Inventing deodorants is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

There is no such thing as superfluous praise.

A true friend does not reveal the song which is stuck in his head.

Every morning I leave the house determined not to let Life make a monkey of me. But I always carry a banana in my bag, just in case.

If you want to have ice cream at the party, bring ice cream to the party.

So many questions, so many question marks.

Advice to coffee drinkers: Don't put all your filters in one basket.

The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The optimist says the glass is half full. The optometrist says you need a new pair of glasses.

Behind every successful sock puppet is an otherwise idle right or left hand.

Monday's dessert is Tuesday's appetizer.

Remember never to rely on memory.

A good magician never explains his jokes.

Huckleberry Finnegans Wake. A plucky lad and a runaway slave fall asleep
on a raft in the stream of consciousness.

Inherit the Wind in the Willows. A mole, a rat, and a toad are brought
to trial by weasels for daring to believe in evolution.

Moby-Dick-and-Jane. "Look, Ishmael! See Dick breach. Breach, Dick, breach!"

All animals are famous for 15 minutes,
but some are more famous than others.

—George Warhol, author of Animal Farm
and leader of pop art movement.

God gave a loaf to Mr. Scrooge,
But just a crumb to me.

—Emily Dickens, author of "Because I Could not
Stop for Death" and A Christmas Carol.

It's perfectly easy to confuse Socrates with Groucho Marx, but how often do we actually take the time to do it?

A midnight invitation to step in for a cup of cocoa is a nice treat -- with or without the cocoa.

Where there's a curd, there's a whey.

An executive who fields her own phone calls has a fool for a receptionist.

Clutter is the niece of inspiration.

The night belongs to raccoons.

Reciprocity is a two-way street.

A writer may be self-employed, but she is at the beck and call of thousands of insistent little words.

A yuppie is someone who doesn't know he's eating rye bread until he gets a caraway seed stuck in his teeth.

The clock with a quiet tick advances just as quickly.

The problem with being frivolous is that no one takes you seriously.

I must be on my way. I have a lot of important dawdling to do.

The theater is no place for histrionics.

I claim no expertise, only a knack for groundless opinions.

My plans are never foolproof, only fool-resistant.

The beaujolais was so pretentious that when I sniffed the cork, it sniffed back.

One of these days, I shall slough off this phony accent and assume a genuine accent.

I like The Importance of Being Earnest so much that I've worn out three pairs of glasses re-reading it. And I don't even wear glasses.

I wouldn't mind working all day, if only it didn't take all day to do it.

I live in fear of being called out on my inappropriate use of the majestic semicolon, that someone will notice it and realize that I do not even have a grade school-level education in punctuation and grammar. Sure, I may have nearly gone to the National Spelling Bee when I was 11, but I cannot form a proper sentence.

[ . . .]

In the end, however, I think I would prefer it if no one spoils the mystery for me. I will sleep more easily at night (The Guy Snoring Above Me notwithstanding) knowing that there is yet a little magic in the world, something I cannot explain.

The broken thought is finishing; the thought is done.

He could not handle the embrace; he would have cried and shaken.

The thing you search for is here; you search for spiraling punctuation.

The semicolon “signals that you’re not expressing a singular thought”, explains the prolific cultural critic, Chris Lehmann. “It signals that there’s tension, that there is some contradictory evidence - and you [have to] sort of trust readers to be able to deal with that, which most editors don’t and many writers don’t.” Menand locates this fear of complexity in the idea that language should do no more than hold up a mirror to the world. “If you subscribe to linguistic transparency, there’s a bias in favour of simplicity,” he says.

[...]

It may seem bizarre to read so much into a stop on the page, but the semicolon is a pause for ambiguity, amusement, complexity, doubt, and nuance. If writing lacks these “genteel” qualities, can we be all that surprised if it is either as dull as a computer manual, or as demagogic as a soapbox on Hyde Park Corner?

Semicolon and I are best of friends, but that wasn't always the case. When I was in highschool--and I shudder to think of this--I actually said "the semicolon is a superfluous punctuation mark; any old parasitic semicolon can be replaced with a respectable period," if not in so many words (or punctuation marks!). Since then, I've come to appreciate the level of nuance that the semicolon makes possible. Semicolon and I are inseperable . . .

Game officials who finally got that semi-colon said they never saw anything like it.  Said it was like something out of one of those extra-large-print books for old people.  I was like, no shit:  I saw the mother.  With punctuation like that out there, you'd be safer going to Africa to hunt exclamation marks.  People see a semi-colon, they laugh.  Because a semi-colon looks harmless.  Well, go ask Charlie how harmless they are.  Go ask Charlie.

It is not easy to write with dispassion of the odious semicolon, but let me try: Except for its function in one copy-editing circumstance, the semicolon is worthless.  It is the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.  Sensitive editors should abolish it forthwith. Forthwith! [...]  The semicolon is a belly-up guppie in a tank of glorious Siamese fighting fish.  It's girly.  It is not just probably the most useless of all forms of punctuation.  It is absolutely, positively the most useless of all such marks ever invented.

flaming wrinkled death
flies down the road in first gear
with her blinker on

--Gregory Engel


Hilltop. Lake below.
My car sinks so slowly. Thank
god it's a rental.

--Carlisle Landel

= Tiger Woods is awesome, and other helpful phrases from the Yindii Guide to American Slang

 

"Down with the 'hood.'" Ebonics-Japanese phrasebook for sale.

 

The strange language spoken by circus owner Papa Lazarou, from the British dark comedy series The League of Gentlemen, may technically be gibberish ("Autom, sprow. Cana, tik bana! Sandwol, but no sera smee?") But it was inspired by Parlari, the private language of traveling British circus folk.

 

Pioneering West African composer Julien Jacob sings in his own mysterious, imaginary language, allowing his listeners to interpret his songs in their own way.

What’s the new word for "cool"? Wicked? Slammin’? Shiny? Wack? Fetch?

 

More from AskMefi: I'm 6'8". People are always asking me how tall I am. Instead of telling the truth, what are some witty, non-confrontational responses I might use? "Depends on where you start measuring."

Vesona is a universal language proposed by Dr. Alesha Sivartha, in which the first two or three letters of any word give the general meaning and the added letters specialize these meanings. An elaborate circular diagram (copy and paste link in new window) shows how Vesona encapsulates all of human knowledge.

 

Verdurian is a language spoken by 55 million imaginary people. The fruitful creativity of Mark Rosenfelder offers background on the history, grammar, and literature of Verdurian, as well as a Language Kit for constructing your own artificial languages.

 

How to say How many flowers are in Pia Zadora's vase? in Esperanto? From Prolific Lo-Fi recording artist Ken Clinger, who records songs in both English & Esperanto.  He juxtaposes awkward practice sentences from foreign language tutorials, creating absurd, surreal alternate realities.

 

Could a computer language be designed today that would last one hundred years?

The politically incorrect alphabet.

Why English is a Silly Language.  "It's really a wonder that any one manages to successfully speak English at all. That people learn it all over the world is just incredible... I mean amazing."
 

The Elements of Style.
 

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of a language called Ursprache with absolutely no nouns. For example, there's no word for "moon," but there's a verb meaning "to moon" or "to moonate." The sentence "The moon rose above the water" in Ursprache would translate as "Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

 

The hypothetical lost continent of Mu (also known as Lemuria) is said to have been destroyed in a global upheaval tens of thousands of years ago. Unorthodox researcher Col. James Churchward believed he rediscovered Mu's alphabet, comprised of beautiful and intricate glyphs.

 

The beauty of the semi-colon lies in its very vagueness. It indicates both connection and division. It is a gentle way of connecting thoughts, without applying the abrupt brake of a full stop or the breathiness of a comma. It implies a qualification or refinement of the idea stated in the first part of the sentence. Sometimes a string of semi-colons shows an evolving idea or description, a string of interconnected ideas.

Virginia Woolf opens Mrs Dalloway with a lovely spray of semi-colons: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of 18 as she was then) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the tress with smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking . . . ”

The sinister semicolon lurks
on the inside. Always inviting,
he calls you to follow as he opens
doors that look like walls.