Word of the Day
Traipse (v./n., TRAYPSS)
To walk around and walk around and walk around, and the feeling that you have towards the end of a very long traipse. Basically, if you use this word to refer to something with a walk, you're right.
Gif of the Day
AbstractCube or hexagon?WavesLight and darknessOddly mesmerizing gifsDead sea?
Link of the Day
Kathryn Schulz - The five best punctuation marks in literature
Kathryn Schulz, a terrific writer, compiles a pretty solid list of the five best uses of punctuation in literature. Why is punctuation important? Schulz explains well:
The muse gets all the press, but here’s a fact: Good writing involves obsessing over punctuation marks. It’s 1 a.m., you’ve got a 5,000-word piece due the next day, and for the last twenty minutes you’ve been deliberating about the use of a semicolon versus a period in a single sentence. (But should it be two sentences? Twenty-five minutes, thirty minutes … ) As a rule, the effect of all that obsession is subtle, a kind of pixel-by-pixel accretion of style. Once in a while, though, a bit of punctuation pops its head up over the prose, and over the prosaic, and becomes a part of a tiny but interesting canon: famous punctuation marks in literature.
We won't spoil the whole thing, but here's a teaser:
4. The colon in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
That is the opening line of A Christmas Carol, although it is less like an opening than like a train car immediately running into another train car. The sentence would be unremarkable if it read, “Marley was dead, to begin with.” The colon would be unremarkable if the sentence read “To begin with: Marley was dead.” But as written, this sentence is insane, or anyway destined to foment insanity in the grammatically prissy. It has death, a dangling participle, and a wonderfully garrulous narrator with some kind of unmentionable Victorian-era disease: wandering colon. It is great.
You can read the whole article at Vulture.
ArtLiteraturePunctuationMeticulous detailWays to get betterApologies to George LucasAlmost Morse Code?
Happy Friday
Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue - Tiny Desk Concert
Trombone Shorty's latest album drops today. This mini show from a few years ago is still great: