Talking Rocks

Recently completed from my summer book list was N.D. Wilson's Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, a staggeringly beautiful yet sober look at human nature, God's existence, and our place in this carnival of a world. Wilson speaks the truth with clarity and interest. As a former English teacher, I was struck most by Wilson's image of Christ as a perfect Shakespeare, the author of a grand story who decides the course of man and has ordained an ending to each man--and to take it further, how balmy it is that the Author actually lowered Himself to become part of that story--so low, in fact, that He slumbered with pigs and horses on the night He was born. Crazy? YES. But wondrous.

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl is Wilson's attempt to capture just a snapshot of what the Psalmist David speaks of here, in Psalm 104: 24-30:

24 O Lord, how manifold are Your works!
In wisdom You have made them all.
The earth is full of Your possessions—
25 This great and wide sea,
In which are innumerable teeming things,
Living things both small and great.
26 There the ships sail about;
There is that Leviathan
Which You have made to play there.

27 These all wait for You,
That You may give them their food in due season.
28 What You give them they gather in;
You open Your hand, they are filled with good.
29 You hide Your face, they are troubled;
You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
30 You send forth Your Spirit, they are created;
And You renew the face of the earth.

~~~~~

Read it, and enjoy.

Best Marriage Proposal Ever.

I have to share. Watch every minute of this.  A bit of joy for your Thursday evening.

Eats shoots and leaves.... ?

Poor Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, will forever be heckled for her courageous commentary on what might possibly be the nerdiest sphere of academia: grammar. And by extension, those who dare to read the book and actually enjoy it might also receive that same heckling. But that's okay. I will step out from the minority of obsessive grammarians and say I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found myself at times laughing out loud. She declares in the introduction that her point is not to write a "book about grammar", but instead to "give us permission to love punctuation." Haha. I'm still laughing about that one. If there's a way to make grammar hilarious, Truss has done it. She is both level-headed and self-deprecating about her fixation on proper puncuation, and the book is filled with various anecdotes to help prove her point that proper punctuation is indeed important, especially in the techno-culture we currently find ourselves in. Here are just a few of my favorite quotes... and hopefully I cite them correctly.


".... the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we see dead punctuation."

"One might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the puncuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burning out from all the thankless effort."

"The big final rule for the comma is one that you won't find in any books by grammarians. It is quite easy to remember, however. The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it. More than any other mark, the comma requires the writer to use intelligent discretion and to be simply alert to potential ambiguity."


And my favorite of all....

"In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly."

For Carrie, any other teacher of English who reads this, and anyone who is a closet punctuation lover, grab a copy of this book at the library and enjoy!