Many years ago, I knew a (dead-serious professional) artist who did collages. She showed me this piece she'd done one time and I asked her about how and why she'd gotten this one particular effect. She looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Look, I don't THINK about this stuff or analyze it." Then a couple years later, a (semi-professional, but really talented) singer and lyricist I knew showed me some lyrics he'd written. I saw a really weird, obscure pattern and asked him if he knew that was there. He looked at me in disbelief and with some annoyance, and said something like "Are you asking whether I control my art?" Since then, I'm not so quick to question creative stuff in that kind of way.
So, when I noted (and quoted via cut-and-paste) the following comment, I saw something but didn't consider changing it, figuring it could well be playing with language, maybe even some kind of allusion to German:
a breath of fresh air in the overly stuffy, crowded, shrill, and cranky world of language-loathing, linguo-ignormauses
Today, I got a message from the author of those words correcting it to
ignoramuses. If I'd been copyediting it, I would have sent a query to the author, but, hey, it's the freakin' blogosphere.
4 comments:
Thanks for making the correction. The funny thing is that at the time of mistyping, I actually paused in mid-thought because once when channeling an Atlantean grammar maven, I suggested that ignoramus does not have a plural (and if it did it certainly wouldn't be ignorami) because it is a verbal, and not a nominal, form in its original Latin, first person plural present indicative active of ignoro (ignorare, ignoravi, ignoratus). That's probably what caused my fingers to stumble.
There's at least a short story in there somewhere ...
Of course ignoramus has a plural; it's an English word now. :-)
Yes. Exactly why I tried to type ignoramuses.
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