My Summer Job

I've been working with Excel a great deal recently, as designing charts for reports is a major part of my work. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't give me intense memories of seventh grade computer science and Mr. Stuart stentoriously announcing that we would be glad to know about spreadsheets one day-- he knew about spreadsheets and had used that knowledge for his summer jobs, and had "never had to flip a burger" in his life.

Well, I'm not flipping burgers. Memories of Mr. Stuart promptly lead to memories of Mr. Stuart's punishments-- generally, banishment from the room to sit at the picnic table outside. "Go sit on the pine!" he would shout, until one day some smart-ass (either Matt H.A. or Eric) shouted back, "This isn't pine! this is Plywood!" -- a statement that said it all about a school in which, as Eddie joked, the history books were so old they contained the sentence, "Someday, man will walk on the moon."

I think he was joking.

While we're on the subject of work, however, can we talk about bad writing? I have had E.B. White on the brain as I fill Excel cells with sentence fragments like "creation of new work through collaborative projects between artists and organizations".

E.B. White once wrote,

On a fetid afternoon like this, when all the nobility goes out of a writer and parts of speech lie scattered around the room among cigarette butts and crushed paper cups, we envy the gossip columnists their lot. We particularly envy them their ability to earn a living by talking in participles. You have, of course, observed this phenomenon of the American press-- the sentence with no verb. From a literary standpoint it is the invention of the century, for it enables the writer to sound as though he were saying something without actually saying it. Thus: "Mrs. Oral Ferrous on the Starlight Roof, chatting with Count de Guiche."

Or, as the world of philanthrophy would have it, "individual artists whose work demonstrates innovation in form and/or
content."

White, however, found a solution. He wrote,

It is perhaps only fair to columnists and to the subjects of their stillborn sentences to confess that, a year or more ago, when we discovered that unfinished sentences were having a bad effect on our nerves, we took to completing all sentences under our breath—using a standard predicate. We found that the predicate "ought to be in bed" served well enough, and that is the one we still use.

"Visual Artists with a mature body of work over two or more decades ought to be in bed." Try it.


(The above citations are from "No Verbs", in E.B. White, Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976, ed. Rebecca M. Dale; Harper Perennial, New York, 1991; p.18 -- A highly recommended book.)