I’m button-burstingly proud to announce that today marks the 11th anniversary of my sharing “Lederer on Language” with you word-loving, verbivorous readers. So I’m giving you all an air hug.
When is enough not enough? Well, enough is a six-letter word. Take the first three letters — e-n-o, anagram them, and you will get the word one. Now anagram the last three letters of enough — u-g-h — and you get the word hug.
So when is enough not enough? When it’s “one hug,” because one hug is never enough.
You might be asking yourself if this column was written by the burgeoning artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. It wasn’t. I wrote it.
As linguist Anu Garg, who publishes A Word a Day, has sagely written, ”AI has been making great progress. I try every new release. I might ask it to write code, an ode, even a Seinfeld episode. Nice, but would it replace poets and writers? Not anytime soon. Simply because it can’t experience joy. The joy of humor. Of words. Of connecting with another human being. And writing without joy is just not the same.”
I was editor of my junior high school literary magazine and my high school newspaper. My classmates would ask, “Richie, when are you going to write the great American novel?” I answered, “Never. I stink at character and plot development, dialogue, and setting — all the elements that make a good novelist.”
You won’t find much of that fictional stuff in my books, unless my spooling out a story will serve the ideas I am trying to communicate. A writer has to find out what kind of writers she or he is, and I somehow got wired as an English teacher with an passion to illuminate ideas about language and literature. I’m a nonfictionalist — a hunter-gatherer of language who records the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces, leak from their pens, and luminesce up on their computer screens.
To be a writer, one must behave as writers behave. They write. And write. And write. The difference between a writer and a wannabe is that a writer is someone who can’t not write, while a wannabe says, “One of these days when . . ., then I’ll . . . .” Unable not to write, I write almost every day.
A grocer doesn’t wait to be inspired to go to the store, and a banker to go to the bank. I can’t afford the luxury of waiting to be inspired before I go to work. Writing is my job, and it happens to be a job that almost nobody gives up on purpose. I love my job as a writer, so I write. Every day that I can.
Early in my life’s journey, I blew up the distance between who I am and what I do. When you are heels over head in love with what you do, and you do what you were placed on this planet to do, you never work a day.
Gentle reader: I hope you can tell that no form of AI could have created the metaphors and expressed the joy that suffuse what you’ve just read — at least for now.
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For most of us, if we lose our khakis, we lose our pants. But if you live in Boston, when you lose your “khakis,“ you can’t start your car. For most of us, “oil” is the black sticky stuff, and an “earl” is a nobleman. But if you live in Brooklyn, an “oil” is a nobleman, and “earl” is the black sticky stuff.
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My next book will be about all the things that I should be doing in my life. It’s called an oughtobiography.
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The other day, I had a consultation with my physician. She said, “Don’t eat anything fatty.”
I asked her, “Do you mean things like hamburgers and bacon?”
She said, “No, I meant ‘Fatty, don’t eat anything!’”
Then she added that I was 50 pounds overweight. I told her that I wanted to seek a second opinion. So she said, “And you’re ugly, too.”
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I hear you have a stepmother. What a coincidence! I have a stepladder, and we’re not related by blood either. I never knew my real ladder, but thanks to my stepladder’s support, I have achieved great heights.