Les yawnes
In honor of Cingular trying to patent the idea of entering smileys into your cell phone by pressing buttons on that phone (or, if you believe the British print media, "to patent smileys"), here is a link to Geoffrey Nunberg's famous short comic essay on smileys, as pointed out by Language Log. I'd forgotten all about this essay. It's really not that great, but oh well. He has a cute line about Jane Austen, who I can't seem to read without falling asleep but whose movie I'm going to watch any day now.
What was rather disappointing, though, was his suggestion for Proust:Proust could have used a yawnie to emphasize the first sentence of Remembrance of Things Past: For a long time, I went to bed early |-O
Clearly, the "yawnie" needs to go after the title:Remembrance of Things Past |-O
Is that really a yawn? It looks like a dude with a unibrow trying to blow smoke rings. Anyway, if it helps me rip on the classics, it's fine by me.
p.s. I've been waiting for someone to make Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow into a movie. Now someone has, and it's coming to Taiwan, and I bet it totally rocks, and there won't be English subtitles, and there probably won't even be English subtitles when it comes out on DVD.
What was rather disappointing, though, was his suggestion for Proust:Proust could have used a yawnie to emphasize the first sentence of Remembrance of Things Past: For a long time, I went to bed early |-O
Clearly, the "yawnie" needs to go after the title:Remembrance of Things Past |-O
Is that really a yawn? It looks like a dude with a unibrow trying to blow smoke rings. Anyway, if it helps me rip on the classics, it's fine by me.
p.s. I've been waiting for someone to make Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow into a movie. Now someone has, and it's coming to Taiwan, and I bet it totally rocks, and there won't be English subtitles, and there probably won't even be English subtitles when it comes out on DVD.