Friday, December 14, 2007

Times gone by

Yellow and red and sunny have been replaced by grey and white and snowy. This is a view from last month of the famous Tension Envelopes factory building. I do not know what tension envelopes are, and I rather like my delusion that they are the manila ones offices use over and over, "sealing" them temporarily with the coated rubber band that winds around the grommetted flat card circles on the body and flap.*

You won't find better rhetoric on any blog. Where else but the ID-confirmation random letter generator dialogue box can you find such gems as "grommetted flat card circles on the body and flap?"

Incidentally, the word grommet is from 1626, has French origins and is not a verb or adjective.

I first learned the word when I was 18 and sewing costumes for "Much Ado About Nothing," produced in the subterranean Shattered nightclub, which smelled always of skunks and was painted black. It's a coffee shop now and quite clean and bright, in Columbia, Missouri.**

You may find that my punctuation seems different. You also may not find it, I could care less.

I am going though a grammatical mid-life crisis.

I learned something that must have always been but that I have never noticed in my reading: both a trusted English use guide and the Associated Press style manual dictate that it is necessary to place a comma after the name of a state, when the state (even abbreviated) is preceded by one of its cities (from which the word is separated there by another comma, the one I know well).

So, if I write, "Let's go to St. Louis, Missouri, for Christmas," that's the way it should appear. It seems preposterously ponderous and unnecessary.

I am using the dictionary more and more, it seems. I used to know how to spell certain words without having to look them up. But who is to say that grommet has two "m's" or only one "t?" English is a messy business. It's no wonder we all speak so abominably.


*Well, now of course I know what they make there; I had to look. I was right, it was not some industrial item no one but those in some specific manufacturing situation has ever heard of. I do not like their logo.
**I guess they reconstituted themselves; it used to be on a street, perhaps Cherry, perpendicular to Broadway.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A grommet is one who loves food.

Anonymous said...

Tension envelopes also spawned one KC Mayor... Richard Berkley is one of the owners.

Freedom Dean said...

Ahhh.... how I miss the joys of getting groped by strange men in Splattered, esp. because I went to the club in order to dance unhindered since it was supposed to be full of GAY men, not strange ones.

hearmysong said...

i actually wrote about shattered in my nanowrimo novel... it was one of the bathroom scenes. slightly serendipitous, eh? i don't miss the sweat or the smells, but i do miss the music :)