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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Ah... Thanksgiving in the US. A day to commemorate a bunch of people escaping religious persecution in their home country so they could start some of their own religious persecution in a new one. Here's an article from that home country (via The Guardian). It's about my all-time favorite punctuation mark; don't worry, it's short, so my fellow Americans can get back to eating politics and talking turkey. I’ll admit it; I’ve become a late-in-life semicolon lover  Vonnegut hated them and Lincoln thought them ‘useful little chaps’. I, meanwhile, have come round to the charms of this controversial punctuation mark after years on the fence Good. Another convert. Let's keep on proselytizing. Is there any punctuation mark more divisive than the humble semicolon? Um, yes? The emdash has started arguments and caused friends to take an extra-long pause, and don't get me started on the interrobang. The use of exclamation marks (particularly by women) makes some people very excitable. I only start to get antsy when I see more than one, and I don't discriminate by gender. The Oxford comma has sparked vigorous debate among friends, family and internet strangers. Oh ho ho ho. I see what you did there. Or, rather, what you didn't do there. You absolute philistine. Still, while competition might be stiff, if there was a Most Provocative Punctuation contest, I reckon the semicolon would win it. I will admit that, superlative or not, it's controversial, in much the same way that the pronunciation of .gif is. Thrust into the world by an Italian printer called Aldus Manutius in 1494, the semicolon has amassed a legion of passionate supporters and haters. You know what's worse than using semicolons? Using commas to splice complete clauses together. Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut (hater) called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Vonnegut also refused to admit he wrote science fiction, so anything he has to say is dubious at best. For most of my life, I was agnostic about the semicolon. Then I had a dalliance with a woman with a bizarre fetish for the things; she even used them in text messages. You know how I weed undesirables out of my life? I see how they react to me texting in complete sentences. If they don't like it, we're not compatible in any way. Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades, a study from language-learning company Babbel found in May. I will admit that overusing them gets distracting. But telling me something's fallen by 50% is useless; were there two books a year with semicolons, and now there's one? Big deal. Another found that 67% of British students – rebels without a clause – rarely use it. Mostly I'm mad someone else used "Rebel Without a Clause" Still, it’s been going strong for more than 500 years, so I doubt we’re going to see the end of the semicolon anytime soon. At least not if I have anything to say about it. One final note: it's one thing to use punctuation. It's another thing entirely to use it appropriately. I see writing all the time that demonstrates unease with even simpler marks; usually, these are commas, either put, in, where, they're, not, necessary (like a Shatner monologue) or left out entirely in which case the sentence just runs on and on without pause or breath causing the reader to become completely exhausted by the time they finally hit the full stop or as we call it in the US a period. |
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