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"Too much traffic"
About Me
- Jenny Davidson
- I have published four novels and four books of literary criticism; I'm currently at work on a book called FOR THE LOVE OF BROKEN THINGS: MY FATHER, EDWARD GIBBON AND THE RUINS OF ROME. I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
A few pieces
Books
My other blogs
Blog Archive
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2008
(621)
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February
(48)
- Doggishness
- One good note
- Most delightful
- Literary footwear
- Realism
- Shock
- Live and let die
- Drawing and Painting the Undead
- Mither tongue
- "It was Arithmetic, it was Mottled, it was Disputed"
- Wilsonian acting
- The ductile mind
- Game, sett and match
- Sameness is all
- "What Caligula used to live like"
- "Is it fun?"
- A book of allsorts
- Patronage
- Stable emulsions
- Bernard Shaw in skirts?
- The language of cat-monkeys, or Meerkat Manor avan...
- Fortification patterns
- Ten signs
- A cloacal kiss
- Huntington fidget pies
- "My hurry of spirits is allayed"
- The want of tails in young cats
- Impact on the breed
- The lion dance
- The permanent waiting room
- No sleep, only dreams
- The contemporary decline in nocturnal literacy
- Scream!
- Clearing the deck
- Tied to the keyboard for three months a year
- The puff of desire
- "Anthony was never a good-looking man"
- Hotheaded
- Addendum
- "I'm not a trained monkey"
- Clawing wrong notes
- "The belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic"
- Damsels and steeds
- Paradise Road
- "I chased the little beasts away with Disneyesque ...
- The serendipity of the archives
- "We had to look it up on Wikipedia"
- Plugra unsalted butter, Wilkin & Sons raspberry ja...
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February
(48)
This sentence left me gaping: "Muhly, who is twenty-six, had a violin concerto that needed writing, but he also had a pot of Bolognese sauce that needed cooking." Since when is the "needed [gerund]" locution acceptable to the New Yorker? (That question can be read gramatically and regionally, and, yes, I am a total grammatical snob on this one, due to regional issues...my kids were FORBIDDEN to use that phrase when we lived in its originary region.)
ReplyDeletePost email conversation with Jenny, I must make myself look less like an idiot by noting that the offending regional locution is in fact "needs COOKED," and that I believe resisting this locution for eight years left me sensitive to all permutations of needing and verbing, hence the outraged response to what is probably a completely reasonable turn of phrase that now looks thoroughly odd to me.
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