The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.
—Alan Alda
“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”
-John Cassavetes (1959)
There’s always been a debate about it—here it is. Films directors talking pan vs. scan.
As Scorsese points out, it is much like “re-directing a movie”.
via kottke.org
Nostalgic future. From Metropolis (1927)
Time is the best author. It always writes the perfect ending.
—Calvero, says. Limelight (1952)
I believe I have finally found my one true job interview dress suit.
Ô journée des mectons. Although, this picture’s about something else, Happy Bastille Day, people—or whatever.
Sound Advice
This week’s f-words come from Charles Harrington elster’s Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations (1999). While my own strong opinions about Orthoepy vacillate between yes! and who-cares?, I have found this book to be (if nothing else) 1—a valuable bet settler and 2—a great way to show your barbarous buddies how much a pedant you can be.
- feral: FEER-ul. this pronunciation is favored by all 4 major american dictionaries.
- fifth: FIFTH or FITH. if you can pronounce the second f, good for you. but there’s nothing slovenly about dropping it… it is biestly however, to drop the h and say FIFT or drop the th and say FIF.
- finis: FIN-is (occasionally, FY-nis). the popular variant fee-NEE is wrong. finis is not french for “finished,” as many apparently imagine. it comes through middle english from the latin word meaning “the end, conclusion.”
- flaccid: FLAK-sid, not FLAS-id. apparently the flabby FLAS-id has been limping around in educated circles for most of the 20th century. webster 3 was the first dictionary to recognize FLAS-id, labeling it with its esoteric symbol of disrepute, the obelus [÷]. flaccid is a book-learned word which may explain why so many educated speakers have swallowed the beastly FLAS-id without giving a second thought to the pronunciation of analogous words. consider: accident, succeed, eccentric, etc.
- forbade: fur-BAD. in 1961, webster 3, in opposition to all previous authority, arbitrarily indicated that forbade should be pronounced fur-BAYD. the controversy may soon be academic: the evidence of my ears says that forbid is fast replacing forbade as the past tense of forbid.
- formulae: FORM-yul-LEE, not -LY. as any science savvy person knows,antennae, larvae, papillae, and so on have a long i sound at the end, right? wrong. words borrowed from latin that form their plurals in -aeproperly have a long e sound at the end. that’s why, for example we say AL-jee for algae.
- forte (strong point): properly FORT, now usually FOR-tay.
- fracas: FRAY-kis. the first a is properly long. when you enter the fray,you enter a fracas.
- fungi: FUN-jy (j as in judge), never FUN-gy (g as in gout).
And for another look at how everything that you are saying, you are saying wrong, there is this and this.
via ragbag
