JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Personal blog of Jessica Zafra, author of The Collected Stories and the Twisted series
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Archive for the ‘Language’

Is this the worst cover story ever, or is it a joke?

January 17, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Fame, Famous People, Language 5 Comments →

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According to the article, fame is like Aztec human sacrifice. To quote our favorite review of one of the later Star Wars, “Break me a fucking give.”

VICE has called Esquire’s interview with Megan Fox The Worst Thing Ever Written. Yup, it’s drivel. But is it sincere drivel, or is it meant to be a joke? Come on, Aztecs, leprechauns, Bigfoot…

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.

Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. She’s sitting on a sectional sofa in workout clothes and a sweatshirt that hide her body, her knees folded beneath her.

The sacrifice’s year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.

Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec. She’s a screen saver on a teenage boy’s laptop, a middle-aged lawyer’s shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.

“It’s so similar. It totally is,” she says quietly…

Megan Fox will not go willingly to have her heart cut out.

Keep reading this drivel.

This breathless bad prose is grammatically correct, unlike many magazine articles we have read.

The Longest Word in the World…

December 15, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Language 2 Comments →

…is the chemical name for the giant protein titin. It takes 3 hours to pronounce. That’s half a Lav Diaz movie. Tell us how it goes.

Weingarten’s new laws of writing

November 21, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Language 3 Comments →

(1) The Law of Conservation of Adjectives. In the old days, writers needed to burden themselves with an arsenal of modifiers adjectives that deliver subtly different connotation and emphasis. No more. Today, one only needs the adverb really, and the degree of emphasis is indicated by how many times it is used. Really, really happy would formerly have been elated. Really, really, really, really happy would formerly have been orgasmic. The really phenomenon is so strong that its limits cannot be plumbed even by the mighty Google search engine, which restricts inquiries to no more than 32 words. I can, however, report that people have used at least 32 reallys very often. How often? Really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really often. Thirty-two reallys, in quotes, returns more than 3 million hits. Here, some of the words following 32 or more reallys: like girls, hot guy, old, cool and want this (its a shirt). A quick anecdotal sampling suggests the most common word following 32 reallys is bored.

Read Prose and Cons. Good news: More people are writing. Bad news: More people are writing.

Señorita Bananas

November 15, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Food, Language, Places 1 Comment →

Maruja, 1967
Etang Discher is second from the right.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com. Meanwhile, enjoy this video combining two of our obsessions.

Sounds like Azarenka. (That is not tennis-watching kittens behavior but kittens fascinated by laser pointer behavior.)

Jezebel’s other names

October 03, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Language 11 Comments →


Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky is available at National Bookstores.

We enjoyed Jezebel, a novel from the 1930s about a beautiful upper-class woman accused of killing a much younger man presumed to be her lover. During the trial she is reluctant to say anything in her defense—the reason for her silence becomes clear as we read her history. Fascinating portrait of self-absorption.

In the Old Testament Jezebel was a woman who introduced the worship of Baal in Israel; her name has come to mean “shameless and immoral female”. At dinner with Consolata and Chus, we compiled a list of local synonyms for jezebel, to wit:

kiri
kerengkeng
talipandas
hitad
haliparot
pagirpir
(First we’ve heard of this, apparently a Batangueno term)
hostess (from 1960s Tagalog movies; early GROs)
baylarina
bellas (Shouldn’t this be a compliment?)
pampam
pokpok
putaching
paka
(from the 1970s, short for “pakawala”)
hotsie patotsie (from the 1950s)
kalapating mababa ang lipad (What’s a low-flying pigeon got to do with it?)

Add to the list.

Never use two spaces after a period.

June 19, 2012 By: jessicazafra Category: Language 5 Comments →

Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

And don’t send us text or email in ALL CAPS because it is the typographic equivalent of yelling and it guarantees that your message will not be read.