copyfire.com Blog

I am a food freak, I admit it. I’ve become somewhat better over the last couple of years, thanks to my husband’s obsession with sports. He addicted me to things like the NFL, that had really never held much interest to me before 2002. Anyway, just because my food freakiness is slightly better, doesn’t mean it’s cured. Although I spend less time watching Food Network, I find that I spend just as much time reading books about food. I love chefs, I like reading about what they do, what they make, how they put it all together (attention: this does not mean Rachel Ray). I like reading about individual foods, and tracing their origins (afterall, there is a whole book about salt. Yes. Salt). I like cookbooks, even if I can’t really make anything in my own kitchen (I do own a kickin’ knife set, though). I enjoy books about cooking technique (I long ago crowned myself the best theoretical cooker this side of the Rocky Mountains). And if a restaurant really captures my attention, and someone’s gone and written a book about it, I am very likely to read it. Which brings me to Alinea.

Alinea, the restaurant, is the creation of chef Grant Achatz (rhymes with jackets). A seemingly not-so-huge, no-so-celebrity chef sort of place, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. And the food! I must eat there. It’s been on my list for two years, since I read about Achatz in one of Michael Ruhlman’s books (Ruhlman opens Alinea (the book) with an interesting and lengthy essay), while he was still chef at Trio in Evanston, IL. However, Alinea is expensive for a peon like me; the shorter of the two tasting menus is $145 per person, not including wine. But my understanding is that it’s as close to a life-changing experience as one can get from a restaurant. At least, for a dorky food nerd like me. It supposedly may even be, may God strike me down where I sit if I am lying, more amazing that Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Yountville, CA.

Did I really just type that? Perish the thought.

Anyway, I can’t say whether it’s better or not, seeing as I am not rich and therefore unable to find $400-$600 dollars for me and my husband to dine in either of these establishments, but I can get just a little bit of a taste, pun intended, for what Achatz is trying to achieve at Alinea by reading his book. Part science experient gone terribly right, part art, and part just delicious, amazing, evocative creations that I can only hope pass over my palate someday, the book really is amazing. The food photography alone is worth the purchase, as long as you’re OK drooling all over yourself. But reading others’ takes on Alinea, and getting inside Achatz’s head, and finding out how he comes up with his individual dishes and menus makes the $50 retail price a little easier to…uh…stomach?

Honestly, I wanted to lick the page. But, I refrained. It was property of the Cuyahoga County Library, after all.

Today’s Los Angeles Times features an interview with Sarah Weinman, the blogger who writes their Dark Passages column. She began keeping track of every book she reads in in 2005, and in 2008, read 462 books, the longest beng about 900 pages, and the shortest being just under 100. I enjoyed this interview because it seems that I read the same way that she does, and she found a way to describe the way her brain works that makes a lot of sense to me (and apparently, it’s a shared sentiment, as some of the comments left on the Times’ website are from people who feel much the same as I do). As much as I read, and as many books as I go through in a year (not 400+, but probably 150 or so), my husband’s often said (only half-kiddingly, I beleve) he thinks I’m just pretending to read, and really just flipping pages. Untrue, but I can see how that probably looks to him.

Weinman has already read nearly 11 books already this year. So, in the spirit of her record-keeping, I’ve decided to keep track of the number of books I read this year. So far, it’s five, and will be six by the end of the day. I don’t have a goal with this, trying to speed through to hit a certain number, but I’ll be curious to see how I do by year’s end.

The 1/6/09 Examiner features a short blog post by Ronald Holden, the famed food writer and blogger, and founder of Cornichon.org. Holden begins the article by writing about the recent Wall Street Journal article on the best and worst jobs in the United States, and wonders why food critic isn’t one of them. I have to agree with him there. If I wasn’t a quasi-vegetarian, and therefore willing to eat a much wider range of foods, that would definitely be a the top of my list of dream jobs (as an aside, though, if anyone out there IS willing to hire a veggie food writer, please shoot me an email — I am all over it).

Towards the end of his blog, Holden mentions an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, and I thought it important to give that op-ed as much publicity as possible. Berry writes about the need for something he’s calling a 50-year farm bill, explaining essentially that with all the rush to “green” this and “eco” that, somehow it’s become lost in the mix that our greatest natural resource, soil, is in great danger of going the way of the dinosaur, due to the great amount of abuse it’s subject to on a regular basis. He goes on to remind us that soil is non-renewable, and there is no amount of money in the form of government subsudies to agri-business giants or otherwise that will allow more food to be grown or raised, because once the soil is dead, it’s dead. His suggestion to make sure that doesn’t happen is a farming practice called perennialization, a form of crop rotation, and a 50-year farm bill “that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”

In other words, ya’ll, if we want to keep eating, we better start paying more attention to where our food comes from, who’s making it, and exactly how it’s made or grown. It could be as simple as eating more certified organic produce, or buying more locally, but regardless, we’re all going to have to do our part. I’d hate to have to live on those weird freeze-dried astronaut meals when I’m in my golden years, and I think you would, too.

According to the Global Language Monitor, on April 29th, 2009, the English language will pass one million words (and we wonder why English is considered so difficult to learn?). The GLM is a service based out of Austin, Texas, that “documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.” According to the GLM website, “English has become the first truly global language with some 1.35 billion speakers as a first, second or auxiliary language.” Who knew?

If you’re a betting person, have some fun by checking out HubDub.com, which bills itself as “the web’s news forecaster.” At HubDub, you can bet (with play money) on when you think the millionth word will make its appearance, and how strongly you feel about that prediction. Good times.

And just so you know, before you go setting up a One Millionth Word party on Evite, the English language actually has no authority that approves new words. According to The Economist’s John Grimond, “…by what authority does the Global Language Monitor say a new coinage is a genuine new word? None. Some countries, such as France and Spain, have academies that claim the right to regulate their national languages, and to repel invasive terms, usually from English. Neither England nor the United States attempts such an exercise in futility. English is a mongrel language that keeps its vitality by absorbing new words, uses and expressions. It promiscuously plunders other languages and delights in neologisms. It is the language of free traders and inventive entrepreneurs such as the staff of the Global Language Monitor.”

Pretty cool, and so very American.

It’s January 1st, and you know what that means. If you’re into the whole New Year’s resolution thing, it’s time to get on it, get moving, get your butt in gear. Surfing around, I noticed that AuthorHouse, which bills itself as the “leading self-publishing company in the world,” posted a list of resolutions aimed specifically at writers and other lovers of the written word.

Now I tend to dislike the whole resolution thing, as it seems to end more often in broken self-promises than anything. The usual stuff about getting in shape, eating better, saving more, spending more time with family — it’s all noble stuff, but so broad, really, how can people help but not follow through half the time? So I’ve tended to make myself yearly goals (note that I don’t call ‘em resolutions — just that word alone is enough to have me breaking my new vows on January 2nd), with long- and short-term milestones that can break up big things into managable chunks. It’s worked pretty well so far for non-writing stuff over the years. So, I have to give AuthorHouse some credit for putting out this list, even if most of what’s listed is fairly obvious. The trouble for those of us who write professionally is that sometimes we get stuck in such a rut of what we’re supposed to be doing, what kind of writing we usually do, what kinds of books we always read, we forget to really enjoy writing. Maybe it’s time to remember why we made this our career choice, and not take it for granted. So perhaps making a list of writing goals for the year isn’t such a bad idea. Because, much like most married people know you have to work at a relationship every day, writers have to work at writing in almost the same way, less we forget why we’re doing it in the first place. It’s hard work, but in both cases, it’s the best and most rewarding kind.

The 34th annual Lake Superior State University List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness was released on Tuesday, 12/30. As usual, the list doesn’t disappoint. This year’s it even contains its first-ever emoticon.

If you don’t know how this list is created, words are nominated by people all over the country, not just the students of the small university in the UP (that’s Upper Penninsula, to you non-Michiganders) of northern Michigan. This year, 15 words were selected from a pool of 5000 nominations.

Some of my personal favorites include:

- Main Street/Wall Street
- Maverick
- First Dude
- Use of the word “Monkey” as a suffix, an example would be if I had named my company “CopyMonkey” instead of “CopyFire.” Says Rogier Landman of Sommerville, MA, “Especially on the Internet, many people seem to think they can make any boring name sound more attractive just by adding the word ‘monkey’ to it.” Rogier, I can’t say I’ve noticed this trend being as rampant as the overuse of “Main Street” but, dagnabbit, I am not going to say I disagree. Monkeys are awesome, but their use as a suffix is certainly suffering from overkill, even if it did take you pointing it out for me to become personally annoyed by it.

In honor of the annual list, I would like to offer up a few words/phrases of my own that I would like to banish:

- Irregardless (what?)
- Low-hanging fruit (just gross. I’m sorry, this is an idiot phrase.)
- Deck (when referring to a PowerPoint presentation)
- Bandwidth (when referring to the amount of resources available)
- Impactful (again, what?)
- Touch base (when used to refer to a meeting, or to the need to follow up on something later)
- Extreme (as in anything prefaced with the word. Extreme poker, bobsledding, baseball, boxing, foosball, whatever. Everything is extreme now. Boooorrriiiinnnggggg.)

And that’s all from me for 2008. Happy New Year, everyone!

Last November, I decided I was finally going to do National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as they like to abbreviate it). I’m here to say that what came out of it for me was 50,000 words of completely unpublishable junk (something about a female chef, and two love interests, and blah blah blah), but it was completely and utterly worth it, for the discipline it instilled in me alone. Workng a full-time job as an editor/writer during the day, then coming home to write a minimum of 1666.6666 words every single day for 30 days was challenging and exhausting, and yet I think I’ll probably do it again. The folks at NaNoWriMo are encouraging and supportive throughout the month, and make you undertand that it’s a competition only with yourself. What you produce doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.

However, for all of you folks out there who are more turned on by competition than a self-contained sense of accomplishment, there’s a new writing contest in town, brought to you by the folks at Toronto’s Broken Pencil magazine. BP is probably the biggest alt culture read in Canada. And now, they’re sponsoring what the Montreal Gazette is calling a “literary survivor” and an “indie writers deathmatch.” Oh dear.

More from the Gazette:

Asked how the deathmatch will work, (Associate Editor Richard) Rosenbaum says “the top eight submissions get posted to our website, where readers can vote for their favourite, and cheer on or hurl insults at the writers and each other, with the writers themselves having to survive round after round of online voting as well as fending off the armies of their opponents’ supporters.”

If after that description anyone is still interested in entering, you can do so if your entry is postmarked by December 31st. Check out Broken Pencil’s website for more information. To the victor go the spoils, including $300 in cash. If you can handle the taunting, anyway.

Australian newspaper The Age featured an article today (or is it tomorrow? They’re hours ahead of us, so…hm. Never mind. It’s in their 12/23 edition.) covering two of my most favorite things. Words and menus. I am a menu addict. I’m the type of person you don’t want tagging along with you to any big city, but NYC in particular. I will stop in front of every restaurant I walk past, scanning for a menu display on an outside wall, so I may then stand there in food rapture, memorizing every word of each glorious dish. The language of food is so rich and diverse that hundreds of books have been written simply to translate for the rest of us just what the heck it all means. You may have noticed, menus are becoming more and more complicated, and beginning to read a bit like bad poetry. And that’s where The Age comes in with their article, “Mincing words.”

The article is essentially a call to bring back the days of simple menus, with descriptions that don’t read like haiku, and are easy to understand even for someone who has never spent even five minutes with The Food Network and Alton Brown (who I happen to love, love, love, but the man does get very wordy and technical. It’s Alton’s world, I’m just living in it). I agree. There’s a way to write a beautiful menu and create amazing dishes without consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged). I feel this change would allow the customer to choose a simple bowl of soup without developing a migraine in the process.

One last note:
The final tragedy of ridiculous menus is the 10-minute parade of specials that spews forth from the waiter before even having the opportunity to dull the pain with a cocktail. What a way to ruin the conversational flow. If I want to stop conversation in its tracks, I usually just do it the old-fashioned way. By getting a huge wad of spinach stuck in my front teeth. Here’s to tradition!

In surfing the internet, looking for lists of the most hated words, I found a few that were pretty phenomenal, which I will link to below. My reason for this type of focused internet searching is due to the fact that I feel an uprising is needed to have all of the major publishers remove certain words like “moist,” “nugget,” and “panties” from their dictionaries (Oxford? American Heritage? Do we have an understanding?).

While I’m on the subject of words that generate anxiety or distaste, I’ve noticed lately there are many other words so consistently incorrectly pronounced, it’s all I can do to not run screaming from the room, ears covered, singing “La la la la laaaaa!” to block out the offense (see also: supposably [supposedly], athalete [athlete]). Other nausea-inducing mispronunciations include: “Wash” pronounced as “Warsh,” “Milk” pronounced as “Melk,” “Interesting” pronounced as “Inneresting,” and of course, “Nuclear” pronounced as “Nu-Q-Lur.”

Finally, one regional bit of scary that I’ve run into since moving to Ohio (”Ohiah” if you’re from an hour or more south of Columbus) is the odd choice to omit in speech the “to be” from certain phrases. It makes my hair stand on end. The best and most-used example of this would be “needs done,” as in “Honey, the wash needs done.” I’m getting a chill just typing it. I don’t know how these two short but important words disappeared from the English language around here, but someone needs to find them and bring them back before my head explodes.

But I digress.

I give you…some lists!

The Worst Words

Wordie’s Corporate Buzz Words and Phrases

If you’re on Facebook, you can join the I Hate the Word Moist group. (I have to be honest, I am tempted to go and sign up right now.)

The Most Horrible English Words

The December 9th edition of the Great Falls Tribune features an article on Mike Schwabenbauer, a high school teacher in Simms, Montana, who, according to the paper, is waging a war against unnecessary exclamation points in writing, both in his classes, and within the local business community. This is an issue near and dear to my heart, so the article struck home. My former position as a greeting card editor in the humor area brought this issue to the surface on a regular basis. Our copy database was rife with these unnecessary marks!!! And I quickly learned, that unless the end of the world was upon us, one exclam was more than enough, if it was even necessary at all. I thank my former director, Shelley, for disabusing me of the notion that “!!” or “!!!” or “!?!” was ever something that should be printed on a page (or a card), and know that my writing is the better for her swift and thorough lesson in proper punctuation.