July 2018 | Comma queen
1
IN PRAISE OF COMMAS
Maybe you’re one of those modern folks who want to drop the Oxford comma, you know the one – the comma that appears after the second-to-last item in a list of at least three things and before the conjunction. (Okay, not my best explanation ever…)
But I am not always so modern. I fight in favor of that comma. And who wouldn’t, now that companies have lost millions of dollars in legal battles fought over missing commas? There’s value hidden in that well-placed comma. Embrace it.
2
LIGHTEN UP, GRAMMAR POLICE
On the other hand ...
Maybe we grammar purists should stop harping so hard on grammar purity (such as the Oxford comma) because language is fluid, grammar is flexible, what is spoken is not necessarily grammatically perfect, but so what? We understand each other. Perhaps that is all we need. (Except in those legal docs—see above—for which everything may rest on accurate grammar.
3
PHYSICALLY PRESENT, MENTALLY ABSENT
Ah, parents. Never doing anything right. In the past, parents gave their kids freedom to roam, but then people started freaking out and thinking that every child was going to be kidnapped and/or murdered if left alone to adventure for a moment (the odds are, in fact, incredibly low) and started calling CPS when they saw kids playing outside alone or in small packs. Now parents are overly physically present, but mentally, they’re elsewhere. They’ve uploaded their brains to their phones, so you'll see them at the park slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, as they scroll scroll scroll through everyone else’s lives, experiencing life in a box, but never the world around them. There, but not there. Our kids notice. And not in a good way.
The quality of parent-kid time is so diminished by screens, it’s damaging the kids (and, I strongly suspect, parents). We’re more physically present with our kids than ever, but we’re not mentally present, and our kids are suffering:
“AT&T rolled out smartphone service at different times in different places, thereby creating an intriguing natural experiment. Area by area, as smartphone adoption rose, childhood ER visits increased.”
Attention is our most precious resource. Dole it out thoughtfully. Put down the super-computer in your pocket. Turn off the pings. Go grayscale. And engage with your kids and this beautiful world around us.
This organized stream-of-consciousness (is that an oxymoron?) 99U talk by designer Adam J. Kurtz made me laugh and also reminded me that I'm but a speck of dust on a giant planet in the middle of an immense universe, which gives me a little more latitude to be myself. No, people aren't staring at me. They're hung up on their own stuff. And that gives me license to create without fear.
4
BE YOURSELF (AND BE NICE)
5
IS THERE ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT OPEN OFFICES?
Open office plans get a bad rap. I've written about it before. I find them both engaging and exhausting at once. Sitting out in the open, fighting not to be overwhelmed by the cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells, I feel disconnected from my coworkers, and the latest studies corroborate that.
Open office plans reduce productivity—yes, yes, we knew that before—and now we know that open office plans reduce the very thing they're trying to foster: collaboration.
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VISUALIZING EXCESS
I never thought I'd recommend this, but maybe we need to start eating more meat and cheese. We have a mind-boggling excess, visualized by Vox.