{"id":66,"date":"2010-05-05T10:56:25","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T14:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/?p=66"},"modified":"2010-07-18T11:00:38","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T15:00:38","slug":"ten-little-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/?p=66","title":{"rendered":"Ten Little Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhere the soul of William Strunk, Jr. is writhing in agony.<\/p>\n<p>This morning, WNYC featured an article on the benefits <i>other<\/i> than revenue of raising the fees for parking meters.  It ended with the assent of a a committee studying the question: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Their heads were nodding up and down vigorously\u00e2\u20ac\u201din agreement.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The last two words were delivered with an odd emphasis, like it was a powerful zinger to close the report, and my immediate reaction was to think, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Was that really necessary?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  Why else would they be nodding, I not in agreement?  Palsy?  Eileene suggested we might otherwise think they were nodding off to sleep, but one does not nod vigorously off to sleep.<\/p>\n<p>And once I started questioning, I couldn&#8217;t stop.  I mean, nodding <i>means<\/i> \u00e2\u20ac\u0153up and down.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  Heads don&#8217;t nod side-to-side.  Nodding implies the head, too.  Unless they were sitting in  council conversing through sock puppets or something.  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They nodded vigorously\u00e2\u20ac\u009d would be entirely satisfactory.  Three unintentional redundancies in ten words is something of an accomplishment, but though not a proud one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>superfluous redundancy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}