Asterisk Quotes

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Well when I write my book, and tell the tale of my adventures--all these little stars that shake out of my cloak-- I must save those to use for asterisks!

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

Well — when I write my book, and tell the tale Of my adventures — all these little stars That shake out of my cloak — I must save those To use for asterisks...

The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white poinsettias outside the church; reunions and degrees. All those radiant asterisks . . . Soon it will all make sense.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and others won't. But once having been there, there's a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it's not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It's a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don't we? And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns - have you thought of that?

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks.

That guy,” Lindsey said, “is a douche. Asterisk, I hate him. Footnote, he can suck it.

That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.

There are no asterisks here. Your feelings are completely valid, you are under no obligation to pardon me, I have yet to earn it for putting you through fear.   What I am trying to say is, I know now that becoming kind is worth every single exhausting effort and sometimes it takes a thousand years.   Today, I apologised to someone I owe an ocean full of amends to.

You and I We do not talk anymore And all our asterisks Are turning Into flowers.

I hate reading poems—school made me hate them. I’d spend hours interpreting one, just to read the memorandum and realize I’d be fucked during exams. I remember making a little asterisk next to every question I struggled with, and at the end of the paper, I’d realize I was looking at the fucking Milky Way.

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children’s blocks.

Frank's bio prompts us to to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have either to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some shit...Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.

I will wake you up early even though I know you like to stay through the credits. I will leave pennies in your pockets, postage stamps of superheroes in between the pages of your books, sugar packets on your kitchen counter. I will Hansel and Gretel you home. I talk through movies. Even ones I have never seen before. I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks. There will be more sweat than you are used to. More skin. More words than are necessary. My hair in the shower drain, my smell on your sweaters, bobby pins all over the window sills. I make the best sandwiches you've ever tasted. You'll be in charge of napkins. I can't do a pull-up. But I'm great at excuses. I count broken umbrellas after every thunderstorm, and I fall asleep repeating the words thank you. I will wake you up early with my heavy heartbeat. You will say, Can't we just sleep in, and I will say, No, trust me. You don't want to miss a thing.

Side note: Down here, you're either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you'll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he's a legend, all-star personality, but there's the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e. won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don't know. Finally, there's Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand.

You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, hanging a second behind his flight.

She finished her drink and put it down. "It's getting chilly out here." "Yes." "Let us repair within." "I'd like to repair." I put down my cigar and we stood and she kissed me. So I put my arm around her trim and sparkling, blue-kept waist and we moved away from the bar, toward the archway, through the archway and beyond, into the house we were leaving. Let's make it a triple-asterisk break: ***

Damn, the good words are all asterisked!” “The men only understand the asterisks. My worry is if they understand the rest!

I function as an asterisk in the limbic system.

Grayson is in training for the Insufferable Olympics, and we really think he can go all the way if he can just jam that stick a little farther up his—” Asterisk,

In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.

The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The early Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.

the genie’s in the steam People wonder how to make it in life. First of kin with innate ability and a lotta hard work. Yes. But don’t forget the steam. The undefined asterisk and intangible. Some call it juice. Some call it magic. The genie’s in the magic. The magic’s in the steam.

Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no-good president. He’ll go down in history with asterisks next to his name for endemic corruption, outrageous stupidity, egregious cruelty, and inhumanity, for diminishing the presidency and the nation, and for being a lout with a terrible wig.

Is that a tentative yes?” “No.” She shook her head. “It’s more like a yes with an asterisk.” “What’s the footnote?” “It’s like ‘yes,’ asterisk, and then ‘Let the record show I think this is probably a bad idea.’” He took her hand again. “But you still want . . . to be with me?” “Cary,” she said, chastising him, “I always want that. I’m obviously in love with you.” “Obviously?” She nodded her head. His eyes were wide again. “Shiloh . . . will you marry me?” “Yes,” she whispered. “Asterisk.” Cary whispered, too: “Let the record show you think this is a bad idea.” “Let the record show I’m terrified of losing you completely.

would read through one of Chris’s books until my eyes gave in to my exhaustion and I could no longer focus. One night as I read from Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, I came across a section where Chris had placed an asterisk in the margin and brackets around the following excerpt: “It is a bad thing,” he said, “not to be able to stand solitude.

The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him. Thus, at first, I would have been content with an electoral defeat, a cooling of public enthusiasm. Later I already required his imprisonment; still later, his exile to some distant, flat island with a single palm tree, which, like a black asterisk, refers one to the bottom of an eternal hell made of solitude, disgrace, and helplessness. Now, at last, nothing but his death could satisfy me.

I'm not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don't have to hold my tongue here, because I'm the fucking star

I looked down at the name that had an asterisk by her name to symbol the utmost importance. “Asha Avery,” I read out loud before frowning. “She must be a big deal amongst the faculty and alumni.

Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest place on the planet. The South Pole averages sixty below zero, has hurricane-strength winds, and sits at an altitude of ten thousand feet. In other words, those original explorers didn’t have to just get there, but had to climb serious mountains to do so. (Side note: Down here, you’re either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you’ll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he’s a legend, all-star personality, but there’s the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e., won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don’t know. Finally, there’s Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand.)

Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This

Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he’s a legend, all-star personality, but there’s the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e., won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don’t know.

Long deep lines, chapters carved in his face by age, question marks, mysterious tales, asterisks, all that the sirens had forgot in the far-reaching solitude of his soul, all that fell from the starry sky, was traced in his face.

I reckon you must get bored more easily than other people.” He came up onto one elbow and looked at her. “Yes. You’ll have your hands full, keeping me excited.” “I don’t remember anything about that in the marriage vows,” she said. “There was obey—I noticed that came first—but I privately added a lengthy footnote to that item.” “This surprises me not at all. But there was the part about serving me.” “It, too, needed a footnote. Then love and honor and keeping you and sticking with you and nobody else. I remember all those. But I don’t recall the minister mentioning anything about keeping you excited.” “That was the serve part. It had an asterisk and some fine print.” “I did not hear any fine print.

Unconditional love is a gift of the heart. It’s a gift that we can both give and receive that comes with no strings attached, no qualifications, reservations, footnotes, asterisks, objections, judgments, or other kinds of fine print legalese that later have to be uncovered, argued over, or cried about.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

By a divine miracle, the pope of Vatican II taught that Vatican II contained no extraordinary dogma and did not carry the mark of infallibility — meaning the documents of Vatican II are fallible and may contain error. Unlike the previous twenty ecumenical councils, the pope placed an asterisk next to Vatican II.

Use the semicolon like you would use any powerful weapon (your best pick-up line or your most effective push-up bra): carefully and sparingly.

Is it only an hour, he wondered, that encompassed three people’s four orgasms? Now I know why, though foreplay can be delineated in all its fascinating and psychotropic detail, a poet must use asterisks or blank paper for orgasmic mechanics that satisfying: they open to something so wide you can now understand why, when sex is that good, you may say, “The sex is not the most important part,” and feel these words analog some shadow of truth.

when certain married words neglect to wear their apostrophes, they might be mistaken for their single friends: The identity of he’ll just went to hell. She’ll is like a shell of its former self. We’ll looks like it wishes it were a well.

go through and take out as many section breaks within chapters as I could, deleting the white space and other markings between them. (By section break, I mean the smaller divisions of text that sometimes exist within chapters, usually set off by a string of three asterisks or something similar.) Late in my revision, I found that many of these mid-chapter breaks, all of which had seemed so essential, had become unnecessary and that losing those interruptions let my chapters read as more continuous and seamless.

Well, first of all,” Langdon said, “Edmond inscribed this piece in clay as an homage to mankind’s earliest written language, cuneiform.” The woman blinked, looking uncertain. “The three heavy markings in the middle,” Langdon continued, “spell the word ‘fish’ in Assyrian. It’s called a pictogram. If you look carefully, you can imagine the fish’s open mouth facing right, as well as the triangular scales on his body.” The assembled group all cocked their heads, studying the work again. “And if you look over here,” Langdon said, pointing to the series of depressions to the left of the fish, “you can see that Edmond made footprints in the mud behind the fish, to represent the fish’s historic evolutionary step onto land.” Heads began to nod appreciatively. “And finally,” Langdon said, “the asymmetrical asterisk on the right—the symbol that the fish appears to be consuming—is one of history’s oldest symbols for God.” The Botoxed woman turned and scowled at him. “A fish is eating God?” “Apparently so. It’s a playful version of the Darwin fish—evolution consuming religion.” Langdon gave the group a casual shrug. “As I said, pretty clever.

Somehow I knew all things were connected, everything but a point on some continuum. This felt more real to me than anything I was ever to learn in any class or read in any book. This feeling of resonance became my standard, so when a teacher told me something or I read something in a book, if I didn’t feel the depth of resonance I found in the woods I never completely accepted what I was reading or being taught. I learned to give the right answers to pass tests and complete assignments, but if I didn’t feel resonance, I posted a mental asterisk on that fact or concept.

We preach grace, but we don’t always practice it. We talk about God’s mercy, but we don’t always want the people who need it most to know it or get in on it. We say we are in the redemption business, but the door to that redemption is often locked by us from the inside. We say, “Come in! All are welcome!” but “all” is often marked with an asterisk. How, I ask, can the world change – how can heaven come to earth – if we stingily protest against God for his grace to others, grace we have freely received ourselves? How can we pray “thy kingdom come,” and be resentful toward God and those he allows to enter the kingdom in his way and his timing?

God loves everybody, exactly the same. No matter what you do. If you grew up like me, then you are waiting for the asterisk to that sentence. Sure, God loves everybody the same. *But he really likes it when you go to Africa. Or start a food kitchen. Or adopt through foster care. Or buy cool, overpriced shoes that may or may not give an orphan in some nameless country a complimentary pair. Or turn your TV into a garden for succulents. Or whatever it is that we believe we must do in order to be fully loved. God took away my asterisk, and now I don’t know how to classify myself anymore. I’m just a sheep of his hand, and it is more lowly and lovely than I could have ever imagined.

Oftentimes, people meet our writing before they meet us; our writing is our first impression.People read our résumés, cover letters, proposals, and emails, and that's the basis on which we are judged first. If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains

I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic.

within the asterisks are repeated three times in the sequence they’re given after the first time they’re worked. So, in total, the asterisk section would be repeated four times. Parentheses – Parentheses

asterisks the number of times called for. Many crochet patterns are also broken down into rows (for flat crochet) and rounds (for circular crochet). Pattern repeats are often made up of a number of rows or rounds, which the designer will indicate in the pattern. At

Asterisks Placed around a word to indicate emphasis or sarcasm, like you didn’t know *that* already.

Aa – pronounced as ah, as in father Bb – pronounced as bay Cc – Generally, its French pronunciation is say. However, its pronunciation will change depending on the situation. If this letter comes before I and E, it must be pronounced as the English S (similar to how C in the word center is pronounced). If it comes before A, O, and U, its pronunciation must be the same as c in cat. Dd – pronounced as day, or similar to D in the word dog Ee – must sound like euh, similar to the emphasis of U in the word burp Ff – sounds like eff, similar to how F is pronounced in the word fog Gg – As a general rule, this letter is pronounced as jhay. However, its pronunciation will change depending on the word. If this letter is found before the vowels A, O, and U, it must sound like the g in the word get. On the other hand, if it’s placed before I and E, the pronunciation must be similar to the S in the word measure. Hh – While this letter generally sounds as ash and is found in French written words, it is ALWAYS silent, even if the word begins with this letter. However, H has two kinds in the French language that are useful in writing. In non-aspirated H (or H muet), the letter H is treated as a vowel and the word requires either liaisons or contractions (other rules will be discussed in a later section). On the other hand, in an aspirated H (or H aspiré), the word is treated is a consonant and will not require liaisons or contractions. To determine which words are aspirated or not so that words can be spelled and pronounced correctly, French dictionaries place an asterisk (or any other symbol) on words starting with an H to indicate that they are aspirated. Ii – sounds like ee, or similar to how the letters ea in the word team is pronounced Jj – pronounced as ghee, and sounds like the S in the word measure Kk – sounds like kah, and is pronounced like the K in the word kite Ll – a straightforward el pronunciation, similar to L in the word lemon Mm – simply pronounced as emm, from M in the word minute Nn – similar to N in the word note, as it sounds like enn Oo – This letter can be pronounced as the O in the word nose, or can also sound similar to the U in nut. Pp – pronounced as pay, or similar to the letter P in the word pen Qq – sounds like ku, or how the K in kite is pronounced Rr – must sound like you’re saying air. To do this correctly in French, you must try to force air as if it’s going to the back of your throat. Your tongue must be near the position where you gargle, but the letter must sound softly. Ss – Generally, it must sound like ess. However, the pronunciation might change depending on the word. If the word begins with an S or has 2 S’s, it must sound like the S in sister. However, if the word only has one S, it must sound like the Z in the word amazing. Tt – pronounced as tay, just like t in the word top Uu – To pronounce this properly, you must say the letter E as how it is said in English while making sure that your lips follow the position like you’re saying “oo”. Vv – pronounced as vay, and sounds like the V in violin. Ww – pronounced as dubla-vay as the general rule. However, this may be changed depending on the word. It can sound like V in the word violin, or as W in the word water. Xx – sounds like eeks, and can be pronounced either like gz (as how the word exit is said) or as ks (when the word socks is said). Yy – pronounced as ee-grehk, or similar to ea in leak. Zz – sounds as zed, or like the letter Z in zebra

The grace and understanding for the familial choices of married women is a given. The humanity of single moms comes with asterisks, ridicule, and judgmental questions.

Ears are impossible to slip.

Please tell me we don’t have to go all the way upstairs for a condom,” she said. “Back pocket.” She leaned with him as he fished it out, then tried to help him get his jeans down over his hips. Her foot hit the coffee table, which snagged on the throw rug and sent the Scrabble tiles sliding all over the board. She laughed as he tore open the condom packet. “Now nobody wins.” “I was ahead.” He put one hand on her hip, using the other to guide himself into her. “So I win.” Emma moaned as he filled her, bracing herself against the couch with a hand on either side of his head. “The game wasn’t over. It’s a draw.” He pulled down on her hips as he drove up into her, making her gasp. “Ties are for pussies. Admit I won.” She looked down into his blue eyes, crinkled with amusement as he grinned at her. God, she loved…having sex with this man. “One good word isn’t a victory.” “That’s not what the score sheet said.” He stopped moving, and when she tried to rock against him, he held down on her hips so she couldn’t move, either. Then he had the nerve to chuckle at her growl of sexual frustration. “Admit it. I can sit here all night.” “Oh, really?” She went straight for a known weak spot—nipping at his earlobe before sucking it into her mouth. He let go of her hips with one hand, intending to push her mouth away, but she rocked her hips. He groaned and put his hand back. She breathed softly against his ear and then ran her tongue along the outside. “Admit I was going to win,” she whispered, “because I can do this all night.” With one leg, he kicked at the table, sending it over and the letter tiles flying. Before Emma could react, she was on her back on the throw rug with Sean between her legs and her hands held over her head. “I don’t lose.” He crossed her wrists so he could hold them with one hand, then used the other to pull her leg up over his hip so he was totally buried in her. “Give up?” She shook her head, but couldn’t hold back the sigh as he oh, so slowly withdrew almost completely and then just as slowly filled her again. “You’re cheating.” He did it again and again, the slow friction delicious and frustrating, until they were both trembling and on the edge. Then, as he was pulling out of her once again with a self-control that made her want to scream, it became a matter of life or death, because she was going to die if she didn’t get what her body was looking for. “Okay, fine. You win.” He drove into her hard, his fingers biting into her wrists before he released them so he could lift her legs to her shoulder. She cried his name as his fingers dug into her hips and he gave them what they both wanted. When he collapsed on top of her, breathing hard against her neck, she wrapped her legs and arms around him, holding him close. “Another one for the win column,” he said once they’d caught their breath. “It has an asterisk, though, because you totally cheated.” “All’s fair in sex and Scrabble, baby.” He propped his head on his hand and smiled down at her. “What should we play next?” “I’ve still got clothes on. You’ve still got clothes on. Maybe we should break out a deck of cards.” “You’re my kinda girl, Emma Shaw,” he said, and thankfully, he was in the process of getting up off the floor, because she didn’t think she did a good job of hiding how happy those words made her.

Spelling can be as elusive as the female orgasm.

Dictionaries are like vitamins and floss; we buy them and then never use them. Even I, an English teacher, a lover of words, have a huge dictionary on my desk, and I never, ever open it.

I am the English teacher who teaches the “boring stuff”— I teach a class on grammar called Writing Skills.

I am the English teacher who teaches the “boring stuff”— I teach a class on grammar called Writing Skills. My students think I love grammar. That just says one thing to me: I chose the wrong profession— I should have been an actress. I don’t love grammar. Loving grammar is like loving oatmeal.

If our writing is full of grammar and punctuation errors, even though the content may be great, it’s like wearing a beautifully made Prada dress that has deodorant stains.

But spell check and grammar check are like vodka: they are definitely helpful but shouldn’t be solely relied on to solve our problems.

The difference between lay and lie is like the difference between sadism and masochism: one means doing something to someone (or something) else, while the other means doing it to oneself.

(Lay) Yesterday, he laid the leather whip down by the handcuffs. (Lie) Five minutes ago, she told him to lay down on the floor and bark like a dog.

Affect: To produce a change in Effect: Something that is produced, a result or consequence

Lacks commitment: I suppose I could marry Dan. Acknowledges commitment: I’m supposed to marry Dan.

Incorrect: I use to be the most popular guy in school, but now I am the Thursday night trivia king at the local bar. Correct: I used to be the most popular guy in school, but now I am the Thursday night trivia king at the local bar.

Even is such a dependable word. It means steady, unchanging. Though, on the other hand, is the opposite. It means despite the fact that, which means it is always dealing with varying circumstances. Though would be too much drama for even.

One of the most pressing questions of our time is arguably this: Does size matter? Is it about quantity or quality? Is it the size of the boat or the motion of the ocean? Is it the length of the magic wand or the power of the spell? Obviously, I am referring to sentence size.

Subject = Boat Verb = Sank Completes a thought = If you went up to someone and said, “The big boat sank,” the person may think that it’s a weird way to start the conversation, but he or she would understand what happened.

If you want to see a truly long sentence, pick up a copy of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which reportedly contains a 4,391 word sentence. And when you’re finished with that one, Jonathan Coe’s book The Rotters Club contains a sentence made up of 13,955 words.

Forget about how you feel about the comma. I know it’s small and cute and curvy, but we’ve got to harden our hearts and use our heads.

When I think about Richard Gere, I can’t help but simultaneously think about the colon.

We use the en dash when we want to express a range of values: Goldilocks will only sleep on Egyptian cotton sheets with a 300–400 thread count. She only eats porridge that is 98–100 degrees.

The closest we can get to set hyphen rules are that the prefixes ex, self, and all always require hyphens while adverbs ending in ly never do: Goldilocks first told the jury that she had been walking through the dimly lit forest and mistook the three bears’ house for an all-inclusive resort. When the jury seemed skeptical, she changed her story and said she had been in a highly emotional state and was suffering from low self-esteem because her ex-boyfriend Jack left her to climb a beanstalk.

Rule #6 – Always tell everyone what they want to hear. That nondesigner dress is absolutely divine. World peace is very important to me. I had no idea that sex tape would be released.

For And Nor But Or Yet So And you know what to do: when you see one of these little fellows in a sentence, stop, look both ways, see if there’s a complete sentence on each side. If there is, insert a comma; if there’s not, keep on walking.

First impressions stick. That’s why it’s so important that we do tedious things like remember to wear deodorant, brush our teeth, and insert commas in the correct places. I mean, imagine what you would think of me if these were the first sentences of mine that you met: When I eat my sister always picks off my plate. If you’re ever in the mood to give head over to the local charity.

Guys who kiss like they’re giving CPR should have to attend kissing classes. If I take out “who kiss like they’re giving CPR,” this is my sentence: Guys should have to attend kissing classes.

When it comes to matters of the comma, don’t follow your heart—follow the rules.

Like an exclamation point, the em dash may be used to provide emphasis, but the exclamation point must go at the end of a sentence—the em dash can go anywhere: There’s a little blonde girl—in my bed. None of my porridge—not even one little drop—is left.

In high school, I was such a slut. And I was not alone; most girls in my high school were total sluts. We didn’t sleep around or have loose morals, but for some reason, in high school, slut was the insult of choice.

Not only can rearranging our sentences to avoid ending them in prepositions sound pretentious, it’s also unnecessary. Grammar experts agree that it’s perfectly acceptable to end sentences in prepositions

The short answer is no. But it’s a “no” with an asterisk, a “no” in need of elaboration—and, since the elaboration is a bit arcane, I’ve relegated it to an online appendix. 1 It’s recommended reading, because if you buy the argument it may radically alter your view of the world. But for now the point is just that the ability to intimately comprehend someone’s motivation—to share their experience virtually, and know it from the inside—depends on a moral imagination that naturally contracts in the case of people we consider rivals or enemies

[on flat affect] ... worlds and events that would have been expected to be captured by expressive suffering—featuring an amplified subjectivity, violent and reparative relationally, and assurance about what makes an event significant—appear with an asterisk of uncertainty.

Our young girls were told that they have inherent value and worth, but it was often with an asterisk: your inner worth is revealed by what you do with your outer body.

It’s the palette of an A24 movie made flesh, and it feels powerful. I am the main character, whom things are taken from, won then irrevocably lost, but while the open ending isn’t quite hopeful, at least it’s still about me. I’m not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don’t have to hold my tongue here, because I’m the fucking star.

I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks

Pit bulls are not dangerous or safe. Pit bulls aren’t saints or sinners. They are no more or less deserving than others dogs of love and compassion, no more of less deserving of good homes. They didn’t cause society’s ills, nor can their redemption...solve them. There is nothing that needs to be redeemed, anyway; they were never to blame on the first place...there never was a “pit bull problem”. What happened to these animals was a byproduct of human fears, and what humans feared most was one another. After all we have put them through, maybe it is time to let pit bulls show us who they are, to let them have a part in writing their own stories. Pit bulls are not dogs with an asterisk. Pit bulls are just...dogs.

regression line will have larger standard deviations and, hence, larger standard errors. The computer calculates the slope, intercept, standard error of the slope, and the level at which the slope is statistically significant. Key Point The significance of the slope tests the relationship. Consider the following example. A management analyst with the Department of Defense wishes to evaluate the impact of teamwork on the productivity of naval shipyard repair facilities. Although all shipyards are required to use teamwork management strategies, these strategies are assumed to vary in practice. Coincidentally, a recently implemented employee survey asked about the perceived use and effectiveness of teamwork. These items have been aggregated into a single index variable that measures teamwork. Employees were also asked questions about perceived performance, as measured by productivity, customer orientation, planning and scheduling, and employee motivation. These items were combined into an index measure of work productivity. Both index measures are continuous variables. The analyst wants to know whether a relationship exists between perceived productivity and teamwork. Table 14.1 shows the computer output obtained from a simple regression. The slope, b, is 0.223; the slope coefficient of teamwork is positive; and the slope is significant at the 1 percent level. Thus, perceptions of teamwork are positively associated with productivity. The t-test statistic, 5.053, is calculated as 0.223/0.044 (rounding errors explain the difference from the printed value of t). Other statistics shown in Table 14.1 are discussed below. The appropriate notation for this relationship is shown below. Either the t-test statistic or the standard error should be shown in parentheses, directly below the regression coefficient; analysts should state which statistic is shown. Here, we show the t-test statistic:3 The level of significance of the regression coefficient is indicated with asterisks, which conforms to the p-value legend that should also be shown. Typically, two asterisks are used to indicate a 1 percent level of significance, one asterisk for a 5 percent level of significance, and no asterisk for coefficients that are insignificant.4 Table 14.1 Simple Regression Output Note: SEE = standard error of the estimate; SE = standard error; Sig. = significance.

agitron: a wiggly line that means an object is shaking briffit: a cloud of dust that means a character has left in a rush emanata: lines emanating from a character’s head that means he or she is surprised plewd: a drop of sweat that means a character is hot or stressed squeans: asterisks that mean drunkenness or dizziness waftarom: a wavy line that means something smells foul

My appreciation for order and regularity, even if it inconvenienced me, meant I never had much trouble with one of the main traditional objections to Christianity (or any religion that posits a loving God): the problem of evil - the question of how any pain and suffering could be countenanced by an all-powerful, all-good God. Consider the simpler problem of natural evils and accidents (falling masonry, flooding, car crashes, virulent flus, etc.). For God to deliver us from all natural pains, the laws of physics would have to be studded with asterisks specifying all the times that flying, twisted metal would need to flout the conservation of linear momentum to stop just short of breaking our bones. I knew what such a world would look like, for it had already been imagined in the sagas of Norse mythology. In one legend, the godling Baldr prophesies his own death, and all the other gods of the Norse pantheon try to save him. The gods and goddesses of Asgard travel the world, extracting a vow from every natural and created thing, be it bird, plant, stone, or sword, never to do Baldr any harm. Once his safety is secured, the Asgardians amuse themselves at feasts by throwing knives and other weapons at Baldr, in order to watch the objects keep their promises, defy their natures, and leave him unhurt. Blades blunt themselves, stones soften, and poison neutralizes itself, all to avoid inflicting any pain on Baldr. To preclude the problem of evil, it seemed, any god would have to give us the same guarantee afforded Baldr. The world around us would have to warp itself to shield us from the weather, from accidents, from gravity, until the laws of physics were unworthy of the name. There couldn't be scientists or empiricism in this kind of world, since the nature of matter would be too protean for us to gain intellectual purchase on. The problem of evil has always seemed to me to be the price we pay for having an intelligible world, one that we can investigate, understand, and love. If miracles were to be possible, they would have to stay below some threshold level of frequency so that they remained clear exceptions to the general course of causality (as in the case of poor, strange Baldr) instead of undoing the rule entirely.