What I Cooked Last Night

Just when I had almost despaired of the future of the English language, I found the above expression in one of the millions of political blogs that choke the internet like river weeds in the Murray; their endless barb-filled comments threads stretching out infinitely like a vicious thorny blackberry vine growing over an abandoned 1930s Dandenong Ranges house. (Yes, I'm practising for the Bulwer-Lytton awards .) Fine words butter no parsnips. Five words that might first have been uttered in the eleventh, fourteenth or sixteenth century. Who knows or cares? While Twitter is stale after a couple of years, a fine proverb thinks nothing of half a millennium. And will the word hashtag even make it to the year 2525? If man is still alive ... (Zager & Evans, 1969). Fine words butter no parsnips. Why? Because buttered parsnips were what you had before potatoes came along. There are plenty of ways to butter parsnips, from simply mashed with butter to baked with butter and honey, bu...

The 2009 winner of literary parody contest, the Bulwer-Lytton awards, was announced some time ago. The winning line: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests." The awards have become a parody of a parody, of course. The contest judges would not look twice at the line on which the contest was originally based. Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford opened with the words: "It was a dark and stormy night." The opener took on a life of its own, assisted by Snoopy of Peanuts. Having said that...