(no subject)

Results of the personality quiz everyone on my flist is doing:

You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius.

( Not entirely off the mark )

A few random but enjoyable places to go:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's addictive Evil Overlord Plot Generator

Gorgeous vintage clothes to drool over

How to swear in 162 languages

The full text of H.W. Fowler's The King's English is here. I intend to read the whole thing so that I'll know when I'm breaking the rules.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's delightful On the Art of Writing is there too. Here's Q on the subject of Jargon, railing against what I would call the 'golden hunter' phenomenon:

An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into ‘that great but unequal poet’ and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes ‘the gloomy master of Newstead’: overleaf he is reincarnated into ‘the meteoric darling of society’: and so proceeds through successive avatars—‘this arch-rebel,’ ‘the author of Childe Harold,’ ‘the apostle of scorn,’ ‘the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot,’ ‘the martyr of Missolonghi,’ ‘the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.’ Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse.