(no subject)

Apparently a bunch of high-profile Atheist books are about to come out and this makes me happy, though I doubt I'll read any of them--seated so deep in the choir as to be rather bored by it. But not believing in God needs to become admissible, then the norm, Goddamn it. Could hypothetically split the Left along the way, I guess (--the hypothetical way), but it's fundamental to sustainable liberal society (hypothetical #3). The only conservatives who seem able to sustain atheism are the don't-rock-the-boat variety, and they're by definition the least of anyone's problems.

Flagrantly broken above are many of the usage rules in the textbook written by the formidable Grammar teacher whose class I begin tomorrow. I'm too widely read in the Romantics to ever comfortably shift to semantic comma use, though her guidelines make good sense. However, and I know she didn't invent these, but I HATE a couple of the quotation rules: putting the sentence's punctuation inside a phrase quoted at its end ("Was it he that said, 'I came, I saw, I conquered?'"); and the proscription of double punctuation in the same situation (er, also same example).

You can do the first one in the British/social science tradition, apparently, but then you have to use single quotes as the main ones and that's pointlessly ambiguous in longhand writing. Of course, so are any triple quote-marks, which you get for quotes-within-quotes in either tradition, hence we should probably all use those French hyphens, or the shieldy-wing things from the Star Wars planes that look like: <-o->

English will be straightened out the same day everyone renounces God.