Sharpening my verbal fangs

I am being tortured right now. The Individual Concept of Support is the capstone event of my Captain's Career Course, and I am trying not to crash and burn. A concept of support is an English guy's worst nightmare. It is a synchronized compilation of all the logistic considerations supporting a military operation. Massive amounts of math, time-rate-distance, straight line computations between multiple points. Rigorous, strict and disciplined thinking.

Ugh.

So, I took particular and uncharacteristic pleasure in taking my daughter to the doctor during this exercise. While there I did some reading in a great book, The Transitive Vampire. It is a book difficult to define, and since I have only read 15 pages of it, impossible for me to review. I will say that from what I have read so far, it is fascinating.The writer unleashes a maelstrom of a vocabulary composed of articulate witticisms that are uniquely expressed. I believe the purpose of the book is pursuit of grammar for the pure joy of reveling in the dance of words, but with a poetic creation of free-wheeling sentences for the hell of sheer fun. If I am ever an English professor, this book will be on the reading list. There is definite innuendo dancing and a gothic influence to the work- as if the Addams family collaborated on a English Grammar book for their future generation of eclectic misfits. Here is a brief sample:

A compound predicate, or compund verb, is the happy issue of two or more verbs that are joined by and, or, or nor and that belong to the same subject:

The recluse groveled before the mannequin and

kissed the hem of her slip.

She wriggled in acknowledgement or writhed in

uncalled-for shame.

The debutante squatted and pondered her

meaningless life.

The werewolf howled piteously and sought

comfort in the lap of his wife.

His huge, calm, intelligent hands swerved

through the preliminaries and wrestled with

her confusion of lace.

It neither soothed the unrecorded regrets nor

averted the impending doom.

Simply too much fun, buy it from Amazon.com today:

The Transitive Vampire

Deliciously evil- a grammatical delicacy akin to verbal frog-legs.