Aww, f*#@! The script to "Uncut Gems" has the 7th-most f-words in Hollywood history.

Three guesses what word he's about to say.

Sometimes, with screenwriting, one word becomes a crutch, a go-to, a repetition. For Adam Sandler's new movie, the f-word is the go-to crutch again and again...and again. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Sandler's recently released Uncut Gems has the 7th-most f-words in Hollywood cinematic history. And how many f-bombs does it actually take to get to 7th place? It takes 408 utterances. Somewhere, Quentin Tarantino must be smiling.

Of course, that means there are six other movies that exceed Uncut Gems for such linguistic love. So, how does the top-10 shake out?


1.)  Swearnet: The Movie  (935 f-words)
2.)  Fuck: A Fuckumentary  (857)
3.)  The Wolf of Wall Street  (569)
4.)  Summer of Sam  (435)
5.)  Nil by Mouth  (428)
6.)  Casino  (422)
7.)  Uncut Gems  (408)
8.)  Straight Outta Compton  (392)
9.)  Alpha Dog  (367)
10.)  End of Watch  (326)


In a shock to all of the western hemisphere's moving-going public, not one film in the top-10 is a Quentin Tarantino creation, despite his scripts' collective reputations. In fact, he barely cracks the top-30, with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction popping up in 27th and 28th place, respectively.

The face of vindication.

And here I was thinking something like Scarface would be in the mix, but it appears Tony Montana was a choir boy all along.

George R.R. Martin is busy / not busy...probably bored.

Game of Thrones dad and occasional seafaring captain lookalike George R.R. Martin recently had an interview with Metro newspapers, and once again defended the casual, sauntering pace his writing has taken in recent years:

"I did not start to write slower over the years," the American author explained. "I was working on the first book for six year and four years on the second one. Fantasists who release their novels every year, do not offer books of large volume. These are not 1.5k pages like mine, but, for example, 500. In addition, I have not become younger. Age does not add enthusiasm."

When asked if he watched the TV show--which, at this point, has blown past the plot line in the books--Martin said he hasn't caught much lately of Jon, Dany, and crew because of his touring and writing.

That dull ache you feel is the onset of a headache trying to figure out Martin's verbal dance-around. He's closing in on seven years to write the latest GoT installment, but he "did not start to write slower over the years." Uh-huh. Yet--YET!--at the same time, "age does not add enthusiasm." And to cap it off, he's too busy to watch an hour of TV once a week because of all the writing/touring going on.

Lest Martin forget, he's not getting any younger doing conventions across the country or interviews with media outlets that find him repeating the same train of thought again and again.

Age doesn't add enthusiasm--although neither does a lack of new books.

Jay-Z says Coldplay's Chris Martin is a modern day Shakespeare.

When offered the chance to to praise someone in measured tones, Jay-Z decided to go big instead.

"I have been in the industry long enough to know when I’m in the presence of a genius and Chris Martin is just that," said the rapper. "In years to come, Britain will look back at him as a modern day Shakespeare."

Personally, I see the similarities, too. Who can forget Shakespeare's catchy pop tunes written for the lute and harpsichord? Timeless stuff.

George R.R. Martin now says the next 'Game of Thrones' book might come out May 2018

Some things in life you never want to rush into, like marriage, having children, or a 7/11 at 3am on a Tuesday.

For George R.R. Martin, it's never wanting to rush into completing a book millions of his fans want to see completed.

A Dance with Dragons--the last Game of Thrones book released--was published in 2011. It's been a six year wait for audiences to learn the fate of Jon Snow, Khaleesi, Cersei, Tyrion, and the rest of the Westeros gang. The wait has been so long that HBO's televised version of the books has caught up and blown past the books' timeline, as the producers of the show can't stick around waiting untold years for Martin to finish his version of events.

Now, Martin claims he'll release the next Game of Thrones book (The Winds of Winter) hopefully by May 2018. In a blog post he says:

"And, yes, I know you all want to know about THE WINDS OF WINTER too. [...] I am still working on it, I am still months away (how many? good question), I still have good days and bad days, and that's all I care to say. Whether WINDS or the first volume of FIRE AND BLOOD will be the first to hit the bookstores is hard to say at this juncture, but I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018... and who knows, maybe two. A boy can dream..."

Two? Two?! Did he just say two, or are there paint fumes lingering around me? I have more faith in Bigfoot, Paula Deen's health tips, and corrupt American politicians than Martin's proclamations.

Two. Keep whispering sweet nothings to us, George.

Google has been paying academics to write about Google.

And no one seems to mention this in their research papers.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google has been willing to pay thousands to various members of the academic community to write papers on the business interests of the company. Google seeks out these researchers sometimes, or vice versa, and proposes the paper, then funds the individual--all while the academic seemingly forgets to mention this hazy ethical middle ground in their finished work. Around 100 papers have developed and been published through this funding.

The Journal caught up with one such professor:


"University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald pitched an idea on copyrights he thought would be useful to Google, and he received $18,830 to fund the work. The paper, published in 2012, didn’t mention his sponsor. "Oh, wow. No, I didn’t. That’s really bad," he said in an interview. "That’s purely oversight." The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut shop with it — we’ll never give you any more money — but that’s fine.'"


"Oh, wow. No, I didn't. That's really bad."

Nah, professor, it's not really bad. Bad implies there could be good as an alternative.

This is just unethical.

This is just shady.

I'm going to go with nutmeg and cumin words myself.

We all have vocal and writing ticks, whether we choose to believe it or not. Listen to your friends talk, those who always say something is amazing or super--two popular words that people rely on like a crutch these days for lack of having any other way to express something is wonderful or surprising.

Famous writers throughout history have had ticks as well, words and phrases they constantly rely on, which data journalist Ben Blatt found out by examining the numbers. Blatt calls them "cinnamon words," a hat tip to Ray Bradbury who once said his favorite word to use in writing was cinnamon.

In his new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Blatt says he found the cinnamon words of many famous writers, as he tells PRI in the interview below.





Jane Austen, for example, leans on civility, fancying and imprudence consistently. Dan Brown? Grail, masonic and pyramid. Other quirks were found by Blatt, like how the word she is used only once in the entirety of The Hobbit, or that James Patterson seemingly uses 160 clichés per 100,000 words in his famed Alex Cross detective novels. (Of course, Patterson really doesn't write his books, so much as his collaborator, so I'm not sure who's to blame there.)

160 clichés, though--that's amazing. That takes a super effort.

John Grisham is a fan of quotation marks.

While on his first book tour in 25-years to promote his upcoming Camino Island, John Grisham was interviewed by various outlets. During one such interview with a site called Chapter16, Grisham was asked about a character in the new book who has rules for writing. One such rule is characters should always speak in quotation marks.

Such punctuation isn't en vogue amongst the high-minded literary set these days, though, so Chapter16 asked Grisham if his personal views share those with his book's character. Likewise, he was asked whether Cormac McCarthy (who started the trend) should be the only writer allowed to go quotation-less. Said Grisham:

"Cormac should be the only person allowed to do that. I think he started it. He has his own rules for grammar and writing. He’s Cormac. He can get by with that; the rest of us can’t."

Ehhh, I'm not even sure McCarthy gets by with it. His writing is like a lazy 6th-grader who just can't be bothered with his essay's basics because his fingers are covered in Little Debbie snack cake goodness and he's distracted by video games. That's Cormac in a nutshell.

Mark Twain's unfinished children's "book" is now finished.

To say Mark Twain has an "unfinished" children's book soon to be published is a bit fast and loose with the facts.

Doubleday Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, plans to release the lighthearted Twain fare on September 26, 2017, after author Philip Stead and illustrator Erin Stead worked to complete the book.

According to Doubleday, the story--The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine--"follows a young boy who eats the flower sprouted by a magical seed and gains the ability to talk to animals. From there, the boy and his new animal friends go off on a wild adventure to rescue a kidnapped prince."

So, it's like Jack and the Beanstalk meets Doctor Doolittle.

In 1879, while the family was visiting Paris, Twain apparently told his daughters a bedtime story following the plot of Prince Oleomargarine. Afterward, Twain wrote 16-pages of notes on a potential full-length book, but left it at that. For over 130-years, the notes remained lost until scholar John Bird discovered them at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011.

Somehow, 16-pages of Twain's notes evolved into a 152-page storybook with illustrations by two other people.

Notes = 152-page book.

A "Twain" book.

Notes.

Based on this metric, I have written tens of thousands of books. It's impressive, if I do say so.

Who wrote the presidential oath of office?

____________________________________________________________

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
____________________________________________________________

That's it. In just 35 words (or 37 words if you count the alternative "or affirm") an individual swears the Oath of Office to The Presidency of The United States for the next four years. Yet, most Americans don't know who wrote the oath, mainly because no single person did.

The oath is written in the United States Constitution, and appears as the only sentence placed in quotation marks. James Madison--who would later become the fourth president--is largely credited with being the author of the Constitution, but an array of Founding Fathers offered their own thoughts of what to include in the document.

In the middle of the following draft from August 6, 1787, in the National Archives, George Washington annotated the presidential oath with his own thoughts, striking out "judgment" and changing the wording to a president's "abilities" (later changed again to "ability"):

During the Constitutional Convention, multiple committees of delegates debated various factors of the document, including a Committee of Detail and a Committee of Style and Arrangement, the latter of which included Madison and Alexander Hamilton, among others.

In the end, no one person can lay claim to the crafting the words forty-four men have said, and a forty-fifth will say later this week. It seems the presidential oath, like American democracy, is a child born of many fathers.

Singapore's migrant workers and the poetry competition they compete in each year.

While among the world's wealthiest, the citizens of Singapore have very little to do with the day-to-day operations that keep their small city-state bustling and operating as amongst the world's most efficient.

Indeed, nearly one-fifth of Singapore's unofficial population is made up of foreign domestic laborers, mainly from Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines.

Singapore: Largely not made by Singaporeans.

I say unofficial because Singapore has a long history of not counting the over one million workers who stay on long-term work visas as members of the population. Saying these individuals are second class citizens would be a compliment, as they are largely ignored, shunned, or abused by the locals as a means of cheap labor. Females are required to live with their employer, often with abusive conditions, while males live in cramped, slum-like dorms spread throughout the city, or in "nice" dorms in remote areas that some say is a form of apartheid.

While they may come from economically struggling countries, these maids and construction workers and garbage collectors and hotel cleaners were often once engineers, doctors, lawyers, educators, and writers back in their native land, now forced to work for menial wages to send back home to support their family.

The physically harsh and emotionally draining conditions don't stop Singapore's migrant workers from channeling their creative spirit into poetry. As Australia's ABC News details, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition is now in its third year, with a large number of submissions that now needs to be whittled down to 17 finalists, for which an evening is reserved by organizers at the National Gallery, and those finalists read their poems to raptured crowds.

Ramaswamy Madhavan, a site engineer at construction sites throughout Singapore, told ABC that such events and writing competition brighten the workers' spirits. "It gives us more energy to write."

And maybe more energy to survive, to live, to thrive.

Handwritten manuscript of 'Jane Eyre' on display in the United States for the first time.

The brief life of Charlotte Bronte will be the focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, where the original handwritten manuscript of Bronte's Jane Eyre will take center stage. It'll be on display in the United States for the first time in the book's 169-year history.

At least half of this is real writing.

Why so long to get around to it? I don't know. Why did it take so long for Charlotte Bronte to get to the point in her books? Why did every character take forever to fall in love?

I'm guessing this is all long-form synergy.



photo: The British Library Board

Maine bed & breakfast can be yours for 200-word essay and $150.

"Write an amazing essay, win a multi-million dollar propety!" has been trendy the past few years as a means to generate interest in otherwise quirky and expensive properties.

The latest comes deep from interior Maine, where a bed & breakfast is "calling all dreamers, writers and entrepreneurs" for their best 200-word essay and $150 entry fee for the chance to win the Freedom House B and B.

Located in Dover-Foxcroft, ME, two hours northwest of Portland, deep (no, like deeeep) in the woods of the Maine, the building is old and historic, but the location is rather--umm--remote? Thankfully, out of the ten questions on the FAQ section of their website they tackle the most important topic:


Does Freedom House B and B have a liquor license?

No it does not have a liquor license.


Well that settles that then. Looks like we're blowing the $150 essay fee we just saved on a night out drinking somewhere in civilization.

Queen Elizabeth was short and to the point with her letter writing as a child.

To celebrate Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday, the public relations arm of the British monarchy has taken to social media to get hip with the kiddos and bombarded sites like Instagram with throwbacks to the Queen's glory days. Those being when she was a kid.

Take the following post, showing the very first letter Queen Elizabeth (known to family as Lilibet) wrote to her grandmother, Queen Mary.

This is the first letter ‘Lilibet’ as Princess Elizabeth was known to her family, ever sent to her grandmother, Queen Mary. #Queenat90 #fromthearchives

A photo posted by The British Monarchy (@the_british_monarchy) on Apr 19, 2016 at 4:40am PDT

You're supposed to read this in your head as if one of the daughters from Downton Abbey is speaking.

How extensive a doll house is it that it's taking ages for the kid to unpack? Is it life-sized? It's possible that every time we look at Buckingham Palace we're just seeing at a really grandiose dollhouse. Is Prince Philip really just an elaborate Ken doll? Potentially.

Masochists and people with writer's block, rejoice! There's an app for that.

The Most Dangerous Writing App isn't shy about patting itself on the back with self-naming itself, and it's not shy about ruining an artistic moment of inspiration that requires a person to pause and ruminate on the possibilities of phrasing.

But that's not the point.

The Most Dangerous Writing App is an open source app that uses a fogged screen and a countdown clock, all in hopes of forcing one to write. If you pause for more than five seconds, everything you wrote is lost, deleted, gone. The fogged screen serves as a focus to simply write as well, forgiving typos and grammar in favor of decidedly placing words on screen--even hot messes in a hazy condition.

You're allowed to endlessly backspace, if you even have an idea where you are on the screen (it's fogged, remember?), but at some point you don't focus on the snafus. You channel your inner James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and slap wildly at the keys in hopes that some nugget, some string of words, a phrase, a sentence sounds like poetry, the beginning of a novel, the ending of an opus, the breaking of your heart.





photo: Wired.com

Pretty much no one in your everyday life knows how to write.

Are you an elitist English snob? Do you go to the grocery store and shake a fist of fury at the express lane stating 12 Items or Less? Do you spit in disgust at the sight of repeated misspellings? Do you privately wear tweed and a monocle and wish you had a British accent?

Your great fashion sense aside, the following photos make up the first of multiple posts about the adventures of everyday life and the dumpster fire that is the English language that surrounds us.

Because everyone really needs an editor in their life.

What's been defaced here is common sense.

This hot mess includes an ellipsis for no apparent reason. Such drama! Don't tell me how it ends!
And clearly Cott Corporation has some hatred toward determiners and prepositions.

---------------------------

You know what's suspicious? Randomly capitalized words.

Maybe that giant eye should keep a look out for that.

-----------------------------

The Virgin Mary not only needs a pair of shoes, she also needs an apostrophe, too.

-----------------------------

Fewer, Arnold. Not less.

It's sort of like how you have fewer major championships than Jack Nicklaus, not less.

------------------------

It's never optional to throw in a hyphen on a whim.

--------------------------

Did you know that a hyphen is not the same as an em dash? And that periods are sort of non-negotiable?

Also--why? Why would anyone play 1,080 hours of underwater Monopoly?

What is the carbon footprint of every individual text message you write?

Jesus's footprints are made up of miracles and not carbon, I assume.

Everything we eat, drink, use, drive, and operate leaves a carbon footprint. The question is how much of a footprint? Are we talking Bigfoot footprints? Jesus walking in the sand footprints? Global-panic-because-we're-all-going-to-die footprints? Just how big?

Someone recently asked NPR's All Tech that question, specifically about the footprint of a text message. There's a solid chance that if you're reading this you're going to send dozens, if not hundreds, of text messages today. So what sort of damage are you really doing besides being antisocial?

All Tech turned to Mike Berners-Lee, the author of the 2010 book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint Of Everything, and all-around impact calculator at Small World Consulting at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. This is his life. And the result of your texting addiction? Fairly minimal.

According to Berners-Lee, assuming we only focus on the actual text message itself and the ability to transmit it (thus, ignoring the manufacture and distribution of the phone to begin with), each text leaves behind 0.014 grams of CO2e. Are you writing 1,000 texts a day? Perform the math accordingly. Berners-Lee notes that in 2010 the estimate for all the world's text messaging carbon footprint was 32,000 tons of CO2e per year. It's probably edged up a bit in the ensuing six years.

That sounds like a lot, but the world produces 50 billion tons of CO2e per year. Writing texts is barely a drop then. So how does this compare to other forms of communication?

Text message:  0.014 grams of CO2e per text
Email:  4 grams of CO2e per email
Letter:  140 grams of CO2e per letter (assuming the letter weighs 10 grams, is made of recycled paper, and is later recycled again)

Berners-Lee says it would take 10,000 texts to equal the carbon footprint of a letter.

But admit it--you're really concerned about one thing here: Does your addiction to emoji use affect the text message carbon footprint?

The answer is no. It's the same as any other character typed into the text box.

Phew. Or, better said:

The English language is killing off the word "the" slowly.

For you non-English folks, a "determiner" is really just a word that quantifies or identifies a noun. Think of the articles the and a. But a determiner can be possessive (like my or their) or something that alludes to quantity (like some or few), among other words.

It appears the way people write today is killing off the determiner though. More specifically, we're killing off the.

Over at the Language Log, a bit of research has shown a precipitous decline over the last century, with some studies showing the use of the dropping by 8% over the last 25 years, or, as they state, a 28% drop compounded over a century.

The Language Log went one step further though. They examined the use of the in two versions of the Bible's Song of Solomon, published roughly 400-years apart: The King James Bible in 1611 and the Message Bible published between 1993 and 2002.

In the King James translation, the is used as 6.57% of all words. The Message Bible? 4.06%. Same Song of Solomon passage, but two very different interpretations from centuries apart.

Not counting the italicized ones, I used the 13 times just now. I'm so King James-y.

10,000 character tweets? They might be on the horizon.

10,000 characters is also known as blogging, but, hey.

Twitter realizes that not everyone has jumped on their bandwagon, much to investors' concerns, so they're looking to branch out.

Twitter's co-founder and current CEO Jack Dorsey has been heading up a project to see how exactly to expand the social media giant's presence, mainly by expanding how much a user can write. Gone would be 140 character limits (although that limit would still remain in your status feed), and users could start writing longer rants during their Twitter beefs without people needing a Rosetta Stone to decipher what most of it meant.

The move is to make Twitter more appealing to the masses. As a result, Dorsey is reportedly mulling the 10,000 character per post mark, but also "only" 5,000. No final decision has been made.

In case you're wondering, this entire blog post you just read? It's 899 characters long.

"Deadlines just stress me out," says George R.R. Martin.

This was said in a blog post Saturday while trying to explain why his latest Game of Thrones book won't be published on time...again.

Martin has taken years and years to write this book, deadlines be damned.

Put another way, imagine if the garbage collector didn't pick up your trash every week. And still didn't collect it for weeks and weeks, and then not for months and months. Barrels of your trash would just pile up, creating a mound of refuse outside your home, all because the garbage collector couldn't be bothered to work. Raccoons would be king, eating everything in sight.

My point, I think, is that raccoons might have eaten George R.R. Martin.




photo: Hypable

Teachers are banning 'boring' words while tripping up on themselves.

Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, CA, wrote a manual in 2009 called Banish Boring Words, which has sold 80,000 copies. Shelton--and other English teachers--have taken up the cause of to deter their students from using a wide array of words, chief amongst them being the likes of said, good, nice, fun, and thing.

"There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use," Shelton told the Wall Street Journal, potentially unaware that nearly every award-winning writer for the past 200 years has used said habitually. "‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list," said (aww, man) Shelton.

And she's not alone with having a list. The Journal notes that the Powell River Board of Education in British Columbia has a list of 397 alternatives to said alone. Robert C. March, a high school teacher in Atkins, NC, has a list of 26 specific words he bans, including I, we, you, me, so, it, and why--and if a student uses any of those 26 words in a paper he will deduct 5-points immediately. March also bans all contractions.

I'm getting a headache just trying to keep it all straight, and I have a degree in writing. (Wait--is 'I'm' a 5-point deduction for the contraction, or 10-points because it includes 'I'?)

But it gets better when you look at the specifics.

March writes on his own site regarding his policy, "Any banned word, or contraction, that appears in a work submitted to me will count as -5 (minus five) points off the total grade."

Submitted to me.

So March deducts 5-points from himself, right? Not so easy, is it??

What do writers know? I guess The Beatles get a 565-point deduction for writing this song:








The Rock Band video game version was the only sensible take on the song. Thanks, Youtube!