A Few Useless Items

Sometimes perfectionism can be self-destructive. Best to avoid it before it becomes a menace.

Sometimes weather can be inconvenient, and sometimes menacing weather is unavoidable. (This is just a general observation, not anything relevant to my day.)

Speaking in abbreviations is annoying. If something is funny, really laugh-out-loud funny, the appropriate response is to laugh out loud, not to say "L.O.L." As an example.

Eep.

Four-way stops are the devil's handiwork.

Word Nerd: Affect/Effect

In the category of "Not Everything You Were Taught in School Is Complete," there is the issue of when to use "affect" and when to use "effect." What you were likely taught in school is that "affect" is a verb ("Will my poor job performance affect the amount of my raise?") and "effect" is a noun ("Your poor job performance has the effect of decreasing the amount of your raise"). You may even have been taught a mnemonic device to help you remember the difference: AVEN (Affect=Verb, Effect=Noun).

That's all well and good, because "affect" is a verb, and "effect" is a noun, but because this is the English language, it's not even half the story. "Affect" is also a noun, and "effect" is also a verb. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Affect" means "to produce an effect or change in," as in "Unemployment news affected the Dow Jones negatively." It also means "to impress the mind or move the feelings of," "(of pain, disease, etc.) to attack or lay hold of." As a noun, it means "feeling or emotion," or in Psychiatry, "an expressed or observed emotional response." Once upon a time (about 600 years ago) it meant "inward disposition or feeling."

"Affect" has other definitions as a verb, including "to pretend or feign," "to assume artificially, pretentiously, or for effect,"¹ "to use, wear, or adopt by preference," "to assume the character or attitude of," and "(of substances) to tend toward habitually or naturally." It also has the archaic definitions of "to have affection for" and "to aspire to," and another obsolete definition: "to incline."

Then we have "effect," which as a noun means "something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence," "power to produce results; efficacy, force, " "the state of being effective or operative; operation or execution," "a mental or emotional impression produced, as by a painting or speech," "general meaning or purpose, intent," "the making of a desired impression," "an illusory phenomenon," and "a scientific phenomenon." As a verb, it means "to produce as an effect; bring about, accomplish."²

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a short paragraph that uses three different uses of "affect" and/or "effect."

¹This is one of my favorite definitions of this word. Like you care.

²All definitions from Random House Webster's College Dictionary. In all likelihood, if I had the unabridged OED, this post would be a lot more complete in its information you probably don't care about.

Old Werewolf Movies

Before Hollywood, werewolf legends didn't necessarily involve the full moon, or humans (usually men, usually Lon Chaney Jr.) sprouting hair in painstaking stop-motion (The Wolf-Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man). I have not found a werewolf legend involving rare Tibetan flowers (Werewolf of London).

These old werewolf movies suffer for their dated look and feel, their outdated make-up, their poor dialogue, and their silly law enforcement officers (in The Wolf-Man, the murder weapon that was used to kill the original gypsy werewolf played by Bela Lugosi, is returned to its owner). And yet, weak as they are by today's standards, these movies provide a unique form of entertainment. If we wish to know what future generations are going to think of today's cutting-edge movie effects, we can experience it by watching old monster movies.

Beaucoup Greetings

Hello, and welcome to Beaucoup Uselessness. I have no defined plans on how I'm going to use this space, but I hope it will be entertaining.