No Cheating

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wanted the ultimate magic kit when I was a kid, but as with so many things in life, disappointment lay in the fact that the magic kits grew more complex, more “magical,” only with higher prices.

Each of them included a “magic wand,” which was just a wooden dowel painted black, or, in the more expensive kits, painted black with a white tip, because a white tip equals classy. The photo of the kid on the magic box with the white tipped wand often showed the kid in tails and with a top hat. (I am sure that because of kids like me, or because of just me, the toy companies needed to add the disclaimer, “Hat and tails not in package.”)
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Today in History: August 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The two men, both of them adults, wanted the boy dead. They wanted him dead. The boy was 14 years old and a visitor from out of town, a city kid from Chicago.

On a visit to see family in the country, in Money, Mississippi, the boy from Chicago went to the local grocery store one day. He bought bubblegum.

He spoke to the woman behind the counter, who was not a lot older than he was, 21. Perhaps he thanked her, perhaps he said something else. Either way, she did not like the contact. She was white and the boy was black.

Her husband later said that the boy had “whistled” at his wife, so he and his half-brother wanted the boy dead. At 2:30 in the morning, with the young woman alongside to identify the boy, they went to the boy’s uncle’s home and found the boy.

What followed was not a lecture from two men to a boy about how a young man should speak with a woman. No. On this date in 1955, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam took Emmett Till with them and the boy never returned. Days later, when the body was found in the Tallahatchie River, it was identifiable only by a ring the boy usually wore. The body was identifiable as human only in the minimal sense after what they had done before throwing Emmett Till in the water. They wanted him dead, you see.
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Make No Mitsaek

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Mistakes suck. Errors do, too.

Adverbs will never go hungry for a lack of work in many writers’ drafts, including mine, but that part of speech demands erasure whenever one encounters it. Adverbs are the empty calories of the English language: They are tasty, and they appear to be helpful when we want to bend a verb to do our verbal bidding and guide our eager reader(s) to share our thought-patterns, when context and the verb itself are capable of handling the task just fine on their own. They are potato chips and cotton candy blended into a linguistic smoothie.

All of the personal errors in my history can be described with an adverb, colorfully. Merely an adverb minus a verb or other details, so no personal stuff, no self-incriminating or embarrassing information might reveal some things: complacently, awkwardly, abruptly, vigorously, languorously, braggingly, disgustingly, violently, wrongly. Timidly. Brazenly. Toss a “very” or three in there.
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