#184 / An Eggplant Equals...What?

Jon Carroll used to be my favorite columnist. He still is, actually, but as he notes in a recent blog posting, Carroll doesn't write a column any more. 

Jon Carroll is free! Well, at least to some degree, I guess. According to the lament I'm referencing above, Jon Carroll misses the demands of the deadline that used to motivate his writing. 

"I spent the last 50 years working to a deadline," Carroll explains. "It’s what I did for a living. Now, all of a sudden, only crickets." 

Carroll was apologizing. "I’m sorry that this blog post is late," he said, "even though it isn’t."

If you didn't ever read Jon Carroll in The San Francisco Chronicle, you missed out (in my opinion, at least). Now, you can subscribe to his blog. You can find it (irregularly, I guess we have to assume) by clicking this link. It's called Jon Carroll Prose. 

In his "Pieces of my brain #2" posting (the one that was late, even though it wasn't), Carroll seems to come out for split infinitives and for the transmutation of our language and writing into something different. You know, the kind of changes that texting is bringing forth into the world. 

Here's what Carroll says about emojis, which are not, as he notes, actually words at all. What are they?

I’m going to contend that they’re a new language being born. We’re going back to pictographs, the oldest form of written communication known. It’s perfect for our globalized world; we may not know Chinese, but we know what an eggplant is. (It’s a penis).

Jon Carroll is still my favorite columnist. Buy yourself an Eggplant Stress Ball. Sign up for Jon Carroll Prose. Find out why!

Image Credit:

http://www.officeplayground.com/eggplant-stress-ball-p7313.html