Admittedly I’m way behind reading Time magazine. I’ve developed a habit where I only read a magazine if someone else is driving or I’m in the bathroom. (I know, that last part was a bit too much information.) A couple of days ago I read some article about the presidential race and they quoted some political mucky muck making the claim something was a “false illusion.” Now there is a good reason to never give a taped or live interview!
Most of you are writers or at least trying to be writers at some level, so you read this blog. Let the title of this post serve as fair warning, multiple rounds of professional editing are mandatory. When you read other people’s stuff, especially quotes from live conversation you are going to find fault with it.
“Potatoe” Mr. Quayle?
The more you progress as a writer, whether your writing manages to fund those nasty vices of eating and living indoors or not, poorly worded things are going to be both an antipersonnel round landing in your brain and a source of inspiration. I don’t remember anything about the article including what the mucky muck was railing against, I just remember this faux pas (or fopa as I’m prone to name directories where I conduct coding experiments that have a low probability of success.)
Most of you are familiar with the double negative and believe it a severe taboo. During my early days as a programmer working in VAX BASIC I worked at one shop where someone actually came up with convoluted logic which required it. Without trying to turn you into programmers to understand this, he was reading from an indexed file and bastardized the error handling.
WHEN ERROR IN READ #INVOICE_FILE, KEY #0% EQ KEY_STR$ USE IF RECORD NOT .NOT. FOUND THEN ... END IF END WHEN
My BASIC is rusty so if the syntax isn’t perfect get over it. What he was trying to do was implement a “lookup not on” function because actually finding the record was an error. Yes, it is not only the English language which can be brutalized beyond recognition.
Let us now return to the concept of “a false illusion.” Aren’t all illusions false? If something is real it is not an illusion, by definition it is fact or some other substantive term. A “failed illusion” would mean an attempt at an illusion which wasn’t quite pulled off, much like seeing the rabbit pop out of the hat well before the magician’s hand reached in for it. Would a “true illusion” be one which was not only pulled off, but the majority of people could not figure out?
At any rate, “False Illusion” sounds like a great title. One a skilled writer could run with. Just you, some caffeine and your favorite writing tools.
