Prose

“Grammarnoir 5: The Shame of the Prose” is a four-part serial, running on Mondays from February 11 until the thrilling conclusion on March 4, National Grammar Day.  Grammarnoir is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance of characters to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.   Part 1: See a Fellow About a Scam He was a pudgy little man with a suit that might have fit him a couple of hundred Denny's grand slams ago. His eyes wouldn't stop roaming around the room, and he was beginning to sweat, even though the outfit I work for doesn't throw around simoleons on heat for the help.

By request, and because in a few days I will be at the American Copy Editors Society's national conference with several people who, by the uncanniest of coincidences, bear the same names as certain characters, here is the fifth Grammarnoir serial in one take.   GRAMMARNOIR 5: THE SHAME OF THE PROSE “Grammarnoir 5: The Shame of the Prose” is a four-part serial, running on Mondays from February 11 until the thrilling conclusion on March 4, National Grammar Day.  Grammarnoir is a work of fiction.

LAUREL -- The choice of what nation a horse is to represent during the International Turf Festival usually depends on where he is stabled or where most of his races have been.That's why owner H.C. Seymour thought he would hear "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem, after his gelding, Roman Prose, won the $250,000 Grade III Laurel Dash yesterday at Laurel Race Course.So Seymour and others were stunned when the band played "God Save The Queen." In other words, track management was saying Roman Prose represented England, although he hadn't been there since August 1989.

Having achieved a degree of notoriety as an editor, I find myself in the uncomfortable role of mentor. A while back, I spent a year as a mentor to a younger newspaper editor in a program set up by the Maynard Institute, and there were a number of young editors whom I hired, when newspapers still hired people, whose careers I was able to foster. Now I find myself about to advise a would-be editor in a different program. It's a little awkward because of the circuitous route by which I found my own path.

Mary McCauley opened her recent Read Street review of All the Living with these thoughts: Can a writer write too well? Can a prose style be too gorgeous? She was referring to C.E. Morgan's lush prose, which she admires. But McCauley noted that a friend was "so aware of the painterly quality of Ms. Morgan's imagery, that it interfered with her ability to immerse herself in the world of the novel." I worry about a related trend. We're so frantic to devour the Next Big Thing, or catch up on our book club pick, that we can scarcely be bothered with a book that challenges us with its style or subject matter.

Brandi Chastain's teammates called her "Hollywood" long before she ripped off her jersey to celebrate her 1999 World Cup-winning goal and kicked her own marketing potential into a new gear. Initially, the cheerfully self-promoting Chastain was ambivalent about the attention generated by a gesture she insists was unpremeditated. "So many other things were happening," she said of the soccer team's sudden ascension to pop-star status. "Why do we have to focus on this?" Five years later, Chastain acknowledges the bra is ... well, still a good hook.

On the last Sunday in June, Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman, a Navy reservist stationed in Bahrain, e-mailed a poem to members of his online haiku group. He said he dedicated the poem to his friend Marianne, "whose good friend was killed this past week, somewhere south of Baghdad." late night call - the remains will arrive on Thursday the weather here not much different from Iraq Jones-Huffman might not have known the soldier who'd been killed, but "I'm sure I passed over the report in the daily summary," he wrote.

A Changed Man Francine Prose Harper Perennial / 421 pages / $14.95 Prose's satire concerns a purportedly reformed white supremacist who wants now to lend his services to a human rights organization. Prose "delivers a well-crafted, ironic and insightful tale of the darker side of human nature," we said last year.

Henry Lee, 82, legendary New York Daily News rewrite man whose snappy, lucid prose illuminated most of the major stories of half a century, died Friday of cancer in Sudbury, Mass. Born in Bridgeport, Conn., Mr. Lee started his writing career as editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper. From that point on, and except for the years he attended Harvard University (Class of '34), he was writing for newsprint -- he worked for the Bridgeport Times-Star, the Bridgeport Post, the New York World-Telegram and, from 1946 to 1979, The Daily News.

Reporters love online publishing because it allows them to write at whatever length they choose and frees them from the constraint of print. They can uncap the well of their inky prose and let the reader frolic in the gusher, without fear that some hack on the copy desk will mutilate their burnished sentences.* They may be misguided. I do not fear prose. I've read what the children call chapter books, thick ones, for decades. I do not quail at long articles in, say, The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books . (I actually read and enjoyed that series on cereal grains published in the waning years of the Shawn era, the ones that were widely disparaged by people who had not read them.)

Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: EGREGIOUS Language very frequently goes topsy-turvy. In English, we have a number of words that bear opposite meanings, such as cleave , which sometimes means "to stick to" and sometimes "to split apart. " If you look at a dictionary that operates on historical principles, like the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll find that the first definition, the earliest one, for egregious (ee-GREE-jus)

Caryn Coyle said she marks CityLit Festival on her calendar every year and plans to attend as many of the readings as she can cram into the day. Before noon Saturday, the Rodgers Forge resident had already amassed a stack of newly purchased books and had just come from a discussion of a novel about life in Baltimore's Highlandtown neighborhood. She was headed to a poetry reading and planning to finish the day listening to several novelists discuss their works. "I love all the stories," she said.

Mary McCauley opened her recent Read Street review of All the Living with these thoughts: Can a writer write too well? Can a prose style be too gorgeous? She was referring to C.E. Morgan's lush prose, which she admires. But McCauley noted that a friend was "so aware of the painterly quality of Ms. Morgan's imagery, that it interfered with her ability to immerse herself in the world of the novel." I worry about a related trend. We're so frantic to devour the Next Big Thing, or catch up on our book club pick, that we can scarcely be bothered with a book that challenges us with its style or subject matter.