Reception

Kathy standing, Lindsey seated

   For Wednesday night's activity, we had a reception with hors d'oeuvres and drinks at Poynter. I met Lindsey Nail, who has replaced Kathy Lu at Roanoke Times (see earlier post The Ego Has Landed).
   Here is a photo of them for you to admire.
   I met other people as well, including Tony Huang from Dallas Morning News, who knows Jerry Bokamper, and Terry Bertling from San Antonio who remembered Cathy Frye and Rick McFarland but had not heard about their ordeal. John Kappes from Cleveland Plain Dealer is in an awfully interesting situation right now, with their restructuring. I'll do a separate post for you on that. But it is 11 p.m. and I promised I would try to get up and run with the women who plan to run at 6:15 tomorrow, so straight to the chase:
   Roy Peter Clark came around with a handout. He was wearing a blue Polo-type shirt with the word Poynter embroidered where a polo icon would go, so I asked if he was Mr. Poynter and shook his hand, as I knew you would want me to do.
   He spoke for about 20 minutes on a topic apparently further explained in his new book How to Write Short.
   He led off with Mr. Higgs (the elderly scientist who just won a Nobel Prize for his work on that physics theory, the one about the particle people are pretending they totally understand) and also Billy Joel, who recently came to St. Petersburg. (I wanted to raise my hand and ask if that was why there was a Piano Man Building down the street, but I did not. Which is good, because later, Michael looked it up on Google and learned that the Piano Man used to be a piano store; it was donated to the university.)
   Clark played some chords on a piano, to illustrate his inclusion of Billy Joel. Clark had heard a talk Joel gave in which he complained that a music transcription company had printed his chords incorrectly. Changing one note just a little switches a major chord to minor, thus changing the world evoked by the chords.
   Then Clark said he had been wondering if there might be a verbal equivalent of the Higgs-Boson, so compressed and  meaningful that we could just use it to evoke meaning, thus saying all that needed to be said without saying so much. (I do believe I am saying this more clearly than he did.)

   He said he's decided that if there is such a thing, it involves the word "two" or — and this is what I took him to be saying, I can't swear he said this — the pairing of opposed meanings.
   Then he gave us four examples:
   • Jesus wept.
   • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
   • Tonio Kroger
   • Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
   A great deal of information is packed into these short phrases because they make opposites collide.
   Got that?
   Me neither, but the title of the talk was "When Words Collide" not "News You Can Use."
   Now, once upon a time, I did my junior research project on the under appreciated genius of Alexander Pope, and I remember that among the glossary of 18th-century rhetorical tricks used with wit to convey the illusion of succinctness there is one in which the two parts of a couplet express contrasting qualities, opposites. For the life of me, I cannot recall that term. All I can drag from the cluttered closet of memory is the term periphrasis.
   But, actually, I think periphrasis is exactly the right word for Clark's talk.