Throwback Thursday is a gimmick permitting the repurposing of old material. Having sold you old rope earlier this week with the annual holiday cautions, I plainly have no shame. So today's throwback Thursday offering is a selection of previously published haiku on the editor's lot. 

Regard the comma,

apt with the compound sentence,

not with compound verbs.

The patient labor

of the lexicographer

embiggens our tongue.

So sweeping the claims,

so erratic the result —

Wikipedia.

A reporter’s hand

reaches for a thesaurus;

screams die in my throat.

In the intern’s work

commas cluster on the page,

sprinkled like pepper.

Thirty-four inches

on educationn reform—

caffeine’s not enough.

The bureau’s story

matches its budgeted length.

My eyes fill with tears.

This story’s first graph

runs for forty-seven words.

Time to turn the page.

Proud writer inquires,

Don’t you find this lyrical?

Shoot me in the head.

Vogue abbreviations in textspeak don't usually intrigue me, but a few days ago Word Spy wrote about one that caught my eye: JOMO.

JOMO stands for "Joy of Missing Out," defined thus: "The pleasure derived from no longer worrying about missing out on what other people are doing or saying."

This is a concept we have been waiting for. 

I am writing this post on what I insouciantly describe as my free time, after having checked work email, two personal emails, Facebook, Twitter, Romenesko, and a handful of other sites. This is also the routine for my days off and vacation time. Discovering JOMO has liberating potential. 

I had had intimations of the concept. When I was no longer in graduate school, freed from social pressure to keep au courant, I could ignore whatever book or author was being widely talked and written about, following my own tastes and preferences.*

At The Sun, early in the days of using Outlook, I once accidentally deleted my entire message list: scores of messages,...

Henry Furhmann at the Los Angeles Times has beaten me to the punch this year with advice against the holiday cliches that any writer with a modicum of self-respect will shun. But I think I am still catching you in advance of the first ’Tis the season, so once more with the holiday cautions.  

Repetition is the point of ritual. Ritual achieves continuity and reassurance through the familiarity of its patterns. You can be sure that you will hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” at the late service on Christmas Eve, that you will eat the same food at family holiday dinners, that you will make the same toasts at New Year’s. That is as it should be.

Unfortunately, in journalism the resort to trite language is celebrated as an honorable ritual rather than a failure of imagination, producing boredom instead of comfort and reassurance. Ye who have ears to hear, heed. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire are a treat; chestnuts in headlines and copy are not.

’Tis the season: Not in copy, not in headlines...

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word: 

FECKLESS

You would imagine, just looking at the word feckless, that it means lacking in feck. 

You would be right.

Feck, a Scots word originally meaning "effect," "majority," "efficacy," or "value," is related to the Middle English effect. It came to mean "vigor" or "energy." To be feckless (pronounced FEK-less) is to be weak or ineffective, worthless or irresponsible. 

Example: From Esquire, "Ryan Seacrest: Lord of Hosts," December 2009: "From February through May, two or three nights per week -- depending on how many feckless, talent-free wannabes remain -- he hosts American Idol, a sewer of innocent depravity that draws thirty million TV viewers per night. "

In Kansas, a heterosexual couple has filed suit seeking to block the arrival of same-sex marriage in the state. 

Philip and Sandra Unruh argue that the Fifth Amendment protects the rights of heterosexual married couples: “A ruling extending marriage to same sex relationships would violate the Unruh’s [sic] right to equal protection under the law by the Court’s failure to protect marriage and support the right of Kansas citizens to codify its implicit meaning.”

In a telephone interview, Phillip Unruh explained the harm that legalizing same-sex marriage would do to his: “It would affect the joy and celebration that we think of when we think of marriage, because we would also have to have in mind on a daily basis that its now shared with people, that, who have the same sex relationships. The word would be a disturbing emotion for us on a daily basis, know that the word is being shared with people who are in a same sex relationship.”

Let me see whether I can put the Unruhs’ minds at ease.

...

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word: 

SUSURRANT

One of the lovelier onomatopoeic words in English is susurrant (pronounced suh-SUR-ant), the sibilants of which echo its meanings: "whispering," "murmuring," "rustling." It is the adjectival form of susurrus, "a whispering or rustling sound."

Susurrus is a direct lift from Latin, where it means "humming" or "muttering."

Example: From James Parker's 2011 article in The Atlantic on R.E.M., "America's Rock Band": "When challenged in the early days about his sleepy, susurrant diction and bric-a-brac phraseology, or about the lack of a lyric sheet inside R.E.M.’s records, Stipe would sometimes refer questioners to Walker Percy’s essay 'Metaphor as Mistake'—an exploration of the ways whereby (as Percy writes) 'misnamings, misunderstandings, or misrememberings' can lead to 'an authentic poetic...