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Badges? We Ain’t Got No Badges   Ordinary Essay   Rosemary Dunn Dalton: Introduction   WWJD?   The Case of the Missing Parenthesis   When in Rome


Get back to where you once belonged. Reading is fundamental. Go forward. Move ahead.

The Case
of the
Missing Parenthesis

by Melissa Lórien Michaels

Dabney (too sitcom film noir, try again), or was it Dexter (short for Dexterity, of course) “Dex-Mex” Rextor (getting too bludgeoning here?) slammed the receiver down on his Dutch-angle–framed, dramatically lit Western Electric Model 500 (sorry, Dabney had already set the scene, with a little help from the title).

“That’s it,” he thought (to himself, as opposed to the mind-readers in the office). “Time to call in the Correction Crew.” Dex-Mex (oh, please no), or rather, Dexter (not much better), was desperate. Clearly. The Correction Crew, at this hour?

For it was in the ante meridiem, and the last time DM had dealt blows with the Correction Crew was the occasion for a syntactical duel the proportions of—

“Yo, Dex-Mex. Forget we in the room?” Slome cracked. “Off in yo fantafrantastic land o’ linguistics?”

“It concerns a by-now legendary (at least in his own mind (thought, once again, to himself) argument about whether to punctuate am (aka (a.k.a.?) a.m.) and pm. You’d scarcely be capable of comprehending, let alone caring.”

“Watch it, Em-Dashmeister,” shot Franklin, before snatching DM’s red pen out of his left hand and tossing it to Slome.

“My pen!” DM cried (with an inflection only he recognized as belonging to a Kids in the Hall character).

“Sheeit. We know what you’re thinking. Callin’ in the bloody Correction Crew.” Slome wove an elegant delete symbol on DM’s title page before dotting it and writing “stet” in the margin.

“You think the 3 CC’s are gonna have better luck huntin’ down a missin’ expletive parentheses?” Franklin teased.

“ParenthesIS. Singular,” Dexter shot. “Not parenthesES. Like you two would even know where to begin looking.”

“Maybe we knows better than you. Excuse me, know.” Slome cocked his head back, flashing a Cheshire as he flipped past the title page.

“Yeah, you never know when you’re dealing with a dash fiend like DM here,” Franklin slashed two hyphens in the air and then, in mock horror, scrambled to substitute one unbroken em-dash.

“Practice your dirty punctuation on your own manuscript if you insist. Just do me a favor and option-shift that hyphen if you’re gonna come writing around here,” said DM.

“Option-shift your own hyphen, Dex-Mex.”

“I do. And I will continue to do so,” belted DM. Weary of this well-rehearsed praddle, Dexter just wanted to find the missing paren.

“We know, we know. Your missing parenthesIS,” Slome mocked.

“Or paren,” thought DM (but how had Slome known what he was thinking?).

“Because it’s in the expletive manuscript, expletive-expletive,” Slome pointed to page 2, from which Dexter read his next line.

“If it’s so expletive obvious, then why haven’t you found my wayward paren?”

“Why don;rsquo;t you ask the Correction Crew?” Franklin cackled.

“Let’s put him out of his morphological misery,” said Slome, cringing as he anticipated Dexter’s usage correction.

When it didn’t come, Slome doubletook, giddy from the absence of obsessive clarification. “Comin’ up on line 50, man. We’re talkin’ TextMate 50.”

“Really?” DM let out a childlike gasp, but then caught himself. “But that only gives you one line!” (For he was counting, of course, the newline that would be 49.)

“I only need one line. Hexadecimal C, man. Check your TM,” Slome gleamed, red pen inserting the perambulatory parenthesis.

Sisehtnerap Gnissim Eht Fo Esac Eht

Get back to where you once belonged. Reading is fundamental. Go forward. Move ahead.
Badges? We Ain’t Got No Badges   Ordinary Essay   Rosemary Dunn Dalton: Introduction   WWJD?   The Case of the Missing Parenthesis   When in Rome

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