Those Riddlesome Moleskine Stickers

If you're like me, you collect those little stickers that come with each Moleskine book. They're labeled "Quality Control" and they combine two aspects: color and design. I haven't kept track of which sticker comes with which type of book, but I have an awful lot of the little gridded ones, in green, orange and yellow. I have one or two of the other designs.

Stickers are fun. Who would throw them away? But the thing is, I don't know what they're for. I held onto them in a little ceramic teacup until I could decide on their function.

The first instinct was to simply lay them out on a piece of paper, organized by design, to have a large one-page collection of them, but I felt they should have a better purpose. My second idea was to use them to seal the backs of envelopes, and that would be sufficient but I still felt there was a reason for them I didn't perceive. In the back of my mind, something nagged that they should go on the books themselves.

Submersed/Immerged In My Studies

I need to post something in here, and I've been wrestling with words a lot, so I think I'll double-back to that tack, if no one minds.

By which I mean, I'm nearing one full year as a hired employee of a local health and medical marketing agency, for which I fulfill the capacity of QA specialist, proofreader and copy editor. I could not be more pleased: on top of friendly and interesting staff, more than a spacious creative office, and beyond the stunning view of St. Anthony Falls and the Stone Arch Bridge—I am a valued member of a dynamic and cohesive team, and my function is to clear up the language we speak. I could not be more pleased.

Essential reading for this work are John McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by which the nascent editor will learn to take some power away from grammarians and lend it to linguists. No longer do you defend the idiosyncrasies of the American English dialect as "that's just how it is" (per those horrible Victorians, who just pulled stuff out of their butts and declared it Scripture); you can step up and say "this is where it came from and why we still use it". Isn't that exciting?