A Life Spent Turding Words

"What," you ask, "is a word turd? Do I pass muster?"

The fact that you are here and asking bodes well. It means, if nothing else, that you can read and write. So far, so good.

A word turd, by my lights, is someone who has an unhealthy fixation on words. He or she reads a lot. Writes a lot. But only publishes some. That last one is important. If you publish a lot, you occupy a different universe, one free from the stench of self-loathing and self-recrimination that is so central to the existence of a true word turd. If you never publish, you're likewise disqualified. The altogether unpublished are something both more diarrhetic, and more constipated than we word turds. They have, let it be said, my fullest sympathies.

Publishing in the word turd fashion--that is, at great, agonizing intervals--is the unexpected orgasm that rewards our lives of fumbling, bumbling foreplay. It is the sudden, unexpected romp in the written hay that proves that our plumbing truly functions. Oh frail fecundity!

If you were expecting me to say word turds love language and etymology and prescriptive grammars and what not, go away. You're a pedant. Too polished to be a true turd.

Many word turds are English majors. Someone somewhere along the line told them they have a gift for literary criticism, or fashioning prose and they got sucked into a way of life that has the occasional escape hatch (e.g., Law School, Public Affairs, etc.), but more often is a sentence to a life spent roaming used book stores and the backwoods of the internet.

Like this place.