The Library of Congress in Washington, DC has 838 miles of bookshelves and over 30 million books. Thirty million. Actual physical paper printed with words. In the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, there are 200,000 books that date back hundreds of years or more. They can’t be opened because of their age and many of the authors are now long forgotten, but if you stand in the middle of the room and stare a while, it is easy to believe that every meaningful thought in history originated somewhere within those volumes. Until you read about the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt that was started in 200 BC, held 700,000 scrolls, and was around for six centuries.
It’s enough to make a person stop writing. I mean, have you ever gone into just a regular bookstore or city library and been overwhelmed by all of those stories? Have you thought to yourself, not only will no one person ever be able to read all those books in a lifetime, but what do I possibly have to add that hasn’t already been said? I certainly have. Continue reading “Everything Worth Saying Has Already Been Said”
She was a flaxen-haired beauty, cute as a button, and never missed a beat.
Every time I begin a sentence with “and”, a voice in my head sings, “You’re not supposed to do that.” I usually fix it and apologize internally to my ninth grade English teacher. So it pains me to admit that after hours of research, I could find no official rule against using a conjunction to start a sentence. Yes, there is a raging controversy about it, but here’s what’s not up for debate: If there is or ever was such a rule, it has a long history of being ignored. I pulled six books at random from my shelves and easily found the following examples.