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I was at a bar convention last week taking care of those annoying continuing legal education credits, and I have something to say to those guys in their 20s and 30s I saw wearing bow ties with their suits. Please stop.
You may think it makes you look cool and “old school,” poised to go all Atticus Finch at a moment’s notice on perpetrators of injustice. It doesn’t.
It comes across as exactly what it is–an affectation. At best, it makes you look like you’re trying to be something you’re not. In other words, it’s the legal profession’s equivalent of driving a Hummer. At worst, it makes you look like a brown-noser. While stroking the senior partner’s ego by dressing like him may have short-term benefits, it’s going to cause your colleagues to resent you, and when that same senior partner gladly pushes you in front of a bus to save himself, no one is going to come to your rescue.
When you’ve practiced law for thirty years, you’ll have earned the right to wear whatever you want, and then you can put on the bow tie. Until then, for the sake of everyone, maybe you should put less energy into trying to look like a good lawyer and more energy into trying to be one.
I’m still slogging through the manuscript, and my mind is starting to play tricks on me. I’m using a red pen to mark the copy of the manuscript I’ve printed out. It’s transparent, and it’s the kind where the ink fills up the entire shaft. As I’m writing, I notice the red liquid sloshing around in the pen, and it occurs to me how much it looks like blood…. I think I’ll go see if there’s an episode of Iron Chef on the TiVo.
Filed under: Language, Life | Tags: Ashley MacIsaac, Booking Through Thursday, Gaelic, Leahy, memes, Natalie MacMaster, Niyaz, Shooglenifty, songs, Urdu
What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love? Why? And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them?
This is an interesting question for me, because I’m not really drawn to songs because of their lyrics. What attracts me is the way they sound–the way the melody and the harmonies interact. For example, my favorite genre of music is Celtic. I am all about the fiddles and bagpipes, but I especially like artists who take traditional melodies and do new things with them, such as Natalie MacMaster, Leahy, and Shooglenifty. Of course, most of their music is instrumental, but when there are lyrics, they’re usually in some form of Gaelic. I still like them because of the way they sound. This is a video of a song called “Sleepy Maggie” by Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac. The woman singing in Scottish Gaelic is Mary Jane Lamond.
I don’t know Scottish Gaelic, so I have no idea what she’s saying, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it? Half of the music I own with lyrics doesn’t have them in English. I have songs in every variety of Gaelic there is, in addition to Welsh, Swedish, German, Russian, Farsi, Urdu, Latin, and Zulu. Here’s another example, a song called “Allahi Allah,” from a group called Niyaz, which takes 14th-century Sufi poems in Farsi and Urdu and sets them to music using traditional Middle Eastern instruments remixed electronically. I think this one is in Urdu. Needless to say, my Urdu is a little rusty.
So I guess I regard the human voice as another musical instrument, albeit an extremely beautiful one with unmatched versatility. I guess I also have oddball musical tastes.
That’s what Holly Lisle calls it. I’m two weeks into revising my novel manuscript, and I must say it’s a very accurate description. I feel like I’m in hip-high mud wading through the Okefenokee. I am, however, seeing progress, I think. At least it seems like progress. Maybe. Wait, is that an alligator?
