Good grammar and stuff

The other day I came across a sentence so wild, so enigmatic, that it left me ponderous for the rest of the night. The sentence seems too clumsily formed to be real, but the verdict is in: This hooligan string of words has been declared grammatically sound by the nation’s leading … whatever you call people who study grammar for a living. The sentence is this: “All the faith he had had had had no effect on his life.” And since it has been deemed grammatically sturdy, it’s available for anyone to use in a written work. My main challenge in life has become to somehow work this raucous sentence into a news story in such a way that the editors cannot possibly argue against it. You can count on me, friends. I shall not rest until this thing of beauty appears in a story about a knife fight or public beat down.

Linguist!

That’s the term for those who study words. It was right on the tip of my tongue. It’s interesting because I’ve always thought a linguist was someone who studied pasta for a living. What do we call THOSE people?

Lost at Mt. Apatite

For the “I Told You So” portion of this column, I give you news of a woman who became hopelessly lost last weekend while walking at Auburn’s popular hiking spot. I’ve mentioned here before that after hiking all over New Hampshire and Maine the past few years, I found the winding trails of Mt. Apatite the most confounding to navigate. I feel vindicated. I feel a little bit queasy, too, but that probably has nothing to do with the lost woman, so let’s move on.

Nope. Naw. Never.

Over the years, a lot of people have asked me: “Why has such a dashingly handsome and talented soul such as yourself never progressed from covering gritty street news to taking on more lofty topics concerning city government?” To answer that question, I’d like to present the Tuesday night council meeting at Lewiston City Hall — a meeting that went on for so long that I went in bare faced and came out fully bearded. One woman who attended the meeting was only mildly pregnant when the meeting began but by the end, she was suffering labor pains. So many people got up to talk at that meeting, I feel I now know the private thoughts of 75 percent of the city’s population. For the life of me, I don’t understand how municipal reporters endure such long meetings week after week. I suspect powerful mood stabilizers come into play, but when I ask our human resources department for some, all I get is weird looks.

P.S.

I’m also out as a municipal reporter because years ago, I donated all my neckties to the area’s top sartorialist. Which, as you know, is a term for a person who studies stupidly long city meetings.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. He is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.