photo credit: theogeo

Two items caught my eye today:

The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)

” … perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking …”

Now I understand why there is no history of dementia in my family … we exercised our snarky, sarcastic brains a lot - even my Grandma Fanny in her less-than-perfect English could curl a lip around, “So, Miss ‘Queen of Leisure’ (that was me in my younger self), you call that a clean kitchen floor?”

Brevity - The Twitter version of the Gettysburg Address

I saw this in today’s Washington Post Magazine. Gene Weingarten, the Post’s resident humorist, tweets on Twitter and shares this final 140 character result of editing “The Gettysburg Address.”

“87 years ago, our dads made us free. Yay! Still want free, but hard! Fighting, dying, burying! Need more fight tho, so dead be happy.”

Okay, just to be fair, here’s the original, a speech already acknowledged for its brevity as much as its spare and powerful beauty:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I’m thinking this kind of writing would be worth a series of tweets just to get it all in as is.

Or maybe that’s just me.