087 - Negative Space: A Waltz

I’ve noticed a trend where many new books feature appended titles labeling the overall form of the contents. “Where The Crawdads Sing: A Novel,” or “I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays” are some recent examples. My favorite one, and one of the rare instances where I think it’s appropriate, is “The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare” by G. K. Chesterton.

With the exception of Chesterton’s brilliant book I find these annoyingly unnecessary. It’s akin to using “very” or “extremely” as degree adverbs, because they waste our time passing along useless information. We already KNOW the book is a novel, or an essay or short stories or we wouldn’t be buying it in the first place. In the same way, what’s the difference between something being important, very important, or extremely important? Who knows?

My latest exceedingly important tune is a waltz in case you were confused.

Here’s a slower version for Dave since it appears you can only speed these up, not slow them down!