Imagine thinking your spouse is a sexy secret agent for decades only to find out he’s a restaurant critic for fat tire boy magazine
Better yet imagine a real spy getting in trouble and mistaking a restaurant critic for a fellow agent. But the critic takes their job very seriously and won’t reveal themselves and so gets pulled into some kind of huge dangerous conspiracy whilst continuing to take notes on the quality of every restaurant they almost get shot in.
• Capitalization to emphasize A Word Or Phrase
• The use of ™ to show Importance™
• Commas,,, used as,,, an ellipsis,,,,
• ran dom s p aci ng to show a choked or strangled sort of tone
• Cut-offs mid sentence
• saying that they love something, or that something is doing its best, even if it’s an inanimate object
• Dramatizing every sentence (instead of saying “Oh, she’s pretty!” One would say “U would let her kill me and say thank you.”)
• random capitalization in the middle of a sentENCE TO EMPHASIZE A RISING, MORE EMOTIONAL TONE
• vague one word answers in response to a picture
• Mood/same/me
• Jokes where the only way to understand it is if you’ve seen two other vines, a tweet, and four Tumblr posts from 2012
• Noticing details about a freaky picture and acting like it’s completely normal
• The opposite: seeing a stupid picture and losing it in response
• Capitalization to emphasize A Word Or Phrase
• The use of ™ to show Importance™
• Commas,,, used as,,, an ellipsis,,,,
• ran dom s p aci ng to show a choked or strangled sort of tone
• Cut-offs mid sentence
• saying that they love something, or that something is doing its best, even if it’s an inanimate object
• Dramatizing every sentence (instead of saying “Oh, she’s pretty!” One would say “U would let her kill me and say thank you.”)
• random capitalization in the middle of a sentENCE TO EMPHASIZE A RISING, MORE EMOTIONAL TONE
• vague one word answers in response to a picture
• Mood/same/me
• Jokes where the only way to understand it is if you’ve seen two other vines, a tweet, and four Tumblr posts from 2012
• Noticing details about a freaky picture and acting like it’s completely normal
• The opposite: seeing a stupid picture and losing it in response
Oh my God I’m not sure of the accuracy of this scale but I made one anyways.
1: Jane Austen. Theoretically Romantic, mostly a clever satirist more interested in the novel as the perfect vehicle for social commentary than in poetry for capturing emotion. Very little chance of swooning and/or dramatic death. A very safe spot on the Romanticism scale.
2: Dorothy Wordsworth: Actually a Romantic, though not excessively so! Enjoy your long walks in the country. Keep those diaries. Your brother can mine them for publishable material until people consider them finally worthy of academic interest a century or two later.
3: Wordsworth. May result in later becoming annoyingly conservative but mostly harmless. Go ahead and wander lonely as a cloud. Gaze upon that ruined abbey.
4: Charlotte Turner Smith. Recover that English sonnet and transform it into a medium that mostly expresses sorrow! Help establish Gothic conventions! Have what Wordsworth called a true feeling for rural England! Die in penury and be forgotten by the middle of the nineteenth century!
5: Blake. ?? Who even knows man. Talk to angels. Create your own goddamn religion. Confuse all of your contemporaries.
6: Mary Shelly. Go ahead and run off with that unhappily married poet who took you on dates to your mother’s grave, but this may result in carrying your husband’s calcified heart around in a fragment of his last manuscript the rest of your life. But also, arguably inventing sci-fi as a genre… so that’s some consolation.
7: John Keats: listen to that nightingale but be forewarned: you will die of TB in Rome and everyone will mock you for dying of bad criticism instead of, you know, infectious disease.
8: Coleridge. May result in never finishing a poem and a severe opium addiction.
9: Percy Shelly. May result in being expelled from Oxford and in premonitions of your own death by drowning.
