San Antonio, Texas — December 2, 2006. Years ago, Smoking Pun author and Cerebral Market co-founder Thaddeus Taylor routinely related macabre tales of ill-fated Alamo refugees to curious tourists. On December 23rd at 3:00 p.m., he will be holding forth on a very different topic at Brentano’s Bookstore, a mere stone’s throw (if you have a good arm) from the Alamo, on the San Antonio River Walk. “I guess you could say the common theme is man’s inhumanity to man, considering the way I’m inflicting all this horrifying wordplay on people,” answered Taylor when asked, for the umpteenth time, “What the…?” “But there’s nothing like the scene of a crime for the scene of a crime, ya know?” This is precisely the kind of double talk that has made Taylor the target of groups like Save Our Language, which is often just called S.O.L. for short, and their Chairwoman Emeritus, Mary M. Webster. There has been talk of protests by the group, leading up to events in Austin and Houston, but thus far they have not materialized.
Readers Encouraged to Participate
The Smoking Pun Crimes against the Language features a combination of more or less useful new words, plus etymological notes and entertaining digressions. It also leads the reader to bonus online content at www.smokingpun.com, and provides the opportunity for would-be neologists to submit their own words for future volumes, which at this time are contingent on Taylor staying out of the Big House. The seemingly innocuous book has caused controversy because of the irreverent nature of some of the material, but Taylor points with evident relief to the fact that there are no pictures of the Prophet in Crimes, and that “none are currently contemplated for future volumes.”
No Time to Stop Evolving
Cerebral Market, established in 2005, takes its mission from a line in Leonard Bernstein’s This I Believe essay: “We must encourage thought, free and creative.” But Fratello Astuto, founding brother of the company, puts it another way:
“When it comes to the human brain, now is no time to stop evolving. It’s vital that we help find new ways to keep the FUN in cerebral functioning.”
