Those Powerful Parentheses

If you were ever in doubt... this blog will prove once and for all that YES, I am a NERD! ...and a future librarian. ...and I'm strangely happy about it. Of course, that doesn't stop me from embellishing on my reading assignments to keep them from putting me to sleep.

This semester, one of my classes is called Advanced Online Searching. Since we do live in the age of computers and online information retrieval... I thought it would be a smart move to make sure I didn't leave any skills in this arena unlearned. In chapter 2, we learned about those powerful parentheses, and how we can use them to drastically affect the outcome of an online search. I'm pulling directly from the text, here. Somebody (named Suzanne S. Bell) went WAY too far to make the science of online searching exciting. This next example assumes you already know something about Boolean Logic. If you don't, I promise not to teach you about it today. Behold:

(insane AND crazy) OR looney
insane AND (crazy OR looney)
(insane OR looney) AND crazy
insane OR (crazy AND looney)
(insane AND looney) OR crazy

Did I miss any vital combinations? Besides my own special blend of the above terms, randomly applied? You see-- each of these options gets highly different results. Go to google.com and check it out. Apparently, "crazy insane" is an actual term. I know I use it fairly frequently, but I thought that was just me. And a few other people I know, whose lives are even MORE crazy insane than MINE is!! Having tried searching "(insane AND crazy) OR looney" for myself, I gave up looking for any separate listings of "looney" after the first 26 pages of links to items containing both the word "crazy," AND the word, "insane." My favorite title so far was this:

bride wigout freakout meltdown hair wedding bridesmaid haircut crazy psycho cut insane rage girls scissors furious bad

Here's the link. I didn't look around too much, so no guarantees that this is a safe/sane/user-friendly site. The title was enough.

Then I looked up "insane OR (crazy AND looney)"... and actually found some titles that also have "looney" in them. I was getting worried, so this came as some relief. I thought maybe I was the last person on earth who used that term. It's happened before. I noticed that whereas "crazy insane" seems to fit a wide variety of interests, most of the links to crazy AND looney information were somehow also referenced by looney toons, or a character therein. I particularly liked look of the article about

The Crazy Oboist's Looney Bin

Similarly, one of my favorite unassigned reading books is Eats Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. In this grammatically gregarious rant, a story is told of a Panda Bear who goes into a diner, orders the special, eats it, pulls a gun, shoots a hole in the ceiling, and walks out. Everyone is vastly confused by this uncharacteristic behavior, until the waitress (who moonlights as an English Teacher because she loves reading and teaching, but still needs to pay the bills somehow-- okay, I made that part up) notices a pamphlet beside the Panda Bear's empty plate. It's a wildlife manual.

On page 37, which is marked with several blobs of hot sauce from the "special," she reads the following sentence: "In its native habitat, the giant panda eats, shoots, and leaves." Ahhh-- he was trying to do what all pandas do! He was trying to BLEND! The waitress explains to the remaining restaurant patrons (the police are busy with REAL crimes, and haven't bothered to show up to this random shooting where no one famous actually got killed) that if only the wildlife manual had been proofread for grammar, it would have stated that "In its native habitat, the giant panda eats shoots, and leaves." All would have been well, and the poor panda would not now be running around downtown with heartburn and a handgun.

...I love stories like that! The ones with a really important message you can GRASP! (Okay, I'm being slightly sarcastic, here... but I did laugh the first time I read the story, and it did convince me to both buy and READ the book.) And... it's nice to have someone defend my personal belief in the power of the parenthesis... and commas. I love commas. I use them, often. SO that's my story about how the proper combination of grammar and Boolean Search Techniques has impacted my world today. It has changed lives, I tell you! CHANGED THEM FOR EVER!! (see previous blog regarding the use of corny movie quotes in nefarious circumstances)

Imagine receiving the following email from your boss, as you sit in a busy newspaper office, creating the final list of articles to be included in tomorrow's run:

"Run that article by me, again." ...huh? The last article you wrote was 3 years ago!

And with this pithy suggestion, I leave you to pursue your silly little unimportant lives where you actually go around breathing outside air and talking to real people who don't check your spelling before they post what you say, and dumb things like that. (Remind me again, what do normal people do every day??)