Normal's a Setting on Your Clothes Dryer
 
           Mr. Zip                       Pathetic Relic
TODAY  - Consisting of five numerical digits designed to improve mail delivery, Zip Codes were introduced by the United States Post Office 48 years ago today. With more than 42,000 Zip codes now in use, the current system includes detailed demographic and economic data collected by the US Census Bureau for each area – which is how and why the use of Zip Codes has become a highly effective tool in direct mail marketing. More recently, your Zip code serves as a standard way to confirm your credit card identity when purchasing “pay at the pump” gasoline. But given all this, the US Post Office says it will go broke come September unless it able to raise its rate once again.
Birthday Boy – The originator of the once ubiquitous – and now sadly terminal -- Elements of Style, Cornell University English Professor William Strunk Jr. was born 142 years ago today. Originally created for his students as “a forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy and brevity in the use of English,” Strunk’s  “little book” was  expanded and published by his former student E.B. White who had joined the staff of The New Yorker. For the third edition of the book, White wrote, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines, and a machine no unnecessary parts.” But of course, all this was long before the Triumph of Doggeral  ProlSpeak*. (*As examples of ProlSpeak and the death of Style, see Tweet, Twitter, Ebonics, Lil’ Wayne, and Dog the Bounty Hunter.)
Click here to experience the horror of ProlSpeak:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSAfg-u8VxY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2STbu2yY7M