Cleaning out the back of the fridge

I have about 20 posts sitting unfinished in the holding bin. I usually give them an obvious title and I write out a brief outline of my observations on quotes and clips and arguments and phrases and words. The oldest draft (an unfinished--and barely started--post on diminutive suffixation) goes back to October of last year.

Many of these post topics are still interesting to me and I'll eventually get to a lot of them. But occasionally a draft is tossed into the bin. Sometimes the observation has been plumbed by another source--"Brizendine is spreading lies about sex differences in brain structure and language!" Sometimes the observation is too obvious--"Have you noticed that people pronounce things differently?" And sometimes I just can't remember what I was going to say. Consider the following passage taken from a story by Arthur Spiegelman.

Reuters: O'Donnell, known for her unabashedly liberal views, and Hasselbeck, who is a political conservative, have sparred frequently on the show, although they profess to be good friends off-camera.

I have no idea what I was going to say about this. It's not memorable or interesting. It's direct writing in a fluff story. It's no longer relevant to anything that's happening in the media. And I'm not even sure why I chose to reveal that the little clip was sitting in my draft file.