Starving Artists and Other Crimes

I love words—the way they work together to express thoughts. But they can work together with context to form thoughts, too.  The title of this post, for example.  If I had been clever, I could have called this post a how-to guide, but I didn’t.  Clever may not be the right word; inappropriate, tasteless, or juvenile might be more apropos.

I like the idea of personalized greeting cards.  Not just the idea, mind you, but the reality.  I’m referring here to greeting cards made expressly for a specific giver to present to a specific recipient. One might think the creation of such cards would require talent, skill, or some other attribute—an attribute one might not possess.  No, those attributes would be necessary only to ensure the cards are attractive or possess beauty in the artistic sense.  To do it the way I’m imagining, only intent and execution is required.

To the recipient, of course, the card might be seen as evidence of criminal intent.  And that could lead to a threat of execution.

I’m diverging rather widely from what I intended to write.  I intended to write about starving artists.  The vernacular suggests “starving artists” are those people who create and attempt to sell art, but who eek out only a meager living from the endeavor, if indeed they eek out any living at all.  The fact that creative, inventive, and—perhaps—idealistic people might struggle and even starve while pursuing their “calling” is a crime, indeed.  Maybe not a crime in the true sense of the word, but a crime to my way of thinking.

The connection between greeting cards and starving artists is this: starving artists could supply the talent and skill to create the art for personalized greeting cards, while the giver of the card would supply the language.  The artist would, based on the language the giver supplies, execute (or create) a personalized card.

After this convoluted exploration of nonsense, using words in ways they were not intended, you might say I am murdering the language with my inappropriate post.  There, I’ve finally gotten around to the other crimes I mentioned in the title of this post.  Now, therefore, my work is done, at least for the moment.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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