Out of Context

As I’m searching secondhand books back to front & reading the pages bottom to top for useable phrases, I can never decide whether to cut them out or just mark them. If I cut them out I’ll loose the good ones for sure – throw them out, vacuum them up, whatever. If I don’t, I’ll never again find that perfect phrase about swimsuits for the old picture of my aunties when they were bathing beauties.













There may be a solution at hand. Clear report covers, without holes, which open at three sides. When a piece of letter size paper is inserted the static holds the cutout pieces in place quite nicely. Now, to find them quickly should they be arranged by theme or what? Time spent on art would be far more productive than this nonsense!













Subjects on the left, verbs in the middle and predicates on the right. There! Sort of a variation on a flip-book for mix & match sentences. It should work.

They shook their heads / oyster pies were / an act of inexcusable barbarity.
He believed / sizing up the situation / a beribbonned bonnet had been unwise. “I am an Englishman!”

Sometimes sentences taken out of context can be downright hilarious when you have images of a future collage prancing through your brain:

Well, I really think that’s about all the clothes you’re really going to need.
She could jitterbug like the dickens and had money to burn.
It looked so much better in the shop.
She just walked right over on her uprights and whispered into his flippers with her bone box.
She blabbed to the kids during lunch, she blabbed to the kids during recess, and if that wasn't enough, she blabbed to the bus driver on the way home.

And my current favorite was about a couple of kids in the Edwardian days being read to by their nanny:
Up in the bedroom things were happy.