Titles
It seems to me that we've been getting more stories with unusual titles than usual. The unusualness of the titles falls into two categories:
Typographical: titles containing periods, commas, exclamation points, two-digit years preceded by apostrophes, numbers, words in all-caps, two colons in a row, ampersands, parentheses, etc.
Length: titles up to 11 words long, up to 66 characters long. Luckily, I designed the database to be able to hold story titles longer than anything we're likely to get (please don't take that as a challenge), but it's surprising.
Reminds me of Charades, which I haven't played in a couple years (not since my college reunion in 2000 (when the SWIL group mind was in full swing, pretty close to telepathic), and not for years before that), and specifically the titles we used to use back when we played team Charades in high school, the most memorable of which was, of course, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad (which I have no desire to actually see, especially after reading the IMDB review that calls it a "miserable, grotty-looking, dull, funny-as-chloroform movie"). They don't make titles like that any more. In Charades, the universal symbol for that title was to flash ten fingers and then five fingers, indicating a fifteen-word title, at which point everyone would yell out the title before you had to actually act anything out. (Signalling 11 words generally meant The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, but that was less certain, and harder to know how to count the words.)
Also, obliquely, puts me in mind of some of my favorite sf story titles, which I'll list here because I'm too tired to do the sensible thing and just go to bed:
- "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line"
- "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side"
- "The Man Doors Said Hello To"
- "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal"
- "Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo"
- "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow"
A lot of people would list "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and "Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!" and "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" and "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" on the above list, but somehow those titles never appealed to me as much.
I was going to say that there were more long titles on sf stories in the olden days of the New Wave, but there are plenty of longish titles still being published. Perhaps I really mean that it seems to me that people are less likely these days to publish stories with odd titles, or unusual literary-allusion/quotation titles.