“Experiments on cadavers have shown that LEDs, Bluetooth connections, and touch sensors are able to communicate with the outside world when implanted into human tissue.”
– New Scientist, 12 May 2012, page 3
What did the cadaver transmit when it “communicated with the outside world”? How about, “Can you come a little closer?”
On the menu of Coastal Flats restaurant, Tysons Corner, Virginia: “We card everyone under 26.”
Ah – how do they know if you’re under 26 or not, unless they card you?
“We were ready to put the shovel in the ground, but they pulled the rug out from under us.”
- ‘Wall Street guru’ Philip Falcone in The Washington Post, 6 April 2012, page A1
“Leonardo DiCaprio and a relative unknown named Kate Winslet were barely in their 20s, as ripe and tender as a doe-eyed baby’s bottom.”
… Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post, 4 April 2012, page C1
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This afternoon, a radio sportscaster reported that “Kentucky [basketball] fans are holding their fingers.”
This could be a defense against digikleptia, but instead I think our jock confused “holding their breath” and “crossing their fingers.”
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1. “Freud [claimed] that in dreams contradiction is ignored, that any element can be represented by its opposite. … [And there was an] early Egyptian linguistic practice in which many words have two meanings, each the opposite of the other.” (Edith Wyschogrod, “Disrupting Reason”)
2. We still have that practice, where the same word or phrase can be taken in a literal sense, or in an ironic sense meaning just the opposite.
3. In the Old Testament era, many Jews considered it sacrilegious to curse anyone. Upon occasion when the text reads “God bless…,” the context makes it plausible that the real meaning is “God damn…”
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In non-fiction works, writers are encouraged to “use plenty of examples.” State an idea, theory, or principle, and give an example, or more than one. The more the better.
This is a problem.
Readers who disagree with a writer seem often to focus on the examples and ignore the principles, both because they tend to be more homey and vivid, and because examples inevitably contain some material not relevant to the principle, and another principle would be needed to distinguish what’s relevant in that example from what isn’t, leading to an infinite regress. (Ah …)
Here’s an example [!]: “A” says, “Socialism means government ownership of the means of production, for example as in the Soviet Union.” But, “B” says, Lenin permitted private ownership of businesses, as did Gorbachev; and, “C” says, there are many better examples of socialism than the Soviet Union. And, “D” says, why are you picking on the Soviet Union anyway?
Better not to have examples at all. If your idea can’t stand on its own merits, maybe you should rethink it, or make it more rigorous, or explain it better. Without examples.
Or consider the literary journal editor who says “The best way to know what we are looking for is to read our journal.” So we find, along with much diverse material (what is the common factor among so much that differs?), a story about a handicapped girl who comes to terms with her condition and moves on with her life. We write a story about a handicapped boy who doesn’t come to terms with his condition and can’t move on with his life. (That was an example of an example.) The editor says “Oh, we just ran a story more or less like that. Try something else. Show me something new.”
Or, the stories you look at are all written in the third person. So you avoid using first person. But perhaps the editor might appreciate a first-person story once in a while, but these are never submitted, just because they are never submitted and hence never published to serve as – examples.
The principle: An example can never completely track what it’s supposed to be an example of, or it would just be a repetition of what it’s supposed to be an example of. Is that clear? Would you like an example?
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If you happen to use Micro Center’s walk-in help desk, a few days later you’ll get an email survey. The survey will want to know the usual things about your visit with the “Knowledge Expert”: what, why, how, was the problem fixed, and so on.
And then, “Tell us about your impression of the Knowledge Expert.” There is a choice of five answers, including this one, which you’re not apt to getfrom Walmart or Bank of America:
“Helpful, but disheveled.”
Being a former geek, I would have preferred “Helpful AND disheveled.”
(from the Washington Post, 14 February 2012, page B5:)
“Gormley testified as prosecutors continued to lay out evidence they say connects Huguely to Love’s May 2010 death, calling a series of Charlottesville police officers who collected T-shirts, cargo shorts, a shower curtain and DNA samples from inside Huguely’s mouth and beneath his fingernails.”
There should, of course, be a comma after “curtain,” but the Post’s rather obtuse style sheet doesn’t permit it.
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A piece by Charles Baxter in the New York Review of Books (issue dated February 9, 2012, page 22) reminds me that the unique prose style originated by Pauline Kael is still alive. Here’s a sample:
“In the landscape of no context, one asks, “What’s going on? What is this? Who are these people? In Libra, Lee Harvey Oswald habitually stares out the front of the subway, observing people ‘on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years.’ As the perpetually hypnotized observer, he’s as locked into place as they are.”
That last sentence, and its place as the “clincher” in the flow of ideas, is vintage Kael.
Baxter is not alone as a writer of Kaelish: in his first years as film reviewer for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane, Kael’s successor there, wrote largely in Kaelish. More recently, though, the effect has been less noticeable.
A South Carolina native interviewed on NPR today (19 January 2012) says he doesn’t like Rick Perry “because of his face plant.” I finally figured that out. It’s not some kind of unfortunate encounter with a potted palm. He meant “his faux pas.”
The Shorter OED defines Gunsel as “1 A naive youth; a homosexual youth, … 2 An informer; a criminal, a gunman.” Merriam-Webter’s Unabridged is similar.
The older of the two meanings, in the U.S., was “homosexual,” and the word was used with only this meaning in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon. However, when that novel was translated to the screen in 1941 (starring Humphrey Bogart), the film was “one of many of the era that … could only hint at homosexuality.” [Wikipedia] The hint was subtle indeed. When one character who frequently brandished a gun was repeatedly called a “gunsel,” most moviegoers thought that the unfamiliar word meant “gunman” or “gunslinger.” This mistake, owing to the fame of the film, eventually became an accepted alternative meaning.
Pauline Kael once mentioned that she had a very high regard for the 1941 film, for its original cinematic qualities and pacing. However, the film is, almost shot for shot, a literal translation of the novel. Many of its virtues are not original in film, but were derived from the book. It’s possible that Kael hadn’t read the novel (at the time, I didn’t venture to ask her that, because I hadn’t read it then, either.)
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SOED defines “portmanteau word” as: “… a blend, both in spelling and meaning, of two other words.”
The term originated with Lewis Carroll, who likened the effect to putting various items in a portmanteau (bag), so that there was one item, the bag.
Now, what is the most common portmanteau word in English?
My nomination:
We have the terms
But we don’t have “eight teen”; we have the portmanteau word “eighteen,” where the “t” does double duty: as part of “eight,” and as meaning “plus ten,” in “teen.”
What has been happening to the blank space? Perhaps under the influence of the Web, it has started to go missing. Consider “GlaxoSmithKline.” What is the problem with calling it “Glaxo Smith Kline”? I’m not even going to insist on the missing commas.
Here are some actual company names from the S&P500:
Wherewillitallend? EnoughAlready!
The Post‘s ombudsman asked readers to comment on the (in)appropriateness of using ‘four-letter words’ in the paper. Here’s my response:
“As a writer, I use these words only to disturb or shock (as Lawrence did in Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Public discourse is not served by people who use these words casually or too often. Therefore, in the appropriate context, the Post should certainly use them.”
Overused, there is no bite left in these words. What then do we say we do want to shock? Many years ago, psychiatrist Robert Lindner wrote that he had seen a prison inmate killed for calling another prisoner “a motherfucker.” How times have changed. [That was the word, by the way, that got Lenny Bruce arrested in San Francisco.]
The Washington Post now commonly quotes interviewees as saying “gonna.” In other cases, the Post doesn’t phonetically transcribe peoples’ speech, but prints them as dictionary-type words. Why “gonna” and not other common examples of hurried or garbled speech?
A curiosity is that “gonna” is not simply a way of saying “going to”; one would not say “I’m gonna Altoona,” even if drunk. Or if he did, the Post would surely not print it as spoken. “Going to” is really a synonym, and a poor one at that, for what Texans call “fixin’ to,” and the rest of us call “intend to,” “will [do],” etc.
With that, I’m gonna getta bottla beer.
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Wittgenstein’s views on ‘private language’ have been concisely summarized by Radden (2011, p.70):
“… he insists that an ideosyncratic ‘private language’ could not be a proper language. Meaning and significance are tied to how words are used, and such use occurs within some linguistic community. Only a mistaken conception of meaning could permit us to envision the possibility of a ‘language’ for one person only.”
Complication 1: Suppose the inventor of Esperanto had never convinced anyone else to learn that language. Would Esperanto then be a private language in Wittgenstein’s sense? Well, no, you might say, because ‘in principle’ Esperanto could be taught to thousands of people and used fluently, which it in fact has been.
But how would that ‘principle’ be formulated? Validated? Applied to Esperanto? What are the criteria for determining that Esperanto would or would not be a ‘real’ (non-private) language in principle, if no more than one person were ever to speak it?
Complication 2: A program written in a computer language can be understood, obviously enough, by a suitable computer program (interpreter, compiler, or assembler, for instance). And we know it’s been understood because the resulting program can execute (whether or not it executes exactly as intended). Is that computer language a ‘language’ simpliciter, or is that only a metaphor?
Complication 3: A computer language is a language if programs written in it can be read and turned into executable code by a suitable computer program. ** Suppose there is only one such computer program (a compiler, for example). Is that language then a private language? Or would the existence of instances of that compiler on many different machines count as making the language a ‘real’ language, when otherwise it would not be? Why?
** Actually, the intelligibility and use of programs written in the Algol language was quite independent of their translatability into executable programs. Many short Algol programs were published to be read by people, not compiled and executed.
(Radden, J., On Delusion. Routledge, 2011)
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“Complaining is one of my more endearing habits. And yours, too, I see.”
“Never complain, never explain” has been credited to Lee Iacocca, but it originated in a slightly longer saying of Thoreau’s.
One who complains has already lost.
Complaining is a sign of weakness; it’s the bark of the dog who didn’t get the bone. [Yes, ‘who.’]
The difference between complaining and objecting is the difference between whining and standing your ground.
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“Language is a city, to the building of which every human being has brought a stone.” (attr. Emerson)
Some add their stone to the foundation, others just throw rocks.
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What’s a meta-complaint? A complaint that repeats the action the speaker or writer is complaining about. Some examples will give you the idea:
1) “Reply all” email in response to, and criticizing, someone else’s “reply all” email, on the grounds that “reply all” is being abused.
2) A policeman in Pakistan who had arrested a woman for “uttering blasphemy” couldn’t tell reporters what the blasphemy was, he said, or he would be just as guilty as she.
3) Letter to the Washington Post, May 28, 2011 asking the Post to declare “a six-month moratorium on the use of” the cliche “double down”, and of course using this term in the process of complaining about people using it.
4) The pot calling the kettle black.
More examples are welcome.
“In 2000, Clinton was the first wife of a president to march in a gay-pride parade, and as secretary of state she has advocated on behalf of gay rights.” (Washington Post, 8 January 2011; also appeared in the edition of 9 January 2011.)
“Advocate” is a transitive verb. That is, it takes a direct object such as “lower taxes”, as in “He advocated lower taxes.”
Use of “advocate” as an intransitive verb (“She advocates for …”, etc.) isn’t good English. Even the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which is considerably more liberal than earlier editions, recognizes the verb “advocate” as transitive only. (Of course “advocate” can be a noun as well.)
But, you say, language changes; this is one of those changes. Therefore it is acceptable.
My answer is that a language change is acceptable if it enhances our ability to communicate with clarity, vigor, or concision. “Advocate”, as an intransitive verb, does none of these.
Wouldn’t “Clinton … has advocated gay rights” have been clearer, shorter, – better?
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Verbatim, from the person performing a stage-two copy edit on a piece of fiction I published, with my comments at “TK: “
[1] “There should never, ever be semi colon’s in dialog, please take them all out, use regular commas or make separate sentences. Thank you.”
TK: The errors here are minor, but when they’re being made by a copy editor, you begin to wonder. First, putting a blank space between “semi” and “colon” should never, ever be done. Normally, “semicolon” is one word. At most, a hyphenated version (“semi-colon”) could be valid. Second, “colon’s” should be “colons” – elementary grammar. Third, the comma after “dialog” should be a period. Fourth, the comma in “out, use” is improper. Read “out. Use” or “out, and use”
[2] “Put Duane’s comment’s in regular font, unless this is mental telepathy”
TK: “comment’s” should be “comments.” And “mental telepathy” is redundant. What other kind of telepathy is there? (If there is any kind of telepathy at all.)
From the piece of fiction: “I got desperate, gave the jimmy some body English, and the door to the office popped open.”
[3] Editor’s comment: “… somebody English … [perhaps the butler?]“
TK: What? “body English” is ordinary American slang, and has been around since 1908. See www.merriam-webster.com.
And the editor has more on the “jimmy” line”:
[4] “It’s correlation to the story and all?”
TK: That’s “Its,” not “It’s.”
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“Gray and Green have denied wrongdoing in the case of Brown’s allegations. The U.S. attorney’s office is assessing Brown’s contention that he was paid by the Gray campaign.”
– Washington Post, 17 March 2011
[Reminds me of: "Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?" - the Steve Buscemi character in Reservoir Dogs.]
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The following is reprinted verbatim from the Washington Post, 15 March 2011, page A3:
“Authorities are still trying to figure out Monday why a call about a suspected robbery at a salvage yard in rural southwest Virginia led to a shootout with deputies a day earlier.”
(Actually, it’s time viewing here, not time travel. The difference is explained [unbelievably] in the film Paycheck, adapted from a Philip K. Dick story.)
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Many creative writing teachers tell us to avoid adjectives as much as possible. But there is a good argument to be made that adjectives add specificity and color to writing; they help us avoid the dull, the vague, and the obvious.
Consider how carefully McDonald’s composes their advertising messages. The result isn’t great, but it’s been tested for effectiveness. Like this one, from a MacDonald’s soft drink cup:
“New Fruit and Maple Oatmeal is a taste explosion for your morning. Topped with crisp, fresh apples, plump raisins and sweet cranberries, it’s wholesome, warming and oh-so-yummy.”
Depending on how you parse this, these two sentences together contain as many as 13 adjectives or predicate nominatives (which also modify nouns) out of 29 total words.
Someone at McDonald’s must believe that adjectives sell, that they add imagery to what would otherwise be a dull passage about a boring food. They’re probably right.
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The following news item is from the Falls Church, Virginia, Police Report for 23 January 2011, verbatim and complete:
“Drunk In Public, 100 blk W Broad St , On Jan 23, 2:23AM. A 30 year old Conyers , GA , woman was observed by an officer appearing intoxicated. She was arrested for Public Drunkenness.”
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From the Washington Post, 15 January 2011, page A13:
Rethinking ‘alien’
Regarding Andrew Alexander’s Jan. 9 Ombudsman column, “Immigration language wars”:
“Illegal”, “undocumented” and similar terms miss the main point: the people in question are citizens of other countries (except for a few who may be stateless) and have no allegiance to the United States. I find it alarming that there are millions of people here whose lawful allegiance is to countries whose policies may from time to time conflict with ours.
There is a word for this condition: “alien.” There’s no shame in being an alien; I’m one whenever I visit another country.
– Terence Kuch, Falls Church
[Thanks to the Post's Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, for suggesting that I send this on to the Post's editorial team.]
A: “Hey, you. Do you have permission to be here?”
B: “Do I need permission to be here?”
A: “Yes, you do.”
B: “Then I must have permission to be here!”
Red Fork pizza’s cooking directions offer the buyer a choice of Desired Crust: Softer, or Crispier.
“Crispy” and “crispier” are two of those Really Bad Words, because there are already literate and well-established words, “crisp” and “crisper”, for these concepts, and the new forms add no value to the language. If we can have “crispy” and “crispier”, then why not “softy” and “softier”?
I will admit a question of euphony. “Crisp pizza” is difficult to get the mouth around; the extra vowel does make “crispy pizza” easier to say. So it’s possible, just barely, to pardon “crisp” and “crispier” in informal speech — but not in the written language, please, not even on the box of frozen pizza on my kitchen counter, which is getting softier by the minute.
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We’ll be out of Afghanistan in Twenty-something.
The origin of most scam emails seems to have migrated from Nigeria to Burkina Faso recently. Anyway, the parade of garbled English goes on.
Why? I’ve visited or worked in five sub-Saharan countries and know that a large number of people, even in the former French colonies, can speak and write English as well as we can (sometimes better). Can’t the originators of these scam emails find some language assistance? I’m beginning to suspect that the garble is intentional — a sign of sincerity. You remember that George Bush the Younger (Yale-educated) used to make quite a few mistakes in English. I’m now thinking that was on purpose, too.
With that as prologue, here’s today’s best from Africa:
“Greetings !!!
“Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent and writing through this channel.I got your contact from the proffesional data base found in the internet Yahoo tourist search.When i was searching for a foreign reliable partner.I assured of your capability and reliability to champion this business opportunity.
“After series of prayers/fasting.i was divinely directed to contact you among other names found in the data base Yahoo tourist search.I believe that God has a way of helping who is in need.
“I am (Jimmy Gamba,the Head of file Department in African development bank (ADB).” [[--the usual pitch follows, not reproduced here]]
A “young X”, where X is anything that can age, must first of all be an X, or it isn’t a young one of that kind at all. A young moose is a moose, a young wine is a wine, a young doctor is a doctor … and a young adult is an adult.
Different cultures define “adult” differently; but in America, at this time, you must be at least 18 to be an adult.
The Wikipedia article titled Young Adult begins this way: “According to Erik Erikson‘s stages of human development, … a young adult is generally a person between the ages of 20 and 40, whereas an adolescent is a person between the ages of 13 and 19.” Adolescent, in this sense, is equivalent to “teen-ager”.
And a recent article in the Washington Post defined “young adult”, in the context of education, to include anyone 25 to 34:
“U.S. falls in measure of degree holders [Washington Post, 23 July 2010, page A5, abridged]
“The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the world’s share of adults 25 to 34 years old with college degrees, according to a new report from the College Board.
“Canada is now the global leader in higher education among young adults, with 55.8 percent of that population holding an associate’s degree or better as of 2007, the year of the latest international ranking. In the United States, 40.4 percent of young adults hold postsecondary credentials.”
So ……. Why do some people call youths under 18 “young adults”? I suspect that the term has been given this sense in an attempt to keep the young under control through guilt. “Now, Johnny, you’re a young adult now, God forbid I should call you an ‘adolescent’! So you have to behave like an adult now, not like one of those — adolescents!” Johnny, wearing the “young adult” tag, doesn’t realize he’s being bamboozled, that the term is being applied to him tendentiously, i.e., cynically and dishonestly.
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“Context creates [a word's] meaning and in its absence there is no meaning.” (David Allen, in New Scientist 10 July 2010, page 25)
Similar propositions are often expressed by linguists. To some extent, the statement is unexceptionable, but it goes too far. Consider the following experiment: Take a word that tends to appear in non-specialist contexts such as newspapers and general-interest periodicals. This must be a word that you do not understand, although you may have a vague idea of what it means. Record this word the next 30-50 or more times (contexts) you run across it. Now: Can you frame an adequate and accurate dictionary definition of that word based on these uses? Then look up the word in dictionaries and on line. In at least some cases, your definition will still be vague, or at times completely inaccurate. Why? Because a prior understanding of a word’s meaning is implicit in the writing of it, but not always in the reading of it. The writer knows more about the word he’s used than any specific use of it will reveal. I claim that this is true of almost all writers and almost all words (including slang) not flagged with “by this term I mean…” or similar locution.
The word I used for this experiment was “trope”. (The word has its usual meaning in Greek (a turning, as in “heliotrope”), but that, as it turns out, sheds little light on its English-language meaning.)
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Quoted verbatim from the AFL-CIO Employees Federal Credit Union Member News for Summer 2010 (volume 19, number 2):
“Effective on or about August 2nd, the office will be located in the lobby of the AFL-CIO Headquarters Building. This full-service, no-cash branch includes a Deposit Taking/Surcharge Free ATM outside, plus the same convenience and services our members are used to on the inside!”
Many newspapers now use “Asian” to denote a group of ethnicities (not merely a group of countries). My point isn’t the injustice of ethnic or racial labeling (although that’s arguable), but the careless use of such a broad term. Are we to understand that, for instance, Koreans, Tamils, Uighurs, Sinhalese, Palestinians, Laotians, Pashtuns, Turks, and so on, are similar enough that they can all be meaningfully encompassed by the single adjective “Asian”? How ‘ugly American’ is that?
“Oriental”, which has fallen out of favor, is at least far narrower than “Asian”, and therefore less problematic. Ethnic or racial labeling is often inappropriate, but where it does make sense I would at least like to see “Asian” as an ethnic label banished from our daily press, in favor of more-specific terms.
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Tired of seeing houses for sale described as “drop-dead gorgeous”? or “To die for?” Do these expressions tap into some ancient and unconscious reservoir of fear? Memories of deadly real estate inhabit our folklore: The House of Usher — Valhalla — Asgard — the first little pig’s house of straw — the second’s house of wood.
And now (Falls Church (Virginia) News-Press, 10 June 2010), Realtor “Merelyn Kaye” advertises a house for sale with a “killer granite kitchen”.
Be careful in there.
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What is this mania for renaming, rebadging a place or building or institution in honor of some personage? If a man or woman is worth commemorating at all, it should be with something new, named just for that person, something never having borne a lesser name, or one suddenly out of fashion.
Consider: Ronald Reagan got a used airport. So did John F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy got a used football stadium that’s now shabby and seldom used for anything. Martin Luther King’s name now graces a large number of streets and avenues around the country; all the ones I’ve seen are rebadgings — used streets with new names.
More generally, once something inanimate is named, it should keep that name. To change names of companies, for example, time after time just adds to the universal confusion. It also helps people forget the lousy service they received from the predecessor organization, in hopes that the ‘new’ one will perform less unforgivably.
It is, I suppose, commendable that after WWII the Germans renamed a large number of Adolf Hitler Strassen, giving each a less pulse-inducing designation; but unless the original name is no longer acceptable for some compelling reason, just leave it be.
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Pronunciation: /hyoob/
Aside from being an infrequent surname, and an occasional nickname for ‘Hubert’, ‘hube’ has been used in several published stories (mine) to mean exactly ‘a human being’, opposed to ‘sim’, meaning a simulation. That is, to emphasize, ‘hube’ is not a synonym of ‘human’ (adjective), but of ‘human being’ (noun). Some of my readers have considered this use of ‘hube’ demeaning, but I don’t mean it that way; just the opposite. ‘Hube’ avoids the disparagement of using an adjective as a noun as if beings were just this adjective, and having said that you know everything you need to know about them **. Besides, if you’re careful about language you might understand that there’s a hint of illiteracy in using ‘human’ as an adjective (from humanus, not from homo).
** Consider ‘cripple’ as an example. You would never use ‘cripple’ as a noun referring to a person, would you? (SOED: “A person (permanently) impaired in movement by an injury or defect, esp. one unable to walk normally. Now regarded as offensive. “)
For useful discussions see Fowler, third edition (Burchfield), page 367f, and American Heritage Dictionary, first edition, page 640.
<END>
from a book review by Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 25 February 2010, page C9:
“The tacitly homosexual relationship of Witold and Fryderyk further intensifies the book’s perfervid kinkiness.”
(aren’t we past writing things like this?)
Headline and sub-head in the Washington Post, 25 February 2010, page D1:
“Olympic dream comes true for GW alum / Elana Meyers and teammate Erin Pac take home the bronze in women’s two-man bobsled”
(not “two-woman bobsled”?)
The alphabet is rapidly filling. Now we have ‘the R-word’ to go along with ‘the N-word’ and ‘the J-word’, the ‘J’ courtesy of Google and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Perhaps only Sammy Davis, Jr., would be an example simultaneously of J-, N-, and R-.
Of course the grand original was ‘the F-word’, making four. Sammy Davis probably qualified under that, too. There are twenty-two letters of the English alphabet left. Oh, yes, we mustn’t forget ‘the L-word’, ‘Liberal’. Twenty-one. Any more ‘x-word’ candidates?
***
Somewhat more seriously, here’s a post from Scientific American sci am online for 10 February, 2010:
“The word “retarded” seems to me to imply a temporary condition — just a little slower to catch up, will eventually do so. But that’s not what happens to most “retarded” people — they never “catch up”. I believe that “intellectual disability” is the more descriptive term of the two. I observe that “retarded” was originally a euphemism, and a poor choice of terminology besides. Time for a new euphemism!”
An unusual number of American surnames that begin with ‘R’ end in ‘S’. Why is this?
Data: Of the 500 most common American surnames, 34 begin with ‘R’. Of these, –
12 end in ‘S’ (Roberts, Reeves, etc.)
6 others end in an ‘S’ sound (Ruiz, Reese, etc.)
The remaining 16 end in other letters or sounds.
[Source: 'Frequently Occurring Surnames in Census 1990' at www.census.gov]
As this web site has noted previously, many lazy people (even TV newsreaders, who should know better) are omitting legitimate sounds from spoken words (e.g., “artic” for “arctic”). But the opposite also happens. More and more, I hear an intrusive “g”, butting in after an “n” where it has no business.
Examples: “increasing” pronounced “ing-creasing”; or “concrete” pronounced “cong-crete”.
These usages don’t seem to be either regional or ethnic, but simply a speaking disorder with no apparent origin.
The following is what you get on Google when you include ‘Jew’ as one of your search terms. Another word has become unusable. (And now we are also not supposed to use “at risk” — a smarmy term, that, but replaced by an even worse one: “at promise”. (see Washington Post, various articles, November 2009). What’s next?
=================================================
An explanation of our search results.
If you recently used Google to search for the word “Jew,” you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We’d like to explain why you’re seeing these results when you conduct this search.
A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for “Jew” brings up one such unexpected result.
If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:
Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like “Judaism,” “Jewish people,” or “Jews” than the single word “Jew.” In fact, prior to this incident, the word “Jew” only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it’s likely that the great majority of searches on Google for “Jew” are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.
We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.
Sincerely,
The Google Team”
<END>
[Scam emails are usually tedious, but this one is a gem (slightly abridged).]
FROM THE DESK OF HON. HON. DANTEX OMAR
DEPUTY GOVERNOR OF CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA
ATTN: HONORABLE FUND BENEFICIARY
The acknowledgement of Your Immediate Contract/Inheritant/lotto Payment. Contract Number #: AV/NNPC/FGN/MIN/009. On behalf of the entire staff of Central Bank of Nigeria, and the Federal Government of Nigeria in collaborated with the Authorities, who are in charge of foreign contract payments. We Apologies for the delay of your Contract/inheritant/lotto payment, the Inconveniences and Inflict that we might have indulge you through.
However, we are having some minor problems with our payment system which have demoralized us, also have caused a lot of predicament to this organization, which is Inexplicable? And have held us Indolent, not having the perseverance and Aspiration to devote our 100% standard Assiduity in accrediting foreign contract payments. Once again, Our Apologies for all inconveniences.
….
I wish to inform you now that the square peg is now in square hole, and can be voguish for that your payment is being processed and will be released to you upon your respond to this letter. Also note that from my record in my file your outstanding contract/inheritant/lotto payment is 20 million dollars.
kindly get back to me the followings: …. [identification] ….
Base on money-laundering and fraudelents art that is going on in Nigeria here, the Federal government of Nigeria has set a monitary group called (EFCC) Economics and Financial Crime Commission In conjuction with F.B.I and Inter-Pole of United state to monitor any foreign transfer.
….
Congratulations in advance.
In sublime indifference to English usage, advertisers have taken up the word ‘outrageous’ to describe commercial products whose merits are perhaps not apparent, and therefore any huzzahs hoped to issue from the buying public must be artificially induced.
It is pleasant, however, to think of people who enjoy frequent outrage **, and how they have finally got their comeuppance from certain brands of breakfast cereal.
** “a feeling of anger or violent resentment” — M-W Unabridged
<END>
How to Punctuate Dialog in Fiction
What five authorities have said [abridged], followed by my summary and recommendations, and notes on the use of colons and semicolons.
Source 1: The Dabbling Mum
from http://thedabblingmum.com/writing/grammar/punctuation.htm
Interior Dialogue – depicts a character’s non-verbal thoughts. Use of quotation marks to set off interior dialogue depends on the writer, according to Chicago Manual of Style. However, many fiction text books discourage the use of quotation marks in interior dialogue. Interior dialogue can be depicted in italics or plain font.
Ellipses: Use ellipses to show faltering, fragmented, speech or dialogue; enclose in quotation marks.
Use em dashes to show abrupt interruptions or broken off dialogue. Again, dialogue is enclosed with punctuation marks.
Correct: “It’s . . . well—”
Use of ellipses shows faltering, fragmented speech enclosed within quotation marks.
Correct: “It’s. . . well—”
Example correctly uses the em dash to portray abrupt, broken off dialogue.
Incorrect: “It’s, well—”
Example is punctuated incorrectly, if the writer intends to portray faltering, fragmented speech.
Source 2: Playwriting 101
from www.playwriting101.com/chapter12
When one character interrupts another, use double dashes (–) or an em dash (a long dash) to show that the speaker is being cut off. Below, I make use of an em dash. No need to write “interrupts.”
HUGO
If my Dad said we’re moving just like that -
CHARLIE
You’d move. Hold this cone
(holds out the ice cream cone)
a sec?
Using ellipses ( … ) does not signify that a character has been interrupted, but rather that she hesitates or trails off of her own accord. For example, Pac can’t bring himself to ask a question:
PAC
Would you … ?
CANDY
Would I what?
Source 3: Deviant Art
from http://wordcount.deviantart.com/art/Punctuating-Dialogue-A-Guide-73936110
[the dash in dialogue]
A dash can be used in dialogue for two reasons (in addition to the standard uses for the dash in prose writing): to represent a shift in tone or to represent a break or hesitation in thought. This is different from the ellipsis (…), which should only be used to represent dialogue that trails off and is likely to begin again.
An example:
“My only purpose has been to stop the madness that was started seven years ago. I cannot afford the risk of–” was all he said, not finding the courage to finish the sentence.
Another example:
Tabitha sighed again and brushed a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. I’m just . . . sick of all the drama going on.”
“Yeah, you and the rest of the world.”
“Whatever.”
Another example:
“Then talk to me. What’s going on? I know there’s more that you haven’t told anyone.”
She took a deep breath. “Yeah . . .”
“Well?”
“Dad’s company needs him in Houston by the end of next month.”
“Okay . . .”
“We’re moving in three weeks. The company already has a house for us there and will take care of selling ours.”
“So, it’s really gonna happen,” he said softly.
“I don’t care about having more . . . more stuff!”
In both texts, we see the ellipses but no dashes. Remember, a dash is used to show a hesitation or break in thought or a change in tone. An ellipsis, on the other hand, is used to show thoughts that are trailing off and/or can be picked up again. The difference is subtle, but it’s there.
In the first example, the speaker very obviously cuts off what he is saying and has no intention of picking it back up again. It’s a break in thought and, as such, should be represented by the dash.
In the second example, the ellipsis is used correctly. “I’m just . . . sick of all the drama going on” shows a trailing off that has every intention of picking the conversation back up. It’s not an abrupt change of tone or thought, even though it is a pause, and as such the dash would be inappropriate.
In the third example, we have quite a few things going on. With “Yeah…” the speaker is very obviously trailing off in both thought and speech. It’s not an abrupt break or a change in thought, simply a hesitation. As such, either convention would be appropriate depending on the author’s intention. Using “Yeah—” would represent a cut off with no interest in continuing the conversation in that direction. “Yeah…” shows that the speaker is hesitating and trailing off and probably would like to continue the conversation if given the chance to find the right words (or some gentle prodding). As such, I believe the ellipsis is more appropriate here but, again, either the dash or the ellipsis would be acceptable.
The appropriate way to use the ellipsis is not just through intent, but also in how a writer should punctuate what comes after the ellipsis when that ellipsis is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the sentence. This is the age-old, “Do I really put four dots in a row?” question. The short answer? Probably.
When using the ellipsis in dialogue to end a sentence one must make two decisions: 1) am I putting my punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks and 2) what punctuation mark should end this sentence. The ellipsis used inside quotation marks should never be the end punctuation for the sentence. In other words, “Okay…” should either be “Okay….” with the four dots inside the quotation marks or “Okay…”. with the period outside of the quotation marks. It could also be “Okay…?” or “Okay…”? or “Okay…!” or “Okay…”! (etc.) depending on what the writer intends. Whichever way is most appropriate and comfortable, that end punctuation must be present.
[internal dialogue]
If quotation marks are not being used to represent dialogue anywhere else in the piece, they can be used to represent internal dialogue; all standard rules would apply. If double quotation marks are being used to represent regular dialogue elsewhere in the text, then single quotation marks can be used for internal dialogue—but this can get messy and is often avoided. Internal dialogue is most often italicized in place of using quotation marks, with the dialogue tags in regular print. Observe:
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Amy thought. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go.
Instead of using quotation marks, one sees the italics and is quickly able to differentiate between something said aloud and something thought. Internal dialogue is also one of those places where the dash might be helpful to differentiate thoughts and speakers, but italics seem to be the preferred method.
[rules for reference: punctuation]
A comma should always separate the quotation from the dialogue tag.
[for American publications] Periods and commas go inside the quotation marks, and all other punctuation (semicolons, question marks, dashes, exclamation points) goes outside the quotation marks.
If a dialogue tag (e.g., he said) interrupts a sentence, it should be offset by commas; when this occurs, the second part of the quotation should begin with a lowercase letter.
A change in speaker equals a change in paragraph.
The ellipsis (…) should only be used to represent dialogue that trails off and is likely to begin again.
The ellipsis used inside quotation marks should never be the end punctuation for the sentence. You need to add end punctuation after the dialogue.
Source 4: Ginny Wiehardt, About.com
Use a comma between the dialogue and the tag line (the words used to identify the speaker: “he said/she said”):
“I would like to go to the beach this weekend,” she told him as they left the apartment.
[for American publications] Periods and commas go inside the quotation marks; other punctuation — semicolons, question marks, dashes, and exclamation points — goes outside unless it directly pertains to the material within the quotes.
In general, don’t use double punctuation marks, but go with the stronger punctuation. Question marks and exclamation points are stronger than commas and periods.
When a tag line interrupts a sentence, it should be set off by commas. Note that the first letter of the second half of the sentence is in lower case.
For interior dialogue, italics are appropriate, just be consistent.
Source 5: Grammatically Correct, by Anne Stilman
In dialogue, the em dash serves to indicate broken-off speech. One speaker can interrupt another:
“They simply happen to regard sex as both a physical and a spiritual experience. If you think I’m–“
“So do I! So do I regard it as a wuddaycallit–a physical and spiritual [Salinger]
A speaker can stop abruptly without being interrupted:
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but–” [Lewis Carroll]
A break can come in the middle of a word:
“Ri–,” he starts, then stops angrily. [Ken Dryden]
The dash also serves to indicate speech that is scattered or faltering: that is, not interrupted by a second speaker, but by the speaker breaking off a thought and starting another, or talking in disjointed sentence fragments.
“She says she is afraid there will be draughts in the passage, though everything has been done–one door nailed up–quantities of matting–my dear Jane, indeed you must. Mr. Churchill, oh! you are too obliging. How well you put it on–so gratified! … Well, [Jane Austen]
Compare the above uses of the dash with those of the ellipsis.
If you can’t produce [an em dash] on your typewriter or word processor, type two hyphens ( — ).
You may either leave spaces around a dash or have the dash lie directly against the words it adjoins. Be consistent.
Whichever style you choose, do not put a space before a dash that is being used to interrupt dialogue in the middle of a word.
When a dash is being used to indicate broken-off dialogue, follow it immediately with a closing quotation mark. Do not add a comma.
“How was I supposed to–” she sputtered indignantly.
Do not put any other punctuation immediately adjacent to a dash, with the exception of a question mark or exclamation point before a closing dash. Even if the text that is broken by dashes would otherwise take a comma or semicolon, do not include it.
Text that is enclosed within dashes may contain any punctuation mark other than a period. Parentheses should be avoided if possible, as the construction of an aside within an aside would be awkward.
Do not employ both a single dash and a pair of dashes in the same sentence, as it would then be unclear which text is enclosed by the pair.
Summary and recommendations
1 interior dialog (thoughts)
The alternatives are:
1a Ordinary Roman (non-italic) font, if it’s clear from context that we are reading thoughts, not speech. This alternative is always preferable, so long as it’s obvious to the reader that thoughts are involved, not actual speech.
1b Italics. This is the most common practice. However, if italics are being used for another purpose in the work (e.g., for quoting a book), then also using italics for interior dialog could be confusing or graphically distracting.
In standard submission format, italics are represented by underlining. This practice dates from the days when typewriters were used, and italics were not available.
Large blocks of either italic or underlined type are less easy to read than ordinary Roman type; their use should therefore be held to a minimum.
1c Single quotation marks for thoughts, where the writer is using double quotation marks for speech. This practice is uncommon, but there are precedents and it can be effective.
Single quotation marks are standardly used for speech within speech, e.g., “I said ‘Stop that!’ but he wouldn’t listen.” In a particular work, if speech within speech is frequent (as in some of Conrad’s novels), then single quotation marks should not be used also to indicate thought, to avoid confusion.
Whatever alternative is chosen should be applied consistently throughout a work.
Imagined speech (addressed in thought to another person) may be graphically represented as normal speech, not as internal dialog.
2 interrupted speech
The most common practice is to use a single em dash to indicate an interruption, abruptly broken-off dialogue, or a shift in tone.
A pair of hyphens ( — ) can be used in manuscript to indicate an em dash. This is useful where the em dash could be garbled by the receiving word processor.
Some word processors auto-correct two consecutive hyphens as a single em-dash character. It is advisable to delete this auto-correction, so that two hyphens remain two distinct characters. The publisher can convert these back to em dashes as needed.
3 speech trailing off (not interrupted)
The most common practice is to use an ellipsis ( … ) to indicate speech that trails off or fades out and is likely to begin again; also to indicate faltering or fragmented speech. (This is different from, and in addition to, the ordinary use of an ellipsis to indicate missing or redacted text.)
In some cases it may not be obvious whether a dash should be used, or an ellipsis.
4 spacing and punctuation of ellipses
Examples of acceptable practice:
(a) “almost eight years now, if…”
The ellipse precedes the ending quotation mark.
There is no comma before or after the ending quotation mark.
There is no space before or after the ellipsis.
But, as in the following example, when an ellipsis separates two words without any other punctuation, it is advisable to put a space both before and after the ellipsis, as an aid to the reader.
(b) “It’s … it’s a boy!”
If the ellipsis ends a sentence, then it gets a final ‘.’ making four, instead of three, periods in a row. However, ‘trailing off’ expressions are usually fragments, and rarely constitute sentences. For an example of an ellipsis that does end a sentence, see “Okay….” in Source 3.
Some writers letter-space the ellipsis ( . . . ), but this is generally inadvisable. It also distorts the word count.
5 spacing and punctuation of dashes
Examples of acceptable practice:
(a) “How was I supposed to–” she sputtered indignantly.
The dash precedes the ending quotation mark.
There is no comma before or after the ending quotation mark; the dash sufficiently indicates a pause.
There is no space before or after the dash.
(b) “My God!–” he gasped.
It is acceptable to place an exclamation mark or a question mark immediately before the dash — but not to excess, and doing so is usually unnecessary.
(c) “before the dash — but not to excess”
When a dash separates two words without any other punctuation, it is advisable to put a space both before and after the dash, as a help to the reader.
Even if the text that is broken by dashes would otherwise take a comma or semicolon, do not include one.
(d) “It’s … well–”
“Shut up, Murgatroyd!”
Faltering speech followed by an interruption. There is no period after the interrupted expression (because it isn’t a sentence), but there must be a paragraph break if the interruption is another character’s speech, as in the example.
(e) “It was a case of ‘hyperexcitement.’”
The (unfortunate) American rule is that the period goes inside the quotation marks, whether or not it logically belongs there. In this case the result appears to be a triple quotation mark, which is impossible. Inserting a space between the two closing quotation marks, so: “…‘hyperexcitement.’ ” is not accepted by editors.
5 paragraphing
[In narrative (not in dialog)]
Paragraph-length is a question of rhetoric, not grammar. Keep paragraphs short, but not too short. About 50 words is typical for most modern fiction. However, many consecutive paragraphs of similar length makes for dull reading; vary the length.
Very short or single-sentence paragraphs can be used for special effects, such as when a startling fact is revealed, or as an ironic comment on the preceding (longer) paragraph.
[In dialog]
If there is a change in speaker, there must be a change in paragraph, even if (at the extreme) the characters are speaking to each other in single-word speeches:
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Never!”
“Not ever?”
The question of judgment arises when narrative intervenes between two speeches. How should the following be paragraphed? (Sentences are numbered for this exercise.)
[1] “Or she,” Donald added. [2] Claire looked up abruptly. [3] “They don’t really do that for girls, do they? My folks sure never did that for me!” [4] “Well –.” [5] Donald snickered. [6] “O great feminist,” he said, “do you think it’s just boys who have their backs up against the wall?”
We need at least four paragraphs here, because there are four speeches, alternating between Donald and Claire. But in which paragraph do sentences [2] and [6] belong? With their preceding sentences, or with the sentences that follow them? Or by themselves in separate paragraphs?
In this example, the answer is clear. Sentence [2] introduces Claire’s speech, and should be paragraphed with sentence [3]; likewise for sentence [5] together with [6]. If, however, we have a different sentence [2],
[2] He waited expectantly for her answer.
then [2] would belong with [1], not with [3].
But in the following example, the answer is not so simple.
[1] “The birth was eight years ago, Donald. Dr. Gordon’s probably moved on by now. Or died. He wasn’t young, remember?” [2] Just as the same topic had so long ago, once again nothing came of it. There was quiet for the exact amount of time needed to signal a change of subject. [3] “Look,” Donald began, “I marked up those drawings again and I need to drive over to Danbury and drop them off for Harman.”
Passage [2] could be paragraphed with passage [1], or with passage [3], but not both. Or it could stand alone. Considering that [2] is from the point of view of a third person external to both characters, and considering that it is a change in tone both from what goes before and what comes after, it could have its own paragraph. This, again, is a question of rhetoric, not grammar.
===============================================================
A note on colons and semicolons in dialog:
Some editors strictly forbid the use of colons or semicolons in dialog. This rule strikes me as, well, stupid. The goal is to record a (fictional) voice faithfully, not to be forced to contrive workarounds. Consider:
” ‘She was really lucky; she will have only bruises,’ Humphrey said.” (Washington Post, 19 February 2011, page B1)
The sense calls for a semicolon here, not a comma and not a period. More important, if Humphrey really speaks this way (carefully, but without regard to rhythm), then the dialog as printed should reflect this, as in this case it presumably does.
A note on commas preceding a quotation:
Many editors will insist on a comma after “said” (exclaimed, remarked, etc.). Usually, a comma is called for by the rhythm of the sentence, e.g., “No,” he said, “it was a bird.” But at other times the comma interrupts what should be the normal flow of speech. The comma, after all, must serve two masters: grammar and rhetoric. At times these masters disagree.
<END>
What’s the difference between idiom and cliché? Refer to books on usage, and dictionaries, and other sources — various fine distinctions are offered, but most seem to be distinctions without a difference. And look at dictionaries of idioms and dictionaries of clichés — their entries frequently overlap.
Consider this view: a cliché is an idiom that hasn’t settled into the language, that still feels uncomfortable to us, and in which the literal meaning still jars against the metaphorical. In personal terms, a cliché is a turn of phrase that didn’t exist when you were young. If you grow up with a cliché it sounds natural; like an idiom. The literal meaning doesn’t intrude.
“O’clock” is an idiom: we don’t think of actual, physical clocks when we say “o’clock”, even when we’re staring straight at one. When the sun is directly overhead on June 22, it is still twelve “o’clock” even if there’s no clock within miles. At some point in history, “o’clock” [“of the clock”] must have sounded strange; must have sounded like a cliché once more than a few people used it.
As a fiction writer, a cliché substitutes for original thought and should be avoided in third-person narrative, where there are suitable alternatives. Idioms are unobjectionable, but you might try to find something original to say instead. Dialog is different: spoken language thrives on both idiom and cliché; how they are used or not used in a story can help define character.
<END>
“Popullution” = population pollution = the pollution of our planet that has come about through irresponsible human breeding.
<END>
Belief cannot be in error.
When you say “I believe p” (where p is some proposition, as in “I believe Earth’s climate is warming”) you could be lying, but you cannot be in error, as you are reporting on the contents of your mind. You are definitively in charge of deciding what’s in your own mind. “I believe…” is therefore the strongest statement you can make.
Even at the extreme, as in “I believe that people with ray-guns are chasing me”, you, again, could be lying about your beliefs, but if you are not, then you must be making a factually correct statement about what’s in your head.
There are two complications:
1) Performative statements, such as “I believe in God the father almighty” said as a formal part of a church ceremony, are irrelevant to actual mental conviction, and so constitute an exception.
2) More tellingly, is saying “I believe p” any different from merely uttering the proposition itself? Saying “p” implies that one believes p unless, again, one is lying. Therefore, the “I believe…” part of the statement is otiose. It would be odd and perhaps contradictory, for example, to say something like “Earth’s climate is warming, but I don’t believe it.”
<END>
“Enjoy” is a transitive verb, that it, it takes an object. For example, in “Enjoy your spinach,” ‘spinach’ is the object, whether or not you actually enjoy it.
Used as an intransitive verb (“Enjoy!”) it was cute at first, but has long outlived its cuteness and is now merely a bore.
<END>
Both these terms are unfortunate, because they focus on the sexual aspect of a person in whom, perhaps, sex has only a small role.
There are problems with “straight”, too (are the others “bent”?) and “gay” (but some are morose.)
See the Scientific American article “Equal right to kiss? Why you may be disgusted by gay behavior without knowing it”, at www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=unconscious-disgust-gay-behavior&sc=DD 20090618 (posted 18 June 2009 on www.sciam.com).
(Is all ‘gay behavior’ sexual?)
<END>
For many years, “one of the few” has been an accepted and harmless idiom, as in “one of the few hitters who batted .300 over several seasons.” But recently this expression has been partially supplanted by “one of the only”, meaning, apparently, one of the few.
There’s something wrong with “one of the only.” ‘Only’ means ‘one-ly’: the only one; singular; unique. Could something be just one of a group of one that’s more than one?
I think what’s happened is that “one of the few” met up with “the one and only” and gave birth to a bastard child called “one of the only.”
However it came about, “one of the only” is an illogical and illiterate expression, and shows whoever utters it to be thoroughly confused or, in the case of the Washington Post, thoroughly unedited:
[re incoming member of Congress Allen West:] “His ‘high and tight’ hairstyle will be one of the only buzz cuts in Congress.” (Krissah Thompson, Washington Post, 24 November 2010, page A1)
<END>
From the brochure “Playing It Safe on the W&OD Trail”:
“Always look ahead for obstacles such as gates, potholes and other trail users, etc.”
You didn’t know that potholes were considered trail users? Reluctance to place a comma before the “and” in a list of three or more items often results in ludicrous statements such as this.
More seriously, such (mis-)usage often results in ambiguity, confusion, and loss of meaning.
Consider how professional speakers (such as TV and radio news reporters) almost always pause before the “and” in these cases; they are mentally inserting the comma, exactly where it should be.
<END>
Brian Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day (7 July 2009) holds, in part:
“ ‘Jr.’ and ‘Sr.’ aren’t used unless the names are identical. So the second Bush president (George W[alker] Bush) is not a junior, the father’s name being George Herbert Walker Bush. But some journalists use ‘Jr.’ and ‘Sr.’ as a kind of loose shorthand {Bush Sr. / Bush Jr.}.”
“When the names are identical” is a matter of context: how the names are spoken or written in a particular book, broadcast, etc. Although Garner is correct that “George W. Bush” should not be written “George W. Bush, Jr.” (because the elder Bush is not “George W.”, but “George H.W.”), the following pair should be acceptable:
George Bush, Sr.
George Bush, Jr.
It is only in contexts that include middle names or initials that the names, as written, become un-identical. Therefore, the “loose shorthand” is correct.
<END>
Remember the proverbial “cold-blooded killer”? We used to consider him more to blame than the killer who strikes in an excess of emotion, hate, or rage. But now the tables are turned.
Since when does a person’s emotional state, when he commits a crime, render him liable to more severe punishment than if he had not experienced the emotion of hate? Since the passage of “hate” crime legislation, that’s when.
Mental states have long been recognized as increasing, or at times mitigating, guilt. Consider: murder v manslaughter, and ‘criminal intent’. But these are matters of intention.Until recently, emotion has been considered relevant to neither crime nor punishment.
It is sometimes said that crimes against “people due to personal attributes beyond their control” (http://moran.house.gov) deserve extra punishment. This position is at least arguable, although I disagree **. But to tie this to “hate” is irrelevant: a man may murder a black person just because he is black, in cold blood. Why should his punishment be more severe if, instead of ‘cold’ his blood were hot
at the time /
of the crime?
____________________
** You are responsible for who you are and what you are, no matter how God or Darwin rolled the dice, no matter whether you could ‘help it’, or not: No excuses.
<END>
Try these out:
.. Biologer
.. Americer
.. Quakist
.. Hikist (or ‘Bikist’)
.. Triflist (= Trifler)
.. Philosophist
.. Fidgetee (one subjected to fidgeting by others)
.. Fiddlant (Fiddler)
.. Dabblian (Dabbler)
.. Piqueur (one who piques, e.g., your interest)
An interesting diversion; a Mensa party-game.
<END>
The comma serves three masters: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Sometimes [,] these masters may be at odds.
(1) Consider this sentence from a short story: “After dinner I carried out the garbage.” Grammar requires a comma after ‘dinner’, and normally the writer should provide one. But consider rhetoric: we may want the comma there, or not, depending on how the writer is shaping the story’s rhythm and narrative voice. The choice is a judgment as to which master must prevail this time.
(2) Sometimes none of the masters is happy. Consider this sentence (from Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post, 1 May 2009):
“The stated purpose of the hearing was to examine whether merchant ships need private or military security on board.”
This sentence could mean either:
(a) “The stated purpose of the hearing was to examine whether merchant ships need private or military security on board, or no security at all.”
or
(b) “The stated purpose of the hearing was to examine who should provide on-board security for merchant ships: private firms or the military.”
<END>
“In a famous exchange with the poet Ann Lauterbach, Lauterbach exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Ashbery, I love clichés,” to which [John] Ashbery replied, “And they love you.” Clichés and stereotypes are Ashbery’s expressive unit. Cliché was originally a typesetter’s term for those plates devoted not to individual letters but to phrases so common that a slug was molded for them. Cliché is language that has been repeated so often it becomes infinitely repeatable. It “loves us” because it is inevitable; we “love it” as a way of mastering, by ingenious bricolage, the language that saturates us anyway.”
– Note how the writer carefully avoids using clichés in this passage!
(Source: Dan Chiasson, “John Ashbery: ‘Look, Gesture, Hearsay’ ”. New York Review of Books, 9 April 2009, p63f.)
<END>
Remember the old joke? A routine questionnaire asks your name, date of birth, and sex, and for ‘sex’ you write ‘yes, please’, or ‘as often as possible’, or ‘not yet, but I’m still hopeful’?
Our language should not change just because people don’t understand it or are simply thoughtless (the origin, apparently, of ‘one of the only’), or are trying to be cute (the historical origin of pronouncing ‘one’ as ‘won’, some scholars believe.) Language should change only when there is good reason for it to change, such as:
.. Increased richness
.. Avoidance of unintentional ambiguity
.. Improved consistency
and, as relevant here,
.. Better distinction between oft-confused words
‘Sex’, before a few years ago, was ambiguous. It could mean sexual activity such as intercourse, or it could indicate the male/female distinction. These two very different meanings were frequently confused, sometimes on purpose; see the old joke in the first paragraph. Women’s groups made the valid point that ‘female sex’ too strongly emphasizes the sexual-activity meaning of ‘sex’, whereas the most important male/female distinctions are cultural, or in other ways have little or nothing to do with sexual activity. ‘Gender’, formerly a term used in linguistics, was adopted in place of ‘sex’ to emphasize this point.
Some writers, while accepting this use of ‘gender’, urge that dogs, cattle, giraffes, etc., do not have ‘gender’, since they have little or nothing in the way of culture; they have ‘sex’ in both senses.
I believe this just confuses the issue, and unnecessarily distances us from our fellow animals as well. I use ‘sex’ to mean sexual activity in any species, and ‘gender’ to indicate any (warranted) male/female distinction in any species; and I urge you to do likewise.
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“A Chinese employee of an Internet café surnamed Mu said the streets of Aba were largely empty.”
Glad to know that Internet cafes have surnames!
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“Center” means “middle”, either literally or figuratively. It does not mean “place” or “site”, unless that place or site happens to be, essentially and not merely accidentally, at the middle of something.
The use of “center” to mean place or site, or establishment or organization (which began about 1960, apparently) serves no useful purpose and contributes yet another jot to the universal confusion.
The established idiom is “center of…”, not “center for…”. Mentally substitute “middle” for “center”, and you’ll see what I mean.
(Footnote: In a show of delicacy, an institution at John Jay College calls itself “Center on Terrorism”, not “Center for Terrorism”.)
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“Special” used to mean nothing more than “sort or kind”; then, a readily extended meaning, “exceptional” or “unusual”. Then, because notable things are exceptional (or they wouldn’t be notable), it came to mean “notable; excellent”. For years, Buick sold a line of cars called the “Buick Special”. There was nothing very unusual about them, but they were asserted, by their press agents, to be notable and excellent.
When did “special” come to mean “inferior” or “below normal in a given respect”? When people decided to hide uncomfortable reality behind pretty, inoffensive words; and worse, when they learned to write Newspeak, where words mean their opposites.
And Buick doesn’t make a “Special” any more.
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(1) “No one is saying that …”, a locution beloved of pundits and politicians. = “You might say that, but if so I can safely ignore you, because you don’t count.”
(2) “No one believes that …”: similar to above.
(3) “That’s a given” = “I’m not going to bother giving you reasons for what I just said.”
(4) “You know,” = “I don’t need to ask you what you know, because I’m telling you what you know.”
(5) “Remember …” is ambiguous. “Remember” [can mean] “You are now functioning as my offline memory device,” or, in the sense of “recall”, “Remember” [means] “I know you didn’t know that, but I’ll just pretend you did!”
(6) “I don’t know what you’re talking about” = “I know what you’re talking about.”
(7) “You can’t be serious!” = “I know you’re serious, but I can’t think of a valid way to dispute what you’re saying.”
(8) “That’s OK.” = “That’s not OK.”
(9) Disbelief : This used to be called “skepticism,” when it was more respectable.
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[Excerpts from the week's sexually oriented junk email. This stuff is slightly less literate than the emails that offer me a few million dollars for pretending to be next of kin to some dead government minister, but it is more direct and -- to the point.]
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Is yours Below 5 Innches Long? Cheerio!
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We Guuaranteees Bigger Pen-nis [is this from Gollum?]
Howdy!
Would you like to see your penis grow inch by inch month by month?
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Do you very want to be engaged in love, but does not can? Purchase itself magic pills!
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The in cre ase of the s iz es of the s ex ual m em be r probably is a conclusive fact.
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The si wx zes and form p mr en tw is, though are defined even at birth of the man, can be subjected changes. The bo kg d gfh y the man can stop the further growth per thirty years, but the growth of the m xz em qi ber does not stop! From scientific researches we know, that p wwg en sr is at the man grows and to its most death develops.
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Your m umn em mjx ber will inc hly re mp ase on 5-7 cen tu time xd ters in le zuf ng iyy th!
Your me yac m uhg be xf r on some centimeters becomes thicker!
Your sexual m vpc em vlk be sl r will lose confusing curvature and it becomes ideal by a st cwg raight line!
And now make a real step to this – b sno uy our me acs ans for incr hy ease of the m fdg em yl be tzy r.
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Betwene everie flancker, and of what breadth and ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. [not sure if this is about sex, but it was time for a break]
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Do the favourite woman of happy! Purchase itself medicine!
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Know her from the sexual side how is she inside exactly
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Realize all of her dreams with our help for short time
Have you ever heard this, “Damn it! Your p en is is really tiny!”?
Didn’t you feel stupid?
Don’t let ladies prefer dildo to you!
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Double Your Penis Size
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Don’t you look upon your diminutive willy as worth worrying about?
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Men always would like, that at them all was more, than at others.
And now make a real step to this – buy our means for increase of the member.
If the man speaks you, that to him all the same with what at him the size of the member – he dissembles.
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“He trusted on the Lord, that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.” Psalm XX:8 (KJV, 1611)
Who’s who, here? I’ve been told that the Hebrew for this verse is just as ambiguous as the English. And use of gender-insensitive language won’t help us: all the ‘he’s and ‘him’s here are male including, as a point of courtesy, God.
(Note two alternative readings for Psalm XX:8:
“… if he will have him.” – 1928 Prayer Book
“… if he delight in him.” – Handel’s Messiah)
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We write “maybe” — but try breaking this jammed-together word in two: “may be”; doesn’t the meaning “it may be that …” come through more clearly and vividly? Try “any way” instead of “anyway”; or, more daringly, “all most” instead of “almost”, showing the tension, the indecision, between “all” and “most”.
David Foster Wallace, in his story “Everything is Green” has an interesting approach. The story, about a man and a woman, is told from the man’s POV, in indirect discourse. When the woman speaks, she says “everything”; but when he speaks, it is ‘”every thing”. And “can not”; and “her self”. This difference is one of the ways Wallace shows us how different the two characters are, how fragile their crumbling relationship is.
The credits for Jacques Tourneur’s noir film “Out of the Past” (1947) include “Screen Play”. Isn’t this clearer, more necessary, than “Screenplay”?
(Sometimes, compounds break up without our help. In the original KJV Bible, for instance, “shalbe” is used for the later “shall be”.)
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If ‘I’m sorry’ is anything other than a semantic blank, it’s formalized regret at having done something, and resolve, at least for the moment, not to repeat what one is now sorry for. But consider the following abuses:
1) The following (from Mike Huckaby in the New Yorker, 1 December 2008, page 30) isn’t about mixed metaphors, although it could be; it’s about abuse of ‘sorry’:
[re Hillary Clinton’s potential appointment as Secretary of State] “It’s one of those things that if he’s floating the balloon it better fly. It would be twice having rung the doorbell and not taken her to the dance. You know, I’m sorry, but at some point you better get in the car with her and take her.”
2) And from a website, verbatim: “If your purchased product was damaged during shipping we will replace it. Our only restriction is were sorry we cannot refund shipping cost. We personaly know your going to love your new camera. Thank you, Pamela”
Pamela isn’t as fluent as Mike, or perhaps she just can’t type; but neither Mike nor Pamela is sorry in any real sense; in their mouths, it isn’t even a performative, ** it’s just a kind of tic.
** In a performative, saying it does it, as in “I dub thee Knight of the Round Table.”
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In brief:
Among other ways of reading and listening, the literal sense is always available, as is the ironic sense. “What the writer intended” is relevant, but not conclusive. Interpretation is the reader’s to determine, not the writer’s.
At length:
Several centuries ago, scholars studying the Bible realized that reading it literally wasn’t sufficient to explicate its entire meaning. While (at that time, anyway) not questioning its literal truth, they also developed supple, and subtle, methods of interpretation beyond the literal. Sometimes the text itself suggested additional meanings, most obviously in the Parables; at others, the scholars went beyond what the writers of the Bible may have intended, but felt these extended meanings to be faithful to the spirit of the book. A famous example of the latter is referring to Jesus as “the second Adam”.
Northrop Frye (see especially Anatomy of Criticism) and other critics have identified these ways to read a text, often called “levels of interpretation”:
Allegorical
Anagogical
Analogical
Formal
Literal/historical
Literal/descriptive
Metaphorical
Moral [‘tropological’]
Mythical
Prophetic
Symbolic
Typical (= of types)
The literal sense is always available to the reader, but may not be the richest or most informative. But what’s missing here? The list doesn’t include Ironic. Now, it’s conventional to view irony as inhering in the author’s intention, not in the reader’s interpretation. But, in the postmodern view that the writer cannot be privileged — he’s just another reader, and is granted no special wisdom — we must view irony as another of the “ways of understanding”.
So how does irony function in this role? At its simplest, it’s exactly the opposite of literal:
Literal: You’re likable enough, Hillary.
Ironic: You’re not likable enough, Hillary.
[Political sidebar: Who says you need to be likable to be President? SEE: Johnson, Lyndon; Nixon, Richard.]
Further reading: See Wikipedia articles on Irony; Hermeneutics; Northrop Frye.
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Examples:
“This sucker’s goin’ down!” (quoted in NY Times) – George Bush, about the financial system, as the crisis hit.
“Get over it!” – Marion Barry, quondam mayor of D.C., upon catching flak for an unpopular decision.
“Bitch set me up!” – same, upon later being nabbed in a drug sting.
The moral: Some public figures known for verbose nonsense can, in a crisis, actually speak a vigorous and vivid kind of English.
In Slavoj Zizek’s new book, Violence, he refers to a character in Shyamalan’s The Village as “the village idiot”. It takes a great deal of courage these days to use a word like ‘idiot’ in its now-literal sense **. Indeed, the plain sense has been almost entirely eclipsed by a variety of figurative senses — leaving no actual idiots left on the planet. Would that it were so!
** Not the same as the original Greek, which meant someone not involved in public life.
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Meat should be cut at the joint, Plato said, not merely hacked apart any old place. Likewise, words, if they must be divided, should be cut at their own joints. The pieces (before and after line-breaks) should bear as much meaning as possible, as an aid to the reader.
In violation of this principle, the Washington Post, last year, divided “homerun” as ho/merun. Exactly what’s wrong here? There is home plate, and runners run there. But baseball does not have a “ho”-anything, nor does anyone “merun”. (In a way, the Post brought this problem on themselves by ramming “home” and “run” together, instead of leaving them as two separate words, but that’s a different topic; see post #61.)
The Post also insists on dividing “England” as En/gland, as if England were not a land, but some kind of gland, ductless perhaps, or duke-less as Labour would like to see it.
The New Yorker, which generally has the most astute editing of any American magazine, recently published a long article about psychopaths, with these word divisions:
psycho/path
psycho/pathology
psychop/athy
The first two are fine: “psych” (psyche) = mind or soul, and “path”, referring to the passions (stuff that happens to us), is a Greek root taken over into Latin. (The “o” could fall on either side of the word division.)
But what is a “psychop”? And what is “athy”? Nothing. And Nothing.
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“Sea change” was original with Shakespeare. But now, every newspaper in the country, and most of the talking heads on TV, use/abuse this weary cliche. Let’s leave this one with Shakespeare; may it be interred with his bones.
I had a dream, or I have a dream? King’s rhetoric played with this ambiguity, brilliantly. But now everybody seems to ‘have a dream’. In retrospect, this cheapens King’s brilliance. ‘Dream’, unless used literally, is another cliche that obstructs clear thought and should be banished from our writing.
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“Am I going to answer the question I just asked, before you get a chance to? — Yes.”
“Do politicians do that all the time? — For sure. And others, too.”
“Doesn’t that just bug you? –I’ll bet it does!”
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“You have heard it said, “Off with his head!” — but we could instead say “Off with his body!” — it’s a question of what remains essentially ‘us’ if we’re forced to part with some of our parts. And consider the cliché “Lost his head” — the opposite point of view.
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Pro-choicers assert that every woman has a right to bear as many, or as few, children as she wishes. If pregnant, the abortion v giving-birth decision is hers alone, never mind the wishes of the father. I’ll agree that the father has no right to insist that a woman carry to term. And I’ll agree that every woman has a right to an abortion. But I don’t agree that a woman has the moral (never mind legal) right to have as many children as she chooses. Why should society condone irresponsible breeding? Even if a woman is wealthy, having many children imposes burdens on every generation after her, overwhelming the earth with people we really don’t need, and the sheer overwhelming numbers of whom are ruining our world. The conundrum is: who will enforce population control? The Chinese experiment has had many problems. And would we trust our own government as the Chinese trust theirs? I don’t think so.
Pro-lifers are flying under false colors. While caring deeply for every human fetus from conception onward (including severely mentally handicapped fetuses whom it is cruel and insensitive to bring into the world), they ignore any right to life other species may have — species who are also God’s children, and who are, as well, innocent of the burden of sin that human beings bear. “Pro-life” should really be called “pro-only-human-life, screw everyone else”.
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Excerpts from Deborah Howell’s column in the Washington Post, September 28, 2008, page B6:
“More than 750 readers from around the country told me they were mightily offended [by an editorial cartoon making fun of John McCain and Sarah Palin]. Many were Pentecostals. Complaints also came from mainline Christians and from a Buddhist who said “it offends me.” McCain and Palin are certainly fair game, but most of those offended by the cartoon felt it mocked all Pentecostals.”
We need to be firm about this: no one can legitimately claim to ‘be offended’, or accused of ‘giving offense’; rather, offense is something we do to ourselves, and it’s usually harmful to do so, both to us ** and to everyone else involved. Taking offense does not solve problems: it adds to them, leaving a residue of hate and resentment.
** This is a good time to recall Spinoza’s discussion of the harmfulness of negative emotions.
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from an interactive news website:
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
I know what that means, but it’s still an odd thing to say; as if my comment realizes it is immoderate and is patiently waiting to be nuanced, or watered down, or surrounded with ‘perhapses’, or ‘other things being equals’, or ‘that having been saids’.
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from Merriam-Webster.com, 17 September, 2008.
“In its very earliest uses in the 16th century, “surly” meant “majestic” or “lordly” These early meanings make sense when you know that this word is an alteration of Middle English “serreli”, which probably comes from “sire, ser”, a title formerly used as a form of address for men of rank or authority. So how did a word with such lofty beginnings come to be associated with grumbling rudeness? Arrogant and domineering behavior is sometimes associated with men of rank or position, and “surly” came to mean “haughty” or “imperious”. These meanings (which are now obsolete) led to the “rude” sense that is very common today.”
Oddly enough, for “rude”, at bottom, means “coarse and rustic” or “characteristic of uneducated people” — hardly “men [sic] of rank or position” — at least some of them.
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A replica-watch purveyor sent me the following spam email:
“Unbelievable Quality – We have fake Swiss Men’s and Ladie’s [sic] Replica Watches from Rolex to the Popular Panerai Watch”
OK, I don’t believe the quality; that was easy.
But the assault on our language goes deeper: What level of quality am I supposed to unbelieve? Too often, “quality” is used to mean “high quality”, ignoring the possibility of middling or low quality — in the replica-watch industry, very good possibilities, indeed. In a country where all the children are gifted and talented, all the watches must be “quality”.
Regarding fake watches, it is legal to bring one (and only one, at least at a time) into the USA — see Customs regulations. The cases of replicas are often well made; one reason they’re cheap is that they often use Chinese-made movements. The Chinese make some excellent watch movements (“quality”), but also some that possess the attribute of quality in a very different way. Which would they send you?
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Merriam-Webster will be happy to email you a word every day, with its uses, examples of use, and etymology. This is an informative service, and recommended. However, the pronunciations M-W recommends are often slovenly, at times too-obviously reflecting practices of ignorant people. This just encourages, and serves to justify, sloppy speech. It also bedevils new Americans (and our children, too) who are trying their best to learn our language. It’s no wonder that the English spoken by people who were educated in India, Africa, or the Mid-East, for example, is often clearer and more intelligible than that of native Americans such as myself.
Example: How would you say “exasperate”? The folks at M-W seem to pronounce it \ig-ZAS-puh-rayt\. Or perhaps they don’t actually say it this way, themselves; they just think that most Americans do, and therefore we all should.
There are several problems with “\ig-ZAS-puh-rayt\”:
(a) Where did the initial ‘i’ and ‘g’ come from? What’s wrong with ‘e’ and ‘x’ (\ks\), just as spelled? I’ve lived in six U.S. states (both coasts and in between); I don’t think I’ve ever heard “\ig-ZAS-puh-rayt\”.
(b) The derivation of the word is ‘ex’, plus ‘asper’, plus a common suffix. In English, we would split this word, if needed, both in speaking and in spelling, exactly that way: ex-asper…’. M-W splits the initial consonant between two syllables, resulting in a \ZAS\ that has no historical justification.
(c) If we must have \puhrayt\, at least split it \puhr-ayt\, giving a decent respect to the embedded ‘asper’, and the existence of ‘ate’ \ayt\ (not ‘rate’) as an English suffix with the required meaning.
(d) Any recommended pronunciation, such as \ig-ZAS-puh-rayt\, either respects the evolution of the word, or privileges the speech of one class or region. In the past, the speech of wealthy white people in the Northeast was privileged over the speech of, for example, whites in Tennessee or Idaho, and over racial minorities as well. The only way to avoid such snobbery is to base pronunciation on the structure of the word itself, and its evolution over time.
“Not a sermon; just a harangue.”
(References: See the discussion of “speak as you spell” in Modern English Usage, 2d edition, p.483; see also the analogous discussion in the 1st edition, p.466f. Fowler would have liked “\ig-ZAS-puh-rayt\”.)
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‘Shame-faced’ is not derived from ‘shame’ and ‘faced’, but from ‘shamfast’, i.e., held fast by a feeling of shame — nothing to do with faces.
This is an example of ‘folk etymology’, a word or usage based on a derivation that is, historically, not the case.
Usage experts dislike folk etymology. They don’t actually say ‘poo-poo’ (etymology unknown), or ‘tut-tut’, but they might as well use these terms.
But consider: folk etymology may be a normal and robust way the language grows — and don’t we often see shame expressed in a face?
Heidegger made frequent and shameless (derived from ‘shame’ and ‘less’) use of folk etymology in his philosophical works. Although often derided by later philosophers, it was, in his hands, a remarkably useful and frugiferous tool.
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“Hoity toity” means “uppity”, or “pretentious”. It’s doubtful that there are any real products or services bearing this name. — And yet, a Web search on “hoity toity” produced the following ‘sponsored links’:
Hoity Toity game – $20. www.Boardgames4Us.com
Buy Hoity Toity for a great price. Free shipping on orders over $100.
Hoity Toity — Browse Our Huge hoity toity Selection. Shop Exava. www.exava.com
Hoity Toity at Amazon. Low prices on Hoity Toity. Qualified orders over $25 ship free. Amazon.com.
– I can’t wait !
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Consider this example: “Max follows, his hands bunch into fists.”
This needs to be fixed. Why and how? The traditional rule is that two independent clauses cannot be linked by a comma. This rule makes sense, because each of these three possible fixes sounds more natural and makes better sense than the example:
Fix number 1: “Max follows, his hands bunching into fists.”
Fix number 2: “Max follows. His hands bunch into fists.”
Fix number 3: “Max follows; his hands bunch into fists.”
Fix 1 adds an extra syllable that doesn’t pull its weight, a syllable that we can do without in a fast-moving narrative. This is a matter of style, not grammar.
The example sentence portrays vivid action. In Fix 2, this action comes to a sharp halt at the period, then resumes. As a matter of style, again, the action needs to continue moving forward at full speed, not stopped and re-started. It is no coincidence that what Americans call “period,” the British call “full stop.”
Fix 3 doesn’t slow the action as much as fix 2 does; it doesn’t add a needless syllable; and it is superior, I believe, in style.
The semicolon is your friend!
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