Wander about but don't be copious

expatiate / ik-spey-shee-eyt / verb

1. to enlarge in discourse or writing; be copious in description or discussion: to expatiate upon a theme.
2. Archaic. to move or wander about intellectually, imaginatively, etc., without restraint.

History: 1530–40; < L expatiātus ptp. of ex(s)patiārī to wander, digress, equiv. to ex-  + spatiārī to walk about, deriv. of spatium

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) expands on the meaning:

(n.)
The act of increasing in size or bulk, real or apparent; the state of being increased; augmentation; further extension; expansion.
  
(n.)
Expansion or extension, as of the powers of the mind; ennoblement, as of the feelings and character; as, an enlargement of views, of knowledge, of affection.
  
(n.)
Diffusiveness of speech or writing; expatiation; a wide range of discourse or argument.
  
(n.)
A setting at large, or being set at large; release from confinement, servitude, or distress; liberty.

A good writer will endeavor to not "increase in size or bulk" but will seek "an enlargement of views, of knowledge, of affection." And endeavor to "release onself from confinement" of thinking.

Top phrases of the decade

I wrote recently of the "top words" of the decade, based on calculations of The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media.

Here are the top phrases of the decade.

1. Climate Change (2000) Green words in every form   dominant the decade
2. Financial Tsunami (2008) One quarter of the world’s wealth vanishes seemingly overnight
3. Ground Zero (2001) Site of 9/11terrorist attack in New York City
4. War on Terror (2001)  Bush administration’s response to 9/11
5. Weapons of Mass Destruction (2003)  Bush’s WMDs never found in Iraq or the Syrian desert
6. Swine Flu (2008) H1N1, please, so as not to offend the pork industry or religious sensitivities!
7. “Let’s Roll!” (2001)  Todd Beamer’s last words before Flight 93 crashed into the PA countryside
8. Red State/Blue State (2004) Republican or Democratic control of states
9. Carbon footprint (2007) How much CO² does an activity produce?
10. Shock-and-awe (2003) Initial strategy of Iraq War
11. Ponzi Scheme (2009) Madoff’s strategy reaped billions & heartache
12. Category Four (2005) Force of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’ seawalls and levies
13. King of Pop (2000)  Elvis was the King, MJ the King (of Pop)
14. “Stay the Course” (2004) Dubya’s off-stated guidance for Iraq War
15. “Yes, we can!” (2008)   Obama’s winning campaign slogan
16. “Jai Ho!” (2008)  Shout of joy from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
17. “Out of the Mainstream” (2003) Complaint about any opposition’s political platform
18. Cloud computing (2007)  Using the Internet as a large computational device
19. Threat Fatigue (2004)   One too many terrorist threat alerts
20. Same-sex marriage (2003) Marriage of gay couple

Try not to be prolix

prolix / pro-liks / adjecive

1. Extremely wordy or verbose, long-winded, bombastic (in speaking).
2. Lengthy, too long, overly protracted (archaic).

From Dr. Goodword: Prolix is one of the oddest words in English: an adjective that doesn't look or sound like an English adjective, native or borrowed. Adjectives just do not end on [x] in English but this one does. This fact makes the adverb, prolixly, sound even odder, though the noun, prolixity, has a nice lilt to it, probably because the accent moves: [prê-lik-sê-ti].

Prolix is rarely used today in the simple sense of "too long". It is most often applied to wordy writing by harried English teachers: "This paper is so prolix, I often thought myself reading a novel with no plot." However, prolixity also finds its way into speech: "Merewether's speech was so prolix that he actually choked on a couple of sentences."

History: English took prolix, like so many others, from Old French, this time prolixe. French inherited it naturally from Latin prolixus "poured forth, extended", an adjective based on pro "great" + lixus "flowed", the past participle of liquere "to flow, run". The same root, liquere, underlies liquor "fluidity", which English captured for a different use.

In writing it's a gift to be simple

"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain." -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill


"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction." -- Albert Einstein

"Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who instead of aiming a single stone at an object takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit." -- Samuel Johnson


"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." -- C.S. Lewis

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Leonardo da Vinci

The top words of the decade

The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, has announced the top Words of the decade, as part of its annual global survey of the English language.

The top words were ‘global warming’, 9/11, and Obama, followed by bailout, evacuee, and derivative; Google, surge, chinglish, and tsunami followed. “Climate change” was the top phrase, while “Heroes” was the top name; bin-Laden was No. 2.

The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.58 billion speakers.

 

“Looking at the first decade of the 21st century in words is a sober, even somber, event.” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor. “For a decade that began with such joy and hope, the words chosen depict a far more complicated and in many ways, tragic time. Nevertheless, signs of hope and renewal can be found in the overall lists.”

Look before you leap

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word 

is really a large matter — it's the difference 

between a lightning bug and the lightning." -- Mark Twain

A few days ago President Obama opined: " ... it's clear that we are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses and presidents for generations, a achievement that will touch the lives of nearly every American."

His use of the word precipice has been much noted, and the point most often made is that it is a particularly poor choice of words when referring to the health care bill, given that precipice carries the suggestion of danger, and for many people national health care would be dangerous.

From dictionary.com we get these definitions:

1. a cliff with a vertical, nearly vertical, or overhanging face.
2. a situation of great peril: on the precipice of war.

The word's history only makes it worse: 1598, "fall to great depth," from Fr. précipice, from L. præcipitium "a steep place," lit. "a fall or leap," from præceps (gen. præcipitis) "steep, headlong, headfirst," from præ- "forth" + caput "head".

Look before you leap, and think before you speak.

For your information

Trying to get heard above the din?

Americans consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2000. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed last year were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.

I've never heard the term zetabyte before. So there's another first.

We learn all this from the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” by the University of California, San Diego.

Here are some details:

• The average American on an average day consumes 34 gigabytes and 100,000 words of information. 34 gigabytes a day is the equivalent of about one fifth of a notebook computer’s hard drive

• The new report estimates that between 1980 and 2008 bytes consumed increased 350 percent, for an average annual growth rate of 5.4 percent

• On average 41 percent of information time is watching TV (including DVDs, recorded TV and real-time watching)

• American consumers watched 36 million hours of television on mobile devices each month
  

• Based on bytes alone, however, computer games are the biggest information source totaling 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average American consumer, or about 67 percent of all bytes consumed

• Americans spent 16 percent of their information hours using the Internet (second only to TV’s 41 percent). With the proliferation of email, instant messaging and social networking, the Internet today dominates two-way communications, with more than 79 percent of those bytes every day

 Byte me.

How Einstein wrote

Professor John Stachel, a former director of the Einstein Papers Project, believes the secret to Einstein's writing style can be found in his comment to an interviewer: "I am the acoustic type. I learn by ear and give by word. Writing is difficult." But his letters flowed easily in a clear stream-of-consciousness - he wrote the way he would have spoken, without pretensions.

"I think he heard the words before he wrote them, and only when they sounded right did he commit them to paper," Stachel says. "Many poets operate this way, but I doubt many scientists do." He speculates that this pattern may have stemmed from Einstein's childhood habit of quietly saying words to himself before repeating them out loud, a kind of self-echolalia.

Two rules for writers

In his blog, War on Mediocrity, Colin Marshall, lists his favorite heuristics, i.e., "rules of thumb," educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem.

Here are two:

"Barf it out, then clean it up." A friend quoted her journalism teacher as saying this, and I've since adopted it as a pithy reflection of the broader phenomenon that the sole path to non-suckage winds through the treacherous woods of suckage. I must therefore make peace with producing something sucky and then iterate that initial product until it achieves decency. The trick is avoiding discouragement by that first piece of suckiness. As a writing principle, everyone knows this — you pound out the rough draft, then do the real writing, which is rewriting — but I submit that it's applicable across all pursuits. Pro: it's the only way to create good things, I suspect. Con: risks incentivizing producing crappier than I have to, at least to start. A worse initial effort might make fruitful iteration tougher. 

"Can I fail at this?" It's like Raymond Chandler said: there is no success without the possibility of failure. Therefore, something I can't fail at is also something I can't succeed at. I can fail at conducting an interview, writing an essay or making a video. I can't fail at meandering around the internet in search of "neat stuff to read." In a recent tweet, I defined procrastination "the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail with tasks at which it is not possible to fail." I suspect I'm less far off the mark than ever, especially regarding why procrastination is not a productive tendency.

Don't you hate to hear this?

If you're in business it pays to pay attention to the words you use with your customers.

Writing in The New York Times, Stanley Fish notes:

There is a class of utterances that, when encountered, produces irritation, distress and, in some cases, the desire to kill. You hear or read one of these and your heart sinks. Everyone will have his or her (non)favorites. Mine is a three-word announcement on the TV screen, “To Be Continued,” which says, “I know that you have become invested in this story and are eager to find out how it ends, but you’re going to have to wait for a few days or a week or a month or forever.”

Here are others. What others do you hate?

• Sold out.
• Closed for Private Party
• Back in an Hour
• Not in Service
• Use Other Door
• Register Closed
• This may hurt a little
• Your call is important to us
• I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize your response
• May I put you on hold for a minute?
• Your card has been denied
• To return to the menu
• Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed
• Invalid user name
• Assembly Required
  

Of a mind to write

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." -- Joan Didion

"One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives." -- Arthur Miller

“Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.” -- William Zinsser

"The pen is the tongue of the mind." -- Miguel de Cervantes

"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind." -- Rebecca West

"It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them." -- Isabel Colegate

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" -- E. M. Forster

"The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing." -- Jean Malaquais

The $2 million comma

So you don't worry about punctuation? This from Professor Malcolm Gibson's Wonderful World of Editing


By GRANT ROBERTSON
From (Toronto) Globe and Mail, June 8, 2006

 A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13 million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

Rogers thought it had a five-year deal with Aliant Inc. to string Rogers' cable lines across thousands of utility poles in the Maritimes for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole. But early last year, Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up.

Impossible, Rogers thought, since its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years.

Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed. The construction of a single sentence in the 14-page contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only one-year's notice, the company argued.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” 

Rogers' intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn't have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation,” the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year's written notice,” the regulator said.

Every writer should take this word to heart

"If I'd had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter."

-- Mark Twain

concise / kên-sais / adjective

Tersely expressed, written or spoken with the smallest number of words.

Dr. Goodword notes:

If a text may be concise, of course, it may be written concisely (the adverb). Although we attribute conciseness to such texts, concision is a much lovelier word that expresses the same sentiment: a memo written with such concision that it was a pleasure to read.

History: Concise is the English revision of Latin concisus, the past participle of concidere "to cut up", comprising com- "(together) with", used here as an intensive prefix + -cidere, a combining form of caedere "to hit, chop, strike down". We find this root in many words borrowed from Latin that imply cutting, incisor, the cutting tooth, incision, and decision, the act that cuts off debate. Since cutting and hitting were the primary means of slaying people prior to the invention of the gun, this word also came to mean "to kill". The same root produced a noun combining form, -cidium "killing", which underlies English words like homicide, suicide, and genocide.

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

— William Strunk Jr.
in Elements of Style