Do you suffer from molassitude?

"Lassitude" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Dr. Goodword enlightens us on similar words for a familiar state of being. Taken together, he writes, these words provide a nice little lexical toolkit for dividing inactivity into several more precise senses.

lassitude (læs-ê-tyud) means:

1. Lethargy, torpor, listlessness, a lack of energy, spirit, vitality.
2. Apathy, a lack of interest in things.

Lethargy is a drowsiness that interferes with alertness.
Torpor is a deeper drowsiness, right on the edge of sleep or unconsciousness.
Listlessness suggests more of a disinclination to move or be active rather than a change of mental state.
Lassitude is more of a lack of motivation to act.
Molassitude would be the slowest sort of lassitude—if only it were a word!

Lassitude, the good doctor informs, comes from Old French which inherited it from Latin lassitudo, the noun from adjective lassus "weary". This word is based on a stem (las-) that goes back to Proto-Indo-European *le- "let go, slacken" plus a suffix -d, *led-, that also gave English let and late, not to mention German lassen "let". With the suffix -n, it pops up in Russian as len' "laziness", in Latvian as lens "slow", and Latin lenis "soft, gentle", which is also at the bottom of English lenient.

Victorian novelists would have been good shrinks

As it turns out, one set of 19^th-century writers had insights into human nature so nuanced and profound they still ring true today.

“Victorian authors do seem to be good intuitive psychologists,” concludes a research team led by psychologist John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. According to a large-scale study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the authors’ depiction of the personality traits, mating strategies and goal-oriented behavior of their characters “largely mirrors the view of those variables as revealed by modern research.”

Hundreds of raters assessed, among other things, the degree to which characters reflect five essential personality traits, including “extraverted, enthusiastic,” “critical, quarrelsome,” “dependable, self-disciplined” and “calm, emotionally stable.”

By crunching this data, the researchers created psychological profiles of these fictional characters. For example, the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre scored “very low on extraversion, well above average on agreeableness and emotional stability, and high on conscientiousness and openness to experience.”

Still fascinated with Twain

The humorist Garrison Keillor has written a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I, which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes.

It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair: “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

In cataloging the passages he uses as evidence of the vacuousness of the book, Keillor inadvertently (or perhaps advertently?) makes the point that even he is interested enough in the minutiae of the great man's life that he would read these words and then produce a long piece reciting them.

So you want to be a journalist

(Thanks, Ed)

Want to write like Mark Twain?

Use plain, simple language. In a letter to D.W. Bowser in 1880 he says:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Going forward, let's not say "going forward"

The excellent Johnson blog at The Economist takes up business cliches, including "going forward."

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:

I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.

or

Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.

Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:

“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).

(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Try this with peanut butter in your mouth

Okay, boys and girls:

I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.

Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons.

She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.

In the 19th century, tongue twisters were developed by experts in elocution as a means of mastering proper enunciation.

One practitioner was Lionel Logue, who trained as an elocutionist in his native Australia, and from that work he began taking on students for lessons in “speech correction.” Along with the tongue twisters, Logue was known to draw on other time-honored elocutionary exercises, like having a stutterer shout vowel sounds out of an open window for long periods.

Logue worked with Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), who was crippled by a stammer that made public speaking a devilish chore.

Logue prescribed a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II.

Perhaps there was more involved in his exercises.

Few, if any, of Logue’s linguistic techniques, from the tongue twisters to the word substitutions, would be used by modern speech pathologists, according to Caroline Bowen, an Australian speech therapist who maintains a Web site with information on Logue. But for Logue, the focus on vocal mechanics was most likely just a means to an end, enforcing a bond of trust with his royal patient.

Logue may not have “cured” the stammer, but by instilling a sense of confidence and chipping away at Bertie’s anxieties, he made it possible for the king to untwist his tongue and find his voice at a moment when his country most needed to hear him speak.

Yonder, yes yonder, yonder

Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest points to this video and says, "Brilliant is the only word for this smashing exposition of the power of the English language. Richard Burton races through this poem with unbelievable speed. A technical tour de force..."



The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to keep--is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--
Yonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Know your airplane lingo

Here are some terms pilots and flight attendants use.

Blue juice: The water in the lavatory toilet. “There’s no blue juice in the lav.”

Crotch watch: The required check to make sure all passengers have their seat belts fastened. Also: “groin scan.”

Crumb crunchers: Kids. “We’ve got a lot of crumb crunchers on this flight.”

Deadheading: When an airline employee flies as a passenger for company business.

Gate lice: The people who gather around the gate right before boarding so they can be first on the plane. “Oh, the gate lice are thick today.”

George: Autopilot. “I’ll let George take over.”

Landing lips: Female passengers put on their “landing lips” when they use their lipstick just before landing.

Pax: Passengers.

Spinners: Passengers who get on late and don’t have a seat assignment, so they spin around looking for a seat.

Two-for-once special: The plane touches down on landing, bounces up, then touches down again.

Working the village: Working in coach.

Jane Austen is hip

A watercolour and pencil sketch of Jane Austen

It's remarkable the Mark Twain continues to draw the crowds 100 years after his death, but here's another infatuation with a long-gone writer.


Jane Austen, the English novelist best known for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen's tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen's work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."

The reading level of most Americans

You're probably not writing credit card agreements, but this tells you something.


Credit card agreements are written on average at a 12th grade reading level, making them not understandable to four out of five adults, according to a CreditCards.com analysis of all the agreements offered by major card issuers in the United States.

The average American adult reads at a ninth-grade level and readability experts recommend important information -- such as credit card agreements -- be written at that level

"Credit card contracts and other such documents are written in dense prose for a reason: So that the customer will NOT be able to understand it," notes Roy Peter Clark, a national expert on writing and a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. "I may be cynical, but I don't think their writing strategies are accidental, the collateral damage of a bureaucratic mindset. I think those writers know exactly what they are doing."

"Experts advise that anything for the public should be written at the ninth grade level," William DuBay, an author and readability consultant says. "If it's about health and safety, it should be written on the fifth grade level."

Is your writing plangent?

plangent / PLAN-junt / adjective

having a loud reverberating sound

having an expressive and especially plaintive quality

The campers were awoken by the plangent howl of a coyote off in the distance.

 

"Mr. Packard is the finest Candide I’ve seen, singing with rich,plangent tone and acting with an un-self-conscious sincerity that never falters." — From a theater review by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, October 27, 2010


Merriam-Webster: "Plangent" adds power to our poetry and prose: the pounding of waves, the beat of wings, the tolling of a bell, the throbbing of the human heart, a lover's knocking at the door — all have been described as plangent. 


The word "plangent" traces back to the Latin verb "plangere," which has two meanings. The first of those meanings, "to strike or beat," was sometimes used by Latin speakers in reference to striking one's breast in grief. This, in turn, led to the verb's second meaning: "to lament." The sense division carried over to the Latin adjective "plangens" and then into English, giving us the two distinct meanings of "plangent": "pounding" and "expressive of melancholy." 


What synonym of "plangent" rhymes with "soulful"? The answer is …

Concentration, not inspiration

Salman Rushdie says he doesn't rely on inspiration.

It’s concentration more and it is to do with developing skills of concentration and I think that is something which, well a few things I think about being a writer that you get better at with time. There are things that you perhaps don’t get better at.  Energy is something which maybe declines, but I think concentration, focus, the ability to shut out the extraneous and focus on what you’re doing.  I think the more you do it the better you get at it. 

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on.  You’re just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you. 

I think inspiration is nonsense, actually.  Every so often I mean like one day in 20 or something, you will have a day when the work seems to just flow out of you and you feel lucky.  I mean you feel and often surprised and you don’t quite know why it is working like that. And on days like that it’s easy to believe in a kind of inspiration, but most of the time it’s not like that.

Most of the time it’s a lot slower and more exploratory and it’s more a process of discovering what you have to do than just simply have it arrive like a flame over your head.  So I do think it’s to do with concentration, not inspiration.  It’s to do with paying attention and I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Two papers in one!

From Best of The Web Today:

• "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."--New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009 

• "The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."--New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010

The hard wiring of story

Our narrative engines

Neuroscientist John Bickle and philosophy of science student Sean Keating describe how the brain's narrative machine works.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our "selves" through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on "split-brain" patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation.

It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere "interpreter" creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. "The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography," he writes.

The language areas of the left hemisphere are well placed to carry out these tasks. They draw on information in memory (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices). As neurologist Jeffrey Saver has shown, damage to these regions disrupts narration in a variety of ways, ranging from unbounded narration, in which a person generates narratives unconstrained by reality, to denarration, the inability to generate any narratives, external or internal.

One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca's area. But also active was Wernicke's area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain's speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.

More at the link.

Mark Twain's thoughts on Thanksgiving

Mark Twain's 70th birthday party

In November of 1905, the month he turned seventy, Macy Halford writes in The New Yorker, Mark Twain was exceedingly famous; the nation was a-tingle with affection for its most humorous and most American American treasure, and all the more so because his birthday that year fell on the most American of holidays: Thursday, November 30th, Thanksgiving day. 

 

In the first volume of his autobiography, Twain describes the efforts of his editor, George Harvey to plan a celebration: 

It arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. 

Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. 

But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand. 

Twain, Halford writes, by this time had travelled a long way—from the banks of the Mississippi to a mansion on Fifth Avenue—and had become, as New Yorkers will, unrelenting in his agendas, and brilliantly so:

Harvey went to Washington to try to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing, arguments which ought to persude him even to put off Thanksgiving Day a whole year—on the ground that nothing had happened during the previous twelvemonth except several vicious and inexcusable wars, and King Leopold of Belgium's usual annual slaughters and robberies in the Congo State, together with the Insurance revelations in New York, which seemed to establish the fact that if there was an honest man left in the United States, there was only one, and we wanted to celebrate his seventieth birthday. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Clemens.

RIP: James J. Kilpatrick

We lost four noted men of words in 2010, as Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. One was James J. Kilpatrick, a newspaper columnist. Zimmer:

James J. Kilpatrick (b. 1920) had a distaste for pompous and hackneyed language, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion vociferously — no surprise to anyone who read his prickly political commentary or saw his rants in the “60 Minutes” debate segment “Point-Counterpoint.”

“When I conclude that a particular usage is execrable, I can execrate at the top of my lungs,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1984 The Writer’s Art, also the title of his long-running syndicated column.


The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick’s pugnaciousness and iconoclasm. After Garner published the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998, the two men found that they were kindred spirits in language matters.

But they didn’t see eye to eye on everything: they had an ongoing debate over beginning sentences with “and” or “but” (Garner was in favor of the practice; Kilpatrick dead-set against it). Ultimately, as befits the author of “The Writer’s Art,” Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.

Some words never die

Thanks to the unearthing of a 17th-century text, we can now learn the sorts of word-sounds heard on the streets of London by the likes of John Milton, Andrew Marvell and probably even Shakespeare himself, Alexander Theroux writes in The Wall Street Journal.

This was the first book dedicated to English slang words, the lingo of sharpsters, shills and vagabonds. Originally printed as A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, it has been newly released as The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699.

Drinking and its effects are heavily represented. A drunk ("pot-valiant") might be described as "cup shot" or "half seas over" and labeled a "swill-belly" or "Malmesey-nose." A "fuddle" is an "excellent tipple." As for "rum," it was once an adjective with a positive meaning, as in "rum-bluffer" (a jolly host) and "rum-bung" (a full purse). The late 17th century was not an age for delicacy. The Dutch were derisively called "butter-boxes." A "foul Jade" was an ordinary coarse woman. A phrase for women in general was "mutton-in-long-coats." The colorful words for prostitute could make up a dictionary in itself.

There are hundreds of words here that have rarely been used since, although this dictionary keeps them brightly alive: "tarum" (for milk) and "fubbs" (a fond word for children). But many old words have kept their meanings to this day: "shop-lift" and "hen-peckt," for instance, and "grinders" for teeth.

"Slang," Theroux writes, "is eternal."

Do you have a chrestomathy?

chrestomathy / kreh-STAH-muh-thee / noun

a selection of passages used to help learn a language
a volume of selected passages or stories of an author

Merriam-Webster: the Greeks had the usefulness of knowledge in mind when they created "chrestomathy" from their adjective "chrēstos," which means "useful," and the verb "manthanein," which means "to learn."

How John McPhee became a writer

John McPhee has published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism.

How did he become a writer? From an interview with Peter Hessler in The Paris Review:

When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing? 

There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.

Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.

Your call is very important to us

Right.

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, has an amusing look at this all too familiar phrase.

NEAL WHITMAN of Literal-Minded:

“Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
I stayed on the line, cleaning up the kitchen one-handed while I waited. By the time I was speaking to a real person, I had listened long enough to have heard the message at least five more times... It was really starting to get to me …

Did you get what was starting to get to Mr Whitman?  I'd have said the absurd lie that "your call is very important to us" repeated over and over while you are inconvenienced by being kept on hold. But he noticed something else that I missed the first time:

You’re missing the final in!, I kept thinking... you have more than one option for what to do with the in. You can leave it stranded at the end, the same way as you’d leave it at the end of the house I grew up in. Or you can take the in along with order, and put them both at the front of the relative clause.

But you shouldn't just abandon it. This phenomenon was noticed as far back as Ernest Gowers, the usage-book writer who called it preposition "cannibalism" in 1954. Mr Whitman notices that the preposition is more likely to get cannibalised by its exact likeness: the in in "in the order" eats the in that should be found in "in which it was received". It sounds wrong to our ears, it seems, to hear in twice so close together, so much so that some people don't notice the preposition sitting there cleaning its teeth after devouring its twin.

Everyday expressions

(Thanks, Lainey)

Everyone's writing a novel. Why?

Novelist Alix Christie figures it this way:

A quarter of a million new novels are published annually across the globe, 100,000 of them in English. This represents, in turn, a quarter, maybe, of the manuscripts that agents try to hawk. Agents, as all writers know, take only a small proportion of the work they’re sent, perhaps a tenth. Ten million scribes in search of a reader may not be so tall a tale.

So what keeps her going?

I have been helped by a lesson I learned years ago, apprenticed in a printer’s shop (a subject I returned to for my second novel, about the birth of printing and medieval guilds). I’ve come to see how helpful it can be to see ourselves as striving toward some mastery in craftsmen’s terms. The guilds have always known that it takes years to become skilled at a craft. The standard term was seven, split into years of formal training and then the “wander years”. Learning from mistakes has always been an inevitable part of the education.

What helps keep me going, though, is literature itself. With its heft, its moral purpose and its beauty, it is a counterweight to our increasingly flighty and commercial world. And in this, I’m very far from all alone. Most writers gird themselves with courage from like-minded souls. My writers’ group, my agent and the fellow writers I share work with all provide more than an eagle eye. They offer succour and seriousness of purpose, and a shared sense that writing is the most intense and most important brainwork that we do.

I have never forgotten a comment made at a workshop by Karen Joy Fowler, a wonderful, successful writer. “I was neither the most talented nor the most clever writer in my writing group,” she told us. “But I was the one who stuck with it.” When things feel especially bleak, this becomes my mantra.

"It is an act of faith," she writes. "Each day we legions of the unknown, we ten million, rise and face the blankness of the page. And in the painful act of making worlds, we make ourselves."

Christie was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist in Southwest Review's 2010 Meyerson Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Voices, "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn" (from Foolscap Press) and Southwest Review.)

You can't refudiate the dictionary

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary have awarded the Sarah Palin the high-brow distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release today, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

Lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

In a followup tweet, Palin said : "Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Albert Einstein: imagination

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."

-- Albert Einstein

Finding a name for the web

Tim Berners-Lee

Ben Zimmer describes the origin of web to refer to the World Wide Web in an interesting piece in The New York Times.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, came up with the term, but not without some juggling.

In 1990, writing a second proposal for his concept, he came up with the name Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.”  

Mine of Information might seem “too egocentric” when treated as an acronym, MOI, French for “me.” The Information Mine could be seen as “even more egocentric” based on its acronym: TIM, Berners-Lee’s first name.

Finally, Berners-Lee came up with a three-word name that suitably described the global reach of the system they were envisioning: World Wide Web.

He and a colleague considered it temporary and planned to find something better. They never did.

In the original title, the three words were run together as WorldWideWeb, but they would soon separate it into World Wide Web (despite the fact that worldwide is best treated as a single word), underscoring the alliteration.

How to abbreviate the name was problematic from the beginning. “Friends at CERN gave me a hard time, saying it would never take off,” Berners-­Lee wrote in his memoir, “especially since it yielded an acronym that was nine syllables long when spoken”: double-u, double-u, double-u.

“The W3 worldview is of documents referring to each other by links,” Berners-Lee and his colleague wrote. “For its likeness to a spider’s construction, this world is called the Web.” 

That single spidery word, capitalized or uncapitalized, would bear countless offspring. The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary catalogs some of the most common web compounds, like web address, web browser, webcam, webcast, web crawler, web developer, web design, webinar, weblog, webmaster, webmistress, web page, web publisher, web server, web site, web surfer and webzine.

Next time you fret about a writing feed, consider: Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation.

Writing online is different

Marc Ambinder, the politics editor of The Atlantic, is giving up blogging after five years. Here are his observations on writing for a blog and writing for print.

Really good print journalism is ego-free.  By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective.  What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter's insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.

Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this.

As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can't really be a reporter without it. I don't care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it's no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called "Marc Ambinder" that people read because it's "Marc Ambinder," rather than because it's good or interesting.

Never too late to write

Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, looks at writers who were still going in their later years.

For every J.D. Salinger, who published “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32, there is a Mark Twain, who brought out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at 49. “Huck Finn,” Hemingway said, is the foundation for all modern American fiction, and I agree.

Alan Furst, the literary spy writer who produces atmospheric thrillers every other year or so, is at the top of his game at 69. When he moved to France in 1987 he had yet to make a mark. “I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,” he told John Marshall in a Daily Beast piece last year.

Nobody was a better American essayist in the 1970s and 80s than Joan Didion. But the writerly sprint culminating in her late-years memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” was breathtaking. She finished the book just days after her 70th birthday.

My favorite septuagenarian inspiration is Norman Maclean, who published the most beautiful,
word-perfect novel of the American West, “A River Runs Through It,” when he was 74. And then he had a second book in him, “Young Men and Fire,” published after his death at 87. Old, seemingly doomed, and brilliant — a role model for all second-act aces.

T.S. Eliot: the art of self-promotion

T.S. Eliot

Joseph Epstein has an interesting essay on T.S. Eliot in Commentary, in which he notes that, "The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day."

Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.”

He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.” 

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.”

He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.”

Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make.

Stephen King and ebooks

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg interviewed King for The Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts.

Do we get the same reading experience with e-books?
Stephen King: I don't know. I think it changes the reading experience, that it's a little more ephemeral. And it's tougher if you misplace a character. But I downloaded one 700-page book onto my Kindle that I was using for research. It didn't have an index, but I was able to search by key words. And that's something no physical book can do.

What about people who love physical books?
I'm one of them. I have thousands of books in my house. In a weird way, it's embarrassing. I recently downloaded Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants," but I also bought a copy to put on the shelf. I want books as objects. It's crazy, but there are people who collect stamps, too.

Is the future of publishing all digital?
It's a hard subject to get a handle on. People like myself who grew up with books have a prejudice towards them. I think a lot of critics would argue that the Kindle is the right place for a lot of books that are disposable, books that are read on the plane. That might include my own books, if not all, then some.

How much time do you spend reading digitally?
It's approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell's "Faceless Killers" and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.

What's going to happen to bookstores?
The bookstores are empty. It's sad. I remember a time when Fifth Avenue was lousy with bookstores. They're all gone.

Metaphor Alert!

"Somewhere along the way, the apostle of change became its target, engulfed by the same currents that swept him to the White House two years ago. Now, President Obama must find a way to recalibrate with nothing less than his presidency on the line. The verdict delivered by voters on Tuesday effectively put an end to his transformational ambitions and left him searching for a way forward with a more circumscribed horizon of possibilities."--New York Times, Nov. 3

-- Best of The Web Today

Learn to trust yourself

Peter Bregman, a management consultant, was preparing a speech recently, when he came to a realization about himself. It applies to any kind of writing.

Each time I created a new version, I sent it out to trusted friends — smart, generous, insightful people — and asked for their advice and direction. Was it interesting enough? Clear enough? Creative enough? Funny enough?

Yet each time they came back with their valuable, thoughtful feedback, I became a little more lost. A little less sure of my message. My ideas. Myself.

He was too quick too eager to accept changes, too eager to please.

Many of us have spent our lives listening to our parents, our teachers, our managers, and our leaders. Choosing what we are told to choose. Being told gently who we are. Molding ourselves to the feedback of others. Seeking approval. Reaching for recognition.

There is good reason to learn from the wisdom of others. But there is also a cost: as we shape ourselves to the desires, preferences, and expectations of others, we risk losing ourselves. We can become frozen without their direction, unable to make our own choices, lacking trust in our own insights.

Just stop asking other people for their opinions!

Instead, take the time, and the quiet, to decide what you think. That is how we find the part of ourselves we gave up. That is how we become powerful, clever, creative, and insightful. That is how we gain our sight. 

It allowed him to focus on what he alone could offer. And he saw that he was relying on others to do his work for him.

Once I decided to stop asking others what they thought about what I thought, I noticed something interesting: I try harder when I'm not relying on others. I fix things I might otherwise leave for others to fix. I work more diligently to ensure my perspective holds together.

In the past, when I sent someone an article for comments, knowing it needed some work, I was being lazy. And my laziness, enabled by the generosity of others, had the side effect of reducing my faith in my abilities to work through the places I got stuck.

Bregman doesn't make the final point, but I will: he's just as smart and capable, if not more so, than those whose advice he sought. So are you.

If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong

The word is odd, but the concept is fun.

paraprosdokian / pæ-rê-prahz-dok-i-ên / noun


Dr. Goodword enlightens us: A paraprosdokian is a phrase or sentence that leads us down the garden path to an unexpected ending. It sets us up to expect one thing but ends on a surprising semantic twist. For example, commenting on the progressive ideas of Labor Party member Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1952), Winston Churchill once quipped: "There but for the grace of God—goes God."

Though many writers were good at creating paraprosdokians, few excelled Winston Churchill and Groucho Marx. Churchill once said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else." One of Groucho's many paraprosdokians is: "I had a wonderful evening—but this wasn't it." Of course, we should not forget W. C. Fields, who once quipped, " "Philadelphia, wonderful town, spent a week there one night. Still not enough paraprosdokians?

Paraprosdokian, Dr. Goodword says, is immediately composed of Greek para "beyond" and prosdokia "expectation". Prosdokia comprises pro and the root of dokein "to think, imagine, expect".The same root gave us the Greek words dogma and paradox, another word referring to something beyond our expectations. In Latin the same root emerged as docere "to teach" (cause to think) and went into the making of the word borrowed by English as doctor "the highest university degree". 

Here are some examples.

• Two wrongs don't make a right—but three lefts do.
• Now, you take my wife . . . PLEASE! —Henny Youngman
• Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
• If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong.
• War does not determine who is right—only who is left.
• The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
• I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way, so I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
• Do not argue with an idiot: he will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
• I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.

Got gobbledygook?

Someone has created a tool to test your writing for gobbledygook. Here it is. I tried it out on my previous post -- Don't be a sketchoid -- and learned that it was written at a 12th grade level and contained only one gobbledygook "word" -- USP, letters in the word suspicious. So I think I'll protest my score of 97 out of 100.

Don't be a sketchoid

Sketchy is a word heard often in our house. It's a popular word. Variations include sketch, skeazy, sketchball, sketcher and sketchmaster. They are used to refer to unfamiliar, suspicious or anxiety-producing outsiders.

They have popped up frequently on lists of slang words collected by students of linguist Connie C. Eble in the English department of the University of North Carolina. Words with the same meaning include rando and creeper.

Eble believes their use is related to the rise of social media like Facebook, through which women are often approached by undesirable men.

“With Facebook and texting,” student Natasha Duarte said, “it’s easier to contact someone you’re interested in, even if you only met them once and don’t really know them. To the person receiving them, these texts and Facebook friend requests or wall posts can seem premature and unwarranted, or sketchy.” 

And yet these words predate Facebook.

A list of slang compiled from students at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, published in the journal American Speech in 1975, included sketch as an adjective meaning “dangerous, risky” (“I think we’re in a sketch situation”). By 1996, one of Eble’s U.N.C. students offered sketch as a noun meaning “someone who is hard to figure out.”

The Urban Dictionary defines it: 1) someone or something that just isn't right. 2) the feeling you get the morning after using a lot of drugs, most commonly associated with extacy. 3) something unsafe 4) someone or something that gives off a bad feeling.

Rando is just as old.

As early as 1971, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, M.I.T.’s student paper, The Tech, was using random as an adjective meaning “peculiar, strange” or as a noun to disparage people outside a community, particularly the community of computer hackers. (The 1991 New Hacker’s Dictionary provides the example “The audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions.”) Eventually it could refer to unfamiliar faces in any social situation, like a party or a bar, with rando as a slangy 21st-century shortening.

I'll offer my contribution to the list: sketchoid. You can assign a meaning of your choice.

Job security for an editor

Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author. 

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.


"This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book," Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen's second publisher, John Murray. 

"Gifford was a classical scholar known for being quite a pedant. He took Austen's English and turned it into something different - an almost Johnsonian, formal style," Prof Sutherland said.

"Austen broke many of the rules for writing 'good' English. Her words were jumbled together and there was a level of eccentricity in her spelling -- what we would call wrong.

"She has this reputation for clear and elegant English but her writing was actually more interesting than that. She was a more experimental writer than we give her credit for. Her exchanges between characters don't separate out one speaker from another, but that can heighten the drama of a scene.

"It was closer to the style of Virginia Woolf. She was very much ahead of her time."

Guess that means that I am ahead of my time.

I could care less

It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers, Jan Freeman writes at Boston.com. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’ ”

Ann voted with her reader — “the expression as I understand it is ‘I couldn’t care less’ ” — but she thought the question was trivial. “To be honest,” she concluded, “this is a waste of valuable newspaper space and I couldn’t care less.”

Let's use up some more bandwidth.

In 1972, Ann’s sister and fellow advice-peddler, Dear Abby, used “could care less” in print herself, and got an earful from readers.

Guidance from the word police:

In 1975, the Harper’s usage dictionary declared that “could care less” was “an ignorant debasement of the language.”

Isaac Asimov: “I don’t know people stupid enough to say this.”

In 1979, William Safire declared in his New York Times column that “could care less” had finally run its course: “Like most vogue phrases, it wore out its welcome.”

Was anybody listening?

Three decades on, “could care less” is flourishing. Ben Zimmer, examining its career last year in a column at the language website Visual Thesaurus, reported that “could care less” had steadily gained ground in edited prose. In American speech, according to research by linguist Mark Liberman, “could care less” is far ahead of the “couldn’t” version. And “could care less” is no recent corruption, Zimmer found; it shows up in print by 1955, only 11 years after the first sighting of “couldn’t care less.”

Ask me if I care.

Do readers care what we call it?

Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate about a trend I've noticed lately -- less and less distinction between a magazine article online and a blog post.

Soon, Gawker will no longer be a blog. The same goes for other sites in the Gawker network. The difference is that when these sites publish their scoops, they won't be doing so in a "blog" format—that is, as a reverse-chronological, scrollable index of posts. Instead, Gawker and co. will transform into something more akin to conventional Web magazines.

While Gawker is dropping the blog format, sites of magazines like Wired and The Atlantic are embracing it. (At both outlets, all articles, other than those that first appeared in print, are published in a blog-like format.) Or check out Newsweek, whose home page lists headlines and snippets in reverse-chronological order, just like at your friend's Blogger site.

Does anyone care? Any reader, that is?

"I say this with all possible deference: Who cares?" wrote Joel Johnson, the Gizmodo blogger, when I approached him with such questions. Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything, a history of blogging, echoes this point: "Just as journalists think readers have a deep awareness of distinctions like 'hard news piece' vs. 'feature' vs. 'news analysis,' we think they understand or care about the line between 'article' and 'blog post.' But they're just reading what we're writing for them and responding. It's our hang-up, not theirs." 

Most readers, if not all, care only that the writing is interesting, informative, relevant and honest.

Thinking about coincidence

John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, has a fine essay in The New York Times on the difference between storytelling and statistics. Here's an exerpt.

Coincidences loom large in narratives, where they too frequently are invested with a significance that they don’t warrant probabilistically. The birthday paradox, small world links between people, psychics’ vaguely correct pronouncements, the sports pundit Paul the Octopus, and the various bible codes are all examples. In fact, if one considers any sufficiently large data set, such meaningless coincidences will naturally arise: the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index in the early 1990s was butter production in Bangladesh.

The most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of all coincidences.

One way to take all the fun out of watching television is to start noticing the coincidences the writers use to make story happen in an hour.

This idea has been done before

This undated form rejection from Essanay Film Manufacturing Company (which was in existence from 1907-1925) is a sweet little snapshot into the mores of the time -- and the bits that haven't changed since. According to the Old Hollywood Tumblr, "[Essnay is] mostly remembered today for its series of Charlie Chaplin films."

(Boing Boing)

Write it out by hand, give your brain a boost

The old art of handwriting has been found to improve mental activity, Gwendolyn Bounds reports in The Wall Street Journal.

During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a "spaceship," actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called "functional" MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters.

"It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time," says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

It's good for grown-ups, too.

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters' proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes. 

Handwriting affects how we think and develop ideas.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key. She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.

Interesting thought as I type this post on a laptop.

Fun with plurals

A learned reader corrected me on a recent post on another blog, which I titled "The amazing story of a bacteria." Bacteria is plural, he wrote, and bacterium is singular.

I knew that, and all the dictionaries will tell you that. However, my ear told me that using the singular would sound like a reference to just one of the little buggers, and I was referring to a species. So it sounded right to use the plural. Technically speaking, I suppose my friend was right.

However, I did find a few references that suggest otherwise. Here's a question posed at a place called Physics Forums.

When you say species of cat, you say exactly that, cat, not cats, the singular, don't you? There seems to be a mixture when it comes to bacteria. Some sources say species of bacteria, others speices of bacterium. Would you say "How many species of cats are there?" or "How many species of cat are there?" It seems, when it comes to bacteria, the plural is used in this case.... Peculiar! Anybody got any ideas??? 

Here's one answer.

I suppose it's because Bacteria is the name of the family (or in this case domain) which is normally given as a plural. So you would say - how many species of the family Felidae are there. But bacteria is also used as a singular in everyday speech anyway. Plus this is English - there aren't any rules, well there are but you are allowed to make up your own anyway. 

Another:

Species is both singular and plural, so it depends. If you are asking about a species of cat, then you're talking about one species. If you ask about species of cats, then you're asking about more than one species. Though, biologists are more typically going to ask about species of felids.

And here's something I found on the pages of John Lindquist, who is on the instructional Laboratory Staff, Department of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bear with me. I'll never post on this again. Lindquist:

To refer to members of a given genus in the plural sense, using Bacillus, Micrococcus and Mycobacterium as examples, one cannot change the genus name directly to a plural form. Bacilli, Micrococci and Mycobacteria would be improper. To get around the problem, one can write such as the following: "species of Bacillus," "isolates of Micrococcus," "strains of Mycobacterium." If the genus names were to be reduced to common forms (made into conventional English words, not capitalized, italicized or underlined), then plural alteration would be valid, as follows: bacilli, micrococci, mycobacteria. Use the term "bacilli" with caution; this term (depending on context) can mean rod-shaped cells in general or members of the genus Bacillus more specifically. [Emphasis mine.]

I have no idea what that means, so I'm going with the guy who wrote, "This is English - there aren't any rules, well there are but you are allowed to make up your own anyway."

I'll also go with Samuel Clemens, my final arbiter on everything, who said:

"I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness."

And added for good measure:

"I am almost sure by witness of my ear, but cannot be positive, for I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. A generation ago I knew the rules--knew them by heart, word for word, though not their meanings--and I still know one of them: the one which says--but never mind, it will come back to me presently."

That's me. The rules were drilled into me in the eighth grade by Miss Schindler (who had taught my father) and in the 12th grade by Miss Whitton (who had taught my father), and somehow I know them but not by name, and like Mr. Clemens, I can't remember how I got into all this in the first place.