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.

How to tell a story

By Mark Twain

The Humorous Story is an American Development.--Its Different from Comic and Witty Stories.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind --the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art --and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print --was created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.

Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it today.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you--every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whopping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller tells it in this way:

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained; whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man's head off--without, however, his deliverer being aware of it. In no long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

"Where are you going with that carcass?"

"To the rear, sir--he's lost his leg!"

"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean his head, you booby."

Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:

"It is true, sir, just as you have said." Then after a pause he added, "BUT HE TOLD ME IT WAS HIS LEG!!!!!"

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gasping and shriekings and suffocatings.

It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form; and isn't worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.

He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can't remember it; so he gets all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious details that don't belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance, anyway --better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all --and so on, and so on, and so on.

The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their faces.

The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art--and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other story.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one where thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.

For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, "I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head"--here his animation would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to himself, "and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw."

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole story. If I got it the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat--and that was what I was after. This story was called "The Golden Arm," and was told in this fashion. You can practice with it yourself--and mind you look out for the pause and get it right.

.

THE GOLDEN ARM

Once 'pon a time dey wuz a momsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm--all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean--pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

When it come midnight he couldn't stan' it no mo'; so he git up, he did, en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de golden arm; en he bent his head down 'gin de 'win, en plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable pause here, and look startled, and take a listening attitude) en say: "My LAN', what's dat?"

En he listen--en listen--en de win' say (set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), "Bzzz-z-zzz"--en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear a VOICE!--he hear a voice all mix' up in de win'--can't hardly tell 'em 'part--"Bzzz--zzz--W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?" (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, "Oh, my! OH, my lan'!" en de win' blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos' choke him, en he start a-plowin' knee-deep toward home mos' dead, he so sk'yerd--en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it 'us comin AFTER him! "Bzzz--zzz--zzz W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n--ARM?"

When he git to de pasture he hear it agin--closter now, en A-COMIN'!--a-comin' back dah in de dark en de storm--(repeat the wind and the voice). When he git to de house he rush upstairs en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years, en lay da shiverin' en shakin'--en den way out dah he hear it AGIN!--en a-COMIN'! En bimeby he hear (pause--awed, listening attitude)--pat--pat--pat HIT'S A-COMIN' UPSTAIRS! Den he hear de latch, en he KNOW it's in de room!

Den pooty soon he know it's a-STANNIN' BY DE BED! (Pause.) Den --he know it's a-BENDIN' DOWN OVER HIM--en he cain't skasely git his breath! Den--den--he seem to feel someth'n' C-O-L-D, right down 'most agin his head! (Pause.)

Den de voice say, RIGHT AT HIS YEAR--"W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?" (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor --a girl, preferably--and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached exactly the right length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, "YOU'VE got it!")

If you've got the PAUSE right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out of her shoes. But you MUST get the pause right; and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.

 

(The Writer's Den)

Circle the wagons!

Metaphor Alert!

Chris Wallace: "And you hear about Democrats talking about House races pulling back and basically throwing some incumbent Democrats under the bus, saying, 'You know, we're just not going to spend money on those races because they're going to lose,' and circling the wagon, building their firewall tighter and tighter, while Republicans are pouring money into an expanding battlefield." Brit Hume: "That is the trajectory of the race. There's no doubt about that, Chris."--"Fox News Sunday," Oct. 17

-- Best of The Web Today

Amen to that

Robert Beard, PhD Linguistics, taught language and linguistics at Bucknell University for 35 years. He calls himself "Dr. Goodword" and presides over his alphaDictionary site. He is a great source for all things about words. 

Here he explains hermeneutic.

hermeneutic / hêr-mê-nyu-tik / adjective, noun

Explanatory, clarifying, exegetical. Exegesis is usually reserved for explanations of the mundane world while hermeneutics is applied mostly in religion and philosophy.

Hermeneutic, Dr. Goodword writes, began as a term in the Church, referring to activities (or art) that explained the scriptures—even though it is based on the name of a pagan god, Hermes. The practice of interpreting the scriptures is known by the adjective used as a noun, hermeneutic (or hermeneutics), and someone involved in it is a hermeneutist. If we remember that this word is derived from the name of the Greek god Hermes, we will be less likely to replace the middle E with an A as many of us, unfortunately do.

Using the word: Since today's word originated in the Church, let's touch base there first: "I just came from another hermeneutic sermon on the epistle of St. John that missed the whole point of the chapter." Remember that, although today's Good Word has long since kicked the habit of the Church and waded into the general vocabulary, it still generally refers to a higher level of interpretation than its lay counterpart, exegesis: "Political science gives us a political hermeneutic of the world while history provides more of a philosophical one."

History: Hermeneutic is the English interpretation of Greek hermeneutikos "interpreting", the occupation of a hermeneutes "interpreter". This word was derived from hermeneuein "to interpret", a verb derived from the name of Hermes, the eloquent wing-footed messenger and interpreter of the ancient Greek gods. Exactly how his name turned up in hermetic, as in hermetically sealed, remains a mystery. This word was adopted in the Middle Ages by alchemists from the Latin word hermeticus, which at the time simply meant "related to Hermes".

The surge in e-books

E-book sales for January to August are up from $89.8 million for 2009 to $263 million in 2010. This 193% increase in sales means that electronic books now account for almost 10% of consumer book sales in the U.S., up from just 3.31% in 2009.

Amazon already sells more Kindle books than hardcover texts, and in the overall market, sales of hardcover books were down 24.% in August when compared to last year (the AAP does not release monthly numbers for paperbacks). 

On the verge

Metaphor Alert!

"With the Democratic Party on the verge of sinking to the bottom of the barrel, I think it's time that African-Americans supporters jump ship and find themselves a new mode of transportation. . . . African-Americans have been the backbone of the party and its most loyal supporters. Like the orchestra that played on the Titanic, blacks have always gone down with the ship while everyone else is scrambling to find a safety net or a lifeboat. Even in the good times, Africans-Americans [sic] still find themselves on the short end of the stick."--Adolph Mongo, Detroit News, Oct. 14

-- Best of The Web Today

Do campaign slogans change the way you think?

The Economist's excellent language blog, Johnson (named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson), notes how the term "pro-choice" came into being and looks into other political uses of language.

NPR has an interview with Linda Greenhouse, the author of a book on the debate that led up to the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling. She explains how the phrase "right to choose" (later "pro-choice") was coined by a pro-abortion campaigner:

...she wrote a memorandum framing the issue of how the pro-repeal position should be described: "Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words—an important consideration in English. We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job. And ... choice has to do with action, and it's action that we're concerned with."

Being "pro" something is of course preferable to being "anti". Nobody wants to sound negative. Plus, it puts the other side at a disadvantage. Being "pro-life" makes your opponents out to be pro-death. So "pro-choice" was a smart counter-move at a time when women's rights were the big issue of social change: it diverted attention from the life/death dichotomy by recasting it as something else.

The writer then notes other uses of this technique: the pro-Israel lobby, for example, and adds:

Given the tendency for the sharpest controversies to settle into this kind of stark framing, it's a bit of a surprise that it hasn't happened for two of the biggest ones: creationism and global warming. Anti-creationists often call themselves "pro-science", but their adversaries have not chosen a pro-position—perhaps because you don't need anything so trivial as a catchphrase when God is on your side.

As for environmentalists, they would obviously be "pro-planet", but the sceptics are evidently struggling to come up with an alternative. Pro-warmth? Pro-carbon? Pro-weather? You can see the difficulty. The closest thing I've been able to find is an argument that it's possible to be both "pro-profit" and "pro-planet". And if you're worried about warming but can't be bothered to reduce your emissions you could always go pro-albedo.

It's useful to keep this in mind, because it happens all the time. as in the Obama administration's refusal to use the words "islam," "Islamist" and "Islamic" in talking about the war on terror.

It all comes back to me now

Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's good-natured servant in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, and his father were fond of following well-known sayings or phrases with humorous or punning conclusions, Merriam-Webster tells us.

For example, in one incident in the book, Sam quips, "What the devil do you want with me, as the man said, when he see the ghost?" Neither Charles Dickens nor Sam Weller invented that type of word play, but Weller's tendency to use such witticisms had provoked people to start calling them "Wellerisms" by 1839, soon after the publication of the novel.

Wellerisms, according to Wikipedia, make fun of established proverbs by showing that they are wrong in certain situations, often when taken literally. In this sense, wellerisms that include proverbs are a type of anti-proverb. Typically a Wellerism consists of three parts: a proverb or saying, a speaker, and an often humorously literal explanation.

Some examples:

• "Everyone to his own taste," the old woman said when she kissed her cow.
• "We'll have to rehearse that," said the undertaker as the coffin fell out of the car.
• A body can get used to anything, even to being hanged, as the Irishman said.
• "This week is beginning splendidly," said one who was to be hanged on Monday.
• "Much noise and little wool," said the Devil when he sheared a pig.
• "So I see," said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.
• "It all comes back to me now," said the Captain as he spat into the wind.

Over the years, this writer says, as wellerisms kept going through cycles of thematic adjustments and creative regeneration, the focus started to shift from the comic situation towards the linguistic pun, the wordplay. The following two examples of 20th century wellerisms illustrate this shift:

• "Don't get in a jam," said one strawberry to the other.
• "I'll raise you two," said the wealthy lady to the orphans.

Changes afoot in textbook publishing

Customization and one-off printing are coming to textbooks, but right now the field is somewhat in chaos. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

McGraw-Hill Higher Education plans to announce its revamped custom-publishing system, called Create, with an emphasis on electronic versions of mix-and-match books. Macmillan Publishers this year announced a similar custom-textbook platform, called DynamicBooks. And upstart Flat World Knowledge touts the customization features of its textbooks, which it gives away online, charging only for printed copies and study guides. Other publishers have long offered custom-textbook services in print as well, though they have always represented just a sliver of sales.

Here's how it works:

The new Create system lets professors go to a Web site and select sections of 4,000 McGraw-Hill books, thousands of articles and case studies, or any document that the professors themselves upload. A price tag displays how much the resulting book will cost. Professors can then choose whether to make the book available to students as a printed book or an e-book. In a demonstration for The Chronicle this week, a book on health care cost about $6 as an e-book but jumped to $16.96 as printed book.

And there's a problem.

The system does not include material from other textbook publishers. That is typical of custom systems but makes it impossible for professors to blend a chapter from one publisher with a competitor's. When Macmillan announced its system, in February, it said it hoped that other publishers would join in its effort. But Mr. Stanford said McGraw-Hill had no intention of doing that, and he doesn't expect other publishers to want to join his company's project, either.

He said that as much as his company would love to become the iTunes store of e-textbooks, he didn't expect that to happen. "If any of us could be the distributor," he added, "we would."

I think it's just a matter of time. And I think that the first to recognize the ultimate customer -- the student -- will win. Right now college textbook publishing is a major revenue stream flowing from dwindling student resources.

On writing humor

Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, shares his technique in The Wall Street Journal. Here are some snippets.

The topic is the thing. Eighty percent of successful humor writing is picking a topic that is funny by its very nature.

Humor likes danger. If you are cautious by nature, writing humor probably isn't for you. Humor works best when you sense that the writer is putting himself in jeopardy. In the early days of my cartooning career, as the creator of "Dilbert," part of the strip's appeal was that I was holding a day job while mocking the very sort of company I worked for. If you knew my backstory, and many people did, you could sense my personal danger in every strip. (My manager eventually asked me to leave. He said it was a budget thing.)

Humor is about people. It's impossible to write humor about a concept or an object. All humor involves how people think and act. Sometimes you can finesse that limitation by having your characters think and act in selfish, stupid or potentially harmful ways around the concept or object that you want your reader to focus on.

Exaggerate wisely. If you anchor your story in the familiar, your readers will follow you on a humorous exaggeration, especially if you build up to it.

Let the reader do some work. Humor works best when the reader has to connect some dots.

Use funny words. With humor, you never say "pull" when you can say "yank." Some words are simply funnier than others, and you know the funny ones when you see them. (Pop Quiz: Which word is funnier, observe or stalk?)

Endings. A simple and classic way to end humorous writing is with a call-back. That means making a clever association to something especially humorous and notable from the body of your work.

Horrible words

The Economists' language blog, Johnson, takes a post from the magazine's style guide on horrible words.

Words that are horrible to one writer may not be horrible to another, but if you are a writer for whom no words are horrible, you would do well to take up some other activity. No words or phrases should be banned outright from appearing in print, but if you use any of the following you should be aware that they may have an emetic effect on some of your readers:

carer and most caring expressions
chattering classes
facilitate
famously
Governance
grow the business
guesstimate
informed (as in his love of language informed his memos)
leverage
likely (meaning probably, rather than probable)
looking to
materiel
poster child
prestigious
proactive
rack up (profits etc)
savvy
segue
source (meaning obtain)
stakeholder


Facilitate, proactive and leverage are at the top of my list.

Already or all ready?

Dr. Goodword digs into already.

1. Earlier than expected (Marian Kine is already engaged).  
2. So soon (Are you leaving already?).  
3. Emphatic modifier (US): Enough already!

A long time ago, Dr. Goodword writes, publishers discovered that already was once all ready and began encouraging us to spell today's word as two. In fact, already has long since become an adverb that indicates an action completed earlier than expected. The phrase all ready retains its original, logical sense of "everyone and everything is prepared".

Already is a verb modifier that indicates an action completed earlier than expected: "Herschel had already finished the whole pie by the time his guests arrived." The sentence, "The children were all ready and bundled up warmly to go caroling on the snowy evening," means that all the children were ready. Here all is a discrete adjective that simply means what it always means: "all".

History: It is true that already originated in the phrase all ready but it is a distinct word today. Frequently used phrases often become independent words over the course of a language's history; always, although, and holiday (from holy day) are just three. They become new words when they take on a meaning no longer related to that of the phrase. All is a strictly Germanic word, apparently borrowed, since we find no evidence outside Germanic languages like English, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Ready is most prominent in Germanic languages: the reed in Dutch gereed, Danish rede (and allerede "already"), Swedish redo (redan means "already"), and the reit in German bereiten "to prepare, make ready". It seems to be related to ride and road, and originally meant "rideable, ready for riding, roadworthy".

I hope you find this impactful

Here are some more business cliches compiled by Marlys Harris at MoneyWatch. The first group is here.

KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
Important measurements, usually of the immeasurable. Example: "The American Psychological Association recently established KPIs for marriage: the weekly incidence of sexual intercourse plus the number of hours spent watching the same TV shows, minus total minutes bickering over the proper loading of the dishwasher."

Low-Hanging Fruit
Easy to get, though in the end, often not worth the effort. Example: The Taliban might be low-hanging fruit for our production overrun of beard combs."

Human Capital
Human Resources, previously Personnel. Example: "Human Capital is on the fifth floor."

Skill Set or Fit
Qualifications, generally modified by the words "wrong" or "bad," and most often used by Human Capital staffers as an excuse for not hiring somebody. Example: "His inability to speak in tongues obviously makes his skill set wrong for the litigator position." 

Knowledge Economy
An environment in which a person has run up $150,000 in student loans to pay for a law degree only to see jobs exported to India whose citizens are apparently very knowledgeable about the U.S. legal system. Example: "The best job in the knowledge economy is plumbing because nobody with an advanced degree knows how to use Drano." 

Throughput
Not your conclusions, but the mind-numbing numbers and facts you chewed over to get there; information generally demanded by a micro-manager who won't believe that you did the work. Example: "Don't tell me what you've decided about the Taliban beard-comb project; I just want your throughput."

Footprint
Impact, formerly ecological, but now applicable to anything. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a significant footprint on our sofa."

Impactful
Having a large footprint. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a very impactful effect on our sofa."

Let's go offline and brand this post by the end of the day

Oh my, I recall a meeting years ago at IBM in which the leader's brain got stuck, and every sentence was laced with "in this space." That one must still be making the rounds, because it's on the list of business buzzwords that make your eyes bleed gathered by Marlys Harris at MoneyWatch.

She enlisted the help of Brett Good, senior district president of Robert Half International, the global staffing firm, who, she says, "is privy to bujillions of resumes where many of us festoon our mundane jobs and meager accomplishments with business gobbledygook to make them sound more important — or less unimportant."

Here are some from her list.

In Transition
A change from one state of being to another; recession variation: collecting unemployment compensation. Example: "Since the downsizing, I've been in transition." Synonym: doing some consulting.

Brand
Put a good face on. Example: "Okay, so we polluted the groundwater by failing to follow those finicky safety regulations. How should we brand it?"

Space
Industry or field. Example: "I'm in the manufacturing space," "I'm in the waste disposal space," "She's in the adult film space," or "He's in the space exploration space."

Go Offline
Pester me about this after the meeting — or preferably never. "Jones, could we go offline to discuss the $10 underpayment of your expense account reimbursement?"

End of the Day
Formerly 5 to 5:30 p.m., now defined as an uncertain point in the future when everything magically turns out okay. Example. "At the end of the day, the pollution in the groundwater may just drain into the earth's core and become unnoticeable."

Transparent
Open about the facts, but not to be confused with honest. Example: "We've been totally transparent about the 15% fee; we disclosed it on page 37."

Can't Wrap One's Head Around
Unwilling to get into the details or deal with the facts; intellectually lazy. Example: "I can't wrap my head around all this recycling business; Let's throw everything in the dumpster behind Home Depot and let them deal with it."

Bandwidth
Money, staff, computing capacity or other resources. Example: "She lacks the bandwidth to compute compound interest."

Save us from acronyms

Notice how every disease for which a cure is advertised on television now has an acronym? PAD. ED. Why is that? To make it sound cooler? Less nasty? DOR: disgusting, oozing rash.

Lane Green has a delightful piece in Intelligent Life Magazine on this subject. A flavor:

Acronyms have become so prevalent that they suffer what anything does when coined without end: devaluation. “Oh, my God” still packs quite a punch in the right circumstances. “OMG”, by contrast, is barely effective as a plaything any more. (“OMG he’s cute.” “OMG is it ten already?”) LOL began life as “laughing out loud”, a way for internet chatterers to explain a long pause in typing. Now, LOL means “you just said something so amusing my lip curled for a moment there.” And how many BFFs will truly be best friends forever?  Teens, with their habit of bleaching once-mighty words (from “awesome” to “fantastic”), can quickly render a coinage banal.

The kids are not ruining the language, though. Grown-ups play the same inflationary game. Walk into any business and a cloud of three-lettered titles surrounds you. The one who used to be just the boss, or the managing director, now styles himself the CEO, for chief executive officer. This alone would be one thing, but it turned into a viral infection: CIO, CTO, CFO, COO, CLO, and so on, for what used to be the heads of technology, finance and operations, and the company lawyer. The so-called C-suite is an allegedly prestigious club, but whither prestige as its ranks swell? Throw in the VPs and SVPs who swarm all over American offices—not just vice-presidents, but senior ones—and everyone is a manager. A study of Linked-In, the networking site, found the number of C- and VP-level members growing three to four times faster than the membership overall. Who, then, is managed any more?

Worth a read.

Image: The author writes, "Perhaps the perfect modern movie is the cult classic “Office Space”. The anti-hero, Peter, begins his working day with a dressing-down from a droning boss about forgetting to put the cover-sheets on his TPS reports. We never find out what a TPS report is. Nor do we have to; the name alone tells us all we need to know about the life seeping out of Peter’s days, three capital letters at a time."