This post will exceed your expectations

I'd say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me, Dan Pallotta writes.

We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word "doorknob." So a new idea for a doorknob becomes "an innovation in residential access."

And there's the corporate version of Valley Girl speak.

The business version of this illness involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." Oh, OK, that explains it.

We talk like idiots.

A term that has lost its meaning is "Let's exceed the customer's expectations." Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. 

Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer's expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? 

I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, "Our goal is to exceed the customer's expectation." The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Get a grip, Dan. It's just value-add.

A tad more uppity than ruckus

ruction / rêk-shên / noun

(Colloquial) A disturbance, a row, a ruckus, rumpus—a rowdy quarrel or fight.

We learn from Dr. Goodword that:

Because today's word is an aphetic form like scry, it is a borderline slang term, probably best not used in formal English. 'Aphesis' is the omission of unaccented initial syllables, especially noticeable in the South when Southerners say things like,'coon, 'gator, and 'possum. Other forms include the verb ruct, which underlies today's Good Word.

When you want a word just a tad more uppity that ruckus, ruction comes to the rescue: "There was a slight ruction in the kitchen when Sedgewick told his wife that he had unsubscribed them from the alphaDictionary Good Word series." Vocabulary building is so important to women. However, remember it is for conversation, not for a printed page that might be read later by a more erudite audience: "What was the ruction in the cafeteria yesterday after I left?"

History: Ruction arose from a confusion of at least two words: eruction and eruption plus a natural tendency to ignore initial unaccented syllables, which we just learned is called 'aphesis'. Eruction is an older form of eructation "belch", which by the middle of the 18th century was being confused with the eruption of volcanoes. The eruction of volcanoes begs metaphorical use to refer to other types of eruptions. At that point, all we had to do was drop the initial E to get this ruction to where it is today. Ruckus? It is the further corruption of ructioncompliments of the US frontier.

Belch. I feel more better now.

The dog ate my draft

Advice to would-be writers: Do not own a dog. John Steinbeck's setter cost him two months' labor on "Of Mice and Men" in the mid 1930s when one night the pup tore apart the half-finished manuscript. The text on the savaged pages, as we learn in Celia Blue Johnson's "Dancing With Mrs. Dalloway," was so badly mauled that Steinbeck was forced to rewrite a large portion of the book. Jack Kerouac was doing equally well with "On the Road" (which he was typing on sheets of paper taped together to avoid having to reload his typewriter) until his housemate's cocker spaniel chewed up a few feet of the scroll. One almost expects to discover that Joseph Conrad's Chihuahua was responsible for the extensive revisions to "Heart of Darkness." As abetters of literary inspiration, dogs clearly rank very low—unless you happen to be John Steinbeck, who took along a canine companion for "Travels With Charley" in 1960. By then the setter had perhaps wisely been replaced by a poodle.

-- Elizabeth Lowry in The Wall Street Journal

How to lose a job before you get it

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has excellent advice for anyone writing a resume.

Over on Facebook, some friends have been talking about how with so many resumes coming in, they’ll toss any that contain typos. One comments: “I used to screen for my law firm. We would receive piles and piles of resumes, and that was during the boom years. I found myself tossing the majority of them for typos and the like. I also was surprised by how many applicants had inappropriate e-mail addresses (e.g., partygirl88@____.com).” 

The Insta-Daughter has a job where, as low person on the totem pole, she’s in charge of sorting the resumes, and she’s been amazed by how many (1) don’t indicate the job sought (sometimes they’re hiring multiple positions, and it’s not always obvious from the resume which one the person is applying for); (2) are several pages long, but don’t have page numbers and the person’s name at the top of each page (which makes them hard to reconstruct if they’re mixed up, as happens); and (3) refer the reader to a website for crucial information. Then there are the typos and grammatical errors, which are distressingly common even though these are mostly people with fancy educational backgrounds, and often with industry experience. 

So here’s some advice: As you put your resume together, imagine that you’re an intern or other junior employee faced with a stack of 500 resumes to sort, because that’s who’ll probably be the first person to see it. Make yours easy to sort, easy to keep together, and easy to follow. And remember that people faced with big stacks of resumes are basically looking for reasons to weed yours out, to reduce things to a manageable number, so don’t give them those reasons. Proofread, proofread, proofread — then have a friend proofread for you. It’s okay to have samples of your work on a website, but make sure that all the stuff people need to decide whether they want to look at you that closely is right there on the resume in convenient form. 

And do think about the email address. I see that kind of thing surprisingly often among my law students. (My favorite was a student — a big Democrat — whose email was “lickBush@___.com”; I suggested a change to something less political, or otherwise subject to misinterpretation). And in general, although people often spend a lot of time fussing over their resumes — because that’s the only part of the process where you’re in complete control — it’s a mistake to view your resume from your own perspective. You need to try to look at it from the perspective of the people who’ll be reading it at the other end.

One more bit of advice from a reader of the post:

In addition to the excellent information about resumes – all stuff I’ve been hammering people about for years – add in the ring back tones used on their phones and their voice mail messages. An utterly vile, hip-hop ring tone or a message like “You know what to do…” or “Leave a message, if it’s important I might call you…” (all stuff I encounter with frightening frequency) are good for a message to the effect “I was going to invite you for an interview until I was exposed to your complete unprofessional ring tone/voicemail message”.

Perhaps the best advice came from another reader:

If you’re looking for a job in the trades go meet people and introduce yourself, who you are and what you’re looking for. I do a lot of IT stuff for small companies and they’re not the kind of place that puts a help wanted ad on Monster or hires professional HR staff. They’re the company that hires their friends nephew or the guy they know from the baseball team or the IT guy from church so get out there and meet people. Almost everyone I know started with crappy jobs like hauling shingles up a ladder, but if you’re not willing to do the crap work chances are you won’t make it that far. There are lots of jobs advertised but there are lots more that aren’t.

You can't sit at home and play on the Internet. You have to get out there to discover the "hidden job market," which is what this reader refers to.

A game the newspapers play

If it's a Democrat who screws up, it's hard to know it. From Instapundit:

A READER POINTS OUT ANOTHER CHANCE TO PLAY “NAME THAT PARTY!” New York Times: Ex-Governor Is Said to Be Focal Point of Inquiry. “Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico who ran for president in 2008, is being investigated by a federal grand jury for possible violations of campaign finance laws, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry.” 

If you scroll down far enough you see this: “Some experts likened the investigation of Mr. Richardson to that of John Edwards, another candidate in the 2008 Democratic race.” But that’s as close as they get to identifying Bill Richardson as a major Democrat and Clinton cabinet member.

For as long as I've been in journalism, journalists have self-identified themselves as liberal. This is one of the results/symptoms.

You need a story

Stanley Witkow, who helps people in their job searches, has a good point: you need a story.

In today’s competitive job environment, you need to do more than float your resumé, attend networking events, and make telephone calls. You need to have a plan. Most important, along with knowing what kind of position you want, you need to insure that everything you present to prospective employers, recruiters and networking contacts is designed to tell a consistent story about you.

Here's the plan.

The most effective way for a job seeker to make a memorable impression on prospective employers is to create a story. It should be a consistent story, reinforced through every part of the job search – from the résumé to the business card to the 30-second introduction to the message left on the answering machine.

Here’s an example. Our of our clients is employed in a small business that is declining because of competition from a national enterprise, and he expects to be laid off soon. Realizing that his niche is going to go away, he needs to reinvent himself. He’s held a series of other positions, but they don’t connect in any way—they’re not in the same industry, they’re not in the same functional position (i.e., he was in sales in one position, in finance in another, and he began his professional career in an entirely different kind of working environment).

But he was passionate in his interest in the environment, and had brought that passion to all of his prior jobs. So in re-designing his resumé, we created a story that showed his wide variety of skills that could be applicable to emerging “green businesses”. Then we created a 30-second introduction which began with his passion, and captured how he hoped to find a position that would marry that passion with the wide range of skills he had developed in his professional career.

Rather than attending a wide variety of networking groups, we urged our job seeker to research and attend organizations where individuals and businesses involved in the green world would participate. In this way his valuable (and limited) time would be spent where he would most likely meet people potentially helpful to his job search.

Finally, he created new business cards and other collateral material that emphasized not his history, but his new story.

Now he is telling a compelling story. He is able to express his passion for the environment, to which he is committed to bringing his considerable business skills. He networks with those who can introduce him to opportunities in green businesses. He leaves a compelling phone message, and makes a strong impression on the people he meets. He is making effective use of his time and other resources. And he is well-positioned for success in his search.

Whither the footnote?*

The e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction, Alexandra Horowitz writes.**

The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.*** 

I admit to being somewhat mystified that technological innovation is imperiling footnotes. Computers would seem to solve what I see as the main problem they pose — to wit, edging in the superscript numbers on a typewritten page and measuring just the right amount of space to leave at the bottom. 

Footnotes really presage hyperlinks, the ultimate interrupter of a stream of thought, she writes 

But footnotes are far superior: while hyperlinks can be highly useful, one never finds oneself looking at an error message at the bottom of the page where a footnote used to be. Even the audio book has solved the problem of how to convey footnotes. Listen to David Foster Wallace**** reading his essay collection “Consider the Lobster,”***** with its ubiquitous show-stealing asides: at a certain point, his voice is unnaturally distant, the result of a production trick intended to represent the small type of a footnote. Wallace’s e-book was not immune to de-footnoting, though; all these crucial asides now appear at the end of the book in the Kindle and iPad versions.

Even the Kindle edition of Zerby’s history of the footnote is now full of endnotes****** instead.

* "Whither" is rather archaic, don't you think?
** Her article can be found here.
*** But you're reading this one, no?
**** I've kept the hyperlink, although you can't actually hear David Wallace if you follow the link.
***** Ibid.
****** Is this an endnote or a footnote?*******
******* Can******** you footnote a footnote?
******** Why not?

Would you pay to read this?

"How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free."

-- Sam Harris

So these two men are on a train ...

One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?"

The other answers, "A MacGuffin." 

The first one says, "What's a MacGuffin?" 

"It's an apparatus for trapping lions in Scotland." 

"But there are no lions in Scotland." 

"Well, then, that's no MacGuffin."

Alfred Hitchcock tells that story to illustrate the meaning of MacGuffin, who is credited with coining the term.

The word means "an otherwise meaningless object in a film or book that provides the motivation for the action; a flimsy excuse for an action."

The linguist Robert Beard explains: 

For an object to be a MacGuffin, it can have no significance itself; it cannot help us understand a character. Perhaps the most famous MacGuffin is the black statue in The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart, playing Sam Spade, wraps up the case by saying, "Oh, and I've got some exhibits: the boys' guns, one of Cairo's, a thousand dollar bill I was supposed to be bribed with—and this black statuette here that all the fuss was about." A more contemporary example is the briefcase in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't fit the definition since it has meaning outside the film and plays a key role in the film's climax.

You can use today's word in many contexts, Dr. Beard says: "I don't know why Macie had to go shopping. She's on a search for some skincare MacGuffin." In other words, Macie is ranging the mall with only the flimsiest of excuses for doing so. This word may also be spelled McGuffin: "The boss wouldn't let me leave when my project was finished, so I spent the afternoon rifling the filing cabinet for a McGuffin to get me out."

From the bard to your mouth

(American Digest)

Go ahead and aggravate me

I was taught that if you are pestering me you are irritating me, that if you admitted to aggravating me you were using the term incorrectly.

Oops.

The linguist Robert Beard has irritated me on this. Or aggravated me. Whatever.

aggravate /  æ-grê-vayt / verb

1. To make heavy or heavier, to load, burden, as to be aggravated with the responsibilities of someone else's office.
2. To increase the gravity of, to make worse, exacerbate.
3. To annoy.

Here's where Beard gets annoying: I recall being told in grammar school (as we called it then) that aggravate can only mean "make worse" and not simply "annoy," as in "This zipper aggravates me when it sticks like this." My teachers didn't know, however, that the word had borne both meanings since the 17th century and, moreover, the original Latin verb, aggravare, could be used in both senses as well. So feel as free to say that the sticking zipper aggravates you to no end as you would to say, "Jerking it like that when it sticks only aggravates (makes worse) the problem."

History: Aggravate is taken from the past participle (aggravatus) of the Latin verb aggravare "to make heavier or worse." This verb is made up of ad "to" + gravare "to burden", based on the root gravis "heavy". We see this stem in many English words borrowed from Latin, such as grave "serious" and gravity. This word also devolved into Old French grever "to harm", which English borrowed as grieve which also gave us grief. The Proto-Indo-European root that gave rise to gravis also went on to become guru "heavy, serious, venerable" in Sanskrit, the ancestor language of Hindi, whence English borrowed the word when India was a colony.

Good grief, you can see why this guru is irritated.

But what do you really think?

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of dogs barking through endless nights.It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is flap and doodle.It is balder and dash."

-- H.L. Mencken, on Warren G.Harding

Are you p'd off?

Jay Nordlinger writes, "Many years ago, I became aware that “pissed” meant one thing in America, another thing in Britain. One night in London, I asked a man for directions. He said, “Sir, I’m pissed.” He didn’t look angry, though. What he was, was drunk."

His readers chimed in.

My Irish relatives said: "Come on in and we'll have a wee nip and some good crack". Crack meaning conversation over there. 

The Japanese equivalent which is used to express anger, that I used below is kind of odd to us westerners.　腹(hara) belly　立つ(tatsu) to stand up, roughly it a literal translation of ちょー腹立つ！ would be "My belly is really standing up!" but it means I'm really angry (or really p***ed off!).

Another reader:

As an admiral’s aide back in 1993 — the admiral was deputy chief of staff at SACLANT [a component of NATO] — I was exposed to many language differences between the Brits and us. My favorite one: 

British Admiral to Boss’s Wife: “So, what did you like best about living in Charleston, South Carolina?” 

Admiral’s Wife: “I absolutely loved shagging on the beach. My husband is quite the shagger, if you didn’t already know!” 

The British admiral gave no response, and he managed to keep from spitting out his drink. [There’s the British stoicism we know and love so well!] Now, my admiral’s wife was a great lady with a sense of humor. When I explained to her the difference in meanings, she almost passed out, she laughed so hard.

In Britain, Nordlinger explains, for the uninitiated (if that’s the word), shagging means copulating. I wrote back to the reader, “Just to be clear: Did you mean to say that the admiral and his wife hit golf balls on the beach?” (To shag is to practice golf shots, as on a range.) He said, “No — the shag is a dance they do in the Carolinas.” I had no idea.

Obama is a rail-splitter, buffoon and boor

Nutmeg dealer.

No wait, he's a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.

A few days ago, Obama lamented that, “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

John Miller looked it up and reports:

After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”

Following Lincoln’s inauguration, the Charleston Mercury dubbed the new president “the Ourang-Outang at the White House.” Others called him “the Illinois Ape,” a “Baboon,” and “the original gorilla.” A Virginia congressman called him “a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.”

Of course it all calmed down eventually.

Many of Lincoln’s critics were in the North. As the 1864 election approached, the New York World condemned the GOP ticket of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson: “The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics, has succeeded,” it wrote. “In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude, requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers, for the highest stations in government."

If you don't like this post, then you're a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” Bite me.

What's the opposite of opposite?

From National Review Online:

A reader writes:

Mr. Derbyshire,

In your July Diary on NRO you mentioned your annoyance with words that have no opposite. Earlier today I was discussing languages with a friend and I recalled that in the past I have used the word “shallow” as a sort of vague, inexact opposite to “steep”, but it never seemed right. What is the actual opposite of “steep”? What word can you put in place of “steep” in “this mountain is very steep” to make it mean the opposite? I don’t think there is one.

Just so. We need an adjective to describe words like this — words with no opposite. “Anantonymous”?

But then … what would be the opposite?

William Butler Yeats: language of the people

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

-- William Butler Yeats

It's the little things

tittle / tit-êl / noun

1. A small jot, such as the dot of an "i", the cross on a "t", the tiny beard (cedilla) on "ç", or the tilde atop Spanish "ñ", as in cañón "canyon".
2. Something minute, incredibly tiny, smaller even than an iota; indeed, the dot on an iota (Greek short "i") is a tittle.

Linguist Robert Beard, editor of excellent alphaDictionary, notes: this noun is unrelated to the verb (to) tittle, which was clipped from the rhyme compound tittle-tattle. Nor should it be confused with a titter "a suppressed giggle". Think of a tittle as the smallest thing or amount visible without a magnifying glass.

Tittle, Dr. Beard writes, originally referred to those itsy-bitsy appendages, diacritical marks, that are added to letters in some languages, "Red Ard almost failed French for consistently omitting the tittles on his written French." Although we classify today's word as a noun, it probably is used today more often as a quantifier, specifying how much, "When Lucinda dropped her ice cream cone on Harry Beard's head, he didn't move a tittle."

History: Tittle entered Middle English as titel, originally a variant of title, from Latin titulus "label, title, inscription". In 1607 Francis Beaumont wrote in his play,The Woman Hater, "I'll quote him to a tittle," meaning precisely, without omitting so much as a tittle. The same Latin word developed into Spanish tilde "accent, tilde". Somewhere over the years that followed, "to a tittle" was apparently confused with the phrase, "cross all your Ts (and dot your Is)," which also referred to exactitude. Ultimately, "to a tittle" was reduced to "to a T", which is how that odd expression wriggled its way into English. When we describe something to a T, we describe it absolutely exactly, down to the very last tittle.

Not one iota! Well, maybe a jot.

iota / ai-o-dê / noun

1. The ninth letter of the Greek alphabet, equivalent to a short [i].
2. A jot, a tittle, a wee bit, a very, very small amount.

Linguist Robert Beard: The name of the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet has become our word for the smallest imaginable thing in general. It sounds a bit odd in English, so it has not developed a derivational family. A rather odd abstract noun,iotacism, is occasionally used in referring to overpronunciation of the sound [i], such as the pronunciation of pen as [pin] down South or bed as [bid] in Australia and New Zealand.

This word is used in Matthew 5:18 of the New Testament: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, not one jot [iota] or one tittle shall in any wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled." The word is usually translated as jot in English but in the original Greek, it is iota. The use of the original iota is quite common in English today: "I will not retreat one iota from my opposition to putting new employees in cubicles."

Iota is the name of the ninth and smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. The letter's name is from Semitic, probably Hebrew yodh, Modern Hebrew yud, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, expressing the sound [y]. This word goes back to yodh, the tenth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, also the word for "hand". This suggests that the shape of the letter likely originated as an Egyptian hieroglyph of an arm. English also borrowed the French version of this word, jota, shortened it and Anglicized the pronunciation to jot.

You can't prop a door open with an e-book

Luddites unite!

I read everything online these days, except books. I don't have a Kindle or an iPad. I have a smart phone, which is smarter than I am, but I don't read anything on it.

E-books are here to stay, it seems -- Amazon sells more e-books than print books. But John Abell, writing in Wired, points to several reasons why they haven't replaced paper books. The one I like is this:

E-books can’t be used for interior design. Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It probably began that time you toted The Cat in the Hat, trying not to be dispatched to bed during a grown-up dinner party. 

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

I like to just stand at a bookcase and look at the books. Apparently, Abell does too.

You can’t keep your e-books all in one place. 

Books arranged on your bookshelves don’t care what store they came from. But on tablets and smartphones, the shelves are divided by app — you can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. There is simply no app for that. (With e-readers, you are doubly punished, because you can’t buy anything outside the company store anyway).
Apple doesn’t allow developers to tap into root information, which would be needed to create what would amount to a single library on an iOS device. If that restriction disappeared, there would still be the matter of individual vendors agreeing to cooperate — not a given since they are competitors and that kind of leveling could easily lead to price wars, for one thing. 

But the way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out. In the digital equivalent, we would see everything we own, tap on a book and it would invoke the app it requires — Kindle, Nook, Borders, etc. With the current sequence — open up a reader app, pick a book — you can easily forget what you own. Trivial? Try to imagine Borders dictating the size and shape of your bookshelf, and enforcing a rule that it hold only books you bought from them, and see if that thought offends you even a little bit.

Good. I've been predicting the demise of print since I got in the publishing business about a thousand years ago, but I've long since given up expecting anything.

The use of strong words

"Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. 

"Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit."

-- Joseph Epstein

Ann Althouse, the law professor and blogger:
Talk about falling short of your aspirations! Of all the Justices on the Court today, I find that Justice Kennedy writes in the least straightforward style. Ah, well. At least he means well. Or is he conning us with this Hemingway talk?

The linked article — by Adam Liptak, in the NYT — links to this set of long recorded interviews with Supreme Court Justices about how they write and how they want lawyers to write.

Justice Ginsburg said she had learned much from a course Nabokov taught at Cornell on European literature. 

“He was a man in love with the sound of words,” she said of her former professor. “He changed the way I read, the way I write.” 

Justice Thomas, on the other hand, cited only a single author, and then only by way of contrast. “It’s not a mystery novel,” he said of a good brief. “People can’t think, ‘I’m Agatha Christie,’ or something like that.”Ginsburg and Nabokov. Thomas and Christie. What do you think of Liptak's juxtaposition? It's a literary device. Would you put it at the Nabokov level? The Christie level? Somewhere lower?

ADDED: Both Nabokov and Agatha Christie are discussed in the Wikipedia article"Unreliable Narrator":

A controversial example of an unreliable narrator occurs in Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator hides essential truths in the text (mainly through evasion, omission, and obfuscation) without ever overtly lying. Many readers at the time felt that the plot twist at the climax of the novel was nevertheless unfair.... 

Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, often tells the story in such a way as to justify his pedophilic fixation on young girls, in particular his sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter....

Now, you want your judges and lawyers to be reliable narrators when they tell you about the facts of the case and interpret and apply the law. Thomas said don't be like Agatha Christie. You need to tell it straight. But Ginsburg said she learned from Nabokov, learned to love the sound of the words. Liptak — I think — intended to make Ginsburg look good and Thomas bad, but it didn't quite work out that way.

A-whole-nother word

tmesis / tê-mee-sis / noun

Splitting a word in two and sandwiching an emphatic modifier between the two parts, as in abso-bloody-lutely or abso-doggone-lutely. 

Like the plural of all English words borrowed from Latin that end on -is, the plural of this word is tmeses.

Tmesis, Dr. Robert Beard writes, is the process of producing what linguists call a sandwich term: an expletive sandwiched between the two halves of the word it is meant to emphasize. This unusual means of emphasizing a word is a speech conceit that is not a part of formal, written English but occurs in speech. Fan-doggone-tastic is as fantastic as it gets, the ultimate in what is fantastic. The only rule is that the sandwich word must be inserted before the accented syllable: Fantas-doggone-tic doesn't work.

History: This Good Word comes via Latin from Greek tmesis "a cutting" from temnein "to cut." The Proto-Indo-European root, like many others, appeared as a triplet, tom-/tem-/tm- "cut", which also gave us atom from a "not" + tom "cuttable" and anatomy from Greek anatome "dissection, cutting up" from ana "up" + tome "cutting". Temple goes back to Latin templum which seems to have originally referred to a clearing, an area in which all the trees were cut.

Is it "compliment" or "complement"?

These two words are easily misused.

Complement means "to supplement" or "make complete": Their two personalities complement each other.

Compliment means "to praise or congratulate": She received a compliment on her sense of fashion.

Linguist Robert Beard, editor of alphadictionary, offers this sentence to help us remember: "Anne Chovi received many compliments for selecting vegetables that were the perfect complement to the fish for her candlelight dinner."

To complement his sentence, and indirectly compliment his work, I'll offer my own: "This blog complements your pathetic life, dear reader, so you might want to compliment me."

Is it "healthy" or "healthful?" Or just nauseous?

R.L.G., whoever that is, at The Economist's Johnson blog, gives us a healthy, or maybe healthful, dose:

I just remembered how irritating I find the distinction a strange minority of English-speaking natives insist on: that "healthy" can only mean "in a state of health", and that "healthful" must be used to describe green vegetables, exercise and other things that make a person healthy.

Both norma loquendi and slightly more rarefied usage tests back me up: "healthy food" is about 20 times as common as "healthful food" on Google. And Google's N-Gram Viewer shows that while "healthful food" (the red line) was about as common as "healthy food" (the blue line) in books until 1980 or so, "healthy food" has been the overwhelming usage since.

I think the insistence on "healthful" is an over-eager application of the principle that one word can't mean both "causing X" and "experiencing X". Many sticklers don't like "nauseous" for the state of feeling nausea. But plenty of words do such double-duty, like "suspicious" and "doubtful", without raising ire. Both a criminal and a detective can be suspicious (in very different ways), and both a piece of evidence and a sceptical judge can be doubtful.

But "nauseated", at least, is fighting a decent rear-guard battle. "Healthful food" is particularly obnoxious to me because it flies in the face of overwhelming native English practice.

I hate flies in my face.

Ptahhotep: a craftsman in speech

"Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting."

-- Ptahhotep

Are book shelf makers the new buggy whip makers?

The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week, CNNMoney reports.

E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 "among all categories of trade publishing" that month -- the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.

Blame it on Santa Claus.

The AAP report attributed February's strong numbers to a post-holiday e-book buying surge by consumers who received e-readers devices as gifts.

Even bigger changes are coming, one industry insider says.

Earlier this month, Barnes & Noble executive Marc Parrish forecast that traditional book retailers have just two years to adapt to an e-book-centric industry. 

"The book business is changing more radically now, and quicker, than movies or music or newspapers have, because we're doing it in a matter of months," Parrish said at GigaOm's Structure Big Data conference in New York. "[The] next 24 months is when this business will totally shift."

What am I going to use to prop the door open?

What (the right) words can do

(Thanks, Pat)

You can read this, or you can set your house on fire

A false choice is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options. It is also called a false dilemma, a false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, fallacy of false choice, black and white thinking or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses.

Look for this when politicians are speaking. Ruth Marcus notes:

As a rhetorical device, particularly as a political rhetorical device, the false choice has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any. The phrase has become a trite substitute for serious thinking. It serves too often to obscure rather than to explain. 

The false-choice dodge takes three overlapping forms. The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.

Thus, Obama on health care, stretching back to the presidential campaign: "I reject the tired old debate that says we have to choose between two extremes: government-run health care with higher taxes - or insurance companies without rules denying people coverage," he said in 2008. "That's a false choice." It's also a choice that no one - certainly no other politician - was proposing.

Or Obama on financial reform: "We need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people." Again, please find me the advocate of either extreme.

Another thing to look for when politicians are speaking: if their mouths are moving, they're lying.

It's always about you

Novelist Howard Jacobson, writing about writing, stumbles upon something even bigger. He writes:

For some of us, part of the ambition to be a novelist is the desire to blot out the ignominies of youth. That's a mistake. The ignominy of being young is a wonderful subject. I would even go so far as to say that consciousness of early embarrassment is indispensable to a novelist. It militates against the biggest sin in novel writing—especially in the writing of novels that excavate the self—which is grandiosity. 

Take yourself too seriously and you're sunk. Me, me, me, me. There's only so much of that a reader can tolerate. A periodic "I" count is always a good idea, though it's not the number of them that matters; it's the spirit of their employment. Catch yourself writing an "I" too many times (and this, too, is a decision about rhythm, again like tap-dancing), and you should either start crossing out or make the self-obsession ludicrous in itself. A first-person comic novel that doesn't know there's something preposterous about a first-person comic novel is already not a good first-person comic novel.

A fellow I know, who led a job networking group and was knowledgeable about job searching, was seeking a position in a non-profit organization. He tried to write a letter without using "I" once. I tend to think that's impossible, but the sentiment is quite valid. Employers don't care as much about what you need as what they need.

It's a lovely, sunny Sunday afternoon, with a crisp chill in the air, so perhaps we should make even more of this, something about humility in dealing with others. Then again, perhaps not.

Surrounded by newspeak

Roger Kimball writes:

When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker the Obama administration’s assault on the English language brings to mind. There is also Confucius. 

Asked by a disciple how to rule a state properly, Confucius replies that it begins with rectifying the names: 

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

That was written about 475 B.C. When will we catch up with its wisdom?

Uh, when the teleprompter breaks?

Something is always imminent

But it's not always eminent.

Robert Beard, PhD, Linguistics, who runs alphaDictionary.com, clears up the confusion.

Imminent means impending, about to occur, just around the corner.

Eminent means "outstanding, towering above others", as an eminent linguist or eminent businessman.

Immanent (with an A instead of an I) means "inherent, indwelling", as immanent rather than externally enforced goodness.

Emanant, with two As, is rarely used these days but remains fair game. It means "issuing from some source", as the emanant goodness of the heart or an emanant cloud on the horizon.

Eminem is a rapper. I just threw this in to see if anyone is paying attention. 

One might say that this blog's eminence is immanent. Then again one might not.

Play ball!

advertent / æd-vêrt-ênt / adjective

Attentive, heedful, aware.

This rarely used word, Dr. Goodword writes,  is the adjective of the verb advert "take heed of, pay attention to" (as opposed to avert "turn away from"). Its negative correlate, inadvertent "inattentive, heedless" is used so much more frequently, it is often taken as an orphan negative, a negative without a corresponding positive. The verb is also related to advertisement, a noun which the British reduce to advert, too. Americans trim it all the way back to ad.

If you studied Latin, as I did, you'll know something of the history of this word.

Advertent  comes to us from Latin advertere "turn toward," from ad "toward" + vertere "to turn"—hmm...adds up, doesn't it? Both the English words versus and adverse are related to this Latin stem. The root that morphed into this Latin verb came into the Germanic languages as *werth, which ended up as English -ward "in the direction of", heard in words like toward, westward, and homeward. We should also be advertent of the fact that the E and R traded places at some point in a process known as metathesis, so that the same root gave us writhe and wreath, both involved somehow with turning.

If you're in a lurch, what exactly are you in?

Yes, you're in a difficult position without help, but where did this word lurch come from? A nifty site called The Phrase Finder explains.

First, we dispose of two common ideas.

Dying to lie in a lych.

There are suggestions that lurch is a noun that originated from lich -- the Old English word for corpse. Lych-gates are roofed churchyard entrances that adjoin many old English churches and are the appointed place for coffins to be left when waiting for the clergyman to arrive to conduct a funeral service. To be 'left in the lych/lurch' was to be in dire straits indeed. 

Another theory goes that jilted brides would be 'left in the lych' when the errant bridegroom failed to appear for a wedding. Both theories are plausible but there's no evidence to support either and, despite the superficial appeal of those explanations, 'lych' and 'lurch' aren't related. 

Oh dear. Let's move on.

In fact, the phrase originates from the French board game of lourche or lurch, which was similar to backgammon and was last played in the 17th century (the rules having now been lost). Players suffered a lurch if they were left in a hopeless position from which they couldn't win the game. The card game of cribbage, or crib, also has a 'lurch' position which players may be left in if they don't progress half way round the peg board before the winner finishes.

This gets interesting, especially for you lefties out there.

The game came to England from continental Europe and its name derives from the word 'left', which is 'lurtsch' in dialect German and 'loyrtz' in Middle Dutch. Why call a game 'left'? The most plausible explanation (and regular readers will know that, in etymology, plausibility isn't everything) is that it relates to the bad feeling against the left hand that was then commonplace in many cultures. In English we have held on to this with the word 'sinister', which derives from the Latin for 'left', whereas 'dextrous' derives from the Latin for 'right'.

Everything is coming clear. I mean, didn't you always, you know, suspect something about lefties?

Surrounded by newspeak

Roger Kimball writes:

When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker the Obama administration’s assault on the English language brings to mind. There is also Confucius. 

Asked by a disciple how to rule a state properly, Confucius replies that it begins with rectifying the names: 

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

That was written about 475 B.C. When will we catch up with its wisdom?

Uh, when the teleprompter breaks?

GE, OC

If you think texting and tweeting are bringing the language to its knees, you will be ROFL over these abbreviations used in the era of the telegram -- you do remember those, right?

ABT About

BTR Better

B4 Before

C Yes; correct

CUL See you later

FB Fine business (Analogous to "OK")

GA Good afternoon or Go ahead (depending on context)

GE Good evening

GL Good luck

GM Good morning

GN Good night

HI Humour intended

OB Old boy

OC Old chap

OM Old man

OT Old timer

SED Said

SEZ Says

TNX Thanks

TXT Text

CUL!

What is your weltanschauung?

Robert Beard, a PhD, Linguistics who runs the alphaDictionary.com site and sends at a "good word" each day by email (sign up here), offers a doozy today.

weltanschauung / velt-ahn-shæw-ung / noun.

This word stands pretty much as it did in German when English traced a copy for its vocabulary, Dr. Goodword says. "This means that we do not expect to find English derivations from it. However, there are spelling and pronunciation pitfalls. (1) Remember that the W is pronounced [v], (2) that the [sh] sound is spelled SCH, and (3) that two Us precede the NG.

Weltanschauung expresses our conception of the world as it should be: "My weltanschauung cannot accommodate preteen dating or senior citizens living out of wedlock." Of course, the German word sounds so peculiar in English that it begs for facetious applications: "Ferdie decided to open a little Philosophy Shop on Market Street to treat those who are out of step with the current zeitgeist or who are struggling with their weltanschauung."

History: It's a German word made up of Welt "world" + Anschauung "outlook". The German word Welt "world" goes back to Old High German weralt from an older compound wer-ald- "life or age of man", from wer- "man" + ald "age, old". The same compound came down to English as world. The word wer- "man" shares the same origin as Latin vir "man", which we see in borrowed words like virile, virtue (aren't all men virile and virtuous?), and triumvirate. While the Old English word did not survive to Modern English, we find remnants of it in words like the name of the wolf man, werewolf.

A lot more here.

Toss those cookbooks

I've been going through the business throwing stuff away. Seems I've saved every telephone I've ever owned. There are three computer printers down there. And more books than the Library of Congress. What to keep?

An article in the New York Times has some advice, including this on books.

Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries. 

But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies a $5 app for the iPad, is the wave of the future. Every recipe has a photo of the dish (something far too expensive for many printed cookbooks). 

Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. When something needs to be timed, there’s a digital timer built right into the recipe. You can e-mail yourself the ingredients list to take to the grocery store. The app does what cookbooks cannot, providing a better version of everything that came before it.
Now all Martha has to do is make a decorative splashguard for a tablet and you will be all set.

You shoont opened this blog

Realizing she shoont.

My insane and dear (which describes most of them) friend Rick asked me this morning, "Is shouldn't a contraction?"

"Yes."

"So is shouldn't've a double contraction?"

"Must be."

"Is a double contraction legal?"

"In some states."

"What is a double contraction?"

"That's when a woman is really, really about to have a baby."

"No, that's when a woman is about to have twins."

Rick had me there. So, as it developed, shouldn't've is a contraction of should not have.

"But," Rick says, "my wife contracts that to shoonta." As in, "You shoonta taken a nap."

Most important things in life revolve around naps.

"Maybe there's yet another contraction waiting," I said.

"Shoont," Rick said.

"You," I said, "shoont have started this conversation."

Stuttering and the writer

"The disorder teaches different things to writers, such as how a sentence can fly when it is freed from the requirements of speech. Writing as a vocation tends to attract control freaks, pathological introverts, and uneasy narcissists—the sort of people, basically, who don't mind spending hours alone at a desk, trying to make their own ideas sound good on a piece of paper—but for stutterers, the endless possibilities for voice control on the blank page carry especial appeal. Give a stutterer a pen and some practice and, suddenly, what seems imperfectible in speech is a few scribblings and crossings-out and rescribblings away. 

"This anxious guilty blockage in the throat," Updike wrote. "I managed to maneuver several millions of words around it." Even a partial list of stuttering writers points to certain correlations between the impediment and the development of literary voice: Updike, Drabble, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert A. Heinlein, W. Somerset Maugham, at various points Christopher Hitchens and the Dunne brothers (John Gregory and Dominick), Philip Larkin, John Bayley, Elizabeth Bowen—and so on, back to Henry James.

"In retrospect, James' impediment seems to gape back at us from every lavish, stylized page of his prose. Who but a speech-blocked writer would devote so much energy and ink to writing, rewriting, and overwriting such a body of work? Who else would dwell so hungrily on the rhythms and refracted meanings of the social sphere? As much as James is a literary paragon, he is the person many stutterers spend their whole lives trying not to be: the eagle-eyed wallflower, the brilliant nonparticipant, a man so disengaged from normal social congress that there's been scholarly debate on the extent to which he was straight or gay or, as one theory has it, neutered on a fence. This is the final and most insidious way stutterers fear being misunderstood: They worry that their speaking voice, and the behavior that accompanies it, will be taken as a window onto something like their personality."

-- Nathan Heller

Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

You'll suck your bains out, kid!

And other oddities of our language ...

• Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?
• Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?
• Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?
• Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?
• Why do "tug" boats push their barges?
• Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?
• Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?
• Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?
• Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?
• Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?
• Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?
• Why is bra singular and panties plural?
• Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?
• How come abbreviated is such a long word?
• Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?
• Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

(Thanks, Lainey)

We should all be sprachgefuhl

It's a mouthful of a word, but palpable.

sprachgefuhl / shprahk-gê-ful / noun

feeling or sensitivity for language and the correct use of gramma

"Shakespeare's plays reflect not only a profound understanding of the human condition but a sprachgefuhl for phrasing and word selection."

Yeah, me too.

Dr. Goodword gives us the history: Sprachgefuhl was plucked by linguists part and parcel from Modern German, where Sprache means "language" and Gefühl, "feeling" from the verb fühlen "to feel". Sprache and English speech share the same origin, as do fühlen andfeel. Since the Germanic [f] comes from Proto-Indo-European [p], we find in Latin, as expected, a related verb, palpare "to feel, stroke gently", from which English palpable comes. Since we feel first and foremost with our fingers, the Russian used this stem for their word, palec "finger".

I'm continually confused by this word

continual / kên-tin-yu-êl / adjective

Repeated over a long period of time, continuing at intervals.

Robert Beard, who holds a PhD in linguistics and calls himself Dr. Goodword, explains continual and its evil relationship with continuous.

Continual is often confused with continuous. However, the meanings of these two words differ significantly and they cannot be used correctly as synonyms.Continuous refers to an action that continues in an unbroken fashion, as a continuous hum or buzzing sound. Continual refers to a repeated action that is periodically interrupted, as continual complaints about the dog from the neighbors. 

If your spouse continuously nagged you, his or her mouth would never close, so nagging tends to be continual, off and on: "Bea Heine's continual nagging makes her husband's life a continuous nightmare." Here is a mnemonic sentence that will help you keep these two adjectives straight: "I must remind myself continually that life goes on continuously.

History: This sometimes confusing word originates from the same Latin adjective, continuus, as does continuous but with the substitution of the suffix -al for Latin -us. Continual comes from the verb continere "to hold together" made up of con "together, with" + tenere "to hold, keep". The root *tend- in the Proto-Indo-European, the origin of most of the languages of Europe and India, apparently meant "stretch", judging from Greek teinein "stretch," Sanskrit tantram "loom," and Latin tendere "stretch". The Latin root was borrowed into English in words suggesting stretching, such as tendon, tend, tense, tenuous, and tent. The English derivative is thin, which is how things get when stretched.