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.

Great moments in accuracy-based journalism

From the New York Times website:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 22, 2011 

An earlier version misstated the tenure of Arthur Hays Sulzberger as publisher of The New York Times. It was from 1935 to 1961, not 1963. It also misstated how long Dr. Sulzberger and her sister, Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, served on the board of The Times. For Dr. Sulzberger, it was 26 years, from 1974 to 2000, not 28 years, from 1972 to 2000; for Ms. Holmberg, it was 37 years, not 30. 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 24, 2011 

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Wednesday about the physician and philanthropist Judith P. Sulzberger misstated the year she became a director of The New York Times. It was 1974, not 1972. (As correctly noted elsewhere in the obituary, she remained a director for 26 years.) The obituary also referred imprecisely to the Pasteur Foundation, on whose board she served. While it is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute in France, it is not the institute's "New York branch."

The late Dr. Sulzberger, as you might have guessed, was part of the family that controls the New York Times Co.!

-- Best of The Web Today

What's a metaphor?

It's for communicating complex ideas.

"Metaphors aren't just used for flowery speech," says Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. 'They shape the conversation for things we're trying to explain and figure out. And they have consequences for determining what we decide is the right approach to solving problems."

"Some estimates suggest that one out of every 25 words we encounter is a metaphor," adds Paul Thibodeau, a doctoral candidate. "But we didn't know the extent to which these metaphors influence people."

The two conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to react to fictional reports on crime in a city. The result: people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a "beast" preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a "virus" infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.

Along with the metaphors, the crime reports also included some alarming statistics. One mentioned that there were about 10,000 more crimes reported in 2007 than 2004, and the number of murders had gone from 330 to more than 500 in that period.

When the 485 participants in that study were asked to highlight what they thought was the most influential part of the report, only 15 identified the metaphor, while almost everyone else said it was the statistics that swayed their decisions on how to curb crime.

"People like to think they're objective and making decisions based on numbers," Boroditsky said. "They want to believe they're logical. But they're really being swayed by metaphors."

What people believe

People don't believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.

-- Seth Godin

Our difficulty with Arabic

"Just spell my name correctly!"

I have a theory that Americans find it hard to follow events in the Mideast and elsewhere, because we find it hard to follow their language. Just look at a list of terrorists -- can you pronounce their names? I often wonder how the CIA keeps track of them all.

"Johnson," the excellent language blog at The Economist, takes a crack at explaining Arabic names, in particular that of Muammar Qaddafi.

NO ONE knows how much longer we'll have to write about Libya's dictator, so now seems a good time to take a crack at his name. Why is the man The Economist calls Muammar Qaddafi spelled so many different ways? A simple version of this question is sometimes phrased "Why can't we write it how they say it? There's got to be a best way." 

There are a few problems in turning Arabic into Roman letters. 

1) Arabic has sounds that aren't easily renderable in Roman letters without diacritics. The h-sound in "Tahrir" I mentioned the other day requires the International Phonetic Alphabet's ħ to distinguish it from English's h-sound, which Arabic also has. But of course most people aren't going to go to the length of finding and using special characters.

2) Arabic has moved a long way in the 14 centuries since the advent of Islam, but the writing system hasn't. Arabs still write with an alphabet suited to the sounds of classical Arabic, but which lacks many of the sounds used in modern dialects (and names).

3) When transliterating, experts like to try to match one Roman letter to each Arabic letter, so we don't have the Qaddafi problem, and so try to agree that q, for example, will always represent the Arabic letter called qaf, even though it sounds nothing like the English q. But, following on from 2 above, this usually means relying on the written form (which doesn't change) rather than the spoken (which can, from region to region or person to person).

If you were a linguist or other expert, with all of the tools of the trade to hand, you'd day something like "The name
القذافي
can carefully transliterated as al-Qaḏḏāfī, according to its Arabic spelling, but is pronounced by Libyans as al-Gaddāfī." 

This is because 

- In classical Arabic, the q beginning his name is pronounced like a k-sound made as far back in the throat as possible. But in many dialects including the main Libyan ones, it's pronounced like a g. So the q/g tradeoff is the one between how it's written and how it's said. K, meanwhile, isn't a great option here. It gets neither the Arabic spelling nor the pronunciation quite right. Kh is worse still. It is used to represent an Arabic sound—just not the one in Qaddafi's name. 

- the middle consonant isn't hard to say: in Classical Arabic it's just like the th sound in the English there. (Not like the one in third). But in modern Libyan Arabic, that sound has become a d-sound. So dh represents the spelling, d the pronunciation. Those who want to show that it's doubled in Arabic can opt for dd, as we do. 

If forced to pick, I'd say Qaddhafi represents the Arabic spelling pretty well, and Gaddafi represents the Libyan pronunciation pretty well. (The "al-" is optional. It's always used in Arabic but frequently left out in English. The Economist's style book recommends leaving it out in most names.) Our "Qaddafi" is a bit of a hybrid, but it's not the worst. Stay away from the k's and kh's, though, in any case. Those sounds do exist in Arabic, but not in the name Qaddafi.

You might want to share this with a spook you know.

Be on the lookout

Be on the look out.

At great personal sacrifice, but motivated by my selfless desire to serve humanity, I somehow got myself off the couch midway through a rerun of NCIS and staggered to the computer to seek an answer to the  No. 1 question plaguing mankind.

What the heck is a "BOLO?"

The foxy lady Zeva had used it one time too many and I had to know. Here, for all of you mired in worry over rising gasoline and food prices, riots and revolution in the Mideast, and a new report that half our dogs and cats are overweight, is the answer:

BOLO means "be on the lookout." This from a website where police officers rant. What had them concerned was the difference between a BOLO and an APB, which, come to think of it, has had me troubled for some time. Here, law-abiding citizens, is the answer:

APB means All Points Bulletin - It may be just an announcement of say a prison break or catastrophe of some kind or it may be a want on a suspect. It is when they want "all points" to hear the information. It is also used in place of a BOLO by some agencies.  

BOLO means Be On The Lookout - this is more traditional and to some, archaic, for when a specific persson or vehicle is wanted in conncention with a crime or perhaos a key witness. 

Clear as mud?

Yeah, but in clearing it up I missed an entire plot twist and I'm still wondering how they caught the bad guys. Maybe they tricked them and switched to an APB.

Why we don't say what we mean

Language is a good entrée into human nature, Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says. For example, why can't we just spit it out?

What I’m studying now is the interface between language and the rest of the mind – how language can illuminate our social relationships.  For example, why does so much of language veiled, or indirect, or done via innuendo rather than people blurting out exactly what they mean? Why do I say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great?” instead of “Give me the salt.”  Why does someone make a sexual overture in terms of, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” rather than, “Do you want to have sex?”  Why are threats so often veiled you know, “Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.”

Given that the listener knows exactly what the speaker had in mind, it’s not that anyone is fooled by this charade; but nonetheless some aspect of the social relationship seems to be preserved if the request is slipped in between the lines. I’m interested in what that says about human relationships, about hypocrisy and taboo. Also what it says about the kinds of relationships we have like dominance versus intimacy, and communality versus exchange and reciprocity.

Just to be concrete, why do you say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great.” Well, in issuing an imperative, you’re kind of changing the relationship. You’re turning it into one of dominance. You’re saying to a friend or to a stranger, “I’m going to act as if I can boss you around and presuppose your compliance.” You may not want to move the relationship in that direction. At the same time you want the damn salt. So if you say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great,” it’s such a non sequitor that the intelligence of the listener can figure out that it really is a request.  But both of you know that you haven’t actually turned the relationship into a superior-inferior.  I think that’s the key to understanding all of these.

That the sexual overture, the veiled threat, the veiled bribe and so on are ways of preserving one of several kinds of relationships at the same time as we transact the business of life such as requests, such as sexual overtures that might be inconsistent with the relationship that we have with the person.

It would be kinda nice if you would comment on this and share this blog with others. Just saying.

This is ironic. Or not.

ironic / ai-rahn-ik / adjective

1. Pertaining to a figure of speech (irony) in which the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning.
2. Related to a surprising state of affairs opposite to what would naturally be expected: it would be ironic for a car dealer to have to walk to and from work.

Given today's economy, that's not ironic. 

Ironic is often misused, Dr. Goodword intones.

If twin brothers, separated at birth, go on to both marry women named Ursula and keep Egyptian hairless cats, that would be coincidental but not ironic. It is neither coincidental nor ironic that the second President Bush stood on the same inaugural podium where his father stood only 12 years earlier, just a fact. Now I am at a loss for a good example of irony. After all this discussion of irony, that would be ironic. (Of course, it isn't true.) 

Anyone who keeps an Egyptian hairless cat is ironic in my book; I don't care what it means.

Irony, the good doctor continues, is found in expressions of just the opposite of what we mean:

"Oh, no, John doesn't know anything about music" (knowing he graduated with honors from Juilliard). However, be careful here: if this type of irony is spoken caustically, it becomes sarcasm. This is a concept describing some of the more entertaining events of life. "I find it ironic that the chef at Chez Pierre eats his meals around the corner at Sam's Diner." Irony can also be found around the house: "Ironically, Sue's mom found her car keys in the car after ransacking the house for them."

The history of this word is ironic, and I don't care what it means:

Ironic is another in a long line of borrowings from French. This time it began as French ironique, a descendant of late Latin ironicus. The Latin adjective was borrowed from Greek eironikos "dissembling, feigning ignorance", itself an extension of eiron "dissembler". Eiron probably came from eirein "to say". If so, we know that Greek eirein came from the Proto-Indo-European root wer-/wor- "word" which, with the suffix -dho, came directly to English as word and to Latin as verbum "word".

I'm feigning ignorance here.

Stealing to write better

A friend asked the other day what he should read to learn to write better.

"Books," I said.

When I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I said, "Mark Twain."

"I don't like fiction," he said.

Oh.

Being the original thinker that I am, I Googled it and came up with some thoughts worth passing on. These are from Leo Babauta, who also writes about Zen things, which should tell you something. Here are a few.

Analyze character, plot, theme. Break down the books you read. You can either do this as you read, or afterward, when you reflect on them while doing something else (for me it’s running and doing housework and when I’m in the shower). Why did the writer make the choices she made? How did she create the characters and convey their qualities? How did she start the book and lay out the plot? How is the theme of the book conveyed throughout the book.

Pay attention to what they do with words. Beyond the big things mentioned above, the writer does little things with words, in every paragraph and sentence and phrase. A good writer pays close attention to words, the effects they create, how they mix together with other words, twists and turns of meaning. See how he does this, as it is the best instruction you can get.

Rip them off. A writing teacher once told me not to mimmic other writers — but instead to rip them off. Steal blatantly. Take things that you discover in other writers, things that work, things that you love … and use them in your own writing. Don’t worry — you can always revise later or throw it out completely. For now, rip them off. It’ll help you make these techniques your own.

Riff off them, experiment. Once you’ve ripped off a few dozen writers, start to riff. Do variations and experiments on stuff you’ve found. Give their techniques and styles your own twists and flair.

All the great writers steal. Don't worry about it. In graduate school I heard Joseph Heller give a lecture about Catch-22. He spent the whole time telling what he'd stolen from Shakespeare and the rest of them. 

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” -- Oscar Wilde 

“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” -- Aaron Sorkin 

"Good writers borrow, Great writers steal."  -- T.S. Eliot

See what I mean?

What people really care about

The most emailed articles at The New York Times this morning:

1. Well: How Meditation May Change the Brain
2. Concierge Medical Care With a Smaller Price Tag
3. Basics: Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch
4. Bush’s Daughter, in a Break, Endorses Gay Marriage
5. Mind: A Home Treatment Kit for Super Bowl Suffering
6. Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated
7. Government’s Dietary Advice: Eat Less
8. G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure
9. Practical Traveler: How to Fight Back When Your Flight Is Canceled
10. Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation

The Times' front page leads, of course, with Egypt, which is how it should be, but the readers' minds are elsewhere.