A sign of the times

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. 

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. 

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Gutenberg first used moveable type 573 years ago. The World Wide Web opened for business 21 years ago. I got all of this post from the Web. You will read it on the Web.

The year of the blatherskite

Here's a word that will be particularly useful in this election season.

blatherskite / blæ-dhêr-skayt / noun

1. A blustery, talkative person, a blabbermouth.

2. Stuff and nonsense, gobbledygook, codswallop.

The linguist Robert Beard notes: Blather (or blether) means the same as today's word in its second meaning above. Skite is probably a Cockney or Australian pronunciation of skate which, among all its other meanings (fish, foot vehicles), at one time meant "a mean, contemptible person". Skate has retained this sense only in cheapskate. A dramatic increase in blatherskites and blatherskiting has been known to occur just before political elections.

I was to define blatherskite as "a politician stumping for (re)election", but decided that this definition was too narrow. Still, 'tis the season of blatherskiting in the US, so why not: "The amount of blather coming out of Washington and the state capitals is ordinarily breath-taking, but the blasted blatherskites lose control of themselves just before elections." Of course, today's word has a much wider application; I'm sure you know someone the word fits: "The meeting was run by a blatherskite so full of himself and codswallop that nothing was accomplished."

History: The original word blatherskite began its life in Scotland. However, during the American Revolutionary War, the Scottish song Maggie Laude, in which this word occurs, became a favorite among Americans, so blatherskite became a familiar colloquialism in the 18th century. The original Proto-Indo-European root, *bledh- "to blow (hard)", went on to become bladder in English and bladhra "bladder" in Old Norse. However, when used as a verb in Old Norse, it meant "to prattle on", so English borrowed the Old Norse version back, giving us today's blather.

How to write normally

Journalist Tim Phillips is the author of Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak Jargon and Waffle. He says:

Number one: try to be understood by everybody you’re speaking to. One of the things about jargon is that we get a lot of pleasure out of it because it puts us in the “in” group, the people who understand the jargon. But we have a responsibility to the people in the “out” group, the people who don't understand the jargon, as well. So try to be understood by everyone you’re speaking to. 

The second principle is stop trying to sound clever if sounding clever doesn’t get you anywhere. Anyone can explain the difficult things so that it sounds like they’re difficult. It really takes insight to take something that’s complex and make it sound simple for people to create understanding. And really, that’s what we should be doing with language. 

The third principle is that it’s about attitude; it’s not about rules. I make jargon mistakes and grammar mistakes all the time. All journalists do. Fortunately, we have people who work as copy editors to fix those for us. If we get hung up on the rules, we’ll lose sight of what we’re here to do, which is to communicate with each other and be understood.

Eschew obfuscation.

I am literally figurative

Commenting recently on the GOP presidential race, prominent political prognosticator Larry Sabato said that in Florida, “we have what is literally a Category 5 hurricane for the Republican nomination.”

Literally? Yikes, A. Barton Hinkle, a columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, writes.

The last time a Cat-5 hurricane made landfall in the United States was seven years ago, when Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Tuesday’s primary was eventful, but nothing as bad as all that. The word Sabato wanted was “figuratively,” not literally. 

He is not alone. About the same time, a Denver TV station was reporting that a young man named Jordan Staucet “is pounding the pavement – literally – looking for a job.” So he was hammering the concrete with his fists? Not exactly. He was simply walking around handing out résumés. 

“Pounding the pavement” is an idiom, a figure of speech, and normally nobody would perform a figurative act literally. If you say someone does pound the pavement literally, then you are saying – well, you know.

To be fair, this persnickety criticism might not be, um, fair, Hinkle writes.

Jesse Sheidlower, a dictionary editor, let it be known a while back in Slate that we shouldn’t take such statements quite so literally. In “The Trouble With Literally,” he notes that using literally as an intensifier has quite a literary pedigree. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby “literally glowed,” and Louisa May Alcott wrote that “the land literally flowed with milk and honey.” They didn’t mean either of those statements literally. They meant Gatsby really, really glowed and the land was really, really plentiful. 

To Sheidlower, this is no big deal, since in the strictest sense, “literally” does not mean what we usually mean it to mean anyway. We have already wandered from the original purpose of “literally” whenever we use it in any sense other than “to copy a text word for word or letter for letter.” (The Latin root is litteralis, “of or relating to letters.”) So if you say you are literally sick to your stomach, and then vomit, you are still using the word “literally,” as it were, figuratively.

Well, Fitzgerald was a drunk, so there.