Hopefully you won't read this

On Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. “We now support the modern usage of hopefully,” the tweet said. “It is hoped, we hope.”

Previously, the only accepted meaning was: “In a hopeful manner.” As in, “ ‘Surely you are joking,’ the grammarian said hopefully.” 

This is no joking matter.

You know these kinds of arguments. 

You know them well. Linguistic battlefields are scattered with the wreckage left behind by Nauseated vs. Nauseous, by Healthy vs. Healthful, by the legions of people who perpetuated the union between “regardless” and “irrespective,” creating a Frankensteinian hybrid, “irregardless.” 

These are the battles that are fought daily between Catholic school graduates, schooled in the dark arts of sentence diagramming and self-righteousness, and their exasperated prey. They are fought between prescriptivists, who believe that rules of language should be preserved at any cost, and descriptivists, who believe that word use should reflect how people actually talk. 

“It was an unconscious mistake,” say the descriptivists. 

“You mean subconscious.” 

“Well, anyways — ” 

“You mean anyway.” 

“That begs the question. Why do you care about grammar so much?” 

“No. It doesn’t! It doesn’t beg the question at all. It raises the question. It raises the question!” 

“I’m going to beat you subconscious.”

Hopefully, you will bite me.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, writes that there are two types of verbs: static (to be, to seem, to become) and dynamic (to whistle, to waffle, to wonder). These are also referred to as passive and active.

Here's what she says about the static verbs:

Static verbs themselves fall into several subgroups, starting with what I call existential verbs: all the forms of to be, whether the present (am, are, is), the past (was, were) or the other more vexing tenses (is being, had been, might have been). In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the Prince of Demark asks, “To be, or not to be?” when pondering life-and-death questions. An aging King Lear uses both is and am when he wonders about his very identity:

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, Henry Miller echoes Lear when, in his autobiographical novel “Tropic of Cancer,” he wanders in Dijon, France, reflecting upon his fate:

“Yet I am up and about, a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughter-house geometry. Who am I? What am I doing here?”

Drawing inspiration from Miller, we might think of these verbs as ghostly verbs, almost invisible. They exist to call attention not to themselves, but to other words in the sentence.

Another subgroup is what I call wimp verbs (appear, seem, become). Most often, they allow a writer to hedge (on an observation, description or opinion) rather than commit to an idea: Lear appears confused. Miller seems lost.

Finally, there are the sensing verbs (feel, look, taste, smell and sound), which have dual identities: They are dynamic in some sentences and static in others. If Miller said I feel the wind through my coat, that’s dynamic. But if he said I feel blue, that’s static.

Static verbs establish a relationship of equals between the subject of a sentence and its complement. Think of those verbs as quiet equals signs, holding the subject and the predicate in delicate equilibrium. For example, I, in the subject, equals feel blue in the predicate.

Verbs can make or break your writing, Hale concludes, so consider them carefully in every sentence you write. Do you want to sit your subject down and hold a mirror to it? Go ahead, use is.

Clip and hang on your refrigerator

(Grammarly. Thanks, Carolyn.)

Politicians do this

obfuscate / ahb-fê-skayt / verb, transitive

1. To dim or darken, to obscure by light deprivation or other means.
2. To make confusing, to obscure the meaning of, to make less comprehensible.

The spelling of this word is rather easy since there is a sound corresponding to each letter except the silent E at the end, the linguist Robert Beard writes. 

However, remember that the silent E makes the preceding A long, so even it has a function. The noun is obfuscation and anyone known for his or her obfuscation is an obfuscator. The adjective meaning "tending to obfuscate" is obfuscatory. There is, however, another rather rare and dated adjective with the same meaning, obfuscous. Use it if you like to live on the edge.

The basic meaning is "to darken", as in, "Closing the blinds to cover his activity had obfuscated the pantry to the point that Les Hyde could not find the chocolates." The metaphorical extension of this word applies to either intentionally or unintentionally confusing matters: "Ivan Oder's explanation of the reasons for the new heat-activated bidets in the restrooms only led to further obfuscation."

History: Obfuscate is the English adaptation of Latin obfuscatus, the past participle of the verb obfuscare "to darken". This verb is built of ob- "over, toward, against" + fuscare "to darken", a verb sharing a root with fuscus "dark." The prefix ob- was subject to the process of "assimilation" whereby a linguistic sound takes on the properties of a contiguous sound. So obfuscare later became offuscare and this spelling, too, slipped into English as offuscate but did not gain enough traction to remain.

How to write a great story

Kurt Vonnegut's tips:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

What's your time?

(Thanks, Thomas)

Prez speaks, press jumps

From Best of The Web Today:

If you're not a Supreme Court justice, that doesn't mean Barack Obama doesn't want to tell you how to do your job. RealClearPolitics notes that in his speech yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the president lectured reporters that he expects more favorable coverage even than he's received:

"This bears on your reporting," President Obama said to journalists. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples' cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalency." 

"As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues. if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago . . . would've been considered squarely centrist positions," Obama said a few moments later.

Some journalists agree as The Atlantic Wire reports:

It's a message The Atlantic's James Fallows has been championing for awhile now and happily acknowledged in the president's remarks yesterday. "From the commanding heights of our government, the 'false equivalence' problem seems to be coming into view," Fallows wrote.

Hey, Fallows! C'mere! Fetch! Aww, good boy! What a cute little lapdog!

Let your sentence tell a story

Constance Hale, a San Francisco journalist, says a sentence is a mini-narrative.

For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). The subject is the person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about; the predicate expresses the action, condition or effect of that subject. Think of the predicate as apredicament — the situation the subject is in.

I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate):The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention.

Let’s look at some opening lines of great novels to see how the sentence drama plays out. Notice the subject, in bold, in each of the following sentences. It might be a simple noun or pronoun, a noun modified by an adjective or two or something even more complicated:

• “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, “Paradise”
• “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” — James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Switching to the predicate, remember that it is everything that is notthe subject. In addition to the verb, it can contain direct objects, indirect objects, adverbs and various kinds of phrases. More important, the predicate names the predicament of the subject.

• “Elmer Gantry was drunk.” — Sinclair Lewis, “Elmer Gantry”
• “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, “Waiting”

 The best sentences, she concludes, bolt a clear subject to a dramatic predicate, making a mini-narrative.