Aks your relator if the house is perty

Metathetically speaking.

When you speak that way you are engaging in metathesis (mê-tæ-thê-sis), the switching of one sound or letter in a word with another.

Linguistic metathesis most often involves R and L, the "liquid" consonants: flimsy was created from filmsy by metathesis, linguist Robert Beard writes.

When we say perogative forprerogative or perscription for prescription, we commit metathesis, switching the positions of the R and E. In some dialects of English ask is metathesized to aks and another common speech error is the pronunciation of foliage as foilage, switching the L and the I. Southerners love metathesis: their pronunciations of pretty as perty, and difference [di-frêns] as differnce all reflect this proclivity.

In use: We have our choice of metathetic or metathetical for the adjective, and -ly may be added to the latter for the adverb:metathetically. The verb is a predictable metathesize, as two sounds might metathesize in a word.

History: Metathesis is a Late Latin noun based on the Greek verb metatithenai "to transpose". This verb consists of meta "beyond, over" + tithenai "to place". Meta comes from the same source as English mid and middle. Apparently, it originally meant "between", for that is the meaning of Russian mezhdu, which comes from the same word. Tithenai comes from an earlier form dhe-ti-, the source of English deed and do.

Why quotes get misquoted

Beam me up, Shakespeare.

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." -- not Shakespeare
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." -- Shakespeare

"Beam me up, Scotty!" not Star Trek
"Beam us up, Mr. Scott!" -- Star Trek

"Play it again, Sam." -- not Humphrey Bogart
"If she can stand it, I can. Play it." -- Humphrey Bogart

Why do we change famous quotations?

Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There's a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. 

Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.

So how do you spot that misquote?

There's (sadly) no effortless way to go about it. The most we can do is to always be skeptical of ourselves, especially if something sounds too right or fluent or spot on. Because the better it sounds, the more likely it is to be a little off. That, and check quotes before we perpetuate them in cyberspace or print. Otherwise, we might end up like Bob Dylan, who once remarked, "I've misquoted myself so many times, I don't know what I've said." (He totally could have said that, right?) 

Just remember: A quote in time must rhyme.

When a plane crashes ...

... where should the survivors be buried?

If you are considering where the most appropriate burial place should be, you are not alone.

Scientists have found that around half the people asked this question, answer it as if they were being asked about the victims not the survivors.

What makes researchers particularly interested in people’s failure to notice words that actually don’t make sense, so called semantic illusions, is that these illusions challenge traditional models of language processing which assume that we build understanding of a sentence by deeply analysing the meaning of each word in turn.

Instead semantic illusions provide a strong line of evidence that the way we process language is often shallow and incomplete.

When volunteers read or listened to sentences containing hard-to-detect semantic anomalies -- words that fit the general context even though they do not actually make sense -- the researchers found that when a volunteer was tricked by the semantic illusion his brain had not even noticed the anomalous word.

What to do. The researchers suggest:

We process a word more deeply if it is emphasised in some way. So, in a news story, a newsreader can stress important words that may otherwise be missed and these words can be italicised to make sure we notice them when reading. 

The way we construct sentences can also help reduce misunderstandings. It’s a good idea to put important information first, because we are more likely to miss unusual words when they are near the end of a sentence. Also, we often use an active sentence construction such as 'Bob ate the apple' because we make far more mistakes answering questions about a sentence with a passive construction -- for example 'The apple was eaten by Bob'.

We are lazy listeners. And lazy thinkers.

And the wiener is ...

Eyelash mite.

The winner of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for the worst sentence in fiction, is Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England.

Here prize-winning entry:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

And the Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award goes to Greg Homer of Placerville, CA.

The stifling atmosphere inside the Pink Dolphin Bar in the upper Amazon Basin carried barely enough oxygen for a man to survive – humid and thick the air was and full of little flying bugs, making the simple act of breathing like trying to suck hot Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup through a paper straw.

Nice work, girls.

Stay out of the shower

Just read this blog.

Today is the birthday of director Alfred Hitchcock, who was born in London in 1899.

His father was a greengrocer — and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of his life, and he rarely drove a car so that he could not be pulled over.

Hitchcock directed great suspense and horror films, including Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). He said: "A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

Hitchcock understood the difference between mystery and suspense.

Alfred Hitchcock once told the French film critic Francois Truffaut to imagine a couple having lunch at a restaurant. Everything appears normal when suddenly boom! A bomb underneath the table explodes killing each patron. Rewind the story. This time you know the bomb is there and it will detonate at 1pm. A clock in the restaurant reads 12:55. 

The couple asks for the check. The slow service builds tension. We want to warn them: “Pay the bill, there’s a bomb!” For Hitchcock, it’s not surprise, but suspense that pushes our pleasure buttons. Of course, Hitchcock left plenty of room for surprises. But he reserved them for the very end – only then was a surprise better than suspense. This is why we return to Psycho: we love reliving the feeling of suspense even when the cover is blown.

Still, I never get in the shower unless I'm armed.

When your smart phone plays editor

The autocorrect function can create some real howlers. Here's how Google intends it to work.

If you type “kofee” into a search box, Google would like to save a few milliseconds by guessing whether you’ve misspelled the caffeinated beverage or the former United Nations secretary-general. It uses a probabilistic algorithm with roots in work done at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1990s. 

The probabilities are based on a “noisy channel” model, a fundamental concept of information theory. The model envisions a message source — an idealized user with clear intentions — passing through a noisy channel that introduces typos by omitting letters, reversing letters or inserting letters. 

“We’re trying to find the most likely intended word, given the word that we see,” Mr. Paskin says. “Coffee” is a fairly common word, so with the vast corpus of text the algorithm can assign it a far higher probability than “Kofi.” On the other hand, the data show that spelling “coffee” with a K is a relatively low-probability error. The algorithm combines these probabilities. 

I guess if you try to tweet that you're having coffee with Kofi Anan you're in real trouble.

Putting a dollar value on a story

Here's a fascinating story from a review of the book Fascinating Objects.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously remarked. Hardly anyone can back this bombastic proclamation with more empirical conviction than Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn.

In 2009, the duo embarked upon a curious experiment: They would purchase cheap trinkets, ask some of today’s most exciting creative writers to invent stories about them, then post the stories and the objects on eBay to see whether the invented story enhanced the value of the object. Which it did: The tchotchkes, originally purchased for a total of $128.74, sold for a whopping total of $3,612.51 — a 2,700% markup.

The most highly valued pairing in the entire project, bought for $1.49 and sold for $197.50, was a globe paperweight with a moving handwritten story by the magnificent Debbie Millman, with proceeds benefiting 826 National.

Not sure I've ever seen the value of story monetized.

Will a computer replace you?

Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by Narrative Science:

"Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012," said the article on Forbes.com.

While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, Phys.org reports, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news.

"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic," says Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell. And with media companies under intense financial pressure, the move to automate some news production "does speak directly to the rebuilding of the cost economics of journalism," said Doctor.

Scott Frederick, chief operating officer of Automated Insights, another firm in the sector, said he sees this as "the next generation of content creation."

The company generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data from major sports events. The company generates advertising on its own website and is now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for sports and real estate news. 

To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company generates articles with a different "tonality" depending on the reader's preference or location. For the 2012 Super Bowl, the article for New York Giants' fans read like this: "Hakeem Nicks had a big night, paving the way to a victory for the Giants over the Patriots, 21-17 in Indianapolis. With the victory, New York is the champion of Super Bowl XLVI." 

For New England fans, the story was different: "Behind an average day from Tom Brady, the Patriots lost to the Giants, 21-17 at home. With the loss, New England falls short of a Super Bowl ring."

Not much different than human sports writers.

Take a vow of chastity

If you write non-fiction using the techniques of fiction you need to know where to draw the line. Roy Peter Clark, who has taught writing for 30 years, begs you to take his vow of chastity.

I've broken some of these rules, and would again, but they are excellent reminders.

 1. Any degree of fabrication turns a story from non-fictionin to fiction, which must be labeled as such. (A person cannot be a little pregnant, nor a story a little fictional.)

2. The writer, by definition, may distort reality by subtraction (the way a photo is cropped), but is never allowed to distort by adding material to non- fiction that the writer knows did not happen.

3. Characters that appear in non-fiction must be real individuals, not composites drawn from a number of persons. While there are occasions when characters can or should not be named, giving characters fake names is not permitted. (They can be identified by an initial, a natural status “The Tall Woman,” or a role “The Accountant.”)

4. Writers of non-fiction should not expand or contract time or space for narrative efficiency. (Ten conversations with a source that took place in three locations cannot be merged into a single conversation in a single location.)

5. Invented dialogue is not permitted. Any words in quotations marks must be the result of a) written documents such as trial transcripts, or b) words recorded directly by the writer or some other reliable source. Remembered conversations — especially from the distant past — should be rendered with another form of simple punctuation, such as indented dashes: — like this –.

6. We reject the notion in all of literature of a “higher truth,” a phrase that has been used too often as a rationalization in non-fiction for making things up. It is hard enough, and good enough, to attempt to render a set of “practical truths.”

7. Aesthetic considerations must be subordinated — if necessary — to documentary discipline.

8. Non-fiction does not result from a purely scientific method, but responsible writers will inform audiences on both what they know and how they know it. The sourcing in a book or story should be sufficient so that another reporter or researcher or fact-checker, acting in good faith, could follow the tracks of the original reporter and find comparable results.

9. Unless working in fantasy, science fiction, or obvious satire, all writers, including novelists and poets, have an affirmative duty to render the world accurately through their own research and detective work. (The poet should not create a piano with 87 keys unless intending a specific effect.)

10. The escape clause: There may be occasions, when the writer can think of no other way to tell a story than through the use of one or more of these “banned” techniques. The burden is on the writer to demonstrate that this is so. To keep faith with the reader, the writer should become transparent concerning narrative methods. A detailed note to readers should appear AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WORK to alert them of the standards and practices of the writer.

If you're a Mark Twain fan

Samuel Clemens and Hellen Keller.

which I am, you'll enjoy a Facebook page devoted to him. It was set up by a friend and local historian, Brent Colley, who also runs this blog about Twain. This site, the history of Redding, CT, has a good bit of Twain material, including notice that his relationship with Helen Keller will be showcased at the Mark Twain Library in Redding this October.

Here from the Facebook page is a letter Clemens wrote to Keller.

Hopefully you will read this

Because I had to memorize The AP Stylebook when I joined that organization a lifetime ago, I perk up when I see references to it. Seems The AP has yielded to the great unwashed on the meaning of "hopefully."

Grammatical purists have insisted that the correct meaning is: “In a hopeful manner.” As in, “ ‘Surely you are joking,’ the grammarian said hopefully.”

Now, according to the AP, it's okay if we use it in this sense: “It is hoped, we hope.”

The battle is joined. Monica Hesse of The Washington Post asserts: "The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland."

Maeve Maddox, who has taught English and blogs as the American English Doctor, counters: "When it comes to crimes against the language, using hopefully to mean “it is hoped” is a long way from the equivalent of murder."

Maddox says we should keep our powder dry for such offenses as:

• I’ve made reservations for Megan and I.
• The chancellor will talk about he and his wife’s relationship with the governor.
• Why don’t you let your father and I talk.
• Me and my friends attend Cal-Tech.
• The suspect told police that him and another man shot the store owner.
• They’re 100% identical as theirs.
• This is something we probably should have did right after 9/11.

I'll grant that those are worse. But hopefully if we draw the line at hopefully we won't be forced to relent on those.

Think like an actor

Andrea Chalupa, a writer, journalist and TV producer, believes that acting can help a writer.

Writers can spend days, weeks holed up in a room, churning out words, not knowing if their work is any good—engaging, or just shallow “busy work.” Actors, on the other hand, have the benefit of the mirror, studying recordings of themselves, or the reaction of any sized audience to immediately know whether they’re being honest. In this regard, it’s better to be an actor than a writer. The instant feedback—communicating with the energy your spoken words, movements, and choices are creating—improve a craft faster than being confined to a desk and chair. On the rare occasion someone asks me for writing advice, I always say to take an acting class.

Shakespeare was an actor. 

And Charles Dickens too studied the craft and wrote his stories to be performed on stage. From an 1883 article published in the New York Times over a decade after his death, it is written of Dickens: “Nor could he ever relinquish his old fondness for the actor's art; for he scarcely did himself justice when he spoke of the stage as being to him but a means of getting money. 

He obtained great applause as an amateur actor, and he became famous as a public reader of his own books; his readings, in truth, closely resembling actings, or suggesting rather the readings of an actor than of an author." The stories he read on stage, the article says, had as many stage directions written on the pages as one would expect to find on the script of a play.

Something I learned at Reader's Digest, where dramas in real life were so important: In the construction of stories, even true stories, it helps to imagine the characters as actors on a stage. This will help you keep point of view and everything else straight. For example, characters not on stage  can't say anything. We don't know how they're reacting to the action or what they're thinking. You're writing what's on stage and only that.