The Writer

Coincidence? You decide.

2012-02-13T11:31:00.002-05:00

William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at Cornell Law School, raises an interesting point about the press and about George Stephanopoulos in particular. Stephanopoulos is an ABC correspondent and former communications director for Bill Clinton.

Remember when George Stephanopoulos, at the New Hampshire Republican debate on January 7, brought up and harped on whether the candidates thought states could ban contraception?

Everyone, at least on our side of the aisle, shook their heads in disbelief as to why Stephanopoulos was bringing up the issue. There was no active controversy over contraception, it wasn’t in the news, and there were far more pressing political issues, yet what seemed like an eternity of debate time was devoted to the subject at the insistence of Stephanopoulos.

It was, shall we say, something out of left field.

Watch the video.

It's pretty clear to me that Steph has an agenda.

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

The Newt Gingrich speaks, and he seems to be aware of what's going on. Watch.

Our fearless writers

2012-02-09T07:34:00.001-05:00

"To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.

"Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute's novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.

"Such overt censorship continues. In 2008, Random House in New York pulled The Jewel of Medina - a slightly syrupy and wholly inoffensive historical romance about Muhammad's child bride Aisha - after a neurotic professor claimed that it was 'explosive stuff ... a national security issue'. Most of the censorship religious violence inspires, however, is self-censorship. Writers put down their pens and turn to other subjects rather than risk a confrontation. So thoroughgoing is the evasion that when Grayson Perry, who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true in 2007, the media treated his candour as news. 'The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,' said Perry, 'is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.'"

-- Nick Cohen

Good question

2012-01-31T18:26:00.000-05:00

1. Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

2. Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

3. If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know?

4. If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

5. Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

6. Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?

7. Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?

8. Why do "tug" boats push their barges?

9. Why do we sing "Take me out to the ball game" when we are already there?

10. Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?

11. Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?

12. Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?

13. Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?

14. Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?

15. Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?

16. If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it?

17. If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

18. If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

19. If you are cross-eyed and have dyslexia, can you read all right?

20. Why is bra singular and panties plural?

21. Why do you press harder on the buttons of a remote control when you know the batteries are dead?

22. Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

23. How come abbreviated is such a long word?
24. Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them?

25. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

26. Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?

27. Christmas - What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?

28. Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway ?

Our press at work

2012-01-26T16:47:00.001-05:00

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
"(Removes words 'and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage,' paragraph 7; removes 'he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan' and instead states 'he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan,' paragraph 10; removes 'he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation' and instead states 'his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation,' paragraph 12; removes 'voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee' and instead states 'opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor,' paragraph 41; removes 'voted against Obama's healthcare overhaul' and instead states 'opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul,' paragraph 41)"--Reuters (corrections to a hit piece on Sen. Marco Rubio), Jan. 26

-- Best of The Web Today

Do you have a knack for writing?

2012-01-24T12:44:00.001-05:00

Or is it all a trick?

A knack, the linguist Robert Beard writes, is a special, inexplicable skill or talent for carrying out a specific action.

That's the noun. There are other forms, he says, of which I have not been familiar.

The verb knack means "to crack, to make the noise of cracking," reflecting the original meaning of knack, the noun. Knacker "something that makes a sharp cracking sound," bears the same meaning. Knick-knack once meant "clatter," the alternation of knicking and knacking sounds. It followed the noun knack to its second historical meaning, "a trick" before ending up with its current sense, "a trinket, gimcrack, kickshaw."

Well, I knew knick-knack. I've never heard of kickshaw.

Knack has a long and curious past, the good doctor informs. It started out around 1380 meaning a cracking sound. This is confirmed by its cousins in other Germanic languages, knacken "to crack" and Norwegian knake "crack." (We also find Gaelic cnac with the same meaning.) For some unknown reason, by the time it reached the middle of the 16th century that meaning had given way to "deception, trick." Probably along the lines of crack shifting its meaning to "snide remark." The sense of "special talent" was first recorded in the 1580s, showing that "trick" took little time to be interpreted as a "special talent."

Knack, I'm going to suggest, is "woody."

The stories your mind tells

2012-01-17T11:38:00.003-05:00

Narrative coherence

Humans love stories, Jason Gots writes. In fact, in some fundamental sense, we need them.

Cognitive science has long recognized narrative as a basic organizing principle of memory. From early childhood, we tell ourselves stories about our actions and experiences. Accuracy is not the main objective – coherence is. If necessary, our minds will invent things that never happened, people who don't exist, simply to hold the narrative together. How often have you had a fierce disagreement with a partner or sibling over who gave you that Three Tenors CD or which of you made the pathetic clay reindeer Christmas ornament? How can two eyewitnesses at a trial be absolutely convinced of two conflicting accounts of the same events.

This tendency to confabulate – to fill in the gaps of memory with plausible inventions that preserve narrative continuity – is most pronounced in patients with significant memory loss, or in laboratory tests with participants who have had the connection cut between the left and right hemispheres of their brain (a procedure that, surprisingly enough, rarely results in death or significant impairment of function). Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Who's in Charge?, has performed countless experiments with split-brain participants. They have revealed a function of the left hemisphere called 'the Interpreter,' which jumps in to make sense of memories, when it has no direct access to those memories or the context in which they were made.

Lovers of film and literature may react with suspicion to any attempt at neurocognitive analysis of their passions.

This is misguided, says Gazzaniga – understanding our hardwired need for narrative coherence doesn't diminish the aesthetic power of a great story – nor will it enable us anytime soon to program computers to write like William Blake. But it may help to explain what's going on when we are mesmerized or stunned by a novel or the latest Matt Damon flick.

Gazzaniga suspects that narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world – to know where we're coming from and where we're headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why. One reason we may love fiction, he says, is that it enables us to find our bearings in possible future realities, or to make better sense of our own past experiences. What stories give us, in the end, isreassurance. And as childish as it may seem, that sense of security – that coherent sense of self – is essential to our survival.

That Matt Damon, some cool dude.

Why didn't Dickens explode?

2012-01-16T05:54:00.003-05:00

"It’s a wonder Charles Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.

"Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.

"He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.

"Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, 'one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.'"

-- Verlyn Linkenborg

What's on the Times' mind

2012-01-15T08:24:00.001-05:00

The New York Times is often accused of being liberal. Do you think? Here's what it offered online today "above the fold," i.e., without scrolling:

CAMPAIGN STOPS
What’s Race Got to Do With It?
By LEE SIEGEL
Mitt Romney is ahead because he is the whitest white man to run for president in years.

EDITORIAL
What They Don’t Want to Talk About
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party fear talking about income inequality in the campaign.

One Percent, Many Variations
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF
The members of the 1 percent, such as Adam Katz, are diverse, especially in where they live, what they believe politically and just how rich they really are.

Boehner Faces Restive G.O.P. and White House Attacks
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
In the new session of Congresss, Speaker John A. Boehner’s challenge is not only to corral his party but also to keep its majority and fend off attacks by President Obama.

Theology Feeds Christian Unease With Romney
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Basic differences about Scripture and the nature of God leads many Christians to conclude that Mormons, including Mitt Romney, cannot be considered Christian.

Simple rules for writing well

2012-01-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

The Economist Style Guide, largely the work of editor John Grimond, is helpful, sensible, and refreshingly unstuffy, blogger Richard Nordquist writes. In other words, it heeds its own advice.

That good advice first shows up in the introduction, which offers eight precepts for keeping our readers engaged.

Catch the attention of the reader.Then get straight into the article. Do not spend several sentences clearing your throat, setting the scene or sketching in the background.

Read through your writing several times.
Edit it ruthlessly, whether by cutting or polishing or sharpening, on each occasion. . . . Nothing is to be gained by resorting to orotundities and grandiloquence, still less by calling on clichés and vogue expressions. Unadorned, unfancy prose is usually all you need.

Do not be stuffy.
Use the language of everyday speech, not that of spokesmen, lawyers or bureaucrats. . . . Pomposity and long-windedness tend to obscure meaning, or reveal the lack of it: strip them away in favour of plain words.

Do not be hectoring or arrogant.
Those who disagree with you are not necessarily stupid or insane. Nobody needs to be described as silly: let your analysis show that he is.

Do not be too pleased with yourself.
Don’t boast of your own cleverness by telling readers that you correctly predicted something or that you have a scoop. You are more likely to bore or irritate them than to impress them.

Do not be too chatty.
Surprise, surprise is more irritating than informative. So is Ho, ho and, in the middle of a sentence, wait for it, etc.

Do not be too didactic.
If too many sentences begin Compare, Consider, Expect, Imagine, Look at, Note, Prepare for, Remember or Take, readers will think they are reading a textbook (or, indeed, a style book).

Do your best to be lucid.
(“I see but one rule: to be clear,” Stendhal) Simple sentences help. Keep complicated constructions and gimmicks to a minimum. . . . Clear thinking is the key to clear writing.

This post will exceed your expectations

2011-12-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-21T17:34:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-21T08:26:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-19T05:52:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-02T06:10:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-16T07:50:00.001-05:00

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?*

2011-10-15T06:07:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-10-05T15:12:00.002-04:00

"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 ...

2011-10-02T17:03:00.002-04:00

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

2011-09-14T05:36:00.001-04:00

(American Digest)

Go ahead and aggravate me

2011-09-12T08:38:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-09-04T05:50:00.003-04:00

"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?

2011-08-19T10:53:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-19T10:15:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-08-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-07T09:52:00.002-04:00

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

-- William Butler Yeats

It's the little things

2011-07-03T08:18:00.002-04:00

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.

2011-07-03T08:17:00.002-04:00

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

2011-06-30T16:57:00.002-04:00

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

2011-06-13T18:23:00.002-04:00

"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

2011-05-21T16:08:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-08T09:48:00.002-04:00

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"?

2011-05-02T08:43:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-04-26T11:17:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-24T08:17:00.002-04:00

"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?

2011-04-20T14:25:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-13T09:30:00.002-04:00

(Thanks, Pat)

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

2011-04-13T09:27:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-08T06:16:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-08T06:14:00.002-04:00

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

2011-04-08T06:10:00.002-04:00

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!

2011-04-08T06:03:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-04-08T05:54:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-29T05:36:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-26T06:19:00.002-04:00

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?

2011-03-26T06:18:00.000-04:00

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

2011-03-26T06:15:00.002-04:00

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

2011-03-10T08:58:00.002-05:00

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

2011-03-05T16:31:00.000-05:00

"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?

2011-03-05T06:34:00.002-05:00

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

2011-03-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-27T06:13:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-25T18:31:00.000-05:00

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?

2011-02-24T17:21:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-23T18:20:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-23T06:31:00.000-05:00

"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

2011-02-22T08:50:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

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.

2011-02-17T09:32:00.002-05:00

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

2011-02-14T14:51:00.000-05:00

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

2011-02-02T08:24:00.002-05:00

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

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

A word for Washington

2011-01-31T06:13:00.002-05:00

Just when you think we've run out of words to describe the politicians in Washington, along comes:

trumpery / trump-êr-ee / noun

1. (Obsolete) Deception, fraud, or trickery.
2. Rubbish, junk.
3. Flashy but trashy finery in the home or on the body.

Does it get any better than this?

Dr. Goodword gives the history: The original meaning of this word, "deception", is now a bit dated and less frequently used but it explains how the word got into English. It was originally French tromper "to cheat, swindle, deceive". Once it entered English, though, as you can see, its meaning eventually dwindled to "nonsense". The similarity of this word to (to) trumpet explains its gravitation toward the sense of "trashy finery". Trumpery is unrelated to the trumping that goes on in many card games; that trump is an old mispronunciation of triumph!

What's in a sentence?

2011-01-29T16:51:00.002-05:00

"The form and rhythm of sentences communicates as much meaning as their factual content, whether we’re conscious of it or not. In 1863, when General Grant took the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last hindrance to free passage of Union supplies along the river, President Lincoln wrote in a letter to be read at a public meeting: “The father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” It’s a poem of a sentence, “The father of waters” and “unvexed to the sea” perfectly balanced on the unexpected pivot of “again goes” rather than “goes again”, and all in the service of a metaphor that figures the Union as an inevitable force and the Confederacy as a blight on nature, without mentioning either. If cadence had no content, “Union supplies lines are now clear” would have the same power."

-- Adam Haslett

A sweet word

2011-01-22T09:21:00.002-05:00

mellifluous / mê-li-flu-wês / adjective

1. Of speech: pleasant-sounding, beautiful, highly articulate, poetic.
2. Sweet as honey or sweetened with honey.

Robert Beard, PhD, linguistics, aka Dr. Goodword, writes:

This word amply demonstrates how we often confuse the senses. It originally referred to honey flowing over the tongue, but this word now refers more often to the sweetness of speech than to that of taste, in other words, speech as beautiful as honey is sweet. Its synonymous cousin, mellifluent, has an equally beautiful noun, mellifluence.

Mellifluous is itself one of the most mellifluous words in English; it is almost onomatopoetic. The image of today's word is a smooth flow of speech approaching poetry if not reaching it: "The poet inundated his audience in mellifluous waves of words." This term describes the ultimate goal of the translator: "The interpreter translated each sentence into mellifluous, idiomatic English that flowed drippingly from her tongue."

History: This word is the English makeover of Latin mellifluus "dripping with honey", based on mel "honey" + fluere "to flow". Latin mel and Greek meli "honey" come from the same root as French and Spanish miel "honey" and English mead "fermented honey". Flu- is a cognate of English flow and flu. The name of the disease, flu, is a clipping of Italian influenza "influence", from the days when diseases were believed to be the evil influence of celestial bodies.

A whole new strain of bad writing

2011-01-19T07:25:00.000-05:00

Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware, dissects this hypothetical bit of writing, which illustrates errors that are all too common these days:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

Here's what's wrong.

1. There should be no comma after "But."
2. The period after "Iron Man 2" should be inside the quotation marks around the title (which would be italicized in most publications, including The Chronicle).
3. No comma is needed after "movie."
4. "Its," not "their," is needed with "Weather Channel."
5. "Whomever" should be "whoever."
6. "Myself" should be "I."
7. "Girl that" should be "girl who"
8. "Gray" is the correct spelling, not "grey."
9. "Amongst" should be "among."
10. "One year anniversary" should be written as "one-year anniversary," but, really, "first anniversary."
11. It's a "Yankee," not "Yankees," game.

Read it all.

It's all lies, I tell you

2011-01-14T13:21:00.002-05:00

Last week Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, accused the new Republican leadership of being liars. Except he didn't mean to.

"As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member ... " he said. And:"I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years ... "

Trouble is, mendacity means 1. Untruthfulness, the tendency or habit of lying, deceiving, misrepresenting the truth. 2. A lie or falsehood.

Mendacity comes, Dr. Goodword writes, with an adjective, mendacious "untruthful, lying" and an adverb, mendaciously. It may also be combined with the second element of another Good Word, stultiloquent, creating mendaciloquent, meaning "speaking with a forked tongue", that is to say, "in lies".

So it's a pretty good word to have around Congress.

Here's its history: Mendacity was taken from the French reworking of Latin mendacitas "mendacity", a word derived from mendax (mendac-s) "lying, deceitful". This word came from an ancestor of mendum "fault, defect", whose root we see in amend, which became simply mend in English, and mendicant "beggar". The only relative of this word I could find outside Latin is Sanskrit minda "physical defect". So it seems to be an Indo-European word that did not spread far over the course of history.

Who needs verbs when you've got nouns?

2011-01-12T09:25:00.000-05:00

At the start of my career, my editor in The Associated Press bureau in New Orleans would leave little notes for me critiquing my work on the overnight shift.

One I recall: "Is 'host' a verb?" Maybe. What about critiquing in the first sentence? Maybe.

Anthony Gardner explores the growing use of nouns as verbs.

Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.

No trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon.

New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for things which did not previously exist, he writes.

We “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” our e-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook —only, in some cases, to “defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb, first intransitive and then transitive (an American friend boasts that he “blogged hand-wringers” about a subject that upset him). Conversely, verbs such as “twitter” and “tweet” have been transformed into nouns—though this process is far less common.

Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new.

Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

Feel free to email or tweet this post.

Twain would have loved it

2011-01-08T08:22:00.000-05:00

Twain and friend John Lewis, 1903.

The literary world is in a fine and dandy kerfuffle over a new edition of Mark Twain's Huck Finn that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave" and the word "Injun" with Indian.

Oh would the old man have loved the publicity!

Here are the facts, as we know them, from The New York Times.

A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has generated much controversy because it will replace the word "nigger," which occurs 219 times in the book, with "slave." (The edition also substitutes "Indian" for "injun.") Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, proposed the idea to the publisher because he believes the pervasive use of that word makes it harder for students to read or absorb the book. In an introduction to the new edition, he wrote, “even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.”

I'd give you my opinion, but why should you care? Instead, let me quote a few of the scholars posting on this at the Mark Twain Forum.

First, Twain expert Terrell Dempsey. A lawyer and long time resident of Hannibal, Mo., Twain's hometown, Terrell is the author of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World.

I am certainly no literary scholar or educator, but I do know a bit about slavery in the upper Mississippi Valley from 1840 until 1865. If one is to understand slavery, one must understand the dehumanization of the enslaved by the master class. The word nigger certainly does not equal the word slave. Slavery ended in Missouri in January of 1865. The niggerization of a substantial portion of the population continued for another sad century denying people social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. The word nigger still floats around Northeast Missouri. "Nigger work" is used by the rougher sort of white people today to indicate hard dirty work. Asbestos siding made to look like bricks is referred to as "nigger brick." The latter has roots in a whole class of cheap goods manufactured and sold to the master class for use by slaves. Of course, it is still used by some to refer to African Americans. Though today most whites do not use these terms in the presence of non-whites, I still hear them from my clients from time to time.

I think that Twain understood exactly what he meant when he used the word "nigger." It certainly entailed far more than "slave." A slave could be freed, but the person remained a nigger. Surely we have progressed far enough that our students can discuss this concept. It is not necessary to whitewash the institution and clean up Twain. I understand the power of the word and I still wince when I hear it. However, it always strikes me as ironic when I hear my older non-white daughter use the word with her boyfriend (a practice she did not have until she moved to New York.) I think Gribben is taking a very wrong and misleading step with his sanitized Huck.

My friend Brent Colley, an historian of Redding, Ct., where Twain spent his final years, has this to say:

This issue is that Twain used those words for a reason. He was holding a mirror up to society... post-civil war society ... and shouting "THIS IS WRONG!"

As Twain Scholar Dr. Cindy Lovell notes:
"In "Huck Finn" Twain pokes us with a sharp stick, makes us squirm, makes us highly uncomfortable. And it's effective."

This will make this reply super long... but it says it well because it's from Twain himself. I see it as proof that he wrote this book, this way, for a reason:

"In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime; carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible--there were good commercial reasons for it--but that it should exist; did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag; bobtail of the community; in a passionate; uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck; his father the worthless loafer should feel it; approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience--the unerring monitor--can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early; stick to it."

I'm almost certain that Twain somehow masterminded this controversy. After all, he instructed that his autobiography could not be published for 100 years after his death. Anything to sell books.

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy: making reality convincing

2011-01-06T18:58:00.000-05:00

"Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

-- Leo Tolstoy

Some words of the year

2011-01-04T17:51:00.000-05:00

as compiled by The New York Times.

coffice: In South Korea, a coffee shop habitually used as an office by customers, who mooch its space, electricity, Wi-Fi and other resources. Presumably, they pay for the coffee.

halfalogue: Half of a conversation, like an overheard phone call. The term was coined in the research paper “Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech is More Distracting” in the journal Psychological Science.

sofalize: A British marketing term created for people who prefer to stay home and communicate with others electronically.

mansplainer: A man compelled to explain or give an opinion about everything — especially to a woman. He speaks, often condescendingly, even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or even if it’s none of his business. Old term: a boor.

social graph: The structure of personal networks, who people know and how they know them, especially online. The term probably came from the internal lingo at Facebook, but it has spread widely among technology companies.

Itching for a good fight/write

2011-01-03T14:43:00.000-05:00

Boxing. You can press the language out of it. The sweathouse of the body. The moving machinery of ligaments. The intimate fray of rope. The men in their archaic stances like anatomy illustrations from an old-time encyclopedia. The moment in a fight when the punches slow down and the opponents watch each other like time-lapse photographs—the sweat frozen in midair, the blood still spinning, the maniacal grin like the teeth themselves have gone bare-knuckle.

Thus begins Colum McCann's delightful essay on writers' fascination with boxing.

Writers love boxing—even if they can’t box. And maybe writers love boxing especially because they can’t box. The language is all cinema and violence: the burst eye socket, the ruined cartilage, the dolphin punch coming up from the depths.

Language allows the experience, and what you have with a fight is what you have with writing, and they each become metaphors for each other—the ring, the page; the punch, the word; the choreography, the keyboard; the feint, the suggestion; the bucket, the wastebasket; the sweat, the edit; the pretender, the critic; the bell, the deadline. There’s the showoff shuffle, the head spin, the mingled blood on your gloves, the spitting your teeth up at the end of the day.

Literature re-creates the language of the epic. And what’s more epic and mythological than a scrap? For those of us who can’t fight, we still want to be able to step into a fighter’s body. We want to walk off woozy to the corner and have our faces slapped a little bit, then suddenly get up to dance, and hear the crowd roar, and step out once more with a little dazzle.

Read all of it.

Do you suffer from molassitude?

2010-12-30T16:36:00.000-05:00

"Lassitude" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Dr. Goodword enlightens us on similar words for a familiar state of being. Taken together, he writes, these words provide a nice little lexical toolkit for dividing inactivity into several more precise senses.

lassitude (læs-ê-tyud) means:

1. Lethargy, torpor, listlessness, a lack of energy, spirit, vitality.
2. Apathy, a lack of interest in things.

Lethargy is a drowsiness that interferes with alertness.
Torpor is a deeper drowsiness, right on the edge of sleep or unconsciousness.
Listlessness suggests more of a disinclination to move or be active rather than a change of mental state.
Lassitude is more of a lack of motivation to act.
Molassitude would be the slowest sort of lassitude—if only it were a word!

Lassitude, the good doctor informs, comes from Old French which inherited it from Latin lassitudo, the noun from adjective lassus "weary". This word is based on a stem (las-) that goes back to Proto-Indo-European *le- "let go, slacken" plus a suffix -d, *led-, that also gave English let and late, not to mention German lassen "let". With the suffix -n, it pops up in Russian as len' "laziness", in Latvian as lens "slow", and Latin lenis "soft, gentle", which is also at the bottom of English lenient.

Victorian novelists would have been good shrinks

2010-12-22T17:55:00.000-05:00

As it turns out, one set of 19^th-century writers had insights into human nature so nuanced and profound they still ring true today.

“Victorian authors do seem to be good intuitive psychologists,” concludes a research team led by psychologist John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. According to a large-scale study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the authors’ depiction of the personality traits, mating strategies and goal-oriented behavior of their characters “largely mirrors the view of those variables as revealed by modern research.”

Hundreds of raters assessed, among other things, the degree to which characters reflect five essential personality traits, including “extraverted, enthusiastic,” “critical, quarrelsome,” “dependable, self-disciplined” and “calm, emotionally stable.”

By crunching this data, the researchers created psychological profiles of these fictional characters. For example, the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre scored “very low on extraversion, well above average on agreeableness and emotional stability, and high on conscientiousness and openness to experience.”

Still fascinated with Twain

2010-12-19T09:20:00.000-05:00

The humorist Garrison Keillor has written a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I, which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes.

It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair: “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

In cataloging the passages he uses as evidence of the vacuousness of the book, Keillor inadvertently (or perhaps advertently?) makes the point that even he is interested enough in the minutiae of the great man's life that he would read these words and then produce a long piece reciting them.

So you want to be a journalist

2010-12-15T18:40:00.001-05:00

(Thanks, Ed)

Want to write like Mark Twain?

2010-12-14T07:44:00.000-05:00

Use plain, simple language. In a letter to D.W. Bowser in 1880 he says:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Going forward, let's not say "going forward"

2010-12-12T07:07:00.000-05:00

The excellent Johnson blog at The Economist takes up business cliches, including "going forward."

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:
I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.
or
Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.
Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:
“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).
(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Try this with peanut butter in your mouth

2010-12-11T13:22:00.000-05:00

Okay, boys and girls:

I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.

Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons.

She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.

In the 19th century, tongue twisters were developed by experts in elocution as a means of mastering proper enunciation.

One practitioner was Lionel Logue, who trained as an elocutionist in his native Australia, and from that work he began taking on students for lessons in “speech correction.” Along with the tongue twisters, Logue was known to draw on other time-honored elocutionary exercises, like having a stutterer shout vowel sounds out of an open window for long periods.

Logue worked with Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), who was crippled by a stammer that made public speaking a devilish chore.

Logue prescribed a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II.

Perhaps there was more involved in his exercises.

Few, if any, of Logue’s linguistic techniques, from the tongue twisters to the word substitutions, would be used by modern speech pathologists, according to Caroline Bowen, an Australian speech therapist who maintains a Web site with information on Logue. But for Logue, the focus on vocal mechanics was most likely just a means to an end, enforcing a bond of trust with his royal patient.

Logue may not have “cured” the stammer, but by instilling a sense of confidence and chipping away at Bertie’s anxieties, he made it possible for the king to untwist his tongue and find his voice at a moment when his country most needed to hear him speak.

Yonder, yes yonder, yonder

2010-12-09T17:46:00.000-05:00

Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest points to this video and says, "Brilliant is the only word for this smashing exposition of the power of the English language. Richard Burton races through this poem with unbelievable speed. A technical tour de force..."

The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to keep--is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--
Yonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Know your airplane lingo

2010-12-08T19:14:00.002-05:00

Here are some terms pilots and flight attendants use.

Blue juice: The water in the lavatory toilet. “There’s no blue juice in the lav.”

Crotch watch: The required check to make sure all passengers have their seat belts fastened. Also: “groin scan.”

Crumb crunchers: Kids. “We’ve got a lot of crumb crunchers on this flight.”

Deadheading: When an airline employee flies as a passenger for company business.

Gate lice: The people who gather around the gate right before boarding so they can be first on the plane. “Oh, the gate lice are thick today.”

George: Autopilot. “I’ll let George take over.”

Landing lips: Female passengers put on their “landing lips” when they use their lipstick just before landing.

Pax: Passengers.

Spinners: Passengers who get on late and don’t have a seat assignment, so they spin around looking for a seat.

Two-for-once special: The plane touches down on landing, bounces up, then touches down again.

Working the village: Working in coach.

Jane Austen is hip

2010-12-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

A watercolour and pencil sketch of Jane Austen

It's remarkable the Mark Twain continues to draw the crowds 100 years after his death, but here's another infatuation with a long-gone writer.

Jane Austen, the English novelist best known for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen's tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen's work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."

The reading level of most Americans

2010-12-06T12:01:00.017-05:00

You're probably not writing credit card agreements, but this tells you something.

Credit card agreements are written on average at a 12th grade reading level, making them not understandable to four out of five adults, according to a CreditCards.com analysis of all the agreements offered by major card issuers in the United States.

The average American adult reads at a ninth-grade level and readability experts recommend important information -- such as credit card agreements -- be written at that level

"Credit card contracts and other such documents are written in dense prose for a reason: So that the customer will NOT be able to understand it," notes Roy Peter Clark, a national expert on writing and a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. "I may be cynical, but I don't think their writing strategies are accidental, the collateral damage of a bureaucratic mindset. I think those writers know exactly what they are doing."

"Experts advise that anything for the public should be written at the ninth grade level," William DuBay, an author and readability consultant says. "If it's about health and safety, it should be written on the fifth grade level."

Is your writing plangent?

2010-12-05T08:15:00.000-05:00

plangent / PLAN-junt / adjective

having a loud reverberating sound

having an expressive and especially plaintive quality

The campers were awoken by the plangent howl of a coyote off in the distance.

"Mr. Packard is the finest Candide I’ve seen, singing with rich,plangent tone and acting with an un-self-conscious sincerity that never falters." — From a theater review by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, October 27, 2010

Merriam-Webster: "Plangent" adds power to our poetry and prose: the pounding of waves, the beat of wings, the tolling of a bell, the throbbing of the human heart, a lover's knocking at the door — all have been described as plangent.

The word "plangent" traces back to the Latin verb "plangere," which has two meanings. The first of those meanings, "to strike or beat," was sometimes used by Latin speakers in reference to striking one's breast in grief. This, in turn, led to the verb's second meaning: "to lament." The sense division carried over to the Latin adjective "plangens" and then into English, giving us the two distinct meanings of "plangent": "pounding" and "expressive of melancholy."

What synonym of "plangent" rhymes with "soulful"? The answer is …

Concentration, not inspiration

2010-12-03T17:23:00.000-05:00

Salman Rushdie says he doesn't rely on inspiration.

It’s concentration more and it is to do with developing skills of concentration and I think that is something which, well a few things I think about being a writer that you get better at with time. There are things that you perhaps don’t get better at. Energy is something which maybe declines, but I think concentration, focus, the ability to shut out the extraneous and focus on what you’re doing. I think the more you do it the better you get at it.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You’re just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

I think inspiration is nonsense, actually. Every so often I mean like one day in 20 or something, you will have a day when the work seems to just flow out of you and you feel lucky. I mean you feel and often surprised and you don’t quite know why it is working like that. And on days like that it’s easy to believe in a kind of inspiration, but most of the time it’s not like that.

Most of the time it’s a lot slower and more exploratory and it’s more a process of discovering what you have to do than just simply have it arrive like a flame over your head. So I do think it’s to do with concentration, not inspiration. It’s to do with paying attention and I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Two papers in one!

2010-12-02T10:38:00.000-05:00

From Best of The Web Today:

"The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."--New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009

"The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."--New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010

The hard wiring of story

2010-11-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

Our narrative engines

Neuroscientist John Bickle and philosophy of science student Sean Keating describe how the brain's narrative machine works.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our "selves" through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on "split-brain" patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialised for intelligent behaviour and hypothesis formation.

It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviours and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialised cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.

Gazzaniga also thinks that this left-hemisphere "interpreter" creates the unified feeling of an autobiographical, personal, unique self. "The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified, and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our lives. These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography," he writes.

The language areas of the left hemisphere are well placed to carry out these tasks. They draw on information in memory (amygdalo-hippocampal circuits, dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) and planning regions (orbitofrontal cortices). As neurologist Jeffrey Saver has shown, damage to these regions disrupts narration in a variety of ways, ranging from unbounded narration, in which a person generates narratives unconstrained by reality, to denarration, the inability to generate any narratives, external or internal.

One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca's area. But also active was Wernicke's area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain's speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.

Mark Twain's thoughts on Thanksgiving

2010-11-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

Mark Twain's 70th birthday party

In November of 1905, the month he turned seventy, Macy Halford writes in The New Yorker, Mark Twain was exceedingly famous; the nation was a-tingle with affection for its most humorous and most American American treasure, and all the more so because his birthday that year fell on the most American of holidays: Thursday, November 30th, Thanksgiving day.

In the first volume of his autobiography, Twain describes the efforts of his editor, George Harvey to plan a celebration:

It arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians.

Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due.

But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

Twain, Halford writes, by this time had travelled a long way—from the banks of the Mississippi to a mansion on Fifth Avenue—and had become, as New Yorkers will, unrelenting in his agendas, and brilliantly so:

Harvey went to Washington to try to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing, arguments which ought to persude him even to put off Thanksgiving Day a whole year—on the ground that nothing had happened during the previous twelvemonth except several vicious and inexcusable wars, and King Leopold of Belgium's usual annual slaughters and robberies in the Congo State, together with the Insurance revelations in New York, which seemed to establish the fact that if there was an honest man left in the United States, there was only one, and we wanted to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Clemens.

RIP: James J. Kilpatrick

2010-11-27T09:02:00.000-05:00

We lost four noted men of words in 2010, as Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. One was James J. Kilpatrick, a newspaper columnist. Zimmer:

James J. Kilpatrick (b. 1920) had a distaste for pompous and hackneyed language, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion vociferously — no surprise to anyone who read his prickly political commentary or saw his rants in the “60 Minutes” debate segment “Point-Counterpoint.”

“When I conclude that a particular usage is execrable, I can execrate at the top of my lungs,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1984 The Writer’s Art, also the title of his long-running syndicated column.

The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick’s pugnaciousness and iconoclasm. After Garner published the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998, the two men found that they were kindred spirits in language matters.

But they didn’t see eye to eye on everything: they had an ongoing debate over beginning sentences with “and” or “but” (Garner was in favor of the practice; Kilpatrick dead-set against it). Ultimately, as befits the author of “The Writer’s Art,” Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.

Some words never die

2010-11-23T17:58:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the unearthing of a 17th-century text, we can now learn the sorts of word-sounds heard on the streets of London by the likes of John Milton, Andrew Marvell and probably even Shakespeare himself, Alexander Theroux writes in The Wall Street Journal.

This was the first book dedicated to English slang words, the lingo of sharpsters, shills and vagabonds. Originally printed as A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, it has been newly released as The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699.

Drinking and its effects are heavily represented. A drunk ("pot-valiant") might be described as "cup shot" or "half seas over" and labeled a "swill-belly" or "Malmesey-nose." A "fuddle" is an "excellent tipple." As for "rum," it was once an adjective with a positive meaning, as in "rum-bluffer" (a jolly host) and "rum-bung" (a full purse). The late 17th century was not an age for delicacy. The Dutch were derisively called "butter-boxes." A "foul Jade" was an ordinary coarse woman. A phrase for women in general was "mutton-in-long-coats." The colorful words for prostitute could make up a dictionary in itself.

There are hundreds of words here that have rarely been used since, although this dictionary keeps them brightly alive: "tarum" (for milk) and "fubbs" (a fond word for children). But many old words have kept their meanings to this day: "shop-lift" and "hen-peckt," for instance, and "grinders" for teeth.

"Slang," Theroux writes, "is eternal."

Do you have a chrestomathy?

2010-11-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

chrestomathy / kreh-STAH-muh-thee / noun

a selection of passages used to help learn a language
a volume of selected passages or stories of an author

Merriam-Webster: the Greeks had the usefulness of knowledge in mind when they created "chrestomathy" from their adjective "chrēstos," which means "useful," and the verb "manthanein," which means "to learn."

How John McPhee became a writer

2010-11-21T09:51:00.000-05:00

John McPhee has published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism.

How did he become a writer? From an interview with Peter Hessler in The Paris Review:

When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing?

There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.

Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.

Your call is very important to us

2010-11-20T14:03:00.000-05:00

Right.

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, has an amusing look at this all too familiar phrase.

NEAL WHITMAN of Literal-Minded:
“Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
I stayed on the line, cleaning up the kitchen one-handed while I waited. By the time I was speaking to a real person, I had listened long enough to have heard the message at least five more times... It was really starting to get to me …
Did you get what was starting to get to Mr Whitman? I'd have said the absurd lie that "your call is very important to us" repeated over and over while you are inconvenienced by being kept on hold. But he noticed something else that I missed the first time:
You’re missing the final in!, I kept thinking... you have more than one option for what to do with the in. You can leave it stranded at the end, the same way as you’d leave it at the end of the house I grew up in. Or you can take the in along with order, and put them both at the front of the relative clause.
But you shouldn't just abandon it. This phenomenon was noticed as far back as Ernest Gowers, the usage-book writer who called it preposition "cannibalism" in 1954. Mr Whitman notices that the preposition is more likely to get cannibalised by its exact likeness: the in in "in the order" eats the in that should be found in "~~in which~~ it was received". It sounds wrong to our ears, it seems, to hear in twice so close together, so much so that some people don't notice the preposition sitting there cleaning its teeth after devouring its twin.

Everyday expressions

2010-11-18T15:10:00.002-05:00

(Thanks, Lainey)

Everyone's writing a novel. Why?

2010-11-17T18:31:00.000-05:00

Novelist Alix Christie figures it this way:

A quarter of a million new novels are published annually across the globe, 100,000 of them in English. This represents, in turn, a quarter, maybe, of the manuscripts that agents try to hawk. Agents, as all writers know, take only a small proportion of the work they’re sent, perhaps a tenth. Ten million scribes in search of a reader may not be so tall a tale.

So what keeps her going?

I have been helped by a lesson I learned years ago, apprenticed in a printer’s shop (a subject I returned to for my second novel, about the birth of printing and medieval guilds). I’ve come to see how helpful it can be to see ourselves as striving toward some mastery in craftsmen’s terms. The guilds have always known that it takes years to become skilled at a craft. The standard term was seven, split into years of formal training and then the “wander years”. Learning from mistakes has always been an inevitable part of the education.

What helps keep me going, though, is literature itself. With its heft, its moral purpose and its beauty, it is a counterweight to our increasingly flighty and commercial world. And in this, I’m very far from all alone. Most writers gird themselves with courage from like-minded souls. My writers’ group, my agent and the fellow writers I share work with all provide more than an eagle eye. They offer succour and seriousness of purpose, and a shared sense that writing is the most intense and most important brainwork that we do.

I have never forgotten a comment made at a workshop by Karen Joy Fowler, a wonderful, successful writer. “I was neither the most talented nor the most clever writer in my writing group,” she told us. “But I was the one who stuck with it.” When things feel especially bleak, this becomes my mantra.

"It is an act of faith," she writes. "Each day we legions of the unknown, we ten million, rise and face the blankness of the page. And in the painful act of making worlds, we make ourselves."

Christie was a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a finalist in Southwest Review's 2010 Meyerson Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Voices, "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn" (from Foolscap Press) and Southwest Review.)

You can't refudiate the dictionary

2010-11-16T18:34:00.000-05:00

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary have awarded the Sarah Palin the high-brow distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release today, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

Lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

In a followup tweet, Palin said : "Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!

Albert Einstein: imagination

2010-11-16T18:27:00.002-05:00

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."

-- Albert Einstein

Finding a name for the web

2010-11-14T09:59:00.000-05:00

Tim Berners-Lee

Ben Zimmer describes the origin of web to refer to the World Wide Web in an interesting piece in The New York Times.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, came up with the term, but not without some juggling.

In 1990, writing a second proposal for his concept, he came up with the name Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.”

Mine of Information might seem “too egocentric” when treated as an acronym, MOI, French for “me.” The Information Mine could be seen as “even more egocentric” based on its acronym: TIM, Berners-Lee’s first name.

Finally, Berners-Lee came up with a three-word name that suitably described the global reach of the system they were envisioning: World Wide Web.

He and a colleague considered it temporary and planned to find something better. They never did.

In the original title, the three words were run together as WorldWideWeb, but they would soon separate it into World Wide Web (despite the fact that worldwide is best treated as a single word), underscoring the alliteration.

How to abbreviate the name was problematic from the beginning. “Friends at CERN gave me a hard time, saying it would never take off,” Berners-Lee wrote in his memoir, “especially since it yielded an acronym that was nine syllables long when spoken”: double-u, double-u, double-u.

“The W3 worldview is of documents referring to each other by links,” Berners-Lee and his colleague wrote. “For its likeness to a spider’s construction, this world is called the Web.”

That single spidery word, capitalized or uncapitalized, would bear countless offspring. The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary catalogs some of the most common web compounds, like web address, web browser, webcam, webcast, web crawler, web developer, web design, webinar, weblog, webmaster, webmistress, web page, web publisher, web server, web site, web surfer and webzine.

Next time you fret about a writing feed, consider: Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation.

Writing online is different

2010-11-11T14:54:00.000-05:00

Marc Ambinder, the politics editor of The Atlantic, is giving up blogging after five years. Here are his observations on writing for a blog and writing for print.

Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter's insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.

Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this.

As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can't really be a reporter without it. I don't care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it's no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called "Marc Ambinder" that people read because it's "Marc Ambinder," rather than because it's good or interesting.

Never too late to write

2010-11-08T12:30:00.002-05:00

Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, looks at writers who were still going in their later years.

For every J.D. Salinger, who published “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32, there is a Mark Twain, who brought out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at 49. “Huck Finn,” Hemingway said, is the foundation for all modern American fiction, and I agree.

Alan Furst, the literary spy writer who produces atmospheric thrillers every other year or so, is at the top of his game at 69. When he moved to France in 1987 he had yet to make a mark. “I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,” he told John Marshall in a Daily Beast piece last year.

Nobody was a better American essayist in the 1970s and 80s than Joan Didion. But the writerly sprint culminating in her late-years memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” was breathtaking. She finished the book just days after her 70th birthday.

My favorite septuagenarian inspiration is Norman Maclean, who published the most beautiful,
word-perfect novel of the American West, “A River Runs Through It,” when he was 74. And then he had a second book in him, “Young Men and Fire,” published after his death at 87. Old, seemingly doomed, and brilliant — a role model for all second-act aces.

T.S. Eliot: the art of self-promotion

2010-11-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

T.S. Eliot

Joseph Epstein has an interesting essay on T.S. Eliot in Commentary, in which he notes that, "The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day."

Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.”

He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.”

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.”

He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.”

Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make.

Stephen King and ebooks

2010-11-05T14:50:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg interviewed King for The Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts.

Do we get the same reading experience with e-books?
Stephen King: I don't know. I think it changes the reading experience, that it's a little more ephemeral. And it's tougher if you misplace a character. But I downloaded one 700-page book onto my Kindle that I was using for research. It didn't have an index, but I was able to search by key words. And that's something no physical book can do.

What about people who love physical books?
I'm one of them. I have thousands of books in my house. In a weird way, it's embarrassing. I recently downloaded Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants," but I also bought a copy to put on the shelf. I want books as objects. It's crazy, but there are people who collect stamps, too.

Is the future of publishing all digital?
It's a hard subject to get a handle on. People like myself who grew up with books have a prejudice towards them. I think a lot of critics would argue that the Kindle is the right place for a lot of books that are disposable, books that are read on the plane. That might include my own books, if not all, then some.

How much time do you spend reading digitally?
It's approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell's "Faceless Killers" and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.

What's going to happen to bookstores?
The bookstores are empty. It's sad. I remember a time when Fifth Avenue was lousy with bookstores. They're all gone.