I’ve visited the Motivated Grammar blog here before. Intelligent posts, interestingly written. Plus, a dead-on informational page, simply titled “Arguments.” By way of introduction:
There are a lot of arguments bandied about as rationales for any given grammar prescription. Most of them are spurious, but a few have some merit. . . . the best way to refute a prescriptivist’s argument is to simultaneously show them that their argument is ill-founded, but even if they persist with that ill-founded argument, they’re still wrong.
My favorite summation in the list of Arguments: “Language is not math.” To which I cheer, “Hear! Hear!” (in rhyme, no less).
This is (in case anyone is confused) a language blog. But for the moment, let’s stop doing the English and start doing the math. From a recent news story:
Mathematicians in California could be in line for a $100,000 prize (£54,000) for finding a new prime number which has 13 million digits.
Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.
Not that I’m truly fretting about it, but let’s consider the goal of this contest. Was the goal set out as “Find a new prime number” (with this story reporting the successful discovery of one that involved 13 million digits)? Or was it set out “Find a new prime number with 13 million digits, no more and no less” (which the California math geeks have discovered)? I suspect the former—in which case, a little comma would have clarified.
“A new prime number which has 13 million digits,” without a comma after number, seems restrictive in the way that saying “a new prime number that has 13 million digits” would restrict. I think I perceive it this way because of the function of sound and timing a comma introduces in such situations, in that restrictive clauses beginning with that aren’t preceded with a comma, while nonrestrictive clauses beginning with which are.
I say, couldn’t a number with 13 million digits have been able to lend a comma to that sentence? Not one?
By the way, a bit of word history that you will see on the bullshitternet soon because I’m making it up: The term “prime number” derives from the financial world. It is created by adding 1 to the “sub-prime number”—the number of dollars involved in the recently proposed government bailout of collapsing sub-prime-deluded banks, which also involves 13 million digits.
I can add no greater praise to Paul Newman than what fans, critics and colleagues have already eloquently delivered. I have rarely used the phrase “American treasure.” I heartily apply that phrase to Newman.
Two thoughts related to both Paul Newman movies and language use come to mind:
The movie was one of the biggest hits of 1967 and included a tagline, delivered one time by Newman and one time by prison warden Strother Martin, that helped define the generation gap, “What we’ve got here is (a) failure to communicate.”
At first, not remembering the movie precisely, I thought the insertion of “(a)” was some sort of quibbling, but the writer was actually aggregating two versions of the quote. Strother Martin, the chain-gang Captain, first says “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Paul Newman as Luke, far later in the film, says “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” I don’t know if the placement/nonplacement of the indefinite article was intentional, but I like to think that it is—transforming the general, euphemistic failure to communicate early in the film to a specific, climactic failure. (Based on the novel by Donn Pearce, by the by.)
Second, the powerful writing of Nobody’s Fool. Here I’m talking about both the Paul Newman film and the Richard Russo novel it’s based on. For an exercise in artful condensation, compare the novel with the film product, which artfully compresses incidents and characters to fit a movie timeframe. Treat yourself to the novel; treat yourself to the film. Both are excellent. I’ve not had the pleasure of enjoying another Russo-Newman pairing in the the novel and the video versions of Empire Falls, but I believe I shall now stop this little bit of blog-writing to engage in that pleasure.
In another bizarre confluence of the wordie and the foodie in me (and, as it turns out, the Blondie in me, as well), I’ll note that one of my prized possessions, hanging in my kitchen, is the original artwork of the May 27 1961 Blondie daily newspaper comic daily panel. This installment has early ’60s kitchen kitch splashed all over it, with Blondie wearing heels, and an apron over a flowing dress, and son Alexander coming home from school with a dress shirt whose sleeves are rolled up nearly to the point where he might tuck a cigarette pack in them. James Dean, he ain’t. Alexander is trotting a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of unsliced bread to one of those kitchen tables with a silverware drawer on one side.
The ’60s were so long ago. By that I mean the 1360s, the time of Chaucer (and no, the topic has not veered from Blondie). Wordie, meet Blondie . . . in the form of the Japes for Owre Tymes blog. That’s not modern misspelling; that’s Middle English. Japes for Owre Tymes is a delightfully arcane blog that each day translates a modern cartoon into Middle English. I wonder what the Middle English translation of “thought balloon” is?
Including Blondie in this Middle-English-a-Day endeavor is appropriate, because the strip has been around since 1930—and in comic strip terms, 1930 is the equivalent of Middle English.
Now, let’s take cartoons back to the origins of English: Old English. And we don’t even have to translate. Here’s an installment of The Captain and the Kids (more commonly known as The Katzenjammer Kids):
On the right, look at those words obviously derived from the Germanic speech of the violent, primitive tribes who spoke the very first versions of English—the Angles and the Saxons. On the left, look at those glyphs from some ancient predecessor of English’s great-grandpappy, Proto-Indo-European. Oh, a language lesson unto itself, all in the guise of Turn of That Century comic child intimidation.
Well, maybe not precisely. Anyway, back to Japes for Owre Tymes. Check out the most recent installment for an interesting lesson on the disconnect between language and reality in the form of The Family Circus (and check out Comics Curmudgeon for additional insight on the very same topic).
(By the way, in the early 1360s, Chaucer would have been in his late teens. I wonder if he rolled his sleeves up for his packs of death sticks?)
I like the goals, the coverage and the common sense over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, a blog devoted to setting folks straight regarding misconceptions and falsehoods related to history, economics, education and other topics. The name comes from the popular “fact” (promulgated by various means, but now certainly fueled by the bullshitternet) that Millard Fillmore was the first President to enjoy a bathtub in the White House, when in fact this nugget of noninformation was first mentioned in a humor piece by H.L. Mencken. Such delusions must be demystified, and if I ever get time, I’ll write a book about misconceptions about the English language and call it Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Oh, wait.
. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.
For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?
This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.
There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.
What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:
I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.
Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.
And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:
I shan’t look for more examples, either. But in case the precise use of will and shall confuses you, consider this 1900 visual guide presented by Motivated Grammar:
To me, this kind of looks like a Buck Rogers decoder ring, or a map of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. Check out the example in the upper left: “Because what must be will be” (the future’s not ours to see! Que sera, sera, which I believe to be the official elevator music between at least two Circles of Hell).
Sometimes it’s best to say what you mean when claiming that someone didn’t mean what he said. Reacting to criticism of John McCain’s recent assertion that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, Sarah Palin told Fox “News”:
It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Sen. McCain chose to use because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy.
Palin used the word verbiage to mean “wording” or “phrasing,” and dictionaries do allow that such meanings might apply. But the first meaning, and very much a prevalent and powerful meaning, of verbiage is (and I’ll leave it to the apolitical—I think—Oxford English Dictionary: “Wording of a superabundant or superfluous character, abundance of words without necessity or without much meaning; excessive wordiness.” Myself, I remember the meaning by pretending that verbiage is a contraction of “verbal garbage.”
So, is it unfair for me to attack Palin’s easily misinterpreted use of verbiage (just because that’s what the word usually means)? If so, consider me unfair. One would think that people in the public eye might give a bit more concentration on carefully choosing their verbiage when defending another’s verbiage.
Wake up, kiddies. Time to open your parens (short for parentheses in the publishing world) under the punctuation tree. But remember, this day, some of Brohaugh’s important punctuation rules:
Use exclamation points sparingly. As I’ve often said, two exclamation points side by side resemble the crutches that they are.
Always jam a hyphen into the anal-retentive. As I’ve mentioned before, the slogan “There is a hyphen in anal-retentive” (which persnickitors know well, as many of them walk as if the hyphen is firmly placed in personal regions) is available on T-shirts and other paraphernalia at nationalpunctuationday.com.
Ignore persnickitors who demand elliptical adherence to the rule that ellipses are used only to indicate deleted words. Punctuation began as a timing device . . . cheer the beauty of ellipses as a timing element, particularly when you want a sentence to trail off with an unstated implication . . .
Adhere to the rule that “Apostrophe use must be organic.” The technical use of the apostrophe is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The aggregation of protoplasm and chlorophyll-grains on the cell-walls adjacent to other cells, as opposed to epistrophe when they collect on the free cell-walls.” So when a persnickitor screams about it’s as a possessive, just open to the biggest dictionary in the world and point to this page that . . . oh, sorry, I was looking at the wrong page.
Remember that colons are poorly stacked ellipses. The third spilled ellipsis rolled around until it stopped, and became a period. None of this is true and has nothing to do with punctuation, but the idea is fun to remember, anyway.
Use quotation to, um, quote. Quotation marks quote and quotation marks mock in varying degrees. Quotation marks do not shout.
Ponder upon the fact that slash marks are technically known as “virgules.” People who point this out are technically known as “language geeks.” (Doesn’t a virgule sound like an evil supernatural creature in a Laurell Hamilton novel? They could be supernatural slashers! . . . )
Always punctuate National Punctuation Day with a ® symbol. Cuz.
Never start a sentence with a comma. Except for sometimes.
As regular readers (or perhaps more accurately, reader, singular) of this blog might infer, I’m a foodie as well as a wordie. A barbecue-competition judge for nearly 20 years, a man who once built a house that a friend described as a “three-bedroom kitchen,” and the self-promoting author of The Grill of Victory: Hot Competition on the Barbecue Circuit, I appreciate passion for food and for words about food.
On this National Punctuation Day Eve, can there be any better folding in (cooking technical phrase, that) of those passions than this delightful post, in which Karen the SoupAddict notes, “my tomatoes and I have started a punctuation scrapbook to the mark (ahem) the day”?
For lots of wry and realistic passion about food, for a snap better than that from a freshly picked green bean (I can indulge in such analogies because I grew up on a Wisconsin farm), and for your comrade-in-spirit-of-making-fun-of-this-blog’s-author, enjoy SoupAddict’s Blog.
(I suspect SoupKaren is now going to curse herself for teaching me as much HTML as she did . . .)
I spotted and camera-phoned the sign below in a . . . umm, OK, it was a friend of mine in the liquor store, and he was sober at the time (honest!)—though the writer and proofreader of the sign apparently were not.
This inventive product from Coors is apparently for the extreme couch potato. Beer, and then no reason to have to move once it’s processed:
. 
, by the by.)
and 
it’s based on. For an exercise in artful condensation, compare the novel with the film product, which artfully compresses incidents and characters to fit a movie timeframe. Treat yourself to the novel; treat yourself to the film. Both are excellent. I’ve not had the pleasure of enjoying another Russo-Newman pairing in the 
and the 
versions of Empire Falls, but I believe I shall now stop this little bit of blog-writing to engage in that pleasure.
. Oh, wait.
, I appreciate passion for food and for words about food.
