05.31.08
Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, spelling at 7:00 am by Bill Brohaugh
Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.
Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:
We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.
Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)
Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.
I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.
Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.
Shameless Plug Alert: For some personal thoughts on spelling bees and why I suck at them, read this sample from my recently published book, in odd coincidence titled Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. End Shameless Plug Alert.
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05.29.08
Posted in redundancy, word history, wordiness, write tight at 6:24 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Noted and cringed at:
A screen shot from the home page of us.iams.com, web site of IAMS Pet Food:
Yes, up there just above the picture of the dog eating a small alien, it says
Learn About 7 Signs of Healthy Vitality
One would hope it would be healthy. Vital in its original use (first recorded in Chaucer, according to OED.com) meant “infused with the essence of life.” The noun form vitality, in use by the late 1600s, originally meant the life force itself. Of course, more figurative meanings ensued, but at its core, vitality is life and the ability to sustain life. The IAMS slogan that you see to the left of the picture makes perfect sense in that context, though perhaps that wasn’t the marketing department’s intent: “Life’s Better.” Better than the alternative? Well, one would assume yes, but let’s return to “Healthy Vitality.”
The phrase is not technically repetitive, though it is redundant (in that redundant means “unnecessary” or “superfluous” and not necessarily duplicating). “Healthy vitality” is good. “Unhealthy vitality” is Dawn of the Dead.
Nonessential Side Note Alert: Vital as a noun appeared about a century after vitality–in the obsolete sense of “the essence of life.” As a noun meaning “something essential,” vital was created by backformation from vitals, which were the essential parts, and not a shortening of “vital signs” as it is used in the medical world today. End Nonessential (and therefore redundant) Side Note Alert.
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05.28.08
Posted in grammar, neology, persnickitors at 8:03 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Noted and cringed at:
From a 4/18/2008 article titled “NL’s slumping sophomores need patience,” from the Sporting News:
Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki and Hunter Pence finished 1-2-3 in the National League rookie-of-the-year voting last year. And by April 15 of this season, each had been benched, giving him time to free his mind and find his lost games.
This exemplifies how we can stumble when trying to adhere slavishly to numeric agreement in grammar. The persnickitors* would have taken Ryan Braun’s weak bat to the SportingNews editors had they allowed “each had been benched, giving them time to free their minds . . .” But I suggest that they would have been justified in allowing it, and I might go as far as to encourage them to allow it.
Yes, each is singular. Their is plural. That’s a technical disconnect. Technical. An often more important connection is that of meaning. By writing each, author Gerry Fraley stated the individual but implied the group, and the group (a singular noun, as well) were (a plural verb) individually engaging in a common activity of freeing their minds. (A diplogrammatic* way to have phrased it would have been to write “all had been benched, giving them time . . .”)
The communication problem here is that the reader is jarred by a shift from discussing three players to stating one him. Which him? Ryan? Troy? Hunter? (And suppose the same sentence structure had been applied to three players in a mixed softball league, Fred, Harry and Sally? Who him then?) The impact of the paragraph was diffused by unclear reference demanded dictatorially by numeric agreement.
By the by, “the group were” is very much standard English in England, a place that has spoken the language for a decade or two.
* Neologism alert: Persnickitor–one who persnickets, one who fusses too hard about grammar from atop the mount; Diplogrammatic—a diplomatic way of sidestepping a grammar problem. End Neologism Alert.
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05.27.08
Posted in abbreviations, neology, ugly words at 6:09 pm by Bill Brohaugh
This is a thought I’ve expounded upon before, but I must address it here, in an early installment of the nascent Everything You Know About English Is Wrong web-log:
Technically, I suppose you could call this a “blog.” You could. I won’t. As a word person, I look skeptically at the word blog. Which is a polite way to say I despise it.
Certainly, I honor the word mechanism that created it, as I do all mechanisms of English neology. It’s an interesting specimen of word-creation, too—an abbreviation that shortens the original phrase (”web-log”) from the front, while most abbreviations lop off the end (such as info for information). Variations occur, of course, such as flu from influenza—lopping off both middle and end.
The mechanism is sound. The result is grating. Blog has all the beauty of other words that start with the same B-L consonant combination, words that have remarkable affinity to the word blog: blather, blab, blabber, blah, blase, blob and bloney. Well, just kidding about that last one.
So, this is not a blog. It’s just blah blathering blabber.
Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert: To be slightly more succinct, I could have tightened my first sentence by writing “expounded on” as opposed to “expounded upon.” But concision is a matter of mental length as well as physical length. “Expounded on” sounds almost unnatural, in that a word as pompous as expounded nearly cries out to be followed by something equally pompous. The phrase is shorter, but mentally longer. And that’s today’s Write Tight moment. End Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert.
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05.26.08
Posted in Churchill, humor at 1:18 pm by Bill Brohaugh
. . . practices his growl, and cracks his knuckles before setting out to type these very words of introduction to the web-log for the book Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. (No, it is not a [can I bear to type it?] “blog.” It is a web-log, for the reasons stated here.)
This first post seeks to introduce this new title from Sourcebooks, now hitting the bookstores (and I expect people to be hitting me back soon). I’m going to step aside for this first post and mention a couple of early comments:
If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you’ll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. You’ll have fun because his lively, comedic, skeptical voice will speak to you from the pages of his word-bethumped book.
That’s Richard Lederer, who wrote such wonderful word books as Anguished English, Get Thee to a Punnery and Word Wizard. Thank you Richard.
Beginning with his “English Delusionary” (a glossary of words created solely for this volume), Bill Brohaugh wants to make one thing perfectly clear: He spends a great deal of time considering irregularities in the English language and our repetitive abuse of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing because Brohaugh, the former editor of Writer’s Digest, isn’t cranky about usage issues. Rather, he’s quite amused. Items that have rendered other linguists apoplectic, seem to merit his mirth. Double negatives? Great! Ending a sentence with a preposition? You betcha! Fond of your ”ain’t”? Have at it! Brohaugh embraces the colloquial while providing insights into just how we arrived at such a comfy kind of grammar. Employing ample pop culture references, he reminds us that “the broken are made to be rules” when it comes to the English language. The book provides a good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves and will be enjoyed by everyone who can’t quite admit to being amused by William Safire because they can’t get past his politics. In other words, Brohaugh is funner.
That’s from a blog on FeatureBook.com. (Wow!–funner than Safire! Though that’s most of the world, but I’ll take it anyway.) Thanks FeatureBook.com.
Better plotted than a glossary, more riveting than a thesaurus, more filmable than a Harry Potter index–and that’s just Brohaugh’s footsnorts–I mean feetsnotes–um, feetsneets?–good gravy I’m glad I’m just a cartoonist.
That’s from John Caldwell, more-or-less homeless resident cartoonist with Mad magazine. Thanks, John. I think.
That’s the introduction. Rants to follow in succeeding posts, when I can’t expect the above-mentioned good folks to do my work for me. But I’ll leave you with one last quote:
Everything you know about English is the sort of errant pedantry up with which I shall not put.
That was not said by Winston Churchill. And the familiar-sounding quote often attributed to him was not said by him, either. And such things are the entire point of the book.
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