I doubt that I will ever own a car made by KIA for various reasons, including the idiot commercials the company used for a time (one involving dog urination). And though I’m not particularly superstitious, I believe I would be somewhat uncomfortable sitting in something sporting letters that mean to many—including this child of the Vietnam era—”Killed in Action.”
The populace is perhaps more familiar with the related military abbreviation—MIA, “Missing in Action.” MIA is also the air-travel designation of Miami International Airport, oddly relevant to the occasional piece of luggage tagged “MIA” and ending up in Pittsburgh.
Given that the alphabet sports a finite number of letters, initialisms with multiple meanings are inevitable. But I submit that sometimes the possibility of initial confusion should be considered. Here’s a sign I saw in the Miami International Airport last week (I added the green circle to highlight what caught my eye):
Couldn’t the sign-maker have spelled out “Miami International Airport” in this case?
When I alerted you to the punctuational paraphernalia available at the official National Punctuation Day web site a couple of days back, I wrote that you could buy “greeting cards, posters and ‘latte mugs’ in addition to T-shirts” there. I hope that nationalpunctuationday.com appreciated the plug despite the fact that I didn’t, as would be the site’s preference, set enough commas into the wild in that phrase. Here’s a “news story” appearing on the site:
Punctuation Man, a leading authority on punctuation and teaching punctuation to elementary school children, today announced his decision to fully support the use of the serial comma.
Shunned by the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, the serial comma is still widely accepted by educators, grammarians, and literary circles, including Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and the Chicago Manual of Style. The announcement coincides with the National Education Association’s (NEA) “Read Across America” child literacy program, to be held nationwide on Monday, March 3.
Well, shunned is a bit strong. It’s not like the AP is, like Dexter, a serial killer hunting down and eliminating criminal serial commas. Here’s the AP’s advice: “Use commas to separate elements in a series, but do not put a comma before the conjunction in a simple series: The flag is red, white and blue.” Note “simple series,” as AP does not universally “shun” the serial comma and offers instances where it’s necessary. One such instance is a final series item that itself carries the word and: I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast. The AP also asks that the serial comma be placed before a complex concluding series element.
As with most things lingual, “rules” (if there are such things) are made to be bent elegantly. Plunking down a comma in a series just because it’s a rule, darnit! is not writing; it is following insert-tab-A-into-slot-B mechanical instruction.
Thoughts on when to use the serial comma:
When the comma clarifies. This is the primary rule. Clear or not? “The flag is red, white and blue” is clear. “I want to thank my teachers, my parents and the Academy” is not—unless I mean to say that my parents and the Academy were my teachers.
When the comma applies emphasis. The word growing tends to be swallowed in “My disappointment is deep-seated, constant, persistent and growing,” but gains emphasis in “My disappointment is deep-seated, constant, persistent, and growing.”
When you can hear the comma. Let’s return to the original function of the comma. It was not at first a tool for organizing sentences. It was a timing tool. It told the readers of early texts, transcribed from oral stories and poetry, where to insert pauses. Other punctuation did the same; different marks for different pause lengths. Different marks, for; different. pause lengths. This gives us an additional physical test regarding whether a comma is appropriate in a series. Would the inserted comma mimic a pause in the sentence—a pause in addition to the pause already injected by the word and? “Red, white, and blue” introduces a pause—even a stutter—to an otherwise swiftly spoken redwhiteandblue.
The economy being what it is, retailers across the country are breaking out the holiday-themed merchandise ever earlier. Halloween displays went up around St. Patrick’s Day, Back-to-School displays went up three weeks before graduation day, and I believe I just saw the first display for Christmas of 2009. Or so it seems.
But, alas, you’re probably behind on your shopping for National Punctuation Day, right around the corner on Sept. 24th. Not me. I’ve already erected my punctuation tree. I have to admit to using a dollar sign ($) instead of the traditional whatchamacallit-A (Å) for my tree. Yes, the tree I use is artificial, but it’s so much easier to erect and store than the natural trees, and either way, the most important moment is topping the tree with that little star (which all you Punctuation Day carolers know from “O Aster Isk of Bethlehem”). I’ve decorated the front of the house with strings of comma lights (my wife claims that they are actually BBQ-themed lights in the shape of red peppers, but I think she has an overactive imagination). Oh, and the ampersands are hung o’er the fireplace with care in hopes that Santubordinate Clause soon will be there.
This National Punctuation Day, I’m hoping to find a special T-shirt under the punctuation tree. It says “Is there a hyphen in anal-retentive?”, and unlike my silliness above, that very T-shirt exists. It’s one of several fun products from the official National Punctuation Day web site. Such slogans are available on greeting cards, posters and “latte mugs” in addition to T-shirts. Delight your beloved anal-retentive persnickitors with such a goodie on Punctuation Day morning or Punctuation Day eve, depending on your individual traditions.
However, beware that Punctuation Day celebrants sometimes have vastly different belief systems. More on that anon, as we approach the big day, baking our period-shaped Punctuation Day cookies and popping popcorn for the tree’s ellipses garlands….
The McCain campaign has become a political persnickitor—a shocked-a-minute bewailer of language abuse, fueled with a creative cynicism that would make Lewis Carroll proud. Oh you bad English speaker! You are a sexist by using the phrase “lipstick on a pig”! And like many shocked persnickitors, McCain is wrong. McCain’s forehead vein is publically popping because of something Barack Obama said:
“John McCain says he’s about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out George Bush — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics — we’re really going to shake things up in Washington,’” he said. “That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”
And, welllllllllll OF COURSE, the aforementioned pig must be Sarah Palin, because, after all, there are no male pigs. But Obama has not mentioned her. Obama has not even applied the phrase to a human being. He’s applied it to an activity, which is how this phrase is used most often. I contend that the sexist is the McCain campaign, who hears the word pig and automatically assumes (or, certainly more accurately, pretends to assume) that the pig is Palin. In that way, they are revealing themselves as the sexists.
That’s looking at the issue from the standpoint of political nonsense. Now let’s look at it from language nonsense. “Putting lipstick on a pig” has been around for decades, an idiom communicating the futuile attempt to put a pretty face on an ugly situation. This is known, professional political persnickitors, as analogy. The McCain campaign obviously doesn’t care about the phrase’s history, use, or intent—even though Mr. McCain has apparently used the phrase himself. Mr. Carroll wrote about words and not phrases in the following, but I believe it applies.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’
When one wants to be master (in this case, of the most powerful nation of the world), willing to twist situations by injecting his politically expedient meanings and implications into observations he doesn’t want to hear and meanings into established English phrases he doesn’t want to respect . . . well, there’s that wall that Humpty sat on. For a while.
McCain’s attempts to manipulate language is putting pig on a lipstick.
Tuesday’s USA Today sports section covers the aftermath of an East Carolina U. upset victory over West Virginia. Fans poured onto the field, and now there are allegations of security pouring it on the fans. That’s background to my griping about the writer pouring it on the readers.
The story quotes ECU police chief Scott Shelton:
“We have five other jurisdictions who assist us at football games, and we will have a reassessment of what jurisdictions we use (in the future),” Shelton said at campus news conference.
Yes, “at campus news conference”—but that’s just me being snarky and it’s beside my main point. Why did Andy Gardiner, the observer outside the game, have to charge onto the field to pour it on with that parenthetical insertion? What does “in the future” add to this sentence? Several elements in the quote imply the future:
Few things will take place in the past or the present. Everything will take place in the future. Will is a verb of future tense.
Reassessment doesn’t connote the future the way will does, yet it implies potential change, and (Doc Brown, Marty McFly and revisionists running for high political office aside) changing the past has proven to be a bit difficult.
The entire context of the story—something went wrong—implies that change will be made. The bigger story is that after such a situation, change is not made.
Sometimes to write tight, it’s best to sit tight. In this quoted material, the original words were doing their work; the speaker was managing to communicate without the need for patronizing kibbitzing. Sometimes, football fans and reporters, it’s simply best to stay in the stands and let the players play the game.
This week, business takes me to a conference at the Key Biscayne Ritz-Carlton (accommodations far above my usual, believe me). In the shower this morning, I noticed that one of those little bath gel bottles was labeled:
Shampooing
Shampoo
This, of course, heartened me, because I was reassured that my hair would indeed be shampooed by this shampoo—so much more preferable than, say that “Depilating Shampoo,” which, if my shower drain is any indication, seems to be the purpose of my shampoo at home.
Turns out that I was being offered some lessons in the ways of a multi-lingual world. When I examined the other little bottles (there always seem to be about 40 of them, and they regenerate overnight), I also found:
Lotion pour le Corps
Body Lotion
Aha! French—one of sthe many languages I managed to avoid in high school and college. This one was appropriate because after a day of travel, I indeed felt like a Corpse in the English spelling. Then there’s:
Conditionneur pour Cheveax
Hair Conditioner
Which I loosely translate to “conditioner you pour on your head.” (Or perhaps not.)
Rollover Beethoven and tell Tchaikovski the news: Stop putting spaces in verb phrases. Such as demonstrated in this email I just received:
Now, many English-speakers would write that as “Roll over your 401(k),” but I fear that such speakers are becoming increasingly rare. The practice of compounding verb phrases is continuing to pick up. Or pickup.
Don’t get me wrong. I find nothing wrong with compounding. I tend to accept and generate compound words more quickly than others. I write website when others still prefer web site. And in my more lyrical fiction endeavors, I’ve written of, for example, “moonshards” to describe scattered light within a forest.
And there’s nothing wrong with language change—as long as it fills a void or brings additional communicative flexibility . . . and doesn’t confuse, introduce grammatical nonsense, or just plain ol’ sound stupid:
Confusion: To embellish my previous smartass example, consider “Pickup the truck.” Versus “Pick up the truck.”
Introducing grammatical nonsense: Consider an instruction you wouldn’t be shocked to see nowadays on a web page (and I believe lax website instruction-writing is at the root of much of this odd compounding): “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” On the surface such construction seems clear. “Rollover your 401(k)” sounds nearly identical to “Roll over your 401(k)” (nearly, and more on that in a moment). But how do I express the fact that I am now acting on that instruction? “I am rolling over” or “I am rollovering”? Past tense: “I rolled over” or “I rollovered”?
Bonus item: Failing to mirror spoken sound. Say “The rollover is dead” aloud, and then say “Roll over and play dead.” Compare the compact (more concrete?) noun versus the flowing, more fluid verb phrase. Form and content.
Sounding stupid: Well, I always do that. But let’s return to our first example. “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” Why not “To getstarted,” as long as we’re at it?
Or, for that matter, why not “whynot”?. And with that, I’ll stopit and shutup now.
(Musical side note: “Roll Over Beethoven” to me is like “On Broadway”—a fabulous, core rock and roll song of which there is no definitive version. That said, I deeply love the Electric Light Orchestra rendition. Check out the video below for that version, additionally delightful because Richard Pryor introduces the song, and YouTube—compound word and all—does indeed call it “Roll Over.”)
When I came out of grad school I landed a literary internship at the infamous Joseph Papp Public Theater in NYC and I had the fortune of co-dramaturging Don Cheadle’s play GROOMED.
Infamous? Has this renowned theater gone bad? Perhaps there were student’s there:
As has been pointed out, maybe this is correct, after all—maybe it’s simply a contraction of singular “student is.”
Or perhaps the theater is infamous because the actor’s, intern’s and student’s are dodging golf balls. Here’s a note from infamous JohnnyB, regarding a newspaper article about a school next door to a driving range:
I found this quote interesting.
So far no children have been hit by errant golf balls, although some have flown over the playground and a few cars have been hit.
Flying children would seem to be more noteworthy than flying golf balls, but that’s just my opinion.
When discussing false origins, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong concentrates on individual words. I do take a poke at “3 sheets to the wind,” “raining cats and dogs” and a couple of other phrases that have been given false histories. For phrases, allow me to alert you to The Phrase Finder website, one of many interesting sources. There you can look up numerous phrases and their origins (and even find them grouped along such themes as “phrases from Shakespeare”), and sign up for a phrase-a-week newsletter.
Yesterday’s newsletter, for instance, pokes at “chip on your shoulder,” supposedly from placing wood chip on, yes, one’s shoulder as a dare to begin a fight. But site operator Gary Martin writes,
Anyone who might be inclined to doubt that origin can take heart from an alternative theory. This relates to working practices in the British Royal Dockyards in the 18th century. In Day and Lunn’s The History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the standing orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:
Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [chips] on their shoulders near to the dock gates, there to be inspected by officers.
The permission to remove surplus timber for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the job for the dock workers.
In readable and interesting analysis, Martin then examines which is the actual origin of the phrase, and if you “knew” that one of the origins was right, well, everything you know about English is wrong, eh?
To read Martin’s analysis and learn the likely true origin, visit here.
By the by, the site is British, so part of the fun of the newsletter is learning about phrases that we Yanks (or at least this particular Yank) haven’t encountered before. Come a cropper? More on that anon.
I had agreed to have dinner with friends the other night, but Doc begged off because of family commitments, Jim begged off because the voices told him to, and I begged off because Jim’s voices told me to. Or, rather, I found myself irrationally busy. All this despite the fact that the dinner had been planned for months, with the obligatory stern instruction, “Mark your calendar.”
Fellow snarker JohnnyB—just about the only one of the group able to honor the commitment—chastised us thusly:
Just read this in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:
The phrase “mark your calendar” does not mean “write this event in on your calendar so you won’t schedule something else in that same time period.”
“Mark your calendar” is a bastardization, by bastards, of a Latin term “mar curcalen dare” meaning “I challenge you to swirl around in the sea,” which means nothing.
As does my commitment to dinner engagements, apparently. And as does today’s post, here just for the fun of it.
concentrates on individual words. I do take a poke at “3 sheets to the wind,” “raining cats and dogs” and a couple of other phrases that have been given false histories. For phrases, allow me to alert you to 
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