12.16.08
Posted in redundancy, style, wordiness, write tight, writing craft at 9:17 am by Bill Brohaugh
My friend JohnnyB over at the Late for the Sky blog was un-dumbstruck by a headline he alerted me to yesterday. (Note: Just as JB introduced his email, “First off, everyone involved is alive.” Even the poor afflicted witnesses!)
Quick recap: Kid darts into traffic. Grandfather dashes to the rescue and picks the kid up, when both are hit by a car. The headline:
Child, Grandfather Struck By Car As Witnesses Look On
JohnnyB Struck By Headline As Witness (Me) Reads On: “Isn’t that what witness means?,” JB writes. “‘Witnesses see nothing’ would be contradictory (though it would be what happens in most Cincinnati crimes).” Indeed, witnesses witness. Or give witness. But JB was also raising a larger concern—that of effective writing. The subject line of his email was a snarked “A fine piece of writing.”
JB says, “The fact that there were witnesses doesn’t even have anything to do with the story. I guess the headline writer thought it added drama.” The phrase also adds a bit of misdirection. Doing something in front of witnesses implies not accident but, as JB notes, dramatic intention. Compare “Dog bites man in front of witnesses” and “Man bites dog in front of witnesses,” the former being somewhat natural and the latter being an act of “I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.”
A couple of side notes before I mention what really frustrates me about the headline: First, the story reports, “Michael Benjamin [one of the witnesses] was there when it happened.” Because witnesses witness, being there “when it happened” is implied. Second, the story wastes the opportunity for precision and drama by beginning “A young boy and his grandfather . . . .” Boy implies “young,” but it turns out that the kid was just two. Beginning “A two-year-old boy and his grandfather” would have delivered additionally appropriate gravity to this incident.
Finally, what’s further frustrating about this story is the headlinese style of “Child, Grandfather Struck by Car”—perhaps deleting that bloated, space-hoarding word and to make room for the ever-so-needed nonsensical redundancy of “As Witnesses Look On.” Now there’s concision for you. Except. The cramped-newspaper-style headline introduces a transcript of an audio TV report—and it appears on the web, the realm of infinite space to express thoughts clearly, and in natural English.
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12.15.08
Posted in Arabic sources, English origins, humor, wordplay at 6:56 am by Bill Brohaugh
I recently stumbled on a blog called The Frisky (”a daily romp on the sexy side”) and its list of “15 Most Unfortunately Named Fashion Items.” Wendy Atterberry takes jabs at garment names including skort and skong, mukluk and spat, and a few R-rated designations, as well (R is for romp, after all).
I love the shot at cummerbund (which, by the way, is Persian for “loin-band”):
A broad waist sash worn with dinner jackets and tuxedos, a cummerbund sounds more like a grammatical error you might learn to avoid in 8th grade English class. “Molly, your sentence had a incorrect gerund, a dangling preposition and an awkward cummerbund. Please re-write.”
In language land, The Frisky might be interested to note the linguistic terms that sound a bit rompish. For instance, take the title of the blog itself: The Frisky. You see the (wink-wink) tittle there, right? Yes, I spelled it right. Tittle. That’s the dot above the letter i. Cross your T’s, and tittle your I’s. Sounds positively ribald.
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12.14.08
Posted in humor, puns, verbal stupidity at 11:33 am by Bill Brohaugh
Klaatu Barada Nikto is not the name of the president-elect (though when I Google “Klaatu Obama,” I get a few hundred pun-intended returns). Instead, these words compose what Frederick S. Clarke of Cinefantastique magazine called “the most famous phrase ever spoken by an extraterrestrial.” (This was some time before “E.T. phone home.”) They are spoken in the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (though apparently not, I note in my third parenthetical in this paragraph, in the 2008 remake I’m in no rush to see, and not in “Farewell to the Master,” the Harry Bates short story that serves as source material).
It’s a phrase so famous that the “In Popular Culture” section of its Wokkawokkapedia entry contains dozens of references, including one of my favorites: “klaatu barada necktie” in Army of Darkness. Here’s one to add to the section: “Klaatu barada stinko,” in the headline of Alonso Duralde’s msnbc.com panning of the 2008 revisit.
No great art to that pun, but I like it, particularly because it so accurately reflects Mr. Duralde’s snarky slapdown of the film. And because it’s Sunday, and I’m lazy, I’ll leave all snarkdom to Mr. Duralde today. Believe me, he’s doing a good job. Here’s my favorite line from the review, as it touches on things linguistic:
The new “Day” can’t be bothered to include the thought-provoking dialogue of the original, choosing instead to bury the audience with special effects that are visually impressive but no substitute for an actual script. And what words do remain are so exquisitely awful that they provide some of the season’s biggest laughs. My personal favorite? Astro-biologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) takes alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) to see a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and notes that her colleague was honored “for his work in biological altruism.” What would that entail, exactly? Helping frogs cross the street?
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12.13.08
Posted in punctuation, redundancy, verbal indiscretions, wordiness, write tight at 10:22 am by Bill Brohaugh
OK, so I’ve been away a bit. My thanks to the folks who wrote to check my pulse. Still pulsing, I’m happy to report, but without the boil about the language I was able to work up in recent months. I try to blame it on a quieter media season with the election and its bloviations over, but in all honesty I just got exceedingly busy in other aspects of this thing we call life.
But the blood-boil level perked up a bit yesterday when I saw this news story about the unrest in Greece:
Terrified workers in banks along Athens’ central Syntagma Square watched in fear as protesters shattered windows just replaced days ago after being damaged in the worst riots Greece has experienced in decades.
Here I would campaign for Athens’s to indicate that Syntagma Square is located in singular Athens and not a group of communities each named Athen. But there’s little boil factor in that. And I strongly suggest positioning the word just before the concept it truly modifies—”days ago”—but, again, a little blood percolation, but no boil yet. Then there’s “workers in banks.” Were they, say, construction workers who just happened to be in the banks cashing their paychecks? I suspect that they were instead “bank workers”—a clearer, shorter, more direct phrasing. Again, pulse quickened, but the little platelets are still floating around in conditions under 212 degrees.
The vascular steam engine revs up around mid-sentence. Imagine this Write Tight
boy’s surprise to learn that “terrified workers” watched “in fear.” Not only can that latter phrase be lopped off, it must be. This description is redundant, as terror is (last I heard) intense fear, but redundancy is the lesser of the two sins the sentence commits. “In fear” doesn’t merely repeat; it deflates. Terrified workers become merely fearful workers in the space of a dozen or so syllables.
So, to reassure my kind friends who checked in on me, the pulse is still there. And so is the re-pulse.
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12.02.08
Posted in write tight, writing craft at 8:18 am by Bill Brohaugh
Susan over at the I’m Just Saying blog recently gave some “Advice for the Day.” It’s good social advice, but it’s also good writing advice. Susan counsels:
If an email you’re sending to me includes the phrase, “I’m not trying to be provocative,” then you should rethink what you’re writing to me; 1)You probably are being provocative, 2)You probably know it and 3)You come across as a total jerk.
In the context of writing, Susan has identified a counterproductive technique we can call “telegraphing your punches.” Verbally. “Excuse me, Mr. Raging Bull—I’m not trying to be aggressive, but I believe I’ll next try an uppercut. You ready?”
In Susan’s case, the writer is a correspondent signaling attack at some level. When threatened with attack, we tighten up, put up our shields, and prepare for, at best, strong defense and, at worst, pre-emptive counter-attack. Bring it on! If the attack comes, we react and likely even overreact. On the other hand, what if what follows that phrase is not provocative? “I’m not trying to be provocative, but the sky is blue.” Dashed expectations, confusion and maybe even frustration ensue.
Such telegraphed punches are far too common in communications. “This joke is hilarious,” crows the party socialite. With audience expectations and skepticism raised, the joke faces increased chances of falling flat on the teller’s face, like egg. The joke might be very funny, but if it isn’t hilarious, the speaker has failed in rising to his own self-inflated standard.
Or take the banal cliche delivery of the TV newscaster: “The numbers will astound you!” Hearing such intoned pronouncements, I don’t lean in toward the idiot box with bated-soon-to-be-astounded-breath. Instead, I lean back and think, Prove it, and almost always, they don’t.
Never apologize for what you’re about to write; never hype it. Just deliver it in as carefully crafted phrasing as you can, and let the words and not the “previews of coming attractions” do the talking. Accusations, attacks, jokes, pranks, mystery-novel endings, compliments, and demonstrations of love are at their most powerful when delivered without forecast, but with a modified level of surprise you have prepared with the consistent foundations laid by your previous actions in real life and your story-telling in writing.
I’m not trying to be instructive, but . . .
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