Some years ago, a local TV station fired a popular weathercaster because he was “just” an announcer. He held no meteorology degree . . . the faker!. This was at the forefront (and the coldfront) of general TV news departments deciding that weathercasters needed degrees so that they could entertain us with adiabatic lapse rates and slipstreams and other meteorological minutia, perhaps trying to imply to us that said weathercasters used El Niño prevailing breezes to scientifically and naturally blow-dry that hair. Put it in simple English! Leave the test tubes back at the lab and tell us if it’s gonna rain tomorrow.
At the time, I was writing for a Cincinnati radio personality, and I composed a comedy bit in which said TV station next demanded that its news anchor have a Ph.D in current events, the economics reporter be a former Secretary of the Treasury, and the sportscaster have a Masters in statistics and Euclidean geometry.
It seems that I have, after all these years, finally gotten my “put it in simple English” request. Driving home last night, listening to the weather report on the radio, I heard this (exact quote as best as I can remember):
Temperatures will hit the 40s tomorrow, but over the weekend, it’s back to the 30s. And that means colder temperatures.
Yesterday I wrote about an English teentwit who officially changed his name to “Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined.” This will, I predict, prove to present some difficulty when applying for credit cards, wooing young ladies, and making dinner reservations.
So perhaps there’s another tack that can be taken by Mr. CFFTSSBWHATFC (hmm, as I write out that initialism, the evocative nature of the last six letters amuses me). Perhaps he can go by his Secret Service code name.
People protected by the U.S. Secret Service are assigned one-word code names for several reasons:
Simplicity
The inability to properly pronounce “Obama”
Watching too many reruns of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Obama’s new code name, by the way, is Renegade, which I believe to be a clever mockery of the previously opposing “maverick.” The new first lady (would “First Lady-Elect” be the proper phrasing?) is Renaissance, and the kids are Radiance and Rosebud. Alliteration is, of course, intentional. Mr. and Mrs. Bush (the latest ones) are Tumbler and Tempo, respectively; the elder Mr. and Mrs. Bush were Timberwolf and Tranquility. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were Eagle and Evergreen (with Chelsea taking Energy—don’t mean to dash your 2012 code name hopes, Gov. Palin). The Bidens? Celtic and Capri; I heard a TV reporter pronounce Mr. B’s code as “Seltic” as in the basketball team instead of “Keltic” as in the European people. The reporter was either ignoring the alliterative nature of the code names, or believed that capri is pronounce “sapree.”
ChannelOne.com has a Secret Service code name generator, which actually isn’t a whole lot of fun because all you do is click a button and it displays a single word as your new code name. (I was Staircase, by the way; walk all over me.) Still, it might benefit Mr. CFFTSSBWHATFC in getting something bold but shorter.
A bit more fun is a Unitarian Jihad name generator, inspired by a wacky but delightful Jon Carroll column. My Unitarian Jihad Name is Brother Peaceful Plasma Rifle of Wisdom. Even that is better than what young Mr. CFFTSSBWHATFC came up with.
Now come post-election reports of a certain VP candidate not knowing that Africa comprises several countries, and is not a country unto itself. I mention this by way of background, because I want to talk about a word used in reporting this claim—which may be true or may be disgruntled exaggeration. The word appears here:
According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked “a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency,” in part because she didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA, and she “didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself.”
I suspect whoever first spoke the word knowledgeability—either Cameron or the source Cameron was quoting—really meant knowledge, given the fact that the examples given were bits of knowledge. Perhaps knowledgeability—the ability to be knowledgeable—was indeed the intended word. I’m skeptical, though, because making such nuanced distinctions seems out of character with certain elements of “news” coverage.
So, I chalk knowledgeability up to verbosity (or verbosability), and then begin to wonder about “a degree of.” What does that mean? I contend that either a candidate has the knowledge or knowledgeability or knowledgeabilitosity to handle the job or not. Why not come out and say it bluntly? The claim is harsh enough to begin with—why try to dance around it with clumsy ballet-shoe phrasings? The candidate, the source or the reporter could have said, lacked “knowledge necessary to be a running mate.”
But, as I said, this claim could be true, or it could be exaggeration or hyperbole. Was the source knowledgeable? Or did the source know?
Raymond Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye, a noir detective novel turned into a film by Robert Altman. If The Long Goodbye is ever adapted into another film, Juaquin Phoenix won’t be in it. Juaquin Phoenix has abandoned films.
That’s all well and good. Phoenix can now be a director or a music video mogul or a knuckle tattoo artist or whatever he wants to be—as long as his new profession has nothing to do with the English language.
In quitting films (with bridge-burning histrionics I predict he’ll regret, I might add), he said . . .
“It’s like greener pastures, you know what I mean?” Phoenix said Saturday. “And so, I’m just going to try and like, I’ll just be doing the other thing…. Hopefully, I will emotionally impact you with that, as well.”
Script! Lines!
Worse than his disjointed announcement, Phoenix punctuated his exit with fists. The old one-two punch. Or, um, the not-so-old two-one punch:
Subtle. And classy. Mr. Phoenix, emotionally impact me with something that resembles coherence, please.
(And a couple of nods before I say Bye! Good in this post: Thanks to Fritinancy for alerting me to the Marquee Generator. What fun. And of course I will use this post as another opportunity to point out my respect for the class act known as Paul Newman, who fueled charities, understood and cherished his art, and never wrote on his knuckles.)
All the following is said because I cherish words, and the wonderful freedom to use them:
In a previous post, I wrote about the familial heirs to the name “Maverick,” one of the surnames that have led to now-common English eponyms—that is, words resulting from proper names. Modern-day Mavericks (the ones legally named, in upper-case letters) have chafed against McCain/Palin stealing an important part of the Mavericks’ proud family history for political purposes.
Even though the Mavericks aren’t “the mainstream media,” Sarah Palin probably considers their vocal disdain as suppression of Palin’s own freedom of speech. Their opinions, you see, apparently violate her First Amendment rights.
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
Gov. Palin obviously has not read the Bill of Rights, you betcha.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Questioning is not abridgement. Opinions are not abridgement. Dictionaries aren’t scarce (nor is the text of the Constitution inaccessible).
So, please, Gov. Palin, do not consider my questioning your negative campaigning against the Constitution as eroding the First Amendment; instead view it as my celebrating it, exercising it, wallowing joyfully in the freedom of it. There are nations where the government can coerce the press to shut up. America is not one of them. Perhaps you can look such facts up on Wikipedia.
Though I wish I could say that Gov. Palin was correct in her self-characterization as maverick, at least in the context of her interpretations of the Constitution, such interpretations seem to be very much following the branded-cattle path established by the Cheney-Bush Orwellian disregard for our most important treasure (quick example, “Wiretapping Is Freedom”).
Thus, because of the McCain/Palin abuse of the word maverick and because of Palin’s desire to continue the Bush Administration’s degradation of the Constitution, I would be pleased if the word lovers and freedom lovers who visit this space go to the polls Nov. 4, and substitute the eponym maverick with a stronger eponym—the one taken from Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott—and captain-charles their candidacy.
When asked whether she and her husband had any more unusual names up their sleeves, the politician [Sarah Palin] said: ‘We did. We never got to get our Zamboni in. I always wanted a son named Zamboni.’
Her husband Todd, however, seemed less than impressed with the suggestion. ‘I don’t think that would have flied,’ he said.
What wouldn’t have “flied”? Zamboni the name or Zamboni the machine? This sounds a bit like Henry Ford naming his son after a car—the Edsel. (Yes, I know it was the opposite—Edsel the human came before the premiere of My Son the Car starring Jerry Van Dyke, or something like that.)
I’ll give Palin the gov a pass on the Zamboni name claim—it was probably a joke. (On the other hand, she characterized as a joke her comment in the pre-VP-selection days that someone would have to tell her what the vice president does—then subsequently proved that she really didn’t know in her odd description of job duties to young Brandon Garcia. So maybe we can anticipate a grandchild named Zamboni or John Deere or Ski-Doo at some point.)
But Todd, man! First dude! Get yer grammar on! Your grammar done slud off the trail!
On the other hand . . . What does a vice president do? “Not only are they there to support the president . . . ”
The vice president they? Plural? Is Sarah including Todd as part of the office, the way she included Todd in her Alaskan administration? We saw how well that little singular/plural misconception flied, now didn’t we?
So, no snarkitations here for a bit, but there’s plenty to keep you informed, entertained, etc. etc. with a few links:
JohnnyB and “Late for the Sky,” with a ridiculous tale of disrespecting your elders gone modern. JohnnyB and I are generational co-equivalents (howz that for a bizarre phrase?), from a time when there was this thing called “common sense.”
“Comics Curmudgeon,” always fun, but in this installment includes still another needed blast at lame verbal puns used by cartoonists who think that Steven Wright needs to be illustrated.
“SoupAddict’s Blog” veers deliciously from food focus to snark at mall kiosks (and I lubs me some snark). But if you’re also a foodie like me (see BBQ ref above), you’ll love the blog in general.
“The Daily Show.” Lubs me some comedy, some reasoned attitude toward the overall personality of a publication (as I’ve spent some years developing magazine personalities), and some attitude toward, as Buckley says, “blog postings” (later in the show).
A reprise: Elections. Punctuation. You may have missed it before. Enjoy, and we’ll see you next week: the candid’ate
I’m rooting for the Philadelphia Phillies in the upcoming World Series for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with logic, such as the fact that Shane Victorino is my Fantasy Baseball League center fielder. Philly might also supply an important outfield position in my Fantasy Language League: the out-of-left fielder, given a catchphrase that has quickly surfaced as something of an unofficial slogan of the team: “Why can’t us?”
The slogan was taken from a grammatically-challenged sports radio caller — yes, I realize that is redundant — and it has already grown so large that Scott Van Pelt reportedly dropped it on Sports Center last night [Thursday, 10/16.]
Such cultural phenomena lead—of course!—to T-shirts, which I’m quick to point you toward not because they promote inevitably-bad sports grammar but because proceeds are going to a good cause.
I can now imagine a Philly player coming to the plate—bottom of the ninth, two out, one man on—and thinking, “Why can’t us?” And after he wallops the walk-off home run, he circles the bases, taunting the opposing pitcher with the classic “All your base are belong to us!”
Which, I kid you not, is the name of my Fantasy Baseball League.
We’ve been hearing a lot of mavericks in this election. The word derives from Samuel Augustus Maverick, a 19th-century rancher and politician who did not mark his cattle with brands (nor, I would assume, did he mark his bulldogs or pigs with lipstick). In time, the name was generalized to denote any unbranded bovine, and then was swiftly given figurative use to denote independent people and less swiftly to self-denote political candidates who couldn’t manage to herd themselves.
That would be McCain and Palin, of course, who have raised the ire of Sam Maverick’s descendent (no, not James Garner). In the New York Times:
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. . . . “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd.”
I find a couple of interesting connections between mavericks old and new in language terms:
Terrellita Maverick seems to believe that the purloined word maverick is in itself a maverick; one meaning of maverick, as recorded in 1890, was “A thing obtained dishonestly,” says the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sam Maverick’s grandson Fontaine Maury Maverick was himself in government, and is credited with creating a word to describe confusing language and bureaucraticspeak: gobbledygook, you betcha.
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.
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