. . . or, “Maybe She Should Join the Progressive Party”
Because my friend JohnnyB over at Late for the Sky is bothered by lists of random thoughts in blogs, I will honor his disdain by a list of recent random unthoughts—unthoughts unthunked when using the language:
Top of the list is one linguistically ungifted governor of Alaska. I know. Taking potshots at Gov. Palin’s syntactical discombulations is like shooting wolves in a barrel, but there are times when I should consider retitling this blog “Everything Sarah Palin Knows About English Is Wrong.” The latest:
I would be happy to get to do whatever is asked of me to help progress this nation.
I would ask her to help progress the language by not using progress as a transitive verb. Though such use has a history, progress-as-transitive is awkward and has no unique function, in that we have a number of synonyms that do the job better. And speaking of history, here’s an Oxford English Dictionary citation that meta-defines the word (from 1814): “Nor have there been wanting projects among them [”them” being us Americans] for getting rid of the English language, not merely by barbarizing it—as when they progress a bill . . .”
This headline appeared on a Washington Post story about scalping Inauguration tickets: “Trying to Keep Inaugural Tickets Priceless.” The Post means free, of course, as priceless means “so valuable that price cannot be determined”—or in the phrasing of the MasterCard commercials, “because there are some things money can’t buy.” In fact, I first thought the headline was an attempt at snowcloning the long-time MasterCard campaign, but the story contains no other evidence of such a connection. The Washington Post—50 cents. Using the right word—priceless.
Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation . . . Now is the time to move forward together, start progressing America.
A new book from Oxford University Press, A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, has researched an important topic, resulting in a list of the top ten annoying phrases (you may be surprised that “Mr. Brohaugh has an opinion” is not among them).
They are:
At the end of the day
Fairly unique
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Absolutely
It’s a nightmare
Shouldn’t of
24/7
It’s not rocket science
Some classics there, particularly #4 and #10. I puzzle over “shouldn’t of,” though. Is this in written English or spoken English? As with such phrasings as “I should of looked up the answer to that question,” the of is a phonetic spelling of a contraction. “I should of” represents “I should’ve.” The phrase “shouldn’t of” perhaps attracts particular attraction because it is an unusual instance of a double contraction: shouldn’t've. Multiple contractions are hardly unknown—consider the pronunciation of a word I’m sure you use on a daily basis: forecastle pronounced as fo’c’sl.
I’m curious about what “a safe pair of hands” means. Is it British? Or am I just cloistered? I’ve never heard it before so haven’t yet had a chance to be annoyed.
As for me, I’m actually going to nominate actually as my greatest source of annoyance at (you knew I was going to annoy you and say it) this moment in time.
(Might I also note that to my moderately math-trained eye, 24/7 seems to equate to 3.428571429.)
A little while back, I wrote of an instance of Freudian grammar, quoting a news report in turn quoting John McCain: “Asked if Gov. Sarah Palin has become a drag on his ticket, McCain said, ‘As a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased.’” McCain’s placement of the introductory clause seems to identify himself as a cold political calculation, which was, I’m sure, not his intent. Though what indeed is the cold calculation? The decision-making behind the selection? The analysis of the decision-making (as in, “If I were now making a cold calculation of the selection . . ”.)? Or the person that was selected?
Granted, I present the latter choice as a cynical joke, but then again, let’s listen to the subject of the discussion—Sarah Palin herself—fall into the same grammatical trap with perhaps even stronger Freudian overtones:
After being found guilty on seven felony counts, I had hoped Senator Stevens would take the opportunity to do the statesman-like thing and erase the cloud that is covering his Senate seat.
I was alerted to this by a Fritinancy post, which eloquently addresses the subject of dangling clauses, particularly Palin’s. Read and enjoy.
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?
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.
One of my favorite movies is Steve Martin’s LA Story, a smartly written, mildly surreal love story and a paeon to a wacky city that Shakespeare so loved (you have to see the movie). And let’s not overlook its healthy dose of pre-Sex in the City Sarah Jessica Parker.
At one point, Martin as TV weatherman Harris K. Telemacher speaks of “the interesting word usements I structure.” In that context, I was delighted to findsome interesting word usements in the real story of LA, in an LA Times section displaying reader-submitted photos. Here are some samples:
OK, it’s the economy that’s collapsing. Not the language. But the language is taking some major hits in all of this mess. If I had a nickel for every time someone said “I’ll invest a dollar for you in the stock market . . .” Oh, wait. I do have a nickel for every dollar invested in the stock market.
More to the point, a couple of instances of word-spotting:
1) Have a fiscal policy that creates immense deficits in good times and bad, burdening America’s posterity with staggering burdens of repaying the debt.
Burdening with burdens is both fiscally and redundantly irresponsible.
Then, of course, there’s the thrill ride known as a Sarah Palin “sentence.” In Slate Kitty Burns Florey writes about Joe Sixpack eloquence (because much of Palin’s grammar sounds like something someone says after enjoying said sixpack—my observation, not Florey’s) and the difficulty of diagramming a Palin sentence.
From the Charlie Gibson interview:
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.
I didn’t stop to marvel at the mad thrusting of that pet political watchword “families” into the text. I just rolled up my sleeves and attempted to bring order out of the chaos:
I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there’s anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I’d be delighted to hear from you. To me, it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (”with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.
And such sentences come from Palin even though she boasts of graduating from journalism school while grumbling about the “media elite” in almost the same breath. (Able to complete a sentence = media elite.) Well, as John McCain said, maybe about “gotcha journalists” but applicable here nonetheless, “you don’t know the context of the conversation, grab a phrase.”
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.
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.
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.”)
, has researched an important topic, resulting in a list of the top ten annoying phrases (you may be surprised that “Mr. Brohaugh has an opinion” is not among them). 
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
