I’ve visited the Motivated Grammar blog here before. Intelligent posts, interestingly written. Plus, a dead-on informational page, simply titled “Arguments.” By way of introduction:
There are a lot of arguments bandied about as rationales for any given grammar prescription. Most of them are spurious, but a few have some merit. . . . the best way to refute a prescriptivist’s argument is to simultaneously show them that their argument is ill-founded, but even if they persist with that ill-founded argument, they’re still wrong.
My favorite summation in the list of Arguments: “Language is not math.” To which I cheer, “Hear! Hear!” (in rhyme, no less).
I like the goals, the coverage and the common sense over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, a blog devoted to setting folks straight regarding misconceptions and falsehoods related to history, economics, education and other topics. The name comes from the popular “fact” (promulgated by various means, but now certainly fueled by the bullshitternet) that Millard Fillmore was the first President to enjoy a bathtub in the White House, when in fact this nugget of noninformation was first mentioned in a humor piece by H.L. Mencken. Such delusions must be demystified, and if I ever get time, I’ll write a book about misconceptions about the English language and call it Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Oh, wait.
. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.
For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?
This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.
There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.
What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:
I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.
Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.
And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:
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.
Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said “I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda“; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.
My own heretofore has rarely taken such a logical route. I like to confuse such insistent people, with a response more like “So, then, why don’t you insist on a plural verb for minutia, which is the plural of minutium?” I love the moment of quiet, the eyes darting back and forth. It’s a test of mettle—or mental stamins, maybe. The response is going to be a) silence; b) “I do use plural verbs with minutia“; c) “You’re full of shit.”
Answer a) speaks to the confusion caused by such Latin words as datum/data, stadium/stadia, graffito/graffiti, and balonum/baloney (well, maybe not the last pair). Answer b) speaks to the “depth” of their knowledge of Latin words, because . . . Answer c) is correct. Minutia is indeed singular, and minutium exists only in my mind as a contender for being the singular of baloney.
The word unique is sacred. Inviolate. Untouchable by human beings. Let us worship it in its perfect splendor! Perfection cannot be modified!
Well, so goes the chant of the persnickitors. If you want to see a spray of blood popping from foreheads not unlike the famed Bellagio fountain display, just announce aloud that something is “very unique” in just about any public place. “Every English or journalism major knows the word ‘unique’ does not take a modifier!” Which is something I didn’t make up, but quoted directly from a blog, inserting the exclamation point because I knew the blogger really wanted to use one, so I’ll take the blame.
Of course, this proscription is bull (read the title of this blog again). What if I say something is “almost” unique? It’s pretty distinctive, but it does share characteristics with another instance of same. Has not unique been modified? You can say “I almost won the game” even when I actually lost, so why can’t something fail to be one-of-a-kind? Or how about “remarkably unique,” “fascinatingly unique,” “preposterously unique,” “strangely unique,” “etceterally unique.” Modifications all. In fact, the little forehead-popping that I quoted above (assisting gallantly by my offered exclamation point) was inspired by a headline reading, “A truly unique collection.” This construction violates neither logic nor grammar, and not even what “every English or journalism major knows.” Consider this concocted extension of that quote: “This truly unique collection, as opposed to collections that previously laid false claim to being unique . .”
At worst, truly in my modification is redundant, in that the “as opposed to” phrase demonstrates contrast, so “A unique collection as opposed to . . .” Even so, truly serves as clarifier and intensifier.
What our persnickitor is objecting to is not modification but a specific type of modification—establishing degree of uniqueness. The cliche analogy, of course, is “Unique is or it isn’t, just like you can’t be a little pregnant.” On the other hand, how often do you hear the acceptable hyperbole that someone is very pregnant—that is, she is far along in her pregnancy, possibly about to go into labor at any moment, and . . . look at that . . . time for the cigars. Sure, “very pregnant” isn’t precise; what hyperbole is?
And with that, I’ll sign off (very off), because I don’t want to beat the subject until it’s morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably, not merely, really most sincerely dead.
I’m confused. Perplexed. Flummoxed. Bemused. Discombobulated. Kerfluffled. Well, those aren’t quite the words I want. Let me turn to my thesaurus . . .
Stop!
PLEASE don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.
Thanks for saving me from myself. That’s from an article by Grant Barrett in the Malaysia Star. Barrett contends that a thesaurus leads you to selecting haughty or imprecise words, or flashy words you haven’t used before and have that new-car smell. These are all dangers, I agree. All tools have dangers. But using a razor doesn’t force you to shave off your eyebrows; using a thesaurus doesn’t force you to select the wrong word.
Barrett’s cautions aren’t (what’s the word I’m looking for? oh—here’s a good one) hidebound. And in fact he makes a superb point that individual words do not substitute for clear, precise writing. The right reasons to use a thesaurus are many:
Discover nuance. The parenthetical above wasn’t me being a smartass. I indeed went to a thesaurus to find hidebound to communicate inflexibility. I liked the tight-skinned implications of the word I found in my search.
Enrich your vocabulary. Perhaps you’ll find a word or two you’d not encountered before. Barrett dismisses the thesaurus in part because “no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries.” Granted. But a tome that included a definition for each word would be monstrous and unpublishable. So turn to the tool dedicated to that purpose. Look up new words in the dictionary. (And the smartass in me wants to ask why someone who finds thesauruses potentially harmful owns more than a dozen of them—wants to, but I’ll resist. Sort of.)
Enrich your understanding of the range of the language. Perhaps you’ll encounter words you know, but hadn’t realized were related to the word you’re looking up. As a hypothetical, imagine someone looking up atrocity and discovering the expected abomination and the unexpected enormity. “That means ‘real big,’ doesn’t it?” our hypothetical writer might think. No, it doesn’t.
Increase your humility. Sometimes the word you know is perfect is not perfect at all. Return to our hypothetical thesaurus consultation, and this time picture the writer looking up enormity to begin with.
Become practiced with writing tools. Use a razor but once in a while, and you’re apt to cut yourself. Use it daily, and shaving becomes efficient; the results cleaner, more acceptable. The thesaurus, the dictionary, the rhyming dictionary, the grammar guide, the etymological dictionary—use all regularly (and not just one of each—a dozen or more sometimes suffices) to learn their strengths, deficiencies, goals and assistances, and you can use each tool like a fine razor to pare down to the most precise words and wordings—a hallmark goal of concise writing.
In fact, a danger far greater than using a thesaurus is not using it enough.
Here’s my dilemma: Do I link to the specious advice I’m about to quote and therefore give it “just-spell-my-name-right” promotion, or do I refuse to even mention the source and rely on your trust that I’m not making it up? Or, a third undesirable choice: Do I disguise the source and dodge the issue entirely?
Oh, wait—a third less-than-optimal choice. I don’t have a dilemma; I have a quandary.
Or so the specious advice I’m about to quote would have it:
The words quandary and dilemma can be confused. A quandary is a difficult decision between many things. “She found herself in a quandary when all three of her boyfriends proposed marriage in the same week.” A dilemma is a difficult choice between two things. For example, “Caught in a major dilemma, she couldn’t decide if she should marry one of them or skip town.”
The only justifiable statement in that quote is “The words quandary and dilemma can be confused.” As demonstrated by how the author has confused them.
Yes, the di- in dilemma communicates “two.” From the Greek, a lemma is a proposition, and a dilemma two propositions. But because we don’t speak Greek and because language changes (it does! honest!) the word can now take broader meaning. In rhetoric, says the OED, a dilemma is “A form of argument involving an adversary in the choice of two (or, loosely, more) alternatives, either of which is (or appears) equally unfavourable to him.” If we’re going to insist that dilemma be used unchanged, then let’s apply the law of Xtreme Etymological Stasis (Xes) and insist that three difficult choices should be a trilemma. Try that one in everyday conversation sometime.
I wonder if the idea of the etymologically unrelated word quandary meaning “more than two” doesn’t come from extispic etymology (divination by examination of the entrails of a dissected word) and assuming that quan- means, um, “four.” Actually, no one’s sure how quandary originated, but none of the suggested etymologies involve numbers.
Such persnickitorial edicts—even when they are grounded in history or logic, which many persnickitorial edicts simply are not—elevate process over communication. Dilemma and quandary are simply synonyms with distinct implications. They impart subtle shifts in meaning and intensity; they speak with different sound. If dilemma properly evokes the level of severity of deciding among three options, then, simply, dilemma is the right word.
Also lost and/or confused in the example is that both these words suggest that the options are unpleasant. In the example, the three boyfriends must have been jerks if deciding which to marry induced quandary. (Then again, the woman was contemplating skipping town rather than marrying any of them, which would affirm that assumption).
So, back to my dilemma (yes, dilemma) about which of three choices to make: I’ve opted for the first. This is advice adapted from Vocabulary for Dummies. Make of it what you will.
When JohnnyB stuck his bloggish tongue in his cheek the other day and recommended that one of his readers check out “Brohaugh’s pedantic language stuff blog,” I commented, “Doesn’t pedantic mean ‘foot antics’?”
The source of that joke is what I call “microparsing”: dissecting a word and making assumptions about the entrails so discovered, in this case with humorous intent. This form of etymological analysis is often as reliable as extispicy (divination by examining entrails). Extispic etymology leads to assumptions and claims that the “man-” in manufacture is a male human (when it derives from a Latin root meaning “hand”) or that triage connotes “three” (when “tri-” comes from a root meaning “to cull”).
In contrast, some words post their origins right on their foreheads—no surgery needed—and those origins go unnoticed. I was surprised recently when a friend paused, then proclaimed “I didn’t know that” in something approaching wonderment after I mentioned that fabulous means “in the nature of a fable.” We see the miracle in miraculous, but apparently have lost the fable in fabulous.
Another example, in the spirit of foot-antical language stuff: It’s obvious, their youth, when you see pictures of soldiers who have died in action. It’s not so obvious, their youth, when you see the word infantry.
But it should be obvious. It’s staring you right in the face.
The word infantry arrived in English in its present meaning after a long journey (on foot, perhaps), through French, Spanish and Italian, and ultimately from Latin infant-—”youth.” The infant in the word infantry is not a literal baby, but a figurative babe. The infantry were the less trained, usually the younger. They were the ground forces, smaller than the cavalry. (They were the lads, marching off to war. And there, too, we see youth as cannon fodder: Lads, in the first use of the word before they were servant males of “low birth” and before they were young men, were footsoldiers. These lads could aspire to becoming cadets, one supposes, where they could go from being grunts to grunt-workers, toting the generals’ golf clubs on foot . . . and becoming the word we know today as caddies.)
And thus concludes today’s peripatetic pedantry.
(But before I go: Doesn’t extispicy sound like a way to order food at a road kill restaurant? “I’ll have my racoon brains spicy and my possum guts extispicy!”)
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong spends a good bit of time mocking “bullshitternet facts,” those Did you know!!!!??? flushable factoids like “The word GOLF was created as an acronym of ‘Gentleman Only, Ladies Forbidden,” and the phrase “Ship High in Transit” led to SHIT (I repeat: “bullshitternet”).
I’m delighted when I find web writers who not only understand that much of the Did you know!!!!??? internet and email posts are nonsense, but also mock the very form. Here are some word-related samples from an old site, (Plastic Thoughts), some of them clever, some of them just plain surreal (which is OK by me):
No month in the English language turns teeth orange, silver, and purple.
20252 rhymes with 12,345,678,987,654,321
The order of letters in the alphabet is controlled by Mrs G Peterson of Wichita, Kansas
“Cabin fever” was responsible for the invention of the phrase “cabin fever”
“K” is the shortest antonym in the English language
More recent, and more dynamic, is the “Did you know” feature at Wikipedia parody site Uncyclopedia, “the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Wander to the bottom of the home page for the “Do you know” items. I have to say that many of the items are strained, but others are clever—and a good deal of the fun is that you can submit your own. (Warning: “Did you know that a sentence fragment?” has been officially banned from the site due to over-submission.) The “Did you know” feature also takes some graphic twists. Did you know . . .
Persnickitors would have it that you might incur a pox upon your lineage should you use the word and (or but or because or . . . yes, or) to begin a sentence. Rhythm be damned. Meaning be damned. Flow of ideas be damned. Rules are rules! And if you go swimming within an hour after beginning a sentence with a conjunction, or you’ll get cramps!
That’s why I’m pleased when I encounter reason regarding the language, and, in the case of today’s post, reason refuting the conjunction superstition. Michelle at the Write or Wrong blog provides insight into the intent of the conjunction guideline, and guideline it is, and no more.
Before adding a comment to Michelle’s post, I zipped over the the Oxford English Dictionary online to double-check the definition of conjunction. In the grammatical sense, quoth the OED, conjunction means “One of the Parts of Speech; an uninflected word used to connect clauses or sentences, or to co-ordinate words in the same clause.” (Emphasis added.)
But (oops) because (oops) I love words, I lingered on the OED’s other definitions of conjunction—to the delight of the Unfortunate English author in me. The earliest meaning of conjunction in English was generic “joining.” This led to a couple of obsolete figurative meanings of joining first recorded in the 1500s, including “marriage” and “copulation.”
So, let’s amend the “rule”: Don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction . . unless you’re writing porn.
. Oh, wait.
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author in me. The earliest meaning of conjunction in English was generic “joining.” This led to a couple of obsolete figurative meanings of joining first recorded in the 1500s, including “marriage” and “copulation.”
. Feel free to 
