08.23.08
Posted in assorted weird crap, persnickitors at 7:21 am by Bill Brohaugh
File under “Jeff and Benjie Go to White Watchtower”
My Everything You Know About English Is Wrong spends a bit of time railing against the persnickitors, the ones whose forehead veins begin to vibrantly throb when they spot a split infinitive (there’s one now! killit! killit!), the ones the ones who attack informal language with an “I don’t like it and therefore you must be punished” attitude, those who believe that a correctly placed apostrophe trumps the importance of historical heritage.
Specific to the latter group, we introduce Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, of the Typo Eradication Advancement League, or TEAL. This Pair O’Persnickitation recently toured the country correcting signage and other public displays of misinformed grammar and punctuation, with an unfortunate stop at Grand Canyon National Park. There they visited the historic Desert View Watchtower, designed by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter and built in 1932. Notes ScienceViews.com, “A perfectionist, Colter scrutinized every detail, down to the placement of nearly every stone. Each stone was handpicked for size and appearance. Weathered faces were left untouched to give the tower an ancient look. With a lavish, highly publicized dedication ceremony, the Watchtower opened in May 1933.”
Colter wasn’t perfectionist enough for our Redactyl Pair. Inside, according to court affidavits (yes! legal proceedings!), Redactyls Deck and Herson found a sign hand-painted by Colter herself. Writes the AP: “Authorities said a diary written by Deck reported that while visiting the watchtower, he and Herson ‘discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, contained a few errors.’” Oh dear! Such regret! What’s the solution? Perhaps an accompanying handmade sign gently placed next to the original suggesting how it might appear with proper punctuation? No no! We’re talking “eradication” here. Hmm. Yellow lettering on a black background. A marker can eradicate that misplaced apostrophe! A little typewriter correction fluid can insert the apostrophe in its proper place! A comma here . . . ! Such masterful brushstrokes! Redactorial Matisses are we!
Well, they probably didn’t say precisely that, but I suspect their thinking came close. Colter’s sign also misspelled immense as emense, which the AP reports was not fixed because, wrote Mr. Deck:
I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. . . . Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight.
It’s tough times for the language when people must lose sleep over not defacing national heritage enough.
Back to the affidavits and those authorities getting all persnickitorial about those things known as “laws,” Deck and Herson’s editorial adventure led to their pleading guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property. They get to pay $3,035 dollars to have Colter’s sign restored (oh, how many train-whistle-blighted nightmares are to ensue? oh, the emensity!). Tag on a year of probation, in which the pair cannot enter national parks, nor can they modify any public signs. A year from now—hey, have at!
Adherence to conventions of grammar and punctuation is a noble pursuit, but in this case, and in many cases where we must allow a changing language, informal layers of communication, and plain ol’ human foibles, sometimes ya just gotta let it slide.
Meantime, the AP reports:
The TEAL Web site now has only this message — “Statement on the signage of our National Parks and public lands to come” — without a period.
We await your statement, Mssrs. Deck and Herson. We trust you will be eloquent in your apology.
Next up—Jeff and Benjie go to the National Archives!
“This is unconscionable! I can’t believe they misspelled British as Brittish! And any whistle-blighted mooncalf knows that you must capitalize United in United States. And hey, Founding Fatheads, we don’t spell it Congrefs anymore—get a dictionary! Nice pen-work, Benjie. And . . . huh? What’s Nicolas Cage doing here?”
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08.09.08
Posted in Greek sources, language change, myths and misconceptions, persnickitors, unknown origins at 12:26 pm by Bill Brohaugh
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.
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07.30.08
Posted in language change, persnickitors, word history, word misuse at 6:58 am by Bill Brohaugh
Allow me to give fulsome praise to a certain word history.
Hold on there, Mr. “Everything You Know About English You Get Bitchy About,” sir!
Aha, a persnickitor in our midst. Let me guess. You screech at me because I’ve misused fulsome in a positive sense, yes?
Indeed! Your usage is egregious! Fulsome means, well, let me turn it over to William Safire in his June sixth column:
Fulsome does not mean “full.” Nor does it mean “complete, well developed” or other pleasing synonyms of abundance. On the contrary, the adjective is used not in a compliment, but in an insult, meaning “excessive.” Its frequent use in “fulsome praise” gives that phrase the meaning of “cloying, unctuous, obsequious flattery.”
Though loosey-goosey usagists may accept the turning of the word’s meaning on its head, most of us draw the line at such surrender to error.
That might depend on who “us” is, I suppose. Woe Is I
authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wrote last year that “the word ‘fulsome’ has been misused so much lately that it may be beyond saving.” One might make a case that “misused so much” (a negative perspective) might be synonymous with “becoming common use” (a neutral or potentially positive perspective), a perspective shift as egregious as allowing fulsome to soften from negative to neutral, I suppose.
Now, I wonder if any language observers in the 1300s and later years were worried about fulsome being “misused so much” when the word first started changing meaning . . . from its original sense of, simply, “full, abundant, plentiful”—the very meaning that persnickitors decry today. That meaning was recorded around the middle of the 1200s (which, I acknowledge, O’Conner and Kellerman themselves note). The word later (oh, those loosey-goosey usagists, turning the word’s meaning on its head!) took meanings of “too full,” and eventually “obnoxiously full.”
So the word history I originally sought to offer my fulsome praise was the history of fulsome itself, of course. And I agree: my use of a shifting word meaning was indeed egregious, in that the first recorded use of egregious, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, was in the sense of “remarkably good.”
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07.08.08
Posted in grammar, language change, myths and misconceptions, persnickitors, unfortunate English, writing craft at 12:12 pm by Bill Brohaugh
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.
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06.28.08
Posted in English origins, foreign sources (general), humor, letters and characters, persnickitors, punctuation at 8:42 am by Bill Brohaugh
I recall, in slightly fictionalized fashion, a book reviewer chastising a particular anal book of prescriptivistic grammar (”Split that infinitive and die, mongrel dog!”—though that’s perhaps being unfair in the mildness of my paraphrase). The reviewer’s complaint was that said prescriptivist had failed at his own stated level of prescriptivism in using an unaccented E in cliche. The dullard! Without the accent, we’d all be pronouncing it “clitch!” Or some such nonsense that I’m exaggerating. Maybe. This incident seemed to me to be something of the wits chucking nits at each other in wit-nitted battle.
In general, English is strongly accepting of original spelling of its adopted loanwords: rendezvous is my typical example. English isn’t so quick to retain unusual characters like the cedilla (in françois, literally and by way of illustration), the tilde (not your great aunt’s middle name, but the swoopy symbol in mañana and the target of a Nike swoop-infringement suit), or the umlaut (the two dots orbiting the proper name Schröder like Deimos and Phobos, but not like Deimös and Phöbös).
Abandoning such non-English conventions is just fine with me, as I’m a strong believer in the fact that we don’t speak non-English when speaking English—and that applies to the written version, as well. So when the persnickitors (including the automated persnickitor in Microsoft Word) start harrumphing that cliche is a misspelling, I return the harrumph. Is that naive of me?, I ask as I see the persnickitors twitch. You’re not naive! You’re naïve!
Well, maybe I’m both, but I’m also aware of not only the lack of necessity but also the problems of trying to cling to what is for us unusual character sets. Quick, run to your typewriter and find the two-dots-above-the-I key. Not right in front of you? Not in front of me, and in fact I had to turn to a special text-editing program to get access to ANSI character 239(EF). Intuitive, eh?
And then there’s this I spotted on the web:
Depending on HTML code and web browsers to properly interpret some of these character sets is neither naive nor naïve—it is ny-eeeee! I find juvenile pleasure in knowing that the symbol signals “phonological diaeresis.”
Equally quickly, without looking, which way do the accents go on the noun resume: résumè, rèsumé, rësumê, rèçumæ?
I’m certainly not the first writer to campaign for dispensing with foreign characters. Here’s Woody Allen, tongue-in-cheek, of course, in a piece called “Lovborg’s Women Considered” in Without Feathers:
Born in Stockholm in 1836, Lovborg (originally Lövborg, until, in later years, he removed the two dots from above the o and placed them over his eyebrows) began writing plays at the age of fourteen.
There are other good uses for such now-obsolute typographical gymnastics. Here’s Steve Martin, following the lead of the fictional Mr. Lovborg, writing about a supposed shortage of typographical periods in the font style known as Times Roman:
“Most vulnerable are writers who work in short, choppy sentences,” said a spokesperson for Times Roman, who continued, “We are trying to remedy the situation and have suggested alternatives, like umlauts, since we have plenty of umlauts—and, in fact, have more umlauts than we could possibly use in a lifetime! Don’t forget, umlauts can really spice up a page with their delicate symmetry—resting often midway in a word, letters spilling on either side—and not only indicate the pronunciation of a word but also contribute to a writer’s greater glory because they’re fancy, not to mention that they even look like periods, indeed, are indistinguishable from periods, and will lead casual readers to believe that the article actually contains periods!”
Ö!
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06.22.08
Posted in language misuse, neology, persnickitors, punctuation, word misuse, write tight at 8:43 am by Bill Brohaugh
Recent interesting words about words:
From the Lingua Techna blog from Paul McFedries (of WordSpy fame): “Is the English Language Full?”, some nice grousing about an anti-neology blog. McFedries is commenting on a Guardian piece, which writer Paul MacInnes begins:
The English language is a growing concern. Every year, Collins gets a pile of free publicity by publicly announcing new additions to its dictionary . . .
My potshots before shooing you off to Lingua Techna: I’m almost certainly overreacting, but am I supposed to infer that dictionary publisher Collins is adding words for the publicity alone? Let’s then also take to task that cynical Encyclopedia Britannica, which keeps adding facts in new editions, the mercenaries! Besides, doesn’t the wealth of publicity bestowed on the announcement indicate that others are interested in said new words, perhaps more so than certain writers? Finally, the Write Tight editor in me must resort to persnickitation and grumble about the redundant “new additions.” Knee-jerk reaction and all that.
Spotted in a blog:
To atone if your’e a jargoneer: Pick a page (or a paragraph) on your website full of buzzwords and industry jargon. If you can’t be an objective judge, have your husband/wife/teenager/friend read it for you. Cross out all the offensive words. . . .
your’e has a certain bit of French panache to it, doesn’t it? Perhaps the symbol is really a slightly miscentered accent over the E. I’m particularly amused by “Cross out all the offensive words.” Like your’e, perhaps? Granted, this is a typo and not pure misuse, but what the hell, sometimes you gotta swing at the softballs tossed at you. For more graphic illustration of true misuse in everyday life, check out the Apostrophism and Apostrophe Abuse blogs. And mull the, shall we say, understated attitude of GrammarBlog: “Do you think people who don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ should be strung up by their gonads? You do? Welcome to GrammarBlog.”
Speaking of French panache, let’s talk about some French pan-ass:
At Dennis Baron’s The Web of Language: More on the Académie Française insisting on wearing “Donnez- un coup de pied moi!” (”Kick me!”) signs on its collective back: Not only does this institution continue to demand purging all non-French words (“One recent example is the Académie’s recommendation of the use of the word ‘courriel’ instead of the English ‘e-mail’”), but now the institution and the people who belong in one demand (no s’il vous plais! involved) that France refuse to recognize even the languages native within its own borders, such as Occitan. Baron writes, “on Monday [June 16, 2008] the Académie Française rejected any attempt to constitutionalize local languages as ‘an attack on French national identity.’” My favorite quote from the post:
France has always been a linguistically-diverse country—the nation is even named after the Franks, a medieval Germanic tribe . . .
Plus, ya gotta like a writer who uses Monty Python to illustrate his points.
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06.18.08
Posted in persnickitors, verbing, word history at 5:49 am by Bill Brohaugh
By day I am a writer and editor for a publication that covers marketing (by night, I am The Incredible Sulk!, but that’s another story). Not too far into my tenure in this position (editor, not Sulk—OK, Sulk, too), I found myself facing a potential arch-enemy in the form of the word leverage. This word glared at me from a manuscript. Actively glared, as it was performing as a verb. The sentence in question was something on the order of “Many marketers leverage customer testimonials to spread positive word-of-mouth.”
I fretted a bit. Leverage exhibits all the symptoms of the sort of word-ballooning I decry in my book Write Tight. The word lever is a perfectly good noun; so is leverage. Why verbicize (”verbate”?) leverage when the verb lever is available? In the manuscript, I replaced the verb. At least, I attempted to. Consider my edits in search of synonym:
- Many marketers exploit customer testimonials . . . Hmm, too harsh. Sounds manipulative.
- Many marketers utilize customer testimonials . . . Close, but utilize with its implication of invention lacks the sense of taking advantage of an appropriate asset. OK, then how about:
- Many marketers take advantage of customer testimonials . . . Closer, maybe, but it still has the tinge of manipulation.
- Many marketers use customer testimonials . . . No. Use is a weak substitute.
- Many marketers lever customer testimonials . . . No. And no. Didn’t even consider it. When was the last time you heard any human being use lever as a verb?
I let leverage live within the manuscript, and I contend that it should live in the language, because it fills a need. Granted, some hate the word, in part because it began as jargon—financial jargon and not computer jargon as one source has claimed, with its first recorded use in the late ’30s.
All this comes to mind because leverage appeared in a recent BBC list of listener-contributed nominations of “50 office-speak phrases you love to hate” (I’d be tempted to ask why “office-speak” isn’t on the list, but I think I just have). The BBC list presents a shiver-inducing group of truly atrocious words and phrases. For instance, what the hell is an “idea shower”? And here’s one I haven’t encountered before: “The new one which has got my goat is conversate.” Yikes. You can converse, so why do you need to conversate?
And I hear some of you saying, “Mr. Incredible Sulk, you blast conversate when converse is available, yet you defend leverage when lever is available?” I do indeed. Conversate fills no need. It is duplicative, a bizarre “synonym” of converse. On the other hand, leverage is not a precise synonym of lever, neither in noun nor in verb form. It fills a need.
And, what the hell, let’s look at some history. The noun lever has been used since at least the late 1200s; the noun leverage has been used in the literal since at least the early 1700s, and figuratively since at least the early 1800s. The verb use of each? The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following quote as the earliest recorded use of lever as a verb meaning “to lift or raise”: “The bottom of the pole being ‘levered’ out of the ground.” This is in 1876, and the use is so unusual that the author put the word in quotes. What’s more, this is physical lifting; the figurative sense isn’t recorded until 14 years later. Therefore . . .
Noun-to-verb transformation time, test subject lever: around 400-500 years.
Noun-to-verb transformation time, test subject leverage: around 50 years. The upstart!
Me, I think that employing the word leverage to create unique meaning is a marvelous example of leveraging the flexibility of English.
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06.03.08
Posted in neology, persnickitors, spelling, word history, word misuse at 6:19 am by Bill Brohaugh
Until today, we’ve not been sure where the word quandary comes from. It might be related to conundrum, though that’s unlikely and, besides, we’re not sure where conundrum came from, either.
So, though we’ve been unsure about the origin of quandary, we have not been “in a quandary” about its origin. Until today. Quandary, it seems, comes from the political science department of the University of South Dakota.
As I write this on 6/3/2008, the primary polls in South Dakota and Montana are prepping to open, and the pundits can’t predict how Clinton will fare against Obama in the land of Great Stone Faces (the ones on the mountainside, not the ones covering the primary on CNN). As reported on Politico:
“Everybody is in the same quandary with how is this going to work,” said Elizabeth Smith, an associate political science professor at the University of South Dakota.
A quandary is a tough decision, a dilemma. It is not, oh ye political pundits and escapees from the USD English department, an uncertain situation, despite Merriam Webster’s flaccid definition of “a state of perplexity or doubt.” A superhero forced to decide to save the love of her life or the entire city of Topeka is in a quandary. Pundits awaiting to see who will be voted off the island in the most recent episode of political Survivor are not. I suspect that some individuals heading to the polls might be in a quandary; some superdelegates who have not yet committed their support are in a quandary. But of the observers, Professor Smith should have said, “Everybody is in the same state of uncertainty . . .” or, more succinctly, “We’re not certain . . .”, or, even better, “We dunno.”
In this regard, I recommend this Polo & Higgins video on YouTube, which offers these lessons: First, it is a beautifully low-key illustration of a quandary. Second, it is a spelling lesson, in that it employs as its title the common misspelling quandry. Third, it is an admirable example of making English one’s one, a concept the persnickitors hate but that I champion in the right circumstances. Because, as one of the Polo & Higgins creators later admitted:
Oh, and it seems like I’ve accidentally spelled “quandary” wrong in the title sequence. I’m going to fix it by making “quandry” a new word.
I respect that. I’m a proponent of creative neology, and I’ve always advised budding neologists that if you’re going to make up a word, do it boldly, without apology (no rhyme intended).
But he got accidentally right, and another nod of respect for that, as it’s often misspelled accidently (but not on purpose). Spell it correctly? Spell it the way I like? Such a quandry!
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05.28.08
Posted in grammar, neology, persnickitors at 8:03 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Noted and cringed at:
From a 4/18/2008 article titled “NL’s slumping sophomores need patience,” from the Sporting News:
Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki and Hunter Pence finished 1-2-3 in the National League rookie-of-the-year voting last year. And by April 15 of this season, each had been benched, giving him time to free his mind and find his lost games.
This exemplifies how we can stumble when trying to adhere slavishly to numeric agreement in grammar. The persnickitors* would have taken Ryan Braun’s weak bat to the SportingNews editors had they allowed “each had been benched, giving them time to free their minds . . .” But I suggest that they would have been justified in allowing it, and I might go as far as to encourage them to allow it.
Yes, each is singular. Their is plural. That’s a technical disconnect. Technical. An often more important connection is that of meaning. By writing each, author Gerry Fraley stated the individual but implied the group, and the group (a singular noun, as well) were (a plural verb) individually engaging in a common activity of freeing their minds. (A diplogrammatic* way to have phrased it would have been to write “all had been benched, giving them time . . .”)
The communication problem here is that the reader is jarred by a shift from discussing three players to stating one him. Which him? Ryan? Troy? Hunter? (And suppose the same sentence structure had been applied to three players in a mixed softball league, Fred, Harry and Sally? Who him then?) The impact of the paragraph was diffused by unclear reference demanded dictatorially by numeric agreement.
By the by, “the group were” is very much standard English in England, a place that has spoken the language for a decade or two.
* Neologism alert: Persnickitor–one who persnickets, one who fusses too hard about grammar from atop the mount; Diplogrammatic—a diplomatic way of sidestepping a grammar problem. End Neologism Alert.
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