08.19.08
Posted in language misuse, punctuation, spelling, typographical errors, verbal stupidity at 12:01 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Excuse me while I crawl into Jonathan Swiftian “infusion of Enthusiastick jargon” depression mode. Here’s a brief quote from an online chat I was privvy to recently. Among the noncapitalization, the elipses longer than the Panama Canal, the fact that someone thinks Deep Space Nine is entertaining, and the misspelling, note the irony of the quickly following self-correction (which was apparently the subject of some thought) contrasted with the beginning of the original post.
DisguisedName: lol im watching the funniest episode of deep space 9 ever lol…………..ferengi thinking they are commandoes
DisguisedName: commando’s
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08.11.08
Posted in assorted weird crap, punctuation, spelling, verbal stupidity at 6:34 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Herewith, some random-yet-numbered observations on using what’s without to express what’s within (with varying degrees of intent):
1. The Unintentional: File under “Well, they put the fish in my barrel and handed me the shotgun, so what am I supposed to do?”
I generally resist taking potshots at the stupid English exhibited in spam subject lines, but this buffoonish attempt simply taunted me too insistently:
do u want good pay job? World recognized University Dip1oma/Degree/Bacheloor for you
I’m sure lots good spelling on diplooma, two.
2. The Studiedly Intentional: File under “Comma sense”
Over at “On Commas, Again” in David Crystal’s blog, Crystal points out that he often employs commas in writing for form and not necessarily for grammar, in a great match of form and content:
Grammatically the commas are unnecessary, in these cases, but they represent the way I want the sentences to be internally heard. The issue becomes a matter of aesthetics, now, and so not everyone will like it. Indeed, a few weeks ago I got a ferocious email from someone complaining about the overuse of commas in my By Hook or By Crook. He found four in one short sentence, he said. Me, overuse commas, in a short sentence? Never, never, never, never, never.
3. The Concocted Intentional: File under “There’s a word I recently learned—just can’t think of it . . .”
Oh yeah. It’s lethologica. And it means “Forgetting the word you’re looking for.” The proverbial tip of your tongue is the land of Lethologia . . . only words you can’t think of reside there. Yes, I concocted the “I can’t think of the word lethologica” schtick as self-conscious form and content, but to swing back to #1 on the list above, here’s a fun bit of unintentional form and content: when lethologica is listed in the Dictionary of Difficult Words . . . because isn’t any lethological word at that moment a difficult word?
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08.05.08
Posted in punctuation, typography at 9:25 am by Bill Brohaugh
I have figured out the real reason American automakers are bleeding red ink—at least for one company. It looks as though the decimal point in figures tallying Ford Motor Company’s losses keeps moving one numeral to the right. Simple explanation: Ford has its punctuation backward. A million in losses? Oops, backward decimal point . . . one digit to the right . . . ten million . . . one more to the right, and a hundred million.
I have proof:
If Ford can’t control its advertising apostrophes, allowing them to pretend to be single open quotes, how can we possibly expect the company to get the decimal points moving in the right direction? I just hope that the same proofreaders aren’t working to make sure that first gear and reverse are properly labeled.
(If catapostrophes amuse/enrage you, I invite you to tune into the Apostrophe Abuse, apostrophism and Apostrophe Catastrophes blogs. The latter blog features one of the blogosphere’s best slogans: “The Worlds’ Worst. Punctuation;”)
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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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06.17.08
Posted in grammar, language misuse, punctuation, typographical errors, word misuse at 11:46 am by Bill Brohaugh
From a press release I received recently:
I wanted to give you a head’s up that . . .
Well, we needn’t worry about what the press release was touting. We must instead fuss about apostrophes whilst I don my persnickitor hat.
The apostrophe in “head’s up” has, of course, wandered in from the great catapostrophic* void. As the phrase is presented here, the press-release author is giving me an up that apparently belongs to a head.
“Heads up!,” as all of us except the press-release writer already know, is a warning call, akin to shouting “Fore!” when teeing off. We used the call quite a bit in my thankfully brief days in the theatre. While building sets or mounting lights, the occasional clumsy technician (whose days in the theatre would be thankfully brief) might drop something or knock something over, potentially onto someone’s head. Heads up! Or, more succinctly, Heads! And not Head’s! It’s very difficult to shout an apostrophe.
Do catapostrophes make you cringe happily, the way people go to horror movies or take ride roller coasters to scream in fear and have fun? Check out the Apostrophe Abuse blog. My favorite abuse recorded there? “Bake’t muffin.” That should make my head spin. Instead, it make’s my head’s pin.
And for more happy cringing, I point to a sample entry from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong: “Plural’s: You do not use an apostrophe when forming plurals.”
* Neologism alert: Catapostrophic—related to an apostrophe catastrophe. End Neologism Alert.
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