02.04.09
Posted in spelling, write tight at 7:44 am by Bill Brohaugh
I direct you to a well-written personality profile in Esquire: Lisa Taddeo’s “The Man Who Made Obama.” This profile of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe features flash snapshot description, adventurous turns of phrases, and a distraction that jars the reader from the usually otherwise adroit writing that precedes and follows it.
It was Plouffe (rhymes with bluff) who gathered the president’s unprecedented thirteen-million-name contact list . . .
The problem lies in the parenthetical—and, more specifically, its placement. Given the unusual name and its spelling (subjects I myself am intimately familiar with), clarifying its pronunciation is necessary. Yet, including the article’s subhead and photo caption, this is the fifteenth reference to Plouffe.
At this point of the story, 19 paragraphs in, the unguided reader has already established a pronunciation—either correct pluff, ploof, or some variation that mildly rhymes with souffle. The readers who didn’t imagine it right will stop reading, glance back at the previous paragraphs, and reconsider at some small but distracting level what they’d encountered before. Some coverage of Rod Blagojevich similarly delayed the needed pronunciation guide until the last name had already been presented multiple times.
In Write Tight, I refer to such instances as addding “mental length” to the manuscript—ballooning the reading experience by forcing the readers to rise out of the story and think about something, in this case a something that could have been clarified much earlier.
And so says I, Bill Brohaugh (does not rhyme with bluff, that royal snitch, or bruhaha).
(Silent gh, for the record. Bro-haw.)
Permalink
12.30.08
Posted in English origins, Latin sources, persnickitors, spelling at 9:25 am by Bill Brohaugh
Language is one of the ultimate manifestations of democratic action. I can declare that the word blibbelfrigdibble means “the tendency to stop a word in the middl,” and the word takes meaning if others agree with that definition. I could spell that word as ieou7aer, and pronounce it blibbelfrigdibble, and if those I communicate with agree, then that’s how it’s spelled. Sure, arguments will ensue. “My English teacher taught me that it’s O before 7, except after a dipthong!—you descriptivist, you!” But in the history of the language, democracy wins out.
Now comes an interesting exercise both in language and in democracy, which reader Jeff Rasmussen kindly alerted me to. You see, in the formal democratic world, one places a proposed change before the public by circulating a petition. If enough people sign, then onto the ballot the proposal goes, and we vote. If people want to change the spelling of stationery (the writing paraphernalia) to stationary, they sign a petition and we vote. Well, we don’t vote, other than by our usage. But now we can sign a petition.
If you agree that stationary should become the proper spelling of both the paper goods and the adjective communicating motionlessness, then hop on over to iPetitions and support it with your John Hancock and your JohnHancock@JohnHancock.opining address. The petitioners explain:
The word “stationery” however was originally spelled with an “a” in English. It derived from the fact that such products were sold in “stationary” shops and not from travelling peddlers. Both spelling derive from the Latin stationarius defined as a place where something is located.
I know that the same folks who complain that it’s O before 7 except after a dipthong will shout that the difference in spelling communicates the difference in meaning, which is often a valid reason to discreetly retain discrete spellings. On the other hand, in this case one word is an adjective and the other a noun, so context will always clarify more quickly than spelling. And the truly technical folk will argue that stationery perhaps didn’t evolve directly from stationarious (as in the wares of a stationary store), but with lineage once removed—in that the person operating from a stationary location known as a station was a stationer, and therefore the adjective “stationery wares,” which know is known as stationery.
Doesn’t matter. One is a noun even though it was once an adjective, and the other remains an adjective. We could spell either or both as ieou7aer and still know what they mean.
Even so, on this particular ballot, I believe I shall take the reactionary stance and side with those who want to maintain the current spelling. Or would that be the reactionery stance?
Permalink
11.02.08
Posted in spelling, word misuse at 12:12 pm by Bill Brohaugh
I’ve been doing some thinging . . .
No, that’s not a typo. But this is:
If John McCain’s supporters are hoping for a “Bradley effect” bounce on Election Day, some pollsters and strategists say they may have another thing coming.
Another Thing is coming?! Two versions of the science fiction horror classic aren’t enough?!
All right. That’s a little silly. Sure, in this instance, the thing is indeed a horrible manifestation, but a verbal one known as an eggcorn—a misheard word (taking its name from a mishearing of acorn.
People who think one way, according to the cliche, have another think coming—a bit of verb/noun wordplay. The thing/think misuse is unfortunately widespread: Google search returns 160,000 hits (though fewer than I’d expected).
While we’re on the topic of hatching eggcorns:
Plouffe said the campaign is pleased that a large part of the early vote so far is coming from sporadic and new voters. “The dye is being cast even as we speak,” he said.
Is casting dye kind of like slinging mud? And is it clothing dye? Hair dye? Princess Dye?
Well, I’m getting silly again. But the eggcorn here is equally silly. The “dye” being cast is a “die.” And it is not the manufacturing die (which is cut, not cast), though once a die has been cut, the product has been preordained, as it were. But the preordination comes in rolling a die—the singular of dice. Once you have cast a die, the outcome is out of your hands. In this case, the eggcorn is visual, as Mr. Plouffe likely didn’t specify the spelling of the word die when he spoke it. Though he’d have been doing the writer a favor if he had.
Permalink
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
Permalink
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?
Permalink
08.02.08
Posted in future of the language, language misuse, spelling at 6:41 am by Bill Brohaugh
Rather, misspelling lessens . . . lessens the impact of this newsletter coverage of a recent poll. Subject: impact of the digital age on the commercial viability of books.
Myself, I’d like to think that the digital age might serve to “significantly lesson” some postmyblog-nownownow digital age writers (if you grant me the verbification of lesson as a synonym for instruct). The issue is not whether the digital age will send legions of little electronic silverfish onto our bookshelves to gobble up all the paper books and cast the pages within from their tomes into their tombs. The issue is whether the digital age will send those silverfish into our writerly brains to kill the words themselves.
I’m being overly dramatic here, of course. Yet, I ask you to appreciate the irony of a web newsletter talking about the potential death of books via electronica while displaying the death of language precision via electronica. Is the “lessen lesson” attributable to relying on homonym-blind spell-checks? Or to what I consider to be the far greater danger: Instant publication sans editorial filters (that is to say, real editors, writers who actually look at their words twice other than to admire them, and real editors who edit the words of writers enamored with their own words).
Mistakes happen. I understand this personally, as I admit that I’ve fallen into the “lessen lesson” homonym trap myself—in drafts and not, to my knowledge, in published material.
The real danger to writing and to books is neither technology nor the digital age. It is haste. Slap-dash postmypearlsofwisdomnownownowhastehastehaste. Haste doesn’t necessarily make waste. Haste makes nonsense.
Are you lessoning to me?
Permalink
07.26.08
Posted in African sources, French sources, spelling at 7:55 am by Bill Brohaugh
Because everything I know about French is wrong, I’ve taken away a series of delights from the Francophone World Scrabble Championship in Dakar, Senegal (likely spelled S-O-M-A-L-I-A by a certain Presidential candidate), held this past week. The Senegalese take their Scrabble seriously, and take great pride that once again they have beaten natives of their former colonizer at their own game. This is, I suppose, similar to Americans taking pride in spelling words like honor the way God meant them to be spelled.
Some highlights:
From an AP story (which confusingly never says specifically who won) highlighting African passion for competitive Scrabble:
“We have far less means than the French players,” says [32-year-old Elisee] Poka, who as a child in Ivory Coast made his own Scrabble set out of wood because he couldn’t afford a store-bought one. “But we keep on beating them.”
The story also mentions Ivory Coast native Joseph Kouassi, who used kitchen tiles as a kid to create the word tiles he couldn’t afford from the store. Now that’s admirable dedication to words. But what does Poka mean by “far less means”?
His French competitors used computers to spit out anagrams . . .
Oh. I suppose the French, so used to blood-doping in the Tour d’France, don’t mind brain-doping. Am I missing something, or isn’t this kind of like being able to use a dictionary at a spelling bee?
Another sign of Africa’s growing influence is the number of African words that have been accepted into the official Francophone Scrabble dictionary. The most recent edition has at least 20 African words, most in Wolof, Senegal’s main dialect. They include ‘yet,’ a kind of shellfish found off Senegal’s coast and ‘mbalax,’ the style of music made famous by Grammy winner Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous singer.
I imagine that this has members of the Académie Française popping forehead veins all over Paris.
A couple of side notes:
Permalink
07.22.08
Posted in spelling, write tight, writing craft at 6:32 am by Bill Brohaugh
The Mr. Write Tight in me should like a recent website discovery more than he’s amused by it, but right now he’s weighing which side to fall on. You see, Thsrs.com am(us/az)es me.
Thsrs is likely not pronounced thissors (which is how you’d pronounce the word describing that dangerous pair if as a kid you ran with them and stabbed yourself in the tongue rather than poking your eye out). It’s pronounced, I presume, thesaurus, because in a clever but still somewhat shaky marriage of form and function, thsrs represents Thsrs.com, a site that bills itself as “The shorter thesaurus.” Type in a word, and you’re presented with a list of synonyms, all shorter than your source word. And shorter is good, right Mr. Write Tight?
To a point, but more on that in a moment.
I decided to play the meta-reference game at Thsrs.com. Meta-reference—referencing referencing—is the sort of thing you see in increasingly tired and repetitious quips: Why is the word abbreviation so long? Monosyllabic isn’t. What’s another word for thesaurus (other than thsrs, of course)? Meta-referring, I typed in sesquipedalian at our designated vowel-less site, half expecting that “sskwpdln” and fully expecting that “verbose” or “wordy” would be among the returned synonyms. What I got was:
polysyllabic
long
pretentious
sesquipedalia
polysyllable
Well, long is shorter (which sounds like an aphorism, doesn’t it?). And I like pretentious—which is only marginally shorter, yet has its special implication. Grandiloquent is but a letter shorter, but should be included, too. The lessons here are twofold: 1) A thesaurus is but a suggestion tool, and 2) the right word is the right word, and the right phrasing is the right phrasing. Shorter is an admirable goal only if shorter communicates as effectively or more effectively.
But back to meta-reference fun. Let’s look up thesaurus at Thsrs.com. But one word is returned: wordbook. Not returned is treasury, or any of the several “other words” for thesaurus, shorter or otherwise (and more on that in another post).
Now, in final meta-reference fun, let’s look up shorter, which returns this result:
Aha. “Shorter” doesn’t exist. And in some senses, it should not exist for writers, especially when it displaces “concise,” “precise,” “exact,” “evocative,” “communicative,” “meaningful,” “poetic,” “powerful” or plain-ol’ “perfect.”
Permalink
07.02.08
Posted in assorted weird crap, spelling at 6:01 am by Bill Brohaugh
In a recent book review, my Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
has been praised as “a searing, gripping novel.”
Well, no it hasn’t. I made that up. But maybe someone from U.K.’s Guardian newspaper wants to call it that—which they may be inclined to do. And, well, yes, my book isn’t a novel, but . . . as long as they spell my name right. The Guardian spelled James Harding’s name right when referring to his Alpha Dogs
as “a searing, gripping novel.” Even though it’s really “a work of nonfiction about a firm of US political strategists,” which the Guardian had to ‘fess up to in a list of corrections of previously published stories.
The source of this retraction is the “Regret the Error” blog from Craig Silverman, and the sad tale (fictional and nonfictional) of Mr. Hardy’s praise was one of the items from Monday, June 20. This blog covers journalistic errata, apologies and embarrassments of various sorts—mistakes in reporting, mainly, but also the occasional word gaffe. For instance, it seems that the word searing is a major source of grief for the Guardian, as this post notes:
A “seering” new documentary referred to in the heading for Up front, page 2, Film & Music, August 11, was in fact “searing”.
And my guess is that the documentary probably wasn’t a novel, either.
Permalink
07.01.08
Posted in spelling, verbal indiscretions at 6:35 am by Bill Brohaugh
Ya gotta like the state of international diplomacy.
[Zimbabwe Presidential spokesman George] Charamba had harsh words for Western pressure: “They can go hang.”
How eloquent. Mr. Charamba, I will give you two points for spelling and conveying some meaning.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
and 
. Feel free to 
