Pakistan told India on Saturday [12/27/2008] it [Pakistan] did not want war and was committed to fighting terrorism — a move apparently aimed at reducing tensions after Pakistan moved troops toward their shared border.
I’m thankful for the specificity of the last two words there, because so many countries have unshared borders. Maybe the writer thought that the Pakistanis were playing “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Geography.” Pakistan has a border with Afghanistan, which has a border with HardyOliverandLaurelStan, who starred in Sons of the Desert, which is often misspelled as dessert, which is often served at Thanksgiving, a celebration at which families usually serve turkey, a country that has a city named Isparta, which is the place that first grew organic iPods, which were subsequently made in China, which has a border (likely shared) with India.
OK, so I’ve been away a bit. My thanks to the folks who wrote to check my pulse. Still pulsing, I’m happy to report, but without the boil about the language I was able to work up in recent months. I try to blame it on a quieter media season with the election and its bloviations over, but in all honesty I just got exceedingly busy in other aspects of this thing we call life.
But the blood-boil level perked up a bit yesterday when I saw this news story about the unrest in Greece:
Terrified workers in banks along Athens’ central Syntagma Square watched in fear as protesters shattered windows just replaced days ago after being damaged in the worst riots Greece has experienced in decades.
Here I would campaign for Athens’s to indicate that Syntagma Square is located in singular Athens and not a group of communities each named Athen. But there’s little boil factor in that. And I strongly suggest positioning the word just before the concept it truly modifies—”days ago”—but, again, a little blood percolation, but no boil yet. Then there’s “workers in banks.” Were they, say, construction workers who just happened to be in the banks cashing their paychecks? I suspect that they were instead “bank workers”—a clearer, shorter, more direct phrasing. Again, pulse quickened, but the little platelets are still floating around in conditions under 212 degrees.
The vascular steam engine revs up around mid-sentence. Imagine this Write Tight boy’s surprise to learn that “terrified workers” watched “in fear.” Not only can that latter phrase be lopped off, it must be. This description is redundant, as terror is (last I heard) intense fear, but redundancy is the lesser of the two sins the sentence commits. “In fear” doesn’t merely repeat; it deflates. Terrified workers become merely fearful workers in the space of a dozen or so syllables.
So, to reassure my kind friends who checked in on me, the pulse is still there. And so is the re-pulse.
As you can imagine, I’ve encountered numerous misspellings and mispronunciations of my name over the years, though I can’t for the world figure out what’s so tough about “Bill.” But seriously, folks . . .
A couple of name-related items in the news, both related to dishonor:
First, what took them so long? Twenty years to correct a painful typographical error. Finally, Clermont County, Ohio (where I lived for a time) has corrected a misspelling in a war memorial in the municipality of Bethel; Sgt. Earnest Wilson, killed by a landmine in Vietnam at age 20 in 1968, is now honored by his given name. A typo in a plaque mounted on a memorial wall had spelled the first name “Earest.”
“He made the ultimate sacrifice,” [brother] Jim Wilson noted. “The least they could do was spell his name right.”
Twenty years after the misspelled plaque was dedicated, that wrong will be made right. A new plaque, with the names of the fallen soldiers - Pfc. Robert D. Waddell, Sgt. Jerry A. Eaton, Sgt. Paul J. Chandler and Sgt. Earnest Wilson - will be unveiled at 2 p.m. Tuesday during a Veterans Day ceremony at the Bethel monument.
Second, what made him make it so long? Contrasting a story where a dedicated, caring family has fought to honor the proper name of a loved one is the story of an English brat that dishonors his own given name by officially changing it to “Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined.” Sure, it’s a stunt, but I understand his grandmother’s feelings about it:
The Glastonbury, England, teenager — originally named George Garratt — said his new name, which is thought to be the world’s longest, has so outraged his grandmother that she is no longer speaking to him, The Telegraph reported Monday.
She won’t be the last. Other people who won’t speak to him will be, say, any HR professional receiving his resume.
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.
I could spend considerable time micro-diagramming last night’s debate with persnickitations aimed at, among other gaffes, redundancies. Mr. McCain spoke of “first beginning.” Mr. Schieffer noted that something was “clearly obvious” (as opposed to indistinctly obvious?). Mr. Obama noted: “When Nixon said it, we imported from 17 to 34 percent of our foreign oil.” Isn’t 100% of foreign oil, by definition, imported? Then there are the spoonerisms and the “Senator Government” Freudian gaffes and the like.
But my main concern is Mr. McCain’s Orwellian twisting of the word eloquence. In 1984, “War Is Peace.” In 2008, eloquence is deception. In two sarcastic instances of “praise” for Mr. Obama’s eloquence, the second of which involved using air quotes to visually make his point, Mr. McCain implied that Mr. Obama was really using language to deceive rather than using language to clearly make his points. Mr. McCain, if you’re going to attack what you wish to convince us is “just words and no more,” use the right words to do it—otherwise you are guilty of your own accusation.
There’s amazing power in that meta-word—a word that describes its own meaning. At one point earlier in the campaign, Mr. McCain disdained the power of the word by attacking Mr. Obama as “just a person of words” (note that Mr. McCain was using, yes, words).
This wordishly wordy attack is, of course, not unique these days. Quoting the words (yes, words!) of James Wood in The New Yorker:
The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.”
Yet, a few years back Phyllis Schlafly spoke with me for an hour on her radio show about, um, words. I was a guest, schlepping my book Write Tight wherever I could, and I suppose that one of my stances in Write Tight—against ballooning the language for the purpose of political correctness—had attracted her attention. These years later, why are words now suddenly her enemy, and the current campaigners’ enemy as well?
My grandfather was a farmer. My father was an auto mechanic. My mother was a short-order cook. They worked with their hands (to the point where my grandfather had lost portions of two fingers to farm machinery), and I love and respect them. They, in turn, returned the love and respect even though I (disdain me! hate me!) am an “elitist who worked with words.” And still do.
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:
We’ve been hearing a lot of mavericks in this election. The word derives from Samuel Augustus Maverick, a 19th-century rancher and politician who did not mark his cattle with brands (nor, I would assume, did he mark his bulldogs or pigs with lipstick). In time, the name was generalized to denote any unbranded bovine, and then was swiftly given figurative use to denote independent people and less swiftly to self-denote political candidates who couldn’t manage to herd themselves.
That would be McCain and Palin, of course, who have raised the ire of Sam Maverick’s descendent (no, not James Garner). In the New York Times:
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. . . . “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd.”
I find a couple of interesting connections between mavericks old and new in language terms:
Terrellita Maverick seems to believe that the purloined word maverick is in itself a maverick; one meaning of maverick, as recorded in 1890, was “A thing obtained dishonestly,” says the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sam Maverick’s grandson Fontaine Maury Maverick was himself in government, and is credited with creating a word to describe confusing language and bureaucraticspeak: gobbledygook, you betcha.
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.”
Those of you who deliberate on why words like conversate and orientate seem to permeate sloppy speech and writing, do you abominate deliberate? If we converse and orient, why don’t we deliber instead of deliberate? In fact, we once did; the first recorded use of the verb deliber, from Chaucer, preceded the verb deliberate by about 150 years. Deliber on that for a while.
boy’s surprise to learn that “terrified workers” watched “in fear.” Not only can that latter phrase be lopped off, it must be. This description is redundant, as terror is (last I heard) intense fear, but redundancy is the lesser of the two sins the sentence commits. “In fear” doesn’t merely repeat; it deflates. Terrified workers become merely fearful workers in the space of a dozen or so syllables.
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