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.
On this glorious eve, I’m going to play the Ghost of Christmas Past to the Scrooges who would penuriously deny us the gift of gifting.
I’m talking about the the Scroogely denial of English’s gifted ability to bestow life to nouns, creating verbs in the process. Gift-noun begats gift-verb begats whining from the persnickitorial language Scrooges, who have real misgiftings about such conversion.
Do these people challenge the word gifted as applied, for instance, to prodigies? Should those endowed with special abilities instead be givended? Or something? Should the relay-baton present be regifted or regave? In each case, I believe I’ll stick with the former.
The American Heritage Book of English Usage notes:
Unfortunately, the use of gift as a verb in Modern English is tainted by its association with the language of advertising and publicity (as in Gift her with this copper warming plate).
Fair enough, particularly when commercialism has tainted the strings-attached noun gift so often that the phrase “free gift” is an almost required redundancy. But the real tragedy of the above example is the possibility of someone thinking a copper warming plate might be a romantic gift.
The language Scrooges are a bit more pointed than American Heritage. For example: “Using gift as a verb is a sign of stupidity, laziness, and verbal sloppiness.” And denying its use as a verb is a sign of not just persnickitorial intolerance but also of denying a basic writing principle: The right word is the right word. Certainly, using the lightning-rod gift when give is the right word is frown-upon-able. “Don’t gift in! I’ll gift you a call later!” But there are instances when gift, with its almost legal nuance, can be a more precise and powerful word than its suggested synonyms. Consider:
Smith will gift the deed to the university. Formal, with implications of recorded transactions and tax benefits.
Smith will give the deed to the university. “Here ya are. Don’t need it anymore.”
Smith will bestow the deed to (upon?) the university. With puffed-up chest and “Pomp and Circumstance” playing in the background.
Smith will bequeathe the deed to the university. Hinting of magnanimity, but without quite the formality of the first instance.
Smith will donate the deed to the university. Comments similar to that of bequeathe.
Smith will make a gift of the deed to the university. Only if Smith is trying to compensate for failing the writing course that instructed students to avoid passive, wordy and, yes, verbally sloppy phrasings.
And so this Ghost of Christmas Past turns back a page or two to quote not Dickens but Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, A Foundling (Book 1, Chapter 5): “As this is one of those deep observations which very few readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, where nothing but the inspiration with which we writers are gifted, can possibly enable any one to make the discovery.”
Sure, there are plenty of ways to abuse gift. But sometimes, like the noun at Christmas, it’s best to accept it with grace and gratitude.
My friend JohnnyB over at the Late for the Sky blog was un-dumbstruck by a headline he alerted me to yesterday. (Note: Just as JB introduced his email, “First off, everyone involved is alive.” Even the poor afflicted witnesses!)
Quick recap: Kid darts into traffic. Grandfather dashes to the rescue and picks the kid up, when both are hit by a car. The headline:
Child, Grandfather Struck By Car As Witnesses Look On
JohnnyB Struck By Headline As Witness (Me) Reads On: “Isn’t that what witness means?,” JB writes. “‘Witnesses see nothing’ would be contradictory (though it would be what happens in most Cincinnati crimes).” Indeed, witnesses witness. Or give witness. But JB was also raising a larger concern—that of effective writing. The subject line of his email was a snarked “A fine piece of writing.”
JB says, “The fact that there were witnesses doesn’t even have anything to do with the story. I guess the headline writer thought it added drama.” The phrase also adds a bit of misdirection. Doing something in front of witnesses implies not accident but, as JB notes, dramatic intention. Compare “Dog bites man in front of witnesses” and “Man bites dog in front of witnesses,” the former being somewhat natural and the latter being an act of “I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.”
A couple of side notes before I mention what really frustrates me about the headline: First, the story reports, “Michael Benjamin [one of the witnesses] was there when it happened.” Because witnesses witness, being there “when it happened” is implied. Second, the story wastes the opportunity for precision and drama by beginning “A young boy and his grandfather . . . .” Boy implies “young,” but it turns out that the kid was just two. Beginning “A two-year-old boy and his grandfather” would have delivered additionally appropriate gravity to this incident.
Finally, what’s further frustrating about this story is the headlinese style of “Child, Grandfather Struck by Car”—perhaps deleting that bloated, space-hoarding word and to make room for the ever-so-needed nonsensical redundancy of “As Witnesses Look On.” Now there’s concision for you. Except. The cramped-newspaper-style headline introduces a transcript of an audio TV report—and it appears on the web, the realm of infinite space to express thoughts clearly, and in natural English.
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.
Quoted from England’s Daily Express, which I know is the world’s greatest newspaper because the paper itself prints that precise slogan under its logo, and you must believe everything you read, particularly everything you read in the world’s greatest newspaper:
“It seems to me that you need to remind people every now and then that you can’t communicate to people in a language unless you know the grammar and the syntax and, indeed, the punctuation,” the prince told a Georgian Group awards ceremony at The Ritz in London.
The prince quoted above is England’s Prince Charles. Bless his royal-blue heart, his intentions are good, but his attempt to “communicate to people in a language” needs a bit of precision. This flabby sentence should feature all the precision of the Buckingham Palace guard, yet exhibits the wasted motion of fans in an artist-formerly-known-as-Prince (the other one) mosh pit. Let me pick royal nits:
The statement is imprecise and, in a sense, not true. You can communicate with grammar, syntax and punctuation lapses. We do it all the time. “I ain’t got none of them cookies no more, they’s gone.” Are you confused about my cookie inventory? Prince Charles meant that you can’t communicate precisely, without distraction, and with authority if you haven’t mastered the big three.
The good prince’s declaration not only fails to address but also itself employs another obstacle to communicating to people in a language: squishy and indirect word use. To wit:
“It seems to me.” If it didn’t seem to you, why would you even say it? Unnecessary. Besides, the phrasing has a subtle sense that he is at odds with general thinking (”they say one thing, but it seems to me that . . . ”)
“you need to.” you must is shorter and more powerful.
“remind people every now and then.” remind people occasionally would have been more direct, and more in tune with an audience sitting in the Ritz.
“to people.” Who else would you be using grammar, syntax and punctuation to communicate to? The dog? Rover doesn’t care if the command “Rover sit” should feature a comma. And not many inanimate objects can hear you at all, not even the chair in Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said.” Delete “to people.”
“in a language.” The phrase’s construction and placement weakens its connection to the language elements about to be listed. See my edit below.
“the.” Instead of “the grammar and the syntax,” how about “its grammar and its syntax”? Despite the being a definite article, “the grammar” gives the noun a general, unconnected air. Its clearly ties grammar to language.
My suggested revision isn’t poetry, but it would likely carry far more of the authority and confidence we expect of the man who will be king: “You can’t communicate precisely and credibly without command of the language’s grammar, its syntax and, indeed, its punctuation.”
And then I’ll take it even further: “You can’t communicate precisely without command of grammar, syntax and, indeed, punctuation,” as grammar, syntax and punctuation are components of language and few other things (name one), and, combined with the word communicate, these three words clearly imply language.
In other words, to fight the good fight, write tight.
Some years ago, a local TV station fired a popular weathercaster because he was “just” an announcer. He held no meteorology degree . . . the faker!. This was at the forefront (and the coldfront) of general TV news departments deciding that weathercasters needed degrees so that they could entertain us with adiabatic lapse rates and slipstreams and other meteorological minutia, perhaps trying to imply to us that said weathercasters used El Niño prevailing breezes to scientifically and naturally blow-dry that hair. Put it in simple English! Leave the test tubes back at the lab and tell us if it’s gonna rain tomorrow.
At the time, I was writing for a Cincinnati radio personality, and I composed a comedy bit in which said TV station next demanded that its news anchor have a Ph.D in current events, the economics reporter be a former Secretary of the Treasury, and the sportscaster have a Masters in statistics and Euclidean geometry.
It seems that I have, after all these years, finally gotten my “put it in simple English” request. Driving home last night, listening to the weather report on the radio, I heard this (exact quote as best as I can remember):
Temperatures will hit the 40s tomorrow, but over the weekend, it’s back to the 30s. And that means colder temperatures.
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.
A lot of interesting words are being bandied about in this election and the coverage thereof. And as always in such matters, people don’t seem to care about exactly what those words mean (to the point of Orwellian “War Is Peace” sorts of rhetoric on the order of “Attack Is Respect,” but that’s a different topic). Here are four examples of words we don’t see much (in two cases, I’d welcome seeing them more), with but fumbled eloquence:
Sometimes it’s best to say what you mean when claiming that someone didn’t mean what he said. Reacting to criticism of John McCain’s recent assertion that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, Sarah Palin told Fox “News”:
It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Sen. McCain chose to use because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy.
Palin used the word verbiage to mean “wording” or “phrasing,” and dictionaries do allow that such meanings might apply. But the first meaning, and very much a prevalent and powerful meaning, of verbiage is (and I’ll leave it to the apolitical—I think—Oxford English Dictionary: “Wording of a superabundant or superfluous character, abundance of words without necessity or without much meaning; excessive wordiness.” Myself, I remember the meaning by pretending that verbiage is a contraction of “verbal garbage.”
So, is it unfair for me to attack Palin’s easily misinterpreted use of verbiage (just because that’s what the word usually means)? If so, consider me unfair. One would think that people in the public eye might give a bit more concentration on carefully choosing their verbiage when defending another’s verbiage.
That’s from the English Fail blog, which is a funny (and distressing) collection of language use subject to ridicule. As one of the commenters noted: “Prepaying in advance seems easy enough. It’s prepaying in arrears that’s tricky.”
That very line of thinking is the foundation of the “As opposed to test” I recommend in Write Tight, and it leads to a couple of recent personal observations in my visit to Planet Redundancy, primarily on the radio:
“He died of a sudden heart attack.” As opposed to a well-planned heart attack? Attacks of any stripe may have gradual underpinnings, but the attacks themselves occur suddenly. The word attack implies abruptness. He died of a heart attack would have been just as clear.
“Are you struggling with too much credit card debt?” As opposed to struggling with too little credit card debt? “Are you struggling with credit card debt?” would have sufficed, as struggle clearly communicates that a problem is being fought, particularly since “credit card debt” also signals a problem.
“Fine-toothed comb.” A very young comb, as it apparently is teething (and doing a good job of it, as well). Though at least one dictionary accepts “toothed” as an alternative, I contend that “fine-tooth” is not only shorter (yes, just slightly), but also less subject to sad “teething” jokes in blogs.
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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