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.
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.”
I can add no greater praise to Paul Newman than what fans, critics and colleagues have already eloquently delivered. I have rarely used the phrase “American treasure.” I heartily apply that phrase to Newman.
Two thoughts related to both Paul Newman movies and language use come to mind:
The movie was one of the biggest hits of 1967 and included a tagline, delivered one time by Newman and one time by prison warden Strother Martin, that helped define the generation gap, “What we’ve got here is (a) failure to communicate.”
At first, not remembering the movie precisely, I thought the insertion of “(a)” was some sort of quibbling, but the writer was actually aggregating two versions of the quote. Strother Martin, the chain-gang Captain, first says “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Paul Newman as Luke, far later in the film, says “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” I don’t know if the placement/nonplacement of the indefinite article was intentional, but I like to think that it is—transforming the general, euphemistic failure to communicate early in the film to a specific, climactic failure. (Based on the novel by Donn Pearce, by the by.)
Second, the powerful writing of Nobody’s Fool. Here I’m talking about both the Paul Newman film and the Richard Russo novel it’s based on. For an exercise in artful condensation, compare the novel with the film product, which artfully compresses incidents and characters to fit a movie timeframe. Treat yourself to the novel; treat yourself to the film. Both are excellent. I’ve not had the pleasure of enjoying another Russo-Newman pairing in the the novel and the video versions of Empire Falls, but I believe I shall now stop this little bit of blog-writing to engage in that pleasure.
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.
Tuesday’s USA Today sports section covers the aftermath of an East Carolina U. upset victory over West Virginia. Fans poured onto the field, and now there are allegations of security pouring it on the fans. That’s background to my griping about the writer pouring it on the readers.
The story quotes ECU police chief Scott Shelton:
“We have five other jurisdictions who assist us at football games, and we will have a reassessment of what jurisdictions we use (in the future),” Shelton said at campus news conference.
Yes, “at campus news conference”—but that’s just me being snarky and it’s beside my main point. Why did Andy Gardiner, the observer outside the game, have to charge onto the field to pour it on with that parenthetical insertion? What does “in the future” add to this sentence? Several elements in the quote imply the future:
Few things will take place in the past or the present. Everything will take place in the future. Will is a verb of future tense.
Reassessment doesn’t connote the future the way will does, yet it implies potential change, and (Doc Brown, Marty McFly and revisionists running for high political office aside) changing the past has proven to be a bit difficult.
The entire context of the story—something went wrong—implies that change will be made. The bigger story is that after such a situation, change is not made.
Sometimes to write tight, it’s best to sit tight. In this quoted material, the original words were doing their work; the speaker was managing to communicate without the need for patronizing kibbitzing. Sometimes, football fans and reporters, it’s simply best to stay in the stands and let the players play the game.
Today, a bit of blatant self-promotion for the paperback edition of my book Write Tight. I feel free to do so as coverage of “current events” because I ran across an unsolicited testimonial on a blog the other day, reprinted here (with kind permission of the testimonializer) on the prime candidate for my new business card:
I’m confused. Perplexed. Flummoxed. Bemused. Discombobulated. Kerfluffled. Well, those aren’t quite the words I want. Let me turn to my thesaurus . . .
Stop!
PLEASE don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.
Thanks for saving me from myself. That’s from an article by Grant Barrett in the Malaysia Star. Barrett contends that a thesaurus leads you to selecting haughty or imprecise words, or flashy words you haven’t used before and have that new-car smell. These are all dangers, I agree. All tools have dangers. But using a razor doesn’t force you to shave off your eyebrows; using a thesaurus doesn’t force you to select the wrong word.
Barrett’s cautions aren’t (what’s the word I’m looking for? oh—here’s a good one) hidebound. And in fact he makes a superb point that individual words do not substitute for clear, precise writing. The right reasons to use a thesaurus are many:
Discover nuance. The parenthetical above wasn’t me being a smartass. I indeed went to a thesaurus to find hidebound to communicate inflexibility. I liked the tight-skinned implications of the word I found in my search.
Enrich your vocabulary. Perhaps you’ll find a word or two you’d not encountered before. Barrett dismisses the thesaurus in part because “no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries.” Granted. But a tome that included a definition for each word would be monstrous and unpublishable. So turn to the tool dedicated to that purpose. Look up new words in the dictionary. (And the smartass in me wants to ask why someone who finds thesauruses potentially harmful owns more than a dozen of them—wants to, but I’ll resist. Sort of.)
Enrich your understanding of the range of the language. Perhaps you’ll encounter words you know, but hadn’t realized were related to the word you’re looking up. As a hypothetical, imagine someone looking up atrocity and discovering the expected abomination and the unexpected enormity. “That means ‘real big,’ doesn’t it?” our hypothetical writer might think. No, it doesn’t.
Increase your humility. Sometimes the word you know is perfect is not perfect at all. Return to our hypothetical thesaurus consultation, and this time picture the writer looking up enormity to begin with.
Become practiced with writing tools. Use a razor but once in a while, and you’re apt to cut yourself. Use it daily, and shaving becomes efficient; the results cleaner, more acceptable. The thesaurus, the dictionary, the rhyming dictionary, the grammar guide, the etymological dictionary—use all regularly (and not just one of each—a dozen or more sometimes suffices) to learn their strengths, deficiencies, goals and assistances, and you can use each tool like a fine razor to pare down to the most precise words and wordings—a hallmark goal of concise writing.
In fact, a danger far greater than using a thesaurus is not using it enough.
I tuned out the chat-drama-chat-ohhh!-chat-chat-drama-drama-draaammmma Olympic commentary last night shortly after one of the U.S. women gymnasts flubbed a floor landing, and one commentator declared, “That is a disaster of immense proportions.” Or some such blather.
Tune-out. Not remote-control-sound-down tune-out. “Oh, just shut up,” tune-out.
The Chicago Fire was a disaster of immense proportions. Hurricane Katrina. Vesuvius. A moment of gymnastic imbalance is, well, a darn shame. But, oh well—there’s no molten lava surging across my kitchen floor.
Said commentator (I would mention him by name if he’d said anything to warrant me spending the energy looking it up) was perhaps trying to marry form and content in his commentary. China about to wrest Olympic Gold from our golden girls! Dreams about to be dashed! Oh the up-close-and-personal-agony-of-defeat-draaaammmmaaa! Had he wanted to marry form and content, he would have taken my instruction and just shut up every once in a while. The content before us was the incredible physical grace and artistry of the gymnastic routines. The form of the commentary should have aligned itself and assumed some quiet, graceful moments. But as it was, the commentator’s verbal gymnastics were themselves a disaster of immense proportions.
Over at StorefrontBacktalk, Eric Athas and Evan Schuman write that “J.Crew Apologizes For ‘Too Many’ Mistakes During Launch, Then Redesigns Its Apology.” Athas and Schuman compare the apology posted on July 30, 2008, and its July 31 version. “By Thursday morning, the apology had sharply shrunk—to less than one-fourth of Wednesday’s size. . . . Wednesday’s apology told customers, ‘We know we’ve let you down.’ That knowledge was apparently erased overnight, as Thursday morning had J.Crew knowing no such thing.”
Then Athas and Schuman write:
A more nitpicky change: On Wednesday, the retailer said: “We want to say that we’re sorry for any issues you have experienced.” On Thursday, the J.Crew team thought about it and decided to be more honest, having concluded that they really did not want to say any such thing. Thursday’s version became “We are truly sorry for any issues you have experienced.”
The Write Tight editor in me disagrees that such a change is in any way nitpicky, and if it is, J.Crew certainly chose a nit that needed picking. I want to commend them for getting to the point. Rather, “I commend them.”
On the other hand, maybe such truncation was just a way of marketing “fleece cut-offs.”
A couple of weeks ago, I was once again honored to give a presentation at The Antioch Writers Conference, a venerable gathering with some fine instructors. The staff is marvelous, as well, and I thank them for their hospitality.
I also had the pleasure of co-presenting with mystery-writer Sharon Short. Her latest, Tie Dyed and Dead: A Stain-busting Mystery, was published in February of this year. We spoke about “The Writing Life: How to ‘Pitch’ to an Agent,” though we covered other types of submissions as well.
My stay at the conference was disappointingly short. It’s a week-long affair, and schedules allowed me to sit in on only a couple of sessions the first morning. But I managed to catch one of the more compelling presentations I’ve seen at a writers conference: Robert Morgan’s introduction to a week of lectures about poetry.
Morgan is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, and author of such poetry books as Topsoil Road: Poems, such novels as Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage (an Oprah Book Club selection), and the recent Boone: A Biography. He spoke eloquently of traditional poetic forms from two standpoints: Memorability, and power. He told of a poetry class in which he asked students to recite lines of poetry off the cuff. Morgan was offered no free verse from the students, only classical meters and rhymes. Here was a group studying modern poetry, but had no modern poetry living at the tips of their brains.
As for power, one example. Morgan noted that “Language spoken with great emotion tends to become iambic.” For example: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” You can clearly hear the “da-DUM da DUM” rhythm, the “the-DRUM the-DRUM” beat of the iambs.
Note that Morgan didn’t say “poetry,” but “language.” Poetic tools and forms, rising from instinctive rhythms in how people express themselves, should be the prose-writers’ tools, as well. I have neither the space nor the poetic training to make this any sort of poetry class. Suffice to say that classical poetic forms are often more natural expressions of language than less-disciplined prose diction, and to write tight—to write so the reader swiftly understands—understand the power of infusing poetic diction appropriately into prose.
And because that’s pretty serious stuff there, and this is supposed to be something of a smart-ass blog, let me leave you with another memory from Antioch. Last year, Paul Dickson, author of many books, including several on word use (like The Hidden Language of Baseball), was talking about Hemingway covering the aftermath of a storm that had wrought horrific human damage. Dickson said, “Hemingway was so moved, he used an adjective.”
. 
, by the by.)
and 
it’s based on. For an exercise in artful condensation, compare the novel with the film product, which artfully compresses incidents and characters to fit a movie timeframe. Treat yourself to the novel; treat yourself to the film. Both are excellent. I’ve not had the pleasure of enjoying another Russo-Newman pairing in the 
and the 
versions of Empire Falls, but I believe I shall now stop this little bit of blog-writing to engage in that pleasure.
. I feel free to do so as coverage of “current events” because I ran across an unsolicited testimonial on a blog the other day, reprinted here (with kind permission of the testimonializer) on the prime candidate for my new business card:
:
, was published in February of this year. We spoke about “The Writing Life: How to ‘Pitch’ to an Agent,” though we covered other types of submissions as well. 
, such novels as 
(an Oprah Book Club selection), and the recent 
. He spoke eloquently of traditional poetic forms from two standpoints: Memorability, and power. He told of a poetry class in which he asked students to recite lines of poetry off the cuff. Morgan was offered no free verse from the students, only classical meters and rhymes. Here was a group studying modern poetry, but had no modern poetry living at the tips of their brains.
), was talking about Hemingway covering the aftermath of a storm that had wrought horrific human damage. Dickson said, “Hemingway was so moved, he used an adjective.”
and 
