Everything You Know About English Is Wrong

Mae day

2009-06-03T11:01:46Z

Forgive me for playing a little catch-up after a long blogsnooze. And forgive me for being late in taking the opportunity to promote a worthy cause: the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. Watch for it next year.

Or, if the Family Circus comic strip has any say in it, “Wach four itt neckst yeer.” I appreciate familial circus support, but couldn’t Bil Keane’s promotional art have been a little less cute, with non-precocious Billy pointing out that the date of the drive was “Satidy May 9″?

Well, at least he spelled “May” right. What explains young Billy’s spelling? Perhaps Josh over at Comics Curmudgeon has the answer.

Meantime, back at the land of superbig spiral notebooks, let’s appreciate the unfortunate message: Letter Carriers will forgive misspellings—even on envelopes, perhaps? If they’re so forgiving of spelling, why do all my letters addressed to “Bill” Keane come back as “undeliverable as addressed”?

The Bing is dead. Long live the Bing.

2009-06-02T10:53:12Z

Bing doesn’t sing.

That’s because Bing is dead. Bing Crosby, that is—as the fans of “White Christmas” and of the hilarious “Road” movies with Bob Hope will recall.

Bing also doesn’t sing as the new name of Microsoft’s search engine, once sporting the now-non-live “Live Search” name. Writes The New York Times:

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”

“The sound of found”? Well, then, aha . . . haha. Ha ha.

OK, it’s meta-Bing time. A search for “Bing” on Bing. The number-one result under “News about Bing” as I write this? “Bing’s communications director resigns.” OK, maybe the search engine’s name is kinda silly, but resigning because of it seems a little severe. Oh, wait. That Bing is Dave Bing, Mayor of Detroit. Totally different story.

The number-one regular result points to bing.com. Didn’t realize the mayor had his own site. Oh, wait. That’s the search engine this time. In the top 9 non-news-specific results (the first screenful that I see), Bing the search engine gets four results, Bing the Crosby gets two, Bing the energy drink (never heard of it, myself) gets two, Bada Bing the fictional bar on The Sopranos gets one. (At least the latter is a better/bettah/bada use of Bing.)

Finally, I can’t write a topper to this story any better than the Times did: “Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: ‘But It’s Not Google.’”

What the H?

2009-03-17T11:07:40Z

Sometimes you have to laugh your way out of a coma.

Such laughter has drawn me out of “Hi. 8. Us?”—for better or worse. And it’s kind of the “8″ part that did it.

A restaurant I like for its food and not its verbal dexterity recently issued a coupon postcard with one of my favorite typos of late. The restaurant’s new slogan? “Were good food and service are always on the menu.” Were? But no more?

Were oh were has that poor H gone?

Hi! 8. Us?

2009-02-17T10:38:33Z

As the licenseplatespeak headline implies, this blog will be back soon.

Does not rhyme with carburetor

2009-02-04T12:44:24Z

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.)

Abdicating advocacy

2009-02-04T12:45:32Z

My favorite malapropism at this moment comes from a recent personal tussle with a manufacturer. Long story short: Said manufacturer’s product Did Not Work; said manufacturer offered multiple troubleshooting suggestions but declined to replace the product; yours truly fumed via both email and telephone until the customer service rep finally caved in, refusing to acknowledge that the product Did Not Work, but offering to replace it with a different model, because he was, as he phrased it so exquisitely in an email, a “customer abdicate.”

What unearth?

2009-01-23T13:05:10Z

I maintain a small file of “perfect words,” ones that elegantly match form and content. One such word is sesquipedalian, which from its Latin roots roughly translates to “a foot and a half long.” It means “using or characteristic of long words.” Words a foot and a half long.

Sesquipedalian represents perfection for everyone. I recently unearthed a perfect word for me. Consider:

I once harbored a deep fascination with archeology.
I think aardvark is a funny word.
I love puns, wordplay, and neologisms.

Thus:

Aardvarchaeology is a science blog I stumbled across and that I frankly know nothing about. Yeah, I could read the “About” section, but I’m still reveling in the word creation. I appreciate several things about this word concoction, in addition to the opportunity it affords me to use another bulleted list:

Perfect word for me personally, as described.
This perfect word was constructed by a Swede—I only dream of being able to concoct wordplay in a second language.
The neologism was created with an archaic (reference intended) spelling of archeology, at least to American eyes—because, after all, shouldn’t old subjects use olde spellings?

Now, I also once harbored a deep fascination with the American Civil War, and I think carburetor is a funny word . . . I wonder what I might stumble upon next.

Uninterest rates

2009-01-17T17:11:05Z

In a news story titled “Dell to offer refunds to customers” comes this sentence:

Some never got promised rebates, while others applied for zero-percent financing but were charged higher interest rates.

Everything I know about math is wrong, too, but am I incorrect in assuming that charging interest of any sort would constitute a figure higher than zero? Therefore, “but were charged interest rates” without the higher is clear. For that matter, the word rates is superfluous, as well. ” . . . others applied for zero-percent financing but were charged interest.” (I’ll leave the discussion of the difference between applying for something and being guaranteed something to another day, when I talk about how I’m suing the government because I applied for negative taxation but taxes were levied nonetheless.)

Sometimes extra words hinder prose not necessarily by adding tiny physical length, but by lading considerable “mental length” onto the reading experience, as readers disconnect from the story to mentally note the wording. If the goal is lower interest, then in my case the sentence quoted above has accomplished that goal, by reducing my interest in the story it tells as I (in my occasional role as general reader) focus on how it is told.

Verbiterrhorage

2009-01-17T17:22:57Z

In one of those “Why didn’t you just ask me and pay me the research grant?” studies, McMaster University has discovered that suffering from seborrheic dermatitis is more severe than suffering from dandruff. Or so the patient perceives—same condition, different names. Give a condition a name worthy of a TV commercial “doctor,” and people get scared. Got it—people don’t understand jargon. Give me the grant money, please. And the newer the concocted medicalese, the greater the likelihood that people will perceive the jargon as more serious. Got it—people fear medical conditions they haven’t heard of more than they fear ones they’ve heard about for years. Give me the grant money, please.

Says the abstract of “The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness”:

This study demonstrates that the use of medical language in communication can induce bias in perception; a simple switch in terminology results in a disease being perceived as more serious, more likely to be a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition. These findings regarding the conceptualization of disease have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, advertising, and public policy.

Among the technical/lay pairs studied:

hypertension/high blood pressure
erectile dysfunction disorder/impotence
seborrheic dermatitis/dandruff
myocardial infarction/heart attack
hypertrichosis/excessive hair growth
pharyngitis/sore throat
myalgic ~~encepalomyelitis~~encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
psoriasis/the heartbreak of (just kidding)

One technical phrase used in the study seems to operate in the opposite direction: “cerebrovascular accident.” On the surface, that doesn’t sound all that bad. It was an accident. Stubbed my cerebellum. Give me a Band-Aid. Just a little boo-boo. The phrase seems to inappropriately disguise the severity of the event: a stroke.

But a figurative cerebrovascular accident is just what you might experience if your doctor were to announce that you have been diagnosed with androgenic alopecia. Don’t panic. Just throw away the comb. It’s male pattern baldness. Don’t allow the doctor to infect you with verbomedicyclical terrhor—the fear of big medical words.

Nobody expects the Spanish anapostrophism!

2009-01-14T12:25:30Z

Kind readers and fellow word lovers, you gotta love a good phrase:

heretical anapostrophism

No comment, because I can’t top such wonderful deconstructionist constructionism, except to point to the source of the phrase (and to some delightful commentary from Motivated Grammar, which alerted me to the phrase).

All I can say is, fercri’s’sake’s.