Last week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor were as bland as the pundits had predicted. But one news report did offer a bit of linguistic titillation. NPR’s Ari Shapiro, commenting on Sotomayer’s opening remarks, said, “I don’t think she went out on a limb {hellip} The statement was much shorter than it needed to be.”
Did he mean that the statement should have been longer, or just that it could have been longer? I had never noticed this potential ambiguity in “need to be,” but it was real: I had to listen to several more sentences before I concluded that the second meaning was the intended one.
A quick online survey suggested the reason for my confusion. “It’s more X than it needs to be” is usually an unfavorable judgment. “Economists can make anything more complex than it needs to be.” Things are “more complicated,” “more expensive,” “more painful,” “harder” than they need to (i.e., ought to) be.
When “more X than it needs to be” is favorable, it usually means that something more than meets expectations. “The Hangover,” claims one online movie critic, is “much smarter than it needs to be.” You can buy a car, software, a burger, or pizza that’s “better than it needs to be.”
Most adjectives plugged into the “than it needs to be” formula are clearly good or bad: smarter, harder, more painful. But some adjectives - shorter, longer, smaller - can go either way. “May result in a service life estimate that is shorter than it needs to be” is a bad thing, from the customer’s point of view. But if a dress or a speech is “shorter than it needs to be,” is that a complaint or a compliment?
The answer is: It depends on the context. Like “it’s all downhill from here,” “you can’t be too tall for this job,” or “I like popcorn more than you,” the phrase “shorter than it needs to be” is ambiguous. That doesn’t make such expressions wrong, but it does mean writers need to handle them with care.
{hellip}
OBJECTIVITY FAIL: A story in the Baltimore Sun earlier this month reported that “a federal jury on Wednesday failed to agree on a death sentence, sparing the lives of two convicted killers.”
That use of “fail” seemed tendentious to some readers, reports John McIntyre, former copy czar at the Sun, at his blog You Don’t Say. “Fail suggests that the jury attempted to impose the death penalty but was unsuccessful,” McIntyre comments. “Neutral, factual language would have been preferable: A federal jury declined to impose the death penalty or, even better, A federal jury reached a sentence of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty.”
I agree with McIntyre’s editing suggestion, but not with his reading of fail. The notion that a failure implies an attempt is one of those pesky usage myths, only about a century old. Ambrose Bierce included it in his cranky usage book, “Write It Right,” in 1909: “Failure carries always the sense of endeavor; when there has been no endeavor there is no failure. A falling stone cannot fail to strike you, for it does not try.”
But fail had meant “neglect to do something expected” as early as the 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; you didn’t have to try in order to fail in your duty. And since the 17th century, fail has been used with inanimate subjects: “The cake failed to rise.” You can say that someone “failed to show up at work” whether the absentee tried to get there (but was trapped in a subway car) or just went fishing.
Fail may indeed be journalistically inappropriate, as in the Baltimore case. A jury may “fail to reach a verdict” (that is its goal), but to say it “failed” to impose a specific penalty implies that the penalty was expected or appropriate. It does not, however, imply that the jury tried but failed.
{hellip}
PROVINCETOWN IN BRIEF: Mary West, a Cape Cod resident, sees many abbreviations for Provincetown in the local print media, and she wonders which, if any, is right. Is it Ptown, P/town, P-town? None of the above?
I remember debating the point once with another editor who spelled it P’town. For me, that suggests the pronunciation puh-TOWN, with just a tiny unstressed p at the start (compare m’lady, s’wonderful, will-o’-the-wisp). My vote is for P-town, since a cap plus hyphen (or space) is the usual way to represent a word with a letter pronounced as a letter: the A train, F-stop, G-string, I-beam, Q fever, U-boat.
There are at least five locations, and innumerable businesses, using the various styles of “P town,” so we can’t say any one way is wrong. But I’m sticking with P-town, which has both tradition and transparency on its side.
E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas. 
