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September 27, 2007
Linguist Mark Liberman, scourge of pop statisticians, debunker of myths about sex and language, has a post at Language Log dismantling yesterday’s story in the New York Times on the “growing happiness gap between men and women.”
According to new research, says Times reporter David Leonhardt, women now spend more time than men at tasks they don’t enjoy -- the reverse of the situation 30-plus years ago.
But which women, and how many of them? Liberman reprints the graph from the study that supposedly demonstrates the trend. “When I show readers of the NYT article the graph of the data . . . they're flabbergasted,” he writes. And no wonder:
The words paint a very different picture, he says:
What people take away from the journalistic description of this study is that women used to be happier than men, and now men are happier than women -- and they think of this as a fact about all men and all women. In fact, we're talking about effects whose size is such that perhaps the happiest half of the population, on an optimistic reading of a complex statistical reconstruction, contains a couple of percent more of one sex than the other!
You’ll also want to catch up with Liberman’s pursuit of the latest junk science in the sex-differences realm: The discovery of the (aptly named) “crockus,” allegedly a brain region that makes girls better at detail work.
There is a real guy, Dan Hodgins, out there spreading the gospel of the crockus to parents and teachers. But his sourcing for the existence of that organ -- a so far nonexistent Dr. Alfred Crockus and the definitely fictional Boston Medical University Hospital -- is looking increasingly shaky.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:03 PM
September 13, 2007
No, I haven’t yet mingled with the throngs of shopperazzi celebrating the arrival of Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus at the newly upscaled Natick Collection, formerly Natick Mall. (That’s why we have the Stylephile crew). But I’ve been monitoring the excitement in my own sedentary, text-centric, nitpicking way.
The first language oddity came in a mailing from Nordstrom, inviting me to enjoy the rewards of using a Nordstrom credit card. The (modest) perks escalate, of course, as the outlay does: To hit the top level, you need “a minimum annual net spend of $20,000 at Nordstrom on your Nordstrom card.”
No doubt the lawyers are responsible for all the preemptive redundancy. But what’s with the “net spend”? That’s not English -- at least, not everyday consumer-friendly American English. The Nexis news database found the phrase only 13 times (over 30 years) in US papers, and five of those were in the trade-oriented Variety.
It’s not that spend can’t be a noun, of course. But net spend is budget jargon; in an invitation aspiring to stylishness, it clashes like a cheap handbag.
But wait, there’s more: Next came a newspaper insert from Neiman Marcus, offering free treats at its opening. In honor of the store’s 100th birthday, visitors were invited to sample “one of those infamous chocolate chip cookies you’ve heard about.” I didn’t bite; I don’t know how a cookie achieves infamy, but I can’t say I’m eager to find out.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 12:47 PM
August 20, 2007
John McIntyre, who blogs on language and editing at the Baltimore Sun, marks his 21st anniversary there with a roundup of things he has learned about newspaper culture. The list will have print journalists intoning "Amen, brother," but readers should also find it amusing and maybe enlightening. Some highlights:
A reporter, seeing a copy editor’s deletion of an adjective or prepositional phrase, will react as if a chapter has been ripped from the Pentateuch.
The dumber the comic strip, the fiercer the loyalty.
To a reporter, a 50-inch story is, by definition, twice as good as a 25-inch story.
The reader who spots the error you [the editor] let into print after you caught 19 others will write to ask if anyone on the staff has been to college.
But one of them stopped me:
No reader cares as much as a thin belch about how hard you worked on the story or photo or headline.
The main point is clear: You don't get credit for effort, only for results. But what the heck is a "thin belch"? Google turns up enormous belches, appreciative belches, loud belches, even a few fat belches, but no thin belches. I have asked the author for enlightenment; check for an update in a day or two.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 08:55 PM
August 15, 2007
Today's "Mr. Boffo" strip has a new eggcorn candidate for Chris Waigl's online collection.
The text reads: "It's all about people. Money is only a bi-product you get when you squeeze them hard enough and long enough."
I had never seen bi-product for byproduct, but it's a logical enough mistake: Here, Mr. B (as corporate executive) is interpreting by-product -- an incidental outcome of a process -- as bi-product, one of two simultaneous results. (But what is the second product he refers to -- simply sadistic pleasure?)
This by- prefix, meaning "aside, apart from the main issue," is fairly uncommon now; an illegitimate child, for instance, is no longer called a by-blow, as Fielding's Tom Jones was. But we still have byplay and bypass to remind us of why it's byproduct.
Biproduct is also a real term, says Wikipedia, but it's not exactly a household word: "In category theory and its applications to mathematics, a biproduct is a generalisation of the notion of direct sum that makes sense in any preadditive category."
All right, then. But I suspect the mathematical biproduct is too arcane to be tempting writers into careless misspellings. In Mister Boffo's use, at least, biproduct has all the marks of a genuine eggcorn.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:41 AM
August 13, 2007
Last Monday the New York Times reported what a CT scan revealed about the insides of "Demetrios," a 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy owned by the Brooklyn Museum:
Dr. Boxt also spotted a tiny mass in the mummy's abdominal captivity measuring about 1.2 inches across. Curators and conservators suggested that it was a scarab.
That same day, the Times's corrections box confessed to having misspelled Alberto Gonzales's name at least 14 times and the name of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher at least 50 times (since 1958). But a week later, there has been no mention of the "abdominal captivity" malapropism.
It might be a spellcheck-induced mistake, but I haven't found a plausible misspelling of cavity that makes Word suggest subtituting captivity. (Nexis, which is smarter than Word -- not that that's saying much -- asks if I mean to search "abdominal CAPACITY.")
So maybe it's just a slip. A rare one -- Google turns up only three other examples of "abdominal captivity" -- and apparently one that doesn't punch readers in the eye (or the gut). And unlike the attorney general, Demetrios is in no position to complain.
(CT scan of an Egyptian mummy -- though not Demetrios -- from the University of Illinois Mummy Project.)
Posted by Jan Freeman at 01:30 PM
August 7, 2007
I was on vacation last week, out where the corn is sweet and the frappes are milkshakes and the soda is pop, so I didn't respond to readers who complained about the Globe's misuse of flaunt in a July 31 op-ed and headline: "Flaunting subpoenas is not permitted." I didn't need to, since a letter to the editor printed last Friday set everyone straight: "The correct word is flout, which means 'to openly disregard.' "
But in this summer slip, the Globe was in good company. In the July 30 issue of the New Yorker, David Remnick, in his Letter from Jerusalem, made the same mistake when he wrote of "Burg’s . . . flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport, because his wife is French-born."
Geoff Pullum commented on the New Yorker's flub on Language Log:
I think (I have no quantitative backup) it is more usual for flaunt to be used where flout was meant, and I can see why there is confusion in that direction: you can boastfully exhibit your contempt for normal standards, and thus flaunt your flouting of them.
I too think of flaunt for flout as the more common mistake, but a week's worth of newspaper data doesn't back up that guess. In the Nexis database of US newspapers, flaunt appeared 41 times; it was correct 39 times and incorrect twice.
Flout was indeed less common overall -- it showed up just 16 times -- but in one of those, it should have been flaunt. So flout was used wrongly twice in 41 cites, or nearly 5 percent of the time; flaunt was wrong once in 16 outings, or 6 percent of the time.
No, that's not a big enough sample to prove anything. But just for fun, I checked a couple of other common errors over the same one-week period:
Infer was used to mean imply seven times in a total 19 instances, or 37 percent of the time. Feel bad, the topic of a discussion in Miss Conduct's blog, got about 200 hits; the less accepted feel badly got only 19, about 9 percent of the total.
Most of the allegedly common errors in English are harder to interpret, though, because they're often just spelling errors. For instance, 12 of the 36 examples of loathe in my sample week were not uses of the verb ("I loathe him") but misspellings of the adjective loath ("She was loathe to admit it"). That's a high percentage of goofs -- but they're all misspellings, not "confusions" of words.
I don't mean to suggest that spelling isn't important. But when someone mixes up the spellings of Neiman Marcus and the Nieman Foundation, we don't say he's confusing the department store with the journalism outfit. Why do we think it's so much worse to type your for you're or flack for flak? (That's not a rhetorical question; send answers, please.)
Posted by Jan Freeman at 08:07 PM
July 17, 2007
Language bloggers, not surprisingly, have a couple of nits to pick with "grammar vandal" Kate McCulley, who goes around town adding commas and apostrophes to defective signs like a Reebok ad reading "Run easy Boston." A feature in Sunday's City Weekly explained:
The Reebok sign should have read "run easily," McCulley observed, and it should have had a comma after "easily," before "Boston."
(Grammar note: “Easy” is an adjective, which must never be used to describe a verb, such as “run”; that task calls for the adverb “easily.”)
"Run easily, Boston"?
Not so fast, said the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar:
While we appreciate the zeal, easy can be used as an adverb that means "with ease," and has been used this way since 1400. (We checked in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman asks if we think Shakespeare's line should be edited to read "The course of true love never did run smoothly." Anyone who thinks "easy" is only an adjective, he says,
needs to take the general grammatical point up with William Shakespeare, Jack London, Francis Beaumont, Wilfred Owen, and many other worthies, as discussed in an earlier Language Log post: "Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?"
Mr. Verb was stopped in his metaphorical tracks by something else entirely: McCulley's declaration "Without punctuation, we have nothing."
What's so striking about the use of "without X, we have nothing" is how it's traditionally been used: Check around a little and you get love, hope and dreams filling that X. . . . all matters with some metaphysical heft. I'm fairly sure you have never been so high that punctuation made that list.
Zeno, blogging at Halfway There, says McCulley's comma campaign warms his prescriptivist heart. Still, he agrees that her objection to easy is wrongheaded, and warns (too late?) that the entire grammar-vandal enterprise is hazardous:
No one can safely wave an admonitory finger and hold forth authoritatively on exactly what is right and what is wrong. That is a fool's errand. Anyone who tries too hard to fill the role of grammar police is certain to find him- or herself brought up on false arrest charges.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 04:46 PM
July 12, 2007
Wave goodbye to "just deserts": In today's entry on his Oxford University Press blog, Ben Zimmer reports that the upstart "just desserts" -- the version that confuses dessert, the after-dinner treat, with desert, something you deserve -- is beating the standard idiom by 58 percent to 42 percent.
Zimmer used the Oxford English Corpus -- a database of "more than 1.5 billion words pulled from newspapers, blogs, magazines, scientific papers, journals, books, websites, transcripts," and other sources, according to the OUP -- to check on the condition of some beleaguered familiar phrases.
There is some good news for traditionalists. The standard sleight of hand, fazed by, and home in on are trouncing the challengers (slight of hand, phased by, hone in on) by 2 to 1 or better.
But vocal chords is neck and neck with the standard vocal cords, and strait-laced scores a pitiful 34 percent against straight-laced. "Poetic innovation or descent into linguistic anarchy?" asks Zimmer. The strait-laced will have one answer, I suppose; the rest will have desserts.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 03:49 PM
July 8, 2007
Commenting on today's substitute-Safire column, a lament about the short supply of grammatically acceptable single men, the irrepressible Mr. Verb sees an entrepreneurial opportunity:
Subject: Enhance your 6r@mm@r!
Isn't it time you did something about your problem? Finally the genuine stuff -- without money tricks! Want harder grammar? Want to make your sentences up to three clauses longer? . . .
"I love how rapidly your product worked on my boyfriend, he can't stop talking about how excited he is having such a big new vocabulary and firm command of syntax!"
And yes, of course there's more, much more!
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:34 PM
July 1, 2007
[Updated 7/03: Staples, whose catalog is the source of this ad, has changed the wording on its website: The refractory table ("stubborn, uncooperative") is now a refectory table (one meant for meals or refreshments -- though traditional refectory tables are large, heavy-legged dining-hall furniture, not modest tea table like this.)]
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:13 PM
June 29, 2007
Idly language-linking here and there, I recently discovered that the most famous punctuation book of all time has not just a website but also an interactive quiz. Naturally, I couldn't resist.
It's only 12 questions, the first six on apostrophes and as straightforward as apostrophe questions can be. You click to add punctuation, as needed, to expressions like "the children's hands" and "four yards' worth."
The next six, on commas, are more complicated. "Stop, or I'll scream"? The quiz demands the comma, but does it really belong in that short, urgent command? When I check the book, I see the problem: Truss thinks "Stop" is an interjection, like "blimey" or "golly" or "heh-heh." But it's not -- it's a verb. And in a short compound sentence like "Stop or I'll scream," that comma is absolutely optional.
Then there's this puzzler:
Of course there weren't enough tickets to go round.
The test wants a comma after "of course." But for me, the punctuation would depend on what that "of course" is meant to do. And in the sample sentence, it's very hard to guess. The "of course" might be emphatic:
"Of course there weren't enough tickets to go round -- he always forgets to buy me one."
Or it might be parenthetical:
Jane gave us six tickets. Of course, there weren't enough tickets to go round, but we knew not everyone would want to see the play.
In the first case, the comma digs a pothole in the rhythm; in the second one, it's natural.
Oddly enough, in the book this test sentence is used to illustrate "weak interruptions" (like "of course") that don't always require commas: Truss says she, and you, can go either way.
Skipping the commas may drop your score down to "75 percent stickler," but that doesn't mean you're not 100 percent correct.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:32 AM
June 28, 2007
Several news reports of Paris Hilton's post-jail interview with Larry King quoted her as saying she wanted to help keep women from going to jail repeatedly. "I know I can make a difference and hopefully stop this vicious circle," she said.
Wow, I thought -- Paris Hilton knows it's vicious circle, not vicious cycle? That's unexpected.
As Paul Brians explains at his website, Common Errors in English:
The term “vicious circle” was invented by logicians to describe a form of fallacious circular argument. . . . The phrase has been extended in popular usage to all kinds of self-exacerbating processes such as this: poor people often find themselves borrowing money to pay off their debts, but in the process create even more onerous debts which in their turn will need to be financed by further borrowing. Sensing vaguely that such destructive spirals are not closed loops, people have transmuted “vicious circle” into “vicious cycle.” The problem with this perfectly logical change is that a lot of people know what the original “correct” phrase was and are likely to scorn users of the new one.
Unfortunately, Hilton's "vicious circle" was even more surprising once I'd seen the interview. (I had to watch it -- tediously, in segments, on YouTube -- because other people's ears can't be trusted; in fact, one website did misquote Hilton's words as "vicious cycle.") King looked as if he might nod off, lulled by the soporific stream of inanities: "Everything happens for a reason," "everyone makes mistakes," "I'm an Aquarius."
I suppose there must be, somewhere in the vast crowd of the momentarily famous, a celebrity whose conversation is less spellbinding than poor Paris Hilton's. But at the moment, I'm finding it hard to imagine.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:33 PM
June 12, 2007
Browsing the Google News headlines last week, I stumbled onto a new verb -- new to me, that is, though familiar enough in Britain for the past quarter-century.
It came up in a story of sudden death in the English countryside: A lamb belonging to celeb-chef Gordon Ramsay, put out to graze on the grounds of David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham's estate, had been killed and eaten by a mysterious predator.
And Ramsay, who'd been fattening up the lamb for a starring role on his TV menu, wanted to know whodunit, reported the Daily Mail:
One downmarket rag last week suggested Gordon -- pictured [above] with the lamb -- had callously made up the story to publicise his show "The F Word." But the chef has been doorstepping neighbours of the Beckhams in Sawbridgeworth in an effort to track down the wild cat said to be the killer.
Doorstepping?
A not uncommon word in the British press, it seems. To doorstep someone is to confront him or her on the way out of a building, demanding answers or quotes, or, more generally, to hover about or stalk him.
The Oxford English Dictionary, which dates the transitive doorstep to 1981, quotes the Daily Telegraph (1987): "The incident . . . came amid mounting Royal Family anger with newspaper and freelance photographers ‘doorstepping’ their annual holiday."
There's an intransitive doorstep, meaning "sell or canvass door to door," that's a couple of decades older: "Dr. David Owen, a young St. Thomas' Hospital research graduate, is doorstepping assiduously in politically doubtful streets" (Daily Telegraph, 1966).
But in all those decades, doorstepping has barely made a dent in the American vernacular: Nexis shows only about 20 uses of the "ambush interview" sense since 1981 (plus a few of the "canvass" sense). (These numbers represent doorstepped and doorstepping, but for obvious reasons, I didn't search plain doorstep.)
Why have Americans resisted doorstep, while embracing gone missing and at the end of the day? We know doorsteps, both literal and figurative, whether or not our own homes have them.
Maybe it's because in this country doorsteps rarely lead to our celebrities and notables. Anyone doorsteppable is perched in the hills above Los Angeles or on the shores of Santa Monica, or barricaded in a Manhattan tower or Washington monument, with a straight path from door to taxi, limousine, or helicopter, no doorsteps involved.
But doorstepping is still young, as usages go. It may yet be coming to a newspaper near you.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:58 PM
June 2, 2007
Since Wednesday, I've been expecting the Times to publish a letter (or two) objecting to the tack Thomas Friedman took in his column, "Iran Arrests Grandma"($) :
Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth -- had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmother and dual Iranian-U.S. citizen, while she was visiting her 93-year-old mother in Tehran. Do you know how paranoid you have to be to think that a 67-year-old grandmother visiting her 93-year-old mother can bring down your regime? Now that is insecure.
Now, you don't have to be Judge Judy to see the holes in this argument. Friedman doesn't really think "67-year-old grandmother" is synonymous with "feeble, harmless old lady." (Golda Meir? Indira Gandhi? Aung San Suu Kyi? He also knows he couldn't use "67-year-old grandfather" that way, to imply "harmless, powerless husk." (Not so long ago, Saddam Hussein was a 67-year-old grandfather.)
So what's with the poor-old-granny rhetoric? (He used the word "grandmother" five times in the column, not counting the headline.) Is the language there to taunt Iran, to fire up American sentiment, or just for "human interest"?
Whatever Friedman's end, readers apparently don't have a problem with his means. I've seen only one blog comment pointing out the illogic of the little-old-granny argument.
Did other readers think that a bit of sexism and ageism in defense of liberty was no vice? Or that the whole grandma angle was just too lame to deserve comment?
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:12 PM
May 21, 2007
I've been meaning to post about the pleasures of reading Miss Snark, the literary agent, though her blog is less about the fine points of language than the gross points -- like how to query an agent without sounding like a nitwit.
Nitwittery is in plentiful supply, though, so Miss Snark (with the aid of her poodle, Killer Yapp, and a pail of gin) has been dispensing a stream of straight talk (and sometimes a shot from the cluegun) to would-be novelists. When she turned on the crapometer, offering free advice on sample queries, those who braved it got responses like this:
You're absolutely awash in more words than you need. Pare! Pare! Take that dagger and cut off about half of what you have here. Get the action moving. Quit telling us how all fired moody and Heathcliffian all these "he's" are. Kill someone! Now!
Miss Snark, alas, has abruptly hung up her stilettos, effective yesterday, saying that she has answered all the questions she has answers for. But the website -- two years' worth of tough love, Clooney swoons, and haiku in honor of Thomas Pynchon's 70th birthday -- lives on.
(P.S.: Miss Snark's "book" cover is only a joke. For now.)
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:17 PM
May 13, 2007
Today's Word column deals with readers' eggcorn favorites, but the harvest was too abundant to be contained in that small space. Here are more contributions (some in edited form) from the current e-mail crop:
Margaret Menamin: "I have encountered the confusion of hearken and hark, gauntlet and gantlet. I once knew a judge who referred to bodyhouses instead of bawdyhouses, and that certainly made a great deal of sense."
Jim Sciulli: Prostrate for prostate, road to hoe, maddening crowd. "[Former Pittsburgh Pirates coach] Bill Cowher always said, 'Sorta speak.' Is it so to speak or sort of speak, or neither?"
Nancy May: "How about hone in on? I hear/see this one all the time."
Matt Seccombe: "My favorite eggcorn (in my editing work) is just desserts for just deserts. It has metaphorical possibilities, with the good boy receiving chocolate cake and ice cream while the naughty one gets stale biscuits and bruised apples."
John F. Guthrie, Jr.: "Chomping at the bit instead of champing at the bit."
Anabeth Dollins: "There's a Chinese food seller in the food court of a local [Pittsburgh] shopping mall that has been selling 'Fried Wanton' for years."
Anonymous:
I'll have to make due
Don't make a big tadoo about it
I chocked it up to experience
It was chalked full of apples
That is just not exceptable
It peaked my interest
It will cause a fervor for sure
I had to either wear sunglasses or glint (squint)
He thinks he has exulted status
He honed in on it like a laser
We went to a potlatch supper
Add some Cheyenne pepper
They use no mast-produced products
David Westlake: "I've always felt that the granddaddy eggcorn of them all is momento for memento. Our brains are too good at making associations with things we already know, such as, in this case, 'Un momento, senor.'"
Edith Maxwell: "My son, now 20, used to talk about furnichair for tables, chairs, couches. My younger son used to say we were going on daycation. My goddaughter used to say she wanted to go out and play in the back yarden. Maybe those are less eggcorns than sensible new formations."
Jennifer Cox: "In 1996, when our entire office was being laid off, my colleague Pierre did his best to convince me that it was a blessing in the skies. I've always loved his imagery and the reinforced idea of 'heavenly' intervention."
Joseph S. Lieber: I suspect I am somewhat less tolerant than you of eggcorns; I tend to view them as little more than mistaken usage. Have you heard for all intensive purposes?"
Nick Giarratani: "Supposively or supposebly in lieu of supposedly. I work at Salem State College and am always
calling my kids on their misuse of those words!"
Sally Harris: "I've talked with several people who insist on using wheelbarrel instead of wheelbarrow. I guess it
sounds like a barrel on wheels."
Ray Smith: "How about the perennial children's eggcorn: chicken pops for chicken pox."
Harold Hyman: "Chaise lounge for chaise longue."
Elliot Singer: "I enjoyed your heart-rendering article."
Greg Nash: "One of my children told his friend that his grandmother had old-timer's disease."
Chaz Scoggins: "Here's one that makes me cringe: safety deposit boxes for safe deposit boxes]."
Bob Vanasse: "I have long suspected that children's common vocalizing of flutter-by, instead of butterfly, might actually be closer to its original name. It is certainly more descriptive."
Joe Donohue: "Sparrowgrass = asparagus. When I was called up in the Berlin crisis of 1961, and assigned to a Kentucky national guard tank battalion, I was asked, 'Do you like sparrowgrass?' I have an image of a huge flock of sparrows, settling down in a field of asparagus and pecking away at it until there is nothing left."
Stan Fleischman: "Does the misuse of tow the line for toe the line qualify?"
Jay Gold, M.D.: "Don't forget medicine (stuff that patients say) as a fertile source: Blood clogs, hard attack, old-timer's disease, sick-as-hell anemia."
Sandra Sweeney: "I was in the airport on Friday and heard a man say: They were wrecking havoc with it."
Elaine Bakal: We humans are always trying to make sense out of things we don't understand. In a memoir writing class I was in a few years ago, one of the students referred to a female character in his story as a pre-Madonna instead of a prima donna."
Julian Smith: "I opened a screenplay from one of my former scriptwriting students and discovered a reference to an anxious character being on tender hooks. My old student clearly meant tenterhooks -- but tender hooks struck me as a very useful description of the way lovers 'hook' one another or hook up."
Linda M. Elsmore: "The Globe ran a TV commercial depicting people from different neighborhoods in Boston. One, reflecting the neighborhood of Cambridge, used the word vervacity in her description. Didn't she mean vivacity or verve?"
John Bonavia: "I wonder if you noticed this extraordinary expression attributed to a Boston police officer (Globe, April 8): 'Sometimes parents just defend their kid until they're blind in the teeth.' I've heard of lie in their teeth or in a blind rage, but blind in the teeth?"
Barb Crook: "Isn't heart-wrenching just a corruption of heart-rending (or as some few others prefer to say, heart-rendering)?"
Earle: "KFI, a talk radio station here in Los Angeles, has a reporter covering the Phil Spector murder trial. This morning he reported on a defense motion to exclude evidence that Spector referred to women with an obscenity. [The defense argued], according to the reporter, that potential women jurors would have a guttural reaction to hearing the word. I found this mixture of gut reaction and visceral reaction pleasant on many levels."
P.R.: "Bare with me, tow the line, tough road to hoe. And a co-worker once offered me a kitten she referred to as a ferro cat; I could not convince her that she meant feral."
Sheila Hallissy: "As a retired English teacher, I have heard a
lot of fractured English. My favorite eggcorn is a student's estimation of her self of steam."
Posted by Jan Freeman at 07:24 AM
May 10, 2007
If you think airline language is worse than airline food, you've got a friend in the cockpit: Boston-bred pilot Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com's Ask the Pilot column, takes on the lingua franca of flight in the current installment. (Part 2, on air-terminal talk, will be online tomorrow.)
Some of Smith's entries are simply informational (and sometimes reassuring). Air pocket "has no precise meteorological meaning," he says; it's just a bump in the ride. And wind shearis "one of those buzzwords that scare the crap out of people, but in fact it's very common and rarely hazardous."
But others entries note pet peeves, which aren't all that different, it turns out, from yours and mine.
AT THIS TIME "At this time, we ask that you please put away all electronic devices and place all cellular phones in the off position." Meaning: now, or presently. This is air travel's signature euphemism, and one whose needlessness really sets my teeth on edge.
TAMPERING WITH, DISABLING OR DESTROYING "Federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling or destroying a lavatory smoke detector." While we're at it, this is another example of fatty verbiage that serves no purpose other than to bore passengers. Meaning: tampering with.
Smith goes too far, though, when he declares that the emphatic do -- "We do appreciate your choosing United" -- is a usage with "no grammatical justification." It may not be necessary in the friendly skies, but this has been normal English for a millennium and more.
The OED quotes (to pick examples with readable spelling) the16th-century Tyndale Bible ("Of whom Moses in the lawe and the prophetes dyd wryte") and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" ("Not so, sir, I do care for something, but . . . I do not care for you").
And Smith ignores momentarily, the top complaint of flying language conservatives. "We'll be landing momentarily," they say, means "for a moment," not "in a moment." (They would also point out that presently means, or did mean till recently, "soon," not "now.")
Still, if you've ever recoiled at being "beveraged" at 30,000 feet, you'll be glad to hear that someone on the front lines shares your dismay, if not your every pet peeve.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 07:12 PM
May 7, 2007
Today's Language Log has a guest post by Reinhold Aman, editor of Maledicta, The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, on the ineptitude of translators around the world when confronted with Don Imus's nappy-headed hos.
Almost all translators mistranslated nappy-headed or hos or both. Below are samples from 16 languages to prove my assertion that foreign readers were severely misled by the wrong translations and that Don Imus was depicted as having been far nastier than he actually was.
Outside North America, English-language news media did no better than Germans and Romanians, Aman reports:
My four U.K. dictionaries (Chambers, Collins, Concise Oxford, Longman) define nappy only as "(baby's) napkin," American English "diaper," without any reference to hair, except for Collins which also lists "having a nap; downy; fuzzy" among its seven definitions of that adjective. For whatever reason, those translators were not puzzled by their strange translation "diaper-headed" or by the bizarre image of black women having diaper-shaped heads or wearing diapers on them. Perhaps those translators thought that nappy-headed was a synonym of "rag-headed" or "towel-headed," common pejoratives applied to Arabs because of their customary headdress.
Readers might take issue with Aman's judgments about the offensiveness of ho -- perhaps because he's immersed in abusive language, he considers it closer to "broad" than "slut" -- but his examples are fascinating.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:44 AM
May 2, 2007
Though I'm occasionally willing to poke fun at ad language, I'm not really annoyed by the slogans that purposely take liberties with "proper" usage. From "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" to "Think different," taglines have always been formulated to get our attention, by fair means or foul.
But language accidents are a different story. How does an obvious blooper make its way into a giant company's print ad, an ad that is surely rewritten, designed, tested, and proofread for months, at vast expense? Right now I'm wondering about a splashy Merck newspaper ad that urges people over 60 to hotfoot it to the doctor's office for a shot of the company's new shingles vaccine. Among the bold red reasons:
The older you get, your risk for Shingles increases.
We'll give them the silly capital S; the writers want to make shingles look scarier and, perhaps, to distinguish the disease from the roofing material. But can there be one native speaker of English, either at Merck or its ad agency, who thinks that is normal English syntax? One who would say to a co-worker, for instance, "The more I write, my grasp of grammar declines"?
Well, maybe there is -- the construction is common enough on the Web -- but there shouldn't be. This is not one of those linguistic tight spots where "correct" grammar sounds overformal ("Whom do you trust?") or wordy ("Each patient should ask his or her doctor"). Some casual yet correct alternatives come to mind:
The older you get, the more you're at risk for shingles. (This one actually appears on the Merck website.)
The older you get, the higher your risk of shingles.
As you get older, your risk of shingles increases.
The risk of shingles increases with age.
Older adults are more at risk for shingles.
"Ask about the facts," the ad concludes. OK, I'm asking: who signed off on this sad excuse for a sentence?
Posted by Jan Freeman at 07:32 PM
April 27, 2007
I had never tried Gender Genie, but Chris's* reminder was timely, since I recently got one of the periodic inquiries I receive from readers who wonder (given my somewhat unisex name) whether I'm male or female.
The answer is female, but is my writing somehow telegraphing testosterone? I asked Gender Genie, feeding it four Word columns. Sure enough, it says I sound like a guy: The columns scored, on average, male 1346, female 964.
As a blogger, I'm more girly: The item I tested was rated female, 840 to 521. But looking at the keywords the Genie scores, I suspect this was because of my quotes from The Economist's stylebook, along the lines of "Aggravate means make worse, not irritate"; those nots, for some reason, count as strongly feminine words.
But is it the writer or the topic that's being measured? Just for fun, I plugged in Barbara Wallraff's latest Word Court column. That scored masculine too, 1005 to 768.
So did Ruth Walker's last Verbal Energy column on the Christian Science Monitor website: male 1168, female 530. And linguist Heidi Harley's recent post on Language Log: male 713, female 495.
Turns out this is just what happened when a columnist at The Guardian put the Genie through its paces a few years ago: Only one of the newspaper's female columnists was identified (and just barely) as woman.
This does make me wonder: Is journalistic prose typically more "masculine" by the Genie's yardstick? And if so, what sort of prose was used to develop the algorithm for nonfiction? Some corpus, apparently, in which women use with, if, not, where, and be a lot more than men do.
*Corrected 4/29: I originally credited the Genie post to Josh. Sorry, Chris!
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:17 PM
April 23, 2007
Until Evan invited us to a grammar scolding last Friday, it hadn't occurred to me that reading usage rules could be a source of masochistic pleasure. But he's right about the Economist's style guide: If you want to be lectured about loose usage, the editors will tell you that "Aggravate means make worse, not irritate," that "Pristine means original or former; it does not mean clean," and similar things they wish were still true.
But for guilt-free entertainment, I prefer the entries you wouldn't find in an American style guide, like the caution on King Canute, who ordered the tide to stop coming in:
Canute's exercise on the seashore was designed to persuade his courtiers of what he knew to be true but they doubted, ie, that he was not omnipotent. Don't imply he was surprised to get his feet wet.
(That's some fancy negation, huh? "They doubted . . . that he was not omnipotent" -- that is, they flattered the king that he was omnipotent. )
Other unexpected and fascinating entries:
Garner means store, not gather.
Scotch: to scotch means to disable, not to destroy. (“We have scotched the snake, not killed it.”) The people may also be Scotch, Scots or Scottish; choose as you like.
Specific: a specific is a medicine, not a detail.
There's also a multiple-choice test and a section on Americanisms, acceptable and otherwise:
Do not write meet with or outside of: outside America, nowadays, you just meet people. Do not figure out if you can work out. To deliver on a promise means to keep it. A parking lot is a car park. Use senior rather than ranking, rumpus rather than ruckus, and rumbustious rather than rambunctious.
Cars are hired, not rented. City centres are not central cities. Cricket is a game not a sport. . . . Ex-servicemen are not necessarily veterans. In Britain, though cattle and pigs may be raised, children are (or should be) brought up.
The British, however, ignore a couple of our obsessions:
Americans tend to be fussy about making a distinction between which and that. Good writers of British English are less fastidious. ("We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.")
And they've thrown off the shackles of the subjunctive, judging by a subhead in the April 14-20 issue of the magazine. "Mitt the Moneymaker," the headline read, and under it: "If only that was all you had to do."
Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:00 PM
April 16, 2007
Who'd have guessed that my 1922 quote from Emily Post in yesterday's column -- on the gaucheness of "Pleased to meet you" -- would be so timely? It was just such language, so the London press is saying, that scuttled the romance of Prince William and girlfriend Kate Middleton.
It was not Kate's own language, though -- contrary to the Reuters item in today's Globe -- that was deemed too rough. It was her mother, Carole, who was heard saying "Pleased to meet you" instead of "How do you do" and "Pardon" instead of "What?" And, worse, "using the word 'toilet' not 'lavatory,'" according to the Daily Telegraph.
Novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson, defending the Middletons in today's Daily Mail, reviewed some of those shibboleths: "If you say 'notepaper' rather than 'writing paper'; if you say 'spectacles' rather than 'glasses'; if you say 'serviette' for 'napkin,' you are almost certainly a member of the middle classes, rather than upper."
Or you may be an innocent foreigner. Last month, Lynne "Lynneguist" Murphy blogged about the trials of moving from the States to South Africa to England, each time having to learn the preferred way to ask for the bathroom, restroom, toilet, or loo.
Shopping for plumbing can be a puzzle too. My mom stopped into Home Depot not long ago and asked to look at lavatories, only to have a helpful fellow lead her to the towering wall of toilets. He thought she was being euphemistic, but no -- she was actually seeking a bathroom sink. At least her need wasn't urgent.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:41 PM
April 11, 2007
"Bifor Aprille was the cruellest moneth (whatever that meneth!), it was a moneth of coloures and cries, and pilgrymages," writes Geoffrey Chaucer at his blog. (Yes, Chaucer hath a blog; he also hath high cholesterol and a wyf who is glad he's dieting: "She seyd that ich was 'blowing up lyk post-Kevin Britney.' ")
There's a reason T.S. Eliot and Chaucer had different views of April, of course -- one of those reasons is bearing down on the Northeast even now. So if you prefer Chaucer's spring -- if you still can recite "When that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droght of March hath perced to the roote," and so on -- then hie thee to Chaucer's celebration of the month.
Chaucer asked his fans for poetic readings and tributes, and he got them. "FSJL" offered these lines on another aspect of April's cruelty:
Whan that Aprille doth March displace,
with weping, walinge, and cryes folk do disporte
for there beth ne shelter ne resorte,
The IRS doth every fotestepe trace,
and will nat grante even a minute's grace,
an ye paye not, thenne the kyng his courte,
shall distrain on ye, and ye shall falle shorte.
And Tremulus Aescgar responded with a translation of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" in the English of two or three centuries earlier:
Hwćt! Đa Eostre-monaţ mid his regne swete,
ţćt drygenysse of Hređ-monaţ ţurhdrifode to ţam wyrtrumum,
and bađeţ hwelce ćdre on swelce wine,
fram hwilc gehwilce bloma biđ weaxode.
If you worry that English is changing too fast, pity Chaucer's pilgrims, whose language had evolved in a comparative heartbeat. Unlike them, we can read centuries-old texts with barely a stumble; take, say, Swift's rhymes on rain in the first few lines of "Description of a City Shower" (1710):
Careful observers may foretell the hour,
(By sure prognostics,) when to dread a shower.
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:57 AM
April 8, 2007
In today's column on eggcorns, I only had space for a mention of mondegreens, those related (but different) misconstruals of poems and song lyrics.
The name mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright, in a 1954 Harper's magazine article where she explained her misunderstanding of an old Scottish ballad her mother used to read to her. "They hae slain the Earl Amurray / And Lady Mondegreen," Wright heard. As she pictured it:
He was lying in the forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves. . . She was holding the Earl's hand.
"They" had in fact slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green -- but Wright refused to correct herself: "I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand -- I won't have it."
I had often seen Wright credited with mondegreen, but I'd never seen the original article. Last week, however -- as Josh Glenn noted here -- Harper's put its archives online, all 157 years' worth, for the price of a subscription ($16.97 a year). So I zoomed back to 1954 and got acquainted with Wright's other mondegreens, like Good Mrs. Murphy (goodness and mercy), Pay Treats Day (that Massachusetts holiday), and the Donzerly Light of the Star-Spangled Banner.
(That same illumination, spelled "dawnzer lee light," would later puzzle Ramona, Beverly Cleary's beloved heroine, not just in English but also in French. In "Ramona la peste," the schoolchildren sing, "Oh voyez-vous, quand la lumiere de l'aube luit" ("Oh do you see, when the light of dawn shines"). But Ramona hears "l'aube luit" as the nonsense word "lobeluits," and decides -- as her English original did -- that it must be another word for "lamp.")
Popular songs, of course, have generated hundreds of mondegreens. In "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything," a line from Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" -- "a piece of Mama Daddy never had" (for "a peace of mind that Daddy never had")-- beats out other famous mishearings like John Fogerty's "There's a bathroom on the right" and the Beatles' "a girl with colitis goes by."
When I double-checked the lyrics at Kissthisguy.com, though, I found that the "correctors" had themselves used an eggcorn: they gave the real line not as "a peace of mind" but as "a piece of mind that Daddy never had," as if Daddy were a few bricks short of a load.
But then, mondegreens and eggcorns are sneaky little critters. There's even one on today's Ideas front, in the tease for "The Word," which makes me suspect that one of my editors was wantin' Chinese food last Friday: The column topic was wanton, but the cover line came out "Want, wonton, wont."
Posted by Jan Freeman at 02:54 PM
April 2, 2007
Over at Separated by a Common Language, Lynne Murphy looks at (among other social niceties) the salutation cheers as used by Americans and Britons:
Cheers is interesting because it is so flexible. In AmE, it is simply used as a salutation in drinking (or sometimes with a mimed glass in hand, as a means of congratulations). In BrE it has this use, but is also used to mean 'thank you', 'goodbye' or 'thanks and goodbye'.
"I find it very useful for those situations in which one wants to close an e-mail with thank you for something that hasn't been done yet," Murphy adds.
Americans, too, have noticed the usefulness of cheers. It has been gaining ground fast as an e-mail signoff here -- I've used it myself occasionally, since (the record reveals) fall 2005. And a count of total uses of cheers in my saved e-mail -- incoming and outgoing -- shows a dramatic rise:
2002: 17
2003: 37
2004: 32
2005: 81
2006: 217
Some of these instances, of course, must be repetitions of the greeting as a discussion goes back and forth, but still, the recent surge is striking. And though cheers may be a British import, nearly all the correspondents in my collection were Americans.
Before cheers was a drinking salute, says the OED, it was merely a cheerful greeting, like the slightly earlier cheerio (1910, as cheero), which also evolved into a hello/goodbye greeting.
That made me wonder if cheers had been helped along, in its transition to America, by its resemblance to ciao, another cheerful hello/goodbye (but one that declined from wordly to cheesy -- in non-Italian usage -- some decades ago).
I don't have an answer, but I do have this fascinating etymological note: Ciao, according to the OED, is a dialect version of schiavo, Italian for slave. Hence ciao means "I am your slave." And you thought "your humble servant" was as sycophantic as a signoff could get.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:07 PM
March 31, 2007
As its authors have been explaining to everyone who would lend them a microphone, "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" is not a basketball book. It's a brackets miscellany, in which experts apply the March Madness method of winnowing to 101 cultural categories as varied as Economic Indicators, Paul Simon Songs, and Women's Undies.
And, of all things, punctuation. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, staged the punctuation playoffs, arraying parentheses and tildes, capital letters and commas in competing pairs. Semicolon and space faced off in the final, and Sheidlower's final pick for punctuation champ was the space.
That's an obvious enough call; none of us want to return to the days when monks economized on parchment by running words together. But how did the semicolon get so far?
By beating the dollar sign and the pilcrow (the old-fashioned paragraph sign) and then, less understandably, the uppercase and the period. The semicolon more powerful than the period? Sounds like the decision of a semicolon sentimentalist.
And Sheidlower's commentary doesn't dispel that suspicion:
A tough battle indeed. While the period is objectively more important, in the end it has no soul. You master the period when you learn to write. The semicolon actually says something. What Nicholson Baker has called "that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology" is a relatively modern mark, yet skilled use of it is what separates the pedestrian from the elegant.
I'd think a showdown between the period and space would have been even tougher. But that's the point, say "Bracketologist" authors Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir: It's not about who wins, it's about the pleasure of squaring off over square brackets, apostrophizing ampersands, and debating em dashes with your fellow punctuation nuts.
And when you've had enough of that, you can move on to the Latin grammar shootout. (The smart money's on the ablative absolute.)
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:21 PM
March 26, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I ranted about the grammatically misunderstood woe is me, and promised (or threatened) to return to the question. And here I am, with a tentative diagnosis: I'm betting that Patricia O'Conner's catchy book title, "Woe Is I," has a lot to do with our current confusion.
Before that 1996 usage guide hit the bookstores, most people knew the idiom was woe is me, and most people never gave it a second thought. Now uncertainty reigns, and no wonder: O'Conner herself hasn't yet got the grammar straight.
Last fall, on her Q&A blog Grammarphobia, O'Conner answered a reader who wondered why the title was not "Woe Is Me" or "Woe Am I":
I chose the title "Woe Is I" to poke fun at hypercorrectness. The butt of the joke is the old rule of English grammar (now considered excessively formal) that required the nominative case after the verb “to be.” (Example: using “It is I” instead of “It is me” or “It's me.”) . . . Here’s how I put it in the preface to the second edition:
“While ‘Woe is I’ may appear technically correct (and that’s a matter of opinion), the expression ‘Woe is me’ has been good English for generations. Only a pompous twit -- or an author trying to make a point -- would use ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ here.”
Beside the point, almost every word of it. As I said in my previous post, woe is me has nothing to do with the predicate nominative. Woe is I is not "technically correct," and that is not just "a matter of opinion." "Woe is me" has been good English not merely "for generations" but (linguistically speaking) forever.
But O'Conner is not alone in her grammatical muddle. William Safire is also confused about woe is me, and, worse, he likes it that way.
In a 1993 New York Times column, Safire -- defending the likes of "it's me" -- wrote that "The grammatically pristine form of 'Woe is me' is 'Woe is I' (or even 'Woe am I'), but go tell that to Ophelia and Isaiah."
Bales of mail soon arrived, Safire reported, informing him that "the pronoun here is not a nominative at all: it is a dative. . . . In 'Woe is me,' the noun is not being equated with the pronoun. The meaning is 'Woe is to me' or 'Woe is unto me.' "
He continued his recap:
My interpretation of Shakespeare and the Bible held that, in this use, woe and me were one and the same, and my point was to show a long history of the use of the objective me, when formal usage would dictate the nominative I. After all, if both Shakespeare's heroine and the biblical prophet said, "Woe is me," who are the predicate nominatarians to insist on "Woe is I"?
And now, said Safire, I have to learn about the dative? He dutifully added a paragraph explaining how it worked, but his conclusion was, essentially, Dative, shmative:
I think Shakespeare knew what he was writing. If he had wanted to say, "Woe is to me," he would have said it (or if the poetic meter required three syllables, "Woe is mine"). Contrary to the opinion of all my activist-dativist correspondents, I think he did intend to equate woe and me. Sometimes the truth lies flat on the surface.
Indeed it does, and here it is: For 400 years before Shakespeare, the written record shows people using woe is me, woe is us, woe is unto me, woe to them. It was ordinary English. If Shakespeare had written "Woe is I," we might want to examine his reasons, but "woe is me" requires no deep interpretation.
Woe is us, indeed, when writers who claim to love language and grammar care so little about the facts.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 09:18 PM
March 14, 2007
I've been reading the new book by Ben Yagoda, "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse" (you can read the first chapter here, and his recent piece in the L.A. Times on the gender-neutral pronoun -- also covered in the book -- here). And in the chapter on pronouns, I came upon this:
[When I answer the phone], how should I respond? Standard English mandates that the verb be be followed by the subjective case, which would have me say something like "This is he." . . .
But in the current millennium, that kind of thing sounds fatally stuffy. This is obvious to songwriters, who have given us such works as Todd Rundg |
