We are gathered today to mourn the passing of a beloved relative and close kin. Though the subject lingers, the kin are seen less and less often and will, I fear, fade from memory. I speak of a relative familiar to all. Who once was always there for people. Who could be independent or subordinate. Who coordinated the flow of information when called upon. Who could always make everything perfectly clear.
I am of course referring to the relative pronoun who and its kin whom and whose. English prefers the use of who to refer to humans: “He is a man who drinks good beer”; “I admire people who play an instrument.” Increasingly over the last 20 years, however, writers have been replacing who with that: “a man that drinks good beer”; “people that play an instrument.” This grates on my ear and my sensibilities. I think writers (and speakers) avoid who because they are uncertain when who should morph into whom. “She is someone whom I like” isn’t as easy a construction as “She is someone that I like.” Since either is technically correct, writers turn coward and choose the sure thing, demoting animated humans to the status of inanimate objects.
The who problem belongs in the general category of pronoun problems that involve case. Unlike Latin and Arabic, English no longer inflects nouns for case—for their grammatical function—except for pronouns. The pronouns change depending on whether they are used as subjects (I, she, we, they) or objects (me, her, us, them) or possessives (my, her, our, their as adjectives; mine, hers, ours, theirs as nouns). We learn to ring these changes as infants imbibing grammar along with vocabulary, and we make the changes easily—as long as we don’t have to think about them. No native English speaker is going to commit errors like “Them told we to go home” or “Us gave he a hard time,” but these examples involve simple subjects and objects in simple independent clauses. More sophisticated structures such as dependent clauses requiring relative pronouns are not so straightforward.
As a simple pronoun and subject, especially in questions, who retains its vigor and can never be replaced with that. No one is going to say “That goes there?” or “That am I?” On the other hand, who is often used incorrectly in place of whom: “Who am I speaking to?” should be “Whom am I speaking to?” or, more elegantly, “To whom am I speaking?” The more elegant formation tells us why whom is correct; it is the object of the preposition and must be in the objective case.
There are various ways to test whether who or whom is correct; among the simplest is to replace it with he or him. It also helps to turn a question, which inverts subject and verb, into a statement, which puts all the elements into their accustomed order. For the example above, these two operations produce “I am speaking to him,” and the need for the objective form becomes clear. In analyzing the sentence “She is the writer (who, whom) I admire the most,” it is again helpful to put the elements into a simpler grammatical form. It is the business of relative pronouns to coordinate two related thoughts. If we separate them, we get two independent structures, in this case “She is the writer” (independent but incomplete) and “I admire her the most.” The use of her as the object of the verb admire tells us to use whom: “She is the writer whom I admire the most.” A simpler test is that if the dependent clause has its own subject (in this case I), the objective case is most likely to be correct for the relative pronoun that introduces it. If the pronoun is followed directly by a verb, the pronoun is most likely the subject, and who will be correct: “I’m the one who knows what’s going on.”
An entirely different problem arises with whose. People generally use it correctly but confuse it with its homophone who’s when writing. Like your and you’re and its and it’s, one is a possessive pronoun (whose, your, its) and the other is a contraction of a pronoun and a verb (you are → you’re, it is or it has → it’s, who is or who has → who’s). The only way to write it correctly is to know what you mean. If you don’t know what you mean, you have no business expecting people to read what you write. ’Nuff said.
Don’t let cowardice and ignorance toll the death knell on our beloved relative who. Stick up for the difference between people and rocks! Be someone who gives humans the dignity of their special pronoun, and never let that dehumanize them again!
This is article 12 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Friday, November 6, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Right ‘N Wrong, or Quoting the Apostrophe
The apostrophe may be the single most misused piece of punctuation, though it’s got stiff competition from the colon, the ellipsis, and the dash. It appears where it doesn’t belong (the adjective its, any “nonstandard” plural) and goes missing when it’s most needed (ladies’ room, for instance). Most of the errors are the result, quite simply, of an unwillingness or inability to think logically about the function of the apostrophe while writing. When speaking, you don’t need to choose between your and you’re; the right sound emerges and communication is achieved. The written word, however, is more demanding. Each word must be coordinated with its neighbors orthographically (visually) as well as syntactically, and orthography includes punctuation as well as spelling. Word-processing programs have added a new twist to the problem, but let’s deal with human errors first.
The apostrophe serves multiple functions. To begin with, it is the sign of the possessive, and where it appears depends on whether the noun is singular or plural: lady’s and ladies’, man’s and men’s (not mens’), child’s and children’s, and passion’s and passions’ are all correct, but only one of each pair will be correct in a given context.
The need for an apostrophe and its placement are simple to determine if you will just stop and think for a moment, not only about whether your noun is singular or plural, but also about whether it’s acting as a noun or as an adjective. For the phrase (taken from an article in TV Guide) “one of televisions most well-known doctors,” ask yourself: Is televisions meant in a plural sense? No. Is it the object of the preposition of? No, doctors is the object. Ergo, it is acting as an adjective modifying doctors, and the s is a possessive s in need of an apostrophe, not an s forming a plural: “one of television’s most well-known doctors” is what the writer meant. (As an aside, English has a perfectly good word expressly devised to convey the idea of most well; the word is best. “One of television’s best-known doctors” would be a preferable construction.)
This kind of analysis, known as parsing, is becoming a lost art. Like sentence diagramming, it’s a skill most people are happy to forget, assuming it ever made its way into memory—assuming it was ever taught at all, a presumptuous assumption nowadays. Without this skill, it is impossible to construct a sentence logically, which is why there are so many college grads out there writing error-riddled semiliterate prose.
The possessive pronouns are a particular cause of confusion, because, unlike possessives formed from common and proper nouns, possessive pronouns do not have an apostrophe. It’s is a contraction of it is (see below); the pronoun is spelled its. I don’t think I will ever see hi’s, but I have actually seen her’s, their’s, and even the incredibly unlikely its’ in pieces written by Ph.D.’s, so mere length and depth of education are no cure. This is where it helps to know the difference between a contraction and a possessive adjective, pronominal or otherwise. If you don’t, you will be one of the legions of “educated” people who write things like “put laundry in it’s place.” Office Depot’s recent thick catalog displayed “can’t find what your looking for?” prominently atop every right-hand page in large type, and nobody who looked at it prepublication caught the error. It’s not rocket science, people, but you do have to pay attention and remember a few rules.
The apostrophe is also used to form plurals for single letters: one A, ten A’s (not As, which is too easily read as the word as). This is pretty much the only legitimate use of the apostrophe in plurals. (There is one other, and it appears in the previous paragraph. Can you find it?) I’m tired of seeing things like Busy Bee’s (a maid service), stereo’s, and zinnia’s. Generally, when you see ’s, think possessive, not plural. A recent ad for Juicy Couture exhorts us to “Do the Dont’s.” To which I reply, the Dont’s what? As written, dont’s can only be the possessive singular of dont, but dont is not an English word. To use the contraction don’t as a plural noun, just add s: don’ts. The rule applies to numbers as well. The term 1990s refers to the entire decade; 1990’s is a possessive indicating belonging to the specific year 1990. People in their 50s are middle-aged, and lots of them were born in the ’50s (not 50’s or ’50’s).
These examples illustrate another very important function of the apostrophe, to indicate that something has been omitted, whether as a contraction (isn’t, o’clock, who’s, don’t) or as a clipping-off (singin’, ’tis, ’50s). Again, errors such as dont’s result from a failure to analyze words logically and identify their grammatical functions (they knew there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere!). Here too, written expression is more demanding than oral; there is no need to distinguish between dont’s and don’ts in speech. An audience will understand what you mean, but a reader can best (not most well) judge your meaning by interpreting the words you have written down. If the words you’ve written down aren’t the words you mean, communication fails or is compromised.
And finally we arrive at the heart of this installment of Crotchets: the many misuses and abuses of the apostrophe in word pairs joined by and. For example, the phrase rock and roll is usually pronounced as if the and had lost both its opening vowel and final consonant and all that remains is the en sound. The result is written as rock ’n’ roll, because a letter has been clipped from both the front and back of the central word. Two apostrophes are needed, one for each omission, and yet about 95 percent of the time only one is used, and it’s a toss-up on which side of the n it will appear. Illustrating my point nicely are two current TV shows. One, on the History Channel, is called Lock N’ Load with R. Lee Ermey. The other, on Showtime, is a new reality series called Lock ’n Load. They’re both wrong, but the History Channel scores extra wrongness points for the capital N, and Showtime scores evading-the-issue points for capitalizing every letter in the onscreen title. Such ambidextrous nonsense makes me want to lock and load.
Sometimes people go the extra mile and use two apostrophes only to get lost in the punctuation forest. A Frederick, Md., business that deals in sound systems and recording equipment is named, according to their ad in the Yellow Book directory, Make ‘N’ Music. There are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. First off, the name is not a contraction of make and music; the paired apostrophes are wrong. I assume that what the owners intended was making music with the g clipped, or Makin’ Music. The fact that Make ‘N’ Music and Makin’ Music sound about the same is no excuse. This error arises from a failure to think logically enough to transform speech sounds into grammatically and orthographically correct words.
There is another error here as well, a bit harder to notice. The first “apostrophe” has been turned and is actually an opening single quotation mark, transforming its mate to a closing single quotation mark in the process. These linguistically challenged people have not only mistaken the clipped -ing ending for a truncated and; they have taken the wrongly derived n, capitalized it, and then quoted it: Hey, guys, let’s make ‘N’ music, whatever N might be. Are you shuddering? I did when I first encountered this thing. (I’ll say this for the editors/typesetters at Yellow Book: the listing below the ad had two apostrophes. Well done!) But then I realized the people who devised this name had been led astray by a word-processing program that is mindlessly quoting the apostrophe.
On old-fashioned typewriters, there was no differentiation between single quotes (‘/’) and apostrophes (’) or between opening and closing quotes (“/”); the marks went straight up and down ('/', "/"), and the same key sufficed for both. Only printers with sophisticated typesetting equipment had apostrophes that curved right and quote marks that curved left to open and right to close a quote. Early word-processing programs made you enter symbol codes if you wanted curved marks. Later versions gave you curved double quotes, but always in pairs. The first time you hit the double-quote key, it gave you an opening quote; hit it a second time, and you got a closing quote. This worked fine unless you forgot to close a quote somewhere, after which every quote began with a close-quote symbol and ended with an open-quote symbol. I have edited many papers with this error, and it’s a pain to fix. Why is it they never forgot twice and set things back to rights? Why did they never notice all the backwards quote marks?
Current versions of Word operate on a different set of rules. The program decides which mark to use as a function of position. If you hit the double-quote key following a space or to start a new paragraph, you will automatically get an opening-quote symbol. Hit it after any character, and it will give you a close-quote symbol. This works perfectly for double quotes. Unfortunately, the program can’t differentiate between an apostrophe and a single quote. The same rules apply: hit the key after a space, you get an opening single quote that curves left; hit it after a character, and you get a closing single quote or apostrophe, which are identical, curving right. Most of the time this works just fine, but few people notice when it goes awry.
Most contractions occur in the middle of the words—isn’t, didn’t, you’re, let’s, o’clock—and thus the apostrophe appears correctly oriented as you type. But if you’re typing something like ’tis,’50s, or this ’n’ that, where the apostrophe follows a space, the program is going to give you an opening single quote, viz., ‘tis, ‘50s, this ‘n’ that. The only way around this is to type the symbol immediately after the word and then go back and insert the space (this’n’ that → this ’n’ that); the program will give you an apostrophe and will not change it when you add the space. However, most people will not notice that they have a single opening quotation mark instead of an apostrophe, and thus I have been noticing nonsense such as Loud ‘N Clear (a personal sound amplifier) and Make ‘N’ Music everywhere I look. It’s not bad enough that few recognize the need for two apostrophes; now they need to recognize that they haven’t got even one. And what is it with the capital N? The word and is never capitalized, and its remnant certainly doesn’t merit such star treatment. Even the Rock ’n’ Roll Queen gets a lowercase n.
And so I beg you to unquote your apostrophe and apostrophize your quote, to say “O quote, I need you to do an about-face and become an apostrophe, lest my poor orthography make me the object of scorn and ridicule.” It will not want to cooperate, you must make it do your will, but in the end you may prevail and take pride in your awareness and your right(eous)ness.
Over ’n’ out!
This is article 11 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
The apostrophe serves multiple functions. To begin with, it is the sign of the possessive, and where it appears depends on whether the noun is singular or plural: lady’s and ladies’, man’s and men’s (not mens’), child’s and children’s, and passion’s and passions’ are all correct, but only one of each pair will be correct in a given context.
The need for an apostrophe and its placement are simple to determine if you will just stop and think for a moment, not only about whether your noun is singular or plural, but also about whether it’s acting as a noun or as an adjective. For the phrase (taken from an article in TV Guide) “one of televisions most well-known doctors,” ask yourself: Is televisions meant in a plural sense? No. Is it the object of the preposition of? No, doctors is the object. Ergo, it is acting as an adjective modifying doctors, and the s is a possessive s in need of an apostrophe, not an s forming a plural: “one of television’s most well-known doctors” is what the writer meant. (As an aside, English has a perfectly good word expressly devised to convey the idea of most well; the word is best. “One of television’s best-known doctors” would be a preferable construction.)
This kind of analysis, known as parsing, is becoming a lost art. Like sentence diagramming, it’s a skill most people are happy to forget, assuming it ever made its way into memory—assuming it was ever taught at all, a presumptuous assumption nowadays. Without this skill, it is impossible to construct a sentence logically, which is why there are so many college grads out there writing error-riddled semiliterate prose.
The possessive pronouns are a particular cause of confusion, because, unlike possessives formed from common and proper nouns, possessive pronouns do not have an apostrophe. It’s is a contraction of it is (see below); the pronoun is spelled its. I don’t think I will ever see hi’s, but I have actually seen her’s, their’s, and even the incredibly unlikely its’ in pieces written by Ph.D.’s, so mere length and depth of education are no cure. This is where it helps to know the difference between a contraction and a possessive adjective, pronominal or otherwise. If you don’t, you will be one of the legions of “educated” people who write things like “put laundry in it’s place.” Office Depot’s recent thick catalog displayed “can’t find what your looking for?” prominently atop every right-hand page in large type, and nobody who looked at it prepublication caught the error. It’s not rocket science, people, but you do have to pay attention and remember a few rules.
The apostrophe is also used to form plurals for single letters: one A, ten A’s (not As, which is too easily read as the word as). This is pretty much the only legitimate use of the apostrophe in plurals. (There is one other, and it appears in the previous paragraph. Can you find it?) I’m tired of seeing things like Busy Bee’s (a maid service), stereo’s, and zinnia’s. Generally, when you see ’s, think possessive, not plural. A recent ad for Juicy Couture exhorts us to “Do the Dont’s.” To which I reply, the Dont’s what? As written, dont’s can only be the possessive singular of dont, but dont is not an English word. To use the contraction don’t as a plural noun, just add s: don’ts. The rule applies to numbers as well. The term 1990s refers to the entire decade; 1990’s is a possessive indicating belonging to the specific year 1990. People in their 50s are middle-aged, and lots of them were born in the ’50s (not 50’s or ’50’s).
These examples illustrate another very important function of the apostrophe, to indicate that something has been omitted, whether as a contraction (isn’t, o’clock, who’s, don’t) or as a clipping-off (singin’, ’tis, ’50s). Again, errors such as dont’s result from a failure to analyze words logically and identify their grammatical functions (they knew there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere!). Here too, written expression is more demanding than oral; there is no need to distinguish between dont’s and don’ts in speech. An audience will understand what you mean, but a reader can best (not most well) judge your meaning by interpreting the words you have written down. If the words you’ve written down aren’t the words you mean, communication fails or is compromised.
And finally we arrive at the heart of this installment of Crotchets: the many misuses and abuses of the apostrophe in word pairs joined by and. For example, the phrase rock and roll is usually pronounced as if the and had lost both its opening vowel and final consonant and all that remains is the en sound. The result is written as rock ’n’ roll, because a letter has been clipped from both the front and back of the central word. Two apostrophes are needed, one for each omission, and yet about 95 percent of the time only one is used, and it’s a toss-up on which side of the n it will appear. Illustrating my point nicely are two current TV shows. One, on the History Channel, is called Lock N’ Load with R. Lee Ermey. The other, on Showtime, is a new reality series called Lock ’n Load. They’re both wrong, but the History Channel scores extra wrongness points for the capital N, and Showtime scores evading-the-issue points for capitalizing every letter in the onscreen title. Such ambidextrous nonsense makes me want to lock and load.
Sometimes people go the extra mile and use two apostrophes only to get lost in the punctuation forest. A Frederick, Md., business that deals in sound systems and recording equipment is named, according to their ad in the Yellow Book directory, Make ‘N’ Music. There are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. First off, the name is not a contraction of make and music; the paired apostrophes are wrong. I assume that what the owners intended was making music with the g clipped, or Makin’ Music. The fact that Make ‘N’ Music and Makin’ Music sound about the same is no excuse. This error arises from a failure to think logically enough to transform speech sounds into grammatically and orthographically correct words.
There is another error here as well, a bit harder to notice. The first “apostrophe” has been turned and is actually an opening single quotation mark, transforming its mate to a closing single quotation mark in the process. These linguistically challenged people have not only mistaken the clipped -ing ending for a truncated and; they have taken the wrongly derived n, capitalized it, and then quoted it: Hey, guys, let’s make ‘N’ music, whatever N might be. Are you shuddering? I did when I first encountered this thing. (I’ll say this for the editors/typesetters at Yellow Book: the listing below the ad had two apostrophes. Well done!) But then I realized the people who devised this name had been led astray by a word-processing program that is mindlessly quoting the apostrophe.
On old-fashioned typewriters, there was no differentiation between single quotes (‘/’) and apostrophes (’) or between opening and closing quotes (“/”); the marks went straight up and down ('/', "/"), and the same key sufficed for both. Only printers with sophisticated typesetting equipment had apostrophes that curved right and quote marks that curved left to open and right to close a quote. Early word-processing programs made you enter symbol codes if you wanted curved marks. Later versions gave you curved double quotes, but always in pairs. The first time you hit the double-quote key, it gave you an opening quote; hit it a second time, and you got a closing quote. This worked fine unless you forgot to close a quote somewhere, after which every quote began with a close-quote symbol and ended with an open-quote symbol. I have edited many papers with this error, and it’s a pain to fix. Why is it they never forgot twice and set things back to rights? Why did they never notice all the backwards quote marks?
Current versions of Word operate on a different set of rules. The program decides which mark to use as a function of position. If you hit the double-quote key following a space or to start a new paragraph, you will automatically get an opening-quote symbol. Hit it after any character, and it will give you a close-quote symbol. This works perfectly for double quotes. Unfortunately, the program can’t differentiate between an apostrophe and a single quote. The same rules apply: hit the key after a space, you get an opening single quote that curves left; hit it after a character, and you get a closing single quote or apostrophe, which are identical, curving right. Most of the time this works just fine, but few people notice when it goes awry.
Most contractions occur in the middle of the words—isn’t, didn’t, you’re, let’s, o’clock—and thus the apostrophe appears correctly oriented as you type. But if you’re typing something like ’tis,’50s, or this ’n’ that, where the apostrophe follows a space, the program is going to give you an opening single quote, viz., ‘tis, ‘50s, this ‘n’ that. The only way around this is to type the symbol immediately after the word and then go back and insert the space (this’n’ that → this ’n’ that); the program will give you an apostrophe and will not change it when you add the space. However, most people will not notice that they have a single opening quotation mark instead of an apostrophe, and thus I have been noticing nonsense such as Loud ‘N Clear (a personal sound amplifier) and Make ‘N’ Music everywhere I look. It’s not bad enough that few recognize the need for two apostrophes; now they need to recognize that they haven’t got even one. And what is it with the capital N? The word and is never capitalized, and its remnant certainly doesn’t merit such star treatment. Even the Rock ’n’ Roll Queen gets a lowercase n.
And so I beg you to unquote your apostrophe and apostrophize your quote, to say “O quote, I need you to do an about-face and become an apostrophe, lest my poor orthography make me the object of scorn and ridicule.” It will not want to cooperate, you must make it do your will, but in the end you may prevail and take pride in your awareness and your right(eous)ness.
Over ’n’ out!
This is article 11 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Tennis, Anyone?
I have been a big tennis fan for 25 years. My first exposure to the game was watching John McEnroe in the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 1984. I had just bought a television after a decade without one and was flipping through the channels, all five of them. I knew nothing about tennis, the scoring, the rules, the shots, nothing, and yet it was obvious to me that I was watching a genius, a master of the game. I have just spent many hours watching this year’s U.S. Open (yay, Del Potro!) and wish to discuss a couple of pet peeves and an interesting twist on a cliché made by one of the commentators.
The first pet peeve is misuse of the phrase “back to deuce.” I insist that this phrase cannot be used when the score first hits 40-all. The players have arrived at deuce; they cannot go back to deuce until they have played the first one. No exceptions, guys. To say “It’s back to deuce” after the first six points is absurd.
My second pet peeve is directed at ESPN2, which is carrying the U.S. Open for the first time this year, in concert with the Tennis Channel and CBS. The 2 clearly stands for second rate, or at least second class. Every moment of every game is spoiled by the endless parade of scores and trivia across the bottom of the screen. It’s hard enough following the tennis ball getting smacked around the court at tremendous speeds; loss of 10% of the screen and the consequent foreshortening of the relevant image make it even more challenging. If the intrusion was a simple, steady right-to-left flow, it might be possible to ignore it. But no, the words jump and dance and skitter and bounce, a constant annoyance and distraction. I ended up covering the bottom of my screen with duct tape (it took two layers) so I could concentrate on the game. Am I the only one who finds this disrespectful not only of the viewers, but of the sport itself? I always enjoyed Wimbledon on HBO and the U.S. Open on USA. I wish the tennis tournaments would return to the networks that treated them with more respect.
Finally, one of the commentators (it might have been Darren Cahill) misspoke and crossed two clichés to make an amusing hybrid. Referring to a player who had gone from being up a break to losing the set, he said that change in fortune had “knocked the wind out of his socks.” This amalgam of “knocked the wind out of his sails” and “knocked his socks off” raises interesting images of a player being blasted out of his tennis shoes, probably with a noise much like a raspberry or a fart. I don’t think the phrase will catch on, but I did enjoy it.
This is article 10 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
The first pet peeve is misuse of the phrase “back to deuce.” I insist that this phrase cannot be used when the score first hits 40-all. The players have arrived at deuce; they cannot go back to deuce until they have played the first one. No exceptions, guys. To say “It’s back to deuce” after the first six points is absurd.
My second pet peeve is directed at ESPN2, which is carrying the U.S. Open for the first time this year, in concert with the Tennis Channel and CBS. The 2 clearly stands for second rate, or at least second class. Every moment of every game is spoiled by the endless parade of scores and trivia across the bottom of the screen. It’s hard enough following the tennis ball getting smacked around the court at tremendous speeds; loss of 10% of the screen and the consequent foreshortening of the relevant image make it even more challenging. If the intrusion was a simple, steady right-to-left flow, it might be possible to ignore it. But no, the words jump and dance and skitter and bounce, a constant annoyance and distraction. I ended up covering the bottom of my screen with duct tape (it took two layers) so I could concentrate on the game. Am I the only one who finds this disrespectful not only of the viewers, but of the sport itself? I always enjoyed Wimbledon on HBO and the U.S. Open on USA. I wish the tennis tournaments would return to the networks that treated them with more respect.
Finally, one of the commentators (it might have been Darren Cahill) misspoke and crossed two clichés to make an amusing hybrid. Referring to a player who had gone from being up a break to losing the set, he said that change in fortune had “knocked the wind out of his socks.” This amalgam of “knocked the wind out of his sails” and “knocked his socks off” raises interesting images of a player being blasted out of his tennis shoes, probably with a noise much like a raspberry or a fart. I don’t think the phrase will catch on, but I did enjoy it.
This is article 10 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
What It Is Is
An odd doublespeak has afflicted the vernacular. It began about two years ago and spread like wildfire from the underbrush to the canopy of society, popping out in the least expected places (President Obama himself on The Late Show with David Letterman). At first I ascribed it to a lingual blip, confusion between or melding of related phrases, but after catching it several dozen times, I realized it was a whole new trend.
I refer, of course, to the repetition of the verb in phrases such as “The thing is is that” and “What it is is,” usually followed by a complete sentence that is in no way modified or affected by this pointless introductory phrase. A related polysyllabic emptiness, “The reason…is because,” is likewise redundant and dispensable, but at least it doesn’t repeat itself.
Whence this stutter-step, this hiccup, this tiny echo? As a lingual blip, a slip of the tongue in extemporaneous speech, it can be explained. The speaker starts out to say “The thing is,” followed directly by the subject (“The thing is, we can’t explain it”). Halfway through, his brain decides to go for a dependent clause instead (“The thing is that we can’t explain it”), leading to the iterative “The thing is is that we can’t explain it.” But this sort of mental-shift error simply would not occur as often as I have been hearing this doublespeak.
The oddest thing about it is, the repetition sounds right, or at least okay, which by the laws of common usage would argue that it is acceptable, if inelegant. (Notice that I did not repeat the is in the preceding sentence.) But I’m not buying it. Redundancy is never good form, and pointless repetition of even a syllable is to be avoided. I can forgive this imitative pipsqueak in off-the-cuff speech, but elsewhere it is anathema.
With apologies to the Rolling Stones: Hey hey, you you, get offa my clause!
This is article 9 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
I refer, of course, to the repetition of the verb in phrases such as “The thing is is that” and “What it is is,” usually followed by a complete sentence that is in no way modified or affected by this pointless introductory phrase. A related polysyllabic emptiness, “The reason…is because,” is likewise redundant and dispensable, but at least it doesn’t repeat itself.
Whence this stutter-step, this hiccup, this tiny echo? As a lingual blip, a slip of the tongue in extemporaneous speech, it can be explained. The speaker starts out to say “The thing is,” followed directly by the subject (“The thing is, we can’t explain it”). Halfway through, his brain decides to go for a dependent clause instead (“The thing is that we can’t explain it”), leading to the iterative “The thing is is that we can’t explain it.” But this sort of mental-shift error simply would not occur as often as I have been hearing this doublespeak.
The oddest thing about it is, the repetition sounds right, or at least okay, which by the laws of common usage would argue that it is acceptable, if inelegant. (Notice that I did not repeat the is in the preceding sentence.) But I’m not buying it. Redundancy is never good form, and pointless repetition of even a syllable is to be avoided. I can forgive this imitative pipsqueak in off-the-cuff speech, but elsewhere it is anathema.
With apologies to the Rolling Stones: Hey hey, you you, get offa my clause!
This is article 9 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Potpourri
Although the French word potpourri has come to mean a collection or assortment, the literal translation is “rotten pot,” a reference to the decayed and decaying material within that makes a sweet smell. This installment of Crotchets is a collection of rotten examples of decaying education, if not civilization, and all the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten the smell.
Surely there isn’t a person in the United States who hasn’t heard of France or seen a map of it. (Whether they could find it on a map without prompts is a different matter for concern.) I love maps and have spent many hours poring over them. Most college students cover their dorm walls with posters of pop stars; I had a map of the world on mine. Maybe that’s why I reacted with a frisson of horror when, flipping through a shoe catalog, I came upon a page of items identified as black, brown, and “bordo.” The last term appeared beside shoes and a handbag of wine red, and clearly this monstrosity was a phonetic misspelling of bordeaux. The city of Bordeaux in France has lent its name, which translates as waters’ edge, to some of the finest wines ever produced as well as the garnet red color associated with wine. This information has escaped the notice or memory of at least one person at Naturalizer, which manufactured the items so identified. I say at least one person, but with reference to the very first article in this series (Who’s To Blame), anywhere from two to ten people other than the Frankenstein who created this monster had to look at it and okay it. Frankly, I am appalled. I wonder whether the persons who put the catalog together had to force themselves to reproduce this misshapen thing or whether, like the perpetrator, they didn’t notice or care.
Now let’s get really down and dirty and talk about compost. Far from elegant, the black gold produced from organic waste by natural agents of decay has become quite chic, a way to feed the earth instead of landfills. Composting is a slow process; even with optimal composition and conditions and regular turning, it will take three to six months to transform dead leaves and manure and food scraps into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. Creative minds have been at work devising ways to accelerate the process. The word accelerate is built from the Latin root celer, meaning swift, plus the prefix ad, meaning for or toward; in the compound, ad becomes ac for easier pronunciation. The person who invented and named Bio-Excelerator as a composting aid either didn’t know how to spell accelerator (and couldn’t be bothered to look it up) or was creatively making a pun on excel. Call me cynical, but I’m betting it’s error, not wordplay.
The next item is from TV Guide, which generally does a good job of editing its material, with few misspellings or grammatical errors. However, they recently committed a major homophonic boo-boo, a category of error that has become increasingly frequent even as the incidence of misspellings has decreased. I attribute this trend in large part to computer spelling-check programs, which offer alternatives but not definitions. A short article on the reality show Celebrity Apprentice, which admitted that many of the “celebrities” were unknown to the average viewer and identified each briefly, was accompanied by several photographs of the better known and more beautiful. One of the would-be apprentices’ tasks was to sell cupcakes on the streets of New York to raise money for charity, and there is a photo of three lovely young women with the caption “Roderick, Jordan and Kardashian hock their wares.” Oh, dear. Hock has several meanings, the most familiar of which have to do with pawnshops and debt. The word the writer was thinking of is hawk, defined in my dictionary (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate) as “to offer for sale by calling out in the street,” which is exactly what these young women were doing. Confusion between homophones is a difficult problem to fix. There are lots of homophones, whether in pairs (not pears or pares) or in multiples (including the infamous two, too, and to), and it’s very easy to think/speak the right sound and write down the wrong word. What’s the answer? Look up every word that has a homophone? The thought that any given word might have a soundalike may not occur in the heat of composition or under the pressure of a deadline. Let me diffidently suggest that those without the talent for spelling (you know who you are) should look up any word that is not part of their ordinary daily vocabulary when they are writing something intended for publication. Now let me put on my suit of armor to survive the projectiles that will be thrown my way for daring to suggest something so time-consuming and tedious. What I actually want to suggest is that they look up every word, because so many common words have soundalikes (you're and your and it's and its among them, all surely part of anyone's daily vocabulary), but even I know that's impractical.
Perhaps I should add broadcast to publication in making this diffident (foolhardy?) suggestion. Television may be a vast wasteland, but one would like to assume the news shows cleave to a higher standard. Unfortunately, I am losing count of the errors stupid (note that stupid is the adjectival form of stupor and does not refer to intelligence) and ludicrous that have appeared on screen to accompany news stories. A story discussing the proper use of parking lights versus headlights on cars told viewers that parking lights, as the term suggests, should be used only when the vehicle is stationary. The caption on my screen, however, had the word stationery. Perhaps I should use my personalized stationery to write a letter of protest. Then there was the piece on a celebrity who was well known as, according to the caption, a “ladies man.” This is just ignorant. The caption writer had two choices, lady’s or ladies’, but completely failed to recognize the need for a possessive. One station now has a with-it dude on the Thursday night 11 p.m. news to let viewers in on weekend happenings. One of these was a sneak peek opportunity for a movie; the onscreen graphic had it as “sneak peak,” surely a peak experience in anyone’s leisure life. Here’s another outrageous suggestion: Hire people who know how to use the language to write onscreen captions or an editor to vet them before broadcast. Or both.
Finally, we have a puzzling piece of nonsense from the funny pages. The comic strip Parallel Universe made a play on the name Chex Mix, a crunchy snack food based on Chex brand cereal. The caption reads “Czech’s Mix…a delicious snack with just a hint of Slovakia.” I will forgo a rant on the misuse of the ellipsis, because there is a much bigger problem to worry about. In the cartoon illustrating this punny caption, the bag the man is holding bears the words “Chech’s Mix.” Chech it out!! The cartoonist created a neologism that destroys the pun! (The second definition of neologism in my dictionary is “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.” I love reading the dictionary!) Why does the error appear in the cartoon but not in the caption? This strip is attributed to two people, Patellis and Whelan. Does one write and the other draw? If the writer knew there was an error, why didn’t he get the artist to fix it in the illustration?
Stuff like this puts me in a really rotten mood, and that’s enough stink for one potpourri.
This is article 8 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Surely there isn’t a person in the United States who hasn’t heard of France or seen a map of it. (Whether they could find it on a map without prompts is a different matter for concern.) I love maps and have spent many hours poring over them. Most college students cover their dorm walls with posters of pop stars; I had a map of the world on mine. Maybe that’s why I reacted with a frisson of horror when, flipping through a shoe catalog, I came upon a page of items identified as black, brown, and “bordo.” The last term appeared beside shoes and a handbag of wine red, and clearly this monstrosity was a phonetic misspelling of bordeaux. The city of Bordeaux in France has lent its name, which translates as waters’ edge, to some of the finest wines ever produced as well as the garnet red color associated with wine. This information has escaped the notice or memory of at least one person at Naturalizer, which manufactured the items so identified. I say at least one person, but with reference to the very first article in this series (Who’s To Blame), anywhere from two to ten people other than the Frankenstein who created this monster had to look at it and okay it. Frankly, I am appalled. I wonder whether the persons who put the catalog together had to force themselves to reproduce this misshapen thing or whether, like the perpetrator, they didn’t notice or care.
Now let’s get really down and dirty and talk about compost. Far from elegant, the black gold produced from organic waste by natural agents of decay has become quite chic, a way to feed the earth instead of landfills. Composting is a slow process; even with optimal composition and conditions and regular turning, it will take three to six months to transform dead leaves and manure and food scraps into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. Creative minds have been at work devising ways to accelerate the process. The word accelerate is built from the Latin root celer, meaning swift, plus the prefix ad, meaning for or toward; in the compound, ad becomes ac for easier pronunciation. The person who invented and named Bio-Excelerator as a composting aid either didn’t know how to spell accelerator (and couldn’t be bothered to look it up) or was creatively making a pun on excel. Call me cynical, but I’m betting it’s error, not wordplay.
The next item is from TV Guide, which generally does a good job of editing its material, with few misspellings or grammatical errors. However, they recently committed a major homophonic boo-boo, a category of error that has become increasingly frequent even as the incidence of misspellings has decreased. I attribute this trend in large part to computer spelling-check programs, which offer alternatives but not definitions. A short article on the reality show Celebrity Apprentice, which admitted that many of the “celebrities” were unknown to the average viewer and identified each briefly, was accompanied by several photographs of the better known and more beautiful. One of the would-be apprentices’ tasks was to sell cupcakes on the streets of New York to raise money for charity, and there is a photo of three lovely young women with the caption “Roderick, Jordan and Kardashian hock their wares.” Oh, dear. Hock has several meanings, the most familiar of which have to do with pawnshops and debt. The word the writer was thinking of is hawk, defined in my dictionary (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate) as “to offer for sale by calling out in the street,” which is exactly what these young women were doing. Confusion between homophones is a difficult problem to fix. There are lots of homophones, whether in pairs (not pears or pares) or in multiples (including the infamous two, too, and to), and it’s very easy to think/speak the right sound and write down the wrong word. What’s the answer? Look up every word that has a homophone? The thought that any given word might have a soundalike may not occur in the heat of composition or under the pressure of a deadline. Let me diffidently suggest that those without the talent for spelling (you know who you are) should look up any word that is not part of their ordinary daily vocabulary when they are writing something intended for publication. Now let me put on my suit of armor to survive the projectiles that will be thrown my way for daring to suggest something so time-consuming and tedious. What I actually want to suggest is that they look up every word, because so many common words have soundalikes (you're and your and it's and its among them, all surely part of anyone's daily vocabulary), but even I know that's impractical.
Perhaps I should add broadcast to publication in making this diffident (foolhardy?) suggestion. Television may be a vast wasteland, but one would like to assume the news shows cleave to a higher standard. Unfortunately, I am losing count of the errors stupid (note that stupid is the adjectival form of stupor and does not refer to intelligence) and ludicrous that have appeared on screen to accompany news stories. A story discussing the proper use of parking lights versus headlights on cars told viewers that parking lights, as the term suggests, should be used only when the vehicle is stationary. The caption on my screen, however, had the word stationery. Perhaps I should use my personalized stationery to write a letter of protest. Then there was the piece on a celebrity who was well known as, according to the caption, a “ladies man.” This is just ignorant. The caption writer had two choices, lady’s or ladies’, but completely failed to recognize the need for a possessive. One station now has a with-it dude on the Thursday night 11 p.m. news to let viewers in on weekend happenings. One of these was a sneak peek opportunity for a movie; the onscreen graphic had it as “sneak peak,” surely a peak experience in anyone’s leisure life. Here’s another outrageous suggestion: Hire people who know how to use the language to write onscreen captions or an editor to vet them before broadcast. Or both.
Finally, we have a puzzling piece of nonsense from the funny pages. The comic strip Parallel Universe made a play on the name Chex Mix, a crunchy snack food based on Chex brand cereal. The caption reads “Czech’s Mix…a delicious snack with just a hint of Slovakia.” I will forgo a rant on the misuse of the ellipsis, because there is a much bigger problem to worry about. In the cartoon illustrating this punny caption, the bag the man is holding bears the words “Chech’s Mix.” Chech it out!! The cartoonist created a neologism that destroys the pun! (The second definition of neologism in my dictionary is “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.” I love reading the dictionary!) Why does the error appear in the cartoon but not in the caption? This strip is attributed to two people, Patellis and Whelan. Does one write and the other draw? If the writer knew there was an error, why didn’t he get the artist to fix it in the illustration?
Stuff like this puts me in a really rotten mood, and that’s enough stink for one potpourri.
This is article 8 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Mispellers of the World, Untie!
Spelling is a very rigid branch of the tree of knowledge, and some people fall off it on a regular basis. The problem begins in grade school, where weekly spelling tests can engender sweaty palms before and despairing puzzlement after. You were sure there was only one r in embarrass! How can there be only one e in judgment? Can anyone make sense of misled (mizzled?) or forearmed (for-earmed?). Why does dispirited have only one s?
The answer is simple and complicated: English is a mongrel of astonishingly mixed parentage. And like all mongrels, it displays exceptional vigor and a hodgepodge of traits.
The language began, more or less, with the Angles, for whom England is named. They were one of several peoples to overrun that green and pleasant land, along with fellow Germanic-speaking Saxons and Gaelic- and Gaulish-speaking Celts, not to mention marauding Danes, Norsemen, and Vikings. Some of the marauders stayed and founded settlements, such as the Viking outpost that became the great city of York. The languages spoken by these peoples had little or no written expression. Even if there was a writing system, there was no need to write for a population that couldn’t read, material to write on was rare and expensive, and the rulers were little different from the ruled in refinement and education.
The Romans brought luxurious baths, straight roads, and straiter Latin, which became the common language, spoken and written, of the educated in every Roman-occupied territory. The arrival of Christianity vastly increased the spread of Latin, so that eventually even humble serfs were exposed to it in church. Along with Latin came Greek, because when Rome conquered the Greeks, they recognized the superiority of the Greek culture in the arts, sciences, and other fields, and Greek became the language of the Roman upper class. A great many Latin words have Greek roots, and much of the vast English lexicon derives directly or indirectly from Latin.
The fall of Rome brought on the Dark Ages, and the young Roman Catholic Church struggled to protect its heritage through the monasteries, which served as centers of learning and repositories of knowledge. Outside the monasteries, the unschooled masses went about their hard daily lives, and the highly structured language of the Romans began to devolve and meld with the vernacular tongues of the natives and the invaders from points north and east, which themselves devolved to lesser complexity and precision. The Romance languages, principally Italian, French, and Spanish, retained gender distinctions for masculine and feminine but lost neuter; they also lost case distinctions for nouns other than pronouns, letting position determine a word’s function within a sentence. They retained multiple verb conjugations and a different suffix for almost every person for every tense and mood.
English devolved further than the Romance languages. It gave up gender distinctions altogether except in reference to creatures that actually had gender. It did so despite its origin as a Germanic tongue that used all three genders, as present-day German still does. I have never seen the point of assigning gender to nouns. When gender determines declension, it makes sense. The nominative ending tells you the gender; for instance, in Latin, -us is (generally) masculine, -a is feminine, and -um is neuter, and each is inflected differently to form the genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases. (Never knew what English was missing, did you? Actually, English does retain some of this, but only for pronouns, and you’ve been inflecting them for case since you first imbibed grammar with your mother’s milk.) But when inflections for case and declension disappear, so do gender clues. Remembering the perfectly arbitrary gender of every single noun becomes an enormous effort. Also, associating gender with the word rather than the person leads to needless ambiguity. In French, both His Majesty and Her Majesty are Sa Majesté, because the word majesté is feminine. This makes no sense to me. If someone says “Go wake up Sa Majesté,” do you go to the king’s chambers or the queen’s?
Just as it had done away with gender, English also gave up making adjectives agree with their nouns in number. We have one blue flower and five blue flowers, whereas French has une fleur bleue (feminine singular) and cinq fleurs bleues (feminine plural). Perhaps the Saxons were thumbing their noses at the French-speaking Normans who were the last to successfully invade the sceptered isle (the Normans themselves began as Norsemen, ceded a coastal province to stop their raids on Paris upriver). English also left behind the second-person singular pronouns and verb forms; thou, thee, thy, and thine have passed beyond old-fashioned to archaic. French retains the familiar tu for intimate conversations with a spouse or with God.
Most English verbs require only five permutations to create every person, tense, and mood, with the help of a mere handful of helper verbs, also with limited permutations. For example, the verb to see can appear as see, sees, saw, seen, and seeing. In French, the equivalent verb, voir, has five different forms for the present tense, another five for the present subjunctive, five more each for the simple past and future, and three for the imperative. Yikes! My French dictionary (published in France) has 27 pages of a table, presented sideways in small type, that spells out every one of the multiple forms of verbs regular and irregular in four different conjugations. The same information for English verbs, a simple alphabetical list that includes every form for every irregular verb, fills only four pages in full-size type. The phrasal infinitive in English is particularly neat; the infinitive form is identical to the verb stem, which simplifies many derivations, including future, subjunctive, and imperative.
Finally, English let go of many plural forms inherited from various of its parents; the plural schoen became shoes, although the -en plural ending survived for men, women, and children, among other very old words. (Speaking of very old words, many of the world’s languages have a word for mother that includes the phoneme ma. Desert-born Arabic, however, uses umm for mother and reserves the nurturing ma as the word for water.)
All these changes simplified the English language. Speakers and writers of English didn’t have to worry about the gender of sexless objects and concepts. They didn’t have to parse every sentence as they formed it to make sure all the nouns were in the correct case; they only had to put them in the correct order. They had only one verb conjugation, irregular verbs notwithstanding, and many fewer forms to wade through. They didn’t have to match adjectives to their nouns in number or gender (which gives English a propensity for dangling participles, but that’s another rant).
These simplifications helped make it easy for English to embrace new words. There was no need for an authority to assign a gender (what gender is blog?), no worry about adapting case or tense inflections (blog, blogs, blogged, and blogging cover all the bases), no problem with making it plural. (For most nouns, just add s; if that looks odd, try es. Do not use ’s, or I’ll smack you down.) English accepted words from Arabic (algebra, safari) and Malay (amok, kapok), Japanese (origami, sushi) and Tibetan (lama), Hawaiian (lanai, lei) and Hindi (veranda) with equal ease. There are more words in the English lexicon than in any other language, and the total increases daily as we invent new words for new things and new processes (photocopy, Internet, and website come to mind).
However, the diverse provenance of this vast vocabulary is reflected in the wide diversity of spelling rules that shaped the words in their native tongues. Also at work are different styles of transliteration for words from languages with different alphabets or no alphabet at all. (For instance, Peking became Beijing and Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze-dong when the system for transliterating Chinese changed.) English spelling has no overriding logic, no simple set of universally applicable rules. The spelling of old English words evolved over centuries and only began to be codified after the invention of the printing press spurred the production and dissemination of written works at a pace impossible for hand copying. The words borrowed and adapted from Latin had the benefit of standardization by generations of scholars and clerics, but borrowings from the Romance languages were less straightforward.
The English words for food animals are mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin: cow, pig, calf, deer. But the words for the meat of these animals are often of French origin, their spelling Anglicized: beef, pork, veal, and venison. This dichotomy is a potent reminder of who could afford to eat meat after the Norman invasion. Embarrass has two r’s because that’s how the French decided to spell the Portuguese word embaraçar (baraça, by the way, means noose). Arabic words involve transliteration from an alphabet that has several versions of d and h and awards the glottal stop its own letter (the hamza) but dispenses with those pesky vowels, which it reduces to optional diacritical marks. (The glottal stop is what you do with your throat if you try to say “a apple” without interposing an n. In other words, English purposely avoids it.)
There have been attempts to derive rules, but they all have loopholes. Everyone remembers “i before e except after c,” but then we have weird and heir, among others. The suffix -ize is used to create verbs in American English (sanitize, verbalize), but not every word that ends with that sound is spelled with a z: surprise and advise are just two examples. Britons spell most such words -ise (summarise, memorise) but have to remember the exception prize.
Spelling is a talent. Without it, you have to memorize every single word added to your vocabulary, which usually has mixed results. (At least we don’t have to remember gender and declension and multiple conjugations too.) The talent for spelling is a form of eidetic memory, the ability to make and retain very detailed mental images. A person with this ability doesn’t have to remember exactly how to spell curious; he has a picture of the word in his head against which to compare the word he writes on the paper. If the pictures don’t match, an alarm goes off, and he’ll fiddle with the written word until it jibes with the mental image.
If you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with eidetic memory, don’t despair and don’t beat yourself up. The ability to spell has nothing to do with intelligence. Extremely bright people can be terrible spellers, making everyday errors such as tommorow, surprize, and seperate. (Word is programmed to outright fix all three of these without a by-your-leave, that’s how common these errors are.) With hard work and sheer determination, a person might memorize as many as a hundred thousand words, but not everyone’s willing to make that effort, especially now that Spellcheck can rescue the hapless. However, the effort to turn on the spelling check feature of your word-processing program should be considered an absolute minimum. Mine is always on. Most of the time it has very little to do; I am one of the lucky ones with an eidetic memory. When I am writing fiction, however, and see squiggly red lines on the screen, I know I’ve been especially inventive—it’s a good thing. Use the spelling checker! It won’t take long and can spare your reader paralyzing confusion and spare you embarrassment (getting caught in a noose).
One major caveat: the program will only tell you if the word you’ve chosen is misspelled. It won’t tell you if you’ve chosen or correctly spelled the wrong word; it can’t. The title of this article contains two misspellings, only one of which (mispellers) upsets the spelling checker. Untie is a misspelling of Unite that happens to be a correctly spelled word, so the program won’t flag it; you have to proofread. See Crotchets articles 1 (Who’s To Blame?) and 4 (Eat Here, We Have Heavy-Metal Windows!) for cautionary examples of failure to use a dictionary to check meaning as well as spelling and failure to proofread.
This is article 7 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
The answer is simple and complicated: English is a mongrel of astonishingly mixed parentage. And like all mongrels, it displays exceptional vigor and a hodgepodge of traits.
The language began, more or less, with the Angles, for whom England is named. They were one of several peoples to overrun that green and pleasant land, along with fellow Germanic-speaking Saxons and Gaelic- and Gaulish-speaking Celts, not to mention marauding Danes, Norsemen, and Vikings. Some of the marauders stayed and founded settlements, such as the Viking outpost that became the great city of York. The languages spoken by these peoples had little or no written expression. Even if there was a writing system, there was no need to write for a population that couldn’t read, material to write on was rare and expensive, and the rulers were little different from the ruled in refinement and education.
The Romans brought luxurious baths, straight roads, and straiter Latin, which became the common language, spoken and written, of the educated in every Roman-occupied territory. The arrival of Christianity vastly increased the spread of Latin, so that eventually even humble serfs were exposed to it in church. Along with Latin came Greek, because when Rome conquered the Greeks, they recognized the superiority of the Greek culture in the arts, sciences, and other fields, and Greek became the language of the Roman upper class. A great many Latin words have Greek roots, and much of the vast English lexicon derives directly or indirectly from Latin.
The fall of Rome brought on the Dark Ages, and the young Roman Catholic Church struggled to protect its heritage through the monasteries, which served as centers of learning and repositories of knowledge. Outside the monasteries, the unschooled masses went about their hard daily lives, and the highly structured language of the Romans began to devolve and meld with the vernacular tongues of the natives and the invaders from points north and east, which themselves devolved to lesser complexity and precision. The Romance languages, principally Italian, French, and Spanish, retained gender distinctions for masculine and feminine but lost neuter; they also lost case distinctions for nouns other than pronouns, letting position determine a word’s function within a sentence. They retained multiple verb conjugations and a different suffix for almost every person for every tense and mood.
English devolved further than the Romance languages. It gave up gender distinctions altogether except in reference to creatures that actually had gender. It did so despite its origin as a Germanic tongue that used all three genders, as present-day German still does. I have never seen the point of assigning gender to nouns. When gender determines declension, it makes sense. The nominative ending tells you the gender; for instance, in Latin, -us is (generally) masculine, -a is feminine, and -um is neuter, and each is inflected differently to form the genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases. (Never knew what English was missing, did you? Actually, English does retain some of this, but only for pronouns, and you’ve been inflecting them for case since you first imbibed grammar with your mother’s milk.) But when inflections for case and declension disappear, so do gender clues. Remembering the perfectly arbitrary gender of every single noun becomes an enormous effort. Also, associating gender with the word rather than the person leads to needless ambiguity. In French, both His Majesty and Her Majesty are Sa Majesté, because the word majesté is feminine. This makes no sense to me. If someone says “Go wake up Sa Majesté,” do you go to the king’s chambers or the queen’s?
Just as it had done away with gender, English also gave up making adjectives agree with their nouns in number. We have one blue flower and five blue flowers, whereas French has une fleur bleue (feminine singular) and cinq fleurs bleues (feminine plural). Perhaps the Saxons were thumbing their noses at the French-speaking Normans who were the last to successfully invade the sceptered isle (the Normans themselves began as Norsemen, ceded a coastal province to stop their raids on Paris upriver). English also left behind the second-person singular pronouns and verb forms; thou, thee, thy, and thine have passed beyond old-fashioned to archaic. French retains the familiar tu for intimate conversations with a spouse or with God.
Most English verbs require only five permutations to create every person, tense, and mood, with the help of a mere handful of helper verbs, also with limited permutations. For example, the verb to see can appear as see, sees, saw, seen, and seeing. In French, the equivalent verb, voir, has five different forms for the present tense, another five for the present subjunctive, five more each for the simple past and future, and three for the imperative. Yikes! My French dictionary (published in France) has 27 pages of a table, presented sideways in small type, that spells out every one of the multiple forms of verbs regular and irregular in four different conjugations. The same information for English verbs, a simple alphabetical list that includes every form for every irregular verb, fills only four pages in full-size type. The phrasal infinitive in English is particularly neat; the infinitive form is identical to the verb stem, which simplifies many derivations, including future, subjunctive, and imperative.
Finally, English let go of many plural forms inherited from various of its parents; the plural schoen became shoes, although the -en plural ending survived for men, women, and children, among other very old words. (Speaking of very old words, many of the world’s languages have a word for mother that includes the phoneme ma. Desert-born Arabic, however, uses umm for mother and reserves the nurturing ma as the word for water.)
All these changes simplified the English language. Speakers and writers of English didn’t have to worry about the gender of sexless objects and concepts. They didn’t have to parse every sentence as they formed it to make sure all the nouns were in the correct case; they only had to put them in the correct order. They had only one verb conjugation, irregular verbs notwithstanding, and many fewer forms to wade through. They didn’t have to match adjectives to their nouns in number or gender (which gives English a propensity for dangling participles, but that’s another rant).
These simplifications helped make it easy for English to embrace new words. There was no need for an authority to assign a gender (what gender is blog?), no worry about adapting case or tense inflections (blog, blogs, blogged, and blogging cover all the bases), no problem with making it plural. (For most nouns, just add s; if that looks odd, try es. Do not use ’s, or I’ll smack you down.) English accepted words from Arabic (algebra, safari) and Malay (amok, kapok), Japanese (origami, sushi) and Tibetan (lama), Hawaiian (lanai, lei) and Hindi (veranda) with equal ease. There are more words in the English lexicon than in any other language, and the total increases daily as we invent new words for new things and new processes (photocopy, Internet, and website come to mind).
However, the diverse provenance of this vast vocabulary is reflected in the wide diversity of spelling rules that shaped the words in their native tongues. Also at work are different styles of transliteration for words from languages with different alphabets or no alphabet at all. (For instance, Peking became Beijing and Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze-dong when the system for transliterating Chinese changed.) English spelling has no overriding logic, no simple set of universally applicable rules. The spelling of old English words evolved over centuries and only began to be codified after the invention of the printing press spurred the production and dissemination of written works at a pace impossible for hand copying. The words borrowed and adapted from Latin had the benefit of standardization by generations of scholars and clerics, but borrowings from the Romance languages were less straightforward.
The English words for food animals are mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin: cow, pig, calf, deer. But the words for the meat of these animals are often of French origin, their spelling Anglicized: beef, pork, veal, and venison. This dichotomy is a potent reminder of who could afford to eat meat after the Norman invasion. Embarrass has two r’s because that’s how the French decided to spell the Portuguese word embaraçar (baraça, by the way, means noose). Arabic words involve transliteration from an alphabet that has several versions of d and h and awards the glottal stop its own letter (the hamza) but dispenses with those pesky vowels, which it reduces to optional diacritical marks. (The glottal stop is what you do with your throat if you try to say “a apple” without interposing an n. In other words, English purposely avoids it.)
There have been attempts to derive rules, but they all have loopholes. Everyone remembers “i before e except after c,” but then we have weird and heir, among others. The suffix -ize is used to create verbs in American English (sanitize, verbalize), but not every word that ends with that sound is spelled with a z: surprise and advise are just two examples. Britons spell most such words -ise (summarise, memorise) but have to remember the exception prize.
Spelling is a talent. Without it, you have to memorize every single word added to your vocabulary, which usually has mixed results. (At least we don’t have to remember gender and declension and multiple conjugations too.) The talent for spelling is a form of eidetic memory, the ability to make and retain very detailed mental images. A person with this ability doesn’t have to remember exactly how to spell curious; he has a picture of the word in his head against which to compare the word he writes on the paper. If the pictures don’t match, an alarm goes off, and he’ll fiddle with the written word until it jibes with the mental image.
If you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with eidetic memory, don’t despair and don’t beat yourself up. The ability to spell has nothing to do with intelligence. Extremely bright people can be terrible spellers, making everyday errors such as tommorow, surprize, and seperate. (Word is programmed to outright fix all three of these without a by-your-leave, that’s how common these errors are.) With hard work and sheer determination, a person might memorize as many as a hundred thousand words, but not everyone’s willing to make that effort, especially now that Spellcheck can rescue the hapless. However, the effort to turn on the spelling check feature of your word-processing program should be considered an absolute minimum. Mine is always on. Most of the time it has very little to do; I am one of the lucky ones with an eidetic memory. When I am writing fiction, however, and see squiggly red lines on the screen, I know I’ve been especially inventive—it’s a good thing. Use the spelling checker! It won’t take long and can spare your reader paralyzing confusion and spare you embarrassment (getting caught in a noose).
One major caveat: the program will only tell you if the word you’ve chosen is misspelled. It won’t tell you if you’ve chosen or correctly spelled the wrong word; it can’t. The title of this article contains two misspellings, only one of which (mispellers) upsets the spelling checker. Untie is a misspelling of Unite that happens to be a correctly spelled word, so the program won’t flag it; you have to proofread. See Crotchets articles 1 (Who’s To Blame?) and 4 (Eat Here, We Have Heavy-Metal Windows!) for cautionary examples of failure to use a dictionary to check meaning as well as spelling and failure to proofread.
This is article 7 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Novelty Wears Off
I’m not sure when it started: maybe the ’70s, maybe the ’80s. I do remember objecting the first time a broadcast television program promised me an “all-new episode!” In a matter of weeks this ridiculous phrase had spread like the measles to spot the other networks (all three of them; ah, the bad old days). Now no premiering episode is ever dissed as being anything less than all-new. Simple new simply won’t do anymore, has been completely cheapened and corrupted.
Of course it’s all-new, if it’s indeed new at all. There is no such thing as a partly new episode, I argued. I perceived no difference between a new episode and an all-new episode, putting this monstrosity in the Department of Redundancy Department category of nonsense.
As it turns out, I was wrong. There is indeed such a thing as a partly new episode in the universe of network television programs.
Successful shows that enjoy a long life, several seasons or several years, occasionally run out of steam. Ideas dry up, the pile of scripts dwindles to a few dogs, the actors want some time off. One solution is to create a portmanteau or retrospective episode, wherein the characters review past events. The (usually very thin) story line generally involves as few of the cast as possible and intersperses a minute or two of acting/dialogue with clips from previous episodes. Voilà, a partly new episode.
I have conceded that all-new is not necessarily redundant in this context. However, I still have a beef, because these partly new episodes are advertised as all-new. No fair, guys! We demand truth in advertising! Portmanteau shows should be labeled as such, to save us all the trouble of watching or recording cobbled-together tidbits from earlier shows. Don’t promise us steak and serve hot dogs. You don’t have to admit it’s only partly new. But you must omit all and describe it accurately as simply a new episode, or the Nitpickers’ Guild will be on your case.
As an aside, let me point out that all-new must be hyphenated whether it precedes or follows the noun. In this phrase, all is being used adverbially; compare with the obvious adverb partly in partly new. The rule is that adverbs that end in -ly are never hyphenated to the adjectives they modify, because their grammatical function is clear, but those that do not end in -ly usually should be hyphenated to prevent misreading. Here, all must be hyphenated so that it won’t be read as either a collective noun (I gave it my all) or as an adjective (we danced all night): All of this is new = This is all new (noun, no hyphen), versus This thing is entirely new = This is all-new. I don’t believe I have ever seen all-new with a hyphen on my TV screen. This does not surprise me.
This is article 6 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Of course it’s all-new, if it’s indeed new at all. There is no such thing as a partly new episode, I argued. I perceived no difference between a new episode and an all-new episode, putting this monstrosity in the Department of Redundancy Department category of nonsense.
As it turns out, I was wrong. There is indeed such a thing as a partly new episode in the universe of network television programs.
Successful shows that enjoy a long life, several seasons or several years, occasionally run out of steam. Ideas dry up, the pile of scripts dwindles to a few dogs, the actors want some time off. One solution is to create a portmanteau or retrospective episode, wherein the characters review past events. The (usually very thin) story line generally involves as few of the cast as possible and intersperses a minute or two of acting/dialogue with clips from previous episodes. Voilà, a partly new episode.
I have conceded that all-new is not necessarily redundant in this context. However, I still have a beef, because these partly new episodes are advertised as all-new. No fair, guys! We demand truth in advertising! Portmanteau shows should be labeled as such, to save us all the trouble of watching or recording cobbled-together tidbits from earlier shows. Don’t promise us steak and serve hot dogs. You don’t have to admit it’s only partly new. But you must omit all and describe it accurately as simply a new episode, or the Nitpickers’ Guild will be on your case.
As an aside, let me point out that all-new must be hyphenated whether it precedes or follows the noun. In this phrase, all is being used adverbially; compare with the obvious adverb partly in partly new. The rule is that adverbs that end in -ly are never hyphenated to the adjectives they modify, because their grammatical function is clear, but those that do not end in -ly usually should be hyphenated to prevent misreading. Here, all must be hyphenated so that it won’t be read as either a collective noun (I gave it my all) or as an adjective (we danced all night): All of this is new = This is all new (noun, no hyphen), versus This thing is entirely new = This is all-new. I don’t believe I have ever seen all-new with a hyphen on my TV screen. This does not surprise me.
This is article 6 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
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