tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47365145621927187142024-03-13T11:52:41.015-04:00CrotchetsChristine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-44002618449589350682012-09-15T05:07:00.000-04:002012-09-15T05:07:08.610-04:00Weighty Issues
A recent Homegoods ad is a perfect illustration
of the average American’s ignorance of the metric system. The hard-shopping
character is showing off her finds. Pulling out a 12-inch-high ceramic vase,
she coos “Twenty-five grams of awesome!” Sorry, honey, but that’s less than an
ounce. The average ball of yarn weighs twice that at 50 grams. A vase that size
has got to weigh at least 20 times that, 500 grams, or about 1 pound. It might
weigh as much as a kilogram, 2.2 pounds.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
While I don’t really expect copy writers to
know metric equivalents off the cuff, I think they should make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> attempt to get it right. Being off
by a factor of 20 to 40 is inexcusable.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="Bodytexttag" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is article 31 in a continuing series. © 2012 Christine
C. Janson<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-1981550841016273082012-09-15T05:04:00.000-04:002012-09-15T05:04:17.436-04:00Magical Thinking in Cats
The psychologists have given us the concept of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">magical thinking</i>, the idea (neurosis)
that one can change things by performing completely unrelated acts. For
instance, sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder may attempt to control
their environment and emotions through pointless enumeration, counting every
step or every crack, or useless repetition, washing their hands 20 times or
checking that the lights are off 15 times. Every religious act also involves
magical thinking. As an example, one may pray for rain or dance for rain.
Neither prayer nor dance has any real, measurable effect on the meteorological
variables that determine precipitation, and yet humans have long done both as a
means of swaying the universe to their purpose.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
It has been generally supposed that only humans
exhibit magical thinking, as it has been generally assumed that only humans
think. But my cat has shown beyond doubt that the phenomenon is not restricted
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">H. sapiens</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
Several years ago, I installed a cat door in
the bottom corner of the sliding screen door that leads to the deck. A push
with the head is all it takes for the cat to let herself in or out. For the
first 6 weeks or so, she loved it as much as I did; she could go in and out
dozens of times a day without bothering me. Then the weather changed, and I
started closing the glass door at sundown. My poor cat, who was about 13 at the
time, got very confused. Sometimes her door was there and sometimes it wasn’t.
The mere sight of the rectangle in the corner wasn’t enough to convince her the
door was available, and I would remind her how it worked, lifting it to allow
her to walk through.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
As the weeks passed, I noticed my cat doing
something that puzzled me. She would approach the door and stand in front of
the rectangle in the corner. Then she would turn and walk completely around the
easy chair nearest the door before approaching the door again. She then either
“recalled” how to open it and went out or took another turn or two around the
chair first. As fall came on and the screen door was available less and less,
her peregrinations got more elaborate and moved farther afield. Now the journey
involved two easy chairs and an ottoman and three or four repetitions before
she would approach the door and attempt to exit. When I had watched her do this
on numerous occasions, I realized that somehow she had decided that walking
around the furniture made the door open. How she came to this completely
erroneous conclusion is a mystery.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
Even after the cat door had been in place for
several years, the odd behavior not only continued, it became even more
elaborate. Every year the cat greeted the appearance of her special door with
joy and used it readily, even though it was only available on warm, sunny days
at first. After a few weeks, something happened in her head, and she began
demanding that I open the screen door for her, which I refused to do (I can be
stubborn, too). It’s possible she simply realized the human wait staff had
gotten lazy and was trying to make me do my job, which is to serve her every
need. I don’t think that’s the case, or not entirely, because soon after she
stopped using her door freely, she started walking around the furniture again.
First one chair, then two, and the journey continued to lengthen as the weeks
went by, eventually encompassing every piece of furniture in the living room
area and two to five repetitions, all to propitiate the door gods and let her
get outside.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
What’s really interesting here is that she
exhibited no such behavior on the other side of the door. On the deck side, she
would occasionally sit and wait for me to open it, but if I ignored her long
enough, she would go through without any propitiatory circumambulations. Was
she, at 17, senile? Confused? Just bloody stubborn? Or praying on her paws?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
If anyone has an animal that exhibits similar
behavior, I’d love to hear about it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="Bodytexttag" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is article 30 in a continuing series. © 2012 Christine
C. Janson<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-49551654215401302082012-08-23T02:00:00.001-04:002012-08-23T02:00:40.541-04:00Recipe for Disaster
<br />
<div class="StyleGeorgia16ptCentered" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Have you ever come across a recipe that is so
obviously bad you wonder why anyone would create it, never mind publish it
somewhere? I found one in a home décor catalog recently that had me alternately
laughing and gagging.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
The recipe is titled Oriental Salad, although
the only “Oriental” ingredients are soy sauce and bok choy. The directions
invite us to toss together 1 head of this Chinese cabbage, chopped “fine,” and
2 bunches of scallions, chopped, as well as 4 ounces of slivered almonds. So
far, boring but not awful, although there will be nearly equal amounts of
cabbage and onion. To this, we are supposed to add 2 packages of ramen noodles
(about 6 ounces total), without the flavor packet, after mashing them and then
sautéing them in ½ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cup</i> of butter,
i.e., one whole stick, one-quarter pound. Good lord! That’s enough butter to lavishly
lubricate a pound of cooked pasta. And what exactly is the point of sautéing
the ramen in butter?? (That much butter would be more like poaching them.) That’s
not how you cook dried noodles, even those that have been parboiled, as ramen
have (that’s why they cook so fast), and butter in no way qualifies as an
Oriental ingredient.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
Now we move on to the dressing, and it gets
much worse. The recipe would have us mix 2 tablespoons of soy sauce with ½ cup
olive oil, ½ cup cider vinegar, and 1 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cup</i>
of sugar. Where do I begin to catalog what’s wrong with this? First, the
proportion of oil to acid is wrong; the usual ratio is 2 or 3 to 1, not 1 to 1.
Then, there is nothing Oriental about olive oil or cider vinegar, and there
will be nothing Oriental about the flavor. Two tablespoons of soy sauce is too
much salt. There’s way too much dressing for the amount of solids. Finally, a
full cup of sugar is such overkill it will render the entire mess inedibly
sweet to anyone over the age of 5. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
directions tell us to pour the dressing over the solids and let it “set—the
longer it sets the better it tastes (overnight is a good time frame).” After 24
hours, the chopped cabbage will be thoroughly wilted and so enveloped in fat and
sugar as to be irrelevant, and the sharpness of the scallions will be lost. The
crunch of the bland butter-coated ramen will compete with the crunch of the bland
almonds, and the only discernible flavors will be sugar, fat, and salt.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
Let’s transform this recipe into something both
edible and Oriental. We can start with 1 head of chopped bok choy or napa
cabbage and 1 bunch of chopped scallions. We’ll add 1 cucumber, split in half,
seeds scraped out, and sliced into ½-inch half-moon pieces, to add juiciness
and freshness. To make it an entrée salad, we can add about ½ pound of diced cooked
chicken seasoned with ginger, garlic, and lemongrass. For the dressing, we’ll
use ¼ cup of rice vinegar, ½ cup of peanut or other flavorless oil, 1
tablespoon of soy sauce, 1 tablespoon of sugar, I tablespoon of sesame oil, and
1 teaspoon of ground ginger. We’ll omit the almonds but retain 1 package of
ramen noodles, sans flavor packet, and break them into small pieces. Instead of
sautéing the ramen, we will let them soak in the dressing for 1 to 3 hours to
soften before tossing them with the other ingredients in a large bowl and
serving immediately. And there you have it, a delicious salad with about 80%
less fat, 94% less sugar, and a great deal more flavor, suitably adult and recognizably
Oriental.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
I am dying to know if the perpetrator of the
original recipe ever actually prepared this salad and ate it—and really thought
it was not only okay but worth sharing. Years ago, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> outed Emeril Legasse as a fraud whose recipes seldom
worked and who relied on showmanship to build his following of, we can only
suppose, noncooks. Did it have any effect on his popularity? No. I find that
sad.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="Bodytexttag" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="BodyTextChar"><span>This
is article 25 in a continuing series. © 2012 Christine C. Janso</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt;">n<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-43645235474330382292012-08-23T01:34:00.001-04:002012-08-23T01:34:26.797-04:00Heck of a Barbeque
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Abbreviations can cause confusion when it comes
time to turn them back into standard words. For instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">barbecue</i> is commonly “abbreviated” BBQ, a great boon to those
paying for neon signs. Unfortunately, people grow accustomed to seeing a Q, and
when it comes time to spell it out, the result is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">barbeque</i>. This word, however, is not pronounced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bar-buh-kew</i>; it is pronounced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bar-beck</i>. If you disagree, I want you to
start saying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">an-tih-kew</i> for antique, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ob-lih-kew</i> for oblique, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teck-nih-kew</i> for technique, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sta-chew-es-kew</i> for statuesque.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There is no Q in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">barbecue</i>. The Q word pronounced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kew</i>
is spelled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">queue</i>. (I swear. If you
want to add -<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ing</i>, it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">queueing</i>. Really. If anyone ever asks
you to name an English word with five vowels in a row, you’ve got the answer.)
Alert readers have realized by now that the first and last words in the title
of this piece <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rhyme</i>. Let that rhyme
be a reminder of how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> to spell
barbecue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<o:p> </o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="Bodytexttag" style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is article 22 in a continuing series. © 2010 Christine
C. Janson<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-22801128739217947322012-08-14T02:13:00.000-04:002012-08-14T02:13:44.520-04:00Snakes and Mice and Bones, Oh My!<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Today I startled a 4- to 5-foot-long rat snake on its way into my garage. I stood still once I noticed it; it had already noticed me and gone still, assessing my threat potential. After about 30 seconds it decided all was well and continued on its way. I have had rat snakes living in my garage before and welcome this one, as I have trapped 13 mice in my kitchen in the last 4 weeks. I'd much rather have the snake feed on them than toss their dead bodies into the small-animal graveyard at the edge of the woods off my deck.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I'm uncertain of the size because coiling makes estimation of length very difficult. My field guide to reptiles says rat snakes range from 42 to 102 inches, so this would be a small one. They are harmless, nonvenomous, who kill like constrictors. My cat had a run-in with one about 5 years ago. I noticed her being very still and focused out on the deck. When I went to look I found her facing down a 6- to 8-foot-long black snake that had raised the front half of its body straight up, head drawn back in an S curve, mouth open. The snake was about 6 feet away and neither creature was moving. I told my cat she was probably safe from this snake, but there are nasty ones up here (timber rattlesnakes) so I preferred that she be very respectful of the species in general, and I carried her into the house to watch from behind the slider. The snake maintained its defensive posture for nearly a minute before standing down and slithering away beneath the deck. I have since found rat snakes curled up on the cinderblocks inside the garage and climbing the rock wall just outside it on several occasions. We cohabit quite nicely.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Mice are a different matter. I don't like to kill, but even one mouse will trash your entire kitchen very quickly. They are filthy creatures, and I have learned not to tolerate them. I use old-fashioned spring-type mouse traps because they are reusable and because they kill quickly and cleanly. I bought a sticky trap once, but it had two major drawbacks. The gluey substance on it gave me a sinus headache, and once the mouse had got stuck on it you were supposed to just throw it away. Poor mouse might take weeks to starve to death or suffocate, futilely attempting to escape every moment. When I had trapped the mouse on this thing, I could not just throw it in the garbage. I actually took it outside and one by one unstuck the little pink feet, then threw the wee gray thing with all its toes intact into the yard. Call me a softy. Then I threw the foul-smelling trap into the garbage bag in the garage to get rid of my sinus headache.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Not sure why I suddenly have so many mice invading my kitchen in the summer when I had none all winter. Mouse invasions are sporadic: none for months, and then a slew. One winter I trapped 8 and the cat caught 12 over 3 months. I knew the cat was getting old when I realized it had been 2 years since she caught anything. She was the major reason for the small-animal graveyard. It seemed disrespectful to throw her catches into the garbage and absurd to actually bury them, so I chose a shady area full of low-growing shrubs about 8 feet from the deck and simply tossed them in that general direction with a short prayer to the Mother Goddess to take her beautiful creature back to her loving bosom. Over the years this space has received many birds, many bats, a number of voles, several flying squirrels, and a praying mantis.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">About a year ago, while clearing the path around the house that passes this part of the yard, I decided to investigate the area for the presence of small bones. I found none. Not one. Dozens of creatures went to their maker in this space, and there is no evidence of it whatsoever. Even small bones would take more than a few years to disintegrate entirely. Where are all the bones?? All I can think is that one or another of the carnivores inhabiting my property smelled fresh kill and carried it off to feast. Or perhaps the turkey vultures came when I wasn't looking. There are plenty of them hereabouts; the area just to the north of me is called Buzzard Flats (great country name, ain't it?). Would I really not notice a turkey vulture (wing span 6 ft) descending within 8 feet of my house? Mysteries are everywhere in this world.</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-11112943570677863482012-08-06T19:12:00.000-04:002012-08-06T19:12:01.780-04:00<h2>
Aerodynamic Haiku</h2>
<br />
Hawk hangs unmoving<br />
<br />
Buoyed and tethered by wind<br />
<br />
Then loosed, soars once moreChristine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-13609300047876409482012-08-06T19:06:00.000-04:002012-08-06T19:06:01.203-04:00"Real" Housewives?<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In <em>The Bonfire of the Vanities</em>, Tom Wolfe refers several times to rich women as being "starved to perfection." In light of the explosive growth in cosmetic surgery since that book was published in the 1970s, I have updated this phrase to "starved and carved to perfection." The <em>Real Housewives</em> franchise prompted the thoughts that led to this updating.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I have never actually watched an episode of <em>Housewives</em> of any locale, just caught snatches in passing by and read a few things in <em>TV Guide,</em> so these remarks are not based on deep research, just on superficialties. But if anyone deserves to be judged on superficialties, it's the women who appear on these unreal reality programs.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">These women are not real housewives in any sense of the word. They are, most of them, very rich and very bored. They are also the products and the victims of the modern beauty industry. They are practically interchangeable in their overdone, overpolished "perfection." No part of their bodies is spared. They have been waxed and peeled and lasered. They have been dyed blonde, streaked, curled, hair-extensioned, blown out, and hairsprayed into unnatural immobility. Their faces show evidence of surgery and Botox, carved and injected into a similar unnatural immobility. Many of them have ruined their mouths in search of beestung lips. They are bronzed and blushed and mascara'd and linered until nothing real is left to see. The bodies of a few look normal or even pleasingly plump, but the majority are stick thin. Not one of them is, to my eye, attractive despite or even because of all the effort and pampering. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">When I speak of starved and carved, I am referring specifically to the predominant look of anorexia so sought after in this country and perhaps in others, abetted by surgery to make sure the bones revealed are aesthetic, noses and jawlines in particular. Breast augmentation is a godsend to these anorexics because with a boob job, you can be 30 pounds underweight and still wear a C cup. (Anyone who gets herself made bigger than a C cup is not interested in looking good and will never look elegant, as any well-dressed woman will tell you.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I don't know the ages of the "real" housewives, but most of them have the sad look of women trying desperately to be younger than they are. Despite the "tasteful" makeup, the engineered faces, and the carefully unelaborate coiffures, I find many of these women plain at best. Nothing wrong with being plain, but the endless pursuit of "beauty" saddens me.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I would like to live in a world where women didn't feel the need to wear makeup, to enlarge their breasts, to wear 5-inch stiletto heels. I wouldn't dare tell anyone not to; I'm not a dictator. But I hate the image of these starved and carved Barbies all over the media, broadcast and printed, where young girls see them and think they represent beauty. Appearance is only one kind of beauty, and a minor kind at that. The facade constructed by these women is the opposite of beauty; it is sham. Which is an antonym of real.</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-86480034401161145482012-07-15T02:58:00.002-04:002012-07-15T02:58:47.360-04:00Beginning Anew<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">I have not worked on my blog for a year and a half. It's time to restart with a new philosophy. I will no longer concentrate on language, although I'll continue to skewer those who are doing it harm. I will also try to keep the posts short, in consideration of limited time availability for reading more than limited attention spans. Here's to the new!</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-61810739104621395112011-02-10T02:40:00.004-05:002011-02-10T02:55:08.188-05:00Haiku?<span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Low winter sun</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Bare-tree shadows stripe the road like</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">An endless bar code</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"></span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-33153105176454891122011-01-19T04:57:00.003-05:002011-01-19T05:10:20.028-05:00Technoglyphic Musings<span style="font-size:130%;">Instant messaging, texting, and chat rooms are fueling the invention of an entirely new “written” language, one designed specifically for keypads and keyboards and miniscreens. This is the context of real-time, live communication via electronic device and screens measured in millimeters, be it laptop or telephone. In this context, brevity is celerity. The fewer inputs you need to make, the more quickly your communication goes out and the “conversation” continues. The fewer inputs you receive, the more “words” can appear—and be comprehended—at one go. Brevity is also a plus when your thumbs are flailing like demented drumsticks over the tiny keys of your smartphone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">About a year ago, I coined the word <em>technoglyph</em> to describe the variety of symbols used to facilitate this new form of written communication. I am ready now to assert that we need this word and attempt to define it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">There are many ways to shorten and compact the standard written forms of words and phrases, and <em>technoglyph</em> is an umbrella term that includes all of them. Chief among these methods is abbreviation, but of a new-fangled sort. The old-fashioned rule was that abbreviations formed by taking the first letter of each word should be capitalized. The multiple steps required to obtain a capital on dumbphone keypads and mini-keyboards have shut this rule down, leaving us with ttfn, j/k, lol, and many others. The capital <em>I</em> of the first person is also being left to the lower case, and the use of an <em>i</em> for an <em>I</em> qualifies as a technoglyph, as it is not standard English (although it may become so if this habit becomes ingrained). Many of the new abbreviations common to texters are for social phrases that acknowledge the live connection in as few letters/inputs as possible (ttfn, for example). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Soundalikes also qualify as technoglyphs. For example, “c” is a technoglyph for the word <em>see</em>, as “u” is for <em>you</em>. They are not abbreviations. I cannot comfortably call them homophones, because they aren’t strictly words, although the definition of homophone has been extended to include single characters. As a puzzle enthusiast, I see them more as <em>rebuses</em>, symbols or pictures representing a soundalike word. Furthermore, in the texting context, “c” and “u” are more than simply homophone or rebus; they are not interchangeable for other soundalikes. For instance, “c” also sounds like <em>sea</em>, but I doubt a sailor is going to text “Set out to c 2day.” Likewise, a shepherd will not text anyone “Lost u 2day,” because it will be misunderstood. The “c” and “u” are not so much symbols or soundalikes as <em>mnemonics</em> for specific standard English words that occur constantly in interpersonal communications.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Numerals are also used as soundalikes/rebuses/mnemonics for common English words and sounds. They can occur alone (2 for <em>to</em>, 4 for <em>for</em>) or in conjunction with letters or pieces of words (2nite, l8er). As time and input savers, they work splendidly for very common words and expressions, not so well for the more exotic, un42nately.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Emoticons were among the earliest technoglyphs. There is an entire glossary of these punctuation-based faces, winking and frowning and sticking out their tongues. Three finger strikes (a colon, a hyphen, and a closing parenthesis), and we have communicated “I am smiling/happy/pleased.” That’s a lot of punch for three strikes! (Actually, I suppose the shift needed for the parenthesis would make it four strikes, but still.)</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />The use of @ to stand for <em>at</em> greatly broadens the application of an old handwritten symbol once confined to matters of math and commerce. Also on the upsurge is $ to stand for money in general as well as for <em>dollar</em> specifically. We don’t use ₤ for <em>pound</em> because it isn’t available on a keyboard, never mind a keypad. That fact allows me to classify $ and @ as technoglyphs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Now let me attempt to define <em>technoglyph</em>. It may be an abbreviation, but one designed for the limitations and niceties of real-time communication. It may be a soundalike, but only for words in common use for personal interactions. It may be a rebus, but it will have only one solution. It may be an old handwritten symbol revamped for vigorous new-age use. It may involve nonstandard use of a standard word, as an <em>i</em> for an <em>I</em>. In each case, I believe the word that best describes the reduction process is <em>mnemonic</em>. Each of these symbols, abbreviations, rebuses, and soundalikes is intended to <em>remind</em> us of a standard English word or phrase with the fewest possible key strikes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Here is one possible definition: A technoglyph is a mnemonic for a common word or phrase, devised specifically for communication (especially real-time live communication) via keyboard or keypad in applications such as instant messaging, chat rooms, and texting.<br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 21 in a continuing series. © 2011 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-57729423516804675462011-01-17T04:14:00.002-05:002011-01-17T04:26:33.040-05:00Yule Know Next Time, Round 2: Deep Research<span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Ah, December! The darkest month of the year, when we lose daylight at the depressing rate of more than two minutes per day, until the winter solstice marks the turning point. Humans crave light at this dark time, and electricity allows us to indulge this craving shamelessly. No wonder the ancients turned the solstice into a weeks-long festival of lights.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Let’s see how much you know about this very important astronomical event. The winter solstice appears on calendars and ephemerides as an exact date and time (to the minute) that changes every year. Do you know how the time is determined? Is it actually the shortest day of the year? Is it actually the first day of winter?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">The answers, surprisingly, are no and no. The shortest day of the year in fact occurs several days before the official date of the solstice. The official date and time instead mark the movement of the sun out of Sagittarius and into Capricorn. And you thought astrology was irrelevant!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">As for its being the first day of winter, that’s a lot of hooey. I have no idea who decided winter “begins” in late December, but it’s nonsense. The meteorologists sensibly account December first as the beginning of the winter season. The ancient Celts, also sensibly, held that winter begins midway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, at the holiday they called Samhain (pronounced sowan) and we know as Halloween, which was also their New Year’s Eve. Interesting that we now switch from daylight saving to standard time at the end of October, proving perhaps that old ideas don’t die, they just get repurposed.</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"><br />In the Celtic calendar, all the seasons begin midway between an equinox and a solstice, and each has its holiday. Spring starts at the beginning of February, a festival once called Imbolc and now “celebrated,” much corrupted, as Groundhog Day. Summer begins with Beltane, now called May Day, and autumn begins in early August at a holiday called Lammas or Lughnasa. Sadly, this occasion is no longer remembered on American shores, though I believe it is still observed in Ireland. This older calendar is why the winter solstice is known to us confusingly as both the first day of winter and the time of the midwinter festival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">In Scandinavia, which experiences the most profound winter darkness on the European continent, and in the countries where the Vikings and Norsemen carried their traditions, including the British Isles, the weeks leading up to and following the winter solstice were known as Yule. When I looked up <em>Yule</em> in my dictionary, however, I was dismayed to see it defined only as “the feast of the nativity of Jesus Christ.” I’m sorry, but it is not. The derivation admits that the word is the Old Norse name for a pagan midwinter festival. Yes, exactly. That festival was celebrated for thousands of years before the Christians coopted it, and I object to its total omission from the definition. I have the same objection when I encounter the saying that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Again, no offense intended, but he is not, at least, not originally and not solely. Celebration of the season predates Jesus by millennia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Americans wish each other a Merry Christmas; in England it’s a Happy Christmas. But 2,000 years into the Christian era, the Swedes still greet their fellows with Good Yule (<em>God Jul</em>), and in France, it’s Joyous Noël (<em>Joyeux</em> <em>Noël</em>). <em>Merriam-Webster’s</em> defines <em>noël</em> as meaning Christmas or carol, says it’s derived from the Latin <em>natalis</em>, meaning birth, and cites its earliest documented use as 1811, in a book of old French songs. I find that almost impossible to believe. The Oxford English Dictionary defines <em>noël</em> simply as a song, with the same first-citation date, but refers the reader to <em>nowel</em>. This word it defines as a joyous shout, akin to <em>hurray</em> or <em>hallelujah</em>, with a 14th-century citation from Chaucer, although it also traces the origin back to the Latin <em>natalis</em>. Again, I’m not buying it. The French had no French word for Christmas before the 19th century and then “chose” a word that means <em>song</em>? Seems more than a little odd to me. That’s like the English wishing everyone a Happy Carol.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Nowel</em> began life as a joyful cry and evolved to mean a joyful song sung at a joyful holiday. What are the chances that <em>Noël</em>, and the festival to which it refers, is actually as old in western Europe as <em>Yule</em> is to the north? Excellent, in my opinion. For that matter, what are the chances that <em>Noël</em> is derived from the ancient word <em>Yule</em> brought to French territory by the Norsemen who settled in Normandy? It’s less of a stretch from <em>Yule</em> to <em>Noël</em> than it is from <em>natalis</em> to <em>Noël</em>, that’s for sure. Etymologists, consider this a challenge!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"><br />Cultures that experience the change of seasons generally have a long festival at midwinter, a festival of lights to chase back the darkness and call upon the sun to return. The Chinese have the Festival of the Lanterns. Even as far south as the Mediterranean, there is Hanukkah, an eight-day event. The Romans had the Saturnalia in mid-December, during which gifts were exchanged. Saturn was the god of harvests; consider the symbolism of holding his festival months after harvest is complete and months before spring planting will begin, when the earth seems barren. Also consider that <em>saturnalia</em> has come to mean a drunken orgy, and we can guess that the Romans celebrated rather lustily, making the beast with two backs to encourage the land to be fruitful once more, a primitive form of magick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">In a festival of lights, people light up the dreary darkness, whether with pre-electricity candles and Yule logs and firecrackers or with modern icicle lights and glittery tinsel and rainbow LEDs. Here in the United States, we string lights on everything from trees to porch columns to fences and place electric candles in our windows like beacons of hope. We bring evergreens into our homes as a symbol that life will be renewed, that the deadness of winter cannot defeat the vitality hidden within soil and branch and seed.</span><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;"><br />The colors of the season are obvious choices. Evergreens supply the only spots of living color in the white and brown and gray monotony of the bleak winter landscape, and green’s opposite is the cheery and warming red that can lift our spirits and gladden our hearts. Nature herself loves this combination, exemplified by holly’s shiny green leaves and bright red berries. People have been decorating their homes at midwinter with living green branches and garlands of aromatic pine and cedar and sprigs of white-berried mistletoe (sacred to the Druids) for almost as long as homes have existed, and the Christmas tree is just the most recent expression of that impulse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">Pagan or Christian, the midwinter festival celebrates coming out of the darkness and the rebirth of the world. You don’t have to be a Christian to celebrate Yule with a joyful song, just a human who craves the return of the sun and its light and warmth. A pagan, after all, is simply one who dwells in the country, close to Nature and sensitive to her rhythms and moods and mysteries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:georgia;font-size:130%;">In March I’ll post a piece about the origins of Easter, another pagan holiday coopted by the Christians. Watch for it!<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 19 in a continuing series. © 2011 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-47997838703781640972010-01-03T17:29:00.002-05:002010-01-03T17:36:31.038-05:00Yule Know Next Time<span style="font-size:130%;">Ah, December! The darkest month of the year, when we lose daylight at the depressing rate of more than two minutes per day, until the winter solstice marks the turning point. Humans crave light at this dark time, and electricity allows us to indulge this craving shamelessly. No wonder the ancients turned the solstice into a weeks-long festival of lights.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Let’s see how much you know about this very important astronomical event. The winter solstice appears on calendars and ephemerides as an exact date and time (to the minute) that changes every year. Do you know how the time is determined? Is it actually the shortest day of the year? Is it actually the first day of winter?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The answers, surprisingly, are no and no. The shortest day of the year in fact occurs several days before the official date of the solstice. The official date and time instead mark the movement of the sun out of Sagittarius and into Capricorn. And you thought astrology was irrelevant!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">As for its being the first day of winter, that’s a lot of hooey. I have no idea who decided winter “begins” in late December, but it’s nonsense. The meteorologists sensibly account December first as the beginning of the winter season. The ancient Celts, also sensibly, held that winter begins midway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, at the holiday they called Samhain (pronounced sowan) and we now know as Halloween. Interesting that we now switch from daylight saving to standard time at the end of October, proving perhaps that old ideas don’t die, they just get repurposed. In the Celtic calendar, all the seasons begin midway between an equinox and a solstice, and each has its holiday. Spring starts at the beginning of February, a festival once called Imbolc and now “celebrated,” much corrupted, as Groundhog Day. Summer begins with Beltane, now called May Day, and autumn begins in early August at a holiday called Lammas or Lughnasa. Sadly, this occasion is no longer remembered on American shores, though I believe it is still observed in Ireland. This older calendar is why the winter solstice is known to us confusingly as both the first day of winter and the time of the midwinter festival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">In Scandinavia, which experiences the most profound winter darkness on the European continent, and in the countries where the Vikings and Norsemen carried their traditions, the weeks leading up to and following the winter solstice were known as Yule. When I looked up Yule in my dictionary, however, I was dismayed to see it defined only as “the feast of the nativity of Jesus Christ.” I’m sorry, but it is not. The derivation admits that the word is the Old Norse name for a pagan midwinter festival. Yes, exactly. That festival was celebrated for thousands of years before the Christians coopted it, and I object to its total omission from the definition. I have the same objection when I encounter the saying that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Again, no offense intended, but he is not, at least, not originally and not solely. Celebration of the season predates Jesus by millennia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Cultures that experience the change of seasons generally have a long festival at midwinter, a festival of lights to chase back the darkness and call upon the sun to return. The Chinese have the Festival of the Lanterns. Even as far south as the Mediterranean, there is Hanukkah, an eight-day event. The Romans had the Saturnalia in mid-December, during which gifts were exchanged. Saturn was the god of harvests; consider the symbolism of holding his festival months after harvest is complete and months before spring planting will begin, when the earth seems barren. Also consider that <em>saturnalia</em> has come to mean a drunken orgy, and we can guess that people celebrated rather lustily, making the beast with two backs to encourage the land to be fruitful once more, a primitive form of magick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">In a festival of lights, people light up the dreary darkness, whether with pre-electricity candles and Yule logs and firecrackers or with modern icicle lights and glittery tinsel and rainbow LEDs. Here in the United States, we string lights on everything from trees to porch columns to fences and place electric candles in our windows like beacons of hope. We bring evergreens into our homes as a symbol that life will be renewed, that the deadness of winter cannot defeat the vitality hidden within soil and branch and seed. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The colors of the season are obvious choices. Evergreens supply the only spots of living color in the white and brown and gray monotony of the bleak winter landscape, and green’s opposite is the cheery and warming red that can lift our spirits and gladden our hearts. Nature herself loves this combination, exemplified by holly’s shiny green leaves and bright red berries. People have been decorating their homes at midwinter with living green branches and garlands of aromatic pine and cedar and sprigs of white-berried mistletoe (sacred to the Druids) for almost as long as homes have existed, and the Christmas tree is just the most recent expression of that impulse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Pagan or Christian, the midwinter festival celebrates coming out of the darkness and the rebirth of the world. You don’t have to be a Christian to celebrate Yule, just a human who craves the return of the sun and its light and warmth. A pagan, after all, is simply one who dwells in the country, close to Nature and sensitive to her rhythms and moods and mysteries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">In March I’ll post a piece about the origins of Easter, another pagan holiday coopted by the Christians. Watch for it!<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 19 in a continuing series. © 2010 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-78899619595983458292009-12-07T06:52:00.004-05:002010-01-03T17:28:47.595-05:00Ignorance and Arrogance<span style="font-size:130%;">Many years ago, I was given a paperback copy of a book called <em>The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way</em> as a gift. So crammed are my shelves with unread books I’ve only just got around to reading it. I stumbled across it by chance a week ago and was drawn to it because I had covered some of the same territory in an earlier article, <em>Mispellers of the World, Untie!</em> I wanted to see what the author, Bill Bryson, had to say and see whether I had left out anything major.</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Most of the book is a discussion of research and histories done by others. Nowhere does Mr. Bryson mention any original research done by him, and his name does not appear in the bibliography, so I’m guessing he has not published in this field previously. None of the books in the bibliography was published before 1931, and there are no primary sources, such as Chaucer’s <em>Canterbury Tales</em>. There is no information about the author at all; his academic background and current profession are unknown. According to the blurbs all over the cover, this book was a hardcover bestseller and well reviewed, even earned the accolade of “scholarly” from the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>. The writing style is breezy and fun, more magazine than academe, which of course adds immensely to readability. But the author betrays such a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic structures of English that I am astounded he got his book published. </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />In his chapter on English grammar and its oddities, Mr. Bryson states that in English, “A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because the grammarians say they are.” He supports this by giving a list of nouns that are also verbs, such as <em>charge</em> and <em>towel</em>. But the statement is arrant nonsense. A noun is a word that functions as a noun; a verb is a word that functions as a verb. In the sentence “The charge appeared on my statement,” the word <em>charge</em> is being used as a noun, and grammarians are as powerless to turn it into a verb as they are to turn it into gold. Only native speakers can decide how to use a given word, setting its function through use, and if they want to change its use, they have to construct a new sentence for it. The fact that English has so many multifunctional terms is a tribute to its unique versatility. A word’s function (noun, verb, whatever) is not revealed until it is actually used; no one can look at the isolated word <em>charge</em> and declare it noun or verb, because it has the potential to be either. This is a very neat trick, not a shortcoming, and cannot be done in many other languages.<br /><br />Claiming that “the parts of speech are almost entirely notional,” Mr. Bryson offers the examples “I am suffering terribly” and “My suffering is terrible.” He says the grammarians would call <em>suffering</em> a verb in the first but a noun in the second, but in his opinion both sentences use “precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea.” Well, no. Technically, the first <em>suffering</em> is a present participle, a verbal adjective, and the second is a gerund, a verbal noun, both of which are derived from the same verb, <em>suffer</em>. It is thus not at all odd that they should express the same idea, but the verb has been inflected in different ways, to form a participle (adjective) to use in the present progressive tense and to form a gerund (noun) to use as a subject. Every English verb has the ability to become a noun or an adjective by the addition of -<em>ing</em>; which it is is strictly a matter of how it’s used. As a native English speaker, the author has automatically used <em>terrible</em> to modify the gerund and <em>terribly</em> to modify the participle even as he claims they are modifying “precisely the same word,” proving that the language center in his brain is operating better than the reasoning center. It isn’t a noun or an adjective because grammarians say it is; it’s a noun or adjective because that’s how it’s functioning. There’s nothing “notional” about it.<br /><br />Having said one puzzlingly harebrained thing, Mr. Bryson reveals even deeper ignorance of how his language works (the language, remember, he has dared to write a book about). In the same paragraph, he writes, “<em>Breaking</em> is a present tense participle, but as often as not it is used in a past tense sense (‘He was breaking the window when I saw him’). <em>Broken</em>, on the other hand, is a past tense participle but as often as not it is employed in a present tense sense (‘I think I’ve just broken my toe’) or even future tense sense (‘If he wins the next race, he’ll have broken the school record’).” These cavils reveal such a complete misunderstanding of basic grammar I am left breathless. Throughout the book he cites Fowler, Copperud, and other well-known grammarians, but he has clearly been too selective in actually reading them. No authorities are cited in this section, but the lack of support for his pet peeve didn’t stop him from ranting. No research went into these inanities. There is nothing here but gibberish.<br /><br />First off, there is no such thing as a “present tense” or “past tense” participle; a participle is an adjective and has no tense. Participles, present and past, are used to <em>form</em> various tenses. The present participle is used to form the <em>progressive</em> tenses present, past, future, and perfect: I am walking, I was walking, I will be walking, I have been walking, I had been walking, I will have been walking. Likewise, the past participle is used to form the <em>perfect</em> tenses: I have walked, I had walked, I will have walked. Reexamine the statements that “present tense participles” are often used in a “past tense sense” and <em>vice versa</em>, and you realize that his statements make no sense at all, present, past, or future.<br /><br />It gets worse. Mr. Bryson follows this arrogant demonstration of ignorance with one of boneheaded wrongness. I can only quote; paraphrase will not suffice. “A noun…is generally said [to denote] a person, place, thing, action, or quality. That would seem to cover almost everything, yet clearly most actions are verbs and many words that denote qualities—<em>brave, foolish, good</em>—are adjectives.” These arguments are meant to shore up the assertion that “the parts of speech must be so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless.”<br /><br />Not in my universe, bub. He has ignored or overlooked the fact that a noun expresses an action or quality in a different way than a verb or an adjective, and it is not uncommon to have closely related words (cognates) in multiple functional categories (e.g., <em>sleep</em> as noun, <em>sleep</em> as verb, <em>sleepy</em> or <em>sleeping</em> as adjective, <em>sleepily</em> as adverb) so that statements about a topic can be made in multiple ways. How is this a failing?? The noun is <em>bravery</em>, the adjective is <em>brave</em>; they both describe a quality, and each can be used to express a thought about heroism. How does that render the categories of noun and adjective themselves meaningless? Wouldn’t it be a bitch if we always had to use <em>sleep</em> as a noun and cast every sentence to accommodate that inflexibility?<br /><br />I repeat, in English a word is characterized by how it is used, and native speakers decide how any given word may be used by using it that way and being understood. Mr. Bryson would seem to prefer a language in which the <em>nouns</em> were always and forever <em>nouns</em> and referred very solidly and concretely to <em>things</em>, and so on. This is not only impossible, it is supremely undesirable. It takes away all possibility of wordplay and inventiveness, not to mention growth and change.<br /><br />I cannot believe this book was ever subjected to an editorial eye. No editor worth her salt would have allowed this nonsense to stand. Although I enjoyed other sections of the book, once I had read this chapter, I could no longer trust any statement the author made that I didn’t already know to be true. “Scholarly,” my ass. I rather doubt the reviewer read the whole thing. Who knows what other idiocies lurk beneath the breezy exposition? I usually resell or donate my unwanted books, but this one is going in the recycling bin as too worthless and too dangerous to pass on. I am as puzzled and outraged as if I had come across arguments for a flat earth in a book on geography.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 18 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-60978934805211379222009-12-07T06:43:00.004-05:002010-01-03T17:18:58.313-05:00Hey! You Talkin' ta Me?<span style="font-size:130%;">Reality shows sometimes resort to on-screen captioning when the dialogue goes mumbly or gets scattered by noise. News programs do the same thing, for example, for heavy accents and 911 tapes. People do not speak orthographically; what they say must be interpreted into the symbols we call writing, and those symbols include more than letters. These on-screen transcriptions do a reasonably good job of presenting the spoken word within the standard expectations of spelling and usually (not always, alas) get the homophones correct. But punctuation is a different story. In particular, nobody seems to understand that <strong>direct address</strong> requires distinctive treatment to avoid syntactical hash.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">We interpret the spoken word differently than we do the written word. The spoken word is always context specific; the written word is always outside the context and must be specified. If the person next to you says “The house is on fire!” you hear the urgency, and you can probably turn and see the flames and feel the heat. If you read the same words, you’re probably far from the fire in time and space, but the quotation marks tell you someone actually spoke the words, and the exclamation point conveys the sense of urgency. Like tone and emphasis in speech, punctuation works with syntax to create meaning in a written communication.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">When you address someone directly, that is, call them by their name or title or honorific (e.g., sir), that instance of direct address is grammatically isolated from any other part of the sentence in which it appears: we say to Bob, “I heard, Bob, and I laughed.” In speech, we can emphasize this separation by a slight pause, but because Bob is actually present, context alone makes the meaning clear. In writing, we must isolate the address with commas as a parenthetical element that is not participating in the grammar. (I.e., the commas are not replicating the spoken pause so much as they are visually fencing off that which is grammatically irrelevant.) If we do not set it off, <em>Bob</em> becomes the direct object of the verb <em>heard</em> because, grammatically speaking, that is how we <em>must</em> read the sentence <em>as written</em>: “I heard Bob and I laughed.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Failure to set off a direct address with a comma may cause great embarrassment or great amusement. A desktop sign seen in a recent catalog reads “Work with me people.” This is clearly advice to work with egotists, not a direct address pleading for cooperation, which would require a comma: “Work with me, people.” “John get the phone” is pidgin for “John gets (<em>or</em> is getting <em>or</em> got) the phone”; a demand that the phone be answered requires an indication of direct address and the imperative: “John, get the phone.” “Don’t hassle me dad” is a Briton’s command to leave his father alone; “Don’t hassle me, Dad” is a plea from son to father for some peace. Note the capital <em>D</em> on <em>Dad</em>. A title used as an address is capitalized: “This is my aunt Mary,” but “Welcome, Aunt Mary!” Now note that without the comma to show direct address, this becomes a command: “Welcome Aunt Mary!”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Another thing that is always set off with commas because it has no grammatical role is an interjection. Many interjections appear in company with the exclamation point that underlines their emphasis: Hey, you, outta my yard! (interjection followed by direct address); Oh, man, is it cold! (two interjections back to back, or perhaps again an interjection followed by direct address); Haven’t seen you in, jeez, 30 years! (euphemistic interjection in midsentence). Swear words and obscenities not participating in the grammar are set off as interjections: “Shit, where’s my cell?” but “Get your shit together.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">There is a new animated Christmas special premiering this December called <em>Yes Virginia</em>. The first word is an interjection, and the second is a direct address, providing <em>two</em> imperatives for separating these words with a comma. I suppose it’s too late for them to change all the ads and titles and unembarrass themselves? Gee, guys, that’s a shame—on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">If you’re talkin’ ta me, baby, you better get it right.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 17 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-57504841481464864482009-12-07T06:34:00.003-05:002010-01-03T17:14:54.309-05:00Yawning Emptiness<span style="font-size:130%;">Humans are communicative critters. We trumped the animal kingdom’s grunts and whistles by inventing language, made up words and rules for stringing them together to yield meaning. After a few millennia to work out the kinks, we rose above ourselves with poetry, drama, rhetoric, and logic. We figured out how to record the words and preserve them, from cuneiform to alphabets to binary code, from clay tablets to parchment to CD-ROM. From the beginning, we also devised ways to subvert the communication that is the very reason for language. We invented lies and other prevarications, giving rise to legal systems for determining guilt and teasing the truth out of conflicting accounts. And we found ways to use words to say nothing at all.</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Saying nothing at all ranges from the long-windedly verbose, like the seasoned politician who can speak stirringly for an hour and convey not one phoneme of real meaning, to the monosyllabically iterative, like those who “um” after every third or fourth word.<br /><br />In current American idiom, there are several go-to phrases for saying nothing and filling the silence while you gather your thoughts. Two of the most dreaded are “you know” and “like.” Speakers in the habit of using these cannot be listened to for very long, because after the first two, every succeeding “you know” or “like” elicits a bigger wince, until the listener risks whiplash or assault charges.<br /><br />There are also words that are mindlessly overused to the point that they lose all meaning. Right now, when I hear “amazing,” I am no closer to knowing what the speaker means, beyond general approval, than if he had not spoken. I’ve also heard enough of “actually,” which doesn’t actually mean anything most of the time. As for “<em>toe</em>-tally,” I’m not going there. These words could all be replaced with the nonsense syllable <em>blah</em> without changing the informational content one bit. However, <em>blah</em> would not carry the emotional charge, the thumbs-up of “amazing” or the emphasis of “<em>toe</em>-tally.”<br /><br />Another way of using language to convey no information beyond emotional content was, until recently, not permitted in public. Now, only G-rated movies are guaranteed to be free of four-letter words and swearing, and obscenities can be heard on cable channels other than the pay-through-the-nose premiums. I am not against this. The words exist; people use them; I use them; it is unreal to portray the world entirely without them. However, I am no more inclined to listen to “fucking” three times per sentence than I am to listen to “you know” at the same frequency.<br /><br />The constant bleeping of four-letter words on reality shows is bad enough. I am astonished that people resort to them as a matter of course, especially in front of cameras, knowing they will be aired (and bleeped) on national television. Swearwords are intensifiers, allow us to express pain, ill will, frustration, and anger without being specific. But a heartfelt “Jesus H. Christ!” when you stub your toe is one thing. A routine “Eat your fuckin’ vegetables, for Christ’s sake” at the dinner table is another. These words have no intended meaning beyond the expression of negative emotion, i.e., there is no actual reference to sex acts or deities. Language like this is a slap in the face, a confrontational way to say “Hey! Wake up! Listen to me! I mean it!” It’s hard for me to believe people are so ready to slap family, friends, and strangers alike.<br /><br />Constant bleeping is bad enough; worse is the constant cussing on scripted shows such as <em>The Sopranos</em> and <em>Deadwood</em>. Lured to watch by rave reviews, I have never sat through an entire episode of either, because after the first ten or twenty uses of <em>fuck</em> and <em>goddamn</em>, about 5 to 10 minutes, I’ve had enough and hit the remote. Slap someone often enough and they’ll go numb. Intense language loses intensity through overuse, until intensity can only be maintained by increased density of use. When every utterance is redlining it linguistically (“The fuckin’ thing don’t fuckin’ work unless I fuckin’ beat on it”), the intensifiers lose all effect, and we are left with emptiness that echoes with negativity. The speaker is saying nothing just as vehemently as he can, shouting “Blah!” at top volume every few syllables.<br /><br />I will, reluctantly, concede that perhaps people do talk to each other like this, with complete disrespect and belligerence, even within families. Reality TV is unpleasant proof of the ubiquity of bad language. I will <em>not</em> concede that such language is either necessary or acceptable as dialogue.<br /><br />Drama may reflect life, but it’s life with most of the quotidian details mercifully left out. Real people visit a bathroom every few hours. That doesn’t mean we have to watch the characters in a play or movie interrupt the action to do the same in the name of verisimilitude. Unless it’s part of the story, we aren’t subjected to belches, nail biting, hiccups, nose blowing, or a thousand other common human acts. We don’t need to see every mouthful of food chewed and swallowed. We don’t want characters to spew “you know” and “like” multiple times in every sentence even though real people do, because they’re boring and annoying and turn the dialogue into Swiss cheese, riddled with empty spaces. And there’s no reason we should have to listen to a lot of meaningless cuss words that have had all the intensity sucked out of them. To hear “Fuck you!” once in a two-hour movie is shocking. To hear it thirty or forty times in a one-hour episode is just a bore, lots and lots of empty space between meaningful words. So much emptiness makes me yawn and go elsewhere, for characters who reveal the story through their words instead of slapping me silly with them.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 16 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-3903779932412709712009-11-29T01:51:00.004-05:002010-01-03T17:08:36.876-05:00Posting-It Notes<span style="font-size:130%;">Congratulations! You have a blog! You have an outlet for all the thoughts in your head and experiences in your life, a way to communicate with the entire world one on-line reader at a time.</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Perhaps you use it as a journal for personal reminiscences and ponderings. Perhaps you have chosen a very specific topic, no doubt your own obsession, be it baseball or <em>Star Trek</em> or puppets. (Mine, of course, is language.) Perhaps you see it as your version of Oprah’s <em>O</em> magazine, presenting a variety of material all centered around your world view. Or perhaps you intend it as a way to keep in touch with family and friends, an ongoing version of the e-mailed Christmas letter detailing everyone’s busy doings.<br /><br />The act of posting material to a blog, no matter its intended purpose, is equivalent to publishing it, i.e., making it public. You may choose to restrict the size of that public, or the quality of your writing may restrict it for you. I can envision several basic scenarios for composing and posting a blog entry. Each will produce a very different caliber of material, which will greatly influence whether others might want to read that blog or return to it. These scenarios apply to blogs that are primarily essays; those that provide a service or database or carry far more images and videos than words have other means to attract followers. However, a visitor is more likely to view an image or video if there are words to lure him in…<br /><br /><strong>Slapdash and Sloppy</strong><br />You’ve just been out on an exhilarating mountain hike and can’t wait to share the experience. Seconds after walking in the door, your hiking boots are off and you’re at the keyboard, logging into your blog. First you upload and arrange half a dozen photos and caption them minimally (e.g., “Me and Joey at the top”). Then, with the cursor settled into the composing window, you start to write. Your thoughts spill out one after the other as they occur, with no attempt to order or arrange them for a sense of progression or continuity, never mind paragraphs. You’re typing too fast to worry about typos. You aren’t concerned about and might not recognize misplaced commas, sentence fragments, or subject-verb disagreements. Clichés abound because originality takes time and thought. You fall easily into texting and chat room habits, abbreviating all sorts of things into technoglyphs (for example, l8r). When your thoughts have been exhausted or dinner beckons, you hit Post, wait impatiently for confirmation, and log out.<br /><br /><strong>Prognosis:</strong> Poor. Only friends and relatives will have any reason to slog through this stream-of-consciousness lack of style, replete with misspellings, random punctuation, grammatical hash, and other aggravations that hinder comprehension and enjoyment. The writer himself isn’t interested in reading it, hasn’t bothered to go back to correct errors or organize. Even if the experience was extraordinary, the attempt to capture it in words was haphazard and lazy at best and a failure at worst. The account serves mainly as a record of events, and the purpose does not encompass either poetry or philosophy. This is the writing equivalent of a crayoned drawing, appropriate for family viewing on the refrigerator door, not good enough for a frame or display in the living room.<br /><br />It is my impression and my fear that this is the method employed by a great many bloggers. If I am correct in this impression, there is a whole lot of unreadable crap floating around in cyberspace. That’s okay, provided nobody expects <em>me</em> to read any of it. (Unless, of course, we share genes, in which case I will find it charming, just as I would find the artwork on the fridge charming.)<br /><br /><strong>Considered and Careful</strong><br />You’ve had a great idea for your blog on wallpaper. Before logging in, you spend some time thinking not only about what you want to say but what order you should say it in. Perhaps you even jot down a few notes to refer to as you compose. You take your time while writing, think about structure and flow as you go. As a prose stylist, you reach for metaphor and simile, enjoy alliteration and humor. You choose the best images and arrange them to work with the text, caption them pithily. You then read over what you’ve written, correcting typos and punctuation, consulting a dictionary for suspect spellings, perhaps even reaching for a thesaurus to avoid using the same descriptors again and again. You discover and correct a sentence fragment, a discordant subject and verb, a dangling participle, an unclear antecedent. One more quick read satisfies you that your piece is presentable, and you post it. If you’re the skeptical type or just enamored of your own writing, you go immediately to the blog to view it and perhaps read it one more time. Once it’s been posted, you probably won’t change it and may never read it again.<br /><br /><strong>Prognosis:</strong> Fair. Because the writer’s subject is near to her heart and she presumably has some expertise, the blog has a good chance of being interesting. Because she has taken the time and trouble to edit the original composition, it also has a chance of being both readable and comprehensible. A blog that is interesting and comprehensible will attract followers, if only among those who share her obsession. This is the writing equivalent of an artwork created for a gallery show, worthy of being framed for viewing by the people who visit the gallery, some of whom will appreciate it more than others. Forethought and afterthought have both been used to narrow the focus and streamline the progression; editing has been applied to root out distracting errors and points of possible confusion. A few errors will no doubt slip through, but not enough to be annoying.<br /><br />This, in my opinion, is the minimum level of effort required to turn out a readable blog. Juicy content will only balance bad writing up to a point. Dry content will have even less weight. Regardless of content, better writing will always mean more readers. I would be willing to read a piece written to this standard, depending somewhat on the topic and the style, but the chances that I would go back for more are only 50-50, again dependent on the topic and style.<br /><br /><strong>Prepared and Perfected</strong><br />It’s time to work up a new piece for your blog about politics, a subject about which your opinions have the weight of knowledge and experience. From a handy list of ten to twenty topics, you pick one and begin turning it over in your head, figuring out not only what you have to say but how to organize your presentation into a coherent whole. You want to create a suck-’em-in beginning, an opinionated, informative, entertaining center, and a satisfying conclusion. You love to find a title that’s clever or punny and will resonate with multiple meanings as the reader moves through the piece. The perfect opening sentence can take several days to construct, but once you have it the rest of the piece falls into place behind it in your head. You then compose your first draft, whether on paper or directly on the computer with Word (or whatever). As you write, you stop constantly to go back and make changes and check how the argument is developing. Once the draft is complete, you edit ruthlessly. Any mistakes missed while composing, including uncertainties of fact as well as spelling, are found and corrected now. Dictionary, thesaurus, and other references are in reach or standing by. You transpose words, sentences, even blocks of text to improve the flow, add things you forgot or thought of later and delete things that are irrelevant or interrupt the argument, no matter how interesting they may be. You agonize over word choice, not just for meaning but for meter and music, and delight in wordplay and truly original use of words. Irony, hyperbole, synecdoche, and all those other curiously named literary tricks are part of your writing toolkit. Finally, after going through the thing ten or twenty or thirty times, you have a piece that is perfect grammatically and polished stylistically. When you go to your blog and hit New Post to open the composition window, instead of typing, you simply paste in a copy of the file created with all the tools available in Word. You then go through it to restore lost formatting and format it further with the blog tools. After one final readthrough to ensure there are no errors, you post the piece and immediately go to view it. You can’t help but read through it one more time because you’re always tickled when you see your work “published.” It’s entirely possible you’ll find one or more small errors despite all the earlier editing and proofreading, and you make the effort to edit and repost the piece. Over the next few weeks you may actually go back and tweak the piece a bit as you think of ways to make it even better.<br /><br /><strong>Prognosis:</strong> Excellent. This is the level of effort, talent, and sheer fussiness required to turn out a piece of writing that will delight as well as inform. Even if readers don’t share his obsession, his passion and persuasiveness will capture their interest. That interest will not be diverted by errors or infelicities of language but deepened by appreciation of his wit and his heart. This is the writing equivalent of a masterpiece, evidence of qualification for the rank of master, worthy of display, if not in a museum, then at least in a highly frequented public space. This is his best, created with every tool and skill at his command. There are no errors of composition or of fact (well, maybe a little one now and then; nobody’s perfect). The reader can simply enjoy the story or argument as it unfolds, be edified by reliable information and entertained by cleverness.<br /><br />A blog written to this standard will attract numerous readers once word gets out, because it can be enjoyed by those who don’t share the writer’s genes or passion for the topic but can appreciate his skillful expression of it. This is the standard I strive for in my own writing. I would dearly love to discover blogs of this caliber on any number of subjects. Suggestions are welcome.<br /><br />Whether you think my blog isn’t as good as all that or you think I’m meeting my goals splendidly, your comments are also welcome.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 15 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-21504070895632471592009-11-19T04:04:00.004-05:002010-01-03T16:59:36.751-05:00Comma-cal Anarchy<span style="font-size:130%;">The idea that commas represent oral or mental pauses is a touchy-feely excuse for punctuation anarchy. My mother, bless her, would say to me, “Wherever I would pause in speaking, I put in a comma.” I would explain patiently that there were real rules for commas based on actual grammatical structures. She would listen, not arguing, for me to finish, and after a moment of silence, she would say, “Well, I use a comma wherever I would pause in speaking.” We had this exact conversation at least three or four times. One literally could not tell my mother anything she didn’t want to hear. How’s your ear-brain connection functioning?</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Myself, I have no memory at all of being taught the correct use of commas in school, elementary or high. I placed out of Freshman Composition, so I have no idea what’s taught at the college level, but I’m betting they don’t spend much time on commas either. I learned most of my grammar in Latin class, and I learned about commas by reading a style manual called <em>Words Into Type</em> when I was twelve, with a graduate course during my training to be a copy editor.<br /><br />I believe many people use commas more or less at random, the “pause = comma” dictum their only guideline. Even in the classroom, mistakes often go uncorrected, and when a change is made, the mere deletion or insertion of a comma teaches nothing if there is no explanation. Indeed, the change itself may be wrong, as ignorance, misinformation, and idiosyncrasy are widespread, even among those we might account experts, such as English teachers. The bewildered student may well wonder why this comma was added or that one was taken away; few are interested or persistent enough to actually plumb the mystery on a case-by-case basis. Chances are the person who made the change can’t explain it logically anyway.<br /><br />Years ago, as part of a class on writing for publication, I wrote several magazine-style articles, all of which used commas according to the rules. The instructor routinely added commas between subjects, between verbs, or between objects when there was more than one in a given sentence. Not one of them was grammatically defensible. His argument was that the reader “needed a break” within a long sentence. Hemingway I am not, and thus he was adding an extraneous comma or two to nearly every sentence. (I have since taught myself to construct shorter sentences, which is the correct fix.) He was a trained writer, a published author, and he was just plain wrong.<br /><br />The rules for basic comma use in the construction of English sentences are actually very simple, very straightforward, and very logical. Summed up very briefly, commas are used between independent clauses, after introductory elements (some leeway here), between the items in a list, and to set off parenthetical elements. Believe it or not, that pretty much covers ninety percent of all licit commas. The rules can be bent for stylistic reasons, but you should know them before you start bending them.<br /><br />Failure to use commas where they are required is one thing. Sticking them in pointlessly occurs just as often. Again summed up very briefly, do not use a comma (unless it is part of a list or parenthetical element) between a subject and verb or verb and object, between an adjective and its noun, after a conjunction, or to set off restrictive material. Again, believe it or not, that’s pretty much it.<br /><br />Unfortunately, to use these rules, you have to be able to <em>identify</em> a subject, verb, and object, a clause, a conjunction, and both restrictive and nonrestrictive elements. Perhaps that’s where everything gets fuzzy and mysterious. So much easier to just stick in a comma at every pause…<br /><br />These grammar-based rules are the standard in any well-edited publication, such as the <em>New York Times</em>, should you care to verify this assertion with a piece of writing other than my own. Notice that following these rules gives readers very clear traffic signals as they move along. Here’s a comma followed by a conjunction, so a new clause is coming up, a new subject, a new thought. A comma placed within a clause (for instance, between dual predicates: “I slapped him, and listened to him cry”) violates that expectation, and the reader has to back up and regroup to grasp the meaning. Syntactically, it’s like a stop sign in the middle of the block instead of at an intersection, and we all know how annoying those are. Profligate use of commas can make it necessary to read every sentence two or three times to determine structure and sense.<br /><br />Because the rules are so clear cut, if you give the same piece of writing to two trained editors, they will make exactly the same comma changes, both insertions and deletions. Moreover, they will be able to explain the reason for every change, and I guarantee the word <em>pause</em> will not come up.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 14 in a continuing series. Formerly posted as Comma Chameleon. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-44432317778080528582009-11-15T04:11:00.001-05:002009-11-29T01:47:16.599-05:00Edless and Be-Eded<span style="font-size:130%;">Let’s talk about participles!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Now that I’ve just lost half of my potential audience, let me assume that the readers who remain know that grammar is not just for geeks. It is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used well or badly. People who disdain grammar or any formal study of how words are put together think they can just set their thoughts down on paper as they occur and they’re done. However, this is like assuming that anything created with crayons is art. What’s good enough for the refrigerator door (think memo or chat room) probably isn’t good enough for a gallery (think magazine or blog), never mind a museum (think hardback or website). Just so for words. Forethought, structure, and judicious editing are all essential to good writing. If it’s a memo to yourself, be as slipshod and sloppy as you like. If it’s something you expect other people to read, you’ve got to follow the rules. An architect can scribble away on the drawing board designing castles in the air, but if he expects other people to live in them, he’d better bring them down to earth and make them structurally sound. Writing is no different. Sentences and paragraphs are constructed, and if they are badly constructed, they will collapse as surely as an unsupported roof and stun the reader with nonsense or aggravation. To avoid that calamity, you have to follow the rules.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Now, let’s talk about participles. (I promise the word <em>dangling</em> isn’t going to come up even once.) Participles are adjectives that are formed from verbs (sometimes from nouns; more on that later) and act as modifiers with verbal force. They describe an action in progress (present participles) or one that has been completed (perfect or past participles).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Present participles end in -<em>ing</em>: a <em>swimming</em> dog, a <em>horrifying</em> accident. They are used to form the progressive tenses: I am walking, he was talking, we will be falling down. Do not confuse present participles with gerunds, which also end in -<em>ing</em> but are verbal nouns: <em>swimming</em> is good exercise, I like <em>painting</em>. Gerunds are lots of fun and often misused and will be the subject of a future article.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Past participles used to be called perfect participles because they are used to form the perfect tenses, but I guess grammarians got tired of all that perfection. For regular verbs, the past participle, like the past tense, ends in -<em>ed</em>; irregular forms must be learned on an individual basis. Memorization involves the infinitive (to be, to go, to do, to teach, to drive, to walk); the present tense (I am, I go, I do, I teach, I drive, I walk); the past tense (I was, I went, I did, I taught, I drove, I walked); and the perfect tenses (I have [had, will have] been, I have gone, I have done, I have taught, I have driven, I have walked). Only the last of these exemplars, <em>walk</em>, is a regular verb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">There is another kind of past participle. It is an adjective formed from a noun that has verbal force. Some of my readers have just gone cross-eyed trying to figure this out, so I will point out that <em>eyed</em> is an example of such a participle. It is formed from a noun (<em>eye</em>) and functions as an adjective (“eyed like an old potato”). This sort of participle causes more problems than the other sorts because of its complexity, not to mention its close association with hyphens as a unit modifier, or temporary compound.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Why should nouns be turned into adjectives, and how can they imply action? That’s just the way English works, and it’s one of the things that make English so fantastically versatile. You can’t say “fair-haired boy” in French, any more than you can say “Diana’s dress”; in French you must employ prepositional phrases and say “the boy <em>with</em> fair hair” (<em>le garçon aux cheveux blonds</em>) and “the dress <em>of</em> Diana” (<em>la robe de Diana</em>).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">One very common error with participles is omission of the -<em>ed</em> ending. Sometimes the error is so commonplace it becomes accepted. One example is <em>ice cream</em>. Because it means cream that has been transformed with ice, it is properly called <em>iced cream</em>, but the error has become ingrained in the language. The same thing is happening to <em>iced tea</em>, a participle modifying a noun, which is more commonly seen as <em>ice tea</em>, which is two nouns side by side. We know what it means, but grammatically it is uncoordinated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Things get even more complex with modifiers created by combining an adjective with a participle formed from a noun, as in <em>cross-eyed</em>. Here too, the common error is to leave the participial -<em>ed</em> ending off the noun portion. An <em>old-fashion</em> candy is like a <em>blue-eye</em> boy, grammatically uncoordinated; these modifiers should be <em>old-fashioned</em> and <em>blue-eyed</em>. Logically, an <em>old-fashion</em> candy might be candy that prefers old fashions; we need the verbal force of the participle to give the sense that the candy has been <em>fashioned</em> in a time-honored way. Similarly, a <em>blue-eye</em> boy might collect them, not have them; here the verbal undertone implies that he has been <em>endowed</em> with eyes of blue. To quote one grammar manual,* “With past participles…the noun being modified is the <em>object</em> of the verb underlying the participle.” Thus, in <em>blue-eyed</em> <em>boy,</em> <em>boy</em> is grammatically the object of <em>eyed</em>, which is not the case with the noun in <em>blue-eye</em>; <em>blue</em> modifies <em>eye</em>, but <em>eye</em> does not refer to <em>boy</em> in the way <em>eyed</em> does.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">What follows is a sampling of <em>ed</em>-less constructions culled from random sources. These samples are presented as they appeared, with or without hyphens, because the proper use of hyphens is a subject so involved it could well carry three or four articles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">From an ad for Kendall-Jackson wines, we have “Red Tail Hawk”; this should be <em>red-tailed</em> <em>hawk</em>, hyphenated, not capitalized. This beautiful raptor has an entry in the dictionary as well as in any field guide to birds, and one wonders why they didn’t bother to look it up before featuring it prominently in their ad. Because participles are so often used in temporary compounds, the dictionary won’t always be able to resolve problems, but in this case laziness was at fault. A catalog page of four shoe styles, all with fringe, weirdly gets it wrong and right in the same space: the incorrect “<em>fringe</em> bootie” occurs three times, right next to the single correct “<em>fringed</em> clog.” Another catalog offers “one dozen long-stem roses,” but it should be offering <em>long</em>-<em>stemmed </em>ones. Yet another catalog says its “long-sleeve, mock-neck top is semi-fit,” thus making the <em>ed</em>-less error twice; I’d rather have a top that is <em>long-sleeved</em> and <em>semi-fitted</em>. (Don’t get me started on <em>mock-neck</em>; it isn’t really a turtleneck, but I guarantee you the neck is real.) The editing at <em>Martha Stewart Living</em> magazine is usually faultless, but a recent issue had both “fan-shape leaves” and “balloon-shape calyxes”; both of these noun-noun combos need to be <em>shaped</em> up. A grocery store circular offered savings on “select sodas,” but I am certain the sodas are neither superior nor distinguished, just <em>selected</em> to go on sale. A clothing catalog described a sweater as having “full-fashion sleeves,” using an adjective-noun combo when what’s needed is an adverb and participle. <em>Full-fashion</em> sleeves might appeal to a trendy fashionista; <em>fully fashioned</em> sleeves are a hallmark of good construction in a knitted garment (not a knit garment). Finally, trout that have been split apart and laid open to resemble a butterfly are <em>butterflied</em> trout; the genetic engineers haven't got around to breeding butterfly trout yet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Now we turn from the edless to the be-eded, where people get confused and put -<em>ed</em> on the wrong word. The J. Jill catalog offered a “capped-sleeve cardigan sweater.” <em>Cardigan sweater</em> is redundant, and the sleeves are not capped with anything; they are cap sleeves, and the cardigan is <em>cap-sleeved</em>. The Talbots catalog wants us to consider a “mix-stitched cardigan,” but there is no mix stitch in knitting that I know of. The cardigan instead has a mix of stitches and is <em>mixed</em>-<em>stitch</em>. The West Elm catalog has for sale a “blocked paisley print duvet cover,” but I’m sure the print has not been blocked in any way. The action here is not blocking but printing. The use of a carved block of wood to stamp a fabric with a repeating design is known as block printing, and this item should have been described as a <em>block-printed paisley</em> duvet cover. The final example has no specific source but is an error I have seen again and again, involving confusion between <em>advance</em> (adjective) and <em>advanced</em> (participle). <em>Advanced</em> ticket sales must involve some new technology for selling tickets; <em>advance</em> ticket sales offer tickets in advance of the event.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Please don’t get down on me for taking examples from catalogs, advertisements, and magazines. These publications are less likely to be subjected to a trained editorial eye (some magazines excepted) and thus more closely represent the language as it is used by the average person, educated to some extent in its use but not dedicated to its study. Through chat rooms and blogs and e-zines, writings by such people are being “published” more widely than ever, and they are one of the groups <em>Crotchets</em> is intended to reach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">My point is that communication is not automatic. You have to work for it; you have to enable it; you have to construct it. For that you need to have the right tools and know how to wield them. Those tools include dictionaries and style manuals. Anyone who writes something intended to be read by another, even if it’s just a blog or a catalog description, owes it to her readers to use those tools to get it right. As with<em> ice tea</em>, we may understand it even if it isn’t exactly right, but we’ll have a better chance of understanding if it <em>is</em> right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Communication is a two-way street. If you will do your best to be comprehensible, I’ll do my best to comprehend you. Write like you don’t give a damn, and neither will I; I’ll turn the page, close the window, surf away, and you will have wasted your time and mine. Do you want to reach people or repulse them? The choice is yours. (You might want to avoid mentioning participles in the opening sentence.)<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">*<em>The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage</em>, which I generally find far too apologetic and accommodating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 13 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-73568041530438719332009-11-06T03:51:00.000-05:002009-11-06T04:02:45.819-05:00Who's That? An Elegy<span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">I am of course referring to the relative pronoun <em>who</em> and its kin <em>whom</em> and <em>whose</em>. English prefers the use of <em>who</em> to refer to humans: “He is a man <em>who</em> drinks good beer”; “I admire people <em>who</em> play an instrument.” Increasingly over the last 20 years, however, writers have been replacing <em>who</em> with <em>that</em>: “a man <em>that</em> drinks good beer”; “people <em>that</em> play an instrument.” This grates on my ear and my sensibilities. I think writers (and speakers) avoid <em>who</em> because they are uncertain when <em>who</em> should morph into <em>whom</em>. “She is someone <em>whom</em> I like” isn’t as easy a construction as “She is someone <em>that</em> I like.” Since either is technically correct, writers turn coward and choose the sure thing, demoting animated humans to the status of inanimate objects.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The <em>who</em> 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 (<em>I</em>, <em>she</em>, <em>we</em>, <em>they</em>) or objects (<em>me,</em> <em>her</em>, <em>us</em>, <em>them</em>) or possessives (<em>my</em>, <em>her</em>, <em>our</em>, <em>their</em> as adjectives; <em>mine</em>, <em>hers</em>, <em>ours</em>, <em>theirs</em> 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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">As a simple pronoun and subject, especially in questions, <em>who</em> retains its vigor and can never be replaced with <em>that</em>. No one is going to say “That goes there?” or “That am I?” On the other hand, <em>who</em> is often used incorrectly in place of <em>whom</em>: “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 <em>whom</em> is correct; it is the object of the preposition and must be in the objective case.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">There are various ways to test whether <em>who</em> or <em>whom</em> is correct; among the simplest is to replace it with <em>he</em> or <em>him</em>. 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 <em>him</em>,” 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 <em>relative</em> pronouns to coordinate two <em>related</em> 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 <em>her</em> as the object of the verb <em>admire</em> tells us to use <em>whom</em>: “She is the writer <em>whom</em> I admire the most.” A simpler test is that if the dependent clause has its own subject (in this case <em>I</em>), 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 <em>who</em> will be correct: “I’m the one <em>who</em> knows what’s going on.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">An entirely different problem arises with <em>whose</em>. People generally use it correctly but confuse it with its homophone <em>who’s</em> when writing. Like <em>your</em> and <em>you’re</em> and <em>its</em> and <em>it’s</em>, one is a possessive pronoun (<em>whose</em>, <em>your</em>, <em>its</em>) and the other is a contraction of a pronoun and a verb (<em>you are</em> → <em>you’re</em>, <em>it is</em> or <em>it has</em> → <em>it’s</em>, <em>who is</em> or <em>who has</em> → <em>who’s</em>). 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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Don’t let cowardice and ignorance toll the death knell on our beloved relative <em>who</em>. Stick up for the difference between people and rocks! Be someone who gives humans the dignity of their special pronoun, and never let <em>that</em> dehumanize them again!<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 12 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-54712843115186666232009-09-27T20:35:00.000-04:002009-11-05T02:42:04.997-05:00Right ‘N Wrong, or Quoting the Apostrophe<span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>its</em>, any “nonstandard” plural) and goes missing when it’s most needed (<em>ladies’ room</em>, for instance). Most of the errors are the result, quite simply, of an unwillingness or inability to think logically about the <em>function</em> of the apostrophe while writing. When speaking, you don’t need to choose between <em>your</em> and <em>you’re</em>; 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.</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />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: <em>lady’s</em> and <em>ladies’</em>, <em>man’s</em> and <em>men’s</em> (not <em>mens’</em>), <em>child’s</em> and <em>children’s</em>, and <em>passion’s</em> and <em>passions’</em> are all correct, but only one of each pair will be correct in a given context.<br /><br />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 <em>TV</em> <em>Guide</em>) “one of televisions most well-known doctors,” ask yourself: Is <em>televisions</em> meant in a plural sense? No. Is it the object of the preposition of? No, <em>doctors</em> is the object. Ergo, it is acting as an adjective modifying <em>doctors</em>, and the <em>s</em> is a possessive <em>s</em> in need of an apostrophe, not an <em>s</em> 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 <em>most well</em>; the word is <em>best</em>. “One of television’s best-known doctors” would be a preferable construction.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <em>It’s</em> is a contraction of <em>it is</em> (see below); the pronoun is spelled <em>its</em>. I don’t think I will ever see <em>hi’s</em>, but I have actually seen <em>her’s</em>, <em>their’s</em>, and even the incredibly unlikely <em>its’</em> 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 <em>do</em> have to pay attention and remember a few rules.<br /><br />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 <em>as</em>). 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 <em>Busy</em> <em>Bee’s</em> (a maid service), <em>stereo’s</em>, and <em>zinnia’s</em>. Generally, when you see <em>’s</em>, 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, <em>dont’s</em> can only be the possessive singular of <em>dont</em>, but <em>dont</em> is not an English word. To use the contraction <em>don’t</em> as a plural noun, just add <em>s</em>: <em>don’ts</em>. 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 <em>50’s</em> or <em>’50’s</em>).<br /><br />These examples illustrate another very important function of the apostrophe, to indicate that something has been omitted, whether as a contraction (<em>isn’t</em>, <em>o’clock</em>, <em>who’s</em>, <em>don’t</em>) or as a clipping-off (<em>singin’</em>, <em>’tis</em>, <em>’50s</em>). Again, errors such as <em>dont’s</em> 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 <em>dont’s</em> and <em>don’ts</em> in speech. An audience will understand what you mean, but a reader can best (not <em>most</em> <em>well</em>) 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.<br /><br />And finally we arrive at the heart of this installment of <em>Crotchets</em>: the many misuses and abuses of the apostrophe in word pairs joined by <em>and</em>. For example, the phrase <em>rock and roll</em> is usually pronounced as if the <em>and</em> had lost both its opening vowel and final consonant and all that remains is the en sound. The result is written as <em>rock ’n’</em> <em>roll</em>, 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 <em>n</em> it will appear. Illustrating my point nicely are two current TV shows. One, on the History Channel, is called <em>Lock N’ Load</em> <em>with R. Lee Ermey</em>. The other, on Showtime, is a new reality series called <em>Lock ’n Load</em>. They’re both wrong, but the History Channel scores extra wrongness points for the capital <em>N</em>, and Showtime scores evading-the-issue points for capitalizing <em>every</em> letter in the onscreen title. Such ambidextrous nonsense makes <em>me</em> want to lock and load.<br /><br />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 <em>Yellow Book</em> 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 <em>make and music</em>; the paired apostrophes are wrong. I assume that what the owners intended was <em>making music</em> with the <em>g</em> 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.<br /><br />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 -<em>ing</em> ending for a truncated <em>and</em>; they have taken the wrongly derived <em>n</em>, 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 <em>Yellow Book</em>: 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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Most contractions occur in the middle of the words—<em>isn’t</em>, <em>didn’t</em>, <em>you’re</em>, <em>let’s</em>, <em>o’clock</em>—and thus the apostrophe appears correctly oriented as you type. But if you’re typing something like <em>’tis</em>,<em>’50s</em>, or <em>this ’n’ that</em>, where the apostrophe follows a space, the program is going to give you an opening single quote, viz., <em>‘tis</em>, <em>‘50s</em>, <em>this ‘n’ that</em>. The only way around this is to type the symbol immediately after the word and then go back and insert the space (<em>this’n’ that</em> → <em>this ’n’ that</em>); the program will give you an apostrophe and will not change it when you add the space. However, most people will not <em>notice</em> that they have a single opening quotation mark instead of an apostrophe, and thus <em>I</em> 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 <em>N</em>? The word <em>and</em> is never capitalized, and its remnant certainly doesn’t merit such star treatment. Even the Rock ’n’ Roll Queen gets a lowercase <em>n</em>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Over ’n’ out!<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 11 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-50538834822327182702009-09-27T20:30:00.000-04:002009-09-27T20:35:33.403-04:00Tennis, Anyone?<span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>arrived</em> at deuce; they cannot go <em>back</em> 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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 10 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-2719273242875860262009-09-27T20:24:00.000-04:002009-09-27T20:30:30.478-04:00What It Is Is<span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>The Late Show with David Letterman</em>). 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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>is</em> 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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">With apologies to the Rolling Stones: Hey hey, you you, get offa my clause!<br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 9 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-71031204636194826072009-09-27T20:01:00.000-04:002009-09-27T20:23:38.055-04:00Potpourri<span style="font-size:130%;">Although the French word <em>potpourri </em>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 <em>Crotchets</em> is a collection of rotten examples of decaying education, if not civilization, and all the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten the smell.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>frisson</em> 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 <em>bordeaux</em>. The city of Bordeaux in France has lent its name, which translates as <em>waters’ edge</em>, 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 (<em>Who’s To Blame</em>), 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.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>accelerate</em> is built from the Latin root <em>celer</em>, meaning swift, plus the prefix <em>ad</em>, meaning for or toward; in the compound, <em>ad</em> becomes <em>ac</em> for easier pronunciation. The person who invented and named Bio-Excelerator as a composting aid either didn’t know how to spell <em>accelerator</em> (and couldn’t be bothered to look it up) or was creatively making a pun on <em>excel</em>. Call me cynical, but I’m betting it’s error, not wordplay.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The next item is from <em>TV Guide</em>, 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 <em>Celebrity Apprentice</em>, 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. <em>Hock</em> has several meanings, the most familiar of which have to do with pawnshops and debt. The word the writer was thinking of is <em>hawk</em>, defined in my dictionary (<em>Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate</em>) 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 <em>pears</em> or <em>pares</em>) or in multiples (including the infamous <em>two</em>, <em>too</em>, and <em>to</em>), 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 <em>any</em> 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 <em>every</em> word, because so many common words have soundalikes (<em>you're</em> and <em>your</em> and <em>it's</em> and <em>its</em> among them, all surely part of anyone's daily vocabulary), but even I know that's impractical.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Perhaps I should add <em>broadcast</em> to <em>publication</em> 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 <em>stupid</em> is the adjectival form of <em>stupor</em> 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 <em>stationery</em>. 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, <em>lady’s</em> or <em>ladies’</em>, 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 <em>before</em> broadcast. Or both.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Finally, we have a puzzling piece of nonsense from the funny pages. The comic strip <em>Parallel</em> <em>Universe</em> 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 <em>neologism</em> in my dictionary is “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.” I <em>love</em> 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?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Stuff like this puts me in a really rotten mood, and that’s enough stink for one potpourri.<br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 8 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-48625537577793277952009-04-04T20:02:00.001-04:002009-10-09T01:37:55.827-04:00Mispellers of the World, Untie!<span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>r</em> in <em>embarrass</em>! How can there be only one <em>e</em> in <em>judgment</em>? Can anyone make sense of <em>misled</em> (mizzled?) or <em>forearmed</em> (for-earmed?). Why does <em>dispirited</em> have only one <em>s</em>?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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, <em>-us</em> is (generally) masculine, <em>-a</em> is feminine, and <em>-um</em> 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 <em>word</em> 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?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>bleue</em> (feminine singular) and cinq fleurs <em>bleues</em> (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; <em>thou</em>, <em>thee</em>, <em>thy</em>, and <em>thine</em> have passed beyond old-fashioned to archaic. French retains the familiar <em>tu</em> for intimate conversations with a spouse or with God. </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>to see</em> can appear as <em>see</em>, <em>sees</em>, <em>saw</em>, <em>seen</em>, and <em>seeing</em>. In French, the equivalent verb, <em>voir</em>, 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. </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Finally, English let go of many plural forms inherited from various of its parents; the plural <em>schoen</em> became <em>shoes</em>, although the <em>-en</em> plural ending survived for <em>men</em>, <em>women</em>, and <em>children</em>, 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 <em>ma</em>. Desert-born Arabic, however, uses <em>umm</em> for mother and reserves the nurturing <em>ma</em> as the word for water.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>blog</em>?), no worry about adapting case or tense inflections (<em>blog</em>, <em>blogs</em>, <em>blogged</em>, and <em>blogging</em> cover all the bases), no problem with making it plural. (For most nouns, just add s; if that looks odd, try <em>es</em>. Do not use <em>’s</em>, 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).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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, <em>Peking</em> became <em>Beijing</em> and <em>Mao Tse-tung</em> became <em>Mao Ze-dong</em> 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. </span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The English words for food animals are mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin: <em>cow</em>, <em>pig</em>, <em>calf</em>, <em>deer</em>. But the words for the meat of these animals are often of French origin, their spelling Anglicized: <em>beef</em>, <em>pork</em>, <em>veal</em>, and <em>venison</em>. This dichotomy is a potent reminder of who could afford to eat meat after the Norman invasion. <em>Embarrass</em> has two <em>r</em>’s because that’s how the French decided to spell the Portuguese word <em>embaraçar</em> (<em>baraça</em>, by the way, means <em>noose</em>). Arabic words involve transliteration from an alphabet that has several versions of <em>d</em> and <em>h</em> 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 <em>n</em>. In other words, English purposely avoids it.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">There have been attempts to derive rules, but they all have loopholes. Everyone remembers “<em>i</em> before <em>e</em> except after <em>c</em>,” but then we have <em>weird</em> and <em>heir</em>, among others. The suffix <em>-ize</em> is used to create verbs in American English (<em>sanitize</em>, <em>verbalize</em>), but not every word that ends with that sound is spelled with a <em>z</em>: s<em>urprise</em> and <em>advise</em> are just two examples. Britons spell most such words <em>-ise</em> (<em>summarise</em>, <em>memorise</em>) but have to remember the exception <em>prize</em>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>tommorow</em>, <em>surprize</em>, and <em>seperate</em>. (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 <em>turn on</em> 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). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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 (<em>mispellers</em>) upsets the spelling checker. <em>Untie</em> is a misspelling of <em>Unite</em> that happens to be a correctly spelled word, so the program won’t flag it; you have to <em>proofread</em>. See Crotchets articles 1 (<em>Who’s To Blame?</em>) and 4 (<em>Eat Here, We Have Heavy-Metal Windows!</em>) for cautionary examples of failure to use a dictionary to check meaning as well as spelling and failure to proofread.<br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 7 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4736514562192718714.post-91055891265244884382009-02-12T00:20:00.000-05:002009-02-12T00:29:43.571-05:00The Novelty Wears Off<span style="font-size:130%;">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 <em>all-new</em>. Simple <em>new</em> simply won’t do anymore, has been completely cheapened and corrupted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Of <em>course</em> 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 <em>new</em> episode and an <em>all-new</em> episode, putting this monstrosity in the Department of Redundancy Department category of nonsense.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">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. <em>Voilà</em>, a partly new episode.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">I have conceded that <em>all-new</em> is not necessarily redundant in this context. However, I still have a beef, because these partly new episodes are <em>advertised</em> 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 <em>all</em> and describe it accurately as simply a <em>new</em> episode, or the Nitpickers’ Guild will be on your case.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">As an aside, let me point out that <em>all-new</em> must be hyphenated whether it precedes or follows the noun. In this phrase, <em>all</em> is being used adverbially; compare with the obvious adverb <em>partly</em> in <em>partly new</em>. The rule is that adverbs that end in <em>-ly</em> are never hyphenated to the adjectives they modify, because their grammatical function is clear, but those that do not end in <em>-ly</em> usually should be hyphenated to prevent misreading. Here, <em>all</em> must be hyphenated so that it won’t be read as either a collective noun (I gave it my <em>all</em>) or as an adjective (we danced <em>all</em> night): <em>All of this is new</em> = <em>This is all new</em> (noun, no hyphen), versus <em>This thing is entirely new</em> = <em>This is all-new</em>. I don’t believe I have ever seen <em>all-new</em> with a hyphen on my TV screen. This does not surprise me. <br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">This is article 6 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson</span>Christine C. Jansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08971212886010240101noreply@blogger.com0