tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88118667639703143282024-03-08T05:06:08.466-05:00Throw Grammar from the TrainNotes from a recovering nitpickerJanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.comBlogger262125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-53180712482895938522024-03-01T16:07:00.002-05:002024-03-01T16:07:38.481-05:00The jimmies story: Fact and fiction<p><i>The "jimmies" question came up again on Bluesky this week, and since my Boston Globe article on the topic is paywalled, I'm posting it here. I haven't done further research in the 13 years since publication, but I haven't heard anything to make me doubt what I've written. If I do find new evidence, I'll post it here, of course. —JF</i></p><p><i> </i></p><p><i>Boston Globe, February 13, 2011</i></p><p>By Jan Freeman</p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">When I mentioned </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;">, the long-established localism for chocolate sprinkles, in a recent column, it was just as a passing example; I didn't mean to reopen an etymological can of worms. But a few days later, along came an e-mail from Ron Slate of Milton, repeating the rumor that has dogged our candy terminology. "My mother told us never to use the word 'jimmies' because it is an epithet for African-Americans,'' he wrote. "So we always said 'sprinkles.' ''</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">Even before that tale got abroad, </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;"> was trailing clouds of factoid and fancy. Its origins are murky, so — like "the whole nine yards'' and "the real McCoy'' — it attracts just-so stories, some plausible and some less so. At the "Boston English'' section of the website UniversalHub, commenters will tell you that jimmies are named for the Jimmy Fund, the children's cancer charity; for a kid named Jimmy who got them on his ice cream as a birthday treat ("they're Jimmy's''); for a mayor named Jim Conelson, or a Jimmy O'Connell who was extra generous with sprinkles; and for a guy who (maybe) ran the chocolate-sprinkles machine at the Just Born candy factory.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of all these theories, only the last is even remotely plausible. Just Born, the candy company that still provides us with marshmallow Peeps and Mike and Ikes, was founded in Brooklyn in 1923, according to its official history, though patriarch Sam Born had already come up with candy innovations like a machine to put sticks into lollipops.</p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The company's website claims that "jimmies, the chocolate grains sprinkled on ice cream, were invented at Just Born, and named after the employee who made them.'' (Company spokesmen have mentioned a Jimmy Bartholomew, but his existence is unverified.) But company histories often include a fudge factor, and this claim of invention seems dubious: Chocolate sprinkles, so called, were already popular in the 1920s, the newspaper archives show. The Nashua, N.H., Telegraph was advertising a treat made with chocolate sprinkles in 1921, before Just Born was born.</p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Later that decade, the sprinkles show up in Ottawa and Spokane newspapers, and by 1927, Sunshine is producing a Chocolate Sprinkle cookie topped with marshmallow and sprinkles. (There's even a laxative consisting of "tasty Swiss-like milk chocolate sprinkles''; a 1928 ad in the Pittsburgh Press says it has given "Thousands of Pennsylvanians . . . the Glorious Complexion of a Regulated Body.'')</p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">Just Born may still deserve credit for coining the word </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;">, but that claim remains to be proven. The company's website has a photo of two large cans of its product, one labeled "chocolate grains'' and the other "jimmies'' — but the jimmies can bears a Zip code, dating it to 1963 at the earliest. That's decades after the oldest print evidence I found for jimmies: a December 1930 ad in the Pittsburgh Press in which a local food emporium offers sponge cake "with creamy butter frosting and chocolate jimmies,'' adding helpfully: "In case you don't know what jimmies are . . . tiny chocolate candies.'' This suggests that the term was new (to Pittsburgh, at least), but it offers no clue to its coinage.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">Whatever the source of the name, though, nothing in the record suggests that </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;"> was ever racially tinged. If it had been, it's not likely anyone would have been coy about it, as racist brand names and artwork were unremarkable in the 1930s and '40s. Katharine Weber, whose novel "True Confections'' is set in a family candy company, blogs about some of them at Staircase Writing: The Abba-Zaba wrappers with their smiling cartoon savages, Heide's "Black Kids'' candy, and Whitman's infamous Pickaninny Peppermints, a brand that persisted until Thurgood Marshall, then a young civil rights lawyer, took on the company in the early 1940s.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">So where did the "racist'' label for jimmies come from? It's possible that people old enough to remember the candies of the '40s, like Ron Slate's mother, wrongly assumed that "jimmies'' was also a slur. But there's no evidence that this notion was ever widespread: David Wilton, who investigated </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;"> in his 2004 book, "Word Myths,'' found no record of the accusation before 1997.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">If the idea hasn't died out, that's surely because it's so hard to prove a negative. But as Wilton notes, "when one would normally expect to find evidence, its absence can be revealing.'' And the absence of evidence here is striking; nobody warning against </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;"> cites examples of its use as a slur; there's just a vague hint that it might have some connection to "Jim Crow.''</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-style: inherit;">In this instance, though, the facts may finally prevail. Yes, you can find fictional etymologies of </span><i>jimmies</i><span style="font-style: inherit;"> on the Web, but the "racist'' label doesn't seem to be catching on. And what we do know about jimmies is widely available: in Wilton's book, in David Feldman's "Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?'' (2006), and on the Web at Snopes.com, StraightDope.com, Barry Popik's The Big Apple, and Wikipedia. So be of good cheer, jimmies fans everywhere; you may feel guilty about the calories in those chocolate tidbits, but there's no shame in the name.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright © 2003 The Boston Globe</span></i></p><p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br clear="none" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; outline: none;" /></p>Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-78419993681221537382023-12-20T13:47:00.000-05:002023-12-20T13:47:43.980-05:00The "Mommy Kissing Santa" legend (Part 2) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="height: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Aj0LfVE3Vlkw54E55oK1c0iHFWr062kUg8pbtwVvy8N8sBdalDULx0Cui_amGTxIlQ8IOwrdBO5HJb80rk-Bd34JgeI89N9PTOZjf_i01fJCbRQ75B_yNyLGuj0WcoTDKezWM2nQwZNVp_CCfZg40jmXTkQYoC20lwf0MvfSEq71Xg_zWfCHgdavSA/s816/Screen%20Shot%202023-11-14%20at%2012.45.40%20PM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></p></div><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="p1" style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirevkLV4nlc14nbTZvjibSyOI1JaRVP2fZJ5mkXLAmc68bORSfs5sYz95HdB0fb0dftnOwvkROaikRKs6z3dC-4zamfdFQ6yobHJFEuizEGKYGo1dlqEHf0c9vxFZ_NR3zH_TQBbpTXP0e7JyVtqgoXfU1F1FHnd_IG6eqIuRbnRSm79h-_uzT8VBQ-A/s599/Screen%20Shot%202021-12-07%20at%204.59.20%20PM.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="399" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirevkLV4nlc14nbTZvjibSyOI1JaRVP2fZJ5mkXLAmc68bORSfs5sYz95HdB0fb0dftnOwvkROaikRKs6z3dC-4zamfdFQ6yobHJFEuizEGKYGo1dlqEHf0c9vxFZ_NR3zH_TQBbpTXP0e7JyVtqgoXfU1F1FHnd_IG6eqIuRbnRSm79h-_uzT8VBQ-A/s320/Screen%20Shot%202021-12-07%20at%204.59.20%20PM.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Boston Globe has just published <span class="s1" style="color: #0000e9;"><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/19/opinion/i-saw-mommy-kissing-santa-claus-banned-in-boston/" target="_blank">my story</a></span> refuting the old myth that "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" was once banned in Boston by the Catholic Church.</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The article won't appear in print till Dec. 24, but Wikipedia has already corrected its entry on the song — up to a point. There's another part of the tale, though, that didn't make it into the Globe. </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Many retellings of the "Kissing Santa" saga include this second chapter, summed up on Wikipedia thus: "The song was commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue to promote the store’s Christmas card for the year, which featured an original sketch by artist Perry Barlow, who drew for The New Yorker for many decades." (The entry will be promptly corrected, I assume; this is what it says today.)</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p></p><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As for commissioning the song, why would a department store order up a composition that didn't mention the store's name or establish any lasting connection? And neither the news stories about Jimmy Boyd nor histories of the song itself — it was written by Tommie Connor, a Brit, and produced under the aegis of Mitch Miller — mention such a sponsorship. It's hard to prove a negative, but this part of the story seems to be pure fantasy. </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(The earlier myth has a kernel of truth, since apparently a few radio stations briefly banned "Mommy Kissing Santa." These bans were somehow, over time, transmuted into a story about Boston and its censorious Catholics.) </span></div><p class="p2" style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I'd be happy to learn that the most plausible part of this legend — that the Perry Barlow cover (above) became a Christmas card — was true (as would his family). So readers, if anyone has a sample to show us, please do. Otherwise, like the rest of the story, this detail remains unproven.</span></div></div></div><p class="p1" style="font-family: Georgia; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></p>Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-60311682393254446142021-02-26T15:36:00.000-05:002021-02-26T15:36:22.400-05:00Sun's web ads leave writer in shade (and reader incensed) <p>I subscribe to the Baltimore Sun for one reason: to read John E. McIntyre (@johnemcintyre on Twitter), longtime editor and exceedingly sensible commenter on our evolving usage. Since his language column is paywalled, I thought his fans ought to see how the Sun treats it (and us) on the web. Screenshots are from today's column. Further comment below, not that it will be necessary ...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTh02lr0JDkyK0jo9kSq4VBRCmfZV0HJ39SCGZIwBHo4BACxVCTRTVsnUmFAyUYVaSLgWzdGomElHTSI2D7wnjDEHG5mOQ3BK-FLIYMyEl0H9MA88OdFGvOaqR7AqFzipghUaZMhaJCEE/s917/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.02+PM.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="917" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTh02lr0JDkyK0jo9kSq4VBRCmfZV0HJ39SCGZIwBHo4BACxVCTRTVsnUmFAyUYVaSLgWzdGomElHTSI2D7wnjDEHG5mOQ3BK-FLIYMyEl0H9MA88OdFGvOaqR7AqFzipghUaZMhaJCEE/w400-h282/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.02+PM.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLx8OGxMfV8gn-zxWBIgUVOAp4z4tZZ6yqt8G-fjJILXdNEboLt4Do6ZdujMewy4vNIYQCJcf487m5oIvU3jmg12iGgyuVfysIh8WGSD9bazfvHYdCaklPbmztjysD80C3QqXQKUY8Mpk/s910/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.32.53+PM.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="910" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLx8OGxMfV8gn-zxWBIgUVOAp4z4tZZ6yqt8G-fjJILXdNEboLt4Do6ZdujMewy4vNIYQCJcf487m5oIvU3jmg12iGgyuVfysIh8WGSD9bazfvHYdCaklPbmztjysD80C3QqXQKUY8Mpk/w400-h133/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.32.53+PM.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDUZ-rAE17GvCCHmG6mwKmoi5dyE2OBf9-Dp8yPeATW3gfZ7CqLxLhVM3oEkumsoqRfO8vMBjzdBtAm5ygE49KcXvq9-KHD7FlGKn3kFnMnGQ1tdY7DpnyttNHUywyLrJ_xkgYzS21bYw/s912/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.16+PM.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="691" data-original-width="912" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDUZ-rAE17GvCCHmG6mwKmoi5dyE2OBf9-Dp8yPeATW3gfZ7CqLxLhVM3oEkumsoqRfO8vMBjzdBtAm5ygE49KcXvq9-KHD7FlGKn3kFnMnGQ1tdY7DpnyttNHUywyLrJ_xkgYzS21bYw/w400-h285/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.16+PM.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq24R997ZIXylAFMzROzKuEjL66TIu6UfyV8iNQBA0hYwLCD-wZ9mL-i3Vt4Nx4BNHGqQZ-4U-i4sjRS_GZJXhNDKAD7Lzi-48IVdwCfYRivbb3E0DS1iw9NIUNM1gudImlLJXGIjT3OY/s890/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.25+PM.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="890" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq24R997ZIXylAFMzROzKuEjL66TIu6UfyV8iNQBA0hYwLCD-wZ9mL-i3Vt4Nx4BNHGqQZ-4U-i4sjRS_GZJXhNDKAD7Lzi-48IVdwCfYRivbb3E0DS1iw9NIUNM1gudImlLJXGIjT3OY/w400-h288/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.25+PM.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm7jGVDEG7x-Wy1ygXoQl5LwiiCEZbYQXAPQpYcbcuKU6RlYf7PG1etniEBg8JnCehI243fZHFZaxwpIysb3ux7iCefNVevtwkshk22THCigdhfaMVGrv66YEdUfhDUfB_0cYUYgsupmg/s916/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.32+PM.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="547" data-original-width="916" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm7jGVDEG7x-Wy1ygXoQl5LwiiCEZbYQXAPQpYcbcuKU6RlYf7PG1etniEBg8JnCehI243fZHFZaxwpIysb3ux7iCefNVevtwkshk22THCigdhfaMVGrv66YEdUfhDUfB_0cYUYgsupmg/w400-h239/Screen+Shot+2021-02-26+at+1.33.32+PM.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: left;">I'm not sure how much the subscription costs me at the moment, since no price is listed in my account details; the Sun wants me to phone (or dig into my credit card statements) to find out. But whatever the price, all I'm buying is this column; I don't need Baltimore news or restaurant reviews.And this is how the Sun repays me.</p><p style="text-align: left;"> Several of the ads are live video; others bounce around or fade into new and different ads. My shots are not full size, but they show how the type—WHICH I CAME TO READ—is utterly overpowered by the ad display. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Dear Sun, this is an abuse of your audience. It might be defensible if you allowed free access to the column. But to ask us to pay for this treatment is ridiculous, appalling, and insulting to both readers and your columnist. </p></div><br />Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-88831346913979042082019-10-03T22:48:00.000-04:002019-10-03T22:48:03.665-04:00Jocks and jockstraps (August 1, 1999)<br />
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<br />Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-34177217874235001092016-12-23T11:39:00.000-05:002016-12-23T11:39:43.357-05:00Usage info at your fingertips<div class="p1">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I’ve been exploring the iPhone/iPad version of Garner’s Modern English Usage (full disclosure: it's a free review copy) and I can heartily recommend it as a last-minute gift, at a reasonable $25. I would even say it’s the first reason I’ve had to be glad I switched to an iPhone; the Android version won’t be available for a few months.</span><span class="s1"></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I don’t always agree with Garner's recommendations, of course — when did two usage geeks ever agree on everything? — but his research is thorough and his arguments are clear. The look of the app replicates the book’s clean, elegant text (extra credit for not switching to an ugly sans-serif typeface). And, of course, searchable text is the ideal medium for reference books.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span class="s1"></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Only headwords and essay topics are searchable, though, which means (among other things) that we journalists can’t search to find out if we’ve been quoted as Bad Examples. (We'll have to wait for our friends to let us know, I guess.) That limitation also disappointed Lynne Murphy, of the Separated by a Common Language blog, who naturally hoped she could search for the BrE and AmE designations so important in her research. (Her fuller review of the app is </span><a href="https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2016/12/try-and-try-to-gmeu-app.html" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">.)</span><span class="s1"></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">On the whole, though, it’s a terrific tool. Now if Santa would only deliver similar searchable versions of some other 20th-century usage books still under copyright — starting with Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, now long in the tooth but still fascinating — I might even learn to love my iPhone. </span><span class="s1"></span></div>
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-35456392301118126552016-07-04T18:23:00.000-04:002016-07-04T18:26:31.380-04:00Frankenstrunk: Birth of a monster<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>A <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26621" target="_blank">post</a> today by Geoff Pullum at Language Log mentioned this Boston Globe column on Strunk & White's </i>Elements of Style<i>. Since the original is behind a paywall (and badly formatted to boot), I've republished it here in a more palatable and accessible form.)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">JUST IN TIME for Halloween, it's back: Yet another edition of <i>The Elements of Style</i>, William Strunk and E.B. White's persistently popular guidebook for writers. And this time it's in costume, decked out with dozens of gay, whimsical illustrations by Maira Kalman (interviewed in this week's Examined Life column). </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The Elements</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">'s new clothes can't hide the worsening limp and spackled complexion that plague this aging zombie of a book. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was never a seamless creation, to be sure; the 1959 first edition merely sandwiched Strunk's 1918 handbook for his Cornell students, lightly edited, between White's introduction and his essay on prose style. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But at least you knew Strunk was Strunk, vintage 1918, and White was White, circa 1958. Succeeding revisions, instead of blending the disparate parts, have left </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Elements</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(The illustrated <i>Elements</i> is essentially the 1999 edition, with a couple of small restorations from the 1918 original. Not quite a restoration, alas, in the case of Strunk's introduction: The proofreaders overlooked one of his "Words Often Misspelled," so the opening sentence now promises "to give in brief space the principle requirements of plain English style.") </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Scanning the recent editions, you sometimes wonder what could possibly have been cut, given the absurdity of what remains. Don't use <i>claim</i> to mean "assert"? Mark Twain did it in 1869, the year Strunk was born. Don't <i>contact</i> anyone? It's a "vague and self-important" verb -- or so people said in the 1920s, when it was new. Don't use <i>they</i> to refer to "a distributive subject" like <i>everybody --</i> unless you're E.B. White: "But somebody taught you, didn't they?" says a character in <i>Charlotte's Web</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Even Strunk's signature battle cry -- "Omit needless words!" -- is question-begging bluster: Which are the needless words? Needless for whom? That's the hard decision, and S&W's editing examples do not inspire confidence. Surely "He often came late" is not always better than "He was not very often on time." And as any courtroom witness could testify, "I did not remember" doesn't equal "I forgot." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We're told we must write "It looked more like a cormorant than like a heron" --because, I surmise, without the second <i>like</i> the sentence might mean "It looked more like a cormorant than a heron looks like a cormorant." Should that remote possibility loom in a stretch of actual prose, of course we can repeat the <i>like</i>, but how often does it happen? A Google search suggests that writers add the second <i>like</i> only about once in 100 such comparisons -- and not all of those <i>like</i>s are necessary. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Could this messy monster have evolved into a different beast? Probably not; White was in a trap the moment he started revising the 1959 <i>Elements.</i> That book could stand as a quirky appreciation of White's old teacher, its dated items just amusing historical artifacts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">White surely knew that some of Strunk's crotchets --his insistence on <i>I shall</i>, say, or his rule that <i>however</i>, meaning "nevertheless," could not begin a sentence -- were becoming untenable; but they were Strunk being Strunk. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But if White, in his revisions, admitted that <i>aggravate</i> could mean irritate (as it did in 1611), or that <i>I could care less</i> was not a mystifying mistake, his usage notes would lose their essential Strunkiness, that bluff certainty that had hooked him in the first place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So rather than join the reality-based usage community, White stuck with Strunkian dogmatism. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hence a book that tells us, in 2005, that </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">offputting</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">ongoing</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> are illegitimate; that </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">hopefully</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is beyond the pale; and that </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">six people</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is a solecism because there's no such thing as one people. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Why does this sort of thing send reviewers into raptures? Maybe they remember, from their college days, a reassuringly slim volume that pretended it could solve their writing problems. The "Strunkian attitude toward right-and-wrong," in White's eccentrically hyphenated phrase, may still stir in readers the eternal hope that someone, somewhere, knows what he's doing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If that certainty is what you liked about your old Strunk and White, you'll find it, only slightly eroded, in the newly dolled-up <i>Elements</i>. But the artwork is merely a colorful shroud on a corpse that's overdue for burial. May it rest in peace, someday soon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>(Jan Freeman, Boston Sunday Globe, Oct. 23, 2005)</i></span><br />
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-39076613055812897982016-03-23T15:38:00.000-04:002016-03-23T15:38:55.243-04:00Six times more ambiguous <div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I wonder how many people had to read this <a href="http://www.pressreader.com/china/the-wall-street-journal-asia/20160316/281573764805629" target="_blank">correction</a> twice, as I did:</span></div>
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<span class="s1">A driver who texts while driving is six times as likely to be involved in a crash as a driver who doesn't text. A Business News article Saturday about driver-monitoring systems incorrectly said that a driver who texts is six times more likely to be involved in a crash than one who doesn’t.</span> </blockquote>
When I got it — the Wall Street Journal had written “six times <b>more</b> likely,” and now was “correcting” the wording to “six times <b>as</b> likely” — I knew it was meant for a small band of sticklers. These are the people who claim that “six times as likely” means “multiplied by six,” but “six times more likely” really — that is, properly, mathematically — means “multiplied by seven”: It’s the original amount plus six more servings.
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But I don’t buy it. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “It is possible to misunderstand <i>times more</i> in this way, but it takes a good deal of effort.” In real life, nobody uses “six times more” to mean “seven times as much” (and if they did, how would a reader know it, without the numbers?). MWDEU concludes:</div>
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<span class="s1">The fact is that “five times more” and “five times as much” are idiomatic phrases which have — and are understood to have — exactly the same meaning. The “ambiguity” of <i>times more</i> is imaginary.</span></blockquote>
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The same argument is aimed at “six times less” to mean one-sixth — which, unlike “times more,” often does trigger my editorial antennae. I’d consider changing it in copy, if it were at all distracting. But I stopped worrying about it once I noticed that Mark Liberman of Language Log uses it unapologetically, even in contexts where he’s wrangling <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8711" target="_blank">complicated statistics</a>. If it’s OK with him, it’s OK with me.</div>
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<span class="s1">Motivated Grammar defends “times less”: <a href="https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/five-times-dumber/"><span class="s2">https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/five-times-dumber/</span></a></span></div>
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<span class="s1">My Globe column on “times less”: <a href="http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/10/21/do_the_math"><span class="s2">http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/10/21/do_the_math</span></a></span></div>
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<span class="s1">John McIntyre disagrees, gently: <a href="http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2008/10/less_is_not_more.html"><span class="s2">http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2008/10/less_is_not_more.html</span></a></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Bill Walsh disagrees, firmly: <a href="http://www.theslot.com/times.html"><span class="s2">http://www.theslot.com/times.html</span></a></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Arnold Zwicky treats “times more” and “times less” in a post on the Recency Illusion: <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463"><span class="s2">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463</span></a></span></div>
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Eugene Volokh notes that Newton, Herschel, Darwin, and Robert Boyle used “times less”: <a href="http://volokh.com/posts/1253897118.shtml"><span class="s2">http://volokh.com/posts/1253897118.shtml</span></a>Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-60132424356685477382016-03-08T15:33:00.002-05:002016-03-08T15:33:37.060-05:00Braving the gauntlet<i>(Originally published in the Boston Sunday Globe, March 28, 2004) </i><br />
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"MARTHA STEWART may still have to run another legal gauntlet," predicted a story in this section two weeks ago, prompting a usage dissent from reader Richard Sachs of Chelmsford: Shouldn't that be a legal <i>gantlet</i>? he wondered. Dan Tanner of Westborough had already issued his challenge: <i>Run the gauntlet</i>, he e-mailed, "is getting past Globe editors. A <i>gauntlet</i> is a glove. A <i>gantlet</i> is what one might run."<br />
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The Globe stylebook sides with the plaintiffs: "A <i>gantlet</i> is a military punishment in which the offender ran between two rows of men who struck him . . . A <i>gauntlet</i> is a medieval glove worn by knights in armor." Simple enough, but there's a catch: Most of the world disagrees.<br />
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The problem is not with <i>gauntlet</i>, the glove, a straightforward borrowing from French; a gauntlet may be flung down or picked up, but it's never confused with a gantlet. No, it's <i>gantlet</i> whose checkered past makes it hard to defend with a pure prescriptive passion, for <i>gantlet</i> was compromised from the beginning. On its way from Sweden to England, where it first shows up in print in 1636, it was transformed from <i>gattlopp</i> ("lane-course") to <i>gantelope</i> or <i>gantlope</i>.<br />
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A decade later, the Oxford English Dictionary records, the new word had already acquired a folk etymology: An imaginative commentator suggested that it derived from "Ghent Lope," a punishment "invented at Ghent . . . and therefore so called." This fanciful notion didn't catch on, though, and <i>gantlope</i>, under pressure from the similar <i>gauntlet</i>, soon gave way. <i>Gauntlet</i> has meant both punishment and glove since at least 1676.<br />
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In the ensuing centuries, Britons seem not to have lost any sleep over the potential confusion. In the colonies, however, some worthy watchdog must have decided we could do better, and in the 19th century <i>gantlet</i> was temporarily revived as the word for the ordeal. It didn't last, though -- Clint Eastwood's 1977 movie "The Gauntlet" was about the purists' <i>gantlet</i>. And today, editors who like <i>gantlet</i> have to dig deep for lexicographical support. Most dictionaries call <i>gantlet</i> a variant of the standard, dominant <i>gauntlet</i>.<br />
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Newspapers beyond US borders also use <i>gauntlet</i> almost exclusively -- it's the spelling of choice in 99 percent of variations on the phrase <i>run the gauntlet</i>. And yet, US editors haven't knuckled under. In newspapers here, the <i>gantlet</i> and the <i>gauntlet</i> now run neck and neck* -- not a bad showing for the <i>gantlet</i> devotees, who must be a smallish band.<br />
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Why do they make the effort, when the rest of the English-writing world does fine without <i>gantlet</i>? Probably because every usage nut treasures a slightly different set of niceties. Bryan Garner (shockingly!) accepts <i>bicep</i> as a singular, though it should be <i>biceps</i>. If you keep the Latin singular, he notes, you're stuck with <i>bicepses</i> or <i>bicipites</i> for plurals -- a high price for accuracy. And yet, in his Modern American Usage, Garner argues for <i>gantlet</i>, distinguishes between <i>masterly</i> and <i>masterful</i>, and wants to keep both <i>insure</i> and <i>ensure</i>, though one spelling would suffice.<br />
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Similarly, syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick is ferocious on the difference between <i>each other</i> and <i>one another</i>, but indifferent to the widely censured <i>comprised of</i> (it should be <i>composed</i>) and unruffled by <i>for free</i>. Theodore Bernstein opposed the verb <i>chair</i> but was willing to give up on the <i>farther/further</i> (one literal, one figurative) distinction. And US journalists, it seems, have adopted <i>gantlet</i> as a shibboleth, a password that signals membership in a select linguistic community.
It may not be the best place to make a stand, given <i>gantlet's</i> lack of adherents and its long-since-corrupted form. But for some usage obsessives, there's no cause like a hopeless cause.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*2016 note: The data about newspaper usage comes from Nexis searches.</span></i><br />
<br />Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-74705631214877663372015-08-06T19:17:00.002-04:002015-08-06T19:17:56.706-04:00You may be a who, or you may be a that<br />(Originally published in the Boston Sunday Globe, August 24, 2003.) <div>
THE WORD / Jan Freeman: Who that?</div>
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<br />"The man that is failing the people more than anyone is Gray Davis," said fledgling candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger of the governor he hopes to supplant. Reader Dave Furlong, a California voter himself, would have changed that sentence: He liked our recent treatment of <i>which </i>vs. <i>that</i>, he e-mailed, "but I wish you had addressed<i> that/who</i> also, as in 'Everyone that wants to go, line up here.' In editing, I find it's a very common error."<br /><br />Very common, yes; an error, only sometimes. Arnold may not be a native speaker, but here his English is traditional, if debatable. The insistence on <i>who </i>for people, on the grounds that calling a man (or woman or child) <i>that </i>is somehow insulting, is a fairly modern prejudice.<br /><br />"A woman that deliberates is lost," Joseph Addison wrote in 1713. The Oxford English Dictionary also coughs up O. Henry's "I'm no traitor to a man that's been my friend" (1910) and Ring Lardner's "Imagine being married to a woman that plays five hundred like she does" (1924).<br /><br />Some stylebooks, including the Globe's, do tell writers to avoid <i>that </i>in referring to people. But throughout the English millennium -- from before the Wycliffe Bible's "the people that dwelt in darkness" (1382) to "The girl that I marry" (Irving Berlin, 1946), <i>that </i>has been a people pronoun.<br /><br /><i>That </i>had a brief fall from grace in the 16th century, when a fad for using <i>who </i>or <i>whom </i>instead swept the English literati (including Addison, who revised his writings to reflect his new faith). But by the 20th century, <i>that </i>was back in favor, as the usage-edict record attests.*<br /><br />In a 1906 American grammar textbook, John Wisely tells pupils that <i>who </i>"expresses persons or personified things," while <i>that </i>is for "inanimate objects, lower animals, persons." Fowler, in the 1926 edition of Modern English Usage, confesses that he'd like to see even more use of <i>that </i>in constructions like "the distinguished visitors that the Crawfords had."<br /><br />Bergen and Cornelia Evans, in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957), note mildly that some writers prefer <i>who </i>where persons are concerned: After centuries of "Our Father that art in heaven" (or "Our Father which art"), the Lord's Prayer now usually says <i>who</i>. But even Miss Thistlebottom, Theodore Bernstein's personification of grammar-school dogma, didn't draw a clear line on that: She would have told you, Bernstein says, that "<i>which </i>normally refers to things, <i>who </i>to persons, and <i>that </i>to either."<br /><br />In his 1996 updating of Fowler, Robert Burchfield tries to make it simple: "Normally use <i>who </i>. . . following a human antecedent and <i>that </i>(or <i>which</i>) following an inanimate antecedent. Either <i>who </i>or <i>that </i>may be used when the antecedent is animate but not human, or when the antecedent is human but representative of a class."<br /><br />Those guidelines (which would call Schwarzenegger's usage wrong) set forth a conceptual rationale, making the choice of <i>who </i>or <i>that </i>dependent on the abstractness of the pronoun's referent. So the barking dog <i>that </i>keeps you awake, two streets over, is different from the dog <i>who </i>goes out for a romp with you every day, an individual with a name. A cyborg <i>that</i>'s on the assembly line becomes a <i>who </i>when it's programmed as a hunk. But unless it's banned by your local authority, <i>that </i>is a pronoun for people too -- some of the people, at least, some of the time.<br /><div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>*There's a detailed discussion of personal </i>that <i>in the indispensable Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. I can't imagine why I didn't mention it here. </i></span></div>
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-35033042052322772892015-08-05T10:48:00.001-04:002015-08-05T10:48:25.481-04:00"Shimmy" makes its moveIn last week’s After Deadline <a href="http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/close-but-not-quite-10/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=After%20Deadline&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body">column</a>, Philip Corbett's list of recent goofs in the New York Times included this:<br />
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<i>Carrying their passports, a loaf of bread and a plastic bag filled with orange juice, the men shimmied across the ship’s mooring rope that night ... </i></blockquote>
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Tsk-tsk, said Corbett: "'Shimmy' is a dance move involving a whole lot of shaking. To climb using hands and legs is to 'shinny' or just 'shin.'"</div>
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<br />I learned this distinction too, as a young editor. But recently, I've begun to wonder whether it will -- or should -- survive. <br /><br />My doubts began as I read coverage of the New York prisoners David Sweat and Richard Matt, whose daring escape involved "balancing on catwalks and shimmying down pipes" (in the New York Times) and shimmying "down an underground pipe" (in the Wall Street Journal). At first I took this as an example of the meaning's migration -- <i>shimmy </i>being used for <i>shinny </i>-- but I was enlightened when I read more detailed accounts. The two escapees actually exited <i>inside </i>the pipes, wiggling along like Little Egypt ("she crawls on her belly like a reptile!”). It was no dance move, but it wasn't "shinning," either. </div>
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<br />In many news examples, it's true, people who "shimmy" up flagpoles and down drainpipes are really <i>shinning </i>or <i>shinnying</i>. But is <i>shimmy </i>really "a grave mistake," as Baltimore Sun blogger John McIntyre once <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-a-sin-to-say-shimmy-for-shinny-20141210-story.html">decreed</a>, in such cases? Shinning up a pole requires a fair amount of hip-waggling, even if it's not done to music. As descriptions of bodily movement, the verbs overlap quite a bit; maybe it's not worth the effort to keep them separated. <br /><br />Whatever the reason, <i>shimmy </i>has moved in on <i>shin(ny) </i>in a big way. I compared them on Google's Ngram Viewer in several different conjugations, and all the results were variations on this pattern: <i>Shimmy </i>rising in the '60s, then more steeply in the '80s, to challenge <i>shin </i>and <i>shinny</i>. </div>
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<br /><br />And the usage mavens have been looking the other way. S<i>himmy </i>vs.<i> shin(ny)</i> does appear in Paul Brians's list of <a href="https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/shimmy.html" target="_blank">Common Errors in English Usage</a>, but it's not in the NYT stylebook, or the AP, or in Garner's Modern American Usage. I checked five or six of my other go-to usage references without finding it.<br /><br />So maybe it's time to add <i>shimmy </i>and <i>shin(ny)</i> to McIntyre's excellent <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-maybe-its-time-to-abandon-your-dog-whistle-edits-20150710-story.html" target="_blank">list </a>of "dog whistle edits" -- the distinctions only copy editors know and love -- and admit that for increasing numbers of readers, <i>shimmy </i>is a perfectly good verb to describe wiggling one's way up (or down) a rope or pole. </div>
Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-73252169197527427782015-05-26T10:00:00.003-04:002015-05-26T10:00:51.834-04:00"Near miss" as Orwellian euphemism <br /><i>(The Word column first published in The Boston Globe, February 8, 1998)</i><br /><br />Tom Devaney of Lynnfield, speaking for many others, writes to beg, "Please tell me: What is a near miss? A far hit?"<br /><br />It's one of the most nitpicked idioms of recent decades, poor old <i>near miss</i>, condemned both by ordinary readers and by professional literalists like Richard Lederer, whose idea of fun is dissecting expressions like <i>head over heels, under water</i>, and <i>nonstop flight</i> to expose their logical flaws.<br /><br />But for the most part, usage commentators give their blessing to <i>near miss</i>. Though it's a relatively new coinage -- it appeared during World War II, to describe a bombing attempt that missed its target but landed near enough to do damage -- it follows naturally from the older <i>near thing</i> (1751), which also means, roughly, a close call. (<i>Near thing</i>, though perhaps more common in Britain, is still current in the United States; just weeks ago, a Spokane reporter wrote of a moose encounter, "It was a near thing.")<br /><br />Indeed, the enemies of <i>near miss</i> seem to be misconstruing <i>near</i>, reading "it was a near miss" as if it meant (nonsensically) "we nearly missed colliding." But <i>near</i> here doesn't mean "almost," but simply "close," as in a (figurative) close shave.<br /><br />That hasn't stopped critics from campaigning against <i>near miss</i>. During the air controllers' strike, a claim that <i>near miss</i> was the industry's way of downplaying the danger of collision made the rounds, appearing in William Safire's New York Times Magazine column in 1981.<br /><br />In 1987, a Globe editorial writer took the conspiracy theory further, concluding that <i>near miss </i>was not only bad usage but "a classic euphemism, consciously used to play a trick on the mind" -- perhaps even to divert attention from the need for air safety improvements.<br /><br />The Globe's use of <i>near collision</i> soared that year -- partly because of the number of near misses by aircraft, and partly, no doubt, because editors and writers were striving to practice what we had preached. But <i>near miss</i> was never beaten back, even in stories about aviation. (Sportswriters seem never to have noticed the debate -- and anyway, <i>near collision</i> would rarely be an appropriate alternative for them.)<br /><br />Today, <i>near miss</i> is used interchangeably with <i>near collision</i> in most reports of air traffic incidents, though the Federal Aviation Administration seems to be leaning toward <i>near collision</i> in its formal statements.<br /><br />So unless you write for a publication that bans <i>near miss</i>, you can ignore the word worriers and go with it. It's good English, it's standard English, it earns its keep. And besides, if you never use an English phrase that doesn't make stone-cold literal sense, you'll be very dull company indeed.<br /> Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-39149871094321225962015-04-11T20:00:00.000-04:002015-04-11T20:00:44.710-04:00 Lie vs. lay: It's so overPeople who've mastered the use of the verbs <i>lie </i>and <i>lay </i>like to claim there's nothing to it, but the evidence suggests otherwise. In a post last year, John McIntyre said he had <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-the-lay-of-the-land-20140501-story.html#ixzz30yLUEOef" target="_blank">considered dropping</a> the attempt to teach <i>lie </i>vs<i>.</i> <i>lay </i>to undergraduate editing students: “They do not hear the distinction."<br />
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And Geoff Pullum recently <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/03/09/lain-the-whom-of-the-verb-world/" target="_blank">pointed out</a> that <i>lain </i>– past participle of <i>lie</i>, as in<i> I lie (down), I lay, I have lain</i> – had become, in the words of his colleague, “the <i>whom </i>of verb morphology.” That is, like <i>whom</i>, the form <i>lain </i>confuses even educated writers and editors, and thus shows up as a hypercorrection. (Here’s one from P.D. James’s “A Taste for Death": "She had drawn off her black gloves and had lain them on her knee.” Yes, that should be <i>laid</i>.)<br />
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I made a similar point about <i>lay </i>vs. <i>laid </i>in a <a href="http://throwgrammarfromthetrain.blogspot.com/2014/05/lying-liers-are-losing-laylie-battle.html" target="_blank">post last year</a>, giving examples in which <i>lay </i>was subbed for <i>laid</i>: “She lay it down on the counter," "he lay her down on the bed," and so on.<br />
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My latest example of the distinction's obsolescence comes from “Between You and Me,” Mary Norris's new book, wherein she explores the minutiae of copy editing as practiced at the New Yorker. Norris, I hasten to note, would not fumble <i>lie </i>and <i>lay </i>in real life. That's why I was fascinated to see her repeat, without comment, an example of Herman Melville getting it wrong, in “White-Jacket” (1850):<br />
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Often I have lain thus, when the fact, that if <b>I laid </b>much longer I would actually freeze to death, would come over me with such overpowering force as to break the icy spell, and starting to my feet, I would endeavour to go through the combined manual and pedal exercise to restore the circulation.” </blockquote>
“There are plenty of funky things going on in this sentence,” writes Norris, and I thought that use of <i>laid </i>would be at the top of her list. But no -- the subject is punctuation, not conjugation. As she explores the options, she quotes the opening of the sentence seven times (in four pages) without once noting that Melville should have written “if I lay much longer.”<br />
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Did Norris ignore it as off topic? (Me, I wouldn’t have been able to resist a parenthetical remark, if only from the ignoble motive of showing I hadn’t read past it.) Did she think readers wouldn’t notice? Did “laid” just sound OK in that particular narrator’s voice? <br />
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I’ll have to ask her. But whatever the answer, this looks like further evidence that conjugating <i>lie </i>and <i>lay </i>is more work than most English speakers are willing to do. I have to agree with Pullum’s conclusion: When we tangle with intransitive <i>lay </i>and <i>lain</i>, “the wonder is that anybody ever gets any of it right. That’s what you should be surprised at.”Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-74098406680340619352015-03-20T18:41:00.001-04:002015-03-20T18:41:32.240-04:00Stephen King scores a grammar winStephen King, novelist and resident of Maine and (sensible man!) Florida, <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/03/19/stephen-king-sorry-gov-lepage-you-wrong/XNBl0lxgwF1XeoPIrp8J6K/story.html" target="_blank">has refuted</a> the Maine governor’s claim that King had left the state to escape oppressive taxes.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Governor LePage is full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green," the best-selling author told a local radio station. "Tabby and I pay every cent of our Maine state income taxes, and are glad to do it. We feel, as Governor LePage apparently does not, that <b>much is owed from those to whom much has been given.</b>"</blockquote>
For me, that boldface sentiment is the news here: In its long quotation history, it has rarely been rendered grammatically. “From whom much is given, much is expected” – from John F. Kennedy Jr. -- is just one mangled example. You'd think a Bible quotation would get some respect, but it turns out the human mind has a hard time supplying the right number of prepositions and pronouns to say what this maxim intends.<br /><br />My Globe column on the construction, from 1997, is paywalled, but never mind -- it’s quoted in Language Log’s <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004100.html" target="_blank">extensive treatment</a> of this Kennedy family favorite in all its crazy permutations. Check it out, and you’ll see why I say King deserves a grammar medal. <br /> Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-65227449232127974552015-02-02T14:14:00.000-05:002015-02-02T14:14:10.223-05:00The problem with your "no problem" problem<div>
NPR has been annoying and depressing me, lately, with its lowest-common-denominator approach to language watching. The new standards editor, Mark Memmott, kicked off the peevefest -- NPR's "Grammar Hall of Shame" -- a month ago, with a <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/12/30/372495062/the-npr-grammar-hall-of-shame-opens-with-i-and-me" target="_blank">post </a>about mixing up <i>I </i>and <i>me </i>(and, yes, an invitation to share your well-worn peeves once again). Now comes a <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2015/02/01/383060338/a-case-against-the-phrase-no-problem" target="_blank">post </a>on the NPR blog, under "culture," that repeats the same old complaints about responding to "Thanks" with "No problem." </div>
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Hoping to detour NPR off this well-trodden low road, I've been tweeting them earlier articles on "no problem," including <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/04/15/dont_mention_it/" target="_blank">mine from 2007</a> and <a href="http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/is-there-a-problem-with-no-problem/" target="_blank">Ben Zimmer's</a> (which quotes and links to Erin McKean's). In case those aren't enough to demonstrate that this horse is, if not yet dead, at least thoroughly beaten, I'm also posting my first effort on the subject. (It appeared in the Boston Globe way back in October 1997, and is thus behind the paywall.) </div>
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I know: Peevers gonna peeve, as long as they can get a few amens from the flock. But here's the truth: You don't like "no problem" because it's newish (only 40 or 50 years old). So you roll it around your brain thinking up ways to construe it as dismissive, inadequate, brusque. Pretty soon you're accusing some (probably) young person -- one who did something deserving of your thanks -- of being insufficiently appreciative of your gratitude. I don't think "no problem" is usually rude, but recasting it as an insult? Definitely rude.<br />
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<b>The Word </b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Different strokes </span></b><b><span style="font-size: large;">for different primates</span></b><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(October 26, 1997)</span></i><br />
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When it comes to everyday pleasantries, it doesn't take much to turn us unpleasant.<br />
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"That's not what I asked him!" complains the hostess whose offer of a drink is refused with, "I'm fine."<br />
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"Who is she to tell me to have a nice day?" grumbles the shopper irritated by a cashier's sendoff.<br />
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And "No problem," to some thankers, sounds like a grudging substitute for "You're welcome," even though such deprecating responses -- <i>de rien, de nada, nichevo</i>, <i>it's nothing</i> -- are common around the world.<br />
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The real problem with<i> no problem</i> and other linguistic innovations is not what they say, though. After all, nobody minds being bidden good morning, no matter how bad the day's news or weather (though the occasional joker will play on the gap between convention and reality by responding, "What's good about it?"). No, it's the very novelty of the wording that irritates. It forces our attention on phrases that should be seamless conventions, slipping by unnoticed as they oil the hinges of daily discourse.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjGnYyUH2JbmR8DxXW4r4-2uTa3REn-LR0OT3Erd9hydOaGqLA6F7xmX3CmzAZebLZiNXisa_9vf0egtZmxj-ae_IU0r0psrBQPrbHkeOQA1NZBKoEy3bAtrmWoaA9s0c9mNZIBnQZx4/s1600/IMG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjGnYyUH2JbmR8DxXW4r4-2uTa3REn-LR0OT3Erd9hydOaGqLA6F7xmX3CmzAZebLZiNXisa_9vf0egtZmxj-ae_IU0r0psrBQPrbHkeOQA1NZBKoEy3bAtrmWoaA9s0c9mNZIBnQZx4/s1600/IMG.jpg" height="200" width="180" /></a>One reason may be that such ritual words are not quite language, but something more like a verbal gesture. In his new book, "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language," British psychologist Robin Dunbar proposes that speech evolved as a substitute for contact: Its purpose is not conveying facts -- "there's a herd of bison down by the lake" -- but extending the reach of the grooming behavior that cements relationships in other primate societies.<br />
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By using conversation, instead of stroking and louse-picking, to demonstrate friendship and seal alliances, says Dunbar, humans gained a survival advantage. We don't have to spend hours of each day in physical contact with other members of our tribes, but can "groom at a distance," nurturing relationships via conversation while we travel, hunt (or shop) for food, lay bricks, nurse babies.<br />
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Dunbar's hypothesis offers comfort to anyone who has ever felt guilty for gossiping instead of turning the talk to global warming or transportation policy. Some two-thirds of all conversations, he says, are about other people, not abstract issues -- a reflection of the basic biological purpose of speech. His theory also suggests why an unexpected response to a conventional greeting might upset you: Like a sudden pinch from a grooming partner, it startles instead of soothes -- just rubs you the wrong way, so to speak.<br />
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There's evidence for this view in contemporary advice columns, too, which are filled with tales of relationships wrecked by untimely displays of verbal originality. In stressful situations -- bereavement, pregnancy, divorce -- the human animal seems especially prone to misunderstandings, which is why Miss Manners and her allies urge us to rely on standard-issue comments, the verbal equivalent of "there, there," at such times.<br />
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In other eras and places, of course, the rules were far more explicit. The discussion of "U" (for upper-class) and "non-U" language habits in the book "Noblesse Oblige," edited by Nancy Mitford, created a sensation in the '50s, as readers on both sides of the Atlantic studied the subtle clues (say <i>house</i>, not <i>home</i>; <i>vegetables</i>, not <i>greens</i>) by which class would tell.<br />
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<i>Pleased to meet you</i>, the only greeting addressed in the essay that inspired the book, "is a very frequent non-U response to the greeting <i>How d'you do</i>?" Professor Alan S. C. Ross declares. "U-speakers normally just repeat the greeting; to reply to the greeting (e.g. with Quite well, thank you) is non-U."<br />
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In our big, babbling democracy, it's not so simple. That kid who says "No problem!" may be contentedly non-U -- or just hipper than thou. (In any case, we should be getting over our <i>no problem</i> problem by now. William Safire, the New York Times' word maven, reported in 1974 that <i>no problem</i> was already being bandied about in the USSR.)<br />
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As for those other irritating phrases, patience is recommended. They will either fade away, or become as natural as 'Morning and 'Night. In the meantime, take care, and have a nice day.Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-71744959721027744362014-12-31T11:59:00.000-05:002015-01-01T00:41:44.335-05:00Use it or lose it: A New Year's pleaIf I could make New Year’s resolutions for other writers, this one would head the list: Don’t use a word and then tell your readers what a worthless word it is.<br />
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Don't do what New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott did in his April 2013 obituary for Roger Ebert: "He was platform agnostic long before that <b>unfortunate bit of jargon</b> was invented."<br />
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Or what Teddy Wayne did it in the the NYT's Future Tense column in February, writing about his holiday from technology: "I also briefly experienced the famous 'fear of missing out,' a.k.a, <b>annoyingly</b>, FOMO." </div>
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Don't do as author Evgeny Morozov did when he complained, in a May NYT book review, of the ubiquity of "the <b>ugly, jargony name</b> of Big Data." </div>
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Or as columnist Maureen Dowd has twice done, using (while deploring) the political sense of "optics." In January 2013, she said the shortage of women in the Administration was "more than an 'optics' problem, to use the <b>irritating cliché of the moment</b>." In October 2014, she wrote that "the White House thought [a female Secret Service head] would be good optics -- <b>that most egregious word</b>." (But not egregious enough to omit.)</div>
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Why the desperate need to distance themselves from neologisms? Maybe these writers -- all, as it happens, from the pages of the New York Times -- were trying to head off criticism from Philip B. Corbett, the paper’s usage watchdog. By preemptively criticizing the jargon, they can have it both ways: They get to use a trendy expression and simultaneously disavow it. (Pro tip: If you really don’t think a word should exist, don’t give it currency in the New York Times.)<br />
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But I think there’s anxiety, not just distaste, behind these disavowals. If language is your expertise, you don’t want to be the last one to notice a lexical fad has run its course. Hence the preemptive apologies: Just in case this is old hat, I already hate it!</div>
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Scott, in fact, has waffled on "platform agnostic." He used it without comment in 2007, when he was quoting the New Yorker. And seven months after he called it "unfortunate jargon," it was back in his good graces: In fall 2013, he wrote of filmmakers determined "to figure out, in a post-film, platform-agnostic, digital-everything era, what the art of cinema might be."<br />
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MoDo, meanwhile, used "optics" without apology in 2009 ("what his aide Anita Dunn calls 'the optics'"), again in 2010 ("Michelle’s optics sent a message that likely made some …wince" ), and in 2012 (Dominique Strauss-Kahn "ignored the bad optics"). But three times was her limit: Only months later, "optics" had become that "irritating cliche."<br />
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This looks suspiciously like journalistic FOMO -- fear of missing out on the moment a popular term turns has-been. But there's a simple remedy: Call the word passé whenever you use it, and nobody can beat you to the punch. </div>
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This isn't just a journalistic worry. Lists of peeves, like the annual <a href="http://www.lssu.edu/banished/" target="_blank">banned words list</a> from Lake Superior State University, always include slang and jargon with plenty of miles left on them (<i>curate</i>, anyone? Or <i>takeaway</i>?). The word-banning enthusiasts, though, are always ready to tell us our favorite phrases are <i>so over, </i>if only we laggards had the wit to see it. </div>
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But grownup journalists shouldn't be playing that game. If "optics" or "FOMO" offends your sensibilities, it's usually simple enough to skip it, rather than make it an occasion to flaunt your taste. There are enough people out there who pride themselves on their language peevery. They don’t need encouragement from professionals.</div>
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-12924945951521397992014-11-17T14:21:00.000-05:002014-11-17T14:21:36.425-05:00You say cannoli, I say cannolis <i>I'm posting this 17-year-old Word column (now paywalled in the Boston Globe's archives) in response to Mark Allen (@EditorMark on Twitter), who just tweeted about</i> panini, <i>which I somehow overlooked when writing about similar Italian plurals. It appeared on Sept. 14, 1997, just a couple of weeks after Princess Diana died in a Paris car that was being pursued by paparazzi. I haven't updated the usage research, except to verify that we (the English-speaking public) remain far </i><a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cannolis%2Cbiscottis&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccannolis%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbiscottis%3B%2Cc0" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">more comfortable</a><i> with the double plural </i>cannolis<i> than with </i>biscottis<i>. </i><div>
<br /><b>Do paparazzi prefer cannoli?</b></div>
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The paparazzi are under a cloud these days, scorned around the world for their unsavory trade and its role in Princess Diana's death. But for the word <i>paparazzi</i>, there's a silver lining: All that attention is reawakening English speakers to the fact that <i>paparazzi</i> is a plural, with a very presentable Italian singular form.<br /><br />The word, as we all heard during the post-crash coverage, was coined by Federico Fellini, who gave the name Paparazzo to the celebrity-chasing photographer of "La Dolce Vita." What inspired the choice is more mysterious: Some accounts mention an annoying childhood friend of Fellini's by that name; one suspects the influence of <i>pappataci</i>, a sand-fly. "It translates literally as Daddy Rocket, though it may owe something to the verb <i>razzolare</i>, meaning to scrape or scratch around in debris," ventures a New Zealand newspaper columnist.<br /><br />As the paparazzi furor burned on, our collective mastery of the word improved. There were a few three-p <i>papparazzi</i>s and at least one reference to <i>a paparazzi</i> -- as well as an Internet mourner's <i>poporatizee</i> and a newspaper's unfortunate contraction, <i>paps</i> -- but most writers got it right.<br /><br />Still, the paparazzi variations are a reminder of the general lawlessness of our language in the matter of adopted plurals. We can choose <i>seraphs</i> or <i>seraphim</i>, <i>tableaux</i> or <i>tableaus</i>, depending on our taste and our dictionary. We've kept <i>alumni</i> and <i>alumnae</i> in their Latin forms, but we've domesticated <i>stadiums</i> and <i>forums</i>.<br /><br />When the language is Latin, of course, there are no current speakers to object to the anglicizing process. English plurals also form rapidly on words in less familiar languages, since we can't hear anything amiss when we add <i>-s</i> to words like the Bantu <i>marimba</i> or Swahili <i>safari</i> -- two nice examples from the Columbia Guide to Standard American English.<br /><br />But Italian plurals are all around us, in movies about <i>mafiosi</i>, in music lovers' <i>concerti</i> and <i>libretti</i>, and most of all, in our diet -- in the restaurants and cookbooks where we find <i>penne</i> and <i>tagliatelle</i> and <i>risotto con</i> <i>funghi</i>.<br /><br />Even these well-known words aren't easy to master: We still haven't agreed on <i>lasagne</i> vs. <i>lasagna</i>. The pastas alone would have defeated English speakers long ago, if they hadn't been so cooperative about functioning as collective nouns. So our <i>noodles</i> are plural, but our <i>spaghetti</i> is construed as a singular, and we never give a thought to a <i>raviolo</i> or a <i>gnocco</i>.<br /><br />And on the dessert menu, there's some delicious evidence of the pluralizing process caught in the act, with all its cultural baggage on display.<br /><br />When we order <i>cannoli</i> and <i>biscotti</i>, we generally use the same word whether we want one or half a dozen -- <i>a cannoli</i>, we say, but most of us feel enough of the plural force that we also say <i>three biscotti.</i> Some people, however, make the plural even more so, ordering <i>six cannolis</i>.<br /><br />"We are used to it," said Enza Merola of Maria's Pastry [in Boston's North End], admitting that she has adopted the usage she hears and dropped the Italian singulars: "I would never say to a customer, 'one cannolo?' "<br /><br />In print, however, <i>cannoli</i> and <i>biscotti</i> meet different fates. A search of the Globe archives, though not exactly rigorous science, shows that the plural <i>cannolis</i> is 20 times as likely to be used in a <i>cannoli</i> connection as is the plural <i>biscottis</i> in a similar spot.<br /><br />Why the gap? I suspect it's a matter of cultural context. Both desserts are old favorites, but <i>biscotti</i> made a comeback as a trendy treat over the past couple of decades, while <i>cannoli</i> remained the ultimate in creamy, messy indulgence.<br /><br />The new biscotti are clearly cookies for grown-ups -- dry, brittle, sophisticated. And the new biscotti people notice things like singulars and plurals in their favorite food languages. Hence <i>biscotti</i> holds on to its plural feeling, while <i>cannoli</i> cheerfully drops the distinction.<br /><br />All conjecture, yes. But there's support for it in a new catalog from J. Peterman, who's now hawking not just clothes but rugs and china -- including a floral biscotti jar for $150.<br /><br />The jar itself is labeled Biscotti. The ad copy calls it a biscotti jar. But in the headline, it's a Biscotto Jar. And the reason for that, you can bet your chocolate cannolo, is to let readers know that J. Peterman, <i>il principe</i> of pretentious prose, is one of them -- a master of the singular of <i>biscotti</i>. </div>
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<i>A year later, in August 1998, I finally caught up with a footnote from The Economist that revealed the probable source of </i> papparazzo.<i> </i></div>
<i><br /></i>The first of the paparazzi died last month, less than a year after the crash that killed Princess Diana and set off a worldwide debate on the hit-and-run photographers' ethics -- and the origins of their name.<br /><br />Tazio Secchiaroli, a Roman "street photographer," had been Federico Fellini's model for the celebrity-chasing character in 1960's "La Dolce Vita," everyone agreed. But why had Fellini named his character Paparazzo? Was it related to <i>razzolare</i>, to scratch around in trash? Influenced by <i>pappataci</i>, an annoying sand-fly? Was it, as one reader of this column suggested, a Riminese dialect word for the part of the chicken sometimes known as the pope's nose?<br /><br />While the rest of us were scratching our heads, some amazingly well-read source tipped off The Economist that the true Paparazzo could be found in a 1902 travel book; thus, the London weekly's post-crash coverage included a footnote informing us that Fellini's scriptwriter "took the name from `By the Ionian Sea,' a book by George Gissing. Coriolano Paparazzo was the proprietor of the hotel in Catanzaro where the British poet had stayed." Gissing was in fact a novelist, and the magazine gave the wrong date for his trip, but the squib was still a coup -- especially the smug last line, which noted that "Gissing's book is still on sale in Calabria, in an excellent Italian translation."<br /><br />To mark Secchiaroli's departure for the great darkroom in the sky, Michael Quinion, proprietor of the World Wide Words Web site, <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-pap1.htm" target="_blank">revisits the history of paparazzo</a> in his most recent newsletter. His account looks like the last word on the word, if not on the subject. Concludes Quinion: "I can only wonder at what the late Signore Paparazzo, the keeper of that hotel in Catanzaro, would make of the coincidences that led through an English writer’s recording of a brief stay there, and the accidental encounter with it by an Italian scriptwriter, to the borrowing of his name as one of the more pejorative in the English language."*<div>
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Skeptics who'd like to meet this Signore Paparazzo can find him via the Internet, too. Among the surprisingly numerous Gissing-related Web sites -- even discounting those that use him only as a limerick rhyme -- there's one with the full text of "By the Ionian Sea." In the original English, of course, not the excellent Italian translation.</div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*The language in this paragraph has been altered slightly, reflecting updates to Quinion's blog post since the original publication.</span></i></div>
Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-54387479957195257622014-11-08T17:02:00.001-05:002014-11-08T18:07:04.069-05:00In memory of Tom, gimme a "dope slap" sourceTom and Ray Magliozzi's long run on public radio has included lots of language fun, as remembrances of Tom, who died last Monday, do not neglect to mention. I'm a longtime fan, and back in 2000, in a Boston Globe column and a follow-up note, I looked into one of their favorite terms -- "dope slap" -- but I didn't get very far.<br />
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My searches this week haven't improved my results, but I'll bet there are "Car Talk" fans out there with better skills (and access to better corpora) than mine. If you're among them, help us out here: Do Tom and Ray (and their parents) get the credit for <i>dope slap</i>? (If you need inspiration, Ray's <a href="http://www.cartalk.com/content/1445-tommy-riposa-pace" target="_blank">tribute show</a> has plenty of laughs, plus the peerless Elizabeth Magliozzi.)<br />
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Meanwhile, here's what I dug up about <i>dope slap </i>14 years ago, as printed in the Boston Sunday Globe.<br />
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<b>Doping out the truth</b><br />
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<i>June 4, 2000</i></div>
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A few months ago, in a story about Tony Blair's parental-leave dilemma, the Globe's Kevin Cullen wrote that the English prime minister "may feel the urge to give a dope slap to his Finnish counterpart, Paavo Lipponen," whose decision to take paternity leave had stepped up the pressure on Blair.<br />
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The article prompted a call from a friend asking, "What's a dope slap?" This was a mild shock: In the hometown of WBUR, the public radio station where "Car Talk" first revved its engines 23 years ago, it takes some doing to avoid hearing "dope slap." The car guys, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, have managed to spread the word not only throughout, but beyond, the English-speaking world. </div>
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The dope slap, officially -- you can click on [<a href="http://cartalk.com/">cartalk.com</a>, the current address] for further discussion -- is a sudden but not very painful smack to the back of the head,* a humane form of the two-by-four blow that gets the proverbial mule's attention. As a slang expression, though, <i>dope slap</i>'s origins are murky. Ray Magliozzi says that his mother used both the term and the dope slap liberally (and "at lightning speed") when he and his brother were young and stupid.<br />
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"I think it may be an Italian-American thing," adds Magliozzi, a Cambridge native. "Go to the North End, and I'll bet four out of five people know it."<br />
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But do they know where it came from? The evidence so far suggests that <i>dope slap</i> has been disseminated largely by "Car Talk" itself. The first mention in the Lexis/Nexis database, in 1992, comes in a transcript of the radio show (the guys are prescribing "a dope slap for driving home after the oil light came on"). Since then, the term has been popping up all over -- on a German website, in a Berkeley PhD thesis on Aesop, and in Malaysia's New Straits Times, which runs the car guys' syndicated column. But the Boston Herald leads the nation in non-Magliozzi-generated uses of <i>dope slap</i>, perhaps supporting the theory of local origin.<br />
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Further data are needed, though -- so if you too were dope-slapped, deservedly or not, please send particulars. Most valuable would be written evidence earlier than 1992; the truth must be out there, if Tom and Ray were getting cuffed around at midcentury. Me, I'm hoping to see the late Elizabeth Magliozzi enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the coiner of the term; but let's get the straight dope, whatever it is.</div>
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<b>Slapped around</b><br />
<i>June 18, 2000</i><br />
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My recent speculations about the origin of <i>dope slap</i> drew a verbal buffeting from one correspondent, who demanded how I could be ignorant of this "old boxing term." He remembers it from the '50s, he says, "when boxing in general was not as regulated and as full of show business. . . . to dope slap someone was to strike them when and where the opponent least expected it," usually in the head, stunning the recipient so that he acted dopey or intoxicated.<br />
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This sounds perfectly plausible, but I haven't been able to find corroboration anywhere in print. That doesn't mean it's wrong, though -- and if anyone can find a citation that links boxing to <i>dope slap</i>, this is the place to send it.<br />
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David Chirlin of Nashua, N.H., had a different hypothesis: "I believe that the 'Car Talk' bros did society a favor by cleaning up the expression <i>bitch slap</i>, popularized in the counterculture years by such comedians as Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. In context, if a woman nagged or verbally annoyed a man beyond a certain point, he would . . . hit her upside the head with what was referred to as a <i>bitch slap</i>. Well, you had to ask."<br />
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Yeah, I did. And the friend who originally asked about <i>dope slap</i> had also wondered if it was a benign variant of <i>bitch slap</i>. Again, the evidence is scanty, though <i>bitch slap</i> does make it into print in 1991, a year before <i>dope slap</i>. It's not published as often, for obvious reasons,* but it's still with us -- though, as my friend also told me, it's been adopted (or coopted) for jocular unisex use in certain circles.<br />
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But <i>bitch slap</i> wasn't the inspiration for the Magliozzi brothers' <i>dope slap</i>, by their own testimony -- and though I haven't yet asked, I doubt that their mom was an Eddie Murphy fan. So the jury is still out on the <i>dope slap</i> derivation. Keep those cards and e-mails coming.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*Update: Some sources also use <i>dope slap</i> to mean a slap to one's own forehead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">**Editing note: I've removed a superfluous phrase, both unnecessary and ungrammatical, that was stealthily added here by a misguided editor back in 2000. Nobody else cares, but I'm ridiculously happy I can make the correction.</span></div>
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-80476813859533390162014-10-09T23:07:00.001-04:002014-10-09T23:07:49.428-04:00Mattress mysteries baffle NY Times <i>(This post is off topic, and kind of cranky, too. Feel free to skip it.)</i><br />
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I admit it – I’m a consumer journalism junkie. When I got Consumer Reports’ print edition, I read reviews of things I will never, ever own: wine chillers, leaf blowers, Cadillacs, backpacks. I like knowing how things are supposed to work, even if they’re not things I want.<br />
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So if the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/garden/how-to-find-the-best-mattress-in-the-maze-of-choices.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0" target="_blank">promises to help me shop</a> for "the best mattress," I’m expecting to learn a little something I didn't already know. But no: Apparently the subject of today’s Home section lead was so soporific that the assigning editor, the writer, and the copy editor all fell asleep on the job. <br />
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The assigning editor accepted the piece; enough said. As for the author, given his innocence about mattresses, I’m wondering if he’s still in the bed Mom and Dad bought him. Buying is confusing, he tells us, because “most major brand names inexplicably seem to begin with the letter 's'." And then there are all those hard words! “Viscoelastic foam,” “pocketed coil technology,” and worst of all, "Talalay latex? C’mon, mattress people. Now it sounds as if you’re just making stuff up." (Gee, if only there were an easy way to look up those obscure terms, so you could explain them to readers.*)<br />
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There follow many paragraphs of filler -- quotes from mattress people, descriptions of various products -- before the payoff, delivered by a Consumer Reports mattress writer: Most of the tech and the specs don’t matter at all. The $5,000 Dux mattress did about as well in CU’s tests as the $540 Original Mattress Factory product. In other words, ignore the article, read Consumer Reports, and buy a mattress that feels good.<br />
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By this point the copy editor was dozing, so we are told that Hastens, a high-end seller, uses "horsehair that is sterilized for up to a year before going into the mattress." Up to a year? What's the minimum time, and how do you do it? And why raise these questions when "sterilized horsehair" would suffice? (A related sign of sleepiness all round pops up in a sidebar: "Mattress prices can be reduced by as much as 50 percent and more.")<br />
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Meanwhile, the story ignores the main reason frustrated consumers can't just go out buy a mattress like their last one. For years now, the big mattress makers have offered only one-sided mattresses -- the underside is not a sleep surface. No more flipping the mattress for extra wear; you couldn’t flip it anyway, because it’s thicker and heavier -- 12 or 15 inches deep instead of 8 or 9. Also, it requires new, deeper fitted sheets; they’re flabbily sized, for mattresses up to 15 or 20 inches, so they don’t fit any very well, but at least you’re stimulating the economy.<br />
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Now, finally, this fad is waning, and in my book, that’s the big news. After years of waiting, I recently found (and bought) a flippable mattress (though fitted sheets remain a problem). <br />
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Commenters on the NYT piece have echoed, and expanded on, my complaints. Why nothing on these heavy, non-flippable mattresses? Why no mention of Ikea’s (normal-thickness, inexpensive) mattresses? What about futons, local manufacturers, flameproofing chemicals, offgassing foam? The comments, in fact, are probably more useful than the article itself.<br />
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And best of all, in the mattress quest category, is Donald Antrim’s 2002 New Yorker piece, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/06/17/i-bought-a-bed" target="_blank">"I Bought a Bed."</a> As someone who once tried out a Dux bed at a local inn -- and ended up sleeping on the floor -- I was the bullseye of his target audience. But even if you're not, it will put your bed-shopping troubles -- and the Times's, too -- into perspective.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*Talalay is the name of the guys who invented one particular latex-foaming process.</span></i><br />
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-28491971307635764192014-10-01T12:44:00.000-04:002014-10-01T12:44:00.873-04:00Two views of "monochrome" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQZQqNQMj2JTl-_BoFqlKXoZ3TsEENhnOVKmwk3pSxcL_axO3UFDD6f-rKqqlxRZIMbe34LXsnIpDhZMbKJk_MY_YeLRNph_gEsYdqWIIQ_m4m_hw-Wc30RQCLy5Rhu1umzQHG1e7XuEs/s1600/amaldress.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQZQqNQMj2JTl-_BoFqlKXoZ3TsEENhnOVKmwk3pSxcL_axO3UFDD6f-rKqqlxRZIMbe34LXsnIpDhZMbKJk_MY_YeLRNph_gEsYdqWIIQ_m4m_hw-Wc30RQCLy5Rhu1umzQHG1e7XuEs/s1600/amaldress.jpg" height="320" width="249" /></a></div>
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Several days ago, in a weak moment, I clicked on some links to coverage of the impending wedding of Amal Alamuddin and that famous actor. That day's photos showed Alamuddin in a striped black and white sundress, but many descriptions of it used a word I found odd: They called the garment "a striped monochrome dress."*</div>
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"Monochrome" (literally "one color") can of course mean black and white (or grayscale) if you’re talking about art or photography or film. Essentially, that usage doesn’t count the background as a color, but only the medium used to create the image or design. </div>
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But this was the first time I'd seen this "monochrome" extended to clothing. If you told me someone tended to dress in monochrome, I’d picture her in shades of one color, not in wide black and white stripes. </div>
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It’s not that I can’t see the parallel -- if a wallpaper design can be a monochrome print, why not a fabric? In fact, I've probably seen toile de Jouy prints called monochromatic; of course, as representational scenes, they seem closely related to art. So maybe the oddity, for me, was that the contrasting stripes of Alamuddin’s dress are equally prominent, so neither color comes across as "background." </div>
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So far, the sources calling the dress (and other black and white striped clothing) "monochrome" seem to be British, so maybe this is a shade of meaning that simply hasn’t gained much traction on these shores. But if it's not here yet, I expect it to arrive any minute, borne on the wings of Zara and H&M. </div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>*Quote and photo from the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2774864/From-custom-Oscar-la-Renta-wedding-dress-red-hot-Alexander-McQueen-party-gown-Inside-Amal-Alamuddin-s-incredible-bridal-wardrobe.html" target="_blank">Daily Mail.</a></i></span></div>
Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-1572010133814912362014-08-04T20:04:00.001-04:002014-08-04T20:04:52.251-04:00Hey there ... <i>(From a column published Oct. 4, 1998, in the Boston Globe's Focus section. Not re-researched since, so caveat lector!)</i><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>In the heyday of the casual greeting</b></span><div>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>'Hey," a colleague said as we met in the hallway last week, "how come everyone says 'Hey' now instead of 'Hi'?"<br /><br />He may have been overstating the case -- <i>hi, hello</i>, and <i>how are ya</i> are by no means dying out -- but clearly, <i>hey </i>has been extending its reach. And I wondered how the greeting <i>hey </i>was related to the other <i>hey </i>that's been spreading in written English, a kind of folksy aside to the reader adopted in the past few decades. Is this one new usage, or two ways to make <i>hey</i>? <br /><br />Not that there's anything new about <i>hey </i>itself; its first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1225, centuries ahead of its near-twin <i>hi</i>. And <i>hey </i>has done yeoman work through the centuries, filling out all those extra syllables in old songs and poems (with a hey nonny nonny) and in 20th-century political chants (Hey, hey, LBJ . . .). In the 16th century came a dance called Hey-diddle-diddle (presumably accompanied by a cat playing the fiddle). <i>Hey </i>serves as a yell of alarm (Hey, bring my car back!) and a magician's exclamation (Hey presto!).<br /><br />But our latest variants are comparatively recent. Random House's slang dictionary (1997) notes the aside-to-the-listener use of <i>hey </i>("Used affectedly for emphasis within a sentence, esp. after but," it says); its samples run from 1974 ("But hey, that's the kind of guy I am") to 1994 (a Dewar's Scotch ad). HarperCollins's slang guide also notes the usage, calling it "Increasingly . . . placative or apologetic."<br /><br />This <i>hey </i>seems like a descendant of the 20th-century <i>hey </i>we get in popular songs, from "Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes" to "Hey hey, we're the Monkees." It's a friendly, casual form of address, implying a certain intimacy and saying, at the same time, "We're making a little joke here -- don't take us too seriously."<br /><br /><i>Hey </i>as a solo salutation has much of the same flavor. It's more cordial, less neutral, than <i>hi </i>or <i>hello </i>--not a greeting to someone you don't know or don't like. I'd also bet -- a small amount, at least -- that it's a guy thing, which may be why my colleague hears it more than I do. (That could change fast, though -- a friend reports that his toddler daughter is using <i>hey</i>, not <i>hi</i>.) You probably wouldn't greet your grandmother with <i>hey</i>, and some bosses would surely consider it too casual. But you never know: After all, it was a very big boss in a very fancy office who recently uttered the <i>hey </i>heard 'round the world: "Oh, hey, Monica . . . come on in."</div>
Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-90982102215647291692014-07-16T10:46:00.000-04:002014-07-16T10:46:13.727-04:00Observations on "one of the only" James Harbeck, blogging at Sesquiotica, has been having an epic <a href="http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/are-you-one-of-the-only-people-bothered-by-this/#comment-17795" target="_blank">comment standoff </a>with a reader who objects to "one of the only." Last Sunday, Harbeck <a href="https://twitter.com/sesquiotic/status/488474712633143296" target="_blank">tweeted </a>that the commenter had returned and "made the same argument, more huffily, and ended by declaring that my readers could judge ... so do."<br />
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OK, let's! My vote probably won't persuade anyone who's resisted the arguments of Harbeck and Gabe Doyle at <a href="http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/rejecting-a-form-thats-too-true-a-new-complaint-against-one-of-the-only/" target="_blank">Motivated Grammar</a> and Bill Walsh at <a href="http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/08/im-one-of-only-prescriptivists-who.html" target="_blank">Blogslot</a> and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. But I endorsed "one of the only" in a 2008 column, and I offer it here in case any of its citations prove useful. (I've added a footnote, but otherwise nothing has been changed or checked. As I recall, a reader objected that "<i>un des seuls</i>" was not a true equivalent of "one of the only," so I look forward to hearing from Francophone readers on that question.)<br />
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Almost unique: What's wrong with "one of the only"?</b></div>
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<i>(Boston Globe, March 23, 2008)</i><br />
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AS THE DISTRICT of Columbia's gun ban squared off against the Second Amendment last week, Georgetown University constitutional scholar Randy Barnett was widely quoted on the momentousness of the event: "This may be one of the only cases in our lifetime when the Supreme Court is going to be interpreting . . . an important provision of the Constitution unencumbered by precedent."<br />
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Objection! e-mailed reader Sue Bass of Belmont. "One of the only cases" doesn't make sense, she protested; it should logically be "one of the few."<br />
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Several contemporary usage writers endorse her view. Paul Brians, in "Common Errors in English Usage," notes that <i>only</i> is rooted in <i>one</i>, and thus ought to remain singular. "The correct expression is 'one of the few,' " he says.<br />
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Barbara Wallraff, in "Your Own Words," agrees. <i>Only</i> means "alone in kind or class; sole," her dictionary says. And you wouldn't say "one of the sole Muslim states."<br />
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Richard Lederer, in "Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay," also shuns <i>one of the only</i>: "This strange and illogical expression began showing up a few years ago," he writes, "and English took a step backward when it did."<br />
<br />
But <i>one of the only</i> has its defenders. James Kilpatrick, in "Fine Print," points out that it is no less logical than <i>one of the best</i> or <i>one of the most talented</i>. "The best advice I can offer is to shake your head and get on with what you are writing," he concludes.<br />
<br />
Earlier usage gurus are silent on the topic, though there's some indirect evidence of their attitude. For instance, the critic Edmund Wilson, reviewing a 1940s potboiler, observed that "one of the only attempts at a literary heightening of effect is the substitution for the simple 'said' of other, more pretentious verbs" like "shrilled" and "barked."<br />
<br />
Usage maven Sir Ernest Gowers liked this quote enough -- despite its use of "one of the only" -- that he included it in his 1965 edition of Fowler's "Modern English Usage," as a comment on "said."<br />
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How long has this been going on? A Google Books search dates <i>one of the only</i> to the 1770s, when a traveler reported that "business, and making money, is one of the only employments" of Rotterdam. But <i>only</i> was already losing its singularity. The 1989 Oxford English Dictionary gave the sense "one (or, by extension, two or more), of which there exist no more . . . of the kind," and quoted Sir Philip Sidney, in the 16th century, using "the only two."*<br />
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This expansive sense of "only" is not just an Anglo-Saxon aberration. In "Swann's Way," Proust's narrator says that a certain day was "one of the only" ("<i>un des seuls</i>") on which he was not unhappy. In German, according to University of Wisconsin professor Joseph Salmons, one of the only (<i>ein der einzigen</i>, etc.) is entirely OK.<br />
<br />
Multilinguist Steve Dodson, at the blog <a href="http://theslot.blogspot.com/2006/08/im-one-of-only-prescriptivists-who.html" target="_blank">Language Hat</a>, said <i>one of the only</i> is common in Russian and in Spanish (<i>un de los unicos</i>). Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley, sent some examples in Italian (along with a caution from an Italian linguist who calls the usage illogical).<br />
<br />
And as Bill Walsh argues at Blogslot, his editing blog, <i>one of the only</i> makes its own kind of sense. "Webster's New World defines only as 'alone of its or their kind,' and nobody objects to 'only two people.' . . . If 'only two people' have done something, wouldn't one of those people be one of only two people, or one of the only people, who have done it?"<br />
<br />
Once we had <i>the only two</i>, in other words, we were on the slippery slope to <i>one of the only</i>. And in everyday, unedited English, we prefer it to <i>one of the few</i> by a Google hit ratio of 3 to 1. Nobody has to use it, but everyone speaking English can expect to hear it. After two and a half centuries, we should be getting used to it.</div>
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*2014 footnote: Sidney's quote is under "lovingness." From Sidney's "Arcadia" (1590): "Carying thus in one person the only two bands of good will, loue lines & louingnes."</span>Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-17691249259053462562014-07-13T18:36:00.000-04:002014-07-13T18:36:18.107-04:00Copy editing: "Is blow job hyphenated?" <div class="MsoNormal">
A recent tweet to the Guardian style guide asked
which version was correct: “blowjob, blow-job or blow job?” As it happens, this question was covered 32 years ago by the incomparable Stan Mack, whose Real Life
Funnies (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim”) ran in the Village Voice from the
1970s into the ’90s.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0SZVvBVl1pADXH0-KhVYS7N_dJ6ZF-YBblssqZqFps6xCrKSOiDFdK0QyDvAQwZ8wEdqTGHazQoj-A8vq95ALLSSaL1WX2nZG_BNP0BH7fdZ1su73-7sZrCAMo6xv94u-38uTxJ_xP0/s1600/blowjob+hyphen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0SZVvBVl1pADXH0-KhVYS7N_dJ6ZF-YBblssqZqFps6xCrKSOiDFdK0QyDvAQwZ8wEdqTGHazQoj-A8vq95ALLSSaL1WX2nZG_BNP0BH7fdZ1su73-7sZrCAMo6xv94u-38uTxJ_xP0/s1600/blowjob+hyphen.jpg" height="278" width="400" /></a></div>
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When this strip ran, in 1982, I was a new copy editor at the
Boston Globe, where there was no occasion to use “blow job” in any style. If I’d
been editing at the Voice, though, I would have voted for open style, which still looks right to me. But as we all know, familiarity breeds
hyphen-free compounds. Most books still use <i>blow job</i>, according to Google
Ngrams, but I can see that a writer or editor using the term regularly might be
ready, after a decade or two, to write it <i>blowjob</i>. And that's what the Guardian (though claiming no expertise) <a href="https://twitter.com/guardianstyle/status/484328522669096960" target="_blank">decided on</a>.<br />
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And yes, it is in "the dictionary": American Heritage
prefers <i>blowjob</i> (but lists the two-word variant), Webster’s New World likes two words (but mentions <i>blowjob</i>), and Merriam-Webster
prefers <i>blow job</i>, period. So editorially speaking, it's <i>chacun(e) à son goût.</i></div>
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If you missed Real Life Funnies the first time around, you can see (and buy) some at Mack's <a href="http://stanmack.com/market.php" target="_blank">website;</a> his current cartoons appear weekly in <a href="http://www.mediapost.com/publications/real-mad/" target="_blank">MediaPost</a>.</div>
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-76885691677172820192014-06-28T15:49:00.001-04:002014-06-28T15:53:13.708-04:00"Fled on foot": Speaking for the defenseNewspaper jargon watchers, including my former boss at the
Boston Globe, like to scoff at “fled on foot” as police-report language that
newsies should shun. Normal people supposedly say “ran away.”<br />
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So I laughed at a metro story in this morning’s New York
Times, where an arrestee describes his fellow suspect’s escape:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“He fled,” Mr. Zacharakis
said. “He didn’t look at me. He didn’t worry about me.”</blockquote>
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Though I’ve never written or edited the kind of stories that deal with fleeing, I’ve always had a soft spot for “fled
on foot,” which allows for the kind of ambiguity
that “ran away” does not. It’s entirely possible, after all, that the police (and you)
know only that your suspect has eluded capture,
apparently without the help of a vehicle. </div>
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In the comments to McIntyre’s <a href="http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2008/10/just_the_facts_maam.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> on cop jargon, two editors make this very point. “Lacking any certain
knowledge about a robber's getaway gait, I am loath to change ‘fled on foot’ to
‘ran away’” writes one.</div>
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Exactly. He or she might have crawled under a porch, climbed a
drainpipe, pulled off a wig and melted into a crowd and sauntered around a corner. Fine, say “ran
away” if witnesses saw him sprinting down the street; but what if the picture
isn’t so clear?</div>
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I don’t see why we should flee from “fled.” The New
York suspect may have learned the usage from the police, but its source doesn’t make it a
bad word. It’s not fancy or long or hard to spell or pronounce, and it gets the
concept across. Maybe I'm going soft, but that's good enough for me. </div>
Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-45505243044350542382014-05-07T16:32:00.000-04:002014-05-07T16:32:21.849-04:00Lying liers are losing the lay/lie battleLast week John McIntyre <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-the-lay-of-the-land-20140501,0,5103765.story#ixzz30yLUEOef" target="_blank">was wondering</a> whether it was time to abandon teaching the difference between <i>lay </i>and <i>lie</i>. His editing students, he said, simply “do not hear the distinction”:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
No matter how many times I review it, they still get it wrong, because <i>laid </i>as past tense and past participle of <i>lie </i>is what sounds natural to them, what sounds like <i>English</i>.</blockquote>
That past-tense <i>laid </i>for <i>lay </i>– “she laid down for a nap” – isn't always audible, but present-tense <i>lay </i>for <i>lie </i>– “I need to <i>lay </i>down” – is easy to hear, and heard everywhere.<br /><br />That's not because we're a nation of semiliterate texting addicts; <i>lay </i>and <i>lie </i>have never been easy to distinguish. In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, the verbs were not well differentiated until the 18th-century usage juggernaut got rolling. From 1300 to 1800, “the usage was unmarked: Sir Francis Bacon used [<i>lay </i>for <i>lie</i>] in the final and most polished edition of his essays in 1625.” <br /><br />But <i>lay </i>for <i>lie </i>is only part of the story. My suspicion that <i>lie </i>is a goner comes from the opposite direction: I’ve been spotting substitutions of <i>lie </i>for <i>lay </i>in the past tense – as in "she lay it down" instead of "laid it down" – even in decently edited books. My most recent example – the fourth, I think, though I haven’t saved cites – comes from Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 novel “The Interestings”: “He lay her down on their bed.” <br /><br />That should be <b>laid</b>, of course. I can understand how a writer might decide that “he lay her down” (in a tasteful married-couple sex scene) sounds more genteel, but a Google Books search finds “he lay her down” in bodice-ripping fiction too – along with other uses of <i>lay </i>for <i>laid</i>. A sampling:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
As she expected, he <b>lay her down</b> on the bed. (“Twist,” 2013)</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
She <b>lay it down</b> by the fireplace and walked over to her bed and lay down. She was very tired. (The Wishing Well,” 2002.)</blockquote>
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Folding the magazine closed, <b>she lay it down</b>. Afterward she got under the covers and lay relaxing on her back. (“Storms Before the Calm,” 2012)</blockquote>
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She <b>lay it down</b> on the counter, a perfect little treasure, white on black. Then she got her special cup down from the cupboard. (“The Red Boots,” 2005)</blockquote>
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After a few minutes, she <b>lay it down</b> on a large flat rock next to her, and joined Ellen for breakfast. (“Lemon Creek Chronicle,” 2013)</blockquote>
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She <b>lay it down</b> in front of Violet, and began to talk at her. (“Stifle,” 2011)</blockquote>
I even found a high school journalism <a href="http://piedmont.k12.ca.us/phs/faculty/bblack/journalism-policies/" target="_blank">style guide</a>, trying to codify rules for the students, that lists the mistaken usage as correct: The past tense of <i>lay</i>, it instructs, is "I lay it (down), You lay it (down), He lay it (down)," etc.<br />
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Presumably these are hypercorrections, the product of an educated aversion to intransitive <i>laid </i>(“We laid in the sun all day”). But whatever their motivation, they add to the confusion surrounding <i>lay </i>and <i>lie</i>. So I won’t be at all surprised if someday we end up with one verb – <i>lay, laying, laid, laid</i> – for both transitive and intransitive uses. And if I'm around to see it, you won’t hear me complaining.Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8811866763970314328.post-86312549883781796212014-04-02T14:49:00.000-04:002014-04-02T14:52:08.192-04:00On (not) getting "pussy" into printJesse Sheidlower’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/the-case-for-profanity-in-print.html">Monday op-ed</a> in the Times, calling for an end to prissy taboo avoidance in print, was a beautiful demonstration of the problem: Even in writing about words like <i>fuck</i>, <i>bullshit</i>, and <i>asshole</i>, he wasn’t allowed to mention the words.<br />
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It reminded me of the time I thought <i>pussy </i>would pass muster in my Boston Globe language column. The year was 2005, and I had been writing The Word for almost eight years without anyone complaining about my language: Nobody had turned a hair at discussions of intransitive <i>suck</i>, or <i>scumbag</i>, or <i>brown-nose</i> (though some readers were surprised to learn the terms’ underlying senses).</div>
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This time the main topic was <i>nooky</i>. A reader had inquired about a humorous use of the word in a Globe Magazine subhed, where a young man wondered if the baby he and his wife were expecting meant “the end of nooky as we know it.” Wasn’t this as vulgar as using the <i>f</i>-word?<br />
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Looking into the history of <i>nooky</i>, I found that it had meanings both naughty and nice, sexist and affectionate. My original copy is long gone, with the computer it rode in on, but the relevant paragraph was very like this:</div>
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The rude <i>nooky</i>, which means a woman (or women) viewed as sexual prey, or sometimes just the female genitalia, is essentially synonymous with a taboo word that sneaks into print only in disguise (as the Bond character Pussy Galore, for instance). The nice <i>nooky</i>, though, merely means sex, or even just "fooling around," and it's something both men and women can want.</blockquote>
But that “Pussy Galore” meant my column had to be OK’d by a Top Editor in Charge of Language. I didn’t know such an office existed, but it did, and the TEICOL outranked even the Executive Editor when it came to Language. And she said no <i>pussy</i>, no <i>Pussy</i>, no way.<br />
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I had come prepared to make my case. The Globe had used Pussy Galore’s name at least 17 times already, referring to either the Bond girl or the band of the same name, and Octopussy racked up more than 40 cites. And what with the bands Space Pussy and Nashville Pussy, the satirical play “Pussy on the Roof,” and the “Sopranos” character Big Pussy, pussies of various origins had been all over the paper, even omitting pussycats and pussy willows.<br />
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But my stats cut no ice. So I tried to explain that I wasn’t <i>using </i>the word <i>pussy</i>, I was <i>mentioning </i>the word. I could feel the skepticism pulsing through the phone. Linguistic theory and pussy precedent didn't matter: This one was not going public.<br />
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Finally I rewrote the graf, <i>pussy</i>-free: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The rude <i>nooky</i>, which means a woman (or women) viewed as sexual prey, or sometimes just the female genitalia, is essentially synonymous with a word almost taboo in newspapers, though the James Bond movies sneak it past the censors in (im)proper names like that of the blonde bombshell in "Goldfinger."</blockquote>
The episode was puzzling, but I finally concluded that the moral was simply “feign ignorance.” If you want to print rude words (outside of serious news contexts), you have to pretend that you don’t notice their taboo senses.</div>
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Apparently the group Pussy Riot does qualify under the serious-news exception: If you can get yourself thrown in jail by Putin, high-minded editors will overlook the fact that your name was chosen as a provocation. And Pussy Riot's ubiquity may help speed the word's recasting as a feminist war cry.<br />
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But "pretend you don't notice the play on words" is a strange guideline for editorial policy at a grownups' newspaper. And so is "don't mention the naughty word itself." As Sheidlower notes, "Discussing a word is not the same as wantonly using a word, just as reporting on racism does not make you a racist." If a word is newsworthy, let's assume readers can handle the sight of it. <br />
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<i>Note: The original "nooky" column is behind a paywall, so I've reposted it <a href="http://throwgrammarfromthetrain.blogspot.com/p/in-recent-globe-magazine-essayshawn.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </i><br />
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Janhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03173219179480606941noreply@blogger.com5