Throw Grammar from the Train

Did you hear the one about "hysterical"?

2012-02-09T23:47:00.000-05:00

After a reader e-mailed me, a few years back, to explain that only God could be said to “create” anything -- the rest of us, his teachers insisted, can only make, fabricate, and build -- I thought I’d heard everything in the weird-peeve department. But Henry Hitchings, of all people, is nurturing a language prejudice almost as eccentric. I learned of it from a review of his latest book, “The Language Wars,” in the Wall Street Journal, where Barton Swaim writes that Hitchings

knows that the meanings of words change over time, and rightly deplores the conceit of those "fusspots" who berate people for incorrect usages, but "I wince," he admits, "when 'hysterical' is used as a synonym for 'hilarious.' "

I’ve heard hundreds, maybe thousands, of word peeves in my lifetime, but I’ve never come across this one. Surely Hitchings, who’s still in his 30s, has never lived in a world where hysterical didn’t mean “funny.” So where did he learn to wince at it?

It's true that hysterical "funny" is not especially ancient. The OED didn't add a listing for the sense until 1993, with the earliest example from Mario Pei in 1969: "To describe something as really funny, a woman will use 'hysterical'." As, indeed, Elizabeth Janeway did in her 1943 novel, “The Walsh Girls”:

She had never seen anything so funny in the world as Alice's face when Connie called her a bitch. It was the funniest thing that could have happened. It was hysterical.

But it wasn't just women. Google Books also finds the usage in Vincent Price's “I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography‎” (1959):

The evening was a plodding delight . . . plodding because I was determined to find something hysterical in every word she said, and when I left … I felt like an idiot because she hadn’t been that funny.

Hysterically funny, the long form of our "hilarious" hysterical, shows up quite a bit earlier. This example from an 1886 short story may be transitional – the narrator is both trying to amuse a young woman and being driven slightly crazy:

My behaviour was often fatuously absurd. Anon I became hysterically funny. Altogether I compared very unfavourably with the bright and facile Stephen.

But in this report from the City College Quarterly, about a student play performed in 1913, hysterically clearly means “exceedingly”:

In particular, David Grant and David Bogen distinguished themselves for remarkable acting. … Mr. Bogen's antics and falsetto voice were hysterically funny.

As it does in this story in Boy’s Life, 1936:

“Funny, aren’t you?” said Alan. "Screamingly, hysterically funny," Happy agreed pleasantly.

You might be guessing, about now, that hysterical is a British nit, but no; none of the usual 20th-century guidebooks, British or American, mention the usage, though a couple of reference works label it informal. In fact, I found just one writer who condemns it: Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, who seems to have launched a campaign to restore the purity of hysterical.

Don’t use it to mean "funny," she advised in "The Grammar Devotional" (2009). "Hysterical means 'excited.'" And she made hilarious/hysterical one of the confusable word pairs in her 2011 book, "Grammar Girl's 101 Misused Words You'll Never Confuse Again." "People will say 'hysterical' when they think something is funny," she told Neal Conan in an NPR broadcast.

But hysterical actually means excited in a negative way … when you're saying someone is hysterical, it's like, you know, hysterical laughter after a bank robbery when everyone is freaking out.

I doubt that Fogarty and Hitchings influenced each other; more likely, there's a lurking anti-hysterical movement out there, a scattering of teachers or editors hoping to reverse this previously uncontroversial extension of the word's meaning. Or is it not so tiny? If you've ever been cautioned about using hysterical to mean "hilarious," please let us hear the particulars.

Dickens's fine point

2012-02-03T23:57:00.001-05:00

Ben Zimmer has a terrific piece at Visual Thesaurus on Charles Dickens's many contributions (slang and otherwise) to the English language. And among the locutions he credits Dickens with introducing or popularizing is one whose origins I've tried, unsuccessfully, to discover: "Not to put too fine a point upon it," meaning "not to mince words," which is, as Ben notes, a favorite expression of Mr. Snagsby in "Bleak House."

What is the literal origin of this "fine point" (if any?). Here's a chunk of the Boston Globe column I wrote in 2009 asking that question. (I omit the paragraph in which I inaccurately called Henry James a fan of "not to put too fine a point on it." Well, he should have been!)

It's tempting to read the phrase as a pen-based metaphor, an explanation offered at the British etymology site The Phrase Finder: "I would imagine it has its origins in either pencils or quill pens which would be used for delicate work if sharpened to a fine point, but for cruder stuff if left blunt.'' But no other source seconds that appealing theory.

I thought the answer was about to emerge last month, when Patricia O'Conner wrote about the phrase at her Grammarphobia blog. But no: She is as baffled as everyone else. "The OED describes the usage as figurative,'' she reports, "but doesn't say exactly what the figure is. Go figure.''

As she says, the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't give the answer, but it does offer clues: In the entry for fine, the cross-reference for "put too fine a point'' (listed under point) appears under the sense of fine applied to tools and weapons: "sharp-pointed, keen-edged.'' The figurative examples come from Shakespeare ("blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure,'' 1600) and Bacon ("the finer edges or points of wit,'' 1622). These uses blend the idea of a sharp tool with a refined apprehension, and other early uses of "fine point'' share that notion.

These examples are often positive, not negative; today, we're always not putting too fine a point on it, but that wasn't always the case. For instance, in an 1842 issue of The Knickerbocker, a New York literary monthly, a writer sardonically advised readers, "If any passage appears to you as dull, consider it a piece of latent wit, whose point is too fine for your obtuse perceptions.''

And the Warren Street Chapel, according to an 1861 "Historical Sketch of Boston,'' was not only a refuge for the destitute: "It aims also to benefit those who, 'to put a fine point upon it,' are in less favored circumstances as regards the means of a true culture.''

If a fine point is a delicate bit of wit or observation, "too fine a point'' implies language that is too refined for the immediate purpose, more polite than the object deserves. This sense seems to emerge seamlessly from earlier figurative uses of fine and point, without reference to anything so concrete as a quill and penknife. If it's more opaque now than it was to earlier writers, that may be because we're far less concerned with gradations of subtlety.

You can't bring it with you (or maybe you can)

2012-02-01T23:12:00.001-05:00

Like any enforcer of an institutional style, the New York Times’s Philip Corbett has to defend certain distinctions well into their obsolescence. One of his probably-lost causes came up in a December After Deadline blog post:

A Met official took the stage to say Ms. White had suffered a short fall and was brought to the hospital.*

Here’s what the stylebook says:

bring, take. Use bring to mean movement toward the speaker or writer; take means movement away from the speaker or writer (in fact, any movement that is not toward the speaker or writer). So the Canadian prime minister cannot be bringing a group of industrialists to a conference in Detroit, except in an article written from Detroit.

I grew up following this rule -- or, rather, not knowing there was any other way to use bring and take; you bring something with you when you come, and take it when you go. And when I asked Boston Globe readers about their usage, in a 1998 column ($ except for subscribers), 73 percent said they did it my way.

But over the years I've gotten used to hearing bring where I would say take -- "I'll bring this to New York," for instance, spoken by a husband sitting next to me in Boston. And even when I was still suspicious of that bring, it was clear that bring and take often hovered on an imaginary threshold, with only the speaker knowing which point of view was assumed: "Shall we bring/take an umbrella?" (See Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for a thorough and sympathetic analysis.)

I don't think I'm alone in my growing tolerance for that minority use of bring, because I keep seeing it in respectable publications. I haven't gone looking for examples, but the usage is still odd enough to my ear that I (sometimes) notice it; here are a few cites I've clipped in the past year or so.

This week, I tested three computer mice that laptop users will actually want to bring along with them. (Katherine Boehret, Wall Streeet Journal, January 2011)

Burch wraps up a slice of cake and two cupcakes for me to bring home to my daughter. (Daphne Merkin, NYT T Magazine, December 2011)

So Wayne and Judy took over their son’s care, bringing him [from Memphis] first to a premier brain-injury center in Atlanta ... and then to a clinic in Destin, Fla. (Jeneen Interlandi, NYT Magazine, December 2011)

[If the world were going to end in December 2012] I’d love to bring my family to the Serengeti to see migrating herds of zebra and gazelles. (Scott Simon, WSJ, January 2012)

And here's one that uses both verbs alternately:

Bring This Checklist with You Next Time You’re Apartment Hunting
Just print it out and take it with you when you're at an apartment showing ... You may also want to bring your camera along so you can take a few photos.
(Adam Dachis, Lifehacker.com, January 2012)

[Edited to add this example, 2/2/2012:]

At some point, most adoptive families do bring their children back to China. (Good Housekeeping magazine, January 2012)

I haven't seen an example yet in the New Yorker, but it sure looks as if certain NYT and WSJ editors think bring sounds normal in these contexts. I'm not there yet myself, but since I'm no longer a working editor, I don't plan to lose any sleep over the question.

* I'd make it "had suffered a short fall and ~~was~~ (had) been brought to the hospital," but Corbett didn't comment on the lack of parallelism.

The writer didn't blue it after all

2012-01-23T13:20:00.000-05:00

A British veteran of colonial Burma and WWII wrote of another former "forest man," his colleague in the teak harvesting trade:

Nor can I ever explain what possessed him to blue all his savings he had accumulated towards the enjoyment of one leave, on the invention and patenting of a form of head protection which should supersede the solar topee in the dry season and the umbrella during the monsoons.

The author is J.H. “Elephant Bill” Williams, and my friend Vicki Croke, who’s working on a book about Williams, sent me the puzzling quote. How, we wondered, could a native speaker of English come up with the blue in that sentence? And how could the editor of the 1953 book in which it appears have missed it?

If Williams had used the past tense, writing “he blue his savings” would look like just a slip, an accidental substitution of blue for blew. But neither spelling makes sense in the infinitive form: “to blue all his savings” and “to blew all his savings” are equally unacceptable.

Our speculation, it turned out, was a waste of time and brainpower; the answer was at my fingertips, in Jonathon Green’s imposing new Green's Dictionary of Slang.* This blue, says Green, is just a variant of the slang blow, “to squander, to waste.” His earliest example is from the periodical Wild Boys of London (1866): “Sich an hawful lot of coin I’ve blued, too.” (Blue, unlike blow, is conjugated as a regular verb: I blue it, I blued it, I have blued it.)

The OED lists the slang blue too, with citations from 1846 to as recently as 1959, when the Observer used it in what sounds like another description of British colonial life: “Men in cotton shirts and corduroys met there to ‘blue’ their cheques on supplies and on fiery colonial rum.” Google Books also has several examples; the latest I could find came from Anthony Burgess's 1963 novel, "Inside Mr. Enderby":

'An' I blued it all on booze in town. I think I'd better come up there,' he added, bold. 'I could sleep on the couch or something.'

Maybe this blue was chiefly British usage, and maybe, despite its century-long career, it was never truly widespread. But if Burgess could use it in 1963, there's no reason to think Williams's editor, 10 years earlier, would have balked at it -- however odd "he blued it" looks today.

*FTC disclosure: Oxford University Press sent me a review copy of Green's Dictionary of Slang.

NPR on the garden path

2012-01-22T17:45:00.000-05:00

Just heard this momentarily misleading report on "All Things Considered":

A Pennsylvania hospital says it was spreading lung cancer …

Wait, spreading it how? It’s not contagious, is it? Well, no:

… it was spreading lung cancer that killed Joe Paterno.

Amazing how far your mind can race down the wrong fork of a garden-path sentence before the truth catches up with it.

Too much of a good thing?

2012-01-17T23:05:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, Robert Lane Greene at Johnson checked in from the road to ask readers what topics The Economist’s language blog should focus on. The replies so far are unusually varied (not just the same old peeves) and sometimes strange, but the strangest of all, I thought, came from Great Uncle Clive. His recommendation:

Not so many posts, Johnson . . . a max of two a week

Allow your bloggers* ... Us ... to respond to each other and develop ideas, before you change the topic

Thanx

A commenter who wants you to post less frequently: With fans like that, who needs critics? RLG is a pro, so I’m sure his response to Uncle Clive won’t be “If you want to develop your own %$@! ideas, write your own %$#@! blog!” But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was thinking it.
*I'm assuming (perhaps too charitably) that Uncle Clive's "blogger" for "commenter" here was a slip.

Impiousness nibblenips

2012-01-11T22:33:00.000-05:00

Though Ron Paul finished well behind Romney in the New Hampshire primary, he was upbeat: "We're nibbling at his heels," he said.

I had never heard this variant on "nipping at one's heels," but it seemed so natural and plausible, I thought for sure it would be in the Eggcorn Database. But no; it's not there, and though the nibbling version gets a handful of Google hits, it doesn't come close to rivaling the standard nipping idiom.

That suits my sense of the words; I think of nipping (at someone's heels) as aggressive behavior, like herding sheep or chasing prey. Nibbling, on the other hand, means eating in tiny increments, or at least pretending to eat, and isn't a hostile act. The OED definition: "To take a small bite, or a series of small bites, at or from (a thing); to bite away gradually; to bite tentatively, delicately, playfully, or amorously."

There has been, historically, some overlap in the verbs' senses -- but not in the direction of the Ron Paul substitution. It's nip, which implies a a pinching action, that has sometimes been used as a synonym for nibble, according the the OED:

The milkcows were nipping the clovery parks (1839).

That durn brute was shakin' his ears and nippin' grass unconcerned as a can o' green corn. (1900)

Apparently, though, there have been moments when a writer felt the need of both verbs at once. And because one of those writers was George Meredith,* the OED has also recorded the "rare" word nibblenip, meaning, naturally, "to nibble and nip." The illustrative quote, from a poem of Meredith's (1883): "Haggard Wisdom, stately once, Leers fantastical and trips: Allegory drums the sconce, Impiousness nibblenips."

Maybe that's the word Ron Paul was looking for: "We're nibblenipping at his heels!" It does have a certain ring to it.

*The quoted lines will hardly recommend him, but Meredith wrote (among many other things) a comic-romantic-feminist novel every bit as deserving of a miniseries as "Jane Eyre" or "Sense and Sensibility." "Downton Abbey" is all very well, but every year I'm amazed that there's still no screen version of "The Egoist."

Open wide and say "aqueduct"

2012-01-05T20:43:00.000-05:00

Listening to the news this morning, I heard an item about Gov. Andrew Cuomo's backing for a proposal to establish a casino at "the Aqueduct racetrack" in Queens. Pronounced AH-kwuh-duhkt,* with the a of "father" in the first syllable.

I nudged my husband, a New Yorker whose artist father used to supplement the family income by manning a parimutuel window in racing season. "How do you pronounce that racetrack?" I asked. "AK-kwi-duhkt,"* he said, using the a of "pat" and "sack."

That's how I say it, too -- and I'm a Midwesterner with no connection to racetracks beyond a typical history of girlhood horse-craziness. But I don't think I would have noticed the AH pronunciation if the aqueducts in question had been Roman waterworks. Aqua, in my dialect, starts with AH, so aqueduct, when it isn't a racetrack name, could reasonably do the same.

But what do I know? According to Charles Harrington Elster, author of "The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations," all the AHs would be better as AKs. When he published the first edition of his book, in 1999, the only aqueduct pronunciation American dictionaries recognized was AK-kwi-duhkt, in his transcription, or ˈækwɪdʌkt (IPA, or so I hope as I type).

By the time of his 2005 revised edition, he reports, things were changing. Some dictionary editors had been "seduced by the popular, broad-a variant." Not only that -- Encarta and the New Oxford American were listing the upstart first! Most dictionaries, however, "continue to countenance only AK-kwi-duhkt, which has always been and still is the only cultivated pronunciation," he says.

Isn't it only natural for the AK of aqueduct to be gradually overpowered by the much commoner AHK of aqua? That's no excuse, says Elster; my AHK-wuh for aqua is just an earlier example of "uncultivated" pronunciation. It wormed its way into American dictionaries only in the 1930s, spread by people who had studied a little Latin and took to pronouncing aqua in what Elster calls a "faux-Latin" style. By this account, aqueduct is following aqua down the road to pronunciation hell.

Elster would like us to use AK (ack!) for all the initial-stress aqua words, which would certainly be neat. But just like those early-20th-century Latin students, we pick up words at different times and places, not in orderly family packs; we don't sort our pronunciations by etymology. I say aquaculture and aquatint with AH, and aquifer and aquiline with AK -- who knows why? A discussion of the question at Wordnik last summer showed I'm not alone:

I just realized that I use /æ/ for "aqueduct" but /ɑ/ for "aqua", which seems terribly inconsistent of me.

The classicist in me insists upon 'a' as in 'father' for both.

Oh, weird -- I hadn't thought about it before, but if it's a Roman aqueduct, I'll say it with the "a" in "father," and if there are no Romans in the sentence, I'll say it with the "a" in "cat."

Maybe Americans will eventually give all the aqua words an initial AH sound, with New York's Aqueduct, as a proper name, holding out till the last. Or maybe not. If you feel like betting, $2 on Uncle Smokey in the seventh might be a safer play.

*Since I quote Charles Harrington Elster below, I've used his phonetic representations.

Friendless in Fitbitland

2012-01-02T23:00:00.001-05:00

A couple of months ago, I upgraded from a perfectly fine pedometer to Fitbit, which can track not only steps but also (it says) the quality of your sleep, synching it all to your Fitbit log. It works as advertised, but I've been letting it slide lately, with all the holiday distractions.

Could be the normal post-honeymoon crash, of course. Self-improvement plans can be fascinating for a few days -- me, it's all about me! -- but they tend to lose their luster as the real world comes back into focus. In this case, though, I think Fitbit's web folks have to share the blame. Whenever I log on to my "dashboard," I see this annoying personal message in the right margin of the page:

Friends make Fitbit more fun

You don't have any friends yet.

Find friends. [link]

"You don't have any friends." Seriously. I would understand (maybe) if Facebook nagged like this -- FB is all about friends, and I barely check in often enough to qualify as a lurker. But Fitbit's job is to help me keep moving, not prod me to bore my friends (yes, they exist) with daily exercise stats.

No doubt there are crowds of Fitbit friends out there, spurring each other to ever higher mileage totals, and if it works for them, who could object? But Fitbit, it's bad manners and bad business to insult customers who prefer not to share. You don't want to be remembered as the guys who put the "bitter" in Fitbitter.

Happy meta-Festivus: Grieving the grievances

2011-12-23T23:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve been trying to get a post off the ground for a while, but my topics were either too ambitious (no time!) or too peevish, and it just didn’t seem right to post minor gripes at The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

But hallelujah! This morning, both Fritinancy and You Don't Say reminded me that today is Festivus, a day that invites – nay, mandates – the airing of grievances. A few hours later, in a delightful cosmic conjunction, I came upon the perfect target for a Festivus grievance: Ron Rosenbaum’s essay today in Slate. The icing on the Festivus cake: The piece itself, though not labeled as such, is an Airing of (Language) Grievances.

Yes, I have language grievances too – who doesn’t? – but Rosenbaum’s list is just the latest entry in a tired and exasperating genre: A catalogue of usages – in this case, allegedly faddish or newish ones – delivered along with the writer’s arbitrary judgments on whether they “deserve” to survive in the language.

Often, as in this case, the writer offers half-baked theories for why some “losers” adopt the offensive words. Of the slang junk for genitals, for instance, Rosenbaum ventures that maybe “overdosing on junk-sex Internet porn has damaged the brains of so many men that they’ve come to think everything sexual is, well, junky.”

That's a joke, I suppose, but there’s more:

Crowdsourcing: Hasn’t it occurred to anyone -- especially the new media genius types who abuse the concept -- that the archetypal crowd is a lynch mob?

Isn’t it obvious that someone who’s using gravitas is mainly trying to confer it upon himself by implying he has the gravitas to recognize and bestow gravitas?

It seems, despite my efforts, we will never be able to stamp out “spot on” and those who think the use of it gives them an Atlanticist sophistication.

But not all trendy words are unspeakable:

One new term I encountered on the website The Hairpin that sounds super-intriguing: napgasm. Apparently, it’s a thing. (That’s another of my fave catchphrases, by the way. It’s a thing is a thing.)

Meh: I still like this! I think it’s rare to find something so new and expressive in the language.

I could say more about his individual peeves and faves, but so could you, dear readers, so I won’t. We can all wonder together: What makes Rosenbaum think he gets to be the nation's "Catchphrase Executioner"?

But my grievance isn’t really directed at Rosenbaum; after all, he has a deadline to meet, and he's hardly the only writer to indulge the delusion that his rulings on language have weight. No, in this case I blame Slate. They’ve published Jesse Sheidlower and Ben Zimmer on language, so they know what reality-based usage analysis looks like. Editors sometimes save writers from their cheesier impulses; in this case they failed. So thank you, Slate, for inspiring a joyously cranky Festivus observance.

It's hard for I -- what about you?

2011-12-08T17:46:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the diligence of my friend Betsy, I finally got around to seeing this year’s (pallid, underwritten) movie version of “Jane Eyre.” But though I wish Jane had been allotted more words, at least the meager script minimized the chance of language glitches. As it was, we were shocked to hear Jane, in the midst of a passionate speech, say to Rochester:

If God had blessed me with beauty and wealth, I could make it as hard for you to leave me as it is for I to leave you.

For I to leave you? Sure, we moderns often use object pronouns in compound nominatives (“Me and the dog are going out”) and vice versa (“an invitation for Sally and I”). But “as hard for I to leave” is much less common. Not unheard of -- Arnold Zwicky gave an example in an August post, and said there were more out there, “too many to dismiss as nothing but inadvertent errors" -- but rare enough that I've never heard a complaint about it.

And Jane’s movie speech generally hews closely to the book, where she says

if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.

So someone (Moira Buffini is the scriptwriter of record) decided to “improve” Bronte’s dialogue, and nobody involved in the production ever said “Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right.” O tempora, o mores, o BBC!

You may have noticed another word change there: Bronte’s “gifted me” becomes “blessed me” in the script, no doubt in deference to today's distaste for gift as a verb. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out that gift "make a present of" dates to the 17th century, though the context was generally institutional, as in "gifted to the Church of Rome."

As early as 1864, though, there were rumblings about it. In “The Queen’s English,” Henry Alford complained that adjectival gifted was “at present very much in vogue. Every man whose parts are to be praised, is a gifted author, speaker or preacher.” In 1909, Ambrose Bierce OK'd gifted but suggested that the verb itself was obsolete: Denouncing talented (vs. gifted), he noted, “These are both past participles, but there was once the verb to gift, whereas there was never the verb 'to talent.' If Nature did not talent a person the person is not talented."

But in the mid-20th century to gift spread to “a more mundane realm,” as Bryan Garner puts it, becoming a mere synonym for give: “He gifted her with a diamond bracelet.” This aroused the opposition, and the usage is still resisted as pretentious; Garner rates its acceptance at only stage 2 of a possible 5. So this edit of Bronte seems to be a reasonable effort to avoid raising viewers’ eyebrows. Unfortunately, changing “for me to leave” to “for I” is enough, all by itself, to raise eyebrows as high as they go -- for some of us, anyway.

Grammar.net's latest cry for help

2011-12-04T17:15:00.000-05:00

I suggested earlier this fall that winners of Grammar.net's Best Blog poll could use some help with proofreading, but apparently nobody stepped into the breach. After the contest, the site sent me (and 47 other nominees, I presume) a consolation prize -- "A gift for participation in the contest for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011." It's a badge to display on your blog, similar to the ones the top 3 winners were encouraged to post.

But as usual, the best part of the e-mail was unintentional: "We would be happy to see you in the list of grammar bloggers in our contest for the Best Grammar Bog next time if we hold it again."

"Best Bog" has an especially nice ring for us Angela Thirkell fans, since one of the novelist's characters -- the post-WWII Mixo-Lydian Ambassadress to Britain -- is a woman of strong opinions whose favorite (often scornful) exclamation is "Bog!" Next time I hear from Grammar.net, that syllable will be my response.

Mondegreen watch: The leaves are down

2011-12-01T23:10:00.001-05:00

Today on "All Things Considered," Melissa Block interviewed novelist Ann Patchett about her favorite "winter song," which (for excellent biographical reasons) is "California Dreamin'." And as I listened, I learned that I had been hearing a mondegreen all these decades. The line that fascinated Patchett -- ~~"Went~~ "Stopped into a church, and I pretend to pray" -- I've interpreted, all these years, as "I began to pray."

Makes sense, right? Whatever the verb here, it should be in the past tense, not present. And nothing makes "pretend" more plausible than "began" (well, nothing I can see in the lyrics.) But pretend it is, and quite clearly enunciated, as pop lyrics go.

Moments later, as I was shaking off my long-standing delusion, Block revealed that she too had mondegreened* the lyrics. "Are the leaves all down?" she asked Patchett, who lives in Nashville. "All the leaves are down," Patchett replied. But no: It's "All the leaves are brown," to go with the gray skies (though the image of bare branches is nice too).

Will mondegreen creation dwindle when we all get our music via earbuds rather than crackly radios? Or is the listening mind just too inventive to stop making its own kind of sense, given half a chance? I'm rooting for the mondegreens; like eggcorns, they're too entertaining to be sacrificed for mere accuracy.

*I see that this verb is out there, in active and passive forms. I'll vote for active, since mondegreening is something we do, not something the song does to us.

The elusive 'misplaced only'

2011-11-23T23:48:00.002-05:00

When I was writing my Boston Globe column, I heard regular complaints about the alleged misplacement of only in a sentence, as when I wrote "you could only murder your victim once." Reading up on the issue, I decided that this peeve is so popular because advice-givers enjoy ringing the changes on made-up sentences that supposedly show the pitfalls of only: "Only John hit Peter in the nose, John hit Peter only in the nose, John only hit Peter in the nose," and so on. (For a very recent example, see Merrill Perlman here.)

But anyone can make up evidence. Several times, I asked readers to give me an example of a truly misleading only that was not in a hypothetical example, but actually in print. In 10 years, no one ever did. Eventually, I spotted one myself, in the Wall Street Journal: "Current tests can detect only what type of virus or bacteria people are infected with after they get sick." (As I discovered at the time, this was apparently an editor's attempt to reword the writer's original "Current tests can only detect.")

Two years later, I've found another misplaced only. It was in Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times Nov. 13, about making tablet computers cheap enough for the poorest Indians to buy. He wrote:

If Indians could only purchase tablets made in the West, the price points would be so high they'd never spread here.

This was a garden-path sentence for me; First time through, I read it with only modifying "purchase tablets made in the West." But no -- Friedman doesn't mean "if they could only buy (some tablets from the West)," he means "if they could buy tablets only (from the expensive West)."

So yes, occasionally the word only is confusingly misplaced. But two examples in 10 years -- one of them created by an editor needlessly moving the only -- hardly amounts to an epidemic.

Fowler, by the way, was scathing about the only fetishists -- "pedants" who meddled where no improvement was needed, "turning English into an exact science or an automatic machine." But he's not alone in his skepticism. My only enlightenment came from Bergen and Cornelia Evans's Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957).

In most cases only is a sentence adverb and qualifies the entire statement. When used in this way its natural position is before the verb, as in but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. This word order is standard literary English and should be followed unless there is a very good reason for placing only somewhere else. ... It is not true that when only stands between the subject and the verb it qualifies the verb alone. One might as well argue that never qualifies saw rather than the full statement in I never saw a purple cow.

And for the 21st-century linguist's version, we have this excerpt from a Geoff Pullum post:

The word only is frequently positioned so that it attaches to the beginning of a larger constituent than its focus (and thus comes earlier), and that is often not just permissible but better. Ian Fleming's title You Only Live Twice was not copy-edited to You Live Only Twice. Why not? Because he knows how to write, and he didn't let an idiot copy-editor change his writing into mush, that's why.

Enough said? I hope so, because there are potatoes to peel and pecans to chop. Happy Thanksgiving!

A kind word for the crossword

2011-11-19T13:16:00.000-05:00

Like any recovering nitpicker, I still feel a certain allegiance to the shibboleths of my youth. (The earlier you learn them, the harder they are to ignore.) So a clue in Wednesday's New York Times crossword made me smile, once I had the answer.

The clue to 48-down was: "Muscle strengthened by curls, informally." The answer: BICEP. And the prescriptivist dog whistle in the clue is the word "informally."

As Miss Mossman explained years ago in Latin class, biceps is a singular, though it's long been used as the English plural too. (Fowler liked bicepses better than the Latin bicipites, but neither caught on.) So according to traditionalists, the word bicep shouldn't exist. Like pea and cherry and kudo, it was formed on the erroneous assumption that a final-s sound signaled a plural.

But the advance of singular bicep was so stealthy that few language mavens noticed it over the years. By the time Bryan Garner got into the usage trade, it was so well established that he simply accepted it. In the most recent (2009) edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, he says that "to refer to a person's right biceps ... seems pedantic." Despite etymology, "the standard terms are now bicep as the singular and biceps as the plural."

I'm not so sure singular biceps has been relegated to nonstandard (or even "pedantic") status, and neither is Google Books, despite that ominous post-2000 drop on the Ngram chart. But "right bicep" is obviously acceptable to many, even if some of us still think of it as "informal." Sorry, Miss Mossman!

Stuff and nonsense

2011-11-15T17:22:00.000-05:00

John McIntyre, scourge of the holiday cliché, recently published this season’s installment of editorial don’ts: No 'tising, no 'twasing, no white stuff, no “yes, Virginia,” and so on. Though I have mildly dissented from a few of his peeves, they all merit journalists' attention. And though John doesn’t mention it, I see there are two additions to his list this year, both items I’m interested in. The first:

Stocking stuffer: Stuff it.

"Stocking stuffer" has indeed earned a place on the watch list: In a search of selected newspapers, it showed up almost as often as "'Tis the season" over the past year (672 hits to 754). I think of it as an advertising word (and use "stocking present" myself), but I don't feel much hostility toward it, except when the suggested "stuffer" is a diamond bracelet or a $7,000 watch.

But a decade ago, I found myself wondering when the “stocking stuffer” concept had emerged. As a child, I had read about the Bad Old Days when a kid's entire Christmas haul would fit into that lone stocking tied to the bedpost – if the child had proved worthy of treats rather than lumps of coal. When had stocking presents been demoted from the main course to mere appetizers, trinkets to distract the kids while their parents sucked down some caffeine?

Not surprisingly, I found that “stocking stuffer” seems to be a byproduct of postwar prosperity. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary dates the term to 1948, and that’s when Filene’s begins using it in Boston Globe ads. (In England it's "stocking filler," also first recorded in the '40s.)

Usage is still sparse through the '50s, though; Google’s Ngram (charting books, not newspapers, but probably just lagging a bit behind) shows the real “stuffer” boom beginning in the '70s. (And what's that dip in the mid-2000s? Maybe there's a nascent anti-"stuffer" movement just waiting for the call!)

The second new item on John's warning list:

On no account are you to publish that execrable article on the estimated cost of the gifts in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Whoever gets assigned to write it every year patently did something very, very bad in a previous life. If you have been guilty of publishing that thing in the past, do not compound your sin.

Hear, hear! This is a time-wasting stunt promoted by PNC Bank, which has the chutzpah to label it “financial education.” Nothing in the whole exercise demonstrates anything worth knowing about inflation, the economy, or the price of gifts your true love may be sending you.

Doonesbury does it -- do you?

2011-11-09T12:17:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago, when "Doonesbury" showed Grandma Joanie proposing to move in with Alex, faithful correspondent JHM wrote to comment on a usage in the strip's dialogue. Joanie offers to help Alex pay her rent. "Wait, is there a hitch?" asks Alex. And there is: "I'd have to move in," says Joanie.

For JHM, hitch wasn't quite the right word. "I would've used 'catch,' as in a deal with strings attached," he said, adding a definition from Oxford Dictionaries online: "a hidden problem or disadvantage in an apparently ideal situation: there's a catch in it somewhere."

I would like to say that yes, I too would use catch, not hitch, in this context, and I'm pretty sure I would: I think of a catch as a preset trap, a hitch as just a random snag in the proceedings. On the other hand, I read right past the hitch in the Doonesbury cartoon, speeding onward to the punch line. So it's obviously not a red-flag distinction for me.

After a quick and unscientific glance at Google News sources, I'd venture to say that the catch-hitch distinction -- as JHM and I make it -- is widely observed: I found catch almost always used to imply a hidden clause or condition, hitch used mostly for "unexpected problem," usually in variations on "it went off without a hitch." But I wonder -- if hitch did start migrating into catch territory, would we notice? Did you?

Over and over again

2011-11-07T18:37:00.003-05:00

“I agree with your objections to the unhelpful comparisons using the stack of money and distance to the moon,” wrote T. Roger Thomas in a comment on my criticism of a New York Times op-ed. Then he went on:

I would also add an objection to the use of "over" in the original piece. To my way of thinking, one can climb over a fence. I would prefer to see the term "more than" used to denote a greater amount of things, which, in this instance, happen to be dollars.

He’s talking (I assume) about Ezekiel Emanuel’s “$2.6 trillion on health care, over $8,000 per American.” But this is a nit that I didn’t pick even when I was a professional nitpicker, despite the temptation to go along with my fellow journalists. "Disapproval of over ‘more than’ is a hoary American newspaper tradition,” says MWDEU, but the usage was standard for many centuries before some 19th-century crank decided he didn't like it.

We haven't identified that crank; as I said in an April 2010 post on "over" and "more than," the earliest mention of the issue I’ve found is in an 1856 usage book by Walton Burgess, son of a New York City printer/publisher, grandly titled “Five Hundred Mistakes in Speaking, Pronouncing, and Writing the English Language, Corrected.” At No. 130 we get: "'There were not over twenty persons present:' say, more than. Such a use of this word is not frequent among writers of reputation."

William Cullen Bryant followed Burgess's lead in 1870, and Ambrose Bierce piled on in 1909. But even in its heyday, the “rule” was far from universal. Scott and Denney's "Elementary English Composition" (1900) said that “over a million dollars” was correct usage. And in 1856 -- the very same year that Walton Burgess declared war on this "over" -- a rival usage book, with an anonymous author, defied his ruling in the boast above its title: “Over 1000 Mistakes Corrected.”

For more on “over/more than,” see John McIntyre (at his non-paywalled former blog) on the AP Stylebook as a "repository of extinct rules"; Mark Liberman at Language Log; and Paul Brians's Non-Errors Page: "This absurd distinction ignores the role metaphor plays in language. If I write 1 on the blackboard and 10 beside it, 10 is still the 'higher' number."

Its not that big a deal

2011-11-02T23:31:00.000-04:00

In this week’s After Deadline blog, Philip Corbett led with recent homophone misspellings in the New York Times – one the common eggcorn reign in for rein in, and several others that are just slips of the brain (then for than, palette for palate, gate for gait). But Corbett avoided the alarmist hyperbole that so often accompanies lists of such blunders: He did not refer to the non-eggcorn errors as “confusions,” as if the spelling-challenged writer truly didn't know a then from a than.

Same day, different blog: At Grammarphobia, Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wandered into the "confusion" quagmire and couldn't get unstuck. A reader asked whether using its for it’s was a grammatical error or a spelling error; here's their answer,* with my objections:

A: On a superficial level, this qualifies as both a punctuation error and a spelling error.

But on a deeper level, it’s a grammatical error, because it represents a failure to distinguish between (1) the possessive pronoun and (2) the contraction.

What “deeper level”? You're saying the writer doesn’t know the difference between the actual words its and it’s? That he mistakenly writes “it’s tires are flat” because he thinks it's OK to say “it is tires are flat”? Of course you don’t think that. Sometimes a mixup -- reign in for rein in -- could be either a simple spelling goof or a genuine confusion (resulting in an eggcornish reinterpretation of the metaphor). Not so with its and it’s. We could drop the apostrophe entirely and we’d still know which was which, because in fact we don't confuse them grammatically.

It also represents a failure to recognize that possessive pronouns don’t sport apostrophes.

Yes, but this is that same “superficial” spelling or punctuation error you noted already.

So the problem is more than just a spelling goof in our opinion. That probably puts us into the grammar-error camp.

Except that there is no “grammar-error camp.” It’s just not a possible interpretation of this spelling mistake. But usage mavens have been calling these errors “confusions” for so long that a lot of people have trouble distinguishing true misunderstandings from misspellings. Not that I endorse misspellings; but they don’t, by themselves, imply weakness of intellect or failure to grasp the sense of a word. We shouldn't go around scaring one another by implying that they do.

*I actually first wrote "here's there answer," though I caught it immediately. And no, I am not confused about the difference between their and there.

Odious comparisons

2011-10-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's Times featured an op-ed piece* by Ezekiel Emanuel -- physician and brother of Rahm -- that included one of the silliest attempts at clarification ever seen (I hope) in those pages. Emanuel wants to help readers grapple with the "$2.6 trillion on health care, over $8,000 per American," that the US spent last year. "This is such an enormous amount of money, it’s difficult to grasp," he writes. So

consider this: If we stacked single dollar bills on top of one another, $2.6 trillion would reach more than 170,000 miles — nearly three-quarters of the way to the moon.

Uh, right. In the first place, I can't remember the last time I saw even 10 one-dollar bills in the same place. I can't even picture a stack of a measly million dollars, let alone $2.6 trillion.

And then ... the moon? It's a long way off, sure, but the distance isn't easy to visualize without better clues than dollar bills. How about "x trips back and forth across the US," or "x times around the world"? Comparisons like this are supposed to give readers a familiar concept against which they can measure the less familiar one. Instead we have $2.6 trillion translated into two equally unhelpful images.

Even if the comparison worked, it's not clear what it's for. Surely the question is not "how much is $2.6 trillion" -- a tall tower of dollars, as much as the entire French economy, whatever -- but when such spending is "too much" for an economy of a given size, and what to do about it.

This is allegedly the first in a series on the topic, so I hope the editors will scrutinize future submissions a bit more carefully. All I learned here is that if I want to shinny up to the moon on a stack of dollar bills, I'll need more than 2.6 trillion of them.

*The link is to the online Opinionator version; nytimes.com didn't want to give me the address of the print version.

Prerequisites for peeving

2011-10-25T18:47:00.000-04:00

There oughta be a law, says Steven Pinker in Prospect Magazine, governing all the world's pundits:

No one may bemoan a decay, decline, or degeneration without providing (1) a measure of the way the world is today; (2) a measure of the way the world was at some point in the past; (3) a demonstration that (1) is worse than (2).

This decree would, first of all, eliminate tedious jeremiads about the decline of the language. The genre has been around for centuries, and if the doomsayers were correct we would now be grunting like Tarzan.

Unfortunately, it would take more than a global overlord to enforce this rule on the pundits' audience. I don't know if people complained less when times were tougher, but in our relatively comfortable society, there's plenty of energy for peeving. When I read Natalie Angier's piece on runaway altruism in the New York Times earlier this month, one bit seemed especially relevant to language scolds:

David Brin, a physicist and science fiction writer, argues in one chapter that sanctimony can be as physically addictive as any recreational drug, and as destabilizing. “A relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism,” he writes.

I don't know about you, but I have certainly enjoyed the sensation of knowing The Right Way in matters of editing. And though indignation can be a force for good, surely its power should be exercised on something more important than the comma? As the linguist Dwight Bolinger memorably noted,* most language peeves are trivial both in linguistic and practical terms: "The same number of muggers would leap out of the dark if everyone conformed overnight to every prescriptive rule ever written."

*In "Language: The Loaded Weapon," Longman 1980, which I did not receive as a free review copy.

Noah's not the boss of me!

2011-10-16T23:56:00.029-04:00

In the waning hours of Dictionary Day, I want to briefly advocate for the locution "advocate for." I was sorry to see Lucy Ferriss, over at Lingua Franca, conceding the point to a critic who told her advocate could only be a transitive verb -- that she could advocate the use of the Oxford comma, but not advocate for it. Says who? Says her dictionary, whichever it is.

Well, dictionary shmictionary. No lexicographer wants you to lie down and roll over just because the phrase you use is not recorded in his or her latest tome. If we say advocate for, the dictionaries will recognize, soon enough, that the intransitive form ("she advocates for abuse victims") is standard -- and in this case doing useful work, not just padding out the transitive verb.

And advocate for is not some bizarre new aberration; the OED calls it obsolete, but gives citations from the mid-17th to the late 19th century, the last from the language scholar Fitzedward Hall: "I am not going to advocate for this sense of actual." And Google's Ngram viewer shows "advocated for" rising steadily since around 1840, so maybe the OED editors weren't as observant as they might have been.

I doubt, though, that people who dislike the revival of advocate for give a damn whether it's "officially" transitive or intransitive; I think they connect it with social-worker jargon from the touchy-feely era, and despise it for class reasons. Yes, it's true (as I noted in a column* four years ago) that advocate for sometimes shows up where advocate alone might be more appropriate (and elegant). But (as I wrote then)

advocate will hardly be the first switch-hitting verb. Do you baby-sit the twins, or baby-sit for them? Shop [Filene's] Basement, or shop at the Basement? Graduate college, or graduate from college? A century ago, when approve of was new, Ambrose Bierce tsk-tsked: "There is no sense in making approve an intransitive verb." [I wonder how he would have liked the British transitive agree: "Heineken UK have agreed a contract extension."]

This isn't the first time advocate has attracted critics. The OED quotes a 1789 letter from Ben Franklin to Noah Webster (happy birthday, Noah!) complaining of several new verbs (as he thought) based on nouns, including advocate. Milton and Pepys and Burke had used the word, but Franklin wasn't having it. "If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations," he wrote, "you will use your authority in reprobating them."

But Webster (whatever his private opinion) recorded the facts: advocate was a verb, like it or not. And any minute now, his heirs at Merriam-Webster -- hi, Peter! -- are going to notice that it's also an intransitive verb, and add that description to the record. Because we're the boss of dictionaries, not the other way around.

*Probably behind a paywall, but I can't tell for sure.

Amazon hears the feedback feedback

2011-10-07T16:20:00.000-04:00

Amazon has just changed its customer feedback link so that if everything goes perfectly, you're allowed to rate the transaction "Excellent" with just one click -- no need to add a comment.

Until recently, it didn't work that way. Even if you clicked the buttons rating the service and product as perfect, you couldn't submit the form till you also put some text in the comments box. This must have irritated thousands of people, and I was among them; eventually I wrote to Amazon pointing out that this was a real disincentive to rate sellers, and one that would disproportionately punish the best merchants -- the ones who rated just an unadorned "Excellent."

I'm sure I wasn't the only one making this point; for all I know, the campaign to revise the feedback form has been going on for years already. But it's always nice to see a huge company actually do something so small yet sensible; so often, it doesn't happen.

Help Grammar.net help bloggers

2011-10-06T19:49:00.000-04:00

Today's e-mail brought an update from Grammar.net letting me know that the voting deadline for their grammar blog poll is fast approaching:

Today is the halfway of the contest finals!

The most active bloggers are about to outrun you in the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 contest. Their friends and readers are actively voting, so why don’t yours?

Your blog is worth to be number one,* you just need some help from people who already love your blog.

The final round ends October, 17th.

Now, this nitpicking doesn’t mean I scorn the Grammar.net poll; anything that helps spread the word about language blogs is a Good Thing, and the master list has already prompted me to subscribe to a couple of blogs I had missed.

But the site has problems. Its own software says so: Grammar.net claims its grammar checker will spot your writing flaws, so I fed it the e-mail I quote from above. The analysis -- just a teaser, not the detailed report that paying customers get -- told me that the text had seven “critical writing issues”: one of sentence structure, two of punctuation, and four of “style.” Overall score: 50 percent. “Weak; needs revision.”

Some of the (free) usage advice also needs revision. The “12 Most Misunderstood Words” item, for example, has an outdated hostility to nauseous (meaning nauseated), claims that alternate can only be a verb, and includes a definition of less that made me laugh out loud:

LESS
You think it means: fewer
It means: a smaller amount of uncountable nouns

So as long as we’re logrolling and backscratching, shouldn’t language bloggers help Grammar.net look more like a club we’d want to belong to? Maybe, when the shouting’s over, the top 10 bloggers should each thank the website with some volunteer help -- 10 corrections, say, or an hour’s worth of editing. The better they look, the better we look. And they can definitely look better.

*Yes, this is a comma fault, but not a bad one, and I’m not a comma-fault fetishist.

Reaching out: The "NYPD Blue" connection

2011-10-04T14:10:00.000-04:00

Nancy Friedman has a terrific treatment of the buzz phrase "reach out" at Visual Thesaurus, to which you should subscribe instantly if not sooner. But in her search for sources of the phrase, she overlooked one that loomed very large in pop culture back when I wrote about "reach out," just a couple of months into my authorship of "The Word" for the Boston Globe.

As I've been through hours of broken-link hell trying to retrieve a copy -- the ProQuest link not only isn't letting subscribers log in, it wouldn't even let me pay five bucks for my own damn column! -- I'm not going to take time to annotate it; there are surely things I would do differently now, but here's what I knew about "reach out" 14 years ago, when I and the Internet were both much greener.

When a cop's reach exceeds his grasp

If they're tuned to our wavelength, the citizens of the universe must picture English-speaking Earthlings as many-armed creatures like the Hindu goddess Kali, or maybe as ambulatory, air-breathing octopuses. What else could explain the amount of reaching out we do these days? Churches reach out to potential members, Newt Gingrich to minority voters, La Leche League members to new mothers.

And while the phrase has been stealthily spreading for decades, it seems likely that it owes its current ubiquity to actor David Caruso -- or, rather, to the TV writers who created his "NYPD Blue" character, Detective John Kelly, back in 1993.

There's nothing wrong with reach, of course, or with out. Both words have been in the language, alone and together, since it was Old English, letting us reach out for the brass ring, the highest apples on the tree, the life preserver thrown from a boat.

But reach out seems to have softened and spread like margarine during the touchy-feely '60s and '70s. The Four Tops had a hit with "Reach Out (I'll Be There)," the Carter administration envisioned a Department of Agriculture that would reach out to consumers, and sex educators were reaching out to adolescents.

AT&T trumped them all, in 1979, with "Reach Out and Touch Someone," one of the most memorable advertising slogans ever written. But the phone company's jingle still hewed to the old-fashioned meaning of the phrase -- it assumed a specific person at the other end of that long distance phone line. The New Age version of reaching out that was growing on us had fuzzier boundaries and less specific goals.

This extended reach out is the verb form of the noun outreach, a coinage (in this sense) of 20th-century bureaucratic minds. The Book of Jargon defines outreach as "digging up end-users when nobody seems to want the 'benefits' of a government enough to apply for them" -- a jaundiced view, maybe, but it captures the newer sense of outreach as an overture made to an amorphous mass of people, not to real, touchable individuals. Barnhart's Dictionary of New English dates this outreach to 1968, and it seems safe to assume that where there was outreach, there was reaching out. But most of us didn't notice how fast it had proliferated till "NYPD Blue" began rubbing our noses in reach out.

For some fans of the TV show, the stock phrase (and the series' other mannerisms and catchphrases) were irritating almost from the start. When Caruso threatened to leave, one reviewer said he would be happy not to hear him "telling people he's going to reach out," as if he were angling for a phone company job. And when his departure was announced, one of the speculative scenarios for the farewell episode had him saying "reach out" once too often and being murdered by partner Andy Sipowicz.

Caruso did leave, but his buzzwords linger on; the boys in "Blue" reach out more than ever, sometimes stretching the phrase to implausible lengths. In an episode last season, Sipowicz rebuked a prostitute offering evidence by saying, more or less, "It's a week already, and you don't reach out till now?"

This is going too far. Surely "turning over evidence" is not a synonym for reaching out, if reaching out means anything at all. "It's become so ubiquitous, you expect them to 'reach out' to the doughnut counter, 'reach out' to swat a bug" complained a reviewer last month.

But if all the reaching out gets you down, there's a quick remedy, prescribed in the "NYPD Blue Drinking Game" devised by Alan Sepinwall and his collaborators (for details, see his "NYPD Blue" site). It's simple: Every time someone says "reach out," you reach for a double Scotch. Soon enough, when they try to reach out to you, you'll be feeling no pain.

(Boston Sunday Globe, September 28, 1997)

Does "Mademoiselle" mean bird-brained?

2011-09-30T18:27:00.000-04:00

American feminism, back in the day, dabbled (jokingly or not) in etymythology: Using herstory, for instance, which implies that the "his" of history refers to maleness, or treating female as a subset of male, when in fact the words aren't etymologically related.

Are French feminists, in the post-DSQ uprising, taking the same etymological liberties? The story I heard on NPR yesterday roused my suspicions (as any too-good-to-check etymology should do). There’s a campaign to create a Gallic equivalent of Ms., freeing French women from the stark choice between Madame (married) and Mademoiselle (not). And spokeswoman Marie-Noelle Bas, arguing the case, told the reporter why mademoiselle was offensive: “oiselle in French is the feminine of oiseau [bird]. And in ancient French, that means virgin, that means stupid, that means somebody who needs to be married."

Well, my Larousse tells me that oiselle does indeed mean “jeune fille naive, niaise” -- a naive or silly girl. (I'll take Bas's word for the "needing to be married" connotation, which is plausible enough.) But does the word have anything to do with mademoiselle?

I don’t think so. Oiselle, says Larousse, comes from the Latin aucellus, the diminutive form of avis (bird). Demoiselle (the source of English damsel) is derived from the Latin dominicella, diminutive of domina, lady (of the house), mistress, female boss. The shared syllables in oiselle and mademoiselle seem to show only that both are descended from diminutive forms, not that they're closer relatives than, say, marionette and lunette, or mozzarella and patella.

But if I’m missing something, dear Francophone readers and scholars, do let me know.

How many crabs could an esteemed chef steam ...

2011-09-22T23:24:00.000-04:00

Boston chef Jasper White is headed to China to enjoy some freshwater hairy crabs, a delicacy he first encountered in 1986, according to this interview in today's Globe. "So what exactly makes the crabs special?" asks the reporter.

A. They’re delicious and highly steamed. And also, they’re rare. They’re found predominantly in the Nanjing Province. And they’re only in harvest four weeks, during fall.

I don't think the reporter's transcription here qualifies as an eggcorn; it's just a garden-variety mishearing, one that's almost plausible in the context. Not that you'd want your shellfish "highly steamed," but then, the other possible reading -- "they're delicious and highly esteemed" -- isn't a very good answer to the question either. At least this version is good for a laugh.

Toilé and trouble

2011-09-21T19:08:00.000-04:00

The etymology of "toilet" is a good story, so I was pleased (at first) to see it mentioned in this full-page Clorox ad. "The word 'toilet' comes from the French word 'toile' which originally referred to a woman's dressing table," the small print begins. But when I squinted, I saw

that what it really said was "from the French word 'toilé.'"
Uh-oh! that charming continental rogue, the accent aigu, has seduced another victim. Toilet does come from toile, in French a kind of fabric (and in English too, where it usually refers to toile de Jouy, with its monochrome print of landscapes or shepherds). But it was the diminutive form, toilette, that English adopted, starting in the 16th century, to mean a variety of things connected with primping. Toilet (toylett, twilet) could mean "A cloth cover for a dressing-table (formerly often of rich material and workmanship); now usually called a toilet-cover," says the OED. A lady's toilet might also be the assemblage of powders and pomades and implements used at the dressing table, or the process of applying them, or even the table itself. Next toilet expanded to mean "dressing room," then to that room with any lavatory fixtures included, and finally to the porcelain throne.

But toilé doesn't come into the story, as far as I know. Yes, it's a word -- a French adjective, and an English noun for a kind of lacework -- but until Clorox adopted it as an adorable description of its pink toilet, it had nothing to do with plumbing.

I don't mean to get too heavy here; it's an ad, and "Le Toilé" is intended to be silly (the ad refers readers to the website odetothecommode.com, where there are probably no actual odes). But if I'd been a copywriter on the pink toilet ad, I think I would have argued for La Toilette instead of Le Toilé. Why invent language facts when the truth would serve just as well?

But, but, but ...

2011-09-18T19:55:00.000-04:00

I didn't think I was confused about the different uses of but and though, but after reading Allan Metcalf's little lesson -- the latest installment in the new Lingua Franca blog -- I'm not so sure. My problem cropped up at this point:

Here’s the distinction: What follows But is the author’s main point. What follows though is a subordinate point.

(a) I would follow you anywhere in the world you’d care to go. But I don’t trust you.
(b) I would follow you anywhere in the world you’d care to go, though I don’t trust you.

Clear enough? In (a), the author won’t be following, because the distrust is too much. In (b), the author distrusts but is going to follow anyhow.

"Clear enough?" Absolutely not. I have no idea why Metcalf believes that in example (a), the "But" expresses sufficient distrust to negate the preceding avowal. He seems to read it as meaning "I would follow you if I trusted you," but for me, the sentiment is the same in both versions: I would follow you anywhere, but (or though) not blindly. But maybe this is one of those distinctions I didn't learn young enough; is it one most people recognize?

The language war on terror(ism)

2011-09-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

Over at Literal-Minded, Neal Whitman explains that he was once among those who thought the phrase “war on terror” was a product of the 9/11 attacks, and who also disapproved of the phrase. Having now researched it, he shows clearly enough that “war on terror” was already current (if not nearly so widespread) decades earlier -- so we can't blame George Bush for it.

The first I heard of any discomfort with the usage was a query from a Globe reader back in 2003. He'd been hearing newscasters use "war on terror" interchangeably with "war on terrorism," and he wondered if that was OK. I answered, briefly, in my column:

They're an odd pair, terror and terrorism -- does any other ism mean the same thing as its root word? Stalin and Stalinism can't change places in a sentence, nor can sex and sexism, cube and Cubism. Why, then, can terror also mean terrorism?

Well, it's those pesky French again. In English, terror was just a word for dreadful fear till the French Revolution brought the bloody Reign of Terror in 1793. By 1801 "reign of terror" was recorded in English, and terror was no longer just personal fear but political brutality.

That capital-T Terror gave birth to terrorisme, a coinage ratified by the French Academy in 1798 and adopted into English the same year. But terror, thanks to the guillotine, was already in use as an abstract noun that meant intimidation by violence, threatened or actual.

I didn’t bother to quote the OED then, but now that I have room for it, here’s the entry (under terror):

4. reign of terror, a state of things in which the general community live in dread of death or outrage; esp. (with capital initials) French Hist. the period of the First Revolution from about March 1793 to July 1794, called also the Terror, the Red Terror, when the ruling faction remorselessly shed the blood of persons of both sexes and of all ages and conditions whom they regarded as obnoxious. Hence, without article or pl., the use of organized intimidation, terrorism.

It wasn't till a year later, in spring 2004, that Jon Stewart put the anti-terror argument into wider circulation, saying (not ad lib, but in a graduation speech), "We declared war on terror -- it's not even a noun, so, good luck.” This prompted Geoff Pullum to conjecture that Stewart was relying on his grade-school notion of a noun as "a person, place, or thing," which was sadly deficient:

The way to tell whether a word is a noun in English is to ask questions like: Does it have a plural form (the terrors of childhood)? Does it have a genitive form (terror's effects)? Does it occur with the articles the and a (the terror)? Can you use it as the main or only word in the subject of a clause (Terror rooted me to the spot), or the object of a preposition (war on terror)? And so on. These are grammatical questions. Syntactic and morphological questions. Not semantic ones.

I can see how "war on terror" might have the sound of headline-writer's shorthand, and its economy probably has helped it proliferate; maybe that's why editor Bill Walsh, of Blogslot, objected to the phrase, claiming only "war on terrorism" was accurate. But terror has denoted a strategy (as well as an emotion) for two centuries, and it would probably take a heap of editorial scorn to stop it now.

What the cover-up covered up

2011-09-05T23:39:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's news reports of the death of Matthew Stuart, brother of the locally notorious Charles Stuart, tended to share a minor but interesting inaccuracy.

In 1989, Charles Stuart killed his pregnant wife on the way home from a childbirth class, blamed a (nonexistent) black assailant, and then, when his story fell apart, jumped off a bridge to his death before he could be arrested. But here's how the Globe (and a number of other news sources) described Matthew Stuart's role:

Matthew Stuart spent nearly three years in jail after pleading guilty to helping cover up the killing of Carole DiMaiti Stuart. He said he helped hide the gun believed to have been used by his brother, Charles Stuart, who blamed the crime on a black man.

Or:

Cambridge police have confirmed the death of Matthew Stuart, who helped his brother cover up the fatal shooting of his brother’s pregnant wife in 1989.

But of course Matthew and Charles didn't cover up the killing; it was reported instantly, by Charles Stuart himself, in a 911 call. They conspired and lied, but what they "covered up" was the evidence, not the shooting.

Journalism's rules account for some of the awkwardness in phrasing. We can’t call it "murder" or call Charles Stuart the killer, since he wasn’t charged and didn’t confess. So what’s the most economical edit that makes the report accurate? Is there a neater solution than "pleaded guilty to helping conceal evidence about the killing"?

That's so cliche(d)!

2011-09-01T18:36:00.000-04:00

Commenting on my "Cake or death?" post, Julia asked about my use of "so cliched":

I once used the word "cliched" in a college term paper. My prof drew a big red line through it and wrote "no such word!" next to it. ... Now it jumps off the page at me when someone uses it as you did in your post. Has the OED accepted it in the staggeringly long span I've been out of college?

It has, Julia -- not that you need the OED's approval to use a word (and to call your prof arrogant and clueless). In 1989, just a few years after your college days, the Second Edition included the the adjective use of "cliched," citing a 1928 book by Alec Waugh (brother of Evelyn): "There is no adjective but the cliché'd deafening that can fittingly describe the tornado of noise that had welcomed the recitation."

I don't know that anyone other than your teacher ever objected to cliched. But the adjective has stirred up some controversy in its more recent, Frenchy form: "That's so cliche!" I wrote about the innovation in 2003, after a Globe reader complained about it; at the time, I said that

adjectival cliche is moving up fast. In expressions where there's a clear choice between cliche and cliched, the adjective is cliche about half the time. In most of those cases, it sneaks in by way of quotations - "It sounds cliche, but he really believed it'' (Miami Herald), or "I was brought up to love everybody, as cliche as that may sound'' (People magazine).* But it's not all spoken-word sloppiness: In the earliest citation I could find, a 1979 Washington Post review of the miniseries "Studs Lonigan,'' the writer himself says of father-son conflict, "It is an old cycle, so cliche it hurts.''

The OED was on to adjectival cliche in 1989, too, quoting the BBC's weekly, The Listener, from 1959: "The kind of fond reminiscence which comes rather too near the cliché view of human situations."

I have no idea what data I was relying on in my 2003 frequency estimate, but here's what Google Ngram Viewer has to say about so cliche vs. so cliched:

By now, I think, "so cliche" seems normal to a lot of younger speakers and writers. And I have a soft spot for it myself, as I confessed in that 2003 column, because it's such a natural choice:

Though cliche came into English as a noun, it retains its French form -- and that form is a past participle, perfectly happy to be used as an adjective. English is full of such French words, some used as nouns (divorcee, souffle, negligee), others as adjectives (passe, flambe).

Even a stickler, it seems to me, might find it in his or her heart to approve so cliche.

* There's no telling whether the source actually said "cliched" or "cliche," of course, but these instances show that the reporter and editor(s) all accepted so cliche as OK.

Dipr need a change?

2011-08-31T20:04:00.000-04:00

Over at Unclutterer, it’s Unitasker Wednesday, the day to make fun of a “helpful” device that has only one (limited) purpose – aside from its main function, that is, of lightening your wallet a bit. Today’s pick, the Dipr, certainly qualifies; it’s a scary-looking hook designed to hold an Oreo (or other sandwich cookie) while you dip it into your glass of milk.

But the Dipr may have another problem besides superfluity: Its name. When I read “The dipr” in the post’s headline -- lowercased, as in the logo* -- I was expecting something completely different: A new twist on, of course, the diaper.

None of the commenters had that reaction, though, so maybe it’s just my Midwestern accent leading me astray; where I come from, diaper is often two syllables, rhyming with (appropriately enough) wiper.

*In my copyediting days, I opposed the common editorial impulse to approximate logo styles in print. You aren't required to cap IKEA or put a star (or asterisk) in Macy*s. As Bill Walsh put it in "The Elephants of Style," there was a time when "editors and even writers knew that logos are logos and English is English. 'You want all caps?' an ink-stained wretch with a green eyeshade might have asked. 'Go buy an ad!'"

Cake or death?

2011-08-24T16:32:00.000-04:00

Well, OK, it was really ice cream and death on the billboard I recently spotted along I-90 in western Pennsylvania, but how could I pass up an Eddie Izzard allusion? Anyway, the ad -- for a local ice cream shop -- promised this:

The ice cream probably is good (they can afford a billboard!), and in most circumstances, "to die for" is cliched enough that its literal sense is almost invisible. But to a potential customer who's speeding along the interstate at 65 or better -- to this one, anyway -- "to die for" isn't the most appealing pitch.

This reminded me of another encounter with unappetizing food language, earlier this year: At a San Francisco restaurant, one of the main course offerings was "Terrorized New York steak." Not even our local hosts could tell us what it meant; we wondered if it was some kind of invention based on "terroir," but that seemed unlikely at a restaurant that had carefully labeled one menu category with the plural form "Bruschette."

So what was it? The waiter explained that the animal itself was not terrorized (at least not by the chef); it was the steak that was handled roughly, first slathered with a strong blend of peppers and herbs, then charred on a hot grill. The violent language seemed incongruous in that health-minded, easygoing city, but apparently the recipe has been around for a while. Maybe nobody minds so long as they reserve the terror treatment for New York steaks.

And speaking of terror, how about that Vermont Country Store catalog? I've gotten used to the idea that the homey purveyor of old-time staples -- like other catalogs aimed at aging Americans -- is selling sex aids along with the bunion pads and caftans. But when you sell a "personal massager," for whatever part of the anatomy, it pays to be sensitive about language. You probably shouldn't keep insisting, for example, that the product boasts "pinpoint accuracy." (Ouch.)

A last Word

2011-08-13T12:38:00.000-04:00

I was holding off linking to my final Word column till the Boston Globe web team added hyperlinks, which has now happened. So I got scooped on my own farewell by John McIntyre (thanks for the kind words, John!)

Some of you knew already that I was thinking this 14th-anniversary month might be a good time to exit the print scene. I had cut back to alternate weeks back in late 2009, when Erin McKean joined me to coauthor the column. And I missed quite a few weeks this summer; I've spent much of it in my Ohio hometown, first to see my ailing mom, then -- after she died in June -- to hang around the ancestral home basking in her (still palpable, still comforting) presence, and to help my brothers and sisters sort things out.

I'm not at all bored with (or bored of) the language beat, just with cranking out 800-word columns, which (however new the material -- and it's not always new enough) tend to be structurally repetitious. (I can't imagine how Bill Safire did it for 30 years.) So I hope I'll be blogging more consistently, once we settle into the new normal.

As for the column, Erin will keep contributing, but there's no word yet on who or what will fill the alternate weeks I've just vacated. Send nominees to the Ideas section editor, Steve Heuser, at sheuser@globe.com; maybe he'll break down and confess that he's already signed my successor.

Sorry about the excess of parentheses here. See y'all soon!

That '70s sew

2011-07-30T00:10:00.000-04:00

This Simplicity sewing publication from 1973 – a thrift-store treasure discovered by my sister – is a hoot, especially for those of us old enough to remember boyfriends in suede bell-bottoms. But how would you interpret its title?

At first glance, I took it to be a manual for males: "Sewing [Instructions] for Men and Boys." A second later, I thought, no, it’s from the ’70s – it must be “Sewing [Clothes] For Men and Boys [to Wear]."

So I was impressed to find, on reading the introduction, that Simplicity was aware of – indeed, was embracing, tentatively – the ambiguity of its title. "If you’re a woman sewing for the men in the family, or if you’re a man making it on your own, we've written this book for you," it assured readers.

But the women were getting jobs instead of sewing for the men in the family, their daughters were demanding admission to shop class instead of Home Ec., and that optimistic pun, "making it on your own," never really applied to sartorial ambition. In the end, we achieved equality by outsourcing our belt loops and buttonholes (and our hand-crafted bookends, too). We've come a long way, baby ...

Peeving is not journalism

2011-07-28T14:11:00.000-04:00

There have been several excellent responses* to the BBC's dimwitted attack on words it (often wrongly) labeled as Americanisms. But as a journalist, I especially enjoyed Gabe Doyle's critique (at Motivated Grammar) of the piece, including this summary:

I’ve been a bit preachy about journalistic integrity of late, but I have to say it once more. Journalism should never consist solely of asking people their opinions and then reporting it. Repeating lies (or mistakes) that are obviously lies (or mistakes) without noting that they do not fit with the truth is not journalism, or at least isn’t what journalism is supposed to be. Journalists are supposed to make truth clearer, not obscure it further behind popular opinion.

Such offhand promotion of misinformation can happen anywhere, but I've always been especially peeved by the publication of letters to the editor that miscorrect a previously published assertion -- or letters that leave readers with no clue who was right. This offense seems to be less common than it once was, or maybe I'm just mellowing with age.

*Doyle's post links to several, if you haven't seen them yet.

Anachronistic yuks

2011-07-26T20:22:00.000-04:00

I'm listening to "Radio Boston," a local show on public radio, do a segment about Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed the string of parks and waterways we call the Emerald Necklace. Nice, until the three chatters began to chuckle about Olmsted's original name for the project: the Jeweled Girdle. "Racy," one of them called it.

Not really. For the first 900 years of its recorded history, girdle meant simply "A belt worn round the waist to secure or confine the garments; also employed as a means of carrying light articles, esp. a weapon or purse," says the OED. The tie around Brother Cadfael's robe, the belt on which the household keys are carried, a decorative sash -- all have been called girdles.

But the OED's first citation for girdle meaning a kind of elasticized corset worn below the waist dates only to 1925. Since the Emerald Necklace project began in 1878, and Olmsted died in 1903, it seems very unlikely that he was acquainted with the girdle as an uncomfortable specimen of what we now call "shapewear." As for "racy," well, I'm guessing the guy who offered that opinion was thinking of a garter belt, an obsolete item (practically speaking) but one still considered sexy in some circles.

"25 Manners Kids Should Know"

2011-07-06T13:57:00.000-04:00

When this tease popped up on a boston.com website, I thought, uh-oh, the headline writer goofed: 25 Manners Kids Should Know, it read.

But the usage was intentional, it turned out. The story -- at Parents.com -- did indeed treat manners as a countable plural: "If you reinforce these 25 must-do manners, you'll raise a polite, kind, well-liked child." And yes, the 25 were enumerated singular by singular: "Manner #17: If you bump into somebody, immediately say 'Excuse me.'" "Manner #25: Don't reach for things at the table; ask to have them passed."

According to the OED, manners in this sense -- "A person's social behaviour or habits, judged according to the degree of politeness or the degree of conformity to accepted standards" -- was once also used as a singular. But even then, it seems to have been a mass noun, not a countable: "Thoughe thou do me good, it is not good maner to abrayde me therof" (1530).

I like to think I'm adaptable, languagewise; I'm fine with to parent and to nap (transitive: to put a baby down for a nap) and to verse (to play versus: "We're versing the Tigers"). But referring to picking one's nose or slurping one's soup as "a bad manner" -- that reminds me of the faraway pen pal who once wrote me, "I have a new for you." It may take me a while to get used to "he has five bad manners."

Can "argue that" mean "argue against"?

2011-06-22T13:45:00.000-04:00

As a fairly heavy user of the em dash, I was please to see Erin Brenner 's defense of it at Visual Thesaurus (responding to a rather heavy-handed Slate article that called for abolishing the punctuation mark entirely).

But Brenner herself used one construction I think is odd, and relatively new (decades old, that is, rather than centuries). Yes, that may be the Recency Illusion at work. But I suspect her usage is more acceptable to younger speakers of English. The construction in question:

I won't argue that writers sometimes overuse the em dash.

What Brenner means is (in my dialect), "I won't dispute that writers sometimes overuse the em dash." It's the Slate writer who "argues that writers [do] sometimes overuse the em dash"; Brenner is countering that argument. And for me, "to argue that" means only "to state the case for" something -- not to argue against it. The OED seems to agree, since there's no definition or example of "argue that" meaning "dispute that" or "argue against the notion that."

Judging from a quick look at Google News, it looks as if "argue that" for "dispute that" generally appears in the negative form -- "I certainly would not argue that providing the opportunity for someone to take time off if they're not feeling well is a good idea," for instance. So maybe the people who use it assume that the not is enough to reverse the sense of "argue that." Not for me! "She argues that the em dash is overused" means "she makes a case for its being overused"; but "she doesn't argue that the em dash is overused" means she doesn't make a case for its being overused -- not that she doesn't dispute the claim of overuse.

The usage isn't all that common in edited prose, apparently, and I can't find any stylebook advice or commentary on the issue; anyone else?

That's what not to write

2011-06-13T17:44:00.000-04:00

Back in January, fev at Headsup: The Blog had a funny post about the "that's what" ledes favored by a certain Detroit Free Press writer. Ledes like:

Heroin for grandma?

That's what an international airline passenger told federal agents in Detroit this week after getting busted trying to sneak $50,000 worth of heroin into the country.

He had a pretty funny collection, but today, reading the paper from my Ohio hometown, I found one (on the front page, no less) that I think tops them all:

Severe diarrhea.

That's what Melissa Campbell's 15-month-old son, Mason Holden, had from Wednesday night until about 4 p.m. Saturday.*

Yes, it really is a news story: The pharmacist mixed the toddler's antibiotic solution at twice the specified strength. The store realized its mistake, according to the report, and phoned the mother later that day, so no harm was done. (And diarrhea is a side effect of the medicine in any case.)

But it's hard to think of a news story of any description (anywhere but The Onion) that would be well served by the lede "Severe diarrhea."

*If that's not enough information for you, just keep reading. "I'm changing him every 30 minutes," the mother says later.

Indefensible

2011-05-27T20:58:00.000-04:00

Even after a week of hearing Netanyahu’s claim that Israel’s 1967 borders are “indefensible,” I’m not quite used to hearing the word in its literal meaning – “Incapable of being defended by force of arms” (OED).

I've surely encountered the literal use before, but the figurative sense of indefensible looms much, much larger in my lexicon. And because the figurative use is so pejorative – not just “incapable of being defended in argument” but “unjustifiable, inexcusable” – I have to make a tiny but conscious adjustment to hear the word as Netanyahu intended it.

Of course, given our different geopolitical situations, it could well be that the literal definition of indefensible is as dominant in Netanyahu's world as the figurative sense is in mine.

I have no idea whether the Hebrew word has the same figurative use as the English one; can somebody enlighten me?

Hapless sign, or hapless honker?

2011-05-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

In today's After Deadline blog, NYT usage monitor Philip Corbett corrects this sentence:

The minimum fine is $350, higher if one of those hapless "DON’T HONK" signs are nearby.

Corbett says: "Make it 'if one … is nearby.'"

Fine -- but I have a different problem here: Can a sign be "hapless"? That is, "destitute of 'hap' or good fortune; unfortunate, unlucky, luckless" (OED)? Surely it's the driver who's unlucky; it would also be OK to say "if, unluckily, one of those DON'T HONK signs is nearby."

I don't mean that "hapless" can never be applied to things; "work performed on the hapless London Plane trees" is fine, since the trees are indeed having an unlucky streak. But (in my idiom, anyway) the New York sign isn't itself hapless just because its location is unlucky for some cabdriver.

Fish and chips served AP style

2011-05-23T18:35:00.000-04:00

My column in yesterday's Globe was about the AP Stylebook's new food section; reading it took me back to my days editing the food section, back when it had three zones' worth of advertising. (That was then ...) Food, I see, remains a maddening area for copy editors. For instance, AP has Monterey Jack but lowercase pepper jack -- same cheese, same Jack, whoever he was, but one is capped and one is not.

The "French" list was odd, too: French bread, French toast, French dressing, but french fries, lowercase -- "because it refers to the style of cut, not the nation." Really? I know of French cut (or frenched) green beans, those lengthwise slivers, but I've never heard of french cut (or frenched) potatoes, up or down. (And where does the style of cut come from, if not "the nation"?)

Also, perhaps because I've never used AP style on the job, I was surprised when definitions didn't accurately reflect the entry word's part of speech: alfresco is called "a meal eaten outdoors," for instance, and dredge (a verb!) is "a cooking technique in which food is lightly coated with flour." Has this always been AP stylebook style?

Finally, yet more evidence that a stylebook (or dictionary) can't do it all. The photo above ran with my column, with the competing fil(l)et spellings differentiated in one common way (though not the way AP now does it). That "fillet" o' fish fits the official definition -- "a boneless cut" -- just fine, as far as it goes. But at the fishmonger's and on the menu, that piece of fish is not a fillet; the cross-section serving is commonly known as a steak.

Left hand, meet right hand

2011-05-16T13:57:00.000-04:00

From the preview for the (subscription only) May issue of The Vocabula Review, emphasis added:

Perhaps nothing in the fetid grammatical atmosphere we are all breathing is more disturbing than the frequent presence of so-called singular they. This should be seen as plain error but is tolerated by some … ("Another Plea for Avoidance of 'Singular They,'" by Robert Hollander)

The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge -- a first-rate, if underappreciated writer -- believed success could be had only in second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister. First-rate pursuits involved "trying to understand what life is about" and therefore must inevitably result in a sense of failure. Thus could a Napoleon or a Roosevelt feel themselves successful, but a Socrates, never. (“Too Wretched for Words,” by Christopher Orlet)

"No word for adultery"

2011-05-10T15:36:00.000-04:00

In the current (May 16) New Yorker, a review of Sarah Vowell's "Unfamiliar Fishes" describes early missionaries to Hawaii as

... wan New Englanders confronted with a people whose language lacked a word for adultery. (Their approximation: "Mischievous mating.")

The "no word for adultery" is Vowell's conceit, apparently, and I haven't tried to check its accuracy. But what immediately struck me is that "mischievous mating" is about a million times more descriptive than "adultery." How did a word like that come to mean "illicit sex with a married person?"

(Now I'll go look it up.)

Where is pointer, where is pointer?

2011-05-04T15:02:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know you've probably moved on from royal-wedding-land, but I didn't watch it, so I'm catching up slowly, via print. Anyway, I was checking the text of the vows the other day when I ran across this very odd report:

Prince William then slipped the ring on the bride's index finger.*

Not very traditional, and also not true, judging by this AP photo:

I don't know anything about the source, International Business Times, except what I see on the website, but it doesn't seem to have any obvious problems with standard English. But I don't think I've ever seen "index finger" substituted for "ring finger" before. Anyone else?

* I hope you weren't expecting me to complain about "on" for "onto."

Annals of prescriptivism: Remit

2011-04-30T23:45:00.003-04:00

I’ve lately turned to crosswords as an insomnia remedy, so at last I’m getting familiar with the standard puzzle lexicon (ASTA, NOLO, LYE, SLOE, etc.). I wouldn’t have guessed REMIT would be on the list, but I’ve seen it twice this month in the NYT puzzle, both times with the same "send a payment" sense as a clue.

Remit caught my eye because, thanks to Ambrose Bierce, I know of its brief career as a usage shibboleth. For a few decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the “send a check” sense of the verb was roundly disparaged by American usage mavens. Here is Richard Grant White, who knew how to rant, writing in “Words and Their Uses,” 1870:

Remit. — Why should this word be thrust continually into the place of send? In its proper sense, to send back, and hence to relax, to relinquish, to surrender, to forgive, it is a useful and respectable word; but why one man should say to another, I will remit you the money, instead of, I will send you the money, it would be difficult to say, did we not so frequently see the propensity of people for a big word of which they do not know the meaning exactly, in preference to a small one that they have understood since childhood.

J. H. Long, “Slips of Tongue and Pen,” 1889:

Do not use remit for send. Remit means to send back, to relax, to surrender, to forgive. "To send a remittance," is still worse.

Albert Newton Raub, “Helps in the Use of Good English,” 1897:

Remit for send. — The word remit means to "send again," or "to send back," and there seems to be no good reason why it should be used for the word send. If one were to comply literally with the request to remit when a bill is sent, he would send the bill back instead of paying it. The word has, however, found a place in commercial transactions from which it could be dislodged with difficulty.

Ambrose Bierce, “Write It Right,” 1909:

Remit for Send. "On receiving your bill I will remit the money." Remit does not mean that; it means give back, yield up, relinquish, etc. It means, also, to cancel, as in the phrase, the remission of sins.

You’ve got the usual objections here: The imputation that people who use the word are trying to sound fancy; the assertion that remit “doesn’t mean” what people are using it to mean; the lament that it’s business jargon, polluting the pure stream of noncommercial English.

But the outbreak of peeving didn't spread far. Robert Palfrey Utter, in “Every-Day Words and Their Uses” (1916), administered a dose of reality:

The facts do not bear out the assertion that "remit should not be used in place of send; remit means to send back." Remit does not mean send back except in the phrases now rare, remit to prison, remit to custody. It does not mean send in ordinary senses, but has the special meaning to send money or valuables, used either with direct and indirect objects, as, "Remit me a hundred dollars," or absolutely, as, "He was compelled to remit," "Please remit."

How right he was: The OED has remit meaning “To send or transfer (something, esp. money) to a person or place” dated to 1545-44, when it appeared in the Statutes of the Realm in the reign of Henry VIII, and in continuous use ever since. But quotes from Johnson, Jefferson, and Macaulay would not, perhaps, have persuaded the most committed peevologists; remit probably survived not because of its pedigree but because (as Raub noted) it had made itself useful as a term of commerce.

Weeding, weaning, winnowing

2011-04-26T12:49:00.000-04:00

In my Globe column Sunday, I looked at the spreading use of wean out in cases where I would have expected weed out. And I briefly mentioned the short-lived controversy over whether weaned on was proper English -- certain sticklers having claimed you could be weaned from mother’s milk, but not weaned on anything.

Too briefly, said reader Russ Greene, who wondered how I could have omitted the famous quip attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, that Calvin Coolidge looked as if he’d been “weaned on a pickle."

I have no excuse; I just didn't think of it. It's a great line, even though, as Greene noted, Longworth did not claim credit for the witticism; she heard it at her doctor’s office, as she recounts in her 1933 memoir, “Crowded Hours”:

When I came in he was grinning with amusement and said, “Mrs. Longworth, the patient who has just left said something that I am sure will make you laugh. We were discussing the President, and he remarked, ‘Though I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Coolidge, I do wish he did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.’” Of course I shouted with pleasure and told every one, always carefully giving credit to the unnamed originator, but in a very short time it was attributed to me.*

In other wean/weed commentary, a couple of readers have suggested that wean out (in the sense “weed out”) could be short for winnow out, which would make more sense semantically. For some reason that doesn't sound plausible to me – because winnow doesn’t sound all that much like wean? Because winnow is less common in spoken English? But I don't know enough to evaluate the idea; maybe a Real Linguist will give us some help in the comments.

*"Crowded Hours" is available at Google Books, but I first found Longworth's account in Ralph Keyes's invaluable book, "The Quote Verifier." Barry Popik's etymology website, The Big Apple, quotes two reports from 1924 that attribute the witticism to Longworth.

Word: Isinglass

2011-04-12T17:26:00.001-04:00

In my last post (on some British vocabulary) I mentioned blancmange, giving the first part of the definition from the (century-old) Century Dictionary. It’s worth quoting in full:

Blancmange: In cookery, a name of different preparations of the consistency of jelly, variously composed of dissolved isinglass, arrowroot, corn-starch, etc., with milk and flavoring substances. It is frequently made from a marine alga, Chondrus crispus, called Irish moss, which is common on the coasts of Europe and North America. The blancmanger mentioned by Chaucer in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 1. 387, was apparently a compound made of capon minced with flour, sugar, and cream.

One of the commenters, Gil, didn’t see how the isinglass he knew could be edible:

I dunno where that cockamamie reference book got isinglass and such. Who today knows what isinglass is? I have seen some as a kid -- it's a transparent sort of quartz that can be split into thin sheets (and used for windows on the surrey with the fringe on top). … I don't think the FDA would approve of an isinglass pudding nowadays.

Like Gil, I knew the isinglass that was translucent (and a feature of the pretty little surrey in the song from “Oklahoma!”). But I also vaguely knew it was an animal product. So what is it really?

It’s both. The original isinglass (first OED cite 1545) is "a firm whitish semitransparent substance (being a comparatively pure form of gelatin) obtained from the sounds or air-bladders of some fresh-water fishes, esp. the sturgeon; used in cookery for making jellies, etc., also for clarifying liquors, in the manufacture of glue, and for other purposes." The word may be “a corruption or imperfect imitation of an obsolete Dutch huisenblas (Kilian huysenblase, huysblas), German hausenblase isinglass, lit. ‘sturgeon's bladder.’”

Two centuries later, the second sense of isinglass appears: “A name given to mica, from its resembling in appearance some kinds of isinglass.”

Whether this isinglass could be used in curtains that would "roll right down, in case there's a change in the weather" is still being debated. Luckily for me (and you), Joel Segal, a bookseller in England, looked into the matter quite thoroughly in January at his blog. The fish-based isinglass, he reports, "was a versatile and expensive commercial product, used as a gum, a food gelling agent, as the sticking medium for surgical plasters, as stiffener for cloth, as a sealant for preserving eggs, and for making mock pearls."

The other isinglass, he says, is

the transparent variety -- otherwise called muscovite -- of the mineral mica. In some parts of world, notably Russia (hence the name muscovite -- i.e. pertaining to Moscow), it's found in large enough sheets to make small window panes, so it was historically used for applications where tough, slightly flexible, heat-resistant, transparent material was needed, such as furnace or lantern windows.

But in actual usage, he finds, the two substances -- both now unfamiliar -- have often been conflated or confused. Thanks for all your research, Joel!

Fish slice, blancmange, pong: How BrE is it?

2011-04-07T17:10:00.000-04:00

I picked up the paperback of “So Much for That,” Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, for a recent plane ride, and I found that along with a good story, it offered readers a little Separated by a Common Language game to play.

Shriver is American-born but has lived abroad a lot, and in London since 1999. This novel, unlike her last one, is set in New York, with American characters. The vocabulary, however, has some locutions that sounded more Brit than Yank to me.

Most striking is the name of a hand-forged kitchen utensil – a work of art that’s important in the book – that is called, from start to finish, a fish slice. I’d never heard the term – even during a stint as a food section copy editor – but of course it was easy to ask Mr. Google, who said it was essentially a spatula.

The other suspicious words were all ones I knew, but thought of as more or less distinctly British. Do you -- whatever your vantage point -- share that impression? Or am I imagining things? Here are the terms that caught my eye (in context), with definitions following:

“Freeloaders and Fall Guys. Saps and Spongers. Slaves and Skivers” (p. 76). Skiver: One who avoids work; a shirker; a truant. (OED).

“A sip of pineapple juice, the Tuesday blancmange with strawberry sauce …” (p 134). Blancmange: In cookery, a name of different preparations of the consistency of jelly, variously composed of dissolved isinglass, arrowroot, corn-starch, etc., with milk and flavoring substances. (Century Dictionary, at Wordnik.com)

“They just wanted to collect their whacking fees for bedside phones” (p. 141). Whacking: Very large; huge. (American Heritage, via Wordnik)

“Maybe the best in me, to me, is hateful, vindictive, and ill-wishing” (p. 147). Ill-wish: To bring misfortune upon, or bewitch, by wishing evil, according to a popular belief in some rural districts. (OED) I’ve mentioned this before, and Lynneguist offered some support (see the comments) for my impression that it was mostly BrE.

“Flicka was deliberately winding her mother up, pushing her to cross a line” (p. 175). Wind up: to annoy, to provoke deliberately (colloq.). (OED)

“He was largely unaware of the pong of paper mills that fugged his hometown” (p. 203). Pong: A strong smell, usually unpleasant; a stink. (OED)

(I wondered about fug, too, but since I knew the noun – “A heavy, stale atmosphere, especially the musty air of an overcrowded or poorly ventilated room” (AHD) – I didn't think I'd have noticed the verb if I hadn't been looking for oddities. But it may be more frequent in BrE.)

Notes, dissents, and further elaborations welcome.

OMG, OED: More cluelessness on parade

2011-03-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

My blog colleagues have already issued warnings to the ill-informed complainers -- like WaPo blogger Alexandra Petri -- who are dismayed by the OED’s inclusion of OMG, LOL, and the like in the latest revision. Said Brian White: “PLEASE STOP WHINING.” Robert Lane Greene: “So the OED included some words people use. Nothing to see here.” John McIntyre: "You may be astonished that a newspaper would publish a humorous essay that is not funny, expressing opinion that is not informed, but I’m concerned with something broader than that feeble effort. Why is it that people do not understand what dictionaries are for?”

But not everyone is getting the message. Writing today at CTPost.com about Chris Brown’s apology for his “Good Morning America” antics, Charles Walsh delivers another dope slap to the OED -- but he kindly attaches a boomerang to it, ensuring the dope slap ends up where it belongs.

“Brown was disappointed that the GMA host did not adhere to the 'talking points sheet' he had his people send over that was all 'positivity,'" writes Walsh.

He did not apologize for inventing the word positivity, which no doubt will be included in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. (Prediction: next spring the OED staff will publicly apologize for adding the hideous texting shorthand LOL and OMG to their august compendium of wordage this week.)

Well, you all know what comes next. The OED’s first cite for positivity (“The quality, character, or fact of being positive (in various senses); positiveness”) dates to 1659. Here’s Isaac Watts in 1741: “Courage and Positivity are never more necessary than on such an Occasion.” And Fraser’s Magazine in 1842: “The most positive man I ever met with … There is positivity in his dark face, large eyebrows, stern features.” And so on, till the present day. But who wants 350 years' worth of facts when there's a good rant just begging to be ranted?

Very small things considered

2011-03-26T16:22:00.000-04:00

As I was researching tomorrow's Boston Globe column -- about the AP's switch from e-mail to email, hyphenation, and house style -- I ran across one of my favorite old pet peeves. (Dating from my days as an actual editor, when I allowed myself a larger collection of pet peeves.) There at AP's online "Ask the Editor" forum* was what I think of as some bad hyphenation advice:

Q. Which way should I hyphenate the following: "a three- to five-year repayment plan" or "a three-to-five-year replayment plan"? – from Eagan, Minn. on Mon, Mar 21, 2011

A. The first is correct.

The editor is thinking of the construction sometimes called suspensive hyphen, in which a phrase like "the two-part and three-part inventions" is reduced to "the two- and three-part inventions." Or "a four-night or five-night hotel stay" becomes "a four- or five-night hotel stay."

Those suspensive hyphens (with word spaces following them) work when the numbers are treated as units. You can have a two-part invention or a three-part invention, but not one in between. Same thing with the hotel stay (as billed by the hotel): There's no four-and-a-half night visit.

But when the numbers express a continuous, inclusive range, and they're joined by to rather than and or or, shouldn't the hyphenation show that continuous relationship? That is:

A trip of four to five days = a four-to-five-day trip (not necessarily in units of one day).

A repayment plan that lasts somewhere between three and five years (maybe four years, maybe 42 months) = a three-to-five-year plan.

Kids between 3 and 5 years old = 3-to-5-year-old kids. (So you can have a group of 3-to-5-year-olds, or a group of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds.)

The Chicago Manual (15th ed.-- haven't seen the 16th) is with AP on this, making no distinction between "Chicago- or Milwaukee-bound passengers" and "five- to 10-minute intervals" (which I think should be "5-to-10-minute intervals," that is, intervals anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes.) In Chicago's online Q&A, there's a hint that the editors have (sort of) noticed the difference:

Q. I’m seeing this particular use of hyphens: low-to-moderate income families. I don’t think it’s correct, but it’s becoming so common that I’m beginning to wonder if I missed something.

A. Chicago style would render this phrase as “low- to moderate-income families,” but this level of hyphen usage is subtle enough that it’s not surprising that you don’t find it consistently applied.

The question of continuous vs. discrete amounts in these expressions reminds me of the finer points of less vs. fewer; though fewer is usual for count nouns ("fewer than 10 entries), less is fine when the focus is on the overall quantity ("tell us, in 250 words or less," or "it will take three hours or less to finish"). This is hard for some people to see (especially if they've been taught that the fewer/less distinction is a firm one), and I can see that my hyphenation distinction might be "subtle enough" -- as Chicago says -- to elude notice. As an ex-editor, I can even say that it probably isn't worth the time it would take to enforce it. But it's probably too late for me to un-notice it.

*This cite will disappear from the publicly viewable Q&A queue sometime soon.

It's (Inter)National Grammar Day

2011-03-04T18:24:00.000-05:00

The highlight of National Grammar Day, John McIntyre’s “Grammarnoir” serial, goes international this year. The gripping finale is here; Parts 1, 2, and 3 are here, here, and here. A wider scope for the holiday is only fitting, says R.L.G., posting (from London) at Johnson: “After all, there are other countries with grammar, even ones that use English grammar.”

Other observances include Gabe Doyle’s annual mythbusting foray at Motivated Grammar, this year with defenses of anyways, center around, and dove (past tense of dive); Nancy Friedman's post, at Fritinancy, on companies that can’t tell lay from lie; and fev at Headsup: The Blog, advising you to ignore the whole thing, but at the very least, not to be “the goofbag who gives ‘grammar’ a bad name by conflating it with the sort of obsessive hyphenation that leads to [a headline like] ‘High-school graduation rates jump.’ Grammar wants you to be clear. It doesn't want you to be silly.’"

I wasn’t planning a party, but I couldn’t help joining one over at Visual Thesaurus, where a debate over inanimate whose -- as in “two diseases whose symptoms are nearly identical” -- has been bubbling since mid-February, when a pair of columnists declared this time-honored usage wrong, wrong, wrong. Well, they were wrong -- as they were in trying to limit that to nonhuman referents -- and fellow Visual Thesaurus contributors have been explaining why ever since. Linguist Neal Whitman is here, with tips on how to research such usage peeves, and Erin Brenner, editor of Copyediting.com, has a two-part rebuttal, here and here. (If those links are dead to you, it's time to subscribe to Visual Thesaurus!)

Brenner shows conclusively that inanimate whose is good English, and ends with H. W. Fowler’s delightful comment on the usage: "In the starch that stiffens English style, one of the most effective ingredients is the rule that whose shall refer only to persons; to ask a man to write flexible English, but forbid him whose 'as a relative pronoun of the inanimate', is like sending a soldier on 'active' service & insisting that his tunic collar shall be tight & high."

But are her readers persuaded by evidence? Of course not. Brenner asks whether they use inanimate whose in their own writing, and most of the commenters willfully ignore the point -- that it's a matter of taste. “It seems wrong no matter what historical precedent exists,” says one. "Rewrite!" urge several other holdouts. Finally I had to chime in with my own little rant:

Erin is using those dusty old facts [a 1382 Bible quote] to show that inanimate whose has been standard English for more than six centuries -- surely evidence in its defense.

And she isn't asking us readers if it's wrong; she has shown that it ISN'T wrong. She asked if we cared to use it ourselves. We are free to avoid it, or any other usage, but there are simply no factual grounds for calling it an error.

As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes, a few (by no means all) usage writers in the 18th and 19th centuries -- a peak time for inventing peeves -- decided to disapprove of it. This does not mean it was ever widely repudiated; I'm surprised Garner even rates it on his Language-Change Index, since its acceptability was never seriously in doubt.

Some more dusty old evidence from MWDEU:

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul" (Shakespeare)

"The fruit /Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste /Brought death into the world" (Milton)

I recommend reading actual literature instead of dodgy usage advice; you can't possibly hold onto the illusion that inanimate whose is wrong when you find it in all the books you love and respect. Can you?

That sounds crankier than I thought it would (as comments no doubt often do, once passions have cooled), but I guess it counts as my contribution to National Grammar Day. I hope to be in a jollier mood next year, but if the winter of 2012 is anything like this one, weatherwise, I may not show much improvement, temperwise.

News to me: "The verbatim"

2011-02-28T18:20:00.001-05:00

Last Friday a guest on NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," commenting on the faux-Koch-brother phone call to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, said he couldn't quote "the verbatim of the call."

The noun verbatim was new to me, but it was all over the Web, not to mention attested in the OED back to 1898 -- "A full or word-for-word report of a speech" -- with a quote from the Daily News (of London): "Crisp writer wanted, who can also do a verbatim."

But 1898 is peanuts, datewise. Google Books effortlessly antedates the noun verbatim to a 1728 edition of John Dunton's "The Athenian Oracle," itself a collection of pieces from Dunton's periodical The Athenian Mercury, published (so says Wikipedia) from 1691 to 1697. "If we take no notice" of a letter-writer's threat, says the Mercury author, "the Verbatim of the Letter is to be Printed (take their own pretty Phrase)."

Those italics are in the original, and I couldn't begin to guess whether verbatim is the part of the "pretty Phrase" the writer is mocking. But mocked or not, the usage is more than 300 years old (and there are plenty of examples from the intervening centuries, too). The Recency Illusion, spoiled again.

"On Language" R.I.P.

2011-02-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

So the New York Times Magazine has decided, a year and a half after William Safire's death (and 32 years after "On Language" began), that it doesn't want the language column anymore. Well, you never know what an editor will think is a good idea (I speak as a former member of that tribe), but Ben Zimmer's farewell column, here, is a cogent and graceful demonstration of why the sort of thing he does will still need doing for the next three decades and more. Luckily we can still read Ben's work at Visual Thesaurus and elsewhere, and the NYT Mag's loss is sure to be some other publication's gain.

Whence the Whoopie?

2011-02-16T10:57:00.000-05:00

Language mythbusters should be pleased by Monday's story in the Wall Street Journal on the fight between Maine and Pennsylvania over credit for inventing the "Whoopie Pie."

Traditionally, this kind of piece just retells the competing origin myths -- the more absurd the better -- and leaves it at that. Was it Amish moms who invented the dessert, inspiring kids to yell "Whoopie" when they opened their school lunchboxes? Or the owners of a bakery founded in 1925 in Lewiston, Maine -- whose records were unfortunately lost in a fire? Who knows?

But reporter Sumathi Reddy went the extra mile, interviewing Nancy Griffin, author of a 2010 book on the Whoopie Pie. She, in turn, had tracked down the earliest known Whoopies at the website of etymologist Barry Popik, who cites a 1931 ad for "Berwick whoopee pie" made in Roxbury, Mass., along with pretty much all that we know (so far) about the term "whoopie pie" (aka "whoopee pie").

And the name itself? "Because whoopie is a catchy name, food historians believe it must have been coined commercially," says the Journal. Author Griffin, however, thinks the name came from a familiar 1928 show tune:

"It is believed they really got their name from the Gus Kahn song" and a popular term used at the time to get around Hollywood censors, says Ms. Griffin. It was called: "Makin' Whoopee."

Annals of peevology: Shifting into a shift

2011-01-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman recently quizzed readers about one of Richard Grant White's most fascinating peeves -- his dislike of the construction "is being built." That's only one of the gems of peevology offered by White, a 19th-century fount (or font) of entertaining prescriptivism. One of my favorite entries comes from a section of "Words and Their Uses, Past and Present" (1870) that White labeled "SQUEAMISH CANT" -- a collection of euphemisms resorted to by "people so prurient that they prick up their ears and blush at any implied distinction of sex in language, even in the name of a garment." It begins with an attack on the word chemise:

How and why English women came to call their first under-garment a chemise, it is not easy to discover. For in the French language the word means no more or less than shirt, and its meaning is not changed or its sound improved by those who pronounce it shimmy ...

Of the two names shirt and smock, given at a remote period to this garment, the first was common, like chemise in French, to both sexes. ... Shirt came to be confined to the man's garment, and smock to the woman's, ... [but] by the large majority [smock] is now thought coarse — why, is past conjecture.

The place of smock was taken and held for a time by shift — a very poor word for the purpose, the name of the act of changing being applied to the garment changed. As smock followed shirt, so shift has followed smock; and women have returned to shirt again, merely giving it its French name.

White even describes what Steve Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill:

It is more than possible that the granddaughters of those who now use [chemise] with no more thought that it is indelicate than stocking, may shrink as they now do from smock or shift, and for the same reason, or, rather, with the same lack of reason.*

What got my attention, though, was that aside I put in bold: White's observation that shift, the undergarment, is derived from shift meaning "to change clothes." And though his etymologies are not always accurate, this one is: The OED shows shift meaning "to change clothing" in 1400; in the 16th century, the noun shift acquired the sense a change of clothes," or what we might call an outfit: "Of rayment he shall haue shiftes twentie" (c. 1570). And by 1601, we get shift meaning simply the undergarment -- the item of clothing most often changed, perhaps?

On the shifting succession of words for this "body-garment of linen, cotton, or the like," the OED concurs with White: "In the 17th c. smock began to be displaced by shift as a more ‘delicate’ expression; in the 19th c. the latter, from the same motive, gave place to chemise."

White claimed to hope that "good sense, simplicity, and real purity of thought should drive out the silly shame" that led people to use such euphemisms. But somehow I don't think Victoria's Secret was the kind of plain-spoken good sense he had in mind.

*I've broken White's text into several paragraphs for ease of reading.

"Making money": Good English or all-American?

2011-01-21T17:49:00.000-05:00

Fred Shapiro, the quote sleuth behind the Yale Book of Quotations, also contributes to the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times (a fact that ought to be blazoned abroad, in my view, but somehow is not). Anyway, he posted yesterday about the expression "make money," responding to a query about the assertion (in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged") that Americans had coined the phrase.

We didn't, of course, but language watchers in the 19th century made the same claim -- as an accusation, not a boast. "Making money," had it been American, would have been just the sort of crass commercial lingo Americans were thought to enjoy. In his 1871 book, "Americanisms," Maximilian Schele de Vere refuted the notion:

It is equally unjust to charge Americans with the invention of the phrase, to make money, much as they may be addicted to the practice. Dr. Johnson already rebuked Boswell sharply for using it, and said: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you should say, to get money."

In 1791, Johnson had lost that battle; as Shapiro notes, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase "to make money" back to 1457, and "it was probably not Americans who were using it in 1457." And MWDEU notes that Shakespeare and Jane Austen also used the expression, though even in the mid-20th century you could find word mavens expressing a faint distaste.

Shapiro also writes for the Yale Alumni Magazine, and this month's column covers familiar quotations that originated with (usually uncredited) women. "I will defend to the death your right to say it" isn't Voltaire's, "iron curtain" isn't Churchill's, "no time like the present" isn't an anonymous proverb -- and Shapiro can tell you where the bylines are buried.

The trouble with "trynewoed"

2011-01-16T00:33:00.000-05:00

For this week’s Globe column, I wrote about the revamped OED Online, which is celebrating its relaunch by opening its doors to all through Feb. 5. I had to go back to check the login instructions, and they were simple enough: For both username and password, enter trynewoed. Interesting word, I thought -- what could it mean?

Yes, it was a supremely geeky-moronic moment. I thought this was an Anglo-Saxon word – a compound that had some delightful ancient meaning related to language treasures. I had actually typed tryne into the OED search box before it dawned on me … right. Try new OED. Of course.

Since I'd already wandered so far off course, I went ahead and clicked "search," and I felt just a little bit less moronic when it turned out that yes, tryne did have a brief existence, centuries ago, as one of the spellings of treen “made of tree, wooden” (and also of the non-Old English-derived words train and trine). Woed was also in the OED, as a Middle English past tense of wade and also as one ME spelling of the obsolete word wood meaning “nuts.” So trynewoed MIGHT have meant “tree crazy" or "wood mad." It just didn't.

My dyslexic episode has a silver lining, though: It reminded me of Wishydig, a language blog I haven't heard from in a while. As blogger Michael Covarrubias explained in a 2007 post, the name really is (not just in my delusions) Old English. But like my fictional trynewoed, it can be divided more than one way:

Wishydig is an Old English compound word meaning "wise thinking." The first word in the compound, wis, is clear. The second word, hydig, is a variant form of hygdig (adjective form of hygd, mind, thought) meaning heedful, careful, prudent.

Ever since I read that, I've been trying unable to decide whether to (mentally) pronounce the word as wis-hydig or as wishy-dig -- and not succeeding. Thanks a lot, Michael -- if only I could hope that trynewoed would torment you back!

Annals of overuse: "crank"

2011-01-02T12:43:00.000-05:00

In researching today's Globe column, on the history of banished words, I learned that crank was among the words labeled "overworked" as long as a century ago. The Baltimore Sun article making the accusation -- reprinted in the New York Times (where I found it) in 1896 -- included this etymological discussion of crank:

That much overworked word “crank” gained universal vogue in connection with Guiteau’s assassination of President Garfield, but it was long before that applied by the late Don Piatt, who claimed to be its inventor, to Horace Greeley –- the purpose of it being to liken the famous editor to the crank of a hand organ,which is forever grinding out the same old tunes. The word, as we have now come to apply it, means much more and worse; it implies a condition of mind verging upon insanity, and this has given rise to the erroneous notion that it has its origin in the German word “krank.”

The hand organ association (allegedly) proposed by Don (or Donn) Piatt, a Civil War veteran and journalist, apparently didn't become part of the word's official history. The OED says the colloquial crank -- "a person with a mental twist ... esp. one who is enthusiastically possessed by a particular crotchet or hobby; an eccentric, a monomaniac" -- dates to 1833: "Uncle Sam's ‘Old Mother Bank’ Is managed by a foreign crank." Since Piatt was born in 1819, he would probably have known this use of crank before he came up with the organ-grinding metaphor.

And though our crank is not derived from German krank, the words do share an ancestry. Crank comes from a rare Old English verb, says the OED, meaning "to fall in battle, of which the primitive meaning appears to have been ‘to draw oneself together in a bent form, to contract oneself stiffly, curl up.’ There are "numerous derivatives" in various languages: "English crank belongs to the literal sense-group, with the primary notion of something bent together or crooked; German and Dutch krank adj. ‘sick’, formerly ‘weak, slight, small,’ shows the figurative development."

More Ngram fun: carrots and sticks

2010-12-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

Carrot and stick, or carrot on a stick? In my last go-round with this one -- when I found "turnips on a stick" in the 1840s -- I decided they might well be two independent creations, rather than an original and a variant. Michael Quinion also covers the issue pretty exhaustively at World Wide words. And here's the Google graph, showing that "carrot and stick," if no more respectable than its stablemate, is a lot more common.

The Ngram view of "another think/thing"

2010-12-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

Mark Liberman has courageously returned to the nor'easter-northeaster debate, though he admits its futility: more evidence is needed, and in any case, "people are entitled to use phony dialect forms if they want." (He cites, among other evidence, some research I did on the topic in 2003, now behind a Globe paywall and outdated in any case.) I hoped he came bearing fresh results from Google's new book search toy, the Ngram Viewer, but it won't let us compare the histories of the two versions -- apparently it can't handle the internal apostrophe in nor'easter (though there are hits for noreaster).

I've been trying out the the Ngram Viewer, too, and it's easy to see its limitations. As Geoff Nunberg and other early commenters have said, it's a pretty blunt instrument, unable to handle many of the search refinements you'd need for real scholarship. But I'm having fun seeing what it says about various competing usages (not hindered by internal punctuation) that I've written about before.

For example, here's the graph for "another think coming" vs. "another thing coming," as in, "if you think you're wearing that, you've got another think coming":

Pretty scary for a traditionalist like me to see the rogue "another thing" rocketing toward respectability! But I was heartened to see that the OED entry has it as "another think," with the "thing" version labeled "arising from misapprehension of to have another think coming." Not that it will affect usage, but someday I can show it to my disbelieving grandchildren ...

Less invasive than what?

2010-12-24T17:17:00.000-05:00

Even if I had celebrated Festivus on schedule, I'm not organized enough to have gathered up my grievances into a neat package the way Fritinancy did. But there was a complaint-worthy headline in yesterday's Times, on the holiday itself, and since I'm behind schedule on everything else, I might as well be a day late recording this too.

It came with the lead story in the Times's Styles section, which had a photo and headline borrowed from Nora Ephron -- "Can We Feel Good About Our Necks?" -- and then a very strange subhead:

Put Away the Turtlenecks:

Less-Invasive Options Exist

To Tackle That Area of Dread

Wouldn't that be nice -- a neck-firming treatment that's less invasive than putting on a turtleneck? But of course the headline writer didn't mean that: The procedures covered in the article are only "less invasive" than a full face- or neck-lift. (They're also expensive and as yet unproven, of course, like so many of the cosmetic remedies that get free advertising in the Skin Deep column.)

It's fine to call something "less filling" or "less expensive" and leave the comparison implied; less has always worked that way. But you can't stick a word like "turtlenecks" in there, in a spot where it insists on being read as the term of comparison, without confusing readers. (I'm not the only one who noticed the problem; the subhead doesn't appear on the web version of the story.)

A little "no problem" problem

2010-12-09T15:47:00.000-05:00

The Ridger’s recent post on the “no problem” curmudgeons reminds me that I finally had my own "no problem" revelation not long ago. After years of wondering (privately and publicly) why people get so cheesed off at the phrase, I finally heard it used in a way that sounded inappropriate even to me, the language libertine.

I was paying the receptionist after a massage, and when she handed me the receipt, I said "Thank you." She replied: "No problem."

Now, I don't even blink at "no problem" in other situations. I ask for a new fork and the waiter brings it; I say "thanks" and he says "no problem." I ask the mechanic, "Can I leave the car overnight?" and he says, "No problem." I’ve always assumed the complainers were objecting to this response, which seems completely normal (if casual) to me.

But these interactions were different from the one at the massage place. I asked the waiter or mechanic for something, got it, and thanked him. In those cases, “no problem” (as The Ridger notes) is no more rude, contentwise, than the time-honored “it was nothing” or “don’t mention it.”

In the transaction at the cash register, though, no service was requested or granted. My “thank you” for the receipt was just part of the minimum ritual – you hand me a receipt, I acknowledge it. In response, either a return “thank you” or “you're welcome” or even a cheery “mmm-hmm” would have been normal, but "no problem" sounded distinctly odd. It seemed to say "yes, I did you a service," when that wasn't the case.

So maybe the “no problem” problem is more subtle than I’d thought. For me, it seems, some “thank you”s can be answered with "no problem" and some can't. Is this true for (some of) the people who object to "no problem," or is theirs a blanket condemnation? And does the distinction exist in other languages that use the equivalent of "no problem, it was nothing" as a response to "thank you"?

Or have I just been thinking about this non-problem for too long?

Ruddy-complected (or not) at the New Yorker

2010-11-26T13:26:00.001-05:00

I’ve been derelict in my blogging duties this month, but I did manage (amid the Thanksgiving prep) to dip into the current (11/29) New Yorker, where I found a couple of words of interest to editors.

From “Are You the Messiah?” by Lauren Collins comes this: “Creme -- ruddy-complected, green eyed, and white-haired -- answered.” Complected for “complexioned” has been a disparaged usage for a century; my teachers treated it as hardly better than irregardless. But Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defends it:

Not an error, nor a dialectal term, nor nonstandard—all of which it has been labeled—complected still manages to raise hackles. It is an Americanism, apparently nonexistent in British English. Its currency in American English is attested as early as 1806 (by Meriwether Lewis) and it appears in the works of such notable American writers as Mark Twain, O. Henry, James Whitcomb Riley, and William Faulkner. Complexioned, recommended by handbooks, has less use than complected. Literary use, old and new, slightly favors complected.

The longer entry in M-W's usage dictionary adds: “There seems to be no very substantial objection to the term other than the considerable diffidence American usage writers feel about Americanisms."

Garner's Modern American Usage (2009) also cites usage -- not specifying "literary" -- and comes to a different conclusion: "Today, complexioned is almost three times as common in print sources." He rates complected Stage 3 on his language-change index, meaning it's widespread but still widely suspect.

So did the New Yorker use complected (apparently for the first time) on purpose? Well, as of this writing, the word remains in the digital edition. But that's not much of a clue, because so does the wrong word in Paul Rudnick's "Nutty," in the same issue.

In this piece, a monologue by Mr. Peanut, the Planters legume recalls days of indulging in “wild sex” with other spokesproducts, including Cap’n Crunch and Snuggle, the fabric-softener bear, after which he wondered if he'd gone too far: “What’s next? The Kool-Aid pitcher? Count Chocula? The Geico gekko?” No, not the Geico gekko, Mr. P., because the Geico mascot is a gecko.

(This is nitpicking, of course; but the New Yorker's legendary editing standards have always made its lapses and innovations interesting to copy editors and word watchers. If the magazine endorses complected, it could change the word's rep at a stroke. But there are far more interesting things to ponder in the 11/29 issue, including James Wood, literary critic and drummer (who knew?), on Keith Moon. And in the 11/22 issue, read my friend Laura Shapiro on Eleanor Roosevelt's management of the White House menus, and give thanks that your feasts are so much more festive than poor FDR's were.)

Anyone can punctuate; Austen wrote the pauses

2010-11-17T21:11:00.000-05:00

Whenever I read one of Geoff Nunberg's "Fresh Air" language commentaries, I'm freshly amazed that so much can be said, lucidly and entertainingly, in a radio piece; reading the prose, you'd swear it was too complex for anything but print. So even if you heard Nunberg's broadcast today -- rebutting, refuting, and refudiating the idiotic "Jane Austen couldn't write, her editor did it all" story of recent weeks -- you'll want to read it (uncut, with footnotes) at Language Log. A couple of highlights:

By the standards of the time, she wasn't a bad speller. She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson — the rules just weren't settled yet. In fact it's pure anachronism to describe any of those things as "wrong" or "incorrect"; it's like calling Elizabeth Bennet a bachelorette.

...

And if it turns out the semicolons were actually put there by someone else, is it right to say that the style is hers? ... it's an embarrassing question. It reveals a certain obtuseness — about writers and style, and not least, about the semicolon. People have the idea that mastering the semicolon is the acme of prose artistry, as if the mark itself could call a logical structure into being. ... But semicolons don't create a structure; they just point to one. It's nice to know where a semicolon is supposed to go, but it's nothing to swell your chest over. The artistry is in being able to write sentences that require one.

The Austen manuscripts are here, but they're not for the faint of heart or weak of eye.

Buncombe, bunkum, or both?

2010-11-06T20:41:00.000-04:00

In a column last month on gubernatorial, I mentioned that John Russell Bartlett had included the word in his 1848 "Dictionary of Americanisms," calling it a coinage born of "our peculiar institutions," along with caucus and bunkum.

That last word prompted a comment from reader Jay Gold:

Interesting [that] Bartlett lists "bunkum" in his list of Americanisms. I always thought the proper spelling was "buncombe", after the North Carolina county that inspired the word. Mencken, who was no slouch in such matters, spelled it that way.

In fact, Mencken listed buncombe and bunkum as alternative spellings, like ketchup and catsup. "Buncombe (usually spelled bunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries," he wrote in the 1921 edition of "The American Language." Bartlett also gave both spellings, and a one-B buncome too, for good measure.

On the origin of the word, Bartlett quoted another source:

A tedious speaker in Congress being interrupted and told it was no use to go on, for the members were all leaving the house, replied, "Never mind; I'm talking to Buncombe." Buncombe, in North Carolina, was the place he represented.

And he left the analysis of its cultural context to "Judge Halliburton of Nova Scotia":

"All over America, every place likes to hear of its members of Congress, and see their speeches; and if they don't, they send a piece to the paper, enquirin' if their member died a natural death, or was skivered with a bowie knife, for they hante seen his speeches lately, and his friends are anxious to know his fate. Our free and enlightened citizens don't approbate silent members; it don't seem to them as if Squashville, or Punkinsville, or Lumbertown was right represented, unless Squashville, or Punkinsville, or Lumbertown makes itself heard and known, ay, and feared too. So every feller in bounden duty, talks, and talks big too, and the smaller the State, the louder, bigger, and fiercer its members talk.

"Well, when a critter talks for talk sake, jist to have a speech in the paper to send to home, and not for any other airthly puppus but electioneering, our folks call it Bunkum."

Tea Party orthography: A Capital Idea?

2010-11-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

In the latest "Good Word" column at Slate, Jon Lackman skips the "Teabonics" wisecracks and instead theorizes that the Tea Party members are capitalizing their nouns -- Freedom, Republic, etc. -- in imitation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

What capital-ist Tea Partiers fail to realize, however, is that their orthography imitates not Thomas Jefferson and James Madison but the far less famous Timothy Matlack and Jacob Shallus—a couple of secretaries. No one played a larger role in crafting the Declaration and the Constitution than Jefferson and Madison, respectively, but it was Matlack and Shallus who hand wrote the official, signed versions of these documents and freely recapitalized them as they saw fit. By contrast, in Jefferson's drafts of the Declaration, there's a striking absence of caps—he writes "life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness," for example. As H.L. Mencken noted, "nature and creator, and even god are in lower case."

Nice. And the author ID promises more language fun to come: "Jon Lackman is writing a doctoral dissertation on the use of invective in art criticism."

The uncorrections file: Gomer, meet Goober

2010-10-29T22:18:00.001-04:00

In a Boston Globe column earlier this month, about why people dislike the word gubernatorial, I mentioned (among other reasons that goober might sound undignified) the existence of Goober Pyle, a character on "The Andy Griffith Show."

Five readers (so far) have taken the trouble to "correct" me on the point, explaining that I must mean Gomer Pyle. Well, no; Gomer was a character, yes, but he had a cousin named Goober.

I was a little surprised that five people -- all of them with keyboards literally at their fingertips -- were confident enough to send (or post) this uncorrection. But I wasn't a lot surprised, because I've made incorrections myself, in my copy editing days -- and some of mine went into print, to my eternal mortification. Every copy editor has done it: confidently changed the right spelling to the wrong one, made an ambiguously named man into a woman, or otherwise fixed something that wasn't broken. And we were getting paid to be right! (I'm feeling a little better about these blunders now that I've read the book "Being Wrong," in which Kathryn Shulz explains that the same mental equipment that makes humans smart is what makes us so often -- so blindly -- wrong.)

So I replied to all five of my misinformants, cheerily* explaining that yes, there was a Gomer, and there was also a Goober. One replied with good humor, claiming the day's Golden Goober award (dondoll, you're a mensch); two ignored me. And two more -- well, like all of us, they really weren't happy about being wrong. So they answered this way:

Guess I didn't watch that show closely enough to notice Gomer had a cousin.

I don't believe I ever watched an entire episode of Mayberry RFD or its Gomer Pyle spin-off, so I defer to your superior knowledge of the Pyle family.

In other words: "I defer to your superior knowledge of the Pyle family, you pathetic couch potato -- I was reading 'Crime and Punishment' that year." Well, folks, I never watched those shows either; I first met Goober Pyle earlier this month, when I was researching the column. I found Goober thanks to -- paraphrasing Holly from "Stone Soup" -- a widely used information system that allows us to check facts from the comfort of our own homes. (If only it had existed back when I didn't know how to spell Thelonious!)

* OK, I admit it, I wasn't so cheery with the emailer whose correction was openly contemptuous.

The definition of insanity

2010-10-24T23:55:00.006-04:00

In today's Globe column, where I plead* for an end to the argument over "I could care less" after 50 years of fruitless repetition, I mention the popular Internet "definition," attributed to various sources: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."

One commenter says "the definition of insanity was Einstein ... who else has it been attributed to???" Well, it is often attributed to Einstein, and also to Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, but so far there's no proof it existed before about 1980.

In the excellent Yale Book of Quotations (2006) -- a scholarly collection, not just a roundup of favorite alleged sayings -- editor Fred R. Shapiro found the earliest statement of the sentiment in Rita Mae Brown's "Sudden Death," published in 1983: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

And just last month, at the Answers.com entry (which also cites Brown), commenter Davidt 9 offered a slight antedating:

The quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results" is contained in the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous which was published in 1982. The review form of the book was distributed to members in 1981 and work on the book began in 1979. All of this predates Rita Mae Brown's book.

He gave a link to the book, which does, as advertised, have the relevant quote on page 11 (25th page of the PDF). I also found a 1980 pamphlet from the Hazelden Foundation, "Step Two: The Promise of Hope," which quotes the same aphorism, so perhaps it got its start in the literature of addiction and recovery.

And of course there may not be an original author; probably these three sources picked up a formulation that had been percolating in the spoken language, possibly in less eloquent variations, just as it was settling into the pithy form we now consider good enough for Einstein.

*Unsuccessfully, to judge from the comments and e-mail.

"Clean is not an option"

2010-10-22T23:13:00.000-04:00

I don’t expect advertisers to hew to formal English, or even standard English, but the tagline for Tide's current ads has been bugging me for a while. It reads:

STYLE IS AN OPTION. CLEAN IS NOT.

Surely that's not what Tide really wants to say? "X is not an option," in the language I speak, means X is not a possibility, X is totally unthinkable – as in the famous "Apollo 13" line, “Failure is not an option.”

I think the copywriters were trying to say that "clean is not optional" – that fashion is a choice, but cleanliness is mandatory (an article of faith, surely, among detergent manufacturers).

The “style” half of the tagline has its own problems. My first reading of “Style is an option” would be that you can choose to be stylish or unstylish; but that doesn’t make much sense in an ad focused on looking good. No, the writers seem to be using “style is an option” as shorthand for “your style is up to you." It isn’t exactly idiomatic English, but at least – unlike the second part of the tagline – it doesn’t say the opposite of what it means.

I guess the intent is so clear (that's what pictures are for) that it doesn't really matter what the tagline says. Or is this usage really changing? Time and Tide wait for no man, they say, and it could be they've left me in the dust.

What's so hard about "prosopagnosia"?

2010-10-11T18:48:00.000-04:00

You may well disagree with me on this -- my friend Betsy already has, strenuously -- but I thought it was odd of the Times Book Review to make such a fuss over prosopagnosia, the medical term for face blindness.

In yesterday's review of Heather Sellers's new memoir, Mary Roach told readers that

"You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know" does not read like any memoir you know, largely because of a condition you may not know and certainly can’t say: prosopagnosia.

Now, I don't object to seeing a rough pronunciation key supplied, as Roach does a bit later: "It's pro-so-pag-NO-see-uh," she confides. But is this really a difficult word? Yes, it's long, and I can imagine a momentary pause while the reader considers whether this is the -gn- of lagniappe or the -gn- of agnostic. But I don't see anything else that's likely to slow down the typical Times reader.

Hyperbole like "a condition you ... certainly can't say" is generally frowned on in journalism, because -- like the classic bad example, "For anyone who's been living in a cave" -- it risks insulting readers. But I'm not a hard-liner; I think plenty of English words are tough to sound out, and plenty of others (like Zagat, which also rated a Times gloss yesterday) are hard to remember. I just don't see how you'd take prosopagnosia to be one of them.

Grammar-checking Shakespeare

2010-10-05T21:17:00.000-04:00

I've written before about the shortcomings of grammar checkers. So has Geoff Nunberg, in a "Fresh Air" commentary called "The Software We Deserve," included in his 2001 collection "The Way We Talk Now." So have Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, at their Grammarphobia blog.

But if that's not convincing enough, here's some recent testimony e-mailed by my friend Louise Kennedy:

So I'm running a spell check on my proposal right before sending it out, and of course I forget to uncheck "check grammar." Which is excellent, because it gives me this:

All the World's a Stage
Suggestions:
The entire [World's a Stage]

"Poor Will," says Louise. Amen to that.

"Sleep tight," one more time

2010-10-04T00:37:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I lodged a complaint here about the return of the "sleep tight" etymythology in some media outlets that should know better. But those were mere bedbug bites compared with what's on the way. According to the Wall Street Journal's review, best-selling author Bill Bryson repeats the legend in his new book, "At Home." The Journal's paraphrase:

When parents kiss their children good night and say, "Sleep tight," it's a fair bet that neither party realizes that the phrase originated in the era of straw-stuffed mattresses. Before the invention of spring mattresses in 1865, bedding would have been suspended by rope lattices that, when they sagged, could be tightened with a key.

Bryson, judging by the book excerpts viewable online, doesn't make nearly so big a deal of it; his reference to "sleep tight" is just a parenthesis ("hence the expression 'sleep tight'"). Still, it's too bad to see such a (justly) popular writer spreading misinformation. As my earlier post noted, the phrase "sleep tight" appeared in the 1860s -- just when the new spring mattresses (assuming that date is correct!) should have begun to make it obsolete. "Sleep tight" means "sleep soundly," and there's no evidence it has any connection at all to rope beds.

If an eggcorn falls in the backyard ...

2010-10-01T16:56:00.000-04:00

Real estate, as we all know, has its own (often euphemistic) shorthand. But this odd term, from a Boston-area ad, appears to be just a mishearing/misunderstanding -- in short, an eggcorn:

This is a solid mulit level house that is ready to move in and ready for your improvements. Roof seems good, older Anderson Windows, large lot (ingrained pool needs to be filled in ).

True, an eggcorn is typically inspired by a word that's somewhat opaque, and it's hard to imagine a more transparent term than "in-ground pool." Nor is in-ground a recent coinage. The OED dates it to 1973 -- "orig. U.S., of an outdoor swimming-pool: built into the ground (as distinct from one placed above ground), esp. at a private residence." And Google News turns up a 1962 ad in the Milwaukee Journal, seeking franchisees to sell a "low priced inground pool to reach mass market."

So how does in-ground become ingrained? I think the connection must be the (relative) permanence of the hole-in-the-ground pool; ingrained originally meant "dyed," and it still means "deep-seated, worked deeply into the texture or fiber" (AHD, via Wordnik). An above-ground pool is removable; not so the ingrained kind.

If I were one of those word watchers who can read minds, I suppose I would accuse the "ingrained pool" people -- Google turns up a couple dozen of them -- of "trying to sound elegant," or something like that. Alas, I seem to be missing the telepathy gene; all I can do is record this interesting substitution.

Carrie Fisher and the one-letter grammar fix

2010-09-28T15:28:00.001-04:00

Wow. I didn't even know Blogger had a feature called "Blogs of Note," but I sure do now. Welcome, new readers, and let me address a couple of the issues you raised in the comments on my National Punctuation Day post.

I asked for a one-letter correction to this sentence in the AP version of Eddie Fisher's obituary: "Their daughter Carrie Fisher became a film star herself in the first three 'Star Wars' films as Princess Leia, and later as a best-selling author of 'Postcards From the Edge' and other books."

My problem was that the sentence says Carrie Fisher became "a film star ... as Princess Leia, and later as a best-selling author." But she didn't, in fact, "[become] a film star ... as a best-selling author." ~~(Yes, she played herself, more or less, in the movie version of "Postcards," but her character was an actress, not an author.)~~* And my one-letter solution was to change as to was: She "became a film star ... and later was a best-selling author."

There were other solutions, of course: JeffScape preferred just to change "later as" to "later became" (though journalists hate to repeat verbs). TheWizard and ImNRtist both wanted to drop "as" entirely, making it "she became a film star ... and later a best-selling author of 'Postcards,'" etc. (But wouldn't that have to be "the best-selling author"?) We could edit forever, but no need; I was just interested to notice that the sentence's faulty grammar (if not its style) could be repaired with just one letter.

Some readers (naturally) found other nits to pick. David said (and Kat~: and Eleanor agreed) that my "was" could be misleading:

Carrie didn't die, her father did, and even if she did die, she still is the author of all her novels. Just as Mark Twain is the author of "Tom Sawyer," Carrie Fisher is the author of "Postcards From the Edge." If she "was" the author, who is the author now?

But our sentence doesn't say Fisher "was the author of x." The obit writer starts her aside about Carrie Fisher at a point in the past: She "became a star" in "Star Wars," and she "later" became (or "was" -- but not "is") "a best-selling author of x." The writer says nothing of her current stardom or bestsellerdom, but I don't think many readers would conclude from that that she's dead. (Verb tense aside, this is her father's obit -- if Carrie had died before him, the writer would surely note it!)

And on a different punctuation point, Karen, who must be an editor, noted that because Carrie was Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds's only daughter together, her name should be set off with commas: "Their daughter, Carrie Fisher, became a film star herself." She's right, but this is a convention that copy editors tend to follow over a cliff; in fact, I devoted a recent Boston Globe column to this very rule, noting how much editorial time is wasted researching the existence of irrelevant siblings. So I ignored this minor violation. (After all, I am -- as advertised -- a recovering nitpicker.)

* As David points out in the comments below, Carrie Fisher is not in the movie "Postcards From the Edge" -- which I knew perfectly well in some unaccountably dormant part of my brain. I saw the film, in which Shirley MacLaine plays the mother and Meryl Streep the Carrie-ish daughter.

What a difference a dash makes

2010-09-25T16:26:00.000-04:00

I meant to nitpick a little yesterday, in observance of National Punctuation Day, and didn't get around to it. But since I have a perfect example, from yesterday's Globe, of the power of punctuation, I'm going to say "better late than never," and nitpick anyway.

The nit showed up in the AP report of Eddie Fisher's death:

His fame was enhanced by his 1955 marriage to movie darling Debbie Reynolds. They were touted as “America’s favorite couple’’ -- and the birth of two children.

I tried to guess what was left out of that second sentence, but I wasn't even close. In fact, it was a tiny edit -- one sentence repunctuated as two --- that caused all the mischief. In other publications, the line reads this way:

His fame was enhanced by his 1955 marriage to movie darling Debbie Reynolds -- they were touted as "America's favorite couple" -- and the birth of two children.

So what happened? It's possible that an editor, somewhere along the line, looked skeptically at that sentence -- did the arrival of two children really enhance Fisher's fame? -- and started to improve the wording. Or maybe a reflexive dash-hater attacked, not noticing that the edit left those two children grammatically unmoored. Either way, this is probably an example of the "editor, interrupted" syndrome, which often leaves crumbs on the pages of newspapers.

I also had a problem (though not a punctuation problem) with the next sentence in the obit, but I'll leave you to find it (or ignore it, as all the editors seem to have done). Me, I would add one little letter and make it all OK. You?

Their daughter Carrie Fisher became a film star herself in the first three "Star Wars" films as Princess Leia, and later as a best-selling author of "Postcards From the Edge" and other books.

Bugged by the "sleep tight" story

2010-09-20T22:32:00.002-04:00

It was a minor irritation, I admit. But I wasn't happy to hear, along with the latest news on the bedbug resurgence, the return of the etymological legend about the origins of "sleep tight" -- and in respectable news outlets, too. First it showed up in the New York Times, in a letter printed in the Sept. 7 Science Times:

The expression “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” is often said to refer to colonial times, when children slept on rope beds underneath their parents’ beds. The ropes would be tightened for support — thus “sleep tight.” Too bad the bugs haven’t gone the way of the rope bed.

The next day I heard it on "Fresh Air," where Terry Gross was interviewing a "professor of urban entomology" named Michael Potter. The rhyme, he solemnly told listeners, dated to the 1500s or 1600s, referring to the rope lattice that supported mattresses back in the day.

Not very likely. The OED says "sleep tight" just means "sleep soundly," and the skeptical view of the faux etymology has been available for some time at Michael Quinion's World Wide Words and at The Phrase Finder, which note that "sleep tight" is not really very old. Their earliest citation comes from Susan Bradford Eppes, 1866: "Goodbye little Diary. 'Sleep tight and wake bright,' for I will need you when I return." And no bedbugs appeared till the 20th century, they said.

But there was newer news, it turned out, on "don't let the bedbugs bite." The day after the "Fresh Air" broadcast, New York word sleuth Barry Popik weighed in at his blog with a wealth of additional "sleep tight" citations. He found the pests (called bugs, buggers, skeeters, and mosquitoes) infesting the bedtime sentiment as early as 1881, just 15 years after the earliest "straight" version: "'Good-night, sleep tight; And don’t let the buggers bite,' said Fred."

In any case, there's no reason a bedbug discussion should divagate into the origins of "sleep tight," since the phrase has nothing to do with repelling insects. It seems pretty clear from Popik's list of Google cites that the buggy versions were earthy variations on a sweet Victorian sentiment, coined for no better (or worse) reason than shock value and a snappy rhyme.

The mystery of Edwin Newman

2010-09-16T15:09:00.000-04:00

Edwin Newman, popular NBC newsman and language crank, died last month at 91, his family has announced. The New York Times obituary recaps some of his peeves:

Among the sins that set Mr. Newman’s teeth articulately on edge were these: all jargon; idiosyncratic spellings like “Amtrak”; the non-adverbial use of “hopefully” (he was said to have had a sign in his office reading, "Abandon 'Hopefully' All Ye Who Enter Here" ... and using a preposition to end a sentence with.

This "Abandon 'Hopefully'" tidbit was new to me; the anti-hopefully sign I've always heard about is the one that the writer Jean Stafford boasted about as a member of the language panel for Harper's Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975), which duly quoted her:

On my back door there is a sign with large lettering which reads: THE WORD "HOPEFULLY" MUST NOT BE MISUSED ON THESE PREMISES. VIOLATORS WILL BE HUMILIATED.

Did Newman also post a ban on hopefully? In his 1974 book, "Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English?" there's a paragraph bemoaning the new fad for "hopefully," but no mention of the "Abandon hopefully" slogan -- which Newman, an unrepentant punster, would surely have used if he'd thought of it. There are many online references to the existence of such a sign above his office door, but so far I haven't found any firsthand testimony -- which seems odd, given that his office was at NBC, not at some small-town English department.

(My earliest cite for the Newman connection comes from the Canadian magazine Saturday Night, allegedly volume 92, dated 1977: "Edwin Newman, the curator of words for NBC, has a sign over his door: "Abandon 'hopefully' all ye who enter here." The year/volume numbers seem plausible, but I have only Google's iffy metadata to go on.)

Meanwhile, the Canadian journal Archivaria, in a piece published in 2000, commemorated the magazine's founding with a similar anecdote set in 1975:

Twenty-five years! How much has changed since that sweet and pleasant summer day almost a generation ago when a dozen or more archivists and friends gathered at a cottage at Lac McGregor in Quebec to discuss what Archivaria could be. Above the door to the cottage was a stenciled, hand-coloured, nearly two-metre-long banner that read: ABANDON HOPEFULLY ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

That paragraph itself gets a footnote explaining that one of Stafford's fellow Harper panelists inspired the banner:

The word “hopefully,” employed as “it is to be hoped,” became something of a trope for the journal’s staff reflecting the intellectual commitment and editorial rigour they wanted to bring to Archivaria. We accepted F.G. Fowler’s* disdain for the usage and the words of a panelist** for the 1975 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage: “I have fought this for some years, will fight it till I die. It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable” (p. 311). As a morale booster for what became a very demanding avocation, it was invaluable.

"Abandon hopefully" is of course just the sort of witticism that could have been coined and re-coined in that heyday of hopefully resistance, and nobody's attributing it to Newman. But his or not, did he ever post the admonition in or near his office? Or is this another story that's just too good to check?

*F.G. Fowler is H.W.'s younger brother, who died before the publication of Modern English Usage in 1926. Nobody else seems to know anything about either Fowler's opinion of hopefully; the OED's first example of the modern hopefully usage is from 1932.

**Hal Borland, once a well-known journalist and author. Sic transit ...

Is that a discreet bulge, or ...

2010-09-14T23:41:00.000-04:00

I'm generally forgiving of homophone misspellings -- in fact, one of my pet peeves is the way language scolds like to label such misspellings "confusions," suggesting that people don't know the difference between then and than or loose and lose when the misstep is plainly (in context) a matter of spelling. The right word is intended -- nobody confuses the meanings of then and than -- but the letters are wrong.

The tougher cases come with words whose meanings can overlap significantly. Disperse for disburse is fairly common, and often can't be ruled absolutely wrong; party hearty and party hardy are both plausible; even reign in for rein in often makes a sort of sense. (As in the campaign literature of a just-defeated candidate for Mass. State Auditor who promised to "reign in wasteful political spending.")

And here's one from today's Wall Street Journal article on new FDA-approved technologies to zap body fat. Mitchell Levinson, chief scientific officer of Zeltiq (which freezes away fat cells), is quoted as saying "This is for patients who have a discreet bulge they want to get rid of." But wait: If the bulge is a "discreet" one, why pay thousands to reduce it?

I think Levinson, man of science, said discrete. But in stories about liposuction, plastic surgery, and the like, the word discreet is much more common -- roughly twice as likely in raw ghits. And it was that context, I suspect, that made discreet look OK to the writer or editor or both. (That's my theory, at least. Now I'll go ask Melinda Beck, author of the otherwise excellent article, whether I've guessed right.)

Reality collides with what Simon says

2010-09-12T13:52:00.000-04:00

In my recent column on "Un-rules," I mentioned (though not by name) a usage adviser who was getting paid to enforce nonexistent rules:

The usage czar of the Telegraph in London recently chastised a reporter for using the construction "spelled it wrong." But the reporter had it right: He spelled it wrong, it’s tied too tight, she drives too slow — all these adverbial forms are fine.

That misguided yet dogmatic peevologist was Simon Heffer, who has now published a book full of similar baseless prejudices, and who today gets a well-deserved thrashing for it over at Language Log.

First Geoffrey Pullum takes on Heffer's claim (uncritically repeated by the BBC) that we mustn't say "The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary," because warn needs a direct object: "has warned the nation."

Then Mark Liberman debunks Heffer's notion (still current in certain journalistic circles) that a collision must involve two moving bodies, not, say, a car and a tree.

And Ben Zimmer follows up with a look at the history of transitive warn, explaining that Heffer's opposition is not based on pure fantasy (as with wrong/wrongly and collide) but was shared by other British usagists of the earlier 20th century, who considered this warn an American corruption.

Heffer's death-grip embrace of old rules and non-rules seems perverse and mischievous, but I suppose the reality-based usage community should be grateful for the abundant fodder he provides us.

Present perfect: The British-American difference

2010-09-10T23:37:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering if there was any truth to a British journalist's lament that the present perfect tense, which he claimed as "distinctively British," was disappearing under the pernicious influence of American English. Lynne Murphy, who's both a linguist and "Lynneguist" at her blog, Separated by a Common Language, promised a post on the question, and now it's here.

You'll want to read it all, naturally, but here's a bit of her summing-up:

There is nothing unAmerican about the present perfect. We can and do use it in the ways that the British do. We just aren't restricted to it. There is something unBritish about using the preterit with certain temporal adverbs in particular and perhaps also more generally to refer to recent-and-still-relevant events. The difference between Did you eat yet? and Have you eaten already? is, in AmE, mostly a difference of formality, possibly also of emphasis.

Imagine that. Once again, the language has failed (present perfect!) to go to hell in a handbasket. Thanks, Lynne!

A dose of hand-applied distress

2010-09-10T16:41:00.001-04:00

In a post a week ago I puzzled over the fact that Restoration Hardware couldn't tell me what substance was used to produce the "hand applied patina" on a wooden table in its catalog. Well, the answer finally came, and it seems to be ... nothing. Patient correspondent Angela wrote for the third time:

We were able to locate the information that you requested regarding finishes. I can confirm that this item is unfinished. The hand applied patina refers to a hand applied aging or distressing. Due to the nature of the finish, stains are inevitable and will add to the vintage appeal of the table over time.

This was in fact useful information, as one of my questions was how well this coffee table would hold up to a drooling, cruising baby's fond ministrations. (Some stains add more to a table's "vintage appeal" than others.) But it wasn't what I'd expected, given RH's term "hand applied" (yes, it needs a hyphen). In my dialect, you "apply" varnish or paint, but when you beat up wood (or anything else), you don't say you're "applying" dents and scratches. Why not just call it "unfinished hand-distressed elmwood," if that's what it is?

If we tell you that, we have to kill you

2010-09-03T17:19:00.000-04:00

Restoration Hardware has long since abandoned its whimsical side (toys, tools, sock monkeys) to concentrate on Belgian linen bedding and sofas the size of minivans; the fat new catalog actually says, on its cover, "BEHOLD OUR FALL COLLECTION." I should have put it straight into the recycle bin. But no -- I had to skim, and there amid the beige was -- behold indeed! -- a table that interested me. But what was the finish on the (almost-nude-looking) wood?

Reluctant to face a phone menu, I e-mailed to ask. And soon the answer came back:

Thank you for contacting Restoration Hardware. My name is Angela, and I will be happy to assist you with your inquiry regarding our [semi-affordable line of furniture]. I can confirm that these items have a hand applied patina.

Well, thank you, Angela, or "Angela," but ... a patina of what? Varnish, polyurethane, shellac, earwax, olive oil, Love Potion No. 9? I tried again, and today another reply arrived:

Thank you for contacting [blah blah etc.] … I can confirm that we do not have the information regarding the finish readily available.

I have submitted Product Information Request #156221 on your behalf. Please allow me 1-2 business days to update you on the status of this request.

Yeah, I should just phone the local store (surely they're trusted with this information?), but now I'm hooked; I want to know how many more layers of bureaucracy are defending the Secret of the Invisible Wood Finish from the scrutiny of potential customers.

Has the present perfect gone missing?

2010-08-28T12:17:00.001-04:00

Guy Keleny, writing the Errors & Omissions column for the Independent, declares that those slovenly Americans are stealing the present perfect tense from the English language. He objects to a usage in his own paper: "Rather than meeting up and talking about what we want to post online, we just add to what someone – maybe on the other side of the world – already wrote."

From this slender evidence he generalizes sweepingly:

Any time up to about 10 years ago any British writer would have said "add to what someone has already written" [my italics].

Under the influence of American usage, the present perfect form of the verb ("has written") is losing ground to the past simple ("wrote"). In British English, the past simple merely signifies an action in the past, whereas the present perfect describes a state of affairs in the present brought about by an action in the past – we now are in a world where somebody "has written". American English, with only the past simple to call on, fails to mark that distinction.

Have you noticed the disappearance of the present perfect in American English? I have not – though of course I've seen "he wrote" in casual contexts where more formal prose would call for "he has written." Is the present perfect really "distinctively British," as Keleny's headline claims? Is its use diminishing in British English, and if so, is it Americans' fault? I'm not good enough at Zimmering* to test these assertions properly (and I'm about to be off the grid for a bit), but perhaps one of the adepts – Mark Liberman or Ben Zimmer himself – can show me how it's done.

Or maybe Keleny will reveal his evidence. But I suspect his lamentation is based on mere sentiment, seasoned with a dash of prejudice.

*"Wait, I'm not ready to be an eponym!" Zimmer tweeted in response to this coinage. Too late, Ben!

Fuhnetiks at the Wawl Street Jurnl

2010-08-21T23:42:00.000-04:00

I almost hate* to give Geoff Pullum another reason to rant about the offhand contempt with which mainstream journalists treat the vocabulary of language and grammar (see: passive voice).
But how could I resist this? In today's Wall Street Journal, the designer/editor team decided to represent "black swan" as a dictionary entry, pronunciation and all, apparently without consulting an actual dictionary. This is the pitiful result.

I'm no phonetics whiz, and in most discussions of pronunciation, a rough approximation is good enough for me. But you don't need to master the IPA to see a few problems here. The ones that stick out for me:

-- Black swan isn't a closed or a hyphenated compound, so that hyphen in "blak-swan" has no excuse to be there.

-- Black swan (for me, anyway) has equal stress on both words, like black tie or black ops. So if that misbegotten apostrophe was drafted to play to role of a stress mark, it too is superfluous.

-- And finally, the graphic simply ignores the difference that every dictionary would indicate with a special symbol (or two): the difference between the a of black and the a of swan. Here, they're shown as the same sound -- as if "black swan" rhymed with "black man." (Or, given the stress on the second word, with "black-MAN."

Long ago, once of my favorite designers replied to a complaint about a similar problem by telling me the unorthodox typography was "a design element." But I notice the WSJ doesn't treat the big red + signs and % signs in its graphic as "design elements" -- no, those mean just the same thing they always do in business journalism. But lexicographic symbols -- pffft, whatever, who cares.

*Almost. But not quite.

Times readers talk back to usage czar

2010-08-21T17:37:00.000-04:00

The Times's usage blog, After Deadline, mostly addresses the routine matters of house style and word choice -- though its author, Philip Corbett, did draw wider attention recently when it got about that he had recommended replacing tweet with "post a Twitter update."

This week's edition didn't go that far, but it issued several tin-eared rulings, starting with Corbett's objection to the paper's increased use of hipster. "As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year," he said -- you'll notice it wasn't a reader who complained -- and to him, that number implied an unseemly striving for hipness.

Apparently he didn't stop to consider the many shades of irony and self-consciousness with which such a word might be deployed. No, hipster had obviously "lost its freshness." (I suspect that, like many other language watchdogs, Corbett wants to be among the first to call a word "overused," for fear of being among the last.)

Next he condemned the punctuation in the sentence "WikiLeaks was more than just a source, it was a publisher." The problem? "Even in the conversational style of a blog post, this is a 'comma splice.' The two independent clauses need a dash, semicolon or period in between."

And then he invoked a Times usage rule that almost nobody observes, objecting to "the woman, who … had just been diagnosed with lymphoma." Because "as the stylebook notes, the disease is diagnosed, not the patient."

It was disheartening to see the paper of the late Theodore Bernstein so passionately embracing its inner Miss Thistlebottom. But when I went back a few days later to read comments, I got a pleasant surprise. Instead of the usual pile o' peeves, the comments section was a forum for debate on Corbett's actual topics, and a number of contributors begged to differ. For instance:

Usually, I find this column a delight, but today I disagree with Mr. Corbett. At least in its post-2005 "hipster" has a specific meaning that may have some disagreements around the margins but is generally understood. Yes, it's gained in frequency but that is because of its growing popularity (and the ensuing backlash.) Would we have wanted to give yuppie a "rest" in the 80s or look for "alternatives" to hippies in the 60s. I think the New York Times's goal should be to educate rather than obscure in code.

The "comma splice" also had defenders:

I respectfully disagree on the comma splice example; it reads perfectly as is. Follett’s Modern American Usage gives the following example as "legitimate splicing by commas": "This was not only his first concerto, it was his best."

Most grammarians believe that some comma splices are justifiable, especially those connecting short, related (independent) clauses.

As for "diagnosed with":

As a physician who writes, for years I resisted “diagnosed with” as applied to a patient. At last, I’ve given it up. It has rooted itself deep in the lexicon, and it does serve the useful purpose of shortcutting an otherwise more convoluted locution (the patient was diagnosed as having, was told he/she had, &c). Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003) notes … "This idiomatic syntax is too common to be called erroneous."

Way to go, readers. I had just about sworn off reading newspaper comments, but if debate like this can prevail over peevology, I'll be happy to reconsider.

Poetess, authoress, walkeress, talkeress?

2010-08-17T23:53:00.001-04:00

Like the folks who imagine that Ms. was coined by a feminist cabal, English journalist Robert Fisk believes that his editor's rejection of poetess is a modern, women's-libber prejudice, part of the "grammar of feminism and political correctness."

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman (here) and Geoff Nunberg (here) have already set him straight. To their learned rebuttals I would like to add a commentary from Edward S. Gould, American language maven and author of "Good English" (1867).

Gould was not alone in his dislike of feminized nouns, but he devoted more space to the issue than most usage writers. He conceded that some such words (marchioness, princess) might be needed, and that others, like actress and patroness, were traditional, though "a good reason can hardly be given for their admission into our vocabulary." But many coinages, he said, were absurd, including poetess and authoress.

Poet means, simply, a person who writes poetry; and author, in the sense under consideration, a person who writes poetry or prose: not a man who writes, but a person who writes. Nothing, in either word, indicates sex; and everybody knows that the functions of both poets and authors are common to both sexes. Hence, 'authoress' and 'poetess' are superfluous ...

If, however, those two words have, by long usage, become conventionally endurable; what shall be said of the superfine affectation, prettiness, and pedantry of conductress, directress, inspectress, waitress, and so on, which have become as plenty as blackberries?

Conductor is a person who conducts; director, a person who directs; inspector, a person who inspects; waiter, a person who waits. Yet if the ess is to be a permitted or an endured addition to those words, there is no reason in language or in logic for excluding it from any noun that indicates a person; and the next editions of our dictionaries may be made complete by the addition of writeress, officeress, manageress, superintendentess, secretaryess, treasureress, singeress, walkeress, talkeress, and so on, to the end of the vocabulary.

Is there a "bite" in "respite"?

2010-08-13T21:05:00.000-04:00

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman looks at the eggcorn of the week, from al-Jazeera's website -- rest bite instead of respite:

The skies over the capital have cleared, a welcome rest bite for thousands of people doomed to spend sweltering nights in overheated apartments.

One commenter suggests (plausibly, I think) that "rest bite" could be formed by analogy on "sound bite," to mean a brief period of relief from exertion or hardship. But what surprised me was that the pronunciation with second-syllable stress (res-PITE, ruh-SPITE, ruhs-BITE, whatever) was common enough to produce such an eggcorn.

Yes, I know the variant is out there -- Elster's "Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations" says it has a "long and tarnished history" -- but I don't think I ever hear respite with second-syllable stress (in "respite care" and the like). Since y'all were so informative (not to mention impassioned) on the pronunciation of often, maybe you could enlighten me about the local renderings of respite you hear, and what you think of them?

Turning out the lights on conditional "might"

2010-08-10T22:27:00.001-04:00

This week's Style Guide entry at Johnson, the Economist's new and prolific (multi-author) language blog, is on the distinctions between may and might. Naturally, I was happy to see that some of the civilized world still shares my belief -- rooted not in rules but in a lifetime of using my language -- that you don't write "If he caught the ball, we may have won," when, dammit, he didn't catch the ball. Or as Johnson puts it:

Conditional sentences stating something contrary to fact ... need might: If pigs had wings, birds might raise their eyebrows.

Cheered though I was by such conviction, however, I'm more certain than ever that this use of might is circling the drain. When I blogged about it (at the Globe's Boston.com website) last December, I noted that the New York Times officially supports my position, but the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language thinks it's time to let it go.

And now comes The New Yorker, pounding another nail into the may/might coffin. In the Aug. 2 issue, Atul Gawande's article* on end-of-life treatments has this:

Almost nothing we’d done to Sara -- none of our chemotherapy and scans and tests and radiation -- had likely achieved anything except to make her worse. She may well have lived longer without any of it.

Might well have, you mean. Oh, well.

*In the printed version of the piece, there was also a more obvious problem: A girl's name was given as both Ashlee and Ashley within the space of a few paragraphs. The web version has fixed that, but left "may well have lived longer" as is -- which must mean that even New Yorker readers don't mind it.

Peeve like a pirate?

2010-08-09T21:07:00.000-04:00

Kevin Kline, according to this interview in yesterday's Globe, is a language stickler. Alas, the actor, funny and intelligent as he may be, is as conventional in his peeves as Miss Thistlebottom could have been:

He holds his nose at "transition" used as a verb. Ditto for "impact." "I can’t stand 'lay' and 'lie,'" said Kline. "No one lays down. They lie down. And then there are hyper-extensions like 'I' instead of 'me.'"

Wait, what's that again? "Hyper-extensions"? Surely Kline meant to say "hypercorrections" -- that's the usual label for constructions like "He gave my wife and I tickets to the game." (At least, it's the usual label among people who think such usage betrays a speaker's attempt to sound educated. There are other theories, and not every grammarian pretends to be a mind reader.)

I'm gonna go ahead and hope it's a transcription error. Even if he deserves it, I'd hate to see my favorite Pirate King brought low by McKean's/Skitt's/Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation.

A premature elegy for "eavestrough"?

2010-08-07T19:40:00.001-04:00

I've been in Ohio for a while, enjoying family festivities and, as I always do, renewing my acquaintance with my native dialect. So it was an especially appropriate time to read the Newsweek piece by Joan Hall, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, on the progress of that wonderful (and almost complete) 45-year-old project.

DARE's research, wrote Hall, shows that despite popular belief, mass communication has not wiped out local varieties of English. However, she said, "Certain regional terms have been weakened by commercial influences, like Subway’s sub sandwich, which seems to be nibbling away at hero, hoagie, and grinder."

This reminded me of the "For Better or Worse" cartoon above, from June 13, in which John is given a honey-do list that includes "Clean eaves troughs." (I write it as one word, myself, but I see the spellchecker doesn't approve.) Eavestroughs was a common synonym for gutters when I was young, but like the regional names for submarine sandwiches, it seems to have been marginalized by national advertisers, who made gutters the generic term.

DARE's map shows eaves trough (also known as eave trough and eaves troth) widely disseminated across the Northern states and throughout California, though not in Eastern Massachusetts. The dictionary quotes a 1961 comment from the journal American Speech: "Eaves troughs and eaves … trail far behind the commercial term [=gutters]. Their markedly greater use by [older] informants suggests that both terms are on the way out."

Maybe, maybe not. Lynn Johnston, creator of "For Better or Worse," is Canadian, and thus not on DARE's map, but apparently she's been living in dialect regions where eaves trough continues to thrive.

*Thanks to Visual Thesaurus and to Mr. Verb for the link.

"But for the grace of God go I"

2010-07-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

Writing in this morning's Times about Tony Robbins's new reality TV show, Alessandra Stanley summed up the appeal of such real-life rescues: "These shows tap into viewers' 'but for the grace of God go I' horror at heartbreaking stories."

Wait, said my husband -- "but for the grace of God go I where?" The standard formulation is "There but for the grace of God go I" (add commas if you like) or, elliptically, "There but for the grace of God …" But we had never seen the saying without a "there" tucked in somewhere.

In this case but for means "if not for," "were it not for," and it needs a conclusion. But for seems to be considered a conjunction, but here it has the force of a protasis, the "if" clause in a conditional. Maybe a real grammarian can give me a better description, but this much I know: "If not for the grace of God, I go," period, doesn't make sense.

After a little research, I'm inclined to blame Keith Urban and his co-songwriters:

But for the grace of God go I
I must've been born a lucky guy

he sings, and not until the end of the song does he use but for in the standard way, completing the thought:

I'd be lost
But for the grace of God.

The original saying looks to be about 200 years old, though its authorship is uncertain. "There, but for the grace of God, go I" is often attributed to John Bradford, the Protestant divine martyred in 1555, I learned from The Phrase Finder: "The earliest example of it that I have found is in 'A treatise on prayer,' by Edward Bickersteth, 1822, in which the author repeats the Bradford story."

But there's no hard evidence that Bradford said it, and the sentiment was widely repeated throughout the 19th century, with and without attribution. Some Google Books cites:

"Had he truly possessed gratitude, he … would have said in his heart, 'I should have been as that publican, but for the grace of God.'" (The Missionary Magazine, 1802)

"The best amongst you may look upon the vilest of the human race and say, 'Such an one might I have been, but for the grace of God!'" ("Horae homilecticae," 1832)

"The author of Pilgrim's Progress [said], on seeing a condemned malefactor passing on his way to Tyburn, — 'Ah, me! but for the grace of God, there goes John Bunyan.'" (Annual Report of the Massachusetts Dept. of Education, 1848)

"Said Wesley once when he saw a murderer led out to execution, 'but for the grace of God there goes John Wesley.'" ("Itinerating Libraries and Their Founder," 1856)

This seems to be yet another case of modern usage losing its grip on a semi-archaic construction. It's happening with the subjunctive "suffice it to say." It was evident in Ray Charles's misinterpretation of the subjunctive in his embellishments of "America," which Geoff Pullum and I noticed at almost the same moment. It's revealed in the many manglings of the Biblical "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required," and, of course, in all those ungrammatical jokes about cups (plural) that "runneth" over. But picky editors have to remember that the adage applies to everyone: There but for the grace of God go we, too.

The hazards of stealth corrections

2010-07-23T13:59:00.000-04:00

Chris Shea, my Globe Ideas colleague, points to a Slate story about Politico's sloppy corrections policy that is itself fascinatingly riddled with updates, clarifications, and corrections. I'm not a hard-liner on minor blog corrections -- and as a part-time print journalist, I'm grateful that the online version of a piece can be corrected -- but it interests me that even among serious journalists, the issue of courtesy to one's fellow scribblers rarely comes up.

It arose for me way back in 2003, when I quoted Mickey Kaus's blog at Slate, Kausfiles, in a Globe language column. Commenting on reports of Arnold Schwartzenegger's sexual misconduct, Kaus had written, "He's not a groper the way Clinton was a groper -- Schwarzenegger seems to actually have a cruel streak."

Luckily, I went back to verify the quote before publication -- because Kaus had silently changed it to read, "He's not a groper the way Clinton was a masher." And luckily the change was made before my column went to press; I would have looked and felt incompetent (although I imagine Kaus would have copped to the change, if asked).

When I was new to blogging, I allowed myself a few minutes to fiddle with a just-published post, because it was hard to proofread (punctuation especially) in the preview version. (It doesn't help that my dying computer screen has a one-and-a-half-inch white stripe down its center.) Occasionally I changed a word to eliminate a repetition. But now that Blogger's preview shows the published format, I manage to catch most typos before clicking on Publish.

Obviously, Mickey Kaus was far more likely than I to see his words picked up and reprinted. But if I changed a loaded word hours or days later -- groper to masher, say -- I think I'd feel obliged to note the change somewhere, in fairness to readers and especially to potential quoters.

On my honor, I did my best ...

2010-07-22T23:37:00.002-04:00

... but this headline from today's Globe West section had me baffled on the first two tries:

At 100, Scouts honor code

and spread the word

The two-deck hed probably made it harder; at any rate, I kept reading "Scouts honor code" as a noun phrase and expecting something like:

At 100, Scouts honor code

still offers guidance

As crash blossoms go, this one is fairly mild; in a language where words like honor (and code and spread and word) can look the same as nouns and verbs, headline writers (and readers) have to tolerate some of this ambiguity. I wondered if maybe I was developing hypervigilance -- turning into a crash blossom peever, the way people nurture their sensitivity to misplaced apostrophes. But my husband, no nitpicker, had the same difficulty, so at least I know I'm not just being cranky.

The kids are all right, but the sing-a-long's wrong

2010-07-19T00:22:00.001-04:00

"Is the use of alright or allright all right?" asked Whitton Norris in a recent e-mail. Well, it's not all right with me, thanks to my early training, but Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage -- you could Google it, but you really should buy it -- points out that many educated and admired writers have used alright.

And since we have already and altogether and always, all originally spelled with all, it's reasonable to assume that alright will one day be all right. Still, I was pleased to see that the new movie "The Kids Are All Right" had chosen that rendering, rather than directly copying the Who's 1965 "The Kids Are Alright" (widely blamed, in editing circles, for giving alright a huge boost).

That pleasure lasted only a few days, until I noticed that the "Grease: Sing-A-Long" movie has been issued under that moronic title. I can see how all right morphs into alright, but does anyone who can read think the audience for this movie will be singing "a long," or nine longs, or a dozen longs? No, they'll be singing ALONG, all one word.

Like "The 40-Year Old Virgin," with its half-hyphenated compound, this sort of title goof makes editors crazy, since they have to choose between the illiterate version and the inaccurate (but correct) version. So today's Globe story on "Grease: Sing-A-Long" ping-pongs between the correct (generic) sing-along and the incorrect (actual) movie title.

Luckily, the story had language news to distract me from my "sing-a-long" annoyance. Paramount, it seems, has revised some of the dirty lyrics from the original movie (not to more modern dirty lyrics, as reporter Joe Keohane would like, but to less raunchy terms). I remember how shocked I was to finally realize (after several viewings, some with children, over the years) that in the car number the guys were singing (IIRC) "The chicks'll all cream/ For Greased Lightning." Now I've gotta go see what else has been bowdlerized.

Update: Apparently "Grease" has been worked over many times since its first staging in 1971, and the 1978 movie itself has been called "bowdlerized." So someone with a deeper interest (and an original cast recording, maybe) will have to do the investigative journalism on this one.

Return to the gates to let any passengers off ...

2010-07-18T17:44:00.000-04:00

A Wall Street Journal story last Thursday -- on the state of the airways this summer, under the new cancellation rules -- included a phrase that was not at all ambiguous, but still managed to stop me cold.

Instead [of canceling flights], airlines have adapted with new procedures, flagging long-delayed flights, sending in help and returning planes to gates before the three-hour limit to let any passengers off and then continuing without canceling the flight.

"To let any passengers off" -- I can see that it's supposed to mean "to let off any passengers who want to get off." But that isn't the normal reading of "any passengers," is it? Ordinarily, it would mean "any remaining passengers," as in this reminiscence about a bus route: "It would stop at the top [of the street] to let off any passengers and then drive to the bottom, where it would wait until it was the scheduled time to leave." Same thing in the negative: "They would not let any passengers off the ferry" (all had to stay on).

Compare:

He inverted the pot to shake out any water (all remaining water).
She said the spray would repel any insects (all bugs within range).
They returned to the gate to let off any passengers (?).

There's no question that completing the thought explicitly -- "any passengers who want to get off -- seems wordy, and of course we allow shortcuts like this all the time in conversation. But they're far less common in print, and still a little jarring -- if only for editors and proofreaders like me, too well indoctrinated for our own reading pleasure.

"Often" with a t?

2010-07-12T11:08:00.002-04:00

John McIntyre has started a list of broadcasting language peeves, among them "Sounding the t in often." I've been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don't think it's a regional thing -- I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don't remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends.

That's why I was primed to notice when Ben Zimmer, in a public radio interview after he was named Safire's successor, said OFF-ten. Of all people, wouldn't he have a clue about the pronunciation shift? Well, no. "Funny, if you had asked me, I would've guessed I say OFF-en," he e-mailed. "Just goes to show how unreliable self-reflection is when it comes to phonetic matters." (And, of course, he might well say OFF-en 98 percent of the time; we all have variant pronunciations -- depending on circumstance, audience, whim -- for some words.)

He pointed me to a discussion at ADS-L, where posters had not been able to establish that OFF-ten was either a generational shift or a regional variant, though one noted that it was an old pronunciation:

The variation seems to go quite far back in history. The American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996) suggests that the /t/ was lost in the 15th century, but that "Because of the influence of spelling," often "is now commonly pronounced with the t." That would, as Robert suggests, make the t-full version a spelling pronunciation.

Naturally, the t version has been scorned as both an ignorant goof and a pretentious mannerism. "The bad odor of class-conscious affectation still clings to it," says Charles Harrington Elster in "The Big Book of Beastly Pronunciations." And it's true that OFF-ten deviates from the usual pattern of soften, listen, fasten, christen, etc.

But ever since I started reading similar criticisms of my native Ohio speech oddities, I've been wary of ascribing motives to people's pronunciations. I grew up with "mirror" pronounced MERE and grocery as GROSHERY. But my parents didn't use those pronunciations because they were uneducated; they used them because everyone did. And my Eastern friends who said VAHZ for vase and AHNT for aunt weren't being pretentious; they too were speaking the language they'd grown up with.

Pretentious pronunciation surely exists -- I sympathize with McIntyre's aversion to "Bach uttered as if the announcer suffered from catarrh, or a Spanish name pronounced as if the studio were in the foothills of Andaluthia." But I think that in general, we're much too eager to label people dimwits or social climbers on the basis of pronunciations they probably acquired in the usual way -- by imitating the people they talk to.

Well, before? Or well before?

2010-07-09T19:06:00.000-04:00

From the Washington Post website, a headline:

U.S. weighed spy swap well before 'sleeper' agents were arrested

I wouldn't call this a crash blossom -- its ambiguity is too discreet for "crash," and either reading of it makes sense. Still, I parsed it wrong (I think) before I parsed it right. Did the US weigh the spy swap "well" -- thoroughly -- before making the arrests? No, I think the WaPo means that the US weighed the swap "well before" the arrests.

Since this sort of thing is both work and play for me, I don't mind having to think twice. But headline writers are supposed to make it easy for readers; so why the vagueness (and syntactical ambiguity) of "well before"?

Well, on the jump we learn that the administration began considering a swap "as early as June 11" -- two weeks and two days before the arrests. So "weeks before" would have been technically accurate, but (having just made it into plural territory) would read as overstatement. "Well before" avoids that pitfall because (like the incredibly elastic journalistic "recently") it's a flexible term. To me, in the context of spies you've been watching for years, "well before" suggests months, perhaps years; but there's no rule that says "well before" can't mean "a couple of weeks before." And so it does, in this case. I think.