The return of Grammarnoir

I once was wary of National Grammar Day, founded in 2004 by Martha Brockenbrough's Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), thinking of it as just another excuse for ignorant kvetching. Then, last year, John McIntyre redeemed the March 4 holiday by making it the occasion for a grammar-based pulp fiction serial. The holiday looms again, and this year's dark tale, "Pulp Diction," is already under way (Part 2, with a link to Part 1, is here).

If you haven't read it, or even if you have, you may want to start with last year's "Grammarnoir," in which I was honored to have a cameo as a language moll lurking about in a dark raincoat.

Speaking of mysteries, is anyone minding the store at SPOGG? The National Grammar Day website is a year out of date: "WHO HAD THE WORST GRAMMAR IN 2008? FIND OUT!" it blares. The list of links is full of outdated and abandoned sites. Martha may not be locked up "in the Big House," except in the plot of last year's "Grammarnoir," but do the forces of evil have her tied up in a windowless, wireless-free room somewhere?

News to me: "Refried beans"

I didn't think about it when I lived in San Diego, eating Mexican combo platters as routinely as we eat pizza in the East. I didn't think about it back when I was copyediting the food section of the Boston Globe. Decades have passed, and now, at last, Trader Joe's has answered the question I was always too dim to ask: Why do we call them "refried beans"? Are they really fried twice? 

Apparently not. According to the Fearless Flyer that arrived in today's mail, the name results from a mistranslation: "In colloquial Mexican Spanish, the prefix re is often used to mean 'very.' So frijoles refritos should actually translate to very fried beans, not refried beans." A number of  other websites say the same, and Snopes.com concurs, citing Diana Kennedy's "Cuisines of Mexico." (Kennedy's a reliable source, or at least she was in my food editing days.) So until I hear otherwise, I'm accepting that refried beans are fried only once.

I also wondered (at long last) why the beans needed to be fried even once, since they can be simmered and mashed into the desired state of submission without the skillet treatment. But now that I've looked up a few recipes, I think I understand.

Wrecking havoc in the sports pages

A few days ago, Globe reader Erin H. spotted a report in the paper saying that the weather has "wrecked havoc" on the Olympic schedule, and she wondered:

Is "wrecked havoc" the correct past tense of "wreak havoc" (I always thought it was "wrought havoc"), or is [the reporter] using it here as the past tense of "wreck havoc"? After an internet search I still can't really tell if there are one, two, or three past tense forms of wreak havoc.

The situation is complicated, to say the least. There's a nice summary of the "wreaked/wrought havoc" variation at The Mavens' Word-of-the-Day, including this clarification of the verbs' family ties:

The past tense and past participle of wreak is always wreaked: "The eruption of Mount Usu has wreaked havoc in Japan." However, wreak/wreaked is sometimes replaced by another verb work/worked: "The volcanic eruption has worked havoc." Occasionally, the archaic past tense of work is used: "The volcanic eruption has wrought havoc." So wrought is not an incorrect substitute for wreaked, but rather an archaic variant of worked.

For good measure, you'll want to check the Mavens' discussion of rack/wrack too. And don't miss Arnold Zwicky's blog post from last week on the interplay of wreck, wrack, and rack, as in "going to (w)rack and ruin." An excerpt:

The OED (draft revision of June 2008) says that rack in rack and ruin is a variant of wrack, which is historically earlier. It has cites for to wrack in the relevant sense from 1412, and for to wrack and ruin from 1577; to rack in the relevant sense is attested from 1599, to rack and ruin from 1706. That is, the wrack of destruction got there first, but there’s been variation for a very long time.

But to answer Erin's actual question: No, we don't wreck havoc or go to wreck and ruin. Or rather, we do, but it's the one usage among all the possibilities that pretty much everyone considers wrong.

Eskimo snow words in the comics

I've become a big fan of Richard Thompson's "Cul de Sac" comic strip, which the Boston Globe has been running for more than a year -- a big enough fan that I recently bought the two book collections of the comics, to catch up on the ones I'd missed. To my delight, an early strip actually addresses the Eskimo-words-for-snow question -- and Mr. Otterloop has heard the tale debunked, though he's not allowed to say so.

This strip and several dozen more of those collected in "Cul de Sac: This Exit" come from the Washington Post Magazine, which published Thompson's work for several years before it was syndicated, according to the introduction by Bill Watterson. (At least some of these are watercolors, and the shadows in the strip above are not scan show-through, as I thought at first, but part of the picture.)

By coincidence, just as I was reading these last week, two other comic strips -- "Pooch Cafe" and "Frazz" -- both pointed out that dinosaurs and cavemen were not alive in the same era. So is this the future of education? For the news, tune in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and for science facts read the funnies -- two sources not under the influence of the Texas Board of Education.