I Thought They Were Hibernating

White House Says Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss

--Reuters headline

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How Do You Say...?

So it seems that we're pronouncing "Haiti" wrong. Or are we?

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What I'm Reading

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, by Jan Freeman

As I've said before, I make it a policy not to review books by friends of mine, or even people I know. But that doesn't stop me from recommending, very highly, this delightfully annotated reprint of a usage guide published a century ago by Ambrose Bierce, perhaps best known today as the author of The Devil's Dictionary.

I met Jan Freeman -- oh, god, has it been thirty years ago? -- when I went to work for Inc. magazine, which was then located in Boston. We bonded quickly over our shared dismay at the editorial product we were ostensibly hired to make better. (Neither of us ever got much support at that.) What I learned pretty quickly was that Jan was a terrific editor and an immensely knowledgeable student of the English language. She was, for example, the first person to disabuse me of the notion that none always takes a singular verb.

Jan was not appreciated at Inc., and she took the earliest opportunity -- the birth of her daughter -- to get out of there. (I got booted out a year or so later.) She went to the Boston Globe, where she was an editor on the Sunday magazine, and now writes a weekly column, "The Word," for the newspaper. Her column is a delightfully unstuffy survey of the way people say things; it is grounded in a realization that some ways of saying things are better than others, but it's never snobbily prescriptive. It deserves all the attention and adulation that William Safire's language column for the New York Times Magazine used to get -- though actually it deserves them more.

Now Jan has published a book that is partly a reprint of Bierce's diatribes against what he saw as substandard diction and grammar, but is mostly a level-headed and revealing commentary on language cranks, past and present. As Jan points out in her introduction, the hunger for guidance on language had been whetted in the 18th century and was ravenous by the end of the 19th. The anxiety for correctness was particularly intense among the upwardly mobile of an America moving out of its frontier years. Slang, neologisms, and Americanisms were frowned upon, and "by the later 19th century many educated Americans worried that their native locutions were less refined than whatever the Brits were saying." So language snobs became gurus.

We're still anxious, of course. And we still have no lack of people willing to make pronouncements on the rightness and wrongness of what we write and say. But as Jan says, when she started writing her own usage column she "began to learn how many of the rules we take as gospel are actually quite recent, or are based on misunderstandings, or are simply the fossilized remains of a casual opinion delivered centuries ago." Bierce was a self-appointed language authority, who saw no harm in ratifying his prejudices into law. But "the most striking fact about Write It Right is how many of its 441 cautions are obsolete. ... And nobody is campaigning to bring back the good old days when fix was a slovenly word, reliable was ill-formed, and pants was vulgar. ... Could it be that by the year 2109, most Americans will feel just as distant from our current quarrels over decimate, epicenter, and enormity? Of course it could."

Still, Jan has a lot of fun exposing how obsolete Bierce's cautions are. Take that slovenly fix, for example. (Bierce's proscriptions are boldface, Jan's comments on them lightface.)

Fix. This is, in America, a word-of-all-work, most frequently meaning repair, or prepare. Do not so use it.

... This is just loony. As MWDEU [Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994)] points out, fix has fewer different senses than take, set, do, or run, and nobody calls these words slatternly. Fix for "repair" or "prepare" (a meal, a drink) dates to the 1760s; the OED's first example is "A number of hands came to fix our whale-boats." The verb may never be elegant, but it is standard American, and it's spreading. These days even British newspapers occasionally refer to "fixing" a BMW or the world economy.

Sometimes Bierce is the only person who has ever been known to object to a usage.

Even for Exact. "An even dozen."

The idiom "even dozen" is the relic of a use of even -- to denote round, rather than fractional, numbers -- that dates to the 17th century; Bierce is apparently the only critic who considers it a misuse. "Even dozen" may have survived because it contrasts with the still earlier "baker's dozen," or maybe just because we like the sound of it. As for the mild redundancy, peevologists need to learn that in language, that's a feature, not a bug.

Sometimes one supposed abuse has taken the place of another.

Graduated for Was Graduated.

The verb to graduate was in transition a century ago; the older passive, "Joe was graduated from college," was being supplanted by "Joe graduated from college." ("To graduate college," without the preposition, was not yet on the horizon.) ... [But] the Biercian orthodoxy was stoutly defended into the 1980s. And then, of course, along came "Joe graduated college" to scandalize traditionalists. The goalposts have moved, but the contest goes on.

Bierce usually tries to find a reason for his prejudices, and frequently fails.

It for So. "Going into the lion's cage is dangerous; you should not do it." Do so is the better expression, as a rule, for the word it is a pronoun, meaning a thing, or object, and therefore incapable of being done. Colloquially we may say do it, or do this, or do that, but in serious written discourse greater precision is desirable, and is better obtained, in most cases, by the use of the adverb.

"Do so" is not really more precise than "do it," but it is more formal; it probably sounds even more elevated to contemporary Americans than it did to Bierce. There's a reason Nike didn't adopt the slogan "Just do so!"

A supermarket I go to in Palo Alto has a sign over its express lane: "Twelve items or fewer." This is the kind of thing Palo Altans will insist on. So did Bierce:

Less for Fewer. "The regiment had less than five hundred men." Less relates to quantity, fewer, to number.

Bierce, like many usage writers of his time and later, signs on to a "rule" that had not been enunciated (or observed) until the 18th century..... In fact, as MWDEU notes, less had been used of countables since King Alfred the Great did it in 888, writing (in Old English) "with less words or with more." But ... in the 20th century it became a serious shibboleth.
...
In practice, less is more often used than fewer when the number is thought of as a limit: A frying pan is "nine inches or less in diameter," for instance, because you aren't measuring in one-inch increments, just stating a maximum size. The same is true for Bierce's regiment: "Less than five hundred men," like "160 characters or less" for a text message, states an upper limit on a collection of countables; the countability isn't the point. It's a testament to our fondness for recreational nitpicking that so many of us think the less-vs.-fewer distinction is both rigid and important.

I could go on quoting, but you get the point. This is a book for anybody who is fascinated by language and what we do with it.

Substance Over "Style"

John McIntyre reviews a book about Strunk and White's Elements of Style.

In apparent disregard of Rule 9 (“Do not affect a breezy manner”) he writes that Harold Ross’s prospectus for The New Yorker “reads like a sort of literary bat signal that must surely have twiddled the antennae of E.B. White as he worked over his desk in the Frank Seaman agency.” And I think that Mr. White, if present, would sigh over Mr. Garvey’s preference for gauntlet over gantlet on three occasions. In short, Mr. Garvey’s little book on the Little Book illustrates the terrible, terrible fate of the writer that Auden identified in his elegy on Yeats: “he became his admirers.”

Where There's a Will...

Mark Liberman on George Will's pronoun-counting.

How in the world did our culture award major-pundit status to someone whose writings are as empirically and spiritually empty as those of George F. Will?

Thoughts While Waiting for the Clothes to Dry

When did "mic" become the dominant spelling for the short form of "microphone"? I see it everywhere in newspapers and online: e.g., "He grabbed the mic out of my hands" and "Tuesday is open mic night at the comedy club." When I was editing stuff, I used to change it to "mike," which seems to me a better spelling because it looks like words it rhymes with: "bike" and "hike" and ... well, "like." But "mic" seems to me like it should sound like a derogatory word for an Irishman. And other words spelled with a final -ic, like a ballpoint pen brand name and another racist word that unfortunately comes to mind, are pronounced as if they rhyme with "pick," not "pike."

Killing the Mood

Everybody who's taken a foreign language has encountered the dread subjunctive mood. We anglophones can pretty much dodge it -- we get tripped up by it only in forms of the verb to be. I learned the rule as "condition contrary to fact" -- you write, "If I were king" instead of "If I was king," unless at one time in your past you really ruled the land. As Jan Freeman observes, “ 'I drove fast' and 'If I drove fast' use the same verb, and we have no trouble telling indicative from subjunctive." But as Jan shows in her latest column, it's not always easy to decide whether you want to write "was" or "were." And then she goes on to spread the good news -- it really, really doesn't matter which you write. Or at least it won't for much longer. The subjunctive is on its way out, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Now if they'd only get rid of "whom," I'd be happy.)

Eke and Eye

John McIntyre on the cliche beat:

Two articles in this morning’s Baltimore Sun reach for the same cliche with reference to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy:

BOSTON — In an extraordinary outpouring of public emotion, thousands of people in Massachusetts solemnly lined highways, overpasses and city streets Thursday to pay their last respects to Sen. Edward Kennedy, the last patriarch of America’s most storied political dynasty.

And:

And with the loss of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and his storied ability to eke out bipartisan compromises, lawmakers are eyeing those consensus proposals. ...

The advice sometimes given to aspiring writers that they should avoid adjectives is like a fad diet — Atkins or South Beach — that rules out a whole class of foods. But it is true that some adjectives are empty calories, and storied is surely one of them. Like prestigious and legendary, two other adjectives that crop up in the work of unimaginative writers, it says merely, “I’m writing an important story about somebody you should have heard of.”

Of course, the first example is constructed almost completely from prefabricated material. Extraordinary outpouring of public emotion turns up whenever a crowd gathers, especially if they are outdoors to pay their last respects. And if this storied figure is also a patriarch, then he must be part of a dynasty.

It pretty much writes itself.

The other article — after revealing that Mr. Kennedy was a Democrat from Massachusetts — refers to his storied ability to eke out compromises. The phrasal verb to eke out, which originally meant to supplement by meager increments or to stretch out a small supply, has come to mean to accomplish with great difficulty, and no one has any business insisting on the older sense. But I thought that compromises were hammered out in the smithy of the Congress.

Sometimes the writer reaches for the wrong cliche. But eyeing, at least, is pure journalese.

Why Everything You Learned in Freshman English May Be Wrong

When I was an English teacher -- a long, long time ago -- Strunk and White's Elements of Style was venerated. And apparently it still is. But linguist Geoffrey Pullum isn't celebrating its 50th anniversary. He finds it full of pernicious and inconsistent nonsense.

Buh-Bye, "Bi"

Ken Jennings analyzes the president's vocabulary.

What's in a Name?

A nurse I hadn't seen before was hanging my IV bag the other day when I noticed her name tag.

"Is your name Arsenic?"

"Ar-say-nich," she said softly, a little wearily, as if answering the question was a burden she had borne for a long time. She was Croatian, she said, and the "c" was pronounced "ch."

Even so, it's an unsettling name for a nurse. You couldn't get away with a Nurse Arsenic in fiction. It would be like calling a surgeon Jack Ripper.

The word "arsenic," I learn from Wikipedia, is from the Greek, meaning "masculine" or "potent," which is how, I suspect, it became a Croatian surname. The Greeks got the word from the Persian, where it meant "yellow orpiment" -- a pigment. (Artists used to get arsenic poisoning from their paints.)

I suspect that Miss Arsenic, if she stays in the United States, will change her name, just as countless Vietnamese named Phuc have decided to do.

I don't mention all of this to make fun. No doubt there's a language somewhere in which "Matthews" means "foreskin" or monkey dung."

Or Maybe Betting on the Wrong Tree?

"Everybody was barking at the wrong horse."

--UC-Berkeley engineering professor Leon Chua on the development of a new circuit called the memristor.

Words Fail Me

Damn the New York Times! They just made my work harder.

Words, Words, Words

I'm always late to the party, but I just discovered the Language Log blog, which I've added to my blogroll. Wonderful, witty commentary on the things people say. But I'm still searching for an explanation of why we call it dog food on the one hand, but chicken feed on the other.

Department of Redundancy Department: It's Always Better When It's Free

Headline in today's Mercury News:

Free gift coming for Xbox 360 owners

What Year Is It?

Amid the calls to ban wood-burning fireplaces and to neuter dogs and cats, the anti-immigration and anti-tax diatribes, the denunciation of global warming as “baloney,” and the sternly worded opinion on Pakistani elections, I found this rather charming comment in the letters to the editor in today’s Mercury News:

I am mildly irritated by those who pronounce the year as “two thousand eight.” I’ll bet not one of those people said “one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.” So, why the grammatical schism? What did they say at the turn of the last millennium?

Ed Jacklitch

San Jose

Well, each to his own, Mr. Jacklitch. I happen to find that “two thousand eight” comes out more smoothly than “twenty-oh-eight.” And I submit that this schism, if that’s what it is, is a matter more of diction than of grammar. It’s too bad that we don’t have YouTube videos of Ethelred the Unready giving the royal New Year’s proclamation for 1008 so we can check up on the way the date was handled in the King’s English. (Though it would have been in Anglo-Saxon or Latin anyway.)

I imagine we’ll waffle between “two thousand something” and “twenty something” for a few years longer. Probably until 2020, when saying “twenty twenty” will be irresistible.

Which reminds me that it’s been a long time since there was a lot of discussion about what we’re going to call this decade. People were arguing for “the naughts,” “the aughts,” “the nulls,” “the zeroes,” “the zips” and “the ohs.” It made me wonder when we started naming decades. I’ve read a lot of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying something like “back in the forties” in them.

The habit of singling out a decade and putting a label on it seems to have begun with “the Gay Nineties,” a phrase that the not-always-to-be-trusted Wikipedia claims wasn’t coined until 1926. (It also notes that the phrase had to do with “merriment and frivolity,” not the current meaning of “gay,” even though it was the decade of Oscar Wilde’s triumph and tragedy.) But we seem to have skipped over the 1900s and 1910s when it comes to labeling. We don’t start treating decades as cultural units until the Roaring Twenties.

It’s a lazy habit anyway. What we call “the sixties” – protest, youth rebellion, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that – really began in 1964 with Beatles coming to New York and LBJ escalating the Vietnam War with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and didn’t end till … oh, maybe the rise of disco and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a decade of merriment and frivolity again?

Afterthought: I wonder if Mr. Jacklitch referred to 2000 as "twenty-hundred"?

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the news media, the Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo is the gift that keeps on giving. Especially since celebrattorney Mark Geragos heard the sirens and signed on to represent the Dhaliwal brothers, survivors of the attack.

One thing that the story I read in the Mercury News doesn’t explain, however, is why Geragos, best known as a defense attorney for the likes of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, is on the case. Seems like the Dhaliwals need a plaintiff’s attorney. Who’s suing whom?

But what really caught my interest was something that the Merc quoted Geragos as saying about the security guard who allegedly failed to respond to the brothers’ pleas for help: “She was completely diffident.”

I think I’d be diffident – i.e., timid and shy – if someone told me a tiger was on the loose. Although on the other hand, diffidence is not something you want in a security guard, so maybe Geragos has a point.

Or perhaps he meant to say “indifferent”? I hope he wasn’t trying for “disinterested,” which too many people use to mean “uninterested,” when what it really means is “impartial.” But that’s a gripe for another day.

Anyway, see what I mean? This is a story with something for everyone: zoo-lovers, zoo-haters, lawyers, lawyer-lovers, lawyer-haters, the morbidly curious, and even wordfreaks.

Go With the Grain

Freerice.com is an intriguing site that claims to do two things: help you build your vocabulary and feed the world's hungry. I'm not certain of its effectiveness on either count, but it's an ingenious attention-grabber.

The premise is that you're given a series of words to define. Each word has four purported synonyms. If you pick the right synonym, you earn 20 grains of rice, to be donated to the United Nations World Food Program. The ads on the site pay for the rice.

When you miss a word, you're given an easier one. When you get one right, you're given a slightly harder word. The site keeps track of your score, too. I got up to level 50 a couple of times, but fell back to level 46 or 47 pretty quickly. At the upper levels, you're getting words like apologue, petrous, secern, axenic, furcula, altazimuth, and retrorse. Time for some educated guessing.