Ed Absurdum

At last, some recognition for our profession

2012-01-24T13:48:00.000Z

Today's word du jour from the OED, in honor of myself and my fellow colleagues.

Verbal stuff that I like: New Hampshire primary edition

2012-01-05T11:17:00.000Z

From Walter Shapiro, "Can Rick Santorum Pull Off an Upset in New Hampshire?," New Republic, posted 1/5/12:

But it will take a day or so for the turbulent news environment to calm before the weekend’s debate double-header, which means that all of us in the press pack are like soothsayers crippled by a sudden shortage of chicken entrails.

Adventures with adverbs (2nd of 3): hopefully

2011-11-23T03:16:00.000Z

It’s been a while since I posted part 1 of the Adventures with Adverbs series. Real life kept intervening. Besides, I kept on not going to the library to check out Edwin Newman’s A Civil Tongue (1976).

I was just a youthful amoeba, barely out of my teens, when Newman’s Strictly Speaking (1974) was published. My parents got it for me, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was a full-fledged recruit into the language police. And then I read its sequel, A Civil Tongue.

As many of you know, one of Newman’s big complaints was the usage of hopefully to mean “I hope” or “one might hope” or “it is to be hoped” or the like. It means, claimed Newman, “in a hopeful manner,” and that’s all it means; i.e., “in a manner characterized by hope.”Newman drove the point home in the footnote on page 41 of A Civil Tongue:

Hopefully has its academic supporters, who say that it is the equivalent of the German hoffentlich. However, Nicholas Christy, a professor of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, wrote to me that hoffentlich means it is to be hoped. The German for hopefully, he wrote, is hoffnungsvoll.

Before we go any further, let’s make up and define some notation:

hopefully(1) = in a hopeful manner,
hopefully(2) = it is to be hoped,

with the understanding that not everybody accepts hopefully(2). And of course we still have the unmarked hopefully

I’m not as familiar with the scholarly literature on hopefully as I ought to be [rolling my eyes]. I hadn’t known that people had defended hopefully(2) by claiming that it means the same thing as hoffentlich (which it in fact does). The obvious question that arises is “So what? Who cares?” I guess the point is that there is an unchallenged word in some language--and one closely related to English as that--that means hopefully(2). Cool. And I guess Newman’s point is that one English word cannot carry the meanings of two nonsynonymous German words. And why not? I don’t know.Let’s sort out the uses of hopefully in the quotation and delete the extraneous stuff (and add either some quotation marks or italics to improve its readability).

Hopefully(2) has its academic supporters, who say that it is the equivalent of the German hoffentlich. However, hoffentlich means it is to be hoped. The German for hopefully(1) is hoffnungsvoll.

There are a few problems here. First, this is convincing only if we assume, as Newman seems to, that one English word can’t mean both hoffnungsvoll and hoffentlich. No reason in the world to assume that, as far as I can tell. More importantly, this doesn’t prove that hopefully(2) is incorrect unless you already assume that hopefully(2) is incorrect. To paraphrase, “Some say that hopefully is equivalent to hoffentlich. But hoffentlich doesn’t mean hopefully; it means it is to be hoped.” In other words, the argument assumes that hopefully doesn’t mean it is to be hoped. But that’s what the argument is supposed to prove.

But that's not quite what I'm trying to say either, or maybe it is. What we really need here is video of me flapping my arms around. The point of these supporters of the hopefully(1) = hoffentlich hypothesis is, so I assume, that it's possible for a single word to mean it is to be hoped that. So Newman comes back with the argument that hoffentlich means it is to be hoped that. Which doesn't mean hopefully. Whatever.

Be all of this as it might, on reading this footnote I resigned from the language police and started on the road to descriptivity.

Integrity and citations

2011-10-27T15:46:00.000Z

Section 17.274 of The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., was quite excellent:

To cite a source from a secondary source (“quoted in...”) is generally to be discouraged, since authors are expected to have examined the works they cite. If an original source is unavailable, however, both the original and the secondary source must be listed.

One imagines the composer of “authors are expected to have examined the works they cite” inwardly rolling her or his eyes at needing to point this out. And note the antepenultimate word of the quotation; that must is very non–Chicago Manual. That part about “is generally to be discouraged” is more in keeping with the manual’s usual tone. But the must is called for; it’s a matter of integrity.I’ll keep this anecdote as vague and boring as possible for the sake of confidentiality. I chose masculine pronouns with the help of a flipped coin.

The author of a book I worked on cited a few dozen sources written in some language other than English. Fine and dandy; happens all the time. I edited the book, and he sent back his emendations. One of them is that he changed the correct spelling of the word for “Proceedings” in a journal title in that other language to an incorrect spelling. My employing university’s library catalogue lists over a hundred journals whose titles begin with the correctly spelled word; nothing in the library has as a keyword (author, title, or subject) the incorrectly spelled version. The misspelled version doesn’t appear in the dictionary of that language that my department owns, and it gets zero Google hits in that language. I may or may not know that language, but I either know or suspect that the incorrect spelling clusters more consonants than that language can bear.

We all misspell things in languages we know, and we mistype words we know how to spell. But this guy took a correctly spelled word and actively changed it into a misspelled version. And it isn’t an obscure word, certainly not to any scholar who reads in the language. This suggests to me that he doesn’t know the language he was citing works in. If he “examined” them, as the manual expected him to do, his examination was meaningless.

What did I do about this? Not a heck of a lot I could do. I asked him to confirm the correction, suggesting that he may have been right the first time. Did I ask him whether he did in fact examine all the cited materials? Of course not. Nor did I ask him to remove all citations in that language. All I could do was get annoyed and write this post.

Why did I cite the fifteenth edition of the manual when the sixteenth is now available? Because that section got seriously muushed in section 15.52 of the sixteenth:

If an original source is unavailable, and “quoted in” must be resorted to, mention the original author and date in the text, and cite the secondary source in the reference list entry. The text citation would include the words “quoted in.”

The use of imperatives instead of passives is good (no, that wasn’t sarcasm), although some might find the eye rolling and the must of the older version preferable (although I did try using a Chicago tone after the comma).

How would that be possible?

2011-10-26T12:08:00.002Z

From a report (All Things Considered, October 25, 2011) by NPR's Mara Liasson on YouTube campaigning:

Romney has been at it longer than Perry, Rasiej says, but that can change.

You're welcome.

Useful anonymous quotation, suitable for frame or T-shirt

2011-10-05T15:11:00.001Z

As a general rule, I agree with all statements whose verbal peachpit is “it might be suggested.”

Class consciousness and The Chicago Manual of Style

2011-09-22T16:42:00.000Z

When I send proofs to an author for proofreading, my cover letter says something along the lines of “No changes should be introduced at this point other than the actual correction of actual errors. This is not the time for rewriting or for mere improvements; it can get expensive and time consuming. (I understand that there is nothing ‘mere’ about an improvement, but the time for them has passed.)” Or words to that effect. Nevertheless, most authors improve (in their opinion) the wording at the proofs stage. When assigning responsibility for errors in proofs, my employer uses the abbreviations that appear in The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), section 2.131:

PE (printer’s error--the customary term for what is generally a typesetter’s error), AA (author’s alteration), EA (editor’s alteration), and DA (designer’s alteration).

Is there some sort of class distinction here? The tradespeople (unlike improvements, they can be considered “mere”) engage in errors; we professionals make alterations.

A recommendation, if I may. Let’s let our abbreviations acknowledge that even intelligent professionals, such as the authors we serve and even we our very good selves, commit errors. (The manual does acknowledge this, describing AAs and EAs in 2.131 and 2.132 as errors that need correction.) It would be an honest thing to do. It might even make the authors a little bit more shy about introducing changes in the proofs stage if they were asked to label them as errors. Not likely, but possible.

Miss Froy and the OED

2011-09-20T20:08:00.000Z

I'm recommending that you do three things, preferably in this order.

1. If you're unfortunate enough to never have seen Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), do so at your earliest convenience. If you don't have any convenience, see it at your earliest inconvenience. You'll thank me later. (It's my favorite movie!) (Don't worry, it isn't scary.)
2. Do you subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day? If not, why not?
3. Read the rest of this post.

I now realize that I've quoted shamelessly from the OED in the past, and I may not have met the legal requirements for doing so, in which case I apologize. I'm not going to just copy and paste the whole thing this time. And all quotes from the OED in this post are Copyright © Oxford University Press 2011.

Today's word of the day is McGuffin, also spelled MacGuffin, Maguffin, and maguffin. Although OED uses McGuffin as its main entry, I'll be using MacGuffin because that's the spelling in the two exemplary quotations that I think are most authoritative. The OED defines MacGuffin as an item in a film or other narrative fiction that is "initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops."

It's hard to define words; if I were a lexicographer in the definitions department in the digital age, the definitions would mostly be videos of me waving my arms around and saying, "Well, you see, a MacGuffin is when, like, for example, you've got your...." So it's without any claim of superiority that I say I think this definition is flawed.

Let's talk about The Lady Vanishes. I'm not going to ask if you enjoyed it, since if you didn't, I don't want to know that about you. If you haven't seen it yet (yet! understand?), what follows won't spoil it, because it involves MacGuffins (the word is usually associated with Hitchcock), and we don't really care about them. Many, including Hitchcock, believe that The Lady Vanishes has the best MacGuffin of them all: the tune sung by the local minstrel near the beginning of the film. But this tune isn't "initially presented as being of great significance"; we don't realize it's important until near the end. On the other hand, this may be the exception that proves the rule (I use the cliché intentionally; "proves" here means "tests," not "proves" in its usual modern sense). Maybe it's such a great MacGuffin because it we don't realize it's a MacGuffin until the end--it violates the norm of MacGuffins. It's a meta-MacGuffin. In hindsight, the audience identifies the MacGuffin. We realize that until the importance of the tune becomes clear, we had thought of Miss Froy (the lady who vanishes, played by Dame May Whitty) as the MacGuffin. Of course, she doesn't make a very good MacGuffin--she is lovable and eccentric, so we actually do care whether she turns up.

In one of the OED's illustrative quotations, Hitchcock says,

In regard to the tune, we have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. We just try to be a little more original. (Alfred Hitchcock, Lect. at Univ. Columbia 30 Mar. 1939 [typescript, N.Y. Mus. Mod. Art: Dept. Film & Video])

Indeed. Given that he mentions "the tune" and that the lecture was the year after the release of The Lady Vanishes, I conjecture that this is what he's referring to.

Anyhow, never mind. Just thinking out loud. I mean, I guess the point is that definitions are hard to do, and I love The Lady Vanishes, and I write about the OED a lot in this blog, and the word of the day was MacGuffin. [flapping arms uncontrollably]

Adventures with adverbs (1st of 3): literally

2011-09-11T23:22:00.002Z

I almost never agree with the language police (hereinafter referenced as the "LP"), but I have to admit that literally in a nonliteral sense usually makes my left knee go numb. (I also have to admit that I used reference as a verb hoping that any LP reading this would get annoyed.)

Although I usually dislike nonliteral literally--and note that I haven't called it incorrect or made fun of those who use it, which should establish my non-LP bona fides--I'm not sure it's always inappropriate. I realized this when I read "Literally the most misused word" by Christopher Muther of the Boston Globe. Muther quotes Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com.

Zimmer points to a recent quote by Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas, who said, "This is literally a dream come true, just like it is for everyone on this team."
"Thomas and his teammates didn't all 'literally' dream about winning the Stanley Cup and then wake up to find themselves acting out their dreams," Zimmer says. "He could have used another intensifier ('absolutely,' 'definitely,' 'unquestionably') to make the same point."

"Thomas and his teammates didn't all 'literally' dream about winning the Stanley Cup and then wake up to find themselves acting out their dreams"? And how does Zimmer know this? To me, it sounds utterly plausible. Zimmer throws in some nonsense about "acting out their dreams." But a dream of winning the cup, not necessarily predicting every play, sounds reasonable.

But let's assume for a moment that Thomas and the rest of the guys didn't literally (in the literal sense) dream of winning the cup. Even then, I think it's not implausible to think that in their waking hours they fantasized about it, or thought about how it would feel. If that's the case, what would be wrong with using literally here, even if it's nonliteral? We all know that words can be used figuratively--Muther uses ubiquitous nonliterally. Does literally have some special status that requires that it always be literal? For me, literally probably requires a higher standard than other words for its nonliteral use to annoy me, but Zimmer has made me realize that sometimes it's absolutely fine for it to be used nonliterally.

Here is Muther's statement about the literal truth of literally:

What the word means is "in a literal or strict sense." Such as: "The novel was translated literally from the Russian."

Taken together, the definition and the example make no sense. The combo suggests that "The novel was translated nonliterally from the Russian" means that it was translated neither in a literal nor in a strict sense. Is Muther saying that a nonverbatim translation (I assume that in the example literally means verbatim) is not a translation in a strict sense?

I'm not interested in trying to fix this. But I do find it much more troubling than the displeasing use of literally.

***!!!!A D D E N D U M!!!!***A few sentences up, it says

Is Muther saying that a nonverbatim translation (I assume that in the example literally means verbatim) is not a translation in a strict sense?

As originally published, it read

Is Muther saying that a nonverbatim translation (I assume that in the example literally means verbatim)--is not a translation in a strict sense.

Pointless and incorrect dash after the parenthesis, and no question mark at the end.

Virtual ellipsis

2011-08-04T12:29:00.004Z

This is revolting. It speaks for itself. Not that this blog has any opinions on revoltingness.

For purposes of this blog, the message is that you (and more importantly authors) need to be both ethical and careful about ellipses and other truncations.

Thank you to Havah Hope for this link.

Virtual Bloomsday, and claiming the dead

2011-06-28T09:23:00.001Z

June 16 this year was Bloomsday--in point of fact, June 16 is Bloomsday every year--the day in which the action in James Joyce's Ulysses took place. It's a tradition of Joyce admirers to hold readings of the book on Bloomsday, and this year, according to an NPR report, a newly fangled version of the tradition was introduced--the entire text was tweeted.

My favorite part of the report was at the end. The reporter asked Stephen Cole, the organizer of the tweeting project, whether he thought Joyce would like the idea. As summarized online,

Cole admits that if he were alive today, Joyce might not like the idea that his book was being broken up into tweets.
"I think he really, really really liked what he put in Ulysses, on the page," Cole says. "And an adaptation of that, which is what we're doing — he probably couldn't see any reason to do. Because it was perfect on the page as he did it."

This honesty is refreshing. Usually when people talk about what the dead would have thought or wanted, by an astonishing coincidence it almost always coincides (as it were) with their own opinions or wants. Amazing! I admire Cole for admitting that he doesn't know (indeed he can't know), but that his guess is that Joyce would probably disapprove.

Some years ago, a young boy was killed early in an interethnic war overseas. I got an e-mail saying that he had been brought up in a family active in his country's peace movement, and that he wouldn't want people to avenge his blood. I got another e-mail saying that his blood cries out for vengeance, and that he himself would want vengeance. Regardless of my own position of this, both e-mails disgusted me, but especially the one calling for vengeance. Neither writer had any way of knowing what the little boy would have thought. If all that's left of the dead is their good name, these two e-mailers were engaging in the last available form of child abuse.

What is the difference between a preposition and a word used as if it were a preposition?

2011-06-19T00:01:00.003Z

Recently two commenters on an online article got into a disagreement about whether “more [adj.] than him” or “more [adj.] than he” is correct to the exclusion of the other. I weighed in with “Both Egg Regis and Squid Viscous [not their real pseudonyms] are mistaken; than can be either a conj. (‘more [adj.] than he’) or a prep. (‘more [adj] than him’).”

To me this is intuitive, but who cares about my intuition? But fear not--Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., agrees with me. Here is MW’s usage note for ²than (prep.) Material in square brackets appears in the first hard-copy printing (FHCP) (2003) and not in the online dictionary (OD) as of June 16, 2011; material in curly brackets appears in the OD and not in the FHCP, and yes, I already know that I need to get a life. Anyhow, here’s that usage note.

After [about] 200 years of innocent if occasional use, the preposition than was called into question by 18th century grammarians. Some 200 years of elaborate [and sometimes tortuous] reasoning have led to these present-day inconsistent conclusions: than whom is standard but clumsy [<Beelzebub...than whom, Satan except, none higher sat — John Milton>] <T. S. Eliot, than whom nobody could have been more insularly English — Anthony Burgess>; than me may be acceptable in speech <a man no mightier than thyself or me — {Shakespeare} [Shak.]> <why should a man be better than me because he's richer than me — William Faulkner, in a talk to students>; than followed by a third-person objective pronoun (her, him, them) is {usually} [usu.] frowned upon. Surveyed opinion tends to agree with these conclusions. Our evidence shows that than {is used as a conjunction more commonly than as a} [is more common than the] preposition, that than whom is chiefly limited to writing, and that me is more common after the preposition than the third-person objective pronouns. {In short,} [You have the same choice Shakespeare had;] you can use than either as a conjunction or as a preposition.

Hear hear!

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is the very strange treatment of this question in The Oxford English Dictionary. (As I’ve mentioned in the past, I refer to the OED without italics, based on The Chicago Manual of Style, which I also refer to without italics: “Names of scriptures and other highly revered works are capitalized but not usually italicized” [CMS, 16th ed., 8.102].) The OED doesn’t recognize than as a preposition, but this is its definition 1b of than (conj.).

With a personal or relative pronoun in the objective case instead of the nominative (as if than were a preposition). This is app. the invariable construction in the case of than whom, which is universally accepted instead of than who. With the personal pronouns it is now considered incorrect.

This strikes me as very odd. “As if than were a preposition”? From a lexicographer’s point of view, what is the difference between a preposition and a word used as if it were a preposition?

That’s the question that all this hoohah was leading up to. And here are a few loose ends.

Why did the exemplary quotation from Milton disappear from the online version of MW’s usage note? The answer is suggested by the OED, which also employs that quotation when discussing than when it’s used as if it were a preposition.

1667 Milton Paradise Lost ii. 299 Bëëlzebub...then whom, Satan except, none higher sat.

From Middle English through the seventeenth century, than was sometimes spelled then. I’m guessing that MW deleted the quotation because using the correct (viz., Milton's) spelling would have just confused the issue. And I like the look of the two consecutive diaereses, but that's beside the point, and I don't do digressions.

It’s worth mentioning, in my possibly worthless opinion, that the OED also lists an obsolete pronoun than.

After a prep.: That; as in for þan for that (reason), therefore; for al þan, for all that (FOR prep. 23b); not (na) for than, notwithstanding that. See also for þan.

I find this stuff interesting, but there's another oddity, probably a computer glitch. "See also for þan" is a link, but it goes to the entry for than as an obsolete pronoun--the entry in which the link itself appears.

A word that should make our eyebrow hairs go boioioing

2011-03-09T02:17:00.003Z

Like "veritable tsunami" and "much ink has been spilled," "raise a red flag" annoys the broccoli out of me. I hope to popularize "make your eyebrow hairs go boioioing" as an alternative cliché.

This article is downright tolerable, except for one thing:

So it didn't necessarily come as a surprise when I read that researchers have now proved that listening to your favorite melodies and harmonies can trigger the brain to release large amounts of dopamine.

"Proved"? Indeed not, and in fact the linked-to study doesn't claim to have proved anything; the closest it comes is "indicate." When another study comes along indicating that music doesn't stimulate the release of dopamine, that also won't be definitive proof.

In our work as manuscript editors, our eyebrow hairs should go boioioing when we come across claims of proof. We will usually not be competent to evaluate how good a study is, but we should question talk of proof. Many of the scholars whose work we play with will appreciate it and tone down the language.

Tolerability

2011-02-11T14:16:00.002Z

A former colleague of mine, Harold Henderson (whose permission to name him I'm going to get after I post this), used to answer "I'm tolerable" when people asked how he was. To which I used to reply "yeah, right, if you think so." I miss Harold, and conceivably one of the reasons for posting this--a reason I dare not speculate on even to myself--is that it gives me an excuse to contact him to get his permission to mention him here.

Lately--which means over the last few years, but since I'm old I have a long perspective, and anything a few years ago is recent to me--and where was I? Right. I remember now. Lately, I've been noticing that some people say "I'm awesome" or "I'm good" or the like when you ask how they are. Which used to sound weird to me. I mean, we're not asking their opinions of themselves or asking them to do a self-esteem exercise. It no longer sounds weird to me because I've heard it so often. (Actually, it still does. I'm still getting used to "into" meaning "interested in," which I first noticed around forty years ago.) But anyhow, nowadays "tolerable" seems like a suitable answer to the question, especially if, like me, you have terrific self-esteem but don't want to brag about your sheer (as opposed to opaque) awesomeness.

Point is, from now on I'm going to say that I'm tolerable when people ask how I am. If I remember. Thank you, Harold Henderson.

Venting my feelings

2011-02-09T18:43:00.003Z

One of these days, if I get around to it, I may do a real post. In the meantime, may I vent my feelings? Thank you.

I hate "veritable tsunami." I hate "much ink has been spilled."

I don't feel any better now, but thank you for indulging me anyway.

Sokal revisited

2011-01-05T13:01:00.003Z

(Those who are visiting from Facebook should know that the previous post, the one on AhfPæk, is the one I was talking about on Facebook.)

Back in 1996, in an early part of my dotage, I loved the Lingua Franca article in which Alan Sokal exposed his own hoax; I got many a laugh from it. Now Michael Bérubé provides an interesting mixed review of that article. I think it's worth a read.

This blog has no opinion on Alan Sokal, Michael Bérubé, Social Text, science studies, science, Andrew Ross, E. O. Wilson, sociobiology, Steve Fuller (whom I don't think highly of--that's a statement of fact about me, not an opinion about him), intelligent design, or the objective reality, nonobjective reality, objective nonreality, and/or nonobjective nonreality of gravity.

The blog is unable to miss Lingua Franca, not having existed when LF was around.

AhfPæk

2011-01-05T02:17:00.008Z

Before I get into the main topic, let me tell you about my favorite source of white noise (it will tie in later). It's SBS Radio, an Australian network that broadcasts in some sixty-six languages (not counting English). I listen to languages that I have no clue in. It's pleasant background sound, and occasionally there's some very good music (and also some boring music). If you don't want to pay attention to it, you probably shouldn't listen to any languages that are closely related to languages you know. "Did they just say that four amoebae are playing hockey? It sounded just like 'four amoebae are playing hockey' in that cognate language I studied for a year in junior high." I listen to a bunch of the languages (nothing Romance or Germanic; too many words similar to English); sometimes I tend to gravitate to Amharic and Cook Island Maori. It's incredibly cool to me that Maori and Cook Island Maori are on SBS's list as two separate languages. The Cantonese broadcast is annoying. It includes a long feature in which a man and a woman are talking and laughing, with a recorded instrumental badoomp-clang every once in a while. Sounds like a lot of annoying American anglophone radio.

Anyhow, be that as it may.

It used to strike me as odd that some of us Midwesterners refer to Pakistan as "Pahkistahn"; odder still that they talk about "Pahkistahn" in the same breath as "Æfghænistæn." This never struck me as incorrect, just unusual; now it strikes me as both nonincorrect and nonunusual (languages change), but still odd.

Odder than the pronunciation is the reaction of some Republicans to it (President Obama appears to be the main popularizer of it), and odd and downright incorrect is the reaction of some Democrats to the Republican reaction. For example, here's Steve Benen of Washington Monthly, back in 2008, quoting some conservatives bellyaching about Obama's pronunciation:

The National Review's Mark Stein, for example, said that Obama prefers the "exotic pronunciation." He added, "[O]ne thing I like about Sarah Palin is the way she says 'Eye-raq'."
This came after the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez posted an email that argued, "[N]o one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It's annoying."

This is truly a stupid thing to make into a campaign issue. Here's Benen's response to this nonsense:

The inanity of what the right decides to whine about never ceases to amaze me. That Obama's pronunciation is accurate is irrelevant. Mispronunciation apparently makes some conservatives feel better about themselves, and raises doubts about candidates who care to get this right. "Elites" care about country names; real Americans don't.

So "Pækistæn" is incorrect? How so? If something is commonplace enough for people to complain that it's wrong, then it's idiomatic in some speech community; if you're going to be cheeky enough to claim that idiom is incorrect, you have a serious burden of proof. How do we know that "Pækistæn" is incorrect? The usual answer is that that's not how Pakistanis pronounce it.

This isn't a convincing argument. The problem is that we're speaking English. In my listening to SBS (I told you I'd come back to it), I've heard non-English radio reports in which the announcer refers to something that sounds to my non-IPA ears like "Ámrika." But English- and Spanish-speaking Americans accent the vowel between the em and the ar; French-speaking Americans have a long but unaccented vowel there. (Can't comment on Portuguese or indigenous languages.) In "Ámrika," that vowel completely disappears. Would anyone be brazen enough to say that those who say "Ámrika" in their native language are mispronouncing their own native language? No? But that's not how Americans pronounce it. If "Pækistæn" is incorrect English because that isn't the Pakistani pronunciation, then "Ámrika" should be incorrect in other languages because that's not how Americans pronounce it in their languages (as far as I know).

By the way, Steve Benen, the opponent of what he takes to be mispronunciation, misspelled the name of the National Review's Mark Steyn in the excerpt quoted above. I don't consider this a big deal in itself; this isn't one of those "nyah nyah nyah, I found a typo" blogs. But if you're going to complain about other people's errors, you should try to get stuff right.

More ridiculous, but this is a matter of opinion, and this blog avoids opinion, is Benen's use of "argued" when he said Lopez "argued, '[N]o one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It's annoying.'"

It should go without saying that this blog has no opinion on President Obama, Steve Benen, Mark Steyn, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Pakistan, or Afghanistan.

This is downright hilarious

2010-12-09T12:48:00.002Z

At least I think so. It's definitely worth a listen. My favorite part is when they call it a new version.

Poorly stated

2010-12-09T12:41:00.001Z

President Obama:

I think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed.

Let's assume he meant "is going to get harmed." Anyhow, doesn't the qualifier mean that one should always negotiate with hostage takers?

This blog has no opinion on President Obama, on those he calls hostage takers, on the taking of hostages, or on whether one should negotiate with hostage takers. (In private life, I may have such opinions.)

A prescient people

2010-11-19T16:35:00.003Z

This originally appeared on another blog long ago. Thank you to the proprietor of the other blog for not giving me grief about reposting it here.

The opening words of Alan Wolfe, "The Great Jewish-American Synthesis," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2005:

Ever since the first Jew arrived on American shores 350 years ago, one question has persistently been asked but never definitively answered. Should Jews accommodate themselves to the culture of the United States...?

Maybe they used the Bible code. Wolfe fails to address this possibility.

Fantasies

2010-11-19T13:05:00.004Z

Last weekend, I went to a musical venuviality called the Stained Glass Coffeehouse. They should be ashamed of themselves for serving coffee in insufficiently clean vessels, but at least they're providing full disclosure. Not my problem, since I don't drink coffee. (Personal revelation! personal revelation!, this is turning into a downright blog!)

But that's not why I'm writing this, and the stained glasses aren't why I went there. I went there because Claudia Schmidt was performing. She pointed out, correctly, that what doesn't kill you only makes you wish you were dead, but that's not why I'm writing this either. Schmidt has a fantasy about some screaming pundit at some point in the screamage saying "I don’t know" and walking out. That isn't my fantasy (yikes!, this really is becoming a genuine blog). Mine is that someday when some pundits are screaming at or discussing with one another, one of them will say, "Well, you've raised a good point. I may need to rethink some of this."

Yeah, right, whatever.

And one more thing. In the first paragraph, I wrote "They should be ashamed of themselves for serving coffee in insufficiently clean vessels, but at least they're providing full disclosure." So before the comma, I'm telling them they should be ashamed of themselves; after the comma, I'm praising them for being shameless. I acknowledge this now in order to forestall the derisory comments.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: Kris Kristofferson's Cascading Negatives Edition

2010-10-24T21:00:00.003Z

This is from "Best of All Possible Worlds" on the Me and Bobby McGee album:

I said "I won't be leaving no more quicker than I can/'Cause I've enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand/And I don't need this town of yours more than I never needed nothing else!"!

Of course, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose/And nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free" is also very wonderful, but you've all heard that one already, and this is an educational blog. [chortle]

The n-word and the w-word, and use vs. mention

2010-10-24T20:58:00.006Z

Warning: This post has quotations with both the w-word and the n-word, and it mentions (but doesn't use [although it questions the importance of the distinction]) the f-word.

Linguist John McWhorter has an interesting column (in the New Republic, posted on October 13, 2010), which I now quote at some length, since a paraphrase will be less eloquent and not much shorter:

[On a tape, an aide to Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor of California] suggests that a useful campaign response to Whitman's offering a deal to the Los Angeles policeman's union on pensions would be to frame her as a "whore."
"The people of California deserve better than slurs," Whitman [Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate] objected in a debate with Brown Tuesday. And moderator Tom Brokaw chimed in that calling Whitman a whore was equivalent to lobbing the N-word at a black person...
The simple fact is that whore has two meanings. One is the original and ancient one of a woman who sells her body for money. It could even be argued that this meaning of the word is becoming somewhat old-fashioned. Words evolve. Always. The newer meaning of whore is a secondary and derived one, applied to a person who takes money or some other form of recompense in return for a service deemed substandard in quality or ethics.
Note that I write "person," as whore is applied readily to men as well as women. A quick internet search reveals the word being applied to Ben Stein, Hugh Jackman, Lil Wayne and Harry Reid (and in Jackman's case, he even happily applies it to himself). Pointedly, Whitman's current campaign chairman Pete Wilson, back in 1995, accused Congress of being "such whores to public employees unions" (in reference to the Fair Labor Practices Act during the Depression!!).
This is the meaning that Brown's aide intended, and an analogy to the N-word does not go through. Nigger implies the generic, definitional inferiority of black people regardless of what they do. The proper analogy would be if the staffer had, with Brown's tacit approval, referred to her with a word beginning with c and ending with t. That is a word generally applied only to women, and with an implication of total, bone-chilling, ice-cold dismissal of female individuals in general.

For the little that it's worth, I agree with McWhorter on this. For the demographic record (which shouldn't be necessary--an argument should stand on its own merits, but some may consider this important), McWhorter is a black (he objects to "African American") male, and I am a white male.

The final paragraph of McWhorter's post reads,

For Whitman, Brokaw, or anyone else to claim that Brown's aide's private usage of whore in the sense he intended is equivalent to someone calling Cory Booker a nigger is, well, politics. Just as when some pretend that blacks and whites are using "the same word" when wielding the N-word--or others pretend that someone like Dr. Laura referring to the N-word is the same as using it--we're all playing a kind of game, unaware of it only in a willing kind of way.

Doc Laura Schlessinger. There's one for you. I agree with McWhorter on this, sort of. Schlessinger did refer to the N-word instead of using it. But it was still extremely stupid. Linguists make the distinction between mention of a word and use of it, and it may be useful in scholarship, but in the real world it often isn't. Imagine you're a parent of a child, and you say to your child, "I don't want you to say 'fuck you.'" You probably can't imagine saying that, since you can't imagine being that stupid. The child is going to say, "But you just said it, hee hee hee hee hee hee hee." And you, in this imagined scenario, are going to reply, "Yes, dear child, but I mentioned it, I didn't use it."

In August, there was some hoohah at Language Log about mention vs. use. Geoffrey K. Pullum, whose posts I admire when they're not way over my head (my fault for my head being so low), quotes Shirley Brown, the first black Liberal Democrat to be elected to the Bristol, England, city council, who said to Jay Jethwa, a Conservative member of the council who is of Indian descent

In our culture we have a word for you … we have a word which we use, and I'm sure many in this city would understand, it's coconut. And at the end of the day I just look at you as that. And the water's either worth throwing away or drinking it.

Pullum adds,

Jethwa was upset; she knew very well that the coconut reference was about being brown on the outside but white inside (and she said she felt it insulted not only her but white people too). She also recognized the metaphor of the often discarded coconut water as suggesting that her remarks were worthless.

Brown was charged with aggravated racial harassment. Pullum comments,

The linguistic point is that Mrs. Brown did not use the term coconut. Although the Guardian sub-head said she "called [her] Asian opponent a 'coconut' during heated debate", she didn't. There was in fact no heated debate: she read prepared remarks quite calmly. And she observed that in her own culture there was a word for people like Jay Jethwa, and said what the word was, and said she saw it as an appropriate one in the context.
It's a small point, but there is a linguistic difference between telling someone that there is a word roadhog for people like them who drive aggressively and ignore other drivers' rights and safety, and actually saying "You're a roadhog." It's the difference between use and mention of the word in question. [Pullum's italics and boldface]

There was a lot of backing-and-forthing in the comments on this post, with a lot of did-not-did-so discourse. She did call her a coconut, says a commenter; she did not, replies Pullum. And then another commenter, and Pullum's re-reply. I take Pullum's point, but it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. "We have a word for you. It's coconut. I just look at you as that." Maybe we can add another differenceless distinction. Brown called Jethwa a coconut. Note that I'm not saying Brown used "coconut," only that she called Jethwa a coconut. Note too that the Guardian's subhead that Pullum objects to uses call instead of use.

Nevertheless, I agree with McWhorter, based on my reading of the Schlessinger transcript, that the doc wasn't using the word. She was mentioning it. I think she should have been busted for stupidity instead of racism. (Not to mention abusing her callers, but that's off topic here.) (Not that this blog has any opinion on abusing people, although I, its author, may [some may consider this yet another distinction without a difference].)

But I think that McWhorter himself recognizes that the difference between mention and use isn't always meaningful. Recall what he said about the female equivalent of the n-word: that it is "a word beginning with c and ending with t. That is a word generally applied only to women, and with an implication of total, bone-chilling, ice-cold dismissal of female individuals in general." Like McWhorter, I can't mention this word, let alone use it. The distinction between mention and use seems sometimes to disappear here.

Oops

2010-10-03T22:11:00.004Z

Careful readers of this blog will note--heck, I noted it, and I'm not even a careful reader of this blog--anyhow, they'll note that the post about Mr. Breakfast has the title "Verbal Stuff I Like," when the correct name of the series is "Verbal Stuff That I Like." And that in that very post I mention "the Verbal Stuff I Like series" (twice) while in the Raymond L. Weiss post I mention "the 'Verbal Stuff That I Like Series,'" with quotation marks and a capped "Series," not to mention that "That" is in it. Oops.

Yes, I do need to get a life.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: Euro Edition

2010-10-03T22:09:00.003Z

This all started when, industrious welkin that I am, I found "peanut fondu [sic]" in a manuscript I was working on. The sic was the author's, not my own, and I had to check the Oxford English Dictionary to see whether the sic was called for. The OED says that fondu is an erroneous spelling, which seems like a pretty nondescriptivist tude. So I did a full-text search in the OED for both fondue and fondu, and in the foodie sense fondue sure did preponderate. Not that either one appeared all that often. And isn't it my opinion that if a spelling occurs often enough to get mentioned as erroneous, that's also often enough to make it a legitimate alternative spelling (not that I'd necessarily use it (stop giggling!, I'm being serious!)!)? It sure is.

But anyhow. Here's one of the exemplary quotations I found that includes fondue. It's not an exemplary quotation for fondue (although maybe it should be, but for "Euro-, comb. form, " definition A.1.c. ("Forming the names of types or genres of music originating in or associated with (continental) Europe").

2002 Big Issue 17 June 33/2 Ok, trance isn't everyone's cup of rave gravy, in fact, there is a whole tranche of Euro trance that makes fondue look dairy-free.

Verbal Stuff I Like: Mr. Breakfast Edition

2010-09-21T10:21:00.004Z

I was wondering one day how to make a soft-boiled egg. Making a hard-boiled egg is a piece of cake. You put an egg in boiling water and neglect it for as long as it ususally takes you to neglect things. After you come back to it, you boil it a few minutes longer if there's any water left. And you've got a hard-boiled egg.

A soft-boiled egg takes more planning. By planning, I obviously mean googling the matter. (So the question arises, if it's so obvious, why am I bothering to tell you? Good question.) So I ended up at the website of Mr. Breakfast. Julie B. asked, "Dear Mr. Breakfast, How do you boil an egg?" Mr. Breakfast acknowledged--correctly, in my opinion--that this is a great question (I would have used "excellent" instead of "great," but that's just a matter of emphasis). Mr. Breakfast then says, "I refer to boiled eggs as 'flash-boiled-then-simmered eggs'. I wasn't sure if you meant 'soft-flash-boiled-then-simmered eggs" or 'hard' so I cooked up a response for both." In point of fact, he doesn't refer to boiled eggs as anything other than boiled eggs anywhere else on the page. But I'm gladdened to know that he intended to do so. Nevertheless, this isn't why I chose Mr. Breakfast for the Verbal Stuff I Like series. Here's his recipe for soft-flash-boiled-then-simmered eggs (or, as he refers to them, soft-boiled eggs). But that's not why I'm featuring him here either. Anyhow, the recipe (which applies only to large eggs):

Remove desired number of eggs from the refrigerator and let them sit at room temperature for 15 minutes.

Place eggs in a small sauce pan and add just enough water to completely cover eggs.

Bring the water to a rolling boil. Covering the pan will lead to a quicker boil and is recommended.

Immediately reduce heat to simmer and remove the cover from the pan.

The amount of time the eggs are allowed to simmer will determine the degree to which the yolk is cooked. A cooking time of less than 4 minutes is not recommended.

Soft-cooked runny yolk:
5 minutes (4 minutes for medium eggs; 6 minutes for extra-large eggs)

Medium-cooked creamy partially-firm yolk:
7 minutes (6 minutes for medium eggs; 8 minutes for extra-large eggs)

Carefully remove the pan from the stove top and place beneath the kitchen faucet. Run cool water into the pan for a minute until the water is cool to the touch. This reduces the temperature enough so the eggs won't continue to cook under their own internal heat. It also brings them down to a more appropriate serving temperature.

To serve soft-boiled and medium-boiled eggs: Place cooked egg in an egg cup. Small cappuccino cups work in a fix. Crack with a small spoon and consume directly from the shell.

Just to illustrate his point clearly, Mr. Breakfast follows the recipe with a very cool picture:

But as I was saying, this isn't why I'm quoting Mr. Breakfast here. No, it's because of this:

Quick & Dirty Method Of Hard-BoilingWhen Mr Breakfast was in college, a vibrant yellow yolk wasn't nearly as important to him as chasing skirts and getting stoned on beer. I--me being him--would simply bring water to a boil, place my eggs in the water and remove them all when the first crack appeared in any one of the eggs. The eggs would naturally be slightly over-cooked. But the negative effect of slight-overcooking was one of appearance. The yolk was more of an off-yellow, just-short-of-green color. The eggs still tasted great.

The change of person, from "him" talk to "I" talk, was in itself not a big deal (at work, I'd pretend to be bent out of shape by it, but not in real life). But the explanatory "me being him"--well, as regular readers of this blog may not be surprised to hear, this appealed to me and won Mr. Breakfast this spot in the Verbal Stuff I Like series.

New Chicago Manual

2010-09-01T14:53:00.005Z

I admire The Chicago Manual of Style (except for the usage guide by Bryan Garner)--in fact, I explained here why I don't use italics when referring to it, an explanation based on the then-current ~~sixteenth~~ [oops!, I meant the fifteenth] edition. I also admire Carol Fisher Saller's The Subversive Copy Editor.

The Chicago Tribune carries an article by Steve Johnson about the new sixteenth edition of the manual, featuring this paragraph:

"Our readers really told us very clearly, 'We don't want to have to think about it that much. Just tell us the rule!,'" Saller says.

If I had been writing this, and if there had been any hint of exclamation on Saller's part, I would have written this as

"Our readers really told us very clearly, 'We don't want to have to think about it that much. Just tell us the rule!'!," Saller says.

But misfortunately, or perhaps not, I didn't write it, and I don't know whether there was any hint of sclam from Saller herself.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: Raymond L. Weiss Edition (and this one is serious); and, My Hypocrisy

2010-08-29T14:59:00.005Z

So far, the items in the "Verbal Stuff That I Like Series" have made the cut by virtue of their quirkiness. This one is absolutely serious. It is from Maimonides' Ethics: The Encounter of Philosophic and Religious Morality (1991) by Raymond L. Weiss, pp. 4-5:

Maimonides himself uses the expression ["philosophic ethics"]. It is even possible that he was the first to do so; at any rate, to my knowledge, he has no predecessor in this matter.

"To my knowledge." It is rare to see a scholarly author acknowledge that a "there is no" statement reflects the extent of their knowledge. And as Weiss notes, a statement about "the first" is a negative statement--it means that there was none earlier. Similarly any statement about "the only," "the largest," "the whateverest"--these are equivalent to saying that there is no other, no larger, no whateverer.

I truly got pleasure from this statement of Weiss's. And after typing up the preceding paragraph, I realized what a hypocritical droplet of whiteout I am. On the occasion once every several blue moons when I come across a parenthetical "to the best of my knowledge," I query the author about it. "This statement about the best of your knowledge could be made about many negative statements in your manuscript," I write. "Why does this one in particular call for the disclaimer?" The question isn't sarcastic, although authors may take it that way. At any rate, they always delete the qualifier.

So why am I pleased by Weiss's statement even though I query it in my own work? I don't know. Maybe it seems more organic in Weiss's case and more thrown in in the others; Weiss's statement, after all, is tentative: "It is even possible that he was the first to do so." I think that's probably it. And what would I have done if I had worked on Weiss’s manuscript? I might have queried it. Maybe, maybe not. A trainload of such tentative statements, each of them carrying the disclaimer, it would make tedious even the most engaging work.

Anyhow, I admire Weiss’s honesty, and that of the other authors who make such a disclaimer, even though I attempt to wave a hatchet at it when it appears on my virtual desk. Go figure.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: Claudia Schmidt Edition

2010-08-12T00:01:00.001Z

Decades ago, literal decades, when I was just a young ramshackle, I was a fan of Claudia Schmidt, a musician who frequently venued in the greater metropolitan region I then lived in (I mean, it wasn't greater then than it is now, but it is greater than other metro regions). I live there still. A few years ago, I went to hear her when she came on tour through these parts once again. In the intro to a song titled "Banana Moon," she said something about most of our moonage. I like "moonage," and in fact it may be because of similar utterances that I was a fan of hers. In part. The music is good too.

Did she say most of our moonage is nonfull? I'm not sure; in a dream, perhaps.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: Tech Edition

2010-08-11T00:01:00.004Z

This (with some redactivity to keep the identity of my employer[s] unknown) is from an e-mail from the tech guy at work.

During the maintenance periods, well-behaved servers will queue messages that are bound for unavailable Wherever email systems.

No clue what it means, but I like it. But hey!, I do have some speculation about what "well-behaved servers" means. In The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., in chapter 5 ("Grammar and Usage" by Bryan A. Garner), in "Glossary of Troublesome Expressions" (sec. 5.202), the entry for gentleman reads

This word is a vulgarism when used as a synonym for man. When used in reference to a cultured, refined man, it is susceptible to some of the same objections as those leveled against lady. Use it cautiously. Cf. lady.

This is the only place in the manual where Garner uses vulgarism; nowhere does he define it. (Although he does implicitly define a "cultured, refined" person throughout the chapter; it seems to mean somebody who writes and talks the way Garner wants them to.) But it's likely that vulgarisms are a subset (whether proper or improper, I don't know--we disapprove of impropriety, but if the set is a set of improprieties, is a proper subset itself improper?), and where was I anyway? Right, I remember now. Vulgarisms are probably a subset of those usages that Garner dislikes. So maybe, taking a cue (and/or queue) from Garner, would a well-behaved server be one who says to a cultured, refined male patron "Would Monsieur like an extra shot of horseradish juice?" instead of "Would The Gentleman like an extra shot of horseradish juice?"?

Or whatever. One of these years, I'm going to post my review of Garner's chapter. When I get around to it.

Verbal Stuff That I Like: A New Feature

2010-08-06T00:01:00.002Z

I gripe too much. Too much negativity. "Jeepolas!, we're all doomed!, somebody said 'therefore' with insufficient support. Yiiiiighhhh!" Well, I guess a flimsy "therefore" can potentially doom us under some circs (and is "potentially" redundant here, or does it provide some needed emphasis? beats me).

Point is, I really do bellyache too much. So I'm going to make a point of posting about verbal or logical stuff that I like. Some of it may be trivial. (But more importantly, I began this graf with "Point is" and then I began the next sentence with "So I'm going to make a point of." Sad.)

So here it is. This blog, as you probably know by now, has no opinion on this article by Jonathan Chait with the title "Deficit Commission Is Harshing My Mellow." But the blog does love that title.

Let's get marginal

2010-07-01T17:52:00.001Z

Can you find the probable error (as opposed to statement that you disagree with) in this?

The most recent NBC/WSJ poll... show[s] a plurality (45-43) preferring a Republican-controlled Congress.

--Jonathan Chait, "Republican Health Care Fratricide," New Republic, posted June 30, 2010

OK. What does it mean to talk about "a plurality (45-43)" in a random sample? In this case, it probably means 45 percent of the sample prefer a Republican-controlled Congress and 43 percent prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress. And if we look at the poll Chait links to, that is in fact what it means. But when polling numbers are this close, we need to look at the margin of error. In the linked-to poll it says from the start that the margin of error is ±3.1 percentage points. But the difference between the percentage that prefer Congress (R.) to Congress (D.) is less than the margin of error. Which means that the poll shows no plurality here. This is what some correctly call a statistical dead heat or a statistical tie. Chait is mistaken when he says the poll shows a plurality.

This is something you see a lot of. Consumers (and writers) of news need to watch out for this. As do you and I, my colleagues.

Pitiful

2010-06-10T15:55:00.003Z

The New Republic is currently running a stupid and inane series called "Dispatches from the Blago Trial" by Margo Howard. In the third installment, Howard makes fun of Mike Ettinger, the attorney for Robert Blagojevich, Rod's brother:

Robert gained top military clearance because he was involved with Persian missiles and in charge of three "nucular" warheads (this pronunciation no doubt a tip of the hat to George W. Bush, this Blagojevich being a Republican).

Howard impresses here with witty commentary about "nucular." But what about those Persian missiles? What involvement did this U.S. military guy have with Iranian weaponry? Why didn't a journalist like Howard find this odd? Why didn't her editors at The New Republic?

Here's my guess about what happened. In Chicago, 39th Street is also (and primarily) known as Pershing Road. The Chicago pronunciation of the street's name is "Perzhing." Whether that's the pronunciation of Gen. "Black Jack" Pershing's name, or of Pershing missiles, I don't know. But my guess is that Ettinger applied the Chicago pronunciation of the street name to the missiles, and Howard didn't notice. Maybe she didn't know about Pershing Road or its pronunciation, maybe she didn't know about Pershing missiles. Whatever.

The point for readers of this editorial blog is that if we see something that seems very odd, such as a U.S. military person who works with Persian missiles, we need to query it. Another lesson, for all of us, is that if you're going to make fun of someone's pronunciations, you should try to look nonignorant when you're doing it. The best bet might be to not make fun of other people's pronunciations.

Says who?

2010-06-09T22:40:00.005Z

Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log surmises that The New Yorker has a policy against putting said and the like before the subject, no matter the length of the subject. Says Pullum,

The New Yorker apparently has a house-style prohibition on (if I may use the technical terms employed in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) subject postposing in a parenthetical report frame for directly reported speech, even when the quoted speech is preposed.

He cites this quotation, which I haven't verified:

"He used to have this great, dignified passion to him," Christopher Hitchens, who, until his own political change of heart, defended Chomsky, says. (Larissa MacFarquhar, "The devil's accountant", The New Yorker, March 31, 2003, p.67, column 2.)

Obviously--so obviously that I feel silly pointing it out--this sentence could be made into a much easier read. As Pullum points out

the New Yorker's fierce and unyielding house style code will not allow the subject to be postposed, to yield what could have been a perfectly acceptable sentence:
"He used to have this great, dignified passion to him," says Christopher Hitchens, who, until his own political change of heart, defended Chomsky.

(Here I note that Pullum is inconsistent on whether "the" should be treated as part of the title of the magazine. In work, I need to notice this stuff, but in real life I passionately don't care about it. I mention it for the sake of my professional cred.)

I bring this whole thing up for a few reasons. First, it's interesting (if you're interested in this stuff, which I am). Second, obviously, if we come across this sort of antipostpositional nonsense in our work, we need to correct it (not that it's incorrect--it's just nonreadable). The third thing is less obvious and much more important. Early on, Pullum says the magazine "apparently has a house-style prohibition on...subject postposing." Later, he says the mag's "fierce and unyielding house style code will not allow the subject to be postposed." This is very seriously non-OK, and it happens a lot in the scholarly stuff we edit. Some new information is suggestive of something or other blah blah yuck yuck, and therefore whatever. We need to protest when the author of a work we're editing magically goes from suggestivity and apparentness to a solid "therefore," or, as in this case, forgets that something is merely apparent. I mean, right, we should make the protest look like a query. And they may say, incorrectly, that it's fine. But we need to do our job.

I realize Pullum may have been quasi-jokey when writing about the "fierce and unyielding house style code." But in editing scholarly books, this is a joke we need to be humorless about.

THE NEXT MORNINGWell, of course what Pullum did was probably OK. My point was that we need to be vigilant about maybe's that morph into defintely's. I actually do think that Pullum's was better than harmless--it was downright OK. But it would be non-OK for someone in our trade to not notice it and not at least be given pause by it.MAJOR EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE MIKESTER (VIZ, ME)Note two of the phrases in the previous paragraph. "What Pullum did was probably OK...I actually do think that Pullum's was better than harmless--it was downright OK." I noticed this in reviewing the paragraph and decided to keep it as an object lesson. It's hard not to fall into this trap, but we editors of scholarly material need to be on the lookout for it. And any of my colleagues who didn't notice what I did should consider finding honest work instead of what we do.

Frog crisis in Greece

2010-05-28T14:22:00.002Z

Language Log is often interesting. I'm linking to this post because there's a comment by me, dated this morning. It's about the kind of stuff that makes you go "whaa?"

Infallibling

2010-05-13T01:26:00.002Z

Today I was working on a book with a quotation from a nineteenth-century Englishman; the quotation had infallible as an adverb. So I looked infallible up in the OED to see whether it was used as an adverb at the time. It wasn't, but it was obsoletely used as a verb long ago. My favorite exemplary quotation is from The Golden Law (1656), by S. H. (Samuel Harsnett):

We will next pursue it with right Reason which will selfly infallible it.

No big deal. I just liked it and wanted to share it.

You know you're in trouble when "proverbial" appears twice in one paragraph

2010-05-05T15:48:00.003Z

Lots of iterativity here: me reprinting a Jonathan Chait item that cites someone who Chait claims is Nico Pitney (at the end of the cited column, several names appear including Pitney's) quoting and making fun of Eric Alterman. Says Chait:

"Finding all the cliches and mixed metaphors in this Eric Alterman paragraph is like cutting fish in a barrel with a butter knife," writes Nico Pitney. After reading the paragraph in question, I think he understates:
And yet even with all its proverbial ducks lined up—a populist crusade is just what the doctor ordered for a divided and dispirited party going into perilous midterm elections—the administration and its lieutenants in Congress are still shooting as many blanks as real bullets at the bad guys. It’s not that their bills are all bullshit, as the Republicans’ clearly are. They contain many worthy measures that would, as almost any fair-minded economist will tell you, provide a proverbial “step [or two] in the right direction.” But somewhere along the line, whether in Obama’s White House, Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department, Barney Frank’s House Banking Committee or Christopher Dodd’s Senate side, a decision was made to let the big fish get away.

Jonathan Chait, "Like Teaching an Old Dog That Didn't Bark to Herd Cats," New Republic, posted May 4, 2010

Worthless grammar edicts from Harvard

2010-05-04T13:57:00.002Z

Specifically, from economist Greg Mankiw. This post by Geoffrey K. Pullum is well worth reading. (Even though he doesn't know how to spell "Jeffrey.")

The danger of pouring the derogatory language on too thick

2010-04-09T12:29:00.004Z

IMPORTANT REMINDER: THIS BLOG HAS NO OPINIONS ON ANYTHING CONTROVERSIAL (SEE "ABOUT ME AND THIS BLOG" IN THE LEFT MARGIN).

[Conservatives] have a general hostility to government and proposals formulated by Democrats, and since they reject the overwhelming majority of actual health care experts on ideological grounds, they have relied on a tiny handful of self-styled conservative pseudo-wonks to fill in the details for them. [emphasis added]
--Jonathan Chait, "The Conservative Misinformation Feedback Loop, Cont'd," New Republic

So here's the conversation:

"So, tell me a little about yourself."

[With smug, satisfied smile] "Well, I like to think of myself as a pseudo-wonk."

***

Yes, stuff like this does sometimes appear in the scholarly stuff that we edit.

Addendum to last post

2010-02-21T19:13:00.002Z

I was so excited when I wrote the last post that I sent it without including an anecdote about my old pal. He used to sing, and this really cracked me up, he used to sing, "Hey, little Donna/You still wanna?/You said that I should ring you up when I was in Tiranë."

What He's Been Up To Lately

2010-02-10T16:38:00.000Z

Well, I hadn't heard from him much lately, but yesterday I got an e-mail from my old pal Enver Hoxha. Enver, like so many who send me e-mails, is in the pharmaceuticals biz. Writes he,

Weither it's Viagra or Vicodin, we carry it all at the lowest price around.Anxiety, Sex Stims, Pain Killers, and more with no need for a doctor!Overnight Shipping100% money back Gaurentee Find our store @ [whatever].

Sorry. You're probably not interested in what my old friends are up to. This is becoming a downright blog.

Inconsistency, Ad Hominem, and Straw Man

2010-01-31T19:07:00.003Z

No, that's not the name of an accounting firm. It's the title that the Fallacy Files gave to a little something that I wrote (wrote very badly, if I may say so) some years ago, before this blog existed. I hope you find it worthwhile. If you want to read it, you can go to the link and scroll down to "Inconsistency, Ad Hominem, and Straw Man."

Oh!, the Megacity of It All!

2009-11-23T20:55:00.003Z

The OED and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) both list megacity, defined by MW as a megalopolis. The OED doesn't define it--it just lists it among a bunch of words that begin with mega-. As noted in the "about me" thing in the left-hand margin, I sometimes have opinions about stuff nobody cares about. And this is one of those times. To me, megacity looks like it should be pronounced /mɜg'æsəɾi/ (I based this on the OED's pronunciation for mendacity, except that OED uses a /d/ instead of a /ɾ/; I guess nobody ever told them about postalveolar flaps). So what? So I think it should be hyphenated (mega-city) for the sake of clarity, that's what.

We could force the issue by making up and popularizing a word megacity that rhymes with mendacity.

Thank you for your attention.

Cognitive whateverism

2009-10-23T18:42:00.004Z

Important reminder: this blog has no opinions on anything controversial.

The New Republic carries this article by James Kirchick, titled "Tom Coburn: Unwitting Cog of the Gay Agenda," which ends thus:

If the President of the United States can "engage" with all manner of tyrants and petty thugs, then surely a small group of enterprising homocons [gay conservatives] can co-sign an op-ed with a conservative Senator from Oklahoma who, not so long ago, was railing against the "gay agenda." What Coburn may or may not realize is that he's just become an unwitting cog in it.

Two questions. Do agendas have cogs? More importantly, how can you realize that you're an unwitting cog?

Thank you to Digital Roberts for sending us this item.

Soaring

2009-09-04T19:01:00.002Z

Chicago Public Radio reporter Mark Rivera quotes Sarah Mendez, the coordinator of bilingual education in Evanston:

And it’s 96 point something, its close to 97 percent meets and exceeds on the ISAT [Illinois Standards Achievement Tests] test. Which means, they are not only doing well, they are soaring.

Let's assume that 97 percent of the students in the program meet or exceed standards, and let's assume these children are soaring (hope it's true; although in keeping with blog policy I have no opinion on bilingual education, I only wish these students well). Even if both of these assumptions are true, it is not true that the 97 percent success rate implies that the students are soaring. If all those students met standards by one point, they wouldn't be soaring, but the 97 percent statement would be true. Of course, this depends on how you define "soaring." You could reasonably say that a student who meets standards in a once-unfamiliar language is soaring compared to what some may expect. But that clearly isn't how Mendez was using the word; as she said, "they are not only doing well, they are soaring."

It might be safe to say that Mendez's program is soaring with such a high achievement rate, and I hope that the students are soaring as well. My point is that we need to be careful when evaluating numbers and the claims about them.

The Value of Checking Primary Sources: A Case in Point

2008-12-19T17:22:00.005Z

Perhaps you're tired of hearing about Rod Blagojevich. Even if you are, I recommend that you listen to this radio clip ("Impeachment Hearings Raise Legal, Pronounciation [sic] Questions") sent by reader Ed Homonym in Chicago. It gets bizarre and hilarious about three minutes into the clip. If you're interested in as much Blagojevich news as you can get your hands (or ears) on, feel free to listen to the whole thing.

***

I've been away from blogging for a while--life keeps intervening. I expect to post something more substantial some time soon (and of course, you and I may define "soon" differently).

Language Police

2008-11-02T16:54:00.009Z

I'm probably an ingrate. A publicist sent me an e-mail offering me a free copy of "a new book from The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar." I turned down the offer--I consider it unethical to accept a free copy of a book (a) that I probably won't read and (b) that I assume I'd give a hostile review to if I did read it.

The book is, according to the press release that the e-mail links to, Things That Make Us (Sic) [sic]: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, The White House, and The World, by Martha Brockenbrough. The cover of the book has "sic" in square brackets, while the press release has it in plain parens. So the square-bracketed "sic" was added by me. It appears from the press release that Brockenbrough is one of those people who make fun of others' spelling and punctuation errors. It would be nice if she were as diligent when vetting a press release that she's responsible for.

According to the press release, this is one of several "interesting grammatical tidbits you'll learn only from Martha Brockenbrough":

Remember that "irregardless" is an irregular word, just as underwear is an irregular hat. Please use "regardless" instead (and keep your underwear under there).

The first thing you might notice about this is that this tidbit has nothing to do with grammar. On closer reading, you'll also notice that it's incoherent. Brockenbrough tells us that "'irregardless' is an irregular word." What does that mean? I think she means it's wrong or unacceptable, but irregular doesn't mean that--it just means not regular. English is full of irregular verbs and nouns with irregular plurals. Irregular seems to be a poorly chosen word here. I can guess why she chose it. We've got regardless and irregardless, so let's use irregular, which is regular with ir- in front. The joke doesn't seem very good, but that's just my taste. And we note that regardless and irregardless are synonyms (if we grant for the sake of the moment's argument that irregardless is a word), while regular and irregular are not.

Not only is irregular a poorly chosen word here, but the analogy seems very poor. I realize (or assume) that Brockenbrough is going for humor, and that different kinds of analogies are used in humor. They can be very strong analogies that make us realize how ridiculous something is, or they can be just silly (I originally wrote "intentionally silly," but there are some humorists who use silly analogies that are intended to be strong). Brockenbrough tells us that "'irregardless' is an irregular word, just as underwear is an irregular hat"; "just as" suggests to me that she thinks she's making a very strong analogy. Underwear is indeed an irregular hat; you can use it as a hat, and people will think it's highly irregular. But underwear isn't useless; it works well as underwear. So if this analogy is any good, irregardless is useful; it just isn't useful as a word. If irregardless is useless, which I suspect is Brockenbrough's point, then the analogy is no good. It strikes me as neither strong nor silly, but just inept.

I don't mean to single Brockenbrough out. The problem is that many of these language-policing would-be humorists seem to care more about spelling, made-up words that they don't like, and the enforcement of made-up rules than they do about logic or accuracy.

Nonimplicit Trust in Reference Works

2008-09-09T09:04:00.006Z

Please join me on the raft down my stream of semiconsciousness. When we disembark, the tour guide--yours truly--will announce that the point of the cruise is that we should read everything critically, even reference works. Even good reference works.

I've been trying to figure out what Bryan Garner, the author of the usage chapter in the fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, considers acceptable and what he considers unacceptable as understood or implicit wording--for example, as he is quoted in a previous post, "Although the inflected form of to be is sometimes implicit [in the passive voice], the past participle must always appear." I quoted this because I wanted to discuss his use of "inflected." I neglected to point out that the statement is incorrect. Garner doesn't give an example of a passive-voice sentence with the form of to be implicit, so I'll provide one: "The sentence was parsed, the verb conjugated." If I ask you, "Has the sentence been parsed?" and you reply, "It has," you will have said something passive with both the form of to be and the past participle implicit.

I guess. It depends on what Garner is talking about. I thought I might get some insight from the entry on implicit in his The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style (ODAUS) (available as part of Oxford Reference Online for those lucky enough to have access to it). Here is the entry:

Implicit, meaning "implied" and functioning as a correlative of explicit, has come to be misused in the sense "complete, unmitigated" <I have implicit trust in her> <I trust her implicitly>. The OED labels this usage both erroneous and obsolete. With its resurgence in recent years, one can still call it erroneous but no longer obsolete--e.g.: "Such implicit [read complete or simply delete implicit] trust heralds a new dawn in married life—until we get the next sex poll, and spouses revert to normal" (Ariz. Republic).

(Entire block quote is as in original, including angle-bracketed and square-bracketed material.)

Two thoughts came to mind when reading this. First, all three of Garner's examples--the two hypothetical ones in angle brackets and the one from Arizona Republic--are the same. They're all about implicit trust. So maybe we're dealing with an idiom here, and it doesn't matter much whether Garner or you or I like it. If you don't like it, don't use it. The second thought that occurred to me was wondering why the OED would say such a ridiculous thing.

What does Garner have to say about idiom? If you search the ODAUS for "idiom," you get thirty-six hits. His actual statement on idioms appears in the entry for illogic:

No serious student believes anymore that grammatical distinctions necessarily reflect logical ones. Our language is full of idioms that defy logic, many of them literary and many colloquial. We should not, for example, fret over the synonymy of fat chance and slim chance. Applying "linguistic logic" to established ways of saying things is a misconceived effort.

To which I can only add "Hear hear," "Huzzah," and "Yep." But why does this not apply to "implicit trust"?

And why would the OED make the very strange and un-OED-like statement that "this usage ['implicit trust'] is…erroneous"? Let's confirm that this is actually the case. Here is the OED's definition 3.a of implicit (since the OED uses boldface, italics, and boldface italics, I'm going to use very large letters for emphasis):

3.a.implicit faith (= eccl. L. fides implicita), faith in spiritual matters, not independently arrived at by the individual, but involved in or subordinate to the general belief of the Church; hence, resting on the authority of another without doubt or inquiry; unquestioning, unreserved, absolute. So implicit belief, confidence, obedience, submission, etc.

So it looks like Garner's statement was erroneous. But it isn't so simple. Definition 3.a is followed, reasonably enough, by definition 3.b:

†b. Hence (erroneously): Absolute, unqualified, unmitigated, as in implicit ignorance. Obs.

Since the dagger means that a definition is obsolete, the OED is being a little redundant here, but that's OK--nothing wrong with driving the point home. The actual problem is that the OED seems to be contradicting itself: it is nonerroneous and nonobsolete to define implicit as "unquestioning, unreserved, absolute" and erroneous and obsolete to define it as "absolute, unqualified, unmitigated." The astute reader will note that these definitions are the same. It looks like the OED was a little careless. It also looks like Garner was, given that he didn't notice the inconsistency. At least, I hope he was being careless--I don't want to think that he noticed the inconsistency but chose to go with the entry that conformed to his preference.

The point is that we even need to read reference works critically.

Oops

2008-08-31T15:17:00.000Z

If my post "Seasonal Absurdity" crossed your desk, what would your main query be? Mine, if I were paying attention, which I can't be relied on to do, would be

The title of this item is "Seasonal Absurdity," and yet you write "the absurdity is timeless." OK?

The lesson is that we need to read critically. Even our own stuff. Or maybe we don't need to, but I sure do.

Maybe I can make an argument that it's OK, but it still needs a query.

Maybe Worth Thinking About

2008-08-22T15:40:00.000Z

A friend in sunny Arizona sent us this article about some guys who don't like "typos." According to the article,

[Jeff Michael] Deck's diary account of the Grand Canyon incident was submitted as evidence in court. It says the two men climbed Desert View Watchtower while on holiday from their typo-enforcement duties "and discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, had a few errors. I know today was supposed to be my day off from typo-hunting, but if I may be permitted to quote that most revered of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, 'Always on duty!' I can't shut it off....Will we never be free from the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded by natural beauty?"

After correcting a misplaced apostrophe and comma, Deck reported, he was aghast to discover what he described as a made-up word: "emense."

"I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further, so we had to let the other typo stand. Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity."

While it may be fun to talk about what idiots these guys are, it may be more productive to use this as an occasion to reflect on the behavior of our colleagues--perhaps even on our own behavior. A typo is an error that has to do with, you know, typography. This was a manuscript sign--manuscript in the original sense--and this guy is having vapors about the typos. A manuscript is nontypographic. A manuscript has no typos. This is embarrassing. But we often embarrass ourselves in similar ways, showing off our own ignorance while acting superior (something I've done more than once). Like the person (I'm not making this up) who filled a manuscript (in the modern sense of the word) on the dirty war in Argentina with queries, increasingly snide, asking since when disappear is a transitive verb. And having hissy fits about trivial errors, some of which may not even be errors, when a logical or factual flaw kicks us where it hurts to be kicked and we don't even notice.

An editor once told me that we're the accuracy department. This, like these guys' vandalism, is emblematic of editorial arrogance at its worst. We take care of the dangling modifiers, and those people who write the stuff, all they care about is getting the Krebs cycle right! I'm saving the public from a misplaced apostrophe, and these people are worried about a unique (in the pedantically acceptable sense of the word) historical marker! O injustice! O apostrophicity!

Some of us sometimes need to get some perspective.

Passive Aggression

2008-08-16T22:44:00.001Z

Someday--maybe, if I get around to it--I'll explain why the usage guide in the fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (chapter 5, "Grammar and Usage," by Bryan A. Garner) was not a good idea. For the moment, though, I'll comment on a part of it that isn't bad at all: section 5:112, on active and passive voice. Garner goes into great detail, and to his credit he doesn't scold. All he says about style is the last sentence: "As a matter of style, passive voice {the matter will be given careful consideration} is typically, though not always, inferior to the active voice {we will consider the matter carefully}" (curly brackets in original).

By the way, there's a problem in Garner's description of the passive. Says he, "The passive voice is always formed by joining an inflected form of to be (or, in colloquial usage, to get) with the verb's past participle....Although the inflected form of to be is sometimes implicit, the past participle must always appear." I believe--and I may be incorrect--that the infinitive is considered uninflected. But it's common for a passive to be formed with the infinitive of to be, as in this sentence. If I'm correct about infinitives being uninflected, then restricting the formation of the passive to inflected forms of to be is incorrect. If I'm incorrect about this, then all verb forms are inflected, "inflected form of to be" is synonymous with "form of to be," and "inflected" here is just a wasted word. Since I'm not sure of myself on this, I'd appreciate your comments.

(There are a few other comment-worthy items in this quotation from Garner--"colloquial usage" [redundant according to his definition of usage, but he uses the phrase a lot] and "sometimes implicit" [he seems to be inconsistent in his acceptance of implicit words]--that are off-topic for the moment. I hope to come back to them in later posts.)

The manual itself is full of passive sentences. Opening it at random, I came to sections 9:56 through 9:63. These sections include 10 sentences with passive voice and 15 without--40 percent are passive. This figure includes cross-references--sentences in which the verb is see in the imperative--among the nonpassives. If we omit these from the calculation, we get 10 sentences with passive and 9 without--53 percent passive.

The point here is not to mock either Garner or the manual (which I hold in the highest reverence, and I'm not joking about that). We've all heard (and perhaps participated in? hmmm?) griping about the passive voice, but in some contexts it seems preferable to the active. Among those contexts are statements of how things are done--they're a given, and that's that, and we don't need to say who says so--and fiats from an authority figure. Both of which apply to the manual.

Seasonal Absurdity

2008-08-12T11:01:00.002Z

I noticed that there seems to be more silliness floating around in the air than usual. Then I looked out the window and figured out why this was happening--we're in a year whose Gregorian number is divisible by four.

(Now, I know that what I'm about to talk about is old news, but I've got other stuff to do than blog, and the absurdity is--I don't know [sigh]--the absurdity is timeless.)

So Wesley Clark says about John McCain, "I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war." And then he says, "He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not." So then Bob Schieffer says neither has Barack Obama, and Obama hasn't "ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down." And then Clark says, he says, "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." So then Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith says [Ed Absurdum at this point in the joke is struggling hard to keep her composure] [update, January 28, 2010: I was still using the pseudonym "Ed Absurdum" when this was originally written], "If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain's service to his country, he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates."

Hwah hwah hwah hwah [snork snork] heeheeheeheehee.

Excuse me [wipes away tears].

Now, I know the best way to ruin a joke is to explain it, but since this is an educational blog [starting to giggle again], I'm going to explain it anyway.

Where to start? Well, OK, first we note that Clark didn't "question John McCain's service to his country." This is a straw man attack. Perhaps more importantly, Clark's statement--that getting shot down in a fighter plane is not a qualification to be president--is true. Many people other than McCain have had that experience. While we may honor their service, most of us, probably including McCain and Smith, would agree that most of them aren't qualified to be president.

We find arguments like this in scholarly work all the time. Rolling our eyes isn't enough (although it's hard to avoid.) We need to query it.

Apparent (But We Know How Appearances Can Be) Inconsistency in the OED

2008-08-08T01:58:00.003Z

Well, we all remember what happened last time I said I found an inconsistency in a dictionary, don't we? That's right--I ended up issuing an apologetic retraction (although I did come back and belabor the subject).

An ordinary fool would cut her losses and not make any such accusations again. But as my hubster points out, I'm not an ordinary fool--I'm an anonymous fool [update, January 28, 2010: I was still using the pseudonym "Ed Absurdum" when this was originally written; in real life, I don't have a hubster, although the missus does].

But before I start, let me point out that I love the Oxford English Dictionary. I often spend hours with it. I find it irresistible. In fact, I speak of the OED in roman letters, following the advice of the Chicago Manual of Style ver. 15 (also mentioned in roman letters): "Names of scriptures and other highly revered works are capitalized but not italicized" (Chic. Man. Sty. 8:11).

Anyhow, I recently looked a word up in the OED, and it mentioned a "non-standard" usage. Hmm, I said to myself; I didn't think they hyphenated this. So I looked for the entry for non-standard; there was no such entry, but there was an entry for nonstandard. Curious, I searched the definitions in the dictionary for nonstandard and got zero hits. When I searched the definitions for non-standard, I got sixty-one hits. In other words, the form that's entered in the dictionary isn't the form the dictionary actually uses.

More on Syllable Breaks

2008-07-29T03:26:00.000Z

OK, I just want to finish up this syllabification business. I posted the apologetic retraction as soon as I saw my error, but there's still a little more that needs to be said.

In my first post on syllabification, I wrote, "I propose that we stop worrying about syllabification. If a break is plausible and gives syllables that can be pronounced and isn't absurd, it's fine." On page 11a of Merriam-Webster's eleventh (quoted in the apologetic retraction), it says,

There are acceptable alternative end-of-line divisions just as there are acceptable variant spellings and pronunciations. It is, for example, all but impossible to produce a convincing argument that either of the divisions aus·ter·i·ty, au·ster·i·ty is better than the other. But space cannot be taken for entries like aus·ter·i·ty or au·ster·i·ty, and au·s·ter·i·ty would likely be confusing to many. No more than one division is, therefore, shown for an entry in this dictionary.

Many words have two or more common pronunciation variants, and the same end-of-line division is not always appropriate for each of them. The division fla·gel·lar, for example, best fits the variant \flə‑'je‑lər\ whereas the division flag·el·lar best fits the variant \'fla‑jə‑lər\.

In some ways, my intuitive approach--it's OK if it "is plausible and gives syllables that can be pronounced and isn't absurd"--is actually stricter than Merriam-Webster's approach. At least, it is if I add that the breaks shouldn't be misleading. Merriam-Webster says that "the division flag·el·lar best fits the variant \'fla‑jə‑lər\." Under my approach, flag·el·lar is incorrect. If I see "flag‑" at the end of a line, I'm going to pronounce it \flag\ (MW transcription, as in "you're a grand old flag" etc.)--there's not going to be a \j\ in the pronunciation. In cases like this, Merriam-Webster's syllable breaks are not just disputable, but downright misleading.

Apologetic retraction

2008-06-26T11:40:00.000Z

May I quote myself? Thank you.

I looked up eschew because I thought I'd heard it mispronounced. The first pronunciation listed (the first among equals) was \e‑'shü\; but--and here comes my point at last--the syllabification is given as es·chew. This makes no sense if the sch is pronounced \sh\, but it's the only break that makes sense if the sch is pronounced \s‑ch\. So Merriam-Webster is contradicting itself. It doesn't take a stand on the pronunciation of the sch, but it does take a stand on the syllabification, which means that it does take a stand on the pronunciation of the sch.

And now I quote page 11a of Merriam-Webster's eleventh, with some added emphasis from yours truly.

There are acceptable alternative end-of-line divisions just as there are acceptable variant spellings and pronunciations. It is, for example, all but impossible to produce a convincing argument that either of the divisions aus·ter·i·ty, au·ster·i·ty is better than the other. But space cannot be taken for entries like aus·ter·i·ty or au·ster·i·ty, and au·s·ter·i·ty would likely be confusing to many. No more than one division is, therefore, shown for an entry in this dictionary.

Many words have two or more common pronunciation variants, and the same end-of-line division is not always appropriate for each of them. The division fla·gel·lar, for example, best fits the variant \flə-'je-lər\ whereas the division flag·el·lar best fits the variant \'fla-jə-lər\. In instances like this, the division falling farther to the left is used, regardless of the order of the pronunciations:

fla·gel·lar \flə-'je-lər, 'fla-jə-lər\

My point is that I sure do wish people would do their research before they publish. Especially me. I apologize to Merriam-Webster. (But boy, did it ever feel cool to think I'd caught a dictionary in a contradiction.)

I do get a little bit of vindication from the fact that M-W seems to more or less share my liberal view on this syllable business, sort of.

Parenthetical Flop

2008-06-14T07:01:00.000Z

Thank you to Gal Vanicity, who heard this on NPR's Morning Edition and sent it to us:

But otherwise it's mud, sand. You can see tree roots clinging to the bottom of what was the lake. Fish, some of them still alive, flopping around.

Don't Give Me a Break

2008-05-13T12:31:00.001Z

I recently heard a radio journalist saying that someone had \e‑'shüd\ (Merriam-Webster transcription) something. Certain that the journalist had mispronounced it, I looked eschew up in Merriam-Webster's eleventh, and to my surprise the pronunciation was listed as \e‑'shü, i‑; es‑'chü, is‑; also e‑'skyü\. According to the dictionary's frontmatter (p. 12a), only the one following also is considered a variant pronunciation, and we are to draw no conclusions on the comparative popularities of the pronunciations that precede it. But still! I mean! But still, I mean I'd never even heard \e-'shü\ before, which may mean only that I need to get a life. (The previous sentence strongly suggests that I do in fact need to get a life. A normal person--one who's not in the editing biz--would have put "only" [or "just"] before "mean," not after it. Pitiful.)

(Or maybe "only mean" would have been correct as well as idiomatic. I mean, the fact that I'd never heard \e‑'shü\ before only means I need to get a life; it doesn't build pyramids. On the other hand, I may only need to get a new line of work.)

But seriously now, the reason I'm bringing this up. I looked up eschew because I thought I'd heard it mispronounced. The first pronunciation listed (the first among equals) was \e‑'shü\; but--and here comes my point at last--the syllabification is given as es·chew. This makes no sense if the sch is pronounced \sh\, but it's the only break that makes sense if the sch is pronounced \s‑ch\. [An apologetic retraction for the rest of this paragraph appears here. June 26, 2008.] So Merriam-Webster is contradicting itself. It doesn't take a stand on the pronunciation of the sch, but it does take a stand on the syllabification, which means that it does take a stand on the pronunciation of the sch.

The Oxford English Dictionary takes a different approach to syllabification. In an entry where no pronunciation guide is given, accents appear at the beginning of the stressed syllables in the main entry. If a pronunciation is given, the accents appear in the pronunciation, and the main entry has no syllabification. Thus, the OED has "antidisestablishmen'tarianism with no pronunciation given.* Slicing it down little by little, we find dise'stablishment and finally establishment, with the pronunciation given as (ɪ'stæblɪʃmənt). The main entry lacks an accent mark since one appears in the pronunciation. (The OED uses accent marks at the base line for secondary stress. Since I don't know how to get those, I use double nonsmart quotes for the secondary accent.)

I propose that we stop worrying about syllabification. If a break is plausible and gives syllables that can be pronounced and isn't absurd, it's fine. I realize that this attitude is similar to that of the author who says "Since I don't understand dangling modifiers, they aren't important." This author is only partially correct. Dangling modifiers aren't important (except, God bless them, as part of a full-employment program for manuscript editors). But the author's not understanding them isn't why they're not important. But I'm digressing again. The point is that I realize that my attitude toward syllable breaks is willfully ignorant, but I'm still right. Merriam-Webster and the OED should adopt the practice of putting an accent mark before the stressed vowel, not before what they suppose to be the beginning of the stressed syllable.

None of which tells us how to break eschew.

* I looked antidisestablishmentarianism up in the OED because it presents many an opportunity for syllable breaks. The OED defines it thus:

Properly, opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England (rare): but popularly cited as an example of a long word. So antidisestablishmentarian.

Indeed.

Illegible

2008-05-09T13:07:00.001Z

The Times Literary Supplement of May 7, 2008, carries a review by Robert Irwin of two books critical of Edward Said, the late author of Orientalism. One of the books under review, Defending the West by the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, discusses "The Imaginary Orient," a paper by Said ally Linda Nochlin that appeared in Art in America in 1983. Nochlin disapproves of Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting The Snake Charmer (c. 1883). Irwin's review tells us that

according to a note in Nochlin's article, "Edward Said has pointed out to me in conversation that most of the so-called writing on the back wall of the 'Snake Charmer' is in fact unreadable". To which Ibn Warraq responds that the wall bears a clearly legible quotation from the Koran's Sura of the Cow in thuluth script. (Hence, perhaps, doubts about Said's Arabic.)

Since Nochlin's article appeared in a scholarly journal, it's worthwhile for those of us in the scholarly editing racket to pay attention. The claim that some "so-called writing...is in fact unreadable" is an argument from ignorance. An argument from ignorance takes the general form "I don't know that this is true. Therefore, it is untrue." Or vice versa. The case of Said, Nochlin, and the sura isn't just an argument from ignorance--it's an ignorant argument from ignorance. In the standard argument from ignorance, the arguer at least knows that he or she doesn't know. A bit of Rumsfeldspeak might help us here. When most of us see a supposed language that's unfamiliar to us, it's a known unknown--we don't know it, but we know that we don't know. Said thinks it's a known--it's bogus and he knows it. But it isn't a known. What's a known unknown to the rest of us is an unknown unknown to Said--he doesn't know that he doesn't know. This all casts doubt onto much more than Said's knowledge of Arabic.

The scholarly Edward Said says it isn't real since he can't read it, the scholarly Linda Nochlin accepts this, and the scholarly Art in America publishes Nochlin's comment. We who edit scholarly materials need to watch out for stuff like this. We need to query authors on whether they can actually know such statements to be true. Some will plant hedges around the wording; since this blog has no opinions, it will let you draw your own conclusions on those who leave it as it is.

Should we criticize Nochlin for making an argument from authority? Yes and no. If she had reason to think Said was familiar with Arabic and all of its calligraphic styles, it was appropriate for her to take his word for it and to cite him as an authority to the extent that he was claiming that it wasn't legible Arabic. Asserting Said's authority for the claim that it wasn't legible at all does seem to be an inappropriate appeal to authority. Or maybe not. This is not just a known unknown, it's a known unknowable. There is no appropriate authority to appeal to for such a statement.

Let the record show that I'm accepting Ibn Warraq's authority on the writing and therefore am vulnerable to a charge of using an argument from authority. Let it also show that Ibn Warraq's claim is at least verifiable (although I haven't verified it). And how would I verify it? By checking with an authority, of course. There's no getting away from it, and it's often appropriate. Most bibliographies are one big appeal to authority, and you lose credibility if you don't have them.

All statements about Nochlin and her article, Ibn Warraq, and Gérôme and his painting (with the exception of Gérôme's first name) are based on Irwin's review, which I found at the invaluable Arts & Letters Daily.

A Comparison That's Probably Not Nonmisleading

2008-04-23T17:37:00.000Z

Imagine this text (from a pro-Obama site) comes your way. What do you do with it? (Before you go any further, you might want to review the material in the left margin about not endorsing candidates.)

In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain's total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton's....

Meanwhile, Senator McCain has raised more than 70% of his total campaign funds from high-dollar donors giving $1,000 or more. Senator Clinton has raised 60% of her funds from $1,000-and-up donors.

First, note that this gives February figures for Obama and "total campaign funds" for Clinton and McCain. Second, and perhaps more subtly, two different types of things are being compared. The only thing that's being said about donations to Obama has to do with the percentage of donors who gave $200 or more; for Clinton and McCain, the percentage of total funds is given.

In case the difference isn't clear to you, let's cook up some highly improbable hypothetical numbers. All of these are consistent with the numbers in this text. Imagine that Obama had 100 donors in February; 95 of them donated $25 each, and 5 gave $2,300 each. And now I'll repeat myself--these figures are improbable, and they're consistent with the text. At any rate, this would give him a February total of $13,875, of which $11,500 came from donors giving $1,000 or more. In other words, 83 percent of this money comes from "high-dollar donors."

The problem is that the percentage of total money from big donors will always be higher than the percentage of total donors who are big (as it were). That's because they give more money. So the comparison made by the text is inherently misleading, unless the Obama contributors in both categories--$200 or less, and more than $200--all gave approximately $200.

So what do you do if text with a comparison like this crosses your desk? I would query it, pointing out the flaws. Some authors will thank you and make a more appropriate comparison (and it might show that the total percentage of money contributed to the author's candidate by large donors is indeed lower than the percentage for the other candidates). Some won't care and will leave it as it is. The truly cynical ones will realize that it's misleading and want to keep it that way. But it's still our job to try to keep them honest, and to make the decent but careless ones look good.

Thank you to H. Luke O'Cephalus for bringing this material, which was found on Brendan Nyhan's blog, to my attention.