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Word Pardons

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Image by Jarrett Heather

Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” video now has close to nine million hits, with the thumbs-up outweighing the thumbs-down more than 100 to 1. For those who take debates over prescriptivism in language usage seriously, there’s plenty of material for hand-wringing in the video, as evidenced by Lauren Squires’s perceptive piece in Language Log. But since there probably aren’t nine million people who have heard of prescriptivism in language, I wonder if there isn’t something else going on in the delight people seem to take in Weird Al’s ditty.

I think of this as a coin with two sides. One is the chronic experience of the English teacher on the airplane who, on confessing her profession, immediately faces a pair of raised palms and a line like “Oh! English! I’d better watch my grammar!” The other is the rolled eyes at a social lunch when the menu misspells the French or misuses a contraction; or as the server departs on a note of “Just ask Karen and I if you need anything.” This latter often escalates into a litany of what bugs everyone most, whether it’s Can I help who’s next or begs the question for raises the question or overusing totally. Unlike litanies of complaint about, say, the health-care system, such rounds of sharing over “word crimes” seem to put the participants in a pretty good mood.

Grammar is just a buzzword applied to this double-sided coin. Weird Al mentions it only in passing, after talking—probably parodically, as several commenters have noted—about writing in the “proper way,” knowing “how to conjugate,” flunking “that class,” needing to learn “the nomenclature,” and making a mission of “literacy.” (Let’s bear in mind that the rhyme scheme probably dictates most of these word choices.) But most viewers know what he’s talking about—the so-called errors that the fellow on the airplane is worried about and that the lunch party cites to one-up one another.

I’d like to submit that for most people, this isn’t about prescriptivism. It’s about finding, establishing, and constantly renegotiating one’s comfort zone. If the table’s set with the knife to the right of the spoon, many of us will shift it back. Most of us will re-orient a slice of pie so that we eat it from the tip toward the crust. In my house, we eat the salad after the main course, which guests often find disconcerting or just plain wrong. Language customs are even more central to our way of being than dining customs, so is there any wonder that we look for some assurance that how we’re going about things still makes sense?

In reading Lauren Squires’s post, for instance, I found myself twice wanting to correct her use of different than to different from. The reason to do so is infinitesimally slight, having to do with an old argument about exclusion versus comparison, and for all practical purposes, the phrases are now interchangeable. Still, that’s my personal, sort of embarrassing preference. The guy on the plane worries that his quirky preferences will be deemed unacceptable to a supposed authority on the subject. The gang at lunch is relieved to be able to air their preferences and have them validated. That these exchanges are not really prescriptivist is evident, I think, in the frequent rejoinders of “Oh, I do that all the time!” that you hear when one or another word crime is aired in a safe setting.

Weird Al’s video has become a safe setting for thousands of viewers. It’s not a teaching tool or a stance. It’s a catch-all, a grab bag of nonstandard bits and pieces that people both use and find themselves uncomfortable with.

As a coda, I’ll note that several people have asked me about the Reed-Kellogg diagrams in the video. There are three of them. The first fails to note that the phrase to diagram a sentence is the object of the verb learn, not part of the verb, and it puts sentence in the position of an adverb rather than the direct object of the verb diagram. The second sentence diagram does a fairly good job except that when is styled as a preposition rather than an adverbial conjunction. The third diagram, of the sentence “Better figure out the difference,” is the most interesting. The sentence itself is nonstandard, with both You and had missing; and even then, the shortcomings of the Reed-Kellogg system require the diagrammer to substitute another wording, like should figure out, to map out a diagram. Within those constraints, the third sentence works except that there’s no need for a tree. But people seem to like trees, in these diagrams; they think trees gussy them up, I guess.

 


Orwell in Gaza

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The New York Times’s hesitant foray into the question of language in this latest enactment of hostilities between Israel and Hamas made me long for the ringing tones of George Orwell. It’s hard to miss what the Times calls the “clash of narratives” being played out even as the clash of artillery continues with its tragic toll on human lives and suffering. The Gaza interior ministry recommends that every Palestinian casualty be referred to as an innocent citizen. Etgar Keret observes that these same dead are referenced by Israeli journalists, not as civilians, but as targets that are uninvolved or being used as human shields by heartless terrorists. Israelis hiding in bomb shelters are taunted for being mice; Palestinians are variously characterized as goats, beasts, snakes, or just animals in general. No matter what actions Hamas perpetrates, Palestinian news makers are apt to begin their report with “In response to the cruel Israeli assault. …” The incursion into Gaza known in the West as Operation Protective Edge actually translates from the Hebrew as Operation Strong Cliff, a metaphor relying on geological imagery that makes Israel’s dominance appear part of the natural order.

Yes, I know, it’s all propaganda, and we’re used to it by now. Didn’t we live through Shock and Awe in Iraq, or the winning of hearts and minds in Vietnam? Still, each engagement comes with its own set of references and its own subliminal messages. I’m struck, this time around, by two in particular. One is Israel’s Iron Dome, its highly effective new antimissile system. The other is the ubiquity of the accusation that Hamas uses ordinary Gazans as human shields.

Bs6GG4mCQAEM3wOCooking up the name Iron Dome was apparently a weekend’s task, and the project leader’s initial idea was straightforward: the Anti-Qassam, referring to the type of missiles most commonly fired by Hamas. When that was rejected as “problematic,” he and his wife came up with Golden Dome, an image that brings to mind the palaces of Kubla Khan or perhaps (closer to home) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. That name was rejected as being too ostentatious, so under the pressure of time, gold was reduced to a lesser metal, and Iron Dome was born. And maybe it works well for Israel’s public image—iron is strong, enduring, humble. When I first heard the term, however, other associations rose up. Iron Curtain, for instance, referring to the divide between East and West during the Cold War; and Iron Cross, referring to the military decoration of the Third Reich. These don’t work so well in garnering sympathy for Israel. Interestingly, though, they both trace their origins to the Holy Land. The symbol of the Iron Cross was established by the Teutonic Order in the 13th century, when the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Christian, at the time) permitted them to combine their Black Cross with the silver Cross of Jerusalem.  And the original Iron Curtain is cited in the Babylonian Talmud, which promises that even an iron curtain will not separate Israel from its God. Plenty of irony to chew on here, but perhaps the term is appropriate in ways that the developers didn’t exactly consider in the time crunch of the weekend.

Human shield, as a term, gets even stranger. Its use has risen dramatically since the 1980s, with reference not just to the Israel-Palestine conflict but to wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and to protective pro-choice cordons facing anti-abortion activists in front of abortion clinics. Although willing demonstrators sometimes assign themselves the term human shield, most groups reject it; the International Solidarity Movement, for instance, of which the American activist Rachel Corrie was a member, takes umbrage at references to Corrie’s being a human shield because, as they point out, “The term human shield is a specific reference to civilians used by military or armed personnel for protection.” Indeed, that is how the term is commonly used, and its practice by not only Hamas but also the Israel Defense Forces has been condemned over the years. So where did it originate? At least one source, apparently, is in Psalm 84, where the sovereign is also referred to as the people’s shield—though as biblical scholar Marc Zvi Brettler points out, “the power of the human ‘shield’ is totally dependent on God, the divine, royal ‘shield.’”

The sovereign, presumably, is a willing shield—plus, he gets to be king. Not so the women and the children. But what happens to me when I read the term over and over is that the word human gets lost, and the word shield, with its attendant imagery, remains. The Times must have had something of the same response; on the day after their rather tepid report on language in the Gazan crisis, they offered the new phrase civilian shields, which didn’t do it for me either. I’m going back to Orwell here. They are not shields, they are people. It is not a dome, but a system. And I don’t see what the cliff has to do with any of it.

Folks, It’s Torture

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gordian-knotThere probably is such a thing a scrutinizing a public speaker’s language too carefully—but not on this blog. Our radar screen lit up this past week as the Twittersphere ricocheted responses to President Obama’s August 1 one-liner: “We tortured some folks.”

The We here are the agents of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. And while the words tortured and folks have received most of the attention, the rhetorical use of the first-person plural performs an interesting sleight of hand. Initially, the President appears to acknowledge that the responsibility for the torture he’s referring to rests with “us,” presumably including himself and the people around him, if not Americans in general. But only a couple of sentences later, he introduces we to put the shoe on a different foot:

When we look back, it’s important to remember how afraid people were after the twin towers fell … and it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.

Here, we are the people living now, looking back; people might refer to our earlier selves, or might refer to some other group of people for whom we can feel a kind of sympathy; folks clearly does not include us, but sets apart the group responsible for the torture he began by assigning to us. So Obama has effectively disarmed accusations that he sets himself apart from ordinary, fallible administrations by introducing we, but manages nonetheless to make it clear in a few sentences that the real we stand quite apart from those folks.

Who, he says, tortured. Tortured is the word that set off the first set of blinking lights in cyberspace. It’s the word that’s been euphemized into enhanced interrogation, special methods of questioning, stress positions, refined interrogation techniques. It’s spawned an entire field of academic inquiry; Amazon now lists 270 books in print in the category of Human Rights Law using Torture as part of the title. President Obama clearly knew that a newly declassified report about the black sites, special renditions, and CIA techniques being used post-9/11 would raise the specter of torture yet again. He nestled the verb not only between We and some folks but also within a cushion of statements reinforcing how frightened, confused, and tough we were and needed to be. But he did say it. And while some may point out that Obama has referred to the use of torture on the part of the U.S. before, to my ear, We tortured carries more rhetorical weight than we compromised by using torture to interrogate.

Bear with me: we’re at some, but I don’t think we can discuss some apart from its inclusion in the expression some folks. The expression has been on a meteoric rise, according to Google N grams, since about 1980, when Ronald Reagan came into office. Though complaints about overdone folksiness surfaced mostly during the second Bush administration and continued into Obama’s presidency, American politicians seem to have been appealing to the folks in their audiences for many decades. Richard Nixon, for instance, no cuddle bear, reached out to the folks for understanding in his famous Checkers speech. But folks, or its original form, folk, evokes very different connotations depending on whether we’re apostrophizing; wondering what the simple folk do; having dinner with our folks; sympathizing with the tough job those folks have; or noting that some folks have different ideas from ours. As HuffPost books editor Zoë Triska observes, “Folks is one of the friendliest ways you can say people,” but it’s also one of the most undifferentiated; both folk and folks are plural, yielding no individuals, whereas within people one can usually find individual persons.

So when Obama confirms that we tortured some folks, there’s not only the same sense of the ludicrous that attended Bush’s “those folks who committed this act” or Obama’s “automatic weapons that kill folks,” but also a certain dismissal contained within the admission. Some folks doesn’t amount to much, and whatever it does amount to isn’t commensurate with individual human beings. It’s the strangeness of that juxtaposition, I think—the elusive, indefinite quality of folks, diminished by its adjective, butting up against the bald truth of torture and the slippery identity of we—that makes President Obama’s four-word statement a Gordian knot of rhetoric.

All Done Copyediting/Copy Editing/Copy-Editing

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copyeditingHallelujah. The copy edits have gone back. Hallelujah.

I’m referring here to the 350-page manuscript for my new novel, A Sister to Honor, forthcoming in January 2015, which I received in copy-edited form 18 days before my wedding date, with a two-week deadline. Between negotiations with the caterer, travel arrangements for various relatives, and the borrowing of baby stuff for my fiancé’s grandkids (the complications of senior nuptials), I cranked on the edits.

These now come, as anyone who has been through this process in the last decade knows, in the form of Track Changes, that handy Word function that eliminates all the little carats and elegantly swirled delete marks that once signaled copy-editing expertise. Track Changes also allows the editor or author to initiate a global change—to decide, in my case, that the holy book of Islam really should be spelled Qur’an rather than Koran and to make that change throughout the text without missing an instance. Of course, because the publisher doesn’t want a rogue author rashly eliminating all the copy editor’s hard work, I am not allowed to undo any changes, including changes of my own. So where the editor might, for instance, eliminate a comma, I could decide to put it back in, then decide she was right and take it out again, then decide to stick to my guns and put it back in, and the whole process produces four lines of changes in the margin in order for everything to remain as it was. But I figure the people in editorial are used to this sort of thing, and it’s my privilege to dither a bit, especially if it’s an important comma.

More interesting to me are the stylings of italics, hyphens, and caps. I have an ongoing argument with publishers over italicization. It strikes me that ever since we’ve been able to italicize in manuscript with a keystroke, rather than going back over the text with a set of laborious underlines (that was in the typewriter era, young ’uns), we’ve been italicizing the life out of our stories. Every slightly non-English word gets italicized; every thought gets italicized; every remembered bit of dialogue gets italicized; and every stressed word in dialogue, regardless of whether the nature of the dialogue itself would stress that word, gets italicized. (That word itself, in my last example, would be in italics, if some copy editors had their way.) I have a problem with all this italicizing. If a Pashto speaker (in my novel) uses a word like ghairat or namus in dialogue, he is not thinking of it as a foreign word, nor is he giving it particular emphasis. There’s also the way in which a whole sentence in italics can seem to be whispered, so that a passage recalled in interior monologue, when rendered as italic, has the effect of the character’s whispering to herself. My own preference is to de-italicize practically everything. In this novel, which contains a fair amount of unfamiliar words and in which interior thoughts and recalled dialogue are brief, I compromised by allowing the latter in italics but insisting that only truly emphasized words, within dialogue, receive the italic treatment.

Hyphenation, I know, falls under the rubric of a general style sheet. Once you’ve established, for instance, that anymore shall be one word regardless of syntax, you are duty-bound to make that consistent across the text. I tell myself I don’t really care about this sort of thing, and I know that the trend is toward the elimination of hyphens generally.  (See my colleague Ben Yagoda’s discussion of this phenomenon as it applies to the title of his new book.) But may I observe that the trend is not entirely consistent? In my case, I noted the following copy-editing changes, among others:

blood red -> bloodred

email -> e-mail

goodbye -> good-bye

daycare -> day care

high risk strategy -> high-risk strategy

entrance-hall carpet -> entrance hall carpet

poli-sci class -> Poli Sci class

set-ups -> setups

chiton-like -> chitonlike

I queried only the last one, which turned a biology student’s quirky observation of her boyfriend’s vertebrae into a long Greek-looking word. But I puzzled over the others.

Finally, I noted some slight shift in capitalization style, which is almost always a bane for fiction writers. Dumpster, to my relief, apparently no longer needs to be capitalized. But the editing mavens haven’t released Internet from its upper-case cage, even though the rest of us think of it pretty generically.

But these are all the small things. For the big stuff, my copy editor was an angel and my savior from a future of huge embarrassment. No longer does a character say yesterday was Tuesday and tomorrow is Monday.  No longer does someone dressed in thick boots go out to buy boots because her thin flats won’t protect her from the snow. As I said: Hallelujah.

Won’t You Guess My Name?

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Melek_tausI didn’t know I was named for the devil until I studied on an exchange program in Belgium. There, I would be introduced as “Mademoiselle Luci Férriss,” and the people who had begun stretching out their hands would recoil. “Lucifer!” they exclaimed more than once. “Why would your parents have saddled you with such a name?”

The answer, of course, is that my parents hadn’t thought they were naming me after the Prince of Darkness. The origin of my first name is the Latin word for light. The origin of my last name is probably the Latin ferrum, referring to ironmakers somewhere back in the family tree; but it could also be the Latin ferre, “to carry,” which made Lucifer the bringer of light, or the dawn. In any case, I’ve rather enjoyed being named after a fallen angel, especially when I’ve found people from other cultures also studying the name in puzzlement. This happened not long ago in a Lebanese bakery where I left my name for a later pickup of spinach pies. “You don’t look Lebanese,” the man at the counter said.

“I’m not,” I said. “Anglo-Irish.”

My surname, he told me, was also Lebanese, referring to the one who carries the iron lance at the front of the army. Ah-ha.

But enough about me. I mention my own connection with the devil merely to support my personal interest in the kind of misunderstanding that has led to the tragically displaced Yazidi sect’s being accused of devil worship. The only explanation we get from the media is that “A central figure in the religion is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, whose story of falling out of grace with God resembles that of Satan’s in Islam,” or that “Melek Taus is sometimes referred to as Shaitan by Yazidis, which in Arabic means Satan.”

Well, the Yazidis speak a dialect of Arabic, and the story’s the same, so what’s missing here?

I don’t know much about Zoroastrianism or the development of proto-Indo-European languages. But a little sniffing around and a sense of what happens to oral stories gave me a better idea. It seems that in Yazidi cosmology, as in the Christian Bible and the Qur’an, God created various sorts of beings, among them angels, jinn (according to Islamic tradition), and humans. In both Islamic and Yazidic versions of the story, the one originally named Lucifer or Iblis, who will become known as Shaitan, or Satan, meaning “adversary,” refuses to bow down to the human whom God creates. But here the stories diverge. In the Islamic version, Iblis is the only jinn asked to join the angels in their obeisance to Adam. Like all other jinns and humans (but unlike angels), Iblis has free will; when he exercises that will to refuse, he is forced out of heaven. The Christian version is much the same, except that Lucifer is an angel infected by pride.

But in Yazidism, God’s command to Melek Taus to bow down to Adam was a test. As an emanation of God, it was impossible for him to bow down to this creature made of dust; and yet it was equally impossible that a command of God’s should be disobeyed. After this point in the story, my understanding gets murky. On the one hand, apparently the peacock angel passed the test and became God’s deputy on earth. On the other, apparently he did fall from paradise, but he spent 7,000 years repenting, during which his tears washed away the fires of hell. Either way, rather than an evil-doer, he is a beneficent being caught up in a sort of cognitive dissonance.

But this is a very, very old story. Consider, if you will, the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which has been around for only a millennium and of which there are already more than a dozen versions. Why should we be surprised that a story about an opposing angel should evolve into different plots with different moral truths while retaining vestiges of the old name? As Elaine Pagels puts it in her book on Satan, “Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being ‘the other’; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human.”

Cold comfort, I realize, for the Yazidis still in Iraq. Their adversaries are all too real, and uninterested in stories.

Solecizing Roget

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MadLibsI’ve already confessed my love of Roget’s Thesaurus, so I am not simply going to pile on with the current wave of complaints about its popularity among students. This popularity, dubbed Rogeting by the British lecturer Chris Sadler, is apparently a side effect of rampant plagiarism and professors’ efforts to curb it by means of software like Turnitin.

The idea is simple, and familiar to me from the research essays we were assigned to write long ago, in seventh grade, on topics like “China” or “World War I.” My personal favorite was a three-pager I was assigned on the topic of Islam. Naturally, I consulted the Encyclopedia Britannica, where I found the equivalent of 30 pages’ worth on one of the world’s great religions. My task, as I saw it, was to reduce this material to as few pages as possible, substituting words like spread for extended in noting how the faith went from Spain to India. I may have used the thesaurus to help me find substitute words; in fact, it may have been the lure of the original Roget’s, with its tantalizing categories of words, synonyms leading to antonyms and thence to related groupings, that left me slaving away, in the wee hours, on what turned out to be a monstrous 12 pages of paraphrased and condensed information.

The crowning touch of the assignment, of course, was to be its decorative cover, and being graphically challenged and short of sleep, I knew of nothing to do about this problem other than break into loud sobs. My mother heard these, came downstairs to the kitchen where I was working, and for the only time in my school career, offered to do the deed for me. Next day I handed in my report with a cover featuring a cleverly executed dusky-skinned fellow in a turban, sitting in lotus position and smoking a hookah. ISLAM was above his head. Down the left side of the cover ran the words Allah Allah Allah, and down the right ran Flaming Sword of the Desert. No one even called me in for questioning.

No such luck now. What’s more worrisome, it seems students don’t have a problem substituting a word they don’t know, or seeking substitutions for words they don’t know, or simply substituting randomly, like Mad Libs set loose on the essay assignments. I’m not sure I believe that anyone actually wrote sinister buttocks for left behind. But I can easily imagine a student’s wanting to alter the phrase misusing Roget, looking up misuse, finding solecism, and transforming it into a gerund without stopping to wonder if there exists a verb, much less what solecism actually means. I can imagine the phrase Jung was betrothed in a brawl with Freud as an attempt not to be caught plagiarizing the sentence Jung was engaged in a dispute with Freud. Oh, please. Renounce. Give up. Vacate. Resign. Cut it out.

Rebecca Schuman at Slate takes this further. We professors, she points out, have been encouraging students to use high-falutin words and not to repeat words within a sentence or paragraph. So we have only ourselves to blame when characters acquire sympathy or instigate our critique, or when an excerpt delineates character interaction. I’m not sure she’s put her finger on it. It seems to me that the stiff diction we decry in student papers, when it doesn’t emerge simply from anxious parroting of trite academic verbiage, comes not from overuse of the thesaurus but from insufficient use. That is, especially as online versions render the thesaurus in dictionary form, we find students seeking simply to replace one word with another as if a “better” word will solve a problem they’re having with expressing themselves clearly.

But one of the joys of the traditional thesaurus is the way it moves from one part of speech to another, from one concept to the next, so that as your eye travels down the page, you find yourself reimagining, not just the word, but the whole sentence, even the whole idea. Maybe you’ve described the sky as indigo already, for instance, so you’re looking for a different shade of blue. Cobalt? Azure? Mazarine, whatever the hell that means, and maybe the teacher won’t know either? But if you move from color to the things that make color, maybe you’d do better to say the sky has been inked. Yes! Or maybe it’s not the color of the sky exactly, but the deepening shadows, and now you’ve moved from specific colors to plays of light and words like penumbral. But to get there, you can’t just drop in on the thesaurus. You have to use it with care, with enthusiasm. With—should I use a less sentimental synonym?—love.

One Less Toilet

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Foc'sle BathroomI spent Labor Day weekend at a grown-up camp for world-music singers in northern Vermont, a happy retreat to the only thing I ever liked about camp, which was all the group sings after dinner. The rude toilet stalls by the women’s cabins had the usual country warnings about flushing sanitary products, cautioning that doing so “will not only mean more work for the maintenance crew, but will also mean one less toilet for you to use until it is fixed.”

I had been mulling over my recent wrist-slapping by a commenter for having written that I’d used “a fair amount of unfamiliar words” in my forthcoming novel, when of course the words were countable. To me, in that instance, the choice was aesthetic; the preponderance of unfamiliar words felt as if it took up a certain volume in the book (a volume that was unnaturally enhanced by italicizing the words), and so amount felt more appropriate than number. But I got to thinking about this prescriptivist distinction, and the signs on the doors of the women’s stalls pushed that thought further.

Certainly the toilets are countable; that’s part of the point of the warning. But to write one fewer toilet feels unnatural, since fewer seems to want to modify a plural noun. Writing one fewer toilets feels unnatural because one obviously modifies a singular, and anyway, you have the need to reference the it that follows in the subordinate clause. The formal solution would be to write one toilet fewer—but somehow, in a stall in a women’s bathroom in the woods, with daddy longlegs and mosquitoes roaming the showers, that diction seems out of place.

Aside from simply wanting to distinguish between the countable and the noncountable, why do we make this less/fewer distinction when we use more for either increased number or increased quantity? I ran through a number of different phrasings as I meandered from one singing group to the next (Lithuanian, Corsican, South African, Appalachian). Very few instances of so-called misuse, as far as I could tell, resulted in misunderstanding. Less people than expected were at the concert is clear in its meaning, as is the ubiquitous 10 items or less. (I don’t think fewer is ever “improperly” employed, e.g., I drink fewer milk than I used to, so I’m not going there.)

The only examples I could come up with wherein the less/fewer distinction made a true difference employed an intervening adjective. For instance, if I say, “We’ve had less happy vacations since he passed away,” we’ve probably taken the same number of vacations but have not enjoyed them as much as we formerly did; whereas “We’ve had fewer happy vacations since he passed away” may mean the same number of vacations with some miserable ones sprinkled in; or it may mean fewer vacations, happy though they may have been.

Make it “We’ve had less good times together since you left,” and the odd combination of less good makes the distinction more ambiguous. Was the missing person such a lynchpin that the group no longer gathers now that he’s away? Or do they gather but then squabble? Hard to say.

Of course, I’m giving these examples in isolation. In reality, context would usually clarify what’s meant. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage seems to agree, at least where one less occurs. But as other distinctions die away (different from versus different than for instance), tiny slivers of difference die away with them. Except for the kind of examples I’ve listed, I can’t see where the disappearance of the less/fewer distinction entails such a difference. Can you?

Speaking Geek

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Man-Woman-Geek-1920x1200I’ve always envied people born in small countries like Belgium who grow up learning several different languages. And while I remain stumped by languages written in any script other than the Latin alphabet, I still dream of unencumbered months when I can get started on basic Mandarin.

I am also a fiction writer, who believes that there are uses to which language can be put that are different in kind, not just in degree, from the uses of everyday communication; that language, for the poet, is oil and brush, canvas and light.

So I was excited to encounter Vikram Chandra’s new book, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. Chandra is a highly accomplished novelist who supported himself for many years as a computer programmer and remains keenly interested in the language, history, and culture of programming. I am a philistine about these matters; I never want to know how the software works, I only want it to work. But the deeper I got into Chandra’s book, the more I felt I was beginning to see the contours of the particular communicative medium that is code, the way you begin to pick out words in another language—not sentences yet, let alone the argument that the sentences might be making, but at least the building blocks of what might one day be a new way for you to articulate ideas or make some rude form of verse.

The great debate of the book—a debate Chandra foregrounds but never resolves—hinges on what we mean by words like communication and art. Years ago, on a long rail journey across Europe, my husband was seated next to a man with whom he shared no language. Frustrated, the man pulled out a sheaf of paper, wrote down an algebraic problem, and handed it across to my husband. He solved the problem, produced one of his own, passed the paper back. In this way, they spent a pleasant three hours, “talking” in mathematics.

But, I pointed out when he related this anecdote, you weren’t communicating anything beyond your mutual enjoyment of math. You were just solving problems.

I had a bit of this same response to the first set of arguments Chandra put forth, about the elegance of code and the idea that “while a piece of code may pass instructions to a computer, its real audience, its readers, are the programmers who will add features and remove bugs.” I wrote to Chandra, to press this question further. Wasn’t code in the end, I asked, merely functional, not expressive? He responded, in part,

Code lasts as long as some books—there’s still code running that was written in the fifties and sixties, in very crucial places. So you’re communicating into the future, to your readers who you will never meet. And I think it’s here that programmers start collapsing the kind of language they use and its intents with art, because they have to —like physicists and mathematicians—confront questions of elegance. Even more so because the product of code (even if not code itself) is most often human-facing, say in a website or app.

Now, here’s something to contemplate. I don’t know exactly how it is, when I use an application or navigate the web, that I’m “reading” differently from the way I used to, but I know there is a difference, and that difference is effected by computer code. I had been thinking of programmers as the technicians who translated a designers’ vision to instructions comprehensible to the computer. But that’s nonsense, of course. Their creative power is far greater, and specific to their medium. Chandra goes on:

But I think there’s a more profound way in which code itself (and not just its human-facing product) inscribes itself on human consciousness. The structures of code surface themselves in the artifacts that nonprogrammers engage with. … We use Google and Facebook, but they also not only use us but shape us. So this is a kind of communication, although often unintended by the programmers, and not the kind of thing they often think about—how code reshapes bodies and consciousness and how we think about the world.

Code-makers, for instance, think largely in algorithms, just as the 4th century BCE grammarian Panini did. In one of Geek Sublime‘s many sublime tangents, I learned that Panini developed almost 4,000 rules that allow the generation of Sanskrit words and sentences from roots that in turn trace to phonemes and morphemes. With his lone text, the Ashtadhyayi, according to Chandra, “Panini created the fields of descriptive and generative linguistics.” When I reread Chandra’s book this fall, I’m going to try to hang on to the roller-coaster ride that takes us from Sanskrit to computer code and to figure out where the pleasure of rasa, “the meta-experience of experiencing oneself experience the stable emotions,” fits in. Meanwhile, I got caught up on the history of programming as a female—yes, ­female—occupation, the workings of logic gates (I get it!), and the horrifying notion of seven million lines of code, many of them plagued by bugs, that run the Pentagon’s software for payroll and accounting. As Chandra points out, 90 percent of the planet’s financial transactions rely on massive amounts of code rolling along as “Big Balls of Mud,” written in languages like Cobol, “the computing equivalent of Mesopotamian cuneiform dialects.”

I don’t speak those dialects, and I’m not likely to learn code. But Chandra is fully bilingual. And if he can explain this other language’s rhythms, versatility, history, and elegance—and, yes, the ways in which we may already be using some of its patois—I’m all ears.

 

 


The Vortex of Authorial Avoidance

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vortex_artWelcome to the vortex, the tourbillion, where we turn and turn in the widening gyre of authorial avoidance of whatever truly dire error we may have committed in the penning of our novel. Step right into the typeset proofs. There—feel that hot wind blowing at your neck? It’s urging you to seize on something—anything, so long as it is minute, fixable, of no importance to anyone save you and the managing editor, to obsess over until the deadline for returning the galleys. Let it draw you onward, inward, upward or outward, it doesn’t really matter, so long as your eyes keep searching for more of this tiny, irrelevant sort of error and you can keep them away from the glaring hole in your plot or the characters who don‘t really add up or the lame, disappointing ending. Keep them away, in other words, from anything that might require you to miss the deadline for returning the galleys, might even require you to (gasp!) rewrite a page, or three, or 10, and then there would be reflow. Heaven forfend—did someone just say reflow? No, we won’t have any of that, the costly business of laying out the typeset pages anew, worrying anew over widows and orphans and the proper alignment of pages and the need to have chapters begin on a recto. (That’s a right-hand page, but stay with me here; we’re in the thick of it now and have to think in Editorialese.)

You’re with me, right? You’ve found something. And not just one thing! Fortunately—oh, curious coincidence!—you’ve just finished the audio version of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a novel set mostly in Wellington (a.k.a. Cambridge), Mass., featuring both Americans and visiting British academics. The reader for the audio is great, does all the accents, but it’s weird. When he’s narrating from the point of view of the Americans, he still uses expressions like I’ll ring you up and He fetched his rucksack. Wow, you thought when you were listening in the car. Zadie Smith lived in the States for a while; you’d think she’d get those expressions right, or at least her editor would catch her. But now you turn to your galleys, because you’ve got recent Pakistani immigrants in the States, and what are they saying? I’ll call you. She grabbed her knapsack.

Focus. Obsess. Don’t make the mistake Zadie Smith got away with making. (And why did she get away with it? Because she published the book first in England, where they didn’t notice? Because she’s Zadie Smith? Yes, it’s a terrific book, so these little nitpickings don’t matter, but still.) Comb through the manuscript for all the places where people are calling each other on the phone. Where it’s the Pakistani characters, have them ring each other or phone each other. Where it’s a knapsack, make it a rucksack.

But wait. Zadie Smith grew up in England, though her mother was Jamaican. Maybe the English your Pakistani characters speak is different from what these American characters who are speaking Zadie-Smith English are speaking. You’ve spent lots of time with people in and from Pakistan, but you haven’t listened, not carefully enough. Go online. Look up “ring up versus call up” and “rucksack versus knapsack.” Lose yourself in the countless inane debates about these phrasings. Consider ring versus ring up. Think about backpack. Email your South Asian friends. Ask what expressions they use. Sit back and watch as they ping-pong back and forth between themselves over which generation or class uses ring or call and whether satchel or merely bag should be introduced.

Finally, as the deadline draws close, decide that you have discovered a small set of subtle tools to show the reader the various degrees of your characters’ assimilation, and the differing tones they use when speaking to each other or to elders. Deploy ring, phone, call, backpack, and bag accordingly. If the vortex has not quite sucked you in entirely, and you still suspect that there might be larger problems remaining in your precious novel even now, even as it is about to fly into the hands of reviewers, wake in the middle of the night. Remember that one of your Pakistani characters, at some point in the plot, needs to buy rain boots. Rush downstairs. Find the offending page. Cross out the words. In the margin, delighted with yourself, write Wellingtons.

 

Sounding Real by Speaking Fake

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HT_arthur_chu_headshot_tk_140203_4x3t_384Arthur Chu is apparently best known as one of the top Jeopardy! winners of all time, but since I haven’t watched Jeopardy! since the last millennium, I have no opinion on his style of play or use of the Forrest Bounce. I came upon him, instead, in an essay on his current voice-over work. Born to Chinese immigrant parents in the 1980s, Chu grew up “translating” their “broken English” into perfectly formed phrases, with rounded Rs and articles in the right places, so they could be understood at customer-service counters and restaurants. It’s an experience shared by many second-generation Americans, who go on to cultivate such accent-free pronunciation that, as Chu puts it:

The thing that made me weird as a kid was that my English was too perfect. My grammar was too meticulously correct, my words too carefully enunciated—I was the kid who sounded like “Professor Robot.” In order to avoid being a social pariah in high school I had to learn to use a carefully calibrated proportion of slurred syllables and street slang in my speech—just enough to sound “normal,” not enough to sound like I was “trying too hard.”

I’ve now listened to Chu on CNN, and he does sound amazingly pitch-perfect American, perhaps slightly Midwestern in his determined rs and long ees, but ideal for the kind of bread-and-butter work he does as the voice of corporate videos and voicemail greetings. What’s more surprising is his being cast as the voice of a Chinese person speaking heavily accented English. “It involves a lot of leveling,” he writes, “a lot of smoothing”:

The tongue stays closer to the center of the mouth rather than doing the pronounced, defined highs and lows that shape the L and R sounds. The vocal cords vibrate in smooth, singing tones rather than doing the little hop up and down that makes for a normal American English syllable.

Chu does not find the stereotyping offensive, because the image he’s projecting is of a Chinese person introducing Americans to the tourist attractions or history of China. Here, I began to part ways with his thinking. He compares the use of a Chinese-accented English to that of a Southern drawl for a video on the American South. But people in the American South speak English, whereas those in China speak Chinese. The video producers have to seek out, first, an English speaker, and second, an English speaker who can sound “authentically” Chinese by faking the accents his parents had in Albany, N.Y.

The second aspect of Chu’s fascinating exploration of his participation in the accent business that bothered me was his comparison of Chinese-American speech to other forms of “code switching.” Emphasizing the determined assimilation of Chinese-American kids into mainstream vernacular, his claims that “there isn’t a Chinese-American accent the way there’s a distinct cadence to how black Americans or Latino Americans talk. Most Chinese-Americans have a pitch-perfect “invisible” accent for wherever they live.”

It isn’t just that this statement vastly oversimplifies both the question of regional accent and the question of ethnic vernacular. It’s also that Chu is echoing a claim I’ve heard, without a shred of evidence, from white Americans who consider themselves completely unbiased: that they can “tell” when a radio announcer, for instance, is black, regardless of her origins or upbringing. That’s racism, and it’s disappointing to find it coming from a commentator whose own experience is so intertwined with questions of prejudice and assimilation. After all, as Chu writes,

To sound like a “normal” American is to wield privilege. … The English I grew up with as “real” isn’t the English I painstakingly forced on myself from listening to TV and my peers at school. It’s the English of my parents, complete with underpronounced L’s and R’s, dropped “and”s and “the”s, sing-songy and “broken” and embarrassing. That accent is real, but my use of it can never be. … After a lifetime of rehearsals and training, the “announcer voice” is my voice, and the only reliable way to sound “less announcer-y” is to put on an accent that isn’t mine, be it Brooklyn, Biloxi, or Beijing.

Now that is real, and requires no comparison to Texans or Latinos to get its message across.

 

Grammar: The Movie

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photo-mainIt’s got an all-star cast: Steven Pinker of Harvard, John McWhorter of Columbia, Geoffrey Nunberg of Berkeley, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Adele Goldberg of Princeton, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty, Brad Hoover of Grammarly, Bryan Garner of A Dictionary of American Usage, and dozens of other marquee attractions, including (way down in the credits) yours truly. I’m talking about Grammar Revolution, a quirky feature-length documentary by David and Elizabeth O’Brien, which is intended—I think—to wake us all up.

I’m not certain what we’re waking up to. I’ve watched the film twice now. The production values are excellent; we move seamlessly from interview to commentary to footage of children learning and even old newsreels of classrooms steeped in progressivist notions of education. The film divides into three parts. The first, “Grammar,” begins by distinguishing between what linguists mean by grammar and what “most of us” mean by it. This divide, between the linguists and “most of us,” gets both labeled and dismissed as a debate between descriptivism and prescriptivism; there are also some embarrassed admissions on the part of certain linguists as to their most-of-us behavior, when they find themselves frowning judgmentally on someone’s use of a preposition rather than a conjunction. A student named Anna makes passing reference to “power structures” that enforce certain rules in order to maintain their power, but that question gets relatively short shrift. The happy consensus at the end of this section seems to be that there is an identifiable grammar to standard English and it behooves most of us to know it so that we can make our way through a world that expects competence in that regard.

The second part of the film, “Grammar Education,” leaves the debate behind—or, rather, decides “most of us” have won it, and we’re talking now about grammar as a set of codes that are useful to know but that too many misapprehend or fail to know—and focuses on how grammar was left in the dust in the latter half of the 20th century. There’s a good deal of slippage here, from grammar through usage, syntax, and diction all the way to regional accent. Since grammar education is in many ways the heart of the film, and the heart of the O’Briens’ project, it’s useful to glance at the teaching page of the website to get an idea of this slippage. There, we see the following quotes:

Grammar often seems to be a low priority in education. Are schools undervaluing grammar, given that employers may rule out applications with sloppy writing? (The New York Times)

Grammar is a litmus test. If job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin. (Kyle Wiens of iFixit)

When young people are taught to undervalue literacy as a life skill, they are being cruelly misled. (Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves)

Students and teachers need the terminology of grammar so they can discuss sentences easily. (Brock Haussamen, author of Grammar Alive!)

The first of these quotes is primarily about bad writing, which has a potential relationship to grammar but isn’t quite the same thing. The second is about a spelling error. The third is about literacy in general, which is a related but qualitatively different subject. The terminology to which the fourth refers is sometimes problematic (see the quarrel resulting from my post on the subjunctive), but in any case, the terms are surely secondary to the concepts.

This central part of the movie has some great material, especially from John McWhorter, about the efficacy of learning grammar; it also contains some inspired scenes with youngsters. But the usual whining about the good old days, before “mediocrity” became “good,” left this viewer fatigued.

The film wraps up with what is called the “Standard English Debate.” There is a bit of a debate here, and it heats up, particularly when Aram deKoven of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire agonizes over a term to replace the odious Standard and Kendall King of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities declares that “in no place in the world do well-paid, high status people not speak what’s considered the standard.” But we end on a note of apparent harmony, with the naysayers out of the picture and the remaining talking heads agreeing that learning Standard English “tears down walls,” “facilitates commerce,” and is “not about whiteness,” “not about being part of an elite club” but “about being able to communicate clearly.”

Look, I’m in the movie. I’m an avid—nay, rabid—Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrammer. And I loved the kids moving parts of sentences around by manipulating differently shaped and colored blocks. But there are debates, more than one of them, that aren’t quite so easily resolved. Maybe a movie, with its need for a wrap-up conclusion, can’t capture those debates. Or maybe the best thing is to download the movie yourself, and then we can have at it.

 

Mentor, the Verb

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Every year, as I fill out my institution’s Professional Activities Inventory, I’m vaguely aware that one of the categories soliciting a response—Mentoring of Colleagues—uses language far more ubiquitous now than when I firmentorst became anyone’s colleague. But it was not until I began a writing project this year that has brought me deep into the fields of business and finance that I started hearing mentor and mentee at every turn. I confess publicly here, and with no small amount of shame, that these terms irritate me, as if someone’s placing a guiding hand on the back of my neck every time either of them comes up.

Mentor, like so many casual verbs and nouns, was once a person, or a character anyway. Possibly the son of Heracles, he became Odysseus’s friend in his old age, and he took charge of Odysseus’s son Telemachus while the wily hero was off at the Trojan war. Athena also dropped in on Telemachus from time to time, and when she did, she took the form of Mentor in order to give him solid advice, like fighting off his mother’s unwelcome suitors.

French romance picked up the Mentor character in the 17th century, and from that point forward, the name became generic. But a Google Ngram shows a sixfold rise in the use of mentor between 1960 and 2008, with books like Mentoring: The Tao of Giving and Receiving Wisdom (1995) leading the charge. I suspect it’s grown far more popular since then; Amazon displays thousands of books with the word mentor somewhere in the title, subtitle, or quick description, with books on business and money leading the way at 2,739 books available on mentoring.

Business profiles, too, emphasize mentoring. Gina Luna, head of JPMorgan Chase’s Houston office, writes,

I think mentor is a verb and not a noun. We all develop relationships, and mentoring—advice, coaching, perspective, and help—is a component of almost every relationship . … I mentor someone when I see in that person the potential to do more, make a change and become a high performer. When I see someone I know has what it takes, I want to maximize the potential. My job is to make the organization better for the future. It’s also really rewarding to help people succeed.

You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to warm to such feelings. And when a note from a student or colleague thanks me for having been his mentor, I feel gratification. Yet I continue to wonder about the particular selectivity of some of these relationships; I wonder about the crumbling of other supportive networks whose place is not quite supplanted by mentoring. Odysseus had only one son; what if he had had 10 sons and 10 daughters? Do the other 19 fend for themselves?

Another mentoring junkie, Walter C. Wright, leans toward using mentor exclusively as a noun:

Because the verb “to mentor” places the initiative, and perhaps the responsibility, in the hands of the mentor, and from my perspective that undercuts the power of the mentoring process.  I do not “mentor” anyone, nor do I want to “be mentored.” … Mentors are important resources for our learning, they are guides for our development, they are models for our choices.  But they are not responsible for our growth.  The power of mentoring rests in the decision to select mentors, the choice to learn from them, and the responsibility to act on our learning. Mentoring as a verb encourages someone to think they are doing something to someone else, rather than being someone for something else.

But then, I think, why aren’t we content with the very synonyms—resources, guides, models—that Wright leans on? To me, there remains something self-congratulatory about mentoring, and a dangerous whiff of the sycophantic in being so-and-so’s mentee.

Still, there it sits, on the Professional Activities Inventory. One grits one’s teeth. One tries to do one’s part. One types in the response.

Truly, Madly, Deeply Avoiding Adverbs

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LY-Adverbs1Pity the lowly adverb. Like the adenoids (I had mine removed, at age 4) or the appendix, it is regarded by rule-mongers as unnecessary, left over from a time when the body of language needed this now-useless organ to process niceties of language that we now handle by way of verbs. Or nouns. Or the effectively placed period.

Only two classes of people, it seems, stick up for the adverb: young adults and members of the bar. A proposal from a student almost never offers to read and scrutinize a particular passage; it offers to closely  read and carefully scrutinize the passage. From a recent student abstract, chosen at random (italics mine): “A personal issue most prominent in my last reading of the text was a quite frequent confusion with some of Fitzgerald’s more elaborately descriptive massages that rely heavily on figurative interpretations to denote potentially powerful meaning.” Whew. Social media exacerbate the tendency, with tweets and updates chirping about being incredibly inspired, so totally excited, more than slightly amused, not to mention the stand-alone Seriously. It’s tempting to start sharpening the surgeon’s blade.

Then along come the lawyers. My father was one—a judge, in fact. You could never say it made your life difficult to take your kid sister to the fair without his leveling his gaze at you and asking: But did it make your life substantially difficult? Now there’s a powerful word, substantially. In a court of law, I imagine it can rack up hundreds of thousands in fees for well-versed attorneys: one fellow’s idea of substantial is another’s idea of piffle. As Jacob Gershman suggests in a recent Wall Street Journal article on legalese and adverbial inclinations, “Adverbs in recent years have taken on an increasingly important—and often contentious—role in courthouses. Their influence has spread with the help of lawmakers churning out new laws packed with them.”

So we get the slicing and dicing of knowingly, recklessly, intentionally, and indiscriminately, to name a few. When does something become indiscriminate? How do we prove intention? Trust me, my dad knew how to wield this part of speech; my sister came to the fair. And so I grew up understanding—as surely, the lawyers in my dad’s courtroom understood—that you needed to sharpen your adverbs before you even approached the bench to make your argument.

The real trouble hits when “colorful” adverbs, rather than opening up some metaphysical universe for argument, toss down a judgment. Take, for instance, the reaction by lawyers on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when Attorney General Eric Holder defended his department’s use of adverbs like traditionally and ordinarily. Holder “flippantly dismisses the Committee’s contentions as a dislike of adverbs,” wrote the lawyers. “In fact, we have no problem with adverbs.”

No, I guess they don’t. In fact, they seem to like one a lot: flippantly.

Like everything else in our language (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Passive Voice; and you, those cuss words I can’t write here), adverbs have great work to do and should be handled responsibly. Anyway, they’re unavoidable. Just witness Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s explanation, at the end of Gershman’s article, of his decision to avoid adverbs as much as possible: “You just discipline yourself,” he says, “to choose your words very carefully.”

Noms de Guerre

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Q: What do great poems and wars have in common?

A: They don’t need fancy names.

George-W.-Bush-Mission-accomplishedShakespeare didn’t title his sonnets, and I’m fairly sure that no one fighting in the Wars of the Roses thought of them in flowery terms. (The name came along 400 years later.) Now, though, we can barely roll out the tanks before we need to come up with a marquee name, something to blaze across the sky in block capitals and declaim in a stentorian baritone. The latest, our push against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is now officially dubbed—drum roll, please—INHERENT RESOLVE.

Say what?

Well, maybe we need to review how we got here. I’ll miss a few tricks (see my omission of the yarmulke allusion in Israel’s Iron Dome), but my understanding is that war-naming began with the Germans in World War I as they attempted first to code-name secret operations and then to lift the troops’ spirits with names like Archangel, Mars, and Valkyrie. Our own names began in World War II purely for security, and originally came from a list of names that would not suggest activities or locations. So we had Operations Gray, Olympic, and Flintlock. The capture of German scientists, along with the technical plans for German rocketry, was known as Operation Paperclip. The only one seeking higher inspiration was Winston Churchill, who had studied the German names extensively and thought “names of a frivolous character” were damaging both to morale and to history. We have Churchill to thank for changing the name of Operation Soapsuds, an American bomber raid on Romanian oil fields, to Operation Tidalwave.

And thus, I suppose, for ushering in the modern predilection for grandiosity in noms de guerre. Though even code names like Overlord, Churchill’s choice for the 1944 invasion of Europe, were top secret, after WWII we went back to the Germans’ PR tactic. The Korean War got names like Thunderbolt, Roundup, Killer, and Ripper. After running into antiwar resistance at home following Operations Blast Out and Masher, Vietnam name-givers resorted to more peaceful patriotic handles: Junction City, Niagara. After Vietnam—partly as the result of an attempt to automate the system by randomly assigning the first initials of the two-word name and leaving the rest to bureaucrats’ imagination—the names ricocheted from Main Street to Armageddon: Urgent Fury (the invasion of Grenada), Praying Mantis (air strike against Iran), Brother Sam (support for the Brazilian coup), Just Cause (invasion of Panama).

Then came the Deserts. Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Snowplough, Desert Scorpion, Desert Thrust, Desert Siphon. We know what these are all about, and how well they went. Some 21st-century efforts at statesmanlike language—Productive Effort, Restore Hope, Earnest Will—sound weirdly, to my ears, like names given by exhausted Puritan mothers to their 13th and 14th children. But the rest have tried feebly to evoke Lawrence of Arabia.

And I guess, this time, whoever has this impossible job at the Pentagon decided the public wasn’t going to swallow any more sand. Inherent Resolve, though initially described by at least one senior officer as “bleh,” covers a lot of angles. There’s Inherent, meaning “existing in something as a permanent and inseparable element,” which I suppose could refer either to our supposedly rock-solid commitment or to the Obama administration’s policy of “leading from behind,” having the effort inhere in the culture itself. Then there’s the hedge in Resolve, a far cry from, say, Enduring Freedom (the Bush administration’s catch-all term for anti-Islamist operations) in its refusal to name the end goal. It’s the journey, one might say, not the destination.

It’s a sad, bitter chuckle one gets at such names, in the end. Better to go back to the poetry. Here’s the latest list of titles from Dog Ear Publishing, where you can shake a fist at Shakespeare with your own proud title, like Living the Dream, A Lost Hero Found, Angelfish, Hockey Cat, Tangled Ashes. More fun, and less harm done.

 

MooT Pursuits

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MooTI have a soft spot for people who invent games, especially games with words. And by way of some random keystroke, I found myself on the mailing list of Jon Steeves, inventor of MooT, “the game of semantics, etymology, and grammar.” For almost two years now, I’ve received random emails with questions like In Greek it means “rules of the belly,” whereas in English it denotes “the art of eating and drinking well.” What word is it?*

red_wine_bottle_48679Finally, I caved and got a copy of the game. Two weekends ago, on a rainy Saturday evening, we hunkered down with friends and a bottle of good wine and set to it.0

The game consists of 1,008 questions, color-coded for level of difficulty, with a roll of the die determining which color question your team must answer. My initial worry, that the game would be of interest only to language geeks, quickly fell by the wayside. Turns out that lots of people like to discuss the difference between elation and exhilaration or to puzzle out the meaning of the X in X-ray. Also turns out that overthinking grammar or etymology can lead to trouble; members of one team, asked to finish the analogy Choice is to diction as order is to –,” spent so much time arguing about whether diction ought to include one’s accent in addition to one’s choice of words that they blew right past the correct answer of syntax. Another team, asked to translate the Persian phrase shah mat, which is the origin of our term checkmate, quibbled with the answer (the king is dead) because technically the king in a chess game is never even captured.

The progress of the game is ridiculously easy. For each question answered correctly, you advance a marker on a cribbage-like board. More interesting, for us, was the difference between what Steeves has dubbed the Collectivist and Corporate versions of MooT. In the Collectivist version, we all played, as it were, against the game. If we got the answer right, we moved our own marker. If we got it wrong, we moved our opponent’s marker. At first gleefully and then rather routinely, we noticed that with four well-lubricated brains debating and rehashing and coming to consensus, we crushed the game.

Then came the Corporate version. For this, we split into teams, halving our mental powers while raising our anxiety and fear of humiliation. This, we found, was a lot more fun. For one thing, it introduces the concept of risk. If the opposing team doesn’t like your team’s answer, it can challenge with a different answer. If it is correct, you advance not at all, and the other team advances your allotted number of spaces. If it is incorrect, however, the other team retreats that same number of spaces. High stakes rest on, say, whether an erstwhile friend is an ex-friend or a fair-weather friend!

We did have—ahem—some complaints. A few of the answers seem debatable. Is water a food?, for instance, receives a resounding Yes from MooT: “According to the COD [Canadian Online Dictionary?], any substance taken into the body to maintain life and growth is a food.” Well, maybe in Canada. But we looked that one up later, and the Cambridge World History of Food begs to differ. And although we got it right, a question like “Was the day we call June 6th, 1944, ephemeral?” seems a tad misleading. Yes, Jon, the day is ephemeral (duh), but its status as one of history’s watersheds is not.

And the assignment of difficulty sometimes seems a bit arbitrary. That doesn’t diminish the pleasure of a fine social game and a great source of trivia, but let me test my group’s sense of what’s easy or difficult with you, discerning Lingua Franca readers. Bearing in mind that there are four categories—Red (really easy), Green (sort of easy), Yellow (a bit harder), and Blue (hard), to which categories would you assign the following questions? You may answer them as well, if you like, but no using outside resources, and you may wish to adopt our group’s friendly amendment of a two-minute timer.

  1. Which subatomic particle binds quarks: the lepton or the gluon?
  2. A once-common Northern European custom was to drink mead during the 30 days following a marriage. What was this custom called?
  3. Which view is narrower, the vista or the prospect?
  4. Use a hyphenated culinary metaphor to describe an incompletely formed plan.
  5. Which teenagers are resentful: the sullen or the petulant?
  6. What language’s name means “Jewish” in German?

Answers next week. Meanwhile, you can get your own game at www.mootgame.com.

*Gastronomy

 


What’s Interesting About ‘Disinterested’

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how-to-handle-a-disinterested-husbandHistory is so annoying.

Just when you gird your loins to pen an eloquent article about the fine distinctions of language, threading your way among the thickets of the prescriptivist debate to request that we all pause to acknowledge what might be lost when such distinctions collapse, history comes along and thumbs its snotty nose at you. I refer to the difference in meaning accorded the adjectives disinterested and uninterested, of which the noun forms are (or should be) disinterest and uninterest.

Fussbudgets like me bristle whenever we hear disinterested used when we think the appropriate term is uninterested. (As with the tendency to use less rather than fewer, the reverse seems never to hold true.)

Recent examples from the news:

Education is treated by the Pakistani state as a series of inputs: dysfunctional school buildings, and underqualified and disinterested teachers.

A Mutual Disinterest for Michigan and Harbaugh

Giddy with disinterest. Tingling with unconscious ennui. Quivering with apathy. I’d say the public mood is paradoxical. (David Brooks)

Emma Howard noted the affable centenarian’s charming disinterest in his growing celebrity.

No matter that this turn of phrase is too new by about 25 years: It bluntly encapsulates Sybil’s disinterest in her old life. (Ben Zimmer on Downton Abbey)

. . . a new American determination to work with a “light footprint” that can give the impression of disinterest. (Roger Cohen)

A disinterested person, to those who gripe about this sort of thing, means an impartial person; an uninterested person is an indifferent, bored, or otherwise unconcerned person. Two very different meanings, with a wide opening for a gray area. When a sports headline reads Disinterest Bothers Calipari, a failure to maintain the distinction between the two meanings renders the headline vague. A few more steps down the road, and the intriguing opening line of a 1982 book review—In reviewing the work of William Golding, I can declare the ultimate disinterest—the disinterest of absolute uncertainty—could leave tomorrow’s readers scratching their heads over the relationship between uncertainty and unconcern.

When I began this post, I thought I’d focus only on the problem with the noun form of the two words. After all, in my first example above, there’s no reason that underqualified and disinterested teachers can’t be corrected to underqualified and uninterested teachers; but the impression of disinterest would have to be corrected to the impression of lack of interest. One can appreciate a writer’s avoiding the stacked prepositional phrasing. Moreover, the noun form, when it means unconcern, almost always precedes or implies the preposition in, whereas a noun meaning impartiality would precede as to or some similar phrase—so we have a giveaway in the context.

That, I thought, would be my point, such as it is. But then I looked into the history, and everything got tangled up. Merriam-Webster claims that disinterest originally meant lack of interest and uninterest meant impartiality—the opposite of the prescriptivist meaning today. But the OED cites 1658 as the first instance of disinterest meaning impartiality and 1889 as the first instance of its meaning unconcern. Checking on the adjective form, we find a closer entangling of the two meanings: Though I found myself reading the several examples of disinterested furnished by the OED from the 17th century as indicating impartiality, the OED editors assigned them almost equally to unconcerned or impartial. The first absolutely clear instance of disinterested meaning unconcerned occurs in 1928.

The problem, I realized, is not with dis- and un-, which are both prefixes negating the word to which they attach. The problem lies with the word interest. Among its many meanings are the quality of being engaged by something—let’s call this meaning A—and a share or concern in a property, enterprise, group, etc.—let’s call this meaning B. Mixing up these meanings, it could make sense to say I am uninterested (A) in a company in which I hold a large interest (B). Or to say that I have a disinterested opinion (B) about something that interests me a great deal (A). If we get confused about the root of the word, it’s no wonder we get a little confused about the prefixed version.

Well, no one ever promised us that language would always make unambiguous sense. Meanwhile, speaking of interests—only a few interested readers responded disinterestedly to the MooT quiz, but from this tiny sampling, it’s clear we rank several questions easier than MooT does. Moreover, we disagree both with the game and with each other. MooT assigned the questions I posed the following answers and difficulty rankings:

  1. Gluon. Green (sort of easy)
  2. The honeymoon. Blue (hard)
  3. The vista. Red (easy)
  4. Half-baked. Yellow (sort of hard)
  5. The sullen. Green (sort of easy)
  6. Yiddish. Yellow (sort of hard)

Only one reader assigned two of the same categories as MooT, and two readers disagreed in every category. Interesting, huh?

 

 

Passivity and Other Afflictions

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call-to-actionLast week, I suggested that we got ourselves into trouble trying to distinguish between disinterest and uninterest because multiple meanings of the word interest put both prefixes at a disadvantage when it comes to drawing bright, clear lines of meaning. Now I’ll wade into muddier waters. Much ink has been spilt over the use or abuse of the passive voice in English. I’d like to propose two notions that, held in balance, might decrease our level of apoplexy:

  1. The term passive voice is a term of art understood mostly by grammarians and poorly comprehended in its specific meaning by the general educated public.
  2. As a culture, we decry passivity in most of its forms. (Exhibit A: voters’ disregard for the midterm elections.)

A similar term, for me, is unreliable narrator. For fiction writers, the unreliable narrator is a device we deploy with care and examine closely in the work of others. But when I use the term in discussions with readers, they initially assume I am disparaging the work in which such a narrator appears, since unreliability is an undesirable trait in real human beings.

As a term of art, the passive voice possesses neither positive nor negative properties; like prepositional phrase or nominative absolute or future tense, it describes a particular construction within a sentence. One of the more interesting games to play, for me, involves deciding when the syntax amounts to passive voice and when it amounts to what I’ve called a predicative past participle, or what others call the adjectival passive: The window was closed; the leaves were raked; smokers are asked to refrain from smoking. Clearly, when we cannot turn the sentence around—when the sentence describes the condition of the window, leaves, or smokers, and not the action being performed by some unnamed agent—the definition of passive voice gets a little more gnarly than in constructions like Debbie was accompanied by John.

These are fun discussions to have. They differ in both degree and kind from the discussions of passivity I encounter when writing teachers discuss the woeful state of student writing. There, as many on this forum have observed, the problems multiply. My sixth-grade teacher tried to drum overuse of the verb to be out of us by requiring us to note each instance of its use in the margins of our papers—an arbitrary exercise, but one I remain mindful of today. Other teachers, finding their students continually beginning sentences with I think … , I feel … , I understand this in the case of … , It seems to me that … , and the like banned the use of the first person, hoping (in vain) that sentences would get out of the muck and start making meaning. Others tried to eliminate empty clauses introducing noun clauses, like There is an idea that or It is important to understand that. Finally, detecting that a certain number of flabby sentences were also in the passive voice (insofar as they knew what the passive voice was; sometimes they confused it with instances of the verb to be), some teachers tried to goose students’ prose by cautioning against that verb construction.

All of the sentences and paragraphs that these teachers were—and are—decrying fall under the general definition of passivity as the general educated public understands that term. Now, the core of the problem may well be unclear thinking, lack of argument, poor academic writing models, even the desire to obfuscate. These things are much harder to talk about, and exponentially harder to correct in student work. So the passivity that teachers decry finds itself labeled throughout as passive voice (or sometimes passive tense or passive construction). And grammarians, who understand passive voice as a term of art, go bananas. Because we love talking about passive voice; there’s nothing inherently wrong with passive voice; countless examples of necessary and eloquent passive voice can be found in literature; and so on.

I do not know if a solution exists to this problem, or even if it really is a problem. Framing and narrowing the definition for nonspecialists might scratch the itch, but I rather suspect it will only muzzle people who are using a term that works, for them, as a catch-all to describe flabby, flat, unfocused writing; and that they rarely use to attack a solid example of passive voice, both because they don’t recognize it and because the term of art is not the target of their ire in the first place.

OK. Bring it on.

 

Noping Out

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keep-calm-and-nope“I love how that goat just nopes out of that situation.” And I love the ring of a newly hatched bit of slang that hasn’t even received its Urban Dictionary definition yet. Here, at its inception, nopes out doesn’t yet sound juvenile to me, or evasive, or overused, or imprecise; it hasn’t yet earned any of the pejoratives that purists may hurl its way if and when it becomes as widespread in the language as amazeballs or totes. Rather, it describes a quick series of actions that seem to have been waiting for some streetwise Adam to name them. The goat (or whoever) takes a look at the situation, processes a quick “Nope” in her brain, and exits as fast as possible.

I’ve been in that situation. Just didn’t have the phrase for it yet. The stirring of nopes out came to me in an email from my editor quoting a tweet citing another tweet referencing this cartoon:

nope_zpsbcc14df0

Other instances of nopes out include an unreferenced scene from the sitcom Seinfeld in which Kramer sees something he wants no part of; he checks the sidewalk around him to see if he’s been spotted, then takes off in his characteristic Bugs Bunny lope around the corner. The scene is a dead ringer for my son’s behavior, 15 years ago, when his baseball went through our neighbor’s window and he looked quickly around before dropping his bat and tearing off down the sidewalk. (Where he thought he was going, given that I’d witnessed him from our kitchen window, is unclear. But the spur to his flying heels was definitely the notion of “Nope, not me, not here!”)

If I were a gambling woman, I’d lay odds on nopes out as a front-runner for slang ubiquity in the next two years or so. First, Nope has risen dramatically over one generation, enjoying almost three times the usage now as it did in 1980. Second, the 10-second video clip favored by Internet sites practically begs for a phrase that will neatly describe the series of feints and moves involved in, well, noping out. Third, the trend toward verbification (Google, weird, sex up) isn’t slowing down. Finally, it’s a delightful phrase. It feels good to say it. Try it the next time you see someone allowing their dog to soil the neighbor’s lawn, after which they fumble for a nonexistent refuse bag, check quickly for judgmental bystanders, then drag the offending pooch rapidly down the sidewalk as if nothing has happened. What a nope out!

Now that I’ve become attached to the phrase, though, I’m already one of its defenders, an early protector of the parameters of its meaning. I fully intend to disapprove of the use of nopes out to indicate simple declining, like the juror who refuses to convict. It will not, in my presence, substitute for no-show, which is an entirely different form of evasion. Nor may it be used to signify other abdications of responsibility, like the committee member who votes Present or the registered voter who stays home from the midterms. The subject must encounter the situation, process Nope, and get out. That’s the deal. Why? Because I said so.

Let’s see how far this gets me, shall we?

Super!

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blurb_mparty6_mario_20080911One of the many casualties of spell checkers is students’ ability to describe their family rituals. Too frequently, recently, they seem to be having super in the dinning room. And from their emails, I infer that the typographical slip comes from the superfluity of the word super, which pops up everywhere, mostly as an adverb: super happy, super hungry, super fantastic. I noticed it particularly when I learned of the passing of a friend’s mother from a mutual friend who wrote to say that he was super sad about it. I do not doubt for an instant the sincerity of my friend’s sympathy. But the oddity of the word choice, to my ears, may stem from an amalgam of at least three influences on our current super craze. I’ll list them in order of increasing historical depth:

  1. the once-popular use of the exclamation Super! to denote something fabulous;
  2. the ordinary-language acceptance, by now, of super as an adjective, particularly in proper names, to mark something as bigger and better than anything else—Superman, Super Bowl, Super-Ball;
  3. the rather more unsettling etymology of both the word super and its most famous designee, Superman.

All three of these background meanings shadow my appreciation of adverbial expressions involving super, especially when they emphasize (as they often do) the negativity of the condition: super sad, super cold, super sick, super hard, super weird. I’ll let others dwell on Nos. 1 and 2 while I concentrate on 3.

The OED defines super purely as a prefix, of course, and attributes to it chiefly properties of being higher, above, beyond, or on top of whatever is being prefixed. Whether that’s what Nietzsche meant when he coined the term Übermensch is a matter of much spilled ink despite George Bernard Shaw’s adoption of it for his play Man and Superman in 1903. Certainly, Nietzsche was not intending anything like the comic-book character my students now know in the form of the blue-eyed British film star Henry Cavill. Nor, in fact, was Superman’s original creator, Jerry Siegel, who first wrote a comic strip about the Super-Man, a Nazified Nietzschean Overman character who was a telepathic villain rather than an all-powerful defender of the American way. The demise of that character in the mid-20th century and the rise of the red-caped Superman who lives on in widescreen cinema coincides, on Google’s Ngram viewer, with a fall in use of the lowercased superman and a rise in the name that continues today.

Superman superman

Accompanying that rise is super’s ascendency as the adverb we know and love or loathe today, meaning “more of” rather than “beyond.”

Superhot supercold

Most of the OED’s examples are fairly esoteric, but when I think of them in ordinary discourse I feel the shift in meaning. For instance, superglacial, first used by Admiral William Parry to describe lakes existing on the top of a glacier, would surely be understood today as describing something very, very glacial. At one time in the past, it was possible for an ascetic to be described as supersexual; now, that term would carry a very different connotation.

We grow weary, of course, of extreme terms being used to describe common situations. Where do you go from super strong, super pretty, super tall? I imagine that one reason I’m hearing the term used mostly to prefix negative modifiers—hungry, cold, tired, sad, lonely—is that its meaning is shifting again. I’m super tired doesn’t mean I’m beyond any state of fatigue, nor does it mean I am as tired as tired can be; it means I didn’t get enough sleep last night and could use a nap.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m hungry, and I’ll try a little super in the dinning room.

Why I Don’t Use Track Changes on Students’ Papers

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icon256They arrive now, in a flood, the end-of term papers. For the most part, they are beyond revision at this point, and the task ahead consists mostly of assessment. Still, I find myself clinging to my Luddite position of accepting papers only in hard copy, regardless of the risk of germ transmission by paper, regardless of deforestation, regardless of the printing costs or the various excuses the demand engenders. The main reason for my old-fashioned insistence is that I still find some students hesitate before turning in a printed copy. They read it one last time, this time not screen-by-screen, but page-by-page, and with the ability to spread the thing out on their desk and see it as a whole entity—an argument, or a narrative—that should have integrity. And those few, those happy few, may pick up a pencil and make a few scratches, then turn back to their computers and have at the thing one more time.

Another reason I cling to the print-only submission requirement is that I prefer to refrain from using Track Changes to respond to student papers. Here, I realize I am swimming completely against the tide. Besides cleanliness and environmental awareness, the list of advantages for using Track Changes goes on and on:

  • You can distinguish clearly between “comments” and “corrections”;
  • You can highlight sections and make broad observations without worrying about squeezing them into the margin;
  • You can return the work to the student whenever convenient;
  • You can edit your own feedback before you send it;
  • Students can respond directly to you electronically, opening a dialogue about your comments;
  • Both you and your students can track several versions of their papers and compare them;
  • If your handwriting is a scrawl, comments in Track Changes will be far more legible;
  • You don’t have to lug piles of student papers around with you;
  • Track Changes is “the way writing takes place in the workplace and it’s a timesaver.”

And so on. Who can argue with such glowing reports? Not I. In fact, when I am working one-on-one with a student or former student, say on a thesis or a book proposal, I make liberal use of Track Changes for all the reasons just given and more. But when I’m teaching undergraduates, I still shy away. My reasons won’t apply to others, and I offer them less as argument than as defense.

  • First is the temptation to correct. All the students I’ve spoken with whose other professors use Track Changes admit that they simply click “accept” when they find grammatical, syntactical, spelling, or punctuation corrections in their prose; they don’t stop to wonder what the original problem was or what they should be learning. So the temptation to function as an editor is strong, but I do not believe teachers should be editors.
  • Second, even if I resist the temptation to correct—or especially if I do so and feel compelled instead to highlight and query what would normally be line-editing issues—the electronic version of the student paper ends up looking like a Jackson Pollock painting of colors, squiggly lines, and call-outs, a discouraging mess for the student to untangle and sort out, even if the paper’s underlying argument is fairly solid.
  • Third, colors and different font emphases (bold, italic, etc.) cannot substitute for the all-capped, red-inked GREAT! splashed across the bottom of Page Three of a paper, with arrows pointing to several points in a paragraph to show how well the student has linked them together and to counteract all the niggling little comments in the margins about false inference or scrambled syntax. Encouragement, in other words, does not spring readily from Track Changes.
  • Finally, just as the student who hands in the paper electronically cannot spread the paper before her and see it as a whole, so she reads my Track Changes comments screen-by-screen and cannot easily get a sense of how my assessment encompasses her paper as a whole.

I also have the luxury of grading papers for classes of 20 students or fewer, and I recognize that instructors with larger classes, or working with graduate assistants, surely find Track Changes a godsend. But like every writing and editing tool at our disposal (think spell and grammar checkers), its use in pedagogy needn’t be automatic. It’s worth at least considering the costs along with the benefits.

Correct me—using your tool of preference—if I’m wrong.

 

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