Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 19, 2009
Questions
A phone call early this morning was about language usage and grammar. Usage of nor versus or. How is traumatic spelled? Should it be modified with very? And the patron being Mrs. Connolly, the telephone number of Staples in Lawrence?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Forgotten positives
Wordsmith.org has a link to a New Yorker story from back 25 July 1994: How I met my wife. The full story is accessible via digital reader, and not as text. At any rate, the story illustrates the theme of the week of May 4-8: forgotten positives.
Wordsmith's choices: evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly and corrigible. The story's beginning illustrates the concept of dropping prefixes quite well.
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do. Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory char- acter who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.
Wordsmith's choices: evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly and corrigible. The story's beginning illustrates the concept of dropping prefixes quite well.
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do. Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory char- acter who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Overstuffed Sentences
Rules of style and grammar from the New York Times.
The phrase “the fact that” is often a warning of complications to come — it suggests that the writer hasn’t found the clearest, simplest path to convey the idea.
Pare down sentences.
Separating the verb from the object by not one but two prepositional phrases made it sound as though we were translating from Latin.
in most cases, the adverb should be adjacent to the word it modifies.
‘More Than’ vs. ‘Over’
The phrase “the fact that” is often a warning of complications to come — it suggests that the writer hasn’t found the clearest, simplest path to convey the idea.
Pare down sentences.
Separating the verb from the object by not one but two prepositional phrases made it sound as though we were translating from Latin.
in most cases, the adverb should be adjacent to the word it modifies.
‘More Than’ vs. ‘Over’
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Mixed metaphors, er .. that is
In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a story about a meat-processing company. The language gets just a mite mangled. To wit:
A recent decision by Smithfield Foods Inc. to use only American pork in its products could boost its bottom line. But what the company really needs are higher prices for its live hogs and lower costs for raising cash.
Say what?
A recent decision by Smithfield Foods Inc. to use only American pork in its products could boost its bottom line. But what the company really needs are higher prices for its live hogs and lower costs for raising cash.
Last month, Smithfield completed the sale of its beef-processing and cattle-feeding operation to JBS SA of Brazil. Now that beef is off its balance sheet, analysts are expressing a fair amount of bullishness about the Smithfield, Va., company's shares.
Let's see: Smithfield decided to concentrate on pork, so it sold its beef and cattle operations; now that it has no beef, some analysts are bullish on the company.Say what?
Thursday, October 30, 2008
When Enough Is Enuf
Language matters. Which words to use, and how they are used, defines good conversation, good reporting, and good writing. Further, how words are constructed, how they are spelled, is of importance.
The notion that by reforming the way people employ language you can reform almost everything else is a durable canard that has survived a thousand years of contrary evidence. Concoct a mental image of language utopians and you'll likely summon a stereotype of busy eccentrics. And you wouldn't be far wrong. But their ranks have also included stalwarts like Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and George Bernard Shaw.
Quite a group -- but how did Carnegie sneak in there?
The trouble with English orthography starts with a simple mathematical fact: the language has 44 distinct sounds but only 26 letters to express them. Letters have to double up (and triple and quadruple up). Add to this a mongrel pedigree and a knack for absorbing new words from all over the world and you have an unruly language that cries out for housekeeping.
Mongrel pedigree? Pardon me for being common. Yes, English, or American English, does readily absorb words from other languages. With a twist, though, now American words are being absorbed by other languages: hamburger, video, gay, are but a few.
Shaw famously argued that the word fish should be spelled ghoti – from the "gh" in cough, the "o" in women, and the "ti" in nation. In his will, Shaw left a small bequest for the winner of a competition to devise a new English alphabet.
Irascible Shaw?
Noah Webster had better luck. The ardent lexicographer and nationalist succeeded in ridding American English of the "u" in words like rancour and humour – spellings, as it happens, that had been introduced in a previous fit of improvement. Webster also won battles against silent or unnecessary letters, like the "k" in publick and the second "l" in travelled. Ironically, he lived out his days in Amherst, Mass., a town whose name is properly pronounced with a silent "h."
Ah-merst? Doesn't sound right. I often add that second el to traveler.
Another child of Amherst (the college) was Melville – later Melvil – Dewey, a hyper-organized young man whose reformist impulses encompassed the metric system and book cataloging. Colonic irrigation was probably in there somewhere. Determined to lead Americans out of their "orthografic swamp," Dewey created his own spelling regime and enlisted Andrew Carnegie to support the efforts of a crusading organization, the Simplified Spelling Board. For decades Carnegie wrote the board a check every year for $25,000.
Ah, Melvil Dewey. Dewey Classification System (R 025.43 D). Colonic irrigation? As in anal-retentive, one supposes.
Dewey's influence reached its zenith in August 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt, a sympathizer, issued an order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt new spellings for some 300 words – for instance, prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. The outcry was immediate and intense. Rusevelt, as one newspaper began referring to him, said that he saw no harm in "the concentration of powers in one man's hands"; but spelling reform, as another paper editorialized, was just "2 mutch." Legislation moved quickly through Congress to countermand this act of executive overreach. Roosevelt withdrew his order.
TR could never be accused of pusillanimity. prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. Prest? Oy.
Eye strike the quays and type a word / And weight four it two say / Weather eye am write or wrong / It tells me straight a weigh.
In MS Word this quatrain is fine. Spelling is correct, but ...
In the end the debates over spelling are skirmishes in the larger war between those who seek to impose lasting order on the way we write and speak and those who believe such efforts to be futile. Most of us keep a foot in each camp, knowing that language both demands regulation and defies control – much as, to take an analogy from physics, we live tidy Newtonian lives in a bizarre quantum universe. It's a serviceable enough contradiction, and what choice do we have? But I doubt we've seen the last of visionaries who refuse to accept it. Dasht hopes lie ahead.
The notion that by reforming the way people employ language you can reform almost everything else is a durable canard that has survived a thousand years of contrary evidence. Concoct a mental image of language utopians and you'll likely summon a stereotype of busy eccentrics. And you wouldn't be far wrong. But their ranks have also included stalwarts like Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and George Bernard Shaw.
Quite a group -- but how did Carnegie sneak in there?
The trouble with English orthography starts with a simple mathematical fact: the language has 44 distinct sounds but only 26 letters to express them. Letters have to double up (and triple and quadruple up). Add to this a mongrel pedigree and a knack for absorbing new words from all over the world and you have an unruly language that cries out for housekeeping.
Mongrel pedigree? Pardon me for being common. Yes, English, or American English, does readily absorb words from other languages. With a twist, though, now American words are being absorbed by other languages: hamburger, video, gay, are but a few.
Shaw famously argued that the word fish should be spelled ghoti – from the "gh" in cough, the "o" in women, and the "ti" in nation. In his will, Shaw left a small bequest for the winner of a competition to devise a new English alphabet.
Irascible Shaw?
Noah Webster had better luck. The ardent lexicographer and nationalist succeeded in ridding American English of the "u" in words like rancour and humour – spellings, as it happens, that had been introduced in a previous fit of improvement. Webster also won battles against silent or unnecessary letters, like the "k" in publick and the second "l" in travelled. Ironically, he lived out his days in Amherst, Mass., a town whose name is properly pronounced with a silent "h."
Ah-merst? Doesn't sound right. I often add that second el to traveler.
Another child of Amherst (the college) was Melville – later Melvil – Dewey, a hyper-organized young man whose reformist impulses encompassed the metric system and book cataloging. Colonic irrigation was probably in there somewhere. Determined to lead Americans out of their "orthografic swamp," Dewey created his own spelling regime and enlisted Andrew Carnegie to support the efforts of a crusading organization, the Simplified Spelling Board. For decades Carnegie wrote the board a check every year for $25,000.
Ah, Melvil Dewey. Dewey Classification System (R 025.43 D). Colonic irrigation? As in anal-retentive, one supposes.
Dewey's influence reached its zenith in August 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt, a sympathizer, issued an order directing the Government Printing Office to adopt new spellings for some 300 words – for instance, prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. The outcry was immediate and intense. Rusevelt, as one newspaper began referring to him, said that he saw no harm in "the concentration of powers in one man's hands"; but spelling reform, as another paper editorialized, was just "2 mutch." Legislation moved quickly through Congress to countermand this act of executive overreach. Roosevelt withdrew his order.
TR could never be accused of pusillanimity. prest, dasht, nite, thoro and good-by. Prest? Oy.
Eye strike the quays and type a word / And weight four it two say / Weather eye am write or wrong / It tells me straight a weigh.
In MS Word this quatrain is fine. Spelling is correct, but ...
In the end the debates over spelling are skirmishes in the larger war between those who seek to impose lasting order on the way we write and speak and those who believe such efforts to be futile. Most of us keep a foot in each camp, knowing that language both demands regulation and defies control – much as, to take an analogy from physics, we live tidy Newtonian lives in a bizarre quantum universe. It's a serviceable enough contradiction, and what choice do we have? But I doubt we've seen the last of visionaries who refuse to accept it. Dasht hopes lie ahead.
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