04 Apr 2009 08:35 am
I'm so sorry to have been out of
touch for the past month. In that time I've taken on a new assignment in an
undisclosed location - which, sadly, means I'll continue to be out of touch for
the foreseeable future.
Of course, as the events of recent
months may have already brought home to you, the future is not foreseeable.
This is true of the future that led to this blog and of the one that has now
led to its suspension. I can't help assuming it will remain true of the present
and future futures.
One thing that might nevertheless
have been foreseen long ago is that The Atlantic and my language columns would make
a home for themselves on the Internet. The Atlantic came to the Web very early.
We became a content provider for America Online at a time, in the 1990s, when
the magazine had more subscribers than AOL did. Back then, I hosted a
month-long forum on AOL, answering people's questions about language. By the
end of the month, I was being interviewed about my emergence as one of the most
popular columnists on the Internet. (No, I'm not kidding.)
That led to the development in
1995 of Word Court for the print magazine, which led to the publication of my
first book, Word Court. That led to the development of Word
Fugitives as an online feature for The Atlantic in 1998 (by which time The Atlantic
had its own popular Web site). And that led to the publication of Word Fugitives as a book, my third,
in 2006. All of this led to many other things, not least among them the launch
of this blog late last year.
The timing of the launch of almost
anything late last year can be said to have been unfortunate. Economics do not
permit, etc. Hence my new assignment, for an entity that shall remain nameless
for now, in a location that shall also remain undisclosed.
I do hope my language columns will
return to The Atlantic in a near future that is as yet unforeseen. If you'd
like to help bring that about, please study the roster of Atlantic advertisers
and buy a lot of stuff from them. (You could also send a letter to the editor.)
In fact, please buy a lot of stuff generally to help get the global economy back
on its feet.
When that happens - and I have no doubt President Obama is right that it will happen - I will take the global
economy's health as a sign of your abiding interest in the English language and
your dedication to my columns about language. I will be grateful that you moved
heaven and earth and pixels and dollars to bring these columns back to the
magazine that was my professional home for so long. In the meantime, please
visit me at my other professional home, www.wordcourt.com. And if the physical location
of the courthouse pictured there is known to you, I advise you to tell no one, lest
you risk an unfriendly late-night visit from the Word Police.
02 Mar 2009 10:42 am
The crucial clues were "Basic," 8 letters = Alkaline
and "Item in stocks," 4 letters = Bone
Blogger Eric Berlin has written a report of the finals that does make them seem riveting. How appropriate that a contest about words comes even more vividly alive in words than it does in pictures.
01 Mar 2009 02:38 pm
I just discovered the rather hilarious site? blog? Celebrity English, which critiques the speech of the likes of Billy Bob, Angelina, and Jessica. It's much funnier for being absolutely deadpan:
Billy Bob has made an error in parallelism. His second sentence contains a list of items that are not all the same grammatical structure.
Dead-on, too, in its analyses of the celebrities' grammar. Even so, I would have preferred "are not all" in the sentence I just quoted to read "don't all have." (Since when are "items" "structure"?)
The truth is, everyone needs an editor!
25 Feb 2009 07:30 am
I've been busy trying to wear out " Speechwars" since my colleague Jim Fallows posted an entry about it yesterday, to help us all prepare for President Obama's State-of-the-Union-equivalent speech.
The New York TImes has been busy with the same thing, to judge from the interactive graphic on its online front page. (Sorry, I don't see how to link to the graphic itself in any permanent way.) The Times shows you the relative use over the years of all the obvious, important words, like "economy," "deficit," "jobs," and "energy."
As a sidebar to that sidebar, I thought I'd look into the presidents' relative use of the Seven Deadly Sins. Yes, I know, it's a Catholic thing and only one of our presidents has been a Catholic. But at least the list gives us something to count.
Theodore Roosevelt is the only president ever to have used the word "lust" in a State of the Union address. "Gluttony"and "sloth" have had no takers. The last president to actually say "greed" was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1954. The word "wrath" has been used 6 times, most recently by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. Since then, "wrath"s more contemporary synonym "anger" has been used 9 times. "Envy" has come up 9 times, most recently in George W. Bush's 2006 address. "Pride" has come up 109 times, in the speeches of every full-term president except Thomas Jefferson.
Shall we do the 7 heavenly virtues as well? (I'm going to use the set of them that Aurelius Clemens Prudentius popularized and that directly oppose the sins.) "Chastity" and "temperance" each made one appearance, in the 19th century. "Charity" had a dry spell lasting through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I, but otherwise has been used throughout American history. We haven't heard about "diligence" since Woodrow Wilson, in 1914. "Patience" has remained out of fashion since the Clinton years. The only presidents since Calvin Coolidge to use the word "kindness" were the Bushes. The last president to use the word "humility" was Bill Clinton, in 2000.
How curious.
If we total everything up, the sins have received 146 mentions, and the virtues 111. So much for accentuating the positive. But wait! "Pride" was mentioned far more often than any of the other qualities, good or bad. And though it's nominally a sin, the word is almost always used in a positive way.
So, what does all this tell us? Um, language is complicated?
23 Feb 2009 04:35 pm
Comments on my previous entry expressed doubt about the correctness of the grammar of "I would like to thank ..." when it means "I am now thanking." Don't worry -- it's fine. By way of explanation, I've hunted up highlights from an e-mail exchange I had in 2006 with Joe Pickett, the editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which I asked for his thoughts on a closely related point. Me:
Here's
a question I'm trying to answer:
Harold
Shaw, of Penobscot, Maine, writes: "Tell them to stop it! When
someone says, 'I want to thank all the little people who voted for me,' why don't
they just go ahead and do it? Say 'I thank all the little' etc., and get it
done with?"
Of course, "I want
to thank ...," meaning "I am now thanking," is perfectly
standard. (Similarly, "I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time ...")
But I don't find a relevant definition in the AHD or any other dictionary.
Doesn't seem to me that the ordinary "desire" meaning ("Used to express desire or
intent: She said she would meet us at the corner") quite
fits, because someone who says "I want to thank ..." is gratifying
the desire. The "be in need of" meaning doesn't fit either. The idea
is more nearly expressing an intention to ..., no? What am I missing?
I think this is related
to polite requests using would and like and want, rendering what are really
commands:
"Would you like to
go to the store and get me some aspirin?" "Want to go to the store
and get me some aspirin?"
I think it ostensibly
fits the "desire" meaning but is used pragmatically to mean
"please."
But let me look around a
bit.
I looked in A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney
Greenbaum, et al., and they confirm what I noted before.
As for would (I am
simplifying):
p. 233 section 4.63
discusses "tentativeness or politeness: could,
might, and would";
"Tentative Volition
(in polite requests)" e.g. in "Would you
lend me a dollar" would is more
polite than will.
As for like (again
simplifying):
p. 235 notes this:
Hypothetical would when followed by a verb such as like,
love, or prefer is used
to indicate a tentative desire in polite requests, offers, or
invitations: Would you like some tea? Thanks but I'd prefer
coffee.
While this doesn't
exactly address your reader's concern (the expression of thanks in public), the
situations seem close enough. The expression of gratitude naturally calls for
politeness and self-effacement, and so would like is
the natural choice.
While we might not be
taken aback if someone said "I thank all the people who made this movie
possible," it's just not as polite as "I would like to thank . .
."
So there you have it: would like to adds an extra tinge of politeness to what it precedes. Politeness may not be ipso facto grammatical, but it comes close.
23 Feb 2009 10:27 am
That thoroughly ordinary staple of awards ceremonies demonstrates something curious about English -- and probably many other languages too. Namely:
If you'd like to thank someone, why don't you?
Um, I just did.
In "I would like to thank...," "would like to" means "I'm doing it even as I speak." But you won't find that meaning of in dictionaries -- at least, not anywhere you can find it, in any recognizable form. I believe this is called an "implicit performative utterance" -- "performative" because the statement actually does what it refers to, and "implicit" because it doesn't do it literally and directly, the way, for instance, "I hereby thank ..." would.
12 Feb 2009 12:03 pm
Re the March word fugitive, about a name for the "interminable" period one can spend contemplating the audiovisuals that cycle endlessly behind a DVD's main menu while one waits for someone else to come sit down, reader Tom Noe writes:
Imagine having to come up with a new name for a geologic period: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7223663.stm Fugitives fans, don't get overexcited. Scientists have a name for the current period. They're calling it the Anthropocene.
If this has you searching your memory for the names of other geologic periods, look here, where you'll find them together with mnemonic devices suggested by listeners to NPR's Science Friday. My favorite is "Can Very Callous Old Senators Demand More Power and Privilege Than Junior Congressmen?" A rhetorical question, obviously.
11 Feb 2009 03:17 pm
David K. Prince, of Lansdowne, Pa., writes, "Often my wife and I will decide to watch a DVD, and then she will delay coming to sit down, thereby subjecting me to the repeat-loop sounds and visuals of the DVD's main menu. What's the word or phrase for this interminable experience?"
Post a comment if you have an idea for the word that David Prince needs. If you hope to be quoted in The Atlantic and earn indisputable bragging rights, please sign in with your full name, and include in your post the town and state (or country) where you live.
08 Feb 2009 10:37 am
In my " Apostrophe News" entry of a week ago, I said that I hadn't seen anyone point out that the city council of Birmingham, England, was following in the footsteps of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names when it banished apostrophes from street signs. That's because I didn't read Michael Quinion's discussion of the flap as carefully as it deserved.
Quinion concludes:
My impression is that fashion, the real difficulties that exist in some cases, and -- particularly -- the absence of firm teaching of grammar and punctuation in school, are all leading to an accelerating decline in the correct use of the mark.
I couldn't agree more. If everybody understood the rules governing apostrophes, there would be less temptation to break them. If we didn't see the rules broken all the time, we'd find it easier to understand what the rules are, and apostrophes would be better able to do their job.
03 Feb 2009 04:40 pm
Writing is awash in conventions: Start a sentence with a capital letter. End a sentence with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Don't hyphenate after an adverb that ends in "-ly." And on and on.
All that stuff is my stock-in-trade. So I was delighted to discover (by way of reader Joel Blum, of Paris -- thanks, Joel!) that comic-book letterers have their conventions too: Point the balloon tail at the character's mouth. Use burst balloons only for screaming. Use hollow sound effects when you need impact but have serious space constraints.
If I hadn't read all the way to the end of Nate Piekos's "Comics Grammar and Tradition" page, I would have missed wonderful information like "Old-school telepathy balloons look like a thought balloon except they have breath marks on opposing corners" and "Traditionally, whispered dialogue is indicated by a balloon with a dashed stroke. More recently accepted options are ..."
An irresistible time-waster.
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