"With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"
Am I paranoid to wonder whether AT&T's "customer-service" representative was punishing
Stanley Fish for correcting her grammar? Or, more precisely, for ranting?
He kind of asked for it. I mean, she was instructed to say "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" He complained. No doubt she has also been instructed to say "I'm sorry you feel that way" in response to any complaint she can't resolve. So when that remark elicited another complaint from Fish, there wasn't much she could do to get him off the phone (and surely she has also been instructed to get callers off the phone ASAP) except to fob him off on someone else. So she invented a problem with his Social Security number and shipped him off to limbo.
Real human communication has been driven far underground in our dealings with corporate representatives. Paradoxically, corporate goals of courtesy and efficiency are what drove it there. Of course, the result is neither courteous nor efficient -- it's just mechanized. The only partial solution I know is to stay really, really nice, even when I'm really, really annoyed. Does anyone else have another strategy that's more satisfying?
Of bailouts and enemy combatants
NPR's "On the Media" had a fascinating
interview this weekend with Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and language consultant, about President George W. Bush's linguistic ineptitude. Luntz doesn't focus on dopey malapropisms like "put food on your family" but on how clumsy Bush has been at framing issues.
For instance, Bush has talked about a "bailout," though it would sound a lot more reassuring if he'd call it a "recovery plan" or "rescue plan." Some of his other locutions -- such as calling prisoners of war "enemy combatants" -- have the opposite problem: They're such flagrant attempts at spin that they invite our cynicism.
All in all, it's refreshing to hear a Republican talk frankly about something Bush has gotten wrong and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama get right.
It's official
I am happy to report that
Gawker has sworn off "douchebag" as a term of abuse. (Commenters take note.) If it's over according to Gawker, it's way more than over according to me!
Desperately seeking ...
... the following commenters on my
November Word Fugitive post, which requested a word for those thoughtless folks
who stop dead at the top of an escalator or walk four abreast on a busy sidewalk.
Geoff Webb
Cathy McNally
Amy M.
Hank Horsey
Space and time permitting, I'd
like to credit you for your coinages in the March Atlantic. You'll each be more unmistakably you if you'll let me
know by e-mail what town and state you live in - and Amy, in your case, your
last name too.
That "irresistible impulse"
There's never room in the magazine for all the amusing Word Fugitives suggestions people send me. Well, hooray for the Internet, where I can post other responses that made my cut. The request to which readers responded in the December issue was this:
Eileen Flug, of Westport, Conn., writes, "I'm looking for a word for the seemingly universal, irresistible impulse, when faced with a dishwasher that someone else has loaded, to rearrange the dishes."
After the jump, some respondents and responses I especially liked. If you sent me the same coinage as one of these people, apologies that you're not credited by name. I went with either the first person to make a given suggestion or the one I thought explained it best.
Continue reading "That "irresistible impulse"" »
December Word Fugitive
Michael Muslin, of Chicago,
writes, "After my girlfriend observed that train commuters with wheeled
briefcases navigate their rolling offices without regard to anyone
else, I realized I needed a word to describe an object which indicates the user
to be a jerk. Cell phones used to be this type of object but, due to their
ubiquity, are no longer."
What might be the word that Michael needs?
The glamorous life of the word guru
Would that inventing new words worked like this! If it did, Word Fugitives would be as popular as American Idol.
Stalking the wild misspelling
Maybe "chicken stalk" is the English equivalent of chicken cacciatore?
Seriously, I'm puzzled about why people aren't better at distinguishing between what they know and what they don't, and why many would rather guess than learn something new.
All right, not everybody has dictionaries constantly at the ready, the way I do. But isn't "stock" something a cook would want to know how to spell?
Word Court in session: "try and ..."
I haven't quit Word Court -- just moved it online. I enjoy being The Honorable Barbara, settling disputes, and finding out what language questions have you stumped. Do tell!
Ken Heinecke, of Minneapolis, writes: "I have become increasingly aware of 'try and' being used in place of 'try to.' As in: 'I need to try and get my homework done today.' As I was reading a Vince Flynn novel the other day I noticed at least 5 instances of this in the first 100 pages. Surely this is not acceptable. Do the editors of such fiction believe that this is more colloquial usage and is therefore preferred? Surely this did not get by both Vince and Pocket Publishing?"
Dear Ken: You're asking two questions at once: (1) What's up with "try and ..."? And (2) to what extent should editors mess with novelists' prose?
(1) "Try and" where "try to" would be more exact has been around for a long time. The inimitable H.W. Fowler discussed it in his 1926 book Modern English Usage, calling it "an idiom that should be not discountenanced" and explaining it as an example of hendiadys, "the expressing of a compound notion by giving its two constituents as though they were independent and connecting them with a conjunction instead of subordinating one to the other." Hendiadys was "chiefly a poetic ornament in Greek and Latin," Fowler goes on to say.
"Try and ..." doesn't seem like a poetic ornament to me, Ken, but Fowler is surely right that it's idiomatic. There are zillions of other not-quite-logical phrasings to keep it company. I suggest you let it go.
(2) Editing fiction is different from editing most nonfiction. The crux of nonfiction tends to be the point or argument the author is making, and a skilled editor is likely to be better than the author at finding and fixing places where it isn't being made clearly or compellingly. But in fiction, the author's voice is crucial. An editor might query something like "try and ..." -- or an out-and-out grammatical mistake -- if it seems out of keeping with the general tone of the writing. But there's no good reason to insist that the author make a change if he or she likes it the way it is and there's nothing that will confuse the reader.
