The thrill of the crossword
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.
Presidents and the 7 deadly sins
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?
I would like to explain ...
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.
"I would like to thank ..."
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.
Joining the "conversate" conversation
My fellow Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a couple of days ago about "conversate": is it a word or not? He interviewed Jesse Sheidlower, of the Oxford English Dictionary, and they had
a good conversation, well worth reading. Jesse is a smart guy and a first-rate lexicographer. But one thing no lexicographer is likely to tell you is that we don't need dictionaries anymore to tell us what counts as a word. We can decide for ourselves.
As Jesse said, what lexicographers do is search out words that people use, see how they use them, and write them up. Adding a new word to the dictionary doesn't amount to giving it a stamp of approval; it just means that the lexicographers found the word in wide enough use over a long enough time that they decided dictionary users might want to know about it.
Well, owing to the Internet, anyone today can figure out how widely used a given word is. Just google it. "Conversate" is all over the Web. If, however, you want to find out whether it's in standard use -- which is often what people mean when they wonder if something is a "word" -- archives of edited media, such as Google News, are a better place to look. According to a search I did just now, "conversate" has turned up in the newspapers and press releases, etc., that Google News tracks exactly five times in the past month. That's very few. Two of the five come from Ta-Nehisi himself; two are from AllHipHop.com, and one was published in an actual newspaper, in a quote from a basketball player. Isn't this already starting to be a good basis for drawing your own conclusions about "conversate"?
Peeved about "slay"
Huh. I have as many peeves as the next grammarian, but "slay" doesn't particularly bother me. It's no farther off-kilter than "pix" in the beloved 1935 Variety headline "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" (translation: Small-town and rural viewers aren't responding positively to movies set in rural milieux).
Headlines are often highly condensed -- I've put in my time as a newspaper editor deleting unnecessary syllables to get the danged thing to fit on one line. And "Slaying" is at risk of being read as a participle rather than a noun-adjective -- as in "Slaying Suspect Amanda Knox, Mystery Killer Vanishes."
In any case, I probably don't need to worry that "slay suspect" will turn up in The Atlantic anytime soon.
No, Caroline, we don't know
I have no opinion -- none at all -- about whether Caroline Kennedy would make a good senator. But for someone with a law degree and now political aspirations, she's
astonishingly ill-spoken.
It's not necessarily admirable in consumers of political rhetoric like me that we focus more readily on "um"s and "you know"s than on what the person is saying. But we do, and it's no surprise that we do -- English teachers and speech coaches have been making this point forever.
I never whaled on Sarah Palin for the way she talks, because there isn't much reason to suppose she could do better. She doesn't have a fancy education, and she doesn't come from a place that's world-renowned for its intellectual life. But Kennedy is a different story. She has the best education money can buy and every possible reason to know what accomplished public speaking sounds like. And she still sounds like a dope, because of those "um"s and "you know"s.
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.
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?
Defining 2008
Baron missed one:
"bailout," from Merriam-Webster, a less capricious choice than some of the others in that it was chosen because it "received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time." (Don't examine that claim too carefully!)
The American Dialect Society will have the last word, literally, when it votes on a 2008 word of the year at its annual meeting, in January. It is now accepting nominations, so if you have a candidate, do tell.
