Publisher's Round-up

More Errors

2012-01-17T16:53:00.000-08:00

Almost daily I get suggestions for additions to my list of common errors. Sometimes they are already on the Web site.

Today I got suggestions for three interesting errors: “off his own back" [off his own bat] “batter an eyelid” [bat an eyelid] and “set a president” [set a precedent].

The first two were actually already on the site, but on a page quite a few people don’t know about, so I thought it was worth mentioning here. It's my "More Errors" page, where I list errors that are not truly common, but are interesting enough to be recorded.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/more.html

I check in Google to see how common a particular error is before writing it up. My arbitrary standard is at least 1,000 hits for the error to be judged common. Google can be confusing, because the feedback on the first page commonly reports far more hits than if you click through four or five pages of results.

“Setting a president” didn’t pass the test, but I did add it to the “More Errors” list.

The same correspondent asked for a listing for “seperately,” a common misspelling for “separately.” I do not write separate entries for most simple misspellings which would be caught by a spelling checker. I make occasional exceptions when I find the misspelling particularly interesting, but most of them simply go into my list of “other commonly misspelled words.”
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/misspelled.html

Both of these are reached by clicking on links at the bottom of the main errors page.
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

More people would find them if I put them at the top of the page, but I don’t want too much clutter up top.

My extremely popular “Non-Errors” page also has a link in the same location. Unlike the misspelled words and "More Errors" the “Non-Errors” appear in the book among the other errors, in alphabetical order.

So what does it mean to do something “off your own bat,” anyway? This expression is common in the UK, Australia, and other places where cricket is popular. It refers to a run scored by a player hitting the ball himself rather than benefitting by the action of another player. So to do something off your own bat is to do it independently, on your own initiative.

Bonus point: is it “benefiting” or “benefitting”? According to most dictionaries, either one is OK.

Incredibly unbelievable

2012-01-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

“Incredible” and “unbelievable” are greatly overused as synonyms for “amazing.“

From the first part of the entry on “incredible” in my book:

The other day I heard a film reviewer praise a director because he created “incredible characters,” which would literally mean unbelievable characters. What the reviewer meant to say, of course, was precisely the opposite: characters so lifelike as to seem like real people. Intensifiers and superlatives tend to get worn down quickly through overuse and become almost meaningless, but it is wise to be aware of their root meanings so that you don’t unintentionally utter absurdities.

(p. 122).

The problem is that when people use these words in this way they are always exaggerating. They mean something like “almost incredible.” This leads to all sorts of contradictory statements.

A woman writing about her cheating boyfriend to advice columnist Amy Dickinson says today, “He often denied evidence I found of his possible dalliances and made me believe it was all an unbelievable coincidence.”

The entry for “incredible” in the book inspired National Public Radio’s Scott Simon to write the following blurb, which you’ll find on the back cover of the second edition of Common Errors in English Usage:

I’d call Paul Brians’ book incredible, fabulous, or fantastic, except thanks to him, I know now that none of those words are what I really mean. Let’s just say that Common Errors in English Usage is the most cheerfully useful book I've read since the Kama Sutra.

New for 2012: Changes to the Common Errors in English Usage e-calendar mailings

2012-01-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote a post about my difficulties in delivering the Common Errors in English Usage daily entries, the e-version of what used to be a tear-off daily paper calendar. In that post, I described the impossibility of delivering massive amounts of e-mail through my own server and let followers of the calendar know that the e-mails would have a new look from then on.

But times change. The service I had signed up with has begun charging for what they do (it is not trivial), and since I am determined to keep the daily delivery free of charge, I am forced to once again change the delivery method for the e-calendar.

Unfortunately, this time the change will require subscribers to take action. If you would like to continue your subscription, please click this link to go to the blog dedicated to the Common Errors in English Usage daily entries and enter your e-mail address into the "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" section on the right side of the page. Follow the subsequent directions to complete the subscription (it takes less than a minute), and you will be back to receiving the entries in your mailbox every day. As always, your e-mail address will not be used for any other purpose than to deliver the entry to your inbox, and there will be an "unsubscribe" link to remove you from the list at any time.

I am sorry for the inconvenience, but I believe this will be the best long-term solution for keeping the daily entries coming free-of-charge and without further interruption.

A wrongly presented common error

2011-12-30T11:53:00.000-08:00

As I go through my list of available common errors for the daily entry to the calendar, I come across some that have been removed from or significantly revised on the Common Errors in English Usage Web site. When this happens, I am often alerted by readers who point out something amiss in the entry. Here was the entry from December 29, 2011:

wrongly/wrong

“Wrongly” always precedes the verb it modifies: “He was wrongly suspected of having
used garlic powder in the lasagna.” “Wrong” is the word you want after the verb:
“She answered wrong.”

To which two readers responded with essentially the same (valid) point:

This is interesting.  I would say "She answered incorrectly."  I would not say "She
answered incorrect."  How is wrongly/wrong different?

I would also say "She was incorrect" not "She was incorrectly."  As I would say "She
was wrong."

and:

"She answered wrong" seems wrong to me.

Her answer was wrong (adjective modifying a noun).  She answered wrongly (adverb
modifying a verb, regardless of pre or post position relative to verb).  Similarly: 
"She answered incorrectly" and not "She answered incorrect."

I looked back at the Common Errors site and discovered that this was a case where the entry had been removed, though I still had it listed among the entries I use to create the daily entries. The point is not that the entry is wrong, but the entry is not fully fleshed out. If you have been saying "She answered wrongly," you are not grammatically incorrect, but the word "wrong" also does something that the word "incorrect" does not: it serves as an adverb as well as an adjective.

I still like the guideline of the entry: "wrongly" goes before the verb it modifies. But that is a guideline, not a comprehensive usage rule. It is perfectly correct (and necessary) to say, for example, "She was accused wrongly," if you are using that sort of inverted construction.

If you thought you observed something wrong about this entry, you were right!

My apologies for any confusion.

Mitts On or Off?

2011-12-15T09:48:00.000-08:00

Journalists seeking to comment wittily on the attacks being made by his rivals on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney are finding the pun “The Mitts are off” irresistible.

The Last Word Blog on msn.com

Mara Liasson on National Public Radio

Ron Fournier in the National Journal

It’s true that “mitt” originated as an abbreviation of “mitten.” But the saying which equates mitts with fists in a boxing match is "put up your mitts,” not “take off your mitts.”

The journalists are cross-pollinating this saying with “the gloves are off,” as in bare-knuckle boxing.

If you know both sayings, you can catch the intended pun. Of course it’s Romney himself who is most fiercely attacking Newt Gingrich, so Mitt himself is “on,” not ”off.”

So the pun is a little “off.”

But in headlines catchy wordplay often trumps logic.

("Trumps." Get it?)

Cow-Cow-Cow Boogie

2011-12-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

I just added to my site an entry on “cowered” and “coward.” If you think this is an unlikely misspelling, try searching for the phrase "a cowered" in Google.

When I write these entries, I try to keep them fairly minimal, but I thought I’d add a few details about this one here.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “coward” is a straightforward borrowing of Old French “couart” or “couard” and can be traced back to a word meaning “tail,” either in reference to a fearful animal tucking its tail between its legs or “turning tail.”

The OED also lists various uses of “coward” as an adjective, but these are all unusual in modern English, so I ignored them. The word has other specialized uses, including in heraldry, where it describes an image of an animal with its tail tucked between its legs.

“Cower” is listed with this etymological note:

perhaps of Norse derivation: compare Icelandic kúra to sleep, doze, Swedish kura , Danish kure , to squat; also modern German kauern to cower, of which the antecedents are unknown.

The entry for the verb “cower” also notes a rare transitive form meaning “to lower, bend down” (example: “Byron Don Juan: Canto III xxxii. 19 The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers His sober head”).

The verb “cow” is probably Nordic. The OED cites similar words in Old Norse, Norwegian, and Swedish. This seems to be the only one of the three to have been connected with the bovine species.

Then there are the few folks who refer to the playwright as “Noel Cowered.” Rare, but amusing.

Libel vs. Slander

2011-12-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

One of the readers of the daily Common Errors in English Usage calendar wrote to ask me to distinguish between libel and slander.

Common words are sometimes given specialized meanings in a certain profession. Examples are the distinctions between “accurate” and “precise,” between “engine” and “motor,” and between “font” and “typeface.”

Sometimes the technical distinctions preserve original meanings, but in other cases they narrow the range of original meanings.

In any case, in non-technical contexts these distinctions are not preserved. Whether or not this is seen as a mistake depends on the “usage community” uttering or receiving the language involved.

Theologians distinguish between “dogma” and “doctrine,” but they do not have a license to prevent journalists and others from using these words interchangeably in non-theological contexts.

I wish lawyers had the ability to restrain other writers from using “actionable” to mean “doable,” but the fact is that a new meaning for the word has evolved and passed into common usage by people who have no awareness of the word’s original meaning.

“Libel” has traditionally been defined in law as written defamation and “slander” as spoken; but the distinction is seldom preserved outside of legal contexts.

Most dictionaries concede the point by listing one or more supplementary definitions like these from the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition (The Apple Dictionary):

Libel

• a false and malicious statement about a person.

• a thing or circumstance that brings undeserved discredit on a person by misrepresentation.

“Libel” is probably less often used of spoken defamation than “slander” is used to refer to written defamation. “Slander” is a more common word than “libel,” and many people consider libel to be a form of slander.

Legal professionals and scholars may insist on the distinction (see the relevant article in Wikipedia), but they cannot overrule standard non-technical usage. Dictionaries reflect that fact.

The "Thank You" card that never was, but actually may be yours now

2011-11-23T22:00:00.000-08:00

Today's Thanksgiving Day (US) calendar entry reminds me that once upon a time there was a thought of producing occasional cards based on Common Errors in English Usage. The idea never got off the ground, maybe in part because of the difficulty of pulling it off for several different occasions.

But then again, there was "thankyou, thank you/thank-you," which I thought actually made a decent card. Here was the outside of the card I dreamed up:

And then when the card was opened, there was this:

So, OK. There are better "thank you" cards out there, I'll admit, but did you ever see one that came with a usage tip? (And no fair saying the two don't mix—that's dodging the question!)

Happy Thanksgiving (US) to you, and if you want to use this card yourself for your own thanking needs, here is a downloadable, printable, trimmable, foldable version (for a usable card, use two-sided printing; the crop marks will guide you to proper trimming and folding, and no, I am not available for tech support):
Thank You card—outside
Thank You card—inside

Punctuation comic strip

2011-11-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

Brooke McEldowney makes punctuation marks sexy in this strip.

Far from the Madding Eggcorn—can Webster's be far behind?

2011-11-16T08:58:00.001-08:00

Years ago I pulled out an old sheet of newsprint, placed an acorn on it, and shot some photos with the digital camera. The day before that I had been in downtown Portland pointing the lens skyward to capture images of clouds.

The family thought it a little perverse, yes, but I had a vision; I was getting ready to build the cover of Far from the Madding Gerund, the collection of Language Log posts we were preparing for publication.

An acorn? For that? True, Geoff Pullum had imagined a large office building labeled with "Language Log," as if the blog itself had a physical location, with professional linguists in their offices all day long cranking out blog posts, running down the hallway to the copy room, ordering take-out together for a lunchtime meeting. A very romantic take on things, not unlike the announcement you hear on Car Talk when they give the address as "Car Talk Plaza." I messed around with it a little, like this:

and this:

also this:

this, too:

and even this:

But I kept going back to the acorn as the one true visual symbol of Language Log. It was the acorn, after all, that had inspired the word "eggcorn," which Mark Liberman in 2003 described on Language Log this way:

Chris Potts has told me about a case in whicha woman wrote "egg corns" for "acorns."This might be taken to be afolk etymology, like "Jerusalem"for "girasole" in "Jerusalem artichoke" (a kind of sunflower). But itmight also be treated as something like amondegreen (alsohere andhere), the kind of "slip of the ear" that isespecially common in learning songs and poems. Finally, it's alsosomething like amalapropism, where a word is mistakenly substituted for one of similarsound shape.

Although the example is somewhat like each of these three named categoriesof errors, it's not exactly any of them.Can anyone suggest a better term?

To which Language Log contributor Geoff Pullum responded that this kind of error should be called an "eggcorn," and thus "eggcorn" became common coin over at Language Log, where it has since been well understood by readers of the site. Too many posts have been written discussing eggcorns to link to, and a spin-off site, The Eggcorn Database, was launched in 2005. (Geoff, by the way, always told me the image on the cover has to be called an eggcorn, not an acorn, which sort of makes my head spin if I think that over too much.)

All these years later, Ben Zimmer tells us that, after the OED family of dictionaries added "eggcorn" last year, the American Heritage Dictionary now has "eggcorn" among its newly added terms of 2011. I like to think that this means my cover is now a word. That said, this is the final version of that cover—an acorn floating on the clouds with the smiling word "Gerund" telling you this is not all dead serious grammar talk inside, plus a joyous blurb by the great Jan Freeman resting like a crown atop the whole thing ("exuberant, tart, and totally addictive"). It may be my all-time favorite cover I've designed:

And, if you have not had enough of the "eggcorn" media blitz (it's just everywhere—it even made this blog!), you may go listen to Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, discussing "eggcorn" and other new entries with Robin Young at Here and Now.

The birthday of Ms.—110 years young

2011-11-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

Those of us who started life on this planet in the 1960s may think that the popularizing of Ms. as an abbreviation—partly due to Gloria Steinem's magazine—in the late sixties/early seventies was very close to the first appearance of that title, but Ben Zimmer has uncovered a piece published on this date in 1901 that shows otherwise. That's an eye-opener for me; by the time I was born, "Ms." was sixty years old!

Just another example of great research by Zimmer, whose excellent work on Winston Churchill appears in our very own Far from the Madding Gerund.

Bifteck

2011-11-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

In case you found the last line of my comments on “connoisseur” baffling [see the last entry on my ”Non-Errors“ Page], here’s a little explanation.

This is a sort of arcane joke on my part. The French sometimes mangle words imported into their language as badly as we do.

In this case they transformed English “beefsteak” into bifteck.

And of course it‘s an allusion to the line commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette when told that poor French people had no bread to eat: “Let them eat cake.”

In fact the story originated long before the French Revolution, when Marie Antoinette was just a little girl. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Book 6 of his Confessions:

Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: “Let them eat brioche.”

We of course translate brioche as "cake"—so there is another linguistic confusion involved.

Languages don’t get to rule on the use of words when they are adopted into other languages.

The French, for instance, use “shampooing” not as a verb, but as the noun naming the liquid stuff you pour out of a bottle.

And brassière, a word meaning “baby‘s vest” or “life jacket,” takes on quite a different meaning in English.

Either Both/Or

2011-10-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Someone wrote me to challenge the use of “either” to mean “both” as in phrases like “on either side.” We’re more used to thinking “either” as meaning “one or the other” as in “you could take either the high road or the low road.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest meaning of "either" is "each of the two," and the first recorded instance of the use of the word in writing is from 10th-century Anglo Saxon:

Hwa is þætte ariman mæge hwæt þær moncynnes forwearð on ægðere hand [“on either hand”].

Here's an example from Middle English, 1325:

Þe holi strem of flum iordane On aeiþer side [“on either side’] stude still as stane. {“The holy stream of the River Jordan on either side stood still as stone.”]

Here’s an 1819 example from Sir Walter Scott:

There was a huge fire-place at either end of the hall.

“Either” meaning “One or other of the two” appears almost three centuries after this meaning.

The original meaning of the word is preserved in traditional phrases like "on either hand" and "on either side."

None: Singular or Plural?

2011-10-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve just come back from a long trip, so this is my first post in quite a while.

(You can find photos of our travels on Picasa.

A correspondent wrote to say that since ”none“ is a contraction of “not one” it should always be treated as singular.

This is a common misconception.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word was originally spelled nan in Anglo-Saxon, and entered the language as the opposite of an.

The OED also provides this usage note:

Many commentators state that none should take singular concord, but this has generally been less common than plural concord, especially between the 17th and 19th centuries.

It also says that with the meaning “no one” “none” is most often plural.

Michael Quinion has an excellent discussion of this point on his wonderful site, World Wide Words.

This view is not peculiar to UK writers.

The rather picky stylebook of the New York Times urges its writers to avoid singular “none” most of the time.

Despite a widespread assumption that it stands for not one, the word has been construed as a plural (not any) in most contexts for centuries. H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) endorsed the plural use. Make none plural except when emphasizing the idea of not one or no one — and then consider using those phrases instead.

See http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/hobgoblins/.

Promises dashed?

2011-08-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

In an AP story on the failure to rebuild New Orleans, it is said that ”promises have been dashed too many times.“

Promises are broken, leading to dashed hopes, right?

May/Might

2011-08-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

When we’re speculating about possibilities in the future, we can often use “may” or “might” interchangeably: “we may go the game” means much the same thing as “we might go to the game.”

But when speculating about the past, “might” is often more appropriate, though increasingly speakers seem to prefer “may” for such uses.

I just heard an newscaster say that the death of an infant “may have been prevented if it had been vaccinated against pertussis.” “May have been prevented” sounds as if there were some doubt about whether the infant died. “Might have been prevented” would be much clearer and more appropriate.

Here’s an extract from my "may/might" entry on p. 145 of the book:

Most of the time “might” and “may” are almost interchangeable, with “might” suggesting a somewhat lower probability. You’re more likely to get wet if the forecaster says it may rain than if she says it might rain, but substituting one for the other is unlikely to get you into trouble—so long as you stay in the present tense.

But “might” is also the past tense of the auxiliary verb “may,” and is required in sentences like “Chuck might have avoided arrest for the robbery if he hadn’t given the teller his business card before asking for the money.” When speculating that events might have been other than they were, don’t substitute “may” for “might.”

When you are uncertain what has happened and are making a guess, then you may want to use “may”: “I think he may have thought I would really like an oil change for my birthday.”

These days I rarely hear “might” used by people reporting events from the past. Newspeople and politicians seem to vastly prefer “may.” Why is that?

My theory: teachers and parents have insisted for years that in asking permission to do something it is more polite to say “may I?” than “can I?” This may have led people to think that “may” is a “nicer” word in all contexts. Or it might not have.

Anyway, sometimes “might” makes right.

School of Thumb

2011-08-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

One of the entertaining features that editor Tom Sumner created for my Common Errors in English Usage book is the list of ”mangled expressions“ beginning on p. 276. It contains a few instances where two common sayings have been cross-pollinated, creating odd hybrids.

Examples include “cast in stone,” “face the piper,” and “mumble jumbo.”

More are listed on my “More Errors” page, including “by the same hand,” “pick fun,” “pin a finger,” “tooth and tong,” and “worth its weight in salt.”

I just heard another example on the radio when a journalist covering sports spoke of a “school of thumb” which sounds like a hybrid of “school of thought” and “rule of thumb.”

An electronica band in Minneapolis named itself “School of Thumb.”

The band seems to have had a short and rather obscure existence, so it hasn’t spread the mangled expression much; but it’s probably a natural mutant which pops up from time to time.

The Possessive Apostrophe His Origin

2011-08-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Recently a reader of my Web site wrote to object to the leading paragraph of my entry on apostrophes, which read:

First let’s all join in a hearty curse of the grammarians who inserted the wretched apostrophe into possessives in the first place. It was all a mistake. Our ancestors used to write “Johns hat” meaning “the hat of John” without the slightest ambiguity. However, some time in the Renaissance certain scholars decided that the simple “s” of possession must have been formed out of a contraction of the more “proper” “John his hat.” Since in English we mark contractions with an apostrophe, they did so, and we were stuck with the stupid “John’s hat.” Their error can be a handy reminder though: if you’re not sure whether a noun ending in “s” should be followed by an apostrophe, ask yourself whether you could plausibly substitute “his” or “her” for the S.

My correspondent called this theory an urban legend, and pointed me toward the Wikipedia article “Saxon genitive.”

I am not one of those people who dismisses Wikipedia as wholly unreliable. It’s my first choice when I’m doing a quick bit of research. But it’s often not a satisfactory substitute for professionally written and edited research.

Here’s the relevant passage from the “Saxon genitive” article:

In Old English, -es was the ending of the genitive singular of most strong declension nouns and the masculine and neuter genitive singular of strong adjectives. The ending -e was used for strong nouns with Germanic Õ-stems, which constituted most of the feminine strong nouns, and for the feminine genitive singular form of strong adjectives.[3]
Gender Singular Plural
Strong masculine -es -a
Weak masculine -an -ena
Strong feminine -e -a
Weak feminine -an -ena
Strong neuter -es -a
Weak neuter -an -ena
In Middle English the -es ending was generalised to the genitive of all strong declension nouns. By the sixteenth century, the remaining strong declension endings were generalised to all nouns. The spelling -es remained, but in many words the letter -e- no longer represented a sound. In those words, printers often copied the French practice of substituting an apostrophe for the letter e. In later use, -'s was used for all nouns where the /s/ sound was used for the possessive form, and the -e- was no longer omitted. Confusingly, the -'s form was also used for plural noun forms. These were derived from the strong declension -as ending in Old English. In Middle English, the spelling was changed to -es, reflecting a change in pronunciation, and extended to all cases of the plural, including the genitive. Later conventions removed the apostrophe from subjective and objective case forms and added it after the -s in possessive case forms. See Apostrophe: Historical development

In the Early Modern English of 1580 to 1620 it was sometimes spelled as "his" as a folk etymology, e.g. "St. James his park"; see his genitive.

The body of this passage presents the theory which my correspondent and many other writers on the Web prefer, but the final sentence referring to the “his” theory as “folk etymology” does not contradict what I wrote. Indeed the idea that the S at the end of a possessive form stood for “his” was a folk (that is, false) etymology in the late 16th and early 17th century.

The article cites several references, but none for the etymology of the genitive apostrophe.

But it does link to the Wikipedia article “His genitive”

As printing became more widespread, and printed grammars informally standardized written English, the "-s" genitive (also known as the Saxon genitive) with an apostrophe (as if an "his" had been contracted) had gone to all nominal genders, including nouns that previously had an unmarked genitive (such as "Lady" in Lady Day"). This remains the general form for creating possessives in English.

This is clearer and more succinct, and does not dismiss or affirm the "his" theory; but it also contains a cited source, a classic article to which most writers on this issue refer: Elizabeth S. Sklar: "The Possessive Apostrophe: The Development and Decine of a Crooked Mark." College English, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 175-183.

Using my university library account to read the article on-line, I find, on page 178 of that article:

A more serious impediment to the application of the apostrophic genitive to the plural forms of regular nouns, however, was the fact that many grammarians considered the procedure illogical and therefore improper. Most grammarians by this time felt that the genitive singular apostrophe had an historical justification: it was regarded as a mark of elision representing sounds which had, in the earlier stages of English, been present and pronounced. Theorists did not, of course, agree on precisely what as elided; some held that the ’s was a contraction for the pronoun in the his-genitive construction, while others, Priestly and Lowth among them, contended that the apostrophe took the place of the e in the Old and Middle English genitive singular affix es. Actually, neither explanation is entirely satisfactory, but both served the necessary function of justifying the presence of the apostrophe in genitive singular constructions and thus hastened its acceptance by grammarians. If they disputed exactly what sounds were elided, they were in accord on the most important particular: something was missing and the apostrophe quite properly took its place.

A footnote on the bottom of the same page continues:

The proposition that the retrenched sound represented by the apostrophe is the e from the old es genitive affix is attractive in its simplicity, but historically improbable. In the first place, over two hundred years had elapsed between the disappearance of the inflectional e and regular use of the apostrophe as a genitive marker; that is, the apostrophe would have to represent a sound heard by no speaker and a letter seen by few. More important is the fact that the nominative plural affix, which was identical to the genitive singular in late Middle English, did not evolve in any systematic way into an apostrophic construction. It is more likely that the presence of the apostrophe is in some way accounted for by the his-genitive construction, which chronologically preceded the advent of the possessive apostrophe; but as Den Breejen shows, the pronomial genitive construction was rather limited in distribution—it was by no means the only, or even the most common, means of expressing the genitive relationship. For a discussion of the evolution of the his-genitive construction, see H. O. Wyld, A History of Modern Colloquial English (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1920), pp. 314-336.

So the article cited as an authority in the Wikipedia “His genitive” article actually argues against the position taken in that article. This is a major problem with Wikipedia. When it cites actual scholarly sources, they are often unavailable for checking on the Internet. You have to have special access to check them.

Then I looked at the Wikipedia article “Apostrophe” and found that it briefly mentions the “–es.” theory but not the “his” theory. These three articles would have benefitted from having a single editor bring them into line with each other, and with their own footnotes.

Further checking in Google Books shows that authorities have been arguing for and against each of these theories since the 18th century.

There are plenty of serious writers on language who provide evidence for the “his” theory, like John Algeo and Thomas Pyles in The Origins and Development of the English Language:

That genitive –s was confused with his is shown by the occasional use of his with females, as in “Mrs. Sands his maid” (OED, 1607), and by the mixture of the two spellings, as in “Job’s patience, Moses his meekness, Abraham’s faith” (OED, 1568). In the latter example, his was used when the genitive ending was pronounced as an extra syllable, and ’s when it was not, the apostrophe also suggesting that the genitive –s was regarded as a contraction of his. Other spellings for both his and the genitive ending were is and ys, as in “Harlesdon ys name” and “her Grace is requeste,” that is ‘her Grace’s request’ (Wyld 315).

His (with its variants is and ys) was much more common in this construction than her or their. The his-genitive, whichever pronoun is used, was most prevalent with proper names and especially after sibilants, as in Mars, Moses, Sands, and Grace, an environment in which the genitive ending is homophonous with the unstressed pronunciation of his. Although the his-genitive in Old English must have been the sort of topic-comment construction cited above, its early Modern English frequency was certainly due, at least in part, to a confusion of inflectional –s and his. The construction has survived, archaically, in printed bookplates: “John Smith His Book.”

Scholars have disagreed about which of these two theories is correct since the 18^th century, and will probably continue to disagree. I suppose it’s possible some early writers used the apostrophe to stand for “his" and others meant it to stand for “-es.” My own note on the subject was a little too sweeping. I’m mainly interested in getting my readers to remember to use the possessive apostrophe, so I prefer to discuss the theory that will best help them do so. I’ve amended the entry as follows:

First let’s all join in a hearty curse of the grammarians who inserted the wretched apostrophe into possessives in the first place. It may well have been a mistake. In Medieval English possessive nouns ended with an -ES or -YS. Eventually the vowel before the S disappeared, and we were left with forms like “Johns hat.” Some 17th-century writers took the result to be an abbreviation and decided that the simple “s” of possession in a phrase like “Johns hat” must have been formed out of a contraction of the more “proper” “John his hat.” One theory is that since in English we mark contractions with an apostrophe, some scholars did so, and we were stuck with the stupid “John’s hat.” Their purported error can be a handy reminder: if you’re not sure whether a noun ending in S should be followed by an apostrophe, ask yourself whether you could plausibly substitute “his” or “her” for the S.

Born in the 19th century?

2011-08-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

I’m used to hearing people confuse the 1800s with the 18^th century (they constitute the 19^th century), but the program for a play I attended this weekend stated that the drama was set in the “19^th century.” However, radio broadcasts played a prominent role in the plot, the music was swing-era pop, and the action seemed to be set in the late 1940s.

It’s bad enough having been born in the last millennium, but I protest against my age being stretched by a whole century!

For more on this subject, see the entry “hundreds/century” on p. 114 of the book, or read the entry on my Web site.

Present Company Accepted

2011-08-08T09:49:00.001-07:00

I’ve just added “present company accepted” to my “More Errors” page.

Expressions with apostrophes

2011-07-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

Someone recently wrote me to complain that the expression “at arms’ length” is often written without its apostrophe. I began to think of other such expressions containing a possessive apostrophe, and came up with the following:

Apostrophes are often mistakenly omitted in common expressions such as ”at arm’s length” and “at wits’ end.” Note that the position of the apostrophe before or after the S depends on whether the word is a plural form ending in S. You hold someone at the length of your arm (singular), but are at the end of your wits (plural).

Other examples: “the people’s choice,” “for old times’ sake,” and “for heaven’s sake.”

Why is the place name in England “Land’s End” but the American corporation “Lands’ End”? It was just a mistake, and now the company is stuck with its misplaced apostrophe.

You’ll find this, and much more, in my main entry on apostrophes.

People have come up with various ingenious explanations for the misplaced apostrophe in Lands’ End, but the company admits its mistake on its own Web site.

Gary Comer, founder-chairman of the corporation explains:

Incidentally... ..a lot of people ask why the apostrophe in Lands’ End is in the wrong place. There have been some silly explanations along the way, but the truth is, it was a mistake.

It was a typo in our first printed piece, and we couldn’t afford to reprint and correct it. In the years since, the misplaced apostrophe has continued to grace our name and our label. And while it has prompted some raised eyebrows among English teachers, it also sets us apart as a company whose continuing concern for what's best for the customer is unmistakably human.

It was nice of him to admit the error, but why did he have to go on to imply that the mistake makes the company appear endearingly human while English teachers have inhumanly strict standards? Is the nonstandard ellipsis at the beginning of this statement also meant to humanize his prose?

Sheesh.

In Many Ways

2011-07-24T16:34:00.001-07:00

Remember “Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”? Its name paradoxically combines the idea of a multitude of routes with the ultimate singular event—the end of everything.

Today I ran across an example in the Seattle Times which reminded me of Milliways. An architect says of the home the home he remodeled "“In many ways, there is no longer any backyard to the house.”

Many people say “in many ways” when no such thing is meant. Often there are only two or three alternatives involved. It’s a lazy way of not bothering to specify how many there are. With some people it’s a linguistic tic which means almost nothing.

How many ways can a backyard not exist? He doesn’t say.

I suppose you could say there’s no lawn, no patio, no chicken coop—the possibilities are endless. Maybe the back fence of the lot is nailed to the rear of the house.

But considered as a mere fact of non-existence, there’s just one way it doesn’t exist: by not existing.

Exulted/Exalted

2011-07-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

When I read the phrase “exulted status” in today’s New York Times I immediately realized that the writer meant “exalted status.” My reaction was to sigh (once again) at the Times' lax proofreading.

And then I had to check it out in Google. Just a little over 1% of Web authors use the incorrect form, so at first I decided I would not write a “Common Errors” entry about it on my Web site and instead add it to my “More Errors” page.

This is where I put various linguistic confusions that I don’t feel merit a full entry but which are worth a mention. Quite a few people stumble on that page from a search engine and don’t realize it’s part of a much more extensive Web site, though I highlight that fact in red at the top of the page. This list is not part of the published book version of the Web site, but it’s very popular among people who find it.

Occasionally I discover that I’ve inadvertently written up a full entry on an item which was previously featured only on the “More Errors” page. I don’t make a systematic effort to prune the list by looking for such duplications, but I appreciate it when people call them to my attention.

Some people also write me to say that some of the words in the left-hand column are perfectly correct. They are quite right, but they mistake the function of that column because they haven’t grasped the meaning of the labels at the head of the two columns: “What was said" and "What was meant.”

To “exult” is to be extremely joyful whereas to “exalt” is to raise something in esteem or power or to intensify something. The adjectival forms are “exultant” and “exalted.” The spelling “exulted” should be used only for the past tense of the verb “exult”: “The candidate exulted in her victory.”

I decided to search for the word “exulted” by itself and discovered a host of misuses. Here are just a few:

the grand exulted leader
LeBron’s Exulted Brand Takes Detour
Our Lady of Sorrows Music Ministry sings “He Is Exulted”
At Taz Solutions online marketing company, we are each exulted rulers of our jobs.
Why are politicians vilified but businessmen exulted?
Serge Gainsbourg said “She Exulted Femininity”
I‘m thinking of running for exulted ruler of my of my delusional world
God‘s Greater Glory: The Exulted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith [a book title!]

All of these in the first ten pages of hits in Google search.

That did it—no “More Errors” page for you, “exulted.” You get your own entry.

Kicking “Foot” as a Verb

2011-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Linguistic conservatives often complain about the tendency of nouns to be made into verbs, especially in the business world.

Examples:

to access
to dialog
to interface
to leverage
to securitize
to trend

Internet and computer language is full of verbed nouns:

to friend
to blog
to text
to google

Other currently popular examples that annoy many people:

to impact
to effort
to parent
to medal

Turning nouns into verbs is a normal process in English, not at all uniquely modern. Richard Nordquist has a nice article about this process on About.com called “What is Verbing?” He points out that such familiar verbs as “rain,” “oil,” and “bottle” were originally nouns.

When linguistic liberals argue that because a new usage follows a well-established pattern it should be accepted, they’re confusing the argument. Such people often pride themselves on rejecting “rule-based” language standards and insist instead on following actual contemporary usage. The problem is that this argument is itself based on a rule: if a neologism follows a familiar pattern, it should be accepted.

But that’s not how people typically decide what is proper usage. Instead, new linguistic forms are accepted or rejected through a social process. When they are first introduced they tend to evoke negative reactions just because they are not traditional. That’s normal, and it’s useless to argue that people shouldn’t object to linguistic change because “language is always changing.” Some changes are widely welcomed, some are mostly frowned upon, and others meet a mixed reception.

The task of the creators of usage guides is to note when a new usage has evoked a significant amount of hostility so that writers and speakers can be warned that if they choose to follow it, they may get into trouble. That’s not at all the same thing as stating that a particular usage is “wrong.”

When there is a lot of money and/or power behind a neologism, it tends to become widely accepted (“leverage,” “google”). But if you were to say you want to “suitcase” your clothes in preparing for a trip, people would think you were being silly. We already have the perfectly good word “pack,” and there’s nothing particularly attractive about using “suitcase” instead.

That said, those who are annoyed by verbing can comfort themselves by considering that some words created by this process pass out of fashion and disappear. A favorite example of mine is the verb “foot,” meaning “dance.”

“Foot” actually has had many uses as a verb, including some which are still current. We say when we pay a bill that we “foot” the bill (because we pay the total at the foot of the bill). “Foot up” is sometimes used to mean “pay up.”

There are specialized uses of the verb in hawking and horsemanship.

But the verb “foot” meaning “dance” is the earliest of these. Around 1400, in the Middle English translation of the French Romance of the Rose, we find “If he can wel foote and daunce, It may hym greatly do avaunce” [many women like men who can dance well].

The most famous early example is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Foot it featly [dance elegantly] here and there” (Act I, Scene 2, line 381).

The most recent example of its use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1863, in C. Cowden Clarke’s Shakespeare-Characters: “The dance of fairies . . footing it to the cricket’s song.” Like this author, modern writers who use “foot” to mean “dance” are most likely to be alluding to Shakespeare’s use in a deliberate effort to sound quaint and twee [a very British word—look it up].

My wife, who sings a lot of Renaissance music, pointed out an example some singers may be familiar with in the third line of a Thomas Morley madrigal first published in 1594:

About the maypole new, with glee and merriment,
While as the bagpipe tooted it,
Thirsys and Chloris fine together footed it.

And to the wanton instrument
Still they went to and fro and finely flaunted it,
And then both met again, and thus they chanted it:
Fa la la!

The shepherds and the nymphs them round enclosed had,
Wond’ring with what facility
About they turned them in such strange agility.

And still, when they unloosed had,
With words full of delight they gently kissed them,
And sweetly thus to sing they never missed them:
Fa la la!

Note that Morley used “fine” as an adverb where a modern writer might have used “finely.” This sort of thing constitutes another pattern that’s not distinctively modern.

Want to see how Thirsys and Chloris might have danced? Check out “Now Foot It! Renaissance Dance Made Easy.”

Common Errors cited in the Chicago Tribune

2011-07-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Heidi Stevens quotes Common Errors in English Usage in a July 13, 2011 article “Settling bets on some vexing phrases.”

The overwhelming success of the Common Errors in English Usage Calendar mailing, and why it will never be the same again

2011-07-08T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this, you are probably already a subscriber to the Common Errors in English Usage e-calendar, and you have probably noticed some changes in its appearance over the past few days. If you are reading this and are not a subscriber to the Common Errors in English Usage e-calendar, what are you waiting for? Go here to subscribe.

I've been getting some questions and comments about this, so I'll take a moment to explain. Before I started the e-calendar, I had never managed an e-mail list. I had no idea what I was in for, but to the extent that I did understand what was involved, I figured it was a matter of adding subscribers to a list, deleting unsubscribers from that same list, and lining up daily entries to be delivered to the list.

And guess what? I was right about that for several months. That really was all that was involved. It took a little time, but I was having fun. From time to time I would get responses from subscribers who had something to say about a particular entry, and I figured all was well.

Something happened, though, a few weeks ago. All of a sudden my e-mail program stopped delivering the entries. I will spare everyone the technical workaround that our e-mail technician devised in order to continue the mailings, but I will add that my Internet service provider must have noticed I was sending out quite a lot of e-mail in a short period of time every day, and so began limiting the amount of e-mail I was allowed to deliver at one time. The only solution, short of getting a reasonable human at my Internet service provider who happened to understand my problem and knew how to make the appropriate changes (not possible, apparently), was to break down the list into eleven different parts and stagger their delivery over a period of about three hours.

Needless to say, this was not tenable over the long term. Though very time-consuming, I managed to continue the mailings while seeking out an alternative, which turned out to be a mail service (Comm100) that provides e-mail delivery for non-spammers such as I, and also maintains a policy of not collecting e-mail addresses of subscribers to be used for other purposes. I am very happy with this situation, and I hope the subscribers to the e-calendar are, too.

This is my (overly) detailed explanation for the new look of the e-calendar. Some feedback I have received will help me improve its appearance, and I look forward to the rest of the year. If you have comments, please add them below.

Figuratively Literal

2011-07-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while a journalist contacts me to consult about one of the subjects about which I‘ve written. The latest query was from a columnist at a major newspaper wanting my opinion about current uses of the word “literally” in contexts where the speaker or writer is being figurative.

Coincidentally (not “ironically”) Tom sent out my entry on the subject in the e-mail calendar shortly after I was doing a bit of research on the subject in mid-June.

I won’t name the journalist since he hasn’t actually published anything about it, but I thought I’d share with you some of what I dug up from one week’s worth of news.

Professional writers usually know enough to use “literally” literally, often creating clever headlines using it. Here‘s an example:

Literally Unbelievable: When satire happens to dense people
—Tatin Yang in the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Many are fond of using the phrase “figuratively and literally”:

Heading out Saturday into North Point Creek on her uncle's Kawasaki, she was still, literally and figuratively, getting her feet wet.
—Nick Madigan in The Baltimore Sun

Politicians are especially prone to misuse the word, but Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz—chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee—evidently meant meant “literally” literally in her rather intemperate remarks about Republicans when speaking to the Christian Science Monitor:

Among other statements, Schultz said Republican attempts to reduce the deficit would kill seniors. She made it plain she was not speaking figuratively. She said ”this plan would literally be a death trap for seniors.”
—Quoted in the Greeley Gazette

But she was less cautious in another use of the word:

Wasserman Schultz, who’s also a Florida congresswoman, said in a weekend interview that Republicans “literally” wish to revive Jim Crow laws, in the form of new voter restrictions. Republicans pounced, and she subsequently issued a statement regretting her choice of language.
—The Hill

Sometimes it’s hard to know whether a person really intends to use the word literally, or is just exaggerating. Here’s an example by Senator John McCain:

“We have terribly out-of-control costs for literally every weapons system we've acquired,” McCain said.
—ABC News/Politics

A lawyer said of the conflagration in which three firefighters were killed

It was literally hell up there.
—Atlanta Journal Constitution

Here’s one from a media reviewer:

After literally crucifying the series premiere of LOVE BITES last week, I felt that this LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE-type anthology series deserved a second chance.
—Carl Cortez, Assignment X

Did his golfing partner really spot Ken Venturi huffing a debilitating substance at the U.S. Open?

“Because he literally, from the back nine in the first round, was on fumes. It was incredible, the performance he put forth under those circumstances.”
—Quoted by Barry Svrluga in The Washington Post

A CNN viewer commented, in reaction to the near-collapse of Newt Gingrich’s Presidential campaign:

Oh, too bad. This season’s presidential contenders are literally falling apart at the seams.

Randy Dockendorf in the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan implied that a Pilates instructor’s client gave her a hotseat:

Stef’s reward was literally one of the hottest tickets in town—a seat at the double-taping of talk show icon Oprah Winfrey’s next-to-last shows at the United Center.

“Deluge” is most often used figuratively, but this writer, while doing just that, suggested the opposite: a literal flood:

I have literally been deluged with information about consumer energy management habits related to the smart grid over the past three weeks.
—Heather Clancy on ZDNet

This writer used it to mean “virtually,” a common error. He defied a reader who called him on it as you will see if you scroll down the page:

Recently HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker said that they were open to the idea of licensing WebOS. And I literally heard the entire internet say, “It’s about time.”
—Jeff Hollaway, The Gadgeteer

I love this one, which implies miraculous powers of resurrection:

You take a volunteer that you literally worked to death in 90-degree weather for 12 hours, and at the end of the day they say, “Can I do this again?” That's just humbling, quite honestly.
—Doug Snyder, President of Special Olympics Illinois, on Pantagraph.com

This one conjures up amusing visions:

Goodrich Park is adjacent to downtown Whitehall and is literally a hop, skip and jump to Montague.
—Amy VanLoon quoted on mlive.com

Here’s an odd use that is literal and figurative at the same time:

“I mean, it literally sounded like a bomb went off.”
—9NEWS.com

Here's “literally” surrounded oxymoronically by two “like‘s”:

“It was going from the garage and then that small little hole thing it was popping out of there already it looked like the house literally like the whole thing was on fire," said Josie Almosaar.”
—Quoted on KHON2.com

Here’s another example of unintentionally undercutting the word’s meaning:

“He was literally kind of shaking,” Travis said.
—Corey Clark, Tallahassee.com (a site which requires you to log in, so I’m not linking to it)

Very often, it‘s used as a synonym for “actually” when no figure of speech is involved:

“We literally just signed the documents this evening,” Jon Pritchett, the group's CEO and operating partner, said Friday night.
—Quoted in the Quad City Times

I know little and could care less about this error

2011-06-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not surprised to learn that many subscribers to the e-calendar have their favorite, or rather least-favorite, usage errors. I frequently get requests to feature one error or another because a reader feels the need to raise more awareness of it. Or, as happened this morning, I get a response thanking me for featuring an error (in this case it was "shrunk" where "shrank" would be the correct form) that the reader has seen or heard just one time too many.

But yesterday's entry ("could care less/could not care less") is one that--though I agree with Paul that the phrase should logically be "couldn't care less"--I have learned to live with. I haven't given up on it as a lost cause; I've just created my own little explanation for how it came to be, and have chosen to ignore all available logic and scholarship concerning its use. I've retreated into my own musings over where it came from. What follows is not even folk etymology; it's just my own secret theory, my own private Idaho.

My completely unfounded explanation for the expression "could care less" comes from an experience of listening to an interview conducted by Lewis Lapham on his radio show about two years ago (no recollection which broadcast it was, unfortunately). At some point in the interview, Lapham presented his guest with an opportunity to explain something to us listeners: "Most Americans," Lewis said, "know little and could care less about [something related to guest's area of expertise]." No, I cannot remember the topic, but suddenly I had a revelation about "could care less." What if, I thought, that expression entered English as a truncation of the (less common, but perfectly logical and prevelent) phrase "know little and could care less"? Everything fell into place for me. Suddenly the phrase that made no sense at all turned on its head to one that worked perfectly well.

After all, "could care less," when contrasted with "couldn't care less" doesn't seem to have much kin in American English. We don't sarcastically say "I give a damn" when we mean "I don't give a damn," for example. We say "like I care" rather than "like I don't care." I'm hard pressed to think of widespread use of phrases that sarcastically insert negations to their meaning.

And so I choose, in my mind, to allow for that. I tell myself that the phrase is short for "know little and could care less." I can even imagine that the phrase "couldn't care less" came along later than "could care less"; that is, I could imagine a speaker using the phrase "could care less" without the preceding "know little and," and a listener chiming in to correct it to "couldn't care less," thus creating a pat expression where there was not one before. I do this fully aware that I have absolutely nothing to back me up; a query to the noted language writer Nathan Bierma about it led nowhere, and Google shows me nothing. This is a conclusion I've allowed to myself free of the rigors of any serious research or scholarship whatsoever. Yes, I feel bad about that, but no, not so bad that I'd change any of it. I cannot abandon this inner bliss in favor of profound regret.

One final note: I never use either "couldn't care less" or "could care less" in my own speech and writing, and I think the bigger point to make is that there is nothing fresh or exciting about either one. Use "know little and could care less" if you must. Even the great Lewis Lapham does it, apparently, but I would stay away from the straight "couldn't care less," logical though it may be.

And as for raising our hackles, some of us need to leave room for "shrunk" vs. "shrank."

Semicolons and "But"

2011-06-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

Someone recently wrote me saying that I often use semicolons before the word "but," which he had been taught was an error.

The fact is that I use semicolons a lot more than most contemporary writers, mostly for what I consider good reasons.

If you read books printed in the 19th century (as opposed to modern editions with normalized punctuation) you'll find that semicolons were formerly used quite often where we would now use commas.

Today, many people do not use semicolons at all—some because they are confused about how to use them and some because they rarely write the sort of complex sentences that requires them.

In fact, I would guess that the main use of semicolons in nonprofessional prose is as a winking emoticon [;]. And I'd bet that more people wink on the Web using semicolons than wink with an eye in real life.

But back to semicolons and “but.”

One argument is that “but” often serves the same purpose as a semicolon, and that in those cases you can’t use them together. I agree.

The excellent Purdue English OWL site gives these examples of semicolon use:

It rained heavily during the afternoon; we managed to have our picnic anyway.

It rained heavily during the afternoon; however, we managed to have our picnic anyway.

This could also be rendered “It rained heavily during the afternoon, but we managed to have our picnic anyway.”

Many people will go further to say that when two independent clauses are linked by a coordinating conjunction like “and” or “but” a semicolon should never be used, but they often fail to mention the exceptions.

The Chicago Manual of Style explains this in entry 5.70:

If the clauses of a compound sentence are very long or are themselves subdivided by commas, a semicolon may be used between them even if they are joined by a conjunction: “Margaret, who had already decided that she would ask the question at the first opportunity, tried to catch the director’s attention as he passed through the anteroom; but the noisy group of people accompanying the director prevented him from noticing her.”

This is actually more complex and subtle than it looks at first. Note that the CMS says the semicolon may be used, not must be used. This is not a matter of absolute correctness, but of style preference.

Also note that the example given combines two points: an initial clause which is either long or subdivided with commas. Some people think you should apply this rule only when the initial clause is so long and complex as to make the sentence confusing without the semicolon. I lean toward the view that whenever the conjoined clauses are subdivided by commas, you need to escalate to a semicolon.

An example from my Web site:

If you're selling something, it's for sale; but if you lower the price, it goes on sale.

In this sort of sentence, common on my site, a compound sentence consists of two balanced halves each of which has a comma subdividing it. It seems to me logical to escalate to a semicolon between the clauses to distinguish that break from the smaller breaks to either side of it.

Another example from the entry in “input”:

Be aware that it’s not welcome in all settings; but whatever you do, don’t misspell it "imput."

Here only the second clause is subdivided by a comma. Many people would not use the semicolon at the conjunction because it’s not needed for clarity’s sake, but I prefer to be consistent.

In the end, this is a matter of preference. If you’re being edited or graded, you need to know what the appropriate pattern is; but when you’re writing to suit yourself you can prefix a semicolon to a “but” when it feels necessary.

All that said, I did find a number of cases on my site where I had gone overboard, so I changed quite a few semicolons to commas before “but.”

Spaces in Family Names

2011-06-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I write up an entry for my site that never actually gets posted out of sheer absentmindedness. I was reminded of this one by reading "Grammar Girl" Mignon Fogarty's recent comments on her blog about what she calls "Camel Case." (See the entry for May 12, 2011 at http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/).

My entry was preserved in the text-only version of my site, but the single-page entry had vanished, or never been created.

Here it is:

SPACES IN NAMES

In many European languages family names are often preceded by a preposition (“de,” “da,” “di,” “von,” and “van” all mean “of”), an article (“le” and “la” mean “the”) or both (“du,” “des,” “del,” “de la,” “della” and “van der” all mean “of the”). Such prefixes often originated as designators of nobility—or pretensions to it—but today they are just incidental parts of certain names.

In their original languages the two parts of the name are usually separated by a space, and the prefixed preposition or article is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence. If you take a college course involving famous European names you will be expected to follow this pattern. It’s not “De Beauvoir” but “de Beauvoir”; not “Van Gogh” but “van Gogh.” The only exception is when the name begins a sentence: “De Gaulle led the Free French,” but “Charles de Gaulle had a big nose.”

Some European names evolved into one-word spellings early on (Dupont, Lamartine, Dallapiccola), but they are not likely to cause problems because English speakers are usually unaware of the signficance of their initial syllables.

When families bearing prefixed names move to the US, they often adapt their spelling to a one-word form. A well-known example is “DiCaprio.” French le Blanc becomes LeBlanc in America, and Italian di Franco becomes DiFranco. The name “de Vries” is spelled in English by various people bearing that name “De Vries,” “DeVries,” and “Devries.” You have to check carefully to determine how a particular person prefers the name to be spelled. Library reference tools like Who’s Who are more reliable than most Web sources.

The practice of retaining the capital letter inside the fused form is one peculiar to American English. Early books by famed science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin rendered her name “LeGuin” though later reprints go with the separated form, which we may assume is her preference. The fused form has the advantage of being easier for computers to sort into alphabetized lists. You will find many Web pages in which the names of Europeans are adapted to the one-word form, but this is a sign of a lack of sophistication.

Once you learn to properly separate the parts of a last name, you need to know how to alphabetize it. Put van Gogh under V, but Van Morrison under M (“Van” is his given name, not part of his family name). Ludwig van Beethoven, however, is under B, not V.

College students also need to know that most Medieval and many Renaissance names consist of a single given name linked to a place name to indicate where the person came from. Marie de France means simply “Marie of France,” and she should never be referred to as simply “de France.” After introducing her full name, refer to her as “Marie.” Forget The Da Vinci Code; scholars refer to him as “Leonardo,” never as “da Vinci.”

Penultimate Frazz Strip

2011-06-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

Some comics have begun to feature comments on misused words. Candorville does it all the time, and the Frazz strip for June 6, 2011, has a nice treatment of “penultimate.”

http://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2011/06/06

If you're not familiar with the strip, you should know that the little kid is Caulfield (yes, named by highly educated parents after Holden). He's brilliant and much smarter than his terrible teacher, Mrs. Olson. The janitor he enjoys talking with is Frazz.

Today Pearls Before Swine features a crocodile who confuses “revolting” with “rebelling.”

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2011/06/07

See p. 171 of Common Errors in English Usage for my own discussion of “penultimate” and p. 193 for “rebelling/revolting.”

A Mountain or Pit of Debt?

2011-06-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times Pierre Razoux writes of Jordan and Morocco, “Both monarchies are highly in debt” (“The New Club of Arab Monarchies,” June 1, 2011).

That seemed odd wording to me. We usually say “deeply in debt.” Google reports that “deeply in debt” is used almost 19 times more often than “highly in debt.”

The reason the usual form sounds better surely has something to do with alliteration. Those two Ds just sound good together.

But it’s also the case that we usually think of debt as a hole needing to be filled in or which we might fall into.

However, we do often use the phrase “a mountain of debt.”

So maybe it’s just the alliteration after all.

The Web site is back!

2011-05-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

The Web version of "Common Errors in English Usage" is back up. The host server had to be disinfected of an invasion by malware (which as far as I know never affected my pages). It's been moved to a more secure server but at the same address:
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/

"Common Errors" isn't my only project. You can check out my other stuff at:
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/

I'd say "minimum attention to speling," too

2011-05-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Looking through the Portland Community College catalog that arrived in the mailbox yesterday, my wife discovered a course in French that looks like it won't be too taxing:

I thought to myself, "Wait a second! Shouldn't that be 'grammer'?" After all, when you see "grammar" misspelled, isn't it just about always "grammer"? Paul Brians' entry on the topic goes like this (links to the Web site are unavailable this week):

grammer/grammar
It’s amazing how many people write to thank me for helping them with their “grammer.” It’s “grammar.” The word is often incorrectly used to label patterns of spelling and usage that have nothing to do with the structure of language, the proper subject of grammar in the most conservative sense. Not all bad writing is due to bad grammar.

I, too, always assumed the correct way to incorrectly spell "grammar" is "grammer." I don't ever remember seeing "gramar" before, but in fact, something went completely haywire in the printed PCC catalog. Every single instance of "grammar" is misspelled. Here are some more humdingers:

To be fair, the PCC catalog on the Web seems to be free of this problem. I still have to wonder how it got through for this print edition, though.

Incidentally, the "grammer/grammar" entry is one of my favorites in Common Errors in English Usage. Not because I think misspelling "grammar" has an extra bit of irony to it, but because the entry addresses the problem, as it were, of using the word "grammar" as a synonym for "usage." I don't know how many times people have asked me about our Common Errors in Grammar book. In fact, the book addresses a little grammar, but its main concern is with correctable slip-ups in several categories of usage: punctuation, spelling, diction, pronunciation . . .

When you sign up for the Common Errors in English Usage e-calendar, I'll send you the daily entries even if you tell me you want the "grammar mailings," but whatever you do, don't tell me you want the "gramar mailings" or I'll be tempted to direct you to some PCC classes I know about.

Belgium Chocolate

2011-05-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

The standard adjective for things from Belgium is “Belgian,” as in “Belgian chocolate.” But a substantial minority of English speakers say “Belgium chocolate.”

Although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't acknowledge “Belgium” as an adjective, this usage is long established, especially in the phrase “Belgium lace.” My guess is that it goes back at least to Shakespeare’s time.

Some country names just seem to lend themselves to adjectival use in English. Consider “China tea” and “China silk.”

Then there’s “India ink” and “India rubber ball”—both definitely standard. “Turkey carpet" is not as common as it used to be, but it’s still used.

We never speak of “Brazilian nuts.”

To me some of these uses sound antique rather than wrong. But if you want to follow the majority of modern speakers, say “Belgian chocolate” and “Chinese silk.”

Note that there’s no good adjectival form of “United States,” so ”US trade policy” is a synonym for “American trade policy,” and preferred by headline writers. Frank Lloyd Wright proposed “Usonian," but that never caught on.

Flatline

2011-05-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

I read this in John Avlon's May 12th column in The Daily Beast: “A more accurate means of measuring listeners showed that conservative talkers’ ratings had either declined or flatlined in the heat of the 2010 election. . . .”

To me, the verb "flatline" means "die" and is derived from the straight line displayed on an emergency-room monitor attached to a patient who has expired. Avlon was using it in the sense "hold steady."

So I checked with Oxford English Dictionary and discovered that both meanings are valid. Avlon's sense is derived from the line on a graph which neither rises nor falls, but remains steady. The meaning I was thinking of refers to a sudden drop to nothingness.

Unfortunately, these two incompatible meanings emerged at roughly the same time. According to the OED the first published use of the “hold steady” meaning occurred in 1976, and the first use of the second meaning in 1980, where William Safire commented on it in his “On Language” column in the New York Times.

So now we have a common term which can be very confusing if the context doesn't make clear which meaning is meant. That’s something for writers to keep in mind.

Fastest-Growing Nonsense

2011-05-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

My subject in this blog is language, but I’ve also been fascinated by the misuses to which statistics are put since high school, when I read Darrell Huff’s classic 1954 little book, How to Lie with Statistics. It was Huff who that taught me to look at graphs and bar charts to see whether they had been pruned at the bottom to exaggerate differences (in journalism and advertising, they almost always are).

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s bestselling Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. It’s a fine survey of recent abuses of math in the public sphere, and I recommend it highly.

I don’t remember whether Huff deals with the phrase “fastest-growing,” but Seif doesn’t. Promoters of new sports, religious beliefs, types of business, and a huge variety of other things love to boast that they are the “fastest-growing” in their category. By this they mean to suggest that they are very popular.

This suggestion is mathematical nonsense because when even very unpopular activities begin growing they typically grow much faster proportionally than well-established ones.

A small software company just getting started can easily double its sales in a week whereas Microsoft never can. That doesn’t mean Microsoft needs to feel threatened by the newcomer.

If I invent a game to play all by myself today and then teach it to my friend to play it with me tomorrow, the number of people playing it will have increased by 100% overnight. I might plausibly argue that it’s the fastest-growing game in the country. But there are still only two people who know about it.

We need to know the relative size of two competitors to judge whether their different rates of growth mean anything. “Fastest-growing” is significant only when the competition is relatively close.

Most often, this sort of claim is not even backed up with statistics. It’s just a phrase people throw around when they feel their pet subject is not sufficiently widely recognized.

When you hear someone claim that something quite unexpected is the fastest-growing in its category, you can safely bet that it’s got little else to boast about statistically.

The third way: apostophes as visual separators

2011-05-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

Today's entry for the Common Errors in English Usage E-calendar was about plural forms of abbreviations:

RBI/RBIs

Some people reason that since “RBI” stands for “runs batted in,” there is no need for an additional S to indicate a plural, and speak of “120 RBI.” However, though somewhat illogical, it is standard to treat the initialism as a word and say “RBIs.” In writing, one can add an optional apostrophe: “RBI’s.” Definitely nonstandard is the logical but weird “RsBI.”

The same pattern applies to other such plural initialisms as “WMDs” (“weapons of mass destruction”), “POWs” (“prisoners of war”), and “MREs” (“meals ready to eat”); but “RPMs” (“revolutions per minute”) is less widely accepted.

This prompted a reader to pose this question on a different point:

I read: “In writing, one can add an optional apostrophe: “RBI’s.” and wondered:

What does the apostrophe signify? Is it a contraction? A possessive? Is there another use for an apostrophe?

I have seen this before but I don’t understand it. Can you explain?

This brings up a very interesting point, since the apostrophe in this case isn't a contraction, nor is it an example of an abbreviation's possessive form. In this instance, it is merely a visual separator to avoid possible confusion. I myself would not use the apostrophe in this case, but there are many style guides that would back me up if I chose to do so.

"RBI's" vs. "RBIs" is not the best example of what I'm talking about, and neither is the tradition, in some style guides, of endorsing the use of an apostrophe for decades, as in "the 1980's." I don't care for that usage, either. I would go with "RBIs" and "1980s."

It's difficult to be entirely consistent, however. There is one case where I like the apostrophe used as a visual separator: when using the plural form of letters of the alphabet. Take this sentence as an extreme example:

"A's are harder to get than C's."

If I drop the senseless apostrophe (it's neither a contraction nor a possessive), I get this:

"As are harder to get than Cs."

Because "as" itself is a word, the apostrophe actually helps avoid any hiccup the reader may experience trying to decipher the opening of that sentence. Having committed to the apostrophe in the plural for "A," it's hard to drop it for the plural of "C" in that sentence. That would break my own style guide rule: Avoid things that look strange.

Taking Exception to Scholarly Language

2011-05-10T13:46:00.000-07:00

There are many contexts in which special uses of various terms can lead to confusion or irritation. The fields of literary criticism and theory abound in such terms.

Beginning college students are often puzzled when their literature teachers tell them to read “criticism” of a work they are assigned. After all, if the book is worth reading in class, wouldn’t writing in praise of it be more useful than writing critical of it?

They swiftly learn that the term “criticism” embraces positive, mixed, and objective analyses as well as negative commentary (see p. 57 of Common Errors).

Students are also often baffled by the fact that “romantic” literature is filled with terror, rage, violence, and death. Where have all the hearts and flowers gone? (See p. 200 of Common Errors.)

These are elementary confusions. More of a problem is the plethora of obscure terms that was introduced into literary theory in the last third of the 20th century. For several decades it became fashionable to write about literature in language so difficult that it effectively barred outsiders from the discussion and attracted widespread ridicule from language commentators.

One odd usage that still prevails is the use of the term “interrogate.” Introduced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1967 (as interroger), it has the unobvious meaning of challenging, analyzing in a critical (that is, negative) way a text, concept, or institution.

Used almost exclusively by left-of-center academics, it is meant to convey an image of the fearless intellectual taking on powerful establishment forces, struggling to make clear the oppressive power exercised by well-established forces in society.

The problem is that in English at least, “interrogate” is more likely to conjure up in readers’ minds brutal officials torturing powerless victims.

This is only one example of many in which critical language seems horribly tone-deaf. Often painful clashes are caused when terms with a despicable past are used without any seeming awareness of their history.

One example is “formalism,” which was first invented as a term criticizing certain writers in post-revolutionary Russia. It developed into a truly noxious term Stalinist critics used to label writers who were considered too complex or insufficiently social-minded. It became associated with censorship and was frequently used to condemn foreign experimental art of all kinds.

Few academic leftists know much about the Stalinist era, and blithely sling the term around as a neutral one without any recognition of its noxious past.

More troubling is “cosmopolitan.” The term is often used in “postcolonial” criticism to label Western analyses of Asian literature which lack a profound understanding of the roots of the works under discussion.

But “cosmopolitan” was used routinely by Stalinists as a code word for “Jewish,” beginning with the anti-Semitic campaign of 1948-1953.

Of course the word has a more positive common meaning: sophistication derived from wide international experience. The postcolonialists seem utterly clueless about the word’s repugnant past.

(See my analysis of “postcolonial”).

Another term I find annoying is “problematic.” It is applied not only to texts that are baffling, but more often to texts that the scholar disagrees with politically. It is a evasive way of saying “politically incorrect.” It tries to make what is essentially a political bias into objective fact by implying that not only does the critic have a problem with the text, the text somehow necessarily presents a problem that all thoughtful readers must come to grips with.

To me it functions very much the way “improper” did in Victorian language. If critics think a writer is racist, sexist, or otherwise objectionable they should say so (see p. 183 of Common Errors).

In the discipline of history, “American exceptionalism” has a tangled past. It was first used by Marxists to analyze the American failure to develop a strong socialist movement. It was used in various ways thereafter, but most commonly since the 1960s by leftist social critics to label what they take to be delusions on the part of Americans that their nation is superior to all others in unique ways. In recent decades it has normally been used in this negative sense.

But recently conservative politicians have seized on the term and used it to criticize liberals who they consider too prone to internationalism, compromise, or peaceful solutions to problems. To gain their approve you must declare your belief in American exceptionalism.

Of course the inhabitants of every nation believe that their country is unique and superior in some regard or other, but it is annoying to many people to hear a truly powerful domineering nation trumpeting its historical superiority.

Are these conservative politicians wittily appropriating the term by making it a positive value in the way that early Americans transformed “Yankee” from an insult to a proud boast? I see no sign of this. I think they just like the sound of phrase and think it describes a self-evident truth: that not all nations are created equal.

Richard Cohen has written an excellent analysis of this recent usage.

Misspell "vise" and win a free book!

2011-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

I was reading Paul Brians' account of the history of vise and vice, as told by the OED, and I could not help but remember, for better or worse, an unusual encounter I had with the vise/vice spellings when I was editing the collection of Language Log entries, Far from the Madding Gerund . . .

The final piece of that book was the Introduction written primarily by Geoffrey Pullum, the co-author of the book (in fact, though Mark Liberman is the founder of Language Log and was listed as the first author of the book, it was Geoff who worked most attentively on the book version). I remember struggling with this sentence:

It concentrates primarily on topics having to do with grammar and correctness in Standard English—how people use the language, evidence that a lot of usage criticism is flat wrong, speculations on why incorrectly framed or completely mythical rules have such a vice-like grip on the minds of educated Americans, and so on. [emphasis added]

You, no doubt, will focus on that "vice-like"—shouldn't that be "vise-like"? I thought so, too, until I consulted the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) at the office here. It told me that "vice" was a spelling of "vise," so (I thought to myself) don't automatically make that change. Best to query the author. Here is photo evidence (note the straightforward manner of the entry: "vice"="vise" with no "esp. British" restrictions on it, and yes, this is an American publication):

Trouble is (or, I guess . . . trouble was), the author was away in Spain, and not Madrid or Barcelona or some other reasonable location. Far away in Spain, out in the Spanish Boonies. Far, far away. "Incommunicado," I think is how they put it. I, under tight deadline, had to make an Editorial Decision.

"No problemo," as they [don't actually] say. I'll just go into the mind of Geoff Pullum, whom I had worked with enough to know things such as he would say that only fools fret over "who" and "whom" in sentences such as this one. He is not just an authoritative English grammarian, he is also a sophisticated and witty prose stylist. He excels at the self-referential sentence that is not too subtle. He enjoys bringing you in on a joke, and so I reasoned something like this:

Here is Geoff using a variant spelling of "vise" in a sentence that discusses the folly of would-be usage police. He is daring anyone to challenge the spelling, daring the reader to consult the dictionary and see that, in fact, even a dictionary editor would agree that "vice" is actually an acceptable spelling for "vise."

Pretty clever, I thought, and let it go at that. Let's leave the spelling as is. So far, so good.

But then . . . within a few months of the book's publication, I received this note from a reader:

Good morning!

Yesterday a birthday box arrived from my firstborn son and fellow linguaphile. In it I found a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund and a box of Godiva chocolates. What bliss! I dipped into both with gusto, beginning with a chocolate cream and the Preface. In the second paragraph I chewed happily while scratching my head in puzzlement. Was I in the "vice-like grip" of a pun or a slip of the homonym. Hmmm. Yum. If you'll reply, I'll send you a chocolate with a G on top! (I'm enjoying the book enormously.)
Hopefully, (and I hope I'm using that word properly),
DEVOTED READER

OK--the name of the reader was not "Devoted Reader." There was a real name involved, but I am respecting the privacy of the reader correspondent.

Naturally, I wrote back with the explanation I outlined above: "vice" is an acceptable replacement for "vise." I was strident, but my reply was not entirely without wit, and I invited the reader to contact Geoff Pullum, who had long since returned to civilization from the far reaches of rural Spain, directly for confirmation on this.

The reader dutifully did follow up with Geoff. Came the reply:

"Vise" is one of the Americanisms of spelling that I have not internalized, despite having been an American since 1987. I do fine with "color" and "center" and "Americanize" and "aluminum", and even vary the spellings according to my audience ("colour" and "centre" and "Americanise" and "aluminium" for British correspondents); but "vise", and above all the single "l" in words like "labeling", tend to slip by me.

MADDING GERUND is strictly supposed to be in American spelling, so you were right to pick on it. I'd like to blame our editor, Tom Sumner, if that's all right?

Best wishes,
GKP

So ouch. Mea culpa. But what about that Random House dictionary? What was going on there? Indeed, I went home that night and consulted the Webster's I used in college. Right there in front of me was the distinction "Chiefly Brit." next to the "vice" spelling when "vise" is standard in American spelling. My heart sank. I had been let down by the hefty Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged).

There was a very happy ending for me, however. The Devoted Reader found the exchange so interesting that she sent me a copy of a really delightful children's book that had been written by her mother-in-law.

There is a lesson here for copy editors everywhere. When you start trying to outthink the room, you'd better start with at least two dictionaries in hand. If you're really lucky, one of them will be the OED, for reasons Paul Brians explained in his recent post here.

Uses of the Oxford English Dictionary

2011-04-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Maintaining Common Errors in English Usage involves a lot of work. Sometimes all I have to do is answer various queries and suggestions from folks who e-mail me. About half of these are from people who have overlooked the fact that entries addressing their concerns are already on the site. For some reason, the “search” blank at the top of the page is underused.

On other days, I receive suggestions and corrections that require more work. Yesterday there were three.

The first was the simplest. In my entry on “bit/bitten” I had absent-mindedly omitted the crucial word “dead” from Walter Brennan’s famous question, “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/bit2.html

The second was more interesting. Someone wrote to point out that people often confuse “vice” with “vise,” especially in the phrase “vise-like grip.”

A little Googling confirmed that “vice-like grip” is very common—sometimes as a deliberate pun, but more often as a mistake.

Wikipedia, however, says of “vice” vs. “vise”:

The two-jawed workbench tool. Americans and Canadians retain the very old distinction between vise (the tool) and vice (the sin, and also the Latin prefix meaning a "deputy"), both of which are vice in the UK and Australia.

I am always interested in cases in which US English preserves older forms that UK speakers have drifted away from, and headed for the on-line version of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is the standard tool for those seeking the history of words. Although almost every sizable library has a copy of the old paper edition, the current one is purely electronic. I have access to it as a retired professor through the subscription of the library at Washington State University and use it almost daily.

The OED did not confirm that “vise” was an older British spelling of the tool, so I’m not sure where the Wikipedia contributor was getting this information from. A brief note states “The spelling vise is now usual only in U.S.” But the examples given do not suggest that the US spelling was ever common in British English. Almost every example given by the dictionary, from the 16^th century forward, spells the word for the workbench tool as “vice.”

The OED even has an entry for “vice-like”:

vice-like, adj.2

Forms: Also U.S. vise-like.

Etymology: < vice n.2 5.

Resembling (that of) a vice; firmly tenacious or compressive.

1835 E. A. Poe in Southern Lit. Messenger June 570/1 Clutching with a vice-like grip the long-desired rim.

1839 P. J. Bailey Festus 136 Traitors! that vice-like fang the hand ye lick.

1856 R. W. Emerson Eng. Traits xiv. 233 What he relishes in Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a mental image before the eyes.

1890 D. Davidson Mem. Long Life x. 258 [He] seized my hand in his vice-like fist.

So what is taken for an embarrassing mistake in modern North America was used by the very American Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson and is still the correct spelling in the UK.

I strive for compactness in writing my own entries, so most of this detail is omitted in the final version of my discussion of “vice-like” vs. “vise-like.”

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/vicelike.html

The final bit of correspondence was from someone convinced that I was mistaken in asserting that “An unusual use of the word ‘wax’ is ‘to change manner of speaking,’ as in ‘she waxed eloquent on the charms of New Jersey’ or ‘he waxed poetic on virtues of tube amplifiers.’”

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/wax.html

This person was convinced that the only valid uses of this term involve growth, as in “a waxing moon” (one that appears to be growing larger).

Back to the OED.

The oldest form of the verb “wax” has nothing to do with the word we use for applying wax to anything. It comes from Anglo-Saxon weaxan, and was spelled in a wide variety of ways in Middle English including waxen, wacse, and vyx.

A note states:

Originally a more frequent synonym of grow v., which has now superseded it in general colloquial use, exc. with reference to the moon (see 6). With this exception, the senses below which are not marked as obsolete are confined to literary use, and have, in varying degrees, a somewhat archaic flavour; some of those under branch I survive only in the traditional antithesis with wane v.

Most of the examples given do indeed have to do with growth, but a separate section is set aside for non-growth uses dating back to the 13^th century. I cite only the first three of a very long list of examples:

Without the idea of growth or increase: To become, turn. (Sometimes used with reference to a sudden or immediate change.)

c1220 Bestiary 151 If he [the adder] cloðed man se, Cof he waxeð.

13.. K. Horn (Harl.) 302 Vpon Athulf childe rymenild con waxe wilde.

1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) Matt. xxiv. 12 The charite of manye schal wexe coold.

The clincher is the “draft addition” dated March 2006 which discusses the sense in which “wax” is most often used today by American writers in the sense I discuss:

intr. To speak or write (increasingly) in the manner specified; esp. in to wax lyrical , to wax eloquent .

1842 Times 2 Nov. 5/3 The gallant colonel then gallantly waxed eloquent in praise of women.

1892 ‘M. Field’ Stephania 2, O sorry sight! A Roman Emperor Deigns to wax eloquent, and by persuasion Has oped the city-gates.

1911 G. Cannan tr. R. Rolland Jean-Christophe in Paris 60 He had the genius of taste except at certain moments when the Massenet slumbering in the heart of every Frenchman awoke and waxed lyrical.

1978 E. Blishen Sorry, Dad III. iii. 114 Stationing himself at a window, he would wax more and more satirical and sarcastic about what he could see of the Boltons' domestic arrangements.

1984 C. James Flying Visits 13 The writer becomes less and less inclined to wax sententious.

1996 C. J. Stone Fierce Dancing xii. 184 Debby began waxing lyrical about the food. It was something else she told me.

It’s not surprising that not many of my correspondents have personal subscriptions to the OED (it costs $295 a year), but it’s worth checking to see whether your local library has a subscription. The paper version is now woefully out of date, but the electronic one is an invaluable tool.

Whits and pieces . . .

2011-04-21T15:07:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Louis de Bernière’s wonderful novel of life in early 20th-century Turkey, Birds Without Wings (2004). His writing is beautiful and impresses me much more than his more famous Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

But I flinched when I ran into this on p. 146: “as a mob they were individually not a wit superior to hyenas.”

Here’s what I’ve written about this point on my Web site: “If you still have all your wits about you, could it be said that your mental powers have diminished ‘not a wit’? No, for the traditional expression is ‘not a whit.’ ‘Whit’ is an old word meaning ‘bit,’ surviving only in this and similar expressions like ‘not one whit.’”

When an old word survives only in a single idiom like this, it is very likely to puzzle speakers and writers and tempt them to substitute a more familiar word that makes more sense to them.

Other examples (traditional word in parentheses):

beyond the pail (for pale)

begs (for beggars) belief

dire straights (for straits)

bear the butt (for brunt)

slight (for sleight) of hand

midrift (for midriff)

wheelbarrel (for wheelbarrow)

beckon call (for beck and call)

fowl (for fell) swoop

hew (for hue) and cry

reeking (for wreaking) havoc

wile (for while) away

bottles (for boggles) the mind

Whim and a Prayer

2011-04-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Roger Cohen writes in the April 18, 2011 New York Times that "Germany had not recovered from the cataclysm on a whim and a prayer. It had stuck to its task."

I'm used to typos in the Times, but goofs like this should be caught by their editors.

"Whim and a prayer" is discussed on p. 249.

Cowing to Special Interests

2011-04-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

In the April 18, 2011 Newsweek Philip K. Howard writes that legislators "now send $14 billion in taxpayer dollars each year mostly to corporations because lawmakers cow to special interests" (p. 32).

I don't think he means that the legislators are cowed by these corporate farmers, even though some of them are well equipped with cows to do the job. (The verb "to cow" is derived from an old Scandinavian word for "intimidate" and actually has nothing to do with cattle.)

I think he means kowtow. Here's my entry on that word, often misspelled cowtow:

COWTOW
KOWTOW

You can tow a cow to water, but you can't make it drink. But the word that means bowing worshipfully before someone comes from the Chinese words for knocking one's head on the ground, and is spelled kowtow.

Or maybe he was influenced by this half-formed thought: "lawmakers bow to special interests." Or "cave to special interests."

Other than that it's great article full of helpful ideas on improving the US.

Paul Brians

Dudley defeats Dewey, or something like that

2011-01-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

In the news this week is the story of how The World Almanac and Book of Facts came to put Chris Dudley as winner of the gubernatorial race in Oregon last November.

Yes, that is news indeed, as the winner was in fact John Kitzhaber.

How did The World Almanac and Book of Facts get it wrong? The editor there, Sarah Janssen, tells us that there was a tight deadline, and at the time The World Almanac and Book of Facts went to press, Dudley was leading the vote tally. Thus the Almanac has had its "Dewey defeats Truman" moment.

Now, I wasn't there, and believe it or not I don't actually know everything about everything, but I don't get this one.

Here's what I saw in last November's election (noting, first of all, that I'm an Oregon resident, so I was probably more in tune with the race than the editor at The World Almanac and Book of Facts):

1. Election day came and went with Dudley in the lead.
2. A survey showed that almost every county but Multnomah had reported 100% of their precincts.
3. Kitzhaber was leading Multnomah County by about 2-to-1.
4. Multnomah County is not only the most populous county in Oregon, it is the only county in Oregon that can truly say it has a large enough population be called urban.
5. Multnomah had reported well under 50% of its precincts, and there is no section of Multnomah County where a Republican like Dudley would pull in more than 35-40%.
6. A few simple calculations told me that Kitzhaber would win the state by at least 10,000 votes, in spite of Dudley's early lead.
7. I had this figured out by noon on November 3.
8. The Oregonian itself was projecting a Kitzhaber win by late November 3.
9. I don't get see how any deadline could be so tight for such a big giant book like The World Almanac and Book of Facts that they couldn't get this right before signing off on proofs.
10. I think The World Almanac and Book of Facts pulled up the morning news on the 3rd, saw Dudley was ahead, and just let it fly without a second thought.
11. Have I ever made a mistake in editing? Yes, I actually have.
12. But I don't think I was ever so vague in my explanation.
13. I therefore think "Unfortunately, this is just the kind of thing that happens when you are on a tight deadline" is pure cop-out of the highest order.
14. It strikes me that this story just flips the whole "unreliable online sourcing" vs. "reliable, edited, printed material" argument on its head. Note that The World Almanac and Book of Facts has the correct numbers in its online edition.
15. Writing in lists leads to haphazard organization.
16. Or had you noticed that already?

Is there a 2011 Common Errors in English Usage Calendar?

2010-10-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

FORGET ABOUT THE "LATEST UPDATE." THIS IS THE REAL LATEST UPDATE: The e-calendar has its own Web site for 2012 and a new way to subscribe or renew your subscription. Read all about it here.
LATEST UPDATE: The e-calendar will continue in 2012. To subscribe, send me an email: tsumner@fbeedle.com.
UPDATE: The e-calendar daily mailings are now available. To subscribe to the list send me a request: tsumner@fbeedle.com.

I've titled this post after a question that comes in just about daily around here, as many are scrambling to find the 2011 calendar on the William, James website or at Amazon, or through their local Barnes & Noble or other bookstore. The disappointing answer is No, there is not a 2011 edition of the calendar.

However, there is some work underway toward developing an e-calendar to be delivered to your e-mail inbox each day. The cartoons? They'll be there when applicable. The accompanying literary quotes? Yes, sometimes.

Changing times in the calendar
business have forced our hand

Assuming this comes together, it will be just like the calendar many of you have seemingly enjoyed for the past several years, except you won't have to deal with the plastic easel on January 1, 2012. Plus it'll be completely free.

If you are interested in signing on for a daily dose of Paul Brians' interesting and witty entries on English language usage, drop me a line: tsumner@fbeedle.com with the subject line "2011 e-calendar," or something like that. Your address will be used only for delivering the daily entries.

I've had more fun than I should have had putting together the calendar for the past five years, but changing times in the calendar business have forced our hand in discontinuing this item. That does not mean, however, that it will not be revived. To find out about that, you'll have to check this space next year for a post titled, "Is there a 2012 Common Errors in English Usage Calendar?"

Free Calendar at Wordstock--the ultimate remainder

2010-10-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

It's the ultimate remainder. The Common Errors in English Usage 2010 edition will be followed by . . . nothing. This is the last chance to grab yours, and best of all it's free if you stop by the Franklin, Beedle & Associates booth at the Wordstock Festival this weekend, October 9-10. One caveat: to make the calendar current you'll have to fast forward to the current date. Then you'll enjoy three (well, nearly three) full months of entries from the remainder of the year.

So there you have it: The Ultimate Remainder. Free, good for the remainder of the year, and not renewable. Will there be a 2012 edition of the calendar? A 2013? Let's just say it's all up in the air for now. Come down to Wordstock and grab this one FREE. May be your last, best shot.

Never on time, always timely: let's make that fifty-ONE years of stupid grammar advice

2010-04-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Sure, it's been a year to the day since Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log and our own Far from the Madding Gerund went on Talk of the Nation with Neil Cohen to discuss his much-discussed-everywhere piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice," but since when have we been current on this blog?

The point is that the critique of Strunk & White is timeless, humorous, AND very sincere, as you will hear if you go back and listen to Pullum. Much of what Geoff says takes me back to my teacher-training days with the Bay Area Writing Project, where we learned the ins and outs of how useless grammar rules actually work against the cause of developing good student writing:

No fooling: Deborah DeWit's Wetlands to show in Salem April 11

2010-04-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Topeka, Kansas, may have changed its name to Google, and Google returned the favor, but this is no joke: Wetlands, the documentary film featuring Deborah DeWit's own artistic documentation of a wetlands area in Tigard, Oregon, is a thought-provoking meditation on Nature as she stands in contemporary culture. This film unfolds to tell two stories of preserving and presenting this natural area: one through the eyes of a gifted painter and the other through the work of environmental engineers. The film has shown in the Portland area over the past couple of months, and now comes this announcement:

We are happy to announce a screening of

Wetlands

Seasons of Mind

a film about art and the environment

Produced By Deborah DeWit and Carl Vandervoort

Music Directed by Jim Leisy

www.wetlandsdocumentary.com

at the Grand Theater in Salem, Oregon

Sunday, April 11th at 4 pm

191 High Street NE

Salem, OR 97301

503-362-9185

To purchase tickets in advance click here

https://robot.boxofficetickets.com/800-494-TIXS/WebObjects/BOTx2005.woa/wa/inspectProgram?id=98955&passKey=de63434de2&idForNetwork=171&passKeyForNetwork=f3a39af2f6

There will be a special exhibition of Deborah's paintings following the screening. For more information please contact

Mary Lou Zeek Gallery

503-581-3229

www.zeekgallery.com

If you will be in the Salem area April 11, the film and gallery show would be very worth your while.

Far from the madding gerund: the "we knew Ben Zimmer when" edition

2010-03-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

Time to meet William Safire’s replacement for the "On Language" column over at The New York Times.

But if you read Language Log, you already know him. Ben Zimmer has been posting there regularly since 2005. Before that, LL readers knew him as a frequent commenter whose remarks were frequently mentioned by Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum in their own posts.

And if you’ve really been paying attention (like me), you’ll know that two of his comments were so good that Pullum insisted they appear in our book collection of Language Log posts, Far from the Madding Gerund, in 2006. I think Geoff put it to me like this: “You are a fine editor, Tom [Geoff is always so gracious when the knife is still held behind his back], but if Zimmer’s posts on Churchill are not included in the book, there will be no book. I hope that’s clear. Maybe you’d like that, though; it would free you up to go back to measuring your woodpile, or whatever it is you do up there in Oregon.”

OK--maybe not his exact words, but I can’t locate the exact words in my flawed email filing system, so I’m forced to resort to making things up (which I just hate to do, by the way--apologies to Geoff if I’ve misquoted, but I think I have not).

And then, if you’ve really, really been paying attention (like me), you will also know that it was a series of Ben Zimmer posts (covering a topic which will by necessity not be covered in his NY Times column--you have to get the book to know what I mean by that) that was selected to represent Language Log in Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs (2008).

And if you’ve pay any attention at all to the language usage biz (like me), you’ll also know that Ben has been one of the rotating columnists the Times has employed to write the “On Language” column during William Safire’s absence due to illness and since his passing.

Somewhere along the line, Zimmer became editor of Visual Thesaurus, which is perhaps the best-produced language usage site for the general reader on the web, due in no small part to his acumen.

Being asked to write the “On Language” column must be the language-columnist equivalent of being asked to host The Tonight Show. William Safire set the standard for the position just as surely as Jack Paar did so for the late-night talk show. This is big--really, really big. The only thing bigger than this is the congratulations and best wishes we send to Ben Zimmer. Ben Zimmer, “On Language” columnist for The New York Times just sounds great, doesn’t it? This is going to be good.

A birthday song

2010-03-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

For anybody in the audience who's got a BII’THDAY today. Happy BII’THDAY to YOU:

Nathan Bierma featured at Visual Thesaurus

2009-12-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

The great Visual Thesaurus has a feature from Nathan Bierma's The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English today. Go there to find out what is the most dastardly puncuation mark in English. If you want to learn the meaning of presticogitation and esquivalience, however, you may need to check out the whole book.

Nathan Bierma hits the streets (again)

2009-11-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Neal Whitman has weighed in on Nathan Bierma's new collection of material culled from the "On Language" column of the Chicago Tribune. Yes, the column is no longer a regular feature in the paper, but Neal points out that like the great DVD box set, The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English lets the series live on.

Neal takes exception with the logic of calling the book an "encyclopedia" and the alphabetical arrangement, but such is the challenge of the anthologizing such material. There is no perfect configuration; every solution has built-in compromises. In the end, Neal does come through with an understanding of what the book really does: "It’s fast, easy, entertaining reading, and would be a good gift for people who like reading about language . . . not so much a reference book as a language lover’s bathroom reader."

But Neal, "encyclopedia" sounds so much loftier than "bathroom reader"; we couldn't resist.

The Revolutionary Paul Brians-

2009-10-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to Interview Paul Brians on camera for Writer's Dojo at Wordstock a few days ago, but here's the real deal from an actual professional: Paul Brians is interviewed by Elizabeth O'Brien of English Grammar Revolution. The video is not yet available, so this will have to do in the meantime.

William Safire Remembered, but Best Remembranced Elsewhere

2009-09-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Ben Zimmer, contributor to Language Log and to Far from the Madding Gerund (and occasional sub at the NYT "On Language" desk), writes two remembrances of William Safire and points to a column where the late, great gray eminence references the work of Language Log in defining the phenomenon known as "snowclones," a term actually coined by Glen Whitman rather than a staffer at Language Log.

Look everywhere else for remembrances of Safire (I'll ignore much of his political opinion except as it relates to civil liberties and media conglomeration), and also look around for discussions of what a snowclone is. As far as I know, Safire never plugged that other phenomenon noted and popularized at Language Log, the eggcorn.

As far as I know, Safire never gave mention to Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage, which would have seemed a natural for him, but once upon a time he did give mention to Brad Hansen's Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media, published by our own selves. To him the book was "catnip for netties."

A Midsummer Hint

2009-08-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

I hate to bring up school at a time like this, but it looks like the Parenting Press E-zine is dropping a back-to-school hint: Get those kids in the Common Errors in English Web site habit, or perhaps a get a copy for the backpack.

Someone is Wrong on the Internet AGAIN--and this time it's ERIC BOEHLERT!

2009-06-11T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a great one: Glenn Greenwald talks to Erich Boehlert about Eric's new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. Boehlert has, for about the million-zillionth time, his finger on the pulse, and I'm sure to be taking a look at this book. His Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush is about as close to a tearjerker as any extremely detailed account of press coverage can be.

But! Right there in the middle of the conversation, Boehlert claims that until a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post had never written a feature on a liberal blogger. Now, I would normally trust Eric to have it right, but in this case I've got to say it: Eric, Eric, Eric . . . where were you in the summer of 2005? How did you miss our own Barbara O'Brien, the Mahablogist and author of our own Blogging America: Political Discourse in a Digital Nation, right there on the cover of the Washington Post Magazine of July 17, 2005, in a feature written by David von Drehle? By my count, that means the Post actually featured a liberal blogger about four years ago.

Oh well, I assume we can trust Glenn Greenwald, anyway, when he signs off saying, "Well, Eric, you've written obviously one of the first books, and I think one of the best books on what political blogs are and what they do." Except Eric's book comes out five years after Barbara's (and Dan Gillmor's, for that matter). Perhaps, though, Glenn's half right. I certainly wouldn't put it past Mr. Boehlert to write one of the best books on just about anything.

UPDATE: You can find the comic featured here, and lots and lots of other good ones, at XKCD.

How blogging ended the newspaper industry

2009-04-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

Or not, as explained perfectly by Allison Hantschel.

Also on this topic, please refer to John Nichols and Robert McChesney, two of this country's greatest media know-it-alls.

Linda Sawaya Live

2009-02-27T10:44:00.001-08:00

Locals will want to note two great events coming up with Linda Sawaya, TV star and author of Alice's Kitchen:

1. Wednesday, March 4, from 4 to 7 pm at

Bale's Thriftway 12675 NW Cornell Road, Portland

A Lebanese cooking demonstration will focus on vegetarian

recipes for Lent.

2. Lebanese cooking demo at the Better Living Show at the Expo Center at the end of March, at the NW Natural Cooking stage . . . more details to follow.

Linda in person is every bit as wonderful as her cookbook, and both of these events will undoubtedly satisfy the soul as well as the palate.

Blogs make it to print, but not finally

2009-01-23T09:12:00.000-08:00

In late 2003, I contacted Barbara O'Brien about an idea I'd had percolating for some time--an idea that Sarah Boxer would call "dreadful " (and David Kamp would disagree)--to assemble blog postings, specifically political blog postings, into a book. Barbara's book Blogging America (July 2004) was one of the first anthologies of blogs in print (the first is credited to Tony Pierce's Blook of 2002), to which which Barbara generously added much original material and commentary. Back then, I called it "editing the internet," and I perceived this as the Next Big Thing in publishing.

It did not (and still does not) make sense to me that there is naturally one world of content available on the web sitting beside another world of content available in print. Six years ago the overlap was fairly limited, though, and so the growth potential seemed enormous. Some months later, in May 2005, my own collection--call it my homage to Donald Rumsfeld--was published. In the crucial nine months between these two books, blogs had hit a tipping point, and the day that Untidy: The Blogs on Rumsfeld was published was also the day that The Huffington Post went online, and there was no looking back--bloggers had big-time readership in an instant. Other web-based news sites with original content inevitably took hold.

With blogs now firmly in American (and the World) psyche, an idea brought up by John Emerson in September 2006 will come to pass, and blogs will have their own national tabloid, The Printed Blog, as highlighted in this NYT article. Next Tuesday (1/27/09) will be a new day in bringing blog posts to print. Of course, I approve.

More on Obama's inaugural address

2009-01-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Listening to Mark Liberman's discussion on The World, I was struck by his declaration that Obama's "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," saying that it may become a historical moment of speechifying if, indeed, America does pick itself up, dust itself off, and begin the work of remaking itself.

Geoff Nunberg at Language Log singles out this phrase as a source of inspiration and an allusion to Jerome Kern's great tune, sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swingtime. You can click on the link to his post to see Fred and Ginger do it in the movie. That version remains the standard, naturally, but here's another good one by Diana Krall:

But what are we picking ourselves up from? If Obama continues to hark back to classic Americana in his speeches, perhaps we can start to forget moments like these from the president who preceded him:

Maybe there is hope after all.

Mark Liberman saves The World!

2009-01-20T22:44:00.000-08:00

Well, he didn't actually save it--it was a pretty good show anyway, but there was Mark Liberman on The World discussing Barack Obama's inauguration speech. Everyone knows Mark Liberman is co-author of our own Far from the Madding Gerund and co-founder of Language Log, but did you know Barack Obama is the current president of the United States? It's true.

You'll be hearing more about Barack Obama in the months and years to come, now that he's the president and all. For now you can listen to Mark Liberman on BBC's The World here. And those on the go can download it here.

Paul Brians with Lionel

2008-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

Paul Brians talked about his Web site and the new edition of Common Errors in English Usage on The Lionel Show this morning. It is here that we learn the irrepressible Lionel's opinion of "irregardless" and his (surprise!) distaste for George Bush's pronunciation of the word "nuclear":

Barbara and Her Garden

2008-12-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

Here's something to beat back any winter blues you may be feeling. Barbara Blossom Ashmun discusses her book, Married to My Garden, and her remarkable garden in this video clip from Garden Time:

More Holiday Shopping Possibilities

2008-12-09T11:47:00.003-08:00

The 2009 Common Errors in English Usage Daily Boxed Calendar has been sold at a lower price this year than in years past, just $11.95. But this good deal just got better for the holidays. We're now offering the calendar at a 5% discount for orders of 5-9, and 10% discount for orders of 10 or more on our calendar page.

Plus, unlike some online retailers, we are able to promise delivery by Christmas day for orders placed in a timely manner (but I remember that last year's edition sold out early, so you may want to time your purchase accordingly). I'm just not sure there's a better idea or a better deal for your holiday gift-giving out there anywhere. Is there?

Limits of Language: Raising the bar in Amazonian praise

2008-12-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

Sure it's bad form for publishers to point to the Amazon reviews for their titles (and besides, what happens, after all, when negative reviews sit next to the positive reviews the publisher is trying to highlight?). And anyway, Amazon claims all rights to those reviews, anyway. So I can't really just reprint what Amazon reviewer David M. Giltinan has to say about Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language, but perhaps just this snippet would qualify as "fair use":

There are still three shopping weeks until Christmas. Nobody else has reviewed this book. So - if you know anyone with an interest in words or language - buy them a copy. Their puppy-like gratitude will last all year.

OK, then, shoppers--have at it.

Portland Monthly features Wordstock Short Fiction 2008 competition winner "Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed"

2008-12-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Kurt Rheinheimer's 2008 Wordstock Short Fiction Competition–winning story, "Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed" appears in the December issue of Portland Monthly.

But it's comma, comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon over there at Portland Monthly, which features three variations on punctuating the title. We have the online version:

Calendar Girl, Arrested. Freed [comma following "Girl"; period after "Arrested"]

Then there is the title as it appears in the print version:

Calendar Girl, Arrested, Freed [comma following "Girl" and another comma after "Arrested"]

Finally, there is the title as it appears on the contents page of the print version:

Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed [comma following "Arrested"]

So which, if any of these, is correct? That would be the punctuation you find on the contents page of the print version: "Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed" (with the online version being, perhaps, the greatest violator of original intent):

But look at me, getting all hung up over some silly commas and a period. This story is so good it doesn't matter how you punctuate the title, and how many stories out there can make that claim? I could actually apply some simplistic literary analysis to justify each of these variations, and thereby reveal some hitherto-unsuspected genius to some carefully crafted editorial decisions, but Kurt would undoubtedly step in and tell me to just stop it, and stop it now.

To which I say, "OK, I, will, stop, it, now."

Mr. Hat's Review

2008-11-17T16:13:00.000-08:00

The wonderful and charming Mr. Hat, proprietor of Languagehat and co-author of Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, has weighed in with his (positive) assessment of Limits of Language. From his comments:

Geoff Pullum wrote about the U.K. edition a couple of years ago, calling it "the ideal birthday present for the linguist in your life who you feel already has everything." It would also, of course, be the ideal Christmas present for anyone who loves language and prefers facts to fancy.

And, since Limits of Language is a US edition of a UK publication, this brings up an obvious question: When will we see the US edition of Monkey's Armpit? Huh? When?

In the meantime, you can listen to the wonderful and charming Mr. Hat in conversation with PRI's Lisa Mullins on The World.

Colorless green ideas do not sleep furiously—or do they?

2008-11-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky’s most famous sentence is also one of the strangest ever constructed: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” His point, in contrasting the syntax of this sentence with a variation, “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” was that while the former is grammatical and the latter is not, the latter is no less probable to appear in English language than the former.

Because he asserted his point so audaciously—claiming that no statistical model for grammaticalness would show otherwise—he left himself open to Fernando Pereira’s 2000 report on his own analysis. It turned out that a simple statistical model showed the grammatical version to be 200,000 times more likely to appear than the ungrammatical version.

All of this was described by Mark Liberman in a Language Log post which was reprinted in Far from the Madding Gerund.

So it seems Mr. Chomsky was wrong in that particular assertion, but then along came Mikael Parkvall to seal the deal, showing us once and for all that colorless green ideas do, in fact, sleep furiously. His illustration serves as the punch line for this post:

This illustration appeared on the back cover of the original UK edition of Limits of Language, but for some reason was dropped for the US edition. Since I was involved in the decision, I ought to be able to explain, but for some reason I cannot. Take another look at that beautiful rendition and tell me I’m not crazy.

And the winner(s) is/are . . .

2008-11-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

I see that the winners of the Wordstock 10 Short Fiction competition are not posted at the Wordstock page, so I’ll put them here for those you googling “Wordstock 10 winners,” or the like. Let’s run them down in the order they appear in The Wordstock Ten: Finalists from the 2008 Wordstock Short Fiction Competition, which is now available for purchase online (all entrants can look for their complimentary copy in the mail in the coming weeks):

First Prize Winner: Kurt Rheinheimer for “Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed”

An odd and oddly-told tale of a young women, one Bimini Padgett, who inexplicably lives at a shopping mall, where she works at a calendar kiosk. It’s all told as a newspaper report, but the reporter can’t ever get objective enough to stand outside the situation and just tell the story. What is this thing, anyway? Is this a parody of newspaper writing? Is it social commentary on our consumer culture? Is it just a prolonged and carefully construed joke? Or what? Here’s what Ursula Le Guin, the final judge, had to say: “It works marvelously, with ‘this reporter’ becoming an increasingly real presence. A very funny, subtle story, which covers a lot of ground without seeming to, takes big risks and gets away with them, [and] ends brilliantly. . . .” See if you can read this story and resist the temptation to get a copy of Kurt’s 2005 collection, Little Criminals. I couldn’t.

Second Prize Winner: Brendan Kerr for “The Sunbather”

In a competition like this you’re bound to see a lot of great descriptive writing, and so it’s a real feat to get recognition for a story that obtains its gravity from its sensual description. That alone makes “The Sunbather” stand out. But there’s a lot of just-beneath-the-surface stuff going on in this coming-of-age story, too. Here’s Ursula Le Guin again: “[T]he movement of this story is elegant and precise, using the consciousness of the boy to bring a dead dog, a sick mother, and the girl next door all into a precarious and significant balance, while never belaboring the significance.” Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Third Prize Winner: Gregory Loselle for “Buried Dinner”

As the narrator digs in his side yard in an attempt to shore up the foundation of his sinking home, he discovers artifacts of a broken relationship that parallel his own recent experiences with his estranged wife, Brenda. Like “Calendar Girl Arrested, Freed,” this is a story without a straightforward narrative; and like that story, it’s richly comic (in spite of the various tragedies that befall the narrator). “The story is a strong, open metaphor, well carried out,” as Ursula Le Guin said.

Ursula Le Guin also extends her congratulations to all the finalists, assuring us that she enjoyed every story and found selecting three prize winners difficult. Here are the other finalists, listed alphabetically by author’s last name, just as they appear in the book:

Linda Barnhart, “Zagharoot”

When an woman gets a phone call from her ex-husband, who has just lost her job at a massage parlor because she has been exposed as a transsexual, she (the ex-wife) takes up the supporting friend role she (the ex-wife) has always played for her (the ex-husband). This is a story that promises to never be boring and always be more than a little offbeat. The final scene is proof that Fellini wasn’t an oddball surrealist; he was just visionary.

Danya Bush: “Looks Like Newsprint”

Two young girls fall in love at ballet school, and from there a tragedy develops. This one is a little like Dead Poets Society transferred to a Degas painting, with the emphasis on Degas and impressionism. In this short piece, there is a simple, poetic language that develops quickly to put you right there at that school and into the narrator’s point of view. Surprisingly effective.

Gregg Cusick: “My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible”

I first came across this amazing piece while screening stories for the competition, and my first response was to go back and read it again when I reached the end. That’s unusual; if you’ve ever been involved in that sort of process, you’ll know that you typically are looking for every reason to move on and just get it over with. But “My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible” screams to be read again and again. Here’s what goes on in this story: An 83-year-old man tells about his efforts to get his local middle school drama department to produce the play he’s written about the crash of the Shenandoah. But as the piece develops, you realize that you are both stuck in and freed of all temporal constraints. If that sounds nutty, so be it. This is a nutty story--it’s hilarious, it’s tragic, it’s completely original. You can forgive yourself for thinking by the end of this story that the narrator is not really the 83-year-old man he insists that he is throughout. He’s really his 43-year-old son or possibly the principal of the middle school himself. Or maybe he’s just another 13-year-old schoolboy attending the middle school and watching the school play as a plywood blimp floats from one side of the stage to the other. If none of this makes sense, you are forgiven. You must read the story for context. It’s brilliant.

Norman Girault: “You Must Remember This”

This one I’d better not give away too much--it’s way too much fun to read through the whole story of the WWII nurse known as “Nurse Beaver”--and yes, the nickname applies just as you may fear it does. Of all the stories in this collection, this is the one with the most epic sweep, covering several sub-plots and many decades, all leading up to a punchline that makes it as memorable as any of your favorite jokes. It’s just pure joy.

James Gish, Jr.: “Voices of the Doomed”

Many years after the fact, the narrator delivers her coming-of-age story, which involves her best friend from childhood, Brendy, and a promise they make to one another. The setting is Bible-belt America, and the details appropriately gothic and ominous. I love the ending, where the narrator finally keeps her promise, in a fashion.

Jendi Reiter: “The Albatross”

Sometimes the order of these stories doesn’t seem so arbitrary. Following “Voices of the Doomed” with this story turns this collection into one that gives a brief glimpse into the dark side of religious fervor. But whereas “Voices of the Doomed” comes more from Flannery O’Connor territory, “The Albatross” features one quite precocious child of New England amid something more like classic American Puritanism, possibly a Salinger character. Funny and poignant.

Lones Seiber: “The Way Home”

This is just a great yarn. A woman gets a call informing her that her Uncle Ray and Aunt Helen have died. As the story develops and we learn about the significance of this aunt and uncle, we (like the narrator) get increasingly less interested in the advice of the other characters who tell the narrator what to do. In the end, she makes the only decision that makes perfect sense, to our great satisfaction.

I’ll second Ursula Le Guin: Congratulations to all the finalists; the fine writing and great imagination poured into each one makes for a great collection the second year running.

Sissy and Cash Behind the Counter: Margaret Malone’s “Minor Theatre”

2008-11-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

The final finalist featured in the Wordstock 2007 Short Fiction collection is a great companion piece to the preceding story, “Corinth Behind the Counter.” Margaret Malone’s “Minot Theatre” also deals with an ambiguous relationship, but the two characters—known mainly by the names they put on their work badges in jest, Sissy and Cash—in Malone’s story are young hipster types working together at a movie theater, rather than the frumpy Corinth and her would-be suitor Lloyd. You can throw that distinction aside, though, and spend more time contemplating how two people obviously attracted to one another can get a lot out of their relationship if they don’t pair up.

You also get a lot out of these stories as a reader. Margaret Malone shares with the rest of the writers featured in this collection a real talent for description, with a knack for selecting just the right details at the right time. Here’s how she describes their work:

They are in the dark movie house, theater number two of two. They are supposed to be cleaning up, dumping whatever they find into the thick, black trash bags they drag from row to row, or offering what is left behind to lost and found or each other. What they ditch might be popcorn bags or empty cups, burrito wrappers, wet socks, beer bottles, bike locks, batteries, a flip flop, occasionally a syringe or used condom, and one time a pair of industrial strength black rubber gloves. What they might put in the big cardboard box in the office which is akin to opening their pockets could be glasses, keys, wallets, cash, knit caps, sweatshirts, CDs, scarves, coffee mugs, and once a journal written by a girl that was living in a van with her boyfriend who sold pot outside the supermarket, sometimes he would bite her when they kissed, it said, bite until she bled. They should be sweeping kernels off the floor. But the theater is pretty clean as is and she is tired, out drinking the night before, avoiding going home, avoiding less rumpled sheets and new familiar space that used to be filled with a couch and a boyfriend and his records lining the perimeter of the baseboard, alphabetical and pristine despite a proper shelf, a jagged alphabet trail leading a listener through three walls of living room and one wall of loft. Her boyfriend had liked his own things separate from hers. He did not like to share. An only child until late in life, sharing was just an extension of all the things that eventually went wrong with his family. So she let him.

It’s the eve of Wordstock 2008, so I’ll just give one last congratulations to last year’s batch of finalists before the unveiling of the 2008 finalists tomorrow.

Painting Cats by Deborah DeWit Marchant

2008-11-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

National Cat Day, October 29, was the launch date for Deborah DeWit Marchant's Painting Cats, the book that includes Deb's writing about her approach to painting cats, and reproductions of many of her paintings of cats. Here's some of what went on that day:

Deb's first appearance was on KATU's AM Northwest, with her cat Indie. Click to view.

Then Deb spent the late morning in conversation at KINK FM. You can hear that on their "Wordstock Author Highlights" page.

Deb's evening was spent at Annie Bloom's Books, where lovers of cats and paintings gathered to listen to Deb read and discuss her work. Jim Leisy introduced:

And Deb signed:

Corinth Stands Behind the Counter, Just Beyond Lloyd's Reach

2008-11-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Springsteen’s “Corinth Behind the Counter” opens with a scoop of egg salad transferred on to a piece of toast, then assembled and passed on to Lloyd, your prototypical ’50s lunch counter gourmand.

The bygone era of the drugstore lunch counter is captured perfectly in this story, and that atmosphere in turn is perfect for conveying the frustrated relationship between Lloyd and Corinth, his lunch-counter crush.

Did I say frustrated? But that implies something never stated in the story. It’s testament to Springsteen’s ability to tap into the power of understatement that we can read this story and fully get the psychology of Lloyd, some of which is achieved just by discussing his understanding of the perfectly made egg- or tuna-salad sandwich.

Other things happen in this story. Corinth’s mother dies and she is forced to leave the lunch counter in the hands of her less-than-capable sister, leading to the central drama of the story: Lloyd’s angst.

And if you get nothing else from the story, it should inspire you to appreciate an American classic, as in the case of this reader:

I liked Jennifer Springsteen's "Corinth Behind the Counter" so much, I got right up and made egg salad sandwiches. Enjoy.

Congratulations to Jennifer Springsteen for being awarded third prize in the Wordstock 2007 Short Fiction Competition. Watch this space for the prize winners and finalists for 2008.

Common Errors in English Usage 2nd Edition: It's a book that deserves its reputation

2008-10-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently to name three common errors in English that everyone should learn to avoid. This is an invitation to expound (in a quite bloated way, preferably) and pass judgment and arbitrarily assign extreme importance to things that ultimately could never be ranked in any way. In other words, it was an invitation I could never decline, and it actually wasn't that hard to think of the three: "its" and "it's."

Well, OK, on its face, that's only one error, and a pretty simple one at that. "It's" with an apostrophe can only mean "it is" or "it has." The apostrophe takes the place of the missing letters in this case, just like the apostrophe in "don't" or "can't," so if you are using "it's" with an apostrophe and cannot logically replace it with either "it is" or "it has," then the correct spelling is "its" with no apostrophe. Example:

It's been too long since I spent the day at the seaside.
The maple shed its leaves assiduously throughout the fall afternoon.

I don't know how many times I've been handed a manuscript to edit where the author--literate, intelligent, successful--somehow had this distinction exactly backwards, or at the very least was not up to using the correct spelling more than about three out of five times, say.

But of course there's an excellent reason why "it's" and "its" get misused by capable writers. It's simply that the apostrophe has one other major function in English besides standing in for missing letters. The apostrophe also is used to mark the possessive case, as in "John's books" or "the leaders' conference." The problem, naturally, is that "its" is a possessive pronoun, so the instinct is to want to insert an apostrophe to mark possession. Pronouns are different from nouns, though. We just don't do apostrophes in our possessive pronouns (his, her, your, their) the way we do with our nouns.

So, then, enter common error in English #2: Correctly inserting the apostrophe in a possessive noun. Here's one that I often have to stop and think about, though the basic rule is straightforward: For a singular noun, add apostrophe-s to the end to make it possessive. For a plural noun ending in "s," add only an apostrophe to make it possessive, and for plural nouns not ending in "s" (such as children), add apostrophe-s to the end to make it possessive. Examples:

the boss's desk (singular noun; add apostrophe-s to form the possessive)
the child's bookshelf (singular noun; add apostrophe-s to form the possessive)
a managers' meeting (plural noun ending in "s"; add apostrophe to form the possessive)
the men's room (plural noun not ending in "s"; add apostrophe-s to form the possessive)

So far, so good--but there is one little hitch when it comes to proper nouns. For a proper noun ending in "s," there is an acceptable style that allows for adding just an apostrophe to the name to make it possessive, whether singular or plural. Example:

Paul Brians' excellent book on English usage
(singular proper noun made possessive by adding an apostrophe)
Jacqueline du Pré's recordings of Brahms' cello sonatas
(two singular proper nouns--one made possessive by adding apostrophe-s; the other made possessive by adding an apostrophe)
the Masons' expansive collection of exotic pets
(plural proper noun made possessive by adding an apostrophe)

Of course, the sign hanging in the yard of your neighbor's house probably should have no apostrophe at all; it should just read "The Smiths," I think. That is, I think the sign is short for [This is the house where] The Smiths [live]. But there may be an argument for adding an apostrophe to the end of "Smiths" if you think the sign stands for something like [This is] The Smiths' [house]. I don't think, however, that the case can be made for a sign reading this way: "The Smith's," though surely you will see such signs wherever you may roam.

Fine--that's two errors tied to "its" vs. "it's," but where could the third error to avoid be? It gets a bit trickier, since this is not clear-cut error-correction turf anymore, but consider these two (classic) sentences:

a) The committee reached its decision.
b) The committee reached their decision.

Note, first, that "its," not "it's," is the correct spelling in Example a). That's worth noting because there's my flimsy connection to the its/it's question I'm addressing. But the issue now becomes transmogrified--it's no longer a matter of wrestling with apostrophes and possessive forms; now it's a question of singular vs. plural. And here, I think, is the source of much confusion among native English speakers. It all seems pretty simple when you use sentences like this:

The dog wagged its tail.
The cats ate their dinner.

Baby stuff, of course. "Its" refers to the dog; "their" to the cats. If you mess this up you probably are not a native speaker of English. On the other hand, go back to sentences a) and b) above, and ask yourself what parts of the sentence are missing. Is it a) or b)?:

a) The committee[, acting as a unified whole,] reached its decision.
b) The [members of] the committee reached their decision.

And on this point you need to settle into some comfortable in-between space that decides both can be correct. Now, enlightened, you can go forward knowing you know which one you mean when using the singular (its) or the plural (their).

There is so much more to say about "their" and "they," and the tradition of the "singular they," which has been covered quite thoroughly elsewhere. For now, I'll just take the opportunity to announce that these issues and many others are addressed concisely, accurately, and fairly in Common Errors in English Usage 2nd Edition, which--as of today--is available for ordering and will be shipping in about three weeks. Have fun!

Next Up in The Wordstock Ten: Samantha Hudson's "Reprieve"

2008-10-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

What's a wife to do? Seek a reprieve, I suppose.

And so the wife, Maura, of "Reprieve" arranges for piano lessons for "the Vanden girl," a 14-year-old neighbor named Catherine, each Sunday afternoon. The husband will give the lessons. The music will assimilate with the afternoon air. Maura will lie by the pool.

"Reprieve" is is thus imbued with tremendous atmosphere and meditative quiet. Just barely under the surface, though, the drama is explosive. Maura will not tolerate her husband, and as the years go by does she become attracted to the Vanden girl? If so, it's a neat trick, as the husband fixates on on another possible lover, Daniel Hammond. Whatever the relationship--Catherine as surrogate daughter? Catherine as lost sibling or resurfaced childhood best friend?--that relationship is loaded with significance.

But as soon as I discuss this story, assertions melt away. To even raise the possibility of a physical attraction between Maura and the Vanden girl is preposterous--there's no evidence for it. This story is all about impressions of events, but where the events described are clear, the impressions are likely to be quite different from one reader to the next.

I suppose a small excerpt should be given by way of demonstration. Here's how it starts, our first taste of these three inscrutable characters:

Sundays were what Maura used to call a reprieve. Then, he wasn’t sure how she meant it.

“Peyton,” she’d say, “isn’t it about time for your reprieve?” and he’d shuffle off to the den, where he had begun giving piano lessons to the Vanden girl from a few streets over. Maura had set it up, when the Vanden girl was around fourteen. That first time, Peyton had waited on the piano bench. He’d worn his suit from work even though it was Sunday, but as soon as Maura had pushed the ratty Vanden girl into the room and shut the stained glass parlor doors behind her, he’d known it was unnecessary. The Vanden girl didn’t require suits. She wore shorts, sandals, and a purple halter top. Where did he get that word, halter top? Teaching at the high school had pushed all sorts of unnecessary things into his head, things he ran across unexpectedly and unhappily.

This story sets up perfectly the final two stories in The Wordstock Ten 2007 edition. I'll be writing up those two stories--"Corinth Behind the Counter" and "Minor Theatre"--just in time for the 2008 edition.

Limits of Language - a wealth of information

2008-09-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Swedish linguist, Mikael Parvall, has written a fascinating book about languages for the general public. It is part “Book of Lists,” part “Guinness Book of World Records,” and part "Visual Encyclopedia," and it contains information on over one thousand languages! The subtitle of the book is "almost everything you didn't know you didn't know about language and languages." Parkvall answers questions such as these: Are there native speakers of Klingon? Has there ever been a state with Esperanto as its official language? What is the least useful dictionary ever produced? What is the world's smallest language? Does English have more words than other languages? In what country are people the most polyglot? Can words consist of consonants alone? He answers these questions and many more, providing an illuminating introduction to linguistics that all readers can appreciate and enjoy. Parkvall teaches and does research at Stockholm University, and has authored four other books on linguistics. He has expertise in Pidgin and Creole languages and the historical and geopolitical influences that affected their development.

Painting Cats launches on National Cat Day

2008-09-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Artist Deborah DeWit Marchant's new book of paintings will be in book stores soon. Her first public event will be held on National Cat Day at Annie Bloom's Books, 7832 SW Capitol Highway, October 29 at 7:30pm. Deborah will discuss her book and sign copies. The book features 40 paintings and 21 pages of Marchant's autobiographical writing about cats. Noted literary author and activist, Marge Piercy, wrote the introduction to PAINTING CATS. If you are a cat lover, or appreciate Marchant's realistic, beutiful paintings, you will want to add this book to your collection. Check out more of her work on our site www.wmjasco.com. More public events in the coming months will be announced soon.

The greatest anti-story ever told: "Thor" by Rachel Sims

2008-08-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest movies I know--I guess if I owned movies I’d own it on DVD or something--is My Dinner with Andre. Don’t know it? It’s great! Here’s the story: Two men meet in a restaurant, have dinner, then go home. Now have I got your attention? (I mean, imagine the special features for that one!)

The fact is, though nothing happens in My Dinner with Andre, it’s the one movie I can think of that is closest to being about absolutely everything, such is the conversation that takes place between the two characters. And the writing is so good you sometimes just swim in the dialogue.

And so Rachel Sims’ “Thor” from The Wordstock Ten comes to mind. What happens in “Thor”? A little less than My Dinner with Andre, actually, since Thor invites his friend Nona for dinner, but she ultimately has to cancel. Compared to My Dinner with Andre, we’re short one character and one meal. If it weren’t about all of creation (and all of destruction), “Thor” would be the Seinfeld of short stories, about absolutely nothing.

Thor (Thorbjorn Raimonds, the main character) is obsessed with creation, though he himself only seems capable of destruction. The story begins with Thor surveying the floor of his bedroom upon awakening. The night before, he had taken a pair of shears and cut all his white shirts into strips which now lie in a bedside heap. As we get to know Thor, and his fascination with the making of noodles, the connection seems clear: The long thin strips of shirts are his (ultimately destructive) act in the service of attempting to match his friend Nona’s skill in creating noodles.

It should be mentioned that the prose of “Thor” is refined, restrained even, so that Nona is referred to as Thor’s friend, though Nona as love-interest (the very first sentence tells us Thor is thinking of how “her hair felt too clean when it rustled shinily past her long nose”) is never far beneath the surface. Their level of intimacy is never discussed, however, in favor of other aspects of their relationship. Thor, after all, is the thunder god—a destructive force; while Nona serves as a counterweight goddess of creation. And so the two define one another and are always in one another’s presence. Even when apart from her, we are told Thor holds her in constantly in mind.

And so as the story progresses, focusing primarily on Thor’s thoughts and observations, we begin to realize just how sweeping such thoughts can be. A story that starts with a glimpse of a small act of destruction concludes with the end of everything. The final paragraph of this story worth reading again and again. Writers will pay attention to the delicate treatment of verb tenses and marvel at the poetry invoked by the subjunctive and the present tense; the general reader experiencing this prose more viscerally will feel something like what we used to call profound back when I was in school. Here it is:

Thor sometimes imagined that the end of the world would be quiet and would come on such soft feet that no one would know it had been and gone. He imagined that the end would be a weakly sunny day with a bracing wind from the west, maybe a Saturday or a Monday. He would stand by a sleek kitchen counter and watch as Nona made her noodles, and the radio would be telling a story about how whales sing to each other, and there might be a small person underfoot, one with rustling hair who liked knees more than hugs. It would be a quiet moment when he thinks perhaps the wind has stopped, and looks outside to watch the trees glittering, and still, and is hopeful that things have changed abruptly and that he can go out. It would be a long moment, within the constraints of momenthood, and the walls would glow like the sky, the clouds still running up high where they run. Then the wind would start again, and Thor imagined that he would turn back to Nona’s hands, and their creation. He would turn away from the rustling trees and there would be Nona, and the noodles. But something would have changed, almost imperceptibly, a change all over the world. A tiny change in being, but so profoundly affecting, and outside the sky would keep blowing by. But as Thor imagined it, that would be the end.

“Thor,” I must admit, is a personal favorite in The Wordstock Ten, a collection that has potential personal favorites all over the place.

This story is a great transition into the final three stories of this collection, all of which deal with more defined, “real” characters, and all of them in ambiguous relationships.

"Dessert" by Tina Ontiveros

2008-05-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

The call has gone out for submissions to the next Wordstock Short Fiction competition, but wait! I still haven't finished writing about the last round of finalists. I left off just as I got to "Dessert."

I begin with four questions:

Ever been married?
Ever had a kid?
Ever had sex?
Ever tried all three?

Actually, the fourth one is the only question that really matters in Tina Ontiveros' "Dessert," a story that gets its dramatic juice from its ability to make us married-with-children types squirm.

The set-up for the story seems completely innocent: A couple's daughter is going to attend a friend's birthday party. Watch the tension build, though, as the three of them--mom, dad, and Olive (the child) unwittingly compete to get what they want out of the scenario. You'll have to read the story to see where it goes, but don't be surprised as each scene elevates the drama and builds toward the inevitable, er . . . climax.

Allison: her aim is still true

2008-04-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

Want some big-time exposure in major media? First, it helps to be a pro-war Pentagon general. It's also a good idea to be wrong about a lot of things. That's good for job security. Or, I suppose, you could go the whole hog of setting policy and fixing intelligence to help propagandize the American public, then take your story to the people. You could probably even find a university to hire you, if you've done all that.

On the other hand, you may have been right all along. What do you do then? If you're Allison Hantschel, there's still a spot on the radio dial for you somewhere. Last week it was on "A Critical Ear" with host Andrew Baoill, broadcast from Urbana, Illinois. You can listen to it here.

Doug Feith reviews Allison Hantschel; Allison responds

2008-04-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

At the bottom of Allison Hantschel's review of Doug Feith's new book with a really serious title, War and Decision (which Allison read so we don't have to), she tells us that without mentioning Allison's book by name, Doug does seem to acknowledge its existence:

He does refer sarcastically to people who "view reading the New Yorker as research"

So there's your one-sentence dismissal of Allison's book. Here is Allison's 19-sentence review of Doug's book:

The book proceeds as a list, which I'll paraphrase here:

I was born.

I grew up.

Kind of.

I work at the Pentagon!

Old school liberals aren't pussies! They're hawks! Richard Perle is awesome!

Being a lawyer sucks.

9/11.

I shook the president's hand! I was in a meeting! I wrote a policy paper! Rumsfeld listens to me! The president listens to me! Everybody listens to me!

The president didn't want to go to war, except that he did, and we didn't make him, except that we have enormous influence, which is impossible to resist.

I hate Seymour Hersh.

Colin Powell is an asshole.

The CIA sucks.

WAR!!!!

Acronyms. Operational details. Tom Clancy.

WAR!!!!

Whoa, war sucks.

Here's what Bush screwed up to make the war suck.

Let me teach you my ways, so that you might replicate my phenomenal successes.

I think I can safely say that this is what Sarah Boxer might call "bloggy writing" (Sarah's definition: "It is conversational and reckless, composed on the fly for anonymous intimates"). I can also say I GET IT, and thank you, Allison, for both your book on Feith and for your review of Feith's own book.

Feith's new book is selling briskly, though I don't know why. The good news is that that is new attention being focused on Allison's book this week. Here are some of the places you may read up on the continuing saga of Allison and Doug:

Long-time champion of this book, Spocko
Firedoglake
Daily Kos
Hecate
Lichbabe
Various Posts At First Draft

The sights and sounds of Lewis Lapham

2008-04-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

Here's Lewis Lapham, legendary editor of Harper's and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, in conversation with Harry Kreisler, talking about what he does, and what he talks about is always interesting.

Lewis is the rarest of birds, a celebrity editor--not quite Bennett Cerf on What's My Line celebritydom, but well-known enough to use his name to do dream projects. (Someday I'll post something about Lapham's Quarterly and the art of compiling, where Lapham has directly influenced me.)

Hyphen Alert! The Oregonian spots an error

2008-03-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

There I was last Saturday staring down my morning paper, trying to coerce it into dispensing some real news, when right there on the front page was this headline: "Wait-here for blooper" (Available online with the more-appropriate headline, "Portland bike box rolls out an error: Wait-here for the misused hyphen") The story (I think I can call it that) was a tale of punctuating woe on the streets of Portland, where work crews are busy installing bike boxes at certain intersections around town in an effort to create a safer environment for cyclists.

But . . . holy cow! Look at the picture and notice that something's gone very wrong here. This bike box sports an errant hyphen. To The Oregonian the extra hyphen may as well be an extra chromosome, and it's time to call on some local reporter to phone up Jeff Rubin and tell us, please tell us, that we're not wrong. Jeff doesn't fail us, of course. "Wait-here sign" would be OK, Jeff says, but on its own, "Wait here" should not be hyphenated.

There's no defense for the poor crew that inserted this hyphen (Portland traffic engineer Rob Burchfield insists, "We did not design it that way"). But I would like to point out that the workers did not operate purely out of ignorance. I was struck by their justification for introducing the hyphen into the design: Burchfield tells us that "when the crews went to lay it out, they put the graphic down on the asphalt and they felt like 'wait here' ran together [motorists would puzzle over the instruction to WAITHERE]. They felt like they needed to put something in there so your eyes would see 'wait' and 'here.' " In other words, the crew made an conscious editorial decision to put in a hyphen, and therein, perhaps, is a little salvation in the saga of the catastrophic hyphen.

When it comes to editing, I often tell people that my job is not to make correct calls, but to justify the calls I make. That's an exaggeration, of course--some things are just wrong, but it is a big factor. In this case, I'd like to call for cutting the crew a little slack. They were out there making their own style guide on the fly, developing a rule that said, in effect, "A hyphen may be inserted between words painted on to the road if eliminating the hyphen would make the words run too closely together, causing (possibly) more confusion than the extra hyphen would." To The Oregonian (and, by the way, to Amy Ruiz at the Portland Mercury blog (be sure to read the comment there by Gary Raisman of the Portland Office of Transporation)) I say we cool it on the criticism. It could, after all, have been worse. They could have gone the quotation mark route.

Over at BikePortland.org, commenter Adam questions the whole phraseology: "One of my concerns is that it says 'Wait Here.' I'm concerned that some drivers may stop where there are supposed to and then move forward into the bike box if there are no cyclists in it. It needs to have a sign like many other intersections that says 'stop here on red.'" I don't necessarily agree with Adam that drivers will be confused, but I prefer questioning the content over questioning the style, and his point does remind us all, once again, that painting instructions on roads is quite a bit trickier than it might seem.

Paul Brians' latest appearance in The Boston Globe

2008-03-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

UPDATED BELOW

In her column yesterday, Jan Freeman referred to Paul Brians' advice for the second time in the past six months, which I guess means he's getting to be a regular there, whether she agrees with his assessment or not.

If you, by the way, are not a regular reader of Freeman's column, "The Word," you need to change that. Regardless of how you would like to praise her (She's one of the few great language columnists? She's one of the only great language columnists?), she always good for an enlightening and entertaining assessment of the issue at hand.

Update: As it happens, I'm currently reviewing entries on Paul's web site and comparing them to the book version. I just came across, quite by coincidence, a revised entry for "one of the only," which is far less conclusive in its judgment than the version Jan Freeman found when she consulted in the book:

Although it has recently become much more popular, the phrase “one of the only” bothers some of us in contexts in which “one of the few” would traditionally be used. Be aware that it strikes some readers as odd. “One of only three groups that played in tune” is fine, but “one of the only groups that played in tune” is more likely to cause raised eyebrows.

If Jan had referred to this updated version on "Common Errors" web site, she still might have quibbled with Paul over the use of "recently," as she cites a source from the 1770s, but she would have found Paul in his more natural stance of presenting a widespread, acceptable use and then pointing out why that usage may cause some to bristle.

National Grammar Day's Martha Brockenbrough reads Paul Brians; gets the wrong message

2008-03-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Nathan Bierma points out that Martha Brockenbrough, who serves as grammar guru for Microsoft's Encarta web site, where she writes a column called "Grumpy Martha's Guide to Grammar and Usage," endorsed March 4 as National Grammar Day. According to Nathan,

. . . she takes Elvis to task -- is no one sacred? -- for singing "I'm all shook up" instead of the proper "all shaken up."

Raise your hand if you prefer this correction. That's what I thought.

Now you can raise your hand if you recognize that this has been addressed by Paul Brians:

Elvis Presley couldn’t have very well sung “I’m all shaken up,” but that is the grammatically correct form. “Shook” is the simple past tense of “shake,” and quite correct in sentences like “I shook my piggy bank but all that came out was a paper clip.” But in sentences with a helping verb, you need “shaken”: “The quarterback had shaken the champagne bottle before emptying it on the coach.”

Last year I used this as a jumping off point for the Common Errors in English Usage Calendar entry for January 8, Elvis' birthday. The difficult-to-read caption you see on that page is this:

His unpopular act included grammatically correct hits of the fifties, all with harp accompaniment: “All Shaken Up,” “Whom Do You Love,” “There Is a Whole Lot of Shaking Going On,” etc.

I didn't know that Martha Brockenbrough would take home the wrong message from that, but she ought to have at least figured out the sarcasm by the time she got to Dylan's birthday, covering Brians' entry on ain't:

That's a little hard to read. Here's Paul's entry:

“Ain’t” has a long and vital history as a substitute for “isn’t,” “aren’t” and so on. It was originally formed from a contraction of “am not” and is still commonly used in that sense. Even though it has been universally condemned as the classic “mistake” in English, everyone uses it occasionally as part of a joking phrase or to convey a down-to-earth quality. But if you always use it instead of the more “proper” contractions you’re sure to be branded as uneducated.

And my caption reads like this:

And from his catalogue of sixties hits: “I Am Not Going to Work on Maggie’s Farm Anymore.”

The point, Martha, was that his act was unpopular; that is, there's a time to rock and a time to write formally. Your intrusions into our times to rock are not any more appreciated than our harp-playing entertainer's.

Geoffrey Pullum weighs in, pointing out that other of the King's hits could be subject to Martha's edit:

Treat Me Nicely
Do Not
Love Me Tenderly
I Cannot Help Falling in Love
Do You Not Think It Is Time?
I Do Not Care If The Sun Does Not Shine
It Is Not Any Big Thing (But It Is Growing)
Is That Not Loving You, Baby?

And by email points out that a Fats Waller hit could have been written by Martha as "I am not misbehaving," to which I say, "Your feet are too big," anyone? That's what I thought.

Upcoming Events for Barbara Blossom Ashmun

2008-03-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

Spring is on the way; a few events for Portland's favorite garden writer are in order:

Thursday March 6, 7 p.m.
Beaverton City Library , 12375 SW Fifth Street, Beaverton, OR 97005, Garden Retreats: Creating a Tranquil Garden, slide show and lecture with Q & A, followed by book signing, Free event.

Saturday April 5, 10:30 a.m.
Smith & Hawken, 26 NW 23 Place, Dreaming Up a Garden from the Heart, lecture and reading from Married to My Garden and Q & A, 10 minutes, Cost: $15, each attendee gets a signed copy of Married to My Garden. To register, contact 503-274-9561.

Tuesday April 8, 7 p.m.
Forest Grove Library, 2114 Pacific Ave Forest Grove, OR 97116. Garden Retreats: Creating a Tranquil Garden, slide show, lecture and Q & A followed by book signing and sales. Free event.

Common Errors in American Holidays

2008-02-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

Over there at Amazon, a reviewer has this comment on the February 18, 2008, page for the Common Errors in English Usage calendar:

Maybe in 2009, a new entry could be the error in the placement of the apostrophe for President's Day on the entry for Monday, February 18, 2008. The common usage is Presidents' Day. How disappointing for a calendar touted as "Common Errors" in English Usage has a common error of its own! Other than that annoyance, I have really enjoyed the calendar.

Which is the kind of comment one has to admire for its willingness to jump right into the thick of things, getting in on the Common Errors action. Logically speaking, of course, the day honors all the U.S. presidents, not just one, so therefore the absolutely correct way of styling this holiday requires a well-placed apostrophe following that final "s": "Presidents'."

I like that logic so much that I've decided to take the commenter's advice and label February 16, 2009, as "Presidents' Day" in next year's edition of the calendar. Using my Google Book search, I see that almost every children's book available styles the holiday as a plural possessive, and it is probably a more acceptable way of presenting the day in front of a crowd likely to appreciate the Common Errors in English Usage calendar. Chalk one up for the Amazon commenter and for the wonders of Web 2.0, which allows for such dynamic exchange of ideas. Yay!

But if you detect a certain lack of embarrassment for having brought this up, if you sense that I'm not contrite about having made the mistake of misplacing this apostrophe, let's just say your intuition has not failed you.

I know I'm given to citing Geoff Pullum a fair amount, but I figure the co-author of the biggest, most revered book on English grammar available ought to know a thing or two about how to approach usage. Here is Geoff discussing the style of another holiday, Patriots' Day (celebrated in the state of Massachusetts):

Why are they all grammatical?

Patriots Day uses the plural noun patriots as an attributive modifier in a singular noun phrase with the head noun day, as in weapons cache or activities center.
Patriot’s Day uses the genitive singular noun patriot’s as the determiner in a singular noun phrase with day as head, as in my MTV, or in Jeeves's description of his profession, gentleman's gentleman.
Patriots’ Day uses the genitive plural noun patriots’ as the determiner in a singular noun phrase with day as head, as in workers' pay or ladies' room.

You would like to think that even Geoff is wrong, though. You'd like to think that there really is a correct way to do these holidays, that you could at least look at the most official source there could be for it, something super official-looking such as a Federal Holidays Web Page. Maddeningly, the most official-looking government page on the matter lists the holiday with its still-most-official title: Washington's Birthday. Over at the post office, where they take their holidays seriously, the singular possessive form is used, though it is set next to the "Washington's Birthday" designation, so it's possible they're just doing this to be consistent with that.

Wikipedia tells us that the plural form, either possessive or not, is currently the norm, but

President's Day is a misspelling when used with the intention of celebrating more than one individual; however, as an alternate rendering of "Washington's birthday," or as denominating the commemoration of the presidency as a singular institution, it is a proper spelling. Indeed, this spelling was considered for use as the official federal designation by Robert McClory, a congressman from Illinois who was tasked with getting the 1968 federal holiday reorganization bill through the House Judiciary Committee.

Wikipedia's justification for using the singular possessive form varies from Pullum's justification for "Patriot's Day," but there's enough justification, I would argue, to style it that way if you want. Plenty of edited material can be found in books to justify the singular possessive. Indeed, The Starr Report prefers it when detailing the Clinton/Lewinsky break-up date in 1998, possibly the most important Presidents' Day event of the past quarter century!

I myself have been wildly inconsistent. In the 2006 and 2007 editions of the calendar I styled the holiday as a plural possessive. Aesthetically, I prefer the singular possessive, and I think that is what took hold of me when I decided to do it that way for 2008. I figured no one would care. Silly me.

Have you heard the one about the farmer's daughter? The farmer's wife? The farmer himself?

2008-02-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

[I will return to writing my comments on all the WS10 stories. I believe this is where I had left off after Pamela Rentz's "Social Security."]

MATTHEW KORFHAGE'S "Ours, All of It"
Here's a writing assignment for you: Tell an American story, but not just a story taking place in America, with a display of qualities you perceive to be American. These qualities may include fierce independence, such as a Hammett/Chandler/MacDonald detective; they may include charlatanism, such as a Hawthorne villain; or a twisted spiritualism, such as you might find in an O'Connor story. You may imbue your characters with any number of these or other traits you may consider unique to the American psyche--aspirations to great wealth and fame, ambiguous puritanism, an inclination toward the metaphysical, distrust of large institutions. Any of these characteristics (and many others) would serve your purpose, if you want to populate your story with events and characters that tell an American Story.

But that's not the assignment. The assignment is to, in 5000 words or less, create a story that is not just an exemplary American story, but a story that actually is America. You want to both convey America and include America. You cannot tell this story without presenting America as a character.

What would you write?

I put all this out to suggest a way to think about Matthew Korfhage's "Ours, All of It," because I think that this is the task that Korfhage has set before himself.

The result is difficult, if not impossible, to describe. Here is a farmer with his wife and daughter traveling in their truck, on their way to deliver their harvest. That's really about it, and it all sounds so innocent, so archetypal, until we learn the grain they haul is headed for the trash, essentially, for this is the grain the farmer gets paid not to grow, or to dump should its introduction to the market create a glut.

We all know about this arrangement, how food production is controlled in this country in order to prevent gluts in the market, in order to protect prices. But we also intuit just how painfully un-American this feels to us, having been raised to understand that hard work (and perhaps only hard work) will be rewarded. But the America we live in is nothing if not schizophrenic; I am always intrigued by the rhetoric we hold dearest: We are a free people, Our markets are free, government is not the solution but the problem, we defeated communism. These are our words of comfort, but Korfhage's family farm is real, and the way it flies in the face of something we call the American Dream is all too familiar.

I have to admit that the first time I picked up this story, I saw the title as humorous, grabbing me the way, say, a Moss Hart title might. Then I started reading and was just lit up by the dazzling prose. By the time I got through this mini-masterwork, though, reflecting on the huge gap this country has between its ideals and its realities, knowing that every bit of it belongs to us, I wasn't laughing.

That dazzling prose? Here's the first paragraph:

So suppose the sky that day looked like America, with piled-high clouds wind-mown into furrows of cotton and cropdusting and projected against a luminous, gaping bluescreen firmament, the sparse greens and browns of trees and houses cutting paper-thin relief into the bowed expanse, all of it seeming to scream out the tragic possibilities of wide open spaces even as the sky tucked and buckled down to the land supporting it; and suppose that in the middle of all that America, the one on the ground and not the one above it, there was a mammoth, red, rust-mottled and beveled-edged Ford F-250 going sixty, sixty-five, seventy on a ribbon of blue-black asphalt hugging flush against the low, imperceptible Midwestern lists and sways, and that inside the pick-up there were one father, one mother, and one daughter, each one pale-skinned and sun-freckled under a dull, brown head of hair. So say there were three.

Allison Hantschel's Century

2008-02-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, I did receive my copy of Allison Hantschel's It Doesn't End with Us, her new book on the history of The Daily Cardinal, University of ~~Washington's~~ Wisconson's [thanks jon in comments!] 100+ year-old student newspaper. Having finished it now, I have to say it didn't meet my expectations. That's a good thing.

If you haven't read it yet—and honestly, I don't know why you wouldn't at least have it on your list—you may have some pre-conceived notions of how a book like this would read. There would be lots of inside information on the University of Wisconsin, it would be filled with stories vaguely familiar to the newspaper staff, fleshed out in ways that would be interesting to Cardinal staffers. It would, in short, be niched out enough that casual passersby would not miss much by ignoring it.

Books are never that simple, though, and even the most obscure tales may have meaningful surprises within. I would argue, though, that Allison's book is not obscure in any way, intentionally or otherwise. It wears its "I-am-significant-beyond-the-particulars-I-describe" heart on its sleeve.

Right off the bat, implications trump events of the story. Beginning at the beginning, we learn of William Wesley Young, the college student who came to the University of Wisconsin from the east coast in the late 19th century to found The Daily Cardinal in 1892. Enter Big Theme #1: Buck the system, just make it happen no matter what. Young establishes the Cardinal as a completely independent student operation, setting the tone for its history by refusing to go to the University for money (a rarity, we learn, for college papers then and now). And therein is Big Theme 2: Be a maverick, go independent.

The paper gets its start, then, right around the turn of the 20th century, and this book reveals much about the American college student experience over the last hundred or so years. And there's another Big Idea at play: The significance of all this goes far beyond the confines of the Cardinal office; there's always a larger historical context for these events.

A pivotal and particularly engaging story in the Cardinal's history is that of Dick Davis, the would-be editor-in-chief. Davis is of a type in the paper's history: He is an intellectual with a strong moral sense. In a way, his inability to engage the trivial (throughout this book, the Trivial is played primarily by The Sports Pages, though there are other manifestations, such as the campus fraternities) is his undoing. There is a coup of sorts the minute Davis is seated as editor. Allison tells the story dramatically (she always does), and as you learn of Davis' pain and anger over the situation—and as you feel his ultimate frustration—another undercurrent of the story surfaces: In current parlance, we call it the red state/blue state divide. In other circumstances we might think of it as a classic struggle of brain vs. brawn, or (for Joyce fans) Shem and Shawn. In the end, Davis, the intellectual, loses his position to a more fraternity-friendly Roger LeGrand.

As the Cardinal's century moves forward from there, we see these themes come back again and again, each time with a bit different twist to them due to the larger context of shifts in the American landscape. Particularly during the Vietnam War, the Cardinal struggles mightily as it tries to adjust its moral/intellectual self to the demands of times (and, like every other American institution, it comes up short; read the book for details). World wars and imperial wars are fought, technology advances and changes everything, the middle class expands and college enrollments go up, and through it all we hear the dramatic tales of how this plays out for The Daily Cardinal as the paper itself struggles to stay afloat, changing with the times.

In the end, It Doesn't End with Us is a sweeping story of what it has meant to be a college student in America for all these years, and a reminder that surviving those years means not taking the system for granted, going it alone, keeping the bigger picture in mind, and confronting impulses of the body and impulses of the intellect, if never quite resolving any of this.

And did I mention that Allison's writing style is a real kick in the pants? It is.

Deborah DeWit Marchant at Powell's

2008-01-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

Deborah DeWit Marchant, celebrated artist and photographer with two books – Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life and In the Presence of Books – presents Inspiration: finding the muse through books, art and writing at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, January 28th at Beaverton Powell's, as part of the Oregon Writers Colony Presents series.

Oregon Writers Colony Presents is a series of workshops for and about writers and writing, held the fourth Monday of each month from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at Powell's Books Cedar Hills Crossing and Beaverton. Authors talk about the craft of writing, nonfiction or fiction. Free and open to the public.

Awaiting spring with Barbara Blossom Ashmun

2008-01-10T12:16:00.000-08:00

Seems impossible that we can start planning for the spring already, but early-bird Barbara Blossom Ashmun, author of Married to My Garden, is getting ready for it with two upcoming events in Portland:

Friday February 15, 3:30 p.m., lecture and slide Show, Dressing Up Your Garden with Art, Yard Garden & Patio Show, Oregon Convention Center.

Saturday February 23, 2 p.m., lecture and slide show, Designing My Garden of 20 Years, Portland Home & Garden Show, Portland Expo Center.

Hey there, Georgy Boy

2007-12-19T14:34:00.000-08:00

I agree with Mark Liberman and Bill Poser: I don't understand the success of Bushisms as a cottage industry, given the mundane nature of seeking out slips of the tongue—many of which any of us could make—compared to the fascinating and important task of calling out truly nefarious deeds. In fact, in putting together Untidy, I made a point of dismissing a similar criticism of Rumsfeld early on in the collection (using Geoff Pullum's perfectly stated "No foot in mouth").

But that was until I discovered the George W Bush Singers. Part Seekers, Young Caucasians, or Lawrence Welk Singers, these guys bring it all home, I think, with a post-modern twist to a pretty tired gag: what they do works just as well as a parody of a bygone era of popular music as it does as a knock on Bush's challenged syntax. Their forte is juxtaposing layered harmonies with amazingly bizarre lyrics, all composed by George W Bush himself. It's the most surreal call-and-response you'll see. Here is their hit "4000 Hours":

Now, what would happen if you worked in the opposite direction, taking something formally structured like academic study and placing it in an free-wheeling atmosphere such as a blog? Perhaps you would end up with something also pretty hilarious, such as Far from the Madding Gerund.

I have, by the way, certainly logged in at least 4000 hours between working on that book and otherwise reading Language Log. I think the country is better for it, so I'll go ahead and count that as the "service to my country" GWB was referring to.

Married to My Garden featured in The Oregonian

2007-12-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

“This one is about how she was romanced by her garden, with all the ups and downs of any great love. With insight, she tells her story, using descriptions and metaphors to make the journey one that most anyone can relate to.”

So says The Oregonian’s garden columnists Kym Pokorny in her feature on winter reading to transport you to the garden.

Where have all the calendars gone?

2007-12-12T12:35:00.000-08:00

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UPDATE: The 2009 Calendar is available to preview and order here.
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UPDATE: The calendar seems to have sold out at Amazon, and we have told Amazon we cannot ship orders to them for this calendar, but as of this update, their message is that the calendar is "temporarily" unavailable. Please be advised that Amazon will not be able to fill any more orders, unless they find some (unknown to us) source for the calendars.
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It's a happy day here at William, James & Company. That is, it's a fine day if you can rejoice over the success of the 2008 edition of the Common Errors in English Usage desk calendar. For the first time in its three-year history, we have officially sold out our run.

But let's look at this news from the other side. Suppose you had been hoping to do something like, you know, actually BUY the calendar, maybe GIVE it as a GIFT in the coming holiday season. Maybe not such good news, in that case.

And yet hope springs eternal. If you are seeking this calendar, you have a few options available. Just because we cannot fill any more orders for this item does not mean that, for example, AMAZON cannot. In fact, at least for the time being, they can.

But suppose by the time you are reading this that Amazon shows the calendar as sold out? Barnes & Noble, in their infinite wisdom, has stocked its own private-label edition of this calendar in their stores. Perhaps you could try calling your local Barnes & Noble store to see if the calendar is still available there (You can use this ISBN to help the clerk search inventory: 978-0-7607-9347-3). You may likewise call your other favorite local bookstore and see if they can order the calendar through their distributor (in that case, try this ISBN: 978-59028-195-6).

Other possibilities exist for finding online vendors for the calendar, should Amazon fail you. You could Google the phrase 2008 common errors in english usage calendar and try clicking on some of the results.

We're happy the calendar has sold so well, of course, but we are not happy for any inconvenience this may have caused. But let's not dwell on that; let's just call it an opportunity for our customers to be resourceful. Isn't the prize more enjoyable, after all, when you've had to work for it?

2007-12-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

The very busy Deborah DeWit Marchant will appear from 1–2:30 p.m. on Sunday, 9 December, at Friends of the Library Store. She will sign copies of her new book, In the Presence of Books, with introduction and text by PNW poet Kim Stafford. There will likely be some copies of Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life there also.

Friends of the Library Store is located in Central Library in downtown Portland: 801 SW 10th Avenue in Portland.

Watching the Knife: Pamela Rentz’s “Social Security”

2007-12-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

If you were paying attention in your creative writing class, you learned about the principle of “Chekhov’s gun,” which states, essentially, that if you show a pistol on the mantel in act one, it had better be fired in act three. For a neat variation on that, how about we coin “Rentz’s knife”? That’s the principle that states if a knife is slipped into a pantleg, see to it that a potential revolution is at hand.

Now let’s throw in another maxim, something attributed to Ronald Reagan (and now often quoted by Ron Paul, the Internet’s favorite presidential candidate, though lately apparently usurped by—yikes!—Romney): The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

Pamela Rentz’s story in The Wordstock Ten “Social Security,” then, may be the only short story in the universe inspired by both Anton Chekhov and Ronald Reagan (Hello REAGAN AND CHEKHOV googlers! Thank you for stopping by).

The setting for all this could not be more perfect; here is Lewis Cedar Creek, and American Indian, living in a godforsaken community—presumably a reservation—that offers no hope for the future or anything resembling The American Dream. Instead, hope is represented by the government officials who come through once or twice a month, announcing, I suppose, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” So it is that the natives overrun by the U.S. government are now at the mercy of that same government.

Lewis Cedar Creek’s frustration with trying to cash a social security check becomes the center of the story, but the appearance of a knife shoved into a pantleg creates the dramatic possibility of an on-the-spot uprising. You need to read the story to see how it all turns out.

The story of the American Indian everybody knows, but the real star of the story—in spite of my above ramblings—is Pamela Rentz’s prose and pitch-perfect dialogue. So let’s leave off with the opening of the story as a sampling of her talent:

ON THE FIRST OF EVERY MONTH, Lewis Cedar Creek, a gray-haired Karuk Indian with caterpillar eyebrows and deep creases in his forehead that formed a stern expression even when none was intended, stepped out onto what was left of his front porch. He shucked his sweatshirt and tossed it back inside before the screen door shut behind him. The morning was a sizzler and only going to get worse. The brown grass curled against the dirt in defeat.

He used a wire twist to fasten the screen door, bolted the trailer door, then slid a rusted sheet of metal from Gerry Charles’ smoke house in front of the door. He attached the metal to the door with a heavy chain and a large padlock he’d taken from an abandoned truck right at the time the world tilted and the looters became the fortunate ones. The padlock was busted, but the sight of it discouraged the curious.

Pamela Rentz’s “Social Security” was awarded 2nd prize in the competition. Congratulations to her.

"The Creek" in Porland Monthly Magazine

2007-12-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

The December issue of Portland Monthly is on sale everywhere, which means that Joshua Michael Riedel's "The Creek" is getting some much-deserved attention, plus it is now accompanied by a great Jillian Tamaki illustration. Of course, the story is also the first story featured in The Wordstock Ten, where it appears with nine other fine stories. Read more about the first three of those stories here, where more write-ups will appear soon.

Deborah DeWit Marchant at St. Johns Bookstore

2007-12-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

Celebrated Oregon artist and photographer Deborah DeWit Marchant will appear at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 5 December, at St. Johns Books. She will sign copies of her new book, In the Presence of Books, with introduction and text by PNW poet Kim Stafford.

St. Johns Books is located at 8622 N. Lombard Street in Portland.

A change of pace for The Wordstock Ten: Jacob Aiello’s “Call Me Ishmael”

2007-11-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

I’d be tempted to say that the first two stories in The Wordstock Ten are stories of heartbreak. In a way, are not all coming-of-age stories really loss-of-innocence stories? And is loss of innocence not the ultimate heartbreak?

If that’s the case, then a story of return to innocence ought to be a heart-healing one, but in fact the premise is false—there is heartbreak and heart-healing in both rediscovery and in loss of innocence. Jacob Aiello’s “Call Me Ishmael” is exemplary. It’s a story of an incomplete man made whole. I should reach end of this piece in full rejoice, so why is my heart in my throat?

No spoilers ahead, but here are the conditions of “Call Me Ishmael”: The protagonist, a family man in need of a healing experience, solicits a prostitute for (non-sexual) favors that will help him put to rest a demon of his own past with his own mother as he moves forward in his relationship with his own son. I hope that is a both sufficiently vague and enticing synopsis.

There are great touches everywhere: the whale you expect to encounter from the story’s title shows up on the first page of not Melville, but of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories. The opening scene, a completely seedy street encounter with the prostitute, moves to a surreal, almost-comic, hotel scene with that prostitute, to the final act of supreme innocence. The story moves with ease from scene to scene to wash away any ambivalence you may have felt about the protagonist.

To put it another way, the hero acts out the tenet expressed in Edward Albee’s memorable line, uttered by Jerry in “The Zoo Story”: “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.” There’s a very short distance the protagonist travels at the end of the story, to simply read to his child a favorite story from his own childhood, but the events preceding that simple act lend all the significance in the world to that final tableau.

Barbara Ashmun at Powells books

2007-11-19T13:06:00.000-08:00

Barbara Ashmun will present a writer's life: hard work, Lucky breaks and connections at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, Oregon at 7:00 p.m. on Nov. 26, as part of the Oregon Writers Colony Presents series.

Barbara is the author of six books, including Married to My Garden and Garden Retreats: Creating an Outdoor Sanctuary (Chronicle Books, 2000). She writes a weekly garden column for the Portland Tribune, and has written for many garden magazines, including Fine Gardening and Better Homes & Gardens.

Oregon Writers Colony Presents is a series of workshops for and about writers and writing, held the fourth Monday of each month from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at Powell's Books Cedar Hills Crossing and Beaverton. Authors talk about the craft of writing, nonfiction or fiction. Free and open to the public.