Weekend miscellany

Item: Tomorrow is the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Joseph Haydn, and as I crouch over the computer in the basement, I’m listening to the Opus 77 string quartets. Listen to the sublime second movement of Opus 72, No. 2 in F major, this weekend if you have a chance; if you are not moved to admiration, you have a heart of stone.

Item: Earlier this week I attended my first tweet-up, in which people linked to The Baltimore Sun by Twitter gathered at The Windup Space, a gallery/bar in the Station North Arts district (with a vacant building on one side and a demolished one on the other, suggesting that Station North remains a work in progress).

I met @MinistryOfBacon and @SpamSpam, among others. The former was impressed by my evaluation of the superiority of bacon over sausage: with bacon, you know what you’re eating. There was also a subsequent mention on Facebook that Owl Meat,* the indefatigable commenter on Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large blog, had encountered me there. I myself was unaware of the honor, not recognizing any of his many personae. Or perhaps he was just having me on at Facebook. Owl Meat, Internet Man of Mystery.**

Item: Snark cropped up this week on Ms. Large’s blog when regular contributor John Lindner unveiled his lack of enthusiasm for the cuisine — if that’s the word we want — at Looney’s bar. Someone appropriated Michael Gray’s name to post a patently false comment. When Mr. Gray objected, someone signing as “Ellen” responded:

For someone who prides himself on his writing style and likes to lob scuds at other's writing ("prattle"), your last post was an English teacher's nightmare.

"Just because of a few obnoxious, childish buffoons" shouldn't be it's own sentence.

Everyone is a legend in their own mind.

Anyone who has leapt with delight on my typos and solecisms will recognize the hazard people run when they set themselves up to comment on other people’s grammar and usage. Others’ writing and its own sentence would surely have been preferable, and while I have loosened up considerably on everyone ... their constructions, I’m not sure that “Ellen” and those English teachers twitching in their sleep would grant the same latitude.

I am sure, however, that legend in his own mind is a damnable cliche.

The snarker snarked is a recurring theme on the Internet.

Item: Among the events of the week to come is something less than a tweet-up but nonetheless promising: the 2009 Abell Symposium, "The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?," sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. This will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Westminster Hall (519 West Fayette Street, Baltimore) on the University of Maryland Baltimore campus. Among the luminaries on the panel will be Monty Cook, editor of The Sun, and Tim Franklin, his immediate predecessor. I plan to show up, and I hope that you will, too.


*Owl Meat Gravy in full reference, though the cognomen varies depending on the subject he addresses.

**Yes, another pop culture allusion.

Know your U.S. Presidents

A correction today from the Times Observer of Warren, Pa.:

An errant classified "personal" ad which appeared in Thursday's Times Observer has drawn the attention of law enforcement officials.

A person from Warren placed the ad, which apparently alludes to the wish that President Obama meet an untimely end by linking him with four assassinated presidents. The ad representative didn't make the connection among the four other presidents mentioned [emphasis added] and mistakenly allowed the ad to run.

Upon realizing the mistake early Thursday morning, the ad was immediately discontinued and the identity of the person who placed the ad was turned over to Warren City Police as per newspaper policy. The local police department forwarded the information to federal authorities, as per department policy.

The Times Observer apologizes for the oversight.

The ad — thank you, Mr. Romenesko — read: “May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!"

The grit in the oyster

I can’t help myself; I’ve been a copy editor for too long. When I read for amusement, I notice things that go awry, and they stick in my mind.

I recently read, and mainly enjoyed, Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Hendry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. It was a refreshing, somewhat novelistic survey of the writers of the Concord circle.

But Martin Van Buren was not the incumbent president in the election of 1852, and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, not April 19, and noticing these slips in the text leaves me wondering how many other, unnoticed errors it might harbor.

This week’s book was Daniel Mark Epstein’s Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries. Looking at Lincoln and his administration through the perspective of John Nicolay and John Hay (and William Osborn Stoddard, about whom I had previously been unaware) was informative both about Lincoln’s character and his management of his administration. Mr. Epstein’s book is also gracefully written and insightful.

Still, I doubt that Hay was the bridegroom at Nicolay’s wedding and suspect that he was instead the best man.

I sat with my son in the October sunlight last year at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill, with a glass of McHenry beer and a plate of oysters on the half shell. That is nearly as good as life gets. The oysters were a little gritty, which did not erase the joy of the day, but it would have been a keener pleasure without the grit.

I admire and enjoy the work of Ms. Cheever and Mr. Epstein, but my pleasure would have been uncorrupted if someone — say a copy editor — had gone through their texts on the alert for the mishaps that befall even the best writers.

'White' is also an ethnicity

The nomination to the Supreme Court of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has generated a quantity of chatter about race, little of it edifying.

Tom Tancredo, a Republican and former congressman from Colorado, has been widely quoted: “If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case ... which is from my point of of view anyway ... nothing more than a ... Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that's going to convince me and a lot of other people that it's got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’ What does that tell you?”*

It tells me something about Mr. Tancredo, but not much about the issue of race.

Let’s refresh the perspective: George W. Bush appointed two middle-aged white men to the Supreme Court.* White is as much an ethnic marker as black or Hispanic — particularly since demographic trends point to a future in which all three groups will be minorities in the U.S. population.

Given that that future is near at hand, it would be a good idea to abandon the practice of saying that ethnicity is an issue only when African-Americans and Latinos are involved. White is also an ethnicity, even if the news media and the commentators are not used to thinking in those terms.



*The quoted material is taken from Politico.com. It is possible that it’s a little garbled, but it is also plausible that Mr. Tancredo sometimes gets his feet tangled in his own syntax.

**It would be odious to identify middle-aged white men with a particular political party.

Things not to give a fig for

Not to care a fig, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, refers to the fruit as “something of little or no value.” Or perhaps it suggests the Spanish fico, which was the popular term in Shakespeare’s time “for an obscene gesture of contempt made by thrusting the thumb (representing the male sex organ) between the first and second fingers (representing the female).” Choose the sense you prefer.

Item: Archie is marrying Veronica

I’m sorry, but does anyone born since the Truman administration care? And aren’t those two collecting Social Security by now and living in a facility that prepares food that does not require chewing?

Item: The Scripps National Spelling Bee

Somehow it does not surprise that our national competition celebrating literacy is devoted to rote memorization rather than reading or thinking.

Item: Jon and Kate’s marriage is in trouble

A couple with eight children who have allowed themselves to be presented to the public in a reality TV show are starting to show some strain. Who’d’a thunk?

Item: Chris Brown is in trouble again

Don’t know his music, don’t care to know it. Didn’t watch his YouTube defense of the accusation the he beat up his girlfriend. Not edified by his latest contretemps. The world of celebrity news coverage appears to consist largely of annoying people who just won’t go away.

Item: Fox News

Comment would be superfluous.


Readers: For your part: Suggestions would be welcome on (a) expressions comparable to not give a fig for or (b) additional items not to give a fig for.

Lure a reader, get a book

A limited-time offer for fans of You Don’t Say:

Introduce five friends to this blog, and I will send you a free book.

The catches:

I want the names of the new readers, your attestation that they have not previously read You Don’t Say, and the titles of at least two posts they have read all the way through.

Four books are up for grabs. The first person to meet the goal gets to choose which. After that, the range of choice narrows progressively.

Offer ends June 6.

These are the prize books:

Mardy Grothe, i never metaphor i didn’t like: a comprehensive compilation of history’s greatest analogies, metaphors, and similes

Ralph Keyes, I Love It When You Talk Retro

Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

David Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

You Don’t Say will bear the expenses of postage and handling only for locations in the United States and Canada. Offer not valid to employees of You Don’t Say or relatives of employees of You Don’t Say. Cannot be combined with any other offer.

Do you know where Puerto Rico is?

Blame the McKinley administration.

Coming to imperialism just as it was passing its high-water mark, the United States, which had previously grabbed the Hawaiian Islands, picked a fight over Cuba with the ever-decaying Spanish Empire. Cuba got independence, and the United States got Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

That was during a few months in 1898. We granted independence to the Philippines after the Second World War, but we held on to Guam and Puerto Rico.

Since 1917, by statute, people born in Puerto Rico are citizens of the United States. That is why an anonymous comment earlier today is — in part — spot on:

Another tidbit: Where's the Baltimore Sun copy desk when you need it?

From Alternet this morning:

A google search for "Sotomayor" and "immigrant parents" brings up 10 pages of results (including over 2,000 news pieces like this one, from the Baltimore Sun, which describes Obama's pick to replace retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter as having been "raised in a Bronx, N.Y., housing project by her Puerto Rican immigrant parents...")

Fun fact: Puerto Rico is part of the United States!

Two things:

(1) The error of calling people immigrants if they have come to the mainland from Puerto Rico is stubbornly persistent and likely represents the limited education and cultural understanding of some journalists.

(2) I think that the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun may in fact have been on duty last night, because the text I read in this morning’s print edition, in the article by Peter Wallsten and Richard Simon of the Tribune Washington Bureau, refers to Sotomayor’s “personal background — raised in a Bronx, N.Y., housing project by Puerto Rican parents.”

Apologies to the Klingons

Some time back, I made a snarky remark about Star Trek fans who had undertaken to translate the Bible into Klingon. Now, thanks to a new book by Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (Spiegel & Grau, 342 pages, $26), I see that I, not they, was misguided.

Ms. Okrent became fascinated with the visionaries — and cranks — who grew frustrated with the irregularities and illogicalities of the natural languages and sought to develop a pure, precise, regular, logical, international tongue. Most of them failed, as a look at the 500 artificial languages in her appendix will readily illustrate. And the 500 are only a partial listing.

You will want to travel with her to that strange crossroad where science and art and ambition and the quirky human personality collide.

The effort she describes is fascinating. An early example is a 17th-century member of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, whose Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language attempts in its six hundred pages “a hierarchical categorization of everything in the universe.” Because to have exact meanings, one must be able to classify meanings. Wilkins’s language came to nothing, but his exhaustive taxonomy prefigured the thesaurus of Peter Roget.

Another effort at logic was mounted in the 20th century by James Cooke Brown, the inventor of Loglan, which attempts to give each word a single, unambiguous meaning. Like Wilkins’s classifications, Brown’s language is exhaustive, as is its schismatic offshoot Lojban. The problem is that the attempt to arrive at single, unambiguous statements requires such extensive qualification, that it is virtually impossible, Ms. Okrent found, even for adepts to conduct a conversation in the language.

Perhaps the most successful artificial language is Esperanto, the creation of Ludwick Zamenhof, which is a kind of stripped-down generic Romance language whose devotees aspire to achieve international understanding and peace through its use. Though it has fallen short of its ambitious goal, there are large groups of people who use Esperanto, and even, Ms. Okrent found, people for whom it is a native tongue. One of those she encountered is Kim Henriksen, an accordion-playing Esperanto rock musician.

But even Esperanto, she finds, develops colloquialisms and minor irregularities, just like the natural languages, as people use it. The dream of a pure, regular, logical language is ever elusive.

Oh yes, Klingon, the creation of the linguist Marc Okrand. The little band of fans or hobbyists — call them what you will — who speak and write Klingon, who translated Hamlet into that language and who are working on the Bible won Ms. Okrent’s surprised respect. She attended a conference of speakers and passed the beginner’s exam in the language. And then there was this scene at the hotel:

“I looked around and saw, near the reception desk, a group of glossy-toothed ‘mundanes’ checking in to the hotel. They appeared to be in town for a sales meeting, or maybe just the wedding of an old fraternity brother. They looked at us, immediately noticing, of course, a costumed member of our group. One of these so-called normal people walked right up to him and, without asking for permission, took out his cell phone to take a picture, saying to no one in particular, and certainly not to the Klingon in question, ‘If I don’t get a picture of this, no one will believe me.’ The Klingon stood tall and posed like a true warrior. At that moment, I knew whose side I was on. The world of Klingon may be based on fiction, but living in it takes real guts.”

I apologize for my previous lack of honor.

Tapped out

In multiple articles you will see or will have seen that Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been tapped for the Supreme Court by President Obama. As a short verb, it is hard for headline writers to resist its use.

But I’ve always disliked the use of that word because of its association with fraternity initiations. Naming a Cabinet officer or federal judge ought to involve more dignity that being invited to join Rho Rho Rho.

Now — thank you, Bill Walsh, for your tweet crediting @edzaf — I have an additional reason to dislike this “unfortunate headline verb in reference to a female nominee, given the prevalent slang meaning.”

No prizes for guessing what that “prevalent slang meaning” is.

It's summer, already

As regularly as the swallows return to Capistrano or the buzzards to Hinckley, journalists reach for seasonal cliches. If you read a newspaper or watched television news over the Memorial Day weekend, you inevitably encountered the phrase unofficial start of summer.

The phrase might lead you to think that there is an official start of summer. There isn’t. June 21 or 22, when the ill-informed may tell you that summer begins, is the summer solstice. Summer, by the third week of June, is well advanced everywhere, except perhaps Minnesota. (A friend in Minnesota tells me that if summer there falls on the Fourth of July, they have a picnic.)

Similarly, December 21 or 22 is not the beginning of winter but the winter solstice. The vernal equinox in March is not the first day of spring, and the autumnal equinox in September is not the first day of fall. But journalists will use these handy dates as a peg for their annual commemorations of the obvious.

Thirty years in the paragraph game, and I never figured out the point of stories, often on the front page, about things that everyone already knows: When the temperature hits a hundred degrees or more, the paper is sure to tell you that it is hot outside; when there is a foot of snow on the ground, count on the paper to inform you that it is winter.

Perhaps such stories are the journalistic equivalent of phatic speech — small talk or chatter that instead of conveying substantial information expresses feelings or establishes sociability. Talk about the weather is a classic example. For my part, I much prefer gossip.

Anyhow, as I was spreading mulch around the azaleas yesterday, with temperatures in the eighties and the humidity rising in advance of the afternoon thunderstorm, I did not require a reporter or news anchor to let me in on the arrival of summer. No doubt you, my readers, in your far-flung locations, observe your own seasonal markers. If you’d like to tell me what marks the start of spring, summer, fall, and winter in Arizona or Colorado or Upstate New York or any of your other venues, feel free to comment.