Item: Wishydig’s recent post, “The English language in America is not threatened,” a point frequently made on these premises, quotes the text of a 1987 resolution adopted by the Linguistic Society of America saying that efforts to make English an official language are misguided and potentially harmful. It will repay your attention.
Item: At Language Log, Arnold Zwicky goes into the peculiar hostility to quotative inversion. At his own site, he examines the peevish hostility to the word blog. For the record, no objection to it here; You Don’t Say appreciates useful monosyllables.
Item: In a weak moment, I succumbed to the temptation to set up a Twitter site, @FakeWardCleaver. Thoughts?
Item: The article on Halloween mentioned in the earlier post “Is that a demon at the door?” has generated a vast number of comments, many of them amusing and some of them intentionally so. The ensuing uproar has moved the editors of Charisma to post a second article defending a Christian’s celebration of Halloween. The comments on the anodyne article are predictably less amusing.
Item: A well-wisher’s anonymous letter today — the one calling me “a thief and a liar” — celebrates the belated discovery of my having been laid off by The Sun six months ago and kindly suggests that as an alternative to eating canned dog food, I might buy a gun and kill myself. Actually, and thanks for thinking of me, I have other plans.
Item: Remember that you can use the GoodSearch engine to find things on the Internet while, if you make the ACES Education Fund your designated cause, funneling pennies to that worthy endeavor.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Is that a demon at the door?
Thanks to @word_czar on Twitter, I have had the opportunity to read what the Rev. Kimberly Daniels of Jacksonville, Florida, has to say about the dangers of Halloween. It is, she asserts, a pagan witch festival, a day devoted to Lucifer. Halloween candy has been prayed over by witches. Opening the door to trick-or-treaters invites demons into your house. There are things going on tonight beneath your awareness:
Sex with demons
Orgies between humans and animals
Animal and human sacrifices
Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
Revel nights
Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant
(Revel nights? Revelry?)
Though you might have expected this to be the work of those scamps at The Onion, the Charisma Web site on which this article appears does not seem to be a satirical production. We are evidently meant to take this straight.
Therefore I will have to check back in a couple of months to see the Rev. Mrs. Daniels expose the Luciferian nature of Christmas.
Baby Jesus almost certainly did not enter the world on December 25 (or at Bethlehem, but that’s a different argument); the early Church appropriated the pagan solstice festival of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) for itself. And everyone knows, or should be warned, that the Christmas tree, popularized in the English-speaking world by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort, is a relic of Teutonic tree-worship. You know that nasty things went on in those forests.
The Old One has his snares everywhere. (Could it be that Beelzebub planted this very article to make Christianity look ridiculous?) Watch your step.
Sex with demons
Orgies between humans and animals
Animal and human sacrifices
Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
Revel nights
Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant
(Revel nights? Revelry?)
Though you might have expected this to be the work of those scamps at The Onion, the Charisma Web site on which this article appears does not seem to be a satirical production. We are evidently meant to take this straight.
Therefore I will have to check back in a couple of months to see the Rev. Mrs. Daniels expose the Luciferian nature of Christmas.
Baby Jesus almost certainly did not enter the world on December 25 (or at Bethlehem, but that’s a different argument); the early Church appropriated the pagan solstice festival of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) for itself. And everyone knows, or should be warned, that the Christmas tree, popularized in the English-speaking world by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort, is a relic of Teutonic tree-worship. You know that nasty things went on in those forests.
The Old One has his snares everywhere. (Could it be that Beelzebub planted this very article to make Christianity look ridiculous?) Watch your step.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Hungry for brains
My son has been inspired to trick himself out for Halloween this year as the title character from Shaun of the Dead, a 2004 zombie comedy whose charm has entirely eluded me. J.P. has acquired a cheap white short-sleeved shirt and a garish polyester necktie. He has lovingly reproduced the red ink stain on the shirt pocket and manufactured a prop cricket bat. A home hair dye job has been accomplished. He’s good to go.
It seems entirely apt, amid this seasonal enthusiasm for the undead, that the Audit Bureau of Circulations should have just released the latest depressing figures for the circulation of American newspapers. San Francisco Chronicle down a staggering 25 percent. The Baltimore Sun down about 15 percent from something that could not be described as a peak. Many others in bad shape. Our metropolitan newspapers increasingly look like our native zombie class, lurching down the street, searching — vainly — for brains.
Some of the drop may be temporary. Newspapers have always labored to manage a huge churn of subscribers, wooing readers with short-term, reduced-rate deals in hopes of retaining them. It would not be surprising that in the middle of a severe recession, with multitudes newly unemployed, customers trying to manage their finances would give up newspaper subscriptions.
But I fear that the decline represents something far more dangerous. As newspapers have frantically cut back on space and coverage and decimated their staffs to achieve savings, they have offered their readers less and less. And as they have also intentionally compromised standards of editing, what they do offer is often shoddy — slackly written and riddled with errors of fact. Manic efforts to redesign and repackage print editions appear in many cases to have alienated traditional readers without attracting new ones.
It has long been clear that demographics are running against newspapers: As readers of the older generations that still have the print habit relocate to celestial addresses, the rising generations won’t touch a daily paper with a bargepole. But the acceleration of the decline just recorded by the ABC suggests that newspaper management has contrived to cheese off many of the dwindling loyalists.
Whistling past the graveyard — also seasonally appropriate — some newspaper executives point proudly to increases in readership of their electronic editions. But Web advertising brings in only a fraction of what print advertising does, and it is far from clear that multitudes of hits on Web stories lead to the kind of return visits and reader loyalty that advertisers would find compelling.
Moreover, I’ve looked at a number of newspaper Web sites, wondering whom the management imagines they attract. Newspaper Web sites often look cluttered. Many are baffling to navigate if the reader is looking for a particular story, and on some I’ve given up even attempting to use the inadequate search function. You might think, with all their cant about forging closer ties with their communities, that they would make it easy to get in touch with members of the staff by providing both e-mail addresses and telephone numbers — but that would be naive.
I would not advise you to be concerned about any danger of attack by zombie newspapers this Halloween. They are mainly a danger to themselves. Though their need for brains is compelling and obvious, they don’t appear to recognize when you have any.
It seems entirely apt, amid this seasonal enthusiasm for the undead, that the Audit Bureau of Circulations should have just released the latest depressing figures for the circulation of American newspapers. San Francisco Chronicle down a staggering 25 percent. The Baltimore Sun down about 15 percent from something that could not be described as a peak. Many others in bad shape. Our metropolitan newspapers increasingly look like our native zombie class, lurching down the street, searching — vainly — for brains.
Some of the drop may be temporary. Newspapers have always labored to manage a huge churn of subscribers, wooing readers with short-term, reduced-rate deals in hopes of retaining them. It would not be surprising that in the middle of a severe recession, with multitudes newly unemployed, customers trying to manage their finances would give up newspaper subscriptions.
But I fear that the decline represents something far more dangerous. As newspapers have frantically cut back on space and coverage and decimated their staffs to achieve savings, they have offered their readers less and less. And as they have also intentionally compromised standards of editing, what they do offer is often shoddy — slackly written and riddled with errors of fact. Manic efforts to redesign and repackage print editions appear in many cases to have alienated traditional readers without attracting new ones.
It has long been clear that demographics are running against newspapers: As readers of the older generations that still have the print habit relocate to celestial addresses, the rising generations won’t touch a daily paper with a bargepole. But the acceleration of the decline just recorded by the ABC suggests that newspaper management has contrived to cheese off many of the dwindling loyalists.
Whistling past the graveyard — also seasonally appropriate — some newspaper executives point proudly to increases in readership of their electronic editions. But Web advertising brings in only a fraction of what print advertising does, and it is far from clear that multitudes of hits on Web stories lead to the kind of return visits and reader loyalty that advertisers would find compelling.
Moreover, I’ve looked at a number of newspaper Web sites, wondering whom the management imagines they attract. Newspaper Web sites often look cluttered. Many are baffling to navigate if the reader is looking for a particular story, and on some I’ve given up even attempting to use the inadequate search function. You might think, with all their cant about forging closer ties with their communities, that they would make it easy to get in touch with members of the staff by providing both e-mail addresses and telephone numbers — but that would be naive.
I would not advise you to be concerned about any danger of attack by zombie newspapers this Halloween. They are mainly a danger to themselves. Though their need for brains is compelling and obvious, they don’t appear to recognize when you have any.
What they ought not to have done
A headline in this morning’s editions of my former paper, The Baltimore Sun:
Conversions don’t worry Episocopal bishop
Lord, have mercy.
Conversions don’t worry Episocopal bishop
Lord, have mercy.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Mr. Bierce's pronouncements
I met a reader of antique texts,
Who said—A brittle and well-foxed usage tome
is catalogued ... its yellowed pages stamped
With shattered rules and empty strictures,
And haughty tone, and sneers of cold command,
Telling how well its maker those prejudices
Expressed, now stamped on these lifeless things;
Every page proclaims its attitude:
My commandments reign supreme;
Heed my decrees, ye writers, or despair!
It lies dusty, untouched. Round the lapse
Of these disregarded edicts, boundless and full
The level shelves stretch far away.
Consider well, you mavens and self-appointed usage authorities, you who seek to remedy the lack of an Académie anglaise, with power over the English language to bind and loose, that the fate of an Ozymandias awaits you. Such a one was Ambrose Bierce.
Bierce, still known for his Devil’s Dictionary and the haunting short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” was a journalist and self-appointed usage authority who published in 1909 a little manual of blacklisted usages. Now the formidable Jan Freeman gives us Ambrose Bierce’s Write it Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers (Walker & Company, 229 pages, $24).
Ms. Freeman, language columnist for The Boston Globe and one of the best-informed and most sensible popular writers on language and usage we have, has done her research, examining not only Bierce’s little book of prejudices, but also eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals by Robert Lowth, Richard Chenevix Trench, Henry Alford, and J. Lesslie Hall, among others. One of Bierce’s predecessors was William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, author of “Thanatopsis” (inflicted on generations of schoolchildren), and, apparently, in his Index Expurgatorius, responsible for the enduring superstition among journalists that over cannot be used in the sense of more than.
Some of the sources of nineteenth-century peevology she describes no longer trouble us. Now that so few students learn Latin and Greek, we tend not to be troubled when English does not match the classical languages (“etymological literalism,” she calls it). Thanks to H.L. Mencken and many linguists, we no longer feel abashed that American English differs from British (“status anxiety”). But some sources persist, particularly the suspicion of commercial language as vulgar and trendy. And the enduring but futile impulse to make English idioms and usage logical recurs in every generation.
Write It Right abounds in the distinctions, largely bogus, that continue to clutter manuals of usage and journalists’ stylebooks: anxious/eager, compare to/compare with, entitled/titled, hanged/hung, healthy/healthful, loan/lend, verbal/oral. People cannot be substituted for persons; no one can sustain an injury; transpire is not synonymous with occur. If you have been bothering yourself over these matters, I urge you to consult Ms. Freeman’s commentary on these entries for a succinct account of how you have been wasting valuable time.
Ambrose Bierce, however, is in a class by himself. Over and over, Ms. Freeman reports, his entries describe distinctions that only he can see. He appears to have been driven to prune the luxuriance of English so that its words could be limited to single, narrowly restricted meanings, as he says in his preface: “Few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries.” It cannot be done, and is not worth doing.
There is much to admire in this little book: the thoroughness of Ms. Freeman’s research, her level-headed analysis of Bierce’s strictures, and — perhaps the enduring lesson — her insight into the foibles of usagists. If you as an editor or manager have the authority to set yourself up as a tinpot despot on usage (as I was for many years), put this book before you and learn humility.
Who said—A brittle and well-foxed usage tome
is catalogued ... its yellowed pages stamped
With shattered rules and empty strictures,
And haughty tone, and sneers of cold command,
Telling how well its maker those prejudices
Expressed, now stamped on these lifeless things;
Every page proclaims its attitude:
My commandments reign supreme;
Heed my decrees, ye writers, or despair!
It lies dusty, untouched. Round the lapse
Of these disregarded edicts, boundless and full
The level shelves stretch far away.
Consider well, you mavens and self-appointed usage authorities, you who seek to remedy the lack of an Académie anglaise, with power over the English language to bind and loose, that the fate of an Ozymandias awaits you. Such a one was Ambrose Bierce.
Bierce, still known for his Devil’s Dictionary and the haunting short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” was a journalist and self-appointed usage authority who published in 1909 a little manual of blacklisted usages. Now the formidable Jan Freeman gives us Ambrose Bierce’s Write it Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers (Walker & Company, 229 pages, $24).
Ms. Freeman, language columnist for The Boston Globe and one of the best-informed and most sensible popular writers on language and usage we have, has done her research, examining not only Bierce’s little book of prejudices, but also eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals by Robert Lowth, Richard Chenevix Trench, Henry Alford, and J. Lesslie Hall, among others. One of Bierce’s predecessors was William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, author of “Thanatopsis” (inflicted on generations of schoolchildren), and, apparently, in his Index Expurgatorius, responsible for the enduring superstition among journalists that over cannot be used in the sense of more than.
Some of the sources of nineteenth-century peevology she describes no longer trouble us. Now that so few students learn Latin and Greek, we tend not to be troubled when English does not match the classical languages (“etymological literalism,” she calls it). Thanks to H.L. Mencken and many linguists, we no longer feel abashed that American English differs from British (“status anxiety”). But some sources persist, particularly the suspicion of commercial language as vulgar and trendy. And the enduring but futile impulse to make English idioms and usage logical recurs in every generation.
Write It Right abounds in the distinctions, largely bogus, that continue to clutter manuals of usage and journalists’ stylebooks: anxious/eager, compare to/compare with, entitled/titled, hanged/hung, healthy/healthful, loan/lend, verbal/oral. People cannot be substituted for persons; no one can sustain an injury; transpire is not synonymous with occur. If you have been bothering yourself over these matters, I urge you to consult Ms. Freeman’s commentary on these entries for a succinct account of how you have been wasting valuable time.
Ambrose Bierce, however, is in a class by himself. Over and over, Ms. Freeman reports, his entries describe distinctions that only he can see. He appears to have been driven to prune the luxuriance of English so that its words could be limited to single, narrowly restricted meanings, as he says in his preface: “Few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries.” It cannot be done, and is not worth doing.
There is much to admire in this little book: the thoroughness of Ms. Freeman’s research, her level-headed analysis of Bierce’s strictures, and — perhaps the enduring lesson — her insight into the foibles of usagists. If you as an editor or manager have the authority to set yourself up as a tinpot despot on usage (as I was for many years), put this book before you and learn humility.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Entitlement
Somewhere early in my career I came across a rule — probably in the Associated Press Stylebook, that fossil record of unsound usage advice — that entitled must not be used in the sense of giving a title to a book, but only in the sense of having a right to something. At some other point, I remember vaguely, I came across advice not to use titled in the sense of a book’s having been given a title, because titled means holding a title of nobility.
One of the glories of the usage game, or mavenry, or whatever you will call it, is that it is entirely possible to be given diametrically opposite “rules,” both of which are wrong.
I haven’t unearthed the source of the objection to titled to determine whether the author was either ignorant or, as the British say, having me on, but the vacuity of the AP rule has been abundantly documented.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage calls entitled for giving a title to a “well-established usage ... common for over 500 years* and ... the older of the two senses.” The third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage concurs without reservation, so we’ve covered both sides of the street. Saying that a book, a play, a short story, or a monograph is entitled so-and-so is not wrong and has never been wrong.
Of course, once you have put the title of the book within quotation marks (AP) or written it in italics (everybody else), even your slowest-witted reader can tell that you are referring to a title, without the need of either verb.
*The current AP Stylebook continues to limit over to spatial relationships. Need I repeat that that, too, is bogus?
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy of it or Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
One of the glories of the usage game, or mavenry, or whatever you will call it, is that it is entirely possible to be given diametrically opposite “rules,” both of which are wrong.
I haven’t unearthed the source of the objection to titled to determine whether the author was either ignorant or, as the British say, having me on, but the vacuity of the AP rule has been abundantly documented.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage calls entitled for giving a title to a “well-established usage ... common for over 500 years* and ... the older of the two senses.” The third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage concurs without reservation, so we’ve covered both sides of the street. Saying that a book, a play, a short story, or a monograph is entitled so-and-so is not wrong and has never been wrong.
Of course, once you have put the title of the book within quotation marks (AP) or written it in italics (everybody else), even your slowest-witted reader can tell that you are referring to a title, without the need of either verb.
*The current AP Stylebook continues to limit over to spatial relationships. Need I repeat that that, too, is bogus?
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy of it or Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Can you tell 'live' from 'news'? Facebook can't
Motoring along the highway or creeping down a city street, I cringe at the sight of a “PROGRESS AHEAD” sign, knowing full well that it means that the roadway has been torn up and I will be jockeying for position with lunatics.
Yesterday, it appears, Facebook put into effect a redesigned home page for members, with a “live feed” and a “news feed.” It seems to be the case that the “news feed” will include items that Facebook has concluded would be of interest to me, while the “live feed” will list all my friends’ activities.
How do I know this? From an article on the changeover in PCMAG.com, which Jack Mulkey thoughtfully put up on his news feed. Facebook gave me no information. Or perhaps Facebook did publish some announcement to readers; but it was not anywhere that I saw, and Facebook is so chaotically organized and its search function so pathetically useless that I probably could not have found the announcement had I known to look for it.
These are the consequences of the double feed. I have to look in two places to make sure that I haven’t missed anything. And since the “live” and “news” categories have some obvious overlap, I get to see some of the same posts in two different places. Oh yeah, and the chronology is all gummed up, with my news feeds listed in this order: an hour ago, 6:27 p.m. yesterday, 11:37 p.m. yesterday, 11 hours ago, 4 hours ago [emphasis added].
When I see Internet enthusiasts scorn newspapers for their arbitrary redesigns that disconcert readers, for their lack of transparency in informing their audience what they are doing, or for their ineptly designed Web sites that make navigation troublesome, I think of Facebook and curl my lip in bitter scorn.
Yesterday, it appears, Facebook put into effect a redesigned home page for members, with a “live feed” and a “news feed.” It seems to be the case that the “news feed” will include items that Facebook has concluded would be of interest to me, while the “live feed” will list all my friends’ activities.
How do I know this? From an article on the changeover in PCMAG.com, which Jack Mulkey thoughtfully put up on his news feed. Facebook gave me no information. Or perhaps Facebook did publish some announcement to readers; but it was not anywhere that I saw, and Facebook is so chaotically organized and its search function so pathetically useless that I probably could not have found the announcement had I known to look for it.
These are the consequences of the double feed. I have to look in two places to make sure that I haven’t missed anything. And since the “live” and “news” categories have some obvious overlap, I get to see some of the same posts in two different places. Oh yeah, and the chronology is all gummed up, with my news feeds listed in this order: an hour ago, 6:27 p.m. yesterday, 11:37 p.m. yesterday, 11 hours ago, 4 hours ago [emphasis added].
When I see Internet enthusiasts scorn newspapers for their arbitrary redesigns that disconcert readers, for their lack of transparency in informing their audience what they are doing, or for their ineptly designed Web sites that make navigation troublesome, I think of Facebook and curl my lip in bitter scorn.
Weekends are for catching up
Item: While the actual Associated Press Stylebook is unintentionally hilarious, FakeAPStylebook on Twitter is a hoot and a half. Some examples:
The numbers one through ten should be spelled out while numbers greater than ten are products of the Illuminati and should be avoided.
Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, “800-lb gorilla in the room.” Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA'S WEIGHT!
There is no such thing as an “Oxford comma.” The other guys in the newsroom are pranking you.
While it's tempting to call them “baristi” because of the Italian roots, the plural of “barista” is “journalism majors.”
Item: If you are concerned about potential dangers of vaccines, Steve Silberman of Wired has provides a link to a useful, fact-based article on the subject, with copious references to the science. The comments on an article in Wired by Amy Wallace on fear and panic over vaccines demonstrate how quickly public discussion devolves into shouting and personal abuse.
As with the AP Stylebook, many of these comments career into unintended hilarity.
Item: Onlineclasses.org has forwarded a link to its list of the top ten plagiarism scandals. It says “of all time” but is in fact limited to those, mainly in journalism, of recent history.
For a longer view, take, for example, the passage in Tristram Shandy denouncing plagiarism: “Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?” This passage, your eighteenth-century professor would have pointed out with a dry, donnish chuckle, Sterne lifted from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Thus we see the difference between the amateur cut-and-paster and an inspired pro.
Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words is a fine study of plagiarism, mainly the literary kind.
Item: I should have been reminding you about GoodSearch, a search engine powered by Yahoo that pays a small sum to the good cause of your choice for each search you make there. My GoodSearch is set to the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund, which provides scholarships to promising students who seek a career as editors. Every search I perform there brings a penny to the fund, and if you, my beloved readers, would also participate, we could over time aggregate a tidy sum. I urge you to try it.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
If a reader of this blog should order a copy of Stolen Words from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
The numbers one through ten should be spelled out while numbers greater than ten are products of the Illuminati and should be avoided.
Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, “800-lb gorilla in the room.” Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA'S WEIGHT!
There is no such thing as an “Oxford comma.” The other guys in the newsroom are pranking you.
While it's tempting to call them “baristi” because of the Italian roots, the plural of “barista” is “journalism majors.”
Item: If you are concerned about potential dangers of vaccines, Steve Silberman of Wired has provides a link to a useful, fact-based article on the subject, with copious references to the science. The comments on an article in Wired by Amy Wallace on fear and panic over vaccines demonstrate how quickly public discussion devolves into shouting and personal abuse.
As with the AP Stylebook, many of these comments career into unintended hilarity.
Item: Onlineclasses.org has forwarded a link to its list of the top ten plagiarism scandals. It says “of all time” but is in fact limited to those, mainly in journalism, of recent history.
For a longer view, take, for example, the passage in Tristram Shandy denouncing plagiarism: “Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?” This passage, your eighteenth-century professor would have pointed out with a dry, donnish chuckle, Sterne lifted from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Thus we see the difference between the amateur cut-and-paster and an inspired pro.
Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words is a fine study of plagiarism, mainly the literary kind.
Item: I should have been reminding you about GoodSearch, a search engine powered by Yahoo that pays a small sum to the good cause of your choice for each search you make there. My GoodSearch is set to the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund, which provides scholarships to promising students who seek a career as editors. Every search I perform there brings a penny to the fund, and if you, my beloved readers, would also participate, we could over time aggregate a tidy sum. I urge you to try it.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
If a reader of this blog should order a copy of Stolen Words from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Further dispatches in the War on Editing
Having watched battalions of my comrades fall over the past several years, and having become a casualty myself, I began to hope that the War on Editing* might have spent its fury, allowing a few fugitive survivors to regroup. Now comes word that a new front may be opening.
Martha Brockenbrough at SPOGG has published an appeal from Bryan Garner, who reports that he has been told that the major bookstore chains are not stocking the new edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage (reviewed here) because usage guides are a “defunct category.” If this be the case — and one can only hope that Mr. Garner has been misinformed by some low-level functionary of diminished intelligence — you can be excused if you feel like the British at Isandlwana when the ammunition ran out.
Mr. Garner’s note:
I have a favor to ask of you as a loyal reader: In the next few hours or days, would you please go to http://www.amazon.com/ or http://www.bn.com/ and buy one or more copies of the new third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage as holiday presents? In fact, keep this gift possibility in mind through the end of the year, won't you?
I need your help in sending a message to the major bookstore chains: they’re not stocking the book because they’ve told Oxford University Press that they consider usage guides a “defunct category.” It’s maddeningly unbelievable. Please help me show them that they’re stupendously wrong.
Meanwhile, in the coming months you might ask about the book when you’re in a bookstore: ask the managers why they don’t stock copies, and encourage them to do so.
If you’re curious to see what effect you’re having, watch the rankings on Amazon.com or Bn.com in coming days and weeks. We’ll be alerting the major chains to those numbers, and we want to get as close to the top 50 as we can. If you're trying to order and see that the book is labeled "out of stock," order anyway: the effort is also to ensure that the online booksellers keep adequate stocks.
In return for this favor – it’s a grassroots effort – I’ll be happy to inscribe copies that you send to LawProse for that purpose, if you (1) include a filled-out FedEx airbill for returning them to you, and (2) suggest an appropriate inscription.
Those of you still struggling to hold the isolated parapet, turret, or ravelin might well heed this appeal. I don’t agree with Mr. Garner in every particular, nor would I expect you to follow his advice slavishly. I don’t care whether you buy his book through the link below or even decide that your money might be better spent on Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (Actually, you ought to own both, each as a corrective for the other.) Ours is a commercial society, and the way you spend your money is one of the few means in your hands to show that editing and precision and clarity matter.
*I believe that Phillip Blanchard was the source of this term for the campaign by newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishers to pursue a short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive campaign of reducing — or even eliminating — editing to achieve short-term savings.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Martha Brockenbrough at SPOGG has published an appeal from Bryan Garner, who reports that he has been told that the major bookstore chains are not stocking the new edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage (reviewed here) because usage guides are a “defunct category.” If this be the case — and one can only hope that Mr. Garner has been misinformed by some low-level functionary of diminished intelligence — you can be excused if you feel like the British at Isandlwana when the ammunition ran out.
Mr. Garner’s note:
I have a favor to ask of you as a loyal reader: In the next few hours or days, would you please go to http://www.amazon.com/ or http://www.bn.com/ and buy one or more copies of the new third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage as holiday presents? In fact, keep this gift possibility in mind through the end of the year, won't you?
I need your help in sending a message to the major bookstore chains: they’re not stocking the book because they’ve told Oxford University Press that they consider usage guides a “defunct category.” It’s maddeningly unbelievable. Please help me show them that they’re stupendously wrong.
Meanwhile, in the coming months you might ask about the book when you’re in a bookstore: ask the managers why they don’t stock copies, and encourage them to do so.
If you’re curious to see what effect you’re having, watch the rankings on Amazon.com or Bn.com in coming days and weeks. We’ll be alerting the major chains to those numbers, and we want to get as close to the top 50 as we can. If you're trying to order and see that the book is labeled "out of stock," order anyway: the effort is also to ensure that the online booksellers keep adequate stocks.
In return for this favor – it’s a grassroots effort – I’ll be happy to inscribe copies that you send to LawProse for that purpose, if you (1) include a filled-out FedEx airbill for returning them to you, and (2) suggest an appropriate inscription.
Those of you still struggling to hold the isolated parapet, turret, or ravelin might well heed this appeal. I don’t agree with Mr. Garner in every particular, nor would I expect you to follow his advice slavishly. I don’t care whether you buy his book through the link below or even decide that your money might be better spent on Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (Actually, you ought to own both, each as a corrective for the other.) Ours is a commercial society, and the way you spend your money is one of the few means in your hands to show that editing and precision and clarity matter.
*I believe that Phillip Blanchard was the source of this term for the campaign by newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishers to pursue a short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive campaign of reducing — or even eliminating — editing to achieve short-term savings.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Said who?
Is this a new tic of New Yorker style, or have I just begun noticing it?
“Horton, you’re one of the few people New York seems to agree with,” Tennessee Williams, another regional Young Turk who dreamed of changing the shape of commercial theatre, said.
I know that there is a longstanding journalistic resistance to inverting subject and verb in attribution, and indeed the “said he” construction would quickly grow tedious. But still, in a quotation followed by an attribution succeeded by an appositive phrase, do you really want to end the sentence with an anticlimactic said? Would it kill you to write, said Tennessee Williams and allow the sentence to end with a little more weight? Can’t you see that you are driving me into a series of rhetorical questions? Will you please stop?
“Horton, you’re one of the few people New York seems to agree with,” Tennessee Williams, another regional Young Turk who dreamed of changing the shape of commercial theatre, said.
I know that there is a longstanding journalistic resistance to inverting subject and verb in attribution, and indeed the “said he” construction would quickly grow tedious. But still, in a quotation followed by an attribution succeeded by an appositive phrase, do you really want to end the sentence with an anticlimactic said? Would it kill you to write, said Tennessee Williams and allow the sentence to end with a little more weight? Can’t you see that you are driving me into a series of rhetorical questions? Will you please stop?
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