Community organized

Last week I heard an apologist for business interests refer to people concerned about global warming as “the alarmist community.” Then on Sunday an innocuous post about gluten on Dining@Large yielded an increasingly strident series of comments, one by a person self-identified as a member of the “gluten free community.” *

I do not speak on behalf of the language usage community but for myself when I say that I am mildly disturbed and to a greater degree annoyed by this vogue for identifying single-issue groups as a “community.” **

Community and common are etymologically related, and I understand that people who suffer from a disorder have common interests and concerns. But community suggests, or ought to, something broader. A community of citizens, such as a neighborhood, has multiple interests and concerns: property values, public safety, schools, taxes, socializing, and many more. In ecological terms, a community is made up of different species acting interdependently in a habitat.

I cringe when I read a reference in a news story to the “African-American community,” because such references leave the impression of a uniform, monolithic group rather than suggest the complexity of interests and concerns that must exist among the members.

We would be better off if we trained ourselves to think and speak about ourselves as members of larger communities rather than narrow ones.



*It did not take long at Dining@Large for someone to crop up with obscure nonsense about gluten and vaccines. Is there some kind of Distant Early Warning system to which the members of the tinfoil hat community are connected?

**How am I supposed to decide which community I represent? I am a former member of the pipe-smoking community and in graduate school was a member of the ABD (All But Dissertation or, alternatively, All But Dead) community. For years I was a member of the newspaper community and the East Coast Liberal Media Elite community but am now in the unemployed community — and, buster, there are a lot of us. I am two-thirds of the way toward eligibility for the Dead White Male community, a lifelong member of the nearsighted community, a practicing member of the bookworm community, an enthusiastic member of the bourbon-drinking, martini-mixing, draft-microbrew-swilling community. Not to mention the bow tie community. Who gets to decide which community defines me?

Tune in tomorrow

As part of the preliminaries to National Grammar Day on Thursday, I recorded an interview this morning that is to be broadcast tomorrow on Sheilah Kast’s Maryland Morning show on WYPR-FM, Baltimore. If you would like to tune in, I am told that the interview is likely to air between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m.

As a further preparation for those of you who may not yet have laid in supplies, here is a link to my instructional video on making a martini, so that you will not let the great day pass without raising to your lips a proper grammartini.

Slainte!

Me, myself, and I

A reader new to this blog has been puzzled by the photo captions in Gore Vidal’s Snapshots in History’s Glare: “Howard and I at Edgewater in the early fifties” and “Senator Gore and I in the thirties.” She wonders whether these are correct or whether me would be preferable.

Mr. Vidal’s usage is traditional and impeccable. Generally speaking, the pronoun me is used as the object of a verb or preposition, I as a subject. Where the pronoun is not an object and holds the same position as the subject of a sentence, as in these captions, I is the default.

Generally, however, is a regrettably necessary weasel word in talking about usage. There are many situations in which me is acceptable and even preferable in place of I. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage devotes a full page to the historical acceptance of it’s me, and Garner on Usage also accepts it, particularly in informal contexts.

As usage, particularly American usage, has grown more informal, what was once taught and modeled as correct — it is I — can look forbiddingly formal, even pretentious. So photo captions written as in Mr. Vidal’s book can look just a little off to younger readers.

There is a perversely reverse side of informality. Some people, struggling to avoid looking vulgar and undereducated, veer into hypercorrection, shunning me and uttering constructions like between you and I. Don’t go there.

Some, having been trained that using I and me sounds egotistical, use the reflexive pronoun myself in its place for the sake of modesty: The wife and myself had a real swell time, Duchess. All right, I loaded the dice with that one. While myself is best used as a reflexive — I saw it myself — the pronoun has been used regularly over four centuries as both subject and object in casual correspondence or conversation. Merriam-Webster’s cites examples from Samuel Johnson, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and numerous other luminaries.

As we grow less rigid about language, because the prevailing trend is toward less formality in most public writing, the question for the writer is often less whether something is right or wrong, but whether the degree of formality or informality is appropriate for the audience and the context.


Addendum: The reader also wondered about the use of awing in The New York Times: “something to the effect that Meryl Streep was awing audiences. Do you think this is a word? If it is, would it be ‘aweing’?”

Awe is both a noun and a verb, and it drops the e for the present participle

Directing your attention elsewhere

If you found snowpocalypse, smowmageddon, and other neologisms more tiresome even than the recent winter storms, take heart from Bryan Garner’s “On Language” column in The New York Times. Such portmanteau words come into the language frequently. Some stick, but many don’t. Spring is near, and by then there will be other linguistic excesses to annoy you. (Just turn on local TV news.)

By coincidence, the Dallas Morning News has just run a feature on Mr. Garner, the Reasonable Prescriptivist, whose work has frequently been praised in these quarters. (Take that, AP Stylebook; I’ll split a verb phrase whenever I damn please.)

Another able writer, Craig Silverman, who maintains the Regret the Error site, has an article in the Columbia Journalism Review on plagiarism and how to forestall it and detect it. Worth keeping a copy on hand.

I am particularly happy to report that, according to Stan Carey, there is no reason for prescriptivists and descriptivists to be at war, since, properly considered, each camp partakes of qualities of the other.

 Today is the last day to take advantage of the early-bird registration for the American Copy Editors Society’s national conference in Philadelphia this April. If you’re serious about editing, you ought to make an effort to be there. And if do, I will be happy to see you there.

National Grammar Day is coming up this week. Check out the Web site, and be sure to check out You Don’t Say on the day itself for the thrilling conclusion to “Pulp Diction,” this year’s grammar noir serial. 

What you meant to say

Renee Petrina, who professes journalism at Ball State, is “developing a workshop on euphemisms for communications students (not just journalism majors).”

“My goal,” she says in a Facebook post, “is to point out words and phrases that students hear a lot but don't think twice about.

“I also want to discuss sins of omission: The message media outlets send when they fail to talk about certain groups.”

She givs these examples:

urban - used to imply black, inner city, with a negative connotation
blue-collar - used to imply rednecks, uneducated, poor
effeminate - stop trying to out people already
downsizing - just say you're firing people even though they work hard
family values - other than people in prison for patricide, does anyone NOT have family values?

I replied initially:

“Flamboyant” is also a traditional code word for “gay.”

“Leafy” and “tree-shaded” neighborhoods are affluent and white. “Gritty” is another code for “urban/black,” though it may sometimes refer to blue-collar white neighborhoods.

Private Eye developed a whole set of euphemisms to get around Britain's stringent libel laws. My favorite is “tired and emotional” for “drunk in public.”

I have since been adding examples, which you may wish to comment on or supplement:

harsh interrogation techniques = torture
enhanced interrogation techniques = torture
collateral damage = dead women and children
strategic withdrawal = retreat
ethnic cleansing = genocide
adult entertainment = porn
exotic dancer = stripper
escort = hooker
replacement worker = scab
restructuring = panic firing of the staff
rightsizing = panic firing of the staff
voluntary separation agreements = panic firing of the staff
pre-owned = used
sanitary landfill = dump
person of interest = suspect, but we won’t say so
correctional facility = jail, prison, Big House
stately home = overpriced McMansion
full-figured = fat
Rubensesque = fat
husky = fat
waiflike [for model] = anorexic/bulimic
television personality = person famous for no identifiable talent
gadfly = crank
outspoken = rude, won’t shut up
loquacious = tiresome, won’t shut up
misspoke = (a) lied, (b) doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or (c) was drunk
matriarch = bossy older African-American woman
elderly statesman = senile
venerable = old, probably senile
veteran lawmaker = party hack
entrepreneur = huckster
blockbuster movie = best scenes already shown in the trailers
laugh riot = guys being hit in the crotch, flatulence
rehab = drying out
contrition = simulated regret after being caught
principled opposition = obstructionism
reform proposal = what the lobbyists paid for
town hall meeting [non-New England] = freak show
tea party rally = freak show

I could go on like this all day, but perhaps you would like to take a turn.

Pulp Diction 3: The wider web

(Previously: 15 items or trouble; The last copy editor)

“What happened to this place?”

I whirled around. “Fogarty! I told you to stay out.”

The Old Copy Editor said, “Fogarty? Mignon Fogarty? Great Fowler’s Ghost, is this Grammar Girl herself?”

“Yeah,” I said, “minus the cape and the winged boots.”

“Could I have your autograph, Ms. Fogarty? On my copy of The Grammar Devotional?”

“We’ve got more important things to do,” I said. She didn’t listen. She never listens.

“Why, certainly,” she said, whipping out a pen faster than the Earp boys slapped leather at the O.K. Corral. “But tell me, what happened to this place?”

“Well,” the Old Copy Editor said, “with nobody going into print journalism anymore, they ran out of unpaid interns, and then they couldn’t generate enough copy to fill as much as six pages. They tried to sell the building, but even the state penitentiary system turned them down. Plan to turn the printing plant into luxury waterfront condos went bust, too. They offered up the computer equipment, but it was so old and broken down from lack of maintenance that even the Third World wouldn’t touch it.

“But the worst was, they lost the Web. They cheesed off the funeral directors — tried  to jack up the prices for the death notices on the Web, and the funeral directors set up their own obituary Web site. Turns out the obits were the only things of ours anyone still read. Web traffic dropped to a couple of dozen hits a day, and the Scavenger Group abandoned the whole shebang. One day, everybody just left.”

“Fogarty!” I yelled. “Enough! You have to look at this.” I shoved the VERBS entry at her, and her big brown eyes widened.

“This is big,” she said, “bigger than just the Peevers.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

“Look,” she said, her broad brow furrowing. “Did you see? There are pinpricks under other letters.”

“What? Let me look.”

She was right:

“The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of the verb forms of words frequently misspelled.

“SPLIT FORMS: In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb. ...” 

mensa

“You know what this means?” she asked.

“It means the conspiracy is broader than anyone could have imagined. It’s big, all right. The AP itself. The Peevers. The self-appointed language authorities. The Illuminati. And now the aristocrats of the multiple-choice test. They’re all in on it. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve recruited the Myers-Briggsians, too — they’ll fall for anything. And it’s all coded in the AP Stylebook. You see what we have to do now?”

“You mean ...”

“Yes, sister. We’ve got to break into AP Stylebook Headquarters. Fast.”

Next: The dark tower

The liar, the cheat, and the thief

I have been asked to make available a previous post on detecting plagiarism and fabrication that is no longer available at Baltimoresun.com:

Those of us in the business regularly consult the Regret the Error Web site, which aggregates published corrections, to see what blunders our peers are fessing up to.

Craig Silverman, the proprietor of the site, does an annual year-in-corrections roundup. And, since 2004, he has also provided an annual roundup of reports of plagiarism and fabrication. These are, mind you, reported instances. As teachers and professors will likely concede, what gets caught appears to be a fraction of what is committed.

The range is impressive. Incidents occur at student papers, metropolitan dailies and national magazines. Columnists are well represented — perhaps they imagine that the rules don’t apply to them. People lift material from Wikipedia, from other periodicals, from Web sites, shoving it all under their own bylines.

No one is immune. In recent years, scandals of plagiarism and fabrication have blighted The New York Times, USA Today and The New Republic. Accusations of what was either plagiarism or extremely sloppy research practices have cast shadows on the work of historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Careers at The Baltimore Sun have been destroyed by evidence of plagiarism and fabrication.

It falls to editors — assigning editors and copy editors — to protect the integrity of the publication. Indeed, the instances of premeditated or accidental plagiarism that have been identified in-house at The Sun have been caught on the copy desk. This, by the way, is one good reason that the copy desk should have the staff and the time to edit, rather than merely process, the copy.

For those of you who teach or edit or have some supervisory responsibility over written material, I offer some commonplace tips on what to watch for.

Changes in diction: If the vocabulary of an otherwise amateurish student writer or cliche-ridden hack journalist should abruptly grow sophisticated, lifting is likelier than an infusion from the muse.

Changes in syntax: Same thing. If a writer who struggles to cobble together a noun and a verb suddenly masters the compound-complex sentence, with attendant Ciceronian participial ornaments, it’s time to start looking for the source.

Specialized information: Ask Howard Baker’s question from the Watergate hearings of beloved memory: What did he know, and when did he know it? Sudden access to biographical details, historical information, ecclesiastical terminology or scientific or medical expertise has to have come from somewhere. Insist on an explanation of the source.

Dubious sources: Any article based on a single source is automatically suspect — how can you tell that the source wasn’t lying? Where’s the confirmation? Similarly, anything based on second- or third-hand sources demands scrutiny. In addition, readers are justifiably suspicious of anonymous sources. Even when anonymity has been granted for good reason, such as the source’s reasonable fear of physical or economic injury, the writer should be obliged to reveal the source to the assigning editor, acquire independent supporting information, and give the reader as much information as is prudent about the anonymous source’s credibility.

Improbabilities: When Jack Kelley filed his famous story with USA Today about seeing, in the aftermath of a bombing, human heads rolling down the street, their eyelids still blinking, it would have been a good thing for the paper if an editor had said, “What the hell?” and followed up. In journalism, as in investment offers, if it looks too good to be true ...

Your job as an editor is to be skeptical, not gullible. Any writer’s work ought to stand up to questioning, particularly about sourcing. So ask the questions.

As it happens, the very ease of theft that the Internet provides also offers ease of detection. Use Lexis-Nexis or Google to find information on the subject that the suspect article covers. Do searches on distinctive and anomalous phrases. (Some colleges and universities employ specialized software and run term papers through it.) Check it out.

Follow up. The first question that must always be asked when a plagiarism is detected is this: Has he/she done this before? This has to be checked out, but it won’t be unless you, who have detected the misdeed, report it to someone in authority.

Don’t agonize over fear of appearing to be an informer. If the instance you identify is a first-time mistake made out of ignorance, you may save a colleague’s career. If it turns out to be one in a pattern of lies, then the career wasn’t worth saving.

How I get myself in trouble

I was simply taking a break from an editing project to check Facebook when I saw a post from one of my Facebook friends/acquaintances about an opinion by Maryland’s attorney general that it may be legal for Maryland to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. “What do you think of this?” the friend asked.


So I wrote: “It's plainly a civil rights issue, and lining up with the precedent of the states that refused to recognize interracial marriages would not be something to look back on with pride.”

A little later someone else posted this response: “Marriage is Biblically defined as between one man and one woman. Gay marriage should not be compared to interracial marriage for many reasons. Homosexuality is a crime and should be punishable. It is not a civil right. One clearly cannot control his ethnicity unless one chooses to surgically alter his skin like the late pervert Michael Jackon. Homosexuality is learned behavior and it is not genetic.”

So I said further, along these lines:

The kind of marriage under discussion is civil marriage — secular, not religious. No church is compelled to recognize gay unions, though some do. Marriage has always been about more than the sexual activity of the participants. It is, for one, about property (read Jane Austen), and it is about the state’s concern with property and insurance and the protection of minor children and other matters.

The point at issue is whether one state should honor what is legal in other states, which is why the Constitution has a “full faith and credit clause,” so that we don’t wind up a bunch of minor duchies and princedoms with conflicting laws, like Germany before unification.

The other issues the commenter raises ignore what you might call facts. Homosexuality is not illegal. It is not, psychiatry has formally determined, a mental illness. Specific behavior, yes, is learned, but there is an increasing body of scientific research that indicates that homosexuality is an inborn trait.

Moreover, it should be obvious to everyone by now that arguing from Leviticus makes more problems than it solves. Both the Old Testament and the New condone slavery — as Maryland once did. The Old Testament permits divorce, but the New Testament forbids it; how should our lawmakers be guided? Should the General Assembly ban the harvesting of crabs because the dietary code of the Old Testament forbids shellfish?

I mentioned the interracial marriage issue because at one time, in living memory, states that denied black people full civil rights were allowed to refuse to recognize marriages between black and white people performed in other states. It was not something of which to be proud today, and to allow an analogous prejudice to copy that pattern will not be something to boast about to our descendants.

Happy days will be here again

In the second act of Annie, after hearing Little Orphan Annie sing “Tomorrow” to his Cabinet, Franklin Roosevelt says that he has decided that “if my administration’s going to be anything, it’s going to be optimistic about the future of this country.”


That is the characteristic American tone. We don’t want to levy confiscatory taxes on the super-rich, because we know that we ourselves are on the brink of winning PowerBall or Mega Millions. Or we’re going to star in a hugely successful reality show or win on American Idol or play for the NBA.

Optimism is the winning tactic in American politics. FDR understood this, mainly. When he tried to punish his enemies, as in the court-packing effort, it backfired. When he conveyed buoyancy and optimism, he prevailed. The most successful Republican presidents of the past half-century, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, radiated genial optimism.

While it would be presumptuous of me to offer advice to Ms. Palin or Senator McConnell or the other worthies opposed to the incumbent administration, I would point out that anger and resentment go only so far in America. Lord knows there are ample reasons for the public to be angry. (Hey, I’ve been out of a job for the past ten months. You think I leap out of bed every morning with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart?) But harnessing that anger is not necessarily a winning proposition.

In recent years, Ross Perot tapped into populist sentiment, but got only so far. (OK, people, on where I put only this time? Sheesh.) Perhaps more resonantly, George Wallace campaigned on the politics of resentment against bureaucrats and plutocrats and people with expensive private educations. He rode a swell of anger, but it ebbed. And, of course, the godfather of the politics of resentment, Richard Nixon, may not be the best example to emulate.

Channeling Pollyanna won’t work — as Hubert Humphrey’s sad “politics of joy” campaign in 1968 showed — but if you want to reach the top in American politics, the best bet is to foster encouragement and hopefulness among the citizenry.

For an example of that native optimism, you can mark your calendars for the Memorial Players’ production of Annie at Memorial Episcopal Church, Bolton Street and Lafayette Avenue in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill neighborhood. Performances will be offered on Friday evenings, April 23 and April 30, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday evenings, April 24 and May 1, at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday matinees, April 25 and May 2, at 3:00 p.m. (Lost among the more impressive members of the cast, you will find me in the role of FDR.)

There are no tickets. Admission is free, but you will almost surely be moved to make a generous contribution toward the costs of the production.

Fulsome is as fulsome does

Commenting on this morning’s post, “Be careful out there,” Marisa Birns wrote:

I remember when fulsome was not the best word to use with “praise”.

So do I.

I remember attending a conference some years back at which an Episcopal priest repeatedly used fulsome to mean lavish. Ever generous with advice, I took him aside privately and apprised him of the traditional meaning, “disgustingly excessive.” Apparently in the laying-on of hands in the Apostolic Succession the reverend clergy are granted some tincture of the divine omniscience, because he did not utter another word to me for the rest of the conference.

(Reminder to editors: Don’t expect gratitude.)

Of course, if you were to dig around in the history of the language, you would discover that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the word meant abundant or full, later plump or well-fed. It was in the seventeenth century that the word took on the sense of excessiveness and offensiveness, and now turning full circle to its earliest sense.

Bryan Garner describes its current status as a “skunked” term, one best to avoid because someone will think you in error no matter which meaning you intend.   

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