Parvum Opus 291 ~ Hatable Slang

PARVUM OPUS

Number 291

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Note: Blogger's editing program makes erratic changes in formatting and capitalization that I did not intend.

Hatable Slang

From Dave DaBee:

New slang I hate (and you can quote me): "vaca" instead of vacation (pronounced "vay kay").

Correspondent #1 today: "… have a meeting with Joe, et all [sic] to get you back up to speed from vaca."

Correspondent #2 today: "… busy day before vaca."

I've just started hearing it this year. It doesn't even show up in most slang dictionaries. It's in UrbanDictionary.com but was only added 5 months ago.

Somebody said, in our branding / messaging exercise at work, that these days anything longer than two syllables eventually gets shortened to two syllables. The pros there rattled off a convincing list.

Oh well, it's that generation-to-generation thing, I suppose. "This is the way we've always done it ~ why does it need to change" vs "Who cares if we change it?? It's just a word." Novelty trumps value, perhaps. Or maybe novelty *is* (perceived as) value. Or fun.

This is how the language changes and how good slang gets born. But also bad slang and unnecessary changes and confusion. Wonder why they don't say "vac" (pronounced "vake")? I don't care for either version.

Can't Spell That

The glorious Olympics reminded me of the inexplicable change in the spelling of Chinese names, which came about a half century ago, according to Wikipedia. I still don't know why Peking should now be Beijing or why it wasn't before. My Chinese student tells me how the Chinese pronounce the names of other countries, and it's not the same as we do and not the same as people in other countries pronounce their names. So we ought to be able to do what's easy in our language, as they do in theirs. We ended up with combinations like Xi, which is not a natural spelling pattern in English, there's no way we can start out with an X sound with no preceding vowel, and the i could be anything, so we say something like Chee or Zhee or Zee.

There was, as you know, some controversy about the age of the Chinese female gymnasts, but maybe that's something that doesn't convert well either. The Chinese year exchange rate gets you two small gymnasts per one gymnast from anywhere else.

Vote as You Shot

The current (Sept.-Oct. 2008) issue of the magazine Mental Floss has an article about a few campaign slogans of yore, more interesting than anything we've heard in the last couple of years, my favorite of which is "Vote as you shot", Ulysses S. Grant's post-Civil War campaign slogan. Speaking of Grant, but I just learned that some books are available from my library as free downloadable sound files. I've got The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, which I don't have time to read, and couldn't find on CD or tape in the library, but maybe I can burn the file to CD and listen to it in the car.

If I were running for anything, as opposed to from anything, I might try "Get Beneath Keith" as a slogan, though it's lacking in substance (and kind of stupid besides), and "beneath" could be misunderstood. If Fred were running, maybe "Stephens Evens" would work (though as a good American he values freedom over equality).

Mental Floss also has a little spelling quiz. What is "a parent language, especially one reconstructed from the evidence of later languages"? Ursprache. German, of course, ur being proto or primitive, and sprache having to do with speech. You may remember urtexts from your Western Civ classes, the very earliest versions of any text such as a history or a bible.

A Wall Street Journal article by Jonathan Kaufman and Gary Fields, "Black in a New Light", about the supposed increase in frank discussion about race in America due to Obama's existence, says that the term "black" is getting more play now because "African-American" doesn't cover all the bases since more black people are immigrating. Which I've said for years, especially when people refer to black Africans as African-American. And they don't bother to refer to me as Scottish-American. Scottish isn't my point, but white is their point.

It has been noted that the favorite word of the last presidential conventions, "gravitas", hasn't been heard recently. Fred remembers when Joe Biden had hair plugs transplanted from his pubic region to his head, so every time Fred sees him, another image superimposes itself, and it's definitely anti-gravitas.

Overheard in New York

All-black-wearing chick with cigarette: Do you ever find yourself thinking really conservative thoughts by accident?

~ Outside International Affairs Building, Columbia University

There are no accidents, say I.

Overheard in Kentucky

In a restaurant yesterday, I kept hearing bits of conversation worth passing on to you; I couldn't write down all of them.

From the waitress: Sittin' on a park bench waitin' on a woman.

From a customer, to a woman who was probably her mother: The rule is never to leave Jeremiah alone with a doll. (Later) If you have plastic surgery and come out looking like a plastic sunburned baby ... I saw the pictures.

Theatrical Actress

From online TV program guide: "...a theatrical actress." Actresses are theatrical, if not all the time. The writer meant an actress of the theater as opposed to movies. A theatrical actress would mean an actress who behaves as if she's acting. Maybe a ham.

Vietnamese POV

I got a manicure in a Vietnamese nail salon from a young male college student whose parents came from Vietnam. He says the U.S. shouldn't have pulled out. Just thought I'd pass it on.

Yahoo Can Afford a Proofreader

Somewhere on Yahoo: Administrate email accounts here. Should be administer.

Heroes

Someone asked why we call people heroes who are paid to do their job, like soldiers and firefighters. We call them heroes when they do something out of the ordinary or exceptionally difficult, but often when they are just doing the job they were trained for. You might say that anyone who does a "heroic" act does it out of his own impulse or nature and therefore can't take credit or be called a hero for doing something. Therefore heroes do not exist. But I don't think that. "Heroic" describes the act but cannot plumb the depths of motivation and choice.

Anti-Heroes

There's been criticism of the new movie Tropic Thunder because some characters use the word "retard" to refer to a person who is whatever the correct word for that condition is. The movie is a comedy (very funny, too) but it has a lot of really gross dialogue, of which "retard" is the least offensive. People have a right to promote their preferred terminology and thinking, but censoring language that real people actually use is like not allowing cigarette smoking in a film. The anti-retard-word people apparently don't object to the obscenities and gore in the movie.

I just discovered the American Dialect Society, but only skimmed the front page. The Wikipedia entry lists their Words of the Year (Words of the Years?) but it's really a list of the most boring and overused words. Their "most outrageous" word for 1990 was politically correct/PC, "adhering to principles of left-wing social concern". Were they actually outraged, and are they still, in 2008? A web search of "politically incorrect" words or word list yields a vastly longer list than ADS can produce. "Black" coffee angers some people. "Flip chart" may offend Filipinos.

"Retard" as a noun is rude, and "retarded" has been replaced by mentally challenged and other euphemisms, but eventually it will probably be offensive to say in any way that some people were born with lower mental capacities.

And, The Language Monitor has a Million Word Watch, watching when the English language gets its millionth word. Will it be a PC word or a bad word? Their examples seem to be nonce words, that is, slang invented for the occasion, and most of which don't last. I think they tend to be created and favored by copywriters trying to come up with something clever, like "copyccino" for brisk ad copy. One is "staycation" (see Dave's unfavored "vaca"), a vacation at home. Someone wrote on the LM web site that if we add a word, we should discontinue one.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus 290 ~ Unrecovery

Unrecovery

Another file exploded yesterday so I reinstalled Windows Office. Hope it helps. Bits of Word document guts and brains are stuck all over the typewriter keys. What a mess. Right now I’m wearing protective clothing as I type. The “recovered text” was no good, but I did find some deleted notes in the recycle file (or redemption file or reformation file, which I hear are new terms in the Green catechism). I’m saving every 60 seconds with different file names and in different places, on the hard drive and online (Yahoo Briefcase). Another good suggestion is to mail a file to oneself.

Editing Etiquette

An editor wrote to Miss Manners about the etiquette problem that plagues us all: what to do about spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors in signs in public places. Fortunately, the tact that prevents us from correcting individuals does not apply to places of business, where the owners presumably want to make a good impression.

Shakespeare Daily Insult

[Thine] horrid image doth unfix my hair. ~ from Macbeth

That explains the snakes. It’s a vicious circle (or a viscous circle, as someone once wrote).

As Far As

“I was very interested as far as changing my career.”

The several problems with the “as far as” blunder are clear in this quotation from the newspaper. First, the speaker omitted the end of that phrase, which should be “as far as changing my career goes” although that would have a slightly different meaning, suggesting the speaker was interested in something else related to the career change. Second, she used the half-phrase as a preposition, a substitute for the simple “in”, which is all she needed after “interested”. Third, what she said is probably not what she meant, and meaning is what we’re all about: “...as far as changing my career” ~ but no further? People seem to use this truncated phrase to mean something like “the subject of” but the whole phrase means “to this extent”.

OINY Issues

From Overheard in New York (which we will pronounce “oiny”):

||| Conductor: This train will not be going to South Ferry, due to issues with the problem.

||| Tween girl looking at internment camp exhibit: Mom, what's an internment camp?

Mother: Umm... I think it's, like, a place where you go when you get a job as an intern. ~ International Center of Photography Museum

Watch Out for Segways

Thanks to Pat S. for reminding me of the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest.

From the B-L site I found a good article by crime novelist Elmore Leonard on writing, part of a New York Times series “Writers on Writing”. Also worth reading regarding censorship: “What Do You Call a Terror(Jihad)ist?” by P. W. Singer and Elina Noor in the New York Times and “A Festival of Grovelling to Terrorists” by Mick Hume in Times Online (different Times, UK), about self-censorship. (Note the double L in grovelling, a British spelling.)

South Africa Gets Funny

Since South Africa has gotten politically correct, some black South African comedians fed up with the “gendered” and “othering” speak are doing tough comedy. Rian Milan wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal.

About “gendered”: I guess it means outward sexual presentation, which one can choose, as opposed to “sexed”, which means “determined the sex” of a baby chick or something useful like that. Although I did know a young woman who used it to mean carnal activity, as in, “And then we sexed.” In Newspeak, not only do people get to decide on their gender, they can denounce other people who use the “wrong” pronouns. I still don’t think a woman who has a partial sex change (hormones, no major surgery) and then gets pregnant is a man. Real men don’t get pregnant.

So I guess I’m guilty of Othering.

Can You Spot the Difference?

||| Appraise and apprise are not the same. Appraise means to estimate the value. Apprise means to inform.

According to dict.org, per Webster 1913, “In the United States, [appraise] is often pronounced, and sometimes written, apprize.” My advice is not to do either.

Recently, though, I heard travails pronounced tra-vies. The speaker may have been laboring for an assumed French pronunciation, but it should be tra-vail, with the long A and the L on the end, although the stress may be on either syllable.

||| Grandiose and grand are not exactly the same. They both mean great and imposing, but grandiose has the additional sense of pompous and pretentious, so it should be avoided as a synonym of grand.

Imagine

We should not require song lyrics to be logical, but after seeing several “Imagine” bumper stickers, referring to John Lennon’s song, I started to extrapolate from “Nothing to kill or die for, no religion too”. People with no religion love that song, but let’s think about no money, no land, no water, no enriched uranium, or any of the other things people fight over on the macro level, and on the micro level, no love (well, people don’t really fight for love, it’s really for lust and jealousy) or no revenge or no respect. And on both levels, no survival instinct.

Why Newspapers Fold

We get the daily newspaper delivered, and I always look through at least a few sections: check out the front page and the editorials, read the advice columns and some of the comics. But here’s one example of why newspapers everywhere are failing. On the front page, a 1-1/2 inch wide column is devoted to highlighting some of the stories inside, a sort of annotated table of contents. Recently, the top of the column previewed a story that would be in the next day’s paper about what has changed in school supplies in the last 25 years, and there was a photo too. It’s not news, it’s not a gripping or important feature, and it doesn’t deserve almost 4 inches of front-page space. The editors decided that in the entire world, there was nothing more newsworthy to put in that space.

The top half of the front page has traditionally been reserved for the most important headline stories, because it’s visible when stacked at newsstands, hence the expression “above the fold”. The big above-the-fold front page stories on the school-supplies day were about tennis, the lottery, and the uneven distribution of fire companies in the city. On that day beneath the school supplies story, it said that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died, see page 10, no photos anywhere. I’ll look the story up online.

Cincinnati’s other major newspaper closed on New Year’s, so this remaining paper doesn’t have any competition. I like newspapers the way I like books: the format is familiar, comfortable, lightweight, quiet, portable, and cheap; it doesn’t require a power source; it’s safe to take on planes and you can write on it. Electronic formats don’t have to replace paper entirely, and I hope they won’t, but it looks like the papers might be doing themselves in.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus 289 ~ Why I Am Called to This Work

PARVUM OPUS

Number 289

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Why I Am Called to This Work

From Overheard in New York:

||| Student: Yeah, someone who plays the cello is a cellist, someone who makes art is an artist, and someone who writes poetry is a poist. ~Hunter College High School

||| Heavily accented Asian cashier to heavily accented Asian coworker: What!? Speaka English, por favor. ~J2 Deli, W 18th St

||| Bimbo looking at scoreboard: I think the "e" stands for "exqualifications" You know, for when a player is "exqualified". ~Yankees Stadium

||| Lady: I know what I am, he ain't gonna labelize me. ~Washington Square Park

||| Real estate agent: And all the doormen and service staff are Easter European. ~Park Avenue

||| Ghetto college girl: I'll talk to you later, I gots to get my learn on, girl. ~Brooklyn College

You know, we can sort of understand all of these people, but how much of the world around them can they understand? I have the most confidence in the “gots to get my learn on” girl.

Me, Myself and I and Sometimes You

Caroline Winter filled in for William Safire on August 3 with a discussion of why we capitalize “I” in “Me, Myself and I”. Her main point is that the single letter “i” would seem to get lost, though we don’t feel the same way about the word “a”, for obvious reasons. Winter noted that a count of the word “I” in speeches by Clinton, McCain, and Obama showed substantially fewer in Obama’s speech, probably because “we” are the change “we’ve” been waiting for (although I haven’t been waiting for myself, I’ve been here for quite a while). Obama is hardly less egocentric than other politicians, but I think he controls his speech more.

In grade school we were taught not to open a letter with the word “I” and to avoid using it as much as possible in writing. It’s not very interesting to write a letter, especially a personal letter, talking only about “you”. (How are you? How’s the weather there? How’s your cat?) Presumably the recipient already knows pretty much about himself. In a job application, it’s all about the writer. “Now let’s talk about you” can be a conversation stopper.

You’ve probably heard the quote, “Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas”, attributed on the web to both Admiral Rickover and Eleanor Roosevelt. They may have quoted it, but I think it goes back much further. I also think it’s wrong. Shakespeare is a case in point. He can’t be said to discuss abstract ideas, exactly, but his great mind observed and discussed people, events, and life brilliantly.

Shakespeare aside, you could also say that small minds talk about themselves, average minds talk about other people, and great minds talk about humanity. Or, small minds discuss things, for instance fashion, average minds complain about preoccupation with fashion, and great minds are contemptuous of people who like fashion. Or, small minds complain about the price of gas, average minds have political opinions about the price of oil, and great minds have to buy gas like the rest of us. There’s no end to the making of aphorisms. If you use an old one as a template, you don’t have to be very clever. This catchy tri-part sentence is nicely balanced and merely the form makes it appear to cover everything that needs to be said on the subject. The late Professor Winston Weathers, from whom I took a rhetoric class, had a nice (in the usual and the antique sense of the word) analysis of the sense of a series created by how many parts it has; I wish I had kept my notes. Two parts (“Small minds discuss people; great minds discuss ideas”) feels different than the three-part aphorism above. Four or more parts implies “plethora” (that much I recall from Dr. Weathers’s lecture): “Small minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas; everyone discusses objects in their path.”

Two Degrees of Separation

I looked up Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky, the Marxist teacher of political organizing strategy who influenced Obama as a community organizer, because someone said Alinsky gave props to Lucifer as the original radical in the introduction to his book Rules for Radicals. A web site called Theistic Satanism quotes Alinsky, in “A role model for left-wing Satanists” by Diane Vera. Theistic Satanism, as you might guess, is literally devil worship, a formerly despised minority among Satanists, according to Vera. Vera also asks and answers such questions as “Should Satanists care about the reputation of Satanism?” (Part of the answer: “Satanists are or should be supermen, utterly beyond caring what the lowly herd thinks of us.”)

I don’t think Obama is a Satanist ~ I don’t think he’s religious enough to worship Satan ~ but the lad has been careless about his influences and associates.

Don’t Go There

Cuil is a new search engine that’s supposed to call up images for every search, in development by a new Silicon Valley extravaganza of a start-up. A list-serve I belong to posted several damning stories of Cuil failure: searches turn up images that don’t belong to the web page, and porn filters seem to be nonfunct (as opposed to defunct). I’m thinking these would-be windfall wealth computer geeks grew up on pictures, not text, nor logic either, a bad start for a programmer.

Which reminds me of the suggestion to slap windfall profits taxes on oil companies. Windfall is fruit that has fallen or been blown from trees, i.e. unexpected easy gain. That’s not the same as profit from work or business, even excess profit. Windfall tax wouldn’t hurt the oil companies anyway, they’d pass the costs on to us at the gas pump.

Sexlet

Anne DaBee wrote about intersexual vs. hermaphrodite:

"Intersexual" is, perhaps, more explicit, and possibly more easily understood by people who never heard of either Hermes or Aphrodite. Unfortunately, it seems as though those folks are beginning to outnumber us. Maybe that's what's at the root of "tell it like it is" ~ EVERYBODY understands what sex is, even if Hermes is only a fancy line of fashion stuff, and who the hell is Aphrodite?

True, everyone understands what sex is, even if they don’t understand sex. Anne also added:

We used to say "niglet", with no intention of being offensive, although it certainly was, with "hindsight is 20/20" applied. At the time "pickanniny" seemed demeaning ~ and "niglet" wasn't? Go figure...

That must have been a local word; it’s not in the dictionary and I never heard it growing up in the South.

In the Chris Rock movie “I Think I Love My Wife”, the married couple spell out the words “white” and “black” in front of their kids when referring to people of those persuasions. I have no idea if any black people actually do that at home with their kids, but it’s interesting ~ the obsession with race fighting the wish not to pass that obsession on to the kids.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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Parvum Opus 289 ~ Engaging with Text for Fun

PARVUM OPUS

Number 289

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Metaphor-Free Zone

Dennis Miller said the expression “thinking outside the box” has gotten stale. He’s right. Not good for a once-snappy saying about not being stale. But instead of thinking up a newer, fresher metaphor, how about no metaphor at all? Next time you’re in a meeting, just tell everyone to try to think of something new. Then at least they won’t get stuck thinking about boxes or pushing envelopes.

Political Fatalities

Someone referred to Parvum Opus as “picayune and opinionated”. Picayune means small and unimportant, not picky, and I think the writer meant picky, even though parvum does mean small. Picayune is a Carib word, oddly enough, according to dict.org, yet pickaninny, a small black child, supposedly comes from the Spanish or Portuguese for small, pequeno (imagine a tilde over the n), and of course is now considered offensive. As Ambrose Bierce defined it a century ago in The Devil’s Dictionary, “The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.” I couldn’t find a meaning for the prefix procy- (searches keep turning up proxy) but it’s interesting that Bierce coined Americanus dominans for this definition. Note that The Devil’s Dictionary, being out of copyright, appears on some web sites, but not all of them include the fatal pickaninny.

From Wikipedia:

Cognates of the term appear in other languages and cultures, presumably also derived from the Portuguese word, and it is not controversial or derogatory in these contexts. It is in widespread use in Melanesian pidgin and creole languages such as Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea, as the word for "child" (or just young, as in the phrase pikinini pik, meaning piglet). In certain dialects of Caribbean English, the words pickney and pickney-negger are used to refer to children. Also in Sierra Leone Krio the term pikín refers to child or children. In Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin English, the term used is picken. In Chilapalapa, a pidgin language used in Southern Africa, the term used is pikanin. In Surinamese Sranan Tongo the term pikin may refer to children as well as to small or little.

Also, just so you’ll know, the word hermaphrodite is now considered not just passe but offensive, according to Oprah. People who are born with physical or genetic characteristics of both sexes (rather than psychological or sartorial proclivities) are to be called by the more medical-sounding term “intersexual”. Hermaphrodite combines (or is the offspring of) Hermes and Aphrodite, male and female Greek deities, respectively. I can see why people would go for the scientific-sounding word but why should this old word be offensive? “Intersexual” is kind of a come-down from Greek gods.

So many harmless words are now considered offensive simply because they’ve been used at times by unfriendly people. Sooner or later all words will be forbidden.

Bryan Garner daily e-mail on English usage was apropos the other day ~ from 1947:

We deeply sympathize, as individuals, with the development of better understanding among all groups, but we do not think that in this country there should be any groups, as was the intention of its Founders, and we deplore, as individuals, the development of group consciousness... . Nowadays, publishers are under pressure from all sorts of groups. What if they should trim their books to suit every point of view and every element of religious and racial pride? What, then, would remain of that one relatively free realm left, the republic of letters?

Letter of Maxwell E. Perkins (4 June 1947) (as quoted in Editors on Editing 306, 306 (Gerald Gross ed., rev. ed. 1985)).

Inartful Art

Politicians used to utter inoperative truths or misspeak; now they’re inartful. But that’s not the word that even they want. Read William Safire’s excellent piece on the meaning of inartful, remembering that artful practically means Machiavellian.

One must read widely and carefully to grasp the nuances of word variants. The core word here, art, can take various prefixes and suffixes, as in artless, artful, inartful. But tacking on a positive or negative appendage doesn’t simply create a positive or negative variant. Historically, the various word forms traveled different paths. Art itself has various connotations: human invention can be creative or deceptive. Inartful does not mean artless (ingenuous, lacking guile), especially when applied to politicians. Politicians’ handlers oughtn’t to suggest that they would have been more artful if they could (though that’s the truth).

Here’s a mnemonic device for pre- and suffixes, a cute-kid quote heard on the radio: “That’s so outportant! ~ You know, the opposite of important.” Logical, but wrong.

Talula Does the Hula

New Zealanders seem to be suffering from having to live upside-down on the opposite side of the globe. The blood pools in their brains and it shows in the names some of them give their children, like Talula Does the Hula. It’s gotten so bad that birth registration officials have blocked some names, such as Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy, and Sex Fruit, but they allowed Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence. OK, I was a hippy and gave my sons unusual names, but they were ancient saints’ names.

Engaging with Text for Fun

The New York Times ran an article called “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” about whether “engaging with text” on the Internet is reading or is replacing reading. Someone named “they” said that fewer teens read books for fun (as if that’s all books are for) and that kids can’t be expected to read To Kill a Mockingbird or Pride and Prejudice for fun. This is the result of parents and kids believing that learning must be fun or it won’t occur. I met a woman today who said her 11-year-old son is just beginning to hate her, quite naturally, and one of the things he hates is that he’s taking Latin, which isn’t fun. Fred didn’t think Latin was fun when he took four years of it in high school, but now he says it was one of the most important courses he ever had. If he hadn’t worked at it then, he wouldn’t be buying and reading Latin books now for fun, which he has been for weeks.

I can’t remember when I read To Kill a Mockingbird but I was reading “serious” fiction by the time I hit puberty. I didn’t really appreciate Jane Austen, though, till I was maybe around 30. Also around that time, an older man mentioned Anthony Trollope to me and when I said I’d never been able to get through a Trollope novel, he said, “Maybe when you’re older” and I flippantly (and rudely) said I didn’t think I wanted to be that old. But I’m old enough now. I guess it’s time to hit the library.

Misunderestimation

Herb H. corrected me on “No one can underestimate the scale of the challenge that climate change represents.” I do think it’s a sort of double negative, which is usually best avoided, and I also think “the scale of” is redundant. The writer meant that the challenge will always be bigger than you think, or that everyone underestimates it, or something like that. But, but I was hasty, careless, and wrong, in analyzing the logic of the sentence. Herb wrote:

If one underestimates the scale of the challenge, then one estimates the scale to be lower than it really is. If the scale has any appreciable magnitude, then one CAN INDEED estimate it to be lower. The only way the condition can be met, that no one can underestimate the scale, is that the true dimension of the scale is minuscule so that no one could estimate it lower than it really is.

He’s right. The writer should have said, “No one can overestimate the scale of the challenge”, which is undoubtedly why Mike Sykes sent it as a bad example in the first place.

It’s also true that “scale” here is used colloquially and imprecisely to mean “big size” rather than a measurement of size (just as “size” sometimes means largeness and “quality” means good).

Fred, by the way, wrote a 2,800-word letter to his friend Herb on it. I’ll pass it on to anyone who’s interested.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.