Cafe Lit

Parvum Opus 393: Conascend with Me

2011-12-31T15:44:00.002-05:00

POSTCOCITY

It’s not that the world has run out of material for Parvum Opus to kvetch about. Maybe next year I’ll get back to a more frequent schedule. This year I’ve worked on other things.

When I was a little kid I had an unformulated desire to publish. I didn’t write much to speak of when I was a child, outside of school, but I remember wanting to make a book out of a piece of cardboard. I think I copied the alphabet on it. I wasn’t precocious enough to really make a book, though. But eventually I began to write, and now I can publish too, thanks to new technology. I write, edit, and design the covers; I have a new publishing name, Who Art, and designed the Who Art logo too. You might say I’m postcocious. If I were an actor I guess I’d want to direct.

So now I’m putting my writing (much of which I already published as e-books) onto real paper. Then I will continue with the epistolary biography of my late high school Spanish teacher, Ellen Rowe (who contributed a bit to the early Parvum Opus columns), as well as other new writing projects.

· I’ve just published the first year of collected Parvum Opus columns in paperback, now online at CreateSpace and also on Amazon.

· Also now in paperback is The Wish Book, a bit of brain candy, lots of fun (CreateSpace and Amazon). I used this verse by Yeats from The Circus Animals’ Desertion as the coda to the novella:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

· The Man from Scratch will be available in a few days on CreateSpace, and on Amazon within a week or two after that. It’s a murder mystery about cloning and the ethics of genetic engineering. Bitterly humorous but not as sweet as The Wish Book (and not suitable for kids).

· When Sonny Gets Blue is an audio book, the first volume of an autobiography by my friend Howard Sonny Robertson (CreateSpace and Amazon). I produced it but it’s entirely Sonny’s voice. Fascinating.

CreateSpace is an excellent Amazon affiliate for DIY publishing and distributing books, CDs, and videos. You do everything online, for nothing or next to nothing, and you end up with a real book. I learned about CreateSpace from reader Dave DeBronkart, who has published two books, also as both Kindle books and paperbacks:

· Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig: How an Empowered Patient Beat Stage IV Cancer (And What Healthcare Can Learn from It)

· Facing Death - With Hope: What one patient learned as he faced the end

Thanx and a tip of the Keith Stephens hat to Dave DaBee.

VOWELS CONTROL YOUR BRAIN

In case you weren’t sure, now we know that it’s the vowels, at least in advertising. Stanford linguistics professor Dan Jurafsky says so. All along I thought it was the consonants. Professor Jurafsky has a blog on the language of food. I think that boy is hungry. Somebody throw him a turkey leg.

(Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, so right now I’ll interrupt my writing for some early festive sipping: St. Germain liqueur. Good sprinkled on corned beef too, by the way.)

HOW JOURNALISTS ARE BORN

Years ago I was an associate editor for a large Midwestern university, in the publications department, which was next door to the news department, all of which was an arm of the public relations office responsible for fund-raising. One day a hard-hitting journalism student hit me hard with this question: What if the university needed money for something? Would we cover it up, or write about it, he probed shrewdly. I explained that our office was all about asking for money, all the time, for everything.

He was probably a classmate of the girl who wrote in the school paper that she was disappointed by London. She’d just come back from her first visit, and asked plaintively, Where were the tickertape parades? A British professor responded that it’s New York, not London, that is noted for tickertape parades. Even New York doesn’t have them every day. Too bad she couldn’t find some other way to amuse herself in London.

HOW FICTION IS BORN

I have other stories from that editorial job that will appear in a future novel. I just add in the murders.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH

Or, Whatever happened to the Jutes?

The Open University has a clever video cartoon about the history of the English language, all told in only 11:21 minutes.

The Open University is European, and not all cartoons.

BAD SEX WRITING AWARD

Dave DaBee tipped me to the Bad Sex Writing Award, sponsored by the Literary Review. Actually I’d mentioned this award in 2009 in PO 350.

The 2010 winner, whose name doesn’t deserve a mention but you can find it along with his book title on the web site, wrote this:

Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

I suggest to any ladies and gentlemen out there contemplating sex for the first time with someone that you ask the object of your speculation to give you an erotic writing sample first (along with the blood test).

WHY NOT?

Conascend

Why do we have the word “condescending” but not “conascending”? If you condescend, you deign to go down to someone else’s level. But don’t we attempt to go up to a higher level at times?

I think we should try introducing this new coinage as a group Parvum Opus project. “We will conascend to add to the English vocabulary.”

Urbia

Why do we have the word “suburbia” but not “urbia”? “Suburbia” is a bit different from “the suburbs” which simply refers to the communities that surround a city, the small towns and residential areas. But “suburbia” usually implies a state of mind and a way of life, and is often derogatory. People who sneer “suburbia” usually grew up there and think they became cool when they left.

So why not “urbia” as a companion word? Its meaning would depend on who uses it. I leave that to you — “You know the type, he lives in urbia.” Send your definitions, and we’ll try to introduce that word too.

PREPOSITIONS ARE IMPORTANT

… but not always logical.

On a reality TV show about people who get done in by their own dangerous exotic pets, the narrator said: “James had a fascination for snakes.” This means that the snakes were fascinated by him. It should have been, “James had a fascination with snakes.” (He was fascinated by them.)

Now it’s true that the preposition “for” seems ambiguous here since it can be used with different meaning in other formations, e.g., “James had a weakness for snakes.” (He was a sucker for their cold little eyes.) But that doesn’t matter. The rule, and the idiom, are what they are. Yes, I understood the meaning, but my attention shouldn’t have been distracted by the misuse of “for” in this instance.

MAN UP

I don’t know when the expression “man up” came into use. It means, of course, to act like a man, do your duty, show courage, etc. Same as “cowboy up”. I recently heard “rooster up” — didn’t note the context, but it must be more like trying to be aggressively dominant, not quite the same as to cowboy up.

JUST SO YOU’LL KNOW

A clumber is a type of field spaniel that hunts silently. Neat, huh?

TYPOSTROPHIC

As I re-read my books in preparation for paperbook publication, I find errors no matter how many times I’ve read them before. Here I reprint a poem I wrote at the end of 2003 about my mistakes — slightly edited.

2003:

As Lewis Carroll wrote in preface to “Hiawatha’s Photographing”:

“In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practiced writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of ‘The Song of Hiawatha’.”

Thus, my end-of-the-year meditation on doing wrong when I know what’s right:

The Unattainability of Impeccability, or

I’m Not Bothering to Make A New Year’s Resolution This Year

In the bowels of my computer

Or perhaps my nether brain cells

Lives a typographic gremlin

Who cares not that I’m a speller —

Disregards my grammar knowledge —

Laughs to think that I’m a writer

(Let alone pretend to edit) —

And to keep from overheating

I must give my thoughts expression,

And attempt perfect composure

When I lay them on the line.

So the gremlin jerks my fingers,

Struts and frets upon my keyboard,

Clouds with floaters my right eyeball,

Even when I type correctly,

Read and proofread till I cannot

Find and fix another error:

Everything looks just as it should be

But it’s all a sad delusion.

“Tart” is “taart,” not even English.

Verbs do not agree with subjects.

Words drop out and strange ones enter.

Print does not match with my brain waves.

GIGO — input leads to output —

Garbage in means garbage out — does

Not explain the situation

(Though perhaps it’s instant karma

As I point my ink-stained fingers

At others' harmless flubs and glitches).

Like the ancient carpet weavers

Of the fabled looms of Turkey,

Should I thread a flower in backwards,

Use red yarn instead of purple,

Purposely distort the pattern,

So Allah will not be offended

By presumption of perfection?

I don’t need to fool my gremlin

By pretending to be flawless.

No god could ever be affronted

By my warp and woof of language —

Vocabulary, syntax, spelling —

All are ways and means to blunder.

Any god who’s worth a prayer

Won’t find hubris in these pages,

Only lots of gag material.

So I’m assigned a lesser spirit —

Just a lowly typing demon

Copyedits all my writing.

By R. Keith, 2003

Happy New Year, and may all your typos be harmless, unlike the one that said “Love me not” instead of “Love me now”.

~ From Rhonda and Fred, 2011

Parvum Opus 392: Real-Word Experience

2011-11-05T00:27:00.002-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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PREPOSTROPHOUS

Rich Lederer agrees about short- and long-lived:

In brief, all major dictionaries cleave to your argument for sounding the i in short-lived and long-lived as a long i. These compounds mean "short/long of life." It should be noted, though, that the Brits prefer the short i in these words.

We both beg to differ with the Brits.

He also wrote:

Most folks who have seen The Help agree that the film is destined to be nominated for multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. But with all the care lavished upon the writing and filming of The Help, in slithers the following prepostrophe:

Skeeter Phelan, the film's protagonist and writer of the book The Help, is typing up a notice for the Junior League's newsletter. The camera homes in on the text, which includes: "Come to the Holbrook's to drop off old coats," which she changes to "old commodes" in order to befoul Hilly's front yard.

You'd think that Skeeter — or at least the writers of the screenplay — would know that Holbrook's should be Holbrooks'.

(By the way, I know someone who did put an old commode in her yard, in hopes of lowering the sale price of the house she lived in when it went up for sheriff’s auction, because she wanted to buy it cheap. It’s a long story.)

AIXELSID TNOF

Dave DaBee posted this reference to a newly invented type font called Dyslexie, designed by Christian Boer of the Netherlands, that is supposed to be easier for dislexics to read. Boer, himself dyslexic, designed the letter shapes to be less confusing.

One of Dave’s Facebook friends, Victoria Haliburton, disagrees. She works with dislexics. I include most of her comments — unedited (she probably wrote in a hurry) — because she is as amusing as she is opinionated (but presumably not dyslexic herself).

Sorry to disappoint you and everyone who wants a miracle cure, but this guyis wrong in so many directions that it is hard to know where to start. First, as the article mentions -- and then ignores -- dyslexia is NOT a vision problem. Every few years somebody comes up with a new snake oil guaranteed to cure botts, glanders, and the hives, shows positive results from their own testing -- and then disappears as mysteriously as they appeared. …. since it is NOT a vision problem, playing around with visual efforts is on the level of curing a cold by sacrificing a chicken -- irrelevant, but the cold gets better in seen days anyway so you can prve the cure . . .. In fact dyslexia can be treated and in many cases "cured" (ie the student looks and acts and tests well within the normal range, although perhaps with a few quirks). The statement in the article "there is no cure" is dead wrong. The treatment has been well-known and used for over a century -- my grandmother could have told you -- and has passed every *scientific* test thrown at it over the last sixty years. read the NIH study on Teaching Children to Read, 1999 (not the hysterical attacks on it since, but the actual study). Be forewarned: you are used to reading medical studie where there is a standard of proof; education so-called "studies" have no such standard and are 90 percent laughable. Anyway, the treatment that works, and works with a ery high success rate, is traing not in vision but in hearing - phonetic discrimination etc. The reason for the high rate of dyslexia and "dyslexia" (much higher) in English is twofold -- the problem of partially inconsistent (only 15 percent by the way) sound-symbol correspondence, and the much uch worse probelm of poorly-prepared teachers who are taught things that just ain't so and who try to teach their students by guess, hope, and pray rather than actual reading instruction.

As far as fonts, by the way, it has been found that one of the *easiest* to read is a serif font, Century Schoolbook -- which was designed as an easy-reading font for children's texts by peple without scientific credentials but wth a lot of real-word experience. The basic rules for font design and calligraphy, which include consistent slant (unlike this new font) and a minimum of additional frills (he's good here) and a balance of open white space and dark letter (he's right here about openness) are designed to maximize readability. Uneven slopes give the reader a headache; I know, I read juior-high kids' papers. They slow you down, quite badly if you are a fast reader.

LITERALLY

Dave also sent an article from the Boston Globe by Christopher Muther, “Literally the most misused word”. Is it literally a hopeless case?

Literally is used, incorrectly, as an intensifier, in the grand tradition of exaggeration that is so American. How many things are really awesome, after all? Is your yes always absolutely a yes?

Proposing substitutes for literally may be useless. For instance, the article quotes Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, on Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas saying, “This is literally a dream come true” when they won the Stanley Cup. Zimmer suggests substituting something like “unquestionably a dream come true”, but is that really any better? It depends on what you mean by “dream”. Possibly Thomas didn’t actually (really truly) dream in the night about the Stanley Cup, though it wouldn’t be surprising if he did, but he could have literally had a dream in the sense of a strong imaginative desire for a future outcome.

Another Bruin, Andrew Ference, said, “I can’t wrap my mind around how many people were there. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.” Well, that’s half true. He couldn’t wrap his head (a physical object) around a concept. But maybe he could wrap his mind (a more abstract sort of thing, really a though) around an idea.

In any case, if literally is used incorrectly more than not, what will take its place?

ARTFUL

Another intrusion of political correctness into art commentary distorts the intention of a 19th-century painting by George Inness, March of the Crusaders, which depicts knights traveling through the Italian countryside. On the linked page here, the comment points out the reference to death in the picture of the noble procession, but in a local Inness exhibition, a curator was compelled to write apologetically that “At this time, many saw the Crusaders as heroes.” This disparagement of the Crusaders has developed largely since the recent unpleasantness, of course, and makes sense if you’d prefer to be living under sharia law.

Lest we forget, the phrase “political correctness” came from Trotsky, and was adopted by the American Communist Party, which would announce that its members had to back certain policies because they were politically correct (i.e. practical) even if they were wrong, or statements even if they were false; the party line shifted often. Unlike the Bolsheviks, we probably won’t be imprisoned or killed for being un-PC, though that could change, but how comfortable would you be in speaking positively about the intrepid knights of the Crusades at your next social get-together?

WHO ART

I am now republishing my e-books in paperback under my new publishing label, Who Art. The first of these is now available on Amazon, The Wish Book, an amusing light read about the old Sears catalogs, a clandestine midnight burial, and a bit of romance. Paper is so much more satisfying than pixels.

The first volume of Sonny Robertson’s audio autobiography, When Sonny Gets Blue, is also on Amazon now.

Parvum Opus 391: Near Language Experience

2011-09-20T23:35:00.001-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Then and Now, There and Here

Re-reading Agatha Christie, I ran across this Postern of Fate (1973).

If I’d been a nice ordinary child of nowadays I wouldn’t have learned to read so easily when I was young. Children nowadays who are four, or five, or six, don’t seem to be able to read and quite a lot of them don’t seem to be able to read when they get to ten or eleven. I can’t think why it was so easy for all of us. We could all read…. I don’t mean we could all spell very well, but we could read anything we wanted to . I don’t know how we learnt. Asking people, I suppose. Things about posters and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. We used to read all about them in the fields when trains got near London. It was very exciting.

She was writing about England, of course.

Postern of Fate is not one of Christie’s best. In 1973 she was 83 years old. Her style became too discursive for a tight mystery, though she hadn’t totally lost her ability to plot. But her observation indicates that most children can learn when they’re expected to, and if they want to, and if vocabulary, for instance, is not purposely dumbed down. Of course reading might be more exciting for someone who’s not drowned in TV all the time.

More recently, circulating the web is an eighth grade exam from a school in Salina, Kansas, much more difficult than what students face today. The myth-busting web site Snopes does not say it’s not a real exam (Snopes also adds a teacher’s exam from Zanesville, Ohio, in the 1870s) but that, uh…. Well, you read it. Snopes doesn’t argue the authenticity of the exams; my guess is that the Snopes writers are defending their own educations, which were undoubtedly less rigorous than those of the 19th century.

Once again I refer you to the McGuffey Readers, which my parents might well have used when they attended one-room schools back in the mountains. Compare with today’s elementary school readers. You can find the McGuffey texts online. Here’s an example of a reading lesson from the primer, the book before Book One.

One day Nat and I sat on the high hill by the sea, where the tall lighthouse stands. We could look far out, and could see the ships at sea. As we sat there, we saw a man near by, with some sheep and lambs. The man had a pipe in his mouth. He sat with us, and let the sheep eat the grass. What fun it is to see lambs play! It made us laugh to see them. The man said that once, when the sheep and lambs were out in the snow, an old wolf took one of the lambs, and ran off with it. I think that men should watch their sheep, so that a wolf can not catch them.

The sentences are longer than six words and some of the words are longer than six letters. Today, of course, books would have few rural settings, and no one would be allowed to smoke a pipe. Probably a wolf would not be allowed to steal a lamb either. (Note, by the way, the archaic spacing of “near by” and “can not”, which now are spelled as one word.)

Dave DaBee Still Busy

We (the editorial “we” consisting of me and Fred) had the pleasure of lunching with Dave DaBee last week. Dave is a goldmine of information. Do check out his web page to learn about his trip from near death to his intercontinental talks on beating cancer by using the Internet.

Dave gave me a copy of his newest book, Facing Death with Hope, a follow-up to Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig: How an Empowered Patient Beat Stage IV Cancer (And What Healthcare Can Learn from It).

He also sent a great New York Times article on spelling.

Near-Language Experiences

In an advice column: “A small child who couldn't have been more than 7 years old had a near-drowning experience at the pool.” Is this like a near-death experience? Why wouldn’t the writer say the child almost drowned? He also had a survival experience, since he’s alive. “Experience” is one of those words like “area” and “field” that are used to increase word count and add a vague sense of importance to plain speaking.

And somewhere I read about “the estimable Herman Cain”. Mr. Cain is to be esteemed, but the idiomatic expression is either “esteemed” (respected) or “inestimable” (his worth is too high to be evaluated). “Estimable” or “inestimable” has to do with estimation, with rating, rather than esteeming. If the writer was thinking about esteem, he should have written “the esteemed Herman Cain”. You could argue a case for “estimable” but it won’t fly.

Perhaps some writers fear using clichés so much that as soon as they recognize a familiar expression, they feel they have to twist it into unfamiliarity to be original. But you have to know what and when to twist.

Grammar Nazis

Did I tell you already about Grammar Nazis, caught on YouTube? Brilliant. Sic semper tyrannis!

Littachur Nazis

Tom Simon told me about this one. The URL says it all: School board removes Sherlock Holmes novel as derogatory to Mormons. The fact is that Mormons were polygamists. Do we have to erase history to be respectful? Other people are polygamists today. So you can’t disapprove, and you can’t even mention anything that anyone might disapprove of.

Misnomer

More than once recently I’ve heard or read “misnomer” used incorrectly. It literally, and obviously, means “wrong name” but people use it to refer to a mistaken idea. I didn’t note specific examples but you get the idea.

Lived Again

Someone on CNN pronounced “short-lived” correctly. I’ve written about this in the past – PO 29 in 2003, to be exact, and I will reproduce my note in its entirety:

LONG LIVE THE LONG-LIVED QUEEN

"Lived" in "short-lived" or "long-lived" is usually pronounced as the past-tense verb ("he lived") but I think it ought to rhyme with "jived". My reasoning (and there are others who agree) is this: Someone or something that is short-lived has a short life; I think the phrase came from the word "life" and took the same path as wife-wive-wives ~ "I have come to wive it wealthily in Padua" (The Taming of the Shrew). In other words, it comes from the noun, not the verb, like calling a person short-sighted, not short-seen.

The CNN line was: “The Pony Express was short-lived.” The reporter said “lived” to rhyme with “jived”.

Eternal Proofreading Plagues

I listened to much of the book Misquoting Jesus on my recent road trip, which was not so much about theology as about copying manuscripts in the old days. Mistakes were made, either through carelessness, or because the scribe wanted to change text he didn’t agree with. In one case, a scribe was copying a double column of text about the “begats” but read across instead of down, leading to God being the son of somebody or other. I was amused to learn of these verses, Revelation 22:18-19:

	18. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
	19. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

In other words, to hell with sloppy editors, proofreaders, and typesetters.

Publishing/Music Shakedown

I recently discovered that CafePress discontinued its CD printing service, thus the autobiographical CD of Sonny Robertson that I produced isn’t available right now. I will find another producer soon. Sonny, by the way, will be performing in England at the Shakedown Blues event on September 24.

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Thanks!

2011-08-04T13:50:00.003-04:00

Thanks to everyone who bought any of my writing on Amazon Kindle! I received my tiny royalty check with great pleasure, and have new writing projects in mind.

Parvum Opus 390: Summer Read

2011-07-14T22:33:00.001-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Arty Bollocks

My work explores the relationship between new class identities and urban spaces. With influences as diverse as Kierkegaard and Roy Lichtenstein, new synergies are created from both explicit and implicit textures. Ever since I was a student I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of the mind. What starts out as hope soon becomes corrupted into a hegemony of lust, leaving only a sense of chaos and the chance of a new reality. As spatial phenomena become clarified through boundaried and diverse practice, the viewer is left with a glimpse of the possibilities of our future.

Is an image or even a thought forming in your mind now? This is an artistic statement generated by David James Ross, whose Arty Bollocks is another one of those automated statement generators that I love. They’re like MadLibs but with a point. The variables are in bold type. Make your own list of trendy and abstract nouns, adjectives, verbs, and names, and try your own artistic, personal, or mission statement.

If you like Arty Bollocks, be sure to read The Painted Word (almost typed “Pained”) by Tom Wolfe.

By the way, wouldn’t Arty Bollocks be a great name for a band? (American translation: arty B.S.)

Summertime and the Readin’ Is Easy

Today I picked up a book on the clearance table — Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Writing about perfume must be like writing about wines. We can compare unfamiliar or complex smells and tastes to familiar ones, but cannot reproduce them with words, though much of the terminology in this book is chemical. Visual images can be approximated in writing — or does it just seem so? — but the language of smell is more esoteric.

Examples from the glossary:

Drydown: The late stage of a fragrance that develops after the top and heart notes subside and before the smell completely fades.

Green: Smelling of cut grass or leaves.

Heart note: The middle portion of a fragrance, after the top note subsides but before the drydown, often considered to be the fragrance’s true personality.

Sillage: French for the wake left in the water by passing ships; fragrance industry jargon for the scent trial left by a perfume at a distance from the wearer.

Top note: The first few minutes of a fragrance, when the materials with the lowest molecular weights and highest volatilities evaporate first.

I was pleased to find that two of my favorite scents are highly rated.

Diorissimo, from Dior, though not sold anymore in its original formulation, “is the archetypal muguet [lily of the valley]…. The original 1956 Diorissimo established Edmond Roudnitska as the Mozart of postwar French perfumery. And Diorissimo was a truly Mozartian fragrance, with a catchy jaunty presto tune like the overture to The Marriage of Figaro…. The best way to describe [the new version] is as the voice of a great soprano close to retirement. The melody, the timbre are there, but some of the high notes are a little forced and have lost the effortless soaring, the liquid fluency of old.”

Grey Flannel is, “despite the fact that [it] can occasionally feel a little crude, a masterpiece.”

I could go on. If you’d like me to look up the description of a fragrance, let me know, though there are some I couldn’t find, and not just because they’re too cheap. The books lists a number of cheap, low rated scents, but some cheaper ones are well rated too.

Years ago a woman said to me, apropos of nothing (though we were in a restaurant), that when you smell something, molecules must actually enter your nose, thus your body. Which is obviously true but I’d never thought about it before. That steak or that flower or that guy next to you is actually getting inside your head, and elsewhere.

I’m also reading The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, by David Mamet, in which the famous playwright writes about, around, under, over, and above his conversion from left to right politically. If you like his theatrical work before, you should like this book. I’ve seen some of his movies, and House of Games stuck with me, a pretty good suspense movie with a weird atmosphere.

And the entry for trash is an out-of-print bodice (or toga) ripper by satirist Florence King. In The Florence King Reader she excerpted a chapter from an early novel, The Barbarian Princess, which she said is mercifully out of print. But I got a copy from a used book dealer. King made money writing genre fiction and wanted to get in on the gravy train that was the lurid “sweet savage” fiction she says was a backlash to the feminist movement of the era.

She made a lot of money from this book under the nom de plume Laura Buchanan, in which a Celtic princess, Lydda, is kidnapped and escapes, is forced into wedlock, is ravished and raped, escapes and becomes a Druid warrior priestess, from Britain to Rome to North Africa and back with stops along the way, and so on and on until she finally marries her true love, the Saxon invader Thel. The book is ridiculous yet gripping. King knew her history and her Latin. She even threw in Saint Patrick as Lydda’s youthful boyfriend, who later unites her and Thel in Christian (at last) wedlock.

I’m thinking about writing to King about this 1978 paperback. The characters on the cover were painted by someone who didn’t read any part of the book: the red-headed Celtic princess is a brunette and the big blond Saxon looks like Charles Bronson. And on the back Lydda, wearing half a robe, appears to have no pelvic bones.

If you don’t like trash, you’ll at least like Florence King’s other work, especially her book reviews. These days her columns appear in National Review.

Serial Karma

Dave DaBee notified me that the Oxford Style Guide now advocates dropping the Oxford comma, which is the serial comma, the one in a series before the final conjunction. We’ve talked about this before, here, so I won’t go into detail, but this is a horrible development and further evidence of weakening standards everywhere. What can it hurt to keep the comma? It often aids in comprehension, and when it doesn’t necessarily, it adds a sense of order, logic, and completeness to a series.

The only bright note is that it seems that it’s the Oxford PR office style guide that perpetrated this shabbiness, not the Oxford University Press.

Daily Writing Tips has a good array of examples of where and why to use commas in 10 Comma Cases in Which More Is More.

Beauty vs. Cutey

Hopping to another on the Oxford Comma site, I found an article on the most beautiful words in the English language, with a short list of suggestions. This is purely subjective as you have to distinguish between the sound of the word and its meaning. For instance, onomatopoeia is on the list, but why? It’s rhythmic but its meaning isn’t particularly beauteous. Someone once complained about the sickening sweetness of something like “summer afternoon” offered as most beautiful words. (Sorry about all the esses.)

Are words with hard K sounds less beautiful, like cookie? Cookie is a beautiful word if you’re looking at a tray full of freshly baked cookies with chocolate chips — especially if accompanied by a bottle of Coca-Cola. Maybe cookie is a cute word rather than a beautiful word, but no one ever discusses cute words.

Because of the contrast between sound and meaning — both of which are subjectively pleasing or otherwise — we have a panoply of names given to babies by parents who were more attuned to sound that meaning, such as this one invented by a comedian, Lemonjello, with the stress on the second syllable, a sort of aural allusion to Michelangelo; and the mythical twins Syphilis and Gonorrhea.

Throwback

Heard on the radio:

“He’s taken some deserv-ed time off.”

“Deserved” was pronounced with three syllables, which is an antique pronunciation though it remains in some words, such as “bless-ed” alongside of “blessed” (blest). But shortly after, the same speaker on the radio said “deserved” with two syllables. I kind of like hearing the old version, a bit of the past popping up unexpectedly.

Not Quite

Someone/s wrote:

· “A saying chalk full of wisdom.” Could sound like that in speech but it’s actually “chock-full”, possibly from “choke full”, which would suggest choking because your gullet is too full.

· “It’s a shoe-in.” Should be “shoo in”, an easy winner, from “shoo” meaning to urge something or someone in a particular direction.

Parvum Opus 389: Esprit d'Logoff

2011-06-03T12:30:00.000-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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HILARY’S VALET

The wife of Congressman Weiner (who may or may not have tweeted a photo of himself in his underpants) is Hilary Clinton’s valet.

What’s wrong with this sentence?

Of course it is “valet”. The word valet is related to “varlet” and “vassal”. It pretty much has always meant “boy”. A valet is the personal servant of a gentleman and is always a man. Hilary Clinton is not a gentleman, and ought not to have a valet, at least not in public. She would have a personal maid. Perhaps a lady in waiting. The pretention of calling her employee a valet is a failed feminist/populist attempt to elevate the job. All jobs with female titles are lowly. A maid is a girl. A servant serves, which is lowly, though waiters (and former waitresses) now call themselves servers. A valet is for rich men. The job is the same, though, taking care of the employer’s clothes and personal needs.

Like other failed euphemisms, this one further denigrates the job it attempts to elevate. You mean there’s something shameful about being a personal maid? It’s honest work, no different, really, from a beautician or drycleaner or waitress or personal trainer.

It’s like when secretaries became administrative assistants. Professional secretaries used to be proud of their jobs and their skills. Administrative assistants want to move up. I crossed the path of one who would not accept campus mail for her boss, the university president, if she spotted a correction on the letter paper –before word processing when mistakes were erased or covered with white-out. “Administrative assistant” has had a good run, so I’m waiting for the day when it will become “administrator”.

Why would Hilary Clinton need a valet? Why not just an aide or personal assistant? Because those words now imply office work, not personal wardrobe assistance.

Obama can have a valet if he wants, but Hilary Clinton’s lady valet reminds me of Nixon’s palace – I mean White House guard uniforms. They looked like something from a musical comedy by one of those European immigrants who entered the movie biz, still dreaming of old Vienna.

Of course, the undercurrent of all this name change is not merely feminist angst. It’s a desire to remove all hierarchy. A job and its title are often defined by their relation to a different job and title. A small company of two people can get away with no titles: it’s just Jim and Bob. A larger organization with different jobs assigned to different people requires an acknowledgement of separate duties, and Jim and Bob decide what jobs they need done and may assign titles: widget designer, widget part procurer, widget maker, widget seller, and so on. If the widget part procurer decides he has equal decision making ability, does he start ordering gadget parts?

If Jim and Bob try to avoid any inequality among themselves and the people they hire, they may try calling them by numbers instead of work functions, but you know number one is always going to be on top, so that won’t work.

My dad was a career military man and he liked to use the phrase “man of rank and title”. My dad was a man of rank, not an officer, but he understood and appreciated discrimination in its best and worst forms.

Matter without any hierarchy or discrimination is an amoeba.

But calling a maid a valet is like the woman who had a sex change operation on the visible parts and then when she got pregnant, said she was the first man to get pregnant. No, she was a woman who’d fooled around with plastic surgery, and with the language. If it looks like a duck but moos like a cow, take a closer look.

(By the way, valet is pronounced val-et, not val-ay.)

STILL CRAZY

Read “Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years” by writing instructor Mary Grabar, on a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (April 21, 2011), then pull your kids out of college. Why should you have to pay for this?

Not only is it in vogue (has been for years) to see all literature, past and present, as coded or overt explications of sex and race and class oppression – the coded stuff being essential to the decoders’ (teachers’) having jobs – but the professors also decry classist (note: not “classic” or “classicist”) notions like grammar, i.e. clarity and logic. (And let’s not forget the writer who eschews capital letters because they privilege some letters over others.) Apparently all students need is a few words and grunts to express themselves. Anything beyond that is elitist.

A co-director of a “Poverty Studies” program said we need to “think critically about how dirty work can be reframed, recalibrated, or refocused to honor all work and workers” (e.g. maid becomes valet). OK, honor it, then say Americans won’t do it and let the illegal Mexicans do it; maybe stoop labor can become earth-proximal agricultural work. In a different professional field, thus have prostitutes become sex workers, without all the unpleasant moral connotations. Next up, whatta ya wanna bet: academic majors and minors in sex work, complete with history classes, medical classes, and business and accounting classes for the pro. You think not? Northwestern University professor J. Michael Bailey has already pioneered with an optional sex demo for his students. Universities just have to take the next step.

Toyota trucks have TOYOTA in big letters on the back and owners sometimes like to paint out part of the word, like the truck I saw with YO on the back, which sounds truckish. A Jewish driver could have OY. You could do TO OT. You might have TOY; they’re small trucks.

ESPRIT

As you know, esprit d’escalier means staircase wit: the clever riposte that comes to you after you’ve already left the room and it’s too late to say it. How about esprit d’logoff, the idea that comes to you just after you’ve shut down the computer? You want to write one more thing or look something up. This is why I’m looking forward to getting my Android phone, really a little web device that I can keep in my pocket or by the bed.

And by the way, wouldn’t Esprit be a good name for a carbonated beverage?

FOUND

“a person in affluent clothing”

While “affluent” and “rich” are synonyms, they are not interchangeable. People can be rich or affluent, but clothing does not possess riches, it displays wealth. It may be luxurious.

BANNED IN TEXAS

Words you can’t say at a Texas graduation:

God (of course) and other deities; join in prayer, bow your heads, amen, prayer, invocation, benediction

No free speech permitted, says judge. I bet you can add to his list.

SUMMER READING

20 classic novels you can read in one sitting, according to Daily Writing Tips:

1. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

4. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
5. Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
6. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
7. Candide, by Voltaire
8. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
9. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
10. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
11. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
12. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
13. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
15. Night, by Elie Wiesel
16. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
17. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
18. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
19. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
20. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

I’ve read most of these and actually remember quite a few of them. Probably won’t read the others on the list. I have my own new revolving list, not classics.

Parvum Opus 388: English Comprisition

2011-05-06T13:15:00.002-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Herb’s Comprisition

Herb Hickman wrote:

Well, Little Opus, I find some things here to carp about.

First, Taliban and other rad muslims don't bury a woman up to her neck to stone her. That would take out all the fun, because she'd be dead before they got in more than a few licks. Buried up to her neck, she could neither inhale nor exhale, and the pressure would likely rupture the abdominal organs too. Actually there's a considerable body of phoney correctness involved. The version I've heard is that correctly a woman is buried up to her waist and a man up to his chest, because he is likely stronger and more likely to be able to free himself and run. If you google stoning, there are a lot of videos. The video quality is very bad, for which you will be grateful.

Second, "comprises" is not ever synonymous with "includes." It means "is made up of," as in the example. "Comprises" needs to be followed by some sort of stab at describing what it's made up of. "Includes" can be followed by anything, even a single small component, anything that is present in the subject entity. A Buick includes a set of tires, but it doesn't comprise a set of tires.

We don't need "comprision" because we have the perfectly good word "comprisition."

Excellent point about “comprise”; the word “include” should often be avoided anyway since it so often replaces a better, more specific verb. I will start trying to use the word “comprisition” every day.

An Indefinite Period

Dubious translations in the New American Bible include this one in Psalm 23:

“I will dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.”

Compare to the familiar:

“I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Possibly “for years to come” is a more accurate translation, though probably not, but it hardly gives one a sense of secure futurity, and in fact takes the reader away from the idea of eternity back into the present world, where your dwelling could be pulled out from under you suddenly even if it is the house of the Lord. Houses of the Lord are being destroyed all over, particularly in the Middle East.

Parting Shot

I finally asked why the racquetball court was broken, out of order, and out of service. A cover fell off the overhead sprinkler, so the court was shut down so a ball wouldn’t hit the sprinkler and turn it on accidentally; however much fun that might be, the damage would cost thousands to fix.

Silver Cross

Whenever I heard the line “cross my palm with silver” I always thought it meant simply to put money in the hand. However, I saw a movie (sorry, I didn’t write down the title) from the WWII era where a man at a country fair goes into the gypsy fortune teller’s tent. When she tells him to “cross my palm with silver” he actually makes the sign of a cross on her palm with a coin. It’s doubtful whether this symbolizes the Christian cross since Christianity warns against fortune telling.

Senses

I didn’t record where I heard this, but someone said:

“He was never seen from again.”

Undoubtedly just a verbal mix-up between “heard from” and “seen” but it does bring to mind the differences between seeing and hearing as expressed in the English language. We receive sound from a source into our ears. Although theoretically the same process occurs with sight – we receive an optical stimulus into the eyes – we sometimes speak as though vision is active, not passive, different from hearing. There are people, such as Rupert Sheldrake, who believe that sight does entail an active extension of some kind of energy from the eyes to the object, and in fact he’s devised experiments to test this, like staring at the back of someone’s head to see if you can make them turn around. Try it.

We do speak of “active listening” but that does not refer to any adjustment of the ears, just nods and grunts to cue someone that we are paying attention, and of course we distinguish between seeing and looking, hearing and listening.

Atavistic

Hazel Dickens, a singer from West Virginia, died. The New York Times obituary called her accent and delivery “atavistic”. That is a poor word choice. At first I thought the writer meant simply “old style” but technically “atavistic” means a throwback, thus it would be a throwback to something before Hazel Dickens’ own time. In any case, the connotation of the word is always primitive and generally negative. The obit writer, Bill Fiskics-Warren, probably thought he was praising her, but there’s condescension in that word.

Loan Words

English has taken aboard a lot of words from other languages without sinking. The Anglo-Saxon vessel remains. As English continues to spread around the world, it will take on even more. Languages from which we’ve imported vocabulary range from Afrikaans to Welsh. Zulu is not on the list linked here, but we need a Z to complete it. As it turns out, South African English has imported Zulu words, some of which are now standard English, such as names of animals like impala and mamba.

But I object to the term “loan words”. It’s not like we’re giving them back. Some anti-Western ideologues have actually said we’ve “stolen” words from other languages. That’s not accurate either.

Oh the Awkwardness

Heard somewhere:

“It would have been a good thing had it been able to happen.”

It would have been a better thing had it been:

“It would have been a good thing could it have happened.”

The speaker’s problem was trying to form a fairly complex sentence using “to be able”, that awkward and irregular verb. “Could it have happened” suggests possibility of occurrence while “to be able” suggests a more active participation in existence. Most things happen without active will, at least verbally.

Cremains

Fred Bauer designed the Pringles can and was so enamored of his design that he had some of his ashes – his “cremains” – buried in one, in Springfield Township, Ohio. “Cremains” is obviously a neologism, but one that ought to be eschewed, except for people who want to be buried in Pringles cans. The word looks sort of like it could be the name of an artificial cream substitute.

YouTube Grammar

Did you know some teachers post videos about grammar on YouTube? I’m not recommending any one of them in particular, just passing on the info.

Witless Lit Crit

A 2003 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles changed the plot, for no apparent reason. In the original story, the old tale of the hound was about a lord who sent the hound after a girl who ran away to escape the evil intentions of him and his cronies. In this movie, the story was about the lord sending the hound out to find his runaway wife. It didn’t make sense. Why do screenwriters do things like this? Even if the twit – one Allan Cubitt – had never read the Sherlock Holmes story, he’d probably seen the previous movies, whose screenwriters didn’t think they were better plotters than Arthur Conan Doyle. There were other changes in the plot too, but this one actually weakens the aura of evil. Cubitt probably doesn’t believe in evil. Rewriting literature for no dramatic purpose (as is sometimes required for screen or stage) is something like rewriting history.

Statistics

I chanced to look at the statistics feature of my Parvum Opus blog (cafelit.blogspot.com), and was surprised to find numbers for hits broken down by countries. By April of this year, there had been page views from:

Australia

Canada

China

France

Germany

Iran

Netherlands

Poland

Russia

Slovenia

Taiwan

United Kingdom

Vietnam

More from the UK than anywhere, of course, but I’m surprised to have hits from … Iran?

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Parvum Opus 387: Kinetic Word Action

2011-03-31T19:45:00.001-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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MAKING THE BUZZ WORD CUT

· We’re at kinetic military action in Libya. You can read what some law professors say about it, if that will make you feel any better. Someday veterans will tell kinetic military action stories, just like they’ve been telling police action stories and conflict stories for the last few decades. Since “kinetic” and “action” are redundant, what does the word “kinetic” add, other than the assurance that we’re not waging military inertia in Libya?

· A fictomercial (or literatisement) is a novel that contains plugs for a product or even a region, not just a product. You’ve seen product placement on TV and in movies; look for it in popular fiction. If I could get Coca-Cola to pay me for a plug, I’d do it. But I have integrity; I actually like Coke.

· Taliban is the new Nazi, when applied to Catholics. Next time you see a pack of Catholics stoning a woman buried up to her neck, you’ll know what to call them. Actually, it’s not clear to me what this is supposed to mean. I suspect various people use it against traditional Catholics and some Catholics use it against other Catholics. I guess Taliban is the new Nazi, so people will start calling those with whom they disagree Talibani. It would be a change. Usually, of course, comparatively conservative (formerly “liberal”) people are called Nazis by people who forget that Nazi stands for National Socialist. The Russians started identifying the Nazis as “right” when they split politically, the Russian Communists being International and Germany being National Socialists. Since Germany wanted to spread itself all over, I don’t see that as a real difference.

COMPRISION

One more time: comprise, compose, consist. Mark Nichol in Daily Writing Tips wrote about his entanglement with the word “compromise”. His explanation is slightly fuzzy around the edges, but he seems to have come to the correct conclusion. Examples:

· A dictionary comprises word definitions, etymology, and a pronunciation guide. (synonymous with “includes”)

· A dictionary is composed of many etc. (synonymous with “is made up of”)

· A dictionary consists of many etc. (synonymous with “is made up of”)

NEVER: A dictionary is comprised of many etc.

I would like to further confuse the issue by suggesting a new word, “comprision”. I think the verb needs a noun. Compose has composition, consist has consistency, comprise has zilch. How about, “The comprision of the dictionary was expanded to include imaginary words.”

BAROQUE MUSINGS

Regarding the racquetball court that was out of order, then out of service, Mike Sykes said:

Nothing really [wrong with saying something is broken]. Except that, for me, 'broken' has always connoted a physical fracture, or at least some sort of fragmentation, rather than any malfunction. It always seemed a little odd to hear a colleague say, for example, that a specification was broken, meaning perhaps logically inconsistent. Yet I'm quite accustomed to think of a vehicle as broken down at the side of the road. Or break of day.
Oh, give us a break!
Time for a break.

And, I’m broke this week.

Mike also asked who goes around disabling all those disabled toilets, not a phrase we usually find in public bathrooms in the U.S. We usually, though not always, reserve “disabled” for people.

In Spanish, if you break something, you say, “Se rompio”, meaning “It broke itself”, neatly sidestepping culpability in the neat way that the passive voice does.

HOW HEADLINES WORK

Once again we see how word choice can editorialize, as in an article referenced on the cover of The Nation magazine:

The struggle for single payer in Vermont

Obviously, if there’s a struggle for something, there’s likely to be a struggle against it too, but would the author write about “the struggle against single payer in Vermont”? Does the actual cover line make you think the writer is for or against single payer health insurance? Why or why not?

It’s the word “struggle”. In politics that word always makes you think of a righteous campaign, complete with noble ideals and sacrifice, more so than “fight” or “battle” for some reason. The Nation is an opinion magazine, not a newspaper, so it’s justified in editorializing, but you often see these kinds of word choices in newspapers too, whether the choices are thoughtfully made or knee-jerk.

SELF-GENERATING ART

Again on writing from the art world, from something or other I read or heard:

He studied reproductive prints of English and American landscapes.

He studied reproductions or he studied prints. He’s not just redundant, the writer forgot that “reproductive” refers to procreation, not copies, though it would be nice if prints would reproduce themselves.

LOST LEAF BOOK

Classic children’s writer Munro Leaf published Grammar Can Be Fun in 1934 but it seems to be out of print. Someone published a page from it on Improbable Research and a few pages are viewable at Curious Pages, but a search on Amazon doesn’t even turn up used copies. Manners, Reading, and Geography can be fun too, by Leaf, and are readily available, but not Grammar. Our library doesn’t even have it. Alibris.com, however, lists a number of used copies for sale by various dealers, ranging from $30 to $225. I didn’t even know I wanted it until now.

FLACCID PRONUNCIATION

I heard the word “flaccid” pronounced “flassid” rather than “flaksid”, which I thought was the correct pronunciation, like “success” where the two Cs sound different, but both versions of “flaccid” are acceptable. “Flassid” sounds limper than “flaksid” anyway. You can’t beat that K sound for impact.

JASPANGLISH

Someone I know who’s living in Japan (and luckily untouched by the earthquake) says there’s a hybrid language composed of 1 part English, 1 part Spanish, 1 part Japanese. For example:

Top of Form

わたしの amiga は on her phone cuando alguien でんわしました then she went a su trabajo

An online translation goes something like, “My friend was on her phone when somebody called then she went to work.” That’s probably not exactly right. I would avoid trying to use Jaspanglish, you could get hurt.

And doesn’t it always seem odd to think about the intersection of a foreign language with another foreign language, other than English? I mean, why would Spanish-speaking people go to Japan, and why wouldn’t they all speak English together? Maybe it’s just me, but the thought gives me the same disconnect as hearing a small child speak another language.

UN-DESENSITIZED

The TV comedy Community is back with a new season on Thursday nights (you can see episodes online; the one on politics is particularly funny), and continues to whack the culture as it so richly deserves. One character said, “Girls today are so un-desensitized.” Note the difference between this and “sensitive”. I’m still brooding over it.

WATCH THE BOOK

Another bookstore conversation reported on notalwaysright.com (that is, the customer is not):

Customer: “This book looks interesting. How do I watch it?”

Clerk: “Watch it?”

Customer: “Yes, where can I find the movie?”

Clerk: “I don’t think this book has been adapted into a movie.”

Customer: “What do you mean? Where can I go to watch it? I want to know what happens in the book!”

Clerk: “Forgive me for asking, but if you want to know what happens, why not just read it?”

Customer: “Read? How stupid! Where’s the movie! All books are made into movies so that we don’t have to read them!”

Clerk: “I am sorry, I can’t help you. This is a bookstore. Only popular books—usually adventure stories—are adapted into movies. I am quite sure that this book hasn’t been made into a movie.”

Customer: “Why not?!”

Clerk: “Because it’s a fishing manual.”

Of course a fishing manual could be made into a documentary or training film. However, I wonder if the people who think all books are movies weren’t read to by their parents when they were little.

NEW CAFEPRESS ITEMS

· Late Boomer

· So how many children don’t you have? / superimposed over CHOICE

Parvum Opus 386: The PO Delivery System

2011-03-21T23:24:00.002-04:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Somewhere in the News Cloud

As newspaper pro Mark Twain said, choosing the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

· Is it news or is it commentary?

Gov. rejects streetcar benefits

The Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper article actually said that the governor of Ohio does not think the purported benefits of a streetcar in Cincinnati are real; it won’t create many jobs and it will cost a bundle. The headline presumes there are real benefits. Whether or not the benefits are there, the headline is inaccurate. The governor may deny that there are benefits; any number of synonymous verbs could be substituted. The governor may also reject the proposed streetcar plan. It’s hard to tell whether the headline writer was careless or convinced that the projected benefits are real, in which the story becomes an editorial, not a report.

· A species of festivity (to quote Kingley Amis in Lucky Jim) featuring Bootsy Collins was announced in the paper:

Funk is not an option.

The writer meant, “Funk is not optional.” Big difference.

An option is a choice; not an option means it’s not on the menu. “Funk is not an option” means you could not choose to be funky.

Optional means you can choose it; not optional means you have no choice. “Funk is not optional” means you have to be funky.

“Funk is not an option” could possibly carry the second meaning, but because “Funk is optional” would be the more common expression, it’s best to use it and avoid any momentary blip of confusion.

· David Forsmark in a blog-on-blog wrote:

“the estimable Megyn Kelly”.

Usually we’d read “the inestimable Megyn Kelly”, meaning that her worth is so high it cannot be estimated (like invaluable). To say someone can be estimated, that her worth is measurable, may or may not be more accurate, but if this isn’t just a typo, I wonder what Forsmark might have meant. Was he being sarcastic or sloppy? When you turn accepted word formulas upside down, you ought to be sure your intention is clear.

TV Tropes

The web site TV Tropes covers themes or perhaps memes or just stuff that you’re likely to encounter in the media. A casual perusal suggests that the site isn’t so much about accepted views of stuff, but is tantamount to a mini-encyclopedia. Is this trip necessary, as they used to say in the days of WWII gas rationing?

Mystifying Spam

No, I didn’t click on any links, but this spam item was tempting:

Portugal regrets not bringing herbal supplements

That’s what happens when you pack light.

The President’s English

So we don’t have the, or a, president’s English. But there is the King’s English or Queen’s English in England. Of course, correct pronunciation of words exists, but that’s not the same as having a particular accent. “Harvard” and “Hahvahd” are both correct, and we could even accept “’Arvard” and “Hoivud”. But “Haravada”, for instance, could not fit on the continuum of comprehensible pronunciations. It looks like a Japanese version of the name.

If we had a “president’s English” which president would it be? Clinton, from Arkansas? Bush, from Texas? Truman, from Missouri? Kennedy, from Boston? Obama, by nowhere in particular, out of Harvard?

An early-nineteenth-century writer found American accents to be somewhat standardized:

"[Americans] at large speak English with a nearer accordance to your standard of pronunciation, than the inhabitants of England. . . . Of this the proof is complete. I have seen a dramatic performance, written in the West Country dialect: the words being spelt according to the local pronunciation; of which I was scarcely able to understand a sentence. . . . [But] from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, every American, descended from English ancestors, understands every other, as readily as if he had been bred in the same neighbourhood." Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, Vol. 4, pp. 276-77 (1822).

Of course, he does specify only descendants of the English, but presumably the English ancestors hadn’t all emigrated from the same spot in England, so what’s to account for greater standardization in 1822 in this large country compared to England?

Out of Service

No thanks to Parvum Opus, probably, but someone changed the sign on the racquetball court from “Out of Order” to “Out of Service”. Still a little awkward but better. “Out of Order” suggests to me moving parts. “Out of Service” just suggests not available for use. But I still don’t know what’s wrong with the racquetball court.

Grape Delivery System

Dave DaBee sent a link to “I, Grape” by Brock Clarke from the Boston Globe, on teaching his small child grammar. The boy has no verbs. If he wants a grape, he says, “I grape.” The mother is more tolerant than Mr. Clarke, but she has her own problems. Mr. Clarke wrote:

When I talk about teaching I tend to use words like “teaching.” Whereas my wife, in talking about her day, referred to her “delivery system.”

You see the problem. The boy will eventually learn to use verbs, but will his mother ever learn to avoid buzz words?

Occasional Verse

William Topaz McGonagall has been considered the worst of British poets (Scottish, from Irish parents), combining a tin ear with a burning desire to write. His most famous poem was about the collapse of the Tay Bridge near Dundee. When it was rebuilt, he wrote another poem to the new bridge. Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian, recited the original poem in a blizzard. Recitation improves it, and probably the blizzard does too.

The custom of writing public verse on the occasion of public disasters has declined, with exceptions, perhaps, for political verse on slavery and the depredations of white people, such as Maya Angelou’s poemon the occasion of the inauguration of President Clinton. (Her poem begs the questions, should African slaves have been glad to arrive in America, all things considered? Her poem didn’t sound too despondent. And, if the white Europeans hadn’t come, would there have been a United States at all?)

Aaarrrrtttttt

Mike Sykes said, regarding my comments on Impressionist gardens and Stieg Larsson’s books, “I share your sentiment. But isn't that a sort of deconstruction, suggesting a meaning that the artist never intended?” Mike also sent a link to a comment on rape statistics in Sweden by sealgoesarf. Let me elaborate.

First, I neglected to include a link to the painting with a woman in a green dress. It was not the Dorchester yard, it was “In the Luxembourg Garden” by Charles Courtney Curran. If you look closely at the actual painting (which I did) you can see that the dress is dark green, in contrast to the cuffs, which are black. But the online reproduction isn't very good.

Second, Impressionist paintings of gardens ask you to contemplate beauty, not social and economic problems. Larsson’s three books, which amount to about 1,800 pages, or six or more average book lengths, cover Swedish politics, government, law, police, secret service, spies, motorcycle gangs, corporate shenanigans, psychiatry, journalism, erratic sexual relations, computer hacking, abuse of women and children, problematic immigration from the former Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, and corruption in general, over quite a few years. In this case, it’s fair to ask why he would omit a major cultural change in Sweden, the large-scale immigration of people from a very different culture. Sealgoesarf suggests that immigrants who feel “isolated” are more prone to commit rape, though the natives do it more, but wouldn’t that suggest that people who are on the receiving end of immigration feel isolated too, and thus their rapes are equally justified?

You’ve Got to See the Movie

Bookstore conversation reported on notalwaysright.com (that is, the customer is not):

(A young woman, about 20 years old, comes up to the counter holding a copy of The Bible.)

Clerk: “Hi, did you find everything you needed today?”

Customer: “Yeah, hey, can you tell me what this is about?”

Clerk: “The Bible?”

Customer: “Yeah, what’s it about?”

Clerk: “The Bible has two parts, the Old Testament which is scriptures and the New Testament, which contains the story of Jesus’ life and works as told through the gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

Customer: “Huh. Is it any good?”

Clerk: “It’s pretty popular.”

Customer: “Nah, I’ll just get this one instead.” *puts a copy of Twilight on the counter*

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Parvum Opus 385: The Untainted Word

2011-03-10T20:48:00.001-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Playing With Accordion Words

Rich Lederer sent along his piece about “accordion words”, close cousin to portmanteau words and syllepsis. I’ve excerpted parts of “Playing with Accordion Words” here. And do see The King’s Speech if you haven’t already.

Garnering twelve Academy Award nominations and four Oscars, including Best Picture, The King's Speech had its coronation, on February 28, as the most honored film of the year. Among its many excellencies is the double entendre in its title. The word Speech in The King's Speech means the speaking of George VI, the stammerer who did not want to become king. At the same time and in the same space, the word Speech means the particular address, in 1939, that King George VI delivered to his British subjects exhorting them to join in battle against the Germans….

Like people, words grow after they are born. Once created, words seldom sit still and remain the same forever. Some words expand to take over larger territories: Once fabulous meant "resembling or based on a fable." Later came the expanded meaning, "incredible and marvelous." A holiday first signified "a holy day," but modern holidays include secular days, such as Valentine's Day* and Independence Day. ….

…The word gay** … can designate all homosexuals, as in "gay rights," or only male homosexuals, as in "the gay and lesbian community."

Business started out as a general term meaning literally "busy-ness." After several centuries of life, business picked up the narrower meaning of "commercial dealings." In 1925 Calvin Coolidge used the word in both its generalized an specialized senses when he stated, "The chief business of the American people is business." …

I have made up the term "accordion words" to describe these double-duty words. In the examples that follow, I list the broader meaning first and the narrower meaning second:…

· Gentleman***: (1) a male: "Ladies and gentlemen . . . ." (2) a refined man.

· Instrument: (1) something used to achieve an end: "Lord, let me be Thy instrument on this earth." (2) something used to produce music: "Bill Clinton's and Lisa Simpson's instrument is the saxophone."**** ...

· Segregate (similarly discriminate*****): (1) to set apart (2) to set apart on the basis of race.

· Temperature*****: (1) a degree of heat (2) too high a degree of heat: “You have a temperature.”…

Samuel Goldwyn once observed, "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." Obviously the movie mogul used verbal to mean "oral," as do most speakers of American English. Butverbal (Latin verbum, "word") communication involves words spoken or written, as in "I'm trying to improve my verbal skills."****** In this sense, Goldwyn's Goldwynism isn't so funny after all.

Think of oral hygiene if you can’t remember that ora means mouth. This loss of distinction in meanings is not only a loss to the language, it ruins a great Goldwyn story, as well as confusing the difference between oral and verbal sex.

I don’t know if this qualifies as an accordion word, but note that in the new translation of The New American Bible, the word booty has been replaced by spoils of war because people today only associate the word with rear end or sex (as in the movie “Booty Call”), because they hear a lot about rear ends and never read anything that might contain the word with the earlier meaning. Of course, the average reader also wouldn’t understand spoils as anything other than ruins or rots.

*Well, there was a Saint Valentine.

** I recently met a woman named Gay, a name that is probably never given to babies anymore, unfortunately. In the past even men were sometimes called Gay, usually short for Gaylord. According the government, the name seems to have disappeared, at least from the top 1,000 most popular names, after 1969. We don’t even have a replacement for the adjective gay (“Our hearts were young and gay”). Sure, you’ll find synonyms, but it’s a sad loss to the vocabulary.

***A professor from someplace in Mittel Europa once asked our class to define “gentleman” and I raised my hand and tentatively offered, “A gentleman is someone who is always kind to people?” He said “No! A gentleman is someone whose clothes and shoes are always clean and neat, even if they are old.” He meant a person of a certain class. I meant the American definition.

****Oh, never mind.

*****Often today people do not understand that the ability to discriminate is a necessary function of the mind.

******One of the cases where we used to be reprimanded for using the word in its narrower meaning: “Everybody has a temperature. You mean he has a fever.”

The Tainted Word

In the current exhibit of garden paintings by American Impressionists at a Cincinnati museum, the person who wrote the notes for each painting fell victim to the modern compulsion to impose a certain political slant on art. A lovely painting by Edmund Tarbell, “In the Orchard”, 1891, depicts his wife and relatives on a sunny summer day in Dorchester, Massachusetts; the orchard is unmowed; it is a peaceful, informal scene. The notes posted on the wall next to this and the other paintings generally say something about technique and training, compare these paintings to the French Impressionists’ work of the period, and discuss the rising popularity of formal and informal gardening. But the annotater couldn’t resist saying that these people hanging out in the back yard are “untainted by grimmer realities of contemporary American urbanization, labor conflict and social strife”. Well, when you barbecue out in the backyard with your friends and family, don’t you feel untainted by grimmer realities? That’s what the beer is for.

You could say the same thing about every painting in the world:

Mona Lisa smiles as if unaware of the Borgias.

“Starry Night” by Van Gogh cavalierly ignores the rotting corpses on earth.

Remington’s “Cracker Cowboys” ride their horses on the job callous to the plight of the unemployed.

I think the person who wrote those placards was still queasy from the influence of the bitter Goya etchings that preceded the garden collection. Or possibly the writer was aware that Dorchester is no longer a pleasant semi-rural suburb of Boston but an urbanized neighborhood replete with social strife and more gang members than fruit trees.

At the exhibit, I heard a woman viewing “In the Orchard” reiterate the sentiment of the placard (and it is sentiment) as if it were received truth, and the man with her said, “Yeah, someone had to carry the chairs out.” Judging by my experience, the man in the painting probably carried the chairs out, or if that’s too sexist for a modern sensibilities, let’s assume the ladies helped carry the chairs outside.

The people viewing the paintings and writing the explanatory notes proclaim their social “awareness” and thus their virtue. They must be conflicted about the fact that they even like art, which requires leisure to produce and to see and appreciate, and often requires wealth to procure and preserve. But artists themselves are not all obsessed with economics and class warfare.

Further evidence of the blindness of the writer appears in the note for another garden painting, which says the woman in that garden is wearing a black dress. The dress is not black, it is dark green. If you think it’s just the painterly indication of shadow, using colors to depicit blacks and whites, not so, because there are very definitely black cuffs at the end of the green sleeves.

Everything isn’t a matter of black and white.

To depict the deep reality of one moment in time, you don’t have to simultaneously invoke something different or distant.

Those immersed in grimmer realities of social strife are oblivious to the possibilities of peace in a quiet grove.

Nonetheless, I will introduce a brief political comment on another work of art, the popular crime trilogy by late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, who wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I read all three long books, and hope that his common-law widow is able to produce more manuscripts. (She’s in a legal wrangle with Larsson’s family.) The books are engrossing and, like the late Tony Hillerman’s books, show the eye of the reporter: clear, detailed writing with not much sense of humor. Sometimes there’s too much detail; I suppose if you’re Swedish and understand Swedish politics of the last few decades, you’d get more out of the story. But I enjoyed the bits about computer hacking even though I don’t have that much technical knowledge.

The center of the books is Lisbet Salander, a young woman who endures, and avenges, extreme and repeated abuse. She is a super-hero of improbable survival. I will bypass the question of writers (and movie producers) who supposedly object to torture but who depict torture in much detail.

What I wonder is, why Larsson, the very modern, secular Swede with a Western ethic, never refers to the large influx of Muslims into Scandinavia who feel justified in raping and otherwise abusing what they think of as whorish Western women. Larsson’s plots are mired in the fallout of Cold War entanglement with aged Russians spies, and with Eastern European sex traffickers, real enough but perhaps not the major social problem there at this moment in time.

Parvum Opus 384: Pahvum Opurse

2011-03-02T18:06:00.001-05:00

Of the Language, With the Language, For the Language

Ben Zimmer has bowed out of the New York Times “On Language” column, once written by the late William Safire. The column may or may not be revived. But Zimmer’s farewell is really about technology, the digital era, and word processing, not about meaning. Safire was better.

Zimmer also quoted British language scholar David Crystal as saying, “Never predict the future with language.” You pretty much have to predict the future with language, but it’s hard to predict the futureof language.

Hoib and Dee-en and Moik

I think "Hoib" (or Hoyb) would definitely be Brooklynese, though I don't know where else it would apply. And the Brooklynites also would reverse the sounds, rendering "boyd" as "bird." A writer once made note of a perfect example at a baseball game where the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted the New York Yankees.

An ace pitcher for the legendary "best team of all time" 1927 Yankees was Brooklyn-born Dodger fan Waite Hoyt, and Hoyt was on the mound in this particular game. The way I hoid it, a hard line drive back to the pitcher's mound broke Hoyt's hand. After the play he circled around the mound holding his hand and grimacing in pain. One of the Brooklyn fans quickly recognized the situation and yelled out the announcement, "Hey, Hert is hoit!"

Waite Hoyt and teammate George Herman (Babe) Ruth were buds -- hard drinking carousing buds as it were. They remained friends for life after ending their baseball careers around the same time. Hoyt was an admitted alcoholic who joined AA and was sober the last 40 some years of his life. After his pitching career, he broke into broadcasting, reportedly overcoming a lot of prejudice against players in that line because of his own good vocabulary. In the early forties he landed the broadcaster job for the Cincinnati Reds network. Hoyt was not sober at that time, and made the national news when he was found passed out in downtown Cinci, reported as suffering from amnesia. Babe Ruth sent him a telegram, "Heard about your case of amnesia . . That must be a new brand!"

Another Brooklynese gem: “soilern steak.”

Dan Erslan wrote on Bostonese:

I was intrigued by the Boston pronunciation of words, so while I lived there, I made a little personal study of it. An r that precedes a vowel sound is always pronounced as an r. So in everyday speech a Bostonian would pronounce "...car in...". Likewise, when a vowel sound precedes a vowel sound an r sound is always inserted between the two as in "an idear of something." .… By adding the rbetween the vowels it isn't necessary to close one's throat at the end of idea and start a new exhale for the of. They can slur right through it. It's a little like the Boston habit of not stopping at stop signs. You often would hear JFK use that idear pronunciation. When the other JFK, John Kerry, ran for president he would often put the r in idea …, as would Howard Dean. I believe they did this intentionally evoke thoughts of Kennedy.

Mike Sykes asked who’s to say who’s correct about pronunciation. I wouldn’t say that Brooklynese or Bostonese isn’t correct. I like them. Pronunciation customs or preferences are usually not the same as differences in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, which may introduce errors in meaning. When I teach pronunciation to my foreign students, I have to teach them when to drop or elide sounds instead of pronouncing every letter in every word clearly and distinctly. That’s not the way we talk no matter what part of the country we live in.

Will

A grammar book I recently used in class covered the auxiliary verb “will” for the future tense, and added that there is no verb “to will”. Not so, as I had to explain to my student. There is the legal sense (He willed me his fortune), and the meaning to effect something through the exercise of the [noun] will, often reflexive (He willed himself to eat the overcooked vegetables). Don’t trust everything you read in textbooks.

Unspeakable Charlie Sheen

The apparently rabid Charlie Sheen has said a number of interesting things lately, including that he’s been a “veteran of the unspeakable”. Oh, why stop now, Charlie? But this reminded me of unspeakable,ineffable, and unmentionable. Why should they have different connotations? Because they can. Too bad we don’t have the word effable (except as a sniggering faux obscenity).

Anyway, as much as I love cute kitty pix I never impose them on Parvum Opus readers, but I’m making an exception now because of Charlie Sheen’s manic way with words. As he says, “I got magic and I got poetry at my fingertips.” Read ‘em and weep, tweet, or shriek.

You can’t process me with a normal brain….

We are high priest Vatican assassin warlocks….

Sounds like way too much coke to me.

Sweet and Useful References

Sweet

A fresh look at corporate buzzword bingo plus a brilliant tour de force anent same by Suzanne Rogers (seven paragraphs into the article on tollbooths in San Francisco).

Useful

10 Latin abbreviations you might be using incorrectly

40 Yiddish words you should know

“What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness”: A good article on the decline of coherence among college graduates.

New Look

Parvum Opus online at cafelit.blogspot.com has a new look. For some reason the program does its own formatting in regard to paragraph breaks, fonts, etc. Unlike some layout designers I could name, I don’t think it’s a good idea to start a new paragraph without either and indent or a space before. It’s only a matter of chance that the preceding paragraph may not reach the right margin, thus identifying the paragraph break. Other than that, I like the new template, which looks like where we live: crowded.

While fiddling with the general design, I ran across (and used) the Fell English type font, designed by Igino Marini, who wrote:

The Fell Types took their name from John Fell*, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography.

Note the faulty parallelism (forgivable as he is Italian):

Not only he created … but he started …

Logically the parallelism looks perfect but actual usage is to invert the word order in the first instance and use the alternate past tense form:

Not only did he create … but he started …

I wonder why we lost the simple past tense inverted form: Not only created he … It’s only used in very formal or poetic language.

In fact quite a lot of historical developments are unexplainable (by me). Dennis Miller joked, “Most people say beheaded, I say deheaded.” Why do we say beheaded when the be- prefix usually suggests an addition or intensification rather than a loss, as in befriend and besmirch?

* It turns out that this is the John Fell who inspired this bit of doggerel by one of his students, Tom Brown, who based it on a Latin line:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

More Questions

· Sign posted n LA Fitness:

Racquetball court is out of order. We are working as quickly as possible to resolve this issue.

I don’t play racquetball but as far as I can tell the court consists of walls, a floor, and a door, with no moving parts. What could be “out of order”?

· Why are some computer books in the Dummies series shelved under “professional computing”?

Step On It

The voice on a radio program about the formula for Coca-Cola said the “Step On” company processes coca leaves without the active cocaine for Coca-Cola; the active part goes to a pharmaceutical company. The speaker pronounced it “step on” but the name is actually Stepan. I noted it because “stepping on” a drug is slang for diluting or cutting it, for instance, mixing cocaine with powdered milk.

Tip

What I learned from our recent annual computer crash, this time because of a virus: always update your programs, including browsers, but especially plug-ins. Newer versions will be somewhat safer. Our Trojan horse came in through Java. In the latest version of Firefox, go to Tools – Add-ons – Find Updates to get a list of the status of your add-ons.

Parvum Opus 383: So Let It Be Noted

2011-02-11T21:45:00.002-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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The Few, The Proud

There aren’t many grammar jokes. In fact there aren’t enough. Here’s one that may be old but is new to me, from Overheard in the Newsroom.

Copy Editor: “Knock knock.”

Photo Editor: “Who’s there?”

Copy Editor: “To.”

Photo Editor: “To who?”

Copy Editor: “To WHOM!”

Hoib Speaks

Herb Hickman wrote:

This matter of "Park Your Car in the Harvard Yard," is heaping cognitive dissonance like coals of fire upon my brow.

I'm suspecting that there are two uses for that phrase, with close to opposite intents. I know not much about representing various pronunciations with variant spellings. But I note that you say "pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd," and I can only hear that rendition with broad "A" pronunciation, possibly giving slight to the adjacent "R"s. Possibly what one might call affecting proper British or Londoner speech. Since the phrase is undeniably linked with Boston speech, thinking of it that way it only makes sense if it is a phrase used in a (futile?) attempt to teach Bostonians how to talk.

On the far far other hand, I learned the phrase from Vinnie Marston — Boston born and bred — pronounced the way Bostonians and New Englanders of that neighborhood speak. I would write Vinnie's version, "Pack ye caa in the haavad yaad." And the "a"s are all flat as pancakes. As opposite as possible from Obama's pronunciation of POCK-ee-stahn. Vinnie's coaching failed me, however, when I went to Duxbury (next to Plymouth where the Mayflower landed) and visited the laboratories of the renowned marine biologist William F Clapp. Standing in the Main Lab building, one of the longest-term employees of the lab told me, "This building was originally a ban." I was truly dumfounded as she repeated, "A BAN, a BAN, a BAN! Then she said, "Where cattle were kept!" That brought some light. But everyone there agreed with her, it was a ban.

Did these Saxons you're talking about form unions and go out on feck?

Herb is right, "Pack ye caa in the haavad yaad" sounds more like the Boston sound. It's hard to spell a vowel sound without a following consonant, but imagine the A in “cat” rather than the A in “what”. However, there are individual variants on the Boston/New England accent (“Hoib” is probably a more New Jersey). Someone once wrote that the Kennedy accent was specific to their family.

Of Note

Someone on radio quoted Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, “So let it be written, so let it be done.” Then I think it was my own brain that suggested “So let it be noted, so let it be done.”

What a world of difference. Ramses wouldn’t write a note or a memo. He’d have his scribes chisel something into a rock, or possibly paint something on a piece of papyrus if he was in a hurry. And for Post-Its he would stick pieces of papyrus together with pitch like that used to seal Moses’ basket made of bulrushes.

The End of an Era

Newspapers have been shrinking year after year. First the regular dailies got narrower, then the number of pages decreased. Even the Sunday paper is so small you can’t use it as a weapon anymore. This week a new indignity appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer: a random half page in the back. You may have seen pages sliced in half vertically as part of a sort of sleeve of advertising wrapping a section. But this is a half page sliced off vertically in the midst of classified pages following the comics. And it’s not one of those mistakes that sometimes happen in the machinery, a wrinkled or chopped page, because the page number appears neatly in the corner of the half page. Tragic.

Another casualty of the new technology may be clocks. So many people look at their phones for the time, or use digital watches and clocks, that a whole generation may be the first not to learn how to tell time on an analog clock. Ask a kid you know, or even someone in his twenties, if he can read a round-faced clock or understand what “half-past” or “quarter till” means. Those phrases only make sense if you can visualize a real clock with a face. Does a digital clock even have a face? And maybe someday instead of pointing to their wrists to ask for the time, people will point to their pockets, where their phones live. Though that could be ambiguous: Do you have the time, or are you just happy to see me?

Incredible

You may have read about the New Jersey Planned Parenthood counselor who was so helpful to the people posing as pimps for underage, illegal immigrant prostitutes. Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council said, “Incredulously Planned Parenthood’s own defense is that the one worker, who told the undercover ‘pimp’ how his underage prostitute could still earn money after an abortion, was doing the writething.” He meant “right”, of course, and he also meant “incredibly”. Incredulous applies to a person who can’t believe something; incredibleapplies to the unbelievable thing. In fact you can remember it that way: incrediBLE, unbelievaBLE. (Unfortunately it won’t work withincredulous, unbelivabilous.)

You Think English Is Hard

What I’ve learned from my students:

The Polish language only has three tenses, past, present, and future, and a formal rule that my Polish student learned in school is to arrange the various clauses in a complicated sentence chronologically, but I’m not sure if that means going forward or backward. If going forward, that last sentence I wrote would start with the middle clause (“My student learned…”), if I understood the rule correctly. Polish verbs are varied by verb endings that indicate person (who did it), not time.

Chinese has no tenses at all, so meaning is indicated through words such as “yesterday” and so on. Chinese also has no articles (the, a, an) and no gender in pronouns.

My Polish student asked how he could make himself clear if he made a mistake in tense (using simple past instead of past perfect, for instance), and I assured him that using qualifiers such as “yesterday” or “tomorrow” would generally make his meaning clear.

Rathole Update

Tim Bazzett sent an update on his publishing empire, Rathole Books.

For customers past and potential, the big news is that all five of my books have been drastically reduced in price to just $12 each (plus s&h, still only $3). And all books ordered direct from the site will be signed and inscribed, of course — something you won't get if you order them from Amazon, where they are still available at full price. And speaking of Amazon, we are currently working at making the books available in Kindle version. Soon, I hope. I'm not a big fan of e-books, but I am trying to accommodate those who are.

I always like to promote writers, including myself: search for my stuff for Amazon’s Kindle Reader.

By the way, I ran across an article about Lehman’s store in Kidron, Ohio, in Amish country, “A Starring Role in the Past”, in the Farm Bureau insurance company magazine for Ohio. I’ve been to Lehman’s, it’s a great store that carries all sorts of products that our grandparents used and that the Amish still use, like wood-burning stoves and kerosene lamps, all new. I did not know that it supplies props for movies. My novel The Wish Book, available in Kindle format, is a fantasy about a store filled with new items from all the old Sears catalogues and also supplies props for movies.

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Parvum Opus 382: Binge Writing

2011-01-21T10:11:00.002-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Crash

Our desktop computer crashed so I’m using my laptop, which means any notes I made for Parvum Opus in the first part of January are unavailable to me right now. We’ve been too busy to take the computer to the shop.

Free Stuff

Learn Out Loud is just one site with free podcasts of literature in the public domain, such as The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. Since I’d never read this classic of detective fiction, I listened to some of it online, but haven’t finished yet. First published in 1908 the book feels modern in certain ways because of the clash between “anarchists” and everyone else. In those days anarchists were throwing bombs from time to time. For that reason alone, the book is worth reading—to get historical perspective on contemporary conflicts.

But listening interrupted, if not wholly spoiled, first by Chesterton’s style. I like his writing, as dated as it seems, but noticed that he uses too many vague qualifiers like “seemed to” and “somewhat” and “like”.

Second, this web site, or at least this book, apparently uses volunteer readers, which makes sense because it probably wouldn’t be cost-efficient to hire professional actors or readers. The Man Who Was Thursday might be read by an American trying to affect British pronunciation, who ends up over-pronouncing words, and mispronounces some, as when he says “asketic” for “ascetic” and “convival” for “convivial”. When a French character appears in the story, the reader starts to sound a little like Inspector Clouseau, using an “outrageous French accent” a la Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Once again, the amateurs, bless their hearts, make me appreciate the professionals more.

Bingeing

Personal disclosure: I smoke cigarettes once every year or two. I buy a pack of cigarettes—American Spirit (no additives) or else something exotic—and smoke maybe one cigarette, or maybe the whole pack, usually around the holidays, so it’s a bit of a festive occasion. I told a doctor about this once when she asked if I smoke, and she said she’d never heard of this kind of “binge smoking”. Is doing anything for fun at rare intervals a “binge”? “Binge” applies a medical or psychological label to a bit of fairly harmless enjoyment, making it into a pathology. Sounds like a lost weekend, if not a long dark night of the soul. Should I get treatment? Go to confession?

Gribbenizing

By now you may have heard that a Professor Gribben has called for a censored version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and is going to get it, because modern students are too tender (or stupid) to read about and understand how people really spoke, i.e. using the N word. I’ll say it: Huckleberry Finn referred to his friend Jim, a slave, as a nigger. This is the word the average Southerner would have used in the 19th century, a pronunciation variant on Negro, which means black (lest we forget). As you know, today rappers use the word all the time, but white people are practically prohibited by law from doing so.* You could lose your job over it. So a publisher is going to make it easier for everyone by erasing history and rewriting literature.

Shakespeare was censored for children, and family reading, in the 19th century by Bowdler, from whom we get the term “Bowdlerized” to mean censored. When I was a senior in high school, Miss Mostenic assigned Romeo and Juliet to the class, using a textbook with every line numbered. Our homework might be to read lines 400 to 600, for example. But she would tell us to skip over anything she thought was bawdy, such as the Nurse’s lines. I wonder if any of the students actually did not read those lines, to save time perhaps.

If books like these are not suitable for children, they should not be used in classrooms at all until at least college. This is bad education.

(Along the same lines, I just discovered that the Miami University Redskins became the Redhawks, which means that instead of a brave Indian warrior as a mascot, or an Indian brave, they now have a guy in a bird outfit.)

*I am going to assume I have a few drops of Negro blood somewhere in my many millennia-long ancestry that qualify me to use this word in this essay.

This and That

· “Proud flesh” is an old expression I first heard from my mom, which means flesh or skin that is inflamed or scarred and rises above the surrounding flesh.
· One of those little things that has hung on in my memory for many years is:

In the telling phrase of Baedeker, it offered “little that need detain the tourist”. Through the miracle of the Internet search, I was able to track it down: Thomas Wolfe wrote it in his novel Of Time and the River. Does anyone read Thomas Wolfe anymore (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, the journalist)? Anyway, Baedeker is or was a popular series of travel books, and I found Wolfe’s quote irresistible. I apply it mentally to various situations and people.

· Mark Cantora wrote an interesting essay on The Great Satan (you and me, of course) and the origin of the word “satan”, which like “devil” means “the adversary”.
· Useful tourist info: Fred informed me that tommy-k is British slang for tomato ketchup (is there any other kind?).
· Heard on the radio: “in storge” (one syllable) for “in storage”, rhymes with “forge” and “gorge”. The “a” disappeared. It makes me wonder why the “a” in that word hasn’t disappeared by now, not that I’m pushing for the one-syllable version, but people pretty much always give it both syllables.

Mike in the New Year

Mike Sykes wrote:

While I completely understand why what you call the Revolutionary War must of necessity have preceded the Civil War, I think "any" might be a bit overstating it. True, civil wars tend to follow revolutions, but the converse could perhaps have happened after a lapse of time. Come to think of it, not many revolutions are explicitly associated with revolutionary wars—the war that followed the French Revolution** was not known as a revolutionary war, though it's ostensible purpose was to restore the French monarchy. And the Spanish Civil War was arguably revolutionary, though it wasn't attempting to throw off a colonial yoke. I suppose strictly speaking a revolution is an end, rather than a means. Though that makes 'revolutionary war' somewhat anomalous. We might recall that it's pretty much the same as a rebellion, though rebels prefer not to be called that (think 'the rebs'***).

**The French Revolution was a civil war. Perhaps our Revolutionary War was too. Perhaps all wars are, if we are all brothers, but we’re not.

***I don’t think Southerners today object to “rebs”.

Your reflection on appointment method raise all sorts of interesting thoughts. I'm reminded of a lovely phrase used in the British civil service: 'lateral arabesque', meaning the moving an incompetent to another job of ostensibly equal status but where they can do less harm.

What a great phrase!

Regarding the painting of an Indian and a telephone pole:

Don't we love reading more into stuff than was ever intended? Isn't that deconstructionism?

Deconstructionists seem to purposely ignore what the artist might have intended so they can substitute their own (much less interesting) ideas.

Regarding pronouncing your “Rs” (pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd):

Pardon my ignorance, but this went straight past me. But what do mean by 'correct'? Who's to say?

I’m all about saying what’s correct, but my point was that we have a common language partly because of standardized spelling around the world, even though the spelling does not always indicate local pronunciation (one reason foreign students have trouble with English). I think it’s good to keep our more or less standardized but peculiar spelling, and recognize that the spelling may symbolize a variety of “correct” pronunciations (at least the comprehensible ones).

Feckless!

Bill Roberts passed on a Gina Barreca column, “Gina's List of Books We're Not Buying This Christmas”, and these are my favorites. But you will have to write these books yourself:

· The Crying Woman's Guide to Handgun Safety
· Feckless!
· Self Deception and You
· Puppies and Espresso: What To Give Your Stepchildren Before They Return Home [variation on a popular sign in coffee shops]
· Only God Can Make Topiary: Inspiration by (or in) the Yard [maybe all trees and shrubs ARE topiary]
· Virginia Werewolf: The Blood Curse of Bloomsburg
· Lulu, the Anxious Last Lobster in the Big Sad Tank (Not appropriate for readers with seafood allergies unless they have insurance)[could be part of a gift set along with PETA’s “Your Mommy Kills Animals” comic book for kids]

Feckless! is my favorite title. Maybe my favorite word; it’s from the Scottish, “effectless”. Which makes me wonder if the f**k word might not come from this source rather than the unpleasant Saxon word for “strike”.

Targets

We’ll have to avoid all war terminology from now on, especially in politics. The recent murders in Tucson by a man who looks like he’s demonically possessed have been attributed by her enemies to the influence of political metaphor on a map used by Sarah Palin’s people in the last election (who happens also to be a hunter). Of course the other side did the same, but they get other people to kill their meat, therefore they are innocent. Some words to eliminate from your vocabulary:

Target (verb or noun)

In my sights

Blow them out of the water

We’ll beat them

Aim at

In the crosshairs

Etc. etc. etc.

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Parvum Opus 381: This Parvum Year

2010-12-28T22:49:00.002-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Long Ago and Far Away

Anne DaBee wrote:

One more "Anne story", as a result of your Andrew Buck report.

I knew an elementary school principal who REALLY didn't know which came first, the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, and firmly believed it didn't matter because they were both over a long time ago. He didn't even have the sense to figure out that their NAMES could keep the chronology straight for him...

I believe his must have been a social promotion, as in "For God's sake, get him out of the classroom, even if we have to make him principal to do it." He'd been a teacher for about 17 years, tenured for 15, and I can vouch for the fact that he had plenty of self esteem. At another time I might get tangled up in a dissertation on the potential dangers of tenure, a practice which has recently come under fire in several local jurisdictions, perhaps because there are already too many tenured twits in the classroom as well as in leadership positions.

It makes verbal sense to you and to me, of course, that any revolutionary war should precede any civil war, but dollars to doughnuts the guy didn’t have a firm grasp on the concepts of “revolution” and “civil war”. Anyone might forget exact dates, but it takes true self-esteem to be clueless about the general trend of history in our country.

I used to think tenure was essential for the protection of free speech, but why should teachers require any more protections along that line than any other working citizen? It’s easy to see that social promotions actually do increase self-esteem totally unconnected with actual knowledge or skill or accomplishment.

True Grit or True Crit

Last week I saw the new movie, True Grit (haven’t seen the old one with John Wayne yet), a pretty good Western. The characters, especially the two main characters, spoke without using contractions, which was intended to give an air of antiquity, and it worked well, although Americans were certainly using contractions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in ordinary conversation. Besides adding a spurious air of antiquity, the effect is to make the speakers sound somewhat formal and serious, as well as more genteel than the characters who do use contractions. Try speaking for a while without using any contractions and see if it does not add weightiness and gravitas to your mind and tongue. I found the technique to be effective in this movie, and somehow it fit well with the vast landscapes of the western plains.

Speaking of which, at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati there’s a painting by Henry Farny called “Song of the Talking Wire” in which a Plains Indian is leaning his ear against a new telephone pole. In the Taft’s and in other descriptions of the painting, the critiques always emphasize something like the “devastating encroachment” of European civilization on the lives of the Indians as symbolized by snow, twilight, a dead deer, and a buffalo skull. But in this 1904 painting, the Sioux has a rifle, not an Indian weapon; he has two horses, not native to this continent; and the carcass of a deer slung over one horse means food, not devastation, and he’s lucky to find food in the winter. The buffalo skull could allude to the vanished buffalo herds, but skulls are not uncommon in the wilderness. Anyway it’s not a human skull. One caption to this painting (I forget where) said this Indian listened at the phone pole so he could tell his people he heard spirits and thus become a shaman. Who knows? I’ve noticed that the explanatory notes in art and other museums are different than they were when I was a kid. They often throw in political commentary of some kind, based on the views of the sign writer rather than the plausible views of the artist.

It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand

Alan Kennedy, whoever he is, is collecting color idioms in various languages and you can add to the list if you know some that aren’t there yet. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the feelings about color in different languages. For instance, a “black bee” is a woman’s female friend in Hindi.

TV person Joy Behar recently tried to get worked up over “Black Friday”, asking if it isn’t a racist expression. Whoopi Goldberg had to explain that Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is the busiest shopping day of the year and businesses hope to get “in the black” on that day. Before computers or even typewriters, clerks made entries in business ledgers with black ink for money coming in (credits) and red ink for money going out (or debits). I hope Miss Joy Thing never complains of being misunderstood herself.

A Minor Event

The BBC is commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 with readings and events throughout the kingdom in the coming year. Already you can find some readings on YouTube if you search “King James 400”.

Of course there are tiresome objections to the BBC devoting so much time to a “minority”. Does this mean no minority tastes should be represented? Only the majority? Which would be…? Even if Europeans are casting off their Christian fetters, they oughtn’t to cast off their knowledge of two thousand years of European history, philosophy, art, literature, and culture.

Pahk It

One Kate Evans has written a short piece on conveying dialect or accents in writing, a tricky thing to accomplish well. But this subject perfectly clarifies the value of our eccentric spelling system, which some people would like to change to one more phonetically consistent. Which phonetic pronunciation should we use? If an Ohian wants to “park the car in Harvard Yard” while a Bostonian wants to “pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd”, who is correct? We all know what “Harvard” is when we read it. Spelling helps make English the common language for so many people around the world.

This Parvum Year

For six and a half years I hit my internal deadline faithfully and sent out Parvum Opus every week, with few exceptions, until I ran out of steam earlier this year. I admit that a paycheck would have kept me on deadline, but obviously that’s not why I write it, and time wasn’t the problem either. Two projects siphoned off my writing energy.

This spring I produced an audio autobiography on CD of my friend, blues musician Sonny Robertson, called When Sonny Gets Blue. It's the first installment and I’m looking forward to collecting more material from him.

This summer I started working on a long-postponed epistolary biography of my high school Spanish teacher, Ellen Rowe. About ten years ago she asked if I wanted a bag of letters she'd written to her parents over a period of more than a decade, starting with her college years in 1953. She broke her neck in a car wreck in Spain when her Spanish fiancé was driving her car in the mountains, and was largely paralyzed ever after. She never married. I was surprised at her offer. Maybe it was because I was a writer and editor, though we didn't discuss what I might do with those letters. Of course my way of reading them — hundreds of letters — was to start typing them, but I didn't get far, then moved to Ohio & got married, and Ellen died in 2005. I let it slide until this summer, when I buckled down and typed every one. Then I started trying to find some of the people she named, and even visited some of her friends in Indiana. In spite of all her losses, Ellen went on to teach and travel, and never complained. A very admirable character. Thus the book, which I’m just beginning to edit; I’m thinking about the chapters I’ll write too.

And I have other projects in mind.

But writing Parvum Opus continues to be a pleasure, particularly when I hear from my readers. So here’s to a happy new year for all, as I end this PO and this year with a cryptic note I made to myself for some reason or other: “Opposite of schadenfreude?”

Schadenfreude (adversity + joy) is a German word meaning the pleasure one takes in someone else’s failure or pain, and what else can we say about studying mistakes in language? When Thomas de Mahy, the Marquis de Favras, was condemned to death by French revolutionaries, he said, “I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” This perhaps gave him some satisfaction.

But when I wrote that note, I don’t know whether I was thinking we need a word for suffering at someone else’s success or happiness; or even for suffering over their adversity; or for taking pleasure in someone else’s success or happiness. It should be pleasure in others’ success, shouldn’t it?

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Parvum Opus 380: Postjudice

2010-12-13T19:48:00.002-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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Book Trailers

Something new (to me, anyway) in publishing: book trailers. Look it up on YouTube, on Book Trailers, on your favorite (still living) writer’s web site, on publishers’ web sites; or just do a general search. Good way to promote your book. A couple I’ve seen are very slick, like movie trailers, and expensive to produce. But you could produce your own. The simplest way would be to get a web cam, make a video of yourself talking about your work or reading from your book, and post it on YouTube. I might try it.

Literature and the Professions

Certain professions lend themselves to fiction, or rather, certain professionals are inclined to write fiction, particularly mysteries. Of course most writers start out with a day job, and most end up with the day job too; not many can make a living writing. But some day jobs are more likely to provide either material or an entire world-view on which to build a novel.

There’s practically a sub-genre of academic novels written by professors, instructors, lecturers (my favorite academic novel is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis). Academics tend to be bitter, but they usually write well unless they get caught up in literary fashions like postmodernism. Amanda Cross was the pen name of Columbia professor Carolyn Heilbrun, whose academic mysteries were a bit too arch, sort of affectedly Nick and Nora, with politics. I was surprised to find that she killed herself for no good reason in 2003.

An article in the UK Guardian discusses the psychologist as novelist, though not in much detail. This is a likely pairing if you think of the novel form as being about character and character development, though you’re likely to get a somewhat narrow idea of what constitutes the human person.

Lawyers and policemen and doctors like to write novels, too. They have the plots and the drama, in addition to lots of observation of human behavior, and law people have ideas about good and evil as well as legal and illegal. Lawyer John Grisham, of course, is hugely popular, and his plots make good movies.

Priests, you would think, wouldn’t have enough free time to dabble in fiction, but Fr. Andrew Greeley is a popular novelist, and his web site calls him a sociologist too. I tried reading one of his books years ago, but couldn’t finish it; as much as I like crime novels, I thought his book was shallow and boring. He’s 82 now, and cracked his skull in a fall two years ago, so the prolific author isn’t writing anymore.

Journalists often are naturals. The late Tony Hillerman was a newspaperman whose clean style worked well with his Navajo police stories and Southwest landscapes.

Anne Stories

From Anne DaBee:

Forgive me for spouting another gem from my "school days", so to speak, this time re "can" and "may".

Student: Can I go to the bathroom, Mrs. D.?

Mrs. D.: I hope so.

Student, puzzled: Huh?

Mrs. D. explains, not for the first time, the difference between "can" and "may", and asks if the student would care to rephrase the question.

Student: NOW MAY I go to the bathroom?

Mission accomplished, at least for the moment.

And then there were the times when students asked to "borrow" a tissue from the box on my desk and received a "no" answer, followed by a brief definition of "borrow" and an explanation of the ick factor inherent in "borrowing" a tissue. Oh, well - I really tried to contribute to the literacy of all those decidedly average middle schoolers...

Here’s a story that will get Anne’s tinsel in a tangle, as someone seasonally said to me last week. Andrew Buck, a Brooklyn school principal, wrote a semi-literate letter to parents, full of errors and incoherencies, but most shockingly arguing (if his statements could be elevated to argument) that textbooks aren’t necessary. Obviously they weren’t vital to him, and yet he has a good job, in education, no less. I wasn’t able to find a transcript of his letter but if you click on his photo at the link above you’ll find pictures of segments of this atrocity, which begs the questions:

· How did he graduate? (Answer: Social promotion to promote self-esteem, of which he has way too much.)
· Why doesn’t he hire a good secretary to edit his letters? (Answer: He doesn’t know he needs one.)
· How did he get this job without at least understanding the value of books? How did he get to be principal of a school, let alone a charter school for art and philosophy? (Answer: He was hired by people who got social promotions and have lots of self-esteem, and perhaps he had a professional write his resume. And possibly it was the art department that had the hiring power. Surely philosophy teachers still have to read books.)

Buck’s philosophical proposition: You can’t learn about textbooks from textbooks. Following that logic, no one could ever learn to read in the first place.

Selections from Mike Sykes

Mike Sykes wrote:

On punctuating abbreviations:

One convention (hardly a rule) is that you don't need a stop if the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the full word. Another, rather more radical school of thought says you don't need a stop if understanding doesn't require it. Us Brits are just not as hide-bound with rules.*

By the same token, you don't get stops at the end of newspaper headlines, even when they're grammatical sentences.

By the way, how do you abbreviate "forecastle"? My dictionary on disk has "fo'c's'le" - I don't think one sees that very often; the OED online has "Also written fo'c'sle" as the only alternative; and HMS Victory has "foc'sle". Can any one of these three be regarded as the correct version?

Dict.org gives fo'c'sle as a spelling, and yourdictionary.com gives fok-sel as a pronunciation; fo’c’sle would be a reasonable approximation of that pronunciation though it does tend to make you expect three syllables; foc’sle would be better. Why a third apostrophe for the absent letter T would be omitted I couldn’t say; it’s hardly worse than having two apostrophes in one word. Do sailors ever pronounce the original word as spelled: forecastle? If you type fo’c’sle into Google, you get Wikipedia’s entry for forecastle.

How about bosun for boatswain (originally, boy or servant on a boat, not a lover on a boat)? It does very well without apostrophes. I think my dad was a bosun on the USS Intrepid in WWII.

*Who would have thought us Americans were hide-bound!

On may and might:

“Might I have the last doughnut?” However, that sounds to me more like a British usage.

It's an attempt to be (over?) polite. But you would be more likely to say "May I go now?"

On apostrophes and prepostrophes:

How about calling all of us who write and speak on apostrophes, “apostrophers”?

The verb "apostrophize" is already in the dictionary, "apostrophizer" would be a natural derivation.

One meaning of “to apostrophize” is to digress, i.e. to speak in apostrophes (L from Gr apostrophē, a turning away from the audience to address one person / apostrephein / apo-, from + strephein, to turn: see strophe).

Preposterous literally means “before after” (i.e. contrary). Someone who prepostrophizes would be turning two ways at once (i.e. absurd).

Pre- and Post-

The word “prejudice” produces a knee-jerk reaction: Prejudice is bad. We need another word to fill in a meaning gap here. I offer “postjudice”. This means opinion based on experience and knowledge. Prejudice can of course come from generalization about experience and/or information, and thus isn’t necessarily unreasonable. Forming an opinion after experience is the mark of a brain in action. “Don’t be judgmental” is the mark of laziness, usually uttered with witless dishonesty.

Me Being

Jeffrey Folks quoted Obama in “Me Being President”:

"The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars... I don't think is me being extremist or me being antibusiness," Obama explained.

Many of us say things like “me being” instead of “my being”, but remember that “being” is a gerund here, a noun, and so should be preceded by the possessive pronoun. Perhaps Harvard doesn’t give remedial English classes as do so many universities.

(I would like to note here that 25%, say, of a billion dollars is way more than 25% of a secretary’s pay. But I apostrophize.)

ODIOGO

Note the Odiogo link in Parvum Opus online at cafelit.blogspot.com. This allows you to listen to a podcast of each issue, or download it as an .mp3 file. Odiogo provides a digital voice reading. It’s a little weird and imperfect, but generally comprehensible.

NEW STUFF FOR CHRISTMAS!

Cute new baby clothes and blanket: “Fresh Pict”. New: stadium blanket. “STET Happens” mugs and coasters and flasks are popular with editors and writers.

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Parvum Opus 379: Prepostrophes

2010-11-18T12:37:00.000-05:00

Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere

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PIQUE PEAK

Shai Hasse sent this:

“Often times you have a short window to peak the interest of a perspective employer, so you must seize that moment. Come learn the art of the 30-second elevator speech at this session from Professor Zagaiski.”

…the above paragraph is excerpted from an email touting the agenda for a weekly professional networking group…think I'll pass............

To be fair, Professor Zagaiski is teaching fast talk, not spelling, which takes slow study.

SYKES THE APOSTROPHER

Mike Sykes wrote:

On the origins of Mrs. and Ms:

…at least in UK, "Hey Mrs", usually spelt as "Hey missus" would not be considered very respectful. Problem is, there's no satisfactory way of hailing a respectable woman/lady of unknown name. Madam sounds like an rather olde-worlde shopkeeper, Ma'am sounds like addressing royalty. We lack the French convenience of Madame (and, of course, Monsieur, or M'sieu).

Traditionally one wouldn’t hail a respectable unknown woman, but realistically it must be done from time to time, as when shopping, eating at a restaurant, or climbing out of a car wreck. (The last time I was in a wreck I restrained myself from speaking at all to the woman in the other car because I knew no good could come of it, and no polite titles would have come to mind. I let the police speak to her.)

By the way, it must be true that in England you don’t put a period after an abbreviation such as “Mrs”, but we do in the U.S., the idea being that over there the period represents absent letters, which in this instance only occur in the middle of the word.

On pedagogical despair:

It'll be a significant step forward when there is a consensus on what is "proper" English! For now, just look at the last few lines of this, noting the date.

Here Mike added this link.

On unobtanium:

And another clever coinage heard on the Dennis Miller radio program from a movie producer: “They moved to the left coast looking for unobtanium.”

Don't remember when I first heard (or saw) it, but it goes back a while, see here.

I had never heard it before.

On “timely” as an adverb:

I tend to share your feeling, yet OED has a separate entry for timely as adverb, quoting examples from Shakespeare and before.

OK, but it doesn’t sound natural or correct now.

On thanks:

Not to mention "Thank you for observing all safety precautions."

All?

On may and might:

By the way, I need to say a few more words about may and might, which also irritated Mike mightily, as in: "...he died last January, and this newly approved drug may have prevented his death." Simply, mightis the past tense of may and should have been used in this case, but that can easily be forgotten because might can also be used for the present or future: “I might go to the game.” Some people have the idea that might is less definite in indicating a possibility than may, but that’s pretty vague and is not a rule (“I may” go vs. “I might go”—can you spot the difference?). May of course also indicates permission (and here we get into the difference between may and can, but that’s not our topic), but it’s also possible to use might for permission: “Might I have the last doughnut?” However, that sounds to me more like a British usage.

On apostrophes and prepostrophes:

But reams have been written on apostrophes, and many more or less normal usages are unexplained. "Brutus' dagger", "James's computer", the "Sykeses' get together".

How about calling all of us who write and speak on apostrophes, “apostrophers”? Here’s more from two other great apostrophers:

Here's my take on house signs, from Richard Lederer and John Shore, Comma Sense:

This brings us to those names we see in front of houses and on mailboxes everywhere—“The Smith’s, “The Gump’s,” and even (sigh) “The Jone’s.” These are distressing signs of our times. Which Smith, we ask, and who, pray tell, is Jone? Here we have an atrocity of both case and number in one felonious swoop.

Who lives in the house? The Smiths. The Gumps. The Joneses. That’s what the signs should say. It’s really nobody else’s business whether the Smiths, the Gumps, and the Joneses own their domiciles. All we need know is that the Smiths, the Gumps, and the Joneses live there. If you must announce possession, place the apostrophe after the plural names—“The Smiths’,” “The Gumps’,” “The Joneses’.” Your attention to this matter will strike a blow against a nationwide conspiracy of signmakers and junior high school shop teachers dedicating to spread of prepostrophes throughout our land.

PERMISSIONTO BEAT

Bill Roberts said, “We should be permitted to beat the living dogdirt out of anyone who confuses accept and except.” Permission granted.

EBONICS REVISITED

Joe Clarke sent a link to the original resolution about Ebonics as a substitute for the teaching of standard English in Oakland, California schools. Perhaps the most outrageous statement in that document is:

…these studies have also demonstrated that African Language Systems are genetically-based and not a dialect of English.

What other language in the world would be described as “genetically based”? If black people do not learn standard grammar, does this mean they not only speak a particular patois but also are geneticallyincapable of learning another language or dialect—after living in this country for three or four centuries? The whole point of this bogus scholarship and educational directive was to oil around the fact that black students in Oakland were getting bad grades. Were they also considered genetically predisposed to figure numbers differently, or not at all? I used to tell my students that learning standard English is a survival skill, and to say that ordinary students (i.e. not mentally retarded) cannot learn what most people learn is at best blindly stupid and at worst intentionally destructive.

EXPERTS SAY

Medical language is often unintelligible to the lay person, of course, but there’s a trend in advertising to make lay people (i.e. customers) feel like they’re in on scientific language. It used to be that advertisers and drug makers made up sciency-sounding names for products, often ending in –ex or sounding like one of the –stan countries. Now I’ve noticed a trend toward rewording ordinary language into other ordinary language. For instance:

A heavy period is a medical condition called “heavy monthly bleeding”.

Low testosterone, called Low T.

Instead of translating a highly scientific, usually Latinate, term into plain English, a phrase in plain English is translated into an almost identical phrase in plain English, although I’ve never heard anyone, medical professional or otherwise, use the term “low T” for hypogonadism. Heavy bleeding is called menorrhagia.

The next phase in advertising will be to have the narrator say something like “heavy bleeding” or “low T” and have the actor who plays the drug consumer just grunt and point to the groinal area.

MISCELLANEY

· On the radio on Veterans Day/Armistice Day: “I’m trying to play as much military music as I can garner.” He should have said “as I can muster.” Garner is about gathering and storing (as grain). Muster can mean gathering and showing the troops. It would have been a better choice just for that reason, but in any case, the DJ is presenting something, not collecting.

· The giant Wal-Mart has sections for Hispanic food and Latino food. What’s the difference? Is there any reason Tex-Mex, for instance, would be more or less Latin-based or Spanish than Cuban?

· From somewhere: “Everything you need to create quick, colorful, creative projects.” I’ve complained before about “creative” used to describe the creation rather than the creator, but in this case, the redundancy is idiotic.

· From somewhere: something “plays a major factor”. This error comes from not attending to the meaning of words, and mixing up cliches. Someone or something plays a role, or is a factor.

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BIOGRAPHY

Buy Sonny Robertson’s intro biography on CD, When Sonny Gets Blue, at CafePress. (Note that if the text on the spine is misaligned, it’s the fault of CafePress, not me.) Also, four of his early pre-blues R&B dance songs are now on YouTube. Search for Sonny Robertson + The Tabs. Music CDs available at sonnyrobertson.com/buy, where you can buy with PayPal.

ONLINE PUBS

I’m publishing for the Kindle digital reader with Amazon and on Lulu.com for download to computer and for printing. Amazon now has a downloadable Kindle reader if you don’t have the little handheld device. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

The Man from Scratch is about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine. Novel. PRICE REDUCED.

A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella. PRICE REDUCED.

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is about a young gambler who finds himself upright in a cornfield in Kansas with his feet encased in a tub of concrete; how would you get out of a spot like that? Short story.

Still Ridge is about a young woman who moves from Boston to Appalachia and finds there are two kinds of moonshine, the good kind and the kind that can kill you. Short story.

Whither Spooning? asks whether synchronized spooning can be admitted to the 2010 Winter Olympics. Humorous sports article.

Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

NEW PRODUCTS in CafePress:

Food thermos and beverage thermos

Scot Tartans and Fresh Pict:

T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

Stuff:

BEVERAGE THERMOS, FOOD THERMOS, SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: If you have problems viewing this site, try a different browser.)

· Click To Embiggen boxer shorts

· Eschew Obfuscation bumper sticker

· Graphic covers of my books

· Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I; & bumper sticker

· No Pain, No Pain

· Star o’ the Bar

· Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Celtic Catti & Snake insignia

· Flash in the Pants

· If you're so smart why aren't you me?

· PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

· I am here maternity tops

· I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

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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. 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 2010. 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 378: Mistress of Unobtanium

2010-10-30T14:50:00.000-04:00

MISTRESS OF MANNERS

Miss Manners (Judith Martin) explains the origins of Mrs. and Ms.:

… the title of Mistress was used for both the married and unmarried, just as its equivalent, Mister, was and still is. Seventeenth- and 18th-century* tombstones can also be found in which Mistress is also abbreviated as - get this - Ms.

That's right - using Ms. for both the married and the unmarried is not a modern feminist invention. No disrespect is intended in the old or the modern usage.

Later, two other abbreviations of Mistress, Miss and Mrs., took on distinct meanings: Miss meaning unmarried, and Mrs. meaning "wife of . . . " Therefore, Mrs. would not be used with the lady's first and last names [i.e. Mrs. Jane Smith rather than Mrs. John Smith], because it would make no sense to call her the wife of herself.

I think she errs here. True, today Mrs. always means a married woman, or a formerly married woman. It’s also a title to sort of distance the speaker from a woman, so you don’t have to holler “Hey you” or “Hey Sue”.

But to go further in her line of thought, is Mister John Smith the husband of himself? No, we suppose he is the master of himself; a free man, whether married or not. In the old days, Mistress Mary Meade was a female in her parents’ house or in her husband’s (and her) house, perhaps her own house, and the mistress of herself to a degree.

While women today sometimes object to being called housewives (“I’m not married to a house”), no one objected to being considered the mistress of a house. It was a great responsibility, a mark of the progression from female childhood to maturity.

*By the way, we all learned not to start a sentence with a numerical digit, but to spell out numbers. In a sentence like this one, where the spelled-out century is paired with the numbered century, should this rule be ignored? It looks clumsy, yet spelling out both dates would be awkward. You could reword the sentence to save the rule, but sometimes this involves twisting the natural flow of the English sentence, but try: “Tombstones in the 17th and 18th centuries…” This has the further advantage of eliminating the hyphenated adjectival phrase.

FROM THE PEN OF ANNE DABEE

Rhonda - You rang several of my bells this time!

On Teaching English

"The mother-tongue differs in one respect from all other subjects of study. It is not only an end, but the vehicle, of instruction. For this reason all teaching is English teaching, and every school exercise may be made, and should be made, an English lesson." Nicholas Murray Butler, Introduction to Percival Chubb's The Teaching of English xx (1902).

The Maryland State Board of Ed. must not have read this in 1973, when I was a volunteer in my youngest's third grade class. Correcting papers, for all subjects, was one of my duties. I was disturbed to learn that, while spelling and punctuation could be marked (i.e. red penciled) on all papers, such errors could only be counted against the grade on ENGLISH papers. The teacher almost apologized when he told me that, and encouraged me to make BIG red marks for bad spelling wherever it occurred. Even on a science paper, misspelling of words in the science lesson (the planet Merkry, for instance) didn't lower the grade as long as the INFORMATION was correct. No wonder we can't spell today! (Btw, this was NOT the way it was done in Minnesota - everything counted on every paper - so it was doubly shocking to me when I learned the Maryland rules. Remember, too, that Dave and his sibs had to learn all verses of the Star Spangled Banner before getting a passing grade in Senior English - things were much different there!)

On apostrophes
The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small-business signs to alert the reader that an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand-lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration... [Dave Barry]

And then there's the issue of incorrectly using the apostrophe when a plural is intended - i.e. on addresses or mailbox signs, "The Smith's", or "We went to the movies with the Smith's" - the Smith's WHAT? For the address/mailbox, it could be considered a verbal shortcut to "The Smith's house"; your guess is as good as mine regarding the companion(s) at the movies... and we won't even address the problems with correct usage of its and it's.

Cereal Comma

(LOVE this! Grape Nut's?)

Back to the serial comma, I still don’t know of a rule saying a modifier at the end of a sentence modifies only the final element in the series (Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig—laugh like a pig? sing like a pig?)...

Perhaps no rule, just 20-some years of training (continuing education, of sorts) proofing and editing legal text, where everything had to be expressed in a way to promote maximum clarity and minimum opportunity for misinterpretation (by clever lawyers trying to bend the law to suit their purposes?) Enough, already - just everybody buy the book and make up your own mind what the author does like a pig... or not.

Illusive allusion may elude

This was the teaser on one of the "current news" bits on AOL's Welcome page. Things like this annoy me almost as much as reporters who incorrectly use "might" and "may". As in, "...he died last January, and this newly approved drug may have prevented his death."

“Tara Lipinski says she remembers a lot of things about winning gold medal during the 1998 Winter Olympics. But one tiny thing still alludes her…”

Wonder what I'll do for entertainment when everyone (at least in America) writes and speaks proper English?

Respectfully submitted - Anne

When everyone speaks proper English, I will have nothing to write about. As for Lipinski, I respectfully submit that the tiny thing is the journalist who alluded [to] her. Apropos of which is an item from Overheard in the Newsroom ‎#5998: Student in basic reporting class: “I think my major in English and my minor in journalism is a conflict of interest.”

And while we’re there, here’s another: Overheard in the Newsroom ‎#6017: Reporter 1: “God, I’m feeling flungover today.” Reporter 2: “What’s ‘flungover’?” Reporter 1: “It’s like hungover, only further over.”

And another clever coinage heard on the Dennis Miller radio program from a movie producer: “They moved to the left coast looking for unobtanium.”

TIMELINESS

This selection shows the problem I’ve always had with the word “timely”:

…verify, correct, and update primary law data timely, efficiently, and accurately…

Efficient and accurate are adjectives and can be made into adverbs by adding ly. Time is not an adjective, but timely is. Timely is not really the same formation as the two other words in the series. We can say “do it in a timely manner” or “do it on time” (which is slightly different in meaning, implying a specific deadline), but we never say “do it timely”, at least I don’t. There isn’t really a parallel construction to maketime/timely into an adverb.

THANKING YOU IN ADVANCE

You’ve probably seen signs like these:

Thank you for bringing only service animals into the store.

The idea is to avoid being negative, e.g. “Do not bring animals into the store, except service animals. And by the way, thanks.” The word “only” is crucial here. I’m waiting to see “Thank you for wearing shirts and shoes”. Or how about “Thank you for parking somewhere else” or “Thank you for driving straight and maybe going around the block instead of making a U-turn”. Even “Thank you for not smoking” requires the use of “not” which is so, uh, negative.

PEN KNIFE

I was watching a documentary video on The Book of Kells—I was lucky enough to find a used CD containing the entire ms.—and in the demonstration of cutting a quill pen, I realized where the term pen knifecame from: obviously a smallish blade suitable for trimming quill pens.

THE WEEKLY GIZZARD: MOI ON EXAMINER.COM

Vote early and often and anywhere you want

A federal court has found that Arizona cannot require proof of citizenship for voter registration, though polling places can require photo ID. This ruling is from the same administration that has chosen not to pursue the appearance of Black...

Columbus Day is for all native Americans

Today is the "official" (Monday) Columbus Day holiday. Someone has posted an anti-Columbus video featuring good-looking young non-white people talking about the heinous crimes of Christopher Columbus (meaning, of course, all white...

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