How Many Clicks Will I Get if I use the Title "Whale Bone Porn"?

A local mom named Ann Pimentel is having conniptions about an exhibit she and her children were scandalized by at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The specimens in the display in question are examples of "scrimshaw"--etchings made on (in this case) whale bones and teeth. Rather saucy engravings they are, too, showing boobies and kissing and everything.

Even though the display was elevated out of sight of impressionable young eyes and was accompanied by a "for mature audiences only" disclaimer, it seems Ms. Pimentel, president of the League of Perpetually Outraged Citizens, was outraged. Describing herself as "extremely disturbed" (which is doubtlessly true), she felt compelled to alert the internet and other media.

According to this story,

Ms. Pimentel told the Vancouver Sun that her two small children — aged two and three — were needlessly exposed to the disturbing “whale bone porn.” No advance warnings were made to sensitive patrons outside the display room, she complained.

I had barely recovered from being introduced to the term "whale bone porn" when I came across another extremely disturbing story, this time in Slate. In a piece called Six Ways to Avoid the Classic "Broken Bottle Scam," I learned that certain aggressive hobo-types in New York have been perfecting a ruse whereby they bump into unsuspecting passersby and then accuse them of breaking a bottle--ostensibly filled with an expensive "medicine"--and bullying them into ponying up some coin for the "loss."

Stratagem Number Five on the author's mostly tongue-in-cheek list of ways of dealing with this scam begins:

Carry around your own bag of bottles. OK, this one might not be the most realistic idea, and it definitely requires some advance planning, but I can’t think of a better way to confound a bottle trickster than by dropping your own bag upon contact and demanding that he reimburse you.

The problem in each of these excerpts is that the word "advance" should be charged with loitering. It serves no purpose in either sentence other than to take up syllables. Warnings and planning must always, by definition, be done in advance, so I hereby rule that the word be stricken from the record.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to watching some whale bone porn.

The War on (the Correct Spelling of) Christmas

In the spirit of selflessness, the proprietors of this local eatery remind us that there is no "I" in "Chrstmas."

Laying Down the Law

Lance Armstrong, in an attempt to "flip the bird" to his detractors, has tweeted this photo of himself lounging  at home with his yellow jersey collection.

The insouciant caption reads:

"Back in Austin and just laying around..."

Hang on there, pedal-pusher. When used in the present tense, as it is here, lay requires an object--that is, laying is what you do to something (or to be vulgar, someone). If it's just you and your yellow jerseys, what you are doing is "lying around." 

Then again, we all know that lying is something Lance Armstrong would never do.

Strange Bedfellows

Like just about any politics junkie (currently going through post-election DTs) I find David Gergen to be alluring and curiously seductive. The tight but creamy voice, that fascinating comb-over, those sexy non-partisan analyses...well, don't get me started.

Still, I have to admit I was shocked to find that Gergen was in fact the "woman" CIA chief David Petraeus forfeited his career for. At least that's what comes across in the opening paragraph of this Salon piece:

David Gergen — a friend of Gen. David Petraeus as well as the woman he reportedly had an extra-marital affair with — said on “Face The Nation” this morning that great men have affairs — and that those relationships can be very important to them in difficult times.

First of all, I have had a well-documented romance with m-dashes myself--I think they are great for setting off a parenthetical thought with vigor and panache--but three in one sentence? That's a punctuational high-wire act I wouldn't attempt without a safety net.

But the real problem here is that description of Gergen as being a friend of Petraeus "as well as the woman he reportedly had an extra-marital affair with." Friends with benefits, indeed!

If we slip another of before "the woman" we get a simple unexceptional story of a man with friends. By eliding that crucial of, however, we invite mental images of David Gergen in drag "servicing" a (hitherto) respected retired serviceman. And that's a whole different story.

November Surprise

It seems that awhile ago, in an effort to cast my online ballot in a survey of favored podcasts, I allowed a sketchy outfit named Stitcher to pollute my Facebook wall with banal "updates" such as this election-eve crap-poll:

Did you catch it? No, not the missing question mark, although that is annoying. I'm talking about Mitt Romney's apparent last minute gambit of ditching running mate Paul Ryan (he of the washboard abs and flexible memory) and replacing him with Ron Paul (he of the geriatric crankiness and inflexible positions). Worth a shot, I suppose. 

Much Too Many

In case you needed to read yet another article on the state of play in the U.S. Election, Slate posted a piece today that should help bring a few nervous Obamaphiles down from the ledge. As the author notes early on:

The latest Associated Press analysis of the race points out that Mitt Romney has much fewer paths to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election.

I hit a couple of speed bumps in that sentence. First of all, why bother with the AP breakdown--or any other poll analysis, for that matter--as long as uber-savant Nate Silver is on the case? It's like showing off your Zune at an Apple store.

And then there is the matter of that phrase, "much fewer paths." Doesn't sound right, does it? But then, "many fewer paths" isn't exactly sublime poetry either. So which is it?

Several minutes of exhaustive Googling reveals a schism in the word nerd community, and that never feels good.

For instance, over on englishforums.com, a senior user who goes by the handle inchoateknowledge states, with definitive assurance, that "fewer is an adjective and is modified by much as an adverb of degree. Many is a determiner, that is a noun modifier, and can not modify an adjective." Which sounds pretty conclusive and contains lots of intimidating grammar jargon to boot.

But a couple of clicks away, the Word Watch column at the Hartford Courant has this to say:

 ...[T]he phrase "many fewer," despite its seeming contradiction, is perfectly correct. That's because the adjective "many" is used with countable items (discrete or separate entities), such as people, pebbles and polliwogs. So when you're referring to a significant reduction in the number of countable items, "many fewer people" (or pebbles or polliwogs) is the correct choice. 

Unfortunately, because of the weird sound of "many fewer," some people fall into the error of using "much fewer" with countable items, as in, "Much fewer people came to the game." 

But "much" should be used only with mass, uncountable items, such as grain, rain and pain. So when you're referring to a substantial drop in the size of uncountable items, "much less grain" (or rain or pain) is the correct choice.

Ah, so the "many/much" question is tied to the "fewer/less" pickle that continues to flummox creators of signs at supermarket express checkout lanes and bunch the panties of grammar fetishists. And in this case, "paths" are definitely discrete, separate, and countable.

Personally, I come down on the side of "many fewer" on the grounds that if the outlook for Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations were rosier, you wouldn't say he has "much paths to reach 270 electoral votes," you would say "many paths." I don't see why the introduction of the word "fewer" in between should change that.

And it turns out that Slate agrees. As of now, I see they have edited the piece to change much to many in the sentence in question. Of course, if the author had just written "far fewer" in the first place, we would have been spared all this kerfuffle and could have spent this time enjoying a nice sandwich.

"That's One Small Indefinite Article for a Man..."

Neil Armstrong has died.

I am old enough to (vaguely) remember the Apollo 11 moon landing. Watching as a spaceman-pajama-clad boy in our Mad-Men-era living room I saw the grainy black and white images on TV. (My parsimonious father wouldn't invest in a color set, or cable, until well into the 70s, so everything on TV was grainy black and white for me). I went over to a window and looked up at the moon, straining to see the flag the conquering space heroes had planted there. I was sure I spotted it.

Here's what else I remember about Neil Armstrong: He never exercised. He believed that every person is issued a finite number of heartbeats at birth and he was damned if he was going to waste any on jumping jacks. Seeing as he lived 82 years before dying from complications when doctors started poking around his ticker...maybe he was onto something.

The Vancouver Sun has commemorated Armstrong's passing with a story recounting his 1977 visit to Vancouver to open the restaurant atop the Harbour Centre tower.

The story includes this sentence:

His infamous words: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” will no doubt endure through the ages.

You'll notice the a in parentheses. That's because the quotation is usually (and accurately) rendered without it. It always bothered me, growing up, that this, one of the most famous of utterances, didn't really make sense.  "Man" and "mankind," in this context, mean the same thing. It wasn't until fairly recently that I learned about the dropped a--which was either the result of a gap in the transmission, or a slip of the tongue owing perhaps to Armstrong's giddiness on planting his boots on the fricking moon. When I discovered the way the line was supposed to be heard, it suddenly made perfect, elegant sense.

The same cannot be said for the Sun's reporter's description of these as "his infamous words." Infamous, according to the American Heritage Dictionary means:

1. Having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious: an infamous outlaw.2. Causing or deserving severe public condemnation; heinous

 No. He may or may not have dropped an a on the moon, but Armstrong's words were, and remain, famous.