The Sic List: Daniel Weber's Daily Catalogue of Literary Infractions

Boys Will Be Boys

2012-01-30T14:28:00.000-08:00

Douglas Todd has a lengthy piece in the Vancouver Sun arguing that sentimentality is not as great as we think it is. (?)

After leading with a banal list of things people can be sentimental about ("Mom and apple pie. Cats and dogs.") and reminding us that some Nazis were capable of getting moist and maudlin at the drop of a swastika-adorned hat, he gives us another example from pop culture:

The acclaimed HBO series, The Sopranos, frequently captures the sentimentality of Mafia members. It portrays Tony Soprano and his cruel cronies weeping about their mothers, sniffling at old movies, idealizing their children, lamenting the loss of tradition and being fiercely protective of their wives (on whom they systematically cheat with their "goombahs," ie. mistresses).

That "i.e" is missing a period and, as Grammar Girl has helpfully determined, five out of six style guides recommend a comma following its deployment. But never mind that for now. More importantly, "goombah," as any mob-follower worth his pomade knows, refers to male friends--paisans--and, more loosely, to mobsters in general. The feminine version, used to describe the "kept women" they keep, is "goomah."

Too Late

2012-01-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

Peter Hitchens (Hitchens the Lesser) has taken to his blog to respond to well-wishers, and once again demonstrates that he is not the graceful prose stylist his sibling was:

First may I once again thank the many people who visited this site to express condolences on the death of my late brother, Christopher.

But of course, late, in this context, means dead; it seems oddly redundant to speak of a dead person dying. As Christopher Hitchens never tired of pointing out, you get only one life. And that includes only one death.

There's a First Time for Everything

2011-12-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

After reading today's withering editorial in The Province, I was delighted to find that the tabloid "paper of record" in our fair town is now on the record as being adamantly opposed to...virginity.

I'm not kidding. In a piece chiding a local group of insufferably smug chaste young women bloggers, the editorialist really lets them have it (as it were).

While no one should judge them for their personal--what previously would have been private--choices, their advocacy of virginity until marriage is a dangerous, out-dated, anti-sex philosophy that most people have rejected.
The last thing that anyone needs, particularly young people, is anything that promotes shame or guilt about sexual desire.

Having worked himself (it's got to be a guy, don't you think?) into a lather (as it were), the essayist continues:

The idea that only sex within marriage is healthy is absurd.

As we've seen before, the word only can change the meaning of a sentence depending on where it's placed. As it stands here, the sentence could be taken to mean that what is absurd is the idea of sex being the only thing in a marriage that is healthy. But if you moved only to come after sex (as it were) it would still be open to ambiguity. It could sound like we're talking about a "sex-only" marriage, and that truly would be absurd. The only solution is to recast the sentence to something like...eh, you know what? Fuck it. (As it were.)

The Atlantic Announces its Own Passing

2011-12-01T22:20:00.000-08:00

Time for more dangling modifier unintentional humor. Today, the (formerly) venerable Atlantic slips on an old syntactical banana peel with this Table of Contents blooper in their online edition:

Letters from Stalin’s Daughter:
Before dying Monday at 85, The Atlantic reviewed her 1967 memoir, "wrung from an agonized conscience"

But of course as regrettably moribund as the (formerly) venerable Atlantic may have been (and is), it did not die last Monday. If it had, we would not be reading this amusingly amateurish subheading.

It's Just a Faze You're Going Through

2011-11-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

A languid, guilty-pleasure scroll through this week's offerings on PostSecret delivers the usual funny/disturbing/annoying revelations, including this "look how I shocking I am" submission:

Well, I am shocked all right. Shocked that the confessor doesn't know the difference between phased and fazed. And shocked at the price. Does this mean I owe my cat 200 bucks?

Point of Order

2011-11-21T12:06:00.000-08:00

We took the kiddies to city hall on Saturday to watch the local election returns come in, because nothing says family fun like sitting in a funereal council chamber silently watching numbers change on a screen.

On the way we in, we saw this propaganda poster full of demographically-correct smiley faces, hectoring us to do our civic duty:

You know what else matters, creator of run-on headline? Punctuation.

Peekaboo! I See You!

2011-10-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

Take a look at this picture from The Province:

Now note the caption:

Gang task force undercover police are in evidence Thursday in and around the court complex in Vancouver where several trials involving gang members are in progress.

I don't mean to tell the Donnie Brascos on the VPD how to infiltrate a gang, but I would suggest that if you want to conceal where your true affiliation lies, you should probably lose the "POLICE GANG TASK FORCE" attire, so that you are not so plainly "in evidence." Either that, or perhaps undercover is just not the word to use here.

Make No Mistake...

2011-10-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

I have here in the writing cockpit a broadsheet-sized book called The Copywriter's Bible, which, like any real bible, is full of outdated anecdotes and questionable advice. I like to refer to it sometimes to remind myself that there was a time when a magazine ad could be this maggoty with verbiage:

This particular novella-length ad, entitled " A FEW ENCOURAGING WORDS FOR THE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT" contains this apercu outlining the oratorical deficiencies of a past U.S. president:

THE WORST SPEECH-WRITER
William Gamaliel Harding wrote his own speeches while President of the USA in the 1920's.

When Harding died, e.e. cummings said, "the only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple, declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors, is dead."

Here is a rewarding sample of the man's style. "I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved."

I don't know--it sounds like George W. on a good day, if you ask me.

Anyway, as it turns out, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this president in his book, Blink, where he used the hapless Harding, whom everyone agreed "looked presidential," as an example of what happens when we choose appearance of ability over, well, ability. He called it "The Warren Harding Error." He did not call it "The William Harding Error." That would have been an error. Not "totally incompetent" perhaps, but definitely an error.

Where's the Last Place You Had It?

2011-09-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

A sad story in today's Province opens with:

The body of an 85-year-old Invermere man who was reported missing Tuesday was found near a dirt road in the Jumbo Creek area a day later.

As I say, a sad story. But not as odd as the headline would have you believe:

Missing Body Found

It wasn't a body that was missing--it was a man. A minor quibble, perhaps, but Body of Missing Man Found would have made the point more clearly, and without the misleading macabre overtones.

A Sneek Peek at Tomorrow's Lunch Feature

2011-09-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

Back to school time--which means back to figuring out what to put in the kid's lunch each day. You can toss a package of processed-cheese-and-crackers into the Dora the Explorer lunch bag only so many times before you hear from Child Protective Services, so I was glad to see this suggested recipe for a simple blueberry banana bread in the morning rag. The mixture is in the oven right now.

But before I try to clean the baking powder out of the toaster and stovetop elements (thanks, Kim, for keeping the open box on the top shelf of the cupboard where I have to jump for it) let's take a look at that ad at the bottom of the page. "A full line-up of concerts, dance, theatre, family, movies..." One of those things is not like the others. "Family events" would probably be more accurate. And "we give you a peak..."? Give me a brake.

And You Thought Your Job was Tedious

2011-08-31T18:19:00.000-07:00

I've always felt sorry for Jimmy Buffet. Sure, he gets to spend most of his life wearing Hawaiian shirts, strumming his six-string for half-drunk tourists, and generally being the exemplar of the middle-aged laid back surfer dude. But you just know that in every single gig he performs, he's not getting off the stage until he sings that song. How sick he must be of it. How does he even pretend to want to do it again?

Then I read about this guy in an AP wire story today:

NEW YORK — Saturday night's performance of "The Phantom of the Opera" on Broadway will be perhaps most memorable for someone who's seen the show a lot.

It will be the last one for actor George Lee Andrews, who will have wrapped up his 9,382nd show over 23 years. The show helped him capture the Guinness World Records title for the most performances in the same Broadway show.

Producers revealed this week that 68-year-old Andrews would not be continuing in the role of Monsieur Andre. Aaron Galligan-Stierle, who is Andrew's son-in-law, will take over the part beginning Sept. 5.

I don't know--I saw "The Phantom of the Opera" once, and that seemed plenty for me. This guy must be seeing flying chandeliers in his sleep.

The error here comes in the final sentence, and it raises an issue that always gives me the heebie-jeebies: how to possessive-ize a name ending in S. I know it should be simple, but this is one of those situations where (metaphorically speaking, anyway) I just mumble into my hand and avoid eye contact and hope nobody presses the point.

Strunk and White have a clear opinion on this--in fact, it is the first rule in the "little book": "Form the possessive singular of the noun by adding 's." It's "Charles's friend" and Burns's poems" they say with characteristic assuredness. (And yet, somewhat curiously, they make exceptions for "ancient possessive names ending in -es and -is," and for Jesus. So it would be "Jesus' iPod," for Christ's sake. That guy gets all the special breaks.)

But it's not really that simple. If you believe this source (and come on, it's on the Internet--why wouldn't you?) it's "Arkansas's former governor" but "Alexander Dumas' first novel." It's "the Smiths' car" but "the Joneses' home." But is it "the boss' memo" or "the boss's memo"? (Or what about "the bosses's memo"?) At this point, let's admit it, we just want to leave it for the intern and go get something to eat.

In any case, in the example above, the iron-man actor's surname is Andrews--which means that most people would form the possessive thusly: Andrews'. Some counter-culture goth types might argue for Andrews's, even at the risk of sounding like Homer Simpson referring to his neighbors as "the Flanderseseses." But no civilized person in possession of their possessive faculties could possibly justify rendering it Andrew's.

Who You Calling Toddler?

2011-08-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

Here's an alarming story from The Province, attributed to that prodigious contributor, Staff Reporter:

A baby was pepper-sprayed Tuesday morning in a dispute between two dog owners. The mother and the six-month-old baby were walking with their pit bull in the 9400-block 132A Street in Surrey just after 9 am. when a man with a doberman pulled out a canister and sprayed the pit bull. The toddler was hit with some of the spray.

According to RCMP, the man says his dog was being attacked.

My problem here is not with the "he barked, she barked" nature of the crime, but rather with the inconsistent identification of the child in question. "Six-month-old baby" makes perfect sense. But you have to be old enough to toddle (i.e.: stumble about in an amusingly drunken manner) to be considered a toddler, so that second designation is just wrong.

And while we're on the topic--who among us hasn't at least fantasized at some point about giving an obstreperous toddler a blast in the puss with bear spray? Be honest, now.

I See Dead People Seeing Things

2011-08-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

I was just going from the fridge to the patio-cum-office (if you're going to spend the weekend working, you may as well throw some sunshine and Margaritas into the mix), and as I passed the TV, I caught a snippet of newscast. Something about a fundraising bike ride up a North Shore mountainside, called The Cyprus Challenge. The ride is in honor of Jack Poole, who, according to the perky newscaster,

"...was integral in bringing the Olympics to Vancouver. Poole died in 2009, just months before he saw his dream become a reality."

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but as I understand it, one's powers of observation are among the first things to go after one dies.

Points of Pride

2011-07-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

It's Pride Weekend in Vancouver, which means tomorrow I can take the kids to the West End to see spangled parade floats full of hairy gay men in assless chaps flagellating each other with foot-long purple dildos.

The Vancouver Sun is getting into the spirit of things with their weekend edition. There's a column explaining why hairy men in assless chaps flagellating each other with dildos came to be a Pride Parade staple (it has to do with irony and self-parody), and a number of other related stories, including an interesting history of the storied Davie Street neighborhood and how it's becoming less gay-centric. Ron Dutton, who is described as an archivist for the B.C. gay and lesbian communities is quoted as saying that nowadays...

There are gay Buddhists and gay volleyball and gay knitting. There's a gay antique car club...So now you can be a part of your community with ever darkening the door of a bar or an overt gay business.

The way I see it, the visitor in this idiom is blocking the light at an open threshold, so I always thought the expression should be "darkening the doorway." Darkening a door just doesn't make sense in that context. And it's interesting to note that although there are plenty of sources that list the "darkening the door" idiom (going back to Ben Franklin),and offer a definition, none that I found provided an explanation for the metaphor. There are, of course, a number of citations for "darkening the doorway" as well, including this from a test of English idioms:

"Get out of here, Jed! First you show up drunk, then you hit on my wife and then you insult my son. Get out of here and don't come back! Never darken my doorway again!" An irate Matt told him.
Correct answer: (c) doorway

So I suppose we can deduce that either version has a respectable claim, but I'm sticking with my "doorway" preference. We can also deduce that Jed is an asshole.

But back to the Weekend Extra section of the Sun. A few pages on, there is another story, this one about how, many years ago, the owner of Joe's Cafe on Commercial Drive asked a lesbian couple to stop kissing, and how a rival (lesbian-friendly) cafe opened nearby in response. The story begins with this puzzling sentence:

A decade ago, Pat Hogan opened up Josephine's Cappuccino Bar and Wimmin's Crafts just off Commercial Drive as a place for lesbians to grab a cappuccino and, if they wanted, each other's hands or lips.

I'm certainly no expert on the amorous techniques of the urban lesbian, but this idea of them reaching out and gripping each other's lips strikes me as unlikely behavior, even for the really butch ones who ride the motorcycles topless in the parade.

You Don't Say

2011-07-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

What Your Favorite Author Says About You

...blares the inane Huffpo headline. Gosh, I didn't realize Paris even knew I existed, let alone that she was talking about me!

You Look Familiar...

2011-07-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

Woman Who Looks Like Casey Anthony, Sammy Blackwell, Attacked By Driver In Oklahoma

A woman outraged over the Casey Anthony verdict was arrested in Oklahoma for allegedly attacking a convenience store clerk who resembles the Florida mom acquitted of murdering her daughter.

After leaving work in Chouteau on Friday, Sammay Blackwell said a customer who had told her that "you look like Casey Anthony" followed her for several miles and then crashed her car into Blackwell's, causing her to flip several times...

Sure it sounds insane, but I must confess that there is a clerk in my local liquor store who bears an uncanny resemblance to insufferable Euro-twit Piers Morgan, and I consequently find myself suppressing the urge to slap his smug puss as he bags my moderately-priced Shiraz. So I can relate.

The nit I'm picking with this AOL-HuffPo story (we'll just overlook the "Sammy/Sammay" inconsistency) is an oldie, and it comes in the final sentence:

In an ironic twist, Blackwell has a daughter named Caylee too, Channel 9 said.

Its claim to the contrary notwithstanding, that sentence suffers from an irony deficiency. As some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, irony and coincidence are not the same thing. The fact that the Casey Anthony doppelganger has a daughter named Caylee is a coincidence--and an astonishing one at that. It may even be a good enough reason to attempt to kill her. But it is not ironic.

On to the the fresh-from-the-mailbox Maclean's for another example of usage and abusage from the collection of greatest hits. In a capsule review of the Swedish thriller novel, The Hypnotist, comes this scene-setter:

Shortly before Christmas, almost an entire family is slaughtered in a Stockholm suburb, two parents and a two-year-old girl literally sliced to ribbons.

Charming. But, as some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, literally means literally, not "I-really-want-to-emphasize-or-hyperbolize-this." It's unlikely the murderer actually filleted the family into sushi with such painstaking precision, especially since the following sentence tells us that another family member, a son, "though cut by as many knife wounds as the others, is still alive." Or perhaps Swedish surgeons are impressively adept at reconstituting ribbons into whole people.

Unintentionally Funny Headline of the Day...

2011-07-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

From HuffPo:

Sarah Palin's Documentary Opens...to a Nearly Empty Audience

It's the auditorium that's nearly empty, not the audience. On the other hand, if they're spending 15 bucks each to see this...

Dead Man Marching

2011-07-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

Today in The Province, columnist Jon Ferry writes about a friend and colleague, Claude Adams, who was sacked from his job as a writer for the CBC evening newscast after an unfortunate error made in the heat of wordsmithing battle:

Under intense deadline pressure, he was tasked to write an intro to a story about a police dog reportedly locked in a sweltering SUV while its RCMP handler went fishing. Adams assumed the dog was dead, which is what anchor Tony Parsons faithfully read on the air.

The problem was the dog, a 10-month-old German Shepard, survived. Which was good for the dog and even for Parsons, who calmly delivered an on-air correction. But it was bad for Adams...the next day he was called into executive producer Wayne Williams' office and given his marching orders.

But "marching orders" are directives a superior gives when dispensing an assignment. I think Ferry means that the hapless Adams received his "walking papers," which, although it sounds better (who wouldn't prefer a blithesome amble with some papers to a forced march?) is in fact the more disagreeable of the two.

Wile E. Cougar

2011-07-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

The bears are back--and this time they've brought the cougars with them. Each day seems to bring another news account of a lively unexpected encounter between man and homicidal woodland beast. There have been two bear maulings in recent days (one fatal) and a sign on my local running trail advising of a cougar sighting in the area had me nervously scanning the perimeter for crouching cats.

The Province tells us of a teen girl on Vancouver Island who forestalled a cougar assault with the time-tested trick of "making herself taller" and ringing her bike bell. That's a trick I'd like to learn. The spontaneous heightening, I mean. I already know how to ring a bike bell.

The piece goes on to inventory other encounters, ending with:

And in the Squamish area, in mid-June, a cougar possibly trying to pounce on a rider preparing for the annual Test of Metal mountain bike race missed and landed on his real wheel.

The cougars have wheels now? Given their already significant predatory advantage, that hardly seems sporting.

The Right Stuff?

2011-06-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you've finished building a new Boeing 747-8?

You take it out for a sandwich run.

AOL travel blogger Kate Auletta has posted a story about a Seattle test crew that made a 2500-mile flight to Pittsburgh last week to sample some legendary Primanti Brothers sandwiches. She says flight test director Paul Shank told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that the sandwiches were a hit with the crew. But they're not stopping there. Apparently, the aircraft needs a little more "testing":

In the future, Shank told the paper, he and his crew will take the plane to try out some pasties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and lobster rolls in Maine.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that should read pastries. Pasties are...well, if you're not familiar with the term you can click here for an eyeful.

When Grammar Meets Math

2011-06-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

Men aren't wearing ties as much as they used to! So goes the premise of a story in this week's Maclean's--a premise supported mostly by anecdotal evidence (and photos) of politicians favoring open collars. The piece veers toward "bogus trend" territory when it seems to contradict that premise with this line: "Sales [of ties] in Canada are up a modest six percent between 2009 and 2010..." But the author posits that the increase can be chalked up to the purchases of job interviewees, "Mad Men" wannabes, and ironic hipsters. The more telling stat, apparently, comes in this pull-quoted sentence:

Fewer than six percent of American men wear ties to work. In Britain, less than 20 percent of men wear them.

When we last visited the fewer vs. less debate, we found that the old "fewer grains of sand vs. less sand" shortcut didn't always apply, and that the most comprehensive rule to follow was "fewer for plural, less for singular." But this is a new twist. Is "six percent" a single quantity or a plural?

Luckily, a quick Google search shows that someone has sent this specimen off to the lab for analysis and the guys in the white lab coats at the Chicago Manual of Style have come back with the results. They start by quoting an American Heritage Dictionary ruling that "Less than is used before a plural noun that denotes a measure of time, amount, or distance"--thereby muddying the waters of our singular/plural guideline pool. They go on to opine that a percentage should qualify as such a plural noun, on the grounds that...well, you can read it yourself if you're still awake at this point.

In any case, the editors of Maclean's seem to have found their own non-solution by going with fewer in the first sentence of that pull quote and less in the second, ensuring that they get it right no less than fifty percent of the time.

Life of Brian

2011-06-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

Brian Johnson, whom I know better as that guy in the hat from the band AC/DC, did an interview with the online rag PopEater to push his new memoir. He comes across as more charming and engaging than I would have expected (although why I should have expectations about a man I know nothing about can only be chalked up to my aversion to people who wear "trademark" hats). Anyway, he relates with rogueish charm the story of how he came to be "that guy in the hat," and he shares some of his thoughts on religion and his personal philosophy of life:

I believe all religions are bad. I think they're a waste of time. Jesus was a clever man. He wasn't the son of God. We all know that he was a very clever, wonderful man and he said, 'Church is in here meaning you are your own church.' If you're a good man you become contended, if you're a good person your dying breath is one of contentment that lasts for eternity and if you're a bad man and you've lived a bad life, you've done some wicked and evil things just for the heck of it, well that will hit you on your last breath of life, that's hell. Now, listen, this is the universe according to Brian and I'm probably as wrong as anybody but I'm as right as anybody else. All religions make money and cause troubles and war and death and I'm tired of it. Stop now! Enjoy your life!

From the mouths of screeching heavy metal rock stars. But I think the interviewer had a couple of hiccups while transcribing the oracle's words. First of all, I'm pretty sure that should be contented rather than contended (although, of course, content would do as well). But more importantly, look at those quotation marks. There seems to be some confusion about when Jesus stops talking and Brian resumes. "Church is in here" are the words of Jesus--the rest is Brian's helpful exegesis of those words. So those closing quotation marks need to slide leftward to keep Brian from putting words in the late Mr. Christ's mouth, which I'm sure is some kind of sin.

Land of the Free, Home of the Bravado

2011-06-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in Slate, the ponderous and verbose Ron Rosenbaum burned through his customary three bushels of pixels (I confess I didn't get past the first few paragraphs) to question the wisdom behind Condé Nast's decision to move their high-profile magazine offices from their current Times Square crib. He says, with his customary measured understatement, that their plan to migrate to "the never-ending security nightmare known as 'Freedom Tower' at Ground Zero, may be one of the single most questionable corporate decisions in New York City history."

Oh, forgive me, right, did I say "Freedom Tower"? Sorry, the 1776-foot tall (take that, al-Qaida! 1776 in yo' face!) replacement for the Twin Towers has been renamed! The false bravado of "Freedom Tower"—especially for a building whose security precautions will make it more like a supermax prison tower—has been replaced (in 2009) by the dignified, nonprovocative reticence of "One World Trade Center."

First of all, I can see it being "one of the most questionable corporate decisions," or "the single most questionable corporate decision." But "one of the single most questionable corporate decisions" seems to me a marble-cheese-type blend of singular and plural--and I hate marble cheese.

Then there is the matter of that "false bravado." Many people (like me) will argue that the term is redundant because the word bravado itself is usually deployed to mean "a false show of bravery." There are others who have no problem with this construction, because they find the definition of bravado to be more flexible, but we can discount their opinions on the grounds that they probably enjoy marble cheese. Either way, though, there is no denying that "false bravado" has the stale odor of cliché about it, and that alone is good enough reason to reject it.

***
Speaking of Condé Nast publications and clichés, Calvin Trillin wrote a wry little piece in the Globe and Mail awhile back (which I just discovered thanks to the editors of Arts & Letters Daily) called "How I got dirty words into the New Yorker". Trillin is an imaginative, keen-witted writer so I was surprised to find this festival of leaden phrases in one sentence:

I said I felt I had to talk to Mr. Shawn about the quote, which was vital to my story, although I knew he had a lot on his plate and I wasn’t going to get on my high horse if he said no.

"A lot on his plate"? "Get on my high horse"? I guess even imaginative, keen-witted New Yorker writers can have an off day.

Booby Trapped

2011-05-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, my wife, Kim, was motoring down the expressway behind the wheel of our sexy Saturn Ion, bopping her head along to "Dancing Queen," when a fellow driver attempting a maneuver that should only be performed by a professional driver on a closed course rear-ended her. The resulting impact catapulted her directly into the office of a shyster lawyer, who is promising to make the disagreeable incident reasonably lucrative for her...and himself.

Today he sent Kim a draft of his proposed settlement letter to the insurance company, and it includes this line:

We note that the CL 19 completed by Dr. Russell indicates that Ms. Weber was breastfeeding at the time of the accident and was therefore restricted in the type and amount of pain medication she could take.

Hang on there, Matlock. You're saying that at the time of the accident, while motoring down a public expressway and listening to a wretched Abba tune, your client was also giving suck to a small child?

Never mind getting a juicy settlement. If this letter goes out as is, Kim will be lucky to avoid jail time.

Maybe Jesus is Just Not That Into You

2011-05-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

Broadcaster silent as "Judgment Day" hours tick by

So goes the Reuters headline about religious wackjob Harold Camping who, after months--nay, years--of strenuous bloviating about mankind's presumed day of reckoning today, seems to be at a loss for words. But this isn't the first time the Lord has stood him up. According to the report:

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

I think that sentence could ready simply, "Camping previously made a prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994." We can do the "failed" math ourselves.

By the way, isn't the appearance of "false prophets" supposed to be one of the signs of the apocalypse? Uh-oh.

Is Our Children's IQs Learning?

2011-05-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yesternight, while searching for a half-remembered epigram, I found myself leafing through a recent favorite: Death Sentences: How clichés, weasel words, and management-speak are strangling public language. It's all about how clichés*, weasel words, and management-speak are--how shall I put this?--strangling public language.

My languid leafing brought me to this passage:

The most dramatic example so far appears to be the news that in some parts of the United States parents have started legal proceedings against their obstetricians when, on reaching high school, their children's IQs do not meet expectations.

But of course it's the children who are reaching high school, not their IQs. Well, presumably their IQs go along with them, but you know what I mean.

*When I type the word clichés in Word, it automatically adds the accent over the e. No such intuitiveness in Bloggerworld, I see. I actually had to type the word in Word, then copy it into the text here (3 times!)--a tedious operation that gives me new appreciation for those old-time typesetters who had to painstakingly create each line of text with calloused, greasy fingers. I have to lie down for awhile now.

Comma Chameleon

2011-05-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

A story in the weekend edition of The Vancouver Sun (yes, I'm just getting to it now--it was maggoty with mothers here on the weekend) offers up some compelling background on the city's premier specialty video store, Videomatica, which--say it ain't so!--is closing its doors after 28 years as a 4th Avenue fixture. Damn you, cheap and efficient movie downloads!

Deep into the obit, the piece reveals that the cinephile's boutique-of-choice celebrated its 25th anniversary by compiling a list of their all-time top rentals. The chart-topper was the quirky British comedy Withnail and I. After that...

The top 10 was rounded out by Wings of Desire, Down by Law, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Betty Blue, Blood Simple, The Decameron and Baraka.

As countless movie nerds with hot-butter-stained t-shirts will attest, the title of the Russ Meyer schlock classic is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And when you have a series that contains an item like this with its own internal comma you need to separate said items with semi-colons to avoid confusion. As it stands, it reads like these are two movies: Faster (which sounds like one of those execrable Vin Diesel car chase pornfests) and Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (which sounds like a command given to a homicidal housecat).

A little detective work (ie: counting) tells me that the author of the piece did in fact think these were two movies, because only by cleaving the title into two films can you get the nine titles you need to round out the top ten.

Speaking of movie title missteps, the Huffington Post is reporting that Philip Seymour Hoffman is set to star in a big-screen jab at L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. The movie, which should be a doozy, is the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, who, we're told, is

an Oscar-nominated writer/director, whose biggest hits include "Boogie Nights," "Punch, Drunk, Love" and "There Will Be Blood."

That should be Punch-Drunk Love. Although I must admit that Punch, Drunk, Love sounds like a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love that I would actually want to see.

Pro-Nouns and Anti-Semantic

2011-05-06T17:06:00.000-07:00

Over at Slate today, the estimable Dana Stevens gave an almost begrudging thumbs-most-of-the-way-up to the new Mel Gibson movie, The Beaver. The film's release, you may recall, was delayed to provide some breathing room between us, the movie-going public, and the stink of Gibson's latest odious transgressions.

In any case, the movie is directed by Jodie Foster, who also performs in the film, and about whom Steven writes:

It's notoriously hard for an actor to direct his or herself on-screen, which may account for the lack of warmth in Foster's scenes with Gibson.

The problem here is that, while his and hers go together like Mel Gibson and raging misogynist anti-Semite, the reflexive pronouns are, of course, himself and herself. (True, hisself is a variant in some dialects, particularly those featured in movies where Jackie Gleason plays a sheriff, but not in Standard Written English.)

So how do we solve this? Some people--those with a sense of panache and derring-do--see an opportunity here to deploy a sexy suspended hyphen, like so: "him- or herself." But if that seems too risqué, we can also go with the stodgy but serviceable "himself or herself." Or, we can simply avoid the whole pickle by recasting the sentence: "It's notoriously hard for actors to direct themselves on-screen...especially when playing opposite a volatile misogynist anti-Semite."

Whitewashed

2011-04-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

I've always admired those lines from E.B. White--so much so that I captured them and preserved them in my collection of lines I admire, which I will one day bequeath to an auction house of fine standing. But not long after cataloging those words and arranging them in their display case, I began to see other versions, including this grotesque mash-up:

"I wake up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult."

E.B White was a writer, after all (and one notorious for the precision of his word choices) so there should be a definitive written record of where the passage in question comes from and in what exact form it appeared. Indeed, the blogmeister at Ishbadiddle did some wiki-sourcing on this very question and determined that that first version is the real thing and it comes from a 1969 New York Times interview. Case closed.

But then yesterday, I sat at my wife's computer to enjoy some idle surfing while munching my bagel, and her home page quotation-generator spit this out:

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. --E.B. White

This time, I happened to know precisely the source, and I knew this was murderously off-key. I only had to step over to the bookcase and pull down my copy of A Subtreasury of American Humor, edited by White and his wife, Katherine, to find these lines in the preface:

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

First of all, I submit this as a rebuttal to all those Strunk and White fundamentalists who insist that the briefer, plainer composition is always better. The real quotation sings; the bastardized version is a feeble croak. Even E.B. White was not an Elements of Style purist. He understood that while there may be rules for grammar, there are only guidelines for writing, and they are mutable. What matters is choosing the right words for the right effect.

Which is what makes these misquotations so irksome. I suppose it's flattering to White, in a way, that his epigrams are passed around so enthusiastically that they become fodder for an undeclared game of Chinese Whispers. But considering the care this legendary literary craftsman put into his work, it is dispiriting to see his sentences vandalized by thoughtless thugs.

Going Gaga

2011-04-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

According to a HuffPo story, Lady Gaga is in trouble with God. I'm not familiar with Ms. Gaga's work, but I understand she is a provocative performer, and this story seems to follow a pattern that started with Elvis shaking his hips and worked its way through Alice Cooper and his snake, Ozzie Osbourne and the headless bat, Sinead O'Conner and the pope pic incident, the guy who did the "Piss Christ" photo of a crucifix in urine, and countless others: Provocative performer says or does something deliberately provocative. Intended provokees are suitably provoked by said provocateur. Minutes of intense outrage ensue from people who claim these stunts are debasing their sacred beliefs. Outraged people become distracted by an image of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and life moves on.

The hullabaloo now is about Gaga's newest musical offering. As the story reveals:

"Judas," the latest single from Grammy-winner and fashion icon has leaked onto the internet early, adding to the already heated debate about the song, and accompanying video's, alleged sacrilege.

Yes, we're missing a the before "Grammy-winner," but the real transgression, grammatically-speaking, comes later in the sentence. If we are to believe that both the song and the video are (allegedly) sacrilegious and that that is what the debate is about, we should be looking at a compound possessive and the first possessive should be song's. If these are two separate issues, though--the debate about the song, and the (alleged) sacrilege in the video--we need to lose the parenthetical clause by dropping the final comma and making it: "heated debate about the song, and the accompanying video's alleged sacrilege." That's what Jesus would do.

Teed Off in Kelowna

2011-04-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

Day Three of our Okanagan odyssey saw us going for a family mini-golf excursion, and what a predictably hapless foursome we present. Kim is about as deftly-coordinated as an arthritic moose. Young Abby's approach to golf is to stickhandle toward the hole like Phil Esposito on a breakaway. As for me, I am by turns astonishingly lucky (hole-in-one on the 17th thanks to a five-foot rebound off a curb) and pathetically inept (my approach on this hole

saw me suffering the effects of more strokes than Dick Clark).

Two-year-old Sam, pictured here sitting smugly by the Deadwood-inspired facade on the 16th green,

carried the day by scoring a consistent two strokes on every single hole, owing to his strategy of picking up his ball after each tee-off, walking it to the cup and dropping it in. I'm actually kind of proud of him for figuring out so swiftly the pointless futility of golf.

Oh, right...the point of this blog entry? It was this sign, introducing us to the 6th hole:

Speaking of hit-and-miss (or, I suppose, miss-and-miss in this case), we have here both absent and superfluous punctuation. There should, of course, be an apostrophe in NATURES to indicate who that gardener is in service to. And when will sign-writers learn that quotation marks are not for slapping around a phrase to give emphasis? In fact, because the scare claws are often employed to indicate irony, the play can backfire like a florescent green golf ball ricocheting off a windmill fan. Although now that I look at that mangy patch of moonscape depicted here, perhaps the claim of "quality service" is indeed meant to be ironic.

Give Us Your Poor...and We'll Give You Our Huddled Masses

2011-04-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

It's election season again, which means more of those voiceover-of-doom, black-and-white commercials showing unflattering photographs of the other guy--the kind that got Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin to sputter:

Must we? The adolescent attack ads? The constant dispiriting insult to our intelligence and national sense of decorum? When did Karl Rove immigrate to Canada?

Should that be immigrate or is it emigrate in this context? I always get those two mixed up, the same way I'm continually confusing Bill Paxton with Bill Pullman. So I looked it up yet again (the immigrate/emigrate thing, not the Paxton/Pullman thing--I've given up on the latter).

The distinction is most often described along the lines of "to emigrate is to leave a country, while to immigrate is to come to a country"--an explanation I find less than satisfying because of course one does both at the same time. But it is a matter of perspective: the person you are seeing off is emigrating and the person you are welcoming (or, in the hypothetical case of Karl Rove, rebuffing at the point of a pitchfork) is immigrating--even if it's the same person.

So McMartin has it right. But the atheists are wrong. At least the atheists who wrote up the promotional material for their upcoming convention. They've posted a biographical snapshot of featured speaker Christopher Hitchens (who is attending via Skype, owing to ill health, alas) that says "In 1981, he emigrated to the United States." As anyone who has heard Hitchens's buttery English accent knows, the man is a product of the UK, meaning he immigrated to the United States, land of the Rovian attack ad.

I Never Thought of Selling It...

2011-04-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

As someone who has changed (more than) his share of diapers, I am well aware of the assorted colours and patterns.

Maybe it's Time to Invest in Some Apostrophes

2011-03-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

I seem to have developed an inexplicable fetish for the TV show Dragon's Den--you know, the one where wannabe or fledgling entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists who tell them that their valuations are "insane." Now that repeats are airing daily and we've got this space-age PVR recording device, it's all too easy to score along at home while watching pitches into the wee hours.

Last night I screened a couple more eps, including one that featured a "mom-preneur" who designs punk-themed clothes for toddlers, such as this t-shirt:

Punk may not be dead, but her pitch was. The Dragons withdrew their offer of one million dollars for 10% of the company when they realized she had left out the apostrophe in what is clearly supposed to be a contraction of "Punk is." Okay, not really--they just told her they didn't see the big-time potential. But if they had taken her to task on the missing punctuation, it might have served as a warning to future businesspeople who take the language into their own hands.

Like this woman in the following episode, who was trying to get funding for her line of plus-sized clothes:

There is no such word as womens. When something is attached to a confederacy of women--women's rights, women's fashions, women's unseemly tendency to gush and swoon over the "dreaminess" of Denzel Washington while their squat, pale husbands are sitting right there--the word required is the possessive, and it is the apostrophe that is essential.

Hitting Where it Hurts

2011-03-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Headline on an AP wire story today:

GM Cuts Unnecessary Spending After Japan Disaster

When the crisis is over they will resume regular levels of unnecessary spending.

Playing in the Margins

2011-03-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

In a future (and a present) where books are delivered by Kindle and iPad, what is to become of those manic scribblers who like to graffiti the pages of their books with marginalia? The gabfesters at Slate podcasted about this very topic awhile back, and today I see this Atlantic piece about the (possible) demise of obsessive literary back-chat. The blogster in question, Kevin Charles Redmon (and since when do you need three names to write a blog post?), spends some time examining the merits of --and the vituperative scorn heaped upon--the Kindle's collective annotating feature, "popular highlights."

And if you don't trust the wiki of would-be English lit professors—191 of who, I see, have highlighted Franzen's thesis in Freedom, "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage"—well, turn the feature off.

There's that pesky who/whom problem again. This seems like a case of hyper-correction, with the author figuring that since the stripped-down sentence would read "professors who have highlighted Franzen's thesis" he is probably on solid ground to stay with the subjective who. But if we use the handy substitution test and try other subjective/objective pairings, the miscue surfaces like a tell-tale blue line on a home pregnancy test pee-stick. For although it's fine to write, "they have highlighted Franzen's thesis," you would never say "191 of they have highlighted Franzen's thesis"--unless of course you suffered from a debilitating neurological impairment. We know without a doubt that it should be the objective them--our ears tell us so. The objective case it is, then, which means whom is the pronoun of choice.

That's Just Sic

2011-03-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

Timothy Noah is having a conniption today on Slate ---something about how the internet-phone pioneers at Skype are holding certain clients' voice mails hostage unless they pony up some coin. He quotes a disgruntled user (and an amusingly semi-literate response to the disgruntled user) before paraphrasing a conversation he had with a Skype spokeshole:

When I spoke with O'Shaughnessy today he said that neither he, nor a Skype customer-service expert he contacted in London, nor a Skype product manager he contacted in London, had ever heard of this problem before, which makes the Skype email's pledge that "we will definitely look in to [sic.] this" ring a bit hollow.

Noah is using the parenthetical "[sic.]" to point out, correctly, that "in to" should read "into." But he errs in throwing a period in before that closing bracket. To quote the infallible Wikipedia:

The adverb sic—meaning "intentionally so written"—first appeared in English circa 1856. It is derived from the Latin adverb sīc, which contains a long vowel and means "so," "thus," "as such," or "in such a manner."

and also...

Because sic is not an abbreviation, it is unnecessary to include a period inside the brackets after the word sic.

A Prepositionalist Incongruousness

2011-03-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

If you read only one print excerpt of a recap of a series of blog posts on the discussions of a book club about the novel The Sentimentalists, it should be today's piece in The Vancouver Sun. In it you will find one of the panelists quoting a passage from the book that includes this sentence:

When I questioned Parada about the incongruencies between my father's stories and the documents to which I was later able to compare them to, he had little to offer by way of explanation.

You won't find the word incongruency in any major dictionary (at least I didn't) but a cursory Googling and a quick visit to Wordnik shows that it's getting a lot of lexicographical traction. I like it. In the example above, the word suggests that the differences between the father's stories and the documents are not just inconsistent, but oddly so. So rather than "incongruent inconsistencies" we get "incongruencies." Cool.

Not so cool, however, is the doubling down on prepositions in the phrase "to which I was later able to compare them to," which will hereafter be referred to simply as "The Paul McCartney Error."

Still Better than the Jell-O and Preparation H

2011-03-09T17:07:00.000-08:00

This just in...my wife, the wily and parsimonious Kim, has poked her head in to say that she's off to the market to, and I quote: "Pick up some cat food and broccoli for dinner."

This is why we need commas in speech as well as writing.

Piers Review

2011-03-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

In the latest Vanity Fair, master baiter James Wolcott delivers a sustained beating to the credibility of Piers Morgan, CNN's comically over-hyped replacement for Larry "the Crypt Keeper" King. Wolcott blames Morgan himself for the flow of P.R. balloon juice that preceded the Brit's debut, in a passage that ends:

Morgan also reveled in Twitter slap-fights, boasting that he would mop the floor with doubters and detractors such as John Schiumo, the 24-hour cable news channel NY1’s prime-time news host, whom he warned, “You’re like Stephen Baldwin and Vinny Pastore—they thought they were big shots in NY too until I wiped them in Celeb Apprentice.” Yes, those were quite a pair of titans he toppled.

That last sentence contains a fairly common grammatical misstep. Baldwin and Pastore may constitute two (ironic) titans, but the word "pair" is (ironically) singular, and that's the word that governs the verb choice. So the sentence should read: "Yes, that was quite a pair of titans..."

For Better or Wurse

2011-03-04T15:43:00.000-08:00

It is with a heavy heart that I present today's befouling of the language, as it comes from my daughter's weekly spelling quiz.

What pains me is that she had the presence of mind to realize she had left out the vowel in Number 9, but then she doubled back and inserted the wrong one. It fell to me, as a loving and involved father, to carefully explain to her that she had brought ineradicable shame on the family, and that from now on I would have to burn her hand with a cigarette for each error she made.

This is almost as bad as the time our two-year-old, Sam, used the word "sententious" when he clearly meant "tendentious." And no, I couldn't just chalk it up to a slip of the tongue; it was in a written communication.

Damn kids today.

The Not-So-Secret Service

2011-02-25T15:19:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of The Atlantic features an "unprecedented access" look into the Secret Service that, frankly, offers little in the way of revelation or insight--although it was fun to read that the New York office keeps a stash of disguises and fake grass for undercover operations. Presumably that's where they keep the ACME-brand rocket skates, too.

The piece centers around security coordination for the United Nations General Assembly meeting in 2010, and early on we get a glimpse into Iranian president Mahmoud Multisyllable's security detail:

During his stay, the Iranian president was ensconced in the smallish, 20-floor Hilton Manhattan East. The hotel remained open to regular guests, and tourists wandered freely through the lobby. No demonstrators were outside when I visited (a somewhat surprising absence, given that the day’s newspapers had disclosed the location of the hotel), but a couple dozen plainclothes police officers were stationed around the building just in case.

Just to be picky here, the newspapers didn't disclose the location of the hotel--Google Maps, or for that matter, the local Yellow Pages, will give you that. What the papers had disclosed was the location of Captain Windbreaker at said hotel.

And Then I Go and Spoil it All by Saying Something Stupid...

2011-02-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

It might be churlish of me to say so, but while reading How to Write a Sentence...And How to Read One by the critic and columnist Stanley Fish, I can't help thinking that the book, as pleasantly pedantic as it is, might be more engaging if its sentences were written by someone more boisterously creative than Stanley Fish. It's a good book. I like it. But if it were written by, say, Martin Amis or, in an alternate universe, David Foster Wallace, I would probably love it. But there is no point blaming a book for its author.

I can, however, blame the author for this passage, where he compares "bad" sentences that create good effects to bad cover songs that produce ironic pleasure:

There's an NPR program called The Annoying Music Show, and when the remastered set of Beatles albums came out in 2009, an episode was built around it. The cuts played included Tiny Tim singing "Hey Jude" and Telly (Kojak) Savalas singing "Something in the Way She Walks." These performances were truly bad and they were truly good.

The line, as George Harrison wrote it, is, of course, "Something in the way she moves." And the song, for that matter, is titled, simply, "Something".

I tried to find YouTube evidence of this cover song atrocity but came up dry. But in searching, I did come across this half-forgotten Telly Savalas sketch on the old Carol Burnett show. Cheesy, but still funny, if you ask me.

Death Be Not Proud

2011-02-16T17:00:00.000-08:00

I've just retrieved the latest issue of MacLean's from the mailbox, which means I've just engaged in my weekly morbid ritual of flipping to the back page first to get right to the obituary profile of this week's unfortunate soul. First, I note the dates at the top and make the quick narcissistic calculation that Roz Chast so deftly captured in this cartoon:

Then, my eye shoots down to the last paragraph for the satisfyingly depressing details surrounding the circumstances of death. This week's profile ends thusly:

Last year, Peter survived a double-bypass surgery, and quickly recovered, eager to enjoy the summer. On Dec. 31, he retired. By mid-January, he and Lydia set off on another big adventure: a three-month road trip through the U.S., from California to Florida, which they had been planning for months. Four days in, on Jan. 19, 2011, they stopped on a Washington state highway so Peter could take a photo of a farmhouse. The sun was in his eyes, and he didn't see the truck that hit him. He was 66.

Damn. You spend decades building a life and this is how it ends--you stop for a bucolic Ansel Adams moment and end up a road pizza with a Peterbilt logo tattooed on your stunned face.

Anyway, I summoned the Google gods and found that the fully-capitalized designation, "Washington State," is indeed the preferred way to go here (although some cautioned against it if it could be confused with the university of that name). After all, we're talking about a highway in Washington State, not a state highway in what could be Washington, D.C.

As for why he was going from California to Florida by way of Washington State--alas, that's something we'll never get to ask poor Peter.

Greenhouse Blueberries, or Blue Berries in a Green House?

2011-02-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

Want to know which organic foods are worth the extra shekels? Then you need to check out this iVillage slideshow, where you will find the following counsel on the advisability of buying blue-ribbon berries:

I only buy berries when they’re in season and sold at the farmer's market or at my local retailer. And I don’t do it to cut green house gases! I buy them in season, because they are much cheaper and so much better tasting.

Sound advice. Except that the difference between a "green house" and a "greenhouse" is worth bearing in mind, as we are reminded in this classic clip--which, coincidentally, is about berries:

The Dumb-Downed Theory of Hyphenation

2011-02-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

According to the Hollywood Reporter (hey, I just happened to hit on it through a series of links; I don't have to explain myself to you) the word on the Beverly Hills street is that they're going to make a major motion picture adaption of Stephen King's post-apocalyptic epic, The Stand. I haven't read the novel, but I'm led to believe it is a post-apocalyptic epic worthy of major motion picture adaption. And apparently this isn't the first time the tale has been bound for the screen:

George Romero and Warners separately tried in vain to launch a movie adaptation in the 1980s, and a tone-downed version was produced as a six-hour miniseries by ABC in 1994.

I'm sorry--a what version? Sure, you can make a case that a hyphenated compound should be treated as a single word for the purposes of past-tensifying--a "mutton-chopped" Civil War general, for instance--but "tone-downed" is an offense to the ear; it sounds like something a child who has been deprived of a Baby Einstein upbringing would say. "Toned-down version" would be the way to go. For that matter, I think you can even forgo the hyphen in this case and opt for the simple, austere "toned down version."

Say That Again

2011-02-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

I've added Charles Pierce's Idiot America to the bedtime reading rotation, because nothing is more conducive to restful slumber than having one's sputtering indignation aroused. As the inflammatory title suggests, it's about idiots--snake-oil-selling charlatans, conspiracy theorist nutjobs, young earth creationists, talk radio gasbags, Sarah Palin--and how they have infiltrated mainstream culture.

Pierce (you may remember him from such NPR panel shows as Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me) builds his thesis on what he calls the "Three Great Premises" of Idiot America, which are helpfully outlined on the back cover and referenced repeatedly throughout the book:

Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

Succinctly aphoristic, no doubt about that. But perhaps a trifle repetitive. The second premise, for instance talks about fact in the first sentence and truth in the second--but aren't all facts truthful, by virtue of their very factness? Still, it has a nice balance and cadence. The final premise, however, is really just a restatement of the previous sentence with slightly different flavoring.

It seems Pierce himself gets tangled up in the interchangeability of these ideas on Page 161, where he develops his "America as library" metaphor:

Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are determined by those people's fervency.

If we go by the wording of the second great premise, the truth and the facts are transposed here. No matter, really, because it reads just as well this way. Which means that the two thoughts contained in the premise are pretty much describing a distinction without a difference. Again, no big crime and the premise as written has a pleasing musicality. I just expected the lyrics of the refrain to be consistent throughout the song.

The End of the "All You Can Byte" Buffet?

2011-01-31T19:01:00.000-08:00

Folks in Canadian cyberland are all atwitter (get it?) about the new CRTC regulations that will allow internet providers to charge a premium to large-bandwith internet users. I know I'm supposed to have a strong opinion on this, but the fact is I can't decide whether to fall in with the "equality of access" egalitarians or the "you gets what you pay for" (or "you pays for what you gets") capitalists.

But I do know I have an opinion on this sentence from a CP story on the brouhaha:

An opposition MP will address the rising cost of accessing rich online data like live sportscasts and movies at a town hall meeting...

The problem here is the separation of town hall and politician. As it stands, the sentence seems to suggest that the topic under discussion is the accessing of sportscasts and movies at town hall meetings. "An opposition MP will address at a town hall meeting..." or, even better, "At a town hall meeting, an opposition MP will address..." would clear up the confusion.

It may not seem like a big deal in this example, but sometimes separations like this can result in unintentionally risible effects. Take, for example, this similar sentence from a U.S. news report:

The congressman stayed after the town meeting and discussed the high cost of living with several women.

Pilfered Puck Leads to Possessive Puzzle

2011-01-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

According to a brief Vancouver Sun filler piece this morning, Philadelphia Flyer defenceman/big meanie Chris Pronger has put a bee in the bonnet of Chicago Black Hawk fans. He scooped up the puck at the end of Game 2 during last year's Stanley Cup finals and he won't give it back. Why the Game 2 puck means so much to Hawk fans (a local restaurant is offering $50,000 for its safe repatriation to Chi-town) is not explained. In any case, Pronger is unmoved, saying:

"It's tucked away somewhere. It'll wind up on eBay at some point. All proceeds will go to the person who buys its charity."

This is a real noodle-scratcher of a conundrum because I don't think there is a clear right answer for how to render that quotation. If Pronger had said, "All proceeds will go to the charity of the person who buys it" things would be simple. But he didn't, so we have to work with what he did say.

As all people who have uncrossed eyes and eat with utensils know, it's is a contraction and its is the possessive, so at first glance that its would seem to be properly deployed; we're talking about the charity of the person who buys it, so we need a possessive. But I would plead extenuating circumstances and argue that "the person who buys its charity" is confusing, because it sounds like the person is buying the charity of "it" ("it" presumably being the puck) instead of buying the puck.

I would further argue that "the person who buys it" is acting as one semantical unit here, like a name, and so we are justified in treating it like a name and tacking an 's at the end to indicate possessiveness. So that would give us something like "All proceeds will go to the-person-who-buys-it's charity." Better, perhaps, but now there is the chance the it's can be misconstrued as a contraction. Let's try this: "All proceeds will go to 'the person who buys it' 's charity." My god, that's hideous.

No, it seems that in grammar, as in hockey, sometimes there just isn't an elegant play to be made. Sometimes you just have to dump it in off the boards and hope for the best.

Surely You Can't be Serious

2011-01-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

An AP headline this headline this morning reads:

Fumes at L.A. plant leave 1 dead, 2 serious

Fumes that can either kill you or turn you into Sean Penn? Weird.

"Bad news, Mrs. Lincoln. There is a new complication."

2011-01-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

I extracted a salmon-colored special bulletin from Abby's backpack today, warning us that there may be a case of pertussis, or whooping cough, at the school. In it, we are rather alarmingly advised that:

Petrussis can cause complications such as pneumonia, convulsions, brain damage or even death.

Now I'm no doctor, but somehow I imagine that when you are dead your condition ceases to be complicated.

Let Me Just Say This About That

2011-01-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

Is there anything more inane and banal than the chatter of TV newspuppets desperately trying to fill time during wall-to-wall coverage of a breaking story? (Favorite line from CNN yesterday: "It's usually a pretty a bad thing to get shot in the head, is it not?")

Yes, there is: the inevitable released "statements" of politicians who want to remind us that they are strongly opposed to bad things and that they are not afraid to tell us in the gassiest verbiage possible. Let's parse this example, from Senator Diane Feinsten, although you could do this with just about any of the statements that were being dispensed yesterday in the aftermath of the massacre in Arizona--they're all pretty much interchangeable:

My heart sank when I heard the news of the tragedy in Tucson [at least she didn't say she was "shocked and saddened]. My thoughts and prayers are with Representative Giffords and her family, the family of Judge Roll and all the other victims and their loved ones. ["Thoughts and prayers" always come as package in these statements--they are the very currency of concern.] Representative Giffords is a beacon of courage and hope [Hope is often exemplified in beacons. And you seldom see a "beacon of disappointment] in our nation right now. She bravely pursued her duties as a member of Congress, despite having been the target of vitriolic political rhetoric in the past. [Who in your game hasn't been? And the phrase "vitriolic political rhetoric" manages to be both noxiously trendy and tediously shopworn.]

This senseless violence [as opposed to the sensible kind] has no place in a free society [thanks for telling us]. She and the other victims were engaged in the very essence of democracy, an elected representative meeting face-to-face with her constituents.

I have seen firsthand the effects of assassination ["let's talk about me"], and there is no place for this kind of violence in our political discourse [Once again, if you're wondering if there is a place for "this kind" of violence, the answer is no]. It must be universally condemned [condemnation is perhaps the strongest word a politician can use and it's usually only deployed against killers and countries we're about to go to war against]. We do not yet know the gunman’s motivations, but I am convinced that we must reject extremism and violent rhetoric.

That last sentence is downright confusing, because it could be taken to mean that we must reject extremism and violent rhetoric as the gunman's motivations. Which is pretty much the opposite of what she means, I'm sure.

What the heck, let's look at a few more. I've italicized the high notes. Feel free to sing along.

From President Obama:

We do not yet have all the answers. What we do know is that such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society. I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping Representative Giffords, the victims of this tragedy, and their families in our prayers.

From Speaker Boehner:

The thoughts and prayers of the House and the nation are with Congressman Giffords and her family. We're also praying for the families of Judge Roll, and all of those who were taken from us yesterday so senselessly. An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serves...Such acts of violence have no place in our society.

From Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts:

Today’s news of the shooting of my colleague Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, members of her staff and her constituents is shocking and horrifying, and my deepest condolences go out to the families of those who lost their lives today in such a senseless and tragic event...Gabby was doing today what she loved best and what all of us in Congress consider a great responsibility and a true honor - to meet with and listen to our constituents. My thoughts and prayers are with her and her family, and with all of those wounded today in the hopes for a full and speedy recovery.

And what about John McCain?

U.S. Senator John McCain issued a statement condemning the shooting attack of Arizona U.S. Rep. Gabriella Giffords, Judge John Roll and several others.

“I’m deeply saddened and shocked [he's confused--he means "shocked and saddened] at the tragedy that has taken place in my home state of Arizona. The shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the deaths of other individuals is a terrible tragedy and one that has shocked me and our nation,’ Mr. McCain said in a statement...

The Arizona Republican also noted that he is “deeply saddened” to hear of Mr. Roll’s death. The Arizona Republican termed the incident a "senseless act of violence."

Mr. McCain noted that his thoughts and his prayers are with the Giffords and Roll family.

Of course he did. We expect nothing less.

Apostrofeeble

2011-01-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

The arts and culture blog Jewcy has posted its list of the ten best podcasts of 2010. The only reason I know this (I admit I've never heard of Jewcy before) is because the Slate Culture Gabfest linked to the list on their Facebook page. I really enjoy the Gabfest--it's my favorite listening while making curry chicken casserole--so I checked out the link, and at the top of the list...well, what a coincidence:

1. Slate Culture Gabfest

Three articulate and seasoned writers from Slate’s roster discuss news stories, TV/films, and books with enough wit to keep it entertaining, while holding back enough on the pretension just enough to keep it palatable. At the end of every episode, each host, “endorses” a cultural artifact about which they are enthusiastic, be it a book about a TV series, article, or perhaps, an apple pie. Whether or not you read Slate, The Gabfest hosts make for great company during your walk to work and Dana Steven’s tastes in film and TV tend to be right on the money. The Slate Culture Gabfest is the perfect podcast for the modern discerning culture-phile.

Always nice to have one's tastes validated by an arbitrary list. The problem here is that the name of Slate's astute and insightful film critic, the one with the winsome podcast charm, is Dana Stevens. And that means the possessive should be Dana Stevens' or Dana Stevens's, depending on which faction of the language police nerdocracy you wish to annoy.

Another apostrophe violation occurs in the blurb for the third entry on the list:

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast gives contemporary fiction writers the opportunity to read some of their favorite short stories that have been published in The New Yorker and then discuss them with the magazines fiction editor.

I'm sure said editor, Deborah Treisman, would recoil at the missing apostrophe in "magazines." She is, after all, a valuable possession of The New Yorker.

And while we're on the subject of possessives, let's not forget how to apostrophize a plural possessive, as demonstrated by this tweet today from the reliably goofy Andy Borowitz:

"Twilight" sweeps Virgins' Choice Awards

Go Ahead, You Deserve It

2011-01-04T16:48:00.000-08:00

I can't say I love the Groupon editorial "voice" (the development and nurturing of which was recently explored in this Atlantic article)--it's a little too self-satisfied and cheeky, even for my sensibilities. But I do like the offers, like the 50% off coupon for one of my favorite local pubs that I greedily seized as soon as it popped into my inbox, or this one for ice-skating sessions at a nearby rink.

Ice is nothing more than water that won't let people swim in it. Such stubbornness deserves comeuppance in the form of sharp metallic blades that merrily crisscross to and fro across the frozen surface. Give ice its just desserts with today's Groupon: for $25, you get a punch-card good for five skate and helmet rentals, five public skate passes, and $10 worth of grill fare (a $65 total value) at Canlan Ice Sports...

I find this miscue interesting*. All careful writers learn to be vigilant about the distinction in spelling between dessert (the after-dinner treat) and desert (the sand-and-camels landscape). But there's another trap here, and the writer of this blurb has become ensnared in it. The term is, in fact, just deserts. In this usage, the word desert is pronounced the same as dessert, but it has nothing to do with toothsome confections. Rather, it derives from Latin (Dessert comes from the French) and it means, appropriately enough, "something that is deserved or merited."

Which means, I suppose, that if you have been exceptionally good, eating just dessert could be your just desert.

*Your results may vary.

Hold it Down in There!

2010-12-29T16:43:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays, The Daily Beast ran a piece entitled "Christmas with My Son with Autism" (why not "with My Autistic Son"?) that was predictably poignant, perhaps a little syrupy and, it must be said, not all that well-written or edited. Case in point:

Now I thought, "How do I undo this damage?" I know, I thought quietly to myself, "I will teach him."

If you're going to put the rest of your thoughts in quotation marks, better include the "I know" as well. And while we're at it, you don't need to include the "to myself" --you can trust us readers to figure out whom you're doing your thinking to. And why are you thinking in a whisper? Worried he might hear you if you think too loudly?

It's A Wonderful Lifetime in Which to be Born

2010-12-27T18:22:00.000-08:00

Our traditional Christmas bacchanal once again left us all awash in gifts of wine and books (except for the kids, of course--they got wine and toys). Among Kim's haul was The Book of Negroes. Despite what you might surmise from the title, it is not John McCain's personal contact list of African-American friends and colleagues, but rather a novel that dramatizes the journey--from down south to up north and on to repatriation in Africa--of a freed slave during the American War of Independence.

Coincidentally, The Vancouver Sun ran a story on the book in this weekend's edition, which includes this quote from the novel's author, Lawrence Hill:

It was such an untold story: the idea that some African people were drawn into slavery in the Americas, and then came to Canada and went back to Africa in the same lifetime in which they were born.

Unless you're Shirley MacLaine, you only get the one lifetime--and pretty much by definition you have to be born into it. That final prepositional phrase, in other words, is about as necessary--and almost as absurd--as the tasteless novelty pencil sharpener my sister bestowed on me.

Luckily, Nobody Noticed He Got the "O" Backwards, Too

2010-12-23T15:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I was sitting by the fire with my little boy on my knee, watching the hockey game while leafing through a coffee table book called The Book of Hockey Firsts. Let's face it, you can't get any more Canadian than that without actually pouring maple syrup on a Mountie.

Anyway, as Sam dutifully yelled out "GOALIE!" at every picture of a masked or padded player, we thumbed through the pages, until we alighted on this team snapshot from 1922 of the Toronto St. Pats, the forerunners of today's Maple Leafs.

I admit it. I couldn't help being tickled to discover that the ineptitude of Torontonian pucksters is not confined to today's hapless squad, but extends back generations and includes the gormless (or possibly dyslexic) equipment manager who reversed the occasional "N" on the team jerseys.

Let's Make a Deal

2010-12-22T17:38:00.000-08:00

I'm playing the annual waiting game with Maclean's. They send me emails and letters beseeching me to re-up for another year, and I continue to ignore their pleas until we finally reach a point where they make me an offer I can't refuse. We're not close yet in our negotiations.

The latest (but still early) missive arrived today--an urgent PAYMENT DUE "invoice" that offered uninterrupted enjoyment of my subscription for a mere $51.83 (which I believe is about double what I paid last year). But wait, they're sweetening the pot:

As a "thank you" we will also send along a BONUS GIFT when we receive your payment plus a $5 Chapters Indigo gift card. (This offer will not be repeated again.)

First of all, the hysterically all-capped BONUS GIFT is actually a cheapo pocket calculator identical to the one I received last year--the one my young daughter uses as a pretend cell phone. I don't need another. I am also more than a little affronted that, in order to receive this "gift," I must submit not only an inflated payment, but also a bookstore gift card. Get your own damn gift cards, Maclean's! And I certainly don't appreciate the final Godfather-ish threat that this is a final offer.

Now, if they had said that they would "send along a BONUS GIFT plus a $5 Chapters Indigo gift card" in exchange for my payment, we might be closer to an agreement. But not much. I'm still holding out for some invisible ink and a pair of x-ray glasses.

A Look Back in Anger...or at Least Mild Irritation

2010-12-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

The TV section in my Vancouver Sun tells me that if I whistle up CNN I can expect to see "a retrospective look back" at some of Larry King's more compelling interviews. There is a glaring redundancy there (some would also suggest that "Larry King" and "compelling" don't belong in the same sentence, but we'll leave that aside for now), and such redundancies always remind me of this exchange from A Few Good Men:

Q: Did you give Markinson an order?

A: I ordered him to have Santiago transfered immediately.

Q: Why?

A: His life might be in danger.

Q: Grave danger?

A: Is there another kind?

Is there another kind of "look back" that isn't retrospective?

On a similar note, yet another year-end special issue of Maclean's arrived today, this time a super-sized "Year in Pictures" edition, which is fronted by an editor's note reminding us that "December is also a time for reflecting back on the year past." Since one can hardly reflect ahead, that sentence would have more spine if its back were removed.

And Soon They'll be Open 8 Days a Week

2010-12-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

My goodness, is it already 25 o'clock? I've got to be up at half past 32!

Hat-tip to Karen @ kapercreative for the pic!

It is to Weep

2010-12-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

John Boehner's Crying: Is He Drinking Too Much? That's the provocative leading question that serves as the title of Matt Lewis's column today on the Politics Daily website. The piece spends several hundred scattershot words probing the lachrymose tendencies of His Orangeness, the soon-to-be Speaker of the House, before arriving at the answer: Maybe. Or maybe not. But probably not.

Before we get to that "definitive" conclusion, however, we get plenty of juicy supposition, speculation, and even self-incriminating testimony such as this:

When President Obama mentioned that he ran into Rep. Boehner at a holiday party last year drinking eggnog, Boehner responded, "I was drinking wine." And when recently asked about attending a "Slurpee summit with the president," Boehner quipped, "How about a glass of merlot?"

Merlot is the name of a wine-producing grape (unfairly maligned in a memorable scene in the memorable film Sideways) and it is usually capitalized. Interestingly, it is also the custom to capitalize "Speaker of the House"--and even just "Speaker"--even though "senator" traditionally is only given the capital treatment when it precedes a name, and "president of the United States" is still the subject of vigorous "to capitalize or not to capitalize" debate.

By the way, as it happens, I have some firsthand experience regarding the relationship between drinking wine and crying. Just this morning, my doctor advised me that my efforts at moderation have paid off, as it appears the activity of my liver enzymes has returned to acceptable levels, and I won't need any further testing for several months--which I took as a green light to lubricate my way through the upcoming holiday season. I was so grateful on hearing the news, I wept.

* * *
For more on "the Weeper of the House" and clips of crying men in movies, there is this timely summary from The Atlantic.

It's Unaccpectable

2010-12-14T13:52:00.000-08:00

I went to my favorite lunch place again today and noticed a new sign, squeaked out with a Sharpie and scotch-taped to the side of the cash register:

WE DO NOT ACCPECT
$100 BILL

Obviously, this is a simple typo. What they mean to say, I'm sure, is, "WE DO NOT EXPECT $100 BILL." Because, really, in this economy, who's buying a cheap takeout lunch with a C-Note?

Give Me a Brake

2010-12-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

I know a guy. Or, more accurately, I know that if I ever need something done on the cheap and nasty--auto repair, paint job, body dismembering--I know that my brother will know a guy. So when the brakes on the privately-owned automobile began making plaintive, teeth-rattling grinding noises, I put in a call to Mark. Surely any brake-and-wheel franchisee would do the job for a decent price, no?

Biggest rip-off in the car repair business, he says, and he puts me in touch with a retired mechanic who sells all makes of brake pads on Craigslist. Within hours, Bill* is at our door with a set of "premium" pads at a fraction of retail cost:

I don't want my brake rotors getting cancer, so of course I insist on brake pads that are free of asbestos. The thing is, I prefer that these pads be described as asbestos-free. Perhaps I'm being a hyper-hyphenator, but I don't think there should be much argument when it comes to compound modifiers (see "high-efficiency" on the same package): a hyphen is what makes a compound one in its adjectiveness. Some will argue that it depends where the compound is deployed ("a well-read scholar" vs. "a scholar who is well read," to borrow an example from Bill Walsh), but many more will argue that any time you're using a compound ending in free (sugar-free, tax-free) the final component is more suffix than word and always requires a hyphen.

But to get back to the pads. What does a fellow like me, who spent the better part of an evening trying to get the hood open on his vehicle to find out how big the engine is (for some reason, Bill needed to know) do with a set of non-cancer-causing brake pads? Luckily, Mark knows a guy who runs a shop in my neighborhood-- a swarthy man of indeterminate ethnicity and loose ethics--who was willing to install said pads for a reasonable forty bucks, provided I crossed his greasy palm with cash and didn't ask for any verifying paperwork. Which made the whole transaction satisfyingly tax-free (with a hyphen) for both of us.

Shady? Yes, I suppose. But if I get busted on it, I'm confident I can get sharp, aggressive legal representation at a good price. Mark knows a guy.

* Not his real name. His real name is John.

'Tis the Season...

2010-12-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

...for magazines to pump out those year-end wrap-up editions that I so love to waste time with over the holidays. I wouldn't want to go into 2011 without indulging in some instant nostalgia about the best books and movies of aught-ten, let alone without reflecting once more on who was hot and who was not.

The first of the bunch, MacLean's "NEWSMAKERS 2010"* special issue was stuffed into my mailbox this week, apparently by a rabid beaver, judging from its mangled condition (please, Mr. Postman, a little care and respect), and inside was a photo-and-caption spread with the uninspired title, Infamous Rogues' Gallery. First up:

MEL GIBSON

He spared nothing in a series of secretly recorded aural assaults aimed at his girlfriend...So far, Hollywood is refusing to forgive. Even his cameo in The Hangover remake--however pathetic a shot at redemption--was axed after a revolt by the film's cast.

First of all, technically it should be "the The Hangover remake". Except it shouldn't, really, because that would sound ridiculous; any sane person (that is to say, just about anyone this side of Mel Gibson) would say "the remake of The Hangover" to avoid that bit of awkwardness. But it would still be wrong, because the movie that is now being filmed (or "lensed" as they say in the trades) is not in fact a remake, but a sequel. Big difference.

*This was one dilly of a pickle: how do you ascribe a possessive to the name of a publication that already possesses a possessive? In other words, if the magazine in question were Newsweek, it would be easy. I could just slap an 's on there--"Newsweek's NEWSMAKERS 2010"--and be done with it. But MacLean's's? I feel unclean even suggesting that. I suppose I could have written around it with "The NEWSMAKERS 2010 special issue of MacLean's," but the solution I decided upon, you'll note, was to ignore the problem, which sometimes (in matters of punctuation, as well as table manners) is the only civilized solution.

Big Deal, Bottom...Glenn Beck Wakes Up as an Ass Every Day

2010-12-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

I started reading The Book of William last night, a charming little book about the creation of--and ongoing marketplace intrigue surrounding--Shakespeare's First Folio. Early on, we find that the Folio's creators had to round up the text of plays from various London printers (who had varying degrees of scrupulous conduct), and in doing so, they discovered that at least three were no longer being printed. The absence of two of those "derelict" plays, King John and Titus Andronicus is perhaps not so surprising, as they remain relatively underwhelming components of the canon today. But...

...the third orphan really is a shocker: A Midsummer's Night Dream. It may be one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed plays now, but it's a mark of the vagaries of theatrical fashion that Puck and Titania couldn't get themselves arrested in the 1620s.

Actually, if you ask me, it's performed too often now. I'll take the angsty poetic whining of Hamlet, the spirited blood-letting of Macbeth, or the deliciously devious plotting of Iago or Richard III over those silly forest fairies any day.

In any case, it seems the apostrophed possessive migrated back one word in that title*. It should read: A Midsummer Night's Dream**.

*While we're on the topic of aprostrophes in Shakespeare titles, here's another trivia tidbit from the book with which to amuse your friends and confound your enemies: The play that goes by the extravagantly-apostrophed title Love's Labour's Lost is thought to have had a companion play, Love's Labour's Wonne, the manuscript of which has been, regrettably and ironically, lost. How sadde.

**There are, of course, a lot of variations on a lot of points in a lot of editions of Elizabethan works, and I did find a reference to a 1598 publication that mentions "a Midsummers night dreame." But that rendering doesn't seem to be at all common (see the original quarto title page, pictured above) and since he's using modern spelling (and an apostrophe), I don't think Collins was intending to go retro. So I'm still going to call it an error.

Making an Impression

2010-12-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

I finished reading Sam Harris's latest, The Moral Landscape, the other night, and I can safely say that if you only read one book this year about the canard that science can have nothing to say about matters of morality, this should be it.

I can't say I found a lot of blog-worthy nits to pick in the book--I was too busy trying to wrap my melon around some of the more abstruse material in the end notes--but here's something to chew on: In a passage describing some of the logical fallacies we humans are inclined toward embracing, Harris writes:

Invariance of reasoning, both logical and moral, is a norm to which we all aspire. And when we catch others departing from this norm, whatever the other merits of their thinking, the incoherency of their position suddenly becomes its most impressive characteristic.

Rather an odd use of the word impressive, don't you think? You don't usually think of yourself as being impressed by someone's incoherence. The usage is not wrong, of course--something that is impressive is something that makes a vivid impression, good or bad--but idiomatically speaking, I think we tend to reserve impressive for things that impress us favorably, and that makes the sentence incongruous on first reading.

To belabor the point, I refer to this passage from further on in the book:

It is useful to know that what we think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how often people can rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work.

Again, Harris is not describing behavior that one would be "impressed by" in the conventional sense of the term. But somehow I find the usage less jarring here--perhaps because it is the principle, not the behavior, that is actually impressing us with its profundity.

Finally, from further along on that page:

Rome will find you sitting in cafes, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine.

That's more like it. Speaking as someone who routinely drinks what he likes to think of as "impressive" amounts of wine, I have no doubt that the word is used here in its most apposite way: to denote awe and respect for a challenge well met.

* * *

Speaking of impressive...I don't want to brag or anything, but this blog seems to be developing quite the readership. Scarcely a day goes by now that I am not fielding emails like this one, which arrived today from longtime reader, Anonymous:

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What can I say? I am humbled by the devotion and grateful for the kind words. And in case you think this was not an honest, heartfelt expression of appreciation, I will just point out that my correspondent also thoughtfully took the time to include a link to a great deal on penis-enlargement pills.

I have the best readers.

Apparently, God Wasn't Their Co-Pilot

2010-12-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

It's the old story: Pilot gets up to use bathroom. Co-pilot tries to adjust seat. Co-pilot accidentally sends plane into a death plunge. Huffington Post has the story, as cribbed from a real news source:

An Air India Express co-pilot on a May 25th flight from Dubai to Pune, India nearly killed the plane's 113 passengers when he tried to move his seat and sent the plane into a 7,000 foot nose-dive, according to ABC News.

The unidentified pilot was trying to adjust his seat forward and pressed a control column forward which sent the plane into a 26-degree nose dive, according to India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation.

Naturally, the airplane's pilot was in the bathroom and couldn't get into the cockpit because the co-pilot "got in a panic situation." The pilot used a secret code to gain access and pulled the plane out of it's nose dive. Aviation authorities said that the plane would have broken apart if it had continued on that path.

Indian authorities said that the co-pilot, who was 25, had not been trained to handle this type of situation.

You'll note that the author used nose-dive in the first paragraph, and
nose dive in the other two mentions (as it happens, nosedive is also an acceptable variant). But the problem goes beyond a lack of internal consistency: Nose-dive is in fact the verb form, as in: "he sent the plane
nose-diving toward the earth."

Also, "it's nose dive" should be "its nose dive."

Also, I'd like to point out, in the co-pilot's defense, that this is yet another problem caused by tall people. I know because I have done something similar when driving the car after my (relatively) lanky wife has been using it. I try to adjust the seat forward while driving, apply brake, and find my sternum propelled into the steering wheel at just shy of air-bag deployment velocity.

So why am I not wearing a seatbelt to prevent this? Because I have a habit of not buckling up until I reach the end of the block when leaving home.

So why don't I learn from previous experience and adjust the seat when the car is stopped? Look, maybe you should stop asking so many questions and just click your little mouse over there and move along.

When Ice Resurfacing Machines Attack!

2010-11-30T21:00:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Sun ran a wry report today on what they have identified as a recurring phenomenon: TV broadcasters almost getting Zambonied. It's pegged on this incident from last weekend's Hockey Night in Canada telecast.

Pretty tame stuff, actually, in this age when every day seems to bring a new "epic fail" viral video of a skateboarder perforating a spleen. Anyway, according to the Sun piece, Zambonis have been hunting the TV talking heads for some time, as detailed in this quoted testimony from HNIC host Ron MacLean:

"It seems to happen to Scott Oake on a continuous basis and certainly happened to Steve Armitage memorably, but for me it was in the 1992 Olympics," said MacLean.

Continuous should be reserved for describing things that occur without interruption. The word needed here is continual, which means intermittent or at repeated intervals. For example, if you have a month of continual rain, you live in Vancouver; but if you have a month of continuous rain, you need to start building an ark. And if Scott Oake is really being pursued by menacing Zambonis on a continuous basis, he's running right now.

Going Ape

2010-11-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

Some website that calls itself The New York Times has been getting considerable attention for a long but engrossing story about a web entrepreneur who is making waves--and money--by cheating and threatening his customers. In a perverse inversion of the traditional business model, it seems the more people he rips off, and the more they complain, the more new customers he attracts. (It has to do with the way Google's ranking system rewards mentions, even when most of the mentions are unmentionable.) It's quite the startling read.

About midway through the epic piece, we get a sampling of online comments left by some of the merchant-hooligan's aggrieved customers:

“Robbery!” wrote one reviewer. Another wonders if primates are running the place. Another quotes a DecorMyEyes e-mail to a disgruntled customer which included this pungent adieu: “do you think I would think twice about urinating all over your frame and then returning it? Common.”

My quibble here is both picayune and pedantic (and wouldn't that make a good name for a folk-singing duo?) but I'm hard-up for grist for this complaint mill, so here goes: Primate is a biological order that includes (among many other creatures): woolly lemurs, marmosets, chimpanzees*, squirrel monkeys**, gibbons, and, yes, humans--even the ones that run shady internet operations.

*"I hate every ape I see, from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z" -- a favorite lyric from the Simpsons episode featuring a Broadway musical adaption of Planet of the Apes.

**Monkeys are not chimps. And yet, my website, wordmonkeywriter.com, features an image of a chimp. Why? Because I'm a hypocrite when it comes to the taxonomical exactitude of primate species.

This Sentence Needs a Circumcision

2010-11-24T11:12:00.000-08:00

Reporters are supposed to be ready for anything, but ABC's Jim Sciutto probably never envisioned having to deliver his own baby boy during his birth.

So goes the opening sentence from a HuffPo report today. Having performed this "emergency home birth" stunt myself--twice!--I can say with a measure of authority that it's really not that difficult. Mostly, you just have to yell "You're doing great!" at regular intervals. The rest pretty much takes care of itself.

But Sciutto not only delivered his own baby, he did it while being born himself, which I confess adds a significantly complicating dimension to the process. Unless, of course, that final "his" refers to the baby's birth, not Sciutto's. But really, when else are you going to deliver a baby? To do it before the birth is abortion; to do it after is...well, self-contradictory. So I think we can agree that those last three words are (like most babies, coincidentally) inane and superfluous.

The Case of the Invisible Verb

2010-11-23T17:14:00.000-08:00

There was another sad case last year in Vancouver of a disturbed person who settled his grievances with his ex-boss by using a shotgun. The killer is on trial now, and the story of the disgruntled* warehouse employee's workplace relationships during his employment is coming to light, as described in this excerpt from a Province report.

Several employees took the stand Monday to testify that Kirkpatrick, who was much older than them, was often testy and impatient.

There is an invisible verb hiding at the end of one clause there--an implied verb, I believe they call it--and once it reveals itself, the error becomes strikingly apparent. You wouldn't say, "Kirkpatrick, who was much older than them were, was often..." Rather, it should be, "who was much older than they," or, if that sounds too Charles Emerson Winchester for you, you can make the implicit verb explicit and say "who was much older than they were..."

Sure, you can make the claim that "older than them" has gained colloquial currency, but remember there are instances where the difference between the objective and the subjective pronoun makes a world of difference in meaning.

For instance, if I say "I hate Ben Affleck more than her" I could be trying to indicate that I have a lower regard for Ben Affleck's "talent" than my wife does. But it could also mean that I hate Ben Affleck more than I hate Kim, when the fact is I don't hate Kim at all--even when she puts my iPod in the washing machine. However, when I say, "I hate Ben Affleck more than she (does)," there is no mistaking who is being hated, and who is doing the hating.

* "I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."--P.G. Wodehouse.

...And Their Snotty Cousins, the Whoms

2010-11-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

We just bought a replacement DVD of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (Our previous edition met its demise last year and if you have children under ten in the home you are required by federal law to have a working copy on hand.)

On the back of the case is an unnecessary synopsis that includes this line:

The fun begins when the grumpy, grouchy, Yule-hating Grinch plots to ruin the Who's Christmas.

As we all know, of course, the Grinch is an ambitious serial offender who targets not just one Who, but the entire population of Whoville. That means we're dealing with a plural possessive, and it should be "the Whos' Christmas," with the apostrophe on the outside.

That's an easy one. But what about singular possessives that end in "S"? Should it be "Dr. Suess' holiday classic" or "Dr. Suess's holiday classic"? I'll bet not even those genial Whos in their most exalted moments of bonhomie would be able to agree on that.

Latest Blog Post (patent pending)

2010-11-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

So there I was this morning, listening to the latest installment of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast on the iPod (loved their catty take on the Sarah Palin reality show) while watching a muted CNN and jogging in place on my mini trampoline (don't laugh--it's a great low-impact exercise), when I happened to catch the end of a commercial for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. It was the slogan that made me pause mid-bounce:

You could say this tagline offends because it ends with a preposition. But, as we've covered before, so what? "A preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with." So says William Zinsser in On Writing Well. Still, why stir that pot and get the Preposition Pollys all exercised?

You could say it offends because that who should be whom, and indeed you would be on solid grammatical ground for your objection, Calvin Trillin's witty aside from yesterday's post notwithstanding.

But what really irks me is that they had the cojones to trademark what is, ultimately, an achingly banal sentiment. We never forget who we're working for. Really? That's worth an R in a circle? So now I can't not forget who I'm working for without worrying about the Lockheed Martin legal department getting on my ass?

But of course this just another in a long series of lame attempts to trademark lame phrases, some of which are documented in this HuffPo slideshow.

I'll Take Goofy Game Show Titles for $800, Alex

2010-11-16T18:02:00.000-08:00

Answer: He wrote a book called Brainiac, which is a recounting of his experiences as the champ of Jeopardy! champs, as well as a gratifyingly engaging exploration of the world of trivia and its geeks.

Question: Who is Ken Jennings?

I was reading said book last night--specifically, a chapter that charts the history of TV game shows--and was struck by the number of, shall we say, questionable titles in the question-and-answer business. You can start with Jeopardy! and that superfluous, hysterical exclamation point. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, on the other hand, is just crying out for a question mark, as many have noted. (Troy Patterson recently speculated in a Slate article that "perhaps the quiz show's producers believe that using one would transform the title into a pointless rhetorical question" or that it is actually a relative clause: "Jamal, who wants to be a millionaire, is the protagonist of Danny Boyle's worst film ..." In fact, word is, the punctuation is omitted because of a superstition in the production world about using question marks. Apparently there is no superstition about appearing to be sub-literate.) This disregard for the finer points of fine points seems to go way back in game show lore: according to Jennings, one of the first quiz show phenomenons debuted on radio in 1938 with the title, Information Please. Comma, please.

Those are just the punctuation offenders. In the 1950's, Johnny Carson got his break hosting Who Do You Trust?, which, while bravely taunting the gods with its use of the question mark, features an incorrectly employed nominative pronoun. Then again, to be fair, Whom Do You Trust doesn't have the same jaunty ring. (The writer Calvin Trillin once famously opined that "the word whom was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.")

That's still better than sounding like a Soviet proctologist, which is what I think of when I read one of the tales of game show trivia that Jennings describes-- a story that takes place on the hit Argentine program, Today We Have an Examination.

Remember, There's No "Remember" in "Remembrance"

2010-11-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

Had our lunch today at the fabled Tomahawk eatery in North Van (fabled for its long waits for a table) and saw this disconnect between signs in the foyer.

"Rememberance" would seem to make sense, but in fact the one on the right gets the spelling correct--as any "vetern" will tell you.

Regardless, our luncheon was the kind of comforting comfort food experience one expects from a visit to the Tomahawk. Lots of greasy belly-stretching entrees and wonderful 1950s-style faux log cabin ambiance. Plus, funky cardboard hats:

A Dashing Display of Pucksmanship

2010-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

Abby has managed to bring home from the school library one of the most checked-out and sought-after items, the picture and rhyme book, Dino-Hockey--a charmingly illustrated story depicting a game between the Meat-Eaters and the Veggiesaurs.

We'd actually gone through a few readings before we were both suddenly bumfuzzled by this page:

At first, Abby was wondering (nay, demanding to know) why the exclamation point wasn't at the end of the sentence. I started to explain how two dashes can set off a parenthetical subordinate clause (and how that clause could have its own exclamation point), when I realized that those dashes were not in fact doing that. That is, if you removed the words between the dashes, the sentence would collapse like a Toronto Maple Leaf defenseman looking down the barrel of a two-on-one.

Still, as a fan of em-dashery, I suggest we keep that first dash and, on Abby's advice, move the exclamation point to the end, giving us: "He knows the game's not over yet--a slap shot headed for the net!"

For the record, Triceratops scored on that late slap shot, giving the Veggiesaurs the win for the Cup.

An Etymology Unmasked

2010-11-08T20:11:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of media hullabaloo about the passenger who boarded an Air Canada flight in Hong Kong as an elderly white man and disembarked in Vancouver as a young Asian guy. Many are shocked that his Mission: Impossible-style silicone mask was able to fool airline staff, but let's face it, most of these grunts are too busy stamping documents, wrestling carry-on into overhead compartments, and telling us to turn off our portable electronic devices to play detective.

The episode inspired the The Vancouver Sun to do one of those silly experiments news outlets like to do, and so a young reporter was dispatched to be made "old" by film special effects wizards and sent out on the streets to see whom he could fool. Practically nobody, as it turned out--an outcome that is foreshadowed early in the first-person report by said intrepid reporter:

If anyone scrutinized me closely the gig would be up, I thought, as you could clearly see my makeup in more detail as well as the fake mustache lining...

Now, the reporter may have had a gig, in the broadest sense of "a booking for a performance," for this bit of street theater. But when someone is caught out in a deception, which is obviously the context here, it's said that "the jig is up." Apparently, the word goes back to the 17th century as the name of a kind of dance, and later it also came to mean a trick or practical joke. Now it's just an insipid cliche, no matter how you spell it.

Objection, Your Honor! Relevance?

2010-11-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

As my keen-eyed wife mentioned on first seeing this Province cover story Wednesday morning--and as a subsequent letter-to-the-editor correspondent queried--if this were a lucky husband and wife, would the sub-head have read, "Heterosexual couple down on their luck strike it rich"? (And wait a minute...shouldn't that be "strikes it rich"? No, I suppose not. Not unless we say "down on its luck." There we go with that collective noun/verb agreement conundrum again.)

Anyway, memo to Province editors: if you say "couple" and show us a picture of two men, we can do the "gay" math.

When a Vowel Isn't a Vowel

2010-11-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend my daughter's Grade 1 class for "reading with a partner" time, where parents are invited to sit in chairs designed for 7-year-old butts (seats that are preposterously narrow and three inches from the floor) and listen to their children read to them.

Abby regaled me with a dramatic reading from the classic Sounds All Around, which included this page:

That first caption reads: "A girl makes sound with an ukulele." Hmm. Later in the day, Abby withdraws from her backpack an order form for school pictures. We have approximately 11,000 digital photos of Abby, but we don't have one of her posed awkwardly in front of a fake rustic fence with a sick expression on her face, so of course we pony up the 27 bucks. This is the order form envelope:

That text in the upper right, intended for families of Walton-esque proportions, reads: "If you have 3 or more children at a MJM school, please pay full price for the first 2 orders and 1/2 price for the 3rd."

The issue here, which becomes evident as soon as you say the offending sentences out loud, involves confusion about when to use a and when to use an. To quote Bill Walsh in Lapsing into a Comma:

Pronunciation, not spelling, rules. Vowel sounds get the an; consonant sounds get the a. Note, however, that a vowel doesn't necessarily produce a vowel sound. Uniform, for example, is pronounced "YOO-ni-form," and thus it does not merit an an.

The same goes, of course, for "YOO-ke-LAY-lee." And M is pronounced "em," so the an does need to come into play when we say "an MJM school".

Class dismissed.

Let's Just Disagree to Agree

2010-11-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

The latest Vanity Fair features a breathless behind-the-scenes play-by-play of what really went down during the Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien contretemps earlier this year.

The lengthy piece, which is an excerpt from Bill Carter's upcoming book, includes this line:

Back in the days when the Letterman team were haggling with NBC over their exit...CBS and Dave's representatives hammered out a contract stating in explicit detail that Dave would be programmed each night following the late local news...

There's nothing really wrong here (other than my spending the better part of an hour reading 18 pages of Hollywood TV gossip) but I find that "the Letterman team were" construction nettlesome, nonetheless. Granted, the rules around collective noun/verb agreement, as established during the Collective Noun Conventions Act of 1936, stipulate that, even though we say the "the team was" in most instances, it is still acceptable to say "the team were" when referring to the actions of individuals within the group. Doesn't mean I have to like it. First of all, it has all the euphony of a clatter of trash cans lids, if you ask me. And secondly, it is so easy to work around the problem with something like "the people on Letterman's team were..." that I have to think the author is jamming the sentence with a seemingly disharmonious noun/verb agreement just to annoy, which is inexcusable.

Later in the excerpt, Carter describes how Jay Leno "made an effort to explain his point of view by sitting down with the national confessor, Oprah Winfrey."

You would think, wouldn't you, that a confessor is one who confesses. And you'd be right. But the same word can also be used, as it is in this context, to describe one who hears confessions and offers absolution. I don't like that, either. I don't mind words doing double duty--I have no anti-homonym agenda--but I draw the line when it comes to the same word having two almost directly opposite meanings. It's like that word cleave, which can mean either to separate or to stick together. Contradictonyms is what they should be called, and when I become president of English they will be banished and their supporters caned.

Goodness, I seem to have worked myself into a bit of a froth there. I think I'd better take a Xanax and lie down for awhile.

On the Good Ship Management

2010-10-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

"Yes, Your Managementship. Right away, Your Manangementship. Please don't fire me, Your Managementship."

Two and a Half Brain Cells

2010-10-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

I see that TV star/colossal prick Charlie Sheen is at it again, tearing up a New York hotel room in a drunken rage. His publicist, in a move that, even for a publicist, is comically inane, has stated that the alleged actor's behavior was due to "a reaction to medication." ("WARNING: Possible side effects include the urge to terrorize hookers, smash furniture, and wrestle the cops in your underpants. See your physician if these symptoms persist.")

Anyway, a line from a Life & Style press release on the incident reads:

Police were later called to Charlie's trashed suite at the Plaza Hotel around 2 a.m., where they found a passed out and half-naked Charlie and his escort screaming from inside the closet.

The problem here is that it is easy to read "a passed out and half-naked Charlie and his escort" as one phrase, making it sound like the two of them were in the closet screaming--he while unconscious. And somehow that manages to make the whole scenario sound even more absurdly sordid.

The solution, of course, is to insert a comma after "Charlie" to provide syntactical separation between him and his hapless escort. And as we all know, when it comes to hookers and Charlie Sheen (or anyone and Charlie Sheen, for that matter) you really can't have too many degrees of separation.

Reader Discretion is Advised...

2010-10-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Number You Have Reached is Not in Service

2010-10-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

Back to Bryson's At Home. In describing what he calls "one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire," our genial author says of the imposing edifice, and it's eccentric architect, Sir John Vanbrugh:

A Vanbrugh structure is always like no other, but Castle Howard is, as it were, unusually unusual. It had a large number of formal rooms--thirteen on one floor--but few bedrooms: nothing like the amount that would normally be expected.

As mentioned before, the word to use when dealing with discrete, countable units (such as rooms) is not amount but number--a particularly noteworthy gaffe here because Bryson uses number correctly earlier in the same sentence. Amount and number, in this way, are close cousins to less and fewer, although, as we discussed recently, the rules governing the distinctions between those two are not quite so cleanly defined.

This also happens to be one of the first grammatical niceties I had ingrained in my neurotic mind as a youth. I was about 10 years old, and showing my father a homework assignment--an essay (I can't remember what it was about, but I remember being proud of it) that contained the phrase "the amount of people who..." My old man gave me a brisk on-the-spot tutorial that set me straight on my error. I remember being impressed that he, as a still-fairly-recent German immigrant, had mastered the English language to such a degree. I also remember being pissed that his nit-picky correction was the only thing he had to say about my masterwork. Were I not of such sound character, such an incident could well have set me on a course to become the sort of person who obsessively nitpicks other peoples' writing.

Get A Lode of This

2010-10-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

New sordid revelations in the case of Canadian Forces colonel/serial killer Russell Williams have emerged. Aside from the murders he has confessed to, there is now the matter of him stealing--and wearing--lingerie and underwear he stole from a variety of victims. Today's Postmedia news service story includes an arresting photo the prosecution recovered of the buff, hirsute colonel in a stolen bra-and-panties combo. The story concludes:

Also introduced in evidence was a letter Williams wrote to the victim of one underwear theft: "I'm sorry I took these because I'm sentimental, too...Your place was kind of like the motherload," the letter says.

Actually, the word Colonel Pervypants was looking for is borrowed from the mining term for the principal vein, and it's spelled motherlode. He must be so embarrassed at that gaffe getting out.

It All Depends on How You Look at It

2010-10-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

In Bill Bryson's new book, At Home, a significant section is devoted to a largely anecdotal history of architecture, including a brief profile of the celebrated 18-century architect, Robert Adam.

After we read about Adam's personal failings and his loathsome treatment of his employees, we come to this curiously ambiguous sentence:

Adam's clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply could not give him enough work.

From the context, it seems clear that Adam's clients gave him plenty of work, but the phrasing "simply could not give him enough work" lends itself to an utterly different interpretation.

This reminds me of a more intentionally ambiguous statement, usually attributed to the critic Moses Hadas, purportedly in response to an author who had sent him an unsolicited manuscript for his review. "Thank you for sending me your book," Hadas wrote. "I'll waste no time reading it."

And Still They're Poor

2010-10-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

In commemoration of this week's post on comma splices.

Some More About Less

2010-10-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

Another hockey season is underway, and here in Vancouver it means another season of speculation about how many games Canucks' workhorse goalie Roberto Luongo should work. According to a "Hot Issue" sidebar in today's Province, this is once again a hot issue, with reporter Ben Kuzma noting:

Less games to keep Luongo healthier makes sense, but so does getting the starter off to a better start.

Here we come upon that pet bugaboo of grocery store express line grammarians everywhere: the distinction between fewer and less. That "10 items or less" sign grates on them (us) because, as we all know, fewer is the word to use when it comes to individual units, and less is the way to go when describing abstractions or quantities that are not discretely countable. If you have fewer grains of sand, in other words, you have less sand.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. I remember once seeing a sticker on a bike in the West End that read "One Less Car," and being momentarily dumbstruck--not just by the cyclist's peevish self-righteousness, but by the phrasing. It seemed to violate the "fewer-describes-discrete-units" rule and yet it sounded right.

That's because it is. I have June Casagrande and her book Mortal Syntax to thank for clearing up the confusion. She explains that while the formula I have outlined above...

...will work just fine nine out of ten times...it will let you down hard when you must choose between "one less item" and "one fewer item."

She goes on to point out that

Here's your best guideline, as paraphrased from Garner's Modern American Usage: Use "fewer" for plural things. Use "less" for singular things. That way, it's clear that, yes, the express lane sign should read "ten items or fewer," but you also get it right when you take a single item out of your cart and end up with "one less item."

So now I can say with confidence that I would be happy if I read one less article about how Roberto Luongo should play fewer games.

Comma Sutra

2010-10-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

We just got back from seeing The Social Network, and for a movie about the creation of a website, it was pretty darn good. I can hardly wait for the blockbuster thriller about Twitter.

Leafing lazily through my complimentary copy of Cineplex, as one does while waiting for the lights to go down, I came across an interview with renowned thespian Christopher Plummer, whose much-heralded performance as Prospero in this year's Stratford Festival production of The Tempest is coming to a multiplex near me for a special limited-engagement screening. (In other words, the theatre is not expecting enough interest to inspire them to commit to an unlimited engagement. It's Shakespeare, after all, not Marvel Comics).

At the end of the Q-and-A, Plummer is asked about his daughter, the actress Amanda Plummer, and he responds, in part:

She has her own kind of talent that has nothing to do with me or anybody else for that matter, she is her own woman.

A few fake-butter-smudged pages later, in the Holiday Preview section, my eyes alight on this passage in a synopsis of the upcoming remake of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon:

Yet neither Bridges nor Damon will carry this movie, that job falls to 14-year Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the bible-quoting teen leading the hunt for her father's killer.

Yes, that should, of course, be "14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld." Aside from that, however, these two quoted sentences have something in common: neither of them should be a single sentence--at least not in this form. In each instance, the writer has sent a comma to do a period's job (or a semi-colon's, or a conjunction's) and thus created an ungainly comma splice.

In the first example, for instance, we could say "because she is her own woman," and the conjunction would make it a grammatically complete sentence. But since we're dealing with a direct quote and we can't change the wording, the solution is obvious. "She is her own woman" should be its own sentence.

In the second excerpt, we can start the second clause with as, although a period or semi-colon would be more emphatic. Personally, I think an em-dash would be pretty sexy, too--God, how I love me a confidently discharged em-dash!--but I understand that not everyone shares my fetish, and some even regard the profligate use of em-dashes as a sign of loose morals.

Finally, it should be noted that there are a number of examples of exemplary writers using comma splices to great effect. This is one of those areas of literary connoisseurship where, perhaps unfairly, you're allowed to break the rule if you understand why you're breaking it and can justify your transgression with the result. "I came, I saw, I conquered" is poetry. The examples cited above are just vulgar.

What Not With Which to End a Sentence

2010-10-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

I don't get it. The caption on this shirt is obviously a reference to a famous--and possibly apocryphal--quip of Winston Churchill's. It's been seen in many forms ("This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put." "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put." Etc., etc.) but no matter the variant, the purpose is to make mock of the long-held superstition about not ending a sentence with a preposition--hence the ironically convoluted, terminal-preposition-avoiding syntax. Dangling participles have nothing to do with it.

Here's another prepositional anecdote: The Guinness Book of World Records once named a winner in the category "sentence with the most prepositions at the end." The honors went to this hypothetical sentence, supposedly uttered by a boy who doesn't want to be read a book about Australia again at bedtime:
"What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about 'Down Under' up for?"

Finally, an old joke:

"Excuse me, where is the library at?"
"Here at Harvard we don't end a sentence with a preposition."
"Sorry. Where is the library at, asshole?"

At Home and At Large

2010-10-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

Bill Bryson has a new book out today, making this as close as I get to observing a religious holiday. I loaded Sam in the off-road stroller and set off on a 60-minute backwoods route to the bookstore to seize a copy as it was being loaded into a window display.

The book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, is another of Bryson's delightfully tangential, anecdote-laced excursions through history. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but already hopelessly in its thrall--which is why Sam spent the afternoon marinating in his own filth while I sipped Shiraz and flipped pages.

Early on, however, on Page 12, where Bryson is relating the story behind the unlikely construction of the "Crystal Palace" in London in 1851 (trust me, it's a fascinating tale) we find this:

The glass levy was abolished in 1845, just shy of its hundredth anniversary, and the abolition of the window tax followed, conveniently and fortuitously, in 1851. Just at the moment when Paxton wanted more glass than anyone ever had before, the price was reduced by more than half.

The problem here is with the word fortuitously, which Bryson seems to be using as a synonym for fortunately. But...

Fortuitous means accidental or by chance...A fortuitous occurrence may or may not be a fortunate one.

That definition comes from A Dictionary of Troublesome Words, an indispensable reference work thoughtfully compiled by--you guessed it--Bill Bryson. Now, I'll acknowledge that it is possible that Bryson is using fortuitously in the cited passage to mean "by chance," but I'd still maintain that in that context it comes off sounding very much like fortunately.

The lesson here? Never take a child on a 2-hour hike without bringing a sippy cup and change of diaper.

Money Never Sleeps

2010-10-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

From today's offerings on PostSecret.com:

Maybe she left because you kept referring to her as your "finance." Well, that and the pathetic teddy bear fixation.

Is This a Dangler I See Before Me?

2010-10-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

This morning's Province brings us a dangler which, while not quite on a par with the classic "President Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding to Pennsylvania on an envelope," is still a good example of the mix-ups that can occur when a supporting clause wanders too far from its subject.

The story is about former Vancouver Canuck fan favorite Brendan Morrison coming back to the team for a tryout. As Jason Botchford reports:

In a battle with about seven players for one or two jobs, head coach Alain Vigneault said Morrison has a leg up on his competition for a couple of reasons.

That should read: "In a battle with about seven players for one or two jobs, Morrison blah blah blah..., according to head coach Alain Vigneault." As it stands, the juxtaposition of that opening clause with the subject "head coach Alain Vigneault" makes it sound as if it's Coach V who is battling for a job (and if he doesn't deliver a Stanley Cup this season that could yet be the case).

Keeping Composed

2010-09-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

I read a pause-provoking article yesterday. Every once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that challenges some long-held assumptions and makes you see your world in exciting new ways. This is not one of those times...but there is some good stuff in the piece. It's sort of a manifesto about how thought and communication can become devalued in an age where we instantly communicate everything that pops into our pumpkins--on Twitter, in Facebook updates, in blog posts. I stumbled upon it on the blog of some guy I've been following on Twitter and I've been telling all my Facebook friends about it.

Here is an excerpt:

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it's making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I've come to despise it.

Personally, I'd jam a hyphen in makebelieve, but beyond that we have the problem of that comprised. Compose and comprise is one of those troublesome twin sets that copyeditors owe their existence to. Briefly, a diet--at least a media one--can be composed of unedited first drafts (I have a fridge full of those myself). And these drafts, along with the insights and other mind-detritus, may comprise a diet. But comprised of, alas, is just wrong.

But hey, that's what edited second drafts are for.

The Mad Man and the Misinterpreted Metaphor

2010-09-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

In today's must-know celebrity news, we're told that actor Jon Hamm, who plays the fascinating Don Draper on "Mad Men" (for those of you cultural defectives who don't know that), has suffered from debilitating depression. This comes from an interview in the UK magazine The Observer, in which he credits antidepressants with helping to break the spell:

"If you can change your brain chemistry enough to think: 'I want to get up in the morning; I don't want to sleep until four in the afternoon. I want to get up and go and do my shit and go to work and ...' Reset the auto-meter, kick-start the engine!"

I took a moment to puzzle over what an "auto-meter" might be until it occurred to me that Hamm probably said odometer with the emphasis on the first syllable, and the British interviewer, in transcribing his words, wrote what she thought she heard, probably assuming it was some kind of uniquely American gadget. Thus leaving us with a passage that's needling into the red zone on the odd-o-meter.

Gee, and All I Got You Was This Hyphen

2010-09-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

If it seems to you that today feels a little different, that's probably because it's National Punctuation Day (at least in the U.S., but if we Northerners can celebrate the sacred tradition of Super Bowl Sunday, we can horn in on this, too.)

And in case you think punctuation is not worthy of being celebrated, I offer this diverting example from the writer John Shore, who imagines this postscript to a love letter:

P.S. I would like to tell you that I love you. I can't stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on earth.

And now the same words, punctuated differently:

P.S. I would like to tell you that I love you. I can't. Stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on earth.

So if you want to be forbearing with punctuation abusers the rest of the year, ok. But for today, at least, if you catch someone disrespecting a colon, feel free to give them a kick in the asterisk.

It's Alwrong

2010-09-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Here's this morning's front page of the Huffington Post:

They're not big on subtlety with their headlines or images at HuffPo. And apparently, they're not big on observing standard spelling conventions. It's easy to find examples of alright around us, starting with The Who, and their "The Kids are Alright" song and movie--but Pete Townshend does a lot of things the rest of us are wise to avoid. Bill Bryson, in his Dictionary of Troublesome Words, notes that, while the truncated version shows up on occasion in respected publications, "English is a slow and fickle tongue, and alright continues to be looked on as illiterate and unacceptable, and consequently it ought never to appear in serious writing." The righteous among us, in other words, use all right.

Grammar Girl, a fine bloggist and podcaster who does actual research, finds that's pretty much the consensus--although she also finds a source who gives a good argument for a distinction between alright and all right. I won't reveal it here (I'm busy and tired--don't you hate that combination?), but it's all there in the preceding link.

He Won't be a Virgin for Long in Prison

2010-09-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

As if the news weren't bad enough for Shelley Malil, an actor who appeared in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, when a jury of his peers did not buy his story that he had stabbed his ex-girlfriend by accident--more than twenty times.

Too add insult to justice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran this formatting-free headline:

40-Year-Old Virgin Actor Found Guilty in Stabbing of Ex-Girlfriend

Goodbye, Newman

2010-09-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

I see that broadcaster Edwin Newman, one of the last remaining journalist icons from the "I reported Kennedy's assassination" era, has died. According to the AP report:

Newman died on Aug. 13 of pneumonia in Oxford, England. He had moved there with his wife in 2007 to live closer to their daughter, said his lawyer Rupert Mead. He said the family delayed announcing Newman's death so they could spend some time privately grieving.

Delaying the announcement is a telling old-school touch, a nice gesture of quiet dignity, if you ask me. But I fear that old Edwin, the author of unabashedly curmudgeonly books on language usage such as "Strictly Speaking" and "A Civil Tongue," while perhaps not exactly rolling over in his grave, would at least shift uncomfortably in his repose at the misused restrictive appositive in that passage. It should be "his lawyer, Rupert Mead" because Rupert's name is incidental to the meaning of the sentence and we need a comma to make it parenthetical.

Yeah, I know: who cares? But while we're at it, let's also point out that it might have been a good idea to begin that last sentence in the passage with "Mead said..." The way it stands now it takes us a moment to realize that the "he" from the preceding sentence (Newman) is not the same "he" who is the subject of the succeeding sentence, and that Newman is not, in fact, reporting on his own death. Which, now that I think of it, is probably every iconic newsman's dream assignment.

We Put the "E" in "Smart"

2010-09-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I took little Sam to school for his first day at the Strong Start program for toddlers--a "play and learn" free-for-all that was maggoty with kids and that had the same disjointed, cacophonous atmosphere, not to mention the same over-the-top theatrical expressions of feeling, as a session of Parliament (never mind a "parliament of owls;" a "parliament of toddlers" seems much more apt). I have to say I almost got a little moist watching my little guy begin his immersion into a social milieu of his contemporaries--even when he introduced himself to a comely little blonde girl by jabbing her in the throat with a fearsomely pointy penguin figurine.

We learned a lot that first day. Sam learned more about counting and sharing, and how to sing along to "Old MacDonald." I learned that it's very hard to get up from a seated position on the floor when I've had a long run the evening before. And we learned that the legacy of former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle lives on, as evidenced by this toy bin label: