Today and tomorrow I am here, at the Leipzig Book Fair:

Messe in German means “trade fair” or “expo.” The promotional insert in last week’s Süddeutsche Zeitung promised 2,300 exhibitors from 36 countries.

Yet the events all seem to be in German. I’m attending to look into opportunities for English editing with Berlin publishing houses, so my prospects aren’t the rosiest.

The web site for the event boasts translations in six other languages, but I’ve counted under ten non-German authors in the program so far. Quite a change from the Deutsche Bahn homepage, where Anatol at Bremer Sprachblog finds that 13% of the words are English:

BahnCard, Surf&Rail, Mobile Services, DB Lounge, City-Ticket, DB Carsharing, BahnShop, Newsletter und Last-Minute-Reisen

German corporate culture normally shows quite an affinity for the English language, and firms sprinkle Anglophone terms into advertising in much the same way that the Japanese do. The Leipziger Buchmesse, in contrast, seems from its marketing to be very much by German readers, for German readers.

On the bright side, several authors I used to work with at the Atlantic Community are promoting books or presenting panels at this year’s fair. I’m hoping to run into them to say a hearty Hallo.

I’ve made a few references in this blog already to the prescriptivist-descriptivist debate. In the context of my work as an editor and translator, however, I’ve chosen sides already: the choices that I have to make with every word mean that descriptivism would do me little to no good.

When I edit, I apply my own particular set of mental rules to a text, with the implicit promise to my client that the rules I’m using cohere to a reader’s general expectations for a text of that type.

That’s prescriptivism, right?

I certainly thought so. Prescriptivism with mollifying modifiers attached, sure–a practical prescriptivist, a pragmatic one–but a prescriptivist nonetheless.

Neither a linguist nor a philosopher by trade, I forgot that there is a third way.

Last week, a reader suggested that I write about normative grammar. I replied:

as things stand right now I’m what I would call a practical prescriptivist: adhere to the rules as far as you must to get the proper meaning across. And that’s how I edit.

He politely refrained from correcting me that what I had described was NOT PRESCRIPTIVISM AT ALL, but the middle ground called normativism. The idea of being a normative grammarian is not as sexy as the descriptivist-prescriptivist dichotomy, which may be why I never considered that I myself could be one.

Jonathan Baron’s book Thinking and Deciding contains an excellent description of all three terms in the first chapter. Although the below explanations discuss how to evaluate thinking, they are just as effective if we consider them with respect to speaking and writing in English.

Imagine he’s talking about language here:

Descriptive models are theories about how people normally think — for example, how we solve problems in logic or how we make decisions. …To study only how we happen to think in a particular culture, at a particular time in history, is to fail to do justice to the full range of possibilities. …Thus, we shall have to discuss models or theories of how we ought to think, as well as models of how we do think. Models of how we ought to think will fall, in our discussion, into two categories: prescriptive and normative.

Prescriptive models are simple models that “prescribe” or state how we ought to think. …There may, of course, be more than one “right” way to think (or write). There may also be “good” ways that are not quite the “best.”

To determine which prescriptive models are the most useful, we apply a normative model, that is, a standard that defines thinking that is best for achieving the thinker’s goals. …Normative models evaluate thinking and decision making in terms of the personal goals of the thinker or thinkers. …normative models tell us how to evaluate judgments and decisions in terms of their departure from an ideal standard.

Substitute “writing” for “thinking” in the normative explanation, and you’ve got the guiding principle for my work and for this blog.

At least, that’s my lay impression. If you are a linguist, philosopher or just all-around taxonomy fan, I’d like to hear yours. What is the nature of editing? What is the process of translation?

How would you describe what I do?

The following lede went out on the AP wire this morning:

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — The Belgian government and banks agreed on Tuesday to pay $170 million to Holocaust survivors, families of victims and the Jewish community for their material losses during Word War II.

That’s a lot of dictionaries.

The title above has two meanings, but only one of them is universally accepted. Which are you thinking of?

From Merriam-Webster (American):
1: for a moment (was momentarily delayed)
2 archaic : instantly
3: at any moment : in a moment (will be leaving momentarily)

I make one new blog post every weekday: each day of the Western business week running Monday to Friday. One moment of each day, I post a new entry to this page.

If I updated according to the uncontroversial usage for momentarily, you wouldn’t see any of them for long: they’d be online for just that one moment, and no longer!

Of course, you probably thought from the title that I would be making a new post very soon. The question is, did you think I had made a grammatical error?

A Questionable Coinage for an Established Word
You can see that Merriam-Webster does not; the “incorrect” usage of momentarily to mean “almost immediately” is present and accounted for. But just as prescriptivists and descriptivists have been sparring over hopefully for four decades, people can get crabby about the proper use of momentarily.

The prescriptivists are sick of the word being shoehorned into waiting rooms and voicemail queues:

The doctor will be with you momentarily.
Your call will be answered momentarily.
You will receive a grammatically incorrect response momentarily.

The descriptivists, on the other hand, see speakers creating a practical new definition that ends a sentence more conveniently than the three-word “in a moment” and more precisely than the hazy “shortly.” While we may not be able to measure the length of a moment, it is at least a countable noun: we know that “a few moments” would be longer than just one.

But Should You Use It?
This abbreviation of “in a moment” is here to stay, at least in the United States. What M-W cites as the third definition for momentarily, Princeton’s WordNet cites as the first. The usage would not pop up in so many places if it did not fulfill a lexical need. Be careful, though: I don’t think the need for momentarily has permeated the entire English-speaking population to the level that you can use it with the impunity afforded to a word like hopefully, a formerly controversial usage that takes the place of the mouthful “it is to be hoped.” The British seem particularly irked by the iffy use of momentarily, so watch out if you’re submitting something to the Financial Times.

In any case, this all means that my pragmatic prescriptivism still gets activated when a writer I’m editing promises to prove her point “momentarily” in a paper.

It also means that I make use of hopefully all the time–but that’s a post for another moment.

Do you know what both of these A-words mean?

I was only familiar with one of them until I moved to Barcelona and the other suddenly became paramount.

An Anglophile is easy enough to figure out: just as a logophile is a lover of words, an Anglophile loves the English, and often their language as well.

My boyfriend is English, and I blog about words: pretty easy to paste an Anglophile label on me.

But the root -phone is trickier, because analogous forms such as homophone and microphone don’t exactly offer a trail of breadcrumbs.

A Brief Digression: Linguistic Battles in Barcelona

Stay with me here, it’s relevant.

Barcelona, Spain has two official languages–Spanish and Catalan. Almost everyone there can speak Spanish, but most public signage and state services are in Catalan. The predominance of one language over another is a frequent topic of discussion on television chat programs and in the newspaper. Although I can speak both languages fluently now, when I first arrived my Catalan skills were much weaker than my Spanish. But I soldiered on, insisting on speaking only Catalan with my Catalan friends, debating the merits of having two languages share one city. They would make reference to catalanòfons (say cat-ah-la-NO-phones), and I would nod vaguely–si, si–having no idea what they meant.

Finally it dawned on me. Catalano-PHONES. Catalan speakers.

End Digression

Anglo-phones. Speakers of English!

We took this word straight from the French, and if you Google it you’ll see that many of the results relate to the Anglophone-Francophone distinction in France.

We can speak of Anglophone countries, such as Ghana and Belize. We can also choose whether or not to capitalize the word; as a capitalization-happy American, I prefer the big letters.

Expat Bonus
Expat is short for expatriate. You knew that. But did you know that the full word is frequently misspelled as ex-patriot?

An ex-patriot who isn’t an expatriate might get his compatriots down; an expatriate who’s been repatriated is probably a dead patriot.

Bonus Bonus
The only spelling I’m ever unsure about is how to spell misspelled.

Bon weekend, my Anglophiles…

Are you smarter than an 11th-grader? Here’s a cute little test to gauge your English skills.

The questions you’ll find behind the link are taken from the SAT, the standardized exam that high school juniors in the U.S. take before applying to college. A few years ago the SAT was revamped to include more analysis of writing and grammar.

The new grammar content probably comes from the Test of Standard Written English, or TSWE, which used to be administered in tandem with the SAT. Can anyone confirm in the comments whether the questions were taken from there?

I remember cramming for the TSWE at twelve years old to gain admittance to a summer writing program. It was the first time I had to study grammar.

I don’t recall what I scored then, (I did get into the program), but this time I can dutifully report a 7/7.

How will you fare?

From Andrew Romano’s blog for Newsweek, Stumper:

There’s always that risk, particularly in America–the suspicion that if something looks good, it can’t possibly work. If someone’s really beautiful, they can’t be smart.

If beauty works against us generally, does the same hold for beautiful words? And if so, is Obama’s erudition hurting his electoral appeal?

Hillary: Small Words Yield Big Gains

The speech in Hillary Clinton’s latest television spot is not exactly sophisticated (key point: “something’s happening in the world”), but the fear-mongering is masterful. In a paternal and slightly threatening voiceover, Clinton’s campaign argues that she is someone who “already knows the world’s leaders” and is “tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.” The unspoken assumption here is that the articulate Obama is not.

The commercial aired last weekend, and lo and behold, Clinton won every state she needed to stay in the race with her dignity intact.

Was the groundswell for Clinton a repudiation of Obama’s slick sloganeering? Or could this comeback mean that Americans are still as motivated by fear as the Bush White House presumes us to be?

Obama: Entrapped by his own Eloquence?

The three Clinton wins last night do not negate Obama’s 11-state string of victories. But commentators over the past few weeks have latched on to whether the junior senator’s literary talent could become a liability. David Brooks of the NYT noticed early on, in April of 2007, that

You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.

When Brooks finally gets a direct answer on foreign policy, the columnist notes presciently that Obama’s response is “either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.”

Monitoring the Message

I’ll keep an eye on the public reception to each candidate’s campaign rhetoric as the nomination fight continues. It will be interesting to see which tactic–diction or drama–wins out.

Grammar is important on certain levels, because proper word choice can help the world avoid misleading headlines like this one:

Mar 4, 2008, 12:24 GMT: Western nations drop plan for IAEA resolution censoring Iran

Whew! The Europeans certainly dodged a bullet with that one. Imagine if those enlightened secular governments had actually censored Ahmadinejad in the Western press? There would be no more rambunctious debates at NYU! No more SNL Digital Shorts with Jake Gyllenhaal cameos! And, most importantly, the IAEA representatives would be stifling open, democratic debate, one of the most ballyhooed elements of the international governance system.

Obviously, Western nations aren’t really that hypocritical. Or that stupid—censoring Iran would play right into the hands of a government which holds state-sponsored symposiums for Holocaust deniers just to highlight the European limits on freedom of speech.

I’m happy to digress into politics on this blog whenever I get the chance, so thank you today to Monsters and Critics for giving me a reason to explain this completely inexcusable typo. In the words of a blogger we linked to yesterday:

Attention, everyone: C E N S O R ≠ C E N S U R E

A censure is a formal rebuke, often carried out by an institution. A censor will redact portions of your text without mercy, often in service of an overt or covert political agenda. A censure is a public action; censorship is often done behind closed doors. Get the point?

Check out this BBC link for a more well-informed and well-written report of what really went down at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Today is National Grammar Day, thanks to a campaign by Grumpy Grammarian Martha Brockenbrough over at MSN Encarta. I’m no prescriptivist, but I’ll be celebrating anyway with an extra post today: Monsters & Critics made a gimme this morning that must be seen to be believed.

Stay tuned…

Apologies for the tardiness of this entry: I’m about three hours later than usual. Then again, this blog has only been up for two weeks, so I’m trusting my eight regular readers (That includes you, my two loyal feed subscribers! Thanks!) to forgive the later update.

See, I grew up in California. I’ve got a little bit of that Protestant work ethic in me (or maybe just Jewish guilt) that makes me feel obligated to write regular daily posts, just as I feel obligated to market my word business to ensure that potential customers know who I am.

But as this is a word-obsessed blog, I have to ask, dear readers: does my use of obligated grate on your nerves? Is your lip curling as you read this at work? Are you cursing me under your breath for adding two extra syllables to the perfectly serviceable obliged?

Take a deep breath. You’re probably English.

Obligated passes the Merriam-Webster test: in U.S. English the word means legally or morally bound, and I find it makes an excellent description for the commitment I have made to put a new post up here every day.

Of course, good old M-W has a similar definition for oblige:

1: to constrain by physical, moral, or legal force or by the exigencies of circumstance <obliged to find a job>
2 a: to put in one’s debt by a favor or service <we are much obliged for your help>
b: to do a favor for <always ready to oblige a friend>

Here’s the thing: I’m a huge word nerd. When I was eleven, I got laughed out of after-school detention for using the word “procedure.” My copy of Roget’s Thesaurus is one of my most prized possessions. My multifarious vocabulary has won me large amounts of money.

And I don’t think I have ever uttered the word obliged.

My English friends, however, use it all the time. As a matter of fact, they use it in every single instance that I would use the word obligated. So is this all another tempest in a teapot?

Looks like. In my decidedly unscientific survey of the interwebs, I found that most posters who had problems with “obligated” were indeed English. And “John” at Pain in the English knows why:

From Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage page 675
“obligated” remains in Scottish and American use, but has dropped out of British English. Both “obliged” and “obligated” mean “being constrained legally or morally”. When the constraint is applied by physical force or circumstances, “obliged” is used. “obligated” is also used to been “indebted for a service or favour”.

John’s right. I checked Google Books and the entry for obligated came up on exactly the page he said it would. There’s an even better explanation, too:

Part of the diffidence toward obligated that is to be found in usage books may come from its having dropped out of use in British English while remaining in Scottish and American use. British commentators and commentators born in areas of British speech are hostile to obligated …Bremner 1980 quotes with obvious satisfaction the fun George Bernard Shaw made of [U.S. President] Woodrow Wilson’s use of the word.

I think that about wraps up today’s U.S.-U.K. debate. But here’s some more amusing evidence that obligated really has dropped out of English English:

• “Attention everyone: It is obliged, not obligated“
• “I’ve only ever heard the word obligated on imported American TV shows.“
• “This is just a personal dislike with no foundation except that I just don’t like the word ‘obligate’.“

And finally:

I was once a legal proofreader/ copy editor in the US. We snagged the word “obliged” (in a multimillion-dollar legal contract) where it should have been “obligated.” We were thanked profusely by the attorneys involved, who said it saved their hides.