Category: Editor at Large

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Editor at Large Punctuated Written English

Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma

This song is against most of the things I stand for on this blog. And I love it.

You may need some context for this one: the “Oxford comma” is more likely to ring a bell under its other name, the “serial comma.” Both terms refer to the final comma in a series, the one that comes immediately before the “and”:

While the Oxford comma is not required, some believe that to leave it out is a silly, arbitrary, and unnecessary choice.

The song hasn’t been released as a single yet, but the grammarian elites have already started talking about it. Follow both links. They’re brilliant.

Full disclosure: I agree with the band (at least, their first line) on this one. I’m not made of stone, people.

Categories
Editor at Large Written English

A Curmudgeon’s Guide to Style

Today I found a stylish and informative reference site on writing from Jack Lynch at Rutgers. One of my favorite bits, on that versus which:

Many grammarians insist on a distinction without any historical justification. Many of the best writers in the language couldn’t tell you the difference between them, while many of the worst think they know. If the subtle difference between the two confuses you, use whatever sounds right. Other matters are more worthy of your attention.

And here’s Lynch on Microsoft Word:

MS Word, in its many versions, is now the most common word processor on both the PC and the Macintosh. It’s so widespread, and so meddlesome, that it deserves a special note. The “AutoCorrect” feature, in particular, is a damned nuisance. It was designed by and for people who like high-tech toys, not by and for people who write.

The “Track Changes” feature, however, is absolutely indispensable. I only fully appreciated it after working with the horrendous editing features of Adobe Acrobat Professional, which made me want to throw my tablet stylus across the room. I agree that “AutoCorrect” is a waste of code. But “Track Changes” is how I make my living! Too bad there’s no entry from Lynch on that.

By the way, I successfully upgraded my site to WordPress 2.5 today! I am so proud of myself!

Categories
Editor at Large Spoken English Written English

Do You Suffer From the Recency Delusion?

Lots of work today, but I wanted to post a quick note on the first of three interesting terms I came across yesterday as I searched for the proper term to describe the (not) new meaning for “hopefully.” All three terms describe mistakes I have probably made, and continue to make, on this blog.

The first was coined by Language Log poster and Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky. It’s called the recency illusion:

the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent

When “hopefully” came into more frequent usage in the 1960s, there was a lot of muttering about those halcyon days when grammar had still been good. While this use of “hopefully” as a sentence adverb became more prevalent in the 1960s, it was nothing new: my pal Peter Andrews at the ol’ M-W dates popular usage back to at least the 1930s. So much for the good old days pre-language change.

So if you think that today’s whippersnappers have only just started substituting “their” for “they’re,” you’ve got another think coming. I’ll be on the lookout for more recency illusions–mine and others–from now on.

Categories
Editor at Large Punctuated Written English

It’s the April Fool’s Aftermath!

As I’m sure most of you have figured out by now, yesterday’s post was a joke for April Fool’s Day. There is no Peter Andrews of the media relations department at Merriam-Webster online. If you look up “its” in the dictionary, you’ll still find multiple definitions for the iterations that go with and without an apostrophe. The multiple incorrect usages in my entry–Its a legitimate spelling, because M-W says that its so–are just as wrong today as they were Monday.

What surprised me was how much this posting struck a chord with readers. I expected surfers to be on the lookout for pranks yesterday, but it seems as if this English error really has spread across the web like kudzu. So prevalent has the “its/it’s convergence” become (thanks to thesaurus.com for helping me describe it) that my report of Webster’s formal approval was taken without question by all who came across it.

[Insert standard I’m-no-prescriptivist disclaimer here]

I’m really not. I happily contribute to the flourishing of hopefully as a speaker-oriented sentence adverb in popular speech and Internet comments. There’s no other word like it. I enjoy beginning written sentences with “and” and “but.” Realizing that a word like “gift” is now accepted as a verb, insofar as it’s become the root of a gerund favored by PR parasites in Hollywood (see “gifting suite”, “gracious gifting”), excites rather than enrages me. I’m into that whole full-stop. In sentences. Thing. Used sparingly, it can do great things for your style.

BUT. When someone sends me an e-mail with “Its official” in the title, I don’t expect an e.e. cummings masterpiece from some brave linguistic trailblazer. I am loath to click on that slothful subject line. I dread opening that hastily typed, impulsive missive, sure to come from some self-interested slacker who is either too important or too absent-minded to respect the rules of grammar in a letter from one native speaker to another.

Grammar. Because how else would you spot spam?

Categories
Editor at Large Punctuated Written English

Its a Legitimate Spelling: Webster’s Agrees

Merriam-Webster online issued a press release today stating that “it’s” and “its” will now be found under one combined entry in the famous reference dictionary. From Peter Andrews, head of media relations for the lexical conglomerate:

Given the heavy influence of the Internet on modern American spelling, we’ve decided to accelerate our normalization process. The ‘its/it’s’ convergence is the natural result of a long erosion in the importance of the apostrophe. We’re taking a good hard look at the rest of the contractions for our 2009 edition, but we believe that ‘its/it’s’–now just its–merits immediate attention.

What M-W calls the “‘its/it’s’ convergence” has until now been one of the top grammatical errors in English. Native speakers and English learners alike will substitute one for the other, when each actually has a clearly distinct meaning.

It’s is a contraction of it is:

It’s a pity she arrived so late. = It is a pity she arrived so late.

Its is a possessive pronoun of indeterminate gender, as opposed to the gender-specific his or her. “Its” is often used to in reference to babies, and in American English “its” will often refer to collective nouns such as “company” or “team”:

The company revised its code of conduct.

As we’ve been through before on this blog, the nature of language is change. One of my tasks as an editor is to stay on top of which changes have passed into common usage and in what context this altered language is acceptable in a text.

Just because M-W says that its so, however, does not mean I will begin applying it as a norm. Especially because this post is an APRIL FOOL!

Categories
Editor at Large Spoken English

dahl-eye LAH-mah and mah-MOOD ah-BAH-SS: Saying It Right at Voice of America

Here in the United States, there are many recognizable accents. Just ask a native of the Peach state about the former President and he may well tell you about “JIH-mih KAH-tuh” from “JAW-juh. “

That’s Jim Tedder of Voice of America (VOA), the U.S.-funded broadcasting service which merits mention on this blog for its use of Special English alone.

Today, however, the focus is on Tedder’s VOA Pronunciation Guide, a handy little index of over 5,000 place and person names which could give an English speaker difficulty. Wondering about what to call the Dalai Lama and Mahmoud Abbas? Check the title of this post, and then click on over to the Pronunciation Guide where you can download actual mp3s of every name, sometimes even recorded by the name’s very—er—namesake.

Did you notice how I used that awkward construction in the last sentence so I wouldn’t have to say his or her? Yeah, I went there.

Categories
Editor at Large

No, Really, My Friends are Men AND Women

Yesterday I wrote about the English pronoun inclusivity problem—is it really okay to say that your brother and sister each has his own personality? Many, including Jane Austen, prefer to use the singular they in unisex instances such as these.

Countries like Spain and Germany have a bigger problem, though, and they don’t have to go looking for hypothetical brother-sister sentences to come up with an example: because of the use of gender in their word endings, Spanish and German generate non-inclusive language practically all the time.

In a nutshell, nouns in both the Spanish and German language have a male plural and a female plural:
those (female) scientists, those (male) nannies.

Just as in English, where one male pronoun is expected to naturally include the unspoken female members as well, the plural noun friends – amigos – refers to any group of comrades with at least one male. A gaggle with 99 women? Amigas. A crush of 99 men? Amigos. How about 99 women and 1 man? Amigos, again.

That means that if you put out a job advertisement in either language seeking mathematicians (matemáticos in Spanish and Mathematiker in German), you run the risk of professional, qualified women thinking that the position could be open to men only. But because these languages have more grammatical inflexibility, you see different solutions than in English.

How can you have it both ways in Spanish, when the very vowel is different? How can you make sure that German mathematicians who are female understand that your Mathematiker includes Mathematikerinnen?

Linguistic explorers in both countries have hit upon a similar solution: use graphics to make the word exist in two different forms at the same time.

Sylvia, a translator colleague of mine and a woman, has some great examples on her Castilian-language blog of how the Spanish are welcoming women and men into their plural nouns: with the @ sign! The @ looks like an “o” and an “a” coexisting, a grafting of the universal amigos onto the exclusively female amigas. When you write to your amig@s, you’re sending the message that you speak to the women and men in your group of friends equally.

The Germans, who often use the ending -er for their plural nouns and make them female by adding -innen, use a capital I to blend the two plural forms: Mathematiker + Mathematikerinnen becomes the inclusive MathematikerInnen. See for yourself here.

Even the German Foreign Office is getting into the act: I caught a job notice on their web site just the other day for translators (singular Übersetzer, plural Übersetzerin) using the more inclusive solution. The URL? http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/de/AAmt/AusbildungKarriere/Stellenangebote/2008-03-29-UebersetzerIn.html. That’s ÜbersetzerIn, to you.

Categories
Editor at Large Politics Written English

S/he, Zey, Yo…How Do We Get Her Into English?

There has been quite a kerfuffle lately (and I’m only allowed to use that word because of the type of blog this is) over the long search for unmarked ways of expressing gender neutrality in English.

More specifically: when you want to talk about everybody’s hats, do you use the traditional masculine his–Everyone has his hat–or do you adopt the gender-neutral but grammatically dubious their?

I try to avoid the situations altogether, rewording sentences to remove any temptation to choose one way or the other. But, for the record, I think that using “their” is the closest solution we have right now. This is one of the few areas in which I disagree with my gurus Strunk and White–as Geoff Pullum so concisely rebuts them (emphasis mine):

Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for five minutes?

In any case, the quest for a more inclusive pronoun in English pales in comparison to the struggles that countries with more gender-dependent languages must undertake, countries in which the words themselves exclude women by their very nature. And even the folks in these countries are making changes, so this language conservatism in English should go right at the window, as far as I’m concerned. If singular “they” was good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough for me.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the two non-English cultures I’m most familiar with, Spain and Germany, and how their speakers are taking gender inclusion in language into their own hands, clunky though it may be.

Categories
Editor at Large Subject-Specific

Attack of the 77-Foot Weenie

We all know this is a weenie:

frankfurter

But did you know that this is too?

castle

In the More-Useless-Information-I-Learned-From-the-Internet Department, I found out a new definition for this inherently funny word yesterday.

Appearing as both “weenie” and “wienie” on various web sites devoted to Disneyana, the term describes an architectural construction which draws the eye and tempts the visitor to venture further into the diabolical design that is the Disney theme park.

John Hench, author of Designing Disney, and a member of Walt’s original team, spells it wienie. The concept apparently came from Disney’s experience of training dogs with “wienies”—that’s hot dogs, frankfurters or wieners (from wienerwurst, or Vienna sausage), to you. Hench describes the human, theme-park purpose of the wienie in a profile from the NYT archives:

The wienie is really a beckoning finger…It’s kind of a reward. If you have a corridor, at the end there has to be something to justify you going that distance.

The photograph above shows Sleeping Beauty Castle, a wienie that draws the hapless Disneyland visitor down Main Street and toward Fantasyland. And speaking of Fantasyland, one of my favorite things about Disney’s term is its resemblance to the German wie nie, which translates roughly to “as never before.”

Whether or not Walt chose this unorthodox spelling on purpose, the vision it conjures when taken literally in German is perfectly apt: Spaceship Earth, the enormous silver ball that sucks visitors into Disney’s Epcot Center and which Slate’s Seth Stevenson describes as “perhaps the wieniest of all wienies,” is powerful precisely because it is like nothing visitors have ever seen before. The 77-foot Sleeping Beauty Castle, scaled to be a welcoming beacon rather than a forbidding fortress, is something that belongs in the Neverlands that Disney built–a big fat wie nie.

Categories
Editor at Large U.S. vs. U.K. Written English

Ask 100 Million Brits, With One Click

I’m currently working on a British English editing job for a Frankfurt design company. They’ve got a 75-page “Broschüre” (read: glossy booklet), poorly translated from the German, that I am to clean up and prettify (I once described my services as “cosmetic surgery” for saggy, baggy texts).

The trouble is that after 30 pages of dubious English, you begin to doubt your own instincts. For example:

  • Is it okay to use “orchestration” when you’re not talking about music or some massive multi-person heist?
  • Once and for all, is it Majorca or Mallorca?
  • I already know that UK English speakers use “orientated” much more frequently than North Americans, but is it preferred to the extent that I should replace “oriented” with its regularized British counterpart?

That’s where the British National Corpus comes in.

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.

In other words, instead of driving your English boyfriend crazy with questions on normativity, you can query the hive mind:

  • The proposed meaning of “orchestration”, as used in the glossy I was editing, showed up exactly NOWHERE in the Corpus. I composed a list of alternatives and left it to the client to decide.
  • The proper English term for that big island off the coast of Spain is Majorca. But I’ve heard the double-ll Catalan/Spanish designation of Mallorca used by British friends so frequently that I had to check which was the most current. The BNC cleared up the confusion: 28 instances of Mallorca, out of 100 million words; 139 uses of Majorca.
  • All those times I’ve seen “orientated” used in the English press, and been supremely freaked out by it, were ameliorated by the results I got when I compared it to “oriented” on the Corpus: “orientated” showed up half as much.

So here it is, y’alls: the big, bad BNC. You can use the new link on the list of References to the right from now on.

I won’t tell you exactly how few uses I found of obligated, so you can enjoy the moment for yourself.