He/she/it bites

For the “surprised it didn’t happen sooner” file:

The Massachusetts House of Representatives has given its initial approval to a bill that would require all future legislation be written in language that is gender neutral.

The one-paragraph bill says legislation should contain non-gendered phrases such as “he/she” or “his/her,” instead of following past practice and using the masculine pronoun by default.

Since most legislation applies to groups rather than individuals (and any law that doesn’t apply to everyone should be suspect) why don’t legislators just use the gender-neutral plurals “they,” “them” and “theirs”? Is there any clumsier construction in the English language that “he/she”?

Praise be

Here’s a line from a story in the Richmond paper,

Richard Bryant ordinarily accepted his kudos for victories on the football field as coach of the Red Devils

and a quiz. What’s wrong with the following sentence? The kudos received by the coach is much deserved.

Give up? Nothing. It was a trick question. You know, if it weren’t for newspapers, that word would have died out a long time ago.

You say you want a devolution

With the Supreme Court’s death penalty decision, we’re going to hear more about this country’s “evolving standard of decency,” so let’s have a little vocabulary lesson.

Devolve is not really the antonym of evolve, or at least it wasn’t until recently. Devolve means a transer or delegation (of a duty or responsibility, for example) to another. We can say that, because of the county’s dissolution of the cumulative bridge fund, maintenance of Fort Wayne’s bridges has devolved on the city.

But I notice the misuse has been committed so often that the anti-evolution definition has started creeping into a few online dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s, which means it’s well on its way to being a correct usage. But there are still other words that get the job done as intended: decline, decay, degrade. I like regress. (Ah, memories; regress, we’ve had a few).

And evolve just means to develop gradually. It’s neutral as to the type of development — it doesn’t mean gradual improvement or getting better. But the way the word has been used lately, many people probably think to evolve means to become more civilized or something.

Guerdon-variety words

After every National Spelling Bee, it is required that at least one witty columnist write a piece making fun of all the exotic words that pop up by using every single one of them in a “We don’t talk like that at the coffee shop” column. (I think it’s one of those secret clauses Al Gore got put into telecommunications law, like the one that requires us to pay for all sorts of things through our phone bills that we know nothing about.) Here is this year’s entry, from the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin’s Jeff Vrabel:

Mishra, by all accounts, was a gracious and entertaining champion, keeping judges and audiences entertained with witty one-liners while routinely knocking back words like “guerdon” and “numnah.”

Both of those words, like all spelling bee words, were absolutely made up for the competition and don’t remotely exist in real life. Let me know, however, if you’ve ever been relaxing in a coffee shop and overheard someone at the next table saying, “Yeah, Bill, I really got a bad guerdon in the numnah right now, and my opificer says I need to have that brankursine removed by cryptarithm before the empyrean gets inflamed and itchy.”

“Guerdon” (GUR dn), for Vrabel and other word reverse-snobs, goes all the way back to the 14th century and has a heck of a pedigree: Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin variation of the Old High German word widarlon. It’s a wonderful word meaning a reward or recompense. Another useful word in the “reward” area is lagniappe (lan YAP), which is an Americanism of Creole origin. It literally means a small gift given to the customer on top of his purchase and, figuratively, an unexpected gift or benefit. I’ve also frequently heard it used as the equivalent of “icing on the cake.” But it’s such a common word that even Connecticut columnists might not think it was made up. Such words add variety and spice to our language.

Also after each spelling bee, somebody is sure to point out that the kids get lists of all the words that will be used, which means that the contest is “just” memorization. But memorization is calisthenics for the brain cells. There probably should be more rote learning in classrooms, not less.

Anyway, congratulations to Sameer Mishra of West Lafayette, who for the next year will be the hero of nerds everywhere (just look at that photo, for God’s sake) and who is reponsible for dozens of headlines across the country that start out “Indiana boy. . .” and don’t end with something embarrassing.

Effete to be tied

Any of you know what “effete” really means? I searched Google News for a hint that anybody writing about politics today has a clue:

•  ”As an issue it’s nothing, but it shows him as the effete, academic liberal.” Nope. That’s Charles Krauthammer, for pete’s sake, and he seems to think it means aloof and elitist.
• “It’s very confusing trying to figure out what an elitist is these days . . . If you’re an elitist-using politician, you’re accusing someone of being an intellectual, an out-of-touch wine-drinking effete snob.” Not him, either. That’s Tom Alderman at the Huffington Post, describing those who have lost touch with the common man.
• “McCain has been portraying Obama as inexperienced, self-entitled and effete, a candidate coddled by a loving press corps and lacking the judgment necessary for the highest office in the land.” Way off. Elite and pampered.

“Effete” is a wonderful, useful word that has been destroyed by its association with politics (and what hasn’t been, eh?). It means — or meant, for a few hundred years — worn out, used up, exhausted of energy, perhaps even a little decadent or degenerate. It comes from the Latin effeta, meaning sterile or unable to produce for having overproduced, in the child-bearing sense. When Spiro Agnew called Vietnam War protesters an “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” he was calling them pretenders to intellect, blisfully unaware that their philosophy was spent and lifeless. Both arrogant and ignorant — it was a $5-word way of calling them high school sophomores.

Perhaps Agnew, in fact, did not know what the word meant, but William Safire certainly did, and he’s the one who probably wrote the speech. “Effete” was immediately misunderstood by almost everybody to mean something like “effeminate,” and nobody from the White House bothered to correct it. Why would they? In “Nixon vs. The Hippies” America, that was at least as good an insult. You can now find effeminate as one definition for effete, down about three or four into the list. But you won’t find elitist anywhere. Yet.

So we now have a new word for elite, which the world didn’t need, and we’ve lost a perfectly good word that expressed something in a way no other word quite matches. So do we tie the language in knots.

OK. Rant over. You may now feel free to use “effete” as a description for the ideas of certain editorial-writing bloggers. 

Dopes

As I hauled my creaky bones out of bed this morning, I decided there needed to be a new word for people like me, and here it it is: “Crippie,” meaning crippled-up old hippie. The folks at the Urban Dictionary have a different definition, but what do they know? Come to think of it, there could be some connection there . . .

Elementary

A breathtaking achievement

Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312 …:

 

The line forms here

George Orwell would understand:

CLEVELAND — It’s no secret that schools need volunteers in order to do more for students, but one proposed law would make it a requirement for parents to volunteer at their child’s school.

Parent Darlene Boyd has been volunteering at her grandchildren’s school for six years. If the state legislature passes House Bill 519, she’ll have a lot of company.

The bill would require all parents to volunteer 13 hours each school year, either in the lunchroom, chaperoning field trips, or wherever the district needs help.

Require to volunteer. This may be the most creative use of language since “affirmative action” interpreted the laws against discrimination to mean that discrimination (of the right sort, of course) was not only permitted but required.

Mr. Pedant strikes again

I know I have a lot of pet peeves for someone who cautions against being overly fussy about language and grammar, but here’s another one:

Depending on who you believe, Indiana could be close to hiring its next basketball coach or the situation could still be in the early interview stages.

It’s true that “whom” is disappearing as our language becomes more informal, but it’s still around and so should still be used when the situation calls for it, as here: depending on whom you believe. We believe he or she or they? No. We believe him or her or them. The objective form is called for.

A good offense

Another language pet peeve:

The Clintons are barnstorming Indiana, with six stops today and Thursday in a push to win this state’s May 6 primary election.

Former President Bill Clinton will hold rallies for his wife’s presidential campaign today in Lawrenceburg, Richmond and Fort Wayne. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will crisscross the state on Thursday, with stops in Terre Haute, Anderson and Evansville.

“This is really the Clinton full-court press,” said Robert Schmuhl, professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Anybody who follows basketball knows that a full-court press is a defensive move — the idea is to slow down the team with the ball so much that it has trouble even getting out of the backcourt. But people who use the term figuratively use it to describe an offensive maneuver — to go all out to win, as the Clintons are doing now. In their case, though, given Obama’s lead, maybe the defensive interpretation can be justified. You know what they say about the best defense . . .

Pedant’s holiday

Clean up you’re writing; Tuesday will be National Grammar Day, and I is watching you:

I confess: I’m one of those people who cares about the difference between a gerund and a participle, between a restrictive and non-restrictive relative clause. This puts me in a tiny minority of deranged grammatical eccentrics — people you should generally try to avoid.

But I have converted from my former life as a grammar prosecutor.

Only now do I know the truth: Sometimes it is best to follow the conventions of standard written English, as quirky, arbitrary and illogical as they often are (explain to me why “aren’t I?” is considered grammatically correct?).

But most of the time — when we’re among friends, family, or anyone we feel comfortable with — we should simply let our hair down and allow our unpolished emissions of language to burst out of us in all their untidy splendor.

That’s sort of how I feel. I care about grammar — in my job, I have to — and I have on occasion corrected people, especially when it involves a pet peeve (I infer what you imply, dammit, and don’t every let me catch you in a “comprising of” situation!) of mine. But the strident Language Police are more than a little annoying. As long as meaning is clear, the purpose of language is served.
 

Logophile’s delight

But my head is already full!

Are you a locavore who decries the tapafication of restaurants or a latte liberal on the fence about Billary? No matter, the explosion of new words in the English language is enough to make you want to bury your head under a blankie or run off to Godzone.

English always has been a mongrel language, but thanks to e-mail and the Internet, the global spread of English and a playful response to changing times, new words and phrases are cropping up so quickly that one language-watcher calculates English is bearing down on a milestone: its 1-millionth word.

Actually, a lot of those words are so esoteric that many of us will never need them, and many are pop-culture buzz words with the shelf life of unrefrigerated mayonnaise. Most of us have vocabularies in the mere tens of thousands, and a couple of thousand get us through the average day. (And on some days, I swear I barely hear a couple of hundred, half of which involve variations on, “No, we don’t do that.”) 

And, no, students today don’t have smaller vocabularies than students in the past. How could they, when you think about it?

Words and deeds

I know how some of you have been criticizing me. As an editorial writer and blogger, I merely deal in rhetoric. All I do is insult people and ideas — just words. To do any real damage, I would need to be an elected official or robber-baron businessman with real power. Those who really want to create havoc in the world need to support those who can act, not just those who can spout angry words.

But I ask you. “Your mother wears combat boots.” Just words? “It looks like your face caught on fire and somebody tried to put it out with a fork.” Just words? “We know what you are — now we’re just negotiating the price.” Just words? “Philadelphia — spent four weeks there one night.” Just words? “Calvin Coolidge has died. How can you tell?” Just words?

Great deeds begin with great words. Those who inspire deserve as much credit as those who are inspired.

It doesn’t bear repeating

A couple of thoughts prompted by the passing of Earl Butz:

1. Could his forced resignation have been a factor in Jimmy Carter’s defeat of Gerald Ford?

The ensuing political firestorm created a dilemma for Ford. Butz’s popularity in Midwestern farm states was a crucial asset to the president, who was in the middle of a tight election campaign against his Democratic challenger, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

That would make two presidencies John Dean contributed to the downfall of.  He’s the one who reported (in Rolling Stone) that a “Cabinet official” had told a racist joke. He repeated the joke but didn’t name the official, but another publication figured that out and named Butz.

2. The joke was so offensive that most publications wouldn’t print it. At most, some accounts paraphrased it, but so badly that it wasn’t possible to really know what Butz had actually said. So, many Americans literally didn’t know what all the fuss was about. But when people did find out what it was, that allowed them to get away with telling a racist joke without actually telling a racist joke: “I don’t think this is funny or appropriate, you understand, but this will help you put the episode in context.”

I notice the current accounts of Butz’ death don’t repeat the joke, either. In fact, some of them barely refer to it. (The one I linked to has one of those crude paraphrases.) It’s interesting that a man can live to be almost 100 and have such a varied and influential life and have his whole existence defined by one moment we still don’t want to talk about much.

It’s also interesting to have this reminder of our racial sensitivities at this moment in our political history, when it is quite likely that a black man named Barack Obama will be a major-party nominee for president. In Butz’ day, a lot of people felt they had to put on a public face of tolerance but still felt free to wax eloquently racist in private. Not that we’ve gotten over race, but there is at least less of that duplicitous behavior now. Every generation, we get a little better. 

Back, clown!

If you like to learn a new word every day, this should take care of today for some of you: “coulrophobia,” the fear of clowns. It can cause panic attacks, shortness of breath, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea and feelings of dread. Apparently, even more people than we realized suffer from it:

Hospitals are being urged not to decorate children’s wards with paintings of clowns in case they upset young patients.

State-funded research has found that in a survey of more than 250 children aged four to 16, all disliked the use of clowns in hospital decor, with even the teenagers seeing them as “scary”.

“Given that children and young people do not find hospitals frightening per se - and only express fear about those spaces associated with needles - this finding is somewhat ironic,” said Dr Penny Curtis of Sheffield University.

Reckless abandon

Am I being too nitpicky? The headline on this story about the awful weather in the nation’s heartland is, “Families flee freezing, powerless homes.” To me, “flee” calls up an image of somebody running away very quickly from something bad that is chasing them — flood waters, a herd of elephants, a raging forest fire. In this case, I might have written “leave” or “depart” — even “abandon,” although that hints that they might not come back.

If you find this post too trivial, you may now leave, quietly and slowly.

Crikey!

What a stupid choice:

Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to “w00t.”

“W00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher’s online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said “w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.

At least last year’s winner, “truthiness,” had a certain goofy charm. There’s nothing remotely charming 0r whimsical about “w00t.”

Sacré bleu!

Is anybody else bummed that we can’t use the term fin de siècle for 92 more years without our pretentiousness being more than obvious?

Words up

Last year, visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site chose “truthiness” as the word of the year. We’re being given the opportunity to vote again this year, and M-W provides us with a list of 20 candidates based on people’s online searches and suggestions. Best of the new words — “blamestorming,” sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible. Best of the old words — and one of my all-time favorites — “Pecksniffian,” unctuously hypocritical; based on the Charles Dickens character Seth Pecksniff in “Martin Chuzzlewit.”  

Objectivity isn’t truth

A new book called “Objectivity” demolishes the virtues of that attribute:

Objectivity is one epistemic virtue among several, not the alpha and omega of all epistemology. Objectivity is not synonymous with truth or certainty, precision or accuracy. Sometimes, as we have seen in concrete instances, objectivity can even be at odds with these: an objective image is not always an accurate one, even in the view of its proponents. Objectivity is neither inevitable nor uncontested. Indeed, juxtaposed to alternatives, it can even seem bizarre. Who knowingly prefers a blurred image marred by artifacts to a crisp, clear, uncluttered one?

Why, then, is objectivity so powerful as both ideal and practice? How did it come to eclipse or swallow up other epistemic virtues, so that “objective” is often used as a synonym for “scientific”?…

Writing about the book, Virginia Postrel observes:

I began to understand why I’ve never embraced my own profession’s celebration of objectivity. Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. With all due respect to C-Span, good journalism in fact requires trained judgment: about what’s important, what’s interesting, what’s worth telling. Good journalism includes story telling and analysis, even in straight news stories and all the more in features or analytical pieces. Mistaking fairness or accuracy for “objectivity” only confuses journalists, their audiences, and their critics.

Getting too close to things can make us myopic, like ants who don’t understand that the anthill they’re in is not the whole world. But trying to be above everything — as too many journalists do — can so remove us from the real world that we have nothing but a superficial understanding of the things we try to cover.

Think it over

There are many reasons to be thankful today, and you can find people writing about most of the usual ones — family, material comforts, living in a free country — in a lot of places. Let me be the only one, I trust, to thank you for arguing with me.

Several years ago, before cancer took Gene Siskel out of the best movie-review team ever, I wrote a column about how lucky he and Roger Ebert were to have each other. They were both good at what they did, and they loved what they did. And their whole relationship was about each making the other better. Siskel could not come up with a negative review without considering what Ebert would say about the same movie. Ebert had to be mindful of how Siskel — whose movie sensibilities he knew very well — would respond to whatever he said. Neither  one could be complacent. If you know someone of roughly equal ability is always going to be there to challenge you, you will always question your own assumptions and bring your best arguments to the game. Siskel and Ebert were competitive, but in a healthy rather than destructive way.

All debate should be that way. The point should not be to best each other or prove ourselves to be the biggest talkers on the block. We are in a search for the truth, are we not? The best way to find the right answers is often to start with a good argument. It helps clear away the bad logic and weak reasoning, replace faulty assumptions with good premises. We work together, competitively, to chip away at the lies and find little truths on the way to the larger truths.

Blogs aren’t quite there yet, are they? We wouldn’t even start one unless we had egos, the desire to be noticed, the overwhelming need to shout out, “Look at me. I matter!” So instead of answering arguments, we tend to answer people, and it becomes more and more personal. You don’t have an argument I challenge; you are a left-wing moonbat. I’m not a worthy opponent with faulty logic that can be demonstrated; I am a conservative wingnut. We just keep calling each other names, and the moonbats and wingnuts who agree with us follow along and keep the echo chambers going.

Remember the origins of Thanksgiving. It’s not just a holiday to be grateful for what we have. The holiday celebrates the needs we had that others recognized and reached out to meet. I have some insights that might help lead to the truth. You have others. Sharing those insights — by arguing about them and thus deciding which ones are valid and which ones are not — improves the human condition.

The ancient Greek philosophers argued for centuries about the metaphysics of life, chewing arguments over for decades before saying, “Well, maybe so, but let’s consider another nuance.” Go read about the atomists. Today, we embrace an agrument during the morning talk shows and discard it before the evening news, daring the moonbats and wingnuts to challenge us.

Slow down a little. Think. Consider. Mull things over. Find the weak points in the other side and address them. Answer arguments instead of people. Make be better and more thoughtful than I would be without your participation.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Nine words

Is this post deceptively clever? To answer that, you’ll need to check out the last entry on the “9 words that don’t mean what you think.” Just peruse it, irregardless of what expectations you have. I trust it will not leave you bemused or nonplussed.

Getting the word out

This just in: Hollywood’s writers are on strike because they want more money from DVD sales and compensation when their work appears on other media platforms, such as the Web. Jay Leno had this reaction: “.” Furthermore, said David Letterman, “.”

Cutting through the fog

This is a blog. It has words. I write them. You read them. The words should all be short, and the sentences, too. That way, you will be able to understand what I am saying. That is good. Big words are bad. Long sentences are wrong. Big words and long sentences make communication harder. We do not want that. We want to keep things simple. If not, we will be sad. I won’t be saying what I mean to. You won’t be hearing what you need to. We both will have failed. That is not good. Let’s not do it.

The above sample has a “fog index“ of 4.2. It’s one way of calculating how easy writing is to read — the ideal is 7 or 8, and anything approaching 12 is too difficult. There are plenty of other methods that newspapers use to make sure they are as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.  Other tests are designed to calculate at what grade level writing can be understood by. “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss tests at the grade 1-to-3 level. Most newspapers, believe it or not, have aimed  for about a 6th- or 7th-grade level. And they still do, only more so:

CLEVELAND (TDB) — Newspaper editors are worried about how to grab readers. And a Cleveland Plain Dealer internal memo from last week urges reporters to keep things simple. Plain English and short, uncomplicated sentences are best. It notes that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s spouse, columnist Connie Schultz, has written at a level appropriate for fifth graders. Meanwhile, Washington bureau reporter Sabrina Eaton seems to be rebuked. The memo says she wrote about Dennis Kucinich at a level appropriate for high school seniors, or subscribers to The New York Times. Her “reading ease” score was low.

This really isn’t “dumbing down.” It’s trying to reach as many people as possible — read some Hemingway. The most complicated idea can be presented in the simplest terms.

I’ll be watching this

A lot of people will probably be making fun of this. I am the government! I can even control the language:

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — Brazil’s Federal District Governor Jose Roberto Arruda “fired” the present participle from his administration, citing inefficiency.

“The present participle is hereby fired from all federal district entities,” the governor wrote in a decree posted on the government’s Web site last night. “As of today, it is forbidden as an excuse for INEFFICIENCY.”

Banning the verb form, which ends in “ndo” in Portuguese (“ing” in English), was done to prevent government officials from using continuous tenses to obscure progress — or the lack of it.

“I find it somewhat ludicrous,” Dario Borim, chairman of the Department of Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “It’s a matter for linguists to discuss not for politicians.”

Decree No. 28.314 was issued to end vague promises by government officials, such as: “We’ll be taking steps,” Globo news agency reported, citing aides to Arruda it didn’t identify by name.

But I applaud him. The present participle — the “continuous tense” — CAN be used to create a sense of action being taken when there really is none, which makes it perfect for government bureaucrats. “We will be addressing the problem.” “We are looking into it.” “We have been listening.”