Lexical Elitists's topics - tribe.net

Who / Whom?

2009-12-31T17:37:19Z

Which is better?

A) Who shall I say is calling?

B) Whom shall I say is calling.

I vote for B).

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

What's up w/ moderatorship?

2009-12-07T17:48:51Z

I just noticed there's no mod? Does anyone want to seize the reins of power? I would certainly be up for it--I love this tribe and everything it stands for, but I'm also not one of the most prolific posters.

(as to my cred, in case I am running for office . . . I've been an editor for about 20 years, and practically sleep with a copy of the Chicago Manual under my pillow. And I lurves me some big words. Also, I've noticed that when I mod a tribe, I do step up and start posting more, finding interesting tidbits, etc.)

But if not me, heck, someone else please state your interest! Let's get this mod thing goin'!

posted in Lexical Elitists - 28 replies

William Safire is dead.

2009-12-07T04:42:43Z

I had just finished reading one of his "On Language" collections this morning when the newspaper arrived with the news of his death.
The New York Times obituary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

new moderator (volunteer) for this tribe

2009-12-03T22:20:36Z

new moderator (volunteer) for this tribe

Dear members,
I'd like to express You my interest in taking over as moderator, just like volunteer; we have a vacancy, indeed ........

All my best regards, to everybody

prof. Luca Burini

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Why it's good to have an editor

2009-11-25T07:35:58Z

A friend of mine is a copy editor for a medical publisher. She told me about an article which was submitted by a urologist who was not a native speaker of English, entitled "Urinary Incontinence: Where Do We Stand, And Where Do we Go From Here?"

posted in Lexical Elitists - 6 replies

When chiasmus is outlawed, only outlaws will use chiasmus

2009-07-28T15:43:29Z

[This is about rhetoric rather than grammar, but the two belong in the ancient trivium and what true lexial elitist could oppose the trivium?]

http://www.news-journal.com/featr/content/features/stories/2009/07/27/07272009_Frank_Pool_column.html

By FRANK THOMAS POOL
Monday, July 27, 2009
What do the following expressions have in common? "Who sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed." "But many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first." "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." "Life imitates art more than art imitates life." "Well, it's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men." "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
The answer is that they all are examples of an old rhetorical strategy called chiasmus. A chiasmus is an inversion of two balanced clauses in a sentence, in the form of A B B A. There are several types of chiasmus, but they all involve this kind of inversion. We encounter chiasmus in the works of great writers and speakers in their most memorable formulations.
Effective language is no accident, and its study is ancient. Our brains are sensitive to patterns of language, and we find patterned language especially memorable. The classical Greeks loved to talk and to argue, to speak and to listen, and being an effective citizen meant being able to persuade one's neighbors of the rightness of one's cause. (That was true of most Greeks, except for the Spartans, who were laconic, made their money out of iron, were fearless in battle but highly superstitious and timid in religion.) Greek linguistic virtuosity impressed the conquering Romans so much that elite Roman families employed Greek tutor slaves to teach rhetoric to their sons. The Greeks developed the art of rhetoric, the Romans applied this knowledge to their own language, and Latin influenced the literatures of Western Europe until the 18th century. It turns out many rhetorical devices identified by the Greeks are equally effective in English, and for that matter, in other languages as well.
One of the problems with studying rhetoric is the terms are all, well, so very Greek. Terms like "antimetabole" or "asyndeton" don't exactly lend themselves to easy understanding or roll off the tongue. "Chiasmus" is an odd word, too, but it's such a distinctive rhetorical device I find it easy to remember.
The first example I gave is from the book of Genesis and was composed in Hebrew. The Psalms in particular often show patterns of repetition and inversion. The second example is Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, which was written in Greek. The third example is Shakespeare, next comes Oscar Wilde, then the indomitable Mae West, and finally, a chiasmus all Americans should know, from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, actually written by speechwriter Theodore Sorenson, who used chiasmus frequently in Kennedy's speeches.
Winston Churchill employed chiasmus effectively as he rallied Britain against the fascist threat in Europe during the Second World War. After the battle of Alamein in North Africa, he addressed his people, saying: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Frederick Douglass proudly declared, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." Mardy Grothe gives sound advice saying, "Don't let a kiss fool you, or a fool kiss you." Ralph Waldo Emerson sagely noted that, "Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech," which is both a chiasmus and a paradox.
And, perhaps, a good way to end today's column.
Frank Thomas Pool is a poet and English teacher working in Austin. He grew up on Maple Street in South Longview and graduated from Longview High School. E-mail: FrankT.Pool@gmail.com

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

edification

2009-07-02T17:58:14Z

"edify"

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edify

Etymology - Latin aedificare 'build'.

to edify (third-person singular simple present edifies, present participle edifying, simple past and past participle edified)

1.(transitive) To instruct or improve morally or intellectually.

1813, The Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, Vol. VI, page 455
That they ought to edify one another by maintaining and promoting the knowledge of truth.

> instruct (transitive) To teach or direct; to give instructions.
> improve (intransitive) to become better
> ethics set of principles of right and wrong behaviour

edifice

Etymology - Middle English edifice, from Old French edifice, reborrowed from Latin aedificium "building", derived from aedificāre "to build, establish" (whence also edify).

pronunciation audio @> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/En-us-edifice.ogg

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

plural or singular

2009-06-22T15:11:07Z

When referring to a group of individuals with a collective name, would the case agreement not be singular?

For example:
KISS were on American Idol. - vs - KISS was on American Idol.

I heard the former on the radio last night. I was nearly asleep and it woke me in annoyance. KISS is the singular name of the band. If one wants to use the plural form, then perhaps one could say, "The members of KISS were on the show."

It seems to me that if one is referring to a single group, the verbs should then be singular. Whereas, if one is referring to members of a group or a number of groups, the plural would be appropriate.

There are countless examples in my mind of singular names for groups. Of course, there are exceptions. The Supremes were famous. The Beatles came to America. The Rolling Stones have had countless farewell tours. Yet these exceptions by their very names are plural.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

Article: NY Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse

2009-06-18T14:17:45Z

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/ny-times-mines-its-data-to-identify-words-that-readers-find-abstruse/

N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse
By Zachary M. Seward / June 11 / 8:08 a.m.
If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.

As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.

All of the 25-cent words I used in the lede of this post are on the list. The most confusing to readers, with 7,645 look-ups through May 26, is sui generis, the Latin term roughly meaning “unique” that’s frequently used in legal contexts. The most ironic word is laconic (#4), which means “concise.” The most curious is louche (#3), which means “dubious” or “shady” and, as Corbett observes in his memo, inexplicably found its way into the paper 27 times over 5 months. (A Nexis search reveals that the word is all over the arts pages, and Maureen Dowd is a repeat offender.)

Corbett also notes that some words, like pandemic (#24), appear on the list merely because they are used so often. Along those lines, feckless (#17) and fecklessness (#50) appear to be the favorite confounding words of Times opinion writers. The most looked-up word per instance of usage is saturnine (#5), which Dowd wielded to describe Dick Cheney’s policy on torture.

This is mostly just interesting — quiz: how many of these words can you define? — but it’s also a reminder that news sites are sitting on a wealth of data, from popular search terms to click rates, that can help them adjust to reader preferences. So are Times scribes being asked to rein in their vocabularies? That might be a Sisyphean (#37) task, but no, Corbett merely advised reporters to “avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.”

After the jump, I’ve taken the original chart of 50 words, which was compiled by director of web analytics James Robinson, and run my own spreadsheet that also calculates look-ups per use. Below that, Corbett’s memo.

For comparison, here are the 25 most-frequently looked-up words on Dictionary.com over a few recent months. There’s no overlap.

And here’s the portion of Corbett’s memo concerning the list:

Big, Fancy Words

We know Times readers are a well-educated group. They expect sophisticated coverage and literate prose. They delight in good writing and don’t shy away from complicated topics.

On the other hand, they probably don’t carry an unabridged dictionary along with the newspaper as they take the subway to work. And they don’t expect a news article to pose the same linguistic challenge as “Finnegans Wake.”

Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?

One benefit of reading The Times online is the “look up” function: double-click on any word and a little question mark appears. Click the question mark and you get a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary.

Our colleague James Robinson, the director of Web analytics, shared some intriguing data with me: a list of the words that had been looked up most often by Times readers so far this year.

Before you check out James’s list, a few words of caution. Don’t take the precise ranking or numbers too literally. Obviously, how often a word is looked up depends partly on how much it’s used and how many people are reading that article online. If Tom Friedman uses some moderately unusual word (say, fealty), and I use a real head-scratcher on the same day (say, phlogiston), it’s a good bet that more readers will look up his word.

And remember, I’m not suggesting that we should ban these or any challenging words. Some uses may be perfectly justified. But let’s keep in mind why we’re writing and who’s reading, and under what circumstances. And let’s avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.

That said, here’s the list. Check it out, then return for a few final comments.

•••

I’ll admit that there were two words on the list that had me thoroughly stumped: sumptuary (“of or regulating expenses or expenditures; specif., seeking to regulate extravagance on religious or moral grounds”) and phlogiston (“an imaginary element formerly believed to cause combustion and to be given off by anything burning”).

Our handling of “phlogiston,” though, showed one way to help readers with a tricky word, even if they don’t click to look it up. It was in a quote in a Science story about physicists who work on Wall Street, and we gave the background before using the word:

But it is not so easy to get new ideas into the economic literature, many quants complain. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the founder and former chief scientist of the Prediction Company, said he was shocked when he started reading finance literature at how backward it was, comparing it to Middle-Ages theories of fire. “They were talking about phlogiston — not the right metaphor,” Dr. Farmer said.

•••

Some entries seem self-referential: it’s no coincidence that a list of obscure and difficult words includes abstruse and recondite, not to mention solipsistic. And while many of these words may look like a foreign language, some actually are: sui generis, bildungsroman and my old friend schadenfreude all make appearances. And some entries just seem baffling: how did we end up using louche 27 times?

•••

Remember, too, that striking and very specific words can become wan and devalued through overuse. Consider apotheosis, which we’ve somehow managed to use 18 times so far this year. It literally means “deification, transformation into a divinity.” An extended meaning is “a glorified ideal.” But in some of our uses it seems to suggest little more than “a pretty good example.” Most recently, we’ve said critics view the Clinton health-care plan as “the apotheosis of liberal, out-of-control bureaucracy-building,” and we’ve described cut-off shorts as “that apotheosis of laissez-faire wear.”

So what do we say if someone really is transformed into a god?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

This Brock--Don't use it.

2009-06-06T16:34:52Z

That was written on a post-it note, adhering to the face of a soap dispenser in a public bathroom.

I wonder: "How in heck could someone think 'broke' should be spelled that way?" I still can't figure it out.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Ad seen on this tribe

2009-06-02T13:41:30Z

Among the little ads that run alongside our posts:

"Learn English is easy, improve your english online. Guaranteed!"

Sadly, [sic]

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

Library Smut--because you can't resist

2009-06-01T15:29:50Z

Breathtaking stuff

http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#url=http%2525253A//thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hot_library_smut/

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The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

2009-05-22T14:32:25Z

Lorraine Feather--a fine singer and something of a grammar nerd--posted this link on her Facebook page. I thought members here would enjoy it.

What's your favorite? It's hard to top: Come in for a nice "hot soup".

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

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The Dumbest Generation?

2009-05-05T23:15:22Z

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) by Mark Bauerlein

http://www.amazon.com/Dumbest-Generation-Stupefies-Americans-Jeopardizes/dp/1585426393

Picked this up at the library today and expect to enjoy it.

I know that *some* kids are on the HYP track (-Harvard / Yale / Princeton) by kindergarten and are so relentlessly scheduled they have to make appointments to chat with friends. But most American teenage school kids spend more time watching television than doing homework. As Harold Bloom put it in a blurb on the cover, this is “an urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young.”

This, I think, is more than simple carping about ‘kids today.’ Will lexical elitists become a thing of the past?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 26 replies

Why Don't Kids Like School?

2009-05-02T16:00:41Z

This is a review of a new book I haven't yet read, though I thought the subject---what neursocientists may have to teach teachers about teaching children---should be of some interest in contrast to the "The Dumbest Generation" thread.

How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds
Will the discoveries of neuroscientists help us to think, learn and remember?
By CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS
We are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge about how the human mind and brain work -- how memory comes in many different types, each stored in a different part of the brain; how our minds constantly process information outside our conscious awareness; how differences in brain function help to define differences in our personalities. A lot of this new knowledge raises provocative questions, not least about human nature.

But as disgruntled students have been saying for ages: How are we ever going to use this stuff? Chemistry can boast of miracle drugs, and genetics has done wonders for our food supply and for medical diagnosis. What about psychology and neuroscience? Shouldn't research on learning and memory and thinking help us to learn, remember and think better?
Daniel T. Willingham thinks that it should. In "Why Don't Students Like School?" he poses nine questions that a teacher might want to ask a cognitive scientist -- beginning with the question in the title -- and then answers each, citing empirical studies and suggesting ways for teachers to improve their practice accordingly. But Mr. Willingham's answers apply just as well outside the classroom. Corporate trainers, marketers and, not least, parents -- anyone who cares about how we learn -- should find his book valuable reading.
So why don't students like school? According to Mr. Willingham, one major reason is that what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy. When we confront a task that requires us to exert mental effort, it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time. For an example, just watch a person beavering away at a crossword or playing chess in a noisy public park. But schoolwork and classroom time rarely keep students' minds in this state of "flow" for long. The result is boredom and displeasure. The challenge, for the teacher, is to design lessons and exercises that will maximize interest and attention and thus make students like school at least a bit more.
Why Don't Students Like School?
By Daniel T. Willingham
(Jossey-Bass, 180 pages, $24.95)
Elsewhere Mr. Willingham has his curious teacher ask: "Is drilling worth it?" The answer is yes, because research shows that practice not only makes a skill perfect but also makes it permanent, automatic and transferable to new situations, enabling more complex work that relies on the basics. Another question: "What is the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?" According to Mr. Willingham, this goal is too ambitious: Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.
It should be said that Mr. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is not in favor of merely making learning "fun" or "creative." He advocates teaching old-fashioned content as the best path to improving a student's reading comprehension and critical thinking. Such a view makes Mr. Willingham something of an iconoclast, since 21st-century educational theory is ruled by concepts like "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles."
Mr. Willingham notes that students cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material. And they cannot understand it without the requisite background knowledge. The same is true of learning to read: Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid. Here, as always, Mr. Willingham shows how experiments support his claims.
The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. "How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?" asks Mr. Willingham's hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: "No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn."
It turns out that while education gurus were promoting the uplifting vision of all students being equal in ability but unique in "style," researchers were testing the theory behind it. In one experiment, they presented vocabulary words to students classified as "auditory learners" and "visual learners." Half the words came in sound form, half in print. According to the learning-styles theory, the auditory learners should remember the words presented in sound better than the words presented in print, and vice-versa for the visual learners.
But this is not what happened: Each type of learner did just as well with each type of presentation. Why? Because what is being taught in most of the curriculum -- at all levels of schooling -- is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form. "Specious," for instance, means "seemingly logical, but actually fallacious" whether you hear it, see it or feel it out in Braille. Mr. Willingham makes a convincing case that the distinction between visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners (who supposedly learn best when body movement is involved) is a specious one. At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.
One is tempted to criticize "Why Don't Students Like School?" in only one respect. The text is peppered with the kind of attention-grabbing but ultimately pointless pictures that abound in contemporary textbooks. When Mr. Willingham cleverly describes an episode of the TV medical drama "House" to illustrate how experts think differently from novices -- they don't necessarily have more knowledge but they do focus more rapidly on the most relevant information -- he wastes almost half a page on a photograph of the actor who plays the main character. The space would be better spent on more of Mr. Willingham's brilliant analysis of how we really learn and his keen insight about how we ought to teach.
Mr. Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124079001063757515.html

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50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

2009-04-17T15:52:31Z

---A rare yet sound attack upon Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."

By GEOFFREY K. PULLUM
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.
I won't be celebrating.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.
This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like "Be clear" (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much." (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn't.) Many are useless, like "Omit needless words." (The students who know which words are needless don't need the instruction.) Even so, it doesn't hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers.
Even the truly silly advice, like "Do not inject opinion," doesn't really do harm. (No force on earth can prevent undergraduates from injecting opinion. And anyway, sometimes that is just what we want from them.) But despite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.
"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.
We are told that the active clause "I will always remember my first trip to Boston" sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It sure does. But that's because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows "by").
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane. (I'm the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. "The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor" sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.
Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done. But it is not what I am most concerned about here.
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
• "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
• "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. "Become" doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)
These examples can be found all over the Web in study guides for freshman composition classes. (Try a Google search on "great number of dead leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn't say whether terrorists did it.)
The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.
"Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."
"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."
That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."
"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.
The book's contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don't apply to them. But I don't think they are. Given the evidence that they can't even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like "subject" and "verb" and "phrase," but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.
There is of course nothing wrong with writing passives and negatives and adjectives and adverbs. I'm not nitpicking the authors' writing style. White, in particular, often wrote beautifully, and his old professor would have been proud of him. What's wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors' own prose on the very same page.
Some of the claims about syntax are plainly false despite being respected by the authors. For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive "should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb." The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk's original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that "some infinitives seem to improve on being split.") But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.
Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like "The dean's statements tend to completely polarize the faculty" places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, "The dean's statements tend to polarize the faculty completely."
This is actually implied by an earlier section of the book headed "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," yet White still gets it wrong. He feels there are circumstances where the split infinitive is not quite right, but he is simply not competent to spell out his intuition correctly in grammatical terms.
An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.
Consider the explicit instruction: "With none, use the singular verb when the word means 'no one' or 'not one.'" Is this a rule to be trusted? Let's investigate.
• Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for "none of us." There is one example of it as a subject: "None of us are perfect" (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
• Download and search Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of "none of us" with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural ("I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset").
• Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural ("None of us ever do").
It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.
Is the intelligent student supposed to believe that Stoker, Wilde, and Montgomery didn't know how to write? Did Strunk or White check even a single book to see what the evidence suggested? Did they have any evidence at all for the claim that the cases with plural agreement are errors? I don't think so.
There are many other cases of Strunk and White's being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English. Consider the claim that a sentence should not begin with "however" in its connective adverb sense ("when the meaning is 'nevertheless'").
Searching for "however" at the beginnings of sentences and "however" elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain's books and found roughly seven instances of "however" at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that "however" at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.
The copy editor's old bugaboo about not using "which" to introduce a restrictive relative clause is also an instance of failure to look at the evidence. Elements as revised by White endorses that rule. But 19th-century authors whose prose was never forced through a 20th-century prescriptive copy-editing mill generally alternated between "which" and "that." (There seems to be a subtle distinction in meaning related to whether new information is being introduced.) There was never a period in the history of English when "which" at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.
In fact, as Jan Freeman, of The Boston Globe, noted (in her blog, The Word), Strunk himself used "which" in restrictive relative clauses. White not only added the anti-"which" rule to the book but also revised away the counterexamples that were present in his old professor's original text!
It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.
So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 32, Page B15

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

Forte as fort or for-tay

2009-04-13T13:22:47Z

Anyone who is "lexically elite" has encountered this conundrum, and I'm curious what you all do about it/with it/when in it.

Consider "forte" in the following sentence.

"She is an accomplished singer of many styles, but Torchsongs are truly her FORTE".

Most of those who are truly lexically elite know that "forte" here, is pronounced "fort" like that building in teh old west where Indians supposedly raided... However, the vast majority of Americans believe the correct pronunciation of the term is "for-tay". This is so prevalent in our society, that educated people will often dismiss you as *ill-educated*, if you "mis" pronounce it as "fort". Several books I've read, suggest that you keep in mind your own "image" and what your goals are, when using this term, cause people love to say "you illiterate fool, it's for-tay".

So my question is "What are lexical elitists to do?" Personally, when i'm in an academic setting I pronounce it correctly, but if I'm in a court room, trying to explain something about Native Cultures to a jury, or if I'm talking to business people trying to get money for some pet project, i'm likely to use "fortay" just cause i don't want to prejudice people against the argument I'm presenting.

just curious what a "good ol' elitist" aught to do. :-)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 17 replies

Were Orwell's views on English clouded by class prejudice?

2009-03-31T23:05:45Z

Down & out on the language of London
Were Orwell's views on English clouded by class prejudice?

Robert Fulford, National Post

The most admired and most quoted of George Orwell's essays, "Politics and the English Language," written in the winter of 1945-46, begins with a familiar opinion: "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way." Sixty-three years later, that remains a favourite complaint among those who believe the world is going to hell. It would be hard to find a period in modern history when no one has floated the same idea. It was already commonplace when Orwell was growing up, at the beginning of the 20th century. Language seems always to be declining, like politeness.

Since Orwell advised us to think critically about what we read, I was encouraged to entertain a few heretical thoughts about him last week when I encountered those opening words for perhaps the fiftieth time. "Politics and the English Language" appears in the first of two new collections of Orwell essays, both of them compiled with loving respect by George Packer and published by Harcourt -- All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays and Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.

Beyond question, it remains a great essay. We cannot be reminded too often of Orwell's central thesis that slovenly writing produces slovenly thought and foolish thought leads to ugly prose. But that opening, coming down to us from just after the Second World War, seems, when you consider the historical context, thoughtless.

Can we still say that the English language in 1945-46 was in a particularly bad way? In retrospect, it seems to have been used in the mid-1940s by some remarkable stylists, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, among others. The funniest English writer, P. G. Wodehouse, was spinning out an endless series of books in never less than superb English. T. S. Eliot and W.H. Auden were hard at work.

Most important, at that moment the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.

In the hands of Winston Churchill, language rallied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.

How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of his and England's existence? In an essay called "Politics and the English Language," how could he have failed to notice both the pre-eminent English politician of the century and his uniquely effective eloquence?

Orwell's politics, sad to say, stood in the way of the truth. He claimed the ability to face unpleasant facts, which often meant recognizing that many of his fellow leftists were apologists in the West for Stalinist mass murder. His willingness to state the harsh reality of communism, from a leftist position, scandalized and infuriated thousands of fellow socialists and marked him permanently as an honest man in a dishonest time, a heroic truth-teller who defied the liars who surrounded him.

He was also committed to a profoundly negative view of the upper classes, among whom Churchill (as a Tory with a noble ancestry) was included. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism," Orwell wrote in 1946. He called England in the 1940s, "a family with the wrong members in control." He could not acknowledge that during the war the one family member with the talent to save Britain was the Conservative prime minister. But, as Orwell wrote in another connection, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

In 1946, on this crucial point, that struggle proved too much for him. This was at the climax of his literary career, just after the appearance of Animal Farm, three years before the publication of his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and four years before his death from tuberculosis in 1950.

Although he's now admired by many conservatives, Orwell was a passionate socialist who hoped and believed the class system was on the way to extinction: "This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue." In his diary, he reported he was sickened by the advertising in the London Underground, "the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries." He expected the war would sweep all that away.

The two new volumes from Harcourt remind us again and again that Orwell was at heart a teacher anxious to share his opinions on every subject. He wrote to his publisher that "I think [Jean-Paul] Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot." In these pages we find him telling us precisely the way tea should be made and fiercely defending the value of English cooking (against French!). Embarrassingly, he was a chronic and reflexive homophobe, an enemy

of "the pansy left" and "nancy poets;" he proudly declared, "I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and [Stephen] Spender." Imagine what a Canadian human-rights commission would do to him today.

Orwell liked to compare honest, truthful writing to a window pane through which we can see the truth clearly. He believed that one can "write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality." But his self-created personality got in his way. The son of an imperial civil servant, he made every effort to declare his solidarity with the lower classes. He deified every aspect of working-class life, from pubs to pigeon fanciers. He was a rare example of a downstart, a bright Eton graduate who signed on first as an imperial policeman in Burma and then became a socialist, a hobo, a dishwasher, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War and an ill-paid freelance writer.

His chosen class consciousness blinded him when he sat down to write a definitive essay on the English language. Today, he remains an authority on the use of the English language and one of its great practitioners. But he missed the most startling development of his time in the subject that he famously made his own.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=d17d36be-9147-4101-a038-74f04b19cc3a

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

Peeve: spelling skills and homonyms

2009-03-25T19:24:23Z

Just need to vent, but this has been one of my pet peeves for ages: why is it that so many people (most recently seen in an academic meeting) seem incapable of differentiating between principle and principal? The two words are completely different in meaning. And yet, so many times, I have seen people blithely write 'the principle effects...'.

The other couple I constantly come across is 'affect' and 'effect'.

Tribe, are we the only ones who care to express our thoughts with precision?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 42 replies

"Sinister dexterity"

2009-03-25T19:23:06Z

I love that phrase. I ran across it the other night while re-reading Melville's "Billy Budd." It refers to BB lacking the 'sinister dexterity' for satire. At last my knowledge of Latin pays off!

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

pseudo, quasi, meta, para

2009-02-27T21:45:03Z

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pseudo

pseudo
Pronunciation [soo-doh]
–adjective
1. not actually but having the appearance of; pretended; false or spurious; sham.
2. almost, approaching, or trying to be.
Origin: 1940–45; independent use of pseudo-

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pseudo
~~~~

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quasi

quasi
Pronunciation [kwey-zahy, -sahy, kwah-see, -zee]
–adjective
resembling; seeming; virtual: a quasi member.
adj. Having a likeness to something; resembling: a quasi success.
[Middle English, as if, from Old French, from Latin quasi : quam, as;]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quasi
~~~~

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meta

meta
-adjective
self-referential; referring to itself or its characteristics, esp. as a parody; about
-noun
something with refers to itself, esp. in self-parodying manner
Example: A movie-within-a-movie is an example of meta.
Etymology: meta 'beyond'

–noun
a female given name.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meta
~~~~

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/para
para
-adjective
pertaining to or occupying two positions

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/para
~~~~

~
Conversational use of thes terms has been clouded for time with me... I would prefer to be more comfortable, but am at a little bit of loss with experience for use in good taste. Any Suggestions?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

Palinisms, or, "Let's progress America!"

2009-02-25T02:36:12Z

...and she didn't say "Let's progress, America!" No, no...she wants to progress our nation. Progressing America is at the top of her list. Has anyone ever heard "progress" used as a transitive verb? It wasn't just a slip of the tongue...she used it over and over again in a single interview. Let's thank sweet Jesus that we won't have to listen to this woman for the next four (or eight) years. Ugh. And then there's the "n" word (no, not THE "N" word)...nuculear. *Sigh*

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

Are you smarter than a 3rd grader?

2008-12-26T20:20:50Z

As lexical elitists, we hold ourselves to a higher standard of speaking and writing than most of those around us. We're called pretentious because we correct "good" to "well" and say "properly" instead of "right."

Maybe those around us will come to us when they have a tricky grammar question and we feel vindicated when we immediately know the answer? We've all been there...

So, when my boss brought his nine year old daughter to work and asked me to help her by looking over her English homework, I was more than happy to oblige. She sat at my desk, looking up at me, doe-eyed, clearly in awe of my impressive linguistic dexterity and unassailable grammaticism, and asked me to look over the exercise she had just completed. Her instructions were to take a sentence, denuded of punctuation, and fill in the quotation marks. I looked over one that she had completed and gently told her that she was mistaken. I turned back to my computer, only to feel a light tap on my shoulder.

"Are you sure?" she asked me, timidly.
"Pretty sure," I said, as unpretentiously as I could.

She shrugged and went back to her work.

A few days later she came back, paper in hand, and showed me how she had done. She, of course, had done very well.

Only one wrong.

The one on which I had corrected her.

Does anyone else have a story like this?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

Sexual identity

2008-12-22T05:25:31Z

Inspired by the "Britishism" thread wherein it was noted a tender of patients in English is a "Nurse" regardless of sex:

So, what is the proper occupational title for a female USPS worker who delivers mail?

Are there other job titles strongly tied to a specific sex?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 24 replies

misspelled place names

2008-12-15T21:50:08Z

While driving yesterday, I noticed a sign for "Resevoir Street." Ugh.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

Question on a Britishism

2008-12-08T13:59:37Z

A random thought wandered through my mind:
In the UK, nurses are addressed as "Sister", a holdover from when the job was done mostly by nuns. How are male nurses addressed?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 8 replies

Insectile paralysis

2008-12-05T15:09:44Z

While playing "Wit's End" after Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, my wife, son and I were baffled by a question relating to the meaning of the expression, "a flea in one's ear." It turns out that it means falling for one's own trap -- sort of like being hoist by one's own petard.

I later recalled once seeing a farce by Feydeau called "A Flea in Her Ear" that had a plot based on somebody getting caught in their own snare. That made me wonder -- how many idiomatic expressions are there in English that relate to insects? Here are the ones that came to my mind -- please contribute to the list:

A bee in one's bonnet.
A fly in the ointment.
A bug in a rug.
Ants in one's paints.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 17 replies

chosing a new moderator

2008-12-01T16:02:56Z

I am a tribster-revivalist and am hoping to bring Tribe.net into its renaissance. I noticed this tribe has no moderator. I'd be glad to volunteer. Let me know how you feel about this, or any other takers please speak up now!

Yours, jana

posted in Lexical Elitists - 47 replies

Bush threatens to open library!

2008-11-29T07:00:35Z

I'm envisioning that it will be a library that bans and burns books deemed "inappropriate" - more a propaganda front that an actual collection of knowledge and learning - but then I'm cynical about Bush's love of books, learning or equal access to knowledge.

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Bush_plans_to_start_library_Freedom_11232008.html

posted in Lexical Elitists - 15 replies

Up is the new down

2008-11-26T13:17:09Z

With all the chatter in the library, I almost didn't hear it, but:
Fifi wrote: "So, if your aim is to up the number of users on tribe, promoting it outside of tribe would be the way to go"

Increase, augment, enhance; all fine verbs. But up? Checking and thinking confirmed that this use is of course perfectly legitimate, if not the verb I would have chosen, but got me to wondering: why did 'up' get promoted from adverb to verb while 'down' languishes in adverb territory? And do you know of any other similar antagonistic and asymmetric couples?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 14 replies

linguistic quirks noticed in other languages

2008-11-23T15:48:54Z

Following up on the thread about linguistic texts, I have some ideas that I have always found curious, yet, alas, no one to share with me.

One example is the Czech language. I studied in Prague for a year, so I only have very rudimentary knowledge. As a native English speaker, I found it quite strange that the polite form of asking a question is in the negative. For example, "Don't you know what time it is?" or "Don't you know how to get to Vaclavske namesti?"

Also, Czech does not share our mathematical ideas of double-negatives. If a statement is negative, then every part of the sentence becomes negative. "I don't have no spare change," is the correct form.

In my study of Spanish, which I must admit was many years ago, I believe the passive is used much more frequently than in English. "The glass fell from the table," rather than "I dropped the glass."

Does anyone else have interesting quirks to share such as this? It does seem to me to go beyond the strict focus of grammar and venture into the psychology behind our choice of words and formulation of statements.

And, please forgive me if my examples may be inaccurate. I am not fluent in any of these languages and quite possibly making errors. My birth language is English and I studied German extensively, almost to the point of fluency, but, sadly, have forgotten much of what I ever learned.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

tribe is recovering..

2008-11-23T15:25:32Z

http://faq.tribe.net/thread/0a4e2240-b36d-47b9-b986-79e000b559c3

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

Collins dictionary says 'meh'

2008-11-23T07:31:59Z

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081117/tuk-bothered-much-meh-is-a-word-45dbed5.html

posted in Lexical Elitists - 6 replies

Did you hear what Paris Hilton said???

2008-11-21T17:09:29Z

Me neither.

Anyway, meh!

;)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

is lexical specificity "elite" enough for this tribe?

2008-11-12T00:14:35Z

One of those things that just bugs me is incorrect usage and grammar in signs. One example I've seen a lot recently is in the wording on signs posted all over California, warning people not to smoke within a certain distance of the doorways.

At my work, the sign says something to the effect of "Smokers must stay 25 feet from entrance".

NOT: "...at least 25 feet...", but "...must be 25 feet..."

And every time I see that, I imagine a big red line, painted on the ground, in a semicircle marking the exact 25' distance from the doorway - and all the smokers being forced to stand on that red line, so that they stay *exactly* 25 feet from the entrance.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

A lifetime in politics

2008-10-26T16:20:09Z

I hate this phrase, usually introduced by “a week is…” It is false. Most weeks are moderately consequential, not lifetimes (in the sense intended). Although pundits might say, “anything could happen” in the final week of the presidential campaign, no one now argues that *last* week (or the week before that one or the week before it) fundamentally changed the race. Indeed, there were *months* in the Democratic primary campaign that changed nothing because Hillary could not overcome Obama’s lead in delegates; the end of that campaign was a long time coming, but its result was seen well in advance.

A week *can* be a lifetime in politics, meaning that one’s political fortunes may be ruined. This has happened twice lately.

First, Democrat Tim Mahoney of Florida (-where I live) was cruising to re-election before news broke of an affair and hush money paid to avoid a sexual harassment suit. The other day, Mahoney refused to show up at a debate with his opponent because TV cameras would be (-as they normally are) allowed in the room. (The opponent showed and fielded questions from reporters for an hour.) It’s the closest thing to quitting I have ever seen this near an election day.

The second case concerns Michelle Backman, a Republican from Minnesota, who recently appeared on “Hardball” and called for a “penetrating expose” of US politicians to reveal which ones held “pro-America views” and which ones held “anti-America” ones. The gaffe proved such an embarrassment, the RNC stopped funding her campaign. Backman’s opponent has since received nearly a million dollars in contributions from people outraged by Backman’s comments. (Few had any idea of her opponent’s name; they just wanted to help Backman exit stage right.)

Mahoney and Backman (-to turn a phrase from SCTV) “blowed themselves up real good.” They are agents of their own political misfortunes. And neither expects such political misfortune to reverse itself *next* week. Yet these are exceptional cases. Most incumbents who were cruising to re-election a month ago still are.

All this to say, I want to shoot the television every time I hear an analyst or pundit preface a response with, “Well, as you know, a week is a lifetime in American politics.” No, no it isn’t. The realization that a politician’s indiscretions, corruption, or “macaca” moments will come to light suddenly (if at all) is better covered (-if one is determined to use a cliché) by the phrase, “What a difference a day makes.”

When we say, “What a difference a day makes,” we are contrasting the magnitude of change with the seemingly inconsequential amount of time that has passed. Perhaps you went to bed worth a million dollars only to awaken broke because of a market crash. What a difference a day makes… This does *not* mean that one should go to bed broke with the expectation of arising rich because, somehow, it *could* happen. That is foolishness.

And in political terms, one should not expect race Y to change dramatically because a previous race with other candidates, call it race X, changed dramatically at some point.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

lexically elite spam?!

2008-08-29T16:18:56Z

A spam email made it through my mail filter today. It was, not surprisingly, an ad for some sort of penis enlargement. The surprising bit was that it used the word pullulate. wow.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 6 replies

Vandals busted for fixing typo on historic sign

2008-08-25T16:00:49Z

Much as I hate to pass along a FOX News story (I'm not sure how I ended up on their page), ya gotta love this one: "Vandals in Hot Water for 'Fixing' Typo on Historic Grand Canyon Sign." Here's the link: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,409382,00.html .

You've been warned...control your Sharpies!

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

Do you agree?

2008-08-25T14:57:36Z

This doesn't.

From http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080822-maya-maze.html :

"A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been uncovered on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists announced last week."

Anyone else vexed by lack of agreement--especially in academic articles?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

Newbie

2008-08-02T06:31:52Z

I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Fun Sway, a lover of words. My family calls me the “Wordsmith.” For my 24th birthday my mother gave me 24 words she thought I didn’t know. My favorite of those words was: Catachresis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις), which literally means the incorrect or improper use of a word -- such as using the word decimate (e.g., "they were severely decimated") mistakenly for devastated -- is a term used to denote the (usually intentional) use of any figure of speech that flagrantly violates the norms of a language community. Compare malapropism.
Common forms of catachresis are:
• Using a word to denote something radically different from its normal meaning.
'Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse – Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
• Using a word to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name.
"a table's leg"
• Using a word out of context.
'Can't you hear that? Are you blind?'
• Using paradoxical or contradictory logic.
• Creating an illogical mixed metaphor.
"He stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the horns,"
Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation, and is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in the avant-garde.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

restaurant gaffes

2008-07-31T16:37:47Z

Driving home today, I saw a sign in front of a restaurant advertising, "Shishka Bobs."

posted in Lexical Elitists - 17 replies

I shuddered in horror . . .

2008-07-31T16:31:41Z

I was at the mall today (hey! It;s not my fault! I needed a phone accessory), and they had giant billboards everywhere making light-hearted pro-consumerism messages, like "Let Her Pay for Dinner!". But the sign that caused me to sink to the ground screaming in pain was "Have no shame for thou love of shoes." For criminy's sake, I know it's an archaic grammar, but you see "thy" around all the time. Heck, I had to learn the Lord's Prayer in school (granted, rural Church of England), which is lousy with "thy"'s. Not so difficult to get it right really . . . you'd think . . .

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

credo

2008-07-31T15:23:09Z

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072501128.html

Established in 2002, the ICC is a permanent court to try individuals who commit the world's most serious crimes: genocide (the extermination of a group of people based on race, class, or creed), war crimes (violations of the Geneva Conventions), and crimes against humanity (systematic abuses based on political, social, or cultural differences). The Court will determine its jurisdiction over the crimes of aggression (as yet undefined) at a review conference in 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072501128.html

Latin: credo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creed

A creed is a statement or confession of belief — usually religious belief — or faith often recited as part of a religious service.

SOO00oo...

i see that there are many interpretations of the word _creed_, which is not unexpected especially considering religious fundamentalists who will argue with anything...

i am concerned tho, that the term is included in this court charter, while even in English, the most broadly accepted vocabulary.... it is contentious.

any comments?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

A grammatical dust-up

2008-07-31T09:52:11Z

I sent the following poem to a friend who is an editor as well as a poet.

Research reveals the average child:

Farts louder than it must,
Betrays parental trust,
Tilts too soon to lust,
Avoids advice like rust,
Upends you back to dust
Convinced it all was just.

The editor thinks "convinced" won't do because it is in the past tense. I counter that this is fine because the parent is "passed" at that point! She counters that the poem focuses on the child's actions, which are present tense; I think it focuses on the parent's reactions.

I thought I would throw this question open to a wider audience of lexical specialists.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 14 replies

Any linguists here?

2008-07-27T16:38:27Z

I've just read a book called Moral Minds by Marc Hauser, who argues that there is a "universal moral grammar" underlying moral judgments akin to the "universal grammar" underlying languages.

I think his book is interesting but a failure. Nevertheless, I came away from it wanting to increase my understanding of modern linguistics. Any suggestions?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 11 replies

kudos to facebook!

2008-07-10T13:28:41Z

I'm impressed. I just saw a story that Facebook is on a mission to eradicate improper grammar!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/ap_on_hi_te/tec_facebook_genders

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

A Lesbian by any other name...

2008-05-02T21:45:54Z

Maybe they could go for "lesbosian"?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/30/true_mytilenians/

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Didn't know this: can anyone confirm?

2008-04-20T18:15:01Z

tribes » other » "stupid" (but fun) questions » topics »

Why do they call it a blowjob?

Answer given by Humming Floaters:

Re: Why do they call it........ Thu, April 10, 2008 - 5:34 AM
In the late 19th century sex workers actually called it a "below job." Over the years it eventually became "blow job."

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

incidence of incidents in which someone says incidences

2008-04-14T12:26:17Z

So it was my understanding that you could have one incident, or several incidents, but 'incidence' refers to a rate of occurrence, so it would be rare to need to pluralize it.

So I _was_ going to rant about how often I hear people say 'incidences' ... but then I looked it up online, and dictionary.com lists one meaning of 'incidence' as the same as incident. Is this correct? Or do they just have it listed because so many people get it wrong that it's becoming accepted?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

Required reading: eggcorns

2008-04-07T15:24:00Z

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

I just stumbled across this link in the literary nerds tribe, and found it to be particularily appropriate for this tribe as well. In the context of the restaurant mis-spelling topic, it immediately raised the bar from my feeble attempts with mangled French food by introducing mangled Italian delicacies instead: Chicken Cacciatore (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/category/english/cross-language/ ).

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

When will they fix it?

2008-04-07T02:32:40Z

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Peterboroughsign.JPG

Does anyone care to Photoshop this one for me?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

Heather? Wherefore art thou, Heather?

2008-03-27T19:02:23Z

Do we need a moderator here?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 27 replies

Buzzwords 2007 All We Are Saying, By GRANT BARRETT

2008-03-25T07:05:43Z

[snip]

What follows is by no means a complete list of the words that took our attention this year, but rather a sampling from the thousands that endured long enough to find a place in the national conversation.

[snip]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/weekinreview/23buzzwords.html?pagewanted=print

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

pleaded vs pled?

2008-03-23T17:54:47Z

Quite recently, I've noticed media articles using pleaded rather often - as in, he pleaded guilty to the crime.

Personally, I prefer "pled." I don't know why, but that's just the way I am.

What does everyone think about this? What are your preferences?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

hung?

2008-02-11T23:31:05Z

I was talking to my mother and mentioned someone hung himself. She immediately chastised my poor grammer and insisted that it should be hanged. But I'm curious.

I would never say, "I hanged out with my friends."
And, of course, we all know about "The stockings were hung by the chimney with care."
But what about saying, "He hung himself from the rafters?"

I tried checking some dictionaries and grammar guides, but found mixed answers. So, is this one of those evolutions of language? Or am I missing something in the tense being used?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 24 replies

“Hey, guys.”

2008-01-22T07:44:09Z

A local columnist ruminated on this usage in today’s paper. The inciting incident took place in an upscale restaurant: a young waiter greeted an elderly married couple with, “Hey, guys.” The woman was not visibly offended. Nevertheless, the columnist wondered how the term “guys” became unisex.

I thought: "Hey, I'd alert the Lexical Elitists. Those guys will have the answer!" ;o)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 23 replies

Publishers?

2008-01-21T19:04:24Z

Forgive me the crosspost. I'm trying to help my Uncle, a retired professor of English, to find a publisher for his memoirs. He would prefer not to self publish. Would anyone have a connection in the publishing world to share?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

"That excuse of a man."

2008-01-19T02:47:21Z

A character on television has been saying this lately in relation to the man his estranged wife has taken to kissing. Each time I hear it, I think, "That's so curiously wrong!"

The normal expression in such circumstances is "no-good excuse" or "sorry excuse" or "poor excuse" or "pathetic excuse," but here we have only "that excuse of a man." The contempt in the speaker's voice is obvious, so no confusion results. And it's dialogue, where grammatical imperfections are often deliberately chosen (-by the writers of said dialogue) in order to reveal an aspect of character.

What I wonder about (---and I *do* wonder about this) is, "Why does *he* say that?"

I think the actor is old and this is just how he says it. I have a hard time imagining why the phrase would be written that way. Does anyone here so a plausible reason?

"That excuse of a man." Curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll put it.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

assortment of obscure (mostly) sexual words

2008-01-18T22:35:52Z

apparently this gentlemen is collecting "sick words." I'd put good money that's meant in the superlative, not pejorative, sense.

http://homepage.mac.com/alexharrell/words.html

I like sphallolalia. It's just fun to say (and do!)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Poor typists with large vocabulary seeks opinion

2007-12-31T09:47:23Z

Hello, I am a poor typists with a large vocabulary. Do you find that you can differentiate between someone like me, and a person who is unable to really tell the difference between proper word usage, based on context, and other telling things during an online discussion? If so, does it matter to you if the person feels compelled to constantly correct themselves. Does it matter if you know that they know that you know the difference?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

Help! Need in-law advice

2007-12-30T04:15:21Z

I'm marrying into a family of extremely nice people who all say "I seen". I don't want to seem like a snob to them but this makes me cringe and widens the divide between his family and mine. Any advice?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 6 replies

Need your collective intelligence! HELP

2007-12-14T19:24:32Z

Ok, so what do you call those sentances that when you read them silently mean little or nothing, but when you hear them read out loud mean something entirely different? Like the Sly Stone song "Thank you falettinme be mice elf". I need to know the name of that particular type of sentence structure or fashion of scripting, and I'd love/need some examples.

Anyone?

(I'm writting a paper on language cognition and the global proccess of speech Vs written language)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

does no one proofread before printing?

2007-12-12T16:25:13Z

I was in a parking lot at a hotel and saw some dreadful signs all around the lot.

"The hotel assumes no responsibilities for vehicles or it's contents."

Hmm... Did they intend to say the hotel's contents? The vehicles? Or maybe they were trying to say that the hotel is content? Ugh.

And the worst part is that the hotel had an incident years ago where a guest was found dead in his room. Maybe they don't want to be liable for the people inside the rooms either?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

awkward phrasing

2007-11-25T22:14:57Z

I was just reading a text that included a phrase something like this... The matter is in significant degree....

I know what the author meant, but I cannot help hearing in my mind "insignificant" rather than "in significant."

And to think it was Carl Sagan of all people! I'm reading Dragons of Eden, a fascinating exploration of the evolution of the brain.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 25 replies

of interest to logophiles and philanthropists

2007-11-21T22:02:31Z

I got this in an email forward today, and while many email forawrds are annoying, I thought I'd share this one. The words on their quiz were quite challenging, I certainly couldn't have defined them all, although I got a lot right by informed guessing based on word roots and process of elimination... yay for intuition and semantic memory!

"If you haven't seen this site yet, take a look. www.freerice.com has a fun vocabulary quiz - for every correct answer 10 grains of rice is donated to hungry people around the world. 10 grains isn't much, but they are already up to 212 million grains a day since it started Oct. 7. Spread the word!"

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

Peeve: saying "Think" you instead of "thank" you.

2007-11-21T06:43:44Z

I think this started with actresses saying "think" you in order to sound younger than they are. But now I hear real women saying this. "Think you." What the hell?

I realize this isn't a lexical matter but I hope to find consolation among my fellow elitists here...

posted in Lexical Elitists - 28 replies

will not/wo not ok/okay/okai?

2007-10-28T00:50:30Z

will not/wo not ok/okay/okai?

I heard a white child born and raised in a formerly Inuit native tribal area

substitute "wo not" in a phrase that called for "will not". He seemed very comfortable with the use, but was also raised within 100 miles of Anchorage, AK.

It stuck with me with potential for use connoteing honesty.

I lack grammatical training (my spelling is rotten too), and am not sure how to ask this question, but...

Is there a word (so I can use a grammer index) for this? ( a substitution with a conotation.)

While I am writing, I've been thinking about the popularly understood "Okay", its abbreviation "ok".

|Is okai a useful spelling, and what other spellings in use might add context to "okay"?

Anyway, I am a neophite lexographer, but always want to learn new communication skills.

Perhaps some lexical elitist might enlighten me?

Jon

posted in Lexical Elitists - 12 replies

" NO ONE UNDER " / 21 ALLOWED INSIDE

2007-10-26T02:26:13Z

I saw this sign, complete with quotation markets, on the door of an arcade this morning. I told my friend Gail, "If they were open, I'd go inside and ask the manager what the heck those quotation marks are doing there."

She thought they were fine. She thought they added emphasis. As in, read my lips, 'no one under' 21 allowed inside.

I still don't like it.

What do you think?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 14 replies

articles and abbreviations

2007-10-18T05:12:28Z

I was just typing something about a labor & delivery nurse and I stumbled over something.

When writing the abbreviation, in this case "L&D," is it proper to use "a" or "an?"

My first instinct is to use "an," because I would mentally read it as "an ell-and-dee nurse." But, if one would read out the words rather than the letters, it would rightly be "a labor and delivery nurse."

Of course, I simply changed to "the" to avoid the whole issue, but now I'm curious. What would everyone else do in this situation?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

Rant about translations... and my patience for errors

2007-10-02T21:56:09Z

HOW BLOODY HARD IS IT TO GET AN ENGLISH SPEAKER TO LOOK AT YOUR AD BEFORE YOU POST IT?

I can't tell you how many times i see products from non-english speaking countries, that mistake "it's" for "its"; "your" for "you're".

course, knowing today's speakers of English, it probably WAS proofread by an english speaker.

Is it really that hard to keep "there" and "their" and "they're" separate in your spell checker? ARRUGH.

(ok, rant over, sorry)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 27 replies

The way to Christ is simple

2007-10-02T21:53:23Z

God's Blessings often benefit all people. But many of His promises are only for His own children. If you're not sure that you're a part of God's family, He offers you this invitation. The way to Christ is simple:

1. Admit that you have a need.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Romans 3:23

2. Believe that Jesus is God, the Son, who paid the wages of your sin.

For the wages of sin is death [eternal separation from God]; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Romans 6:23

3. Call upon God.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Romans 10:9

King James Version

The Holy Bible

ISBN 978-1-58660-198-0

Barbour Publishing

www.barbourbooks.com

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

The greatest of pleasures

2007-09-28T14:49:06Z

“To be learning something is the greatest of pleasures, not only to the philosopher but the rest of mankind, however small their capacities.”

Aristotle said that. What does it say about human beings that this is true of them? If you think this is *not* true of human beings, what does it say about them that this is false?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Worterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen (Big PDF)

2007-09-27T17:30:06Z

Worterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen: Dritter Teil: Wortschatz der Germanischen Spracheinheit by August Fick with contributions by Hjalmar Falk, entirely revised by Alf Torp in 1909.

http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/pdf/pgmc_torp/pgmc_torp.pdf

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

Ok Josh..

2007-09-23T19:54:09Z

http://tribes.tribe.net/pickypoets123?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5Bcc9ccce8-e722-4cf9-b127-d850d33cfc20%5D

As it is my first ever tribe creation, I don't know how to post it to other stuff.. Just please liik up "limericks and hiku" if you're interested.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

A "Jumbled" poet

2007-09-22T15:00:44Z

Today's Jumble words are

Brook
Agile
Oblong
Queasy

Using them, I composed the following.

A nightingale's song stirred in the poet memories of his agile youth, so he leapt over the brook, then leapt back, and leapt over a third time, landing queasy. His stomach soon settled in an oblong box.

What can you make of them?

Fans of such playfulness are invited to join Jumble Bums; we do this every day.

http://tribes.tribe.net/jumblebums

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

New Tribe: Jumble Bums

2007-09-12T20:00:07Z

I love the Jumble (“that scrambled word game”) in the morning paper. Some time back I started jotting down the words of the day and turning them into phrases (--canned bamboo * tempo trophy * limber dismay * ). Why not? Sometimes they inspire poems or descriptions for stories. (“Limber dismay” is classic, even if I didn’t think of it!)

So I’m starting this tribe for other lovers of the Jumble and wordplay.
There’s a link in case you wish to play the daily Jumble online.

http://tribes.tribe.net/jumblebums

posted in Lexical Elitists - 0 replies

Lovers of Levengers

2007-09-10T15:36:51Z

Lovers of Levengers
Lounging in leather chairs
Laughing loud, leering low,
Luring each other upstairs.

(I wrote this in a message to my friend Ann, who also loves Levengers, the store supplying "tools for serious readers.")

http://www.levenger.com/HOME/RtlHomePage.asp?Params=category=556|level=2|pageid=5514

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

word nerds rule!

2007-08-24T12:03:38Z

I just felt the need to say that this is my favorite tribe. Even though we're all passionate about words, and somewhat persnickety about usage, everyone here is far more civil than in most tribes, even tribes where people hold up compassion and kindness as a virtue. The fact that we don't need a moderator speaks volumes to me. (Well edited and grammatically correct volumes, of course!) Perhaps it's because we all value communication and discussing semantics is honestly about trying to unearth a commonly understood and "correct" meaning of a word. Whatever the reason, I really do appreciate you all and this tribe. :-)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 7 replies

What about translating Elvis into Latin?

2007-08-16T21:09:30Z

I couldn't resist! :o)

Crooner 'with a calling' sings Elvis ... in Latin
Published: Wednesday August 15, 2007

Die-hard Elvis addicts might not approve, but hits by the man who defined cool when he took rock 'n' roll into the mainstream can now be heard ... in Latin sung by a Finnish literature professor.

In yet another testament to the irrepressible influence of "The King," fans can croon along to the broody "Nunc hic aut numquam" ("It's Now or Never"), shake hips to the slightly scary sounding title "Nunc Distrahor" ("All Shook Up"), or just have fun with "Ne Saevias" ("Don't Be Cruel").

"Latin is an eternal language and therefore I believe it is important to document Elvis' songs also in this eternal language," said Jukka Ammondt, known by his stage name Doctor Ammondt.

The late Pope John Paul II was one of his fans, as is former US president Bill Clinton, according to this professor at the University of Jyvaeskylae who released his first Elvis album in 1995 under the title, "The Legend Lives Forever in Latin."

But why the language of Caesar?

"In my high school years in the early 1960s I had my own band and I sang Elvis in English," said Ammondt.

"Later, as a university professor in the 1990s, I realised that it was my calling to sing Elvis in Latin."

He now tours every summer during university break, playing across Europe or the United States where he has performed in Memphis, home to Elvis' Graceland mansion, New York and San Francisco.

Ammondt, whose lyrics are translated by a fellow professor, is passionate about all things Latin -- he often listens to the Finnish public radio's news broadcasts in Latin, the only one of its kind outside the Vatican.

His musical "calling" started in the early 1990s when he recorded an album of Finnish tango songs in Latin, "Tango Triste Finnicum," before moving on to Elvis. In 2001, he recorded an album in Sumerian, a now-defunct language of ancient Mesopotamia, today part of Iraq.

Ammondt, who has a gift for languages and a sense of humour, insists that Finns have an easier time pronouncing Latin than English.

But it's not everyone who can get their tongue around Elvis' 1956 hit "Tedere me ama" ("Love Me Tender"): "I tenere me, suaviter/Ama intime/Me beasti dulciter/Et nunc amo te/Tenere me adama/Vero somnio/Amo te, o lux mea: Fiat unio."

Even with the twangy electric guitars and heavy horns, the Latin lyrics are jarring and some might say Ammondt is not a born crooner. His renditions have been compared more to karaoke singing than to Tennessee recording studio material.

That doesn't matter for Ammondt, who may be described as eccentric. An expert on Bertolt Brecht, romanticism and melancholy in literature, he doesn't mind jeers or criticism.

He says Elvis' songs have given him the "courage to be myself and to think as an individual and to pay attention to my own feelings."

In his early 60s with long grey hair and round spectacles, the thin, divorced father of three posed almost-nude for his 1997 "Rocking in Latin" album cover.

Ten years younger than his idol, Ammondt, who has his own website, www.drammondt.com, never had the chance to play for Elvis before the rock 'n' roll legend died of a heart attack on August 16, 1977 at age 42.

But he met Carl Perkins, who wrote the music and lyrics to "Blue Suede Shoes" and first recorded the song before Elvis turned it into a smash hit -- and which Ammondt has transformed into "Glaudi Calcei."

Perkins, who died in 1998, was "interested" by his endeavours, Ammondt said modestly.

He said Pope John Paul II, who received some of Ammondt's recordings from the Finnish embassy to the Vatican, was "positive about the idea of promoting the Latin language in this way."

And former US president Bill Clinton, who plays the saxophone in his spare time, sent Ammondt his regards after listening to his music.

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Crooner_with_a_calling_sings_Elvis__08152007.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

how many do you know, oh elitist cronies...

2007-08-15T16:08:02Z

houghton mifflin has published a list of of 100 must-know words for high school grads. Must admit, I don't have all of these in my vocab... how 'bout youse guys? :P

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/100words/

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

Proper use of "began to?"

2007-08-13T23:40:43Z

I'm curious about the proper use of "began to." I read and edit stories/essays/personal statements from undergrads. They love to say "I began to grow angry" or "I began to cry." I was taught that unless the action is interrupted ("I began to cry but stopped when I thought about rainbows and kittens"), saying "began to" is unnecessary...instead, you should just get to the point and say "I cried." It may not be a hard and fast rule, but does the general idea sound right?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

Newspaper headline "gay-firing law starting"

2007-08-13T17:43:58Z

If you read that, knowing nothing about the town or the politics -- what would you think the topic is?

i HATE headline writers, sometimes.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

Imfa Infa Aaaahhhhrrrgg!!!

2007-08-12T03:53:04Z

In the last few years I have slowly heard an increasing number of individuals in the media mispronounce various words, especially the word infrastructure. With the weapons of mass destruction debacle, the whole greenhouse specter and what we are doing to change it, and now the bridge in Minnesota the word and its mispronunciation rings in my ear at least two or three times per day. How is it, that a talking head, whose only job is to talk, foul up that job? If on the page or teleprompter it says i-n-f-r-a, how does this become Imfa or infa?
One exception stands out, a few days ago, my hero Jim Lehrer actually remembered the forgotten ‘r’ in discussing the bridge collapse and not ten seconds later, our speaker Pelosi left it out in her reply.

Sigh.

</rant>

posted in Lexical Elitists - 5 replies

british English v. american english "i did used to do"

2007-07-29T20:06:10Z

My french husband and i were discussing the use of "did used to do". he had never seen the phrase "did used to" as he understood the rule to be "did + inivintive verb". I told him it wasn't inaccurate, for all it's uncommon. But when i looked it up online, i found this interesting comment in a list of ways "used to" is used

Used you to play the organ in church before you became a monk?

my grammar warnings flashed on immediately, but that is apparently very correct. HELP??? is it something that is British?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 11 replies

well and good

2007-07-21T02:07:38Z

The post about Al Gore and the overuse of "whom" reminds me of something else. I go absolutely batty when people say, "I don't feel well." I hear it so often working at the hospital and it's so terribly annoying. I really want to ask, "Gee, are you experiencing some type of neurological disorder that interferes with tactile sensation?"

Well is an adverb, not an adjective. If someone doesn't feel well, they probably cannot distinguish between silk and corduroy.

Yet, everyone seems to think it sounds more correct than "I don't feel good," which is grammatically correct. James Brown was absolutely correct to proclaim, "I feel good!"

Ugh!

posted in Lexical Elitists - 8 replies

This isn't really about Al Gore, but

2007-07-10T17:04:40Z

I just read this online:

"Former Vice President Al Gore, whom some Democratic activists want to see as a 2008 presidential contender, had no immediate comment about his son's latest arrest."

Shouldn't it be "who some Democratic activists..." or is it really whom? Isn't Al the subject of this sentence? Or in this clause, are the activists the subject?

Thanks! I'm so irritated by people overusing 'whom' to sound intellectual, but in this case I'm not sure.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 19 replies

That vs. which

2007-07-09T22:24:44Z

Comrades:

"Topics which I want to learn more."

"Topics that I want to learn more."

In my native Rocky Mountain English dialect, these sentences are almost interchangeable. I generally use the which when it refers to a substantive. My California-born wife agrees.

I recall many years ago a friend of mine telling me of a British fellow who complained that Americans don't know the difference and misuse "that" and "which".

Do you have a hard and fast rule about "that" and "which", which/that you can impart to us ignoramii?

Craig in Arcata

PS. The sand which is here is not as tasty as the sandwiches there.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 18 replies

advertising flubs

2007-07-03T16:37:31Z

How often do you catch mistakes in advertising? Isn't it soooo annoying?

One of my favorites is a commercial for an assisted-living facility in my area. The text, which is both spoken and printed on the screen, reads the following:
Live Comfortable
Live Safe
Live Secure

Every single time that I see this commercial, I find myself screaming at the television, "-LY!" at the end of each line.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 29 replies

Mayn't I?

2007-06-28T15:16:20Z

I appreciate the can/ may distinction. ("Can" refers to ability while "may" refers to permission.) Yet I can't imagine myself saying, when pleading for permission, "Mayn't I?" (As in, "Dear, mayn't I wait until a commercial to take out the trash?")

What sayest thou?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

Hyphenation

2007-06-27T04:57:22Z

I've been listing my dad's antique books on biblio.com, and one of the most striking differences I've noticed in the texts (orthographically, anyway) is the non-standardization of hyphenation. More currently, though, I'm confused by three disparate spellings of tie dye, tie-dye, and tiedye. Does anyone have a preference? Which look(s) weird? Why? What do your favorite sources say? Just curious...

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

"Mine your own business!"

2007-06-21T16:48:51Z

This is funny, though it wasn't meant to be. To "mind" one's own business means to tend to it, but to "mine" it suggests digging up buried ideas. As a writer, I think "mining my own business" sounds like an excellent job description, especially when "business" suggests one's affairs rather than merely one's work.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 4 replies

adjectival anathema

2007-06-20T20:18:42Z

anathema is a noun, but it seems the way it most commonly is used like an adjective: "Small-minded loudmouths are anathema to my soul."

(I suppose this construction works because it is like a trope, with the one noun standing in for all the adjectives it implies? You can't just substitute any noun and have it work, but put the right loaded noun in there and it does. Eeeeeeenteresting.)

At any rate... my question is, what if one generates an adjectival form like "anathematic' ? Is this wrong? Redundant, but forgivable? The long-awaited solution to an adjectival dilemma?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 10 replies

We bore the gods

2007-06-18T14:24:10Z

[ I know this isn't a poetry tribe, but what delights me in the following silliness--penned this morning over coffee--is the use of---you'll see.]

We Bore the Gods

We bore the gods.
It's why they hide away.
--They nag like wives, those mewling scrives*.
(*From the Hordu: root of decay.)

That cracks me up! A false footnote in a poem! Hordu isn't even a language. (My original thought was Urdu, but then I thought, hell, I don't *know* Urdu and besides 'Hordu' would be funnier.)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

Would you believe

2007-06-17T16:41:29Z

there is a tribe called "al of your sexual fantasys in this tribe"?

I joined and immediately called for a correction of the spelling, adding, "Am I the only one bothered by this?"

Evidently everyone is masturbating or dead, as there's been no response to my urgent plea.

At least here I rest assured someone will feel my pain. (And while you feel it, tell me what you're wearing... joke!)

posted in Lexical Elitists - 9 replies

Noize * boi * kewl

2007-06-15T19:13:08Z

Heather complained about authors using odd spellings to convey slang, dialect, patois.

I thought this morning of two spellings ('noize' and 'boi') that follow normal pronunciation and use the same number of letters but are chosen for (debateable) visual appeal. A third, 'kewl,' has sonic value, as it suggests sounding "cool" as two syllables, koo-wul, but it's overuse has left the reader unsure whether it's supposed to suggest that pronunciation or just to look, well, kewl.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 1 reply

True, that !

2007-06-14T20:23:28Z

Ok, so i just heard myself say in reply to the claim "It never hurts to try", "True that".

and despite not knowing where i picked this rather youthful phrase up from, what i'm really curious about is how any one would punctuate the damn thing.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 21 replies

Subjunctive

2007-06-11T21:37:24Z

I was tutoring some highschool kids in french, and they asked about sujunctive.

Not really pondering whom i was talking to (high schoolers) I told them it was like our subjunctive mode. to which i got the "stare of confoundment and of 'are you really a teacher'".

How many of you still use subjunctive, or even hear it used in teh real world often or correctly. I never really stoped to consider that it's dying, but clearly it is.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 15 replies

Think of the children!

2007-06-04T22:54:06Z

Heard on the radio that schoolteachers in Hayward are expected to go on strike, "A move that could impact thousands of children." Mmmmm hmmm. They might, for instance, fail to learn about avoidance of "impact" as a verb . . .

posted in Lexical Elitists - 8 replies

of vs for

2007-06-01T23:46:41Z

hello all, these two prepositions are giving me a hard time. The net hasn't thrown up any answers too, which makes me wonder if I am the only nincompoop grappling with this.

The dilemma is in their use as phrasal verbs - plan for/plan of; proposal for/proposal of. Most times, I have an innate sense of which is appropriate, but haven't got to figuring out exactly why...can someone point me to an online resource?

thanks.

posted in Lexical Elitists - 2 replies

passive of a different color.

2007-05-31T16:06:32Z

just a little mini-outburst here.... but what is up with people using the phrase "passive-aggressive" to refer to outright aggression? have we completely forgotten the meaning of the word passive?

this link was on boingboing.net today, http://passiveaggressivenotes.wordpress.com/ and while it is really funny, most of it isn't passive at all.

Call me a hair splitter, but writing essentially "I spit in something you ate" is very active to me, no?

posted in Lexical Elitists - 3 replies

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