Cantankerous commentary on what we speak and why we speak it, from Bill Brohaugh
Kind readers and fellow word lovers, you gotta love a good phrase:
heretical anapostrophism
No comment, because I can’t top such wonderful deconstructionist constructionism, except to point to the source of the phrase (and to some delightful commentary from Motivated Grammar, which alerted me to the phrase).
All I can say is, fercri’s’sake’s.
OK, so I’ve been away a bit. My thanks to the folks who wrote to check my pulse. Still pulsing, I’m happy to report, but without the boil about the language I was able to work up in recent months. I try to blame it on a quieter media season with the election and its bloviations over, but in all honesty I just got exceedingly busy in other aspects of this thing we call life.
But the blood-boil level perked up a bit yesterday when I saw this news story about the unrest in Greece:
Terrified workers in banks along Athens’ central Syntagma Square watched in fear as protesters shattered windows just replaced days ago after being damaged in the worst riots Greece has experienced in decades.
Here I would campaign for Athens’s to indicate that Syntagma Square is located in singular Athens and not a group of communities each named Athen. But there’s little boil factor in that. And I strongly suggest positioning the word just before the concept it truly modifies—”days ago”—but, again, a little blood percolation, but no boil yet. Then there’s “workers in banks.” Were they, say, construction workers who just happened to be in the banks cashing their paychecks? I suspect that they were instead “bank workers”—a clearer, shorter, more direct phrasing. Again, pulse quickened, but the little platelets are still floating around in conditions under 212 degrees.
The vascular steam engine revs up around mid-sentence. Imagine this Write Tight
So, to reassure my kind friends who checked in on me, the pulse is still there. And so is the re-pulse.
This is (in case anyone is confused) a language blog. But for the moment, let’s stop doing the English and start doing the math. From a recent news story:
Mathematicians in California could be in line for a $100,000 prize (£54,000) for finding a new prime number which has 13 million digits.
Prime numbers can be divided only by themselves and one.
Not that I’m truly fretting about it, but let’s consider the goal of this contest. Was the goal set out as “Find a new prime number” (with this story reporting the successful discovery of one that involved 13 million digits)? Or was it set out “Find a new prime number with 13 million digits, no more and no less” (which the California math geeks have discovered)? I suspect the former—in which case, a little comma would have clarified.
“A new prime number which has 13 million digits,” without a comma after number, seems restrictive in the way that saying “a new prime number that has 13 million digits” would restrict. I think I perceive it this way because of the function of sound and timing a comma introduces in such situations, in that restrictive clauses beginning with that aren’t preceded with a comma, while nonrestrictive clauses beginning with which are.
I say, couldn’t a number with 13 million digits have been able to lend a comma to that sentence? Not one?
By the way, a bit of word history that you will see on the bullshitternet soon because I’m making it up: The term “prime number” derives from the financial world. It is created by adding 1 to the “sub-prime number”—the number of dollars involved in the recently proposed government bailout of collapsing sub-prime-deluded banks, which also involves 13 million digits.
Wake up, kiddies. Time to open your parens (short for parentheses in the publishing world) under the punctuation tree. But remember, this day, some of Brohaugh’s important punctuation rules:
As regular readers (or perhaps more accurately, reader, singular) of this blog might infer, I’m a foodie as well as a wordie. A barbecue-competition judge for nearly 20 years, a man who once built a house that a friend described as a “three-bedroom kitchen,” and the self-promoting author of The Grill of Victory: Hot Competition on the Barbecue Circuit
On this National Punctuation Day Eve, can there be any better folding in (cooking technical phrase, that) of those passions than this delightful post, in which Karen the SoupAddict notes, “my tomatoes and I have started a punctuation scrapbook to the mark (ahem) the day”?
For lots of wry and realistic passion about food, for a snap better than that from a freshly picked green bean (I can indulge in such analogies because I grew up on a Wisconsin farm), and for your comrade-in-spirit-of-making-fun-of-this-blog’s-author, enjoy SoupAddict’s Blog.
(I suspect SoupKaren is now going to curse herself for teaching me as much HTML as she did . . .)
When I alerted you to the punctuational paraphernalia available at the official National Punctuation Day web site a couple of days back, I wrote that you could buy “greeting cards, posters and ‘latte mugs’ in addition to T-shirts” there. I hope that nationalpunctuationday.com appreciated the plug despite the fact that I didn’t, as would be the site’s preference, set enough commas into the wild in that phrase. Here’s a “news story” appearing on the site:
Punctuation Man, a leading authority on punctuation and teaching punctuation to elementary school children, today announced his decision to fully support the use of the serial comma.
Shunned by the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook, the serial comma is still widely accepted by educators, grammarians, and literary circles, including Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and the Chicago Manual of Style. The announcement coincides with the National Education Association’s (NEA) “Read Across America” child literacy program, to be held nationwide on Monday, March 3.
Well, shunned is a bit strong. It’s not like the AP is, like Dexter, a serial killer hunting down and eliminating criminal serial commas. Here’s the AP’s advice: “Use commas to separate elements in a series, but do not put a comma before the conjunction in a simple series: The flag is red, white and blue.” Note “simple series,” as AP does not universally “shun” the serial comma and offers instances where it’s necessary. One such instance is a final series item that itself carries the word and: I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast. The AP also asks that the serial comma be placed before a complex concluding series element.
As with most things lingual, “rules” (if there are such things) are made to be bent elegantly. Plunking down a comma in a series just because it’s a rule, darnit! is not writing; it is following insert-tab-A-into-slot-B mechanical instruction.
Thoughts on when to use the serial comma:
With that, I shall cease, and desist.
The economy being what it is, retailers across the country are breaking out the holiday-themed merchandise ever earlier. Halloween displays went up around St. Patrick’s Day, Back-to-School displays went up three weeks before graduation day, and I believe I just saw the first display for Christmas of 2009. Or so it seems.
But, alas, you’re probably behind on your shopping for National Punctuation Day, right around the corner on Sept. 24th. Not me. I’ve already erected my punctuation tree. I have to admit to using a dollar sign ($) instead of the traditional whatchamacallit-A (Å) for my tree. Yes, the tree I use is artificial, but it’s so much easier to erect and store than the natural trees, and either way, the most important moment is topping the tree with that little star (which all you Punctuation Day carolers know from “O Aster Isk of Bethlehem”). I’ve decorated the front of the house with strings of comma lights (my wife claims that they are actually BBQ-themed lights in the shape of red peppers, but I think she has an overactive imagination). Oh, and the ampersands are hung o’er the fireplace with care in hopes that Santubordinate Clause soon will be there.
This National Punctuation Day, I’m hoping to find a special T-shirt under the punctuation tree. It says “Is there a hyphen in anal-retentive?”, and unlike my silliness above, that very T-shirt exists. It’s one of several fun products from the official National Punctuation Day web site. Such slogans are available on greeting cards, posters and “latte mugs” in addition to T-shirts. Delight your beloved anal-retentive persnickitors with such a goodie on Punctuation Day morning or Punctuation Day eve, depending on your individual traditions.
However, beware that Punctuation Day celebrants sometimes have vastly different belief systems. More on that anon, as we approach the big day, baking our period-shaped Punctuation Day cookies and popping popcorn for the tree’s ellipses garlands….
Noted and cringed at:
In an otherwise enlightening blog entry:
When I came out of grad school I landed a literary internship at the infamous Joseph Papp Public Theater in NYC and I had the fortune of co-dramaturging Don Cheadle’s play GROOMED.
Infamous? Has this renowned theater gone bad? Perhaps there were student’s there:
As has been pointed out, maybe this is correct, after all—maybe it’s simply a contraction of singular “student is.”
Or perhaps the theater is infamous because the actor’s, intern’s and student’s are dodging golf balls. Here’s a note from infamous JohnnyB, regarding a newspaper article about a school next door to a driving range:
I found this quote interesting.
So far no children have been hit by errant golf balls, although some have flown over the playground and a few cars have been hit.
Flying children would seem to be more noteworthy than flying golf balls, but that’s just my opinion.
We have all skeptiquoted someone at some time or another. “He said he was ‘visiting a sick friend,’” when the he in question was dallying with his mistress—that sort of thing. Placing the words “visiting a sick friend” in quotes communicates skepticism, a sly wink, or bold acknowledgement that the quoted material involves at best a euphemism and at worst a lie.
So why do so many people place quote marks around words and phrases that are hardly dubious, and clearly true? That’s the thrust of a fun blog called (I won’t put the name in quotes), The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.
Now, at least one word observer contends that such “usage” is not unnecessary at all—just misunderstood. Specifically, I’m referring to Grant Barrett, who has joined Martha Barnette on the A Way With Words NPR program (I say “away with words,” too! They’re so troublesome . . .). As you’ll see here, Barrett points out that such quote marks are intended for emphasis, and he calls them “shout quotes.” Barrett’s point is good—in that the intent in overused quote marks usually is indeed emphasis. But we should judge not intent but success, not what the writer sought to communicate but is communicated. The primary uses of quotes—to indicate specific spoken or written words, and to signal sardonic, doubtful or smirking reference—are too powerful for “emphasis” to overcome such implications. This is particularly so when the shout toolkit has so many other devices. Am I “shouting” by using those quotes, or do I accomplish SHOUTING shouting *shouting* shouting !shouting! shouting shouting more efficiently with other typographic devices? (I’d do a double underline if it didn’t mean getting a Ph.D in HTML coding . . .).
Of course, we’ll continue to see “quote” mis”use”, and I’ll grant that it might even become increasingly accepted should it spreads. I accept and cherish a changing language, though I champion change when it fills a void—and using quotes to “shout” when you can SHOUT, AND SO ON in so many other ways is redundant “at best” and confusing and mockable at worst.
By the by, Barrett refers to the skeptical quotes as “scare quotes.” I like to call them “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” quotes. Know what I mean? Then say no more!
With the ‘08 Presidential campaign flaring up . . . um, heating up, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong nominates a candidate with increasing, undeniable presence:
Check out the “news story” here.
Bill Brohaugh is the author of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
