06.16.08
Posted in redundancy, verbal stupidity, wordiness, write tight, writing craft at 6:54 am by Bill Brohaugh
The Write Tight
editor in me likes this:
That’s from the English Fail blog, which is a funny (and distressing) collection of language use subject to ridicule. As one of the commenters noted: “Prepaying in advance seems easy enough. It’s prepaying in arrears that’s tricky.”
That very line of thinking is the foundation of the “As opposed to test” I recommend in Write Tight, and it leads to a couple of recent personal observations in my visit to Planet Redundancy, primarily on the radio:
- “He died of a sudden heart attack.” As opposed to a well-planned heart attack? Attacks of any stripe may have gradual underpinnings, but the attacks themselves occur suddenly. The word attack implies abruptness. He died of a heart attack would have been just as clear.
- “Are you struggling with too much credit card debt?” As opposed to struggling with too little credit card debt? “Are you struggling with credit card debt?” would have sufficed, as struggle clearly communicates that a problem is being fought, particularly since “credit card debt” also signals a problem.
- “Fine-toothed comb.” A very young comb, as it apparently is teething (and doing a good job of it, as well). Though at least one dictionary accepts “toothed” as an alternative, I contend that “fine-tooth” is not only shorter (yes, just slightly), but also less subject to sad “teething” jokes in blogs.
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06.11.08
Posted in humor, redundancy, writing craft at 6:27 am by Bill Brohaugh
Whenever I speak at writers conferences on the topic of “Write Tight,” I offer a free copy of my book of the same name to the audience member who can guess what this bloated, euphemistic product description is intended to describe: “hydro-force blast cup.”
Though it actually describes a common household tool, a “hydro-force blast cup” sounds military, doesn’t it? The military, after all, is good at such euphemistic bombast, such as from the Vietnam days where using Agent Orange for defoliation was called “resources control management” (sounds like they were filing all jungle plants in a big cabinet in alphabetical order) or more recently to former military officers appearing on news shows to offer “independent” analysis of the Iraq war as “message force multipliers.” In the latter case, I bow to The Daily Show’s recent unveiling of this euphemism, paired ironically with an instance where the military titled a report with much wordage, yet direct wordage:
Such euphemisms as “message force multipliers” should be flushed, but unfortunately they seem to proliferate to the point of clogging up the communications pipelines—and when that happens, it may be time to bring out the hydro-force blast cup: the handy-dandy toilet plunger.
(Shameless Plug Alert [avert your eyes]: Write Tight is new in paperback from Sourcebooks. End Shameless Plug Alert.)
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06.09.08
Posted in Shakespeare, myths and misconceptions, redundancy at 7:06 am by Bill Brohaugh
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, dinosaurs and other thought-to-be extinct creatures have survived on a South American plateau. Look, up there—pterodactyls! Over there—a stegosaurus! And the rarest find of all—a group decended from Elizabethan colonists who still speak perfect Shakespearean English!
Of course, the children of the colonists are not denizens of the Lost World. They actually live in the Appalachian Mountains (or maybe in a holler—a real Elizabethan word, that). Or so goes a myth as old as the dinosaurs and, despite A. Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton, even more persistent. This is one of a number of Shakespeare-related canards discussed by David Crystal in his recent Think On My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language
. “Anyone who believes this is, as Thersites says of Agamemnon [in Troylus and Cressida], ‘not so much brain as ear-wax,’” Crystal writes. So much ear-wax that they can’t hear the arguments against the probability of an entire language being preserved like a prehistoric insect encased in amber (which is not a type of hardened ear-wax, by the way). “It’s a myth born of ignorance of the basic facts about the way language changes.” Shakespeare himself, Crystal notes, “even refers at one point to language change taking place within a generation. Mercutio [in Romeo and Juliet] sneeringly describes the way Tybalt speaks; he calls him one of the ‘new tuners of accent.’”
Good stuff for the wrong-wrong-wrong crowd, and recommended—though more than a bit pricey at an $80 list price. I also recommend Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left
, which takes an Everything You Know About English Is Wrong attitude in expressing counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!
(now with pictures in addition to exclamation points!).
Crystal’s blog deserves regular visits, as well.
Think of the possibilities: M. Night Shyamalan and Michael Crichton co-script a film in which a secret village of Shakespearean speakers finally surfaces amongst crop circles in a corn field. Coming soon to a theater near someone: The Lost Word!
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06.04.08
Posted in grammar, redundancy, writing craft at 7:37 pm by Bill Brohaugh
One of my consistent writing foibles is forgetting to close parenthetical thoughts (leaving me with odd sentences like this. Perhaps my subconscious is trying to tell me to skip the parentheticals entirely. After all, like footnotes and phrases like “by the way,” parenthetical text is often superfluous—if it weren’t, why wouldn’t you elevate it to the main text in the first place?
So I have to be kind to the following news quote from 12/14/2007, one that exhibits the danger of a lost comma that demarcates the end of a clause:
Stuart Bowen, special inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction gestures during a news conference in Paris . . .
Lacking the important second comma, this story apparently introduces us to a new governmental post: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Gestures.
The ability of English words to cross functional boundaries simultaneously gives writers and speakers freedom and pitfalls. The word gestures in the above quote, without punctuational guidance, seems at first glance to be a noun. With such flex words, we must construct sentences carefully to give organizational and contextual clues to just what part of speech is being called for.
But let’s return to this story: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Gestures. I can only imagine what those gestures might be.
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05.29.08
Posted in redundancy, word history, wordiness, write tight at 6:24 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Noted and cringed at:
A screen shot from the home page of us.iams.com, web site of IAMS Pet Food:
Yes, up there just above the picture of the dog eating a small alien, it says
Learn About 7 Signs of Healthy Vitality
One would hope it would be healthy. Vital in its original use (first recorded in Chaucer, according to OED.com) meant “infused with the essence of life.” The noun form vitality, in use by the late 1600s, originally meant the life force itself. Of course, more figurative meanings ensued, but at its core, vitality is life and the ability to sustain life. The IAMS slogan that you see to the left of the picture makes perfect sense in that context, though perhaps that wasn’t the marketing department’s intent: “Life’s Better.” Better than the alternative? Well, one would assume yes, but let’s return to “Healthy Vitality.”
The phrase is not technically repetitive, though it is redundant (in that redundant means “unnecessary” or “superfluous” and not necessarily duplicating). “Healthy vitality” is good. “Unhealthy vitality” is Dawn of the Dead.
Nonessential Side Note Alert: Vital as a noun appeared about a century after vitality–in the obsolete sense of “the essence of life.” As a noun meaning “something essential,” vital was created by backformation from vitals, which were the essential parts, and not a shortening of “vital signs” as it is used in the medical world today. End Nonessential (and therefore redundant) Side Note Alert.
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