In one of those “Why didn’t you just ask me and pay me the research grant?” studies, McMaster University has discovered that suffering from seborrheic dermatitis is more severe than suffering from dandruff. Or so the patient perceives—same condition, different names. Give a condition a name worthy of a TV commercial “doctor,” and people get scared. Got it—people don’t understand jargon. Give me the grant money, please. And the newer the concocted medicalese, the greater the likelihood that people will perceive the jargon as more serious. Got it—people fear medical conditions they haven’t heard of more than they fear ones they’ve heard about for years. Give me the grant money, please.
This study demonstrates that the use of medical language in communication can induce bias in perception; a simple switch in terminology results in a disease being perceived as more serious, more likely to be a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition. These findings regarding the conceptualization of disease have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, advertising, and public policy.
One technical phrase used in the study seems to operate in the opposite direction: “cerebrovascular accident.” On the surface, that doesn’t sound all that bad. It was an accident. Stubbed my cerebellum. Give me a Band-Aid. Just a little boo-boo. The phrase seems to inappropriately disguise the severity of the event: a stroke.
But a figurative cerebrovascular accident is just what you might experience if your doctor were to announce that you have been diagnosed with androgenic alopecia. Don’t panic. Just throw away the comb. It’s male pattern baldness. Don’t allow the doctor to infect you with verbomedicyclical terrhor—the fear of big medical words.
. . . or, “Maybe She Should Join the Progressive Party”
Because my friend JohnnyB over at Late for the Sky is bothered by lists of random thoughts in blogs, I will honor his disdain by a list of recent random unthoughts—unthoughts unthunked when using the language:
Top of the list is one linguistically ungifted governor of Alaska. I know. Taking potshots at Gov. Palin’s syntactical discombulations is like shooting wolves in a barrel, but there are times when I should consider retitling this blog “Everything Sarah Palin Knows About English Is Wrong.” The latest:
I would be happy to get to do whatever is asked of me to help progress this nation.
I would ask her to help progress the language by not using progress as a transitive verb. Though such use has a history, progress-as-transitive is awkward and has no unique function, in that we have a number of synonyms that do the job better. And speaking of history, here’s an Oxford English Dictionary citation that meta-defines the word (from 1814): “Nor have there been wanting projects among them ["them" being us Americans] for getting rid of the English language, not merely by barbarizing it—as when they progress a bill . . .”
This headline appeared on a Washington Post story about scalping Inauguration tickets: “Trying to Keep Inaugural Tickets Priceless.” The Post means free, of course, as priceless means “so valuable that price cannot be determined”—or in the phrasing of the MasterCard commercials, “because there are some things money can’t buy.” In fact, I first thought the headline was an attempt at snowcloning the long-time MasterCard campaign, but the story contains no other evidence of such a connection. The Washington Post—50 cents. Using the right word—priceless.
Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation . . . Now is the time to move forward together, start progressing America.
A new book from Oxford University Press, A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, has researched an important topic, resulting in a list of the top ten annoying phrases (you may be surprised that “Mr. Brohaugh has an opinion” is not among them).
They are:
At the end of the day
Fairly unique
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Absolutely
It’s a nightmare
Shouldn’t of
24/7
It’s not rocket science
Some classics there, particularly #4 and #10. I puzzle over “shouldn’t of,” though. Is this in written English or spoken English? As with such phrasings as “I should of looked up the answer to that question,” the of is a phonetic spelling of a contraction. “I should of” represents “I should’ve.” The phrase “shouldn’t of” perhaps attracts particular attraction because it is an unusual instance of a double contraction: shouldn’t've. Multiple contractions are hardly unknown—consider the pronunciation of a word I’m sure you use on a daily basis: forecastle pronounced as fo’c’sl.
I’m curious about what “a safe pair of hands” means. Is it British? Or am I just cloistered? I’ve never heard it before so haven’t yet had a chance to be annoyed.
As for me, I’m actually going to nominate actually as my greatest source of annoyance at (you knew I was going to annoy you and say it) this moment in time.
(Might I also note that to my moderately math-trained eye, 24/7 seems to equate to 3.428571429.)
Now come post-election reports of a certain VP candidate not knowing that Africa comprises several countries, and is not a country unto itself. I mention this by way of background, because I want to talk about a word used in reporting this claim—which may be true or may be disgruntled exaggeration. The word appears here:
According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked “a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency,” in part because she didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA, and she “didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself.”
I suspect whoever first spoke the word knowledgeability—either Cameron or the source Cameron was quoting—really meant knowledge, given the fact that the examples given were bits of knowledge. Perhaps knowledgeability—the ability to be knowledgeable—was indeed the intended word. I’m skeptical, though, because making such nuanced distinctions seems out of character with certain elements of “news” coverage.
So, I chalk knowledgeability up to verbosity (or verbosability), and then begin to wonder about “a degree of.” What does that mean? I contend that either a candidate has the knowledge or knowledgeability or knowledgeabilitosity to handle the job or not. Why not come out and say it bluntly? The claim is harsh enough to begin with—why try to dance around it with clumsy ballet-shoe phrasings? The candidate, the source or the reporter could have said, lacked “knowledge necessary to be a running mate.”
But, as I said, this claim could be true, or it could be exaggeration or hyperbole. Was the source knowledgeable? Or did the source know?
All the following is said because I cherish words, and the wonderful freedom to use them:
In a previous post, I wrote about the familial heirs to the name “Maverick,” one of the surnames that have led to now-common English eponyms—that is, words resulting from proper names. Modern-day Mavericks (the ones legally named, in upper-case letters) have chafed against McCain/Palin stealing an important part of the Mavericks’ proud family history for political purposes.
Even though the Mavericks aren’t “the mainstream media,” Sarah Palin probably considers their vocal disdain as suppression of Palin’s own freedom of speech. Their opinions, you see, apparently violate her First Amendment rights.
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
Gov. Palin obviously has not read the Bill of Rights, you betcha.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Questioning is not abridgement. Opinions are not abridgement. Dictionaries aren’t scarce (nor is the text of the Constitution inaccessible).
So, please, Gov. Palin, do not consider my questioning your negative campaigning against the Constitution as eroding the First Amendment; instead view it as my celebrating it, exercising it, wallowing joyfully in the freedom of it. There are nations where the government can coerce the press to shut up. America is not one of them. Perhaps you can look such facts up on Wikipedia.
Though I wish I could say that Gov. Palin was correct in her self-characterization as maverick, at least in the context of her interpretations of the Constitution, such interpretations seem to be very much following the branded-cattle path established by the Cheney-Bush Orwellian disregard for our most important treasure (quick example, “Wiretapping Is Freedom”).
Thus, because of the McCain/Palin abuse of the word maverick and because of Palin’s desire to continue the Bush Administration’s degradation of the Constitution, I would be pleased if the word lovers and freedom lovers who visit this space go to the polls Nov. 4, and substitute the eponym maverick with a stronger eponym—the one taken from Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott—and captain-charles their candidacy.
If John McCain’s supporters are hoping for a “Bradley effect” bounce on Election Day, some pollsters and strategists say they may have another thing coming.
All right. That’s a little silly. Sure, in this instance, the thing is indeed a horrible manifestation, but a verbal one known as an eggcorn—a misheard word (taking its name from a mishearing of acorn.
People who think one way, according to the cliche, have another think coming—a bit of verb/noun wordplay. The thing/think misuse is unfortunately widespread: Google search returns 160,000 hits (though fewer than I’d expected).
Plouffe said the campaign is pleased that a large part of the early vote so far is coming from sporadic and new voters. “The dye is being cast even as we speak,” he said.
Is casting dye kind of like slinging mud? And is it clothing dye? Hair dye? Princess Dye?
Well, I’m getting silly again. But the eggcorn here is equally silly. The “dye” being cast is a “die.” And it is not the manufacturing die (which is cut, not cast), though once a die has been cut, the product has been preordained, as it were. But the preordination comes in rolling a die—the singular of dice. Once you have cast a die, the outcome is out of your hands. In this case, the eggcorn is visual, as Mr. Plouffe likely didn’t specify the spelling of the word die when he spoke it. Though he’d have been doing the writer a favor if he had.
The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers
That’s Maureen Dowd. Hoi polloi from the Greek literally means “the many.” Hoity-toity, a duplicative (think flimflam, dillydally, etc.) means, to put it informally, “all uppity and stuff.” And Dowd gets them both right.
Hoi polloi is often misused to mean the phrase’s very opposite—”the elite”—likely because of comparison or confusion with the similar-sounding hoity-toity. In an odd way, hoity-toity has experienced a similar reversal, though in the opposite direction. Hoity-toity, meaning “putting on airs” in a mocking sense, results from the verb hoit, which means, roughly, “to act the hoyden”—to be rude and boorish. Which is an accusation that the hoity-toity might be prone to assign to the hoi polloi.
(And if you persnickitors are going to grouse that “the hoi polloi” is redundant, bring it on. I’m ready for you.)
Let’s pause in our verbal travels—let us sojourn—to examine a line from a David Brooks editorial:
They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them.
Despite their similarity (and common origin), sojourn and journey are not synonymous. A sojourn is a pause in a journey, a temporary stay. A sojourner is a visitor, a temporary lodger. Is Brooks using the word sojourner correctly here? I tend to think so, though I can’t say for certain, as the context could allow either interpretation of the word. Brooks likely means that Obama pauses to visit each situation, though “go through” tends to imply otherwise.
Either way, the word gave me pause and an excuse to linger over another interesting word, so to invite a brief stay by you, my fellow sojourner.
I could spend considerable time micro-diagramming last night’s debate with persnickitations aimed at, among other gaffes, redundancies. Mr. McCain spoke of “first beginning.” Mr. Schieffer noted that something was “clearly obvious” (as opposed to indistinctly obvious?). Mr. Obama noted: “When Nixon said it, we imported from 17 to 34 percent of our foreign oil.” Isn’t 100% of foreign oil, by definition, imported? Then there are the spoonerisms and the “Senator Government” Freudian gaffes and the like.
But my main concern is Mr. McCain’s Orwellian twisting of the word eloquence. In 1984, “War Is Peace.” In 2008, eloquence is deception. In two sarcastic instances of “praise” for Mr. Obama’s eloquence, the second of which involved using air quotes to visually make his point, Mr. McCain implied that Mr. Obama was really using language to deceive rather than using language to clearly make his points. Mr. McCain, if you’re going to attack what you wish to convince us is “just words and no more,” use the right words to do it—otherwise you are guilty of your own accusation.
There’s amazing power in that meta-word—a word that describes its own meaning. At one point earlier in the campaign, Mr. McCain disdained the power of the word by attacking Mr. Obama as “just a person of words” (note that Mr. McCain was using, yes, words).
This wordishly wordy attack is, of course, not unique these days. Quoting the words (yes, words!) of James Wood in The New Yorker:
The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.”
Yet, a few years back Phyllis Schlafly spoke with me for an hour on her radio show about, um, words. I was a guest, schlepping my book Write Tight wherever I could, and I suppose that one of my stances in Write Tight—against ballooning the language for the purpose of political correctness—had attracted her attention. These years later, why are words now suddenly her enemy, and the current campaigners’ enemy as well?
My grandfather was a farmer. My father was an auto mechanic. My mother was a short-order cook. They worked with their hands (to the point where my grandfather had lost portions of two fingers to farm machinery), and I love and respect them. They, in turn, returned the love and respect even though I (disdain me! hate me!) am an “elitist who worked with words.” And still do.
A lot of interesting words are being bandied about in this election and the coverage thereof. And as always in such matters, people don’t seem to care about exactly what those words mean (to the point of Orwellian “War Is Peace” sorts of rhetoric on the order of “Attack Is Respect,” but that’s a different topic). Here are four examples of words we don’t see much (in two cases, I’d welcome seeing them more), with but fumbled eloquence:
, has researched an important topic, resulting in a list of the top ten annoying phrases (you may be surprised that “Mr. Brohaugh has an opinion” is not among them). 
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
