English

Five Wonderful Phrases That I Resolve to Use More Frequently in Conversation

1. soup to nuts
2. by hook or by crook
3. ass-over-teakettle
4. dollars to doughnuts
5. tits up

There was a story this morning about gay marriage on LA’s 89.3 KPCC. I was infinitely more offended by the fact that reporter Kelly Wilkinson pronounced the word “rural” as “rurl” and the word “unfamiliar” as “unfermiliar” than I was about any part of the gay rights argument.

I got a new insulated coffee mug a few days ago. There was a little slip of paper inside it with “instructions”. This is a coffee mug. It’s very nice and this morning it did an excellent job of keeping my coffee hot while I drove to the office. Here’s a bit of the writing which was printed on the card:

There is also a prominent reference to “the drinking hole” and a caution to keep it away from children when filled with hot liquid. It’s not really clear whether they are warning me about children who may be filled with hot liquid or if they are warning me about hot liquid in the mug.
I feel compelled to tell you that (a) I cannot guarantee that everything I put in this mug will be delicious, (b) I don’t usually make my coffee using a fire, (c) I don’t really consider coffee “food”, (d) there’s no way to “screw the lid tight” because it just pops on and off, and (e) I hardly ever find myself in a field these days. Oh, those wacky Chinese insulated coffee mug manufacturer instruction translators! They just kill me.

Recently I saw a commercial for Sylvan Learning Centers. This is a company that is selling products to help your children do well in school. The ad showed a teenage girl gabbing on the telephone. The voice-over said, “Sally sure can talk fast. We can help her read fast,” or something like that. Apparently grammar is not one of the subjects that Sylvan covers. How does a company that claims to help educate children manage to let a commercial with such an egregious grammatical error get all the way to the television screen? There must not be any English majors working in the marketing department over at ol’ Sylvan.

Fast is an adjective. You don’t do things “fast”. You do things quickly.

Last night I writhed in agony while watching the 11 o’clock news. The local NBC affiliate was running a story about the Sacramento disc jockeys that were fired recently. (The radio personalities had sponsored a contest which led to the death of a woman.) Behind the anchorman the screen displayed DJ’s Fired. I’m sure that employees at my office are sick of hearing me say, “An apostrophe is never used to indicate a plural.” How can NBC not have someone to check what’s going to be printed in big block letters on screen? Why, NBC? Why?

“The ‘plural apostrophe’ (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, ‘Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.’

Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell ‘dogs’, you’re illiterate.”

After several years of mostly neglecting my Flickr account, I have finally started uploading the tons and tons of photos I’ve taken. Flickr is — if you can stomach the missing “e” — an incredibly cool site. Everything is intuitive and as far as I can tell, they haven’t done anything “wrong” anywhere. It’s everything a good website should be.

I particularly like the way they do their best to determine the camera model used to take each photograph. The majority of mine were taken with my PowerShot S500. So many, in fact, that my battery has started to fade away. A full charge used to last days and days, but now it barely powers a day’s worth of snaps. Luckily I have the internet at my command.

It took me about five minutes to find a replacement battery on eBay for only $5.00 (with free shipping!) from a company called iTrimming. Their site isn’t brilliant, but they do have a ton of inexpensive cool little geek accessories. My battery arrived in three days and, as a “bonus”, they included one of those silly cell phone antenna boosters. Now, I’m going to guess that this thing is absolutely worthless. (How can a little sticker with some metallic ridges on it possibly improve my cell phone’s reception?) It was worth it to open the package, though, if only to read the Chinese instructions. “THE ANTENNA WILL WORK MOST EFFICIENTLY WHEN INSTALLED PRORERLY,” it exclaims.

I dig how the package lists “Elevators, tunnels, buildings and more” on its feature list. It doesn’t say that the antenna improves reception in these places or anything; it simply has those words in the list. The “Validity” section of the instructions is the best part. It states, “The Cell Antenna is generally not affected by extreme heat of moisture, however, users ate advised to protect the antenna from physical damage such as scratches. Under normal use, the Internal Antenna will have a 18 month lift span.”

Amazing! According to this test I am an English Genius. It was not a surprise to see that I scored a perfect 100%, actually, on the advanced sections. What was shocking was that I scored in the embarrassingly-low 80s on what were supposed to be the simple sections. That, and the fact that I could perform under 90% on any section and still be considered a “genius” by this test. I wonder if that’s because I did so well or because so many others have done so poorly.

(I don’t know that “English Genius” is how I would describe someone with good skillz in the ol’ vocab department, though. Doesn’t that phrase just make you think that I’m a genius from Merrye Olde England?)

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

The “plural apostrophe” (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale, UGH) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, “Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.”

Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell “dogs,” you’re illiterate.

via strange brew

Someone commented on my mini-rant that the words “itch” and “impact” are not verbs. The reader seemed to suggest that the appearance of these words in “a dictionary” as verbs is a viable argument for them being accepted that way. My reply:

There are many words in “the dictionary” that are not words. You cannot use the fact that hundreds of thousands of people use a word incorrectly as evidence that they are using it correctly. This is a tautology. It is tantamount to saying, “There are hundreds of thousands of murders each year, so we should just accept murder as law.”

Yes, impact likely appears in dictionaries as a verb today. (It didn’t always.) And using it as a verb only displays to those of us with a respect for language and law that a person has a limited vocabulary. One last thing: An itch is a thing. To scratch an itch is to do something. To itch an itch makes no sense. Again, it just shows that the person saying it has a very poor vocabulary (or, alternatively, is extremely lazy … splitting hairs, I know …). It is true that there are a slew of words which are appropriately nouns and verbs. Hammer is a good example. You hammer a nail with a hammer. A knock is another good one. When you knock on a door you are producing a knock. Itch and scratch are not the same, though. You cannot itch an itch. A person saying that sounds about as intelligent as a person saying, “I’m hungry. Let’s go food,” or, “Can you car me to the airport?” So. While I have to admit that you are correct - itch and impact appear in the dictionary as verbs - the point of the entry on which you commented is that no self-respecting writer (or speaker) of English would use them as such.

This is from an English lit. class; it was written on February 10, 1993 …

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

What makes a man a hero? Where lies the line which when crossed changes a mortal man into a legend? Is it at the altar at Canterbury? in the Minotaur’s labyrinth? or is it an age or a time? Does a man become a hero when he transforms from a boy to an adult? or when he stops being a man and becomes a martyr? Where are the heroes of 1993? In whom do the children of this age believe? Like whom do they strive to be? Kennedy, Lennon, and even Superman are dead. World leaders are mockeries of real men, more like Pilates than Thomas Mores. Pop culture’s icons change daily. It is interesting that nearly 600 years ago someone was writing about heroism in a way that can be understood today. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells a tale in which a man is proven to be a hero through the seemingly un-heroic decisions made in the course of numerous tests. Sir Gawain is a hero for the 21st century. He is tried and trapped, he is inundated with opportunities to fail and yet he does not lose. More importantly though, in the end he learns an essential, inescapable fact about himself and human nature.

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I want you to stop what you’re doing. I want you to look at the word below. I want you to speak it aloud.

height

How did it sound? Say it again. Did it rhyme with “right”? It should have. Say it again. Did it rhyme with “byte”? It should have. Say it again. Aloud, damn you. “Height” rhymes with “might”.

Think for a second. When you say it, does it sound like “hythe”? If it does, do you realize that you sound like an idiot whenever you say it?

No, it’s not “slang”.
No, it’s not “an accent”.
No, it’s not “just the way we say it here”.
No, it’s not “the same thing”.
The word is h-e-i-g-h-t. It rhymes with “tight”. If you say it any other way, it doesn’t mean you are being eloquent, or fashionable, or rebellious, or cool, or anything other than ignorant.

Unless you have a lisp. If you have a lisp, then you are excused and I’m sorry for making you feel dumb. People with lisps aren’t dumb. People who don’t have lisps but pronounce the word “height” as if they had a lisp are dumb. Are we clear on that?

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Ending Lists

Why does it seem that nobody knows the correct way to end a comma-delimited list? Did they stop teaching this after 1980 or something? Let’s review, shall we?

First let me explain the philosophy upon which the correct use of “commas in lists” rests. It’s another topic that I realize they almost definitely stopped teaching after 1980: mathematics. Take the following expression:

1 + 1 x 3

If you studied mathematics in school you should remember the algorithm that is used to resolve it. There are no special characters in this expression, so we evaluate any division or multiplication first, then addition and subtraction, and we go from left to right. So this expression - in your mind - looks like this:

1 + whatever I get when I multiply 1 and 3

The expression evaluates to 4, of course. To make the expression easier, you could add brackets or parentheses.

1 + (1 x 3)

That equals 4 as well, and is, in fact, logically equivalent to the first expression.

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“Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools … for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.”

link via the always delightful Follow Me Here