language

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.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

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.

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.”

I think I’m going to have to add some of these to my email sig. Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam! Because, you know, interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europe vincendarum.

These are from a joke email circulating that purports to be “ANALOGIES & METAPHORS FOUND IN HIGH SCHOOL ESSAYS”. I highly doubt that these were actually culled from high school essays. The main reason I don’t believe it is because there is no point of reference. There is no notation or source. The second reason I don’t believe it is because, even if there was a source listed, it’s a freaking chain email, for the love of Pete Sampras. I am skeptical - and you should be, too! - about 73.6% of the news I hear on NPR or NBC; you think I’m going to trust a chain email? And the other strong reason I have to be cynical about the origins of this bit o’ electronically-transmitted comedy is because, with the possible exception of a few cousins and my half-sister, I don’t think I know of anyone sub-20 that can write a complete sentence.

Regardless … it’s still quite a funny collection of sentences.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like socks in a dryer without Cling Free.

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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.

She seemed like a shy girl when they met, but a few drinks later, they were throwing the rubber bald-headed chutney.

explorant adversa viros — “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Literally it means, “misfortunes put men to the test.”

from Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin, by Eugene Ehlrich

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.

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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Do you know what the “M” in “ATM” is? Does it really irk you to see an “ATM Machine Inside” sign? If so, take a look at some of the photos at It’s A Wacky, Wacky World.
Special-bonus-oldie-but-goodie link: The Periodic Table of Rejected Elements