'Ate' Or 'Et'?

'Ate' Or 'Et'? New British Library Project Charts The Way Pronunciation Is Changing

(AP) LONDON (AP) - If you say tomato, and I say tomahto, the British Library wants to know.

The research institution is inviting people to have their voices recorded as part of a project to chart the way pronunciation and accents in English are changing.

The library wants visitors to read aloud a passage from a children's book - "Mr. Tickle" - so linguists can compare the way people make vowel sounds, learn how they deal with words ending in "ing" and hear whether they pronounce "garage" to rhyme with marriage or mirage.

Roger Walshe, the library's head of learning, said Thursday that the result will be "a snapshot of English in the early 21st century."

Visitors to the Evolving English exhibition, which opens Nov.12, will be able to record themselves in sound booths, and others can submit audio clips on the library's website, www.bl.uk. The results will be preserved for future researchers in the library's sound archive.

The exhibition traces the development of English over more than 1,000 years, through displays that range from an original manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf" to the King James Bible and Victorian pamphlets on how to speak properly.

Just what constitutes "proper" pronunciation remains a thorny issue - especially in Britain, whose many accents can often pinpoint the speaker's regional origin and class background. George Bernard Shaw's observation in "Pygmalion" that "it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him" still holds a large measure of truth.

Yet linguists say pronunciation is constantly evolving. Young people in Britain are increasingly likely to call the eighth letter of the alphabet "haitch," rather than "aitch," and pronounce the past tense of "to eat" as "ate" instead of the old-fashioned "et."

"There is no right or wrong," Walshe said. "There are just different usages.

"People have always been concerned about change and at times have tried to prevent it, but the change is unstoppable.

"It is almost like a Darwinian evolution. When English is transplanted or grows up in a new area like the United States it will evolve in a new way, but there will be shared characteristics, so you can see the common ancestor."

In turn, the young linguistic upstarts often influence the mother tongue. Britons increasingly pronounce "schedule" in the American way - "skedule" rather than "shedule."

"I heard a politician the other day talking about 'stepping up to the plate,'" Walshe said. "No one plays baseball here, but you hear that phrase."

The $2-million Comma

GRANT ROBERTSON

Toronto Globe and Mail
July 8, 2006

It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada.

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation.

The controversial comma sent lawyers and telecommunications regulators scrambling for their English textbooks in a bitter 18-month dispute that serves as an expensive reminder of the importance of punctuation.

Rogers thought it had a five-year deal with Aliant Inc. to string Rogers’ cable lines across thousands of utility poles in the Maritimes for an annual fee of $9.60 per pole. But early last year, Rogers was informed that the contract was being cancelled and the rates were going up. Impossible, Rogers thought, since its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years.

Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed. The construction of a single sentence in the 14-page contract allowed the entire deal to be scrapped with only one-year’s notice, the company argued.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

Rogers’ intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn’t have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation,” the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year’s written notice,” the regulator said.

Rogers was dumbfounded. The company said it never would have signed a contract to use roughly 91,000 utility poles that could be cancelled on such short notice. Its lawyers tried in vain to argue the intent of the deal trumped the significance of a comma. “This is clearly not what the parties intended,” Rogers said in a letter to the CRTC.

But the CRTC disagreed. And the consequences are significant.

The contract would have shielded Rogers from rate increases that will see its costs jump as high as $28.05 per pole. Instead, the company will likely end up paying about $2.13-million more than expected, based on rough calculations.

Despite the victory, Aliant won’t reap the bulk of the proceeds. The poles are mostly owned by Fredericton-based utility NB Power, which contracted out the administration of the business to Aliant at the time the contract was signed.

Neither Rogers nor Aliant could be reached for comment on the ruling. In one of several letters to the CRTC, Aliant called the matter “a basic rule of punctuation,” taking a swipe at Rogers’ assertion that the comma could be ignored.

“This is a classic case of where the placement of a comma has great importance,” Aliant said.

A Rose By Another Name?

Here is a fascinating list I came across at Mental Floss


What 10 Classic Books Were Almost Called

by Stacy Conradt - October 10, 2010 - 8:44 PM

Remember when your high school summer reading list included Atticus, Fiesta, and The Last Man in Europe? You will once you see what these books were renamed before they hit bookshelves.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald went through quite a few titles for his most well-known book before deciding on The Great Gatsby. If he hadn’t arrived at that title, high school kids would be pondering the themes of Trimalchio in West Egg; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover.

2. George Orwell’s publisher didn’t feel the title to Orwell’s novel The Last Man in Europe was terribly commercial and recommended using the other title he had been kicking around—1984.

3. Before it was Atlas Shrugged, it was The Strike, which is how Ayn Rand referred to her magnum opus for quite some time. In 1956, a year before the book was released, she decided the title gave away too much plot detail. Her husband suggested Atlas Shrugged and it stuck.

4. The title of Bram Stoker’s famous Gothic novel sounded more like a spoof before he landed on Dracula—one of the names Stoker considered was The Dead Un-Dead.

5. Ernest Hemingway’s original title for The Sun Also Rises was used for foreign-language editions—Fiesta. He changed the American English version to The Sun Also Rises at the behest of his publisher.

6. It’s because of Frank Sinatra that we use the phrase “Catch-22” today. Well, sort of. Author Joseph Heller tried out Catch-11, but because the original Ocean’s Eleven movie was newly in theaters, it was scrapped to avoid confusion. He also wanted Catch-18, but, again, a recent publication made him switch titles to avoid confusion: Leon Uris’ Mila 18. The number 22 was finally chosen because it was 11 doubled.

7. To Kill a Mockingbird was simply Atticus before Harper Lee decided the title focused too narrowly on one character.

8. An apt precursor to the Pride and Prejudice title Jane Austen finally decided on: First Impressions.

9. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Secretly, apparently. Mistress Mary, taken from the classic nursery rhyme, was the working title for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

10. Originally called Ulysses in Dublin, James Joyce’s Dubliners featured characters that would later appear in his epic Ulysses a few years later.

I Missed This - Another Sad Passing

Edwin Newman, Journalist, Dies at 91

Jerry Mosey/Associated Press


Edwin Newman, the genteelly rumpled, genially grumpy NBC newsman who was equally famous as a stalwart defender of the honor of English, has died in Oxford, England. He was 91.

He died of pneumonia on Aug. 13, but the announcement was delayed until Wednesday so that the family could spend time grieving privately, his lawyer, Rupert Mead, said. He said Mr. Newman and his wife had moved to England in 2007 to live closer to their daughter.

Mr. Newman, recognizable for his balding head and fierce dark eyebrows, was known to three decades of postwar television viewers for his erudition, droll wit and seemingly limitless penchant for puns. (There was, for example, the one about the man who blotted his wet shoes with newspapers, explaining, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”) He began his association with NBC in the early 1950s and was variously a correspondent, anchor and critic there before retiring in 1984.

An anchor on the “Today” show in the early 1960s and a familiar presence on the program for many years afterward, Mr. Newman also appeared regularly on “Meet the Press.” He won seven New York Emmy Awards for his work in the 1960s and ’70s with NBC’s local affiliate, WNBC-TV, on which he was a drama critic and the host of the interview program “Speaking Freely.”

He also moderated two presidential debates — the first Ford-Carter debate in 1976 and the second Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984 — and covered some of the signal events of the 20th century, from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Newman’s best-known books, both published by Bobbs-Merrill, are “Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?” (1974) and “A Civil Tongue” (1976). In them he declared what he called “a protective interest in the English language,” which, he warned, was falling prey to windiness, witlessness, ungrammaticality, obfuscation and other depredations.

But Mr. Newman “was never preachy or pedantic,” Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of the NBC “Nightly News,” said in a statement.

“To those of us watching at home,” Mr. Williams added, “he made us feel like we had a very smart, classy friend in the broadcast news business.”

Mr. Newman was fond of saying that he had “a spotless record of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as he told Newsweek in 1961. There was the time in 1952, for instance, that he left London for Morocco, only to learn on arriving that King George VI of England had just died.

But in fact Mr. Newman helped cover numerous historic events, among them the shootings of Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. He announced the death of President John F. Kennedy on NBC radio.

He also narrated many well-received NBC television documentaries, including “Japan: East Is West” (1961) and “Politics: The Outer Fringe” (1966), about extremism.

His role as a moderator for presidential debates seemed only fitting, for it was the dense thicket of political discourse, Mr. Newman often said, that helped spur him to become a public guardian of grammar and usage.

Among the sins that set Mr. Newman’s teeth articulately on edge were these: all jargon; idiosyncratic spellings like “Amtrak”; the non-adverbial use of “hopefully” (he was said to have had a sign in his office reading, “Abandon ‘Hopefully’ All Ye Who Enter Here”); “y’know” as a conversational stopgap; a passel of prefixes and suffixes (“de-,” “non-,” “un-,” “-ize,” “-wise” and “-ee”); and using a preposition to end a sentence with.

This prescriptive approach to English did not win favor everywhere. In an article in The Atlantic in 1983, the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg took Mr. Newman and the author Richard Mitchell to task for writing “books about the language that rarely, if ever, cite a dictionary or a standard grammar; evidently one just knows these things.”

Mr. Newman’s other books include a comic novel, “Sunday Punch” (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Other honors are an Overseas Press Club Award in 1961 and a Peabody Award in 1966.

His survivors include his wife, the former Rigel Grell; a daughter, Nancy Drucker; and a sister, Evelyn Newman Lee.

Despite his acclaim, Mr. Newman’s constitutional waggishness kept him from taking himself too seriously. In 1984, the year he retired from NBC, he appeared on the network as a host of “Saturday Night Live.” (One of the show’s sketches portrayed a distraught woman phoning a suicide hot line. Mr. Newman answers — and corrects her grammar.) A few years before that he delivered the news, in front of a studio audience, on David Letterman’s NBC morning show. He was also a guest on the game show “Hollywood Squares.”In 1996 Mr. Newman shocked the journalistic establishment by serving as the anchor of the USA cable channel program “Weekly World News,” a short-lived television version of the supermarket tabloid. Among the “news” items Mr. Newman introduced was a report on a South Seas island tribe that worshiped the boxing promoter Don King.

“Apparently it is thought that my presence lends some authority,” Mr. Newman told The Washington Post that year. He added, “If I’m leading into a story about a couple with a poltergeist in their lavatory, I have to do it soberly.”

Strictly Speaking

You Can Look It Up!

Today is Dictionary Day!!


Noah Webster said -

"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground."



If you have a favorite “color” rather than a favorite “colour,” thank Noah Webster. The father of the American dictionary was born today in 1758, a day also celebrated as Dictionary Day.

Webster believed that just as America had established its independence from England, so should American English establish its independence from British English. A teacher by profession, he began his crusade in the classroom, where students were still studying from textbooks imported from England.

Webster published his own textbook, “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” in 1783. It was colloquially known as the “Blue-Backed Speller” because of the color of its cover. It soon became the best-selling American book of its time, providing adequate funding for Webster’s dictionary research.

In 1806, Webster published “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,” the first American English dictionary. He immediately began work on an expanded edition, titled “An American Dictionary of the English Language.”

In order to accurately research the origins of American English words, Webster learned 26 languages, including Sanskrit. He altered what he considered unecessarily complicated British spellings to make words look and sound more American.

The process took more than two decades. When “An American Dictionary of the English Language” was finally published in 1828, it contained 70,000 words and included words of American origin like “skunk” and “squash” that had never appeared in British dictionaries.

Webster’s work set new standards for lexicography, overshadowing his predecessor in the field, Englishman Samuel Johnson. I think Webster was somewhat proud that his dictionary had bumped British English out of the linguistic spotlight.

So how can we celebrate Dictionary Day?


Celebrate Words!

1. Enjoy Nonsense Words

Read Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and mark all the words you cannot find in a dictionary.


2. Learn Some New Words

I found these gems at various places on the web -

HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS -- with honor

FUSTIGATE - to cudgel or beat

BEJUGGLE - to outwit by trickery or deception; to cheat

BATRACHOPHAGOUS - one who eats frogs

PANDICULATION - stretching and yawning before going to bed or when waking

ULOTRICHOUS - having very wooly hair

Or just browse through your dictionary for something that catches your eye.


3. Adopt a "Dying" Word

At Save The Words, you can find words that are going out of use and try to revive them. You can also sign up for a word a day email.


Enjoy the day!!

How They Became Writers

It’s not unusual for professors and journalists to end up as influential writers—just look at Toni Morrison, Ezra Pound, and John Updike. But sometimes our wordslinging heroes take a longer, less direct route to greatness. Oftentimes, those experiences will end up in the author’s work. Other times, it’s just an odd footnote. Here are ten great writers who held non-writerly jobs before their big breaks.


1. George Orwell

Before writing 1984, George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) was an officer of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He shouldered the heavy burden of protecting the safety of some 200,000 people, and was noted for his “sense of utter fairness.”


2. Herman Melville

Though one might expect the author of Moby-Dick to have some experience at sea, it’s interesting to note that Melville was employed as a cabin boy on a cruise liner after his attempts to secure a job as a surveyor for the Erie Canal were thwarted. He made a single voyage from New York to Liverpool.


3. Kurt Vonnegut

The Slaughterhouse-Five author was the manager of a Saab dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts—one of the first Saab dealerships in the US. He also worked in public relations for General Electric, and was a volunteer firefighter for the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department.


4. Jack London

While everyone knows about London’s experiences in the Klondike Gold Rush, a time that heavily influenced his writing (um, The Call of the Wild, anyone?), it’s not-so-common knowledge that as a very young man, Jack London worked at a cannery, then became an oyster pirate. And his sloop was named Razzle-Dazzle.


5. John Steinbeck

A strange job, perhaps, but working as a tour guide at a fish hatchery led the Tortilla Flat author to his first wife, Carol Henning. Later, he would work long hours at a grueling warehouse job until his father began supplying him with writing materials and lodging to focus on his literary career.

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We interrupt this post with a news bulletin.

Name of Massachusetts town's sewage boat? Not Poop Sloop

Oct 11, 10:53 AM (ET)

SALISBURY, Mass. (AP) - Salisbury, Mass., has a new sewage pump-out boat, and its name is more than just clever: It's also good advice.

The vessel's unglamorous job is to travel from boat to boat and pump out onboard septic systems. The craft was paid for in part by a state environmental grant and will help keep the harbor clean in the town near the New Hampshire border.

Harbormaster Ray Pike says the town's harbor commission got hundreds of suggestions for the boat's name but settled on Down Winder. Pike tells The Newburyport Daily News there were plenty of clever suggestions - including Poo Bear, Pumpty Dumpty, Poop Sloop and Dung Dingy.

He says the commission had a lot of chuckles selecting a name. The winner was suggested by boater Richard Calderwood.

---

Information from: The Daily News of Newburyport

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We now resume our regular posting.


6. Jack Kerouac

Perhaps most famous for being a self-proclaimed dharma bum, it’s no surprise that Kerouac worked some odd jobs. These include but are not limited to: gas station attendant, cotton picker, night guard (detailed in On the Road), railroad brakeman, dishwasher, construction worker, and a deckhand.


7. Richard Wright

The celebrated author of Native Son and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” fell on hard times during the Great Depression, like almost everyone else. He secured a job as a postal clerk, only to be laid off. It was then, living on federal assistance, that Wright began making literary contacts and having work published in journals.


8. Joseph Heller

Coiner of the phrase and lauded author of Catch-22, Heller grew up very poor and had to work at a young age to help support his family. Before going on to literary greatness, he was a blacksmith’s apprentice, messenger boy, and file clerk. It took him 11 years writing after dinner each night to finish Catch-22.


9. Joseph Conrad

Though it’s apparent in reading Conrad’s work (especially Heart of Darkness) that he lived a large part of his life at sea, it’s maybe less obvious that he spent part of that time involved in gunrunning and political conspiracy.


10. Harper Lee

The author of one of the great American novels and winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction had worked as a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines for eight years when she received a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” By the next year, she’d penned To Kill a Mockingbird.

Did You Ever Wonder...

...where some literary characters came from?

Take a look at these.

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind was distant cousins with Doc Holliday. It’s supposed that she based the character of Ashley Wilkes on him.

Moby-Dick was based on a real-life albino sperm whale from the 1830s named Mocha Dick. Mocha Dick was infamous for attacking ships and surviving harpoon injuries. He was killed in 1839.

Branwell Bronte is thought to have served as the inspiration for Benjamin Braddock in the 1963 novel The Graduate. Although Bronte died more than 100 years before the novel was written, his taboo relationship with a much older, married Mrs. Robinson has raised suspicion that author Charles Webb was a bit of a Bronte historian.

There are several theories as to where Ebenezer Scrooge came from, but one of the strongest contenders is that he was based on a miser named John Elwes. Dickens mentioned him in later letters and the man who illustrated Dickens’ work, John Leech, chose to portray Mr. Scrooge in a manner that closely resembled Elwes. Do you see the resemblance?

The appearance of Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables was based on a picture of Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit. Lucy Maud Montgomery didn’t know this at the time, though – she simply pulled a picture out of a magazine that she felt best embodied her idea of Anne.

Robert Langdon, it may come as no surprise to you, is Dan Brown’s idealized version of himself. Brown and his most famous character share a birthday, a hometown and the same school. His name was based on John Langdon, professor of typography at Drexel University. The real Langdon created the ambigrams for Brown’s book Angels and Demons.

Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby is believed to be a thinly-veiled version of Ginevra King, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman. Their very different social standings drove them apart, and during his relationship with King, Fitzgerald wrote the phrase, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls,” which was later used in the movie version of Gatsby.

In his post-Gatsby novel, Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald based his main characters on people not very far from his heart – himself and his wife, Zelda. He mirrored their life right down to affairs, psychiatric treatment and even his feelings about his own professional failure.

Dill Harris from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is believed to be based on her childhood best friend and neighbor. That kid, Truman Persons, just happened to grow up to be famous in his own right – you know him better as Truman Capote.

A real James Bond? Maybe. Ian Fleming never confirmed that his superspy was ever based on anyone with the exception of James Bond, ornithologist, whose name he borrowed. But historian Keith Jeffery has speculated that 007 was based in part on Fleming’s friend Bill Dunderdale, an MI6 agent who seems to have shared Bond’s affinity for women and cars.

Driving Up The Hall

Here are some very common errors that, as Ziva would say, drive me up the hall.


PRESCRIPTION vs. PERSCRIPTION

"The most widely sold 'perscription' medication on the market." Oh, my: You are, in fact, prescribed (emphasis on "pre") medication by a physician. However, this mispronunciation is as wide spread as the the black death. . . . and this is"per" the drug manufacturers!


"THE TOWN WAS NEARLY DECIMATED"

How often have you heard that used as a way to say people were nearly wiped out, when in fact, it means "one of every ten" people was eliminated. (From the Latin, decimare: "removal or destruction of one-tenth." See Online Etymology Dictionary) Now, if the town was annihilated . . .


V vs. VS.

Okay . . . this one really grates on me: "Roe 'v' Wade." It used to be "Rowe vs. Wade," but the supposedly enlightened ones don't care about our Latin (as in Roman) jurisprudence linguistic roots. I cringe every time I here "versus" being shortened to "vee." What is even worse is when someone says "verse" as in "the Yankees verse the Red Sox". ARGGGGH!


ESPRESSO / TOO MANY COFFEE BEANS (espresso)

We in America truly base our pronunciation of word on words with which we are familiar. "Espresso" isn't part of our culture. So many folks want a fast, hot drink we call "eX-press-O." Oh ,well.


"PLURALISM"

Heard on the Discovery Channel: "The welding team are worried." When good people make a wrong grammatical turn, the result is a dismemberment and incorrect reassembly of the language. Which words go where?! "Team" or "group" refers to a unit or oneness and not a plurality. (The sum of a team or group is 1.) The same is true of "band" and "gang." When people or things are referred to as a unit - as is "the welding team," the correct statement is: "The welding team is worried."


"IT IS SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE TO PICK ON THIS ONE . . ." > double negative

Regardless of your attitude, this one is in the dictionary: "irregardless." The "ir" doesn't mean or add a thing, but through usage, irregardless [sic] has been accepted as proper English: An example of how we begin to accept words rather than fight it.


"I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE SEEN . . ." > stupid statement

It is odd to say: if it is not redundant, it is at least incorrectly structured. Either you have "never seen . . ." or "in your lifetime there have never been . . ." The point is, can you see anything that isn't during your lifetime? (That is . . . unless you share some very strange beliefs.)

Amusing And Amazing

Two news articles caught my attention recently. The first was amusing; the second amazing. What foresight I showed by not making my posts here in all caps!!

You have got to be kidding me!

First the amusing -

GA leader: Boring names will stop rural sign theft


Sep 25, 11:15 PM (ET)

DARIEN, Ga. (AP) - A rural Georgia county is losing about 550 street signs a years to thieves and a commissioner says he has a solution: Make the names boring.

McIntosh County Commissioner Mark Douglas serves a rural county about 60 miles south of Savannah. He says signs marking Green Acres, Boone's Farm and Mary Jane Lane are frequently stolen.

He suspects the thieves are targeting those signs because they share names with a popular TV series, a low-cost wine or, in the third case, a slang term for marijuana.

Then there's the stolen signs for Harmony Hill. Douglas figures the thieves just like the alliteration.

It's become a costly problem. County Manager Luther Smart says the area is paying $17,000 a year to replace the signs.

#####

and then the amazing -

$27 million to change NYC signs from all-caps

By JEREMY OLSHAN

Last Updated: 11:07 AM, September 30, 2010

Posted: 12:53 AM, September 30, 2010


The Capital of the World is going lower-case.

Federal copy editors are demanding the city change its 250,900 street signs -- such as these for Perry Avenue in The Bronx -- from the all-caps style used for more than a century to ones that capitalize only the first letters.

Changing BROADWAY to Broadway will save lives, the Federal Highway Administration contends in its updated Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, citing improved readability.

At $110 per sign, it will also cost the state $27.6 million, city officials said.

"We have already started replacing the signs in The Bronx," city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told The Post. 'We will have 11,000 done by the end of this fiscal year, and the rest finished by 2018."

It appears e.e. cummings was right to eschew capital letters, federal officials explain.

Studies have shown that it is harder to read all-caps signs, and those extra milliseconds spent staring away from the road have been shown to increase the likelihood of accidents, particularly among older drivers, federal documents say.

The new regulations also require a change in font from the standard highway typeface to Clearview, which was specially developed for this purpose.

As a result, even numbered street signs will have to be replaced.

"Safety is this department's top priority," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last year, in support of the new guidelines. "These new and updated standards will help make our nation's roads and bridges safer for drivers, construction workers and pedestrians alike."

The Highway Administration acknowledged that New York and other states "opposed the change, and suggested that the use of all upper-case letters remain an option," noting that "while the mixed-case words might be easier to read, the amount of improvement in legibility did not justify the cost."

To compensate for those concerns, in 2003, the administration allowed for a 15-year phase-in period ending in 2018.

Although the city did not begin replacing the signs until earlier this year, Sadik-Khan said they will have no trouble meeting the deadline, as some 8,000 signs a year are replaced annually simply due to wear and tear.

The new diminutive signs, which will also feature new reflective sheeting, may also reflect a kinder, gentler New York, she said.

"On the Internet, writing in all caps means you are shouting," she said. "Our new signs can quiet down, as well."