The Year In Language

The best and worst of 2010

By Erin McKean
January 9, 2011

I know, it’s getting a little late to reminisce about 2010. But besides being a new year, it has also been about a year since I started writing about language for Ideas (thanks again to Jan Freeman for sharing this column!), and I thought it would be fun to look back at a year’s worth of the best and worst stories about words.

From a lexicographer’s point of view, the best language story of 2010 was the recent paper in Science about “culturomics.” The authors define this term as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture,” but what they literally did, working with Google Books, was take the full text of a huge number of books — about 4 percent of all titles ever published — and crunch the words as data, on the model of the Human Genome Project.

One amazing finding: They estimated “that 52% of the English lexicon — the majority of the words used in English books — consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” They found vast quantities of words like aridification, slenthem (a musical instrument), and deletable, none of them in normal dictionaries. Time to get crackin’, fellow lexicographers!

Along with their study came a public release of billions of sorted phrases, ranging up to five words in length, and a tool that allows any user to chart how common specific words are over time (it’s at www.ngrams.googlelabs.com). As fascinating as they are, these graphs have also led to lots of great discussion about one big thing missing from the data: the context in which the words are used. When we use the word class, are we talking about social rank (“middle class”) or school (“geometry class”)? That kind of analysis will have to wait for a different tool.

The extended news cycle of Sarah Palin’s use of refudiate was another highlight of 2010’s language reportage: On July 14, she used the word (a blend of refute and repudiate) in a segment on Fox News; a week later she used it in a tweet about the planned Islamic center near Ground Zero (“Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate”). A few hours later, after the disappearance of the original tweet and a lot of talk about the unusual blend, Palin tweeted again: “Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” (It’s true — experts estimate there are at least 1,500 words first known to be used by Shakespeare, so if anything Palin has some catching up to do.) Her coinage generated some excellent analysis from both Mark Liberman at the Language Log blog (who found earlier examples of the word in several places, including in a 1984 science fiction story by John Sladek) and from Ben Zimmer, writing on VisualThesaurus.com, who was able to date its use back to at least 1925. In November the New Oxford American Dictionary named refudiate the word of the year for 2010.

In other new-words news, Oxford English Dictionary category, it’s wonderful that the OED now includes an entry for eggcorn (a word beloved of language enthusiasts, an eggcorn is a “mistake” that has its own kind of internal logic, like eggcorn for acorn, or expatriot for expatriate).

The dumbest story of 2010, wordwise, has to be the Global Language Monitor’s affirmation in late December that WikiLeaks is a for-real darn-tootin’ word of English. Calling WikiLeaks a “new media and high technology” company (it’s not; it’s a nonprofit organization), GLM asserts that the 300 million “citations” it has found for the name means that WikiLeaks is, by sheer force of numbers, officially an English word. Note that GLM didn’t make any assertions about whether WikiLeaks actually functioned as a word (for example, pointing out instances of people using WikiLeaked as a verb, which would be a reasonable argument), and didn’t give any instances of the citations used to make their determination. I’m all in favor of discussing how names become words, but it seems absurd to declare a “word” based purely on uncritical beancounting. By the same standard, the misspelling seperate, the number 101, and “Little Fockers” should all be considered English words now.

A much better story, in the real-language-scientists-finally-getting-some-respect department, is that two linguists won MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” this year: Jessie Little Doe Baird, whose project in Mashpee is working to revive the language of the Wampanoag Nation, and Carol Padden, a professor at the University of California San Diego who researches the structure and evolution of sign languages.

The best pronunciation story of the year was surely the air-travel-disrupting Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull (if you need a refresher, it’s pronounced, roughly, AYE-yah Fyat-lah Yir-kutl). And the best naming story? That would be the case of (we must say mild-mannered, whether he is or not) Richard Smith, 41, of Carlisle, England, who changed his name to Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand. Before the name change (as reported in May by the UK paper Metro) Mr. Smith was known to his friends as “Spiff.”

And it’s not really a news story, exactly, but if you have a minute to search online for “Stephen Fry kinetic typography language” you will not be disappointed by the video you find. Trust me.

All in all, 2010 was a great year for stories about words and language — here’s hoping 2011 is even better!

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com. E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

Banished Words

Lake Superior State University 2011 Banished Words List


It may have been word of the year in some wheelhouses, but "refudiate" wasn't looked upon favorably by many who sent in nominations for Lake Superior State University's 36th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness, which was released on New Year's Eve.

In a busy U.S. election year, "the American People" told LSSU they were tired of not only "refudiate," but also "mama grizzlies" who wanted their opponents to "man up."

But words and phrases related to technology and the way we communicate dominated the list for 2011, including "viral," "epic," "fail," and the use of websites "Facebook" and "Google" as verbs. "Viral" received the most nominations.

The "back story" on LSSU's popular list began on Jan. 1, 1976, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and a group of friends each contributed a few expressions that they disliked to form the first list. After that, the nominations stacked up for future lists and Rabe's group, known then as The Unicorn Hunters, didn't have to make up its own list again. LSSU receives well over 1,000 nominations annually through its website, lssu.edu/banished.

And now, here's a look at the 2011 list. Get ready for the "wow factor!" It's full of "epic" "a-ha moments" that are sure to "viral." It's a no-"fail" list that you'll be "facebooking" and "googling" with your "BFFs." "Just sayin'."

VIRAL

"Often used to describe the spreading of items on the Internet i.e. 'The video went viral.' It is overused. I have no objection to this word's use as a way to differentiate a (viral) illness from bacterial." Jim Cance, Plainwell, Mich.

"This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined." Kuahmel Allah, Los Angeles, Calif.

"Events, photographs, written pieces and even occasional videos that attracted a great deal of attention once were simply highly publicized, repeated in news broadcasts, and talked about for a few days. Now, however, it is no longer enough to give such offerings their 15 minutes of fame, but they must be declared to 'go viral.' As a result, any mindless stunt or vapid bit of writing is sent by its creators whirling around the Internet and, once whirled, its creators declare it (trumpets here) 'viral!' Enough already! If anything is to be declared worthy enough to 'go viral,' clearly it should be the LSSU Banished Words list for 2011!" Lawrence Mickel, Coventry, Conn.

"I knew it was time when the 2010 list of banished words appeared in Time magazine's, 'That Viral Thing' column." Dave Schaefer, Glenview, Ill.

"I didn't mind much when 'viral' came to mean an under-handed tactic by advertising companies to make their ads look like pop culture. However, now anything that becomes popular on YouTube is suddenly 'viral.' I just don't get it." Kevin Wood, Wallacetown, Ont.

"Every time I see a viral video on CNN or am asked to 'Let's go viral with this' in another lame e-mail forwarded message, it makes me sick." Lian Schmidt, Bandon, Ore.

EPIC

More than one nominator says the use of 'epic' has become an epic annoyance.

"Cecil B. DeMille movies are epic. Internet fallouts and opinions delivered in caps-lock are not. 'Epic fail,' 'epic win', 'epic (noun)' -- it doesn't matter; it needs to be banished until people recognize that echoing trite, hyperbolic Internet phrases in an effort to look witty or intelligent actually achieves the opposite." Kim U., Des Moines, Iowa.

"Over-use of the word 'epic' has reached epic proportions. Tim Blaney, Snoqualmie, Wash.

"Anything that this word describes in popular over-usage is rarely ever 'epic' in the traditional sense of being heroic, majestic, or just plain awe-inspiring." Mel F., Dallas, Tex.

"Standards for using 'epic' are so low, even 'awesome' is embarrassed." Mike of Kettering, Ohio.

"I'm sure that when the history books are written or updated and stories have been passed through the generations, the epic powder on the slopes during your last ski trip or your participation in last night's epic flash mob will probably not be included. This may be the root of this epic problem, but it seems as if during the past two years, any idea that was not successful was considered an 'epic-fail.' This includes the PowerPoint presentation you tried to give during this morning's meeting, but couldn't because of technical problems. Also, the ice storm of 'epic proportions' that is blanketing the east coast this winter sure looks a lot like the storm that happened last winter." DV, Seattle, Wash.


FAIL

One nominator says, "what originally may have been a term for a stockbroker's default is now abused by today's youth as virtually any kind of 'failure.' Whether it is someone tripping, a car accident, a costumed character scaring the living daylights out a kid, or just a poor choice in fashion, these people drive me crazy thinking that anything that is a mistake is a 'fail.' They fail proper language!"

"Fail is not a noun. It is not an adjective. It is a verb. If this word is not banned, then this entire word banishment system is full of FAIL. (Now doesn't that just sound silly?)" Daniel of Carrollton, Georgia.

"Mis-used. Over-used. Used with complete disregard to the 'epic' weight of the word. Silence obnoxious reality TV personalities and sullen, anti-establishment teenagers everywhere by banishing this word." Natalie of Burlington, Ont.

"It has taken over blogs, photo captions, 'status' comments. Anytime someone does something less than perfect, we have to read 'FAIL!' The word has failed us all." Aaron Yunker, Ishpeming, Mich.


WOW FACTOR

"This buzzword is served up with a heaping of cliché factor and a side order of irritation. But the lemmings from cable-TV cooking, whatever design and fashion shows keep dishing it out. I miss the old days when 'factor' was only on the math-and-science menu." Dan Muldoon, Omaha, Neb.

"Done-to-death phrase to point out something with a somewhat significantly appealing appearance." Ann Pepper, Knoxville, Tenn.


A-HA MOMENT

"All this means is a point at which you understand something or something becomes clearer. Why can't you just say that?" Audrey Mayo, Killeen, Tex.

BACK STORY

"This should be on the list of words that don't need to exist because a perfectly good word has been used for years. In this case, the word is 'history,' or, for those who must be weaned, 'story.'" Jeff Williams, Sherwood, Ariz.

BFF

"These chicks call each other BFF (Best Friends Forever) and it lasts about 10 minutes. Now there's BFFA (Best Friends For Awhile), which makes more sense." Kate Rabe Forgach, Ft. Collins, Colo.


MAN UP

"A stupid phrase when directed at men. Even more stupid when directed at a woman, as in 'Alexis, you need to man up and join that Pilates class!'" Sherry Edwards, Clarkston, Mich.

"Another case of 'verbing' a noun and ending with a preposition that goes nowhere. Not only that, the phrase is insulting, especially when voiced by a female, who'd never think to say, 'Woman up!'" Aunt Shecky, East Greenbush, NY.

"Can a woman 'man-up,' or would she be expected to 'woman-up?'" Jay Leslie, Portland, Maine.

"Not just overused (a 2010 top word according to the Global Language Monitor) but bullying and sexist." Christopher K. Philippo, Glenmont, NY.

"We had to put up with 'lawyer up.' Now 'man up,' too? A chest-thumping cultural regression fit for frat boys stacking beer glasses." Craig Chalquist Ph.D., Walnut Creek, Calif.


REFUDIATE

"Adding this word to the English language simply because a part-time politician lacks a spell checker on her cell phone is an action that needs to be repudiated." Dale Humphreys, Muskegon, Mich.

Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles, Calif. wants to banish what he called 'Sarah Palin-isms': "Let's 'refudiate' them on the double!"


MAMA GRIZZLIES

"Unless you are referring to a scientific study of Ursus arctos horribilis , this analogy of right-wing female politicians should rest in peace." Mark Carlson, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

"These politicians in Congress say 'the American People' as part of what seems like every statement they make! I see that others have noticed it, too, as various websites abound, including an entry on Wikipedia." Paul M. Girouard, St. Louis, Mo.

"No one in Washington can pontificate for more than two sentences without using it. Beyond overuse, these people imply that 'the American people' want/expect/demand all the same things. They don't." Dick Hilker, Loveland, Colo.

"Aren't all Americans people? Every political speech refers to the 'American' people as if simply saying 'Americans' (or 'people') is not enough." Deb Faust, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.


I'M JUST SAYIN'

"'A phrase used to diffuse any ill feelings caused by a preceded remark,' according to the Urban Dictionary. Do we really need a qualifier at the end of every sentence? People feel uncomfortable with a comment that was made and then 'just sayin'' comes rolling off the tongue? It really doesn't change what was said, I'm just sayin'." Becky of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

"I'm just sayin'...'I'm not sayin'''…Actually, you ARE saying…A watered-down version of what I just said or intended to say….SAY what you are saying. DON'T SAY what you aren't saying." Julio Appling, Vancouver, Wash.

"Obviously you are saying it…you just said it!" Catherine Wilson, Granger, Ind.

"And we would never have known if you hadn't told us." Bob Forrest, Tempe, Ariz.

"When a 24-hour news network had the misguided notion to brand this phrase as a commentary segment called, 'Just sayin', I thought I was going to wretch." Casey Conroy, Pleasant Hill, Calif.


FACEBOOK / GOOGLE as verbs

"Facebook is a great, addicting website. Google is a great search engine. However, their use as verbs causes some deep problems. As bad as they are, the trend can only get worse, i.e. 'I'm going to Twitter a few people, then Yahoo the movie listings and maybe Amazon a book or two." Jordan of Waterloo, Ont.


LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST

"It's an absurdity followed by a redundancy. First, things are full or they're not; there is no fullest. Second, 'live life' is redundant. Finally, the expression is nauseatingly overused. What's wrong with enjoying life fully or completely? The phrase makes me gag. I'm surprised it hasn't appeared on the list before." Sylvia Hall, Williamsport, Penn.

What Is Your Opinion?

Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word

By Marc Schultz
Jan 03, 2011


Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure — T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with "slave" when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the "n" word ("My mother said it's only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people") and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it."

Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn. What finally convinced Gribben to turn his back on grad school training and academic tradition, in which allegiance to the author's intent is sacrosanct, was his involvement with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Alabama.

Tom Sawyer was selected for 2009's Big Read Alabama, and the NEA tapped NewSouth, in Montgomery, to produce an edition for the project. NewSouth contracted Gribben to write the introduction, which led him to reading and speaking engagements at libraries across the state. Each reading brought groups of 80 to 100 people "eager to read, eager to talk," but "a different kind of audience than a professor usually encounters; what we always called ‘the general reader.'

"After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable." Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition's potential for controversy. "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he said. "Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this." Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' "

Of course, others have been much more enthusiastic—including the cofounders of NewSouth, publisher Suzanne La Rosa and editor-in-chief Randall Williams. In addition to the mutual success of their Tom Sawyer collaboration, Gribben thought NewSouth's reputation for publishing challenging books on Southern culture made them the ideal—perhaps the only—house he could approach with his radical idea.

"What he suggested," said La Rosa, "was that there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."

La Rosa and Williams committed to a short turnaround, looking to get the finished product on shelves by February. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be a $24.95 hardcover, with a 7,500 first printing. In the meantime, Gribben has gone back to the original holographs to craft his edition, which is also unusual in combining the two "boy books," as he calls them, into a single volume. But the heart of the matter is opening up the novels to a much broader, younger, and less experienced reading audience: "Dr. Gribben recognizes that he's putting his reputation at stake as a Twain scholar," said La Rosa. "But he's so compassionate, and so believes in the value of teaching Twain, that he's committed to this major departure. I almost don't want to acknowledge this, but it feels like he's saving the books. His willingness to take this chance—I was very touched."

Some Quotes For The New Year

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New Year's Quotes and Holiday Sayings
Be prepared!


Some New Year's Day quotes and sayings can be funny and humorous and add inspiration (or indigestion) to our outlook for the new year.

As usual, our favorite humorist, Mark Twain, shows up. And our old buddy Anon sneaks in too!

Enjoy what lies ahead, my friends! Keep eyes and ears open, prepare to be amazed, look for the wonder around you and stop playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat!

(Do you know where that expression comes from?)


* "New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." ~Mark Twain

* "An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." ~Bill Vaughn

* "Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right." ~Oprah Winfrey
* "Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning, but a going on with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us." ~Hal Borland

* "Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let every new year find you a better man." ~Benjamin Franklin

* "Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever." ~Mark Twain

* "Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to." ~Bill Vaughn

* "It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets." ~William Thomas

* "Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet." - Samuel Beckett

* "New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions." ~Mark Twain

* "The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to." ~P.J. O'Rourke

* "Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go." ~Brooks Atkinson

* "From New Year’s on the outlook brightens, good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining." ~Leonard Bernstein

* "Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits." ~Anon

* "New Year's Eve, where old acquaintance be forgot...Unless, of course, those tests come back positive." ~Jay Leno

* "New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time." ~James Agate

* "New Year's Day is every man's birthday." ~Charles Lamb

* "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." ~Oscar Wilde

* "Your Merry Christmas may depend on what others do for you. But your Happy New Year depends on what you do for others." ~Anon

And finally - this fascinating thought -

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." ~T.S. Eliot

First Thoughts

Happy Ewe Near!!

A common grammar topic this time of year is where to put that silly apostrophe in the phrases New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

The sentence above shows that the answer is Y-E-A-R-apostrophe-S. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Current English, the term new year refers to "the calendar year that has just begun or is about to begin following the 31st of December."

That means there is just one year that's new and being celebrated. The Eve—or the Day—belongs to that singular new year, thus the apostrophe comes before the S. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English spells out New Year's Eve and New Year's Day that way, too: apostrophe-S. To further reinforce this, the Gregg Reference Manual asserts that possessives in names of holidays are usually singular; New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are among them.

Many folks comment on this issue. Among the best can be found at The Punctuator. Look for the December 24th post. Rimpy does a great job with his blog!

But talking about where to hang an apostrophe in New Year's Eve and New Year's Day isn't enough for a complete post. So...

It could be said Scotland has had tremendous influence on the way the New Year's holiday is observed in the English-speaking world. Combine that with Scotland's own New Year's traditions and we have a number of linguistic lessons and new words to discuss.

One of those terms is Hogmanay. Hogmanay is used commonly in Scotland to describe New Year's Eve, but no one can exactly say for sure where it came from.

There are assertions supported by evidence that the word Hogmanay comes from Scandinavian languages, from Flemish, Anglo Saxon or Gaelic—but it probably comes from France. Given the historic alliances that existed between Scotland and France down the years, Hogmanay may have come from the French L'homme est n&3acute;, literally, "man is born," meaning for the new year.

On Hogmanay, the bells are traditionally rung at midnight and then one hopes for a first-footer; that is, the first guest to cross one's threshold in the New Year. The first-footer presents the homeowner with symbolic gifts: coal, for warmth; black bun, a traditional fruitcake; shortbread; salt; and whisky. And it's really good luck if it is brought by a dark-haired person. The feeling used to be that in the days of the Vikings, when a fair-haired person turned up, it might not necessarily be a good thing.

A New Year's tradition that is familiar to English-speakers everywhere is the singing of Auld Lang Syne. This is a song and poem that was written by Scottish poet Robert Burns. He was born in Ayrshire in 1759. He's quite a fascinating guy. He actually only lived until he was 37 but packed a whole lot into his life. He is famed as a poet, and to a certain extent a philosopher, too: some of his work is very, very deep.

Auld Lang Syne doesn't come from Scottish Gaelic but from Broad Scots or Lallans (Lowlands)—the dialect of southern Scotland. It means "long time since" or "long time past."

The song itself is actually quite a sad piece. It's a man talking to a friend who he has known since his childhood, and they're saying, We have a long history, so let's lift a drink to one another.

Lastly, Scots don't wish anyone "Happy New Year" until the actual new year arrives. Until that point, it is proper to say, "A good one to you when it comes."

It has now come.

HAPPY NEW YEAR dear readers!!

Remember When We Spoke Of Loos?

Loo of the Year Awards

The Loo of the Year Awards continue to attract enormous interest from all quarters – providers, users and the media.

There’s nothing quite like an Award winning lavatory to stimulate local and often national media attention!

There are a range of National Awards, as well as accompanying Attendant of the Year Awards, for the cleaning staff who look after each facility – the unsung heroes and heroines.

It is often hard to work out how analysts make their assessments. In the case of Seymour Pierce’s leisure expert Hugh-Guy Lorriman it seems to be all about the state of a company’s toilets.

He was much taken by the pub chain JD Wetherspoon’s clinching of the coveted Golden Toilet Seat award from the British Toilet Association.

“While our noting of this event looks like it stands within the British tradition of toilet humour there is a serious comment on the JDW business model,” he wrote.

Mr Lorriman believes it underlines service standards at the chain.

He added: “Next time you pop into a Wetherspoon, check out the loos.”

From The Herald (Scotland) 11th December 2010.

J D Wetherspoon has won the much coveted UK Overall Winners Trophy in the 23rd Anniversary Loo of the Year Awards competition to find the very best ‘away from home’ toilets in the UK.

Awards managing director, Mike Bone quotes - “The UK’s hospitality sector is placing significantly increasing importance on provision of first class toilets that contain the facilities their customers need and expect when visiting their premises. Wetherspoon’s is continually raising the bar within this sector providing excellent and unique toilets in its pubs throughout the UK.

If you are thinking this is really not serious stuff, please consider the following article from The Wall Street Journal.


No Bathroom Humor, Please, Loo of the Year Awards Are Too Serious

British Accolades Leave Winners Flush With Success; Looking for the 'Wow Factor'

By PAUL SONNE And ALISTAIR MACDONALD

KENILWORTH, England—The Nobel Prizes identify top advances in medicine, peace and economics, among other things. The Academy Awards tout the ability of movies to illuminate a complex world. In this English village last week, organizers of Britain's Loo of the Year Awards were just as eager to detail their contributions to society.

More than 1,400 entrants competed in the U.K.'s Loo of the Year Award. Who snatched the crown for the best throne? WSJ's Paul Sonne reports from Kenilworth, England.

"This is our opportunity to celebrate the very best in away-from-home toilets," Mike Bone, director of the British Toilet Association, said in his opening address. "The toilets you will see today, the winning toilets, show the power of really wanting something good in this world and striving to achieve it."

At the annual event more than 1,400 venues—including restaurants, shopping malls, hotels and government buildings—compete to snatch the crown for having the nation's best throne. The prize: recognition from colleagues and a trophy bearing a mounted golden toilet seat.

David Magill, the general foreman at the Larne Borough Council, traveled from Northern Ireland to reach a Tudor-style hotel here, where he joined scores of champagne-quaffing colleagues charged with manning the nation's bathrooms.

Mr. Magill, who has managed Larne's toilet unit for seven years, entered 10 bathrooms in this year's contest. His dream: to receive the grand prize for best in-house cleaning staff. "If we win the big award, I'll probably jump through the roof," Mr. Magill said before the ceremony. "You'll probably need a helicopter to pick me off."


Flush With Success

To contestants, the Loo of Year awards are deadly serious. Doreen Hutton, environmental services manger for 2007 overall grand prize winner Trafford Centre, a mall in Manchester, says she constantly ponders how to win again.

"We feel that pressure, that we need to stay up there and stay forward thinking when it comes to new toilet technology," she says.

It costs £99.75, or $157.31, per bathroom to enter the competition, although there is a volume discount. Entrants get detailed feedback from expert inspectors.

During the summer, nine inspectors fan out to grade entrants on more than 100 criteria, such as cleanliness, disabled access and availability of paper towels. Judges pride themselves on their incorruptibility.

Inspector Richard Ward declines offers of free food, and even cups of tea or coffee, when making his rounds. "I won't compromise my neutrality," he says. Mr. Ward admits to thinking not "about an awful lot" other than toilets in the summer and struggles to step into a bathroom without mentally grading it.

Judges need an eye for detail. Bob Davies, a retired computer project manager from Reading, England, became an inspector for Loo of the Year seven years ago when a friend involved with the contest approached him. "He knew me and knew it was the kind of job I had some aptitude for," says Mr. Davies, 71, who was wearing a necktie emblazoned with multicolored symbols for male and female restrooms. (Judges, regardless of their gender, can inspect both men's and women's bathrooms).

This year, Mr. Davies scrutinized more than 150 toilets across England, always arriving unannounced. Contestants sometimes stall him so someone can tidy up before he enters. "There are distraction techniques which buy time for people," he says. "But you can always see the long-term dirt."

What makes an award-winning restroom? "It's the wow factor we want," says Richard Chisnell, founder and chairman of the Loo of the Year Awards, who inspected about 150 loos with his wife Maureen in Wales this summer. The couple storms out of restaurants without clean bathrooms.

Mr. Chisnell says "bits and pieces" are important. "For instance, is there a choice of hand drying?" he asks, noting he prefers to dry his hands "properly, with some physical movement," rather than under an electric hand dryer.

Judge Iain Wilson looks for modern urinals, stalls and an attendant who "takes ownership and pride" in his or her charge. Good bathrooms are often those that attendants personalize with flowers, pictures and decorations around events like Halloween, he says. His fellow judge, Mr. Davies, recalls a top-notch public toilet in Portsmouth that mixed its own trademark mouthwash on a daily basis. Christmas trees, Mr. Davies says, are a big plus.

Britain's interest in commodes stretches through the ages. Sir John Harington, an English writer under Queen Elizabeth I, is sometimes credited with inventing the flush toilet in 1596. Thomas Crapper, who built ornate toilets for British royals, helped popularize and perfect indoor plumbing in the late 1800s.

But some believe Britain's public toilets are in peril. From 1999 to 2007, the number of public toilets in the U.K. fell by 40%, according to the British Toilet Association. It predicts another 1,000-plus public toilets will close in the next 12 months as the U.K. makes budget cuts.

And many feel the quality is fading, too. "We lost the plot somewhere along the line," Mr. Davies lamented. "Anyone going to the continent 30 years ago, for example, would criticize the loos in France, whereas now they've outpaced us and their loos are of a better standard than ours."

He added: "Like being a pioneer in anything, I suppose, you get complacent...We're waking up to the fact that we are lagging behind."

That makes the Loo of the Year Awards all the more important. As Mr. Bone called the winners onto the stage Friday, purple and blue spotlights circled the room while the pop band Kings of Leon blasted from speakers. When he awarded the grand prize to the British pub chain JD Wetherspoon PLC, senior manager Mark Fletcher hoisted the golden toilet seat.

"You have to make sure you don't lift it by the seat because it'll crack," Mr. Chisnell told Mr. Fletcher as he handed over the hardware.

Mr. Fletcher says JD Wetherspoon, which runs 790 pubs across the U.K., has a board that places a premium on restroom standards; employees check to make sure bathrooms are clean every half an hour.

Meanwhile, Mr. Magill captured the quarry he came for: best in-house cleaning team. "I've worked for Larne Borough Council for 13 years, and this is my proudest moment," he said.

One venue, however, failed the test: the Chesford Grange Hotel, where the awards were held. "These toilets are currently OUT OF ORDER," a sign on one of the men's restrooms read at Friday's ceremony. "We do apologise for the inconvenience caused."

Entries for Loo of the Year Awards continue at high levels despite the economic situation and over 1400 entries were received in 2010. Standards in Awards entrant’s toilets are also improving – 72% of the total entries achieved the top 5 Star grading (58% in 2009).

Other major UK Trophy Winners were: ASDA Stores for individual category entries, Ceredigion County Council for public toilet entries, Haven Holidays for corporate provider entries, Tesco – TC Contractors for accessible facilities, Ceredigion County Council for Changing Places Toilets, ASDA for baby change facilities for the second year running , Harrogate Borough Council for ECO friendly toilets, Staffordshire County Council for Toilets in Education and Highland Council for Local Authority Toilet entries.

Trophy winners in the associated Attendant of the Year Awards, for the very important people who put the sparkle and pride into the UK’s toilets, were: Sandwich Town Council (individual attendant team), Larne Borough Council(in-house cleaning team) and Danfo UK (external contactor team).

Representatives from the top twenty Local Authorities public toilet providers – the Loo of the Year Awards ‘Premier League’, were also honoured at the prestigious Awards Presentation held on 3 rd December at the Chesford Grange Hotel in Kenilworth along with thirty four members of the Awards ‘Champions League’, the Standards of Excellence for participants achieving five or more five star Award grades. Popular entertainer and TV show host Les Dennis provided the after lunch entertainment with a special edition of a unique ‘Flushing Fortunes’ quiz show.

The 2010 Awards were run in association with Airdri, the UK based manufacturer of warm air dryers, British Toilet Association, The Changing Places Consortium, and The British Cleaning Council. The four national tourism bodies – Visit England, Visit Scotland, Visit Wales and The Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Danfo, flush-wiser (PHS Washrooms), Healthmatic, Lotus Professional and SCA Tork also supported this year’s Awards.

Full details of the 2010 Awards results are available on the Awards website:
Loo Of The Year Awards

Word Of The Year?

Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year

(AP) December 20, 2010

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) — As Greece faced a debt crisis, the government passed a series of strict austerity measures, including taxes hikes and cutting public sector pay.

The move sparked angry protests, strikes and riots across the country as unemployment skyrocketed and the crisis spread to other European nations. The move also incited a rush to online dictionaries from those searching for a definition.

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.

John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.

"What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'."

Runners-up also announced Monday included "pragmatic," ''moratorium," ''socialism," and "bigot" — the last word resulted from public uses by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former CNN host Rick Sanchez and former NPR senior analyst Juan Williams.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, said this year's top 10 words were associated with a news event or coverage, which editors believe resulted in prolonged jumps in searches.

"Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint the searches on one particular news event, but typically that is what sparks people's curiosity in a word," Sokolowski said.

For example, "socialism" was searched, editors believe, because of coverage around federal bailouts and Democratic-backed federal health care legislation. And editors noticed that "pragmatic" was looked-up a number of times after midterm elections.

According to Morse, the dictionary's online website sees more than 500 million searches a year — with most of those being usual suspects like "effect" and "affect." But he said words selected for the dictionary's top 10 were words that had searches hundreds of thousands of out-of-character hits.

Also making the top ten list was the word "doppelganger." Sokolowski said the word saw a jump in searches after George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "Good Morning America" called "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert "Julia Roberts' doppelganger." Roberts played Gilbert in the book's film adaptation and resembles the writer.

"Doppelganger" was also used in the popular television show, "The Vampire Diaries."

"Sometimes, that all it takes," Sokolowski said.

Words "shellacking," ''ebullient," ''dissident," and "furtive" also made this year's top list.

Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and author of "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word," said the list of words shows how the country is evolving because the public is looking up words that used to be very common.

"Around 20 to 30 years ago, everyone would know what 'socialism' was," said Metcalf, who is also executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. "Same with bigot. That fact that they have to be looked up says something about us."

That's true with some words like "shellacking," said Jenna Portier, an English instructor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. Although Merriam-Webster editors said searches for the word spiked after President Barack Obama said he and his party took "a shellacking" from voters in midterm election, Portier said the word is very common in southern Louisiana. "Where I'm from, it means to varnish something like wood," Portier said.

Shana Walton, a languages and literature professor also at Nicholls State University, said she understands how news events maybe influenced the dictionary's list.

"If 'moratorium' is one of the most looked-up words, that's clearly a reflection of how often the word was used in the wake of the BP oil spill," said Walton, a linguistic anthropologist who is doing research on oil and land in south Louisiana. "Many people in south Louisiana expressed much more outrage about the moratorium, frankly, than about the spill."

Metcalf said the American Dialect Society will release its "Word of the Year" winner in January, but it's selected by the group like Time's Person of the Year.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press

Britglish?

Although I was born in and live in America I still enjoy the British version of English and this tends to show through sometimes. Perhaps the five years I enjoyed England whilst in the USAF has something to do with this.

For example, words that end with "-ward" in the US tend to be "-wards" in the UK, like backwards, afterwards, forwards, inwards, outwards, downwards, upwards, etc.

Then there are words like dreamt vs. dreamed, and leapt vs. leaped. For some reason I have no problem switching from "dreamt" to "dreamed," but I cannot stand the idea of using "leaped." In the end I used "dreamed" and "leapt" – sometimes either is okay as long as the text is consistent. But I might change my mind about this...

Now take burnt vs. burned. There's an argument that says "burnt" is an adjective whereas "burned" is a verb, so you might say "the burnt house" and "the house burned."

Another funny one is crept vs. creeped. You can say "creep into a tent" or "he crept into the tent" but "creeped" is normally reserved for "he creeped me out" (a different meaning altogether).

It seems like Americans just stick "-ed" on the end of everything, like spelt vs. spelled. But then along comes the word "dived" which is used primarily in the UK and is laughed at in the US. Just to be awkward the US uses "dove."

Moving on to might vs. may, many think "may" is preferable. You can say "I may go to the party" or "I might go to the party," and some will say that "may" is more correct, and that "might" is used in past tense such as "I might have gone to the party if I had known about it." So why do I use "might" far more often? I don't know if this is a British vs. American thing, or just me. In any case I decided to leave all my uses of "might" and my occasional uses of "may" – a guy could drive himself mad worrying about this stuff!

When I was at school, the plural of "hoof" was always "hooves." But the plural of "roof" is not "rooves," it's "roofs." So why can't I use "hoofs" instead? Turns out I can, according to both my American AND British dictionaries. Who knew? Not me, apparently. It's funny what you learn and then have to unlearn.

In England it's "storey/storeys" when referring to floors of a building, and "story/stories" for tales. In America it's just "story/stories" for both. I kind of miss the "-ey" ending. (Just as an aside, in England the lowest level of a four-storey building is the ground floor, with first, second and third above. In America, a four-story building's lowest level is the first floor, with second, third and fourth above. There's a four-story building in my book and I removed the bit where it said they "entered the first floor" as that might confuse British folks!)

Some say that "anymore" is better than "any more" but "any time" is better than "anytime." To be safe, I've just stuck with "any more" and "any time."

Switching to a different subject, I wondered what dragon groupings are called. You know how you have a herd of elephants and a litter of kittens? Many of these grouping names are shared, for instance you can also have a herd of horses and a litter of puppies. But I was surprised to realize that, in addition to a flock of birds and a flock of sheep, you can also have a flock of elephants as well as a herd of sheep! I wasted many minutes on the internet looking up this stuff. Grr!

But what about dragons? There are no such things (no, really, they're make-believe), but I guess they're fairly close to alligators, so I used alligators as a starting point. So we have a bull (male), a cow (female), and a hatchling (young 'un). You can have a congregation or bask of alligators, so I guess that works for dragons too... only I would love to use a fleet of dragons, thinking I'd heard that term before. But it turns out I can't find much about a fleet of dragons anywhere, so maybe I dreamed/dreamt it!

There is a a phrase, "cute as a button." that I was once told should be "bright as a button." Well, it turns out that both phrases are fine, but "cute" is American while "bright" is British:

"Cute as a button" – as in the button quail, a small, gray and super fluffy bird.

"Bright as a button" – the British version of "cute as a button" which means "cute, charming, attractive, almost always with the connotation of being small."

This stuff could rattle around in your head for years to come. Sorry...

The Greatest Sentence

Today, as on many other days, I am relishing the taste of good words.

The author Anne Dillard tells the story of a student who approached a writer and asked if he could ever be a writer. He is then challenged with the question, "Do you like sentences?" I can not think of a better means to divide writers from non-writers. A writer will immediately tremble and then recount favorite sentences. A non-writer will be confused. "Sentences? I like books. I like stories well-told. But sentences?" This latter group stands in awe at the dimensions of a cathedral. The former group is thrilled by how the stacking of each brick transgresses gravity as buttresses fly, defying the heavens to create the heavenly.

For the writer, beyond the appreciation of reading a well-crafted sentence, is the desire to create the sentence that will make the angels laugh or cry, invoke a synchronous nod from the gods of literature, and curl a Grinch-sized smile on the lips of the constant reader. Do you like sentences? Do you love sentences?

What is the greatest sentence? To begin this quest, I must address the question: What makes a sentence great? That depends on its mission. It can be great because it conveys a timeless truth or a sums up a great aspiration. This variety often fills books of quotes. Along with exemplary construction is the "uh-huh" factor, the recognition of its wisdom.

"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth." Muhammad Ali

"I am not young enough to know everything." Oscar Wilde.

Variants of these are those that owe their existence to other well-known quotes. They are equally quotable, even if they often devolve into cynicism.

"The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep." Woody Allen.

"Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation." James Thurber

"East is east and west is San Francisco." O. Henry

Dorothy Parker summarized the distinction between these forms: "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words." Still, don't underestimate calisthenics. This includes the powerful form of construction known as chiasmus. Here a set of words are introduced and then their order is reversed. This can reiterate a point, provide contrast through counterpoint, or twist the thought in unexpected directions. Shakespeare's: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air." Or the comment in regards to the chance of finding a man in Alaska where single men greatly outnumber women: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." That is from our old buddy Anon.

Which leads to the next observation. Many sentences are great because of their context. Most sentences are servants, not masters. Their purpose is to help support the larger structure. Even when the sentence becomes a grand summary of all that was before it, it is diminished out of context. "He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly: 'My dear, I don't give a damn.'" Margaret Mitchell. This declaration would be forgotten if it had come from some pot-boiler novel. It is great because it served its purpose perfectly.

"These are the times that try men's souls." Thomas Payne. An elegant, simple construction. Poetic. And yet it helps to know the times to which Payne refers.

"Jesus wept." A thrilling sentence of minimalist simplicity. But its beauty is completed by knowing the gospel story.

"Buddha laughed." There is no scriptural mention of Jesus laughing. Perhaps the contrasting combination, "Jesus wept; Bhudda laughed," is an all time great sentence. Checking Google, I find that a Reverend John Morehouse has used this as the title for a sermon. I hope his sermon did it justice.

Another of my personal favorites requires context. It is from the film critic Todd Anthony's review of Oliver Stone's Nixon: "Two master liars locked in mortal combat."

I would argue that the greatest sentences ever are those that can stand alone. They do not require context or gymnastics for resonance. It is not the wisdom they contain that elevates them. It is their elegant construction. The word choices are unexpected and yet perfect. They have song and the voice to sing it. Often they are short, simple, and precise. Several examples, in reverse order of length:

"Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me." Psalm 42

"For a steep second she thought his gaze hummed; but it was only her blood she heard.." Thomas Harris

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." George Orwell

"There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he deserved it." CS Lewis

"Shut up, he explained." Ring Lardner

Others among the greatest sentences are bulky. Although it is hard to sustain intensity and focus over length, some styles don't require these attributes. Beat poetry and stream-of-conscious can invoke great rambling rants. Nonetheless, one can't help but feel that even great authors succumb to the self-indulgent audacity of the hopelessly long sentence. Victor Hugo had a sentence of 823 words in Les Miserables, while Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom had a sentence of 1,300 words. Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Joyce's Ulysses runs thirty pages. Finally, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club has a sentence clocking in at 13,000 words. No one is quoting these, at least not at length.

There are long-winded sentences that are worth every ounce of breath. Ginsberg's "Howl" is 2031 words, crammed with kaleidoscopic discomforting imagery. The opening to The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, clocking in at 119 words, is brilliant in its construction, its word choice and its discovery of truth through contradictions. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

My pick for the greatest long sentence is from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. At 348 words, copyright privileges prevent me from quoting it in its entirety. It begins: "It is a light blue moonless summer evening," and continues, "while the floats, for there are timber diving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver," and concludes, "and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightning in the blue evening...unearthly."

Which leaves my choice for the greatest sentence ever. It has all of the best qualities of the previous choices: lightness and weight, music and voice. It has a startling poetry and a resonant vision. At 46 words, it seems brief. From Lincoln's second inaugural address: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

One of the best books to find truly exquisite sentences is "The Maytrees" by one of my favorite authors - Annie Dillard. She is one of the best in the business. Dillard’s prose is breathtaking; her metaphors, to borrow from her lexicon, enough to knock you out. The sea is “a monster with a lace hem.” Pete’s “fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were less interesting than frogs, and noisier.” Lou “opened her days like a piñata.” When Toby leaves her (somewhat improbably) for Deary, Lou “had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love’s long line alone; it did not catch.”

"The rest is silence." Shakespeare

"I" Before "E"

This list of words is based on the "rule" that I learned as a student of junior high school English:

"I before E except after C; exceptions are either, neither,
foreign, leisure, protein, seize and weird."

Or...

"I before E except after C unless in neighbor and weigh."

I think there may be one or two (or quite a few!) other exceptions.

ancient
apartheid
atheist
cleidomastoid (collar bone)
conscience
deign
deism
deity
eight
feign
feisty
freight
geisha
height, heighten
heist
inveigh
kaleidoscope
monotheism
neigh
neighbor, neighborhood
Pleiades (star cluster in Orion)
Pleistocene
prescient
reign
rein
reindeer
reinstall, preinstall, reincarnation, reinvent, reinstate, reinstitute, (plus many other "re-" words
science
sheik
skein
sleigh
sleight (of hand)
species
stein
theist
weight
veil
vein

Any others folks?

Random Words - 1

A few random words I came across recently -

sesquipedality

PRONUNCIATION:
(ses-kwi-pi-DAL-i-tee)

MEANING: noun: The practice of using long words.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin sesqui- (one and a half) + ped- (foot). First recorded use: 1759.

NOTES:

Literally speaking, sesquipedality is using words that are one and a half feet long. A related word is sesquicentennial (150th anniversary). Nothing wrong with using a sesquipedalian word once in a while, if it fits, but it's best to avoid too many long, polysyllabic words. This dictum doesn't apply to German speakers though, as Mark Twain once observed, "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective."

There's a bean subspecies commonly known as a yardlong bean. It's really misnamed as it's "only" half a yard long. Its scientific name, Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis, is more precise.

USAGE:

"The stories in Oblivion comprise relatively straightforward prose, with textual play and sesquipedality trimmed to the bone."

Tim Feeney; Oblivion; Review of Contemporary Fiction; Jul 2004.

#####


Hobson's choice

PRONUNCIATION:
(HOB-sonz chois)

MEANING: noun: An apparently free choice that offers no real alternative: take it or leave it.

ETYMOLOGY: After Thomas Hobson (1544?-1630), English keeper of a livery stable, from his requirement that customers take either the horse nearest the stable door or none.

NOTES:

Hobson had some 40 animals in his rent-a-horse business and a straightforward system: a returning horse goes to the end of the line, and the horse at the top of the line gets to serve next. He had good intentions -- rotating horses so his steeds received good rest and an equal wear, but his heavy-handed enforcement of the policy didn't earn him any customer service stars. He could have offered his clients the option of choosing one of the two horses nearest the stable door, for instance, and still achieve nearly the same goal. More recently Henry Ford offered customers a Ford Model T in any color as long as it was black.

USAGE:

"There, many are given a legal Hobson's choice: Plead guilty and go home or ask for a lawyer and spend longer in custody."

Sean Webby; No Lawyer in Sight for Many Making Way Through System; San Jose Mercury News (California); Dec 30, 2009.

#####

Hobson's choice led me too -

Morton's fork

PRONUNCIATION:
(MOR-tuhns fork)

MEANING: noun: A situation involving choice between two equally undesirable outcomes.

ETYMOLOGY: After John Morton (c. 1420-1500), archbishop of Canterbury, who was tax collector for the English King Henry VII. To him is attributed Morton's fork, a neat argument for collecting taxes from everyone: those living in luxury obviously had money to spare and those living frugally must have accumulated savings to be able to pay.

USAGE:
"Japan's political elites] face a Morton's fork between being ignored or being seen as a problem to which there is little solution."
Michael Auslin; Japan Dissing; The Wall Street Journal (New York); Apr 22, 2010.

#####

And finally -

decussate

PRONUNCIATION:
(di-KUHS-ayt, DEK-uh-sayt, adjective: di-KUHS-ayt, -it)

MEANING: verb tr.: To intersect or to cross.

adjective:
1. Intersected or crossed in the form of an X.
2. Arranged in pairs along the stem, each pair at a right angle to the one above or below.

ETYMOLOGY: The word originated from Latin "as" (plural asses) which was a copper coin and the monetary unit in ancient Rome. The word for ten asses was decussis, from Latin decem (ten) + as (coin). Since ten is represented by X, this spawned the verb decussare, meaning to divide in the form of an X or intersect.

NOTES:

Samuel Johnson, lexicographer extraordinaire, has a well-deserved reputation for his magnum opus "A Dictionary of the English Language", but as they say, even Homer nods. He violated one of the dictums of lexicography -- do not define a word using harder words than the one being defined -- when he used today's word and two other uncommon words in defining the word network:

Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

And what is "reticulated"? Again, according to Johnson:

Reticulated: Made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities.

USAGE:
"How I wished then that my body, too, if it had to droop and shrivel, for surely everyone's did, would furl and decussate with grace to sculpt the victory of my spirit."

J. Nozipo Maraire; Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter; Delta; 1997.

What Is A Lipogram?

A lipogram is a text that purposefully excludes a particular letter of the alphabet. A contemporary example is Andy West's novel Lost and Found (2002), which does not contain the letter e.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "missing letter"

Examples and Observations:

* "Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary 'fill-ins' as 'romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road.' Nor will it say anything about tinklings lulling distant folds; robins caroling at twilight, nor any 'warm glow of lamplight' from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that 'a child don't know anything.'

"Now, any author, from history's dawn, always had that most important aid to writing: an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction did not block his path. But in my story that mighty obstruction will constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography."

(Ernest Vincent Wright, from Gadsby, 1939--a story of more than 50,000 words that does not use the letter e)


* "Most common of all marks from A to Z,
It's tyrant to orthography, and smug
That not a thing of worth is said without
Our using it. . . ."

(Daniel J. Webster, "A Lipogram: Writing Without It." Keeping Order on My Shelf: Poems and Translations. iUniverse, 2005)


"The earliest lipograms are thought to have been composed in the sixth century BC, but none has survived; maybe they were never actually written down, only imagined, to circulate among the clerisy as instant legends of verbal skill. . . . [T]he lipogram should be a purposeless ordeal undertaken voluntarily, a gratuitous taxing of the brain, and the severer the better. It should make the business of writing not pleasanter but harder."

(John Sturrock, "Georges Perec." The Word From Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers. Verso, 1998)

Here are some more fascinating works -

* Adam Adams' novel Toxic Panda is an armchair treasure hunt excluding the letter E throughout the book and the embedded puzzles.

* In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) the first chapter consists solely of words beginning with "A". Chapter two also permits words beginning with "B" and so on, until at chapter 26, Abish allows himself to use words beginning with any letter at all. For the next 25 chapters, he reverses the process.

* Gyles Brandreth re-wrote some of Shakespeare's works as lipograms: Hamlet without the letter "I" (e.g., "To be or not to be, that's the query"; Macbeth without "A" or "E"; Twelfth Night without "O" or "L"; Othello without "O".[7][citation needed] In 1985 he also wrote the following poem, where each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram (using every letter of the alphabet except "E").

Bold Nassan quits his caravan,
A hazy mountain grot to scan;
Climbs jaggy rocks to find his way,
Doth tax his sight, but far doth stray.

Not work of man, nor sport of child
Finds Nassan on this mazy wild;
Lax grow his joints, limbs toil in vain—
Poor wight! why didst thou quit that plain?

Vainly for succour Nassan calls;
Know, Zillah, that thy Nassan falls;
But prowling wolf and fox may joy
To quarry on thy Arab boy.

* In Christian Bök's novel Eunoia (2001), each chapter is restricted to a single vowel, missing four of the five vowels. For example the fourth chapter does not contain the letters "A", "E", "I" or "U". A typical sentence from this chapter is "Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth." Lipogrammatic writing which uses only one vowel has been called univocalic.

* Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), a book by Mike Schertzer (1998), pretends to have been written "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The poems that follow use only the 4 vowels "A", "E", "I", and "O", and 11 consonants "C", "D", "F", "H", "L", "M", "N", "R", "S", "T", and "W" of this utterance.

* Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (2001) is described as a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable": the plot of the story deals with a small country which begins to outlaw the use of various letters, and as each letter is outlawed within the story, it is (for the most part) no longer used in the text of the novel. It is not purely lipogrammatic, however, because the outlawed letters do appear in the text proper from time to time (the characters being penalized with banishment for their use) and when the plot requires a search for pangram sentences, all twenty-six letters are obviously in use. Also, late in the text, the author begins using letters serving as homophones for the omitted letters (i.e. "PH" in place of an "F", "G" in place of "C"), which some might argue is cheating.


Some amazing stuff!

Speaking Of Mark Twain...

Mark Twain on the Rotten English Alphabet


Mark Twain had little respect for what he called our "foolish" and "drunken old alphabet," or for the "rotten spelling" that it encouraged. Nonetheless, Twain was hardly convinced that the efforts of spelling reformers would ever succeed. It was the alphabet itself that needed to be torn up and rebuilt from scratch.

In the early years of the 20th century, one of the more prominent advocates of spelling reform was the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. He funded the efforts of the Simplified Spelling Board and the National Education Association, which had gained headlines recommending these twelve "reformed" spellings:

1. "bizness" for business
2. "enuf" for enough
3. "fether' for feather
4. "mesure' for measure
5. "plesure" for pleasure
6. "red" for read (past tense of "to read")
7. "ruf" for rough
8. "trauf" for trough
9. "thru" for through
10. "tuf" for tough
11. "tung" for tongue
12. "yung" for young

An additional 300 new spellings soon followed.

At first the initiative met with modest support (President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all government printing offices to use the new spellings and a few newspapers followed suit), but Mark Twain remained skeptical.


Twain's Response to Carnegie and the Spelling Reformers

In December 1907, at a meeting honoring Carnegie in New York City, Twain gave a speech in which he explained why a piecemeal approach to spelling reform was doomed to fail:

There's not a vowel in [the alphabet] with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch anything to. Look at the "h's" distributed all around. There's "gherkin." What are you going to do with the "h" in that? What the devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know. It's one thing I admire the English for: they just don't mind anything about them at all.

But look at the "pneumatics" and the "pneumonias" and the rest of them. A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken thief. Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs. . . .

If we had adequate, competent vowels, with a system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so every shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not a word in any tongue that we could not spell accurately. That would be competent, adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping, the hair punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name of simplified spelling. If I ask you what b-o-w spells you can't tell me unless you know which b-o-w I mean, and it is the same with r-o-w, b-o-r-e, and the whole family of words which were born out of lawful wedlock and don't know their own origin.

Now, if we had an alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of inadequate and incompetent, things would be different. Spelling reform has only made it bald-headed and unsightly. There is the whole tribe of them, "row" and "read" and "lead"--a whole family who don't know who they are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what kind of a one.

If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of a man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to recall the lady hog and the future ham.

It's a rotten alphabet. I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and leave simplified spelling alone. Simplified spelling brought about sun-spots, the San Francisco earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never have had if spelling had been left all alone.

Now, I hope I have soothed Mr. Carnegie and made him more comfortable than he would have been had he received only compliment after compliment, and I wish to say to him that simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

("The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling," December 9, 1907)


Postscript on the Spelling Reform Movement

Eventually, after donating more than $280,000 to the doomed cause of spelling reform, Carnegie gave up. In 1915 he told the editor of The Times of London, "Amended spellings can only be submitted for general acceptance. It is the people who decide what is to be adopted or rejected."

And a century later, of course, the 26 letters in that "rotten alphabet" remain unchanged.

Happy Birthday Mark!

Yesterday (November 30) was the birthday of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain was very popular, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death he was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".

Here are just a few quotes from this genius -


A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
Mark Twain

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
Mark Twain

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Mark Twain

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Mark Twain

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
Mark Twain

All generalizations are false, including this one.
Mark Twain

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
Mark Twain

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
Mark Twain

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.
Mark Twain

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Mark Twain

How Some Words Are Related

The words we use have long histories. Some are straightforward, but many have interesting stories behind them. I have seen many lists of interesting etymologies, but I have very few lists containing pairs of words that are related in some way. The following pairs have some interesting stories about how they are related.


Cybernetic and Governor

The words “cybernetic” and “governor” come from the same word. That puts Arnold Schwarzenegger in a whole new light, doesn’t it? Cybernetic, while popularly known in the context of biotechnology, is to do with the science of regulatory systems. This can mean the way computer programs control robotics, or how social groups are arranged into hierarchies. The word “cybernetics” comes straight from the Greek word “kubernetes”, in English. The Greek “K” (kappa) is generally turned into a “C” in English, and the Greek “U” (upsilon) becomes a “Y” in English (cyclops is a perfect example). In Greek, a kubernetes was the pilot of a ship, the person who controlled how the ship moved.

The Greeks were better sailors than the Romans, so it did not take long for the Romans to use Greek terminology on Roman ships. The Romans, however, favored the “G” sound over the “K” sound, and “kubernetes” became gubernator. From there, the word started to mean “the guy in charge.” Centuries passed, and the Latin-speaking Franks, who lived in one particular region of Gaul, imposed their pronunciation of Latin on the region, which they now called “France” or “land of the Franks.” Just as the Romans preferred the “G” sound to the “K,” the French preferred the “V” sound to “B”, in this particular word, giving us “governor.” The French “governor” passed into English after the Norman invasion (more on that later).


Dexterity and Sinister

Unlike the two previous words, dexterity and sinister do not come from the same word, but were, in fact, opposites. Dextera in Latin means “right hand”, and Sinistra in Latin means “left hand.” Both words acquired their modern connotations in antiquity. The right hand was the hand that held a soldier’s weapon. “Right-handed” became slang for being skillful or agile, giving dexterity its modern meaning millenia before it was reduced to another stat on an Orcish archer’s ability score.

Sinister’s modern meaning comes from fortune-telling. Augurs (not to be confused with auger, a word discussed a little later) were Roman priests who specialized in divining the will of the gods by watching the flight of birds. The number, direction, origin and species of birds seen, all had some meaning to the augur. Birds seen in the augur’s right field of vision were auspicious, or favorable, while birds seen off the left shoulder were unfavorable, thus “sinister” acquired the meaning of harmful or evil.


Shirt and Skirt

The Anglo-Saxons who invaded and settled Great Britain spoke a dialect of West Germanic, the largest of the three branches of Germanic languages. In the 11th century, Vikings from Denmark invaded and settled throughout what would become modern England, eventually controlling half of the region. These Danes spoke a dialect of North Germanic. The two languages were very similar, but had a number of important differences in pronunciation. Words that had a sh pronunciation in Old English were given a sk pronunciation in Danish.

Both cultures wore a long, unisex frock. In Old English it was called a scyrte (pronounced shoor-teh), while in Danish it was called a skyrta (skoor-ta). As the two cultures mixed, Danish words found their way into the English vocabulary. The nearly identical words for the same object began to be used alongside each other. One came to mean the top half of a man’s outfit; the other came to refer to the bottom half of a woman’s outfit. The same thing happened to many other words, such as screech and shriek.


Gringo and Greek

The Greeks have never called themselves “Greek.” They have always referred to themselves as “Hellenes”, after the mythological figure Hellen (not to be confused with Helen of Troy). The word “Greek” comes from the Latin term “Graeci,” which means “the people from Graia,” the first Greek town the Romans encountered. Gringo, a derogatory word for non-Spanish speakers that is used in many Spanish-speaking areas, likely comes from Griego, the Spanish rendering of Graeci. The word was originally a casual way of saying “foreigner” in Spanish, not unlike the English expression “it’s Greek to me.” After the Spanish expansion into the Americas, the word began to take on a more derogatory context.


Galaxy and Lettuce

The word for milk in Greek was galax (or galactos, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence or not), while the word in Latin was lac (or lactis, again, depending on whether it was the subject of a sentence). Both Greek and Latin developed from proto-Indo-European, and the two words come from the same source. The Greek term, however, had an extra syllable.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is named after its milky-white appearance in the sky. The word galaxy developed out of the Greek galaxias, with the word galax as its root. The actual term “Milky Way” is a translation of the Latin “via lactea.” Lettuce comes from the Latin word for lettuce, “lactuca.” The word developed from lac (lactis) because the juice of the plant has a milky white appearance. Speakers of Old French pronounced “lactuca” as “laitue.” The English term, developed from the plural “laitues,” was eventually spelled “lettuce.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

I send you some thoughts (some personal and some attributed) for Thanksgiving Day, my sincere thanks for visiting this blog and my hope that in giving thanks even more will become open and visible to you.

The other day a friend asked me if I liked Kipling. I told her that I had never kipled before and that I would get back to her. I know what I need to do over the holiday!

It is literally true, as the thankless say, that they have nothing to be thankful for. He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient. But a thankful heart hath a continual feast. W.J. Cameron

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. The half-time of a football game takes twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Now, as someone (I honestly forgot who) once said, - "Enjoy eating your ritually beheaded corpse with 3rd degree burns over 100% of its body." Maybe it was Agent Mulder from "The X Files"?

Have a wonderful holiday!

Failure To Communicate

From The Boston Globe

The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age

By Kara Miller
May 19, 2010

WHEN YOU teach English to college students, you quickly realize two things.

First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.

The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.

But I can’t help it; there’s so much to correct. Subjects don’t agree with verbs. “Its’’ and “it’s’’ are used interchangeably. “They are’’ is confused with “their.’’ And facts too often function as topic sentences. Many of the students whose work I correct are smart, motivated, and quick to incorporate suggestions. But they have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place.

Some of the problem, of course, is carelessness. But much of it is not. I have read seniors’ cover letters — letters that aim to snag them a dream job — and they’re frequently riddled with both grammatical and stylistic mistakes.

Inadequate writing skills have led to concern in colleges across the country. In 2007, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 24 percent of 12th-graders scored “proficient’’ or better. That same year, more than 80 percent of students at the City University of New York had to enroll in remedial courses in reading, writing, or math.

Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, has expressed deep concern about the erosion of solid communication skills. “In an age overwhelmed by information (we are told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and write — in other words, to organize information into knowledge — can be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill.’’

Which leads to a serious question: why do so many students come to college without a command of fundamentals?

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

The few teachers who do spend day and night reviewing papers deserve both a medal and a hefty raise. As they know, fixing students’ writing is complex; it simply cannot be boiled down to a multiple-choice test or a series of right-and-wrong answers. Which may mean rethinking the way writing is taught in high school — and, perhaps, the way teachers are compensated.

We often belittle English teachers — if you speak and read English, how hard can it be to teach it? — but those with strong communication skills are both rare and valuable. Recall that when Massachusetts implemented a teachers’ test 12 years ago, the public was shocked to discover that more than 30 percent of prospective teachers failed the literacy portion.

Though the media tend to focus on nationwide shortages of math and science teachers — which are indeed acute — finding, coaching, and retaining good English teachers is an underreported struggle. Indeed, as anyone who has received a poorly written e-mail, assessment, memo, cover letter, or report knows, writing — both good and bad — has real power. The National Commission on Writing (a part of the College Board) has calculated that “remedying deficiencies in writing costs American corporations as much as $3.1 billion annually.’’

In an increasingly digital world, writing acts as a vehicle for knowledge — giving it short shrift in the classroom is a serious mistake.

Kara Miller teaches at Babson College.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

National Novel Writing Month

Before our regular post, here is an interesting piece of news -

Sarah Palin coins ‘word of the year’

The guardians of usage at the New Oxford American Dictionary awarded the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin the distinction of coining 2010's "word of the year" — "refudiate" — via her Twitter account.

According to TLC, roughly 4.96 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska." That's the biggest premiere in the channel's history.

And as if the ratings triumph weren't enough, today the New Oxford American Dictionary declared "refudiate" the top word in 2010 — a verb that Palin apparently invented.

The former governor used the word in a Twitter message last summer, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. When critics pounced on the made-up verb, Palin deleted the Tweet and replaced it with one that called on Muslims to "refute" the site — even though that usage made no sense, either, since to refute is to prove something to be untrue.

But in a release on November 15, the New Oxford American Dictionary defended Palin's use of the word. "From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used 'refudiate,' we have concluded that neither 'refute' nor 'repudiate' seems consistently precise, and that 'refudiate' more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of 'reject,' " the New Oxford American Dictionary said in a press release.

And lest you think the New Oxford editors were only hailing "refudiate" as a publicity stunt, let the record show that Palin's coinage was also named to the honor roll of the Global Language Monitor project — together with terms such as "spillcam" and "vuvuzela."

*****

And here is the post for today -

It’s National Novel Writing Month!

National Novel Writing Month

Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren’t going to be worth the paper they’re printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: Irish novelist John Boyne said he was so wrapped up in this engrossing tale of a boy living through the Holocaust that he wrote the entire thing in two and a half days, barely stopping to eat or sleep throughout the ordeal. He notes that his other novels took months of planning and effort to write, but this story simply could not be slowed.

On The Road: The so-called “beatnik bible” that inspired an entire generation was penned in only three weeks. Granted, Jack Kerouac spent seven years travelling across America and taking detailed notes the entire time, but the actual fruits of his labor took less than a month to put on paper. It’s worth noting that he typed the entire draft on one 120 foot long piece of teletype paper that he taped together before writing.

A Study In Scarlet: The novel that introduced the famed detective work of Sherlock Holmes to the masses took Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle three weeks to write in 1886. This story was also notable for being the first Sherlock Holmes story to be adapted to the silver screen.

The Tortoise and the Hare: In 1954, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote this tale in three weeks after being romantically entwined with a man who refused to leave his wife. She revealed in an interview in 2005, “I have never looked at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return.”

The Gambler: Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this tale in 26 days while also writing Crime and Punishment. He was heavily in debt and addicted to gambling and saw the semi-autobiographical novella as a good way to help him pay off his debts. He later ended up marrying the young stenographer to whom he dictated the story.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark took only one month to write this novel about a fictionalized version of her teacher, Christiana Kay. She said the story was inspired by a 1960 class assignment: “We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating.”

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, good luck! We hope these stories helped inspire you to get cracking.

Interesting Article From Erin McKean

Redefining Definition


By ERIN McKEAN
Published: December 17, 2009

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. “According to Webster’s,” begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries “do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings,” we don’t often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word’s essence.

But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

Despite all the thought and hard work that go into them, definitions, surprisingly, turn out to be ill suited for many of the tasks they have been set to — including their ostensible purpose of telling you the meaning of a word. Overly abstract definitions are often helpful only if you come to them already primed by context. It’s difficult to read a definition like “(esp. of a change or distinction) so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyze or describe,” and have subtle immediately spring to mind; or to come across “reduce the force, effect or value of” and think of attenuate.

Definitions are especially unhelpful to children. There’s an oft-cited 1987 study in which fifth graders were given dictionary definitions and asked to write their own sentences using the words defined. The results were discouraging. One child, given the word erode, wrote, “Our family erodes a lot,” because the definition given was “eat out, eat away.”

Neither are definitions complete pictures of all the possible meanings of a word. One study found that in a set of arbitrarily chosen passages from modern fiction, an average of 13 percent of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were used in senses not found in a large desk dictionary. And of course there are some words that simply elude definition, a problem even Samuel Johnson faced. In the preface to his groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language, he wrote, “Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it when they are exhibited together.” We all have had Johnson’s experience of “easily perceiving” differences between words that we cannot as easily describe — quick: what’s the difference between louche and raffish? Most people, when asked what a word means, resort to using it in a sentence, because that’s the way we learn words best: by encountering them in their natural context.

Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions? The short answer, for hundreds of years, has been a practical one: space — specifically the lack thereof. Print dictionaries have never had sufficient page-room to show enough real, live, useful examples to create an optimal and natural word-learning experience. Even the expert lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, which famously includes “illustrative quotations” alongside its definitions, still put the definition and its needs first, making new words wait their turn to make it through the definition bottleneck.

The near-infinite space of the Web gives us a chance to change all this. Imagine if lexicographers were to create online resources that give, in addition to definitions, many living examples of word use, drawn not just from literature and newspapers but from real-time sources of language like Web sites, blogs and social networks. We could build people’s confidence in their ability to understand and use words naturally, from the variety of contexts in which words occur. Indeed, this is what my colleagues and I are trying to accomplish at the online dictionary Wordnik.com: we’re using text-mining techniques and the unlimited space of the Internet to show as many real examples of word use as we can, as fast as we can.

This approach is especially useful for grasping new words and uses: if you look up tweet on a site like mine, for example, you understand that the word is used to refer to messages sent via Twitter; there’s no waiting for an editor to write you a definition; plus there are examples of tweets right on the page. Online, you can also look up just the form of a word you’re interested in — say, sniped instead of snipe — and find precise examples. A word is so much more than its meaning: it’s also who uses it, when it was used, what words appear alongside it and what kinds of texts it appears in.

Without privileging definitions, dictionary-making would involve more curation and less abridgment, less false precision and more organic understanding. If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature — think of them as extremely nerdy poems — without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.

Erin McKean is the chief executive and founder of the online dictionary Wordnik.com. She was previously the editor in chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.