Oh, Those Prepositions!

Dear Stan,
Is there a reason for not ending a sentence with a preposition that
you can think of?

from Hartford, CT

I must admit I don't know where you're coming from. Correct usage in English and Science is something I've devoted my whole life to. Of course, if I say anything you can't understand, it will just become a new hammer you can try to hit me or another expert over the head with. There are plenty of people like you I can't hope to change the mind of. But then, I've dealt with people like you before. People who don't really want to learn, but just hope to find someone they can publicly disagree with. There's little I can say that your type won't find something to object to. But getting back to your question, no, there's really no reason for not ending a sentence with a
preposition, at least none I can think of.

Stan


Looking deeper into the question we find -

The saying attributed to Winston Churchill rejecting the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition must be among the most frequently mutated witticisms ever. I have received many notes from correspondents claiming to know what the “original saying” was, but none of them cites an authoritative source.


The alt.english.usage FAQ states that the story originated with an anecdote in Sir Ernest Gowers’ Plain Words (1948). Supposedly an editor had clumsily rearranged one of Churchill’s sentences to avoid ending it in a preposition, and the Prime Minister, very proud of his style, scribbled this note in reply: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” The American Heritage Book of English Usage agrees.


The FAQ goes on to say that the Oxford Companion to the English Language (no edition cited) states that the original was “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” To me this sounds more likely, and eagerness to avoid the offensive word “bloody” would help to explain the proliferation of variations.


A quick search of the Internet turned up an astonishing number. In this era of copy-and-paste it’s truly unusual to find such rich variety. The narrative context varies too: sometimes the person rebuked by Churchill is a correspondent, a speech editor, a bureaucrat, or an audience member at a speech and sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, and sometimes even a young student. Sometimes Churchill writes a note, sometimes he scribbles the note on the corrected manuscript, and often he is said to have spoken the rebuke aloud. The text concerned was variously a book manuscript, a speech, an article, or a government document.


Here is just a sample of the variations circulating on the Net:

1. That is a rule up with which I will not put.
2. This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
3. This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
4. Not ending a sentence with a preposition is a bit of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
5. That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put
6. This is insubordination, up with which I will not put!
7. This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
8. This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.
9. Madame, that is a rule up with which I shall not put.


One poor soul, unfamiliar with the word “arrant,” came up with: “That is the sort of errant criticism up with which I will not put.”


Then there are those who get it so scrambled it comes out backward:

1. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
2. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not put.
3. From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
4. Please understand that ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.


I checked the indexes of a dozen Churchill biographies, but none of them had an entry for “prepositions.”


Ben Zimmer has presented evidence on the alt.usage.english list that this story was not originally attributed to Churchill at all, but to an anonymous official in an article in The Strand magazine. Since Churchill often contributed to The Strand, Zimmer argues, it would certainly have identified him if he had been the official in question. It is not clear how the anecdote came to be attributed to Churchill by Gowers, but it seems to have circulated independently earlier.

A Revenge Not So Sweet

Occasionally a phrase comes up in conversation that sticks in my mind until I find out more about it. This week, when talking with a friend about an illness recently suffered, the phase Montezuma's Revenge came up. Or out...

This is what I found.

Meaning

The diarrhea that is often suffered by tourists when travelling to foreign parts, in this case South America.

Origin

Montezuma II (also spelled Moctezuma II) was Emperor of Mexico from 1502 to 1520 and was in power when the Spanish began their conquest of the Aztec Empire. The sickness, colloquially known as the 'squits/runs/trots' and more formally as 'Traveller's Diarrhoea', is usually caused by drinking the local water or eating spicy food that visitors aren't accustomed to. It is a bacteriological illness, always uncomfortable, and occasionally serious. Most cases are caused by the E. coli bacterium.

The revenge element of the phrase alludes to the supposed hostile attitude of countries that were previously colonized by stronger countries, which are now, in this small but effective way, getting their own back.

There are many countries that were previously colonised that are now tourist destinations, and names for the condition reflect the part of the world concerned. These euphemisms are usually comic, reflecting the embarrassment felt by the sufferer and the amusement of the lucky non-sufferers. Of course, although Montezuma clearly had no reason to love the Conquistadors, his revenge isn't reserved for Spaniards - other names for it are:

The Gringo Gallop
The Aztec Two-step

Those unlucky enough to suffer from the condition in Asia might hear it called:

Gandhi's Revenge, Delhi Belly, The Rangoon Runs, Bombay Belly (India)
Gyppy Tummy, The Cairo Two-step, Pharaoh's Revenge, Mummy's Tummy (Egypt)
Bali Belly (Indonesia)


Travellers from Asia to the west are just as likely to suffer the illness, as it isn't caused primarily by insanitary conditions but by ingesting a strain of the E. Coli bacterium that one's body is unaccustomed to - an event just as likely in London and Los Angeles as it is in Cairo and Kuala Lumpur.

Delhi Belly and Gyppy Tummy were the first of these terms to gain wide usage and they appeared during WWII, when many British and US servicemen were fighting in North Africa and Asia. The earliest citations in print are from the Indiana Evening Gazette, October 1942:

Americans on duty overseas are learning also to guard against "Teheran tummy" and "Delhi belly" and in Alan Moorehead's A Year of Battle, 1943, which pretty much sums things up:

"Few set foot in Egypt without contracting 'Gypsy Tummy'... It recurs at irregular intervals and it makes you feel terrible."

As a phrase, Montezuma's revenge isn't particularly old. The earliest citation of it in print that I can find is from the US newspaper The Modesto Bee, February 1959:

In Mexico it sometimes is called the Aztec curse, Montezuma's revenge... and other colorful names. It can be either a mild or explosive illness.

See? In the end, it all works out.

Crosswordese

Crosswordese refers to hackneyed, obscure words or partial phrases, usually three, four and five letters long, used in crossword puzzles. These words are rarely, if ever, encountered in everyday conversation but often appear in crosswords because of the need for vowel-rich words or vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant (and vice versa) words in particular areas of the grid. Puzzles with too much crosswordese are frowned upon by cruciverbalists (crossword makers and solvers) and most publications have strict limits on their frequency in any given puzzle.

The following is a partial list of some of the most common crosswordese:

ADIT - Mine entrance
AERIE - High nest
AGHA - Turkish (Muslim) title of honor; a general
AGA - Turkish (Muslim) title of honor; a general
AGAR - Lab culture medium
AIT - River island
ALAI – Part of 'jai alai', a game played with a ball and racket
ALAR - Wing-shaped; Banned orchard spray
ALATE - Having wings
ALEE - Nautical term meaning 'away from the wind' or 'towards shelter'
ALETA - Prince Valiant's wife
ALEUT - Northern native (Aleutian Islands)
AMAH - Asian nanny
AMAS - Latin verb: You love
AMAT - Latin verb: He loves
AMATI - Famous violin (cf: violin maker, Andrea Amati)
AMIR - Muslim (religious) leader
AMO - Latin verb: I love
AMOR - Love, in Latin
ANIL - Shrub yielding a blue dye
ANKH - Egyptian hieroglyphic character (eternal life)
ANOA - Asian buffalo
APSE - Semicircular recess in a church
ARN - Prince Valiant's son
ARTE - Johnson of "Laugh-In" fame
ASTA - Dog of film in the 1930s
ASTI - Italian city known for its sparkling wines
ATRA - Gillette brand safety razor
ATTU - Westernmost Aleutian island
AULD - Part of "Auld Lang Syne"
BIRR - Ethiopian currency
BRIO - Italian: vigor; vivacity
CREE - Native Indian of northern Canada
ECRU - Shade of grayish-pale yellow or grayish-yellowish brown
(often describes fabrics: silk/linen)
ECU - Middle Ages shield; old French coin silver or gold coin
EDDA - Icelandic epic
EDO - Kyoto formerly
EERO - Architect Saarinen (St. Louis Arch, GM Technical Center)
ELIA – Part of 'Elia Kazan', Greek-born American film and theater director
ELO - Electric Light Orchestra
EMIR - Arab title of nobility
ENA - Bambi's aunt
ENATE - Related on the mother's side
ENO - Brian Eno, English musician, composer, record producer
ENID - Author Blyton
ENO - Music producer Brian ENO
ENOS - First-born son of Seth
EPEE - Dueling sword
ERAT - From Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED)
ERATO - Muse of poetry
ERE - Before, poetically (e'er)
ERIN - Poetic name for Ireland
ERLE – Erle Stanley Gardner, American lawyer and author (Perry Mason)
ERNE - Sea eagle (osprey)
ERSE - Scottish Gaelic
ESNE - Anglo-Saxon slave
ESSE - "To be" in Latin
ETE - 'Summer' in French
ETRE - "To be" in French
ETTU - Part of "Et tu, Brutus?" (Caesar's last words)
ETUDE - Musical study
ETUI - Decorative case for sewing kit
EWER - Pitcher
GAM(S) - Attractive female leg
HOI - as in hoi polloi, "the masses" or "the people", usually derogatory
IDES - Mid-month dates
ILIE - Nastase of tennis; Author Wiesel
IMAM - Muslim religious leader
INNU - Northern native (Eastern North America)
INRI - Letters on the cross
IOTA - Greek letter or small, tiny (insignificant) amount
ISIS - Egyptian goddess of fertility (sister & wife of OSIRIS)
KLEE - Artist Paul
KUDU - African antelope
LANAI - Veranda (Hawaiian)
LARA - Dr. Zhivago's mistress (Julie Christie role)
LARI - Georgian currency
LECH - Lech Walensa, former Polish Solidarity leader and president
LEI - Hawaiian necklace (wreath of flowers)
LEK - Albanian currency
LEV - Bulgarian currency
LUAU - Hawaiian feast
NAN - Indian bread
NARD - Ointment or salve
NEE - Formerly called (woman's maiden name)
NENE - Hawaiian goose
NOLO - As in "nolo contendere"; plea of "No Contest" in a court of law
OBI - Japanese sash (Geisha wear)
OLEO - Margarine
OLIO - Mixture, elements of writing, music, art or food
OMAN - Neighbor of Yemen
OMOO - Herman Melville novel (1847)
OONA - Charlie Chaplin's wife
ORO - Spanish: gold
ORT - Food scrap or leftover
OTT - Baseball player Mel (1st NL player to surpass 500 home runs)
PABA - Sunscreen ingredient (Para Amino Benzoic Acid)
POI - Polynesian staple food
RANI - Indian queen or princess (wife of a Rajah)
RANEE - Indian queen or princess (wife of a Rajah)
ROUE - Rake (man devoted to sensual pleasures)
SARD - Gem stone
SARI - Indian dress
SKUA - Predatory seabird
SLOE - Fruit of the blackthorn (gin flavoring)
SOU - Old French bronze coin
SPEE - Part of "Graf Spee" German battleship
STRAD - Famous violin (cf: violin maker, Antonio Stradivari)
STOA - Covered walkway or portico
TARA - O'Hara estate in 'Gone With the Wind'
TETRA - Aquarium fish
TOPEE - Pith helmet
TYRO (TIRO) - Novice or beginner
UNAU - Two-toed sloth
URDU - Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Pakistan and India
UTE - Native American

'Ate' Or 'Et'?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The $2-million Comma

GRANT ROBERTSON

Toronto Globe and Mail
July 8, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the CRTC disagreed. And the consequences are significant.

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

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

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

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

A Rose By Another Name?

Here is a fascinating list I came across at Mental Floss


What 10 Classic Books Were Almost Called

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Missed This - Another Sad Passing

Edwin Newman, Journalist, Dies at 91

Jerry Mosey/Associated Press


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strictly Speaking

You Can Look It Up!

Today is Dictionary Day!!


Noah Webster said -

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how can we celebrate Dictionary Day?


Celebrate Words!

1. Enjoy Nonsense Words

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


2. Learn Some New Words

I found these gems at various places on the web -

HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS -- with honor

FUSTIGATE - to cudgel or beat

BEJUGGLE - to outwit by trickery or deception; to cheat

BATRACHOPHAGOUS - one who eats frogs

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

ULOTRICHOUS - having very wooly hair

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


3. Adopt a "Dying" Word

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


Enjoy the day!!

How They Became Writers

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


1. George Orwell

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


2. Herman Melville

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


3. Kurt Vonnegut

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


4. Jack London

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


5. John Steinbeck

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

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We interrupt this post with a news bulletin.

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

Oct 11, 10:53 AM (ET)

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

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

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

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

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Information from: The Daily News of Newburyport

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We now resume our regular posting.


6. Jack Kerouac

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


7. Richard Wright

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


8. Joseph Heller

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


9. Joseph Conrad

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


10. Harper Lee

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

Did You Ever Wonder...

...where some literary characters came from?

Take a look at these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving Up The Hall

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


PRESCRIPTION vs. PERSCRIPTION

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


"THE TOWN WAS NEARLY DECIMATED"

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


V vs. VS.

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


ESPRESSO / TOO MANY COFFEE BEANS (espresso)

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


"PLURALISM"

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


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

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


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

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

Amusing And Amazing

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

You have got to be kidding me!

First the amusing -

GA leader: Boring names will stop rural sign theft


Sep 25, 11:15 PM (ET)

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

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

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

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

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

#####

and then the amazing -

$27 million to change NYC signs from all-caps

By JEREMY OLSHAN

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

Posted: 12:53 AM, September 30, 2010


The Capital of the World is going lower-case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Done On Purpose Or In Error?

As I read these news articles and headlines I can't help but wonder if at least some of these were done on purpose. Perhaps two or more editors having a friendly bet as to whether or not they would see print on be spoken on the air with no further comment.

Headlines:

* "Slain Doctor Worried About His Death" -- In a local paper in Canada.

* "Public Inquiry To Be Launched Into Avalanche" -- A front page headline in the National Post.

* "Youth Hit By Train Is Rushed To Two Hospitals" -- In a local paper.

* "Golfing Immortal Dies Aged 69" -- A headline in a New Zealand paper.

* "Flawless Take-Off Marred By Hitch" -- A headline in a New Zealand paper.

* "Holy Mother Crushes Sacred Infant" -- In a Catholic newspaper, referring to a basketball game between two Catholic High Schools.

* "Women Look Good" -- In a Canadian newspaper, referring to the women's curling team during the 1998 Winter Olympics.

* "Joint Committee Investigates Marijuana Use" -- A local newspaper of a suburb of Toronto, describing a committee set up by the board of education and the local municipality to investigate marijuana use among high school students.



News Articles:

* "The glamorous 17-year-old wants to be a policewoman some day, like her dad." -- From a New Zealand paper.

* "Although as a rider and breeder she has won countless prizes, she says she enjoys an occasional beating." -- From a New Zealand paper.

* "'It's a sad and tragic fact that, if you're a farmer, you are three times more likely to die than the average New Zealander,' he said. The rate was even worse for farm workers." -- From a New Zealand paper.

* "Latest census figures show that more than one New Zealander is a Maori or Polynesian." -- A New Zealand paper's cautious yet accurate report.

* "Visitors to the sandspit are advised that there is a prohibited area near the groin." -- From a New Zealand paper.

* "However, things are not always as simple as they seem. Is all this precipitation being monitored? And if it is, why? And if why, then by whom? To all these questions, the answer is yes." -- From a New Zealand paper.

* "The driver involved in this incident asked that her gender not be revealed." -- From a Sydney, Australia, paper.

* "'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex." -- From an IGN game review.



Radio News:

* "There's an overturned tractor-trailer heading north on Route 93." -- Report in a radio station's morning traffic update.

* "Seasonal weather for the time of year." -- Radio weather report.

Televised Reports:

* "Susan, things are washing up on the shore that have never seen the light of day in a long time." -- From a local news report on the aftereffects of 1989's Hurricane Hugo.

* "The bodies could not be identified because they were found face down." -- A reporter, reporting on a story of the discovery of two bodies under a bridge in rural Missouri.

* "Doctors say the longer the babies live, the better chance they'll have at surviving." -- From a local news cast.

* "Today Lesbian forces invaded...no, sorry, that should be Lesbianese." -- From a news report in UK, on a Lebanese conflict.

Online News:

* "Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam War." -- From abcnews.com, April 30, 2000. Revisionist history strikes again; now the war only lasted one day.

News Ads:

* "Panda lovers were saddened to hear that the world's oldest panda passed away today. We'll give you the reason for his death tonight at nine." -- From a nightly local news ad.

* "Local construction is making it hazardous to drive in some areas of our city. We'll tell you which to avoid on the way home on news tonight at 9:30." -- From a nightly local news ad on the radio.

Corrections:

* "Due to a typing error, Gov Dukakis was incorrectly identified in the third paragraph as Mike Tyson." -- Correction in a Massachusetts newspaper.

Events:

* "March 18: Outdoor Adventure Series: Indoor Rock Climbing" -- In a school's newsletter.

Horoscopes:

* "Cancer, June 22-July 23. Your home life could be chaotic. Some moments of solitude and medication can help you get through the day."

Sports Announcing:

* "As Phil De Glanville said, each game is unique, and this one is no different than any other." -- Channel 4 news

* "If England are going to win this match, they're going to have to score a goal." -- Grandstand, BBC1

* "Well, I guess we can see that Ralph isn't a left-handed hooker." -- Sportscaster, after Ralph Sampson missed a left-handed hook shot.

* "It's an island because it's surrounded by land. I mean water. Islands are surrounded by water, and that affects them." -- A TV commentator for America's Cup racing.

* "And the name of that country really tells you exactly where these guys are from." -- A TV commentator for the 2000 Olympics opening ceremonies.

* "And there's Bill Gates, the...most...famous...man in the...ah...Microsoft." -- A TV commentator for the 2000 Olympics.

* "The ball is going back, Smith is chasing it, it's still going back, Smith jumps, he hits his head on the wall and it rolls off! It's rolling all the way back to the infield. This is a terrible day for the Padres!" -- A San Diego Padres announcer.

Interviews:

* "Am I cold? Why do you think I'm sitting here under these two Africans?" -- An elderly lady, incredulously, during a televised interview at her home.

* "How awful! Do you still have an artificial leg?" -- Simon Fanshawe, during a Metro Radio Interview, when a listener said, "My most embarrassing moment was when my artificial leg fell off at the altar on my wedding day."

* "So did you see which train crashed into which train first?" -- A talk radio interviewer, questioning a 15-year old eyewitness to a head-on train collision. The answer he gave was, "No, they both ran into each other at the same time."

Driving On The Army of Tennesse Hihgway

How come nobody notices things like this until it is too late. This was not like an obscure misprint in a small print advertisement! It is a road sign!!! A BIG road sign!!


Transportation Dept. ridiculed for misspelling road sign.

Associated Press

A new sign on a highway near a Civil War battlefield in northwest Georgia is getting attention for the wrong reason.


The informational sign posted last week on U.S. 27 near the Chickamauga Battlefield says: "Army of Tennesse Hihgway." Both "Tennessee" and "Highway" are misspelled.

Chickamauga City Manager John Culpepper told the Chattanooga Times Free Press "they can't spell down at the Georgia Department of Transportation."

GDOT spokesman Mohamed Arafa said there are sometimes mistakes with names "but Tennessee, there's no excuse for that." He also said the department "used to be the Department of Highway."

Arafa said the sign would be fixed immediately.

Culpepper said the Confederate States of America signs were installed to mark the paths that troops took toward the Battle of Chickamauga.


"There is no excuse" for misspelling Tennessee?!? So, hihgway is ok??

English Dies

From The Washington Post

Goodbye, cruel words: English. It's dead to me.


By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, September 19, 2010

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.

On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."

Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question.

It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will be mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States, English has become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young adults. Once the most popular major at the nation's leading colleges and universities, it now often trails more pragmatic disciplines, such as economics, politics, government, and, ironically, "communications," which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-device-friendly ads for products like Cheez Doodles.

Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street.

"Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."

Another Reason I Don't Like Starbucks

From The New York Post


Grammar stickler: Starbucks booted me

By JOHN DOYLE, REBECCA ROSENBERG and ANNIE KARNI

Last Updated: 11:12 AM, August 16, 2010



Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts.

Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson -- make that barista -- for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules.

Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?"

Prof rips schmear tactics.

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want.

"Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English."

Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain's stilted lexicon -- balking at ordering a "tall" or a "venti" from the menu or specifying "no whip."

Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a "small" or "large" cup of joe.

Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese -- or neither.

"I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said.

"The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' "

But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down.

"I didn't even want the bagel anymore," she said.

The bagel brouhaha escalated until the manager called cops, and responding officers ordered her to leave, threatening to arrest her if she went back inside, she said.

"It was very humiliating to be thrown out, and all I did was ask for a bagel," recalled Rosenthal, who said she holds a Ph.D. from Columbia.

"If you don't use their language, they refuse to serve you. They don't understand what a plain multigrain bagel is."

A Starbucks employee who witnessed the incident blamed Rosenthal.

"She would not answer. It was a reasonable question," the worker said.

"She called [the barista] an a- -hole."

An NYPD spokesman confirmed that officers were called to the coffee shop but said he was unaware of anyone being tossed out.

Rules Grammar Change

From The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Rules Grammar Change

March 12, 1997 | ISSUE 31•09

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Grammar Guild Monday announced that no more will traditional grammar rules English follow. Instead there will a new form of organizing sentences be.

Enlarge ImageAnnounces to reporters Joyce Watters grammar rules new English for. U.S. Grammar Guild is Watters president of.

U.S. Grammar Guild according to, the new structure loosely on an obscure 800-year-old, pre-medieval Anglo-Saxon syntax is based. The syntax primarily verbs, verb clauses and adjectives at the end of sentences placing involves. Results this often, to ears American, a sentence backward appearing.

"Operating under we are, one major rule," said Joyce Watters, president of the U.S. Grammar Guild. "Make English, want we, more archaic and dignified sounding to be, as if every word coming from the tongue of a centuries-old, mystical wizard, is."

Brief pause Watters made then a. "Know I, know I," said she. "Confusing sounds it, but every American used to it soon will be."

At a press conference recent greeted warmly the new measure by President Clinton was.

"No longer will we adhere to the dull, predictable structure of our traditional grammar system. This nation will now begin speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different," said Clinton.

"Excuse me," added he pause long after a. "Meant I, the dull, predictable system our traditional grammar of adhere to no longer will we. Speaking, writing and listening to something fresh, exciting and different will this nation now begin."

This week beginning, America across, all dictionaries, thesauruses and any other books or objects with any sort of writing upon it or in it revised to fit the new syntax will be. Libraries assure people wish to that the transition promptly begin will, but that patient people should be, as so much to change there is.

"Feel good it will make people to know for all these changes that, librarians cold, crabby and as paranoid and overprotective of their books and periodicals as ever remain will," said Yvonne Richter, Director of the Library of Congress.

The enthusiasm of government officials despite, many Americans about the new plan upset are. "Why in the world did they do this?" a New Canaan, CT, insurance salesman, said Brent Pryce. "There's absolutely no reason. It's utterly pointless and will cause total chaos throughout the country, not to mention the fact that it will cost billions of dollars to implement. And what's this U.S. Grammar Guild, anyway? I've never heard of it."

When of this complaint informed, government officials that they could not the man's words understand said, because of the strange, unintelligible way of speaking he was

Learning Euphemisms From Ziva

Recently I gave euphemisms some thought. I thought about how hard the English language could be to learn what with all the euphemisms that are used. I came across the following news article that illustrates the point quite well. Before I found this article I was thinking of one of my favorite TV shows. NCIS has a character named Ziva David - an Israeli Mossad agent who struggles with euphemisms often and quite humorously. Many examples follow the article.

Have a few laughs!



guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 August 2010 18.03 BST

I want to spend a penny, not go to the shop: nurses to be taught euphemisms

Norfolk hospital organises lessons for foreign nurses to avoid cultural misunderstandings with patients


Foreign nurses are receiving a crash course in euphemism after bewildered patients expressing the wish to "spend a penny" found themselves being escorted to a hospital gift shop. Norfolk's Queen Elizabeth hospital has organised special "adapting to life in Norfolk" sessions for Portuguese staff whose otherwise excellent English results in too-literal translations of everyday expressions. Patients, particularly the elderly, face being met with incomprehension when complaining of "feeling under the weather", suffering "pin and needles" or experiencing problems with their "back passage".

Local expressions such as "blar", meaning to cry, and "mawther", meaning "young woman", are also likely to see mystified nurses flicking in vain through conventional phrasebooks. The distinct Norfolk brogue provides another linguistic obstacle for the recruits hired by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS trust. "One of the things people from overseas had difficulty with was our euphemisms such as 'spend a penny'," said a hospital spokesman. "In the past some of the new recruits from abroad, when patients used the expression, were taking people to the hospital gift shop."

"They all speak exceptional English, but that doesn't necessarily cover the type of English spoken in Norfolk. We have many different phrases and sayings in this part of the world. A lot of patients are elderly and use what can only be described as quaint phrases and descriptions, especially for body parts and common illnesses." The hospital has organised two-hour induction courses in dialect, idiom and colloquialism, covering phrases such as "spick and span", "higgledy-piggledy", "la-di-dah" and "tickled pink". Other useful terms on the agenda are "jim jams", "a cuppa" and "elbow grease". Nurses are being asked to write down any confusing phrases they hear on the wards so they can be discussed in follow-up meetings.

Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients' Association, said the training would ensure "safe service" in hospitals. "Anyone working for the NHS - nurse, doctor, other healthcare professional, healthcare assistant - must be able to be understood by the patient and must demonstrate that they are safe to treat patients," she said. But Fiona McEvoy, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, resorting to idiom herself, said it was "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut". It made more financial sense for foreign nurses to pick up local phrases "from hearing them used and being advised by peers", she said.


Here are the promised euphemism learnings of Ziva David

Ziva: You are a broken tape, Gibbs.
Tony: Record. A broken record.

*****

Ziva: "It appears he didn’t know... I feel like a donkey’s butt."
McGee: "Donkey's butt?"
Tony: "I think she meant 'Horse's Ass', McGee."
Ziva: "Yes, that, too."

*****

Tony: I don’t know. Look at the guy. He’s such a …
Ziva: Pimp.
Tony and McGee *in unison*: Wimp.

*****

Ziva: Once he saw us at Norfolk, he must have taken a kite.
Tony: Hike. The expression is taking a hike.
McGee: She may have had it confused with “go fly a kite.”
Ziva: I speak five languages, forgive me if I get confused sometimes. I found his bank book.
Tony: Check book.

*****

Tony: Didn’t you see the signs? It’s yard sale day.
Ziva: I see. And do Marines sell their yards often?
McGee: No, it’s actually when people gather stuff they don’t want anymore, and sell it in their yards.
Ziva: Why would anyone want to buy somebody else’s junk?
Tony: One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
Ziva: In Israel, we have a saying. “Zevel Ze Zevel.” Crap is crap.

*****

Tony: You haven’t met our hacker.
Ross Logan: He’s good?
Ziva: Does a bear sit in the woods?
Ross Logan: Are you the crackerjack team on this job?
Tony: She’s Israeli.
Ziva: Look, I know I got the bear thing right.

*****

Ziva: I’ve learned from Gibbs that in certain cases you can attract far more bees with honey…
Tony: Flies.
Ziva: What do flies have to do with honey?
Tony: Flies… don’t like... vinegar.
Ziva: Vinegar?
Tony: It’s complicated. Here he comes.

*****

Ziva: If the glue sticks?
McGee: Shoe fits.

*****

Ziva: Do you mind if I grab a bat nap?
Female Park Ranger: No, just, um, hang from the rafters.

*****

Ziva: Great! He’ll be like finding a pin in a haystack.
Tony: A needle in a haystack.
Ziva: Well, aren’t these just as hard to find?
Tony: No.
McGee: No.

*****

McGee: What Tony was saying about me before, you know, do I come off as unmanly?
Ziva: I think Tony is jerking your brain
McGee: Chain? Jerking my chain?
Ziva: Whatever.

*****

ZIVA: This woman is a total turd! A geek, yes?
TONY: The term is nerd.
ZIVA: Whatever.

*****

Ziva: Everyone’s avoiding me! Do they think I’m going to lose control, just enter the building and massacre everyone? I mean, I’m being treated like a leopard.
Ducky: I believe the phrase is 'like a leper'.

*****

Ziva: Ducky, drip it!
Ducky: Do you mean: Drop it or Zip it?
Ziva: Ah, American idioms drive me up the hall.
Ducky: Well, actually... never mind.

*****

Ziva: I’ve asked Tel Aviv if Captain Mahir is a blimp on their radar.
Tony: Blip.

*****

Ziva: ... He won’t talk unless I...
Tony: No torture.
Ziva: He won’t talk.
Tony: Try.
Ziva: Okay. But you’re tying my feet.
Tony: Hands.
Ziva: Those, too.

*****

Shepard: ...when Pinpin handed him Galib’s passport it was good enough.
Ziva: To pass the mustard.
McGee: Muster, not mustard.

*****

Gibbs: Marital problems?
Ziva: Well, according to someone called Scuttle Butt, he caught his wife cheating on him.
Gibbs: Scuttlebutt’s not a person, Ziva. Scuttlebutt is what Marines call gossip.
Ziva: And then you wonder why I have a problem with your language.

*****

Ziva: Are you okay?
Tony: Never better.
Ziva: You look run-over.
Tony: The term is rundown. I do?
Ziva: Maybe you need servicing.
Tony: Clearly, we’re still having some problems with the idiosyncrasies of the English language.
Ziva: The finely tuned engine, I think you called it. You should see a doctor.

*****

(Ziva asks Tony why he needs two cell phones)
Tony: Uh… one for each ear. No, it’s a spare. This one has sort of been on the fritz. That’s another word you probably don’t know the meaning of.
Ziva: Act up?
Tony: I’m impressed. Uh… all right. I’m heading out. Going to see the doctor…. about being run-over. Down.
Ziva: Don’t forget Fritz...
Tony: ... Oh!!

*****

Ziva: You need to cut the man some slacks, Ducky.
Tony: I agree. Except the term is slack.

*****

Tony: It’s almost unfair interrogating junkies.
Ziva: It’s like shooting fish in a pond.
Carson: I um… I think you mean a barrel.
Ziva: Why would a fish be in a barrel?
Carson: Um… I um… it’s a good point. I never really thought about it before.
Ziva: Mm-hmm.

*****

Army Lieutenant Marsden: Command sent me out to go over Captain Reynold's death benefits with her.
Ziva: Quite the waterfall.
Tony: She means windfall.

*****

McGee is looking at a site where he can adopt a dog and starts talking to Tony and Ziva:
Tony: I’m not ready to start taking tips on this from you Probie.
McGee: Tony I think it’s time you get back on that horse.
Ziva: (looks at Tony funny) Are you getting a pony?
Tony: It’s an adage.
Ziva: I’m not familiar with that breed.
Tony: Well yeah they are quite rare. Sort of a cross between a Pegasus and a unicorn.
(Ziva gives him a disgusted look.)

*****

Ziva talking with Fornell:
Ziva: I would hate to be misunderstood.
Fornell: Does that happen often?
Ziva: Once in a blue lagoon.
Fornell: I think I'll be able to translate.

*****

McGee: Think she did it? She is the one that called us.
Ziva: Well it would not be the first time a murderer tried to throw us up that way.
McGee: Off. Throw us off.
Ziva: Exactly.

*****

Tony: We've gotta figure out what he was doing here.
Ziva: And with whom he was doing it.
Tony: Doing what with?
Ziva: Whatever it was he was doing when he was undone.
Tony: (confused look) Done...What?
Ziva: Done!
Ducky: In, my dear fellow. Done in. Don't you understand the Queen's English?
Tony: Not this queen.

*****

Ziva: Is that why we're here? So you can google the girls?
Tony:"Ogle." And no, we're here to accompany the director.

*****

Ziva: ...His finger is in many eyes.
Tony: Pies...

*****

Ziva: My citizenship test is coming up and I wish to pass with swimming colors
McGee: Flying colors
Ziva: Any colors will do McGee

*****

200 Words For The 200th Post

For our 200th post I chose two lists of 100 words each. Yes, of course, they are subjective lists. So, if you feel a word is missing or a few do not belong, please feel free to comment.

And thank you to all readers who visit and comment. Both your visits and your comments are appreciated.


What makes a word beautiful? Attempts to create lists of the most beautiful words in current use have generated selections based on either the elegance of sound and structure or the feelings and concepts the words evoke, or some combination thereof.

For example, one of the more notable beautiful word lists comes from language expert Dr. Robert Beard. Dr. Beard’s list, which is posted on his popular alpha Dictionary website, contains, for the most part, words that sound beautiful or elegant.


The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English


Ailurophile A cat-lover.
Assemblage A gathering.
Becoming Attractive.
Beleaguer To exhaust with attacks.
Brood To think alone.
Bucolic In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant Like a cat's eye.
Comely Attractive.
Conflate To blend together.
Cynosure A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance A brief love affair.
Demesne Dominion, territory.
Demure Shy and reserved.
Denouement The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude Disuse.
Desultory Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous Filmy.
Dissemble Deceive.
Dulcet Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent Bubbly.
Efflorescence Flowering, blooming.
Elision Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir A good potion.
Eloquence Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient A softener.
Ephemeral Short-lived.
Epiphany A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile At one time, for a time.
Ethereal Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative Suggestive.
Fetching Pretty.
Felicity Pleasantness.
Forbearance Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious Fleeting.
Furtive Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour Beauty.
Gossamer The finest piece of thread, a spider's silk
Halcyon Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue To infuse, instill.
Incipient Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue A naive young woman.
Inglenook A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance Blithe nonchalance.
Inure To become jaded.
Labyrinthine Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe A special kind of gift.
Lagoon A small gulf or inlet.
Languor Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure Free time.
Lilt To move musically or lively.
Lissome Slender and graceful.
Lithe Slender and flexible.
Love Deep affection.
Mellifluous Sweet sounding.
Moiety One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen A slip of the ear.
Murmurous Murmuring.
Nemesis An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea A solution for all problems
Panoply A complete set.
Pastiche An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra A half-shadow.
Petrichor The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora A large quantity.
Propinquity An inclination.
Pyrrhic Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential Most essential.
Ratatouille A spicy French stew.
Ravel To knit or unknit.
Redolent Fragrant.
Riparian By the bank of a stream.
Ripple A very small wave.
Scintilla A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal Eternal.
Seraglio Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous Whispering, hissing.
Talisman A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation Tinkling.
Umbrella Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial In trace amounts.
Wafture Waving.
Wherewithal The means.
Woebegone Sorrowful, downcast.


A link at the bottom of the page brings us to -

The 100 Funniest Words in English


Abibliophobia The fear of running out of reading material.
Absquatulate To leave or abscond with something.
Allegator Some who alleges.
Anencephalous Lacking a brain.
Argle-bargle A loud row or quarrel.
Batrachomyomachy Making a mountain out of a molehill.
Billingsgate Loud, raucous profanity.
Bloviate To speak pompously or brag.
Blunderbuss A gun with a flared muzzle or disorganized activity.
Borborygm A rumbling of the stomach.
Boustrophedon A back and forth pattern.
Bowyang A strap that holds the pants legs in place.
Brouhaha An uproar.
Bumbershoot An umbrella.
Callipygian Having an attractive rear end or nice buns.
Canoodle To hug and kiss.
Cantankerous Testy, grumpy.
Catercornered Diagonal(ly).
Cockalorum A small, haughty man.
Cockamamie Absurd, outlandish.
Codswallop Nonsense, balderdash.
Collop A slice of meat or fold of flab.
Collywobbles Butterflies in the stomach.
Comeuppance Just reward, just deserts.
Crapulence Discomfort from eating or drinking too much.
Crudivore An eater of raw food.
Discombobulate To confuse.
Donnybrook An melee, a riot.
Doozy Something really great.
Dudgeon A bad mood, a huff.
Ecdysiast An exotic dancer, a stripper.
Eructation A burp, belch.
Fard Face-paint, makeup.
Fartlek An athletic training regime.
Fatuous Unconsciously foolish.
Filibuster Refusal to give up the floor in a debate to prevent a vote.
Firkin A quarter barrel or small cask.
Flibbertigibbet Nonsense, balderdash.
Flummox To exasperate.
Folderol Nonsense.
Formication The sense of ants crawling on your skin.
Fuddy-duddy An old-fashioned, mild-mannered person.
Furbelow A fringe or ruffle.
Furphy A portable water-container.
Gaberlunzie A wandering beggar.
Gardyloo! A warning shouted before throwing water from above.
Gastromancy Telling fortune from the rumblings of the stomach.
Gazump To buy something already promised to someone else.
Gobbledygook Nonsense, balderdash.
Gobemouche A highly gullible person.
Godwottery Nonsense, balderdash.
Gongoozle To stare at, kibitz.
Gonzo Far-out journalism.
Goombah An older friend who protects you.
Hemidemisemiquaver A musical timing of 1/64.
Hobbledehoy An awkward or ill-mannered young boy.
Hocus-pocus Deceitful sleight of hand.
Hoosegow A jail or prison.
Hootenanny A country or folk music get-together.
Jackanapes A rapscallion, hooligan.
Kerfuffle Nonsense, balderdash.
Klutz An awkward, stupid person.
La-di-da An interjection indicating that something is pretentious.
Lagopodous Like a rabbit's foot.
Lickety-split As fast as possible.
Lickspittle A servile person, a toady.
Logorrhea Loquaciousness, talkativeness.
Lollygag To move slowly, fall behind.
Malarkey Nonsense, balderdash.
Maverick A loner, someone outside the box.
Mollycoddle To treat too leniently.
Mugwump An independent politician who does not follow any party.
Mumpsimus An outdated and unreasonable position on an issue.
Namby-pamby Weak, with no backbone.
Nincompoop A foolish person.
Oocephalus An egghead.
Ornery Mean, nasty, grumpy.
Pandiculation A full body stretch.
Panjandrum Someone who thinks himself high and mighty.
Pettifogger A person who tries to befuddle others with his speech.
Pratfall A fall on one's rear.
Quean A disreputable woman.
Rambunctious Aggressive, hard to control.
Ranivorous Frog-eating
Rigmarole Nonsense, unnecessary complexity.
Shenanigan A prank, mischief.
Sialoquent Spitting while speaking.
Skedaddle To hurry somewhere.
Skullduggery No good, underhanded dealing.
Slangwhanger A loud abusive speaker or obnoxious writer.
Smellfungus A perpetual pessimist.
Snickersnee A long knife.
Snollygoster A person who can't be trusted.
Snool A servile person.
Snuffledup Congested
Tatterdemalion A child in rags.
Troglodyte Someone or something that lives in a cave.
Turdiform Having the form of a lark.
Unremacadamized Having not been repaved with macadam.
Vomitory An exit or outlet.
Wabbit Exhausted, tired, worn out.
Widdershins In a contrary or counterclockwise direction.
Yahoo A rube, a country bumpkin.
@ The "at" sign.

Dis'ed

You probably know by now that I am a big fan of the pun. Adjectives beginning with the prefix “dis” seem to be especially vulnerable to puns. Have you heard about the…

…disappointed chairman?

…disbanded rock group?

…discarded communist?

…discharged cavalry?

…disclosed doors?

…disconcerted orchestra leader?

…discounted blessings?

…discouraged hero?

…discredited shopper?

…discriminating convict?

…discussed blasphemer?

…disenchanted witch?

…disfigured mathematician?

…disillusioned magician?

…disintegrated school?

…disinterested bond holder?

…disjointed marijuana smoker?

…dislodged Elk member?

…dismantled moose head?

…dismayed year?

…dismembered committee?

…dismissed bride?

…disorderly salesman?

…disoriented Chinese?

…dispatched trousers?

…displayed stage manager?

…disposed model?

…dissected religious cult?

…dissolved equation?

…distracted landowner?

…distilled cash?

…distorted chef (or attorney)?

…distressed Samson after he met Delilah?

…distrusted banker?