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.

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.

---

Information from: The Daily News of Newburyport

#########

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."