Homeland Security

I just ordered room service here at the Xona Resort Suites (nine greenbacks for a desiccated chicken sandwich and another nine for a niggardly plastic cup of down-market cabernet), and after hanging up the phone I scanned the "For Your Safety" section at the front of the menu book. It begins thusly:

When in your room, double lock the door by turning the deadbolt and securing the door latch. This will prevent the door from being opened by a regular key and insure your privacy. Please make sure you lock all the doors leading to the patio and insure the security bar is placed on the sliding glass door as well. Then lock yourself in the bathroom with a shotgun and put on Kevlar pajamas and a combat helmet.

All right, so I made up the last bit. Still, the idea of fortifying the room in such a fashion while I'm in it really harshes my Arizona mellow. Roving bands of regular-key-wielding bandits be damned, I'm going to continue to leave the window open and wander out onto the patio in my underpants.

But onto the parsing. Yes, double lock as a verb needs a hyphen. But we've had enough hyphen talk lately. What really bumps me here is the use of insure in this context, rather than ensure. There is a lot of boring debate about how much overlap and interchangeability there can be between the two. Everyone agrees that insure is the word to use when talking about liability issues and insurance protection, but most dictionaries grant a second definition of "to make sure." I like ensure in this instance, though, for the simple reason that I like having different words mean different things. Why should insure, which has plenty to do, what with all those Allstate policies, encroach on ensure's turf? I say we close the sliding glass door between these etymological cousins and ensure the security bar is in place.

You're Like Me! You're Really, Really Like Me!

I got to spend a few idle moments today cruising the aisles of a Barnes and Noble. (This particular B&N was in the Kierland Commons area of Scottsdale--a shopping enclave patronized in large part by extravagantly-coiffed "kept women" of a certain age with preternatural tans and designer-brand face-lifts. I always feel conspicuously like a hideous troll when I go there.)

Passing by a display table, my eyes alight on this colorful little tome:

As it happens I have played a significant role in making two people--my daughter and my son--who are a lot like me in many ways. And I'm actually somewhat proud to say that in each case my part in the process took (a little) longer than 90 seconds.

Up in the Air

I'm spending the balance of the week in Scottsdale, Arizona (where the landscape is like a Roadrunner cartoon come to life), which means I spent today enduring the "glamor" of modern air travel: having to remove my shoes and belt like a new prisoner about to be deloused, stepping into a full-body scanner that gave me a close-up look at the polyps in my urethra, being subjected to the charms of U.S. border agents, and having to show my boarding pass every few feet to another bored bureaucrat. Finally, after being "processed," I retreat to the safety of the bar in the departure lounge, and take a glance at my ticket:

Sorry for the fuzziness (that's the best still my Flip camcorder can capture). So what's the error here? This ticket stub indicates that the departure time is--get this--2:29 p.m. That's right--not 2:30, not 2:45, but precisely 2:29 p.m.

The aircraft, as it turns out, was actually taxiing* to the runway at about 2:40--a fact I could verify by showing camera footage of the clock on my cell phone, were it not for the fact that activating a cell phone and camera on take-off would get me swiftly tackled by overzealous air marshals and subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving an unlubricated mop handle.

Anyway...I'm not complaining about the late departure--I was in no particular hurry, and in any case we arrived on time in the desert. I'm just bumfuzzled by the hubris of airlines announcing these oddly-specific departure times, as if we were counting down to a space launch, when in fact any veteran flyer knows that you're lucky if you come within 20 minutes of the declared wheels-up time.

*Just wondering: is there another English word, other than skiing, that features a double i?

Babysitter Gets Suspended Sentence

Last week, Abby brought home from school a flyer pitching after-school classes. The description of one of the courses, for Babysitter's Training, was maggoty with errors, including this concluding advisory:

Bring a nut and candy free lunch

Without the help of some hyphens, this sentence is open to misinterpretation. Should I bring a single nut, along with a lunch that is free of candy? A free lunch consisting of nuts and candy? Neither, actually, because, as a middle-aged dad who is most emphatically not a babysitter, I won't be attending at all.

In any case, the construction to be used here is
"a nut- and candy-free lunch."* That's right--with this baby, you get not just the gratifying clarity of employing hyphens, but also the spine-tingling frisson of satisfaction that comes from firing off a suspended hyphen, which, as we all know, is the most exciting hyphen of all.

Earlier in the description, there is another missing hyphen, when we are advised that participants receive a "personalized wallet size completion card," but I'm inclined to let that one go simply because I was amused by the image of a 12-year-old pig-tailed kid flipping open her Hello Kitty wallet with a dramatic flourish to flash her official Babysitter's Training credentials.

*Note the space after the first hyphen and the absence of a hyphen following and.

Thanks for the Heads-Up...

...and once again, everyday should be two words.

Don't be Such an Anxious Beaver

My wife doesn't often present me with unexpected gifts (my latest respiratory virus notwithstanding), so I was delighted when she picked up for me the Modern Library edition of Letters From The Editor, a compilation of communications from the New Yorker's brilliant founding editor, Harold Ross. Sure, she got it at a thrift store for 99 cents, but it's the meager thought that counts. In any case, I find myself dipping into it for awhile most nights to transport myself to Jazz-era New York and a time when a magazine and its editor were regarded with the kind of reverence we now reserve for the likes of Paris Hilton.

Within the milky-smooth pages of the volume (thank you, Modern Library, for your attention to tactile detail), in a letter to longtime New Yorker contributer Alexander Woollcott, a brusque and comically distracted Ross tells Woollcott he's going to try to visit soon, signing off with:

I don't know how to get to Vermont, or to the lake after I get there, but will take this matter up later. I am very anxious to see you.                                                                           Sincerely,                                                                           Ross

I know that anxious, over time, has in many quarters become an acceptable synonym for eager, but the fact remains that many usage mavens--Bryson; Bernstein; Garner; Barbara Wallraff; the American Heritage Dictionary; my high school English teacher, Mrs. Thompson--will point out that the word derives from anxiety and is best used when an element of worry or trepidation, and not merely anticipation, is involved. Considering that the above missive comes from the famously punctilious Harold Ross of the famously punctilious New Yorker, I feel justified in taking the legendary editor to task. Luckily for him, he's been dead for sixty years, and has mercifully escaped the sting of my critical lash.

A Site for Soar Ayes

The New Republic dispatched renowned linguist John McWhorter to go deep into the mind of Sarah Palin in an attempt to puzzle out her, shall we say, distinctive speech patterns. He emerged covered in sticky rhetorical goo but with a reasonably enlightening analysis. At one point, though, he compares Palin's stream-of-unconsciousness prattle with Joe Biden's equally folksy, but more coherent, syntax by capturing this quote of Biden's from their debate:

Barack Obama laid out four basic criteria for any kind of rescue plan. He said there has to be oversight. We're not going to write a check to anybody unless there's some kind of oversite of the Secretary of the Treasury.

How is it that he gets oversight correct in the first instance, but not in the next sentence? And how does the editor/proofreader not catch that? And why does someone like me come along and snarkily point out what is obviously just a simple (ahem) oversight? We'll never know.

But that's not all. In this morning's Vancouver Sun recap of last night's Canucks game, reporter Iain MacIntyre, commenting on the less-than-stellar performance of the local team's defense, says that:

The Canucks, minus Ehrhoff and Mitchell, were not an encouraging site in their zone.

To be fair, MacIntyre is usually an astonishingly graceful prose stylist for a sports beat reporter, and I think we can attribute this lapse to deadline pressure. In any case, he's a darn sight more literate than Mrs. "I-can-see-Russia-from-my-porch."

The One and Only

My brother dropped by for a visit the other day with his two-year-old daughter. My two kids were home with me at the time, and Mark and I "enjoyed" an afternoon of monitoring the movements of three boisterous young children, which is kind of like herding fish. Before leaving, Mark presented us with a parting gift: a sleek black electric kettle. Evidently, he had come across an enticing sale at a discount store and had loaded up on them because, hey, everyone loves a kettle.

I've always been a stove-top man myself, but I have to say I have been impressed with the electric kettle's brisk efficiency. I was, however, stopped short by the first commandment in the user manual:

• USE WATER ONLY IN THE KETTLE

You mean I can't use water anywhere else? Not even to wash the chocolate cookie detritus off the kids' faces before their mom gets home? Of course, that's not what they mean at all. What they mean is that I am advised to "use only water" in the kettle, as opposed to, say, coffee, beer, or liquid nitrogen.

Only is one of those slippery modifiers that needs to stay close to the word it's modifying (and in the right sequence), or else it can end up changing the meaning of the sentence, as neatly evidenced in this little tutorial I found online, which is attributed to the ever-prolific Anonymous.

"She told me that she loved me." Let us count the ways:

"Only she told me that she loved me." (No one else has told me that.)
"She only told me that she loved me." (Provided no evidence of her love.)
"She told only me that she loved me." (Not the gabby type.)
"She told me only that she loved me." (She had nothing more to say.)
"She told me that only she loved me." (Sad, hearing no one else loves me.)
"She told me that she only loved me." (Doesn't idolize me, but loves me.)
"She told me that she loved me only." (Ahhh!)


Would that all slippery words came with such a concise flash-card guide. If only.

Master-Baiting

Too often, I use this blog to take cheap shots at usage errors committed by those for whom mastering Standard English is a struggle. This makes me a pedantic ass. Today, however, I'm going to take a cheap shot at someone whose understanding of, and abilities with, the English language far exceeded what I could ever hope to accomplish in many lifetimes. Plus, he's tragically and prematurely dead. This makes me a captious little weasel.

I was listening to one of those Slate podcasts when the subject of usage issues in general, and David Foster Wallace's piece "Authority and American Usage" in particular, came up. This led me to pull down the collection Consider the Lobster, in which that essay is contained, pour myself a glass of wine, and spend a Sunday afternoon blissfully immersed in the strange and wonderful mind of DFW as he picked apart prescriptive vs. descriptive arguments in the usage wars.

Early on in the piece, in one of those discursive footnotes he was so famous for, he apologizes for using the phrase "historical context" and writes:

One of the personal little lessons I've learned in working on this essay is that being chronically inclined to sneer/wince at other people's usage tends to make me chronically anxious about other people sneering/wincing at my usage.

I perfectly understand the fear of being caught with one's syntactical fly open--and I promise I did not sneer or wince when I came upon this sentence, in which Wallace is analyzing an excerpt from Bryan A. Garner's preface to A Dictionary of Modern American Usage:

Whole monographs could be written just on the masterful rhetoric of this passage.

Normally, this wouldn't be worth mentioning (and probably still isn't), but given Wallace's hyper-vigilance when it comes to word selection, I think I'll just point out what Bill Bryson (who is also quoted in Wallace's piece) has to say in his Dictionary of Troublesome Words:

masterful, masterly. Most authorities continue to insist that we observe a distinction between these two--namely that masterly should apply to that which is adroit and expert and masterful to that which is imperious and domineering.

True, Bryson goes on to note that no leading dictionary insists on the distinction, and that indeed masterly is often an awkward choice of adverb, but he still observes that "masterly should perhaps be your first choice when you mean in the manner of a master..."

That said, David Foster Wallace's essay remains a masterly exegesis on the subject of English usage and is highly recommended for Sunday afternoon perusal with a glass of assertive, but never masterful, Shiraz.

Should Have Seen That Coming

An Enormity of Enormous Proportions

In today's "Dear Prudence" advice column on Slate, Prudie counsels a young woman who's having difficulty relating to a father who has been incapacitated by a stroke. She reminds the letter-writer to offer support to her mother as well:

Being a caretaker is arduous work, made all the harder by the enormity of your father's losses. 

Here we find one of the more common word mis-usages. Enormity does not refer to amplitude. Rather, it denotes, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, "a monstrous offense or evil; an outrage." So, to be accurate, we can speak of the enormity of the injustice that occurred when Ben Affleck was awarded an Oscar. But we can only bemoan the enormousness of the pain the movie-going public has been subjected to by his performances.

The Writing on the Wall

I enjoyed an unexceptional yet memorable evening with the kids on Friday: a stroll through the park, a visit to the video store to select the night's entertainment, and a lively and messy dinner at the local pizza parlor. On the way back we stopped at the playground adjacent to our home, where Abby pretended to be a brown and white terrier named Frisky who liked to fetch sticks and run up slides, while Sam repeatedly--and with spectacular windmilling of the arms--fell and concussed himself on the various steel appendages of the playground apparatus.

It was on this very apparatus--a cube-like structure with slides and ladders and an inner fort-like enclosure--that I spotted this graffito:

As a parent, I have to say I found this disturbing. I don't want my kids exposed to such sloppy disregard for punctuation. I mean, if the author here is exhorting said bitches to smoke weed (as he undoubtedly is) the correct phrasing would require a comma: "smoke weed, bitches." As it stands here, the message could be construed as an attempt at guerilla marketing--an imperative request to smoke a brand called "weed bitches." Unlikely, I grant you, but when one is trying to persuade bitches of one's credibility vis-a-vis the smoking of weed, one needs to be precise.

Where They Keep the Litrature

Seam Stress

One of the disadvantages of sharing a body shape with Barney Rubble is, as you would expect, buying clothes. Last weekend I saw a shirt that caught my fancy--a loose, linen number that I imagined would make me look stylishly casual and artistic, like Pablo Picasso in an outdoor cafe. But the only size that would accommodate my ample rotundity draped down to my knees. That's how I ended up delivering myself and my new purchase to a neighborhood establishment that bills itself as:

Classe* Dressmaking Shoppe

Nothing technically wrong with that, I suppose. But you have to admit it's incongruous: a humble dry cleaning and alterations enterprise in a Canadian suburb, run by a family of Asians, with a name that evokes elements of French haute couture design enlivened with a dash of Ye Olde English quaintness.

Inside, I was led past the front counter into the bowels of the operation--a grimy, dimly lit workhouse populated by a couple of stooped and wizened old women who didn't look up from their sewing machines. In that sense, there was some Olde English authenticity, in a dispiriting, Dickensian sort of way. I was wordlessly guided to the "changing room"--a corner of the dungeon draped off with a sooty green curtain--which I shared with a dust ball the size of a gopher's head, before coming out to have my shirt pinned as I stood in front of a cracked, grease-spotted mirror. Classe**, indeed.

The final insult was that the bill for alterations exceeded the initial cost of the shirt, and now I'm not even so sure I like it that much after all. It makes me look like Barney Rubble trying to look like Pablo Picasso in an outdoor cafe.

*Blogger will not allow me to use an accent over the e, as it is rendered in the original. You'll just have to imagine one.

**Or print this out and draw it in.

The Forbidden Past

Here's another questionable caption--this time from the deliciously addictive time-waster website, Awkward Family Photos*:

Nobody forbid these two to marry, but they decided to poison themselves anyway.

At first I read that opening clause as an imperative (as in, "Don't anybody try to forbid these two...") but it soon becomes obvious that the past tense is what we're going for here, in which case the word should be forbade.

And how should one pronounce forbade? Well, if one has in one's en suite library, on a shelf just above the commode, a copy of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, by the curmudgeonly and finicky Charles Harrington Elster, one could find this exegesis within:

The spelling pronunciation fur-BAYD has flourished since Webster 3 (1961), in opposition to all previous authority, arbitrarily indicated forbade should be pronounced fur-BAYD...Burchfield, in a peculiar burst of unsubstantiated permissiveness, claims that fur-BAYD "cannot be said to be wrong"; nevertheless, other recent authorities prefer the traditional fur-BAD and current dictionaries list it first.

 So there you have it: fur-BAD is the preferred way to say it, unless you're one of those loosey-goosey linguistic faddists. But wait a minute! Further on in the entry, Elster writes:

The controversy may soon be academic: the evidence of my ears says that forbid is fast replacing forbade as the past tense of forbid.

  WTF? You mean the caption may have it right (or at least acceptable to some standards), after all? I checked around, and indeed some dictionaries appear to sanction the use of forbid in the past tense. I'm afraid I'm going to have to overturn that decision, on the grounds that there is a useful distinction to be made, as indicated by my initial confusion, noted above. That's right--I hereby forbid the use of forbid in past tense contexts. You are, of course, free to appeal my ruling to a higher authority, but until then, court is adjourned.

*Check out their recent collection of  horrendous pictures from the '80s and just try not to squirm as you remember the photographic evidence of your own pastel-shaded, big-haired past.

A Recipe for Disaster

Today's selection comes from a HuffPo slide show of funny corrections. As we all know now, "due to" is used incorrectly in this correction (in fact, we can dispose of the whole "due to" clause entirely and achieve greater brevity and clarity). But the bigger issue, to my mind, is recognizing cilantro as a foodstuff. Cilantro is a vile, odious creation of the devil. It is, as I believe I have said before, the Charles Manson of garnishes: small but devious, and it murders anything it comes into contact with. 

I would rather have the cement.

Stone-Faced

Look, I'm not proud of this, OK? But who among us hasn't had the experience of idly trawling the webosphere, mindlessly clicking links, and inexplicably ending up in some louche (and irresistably compelling) corner of cyberspace? In other words, I don't remember how I arrived at this slide show of "When Stars Have a Bad Day"--let's just say I was doing research and leave it at that--but I could not look away once I got there.

Among the photos of the stars and their cellulite and bunions was this snap of Sharon Stone with an accompanying caption.

Sharon Stone's eyes looked bruised as she shopped in Beverly Hills, Calif., Jan. 21, 2010. She wore a fedora and sunglasses that she eventually took off to conceal her dark eyes.

Remember when we covered the whole "that vs which," "restrictive vs non-restrictive clause" conundrum? Neither do I, really. Not in detail, anyway. But in any case, the above is an example of how a misplaced that  can sabotage the intended meaning of a sentence.

Obviously, one does not take off sunglasses to conceal one's eyes, but that's what this caption appears to be saying. If we throw in a couple of commas, however, and have which tap that on the shoulder and take its place, we get: "She wore a fedora and sunglasses, which she eventually took off, to conceal her dark eyes." The fact that she took the glasses off becomes parenthetical (and it explains why she is bare-faced in the picture) while the logical integrity of the sentence is preserved. That way, we gossip-loving voyeurs understand that she had been wearing sunglasses to cover her hideous, probably post-plastic-surgery bruising.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to passing judgments on hotornot.com.

No, It's Not Margaret Atwood

I took my daughter, Abby, to the local dollar store on the weekend because her birthday party is coming up and she needed to select some undoubtedly toxic, probably child-labor-produced gewgaws to put in the goody bags her friends will take home. It seems to me that when I was a freckle-faced urchin the only thing I took home from friends' birthday parties was gastric distress from slurping back too many root beer floats, but nowadays one is judged on the value and creativity of one's birthday goody bags, and I didn't want to disappoint.

For that matter, I can recall receiving as a birthday gift from Claus Heckerott a used Hardy Boys book in a brown paper lunch bag that had been festively stapled and scotch-taped. Compare that with Abby's haul from last year's 6th birthday bun-toss, where she was bestowed with pink plastic merchandise commensurate with the gross national product of Brazil, and you begin to see the depth of my resentment for my offspring.

I digress. 

On the way out of the store I discovered the stationery aisle, which I navigated with all the temperance of Lindsay Lohan at a Mardi Gras parade. Steno pads, notebooks, retractable (!) felt tip pens, tape dispensers, and, finally, this...

It is actually a violation of the Sic List constitution to mock examples of "Chinglish"--too easy, too unsporting--but I couldn't pass this up. I didn't really need a writing board. But a "writting broad," with photos of a writting broad in action? Best 99 cents I ever spent.

Looking for a Verbal Dominatrix

For Sale: Perfection (slight apostrophe damage)

And they're not prepared to pay it.

Who's Your Daddy?

The Vancouver Sun has a story by Peter Birnie on playwright Kevin Loring, whose play is running in town. In the opening sentences, we find this:

When the award-winning playwright telephones to talk about a remount of Where the Blood Mixes, opening tonight at the Firehall Arts Centre, he's busy babysitting 13-month-old daughter Jade Winter.

 Maybe, as a househusband/writer, I'm oversensitive to this sort of thing, but riddle me this: if Birnie was talking to a female playwright who happened to be home with her daughter, would he say she was "babysitting?"

On a recent neighborhood excursion with my 6-year-old daughter and 16-month-old son, I collected no less than three examples of this form of subtle sexism--interestingly enough, all from women.

"Mommy has the day off today, eh?" says the kindly old fossil we pass on the street, as I yell at Abby to stop at the curb while picking up Sam's jettisoned sippy cup from the sidewalk.

"Got stuck babysitting today, I see," says the cashier at the Safeway, as I pull unauthorized chocolate bars out of Abby's grip while wiping Sam's nose with his sleeve.

"Is Daddy taking care of you guys today? Where's Mommy?" enquires the hairstylist who trims Abby's locks, while I spin Sam around in an adjacent chair until his eyeballs roll independently.

"Actually, their mother is dead--rodeo accident," I say.

I didn't really say that. But come on, people! Is it really that unusual for a dad to tend to his kids? I suppose I could look at it another way and be gratified that the bar is set so low for fathers that even the most banal (and marginally successful) acts of solo parental supervision are cause for comment. But I can't help feeling rankled at the condescension. I'm not a babysitter, dammit. This is just another example of the oppression and discrimination that the middle-aged white man has had to deal with throughout history.

We've Heard it All Before

I'm enjoying David Eddie's book, Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad. My copy is an old uncorrected proof of the 1999 release that I've had lying around for years. Now that I am, like its author, a bona fide househusband and part-time freelancer, I felt now was the time to crack its flimsy cardboard spine.

A good read it is, too. But that won't stop me from picking a few nits. On page 115, for instance, Eddie describes an ill-fated job interview for a position he really didn't want. It begins:

I passed the first round of interviews with flying colors, talking a blue streak until they gave me the green light to see the silver-haired honcho.

I haven't seen a parade of cliches like that since...well, since last night's Olympic closing ceremonies (I mean, really--inflatable Mounties and beavers? Hockey players and lumberjacks? Why not just douse the crowd with maple syrup, eh?). But maybe it's intentional, you say--the author here is playing off the first cliche of "flying colors" with the "blue streak, green light, silver-haired" combo. I'm not so sure. A few pages later, we have this:

If I have one Achilles' heel, though, it's that I wouldn't mind being part of London's "smart set," rubbing shoulders, clinking glasses and trading bon mots through bad teeth with various brilliant characters like Martin Amis. I don't know, Martin Amis would probably avoid me like the plague, but this was my boyish dream.

Obviously, Eddie's world is a place where people suffer from Achilles' heels, shoulders are rubbed and people avoid others like the plague. This, in combination with the colorful sample above, compels me to accuse him of reckless cliche-mongering. The final irony here being that Martin Amis is the author of the critical manifesto, The War Against Cliche.

Giving Nothing Away

I'll take two and double my savings.

Too Big for Our Breeches

As you may have heard by now, the Winter Olympics are on now here in Vancouver. As you may not have heard (it didn't get a lot of media play), some deranged meatball tried to get at U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden during the opening ceremonies, but was foiled by some crafty Mounties who questioned his (the meatball's, that is, not the Vice-President's) cereal box cut-out credentials. According to an online CTV report entitled Man Infatuated with U.S. VP Breaches 2010 Security:

The RCMP says it has not made any changes to its security protocols because of the breech.

My favorite online dictionary gives the first definition of breech as: "The lower rear portion of the human trunk; the buttocks." Hence, a breech birth. So, while the interloper in this story was clearly an ass (who the hell has an infatuation with a Vice-President?), the word to be used here, as it was in the headline, is breach.


Speaking of the Olympics and the opening ceremonies, we took the kiddies downtown last week to spend a day exposing ourselves to Olympic fever and its attendant symptoms (over-exuberant patriotism and over-priced souvenirs). On our stroll down Granville Street, I spied through a window this sign, with its criminal breach of standard spelling protocol, lying on a desk in a cluttered office beside the box office to the Vogue Theatre, which is offering big-screen coverage of major events.

And finally, speaking of the Olympics and Vancouver, allow me to recommend this amusing divertissement  that appeared in The Province last week. It's wry, witty, and wise, and well worth the time to read and pass along. And I'm not just saying that because I wrote it.

Keep Your Hands Where We Can See Them

Um...that should be semen-related.

I'll Wait for the iFamilyMiniVan

I remember reading somewhere awhile back that what the ailing U.S. auto industry needs is some of the playful and seductive design ingenuity behind Apple's best products. Well, behold: we give you the iMo.

Alas, the iMo is only (for now, at least) a work of fiction. It's one the concept cars featured in this Huffington Post slideshow. The description, as composed by the iMo's designer, says:

iMo is a robotic car based on the Apple philosophy which consists of applying a process of elimination to come up with simple and elegant design solutions, by means of cutting-edge technology.

First of all, we have the problem of  which  being used with a restrictive clause--a gaffe I covered in obsessive drunken detail recently. But the thing is, with this example, we need not fuss about with whichs and thats at all. Why not just: "the Apple philosophy of applying a process of elimination..."? That, I think, would be in the Apple spirit of simple and elegant solutions.

Home is Where the Heart Attack Is

I was having breakfast at A&W this morning with my little guy, Sam (if you can call sharing a greasy Bacon N' Egger with a drooly 15-month-old having breakfast), and between bites I stole a look at today's edition of the Metro, the freebie commuter paper. Their book review page (if you can call three artlessly composed, error-ridden single-paragraph summaries book reviews) bears the headline "Rice hones in on religion"--a reference to Anne Rice's debut novel of her new series, in which she has evidently traded vampires for angels.

But of course, Anne Rice isn't honing in on religion. To hone is to sharpen, either literally (as with knives) or metaphorically (as with wit or skills). To focus attention is to home in on, and that is clearly the trite phrasing the author was going for here.

Some dictionaries have now starting including "to focus" as a second definition for hone, but that only means that so many careless writers have made the mistake that descriptivist lexicographers feel obliged to record it. Any writers worth their salt (900 mg of which can be ingested in a single Bacon N' Egger) who have honed their skills will continue to home in on the difference.

Dear Internet...

 

 

A Capital Offense

This is something we're seeing more frequently--particularly in internet forums and message board posts: the feckless use of the "Shift" key. Usually, it  seems, the author is taken with the idea that Capitalizing a Word gives it Emphasis. In the case of the headline in this mailer, it's more a matter of random capitalization (why the shout-out for Year but not helping or children?).

Sure, you can argue that conventions around capitalization, like fashion conventions, are essentially arbitrary, and that Shakespeare himself played with spellings and capitalization with freewheeling abandon. I would argue that if you want to follow language conventions from the 1600's, you should be required to wear an Elizabethan ruffled collar.

The Naked Truth About Super Bowl Ads

The Fifteen Most Brilliant Super Bowl Ads is a feature today on The Daily Beast--and who can resist skimming a few moments off one's life to watch these clever and captivating pitches?

The caption blurb for #13, a Sierra Mist commercial, has this to say:

This ad stands out thanks to recognizable D-list comedians and the common problem of dealing with irreverent airport security personnel. We've all been there. The product is important to the ad, but the entertainment burden is bared by the story and the characters.

We all know what it means to bear a burden; turn that around and you have a burden being borne. But a burden bared? Sounds like this sentence had a wardrobe malfunction.

Drink Up, Kids, or You Won't Amount to Anything

According to a notice from my daughter's school, "February is Healthy Kids Month!" The rest of the year, the tykes are free to be morbidly obese, disease-ridden alcoholic chain-smokers, but for the next 28 days...well, shape up, kiddies.

In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, every child in the school will be receiving a monogrammed stainless steel water bottle (or "Stainless Steel Water Bottle," as the caps-happy author of the message would have it) as a means of encouraging the regular consumption of fluids. In my day, schools were outfitted with hallway water fountains, which gave you an excuse to leave the class by saying you were thirsty, and afforded you the opportunity to, with the deft application of a thumb, spray passing girls with a jet of H2O. Education just ain't what it used to be.

In any case, we parents are advised that:

There will be a small amount of water bottles set aside, in case you would like to purchase an extra one.

 The problem here is with the word amount. Any time you're dealing with discrete individual units, the word to use is number. Amount is for those nouns that can't be counted. As in: "With the amount of water these kids will be drinking, we can expect to see an increase in the number of bathroom visits."

The Road to Excellence

A Fairly One of a Kind Situation, Kind Of

According to The Now, our tri-cities community paper, some local residents have been arrested after taking delivery of a tombstone from Iran--a tombstone stuffed with almost 125 pounds of opium.

"It's a pretty unique type of secretion method," a police spokesman is quoted as saying.

I know it's unfair to hold spoken statements to the same standards as written communication...but tough noogies, Dudley Do-Right. I'm still going to point out that "unique" is an absolute that means "one of a kind." There can be no degrees of uniqueness. You can't be "very" or "pretty" unique (nor can your secretion method), any more than you can be "sort of" pregnant or "slightly" dead. But in this case, you can be so busted.

Which Wine is That?

It's not often you can find a drinkable wine for under ten dollars (at least not in Canada, with our confiscatory booze taxes). Allow me to recommend the Gray Fox Shiraz, which retails for $6.99 (which would make it...what, about a buck and a half  U.S.?). If, like me and most other successful people, you're poor and drink a lot of wine, that represents pretty good bang for your grape-buying buck. Remember, though, I said "drinkable," not "outstanding," and keep in mind that it has to be the Shiraz--the other wines I've tried in the Gray Fox line-up taste like yak urine.

Anyway, I'm enjoying my first (ok, third) glass right now and I notice that the marketing babble on the back label of the bottle includes this line:

Our Shiraz is a full bodied wine which displays ripe raspberry with hints of black pepper and not a trace of yak urine.

Ok, I made that last bit up. But we are still left with the un-hyphenated "full bodied" and, more disturbingly, a misused "which." And it is truly disturbing because it means I have to harsh my wine mellow by getting into a discussion of defining versus non-defining clauses.

A defining (or restrictive) clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence and cannot be removed without causing confusion. Defining clauses use "that" and are not set off with commas: "The wine that I drink is cheap and tastes surprisingly unlike yak urine." Here, the clause "that I drink" is defining the wine in question. Similarly, the example on the Gray Fox bottle needs a "that."

With non-defining clauses we use "which" and set the phrase off with commas: "The wine, which is bottled on a yak farm, is cheap and tastes surprisingly unlike yak urine." In this example, the clause "which is bottled on a yak farm" is incidental and could be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence--in other words, it does not define (or restrict) the essence of what is being conveyed.

Wasn't that fun? Oh yes, I suppose it's worth noting that many otherwise sane (albeit usually British) people are much more lax about this distinction. Even the scrupulously-edited New Yorker, for instance, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, will often allow a "which" to sit in on a defining clause. So if you want to be loosy-goosy with your "thats" and "whichs" you do have reputable sources to call as character witnesses. But you risk being mocked by those of us who appreciate the ripe raspberry nuances of a well-placed "that" and the hints of black pepper in an artfully executed "which."

Obama on the Rebound

From page 199 of Game Change, the recounting of the 2008 U.S. presidential election that is dripping with juicy gossip, comes this line:

It was hard to see how a wildly polarized electorate would rebound to Obama's benefit.

I'm fairly certain that the word the authors had in mind here was the seldom-used redound ("to have an effect or consequence"). Rebound means...well, we all know what it means.

Incidentally, I saw a headline today that read, "Obama's First Year Most Polarizing of Any President, Gallup says." Well, let's hope he can rebound in Year Two.

The Voice of Authority

Failing a Lab Test

This morning I went for my semi-annual blood-tapping, so my doctor can tell me that my bad cholesterol is too high and my liver enzymes are enzyming in an improper fashion, so lay off the cheese and red wine. We go through this ritual regularly, but what the hell, this is Canada, and the tests and doctor visits are free, so I play along.

Before the plasma-pullers could get their needle in me, I was stopped short by this sign [click to enlarge] in reception--a jumble of words and colors and odd spacings that could create confusion, or even, dare I say, panic. (If people are getting fevers or coughs on entering immediately, this lab needs to be shut down by a Haz-Mat team in crinkly white spacesuits).

My suggested wording, for what it's worth, would be: "If you have a fever or cough, notify a lab assistant immediately on entering." But I'm just a cheese-eating wino who is too wimpy to watch the needle go in, so what do I know?

A bonus for keen-eyed viewers: "fragrance free" in the other sign should be hyphenated.

Physician, Heel Thyself

The garrulous and avuncular (not to mention ubiquitous) Dr. Art Hister, Vancouver's medic-in-the-media, has a feature story in the latest edition of People First, the freebie mag distributed by Peoples Drug Mart. The good doctor begins his piece with this roller-coaster of a sentence:

My wife would say that I got really interested in the increasingly important medical issue of preventing falls in the elderly because, as she won't let me forget, "you're no spring chicken, my dear, more like a bruised old capon," (to be fair she's dead on, but I wish she weren't so brutally honest), but the truth is that I've been quite interested in the issue for a long time now, ever since, in fact, my wife and I took one of our annual hiking holidays, which as is too often the case, turned out to be anything but a "holiday" or what my wife calls "fun".

 Now, I have no problem with long sentences when they're artfully constructed and under control (Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace, to name just two dead men, used to cast enthrallingly epic sentences) but that opener is not just a run-on, it's a runaway freight train. Here's fifty cents, doc--go buy yourself a period.

And speaking of periods, when the sentence finally does roll to a halt, after those Borscht Belt-style "take my wife" digressions, the final punctuation falls outside the quotation marks. Personally, that seems logical to me (and to the British, God love 'em) but the American (and Canadian) convention is to tuck the punctuation inside.

Take That, Abalama!

Some of my Best Friends are Light-Skinned Negroes

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in the stink for being quoted as saying Barack Obama is a light-skinned black who doesn't (usually) use a "Negro" dialect. Obama accepted Reid's apology, saying the leader had used "inartful" language in praising him. True enough, but Reid also used inartful language in his statement apologizing for his inartful language, saying:

"I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans for my improper comments."

Offending "any and all"? No comma after the parenthetical "especially African-Americans"? Apologizing for offending them for his comments? You'd think the Senate Majority Leader would have someone on staff who can put together a sentence saying "I'm sorry" without waterboarding the English language.

Incidentally, Reid's quote that launched the brouhaha comes from the new book, Game Change, a behind-the-scenes tell-all about the '08 election that I spent a couple of hours driving through a downpour to get my greedy mitts on. Settling in with it last night, I came across this line on Page 20:

Clinton's decision to forego the 2004 race would prove fateful.

 At first I was disappointed. Obviously, the authors had not read my recent blog entry on forego/forgo confusion. Then I remembered that the book had gone to press long before I posted that, so I suppose I'll have to give them a pass.

An Everyday Experience

 I think I could start a daily blog just collecting instances of every day versus everyday confusion. Once again, for the record, everyday is the adjective meaning "commonplace," every day is your standard adjective-and-noun platonic coupling. So, an everyday occurrence can happen once in while, or it can happen every day.  Considering there is a 50/50 chance of getting it right, why does it seem that you're more likely to find the wrong usage? Or is it just that this grievance has become a personal fetish of mine, so I'm seeing examples everywhere?

A couple of cases in point from yesterday. I was buying a loaf of crusty sourdough at the local Cobs Bread (what--no apostrophe?) and offered the young man behind the counter--a surly youth with bad skin and an adam's apple the size of an eight-ball--a twenty-dollar bill for my three-buck loaf. He looked at it as if I had slapped a dead raccoon on the counter top.

"Got anything smaller?" he said finally.

"No, sorry. Just went to the ATM. That's all I've got."

He issued a weary theatrical sigh and let his bony shoulders sag even further, before opening a till that was chock-a-block with billls and coins of small denominations and completing the transaction.

I digress. Our focus is here is not the attitude of kids today (but c'mon, metalhead, you're serving customers in a bakery, not selling dime bags in the parking lot), it is the promotional flyer on display next to the abundantly-stocked cash register--the one with the tagline, bread for everyday. Everyday what?, I want to ask. Maybe next time, I'll get surly bakery youth to explain.

Later that afternoon, young Abby arrives home from her first grade class bearing a message from the teacher about the words Abby is to study this week to prepare for a test on Friday. (It seems to me when I was in first grade I was pretty much just trading hockey cards and eating paste, but there you go.) The message concludes:

It is my hope that your child will be able to transfer what they learn through this spelling program into their every day writing.

Grrr. It is my hope that my kids grow up in a world that recognizes a distinction between everyday writing and bread for every day.

And that they don't become surly bakery youths.

A Pique into the Late Night Dramas

Jay Leno was in town over the weekend doing his stand-up schtick, while TV-land was abuzz with rumors of his return to the 11:35 slot on NBC. The local Province newsrag sent reporter Katie Mercer to the show, and her dispatch tells us that, while Leno made no explicit mention of the kerfuffle during his act,

Interest seemed to peek on the rare occasion the words Late Night slipped out of Leno's lips.

Usually, one's interest, or curiosity, is said to be piqued (provoked or aroused), although a case can be made here that the audience's interest peaked (as in, reached its apex) at that moment. One thing their interest did not do, however, is peek, something traditionally done by humans and their eyeballs.

And what's with the italicized, capitalized reference to "Late Night,"  which shows up again in the final paragraph:

The dismal reality is that O'Brien hasn't been able to fill the comedian's [Leno's] shoes, who easily transitioned into the Late Night spot himself after Johnny Carson..."

The show Leno transitioned into after Carson left was, of course, The Tonight Show--the same show Conan O'Brien may now be leaving in a fit of pique. And as anyone who follows these things (or has read or watched  The Late Shift) knows, Leno's transition back then was anything but easy.

Is This What They Mean by Frankenfood?

Another Foto Friday quickie:

There is a Muenster cheese, an American product, not to be confused with the French Munster cheese, not to be confused with the TV show, The Munsters, which is not to be confused with monsters, which may have led to the confusion here. And yes, parmesan is misspelled, too.

Now You're Just Being Wheird

Stephen Metcalf (who, based on what I've heard of him on the Slate Gabfest podcasts, is either a brilliantly incisive critic or an insufferable poseur--I can't decide) has an article on Slate--a 50th anniversary re-review of A Separate Peace. In it, he recounts his own experiences as a young man attending Exeter:

"I remember too the giant birdlike rectitudinous old men, Latin teachers who audibly aspirated the H in while and whom..."

Everyone aspirates the H in "whom"--it's the W that is silent.

But of course no discussion of audibly-aspirated H's would be complete without this:





And while we're at it, I just had to see this again:

Walk of Shame

Walking back from lunch yesterday through the quaint streets of downtown PoCo, I came across a series of signs within a few feet of each other that warrant picayune picking on. First up, the Dairy Queen on the corner:

We've covered the whole confounding "due to" thing before, and this usage clearly doesn't meet the criteria we all agreed on at that time. "Closed for renovations" would have worked just fine. Aside from that, though, I am curious about those "boxes of novelties."

Farther down the block is this establishment:

Apostrophes are obviously not among the accessories available here. That should be "Ladies' Fashion." There are some people, by the way--people of questionable breeding with sloped foreheads, for the most part--who argue that this usage is acceptable on the grounds that "ladies" is serving as a plural adjective rather than a possessive. To them I say: when's the last time you saw a sign touting "Men Fashion?"

But wait a minute. Not two doors down, at my daughter's favorite store (she likes to watch the doggies in the window) we find this:

I see what's happening now. Evidently the 2500-block of Shaughnessy Street has been struck by an apostrophe drought (and what's with the "$$$"?), a diagnosis confirmed by the presence of the Peoples Drug Mart across the street.

There's a Lot at Steak Here

Last night I was reading a selection from Ruth Reichl's book, "Garlic and Sapphires," about her experiences as the New York Times restaurant critic who dined in disguise to find out how the top restaurants treated a diner who was not the New York Times restaurant critic.

In the passage in question, she is talking about her humiliation at being called out in "the greenies"--the Times's in-house daily critique--for writing the sentence: "If you are a native New Yorker, steak is in your blood."

"The word police pounced," she writes.

"There, circled in the greenies, was the offending sentence. Next to it...was this comment: 'What if you are Chinese? Latino? Beware of generalizations.'"

I confess I don't see the problem. Ascribing certain traits to native New Yorkers seems fine to me, and doing so doesn't discount the possibility that others may share those traits. And isn't it understood that native New Yorkers can come from all cultural backgrounds? Sounds like someone is hyper-sensitive about inclusiveness.

But the topic of examination today actually comes in Reichl's next paragraph:

"Mortified, I went slinking through the newsroom, wishing I had never written those words. Why hadn't I simply said what I meant? Which was: 'Growing up in New York City, steak was an important part of my childhood.' It was the truth and no one could possibly have objected."

I object! Not to the validity of her steak-eating claims, but to the structure of that sentence. Here we encounter the dreaded dangling participle, which has made a fool out of many a well-meaning writer. The participial clause, "growing up in New York City," has become detached from its intended subject (Ruth Reichl) and has adhered itself to the steak, making it sound like it was the meat that grew up in New York.

The "native New Yorker" line may have raised the ire of the composer of the "greenies," but I submit it was the better choice, on both stylistic and grammatical grounds, than her imagined do-over.