Writing by Ear

It's one of the simplest rules in English: use a before a word beginning with a consonant; use an when the following word starts with a vowel. Easy-peasy, right?

Not so fast, Ben Kuzma, sportswriter for The Province, who wrote the following in a piece about the re-signing of Canucks forward Mason Raymond:

Next summer he'll be an UFA and it's up to him to determine what leverage he'll have.

 The trick here is that the correct deployment of the indefinite article depends on the sound, rather than the spelling, of the word it's "articling." UFA, in this context, stands for "unrestricted free agent," and if Kuzma had gone with the full monty description, an would have been the correct choice. But "UFA" is an initialism and its initial sound is pronounced "yoo" so "a UFA" is the way to go. Similarly, we would say that Raymond is "an NHL player," because even though "N" is a consonant, it is pronounced "en."

All of which sounds ridiculously complicated but is in fact intuitively easy in most cases if you sound out the phrase in question. Just try saying "an UN resolution" or "a IRS investigation" without spraining your larynx or sounding like Sarah Palin. Impossible.

A Law of Attraction

Mormons aren't supposed to gamble; Mitt got $10million from casino magnet Sheldon Adelson. Why doesn't some reporter ask Mitt about that?

That was a tweet from TV provocateur Bill Maher about a week or so ago.

Sheldon Adelson owns casinos. You could even say he is attracted to casinos, which is why he owns so many of them. But he does not attract casinos to himself in the way "chick magnet" Matthew McConaughey attracts women, for instance. That is because Sheldon Adelson is not a "casino magnet" but rather a "casino magnate."

The primary pronunciation of magnate in most guides calls for a long a in the second syllable, but enough people of dubious breeding are pronouncing it exactly like magnet that that has become an established alternative utterance. This has obviously led to some confusion between the words, as evidenced by the faulty tweet of said TV provocateur. 


I'll never be able to trust the Internet again.


Addendum: For an excerpt of the funniest writing you will ever read on magnets, see this.

Unfortunate Unintended Pun of the Day

Dozens die in Syria,UN has grave concerns Sydney Morning Herald

Now There's an Episode of The Bachelorette I Would Watch

Mike Huckabee: "Madonna more likely to pick me than Mitt Romney"

What's this? The Huckster and the Mitt Man are fighting for the romantic favors of an aging pop tart? And Huckabee thinks he has the inside edge? That's the impression you could get from that HuffPo headline from earlier today.

Sadly, the real story is nowhere near as awkwardly surreal. Huckabee was asked about the chances of his being selected as Mitten's running mate and he responded, "I think there is a greater likelihood that I'll be asked by Madonna to go on tour as her bass player." A weird reference for him to make, perhaps, but not as disturbingly weird as the headline seems to promise.

This the kind of ambiguity that can arise when the word than mixes with people, and it can often be cleared up with the addition of a tiny verb. If that headline had an is at the end, there would have been much less opportunity for the reader to conjure an image of two middle-aged political blowhards doing a "the girl is mine" routine.

Or take, for instance, the sentence: "I love wine more than my wife." That could be taken to mean that I love wine more than my wife does. Or it could mean that I love wine more than I love my wife. In my case, the first interpretation is an unremarkable declaration of fact. The latter is just speculation on my wife's part.

How Do You Say "False Arrest" in Swedish?

Last night we had dinner at Ikea (yeah, like you've never done it) and after a splendid repast of fish and discount cafeteria Cabernet, my micro-bladdered wife, Kim, had to (predictably) adjourn to the facilities.

While I was waiting outside this door...

...two things bubbled to the surface of my Cabernet-muted consciousness:

1. That should be "WOMEN'S". You need the apostrophe to indicate the possessive. Womens is what you say if you're a polygamist hillbilly ("I gots me two womens!")

2. There is no surer way of getting the hairy eyeball than by loitering outside the women's washroom with a camera trained on the door and discount Cabernet on your breath.

The Eight Times the Vice President Did Something That Mattered

So reads the headline of a Slate piece from a few days ago. I take issue with that article. Not the piece itself (although we'll get to that in a moment), but the definite article in the title. It's not a clear case of violating an on-the-books rule, but bear with me while I make my case.

The article sets out to enumerate--in light of Joe Biden's "getting out in front" of the gay marriage issue--the eight times in history that a sitting vice president has done something more noteworthy than cutting a ribbon at the opening of a shopping mall. So shouldn't that be "The Eight Times a Vice President Did Something That Mattered"? After all, we're talking about a number of different Vice Presidents, not one particular man with hair plugs and bleached teeth.

There is room for dissent here. In fact, coincidentally enough, Slate ran a piece just yesterday, tied to the sordid John Edwards trial, called "The Meaning of The", which attempts to explain why lawyers argue over the meaning of basic words. The author explains:

In regular speech, the definite article (the) can sometimes refer to something unique—for instance, “I have a cat. The cat is sleeping.” Other times, it can refer to something that’s not unique: If I say, “My cat is lying on the arm of my chair,” I’m not implying that the chair has only one arm. Whether the refers to something unique depends on the context in which it’s used and can be open to interpretation. 

Fair enough. If you say that, in American legislative politics, the Vice President's most significant duty is to break ties in the Senate, we understand that you are referring to the position rather than an individual person. But when you give us a contemporary article professing to outline the eight times the Vice President did something that mattered, especially when the buzz has been about what this Vice President did last week, it's fair to assume you might be talking about the current incumbent.

Which brings us to the what the current Vice President did last week and how it is characterized in this article:

On May 6, 2012, Joe Biden offered up his full support for gay marriage on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I am absolutely comfortable” with “men marrying men” and “women marrying women,” the vice president declared.
...The White House says Obama’s “evolving” position was heading to the same place—very soon. Maybe so. But Biden’s gaffe made Obama get there sooner.

Now, I'm as entertained as the next guy by Joe Biden's stream-of-consciousness non sequiturs. But in this case, I think it says more about the nature of politics than it does about his verbal dexterity that when he is asked a straightforward question and gives a straightforward, honest answer we call it a "gaffe."

A Letter of Variable Interest

Wow, check this out: the President of RBC Global Asset Management is writing to me!

As much as I hate to get all red-pencil pedantic with my new pen pal , I think there are few hiccups here.

The opening sentence begins:

As a valued client, we are pleased to offer you...

So who's the valued client here? Once again, our syntactical orientation is discombobulated by a fiendish dangler. (What's a dangler and why does it hurt to get smacked with one? I refer you here, here, and here.)

On to the next sentence:

Many clients prefer to view their reports online, however, we will continue to mail printed copies to those clients who request them.

The marriage of those two sentences is even more awkward and grotesque than the Julia Roberts-Lyle Lovett coupling. Here's a nickel, Mr. President. Go buy yourself a period.

Next sentence:

If you wish to receive a printed copy of the reports, for the funds you currently invest in, please complete the detachable postage-paid reply card...

I don't know where that superfluous first comma wandered in from, but I'll bet I'm paying for it with some kind of service charge or another.

But perhaps the most conspicuous--and most mirth-giving--error occurs right up front with the salutation:

Dear Investor

I mean, really. My "investments" consist of a flaccid retirement account that is propped up by monthly contributions from my empty wine bottle redemptions. Which makes me an "investor" the same way my three-year-old's Easy-Bake Oven makes him a chef.

The Name's Noah Webster--I'm Here for My Reading

Oh, dear. It appears, judging from this garish sandwich board sign occupying sidewalk space on our local main thoroughfare, that one of those elaborately-scarved, morally-bankrupt soothsayer fraudsters has unpacked her scented candles and patchouli oils and set up shop in our neighborhood.

When Angela writes "set back" she is, of course, trying to conjure up the noun "setback." But hey, she's a sideshow con artist, not a writer. Similarly, it would be uncharitable to point out the simple typo in "you life," which is why I'm pointing it out. (I've just never felt very charitable toward elaborately-scarved fraudsters.)

But really, Angela--"Ruin Stones"? If you can't get that right, you are going to give your profession a bad name and "rune" it for all the other, more orthographically diligent, small-time hustlers and pernicious beady-eyed swindlers.

If They're Yearning to Break Free, Why Are They Huddling?

Emma Tietel, MacLean's token young person columnist (look kids, aren't newsmagazines cool?) wrote a piece recently decrying the neutering (as it were) of gay-straight alliance clubs by Catholic school boards in Ontario.


You can just see it in lights: the club's mission statements, and the Catholic boards' iconoclastic revision to Emma Lazarus's legendary sonnet: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free...oh yeah, also your gay, bisexual, transgendered...anyone with acne."


Not sure I get that. But anyway, speaking of iconoclastic revisions, when the French sent over Lady Liberty, the poem on the card that was attached to the gift bag spoke of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Hold the Homophone*

Cherry shouldn't be silenced

So goes the headline to Province sports columnist Ed Willes's articulate defense of the outrageously inarticulate (and undeniably entertaining) hockey bloviater Don Cherry. The subheading explains:

New media puts CBC under pressure to sensor commentator

Now if they were talking about applying sensors to Cherry's cranium that would deliver a bracing A/C jolt every time he was detected pronouncing Quebec as Cue-bec, I could see the point. But of course the story is about the latest effort to stifle Cherry's more outlandish opinions--in other words, to censor him.

Meanwhile, do you remember the MPMan? Of course not; nobody does. A piece in The Atlantic today explains how the device, the first portable MP3 player, was destined for failure. This sentence sets the stage by describing the success of the MPMan's progenitor:

For a decade after its launch, Sony's Walkman retained a 50% market share in the U.S. (46% in Japan) in a space teaming with competitors, even as it enjoyed a price premium of approximately $20 over rival offers.

The phrase "teaming with competitors" is practically a contradiction in terms, since one usually competes against one's competitors. It's nonsensical, but that's because the word the author meant to use here is teeming, as in "overflowing, maggoty, out-the-wazoo with superabundance."  Another example of sound-alike cousins being mistaken for each other.

*From Wikipedia: "In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings. Thus homonyms are simultaneously homographs (words that share the same spelling, irrespective of their pronunciation) and homophones (words that share the same pronunciation, irrespective of their spelling)."
Not that it matters--as far as Rick Santorum is concerned none of them should be allowed to marry.

With This Hyphen, I Thee Wed

The inexorable march toward marriage equality picked up its pace yesterday with this news, as headlined at HuffPo:

Washington Gay Marriage Bill Signed Into Law By Governor Chris Gregoire

After recounting the details of this legislative triumph, the report advises us that

Separately, an anti-gay marriage initiative was filed at the beginning of the session, but the language is still being worked out so no signatures have been collected yet. An initiative alone would not pause the law.

This reminds me of the "orange juice salesman" conundrum from Bill Walsh's Lapsing Into a Comma. The phrase could be construed as describing a juice salesman who is orange, so he suggests employing a hyphen, like so: "orange-juice salesman." Even though "orange juice" is not normally hyphenated, this helps alleviate the confusion and unintended comedy.

That's why I think "anti-gay-marriage initiative" may be the way to go here. As it stands, "anti-gay marriage initiative" could be taken to mean a marriage initiative that is anti-gay. Hmm. On second thought, perhaps it is accurate the way it is.

Copy-Editing the Neighborhood

I can't blame these local merchants for not wanting their allotment of customer parking to be hijacked by those smelly construction goons who are erecting the first monolithic apartment tower in our cozy little 'burb...

...and we can even chalk up the missing apostrophe in "owners" and the unorthodox spelling, "expence", to the heat of the moment. But "Lyons Park"? The reader of this sign need only swivel his or her noggin 90 degrees to the left to see this:

Swiveling my perplexed noggin 90 degrees in the other direction, I see the Thai restaurant that Kim and I Grouponed our way into a few weeks ago. Alas, that evening was over before it began when our dinner guest, Professor Stephen Hawking, saw this sign at the maitre d's podium...

...gave a synthesized grunt of dismay, and swung a deftly executed, motorized U-ee. We were, as you can imagine, mortified.

Continuing into the north side of PoCo (which you really shouldn't do--we star-bellied Sneetches tend to stick to the south side), we find this sign in the window of what was formerly a Rogers Video location:

Here's a handy tip about spotting danglers; if you stop reading shortly after the first comma, the game is up. In other words, if you just read "As a valued customer, we..." you instantly see the problem. This Rogers outlet is not a valued customer. Hell, they're obviously not even a valued retailer, given the forlorn state of these premises and the fact that video stores in general are becoming about as relevant as blacksmiths in today's commercial landscape.

Let's ponder that over an over-priced coffee, shall we? There's a Starbucks just a couple of blocks away from home we can go to (although I suppose by now the name "Starbucks" implicitly includes the phrase "a couple of blocks away"). It's still light out, not even crepuscular*, and yet we can still enter through this door, despite what the sign says:

Why? Because the sign doesn't make any sense, does it? Why lock the doors of the alternate back entrance during daylight hours, only to open them under cover of darkness, when undesirables from the north side could be lurking? Clearly, they have their dawn and dusk transposed.  But the sign has been there since video stores were popular and nobody seems to have noticed. I just consider it part of our small town charm.

*Crepuscular : "of or relating to twilight." Despite my wife's objections (she thinks it's an ugly word) I think this is a great word to wedge into everyday conversation. "I don't feel like watching The Twilight Zone tonight, dear. I find it too crepuscular."

Boys Will Be Boys

Douglas Todd has a lengthy piece in the Vancouver Sun arguing that sentimentality is not as great as we think it is. (?)

After leading with a banal list of things people can be sentimental about ("Mom and apple pie. Cats and dogs.") and reminding us that some Nazis were capable of getting moist and maudlin at the drop of a swastika-adorned hat, he gives us another example from pop culture:

The acclaimed HBO series, The Sopranos, frequently captures the sentimentality of Mafia members. It portrays Tony Soprano and his cruel cronies weeping about their mothers, sniffling at old movies, idealizing their children, lamenting the loss of tradition and being fiercely protective of their wives (on whom they systematically cheat with their "goombahs," ie. mistresses).

That "i.e" is missing a period and, as Grammar Girl has helpfully determined, five out of six style guides recommend a comma following its deployment. But never mind that for now. More importantly, "goombah," as any mob-follower worth his pomade knows, refers to male friends--paisans--and, more loosely, to mobsters in general. The feminine version, used to describe the "kept women" they keep, is "goomah."

Too Late

Peter Hitchens (Hitchens the Lesser) has taken to his blog to respond to well-wishers, and once again demonstrates that he is not the graceful prose stylist his sibling was:

First may I once again thank the many people who visited this site to express condolences on the death of my late brother, Christopher.

But of course, late, in this context, means dead; it seems oddly redundant to speak of a dead person dying. As Christopher Hitchens never tired of pointing out, you get only one life. And that includes only one death.

There's a First Time for Everything

After reading today's withering editorial in The Province, I was delighted to find that the tabloid "paper of record" in our fair town is now on the record as being adamantly opposed to...virginity.

I'm not kidding. In a piece chiding a local group of insufferably smug chaste young women bloggers, the editorialist really lets them have it (as it were).

While no one should judge them for their personal--what previously would have been private--choices, their advocacy of virginity until marriage is a dangerous, out-dated, anti-sex philosophy that most people have rejected.
The last thing that anyone needs, particularly young people, is anything that promotes shame or guilt about sexual desire. 

Having worked himself (it's got to be a guy, don't you think?) into a lather (as it were), the essayist continues:

The idea that only sex within marriage is healthy is absurd.

As we've seen before, the word only can change the meaning of a sentence depending on where it's placed. As it stands here, the sentence could be taken to mean that what is absurd is the idea of sex being the only thing in a marriage that is healthy. But if you moved only to come after sex (as it were) it would still be open to ambiguity. It could sound like we're talking about a "sex-only" marriage, and that truly would be absurd. The only solution is to recast the sentence to something like...eh, you know what? Fuck it. (As it were.)

The Atlantic Announces its Own Passing

Time for more dangling modifier unintentional humor. Today, the (formerly) venerable Atlantic slips on an old syntactical banana peel with this Table of Contents blooper in their online edition:

Letters from Stalin’s Daughter: 
Before dying Monday at 85, The Atlantic reviewed her 1967 memoir, "wrung from an agonized conscience"

But of course as regrettably moribund as the (formerly) venerable Atlantic may have been (and is), it did not die last Monday. If it had, we would not be reading this amusingly amateurish subheading.

It's Just a Faze You're Going Through

A languid, guilty-pleasure scroll through this week's offerings on PostSecret delivers the usual funny/disturbing/annoying revelations, including this "look how I shocking I am" submission:

Well, I am shocked all right. Shocked that the confessor doesn't know the difference between phased and fazed. And shocked at the price. Does this mean I owe my cat 200 bucks?

Point of Order

We took the kiddies to city hall on Saturday to watch the local election returns come in, because nothing says family fun like sitting in a funereal council chamber silently watching numbers change on a screen.

On the way we in, we saw this propaganda poster full of demographically-correct smiley faces, hectoring us to do our civic duty:

  You know what else matters, creator of run-on headline? Punctuation.

Peekaboo! I See You!

Take a look at this picture from The Province:

Now note the caption:

Gang task force undercover police are in evidence Thursday in and around the court complex in Vancouver where several trials involving gang members are in progress.

I don't mean to tell the Donnie Brascos on the VPD how to infiltrate a gang, but I would suggest that if you want to conceal where your true affiliation lies, you should probably lose the "POLICE GANG TASK FORCE" attire, so that you are not so plainly "in evidence." Either that, or perhaps undercover is just not the word to use here.

Make No Mistake...

I have here in the writing cockpit a broadsheet-sized book called The Copywriter's Bible, which, like any real bible, is full of outdated anecdotes and questionable advice. I like to refer to it sometimes to remind myself that there was a time when a magazine ad could be this maggoty with verbiage:

This particular novella-length ad, entitled " A FEW ENCOURAGING WORDS FOR THE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT" contains this apercu outlining the oratorical deficiencies of a past U.S. president:

THE WORST SPEECH-WRITER

William Gamaliel Harding wrote his own speeches while President of the USA in the 1920's.  

When Harding died, e.e. cummings said, "the only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple, declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors, is dead." 

Here is a rewarding sample of the man's style. "I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved."

I don't know--it sounds like George W. on a good day, if you ask me.

Anyway, as it turns out, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this president in his book, Blink, where he used the hapless Harding, whom everyone agreed "looked presidential," as an example of what happens when we choose appearance of ability over, well, ability. He called it "The Warren Harding Error." He did not call it "The William Harding Error." That would have been an error. Not "totally incompetent" perhaps, but definitely an error.