Booby Trapped

Several months ago, my wife, Kim, was motoring down the expressway behind the wheel of our sexy Saturn Ion, bopping her head along to "Dancing Queen," when a fellow driver attempting a maneuver that should only be performed by a professional driver on a closed course rear-ended her. The resulting impact catapulted her directly into the office of a shyster lawyer, who is promising to make the disagreeable incident reasonably lucrative for her...and himself.


Today he sent Kim a draft of his proposed settlement letter to the insurance company, and it includes this line:

We note that the CL 19 completed by Dr. Russell indicates that Ms. Weber was breastfeeding at the time of the accident and was therefore restricted in the type and amount of pain medication she could take.

Hang on there, Matlock. You're saying that at the time of the accident, while motoring down a public expressway and listening to a wretched Abba tune, your client was also giving suck to a small child?

Never mind getting a juicy settlement. If this letter goes out as is, Kim will be lucky to avoid jail time.

Maybe Jesus is Just Not That Into You

Broadcaster silent as "Judgment Day" hours tick by

So goes the Reuters headline about religious wackjob Harold Camping who, after months--nay, years--of strenuous bloviating about mankind's presumed day of reckoning today, seems to be at a loss for words. But this isn't the first time the Lord has stood him up. According to the report:

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

I think that sentence could ready simply, "Camping previously made a prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994." We can do the "failed" math ourselves.

By the way, isn't the appearance of "false prophets" supposed to be one of the signs of the apocalypse? Uh-oh.

Is Our Children's IQs Learning?

Yesternight, while searching for a half-remembered epigram, I found myself leafing through a recent favorite: Death Sentences: How clichés, weasel words, and management-speak are strangling public language. It's all about how clichés*, weasel words, and management-speak are--how shall I put this?--strangling public language.

My languid leafing brought me to this passage:

The most dramatic example so far appears to be the news that in some parts of the United States parents have started legal proceedings against their obstetricians when, on reaching high school, their children's IQs do not meet expectations.

But of course it's the children who are reaching high school, not their IQs. Well, presumably their IQs go along with them, but you know what I mean.

*When I type the word clichés in Word, it automatically adds the accent over the e. No such intuitiveness in Bloggerworld, I see.  I actually had to type the word in Word, then copy it into the text here (3 times!)--a tedious operation that gives me new appreciation for those old-time typesetters who had to painstakingly create each line of text with calloused, greasy fingers. I have to lie down for awhile now.

Comma Chameleon

A story in the weekend edition of The Vancouver Sun (yes, I'm just getting to it now--it was maggoty with mothers here on the weekend) offers up some compelling background on the city's premier specialty video store, Videomatica, which--say it ain't so!--is closing its doors after 28 years as a 4th Avenue fixture. Damn you, cheap and efficient movie downloads!

Deep into the obit, the piece reveals that the cinephile's boutique-of-choice celebrated its 25th anniversary by compiling a list of their all-time top rentals. The chart-topper was the quirky British comedy Withnail and I. After that...

The top 10 was rounded out by Wings of Desire, Down by Law, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Betty Blue, Blood Simple, The Decameron and Baraka.

As countless movie nerds with hot-butter-stained t-shirts will attest, the title of the Russ Meyer schlock classic is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And when you have a series that contains an item like this with its own internal comma you need to separate said items with semi-colons to avoid confusion. As it stands, it reads like these are two movies: Faster (which sounds like one of those execrable Vin Diesel car chase pornfests) and Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (which sounds like a command given to a homicidal housecat).

A little detective work (ie: counting) tells me that the author of the piece did in fact think these were two movies, because only by cleaving the title into two films can you get the nine titles you need to round out the top ten.

Speaking of movie title missteps, the Huffington Post is reporting that Philip Seymour Hoffman is set to star in a big-screen jab at L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. The movie, which should be a doozy, is the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, who, we're told, is

an Oscar-nominated writer/director, whose biggest hits include "Boogie Nights," "Punch, Drunk, Love" and "There Will Be Blood."

That should be Punch-Drunk Love. Although I must admit that Punch, Drunk, Love sounds like a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love that I would actually want to see.

Pro-Nouns and Anti-Semantic

Over at Slate today, the estimable Dana Stevens gave an almost begrudging thumbs-most-of-the-way-up to the new Mel Gibson movie, The Beaver. The film's release, you may recall, was delayed to provide some breathing room between us, the movie-going public, and the stink of Gibson's latest odious transgressions.

In any case, the movie is directed by Jodie Foster, who also performs in the film, and about whom Steven writes:

It's notoriously hard for an actor to direct his or herself on-screen, which may account for the lack of warmth in Foster's scenes with Gibson.

The problem here is that, while his and hers go together like Mel Gibson and raging misogynist anti-Semite, the reflexive pronouns are, of course, himself and herself. (True, hisself is a variant in some dialects, particularly those featured in movies where Jackie Gleason plays a sheriff, but not in Standard Written English.)

So how do we solve this? Some people--those with a sense of panache and derring-do--see an opportunity here to deploy a sexy suspended hyphen, like so: "him- or herself." But if that seems too risqué, we can also go with the stodgy but serviceable "himself or herself." Or, we can simply avoid the whole pickle by recasting the sentence: "It's notoriously hard for actors to direct themselves on-screen...especially when playing opposite a volatile misogynist anti-Semite."

Whitewashed

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. 

I've always admired those lines from E.B. White--so much so that I captured them and preserved them in my collection of lines I admire, which I will one day bequeath to an auction house of fine standing. But not long after cataloging those words and arranging them in their display case, I began to see other versions, including this grotesque mash-up:

"I wake up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult."

E.B White was a writer, after all (and one notorious for the precision of his word choices) so there should be a definitive written record of where the passage in question comes from and in what exact form it appeared. Indeed, the blogmeister at Ishbadiddle did some wiki-sourcing on this very question and determined that that first version is the real thing and it comes from a 1969 New York Times interview. Case closed.

But then yesterday, I sat at my wife's computer to enjoy some idle surfing while munching my bagel, and her home page quotation-generator spit this out:

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. --E.B. White

This time, I happened to know precisely the source, and I knew this was murderously off-key. I only had to step over to the bookcase and pull down my copy of A Subtreasury of American Humor, edited by White and his wife, Katherine, to find these lines in the preface:

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

First of all, I submit this as a rebuttal to all those Strunk and White fundamentalists who insist that the briefer, plainer composition is always better. The real quotation sings; the bastardized version is a feeble croak. Even E.B. White was not an Elements of Style purist. He understood that while there may be rules for grammar, there are only guidelines for writing, and they are mutable. What matters is choosing the right words for the right effect.

Which is what makes these misquotations so irksome. I suppose it's flattering to White, in a way, that his epigrams are passed around so enthusiastically that they become fodder for an undeclared game of Chinese Whispers. But considering the care this legendary literary craftsman put into his work, it is dispiriting to see his sentences vandalized by thoughtless thugs.

Going Gaga

According to a HuffPo story, Lady Gaga is in trouble with God. I'm not familiar with Ms. Gaga's work, but I understand she is a provocative performer, and this story seems to follow a pattern that started with Elvis shaking his hips and worked its way through Alice Cooper and his snake, Ozzie Osbourne and the headless bat, Sinead O'Conner and the pope pic incident, the guy who did the "Piss Christ" photo of a crucifix in urine, and countless others: Provocative performer says or does something deliberately provocative. Intended provokees are suitably provoked by said provocateur. Minutes of intense outrage ensue from people who claim these stunts are debasing their sacred beliefs. Outraged people become distracted by an image of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and life moves on.

The hullabaloo now is about Gaga's newest musical offering. As the story reveals:

"Judas," the latest single from Grammy-winner and fashion icon has leaked onto the internet early, adding to the already heated debate about the song, and accompanying video's, alleged sacrilege.

Yes, we're missing a the before "Grammy-winner," but the real transgression, grammatically-speaking, comes later in the sentence. If we are to believe that both the song and the video are (allegedly) sacrilegious and that that is what the debate is about, we should be looking at a compound possessive and the first possessive should be song's. If these are two separate issues, though--the debate about the song, and the (alleged) sacrilege in the video--we need to lose the parenthetical clause by dropping the final comma and making it: "heated debate about the song, and the accompanying video's alleged sacrilege." That's what Jesus would do.

Teed Off in Kelowna

Day Three of our Okanagan odyssey saw us going for a family mini-golf excursion, and what a predictably hapless foursome we present. Kim is about as deftly-coordinated as an arthritic moose. Young Abby's approach to golf is to stickhandle toward the hole like Phil Esposito on a breakaway. As for me, I am by turns astonishingly lucky (hole-in-one on the 17th thanks to a five-foot rebound off a curb) and pathetically inept (my approach on this hole

saw me suffering the effects of more strokes than Dick Clark).

Two-year-old Sam, pictured here sitting smugly by the Deadwood-inspired facade on the 16th green,

 

carried the day by scoring a consistent two strokes on every single hole, owing to his strategy of picking up his ball after each tee-off, walking it to the cup and dropping it in. I'm actually kind of proud of him for figuring out so swiftly the pointless futility of golf.

Oh, right...the point of this blog entry? It was this sign, introducing us to the 6th hole:

Speaking of hit-and-miss (or, I suppose, miss-and-miss in this case), we have here both absent and superfluous punctuation. There should, of course, be an apostrophe in NATURES to indicate who that gardener is in service to. And when will sign-writers learn that quotation marks are not for slapping around a phrase to give emphasis? In fact, because the scare claws are often employed to indicate irony, the play can backfire like a florescent green golf ball ricocheting off a windmill fan. Although now that I look at that mangy patch of moonscape depicted here, perhaps the claim of "quality service" is indeed meant to be ironic.

Give Us Your Poor...and We'll Give You Our Huddled Masses

It's election season again, which means more of those voiceover-of-doom, black-and-white commercials showing unflattering photographs of the other guy--the kind that got Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin to sputter:

Must we? The adolescent attack ads? The constant dispiriting insult to our intelligence and national sense of decorum? When did Karl Rove immigrate to Canada?

Should that be immigrate or is it emigrate in this context? I always get those two mixed up, the same way I'm continually confusing Bill Paxton with Bill Pullman. So I looked it up yet again (the immigrate/emigrate thing, not the Paxton/Pullman thing--I've given up on the latter).

The distinction is most often described along the lines of "to emigrate is to leave a country, while to immigrate is to come to a country"--an explanation I find less than satisfying because of course one does both at the same time. But it is a matter of perspective: the person you are seeing off is emigrating and the person you are welcoming (or, in the hypothetical case of Karl Rove, rebuffing at the point of a pitchfork) is immigrating--even if it's the same person.

So McMartin has it right. But the atheists are wrong. At least the atheists who wrote up the promotional material for their upcoming convention. They've posted a biographical snapshot of featured speaker Christopher Hitchens (who is attending via Skype, owing to ill health, alas) that says "In 1981, he emigrated to the United States." As anyone who has heard Hitchens's buttery English accent knows, the man is a product of the UK, meaning he immigrated to the United States, land of the Rovian attack ad.

I Never Thought of Selling It...

 

As someone who has changed (more than) his share of diapers, I am well aware of the assorted colours and patterns.

Maybe it's Time to Invest in Some Apostrophes

I seem to have developed an inexplicable fetish for the TV show Dragon's Den--you know, the one where wannabe or fledgling entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists who tell them that their valuations are "insane." Now that repeats are airing daily and we've got this space-age PVR recording device, it's all too easy to score along at home while watching pitches into the wee hours.

Last night I screened a couple more eps, including one that featured a "mom-preneur" who designs punk-themed clothes for toddlers, such as this t-shirt:

Punk may not be dead, but her pitch was. The Dragons withdrew their offer of one million dollars for 10% of the company when they realized she had left out the apostrophe in what is clearly supposed to be a contraction of "Punk is." Okay, not really--they just told her they didn't see the big-time potential. But if they had taken her to task on the missing punctuation, it might have served as a warning to future businesspeople who take the language into their own hands.

Like this woman in the following episode, who was trying to get funding for her line of plus-sized clothes:

There is no such word as womens. When something is attached to a confederacy of women--women's rights, women's fashions, women's unseemly tendency to gush and swoon over the "dreaminess" of Denzel Washington while their squat, pale husbands are sitting right there--the word required is the possessive, and it is the apostrophe that is essential.

Hitting Where it Hurts

Headline on an AP wire story today:

GM Cuts Unnecessary Spending After Japan Disaster

When the crisis is over they will resume regular levels of unnecessary spending.

Playing in the Margins

In a future (and a present) where books are delivered by Kindle and iPad, what is to become of those manic scribblers who like to graffiti the pages of their books with marginalia? The gabfesters at Slate podcasted about this very topic awhile back, and today I see this Atlantic piece about the (possible) demise of obsessive literary back-chat. The blogster in question, Kevin Charles Redmon (and since when do you need three names to write a blog post?), spends some time examining the merits of --and the vituperative scorn heaped upon--the Kindle's collective annotating feature, "popular highlights."

And if you don't trust the wiki of would-be English lit professors—191 of who, I see, have highlighted Franzen's thesis in Freedom, "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage"—well, turn the feature off. 

There's that pesky who/whom problem again. This seems like a case of hyper-correction, with the author figuring that since the stripped-down sentence would read "professors who have highlighted Franzen's thesis" he is probably on solid ground to stay with the subjective who. But if we use the handy substitution test and try other subjective/objective pairings, the miscue surfaces like a tell-tale blue line on a home pregnancy test pee-stick. For although it's fine to write, "they have highlighted Franzen's thesis," you would never say "191 of they have highlighted Franzen's thesis"--unless of course you suffered from a debilitating neurological impairment. We know without a doubt that it should be the objective them--our ears tell us so. The objective case it is, then, which means whom is the pronoun of choice.

That's Just Sic

Timothy Noah is having a conniption today on Slate ---something about how the internet-phone pioneers at Skype are holding certain clients' voice mails hostage unless they pony up some coin. He quotes a disgruntled user (and an amusingly semi-literate response to the disgruntled user) before paraphrasing a conversation he had with a Skype spokeshole: 

When I spoke with O'Shaughnessy today he said that neither he, nor a Skype customer-service expert he contacted in London, nor a Skype product manager he contacted in London, had ever heard of this problem before, which makes the Skype email's pledge that "we will definitely look in to [sic.] this" ring a bit hollow. 

Noah is using the parenthetical "[sic.]" to point out, correctly, that "in to" should read "into." But he errs in throwing a period in before that closing bracket. To quote the infallible Wikipedia:

The adverb sic—meaning "intentionally so written"—first appeared in English circa 1856. It is derived from the Latin adverb sīc, which contains a long vowel and means "so," "thus," "as such," or "in such a manner."

and also...

Because sic is not an abbreviation, it is unnecessary to include a period inside the brackets after the word sic.

A Prepositionalist Incongruousness

If you read only one print excerpt of a recap of a series of blog posts on the discussions of a book club about the novel The Sentimentalists, it should be today's piece in The Vancouver Sun. In it you will find one of the panelists quoting a passage from the book that includes this sentence:

When I questioned Parada about the incongruencies between my father's stories and the documents to which I was later able to compare them to, he had little to offer by way of explanation.

You won't find the word incongruency in any major dictionary (at least I didn't) but a cursory Googling and a quick visit to Wordnik shows that it's getting a lot of lexicographical traction. I like it. In the example above, the word suggests that the differences between the father's stories and the documents are not just inconsistent, but oddly so. So rather than "incongruent inconsistencies" we get "incongruencies." Cool.

Not so cool, however, is the doubling down on prepositions in the phrase "to which I was later able to compare them to," which will hereafter be referred to simply as "The Paul McCartney Error."

Still Better than the Jell-O and Preparation H

This just in...my wife, the wily and parsimonious Kim, has poked her head in to say that she's off to the market to, and I quote: "Pick up some cat food and broccoli for dinner."

This is why we need commas in speech as well as writing.

Piers Review

In the latest Vanity Fair, master baiter James Wolcott delivers a sustained beating to the credibility of Piers Morgan, CNN's comically over-hyped replacement for Larry "the Crypt Keeper" King. Wolcott blames Morgan himself for the flow of  P.R. balloon juice that preceded the Brit's debut, in a passage that ends:

Morgan also reveled in Twitter slap-fights, boasting that he would mop the floor with doubters and detractors such as John Schiumo, the 24-hour cable news channel NY1’s prime-time news host, whom he warned, “You’re like Stephen Baldwin and Vinny Pastore—they thought they were big shots in NY too until I wiped them in Celeb Apprentice.” Yes, those were quite a pair of titans he toppled.

That last sentence contains a fairly common grammatical misstep. Baldwin and Pastore may constitute two (ironic) titans, but the word "pair" is (ironically) singular, and that's the word that governs the verb choice. So the sentence should read: "Yes, that was quite a pair of titans..."

For Better or Wurse

It is with a heavy heart that I present today's befouling of the language, as it comes from my daughter's weekly spelling quiz.

What pains me is that she had the presence of mind to realize she had left out the vowel in Number 9, but then she doubled back and inserted the wrong one. It fell to me, as a loving and involved father, to carefully explain to her that she had brought ineradicable shame on the family, and that from now on I would have to burn her hand with a cigarette for each error she made.

This is almost as bad as the time our two-year-old, Sam, used the word "sententious" when he clearly meant "tendentious." And no, I couldn't just chalk it up to a slip of the tongue; it was in a written communication. 

Damn kids today.

The Not-So-Secret Service

The latest issue of The Atlantic features an "unprecedented access" look into the Secret Service that, frankly, offers little in the way of revelation or insight--although it was fun to read that the New York office keeps a stash of disguises and fake grass for undercover operations. Presumably that's where they keep the ACME-brand rocket skates, too.

The piece centers around security coordination for the United Nations General Assembly meeting in 2010, and early on we get a glimpse into Iranian president Mahmoud Multisyllable's security detail:

During his stay, the Iranian president was ensconced in the smallish, 20-floor Hilton Manhattan East. The hotel remained open to regular guests, and tourists wandered freely through the lobby. No demonstrators were outside when I visited (a somewhat surprising absence, given that the day’s newspapers had disclosed the location of the hotel), but a couple dozen plainclothes police officers were stationed around the building just in case.

Just to be picky here, the newspapers didn't disclose the location of the hotel--Google Maps, or for that matter, the local Yellow Pages, will give you that. What the papers had disclosed was the location of Captain Windbreaker at said hotel.

And Then I Go and Spoil it All by Saying Something Stupid...

It might be churlish of me to say so, but while reading How to Write a Sentence...And How to Read One by the critic and columnist Stanley Fish, I can't help thinking that the book, as pleasantly pedantic as it is, might be more engaging if its sentences were written by someone more boisterously creative than Stanley Fish. It's a good book. I like it. But if it were written by, say, Martin Amis or, in an alternate universe, David Foster Wallace, I would probably love it. But there is no point blaming a book for its author.

I can, however, blame the author for this passage, where he compares "bad" sentences that create good effects to bad cover songs that produce ironic pleasure:

There's an NPR program called  The Annoying Music Show, and when the remastered set of Beatles albums came out in 2009, an episode was built around it. The cuts played included Tiny Tim singing "Hey Jude" and Telly (Kojak) Savalas singing "Something in the Way She Walks." These performances were truly bad and they were truly good.

The line, as George Harrison wrote it, is, of course, "Something in the way she moves." And the song, for that matter, is titled, simply, "Something".

I tried to find YouTube evidence of this cover song atrocity but came up dry. But in searching, I did come across this half-forgotten Telly Savalas sketch on the old Carol Burnett show. Cheesy, but still funny, if you ask me.