Where's the Last Place You Had It?

A sad story in today's Province opens with:

The body of an 85-year-old Invermere man who was reported missing Tuesday was found near a dirt road in the Jumbo Creek area a day later. 

As I say, a sad story. But not as odd as the headline would have you believe:

Missing Body Found

It wasn't a body that was missing--it was a man. A minor quibble, perhaps, but Body of Missing Man Found would have made the point more clearly, and without the misleading macabre overtones.

A Sneek Peek at Tomorrow's Lunch Feature

Back to school time--which means back to figuring out what to put in the kid's lunch each day. You can toss a package of processed-cheese-and-crackers into the Dora the Explorer lunch bag only so many times before you hear from Child Protective Services, so I was glad to see this suggested recipe for a simple blueberry banana bread in the morning rag. The mixture is in the oven right now.

But before I try to clean the baking powder out of the toaster and stovetop elements (thanks, Kim, for keeping the open box on the top shelf of the cupboard where I have to jump for it) let's take a look at that ad at the bottom of the page. "A full line-up of concerts, dance, theatre, family, movies..." One of those things is not like the others. "Family events" would probably be more accurate. And "we give you a peak..."? Give me a brake.

And You Thought Your Job was Tedious

I've always felt sorry for Jimmy Buffet. Sure, he gets to spend most of his life wearing Hawaiian shirts, strumming his six-string for half-drunk tourists, and generally being the exemplar of the middle-aged laid back surfer dude. But you just know that in every single gig he performs, he's not getting off the stage until he sings that song. How sick he must be of it. How does he even pretend to want to do it again?

Then I read about this guy in an AP wire story today:

NEW YORK — Saturday night's performance of "The Phantom of the Opera" on Broadway will be perhaps most memorable for someone who's seen the show a lot.

It will be the last one for actor George Lee Andrews, who will have wrapped up his 9,382nd show over 23 years. The show helped him capture the Guinness World Records title for the most performances in the same Broadway show.

Producers revealed this week that 68-year-old Andrews would not be continuing in the role of Monsieur Andre. Aaron Galligan-Stierle, who is Andrew's son-in-law, will take over the part beginning Sept. 5.

I don't know--I saw "The Phantom of the Opera" once, and that seemed plenty for me. This guy must be seeing flying chandeliers in his sleep.

The error here comes in the final sentence, and it raises an issue that always gives me the heebie-jeebies: how to possessive-ize a name ending in S. I know it should be simple, but this is one of those situations where (metaphorically speaking, anyway) I just mumble into my hand and avoid eye contact and hope nobody presses the point.

Strunk and White have a clear opinion on this--in fact, it is the first rule in the "little book": "Form the possessive singular of the noun by adding 's." It's "Charles's friend" and Burns's poems" they say with characteristic assuredness. (And yet, somewhat curiously, they make exceptions for "ancient possessive names ending in -es and -is," and for Jesus. So it would be "Jesus' iPod," for Christ's sake. That guy gets all the special breaks.)

But it's not really that simple. If you believe this source (and come on, it's on the Internet--why wouldn't you?) it's "Arkansas's former governor" but "Alexander Dumas' first novel." It's "the Smiths' car" but "the Joneses' home." But is it "the boss' memo" or "the boss's memo"? (Or what about "the bosses's memo"?) At this point, let's admit it, we just want to leave it for the intern and go get something to eat.

In any case, in the example above, the iron-man actor's surname is Andrews--which means that most people would form the possessive thusly: Andrews'. Some counter-culture goth types might argue for Andrews's, even at the risk of sounding like Homer Simpson referring to his neighbors as "the Flanderseseses." But no civilized person in possession of their possessive faculties could possibly justify rendering it Andrew's.

Who You Calling Toddler?

Here's an alarming story from The Province, attributed to that prodigious contributor, Staff Reporter:

A baby was pepper-sprayed  Tuesday morning in a dispute between two dog owners. The mother and the six-month-old baby were walking with their pit bull in the 9400-block 132A Street in Surrey just after 9 am. when a man with a doberman pulled out a canister and sprayed the pit bull. The toddler was hit with some of the spray.

According to RCMP, the man says his dog was being attacked. 

 My problem here is not with the "he barked, she barked" nature of the crime, but rather with the inconsistent identification of the child in question. "Six-month-old baby" makes perfect sense. But you have to be old enough to toddle (i.e.: stumble about in an amusingly drunken manner) to be considered a toddler, so that second designation is just wrong.

And while we're on the topic--who among us hasn't at least fantasized at some point about giving an obstreperous toddler a blast in the puss with bear spray? Be honest, now.

I See Dead People Seeing Things

I was just going from the fridge to the patio-cum-office (if you're going to spend the weekend working, you may as well throw some sunshine and Margaritas into the mix), and as I passed the TV, I caught a snippet of newscast. Something about a fundraising bike ride up a North Shore mountainside, called The Cyprus Challenge. The ride is in honor of Jack Poole, who, according to the perky newscaster,

"...was integral in bringing the Olympics to Vancouver. Poole died in 2009, just months before he saw his dream become a reality."

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but as I understand it, one's powers of observation are among the first things to go after one dies.

Points of Pride

It's Pride Weekend in Vancouver, which means tomorrow I can take the kids to the West End to see spangled parade floats full of hairy gay men in assless chaps flagellating each other with foot-long purple dildos.

The Vancouver Sun is getting into the spirit of things with their weekend edition. There's a column explaining why hairy men in assless chaps flagellating each other with dildos came to be a Pride Parade staple (it has to do with irony and self-parody), and a number of other related stories, including an interesting history of the storied Davie Street neighborhood and how it's becoming less gay-centric. Ron Dutton, who is described as an archivist for the B.C. gay and lesbian communities is quoted as saying that nowadays...

There are gay Buddhists and gay volleyball and gay knitting. There's a gay antique car club...So now you can be a part of your community with ever darkening the door of a bar or an overt gay business.

The way I see it, the visitor in this idiom is blocking the light at an open threshold, so I always thought the expression should be "darkening the doorway." Darkening a door just doesn't make sense in that context. And it's interesting to note that although there are plenty of sources that list the "darkening the door" idiom (going back to Ben Franklin),and offer a definition, none that I found provided an explanation for the metaphor. There are, of course, a number of citations for "darkening the doorway" as well, including this from a test of English idioms:

"Get out of here, Jed! First you show up drunk, then you hit on my wife and then you insult my son. Get out of here and don't come back! Never darken my doorway again!" An irate Matt told him.
Correct answer: (c) doorway

So I suppose we can deduce that either version has a respectable claim, but I'm sticking with my "doorway" preference. We can also deduce that Jed is an asshole.

But back to the Weekend Extra section of the Sun. A few pages on, there is another story, this one about how, many years ago, the owner of Joe's Cafe on Commercial Drive asked a lesbian couple to stop kissing, and how a rival (lesbian-friendly) cafe opened nearby in response. The story begins with this puzzling sentence:

A decade ago, Pat Hogan opened up Josephine's Cappuccino Bar and Wimmin's Crafts just off Commercial Drive as a place for lesbians to grab a cappuccino and, if they wanted, each other's hands or lips.

I'm certainly no expert on the amorous techniques of the urban lesbian, but this idea of them reaching out and gripping each other's lips strikes me as unlikely behavior, even for the really butch ones who ride the motorcycles topless in the parade.

You Don't Say

What Your Favorite Author Says About You

...blares the inane Huffpo headline. Gosh, I didn't realize Paris even knew I existed, let alone that she was talking about me!

You Look Familiar...

 Woman Who Looks Like Casey Anthony, Sammy Blackwell, Attacked By Driver In Oklahoma

A woman outraged over the Casey Anthony verdict was arrested in Oklahoma for allegedly attacking a convenience store clerk who resembles the Florida mom acquitted of murdering her daughter. 

After leaving work in Chouteau on Friday, Sammay Blackwell said a customer who had told her that "you look like Casey Anthony" followed her for several miles and then crashed her car into Blackwell's, causing her to flip several times...

Sure it sounds insane, but I must confess that there is a clerk in my local liquor store who bears an uncanny resemblance to insufferable Euro-twit Piers Morgan, and I consequently find myself suppressing the urge to slap his smug puss as he bags my moderately-priced Shiraz. So I can relate.

The nit I'm picking with this AOL-HuffPo story (we'll just overlook the "Sammy/Sammay" inconsistency) is an oldie, and it comes in the final sentence:

In an ironic twist, Blackwell has a daughter named Caylee too, Channel 9 said.

Its claim to the contrary notwithstanding, that sentence suffers from an irony deficiency. As some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, irony and coincidence are not the same thing. The fact that the Casey Anthony doppelganger has a daughter named Caylee is a coincidence--and an astonishing one at that. It may even be a good enough reason to attempt to kill her. But it is not ironic.


On to the the fresh-from-the-mailbox Maclean's for another example of usage and abusage from the collection of greatest hits. In a capsule review of the Swedish thriller novel, The Hypnotist, comes this scene-setter:

Shortly before Christmas, almost an entire family is slaughtered in a Stockholm suburb, two parents and a two-year-old girl literally sliced to ribbons.

Charming. But, as some tedious scolds never get tired of pointing out, literally means literally, not "I-really-want-to-emphasize-or-hyperbolize-this."  It's unlikely the murderer actually filleted the family into sushi with such painstaking precision, especially since the following sentence tells us that another family member, a son, "though cut by as many knife wounds as the others, is still alive." Or perhaps Swedish surgeons are impressively adept at reconstituting ribbons into whole people. 

Unintentionally Funny Headline of the Day...

From HuffPo:

Sarah Palin's Documentary Opens...to a Nearly Empty Audience

It's the auditorium that's nearly empty, not the audience. On the other hand, if they're spending 15 bucks each to see this...

Dead Man Marching

Today in The Province, columnist Jon Ferry writes about a friend and colleague, Claude Adams, who was sacked from his job as a writer for the CBC evening newscast after an unfortunate error made in the heat of wordsmithing battle:

Under intense deadline pressure, he was tasked to write an intro to a story about a police dog reportedly locked in a sweltering SUV while its RCMP handler went fishing. Adams assumed the dog was dead, which is what anchor Tony Parsons faithfully read on the air.  

The problem was the dog, a 10-month-old German Shepard, survived. Which was good for the dog and even for Parsons, who calmly delivered an on-air correction. But it was bad for Adams...the next day he was called into executive producer Wayne Williams' office and given his marching orders.

But "marching orders" are directives a superior gives when dispensing an assignment. I think Ferry means that the hapless Adams received his "walking papers," which, although it sounds better (who wouldn't prefer a blithesome amble with some papers to a forced march?) is in fact the more disagreeable of the two.

Wile E. Cougar

The bears are back--and this time they've brought the cougars with them. Each day seems to bring another news account of a lively unexpected encounter between man and homicidal woodland beast. There have been two bear maulings in recent days (one fatal) and a sign on my local running trail advising of a cougar sighting in the area had me nervously scanning the perimeter for crouching cats.  

The Province tells us of a teen girl on Vancouver Island who forestalled a cougar assault with the time-tested trick of "making herself taller" and ringing her bike bell. That's a trick I'd like to learn. The spontaneous heightening, I mean. I already know how to ring a bike bell.

The piece goes on to inventory other encounters, ending with:

And in the Squamish area, in mid-June, a cougar possibly trying to pounce on a rider preparing for the annual Test of Metal mountain bike race missed and landed on his real wheel.

The cougars have wheels now? Given their already significant predatory advantage, that hardly seems sporting.

The Right Stuff?

What do you do when you've finished building a new Boeing 747-8?

You take it out for a sandwich run.

AOL travel blogger Kate Auletta has posted a story about a Seattle test crew that made a 2500-mile flight to Pittsburgh last week to sample some legendary Primanti Brothers sandwiches. She says flight test director Paul Shank told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that the sandwiches were a hit with the crew. But they're not stopping there. Apparently, the aircraft needs a little more "testing":

In the future, Shank told the paper, he and his crew will take the plane to try out some pasties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and lobster rolls in Maine.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that should read pastries. Pasties are...well, if you're not familiar with the term you can click here for an eyeful.

When Grammar Meets Math

Men aren't wearing ties as much as they used to! So goes the premise of a story in this week's Maclean's--a premise supported mostly by anecdotal evidence (and photos) of politicians favoring open collars. The piece veers toward "bogus trend" territory when it seems to contradict that premise with this line: "Sales [of ties] in Canada are up a modest six percent between 2009 and 2010..." But the author posits that the increase can be chalked up to the purchases of job interviewees, "Mad Men" wannabes, and ironic hipsters. The more telling stat, apparently, comes in this pull-quoted sentence:

Fewer than six percent of American men wear ties to work. In Britain, less than 20 percent of men wear them.


When we last visited the fewer vs. less debate, we found that the old "fewer grains of sand vs. less sand" shortcut didn't always apply, and that the most comprehensive rule to follow was "fewer for plural, less for singular." But this is a new twist. Is "six percent" a single quantity or a plural?

Luckily, a quick Google search shows that someone has sent this specimen off to the lab for analysis and the guys in the white lab coats at the Chicago Manual of Style have come back with the results. They start by quoting an American Heritage Dictionary ruling that "Less than is used before a plural noun that denotes a measure of time, amount, or distance"--thereby muddying the waters of our singular/plural guideline pool. They go on to opine that a percentage should qualify as such a plural noun, on the grounds that...well, you can read it yourself if you're still awake at this point.

In any case, the editors of Maclean's seem to have found their own non-solution by going with fewer in the first sentence of that pull quote and less in the second, ensuring that they get it right no less than fifty percent of the time. 

Life of Brian

Brian Johnson, whom I know better as that guy in the hat from the band AC/DC, did an interview with the online rag PopEater to push his new memoir.  He comes across as more charming and engaging than I would have expected (although why I should have expectations about a man I know nothing about can only be chalked up to my aversion to people who wear "trademark" hats). Anyway, he relates with rogueish charm the story of how he came to be "that guy in the hat," and he shares some of his thoughts on religion and his personal philosophy of life:

I believe all religions are bad. I think they're a waste of time. Jesus was a clever man. He wasn't the son of God. We all know that he was a very clever, wonderful man and he said, 'Church is in here meaning you are your own church.' If you're a good man you become contended, if you're a good person your dying breath is one of contentment that lasts for eternity and if you're a bad man and you've lived a bad life, you've done some wicked and evil things just for the heck of it, well that will hit you on your last breath of life, that's hell. Now, listen, this is the universe according to Brian and I'm probably as wrong as anybody but I'm as right as anybody else. All religions make money and cause troubles and war and death and I'm tired of it. Stop now! Enjoy your life!

From the mouths of screeching heavy metal rock stars. But I think the interviewer had a couple of hiccups while transcribing the oracle's words. First of all, I'm pretty sure that should be contented rather than contended (although, of course, content would do as well). But more importantly, look at those quotation marks. There seems to be some confusion about when Jesus stops talking and Brian resumes. "Church is in here" are the words of Jesus--the rest is Brian's helpful exegesis of those words. So those closing quotation marks need to slide leftward to keep Brian from putting words in the late Mr. Christ's mouth, which I'm sure is some kind of sin.

Land of the Free, Home of the Bravado

Yesterday in Slate, the ponderous and verbose Ron Rosenbaum burned through his customary three bushels of pixels (I confess I didn't get past the first few paragraphs) to question the wisdom behind Condé Nast's decision to move their high-profile magazine offices from their current Times Square crib. He says, with his customary measured understatement, that their plan to migrate to "the never-ending security nightmare known as 'Freedom Tower' at Ground Zero, may be one of the single most questionable corporate decisions in New York City history." 

Oh, forgive me, right, did I say "Freedom Tower"? Sorry, the 1776-foot tall (take that, al-Qaida! 1776 in yo' face!) replacement for the Twin Towers has been renamed! The false bravado of "Freedom Tower"—especially for a building whose security precautions will make it more like a supermax prison tower—has been replaced (in 2009) by the dignified, nonprovocative reticence of "One World Trade Center."

First of all, I can see it being "one of the most questionable corporate decisions," or "the single most questionable corporate decision." But "one of the single most questionable corporate decisions" seems to me a marble-cheese-type blend of singular and plural--and I hate marble cheese.

Then there is the matter of that "false bravado." Many people (like me) will argue that the term is redundant because the word bravado itself is usually deployed to mean "a false show of bravery." There are others who have no problem with this construction, because they find the definition of bravado to be more flexible, but we can discount their opinions on the grounds that they probably enjoy marble cheese. Either way, though, there is no denying that "false bravado" has the stale odor of cliché about it, and that alone is good enough reason to reject it.

***
Speaking of Condé Nast publications and clichés, Calvin Trillin wrote a wry little piece in the Globe and Mail awhile back (which I just discovered thanks to the editors of Arts & Letters Daily) called "How I got dirty words into the New Yorker". Trillin is an imaginative, keen-witted writer so I was surprised to find this festival of leaden phrases in one sentence:

I said I felt I had to talk to Mr. Shawn about the quote, which was vital to my story, although I knew he had a lot on his plate and I wasn’t going to get on my high horse if he said no.

"A lot on his plate"? "Get on my high horse"?  I guess even imaginative, keen-witted New Yorker writers can have an off day.

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."