Purple people?
Posted: July 7, 2009 Filed under: Language, writing | Tags: Copywriting & Creative, misplaced modifiers, squinting modifiers 4 Comments »Adjectives and adverbs (and adverb clauses) modify other words. Simple enough, unless you put them in the wrong place. A great example of a misplaced modifier is this one from Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” Of course, the rest of the joke is: “How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Much less obvious is a “squinting modifier,” a word that may modify either a word before it or a word after it in the sentence.
Brushing my teeth often is a nuisance.
Does “often” modify “brushing” or “is?”
In his famous song, Sheb Wooley sings of a “one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater.” Many people, sensible people, have wondered whether the word “purple” modifies “eater” or “people.” If you listen to the lyrics closely you discover the truth:
I said Mr Purple People Eater, what’s your line?
He said eating purple people, and it sure is fine
But that’s not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock ‘n roll band
Had “people eater” been combined to form one word–peopleeater–or perhaps hyphenated–people-eater–then you could determine that the eater was purple. But only if you could read the lyrics. Of course, the monster could very well be purple AND eat purple people. Sometimes food determines coloration. Shrimp-eating flamingos come to mind. Also, Gerber carot-eating babies.
How many times have you seen a sign such as “Old Book Shop,” or perhaps even “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe?” Is this a shop of old books or merely a book shop that is old? Likewise, I know people who describe themselves as “rare booksellers.” This is clearly not their intention. They may, indeed, be a rare breed, but what they mean is, the books they sell are rare. Better, then, to be a “seller of rare books.” Of course, this kind of stuff can drive you crazy if you let it.
I noticed on my other blog, I called the Outer Banks “a small boater’s paradise.” Could I really mean that it is a paradise for boaters who are small? Probably not. I could have avoided the possibility by simply saying “a small boat paradise.” But that takes away the human element, doesn’t it?
“The Outer Banks is a paradise for users of small boats” certainly takes away all doubt. But I don’t like it. So I have to use my own judgment and decide whether my language is confusing or not. And whether I care if someone chooses to “misread” it.
A few more modifier problems I found while browsing the internet:
The patient was referred to a psychologist with emotional problems.
Whether wearing a turtleneck or a low-cut top with a push-up bra, guys like checking out our boobs.
They bought a puppy for the girl named Fido.
Three horses were reported stolen by the Memphis police.
The point is, as a writer you can easily miss squinting or misplaced modifiers because you know what you mean. In advertising and marketing, this can lead to miscommunication, which can be merely annoying or down right detrimental. Modifiers, like low-cut tops, deserve a second glance to make sure they don’t leave the reader squinting or scratching his head. Or wondering if a purple people eater could possibly be green.
Mad language
Posted: April 29, 2009 Filed under: Language, Vocabulary | Tags: Dictionary, Language, new usage, words 2 Comments »Three segments and a short outtake from MadTV about language and perhaps the end of English as we know it. Too funny–and scary–not to pass along!
Ifs, Ands and Buttheads
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, Language, writing | Tags: clients, Copywriting & Creative, Elements of Style, English, grammar, Strunk and White 9 Comments »Someone once told me (a client, actually) that we call them “clients” because we can’t call them a–holes. Indelicate, to say the least, and certainly not true of my current clients:-). But I have had a few such clients in the past.
One guy hired me when I was just starting out to produce a newsletter. It turned out to be part of a pyramid, multi-level, downline scheme. He was shifty and shady and left me holding the bill for printing. He told me my writing was “full of grammatical errors.” Like what? I asked.
“You can’t start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but,’ he declared. Yes you can, I assured him. I have a master’s degree in English, after all, so I should know. “Well, you better go back to skewl then!” he drawled.
There are still a few people out there who don’t understand that correctness isn’t always determined by the rules for formal English you learned in “skewl.” There’s a big difference between formal English and the conversational English we use every day in our speech and which is purposely leveraged by magazine writers, advertising writers, and others who write for the general public.
Why be informal? Because that’s how you connect with people on a personal level. It provides a sense of familiarity and friendliness. It makes what you write a little more interesting and compelling and accessible and human and engaging and, well, the list goes on.
Formal, academic English has its place. But so does the sentence that starts with “and” or “but.” And the sentence that’s comfortable with the preposition it hangs out with. Not to mention the sentence your English teacher would consider “incomplete.” Like this one.
The more at ease you become with your own language, the better writer you will be. And that means not letting the ghost of your English teacher or, worse, Strunk & White, haunt you.
For the linguists and grammarians who contributed to this NY Times article, S&W’s fifty-year-old The Elements of Style, with it’s narrow vision of what writing is, has become a dinosaur and even an unwitting deterrent of writing in general.
A disservice to education, says one. The first 14 pages are still gospel truth but the rest is baloney, says another. As someone who has never liked rules very much, I savor such insubordinate clauses.
Well, I’ve got to go. A client needs me. Seems his client is being a real client, as they say.
Wordcracker: neologism
Posted: April 24, 2009 Filed under: Language, Vocabulary, Wordcracker | Tags: English, neologisms, new words, words Leave a comment »It means “new word.” New words are added to the English language every day, and folks say we’re nearing our millionth word. But I won’t go into a long dissertation about neologisms because Forbes recently hired linguists and others experts to do it. Lots of interesting articles about WORDS in the current issue. Check it out!
And for more from Wordnut on coining words, go here.
“Common Era” leaves history behind
Posted: April 6, 2009 Filed under: Euphemism, Language | Tags: BCE, calendar, Common Era, dates, history 4 Comments »I was taken aback the other night while watching a show about Jerusalem. Ray Suarez kept referring to dates as BCE, Before the Common Era and CE, Common Era. I guess this has been going on for a while and I just hadn’t noticed. It’s more inclusive and PC, I suppose, than BC, Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini (The year of our Lord).
My assumption was that non-Christian scholars had been offended long enough, had suffered for centuries, hands shaking as they were forced to add BC after their dates against their will, and they just weren’t going to take it anymore. But then I read where Common Era was coined in Christendom no later than 1615. And that CE can refer to Common Era, Christian Era or Current Era. This gets complicated in a hurry.
The point is fairly simple, however–to take Point Of View out of the terminology. Unfortunately, it takes the life out of it as well. Common Era may be nice and secular and generic, but it ignores a huge amount of history and tradition and denies the importance of the culture that invented the Gregorian calendar so much of the world lives by.
But who wants history in their history, anyway?
I guess I do. My question is, what makes the Common Era different from the one preceding it–you know, Before the Common Era? The terminology may have changed but the basis of the two eras (Jesus’s birth) remains the same.
Doesn’t it seem just a bit silly (shortsighted, revisionist, egocentric) to uphold the idea of two eras without reference to why there are two eras in the first place?
If we can’t agree to embrace tradition as a valuable part of history and context as a valuable part of our telling of history, if we can’t agree to let the human story stand, if we cut every connecting thread to the past and undermine all sense of continuity, then it seems our “Era” is about the only thing we’ll ever have in common.
Can economic euphemisms be bubblewrap for society?
Posted: April 1, 2009 Filed under: Ethics, Euphemism, Language, Vocabulary | Tags: economy, Euphemism, government, Orwell, words 1 Comment »As a follow-up to my earlier post on euphemism, I want to direct you to an excellent Slate article by Daniel Gross called “Bubblespeak.” While the burst bubble that was our economy has brought an abundance of terms to the forefront––TARP, toxic assets, securitization–it has also created an environment in which Orwellian doublespeak can flourish.
In his humorous but unfortunately serious article, Gross demonstrates how “toxic assets” became “troubled assets,” as if we could send them to reform school and they’d be all right. Just calling them assets seems to be overpromising. He writes about past mistakes becoming “legacy debt,” trouble that executives inherited but seemed to have had no hand in. And so on.
I wonder if this softening and twisting of reality is simply a manipulative tool of the powerful, or if we as Americans or even as human beings actually prefer it. I guess it’s a little of both. When we call junk bonds “high yield bonds” or call the widespread infection of debt “securitization,” or call subprime loans “nonprime,” we are lying to others, for sure. But aren’t we also telling people what they want to hear? Is there not some complicity among those who want to feel better about themselves and their decisions?
Certainly, when we (or our government) call worthless mortgages “troubled assets,” we are lying to ourselves. But now that all has been revealed, maybe it’s not so bad. Perhaps we are merely softening the blow, protecting ourselves with a kind of verbal bubblewrap, and, out of necessity, making our challenges seem surmountable and our darker days a little lighter.
Senator JFK once made fun of Eisenhower by attributing this false quote to him: “We are now at the end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.” These days, that actually sounds pretty good.
More expressions than you can shake a stick at
Posted: March 31, 2009 Filed under: Expressions, Language, Southern Words, Vocabulary | Tags: cliches, Expressions, Language, Vocabulary, words 2 Comments »
I grew up in a house where things were rough as a cob, the sky was clear as a bell, and there were more expressions than you could shake a stick at. But don’t call them cliches. When my dad speaks, he uses the expressions he got from his father as naturally as breathing. They never sound tired or worn out. In fact, when I was young I didn’t even think of them as expressions. It was as if there were no other way to say it.
For fun, I thought I would explore a few of these, most of which seem to be American in origin.
ROUGH AS A COB
Traditionally, this is used to describe people or circumstances that affect you personally. “That guy was rough as a cob” would mean he was abrasive, someone who rubbed you the wrong way. As far as I can remember, My dad never used it that way. In fact, being a boater and a sailor, he would say, “The bay is as rough as a cob out there.” I wonder if he even knows that the expression refers to the use of corn cobs in the outhouse for personal hygiene.
FORTY-ELEVEN
If there is more of something than you care to count–say, varieties of candy at the store–then you might conclude that there are forty-eleven different kinds. George Thompson of the American Dialect Society traces the word back as far as 1836. He speculates that it might be a Black expression, but my guess is it is merely Southern.
[Cornelia Latting, a young colored woman, sentenced to 2 years, months; she tells the court] that she did not care a d–n if they had sent her up for forty-eleven years.
New York Transcript, February 15, 1836, p. 2, col. 4.
Another reference he found:
I never go into one [a toy store] without wishin’ it was Christmas once a week, and I had forty-eleven children to buy toys for.
S. Annie Frost, “The Daffodils Prepare fot a Fancy Fair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, July, 1866, p. 52, col. 2 (Proquest’s Amer Periodicals)
It’s a little like “umpteen,” I suppose.
A BUCK THREE-EIGHTY
If your wife asks you how much that gleaming new piece of hardware for your boat cost, you might not want to tell her, so you downplay the cost as if it is inconsequential and you say, “oh, about a buck three-eighty.”
COULDN’T STIR ‘EM WITH A STICK
This is a simple one used to describe a crowd. In other words, “thick.” There were so many people, you couldn’t stir ‘em with a stick. It might be people, but it could also be boats in the harbor or roaches in the motel room. Which brings us to another similar stick-related expression:
MORE THAN YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT
This one could just be a simple variant of “more than you can count” or more than you can point out.” However, something about that stick shaking seems to hint at something else. Nobody knows for sure. The best explanation I have found is in World Wide Words, an online newsletter by Michael Quinion:
Its recorded history began — at least, so far as the Oxford English Dictionary knows — in the issue of the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania dated 5 August 1818: “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at”. Another early example is from Davy Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East of 1835: “This was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend that was worth shaking a stick at”. A little later, in A Book of Vagaries by James K Paulding of 1868, this appears: “The roistering barbecue fellow swore he was equal to any man you could shake a stick at”.
The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended and fixed phrase “more … than you can shake a stick at”, meaning an abundance, plenty. The phrase without the “more than” element is rather older, but not by much.
Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture, or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem to fit this idea: “nothing worth shaking a stick at” means nothing of value; “equal to any man you could shake a stick at” means that the speaker is equal to any man of consequence.
Where it comes from can only be conjecture. One possibility that has been put forward is that it derives from the counting of farm animals, which one might do by pointing one’s stick at each in turn. So having more than one can shake one’s stick at, or tally, would imply a great number. This doesn’t fit the early examples, though, which don’t have any idea of counting about them. Another idea is that it comes from battle, in which one might shake a stick at one’s vanquished enemy. This could possibly have led into the early usages.
Following publication of this piece in the World Wide Words newsletter, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might have come from the Native American practice of counting coup, in which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In that case, “too many to shake a stick at” might indicate a surplus of fallen enemies, and “not worth shaking a stick at” would equate a person with “an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him”, as Sherwin Cogan put it. An intriguing idea, but there’s no evidence that I know of.
FAIR TO MIDDLIN’
Both “fair” and “middling” are cotton classing terms. Cotton has to be classed according to quality, and these classes are rather average. So if somebody asks, “How are you,” and you say “fair to middlin’” (the “g” is dropped in the South), you are basically saying “could be better, could be worse.”
CLEAR AS A BELL
No doubt, this simile originally would have been used to describe a pure, resonating sound. The radio station came in clear as a bell. That makes sense. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that the sky was clear as a bell. For me, this is no longer a simple comparison; it is poetry. Describing how something looks by comparing it to to how something else sounds–that’s awesome.
Sure you’ve heard it over and over. Believe me, I’ve heard it at least 100,000 times. “It’s clear as a bell, not a cloud in the sky.” But it still resonates for me, makes the sky seem deeper somehow. And I think that the idea of the sky as a dome helps with the bell analogy. If God were to flick it with his finger it would ring mighty and true. I wonder who first used the phrase in this way.
The O.E.D. devotes almost four pages to the word “clear.” There I found a line of Dickens (from Oliver Twist): “Real, fresh, genuine port-wine . . . clear as a bell, and no sediment.” Not about the sky, of course, but the same wonderful mixing of the senses.
For more expressions, click here.
Families have languages of their own
Posted: March 27, 2009 Filed under: Language, Vocabulary | Tags: family, family humor, family words, Paul Dickson, words 7 Comments »Years ago, when she was very young, my daughter came down the stairs and into the den and asked, “how do you spell stew?” S-T-E-W, my wife said, and she disappeared. A little while later, she came in again and asked, “how do you spell pit?” “You mean like a hole?” I asked her, wondering what in the world she was up to. “Yes,” she replied. So I told her. Satisfied, she ran back up stairs. A while later her older brother came down with a disgusted look on his face and a sign he took off his door, which said, WILL IS STEWPIT. When we confronted our daughter (trying not to laugh at the irony of misspelling that particular word) she explained that if she had asked how to spell stupid, we would have demanded to know why, and so she thought this was a pretty good roundabout. And to this day, when something is really dumb, I’ll say it’s stewww-pit. It’s a family word, and most families have a few. I figure some offices might too.
The best thing about a family word is that there’s usually some sort of story behind it that only the family knows and appreciates, a rich association which makes it like a secret code that bonds family members and deepens their appreciation for being a member of the group. If you enjoy this sort of thing, check out Family Words by Paul Dickson. He collected words from families across the country, some of which are pretty funny. And some of which are kinda stewpit. Does your family have its own words or unique expressions? Care to share?
Scholars fixin’ to publish regional dictionary
Posted: March 24, 2009 Filed under: Language, Publishing, Southern Words, Vocabulary | Tags: Regional dictionary, words 1 Comment »The final volume of the Dictionary of Regional English (S-Z) is almost ready for publication. Check out the story here. I’ll be interested in what it says about “tump.”
Is Bud Light good? No, but it’s “drinkable.”
Posted: March 23, 2009 Filed under: Copywriting & Creative, Language | Tags: Advertising, beer, Bud Light, drinkability, reinheitsgebot, Slogans 8 Comments »Drinkability. That’s the claim to fame of Bud Light these days. Which, when you think about it, is truth in advertising, isn’t it? They don’t say it’s delicious or better than other beers, which might not be believable. No, they proclaim proudly that it’s, well, drinkable. And while I, a champion of the Reinheitsgebot beer purity law of 1516, might think a beer should actually taste good, perhaps that’s not what most beer drinkers care about. Is it drinkable? Sure. In the way that antifreeze isn’t, I suppose.
It’s one thing for your product to be poor (and most mainstream American beers have been poor since prohibition); it’s quite another when the advertising can only muster a “well, it’s not going to kill you” tagline. That’s when you know you’ve reached the bottom of the longneck. The bar at the bar has been set low. “Hey, don’t give me any of that undrinkable stuff. I’m looking for drinkability in my beer!” But then again, when your beer tastes like somebody already drank it, I guess that’s all you can say.
