Grammar Round-up

I just came across this apparently weekly NY Times column explaining the editors' position on various grammatical issues and rounding up usage errors of the past week.  Definitely worth a read!

Here is the beginning:

The ‘Tweet’ Debate

By PHILIP B. CORBETT

After I distributed the in-house version of After Deadline to my colleagues last week, word leaked out that I had supposedly “banned” use of the word “tweet” to refer to messages posted on Twitter.

I had suggested that outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” should still be treated as colloquial rather than as standard English. It can be used for special effect, or in places where a colloquial tone is appropriate, but should not be used routinely in straight news articles. I had made this point before; my memo was simply a reminder.

Reaction outside The Times was swift, widespread and often negative. The scorn we encounter from traditionalists for allowing “data” as either singular or plural — previously my benchmark for an incendiary stylebook issue — pales in comparison.

...
[the rest of the article]

Wordplay Winners

We blogged a few months ago about Princeton Prof. Joshua Katz's freshman seminar on wordplay.  An article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine at that time announced a constrained writing contest.  Now the results are in, and we're impressed!  The winning entry, pictured above, took it's constraint cue from the letters in a regulation Scrabble bag.  Impressive effort -- congrats to Justin Werfel, who took top honors.

The best part of wordplay is that it encourages other wordplay.  One of the honorable mentions, Arlen Kassof Hastings, submitted this in response to Werfel's winning entry:

If any of you, dear readers, have what it takes to compose a piece of constrained writing using only the letters (and blanks!) in a regulation Scrabble set, submit it to us and we will surely post the results!

Communicating ... with aliens!

The link in the title is not about language in the traditional Liquid Ridiculous sense, but rather about communication. Would you know how to greet an alien who didn't speak English, who maybe didn't speak at all? If everything from your backgrounds were as different as they are likely to be, on what basis would or could you interact?

Anyone who has read Contact by Carl Sagan or seen the movie based thereon has been exposed to the the concept that we will be largely unable to communicate with extraterrestrials if we encounter them. Ratcheting up the nerd factor, an excellent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled Darmok addresses similar ideas. Here's a commonsense guide to keep in your pocket in case you should ever find yourself face-to-face (if it has a face) with E.T. (should you be lucky enough to meet a bipedal and carbon-based -- let alone Reese's Pieces-eating -- alien).

Words as Weapons

I saw this in yesterday's New York Times.  It raises important questions about the power of words to define our reality and, therefore, to determine our political and social responses to that reality.

One meta-political question it raises implicitly: Does the word "terrorism" have a cogent definition, or does it mean different things to different people (possibly dependent on different agendas)?  

Here are a few excerpts; click above for the full article.

• WASHINGTON — Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new report of political violence, whether merely plotted or actually carried out, there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled “terrorism”?
...
But more is at stake here than semantics or petty point-scoring in the blogosphere. Political violence has two elements: the act, and the meaning attached to it. Long after the smoke of an explosion has cleared, the battle over language goes on, as contending sides seek to aggrandize the act or dismiss it, portray it as noble or denounce it as vile.
...

From the debate over word choice came the adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a cliché already by the 1980s.

“That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading,” President Ronald Reagan said in a 1986 radio address. “Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.”
...
Thinking of ends and not means, Mr. Reagan praised the Nicaraguan contra rebels, who had a bloody record fighting the Communist Sandinistas, as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” In the cold war contest with the Soviet Union, he armed and embraced the Afghan “freedom fighters” and their Arab allies, some of whom evolved into the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That long-ago radio address sounds naïve in retrospect in another respect, too. “History is likely to record that 1986 was the year when the world, at long last, came to grips with the plague of terrorism,” President Reagan declared. President Obama is unlikely to venture a similar prediction anytime soon.

Grammar Lovers, Unite!

It has come to our attention that we missed a major grammar milestone last week.  Apparently, March 4 was National Grammar Day.  They even recorded a YouTube music video of their original song, "March Forth" (Get it? Of course you do, if you're reading Liquid Ridiculous).  That website has a number of other delectable offerings, such as grammar-related poetry.

In addition, there are a few things every Liquid Ridiculous reader should know about.  You'll probably want to become acquainted with the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), at whose website you can download your very own official membership card.  I also recommend joining their facebook group (search SPOGG) and perusing the photos of bad grammar posted by members. 

I heartily endorse the Society's online journal; I'm surprised they don't call it the SPOGG Blog.  Like us, they post grammatical musings, only more regularly.  Also, there's a fantastic list of grammar-related links in honor of National Grammar Day.

Finally, you might just want to get yourself a copy of grammar maven Martha Brockenbrough's new book, Things That Make Us [Sic].  Pointing out bad grammar in the world is fun!  And sometimes it makes us feel better about ourselves -- isn't that right, dear readers?

We hope you had a syntactically satisfying National Grammar Day, and we wish you many more.  And we pledge not to forget it next year.

Discovering Ambrose Bierce

Your Liquid Ridiculous team recently came across a pair of radio broadcasts on the topic of Ambrose Bierce, a famous turn-of-the-previous-century linguist, pedant, and apparently general curmudgeon.  He's probably most famous for The Devil's Dictionary, a clever and sarcastic dictionary with, as an example, a definition of "love" that begins: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage."  In a special mini-podcast edition of the independent radio show "A Way With Words" -- which incidentally we highly recommend if your public radio station subscribes to it or you're of a podcasting bent -- one of the hosts interviewed an author who's written a new book about Bierce's writings, life, and character.  We hope to review it for the blog one day.  (We hope generally to begin writing germane book reviews, but that would require having time to read books.)  NPR also recently ran a quaint little story about quirky linguistic pet peeves, which naturally included some great material from Bierce.

Art as Palindrome

There is beauty in symmetry; so saith both experience and science, which attempts to explain why we find symmetrical faces more attractive.

Some artists have taken that a step further, creating not just symmetrical portraits or depictions of symmetric things -- Salvador Dali's Santiago El Grande being a great example -- but completely symmetrical paintings, such as Barnett Newman's Onement I. Some have taken forays into self-conscious symmetry. Aesthetics are often better served with almost perfect symmetry, which M.C. Escher used to great effect, but it's an interesting exercise in using science to further art. (How often do you hear that happening?)

The recent post about Palindrome as Art got me thinking about symmetry in language, specifically on the subject of ambigrams. Ambigrams are an interesting variation on palindromes: words or phrases written in such a way that they read the same when turned upside down. For example,

MOW

is an ambigram (using some fonts). A more interesting ambigram, and the earliest reference I could find to an ambigram, is the word "chump" written in cursive:

This is a more interesting variation, because as you can see, there is not a one-to-one correlation of one letter turning into another when turned upside-down. The c and h together become the p and the end of the m, and in fact, except for the c, each letter becomes part of two letters.

The modern ambigram uses distortion to create an ambigram. In this way, an 'a' can become an 'e' or even an 'o'. Another "trick" is to have seemingly superfluous marks that are ignored by the eye when read one way, but are noticed as being part of the letters when read the other way. Look at happy holiday for extraneous marks and happy birthday for distortion (although they both use both techniques).



In fact, using distortion one can make an ambigram out of virtually any combination of letters, although it's often so distorted that you can't decipher the ambigram without knowing what it's supposed to say. However, good ambigrams give the reader other cues, visual or otherwise, to assist in deciphering.

But I find the simplest and most pure (i.e., least unnecessary extra letter pieces) ambigrams the most aesthetically pleasing. Pure symmetry alone is not the answer. John Langdon's book on ambigrams is an excellent collection of ambigrams made by the author, and I suggest at the least you take a look at the cover. "Wordplay" as an ambigram delights me on multiple levels.

To return to the topic back to symmetry in art, why is it that certain asymmetry is also desired? Dali's paintings, Escher's drawings, even John Langdon's "Joy to You" are not perfectly symmetrical. Slight variation keeps the pictures from being too mechanical, too artificial. So despite scientific proof of our preference for symmetry, true artists know how to use asymmetry as well to create an aesthetically pleasing picture.

Sui Generis Expressions

Groundhog Day: Quick, what's the first idea that comes to mind? It's February, so it's possible that it's Punxsutawney Phil and an implausibly unironic highfalute of Gobbler's Nob village elders in top hats. (I propose "highfalute" as the collective noun for village elders in bombastic headgear.) If you're from New England there's an outside chance it's a quahog predicting the weather before being frittered. But most of the time, for most people, it's an experience of being trapped in a mundane, repeating cycle. That may be accompanied by visions of Bill Murray's sad-sack newsman repeatedly waking up at 6:00 AM to cover the same soul-crushing story and eventually trying to kill himself before turning his life around and triumphantly sleeping with Andie MacDowell.  But what's interesting is that there's a good chance it's not.

Every now and then, a bit of pop culture so embeds itself in the collective consciousness that it creates a concept that persists independent of the source material. "Groundhog Day" is such a concept. The monotony of daily life for many people is a phenomenon that needed a pithy term to encompass it, and "groundhog day" fits the bill. One day, perhaps not too far off -- the kids born when the movie came out are applying to college -- people will be using the term in this sense without any idea where it came from.

Your intrepid bloggers have come up with a few other examples of this phenomenon, but we trust that our distinguished readers will come up with many others, and we invite you to share.

• Bucket list - Another term that brings pith to a somewhat familiar idea, "list of things to do before you die." This will probably be a part of the general lexicon without any association to the movie faster than groundhog day because the term evokes the idea directly, rather than by way of the source material.
• White whale - This phrase may never be truly divorced from Moby Dick, particularly because its users tend to be erudite enough to know where it comes from, but as a term for a self-destructive obsession it has a place in the language.
• Albatross - More likely to be used without consciousness of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe a self-created curse or affliction with a karmic dimension.

Please, dear readers, offer up your suggestions to add to the list.

Word Play for Fun -- and Credit!

I was delighted to read in the February 3 Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine about a freshman seminar called "Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble" (by Merrell Noden, link to full article above).  Joshua Katz, Professor of Classics and linguist extraordinaire, leads 15 students in the examination and creation of various types of word play, such as constrained writing.  Examples of constrained writing include palindromes, lipograms, alliteratives, anagrams, and, more commonly, rhyme and meter.  As an example of one of my favorite types of constrained writing, watch this footage of word wizard Victor Borge's Inflationary Language; as far as I know, he invented this grammatical gimmick.

We here at liquidridiculous are jealous that these undergraduate students get to spend 3 hours each week as ludic linguists.  Would that we could have had such opportunities in our misspent youth!  You really must take a moment to appreciate the impressive work these students have done for this class.

To the skeptics out there who find such obsessions frivolous, I have two responses:
1) Why are you reading this blog?  It is a veritable monument to frivolity; and
2) Read the PAW article, especially toward the end, where Prof. Katz discusses the bigger issues at stake in understanding the delightfully complicated ins and outs of language.

There is something universal at work here.  "There is something in all of us, [Katz] says, that craves wordplay. 'That's one of the things that's so interesting about it,' he muses. 'It resonates so seriously with children the world over, [in the form of] puns, oral games, rhymes, and songs.' As we get older, most of us stifle our fascination with it. But these lucky students, with Katz as their guide, are rediscovering the deep and serious pleasure of playing with words."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.  Keep up the good work.

In the meantime, for the rest of us amateur enthusiasts, the grammatical gauntlet has been thrown down in the form of a "Constrained Writing Contest" sponsored by the PAW Magazine.  Here are the details from their website:

Try your hand at constrained writing and you could win a trio of DVDs for word lovers: “Spellbound,” “Wordplay,” and “Word Wars”!  

Lipograms (banning a particular letter), palindromes (reading the same backward and forward), alliteratives (each word starts with the same letter), anagrams ­(rearranging the letters in a sentence, for example, to create a new sentence) — whatever your puzzle passion, send your example by March 1 to paw@princeton.edu or to “Constrained Writing,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 194 Nassau St., Suite 38, Princeton, NJ, 08542. We plan to post submissions and announce the winner in the April 7 issue. 

We hope, dear readers, that you'll throw your highbrow hat into this recherche ring.  In other words, bring it on!  

William Safire, 1929-2009

We know this is old news, but given that this is such a language-focused blog, we couldn't let the great William Safire's passing go without comment.  I myself count his "Fumblerules" among those books that most influenced my own interest in all things grammatical.  If you who haven't had the opportunity to read much, or any, of his wonderful On Language column, he has written several books compiling years of them, including some that are out of print.  He will be missed.

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.  
(The rest of the article is at the link in the title.)

The Fumblerules of Grammar

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years.
As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:

• Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
• Don't use no double negatives.
• Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
• Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
• Do not put statements in the negative form.
• Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
• No sentence fragments.
• Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
• Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
• If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
• A writer must not shift your point of view.
• Eschew dialect, irregardless.
• And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
• Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!
• Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
• Hyphenate between sy-
  llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
• Write all adverbial forms correct.
• Don't use contractions in formal writing.
• Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
• It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
• If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
• Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
• Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
• Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
• Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
• Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
• If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
• Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
• Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
• Always pick on the correct idiom.
• "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"
• The adverb always follows the verb.
• Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

The Palindrome as Art

The following poem was written by James A. Lindon and first published in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language in 1967. It and some of the other examples below are taken from fun-with-words.com, which is linked in the title.

Doppelgänger

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush –
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever –
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone –
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him, for the first time
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

Much more after the jump...

Academic mumbo-jumbo

(special thanks to JS for sending this one along)

This abstract of a lecture (at a prestigious academic institution, mind you) might as well be in a foreign language.  Any thoughts on what it might mean?  Names have been omitted to protect the overly intellectual.

"For a symptomatology of the image"

The liberation of the image as a specific epistemic object, unbound from its traditional mimetic function, has gone hand in hand with the postulation of something like an autonomous "reign of pictures". While the newly found "image sciences" ask about the specific differences of images, ____ will explore a different model of thinking. Describing some of the possible "symptoms of the iconic" (replacing the old question "What is an image" by "Where and when is an image?"), the image will serve as an exemplary object for outlining a different episteme (symptomatological, conjectural and thus essentially precarious) of what singularity means.
...
During his Visiting Fellowship at ____, he will be working on the question "Can the subaltern testify?"

"blank" rhymes with . . . ?

After a nearly five-year hiatus, LiquidRidiculous is back with a never-before seen post.  We hope you'll enjoy, and leave a comment.

   ~TomSwifty

-------------------------


Give a listen to the audio pronunciation of "blank" at M-W.com. Note the short "a" in the middle. Now have a gander over at the same thing for "plank". Note the length of the "a." Do they sound the same? If you have a cunning ear for phonetics, you'll agree that the answer is no. If you don't, trust me; I have such an ear. Of course, both words have the same written pronunciation - officially they have the short "a" of blank.

The difference is subtle. Subtle enough that most people don't notice. Subtle enough that the potentates at M-W.com didn't notice. If you aren't listening carefully for it, you'll hear whichever one you normally say. It can lead to some extraordinary IM conversations for people as, uh . . . unique as us.

T: well, blank and black do rhyme
D: uh... no they don't
T: um, what?
D: blank and black? the vowels don't sound the same at all!
T: what are you talking about? they both have a short 'a'!
D: are you insane?!? the 'a' in blank sounds like 'weigh'
T: "blaynk"!?
D: yeah
T: i can't tell if you're kidding or not
D: i've never been more serious

This proved to be a paradigm collision that could only be resolved by actual human speech (ie, the telephone).