A Picture of Language - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/a-picture-of-language/

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Sent from my iPhone

Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors: Why I Hate Grammar Nazis - And Why I Am One

http://wordplay-kmweiland.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-i-hate-grammar-nazis-and-why-i-am.html?m=1

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Sent from my iPhone

The Joy of Writing

Thanks to facebook, I discovered this most unlikely source of hilarious genius: a press release.  As the (predictably) NPR story discusses, it's totally fake, and its author knew nothing about the subject matter; he simply made the whole thing up.  By the way, the author of this press release about a new small-time indie band is Chuck Klosterman, who is famous enough that I know the name but not famous enough that I could have told you anything he's done or even his profession before reading the article.  Actually I would have guessed he was an old-time boxer, or perhaps a two-way football player.  In any event, the article is interesting as far as it goes, but the headliner is the press release itself, which is reprinted in its entirety in the article, and can be found after the jump.  Evidently, amazingly, somebody somewhere thought it was for real.

Everyday Metaphors

Good read in the Times, by David Brooks (pasted below in full):

April 11, 2011

Poetry for Everyday Life

By DAVID BROOKS

Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.”

The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.

In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked.

When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.

When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.

The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events, we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.

Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen.

Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.

Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm.

To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

2010: The Year in Grammar

Huffington Post just published this article, "Grammar Pet Peeves: The Stories of 2010."  Here are their picks for top ten grammar stories of the year:

• How To Use An Apostrophe
(original story - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe)

• Huffington Post Readers Pick The Worst Grammar Pet Peeves

• Worst Grammar Mistakes Ever

• New Dictionary Words

• Chicago Manual Changes Rules

• 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks 'Infect' The Nation: Grammar Pet Peeves

• National Punctuation Day

• 'Toponymity': The 13 Strangest Birthplaces Of Common Words

• Lexical Ambiguity

• Grammar Pet Peeves

• Top Words of 2010

• Google Ngrams: Charting The History Of English

What are you favorite Grammar Stories of the year?

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).

Synantonyms...?

Once upon a time, there was a conversation. One person pontificated, somewhat ironically, that she was a taker, not a giver. She attempted to clarify her statement by saying that her sister was a caregiver, and she a caretaker. Hilarity ensued, as hilarity is wont to do.

Time passed, as time is also wont to do.

There was then another conversation, wherein this tale was told to the purveyor of a certain blog, and all present recognized the blogworthiness of the anecdote.

Brains were racked for any other example of a pair of antonyms (giver-taker) which, by the addition of a prefix, suffix, or compounding word (care), became a pair of synonyms. The best pair that could be found was "sinkhole" and "swimming hole", which are not actually synonyms, but certainly are much more similar than "sink" and "swim."

And so we ask you, o faithful readers, our muses, we beseech thee tell us, is this an example of a class of words, either of antonyms or of synonymizing augmenters, or is this a random linguistic accident of the sort produced by thousands of monkeys with thousands of typewriters?

Thanks to Tali for the idea, and for your forbearance as we take artistic liberties with the tale.

Have we gone far enough?

Political correctness is old news, but there's one area of our culture that we haven't purged of latent and tacit racism: completely benign idioms.

Consider:

• If we get our finances in order, we'll finally be out of the Native American and back in the African American.
  
• Well that's really the pot calling the kettle African American, isn't it?
  
• I was always impressed that Ansel Adams could capture so much depth and emotion in his African American & Caucasian photographs.
  
• The President today signed the comprehensive civil rights legislation into law during a ceremony in the Caucasian House Rose Garden.
  
• I'm dreaming of a Caucasian Christmas...
  
• In the Middle Ages, two-thirds of Europe's population was wiped out by the African American plague.
  
• When camping, be sure to pack away all of your garbage so as not to attract the attention of hungry African American bears and grizzlies.
  
• That acne cream really takes care of those unsightly african-americanheads and caucasianheads.
• Joe didn't get into the frat he wanted because one of the members African-Americanballed him.
• After being accused of having communist sympathies, Mort was African-Americanlisted and couldn't get another screenwriting job.
• Surely, one of the most brilliant sales pitches in all of literature was Tom Sawyer's convincing his peers to pay him for the privilege of Caucasianwashing the fence.
• Once they had the incriminating pictures, they were able to african-americanmail him for millions.
  

Did we leave out any good ones?

You keep using those words... I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Thanks to friend and regular comment contributor Keith for this bit of deft wordplay. Ah, the joy of English, where verbs are homonyms of nouns and adjectives, and helping verbs can be main verbs, and adjectives can concatenate themselves onto nouns as prefices or suffices, and they all have a gay old time.

The mad frog was hopping around the man.
The madman was hopping around the frog.
The man was mad frogging around the hop.
Around the frog, the man was hopping mad.

The moron says what?

Is there a word for the opposite of "schadenfreude," where instead of perverse joy you feel sadness for the misfortune of others? I suppose, perhaps, "compassion," but it would probably sound better in German. In the interest of completeleness, "compassion" in German is, according to the Babelfish online translator, "mitleid." Or, using the same device but constructing the German in a manner parallel to the English translation of "schadenfreude" (harming joy), it would be "schadensorge" (harming sorrow). But that's probably a very foul bastardization of the German.

I feel mitleid and schadensorge when I see sentences such as "The clown stuck his penis in somebody's eye, having decided between the midget and I." or "The clown stuck his penis in whomever was standing closest, and of course it had to be a midget ." In a way, they are the saddest of all grammatical errors, because they are on some level the consequence of the perpetrator trying desperately hard not to make a grammatical error. Since people regularly (and incorrectly) use "me and" or "and me" as part of the subject of a sentence, they are constantly reminded, at least, one can hope, in grammar school, that they should use "and I." Likewise, "whom" (and its -ever derivative) is severely underused. It's rather a mark of sophistication to use it properly.

So when a person uses these underutilized turns of grammatical phrase, but they use them incorrectly in the place where the other, more common expressions would actually be right, it brings a tear to the linguistic humanist's eye. It's like a puppy who's so excited when you come home that he unknowningly and incontinently tinkles on the floor, and you get angry and scold him, but he can't even understand what he did wrong in the first place. And so the cycle repeats, and, embittered by the cruel and unjust world, the puppy turns to drugs and finally a life of crime, until he has to be put down. That poor puppy. And all because you don't understand grammatical cases. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Linguistic Pet Peeves

This is just a list of those phrases that people say, usually without thinking about what they really mean, that I find irksome. If you use them, it by no means means that you're a bad person, it merely proves that nobody really thinks about everything they say.

• "I'm going to let you go." People use this often to end a telephone conversation, and taken literally it's sort of a nice gesture. Unfortunately, most of the time that it's said, it's said disingenuously - you don't "let someone go" because you know they have something to which they should attend, but because you have something to which to attend, but you instinctively don't want to be the one responsible for ending this stimulating conversation.
  
• "Let me know." I use this all the time, and I hate it. It's a bizarre, polite euphemism for "tell me." Please, good sir, I do beseech thee, permit this poor supplicant the awareness of that which you have to impart. Just answer my damn question!
• "Amazing." The rampant overuse of this word is an example of meaninglessness. For many people, calling something "amazing" is no more descriptive than giving it a thumbs up. It has lost its actual meaning of describing a thing that amazed the speaker. Was that book really amazing? Did it actually amaze and astonish you? Were you dumbfounded? Or do you simply lack the vocabularly or at least the assiduousness to praise it in a more precise manner? I would wager, in most cases, that it's the latter.
• "Standing on line." This I believe to be a Northeastern (aka, Yankee) turn of phrase. This, to me, is an alternate form of "in line." Are there lines painted on the ground in certain parts of the country to facilitate enqueueing? I've been around a bit, and I've never seen them. I've waited, people seriatim, in a lot of places, and I've never seen a guide marker underfoot. The line is an imaginary one, formed by the people waiting. I can't see how anybody is "on" that line. But they sure seem like they're "in" it, inasmuch as they're the constituents of it.
  

I'm sure our devoted readership has other such phrases that it deplores, rationally or otherwise. As always, please share, and we'll include.