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.

get outta here

There are many colorful ways of telling someone to bugger off, or of announcing one's own imminent exodus. Here are a few. As always, we welcome submissions.

• Make like a tree and leave.
• Make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here.
• Make like a fetus and head out.
• Make like the Catholic Church and get the fuck out of here.
• Make like an exorcist and get the hell out of here.
• Make like Siamese twins and split . . . and then one of you die.
  

Juvenile Brinkmanship

It seems the proclivity to engage in arms races develops in us from a tender young age. Consider the following two examples.

1. From a psychology textbook, courtesy of our friend in Columbia's psych department:

We study exchanges like these, between David and Josh, two young children, in a section of my textbook on the development of "prosocial behavior."

• David: I'm a missile robot who can shoot missiles out of my fingers. I can shoot them out of everywhere - even out of my legs. I'm a missile robot.
• Josh: (tauntingly) No, you're a fart robot.
• David: (protestingly) No, I'm a missile robot.
• Josh: No, you're a fart robot.
• David: (hurt, almost in tears) No, Josh!
• Josh: (recognizing that David is upset) And I'm a poo-poo robot.
• David: (in good spirits again) I'm a pee-pee robot.

What kind of robot are you?

----

2. During Sunday school recently, I went into a neighboring 2nd-grade classroom to get a few markers, and the students were doing a Passover art project. Two boys close to where I was standing were drawing the Angel of Death, and here is the brief exchange I overheard (names have been assigned arbitrarily; any resemblance to their actual names is purely coincidental):

• Moishe: My Angel of Death has a scythe to kill people!
• Shmuli: Oh yeah, my Angel of Death has a pitchfork!
• Moishe: Mine has a scythe and a pitchfork!
• Shmuli: Well, mine is spiky.

Unfortunately, I didn't hear what was surely a thrilling conclusion to this Angel of Death arms race.

What does your Angel of Death look like?

gizoogle my noogle

I'm happy to report that http://www.gizoogle.com/ has a "translizzle" feature. I tested it with a bit of verse by our good friend Erasmus Darwin, the 19th century botanist, biologist, and poet. He's Charles Darwin, of Beagle fame,'s grandfather. The first passage is his text; the second, the translizzle. Though it is by no means the most ridiculous example one can imagine, it is everthemore (isn't that better than "nevertheless"?) delightful. It picks up steam toward the end.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Translizzle:
Organic life beneath tha shoreless waves
Was bizzorn n nursed in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spherical glass,
Move on tha mizzay or pierce tha watery mass;
These, as successive generizzles bloom,
New powa acquire n larga limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetizzles doggy stylin'
frontin' realms of fin n feet n wing.

We encourage you to generate your own translizzles. As always, we will post those that are worthy.

In that vein, our good friend Rav Rockin Mullet has offered two shining examples of what he calls a “jewish gangsta haiku”.

hanukkah haiku:
me gotsd a dreidle
I made dat shiz out of cliz –
shit got dry – fuck dat!

passover haiku:
you may gotsd dem ho’s
and you may gotsd a fly crib
but we fuck you up – ten plagues, biatch*!

[*NOTE: the Haiku Authority of America (“HAM”) has agreed that “biatch” may be interpreted as one or two syllables, depending on who be holding a mu-fuggin gun to their heads. Thank you for your understanding and unconditional support for our greater mission (biatch!).]

"only" a word?

Ah, the power of a single word. Consider:

• The clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
  Standard.
  
• Only the clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
  At least no one else did.
  
• The only clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
  Of course, you send one clown, and it has to be the pervert.
  
• The clown only stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
  Well, at least he didn't do anything else with it.
  
• The clown stuck only his penis in the midget's eye.
  Anything more would just have added insult to injury.
  
• The clown stuck his only penis in the midget's eye.
  Enough said. (My personal favorite.)
  
• The clown stuck his penis only in the midget's eye.
  Depending on how you parse (and intone) this, it can mean that the clown didn't stick anyone else's penis in the midget's eye; or, he didn't stick it anywhere other than the midget's eye...
  
• The clown stuck his penis in only the midget's eye.
  At least he didn't stick it in anyone else's eye...
  
• The clown stuck his penis in the only midget's eye.
  Sure, single out the midget. They always get the short end of the...uh...stick.
  
• The clown stuck his penis in the midget's only eye.
  That's just sad.
  
• The clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye only.
  What's the big deal? It was just his eye.

thanks to our loyal readers for additions and corrections

fish fish fish fish fish

It's a well known linguists' paradigm -- the seemingly nonsensical string of words that can actually be parsed as a grammatical sentence.
Fish fish fish fish fish.
In other words, flounders that groupers eat hunt flounders.
Still don't get it? Think about the phrase "games people play" -- it's elliptical (the expected "that" is omitted) for "games that people play." Same thing for "fish fish fish" -- it's an elliptical noun phrase serving as the subject of the longer sentence. But be careful -- it works best when the first "fish" is the object of the third "fish" within the inner phrase structure...

There are many fun examples of this phenomenon -- write in with more!
(for some reason, most of them involve animals...)

• Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.
• Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. ("Buffalo" can be a place, an animal, and a verb. Look it up! If you still can't parse it, let us know.)
• Geese geese goose goose geese.
• Sheep fish goose fish sheep. (Whether it's actually possible to "fish sheep" is an open question in my book.)
• Fish Fishkill fish fish kill fish. (Fishkill, NY acts as an adjectival modifier.)
• Buffalo geese Fishkill dogfish fish kill Buffalo sheep.
• Help help help help help. (Thank you, Dracubeth, for that worthy submission!)
  

the possibilities are nigh endless....in whimsy and ludicry!

Have you ever noticed...

...that if you stare at a word for too long too many times, it starts to look CRAAAAAZY? For example:

knowledgeable

mixed metaphors and idiotic idioms

Like malapropisms, I suppose, but more haphazard and less genteel:

...whatever bloats your goat...
That's for cock sure!
The hand's on the other foot now!
shit or cut bait
fish or get off the pot
[more to come...]

Send in your own fractured phrases. We will post those that are worthy.

A timestamp of slovenliness

Peruse the list of teams here: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/players. At first blush, they appear to be in alphabetical order. Then you find the anomaly of the Tennessee Titans between the Denver Broncos and Indianapolis Colts. Likewise the Oakland Raiders between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins. Then the ludicry of the Baltimore Ravens being the second team from the bottom, followed by the Houston Texans. A similar pattern of absurdities can be found in the NFC's column.

Those who know NFL history know where I'm going with this. This list hasn't been updated since 1994, when the Raiders and Rams were in Los Angeles, the Titans were the Houston Oilers, and the Jaguars, Panthers, Ravens and Texans didn't exist. It seems a ridiculous way to date oneself.

That would make a great band name!

Or, in many cases, a great blog name. They're fairly similar. Here is an ever-expanding list of amusing or otherwise interesting band names that we've come up one way or another.

Liquid Ridiculous	Papal Crap	His Own Sock
Punctuational Clusterfuck	Never Sweat	Haggard Ken
The Haptic Explorers	Grinder in the Lid	Tastes Like Chicken
Bootleg Jesus	Sword Words	Chicago Pile Number One

Send us more, of your own creation! We will post those that are worthy.

Who are these people?

I keep getting emails from senders with names like Gynecologist P. Joviality and Fricassee Q. Laxative, usually trying to sell me viagra or cialis or some other pill that promises to make my life more fulfilling. Because I'm never happier and more at peace than when I have a nuclear erection. Thanks, Gynecologist!
Who the fuck wrote the code to generate these cocktarded names? Do they actually believe that this is effective advertising and that people will read these inane, odious emails? (Irony: Clearly, I do. Regularly.)

Dear reader, if you have any insight, we beseech thee, COMMENT.

how to write good

This is one of the most cogent and incisive "guides to writing" that I've ever read. Also in the top 5: George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". Go and study them.

(from Paul Graham's site)

A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.

I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes-- 23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting. But as an experiment I'll put it online. It is at least extremely dense.

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unneccessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

Sigh... oh so many sighs

There's nothing sadder than people using "whomever" as the subject of a noun clause, like "We should drag out into the street and shoot whomever uses that loathsome construction." You can actually hear them being proud of themselves, but simultaneously earning the scorn of the knowledgeable.

I was in the Columbus, OH airport today and shook my head in predictable disappointment at a large ad in the terminal: Below a picture of a doctor concerned about the quality of a health insurance plan, the caption read, "Who can I count on?" Well, doc, you can count on I.

I received an Evite "From Jane (courtesy of Jesse)." Trouble is, it came from Jane's email account, and is an invitation to a party at Jesse's house. This should be "From Jesse (courtesy of Jane)."

...said Tom swiftly

• "Here's the real male goose," said Tom, producing the propaganda.
• "I manufacture tabletops," said Tom counterproductively.
• "I need a place to put my painting," said Tom easily.
• "For such a skinny monarch, he sure makes a lot of noise," said Tom, thinking aloud.
• "Why, 'e urinated on me cabin, guv'nuh!" said Tom epistemologically.
• "I like hanging around other men," said Tom cogently.
• "There's a trumpet stuck in my butt," said Tom astutely.
• "I'm just as holy as the Pope," said Tom copiously.
• "I like hot dogs," said Tom frankly.
• "I just ate a bucket full of tacks," said Tom tactfully. (thank you, Michael, for that contribution)
• "I think that mangy dog tricked me," Tom concurred.
• "I'm gonna trick that mangy dog into making a deal with that giant magical tree creature," said Tom concurrently.
• "The new pope should be a woman named Catherine," Tom pontificated.
  

Send us new Tom Swifties! We will post those that are worthy.