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.

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.