The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!
February 5, 2010
Writing my last post about how language is a mare’s nest of grammatical and social rules reminded me of one of my pet peeves: people in the news business using the phrase “to hospital”: “Three men were injured and rushed to hospital.”
“To hospital” is a British idiom, and I have no problem with British folk saying “to hospital.” But the American idiom is “to the hospital,” and when Americans say “to hospital,” it is such egregious truckling to our erstwhile colonial masters, it really gets my dander up.
I first heard the phrase used by an American newscaster several years ago on NPR, the last place one would expect such shameless bootlicking. Now I’m hearing it on all the outlets, cable and broadcast.
The only possible explanation for this British linguistic invasion is the putative social prestige that some Americans associate with British accents and locutions.
Stop this mindless pretentiousness. Remember Lexington and Concord!
–Dennis
Shining Light on a Problem We Can’t Lay to Rest
February 3, 2010
A week or so ago, one of our readers wrote to say how irritated he was to find newspapers using ‘shined’ instead of ‘shone’ as the past tense and past participle for ‘shine.’ I’m so late in responding because it turns out I’m of two minds about this matter.
On the one hand, he’s right about the grammar. More or less. Yes, usually it should be ‘shone,” though ‘shined’ is correct when the verb ‘shine’ is transitive and means ‘to polish’: “I shined my son’s shoes so he would look presentable at the birthday party, shined them so much they shone like the sun.”
Still, that trivial caveat aside, I share our reader’s irritation with public institutions that should know better, and particularly public institutions like newspapers, whose lifeblood is language, joining what seems to be a world-wide conspiracy to misuse, mangle, or generally dumb-down grammar. I remember vividly sitting in class, day after day, while Mrs. Block, my fourth-grade teacher, drilled us pitilessly on irregular verbs. Slay, slew, slain. Slink, slunk, slunk. Smite, smote, smitten. Stink, stank, stunk—how we fourth-graders loved that one, a brief moment of joy in the bleak wasteland of prescriptive grammar. Otherwise, what torture it was!
But I had to learn it and, by God, the Washington Post should learn it, too.
And yet (and here’s why I’m of two minds on this matter), why did we have to spend the entirety of fourth-grade in the painful and fruitless struggle to get irregular verbs right and, after all of that, so many of us—myself included—continue get them wrong? Well, we had to spend that much time because English makes no sense at all, particularly irregular verbs. If it’s whine, whined, whined, why shouldn’t it be shine, shined, shined? Even worse, irregular verbs aren’t regularly irregular. Why is it speak, spoke, spoken but spring, sprang, sprung? String, strung, strung but stride, strode, stridden? Or, for that matter, if it’s spring, sprang, sprung, why isn’t it string, strang, strung?
So, people who use ‘shined’ when they should use ‘shone’ are probably not ignorant rubes at all but just plain, hapless folk who instinctively want to put a modicum of order into the hopelessly irrational system that is English grammar.
That’s the first reason I pause before jumping on people who say ‘shined’ instead of ‘shone.’ Here’s the second reason. English is more than a linguistic system bound by (totally irrational) grammatical rules; it is also a system of communication bound by all sorts of complex (and totally irrational) social rules. For instance, if I go upstairs to get a brief nap and, when I come down, Barbara asks me where I was, I say, “I lay down for a nap.” But my voice always catches before I say “lay.” In part it’s because my mind is making a rapid grammatical calculation (“Shouldn’t it be laid like any other self-respecting verb?) but mostly it’s because my mind is making a social calculation, too (“Won’t Barbara think me insufferably pretentious if I speak like an English professor?).
So the long and short of it is that I don’t know what to conclude—except that I hope my daughter doesn’t read this posting. After so mercilessly getting on her case for saying “Kelly and me were thinking that…,” she’ll never get off my back.
–Dennis
Embracing Rather Than Eschewing English Teachers
February 1, 2010
My mother was a high school English teacher in the Philadelphia public school system back in the late 60s. I was thinking about her yesterday as my husband and I corrected our daughter for the 9,999 time about pronouns: “Me and Kelly were thinking that….”
“KELLY AND I,” my husband and I thundered simultaneously.
I remember my mother correcting my similar contortions of the English language. I would roll my eyes at what I considered her “English teacher” pretensions. In addition to being a stickler for proper pronoun usage, she had, what I considered, an odd vocabulary. For instance, she would “eschew” rather than “avoid,” “abstain,” or “do without.” And when she answered the phone and the caller asked for her, she would respond, “This is she” instead of the more relaxed “speaking.” And, finally, she would never begin a written sentence with the word “and,” as I’ve begun this one and the one preceding it. No one’s perfect, Mom. At least I’m not a felon. Yet.
I tell you all this as a preface to sharing a piece I read in the Miami Herald this morning. I offer this in contrast to what the Washington Post’s ombudsman wrote about the glut of copy-editing mistakes in the Post recently, turning me off with his lead, “When it comes to typos and syntax, retired English teachers and armchair grammarians delight in playing “Gotcha!” with The Post.” (I wrote about this in my January 18th post). It was a reactive and defensive column that did little to assure faithful Post readers that the mistakes were being taken seriously.
The Miami Herald piece, on the other hand, sought out a retired schoolteacher for her critique and took what she had to say to heart. It’s worth reading.
Criminal Etymologists
January 20, 2010
The other day I was talking to my daughter and I used the word “hoodlum” (I don’t remember the context, but I was probably describing what all the boys in the high school she would soon be attending were like and why she should avoid having any contact with them). She didn’t know the word. Usually, she hates it when I use words she doesn’t know—“eighteenth-century words,” she calls them—but this time, after the obligatory dissing, she expressed some interest and asked if it meant the same thing as “’hood,” as in “Boyz ‘n da.” I told her it didn’t, but in fact I hadn’t the slightest idea where “hoodlum” came from.
It turns out that nobody has much of an idea where it comes from. Some claim that it derives from “huddellump,” which in the Bavarian dialect means “rags” and “a slovenly, careless person,” but since the word first appeared in 1871 in San Francisco, this seems something of a stretch, and even one of the etymologists who puts forward the theory admits that it is “a guess,” and then adds rather lamely, “though perhaps better than average.”
The San Francisco origin has tempted another etymologist to suggest a rather different origin. In the late nineteenth century, he says, San Francisco was hit by a crime wave, and one of the gang leaders responsible was a man named Muldoon. Newspaper writers wanted to blame someone, but since there was no legal evidence that Muldoon was the real culprit, in their stories they spelled his name backward just to be safe, attributing every robbery, assault, or act of petty larceny to someone named Noodlum. But that was so obvious—and it so obviously left them open to a law suit—that they changed the ‘N’ to an ‘H’ and, voila, Hoodlum was born.
It’s a flimsy theory that doesn’t have much evidence to support it, and I was ready to dismiss it out of hand until I remembered the putative origin of the closely related word, “hooligan.” This word is said to derive from an Irish family who lived in Southwark, London, around 1900. Their surname was Hooligan, and they were reputed to be behind the crime wave that gripped the city at that time.
Still, as the poet and amateur etymologist John Ciardi remarked about this supposed origin of the word hooligan, “never trust an Englishman to be accurate in ridiculing the Irish; with the English the ridicule comes first and the details may be freely invented along the way.”
—Dennis
The Wonder of Naked Grammar
January 18, 2010
I just finished the lovely novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. One of the book’s two alternating narrators is Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old French girl who has opinions on all sorts of things, including grammar:
Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, “Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is! How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!”
I finished the novel late Saturday night. When I got up Sunday morning, Dennis told me I should read the Washington Post column by the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander. ”It’s about their copy-editing problem,” Dennis said, handing it to me while I sipped my coffee. We’ve both been annoyed by the increase in errors in the Post.
The column’s lead grated on my nerves: “When it comes to typos and syntax, retired English teachers and armchair grammarians delight in playing ’Gotcha!’ with the Post…” The tone was dismissive, as though only grumpy old retired folks wearing Depends and wielding washed up red pens cared about mistakes. To diminish the importance of accuracy and quality in a publication’s prose is short-sighted. The Washington Post is a newspaper with a national, even international reputation, and its currency is the written word. It’s like a chef being cavalier about the ingredients that go into a recipe. Who cares if we use basmati instead of arborio rice in that saffron proscuitto risotto. Really?
Alexander explains that the errors are caused by a shrinking staff due to buyouts, and to the changing and increasing duties due to technological advances of those copy editors who do remain. I understand that times are tough for newspapers but I also believe that copy editing should be a priority when triaging resources. I don’t want to be an armchair grammarian and when I’m a retired English teacher I hope I have better things to do than police the Washington Post for comma splices and dangling modifiers. What I do want is to read sturdy, clean prose and well-reported journalism. I’ve always turned to the Post for that, and I hope I can continue to in the future.
–Barbara
On Fox News and Down the Toilet
January 12, 2010
The Washington Post’s lead story in Style today quotes Republican strategist Todd Harris as noting that Sarah Palin’s new gig on Fox will give her “a platform she can use to stay relevant, to stay in the public eye and to flush out some of her policy positions.”
When I read that I thought for a moment this was another instance where the Post’s recent lack of attention to copy editing was coming into play. But the quote is repeated twice in the hard copy of the paper — both in the body of the piece and as a takeout quote – and so my next thought was the quote was accurate and that perhaps it was a case of the speaker misspeaking. Or miss-thinking. Didn’t Harris mean to say “flesh” rather than “flush”?
To “flesh out” would mean to articulate more fully, to detail or delineate. To “flush out” is a hunting term meaning to force an animal to stop hiding (visions here of that poor turkey being slaughtered in the background as Palin was being interviewed in the foreground). Or maybe Harris didn’t misspeak. Maybe he did mean exactly what he said — to flush out as in to clean out a system with a flow of water. Was Harris implying that Palin’s policy positions needed an enema?
Ghosts of Ghostwriters Past…
January 4, 2010
One of my Christmas presents this year was Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda. Dennis took the not-so-subtle hint I left in an earlier post that this would be a much appreciated gift.
I wasn’t disappointed. With plenty of time to read as I sat by the fire, snowed in, literally (thank you, Arlington County, for the crappy plowing job you did in our neighborhood), I was able to catch up on my reading. First I read Jon Loomis’s quirky, entertaining Mating Season, then Lorrie Moore’s amazing novel A Gate At the Stairs, and then, finally, I got to Yagoda’s book. My approach mimicked our daughter’s eating style: good stuff like pasta first, necessary and healthy stuff like vegetables second. I thought the memoir book would be the veggies of my reading list. It was certainly good for me, but it also turned out to be a wonderful read. I’m very interested in the whole genre of autobiography and memoir, I suppose because I’ve done more ghostwriting than I’d like (or am contractually able) to admit. Ghostwriting is to memoir what Asperger’s Syndrome is to autism. It’s on the spectrum but it’s a diluted form.
Yagoda has a section on ghostwritten celebrity memoirs and it’s clear that he did his research. He tells many amusing ghost stories, my favorite one about baseball great Ty Cobb and his hapless ghostwriter Al Stump — talk about a Dickensian name– whom Yagoda notes was “living out a ghostwriter’s weird version of Stockholm syndrome.” He talks about what a horrible, cruel guy Cobb was to work for, and how he quit the project twice and was fired once, but always came back. You see, Cobb was dying and Stump just felt compelled to help the guy and finish the book. Yagoda quotes Stump as having later said that he felt bad about the book, that it was a cover-up, I guess meaning it didn’t reflect what really happened. “I felt I wasn’t being a good newspaperman.” Understandable. There is an unhappy tango between fact and fantasy, as any journalist who has ghostwritten a book knows. The celebrity wants the story to be told in a sanitized way either because he believes that’s what really happened or he wishes that’s what really happened. It takes the skills of a “newspaperman” and the imagination of a fiction writer to pull off a successful ghostwritten book. Which leads me to the article I clipped from the Post Outlook section on Sunday (I know, how quaint that I’m one of the six readers who still has one delivered and thrown in the bushes every morning.). A terrific book review by Tom Miller uses the occasion of the publication of a novel called The Autobiography of Fidel Castro to explore the notion of autobiography and who is best suited to write the story of a life. It brought to mind an article on poynter.org that I refer my students to about the art of profile writing. It quotes Malcolm Gladwell as saying something along the lines of when you write profiles the least important person to interview is the subject himself. After my years as a ghost, I’d have to agree.
Pitching Tenses
December 22, 2009
I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s terrific new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. The narrator, a twenty-year-old college student from the Midwest, returns to her small rural town and observes this about the way they speak there:
They used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in, “I’d been gonna do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whoosed away again, beyond my grasp. “I’d been gonna do that” seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant “Hell yes, if I had a time machine!” People here could narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: “I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said …” It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this?
–Dennis
Sign Of The Times
December 20, 2009
MISSING MORE THAN AN APOSTROPHE
Confessions of a Failed Father
December 10, 2009
My twelve-year-old daughter told me yesterday that she has cut off all communication with a friend because he used the word “deteriorate” in a sentence. “You speak like a seventy-year-old,” she told him in scorn. When I told her that she should admire people with large vocabularies, not make fun of them, she blew me off, too. “I’m not grammarful,” she said.
Where did I go wrong?
–Dennis
