BAM! OUCH!
February 23, 2010
Yesterday morning my neighbor and I were at the gym, walking briskly around the track. Our gym is at the local community center and one of the things we love about it is the rich cross section of people who frequent it: white, black, Asian, Ethiopian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, fat, thin, young, old; there’s definitely more diversity than Spandex here.
My neighbor holds a PhD in sociology so she loves to study the melting pot of humanity as she lifts weights and rides the recumbent bike. No PhD for me but being the nosy journalist that I am, I, too, get a kick out of observing and eavesdropping. One of the populations we most enjoy studying is the Tribe of the Male. Their habits are inscrutable to us and we are invisible to them: enticing conditions for spying. We listen as they talk about who has died or divorced in their community, how they feel about the snow removal in our county, how good or bad a job they feel Obama is doing, and how ’bout those Saints!
So back to that track yesterday morning: as we walked in the walk lanes, a young man came running toward us in the jog lane. He was running the wrong way. Each morning a sign with an arrow indicating which way the jogging/walking traffic should go. Ours is a peaceful gym and people comply with the rules, as far as I can tell (though hard to know about the “no spitting in the water fountain” admonition). My neighbor turned to me and said, “Do you think he realizes he’s going in the wrong direction or he’s the type who never follows rules?” Hers was an observation rather than a judgment. She doesn’t sweat the small stuff; she just notices in a cool, clinical way. Although there were several of us walking or running in the designated direction, Wrong Way guy kept on running in the wrong direction. Finally, another jogger politely pointed out he was going in the wrong direction. There was what sounded like a good-natured exchange but Wrong Way guy kept on in the wrong direction. In another lap, Right Way Guy again said something to him. Wrong Way Guy started yelling something about “Bam.” “You don’t need to call me BAM. You don’t need to say that’s BAM.”
My neighbor and I both looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Bam?”
Wrong Way Guy and Right Way Guy kept yelling at each other and I grew nervous it might come to physical blows. BAM! BAM! But luckily, they chilled and I was left with a linguistic question.
When I got home I went to urbandictionary.com and looked up “bam.”
There were several choices but the main one was a Scottish colloquialism meaning “idiot.” Unconvinced that these two gentlemen were batting about Scottish slang, I looked further and “bam” turned up in a dictionary of Marine Corps terms and words.
If I’ve interpreted the data correctly, Right Way Guy was using BAM as an acronym, calling Wrong Way Guy a “Broad-Assed Marine,” (horror of horrors, he was calling him a girl) I suppose a modern day take on the slur Your mother wears Army boots.
Funny, I’ve never seen a woman, Marine or non-Marine, running the wrong way on that track.
–Barbara
The Crack-Up
February 21, 2010
While writing notes to a lecture early this morning, I used the phrase “not all it’s cracked up to be.” Perhaps it was because the hour was so early or perhaps it was because I hadn’t finished my first cup of coffee, for the first time in my life, this phrase struck me as odd. I couldn’t make any literal or figurative sense of it. To “crack up” meaning to suffer an emotional or mental breakdown makes sense because it suggests both a falling apart and a falling down. To “crack up” meaning to respond with wild laughter feels right because it has to do with losing composure. But something’s being “not all it’s cracked up to be.” What does that mean?
A quick tour through the Oxford English Dictionary answered the question. As far back as 1450, “crack” came into English usage meaning “loud talk, boast, brag,” and sometimes “exaggeration”; a bit later, the meaning “to pronounce or tell briskly” was added. By the nineteenth century in America, it evolved into the idiom, “to crack up,” meaning “to praise.” Thus, “William cracked up his brother Tim’s new book.” If Tim’s new book wasn’t very good, then it “was all it was cracked up to be.”
As far as I can tell, “crack” with its all those meanings of speaking, boasting, and pronouncing briskly has fallen out of usage. Except for “crack a joke,” the almost defunct “cracking wise” (still hanging in there, though, in its variant, “wisecrack”), and of course “not all it’s cracked up to be,” all of which survive in our language like so many marsupials, “crack” meaning some sort of “talk” is pretty much extinct.
–Dennis
When SpellCheck Isn’t Enough
February 13, 2010
The ability to spell correctly literally may be a matter of life or death. Don’t believe me? Click on thisYouTube link and enjoy.
Note to Copy Desk: Remove Notes to Copy Desk
February 13, 2010
See second paragraph:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/when-in-rome,1156301/critic-review.html
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.
