Rescue Me
December 18, 2010
Six years ago our lives changed when we found our dog at the Lost Dog and Cat Rescue Foundation. Dennis wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of getting a dog — not because he doesn’t love dogs but because he feared that Sasha and I wouldn’t do our share of the feeding, walking and general care that a dog requires. His fears were not unfounded but, in the end, it didn’t matter. He grew so attached to our dog, and she to him, that he didn’t want our help, mainly because he believes no one can care for her as well as he does.
Our dog is a mutt, part Border Collie, part yellow Lab, part some sort of snow dog. She’s also beautiful and kind and easygoing. She often puts her head in my lap as I sit here typing and looks up at me with her big brown eyes. Sometimes I let my mind wander back to that day she joined our family and I feel anxious realizing that if we had showed up a moment or two later, she would have gone home with someone else. Just after we claimed her and began the paperwork, other people approached our dog and asked if she was still available for adoption. She has that It Girl quality — an intangible vibe that draws people to her.
When we go for a walk with her, strangers inevitably ask to pet her and then ask where we got her. I used to say, “She’s a rescue dog” but that phrase is confusing to non-dog people. They conjure up images of Saint Bernards with barrels of whiskey around their necks on a mission to save people trapped in an avalanche. “No,” I have explained, “We rescued her from a shelter.” I’ve never liked that explanation because it sounds boastful but also because it’s inaccurate. The truth is, that in her own way, she rescues me every day. She rescues me from the despair I feel from a bad sentence that I’ve written, or an unkind word that someone has said to me, or a stressful day that feels endless. She asks for nothing but an occasional Milk-Bone and a scratch on her belly.
What’s led me to think about all this is an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post. Writer Betsy Karasik makes a plea in her piece for Americans to consider going to the local pound for their pooch rather than insisting on getting a purebred from a breeder. She makes a great case for her cause. And she also ends her piece by resolving the rescue vs. rescued issue: “Saving an animal from starvation and homelessness is its own reward, but the beauty of rescuing an animal is that, from an emotional standpoint, it turns around and rescues you right back.”
A Jerry-Built Post, Jury-Rigged at the Last Moment
November 7, 2010
This month, I’ve chosen Moby Dick for my bedtime reading (for the same reasons I chose to read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi last month: short chapters and not much of a plot). Last night, I read the conversation between Captains Peleg and Bildad, owners of the Pequod. Bildad reminds Peleg of an earlier voyage he had made with Ahab when they were caught in a typhoon, which had blown all three masts overboard. “Did’st thou not think of Death and Judgment then?” he asks Peleg, and Peleg replies:
When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.
I sat bolt upright in bed. “How to rig jury-masts.” So that’s where “jury-rigged” came from! A quick turn to the “Dictionary of Sea Term” at the back of the novel confirmed it and filled in some details. A “jury-mast,” it explains, is “A temporary mast, rigged at sea, in place of one lost.” (A quick search this morning filled in more detail: “jury” in this sense may have been a corruption of “journey,” since a jury mast was erected after the journey had gotten underway.)
I was pleased with this discovery because now I had a way to fix it in my students’ minds the meaning of “jury-rigged,” a wonderful word whose usefulness has been vitiated by an unusual concatenation of cross-contaminations. First, my students confuse it with the phrase “rigged jury” so that instead of meaning “makeshift repairs or temporary contrivances,” it has come to suggest something fraudulent or even illegal. The word has been further fuzzied up because, by a kind of back pressure from the word “jerry-built,” it has been transmogrified into “jerry-rigged” and consequently has taken over its meaning as “built cheaply and shoddily.”
People speak of English as a “living language,” which is true enough I guess, and I suppose that’s all well and good. But if it’s a living language, it’s also a dying language, and I for one am not happy to see the fine distinctions between “jury-rigged,” “rigged jury,” and “jerry-built” go, and I’m mortified by the prospect that one day I’ll have to re-title this entry, “A Shoddily Constructed, Makeshift Post.”
–Dennis
Revisiting Language People vs. Math People
November 4, 2010
Back in March, Dennis wrote a post about Language People vs. Math People. The context was our daughter’s math homework and the vexing topic of word problems.
For some reason, more than nearly any other search that leads people to our blog is “math vs. language.” Hardly a week goes by when that search doesn’t show up in our site stats. I was just reminded of this when I was half-listening to CNBC, the money channel, and I heard Mark Haines say to his Squawk on the Street co-host, Erin Burnett, something along the lines of “you can’t modify unique. Something is either unique or it isn’t… You can’t say the very, very latest. Something is either the latest or it isn’t.” Way to go, Mark Haines! You are both a math person and a language person.
Now if you could explain derivatives and the like to the English majors of the world, we’d be really, really impressed. Just this morning our daughter, after listening to me predict the stock market was going to go way up today, said, “Can you explain all this stuff to me? What’s the NASDAQ? What’s the Fed?”
Dennis replied, ”If I could, we’d live in a much bigger house, Sweetie.”
“I like our house,” she replied. Now that’s a language person for you.
–Barbara
The Plain Style
October 28, 2010
For the past month, I’ve been casually going through Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It’s perfect for reading at odd moments and in quick snatches. The chapters are short and pretty much self-contained, and there is no overarching plot or argument that you need to keep track of.
What I’ve come to admire about the book is the sheer cleanness of the prose. Almost nothing dates it. In its clarity, its lack of pretension, its sureness of tone, and especially in its keeping its eye steadily on the workings of the real world, it reminded me a bit of John McPhee.
Twain wrote so cleanly he can’t help himself making fun of those who don’t. Here’s a passage from XLV:
“The Times-Democrat sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April. This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him. They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek. That was all there was to it. And that is all that the editor of the Times-Democrat would have got out of it. There was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it. He would probably have even tabulated them; partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them:
On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.
“Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement.
“The trouble with the Southern reporter is—Women. They unsettle him; they throw him off his balance. He is plain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until woman heaves in sight. Then he goes all to pieces; his mind totters, becomes flowery and idiotic.”
–Dennis
The Hyphen As Subterfuge
September 30, 2010
I was just putting together my book order for my spring semester courses. Every semester when it gets to be time to send the information into the campus bookstore, I wonder about the ISBN. What does ISBN stand for? (International Standard Book Number) Why does Amazon often list two of them? A quick Google search of “decoding ISBN” led me to a blog that answered all my questions and more. Yes, this officially makes me a nerd. And yet, there’s some interesting information hiding in those long strings of numbers. Really. For instance, the ISBN reveals whether the book is self-published. Have you ever noticed that sometimes there are hyphens within the ISBN and sometimes there aren’t? The hyphens are often strategically placed to try to hide the size of the publisher’s block of books.
If you aren’t asleep by now and want to learn more about how the ISBN thing works, there’s actually an ISBN organization.
–Barbara
Two Cheers For the Semi-Colon
September 24, 2010
Style Is The Man
September 7, 2010
The smartest writer in The Washington Post, of course, is Heloise, whose capacity for finding ever more inventive uses for empty bleach bottles makes her deserving of a Pulitzer. But the second smartest is the advice columnist, Carolyn Hax. She is very wise about people, and her advice is almost always right on the money.
The other day, I read the following letter someone had written to her. (The point I want to draw attention to is the writing style, not the problem between the husband and wife, so read it with that in mind):
Wife had an important meeting. That morning, she realized she had no business suit that fit her… She proceeded to spend $500 on two suits right before the meeting. Husband flipped out. Demanded that Wife plan her clothing purchases in the future. Said Wife couldn’t possibly like the suit she bought. Wife is upset that Husband flipped out. Husband thinks she should get over it … and so on.
I’m at a loss to explain such a bizarre style. At first, I thought I was reading a set-up for a joke (Priest walks into a bar, sits next to a rabbi. Rabbi turns to him, says…) but when I asked Barbara about it, she speculated that the telegraphic style was the final symptom of the general collapse of our culture brought on by texting.
I don’t know. Texting may explain the unsettling elimination of articles and pronouns, but what do you make of the capitalized Wife and Husband? Is this an updating of an allegorical medieval morality play? If the writer went on in this letter, after Wife and Husband, would he bring in Marriage Counselor and Divorce Lawyer? And what about the psychological distancing here (we find out later in the exchange what we knew from the beginning, that Husband is in fact the writer himself, and Wife is his wife)? It’s not the distancing that’s creepy, it’s the sheer transparency of the distancing, the fact that the writer knew that no one would be fooled by it but felt compelled to do it anyway.
I have no answer to any of these questions, and I have no real point to make beyond that I wish people would pay more attention to how they write.
And, by the way, Wife needs to dump Husband, don’t you think?
–Dennis
NPR=BBC. OMG!
August 27, 2010
Several months ago, I confessed to my irritation about Americans using British locutions. Specifically, I complained that reporters and news readers on NPR increasingly were employing the British phrase “in hospital” instead of the American “in the hospital.” Imagine my horror, then, when I heard the following on my local NPR station today: “An exclusive interview with Michelle Rhee today, in studio.”
“In studio”!
Do the British actually say this or was it invented by a particularly pretentious American?
–Dennis
“Language Police” — Not Just A Metaphor
August 20, 2010
Would you like 15 years to life with that bagel? Read this New York Post story about an English professor who is getting shmeered for refusing to say that she doesn’t want a shmeer. And what’s up with the New York Post’s spelling of shmeer? Oy!
THE WRITER: A FIGURE OF PATHOS OR JUST A PATHETIC FIGURE?
August 11, 2010
Several weeks ago I read a review of Mentor, a new memoir by Tom Grimes. I don’t know Tom Grimes, and evidently that’s my loss, for the reviewer praises the work highly as “superb” and “deeply moving.”
Still, I don’t think I’ll read it. It is the reminiscence of a writer who has failed, his book orphaned when his editor left one publishing house for another and then negatively reviewed when it finally did get published. On his book tour, he faced completely empty rooms.
The review ends with a quote from the book where Grimes ruminates about why he feels he needs to be a writer in spite of the fact that he is, in his own eyes, such a failure:
For me, writing is a necessity. I exist in sentences. I forget my sense of failure. I forget time. I forget that I’m aging. I forget that one day I will die. Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I’ll ever take.
What writer can read this without his heart breaking?
As it happens, my own book was just published. I’ve had it in hand for several weeks now and can’t bring myself to open it because I’m sure the first thing I’ll see is a typo. And so it was much against my better judgment that I went on Amazon and searched out the ranking of my book. It stood at 5,076,621. I bucked up surprisingly well. After all, it had been out only two short weeks, there were no reviews yet, and a reputation for excellence spreads slowly by word of mouth. And anyway, it’s still summer. There are a lot of people right this very moment lying on a beach eager to read a page-turner about Daniel Defoe’s attitudes toward colonialism and the shocking truth about indentured servitude in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies.
Two days later, I broke down and went to the Amazon site again. My book had dropped to 5,084,536.
And that’s why I won’t be reading Tom Grimes’ memoir, excellent though I’m sure it is, about being a failed writer.
–Dennis
