“‘The Ghost Writer,’” I answered. Then added, “It’s about a ghost writer.”

“Yeah, I figured,” she said. “What is it, a horror movie?”

When I finished laughing uncontrollably I realized that judging from my life, that was a natural conclusion for Sasha to come to. What was it Carrie Fisher said? Good anecdote, bad reality?

I was very much looking forward to seeing the film, and I was not disappointed. Roman Polanski has directed a masterpiece. The plot is tight and unpredictable and the atmospherics have that spooky, Hitchcockian thing going on. I am going to be very careful not to give away any of the plot but  here’s the premise: a Tony-Blair like character, post-prime ministership, needs a ghostwriter to finish his memoirs after his first ghost ends up dead.  The new ghost finds himself in the rarified atmosphere that I know all too well: tiptoeing around the living quarters of a famous person, an outsider, whose very presence embarrasses the “author” and threatens the inner circle. Even the kitchen staff eyes you suspiciously.

Needed but not trusted, the ghost slinks around trying to do his job under really weird circumstances. It’s hard to hold onto one’s self-respect in this role. I groaned audibly when the ghost, upon learning of the p.m.’s wife’s youthful political ambitions, asks her, “Did you ever want to be a proper politician?”

Eyes ablaze she shoots back, “Did you ever want to be a proper writer?”

Ouch. I feel your pain. 

Polanski himself an outsider, shows great insight into, even empathy for both the politician and the ghost. At one point, early on, the ghost reports to the p.m.’s assistant that the former p.m., played by Pierce Brosnan, keeps calling the ghost “Man” and he takes it as a term of endearment.

“That’s what he calls people when he can’t remember their name,” she notes.  Ah, I remember the invisibility.  I know what it feels like to have someone look right through you. Erased as soon as your services are no longer needed. Much later, the ghost, not invited to the book’s launch party, accompanies the assistant as her guest. When she says she is appalled he wasn’t invited, he explains, “It would be like having the mistress attend the wedding.”

The actor who plays the Ghost, Ewan McGregor, nails it. He is hunched over, as if trying to burrow into himself–a demeanor that we ghosts often assume. But in real life he’s much more confident. On “Good Morning America” in an interview promoting the movie, he gives George Stephanoupolos a run for his money. To set up the interview, they air  a clip in which the Ghost is subjected to a tense interview with the top brass at the publishing house. He admits that he’s not a politics buff: “I don’t read political memoirs. Who does?”

After the clip airs, Stephanoupolos says lightly, “As someone who has written one I’ll try not to take that personally.”

“You’ve written one?” McGregor shoots back.

“Yes,” Stephanoupolos mumbles, looking shocked that there is anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know his pedigree.

“Come on! How boring is it to write a book about politicians. Really, on a scale of one to 10, 10 right?”

By now Stephanoupolos is squirming and laughing uneasily. “I don’t — no! I wouldn’t think so.”

“I think it’s the antidote to insomnia probably,” McGregor finishes, clearly triumphant. And he is so right. Everyone knows that no one reads these things, at least not closely. In this town the index is the only thing that anyone studies, for one’s own name. 
 

There’s so much more I could say, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the movie for you. Besides, I’m saving some of what I know for my own memoirs. By Barbara Feinman Todd, as told to Barbara Feinman Todd.

 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

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/when-in-rome,1156301/critic-review.html

“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

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

“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.

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