Parsing Political Language

In this final month of the election season, Christopher Weyant’s New Yorker cartoon seems especially pertinent:

Learning A New Language

As commerce and communities continue struggling toward a global mashup, it seems critical that we comprehend more than one language. Considering the latest U.S. demographics, Spanish would be the sensible choice for Americans who now speak only English. For job-seekers, Chinese or Arabic could improve your employment chances. I, on the other hand, have been busy lately learning a somewhat obscure language: horse.

“Do you even HAVE a horse?” you may be thinking. “Are you planning on GETTING one?”

No. And No. But logic and practicality don’t always rule my decisions.

In fairness, though, I have a few good reasons: 1) Learning anything new keeps one’s brain functioning properly, 2) I AM residing in the horse capital of the world, plus 3) I’m taking riding lessons, so it behooves me to communicate well with the powerful creatures who could easily (albeit unintentionally) maim me.

Anyway, I’m going to give it my best shot. Mr. Ed made it so easy for Wilbur Post. (If Rosetta Stone would only add animal languages to its roster, I’d be a loyal customer!) I’ll let you know how it goes…

[Photo of Rousing Sermon by John Sommers II for Reuters.]

Hard Times for All

Apostrophes WANT to work, but they’re underemployed these days. It seems they’re either inserted as an indicator of a plural (see poster at right) or they’re omitted altogether. Contractions? Forgeddaboutem. Apostrophes just waste space and energy when texting.

Please help apostrophes if you can. Let’s not stand idly by as they fade into oblivion.

[Pic from Twitter feed of Waterstones Oxford Street.]

A Cat By Any Other Name…Is A Cat Is A Cat Is A Cat?

Most of my pets have suffered through and recognized a multitude of monikers. (Except my husband’s Burmese. She came with an unfortunate name from which we never deviated. This I deeply regret. She deserved better.) I used to feel embarrassed about the affectionate names I gave my pets—even a little ashamed.

However, all my animal reading of late informs me I’m hardly alone in this matter. Wherever the lives of humans and critters intersect, so, too, do quirky identifiers.

Take my first cat, for example. She had NO name when I adopted her. After a round of serious decision-making, I gave her the nickname of one of my siblings: Precious. And it fit. Her tiny, snow-white body of ultrafine fur, her peridot eyes, her translucent pink ears, her troubled past and ultimate rescue—all pointed to a fragile creature whose quiet nature made her seem more of a porcelain figurine than a growing kitten. She truly was Precious. And though she never outgrew this name, she grew in to a few others: Miss P., Missy, Preciouroni (she LOVED pepperoni), Preciouronious, White Thang (after the tune “Wild Thing” and because one vet we took her to labeled her file with a large “W,” meaning she was “wild and uncontrollable”; oddly, this held true only for that particular vet clinic), Miss Thang, Blanche, Blanche du Chat, The Empathy Cat. Her Whiteness tolerated every nickname we dished out.

I thought we did well by her until I read “The Naming of Cats” by T. S. Eliot. The poet contends every cat should be given three formal names: 1) The common, sensible name—the one used daily; 2) A particular name, one that’s peculiar to your cat and shared by no other feline—one that’s used, perhaps, only on paper; and 3) The name only your cat knows and will never confess. As the poem goes:

“When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name…”

Oh my. I had no idea so much was at stake. I clearly failed my felines.

Some people think names don’t concern animals. It’s our tone of voice that motivates them to respond to us. “Pickle” or “Pumpkin” makes no difference; it’s how we say it that matters. But this line of thinking ignores both the intelligence of animals and their individual personalities.

Take Precious’s best friend, for example. When my husband gave the kitten to me, she could fit in the palm of my hand. (She could fit on top of a doorknob, too, but that’s another story.) Whenever I touched her, she purred—like the tiniest of racing engines. I named her InstaPurr, and for her entire life, anyone could rev her motor with the slightest touch.

InstaPurr garnered a long list of nicknames: Purr, Purrbator, Purrly Girl, Pumpkin, Dirtball (she was NOT a clean cat in her youth—ignored the litterbox and showed no interest in personal grooming), Sweet Pea, Binge and Purrge (yup—she ate, she vomited; it seemed like a game for her, her way of challenging me: “Ha! See if you can clean THIS up!”). She took all her names in stride save one. One word could throw her mood and incite her to yowl: Mabel.

Call her Mabel and she’d immediately do the opposite of whatever she was engaged in: jump out of your arms, walk away from nuzzling your ankles, stop purring. We couldn’t believe it; thought it a fluke at first. But soon we realized we could use the name to our advantage. Whenever Purr started to do something bad (she was the most ill-behaved pet we ever had), we would just say “Mabel” to her and she’d stop. “No,” “Don’t,” “Knock it off,” and every other typical reprimand had no effect on the cat, but call her “Mabel” and she’d retreat.

I don’t know what she heard in the name, but her reaction was clear and innate. It MEANT something to her. Purr was not a Mabel, regardless of our intonation. Purr taught us that words matter, even to nonhumans. Naming a creature demands thoughtfulness and vision. And if that creature is a feline, think Eliot and not Shakespeare—for the feline expects a “deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

[Photographs are from Freekibble, which you can access at the right of Lull to feed shelter cats with the click of a mouse.]

A WordGazing Holiday

Today is National Proofreading Day, which seems an appropriate time to post this ad I noticed in the New Yorker:


Look closely at the first line of reverse type. Some would roll their eyes or mutter a “Geeze.”

Me? It just makes me sad.

WordGazing: Finally, Justice Will Be Served

I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE
PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

The text above is on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in D.C. Not only is it carved without punctuation, it’s also paraphrased.

Yup. Not really a quote. And not even the gist of the original utterance, which is:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.”

What’s more, when you think about the abundance of material the highly quotable Dr. King provided us, why in the world was this chosen in the first place?

The truncation was a “design change” according to Ed Jackson Jr., the executive architect. He ran it by the oversight body, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and they didn’t have a problem with it. Neither did the Council of Historians.

Shame, shame, shame. If space was really an issue, then the solution was not to abbreviate but to choose different material. A quote that’s paraphrased isn’t a quote. Period. PERIOD, screams the editor in me.

I don’t expect architects to understand the problem with this kind of language bastardization, but I certainly expected more from the historians who approved it.

The good news today is that the stone-chiseled text is going to be fixed. Not sure how, but I’m glad someone in D.C. finally saw the light.

Here’s a King quote that speaks to me, that reminds me how to live my life:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Preparing for the Big Night

Who Knew?

“You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited, once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.”
—from “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” in A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain

WordGazing: George Clooney on Drinking and Spelling

Have you seen the latest Time magazine? George Clooney is asked whether he follows Twitter. He answers:

“No, because I drink in the evening and I don’t want anything that I write at midnight to end my career—‘You can kiss my ass,’ all spelled wrong.”

Don’t you just love a man who worries about his spelling?

The Blue Jay Chronicles: A Tête-à-Tête

Blue Jays have been curiously absent from our feeders since Spring. Now they’re back. Our days are frequently interrupted by their piercing calls, and they appear to be juveniles—more gray and brown than blue, feathers sticking out in weird directions.

One afternoon as I hung laundry on the line outside, a Jay perched on the telephone wire above me, squawking. I watched and listened for a bit, then tried to mimic his call.

After a moment of silence between us, he bleated a distinctly new and louder call, over and over and over again. There was a panic in it, and the Jay took off—flying from tree to tree, crying out his message.

But what was he saying? More to the point, what had I said to incite his communiqués? I vowed to keep my mouth shut during future bird-watching.

[Art by Matte Stephens.]

Ode to the Comma

t’s National Punctuation Day again. In the spirit of the celebration, here’s an excerpt from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. The character speaking is Renée, a 54-year-old widowed concierge who hides her intelligence (I modified the typography slightly for easier comprehension):

Madame Michel,
Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s this afternoon?

I’ll pick them up at your loge this evening.
Scribbled signature

I was not prepared for such an underhanded attack. I collapse in shock on the nearest chair. I even begin to wonder if I am not going mad. Does this have the same effect on you, when this sort of thing happens?

Let me explain:
The cat is sleeping.

You’ve just read a harmless little sentence, and it has not caused you any pain or sudden fits of suffering, has it? Fair enough.

Now read again:
The cat, is sleeping.

Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity:
The cat comma is sleeping.
The cat, is sleeping.
Would you be so kind as, to sign for.

On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect:
I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace …

And on the other hand, we have this dribbling scribbling on vellum, courtesy of Sabine Pallières, this comma slicing the sentence in half with all the trenchancy of a knife blade:
Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s?

If Sabine Pallières had been a good Portuguese woman born under a fig tree in Faro, or a concierge who’d just arrived from the high-rise banlieues of Paris, or if she were the mentally challenged member of a tolerant family who had taken her in out of the goodness of their hearts, I might have whole-heartedly forgiven such guilty nonchalance. But Sabine Pallières is wealthy. Sabine Pallières is the wife of a bigwig in the arms industry. Sabine Pallières is the mother of a cretin in a conifer green duffle coat who, once he has his requisite diplomas and has obtained his Political Science degree, will in all likelihood go on to disseminate the mediocrity of his paltry ideas in a right-wing ministerial cabinet, and Sabine Pallières is, moreover, the daughter of a nasty woman in a fur coat who sits on the selection committee of a very prestigious publishing house and who is always so overloaded with jewels that there are days when I fear she will collapse from the sheer weight of them.

For all these reasons, Sabine Pallières has no excuse.

[Drop cap by Jessica Hische; art from Serial Comma Killer.]

The Curse of the Proofreader

Contrary to what you might think about proofreaders and editors, we don’t LOOK for mistakes when we’re not working. Mistakes seem to gravitate toward us.

A moment ago the word priviege spoiled my morning reading of a deftly written essay. A week ago there was a typo in my fortune cookie. (Does that render the prophecy null and void?) Ten pages into Stanley Fish’s How to Write A Sentence is a word that should have been singular but made its way into print as a plural. A job application asked if I was persuing a degree.

Oh, I could spend days listing the typos I’ve read this year alone—on menus, signs, press releases, news reports, television graphics, ads—but I’d prefer to forget them. I cringe when I see them, though there are a few of my ilk who delight in the mistakes of others—enjoy playing a game of “Gotcha!” with all printed materials. I’m more forgiving and feel bad for both the writer and the proofreader/editor when typos pop out. Do you understand how disruptive typos are to me? How they mar my pleasure and interest when reading?

There’s one exception. The other day, I was at my computer when an ad cried out for my attention. Typically, I ignore online ads, but this one made me laugh (after I recovered from my initial shock). In big, bold, uppercase letters it read:

INTROUDING the Must-Grab Flavors
of Mock-Tail Season
New _______ Mocktails

In addition to the butchered first word of the teaser, the company couldn’t decide* how to spell mocktail for their new product. (New products generally mean newly coined words and require corporate editors to create new rules for their style guides. Marketing campaigns that bypass the editor are often strewn with inconsistencies like mock-tail and mocktail.) Or maybe the joke’s on me and I’m just not fluent in Mock English (or mock English, or mock-English, or Mock-English).

When I’m working, I stalk typos. When I’m not, they stalk me. This is the curse of my profession. Oh woh iz mee.

* Arguably, perhaps the editor chose to hyphenate the word when used as an adjective and close it when used as a noun. However, that’s an odd choice in this era of dehyphenation.

[Photo from I Can Has Cheezburger; proofreader’s marks by Eve Corbel.]

When It Comes to Shameless Marketing Schemes, Even God Needs Them

The two churches up the hill from us have been promoting their Vacation Bible Schools (or “VBS” as one denomination refers to it) on banners.

“Pandamania! God Is Wild About You!”

That’s the headline on one, though the attention-getting factor on both banners is an illustration of a panda bear—one in cool shades, the other midst bamboo.

Influencing people to change or do something—switch brands, save the environment, patronize museums, pay higher taxes—requires marketing on some level. And the language of influence must appeal to the target audience.

Even animal shelters rely on experts like Seth Godin to help them “move product.” Godin once suggested that shelter dogs would be adopted more readily if they were labeled “Golden Retriever [the über family companion] Mix” or a “____________ Blend” (fill in the blank with whatever the breed du jour is). No matter that the pooch has a chocolate-hued Staffordshire Bull Terrier face. Well, probably especially if the pooch has a chocolate-hued Staffordshire Bull Terrier face. (I’ll address this kind of truth-bending in a future post.)

When I saw the banners, my first thought was the heavily advertised film Kung Fu Panda. What? God uses cinema tie-ins to entice youngsters into the fold? I guess it’s no different than a shelter full of Golden Retriever Mixes. Ideas for silly headlines started popping into my head: Panda-ing to Children, for instance.

However, on the banner touting “God Is Wild About You!” Psalm 139 was cited as the source of the “excerpt.” I don’t know what Bible edition this is from, but it’s a far cry from the old King James I had as a child. The quotation made me wonder about the choice of visuals on the banners—maybe it wasn’t a movie tie-in after all. Why was a panda used? Because children these days are naturally drawn to the look and cuddliness of wild pandas? Because children are concerned about conservation of the wild—which the panda represents?

I conducted a quick Web search on my phone for some answers. First I checked to see how many films involved pandas (thinking this was a trend I was clueless about), but horror of horrors! Google gave me panda movies, all right, but the first page of results was all porn. I didn’t look further. And I’m not going to.

Perhaps you can enlighten me about why porn flicks are panda movies and why pandas fascinate children and which Bible translation includes “God is wild about you.” Until then, I’m content to stay under this rock that’s apparently shielded me from recent culture shifts.

[Top pic from Animals Gallery; bottom pic by Bernard de Wetter for World Wildlife Fund.]

Flash Mob: Words Await Organizer

“One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.”
—from “Permanently,” by Kenneth Koch

[Photo by Max. I saw one of these lovely cats in my ’hood yesterday—in red.]

Art Becomes Life

This definition of surrealism from illustrator Brad Holland caught my attention some time ago and I thought I’d share it with you today.

“An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.”

Yup. Aptly describes my existence. How about yours?

[The illustration is Brad Holland’s. I think it’s how some writers envision editors.]

WordGazing: Let’s Hope the Gov Sings

aw this on a major news outlet’s Web site about important legislation that the governor should (in my estimation*) uphold:

“The governor said it is his policy not to say if he will sing or veto anything during the session … .”

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple switch of two letters can alter the meaning of a sentence? Heck, this transposition alters legislative procedures.

* Turns out the governor exercised his veto power on the referendum. Too bad he couldn’t sing.

[Art from Jessica Hische.]

WordGazing: Derby Tip for Grammarians

If you’re still looking for a pony to bet on in today’s Run for the Roses, put your money toward the only one with a connection to punctuation: Comma to the Top. It’s a Southern expression for apostrophe.


I read an uptight blogger’s rant about how ridiculous it is to use a four-word euphemism in place of apostrophe. I don’t know the etymology behind it, but it works—descriptively speaking. And if it helps some folks use a “comma to the top” properly (we already know how many folks can’t master the apostrophe), then what’s to complain about?

WordGazing: Weather Worries

At the bottom of the television screen last night, I saw this:

Flood warning…don’t drown.

Well, thanks for the encouragement, I thought. I wasn’t planning to.

But then I saw the warning in its entirety. In the case of rising waters, viewers were told to seek higher ground. Otherwise…

“If traveling, remember turn around, don’t drown.”

Could this be the newsroom’s nod to Poetry Month?

[Pic from LEX18.com.]

Taking the Easy Route to Problem-Solving

We just received the last three issues of National Geographic Magazine (a glitch I caused by renewing late) and in one was this photograph:


If you live in the Chesapeake Bay area, you probably know all about the cownose ray. But I’d never heard of the creature. And though lots of unusual critters parade through NGM pages over a year, none has captivated me quite the way this ray has.

The sharks that keep the ray’s numbers in check are on the decline. Now, without a predator on their tails, the rays are using the Bay as their personal kitchen—eating shellfish and mussing up the habitat of other marine wildlife. The local fishing industry has, understandably, deemed the ray a pest, though the damage has yet to be quantified. There’s already talk about putting the cownose ray on restaurant menus (resembles tuna, according to a taste test), but the ray would have to be renamed—something more palatable like “Chesapeake Ray.”

Clever, hunh? We can be imaginative when it comes to spin, but not so much when it comes to real problem-solving.

Look at that mug again. It’s homely, haunting, melancholic, otherworldly. There should be a cownose puppet for cownose advocacy. Surely there’s some way of preventing yet another creature from becoming a human’s lunch…

WordGazing: Proof of Proofreaders’ Value

Found this ad online this morning while I was browsing for new clients:

HI
I am looking for author to help me with my upcomming book. (Technical and non-friction author preferred.)

Of course, running a spellcheck program could have fixed the poorly spelled upcomming. But what about non-friction?

Technically, this isn’t a misspelling; spellcheck would have ignored it. Yet, if it doesn’t communicate what the writer intended, it’s a typo.

Now I’m left to wonder what the writer intended. Is s/he simply averse to conflict? Or does s/he really REALLY need an editor?

[Photo of 1901 proofreaders by Thomas Lewis.]