Fritinancy

From My Twitter Files

I've been using Twitter to post quick links to blogs and articles I find interesting. Here's a roundup of about a week's worth of my tweets about names, brands, and language (okay, and politics, too):

Convivium Brands, a California company specializing in "on-demand private-label wine and spirits brands," has introduced four varietals under a new wine brand: Lipstick on a Pig. Each bottle is available with a red (presumably Republican) and a blue (Democratic) label. According to the website: "Lipstick On A Pig Wines allow consumers to weigh in and voice their opinions with their palates!" (In case you missed it, you can read here about the political flap over the expression "lipstick on a pig.")

I got a kick out of Newsweek columnist Joe Klein's nickname for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin: "Embarracuda." Other nifty words in the column: "nothingburger" and "empretzeled."

Anyone else catch the name of the Treasury Department guy who'll be overseeing the $700 million financial bailout? It's Neel Kashkari. Yeah. Cash and carry. That's going to be everyone's motto pretty soon.

Writer Anne Lamott misses the late, great newspaper columnist Molly Ivins this campaign season. Me too. (Never heard of Ivins? Read my tribute to her.)

John McCain and Sarah Palin are fond of calling themselves mavericks. But a descendant of 19th-century Texas rancher Samuel Maverick--whose unbranded cattle were known as Maverick's--warns them to put a lid on it. Terellita Maverick, 82, a  member emeritus of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says McCain "is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase." "He's a Republican," she said. "He's branded."

Jay Rosen, who's on the journalism faculty at NYU and whom I follow on Twitter, suggests that Gov. Palin's speech patterns were influenced by her brief stint on a television news program, and directs us to Michael Kinsley's 2001 essay for Slate about "what TV news is doing to our precious verbs." Answer: they've been reduced to "universal gerundiciples." Judge for yourself. Here's Kinsley, in full parody mode:

I suspecting the trend of TV news talking in headline-ese traceable to Rupert Murdoch, who buys the New York Post many years ago and founding Fox TV News more recently. The Post famous for its brilliant headlines. Fox News, though hypocritical about denying its brazen right-wing politics, the most creative of the TV news networks.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sarah Palin's "pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism."

Language Log's Mark Liberman takes issue with Dowd's assertion that one of Palin's spoken sentences--“It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there"--defies diagramming. He manages to wrangle it into shape. Other Palin sentences don't fare so well.

Two more Language Log posts on Palinesque predilictions: one on the governor's affection for affective demonstratives--the point words "this" and "that"--without referents ("loaning us these dollars," "trying to forge that peace," "craving that straight talk"), and one on her curious use of also as semantic glue, especially at the end of sentences.

And while we're in LanguageLogLand, here's Geoff Nunberg commenting on Steven Pinker commenting on Ms. Palin's pronunciation of nuclear: 

Palin has to be aware that many people consider her pronunciation nonstandard, and she (or her handlers) seems to have made some effort at correction, which is presumably why she pronounced the word as "new clear" when reading off the teleprompter in her convention speech. Since then, though, it's been "nucular" all the way, which may be part of the "let Palin be Palin" strategy. 

I'm learning the most interesting things from fashion blogs. For example, The Thoughtful Dresser (in the UK!) led me to www.270toWin.com, an interactive Electoral College map with current projections and actual results going back to 1789. And Je Ne Sais Quoi posted a nice graphic that compares the presidential candidates' tangible assets.

One more, then back to work: Critic Roger Ebert watched last week's vice-presidential debate and was reminded of Fargo. But he couldn't decide whether Sarah Palin was channeling Marge Gunderson or Jerry Lundegaard.

Party Like It's 1066

Can you believe it's already been 942 years since the Battle of Hastings? Seems like only yesterday. Garrison Keillor is celebrating all week on his Writer's Almanac radio segment, with interesting bits about the influence of the French-speaking Normans on the English language. If you missed today's radio broadcast, you can read a transcript, listen, or download the podcast.

On today's segment, Keillor also reads "Windows Is Shutting Down," a  witty poem by Clive James, who's better known (to me) as a critic and essayist. I liked the poem so much that I'll be seeking out more of James's poetry. Here's the first stanza:

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Read the rest of the poem here.

And as long as we're waxing nostalgic--it's the first day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, after all--here's the Billy Collins poem "Nostalgia." It's the one that begins:

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Violations

I stared at this parking-lot sign for a good five minutes, trying to figure out what it meant:

 

First I interpreted "parking" as an adjective modifying "vehicles." Dilemma: does that mean "vehicles in the act of parking" or "vehicles on official parking duty" (whatever that may mean)?

Got nowhere with that.

Then I read it as a prohibition of [the activity of] parking vehicles. But that would have required a singular form of "to be," right? Parking ... is prohibited.

But grammar be damned. Was this sign telling me I couldn't park on Berkeley Bowl property? There was ample physical evidence to the contrary: as usual, the parking lot was full. I even spotted a few motorcycles and mopeds. I parked; I wasn't towed.

So maybe the sign simply means "Don't park on the sidewalk." Which would have saved ink. And headaches.

Speaking of headaches, and disagreement, check out the caption on this photo in yesterday's New York Times Dining In section:

TONIGHT'S SURPRISES: The cost of specials aren't always divulged.

It's the cost, singular, that isn't always divulged. The specials (plural), we may assume, are revealed eventually. Prepositional phrases often confuse writers; a little sentence-diagramming would clear matters up immediately.

P.S. For those of you outside the Bay Area, the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace is one of our foodie meccas. If you think 18 types of bulk rice are just about enough, if you want first pick of local Gravenstein apples, and if you like to hear shoppers conversing in 10 or 12 languages as they survey the grass-fed buffalo steaks, this is the place for you. And for all the rest of you, too. The store got its name from its previous location, a decommissioned (dislaned?) bowling alley.

Electile Dysfunction

Is there a 12-step program for campaignoholics? If there is, don't tell me about it. I'm having too much fun with stuff like this:

Schnaufblog parses the Bristol Palin pregnancy announcement, in particular this sentence: "We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us."

The relative clause after children contains a coordination structure. What causes the ungrammaticality (at least I think the sentence is ungrammatical, not just odd) is that who is an object pronoun in the first part of the sentence, i.e. one could also say whom ("...five wonderful children whom we love"), and a subject pronoun in the second part of the sentence, i.e. one could not say "...and whom mean everything to us".

Conjugate Visits points out that although Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, works in "blue-collar" fields, he ain't "working class":

He's an oil production manager and a commercial fisherman. But class-wise, his income helps put the family well outside the group that's often called "working class" and that struggles to get by in today's economy.

Over at Slate, Paul Collins examines why John McCain can't stop saying "my friends":

Is this a doctrine of pre-emptive friendship—immediately declaring crowds won over with an oratorical "mission accomplished"? Perhaps, but McCain's friending is a strategy that hearkens back to classical rhetoric.

Or maybe just to mid-20th-century musical theater.

OMG, Sarah Palin has a blog! Well, "Sarah Palin" does. And she has so much to share:

I just have to say that I love the comments! :)  Outside of my rock (hi- todd!) there is no one else offering me this kind of support as I set out on this journey to become the second most powerful person in the world.  Keep it coming, it is great!  In alot of ways, I feel like Tom Joad in that movie East of Eden.  I am out there for you.  When there is stuff that is bad, I will be there to help. 

Something tells me she isn't talking about this comment from someone named Hillary: "Get over yourself, chiquita, and don't give up your day job." (Via Very Short List.)

There's a link from "Sarah"'s blog to "Bristol and Levi's wedding registry" at JCPenney.com. I totally have dibs on that awesome Bowler Camo Diaper Bag.

Previously on the Palin Channel.

Criteria

In an editorial today, "Senator McCain's Choice," the print edition of the New York Times included this passage:

Governor Palin’s lack of experience, especially in national security and foreign affairs, raises immediate questions about how prepared she is to potentially succeed to the presidency. That really is the only criteria for judging a candidate for vice president.

It's criterion, the singular form of this Greek noun. Phenomenon is another singular noun that's often erroneously mixed up with its plural, phenomena.

The Times's error was corrected in the online edition.

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By the way, the "split infinitive" in the editorial--to potentially succeed--is perfectly acceptable. See this Language Log post for more about that hoary grammatical fallacy.

Try It with a Scramble't Egg

I've seen some oddly placed apostrophes in public places—who hasn't?—but never anything quite like this:

Questions, questions:

• Just one muffin? Is it really, really big? Did the cook get tired? Or quit? Is "muffin" now a mass noun?
• Why use two characters, the apostrophe and the t, when only one character, a d, is needed?
• Does this look vaguely Shakespearean? Maybe not—when Shakespeare used 't, he was forming a contraction with "it" (Love's Labours Lost, Act II: "Will you prick't with your eye?").

This sign has been bothering me since I first saw it more than a week ago. Botherment led to rumination about the English past tense, and rumination led to Googling. Here's what I learned:

From very early in the development of English, -ed was used to mark the past tense in weak (also known as "regular") verbs such as bake. By contrast, strong (irregular) verbs changed their vowel sounds— sing/sang/sung, for example. Dan Tobias writes:

Originally, the "-ed" suffix was pronounced as a separate syllable, but by Shakespeare's day it was commonly shortened to the modern form, and often spelled like "deceiv'd" to indicate this (and this pronunciation was denounced by linguistic purists of the day as sloppy).

Not Exactly Rocket Science informs us that:

In the Old English of Beowulf, seven different rules competed for governance of English verbs, and only about 75% followed the “-ed” rule. As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. With new additions to the lexicon taking on the standard regular form (‘googled’ and ‘emailed’), the irregulars face massive pressure to regularise and conform.

Today, some past-tense formations can take -t instead of, or in addition to, -ed. Consider dreamed/dreamt, leaped/leapt, burned/burnt. In these instances, the -t suffix is a marker of British English (BrE) spelling. But in others—slept, crept, kept—there is no -ed equivalent in American English (AmE). And in a few cases AmE uses one spelling for the verb form ("I burned the toast") and another for the adjective ("The carpet comes in the perfect shade of burnt orange").

Sometimes there's a little pronunciation confusion, too. The "baked" in "baked muffin" sounds like it ends in -t. But the "scrambled" in "scrambled eggs" ends with a -d sound. Yeah, go figure. 

So here's my theory. I'm guessing that the muffin man (have you seen him?) is a bit spelling-challenged but knows something about phonetics. He was thinking "BrE past-tense suffix"—maybe he's from England, or a Commonwealth country; maybe he learned/learnt English by correspondence course—but when he wrote "Baket" it looked funny, like "basket" misspelled (or misspelt). So he thought, what the hell, let's throw in an apostrophe, because apostrophes are the Band-Aids of spelling. Aren't they?

But I'll entertain other theories. Hold forth!

Bonus link: The apostrophes of Canada, or Canastrophes.

Photo: Pergamino Cafe, Columbus Avenue at North Point, San Francisco.

August Linkfest

Some blogs I've been enjoying lately (and haven't mentioned previously):

I discovered Lexiophiles when, to my flattered surprise, it included Fritinancy among its "Top 100 Language Blogs." (I'm at #26. I'm in some very impressive company, but I seem to be the only "language" blogger who focuses on branding, naming, and other commercial applications of words.) Lists like this one often are shameless link bait, but the Lexiophiles blog is of real value to anyone with an interest in language. Each post appears in English plus one other language, and as far as I can tell the translations are done by actual humans. (Not that there aren't errors...) Here, for example, is a post on Spanish tongue-twisters (trabalenguas) in English and in Spanish. 

Bill Brohaugh has dropped by and left comments here, which is how I know about his excellent blog, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong (which is also the title of one of his books). He's funny, he's smart, and he asks the right questions. For example, we don't conversate, so why do we deliberate?

Conjugate Visits is June Casagrande's blog on "you know, like grammar and stuff." June has a refreshingly light style and a disdain for grammar snobs, although she admits to a meanie streak.

Brian White, a copyeditor at the Louisville Courier-Journal, writes Talk Wordy to Me, in which he muses on words and language. Such as: what does it mean when a newspaper movie review provides a ratings warning for "brief language"? (Words of four letters?)

And some end-of-summer diversions:

Nothing to do with language at all, but I just can't stop telling people about WalkScore. Enter your address and ZIP code (U.S. only; sorry) and find out how walkable your neighborhood is on a scale from 0 to 100. Mine is 80--"very walkable"--although a neighbor just three blocks away scored 97, "walker's paradise," which seems more accurate. Most days I do fine without a car. Even more interesting, the Los Angeles neighborhood I grew up in (Miracle Mile) scores an 85! Yep, Los Angeles. And WalkScore apparently doesn't even know about my old elementary school, a block and a half from our house; it doesn't show up in the results. Back in the day, my brothers and I walked or biked everywhere (or took the bus), partly because our mother didn't drive. That's right: in Los Angeles.

By now, just about everybody has blogged about Wordle, but see if that stops me from chiming in. Wordle creates beautiful tag clouds out of your blog post, web page, or other text. I'd show you an example, as Beancounters did, but whew--too much work to save and reproduce. Just go over there and play with it.

Why does German sound--well ... funny to English speakers? Toronto grad student (possibly a professor by now) Daniel Bader explains in this post from 2005. Synopsis: it's because English "developed something rather unique in a language, two virtually completely distinct registers," with neologisms being coined from ancient Greek and Latin and everyday vocabulary coming from Anglo-Saxon and French. Not so in German, where neologisms are cobbled together from German. Which sounds funny.

And speaking of, or in, German, if schadenfreude's your game, you'll love Typos in Print, which ferrets out misspellings, usage errors, and proofreading slips in popular fiction, nonfiction, and even--gasp!--Strunk and White. You can play along at home, according to blog author Tim Stewart:

Go to amazon.com, select the "Books" section , enter a commonly misspelled word (such as embarassed, occurence, or even inteligence) as your search query, and then hit "Go." Then sort the results by "Bestselling" and chuckle at the book titles and snippets that come up. People, those are real, live published typos. Copyeditors of the world, untie!

Quote of the Day

"It's hard to get rich on grammar, though you can get thin trying."

-- Martha Brockenbrough, SPOGG* blog

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* Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar

But Enough About Myself

Let's talk about me:

(Click to enlarge.)

More funnies at Candorville.com.

Thanks, Michael!

Grammar Girl Trips on Its/It's

I've been enjoying Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, the just-published first book by Mignon Fogarty. Like Fogarty's Grammar Girl podcasts, the book is breezy and reassuring, yet authoritative. Fogarty uses just enough popular-culture references to guarantee her readers' attention without sounding like she's trying too hard. And she charms us by sharing some of her own usage faux pas.

For example, on page 35 she confesses:

When I was in second grade, I lost a spelling bee because I misspelled the word its. I put an apostrophe in where I shouldn't have, and it was a very traumatic moment in my young life. I think this lesson is burned into my mind precisely because of my past misdeeds, and although I can't change my past, I believe the next best thing would be to save you all from similar apostrophe-induced horrors.

Well and good, except on page 177 she writes:

When you're tempted to use communicate, ask yourself if you really mean tell. Communicate has it's place...

An example follows, but I couldn't concentrate. I was too distracted by that apostrophe-induced horror.

It's bad enough when an error like this one slips into the daily newspaper or an annual report. But in a book purporting to tell us Right from Wrong, usage-wise ... oh, dear.

Linguists have a semi-jokey name for this particular nightmare: Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation. It specifies that "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one error." (For example, in that particular phrase in the article I just linked to, by Jed Hartman himself, "error" is misspelled "eror.") This rule is also known as McKean's Law, in honor of "dictionary evangelist" Erin McKean.

Here's my advice to Mignon Fogarty, who is currently on book tour: own up to the error and treat it with your characteristic good humor. Use it as an opportunity to talk about Hartman's Law, McKean's Law, famous mistakes-in-print, and Our National Proofreading Crisis.

And make sure it's corrected in the second edition.

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It you were expecting this post to be about ice cream, I apologize. Read more about It's-It ice cream treats here.