Fritinancy

Scare Quote

Well, it certainly alarmed me:

At the moment I noticed the slogan—on the side of a recruiting van for the Oakland Police Department, as it turned out—I wasn't thinking about anything excerpt merging into the left-hand lane, but I immediately began wondering, "More what?" More exhausting? More aggravating? More migraine-inducing? Probably all of the above, knowing Oakland as I do.

On the other hand, I could almost hear the immortal Inigo Montoya muttering disapprovingly, "I do not think it means what you think it means." Let's accentuate the positive! Perhaps "more" means "more rewarding," "more exciting," even "more doughnuts." Who knows?

Because ...  those quotation marks. They worry me. Slogans are supposed to be declarations of fact, not snippets of overheard dialogue. The punctuation renders the slogan slightly shady, somewhat second-hand.

And then there's the tacit assumption that the slogan-writer knows what I think. Just a little high-handed, no?

By the way, the OPD recruiting site is a different entity from the regular OPD site, which appears to have been designed and programmed by someone's nephew taking his first community-college Web class. I know Oakland is hurting, but this is an embarrassment.

For the record, my favorite unofficial Oakland slogan is this one. Don't bother to search for it; it appears on a T-shirt I bought about 15 years ago and have never seen since.

That's my town!

The Flexible Umlaut

It's not just for heavy metal bands any more:

Öömmm...

October Surprises

Stop the presses! (Stop the press's?)  Bill Brohaugh has alerted me to this unexpected campaign development.

And Karen Wise is keeping a low profile because of this shocking news story, dated November 7.

September Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the kids are complaining about homework—it's almost time for National Punctuation Day! Mark your calendar (September 24) and start making preparations. Bill Bronaugh, at Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, has already put up his Punctuation Tree. John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun offers a set of Punctuation Day resolutions. As for me, I know what I'll be wearing to the big Punctuation Day parade. (Naturally, I'll be registering under my Palin Baby Name: Comma Liberty.)

Mr. Verb wants to know the best nickname for Sarah Palin: Caribou Barbie? June Cleavage? Visit his blog to cast your vote.

A former copyeditor myself, I'm proud and happy to see Why Editing Matters, a write-in site from the American Society of Copy Editors. But entry #124 makes me want to weep.

If you're curious about stuff like Go Girl Glo Energy Drink, Flamin' Hot Funyuns, Nature's Path Organic Frosted Strawberry Toaster Pastries, and Every Man Jack Citrus Scrub Body Wash—whether as potential customer or as horrified bystander—then The Impulsive Buy ("Putting the 'ew' in product review") is required reading. All the basic info (serving size, calories, price), plus new! improved! attitude. Here, for example, is what reviewer Ace has to say about Pringles Extreme Screamin' Dill Pickle:

Luckily, there is more to this damnation of cardboard tube than a stupid name, and believe me, it is a very stupid name. “Screamin’ Dill Pickle” was actually slang for gonorrhea where I grew up. It brought back some bad memories when I saw this on the shelves. Pickle flavoring on Pringles scared the shit out of me. I absolutely hate it when I get pickle juice on my fries, so pickle flavoring on Pringles would probably be that much worse.

David Foster Wallace's death still feels like a personal loss, but it has also motivated me to rediscover some of his writing, like this 2001 essay for Harper's titled "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage," in which Wallace writes:

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

And here's a link to Wallace's eleven-page article on "the late, great John McCain," published in April 2000 after Wallace spent a week on the Straight Talk Express. (Hat tip: Wonkette.)

And as long as we're in that territory, I highly recommend Edge.org, where scientists and other thinkers take on Big Subjects in an open-forum format. I stumbled onto Edge through an essay by Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, provocatively titled Why Do People Vote Republican? I'm not entirely convinced by Haidt's conclusion—that Republicans care more about "the integrity and identity of the collective" and Democrats care primarily about "a collection of individuals, each with a panoply of rights" (in fact, I think he's got it reversed)—but I am determined to have a civil conversation about these ideas.

Lighten up, you say? Okey-dokey. Let's click over to 23/6 ("Some of the News, Most of the Time") and chuckle at headlines like "Lehman Collapse Hurting the Kind of Men You Fall in Love with--Douchebags."  And laugh liberally at this:

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.

Marking Our Territory

Are semicolons a girl thing? Salon editor Sarah Hepola wants to know. When Editrix interviewed her a few weeks ago, Hepola said without hesitation that her favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon. As she writes in Broadsheet, a Salon blog:

To me, the semicolon has a certain elegance, like a vodka martini; I don't whip it out every day, but on occasion, and with great relish. So it was with shock that I read a recent Boston Globe article suggesting that my favorite punctuation mark is ... girlie?

To put that assertion to the test, Hepola assembled a panel of Salon writers (Page Rockwell: "I love the semicolon. But then, I also love the eyelash curler").

Personally, I've always thought of semicolons as masculine--effete masculine, perhaps (the tweedy professor pauses for effect, but doesn't come to a full stop), but XY nonetheless.

You want feminine punctuation? Well, a (male) creative-writing teacher used to fill the margins of my papers with admonitions to "get rid of that schoolgirl dash." That's right, the em dash: that long straight line leading to a literary ejaculation. Schoolgirl?

I'm sticking to my em dashes--and my semicolons, too; thanks very much. The real girly mark, for me, is the excessive ellipsis. You know ... those sentences that just ... trail off ... like the annoying rising inflection at the end of a sentence ... all vaporous and ... oh gosh, what was I saying ...

Totally girly.

Apostro-faux

Editrix wrote a very intriguing post about a Silicon Valley startup that's developing "comment-correcting software" called apostrophree. The lower-case a, she said, is intentional. What a boon: automatic correction of their/there/they're, affect/effect, and missing or misplaced apostrophes (whence the software's name). Who doesn't want that?

The full story is over at Typical Programmer, in the form of an interview between TP (Portland, OR, computer guy Greg Jorgensen) and apostrophree's founder, a person called "John Scogan." My quotation marks are intentional, too, because there is apparently no such person--and, sorry to disappoint--no such software.

The tip-off is in the first sentence:

In a little-noticed deal that closed yesterday the Silicon Valley startup apostrophree secured a $25 million first round with Bolus Venture Capital of Palo Alto. apostrophree received seed money from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator earlier this year.

A Google search confirms that there's no Bolus Venture Capital in Palo Alto or anywhere else, but I didn't need Google to tell me that bolus is part of the joke: it means, variously, "a mass of chewed food," "a vaginal or rectal suppository," or "a single dose of a drug." But it does sound VC-ish.

There's also no apostrophree--in fact, if you fancy the domain name (which I concede is darned clever), it's available right now, with one or two e's.

What makes it such an effective hoax is that Typical Programmer is a generally dead-serious blog about dead-serious programming issues. Which explains why so many earnest commenters were taken in ("At least once in a while, the system must produce false positives: correcting ‘errors’ that do not exist, or correcting things in an incorrect way").

I can't resist quoting from the "Scogan interview":

But how does apostrophree save time? Don’t people just read through bad spelling and ignore missing apostrophes?
Most people either don’t recognize or don’t care when they encounter a misspelled word or incorrectly-formed plural. But some people do notice, and there’s a personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online. We’ve studied this for over a year, in many settings, and over and over we find the same thing: the most expensive employees, especially technical people such as programmers, can be provoked by the smallest error to post a comment of their own correcting the error and chastising the original poster. Observing technical staff in one organization we found that just two common errors — it’s instead of its and there instead of their — accounted for six hours of essentially wasted time per month per employee.

At least one element of this parody is 100 percent accurate: the bit about the "personality type that will spend a lot of time demonstrating their superior English skills online."

Just saying.

Of course, even hoax startups have business plans:

How do you plan to grow apostrophree so you can sell upgrades and keep money coming in?
We’re working on some things now, like cliché removal, that look promising. We have a team in the U.K. working on changing passive voice to active. Even something as simple as correcting capitalization of technical words and acronyms can pay off. If one of your expensive programmers comes across PERL instead of Perl he can spend thirty to forty-five minutes posting a correction, including extracts from two or three Wikipedia articles and Usenet archives. That’s ten to fifteen minutes per uncapitalized letter. And your programmer will compose and post a new version of the correction every time PERL is encountered online. That’s more than five times as long as is typically spent correcting presently when currently was meant.

By the way, this is Typical Programmer's second interview with a programmer "working on interesting projects and pushing new ideas and technologies." The first, posted on July 28, was with Boyd Hakluyt (um, pronounced hack-light?), who is working on "a new web application framework called Miasma." I especially enjoyed this:

What was it called before you renamed it Miasma?
Originally it was called Darlene. One of our lead developers, who wrote the core URL routing code and the template parser named the first version after his girlfriend. When they broke up we talked about renaming it couldn’t settle on a good name that wasn’t taken. When he left the project Darlene didn’t seem to fit anymore. I think Miasma is cool name and no other programming project is using that name. I have a friend working on a logo, too.

How many people are working on Miasma?
Right now it’s just me, but I’m working on it almost every day.

I love "almost every day."

Jorgensen even includes some code snippets, which are probably just as hilarious as the "interview transcript," but I haven't a clue.

Here's the actual Miasma.com, a nice blog by a San Francisco gal. And here, for your further edification, is BBC World Service Digital Planet contributor Bill Thompson on "miasma computing" (hat tip: Nick Carr):

It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as cyberspace, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle's story.

Update: From the comments thread on this Metafilter post about "Apostrophee": Seems that John Scogan was a jester in the court of King Edward IV. He was "an Oxford scholar" who "loved practical jokes."

July Linkfest

Back of the Cereal Box shares my twin obsessions with The Simpsons and baby-name trends. Here he catalogs the offspring of those picturesque country yokels Cletus and Brandine Spuckler. Of the 36 (!) names on the list, my favorite has to be Rubella Scabies. (Hint to Simpsons writers: Malaria and Salmonella would be nice for the next litter.) And a hat tip to Back of the Cereal Box to introducing me to Stuff White Trash People Like, a parody of this well-documented site, itself a sort of parody.

Editrix has been publishing a series of amusing and illuminating interviews called "5 Questions with..." Among the interview subjects: Tom Ruprecht (author of George W. Bush: An Unauthorized Oral History), Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics and the Freakonomics blog), and Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. From the interview with humorist Dave Barry:

Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?

A: I am most fond of the comma, because when you see it on a check, it means there are more numbers coming.

The Name Inspector writes about business names like Zlio and Vlingo "that don't toe the line of normal English phonotactics." Phonotactics was new to me; it's "the study of sound sequences that do and do not occur in a given language."

The Pollywog Blog passes along this sobering lesson in how not to name a product. Dual-N-Band what-what?

Thsrs is an interesting twist on the conventional thesaurus: enter a word, and it suggests shorter synonyms only. Why should you care? Well, it's useful for Twitter posts, where you're limited to 140 characters. (Via All This Chittah Chattah.)

And speaking of shortening, here's Mike Pope on "URL tinyfication" products such as TinyURL, which tranform long URLs into itty-bitty ones--again, handy for Twitter posts and anywhere else a long URL might be broken over two lines. I knew about several of these products, but hadn't known there were at least 41 of them.

By the way, if it's text rather than a URL that you need to condense, TinyPaste is just the thing. Paste your text block into the window--there seems to be no length limit--and TinyPaste will reduce it to a single short URL.

Finally, Goofy noted in a recent comment that he thinks "it's weird how much we fetishize the apostrophe." If that's your vice, indulge it at OUP Blog, where Anatoly Liberman examines the history and function(s) of the little squiggle, and observes, "It was not the brightest day for the English speaking world when the apostrophe invaded its books." And it's a problem not just for Anglophones: here's a site that documents German apostrophe abuse.

How I Roll

Could. Not. Stop. Laughing.

From The Rut, via Beancounters (del.icio.us).

The 40-Year-Old Quotation Mark

During last month's trip to Los Angeles I continued to sort through the contents of my parents' house, as previously documented here. And I continued to find museumworthy artifacts of American commerce, thanks to my parents' meticulous archiving (what others might unfairly term "hoarding").

Case in point: the paperwork for an RCA Evanger New Vista 25" color TV. According to the receipt--preserved in a plastic bag along with the manual, the schematic, the product tag, and an insert announcing "an important new space-age development"--my parents bought the set in 1966 for 175 books of Blue Chip Stamps.¹ That particular TV was eventually replaced by a slightly more contemporary set (with a newfangled gizmo called a remote control), but the old documents were faithfully preserved.

The RCA documents capture a moment in history when technology was miraculous, advertising was free of irony, and average Americans had attention spans that allowed them to follow sentences of more than six words. By today's standards, the RCA documents, like the magazine ad reproduced here², are unacceptably verbose, filled as they are with long, well-constructed sentences set in eyestrain-inducing eight- and nine-point type. 

The writers enlivened their long copy with a variety of gimmicks. Color television was still enough of a novelty in 1966 (and an expensive novelty at that--this set cost about 75 percent of the average U.S. worker's monthly salary) that copywriters felt it necessary to use italics and capital letters to drive home their points, e.g.:

• The COLOR CONTROLS USUALLY NEED NOT BE DISTURBED DURING A BLACK-AND-WHITE TELECAST.
• To switch receiver "on" pull out the ON-VOL control knob, then turn to right approximately one-third way for medium volume; allow about one-half minute for warm-up, then reset for desired volume. 

I hope you appreciated the semicolon in that last sentence. I certainly did.

I noticed something else about RCA's writing style: the generous use of quotation marks in contexts other than actual quotation. I had thought this phenomenon (some call it abuse) was of much more recent vintage, as evidenced by the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, which amply documents contemporary "infractions" (irony intended). But no; RCA's writers were clearly enamored of superfluous quotes more than 40 years ago.

For example, a bright-pink (!) leaflet titled RCA Solid Integrated Circuitry poses the question, "What is an RCA Solid Integrated Circuit?" And answers it:

It's a tiny "chip" of silicon incorporating matched transistors, resitors and diodes. ... In the electronic systems of space vehicles ... these new micro-circuit "chips" have already proven themselves in spectacular fashion. ... RCA Solid Integrated Circuits are the latest in a series of RCA Victor advances over old-fashioned "hand wiring."

And here's an example from the operating instructions:

If circuit breaker continues to "kick out," turn receiver "off" and contact your serviceman.

Scholars call quotation marks like these scare quotes; they're considered acceptable when used to express the writer's distance from or unfamiliarity with a subject, but unacceptable when used merely to draw attention to a term. In his blog Lexicographer's Rules, Grant Barrett renames them shout quotes, thumbs his nose at the rules, and gives them an enthusiastic shout-out:

They’re appropriate when you have no other easy way to indicate emphasis. They’re appropriate when used, for example, in casual sign-making. They’re appropriate when bolding or underlining is not possible. They’re appropriate when used by people who don’t do typesetting for a living.

(Judging from his commenters' responses, you'd think Barrett was endorsing the broiling of fetuses on a spit.)

What's interesting to me are the many ways in which the RCA writers used attention-drawing quotation marks. In the first example the quotes emphasize how exotic silicon chips were in 1966--so exotic that if you didn't put quotation marks around "chips" readers might think the word was a typo. The quotes around "hand wiring," by contrast, emphasize the opposite: the laughable quaintness of your old pre-silicon black-and-white TV. "Kick out" was clearly jargon; the quotation marks told non-technical types that here was a term they might want to learn if they wanted to sound in the know. And the quote marks around "off" do what grammar gurus say they never should: add emphasis to the word.

Technical writing today seems much less solicitous of consumers' tender sensibilities. I have an entry-level color printer whose manual addresses me imperiously:

You cannot change this setting on this machine. Selections of this setting will be based on that of the PictBridge compliant device.

Uh ... sure. And heaven help me if I'm just getting started with computers and digital photography and don't know what JPEG, TIFF, or Bitmap mean. I won't get any help from the manual. Frankly, a few scare quotes here would not have been out of place.

___

¹For you young 'uns: Blue Chip Stamps and their primary rival, S&H Green Stamps, were the buyer-rewards programs of the 1960s and 1970s: with every purchase at a supermarket or gas station, you'd get a few stamps to paste in a book. Completed books could be redeemed for products selected from a catalog. My father had a little side business--of questionable legality--buying stamp books from gas-station owners, small-business people, and average Joes who needed some quick cash. Dad paid something like 10 percent of the stamp books' redemption value and then exchanged the books for household gadgets; it was a family joke that everything in the house was acquired with stamps. But Blue Chip Stamps was no joke to legendary investor Warren Buffett, who began buying the company's stock in 1970, when Blue Chip had sales of $126 million. In the 2006 Berkshire Hathaway annual report, Buffett wrote: "When I was told that even certain brothels and mortuaries gave stamps to their patrons, I felt I had finally found a sure thing." It was one of very few times when Buffett was proved wrong. By 2006, Blue Chip Stamps revenues had fallen to $25,920 for the year.

²Ad for 1965 RCA New Vista color TV from here.