Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Patchwriting

Patchwriting: “A restatement of another writer’s text that uses too much of the original vocabulary and syntax.” (Word Spy)

Patchwriting has undergone a semantic shift since the term was coined, in 1993, by Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. In “A Plagiarism Pentimento,” published in the Journal of Teaching Writing, Howard contrasted patchwriting positively with plagiarism:

[O]ur adherence to the received definition of plagiarism blinds us to the positive value of a composing strategy which I call “patchwriting”: copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes. By failing to recognize patchwriting as a valuable composing strategy in which the writer engages in entry-level manipulation of new ideas and vocabulary, we fail to support our students in their efforts to assimilate the constructs of unfamiliar discourse.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Twenty years later, patchwriting has a more negative cast, possibly because the Web has made the practice easier and more pervasive, both on college campuses and in newsrooms. In a 2012 post on the journalism site Poynter.org, Kelly McBride criticized patchwriting as “problematic” writing—“the rearranged work of others”—that is “more common than plagiarism” and “just as dishonest.”

One writing teacher who doesn’t disparage patchwriting is Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet who teaches a course called “Uncreative Writing” at the University of Pennsylvania, in which students retype phone books and menus and plagiarize other writers’ work. (Uncreative Writing is also the title of a 2011 book by Goldsmith.) In a recent interview with The Awl, Goldsmith patchwrote most of his responses to the reporter’s questions and identified his self-poached sources. Here’s Goldsmith’s defense of Uncreative Writing:

The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it becomes a very different game, one in which they're forced to defend choices that they are making about what they're plagiarizing and why. And when you start to dig down, you'll find that those choices are as original and as unique as when they express themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they've never been trained to think about it in this way.

“The new creativity is pointing, not making,” Goldsmith summed up.

Rebecca Moore Howard did not give an etymology for patchwriting; it appears to be formed in imitation of patchwork, the sewing technique. As far as I can tell, the name of the hyperlocal news network Patch (owned by AOL) has no relation to patchwriting. Rather, Patch’s sprouting-grass logo gives the impression of “a patch of earth.”

Also see copypasta.

Book Review: “How to Not Write Bad”

Ben Yagoda’s new book has a cheeky title: How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. It’s a compact little volume, just 172 pages, that’s intended for students and teachers but will be welcomed by anyone who wants his or her* writing to be appreciated. And it’s such a good example of good writing—vivid, charming, funny—that even experienced writers will read it with pleasure.

 

 

In his introduction, Yagoda says the inspiration for his title came from a psychoanalytic concept first proposed in the 1950s: “the good-enough mother” (or parent) who doesn’t solve every problem but still manages to get the job done pretty well. “What I’m talking about here,” Yagoda writes, “is good-enough writing. As with parenting, it isn’t necessarily easy to achieve, but it’s definitely achievable. And it’s a decidedly worthwhile goal.”

How to get there? By reading a lot, of course—preferably writing that has been “selected and processed by an editor, and then ‘published.’” And once you sit down to write, Yagoda says, write mindfully. (Here I pause to consider that Ben Yagoda’s surname can be anagrammed into god, yoga, and Yoda.) A big part of mindful writing is maintaining “an awareness of and attention to the (hypothetical or real) person who will eventually be reading your words.”

Yagoda teaches advanced journalism and writing at the University of Delaware—he also writes the Not One-Off Britishisms blog and is a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog—and most of the examples in the book come from his students. The majority of those students, he writes, “put me in mind of what Jack Nicholson famously shouted to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. The Cruise character couldn’t handle the truth, Nicholson said. Well, most students, I’ve found, can’t handle writing ‘well.’ At this point in their writing lives, that goal is simply too ambitious.”

One bad student example should suffice:

The criteria that made this site able to be nominated are because of the uniqueness of the content it possesses.

Yagoda’s suggested not-bad rewrite:

The site has excellent content.

Some specific bits of wisdom from How to Not Write Bad:

On preparing to write: “First, turn off the radio, the iPod, the television; put your phone on silence and in your pocket, X out of or minimize all screens other than the one you’re writing on. Multitasking = bad writing.”

On spelling: “Spell-check, in many ways a wonderful innovation, has caused spelling muscles—never especially robust to being with—to atrophy to the point that they now have the firmness of mint jelly.”

On punctuation: “You can dismiss apostrophes—and punctuation in general—as just a series of technical details. I prefer to look at them as measures of mindfulness.”

On the inadvisability of punctuating by ear: “”[S]tudents tend to insert commas at places where they would pause in speaking the sentence. This has about the same reliability as the rhythm method in birth control.”

On the passive voice: “The passive is a problem if and only if it leaves in its wake an insistent question that begins with the word Who?”

How to Not Write Bad is available in all the usual places, in print and e-formats, including, naturally, on Amazon, where Yagoda admits to obsessively tracking the book’s ranking. On publication day, February 5, he combined this “narcissistic endeavor” with some fitting philanthropy: For every ranking drop of 100, he donated a copy of How to Not Write Bad to Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia after-school program that teaches kids ages 7 to 17 “to think and write clearly.” I think the game is off now—at last check he’d donated 17 copies—but you may still want to support Mighty Writers, which looks like a mighty fine endeavor. And buy the book, of course.

By the way, once you’ve mastered the advice in How Not to Write Bad I suggest you read Yagoda’s 2005 book The Sound on the Page, which I wrote about in 2007.

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Disclaimers: 1) I received a review copy of How to Not Write Bad from the publisher, Riverhead Books. 2) The David Friedman to whom Yagoda dedicates the book is not the David Friedman to whom I am related.

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* Yagoda acknowledges that within 10 to 15 years many uses of singular they will be acceptable in formal writing. “However,” he writes, “they’re not acceptable now, so you have to make adjustments.”

The CMoS Interview

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by the Chicago Manual of Style—the indispensable resource for editors and publishers—for the monthly Shop Talk feature. I rambled on about the name-development process, mental workouts, and favorite books; the expert CMoS editors made me sound focused. Go take a look. And if you have editing or proofreading questions of your own, check out the CMoS Q&A while you’re there.

Get It Off Your Chest

Moist jeans may be the Next New Thing; moist bras, not so much. Fortunately, there’s an app—a nappy?—for that: the Wick’em moisture-managing bra liner.

 

For consistency, shouldn’t it be “to keep ’em dry”?

 

 

As a brand name, “Wick’em” is assertively descriptive if a bit too reminiscent of Hang ’em High. (I’d like it better if the brand were spelled Wickham and the styles were called Lady Wickham, the Dowager Countess of Wickham, and Mistress Wickly.*) There’s no way to make “wick” sound elegant, and the apostrophe takes it even further downmarket.

The folksiness of that eye dialect is at odds with the boardroom-stiff brand voice of Wick’em’s parent company, Coconut Grove Intimates (whose other products include adhesive bras and which is headquartered, incongruously, in Ontario, Canada, far from any coconut groves I’m aware of). There’s that “moisture management” descriptor, for starters. And on Wick’em’s About Us page I learned that Coconut Grove Intimates is “an industry leader in the development of solution-oriented bras and bra accessories.” Maybe Hank Hill should be the corporate spokesman.

 

 

Hat tip to Corporette for the Wick’em link.

 

P.S. If you’re goin’ to go droppin’ letters, at least get it straight. It’s “Wear ’n’ Care”—one apostrophe for each of the missing letters in “and”—not “Wear N’ Care.”

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* And I’d really like to rename the product Bosom Buddy, but it’s taken.

Word of the Week: Said-Bookism

Said-bookism: A verb used in place of “said” – almost always a needless distraction. From “said book,” a pamphlet of synonyms for “said.” Said-bookism is a subspecies of “the elegant variation,” the term coined by H.W. Fowler (1858–1933) to describe a substitution of one word for another for the sake of variety.¹

Although I was trained early in my editing career to purge manuscripts of fancy synonyms for “said,” I learned only recently that there was a name for the writing sin I’d been correcting. Stephen Dodson, in his Language Hat blog, educated me:

I don’t know if there ever was such a thing as a “said book” listing innumerable substitutes for the simple and useful verb “said,” but that concept is the basis of the term “said-bookism,” known to most professional writers as something to avoid as a sure sign of amateurism.

Said-bookism comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of terms used in discussing science-fiction writing. The lexicon was developed by the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, a workshop for professional science-fiction writers founded in Texas in 1973. The full lexicon – which includes wonderful entries like Phildickian, nowism, and ficelle character – has been published on the Science Fiction Writers of America website; it’s useful for writers of other genres (and nonfiction).

Television writers, for example. Here’s how the peerless TV Tropes website begins its entry on said-bookism:

“Said Bookism?” Alice interrogated. “What’s that?”

“Well,” Bob exposited, “it’s a variety of Purple Prose in which the writer goes out of their² way to avoid the word said.”

“Why would they do this?” ejaculated Alice.

“Because,” explicated Bob, “it was the fashion at one point. There were even ‘said books’ you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of said as saying said was discredited during that time. That's where the name of the trope comes from,” he further proclaimed.

Some Tom Swifties rely on said-bookisms for their humor – “‘I used to be a paratrooper,’ Tom explained” – although most use adverbs to drive home the pun. (“‘We have no oranges,’ Tom said fruitlessly.”) The Twilight books are flagrant perpetrators of self-bookisms, as the Reasoning with Vampires Tumblr makes painfully evident.

In a more serious vein (sorry, Twilight fans; this sort of thing is infectious), here’s the Letter Go blog on “What’s Wrong with Using a Said Bookism?”:

The very thing that editors love about the word ‘said’ is the thing that makes some writers shun it. ‘Said’ is unremarkable, unadorned, invisible. It blends into the background, allowing the dialogue to dominate the sentence and the reader’s eye to skip along unimpeded by the writer’s clever turn of phrase.

Remember that the writer’s job isn’t to wow the reader with beautiful prose and punchy word choice. The writer’s job is to tell a story so real that the reader lives it. The action, dialogue and internal dialogue are the stars of the show. The adverbs, adjectives and said bookisms are the special effects – too much and the reader either becomes jaded or pays more attention to them than to the story.

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¹ The most famous example of an elegant variation is “elongated yellow fruit” for “banana.” As Ben Yagoda observes – um, says – sportswriters are especially productive generators of elegant variations.

² Yes, singular “they” can be kosher. I refer skeptics to Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre.

Brilliant

This ad appeared in the New York Times on December 13:

 

 

 

The succinct copy is unafraid to use the other D-word, debt, to contrast absurdly overpriced diamonds with lookalike moissanite stones. “She’s forever … You’re forever” echoes the company name, itself a sly poke at the long-running slogan of the De Beers diamond cartel, “A Diamond Is Forever.” In fact, I’m kind of amazed that Forever Brilliant was able to register its name as a trademark. Well played.

For more on diamond marketing and the romantic-industrial complex, see my 2008 post, “Stones.” And read The Heartless Stone, Tom Zoellner’s account of how a “relatively common mineral” came “to signify love and eternal promises.”

Long Reads for a Long Weekend

We have a three-day weekend here in California, in honor of the holiday called Columbus Day (traditionally), Indigenous People’s Day (in Berkeley and elsewhere), and Exploration Day (according to a group of scientists who are petitioning the government for an official name-change). It’s a good opportunity to catch up on some long-form reading. Here are three pieces I recommend.

“Villager and Me” is Andrea Lee’s reminiscence—sparked by an encounter with an ad in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker—of the “proto-preppie” women’s fashion brands Villager and Ladybug. “Up and down the East Coast,” Lee writes, “in that American provincial period before the invasion of international brands, before ‘Love Story’ had graven the word ‘preppie’ into the national consciousness, boarding-school girls and country-club wives swathed themselves in Ladybug and Villager. Until, of course, the zeitgeist swept them off to become hippies.”

A typical Villager dress—which I remember well from my own West Coast girlhood—looked like this:

“Rustling softly downwards, like the quality of mercy…”

The clothes were demure, but the ad copy and color names could cause an impressionable girl to swoon with desire. The real story here, though, is about the man behind Villager and Ladybug, Max Raab, “a brilliant mercurial Jewish Philadelphian, son of a garment manufacturer whose ambition was to make the cheapest blouse in town.” Here’s Lee on Raab:

A lifetime maverick with a passion for jazz and movies, Raab flunked out of high school, fought in the Korean war, pumped gas, delivered mail, and sold televisions and Fuller brushes before coming up with the idea that made his—first—fortune. I like to imagine that he built the Villager and Ladybug concept on his wistful outsider’s view of the style Philadelphia débutantes were after when they borrowed their boyfriends’ Oxford cloth shirts. By the time I was mooning over the ads, there were over a hundred Villager shops with rustic wooden floors nationwide, and his line of upscale feminine sportswear had earned a hundred and forty million dollars. “I know women better than they know themselves ” Raab said in a New York Times interview. “The Waspy girls all want that country look, and the Jewish girls want to look like the Wasps. I knew I had a winner.”

Raab enjoyed “a long, sublimely quirky career” that included producing out-of-the-mainstream movies such as A Clockwork Orange. (Lee: “When I read that, I just sat for a minute imagining Shetland cardigans and A-line skirts mingling in his brain with Malcolm McDowell and his droogs.”) When he died, in 2008, Raab was working on a film about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

Andrea Lee used to contribute regularly to The New Yorker; this article—online only—is the first writing of hers I’ve seen in quite a while. More, please!

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In a very different elegiac vein is this interview in The Awl with the writer Fran Lebowitz, who achieved meteoric success in the late 1970s and has been famously afflicted with writer’s block—but not talker’s block—ever since. If you’ve seen the 2010 HBO documentary about her, Public Speaking, you’ll be familiar with some of the territory covered in the Q&A—in particular, the gay culture of the 1970s and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on the New York arts audience. Lebowitz is so quotable that it’s hard to pick just one excerpt, but I’ll try: “The memories of people are very short. As we know, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't still have Republicans in office.”

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The British author and journalist Steven Poole is fed up with the cult of foodism. Poole’s excellent rant in the Guardian (UK), “Let’s Start the Foodie Backlash,” is an excerpt from his new book, You Aren’t What You Eat; in it, he takes on “food raves,” “feastivals,” cooking shows, and the language of menus: 

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word “baby” in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a “baby” lamb or the “baby” queen scallop can be “resting” (in the scallop’s case, resting itself on another baby, this time a “baby gem”, since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these “baby” organisms into our mouths doesn’t register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Poole traces the word “foodie” back to 1982 and “foodist” to the late 19th century—for hucksters selling fad diets, “which is quite apt,” he tartly observes.

Happy exploring!

Fix These Ads, Please

Here’s a slightly belated quiz in honor of National Punctuation Day. What’s missing from each of these national ads?

 

Email promotion for the Pizza Hut P’Zolo.

 

Magazine ad for Crest Pro-Health “clinical” rinse and toothpaste.

 

 

If you said “the comma of direct address” – also known as “the Donner Party comma” – give yourself a standing ovation, sir or madam.

The P’Zolo headline needs a comma after “YA” to make it clear that the word is slang for “you” and not the librarian’s abbreviation for “young adult.” The Crest headline needs a comma after “hike” to avoid suggesting that the reader deserves a wall-mountable award for going the distance on the Appalachian Trail. (Better layout would help, too: the idiomatic “take a hike” shouldn’t be broken up over two lines.)

Who’s at fault? Maybe the copywriter; maybe the proofreader, if there was one. Most likely, a comma-averse art director decreed that an extra punctuation mark would disturb the Platonic perfection of his design. I speak from experience: I’ve had many frustrating conversations with designers and art directors who arbitrarily removed correct and necessary punctuation “because it looked funny.” To which I say: Stick to pictures, bub.

Nora Ephron, 1941-2012

I didn’t know Nora Ephron, but that isn’t stopping me from taking her death—yesterday, of leukemia—very personally. Just a couple of weeks ago, after all, she’d been in my car, talking about her career at the New York Post, her incipient bald spot (she called it “my Aruba,” and you really have to hear her explain why), and that travesty known as the egg-white omelet. She sounded feisty and funny and thoroughly, you know, alive.

OK, she wasn’t physically in my car. But her voice was there, reading her most recent collection of essays, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, an audiobook I’d checked out from the library. I listened to all three discs, and then I listened to them again. And I remembered, again, how much Nora Ephron has meant to me.

Most of the tributes to Ephron have focused on her hugely successful movies. I’m sorry to say—which is, by the way, a phrase I associate with Ephron, as is “by the way”—that I remain a grumpy skeptic. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally are too slick and schmaltzy for my taste, with heavy-handed soundtrack cues telling you exactly what to think and when to weep.

It was her journalism and essays that made me an Ephron fan, beginning with pieces in Esquire like “A Few Words About Breasts” (whose slam-bam ending was shamelessly swiped by Lionel Shriver in her novel So Much for That) and continuing through her sharp-eyed, hilarious work for The New Yorker and Huffington Post, some of which was collected in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2011). Here was a woman who could be smart and funny on deadline. I loved her ear for the rhythm of a sentence and her eye for everyday nuttiness and sadness. I wanted to learn from her. I wanted to imitate her. I wanted to be her.

Except, probably, for the miserable marriage to that two-timing bum Carl Bernstein. Which, of course, she turned into a best-selling novel and hit movie, both called Heartburn. Take that, Watergate Boy.

You can listen here to an excerpt from the title essay of I Remember Nothing. (Thank you, Amazon.) And here—because you know how much I love umlauts—is an excerpt from one of my favorite recent Ephron essays for The New Yorker, a Stieg Larsson parody called “The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut”:

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what.Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But it wasn’t all wit on wry for Ephron. Read or listen to “Pentimento,” her essay about Lillian Hellman, in I Remember Nothing, to see how Ephron could illuminate the contradictions of a legendary personality and eulogize the painful end of a long friendship.

The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy, who interviewed Ephron for a 2009 profile in the magazine, has written a graceful remembrance. The New York Timesobituary, by Charles McGrath, is comprehensive and revealing. (I’d forgotten all about Ephron’s directing debut, This Is My Life, which flopped.)

Then there’s NPR’s tribute, which combines a report by Neda Ulaby (whose name would no doubt have tickled Nora Ephron no end) with an intro and outro by “Morning Edition” anchor Renee Montagne. In the outro, at about 3:23, Montagne flubs the title of Ephron’s final essay collection, calling it I Can’t Remember Anything.

I wish Nora Ephron were here. She’d have the perfect comeback.

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More on Ephron: Noreen Malone at New York magazine and Emily Yoffe atSlate (both via Nancy Nall).

 

Word of the Week: Prochronism

Prochronism: A chronological error in which an event or usage is dated earlier than its actual occurrence.

A prochronism is a specific type of anachronism; “anachronism” (from Greek roots meaning “refer to wrong time”) can apply to any misplacement in time, while a prochronism

occurs when an item appears in a temporal context in which it could not yet be present (the object had not yet been developed, the verbal expression had not been coined, the philosophy had not been formulated, the breed of animal had not been developed, the technology had not been created). (Source: Wikipedia).

I discovered “prochronism” via Prochronisms: or Downton Crabbey, a blog dedicated to “using TV anachronisms to learn about changes in language, and trying to avoid complete curmudgeonhood in the process.” The blog’s author is Ben Schmidt, a graduate student in intellectual history at Princeton whose earlier work I mentioned in a February post. Schmidt started Prochronisms when PBS’s “Downton Abbey” was on the air; he charted every two-word phrase in the series to unearth prochronistic usages such as “just might” (much less common in 1920 than “might just”) and “black market” (unknown in Britain until World War II).

Post-Downton, Schmidt trained his focus on “Mad Men,” which was set in 1966 this season. He nailed the obvious problems with “callback” and “pay phone” in the mid-1960s. And he discovered the prochronism in an innocent-sounding phrase like “I need you to make dinner reservations”: people in the U.S. rarely said “I need you to” until about 1980. (“‘Need’ and ‘just' are words that are surprisingly modern in their usage,” notes Schmidt.)

“Mad Men”’s final episode of Season 5 aired last night. Schmidt hasn’t yet revealed where Prochronisms will travel next. I’ll make a suggestion: Season 3 of “Boardwalk Empire,” coming this fall.