Stuff that's been rattling around in my brain:
"Moonlight in Vermont," written in 1943 by John Blackburn to music by Karl Suessdorf, may be the only popular song in English whose verses are all perfect haikus: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. (The bridge breaks the pattern but maintains the impersonal mood and the rhymeless scheme.) Take a look:
Pennies in a stream / Falling leaves, a sycamore / Autumn in Vermont.
Gentle finger waves / Ski trails down a mountainside / Snowlight in Vermont.
Evening summer breeze / Warbling of a meadowlark / Moonlight in Vermont.
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Two readers wrote separately about the peculiar way TypePad explains its comment-verification challenge:
This test is used to prevent automated robots from posting comments.
As if there's some other kind of robots.
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There are scare quotes and shout quotes and 40-year-old quotation marks, and now, thanks to Go Fug Yourself, we have quotation marks of scorn.
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I wanted to schedule a bulky-waste curbside pickup, so I dug out the Waste Management brochure to find the phone number. On the mailing-label side was this text:
Well worth the effort,
Clutter-Free
Your World!
"Clutter-free" is a verb? Or maybe Yoda-like this sentence is--a grammatical inversion that's meant to be read "Clutter-free: your world!" No, I didn't think so.
I'd have used "declutter" myself; it's a more clutter-free construction. But perhaps poor old Waste Management is just trying to sound like the cool kids, with their "thumb this up!" and their "stumble it!" and all the other quirky verbifications. (Hat tip to Mr. Verb for his defense of the latter two expressions. I'm OK with them, too, because they're really brand extensions. But "clutter-free this"? Nope.)
The verb "clutter-free" will not be showing up in dictionaries soon, I suppose, but it has logic. Working backward from "free your world" -- and "free" does work as a transitive verb -- it's not illogical to qualify the verb. In this case, they're moving the qualification "[of clutter]" from a prepositional phrase to a verb prefix.
Not long ago we ran across "to customer-ready" (http://evolvingenglish.blogspot.com/2006/02/super-exciting-verbing.html), which seems to follow a similar pattern.
If I had better Google chops and/or was more attentive, I bet I could come up with other similar examples.
Posted by: mike | June 27, 2008 at 01:50 PM
@Mike: Interesting points. But isn't the operative word "clutter" rather than "free"? You're not "freeing" your world, you're ridding it of clutter.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | June 27, 2008 at 02:14 PM
If something has no clutter, it is uncluttered. So shouldn't the verb be 'unclutter' rather than 'declutter'?
Posted by: JD | June 28, 2008 at 09:24 AM
Aha. Well, I guess it's in what the emphasis is. I was reading it as "free yourself of clutter," which worked ok for me. Making the transformation then to "clutter-free yourself" is, of course, the unusual twist.
@JD -- "de-", "un-", they seem pretty closely related You can detangle your hair or untangle a rope, which seem like the same thing. Except that people tend not to swap these (e.g. untangle hair, detangle a rope). Currently, "declutter" gets about 1.5 million hits on Google, whereas "unclutter" gets about 225,000. According to RHD, the "de-" prefix indicates (among other things) "removal, separation, negation, reversal." The "un-" prefix more generically means negative or opposite. That would seem to make the "de-" prefix a more, dunno, active prefix.
Posted by: mike | June 28, 2008 at 10:24 AM
@JD: Mike took the words right out of my mouth. You might say he de-worded me.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | June 28, 2008 at 10:56 AM