Cover Art Controversy!

January 30, 2009, 8:46 am

I guess that there is a dearth of library stock photos. Take a look at the cover of my book and then at Rachel Singer Gordon's new book :

Interesting huh? Different publishers, but similar designs, yes? Rachel has many more subscribers than I do, so perhaps a few people will mistakenly purchase my book instead. Hmmm, I wonder if maybe Lauren Pressley's new book will share our same cover art too?

Thanks to a loyal reader for discovering this. I promise that I have not given up on DBL .

In other cover art news. A forthcoming book by Emory librarians features the Georgia Tech Library on the cover. The West Commons is nice and all, but I would have gone with the East Commons because it looks more modern. I have seen C. Forrest present before and he is pretty good, so I am sure that his book will be interesting as well. See, put Tech on the cover and I'll sell for you.

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JennieD

On the positive side, I do like that stock image. I’m going to go look for it to use in some local promotions …
Ernest B.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
http://profile.typepad.com/bells steven bell

I can’t believe you blogged this.
But interesting to see them side by side.
flotsam

Hear, hear.
greensubmarine

I certainly agree that “but” works well in the way you’ve outlined, and perhaps that merits reconsidering the rule.

However, it’s important in any discussion of this issue to observe that the language has adapted ways to fill the need you describe without breaking the rule.
sand6432

Some might argue that one could use “However” instead at the beginning of a sentence. But I happen to agree with your argument here.—Sandy Thatcher

ugahistory

Yikes–no! “However” at the beginning of a sentence (except when used in the meaning of “which ever way”) sounds awful. And it’s certainly no substitute for “but” in this usage–it lacks the elegant simplicity and punch of “but” and it sounds pedantic and artificial. No one other than a satirical professor character in a TV series would ever begin a spoken sentence with “however.” So why write that way? “However, the train did not come” belongs to the same category of stilted, artificially formalized sentence construction as “It was in 1910 that he was born.”

academicwanderer

Great points, and I agree, but …

The title of this section wistfully reminds me of the old gossip journal for academics, Lingua Franca.
dottyeyes

Somehow this reminds me of the hair conditioner I use: Apply. Let sit for two minutes. Rinse. Why the two minutes? Did they actually test this? One minute doesn’t work? Three is too many? Sometimes, I picture people sitting in an ad room, just making stuff up, and then it gets etched into our collective rulebook.

dank48

Some “rules” were in effect made up about like that. “Split infinitives,” for instance. After all, infinitives can’t be split in Latin, so “obviously, since English grammar is based on Latin grammar, it’s wrong to cheerfully separate one part of an English infinitive from the other . . .” Nuts. Too many “rules,” such as not splitting infinitives, no prepositions at the end of the sentence, no conjunctions at the start of the sentence, et cetera ad infinitum are just synthetic, prescriptive made-up B.S. that fossilize some pedant’s prejudices, including the notion that language is or should be static.
But it should be noted that Lincoln began not just a sentence but a paragraph with “But,” and quite effectively too, and Shakespeare–for whatever reason–is breaking two “rules” in that line: I wonder why he wrote “thy eternal summer” rather than “thine eternal summer,” as the sound would ordinarily require. It’s not a typo; every source I checked has “thy” not “thine.” I’m sure it’s something he never worried about.

22199474

     To emphasize what Professor Metcalf said about “eight glasses a day,” here’s a brief item that we ran three years ago in “Penn Medicine,” which I edit:

Eight Glasses of Water? Not So Fast

            Many of us “know” that we should be drinking eight glasses of water a day. All that water, we have been told, would bring benefits, such as helping flush toxins from the body; suppressing appetite; improving our skin; and reducing headaches. In popular lore, water seemed only slightly less effective than an apple a day in keeping the doctor away.
            But Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., a professor of medicine in the renal, electrolyte, and hypertension division, and Dan Negoianu, M.D., a research fellow in the division, have done research that basically throws water on these beliefs. In a widely publicized editorial in The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, they noted “multiple web sites warning health-conscious readers they must drink eight glasses of 8 oz/d to remove dangerous ‘poisons.” While acknowledging that “individuals in hot, dry climates” have an increased need for water, they ask whether “average, healthy individuals living in a temperate climate” need the extra water. They conclude: there is no scientific evidence that they do. In most cases, the benefits are told in “wives’ tales” or “urban myths.”
            In fact, as Goldfarb told NPR in April, “drinking large amounts of water surprisingly tends to reduce the kidney’s ability to function as a filter. It’s a subtle decline, but definite.”
            In most cases, Goldfarb and Negoianu argue, there is no evidence of a lack of benefit, either.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Antsy-Kuhnwisse/100002159499682 Antsy Kuhnwisse

If I ever tried to drink 64 oz of water in one day, I think it would kill me. Been pretty healthy for 50+ years drinking about 1/8 of that amount.

As for the rules: the split infinitive and preposition-at-the-end rules are silly, all right, but I try to observe them, just in case my writing is received by a stickler. I see the point of the conjunction-at-the-beginning rule — breaking it recklessly and repeatedly can be awful — but I agree that there are times when violating it can be just the right thing to do.
panhandle

Eight glass of water! I thought they said, “Beer.”

QuiHai

“But it’s no big deal, even if we tangle up them..” Point taken, but if this had been “… tangle them up,” the sentence would have ended with an adverb, not a preposition.

I once used a stylebook that required prepositions of up to three letters to be lower case in book titles. Noting that the rule didn’t mention adverbs, I dutifully capitalized the “up” in “Growing Up Brady.” Lowercasing the “up” would have implied that the book was the story of some vine or mold that ever so slowly grew up a Brady.
11182967

A foolish rule of grammar nicely rebutted.
sllibrary

guy’s absurd. start with a but. Yah, right. Point is, using such things, when you are skilled in language & writing, is of course with nearly everything doable & permissible, but to suggest to the noob, who has no clue, to start off with but & and, is just nuts. Such folks have enough on their plate trying to get their thoughts in gear on paper, attempting to communicate with others, let alone thwarting simple convention. Rules aid the ignorant, like the lines on the pavement driving – you can cross them, to your peril.
ramanujam

I remember what Winston Churchill said about the insistence that a sentence should not end with a preposition: ‘This is a tendency up with which I cannot put.’
ramanujam

As a professor of English and as a writer, I have something more to say on the interesting subject Allan Metcalf has dealt with. ‘The King’s English’ is one of my favourite books. Written by H W Fowler and his younger brother, F G Fowler, and published in 1906, this epoch-making book has enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention in the past 105 years. “It took the world by storm”, said ‘The Times’ about the book, while paying tribute to H W Fowler on the occasion of his death. This century-old book, which made Fowler a household name in all English-speaking countries, still makes stimulating reading.

A few weeks ago, I had occasion to thumb again the yellowing pages of the musty, old copy of ‘The King’s English’ in my college library. The purpose was to pick up some Fowlerian rules for use in a guest-lecture I was expected to give. The book was as good a read as it had always been on earlier occasions, but I was not sure whether I could use the Fowler brothers’ hand-me-downs in my lecture. I, therefore, turned to another favourite, Alan Warner’s ‘A Short Guide to English Style,’ and found it a better fit.

Why did the Fowlerian precepts disappoint me? I will answer the question with reference to
four of the Fowler brothers’ “practical rules in the domain of vocabulary”.

“Prefer the concrete word to the abstract” is one of the precepts. On the face of it, it is sound advice because abstract words are, after all, enemies of precise expression. But not quite sound, if you examine it carefully. We often talk about our – and other people’s – attitudes and feelings. We will not be able to talk about them, if we decide to use only concrete words for joy and sorrow and love and anger.

“Prefer the single word to the circumlocution”, say the Fowler brothers. ”No” is certainly preferable to the pedantic “The answer is in the negative.” But there are situations in which “No” would be considered blunt and therefore impolite. Whether one should use the single word or the periphrasis depends on the context or the occasion.

“Prefer the short word to the long” is the third rule. I do like short words, but, as a writer, I have often found long words more effective than short words in the expression of emotional ideas. ”Stupendous” and “magnificent” are much more powerful than “large” and “grand”.

The last rule is: “Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.” In other words, avoid Latin derivations where native words can serve the purpose. It is a lame-duck rule, as Michael Beresford points out in his ‘Modern English’. Even at the time of publication of ‘The King’s English’, the distinction between the Anglo-Saxon element and the Latin element had ceased to be of any importance. And now, in the context of what David Crystal calls “World Englishes”, the cry for Saxon English or the pedigree of English words would only be a voice in the wilderness.

“Break any of those rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”, said George Orwell, author of ‘Animal Farm,’ four decades later. He was a very sensible man.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520901360 Gene Callahan

“We often talk about our – and other people’s – attitudes and feelings.
We will not be able to talk about them, if we decide to use only
concrete words for joy and sorrow and love and anger.”

I think you have confused “material” and “non-material” for “concrete” and “abstract.”
BullHubbard

Does anyone still seriously consider such choices “rules”?
mjcurry

I was excited to see a blog called Lingua Franca but disappointed that so far it seems to consist of the same old same old nitpicky topics that drove me away from the English department and my career as an editor. How about something on World Englishes and the pressures of globalization? how about getting Jan Blommaert to be one of the bloggers–that would be a fresh viewpoint indeed.
11117994

Most of our grammar problems are self-inflicted. The admonition not to start sentences with “But” or “And” arises because we insist that those words are conjunctions, and they may well be–when used as conjunctions. But at the beginnings of sentences, they are adverbs (“conjunctive adverbs” if you’re a polysyllabic grammarian who can’t quite let go).
Grammar is at least as much descriptive of how we communicate in words as it is prescriptive. If we turned our teaching of grammar to the reality of four basic grammatical functions–two structural (verbs and nouns) and two decorative (adjectives and adverbs)–we might get somewhere with our students. Instead, we insist on the separate existence of such creatures as infinitives, gerunds, and their phrase variants, not to mention substantives and subject or object clauses (all nouns); and articles, appositives, participles, and phrases and clauses modifying nouns (all adjectives).
We tell our student that a “part of speech” is what something looks like, rather than what function it’s performing in a sentence. Thus, a noun is “a person, place, or thing,” or for the pickier, “the name of a person, place or thing.” But I suspect that anyone reading this could take any person, place, or thing and turn it into a verb or an adjective. Then again, I might be just toying with you.

Andy Starkis