July 31, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
At least one front-page story in Sunday’s edition of the Jacksonville, Ill., Journal-Courier captured my attention. It began:
“At least one Jacksonville citizen and the city’s police chief have a difference of opinion over how complaints against police officers should be handled.”
It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen “at least one.” You’re writing against deadline, and you hear that somebody did something. If somebody did, maybe somebody else did too. So to be safe, you make it:
“At least one victim of the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre has indicated he intends to sue, claiming that the theater failed to adequately protect its audience.” (ABC TV News, July 25)
“There appeared to be several emotional people and at one point, at least one officer was seen firing what appeared to be pellets into the pavement that left marks on the surface in an effort to…
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July 30, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
This past week’s New Yorker featured an article by Jack Hitt on the accomplishments of forensic linguists like Robert Leonard of Hofstra University, whose expertise about language use has brought convictions for accused killers and settlements in tangled cases about libel and copyright. I found the article fascinating, particularly in its report of a “schism” in the world of forensic linguistics. Who doesn’t love a good internecine quarrel? But I was caught off-guard by my own response to the careful discussion of how Leonard and others arrive at their conclusions.
I spend, after all, a good chunk of my day at the keyboard. Like most writers, I take some pride in what we variously call style or voice. I like to think that I know what elements constitute my style—a fondness for parataxis; a hunger for the periodic sentence; a desire to vary sentence length in any given…
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July 27, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Today’s riddle:
What happens to a noun when it tries to be an adjective?
It doesn’t count.
That’s the shocking result of taking a noun and putting it in front of another noun, so that it takes on the humble role of an adjective.
In its natural habitat, the noun rules. It is the monarch, the head of state of the noun phrase. Behold there the noun in its glory, surrounded by unlimited dependents—determiners, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, even entire subordinate clauses.
But sometimes one of the dependents is another noun, and for the dependent noun it’s a different story. It assumes its subordinate place right before the head noun, behaving like an adjective but not looking like one.
Take for example the noun phrase “a smart puzzle book.” The procession of modifiers leading to the head noun “book” includes an adjective and a noun.
That …
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July 26, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Since Cyrano ghosted those letters for Christian, we women have been susceptible to the well-wrought phrase. Its flip side, obviously, is the clumsy or offensive effort that works about as much romance as a proposal to tip cows. Recently I ran across the 21st-century single woman’s complaint regarding male correspondence in the ongoing blog The Well-Written Woman. In this case, of course, the suitor’s courtly phrasing comes not off the tip of a quill but from the taps of the keyboard and the emoticons blinking away on his screen.
Is it wrong, our fair blogger inquires, to eliminate suitors because of instant messages that are “grammatically jacked up, spelling errors a plenty, a huge lack of confidence in what’s being written, and a blatant lack of respect for proper punctuation. Is it wrong to eliminate someone from the pool because of this?” Her response, in her own caps: …
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July 25, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
Hans Christian Andersen, Belford, Clarke & Company, 1889, “Fairy Land”
This summer’s mid-Atlantic heat wave fired up the jetstream, which was pushed southward by warming Arctic conditions. This unleashed devastating downpours on Britain. In Edinburgh in July there were monsoons. I saw the driver of a double-decker bus advise the chauffeur of the queen’s magnificent maroon Bentley to turn back and take a different route to her majesty’s Edinburgh residence at Holyrood House Palace, because of deep flooding near the park. And as the rain bucketed down I noticed raindrops hitting the road so hard that they shattered and bounced back up in little ring patterns like tiny figures in white tutus dancing on the dark road surface.
You might think it unlikely that any language would have a single word meaning “visual…
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July 24, 2012, 12:01 am
By C.S. Giscombe
Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (courtesy of bluemountains-jamaica.net)
“a compound of the most heterogeneous description” –F.G. Cassidy
I set out for the International Maroon Conference by shouldering my backpack and walking across Berkeley to the BART station and then there I was on the train to SFO sitting catty-corner from a woman my age who also had a pack. Mexico, she said. Jamaica, said I. She said, They’ll know you’re an American as soon as they see you. But I’d been before and replied—in what Lucy Ferriss has identified as the argot of our times—I’m good until I open my mouth.
The Maroons were slaves who, having seen no future in slavery, took to the hills and swamps from which they fought the British to a standstill in the 17th and 18th centuries. (OED: “Hist. Europe in Ann. Reg. (1796) 60/1…
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July 23, 2012, 12:01 am
By Ben Yagoda
White vans, with men, in Oxford
The ABC television network has announced that in 2013 it will air a sitcom called Family Tools. Previously, the show was called Comeback Jack; before that it was called Red Van Man, and before that, it was called White Van Man. And therein lies a tale.
Like many American comedies, including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and The Office, this one took its premise from a British original, White Van Man. If you are American, that phrase probably means nothing to you. And neither does the much older expression from which it sprang, “man with a van.”
I myself first became aware of the latter when I got an e-mail from a BBC correspondent, Michael Wendling, who was interested in Not One-Off Britishisms, the blog I conduct about British expressions that have become popular in the …
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July 20, 2012, 12:01 am
By William Germano
It wasn’t just the Sarah Palin thing. If you’ve been listening, America’s worried about our 49th state’s mental health.
It’s been a concern for a number of years now. You hear it on street corners and in subways. He’s what you might call a terrible human being, nome sane? You believe this weather, nome sane? Man, what I wouldn’t give right now for seats to the playoffs – owner’s box!—nome sane? People say all sort of things they want you to pay attention to, and then punctuate it with a special concern for the sanity of Alaskans. Nome sane?
Sure, what they’re really saying—or sayin’—is “Know-what-I’m-saying?,” which took over from “Know what I mean?,” a luxurious four-syllabler we don’t have time for anymore. We don’t want to end a sentence with Do you understand?, which it’s hard to make not sound angry or patronizing, and which…
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July 19, 2012, 12:01 am
By Ben Yagoda
In the New York Times, this man is known as "Mr. Pop"
A few weeks ago, Bob Diamond, the ousted chief of Barclays, uttered the following in front of House of Commons, which was investigating his bank’s activities:
- “John, we have been through this a number of times.”
- “The investigation—what I would want to point out to you is this—Jesse, can I finish?”
- “It’s a very, very pressurized situation, Michael.”
- “So, you know, it’s interesting, Teresa.”
“John,” “Jesse,” and “Michael” are all members of Parliament. So is Teresa Pearce, who subsequently appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and told the host Robert Siegel: “I was surprised that he continually addressed us by our first name, especially as I’ve only ever met him once before and that was in a formal setting. That was …
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July 18, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Health-care T-shirt, courtesy storebarackobama.com
It’s salutary to make a mistake. Not enjoyable, but salutary.
If you get something right, that’s that. But if you get something wrong, people take action to set you straight. And you learn more than you would if you were right.
I was wrong about something the other day: BFD. That’s an abbreviation for “Big … deal,” with a familiar four-letter word in the middle as an intensifier.
BFD made it into the news recently with a T shirt for the Obama campaign reading:
HEALTH
REFORM
STILL A
BFD
OBAMA – BIDEN
And that’s when a reporter for Slate phoned to ask my opinion on the durability of the initialism BFD. I hadn’t noticed it, and I hadn’t done any research or even thought about it before the reporter asked. Shooting from the hip, and th…
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