June 11, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is telling audiences like the one at the Hay Literary Festival that Google will be changing our spelling habits. This development, he predicts, will be all to the good for the English language—not because we will start spelling with as iwth, but because we will drop all those irritating, unnecessary silent letters cluttering our orthography.
Maybe, maybe not. I’m no prognosticator. What interested me about Professor Crystal’s forecast was not so much the observation that commonly misspelled words receive an autocorrect from Google’s search engine, but rather his first example of a spelling ripe for change: rhubarb. My partner is Canadian, and as we were on a long drive, I me…
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June 7, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
As usually happens when anyone in the academy takes seriously the kinds of communication that happen outside the academy, John McWhorter’s recent TED talk on texting as a new language has prompted a storm of controversy and a rush to the barricades. On the one hand, the promoters of new expressions, code-switching, and the democratization of language; on the other, the defenders of clear, concise prose written in standard English, on which the effects of texting become clear as soon as a student writes “1000s of yrs ago” or puts three exclamation points together in an academic paper.
As a novelist and nonlinguist, I had a slightly different reaction to McWhorter’s presentation. It drove me back to fiction. “Texting is fingered speech,” McWhorter said at one point. “Now we can write the way we talk.” Thus emerges the argument for texting, not just as a handy way of…
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May 29, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that the United States Board on Geographic Names has clamped down on the efforts of citizens in Thurman, N.Y., to name a nearby mountain Jimmy’s Peak. They[’]ve been removing (in what, misheard, might sound like a different form of mutilation) “the genitive apostrophe and the ‘s’” since 1890, after all, though “the Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.”
I was surprised, however, to discover that there are warring groups devoted on the one hand to the apostrophe, genitive or otherwise, and on the other to its defeat. Of course, the apostrophe hasn[’]t been around all that long—only since the 16th or 17th century, depending on its…
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May 20, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Hundreds of readers opened their New York 
Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the terrific British novelist Kate Atkinson. This book is Life After Life by the terrific American novelist Jill McCorkle. A galumphing typo by the compiler of the table of contents at NYTBR? Nope. There’s the review, glowing about McCorkle’s book much as the reviewer of Atkinson’s book had glowed a mere two weeks earlier.
You cannot copyright a title, and good thing too. Otherwise, the dozen iterations of Forever that have appeared in print in the last two years alone (romance, fantasy, werewolves, YA—name your own genre) would have to resort to the thesaurus for Evermore, Ever and Anon, Till Hell Freezes Over, Semper Eadem. But although McCorkle’s and Atkinson’s publishers are…
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May 16, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Quickly, now, without checking any dictionaries or usage guides: which of the following expressions is original, standard usage?
- Once and awhile
- Set and stone
- Try and get
- Spit and image
- All and all
- Hand and hand
- Tongue and cheek
I’ve run into all of these recently, mostly in student papers, but also in published work. So many of our habitual expressions have lost their connection to the original meaning that students—and sometimes professional writers—set them down as they sound without regard to whatever sense they might make. Given the aural similarity of and, in, and -ing, it’s no surprise that malapropisms like in this day in age crop up—for how often do we actually think about something being common in this day and also in this age, or era? And why would we?
If we think carefully or have background knowledge, of course, we can and do make some sense…
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May 7, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
We may be seeing the death spasms of lol, and few will mourn its passing. Emerging a couple of decades ago as an initialism for laugh[ing] out loud, it suffered misuse through most of its brief life by well-meaning parental units who construed it as lots of love. Since the millennium it has devolved through irony to sarcasm until it arrived, as Katie Hearney at Buzzfeed points out, at meaninglessness.
What’s brought lol into prominence recently is its appearance in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s e-communications, in situations where the supposed meaning of the term renders the accused bomber eerily heartless: Lol those people are cooked and the like. As it turns out, Tsarnaev was most likely referring, not to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, but to members of Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals; and the word cooked here most likely means “crazy” or “high from…
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May 3, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
As we approach the annual rites, the degree of dudgeon rises again. Obama may say it; Barbara Walters may say it; our beloved children, on whom we have showered more than half our income annually over four years of university education, may crow it, but we as a nation of tut-tutters get the heebie-jeebies when we hear it: She graduated college. “I immediately went to the bathroom to be sick,” wrote one online commenter about hearing the term on a news broadcast. Another suggested that one can graduate college only by measuring it out as portions, as in the OED’s 1834 example, “Graduate that tangent, and place the crest of the traverse on a parallel plane ten feet above it.”
True, that august reference tool does not use the verb “to graduate” transitively except as the obverse of the usage to which the tut-tutters object. That is, Oxford can graduate you, and you can be…
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April 22, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Once again, with the marathon bombings in Boston, we heard a term that didn’t exist when I was growing up: first responder. The blogosphere hums with disdain for coinages of the last 50 years, so I’d like to take a moment, in the midst of our grief and bewilderment at the bombings themselves, to celebrate this one.
A first responder, as we all vaguely know by now, is someone with a degree of training who arrives first on the scene of a disaster. These people might be medical personnel trained in emergency management, firefighters, law enforcement officers, bodyguards, lifeguards, and so on. In one sense, the term first responder is handy simply because it lumps all these people together and doesn’t rely on initials. But more to the point, it both designates what they really do—respond first—and suggests a level of preparedness that none of the job descriptions otherwise…
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April 15, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
When you’re preparing your taxes, you have to get your laughs where you can. I use an online filing tool that has saved my sanity, but it is—like all such programs—one size fits all. When it comes to the income other than my salary, I have picked the category “999999,” which is everything that is not categorizable as food service, freight hauling, and so on, and have described the service for which I am being paid as “writing.” It is, after all, what I do when I’m not teaching, unless you want to list “reading,” which of course figures into the activity in a big way (both reading aloud, as in “giving a reading,” and reading silently, of which the writing is a sort of consequence) but which would probably get me audited.
Being user-friendly, my tax-prep program asks me a series of questions for which my listed activity, like an entry in Mad Libs, provides the…
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April 12, 2013, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
I hadn’t meant to follow up on my homophone post, but this week’s New Yorker has inspired me. First, let’s get our terms straight. Several commenters referred to the words I listed (peek/peak, maze/maize, census/senses, etc.) as homonyms. But although a homonym—same spelling, different meaning (bark/bark, stalk/stalk, etc.) is a type of homophone—words that sound alike but mean different things—the reverse is not necessarily so. A homonym is a subset, if you will, of a homophone; and, delving deeper, we’ll find it has its own subset, listed by some commenters as contronyms but also known as auto-antonyms, autantonyms, or contranyms: words spelled the same but with opposing meanings.
Whatever you call them, contronyms are fun to list and to research. How is it, for instance, that sanction came to mean both reward and punishment? It derives from the Latin sanctio, for law …
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