May 25, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Following up on my colleague Ben Yagoda’s post on the latest battle in the –iptivist language wars, I’d like to play a game, or take a survey—call it what you will. Below is a fairly random selection of sentences from The New York Times, a publication chosen mostly because I read it every day. (Not out of elitism, but because I live not far from New York, and because it contains some of the best newspaper writing in the country.) Because these sentences were published in one of the “registers” to which Ben referred, I suspect they rub some folks the wrong way. But maybe not. Here they are, with various options for your response:
1 = This sentence commits an egregious grammatical, vocabulary, or syntactical blunder, and the copy editor should be chastised if not fired.
2 = This sentence contains a grammatical, vocabulary, or syntactical error that is a symptom of our…
Read More
May 16, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
I discovered this intriguing comment in the readers’ responses to my colleague Geoffrey Pullum’s brief note in Language Log, responding in its own way to the news from Slate that a significant number of Swedes have been attempting to get the neologism hen accepted as an alternative for han and hon, or he and she.
The debate on this subject seems endless and traverses gender references in languages as diverse as French and Mandarin. As I am neither a linguist nor versed in non-European languages, I won’t attempt a summary of the discussion. Suffice to say that not only since the advent of 20th century feminism, but also since medieval times, usage of gender-neutral pronoun alternatives have been both advanced and, in some cases, put into relatively widespread use.
The fuss over hen has to do, not with its acceptance as an “in-between” pronoun, similar to the oft-discussed …
Read More
May 7, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Spending a couple of weeks in Pakistan, especially in areas near to the tribal belt and the Khyber Pass toward Afghanistan, is bound to be enlightening at this moment in history. I was in Lahore and Peshawar for two weeks in April, researching background material for a novel, and learned more about disparities in culture than years of reading books had taught me. Only a handful of these insights bear directly on language, but I’ll take advantage of this post to note them in brief.
•Linguae Francae. The national language of Pakistan is Urdu, a mish-mash of Hindi and local dialects, and nearly everyone speaks it. In Lahore, they also speak Punjabi, which is related to Urdu but not the same, and they’ll often switch between one and the other. Educated classes also read and write English, but the driver who took me to all my appointments in Lahore spoke and wrote solely Urdu. Yet…
Read More
May 3, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
A new parlor game has emerged thanks to Ben Greenman and his colleagues at The New Yorker, who recently initiated a Twitter-based game called “Questioningly.” They began by asking people to suggest a word that might be eliminated from the English language, on the theory that we have (at least) one word too many. The results of their contest were hilarious, not only because of the variety of reasons for nixing a word—triteness, political correctness, ugly sound, superfluity, misuse, sledgehammer use, arrogance, and so on—but because readers were so vehement about the need to execute a word. One proposed “God,” “because he doesn’t exist”; another “he,” to “realize how women have felt these past 20,000 years.” Through a link to Ben Zimmer’s post on a similar topic, I learned that there’s a Facebook group called “I HATE the word MOIST!” where you can go to…
Read More
April 24, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Most people I know don’t want to like Stanley Fish. They cite with manufactured displeasure his unctuous blog post on Sarah Palin, as if his praise of her autobiography were the greatest betrayal of liberal values since David Mamet came out as a conservative. But I fell in love with form in seventh grade, when I diagrammed a sentence from Silas Marner that covered four blackboards and came out perfect. And so I avidly followed Fish’s New York Times series on using syntax, rather than self-expression, to teach writing. I broke with several rhet-comp friends over his chastisement of their free-writing practices. I can fill your ears with the ways my beloved Blake sentence, “For we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love,” works through eye-rhyme, alliteration, aphorismus, aposeipesis, hypallage, and transposition—not to mention iambic…
Read More
April 20, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
It was in Robert MacNeil’s TV series The Story of English that I first heard the rumor of Shakespearean English being alive and well on certain islands off the coast of the southeastern United States. MacNeil went there, as I recall, and several locals declaimed in the Bard’s language, all of them sounding fairly colorful and convincing—and a whole lot less respectable than the upper-class accents we had cultivated for my high-school production of The Taming of the Shrew.
Now the estimable British Library has released a set of scenes and speeches on CD that claim to be performed as Shakespeare would have intended. How do they know? To learn the answer, I had to work my way past the clips from the CD release that can be found on the Web or downloaded from the British Library—for instance, this snippet from Macbeth.
To me, this audio sounds, first, like someone whose jaw has …
Read More
April 11, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Constance Hale, author of Sin and Syntax, has been running a series of columns in The New York Times whose simplicity boggles the mind. I agree with everything she writes, though some might not. Yet needing to effect a transition with “Switching to the predicate, remember that it is everything that is not the subject” or “When a sentence lacks one of its two essential parts, it is called a sentence fragment” may reveal something about the Times’ readership.
More interesting than Ms. Hale’s attempt to enliven what used to be sixth-grade lessons in old-fashioned syntax are the readers’ responses, which manifest the pitfalls of straining to make words work. In her second column, for instance, Ms. Hale focuses on nouns, warning that “novice writers goo up descriptions with a lot of lush adjectives, rather than a few precise nouns.” She then assigns her readers the task…
Read More
April 2, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Cartoon by Dave Walker
I don’t usually run screaming from master classes in writing and publishing. But I came pretty darn close last month when the publicist Michele Karlsberg launched into a blizzard of suggestions for authors, illustrators, and pretty much anyone who has a product for which they seek consumers.
“You should post four times a day,” she said. “The hours with the highest traffic on Facebook are 9-10 a.m., around noon, around 3 p.m., and mid-evening, around 8 or 9 p.m. The life of a post is maximum three hours. Be aware of that. And you can’t just be putting your book out there all the time. People will ignore that. You need to start a conversation. Like, ‘Tennessee Williams? Discuss.’ People love that.”
From that nugget, Ms. Karlsberg went on to discuss the…
Read More
March 29, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
March 18: I am sitting in the Charlotte airport, which seems to be my home away from home these days, and I’ve just had a tiny moment that left me, as the French say, bouleversée. Traversing the moving walkways and mottled industrial carpet from Concourse C to Concourse B, I noted how the temperature of the air increased as I turned from the high-ceilinged atrium onto the more crowded concourse, and it occurred to me that most of the heat was being generated by the hundreds of warm-blooded creatures who were hurrying from one gate to the next. How remarkable, I thought, that each one of us in this impersonal space is a sentient creature; and the next thought hurtling my way was that our sentience was manifest primarily in language. My dog, for instance, is sentient. And my dog’s experience of this space would differ from mine in many, many ways—but mostly because of language.
OK,…
Read More
March 20, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
The Bard is rolling in his grave—with laughter, we hope, but a sad, ironic sort of laughter. Project Rose, the effort by for-profit colleges to rebrand their institutions by changing “call center” to “enrollment-assistance center” and “write some business” to “accept applications” turns Shakespeare’s aphorism on its head. The intrinsic nature of a thing, he was suggesting in Romeo & Juliet, is unchanged by its label. For-profit colleges are betting that their target constituency is more like the Capulets and Montagues—regardless of your moral fiber, if you’ve got the right name and speak the right language, they’ll accept you as a member of the clan.
Or—worse—the Project Rose people may be assuming that clan membership comprises nothing more than the right terms. Claim that you’re a rose often enough and poof! You’re a rose. Long ago, I edited a…
Read More
Follow Lingua Franca through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE