Category Archives: Nit-picking

BBC English: a flawed quiz – the questionable question

fforfail

I wrote in yesterday’s post about the BBC’s English quiz, which wasn’t up to scratch in my book. My score was docked because of my answer to question number 3, concerning a certain androgynous sibling called Hilary, which went as follows:

“Read this sentence carefully. “I’d like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn’t, and to my only other sibling, Hilary.” Which of the following is correct?

1) Hilary is male

2) Hilary is female

3) It’s impossible to tell from the context”

Well, it’s not just impossible to tell from the context, but the sentence itself doesn’t make sense. Given the way it’s punctuated, it states pretty clearly that the speaker has more than one sister (“my sister Clara” means that there is another sister; “my sister, Clara” would have identified Clara as the only sister) and more than one brother (“Benedict, my brother who doesn’t” identifies Benedict as the only one of two or more brothers who doesn’t live in Madrid). So the speaker is kidding himself if he thinks he has only one other sibling: it just doesn’t follow logically. Either that, or he doesn’t understand how to punctuate.

And it seems that I’m not the only one who found fault with the quiz, which was doling out 9/10s by the dozen to undeserving souls. And it wasn’t just question 3 that raised eyebrows and tempers. The internet lit up with confusion and outrage; linguist Peter Harvey had a field-day with the quiz on his blog; and there was a lot of healthy discussion among Facebook fist-shakers who felt similarly wronged.

The moral of the story seems to be this: check your own proficiency before testing others’ …

Mrs. Thatcher or Lady Thatcher?

BaronessThatcher

Whatever opinions we might hold about the former British Prime Minister who died this morning (and she probably was one of the most divisive prime ministers in living memory), it seems only fair that she should be referred to appropriately, according to the title that was conferred on her. In 1992, Margaret Thatcher was granted a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire.

This morning, the two most influential U.S. newspapers, reporting on Thatcher’s death, are calling her simply “Mrs. Thatcher”. The Wall Street Journal writes: “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother, Baroness Thatcher, died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher‘s spokesman, Timothy Bell. She was 87.” It seems extraordinary that the newspaper’s house style apparently prescribes the removal of honorary or conferred titles, even in the very same sentence that the title itself is quoted by her official spokesman. The New York Times clearly has a similar editorial policy: “Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, ‘in most respects, is uncontested by the Blair government,’ Mr. Young, her biographer, said in a 1999 interview.” This must be a new policy on the part of the New York Times, since its 2010 review of composer Andrew Lloyd Weber’s new musical in London referred to him appropriately, acknowledging the knighthood that was bestowed on him in the same year that Thatcher was granted her peerage: “Lord Lloyd-Webber’s last international smash was, in fact, the first “Phantom”.”

The English newspapers, when not referring to the Iron Lady just by her last name, respectfully use her correct title, which is either ‘Lady’ or ‘Baroness’:

“The first woman elected to lead a major western state, Lady Thatcher, as she became after the longest premiership since 1827, served 11 unbroken years at No 10.,” The Guardian reports.  The BBC also recognizes her life peerage in its coverage: “Lady Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the first woman to hold the role.”

We can trust Debrett’s, “the modern authority on all matters etiquette, taste and achievement”, to confirm and clarify how a baroness should be referred to and addressed. Indeed, its entry on baronesses ends with the example of Lady Thatcher herself:

“At present all peeresses in their own right are either countesses or baronesses. In the peerage of Scotland, the term Lady (ie Lady of Parliament) is the legal term of the fifth grade of peerage because the term “Baroness” is used in Scotland in a feudal sense relating to land tenure.

“A countess in her own right is addressed in the same way as an earl’s wife, but a baroness, whether hereditary or life, has the option of two alternatives, ‘Baroness’ or ‘Lady’.

“Since the Peerage Act 1963, and the growing numbers of female life peers, the use of the continental style of ‘Baroness’, both verbally and in writing, has become widespread. Most Baronesses in their own right, however, prefer to be styled ‘Lady’, and the same is true of a minority of Life Baronesses (for example Lady Thatcher).”

We’ll give The Queen the last word on this, as I’m sure she knows how to talk about a baroness. As a Buckingham Palace spokesman said this morning: “The Queen was sad to hear the news of the death of Baroness Thatcher.”

The verbal anochronisms of Mad Men

MadMenwhatever

Yes, Mad Men is fallible. “Whatever.” Can you imagine Don Draper saying that? In that valley-girl passive-aggressive kind of way? I can’t either. And I’ve no idea if he ever has done, in that way, since the Madison Avenue drama first graced our TV screens back in 2007. But there are a handful of writer-linguist-historians who almost certainly do know, and who would argue persuasively whether or not that particular use of that particular word would have been prevalent in the dialogue of early- to mid-sixties ad men. In this particular case, whatever as a slightly dismissive interjection probably isn’t, in fact, a complete anachronism in ’60s American English. It was in the script* of a 1965 episode of Bewitched, a popular TV sit-com whose lead male character, Darrin Stephens, also worked in a Madison Avenue advertising agency. (Imagine Stephens and Draper sipping martinis together at the bar, or Betty and Samantha twitching their noses over coffee…)

As the curtain goes up tonight on season 6 of Mad Men, I feel as giddy as everyone else that my nearly year-long wait is finally over. But I also felt the need to do a round-up of the last five years of articles and blog-posts that have nit-picked mercilessly through the series’ scripts, reveling in the discovery of verbal flaws and prochronisms** in a TV show that is known for its fanatical attention to historical detail and its retro-accuracy. Perhaps it’s a perverse case of finding the exception that proves the rule, or just an obsessive compulsion to analyze and understand every last detail of something that is loved and admired.

The linguist Ben Zimmer, the former “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine, leads the pack of Mad Men lingo-busters. Practically every article on the web examining the language of the series leads back to a writing or finding of Zimmer’s. Perhaps his most comprehensive and fascinating article on the subject, which he penned at the beginning of the fourth season in one of his last contributions to the New York Times Magazine, delved into the conscientiousness of the series’ scriptwriters and their fanatical attention to period detail. When it comes to a question of usage, Zimmer reported, the show’s research staff “consults the Oxford English Dictionary, slang guides and online databases to determine whether an expression is documented from the era and could have been plausibly uttered. ‘When in doubt,’ [series creator Matthew] Weiner said, ‘I don’t use it.’”  For his blog Visual Thesaurus, Zimmer quoted something Matthew Weiner told him during his interview for the New York Times piece. “‘I never want it to be wrong. … Any anachronisms that do occur are mistakes.'” Zimmer revealed in the article: “[Weiner] said he still regrets allowing the character Joan to say “The medium is the message” in the first season, four years before Marshall McLuhan introduced the dictum in print.”

According to Benjamin Schmidt, another linguist-historian whose treatises on the language of Mad Men are almost as numerous as Don Draper’s conquests, the series’ writing staff also run usage queries through the Google Books database to ensure period accuracy, as he reported in his round-up article on Mad Men anachronisms in The Atlantic last year. Schmidt, an intellectual historian (in both senses of those words), has his own blog, Prochronisms, that looks at historical changes in language by analyzing period  TV shows and movies, including Mad Men, using an algorithmic computer program that he himself devised. If you want to really geek out on the linguistic NGrams of Mad Men, read his blog post from April last year, when the series had just returned for its fifth season. Rather than identifying specific anachronistic vocabulary or expressions that hadn’t yet been coined or wouldn’t have been in usage in the 1960s, Schmidt takes a broader and more subtle look at patterns and frequencies of particular word combinations in that time setting. Take as an example the relative infrequency of the words “I need” in the ’60s: “To say ‘I need to’ so much is a surprisingly modern practice: books, television shows, and movies from the 1960s use it at least ten times less often, and many never use it all,” Schmidt explains in his Atlantic article.

In 2009, the linguist John McWhorter wrote a detailed and nuanced account in the New Republic of the series’ and the period’s language usage and patterns, focusing more on the socio-economic and contextual determiners of usage in terms of accent and articulation rather than on the usual subjects of vocabulary and idiom. “When Jennifer Crane gets up and takes her husband over the Drapers’ table saying “I want to” see how they are, crisply pronouncing want separately from to, it’s false,” McWhorter suggests. “That woman, even with her poise and aggressive social aspirations, would have said wanna just as we all do when we are not reading from text or laying down an answering machine message.”

These enlightening surveys highlight the very complex challenges faced by any scriptwriter aiming to replicate the language patterns of a bygone era. But interesting and erudite as they are, what we all really want to know is: where are the real bloopers? What words and expressions uttered by Mad Men‘s characters hadn’t yet been invented or entered the lexicon of the time? Considering the dialogue-heavy series has been on the air and under the microscope for five years, it’s impressive that only a handful of instances of actual verbal anachronisms (and even a few are arguable) have been identified; most were included in Vulture’s summary of Mad Men anachronisms published on Friday and are paraphrased below. (The lingo-buster in each case is in parentheses after the offending phrase.)

“The medium is the message.” (Various) Joan wouldn’t have known this phrase in 1960; it was a quote of media theorist Marshall McLuhan that was popularized in his 1964 treatise Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

“I’m in a very good place right now.” (McWhorter) Peggy said this in 1963, referring to her state of mind after smoking marijuana. “Its modern usage is metaphorical, having to do with spirit and development,” explains McWhorter, who says he first heard the phrase used by someone “of a rather New Age-y frame of mind” in 1994.

“1960, I am so over you.” (Zimmer) Joan said this in 1961, and Weiner has cited the 1948 Cole Porter song “So in Love” as proof of the viability of so being used as an intensifier at the time. Zimmer argues: “Scholars of semantics might disagree, seeing a nuance between Porter’s use of the adverb so, which quantifies the extent to which the character is in love, and the later Generation X-style spin on the word as an intensifier meaning ‘extremely’ or ‘completely’ without any comparison of relative degree.”

“I know you have to be on the same page as him.” (Zimmer) The OED traces the idiom “to be on the same page (as someone else)” to 1979. Its first known usage is in a  New York Times sports article from that year about the NFL: ‘It takes a long time for everybody to get on the same page as far as the rules are concerned.’

“The window for this apology is closing.” (Zimmer) The OED suggests that this type of figurative window is an extension of the aeronautical term launch window. Though launch window dates to the mid-’60s, the first known use of window as in “window of opportunity” or vulnerability comes from a 1979 congressional hearing.

“Awwa!” (linguist Neal Whitman, also a Visual Thesaurus contributor) Whitman pointed to Ben Yagoda’s 2007 article for Slate on interjections identifying “Awwa!” as “a 21st-century innovation.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

Mad Men has also been proved guilty of allowing anachronistic fonts and books to trespass on its properties. On his blog, designer Mark Simonson has identified several futuristic fonts spotted on the show, and Andrew Hearst devotes an entire post on his blog to the series’ closing credits, which are set in an ’80s typeface. Zimmer noticed an ’80s edition of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting on Lane Pryce’s shelves, and brought it to the world’s attention on his Visual Thesaurus blog back in 2009. Finally, George W. Bush speechwriter and RedState.com founder Joshua S. Trevino spotted another as-yet-unwritten set of books over Betty’s shoulder in season three: the Griffin’s “The Corps” series was written in 1986, 1987, and 1990 respectively.
~~~~~~~~~~~

* from IMDB:

“Samantha: Mother, there’s something I have to tell you.
Endora: Good morning, Derwood.
Samantha: Darrin.
Endora: All right, whatever.”

** Prochronism: a particular type of anachronism, in which an event, person or object is placed earlier than it actually occurred or came into existence, eg. a verbal expression that had not yet been coined

Live safe, think different, eat fresh, drive slow. Are we doing good?

thinkdifferent
eatfresh

 

driveslowchildren

livesafe

 

Ah – the flat adverb. There’s nothing quite like it to get temperatures raised and grammarians talking. Is an adverb with its tail shorn off ever really legitimate?

A quick primer: an adjective describes a noun or pronoun (black as in “the black dog”, happy as in “she was happy”), and an adverb — which often ends in “ly” —  describes a verb (erratically as in “he drove erratically”, happily as in “they danced happily”) or an adjective (“he was wonderfully peaceful”). There are some words, known as ‘flat adverbs’, that work legitimately in either role: hard can be both an adjective (“the ground was hard”) and an adverb (“he worked hard”); fast is another example (“her typing speed is fast”; “he drives too fast”). But there are certain adjectives — especially those that can be transformed into adverbs with the addition of “ly” (slow/slowly; fresh/freshly; healthy/healthily, safe/safely) — whose viability as adverbs when stripped of their two-letter suffix is debatable. Is it really OK to tell someone to “drive safe” or to “eat healthy”?

It might come as a surprise to learn that the flat adverb was much more common in middle English than it is now — especially when it came before an adjective. There are numerous historical literary and Biblical examples of the flat adverb: ‘the weather being excessive hot’; ‘extreme hot’; ‘the sea went dreadful high’ from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and “they were sore afraid” from Luke 2:9 are just a few. It was only when grammarians of the 18th century insisted on adding “ly” to the ends of adjectives to distinguish them as adverbs that the suffix gave the verb- and adjective-descriptors their own formal structural identity.

In an earlier Glossophilia post, “I’ll take that with a side of small words”, I pointed out what I see as an American English tendency to abbreviate or shorten words or phrases whenever a good opportunity presents itself, and I think the flat adverb is a good example of this. I really can’t imagine any of the so-called adverbs in the signs or ad slogans above being used or displayed in an English setting, even in the hip abbreviated lingo of today. And that’s not to suggest any kind of linguistic superiority or loftiness on the part of the Brits (they’re just as guilty of grocers’ apostrophes and other common clangers as everyone else in the English-speaking world). I just think they’re not programmed by their linguistic DNA to strip adverbs down flat the way Yanks do, even if this was the practice of their forebears. Go figure.

Pet Peeve Poll: Have your say

peevedqueen

 

There are three types of Glossophilia post that always seem to attract particular interest and attention.

The first is the topic of slang and colloquialisms — the more obscure, quaint, and rude the better. We all want to know where, when and why these strange little words and expressions found their way into the colorful world of our informal banter.

Next is the Great Trans-Atlantic Divide. It’s not the wide ocean that really separates us, nor the fact that we can’t agree on a common system of measurement, DVD-watching or which side of the road to drive on. No, what distinguishes the American from his British counterpart is what comes out of his mouth — and I’m not talking about accents. We speak differently, therefore we think differently. Discuss.

Finally, who doesn’t have a long laundry list of pet peeves when it comes to written and spoken English? No matter how linguistically lofty or proudly proletarian we are when it comes to our choice of words, we all love to prod and pick at those who, like, talk different than us or get on their haughty high horses; the language we all share is an endless and fascinating source of entertainment and amusement, especially when we’re identifying that which bugs and annoys us in other people’s prose.

My father and a couple of his friends (all notably British) have started a list of their favorite pet peeves; here are some of them below, with a few of my own thrown in. (Those marked with an asterisk are heard more in British than American English.)  Which of these, if any, annoys YOU most? Please add your thoughts and your own pet peeves in the comments section below.

 

“Overkill” expressions, which feel the need to introduce superfluous words unnecessarily for extra effect:

  • “Track record” – when “record” will do
  • “For free” – when “free” will do
  • “Kick start” – when “start” will do
  •  “Head off to” – instead of “go to”
  • “Each and every” – when “every” will do
  •  “At this moment in time” – when “now” will do

 

The pompous word choice:

  • “Boasts” –  a favorite expression of realtors: “The kitchen boasts a quarry tiled floor”
  • “Commences” – instead of “starts” or “begins”
  • “Concludes” – instead of “ends” or “finishes”
  •  “Deduce” –  instead of “understand” or “gather”
  • “Thus” – in informal speech or e-mails

 

The wrong word choice:

  • “Literally” used when “figuratively” is meant
  • “Coruscating” used to mean harshly critical (confusing it with excoriating), when it really means glittering
  • “Prevaricate” used as a synonym for “procrastinate”, when it really has the sense of deviating or diverting by deceit, not necessarily by delaying anything
  • “Alternate” instead of “alternative” – as in “Please suggest an alternate route to the airport”
  • “Presume” instead of “assume” – as in “I presume you’re taking an umbrella?”

 

Ugly misuse/abuse:

  • “You and I” used when you and I are the objects of the sentence: “He gave it to you and I”
  •  “Both” applied to two people about each other – as in “they both hated the other”  instead of “each hated the other” or “they hated each other”
  •  “Like” instead of “as if” or “as though” – as in “He felt like he was drowning”
  • “However” instead of “but” used halfway through a sentence – as in “She didn’t like him, however she went out with him anyway”
  • The difference between “which” and “that”, which isn’t that hard to understand!
  • “Whomever” used as a subject instead of “whoever” – as in “Whomever likes this apple can have it”
  • “In regards to” instead of “with regard to”, “in regard to”, or “as regards”. And why not use “about”, “concerning”, or “regarding”?
  • “Could of”/”should of” instead of “could have”/”should have” – as in “I could of easily beaten him in that match”
  • “I could care less” instead of “I couldN’T care less”
  • “Only” before the wrong word – as in “I can only talk to you for a minute” (ie. I can’t sing or dance to you)
  • “Sung” instead of “sang” in simple past – as in “I sung the hymn this morning”
  • “All of” when “all” will do – as in “I ate all of the cookies in the jar”
  • “To transition” (ie. “transition” used as a verb) – as in “We will transition over to a new platform”

 

Marketing/corporate BS:

  • As well as some of the pompous words above, prolific use of any of the following, often in combination: “synergy”, “leverage”, “first ever”, “going forward”, “transition” (used as a verb), “out-of-the-box thinking”, “content streamlining”, “strategize”, “bandwidth”, “result-driven”, “paradigm”, “multi-platform”, “functionality”, “empower[ment]”, “top-down”, “e-tailers”, “online assets”, etc.

 

Meaningless sentence- and gap-fillers (most of these are British-isms):

  • “Like” used for no apparent reason mid-sentence (or at the end of a sentence by Brits) – as in “She, like, went ballistic”, or * “Have you been to the shops, like?”
  • * “Basically” – as in “Basically I told him to go”
  • *  “I mean” / “You know” used for no apparent reason mid-sentence.  Peter Snow of Channel Four says it in every sentence.
  • *  “To be honest” or “to be honest with you” starting every sentence
  • * “If you like” ending every sentence
  • * “Do you know what I mean?”  used to fill gaps between sentences

Just …. ugh:

  • “First ever” (so awful it gets two entries in this post)
  • “Was like” meaning “I said” –  as in “I was like ‘You do!'”
  • “Thusly”
  •  “With respect, …” or “With all due respect, …”  before launching an attack on someone you think is an idiot

Update, during Superbowl lights-out:

  • “Change it up”
  • “Space” meaning an abstract area of thought, discussion or virtual territory – as in “You’re invading my personal space”

 

To premiere or not to premiere

Premier was adopted by the English language in the 18th century;  its sister, premiere, with its added feminine ‘e’ (and sometimes dressed up with her French accent – première), entered the English lexicon fashionably later than her male counterpart, probably in the late 19th century. Premier, derived from the French word meaning ‘first’, means first minister, prime minister or other head of government when used as a noun. When strutting its stuff as an adjective, it means first in status or importance, order or time (earliest).  Premiere is a noun — and at least when she made her debut in the English language she was only a noun — describing a first public presentation of a play, film, opera or other performance. There’s little or no dispute about any of these definitions (except for Fowler frowning on the use of premier as an adjective; see below*).

It’s the female form that’s had a harder time adjusting fully to life in English society. Whether and to what extent premiere should be used as a verb is what usage experts tend to grapple with, even though the word has been in use as a verb  since the 1930s. The OED does give it an official second definition as a transitive verb, “to give a premiere of”, but it stops short by not giving the verb an intransitive form, eg. “the symphony premiered in August”.

Merriam-Webster‘s Dictionary of English Usage (3rd ed.) outlines the unfolding of this verb-that’s-really-a-noun, and points out the fascinating possibility that its origins in the world of show business (where it is ubiquitous and to which its usage is still largely confined) have contributed to its lack of credibility and acceptance as a legitimate verb:

“The verb premiere is resoundingly rejected by the major usage panels, although most commentators take no notice of it and dictionaries treat it as standard. The panelists tend to regard it as jargon, in part because of its derivation from the noun premiere, which, in their opinion, makes it a noun misused as a verb, and in part because of its origins in the world of show business. It is also a fairly new word, although not as new as some might suppose.  We first encountered it in 1933, and by the 1940s it had established itself in regular use as both a transitive and intransitive verb:

” … the Paris Opera plans to premiere an old work of Jean Cocteau and Arthur Honneger” — Modern Music, November-December 1942

“The latter two houses première foreign films.” – Parker Tyler, Tomorrow, March 1945

“The night Crosby premiered” — Newsweek, 28 Oct. 1946

“….the new show premièred on June 26” — Newsweek, 2 Aug. 1948

Its use continues to be common today:

“Trollope will premiere on television in the midst of the latest squall in Anglo-American relations” — Karl E. Meyer, Saturday Rev., 22 Jan. 1977

“… when the play was premièred in 1889” — Ronald Hayman, Times Literary Supp., 28 Jan. 1983

Anyone determined to avoid it will find it has no exact synonym. Open can sometimes be used in place of the intransitive premiere, but it less strongly denotes a “first ever”[**]  public performance than does the longer word, and in many cases it is simply unidiomatic. A television program or musical composition, for example, could not be said to “open.” Open is also unidiomatic in transitive use — you could not say “The Paris Opera plans to open an old work. . . .” Of course, one may always replace premiere with a phrase, as in “… the new show was first performed on June 26” or “… Crosby performed for the first time on television…,” but the necessity of such revision seems dubious. The verb premiere may have deserved to be called “jargon” fifty years ago, but in current English it is just another available verb, and we recommend that you regard it as such.” So says Merriam-Webster.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2006) confirms the slow and grudging acceptance of this new verb, and also notes that it has been unable to break out from its  confines in the entertainment world, where its reputation still remains murky:

“In entertainment contexts, the verb premiere has become the standard way of saying ‘to introduce to the public,’ or ‘to be introduced to the public.’ Since it seems always to imply newness, premiere is frequently used in advertising. Thus a movie can premiere in selected theaters, and a year later it can ‘premiere’ to a different audience on television. The verb first came out in the 1930s and acceptance of it in general usage has been slow. In 1969, only 14 percent of the Usage Panel accepted it. Nineteen years later, however, when asked to judge the example The Philharmonic will premiere works by two young Americans, 51 percent of the Panelists accepted this usage. But only 10 percent of the Panelists in the 1988 survey accepted the extension of the verb to contexts outside of the entertainment industry, as in Last fall the school premiered new degree programs.”

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*In the first edition of his Modern English Usage (and left unrevised in his second edition), Fowler turned his nose up at the word premier used as an adjective, claiming it “is now suggestive of tawdry ornament, though it was formerly not avoided by good writers and has shown signs of coming back into favour in the wake of the now popular première. The ELEGANT-VARIATIONIST finds it useful …, but would do better to find some other way out. It is wise to confine it now to such traditional phrases as the Duke of Norfolk is premier duke and earl of the U.K.”

* * see Glossophilia https://glossophilia.org/?p=1052

Marketing hype at each and every turn

 

Strunk and White call it “pitchman’s jargon”. Bryan A. Garner describes the phrase in his Modern American Usage as “trite” and recommends avoiding it.

“Each and every” is one of my pet peeves, and it jostles for position at the top of my list of most annoying ’emphasizers’ that are now ubiquitous in marketing and media hype. (“First ever” is at Number 1, and will probably stay there for the foreseeable future.)

“Each and every” is tautologous, even though the words have slightly different meanings – or perhaps more accurately, different emphases. Each means every one separately, with the emphasis being on the separate identity of each person or thing in the collection. Every means each and all – without exception. Here the emphasis is on the fact that everyone or everything in the group has something in common. Take these two sentences: “Each camper carried his own lunch.” “Every camper carried his lunch.” The first sentence is pointing out that the campers had a separate meal each, probably lovingly prepared by a doting parent, and each had responsibility for carrying his own brown bag. In the second sentence, the thrust of the message is that all the campers were carrying their midday meals; no-one was going hungry on that particular day. Even though the same campers were carrying the same lunches in the two sentences, their meanings are subtly different.

“Each day brought a different challenge to her project, but every day started with a cup of coffee.” In this case the challenge gave each day its own unique and particular character; the coffee united the days and described a homogenous blur of caffeinated waking hours.

“Each and every” has slowly but surely crept into marketing- and media-speak as a way of emphasizing the no-exception, all-inclusive nature of an offer, deal, or  campaign, or even just emphasizing a fact. Here the emphasis is clearly on every thing, every one, every time. Each is like a toddler being dragged along behind with a thumb in her mouth: there’s no place for individuality or separation here. Using the phrase “each and every” is really a form of literary impotence or laziness, where more creative wording could be used to give every the weight it probably deserves. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes that usage experts generally denounce the phrase as a cliché, a pomposity, and a bit of bureaucratic bombast.

The same criticisms can be aimed at the similarly tautologous phrase “first ever”, another marketing-hype term, which tries clumsily to accentuate the first. There are no different gradations of first: something is either first or it isn’t (when it’s second, or third, etc. …). Adding ever doesn’t make it more first; it serves only to annoy – and possibly even to raise the suspicions of – the attentive reader or listener. A more elegant way to underline the fact that the person or thing in question has beaten everyone or everything else to the start-line is to introduce a qualifying verbal phrase using ever as an adverb: “The first person ever to set foot on Mars”; “the first time the piece has ever been performed”.

 

Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office (WSJ)

Published today in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html

This Embarrasses You and I*

“When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, “There’s new people you should meet,” her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company. “I cringe every time I hear” people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.

“Employers say the grammar skills of people they hire are getting worse, a recent survey shows. But language is evolving so fast that old rules of usage are eroding. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break.”

 

How’s Your Grammar?

Take a quiz to test your skills.

 

 

We like to like like Tina Charles loves to love

And I’m not, like, talking about kids who, like, can’t get through a sentence without, like, saying like. That scourge is so, like, 20th-century.

No, I’m talking about when the word like is used before a clause (as a conjunction).

The universally accepted and undisputed usage of like is as a preposition (ie. governing nouns and pronouns): “She looks like her daughter.” “He sounds like a bird.”

It’s when like is used as a conjunction (ie. connecting two clauses) that swords are drawn, tempers start to flare, and trans-Atlantic disagreement comes into play.  In the US, the colloquial use of like as a conjunction is now reasonably commonplace and accepted, especially when like simply replaces as (which more appropriately governs phrases and clauses). “We now have brunch every Sunday like we did in Sweden.” Such a sentence generally grates on English ears, which prefer, “We now have brunch every Sunday as we did in Sweden.”

Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, tackled this “most flagrant and easily recognizable misuse of like,” referring to the OED which similarly and roundly condemned the misuse as “vulgar or slovenly”.  The OED colorfully used a sentence written by Darwin (“Unfortunately few have observed like you have done”) to illustrate the abuse.

More egregious – and even more grating to British English speakers – is when like replaces as if or as though, masquerading even more  boldly as a conjunction. Fowler cites this lovely OED example: “The old fellow drank of the brandy like he was used to it.” Nowadays, the Oxford American Dictionary recognizes the “informal” usage of like as a conjunction to replace as; however, it clearly forbids using the word to mean as if or as though.

If you want to delve into the even more complicated arguments about the use and misuse of this overused word that we love to like (especially once we get into ‘disguised conjuntional use’, when there is no subordinate verb), Fowler’s your man.

Meanwhile, Strunk and White summarize the tussle over ‘like’ in their characteristically eloquent fashion, using it as a case study to argue more generally about the evolution of language:

“The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn’t. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has long been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.”