Which popular US TV show offers us an icky howler in its opening sequence?
Category Archives: Nit-picking
The English pleaded, the Scots pled
“NewsOK ran this interesting article earlier today about the past participles and past tenses of weak and strong (or irregular) verbs, and variations in their usage amongst the Brits.
I’ve been meaning to write a post on ‘hung’ and ‘hanged’, ‘sung’ and ‘sang’, ‘lighted’ and ‘lit’, and other treacherous conjugations. Stay tuned for more on this murky subject of the past tense … Continue reading
Those goofy New York Times headlines!
A very sad headline in the NYT of May 15, 2011 is so badly written that I had to laugh.
“For Second Time in 3 Days, NATO Raid Kills Afghan Child”
It seems that mean old NATO has killed the same poor Afghan child twice in only three days (why didn’t the first time work out, NATO gunners?). Alas, of course the headline writer meant to convey the sorry fact that within the last three days two separate Afghan children have been killed in NATO raids.
Perhaps if NATO and the US government would clean up their war acts, the Times could clean up its headline-composing act and we’d all be a lot healthier and happier – and more Afghan children could grow to adulthood.
What’s the problem with “no problem”?
Almost no one says “you’re welcome” when thanked these days. The exceedingly rude-sounding “no problem”, or — much worse — “no worries”, is the usual response (if ANY) to the simple “thank you”. “No problem” is tossed back with utter lack of care or notice – appropriately enough, since it indicates brain-death like a flatline. If you know enough to respond to thanks offered you for a task or deed, you should know enough to say “you’re welcome”.
Whenever a shop assistant (aka “team-member”, “associate” — of what or whom?, I ask myself) answers my thanks with “no problem”, I reply “I should HOPE there’s no problem; it’s your JOB” upon deaf ears and to a blank stare. But I’ve noticed that when I congratulate (and thank) the utterer of “you’re welcome” for her or his usage of the appropriate response to thanks, I get a pleasant reply. I rest my case.
PS. What, I wonder, will replace thank you, or thanks? Oh, that’s already happened: no thanks!
Lot’s of apostrophe’s and “quotation mark’s”
I just stumbled on two fun blogs: one devoted entirely to “unnecessary quote marks” and one to apostrophe abuse (when people use lot’s of apostrophe’s for plural’s etc.)
Here’s an example from each (with the most bizarre example I’ve seen of a misplaced apostrophe):
Woe to whom?
Welcome to our first “Glossologue”! Every month, Alison (my fellow Glosso-blogger) and I will post an example of language usage that sparks discussion and debate – and we invite you all to come and battle it out here on Glossophilia.
Feel free to weigh in and offer your insights and arguments – especially if you’re right!
* * * * *
Glossologue I: Woe to whom?
Last week Alison and I crossed swords – very briefly and amicably – over something one of us stumbled on in the “Ethicist” column of the New York Times magazine*. Here is the statement in question:
“It’s unethical, but then again, it’s just an updated form of advertising, and woe to him who seeks truth therein.”*
It’s that pesky pronoun that knots our brows: is it really “woe to him who“? If he is the one seeking the truth, shouldn’t he have the benefit of a subjective pronoun before the only verb in that part of the sentence – “he [who] seeks”? However, he is, after all, the object of the woe being heaped, and let’s face it: without the relative clause that follows (“who seeks truth”), “woe to he” is clearly a clanger.
So, is this sentence correct, or has there been an editing booboo*? What do you think?
* this is not necessarily the final version that appeared online or in print
They’re there …
Louise’s witty elaboration on that-witch-which reminds me of one of my peeves about spelling mistakes that result from ignorance (or just bad spelling): they’re-there-their (there are more on my list of peeves, but they’ll have to wait).
Most people have a problem distinguishing their from there, which seems to me as easy-to-solve a problem as there is in the English language’s miasma of spelling problems.
They’re is there because THEY ARE is being contracted — as it usually is in when spoken — to THEY ‘RE by the insertion of an apostrophe (more on that little beast anon). The apostrophe replaces a SPACE between the words and the A that begins ARE (that’s why it’s called, appropriately enough, a CONTRACTION). And in this case, the contraction means that more than one person or object is placed somewhere in the space/time continuum. They are in New York. They’re in Germany. They’ve left their traces in outer space. Who? The stars in outer space.
Their and there are subject to mix-ups, I expect, mainly because of spelling or typing errors. But an easy way to distinguish them might be to see THEIR as having an I in it, signifying a person, and in this case more than one person (or thing) with one or more possessions or attributes: I like Siamese cats because their eyes are blue, and – look over there! – they don’t shed their hair all over the place.
There it is: THEY’RE THERE, LEAVING THEIR MARKS EVERYWHERE.
Bismarck, his Mutti, his – and my – antipathies
“A great hater, Bismarck’s first antipathy was directed at his mother: ‘Hard and cold,’ he called her. His father – a weak, ineffectual Junker, if you can imagine such a thing – merely embarrassed his brilliant son, whose bullish character first surfaced in drinking and dueling.” (Quoted from a review, by George Walden, of “Bismarck, A Life”, the new biography by Jonathan Steinberg, posted at Bloomberg.com.)
A classic case of misplaced modifier, this gaffe is offensive on two fronts. First, it seems anti-feminist; second, it implies – nay, states outright – that Bismarck’s ANTIPATHY was “A GREAT HATER”, when what it wants to say outright is that BISMARCK was “A GREAT HATER”, and that the first object of his hatred was his own female parent. A surprise, say you?
This sends me down a thought-path to the fact that many nations’ natives refer to the country where they were born, raised, or currently live, as the FATHERLAND. Bismarck’s most famous product, Adolf Hitler, used the word VATERLAND to great effect. But the denizens of the largest of Germany’s traditional arch-enemies, Russia (aka the Soviet Union), always referred to their country as MOTHER RUSSIA or the MOTHERLAND.
And we poor shmoes in the United States of America? Upon us the term HOMELAND was foisted by right-thinking (i use the term specifically) wordsmiths after “Nine/Eleven” (along with the alleged Security achieved by the patting-down of every airline passenger in the USA – or headed this way from anywhere else on the Globe). Is this nomenclature, now nearing its tenth birthday, an unintentionally left-wing idea from the right-wing thought-police? Heaven preserve us from giving our HOMELAND a sexist title! Did the Republicans really buy this? What do they call the USA, besides insisting that it’s the greatest darn country ever invented and perfeclty peerless in every way?
My family’s favorite way of demonstrating the dreaded misplaced modifier is: “Kicking and screaming, she took the baby out of the room.” But I admit that it’s a long way between that simple and idiotic example about Otto von Bismarck and his Mutti and my latest disquisition. And so, should we just go ahead and Blame It All on Frau Bismarck? Oh, let’s!
Next: shall we parse “… whose bullish character first surfaced in drinking and dueling. …”?
Mea culpa, Anna Bolena
We pride ourselves at 21C on getting most of our information right – factually and grammatically. But as Glenn often reminds us: only Allah is perfect. And perfect today’s press release about Anna Netrebko certainly wasn’t, as a journalist rightly pointed out to me this afternoon.
Can you spot the mistake? http://www.21cmediagroup.com/mediacenter/newsitem.php?i=651 [Oh – it’s been fixed. – Ed]
I’ll give you the paragraph in question.
“The first in a trilogy of operas Gaetano Donizetti wrote about the Tudor period (Maria Stuarda, named after Mary, Queen of Scotts, and Roberto Devereux, about the reputed lover of Elizabeth I, are the other two), Anna Bolena follows the tragic demise of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII who literally lost her head because she could not bare the King a male heir. The soprano role is considered one of the most challenging in the bel canto repertoire, making the opera difficult to cast and rarely performed. The fall 2011 production at the Met, which is staged by David McVicar and also stars Garanca as Giovanna, in fact marks the work’s Met premiere.”
Brownie points if you can spot more than one mistake …
A missing comma turns a cook into a cannibal
