Category Archives: Nit-picking

Happy posters

“This poster can make you happier than any other on the subway.”

So reads an ad for the School of Practical Philosophy that graces the occasional NYC subway car. The problem is, it just doesn’t make me happy. It presses all my buttons, has me reaching for my red pen, and makes me think I’m a subway poster, which I don’t think I am.

If I’m supposed to be happier than “any other”, I ask myself this: than any other what? Than any other poster on the subway? Well, I’m posting on this blog, which makes me a poster, and I am on the subway (at least when I’m reading the ad), so I guess I’m another poster on the subway. But I don’t think that’s what the School of Practical Philosophy is getting at. Or maybe it is.

Perhaps it’s trying to say that the poster can make me happier than any other poster can. Ah: but then why leave out the can? Perhaps because it suggests a can of posters?

Can the School of Practical Philosophy possibly mean that its ad can make me happier than any other human – or reader, or thinker, or philosopher, or nit-picker – on the subway? But what happens when I resurface from the belly of the earth, blinking in the hot sunlight. Will I still be happy?

Keep to the right, please!

Not that I want to see serried ranks of humanoid bots, but… (actually, that’s not a bad idea)

We city walkers are speedy, as the Times tells us, but why does no one keep to the right on the sidewalk these days? Subway platforms and pavements and stairways are more crowded than ever, but we pedestrians and stair-climbers (and -descenders) would all be better off if we kept – for the most part – to the right. I am not talking about politics, mind you. The prevalence of sidewalk bridges and scaffolding exacerbates the problem. Such distractions as store windows, vendors, interesting sights and sites to check out, intersections to cross, and dog-poop to avoid (don’t get me on a sidetrack), frequently call for a move to the left, and might, on occasion, be excused.

I’ve made a casual study of the predicament, and I trace it, like so many problems of today, to bad schooling at home and away from home. Can you imagine such a thing – difficult, isn’t it? Most of the little ones in our crowded schools – and even the bigger kids – are no longer instructed to keep to the right in hallways, on stairs, or outdoors, not even during fire drills! I often plow through the crowds on the pavements of my neighborhood shouting “Keep to the right, keep to the right”, and of course people pay no attention; who would want to give the impression she pays heed to street-loonies? My first grade teacher is probably whirling in her grave, as is YOURS!

But seriously: even the London Underground, a paragon system, has well-placed signs on the long, steep escalators at some stations requesting that riders keep to the RIGHT (not LEFT). I would love to see sparkly new city-posted signs reading PLEASE KEEP TO THE RIGHT along the busiest sidewalks of New York City. They’d be a sight for the sore eyes of this city walker, and probably for a few hundred thousand of her fellow pedestrians.

Mahler IX led by Andris Nelsons

James Levine’s lamentably long and continuing absence from public performances gave New Yorkers an opportunity to hear Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons at work with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall, conducting the Mahler Ninth Symphony. Nelsons recently led the New York Philharmonic in the Shostakovich Fifth, and is now conducting Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame” at the Met, which institution prefers the title “Queen of Spades” – a possibly confusing moniker in this multi-faceted town.

A New York Times critic found the Boston Symphony during the concert “for the most part … not … sounding its best”, and experienced the performance as “almost a touch too loud”. Toward the end of the 80-plus-minute symphony, “in contrast to the general hubbub, the strings produced moments of glorious quietude, which fades from quieter to quietest. … But in moments of comparative stillness in the first movement, where other instruments were playing around the strings, those instruments stole attention,” much the way ill-chosen words can spoil an otherwise fine passage of writing.

More than (not “over”) 20 years ago, I attended a rehearsal and performance of the same piece in the same hall, in the company of the same critic (both of us were then in other jobs). Herbert von Karajan was leading “his” Berlin Philharmonic. I’d wager that The Critic, like me, was thinking of those performances the other night, while the Boston Symphony played. I enjoyed the Nelsons performance more than The Critic did, not least because of many of the effects Nelsons elicited (or did the orchestra offer them on its own?) by using beautifully delicate finger-gestures. Of course The Critic is paid to criticize, and I (a non-professional) pay to attend (and enjoy, or not) the concert, as well as to read his review. In this case I enjoyed a great deal about the performance of this long and complicated piece, which Mahler himself, alas, never heard; I’ve heard perhaps 25 times in my life and count this as one of the fine ones. Lucky me.

There’s no tense like the present

Published in The Globe and Mail, Wednesday March 9

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/russell-smith/theres-no-tense-like-the-present/article1935211/?service=mobile

There’s no tense like the present

RUSSELL SMITH

Last updated Friday, Mar. 11, 2011 2:50PM EST

Lead image

When is the last time you have smoked? (Reuters)

A doctor friend tells a story that illustrates why it’s important to understand verb tenses.

A patient whose first language is not English is asked about quitting smoking. He says, “I try. I don’t smoke for six weeks.”

The simple present is the only verb tense the man knows, so it’s impossible to tell if he is saying that he will try, and is aiming for six weeks of abstention; or that he has been trying, and hasn’t had a ciggie for six weeks; or that he tried, and abstained for six weeks (but has relapsed).

Rephrased questions from the doctor couldn’t provoke any more precise answer, so the doctor still doesn’t know what shape the guy is in.

This is a familiar limitation for new speakers of any language, but it’s particularly tricky in English, which has a wide variety of verb structures with subtle distinctions that don’t exist in many other languages.

It is possible that the man wanted to say “I haven’t smoked for six weeks” – that’s called the present perfect – but even native speakers of English have trouble with that. It’s an odd structure, one that does not translate exactly into French, for example.

Because of the strangeness and subtlety of this tense and aspect (definitions coming in a moment), it is frequently avoided, as in “I didn’t smoke yet” instead of “I haven’t smoked yet.” Or just misused: I have heard Canadian radio announcers say such head-scratchers as “There has been an acquittal last night” or “A train has derailed on Friday.”

I have made the plea before for the continued oiling and maintenance of this gleaming, intricate mechanism of the language, but nothing seems to slow its rust. So here are a few more arguments for respecting its complexity (if only for the sake of your medical charts).

First, tense and aspect. All verbs in sentences can be described as having a tense (present, past, future), an aspect (how exactly in the present, past, future) and a mood (subjunctive, indicative, imperative etc). The moods we will leave for a later column. Aspect means that you can use a variety of present forms with gently differing meanings. “I smoke,” for example (simple present), has different implications from “I am smoking” (progressive present) or “I do smoke” (intensive present).

All those are present tenses. And so is “I have smoked.” It’s commonly described as being a past tense, but it’s not helpful to think of it that way. Rather, it is a perfect aspect of the present tense.

I know, the present perfect looks a lot like the French passé composé (“j’ai fumé”) or the Italian passato prossimo (“io ho fumato”), but it does not mean the same thing. In French and Italian, those are past tenses. So you may say “j’ai fumé hier” and it makes sense – I smoked yesterday. “I have smoked yesterday,” however, does not sound like natural English. This aspect is not normally used in a sentence referring to a specific moment in the past.

If you say “I have smoked,” it refers to your present state – you are now in the state of having smoked. This is why we often use this structure with the words “already,” “since,” “recently” or “yet.” The sentence may refer to a past event, but it is being described because of its consequences for the present. If you mention a specific moment in the past you use the simple past, “Yesterday, I smoked.”

Here’s a simple demonstration: If you say “I ate this morning,” it means it is now afternoon. If you say “I have eaten this morning,” it means it is still morning.

A final proof of its presentness: Try to imagine using this aspect with a dead person as the subject. “Michael Jackson has eaten.” Doesn’t make sense, right? (“Michael Jackson last ate in 2003,” however, is a perfectly coherent sentence.)

So, if the patient above spoke elegant English and was trying to say he was currently off cigarettes and had been for six weeks, he would have said “I have not smoked for six weeks” – and isn’t that, if you think about it, just amazingly economical for such a complicated and nuanced thought?

And wouldn’t it be better for your health if you could communicate your patterns so precisely – maybe even revelling in such high-level acrobatics as “I have been smoking since this morning?”

Okay, maybe not, but it’s at least delightful just to have the ability.

Published on Wednesday, Mar. 09, 2011 4:30PM EST

None the wiser

A quick Google search of the phrase “none of them was” turns up 5,290,000 results. A similar search, but with ‘none’ used as a plural rather than singular pronoun (“none of them were”) turns up half as many results again: 8,750,000. So clearly the word “none” is used more often as a plural pronoun.

I have always believed – ‘quite’ emphatically (see previous post), and perhaps even obnoxiously – that “none” is a contraction of the words “no one”, and as such it should always be treated and used as a singular pronoun. But I couldn’t have been more wrong, as Fowler points out.

According to Fowler’s Modern English Usage (from a 1949 edition, but that’s modern enough for me), “It is a mistake to suppose that the pronoun is sing. only & must at all costs be followed by sing. verbs &c.; the OED explicitly states that pl. construction is commoner.”

And sure enough, OED explains more fully:

“In sense 1 of the pronoun, none can be followed by a singular or plural verb according to the sense. If the sense is ‘not any one of’ a singular verb is used, e.g. None of them is any good, while if the sense is simply ‘not any of’ a plural verb is used, e.g. None of them want to come. The use of the singular verb is more emphatic.”

oder/ou du und ich, toi et moi, kid

Giving a lovely textbook definition below, L wrote:

“Glossophilia is a love of language, be it foreign or native. The term refers to a deep and passionate love for language and the structure of language. Glossophiles study literary terminology as well as grammar, punctuation and language structure. Glossophiles share an interest in lexical choice and imagery.”

I don’t know whether glossophiles are also generally nit-pickers, but I’ll bet it’s part of the genome. So I will add that MY purpose in this endeavour is to nit-pick. Actually, nit-correct! Not knit-pick – that’s what my nit-picking mother did after her concentration upon her needles and wool wavered for a moment (e.g. when she started nit-picking with one of us), and she had to REMOVE STITCHES. [I’ve done that on a few occasions when i didn’t want to return to the doctor after s/he sewed up a wound. Such behaviour sows bad feelings among medical professionals.]

L, a mother herself, is more lenient and forgiving than I, but can be a demon nit-picker as well. It’s probably why we first disliked one another (not each other) because of our competitive natures’ competing in the work-place. And also probably why we fell in, like thieves, once we recognized related sense of humor and figured out that it was toi et moi, baby – inside the workplace as well as outside it.

I don’t wish to stop the development of language, but I detest the throwing-out-of-the-baby-with-the-bathwater that my favorite language, ENGLISH, has been subjected to in a time when The Word (I refer not to the Bible) is more spoken than written – or written well. I do not blame its abuse upon “non-native-speakers”. So I will nit-pick here as in the rest of my life.

PS: I also love German and, to a lesser extent, French, as well as Italian. I can’t believe how much I love German, especially after hating it from a distance until my late ‘twenties, when I discovered German Lieder and began to learn the language from poets like Schiller and Goethe, through Schubert and Schumann’s songs (to name only a fraction). I speak French, but not Italian, and love how they sound when sung.

It’s you and me, kid

Admitting to a very lowly guilty pleasure isn’t how I would have chosen to kick off our blog. But reality TV dating is such rich and fertile land for harvesting language abuse that I couldn’t resist the temptation to go there. The show’s inelegantly scripted protagonists talk earnestly to the camera; their memorized soundbites are designed to offer careful and reflective commentary on – and some respite from – the alcohol-fueled antics (linguistic and otherwise) of the couples’ various interactions. It’s like catnip to the glossophile – especially when it comes to you and me.

In dating life (both reality/fake and real), there’s a lot of you and me, him and her, them and us. And there are those who wrongly believe that “you and me” is wrong and “you and I” is right, if you’re speaking the Queen’s English correctly, no matter what the context. Gazing into each others’ eyes over wine and room-keys, the reality couples whisper hopefully: “There’s a real connection between you and I.” And what happens when they venture tentatively into the land of possessives, and they’re tiptoeing around what they – or their romantic rivals – might have? You got it. “Ever since we met, I’ve sensed that you and I’s chemistry is undeniable.” … “I worry about what happened on you and she’s date.”

It’s yours and mine, kid.