Mother of Beauty

“It’s just a phase of every life,”
The adults like to say.
When offspring of a common pair
Begin to disobey.

They’ll fight, they’ll feud, they’ll interfere,
By Cain and Abel’s lead.
For children – namely those of kin –
Are hardly all agreed.

Yet as the farmers grow to men
And younger shepherds age,
Their boiling blood runs cooler and
Respect is born from rage.

For all begin to realize
Their own misguided ways:
Their twin or kin the enemy,
Instead of numbered days.

Then soon enough, they too will take
Their final breaths of air;
And what a shame to realize
That love could have repaired

The youthful battles—bored disputes—
Our mothers couldn’t cease.
For she grows old, thus from her rule
We siblings are released.

We’re disciplined by someone else,
A stricter reaper now;
For beauty’s mother wakes us up
Before she lays us down.

— Flo Wen

(Published in the Tufts Observer)

You say forward, I say forwards; you say toward, I say towards …

Which of these sentences sounds easier on the ear to you? 1) “I’m inching forwards, aiming farther, and heading towards the finishing line.” or 2) “I’m inching forward, aiming further, and heading toward the finishing line.”

If you’re British you probably leaned towards the first (although you might have preferred further to farther); if North American, you almost certainly chose the second.

The differences in usage between further and farther, forward and forwards, and toward and towards often come down to preference, largely determined by which side of the Atlantic you live on. But there are also some subtle differences in meaning that can affect which word you choose.

1) Further/farther:

Take these five recent instances of further/farther in the media:

“Gen. Martin Dempsey said the U.S. has been preparing for further provocations or action from North Korea.” (USA Today). “The Red Sox were waiting to get the results of John Lackey’s MRI further interpreted.” (Boston Globe) “In Britain, the word semolina conjures up images of grim school dinners, but farther east it’s one of the staple ingredients of sweet and savoury cooking alike.” (The Guardian) “In the eyes of the federal government, urban Minnesota has just pushed a little farther into the countryside.” (Minnesota Public Radio). Clare Mann, describing her tour of an Italian volcano in the Telegraph, wrote that “Some visitors climbed farther down into the crater.”

In the first two sentences, further is the adjective or adverb of choice, meaning “to a greater extent, more”, or “to or at a more advanced point in space or time”. However, in the last three examples, in which there’s a sense of geographical distance or movement, the word farther doesn’t seem out of place, as it would in the first couple of sentences.

The words further and farther are virtually interchangeable, although the latter is often used when literal rather than figurative distance is implied. The OED states that “the form farthest is used especially with reference to physical distance, although furthest is preferred by many people even in this sense.” Fowler in his Modern English Usage, explains what he understood to be the surprising etymology of the two words: “The history of the two words appears to be that further is a comparative of fore and should, if it were to be held to its etymology, mean more advanced, and that farther is a newer variant of further, no more connected with far than further is, but affected in its form by the fact that further, having come to be used instead of the obsolete comparative of far (farrer), seemed to need a respelling that should assimilate it to far.”

2) Forward/forwards:

During a Commons debate on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, British MP Caroline Lucas was recently quoted in The Guardian as saying: “As well as looking backwards, it is also about learning the lessons looking forwards.” In this case, forwards is clearly being used to signal the direction of the looking, especially in contrast to the opposite direction mentioned earlier in the sentence. Lucas might also have wanted to distinguish “looking forwards” in a directional sense from the sense of anticipating something positively, ie. “looking forward” to something.

Like further and farther, the distinction between forward and forwards is subtle or in some cases non-existent. According to the OED: “The present distinction in usage between forward and forwards is that the latter expresses a definite direction viewed in contrast with other directions. In some contexts either form may be used without perceptible difference of meaning; the following are examples in which only one of them can now be used: ‘The ratchet-wheel can move only forwards’; ‘the right side of the paper has the maker’s name reading forwards’; ‘if you move at all it must be forwards’; ‘my companion has gone forward’; ‘to bring a matter forward’; ‘from this time forward’. The usage of earlier periods, and of modern dialects, varies greatly from that of mod. standard English. In U.S. forward is now generally used, to the exclusion of forwards, which was stigmatized by Webster (1832) as ‘a corruption’.”

The British forwards might well be in decline, often dropping its final ‘s’ in favor of its American counterpart. A Google search on forwards returns references mostly to a particular type of sportsman — “an attacking player positioned near the front of a team in football, hockey, etc” (OED) — in its plural form.

3) Toward/towards

“Cyprus is edging towards euro exit,” read a recent headline on the Reuters UK blog. “Andy Murray turns focus towards clay court season” was the first part of a Telegraph headline last week. Across the Atlantic, Suzy Menkes in the New York Times talked about “[Mrs. Thatcher’s] attitude toward the Falklands war against Argentina.”

As borne out by these examples, the difference between toward and towards is one simply of usage and preference, determined by whether you speak British or American English (with the latter favoring the ‘s’-less word, in keeping with its preference for the ‘s’-less forward). About toward and towards, Fowler wrote slightly abstrusely: “The -s form is the prevailing one, and the other tends to become literary on the one hand and provincial on the other.” Whether that means logically that American English is both more literary and more provincial than British English is probably best left for a separate discussion …

Mrs. Thatcher or Lady Thatcher?

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

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

Poetry in Motion: “Ragtime” by Kevin Young

Seen on B train of NYC subway this evening.

The dying art of shorthand

In one of my first jobs after college, as secretary to the then managing director of Novello & Co, George Rizza (a distinguished bewhiskered gentleman), I was often called on to take dictation. With my legs crossed and tucked politely under my chair, a note-pad on my knee and sharpened pencil in hand, I’d focus my eyes on the blank lines before me, poised to capture the words about to spill from my boss’s mouth. After a few moments of pregnant silence, like the pause before the shot of a starting pistol, George Rizza would nod with a smile in my direction, then begin to talk fluidly and eloquently as though the intended recipient of his letter were in the room with him — more often than not a composer whose new work was about to be unveiled. I would scribble furiously, my heart pounding in my chest as I took each syllable that reached my ear and allowed it to pass like a code through the audio, mental and nervous flowcharts of my brain and down into my hand, instantly parsing the information and depositing it on the page as a symbol representing the phonetic ‘chunk’ that had reverberated on my eardrum just a split-second earlier. Over the course of a ten-minute dictation, Rizza’s well-considered words transformed themselves through my seated form from a barrage of sounds and syllables into a picture of pencil-lead marks, most of which were decipherable only by me.

As the longed-for final four phonemes arrived at my ear — yaw – sin – seer – lee, my head and hand flushing with relief — I would rush from my chair with as much grace as I could muster in my haste. Back at my desk just a few steps and seconds away, I would begin the process — sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating — of transcribing my scribble back into the meaningful and elegant prose that had issued from Mr. Rizza’s mind.

I had emerged a few years earlier with flying fingers from a three-month course at the Anne Godden Secretarial School in London, clutching a diploma declaring my typing and shorthand speeds: 100 and 150 words per minute respectively. Young Englishwomen seeking secretarial positions in the early to mid-1980s were expected to have respectable shorthand and typing speeds, given the traditionally underwhelming hunt-and-peck typing skills of their (usually male) prospective bosses. As was the trend in England at that time, I was trained in the Pitman method of stenography. (Stenography, meaning to write in shorthand form, comes from the Greek word stenos meaning “narrow” and graphē or graphie meaning “writing”.) Developed by Sir Isaac Pitman in the early 19th century, his is a phonetic system in which sounds rather than letters are represented — consonants by straight and semi-circular strokes in different hefts and orientations, and vowels (when needed) by dots, dashes and other marks. By the end of the 20th century, Pitman’s was the most widely used method around the world — it has been adapted for no less than 15 languages. Although still ubiquitous, especially in the UK, it has been superseded in the U.S. by the Gregg method, which is also phonetic but with more simplified strokes. Nowadays, a third system called Teeline has become the shorthand of choice for teachers of stenography in the UK; unlike Pitman and Gregg, it is a spelling- rather than phonetic-based method, and it is recommended in Great Britain by the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

Outside the office, shorthand was until very recently an inherent part of the jobs of court reporters or stenographers, journalists, and medical practitioners (although in the latter case, shorthand is more for the purpose of concise, compact recording than for swift transcription). However, with the advent of the stenotype machine in the late 19th century and more recently with the use of high-quality digital audio recordings, the court stenographer has effectively become extinct. (The contract of the last stenographer at the Old Bailey in London was allowed to expire in March 2012.) Add to that the ubiquity of portable personal computers, the universal ability and willingness to type fast, and the abbreviated new lingo of texting and IMing, and it only stands to reason that penned stenography has become something of a dying art. Many journalists still regard it as an inherent part of their trade, and whether it’s by means of Pitman, Teeline, Gregg, or an improvised personal language of one’s own devising, the skill of shorthand will probably endure in some form for as long as there’s a discrepancy between the respective speeds of speech and handwriting.

Nickname the landmarks: here they are …

Each of these extraordinary architectural landmarks has been bestowed at some point in its history — either before, during or after its design and construction — with a colorful nickname. Clues to most of the nicknames lie in the resemblance of the building to a common household object — but not in every case …

Answers (official building name or address, city, nickname, and origin of nickname if not immediately apparent) are below each picture.

1. The great bell of the clock (and usually the clock and the clock tower as well) at the north end of the Palace of Westminster (London) – Big Ben. Big Ben was most likely named after Sir Benjamin Hall, First Commissioner for Works, whose name is inscribed on the bell; or it might have been named after Ben Caunt, a champion heavyweight boxer.

2. Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral (Liverpool) – Paddy’s Wigwam

3. Clyde Auditorium (concert hall, Glasgow) – The Armadillo

4. Soccer City Stadium (Johannesburg) – The Calabash. The Calabash was named after the African cooking pot, one of the inspirations for the stadium, and reflected the “melting pot” that is South Africa.

5. House of World Cultures (art museum, Berlin) – The Pregnant Oyster

6. Absolute World Building (Mississauga, Canada) – The Marilyn Monroe

7. Sydney Opera House (Sydney) – Nuns in a Scrum

8. MIT’s Simmons Hall (Boston) – The Sponge

9. Kaiser Wilhelm Church (rebuilt after WWII bombings in Berlin) – The Lipstick and Compact

10. Casa Mila (Barcelona) – The Quarry

11. Sydney Harbour Bridge (Sydney) – The Coathanger

12. Velodrome (London) – The Pringle

13. 30 St Mary Axe (London) – The Gherkin

14. 60-70 St Mary’s Axe (London) – Can of Ham

15. 20 Fenchurch Street (London) – Walkie-Talkie

16. 122 Leadenhall Street (London) – Cheese Grater

17. Strata tower (London) – The Razor

18. The Shard in London was given its name because the English Heritage claimed the building would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London”. The Shard appears to be the official name of the building, not just its nickname, so this building should really be disqualified from this list.

19. St. John’s, Smith Square (London) – Queen Anne’s Footstool. According to Wikipedia: “As legend has it, when [Thomas] Archer was designing the church he asked the Queen what she wanted it to look like. She kicked over her footstool and said ‘Like that!’, giving rise to the building’s four corner towers.”

20. 175 Fifth Ave (New York) – The Flatiron

21. CBS building at 51 West 52nd St (New York) – Black Rock (for its dark-gray granite and dark tinted windows)

22. 209 South LaSalle St (Chicago) – Rookery Building. The Rookery assumed same name as the building that it replaced: named for crows and pigeons that inhabited its exterior walls and for shady politicians it housed, given the rook’s reputation for being acquisitive.

23. CCTV media building (Beijing) – Hemorrhoid or Big Underpants

24. Frost Bank Building (Austin) – The Owl building. If you view the top of the tower from a corner, the two faces of the tower clock resemble owl eyes and the corner of the observation deck a beak. According to UT Austin legend, this was designed deliberately, as the tower’s architect was supposedly a graduate of Rice University, whose athletic mascot is an owl. The Owl’s architect was in fact Paul Cret, born in Lyon, France, who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

25. George Pompidou Centre (Paris) – The Cruise Liner

26. Stedelijk Museum’s new addition (Amsterdam) – The Bathtub

27. Beijing National Stadium (Beijing) – The Bird’s Nest

(Nick)name the landmarks

Each of these extraordinary architectural landmarks has been bestowed at some point in its history — either before, during or after its design and construction — with an appropriately colorful nickname. Clues to most of the nicknames lie in the resemblance of the buildings to common household objects — but not in every case … Can you identify them all?

Answers (nickname, official building name or address, city, and origin of nickname if not immediately apparent) will be posted tomorrow at noon.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

Easter — sunrise in a name

The origin of the name Easter — one of the most important days in the Christian calendar when the resurrection of Christ is commemorated throughout the Western world — is not definitive, but it’s now generally understood that its pagan etymology dates back many centuries to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre (also Estre, Estara, Eastre, Ostara, and other variations), the goddess of sunrise. Linguistically and spiritually she is thought to be related to Hausos, the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess, and to Austron, the Proto-Germanic goddess of fertility and spring, whose feast was almost certainly celebrated on the spring equinox, a time recognized by many pagan cultures as the start of the year and marked with important celebrations. At the heart of the names of these fruitful morning goddesses is the word East — the direction of the sunrise.

The eighth-century Christian saint, scholar and linguist Bede argued in his book De temporum ratione (“The Reckoning of Time”) that the Anglo-Saxon Christians adopted not just the name of the goddess Eostre but also many of the celebratory practices of her spring feast day for their Mass of Christ’s resurrection.

That Easter is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess isn’t a universally accepted truth, however. The historian Ronald Hutton argues with Bede in his book Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, suggesting that “the Anglo-Saxon Eostur-monath meant simply ‘the month of opening’ or ‘the month of beginnings'”, and his theory is borne out by the fact that many of the other Anglo-Saxon month names translate as seasonal events rather than the names of gods or goddesses.

The ubiquity of buzzwords and business speak

Update, Oct 2018: You can now check your own writing for jargon, using the “Jargon Grader” app. Sic. It really does exist. …

We’re all playing Bullshit Bingo most of the time — in our heads, if not in the board room. When loud cell-phone guy on the morning commute is maximizing symbiotic deliverables, or your colleague’s powerpoint presentation is all about e-enabling mission-critical synergies, the urge to punch a fist in the air and shout “BS Bingo” can be overwhelming. But we all hear and read it and even sometimes speak or write it on a regular basis. Corporate and marketing jargon is here to stay in our daily vocabularies — at least when it comes to the media and the workplace, where formal relationships are negotiated, proposals are pitched, deals are done, speeches are delivered, products and services are advertised, and opinions or beliefs are expressed — often publicly, persuasively, delicately. But why don’t we go home and innovate cross-platform systems or expedite transparent convergences when we snuggle with our sweeties on the sofa? This relentlessly unattractive terminology seems to be born of and lend itself well to several different possible motives, which often can’t be easily discerned; they include sheer pretentiousness, vain attempts at linguistic or intellectual prowess, deliberate and strategic ambiguity, projections of authority or objectiveness, or simply being fashionable and speaking the lingo of the corporate West. Continue reading →

Glossophilia

1. n. The love of language

Mother of Beauty

Mother of Beauty

You say forward, I say forwards; you say toward, I say towards …

Mrs. Thatcher or Lady Thatcher?

The verbal anochronisms of Mad Men

Poetry in Motion: “Ragtime” by Kevin Young

The dying art of shorthand

Nickname the landmarks: here they are …

(Nick)name the landmarks

Easter — sunrise in a name

The ubiquity of buzzwords and business speak