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.)

Unnecessary Quotes.com

Apostrophe Abuse.com

Here’s an example from each (with the most bizarre example I’ve seen of a misplaced apostrophe):

 

 

 

 

Kate and Pippa in the words of the poets

My father writes about some of the Kates and Pippas of literary renown …

http://www.barder.com/3200

Pippa and Kate in the words of the poets

April 30th, 2011

Oh, no, not that wedding again? Calm down, dear, it’s only a footnote.  According to the tabloids and the internet, Pippa Middleton, sister of the new Princess William formerly known as Kate, stole the show yesterday for many viewers, not only more than rivalling her sister’s good looks but prompting excited comments about a particular aspect of her figure.  A Daily Mirror headline, for example, screams:

Pippa Middleton bridesmaid dress sparks Facebook fan page for her bottom

and sure enough, there’s the facebook page in question, already marked as ‘liked’ by more than 44,000 connoisseurs of the anatomical feature in question.  But on a more elevated level, the catapulting to national celebrity status of the lovely Pippa must have sent at least some of us to our collected poetry of the now much neglected Robert Browning:

from Pippa Passes

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

– of which the last couplet at least has achieved immortality, if the rest of the long narrative poem hasn’t.

SRD GIRL. [To PIPPA who approaches.] Oh, you may come closer: we shall not eat you! Why, you seem the very person that the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with! I’ll tell you all about it.

Here Browning evidently foresees the impression that some observers claim to have got from the proceedings yesterday that Prince Harry, brother of the groom, sharing responsibility for the young bridesmaids and page boys with Pippa, the sister of the bride, appeared somewhat smitten by her, being overheard (or lip-read) to whisper to her a gallant tribute to her beauty, although whether Browning’s description of young Harry as “the great rich handsome Englishman” fits the bill is for others to judge.  Anyway, I doubt if Harry’s long-time girlfriend Chelsy Davy has anything to worry about.

Cole Porter also obviously had a premonition, putting words into the mouth of the groom on the red-quilted palace balcony (only confusing the prince’s nickname with his Dad’s):

FRED:

So, kiss me, Kate, thou lovely loon,
‘Ere we start on our honeymoon.
So kiss me, Kate, darling devil divine,
For now thou shall ever be mine.

But let Shakespeare have the last word, even if he also gets a little confused over who would be speaking — William, obviously, not Harry, still on the balcony:

Kate, I cannot look greenly nor gasp out my eloquence, nor I have no cunning in protestation; only downright oaths, which I never use till urged, nor never break for urging. If thou canst love a fellow of this temper, Kate, whose face is not worth sun-burning, that never looks in his glass for love of any thing he sees there, let thine eye be thy cook. I speak to thee plain soldier: If thou canst love me for this, take me: if not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; but for thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee too…

Now, welcome, Kate: and bear me witness all,
That here I kiss her as my sovereign queen.

Well, his queen-to-be, anyway.

 

 

 

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.

 


“What if there’s no hell?” asks Time …

“What if there’s no hell?” asks Time magazine.

Well, the subjunctive mood might find out soon, as it continues its slow demise  and enters grammatical purgatory.

In bygone days,  in olden English (before Chaucer or Shakespeare), all or most of our verbs were conjugated to reflect different grammatical ‘moods’ ranging from indicative, imperative and conditional to optative, potential and subjunctive.  Such subtle  inflections still pepper the verbs of romance languages such as French and Spanish, but the aggressive (d)evolution of English has left much of this complex conjugation behind in the dust, leaving us with most verbs expressed only in the straightforward indicative.

Thankfully, there’s a notable exception when it comes to the subjunctive mood: the one in which we defy reality or reason, we let our imaginations fly beyond the possible, we wonder and wish, yearn and desire, and we allow the ‘what ifs” to have their very own voice.  It’s in the use of our most common verb, which is almost not a verb because it represents the very essence of soul and identity: “to be”.

“If I were you” is probably the most common and undisputed example of this most poetic of grammatical moods, and the easiest way to explain it. In normal indicative mood, when “I” is the subject of the verb “to be” it is conjugated as “I am” or “I was”. But the moment that element of doubt, hypothesis, desire or contrariness is introduced, we abandon the different inflections for different subjects, and suddenly we’re all in the same boat, using the same form of being: “were”. “If I were you, I would.” “If he were better behaved, he wouldn’t.”

Noel Coward, imagining a different reality, wrote whimsically:

“I believe in doing what I can
In crying when I must
In laughing when I choose
Hey ho, if love were all
I should be lonely.”

The wistful Christmas song “In Dulci Jubilo” ends with a plaintive wish to be transported elsewhere: “Oh that we were there.”

J. S. Bach, in his sacred song “Komm, süßer Tod” (“Come, Sweet Death, Come Blessed Rest”) captures in his music the desire for death and heaven; the words, translated from the German, capture in sweet subjunctive that same yearning for a journey of body and soul:

“Come, sweet death, come blessed rest!
Oh, that I were but already
there among the hosts of angels”

The subjunctive is alive  and well when we ask that you be patient, when he proposes that they be united in their cause, when I urge that the situation be addressed, when they prefer that she be kind, or when you request that she be there.

Now, as Time asks about that most elusive of truths, the atheist will argue convincingly that there is no hypothesis, uncertainty or impossibility – and therefore no need for a subjunctive mood – in the question the magazine poses. Believers  in an after-life would surely prefer a “were” in place of that contracted “is”: “What if there were no hell: would we all be saved?” Using the subjunctive immediately assumes and defines a set of beliefs and realities. Conversely, a simple difference in belief and religious conviction can determine not just the grammatical mood but the very essence of the question being posed.

“What if there were no subjunctive?” Oh that we never know …

 

 

Thanks, Damian, for the Time tip-off …

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 …