For a while, I worked for the French government on the Minitel project. On of the products was the carte de memoire, a credit card with a programmable computer chip embedded within the card. In the early 80s, they wanted to sell it in the US and approached the US Government as well as the US banking system and various state entitlement programs. They needed a name that the US would feel comfortable with and came up with "Smart Card". Even in France now, though, I have been told, the English phrase has taken hold.

On a slightly different subject, some of you may be familiar with Fowler's Handbook of English Usage. It used to be the standard usage book for writers with any pretensions at all towards being accurate and strangely enough it still makes interesting reading. ALthough I don't follow it slavishly, it is the only style book I own and I refer to it for common sense answers to the kinds of difficult questions that plague writers and editors about style and usage.

This is the 75th anniversary year of its publication and as a result, there have been a number of articles, mosty very appreciative, of this spin-off from the OED. The paragraph below gives an idea of some of the refereshment to be found in this old arbiter of taste. It is not a quote from Fowler himself, but is from a recent article about him.

For the first generation of readers, a large part of Fowler's appeal was his impatience with what he labelled "Superstitions": never begin a sentence with "But," never end a sentence with a preposition, never split an infinitive. His general position was that it is almost always worse to appear to have gone out of one's way not to break a rule than it is to break it when breaking it appears to be unavoidable. Fowler wanted writing to be unaffected and clear.

Not a bad point of view for 75 years ago, no? Irt remoinds me of several squabbles in this website where writers and would be writers have aired their pet peeves. Fowler would have had little patience with many of the "rules" we try to apply.

This next paragraph is actually a quote from Fowler's Handbook of English Usage. Wasn't there a "Saturday Night Live" skit that shared these thoughts?

To say a French word in the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a different nature, and after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state; it is a feat that should not be attempted; the greater its success as a tour de force, the greater its failure as a step in the conversational progress; for your collocutor, aware that he could not have done it himself, has his attention distracted whether he admires or is humiliated. All that is necessary is a polite acknowledgement of indebtedness to the French language indicated by some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound.

I think that is wonderful writing in itself. It reminds me of Mark Twain in such books at "A Tramp Abroad".

I am afraid that I am starting to ramble. It is about 4:00AM in California and this post is the result of waking up at 2:00AM and deciding I didn't feel like sleeping for a while. Now maybe I'll go take a nap.

Sourdough