Not Just for pedants

Subject: Not Just for pedants
From: Sourdough
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 01:59 PM

From time to time, a thread here burns fueled the annoyance of those who see the English language being abused by journalists, advertising copywriters, authors and just plain folks.

I recently found an organization (a seventeen year old non-profit group) made up of such people. One of the main forces behind the organization is Richard Lederer whose name will be familiar to people who care about this subject. He is observant, witty and his books and articles are usually filled with information as well as just plain funny.

The s an article from a recent issue of their publication, posted as a sample. It is by Lederer. It is about English and synnyms. Fascinating.

Interested? The site is at http://spellorg.com/

Sourdough

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: Wyrd Sister
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 02:09 PM

Thanks for the site. Even MORE like-minded people in this world? Folk music AND respect for the language? At this rate I will have to rethink just how weird I am after all!

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: GUEST, Sardus
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 02:20 PM

Only since pedantics are relevant (I appreciate your taking the time to provide the reference): The principle quote they use is slightly misquoted. It should read: "...I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" It's a very minor error, but. . . Second, there's almost nothing of interest to see unless and until you give them US$20.00.

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 02:26 PM

If I could get lots of people to send me $20 that'd rapidly stop me feeling annoyed. (Using the word "mad" to mean annoyed is of course just the kind of thing that often upsets people who get mad about things like that...)

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: heric
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 02:43 PM

I was wondering about the choice of that quote, as well (I'm the guest above.) I also sincerely apologize for misspelling principal in a pedants' thread.

Dan P.S. I just bought a fun book from Costco as a Christmas present: The Random House Dictionary of America's Popular Proverbs and Sayings (US$20.00)

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: lamarca
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 04:35 PM

I always wonder about people who use the "Mad as hell" quote, and whether they know its context. It came from Paddy Chayevsky's wickedly brilliant screenplay for "Network". The whole point of the movie, as I saw it, was that the newscaster who uttered it on television inspired a whole bunch of people to slavishly do the same (monkey see, monkey do...). The cynical directors of the TV network news used the anchorman's popularity to manipulate the audience into following directions like sheep.

I remember walking through my college campus during the week after seeing the movie as various students stuck their heads out of dorm windows to dutifully yell the phrase, thinking they were being rebellious, when, actually, they were just proving how effectively Chayevsky had manipulated them...

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: Marymac90
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 05:34 PM

My pet peeve is the misuse of mental health terms, such as schizophrenic and bipolar. People often misuse these terms to mean anything from being ambivalent to having Multiple Personality Disorder, a very rare psychiatric disorder. The thing that unites all the varieties of schizophrenia is being out of touch with reality, as in having delusions, or hallucinations (often audio). Bipolar Disorder, formerly called manic-depressive illness, is a condition in which a person has mood swings, and is sometimes very depressed, and sometimes very manic--kind of like being on speed. These mood swings generally take quite a while--weeks or months--to swing between the two states. If a person's mood changes suddenly and frequently, we say that their mood is labile.

Mary McCaffrey, aka Marymac, enjoying feeling like a Social Worker, instead of a receptionist/housemaid!

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 19 Nov 01 - 06:25 PM

feeling like a Social Worker, instead of a receptionist/housemaid There's a difference to the feeling? Well, sometimes maybe.

We used to say "Mrs Brown is in to see you - she's a bit high today."

The "professionals" try to use the demotic expressions, and the rest of the world tries to use the professional jargon, each in the hope that it makes us more credible. And every now and again we switch round, to show we aren't one of them really.

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: Sourdough
Date: 20 Nov 01 - 03:38 AM

I, too, was disappointed by the $20 price tag but the books they offer free upon signing up are probably worth close to the 20 dollars. Actually, a lot of the books in their bookstore seemed interesting - titles I hadn't heard of before, about word and phrase history for instance.

I liked the idea of those cards to send out to reporers and on-camera personalities when they make an egregious error.

Coincidentally, The Atorney General of the US was just on television news and repeat a neologism, twice (in case we hadn' heard I before. He was talking about the $25 million dollar reward for You-Know-Who. He says that it will "incentivize" Afghans to search for Bin Laden.

Wonderful thing about English hough is the fact that you can ell immediately what it means. Too bad, the word is a it awkward.

Sourdough

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Nov 01 - 08:34 AM

I'd say that coming up with words like "incentivize" is a great way of encouraging people in the rest of the English speaking parts of the world to feel contemptuous of America. (As it would for any other country doing the same, I hasten to add.)

I've nothing against new words which add to the wealth and variety of the language. That one doesn't.

I wonder, if one of Bin Laden's cronies turns up with the head in a bag and dumps it on the table, will they actually pay up? Or will the fella at the desk feel tempted to shoot him, and hand in the two heads, and keep the money for himself?

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: Guessed
Date: 21 Nov 01 - 06:26 AM

the French government have a long tradition of eschewing foreign imports like "le week-end", they even issued edicts on the American terms abounding in electronics, but in technical terms, American is the lingua franca (if you see what I mean)
needless to say they failed, engineers the world over want to understand each other. The inventor usually gets to name the process/gizmo and it often sticks.

Subject: RE: Not Just for pedants
From: Sourdough
Date: 21 Nov 01 - 07:03 AM

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