Today’s discussion on the Editors’ Association of Canada listserv has brought forth an ad looking for performers with “tonnes of energy.” Hm! That would be “tons,” right? Boy, give these people 2.5 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km…
Except that there actually is a case to be made for it. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged centimetre, idioms, inch, kilometre, metric conversion, mile, tonnes, tons
There are some bits of usage that people are more likely to get wrong if they stop and try to get them right. I encountered one of the most noteworthy and commonly confounding cases in a recent edit, when I had to change “the majority was” to “the majority were” and “the remainder was” to “the remainder were.”
In ordinary speech, we generally have a natural feel for these things. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged collective nouns, collectives, majority are, majority is, quantifiers, remainder are, remainder is
One of my favourite records (now CDs) of all time is Duran Duran’s Rio. I’ve listened to it countless times, and almost all of those times on speakers, not headphones, until recently, when I started listening to music at work in the afternoon to keep from getting drowsy.
Towards the end of the last track, “The Chauffeur,” there’s some speech and other sounds. The speech is in a resonant male voice with a somewhat toasty British accent. For years I really didn’t know what the voice was saying. You can’t tell that well over speakers, especially with the pan pipes, synthesizer and especially drums going all at the same time. I amused myself imagining the most audible bit was “It’s Maury Niska-Nagay, and Maury’s… covered in shit.” I knew, of course, that that certainly wasn’t it, though there were sounds of that general order.
But recently, listening to it on headphones, I thought, “No, really, what is that dude saying?” Continue reading
I’m told Carol Fisher Saller of the Chicago Manual of Style, in her new book The Subversive Copy Editor, recounts how she convinced an author that that of him who seeks should be that of he who seeks.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ms. Saller! You’ve clearly been staring at this stuff too long! You’ve simultaneously overthought and underthought this one. Overthought because you’re letting your ideas override your ear; underthought because you haven’t properly analyzed what’s going on here. Continue reading
A colleague asked whether “among other things” in a sentence such as the following is a dangler:
Among other things, this book explores the concept of silliness.
Update: I have now posted an HTML version of the full paper, finally. It’s at sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/an-historic/.
This the first part of a longer paper. This part, the introduction, is the most concise introduction to the issue; the second part covers the history; after that it goes into more technical depth with a survey of current attitudes that I conducted. The full text of the paper, with the references, is available as a PDF.
One of the most regular and inflexible rules of English is the one governing which version of the indefinite article to use in a given context. It is a useful thing to have an understanding of the rule, and it would take less than an hour to learn a habit of choosing according to the sound of the following word: a before a consonant, as in habit, but also before a consonant sound written as a vowel, as in useful; an before a vowel, as in understanding, but also before a silent consonant (inevitably h) followed by a vowel, as in hour. Although in some dialects a is used before vowels as well, this usage is considered nonstandard and is generally looked down upon (notwithstanding which it has occasionally been predicted that this will be the ultimate use everywhere – see, for example, the editor’s note following Bolinger 1975). An before a consonant would be considered a mark of a nonnative speaker.
There is, however, a salient exception. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged a historic, a historical, an historic, an historical, historic, historical, indefinite article
This is the text of a presentation I made at the Editors’ Association of Canada Conference in Vancouver, June 10, 2006. It came with a handout, “A brief history of English,” which is available as a PDF. It traces the history and development of the English language and the nature and function of language change.
Continue reading
Posted in language and linguistics
Tagged class, English history, English language history, English vowels, great vowel shift, language change, language deterioration, lexical change, long vowels, morphological change, morphology, Old English, phonetic profiling, proper English, reanalysis, Robert Lowth, semantic change, semantics, short vowels, sociolinguistics, sound change, standard English, syntactic change, syntax, word change
A fellow editor was wondering about the distinction, if any, between confident in and confident about. This is what I make of it: Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged confidence, confident, confident about, confident in
This is the text of a presentation I made to the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada, Sept. 24, 2007. Certain parts were sung; you can guess which.
It ain’t necessarily so, no,
it ain’t necessarily so,
the things Strunk and White
want to tell you are right,
it just ain’t necessarily so.
Getting pissed off about grammatical errors is a favourite activity of a surprisingly large portion of English speakers. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged a historic, ain't, alright, an historic, anyways, can, capitalization, conjunctions, decimate, descriptivism, double negatives, double superlatives, fewer, fun, hopefully, language change, lay, less, lie, like, may, more unique, prepositions, prescriptivism, sentence adverbs, sociolinguistics, split infinitives, standard English, till, verbing
Edit: When I wrote this back in 2008, I was less sensitized to the insistent racism and injustice experienced by black people in America, and so I did not take into account why the erroneous account might spread so readily, or the surrounding sentiments; I also used the word lynching too readily in a figurative sense, which can belittle the genuine life-and-death nature of its historical reality.
Nobody likes being called racist, of course, but the fact that it upset me so much is likely because to some extent I really did, in the back of my mind, belittle the concerns of blacks in America and Canada. When your life has been free of certain kinds of harassment, it’s far too easy to think those who complain of it are whiners. I’ve since learned better.
But I’m not going to revise this and pretend I didn’t write it as I wrote it. These are my words the way I wrote them, and I won’t duck and pretend I wasn’t so knee-jerk insensitive.
I still do not accept the inaccurate etymology offered for picnic; the historical data are well established. And I do think that phonetic profiling can have scurrilous effect. But the sounds of words also have effect regardless of etymology. For example, niggardly has nothing to do with the “n-word” etymologically, but it sounds so much like it, it’s more or less impossible to use it without bringing that worse word to mind. I am less convinced of this in regard to picnic, but I would like to know how others hear it (before they are told any accounts of its origins).
I do not, in any event, consider it fair to tell people they are being racist for using a word that has no actual history of racism and that, to them, has no racist overtones or implications. Especially when no one seems to be calling anyone out for using bulldoze, which has a truly awful history – but doesn’t sound like a taboo word.
But now that these stories have been spread, we have to be aware of them, and address them – and the sentiments and experiences behind them.
Spread the word and help stop another lynching of a perfectly guiltless word – and the family tradition it refers to. Tell your friends and colleagues that picnic is not a racist word.
You might think that this is a joke or a parody. Unfortunately, it’s not. People with influence over what students learn are maintaining that “picnic” is an offensive word, and that the origin of the “picnic” is in a happy outing to eat out on a lawn while watching a lynching (the term supposedly being from “pick a nic” – “nic,” in this account, is another version of the “n-word” – to string up). Continue reading
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