horseshoer

Posted on March 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Have fun looking at this word, and then have fun saying it.

If it snags your eyes, it’s with good reason: the second half of it is just the first half rearranged… in the spelling, that is. The pronunciation is almost completely different – /r/ is the only phoneme the two halves have in common, and it’s a mere glide in the first half and a full syllable in the second.

In the first half, the o is made with the tongue lower than with, say, over, and higher than with, say, on. The s is voiceless, as indicated by the e, which is not pronounced and is just there to keep the word looking like a plural of hor and having the s said [z] – originally there was no e written on horse.

In the second half, neither s nor h is said with individual value; although we have, and have always had, the “sh” sound in English, classical Latin didn’t have the sound, and so our alphabet didn’t come with a symbol for it. In Old English it was written sc; now it’s sh. The o has always been there in this word, and used to be said [o]; the e has not always been there, though in shoer it would be there anyway as part of the er suffix. And again the e is not said; we just go straight to the r (if you’re British and glide the r, you’re still not saying the e as you would if giving it normal value; you’re saying a sound reserved for er, farther back in the mouth).

If you’re just learning English, you may well think that this word was invented by the devil, or at any rate, its referent notwithstanding, that it is quite unlucky. It stands as evidence against the silly assertion that English is a logical language. It also forces you to make a sound remarkably like that of a dishwasher in action (and nothing at all like the clank of a horseshoe). But, better still, it forces the speaker to do something rather unusual: follow an alveolar fricative with an alveopalatal fricative – you start with that [s] and then immediately have to slide the tongue back a little off the ridge. It’s just screaming for the first sound to be assimilated into the second. And it probably would come to be thus if it were a common word.

Now, it is made of two common words, both great old Anglo-Saxon words emerging from the mists of time little altered. And its referent is nothing new – someone who makes horseshoes or shoes horses. But even though there is still work (if less of it) for such tradespeople, they are not commonly called by the plain (if horse-whispering) word we have here. No, fittingly for a line of work that persists mainly in rather upscale milieux, it gets a Latinate denomination: farrier.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

fungible, fungi

Posted on March 7, 2010 | 6 comments

We were setting out some refreshments at Domus Logogustationis for our monthly Words, Wines, and Whatever tasting event. Maury had paused to scrutinize a piece of truffled Gorgonzola.

“I believe this is a bit mouldy.”

I peered over. Elisa, ready to hand, made a funny face. “It’s supposed to be! It’s blue cheese!” she said.

“Yes,” said Maury, holding up the offending wedge, “but there is the mould in the cheese and the mould on the cheese. Moulds are not fungible.”

“Ironically,” I said.

“Why ironically?” Elisa asked.

“Because they’re fungi,” Maury said, pronouncing it “fun-jye.”

“Fungi?” Elisa said, saying it “fun-guy.”

“I am often thought one such, thank you,” Maury replied.

Elisa was about to say something, the caught herself and gave Maury a light swat. “Ha ha. But you said ‘fun-jye.'”

“Well, yes,” said Maury, “I was going with the usual way of saying anglicized Latin terms. We don’t, after all, say fungible with a velar g. Or pretty much any other similar Latin-derived word, except for fungi, which has both options available.”

“They’re fungible,” I said.

“Fungible,” Elisa said, pondering. “That’s a fun word. Sounds a bit like spongeable.”

“Fittingly,” said Maury, “since the word fungus comes from the same Greek word that gives us sponge.”

“But fungi aren’t sponges,” Elisa said.

“Nope,” I said, “sponges are part of the animal kingdom. Fungi are their own kingdom.”

“So does fungible relate to fungus?” Elisa asked.

“No,” Maury replied, “it’s just a coincidence of sound, though it might have been the basis for various Latin puns. Fungible comes from fungi vice.” Maury gave the classical pronunciation – like “foonghee weekeh” – and then repeated the term with the old British-style version, like “fun-jye vie-see.”

“To take the place of or fill the office of,” I translated. “For things that are fudgeable. Break one glass and you can use another similar one in its stead. A dollar is a dollar. And so on. If any item of the type will do, it’s fungible.”

“Fungi vice!” Elisa giggled, saying it like the name of a mushroom cop show. “Maybe we should call the fungi vice squad on this piece of cheese.”

“It might gorgonize them,” Maury said.

“They might gorge on it,” Elisa riposted.

“Hey,” I said in a tough-guy voice, “We ain’t lookin’ for truffle.”

“Another kind of fungus,” Maury pointed out. “Also not fungible.”

“We ought to have mushrooms here to add to the fun, guys!” Elisa said. She tittered a bit at her pun.

“I’m always leery of mushrooms,” Maury said.

“Timothy Leary?” I asked.

“His kind of fungus was more ergot than psilocybin, I think,” Maury said (ergot is a mould related to LSD), “but it was the latter kind that struck home to me just how fungible fungi aren’t. I knew a fellow in my college days –” (I interjected “Mycology?” but Maury continued) “– who wished to procure some of it for hallucinatory adventures, but he found it unavailable. Someone he knew said he could get him some Amanita muscaria instead, another mushroom for trips. Unfortunately, the Amanita he got was phalloides.”

“Ooo,” I said.

“Fotunately for him,” Maury continued, “he realized soon enough that he wasn’t tripping, and so he took a trip instead to the emergency ward. Saved his life. If he had waited until he had developed cramps a couple of days later, he would likely have died of liver failure within the week.”

We paused. Then looked at the truffled Gorgonzola. There was indeed a small spot of surface mold. “Keep or toss, then?” I asked.

Maury took a cheese knife and sliced off the offending part, then placed the rest on the tray. “It won’t kill us.”

6 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

hopefully

Posted on March 4, 2010 | 4 comments

Ah! You see this word, controversial in the past century, and look hopefully. Will the dispute that has brought such despair to an ostensibly bright-eyed word be resolved, or at least addressed enlighteningly? I write this note hopefully; hopefully, it will sort out some key points. The word and its uses will be fully examined, and, I hope, fully tasted.

Let us start with a morphological decomposition: hope+ful+ly.

The ly comes from a Germanic root meaning “appearance, form” that is also the root of like (all forms of the word like are related and have this origin). In this case it makes the word an adverb, but there is an identical and cognate suffix that makes adjectives: kingly, early, leisurely, etc.

The ful is just full written with one l instead of two. And the hope is, of course, hope. Both hope and full come from Germanic roots and have always meant what they mean now (though their forms have modified over time – full is cognate with forms throughout the Indo-European languages, all having a labial and a liquid, as in plenum in Latin and plérés and pléthos in Greek).

So this word is, like, full of hope! It was assembled in stages, historically: though its parts date back into the mists of time, hopeful is first cited by the Oxford English Dictionary from 1594 (in Shakespeare’s Richard III, not the most hopeful play in the canon), and hopefully from 1639.

Say it now, slowly: hope – your mouth is in a shape to swallow something, a gulp of liquid perhaps; you sure hope it’s good! – ful – now your mouth is full with your tongue, as it arches like a stretching cat, tip and tail high – ly – the tongue is now pressing its mid part forward and up, as the tip and tail drop back. The motion your tongue makes is a little reminiscent of the sun salutation, a common yoga routine. Ah, greet the morning hopefully! Hopefully it will be a nice day.

But there it is: the bitter twinge, the fly in the ointment. Can you say hopefully like that, setting the tone of a sentence without modifying the main verb? Ignoring for a moment how long people have been doing so, isn’t it illogical?

Ah, logic, logic, logic. In the sciences, you see how something works, and you make a hypothesis. If it is further confirmed, it is a theory. But if you find data that contradict your theory, you need to revise or discard it; it’s considered rather bad form to simply declare the data wrong. Not that it’s never been done, but when it’s done it doesn’t generally last. Biologists refused to believe that a platypus could lay eggs and yet be a mammal. It simply didn’t fit within their tidy taxonomies. It really was a hopeless case. But in the end the physical fact was indisputable.

But in language, because we do have the opportunity to influence its use, and it is a form of behaviour susceptible to having “correct” and “incorrect” forms, platypus denial can persist for a long, long time. Failure to analyze grammatical functions correctly is presented not as a defect, which it is, but as a virtue: you have logic on your side, so all those people who are saying things in a way that does not match your analysis must be wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, garbage in, garbage out: if your assumptions are wrong or your logic is incomplete, your conclusions will be rubbish.

And the usage always comes first. Natural languages are not constructed; they arise spontaneously and are analyzed after the fact. They can be influenced, but one does well to consider what sort of influence to exert and why. That’s the pragmatic side of the question – does a given usage enhance or detract from the expressive potential of the language? Well, let us examine the one at hand. Frankly, I don’t see what the fuss is about. But, sadly, there is a fuss, so, clearly, I need to address it.

The “logical” analysis that leads to rejection goes as follows: “Hopefully is an adverb meaning ‘with hope,’ so it must apply to the verb. If you say ‘Hopefully, I am going,’ it means ‘I am going hopefully.’ To use it otherwise is wrong.” The problem is that it is used that way, is used that way clearly and effectively, and thereby adds to the expressive potential of English. But that’s not the only problem with that analysis.

You see, the contested use of hopefully is as a sentence adverb, i.e., an adverb that sets the mood for a sentence, and it’s far from being the only word we use in that way. It’s an established and well-understood usage. If I say “frankly, I don’t see what the fuss is about,” it’s not the seeing that’s frank; if I say “sadly, there is a fuss, so, clearly, I need to address it,” I’m not saying that the fuss occurs sadly or that the address is what will be clear – although I hope the address is reasonably clear.

Seriously, sentence adverbs have been around at least since the 17th century – “seriously” was used as one in 1644. The animus towards them has only been around since the 20th century, and only really caught on in the 1960s, and has been focused mostly on hopefully, which is a bit of a latecomer to the sentence adverb game, showing up in the early 20th century – but well before many usages that are now commonly accepted.

So, really, why should there be any question about it? It’s obviously a perfectly viable usage. And I certainly do hope that the eyes of the grammaticasters will open fully; if they can learn to like it, I will be full of hope for the language.

4 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

doldrums

Posted on March 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

Do life and work in late winter seem especially sluggish? As though, if life were an orchestra, you were not the concertmaster or even the oboe but merely the second timpanist, stuck back in the corner beating dull drums slowly? This incessant tedium… it’s enough to make one throw a tantrum if one weren’t so listless. It’s like being a sailor on a becalmed boat.

Or, more to the point, being a sailor on a becalmed boat is like it. You know how we tend to get words for internal states – mental and emotional dispositions – from words for concrete physical things? Well, guess what. Here’s one that goes the other way. Doldrums referred first to mental dullness, drowsiness, and depression; it was later transferred to the areas of the ocean where one could be becalmed (and thus in the doldrums as far as mood and activity went, too).

Doldrum comes in turn from dull plus an ending imitative of tantrum (a kind of deliberate opposite formation, like craptacular formed from spectacular). And guess what about dull (drum roll, please)… It’s also a word that referred to mental state first and then later to physical nature! Yes, that’s right; it comes from and old Germanic root meaning “foolish” or “stupid”. From there it extended to sluggish spirits and blunted moods. And only from there, and a half a millennium after the first instance we have recorded of it in English (but still before Shakespeare), do we see it used to refer to knives, light, etc.

So doldrums, with its echo of ho-hum, really is a perfect word for the late winter blues, when the superintendent of your spirits is become slumlord, and perhaps, like a bored and stagnating sailor, you get into the rums and just plop upside-down (plop upside-down? dold… just lie on your back in your state of stupefaction and look at it).

Thanks to Margaret Gibbs for suggesting doldrums.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

pschent

Posted on March 3, 2010 | 1 comment

In case you were wondering whether we have any words in English that can’t be pronounced according to English phonotactics, well, yes, of course we do. English is rapacious and will take words from anywhere if it sees them as suitable and desirable.

Take, for example, pschent. This is not a typo for Paschen or psyche or anything else, not even James Joyce’s pftjschute. It is also not pronounced like pshaw but with an ent in place of the aw. No, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it begins with a voiceless bilabial stop, which is followed by a voiceless alveolar fricative – /ps/, already a forbidden onset in English, even though we have tons of words starting with the letters ps thanks to /ps/ being so common in Greek as to have its own letter – and that in turn is followed by a voiceless velar fricative, as in German ach (and written [x] in the International Phonetic Alphabet), a sound we no longer even have in English, officially. And then, then, then, finally then, you get to say the same sounds as the end of went. It seems like some pop-bottle explosion: “Man, someone musta shook that Coke, cuz it just pschent!” No wonder some other dictionaries allow this word an onset of just /sk/.

So, ah, what is it really, this pschent? Well, Torontonians have lately had a chance to see plenty of pictures and sculptures of it, if they’ve visited the King Tut exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You probably thought of it as a double crown (which sounds like a coin or a brand of beer). The pharaoh of unified Egypt was a man who wore two hats, you see. At the same time. One was the milk-bottle-shaped white crown of Upper (southern) Egypt; the other was the more rakish red crown of Lower (northern) Egypt, which just so happened to fit around the white crown like a zarf (or one of those jugs one puts ones milk bags into, if one drinks milk from bags). The pschent was, in its way, Egypt’s answer to the Union Jack. Only worn on the king’s head.

This word was one of the ones on the Rosetta Stone, that parallel text that first allowed the hieroglyphs to be deciphered. Pschent was in the Greek and in the Egyptian demotic script; it comes from p “the” and skhnt “sekhemti”. Oh, I should say that sekhemti was the hieroglyph for this crown; it meant “two powerful ones”. But we couldn’t borrow that word! Where would be the fun in that? Be happy at least that we took the Greek version, with the e in it; skhnt can only be said when one is sound asleep. Not that one has many occasions to speak of pschents in daily life, of course.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

aplomb

Posted on March 2, 2010 | 1 comment

What picture do you get when you see or hear this word? Perhaps a cool customer, one with chin up and chest out but as calm as Jeeves, someone who, when pitted against a problem, does not take things lying down but does not throw his (or her) weight around, someone who surveys the situation, senses the gravity of the circumstance but always keeps head on shoulders, takes the lead, and gives a measured response? And perhaps someone with a plummy accent?

The look and sound of the word seem to go well with the sense. The pl is seen in calm, measured words such as please, pleasant, plan, and plush, as well as weighty words such as plot, plop, plug, and plough, along with an assortment of other kinds of words such as pluck, plural, and plight. The calm /m/ of the end with its thoughtful nasal hum can also be seen to be leaving something unsaid – that b there. Ah, that b. Look: first you see it hanging upside down p, then it is right side up but in two pieces lo, and with the calm hand of intervention m it ends up as it should be, but tamed. Yes, this word gets from a to b so calmly you don’t even notice you’re at b.

And where did that b come from? Originally from Latin plumbum, which is the reason the chemical symbol for lead is Pb. If, like a surveyor, you take a properly shaped piece of plumbum and dangle it from a string as a weight, you will find it will find gravity for you quite nicely and tell you exactly which way is up. We may call such a device a plumb bob (sounds like a Hallowe’en game) or a plummet. If you happen to be French, however, “lead” is plomb and if you follow the lead of the lead – not throwing it around, but just being as upright as it is – you are à plomb. So this French prepositional phrase meaning “in vertical position” is now a noun in English meaning, roughly, “as cool as a cucumber”.

This noun, incidentally, is found most of the time with the word with usually two or three words before it: with grace and aplomb, with equal aplomb, with as much aplomb, with considerable aplomb, with characteristic aplomb, with the same bleary-eyed aplomb, et cetera. This is not so surprising, since it expresses a manner of doing things (and doing things with manners). It could have been an adjective (like adroit) or an adverb, but somehow it ended up a noun. Perhaps because it expresses such stability. And perhaps because a plum is, after all, a noun.

Thanks to Jens Wiechers for asking for aplomb.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

thwack

Posted on March 1, 2010 | 1 comment

“So it comes to him,” Daryl said, gesturing, “and THWACK!, he just nails it.”

I emitted a descending whistle of appreciation in response.

Raoul, interested though he may sometimes be in sports tales, was as usual more interested in the sport of words. “What part of speech is that?”

“What,” Daryl asked. “Nails?”

“No, thwack,” Raoul said.

“Well, a thwack can be a noun, and thwack can be a verb…”

“Yes,” Raoul said, “‘He thwacked it a good thwack.’ But this wasn’t either of those, was it? More of an interjection, I think.”

“You can interject nouns and verbs,” Daryl said. “Nuts!” He paused for a split second and then, having thought of it, grabbed some nuts from the bowl on the table. Then he pulled out his iPhone and started typing on it.

“But saying that when you encounter catastrophe is not like saying it when you encounter cashews,” Raoul objected. “It’s not like saying ‘Bees!’ or ‘Incoming!’ or ‘Run!’ or ‘Help!’ It’s not indexical; it doesn’t indicate the presence of, or need for, nuts. Nor do I think thwack is like nuts – one says nuts where one could equally say drat or rats or any of several less polite things. Thwack indicates something more specific. Perhaps one could say smack or whack, depending on the impression of the sound…”

“Well,” Daryl said, flicking through screens on his iPhone, “it’s onomatopoeia, and has been with us at least since about 1530, first as a verb and then as a noun. Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus. I find no listing for it as an interjection.”

“Ah,” I said, deciding my time to dive in had come, “the insistent neglect of ideophones. Even in African languages, some of which have hundreds of them and use them fairly often, they were a long time in being recognized and studied. For some reason many linguists don’t find them interesting enough to study, which I find truly strange. Things that break the expected patterns and categories are the most fascinating!”

“Ideophones?” said Daryl. Tap tap tap he went on his iPhone.

“A particularly performative set of words. Not per se a lexical category; they can be any other word class. But they add an element of performance, and often have unusual sounds and grammatical aspects.”

“Onomatopoeia,” said Raoul. “Straightforward imitation.”

“Standardized, lexicalized, and not always imitative,” I said. “In some languages, for instance, there are ideophones to emphasize intensity of colour – different ones for different colours. Some also use gestures and non-speech sounds. For instance,” I increased my level of performative involvement, “‘Was he in trouble?'” Onto the end of this, as answer, I tacked a low whistle with eyes wide open and right hand fanning head. Then I added, “And that’s culturally standardized.”

“But thwack is plain imitation,” Raoul insisted.

“Why not thap or thwap or swapt or…” I said.

“I notice you use voiceless fricatives on all of them,” Raoul pointed out.

“Well, yes,” I said, “that makes the difference between thwack and whack – the clearer sense of something whistling through the air before impact. That is imitative, but why not fwack?”

“Sounds vulgar, doesn’t it,” Raoul said, and reached for the bowl of nuts.

I tried saying thwack and fwack a few times. “Thwack allows a better pucker and release, a kind of oral gesture imitative of an impact.”

Daryl had found something more with his web searching. “They’re most likely to be used in fairly active, lively, informal narratives, aren’t they?”

“That seems obvious enough,” Raoul said.

“And often in the narrative present,” Daryl continued.

“Is that what you’re finding?” I asked. “That seems reasonable. Just as you used it.”

“And,” Daryl said, scrolling some more, “frequently with exclamation marks, sometimes all caps or italics, and repetition.”

“Well,” I said, “voilà! There you have it.”

“Voilà,” Raoul said. “And what part of speech would that be here?” And so it began again.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

discobolus

Posted on February 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Imagine stepping onto the dance floor at a club and seeing a discobolus. How would you like that? I would not, even if the discobolus were covered with little mirrors. A discobolus is not a disco ball, you see, nor even a bolus in a disco. The stress is on the second syllable, rather like discover us: “Let’s hid behind the turntables; he won’t discobolus.”

The disco, to be sure, is the same disco as elsewhere, referring to discs – including the discus, and quoits (rings tossed like horseshoes). It comes from Greek diskos. The bolus is from Greek bolos, “thrower”, from ballein, “throw” (as in ballistic). The us ending tells us it’s come by way of Latin, as the equivalent Greek ending is os.

So a discobolus is a discus thrower. The c, o, and o are reminiscent of discs, anyway. The word starts on the tip of the tongue, swings back at /k/ to the velum, up to the lips at /b/, and then back to the tip (tip tip back lips tip tip – same rhythm as a popular hockey chant: “Let’s go, [two-syllable team name], let’s go!”). The movement is only vaguely reminiscent of the wind-up of a discus thrower.

So if there were a discobolus in the middle of the dance floor, he would truly be a diabolus in musica (and might be that way due to a diminished fifth – of Scotch, say). And if we were there dancing and he chose to hurl his discus or quoit, it would just clobber us. And would we be discombobulated? Quite.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

deliquium

Posted on February 27, 2010 | 3 comments

I was at one of the Order of Logogustation’s weekly word tastings and had just been served up deliquium when I heard a sound that caused a ripple of horripilation down my spine. It was the unmistakeable creak of matching his-and-hers black leather pants and jackets, and it was right… behind me… looking… over… my… shoulder…

“Mmm, what have we here?” purred Marilyn Frack, 32 millimetres from my ear. “Deliquium! Look, Edgar!” Her other half, Edgar Frick, appeared on my other side, peering at the word I held in my hand.

“Well, now, there’s a liquid-looking word,” declared Edgar.

“In spite of the fact that there’s only one liquid in it,” I said, meaning the /l/.

“But you see,” Marilyn said, “it has two cups, u u.”

“And two candles, i i,” Edgar added.

“Well, then,” Marilyn said, turning towards Edgar, “it’s just you and I, with two cups and two candles! Let us drink deeply!”

“And perhaps,” I said, “you’ll drink so much you’ll pass out. That is, you will suffer deliquium.”

“Pass out!” Marilyn said. “Become as liquid and flow to the floor?”

“It’s a trick word,” I said. “Although there is an obsolete word deliquium that means ‘deliquescence,’ which is melting or becoming liquid by absorbing moisture from the air –”

Marilyn broke into her impression of Katarina Witt in Battle of the Blades: “I’m melting in my seat, and I don’t mean my armpits!” She smiled and licked her lips.

“I don’t think she meant absorption, either,” I said. “But while that deliquium and the sound of liquid have affected the interpretation and use of this word, the sense of swooning or syncope – actually through hypotension rather than intoxication – comes from a Latin homonym meaning ‘failure’ which is formed from a past tense form of the same Latin root that gives us delinquent.”

“One of my favourite words,” Edgar said, “to embody.”

“Then you will commit many a delict,” I said, “which is an offence against the law, coming to us from the same root by way of delictum, which means ‘fault’, ‘offence’, ‘crime’.”

Marilyn’s left eyebrow arched archly. “As in in flagrante delicto! Oo, now I could swoon!”

“We really must thank James for introducing us to this delectable lexeme,” Edgar said, leering heavy-lidded past me at his lover.

“Deliquium?” Marilyn said, leaning close in on me. “Let’s. Do we lick ‘im?”

At which point I believe I lost consciousness.

My thanks to Jens Wiechers for suggesting deliquium.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

“Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide”

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 1 comment

In today’s New York Times, my eye was caught by the following headline:

Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide

It caught my eye because I couldn’t figure out what they meant by it. There were multiple options, none of them certain. It wasn’t until I read the third and fourth paragraphs that I got the gist:

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

The short of it is that the banks helped to hide the debts, and now they’re betting Greece will default on them.

There are a few problems with the headline the way they have it:

  • First, “bet” is temporally ambiguous – I wasn’t sure if they were talking past or present.
  • Second, “defaults” could be a plural noun or a present-tense verb.
  • Third, the present tense is confusing for “defaults” here because it’s referring to the future – something we do in English, use present for the future (since we have no inflecting future tense, just an auxiliary-based one with “will”), but it might be better to be clearer by saying “will default”.
  • Add to this the increasingly common practice of using attributive nouns rather than adjectives, which allows “Greece defaults” to be read as “Greek defaults” or “defaults of/by/from Greece”, and the standard dropping of the relative “that”, and you have something really a bit unclear.

Now, of course, “Banks Bet that Greece Will Default on Debt They Helped Hide” is noticeably longer, which is a problem in newspaper headlines, especially since the NYT still has a print edition with actual column inches to fit within. Likewise “Banks Helped Greece Hide Debt, Now Bet It Will Default”. “Banks Set Greece Up to Fail” might seem harder to defend as a statement, but is probably a better headline all around. (The ambiguity of “set” is OK here because it happened in the past and is still happening in the present.)

But, then, is it really a bad headline? It did get me to read the article, just as the most egregious website I’ve ever seen – yvettesbridalformal.com — has gotten me (and my friends) showing it to everyone, making for excellent advertising.

Incidentally, the title on the web page of the news article (not the headline but the title you see at the top of your browser) is “Trades in Greek Debt Add to Country’s Financing Burden” – clearer but, yes, less catching.

1 Comment

Posted in editing

Tagged , , ,