Waking Up Writing takes a week of downtime. Time to plant cabbages and tomatoes and beans and onions. Time to begin sawing and splitting next winter's firewood. Maybe get in a few long bike rides, a trip to the mountains or the ocean before the tourist hordes arrive. Time to reflect and recharge.
I'll be back June 2.
This one appeared recently in a response to a woman who fears her husband cares more for another woman than for her. Abby responded: “Many wives make their husbands ‘understand’ when communication breaks down through marriage counseling, and that’s what I recommend for you.”
Written like that, the phrase “through marriage counseling” creates a dangling modifier, making Abby’s advice sound as if the communication breaks down because of marriage counseling.
Abby might have confused readers less if she’d rearranged her words (and changed a few) to read something like this: “When communication breaks down, marriage counseling can help many waives can help their husbands understand their point of view.”
Responding to a woman who asked for advice about how to handle her loneliness after her husband’s suicide, and how to tell her young children about how their father died, “Dear Abby” wrote recently, “Being a survivor of suicide can be isolating, but it doesn’t have to be inevitable.”
Whoops!
By having the subject of the subordinate clause (“it”) refer back to the subject of the main clause (“Being a survivor of suicide”), Abby’s statement implies that a person might have a choice about “being a survivor of [a loved one’s] suicide.” A gruesome thought!
I think Abby meant to deliver this message: “Surviving a loved one’s suicide can feel isolating, but isolation isn’t inevitable.”
As for the Monitor headline, for Web display or reference, you might rewrite it to read something like this: Floods bring out Good Samaritans.
Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food Movement. Petrini had come to Durham to receive an honorary doctorate from UNH.
He spoke about how the Slow Food movement honors not only the conviviality, good taste and sociability important to the enjoyment of food, regional food, but the central relationships between and among food, human health, environmental health, culture, community, and social justice.
Petrini urged his audience to do away with the word consumer as it applies to food. He prefers co-producer, implying that with their food choices, people also participate in the modes of agricultural production and processing that brought that food to their tables. He reminded listeners that with every bite, humans also quite literally produce their own bodies.
Food for thought.
If you love words (especially weird words), word histories, and lively writing, Michael Quinion delivers them all at his Web site, World Wide Words. The site features commentaries on thousands of English words “from a British viewspoint,” as well as articles about words.
Here’s a snippet from an entry I love, Quinion’s commentary on the ex-word vegelate. For a quick treat, go out and read the whole entry.
It’s not often that lexicographers can say of a recently created word that it’s already defunct (they mark it historical, but that’s what they mean). This rare situation has arisen with this word vegelate, which has had a good run in the corridors and debating chambers of the European Union, but has finally been laid to rest.
Some European countries greatly dislike British milk chocolate, in their view a bastard concoction that ought not to stand alongside the glories of the product from Belgium and France…
As part of their fight against accepting it, European chocolatiers argued that British chocolate didn’t deserve even to be called by that name. Various alternatives were put forward, such as industrial chocolate, vegetable fat milk chocolate or a German word that roughly translates as fat glazed. But a suggestion from France in the mid 1980s, the word vegelate, became the term preferred by the continental campaigners…. (it had nothing to do with that Australian delicacy vegemite, nor with veg out, nor a verb that might describe an unnatural act with a vegetable; it was the mirror in language of the British chocolate-makers’ supposed sins: a blend of vegetable with chocolate).
The past couple of posts, I’ve offered a new word and a new use of an old one. Have a look at WordSpy, a Web site that keeps track of newly coined words and usages
A couple of new entries:
E-thrombosis The formation of blood clots caused by sitting at a computer for prolonged periods. Occupational hazard for writers and techies.
Fratire A literary genre that features books written by men and focusing on young male protagonists who engage in drunkenness, promiscuity, and loutish behavior. The young-male counterpart of chick-lit.
I like these words from the employment sector:Decruitment A nifty new euphemism for worker layoffs. See also career change opportunity.
Worklessness The condition of being unemployed and having little or no prospect for employment. The resonances with “helpless ” and “hopeless” and “worthless” create a potent and useful substitute for some forms of “unemployment.”
For advertisers, the challenge is getting their message across in one medium while the consumer is active at the same time in several others. The buzzword these days is “engagement” — as in how engaged, or involved, the consumer is in a particular activity, a notion that is still relatively new in a media world that has for decades relied on stable indicators like the Nielsen ratings.
The question for programmers is whether it is possible to break through the clutter and offer material that commands more of their viewers' attention, and perhaps more advertising as a result. Sharon Waxman, At an Industry Media Lab, Close Views of Multitasking
Land grant universities across the nation got a big dose of “engagement” following 1999 publication of the Kellogg Foundation’s Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution.
The term has recently turned up in unusual market research conducted in Los Angeles. The new use roughly translates roughly into, “How much and what quality of attention do new-media multi-taskers give to an advertiser’s medium at any given moment?
They call it “concurrent media usage,” this phenomenon of using two, three, four or more media devices simultaneously. What should a poor advertiser do when the customer simultaneously (pick two or more)chats on a cell phone, sends and receives text messages, surfs the Internet, posts to a blog, plays video games, uses the phone to take and email a photo to a friend, listen sto music, watches TV, and types on a laptop?
The Emerging Media Lab in Los Angeles plans to find out.“Multitasking is not quantified yet,"” said Greg Johnson, the lab's executive director. “The metrics of all this is a big piece of what our clients want to know, and they want to know desperately. They don't know where their customers are, and it's our job to find them again and what they're doing.”
Say, what?
David Poltrack, the president of CBS Vision, the network's research arm, said that in the age of multitasking, it was hard to evaluate levels of engagement. “We know people are watching with shared attention,” he said. “But we don't know to what degree it's less-than.”
It does seem certain, though, that a viewer who is multitasking is not doing those activities with equal interest. “Terms like multitasking imply equal attention,” said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State. “But cognitive science tells us this isn't possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages.”
Hmmm.
IAG Research, a company that measures engagement, has slowly been bringing the television industry around to its measurement approach…. The viewer's attentiveness is graded on a scale of 0 to 100, and is not formally used to set advertising rates, but Alan Gould, IAG's chief executive, wonders how long that will last.
"When you have a small but attentive audience, that information can be very important," …. One day, that could mean higher ad rates for … shows that command a greater portion of its viewers' concentration.
“Over time,” he said, “I don't see how it doesn't get baked into the equation.”
Move over, Betty Crocker. I predict one heckava bakeoff!
Word for the day: populence, a portmanteau word that combines popular with opulence.
I found it first in a news story in my Sunday paper—the reprint of a piece by Tom Marshall from the Daily Hampshire Gazette (available online only by subscription) about the Ph.D. dissertation of Elad Granot, a doctoral student in marketing at the Isenberg School of Management.
According to the article, Granot spent the last year interviewing a small cohort of women about their “fierce loyalty” to the Victoria’s Secret brand of underwear.
Marshall says Granot found that his subjects' responses challenged the “conspicuous consumption model” of upscale buying habits—goods bought to assert social status and impress others. Instead, the article reports, Granot's subjects, who came from all age groups and income brackets, purchased the expensive undergarments simply to treat themselves. Granot chose the term populence to describe this phenomenon.
I don’t think the phenomenon the article describes—buying and staying loyal to a high-priced product simply to assert one’s value—reflects any change in consumer habits. Companies marketing brand products to women have used the strategy for decades.
Consider how well its “Because I’m worth it,” campaign seems to have worked for L’Oreal cosmetics for 30 years. And look where it’s taken us. The campaign has even stormed the bastions of academia.A quick Google search reveals a broad variety of uses for the word populence. For example, from a March, 2002 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Are we better off for living in a culture in which luxuries are turned into necessities, mild addictions are made into expected tastes, elegancies are made niceties, expectancies are made entitlements, opulence is made into populence?
From a 2004 essay on greed in market economies, by the Islamic Human Rights Commission:
Besides hunger and fear, lack of health care, decent education and housing shortages, which make living hard, the poor live with brash populence in their faces. People in decaying buildings daily watch glittering television scenes of shining cars, ocean yachts, and overflowing parties of the rich and famous.
Here, it appears as the title of an art exhibition:
POPulence explores how contemporary artists wrestle refinement out of the overwhelming surplus of images in modern life. Rather than stepping back from the chaos of the media-saturated world in which we live, these artists plunge fearlessly into the unpredictability of everyday life—a world inundated by sexy advertising, television, movies, the instant connectivity of the Internet and the whiplash pace of video games.
A lot of contexts for a word that hasn’t even made the dictionaries. I think “populence” has a future.
All’s Well That Ends WellA good ending leaves readers satisfied, perhaps a bit startled, shaken, or amused and looking forward to more of your work. Powerful endings help readers remember what you’ve written.
Title of a play by William Shakespeare
As with a lead, a good ending can pop into your mind at any point in the writing process. You might even know how you want your piece to end before you start writing it. As you do with leads, feel free to collect, mull over and reject lots of endings as you move along.
A few points about endings:
Try to avoid summaries. An ending that begins “So, to summarize what we’ve learned in 50 years of …” consigns your piece to an ignoble death. If you must summarize, simply leave your readers with the bones of the matter, as in this famous biblical summary: “And now abide faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”
For more on writing endings, read Roy Peter Clark’s Write Endings to Lock the Box.
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.Blaise Pascal Pensées (1670)
A good lead sentence or paragraph hooks readers and entices them to keep reading rather than moving on to one or another of a hundred other obligations, distractions and diversions.
You might not find a good lead to your piece for awhile. Lose the old mindset that thinks of writing as a linear process where you “start at the beginning and write to the end.” Many times, the right lead doesn’t come until halfway through or near the end of a writing project (though occasionally you may come across such a great opening line or two that you'll want to write a piece just to get to use it).
Direct quotations that connect to or summarize the central theme can make good leads. A good quotation works well even if you conducted no interviews for your piece. Why? Because human beings come hard-wired for speech. Readers respond deeply and immediately to the voices of real people. Good written communication almost always involves a real person telling a story to other real people.
A good quotation can come from many sources—a snippet of overhead conversation, a formal interview, a book, a billboard, a church sermon, a road sign, a TV show, an advertisement. Any direct quote that makes a point in some fresh way related to your topic could serve as a good lead.
A question sometimes works well as a lead. “Where have all the flowers gone?” would probably compel most Baby Boomers to read on.
A few more words about leads:For more about starting well, read Chip Scanlon’s The Power of Leads.
English contains a lot of nouns (many of which also serve as adjectives) that combine a verb with a preposition to form a single word: e.g., workout, workup, login, getup, shutout, liftoff, wakeup, runoff, standup, signup, kickoff, shutdown, backup, standoff, rundown.
But when you want to use these terms as verbs (expressing action), write them as two words:
Please log in with your name and password.
We like to work out at the Y after work.
Back up your hard drive before you bring your computer in for service.
We plan to kick off the program with a chicken barbecue.
Sign up for the workshop before October 3.
In an article about a cat show in Concord over the weekend, I read, “While some cat owners were there to win, largely to boost their breeding potential, others were there just for fun.”
Oops! This reads as if the owners had ambitions for their own “breeding potential.”
The reporter could have avoided the humorous ambiguity if she’d written, “While some cat owners were there just for fun, others competed to win, since champion cats command higher breeding fees.”
Early Saturday morning my yowling cat Reiki wrenched me from a close-to-consciousness dream in which I was watching a panel of experts haranguing each other on TV.
I came to just as one of the commentators shouted, “I don’t care if you do have an 18-verb advantage, it won’t change the fact that the secretary lied about weapons of mass perception.”
Yikes! Time to lay off the late-night blogging after hours of C-SPAN.
Science news of the past several weeks has revealed that animals—whales and starlings, at least—not only communicate with “language,” but they apparently use syntax and grammar, a higher-order language skill many linguists have long believed only humans possess.
Wow!
From a New Scientist account of the whale research:
Researchers describe human language as hierarchical because it consists of sentences which contain clauses, which in turn contain words. This hierarchy helps us to extract meaning from what we hear. But some researchers remained sceptical that whale songs could contain this degree of organisation when Roger Payne* and Scott McVay first offered the idea in 1971 (Science, vol 173, p 587).
At the time, some argued that the observation was too subjective, explains Ryuji Suzuki, a study co-author at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.
He and colleagues developed a computer algorithm to analyse the complex patterns of moans, cries and chirps in 16 humpback whale songs. The software draws on mathematics such as probability, and considers the placement and repetitive nature of the smallest units of the animals’ songs…. Suzuki says the analysis objectively demonstrates that the whale songs have a hierarchical syntax
And a University of California at San Diego press release about the starling research:
Timothy Q. Gentner, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, a study published in the April 27 issue of Nature demonstrates that starlings have the capacity to classify acoustic sequences defined by recursive, center-embedded grammars.
[C]enter-embedding refers to the common characteristic of human grammars that allows for the creation of new (and grammatically correct) utterances by inserting words and clauses within sentences – theoretically, without limit.
The starling study used conventional reinforcement techniques for both teaching and assessing their subjects’ grammatical abilities. Scientists rewarded the birds with food when they pecked the “correct” sequence of buttons in response to different song patterns, much the same way “grammar school” teachers correct 5th-grade grammar papers with As, Bs, Cs, etc.
I found this cryptic statement about the whale research the most intriguing notion of all my reading on the research into animal grammar: “Shorter whale songs appear more complex than longer ones, according to the new study.”
Ahhh! Maybe even whales compose haiku.
Hear some whale talk
Listen to starlings
Headline in yesterday’s paper: Officials knew of abuse, suits say.
Say, what? Those “suits” really wreak mischief when they appear in headlines, because the word has so many meanings. Remember this one?
Yesterday’s headline evokes the idiomatic meaning of the word “suits”: guys who wear suits—executive types, often government executives.
Checking the paper’s online version today, I noticed someone had changed yesterday’s title to Suits: abuse was known.
My morning paper carried a wire service article relating new research that supports a growing consensus among climate scientists that human-induced global warming contributes to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes.
I got a chuckle from a quotation attributed to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Thomas Knutson, who described the warming of tropical waters as “the tip of the iceberg.” My paper’s editor had also selected the quotation as a pull-quote.
Neither Knutson, the reporter, nor the editor who pulled the quote caught the silliness of inserting “the tip of the iceberg” into the context of scientific discourse on global warming, tropical storms, and regional warming trends, sounds silly.
Clichés roll mindlessly off our tongues, pens, or keyboards. They’ve become such fixtures of daily discourse, we miss them while editing and proofreading. Readers often process them mindlessly. But clichés dilute and pollute intelligent prose.
To avoid them, ask the person or people who review your text to scrutinize it for clichés. The exercise will help them become more critical readers and, perhaps, better writers in the process. And next time you sit down with a newspaper or magazine, cruise for other writers’ clichés. When you find one, mentally rewrite that sentence with fresh words and see how it improves.
served.”
The question of whether to use the present “serve” or the past participle “served” in this idiomatic expression has come up three times in the past week.
Although dictionaries sometimes suggest “serve” as a common alternative usage, most (including dictionaries of idiomatic expressions and cultural literacy) describe the expression as shorthand for “Those who come first will get served first.”
If you use the expression to modify a noun (“We plan to offer tickets on a first-come, first-served basis”), insert hyphens (see #1).
Merriam-Webster clearly states that the two words are fundamentally interchangeable, with only partial specialization. The Handbook makes the case that the words are already distinct, though not in quite the manner Merriam-Webster predicts. However, as I will demonstrate below, neither guideline is an accurate reflection of usage, in the United States, Great Britain, or Australia.
For this study, I used the Cobuild corpus. This corpus has the advantage of containing several sub-corpora, with samples of American, British, and Australian English….
Terry Watt, Commonly Confused Words
Writers often confuse further and farther. As you’ll see if you read the entire document linked above, linguists use sophisticated tools to study word evolution and the incidence of modern usage.
As a practical matter, you’ll do okay if you follow this easy-to-understand principle: Use farther when you mean physical distance: “We live farther from the lake than you do.” “The horses are too tired to go any farther.”
Use further to communicate all other meanings, such as additional, continuation, metaphorical distance, or extension of time or degree: “We need further study to explain these results.” “The chairman said he would conduct further investigation and report back at next month’s board meeting.” “You need more documentation to further support this thesis.”