Off of

Except for informal spech, or when you need to quote someone directly—“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” drop the “of.”A simple “off” will do.

He ordered the warden off his property.
Get off my back!
I had trouble getting off my horse.

 

Off of

Except for informal spech, or when you need to quote someone directly—“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” drop the “of.”A simple “off” will do.

He ordered the warden off his property.
Get off my back!
I had trouble getting off my horse.

 

Your, you’re

Last week, I received two emails from two people in the same 10-minute period containing the same message (in response to my earlier thank-you messages).

“Your welcome.”

Time for a reminder! If you mean “you are,” use the contraction “you’re.” You’re welcome. You’re not alone. You're double-parked.

If you want to show possession, use “your.” Please reboot your computer.  Your hair is on fire. You can pick up your son at the Northfield police station.

When words have alternate spellings

Some words have more than one common spelling. Take dietician/dietitian.

From the professionals’ standpoint, dietitian seems to rule, as in Today’s Dietitian: The Magazine for Nutrition Professionals Making a Dofference ni Today's World http://www.todaysdietitian.com/index.php Registered Dietitians (RD) are “Your Link to Nutrition and Health.”

But you can also find Ask the Dietician and learn about the role of Dietician on the liver transplant team at the University of Southern California Liver Transplant Program and Center for Liver Disease.

Several dictionaries I consulted allow either spelling, without specifying a preference.

Recently, I reviewed a long information piece that contained the word repellent/repellant spelled both ways, with the alternate spellings scattered randomly throughout the text. (My dictionaries allow both, without preference.)

Some words have three or more spellings, mostly words that attempt to replicate in English words that come from languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet (tsar, tzar, czar), or that come from literature that predates standard spellings (griffin, griffon, and gryphon).

My suggestions:

When writing an academic paper or a piece for a professional journal, use the spelling most often used by others in the field.

If you produce a piece for a widely circulated newspaper or magazine, the editor will probably adjust your spelling to conform to the publication’s style guide.

Whatever you do, don’t allow two or more alternate spellings of a word to creep into a document. Choose one spelling and use it consistently.

Word resonance

Many common words we writers choose to communicate directly and precisely may also resonate with a wide variety of literal, idiomatic, symbolic, and figurative meanings in addition to the meaning we “intend.”

Good writers take advantage of this wonderful word plasticity, deliberately using word resonances to add nuance, desirable ambiguity, and complexity to their texts. But they also stay vigilant for unintended word resonances creeping into their writing.

Take, for example, our word “rock.”

In its most common use as a noun, it means a mass of hard consolidated mineral matter, as in, “The rocks in my garden make the carrots grow crooked.”

The common verb form of “rock” means to move back and forth or sideways, as in rock-a-bye baby.

We also use “rocky” as an adjective with both literal (a rocky landscape) and figurative (a long, rocky road ahead). As an adverb, “rock” emphasizes solidity, density, or steadfastness: rock-hard, rock-solid, rock-steady.

Think of all the ways human beings have used rocks literally: as ballast, anchors, shelters, weapons, tools, building materials, area delineators (Good fences make good neighbors), animal enclosures, heat storage media.

Consider how different figurative uses of the word “rock” can generate opposite or near-opposite meanings. For example:

Solid, supportive, stable, unchanging: He’s my rock. The wise man built his house upon a rock. In danger or difficult: The university finds itself between a rock and a hard place. His life has hit rock bottom. Their marriage is on the rocks.

Quiet, impassive: He sat there like a rock.
Intense, active: I’m gonna rock your world!

Humble, common, worthless: It won’t amount to a heap o’rocks. The platitudes abound, ubiquitous as the rocks.
Rare, of great value: She flashed a rock the size of a ping-pong ball on her left hand.

Rock on!

Keeping up with language

2005 was the year we saw a convergence of a number sometimes contradictory language trends: the major global media became more pervasive yet actually less persuasive; the language spoken by the youth of the world is converging at an ever-increasing rate; and the Political Correctness movement become a truly global phenomenon. Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor (GLM)

Want to stay tuned to the hot topics of the day? Keep up with the latest argot of politics, fashion, youth culture, business, entertainment, political correctness? For all this and more, bookmark The Global Language Monitor.

The GLM analyzes language trends and their subsequent impact on politics, culture and business (with a particular focus on Global English) by means of what progenitor and president, Paul JJ Payack, calls the Predictive Quantities Index Indicator, an algorithm that

helps track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the Blogosphere. The algorithm tracks words and phrases in relation to their frequency of use and contextual usage. The PQ Index/Indicator is weighted, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, and citations in the major media.

Payack says his algorithm choices often contradict the beliefs of pundits, to wit, the fourth-quarter 2005 list of politically sensitive terms http://www.languagemonitor.com/wst_page12.html

Go here to learn the most frequently spoken word on the planet according to Payack.

Disclaimer: While I find the GLM lists interesting, amusing, and informative guides, I won’t vouch for the algorithm or its accuracy, despite the fact that numerous credible news and information sources cite its findings as authoritative.

Spelling: A pill for every problem

The Web site yourdictionary.com offers a list of the 100 most frequently misspelled words in English. (Don’t ask me how they count all those misspellings.)

In the intro to the list “Dr. Language” promises: “Each word has a mnemonic pill with it and, if you swallow it, it will help you to remember how to spell the word.”

Well, maybe. Take the mnemonic pill for that tricky word “judgement”:

“Judgement” is governed by one of the rare rules of English orthography, so why not enjoy it? After [c] and [g], [e] is retained to indicate the letter is “soft,” i.e. pronounced like [s] or [j], respectively. Omitting it indicates it is “hard,” i.e. pronounced [k] or [g], as in “fragment,” “pigment.” If we write “management,” “arrangement,” we should write “judgement,” “acknowledgement,” “abridgement.” The presence of the [d] is of no significance to English orthography.

Gulp. How’d that go down?

“Compare to” or “compare with?”

Many writers use the phrases compare to and compare with interchangeably.

But for greater precision, use compare to when you want to stress the similarities between two things (people, ideas, etc.).

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

Use compare with to suggest a set of differences and/or similarities between or among things (people, ideas, etc.).

Over the past nine months, the consortium carefully analyzed the genome and compared it with the genomes of organisms that have already been sequenced, including the human, the mouse, the rat and the puffer fish. NIH News release

Gender un-biasing

I read a lot during my late December-early January vacation. As I often do, I had four or five books going simultaneously. I read them the way I've read since childhood, opening one book at some random location, reading a bit, then picking up another and doing them same.

Books that interest me I usually read in entirely, but rarely from front to back, the way most print authors intend.

Two of my early winter reads involved writing: William Safire’s How Not to Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Long Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.

I recommend them both as fun, quick reads by great word masters that will refresh your awareness of good writing principles and when to break them.

Reading the way I do often provides me with delicious serendipitous collisions of material from different volumes. That happened as I dipped into the Le Guin and Safire books, serendipitously coming across passages in each that adress the matter of how to handle the tricky gender-referencing pronouns.

Novelist Le Guin:

Whatever the writer does has to be within the frame of knowing [readers’] shared expectations. Only if you know the rule can you break it.

Here’s an example: I often use the possessive pronoun “their” in the singular. This is “incorrect,” say the grammarians, because each one, each person is a singular noun, and there is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used theirwith words such as everybody, anybody, a person; and so we all do when we’re talking…. The grammarians only started telling us it was “incorrect” along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when they also declared that “he” includes both sexes: As in: “If a person needs an abortion, he should re required to tell his parents.”

Do I have to say that my use of “their” is politically motivated, and, if you like, politically correct? It’s a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language-legislators.

But it isn’t politically incorrect. It’s just pushing it a little.

I know what I’m doing.

And now, the irrepressible and witty arch-conservative Safire:

Etymologists know that the word man, going back to the Sanskrit manus, means “human being” and is sexless. Although man and woman are differentiated in English, the universal meaning of man to encompass both sexes remains. Why accept a fiat from anti-sexism headquarters to change it now?

Cool it humankind; let language change in its own time, not to fit the schedule of any –ism. Resist the linguistic importunings of those who say, “get with it man.”

Well, yeah. And the word economy derives from two Greek words meaning household management.” But the sentence: “The report notes the U.S. economy grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter,” doesn’t conjure many mental references to households divvying up the child care responsibilities or trying to stretch the food budget by planting a vegetable garden, any more than the generic word “work” covers the tasks of preparing meals at home, tending that vegetable garden, or splitting your own firewood.

Safire seems to ignore the point Le Guin tacitly honors: Even single words can trigger a frame of reference which tacitly describes a worldview that accords more value to some people, practices, or ideas than others. Mindful writing and critical reading require the capacity to make explicit the frames that underlie word choices.

From my perspective, we need to make ordinary language both more gendered and more gender-bias free.

Take it from someone who took up sports in the mid-1980’s, when women had no choice but to wear “unisex” running shorts and shoes. If the men of that day had had to wear garments designed around the shapes of female torsos and feet, the marketing term “unisex” wouldn’t have lasted six months.

Sprachgefühl

Do you have Sprachgefühl (SHPRAKH-guh-fyool)? This German word means having a feeling for language, especially an ear for idiomatically appropriate language.

For writers, Sprachgefühl requires not only having an ear for language, but actually writing for the ear.

To ensure your writing has Sprachgefühl: From time to time, read aloud what you’ve written. If it doesn’t sound natural, a lot like you speak, revise it until it does.

Note: People who learn English as a foreign language, especially as adults, often struggle with English Sprachgefuhl, since idiomatic language refers to language whose meaning a listener or reader can’t infer from the meanings of the words that comprise it.

Firstly et al.

As E.B. White put it in the chapter he contributed to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (1959): “Do not dress words up by adding ‘ly’ to them, as though putting a hat on a horse.” —The Mavens’ Word of the Day, June 29, 2001

Word stylists argue about the correctness of adding “ly”, to the so-called “enumerative adverbs.” Firstly or first? Secondly or second? Thirdly or third? And so on.

I tend to edit out the “ly,” not only in the cause of brevity, but because the short forms sound more modern and less stuffy to my ear. And I agree with the author, JC, quoted above, that it also makes sense from a number of other pserspectives:

I think your repeated deletions of -ly represent time well spent. Partly this is a matter of consistency: I can't imagine anyone saying “eleventhly” or “seventeenthly”—and even those who do use “firstly” in enumerations would never use it in any other adverbial context (“The Smyths arrived at the party firstly and left lastly?”). But perhaps another reason to avoid firstly and secondly is that they resemble hypercorrections--inappropriate forms substituted for perfectly good ones, out of a desire to sound especially correct.

As for “thusly,” ugh! Already an adverb, “thus” stands well without further dressing up.

For more on the suffix imagine anyone saying “eleventhly” or “seventeenthly”—and even those who do use “ly,” visit this page in The Mavens’ Word of the Day.

Mogigraphia

Tennis players have their elbows, athletes have their feet, so what do writers get? They get their cramps. Mogigraphia is a fancy name for writer's cramp…. A synonym of mogigraphia is graphospasm.

-Anu Garg , Wordsmith

Delightful words like these make a common muscular problem sound erudite, in a sort of Pythonesque way. Mogigraphia derives from the Greek words mogis (with difficulty) and graph (writing).

Hear mogigraphia pronounced (marvelously sensuous).

Use it in a sentence: “Good news! It’s not carpal tunnel, but only a bad case of mogigraphia. Take two aspirin and lay off the dissertation for a week or two.”

“Anything that's spoken or printed is a potential source.”

Think you have a tough writing job? Imagine developing definitions for dictionary entries.

To wit: In addition to the 58 new entries in Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which include “catwalk,” “Al Qaeda,” “blog,” “sheesh,” “cargo pants” and “irritable bowel syndrome,” word-seekers will find 20 new meanings for existing words, among them, “wedgie.” The anonymous definition-writer came up with:

wedgie: 2. the condition of having one's clothing wedged between the buttocks especially from having one's pants or underpants yanked up from behind as a prank -- often used with get or give

From a Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, interview with Webster's editor-in-chief, Mike Agnes:

How do you collect new words?
We have a language-monitoring program in place. We have researchers that work full time in-house who monitor print, radio and television sources. They have a reading program. They read novels, magazines, newspapers … listen to talk radio. They are recording emerging English, anything that is not documented in our current college dictionary. Anything that's spoken or printed is a potential source. I don't care if it's graffiti on a men's room wall.

What a gig! Where do I apply?

Ready to (w)rack and roll

In a December 11 Concord Monitor article headlined, In 500 words or less, make yourself irresistible: Seniors sweat out answers to college essay questions, I found this line: “Locally, high school seniors are racking their brains to answer them as winter application deadlines approach.”

I took the word “racking” for a homophonic error. I’ve always used the verb “wrack” in clichés involving the brain. To my eye, “racking their brains” invokes an image of brains set on a rack to cool or dry out.
As I usually do, I checked my preference with a few online sources. Lo and behold, Paul Brians offers my spelling as one of the Common Errors in English.

If you are racked with pain or you feel nerve-racked, you are feeling as if you were being stretched on that Medieval instrument of torture, the rack. You rack your brains when you stretch them vigorously to search out the truth like a torturer. “Wrack” has to do with ruinous accidents, so if the stock market is wracked by rumors of imminent recession, it’s wrecked. If things are wrecked, they go to “wrack and ruin.”

Oops!

But wait! The Columbia Guide to Standard English offers this refinement:

In some senses, the verbs rack and wrack are synonymous, and the two words, each as either noun or verb, are nearly interchangeable at some points. The usage problems arise over which spelling to use where there seems to be a possible or a clear overlap in meaning. Most Edited English will prefer rack your brain, wrack and ruin, storm-wracked, and pain-wracked, but other Standard written evidence, including some Edited English, will use the variant spelling for each

I follow the link to nerve-wracking, where I read:

nerve-wracking, nerve-racking (adj.)

These homophones are variants of the same word meaning “intensely stressful on the nerves,” “trying of the patience,” as in That oral exam was a nerve-wracking [nerve-racking] ordeal. Both spellings are Standard.

Then I turn to Brenda Shaw, who opines in the Eggcorns Forum:

To ‘wrack’ means to ruin or destroy; it’s related to ‘wreck’. To ‘rack’ means to torture someone (esp. on the rack), or to literally or metaphorically stretch and strain something as if on the rack.

Which is the original form of ‘nerve-(w)racking’ or ‘to (w)rack one’s brain’? Either one makes sense in either context. If something is nerve-wracking, it’s destroying one’s nerves; if it’s nerve-racking, said nerves are being strained. Racking one’s brain would mean to stretch or strain it to the limits of endurance; wracking one’s brain would mean thinking so hard that the brain is wrecked.

Hey, given my druthers, I’d prefer a brain or nervous system overwrought from “thinking hard” as opposed to “stretched to the limits of its endurance.” So, I guess I’ll keep on wrackin’ and rollin’.

Snowclone

Sometimes a trend comes along that is brutally painful for a self-respecting journalist to acknowledge. So it is with some embarrassment that I report on the latest obsession buzzing through the arcane fields of linguistics and lexicography, one that will resonate with any Times reader who values well-written English. We hacks, it seems, have become so enamoured of lazy, formulaic turns of phrase that we have inspired a new academic sport devoted to chronicling them. They even have their own name: snowclones. Snowclones? Darling, as journalistic clichés go, snowclones are the new black. David Rowan, Trendsurfing: “Snowclone Journalism”

In honor of the big dump of snow we Granite Staters received last week, I offer a recently coined word you may not have com across: snowclone. (I hadn’t until I read about it here.)

A speaker or writer creates a snowclone when she uses the structure of a familiar idiom or cliché with a new idiom in a new context:

The Eskimoes have 100 words for snow. If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy.

To be, or not to be? To ski or not to ski?

This is the face that launched a thousand ships. This is the voice that launched a thousand naps.

I like the way blogger Justin Busch describes snowclones: “those endlessly reusable templates for new cliches.”

It seems that linguists around the world have begun collecting snowclones, using their lists to poke fun of, primarily, journalists, for their laziness in not inventing fresh phrases for their descriptions.

The sport emerged about two years ago, when a distinguished linguistics professor, Geoffrey Pullum, reflected on Language Log, a popular linguistics chat forum, that there was rather a lot of newsprint being wasted on vacuously clichéd constructions such…. “We need a name for [the] multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers,” Pullum suggested. He cited one particular bugbear: the recurring journalistic construction about Eskimos and their vast armoury of words supposedly devoted to snow.

…. The problem, rather awkwardly, is that the assertion’s very premise appears to be flawed. The Inuit language pays far less attention to snow than the writers who recycle the attention-grabbing claim to make their points. It has become one of those “phrases for lazy writers in kit form”, Pullum lamented. Then why not, replied another professor, Glen Whitman call the construction a “snowclone”? David Rowan, Trendsurfing: “Snowclone Journalism”

I appreciate Pullam’s perspective on recycling worn-out expressions. On the other hand, I can also appreciate that some snowclones serve as sophisticated linguistic devices that take advantage of the human brain’s affinity for patterns, tapping into readers’ cultural understanding of the original idiom to bring them swiftly to an understanding of a new idiom, trend or point of view. For example,

I believe the children are our future, unless we stop them now! Homer Simson

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Anonymous

Note: For some insight into the myth of those innumerable “Eskimo words for snow,” visit this Wikipedia entry.

Eponyms

We call a word derived from the name of a real or fictitious person or place an eponym.

For example, the fourth Earl of Sandwich gave rise to our word sandwich. Our word lynch probably comes from Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and Revolutionary War patriot who established an irregular court that doled out vigilante justice. The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur lent his name to the process we call pasteurization.

As an editor, I appreciated the eponym that appeared in my email inbox as the Word-A-Day for December 6: dryasdust, an adjective meaning “extremely dull, dry, or boring.” It comes from Jonas Dryasdust, a fictitious person to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated some of his novels.

“Oy vey! I have to finish editing 12 dryasdust fact sheets by 3:00 p.m. today.”

P.S. I chuckled over the seasonal irony of the daily quote accompanying the dryasdust entry. Mark Twain wrote, “Be good and you will be lonely,” a direct contradiction of contradict Santa’s admonition, “So be good for goodness’ sake!”

Principal or principle?

Many Extension writers confuse these homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings).

The word principal can function as either an adjective or a noun. As an adjective, principal means main, chief, or most important: “The prosecutor named Mr. Lee as the principal suspect in the crime.” “The collapse of the coalition serves as the principal argument in favor of our original plan.”

As a noun, principal has several meanings, including the amount of a loan not including interest (“He owes only $1000 on the principal.”), the main owner or investor (“As a principal in the project, Boggs should have given the field work more scrutiny.”), or a school executive (“Mrs. Higgins sent Beth to see the principal.”)

The word principle is always a noun. It means a rule, standard, or guideline. “I stand on principle.” “We operate from three central principles.”

Accismus

With the largest vocabulary of any language, in English we have a word to describe almost everything. And when we can't find one, we're happy to borrow from another language…or just make one up….” Anu Garg, Wordsmith

From that category of words I’ve occasionally wished we had, but never knew we did comes accismus (ak-SIZ-muhs), a noun that means “pretending disinterest in something while actually desiring or craving it.” It comes from the Greek word akkismos, meaning coyness or affectation. A useful word. I like its adjectival form, too, accismatic.

Listen for the faint, resonant tones of accismus when you hear someone say (or see in writing), “Oh, I don’t deserve such an award,” “You can’t mean me!” or “I was only doing my job.”

Data, criteria, phenomena

Plurals all! To refer to a single instance of any of these terms, use datum, criterion, or phenomenon.

I’ve compiled a data file, where I’ve listed each datum of observation in my experiment.

In a list of criteria for membership in an organization, I’d call a required academic credential one criterion.

If I study unusual geographic phenomena, I’d call a single feature a phenomenon.

Godwottery

A Word a Day (AWAD) brought me a great new word today—godwottery—which applies to two of my major interests: horticulture and prose style. According to Anu Garg, who directs the AWAD project, godwottery has two meanings:

1. Gardening marked by an affected and elaborate style.

2. Affected use of archaic language.

Garg says the word arose from a line penned by Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897): “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! (God knows),” when he needed a line to rhyme with a line ending in “rose plot.” The poem described Brown’s garden, which featured a pool with fish, a grotto, ferns, roses, and more.

As a long-time gardener, I’ve seen many gardens (and known many gardeners) afflicted by godwottery. I’ll admit to a certain fascination with these outdoor spaces dotted with plastic, copper, glass and ceramic sculptures, pump-driven brooks and waterfalls, and sometimes planted with garish fake flowers in surreal colors in spots where real ones have failed to thrive.

Fortunately, garden godwottery has never tempted me, since I grow mostly fruits and vegetables in a hillside garden passersby can’t see from the road. I don’t really care what it looks like, as long as it produces plenty of food.

As a writer/editor, I’ve ploughed through my share of prose godwottery, including occasional drafts of my own work.

I cured myself of prose godwottery by reading widely, which sensitized my ear to both good and bad prose in a hundred styles, and by having the good fortune to work with a string of fine editors who helped me unclutter my style.

Do you recognize off-putting godwottrery in your own, or others’ prose? Don’t underestimate the value of a good copy editor.

Baring it all

“Bare with me,” a writer begged his readers in an article I read recently.

Oops! In this simple case of a misused homonym (words that sound the same, but have different meanings and often, different spellings), the writer issued an invitation to get naked with him.

I think he really meant “Bear with me,” where "bear" means “put up with.”

Our words bear and bare each has a wide range of meanings. For example, "bear" appears in many many phrasals, two-word verbs, which often dramatically transform the meaning of the original verb: e.g., bear down (accelerate, push harder, move up on), bear up (endure serenely), bear with (put up with), bear out (confirm the truth of).

On the other hand, “bare” changes meaning often, and often quite subtly, when used as an adjective: e.g., bare root, barefoot, bare-knuckle, bare bones, bare truth, bare livelihood.

Viable vs. feasible

“Viable” means alive, capable of sustaining life, able to reproduce. So, you’d write about a viable bacterial colony, a viable seed, a viable ecosystem.

For accuracy in formal writing, reserve “viable” for living things, and describe strategic plans, political candidacies, economic ideas, and concepts as “feasible,” “sound,” “comprehensive,” etc.

Literal vs. virtual

I’m literally dead on my feet.
We had virtually no resources.

Many of us have difficulty distinguishing between the meanings of “virtual” and “literal”

“Literal” means “actual, without interpretation or embellishment.” It doesn’t mean “almost.”

“Virtual” means “not real.” It implies a representation of something, but not the thing itself.

Someone “literally” dead on her feet wouldn’t remain vertical for long! Instead, you’d write, “I‘m virtually dead on my feet (not really dead, but a good representation of dead).”

And rather than, “We had virtually no resources,” you’d write, “We had literally no resources (no actual resources at all).”

Botanical nomenclature

Over my years of editing fact sheets and newspaper columns that contain the Latin names for crops, ornamental plants, weeds, and trees, I’ve seen a lot of variation in the way writers choose to present them typographically.

Unsure myself of the scientifically correct way to write botanical names, I consulted the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

The Code specifies italics for genera and species, and initial capitals for genera, but not species or subspecies: Glycine max (soybean); Zea mays (corn), Acer saccharum (sugar maple).

Capitalize the first letter and use Roman (non-italic) type for names of higher ranks: family, order, class subphylum, phylum and kingdom.

Learn more (a lot more!) about the standards for identifying plants by spending some time perusing the International Code yourself.

Incentivize

Please don’t!

This verbification of the noun “incentive” emerged from the mindless jargonbabble of the corporate memo. To my ear it sounds ugly, cold, and harsh, something that gets done to people, rather than inspiring them to act. “The vice-president’s new strategy will incentivize the field staff to work more for less pay.”

I dislike even more its close relative, “incent,” as in, “The government will use tax credits to incent middle-class Americans to save more.”

Linguists call such constructions back-formations—new words created from old ones. We’ve added countless interesting new and useful words to English language through this process, many of which no doubt sounded pretentious, awkward, or ignorant at first. But other back-formations die early. I hope incentivize and incent fall quickly into the mass grave of failed language.

If you find one of these words coming from your keyboard, consider replacing it with one of the solid, conventional alternatives: How can we motivate people to save more? Let’s brainstorm what incentives will bring people out. This kind of encouragement should move people to act.

Infer or imply?

Someone asked yesterday, “Should I use infer or imply in this sentence: ‘The data...an alternative hypothesis.’”

A speaker or writer implies; a listener or reader infers.

So, “Did you [the writer] mean to imply an ethical lapse on the part of Sen. Hogswell?” But, “I [the reader] infer from the evidence that Sen. Hogswell broke the law.”

In the example above, the data serves as a metaphorical “speaker,” so my questioner would write: “The data imply an alternative hypothesis.”

A person interpreting the data, however, would “infer an alternative hypothesis from the data.”

Addressing my issues

A few strong uses of the verb to address:

Martha addressed the envelope. (put an address on)

The provost will address the Dean’s Council on Friday. (speak to, talk to)

I addressed my question to Dr. Rankin. (direct to or at)

She doesn’t like her children to address adults by their first names. (greet)

Tiger addressed the ball as he prepared to tee off. (face off, assume a stance towards)

Cosby’s book addresses the causes of homelessness. (cover, treat)

We’ll address the hydrological aspects first. (face, confront)

However, when used as an abstract catch-all verb that suggests action aimed at solving a problem, address doesn’t deliver much meaning. It’s become a bureaucratic cliché, and when I see it used this way, the word raises my suspicions that the person or group doing the addressing actually didn’t or won't do much, maybe nothing:

The administration developed a new plan to address underage drinking.

I need some time off to address my issues.

If you find you’ve used the word address in a problem-solving context, consider finding a more specific, concrete verb that tells the reader what the subject of your sentence actually did, wanted to do, or plans to do, or might do. So, for example:

The administration will tighten its zero-tolerance policy on underage drinking by mandating a two-week residential alcohol education program for first-time offenders.

I need some time off to mend fences with my dad and begin treatment for my eating disorder.

Now, about those issues you keep trying to address. The word issue has many meanings, but it doesn't mean “problem.”

Solve problems. Identify obstacles. Reframe the situation. Slay your demons. But please don’t address your issues, at least not in writing.

Confusing word choices

Alternately or alternatively? Illusion or allusion? Complement or compliment? Flaunt or flaut? Founder or flounder? Principal or principle? Their, they’re, or there? Lay, lain, or lay? Disinterested or uninterested?

Oy vey!

Most of have a few words we just can’t keep straight from words with similar spellings or close meanings. I have a few myself: farther vs further, for example.

Infoplease.com has a handy list of easily confused or misused words
you might want to bookmark to save yourself an embarrassing mistake in case you don’t have a copy editor handy.

I also recommend their little page of often-mispronounced words.

Sic

Someone asked me recently what it means when she sees [sic] in the middle of a direct quotation.

“Sometimes there seems to be something wrong with the sentence being quoted, so I’ve always thought it was a snide comment, as if the writer is implying the person being quoted is sicko or something,” she said.

Writers have an obligation to quote others accurately, even when the quotation contains a spelling, grammatical, or other error. Adding [sic]—a Latin word meaning “thus,” and usually enclosed in brackets and italicized—directly after the error alerts readers to an error in the original speech or text. For example, “Bloom wrote to Fielding last July, ‘I feel like I’m living on barrowed [sic] time.’”

Use [sic] sparingly and with care. Don’t deliberately use quotes that contain mistakes to make fun of a speaker or writer.

Between or among?

Headline from the Concord Monitor, Sunday, August 8:

Did friction among two elderly sisters result in murder?

Yikes!

“Among” refers to the interaction of three or more entities: Friction among the three adult siblings resulted in the murder of one. It can also mean “in the midst of or part of a group”: The reporter wandered among the delegates on the convention floor.

Use “between” to describe the interaction of two entities: Friction between two sisters may have resulted in the murder of one. “Between” also describes an interval or distance that separates two entities: She lives somewhere between Concord and New London.

Hard to bear

Associate Press writer John Leicester’s account of Lance Armstrong’s seventh consecutive victory in the Tour de France bicycle race delivers this gem: “I’m finished,” Armstrong told a motorcycle-born TV reporter as he rode a victory lap of the Champs Elysees….

“Motorcycle-born” conjures a hilarious image.

Leicester’s editors should have caught this one and added an “e” to make the word "motorcycle-borne," past participle of the verb “to bear,” which means “to carry or support.”

“Born,” on the other hand, has to do with birth: e.g., Swedish-born, born in captivity, Born in the USA.

Me, myself and I

Writers get into a lot of trouble with personal pronouns, especially when talking about themselves. A few reminders:

Use "I" as the subject of a sentence: I broke my collarbone in a bicycle race last Saturday.

Use “me” as the direct or indirect object of a verb: Give it to her and me. He sent it to Martha and me.

Use “myself” only for emphasis, when you refer back to yourself: I’d rather do it myself.

A good rule of thumb: Use “myself” only in sentences containing the subject “I.”

I’ve made the same mistake myself many times.

I myself have seen the performance at least half a dozen times.

I don’t like talking about myself.

A lot, all right

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of “alots” and “alrights” in print.

Although written English has evolved to fuse the words “together” and “ready” with “all,” creating “already” and “altogether,” correct usage still requires two words for the expressions “a lot” and “all right.”

We lost a lot of money. The flower arrangement looks all right to me.

Don’t confuse the non-word “a lot” with the real word “allot.” Allot means to “give out or distribute shares of something, to accord or assign.”

The moderator allots only three minutes to each speaker.

Hands-on, heads off: idioms and phrasal verbs

The July 8 Concord Monitor had a catchy headline above the story reporting the retirement of long-time state veterinarian, Cliff McGinnis: A hands-on veterinarian heads off.

The headline’s catchiness derives from its pairing of two idioms referring to body parts: the adjective hands-on and the phrasal verb, heads off.

The term "idiom" refers to a use of words outside the literal meanings of the core word or words. Knowing the literal meaning of the words can’t help people understand the meanings. We have to learn them as essentially new words.

American English makes free use of human body parts to create hundreds of colorful, meaningful idiomatic expressions—leg up, heads-up, elbow your way in, a heady experience, a pain in the butt, eye candy, nose in the air, thumbnail sketch, nose out of joint, stick your neck out, a hand up not a handout, hanging by the skin of your teeth, knee-jerk reaction.

Idioms differ from slang in that slang refers to the often colorful expression of informal speech that often defines an age group or a culture. Idioms, which might have started out as slang, have passed over into common written usage, and may appear even in formal texts.

Phrasal verbs, two-word verb phrases that contain a verb plus a preposition or adverb, create meanings different from the original verb. Think of the subtle shades of meanings communicated by each phrasal verb created from the original verb fall: fall in (line with), fall out (with a supervisor), fall back (on your parents for support), fall on (hard times), fall between (the cracks), fall by (the wayside), fall to (pieces), fall under (a spell), fall wide (of a mark), etc.

Non-native or near-native English speakers, children, and others with limited reading comprehension skills get meaning from written texts by deciphering the literal meanings of words. They may not understand an idiomatic expression, and may have difficulty extracting an idiom from the rest of the sentence. When your target audience includes these groups of readers, try to minimize or eliminate idioms or make their meanings explicit from context.

Eggcorns and pullet surprises

I recently came across a delightful Web site that publishes eggcorns, a name given to those often-hilarious new words or turns of phrase that result when someone mishears or doesn’t understand a word or phrase and tries to reproduce it either orally or in writing.

The term eggcorn came via a September 23, 2003 post to a blog for linguists called Language Log reporting that someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn.”

My all-time favorite eggcorn came from a high school essay: “In 1957, Eugene O'Neill won a Pullet Surprise.” Other favorites: My daughter Molly’s rendition of America the Beautiful: “America, America, God spread his drapes on me.” And who can forget Round John Virgin, he of Silent Night fame.

Many eggcorns make semantic sense, and reveal the mind at work to make sense of what the ear has heard. Some notable examples:

The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects. (pistil)
They said their wedding vowels in front of 300 guests. (vows)
She suffered an eggtopic pregnancy. (ectopic)
We planted high bred tomatoes. (hybrid)
J.D. Salinger’s most famous book was Catch Her in the Rye. (Catcher)
The great wall of China was built to keep out the mongrels. (Mongols)
Pompeii was destroyed by an overflow of saliva from the Vatican. (lava from Vesuvius)
Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock. (hemlock)

I love these little gems. They reveal our humanity as we struggle to understand others and to make ourselves understood. The delightful juxtapositions of meaning eggcorns deliver can deepen our understanding of language.

We’ve all laid our share of eggcorns and pullet surprises. The simple act of “getting” someone else’s overdose of wedlock or high bred tomatoes can also spark a flash of empathy and a moment of self-remembering.

Getting personal

You often hear or read about someone’s personal opinion, personal favorite, personal experience, or personal best.

Having an opinion, a favorite, or an experience, or bettering a best time running the 10K implies a connection to the person. The word personal becomes redundant. You can’t have someone else’s opinion, or run someone else’s best time.

The main exception: You might want to use the word personal to distinguish a public figure’s private decision from a business, professional, or political decision. “This personal dilemma prevented the CEO from participating in the forum.” If you chair the town budget committee, for example, you might address the attendees at a public hearing, “Speaking personally, I don’t understand how Johnson can support this idea.”

Similarly, writers and speakers often use the word “own” redundantly, as in “my own opinion.” Sometiomes they even commit the double redundancy of “his own personal accounts.” Saying or writing my car implies the car belongs to you. Writing his values implies the vaues belong to him.

Cutting unnecessary words from a text makes it denser with meaning, easier to read, and less intimidating to the eye.

Unique

The word unique means "one of a kind." Adding a qualifier, such as very, highly, absolutely, somewhat, almost, etc., won’t make it more or less so. Enough said.

Affect, effect

Writers often confuse these words, in part, I think, because the words sometimes carry similar meanings when used as different parts of speech: i.e., We managed to affect the outcome. Our actions had the desired effect. Arrghh!

Affect comes from the Latin roots facere (to do or make) and ad (to, towards), meaning "to apply oneself to, to act upon, to aim at." Nothing you can do will affect the outcome. Sometimes it means "to move, touch (emotionally) or influence": His words affect me deeply.

Effect also derives from the root facere (to do or make), with the prefix ex (from, away). It means "to work out, to accomplish, bring about." Congress passed three bills intended to effect long-term improvements in the system.

As a noun, effect means a result: We didn’t see the effects of the storm until the following spring.

The noun affect generally refers to an emotion, or emotional state. A good teacher quickly picks up on a child’s affect.

Then we have the adjective forms: Effective means something that "works as designed or intended," and affective refers to something involving the emotional side of experience.

The roots affect and effect have given us a slew of words that deliver subtle shades of meaning: From affect we get affected, affectionate, affectation, affectationist, affecter, affectual, affectioned, and afffectuous. Effect has produced effectual, effective, ineffectual, effectivity, effecter, effectable, effectuate, and more.

But let’s save these for another day.

Verbal

Do you often write “verbal” when you mean “spoken” (rather than written)?

In its broadest sense, verbal (from the Latin verbum, meaning word) means “having to do with words,” or “communicated by means of words"—spoken or written.

When you want to distinguish something as spoken, use the more precise “oral,” e.g., “They’ve worked under an oral agreement since February.”

Utilize, utilization

The words “utilize” and “utilization” appear much too often in Extension publications. In nearly every instance, the plainer “use” makes a better, less pretentious choice.

We utilize quantitative methods whenever possible.
We use quantitative methods whenever possible.

We’ve increased our utilization of on-demand computer publishing.
We’ve increased our use of on-demand computer publishing.

“Utilize” does have its place, in the narrowest sense of “to turn to profitable use.” For example, writing “The car mechanic couldn’t use the computerized exhaust analysis equipment,” could imply that the mechanic hadn’t figured out how to use the new equipment, whereas, “The mechanic couldn’t utilize the computerized exhaust analysis equipment,” implies that the mechanic couldn’t make practical/profitable use of the new equipment, perhaps because of a software glitch or an equipment malfunction.

Speaking of “use,” it puts me off to read or hear or read it referring to people. To my ear, “using" people implies “taking advantage of” them.

Instead of saying or writing “We’ll use Carol for the clerical work,” you could write “We’ll move Carol from reception to data entry.” Rather than “They use an engineer from Cornell to review the data,” consider revising to “They hire an engineer from Cornell review the data.”

Its or it's?

One day this week, two of you told me you never know whether to write it’s or its. A lot of folks have this problem.

How can you decide quickly? Ask yourself if you could replace the word with the verb phrase it is. If you answer yes, use it’s, the contraction for it is.

It’s (it is) raining.
It’s (it is) too early to tell.
It’s (it is) not in our best interest.

If you answer no, use its, an adjective indicating possession.

The research team checked its data.
The cat scratched its ear.
The tree sheds its leaves in October

The confusion arises because we ordinarily add 's to nouns to indicate possession: the team's data, the cat's ear, the tree's leaves.

Notorious

Some of you use the word “notorious” as a synonym for “famous” or “well known.” While it does mean "distinguished, notable, remarkable, conspicuous, celebrated, famous, or renowned," notorious also carries a connotation of "unfavorable, crooked, or unscrupulous."

So you might write of a notorious jewel thief, a company notorious for its persistent failure to comply with air quality permits, or a scientist who gained notoriety for altering the results of his research to produce an outcome more favorable to his funders.

But you probably wouldn’t want to write, “Notorious Extension water resources specialist, Al G. Bloom, received the 2005 Warriors for Water Award for his work on the Squam Lakes Project.”

Assist, assistance

Calling it assistance rather than help doesn’t make the quality of the help any more impressive, important or professional. Help usually works better, even in scientific and technical documents, because it sounds more like what people want (and get) when they need it.

We rarely hear people say, “Do you have time to assist me in loading my car?” or “Thanks for your assistance.” The best writers write for the ear.

Setting priorities

Many writers choose “prior to” as a classier substitute for “before.” To my ear it sounds affected. I agree with Len Levin, longtime copy editor at the Providence Journal, who spoke to a group of editors at a conference recently. “You wouldn’t say ‘posterior to’, when you mean ‘after’, would you?” he said. “Use ‘before’.”

The word “prior” does serve well as an adjective, though. A person holds prior claim to an invention. I have a prior commitment.

As for the verb “prioritize,” I think it smacks of government reports and bureaucratic memos. Ordinary people set priorities. They do things in logical order. They do first things first.

Improve your vocab

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