Big Red Pencil

Tiger Woods' apology, visualized

2010-02-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

Funny Sunday Headlines

2010-02-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

Nothing better than potty humor from the newspapers to enliven a Sunday morning:

From the Marin IJ: Teasing a story about a local female skier, editors on page 1 presented: “Armenian Team Taps Skier From Novato.”

This is one of those verb choices that, while tailor-made for tight-real estate newsprint, really should be stricken from the copy desk’s tool belt.

From the New York Times, a photo caption accompanying the story "A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm" reads:

Pavle Milic decided to serve only Arizona wines at FnB, his Scottsdale restaurant. He says that in blind teste tests, people think that the wines come from famous wine regions.

I don't know about you, but a teste test sounds really unpalatable, until you discover that the singular of testes is testis.

Even so, don't look for Rocky Mountain Oysters for Mr. Milic's customers, it appears--test or no test.

Dear Twitter, Please Take Bonehead English

2010-02-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

Every time we get an email notification from Twitter informing us that some new, smart, sentient human being is now following us, Twitter bots CAN'T GET IT RIGHT! We're instructed:

"You may follow (person's name) as well by clicking on the 'follow' button on their profile."

Jesus H. Christ! Hey, Biz Stone, (btw, I'm blogging on one of your earlier creations, thank you) 99 percent of the people who follow other people are people (or more precisely a person). That takes the SINGULAR PRONOUN. Please change your email notifications so that it reads

"You may follow (person's name) as well by clicking on the 'follow' button on his or her profile."
Or
"You may follow (person's name) as well by clicking on the 'follow' button on the user's profile."

We're cutting back on education funding in these dark economic times, Biz. Don't contribute to the dumbing down of America with one of the most popular social media features of the day.

Paging New York Times' Copy Chief

2010-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

The headline on Billy Preston's obituary in the renowned New York Times:

Obituary: Billy Preston, 59, reknowned keyboardist

Yes, it seems we all knowed Billy Preston.

P.S. Preston died in 2006, and if memory serves, The Times hadn't gutten its staff just yet.

Are stripper-linguists getting a raw deal??

2010-01-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

The question is, are strippers Alexia Moore (left) and Falynn Rodriguez better lap dancers or linguists?

That's what put-off prosecutors are wondering in New York this week after the two gyrating gals fought a prostitution charge.

In trying to have the charges dropped on a technicality, the pair argue that language is paramount (and we could argue no more vociferously).

According to the New York Post (and check out the lede):

The purportedly glitchy grammar in the charges against the pair alleges that they "did engage, offer and agree" to acts of prostitution with an undercover officer at Big Daddy Lou's Hot Lap Dance Club on West 38th Street in July 2008. That differs from the wording in the state penal code, which specifies "engage, offer or agree," the gals argue.

This just goes to show that some people can dance and parse language at the same time.

God Bless America.

(Tip of the fountain pen to Duffy Moran for bird-dogging this gem).

Depends on what the definition of "is" is

2010-01-25T13:04:00.001-08:00

The late, great Billy Preston said it best:

"Nothing from nothing leaves nothing."

In reviewing a legal disclaimer recently, I came across this mind-bending bunch of gibberish:

"A Tennessee resident consents to the use of his name and likeness only if such Tennessee resident expressly consents to such use."

Somewhere, Bill Clinton is smiling.

A handy guide to dealing with apostrophes

2010-01-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Almost a year ago, I posted a couple of times about the Apostrophe Catastrophe over in Merry Olde England.

Just came across an amusing and graphical rule on apostrophe's from theoatmeal.com.

Cute and it comes as a poster. Schools should buy these by the truckload. No child should be allowed to move on from grammar school unless he passes a test that includes getting the right forms of "it's" and "its" correct.

Oxford University Press' Word of the Year was...

2010-01-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

..."unfriend."

"It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

(I don't know about you but I get a kick out of "lex-appeal.")

In any case, the pace of language change seems to have ramped up in recent years thanks to inventions emanating from the technology world (Google as a verb, for instance, meaning to search). Being the pseudo-snob I am when it comes to language I once that that trend was dreadful, but I've changed my tune. With technology changing the world so fast, language must keep up.

In fact, it seems people are just as passionate about language as ever, judging by the comments on the Oxford blog referencing one of the finalists in the judging: Tea-bagger. Scores of commenters weighed on on the term, which has both political and sexual definitions (although Oxford avoided publishing the latter definition).

(P.S. None of our words of the day entries made the list, but then again, all of those are already in the dictionary).

Death of the written word? Hardly

2010-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

We worry in these precincts about the death of the written word. But people actually read more today than in years (perhaps ever). True, "writing" has been redefined as more digital belching in many cases. But the immense amount of new information created every second of every day is written. Just spend a few minutes with a good real-time search site like Collecta and you see how much is bubbling up--some of it banal, but much of it worth a read and your valuable time.

HubSpot bird-dogs a study from the University of California at San Diego that bolsters the argument that the written word is thriving. Here's a link to the complete study.

Researchers Roger Bohn and James Short point out that reading as a percentage of our information consumption has actually tripled in the past 50 years if we use words (on printed page or digital screen) as a measurement. The chart shows the transformation of reading in the past 50 years.

So, those of you with a passion for writing, fear not. There's plenty of upside in our world. And given the vast amount of information that's produced every second in printed form, there will always be a demand for those who can write clearly, concisely and cleverly.

Happy New Year: Now Pronounce It Properly

2010-01-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

"Two-thousand and ten" or "twenty-ten"... how shall we pronounce it?
Tom Torriglia says it's the latter.

Torriglia, the public face of the National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG), told the San Francisco Chronicle:

" 'Twenty' follows 'nineteen.' 'Two thousand' does not follow 'nineteen.' It's logical."

But George Lakoff at U.C. Berkeley responds:

"It's not wrong to say 'two thousand ten.' And it's not like 'twenty ten' is the right way."

My wife and fellow wordsmith, The Screaming Lady, ponders the debate over a cup of New Year's Day coffee.

"Technically it should be 'two-thousand ten' because that's how you'd pronounce it if you counted upwards from year one. I think we're just lazy."

But if we went that route, Zager and Evans would never have had a hit song in the '60s, or at least one that had a decent meter.

I resolve to keep it simple and give my lips a rest whenever I can.

Where Have All The Editors Gone?

2009-05-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

There once was a time when if you wrote a headline like this for a wire service, a grizzled vet across the newsroom who edited your copy would explode in laughter or rage. If you were a greenhorn, it would be the latter rather than the former. Either way, the vet's coffee would be spilled all over the desk, ashtray knocked to the floor--such would be the umbrage taken at the headline and story description of this suspect.
The editor would stand and hitch up his pants over his pot belly and question the writer's manhood, intelligence and college pedigree in language that would peel paint. (At least mine did).
Now pictures may be deceiving, and John Floyd Thomas Jr. could be eight feet tall, but he doesn't look like he weighs 800 pounds. Either of those physical features would qualify Thomas as the "largest ever" serial killer.
Instead, he's suspected of being the most prolific killer in L.A.'s history, a fact that Thomas Watkins notes in his lede. So why does the headline quote robbery-homicide Capt. Denis Cremins bludgeoning of the language?

"If he turns out to be the guy, he probably would be the largest ever (serial killer) in the city of Los Angeles."

We may never know, just as we may never know why serial killers are "prolific," "indefatigable," hardworking," "dedicated," "diligent" or "tireless."

The "Natinal" Pastime

2009-04-22T09:10:00.001-07:00

The team off to the worst start (3-10) in Major League Baseball also employs a vendor with the worst spelling habits.

The Washington Nationals use Majestic Athletic uniforms and, as part of the deal, they get Majestic's crackerjack copy desk too. Nationals players Adam Dunn and Ryan Zimmerman played three innings of a game last week wearing home jerseys that read Natinals.

It took a few days, but Majestik officials finally got around to apologizing.

Uniform typos aren't uncommon, unfortunately. Joe Carter of Toronto (below) was an earlier, famous example. And it took him six innings to figure it out, according to Paul Lukas, who compiled a nice list of jersey injustice two years ago.

By the way, for those of you keeping count, the Nationals lost the Typo Game in extra innings, 3-2. Zimmerman was 2-5 and Dunn 0-3.

Word of the Day: Chthonian (gesundheit!)

2009-04-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, I come across a word I couldn't even imagine existed, have never heard and couldn't make up if my life depended on it. Today was such a day.

Chthonian (tho' ne un): Pertraining to the deities, spirits and other beings dwelling under the earth.

A variation was used in Meghan Cox Gurdon's brilliant essay in today's Wall Street Journal on eco-propaganda in children's literature (Carl Hiaasen being her poster boy in this case).

If you have somehow missed the fact that April 22 is Earth Day, it's probably because you are grown up. Were you a child, there's not a chance you'd be allowed to miss the urgent chthonic nature of the day -- nor the need to recycle, to use water sparingly, to protect endangered creatures and generally to be agitated about a planet in peril.

This weekend in the mountains, as I lay down on the ground to sleep under the stars, I will no doubt listen for faint chtonic sounds emanating from below me, maybe from the goddess pictured here.
And it'll probably keep me awake all night!

Copy Editor's Lament

2009-04-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

A lovely mixture of melody and lyric brings the tragedy of the dying copy desk home at Christopher Ave's site, Music for Media.
"Copy Editor's Lament" makes you laugh and cry at the same time, especially if, like the protagonist, you've been laid off! (And, if you're like me, you met your future wife on the copy desk in college).

An excerpt:

"I'm a human safety net...I can provide punctuation, appropriate for publication, make the capitalization right. I was there to fix your grammar when you thought it wouldn't matter, cut all your extraneous blather down."

Copy editors are among the tens of thousands of reporters and editors who have been cut loose in the past year or two in North America. As Ave puts it in the song, "with only Web sites and TV, nothing really there to help you see."

Yeah. Good luck with that.

In any case, here's to Christopher Ave and all of you who understand the difference between a colon and a semicolon.

New Gig, Old Books

2009-02-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

So what's a fellow to do on Day One of his work in the Gig Economy? Unpack reference books from the old gig.
That work, which I did first thing yesterday morning, may be akin to a soldier checking, oiling and testing his weapon. I felt a granite sureness in pulling out Webster's Unabridged, The Chicago Manual of Style, Follett, Fowler, Strunk and White and the AP Stylebook. Weapons and ammo. Check. Ready to go to battle.
I mentioned this in a Tweet and got an interesting response from an old colleague, an award-winning wordsmith in his publishing days.

Strunk and White? Are you kidding? The days of having 30 minute arguments of serial commas and whether one means anticipation or simple expectation are days of yore, old friend.

I understand where he's coming from, in an era of 140-word Tweets and IM slang that's, OMG, 2die4.But sunshine peeks through the clouds. His response coincided with a request from a colleague at Blanc & Otus. A client wanted to resolve an internal discussion about how to handle compound modifiers. He was wondering whether their copy was too hyphen-happy.
There, in the pages of those great language books, was the guidance we so often have trouble finding these days: Use the hyphen to avoid confusion. "Small-business owners" means something different than "small business owners."
So people still care. Are these people graying around the temples, raised at a time when we read books not screens, tapped typewriters not keyboards? Perhaps. But at the agency I got urgent questions from twenty-somethings (note the hyphen) about serial commas, about punctuation, about style. It matters.
People, like nature, abhor a vacuum.While the language evolves as it should, business communications, done well, will always adhere to rules.

In writing, measure twice, cut once

2009-02-13T11:07:00.000-08:00

PR industry consultant Sam Whitmore has been tracking editorial accuracy (as if he doesn't have enough to do!). It falls loosely under the umbrella that smaller editorial staffs are doing more work and stress cracks are emerging. He used as an example an error in a Wall Street Journal story about an SAP product. His email blast today contained the following:

It turns out that the WSJ no longer has a copy desk per se. Senior editors still read and edit stories, but recent layoffs have decimated the layer of fit-and-finish wordsmiths -- copy editors and slot readers -- that reinforced the WSJ's hard-earned reputation for excellence. Also, WSJ production systems don't make it easy for reporters see a headline before it runs. This creates risk when stories are technical, like the SAP piece.

This anecdote illuminates a ignored problem within digital publishing: When a piece of content is published, regardless of when it's corrected, the original incorrect version not only can get into millions of hands quickly but can also exist in certain forms even after the correction.
The moral to the story? Similar to a carpenter (who should measure twice, cut once): edit many, publish once.

The Apostrophe Catastrophe Continues

2009-02-12T09:14:00.001-08:00

Earlier this month I blogged about about the lingua lunacy that's infiltrated elected officials in Birmingham, England. In short, they're ignoring them on public signs.
An updated dispatch from the Daily Telegraph indicates the good guys are still losing the good fight.

Wakefield Council in West Yorkshire said that it did not include the punctuation mark on road signs "to avoid confusion", even where the name was intended to take the possessive.

One of the good guys turns out to be the uncle of an EE Times colleague of mine, David Blaza.

Allan Blaza of the Pontefract Civic Society accused the council of ducking its responsibility to maintain standards.
He said: "I think it's a cop out. I'm sufficiently rigorous when it comes to the English language, which is a magnificent language, to feel sure that all the grammatical necessities – not niceties – should be observed."

Here, here, Mr. Blaza. Now that said, check out the photos here. The upper photo is from the earlier coverage and shows no apostrophe. The lower photo is from the more recent story. It has an apostrophe but appears to be a different sign placed in a slightly different position near the church.
So there's hope.

The Art of Editing

2009-02-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

Our son, a high school sophomore, demonstrated over breakfast today why that adage about jazz is just as true about writing: Often it's what you leave out that resonates more than what you put in.

He was reading a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about a trial of a man accused of shooting the bullet that paralyzed a young boy while he was playing piano.

Here's the lede:

(02-02) 17:58 PST OAKLAND -- The 11-year-old boy paralyzed by a gas station robber's bullet while taking a piano lesson in Oakland still plays music and basketball - but now, he does both from a wheelchair.

My son's suggestion: Replace "paralyzed" with "hit" or "struck" or "shot," and you have a better lede. The changed construction adds an element of suspense to the sentence because it leaves out the outcome of the shooting until the end of the sentence. The emotion-coaster that creates in a single sentence is breathtaking: He was shot! Oh, he survived! He can play basketball and piano! Oh! He's paralyzed and in a wheelchair!

Writing is just as much about engaging with readers as it is about the raw conveyance of ideas and information, even in the digital age. Whether it's in print or online or in an email newsletter, good writing engages the mind.
You do that, and the rest will follow.

Catastrophe for Apostrophes

2009-02-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

The people who invented the English language seemed determined to destroy it.
Birmingham, England, officials have decided it's okay not to have apostrophes.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Martin, why on Earth are you debating apostrophes? There's nothing to debate. They're a crucial part of understanding a written piece of communication.

Perhaps you should pass a law allowing people to spell Birmingham any which way they choose. Or renaming it. I'd vote for Mullaney's Folly.

Quote of the day

2009-01-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

From Dr. Seuss:
"So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads."

Tip of the cap to Mighty Meredith for the Twitter Tip.

How Obama's Words Look to Us

2009-01-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

A great way to revise and refine your copy is to run it through visualization tools (more on this in another post). Then there are times when you just want to admire how those words look. Here's what one visualization of Barack Obama's inauguration speech looks like, courtesy of the IBM-backed tool Many Eyes. Click on the image for a better view.

The Writer in Chief

2009-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

It seems appropriate to re-energize this blog on Inauguration Day, as Barack Obama takes office as the 44th (and first African-American) president of the United States. It's not just about the theme of hope that we so dearly need right now, but it's, as Peggy Noonan points out, the theme of language.
Imagine that: A writer in the White House. It's a been a while. Maybe not since Kennedy (although Profiles in Courage was a bit of an outsourced endeavor).
Noonan wrote in this weekend's Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama is a writer, and he sees himself as a writer. It is an important part of his self-perception. He is the author of two books, the first of considerable literary merit. He loves words. It is in writing that he absorbs, organizes data, thinks his way through to views and decisions, all of which adds to the expectations for his speech.

I can relate to that.
On Greeley's Ghost last year, I wrote of Obama's muse, Abraham Lincoln and how gracefully he describes his favorite portrait of Lincoln.
Could it be that a writer--The Writer in Chief--could navigate our troubled waters? We've had a businessman, two career politicians and an actor in the Oval Office since 1980. We've had good times and bad. And, I'd suggest, we've been frustrated at one level or another.
We need someone who can articulate not only our troubles but the way forward. In an age of sound bytes, text messages and IM, the complexities of the world around us are lost, vaporized in unknowing, uncaring, inarticulate ones and zeroes.
With his savvy use of new media, it could very well be that Obama, the writer, is the right man at the right time, able to analyze, synthesize and articulate complex problems and bridge old forms of communications with new, while using language to inspire and lead.
There's hope yet.

Oh, the horror!

2008-08-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

Joseph Califano Jr. leaps atop the language of Wall of Shame this morning in an article about kids raiding their parents' medicine cabinets to steal prescription drugs. Said he, in a statement:

Many problem parents become passive pushers by leaving abusable and addictive prescription drugs, like their painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin, around the house, making them easily available to their children.

Since Califano's organization, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, is located at Columbia University, I won't be passive about pushing this link to its English department faculty in case he has a hankerin' to double-check his language before his next public pronouncement.

Where have all the editors gone?

2008-08-06T12:14:00.001-07:00

Sports writer Dave Albee writing in this morning's Marin IJ on local rower Mike Altman in the Olympics:

IN ROWING, the focus usually comes from within rather than from outside visuals. That's how it is when your back is always turned away from the finish line.

Funny, I thought in rowing your back was always facing the finish line.

S.F. Chronicle Science writer David Perlman had his own problems today. He wrote about rampant rumors of cover-ups over Mars research:

The latest heady rumor: that the spacecraft Phoenix now analyzing soil and ice on the arctic plains of Mars had discovered chemicals so startling and so relevant to the search for life on the Red Planet that the White House and the president's science advisers have been secretly briefed, even though NASA would not share the information with the public.

The logical structure of the last clause doesn't work. NASA's not sharing information with the public isn't at odds with the White House having a secret briefing. They're part and parcel of the same thing.

To the two Davids: We're concerned about your copy desks, but the good news is we're still reading.
(As for the photo, it's a beauty, and it's from a fine photographer, Kevin Sargent)

(A) wanker

2008-07-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

In British slang, a wanker is a pejorative term for someone who plays with himself or is a detestable person.
One example would be Giles Coren, a restaurant reviewer in England, who went ballistic on newspaper copy editors ("subs" as they're called) for removing the article "a" from one of his reviews.
He picks it up from here, in all his foul-mouthed, verbose petulance. At the end of the day, he has a point that the deletion of that single letter ruined a good double entendre. But, really Giles, is it worth vaulting yourself into the modern Pantheon of jackasses to make a point? I guess it is.

(Tip of the fountain pen to my old colleague Paul Dempsey for the article reference).

Perils of automation

2008-07-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

By Jacqueline Damian

I’m indebted to my former boss, Greg Lupion, for finding this one:

It seems a Christian news site outsmarted itself by programming its software to automatically change the word “gay” in any copy to “homosexual.” Thus, as reported by a Washington Post blogger, Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay became Tyson Homosexual on the site. Oops.

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” by Marvin Who?

Gobbledygook

2008-06-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

Gobbledygook means language characterized by circumlocution or jargon. The word seems to originated, according to Webster's, between 1940-45, which makes sense because World War II was in full swing, and the military is famous for gobbledygook.
David Meerman Scott writes this morning that authorities in England and Wales are trying to end its life span here and now. Across the pond, the Local Government Association is urging governmental officials to junk jargon.
Said LGA Chairman Sir Simon Milton:

"The public sector can not, must not and should not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases. Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?"

(Would you expect anything else from a Milton? Paradise may yet be regained!)
The list includes: coterminous, empowerment, stakeholder, slippage, synergies and best practice. If these were outlawed in the United States, business communications might come to a crashing halt.
Onward....
My ex-EE Times colleague Alex Wolfe suggests actor William Shatner is changing careers...radically.
His new autobiography is titled "Up Till Now," which suggests Shatner is telegraphing a move into farming. It's discouraging to see a book--presumably reviewed by editors--titled in thus, when it should be "Up 'Til Now."

What's in aName?

2008-06-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

By Jacqueline Damian

My home state of Rhode Island is known for its colorful political characters, most famously Buddy Cianci, a former Providence mayor, convicted felon and pasta sauce purveyor (under the “Mayor’s Own” brand). Lesser known but no less zany were a couple of politicians who tweaked their names to better their election odds.

Back in the 1960s, Mario Russillo added a small “a” to the front of his surname to gain the top ballot spot in the race for town administrator, in the days when primary candidates were listed alphabetically. When challenged in a subsequent primary by a man who overtly stole his strategy, styling himself as Ralph aRusso, he simply tacked on a second “a,” becoming Mario aaRussillo. Note: he won both times.

We laughed at the time, but in retrospect, these guys seem prescient. Sticking a lowercase vowel onto a proper name has become a 21^st century verbal tic.

First came “e,” as in e-mail, e-card, e-vite, e-paper and, of course, eBay, the bane of copy desks across America. (What do you do when the company name starts a sentence? I’ve seen EBay and Ebay in print, while some editors cave and just run with eBay, tossing out the rule that a sentence must begin with a capital letter.)

Next came “i,” for iPod and iPhone and a bunch of others. Whereas the “e” in e-mail and its kin stands for something comprehensible (electronic), it’s a little less clear just what the “i” means. Information? Internet? Or, as our nephew David said as he showed off his iPhone for us last night, plain old “I,” as in me, personally, like the Beatles’ song “I, Me, Mine”? How ironic, though, to take the proud capital I of the personal pronoun and knock it down to mini size.

Moving down the vowel list, I’ve seen the occasional lowercase “u” stuck in front of a word -- a product name, say -- in the context of the electronics industry. To the engineering community, it stands for the Greek mu, which is used to signify “micron.”

With all the other vowels pressed into service in one way or another, can “o” be far behind? Something along the lines of oBrotherwhatwilltheythinkofnext.com might be a place to start.

Impact's effect

2008-06-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

By Jacqueline Damian

When is a noun not a noun? When it’s pressed into service as a verb, of course – like the word “impact,” verbified by (I suspect) lazy writers flummoxed by the intricacies of effect and affect. How much easier to sidestep the whole problem by just using impact.

Turning a noun into a verb is nothing new in the English language, of course. Think picnic and picnic, to cite just one example appropriate to the season. But it seems as if suddenly I’m spotting this trend everywhere -- and it’s not always a pretty sight.

First there was a CEO’s use of the term “scholarshiping” in a Newsweek column about corporate-sponsored (and sometimes questionable) student aid. “ ‘Scholarshiping sends a positive message, one of good will,’ says Brickfish CEO Brian Dunn.” Ugh! Are busy execs so pressed for time that they must opt for one word, albeit bogus, instead of two legitimate ones? Is it really so much harder to say that “giving scholarships sends a positive message”?

The following week Newsweek delivered another example when Steven Levy, my favorite technology writer, repeatedly used the word “friend” as a verb in a column about social-networking sites. Now, Levy can write. Specifically, he can write comprehensibly and entertainingly about technology, something that eludes many, if not most, tech beat reporters.

So why did he have to say things like “While Facebook doesn’t want to dictate rules of friending behavior to its users…” and “One MySpace exec has even surprised himself by friending a potato,” when there’s a perfectly good English word that would do the job? Is befriending too old-fashioned?

Levy might be excused for simply repeating a term that’s widely used in the industry he covers. But how to explain the doctor interviewed about the 1918 flu pandemic on the PBS series American Experience? Speaking about strategies for containing the virus, she opined that “you can’t barrier yourself from being exposed.” Let’s be kind and assume she meant barricade.

Then, in the June 16 issue of Newsweek, biology teacher Sally G. Hoskins turned it all around. In “My Turn,” a column of reader-submitted essays, Hoskins wrote of her frustrations in trying to get kids fired up about biology. At one point, to underscore the subject's urgency, she had her students imagine what would happen if they were laid low by a dread disease.

“In the event that the doctor has two minutes to discuss the situation and to describe the biology underlying the disease so that you can look up clinical trials,” she told them, “you are going to need to know what a cell is and how disease can impact it.”

Ugh, there we go again, with impact as a verb. This is one battle that’s long been lost. But wait:

“It was a pretty good rant,” Hoskins confides, “aside from my use of ‘impact’ as a verb.”

Bingo! Now, there’s a woman after my own heart.

The medium really is the message

2008-06-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Note: I hectored my former EE Times editorial colleague Jackie Damian into contributing her insights to Big Red Pencil. Herewith, her first entry!

By Jackie Damian

Everyone who writes – no wait, let’s make that everyone who reads (in other words, everyone) – should hie over to The Atlantic site and check out the July/August cover story, titled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”
Author Nicholas Carr pretty much answers that not-so-rhetorical question with a resounding yes, describing how the Internet – in the way it delivers quick snippets of info and discourages concentrated reading – is actually reshaping our brains and the way we think. “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged,” Carr writes. He cites both anecdotal evidence from bloggers who can’t concentrate on any articles longer than a few paragraphs, to research on neural information processing: This is your brain on Google.

Conspiracy theorists, take note:

“The faster we surf across the Web – the more links we click and pages we view – the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link – the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interests to drive us to distraction.”

Perhaps the most subversive thing anyone who loves the written word could do this summer, therefore, would be to put away the laptop and open "Ulysses."

Oh so trendy

2008-06-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

I returned today from a vacation of relaxin', readin' (Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War," for the second time) and writin' (notes for a novel that's beginning to congeal in my soupy head) to discover the editing business still needs editors.
I Googled the phrase "passing fad" to find 345,000 citations. That means that 345,000 times some writer didn't care enough to think before putting fingers to keyboard. While not strictly redundant, the word "fad" means a "temporary fashion," so a fad is, by definition, passing. Would that we should think as much before writing as we do before stepping off a city curb. By the way, I was moved to this demi-diatribe by a Moira Herbst's BusinessWeek article: Energy Efficiency: A Passing Fad?
On a different note, I've enlisted the help of a longtime editorial colleague of mine, Jackie Damian, to contribute to this blog from time to time. (I'd love for it to be daily, but she does have a real life!) Jackie is one of the finest editors I've ever worked with. I've seen her transform the unintelligible into the articulate and the workable into the insightful. Her first contribution comes later this week.

Rita Moreno for president

2008-06-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

College commencement speeches can be thumb-suckers highlighted by the occasional paper airplane drifting over bored, enrobed graduates. Rita Moreno, however, struck a blow for righteousness this weekend with her speech at Mills College in the East Bay. The only problem is the speech probably should have been given as the Class of 2008 entered Mills, rather than exited.

How we look is a matter of personal preference and is really rather easy to deal with, but — language, language — which is so central and important to one’s success is too often sorely lacking.
I am constantly saddened and dismayed by the way in which we have come to torture the English language. ... College students who use the term “he goes” in place of “he says” and whose sentences are riddled with “you know?” and who cannot complete a sentence without inserting the word “like” at least three times. ... My advice: Stop it this minute.

Write well, spell correctly, lawyer urges

2008-06-04T08:56:00.001-07:00

Lawyers are often criticized for arcane and convoluted language. Not Andrew Berry (left), chairman of McCarter & English in Newark, N.J. He's interviewed in The Wall Street Journal Law Blog about the importance of clear writing and avoiding typographical errors. Says he:

“Do not ever for the second time give your senior (lawyer) a piece of writing with a typo or a grammatical mistake.”

Such errors, he says, derail the lawyer's stock in trade: A smooth train of thought.
In addition, Berry urges young lawyers to read Antonin Scalia's new book on advocacy, especially the parts about the importance of writing well.
The dynamics of today's communications (IM, email, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, text-messaging) augur against this, but Berry and the rest of us can dream, can't we??

Word of the Day: Guerdon

2008-06-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

n. A reward, recompense or requital. (As a verb, to reward).

The word has several Middle English derivations, all of which probably come from the Latin donum, or gift, according to Webster's Unabridged.
You're probably wondering why guerdon shouldn't have a more martial meaning, with similar words like guerilla. That's because those ME derivations include a variation of widar, to give back.
Guerdon is what Sameer Mishra (left) spelled to win the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington last Friday. For winning, his guerdon includes $35,000 and a $2,500 savings bond. Not bad for getting your letters right.

Bad grammar "Eccos" relentlessly

2008-05-28T13:54:00.001-07:00

Ecco makes pretty good shoes. Their ad agencies writes pretty painful ad copy.
From the recent "My World My Style" print and online campaign:

"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet. So for my shoes, comfort and styles have to go hand and hand. My Ecco is Yucatan."

Do advertising agencies no longer employ copy editors? Does the "feel" of the copy outweigh the value of the words that produces it?
"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet"...???? As opposed to.... your hands?? That would be quite a feat!
And less obvious but still grating: "comfort and styles have to go hand and hand." I get it, but when the product is shoes, isn't there a better simile??

Word of the Day

2008-05-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Tergiversate: (v) to change repeatedly one's attitudes or opinions.
From the Latin tergiversatus, to turn one's back.

I haven't come across that word ever, and it's a beauty. Found it Joe Queenan's Wall Street Journal op-ed today on, who else? Hillary Clinton. Fits like a glove.

Say what you mean

2008-05-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Writing functions both as a spotlight and as a shield. It you want it to function as the former, it's important to strip out all ambiguity from your sentences, otherwise it's simply a waste of everyone's time.
Take Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's less-than-encouraging quotation this week about the financial markets:

"I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us."

That came from a Wall Street Journal story, headlined: "Paulson Sees Financial Turmoil Abating." His quotation, however, says nothing of the sort. It's "likely." His quote says, to me, "maybe we're coming out of it; maybe not."
If he really means to say the financial turmoil is easing, he'd have said: "The worst is behind us."
It's unsettling--when so many of us are unsettled that we haven't hit bottom--that the secretary of the treasury is unsure.

Jury rig

2008-05-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like the wide-open spaces in the mountains to give one a chance to improvise when needed. I spent this weekend with (left to right) my buddy, Pat, my son, Malcolm, and my brother, Kirk, fixing a major problem near our cabin in the Coast Range. You can see a newly graded road running across the creek and out of the picture. That's on our absentee neighbor's property, up the creek from our place. That road hasn't been graded--or used much--since the 1970s, and the creek's comings and goings over the succeeding decades has made the creek ford impossible. It's not an important road, so no biggie. But they graded it this spring, which is nice. Except when that grading rips through your water supply line buried under the road.
To make a long story short, I asked the guy to dig us a trench so we could fix the situation, but he hasn't been back up, so we had to act to get in water for the summer (our barrel is a quarter-mile hike upstream from here).
So we dug. And dug. It's gravel--not easily worked. We dug as much as we could, and then, to protect the PVC line, we hauled an old iron pipe down the creek to slide over the PVC section to protect it (while buried) from trucks rolling over.
It wasn't pretty, but it'll get the job done.
That's the definition of jury rigging (not to be confused with bribing jurors to help one's client).
While now used to describe anything that's makeshift or temporary, it originally was used to describe the replacement of mast and yards in case of damage.
In our case, jury rigging was more fun, as they say, than humans should be allowed to have while standing.

Stating the obvious

2008-04-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Often in covering tragic and dramatic news stories, reporters get carried away and lose their writing discipline. Such was the case with last week's shark attack off Solana Beach, Calif., that killed triathlete David Martin.

Witnesses said he was lifted vertically out of the water by the creature, which retreated after a single bite.

My son, reading the story, caught the error: "lifted vertically." To lift means to raise, and the last time I checked, raising is a vertical movement.

The sentence is imperiled: Pew Study

2008-04-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

The Pew Research Center is out with a study this week about writing and teens. There's good news and bad news. The good news is teens write more today than older generations. The bad news from "Writing Technology and Teens:" emoticons and abbreviations threaten the sentence. The study quotes James Billington, the Librarian of Congress:

Young Americans' electronic communication might be damaging "the basic unit of human thought -- the sentence."

Some highlights from the report:

93% of teens say they write for their own pleasure. FOR THEIR OWN PLEASURE. WOW!
The impact of technology on writing is hardly a frivolous issue because most believe that good writing is important to teens' future success.
Teens more often write by hand for both out-of-school writing and school work.
Teens believe that the writing instruction they receive in school could be improved. (OR, MIGHT WE SUGGEST, SUPPLEMENTED BY A CERTAIN WRITING BLOG...)

An Associated Press dispatch about "Writing Technology and Teens" focused on the impact that technology (IM and text-messaging for example) are having on formal writing.

"It's a teachable moment," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew. "If you find that in a child's or student's writing, that's an opportunity to address the differences between formal and informal writing. They learn to make the distinction ... just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing."

"Writing Technology and Teens" doesn't delve into what defines formal writing. Some would say it needs to cover all communications, from email to memos to proposals to contributed articles. Some might argue that different styles fit different forms. I fall into the latter camp.
I think the bigger problem is that the time pressures on everyone in the work place (at least the American work place) are hurting good writing just as much as technology may. It takes time to formulate a coherent thought and then communicate it. If we keep that in mind, we'll be fine. If we continue down our increasingly manic work-environment path, we'll be in trouble.

Word of the Day

2008-04-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

Don't know where he finds 'em, but he does. Oregon's favorite adopted son, Mr. B. Santo, forwards:

Graupel
Pronunciation:

\ˈgrau̇-pəl\
Function:: noun
Etymology:: German
Date:: 1889

: granular snow pellets —called also soft hail

In Webster's, it appears derived from the Greek Graupel for hulled grain, which is coincidental since I spent last night reading about malting barley and the joys of the decoction mash in brewing.

Batter up

2008-04-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

The first month of the 2008 Major League Baseball season is nearly in the bag, and that calls for some reflection. I was driving somewhere this weekend, listening to the Giants' game, when my wife made an insightful remark (not unusual). Why, she asked, do they say he "flied out" when a ballplayer hits a fly ball that is caught by a fielder? Shouldn't it be flew out? Good question. Freedictionary.com doesn't even mention it, instead defining "to fly out" as

To rush out. To burst into a passion.

Occasionally, you'll hear a broadcaster use "flew out," but not often. It's all the more surprising as it's common to hear a broadcaster describe a long home run by saying "that ball just flew out of here!" (We're not hearing this too frequently this season with the Giants, but that's another story).
The other faux pas that all broadcasters make is the use of the acronym for runs batted in (RBI). "A-Rod has three RBIs today," a broadcaster might say. In fact, the plural needs to be RBI (runs batted in). And then you'll hear newbies exclaim "It's gone! A grand slam home run!" Usually, their more experienced microphone partners will take them aside and gently remind them that a grand slam by definition is a home run.
Such are the things I ponder when my team is forecast to lose 100 games this season.

Good news, bad news

2008-04-04T11:22:00.001-07:00

The bad news is that California kids need to improve their writing skills. The good news is that those of us who make a living with words don't have to worry about job security any time soon.
Just a quarter of the state's eight-graders scored at grade level in writing. New Jersey has the nation's best young writers.

California students have improved, however. The writing test was last administered in 2002, when 23 percent of the state's students scored at grade level. In 1998, 20 percent did as well.

Verbing

2008-03-27T15:37:00.001-07:00

I had a rare chance to listen to the broadcast version of Michael Krasny's "Forum" program no KQED radio today as I drove down to Silicon Valley for an interview. On it, he hosted author and journalist Marilee Strong of Oakland, who has written a book "Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives."
Really interesting interview that you can hear here. Really annoying use of the verb "disappeared."
As in: "When he disappeared his wife." I have never heard this construction in my life, and it sounds wretched. But the dictionary allows disappear to be a transitive verb, meaning it can take an object.

v. tr.
To cause (someone) to disappear, especially by kidnapping or murder.

(From Dictionary.com)

I don't know. It still makes me feel creepy saying it.

On writing

2008-03-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it. (I once gave my dad a Father's Day card that had that sentiment). Email and IM and the immediacy they introduce into our lives are enabling people to write lousy sentences.
It's not just that email and IM are fast, throw-away forms of communication. They encourage fragmented thoughts (splash something out, hit send, move on to the next message or task).
In this world, prepositions grow like kudzu. They lengthen sentences, bore the reader and obscure meaning.
Write actively, not passively. Show your writing who's boss.

I came across this construction this week:

One of the key learning’s I want to start off by highlighting is never pretend to be something you’re not online.

That's what we get paid the big bucks for.

Sentences should be constructed in such a way that the reader is almost forced to stick with it from beginning to end--the way you roll down a grassy hill. For the reader, it should be effortless.

Word of the Day

2008-03-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

It's study hall at home tonight--quiet and peaceful. My wife is reading "Tortilla Curtain," written by T.C. Boyle.
She comes across one of those words you love but are usually too lazy to look up:

Peregrination. It means a walk or traverse, although it sounds like it should mean something a lot more complex, like the act of staring at a subway map in a foreign land trying to figure out where to go. It's obviously related to peregrine, which means "having a tendency to wander" and is a type of falcon (Falco peregrinus).
The Latin root, peregrinus, means pilgrim.
And with that, it's time to fly.

Quote of the day

2008-03-18T12:28:00.001-07:00

From Joshua Rosner, managing director at Graham Fisher & Co., on the current financial meltdown:

"We haven't had a full gut check of truth-telling."

Headline of the day

2008-03-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Chronicle, Food Section:

Tripe lovers
reveal their
offal secrets

Didn't even need a squeeze to fit the one column.
If you're an offal fan, read on.

Eliot Spitzer and the language of shock

2008-03-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York is in very hot water after the New York Times linked him to a high-priced prostitution ring. Keith L. T. Wright, a Democratic assemblyman from Harlem, said it most entertainingly when he tried to describe the news' affect on Albany:

“We’re at a total standstill. Everybody is stunned. Everybody is absolutely stunned.”

Unequivocally. Absolutely. Totally. Darn tootin'.

I hustled to the dictionary to understand the difference between a prostitute and a call girl, having come in contact with neither during my lifetime. (Honest). Prostitute is the umbrella term. It defines a woman who has sexual intercourse for money. Its root is the Latin prostituere, meaning to expose for sale. There's also the variant statuere, which is to cause to stand. And I'll let that stand right there.

A call girl is a prostitute with whom an appointment can be made by telephone. In America in the 1930s it was also used to describe a prostitute who could be called upon at a brothel, but that description has fallen out of favor. Today call girls are generally more expensive prostitutes favored by wealthy businessmen, athletes and, um, politicians who are trying to be discreet.
Doesn't always work out that way, however.

It's personal...or not

2008-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Screw up your pronouns, and you can look naked as a writer:

“Today’s savvy marketers are quickly realizing that viewing the customer as merely a target is a critical mistake. In fact, referring to the people that consume their products as anything other than people, is a mistake.”

And writing about people with a pronoun other than “who” is a mistake as well.

Onward... into new-word hell:

Onboarding: "...in the case of onboarding (adding a new hire)."

In some organizations, I hear this process can be as painful as waterboarding.

Trialing: "Advertisers have been willing to trial these products." It's trial to come across these constructions, but it's what I get paid the big bucks for!

Coffehouse words

2008-03-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

Many writers tend to jump on trendy words as quickly as they do trendy food and cocktails. Usually they do so without understanding the meaning. Abused about as badly as Michael Vick 's dogs is word "ironic." It's been hip for years, and it continues to be hip. Like cockroaches, I suspect, it will survive nuclear war. It's a word you pick up in college coffee houses, listening to your English major friends chat about Proust. It sounds intellectual. Most college graduates stagger out into the world having forgotten most of what they learned in school save for precious words such as ironic. They use such words liberally to erase any suspicion among strangers that they forged their diplomas.

Today, an otherwise insightful column from Mediapost, began this way:

I'M WRITING THIS COLUMN FROM the office of a Facebook Friend, ironically enough, as there was a building collapse in Harlem this afternoon that has canceled all train service out of Grand Central for the foreseeable future. Who knows when I might see the home office again?

A tough situation to be sure, but not ironic. Irony conveys meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning. It might be ironic (or just plain bizarre) if the writer were typing from the office of the building that collapsed, but that's not the case.

So think about those coffee-house words before you employ them.

Onward... another day's worth of redundancies

Integral part: Integral means "part of" something.
End result: A result is the end of a process.
Irrefutable facts: A fact is something that exists, that is reality. Unless you're channeling Descartes, facts aren't refutable. (While we're at it, you might want to use "refutable" where applicable rather than "irrefutable." The latter is in the dictionary, but means the same thing--and the former's 1505-1515 origin beats the latter by a century).
Contributing factor: Factor: 1. one of the elements contributing to a particular result or situation.

National idiom shortage

2008-03-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

You think the economy's in bad shape? Check out a Page 1 Onion story in the current edition.

Since beginning two weeks ago, the deficit in these vernacular phrases has affected nearly every English speaker on the continent, making it virtually impossible to communicate symbolic ideas through a series of words that do not individually share the same meaning as the group of words as a whole. In what many are calling a cast-iron piano tune unlike any on record, idiomatic expression has been devastated nationwide.

More on Buckley

2008-02-28T12:49:00.001-08:00

From today's Wall Street Journal excerpts of the late William F. Buckley's writing and speeches:

"I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words."

Lapidary: "Characterized by an exactitude and extreme refinement that suggests gem cutting."

(ME lapidarius, relating to stone cutting).

Eristic: "Pertaining to controversy or disputation."

Derived from the Greek eristikos, eris meaning discord.

Death of a sesquipedalian writer

2008-02-27T21:36:00.000-08:00

William F. Buckley Jr., who for decades warmed my father's heart and chilled the necks of liberals, died today at 82. Died at his desk. Died writing a column.
The New York Times' headline must have Buckley raising a heavenly martini in toast:

William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right

The Times indirectly defined that fabulous word we learned as kids when it made reference to Buckley's use of "ten-dollar words."

On writing

2008-02-27T17:49:00.000-08:00

Roy Peter Clark at Poynter has an interview this week with legendary sports writer Frank Deford, famous for his work, among other places, at short-lived The National (I have a copy of the last issue) and at Sports Illustrated.

The interview got me thinking about writing techniques. Deford has a couple of good ones:

· He types his written notes to get a sense for what he has, doesn’t have and needs to get.

· He uses colored paper to block out chunks of his stories (the historical background on blue, for instance).

· And if he has writer’s block (I’ll dedicate a post to this at a later date), he just starts somewhere and works from there (say in the middle and writes to the end and then figures out the top).

Writing in business is straightforward: You’re trying to communicate simple messages effectively; not elaborate on chaos theory. There’s always a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is what you’re going to say; the middle is what you want to say; and the end is recapping what you just said.

Visualizing that structure is relatively simple.

Deford’s techniques (and others) are effective on much more complex writing projects. The most valuable book I ever read on writing is “The Art and Craft of Feature Writing” by William Blundell, a onetime editor for The Wall Street Journal. Blundell taught me to use 3x5 index cards to frame both major and minor points, including quotes. You can then lay the cards out in front of you, pushing them around to where they best work.

Adopting outline and prep techniques like Blundell’s or Deford’s make the act of sitting down at your laptop to write much less daunting.

An abundance of fodder

2008-02-25T17:34:00.000-08:00

Andy Kessler, who wrote "How We Got Here," is one of my favorite business columnists. I catch him in The Wall Street Journal whenever he makes it onto the op-ed page. Today, he has a column titled "Internet Wrecking Ball," about the so-called "net-neutrality" issue.
I call out a couple of minor boo-boos (not to pick on Kessler but because I've got to post an item, and a bird in the hand is twittering at me):

"I personally would climb telephone poles on my street..." If you're doing the climbing, Andy, you can't outsource it. It's going to be personal.

"Yes, despite an overabundance..." (Part of the definition of the word abundance is "oversufficient quantity or supply," so overabundance is overly oversufficient and going over-over the top. But aha! you say, as if you've lured me into a rusty bear trap that has snapped violently around my ankle: Why, then, is the word overabundance in the dictionary? Because smart people who write dictionaries sometimes screw up.
Can you use overabundance? Sure. You can use colloquialisms too. But my point is: edit paranoid. The more critically you look at every word, the more you will whittle your copy into cogent prose and communicate clearer thought.

Word of the day: Skintle

2008-02-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

(′skint·əl) (civil engineering) To set bricks in an irregular fashion so that they are out of alignment with the face by ¼ inch (6 millimeters) or more.

This word is fairly new because it's not in Webster's Unabridged, even in the new-word section. Tip of the cap to Brian "Wretch" Santo for calling this out. His house is apparently one of only a few in his city that's skintled.

From where I sit...

2008-02-21T17:43:00.000-08:00

Before satellites and infrared technologies, sight was a major advantage in hunting, military campaigns and pioneering, to name a few.
I came across the construction today: "From my vantage point, it appears...."
Since vantage means "a position, condition or place affording...a commanding view," vantage point is redundant.

As is...
"Entirely new." That came from the same contributed piece I reviewed.

In an analyst report, I encountered this sentence:
"Having generated clear success on the public Internet, the question becomes whether or not these tools add business value."
Aside from the "public Internet" (because I have yet to come across the private Internet), the construction, while common, is nevertheless weird. It should be "xxx the question is 'do these tools add business value.?'"
Or...
"xxxthe issue becomes whether these tools add business value." (whether or not is just lazy grammar).

The Period As Statement

2008-02-20T09:54:00.001-08:00

Women's Wear Daily reports today that The Wall Street Journal 's planned magazine, Pursuits, which is scheduled to launch in September, has been renamed WSJ. (That's W S J period). WWD quoted a Journal spokesman as saying:

"The three letters happen to be typographically quite pleasing. And its simplicity gives us enormous flexibility visually and semantically."

I haven't been able to track down the font yet, but it's worth noting that down to the period used WSJ., it's different from than The Wall Street Journal masthead type font. That style is Escrow, designed by Cyrus Highsmith, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Tomaso Capuano, who designed the quarterly Times of London supplement, Times Luxx, is designing WSJ.
In an era in which video rules our lives, words are devalued and typography seems quainter than quill pens, this is a fabulous story. The Journal, in fact, always has placed a premium on typography since the paper until relatively recently was text heavy, black and white and ran few graphics. And to my knowledge, The Journal is the only newspaper in North America that puts a period at the end of its name.

Many, Multiple and Myriad

2008-02-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

In writing, people tend to hunt for $10 words when the nickel version works. "Many" is just one of those words. Like an old sweater, reach for it when you need it. Often, in an attempt to sound more serious or professorial, people will use "multiple." It's fine, but I'm not crazy about it. It reminds me of math class.
Then there are times when writers drop back in the pocket, look down field and go for the long bomb: "Myriad."
It's a good word, although it can sound a little pompous, but, hey, sometimes it's good to thrown down like that. It's almost always misused in a sentence: "...the result of a myriad of factors."
That's essentially saying "it's the result of a lot of a lot factors."
Proper grammar, for instance as an adjective, would be "There are myriad reasons the Giants will lose 100 games this season, but we can start with the starting nine."

It's a noun and an adjective meaning a very great or indefinitely great number of things. It's from the Latin myria, meaning 10,000.

Onward...

A couple of recent updates to the AP Stylebook online:

Asian-American

A person of Asian birth or descent who lives in the U.S. When possible, refer to a person's country of origin. For example: Filipino-American or Indian-American. Follow the person's preference. See nationalities and race, and race entries.

heart attack, heart failure, cardiac arrest

A heart attack (myocardial infarction) occurs when one or more arteries supplying blood to the heart becomes blocked. Heart failure is a chronic condition that occurs when a weakened heart can no longer effectively pump blood. Cardiac arrest, or sudden cardiac arrest, occurs when the heart suddenly stops beating. It can be due to a heart attack, a heart rhythm problem, or as a result of electrocution or other trauma.

Word of the day: Imputrescible

2008-02-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

On the "other" blog I wrote, in part, about the joys of serendipity that the printed word has over digital. Such was the case the other day when I was searching for the definition of a word and stumbled across imputrescible.

adj. not liable to decomposition or putrefaction; incorruptible.
It's from the Latin putresc(ere), to grow rotten.

Example? The last thing one could characterize Roger Clemens' testimony before Congress this week was that it was imputrescible.

Warning: Crocodiles ahead

2008-02-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

My favorite author is Mark Helprin ("A Solider of the Great War" etc.). He tells soaring stories with pristine, precise prose that works its way into every pore of your soul. What got me hooked years ago was the fact that Helprin's prose -- his fiction -- is relentlessly optimistic, and not cheesily so. His writing made me realize I could slink through life as a cynic, or I could pilot along optimistically. Indeed, even in the darkest moments, there is life if you choose to see it.
He's a conservative columnist, and he writes (too infrequently) for The Wall Street Journal. Today he penned a winner: "McCain and the Talk-Show Hosts," a piece that finally took to task the jabbering jackasses of the jaw-jockey circuit.
His last words were priceless as he described: the "relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter." Most of us would labor for a day or more coming up with that description. For Helprin, no doubt, it flowed effortlessly. Man, if I could write like that..........

Onward:

"5 a.m. in the morning." That's what a.m. is: the morning. It's bad enough to be awake at that hour, let alone emphasize the point redundantly. A.M.=Ante Meridiem, or before noon in Latin. (Without the periods, of course, it means amplitude modulation, a form of radio wave, which, coincidentally, carries many of the jabbering jackasses of the jaw-jockey circuit.)

Bad writing can be good

2008-02-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Yes, indeed, bad writing can be good. And entertaining. There used to be, yes once and perhaps still, a contest. A glorious contest. It celebrated the writing of Ernest Hemingway. His brevity. And style.
It was called the Bad Hemingway competition. Books were written about it. Articles too. Some very funny. Painfully so.
But as with writing in general, the competition seems to have dried up. Like a tomato in the hot Spanish sun. So too interest in the Big Man.
Maybe Papa got a bum rap.
Then again, maybe he should have read more Bernard Malamud.
The opening sentence from Malamud's book, "The Natural," which bore only a faint resemblance to the movie:

Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised at the bright sight of himself holding a yellow light over his head, peering back in.

As far as I know, there have never been any Bad Malamud contests.

Parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme

2008-02-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

Kimberley Strassel's "Potomac Watch" column in today's Wall Street Journal is an interesting read, if you're looking for insight into why Democrats, with a fabulous chance to take back the White House, continue to eat their own. But she writes, referencing an Obama policy plank:

"It's a good bet his success was in part due to his promise to not garnish their wages to pay for policies."

First, there's the split infinitive: "to not garnish." More importantly there's the misuse of of the verb "garnish." Back in the day, when I worked for UPI, if anyone wrote "garnish wages," the old-timers in the newsroom would howl with laughter and ask whether that would be with parsley or a lemon wedge. The proper verb is garnishee (to attach money or property), and here's hoping that never happens to you!
Upon further review, though, Webster's Unabridged allows that definition for "garnish," which must have been added since the days of our newsroom nitpicks.
In any case, stick with garnishee because it's a great zinger at a cocktail party, and it will be all but impossible for the person you correct to pull out Webster's Unabridged from his or her pocket.

Onward...

Internet (up)
Web and Web site (up)
but dot-com (down)

Friday (up)
cocktail hour (down)

It's in the genes

2008-02-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

My daughter had to remind tonight that I forgot a key memory in the opening post of this blog. We're all a product of environment and genes, and I left out a great anecdote.
My paternal grandfather was a businessman, Stanford Class of 1910. Was a friend of Hoover, so much so that when Hoover ran the European relief effort after World War I, he put my grandfather in charge of Poland. It's a biography waiting to be written. That's a shot of him, far left, at a Mills College function in 1935. I think he was on the board of directors. You'll notice he's holding his right arm. He contracted polio in Poland and it withered his left arm, and I think he was self-conscious about it.
Anyway, Maggie reminded me that the old man read books with a pencil in one hand. We have evidence up at our place in the mountains: dozens of old books. He didn't underline much, but he did edit with that pencil, circling mispellings and correcting grammars, putting commas where they should have been.
Get a life? Perhaps. I think the dictionary on the stand, which I mentioned on Greeley's Ghost, was his idea.
The point is I'm doomed. Maggie, our daughter, is probably doomed; Malcolm too (he already calls out "added bonus" anytime he hears it on the TV or radio. It's great for your mind; not so great for your friends.
C'est la vie.

Onward...

Driving the wordsmith to school today, we heard...
"Fully engulfed," which ranks right up there with "totally destroyed" and the arson that was "intentionally set."

A (good) quote a day keeps the boredom away

2008-02-05T12:37:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest challenges in journalism and PR is the quote. It's also the biggest lost opportunity.
In the wire-service business I was taught to quote someone only if I couldn't paraphrase the sentiment better. I was reminded that I was a writer, and that's what I got paid to do (I worked with a number of reporters over the years who used quotes liberally, and 99 percent of them aren't in the business anymore). A reporter or historian might have written "87 years ago," but Lincoln said "Four-score and seven," and they're four of the more memorable words in the English language.
In PR, quotes start out like crater-sized holes in a press release outline: "INSERT COMPANY/VENDOR/CUSTOMER QUOTE HERE." They go downhill from there. For many professionals, it's an afterthought. Almost without exception, press release quotes are dull and devoid of meaning.
Here's a winner from today's BusinessWire feed:

“By implementing a standard way of managing the collaboration between technologies, EDRM has capitalized on the industry’s readiness to work together and move the entire industry forward.”

Replace "EDRM" with anything and it works in any industry. It's also meaningless. It's like saying people love warm sunny days.
Quotes, although tricky to write well, don't have to be this bad.
If you're in PR, use the quote to get your message across in a way that can't be paraphrased (journalists use canned quotes all the time, but they won't use crappy ones). You will get pushback from your client, but persevere because it will pay off. If you're a journalist, keep asking questions until you get a quote you can use.
A lot of this is writing 101, but it gets lost in the flood of information we all produce every day.

Onward...

Rob Cox, on BreakingViews.com, has a fine post today that imagines a note from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, responding to MSFT's $44.6 billion offer to buy his company.

However fine the post, it contained a couple of teaching moments.
"...came as a complete surprise." While not a hard-core redundancy, this example illustrates how a little discipline can go a long way in writing. Surprise speaks for itself; unless there's a time element (latest surprise), why modify its degree? A surprise is a surprise is a surprise. The more we modify words that stand resolutely on their own, the more muddled our communication becomes.

"...articulating our admittedly complicated strategy." All "Jerry" has to write is the word "complicated," and he's admitting its complexity. This too can be a gray area, but it's better to put all adjectives and adverbs under the magnifying glass in the heat of the day. More often than not, you should end up searing them into oblivion.

The facts on de facto

2008-02-04T12:22:00.000-08:00

I came across this line while editing today:
"To date, the current de facto standard is...."
This is a belt-and-suspenders approach to writing. "To date" and "current," especially when you're writing in the writing tense (and if you're not, you've got other problems) are redundant here. "Current" is "to date." I'd much prefer "The standard is..."
Now for "de facto" ... this gets interesting. The definition is "in fact, in reality." Using it as a modifier here is like adding a second set of suspenders with your belt. A standard is a fact in this case. Webster's Unabridged provides a fine illustration of how to use de facto:
"Although the school was said to be open to all qualified students, it still practiced de facto segregation."

Onward to online...

From BBC online: "A total of 24 states will hold nominating contests on Super Tuesday." Better: "Twenty-four states xxx" (Geez, from the Brits, the fathers of the mother tongue).

Jennifer Lehr's opening line on the Huffington Post: "I've been totally obsessed with the primaries."
If you've got an obsession, I can guarantee you it's total. Obsession. 1. The domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc. From the Latin obsessio meaning blockade or siege.

Pre- this, baby

2008-02-01T16:19:00.001-08:00

A tip of the cap on this to Brian Santo (aka Wretch, as in ink-stained), who years ago published what amounted to a chemical equation as a headline in EE Times. It hung in another colleague's office until just last year.

Onward... Brian brings up the abuse of the prefix "pre." “Pre” is a prefix that you can easily begin to watch out for. There are scores of words where it is correct, but scores of words that lazy writers have coined and, in the process, created hilarious redundancies. For instance:
"...it comes pre-installed..."
"...it's pre-packaged..."
"... the system is pre-configured..."
"When I'm really old, I expect my food to be pre-chewed."

As I noted in my inaugural post, there's "pre-plan ahead." And there's a "pre-established" whatever.

Researching this post, I came across "preadult," which originated between 1900-1905. What's wrong with "adolescent" and "child?"

In any case, I'm feeling prescient that there will a fair amount of pre-game imbiding this Super Bowl Sunday, which will precipitate a predisposition among many to precarious amounts of tipsness. There is precedent.
But this may just be my prejudice.

Words of the day

2008-02-01T11:22:00.002-08:00

Aliquot: (adj.) 2. Chem., Pharm., comprising a known fraction of a whole and constituting a sample: "an aliquot quantity of acid for analysis."
From Latin ali, some other and quot, as many as.

Bolus: 1. Pharm., Ve., Med. A round mass of medicinal material, larger than an ordinary pill.
From the Greek, bolos: clod or lump.

I'm fairly confident that I will never again come across these two words in the same editing session. These popped out while I was reviewed an awards-nomination form for a high-tech, transdermal patch that delivers multiple medications.

Focus, focus, focus

2008-01-31T20:40:00.000-08:00

The longer your parents are gone, the more the questions build. I have stored up bunch for my old man. Among the top five are: "You had money. Why did we have a monocular? Why not binoculars???"
If you've never seen a monocular it was because my old man bought the only one ever sold on the market. At any one moment in history, there are only so many one-eyed bird-watchers. But he had to have it. And it was a lot cheaper than the cheapest binocular set, which played to the core values of a man who, despite being wealthy, bought sport coats at K-Mart for $15. (The deal thrilled him, but it made my mom weep publicly).
The monocular: Undoubtedly it was designed by a German count who lost one eye in an artillery blast at Verdun. Everyone else in the world has binoculars, and while it's never easy to get each lens focused, you can at least at least try. With a monocular, you're squinting into the eyepiece and trying to determine if, yes, by golly, that is an ivory-billed woodpecker, or, more accurately, you're looking at an eyelash that's been permanently embedded in your cornea because you've been spending 20 minutes shoving your eye socket into the damn device trying to see something, anything.
Why, oh why, do I bring this up? Because I read constantly the construction "heavily focused" or "focused heavily." I Googled "focused heavily" in quotation marks and it returned 114,000 citations.
It's one of those phrases that drives ya nuts. Focus and weight do not go together the way that McDonald's and weight go together. In fact they don't go together at all.
If you want to modify focus, try "narrowly." But even then, why modify a perfectly good verb?
When it comes to good writing, the mantra is focus, focus, focus.

I hear that train a-comin'

2008-01-30T11:09:00.000-08:00

Trains are loud, and steam-powered locomotives probably louder than diesel-powered trains. But Julia Flynn Siler took that noise to a new level in her book, House of Mondavi. In the first chapter, she wrote of family patriarch Cesare Mondavi travelling to California:

"As their smoke-bellowing train transported the family across the Great Plains and the desert into California..."

So not only did Mondavi have to put up with rocking and rolling, clanking and clatter of the old train (not to mention cranky kids, sleepless nights and flatulent fellow travellers), but the smoke was yelling at him.

Billowing is what she was looking for.

bil·low (bl) n.
"A great swell, surge, or undulating mass, as of smoke or sound.

Dictionary.com tells us the origin:
1545–55; <>bylgja wave, c. MLG bulge; akin to OE gebylgan to anger, provoke]

You know, um, she's like...

2008-01-28T17:30:00.003-08:00

When I was a kid, my father would ride me mercilessly to get rid of a speech tics.
"I have a funny story for you," I'd start.
"I'll be the judge of that," he'd reply. (He got that response from HIS old man).
The biggest thing was "um." I had a habit, as did many kids in their pre-adolescent years, of inserting "um" in mid-speech as a way to pause and think about what to say next. He dinged me on it constantly. I remember vividly riding in our old Willys Jeep through the woods one summer day trying to tell him something laced with "ums." He kept knocking them back at me like Arthur Ashe volleying at the U.S. Open.
He won. Eventually. He forced me to pause silently as I searched for the next phrasing and he allowed me to feel comfortable pausing because he wouldn't interrupt.
Today, it's almost impossible to pause in the middle of a sentence because whomever you're with will interject something. It's a massive problem in this era, and we'll take that subject up later.

Onward...

"Successfully achieved..." You can't unsuccessfully achieve, win, pass, modulate or do anything.
So when it comes to adverbs, I'll twist a line: "Trust yourself with adverbs the way you would trust a toddler with a butcher knife."

An annual headache

2008-01-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

Often, people build sentences like McMansions. They insert phrases they think are giving heft to the communications, when they're just muddying the message.
"In an effort to..." and "seeking to bring"... are common poor constructions.

The following graf, which I pulled from a BusinessWire release this morning, uses one of those phrases in a sea of words, which, viewed as a whole border on the meaningless:

"Home-based occasions are rising with consumers seeking to bring the favored aspects of on-trade alcoholic drinks consumption into the home. However, although volume sales are rising, heavy discounting is limiting value growth and undermining the potential in consumers' openness to trading up."

Onward...
"Five finalists for its first annual..."
It can't be annual if it's the first.

Safire On Language

2008-01-27T11:34:00.001-08:00

Columnist William Safire is retired from the New York Times, although he continues to write "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine. Some years after I got the Edwin Newman books on language, someone gave me Safire's "On Language," which is and will be a classic. He had a chapter in there about whether to use "dived" or "dove" as the past tense. He weaved through arguments on both sides--arguing strongly, though, that "dived" is correct--until concluding that he wasn't sure it mattered.
"I'm not a hawk on dove," he wrote.
(His column today focuses on the word "change," beaten like an old horse in this year's presidential campaign.)

I’m aggressive on passive

2008-01-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

The biggest contributor to bad communications is passive construction--the back-pew belchings of lazy writers. Passive sentences reflect a rushed writer who refuses to rethink a phrase to make it active, powerful and clear.

“A leading provider of database software for business intelligence.” That’s passive and flabby. It says almost nothing, except that the company sells database software. Well, wait. We don’t really know if it sells the software; it could be a distributor; it could be a consultant that just installs the software for someone. Provider is a very flabby term. Business intelligence. Some would argue that’s as oxymoronic as “military intelligence.” But people who follow enterprise software know what BI is. Still, in the Internet age when a release goes out, it’s available to everyone online, millions and millions of people. I’d say around 99.9999 percent of the people online don’t know what business intelligence means. So when you stumble into these jargon canyons, claw your way out with active sentences that give a better sense for, in this case, the software and its utility within an organization.

Onward…

Commas in a series: This question came up today. In grammar school (maybe they don’t teach grammar any more), you’re taught to include a comma before “and” and “or” in a series. For example, “Today in San Francisco, it rained cats, dogs, and everything but the kitchen sink.” AP style, however, does not call for a comma. “My therapist told me to eat less, cut back on the booze and exercise more.” So we go with AP style.

Commas, periods, etc. and quotation marks: They always go inside, not outside the quotation marks, unless you’re in the United Kingdom, where, because they drive on the wrong side of the road, they put them outside.

P.S. These things “ “ “ are quotation marks. What the candidate said today on the stump is a great quote.

Just when you thought it was safe...

2008-01-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

(01-23) 19:43 PST KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) --

Thieves in Malaysia stole an adult cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it, but abandoned the animal when the getaway vehicle crashed into a tree, police said Thursday.

The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers.

Frazier vs. Ali; Roe v. Wade

2008-01-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

There's an inherent bias toward overwriting on so many levels. People who can't communicate overwrite because it sounds important. Freelancers can overwrite because they often get paid by the word. And in PR people can overwrite because the client wants to see production; production=words.
In reality, it takes more time, is worth more to the client and allows the agency higher billings if a piece is written tightly and crisply. Why? Because it takes more time and effort!

Onward...
Further vs. Farther: Further is used with degree; farther with distance.
Comprise vs. Compose: Nine players comprise a baseball team; Major League Baseball is composed of team owners who have lost touch with reality.
Less vs. Fewer: Less bombast in discourse; fewer words in writing.

Worse than we thought

2008-01-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

Newspapers, despite a platoon of copy editors, can come under withering fire for their lapses. Today's San Francisco Chronicle contained a head-scratching hed:

Startling jump in California foreclosures

Startling. Really. If you assume that the people who publish newspapers read their product (OK, maybe that's the whisky talking), how can a jump in foreclosures in this lousy real estate market be startling? Startling is when a piano falls onto the sidewalk in front of you. Startling is seeing the movie star you've fantasized about standing at your door with Champagne and flowers.
Onward....
Utilize. One of the demon words of today's PR lexicon. It means to make something practical, as in "we utilized cold fusion." But 99.99% of the time, companies use it at a replacement for the frumpy but perfectly clear "use."
"Marking a year of exceptional momentum and recognition"....
It's hard to believe that a company would consider a product's momentum exceptional, unless of course the good communications folks believed the product to be a dog and the momentum to be a mind-boggling surprise. Exceptional means forming an exception or rare. Of course it also means superior, but that's the secondary definition. If you're writing on the razor's edge, there's gotta be a better word that doesn't open one up to this ridicule.

Word of the day: Ruction

2008-01-23T12:40:00.001-08:00

Holman Jenkins Jr., one of America's best columnists, weighed in today on sovereign fund investments flooding into our vulnerable economy.
He asked:

"Would we prefer they spent it patronizing the global arms industry, especially after this week's temperamental market ructions?"

Ruction. There's a word I hadn't read before. It means a disturbance or a row, and its murky origin dates to between 1815-1825. Sounds like something that might have come from Wellington at Waterloo: "Quite a ruction, eh what?"
Ruction isn't related at all to ructation, which is the act of belching wind.
Just so you know.

Fighting flab

2008-01-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

What got me rolling here was a short presentation I gave the staff on flabby language. I'd considered offering one-hour tutorials and bringing in pizza, but time's money in our business. Plan B was to do a couple of minutes at each all-hands meeting.
Here are some offenders I called out:

"Have already partnered/worked/etc." If you're using the past tense, it's already happened (or, I should say, 'it's happened.')

"Existing customers." If you keep using that construction with more pedantic customers, they won't be customers for long. What about "future customers" you ask. Well, in some circles we call those "prospects."

"Proven track record." A record is a record is a record. It's inherently proven because it's a record. If you want to get extreme, kill "track."

"Offers the ability to achieve unrivaled reach..." As a rule, ability is abused as a word in the communications business. In fact it's almost never used to describe someone's talents, as it should be. In the case here, "can reach," "offers unrivaled reach" work just fine.
And the best for last: "Brands seamlessly woven into XYZ’s vault of rich media." Not quite sure what that means, but weaves don't have seams; stitched materials do. And weaving something into a vault is a helluva technological achievement that even our asonishing age hasn't accomplished.

In the beginning...

2008-01-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

I got the itch early. In high school, I took a shine to English. My grandparents gave me one of Edwin Newman's books on writing, and I was in. Then there was Harry Flanagin. He was an old friend of my grandmother's. He worked at the old San Francisco Call in the 1920s and '30s. When I started studying journalism, he, sitting in front of the Mill Valley Market sunning his 85-year-old face, would say: "The best part about journalism for me was taking out that big red pencil and just slashing through copy. There's no better feeling."
Years later, it was a radio ad:

"Pre-plan ahead for your future."

Today we find ourselves in an era of dreadful, undisciplined writing.
That's good news for some of us.