Word of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.