(A) wanker

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.