Some pet peeves I can't give up.

"To give" as opposed to "to gift" is still a good and useful verb. Using the past tense "gave" instead of "gifted" saves space, and avoids confusion with an adjective meaning "having great natural ability: talented" (Merriam-Webster). I know I've lost this battle; I'll never forgive you, Jerry Seinfeld.

Apostrophes belong in possessives and contractions; not in plurals. You're going to a show with the Smiths, not the Smith's. Some exceptions: (1)"its" as a possessive doesn't take an apostrophe, to avoid confusion with "it's" as a contraction of "it is"; (2) hers, his, ours, theirs, and yours don't take apostrophes. Mostly it's the misuse of apostrophes in plurals that annoys me. 

If you drop something on the sidewalk and don't pick it up, you lose it. If you deliberately let something go, you loose it. 

Tampa is a city; Tampa Bay is a body of water. If you say "I'm going to Tampa Bay" I'll advise you to pack your SCUBA gear (unless you're a pro baseball, football, or hockey player).

The Economist's "Johnson" beckons me off my usage high horse.

 Well, at least a little. This week's issue of The Economist, in its "Johnson" column, a regular feature dealing with usage matters and named in honor of Dictionary of the English Language author Dr. Samuel Johnson, is captioned "Death nails and foul swoops". It so appears in the print edition; the on line edition linked above, which may be fully available only to Economist subscribers, gives the title as "Sometimes solecisms can reveal linguistic ingenuity." Merriam-Webster's first definition of "solecism" is "an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence: also a minor blunder in speech." 

The particular solecism to which the columnist refers is the "eggcorn," defined as "a particular kind of mishearing of a word or phrase" that "has a logic that makes it alluring." The word "eggcorn," which is a mishearing of "acorn," has such a logic. "Acorns and eggs have similar shapes, and both produce life." The "Johnson" author gives several other examples of eggcorns. "Death nail" for "death knell" makes sense because nails are associated with death, being used to secure coffins. "Knell," meaning the sound of large bell, such as a church bell that would be rung for a funeral, is not now widely familiar, except perhaps to those who have memorized the opening line of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." Similarly, "in one foul swoop" makes more sense to contemporary readers than "fell swoop," as "fell," when used as an adjective, and the fourth entry for that word in Merriam-Webster, meaning "fierce, cruel, terrible"; or "sinister, malevolent"; or "very destructive, deadly"; or (in Scotland) "sharp, pungent"; is not much in use these days, whereas "foul," which fits all of these definitions, is. 

The author mentions several other eggcorns with approval. One is "to change tact" for "to change tack," presumably because most people don't know how to sail. Still, to me, "tact" seems questionable. Again, I resort to Merriam-Webster, which gives two definitions of "tact": the first is "a keen sense of what to do or say in order to maintain good relations with others or avoid offense"; the second is "sensitive mental or aesthetic perception." So, would a "change of tact" mean a loss of the "keen sense" or of sensitivity? That doesn't seem good. Arguably, I suppose, it could mean that the "keen sense" tells you that you should change your approach in order to "maintain good relations" or "avoid offense."

This all makes me reconsider something I posted here twelve years ago, about what I called "the rein vs. reign syndrome." My first objection in that post, to the Wall Street Journal's referring to an effort to "reign in" instead of "rein in" a jury award, is one I stand by. The intended meaning here is to check or decrease the award, as one checks the speed of a horse by pulling on a rein. The problem comes with the expression "to give [or allow] free rein." This is now frequently changed to "free reign." To give a horse free rein is to allow it to proceed at its own chosen pace. To allow a person free rein is a metaphorical way of saying they are free to do as they choose. As for "reign," I resort once again to Merriam-Webster, which gives several definitions of reign, both as a noun and as a verb. I'm more interested in the verb definition, the third of which is "to be predominant or prevalent." The question then becomes whether the giving of "free reign" refers to oneself or to another. In the contexts in which I've seen it, I think it mostly, if not entirely, means the latter. Consequently, I now believe "free reign" for "free rein" is a true eggcorn. 

It occurs to me that the tact vs. tack and rein vs. reign controversies may reflect class or geographical differences. These days, to many Americans sailing is considered an "elite" avocation, so "tack" may seem foreign to them, although I doubt this holds true in some coastal and lakes regions. Similarly, rein is an equestrian term that would be unknown to most of those in urban areas, and to many of the poor in others. It would be interesting to see how these substitutions are distributed geographically and by average income.

Are these fifty synonyms in Fifty Shades of Grey so bad?

I've not read nor seen Fifty Shades of Grey nor any of its sequels and, good Lord willin' and the creeks don't rise, I never will. I was amused by Patti Greco's piece in Vulture in which she lists what she thinks are "The Fifty Worst Synonyms in Fifty Shades of Grey" and gives what she thinks are appropriate corrections. I agree with some of them, and the sample sentences she's displayed make me think I might not have missed much by ignoring Ms. James's works. In some instances, though, I find Ms. Greco's aversion to words that may seem a wee bit erudite or affected--H.W. Fowler might, were he still living and forced to read my prose, find me too fond of "battered ornaments" or hanging out on Wardour Street--and Ms. Greco's wanting to replace them with a string of commonplace words that make the sentence longer, not to my liking. Here's the list:


1-2. The offense: "To be honest, I prefer my own company, reading a classic British novel, curled up in a chair in the campus library. Not sitting twitching nervously in a colossal glass-and-stone edifice."

The fix: "To be honest, I prefer my own company, reading a classic British novel, curled up in a chair in the campus library. Not sitting twitching nervously in a giant glass-and-stone building."

My response: I agree on replacing "colossal", a word that, in my opinion, should be used only for olives or statuary. I like the word "edifice", especially if there's stone involved.


3. The offense: “I squirm; he’s made me feel like an errant child.”

The fix: “I squirm; he’s made me feel like a disobedient child.”

My response: I like "errant", and it's shorter.


4. The offense: “I haven’t made any plans, Mr. Grey. I just need to get through my final exams. Which I should be studying for right now, rather than sitting in your palatial, swanky, sterile office, feeling uncomfortable under your penetrating gaze.”

The fix: Cut palatial…it means the same thing as swanky.

My response: I agree.


5. The offense: “The richest, most elusive, most enigmatic bachelor in Washington State gave you his cell phone number?”

The fix: The richest, most elusive, most mysterious bachelor in Washington State gave you his cell phone number?”

My response: Almost a draw, but I prefer "enigmatic", which to me has a slight difference in meaning.


6. The offense: “ 'Ray? He’s … taciturn.' ”

The fix: “ 'Ray? He’s … a quiet guy.' ”

My response: "Taciturn" is a good word, but it seems out of place in what appears to be a snippet of ordinary conversation, so I agree with Ms. Greco.


7. The offense: "I refrain from rolling my eyes at him."

 The fix: "I stop myself from rolling my eyes at him."

My response: What's wrong with "refrain"? It's punchier.


8. The offense: “Okay … so his grey eyes are still haunting my dreams, and I know it will take an eternity to expunge the feel of his arms around me and his wonderful fragrance from my brain.”

The fix: “Okay … so his grey eyes are still haunting my dreams, and I know it will take an eternity to forget/shake the feel of his arms around me and his wonderful fragrance from my brain.”

My response: I've long thought "expunge" an ugly word. It sounds like something that formerly was used to soak up spills. In this instance, I'll go with the longer of Ms. Greco's suggested alternatives, "forget", because "shake the feel of his arms" seems awkward.


 9. The offense: " 'Anastasia, you were comatose. Necrophilia is not my thing. I like my women sentient and receptive,' he says dryly."

The fix: " 'Anastasia, you were comatose. Necrophilia is not my thing. I like my women awake and able to feel what I’m doing,' he says dryly."

My response: I'd go with "awake and receptive".


 10. The offense: "One minute he rebuffs me, the next he sends me fourteen-thousand-dollar books, then he tracks me like a stalker."

The fix: "One minute he rejects me, the next he sends me fourteen-thousand-dollar books, then he tracks me like a stalker."

My response: Six of one; half a dozen of the other.


11. The offense: "I brusquely towel-dry my hair and try desperately to bring it under control."

The fix: "I rush to towel-dry my hair and try desperately to bring it under control."

My response: I agree. "Brusque" may technically be applicable to hair drying, but I don't think of it that way.


 12-13. The offense: "He puts down his cutlery and regards me intently, his eyes burning with some unfathomable emotion."

The fix: "He puts down his fork/knife/spoon and looks at me intently, his eyes burning with some unfathomable emotion."

My response: No problem with cutlery, assuming he put down more than one piece, and no problem with "regards".


14. The offense: “I wanted to run my fingers through his decadent, untidy hair, but I’d been unable to move my hands.”

The fix: Cut. This makes no sense.

My response: I'm not sure why Ms. Greco thinks it "makes no sense." I'm guessing it has to do with bondage. "Decadent" isn't an adjective I'd think of for hair.


15. The offense: “If I could only lean forward, my nose would be in his hair. He smells clean, fresh, heavenly, but I’m fastened securely in my seat and effectively immobile.”

The fix: “If I could only lean forward, my nose would be in his hair. He smells clean, fresh, heavenly, but I’m fastened securely in my seat and can’t move.”

My response: I agree.


16-17. The offense: “He sits down beside me and buckles himself into his seat, then begins a protracted procedure of checking gauges and flipping switches and buttons from the mind-boggling array of dials and lights and switches in front of me.”

The fix: “He sits down beside me and buckles himself into his seat, then begins a dragged-out process of checking gauges and flipping switches and buttons from the mind-boggling array of dials and lights and switches in front of me.”

My response: How about "long process"?


18. The offense: “ 'Christian, what you fail to understand is that I wouldn’t talk about us to anyone anyway. Even Kate. So it’s immaterial whether I sign an agreement or not.' ”

The fix: “ 'Christian, what you fail to understand is that I wouldn’t talk about us to anyone anyway. Even Kate. So it doesn’t matter whether I sign an agreement or not.' ”

My response: I agree. I read enough lawyerese without having to find it in trashy fiction.


19. The offense: “My subconscious has reared her somnambulant head. Where was she when I needed her?”

The fix: Cut; it’s implied.

My response: I'm not sure what's implied, but I don't know how a head can sleepwalk.


20-21. The offense: “He’s facing me, and I have an unprecedented opportunity to study him.”

The fix. “He’s facing me, and I have a chance to study him for the first time.”

My response: I'm OK with either.


22. The offense: “Climbing out of the bath, I take his proffered hand.”

The fix: Cut; it’s implied.

My response: I agree.


23. The offense: “This time he doesn’t stop at my knee, he continues up the inside of my thigh, pushing my thighs apart as he does. And I know what he’s going to do, and part of me wants to push him off because I’m mortified and embarrassed.”

The fix: Pick one. These mean the same thing.

My response: They do, but I think using two synonymous or nearly synonymous words for emphasis can be appropriate and useful.


24. The offense: “I sit on my bed and gingerly extract the manila envelope from my bag, turning it over and over in my hands.”

The fix: “I sit on my bed and slip the manila envelope from my bag, turning it over and over in my hands.”

My response: Ms. Greco is right;"slip" is good and economical. I'll confess, though, to liking "gingerly extract"; perhaps because I'm fond of ginger beer, which is made with ginger extract.


25-26. The offense: “For the first time in my life, I voluntarily go for a run … I need to expend some of this excess, enervating energy.”

The fix: “For the first time in my life, I voluntarily go for a run … I need to work off some of this excess, enervating energy.”

My response: I agree; "work off" is more vivid.


27-28. The offense: “Shaking my head and endeavoring to quell my nerves, I decide on the plum-colored sheath dress for this evening.”

The fix: “Shaking my head and trying to calm my nerves, I decide on the plum-colored sheath dress for this evening.”

My response: I agree.


29. The offense: “He looks askance at my Beetle, but I ignore him.”

The fix: “He looks disapprovingly at my Beetle, but I ignore him.”

My response: I prefer "askance".


30. The offense: “And that’s not the future he envisages.”

The fix: “And that’s not the future he imagines.”

My response: I agree. "Envisage" is not a word for which I envisage much of a future.


31-32. The offense: “Ray pulls his car into the campus parking lot, and we follow the stream of humanity dotted with ubiquitous black and red gowns heading toward the gym.”

The fix: “Ray pulls his car into the campus parking lot, and we follow the stream of people dotted with matching black and red gowns heading toward the gym.”

My response: I agree.


33. The offense: “The ceremony takes another hour to conclude. It’s interminable.”

The fix: “The ceremony takes another hour to conclude. It’s never-ending.”

My response: I'm surprised Ms. Greco didn't catch the contradiction here: that the ceremony did conclude means it was neither interminable nor never-ending. I'm happy with either of those, but I'd replace "It's" with "It seemed".


34. The offense: “Christian! I stare up at him, imploring him to refuse.”

The fix: “Christian! I stare up at him begging him to refuse.”

My response: No preference.


35. The offense: “ ‘Anastasia,’ he cajoles. ‘I am sorry. Believe me. I don’t mean to laugh.’”

The fix: Let’s just go with says.

My response: Yeah, let's.


36. The offense: “ ‘I wish you were here,’ I whisper, because I have an urge to hold him. Soothe him. Even though he won’t let me. I want his proximity.”

The fix: “ ‘I wish you were here,’ I whisper, because I have an urge to hold him. Soothe him. Even though he won’t let me. I want him close to me.”

My response: I agree.


37. The offense: “My subconscious nods sagely, a you’ve-finally-worked-it-out-stupid look on her face.”

The fix: Stop personifying your subconscious.

My response: You don't think your subconscious is a person? As they say, you're never alone....


38. The offense: “…I wonder for a brief moment what it must be like to grow up with both one’s parents in situ.”

The fix: “…I wonder for a brief moment what it must be like to grow up with both one’s parents at home.”

My response: I agree, reluctantly. I've had a weakness for Latin since my father told me it's a dead language. Is linguistic necrophilia a thing? (Side note: lately, I've seen "Is X a thing?" used instead of "Is there such a thing as X?" I like it.)


39. The offense: “He raises a censorious eyebrow at me.”

The fix: “He raises a disapproving eyebrow at me.”

My response: I like "censorious".


 40. The offense: “My heart is in my mouth as I reread his epistle and I huddle in the spare bed practically hugging my Mac.”

 The fix: “My heart is in my mouth as I reread his e-mail and I huddle in the spare bed practically hugging my Mac.”

My response: I agree. An e-mail is not an epistle. An epistle should be handwritten on parchment.


41-42. The offense: “I gaze at my mom. Her earlier jubilation has metamorphosed into concern.”

The fix: “I gaze at my mom. Her earlier excitement has turned into concern.”

My response: I don't think "jubilation" and "excitement" are exactly synonymous, though Mr. Roget and Ms. Greco may disagree. I'd keep jubilation, but substitute "turned" for "metamorphosed", a word that in recent usage has turned into the more compact "morphed". I still prefer "turned".


43. The offense: “Holy shit … something’s amiss — the strain in his jaw, the anxiety around his eyes.”

The fix: “Holy shit … something’s wrong — the strain in his jaw, the anxiety around his eyes.”

My response: I agree. I think "amiss" is a good word, but it doesn't fit with "Holy shit".


44-46. The offense: “I sit on the barstool, momentarily stupefied, trying to assimilate this morsel of information.”

The fix: “I sit on the barstool, momentarily speechless, trying to absorb this piece of information.”

My response: I think all the offensive words have good uses, but I agree with the changes Ms. Greco suggests.


 47. The offense: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit … that smarts.”

The fix: “He hits me again, and the pain pulses and echoes along the line of the belt. Holy shit … that hurts.”

My response: I like "smarts".


 48. The offense: “…scalding tears spill down my cheeks.”

The fix: “…hot tears spill down my cheeks.”

My response: I like "scalding"; it gives it more oomph.


49. The offense: “I just want to curl up. Curl up and recuperate in some way.”

The fix: “I just want to curl up. Curl up and feel better.”

My response: I agree.


50. The offense: “Tears course unbidden and unwelcome down my cheeks…”

The fix: Pick one. And stop crying over this loser.

My response: This is one of those instances in which I think using two near-synonyms for emphasis, especially when they alliterate, is a Good Thing. I agree with the advice in Ms. Greco's second sentence.

Louis Menand, how could you?

I was thoroughly enjoying Louis Menand's "The Elvic Oracle", his review of Peter Guralnick's Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, but then I came to this parenthetical:

(Becoming friendly with d.j.s who played the kind of music you recorded was basic industry practice. Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, used to have a trunk full of alligator shoes when he drove around visiting local d.j.s. He’d ask for their shoe size and gift them a pair.)

I've Italicized "gift" in the quotation because, as I've noted before, "gift" as a verb is unnecessary, as "give", which has no more letters, is already available, and using "gifted" as the past tense of "gift" causes confusion with "gifted" as a commonly used adjective.

In any event, thanks to Menand's review, I'm looking forward to reading Guralnick's book and reviewing it here.

Grammar snobbery is the sort of thing up with which I will not put. Well, not too much.

There's a story, possibly spurious, that Winston Churchill was handed a draft of something he'd written; on it, an editor had written in the margin that he should change a sentence so that it didn't end with a preposition. Churchill's response, written below the marginal note, was, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

I've never been keen on the rule that one should never end a sentence with a preposition. It's something I'm willing to put up with. Similarly, I'm no fan of the rule against splitting infinitives. "To boldly go" is certainly the best known violation of that rule, and it sounds, and reads, so much better than "To go boldly," My guiding rule on syntax is, if its meaning is clear and it isn't ugly, it's okay.

In general, I have no objection to neologisms, unless they're ugly or replace something that doesn't need replacing. This extends to making verbs out of nouns, including, as I can never resist adding, the verb "to verb." My wife, who is an archivist, hates to see "archive" used as a verb. She's fighting a losing battle; one that, in my opinion, isn't worth fighting. Yes, "archive" is a noun meaning a repository of historically significant materials, but to use "archive" as a verb meaning to add something to an archive (n.) doesn't create any confusion. Also, "I archived X" is shorter than "I added X to the archive." The fact that "archive" is now a button on some software programs probably means the battle is over.

There's one exception to my non-objection to the verbing of nouns. That's the recently popular use of "gift" as a verb, replacing the already available and good "give." I made my argument here, then walked it back a bit, more in the sense of accepting the inevitable than changing my mind.

One thing I won't back down from is my struggle against apostrophe misuse. Using an apostrophe in a plural noun, as in "The Johnson's are coming to dinner," or failing to use one in a possessive noun, as in "That is Jims car," isn't creative or cute, it's just stupid. I've stated my case in full here.

I also get on my high horse about confusion of homonyms, such as rein and reign and throws and throes. My particular peeve now is a confusion of near-homonyms I see frequently on social media, the use of loose for lose.

You graduate; you don't graduate your school.

For some time now I've been getting periodic email updates from a blog called "Law Prose" from Bryan Garner, who seeks to improve lawyers' use of language. Being a usage scold (right now I'm riled up over apostrophe abuse in some documents I've been reading) I always peruse Garner's posts, so far always with appreciation. Most of them are on matters relating to the drafting of legal papers, but his most recent one is on a more general pet peeve of mine. I cringe whenever I read or hear something like "John Doe graduated Princeton in 1995." No, no, no. John did not "graduate Princeton"; he graduated from Princeton.

Garner tells us that the original syntax, dating from the fifteenth century, was in the form "Christ College Cambridge graduated John" or, "more commonly," he writes, "John was graduated from Christ College Cambridge." This makes sense; the school graduates the student, not the opposite. In the nineteenth century, though, the "was" began to be dropped from the latter construction, thus going from the passive to the active voice and making "graduate" an ergative verb. (Hey, you learn something every day!) So it became "John graduated from Princeton." It's clear from this construction that John did nothing to Princeton (apart from receiving a diploma from it and, perhaps, leaving).

But then, Garner notes with sorrow, sometime in the mid twentieth century it became common to drop the "from," leaving "Jane graduated Yale," or the like. As he writes: "Although this wording is becoming increasingly common, it is best avoided." He continues:

As the Washington Post copyeditor Bill Walsh puts it, “When I hear ‘I graduated college,’ I want to answer ‘No, you didn’t.’ . . . [Y]ou call your education into question if you omit the from.”

Don't let "loose" be your noose. Another usage scolding.

"These pants used to be loose, but now they're too tight. I need to lose some weight." In these two sentences, I've demonstrated correct uses of two similar words: "loose," an adjective meaning, in this instance, not tight fitting, but which has other meanings, such as approximate rather than exact; and "lose," a verb here meaning to shed, but which also may mean to fail to prevail in a contest.

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of misuse of "loose" where "lose" is appropriate, even in published articles such as Frank Sonder's (CEO and co-founder of foresee, GMBH) "The Future is Ours: Robots Take Over":

History shows that all industrial revolutions so far had positive effects, even with certain groups initially loosing their jobs to machines.

To be fair, this article (which I found on Linkedin Premium) was probably written in German, so the fault is likely that of the translator (Was a translation program used?) rather than Sonder's. Still, I've seen this error often enough in ordinary on-line discourse that it does seem to be a common one--and a sneaky one because spelling checker programs don't catch it.

I don't recall ever seeing the opposite error--using "lose" where "loose" is meant (e.g. "These pants are too lose"). Maybe the confusion comes from the fact that "loose" can be used as a verb ("I will loose my bulldog from his chain"), although this usage seems almost archaic, having been replaced in contemporary usage by "release."

Go back and read the first two sentences of this post. Got it? Go, and sin no more.

Give vs. gift: is the battle lost?

When I saw this sign on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan, I was mightily discouraged. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I'm a bit of a usage stickler; not too much of one, I hope, but still determined to hold the barricades on some (and I'll fight that one to the death). Not too long ago, I posted this, decrying the use of the noun "gift" as a substitute for the verb "give." My rationale was, this does nothing to enrich the language, since there's already a perfectly good word for it, and it doesn't simplify things, as "I gifted" is actually longer than "I gave." Also, "gifted" as the past tense of "to gift" could be confused with "gifted" as an adjective meaning what all the children in Lake Wobegon are.

Since then, in part because of a discussion on Facebook, I've come to realize that "to gift" is a back formation of a novel verb, first reported from 1995, to re-gift, or sometimes un-hyphenated "regift." This means "to give (a previously received gift) to someone else." Here I'll confess, "re-gift" has an ironic zing that "re-give" lacks. I can see how this led to the original giving of the gift becoming "gifting." Does this bother me? Yeah, sorta. Still, substituting "gift" for "give" to describe the giving of a gift doesn't seem that big a deal. The confusion of the past tense "gifted" with the adjective seems curable by context.

It seems my neighborhood Kiehl's store is treading the margin. The sign leads me to believe they are using "gifting" here to mean "gift-wrapping." That could actually be a useful usage. "May I gift that for you?" has an advantage of economy over "May I gift-wrap...?"

A new homonym peeve: "throes" vs. "throws."

In her piece on The Real Deal about the controversy over Long Island College Hospital, Julie Strickland wrote:

Fortis Property Group and NYU Langone Medical Center, the bidders currently [in] the throws of negotiations with LICH owner the State University of New York, now have a few days to wheel and deal on a community-needs assessment. (Emphasis added.)

I suppose one could be said to be "in the throws" if one is on the mound, like Mike Pelfrey in the photo above, or addressing the Porcelain God after the ingestion of too much tequila.  What the bidders for LICH were in were the throes, meaning "a hard or painful struggle". One could be both in the throws and the throes: certainly in the tequila example; also in the baseball example when, say, the game is close, there are no outs and runners in scoring position, and the count is against you. In the matter of the LICH negotiations, though, it's got to be the throes, at least unless you accept the argument that SUNY threw victory to Fortis.

I'm hoping this isn't Ms Strickland's unforced error; she has a good record. Rather, I suspect it's the fault of a spell check program (as Twif suggested in response to my earlier diatribe against rein/reign confusion) that wasn't fed enough vocabulary to recognize "throes." That, or a really dumb copy editor.

Karen Shaw proves Mies and Browning right ...

...at least in fifteen out of nineteen languages.

Ms Shaw's (photo above) art is based on a simple premise that yields a plenitude of results. The premise is: assign to each letter of the Roman alphabet its ordinal number, A=1 through Z=26. For any word, sum up the numbers of the letters. Find other words having letters that yield the same sum. This can lead to interesting relationships that may be used as the basis for a work of art. For example:

The number 53 corresponds to O'Keeffe and to F Kahlo, artists associated with New Mexico and Mexico, respectively. It also is the sum of the word "sum," as well as of "emerge" and of the Spanish unidad ("unity").

Similarly, 77 yields print, Hogarth, Warhol, parallel, and character: something for aspiring art historians to contemplate.

The centerpiece of Ms Shaw's exhibit, "The Summantics of Art," was her demonstration that the statement "Less is more," which I have always associated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the preeminent architects of the past century and designer of the Seagram Building, but which statement Ms Shaw noted was earlier used by the English romantic poet Robert Browning in Andrea del Sarto, is true in fifteen languages using the Roman alphabet. In each of these languages, including English, the sum of the numbers corresponding to the letters in the word meaning "less" is greater than that of the numbers corresponding to the letters in the word meaning "more." Ms Shaw admits this does not hold true for Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Gaelic, or Welsh, and wonders, "What could this mean?"

At the time she developed her numerological system, Ms Shaw wasn't aware of its kinship to the Jewish mystical practice called Gematria, but was delighted to learn of it.

"Gift" is a noun, "gifted" is an adjective, "give" is a verb.

I'm on my usage high horse again. It isn't all that high. As I've said before, I'm not some fusty pedant who worries about split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions. I usually don't object to the verbing of nouns; note that I just used the verb "to verb." I do have my pet peeves, but I like to think that I limit them to instances where error will cause confusion.

Today, though, while reading a news report about a court decision concerning efforts to save Long Island College Hospital, which serves our community and where my daughter was born, I saw this:

The Wednesday ruling also required SUNY Downstate to account for the Othmer Endowment Fund by Sept. 20—a $130 million endowment gifted to LICH by the Othmer family.

--Sarah Matheson, "Ambulance Services Restored at Brooklyn's LICH," Epoch Times, September 6, 2013 (emphasis added).

The reason I've Italicized "gifted" in the quotation is that it's incorrectly used as a verb. It's an adjective that roughly means possessing greater than average intelligence or skill. The correct word in the context of the quoted sentence would be "given," the past participle of the verb "to give."

Why do I care? Because "gift" is a noun that doesn't need to be made into a verb, There's already a verb form, "give," that has no more letters than "gift," and therefore gives us no advantage in economy of expression. Consider, for example: "To verb a noun," thereby using the noun "verb" as a verb, has an advantage of brevity over "To make a noun into a verb." By contrast, "He gifted a book to his daughter" is longer, and clumsier, than "He gave a book to his daughter." Also, to use "gifted" as the past tense of "to gift" creates confusion with its use as an adjective. Would "a gifted child" mean a child blessed with talent, or one who was made available for adoption (not that they mightn't be the same)?

Addendum: I should mention that "give" is sometimes used as a noun, in a way that doesn't bother me. It's used as a synonym for "flexibility," as in, "There's some give in it."

Second addendum: Ugh!

It used to be. It's been dumbed down.

(Note the use of "dumb" as a verb. Very useful, I think.)

No, you can't reach a crescendo. Or can you, if you're a famous writer?

Miles Hoffman, a fine fellow I'm sure, takes umbrage with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the historian James M. McPherson, George F. Will, William Safire, and others, for using some variant of the phrase "reach a crescendo." This strummed a mystic chord of memory for me. Sometime in my tween years, I read a Walt Disney comic in which Donald Duck got into a noise war with a neighbor. Donald decided to finish it off by turning his record player to top volume and putting on "the fortissimo crescendo from Bombpopoff's 'Eruption of Vesuvius.'" I was pretty sure there wasn't a real composer named Bombpopoff, but I couldn't resist mentioning this to my music teacher. He laughed, and said there could be no such thing as a "fortissimo crescendo." "Fortissimo," he said, means "as loud as it can get." "Crescendo" means "getting louder." Nothing can be as loud as possible and getting louder at the same time.

This, essentially, is Hoffman's argument. To say or write, "The battle reached a crescendo," is nonsensical. a crescendo is a process, not a completion. It may end at fortissimo, or somewhere below that, but once it gets there, it's not a crescendo anymore. I could only agree.

But then I read a letter to the Times editor by Jamie Apgar, of Berkeley, California, in part as follows:

I am disappointed by Mr. Hoffman’s article. “To reach a crescendo” is an idiom. Idioms are suited for neither syntactical analysis nor literal interpretation. ...

More broadly, the point of language is to convey meaning. I doubt that any of the sentences by the famous authors that Mr. Hoffman mentions are rendered opaque by including the “crescendo” idiom. They may indeed be clearer or more powerful because of the metaphor. I think that I’ll stick with Fitzgerald.

Well, to say, "The battle reached a fortissimo," seems silly and confusing. One could instead say, "reached a climax," thereby substituting a sexual reference for a musical one. Or, there's "reached its acme," which might bring to mind Wile E. Coyote.

Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard Bernstein, wrote to the editor that she was "gratified indeed" by Hoffman's piece for its "elucidation on the word 'crescendo.'" She went on to suggest "a reason for the pervasiveness of the misuse":

I’m certain that it’s because the sound of the word so felicitously evokes the crashing of cymbals: “the crash at the end-o.”

Be that as it may, I'm inclined to agree with Apgar: "reach[ed] a crescendo" is one of those usages that, through repetition, has come to mean something specific to most readers, although it may be at variance to what musicians and students of music understand "crescendo" to mean. I suspect John McWhorter would concur. (You can read the full texts of Ms. Apgar's and Ms. Bernstein's letters here.)

Perhaps the best known example of a crescendo, one that extends for the entire length of the composition, is Ravel's Bolero. Anyway, I couldn't resist the opportunity to send you to another of my posts.

Image:Best Clip Art Blog.

Cockney rhyming slang.

So, what's a Godiva? It's a five pound note, or, in Cockney speech, a "five-ah," which rhymes with "Godiva." This is Cockney rhyming slang at its most basic--for the word intended, substitute another word with which it rhymes. There is another, more meta (to use a Greek-rooted prefix recently made into an adjective) version in which, instead of the word that rhymes with the intended word, another word associated with the rhyming word is used. For example, instead of "Godiva" for a five-ah, say "Lady," a word usually yoked to Godiva, as in, "That'll cost you a Lady."

I was introduced to the meta version some years ago at the bar of the Bells of Hell. I was chatting with an English friend when a--how you say?--well-endowed young woman walked by. "Nice set of Bristols," my friend said. His meaning was obvious to me, but the usage wasn't. "There's a football club called Bristol City," he explained, "and city rhymes with... ."

One Briticism that piqued my curiosity is "Gone for a Burton." Having seen this in Private Eye, I asked another English friend what it meant. "It means he died," was the answer. "How does it mean that?" I asked. My friend didn't know. I later read that it may have originated with Royal Air Force flyers in World War Two, to refer to a comrade who hadn't survived a mission. Burton, or Burton-on-Trent to give its full name, is a city known for its breweries, as acknowledged by A.E. Housman in A Shropshire Lad:

Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.

A plain meaning of "Gone for a Burton" then would be "Gone to the pub for a pint." Regarding a deceased friend, it could mean "Gone to that big pub in the sky." Still, I wonder if it might not be an instance of Cockney rhyming slang. Burton doesn't have any obvious rhyme relating to death, nor does Trent, nor ale, the brew that made Burton famous. But it occurred to me that a properly drawn pint of ale has a head, which rhymes with dead. If this is in fact the origin of the expression, it could be an instance of meta-meta rhyming slang, going from Burton to ale to head. If, however, Burton is taken as a synonym for ale, then it's only a single meta.

Regarding the sign in the photo at the top of this post, I found translations for "monkeys" (hundred pound notes) and "ponies" (twenty-fivers) in this glossary. I don't know the meaning of "edges" or of "carpets." Perhaps one of my English friends can help. "Visa," I presume, means just what it is.

It's Chanukah, and Chanukah it is.

 In the song accompanying the video above, the LeeVees address the burning question: how do you spell the name of the minor Jewish holiday--but which has become major in the American context; see Hilary Leila Krieger's piece on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times--that started today, and will last for another seven days? Ms. Krieger chose "Hanukkah." Four years ago I chose the alternative "Chanukah," mostly because it gave a visual as well as sonic alliteration to my post's title, "Chanukah on the Chisholm Trail." Last year I avoided the issue by not mentioning the name in the title or body of my post, although the caption of the embedded Matisyahu video spells it "Hanukkah." The LeeVees don't give us an answer.

Of course, there is one absolutely correct way to spell the name of the holiday:  חֲנֻכָּה What we're considering here is how to spell it in a transliterated fashion, in the Roman alphabet. I've made my choice: I'm going with Chanukah. My reason is that the initial "Ch" denotes the slight guttural sound, as distinguished from the soft English "H," that properly begins the word. So says this latke loving (salmon roe and sour cream, please) goy, who eagerly awaits our neighbor's Chanukah celebration.

Reports that the Oxford comma had been found redundant, was expunged, and would be seen no more, were exaggerated.

My wife gave me a scare a few days ago by announcing that the Oxford comma had been dropped from the Oxford Style Manual. As it turns out, this was a false alarm caused by the failure of the University Press's P.R. firm to use one in their announcement of the Manual's latest edition. Silly monkeys.

So, what is this Oxford comma, and why does it matter? (Hint: there's one in the caption of this post.) You won't get the answer by watching the video above, and listening to the lyrics of a song called "Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekend, one of my favorite twee bands (the other is Belle & Sebastian). You will by reading this NPR piece by Linda Holmes, whose views on language issues appear virtually congruent with mine (although I do hyphenate "e-mail"). She concludes by noting that all of us who care about such things have our pet peeves. If you've been following this blog for a while--and if you have, God bless you--you know mine.

Update: reader Quin, in a comment below: "A battle rages in my firm over this--it's AP v. Oxford." I'm guessing you're on the Oxford side, Quin, so you may cite the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., 2010) 6.18 as support:

When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series of three or more, a comma--known as the serial or series comma or the Oxford comma--should appear before the conjunction. Chicago strongly recommends this widely practiced usage, blessed by Fowler and other authorities (see bibliog. 1.2), since it prevents ambiguity.

A small victory in the apostrophe wars.

Here's the original version, along with my rant (which made me, in Stephen Fry's eyes, a loser).

Yes, I think the old sign was prettier than the new one, except for that egregious grammatical error.

Am I a language pedant; in Stephen Fry's word, a "loser"?

Some friends -- she was a high school classmate, he's a retired teacher and published poet -- sent me the above clip. I don't think they sent it in reaction to anything I wrote here or to them, or said, but just because they thought I'd enjoy it. It is a clever piece, and the moving, nay dancing. typography is a joy. I agree with about ninety percent of what Fry says. Where he made me wince was his reference to those who decry the misuse of apostrophes, whom he specifically singled out as "losers." For a moment, I had the horrid feeling he might have seen this post.

I'd like to think that I'm not some fusty language pedant. I'll confess to having weighed in on the "fewer/less" imbroglio, which I now regret. It's not only a losing battle, but one not worth fighting. I try to keep my own writing free of split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions (unless, in the latter instance, it results in a clumsy construction; see Winston Churchill's rejoinder to someone who tried to correct his grammar). Nevertheless, I don't fault others for these things, and am glad to allow Enterprise and her crew "to boldly go". I have no problem with the verbing of nouns, including the verb "to verb". My wife, an archivist, takes umbrage at "archive" as a verb. Again, I think it's a losing battle, especially in the age of computers, when one can "archive" with a click or a keystroke.

There are some things up with which (nodding to Sir Winston) I will not put. One is the misuse of apostrophes. I disagree with Fry if he thinks this is an example of something fresh or invigorating, like a clever neologism or the use of a word in a new context. It's just wrong, and it does harm to clarity. Perhaps it's "elitist" to call someone for not knowing the rules, but so be it. Fry seems to contradict himself. At first he says those who object to the creative use of language do so on the grounds that such usage is elitist, in which instance he allies himself with the elitists. Then, without using the e-word, he implies that those who object to incorrect apostrophe usage are guilty of snobbery. I plead guilty.

Heather Quinlan surveys the New York accent.

Here's the trailer for friend and Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague Heather Quinlan's forthcoming (and you can play a part in bringing it to the big screen: see here) documentary If These Knishes Could Talk: the Story of the New York Accent. For those with sensitive ears, caveat: you get hit with an F-bomb at the beginning.

Do you curate? If so, you rate.

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague, Heather Quinlan, recently posted about a "pop-up-store" to appear in our neighborhood. She wrote that the proprietor "drew upon her own experiences to curate the store", and quoted the proprietor as saying, "So I wanted to bring a really cool curated store to you...." The post drew the following comment thread:

Topham Beauclerk:
The use of the word “curate” as a synonym for wholesale buying is new to me. Phony and pretentious.

the where:
It’s a yuppie/brownstoner way of saying no tube socks which is code for something far more sinister and phobic.

Heather Quinlan:
I’m eating a curated ham sandwich right now.

David on Middagh:
Really? Mine has tube socks.

AEB:
No, I like the word and its use. Now I can say that every morning I curate my cats’ litterbox….

Andrew Porter:
Wasn’t it the Curate in Wells’s “The Time Machine” who went mad? Played by Tim Robbins in the latest film version.
Maybe curate was a typo for cutrate?

AAR:
A nice idea! Why jump all over it because of one word when a shop like this is the sort of thing many bloggers wish would come to Montague Street? Let’s support the entrepeneurial spirit even if the product doesn’t suit everyone.

I was familiar with two meanings of "curate." The first is as a noun, in the sense referred to by Andrew Porter. That is, as a priest in the Church of England who serves as a vicar or, in a larger church, as assistant to a rector. This is confirmed by Merriam-Webster Online. The second is as a transitive verb, meaning to perform the functions of a curator; in other words, to select the items for inclusion in the permanent collection of, or a special exhibit mounted by, a museum, to determine how and where the items are to be displayed, and to provide text and other visual or aural aids to explain or give context to the items. This again was validated by Merriam-Webster (follow the link above and click on the second meaning), which shows the date of first use of "curate" as a verb as 1909. The first use of the noun "curator," however, is shown as 1561. This strongly suggests that "curate" as a verb is a back-formation from the noun "curator." While the definition given by Merriam-Webster for curate as a verb, "to act as curator of," could apply outside the museum context, the examples given there both refer to museums.

So, I would be prepared to agree with Topham Beauclerk that the use of the verb "to curate" other than in its customary context is, if not "phony and pretentious," at least a stretch. But, then, I did a little more web research and came across this New York Times article from last October, which I missed, probably because it was in the "Fashion & Style" section, which I used to ignore but now know is essential reading. According to the author, Alex Williams:

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.

Williams goes on to quote one of my favorite public intellectuals:

For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”

Williams notes that the "nontradtitional" use of the verb "to curate" (the "traditional" use, as we've seen, having originated in 1909) "took off" after 2000.

Finally, Williams asked a "traditional" curator what she thinks of this expanded definition, and got this response:

“Maybe the use of ‘curate’ to refer to extra-museum activities is just metaphorical, akin to the way we use the word ‘doctor’ as a verb,” Laura Hoptman, a senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, wrote in an e-mail message. “If we doctor a script, we are only theoretically operating on it.”

“It doesn’t really bother me,” she said of the trend. “Actually, I’m hoping its popularity will spawn a reality television show — maybe ‘Top Curator’? ”

Update: See Rebecca Goldman's cartoons in "Who Curates the Curators?" from Derangement and Description.

The New York Times' Homeric nod.

This just in from the Gray Lady:

President Obama and his Russian counterpart, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, have broken through a logjam in their arms control negotiations and expect to sign a new treaty slashing American and Russian nuclear arsenals in Prague next month, officials from both nations said Wednesday.

Russia and the U.S. both maintain nuclear arsenals in Prague? Does Vaclav Klaus know about this?