Category: Words
Another irrefutable argument for the serial comma
An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation:
When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority?
H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist’s identity, I’ll update.
Those aborted cuts – feedback
Civil Rights activist Warren Reed took the time to read the complex documents setting forth the Dexter Government’s furtive plan to slash medical benefits for residents of special care homes. The documents were posted here last night. The Dexter Government shelved the plan, which would have required residents making less than $2,000 per year to pay for needed medical supplies, dental treatments, vision care, and certain drugs including, in some cases, insulin and anti-seizure medication. The unannounced cuts, developed without consultation, were to have been implemented Canada Day, but were put on hold late Thursday after the Canadian Press wire service started asking questions of the Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse.
Reed writes:
The documents evoke the fine old days of the workhouse. I thought Dickens was dead. The whole plan is so paternalistic and antediluvian as to be worthy only of incineration. Yossarian himself would perk up at the “Policy Objectives” section, which parses into something like, “The objective is the policy and the policy is the objective.”
Unfortunately, you have let a bit of unnecessary cliche creep into your language. As suggested below, you could have written the whole article without reference to “disabilities” (proposed deletions highlighted in yellow).
By reminding the reader that the policy merely affects the “disabled” you plant the thought that these people are different from us. They are us.
Warren has a point, though I think he carries it one step too far. That this policy would have applied only to Nova Scotians with disabilities is a pertinent fact readers ought to know. It’s not just a mean policy, but a discriminatory one that targets a group of Nova Scotians ill-equipped to stick up for their rights. Alas, having made that point, I then slipped into the common error of repeatedly defining the affected people by their disability. Warren is right. They are not “the disabled.”
They are us.
Words we don’t say
When Hugo Lindgren took over as editor of New York in 1997, he found the magazine’s staff grieving over the firing of his predecessor, Kurt Andersen, now a best-selling novelist. Now top dog at the New York Times Magazine, Lindgren reports that Andersen unwittingly left behind a gift.
Tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine.
The list [pdf] stands up pretty well, but I’ll bet Contrarian readers could nominate a few submissions. I would allow indie, and nominate the following additions:
Journey (except meaning “long trip”)
The rest, as they say, is history
Speak to [a topic]
After the jump, the original list:
Chicago’s hidden poetry
The Chicago Manual of Style, grand dame of copydesk styleguides, has published its 16th edition, but Ed Park, writing at Bookforum.com, recalls the 14th fondly:
Though I never read the book cover to cover, the Chicago Manual of Style took up a lot of brain space during my copyediting years. Section headings suggested good titles for poems or chapters: “Mistaken Junction” (5.63), the vertiginous “Words Used as Words” (6.76). Ostensibly a reference work, it was really a form of secret potent literature, offering some of the challenges and unconventional pleasures of the sort of doorstop-shaped fiction I was consuming back then anyway.
Chicago’s examples could be recondite or mischievously witty or of a weirdly resonant blandness. You could be boning up on the proper use of brackets (section 5.129) and be hit with quotes like this:
During a prolonged visit to Australia, Glueck and an assistant (James Green, who was later to make his own study of a flightless bird [the kiwi] in New Zealand) spent several difficult months observing the survival behavior of cassowaries and emus.
You’d feel an urge to procrastinate, to follow these intrepid antipodean emu watchers, but alas: The sadistic authors of the fourteenth knew that less is more.
Where did these fragments come from? What did they mean? Sometimes there would be a message just for me. On late nights while I waited for proofs to materialize, I would think of the poem disguised as 5.136, which asks the reader to “consider the range of expressiveness achieved by the following changes in punctuation”:
Go home.
Go home!
Go home?
Go home?!
The comment section has a useful note on atomic typos.
Farewell Constance
Gone-fishin’ CBC Radio host Costas Halavrezos muses about his ego-lite broadcasting style on the veteran’s last Maritime Noon broadcast:
[A]s listeners, you’ve noticed I play my personal cards close to my chest. I don’t tell cute family anecdotes or talk about my favourite sports teams or what I had for breakfast, because I believe every second of broadcast time is precious, and well, the majority of you don’t get to communicate with other Maritimers every day like I do, so it’s best if I stay out of the way and free up the space.
This is but a variant of E.B. White’s famous advice to young writers in The Elements of Style: “Place yourself in the background. Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author.” It’s a formula that made Costas was as comfortable and enduring as an old pair of slippers.
Via Bruce Wark.
So, buttons on your britches?
Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction “so” to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with “so.”
While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with “so,” he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so’s to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees.
In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of possible transitions with a catchall. And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving software types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process — if this, then that.
This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Compared to “well” and “um,” starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Whereas “well” vacillates, “so” declaims.
Girisharadas also cites Galina Bolden, a linguistics scholar who has written a scholarly paper [pdf] on the use of “so.”
[Bolden] believes that “so” is also about the culture of empathy that is gaining steam as the world embraces the increasing complexity of human backgrounds and geographies.
The ascendancy of “so,” Dr. Bolden said, “suggests that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”
To begin a sentence with “oh,” she said in an e-mail message, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with “so,” she said, is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.
Hat tip: Now the Details via CH
Anonymous, ’til we decide to out you
Lindsay Brown doesn’t like anonymous posting:
The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary.
First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters.
Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They’ll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware.
The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic way the contradiction tolerated by media who encourage online “anonymity”. We know that the Herald is an ethical news organization, so it follows that the paper regards anonymous commentary as ethical. But the story on the premier’s chief of staff is predicated on the idea that it was UNethical for him to post anonymously. So, either posting anonymously was unethical, or the newspaper acted unethically when it identified the poster. The Herald can’t have it both ways. Media outrage across the country at the anonymous postings from Helena Guergis’s staff in March shows our local paper has plenty of company — they are all wallowing together in a frothy hot-tub of contradiction.
They can defend themselves by arguing that anonymous commentary is the special domain the elusive “ordinary citizen”, and that the public has a right to know when someone with a vested interest or bias has trespassed. That leaves online media with two options: they can check every anonymous post to ensure that its author is in fact ordinary; or they can require posters to sign their work and allow readers to determine for themselves how much credibility the writer deserves. The latter continues to work well on letters-to-the-editor pages.
A commenter on the Herald website called LilacLover also sees the contradiction:
So let me get this straight. The Chronicle Herald facilitates a public web forum, where readers can post comments with relative anonymity. However, if those comments call into question the Chronicle Herald’s objectivity on a particular story, then that reader can expect to be tracked down, repeatedly contacted, and exposed on the front page? If so, then I think Dan O’Connor’s comparison to Frank magazine may in fact be legitimate. I just registered today, to make this comment, and nowhere did I see a location to even enter my real name or did I see a Terms of Use* clause, informing me of this seemingly witch-hunt practice.
*The Herald does have a Terms of Use clause.
More begrudgery
Contrarian has some highbrow friends, including Mike Targett, who weighs into the begrudgery debate quoting Wittgenstein: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
That is the classic formulation of descriptivism, the reigning philosophy among lexicographers. The trouble with descriptivism is that it leads to definitions like this one, from Merriam-Webster: “biweekly: 1. occurring twice a week; 2. occurring every two weeks.” It’s true, people use biweekly to mean both things, but sometimes you need a prescriptive dictionary to tell you what a word really means. I’m with Lindsay Brown on that score.
Begrudgers pile on
Bruce Wark writes:
[B]egrudgery… may not (yet) be in dictionaries, but it is a useful coinage. Besides, the OED does list the Irish-English noun, begrudger: a resentful and dissatisfied person; a habitual naysayer or complainer. Well, what does a begrudger indulge in, if not begrudgery?
I’d say it’s OK to use a non-dictionary word if there’s no other word that conveys the meaning. Shakespeare did so repeatedly coining around 1,500 words, many of which we use today. To the Bard we owe bedroom, cold-blooded, compromise, enmesh, leapfrog, lonely,love letter, unreal and worthless. And since Shakespeare did not coin begrudgery, someone else had to.
A distinguished Nova Scotian who may wish to remain anonymous adds:
I can’t say for sure that “begrudgery” is a word with a long pedigree, but I’m quite sure it is in current use in Ireland. Begrudger is a commonly used Irish noun (along with “whinger”, a somewhat related unflattering comment).
I used “begrudgery” when speaking to an Irish lawyer after reading your blog this morning and he didn’t bat an eye.
If it isn’t a standard word, it should be. It expresses an idea which I don’t think any other single word encompasses. Isn’t that how English came to have such a large and varied vocabulary?
The Coast and Justice Robertson were both wrong
An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast’s craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson.
The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper’s website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation.
Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them to the judicial wolves. The paper deleted the comments and published a grovelling apology, effectively inoculating itself from any exposure to a libel suit. It also declined to contest the request for a disclosure order, which Robertson granted to sanctimonious applause from several practitioners of the fourth estate, many of whom allow anonymous (and often scurrilous) posting on their own websites.
Unlike Robertson, the Ontario Court had the benefit of hearing both sides of this argument, and found, as Paul Schneidereit reports in yesterday’s Chronicle-Herald:
[T]hat the value of freedom of expression is so fundamental that defamation lawsuits against anonymous Net commenters are not entitled to automatically obtain information that could lead to their identities being unmasked…
[The decision] raises fresh questions about how quickly a Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice last month ordered the Coast and Google to cough up information that may identify several individuals who anonymously posted, and emailed, allegedly defamatory messages about senior members of the Halifax Fire Department in 2009.
The Ontario Court did not establish an unlimited right to post comments anonymously. Rather, it found that the posters’ Charter rights of free expression and privacy must be balanced against the the public interest in promoting the administration of justice.
Before ordering disclosure, the court ruled, a judge must consider whether the anonymous posters had a reasonable expectation of anonymity; whether the would-be plaintiff has established a prima facie case of libel; whether the plaintiff is acting in good faith; and whether the public interests favouring disclosure outweigh the posters’ legitimate interests of freedom of expression and right to privacy.
The good faith issue could be significant in the Nova Scotia case if it turns out the officers’ real reason for seeking disclosure was not to facilitate a libel suit but to identify members of the fire service who could be disciplined or fired.
Contrarian has not read the comments, and has no opinion as to their veracity or fairness. But let’s assume, hypothetically, that they included accusations of racism. Racism is a critical public issue in Nova Scotia. It is also an issue fraught with emotion, and anyone accused of racism is likely to feel defamed. In such a circumstance, courts should give the broadest possible scope to free debate on an issue of vital public importance, and not restrict that debate out of concern for the tender feelings of public officials who may be swept up in it.
Robertson considered none of these factors. Instead, she assumed the posters had libelled the officers, and declared, peremptorily, that “the court does not condone the conduct of anonymous internet users who make defamatory comments and they like other people have to be accountable for their actions.”
Pretty shoddy all around.
