Nonsense Verse

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

Copy in the raw

Sometimes, the best way to explain why editors exist is to let the unedited words speak for themselves. John McIntyre has a great post over at You Don't Say, demonstrating the ugliness that can go on behind the scenes at a newspaper. A highlight:

"Spring has sprung and besides trying to cope with the pollen attacking your sinuses, the staff at Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center Inc. wants you to be aware of another usual spring ritual: suicides."

You can read the full sampling here.

Conversations one has at work

"So, we can't use 'knockers.'"

"'Knockers'? Which piece was that in?"

"[Blah, blah's.] Is it all right to just go with 'breasts'?"

"Breasts. Hm. How about 'gazungas'?"

"If you can tell me how to spell 'gazungas,' I'll ask."

Rated PG-13 for crude language

I was flipping through the dictionary yesterday to look up the word "shoehorn," to determine whether it was one word or hyphenated when used as a verb (one word, according to Webster's New World College, Fourth Edition). And as my eyes skimmed the pages — set/settle, shaman/shard, shellfire/shield — one set of guidewords stopped my progress:

shinny/shitkicker

Of course Bad Words are in the dictionary (that's right, kids — go nuts!). But two little things surprised me. One was that the dictionary editors didn't mind "shitkicker" appearing in bold type atop the page. But I guess that makes sense when you assume the dictionary's point is not to dictate any kind of vocab-morality. (Having to police the "wraps" in a volume of 1,716 tissue-thin pages might also get tedious pretty darn fast, although then again, by nature, dictionary editors are probably more up to that task than most mortals.)

The second surprising thing popped out when I decided to take a detour from my "shoehorn" quest to learn a little bit about the roots of "shitkicker" — getting lost in a maze of etymological tangents being one of my more favorite pastimes. What I discovered was that while "shit" is labeled downright "vulgar," its partner "shitkicker" — a term of American origin meaning "a poor, rural person, especially one from the South or Southwest; rural or rustic; of or having to do with country music" (!) — gets a mere notation of "slang" (with "somewhat vulgar" tacked to the end of the definition, after the jump).

Fascinating. So does "shit" lose its power when attached to any kind of suffix? In the eyes of the dictionary, apparently so: "shitfaced," "shit list," "shitload" and "shit-eating grin" are all deemed "somewhat vulgar" as opposed to outright "vulgar," the warning to that effect appearing at the end, rather than at the conspicuous beginning, of each definition. Does the dictionary explain itself? Sort of. Here's what it says about the labels in the "Guide to the Dictionary" section at the front:

Slang: The word or meaning is not generally considered standard usage but is used, even by the best speakers and writers, in very informal situations or for creating special effects. People belonging to a certain group, such as teenagers or jazz musicians, often use a particular group of slang terms. [NV aside: There's so much to say about the examples chosen for that second sentence, I don't even know where to start.]

Vulgar: The word or meaning is regarded by many people as being too crude, coarse, or unrefined to be suitable for use in many social situations.

So, to recap: "shit," not acceptable in mixed company; "shitkicker," not standard, but hey, some of the best speakers and writers may beg to differ!

I don't know. If I were tossing back a few with a bunch of country music fans at Joe's Bar and said "shit"  (vulgar) because I fell off my barstool while getting a little too rambunctious over Willie Nelson singing "Crazy," my pals probably wouldn't be offended. But if I then reeled around and said, "Hey, stop teasing me you bunch o' worthless shitkickers!" (slang), I could see winding up with a pool cue to the head.

The moral of the story: As ever, it all depends on context.

And speaking of context, all this "shit" talk reminds me of a childhood tale:

One day, a little girl — she was 4 at the time, or maybe she was 7 — walked up to her mother with an important question. This little girl was very inquisitive about words, and she'd recently heard one that her friends had refused to define. And so she went to her mother, because that was always the best way to get to the bottom of such things.
"Mommy?" she said.
"Yes, dear," the mother replied.
"I have a question," the little girl said.
"O.K., go ahead."
"What does 'shit' mean?"
And the mother turned bright red and grabbed the little girl by the arm and said, "Who told you that word? Don't you ever use that word again!"
"O.K., Mommy," the girl said. She promised never to use the word, except that there was one problem — she still didn't know what it meant. And so, she solved the problem the second-best way she knew how: She went to the dictionary.

Epilogue: Her promise to cease using the word stuck for quite a few years. She slipped and used it only occasionally, usually in the context of tripping and falling down (and it's quite remarkable that she didn't use the term more often, come to think of it, because her tripping and falling was not exactly an unusual occurrence). Then, alas, she became involved in journalism — and the promise was rendered, as the dictionary might put it, Obs. And so, dear readers, we come full circle, to the post you just read today. The End.

Editing: Better than sex?

This Salon article by Gary Kamiya will provide answers to those of you who've said to me, "O.K., you're an editor -- but what is it that you do?"

It not only demystifies the process, but also makes a fine argument in favor of editing in the age of blogs. Enjoy.

Quote of the day 04.26

"The split infinitive is not a violation of literary morality. It is not even a blemish until it is grossly overdone."
-- Edward T. Teall, Putting Words to Work (1940).

Quote of the day 04.23

John McIntyre over at You Don't Say, his blog on language and usage, writes today about common errors in copy editing, as well as a common copy editors' lament:

One of my students experienced a flash of insight into copy editing, saying, "You catch 19 errors in a story and then get penalized for the 20th. It' just not fair."

Well, kid, it comes with the territory. No one ever said it would be fair.

But my favorite part is the second sentence here, which qualifies as the quote of the day (and maybe the month):

A story with only 20 errors may be better than average. Some years back, a veteran reporter set to work on the city desk commented after the first week, "Reading other people's raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."

I am so stealing that one.

Word of the day: koan

Today I was reading the title essay in Joan Didion's "The White Album," and at one point she described a question she had once been posed as "a kind of koan of the period" (the period being 1970, and the question being, "If you can't believe you're going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what's the point of dying?").

Right.

I remember learning the meaning of "koan" many years ago, probably in a community college class called The Philosophy of Religions. But I could not remember the precise definition this time, so I went to look it up. This is one given by the American Heritage Dictionary:

A puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening.

The etymology of the word, from the Online Etymology Dictionary, I found even more revealing:

Zen paradox, 1946, from Jap. ko "public" + an "matter for thought."

So there I had my answer, and a fairly concise way to repeat the definition, should I happen to be asked at, say, a cocktail party, "Do you know the meaning of the word 'koan'?"

Now, because I love the idea of there being such a short, catchy little word to describe such an esoteric concept, I kept reading the handy page of information provided me by Dictionary.com. I wanted to know more about koans, to read some examples of them. And happy day, at the bottom of the list of definitions was en entry from Jargon File (aka The New Hacker's Dictionary), pointing to "Some AI Koans" (as in "artificial intelligence") -- "jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers."

Jackpot. Now, I could geek out on koans while also geeking out on geek jokes! Ah, symmetry.

There's also something charming about peeking into these people's worlds, glimpsing how their minds work. These are humans who process information in a way I can never hope to. They can read an "Ed. note" like this -- "Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves" -- and know exactly what that editor is talking about. I kind of get it. Especially in the context of the joke. But not really. At that same cocktail party, if someone were to come up to me and say, "Ain't it a bitch about those pure reference-point garbage collectors," I would have to simply smile and nod, and down my drink so as to have an excuse to go seek out the bar. And yet, having eavesdropped on this tiny bit of MIT humor, and having giggled along with the parts of the jokes I did understand, I somehow feel that much cozier with the crazy-smart people. And all thanks to Didion and koans and Internet blessings like Dictionary.com.

How to tell you're a geek for life

For your 30th birthday, you get several books on grammar. And you're excited.

Grammar, and the rhythm and the magic

In response to a query about that last post, I'm moved to expand: Embracing grammar does not mean an author must sacrifice rhythm or style. That's the point Francine Prose starts to make here: "Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought."

Let's explore that.

My interpretation of what Prose is saying is that understanding the way sentences are structured will give writers more power, not less, when it comes time to play with that structure -- to, at their creative will, "break the rules," and break them well. The thing is, in writing, the rules are infinitely bendable. Writers can choose "wrong" words (from a pedant's viewpoint) but go on to employ them in such a way as to make them, in context, seem more "right" than the reader could ever have imagined. What doesn't work is the writing that takes the rules and abuses them to such an extent that a sentence becomes impossible to comprehend -- or just plain groan-inducing. (How many times have you read tortured prose where the writer was obviously trying to stretch a bit too hard? Take my word for it: Editors run into that sort of thing almost daily.) At that point, the breaking of the rules serves no one -- not even the author, for who wants to read a book made impenetrable in its gobbledygook?

In the very same chapter in which Prose makes the case for grammar, she also says it's "essential to find a style manual with a loose interpretation of the whole concept of style[*], lest you be advised against ever writing the sort of sentence fragment that animates the Philip Roth passage" (a mesmerizing excerpt from American Pastoral that she cited earlier). "Which is why, I believe, it's necessary to hold the concept of clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness, and why it's essential to read great sentences -- that is, the sentences of great sentence-writers -- along with your style book."

Let's linger on that word for a moment: CLARITY. In all the verbal pyrotechnics a writer may employ, it comes back to that. At the end, do we understand what we just read? After a 181-word sentence -- which is the length of a Virginia Woolf sentence Ms. Prose uses to make her point -- are we still breathing? Is the brain electrified, or is it confused? This is where Prose goes on, after her discussion of grammar, to write at length on the importance of rhythm, using the Woolf sentence and those of several other writers as examples. And she illustrates her point with a couple of lovely sentences of her own (again on Woolf):

Because as her sentence winds on, everything proceeds in an orderly progression from that participle "considering" and that introduction of "illness" as the noun that can subsequently be summoned up by the pronoun "it." Pausing to breathe at each comma, we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses that break over us like waves, clauses that increase in length, complexity, and intensity as the aspects of illness that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Comma. Participle. Clause. Pronoun. See how that works? What she's saying is that the building blocks are all still there, that they can be applied to the most dazzling and unconventional of sentences by Woolf, by Roth, by Joyce or by Hemingway. But they're employed in a way that makes sense, one that breathes with the help of -- wait for it! -- the happy little pieces all coming together harmoniously. In fact, speaking of harmony, here's another Prose analogy: "It's helpful to consider the parallels to music, the way that, at the end of a symphony, the tempo slows down and the chords become more sustained or dramatic, with overtones that reverberate and echo after the musicians have stopped playing."

Where that music becomes discordant, though, is in the misapplication of some of the building blocks. I'm going to play with Prose's own sentence here and rearrange the commas. Note how the random insertion or deletion of the commas impedes the breath, even changes the meaning, and turns this into something less than lyrical:

Pausing to breathe, at each comma we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses, that break over us like waves clauses that increase, in length, complexity and intensity as the aspects of illness, that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice, of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Enh. Feel like you're hyperventilating? I sure do. The haphazard placement of the commas destroys the sentence's natural flow. The good news is that even without having all the comma rules memorized, talented writers can usually still get by, helped by their natural ear for the language. (And as the above example should illustrate, even people who aren't writers have enough of an ear to recognize when something is off. This is what I referred to in my earlier post.)

I've mentioned before how I often get e-mail from old friends or new acquaintances (even parents) asking me to please forgive them their sins of syntax, goofs of grammar, perversions of punctuation. What's truly amazing (even heartbreaking) to me is when they include these kinds of caveats up front, then go on to write an amazingly gorgeous letter. A letter in which, sure, they've bent or broken some rules, or used nonsense words, or made-up words (something I do all the time, by the way), and yet from a writerly standpoint, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what they've done. I'm frequently left dumbfounded by these apologies, but then I realize it all comes back to the root problem: These people are convinced they're abusing the writing because they feel unclear on the rules, insecure about their mastery of them; and if they're unclear on the rules, they think they must be breaking them, they must be committing embarrassing gaffes -- they're just not sure which ones.

This is again where grammar becomes a tool -- to if nothing else relieve these writers' paranoia. Some writers obviously have more of a natural gift for rhythm, for the layering of clauses, for the ingenious use of vocabulary. What's funny is that in exercising their gift, they're most likely already using most of the helping tools of grammar. They just don't realize it.

* To this, I'd add that it's helpful to have not just one style manual, a "loose" style manual, but rather a collection of manuals of style and usage to weigh the advice of various authorities and then make an informed decision of one's own. By studying the ideas of different experts, you pick a variety of tips and tricks, not just the ideology of one grammarian.