Marcial Arts and Letters

The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds us that April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Geoffrey K. Pullum will not be uncorking the champagne. He describes the style advice as “mostly harmless,” reserving his opprobrium for the grammar proscriptions and maxims. These, he concludes, range from “limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.” He laments that many have now entered our psyches without reservation or interpretation and have been (alas) taken up–like the injunction against use of the passive voice–even by Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. He notes further that the authors broke their own “rules,” as have writers of the caliber of Henry James and Oscar Wilde. He ends by saying, “English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”

I went to pick up an item or two from the grocery store yesterday. I grabbed a container of juice and proceeded to the fish counter. The man behind the counter looked at the container (made by Ceres) and said, “Ah, Ceres. Goddess of agriculture.” I queried him as to how he knew this. He replied that this is the statue gracing the capitol building in Montpelier, Vermont (the state where we live). He went on to rattle off various facts of Vermont history—that Vermont had joined the Union as the fourteenth state in 1791, becoming the first state to enter the Union after the original thirteen colonies. And then—this was the punch line I never saw coming—he told me that “yesterday”—and so that would be March 7—was the anniversary of the day in 1850 when Daniel Webster gave his famous speech on the preservation of the Union, wherein he said, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States.” Yes, Webster said exactly that. That would be one of the speeches we feature in Milestone Documents of American Leaders, on its way to press at the moment. The fish man continued to amuse me with tidbits from Lincoln, General MacArthur, and so on. Seems to be a special interest of his, American history and speeches. The fish man at Hannaford’s. What fun.

The verbal gaffes, the mangling of the mother tongue, the malapropisms of our former president have gone down in history as “Dubya speak.” Mat Whitcross in “George Bush’s War on Language,” goes so far as to accuse Bush of ”a calculated use of Orwellian double speak.” Now comes the new president, whose prose style is finding immediate favor with such opinion writers as Stanley Fish in the New York Times (see “Barack Obama’s Prose Style”). According to Fish, “Obama doesn’t deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate.” We are asked to “linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.” Quite a contrast to the man who once told high school students, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” The dumbed-down days are over. At least for the next four years.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes news that Princeton University Press has recalled a spring title (Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, by Peter Moskoshat) that was found to have some 90 grammatical and spelling errors in its 245 pages. The press’s director, Peter Dougherty, stated that the book had been given to an inexperienced copy editor. When asked how much the recall and reprint would cost, Dougherty answered simply, “a lot.” The mistakes surfaced only through close reading on the part of the author’s friends and family.

Editing listservs have been buzzing over the cutting of corners and lack of oversight on the part of university and academic presses. Some presses have dispensed with proofreading altogether or sent proofreading offshore or enforced turnaround times that border on the ludicrous. Pay rates have stagnated. Princeton University Press reputedly has the largest endowment of any university press in the country. One would think they could have afforded to allot a few more dollars toward prevention to avoid “a lot” of cure.

In “The Queen’s English Is Dead,” Annalee Newitz discusses the implications of David Graddol’s notion that native English speakers are a dying breed. By 2010, according to his estimates, 2 billion people will be speaking English, but only 350 million will claim English as their mother tongue. This burgeoning globalization, coupled with the wide use of the Internet, will lead to a simplification and fragmenting of the language that, to Newitz, is not altogether disheartening. Can we language perfectionists come to view the new English as a cross-cultural communications tool that might have a valuable invigorating effect? Newitz argues thus when she says, “Once we all acknowledge that there are many correct Englishes, and not just the Queen’s English or Terry Gross’ English, things will be a lot better for everybody.”

In this fun video the original English (which appears in subtitle form) was translated into French and then into German and then back to French and back to English by a popular Web translating service.

On March 24, in the “Talk to the Newsroom” column of the New York Times, Merrill Perlman, manager of the newsroom copy desks, answered readers’ questions. One reader, Robert Cloud, managing editor of

St. Martin’s Press, voiced concern about the dearth of “literate freelance copy editors.” Perlman agreed that the breed seems to be vanishing and added that she believes that the way in which we use the English language has affected the skill with which we use it. Information is no longer conveyed to us primarily in print form but rather through aural media. How else, she asks, to explain the “morphing of ‘home in on’ to ‘hone in on’,” for example. What are the qualifications of a good editor, and how does one acquire them? A forthcoming blog post will begin the discussion.

The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL), “dedicated to a more perfect spelling union” has been moving westward across the country (starting in Massachusetts) in their outreach mission to eliminate typos in public venues.  I applaud this “vigilante copyediting” and wish them well. Read the blog and buy a T shirt!

“Merriam-Webster Unabridged” is the name of the Web service that for $30 per year gives you access to

·                  Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged

·                  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate^® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, with audio pronunciations

·                  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate^® Thesaurus

·                  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate^® Encyclopedia

·                  Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary

·                  Merriam-Webster’s Spanish-English Dictionary, featuring bilingual words and entries

·                  Merriam-Webster’s French-English Dictionary, featuring bilingual words and entries

You also get access to an atlas, style guide, and word games.

Courtesy of friend Henry comes this link to Etymologic, “the toughest word game on the Web.” Henry scored an astonishing 7. My own score remains a Schlagergruppen secret.