Today is National Grammar Day. Go to the Grammar Girl’s National Grammar Day page and enjoy the celebratory song “March Forth.” While you are there, check out the Songwriting Hall of Shame, read John McIntyre’s grammar noir “Wages of Syntax,” and send a National Grammar Day e-card. Fun, fun, fun.
This week’s Style and Substance takes a cold, hard look at “news” releases. Why is it that all too often they fail miserably to inform, though they do not fail to amuse? A case in point is the stunningly convoluted piece of “corpspeak” from Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. that tells us it “will leverage an innovative outcome-based, managed services engagement model with committed productivity benefits over the long term.” Is anyone else reminded of the Postmodernist Generator–an online gibberish generator that can create grammatically correct and utterly nonsensical academic papers and research reports?
The University of Chicago Press has published the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The Subversive Copy Editor, who headed up the team for CMOS 16, highlights the changes. In headlines the second term in a hyphenated word is now capped, as in Twenty-First Century. A generic term is now also capped when its proper form applies to more than one modifier: Illinois and Chicago Rivers. Brand names that begin with a lowercase letter followed by a capitalized letter may now start a sentence (e.g., iPad). For this wisdom, you can pay $65. Or not. I will not be asking my editors to buy the new edition. How’s that for subversive?
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
