Monthly Archives: September 2014

A Name Too Far

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Some years ago I called for a moratorium on ‘n, the pseudo-contraction that’s supposed to take the place of and in expressions such as burgers’ n beer, wings ‘n fries, and other cholesterol-laden linguistic and culinary crimes. Nobody heard me and nothing changed in the public arena, perhaps because the only people present when I called for this were a bunch of English teachers who wouldn’t dream of substituting a grunt for a conjunction.

Allowing hope to triumph over experience, I’m now asking for another moratorium, this time on the invention of cutesy names for beer. Now, I don’t drink beer. I do, however, hang out at times in bars where good draught beer is served. I like watching people enjoy a glass of amber liquid that reflects the sunlight and casts a warm glow. At first, it was fun to read the bar menu and savor names that hadn’t been derived from corporations. Out with Miller, Pabst, Budweiser, and the like, I thought. In with Victory Hop Devil, London Pride, and other creative terms.

Melange a Trois with 3 Philosophers?

Melange a Trois with 3 Philosophers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But things have gone too far. The unusual has become commonplace and thereby lost its luster. Moreover, the contrived names increasingly leave consumers scratching their heads. When the name column on the beer menu expands to accommodate three inches of letters, it’s time to pull back. Let Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hops Club Brand alone, please. Instead, describe what’s actually in the beer – wheat, blueberries (and by the way, who on earth would ever want blueberries with beer?), bitters, whatever.

I assume that this post will lead to a new trend in beer names, or, at the very least, a batch of Extra Grouchy Grammarian Stout.

A Phabulous Invention

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As a grumpy grammarian, I’m supposed to tsk-tsk changes to the language by anyone other than Shakespeare, but my reaction is more complex. I’ve been on the Internet since techies were trying to decide between “dot com” and “period com” to talk about websites. I sat on the sidelines when other grammarians waffled between “mouses” and “mice” for the plural of a computer mouse. Fortunately, the touchscreen showed up and rendered the issue moot.

I do object to the name of the latest must-have device, the “phablet,” a cross between a cellphone and a tablet, with, as far as I can tell, the worst features of each. Who named this device, which sounds like a tweeted tale by Aesop? A couple of people have claimed the credit or blame, depending on your point of view.

Yet I can’t help feeling that some computer terms have enriched the language. “The default is that we get up at 6:30 a.m.,” my early-bird husband says. “Time to reboot,” I’ll say when we’ve been stuck in a way of thinking that isn’t going anywhere.  I love words that slip from the machine to real life. Soft boot, hard boot, and even  humanware specialist are interesting concepts. I definitely need a hard boot on Monday mornings but a soft boot after work.  As I try to unravel the directions for a new piece of software, explanations from a humanware specialist help. (Not a techie? A hard boot occurs when you turn the computer on and the whole thing starts up, having been off duty for some length of time. A soft boot resets part of the system of a machine that’s already running. A humanware specialist trains people to use technology.)

Then they are the prefixes. The lowercase i  hasn’t been this popular since the first teen poetry magazine was published. Thanks, Apple, for giving us iPads and iPhones; I assume that iAddiction is next. Thanks, programmers, for popularizing kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, and peta- as prefixes for bytes.  After mining the ancient Greek language, techies have turned to fabricated word parts. (One prefix, yotta-, pays homage to the Star Wars’ character Yoda.) The amounts these prefixes represent seem unimaginable, except that techies have not only imagined them but also attempted to make the terms comprehensible. Did you know that the sum of five exabytes equals the number of all the words ever said during the entire span of human existence? (Source: highscalability.com)

And in this age of ecology, who could object to recycling old words to describe new situations? Such repurposing builds bridges between virtual and ordinary reality. You don’t function well when you have a virus, for example, and neither does your computer. Sadly, most human infections can’t be countered by an antivirus regimen. We just have to accept the downtime. Oh, for an escape button!

Everything new will be old someday, and everything old does not necessarily return. But as you’re tapping a stylus on your tablet, spare a thought for the ancient scribe scratching on a wax tablet with a different sort of stylus. You’re both likely to have sore forearms and fingers, just as you’re both likely to change the language. And in the end, that’s mostly a good thing.

See you in the cloud.

Following Guest?

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Some years ago, I stood on Fifth Avenue waiting for the next convoy of buses to arrive. (FYI, Car People: New York City buses travel in packs, apparently under orders to stay within sight of another bus driver at all times.) I remarked to a fellow potential passenger that I was going to be late. “I can’t be late,” he replied. “I’m a physician. I’m ‘delayed,’ not ‘late.’” So I get why doctors have patients, because patience is what you need when your healer is attending to someone else’s life-threatening condition or waiting for public transportation.

My lawyer and accountant have clients, but the stores in my neighborhood have customers — or at least they used to (more about that later). Why the difference? The official definition of a client is someone who receives services. A customer, according to several dictionaries I consulted, pays for goods or services. The term client seems to elevate the service provider to the status of a professional, someone who’s chosen a career path and studied mightily for the qualifications to practice it. (Why practice, by the way? Haven’t they perfected their skills by now?)

I realize, of course, that value judgments are all over these words. Plenty of people who have spent years learning a craft or trade and decades pursuing it have customers. When I drop off clothes at the dry cleaners, for example, the hardworking people who run the place manage to remove all sorts of stains and spruce up my garments, all the while smiling at their customers and staying on the right side of the many laws that regulate their business.

Now “trending,” as they say on social media, is guest. Hotels used to have customers or clients, but now they have guests. Okay, you stay overnight somewhere, they take care of you and at least in theory try to make you comfortable. Those activities do fall into the category of hospitality, so I can live with guest when it comes to lodging. But employees at my favorite frozen yogurt place now bid the “following guest” to step up to the little scale to weigh each portion of empty but oh-so-tasty calories and compute the price. How am I a guest when I have to pay for this product? Should I extrapolate and charge for the asparagus at my next dinner party? I imagine the corporate expert who wrote the script for this frozen-yogurt franchise. “Let’s create a cozy atmosphere! Everyone will feel like a guest in our home and eat more yogurt,” they say in my fantasy, although how anyone could live with three flat-screen televisions displaying tween sit-coms and a color scheme that could most mercifully be called garish is beyond my comprehension.

My recommendation: Make everyone (patient, client, guest) a customer. Because, as we all know, the customer is always right.

I’m not “his”

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Today’s paper has a full-page ad for a type of investment product I’ve been considering for some time. The ad, which had to cost a bundle, detailed why I should leave my current financial advisor and switch to the guy whose smiling photo appears in a sidebar. I was halfway to writing “follow up on this” on my to-do list when I crashed into a recommendation about what I should  “ask the salesman when evaluating his product.” Excuse me? No females sell investment products? I could accept this sentence if it referred to Smiling Guy’s company, because presumably he’d know the gender composition of his sales force. However, the recommendation was to ask my advisor. My advisor could be anywhere and therefore could be anyone, including a female.

I imagine that Smiling Guy (or his copy editor) was taught that a masculine pronoun includes both men and women. This principle, the “masculine universal,” was in effect when I was in elementary school. Judging from his photo, though, I’m quite a bit older than Smiling Guy. Plus, I’ve learned and taught that inclusiveness costs nothing and brings huge advantages. Leaving out half the human race (notice that I didn’t say “mankind”) isn’t good business. This fact I know for sure, as there’s no way I’m giving my money or time to Smiling Guy, because to him I don’t exist. I’d rather speak with a broker, investment counselor, or agent than with a company that attaches the word sales only to a man and his product.

Not that I’m blaming Smiling Guy. Well, actually I am, but only a little. The problem Smiling Guy faces is rooted in Standard English grammar and British history. One unbreakable rule, agreement, holds that singular forms must be paired with singular forms and plural with plural. A table has stains on its legs; tables have stains on their legs. The singular noun table pairs up with the singular pronoun its, and the plural noun tables pairs with the plural pronoun their. So far, so good, because its is neither masculine nor feminine, but “neuter,” in grammar terminology. The plural pronoun their wins the hospitality award, because this useful pronoun  pairs with plurals of nouns that are masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Their was once considered a good match for both singular and plural nouns. Here’s where British history enters: One highly influential British grammarian decided that such versatility was confusing and declared that their henceforth would be plural only. Because this grammarian saw no problem with the masculine universal, the proper match for a noun such as student was he (singular, masculine), and any females in the vicinity were expected to understand their supposed inclusion in that pronoun.

Enter feminism, sometime in the late 60s and early 70s, and a different viewpoint on language. It became obvious that Standard English, when dealing with a singular noun that could apply to either gender, had a pronoun problem. Some radicals urged the adoption of per to replace, for example, his or her. This effort was as effective as the invention of Esperanto, a so-called universal language created from shreds of many other languages and spoken by a crowd small enough to fit in my living room – and I live in NYC, so my living room isn’t all that big. Other grammarians opted for their, reasoning that this now firmly plural term should revert to its singular/plural, all-inclusive nature. Still others urged a 50-50 split, alternating the masculine universal with the feminine universal (she and  her, referring to both sexes), paragraph by paragraph. Personally, I find it jarring to read about giving a baby his bottle and changing her diaper shortly thereafter.

Most English teachers, including me, adopted this rule: Use his or her or he or she when you refer to a mixed group of males and females or when you don’t know which genders are represented in the group. I should point out that my rule comes with a warning. No one wants to read clunky sentences like “every agent should ask his or her client about his or her investment goals.” Solve this problem by rewording the sentence to avoid the need for pronouns (“Ask the client about investment goals”) or switch to plural (“Ask clients about their investment goals”).

Smiling Guy, take note, and perhaps your company will appear on my to-do list after all.

 

Overpriced at . . .

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First all the simple prices (Shoes – $30) sprouted nines (Shoes – $29.99) in order to convince math-challenged customers that the product was more affordable because of a single missing penny. I made peace with that development, because who am I to question a marketing strategy? I deal with words, not numbers.

Next up on the sales horizon was the addition of the word price, as if we consumers thought that $29.99 represented the amount the store would pay the customer to take a pair of shoes off the shelf. Price $29.99 was a little too much information, but no harm done. The last price-straw, as far as I’m concerned, is an extra D. More and more, shoes are priced at $30 or $29.99, figures not adjusted for inflation.

In grammar terms, the cost of an item is attached to a participle (priced), a descriptive verb form. Why? Usually participles give you extra information: Jenny, hiking in stiletto heels, broke her ankle. The participle in that sentence is hiking. It’s derived from a verb (to hike), but it’s functioning as a description of Jenny. (The real verb in the sentence, in case you’re interested, is broke.) The participle tells you that Jenny didn’t break her ankle doing something noble, like running after a mugger or saving a baby from a burning building. The participle tells you that Jenny is either clueless (I thought we were going to have dinner at a four-star restaurant!) or just dumb (Who knew shoes wobbled in the wilderness?). Hiking serves a purpose in the sentence.

The participle priced at implies human activity without identifying the actor. Who did the pricing? You have to guess. It may be the boss: Our store manager, desperate for a promotion, priced the shoes at $30 so he could brag about his empty stockroom. Perhaps this participle is an attempt to distance store employees from consumer outrage: Don’t blame us. We just sell the things, which are priced at $30 by nameless bureaucrats in the main office who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing these shoes.

One thing is clear about this participle: priced at usually precedes a number that is much too high, considering the item it’s attached to. Yet somehow I doubt you’ll see overpriced at $30 or $29.99 anytime soon.

Better than what?

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From a New York Times article about road repair in Los Angeles, published on September 2, 2014:

“It’s part of a pattern of failing to provide for the future,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A. “Our roads used to be better than the East Coast; now they are worse.”

No offense to Professor Shoup, who is undoubtedly a learned fellow. When most people speak,  the finer points of grammar oten fall by the wayside. Shoup likely intended to compare the roads in Los Angeles to the roads on the East Coast (and he’s right – anything that isn’t a pothole is a bump, as far as I can tell). In the quotation, though, he compares LA roads to the whole East Coast, including people, climate, restaurants, sneaker selection, sports teams . . . everything existing in the region that stretches from the tip of Maine to the Florida Keys.

No offense to the reporter, either, who was faced with a tricky situation. Technically, everything enclosed in quotation marks reflects what someone has said, mistakes included. Most writers clean up the quotations a little, eliminating uhs and ums and other repetitive remarks. Otherwise you end up with quotations like this one: “The roads, yeah, well, the roads, they are, um, I mean they used to be better, but. . . .”  Nerdy grammarian that I am, I would have liked to see one tiny change to the original quotation, so that Professor Shoup would be comparing our roads to the East Coast’s. Who knows, maybe he actually said that, but the apostrophe and the letter s got lost in the publication process.

Correct or Lifeless?

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P1010045

“Enyoy,” says the Latino waiter as he places my lunch on the table.

“I found a parking after driving around the block,” explains my friend, whose first language is French.

“Are youse on line?” asks a polite fellow in the bank.

These are some of the “Englishes” of my city. They’re all good, making the stew of life in New York richer. They are not, however, all correct. Standard English would substitute “enjoy,” “a parking place,” and “you” in the quotations above.

“Yeah, so?” as they say in New York (or Noo Yawk, if you’re a native). Perfectly correct grammar and smoothed-out, homogenized pronunciation is fine – for some situations. You certainly want to be correct when you’re applying for a job, trying to impress a teacher, or . . . well, you get the idea. Yet losing variety in language is like tearing down neighborhood stores and plugging in clones of nationwide chains that have had their personalities surgically removed.

I know the rules of Standard English, but I also know that rules are sometimes meant to be broken. The trick is to understand the rule you’re ignoring and to understand the effect of your words. And the only unbreakable rule is simple: Communicate your meaning clearly.

Feel free to trample correctness when the result is more interesting expression. Select your English from a wide menu, and enyoy.