Who doesn’t love the holidays? Lots of people, actually. If you’re stressed out, I have some suggestions. First of all, ignore signs like this:
If it’s NEW it can’t be a TRADITION, not if you accept the dictionary definition (“a long established custom passed from generation to generation”). Besides, you’re probably too busy to add anything NEW to your to-do list.
If you’re absolutely determined to try something NEW, here’s a possibility:
DROP-OFF your CHILD and let peace and quiet descend. Brilliant! And if the kid comes back in less-than-perfect condition, you can always go here:
After you pick up your clean, neatly folded offspring, stash them in a drawer and head to the mall. But avoid this store:
Why would you buy something at a store promising to lower the price after you’ve plunked over some cash? Be wary of this shop, too:
The 99 CENT part sounds good, but what about the PLUS? Thousand-dollar T-SHIRTS, million-dollar UNDERWEAR . . . the sky’s the limit.
That’s all the advice I have today, except for this: Find a way to enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate, and find a way to help someone who needs it. I wish you all the joy of this holiday season!
Right around this time last week, a surgeon inserted a tiny camera and an equally tiny tool into the most poorly designed human joint. I refer, of course, to the knee. Seriously, Evolution, were you napping by the time you got to the middle of the leg? I was fortunate to have excellent medical care, and even more fortunate to have medical insurance. I am aware that many others are not so lucky. And before I move on to the language of medicine, I will climb — carefully, because, you know, the knee — onto my soapbox. Health care is a right, not a privilege, and our society should treat it as such.
During the past week I’ve thought a lot about the language of medicine. Not the scientific, but the ordinary terms. For example, what did I have? A procedure? To me that sounds euphemistic, like real estate agents’ calling an apartment “charming” (last renovated when Eisenhower was president) or “cozy” (comfortably accommodates two people, standing up). To me surgery is more serious, something that happens to a vital organ. Perhaps the middle ground is operation, a term useful for military invasions and public relations blitzes.
My procedure/surgery/operation took place in a facility, not in a hospital (a serious, stay-over place) or an office (less serious, with magazines in the waiting room) or a clinic (middling serious). The root of facility is facilus, Latin for “the means or unimpeded opportunity for doing something.” I’m not sure about the unimpeded part (see note above on insurance), but the facility I went to certainly did something. A good something! My knee feels better.
The last term is patient, from the Latin patior, “to suffer or endure.” I got off lightly, in this instance, with not much beyond soreness. I didn’t even have to be patient, because everyone involved in my procedure/surgery/operation kept to the schedule. I’m sure my future holds more medical (INSERT PREFERRED TERM HERE), because I’m senior/older/in my golden years/not dead yet. I can only hope everything proceeds smoothly, and that the insurance company approves.
The national mood, and, I must admit, my own mood, is so down that an elevator to the sub-basement wouldn’t reach it. What to do in response? Well, you can have a serving of this:
(Photo courtesy of my friend Catherine, who prefers grape jelly and proper spelling)
Judging from the muttering and sometimes shouting of Gripe(s) I hear, this is a popular option. However justified your Gripe, though, venting your feelings is a short-term fix at best.
An alternative:
(Photo courtesy of my friend Deborah)
In my experience, inflicting the SILENT TREATMENT on others seldom yields positive results. The target may experience the silence as agreement or worse, welcome it as a peaceful interlude.
What else can you try? Here’s a tempting option:
The problem with BREAKING, REMOTE or otherwise, is that at some point you have to put the pieces back together.
One more:
I posted this photo of a New York Times headline eight years ago, commenting on the repetitive nature of the expression Failing to Succeed. (What’s the alternative — Failing to Fail? Succeeding to Success?) But now I’m focusing on Giving Compromise a Try. Not on matters of principle, of course. But maybe finding common ground around the edges of less important disagreements can lead us, and our national mood, out of the sub-basement. Perhaps as high as the basement? Surely that’s not too much to ask?
$1.5 billion. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? That’s the settlement of a class-action suit filed against Anthropic, a company that downloaded pirated copies of books, including fifteen of mine, to train its artificial intelligence software. When I heard $1.5 billion I hyperventilated for a few minutes. Then I read the fine print. Attorneys get paid first, and publishers will have a share. My portion, converted into coins, is likely to fit inside a medium-sized piggy bank. Still, I’m pleased that a blow has been struck against dishonesty.
Many more suits have been filed against AI companies, but I doubt any will include their effect on the em dash, the longest of the three punctuation marks formed with a horizontal line. Written material containing an em dash is now assumed to be AI-generated. In a weird way, that assumption makes sense. AI was “trained” by professional writers’ work. We use em dashes. Hence, so does AI. But as a professional, em-dash-using writer, I’m caught in a loop: my work looks like my work and therefore resembles AI-generated work designed to mimic my work. Kafka, meet Chat GPT.
Now for the en dash, a slightly shorter line that signifies a strong connection. Sometimes the connection is geographical, describing, say, a train route between Boston and New York. Sometimes it’s personal, referring perhaps to the coordination between pitcher and catcher. Most often, the en dash functions chronologically:
That’s what it’s doing on the stone-paneled wall of a churchyard in my neighborhood. Each slab is incised with a name and a set of dates. A life span! The en dash expresses the strong — in fact, absolute — connection between birth and death. A couple of panels, belonging to the ultra-prepared, show only one date and the en dash, waiting to be completed by an unknown, though certain expiration date. If the em dash has come to signify inhumanity (for what else is artificial intelligence?), the en dash expresses the ultimate truth about humanity. Everyone born will die.
Before the en dash comes for you, I recommend you make the most of every moment — for yourself, and for a world that needs all the help it can get.
Speaking of the world, I have an update to share. Take a look at this photo, which I snapped outside the United Nations in 2015:
For a decade, drivers had to decide which sign to obey — STOP or NO STOPPING. But now all the signage has replaced. NO STOPPING is what drivers are supposed to do. Which means that if the traffic light next to the NO STOPPING sign is red, you should blow right through the intersection. Well, nobody’s perfect.
Proofreaders make comments to writers, who are supposed to amend their text accordingly. That’s a good system — when it’s actually put into practice. Not so in these signs.
First is a sign my student Allison sent me. There’s a ton of words, but if you persevere, the last line makes the time you spent reading more than worth the effort:
If it’s still too long let me know must have been meant for the person in charge of placing labels on food, who, based on this sign, either had way too much to do or cared way too little about the finished product.
Next is a sign — one of a dozen or so — posted on West 72nd and Broadway when Pope Francis visited New York City in 2015:
Once again, it’s worth plowing through these nearly unintelligible instructions for trash pickup to arrive at the last line: he said the 4 — 12 shift. If he was Pope Francis, I commend him (posthumously) for his attention to detail.
I found this one while searching for a place to stay during a recent trip. I won’t reveal the name of the perpetrator, but I will say that it’s a major hotel chain:
The fun part of this caption appears in the center of the second line. The text indeed needs a comma, and the hotel needs to pay more attention to its advertising.
Whatever form your labors take, I wish you a Happy change to lower case Labor Day weekend.
A former student of mine recently put out a call for catchphrases unique to a family. If you’re in the family, you know the meaning. If you’re not in the family, you don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on. These signs fall into the “if you know, you know” category. They make perfect sense to somebody, somewhere, but they puzzle to the rest of us. Here’s one:
What does RADIANT TUBING do? And what is it radiating — joy, sunlight, cosmic rays? Why must we BEWARE? And does BEWARE mean “don’t come within three miles of this sidewalk” or “take your piledriver somewhere else”? Theories, or better yet, actual information, welcome.
Another enigmatic ad:
I live in the sort of neighborhood where doing one’s own chores is not a given. Even so, I’m surprised that someone would hire someone else for BREAKING a REMOTE CONTROL device. In my experience, all you have to do is throw the thing at a wall. The wall generally cracks, though. Maybe that’s a reason to hire a pro?
It’s well known that some of us are not technologically literate enough to figure out an app. So it would not shock me to see a service offering help with, say, downloading, installing, and using an app. But the service offered by this sign goes a step too far:
I don’t need someone to PICK-APP for me. I can select an app all by myself!
Last one:
No, this doesn’t refer to a haircare product. It concerns parchment paper. Does anyone actually measure and cut the paper and then reinsert it for Decurling? This definitely falls into the life’s-too-short category for me. I use my hands.
Wishing you well in these dog days of summer! If your family has a catchphrase, feel free to share it.
I vividly remember the night in December 1980 when John Lennon was shot and killed. Contemporary news accounts reported that Yoko Ono, his wife, wasn’t injured in the attack. That’s wrong, I remember thinking. The same bullet that took Lennon’s life also took the life Ono had with her husband. It took the life Lennon’s children had with their father. Homicide isn’t a dot. It’s a circle.
I’m writing about this topic today, instead of making my usual snarky remarks about grammar, because a few days ago a former student of mine was gunned down in the lobby of an office building on Park Avenue. Only 43, Wesley Mittman LePatner was a bright light in high school and a bright light in adulthood – a loving mother and wife, a wise mentor, a responsible and generous citizen. The gunman killed Wesley and three other innocent people because somewhere in his sick mind their destruction made sense and because our society failed to keep a powerful weapon out of his hands.
I think a lot about language, as readers of this blog know, so I paid close attention to the words used to report this crime. Alerts on my phone reported “police activity,” then “active shooter,” and then “containment.” Bloodless words for a bloody deed. To be sure, the authorities are rightly concerned with preventing panic. It’s not appropriate for them to scream with the emotion they undoubtedly feel.
But the rest of us should scream, for as loud and as long as it takes, until the insane level of gun violence and our collective tolerance for it falls as definitively and finally as Wesley did. May her memory be a blessing, and may it be a motivation.
Every once in a while I see a sign that’s missing something: a letter, a word, a punctuation mark, or, all too often, clarity. Consider this notice, which was chalked on an old-fashioned sandwich board near the entrance to a rather fancy (i.e. expensive) food store near me:
I’ve cropped the photo, but nothing I removed answers this question: Place your party platters & cake where? The sign appeared at the beginning of a holiday season, so presumably the store was hoping for advance notice instead of a same-day request to rescue a host who invited 235 people to a celebration despite having only two olives and a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. Which I’m pretty sure in my neighborhood is not all that rare. My sympathy is with the sign-writer, who neglected to squeeze the word “order” into the message.
This notice, which my friend Andie sent me, is missing an important definition:
I’m guessing the store doesn’t want to Refund any money to its customers. But what does Redone mean? (And why are Refund and Redone capitalized?) If I buy a salad and report that it’s a bit vinegary, for example, will the store rinse off the leaves and apply new dressing?
I’ve held onto this sign for a while, trying to decide whether it’s an insult to neighbors (RESIDENT TRASH) or an attempt to fend off TRASH that turned tourist and went sightseeing inside this bin:
Theories welcome.
I doubt I’ll ever patronize this establishment:
Some crucial information is missing from this sign: How deep are the cuts? Are we talking scalp-scrapes or decapitation? Also, do the police know?
My late husband spotted this sign some years ago, in a major-appliance store that went out of business soon after he snapped the photo:
What’s missing from this label, of course, is a list of the food that comes with — w/ — this Refrigerator. Is it stuffed with macadamia nuts and caviar or leftovers from the manager’s lunch?
All joking aside, we’re all missing something these days. Whatever you’re missing, I hope you find it!
What’s the opposite of “mass marketing” — the attempt to reach as many customers as possible and (unofficially) to bloat my email spam folder? I’m calling it “tiny marketing” — the attempt to reach a specific sort of consumer. Very specific.
Take this store, for example:
I was not surprised to see a going-out-of-business sign show up in the window of this shop. After all, they were marketing to one KID (indicated by the apostrophe’s position before the S) instead of to all AMERICAN KIDS, for which they’d need to place the apostrophe after the S.
The audience for this sign is also rather small:
Opera singers who are into DUMPING GARBAGE into an ARIA — how many can there be?
I truly don’t know how many vehicles this sign addresses:
Question: When you’re riding on ALT BUSES, what sort of alt rock is piped in? May I suggest Nirvana and the Foo Fighters? Maybe a little U2?
This product could have wide appeal, but somehow I doubt it:
I’m not sure I’d ever want my portrait painted, but if I did, I wouldn’t want Abraham Lincoln looming over me. I’d rather be in a canvas by myself.
One last photo, with no-question-about-it mass appeal:
Unless you want Shower Caps that ensure wet hair, this product’s for you. I imagine that’s all of us. I know that’s all for this post. Happy first day of summer!
I will never love another city more than I love New York, but Madrid comes close. Much made me smile during a recent visit there with my older granddaughter, including some signs.
This one was posted next to the elevator in our hotel:
My granddaughter pointed out that whoever proofread “even just taking the instead of the elevator” should probably have climbed THE STAIRS to increase blood flow enough to notice that some words were missing. She also wondered if the sign implied that residents shouldn’t TAKE THE STAIRS at other times of day. I got stuck on the phrase by the time you get to work. Does that mean work begins at noon or later? We never found out, perhaps because we invariably took the elevator and our brains never got any extra blood flow.
This poster was in the window of a convenience store:
Translation: Water with Gas and Alcohol. In Spain, seltzer is “water with gas,” so I understand that part. But GAS & ALCOHOL? Is the ALCOHOL in question vodka, whiskey, rubbing, or something else? Neither of us wanted to purchase a bottle to find out.
Notice the red-and-yellow swatch on this sign, an allusion to the Spanish flag:
As I snapped the photo, I thought how lovely it is to be proud of your connection to your country. That’s not always the case, as these photos of a box containing a knee brace reveal. Here’s the front:
And the bottom:
The last photo is blurry because I had to enlarge print that was quite a bit smaller than the two flags on the front. Is there a consumer who needs to know the international nature of this product before buying it? If so, that consumer isn’t me. I just wanted my knee to feel better (and it does).
Whatever location you’re in, I wish you a pleasant day!
