In today’s New York Times:
A critic of conventional wisdom and an amateur musician, Dr. Schipper’s work focused on improving efficiency in energy use and transportation.Do you see what’s wrong? Claire Cook’s Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (1985) has a good explanation.
comments: 20
Wow - his work is both a critic and a musician. I'm losing faith in the NYT. Just the other day they ran an article about Obama's Midwest trip, the headline of which used the word "capital" in reference to Washington, D.C.
Capital and capitol always confuse me. Garner’s Modern American Usage: “The first is a city, the seat of government; the second is a building in which the state or national legislature meets.” If it’s the headline I think it is — “Far From Capital, Obama Still Finds Its Woes” — capital is right. But I somehow still think of D.C. as the capitol, which, it seems, it isn’t.
I saw the dangle right away; this particular awkward appositive is a problem when amateurs attempt to imitate the classic Time style.
Capital and capitol derive from two related, but different Latin words. Capital comes from the Latin adjective capitalis, which is derived from caput, capitis, "head", including "head" as in "head of cattle", money and livestock going back a very long time together, but also "capital (city)", cf. Ger. Hauptstadt, Cze. hlavní město, "head city". The Capitol in Rome was the site of the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of the Eternal City.
Thank you, Norman!
I used to have a collection of egregious dangling modifiers and such. Aren't editors supposed to be checking the work?
Re: Capitol, my vague recollection is that "-tol" means hill, and as it has been pointed out, "cap" means "top". Wasn't it, if not a requirement, at least a protocol that the capitol of any city in the U.S. was to be built on the tallest hill in the surrounding area?
Elaine, yes. The same sort of thing is happening in the book trade.
Sean, I can’t find anything about -tol meaning “top.” I don’t know how widespread the practice of building on a hill was — in some parts of the U.S. it’d be pretty difficult.
No, I mentioned that -tol is "hill" not, "top." Funny enough, even in Tallahassee they managed to put the capitol atop what could be considered a hill, even for Florida!
Oops — I should’ve typed “hill.” I couldn’t find anything for -tol.
Sean, I don't think your etymology is correct (though I am not a classicist). The Latin word from which capitol is derived, Capitolium, was a temple dedicated to the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), usually situated in a prominent place like a hill. In Rome, the Capitolium was located on the appropriately named Capitoline hill. In any case, you have divided the word incorrectly: capit- means "head" (being the stem of the oblique, i.e. non-nominative, cases), not "cap". The suffix -ōlium is straightforward derivational suffix, in this case a neuter noun/adjective of the second declension derived from another noun. Can't think of any other examples of other words with -ōlium off hand though.
“Can’t think of any other examples of other words with -ōlium off hand though”: Norman, I’d say you’re doing fine. Thanks for that.
In today's (Saturday's) print edition, the passage now reads: "Dr. Schipper, who was known as Lee, held a bachelor's degree in music and a Ph.D. in astrophysics, both from Berkeley, but he specialized in energy efficiency and transportation energy and was often a critic of the conventional wisdom." That solves the appositive problem--I'd like to think that NYT's editors visit OCA--but now "the conventional wisdom" jars a bit.
At the risk of overdoing it, and with the hope of saving a little face, I had confused "tol" and "tor", e.g. Glastonbury Tor.
I'll now think twice before acting on vague recollections. :)
Stefan, the sentence I quoted still there — it’s on the general Obituaries page (I didn’t link because the page changes from day to day). I think that the but in the sentence you quoted doesn’t really work: is there any contradiction between studying music or astrophysics and criticizing conventional wisdom? I think that the Times is squeezing too much into a single sentence.
Sean, I had a vague recollection of tor, but I thought, Nah, he doesn’t mean tor. Honest.
Aha, I didn't realize "capital" could mean a city. I'm sure the NYT meant the city and not the building, in which case their usage was correct. Thanks for restoring my faith, at least in this instance.
You’re welcome, Pete. But here’s a sentence gone wrong from an artlcle in today’s Times: “To the degree that conservatives make a psychic or political link between Mr. Perry and Mr. Bush, could also undercut Mr. Perry’s otherwise solid appeal to members of the Tea Party movement, many of whom feel that Mr. Bush betrayed their principles by becoming a big-government conservative.”
Nice get, MIchael, and nice discussion.
I expect that -olium is a phonological variation of --orium, which means "place where x is done" when x = first element of word. Most famous example is vomitorium, for which the Romans are so unjustly famous. Dormitory is a word we get from -orium; we also get refectory from that suffix. Capitolium is the place where the "head" or the "chief" lives, i.e. Jupiter, the chief god of the Romans.
Thanks, David. -Olium made me wonder about -oleum, and now linoleum will never look the same to me. So much to learn from these comments!
One of my biggest pet peeves is the use of "Graduated" as a verb. I hear it so much that I have begun to wonder if it is now accepted in modern language.
When I hear someone use it, I picture them determining and then etching the measurement lines on science lab beakers and etc. I also picture a person laying in rocks or other substrate which will be paved over to make an incline on a road.
I've no idea how many times I have heard educators, in particular, put it to this use. Yuck.
Berit, is this what you’re thinking of?
“The traditional use is ‘be graduated from’: she will be graduated from medical school in June. However, it is now more common to say ‘graduate from’: | she will graduate from medical school in June. The use of graduate as a transitive verb, as in | he graduated high school last week, is increasingly common, especially in speech, but is considered incorrect by most traditionalists.”
[Cut and pasted from my Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary.]
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