Garner’s Modern English Usage is now available as an iOS app, beautifully designed and exceedingly useful. So when I’m reading The New York Times on my phone and see this editorial headline —
— I can open the app and find this entry:
[Click for a larger view.]
And then I can go back to reading the Times and thinking with ever-deepening dread about where our country is headed.
Related reading
All OCA Garner-related posts (Pinboard)
[An Android app is supposed to be available soon. The star at the bottom is for marking an entry as a favorite, a good way to keep track of anything a writer needs to check again and again (for me, if and whether). One thing I miss: full-text search, which I’m guessing would have been unwieldy with so much text. The Times uses both caldron and cauldron. Caldron appears to be the more common spelling among Times writers. AP and Reuters appear to prefer cauldron.]
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
GMEU app
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comments: 5
I read your Money, mouth, literally, figuratively post, and I was going to say you must have a hard time getting thru the day, because everything you look at needs its English corrected. Then I was gonna laugh and sympathize and say my continuous running commentary on TV commercials drives my wife nuts.
Then I said to myself: No, leave the poor man alone.
And then I read *this* post.
Ha! I almost always tune out commercials. But these things in print jump out at me. I think that’s just what happens when you’re looking at writing all the time. I don’t go looking for things; they just announce themselves. I mean, literally putting your money where your mouth is?
But also: I can’t recall ever seeing this spelling. I didn’t know that caldron Is a variant.
Out of interest I looked at Google's NGram Viewer for these two words (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cauldron%2Ccaldron&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccauldron%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccaldron%3B%2Cc0)
In short this reckons that cauldron has remained more or less steady in use from 1800 to now, whereas caldron peaked around 1860 and has been in steady decline ever since. What that says about a newspaper which prefers caldron is anybody's guess...
Thanks for the Ngram link, Richard. As you may already know, the new Garner’s Modern English Usage makes use of Ngrams.
I suppose that if you’re the Times you can spell words in outré ways when you choose to, just as The New Yorker uses umlauts where few writers would. But this variant spelling is easily mistaken for a mistake.
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