Words of wisdom from Albert King

Albert King to Stevie Ray Vaughan : “Most important thing: the better you get, the harder you work.”

Indeed. As one improves, the work gets more difficult, not less. It’s the beginner who slaps something together and thinks it adequate. It’s the 職人 [shokunin ], dedicated to a craft, who is ever intent on making it better.

I am always happy when students come to realize that the work of writing requires greater effort than they had imagined. As they become better writers, they have to work harder. There’s more to think about, more to try to get right.

A related post
Aaron Draplin on “good enough”

Enhanced euphemism techniques

On NPR earlier this morning, a Morning Edition interviewer spoke of “enhanced interrogation techniques, which many call torture.” Really, NPR? Must you continue to use a state-sponsored euphemism (sans quotation marks) in your reporting?

More appropriate: “so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which many call torture.”

More appropriate: “what the CIA calls ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and what many call torture.”

The practice of “enhanced interrogation” has an interesting history.

A related post
Euphemism

The CIA and the English language

From a New York Times article quoting the Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency and torture:

“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

Or in plain language: Don’t put questions in writing.

“Given activities,” “operational guidelines for this activity”: the Agency man writes in abstractions. “Strongly urge,” “be refrained from”: the Agency man writes without a sense of agency. It’s as if he’s read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” backwards.

A related post
Getting the truth (WWII, and a different way to interrogate prisoners)

Ghostwriter blurb writer

Before there was wireless, there was Ghostwriter . The show was a fambly obsession when our children were growing up. I always thought that the Ghostwriter emblem suggested the Chinese character 言 [yán ], which means “speech,” “words,” “to say,” “to talk.”

I discovered in my files a Ghostwriter blurb that I wrote in 1994 for my university’s PBS affiliate. I had forgotten all about going to bat for the series:

Ghostwriter shows a world in which children work and play in words, a world in which keeping a journal, reading a novel, revising a letter, making a petition, or composing a song is as everyday and natural as breathing. Reading and writing here are not just “school” — they’re the stuff life is made of. I can’t think of another television show that offers more ways for children — and even their parents — to grow as readers and writers.

Or as they said on Ghostwriter, Word!

No Googling: can you name the original six-member Ghostwriter team, fast?

[Ghostwriter logo from Wikipedia.]

Just a sentence more from Patrick Leigh Fermor

Leigh Fermor’s prose sometimes tends toward purple. But he can also fashion sentences with sharp, understated wit. Here’s one from A Time of Gifts, about the Barons Schey v. Koromla:

They had once been very rich, but, like everyone else, they were less so now.

[If the prose is sometimes purple, at least it’s a good purple.]

Leigh Fermor and Proust

Štrkovec, Slovakia, March 1934: another gift, in the house of Baron Philipp Schey v. Koromla, aka Pips:

“I’m on the last volume,” Baron Pips said, lifting up a French paper-bound book. It was Le Temps Retrouvé and an ivory paper-knife marked the place three quarters of the way through. “I started the first volume in October and I’ve been reading it all winter.” He put it back on the table by his chair. “I feel so involved in them all, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’ve finished. Have you ever tried it?”

As one can guess from the tone of my diary, I had only just heard of Proust, but always mentioned in terms of such respect that I was flattered by his question. I took the first volume to bed that night; but it was too dense a wood. When I tried again in Rumania next year, the wood lightened and turned into a forest whose spell has been growing ever since: so, in spite of this hesitant start, Baron Pips was my true initiator.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977).

What’s a reader to do after finishing Proust? In 2006, I wrote a post about finishing for the first time.

Other Leigh Fermor posts
“Footpads and knaves” : From A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel : Leigh Fermor’s eye : “Like rear lamps fading through a fog” : Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin : One word from A Time of Gifts

[Štrkovec: or in Hungarian, Kövecses.]

“Like rear lamps fading through a fog”

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe. Leigh Fermor has been writing about Prague:

In this late attempt to recapture the town, I seem to have cleared the streets. They are as empty as the thoroughfares in an architectural print. Nothing but a few historical phantoms survive; a muffled drum, a figure from a book and an echo of Utraquists rioting a few squares away — the milling citizens, the rushing traffic vanish and the voices of the bilingual city sink to a whisper. I can just remember a chestnut-woman in a kerchief stamping beside a brazier to keep warm and a hurrying Franciscan with a dozen loaves under his arm. Three cab-drivers nursing their tall whips and drinking schnapps in the outside-bar of a wine cellar materialize for a moment above the sawdust, their noses scarlet from the cold or drink or both, and evaporate again, red noses last, like rear lamps fading through a fog.

Related posts
“Footpads and knaves” : From A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel : Leigh Fermor’s eye : Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin : One word from A Time of Gifts

[Making slow progress: I’ve traveled the final eighty-three pages in two-and-a-half weeks. Utraquists? See here.]

Ending a sentence with it

A thoughtful student asked today about an alleged rule of writing: “Don’t end a sentence with it.” Whoever thought up the rule probably didn’t see the comedy in that sentence. I’ve been told of other such rules: many students come to college believing that they must never begin a sentence with and, but, or because. The it-rule though is new to me. I suspect that it is not widespread: Garner’s Modern American Usage makes no mention of it, not in its entry about it, not in its entry about superstitions.

I did find the following comment, in Richard Lauchman’s 25 Hiccoughs of Guidance that Ruin Writing Style:

How did this one ever get started? When I was in school, no one ever bothered to tell me that ending a sentence with “it” was wrong. I’ve never been able to learn the basis for this advice. It makes no sense to me.

But what I can report is that many people have heard this “rule” and thus shy away from writing We have received your proposal and will notify you after we review it. Instead, of course, they feel compelled to write We have received your proposal and will notify you after it has been reviewed. If they have managed to evade the superstition about repeating words but have been exposed to the idea that pronouns are taboo, they write Subject proposal has been received by this office, and notification will follow after said proposal has undergone review. When we read this sort of thing, we have no one to blame but ourselves. After all, for it we asked.

Reader, are you familiar with this rule? Have you heard of it?

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February 23, 2015: Here’s more evidence, if anyone needs it, that it is acceptable to end a sentence with it. From Joseph M. Williams’s Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (New York: Longman, 2003):

A sentence can end flatly if you repeat at its end a word used just a few words before, because the voice we hear in our mind’s ear drops off at the end of the sentence. You can hear that drop if you read aloud this sentence and the previous two sentences. To avoid that kind the flatness, rewrite or use a pronoun instead of repeating the word at the end of the sentence. For example:

A sentence will seem to end flatly if you use a word at its end that you used just a few words before, because when you repeat that word, your voice drops. Instead of repeating the noun, use a pronoun. The reader will at least hear emphasis on the word just before it.

[The words drops, pronoun, and before are in bold to mark emphasis.]

Not only is it acceptable to end a sentence with it : doing so can be the right thing to do.

The passage is missing from the 2010 tenth edition of the much longer Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. It may be missing from the 2013 eleventh edition too. No matter: it was and is acceptable to end a sentence with it.

[“Don’t end a sentence with it”: granted, it here doesn’t function in relation to an antecedent. But still. Lauchman Group offers writing workshops for people in the world of work.]

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January 19, 2016: I found my way to an influential source for this non-rule: Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. With an Appendix, Containing Rules and Observations for Promoting Perspicuity in Speaking and Writing (1795). Murray (1745–1826) was a lawyer who in retirement began writing books of grammatical instruction, with extraordinary success: Bryan Garner notes that in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, Murray’s books sold more than fifteen and a half million copies.

Murray’s advice about writing is at times remarkably congenial. Here is an observation that might have inspired William Strunk’s exhortation to “Omit needless words”:


[The first rule promoting the strength of a sentence, is, to prune it of all redundant words and members.

It is a general maxim, that any words which do not add some importance to the meaning of a sentence, always injure it. Care should therefore be exercised with respect to synonymous words, expletives, circumlocutions, tautologies, the expression of unnecessary circumstances. The attention becomes remiss, when words are multiplied without a corresponding multiplication of ideas.]

But at other times Murray’s advice is less helpful. Here is the rule against ending a sentence with it:


[The fifth rule for the strength of sentences is, to avoid concluding them with an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word .]

An example follows:


[Even the pronoun it , should, if possible, be avoided in the conclusion: especially when it is joined with some of the prepositions; as, with it , in it , to it . We shall be sensible of this of the following sentence. “There is not, in my opinion, a more pleasing and triumphant consideration in religion, than this, of the perpetual progress which the soul makes toward the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period in it . How much more agreeable the sentence, if it had been so constructed as to close with the word period !]

“Should, if possible, be avoided in the conclusion”: the rule is not absolute, and as David Crystal points out, Murray ends a sentence with it just two pages later. It must have been unavoidable, he might have said. In the sample sentence above, though, the problem lies not in the word it but in “words which do not add some importance to the meaning of a sentence”: in it , an unnecessary phrase, needless words. There was and is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with it , or with an adverb, or with a preposition. She threw the ball and I caught it. We danced gracefully. Where did that noise come from?

How strange and sad that a warning — not a prohibition — issued in 1795 should still haunt writers. In the last three months, at least 500 people have wondered or worried enough to visit this post.

[I found my way to Murray’s warning while reading David Crystal’s The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (2006): “To maintain the ‘strength’ of sentences, [Murray] says, we must ‘avoid concluding them with an adverb, a preposition, or any inconsiderable word’ — by which he means (from the examples he gives) pronouns such as it .” I have reproduced the more legible text of Murray’s An English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the Language, Illustrated by Appropriate Exercises, and a Key to the Exercises (1808). In both English Grammar and An English Grammar, the rule appears in a discussion of sentence strength (“a disposition and management of the several words and members, as shall bring out the sense to the best advantage.” For the third passage, the earlier English Grammar has a semicolon after conclusion and the word more before especially .]

Dialogue writing of orange and strawberry

Yet another cybernaut has arrived in search of homework: dialogue writing of orange and strawberry. Well, okay:

“Hello there, strawberry. What the hull is going on?”

“Aah, just the daily rind.”

Please continue this assignment in the comments if you so choose.

Many searches for homework in the form of write five sentences have ended up at Orange Crate Art. A post about five sentences from Bleak House started it all.

Five-sentence posts
The cat : Clothes : The driver : My house : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The rabbit : The ship : Smoking : The telephone : The world

Gamewell fire alarm

[As seen in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, earlier this year. Click for a larger view.]

This old fire alarm was on duty last spring. I hope it’s on duty still. Click for the larger view to get a better look at the logo, which recalls that of the IBEW. (See below.) You might be able to make out the words Fire Alarm Station and The Gamewell Co. Newton Mass., below the 655.

Though no longer based in Newton, the Gamewell Co. is still in business as Gamewell-FCI.

[FCI: Fire Control Instruments.]

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December 16: Gamewell forwarded my query to Gary Spohn, an expert on old Gamewell equipment. Gary tells me that this style of box is a “1924 style,” a design patented in that year. This box was made, he says, between 1938 and 1950. A look at the innards would reveal more.

Thank you, Gary.

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December 16: Gary dates the first version of the Gamewell logo to 1879. The first IBEW logo appeared in 1891. So it would appear that it is the IBEW logo that recalls the Gamewell logo.

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March 2024: Here’s a Gamewell alarm in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.