An attendance policy

Plain and practical:

I hope all of you will attend at least as regularly as I do.

From a Fall 1973 syllabus by the poet Ted Berrigan. It’s the “at least” that kills me.

Other Ted Berrigan posts
“A Final Sonnet”
“Resolution”
Separated at birth? With C. Everett Koop
“Whoa Back Buck & Gee by Land!”

The gender-neutral hen

News from The Guardian : “The official dictionary of the Swedish language will introduce a gender-neutral pronoun in April, editors at the Swedish Academy have announced.”

The word is hen . Han and hon are Swedish for “he” and “she.” Notice that The Guardian cannot tell us what hen is Swedish for: there’s no gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in common use in English yet.

From a title page

[From the title page of Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937). Actual size 9/16″ × 9/16″.]

If this image was ever a Funk & Wagnalls trademark, the details seem to be well-hidden. I liked the image enough to scan it and make it more readable, though I’m still not sure what it says. Is the kneeling figure working with a book and a globe?

Also from Mr. Hyphen
Living on hyphens

Living on hyphens

One man’s family:

Years ago, when you and I and the world were younger, language was simpler. In the ’90s, when I was in my teens, my father and grandfather were students of grammar and related subjects, such as punctuation and compounding. My father specialized in the field of the compound word. We of his household may be said to have lived on hyphens. We did this figuratively, in that we heard them much discussed; literally, in that they translated into food, shelter, clothing and recreation, since they furnished the head of the house with remunerative employment.

Edward N. Teall, Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937).

A family living on hyphens: something Salinger might have invented.

Edward Teall’s father must have been F. Horace Teall, who wrote The Compounding of Words in “Funk & Wagnalls’ Standard Dictionary of the English Language” (1891), available from Google Books. Like father, like son.

I found my way to Meet Mr. Hyphen by reading Mary Norris’s Between You & Me.

*

March 25: Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster tells me that Edward Teall was a Merriam-Webster editor. Thanks, Peter.

Review: Mary Norris, Between You & Me

Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. 240 pages. $24.95 hardcover.

Mary Norris is a copy editor, aka query proofreader, aka page-OK’er, at The New Yorker, where she has worked for more than thirty-five years. Early in Between You & Me she writes,

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey.

Part memoir, part free-ranging meditation on matters of usage, this book, too, draws on the entire person. Ten pages in, when Norris describes the skirt she wore to her New Yorker job interview, I worried that Between You & Me would turn out to resemble Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year. But my worry was for nothing. The catalogue of knowledge and experience that followed two pages later (quoted above) makes the difference clear: Norris is interested in everything.

Between You & Me is rich in details of The New Yorker’s people and practices. It’s all from a ground-level perspective: Pauline Kael makes a cameo appearance (“You helped me!” she says, after Norris makes a suggestion), but there’s very little of William Shawn or later editors or the magazine’s writers. The New Yorker people in the spotlight are the copy editors Lu Burke and Eleanor Gould. Burke (who left a million-dollar estate to her local library) is cranky and volatile, the creator of a Comma Shaker meant to mock the magazine’s “close” (or excessive) punctuation. Gould, long renowned for her devotion to clarity in writing, here seems a baffling mandarin, a maker of style choices that sometimes defy logic (for instance, “blue-stained glass” to describe blue stained glass). The New Yorker ’s dictionary hierarchy also defies logic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate first (the Little Red Web in house parlance), Webster’s Second second, and Webster’s Third third. Yet the Collegiate was for many years based on Webster’s Third, the dictionary that The New Yorker regards with “an institutional distrust.” It should be no surprise that the American Heritage Dictionary has no place at the magazine, which needs no advice from a Usage Panel. The New Yorker is a Usage Panel unto itself.

As for usage, Between You and Me takes stock of a number of problems and questions in language: subject and object pronouns (thus the book’s title); gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns, from ip (1884) to ee (2014); dangling modifiers; spelling; punctuation marks; the apostrophe (which Norris rightly regards as a matter of spelling, not punctuation); that and which; who and whom. What Norris offers, though, is not how-to advice (an appendix points to helpful books) but personal commentary, wit, and delightful examples of language in action. Writing about gender and pronouns, Norris draws upon life with her transgender sibling Baby Dee. Writing about subject and object pronouns, Norris cites hypercorrecting bowler Ralph Kramden (“We have already reserved that alley for Teddy and I”), Montgomery Burns (whose exclamation “You were he!” befits a villain), and the Astrud Gilberto rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema” (“She looks straight ahead — not at he”). What is more: Norris has a good idea about where that he came from. Writing about punctuation, she observes that the em dash “can create a sense of drama — false drama.” She likens the colon to a butler who says “Right this way.” No more than one colon to a sentence: “A butler would never tolerate another butler in the same household.” And Norris is the only writer I’ve read who mentions what must be a remarkable book, Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (1937). “Good compounding is a manifestation of character,” says Mr. Teall.

If you can imagine reading a book on usage while you sit waiting to participate in the ritual movements of alternate-side parking, if you have wondered how to form the plural possessive of McDonald’s, if you would find it difficult to choose between “bright red car” and “bright-red car,” if you care about no. 1 and no. 2 pencils, if you think road trip when you hear Pencil Sharpener Museum, you’ll find much to like in Between You & Me. If you cannot imagine, have not wondered, wouldn’t find it difficult, don’t care, and don’t think road trip, Mary Norris will show you what you’re missing.

And in case it isn’t already clear: Mary Norris is not the American Lynne Truss. There is one moment of Truss-like hyperbole in the book, and it feels entirely out of place: Norris says that when she hears the words “He sent flowers to Kate and I,” “some lining between [her] skin and [her] inner organs begins to shrink.” That physical reaction may call for a truss. But unlike Truss, Norris is knowledgable, and she’s a careful, graceful writer. Given her line of work, she’d have to be, don’t you think?

Between You & Me will be published on April 6. Thanks to W. W. Norton for a review copy.

Related post
The irregular restrictive which (A New Yorker usage)
Marry Norris on New Yorker style

[Gould is an intimidating figure. I have followed her practice in spelling copy editor and copy-edit. Garner’s Modern American Usage: “Each is now preferably a single unhyphenated word.”]

Geoffrey Pullum on On Writing Well

Geoffrey Pullum has a new target: William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Pullum writes about the book in a Language Log post, “Awful book, so I bought it.” His complaints concern Zinsser’s advice about verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Pullum charges Zinsser with “passivophobia” and gleefully points out Zinsser’s use of adverbs and adjectives, the very words, Pullum says, that Zinsser dismisses as mostly unnecessary:

It’s the old story of do as I say, not as I do. You and I are told that we won’t be good writers unless our adjective and adverb count is close to zero, but Zinsser is a professional so he doesn’t have to worry: he can use them at will, sometimes two out of every five words, without incurring criticism.

Sigh.

On Writing Well does recommend the active voice: “The difference between an active-verb style and a passive-verb style — in clarity and vigor — is the difference between life and death for a writer.” Writing about student essays, Pullum has said much the same thing:

Certainly, reading an unbroken procession of agentless passives that could have been actives is like being hit on the head over and over again with a mallet labeled “I REFUSE TO TELL YOU WHO THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY IS.” And it’s boring! Theories will be discussed; grammars will be compared; aspects will be assessed; problems will be analysed — beam me up, Scotty! There is only one form of sentence construction down here!

The only difference between Zinsser and Pullum: Pullum says the problem with the student essay is not the passive voice but “the writer’s tin ear.” But what makes it possible to accuse that writer of having a tin ear? I think it would be that writer’s overreliance on the passive voice.

Pullum has made the no-adverbs, no-adjectives charge against The Elements of Style as well. With Zinsser, as with Strunk and White, the charge is absurd, and it relies on selective quoting that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman composition class. Pullum quotes Zinsser as saying that “Most adverbs are unnecessary” and that “Most adjectives are also unnecessary.” Let’s look though at more of what Zinsser says. About adverbs:

Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. Don’t tell us that the radio blared loudly; “blare” connotes loudness. Don’t write that someone clenched his teeth tightly; there's no other way to clench teeth.

And about adjectives:

Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit — a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled.

William Zinsser never suggests that a writer aspire to adjective- and adverb-free prose. And what On Writing Well offers is not “mendacious drivel about passives and modifiers” but sound advice about lifeless sentences and dopey overwriting. But you wouldn’t know that if you were to trust Geoffrey Pullum.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)

[“Not every oak has to be gnarled”: what a delightful sentence.]

“Sardines in instant cans”

[Life, July 24, 1964. Click for a larger, fishier view.]

What will they think of next? Perhaps a way to make sardines more photogenic. Oh, wait — it’s been fifty years.

Related posts
Alex Katz, painter, eater Sardines for lunch, every day
City for Conquest (and sardines)
End of the U.S. sardine industry
The frightening truth that they don’t want you to know about sardines
Go fish
New directions in sardines
Sardine moose
Satan’s seafood

[The lunch hour approaches.]

Word of the Day: expiate

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is expiate :

1 : to extinguish the guilt incurred by

2 : to make amends for

M-W explains:

The word derives from expiare, Latin for “to atone for,” a root that in turn traces to the Latin term for “pious.” Expiate originally referred to warding off evil by using sacred rites or to using sacred rites to cleanse or purify something. By the 17th century, Shakespeare (and others) were using it to mean “to put an end to”: “But when in thee time’s furrows I behold, / Then look I death my days should expiate” (Sonnet 22). Those senses have since become obsolete, and now only the “extinguish the guilt” and “make amends” senses remain in use.

Expiate is for me a William Faulkner word. It’s prominent in Light in August (1932), where it’s used by the narrator (along with expiation ) and by two characters, both religious fanatics:

“To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering aint no more than a handful of rotten dirt.”

*

He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs. They were not the man’s; he had heard McEachern drive away in the buggy, departing in the twilight to drive three miles and to a church which was not Presbyterian, to serve the expiation which he had set himself for the morning.

*

She began to talk about a child, as though instinct had warned her that now was the time when she must either justify or expiate.

*

Again they stood to talk, as they used to do two years ago; standing in the dusk while her voice repeated its tale: “. . . not to school, then, if you dont want to go . . . Do without that . . . Your soul. Expiation of . . .”

*

The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.

Expiate is one of a number of words that always recall works of literature in which I encountered them. Other such words:

Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum

Erin McKean on how dictionaries work

Lexicographer Erin McKean, interviewed for The Chicago Manual of Style ’s Shop Talk:

I’d love for dictionary entries to be used as you’d use the technical specs for some piece of equipment. In the same way that you’d check whether the washing machine you want to buy has the right cubic capacity for your household, you’d look up a word to check whether it had the right denotation, range of use, tone, literary allusions, or what-have-you for your intended use. The role of the dictionary is to help you decide on the right word for you, not to rule whether something is or isn’t a word.

I truly believe that if something is used as a word, it’s a word. The rest is just bookkeeping.

Related posts
Erin McKean talks (Why isn’t asshat in the dictionary?)
A “wheelchair dude” in our Macs

Domestic comedy

“Perry Mason meets The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! It’s like Godzilla meets Rodan!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[David McCallum appeared in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Fifty Millionth Frenchman (February 20, 1964). Later that year he began playing Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Better living through TV!]