“[I]t’s readers”

[A sidebar to an article in today’s York Times.]

Here’s a post with Jessica Mitford’s tongue-in-cheek advice for choosing between its and it’s.

[Trying to create a post in Blogger’s iOS app is hell on wheels, with three flat tires.]

Another relic

Diane Schirf continues her “Relics” series by writing about the push reel lawn mower.

[To my surprise, lawn mower really is two words.]

Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner

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

In the downfunnelled light of a curbchannelled street in a neartropical metropolis, a tall, circuitriderlooking man stood amid the carnival confettisplatter overhead and confettidrift underfoot. His clothes were neartweed; his shoes flimsy, as though made of imitationleather. The package he carried contained a new hat of admirable machinesymmetry, purchased after much scribblescrawling of figures and a deal of coinfumbling, as a weddingpresent for —

All those crazycat compounds actually appear in “Pylon,” one of William Faulkner’s novels. Along with them go such others as cheeseclothlettered, mirageline, corpseglare, coffincubicles, bottomupwards, wirehum, canallock, umbrellarib.

“In the downfunnelled light”: that’s not Pylon (1935); it’s Teall’s assembling of compounds from the novel — Faulkner words, or better, Faulknerwords — in a handful of sentences. A sampling from Light in August (1932), which I’m now teaching: branchshadowed, cinderstrewnpacked, fecundmellow, hardfeeling, hardsmelling, moonblanched, pinkwomansmelling, sootbleakened. I love modernism.

Faulkner’s habit of compounding owes much to the example of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): cabbageeared, dressinggown, hairynostrilled, scrotumtightening, snotgreen. These compound words make me think of Anglo-Saxon poetry and Homeric epithets. Κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ : Hector moving-the-helmet-quickly.

I wonder if Teall was aware of William Carlos Williams’s decouplings in “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

I love modernism.

Also from Meet Mr. Hyphen
Funk & Wagnalls logo
Living on hyphens

Another college president plagiarizing?

News from 13News: “The incoming president of Virginia Wesleyan College has a history of plagiarism, according to a book and published media reports.”

Plagiarism in high places in a minor theme in Orange Crate Art. The presidents of Jacksonville State University, Malone University, Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical, South Central College, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Tennessee Temple University have appeared in earlier posts.

Related reading
All OCA plagiarism posts (Pinboard)

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.]