Barack Obama, yesterday, speaking to U.S. mayors on the challenge of the coronavirus:
“Speak the truth. Speak it clearly. Speak it with compassion. Speak it with empathy for what folks are going through. The biggest mistake any us can make in these situations is to misinform, particularly when we’re requiring people to make sacrifices and take actions that might not be their natural inclination.”Advice for non-mayors as well.
“I’m gonna wordsmith it.” The meaning is clear: someone is prepared to go over a piece of prose with unstinting care to get everything right. That’s what a wordsmith — “a person who works with words,” “especially : a skillful writer” — does. But is wordsmith a verb?
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the transitive verb smith, or smið — ”to make, construct, or form (a metal weapon, iron implement, etc.) by forging and hammering” — to the year 1000 or so. The word soon acquired a figurative meaning: “to create or refine, esp. as if by the work of a smith.”
The OED entry for wordsmith has the word only as a noun, with a first citation from 1873. But the dictionary adds the (undefined) variant wordsmithing, with citations from 1920 and 2006 — “not an excellent bit of wordsmithing,” “any wordsmithing and posturing.” Word Spy cites an earlier appearance, from 1899: “Small wonder that in slang every man tried his hand at word-smithing.” Wordsmithing in these three citations appears to be a gerund, a verb form functioning as a noun.
But where’s the verb? Wordnik has a Wiktionary definition of Wordsmith as a verb: “To apply craftsman-like skills to word use.” Alas, no citations. But wait: Wordnik also has an entry for wordsmithed, with citations from the Internets. From 2010: “We broke into groups, developed draft text, and then wordsmithed as a group to produce the final text.” Here’s an older (1988) non-Wordnik example of wordsmith as a verb, from Richard Feynman via Google Books:
Gradually, I realized that the way my report was written, it would require a lot of wordsmithing — and we were running out of time. Then somebody suggested that my report could go in as an appendix. That way, it wouldn’t have to be wordsmithed to fit in— and that’s where the preview runs out.
McKean’s law at work in a letter to a newspaper:
I continue to be amazed and amused at the frequency of misspellings, improper punctuation, incorrect use of words and other proof reading errors that seem to plague our print media.Or as I used to say on pages that went out with writing assignments:
Use the computer to check spelling, but don't trust it to proof read for you. Please, don't be car less.
Out for a walk, I talked from a distance with an area man who is ready for things to get back to normal. Well, at least a new normal, I said.
At the close of our short conversation, I said take care, something I say routinely, but which now seems to carry greater weight. The area man assured me that he’s young, strong, and not worried. I kept my mouth shut.
McKean’s law says that “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.” And so it was that when I wrote a post in which I called attention to Donald Trump*’s non-standard pronunciation of siege, I misspelled the word as seige.
Which was fine by my Mac, whose spellchecker fails to recognize seige as a nonword. Here, look:
I typed the word and non-words you see above in TextEdit, chose Check Document Now from the Spelling and Grammar menu, and found that only hghgh was flagged. I tried again, choosing Show Spelling and Grammar, and the result was the same. Seige also passes for a word in MarsEdit, Pages, and, I would imagine, any app that uses the Mac’s spellcheck. Checking seige against the Mac’s dictionary with Look Up returns nothing: at least the dictionary knows that seige is not a word. I’m using macOS Mojave 10.14.6. Catalina users, do you get the same results?
The Blogger composing window sometimes flags seige. But only sometimes. As I type this post, the non-word is sometimes underlined in red, sometimes not. Now I’m wondering how many more non-words get by my Mac. But as everyone should already know, you can’t trust spellcheck.
[McKean’s law is named for the lexicographer Erin McKean. Years ago Erin helped me get an explanation of a strange sentence in the Mac’s digital thesaurus.]
A first-person account, by Emily Hogstad. An excerpt:
The image I can’t shake, though, is the one of Wisconsinites who don’t have my level of privilege, who will be forced to wait half a day or more in line to vote. During a pandemic. Who will risk illness or death to do it anyway.
When I think of them, I’ve run out of excuses.
Matt Thomas of Submitted for Your Perusal is moving his Sunday New York Times digests to e-mail. In this post he explains why and tells the reader how to subscribe.
Matt has been digesting the Sunday Times since December 2007. I’ve been reading him almost as long. Something I said in 2008 still holds: Matt’s digests almost always point me to Times items I’d otherwise overlook.
[Click for a larger view.]
“I have a whole list in here”: Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson in Bombshell (dir. Jay Roach, 2019).
More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once
Of coronavirus. From The New York Times obituary:
After graduating from high school, he worked for the Post Office for two years before being drafted into the Army, which sent him to West Germany in charge of the motor pool at his base. After being discharged, he resumed his mail route, in and around his hometown, composing songs in his head.I can’t claim to know his music well, but I’ve never forgotten this song from my folkie youth.
“I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,” he wrote on his website. “I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”
Ezra Pound: “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity.” Let’s say a writer’s sincerity. Pound’s point is that there’s no genuine art without an absolute care for words and their implications. The cheap ornament or facile figure of speech won’t do.
When it comes to spam comments, one might think of sincerity as the test of a writer’s technique. Sincerity is crucial. Once you can fake that, &c., as the saying goes.
A useful exercise for novice students of writing might be to examine a spam comment closely and figure out all the ways in which its attempt at sincerity fails. Here’s one I received earlier this week:
That’s great! Just pumped up. You always give your best! Super useful and awesome information here. I thank you! Thank you very much!Obviously, it’s a fake, and you can tell in an instant. But how much evidence can you assemble to make that case?
