How to improve writing (no. 98)

As I wrote in no. 75, “Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences.” Even the polls need rewriting. To wit:

Hypothetically speaking, would you be in support of or not in support of an exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule with regard to legislation involving voting rights?

☐ Would support
☐ Would not support
☐ I’m not sure
☐ Other / No opinion

Do you support an exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule in order to pass voting-rights legislation?

☐ Yes
☐ No
☐ Undecided
☐ No opinion

From thirty-eight words to twenty-two. Which question would you prefer to read and answer?

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All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 98 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

The best book of the past 125 years

Readers of The New York Times have spoken. Kinda predictably. Yep, the best. Whatever you say.

A related post
NYT “Best Book”

[At least they didn’t pick Harry Potter.]

Gorgias in our time

An episode of In Our Time made me think that it would be a good time to read Plato’s Gorgias. I had a fair idea of what to expect. But I didn’t know that there would be a discussion of medical expertise and its opposite:

Socrates: You said just now that even on matters of health the orator will be more convincing than the doctor.

Gorgias: Before a mass audience — yes, I did.

Socrates: A mass audience means an ignorant audience, doesn’t it? He won’t be more convincing than the doctor before experts, I presume.

Gorgias: True.

Socrates: Now, if he is more convincing than the doctor then does he turn out to be more convincing than the expert?

Gorgias: Naturally.

Socrates: Not being a doctor, of course?

Gorgias: Of course.

Socrates: And the non-doctor, presumably, is ignorant of what the doctor knows?

Gorgias: Obviously.

Socrates: So when the orator is more convincing than the doctor, what happens is that an ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience. Is this what happens?

Gorgias: This is what happens in that case, no doubt.

Socrates: And the same will be true of the orator and oratory in relation to all other arts. The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of persuading the ignorant that he seems to know more than the experts.

Gorgias: And isn’t it a great comfort, Socrates, never to be beaten by specialists in all the other arts without going to the trouble of acquiring more than this single one?

Plato, Gorgias. Trans. from the Greek by Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones (New York: Penguin, 1974).

Graphs!

From Alan Alda’s Clear + Vivid conversation with Steven Pinker, June 2020. Alda asks Pinker how he convinces someone that there’s less illness, less poverty, less violence, that things are getting better. Pinker’s response: “The answer is: I use graphs.”

Sigh.

If you are without access to proper medical care, if you are hemmed in by poverty or violence, graphs don’t mean a thing. No one lives life in the aggregate.

Pinker’s perky answer (which, of course, he elaborates on) has been stuck in my head for some time. I realize now that it sounds to me like the thought of a twenty-first-century Dickens character. Yes, everything is getting better. Look at my graphs!

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Jeffrey Epstein and Steven Pinker on overpopulation (yes, really) : Pinker on Strunk and White : A (withering) review of Pinker’s The Sense of Style

[The full exchange between Alda and Pinker may be heard at the 13:03 mark.]

NPR, sheesh

“We should be seeing a commiserate rise,” &c.

Uh, commensurate.

Garner’s Modern English Usage marks commiserate for commensurate as Stage 1: “Rejected.”

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Word of the day: tragus

The word of the day is tragus, pronounced \ ˈtrā-gəs \: “the prominence in front of the external opening of the outer ear.” The word derives from New Latin, from the Greek tragos, “literally, goat.” Why is this body part likened to a goat? The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “on account of the bunch of hairs which it bears.”

Sample sentence: “The tragus should then be pumped 5 times by pushing inward to facilitate penetration of the drops into the middle ear.”

You can guess how I learned about this word. The sample sentence comes from the printed matter that accompanied my drops.

[Yes, an ear infection. And yes, there’s a goat in tragedy too.]

Well, or not

Honoré de Balzac, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives. 1842. Trans. from the French by Jordan Stump (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Balzac is not really my cup of coffee. But this epistolary novel has many rewards. Renée de Maucombe and Louise de Chaulieu leave their convent school and trade letters as their lives diverge. Letters from others appear as well. This passage is from a letter by Renée that describes what she calls the joys and terrors of motherhood. Well, or not seems eerily apt today.

[Armand is Renée’s son, named for Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu.]

Pronouncing omicron again

“What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters?” In The New Yorker, Mary Norris looks at omicron and other letters.

I noticed a setence that needs improvement:

Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short “o,” as in “om,” and omega with a long “o,” like an Irish surname: O’Mega.

As in “om”? I think that “om” here is too easily misread as the word om, pronounced with a long o : \ ˈōm \. Clearer:

Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short o, as in Tom, and omega with a long o, like an Irish surname: O’Mega.

Tom goes nicely with O’Mega too.

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How to pronounce omicron

[Why I added italics: “When a word or term is not used functionally but is referred to as the word or term itself, it is either italicized or enclosed in quotation marks": The Chicago Manual of Style (7.63). I replaced the quotation marks with italics for consistency. The New Yorker of course doesn’t use italics. The important change here is Tom for om.]

“Book-wrapt”

In its real-estate section, The New York Times hypes the idea of being “book-wrapt” in your “bookroom.” “Well-groomed libraries in brownstones,” we are told, “help spark bidding wars.”

Well-groomed indeed: five of the ten photographs accompanying the article show pretty meager shelves. How many books are needed “to make a place feel like home”? One thousand, the article’s expert says, and then he cuts that number in half, and the Times writer adds that “even that number is negotiable.”

Reading this article finally prompted me to make a rough count (with Elaine’s help) of what’s in our “bookroom,” which means our house, minus the bathrooms and the laundry room: about 3,200 books.

The Watts Towers at 100

“A hundred years ago, in what was then the semi-rural farming community of Watts, a 40ish-year-old Italian immigrant laborer named Sabato Rodia bought a little home on a dead-end block by the railroad tracks and started collecting junk”: The Watts Towers at 100 (Los Angeles Times).

The towers have been closed for for restoration since 2017. I feel fortunate to have seen them up close in 2014.

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Watts Towers : Watts tiles : Watts House Project