“Qua”

[“Qua,” xkcd, March 9, 2022.]

I can’t decide if it’s a joke on Waiting for Godot. It might just be someone being witty about qua.

Related reading
Two more posts about qua

[But shouldn’t the punchline read “Nice use of ‘ “qua” qua “qua” ’ qua ‘ “qua” qua “qua” ’ ”?]

From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

How many times did I hear, as an undergraduate, someone say “Man qua man” and mean it? Too many times. From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Qua (= in the capacity of; as; in the role of), is often misused and is little needed in English. “The real occasion for the use of qua,” wrote H.W. Fowler, “occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects” (Modern English Usage [1st ed.] at 477). Here is Fowler's example of a justifiable use: “Qua lover he must be condemned for doing what qua citizen he would be condemned for not doing.” But as would surely work better in that sentence; and in any event, this use of qua is especially rare in American English.

One is hard-pressed to divine any purpose but rhetorical ostentation or idiosyncrasy in the following examples:

“Such developments . . . do not explain why students qua students have played such an important role in stimulating protest.” Seymour Martin Lipset, “Why Youth Revolt,” N.Y. Times, 24 May 1989, at A31.

“The proposal that a physician qua physician (or a medical ethic as such) is the necessary or best authority for the existential decision of rational suicide misrepresents medical knowledge and skills.” Steven H. Miles, "Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Profession's Gyrocompass," Hastings Ctr. Rep., May 1995, at 17.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.

Related posts
Singular they (and the patriarchal language of my undergrad education)
The word of the day: quaquaversal

A PBS qua

Heard this evening on the PBS NewsHour , a reference to David Petraeus sharing classified information with “his mistress qua biographer.” An arresting characterization, one that I doubt I’ll ever hear repeated.

Bryan Garner has an excellent discussion of qua (meaning “in the capacity of; as; in the role of”), a word he characterizes as “often misused” and “little needed.” Garner quotes H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926):

The real occasion for the use of qua occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects.

That’s it exactly: Petraeus was sharing information with his lover in her role as his biographer. Here, I think, qua works well. Garner’s recommended alternative — as , as in “his mistress as biographer” — would not work nearly as well here.

Of course, not having a mistress and not sharing classified information would work even better.

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. The first comes from a post about Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; the second, from Villette itself. The third? You got me. “Pflaaaap!”

“The estrade — okay, platform”
“The nobody you once thought me!”
“Get on with it”
“Post stuff”
“Space for thought”
“At work or at play”
“Walking through a wooded area”
“Brought to the screen on an excellent shoestring”
“When we started communicating, we were using pay
    phones”
“They grow up so fast”
“Click for larger turtles”
“The wet lead makes a darker line”
“Extensive parking facilities”
“Now with more Chock full o’Nuts”
“Stealing radio tubes and engaging in fisticuffs”
“Faculty-sharpener”
“A candy store of the imagination”
“E, G, D, A”
“Ontological underpinnings”
“Not a clue”
“Eyes open”
“And supplies”
“Did he write this himself?”
“Torn between ‘Huh?’ and ‘Wha?’”
“Qua qua qua”
“Where has Merrick Garland gone?”
“Redolent, redolent of coffee”
“Just ‘music’”
“Giveaway”
“Why a duck”
“Shirtsleeve weather”
“Dose folks”
“Check your local listings”
“Mid-century postmodern”
“America is minorities”
“Once a subfolder, always a subfolder”
“Truth matters”
“Pflaaaap!”
“Hey, what a cat, to dig Troy”
“67 + 92 + 25 = 184”
“Run rushes with Zanuck”
“I’m on it”
“Items in a series”
“Changeable signs”
“The reason is not because”
“Sound it out”
“I hope this blog post finds you well”
“Easy to install … see back of box”
“For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”
“Shiny topics”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not