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| SEPT
98 | OCT 98 | NOV 98 |
DEC 98 | JAN 99 |
FEB 99 | MAR 99 |
APR 99 | MAY 99 | JUNE
99 | | WRITING TIPS |
MEET THE DOCTOR | SPLEEN
VENTING | SEAL |
SITE RESUSCITATION | JUST THE WAY IT IS | What do temper tantrum, hurly-burly, welcome wagon, and blame game have in common? I won't keep you guessing. They demonstrate a characteristic of English that, though not unique, makes the language more fun—and even poetic. The two major categories that these examples fall into are rhyming words and alliterated words. They are usually two words, with some pairs joined by and or or. Here's a very brief list of common rhymed pairs: hell's bells, loosey-goosey, roly-poly, mumbo-jumbo, Humpty Dumpty, wild child, meet and greet, willy-nilly, hoity-toity, brain drain, boot scoot, true blue, space race, gang bang, plain Jane, gloom and doom, run and gun, funny money, prime time, use it or lose it. Others, such as hillbilly, almost fit the bill and certainly follow the spirit of the category. When you have a few spare minutes, you could easily make your own list. Alliterated phrases are probably even more common than rhyming phrases. Again, here is a small sample: worry wart, trash talk, trailer trash, jumping jack, dead duck, motor mouth, beer belly, pen pal, feeding frenzy, nervous Nellie, spic and span, bird brain, party pooper, funny farm, short sheet, thunder thighs, do or die, blue blazes, house husband, jungle gym, big bang, chump change, right as rain, trick or treat, black and blue, R & R, down and dirty, rough and ready. Occasionally this pattern exhibits itself within single words. This group includes telltale, shipshape, and tattletale. A subcategory of the alliterative pattern includes pairs in which the only change is an internal vowel: flimflam dillydally, riffraff, wishy-washy, tiptop, ticktock, and clipclop. Interestingly, most of these pairs have an i in the first half and an a or o in the second half. So what? This is a bit of whimsy, but how does it matter? Aside from the poetic nature of these examples, these tendencies make certain phrases easier to remember. And most of us need that! A Dallas Morning News columnist recently wrote about common mispronunciations. I heard about but didn't read this column, so I'm in no danger of plagiarizing him. Instead, I've decided to come up with my own list of common and not-so-common mistakes. I'm purposely avoiding regional differences in pronunciation, because they are simply different, not wrong. When I began teaching English in the 1960s, our textbooks focused on examples such as saying ath-uh-le-tics instead of the correct ath-leh-tics. I'm afraid the field is now populated with many more serious cases of mispronunciations. One category involves names of proper nouns such as Iraq, Iran, and Italian. None of these words have an “EYE” sound. They all begin with an “ih” sound, as in fit. The word Realtor (which, unbeknownst to many people, is also capitalized) has two syllables: “Real” and “tuhr.” This pronunciation should not be a tongue twister; however, this word is routinely mispronounced. The usual mispronunciation is “Ree-luh-tuhr,” which obviously adds a third syllable. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush have been routinely lampooned for their failure to master the word nuclear (and they aren't alone). The usual mangling is “new-kew-luhr.” In both cases the mispronunciation involves the reversal of “l” and an adjoining vowel. Now to an obscure error, the mispronunciation of alternative. My mother, whose pronunciation was otherwise impeccable in her Texan way, always said “AL-tuhr-nuh-tiv” instead of “ALL-tuhr-nuh-tiv.” This example goes to show that everyone, no matter how intelligent, may have a stumbling block. The word beneficent isn't very common in everyday speech, so people who run across it in print don't always know how to pronounce it. A discussion of the correct pronunciation of this word, which appears in Randall Thompson's Testament of Freedom, led to a trip to a dictionary after choir rehearsal. The two choices at the rehearsal were “bih-nih-fih-sunt” and “bih-nih-fih-shunt.” The first one is correct. Its pronunciation is like that of magnificent. Note that both end in “-cent,” so the “c” has an “s” sound. When an “i” follows the “c,” it typically has an “sh” sound, as in sufficient. A finale: A CNN reporter recently mispronounced tangentially twice in the same report, so it wasn't a slip of the tongue. By the way, I've never heard anyone else do so. He said “tan-gin-suhn-ly” rather than “tan-gin-shu-ly.” It's similar to the above issue: in this case a “t” followed by an “i” is also pronounced “sh.” Back to my favorite preoccupation: compound nouns. This time I'll approach the subject by grouping them into categories. Among the largest is the one filled by terms with negative connotations. Note just a few: beer bust, town drunk, ambulance chaser, death march, lunatic fringe, village idiot, name dropper, ghost town, witch hunt, drama queen, space cadet, basket case, love handles, party animal, death trap, and pity party. This trend points to our seeming bias toward the down side of life. But since I'm not a psychologist, I won't pursue this possibility any further. Though there are many examples of a second type, here I'll provide just a few. Look at fishing expedition and wing nut. Each has an innocuous literal meaning, but each also has a metaphorical meaning. Interestingly, both of these meanings are negative. Hmmm … more negatives. What does this say about us humans? Another category involves terms that were once both popular and understood but which are now unfamiliar or no longer commonly used. They include garter belt, spinning wheel, piece goods, steering knob, and monkey wrench. My apologies to those among you who are familiar with these terms, but here goes with some explanations. Before the advent of pantyhose, garter belts were worn by women as a contraption to hold up their hose, which came in two pieces, one for each leg. Good riddance! Most of you recognize the term spinning wheel, but piece goods is foreign to most younger people. In the "olden days," department stores had a section for sewing supplies, including bolts of cloth, which are the piece goods. Today cloth is sold almost exclusively in specialty stores. Steering knobs were standard equipment on cars before the advent of automatic transmissions and sophisticated gearshift mechanisms. Without them it was difficult to steer the old clunkers. The phrase monkey wrench has now been shortened to wrench. And to my knowledge, no monkeys ever wielded these tools. My catchall group includes ivory tower, gift horse, crowd control, dance card, flower child, fortune cookie, fishing pole, candy wrapper, totem pole, and granny gown. Phrases such as candy wrapper are easy to understand and typify the efficiency of using two words instead of three or more: e.g., "wrapper for candy," "gown typically worn by grandmothers or other older women," "pole used for fishing," and "pole with totems carved on it." Definitions or explanations of dance card, fortune cookie, ivory tower, gift horse, and crowd control would take even more words, so they demonstrate the value as well as the variety offered by our treasure trove (another example) of compound nouns in English. One of this year’s feel-good movies is Akeelah and the Bee, which tells the story of an 11-year-old African-American girl in Los Angeles who is challenged to test her amazing spelling ability in a competition. As one who almost made it to the Scripps’ National Spelling Bee, I can identify with the rigor demanded by spelling bee participants. However, in my day, entrants were not inundated with esoteric words and scientific terms like the ones that now strike fear into fourth- to eighth-grade children. The final word in the movie was pulchritude, which is not one that many people use often in business or personal writing and conversation. A bonus is that spell checkers will always check its misspelling. One word that, in my view, should have been caught, but wasn’t, in a recent Time magazine article is amok. One current dictionary says that amuck (which mirrors the pronunciation) is an alternate spelling. My spell checker agrees, but my rule is always to use the preferred spelling. A
spelling error that appeared in two succeeding sets of program notes for Dallas
Symphony Orchestra concerts highlights the confusion of forgo and forego. Forego means “to precede” i.e., “to go
before”; forgo means “to do without.”
The usual error is to choose forego
when forgo is called for. An
interesting side point is that whereas forgo
is used in the present and future tenses, the other tenses are rarely spoken or
written: have you ever said, “I forwent lunch in order to enjoy the banquet
later that day”? Likewise,
forego has only two common forms: foregone (“a foregone conclusion”) and foregoing (“the foregoing statements”).
These are both adjective uses; I have never seen the verb forego used. Another
word that played a role in the movie is eminent.
When the pronouncer gave this “trick word” to Akeelah, she had to know that
there are three spellings and meanings but only one pronunciation. Eminent means “noteworthy” or
“outstanding”; immanent means
“living” or “ inherent”; and imminent
means “impending” or “immediate.” Akeelah wasn’t fooled. A different type of misspelling—one that I can’t explain—is the tendency to
write committment rather than commitment. Maybe people see commitment as similar to committee. Good luck and good spelling! 2006 TIPSOne
of my favorite Christmas gifts was Words
and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, a book mostly about irregular
verbs, written by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. To most people, such a
gift is equivalent to getting switches and ashes in their Christmas stockings. However,
I found it fascinating. One of its premises is that the way children learn
irregular verbs provides a microcosm of the way people acquire language in
general. It also unlocks for readers some of the crazy peculiarities of English
and the mysteries of the mind. Regular
verbs follow established rules and have four predictable forms. For example: shift, shifts, shifted, and shifting. The overwhelming majority of
English verbs are regular, thank goodness. There
are less than 200 common irregular verbs, fewer than in the past, as the
tendency for English speakers is to make verbs regular. The
forms of irregular verbs must be memorized, but there are some common patterns.
For example: ring, rang, rung and sing, sang, sung (but not swing, swang swung!); grow, grew, grown and know, knew, known; hit, hit, hit and shut, shut, shut. If you have children or have been around enough of them, you may have noticed that when they were learning to talk, they made a number of mistakes with forms of irregular verbs such as go, throw, run, and see. What you may have missed is that children go through three stages. In the first stage, they actually get the irregular verbs right! Then as they internalize the rules for forming regular verbs, they mistakenly apply these rules to irregular verbs as well. That’s why they begin to say goed, throwed, runned, and seed. In the third stage they sort out the two types and memorize the irregular forms. Of course some people never master all the irregular forms. That’s why you’ll hear adults still saying throwed. Beyond this process, some irregular verbs are on the march: changing from irregular to regular or regular to irregular—or making other unpredictable changes. Regular to irregular (the least-likely scenario): drag was once a regular verb (drag, drags, dragged, dragging). Now the past-tense form is routinely seen and spoken as drug. Likewise, the past-tense form of sneak commonly morphs to snuck. In addition, dived has given way to dove, despite the heroic efforts of English teachers. Irregular to regular: Most changes from irregular to regular are lost in the mists of history, but a couple of contemporary evolutions are worth noting. The verb strive previously took the forms strive, strove, and striven (like drive, drove, and driven). Now, however, strived is an acceptable alternative to strove and striven. Other evolutions: The sing-sang-sung/ring-rang-rung pattern is under assault. You’ll hear “They sung the song” and “The bell rung” as often as not, even from highly educated people. The class of words that include cut, hit, cast, broadcast, and forecast is in disarray. Historically, these words had only three forms: e.g., cut, cuts, cutting (no –ed form). Now, though, the use of broadcasted and forecasted is common. 2006 TIPSTo end the year, I'll throw a few darts at our grammar checkers. I've said before that spell checkers are great for spotting misspellings of words like imagination, which cannot be confused with any other word (unlike to/too, in/it, compliment, complement). Grammar checkers can handle many routine problems (it would catch they is and the flies swarms as errors). However, they aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Here are a few sentences with errors that it won't catch. • Me ancestors came primarily from the British Isles. (Just a typo, but the grammar checker isn't up to the task.) • Stuart's deft handling—both technically and as a sociopolitical critique—of these multiple affiliations in his three portraits of Morton culminate in the Worcester portrait Explanation: It should be easy for you to see that handling is the subject (because of its position in the sentence), but there are so many words between it and the verb, culminate, that the grammar checker is overwhelmed. • I found it myself at a loss for words. (You can see for yourself that this sentence is nonsense. We may write such sentences when we make revisions but fail to complete the rewrites properly.) • Below is a list of FAQs. (Obviously correct to you, but not to the grammar checker.) • He checked out it himself. Explanation: In this case the grammar checker didn't respond with a correction, but there was a green squiggly line under it, so writers may not have known what to make of it. It's perfectly correct. Himself is an intensive pronoun, referring (reflecting") back to the word He. If you want to share your examples of other types of errors that (1) grammar checkers didn't catch or (2) they gave you an explanation that you either didn't understand or didn't agree with, e-mail them, and I'll try to lend a hand. Top executives, board directors, and financial institutions that profited by Enron's success saw to it that any and every means be pursued to feed their ever-expanding standards of living.
| SEPT
98 | OCT 98 | NOV 98 |
DEC 98 | JAN 99 |
FEB 99 | MAR 99 |
APR 99 | MAY 99 | JUNE
99 | | WRITING TIPS |
MEET THE DOCTOR | SPLEEN
VENTING | SEAL |
SITE RESUSCITATION | JUST THE WAY IT IS |
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