Recent reports on the -gate front: on September 20th, in a comment from Chris Waigl on my mooch(er)- word posting, moochergate; and in the September 24th New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece “Gropegate” (p. 34) by Ben McGrath, about NY state assemblyman Vito Lopez and his reported inclination to grope female staff.
These took me back to a reporter’s query in June about -gate words.
Corrections in publications usually focus on matters of content (someone’s age, the correct title of a publication, the date of an event), on typos, or on unintended ambiguities, but occasionally usage crops up, as in this Correction of the Week from the New Yorker of September 24th (p. 95):
From the San Jose Mercury News.
An item in the July 12 News of the World column about police confronting beachgoers incorrecty reported what the beachgoers were doing. They were not flouting their breasts, they were flaunting them.
Today’s Zits:
This is the latest in a series of strips about Jeremy and Sarah: Jeremy seems not to be listening to Sarah at all (and Jeremy’s father is presented as doing the same to Jeremy’s mother), and now, when Jeremy responds, it’s in monosyllables — he’s speaking, but not communicating.
That gives us two stereotypes at once: genderspeak and teenspeak. Males don’t listen, males are uncommunicative (especially when talking to females), and the teen stereotypes are for “laconic guys and gabby guys”.
In the strip above, Jeremy finally produces a minimally non-monosyllabic response. I doubt that it will satisfy Sarah.
At sundown today begins Yom Kippur:
Yom Kippur (Hebrew: יוֹם כִּפּוּר, … or יום הכיפורים), also known as Day of Atonement, is the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people. Its central themes are atonement and repentance. Jewish people traditionally observe this holy day with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogue services. Yom Kippur completes the annual period known in Judaism as the High Holy Days or Yamim Nora’im (“Days of Awe”). (link)
Despite the deep seriousness (and foodlessness) of the day, many have been tempted to play on the name, as here:
(Hat tip to Bert Vaux, who credited Russell Mystiek.)
As for kippers:
A kipper is a whole herring, a small, oily fish, that has been split from tail to head, gutted, salted or pickled, and cold smoked. (link)
Suitable for breaking the fast, though lox or smoked whitefish (and eggs, bread, and cheese) would be more traditional.
From Henry Mensch on Facebook, this advice on the lifehacker (“Tips and downloads for getting things done”) site (by Adam Pash):
Email Writing Values: Concision, Concision, Concision (by Adam Pash)
Before we get started, I should preempt this post with a concise summary of the helpful suggestions below, in case you don’t want to wade through all that pesky text:
In your email, be brief and to the point.
Cut it down to subject only if you can with EOM.
For most email, try to keep it under five sentences.
What I noticed first was preempt, which is certainly the wrong word. Then the wordiness of the advice, going exactly against content of the advice. And, finally, the choice of concision rather than conciseness. Three very different considerations.
In the mail a few days ago, an announcement for a multimedia performance at Ohio State’s Mershon Center on October 12th: a live-action graphic novel entitled The Intergalactic Nemesis.
(Only a bit about language; mostly about (animated) cartoons and cultural analysis.)
From Henry Mensch on Facebook, a link to the Smithsonian Magazine blog Paleofuture by Matt Novak, with a 9/19/12 posting on “50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters”.
From Steven Weinberg‘s article “Why the Higgs?”, New York Review of Books 8/16/12, p. 78, two conjoined objects with a personal pronoun as 2nd conjunct. First, in par. 5, with the first 1sg pronoun in the piece:
This is what happens in the theory of weak and electromagnetic forces proposed in 1967–1968 by Abdus Salam and myself.
and then, in par. 8, after an occurrence of Salam and I as subject:
One of the consequences of theories in which symmetries are broken by scalar fields, including the models considered by Goldstone and the 1964 papers and the electroweak theory of Salam and me, is that …
That is, Weinberg introduces himself into the text with a reflexive pronoun, myself. A nominative form I follows, in When Salam and I used ...; after it, an accusative me (and then another nominative I, in Salam and I found …). Those exhaust the 1sg pronouns in the text.
What’s notable about this is the myself, an “untriggered” reflexive, neither anaphoric (with an antecedent in its clause) nor emphatic (doubling another NP, as in He himself did it). The usage literature is pretty much dead set against untriggered myself, which means that this literature doesn’t even consider what writers like Weinberg are doing with it.
A “Lives” column by Robin Marantz Henig (“I’m With Stupid: The pleasures of learning tap-dance (badly) in middle age”) in the New York Times Magazine of September 16th indulges in several nounings of adjectives.