Description:
This is a blog about language—word and phrase origins, grammar and punctuation, writing tips, language use, misuse and abuse, as well as words in general. Brought to you by an expatriate instructor of English. It is concerned with mainly English, as well as the way English interacts with other languages.
Interestingly, I once read a National Geographic article (I think it was in the early 1990's) in which a researcher described a single conversation (in American-Sign-Language) between 3 species: a human, a gorilla, and a chimpanzee. Here's an excerpt from the ABC article:
The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos -- a close relative of the chimpanzee -- and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a strange place for them to live, don't say it out loud ... these apes understand English.
You can talk to the apes, and they know what you are saying.
The residents of the Great ApeTrust are part of groundbreaking language research where the apes are being taught to communicate with humans by pressing 350 lexigrams —symbols that appear on a screen and represent thoughts and objects.
The superstar is 26-year-old Kanzi, whom Bill Fields has been working with for years. To communicate, Fields speaks to Kanzi, who then points to the lexigrams to respond and demonstrate a level of understanding.
"Qualitatively, there is no difference between Kanzi's language and my language," Fields said. "It's a matter of degree."
The key to ensuring they grasp the language, the researchers said, is to start teaching them when they are young, just like you would with human babies.
In that National Geographic article, I remember the researcher also reportedly asked the chimpanzees which type of music they preferred, and they responded "Jazz".
Some of the chipanzees described in the article even made up new compound words, such as combining the word "Candy" and "Drink" to describe grape juice as "Candy-Drink".
My only stand is on behalf of better writing. I take no sides in the debate over capital punishment, which gives rise to today's point.
Too often, articles on Google News say someone is to be executed by lethal injection or is sentenced to be put to death by lethal injection. In each case, lethal is redundant. An injection that kills is lethal to begin with.
I am passively considering a career change. I'm passively pursuing a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. I'm passively engaging others in debate about better writing.
What is it that possesses bureaucrats to say they are actively considering, actively pursuing, actively engaging? For example, the paper told me this week my governor is actively considering a tax on 401k plans.
Is this like a submarine movie in which the captain searches with active and passive sonar? Can the governor passively consider a tax hike and then—ping!—switch to active consideration?
Of course not. It's bureaucratic jargon, garbage that's invading our language. You consider or don't consider, engage or don't engage, pursue or don't pursue. It's redundant and silly to say actively before any of these. To illustrate, try saying passively, the antonym of actively, instead.
Don't blame the bureaucrats. They can't help it. But there's no excuse for this junk appearing in articles, most of them—surprise, surprise—about government.
"Worst of all is the kind of jargon employed as an obfuscating technique in bureaucratic or political contexts," Fowler's Modern English Usage says in its lengthy entry on jargon. "Genuine communication in such areas of life has never been more important in our inflammatory and dangerous times."
I'm actively considering sending the author a thank you letter.
It's called the wayward apostrophe, the superfluous apostrophe or the errant apostrophe. I call it the #@%*&$@ apostrophe. It's the erroneous use of an apostrophe in common plural words and in other contexts.
You've seen it: a carved sign declaring The Smith's live in the home; a scrawled banana's for sale; a menu listing fresh prawn's. Some usage guides call this a greengrocer's apostrophe, as it shows up so often in the produce section (orange's, grape's, apple's).
Fowler's Modern English Usage says it once was proper to use an apostrophe to create a plural when a noun ended in a vowel. Since the mid-1800s, it says, grammarians have condemned this. "But it continues to appear, to the amusement of educated people, in signs and notices," it says.
"Superfluous apostrophes are a symptom of unedited prose and of the inexperienced writer," The Cambridge Guide to English Usage says. "As applicationsof the apostrophe begin to shrink, expert writers and editors are also less certain about its use."
Garner's Modern American Usage notes the wayward apostrophe often finds its way into the word says. Google News turns up plenty of articles with say's.
"The only possible cure is increased literacy," Garner's says.
After a storm, tornado, hurricane, flood, etc., bureaucrats assess damages. Speakers of English assess damage.
After a flood, one bureaucrat was quoted in the newspaper offering "a statement of damages from the storm events we had." He added that more money "would help us to recover some of the costs for the damages that occurred."
This kind of bureaucrat-speak is why God created paraphrasing, GrammarHell.com suggests. We'll simply wince at storm events and deal with damage/damages.
Garner's Modern American Usage notes that "the singular damage refers to loss or injury to person or property; the plural damages refers to monetary compensation for such a loss or injury."
The Associated Press Stylebooksays simply, "Damage is from destruction ... Damages are awarded as compensation for injury, loss, etc."
A tornado causes damage, followed by lawsuits seeking damages over shoddy construction.
Trying to bloc out time for a vacation? It'll never happen.
An alliance or alignment of people, groups, nations, investors, voters, etc., is a bloc. Block applies in any other case in which block or bloc is used.
Block as a noun covers "a quantity, number, or section of things dealt with as a unit," such as a block of time, according to Mirriam-Webster OnLine.
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage lists people among the things that can be dealt with as a unit. Thus GrammarHell.com can't complain when the newspaper, as it did recently, says that candidates are "divvying up blocks of support." It's correct if the people within the blocks aren't aligned.
Among other meanings for block: a solid piece of material (block of wood); a heavy stand used for chopping; an obstruction. Block as a verb means, among other things, to obstruct, to mount or mold on a block or to sketch roughly.
It might help to keep in mind that bloc is never a verb. You'll never bloc out time.
An article says a certain state normally has so many millions of dollars each year to disperse to law enforcement. Unless officials plan to toss bills into the wind, letting cops run for them, the writer meant disburse.
This is a common error and warrants an especially involved entry in Garner's Modern American Usage. Disburse means to pay out, as from a fund. Disperse means to scatter or spread widely or in all directions.
Those with editors are as confused as anyone. You'll find dozens of errors (mixed in with some correct uses) when you run these queries in Google News: dispersed, disperse, dispersing money; dispersed, disperse, dispersing funds.
It works the other way as well. You'll find plenty of erroneous references on Google News to crowds that disbursed or disburse.
One grammar guide tells me Star Trek Capt. James T. Kirk should be reprimanded for splitting an infinitive when he says, "to boldly go where no man has gone before."
Heresy, I say. Would it mean half as much if Kirk had said, "to go boldly where no man has gone before?" Yech.
A split infinitive occurs when a word, usually an adverb, separates the infinitive marker to from the verb (for more on infinitives, click here).
In general, you want to avoid splitting infinitives. But don't go nuts doing it. "Knowing when to split requires a good ear and a keen eye," Garner's Modern American Usage says.
Click on the following examples and you'll see that to flatly reject doesn't convey the same meaning as to reject flatly. Thus, a split is justified to preserve meaning.
The simplest grammar, it says, can be taught to a common songbird. That's if you believe research some supposed expert has put forward.
The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.
Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.
So do these results disprove famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theorythat "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language?
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