Lost causes in grammar

In 1951, when I was in the first grade, a paperback book called Grammar at Work was published. It was the work of Joseph Bellafiore, principal of Lafayette High School in New York City. I was recently handed a copy of this book, on the cover of which is written in ink, "Desk Copy - H.R. 18." The book remains in remarkably good shape, so apparently it was not used that much.

Leafing through it, I was drawn to a section called "Errors to avoid in diction or choice of words." There are 78 of these errors to avoid, and most of them still make sense all these years later. The first one, for example, advises not to say accept when you mean except. The last one discourages the use of youse. Good advice, I'd say.

Yet several of these 78 points remind me of how true are this book's very first words, "a living language." Living things change. And the English language has changed since 1951.

Take for instance the use of the word some as an adjective meaning excellent. Bellafiore forbids this. Yet the very next year, 1952, Charlotte's Web was published. And we all remember the words Charlotte spun on her web to save her friend, Wilbur the pig, from the dinner table: "Some pig." This book was written by E.B. White, one of the authors of The Elements of Style, a much more important book than Grammar at Work on the subject of proper English usage. The battle to save some from being used as an adjective in this way
was lost right there.

Some other lost causes that Bellafiore fought for include these:

Do not say aggravate as a synonym for irritate. Yes, aggravate means "to make worse," but meanings change over time, and now most people think it means to irritate, only more so.

Do not use can when you are asking for permission. Kids of my generation grew up playing the game "Mother May I?", the point of which seemed to be to teach us that may was the proper word to use when asking for permission. It didn't work. I suspect that most of the English teachers I had said can rather than may, at least outside the classroom.

Do not say healthy when you mean healthful. Children are healthy because they eat healthful foods and get healthful exercise. But when is the last time you heard anyone use the word healthful?

Do not use mad when you mean angry. Mad may actually mean insane, but most of us get a little insane when we get angry. At any rate most people have been saying mad to mean angry for a long time. That ship has sailed.

Use the word nice to mean "refined or carefully discriminating," not "pleasant or well-behaved." What? I can't remember a time when nice didn't mean pleasant or well-behaved.

Say plan to, not plan on. Sure. I plan on doing just that.

The joy of gobbledygook

Some words are just more fun to say than others. Rutabaga, for example. Or pumpernickel.

Somehow neither of these words made the cut for L Is for Lollygag: Quirky Words for a Clever Tongue, a charming dictionary of words that are a pleasure to pronounce. Many of these words, such as gobbledygook or humdinger, aren't even necessary. We have other, shorter, simpler words we could use. But, especially in the spoken word as opposed to the written word, brevity and simplicity are not primary objectives. More important, at least in casual conversation, is entertainment value.

Comedians know this. Writers like Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll knew it as well. Yes, they were working with written language, but they knew their books would be often read aloud and enjoyed as much for the sound of the words as for their meaning. (In Carroll's case, sometimes the words didn't even have any meaning.) We might say the same thing about Dr. Seuss.

Say aloud some of these words from L Is for Lollygag: cantankerous, dungarees, haberdasher, hullabaloo, peccadillo, plethora, rapscallion, rumpus, scalawag, serendipity, wisenheimer and Zamboni. Pleasurable words need not have several syllables. Even words like crux and rogue are included.

I was surprised how often I thought of my mother while reading this book. I didn't realize it during my youth, but she must have loved the sound of such words as catawampus, conniption, gadabout, gallivant, gumption, kitty-corner and persnickety. All these words are in the book.

If the words are fun, so are the definitions. Here's how this book defines amok: "going  crazy or out of control, like children who've had too much sugar. People usually run amok because walking amok would take too long." With writing like that it's a shame Chronicle Books did not see fit to give the writers, Molly Glover and Kate Hodson, cover credit. Their names are listed, however, in small print, on the copyright page. To that I say fiddlesticks!

A novel collection of stories

Is it a novel or a book of short stories? Surprisingly, it isn't always easy to tell.

Take Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, for example, or Mister Monkey by Francine Prose. Both consist of stories that could stand alone, yet they have characters and a few other points of reference in common. It helps when the author makes it clear what it is, as Edward Rutherfurd does when he tells the history of places like London, Paris and New York in a series of stories, some of which may take place decades or even centuries apart. He calls his books novels, so that is what they are. Other writers aren't as helpful.

I started reading Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House (2004) under the impression it was a novel. Soon I was not so sure. Some editions of the book identify it as a novel. Mine does not. Neither the paperback cover nor the copyright page makes it clear. Then I skipped ahead to a conversation with the author at the end of the book, where Hoffman refers to her "stories." So let's call it that, yet her book actually has much in common with Rutherfurd's. While Rutherfurd tells the history of a certain place with related, sometimes reoccurring characters, Hoffman does the same thing, but her place is a fictional New England house. Her "history" tells of the occupants of that house over a couple of centuries.

These stories are beautifully written in that lyrical style Hoffman does so well in her best work. Some end tragically, as with sailors lost at sea, a murder or a suicide, while others paint more positive pictures. As for painting pictures, the most important color on Hoffman's palette is red. In these stories we find red hair, red skin, red pears, red oaks, red-winged blackbirds and so on. There is the more common blackbird in the first story, "The Edge of the World," but after that it is a white blackbird that flies through the stories, as if it were the ghost of that original bird. Some characters view it as an omen, but whether it brings good luck or bad varies from story to story.

Hoffman says in the conversation at the end that Blackbird House began with a short story she was asked to write for the Boston Globe. That story, "The Summer Kitchen," inspired the rest.

I love this book, whatever it is.

Reading as character building

Karen Swallow Prior

I have yet to read Karen Swallow Prior's book On Reading Well, but I did find an interview with her on the web that I found interesting. She argues that reading builds character, or at least can build character. It depends upon what we read, how carefully we read it and how well we digest what we read.

"What we read contributes to virtue when we read timeless works that convey universal human experiences that transcend time, place, and social position," she says. "In the book, I show how we can learn about diligence from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, patience from Jane Austen's Persuasion, justice from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities — and much more."

Watching the PBS series The Great American Read I was struck by how often those people interviewed to promote one novel or another spoke of the virtue conveyed through that particular novel. It wasn't just an entertaining story. It was a story with a good message, a story that teaches something good to its readers.

I recall one woman saying that reading a good novel was a better way to work through one's problems than going to a therapist. It may also do more to make you a better person than listening to any sermon. A novel places you in the mind of another person, putting your feet into that person's moccasins, so to speak. Just the act of viewing things from another person's point of view can make you a better, more sensitive person.

Can movies do the same thing? Well, yes, at least up to a certain point. Movies, however, deal more  with images than with words, and never mind the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. In reality, words carry more lasting impact. Last Satuday at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg I heard Roy Peter Clark, author of The Art of X-ray Reading, say that if you add up all the words in the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer and a few other notable pieces of writing, you come up with fewer than a thousand words. Yet no picture could mean as much or convey as much as those words.

Words from war

A few days ago we marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War on Nov. 11, 1918. The war was great only in the sense that it was big, not that it was very good. Just a few years later there was an even greater war, so now we just call it World War I. Let's hope we stop counting.

Big events often add words to our vocabulary, and that was certainly true of that war. Each fall I try to celebrate, or at least observe, the 100th anniversary of the birth of new words or expressions in the English language, and it should be no surprise that the war that finally ended in 1918 produced a number of new words, including a few that year such as buck private, D-day and recon, all words I would have expected to have come out of World War II. The word internee may also be a product of the war. The expression oo-la-la probably also resulted from the war, since we associate it with French women, and American soldiers certainly met a lot of French women during and after the war.

Jeannette Rankin

The Russian Revolution began in 1917, but not until the following year did a lot of words associated with that event find their way into the language. Consider Bolshie, Leninism, neo-Marxism and Red Army.

The election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to Congress in 1916 led to the creation of the word congresswoman in 1918. Why it took a full year for that to happen I cannot imagine.

Here are some other useful words that sprang into existence that year: baby blues, blah, breakthrough, decertify, defeatism, defeatist, devalue, both extrovert and introvert, fadeout, force-feed, major (as a verb), maladapted, Mickey Finn, motorboating, Murphy bed, narcissistic, politicization, pre-med, roomie, rustproofing, scrimpy, shimmy, speedster, streamline (as a verb), surrealist and umpteen.

A few words coined in 1918 have all but disappeared from the language. I am speaking of farmerette Girl Guiding, Indianization and pitch-in dinner.

As always I am grateful to Sol Steinmetz and his book There's a Word for It for this little birthday party.

Dogs take charge

The dogs had to have their chance. Had to be left unhampered to try for success where the human race had failed.

Clifford D. Simak, City

In City, Clifford D. Simak’s classic sci-fi novel from 1952, the world has gone to the dogs, quite literally. Educated dogs like Bounce and Rover aren’t even sure that Man ever existed. He may have just been a mythical creature. Nevertheless they ponder the meaning of a series of eight tales that describe the gradual disappearance of humans and the emergence of dogs as the dominant species.

Sometimes thousands of years pass between these stories, so great changes sometimes take place between tales. Mankind does not become extinct exactly. Most humans choose to relocate to Jupiter, where existence is possible only by taking a radically different form, thus becoming something other than man. This new form somehow alters the mind in a way that makes it becomes to the human mind. Those who do not migrate elect instead to "take the sleep," or hibernate, for long periods, forever in some cases.

They leave behind their dogs, who have learned to think and speak like humans, and robots, which can do all the things dogs can't do, lacking thumbs. This new world seems like an ideal one, for there is a strong moral code forbidding violence against other creatures. Dogs won't even harm their fleas, though the fleas don't seem to live by the same code.

Yet trouble is brewing in this Eden. The world is becoming seriously overpopulated, and killing may be the only solution.

Simak maintains a serious tone throughout a relatively short novel that could easily turn comic. He tackles some tough issues and poses some intriguing situations. He also, in a book published 66 years ago, offers a perceptive look into 21st century living: "It was all here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair." Except for that "twirling a dial" part, that's a pretty accurate picture of the Internet.

English words from non-English places

Two books I read recently were goldmines of word origins, a subject I find interesting.

In Hero of the Empire, Candice Millard's account of Winston Churchill's daring escape during the Boer War, she mentions the possible origins of such words as:

Early trench coats

trench coat — So called because British soldiers wore a similar coat designed by Thomas Burberry in the trenches in France during World War I. Earlier Burberry made gaberdine coats for soldiers fighting in South Africa.

sniper — In India, riflemen skilled enough to kill small birds called snipes were termed snipers.

khaki — Derived from a Urdu word for dust.

corral — The Boers got their word kraal from the Portuguese word curral, meaning a circular livestock enclosure. The English turned it into corral.

Tony Horowitz serves up even more word origins in A Voyage Long and Strange:

saga — It "stems from a Norse word for 'say,'" says Horowitz.

canoe — From the native word canoa, heard by Christopher Columbus.

hammock — Caribbean islanders called this swinging bed a hamaca.

tobacco — Islanders smoked rolled-up weeds, which they called tabacos.

cannibal — Natives told Columbus about a man-eating tribe called the Canibales.

hurricane — From the Taino word huracan.

barbecue — From the Taino word barbacoa.

Appalachian — There was an Indian tribe in Florida called the Apalachee.

moccasin — From the Algonquin word mockasin

tomahawk - From the Algonquin word tomahack.

raccoon — From the Indian word aroughcun.

Horowitz also suggests, without much conviction, that the Indian chammay, meaning friend, may be where the English got the word chum.