Archive for the 'Grammar Sucks' Category
Consider this from Michael Masnick at TechDirt:
If the current US Copyright Law had been in effect over Shakespeare, I think he could have been sued by many authors for copyright infringement for writing that masterpiece.
Count how many lawsuits there could have been just for King Lear alone:
Shakespeare’s play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Celtic mythological figure Lear/Lir. Shakespeare’s most important source is thought to be the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.
Other possible sources are A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Malcontent (1604), by John Marston; The London Prodigal (1605); Arcadia (1580-1590), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot; Montaigne’s Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden (1606); Albion’s England, by William Warner, (1589); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett (1603), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness. King Lear is also a literary variant of a common fairy tale, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him.
The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus.
I stumbled across a real, live proofreader today writing about her profession for an online publication called MedPage Today. Not only was it refreshing to read about someone’s plying an honorable but almost extinct journalistic trade, but Liz O’Brien also had two great links. (I wonder if Ms. O’Brien would catch what’s seriously wrong with my previous sentence.)
First, she linked to a story about a proofreader who died at his desk and wasn’t discovered for five days. His legendary name is George Turklebaum, and you can read about him here.
What’s even better is a collection of un- or mis-proofread headlines that are worth more than a few chuckles.
A lot of what’s causing heartache for newspaper finances across the land is flying under the radar. Most pundits point to the availability of news online, which is all very good as one contributing factor, and others chart the migration of ads from print to online–or to oblivion in these trying times.
However, as both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Cleveland Plain Dealer announced restructurings over the weekend (the Star Tribune through bankruptcy), the bedrock of newspapers’ financial survival has been gobbled up by Craigslist and other free online advertising venues.
That would be the least flashiest aspect of the business–newspaper classified ads.
So, while newspaper readership is marginally down, classified advertising is hemhorraging. Analyze it as you may, but the bottom line is that newspapers are an endangered species, at least the big-city variety.
Which is all too sad.
Jonathan Littman and Marc Hershon have come out with a new book, and a Web site of the same name, called I Hate People.
What it reveals–and what took me almost my entire professional career to figure out–is that you can’t trust anyone at work. They’ll all stab you in the back or throw you under the bus in an instant–if it somehow helps them.
Now, back to my headline. I could examine the saying, "There’s strength in numbers," from a perspective of where it came from and what it means, but I’d rather cue it into the book, I Hate People.
The authors reveal that forty or so years ago, Fortune magazine did a survey of qualities employers most sought in employees. Teamwork ranked tenth. In a similar survey done by the magazine in 2005, teamwork had jumped to number one.
How depressing, considering that the only people who love teams are those who command their appearance and those blowhards who worm their way into taking charge of them to feed their egos.
Hershon and Littman cite an experiment by a French engineer named Maximilien Ringelmann, who measured people’s efforts pulling on a rope attached to a strain gauge. Pulling in groups, people exerted themselves less; pulling alone, they gave it their all.
This has come to be known as "social loafing," or simply the "Ringelmann Effect."
Either way, it accounts for the futility of throwing teams at a problem. Better to give a million monkeys one typewriter each and see how long it takes them to recreate the Great Books of the Western World.
I’m not sure when he wrote the first edition of his A Short History of Financial Euphoria, but the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith updated it in 1990 following the stock market crash of 1987 and then the savings and loan meltdown of the late 1980s. Those times seem tame compared to what’s transpiring now. Unfortunately, Mr. Galbraith is no longer around to blame our all current problems on Republicans, as he does in this book. (At least in his The Great Crash 1929, he finds plenty of blame to spread around, including to the Federal Reserve.)
I call this book, which is really only a hundred or so pages long and can be read in an hour, must reading because it confirms what should be obvious: Crashes develop because of greed and speculation. What may not be obvious–in fact, I know it’s not that obvious to the general publi–is that greed and speculation arise only after the government fans the flames of, well, greed and speculation by…
Continue reading “Must Reading: ‘Short History of Financial Euphoria’” »
I’d probably have had an easier time figuring out how to spell the winning word in this year’s National Spelling Bee than I would in spelling the winner’s name.
Laodicean, meaning lukewarm to politics, was the deciding word for Kavya (phonetic and easy) Shivashankar (actually, pretty phonetic as well), the 13-year-old winner. Actually, I take it all back–Ms. Shavishankar’s name is the easier one since the c in Laodicean could be confused with sh or ch.
I was happy to note the use of some attempted humor in constructing sentences using the challenge words, as in:
"While Lena’s geusioleptic cooking wowed her boyfriend, what really melted his heart was that she won the National Spelling Bee."
I doubt anyone will be using geusioleptic (tasty) anytime soon when yum and yummy work just as well.
I recently picked up a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by the late and absolutely great chef Julia Child in preparation for a book I was and still am considering to write
While I’ve tried, so far, one of her recipes–the first one, in fact, for Potage Promentier (potato-leek soup)–what truly impresses me about this book is the the absolutely simple, clear and understandable English that Julia used in writing it. No wonder it became the revolutionary cookbook that changed American cooking and eating habits.
Julia Child was an American, of course, who found herself in France with her husband while he was on a diplomatic mission. She soon mastered the French language but also French cuisine, whch she shares in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Even if you have no intention of learning to cook French food, Julia’s book–at least the introduction in which she tells the story of her years in Paris–is a must read to see how beautiful simply written English can be.
Back in her day, people communicated largely by letter since phones were still too expensive and still pretty scarce. People were foced to learn how to make themselves understood in writing. It clearly shows in this masterful work.
In more obfuscation and lawyerese, Obama and his stormtroopers have now exorcised reality from the English language.
Instead of "war on terror" or "war on terrorism," they’re using "overseas contingency operations," and instead of "acts of terror," they’re referring to "man-caused disasters."
George Orwell would be proud, in a negative sort of way, of course.
All of this prompted satirist Joe Queenan to rewrite some Talibanic sayings. In his reworking, "beheadings" become "cephalic attrition" and "flayings" have morphed into "unsolicited epidermal reconfigurations."
Oh, my, and at least another four years of this nonsense out of the nation’s capital, or rather, four more years of this "syntactic reconsideration and reconstitution," otherwise known in plain language, as "utter bullshit."
Somehow I’m not buying the reason the Washington Nationals are giving for some of their players’ wearing misspelled Natinals uniform tops over the weekend. Supposedly, they had to send their opening-day jerseys to MLB offices for display, and the replacement uniforms arrived with the misspelling. Mean to tell me the club supplied only one uniform for the players and had to order replacements that somehow got misspelled? Anyway, here they are in full glory.
Probably to almost every American born from 1970 on, perhaps even much earlier, the name Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) draws a shrug if not some stupid mocking of his name, "Jawawawa who?" or the sort that, unfortunately, Americans are prone to utter to hide their ignorance and to bring everyone down to their own level. Following on the heels of the work of Mahatma Gandhi in leading the overthrow of British rule in India, Nehru served as the modern nation’s first prime minister from 1947 until his death in 1964. He was pretty much a communist who allied his country with the Soviet Union, but we can forgive him that since later on Indian awoke to the powers of freedom and free enterprise. Perhaps his iron grip was needed in the formative days of his nation.
Nehru was educated in Great Britian and was widely read in the true meaning of a classical education. He went on to found many of India’s top institutions of higher education while in office and firmly believed in the power of education. And in the power of words.
I’m reading his remarkable Glimpses of World History, which he wrote while in prison by Great Britain for the sixth time for agitating for statehood and overthrow of the British. What’s remarakble is that he wrote everything from memory and seems to have grasped the broad range–and depths–of world history with remarkable clarity, vision and understanding. The book was gathered and compiled from letters he wrote in prison to his daughter, whose name may be more familiar with Americans, but I doubt it for the newer generations. Her name was Indira Gandhi.
When I started reading Glimpses, I came across this magical description of the passage of time from the perspective of a man serving his sixth prison term for an ideal he so passionately believed in. It reminded me of the passage of my own infinitely more meaningless years on earth:
"It was winter when I came. Winter gave place to our brief spring, slain all too soon by the summer heat, and then, when the ground was parched and dry and men and beasts panted for breath, came the monsoon, with its bountiful supply of fresh and cool rain-water. Autumn followed, and the sky was wonderfully clear and blue….The year’s cycle was over, and again it began: winter and spring and summer and the rainy season. I have sat here, writing to you and thinking of you, and watched the seasons go by, and listened to the pitapat of the rain on my barrack roof."
The passage reminded me of the switfness of life and the mortality that is built into our ever-so-brief days here to enjoy the seasons.
Now for those of you (especially in the media) who think that Obama’s lawyerese and concomitant confidence are somewhere great English, read this passage from Nehru on the independence of his beloved India:
"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity."
My but we’ve come a long ways in 50 years–down a steep decline from greatness that once was.
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