A Pointless Competition

 

A Pointless Competition

I was recently in a doctor’s waiting room where there was a sign on a door that read, “Do not block door.” Yet there was a clear and ample pathway leading to and from the door; I would have had to go out of my way to move furniture or seek other objects to block the entry. It would have been different if this were a fire exit and near clutter that would have been a hazard in an emergency.

By contrast, a reasonable sign would be “Do not smoke/No smoking.” That’s a behavior that one might realistically need to address.

The likelihood of someone blocking the door was remote. “Do not block door” was a waste of words. They might as well have had signs that read:

·         Do not set fire to the furniture

·         Do not stab yourself in the foot

·         Do not bite other patients

·         Do-it-yourself surgery not permitted

The likelihood of needing to forestall any such actions is close to zero, one would hope.

Which brings us to this blog’s first competition. I’m offering a prize: one of my recent books (see below*). It will go to the reader who emails me what I think is the funniest or most absurdly pointless sign (or signs) that you can imagine appearing in a doctor’s waiting room. Deadline: July 25.

The books are:

·         I’ll be Your Server: The Heart of Christian Discipleship

·         Meet the Dog that Didn’t Sh*t:101 Reflections on Words and Their Magic

·         Sit, Stand, Walk, Run: A Vocabulary for the Christian’s Journey

·         The God Who Blesses

·         Your Photo on God’s Fridge Door: 101 Parables and Analogies for Today

See Amazon for more information about these titles.

* I can send the prize only to someone in the USA or Canada; sorry.

May the most imaginative reader win.

[300 words]

Vocabularies and Fingerprints

 

Vocabularies and Fingerprints

Each Friday I volunteer at the Barton School, at Spokane’s First Presbyterian Church. The School’s mission is to help non-English speakers improve their fluency. I’m constantly struck by the students’ courage and tenacity in trying to figure out the complexities and inconsistencies characterizing English.

Then there’s their vocabularies. I’m often surprised by the basic words (in my opinion) that they don’t know and even more surprised by some that they do. Our vocabularies are like our fingerprints: Unique. I’m convinced that none of our vocabularies perfectly overlaps with anyone else’s.

Which brings me to my list of words or phrases. When I’m reading I look up words I don’t know. Well, usually. Then I enter them in a Word document (that’s appropriate). Occasionally I update my list, as I’ve done this month, culling a few that I’ve remembered.

You see, that’s my problem. Merely looking up an unknown word usually isn’t enough to recall its meaning when I encounter it again. As I tell my students, repetition is needed for a word to become a permanent resident in one’s vocabulary.

Here are five of these entries, giving you a small sample of the English words I’ve encountered.

Ambisintrous: Clumsy with both hands. (Remember “ambidextrous”? Then there’s that delightful line, “I’d give my right hand to be ambidextrous”?)

Capgras syndrome: A mental health condition that leads you to think people have all been replaced by exact doubles.

Iatronudia: The tendency of some women to pretend to be sick so they can be seen unclothed in front of their doctors.

Retronym: A term referring to a noun and a modifier that specifies the original meaning of the noun, usually required by technological advances, to clarify meaning. Examples: rotary phone, snail mail, analog watch.

Siffleur: A professional whistler.

Maybe I’ll remember these now.

[300 words]

Friends Old and New

 

Friends Old and New

This month I’ve been re-reading some of my favorite books, relishing other writers’ mastery of words. One of my most-loved books is an anthology of short stories by H. H. Munro, who wrote under the pen name of “Saki.” Sadly, he was killed in World War I at the age of 45. Here are two examples of his inventive mind at work. Who knows how much more he might have brought us had he lived.

·         “The people of Crete make more history than they can consume locally.”

·         “‘Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death,’ said Clovis.”

Then there’s Never Rub Bottoms With A Porcupine, an anthology published by the English magazine, the New Statesman. It’s a compilation of responses to the publication’s literary-style competitions, to which readers respond with sometimes brilliant imagination. One competition (repeated occasionally) requests imagined proverbs of “a self-evident nature.” Three examples:

·         “Gloves make a poor present for a man with no hands.”

·         “A bald man does not fear gray hair.”

·         “A knowledge of Sanskrit is of little use to a man trapped in a sewer.”

But I’ve read new material too, including a book by Roy Peter Clark: The Glamour of Grammar. He provided a colorful reminder to keep a sentence’s subject and verb as close together as possible: “The creation of meaning… requires a subject and a verb, the king and queen of comprehensibility. And the king and queen are most powerful when they sit on adjacent thrones rather than in separate castles far away.”

Especially memorable for me, however, was his example of a Twitter message he encountered: “There’s a dead squirrel in the driveway. Mrs Liebowitz is worried that the death might be gang related. She’s checking FOX News to be sure.”

Ah, the joys of reading.

[300 words]

 

Are You Hangry?

 

“Are you hangry?”—The Conversation

You: “Funny how monosyllabic has five syllables, isn’t it?”

Me: “Yes, English is full of curiosities.”

You: “Such as?”

Me: “Take the letter A. If you start spelling out numbers (1, 2,  3...), you wouldn’t use the letter A until you reached a thousand.”

You: “Speaking of numbers, forty is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order.”

Me: “Regarding alphabetical order, English has a handful of words with each vowel, in order, once only. For example, abstemious and facetious.”

You: “How about this: can you think of any words beginning and ending in und?”

Me: “How about underground? Any others?”

You: “Yes: underfund. My turn: What are the only common words in English that end in -ngry?”

Me: “That’s easy: angry and hungry.”

You: “The Oxford English Dictionary now includes hangry, which combines angry and hungry to mean ‘bad tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.’”

Me: “I’m left handed. So one of my favorite words is stewardesses.”

You: “Because?”

Me: “It’s the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.”

You: “I don’t know if there’s a right-handed equivalent. But I like uncopyrightable; it’s one of only a few words that have 15 letters, none of them repeated.”

Me: “Sort of the opposite of bookkeeping, which has three repeats in a row.”

You: “I like words containing other words. My favorite is therein, which gives you 13 words using consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein. If you wonder about er, it’s okay. Merriam-Webster says it’s an interjection, usually indicating hesitation.”

Me: “Does anyone else care about all this?”

You: “Almost certainly not.”

Me: “Interesting word, almost. It’s the longest commonly used English word with all the letters in alphabetical order.”

You: “Oh.”

[300 words]

A Word for You and I

 

A Word for You and I

After reading my January posting a faithful reader noted her irritation when people say something like this: “She said hello to you and I.” I share her pain.

We need “…to you and me.” Because the to is a preposition, we need the objective pronoun. You wouldn’t say, “She said hello to I.”

But her grumble got me thinking: Does it matter if someone says to you and I? You and I know exactly what they mean. Oops: I’ve used the plural they as the pronoun for the singular someone. Does that matter?

I’m not hung up on, nor do I understand, the intricacies of English grammar. Who truly cares about the past pluperfect, modal auxiliary verbs, or interrogative marsupials?

In my book on words, Meet the Dog that Didn’t Sh*t, I noted that English is a dynamic language, with rules and usage perpetually in flux. But while English speakers are continuously reshaping parts of the language I’m convinced that we need some rules and some standards. They may change over time but they are the rules and standards that we happen to have right now. For me, a good rule of thumb is, “Would I correct my children’s speech or writing on this point?”

Linguist David Crystal makes this point about applying grammatical rules with flexibility: “Competent writers know they have the ability to switch into and out of standard English,” what we might define as “good” English, what we’d expect to see in a well-edited book. But he adds that much of our usage is informal: “Every sentence we speak or write involves a choice. We hope we have made the right choices—that we have chosen language which is both meaningful and acceptable to our listeners and readers.”

I’d say that’s good advice for you and I.

[300 words]

 

A Mystery Solved

 

A Mystery Solved

For those of you who read last month’s entry, about “Red Little Riding Hood,” you’ll recall that in English adjectives must be in this order: opinion/size /age/shape/ color/ origin/ material/ purpose Noun. I cited this example: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

(If you didn’t read last month’s entry, this one will make more sense if you go back and do so. For your own benefit. Really.)

Then I mentioned the exception to this rule, the example of the “Big Bad Wolf.” According to the rule, shouldn’t it be the “Bad Big Wolf”? Yes. So what’s going on?

In English when we have two words following each other that are largely the same, but in which we’ve changed the vowel, we must ensure that those vowels follow this order: I-A-O. Thus we have “pitter patter” (I-A) To say “patter pitter” (A-I) sounds wrong.

Linguists call this (you might want to get a pen or pencil and write this down) the ablaut reduplication rule. Other examples? We say flip-flop and tit-for-tat. To say flop-flip or tat-for-tit just sounds wrong. Same with bish bash bosh, which Wiktionary defines as “indicating the completion of a task with efficiency.” Definitely not bash-bish-bosh. The ablaut reduplication rule takes precedence over the adjective-order rule.

Back to the adjective rule for a moment… The book describing these mysteries, Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, shares an anecdote about J. R. R. Tolkien, whose first venture into writing fantasies like The Lord of the Rings began as a 7-year-old. It was about a “green great dragon,” he told his mother. Honoring the adjectives rule, she told him there was no such thing; it had to be a “great green dragon.”

Forsyth says “Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.”

[300 words]

 

Red Little Riding Hood

 

Red Little Riding Hood Has anyone ever told you have a “tell,” something you do without realizing it? Perhaps it’s tugging on your left ear when you’re nervous. In language too we often do things unconsciously. Take adjectives, for example. In English, adjectives normally precede the nouns they’re describing: a dead walrus, a tearful gangster. (Not always, though; we have “heir apparent,” not “apparent heir.”) But what fascinates me is the unspoken rule regarding the order of adjectives we might use, as in “Little Red Riding Hood.” We can’t have “Red Little Riding Hood.” Our ears tell us this is wrong. But why? Author Mark Forsyth explains in his book The Elements of Eloquence that in English, adjectives must be in this order: opinion/size /age/shape/color/origin/material/purpose Noun. He gives this example: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Another writer comments, “If you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.” Because size must come before color, you need to have Little Red Riding Hood. And if you want to say she’s a “good girl,” you need “good little girl” where opinion (good) must come before size (little). That’s why “little good girl” sounds weird. Same with “An ugly old Belgian hunting dog.” You can’t switch to “an old Belgian ugly hunting dog” or “a Belgian hunting ugly old dog.” It’s a complete mess.   That’s why we have the rule. But wait… What about the “Big Bad Wolf”? Here we have size before opinion. Shouldn’t it be “Bad Big Wolf.” Why do we say this? In next month’s blog we’ll look at the explanation for this grammatical minor strange rule. [300 words]