Sorry, my mistake

 

Sorry, My Mistake

Before it slips even farther into the past, let’s revisit the experience of Tom Craig at the Paris Olympics. He was a member of the Australian field hockey team and was arrested for buying cocaine. He later apologized and said, “I made a terrible mistake.”

That’s also the word used by the person in charge of all Australia’s athletes at the games, Anna Meares. She said, among other things, that “he has owned up to his mistake.” But she still sent him home.

Here’s a fellow who decides to buy cocaine. He seeks out a seller. He pays the going rate. All purposeful, voluntary actions. Then he says he made a “mistake.”

A mistake is inadvertent, unintentional, like when I write the wrong date on a check. Or when I try getting into the wrong car at the mall because its identical to mine.

If you catch me breaking into your house, are you okay with me saying, “Sorry, my mistake”? Or what if I say I meant to break into the house next door? “Sorry, my mistake.”

Here are the four ways Merriam-Webster defines “mistake,” with examples.

1.      To blunder in the choice of [mistook her way in the dark]

2.      To misunderstand the meaning or intention of [don't mistake me, I mean exactly what I said]

3.      To make a wrong judgment of the character or ability of [The army's leaders mistook the strength of the enemy]

4.      To identify wrongly, confuse with another [I mistook him for his brother]

Then there’s the sense in which Craig used the word, which was, “I displayed mind-blowingly appalling judgment, but if I call it a ‘mistake’ maybe people will be more forgiving.”

I might be more forgiving if he had later said, “I made a mistake when I said ‘mistake.’”

[300 words]

Word Kill

 

Kill Your Darlings

Any writer can put words on a page or a screen. But good writers know which ones to kill.

Let’s look at five realms of redundancy.

Bureaucratic Speak: Here’s an example from a British government report. “What I have said has demonstrated that it is very difficult to find an answer to that question, but if pressed for an answer I would say that, so far as we can see, taking it rather by and large, taking one thing with another, and taking the average of departments, it is probable that there would not be found to be very much in it either way.” How about, “It’s a toss-up”?

Dead words: Words that are fine in speech kneecap our writing: Very (I once had a student use “very” fourteen times on one page), really, actually, etc.

Email: What could be cut in this exchange?

·         I’ve attached the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting.

·         Thanks.

·         You’re welcome.

·         We’ll talk more then.

·         Sure.

·         Look forward to it.

·         Me too.

·         Take care.

·         And you.

Will someone strangle those two?

[I don’t text, so I am spared the horror of those individuals who feel compelled to send a “like” to every text they receive.]

General Bloat [not to be confused with Major Disaster, Corporal Punishment and certainly not Private Parts]: Some examples, with possible solutions:

·         in the event that = if

·         regardless of the fact that = though

·         under the circumstances in which = when

Personal Bad Habits: We all have words with which we’ve fallen in love, our darlings. They serve as default fillers when we’re not writing thoughtfully. When I’ve finished a draft I’ll follow the writing advice of whoever said “kill your darlings” (apparently Arthur Quiller Couch) and launch a search and destroy mission against simply, just, and indeed.

Down with needless redundancy!

[300 words]

Clarity, Originality, Simplicity

A recent edition of The Economist had a spoof advice column in its business section, with this question and answer.

My manager often says that “we need to go to the balcony.” Everyone else nods, but then they don’t actually go anywhere. As far as I can see our office doesn’t even have a balcony. In a meeting the other week one person said “this is a two-finger point” and the person running the meeting replied “let’s double-click on that later.” I have no idea what is going on half the time. What can I do to keep up?

Just hang in there. Incomprehension is an enormous part of office life. You will eventually develop a sense of what phrases like this mean. In fact, you will eventually start saying this kind of rubbish yourself and someone else will write to me about you.

And now, my 300 word response…

Clarity, Originality, Simplicity

This blog is two years old. The first post was on July 3, 2022. If you’re still reading, thank you. (If you’re not, well, you’re not.)

So here is my vision for the next two years. Eyeballing the blog’s performance to date, it’s clear when I run the numbers that the blog has yielded a synergistic blend of low-hanging fruit coupled with a curated product that consistently delivers even more than 110 percent.

Following what I am confident were best practices, and without moving the goalposts, I have tried to bring to the table the blog’s underlying core competencies, or strengths: words! Using words as leverage, then, despite lots of moving parts in a robust competitive environment that is the blogosphere today, more than once I’ve had to engage in blue sky thinking as I’ve circled back to prioritizing the blog’s key takeaways.

In mid-2023 I had an aha moment—something of a game changer, you might say—when without reinventing the wheel I realigned the blog’s key performance indicators to better gain traction as I sought enhanced reader buy-in. And the bottom line? You, dear readers, are the deliverables.

Always aspiring to utilize cutting edge digitization opportunities, I ran a beta version up the flagpole in November last year. Results were mixed. Initially, I accepted that it is what it is and was tempted to leave everything on the back burner. But, to my surprise, as the re-envisioned approach broke down the silos that impacted the blog’s performance, I grasped what could be achieved by thinking outside the box. The bandwidth we needed was there all along.

You can be assured that the core values securing mission alignment will sustain this blog going forward. You can be assured of the clarity, originality, and simplicity you have come to expect.

[300 words] 

More Easier

 

More Easier

            This morning I corrected a young woman who said something was “more easier.” Not so, I said; it was either “easier” or “more easy.” Used as an adjective, I told her, one could say a task was “easy/easier/easiest.” (“Easy” can also be an adverb, a noun or even a verb, according to Wiktionary…)

            I don’t normally correct people’s speech, tempted though I am. (I once corrected the grammar on a consent form before having a root canal.) This woman, however, welcomed the correction and explanation. She was a native Russian speaker, a refugee who has been in Spokane for a year and she and I were at the Barton School, a language program at First Presbyterian Church in Spokane.

I’ve been volunteering there for about eight months, interacting with students from around the world. Some are beginners; others, like my student, already have credible spoken English. Many are refugees; others are in the US for family reasons. What they have in common, though, is a commitment to improving their English fluency. The courage, patience and perseverance of these students is humbling. I cannot imagine waking up one morning in a country whose language was totally alien to me. My mind often goes back to the summer of 1992, when thanks to a Whitworth University grant I spent six weeks in Guatemala learning Spanish. I still recall the frustrations I had learning the grammar, especially a mysterious thing called the subjunctive, and not pronouncing words correctly. Fortunately, my well-being didn’t depend on speaking Spanish. The Barton students, though, have no choice but to try and master our devilishly difficult, illogical, inconsistent language. (Just think how we pronounce ough in cough, tough, through, thorough, dough, thought and drought.)

Yes, English is a difficult language. If only it were more easier.

[300 words]

 

 

Word Perfect 

I’ve been working with an editor on my latest book, I’ll be Your Server, a series of reflections on servants in the Bible. As we go back and forth on placement of commas or singular versus plural verbs, I’m aware that we’ll not catch everything we should. I’ve increasingly accepted that there are no perfect books. All my books, and I assume all other books as well, have errors: typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, or whatever.

My son, Matthew, is an excellent proofreader. He invariably catches numerous errors in my drafts. But even he doesn’t catch everything, and within about 17 minutes after opening my latest book, he can be guaranteed to find at least one more elusive typo. Sigh…

This leads to acute schadenfreude [pleasure at someone else’s misfortune] when I discover the typos of others, and I’m reminded of their humanity—and mine.

Three examples. A music organization in Spokane proudly advertised its upcoming “12-hour continuous recital.” Unfortunately, they omitted the “i” in “recital.”

The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas in Austin, published its commencement brochure describing itself as “The School of Pubic Affairs.” The School duly issued an apology for what it termed its “eggregious typo.”

Then there is the so-called “Wicked Bible,” published in 1631. It proclaimed in Exodus 20:14 that “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

I’ve recently read Dreyer’s English, by the former copy-editing chief of Penguin-Random House, Benjamin Dreyer. He notes how difficult it is to attain perfection in editing and even he continues to find errors in books that he has edited.

Writers and editors are uncomfortably aware of the first part of Alexander Pope’s line, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” But we turn to you, dear reader, to embrace the bit about forgivenes.

[300 words]

 

 

Welcome Words, Wicked Words, Wasted Words

 

Welcome Words, Wicked Words, Wasted Words

This month’s 300-words entry is late: Sue and I were in Pennsylvania helping take care of our twin grandchildren, Sophie and Hazel, until earlier this week. It was a delight to hear first-hand their steadily increasing vocabularies.

Words were much on my mind during that visit, both because of the girls and the two books I’d taken along to read.

One was specifically about words and the comedian who became legendary for using bad ones: George Carlin. The book, Carlin’s autobiography, Last Words, described growing up in New York and how he became a nationally renowned comedian. The book’s downside was the gratuitous foul language and the depressing accounts of his drug and alcohol abuse. Still, the examples of his comic routines highlighted his remarkable facility with words.

The second book was a novel selected for a mindless read. (I’ll mention neither the author nor the title to protect the guilty.) It purported to be a crime thriller. But the real crime was that the book was an appalling waste of words. The protagonist lacked any credibility: a former homicide detective who had palatial homes on the East and West coasts. He was also a lawyer and a pilot who flew his private jet to his English estate. The dialogue was painfully predictable and the story ended with one significant plotline unresolved. In brief, this was one of the worst written books I’ve ever read. I kept hoping that it would get better; it didn’t.

Two lessons. First. I was reminded that writers should never send readers away disappointed. Give them something: amusement, hope, entertainment, information, inspiration, whatever. Second, I should have remembered John Ruskin’s words: “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.” Too late.

[300 words]

AI in My Time of Need

 

AI in My Time of Need

Not having any inspiration that merited a 300-word blog entry dealing with words, I did what any self-respecting student would do: either copy and paste something from Wikipedia or go straight to AI Chat or a comparable website. First, though,I asked AI Chat, “Is there anything wrong with asking you to write a story for me?”

Here's part of AI’s answer: There is nothing inherently wrong with asking someone to write a story for you. However, it is important to consider the time and effort that goes into writing a story, and it is courteous to compensate the writer for their work if you are requesting a custom story.

I didn’t find this especially compelling so I thought I’d try a different tack altogether, and asked if it knew who the legendary Portuguese explore Vasco da Gama was, and if he’d vote for Donald Trump as president. Here’s the response:

Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer who was the first European to reach India by sea. He was born in the late 15th century and is known for his groundbreaking voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to the east coast of Africa and then on to India. It is impossible to say definitively whether da Gama would have voted for Donald Trump, as it is purely speculative and based on personal opinions and beliefs. Since da Gama lived centuries before Trump and in a different cultural and historical context, it is unlikely he would have had the opportunity to participate in modern American politics.

Then, the story. I was impressed that AI delivered a coherent piece of 301 words. I cut one word to match the spirit of this blog. So here, following my 300 words (admittedly padded with AI’s help), are another 300—exactly—courtesy of AI.

In the bustling city of Verboten, words were a rare and precious commodity. They were kept locked away in a grand library, guarded by the esteemed Wordkeeper. Only those deemed worthy could enter its hallowed halls and partake in the knowledge and power that words held.

One day, a young girl named Nova stumbled upon the library by accident. Intrigued by the magnificent structure and the whispers of stories and wisdom that emanated from within, she begged the guards to let her in. Reluctantly, they agreed, sensing something special about her.

As Nova wandered through the aisles filled with books of every color and size, she was overcome with a sense of wonder and awe. She had never experienced the magic of words before, and she was determined to learn all that she could.

The Wordkeeper took notice of Nova's insatiable thirst for knowledge and decided to take her under his wing. He taught her the power of words, how they could inspire, educate, and bring people together. Nova soaked up every lesson, her heart swelling with the beauty of language and expression.

Nova became known throughout the city for her eloquence and wit. People would gather in the town square to hear her speak, hanging on her every word as she painted vivid pictures with her language.

And so, the once-silent city of Verboten was transformed by Nova's words. They brought joy, unity, and understanding to its inhabitants, showing them the power and magic that lay within every syllable and phrase.

And as Nova stood in the town square, surrounded by the people she had touched with her words, she knew that she had found her true calling – to share the gift of language with the world and bring light to even the darkest corners of the human heart.

 [600 words]