Talk Wordy to Me

Friends have started sending me stories about the typo vigilantes, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, who have a book out, The Great Typo Hunt.

You may remember the Typo Eradication Advancement League from 2008. The pair went across the country, correcting typos without permission of whoever owned the sign or other item with the incorrect punctuation, spelling, or what have you. Jan Freeman, in a recent post about the book, recaps:

The three-month odyssey ended with a whimper, though, when the guys returned to Deck’s Somerville home to face a summons from the National Park Service: A sign they had corrected at the Grand Canyon was, it seemed, a 1932 hand-painted artifact, its mispunctuation protected by federal law. Deck and Herson could have gotten away with it — but they had posted the damning evidence on their own blog. Fined, muzzled, mocked in the media, and given a year’s probation, they closed the incriminating website and hunkered down.

They apparently didn’t hunker down for long, but they no longer make corrections without permission. And now they have a book. I haven’t read it, and I really have no interest. Last year, I was sent a copy of I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar — based on the Facebook group of the same name — and haven’t read that either.

John McIntrye wrote about Deck and Herson in 2008, and he put it perfectly when he said:

What is annoying about the whole enterprise is that it trivializes grammar, and reinforces the public image that people concerned about grammar and usage are (a) preoccupied with trifles and (b) busybodies whose joy in life is to correct other people publicly.

Think that isn’t the perception? Here’s something from a Philadelphia Inquirer story this week about the pair’s visit to the fair city of my birth:

Part classic road-trip narrative, buddy-love saga and state-of-the-nation survey, it’s also an adventure thriller for grammar fiends, travel porn for copy editors and other enforcers of linguistic propriety.

It’s not travel porn for me. My job as a copy editor when it comes to grammar, spelling, etc. is to ensure that my newspaper is free of errors and is written in a way that is not confusing to readers. We are a professional publication, and people are paying for a product they expect to be understandable and literate. Same with magazines and books. But I don’t care how you speak, and I don’t care what your sign says. I certainly notice mistakes outside of work, but I generally don’t point them out unless I’m trying to annoy my wife.

I’m a copy editor, not a language judge. I’ve seen people write that when they see a typo in a menu, it makes them not want to eat at the restaurant because a sloppy menu makes them wonder if the chef is as sloppy in the kitchen. Which is ridiculous. It would be like a chef saying he doesn’t want to read your newspaper because you can’t cook a decent omelette or you burned a cake.

The lead of the Inquirer story called the pair word nerds, a title I like to use for myself. And they are welcome to that. But like other kinds of nerds, it takes all kinds. Please don’t think we are all out there thinking ill of you if you mix up which and that.**

*Yes yes, that was on purpose.

**Did the sticklers among you catch what I did there?

A pub sign showing a niblick in Auchterarder, Perthshire, Scotland. From Brian Forbes' Flickr stream.

The OED had a good word of the day a few weeks ago: niblick. It sounded like a creature in a fairy tale to me. Alas, it is just a golf club. The definition:

• An iron (formerly wooden) golf club, originally one with a relatively short face and subsequently applied to most lofted irons with a heavy head, used especially for playing out of bunkers and rough ground. (Equivalent to a modern number 8 iron, 9 iron, or wedge.)

It’s origin is uncertain the OED said it could come from nib, since the clubs has a hooked appearance. For another theory, it  cites David Langdon’s 1975 book of golf terms, How to Talk Golf: “Niblick, old fashioned term for a No. 9 iron. Said to be a corruption of Scottish ‘neb laigh’, a broken nose, referring to the short club-face.”

When I was in New Orleans, I went to the National World War II museum with my dad and brothers. It’s a great place. I visited it with my dad in 2002 when it was the National D-Day Museum. It has since expanded, and one of the most interesting things that I saw this time was a copy of the draft of President Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It is covered with editing marks, which is fascinating.

The most interesting edit is the first line, which originally read, “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in world history.” On the draft, “world history” is crossed out and replaced by “infamy.” It’s amazing how changing just two words can turn a flat line into one that echoes for generations.

I didn’t have my camera, so I took a picture with my phone. It’s hard to read, but you can see the editing marks:

I’ve been on vacation the past 10 days. My wife and I went to my cousin’s wedding in New Orleans and then spent a few days there with my parents and brothers. Then we flew to Philly to see her family. Toward the end of my trip, I knew that a bad day was coming. My best friend, Chris Jones, was killed in a car accident just after midnight on August 7, 2003. He was 19. These days the pain from that has mostly receded into some deep corner of my brain, but every time the anniversary comes around, and on his birthday in March, it comes out to twist a knife in my gut.

This year it came in the evening on Saturday. Lauren’s mom, uncle, cousin, sisters and brothers-in-law, our nieces, and my parents all were over at Lauren’s grandmom’s house for dinner. The party had mostly wound down, and the knife twisted all of a sudden. I was down for about an hour. Then this happened:

That’s my month-old niece, Zoe. As I said on Twitter later that night, it’s hard to stay depressed when you are rocking your baby niece to sleep. Thanks Zoe.

When Lauren and I were driving home from the airport yesterday, we listened to Bowling For Soup’s most recent album, Sorry for Partyin’. One of the songs, “Bfff,” is a great tribute to a guy’s best friend. (You can listen to Bfff on Bowling For Soup’s website.) It reminded me of all the trouble Chris and I got into in high school, and all the great times we had. And it made me laugh. Here’s the chorus:

You’ll tell the world I’m gay when you hear me say
that I really and truly feel this way
not that there’s anything wrong with being gay

And sometimes we punch each other in the face
like when I hit on your mom and got to second base
I’m trying to say I love you in a heterosexual way.

Laughter through the tears. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or any other afterlife, but I hope Chris knew I loved him in a heterosexual way.

The Washington Post had a really interesting article about Salt, the new Angelina Jolie spy movie out today. The article talks about how Jolie is charting a career course that is traditionally only taken by male actors, splitting her time between serious dramas and action flicks, while avoiding genres like romantic comedies.

But what really caught my eye was the interesting word used in the article:

If “Salt” makes anything clear, it’s that the most superhuman stunt Jolie performs in the movie can’t be found in the over-the-top set pieces, or in her deceptively layered performance as the film’s slippery title character — or even in the marmoreal perfection she has reached as a physically flawless screen object.

The OED definition of marmoreal:

• Resembling marble or a marble statue; cold (also smooth, white, etc.) like marble.

Marmoreal comes from the classical Latin marmoreus, which comes from marmor, meaning marble. One of those times that I wish my two years of high school Latin had taken. This seems like  a bit of an obscure word to use in a pop-culture article, but it’s the right one here for what the writer wanted to say. Movie stars do cultivate that statue-like perfection.

In April, I started selling mugs and T-shirts with the Talk Wordy to Me logo to raise money for the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund. I have made $55 from them so far.

Now I am debuting a new design, one that should be of broader interest to copy editors:

My friend Lindsay Hack, a page designer at The Courier-Journal, donated her time to making that. She’s awesome. (Lindsay also designs jewelry. She sells it on Etsy.)

And thanks to Andy Bechtel for refining my original idea.

Both the mugs and T-shirts have color and style customization options on the right side of the product pages in my Zazzle store. (Please use that link or the one in the right column of this site. I get an extra 15% for any sales made through those links, which contain a referral code.) I get 10% on each sale, plus the 15% for the referral, so 25% of your purchase will support ACES. I also get a bonus if sales reach certain targets.

The original Talk Wordy to Me mugs and T-shirts are still available as well.

Thanks in advance to everyone who buys something!

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve started reading Helmet for my Pillow, the World War II memoir of Robert Leckie, who served in the First Marine Division. The book was published in 1957, and Leckie’s writing shows how different the tolerance for foul words was back then. (Obviously, this post will contain some language.) The worst he’ll write so far are words like bastard and raggedy-assed.

This reluctance to use the foul language common among soldiers contrasts sharply with The Pacific, the HBO miniseries that was partly based on Helmet for my Pillow. The episodes of that show were filled with all the salty language that lurks offstage in the book.

Early in the book, Leckie talks about the Marine who took recruits to the train headed for the training center at Parris Island in South Carolina:

The master gunnery sergeant who became out momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mellow blasphemous oaths that were to become so familiar to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had spent a lifetime in vituperation.

(To vituperate is “to rebuke or criticize harshly or abusively; berate. See synonyms at scold,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.)

Like other times in the book when he talks about foul language, Leckie never shares what was said. It’s kind of like a horror book or movie where the really gory stuff takes place without being described or shown, leaving it to your imagination. When it’s well done, that can be a good thing, and Helmet for my Pillow is very well done. Here’s another passage, from training at Parris Island:

The rifle range also gave me my first full audition of the marine cursing facility. There had been slight samplings of it in the barracks, but never anything like the utter blasphemy and obscenity of the rifle range. There were noncommissioned officers there who could not put two sentences together without bridging them with a curse, an oath, an imprecation. To hear them made our flesh creep, made those with any depth of religious feeling flush with anger and wish to be at the weather-beaten throats of the blasphemers.

We would become inured to it, in time, have it even on our own lips. We would come to recognize it as meaning no offense. But then it shocked us.

How could they develop such facility with mere imprecation? This was no vituperation. It was only cursing, obscenity, blasphemy, profanity — none of which is ever profuse or original — yet it came spouting out in amazing variety.

Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used as an insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s — until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.

(To imprecate is “to invoke evil upon; curse,” according to the AHD.)

I’ve read and heard plenty of people describe all the ways fuck can be used, but never so eloquently, and never without actually using the word. Leckie’s analysis reads almost like poetry, as does much of the book.

Amanda Palmer, who’s part of the Dresden Dolls and has a great solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, also writes a a good blog. She went to a Lady Gaga concert on the Fourth of July and wrote a long blog post about it. It’s a bit rambling, but very interesting. She captures how I mostly feel about Lady Gaga here (contains language):

i’m not really a fan of the music (disco dance music doesn’t do it for me, and some of the lyrics drive me nuts), and i’m not even sure i’m a fan of the performer, but i’m definitely a fan of other aspects…the fact that she writes her own tunes, and her off-song message (her songs kind of have a hard-to-read message, but her stance in interviews etc is generally: be a freak, be yourself, gay is good, self-expression is the shit. to which i say: RAH RAH AH AH AH).

I like some of the Lady Gaga songs if I’m in the right mood, but that’s about how I feel. Way deeper in the post, Palmer writes this, which I liked:

all these voices in your head bicker and argue and obscure the real key to freedom:

your ability to stand still and ask:

who do i want to be

and what do i want to do

RIGHT. NOW.

?

There’s really a lot of interesting stuff in there if you have 10 minutes to have your thoughts provoked.