Monthly Archives: August 2008

A Washington Post article about Russia’s incursion into the former Soviet republic of Georgia brings in another word I had to look up:

“There is a Russia narrative that ‘we were weak in the ’90s, but now we are back and we are not going to take it anymore.’ But being angry and seeking revanchist victory is not the sign of a strong nation. It is the sign of a weak one,” said Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

That comes from revanche, a French word which Merriam-Webster online defines as “revenge, especially a usually political policy designed to recover lost territory or status.”

I came across this sentence in a football story while I was working last night, about an injured quarterback’s workout the day before he returned to practice: “He threw passes with velocity and moved around on his legs.”

Doesn’t anything thrown have velocity? And one would assume he wasn’t in a wheelchair if he was working out and returning to practice.

Better to describe how hard he was throwing and how well he was moving around, which I think is what the writer was unsuccessfully trying to convey.

The group that gives the Orwell Prize, an award for political journalism, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries in a blog:

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.

I haven’t dug into the backlog yet, but this is a really cool idea.

Found on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog.

In an Politico article about Barack Obama’s vice presidential choice, Joe Biden, the Delaware senator is described as someone who “can also deliver stemwinder.”

I’d heard this word only once before, about a year ago at work. In this use, it means “a rousing speech,” according to Webster’s New World.

That’s the second definition, though. The first definition is the second’s origin, “a stem-winding watch.” Though a good stemwinder (the speech, not the watch) can go on for a long time, the adoption of term for public speaking  has nothing to do with the need to wind your watch while listening to it. As Slate explained in a 2004 article:

The term dates back to the middle of the 19th century, when the stem-winding watch came into vogue. The newfangled timepiece was a vast improvement over its predecessor, the key-wound watch, because the mechanism for setting it was a stem actually attached to the watch, rather than a key that was easily and frequently misplaced. This technological advance was so widely appreciated that, by the end of the 1800s, the term stemwinder had taken on the figurative meaning of “excellent” or “outstanding,” or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “a person or thing that is first rate.”

It’s the 19th century’s version of “better than sliced bread.” Of course, that’s outdated too.

Totally unrelated to words, but:

PANAMA CITY, Fla. – Bay County Sheriff’s deputies were forced to use a Taser to subdue an escaped emu named Plop-Plop. The large female bird escaped from a farm last weekend and on Monday, she holed up with some horses and goats in a pen.

God I love Florida. (The emu is fine, by the way.)

John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun copy-desk chief, talks about the word disinterested, which has come to be used to mean both impartial and not interested, over at You Don’t Say. And he makes the broader point that you should consider your readers and your intent when using a word whose meaning has split:

I can try to help my students by advising to keep in mind the basics of rhetoric: What are you trying to say? Who is in your audience? What words, tropes and strategies will convey your meaning to the reader most precisely, without misunderstanding or distraction? There are choices to be made, and editing is making choices.

The Editrix is musing about the word language over at her site after I criticized a badly worded movie review.

I’d never thought about “Language!”—that order shouted so often by worn-out mothers everywhere—being a verb, but I guess it makes sense.

Craig Lancaster, copy chief at the Billings Gazette, points to a game where you have to identify as many of the 100 most common words in the English language as you can in five minutes.

I got 30. I feel that I should have gotten more. Especially “of.” I missed of. Boo.

Try it out. Tell me how you do in the comments. And, hey, I’ve already spotted you a word.

I was talking with a fellow Temple News alum, Chris, about punctuation and quotation marks. Specifically, if a question mark always must go inside a quote, as in: Did he really say “I’m going to slap you back to the Roaring Twenties”? (I have no idea what that means.)

If you work at a newspaper (as Chris and I do) this isn’t an issue that comes up a lot, since newspapers don’t usually ask question inside stories. So I checked the New York Times stylebook, which said that periods and commas always go inside quotes (Yes, he really said, “I’m going to slap you back to the Roaring Twenties.”); that commas and semicolons always go outside quotes (Yes, he really said, “I’m going to slap you back to the Roaring Twenties”; he’s an idiot.); and that question marks and exclamation points go inside or outside, depending on if they refer to just the quote or the entire sentence (No, he actually said, “Can I slap you back to the Roaring Twenties?”).

So the example in the first paragraph above is correct, at least according to NYT style. This makes sense, because punctuating that way gives a cue to the reader who is asking the question (or making an exclamation).

I’ve come across the word ablution several times in the past day. It seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place why. I looked it up in Merriam-Webster.com, which gave the definition: “1 a: the washing of one’s body or part of it (as in a religious rite) b: the act or action of bathing.”

OK, now I knew what it meant. (I’d been seeing it used just in the sense of bathing, not in a religious sense.) That didn’t explain why I thought it seemed familiar beyond just having read it before. So I checked the OED, and found it, in two parts, definitions 1e and 2a:

1. e. In Rom. and Angl. Churches: the washing of chalice and paten after the celebration. In Rom. Ch., the washing of the priest’s hands before assuming the sacred vestments, and during the celebration. 2. a. The water etc. with which anything has been washed; spec. in Catholic Ritual, the wine and water used to rinse the chalice, and wash the fingers of the celebrant after the communion.

Oh, right. I was an altar boy (altar server after they started letting girls participate) in grade school. One of the altar boys’ many jobs was to bring the water after Communion for the priest to wash out the chalice and then wash his fingers. We didn’t call it ablution among ourselves (I don’t think we really called it anything), but I think I knew the word from that.

It comes from the Latin abluere, meaning to wash off.