Monthly Archives: September 2008

Today, someone did a search for “found out when will i die” and found their way to my humble site. Sorry buddy, Death is two blogs down the street.

This from Oxford University Press: “In celebration of the OED ‘s 80th anniversary, we are offering the 20-volume set at its lowest price ever!”

That low price? $895. Yee-haw. Especially if you can get it for free through your library.

Well, we just entered Day 4 of having no electricity at the Talk Wordy to Me homestead, thanks to Sunday’s Hurricane Ike windstorm. I won’t bore you all with details of how we’ve been entertaining ourselves (mostly reading). But how about some statistics and lists?

Items left in fridge after cleaning out all meat, dairy and anything that says “refrigerate after opening”:

• 1 2-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce.
• 1 12-ounce bottle of Seagram’s Strawberry Daiquiri-flavored malt beverage.
• 10 thawed freeze pops. (the colored liquid in a long plastic tube. Delicious frozen. Thawed, not so much.)

Cans of food bought after power came back at grocery store yesterday:

• 2 cans Chef Boyardee beef ravioli. (1 already eaten.)
• 2 cans SpaghettiOs with meatballs. (Meatballs = protein.)
• 1 can Dinty Moore beef stew. (For extreme hunger situations only.)
• 3 cans Campbell Select soup. (Select means it’s classy. Oh, and 1 already eaten.)

Other statistics:

• Number of hours I came into work early today so I could have air conditioning and Internet access: 2.
• Number of days the power company is now saying it will take to restore all power: 10-14.
• Books read since blackout began: 1 1/2.
• Number of times I’ve used the phone book: 1.
• Number of times I’ve called 411 because the freaking phone book doesn’t have the number I wanted: 1.
• Number of movie theaters called that do not have power: 2.
• Number of theaters called that do have power but aren’t showing any movies we wanted to see: 1.
• Number of times I’ve thought, oh, let’s look that up online, then remembered the blackout: 712.
• Number of times I’ve thought I should see if anything’s on TV because I’m bored, then remembered the blackout: 2,488.
• Number of times I’ve walked into a room, flipped a light switch, remembered the blackout, muttered impolite things under my breath, then turned the switch back off: 4,058 bajillion. Give or take.

Anyway, we’re fine otherwise. We still have hot water and can cook on our stovetop (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for natural gas), so we’re in better shape than a lot of people.

Merrill Perlman, former copy desk chief at the New York Times and now proprietor of the Columbia Journalism Review’s Language Corner, wrote yesterday today* about the various takes on the word irregardless in different dictionaries:

Indeed, those dictionaries that include “irregardless”—which is most of them, now—call it “nonstandard” or “disputed” English. Most note that the word is probably derived from a combination of “regardless” and “irrespective,” and that it was first spotted in the early 20th century. But they disagree on just how nonstandard it is.

Check it out.

*This post was meant to go out tomorrow, not today. I also corrected the post time.

Someone found this blog today searching for the phrase “who took my pie word.” Weird. Must have gotten them to this post.

I swear I didn’t take their pie word.

Oh, and still no power. Boo.

My wife and I live in Louisville. We got hit by a big wind storm yesterday, courtesy of Hurricane Ike. It knocked out power to about 300,000 customers, including us, and they are saying it might be a week before everyone’s power is restored. According to the fact box we are running in the paper tomorrow, all of the food in my fridge is already unsafe to eat. Apparently, that only takes 4-6 hours. The freezer is good for a day, though. Two if it’s totally full. Which mine is not. We will be living out of cans this week, I think.

It’s nothing like the destruction in Texas, but it does suck.

I’m posting from work right now, but it’s likely that I won’t be posting much the next few days.

Hope everyone is safe.

I found a Webster’s New World dictionary while I was wandering around the back hallways of the newspaper last night. I flipped it open randomly and found a word, cestus, that had two very different entries, one with Latin and Greek origins and one with just Latin.

In the first entry, cestus is defined as “in ancient times, a woman’s belt or girdle.” The OED adds that such belts were “particularly that worn by a bride.” It comes from the Latin word cestus, which is derived from the Greek word kestos, meaning “girdle.” This could have been a kestos:

Silver and gold Greek belt from vlasta2's Flickr photostream.

In the second entry, cestus is defined as “a contrivance of leather straps, sometimes weighted with metal, worn on the hand by boxers in ancient Rome.” That comes from the Latin noun caestus, which is derived from the Latin verb caedere, meaning “to strike, beat.”

This is a caestus. When the definition says “weighted with metal” it means that they often had iron bands or studs across the knuckles:

Caestus from where are the joneses' Flickr photostream.

So, there you have it. Cestus, a woman’s belt or a brutal boxing glove.

Update: As several people have pointed out, the original headline on this post,  “Churchill might not have put up with that, but he was pedantically opposed to this” did not contain an infinitive (in this case, to oppose). I’ve changed it to reflect that.

There are lots of fake rules of grammar that are bandied about as truths. One is that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. (This results in sentences such as “I don’t know to which store I am going” instead of “I don’t which store I am going to.”) A Winston Churchill line is often used in debunking this: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” (There’s a question about exactly how he phrased it; see this for more.)

But Churchill apparently clung to another false grammar rule — that you can’t split infinitives. (This blind opposition can result in awkward sentences like “He was opposed pedantically to this.”)

Last night, I started reading Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, a book about the Allies’ campaign in Italy during World War Two. In the prologue, Atkinson writes about Churchill’s May 1943 trip across the Atlantic to the United States for a two-week conference on war strategy. During the five-day journey, Churchill “rebuked those unblessed with his fluency by reading aloud from Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the ‘wickedness of splitting infinitives and the use of very instead of much.’ ” I checked the notes, Atkinson was quoting from Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. Moran was Churchill’s personal physician.

So much for Churchill being a paragon of common-sense English. (I have a copy of the 1965 revised edition of Fowler’s book, and it does seem to look down on splitting the infinitive.)

John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun said this about the no-split-infinitive rule: “A hoary shibboleth. If your English teacher warned you off this, she was wrong. If your first editor forbade this, he was wrong. If you own a book that prohibits this, get rid of it.” And Craig Lancaster of the Billings Gazette has a whole slew of links about the issue here.

The Editrix talks about whether it’s Down Syndrome or Down’s Syndrome, what with all the focus on Gov. Sarah Palin’s child with the disorder.

John McIntyre comments on an article by Jill Rosen in the Sun — the paper where he’s the copy-desk chief — “about the grammar vigilantes who make it their business to correct other people’s lapses in grammar, spelling and usage.”

Some people Ms. Rosen quotes complain that this nagging about grammar has intimidated them, has inhibited their readiness to write. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You may recall Flannery O’Connor’s remark, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” The Internet contains a tsunami of half-baked ideas, ineptly expressed.

However, he also thinks it’s just rude to go around correcting people:

If bad grammar is a breach of etiquette, then what is publicly scolding people about faulty grammar? It’s bumptious. It is like going around and correcting other people’s pronunciations — not an activity that will leave you beloved.

Bumptious is an awesome word, by the way.