Monthly Archives: October 2008

I wrote an article in the most recent American Copy Editors Society newsletter on the use of big words in newspaper articles. I’m reprinting it below.

I’m also using it to introduce a new regular feature, which I hope to run every Monday, highlighting good and bad uses of big words in the news, which I have already been doing sporadically. That will begin next week.

Here’s the article:

The word peloton glowed on my screen, daring me to challenge its use in a story about a bicycle race I was editing on a slow Sunday evening in July.
I looked it up: “n. the main body of riders in a bicycle race.” I highlighted it. My finger hovered over the delete key; I was ready to replace it with “pack.”

Then I remembered something that an editor told me during one of my internships after I complimented his use of the word freebooters in an editorial about crooked politicians or some others of their ilk.

“I think it’s good to send the readers to the dictionary once in a while,” he said.

I hadn’t thought of that. I knew what a freebooter was.

Now, a few years later, I was being sent to the dictionary. It sounds like a punishment, but I don’t think it has to be, as long as the word is being used for a good reason.

Good use: A quote about Russia’s incursion into Georgia in the Washington Post contained the word revanchist (for a policy of “revenge, especially a usually political policy designed to recover lost territory or status”).

Bad use: Saying circumgyrate when rotate will do.

The difference is that revanchist captures a larger idea that takes a baker’s dozen of words to express. Circumgyrate is a cool word, but it’s just a longer, more obscure version of another single word.

Also, peloton and revanchist were being used in articles more likely to be read by people who already knew the word or who would be motivated to look it up.

Peloton came in our third day of coverage of a national road race not many people had heard of. Most of the people who read that story were likely to be dedicated sports junkies or big cycling fans.

The Post used the revanchist quote, without explanation, in a story on A14 three weeks into the conflict. Again, a story that plays more to the interests of junkies, in this case those addicted to politics and international affairs.

I think that by not editing out words like these in a story when they are appropriate, copy editors can provide a little reward for readers who know the word and for readers who are curious enough to grab their dictionary. (The New York Times’ Web site has a built-in feature that makes this easy. Double-click a word, and a screen with a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary pops up. I think every newspaper should have this.)

This isn’t a call to obfuscate and vex (OK, confuse and annoy) readers by using big words all the time. But there’s nothing wrong with using a specialized word in context once in a while.

The Philadelphia Inquirer uses (and explains) a word that perfectly captures the feelings of Philadelphia sports fans before the Phillies won the NLCS on Wednesday to reach the World Series:

Philadelphia celebrated by spending obscene amounts of cash on enough Phillies shirts, caps, car air fresheners, grill covers, baby bibs, pennants, sweatshirts, socks, wall clocks and fuzzy blankets to make up for the last 15 years of tsuris.

What? The word is not familiar? It’s Yiddish for pain and suffering. And the feeling had been like one huge communal downer that cuts across every ethnicity, class, gender, and American Kennel Club breed.

New York Times columnist David Brooks walks out a new word to me in his column today: Barack Obama “grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother.”

But his use of the word is a bit off, as the Times’ handy double-click-on-a-word-to-get-a-definition feature* shows with the American Heritage Dictionary:

adj. 1. Walking about or from place to place; traveling on foot. 2. Peripatetic Of or relating to the philosophy or teaching methods of Aristotle, who conducted discussions while walking about in the Lyceum of ancient Athens.

I doubt that Obama’s mom actually walked them to each of their various homes, especially Hawaii. I generally applaud the use of big words that send newspaper readers to the dictionary, but only when used correctly. A lot of big words tend to have a specialized meaning, like peripatetic. It doesn’t quite fit here. Itinerant would be closer to the mark.

As a noun, peripatetic also emphasizes walking, though it does allow for itinerant:

1. One who walks from place to place; an itinerant.
2. Peripatetic A follower of the philosophy of Aristotle; an Aristotelian.

And the etymology shows its walking roots:

[Middle English peripatetik, from Latin peripatēticus, from Greek peripatētikos, from peripatein, to walk about, or from peripatos, covered walk (where Aristotle allegedly lectured) : peri-, peri- + patein , to walk.]

*The Times has upgraded this feature slightly. It used to be that when you double-clicked a word it automatically opened a pop-up window with the definition. Now a little word balloon with a question mark appears, and you can click on that for the definition. Major improvement. I’m always randomly clicking on things as I read (a hazard of copy-editing on a computer all day), and it was always annoying to accidentally get the definition for “the” or whatever else I’d wandered upon.

I have a feeling I’ll be making lots of posts inspired by Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, about the Allies’ WWII campaign in Sicily and Italy. Atkinson has a way with words and with anecdotes, some of which fit right into Talk Wordy. Here’s two snippets I’ve come across recently:

1. On troops stationed in North Africa, we get a good English word and two interesting Arabic ones: “Snatches of Arabic seeded the soldiers’ palaver, notably maleesh, ‘no matter’ and bardin, ‘in a little while.’ ” (p. 40)

In this instance, palaver is used to mean (according to Webster’s New World’s second definition) “talk, especially idle chatter.” It can also mean: “a conference or discussion, as originally between African natives and European explorers or traders” or “flattery, cajolery.”

According to New World, palaver is derived from the Portuguese word palavra, meaing “a word, speech.” Palavra is derived from the Latin word parabola, meaning parable.

2. On Gen. Dwight Eisenhower: “At times he could nitpick, grousing that ‘not one officer in fifty knows how to use the English language’ and supposedly cashiering an aide for failing to master the distinction between  ‘shall’ and ‘will’ ” (p.49) Cashier means to dismiss from service. Seems that while no one likes someone who goes around correcting their grammar, you can get away with it when you are the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the Mediterranean theater.

Slate explores something I have been wondering about: the recently increased use of “fail” and “epic fail” both to criticize and to express schadenfreude — especially in reference to the financial crisis.

What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. … Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”

Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor.

This can also be seen as a common phenomena of English, Slate says:

Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience. Between Old and Middle English, many nouns stopped being declined, says Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota. Likewise, while Romance languages still conjugate their verbs, English keeps it relatively simple: I speak, you speak, we speak, etc. It’s also common for verbs to become nouns, Liberman points out. You can lock a door, but it also has a lock. You can bike, but you can also own a bike. There was great fuss a century ago among readers of the British magazine Notes and Queries when it used the word meet to refer to a sporting event. It’s not surprising that failure would eventually spawn fail.

I get a daily English usage tip in my e-mail from Garner’s Modern American Usage.* Today’s was on the idiom “lay waste,” which I have always heard used in this way: “they laid waste to the city.”

This is not the original idiom, apparently:

The traditional idiom is an unusual one: either “they laid waste the city” or (a variant form) “they laid the city waste.” “Lay” is the verb; “city” is the object; and “waste” is an adjective serving as an objective complement.

However, “laid waste to” is now the dominant usage:

In 1965, an academician polled about 100 college students in New York, only a quarter of whom preferred the traditional phrasing; half preferred the phrasing “laid waste to the city.” In that version, “lay” is the verb; “waste” is a noun serving as a direct object; and a prepositional phrase follows. The phrasing doesn’t make any literal sense.

A look at relative frequencies in 2003 showed that in modern print sources, the version with the superfluous “to” outnumbers the one without it by a 3-to-1 ratio.

*There is a link in the bottom of the right column to subscribe to the usage tip of the day if you are interested.

I came across the word gormless in a book, The Blade Itself, that I finished reading over the weekend. Merriam-Webster defines it as “lacking intelligence, stupid,” while the OED says it means “wanting sense or discernment.” In the book, the word was used to refer to a nobleman’s attitude toward peasant types in a crowd.

M-W gives this etymology: “alteration of English dialect gaumless, from gaum attention, understanding (from Middle English gome, from Old Norse gaum, gaumr) + -less.”

M-W says gormless is a chiefly British word; that makes sense, as the writer, Joe Abercrombie, is British.

This in from reader Elizabeth Ditty, an article about a Times (of London) campaign to save various words that Collins is planning to remove from its largest dictionary because they are too obscure. The article liberally uses the words that the British dictionary has designated for deletion:

Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.

For the record, WordPress’ spell checker doesn’t recognize any of those.

OK, we are back.

I was reading the New York Times on the plane this morning, and there was an interesting story about the influence that caricatures can have on a politician’s image, most recently Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, but also ones like Chevy Chase’s Gerlad Ford and Thomas Nast’s Boss Tweed.

It had this on the origin of the word caricature:

The word comes from the Italian “caricare,” meaning “to overload.” Some characteristic is heavily piled on: the elongated nose, the prominent belly, the bulbous eyes. Caricature seems to have its earliest associations with portraits that showed human subjects to be transformed animals. This can be just a trick of perception, but the art comes from connecting physical characteristics to character, the way Leonardo da Vinci did in his human-animal hybrids. For a great caricaturist, physiognomy is a reflection of the hidden soul: by showing us something exaggerated, something overlooked is revealed.

We have a family thing to deal with, so I’ll be offline the next few days. I hope to be back at full steam next week.