Monthly Archives: March 2009

I was talking with my wife the other day, and the phrase “hoist with his own petard” came up. This is one I’ve always liked.

In the early days of gunpowder in Europe, a petard was a primitive bomb that would be carried to or buried under a wall to blow up the defensive works. I first heard of them when I was a kid, playing Age of Empires II, and a petard was one of the units you could create. (That’s him at right.)

As with any explosives, especially primitive ones, these could go off prematurely. (In Age of Empires, they tended to get blown up when attacked before they did their job, making them pretty useless.) Thus “hoist by his own petard,” which means “blown into the air by his own bomb; hence, injured or destroyed by his own device for the ruin of others,” according to the OED.

The phrase was created by Shakespeare in Hamlet, which was first published in 1603.

In that play, King Claudius sends Hamlet to the English court with his “friends” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, along with letters requesting Hamlet’s immediate execution. Hamlet suspects that the king is up to no good, and opens the letters, rewriting them so they request the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thereby hoisting his uncle by his own schemes. As Hamlet puts it:

There’s letters seal’d: and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard: and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon.

And thus was born a phrase that’s lasted four hundred years.

Petard itself comes from the French and had a funny literal meaning, according to the American Heritage Dictionary: “The French used pétard, ‘a loud discharge of intestinal gas,’ for a kind of infernal engine for blasting through the gates of a city.”

And that, of course, reminds me of this:

This is not a normal Talk Wordy to Me post, but it’s something I needed to write. Back to regular posts tomorrow.

When I was a senior in high school, I forgot my best friend’s seventeenth birthday. I felt like hell when I realized it, especially since he had remembered my eighteenth the week before.

It wasn’t a mistake I repeated. But I didn’t have many more chances. Christian Jones died in a car accident when he was nineteen.

Today would have been Chris’s twenty-fifth birthday. He never made it past his freshman year of college, never became an engineer like he was studying to be at the University of Pittsburgh. He died only a few weeks after he got his driver’s license. He’d failed the test probably five times, every time on some small technicality. It frustrated him to no end, and I made fun of him all the more for that.

I’d say I wish he’d failed the test one more time, but I don’t. He wanted that license, and I’ve never second-guessed that. Not because I think there was any higher power that had Chris’s death in his plan. I don’t. It’s just that there’s no way to foresee the consequences of our actions, and I don’t think it’s worth debating the might-have-beens.

Like how he’d asked me to hang out that day. I didn’t because I was going to see the second Matrix movie with my girlfriend. If I hadn’t, who knows if he would have gone out on a long drive that August night to visit friends at a camp? And then fallen asleep at the wheel on the way home.

Doesn’t matter. It’s what happened.

There are lots of little things I still have that he gave me. A collection of pirated 80s music. Postcards from trips to Italy, Germany, Normandy, and the Badlands of South Dakota. The things he taught me about carpentry and building computers. The things he taught me about being a friend.

The knife he gave me for the eighteenth birthday he didn’t forget.

I wrote a eulogy for Chris that I never got to give. There were hundreds of people at the funeral — many had to sit in an overflow room at his church — and too many wanted to speak about him. Everyone just said a few words.

Here’s what I wrote that August five and a half years ago:

Chris meant a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a builder, an explorer, an engineer, and as he liked to say, a problem-solver. Chris was always trying something new, and he was always planning some project to help someone else. One of the best memories I have of Chris is working long hours after school on the sets for the plays at Central. He just took such joy in creating something. The time we spent together under the stage building, listening to music, singing, and talking about the lives we were living sealed our friendship.

And that was what Chris was most of all, a friend. You couldn’t help but be friends with him; he didn’t really give you any other choice. He was my first good friend in high school, and he soon became my best friend. I was a shy kid, and Chris helped draw me out of my shell. He was the first person outside of my family who was genuinely interested in who I was and where I wanted to go in life.

Our friendship wasn’t just a thing of high school, like so many of those we forge in those years. The two years since I graduated were just as good as the three we were at Central together. We saw plays, built computers, and wandered around Best Buy, talking about all the gadgets we couldn’t possibly afford. He showed me around Pittsburgh when I went out to visit him at school, and we took a road trip to Ohio in June. Chris was going to take me to San Francisco with his frequent-flier miles; he wanted to get me out into the world, a world that at age 19 he had already explored as much as many people three times his age.

Chris lived a life that was fuller than anyone else that I knew. He taught me about carpentry, computers, stereo equipment and getting the best deal on whatever we were trying to buy that particular week. He taught me how to be myself and to never be afraid to show others who I was or to be ashamed of what I wanted.

And he taught me what it meant to be a friend. Chris always had time for me, no matter how busy he was or what else he wanted to do. We argued a lot, but in a good way, bouncing ideas off each other like ping-pong balls and learning who we were and what we stood for in the process. We grew together, but we never stopped being who we were.

I don’t know how else to put it: I loved Chris, and he gave me more in the five years we spent together than I could hope to get in many lifetimes. I feel blessed and privileged to have known him, and I will miss him more than I can ever express in these words.

Happy birthday Chris.

John McIntyre addresses the question of correctness in using “they” or “their” as a singular instead of “he or she” or “his or hers” when trying to avoid sexist connotations:

Use their.

That baying sound you hear in the distance is the outraged howling from copy desks across the country.

He makes a good argument after that, one I agree with.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the past few days about the dirty, dirty $165 million in bonuses at AIG. And frequently, the word abrogate is being used in news stories when talking about the possibility of the government canceling the contracts that award these bonuses.

From a New York Times column from Monday:

If you think this economy is a mess now, imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start abrogating contracts left and right.

I’d heard this word once or twice before, but never so often at once. A Google News search pulls up a lot of recent uses of abrogate, mostly in relation to AIG. I wonder if it will be one of those words like “surge” or “change” last year that suddenly pops up and gets used a ton, then goes back to its normal frequency of usage.

Abrogate comes from the Latin abrogare, which means “to repeal, to disregard, ignore, repudiate, to cancel, revoke, to take away,” according to the OED. In English, it has the added meaning of repealing with authority:

• OED: “To repeal (a law, established usage, etc.); to abolish authoritatively or formally; to annul, to cancel.”
• American Heritage: “To abolish, do away with, or annul, especially by authority.”
• Merriam-Webster Online: “To abolish by authoritative action.”

The OED has quotes of abrogate being used as far back as 1520.

Last night at work, one of our reporters joked that he would “be on tenterhooks” waiting to see if the University of Kentucky made it into the National Invitation Tournament. According to the OED, to be on tenterhooks is to be “in a state of painful suspense or impatience.” The NIT is a big disappointment for fans who are used to the Wildcats making it into the NCAA Tournament year after year, so his comment was heavy on the sarcasm.

So, I wondered, what is a tenterhook. Well, it’s a hook on a tenter. Duh.

Oh, you want more? OK.

Courtesy of The Fulling Mills of the Isle of Wight

According to Merriam-Webster Online, a tenter is “a frame or endless track with hooks or clips along two sides that is used for drying and stretching cloth.” The OED’s first recorded use of tenter is in 1408. The first recorded use of tenterhooks in the sense of “that on which something is stretched or strained; something that causes suffering or painful suspense” is in 1532.

I found a bit more on tenters at the Web site of the Trowbridge Museum in Britain.

Merriam-Webster insulted us copy editors yesterday, so John McIntyre insulted them back.

Emily Udell, one of the reporters at my paper, pointed out something interesting to me last week:

I am working up a blog entry about a new Pew study on how much money states spend on incarceration versus programs for people on parole or probation. I knew the word for a person on parole was a parolee, but probationee didn’t sound quite right. I discovered that the proper word is probationer, which sounds like it means a person who grants probation to another. I thought that was kind of interesting — parolees and probationer.

This is interesting. I guess it’s kind of like the British word for retiree, which is pensioner. I looked probationer up in four dictionaries and three usage guides, but none explained why -er is the proper suffix here. Probably just one of those things in English that just is.

You can read the blog here. It’s the March 3 entry.

Last Friday, Doug Fisher of Common Sense Journalism took on the notion that most writers at professional publications these days can get by without copy editors “meddling” with their copy. In the post, he wrote:

Ah ha, you say. But that those (errors) got through a copy desk is proof we can do without them because they aren’t catching it anyhow. Well, if anything, I’d suggest is is more proof of how desks have been emasculated so that they no longer can do the job required.

I sent him an e-mail, asking if he meant emaciated and not emasculated. I thought it was a typo incorrectly corrected by a spell check. He wrote back:

I meant emasculate. While the word’s origin is to deprive of one’s manliness, it has long held the broader meaning of an almost violent cutting off of the object’s strength, etc. From one dictionary:  ”the opposition emasculated the committee’s proposal: weaken, enfeeble, debilitate, erode, undermine, cripple; remove the sting from, pull the teeth out of; informal water down.” In fact, in that dictionary, that is the first definition, while the equivalent of castration is second. Depending on the dictionary, they switch positions.

The reason I used it is that its connotation is of swiftness and violence. Emaciation has a longer, slower connotation. I don’t think what is being suggested is in any way long or slow.

He’s right of course. The OED says emasculate comes from the Latin emasculare, which means “to castrate.” And the first example the OED has of emasculate being used to mean “to weaken” is 1607. I didn’t know emasculate had any sense besides castration. I henceforth vow to look up any word before I e-mail someone for something like this. Sorry.

Here are a few dictionary entries that illustrate his point about the definitions being switched around. From Merriam-Webster online:

1. to deprive of strength, vigor, or spirit : weaken.
2. to deprive of virility or procreative power : castrate.

From American Heritage:

1. To castrate.
2. To deprive of strength or vigor; weaken.

From the OED:

1. To deprive of virility, to castrate (a male person or animal).
2. a. To deprive of strength and vigour; to weaken, make effeminate and cowardly; to enfeeble, impoverish (language). b. To take the force out of (literary compositions) by removing what is supposed to be indecorous or offensive.

Jan Freeman at The Boston Globe’s “The Word” blog points out a column at The Visual Thesaurus that shoots down the myth that nauseous should only be used to mean “something that makes you sick to your stomach” as opposed to “feeling sick to your stomach.”

All across the Web, language blogs are heralding the arrival of National Grammar Day today! Sharpen your tongues! Sharpen your red pencils! Prepare to take those who would mangle our fair language and throw them back into the oily depths from whence they arose!

Just kidding.

The point of National Grammar Day is to use good grammar in your own speech and writing, not to use it as an excuse to go around correcting people’s English. Everyone hates that. But encouraging clear communication through gooder grammar on your own part is a good cause any day of the year.

From the Web site of the The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, which created National Grammar Day:

Some of our members are planning Good-Grammar Potlucks at their offices. What do you serve at good-grammar potlucks? High-fiber foods, of course. They’re good for the colon.

Ha! Or, as Animal of the Muppets would say: “Bad pun!” Then he’d bite you. But it’s still funny.