Monthly Archives: April 2009

Last week, we ran a story in the paper about a cemetery that had built a brick wall modeled after the one at Wrigley Field to hold the cremated remains of Cubs fans — for a price of course. (My headline? “Die-hard fans of Cubs can now rest easy.”)

This led to a discussion of what the technical term for such a wall was. One of my coworkers came up with columbarium. 

The American Heritage Dictionary gives these definitions for columabrium:

• 1a. A vault with niches for urns containing ashes of the dead.
• 1b. One of the niches in such a vault.
• 2a. A dovecote. (Home for birds.)
• 2b. A pigeonhole in a dovecote.

So what do pigeons and ashes have to do with each other? The word columabrium is Latin, and it “is derived from the Latin columba (f0r “dove” or “pigeon”), and it originally referred to a pigeon house or dovecote. It later acquired its more common meaning by association,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Last week on You Don’t Say, John McIntyre used a great quote and an interesting word while talking about some favorite writing and some low-brow abuse that was heaped upon him by commenters from another Web site:

I’ve been quoting Mencken since high school, and in light of the past week’s brouhaha over The Web Site That shall Not Be Named, this seemed apposite: “Here [in the United States] the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy.”

Apposite means “strikingly appropriate and relevant,” according to American Heritage Dictionary. It comes from the Latin appositus, the past participle of apponere, meaning to put near.

Yesterday’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day had an interesting entry:

marijuana; marihuana. The former spelling now predominates and should be preferred. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, speaking in 1986 at a luncheon, stated: “The big problem we had in the Court this past Term was how to spell ‘marijuana.’ We were about equally divided between a ‘j’ and an ‘h’ and since I was supposed to be the swing vote on the court, and just to show my impartiality, I added a footnote in a case . . . in which I spelled ‘marijuana’ with a ‘j’ once and an ‘h’ in the same sentence.” Quoted in ABA Journal, 1 Oct. 1986, at 34.

You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day through the link at the bottom right of this page.

From a New York Times article yesterday about the Supreme Court arguments over a case of whether school officials had the right to strip-search a middle-school girl because they thought she might be hiding prescription-strength ibuprofen in her underwear:

Mr. Wolf, (the student’s) lawyer, injected another new term into the court’s lexicon. He said a search may be appropriate if the school has evidence that a student makes a habit of “crotching” drugs.

Were I in the habit of buying drugs, I don’t think I’d buy them from someone who was “crotching” them. Just sayin’.

A recent Slate article on President Obama used an interesting word while talking about his approach to rhetoric: “Compared with the black-and-white approach of his predecessor, Obama’s technique is practically grisaille. Yet while the nuance is intellectually welcome … “

So from the context, you get the idea that grisaille means something other than black and white. However, the author helpfully includes a link to the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on grisaille: a “painting technique by which an image is executed entirely in shades of gray.” The original sentence in Slate looked like this:

• Compared with the black-and-white approach of his predecessor, Obama’s technique is practically grisaille.

I think this is a good way to handle using an obscure word in an online article written for a mass audience. People who are interested can click on the word and find out what it means. People who don’t care — or who already know what grisaille means  — can keep reading, without an interruption like this:

• Compared with the black-and-white approach of his predecessor, Obama’s technique is practically grisaille — a painting technique by which an image is executed entirely in shades of gray.

I’ve said before that I really like the way the New York Times handles this. You can double-click on any word in a Times article, and you get a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, assuming the AHD has an entry on the word.

The Web is a very powerful tool, and more newspapers and other media, and their writers, should be using it to help their readers. Especially if they like to use big words. Not everyone has a stack of dictionaries or a folder of dictionary bookmarks nearby when they want to get all word nerdy.

Speaking of word nerdy, grisaille comes from the French word gris, which means gray. Gris is adapted from the Old High German grîs (in modern German, greis). There’s also the Old Saxon grîs and the Dutch grijs. (All according to the OED.)

Interesting entry in today’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day on minuscule:

So spelled, not “miniscule.” The word derives from the word “minus”; it has nothing to do with the prefix “mini-.” But the word is commonly misspelled. … The counterpart — a rarity — is “majuscule.” Today that term is used only in printing, to denote a capital letter.

You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day through the link at the bottom right of this page.

Regret the Error, a blog that posts interesting newspaper corrections, had a good one yesterday showing how spell check can give you a very very wrong suggestion to correct a typo:

This is an early favorite for 2009′s Typo of the Year. The Daily Universe, a student paper at (Brigham Young University, a Mormon school), recalled and trashed the full printing (18,000 copies) of its Monday edition after discovering a typo. Notably, it was a typo that could have offended the Mormon church.

The typo? The paper referred to the Quorum of the  Twelve Apostles — a group of Mormon leaders — as the Quorum of the  Twelve Apostates.

That’s pretty bad. Why? An apostate is “One who has abandoned one’s religious faith, political party, principles, or cause,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.

The newspaper’s editorial manager,  Rich Evans, explained how the error happened on the newspaper’s Web site:

“Our copy editor in charge of the front page, who was under deadline pressure, was using spell check on her page and had misspelled the word apostle,” Evans said. “One of the first options that came up on InDesign’s spell check suggestions was the word apostate. Unfortunately that’s the one she clicked on. It still should have been caught by two more levels of review after that, but again with deadline looming, the worst possible thing happened.”