Monthly Archives: October 2009

This week’s Words of Others was from George R.R. Martin’s The Hedge Knight. Today’s post comes from the sequel to that story, The Sworn Sword, and is a good one to lead into Halloween weekend.

Dunk is now in the service of a very minor lord and is visiting another castle at the lord’s behest. The lady of Coldmoat castle is a 25-year-old with three dead husbands and is called the Red Widow. Dunk is discussing her with Coldmoat’s priest, who says:

Coldmoat crawls with revenants, it must be said. The husbands die yet their kin remain, to drink my lady’s wines and eat her sweetmeats, like a plague of pink locusts done up in silk and velvet.

Revenant has two meanings, according to the OED:

• 1. One who returns from the dead; a ghost.
• 2. One who returns to a place.

The ghostly variety of revenant is the older meaning, with a quotation from 1827 in the OED. The second meaning dates to at least 1886.

The word comes from the French, where it is the present participle of revenir, meaning to return. The American Heritage Dictionary points out that the word revenue has a similar origin, and gives further etymology in revenue’s entry: “Middle English, from Old French, from feminine past participle of revenir, from Latin revenīre : re- + venīre, to come.”

I spotted what I thought was an odd usage of the word moot in an article in last week’s New York Times about a Senate bill that would “end what has become known as the “widow penalty” — the government’s practice of annulling foreigners’ applications for permanent residency when their American spouses die before the marriage is two years old.”

Some of the spouses affected by the widow penalty had sued over it, but:

The bill approved Tuesday would appear to moot Ms. Robinson’s case, along with about a dozen similar court cases around the country that are challenging the widow penalty.

I’d never seen moot used that way as a verb. The American Heritage Dictionary has these definitions for it as a transitive verb:

• 1a. To bring up as a subject for discussion or debate.
• 1b. To discuss or debate.
• 2. Law. To plead or argue (a case) in a moot court.

But nothing in the sense of making the case unnecessary. That sense compares to the AHD’s second definition of moot as an adjective, as in a moot point:

• 1. Subject to debate; arguable: a moot question.
• 2a. Law. Without legal significance, through having been previously decided or settled.
• 2b. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.

I scanned through the much larger set of definitions for moot in the OED and couldn’t find any for moot as a verb meaning to make irrelevant or unnecessary.

So I then checked my Garner’s Modern American Usage. Although the book is for a general audience, Garner’s background is in law and the book has a lot of good entries on law-related words that dictionaries do not explore as fully. On moot as a verb, Garner says:

Historically, the verb “moot” meant “to raise or bring forward (a point, question, candidate, etc.) for discussion.” That sense was formerly used in American English, but today it is current only in British English.

In American legal usage, a new sense of “moot” has taken hold: “to render (a question) moot or of no practical significance” (Black’s Law Dictionary [9th ed. 2009]). E.g.: “A challenge to an abortion statute will be mooted after nine months by the birth of the child.” William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, “The Economics of Anticipatory Adjudication,” J. Legal Studies 683, 717 (1994).

So the NYT article’s usage was not incorrect, just unfamiliar to me. (That could be another subtitle for this blog. Good thing I like learning this stuff.)

All of these usages derive from moot as a noun, defined by the AHD as:

• 1. Law. A hypothetical case argued by law students as an exercise.
• 2. An ancient English meeting, especially a representative meeting of the freemen of a shire.

The second definition is the original meaning of moot, from which all the rest evolved. OED says the use of moot for the English meetings goes back to the 12th century.

This week’s On Language column in the New York Times Magazine was about the stop-and-start genesis of the title Ms. It was first proposed in an article in The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., in 1901,which said:

Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts.

But it wasn’t until long after 1901 that it caught on, as feminists promoted it as a title that did not tie them to marital status. But that wasn’t the aim of the 1901 article, On Language thinks:

Though (philologist Mario) identified the early proponents of Ms. as feminists, the Republican writer (most likely a man) presented the argument for the title as one of simple etiquette and expediency.

Here’s the lead of a story in Wednesday’s New York Times:

BEIJING — In what has become a familiar vocal pas de deux, Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader, stepped off a plane in Tokyo on Tuesday and immediately began accusing the Chinese government of secretly executing members of the Uighur minority and illegally detaining hundreds of others.

The OED defines pas de deux as “a dance for two people. In extended use: a partnership or liaison between two people, countries, etc., especially one which is difficult to initiate or requires careful handling.”

I’ve said before that I can be a fan of sending people to the dictionary, but I usually like that to be accompanied by a hint of context or to greatly add something to the story.

In this case, I don’t think that exists. Even if you know what a pas de deux is, it’s not clear here what the two-sided relationship is. Is it that of Kadeer and whatever country she has visited? That doesn’t seem likely, since it’s a “vocal pas de deux,” and the host country isn’t doing any talking. The same goes for a pas de deux between her stepping off the plane and starting to attack China, since the plane obviously isn’t talking. So is it between her two accusations, that of executions and detentions? That seems to be the most likely explanation.

But saying pas de deux in that case doesn’t add anything to a person’s understanding. It smacks of either showing off or of trying to spice up a lead that doesn’t have a lot of action. If the goal was the latter, I think this fails because it just clouds the introduction to what was a pretty interesting story about Kadeer. There would have been nothing wrong with something like “BEIJING — In what has become a familiar greeting … ” And China’s detentions and executions don’t so much have a relationship as they are part of the same policy of human-rights violations.

The New York Times is a more challenging paper when it comes to the language it uses, and that’s great. But this goes a bit above and beyond, especially in a news story.

Here are two quotations from the OED where pas de deux is used to better effect. You still might have to look it up, but the definition is immediately applicable to what you just read:

• 1973 Times Literary Supplement 26 Oct. 1324/1 Between them they perform a ritual examination of conscience, a pas de deux in which they are painfully at cross-purposes.
• 2001 Science 10 Aug. 1034/2 Researchers have identified several critical steps in the delicate pas de deux between HIV and the cells it infects.

Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary etymology: “French : pas, step + de, of, for + deux, two.”

Here’s an interesting bit from today’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Noisome is often misconstrued as meaning “noisy; loud; clamorous.” In fact, it means “noxious; malodorous.” The word is related etymologically to “annoy.”

Here’s the etymology for noisome from the American Heritage Dictionary: “From the Middle English noiesom : noie, meaning harm (short for anoi, meaning annoyance, from Old French, from anoier, meaning to annoy)” + “the Middle English -som, from the Old English -sum, meaning -like.”

And the AHD etymology for annoy: “From the Middle English anoien, from the Old French anoier, ennuyer, from the Vulgar Latin inodiāre, meaning to make odious.”

You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day here.

My wife and I are going home to Philly for the week. Driving. All 700 miles. Thanks, ridiculous plane fares.

Posting will resume next Monday or Tuesday. My access to the Internet will be spotty, at best, but I might be doing some Tweeting.

See y’all next week.

I read horror novels. I’ve read non-fiction books about psychotic murders, the killing streets of Baltimore, and battlefields across centuries and continents. I’ve seen movies like Saw and plenty of other frightfests.

None of those terrified me like In Harm’s Way, by Doug Stanton (2001).

The book is subtitled “The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of its Survivors.” The Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945, in the closing days of World War Two, though no one knew it was so close to over at the time.

(The Indy went down a few days after secretly delivering the components of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb was so secret that everyone assumed Japan would have to be invaded, at an estimated cost of 1,000,000 American casualties. Instead, Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on August 6 and August 9; Japan surrendered on August 15.)

But even if the sinking of the Indy hadn’t happened so close to the end of the war, it would have been no less horrifying.

When the ship was hit — about halfway between the ship’s last stop in Guam and its destination in the Philippines — just after midnight, there were 1,196 men on board. It is estimated that 900 made it into the Pacific water alive. The ship radioed for help, but the messages were disregarded because they could not be confirmed; sending false distress signals was a common Japanese ploy. When the ship didn’t arrive in port, it was “simply assumed that the Indy had been diverted to other action.”

The men in the water were tortured by the sight of passing American planes for days, flown by men who simply didn’t see the men in the water. It wasn’t until after 11 a.m. on August 2 that the pilot of a patrol plane noticed the oil slick.

The last survivors was not pulled out of the water until August 3, more than 4 1/2 days after the ship sank.

Only 321 men came out of the Pacific alive. Four died in the next week.

During those 4 1/2 days, the men in the water — many of whom were wounded — slowly lost their minds, their bodies deteriorated in the salt water, and they suffered from hypothermia. (Even though the water was in the 80s, it still leached the heat from the men. Their core body temperatures dropped below 90.) When then men started to lose it, they began to kill each other.

And there were sharks, circling for the entire time the men were in the water. The book estimates that 200 died of shark attacks.

In Harm’s Way might be the first book I’ve ever had to put down for a moment before starting to read again. I did that at this passage, the first real gut-churning moment of the book for me, on page 124:

Looking over his shoulder, he could see one of the ship’s propellers still spinning. Men were jumping off the stern, screaming as they dropped. They hit the blades and were thrown into the air. One minute they were dropping straight for the sea; the next, they were flying sideways, wailing as they flew out into the darkness.

I was truly nauseated after reading that. I set the book down. But I had to pick it up again. It only got worse as I read the book in whatever spare time I had, finishing it in a day.

Stanton simply, but very carefully, lays out the disaster, mixing horrific detail with descriptions of the foul-ups that left the men in the water for so long. The stories of what the men were going through as they drifted, and the knowledge that helps was not on the way, upset me more than anything else I’ve ever read or watched. In Harm’s Way is a fantastic book, a sharply written account of a story that needed to be told.

But it is not a book I could ever say I enjoyed.

(Spoiler: I’m not a badger)

The L.A. Times had a story about Megan Fox last month, and it used a word twice that always seems to be used to describe young, attractive starlets:

There are a handful of salient facts about her that have exploded into the public consciousness, mainly because the 23-year-old, Tennessee-born ingenue has said them for maximum effect in numerous magazine cover stories. It’s helped that the articles invariably arrive accompanied by suggestive photos of Fox in a bikini or lingerie or Daisy Duke shorts or perhaps naked beneath a faux-fur blanket or in a towel that leaves just enough to the imagination to linger in the imagination after you close the magazine.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives these definitions:

• 1. A naive, innocent girl or young woman.
• 2a. The role of an ingénue in a dramatic production.
• 2b. An actress playing such a role.

Given Fox’s role as the sex symbol of the moment, her candid discussion of her sexcapades, and her numerous lad-mag photo spreads, ingenue here is clearly used in the sense of the second definitions. The only Fox movie I’ve seen was the first Transformers, and she did play a fairly innocent character in that. Not so sure that applies to her latest film, Jennifer’s Body, a horror movie in which she plays a killer cheerleader.

It seems to me that this is another word, like “debutante,” that gets thrown around a lot in newspapers. Same with “stud quarterbacks.” I think the question to be asked about these words is: Is it accurate, or is it just an easy crutch to avoid thinking? In Megan Fox’s case, I think her ingenue days might be behind her.

The AHD etymology: French, feminine of ingénu, meaning guileless, from Latin ingenuus, meaning ingenuous.