Monthly Archives: April 2010

Today’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day was interesting:

A “parley” (/PAHR-lee/) is a discussion of disputed matters, especially a negotiation between warring parties to end hostilities. A “parlay” (/pahr-LAY/) is a series of all-or-nothing wagers made in hopes of eventually accumulating large winnings.

Each word is sometimes misused for the other.

This immediately made me think of Pirates of the Caribbean:

src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/hH-1WVevbGQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″>

According to Garner’s, then, Johnny Depp and all the rest who ask for parley in the movie are pronouncing it incorrectly. Interesting.

In the video above, Captain Jack says the French came up with parley. And, indeed, French does come up in the American Heritage Dictionary etymology for parley:

• Middle English, from the Old French parlee, from feminine past participle of parler, meaning to talk, from the Vulgar Latin paraulāre, from the Late Latin parabolāre, from parabola, meaning discourse.

And also in the etymology for parlay:

• Alteration of paroli, meaning the staking of double the sum staked before in faro, from the French, from the obsolete Italian, probably from the Italian parare, to place a bet, from the Latin parāre, meaning to prepare.

(In the third item on Answers.com, the Columbia Dictionary describes faro as: “[for Pharaoh, from an old French card design], gambling game played with a pack of 52 cards. First played in France and England, faro was especially popular in U.S. gambling houses in the 19th century. Players bet against a banker (dealer), who draws two cards-one that wins and another that loses-from the deck (or from a dealing box) to complete a turn. Bets-on which card will win or lose- are placed on each turn.”)

Photo by Renee Petrina.

I attended my first American Copy Editors Society conference last week. It was fantastic. I’d missed the chance to go the past few years for various reasons, but I really pushed to get time off to go this time, especially because it was in my hometown, Philadelphia.

I was amazed at how many other people made an effort to attend. The count on the conference website is 328 attendees. That’s in an organization that has a membership in the mid-700s, including traditional newspaper copy editors, magazine editors, freelancers, and those who work  in the corporate world. I think it’s really impressive that half of the membership came, especially since many paid their own way. A show of hands at the opening session showed that about half the people in the room spent their own money to be there.

That kind of commitment was really a big morale booster for me. The past few years have been terrible ones at American newspapers, and the War on Editing, as John McIntyre calls it, has made things especially gloomy on copy desks. It was heartening to be among the survivors, who still care deeply about the importance of copy editing. They care despite the disdain many companies seem to have for the work of adding clarity, accuracy, and credibility to their publications.

It was also great to see old friends, to meet people whom I only knew from their blogs or on Twitter, and to make new friends. I got to share a few of my favorite places in Center City (Philadelphia’s downtown) and to discover a new one. (Thanks to Fergie’s pub for giving a bunch of us a great place to hang out on Friday night.)

I’m not going to rehash the sessions here. There are some good posts on those on the ACES blog, including one I wrote on Bill Walsh’s session, “Rules that Aren’t.” And I am writing about Rutgers professor Susan Keith’s session on “The Future of Editing” for the ACES newsletter. I’ll post that here once it is published.

ACES is doing a lot of good by supporting and promoting the work of copy editors. I knew that before the conference, but I really saw what that means there. It means training; it means shoulders to cry on and ears to bitch to; it means awards and scholarships (you can buy a Talk Wordy to Me t-shirt or mug to support that). And it means, most of all, that whether we work at night in mostly empty newsrooms, in offices with civilian hours, or at home as freelancers, we are not alone.

Amid all the hubub of the ACES conference last week, I missed that Talk Wordy to Me had been named one of the 50 Best Blogs for Grammar Geeks on Online University Reviews. There are a lot of good blogs on the list, and I’m grateful to be in their company. I’m looking forward to exploring some of the blogs on there that I had not heard of.

The American Copy Editors Society has an Education Fund, which has the following goal:

Finding and hiring talented copy editors has always been challenging, but a world hungry for information needs copy editors more than ever. To help meet that need, the American Copy Editors Society has awarded scholarships to deserving students since 1999.

The fund now has over $150,000 and is self-sustaining. But the more it grows, the more it will be able to support future copy editors. ACES members were challenged at the conference last weekend to help make that happen.

To that end, I’ve decided that any money I make on mugs and t-shirts through my Zazzle store (a buck or two per sale, plus a referral fee if you click on the link from this site) will be donated to the ACES Education Fund. If you like reading newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and any other words that are clear, accurate, and credible, please consider picking something up.

Thanks!

The mug that I use for tea at work got broken, so I decided to get one with Talk Wordy to Me’s new logo on it, so I whipped one up at Zazzle.

Zazzle also has a store (like Cafepress) to sell mugs and t-shirts, so I posted some of both in case anyone is interested in buying one. There’s a ton of options for both the mugs and the shirts. The store is here.

UPDATE: Mary Brolley pointed out via Facebook that the original mugs and t-shirts had Writing misspelled as Writng. Ugh. It’s fixed, but the new stuff is taking a while to show up. Thanks Mary!

UPDATE 2: OK, the corrected stuff is up.

I got back to Louisville yesterday from the ACES 2010 conference in Philadelphia. For now, a one-word review: AWESOME. More on that later this week. I have a lot of catching up to do today.

I’m headed to the American Copy Editors’ Society conference in Philly on Wednesday, so I won’t be posting here this week. I gotta pack and get some chores done before I leave. Once I am there, I will be writing for the conference blog. So you can get your fix of wordy talk from me and a bunch of other word nerds starting Thursday.

I already have a few things up about two of my favorite places to eat in Philly, Sang Kee Peking Duck House and Moriarty’s. My friend Luke Murray wrote about the Pen & Pencil Club (America’s oldest press club) and two good places to get a cheesesteak near the conference hotel.

See you next week.

My wife gave me The Book of Firsts by Peter D’Epiro for my birthday last month. It’s a collection of 150 short essays, with seven or eight for each of the first 20 centuries A.D., on firsts such as “Which emperor first criminalized Christianity in the Roman Empire?” and “What was the first photograph?” Good stuff.

In the section on the second century, D’Epiro asks, “Who was the first comparative biographer?” I’m writing about this one not because of the answer (Plutarch), but because there are several interesting etymologies in this essay about Plutarch’s book, Lives:

• On the founders of Rome: “In the life of Romulus, we find all the familiar tales, such as how he and his twin, Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf, though Plutarch offers the alternative interpretation that the boys’ adoptive mother was the real lupa, since the word can mean both ‘she-wolf’ and ‘whore’ in Latin.”
• On the Spartans: Plutarch “also gives examples of their laconic wit (the word laconic comes from the district of Laconia, of which Sparta was the capital), as when a Spartan refused to go hear a man who imitated a nightingale’s voice with the explanation, ‘I’ve heard the nightingale itself.’”
• On Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and reformer: “When mentioning that Solon forbade the export of any produce except olive oil, Plutarch explains how informers became known as sycophants (literally “fig revealers”), since they curried favor with the authorities by squealing on Athenians who traded in figs.”