Talk Wordy to Me

I’m not sure why, but I’ve never gotten into National Grammar Day, which is today. So I don’t really have anything to say about it.

But John McIntyre has a good list of constructive ways to recognize it over at You Don’t Say, including “Hire an editor” and “Get yourself some good advice.” You can also check out the blogs on the right side of this page, and there’s a more extensive list on the National Grammar Day site.

I was never much for The Killers when they became popular in 2004. But I decided to give their first album, Hot Fuss, a listen or three last week. It was better than I had remembered, though I don’t think they’ll make it into my regular rotation.

In one song, “All These Things That I’ve Done,” the line “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” is repeated several times. That caught the ear of my inner word nerd, and I wondered if soul and soldier had a common etymology that the Killers were cleverly using to express their angst.

Nope.

Here are the etymologies, from Webster’s New World:

• Soul: From the Middle English soule, from the Old English sawol, akin to the German seele and the Gothic saiwala, from the Germanic saiwalo,* literally that belonging to the sea (from saiwa-, meaning sea): from the early Germanic belief that souls originate in and return to the sea. (*The etymology notes that the Germanic part is unverified, but I thought it was interesting.)
• Soldier: from the Middle English soldiour, from the Old French soldier, from solde, meaning coin, pay, from the Late Latin solidus, literally meaning solid and figuratively meaning coin.

(Despite today’s discovery that I have access to the OED again, its etymologies in these cases were needlessly complex for my purposes.)

This really has nothing to do with words, it’s just a really cool music video by OK Go, which is known for their cool music videos:

Wired has a story about the making of the video.

Apparently, I can get into the OED through the Louisville library Web site again. All praise to the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

That is all.

(Obviously, this will contain some language.)

Generally, newspapers have a policy against printing profanity, with the exception of a quote that is exceptionally newsworthy. (Usually a public figure cursing at someone else in public, such as Dick Cheney’s famous “Go fuck yourself” to Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate.)

Although I think these rules tend to err of the stodgy side, in a publication intended for a mass audience, I understand the need to be as inoffensive as possible so as not to lose readers.

Usually, if a quote contains profanity but the reporter wants to use it, the profanity will be replaced with some sort of typographical fix. So when Cheney said “Go fuck yourself,” some newspapers reported it with something like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go … yourself,” he said.

Or like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go — yourself,” he said.

I don’t quite get this. If you think it is important enough to say that the person cursed at someone, then why don’t you think it is important enough to report what they said? The reader is left to guess about the degree of the obscenity and is probably left playing fill in the blank. (It’s fairly obvious in this quote, but what about something like “That’s … ridiculous.” Lots of naughty words fit there.)

But sometimes, newspapers print something stupid like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go f–k yourself,” he said.

I saw an example of  this in a newspaper recently (different profanity and context, but it was a quote of one elected official speaking to another in public), and I literally said, “Come on!” loud enough to draw attention from those around me at the breakfast place I was eating at.

This is the worst way to handle profanity. You are trying to act like you care about your readers’ sensitivities, but really, you’re just insulting their intelligence. The argument I have heard for “f–k” or “s–t” or whatever is that it is to protect kids. But readers don’t sit around discussing newspaper ethics or policies or reading our handbooks. They don’t know why you just took out the middle letters, and they’ll probably think the newspaper thinks they are too dumb to figure out what the word is.

And even if the policy is understood — and even if a child young enough to protect from swearing is actually reading an article about politics — all this will do is make the kid go to his parents and ask what it means.

Leaving aside whether or not kids need to be protected from cursing, I think that a kid reading something like that gives a parent the opportunity to talk about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, whether you are a 10-year-old or a vice president.

Quoting a powerful figure telling another powerful figure to go fuck himself is not gratuitous use of profanity. It’s just news.

But if your policy is to not print profanity except in extreme cases, and you judge that something is not extreme, then leave it out entirely, or at worst, take the word out using ellipses or dashes or whatever. Don’t just take out the middle letters. It’s a gutless way to deal with the issue.

Warren Ellis, a comic book writer who has quickly become one of my favorite people on the Internet, offers an evaluation of the proposed design for the new U.S. Embassy in London. “Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!”

This week’s Words of Others, like last week’s, comes from Warren Ellis’ Shivering Sands, a collection of essays by the British comic book writer.

In “Nothing Happened,” written in 2003, Ellis uses Marilyn Manson as a jumping-off point, specifically an interview in which Manson “explains his evocation of Cabaret in his recent work as a reaction to recent times, Thirties vaudeville as a haven from politics.”

Ellis interprets Manson’s message as a reaction to the start of a new century that is pretty much like the end of the last, and Ellis doesn’t like that idea: “Is it a creative reaction, to answer ‘nothing’s happened’ with ‘nothing’s going to happen and you can’t do shit about it’?”

And then Ellis closes with absolute brilliance (warning, contains language):

The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.

I’m reading Shivering Sands, a collection of short essays and other writing by British comic book writer Warren Ellis. A lot of it is thoughts on writing and the creative process, both his and others’. In “Comics and Ideas,” he talks about how comics educate and transmit ideas. It concludes with this line:

The best fiction, like the best reportage, is about the writer telling the reader where they think they are today, and what they think it looks like.

Jan Freeman, who writes The Word column for the Boston Globe, had a good one yesterday about two words that fell down with all the snow last week on the East Coast: snowmageddon and snowpocalypse. I love them both. Ms. Freeman explores their origins and delves into the root words, explaining why snowpocalypse might better reflect the mood under all that snow:

If you have any purist leanings, there are reasons to go with snowpocalypse. It’s based on apocalypse, the Greek word for “unveiling, revelation” and the alternative name for the Book of Revelation, that vision of the world’s end. Well into the 19th century, apocalypse could still be used as an everyday synonym for “disclosure,” but by the end of the century it had acquired a darker meaning: a catastrophe or disaster of the scale foretold in Revelation, one that does (in the Oxford English Dictionary’s words) “drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm.”

Armageddon, on the other hand, is just one battle, a single event in the long unrolling of the end times; its name is a site in Israel, says the OED, “the place of the last decisive battle at the Day of Judgement; hence [it is] used allusively for any ‘final’ conflict on a great scale.”

But she also thinks snowmaegeddon will win out. Read the full story to find out why.

As I write this late Sunday night, snow is falling on Louisville, making its way slowly east. It may be there by now. Search your souls, sinful, liberal East Coast types. The end is nigh. Or at least the beginning. Of more shoveling.