Strong Language

Researchers at Oxford University have compiled a list of the most irritating words and phrases in the English language, or at least its British variant.

They published their work in Damp Squid, a book named after the widespread confusion over squid and squib (a mistake we must have made a thousand times.)

It’s not quite clear from the Telegraph what standards the study used. Did a particular word annoy the entire British empire (such as it is), or just  the UK? Or just Oxford, or Lynne Truss, or a couple of hung-over freshmen?

Ready?

At the end of the day
Fairly unique
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Absolutely
It’s a nightmare
Shouldn’t of
24/7
It’s not rocket science

We’d advise them to relax. Surely there’s more to be annoyed about.

“I’m, like, totally ready to lead.”
Paris Hilton

In response to the McCain ad ridiculing Obama as a celebrity — with a picture of Paris to prove it — and asking But is he ready to lead?

Yesterday we completed a year without TV. How’d that happen? See Cathode rays are dark.

How did we survive? Newspapers and Netflix. Books and Billy Justice. Dinners and dogs and dumb homeowner projects.

We seem to be intact. But we’ll string up the antenna (or cable, or whatever) and climb back on the grid soon.

Lazy writing never goes out of style, but recently we’ve noticed a spike in a certain usage. Here are examples from today’s papers:

The allegations need to be investigated.
The sandbags need to be removed because they cause erosion downstream.
Mortgage rates need to be lowered.

We’re reminded of the famous defense to a murder charge: “He needed killing, Your Honor.”

What else do sandbags “need”? Food, water, a scratch behind the ears? And what do mortgage rates do when their “needs” aren’t met? Pout, cry, throw a tantrum, go on strike? Or just sit in quiet suffering?

Read the rest of this entry »

For years we’ve maintained a pointless little file of names with a certain characteristic: They reflect the owner’s occupation.

We haven’t paid much attention to it recently, but after today’s papers we knew we had to go public. These are all real names:

How could Francine Prose not write fiction?

How could Usain Bolt not run races?

How could Storm Field not forecast weather?

How could John Fund not report for the Wall Street Journal?

How could Rick Wagoner not run General Motors?

How could Igor Judge not preside over a court? (Britain’s highest one, making him Lord Judge, the Chief Justice)

How could Chris Moneymaker not win at poker?

How could Donald Trump not operate a casino?

And what finally tipped us over? Why, today’s obit:

With a name like William Headline . . .
How could he not have been a CNN bureau chief?

It’s all in the great tradition of Major Major from Catch-22.  (Ten points for his full name and rank!)

Refile under: can’t make ‘em up

Strong Language doesn’t get out much, and we remain a hermit despite many attempts to reform us. Coffee and a T1 line — O wilderness were paradise enow.

Then they said, “Hey, SL, why don’t you come to the IABC awards this year? They’re called Atlanta’s Got Talent — and there’s sauce bearnaise on the menu!”

It was an invite we couldn’t decline, and it was a treat. Beautiful work well recognized —  many interesting conversations — sauce worth slurping (though we did not) — and a very funny Conn-man at the podium. And mimes.

We’re a little busy at the moment — Recession on Line 3 — but we’ll offer more substantive notes presently. (We may even tackle the mime question — an antilanguage if ever there were.)

Meanwhile, kudos to the winners, thanx to Elena and all the organizers and volunteers, and backatcha to the kindly greetings of all.

Here’s to Dr. K at Marietta Eye. Lakshmana Kooragayala has tended Strong Language’s weak retinas for a few years now, and both eyeballs are happy with the care.

John Milton lost his sight at 44 and wrote his famous poem soon afterward.

We suffered a retinal detachment in 1971, when we were 19 and immortal. We wrote no poems, though. Medicine had a solution, our parents were insured, and that was that.

SL doesn’t do a big trade in personal items, preferring to stay focused on language. But when John Milton opens a door for us, we go in.

Don’t neglect follow-up appointments! Today we kept one, and two hours later we walked out with a laser-repaired retina. Had we waited, nothing might have happened. On the other hand, our light might soon be spent.

This week’s New Yorker reports on a conversation with a top official at a major global financial institution who asked not to be identified “because, well, he did not want to be identified.”

It’s a refreshing jab at the New York Times, which has recently put itself through contortions to justify printing comments from anonymous sources. (There’s a history, of course — Google Jayson Blair — but it’s beyond our present porpoises.)

We’ve been monitoring the situation for you (SL at its post). The Times quotes many a source who requests anonymity because:

“He is not authorized to speak on the events.”
“The meeting was not public.”
“The subject matter is sensitive.”
. . . and so on.

Where does it end?  Before long it will be “an official who asked not to be identified because he was eating a ham sandwich.”

The New Yorker approach is better, although they backslide week-to-week. Actually, we prefer the old-fashioned approach, where a rag protects its anonymous sources without justification or apology. A journalist who makes up quotes can make up a reason for anonymity. The NYT add-ons are meaningless.

Every year since 1978, the Diagram Prize has recognized the most unusual title of a book published in Britain. Past winners have included such greats as

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
How Green Were the Nazis?
People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead
How to Avoid Huge Ships

This year the prize also recognized the all-time best of the best. The winner was Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, a title that, according to the authors, “purely describes what’s in the book.” Good enough for us.

Next time you drop 100,000 pieces, put 25k in the mail and the rest in the trash. That”s apparently how the National Center for Database Marketing operates.

We received a brochure from the NCDM inviting us to that organization’s conference in Florida. In fact we received 4 separate mailings on the same day, each addressed to the same name but with a different executive title for each. Strong Language, of course, is a one-man show.

Inspires confidence in the outfit’s database marketing expertise, doesn’t it? They can help you quadruple your direct mail budget, to zero effect.

File under: Can’t make it up.

We’ve been telling you about cloud computing, whereby your work is processed in real time on remote servers. It’s off and running, and most businesses will climb aboard eventually.

But right now, if your biz is moving cloudward, or even thinking about doing so, take notice: Yesterday the cloud grew up a little.

What happened? Gmail went down, that’s all.

Larry Dignan explaines the implications over on ZD Net. Here’s a pull:

Google’s Gmail outage is the latest stumble for nascent cloud computing services, which are becoming the lifeblood for small businesses and startups. If you’re depending on these Web-based apps you need a backup plan.

We liked the term cloud computing. Still do. But as the language angle recedes we’ll have to let it go. Stay on top of the technology with the ZD blogs.

SL stands with the Chicago Manual of Style on the serial comma, which is also called the Oxford comma.

You can’t go wrong with it, but you can go badly wrong without it:

I’d like to thank my parents, the pope, and Mother Theresa.

I’d like to thank my parents, the pope and Mother Theresa.

The second version, without the serial comma, casts doubt on the vows of celibacy and suggests a paternity scandal.

The serial comma is unpopular, we suspect, because commas are so overused in general. When a teacher or editor decides to take a stand, the serial comma is an easy target.

In professional work, of course, we conform to our client’s style. But in SL’s own style (which combines the best of Chicago, AP, NYT, Strunk, White, and Huck Finn), a series takes a serial comma.

Surely you’ve heard this old cornball.

Three guys are stranded on a desert island for 20 years. Not only have they told all the jokes they know, but they’ve told them all so many times that by now they just refer to them by number.

So when one guy says, “Thirty one,” it sends them all into a giggling fit.

And when another guy says “Ninety-six,” they crack up over that.

Then the third guy says, “Sixty!” and nobody laughs.

“Hey!” he says. “That’s a funny joke!”

“Yeah,” says one of the others. “But you always screw it up.”

The joys of travel caught up with us last week, and we spent an unscheduled 24 hours in Ohio. We muttered and sputtered, but we came out ahead overall — because we happened to pick up a copy of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan at an airport shop.

We’ve long been partial to Mr. Pan, a heathen deity who shows up often in legend and literature. For one of his darker turns, read The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.

Barrie’s play and novel, written at the turn of the 20th century, were darker than the Disney version — no surprise there. But what stunned us was the writing: Barrie was a perfectionist, unrelenting.

That’s all we ask.

Funny quiz on literary back-translations by Henry Alford in today’s NYT Book Review.

Best of show: Angry Raisins, the English version of a Japanese publisher’s attempt at The Grapes of Wrath.

Alford’s own multiple-choice offerings are worth the read.

Hydrogen signals “from the Martian earth” indicate the presence of water, says Rough Guides. “The Lander uses a robotic shovel to dig into the Martian earth,” says Design News.

“Martian earth!” says Strong Language. “What th’??!!”

“Easy, SL,” says everybody else. “Didn’t you know that earth is another word for soil?”

“Oh, yeah?” say we. “So tell us: Did they name it for the planet, or the other way around? But then why didn’t they name the planet Soil, or Ground, or Dirt? Greetings, Dirtlings!”

Either way, when some of the stuff shows up 120 million miles away, wouldn’t you expect more than casual mention in a couple of niche mags?

SL is as confused as the next Earthling. How much earth is there on Mars, exactly? What about those other planets — do they have some? Is there a pile on the Moon? Most important, who (or what) is behind the caper?

Meanwhile, you’re in good hands. We’ll cover this issue even if the other media won’t touch it. Because if there’s any earth up there, Earth owns it. SL at its post.

Bo Diddley was a founder of rock and roll, and the beat he invented drove much of the music that followed. Born Otha Ellas Bates, he passed on June 2. Read the Times obit

Where did his name come from? There are different recollections, but SL suspects a one-stringed instrument popular in Mississippi, where Bo came up, called a diddley bow.

We backed into Mr. Diddley once, literally, on a Delta flight. We begged pardon, he was gracious, and when we said “Bumpety-bump” you should have seen him grin. (It’s from Mona, his 1957 classic, the flip side of Hey, Bo Diddley.)

Bo Diddley knew something about creativity. He once said: “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like. You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it.”

For a language blog, this is irresistible. Fair warning: It includes mild profanity.

The Subprime Primer

Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all… Shreve to Quentin in Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner.

Okay, Shreve. Will do.

The Society for Technical Communication has scheduled its national conference in Atlanta next year, and to help prepare the local chapter for the coming hordes, SL is assembling a reading list. Here’s a start for Atlanta and Georgia:

Memoirs by Gen. William T. Sherman. Some Atlantans hated the man who burned the city, and others named their children for him. Unexpected bonus: Sherman, like Grant, could write.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Fiction is lying — that’s its nature. But while some authors tell stories in order to reveal truth, others . . . Well, meet Mrs. Mitchell. Nostalgic for slavery, repelled by democracy, she’s not our cup of julep. But she was a better writer than she’s given credit for.

The Inman Family: An Atlanta Family from Reconstruction to World War I, by Tammy Harden Galloway. After the war, these masters without slaves landed in Atlanta and quickly created the biggest cotton brokerage in the world. And a steel mill, a railroad, an energy company, a little school on North Avenue, and not a few governors.

Atlanta and Its Environs, by Franklin Garrett. For a comprehensive history it’s all we’ve got — two volumes of vast information, though writ dense and obscured by fawning.

The Creation of Modern Georgia, by Numan Bartley. Georgia since Oglethorpe, and especially since the Civil War. Includes a tight chapter on Reconstruction.

The History of Georgia, Kenneth Coleman, ed. Straight from the State, so to speak. First published by Carter in 77, reblessed by same in 91, it’s still in print today.

Imagineering Atlanta, by Charles Rutheiser. Is this a city or a marketing plan? Rutheiser captures the heady mix of civic boosterism brewed in Atlanta by railroaders and insurance men, politicians and publishers, advertisers and Ku Klux. (The title is especially apt: Imagineering is a Disney term.)

Mayor: Notes from the Sixties, by Ivan Allen. Atlanta in mid-century, as reported by its world-famous mayor. Allen came from merchant stock, but he jumped class — he married an Inman — and led the city’s business establishment into the modern world. If you ever wondered why King’s hometown saw so few civil rights protests, Allen’s autobiography explains it.

1864: Yankees at the Gates, by Steve Marshall. A summary of Sherman’s invasion of Georgia and capture of Atlanta, including a short account of the city’s origins. Read 1864: Yankees at the Gates

Ever fill out ten identical medical forms, by hand, in one day? Ever ride in circles on a pharmacy-doctor-insurance carousel? Ever wonder why your doctor is asking you what prescriptions you take?

Here’s something just for you! Google Health “puts you in charge of your health information. It’s safe, secure, and free.”

Skeptical? An FAQ section explains the service further. Question 6 in particular caught our attention:

Q. If it’s free, how does Google make money off Google Health?

A. Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users’ needs.

Wait — did SL miss something here? Like an answer to the question? Let’s ask it another way:

Q. What’s the business model?

Sergey and Larry have one, you may be sure. Those choirboys didn’t get rich by singing for free. Or by telling the ol’ public everything all at once.

Shaun Kelly makes good points at Shoap’s STS Blog.

I’d go a bit further. You’re doing a terrible disservice to an expert audience if you abandon jargon and weigh down your writing with “clear and simple” explanations of every term a layperson wouldn’t understand.

Question: What do you call forty technical writers guzzling chianti and chicken parm?

Answer: A fun bunch!

We had some good conversations last week at the awards banquet of the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication.

One was with Mike Hughes, who mastered the ceremonies and presented awards. He was recently elected second VP of the national organization,

A few facts:

• Mike tells his own story at User Assistance.
• He’s on track to lead the STC in 2009, just as the organization holds its international conference in Atlanta.
• He took home an award himself for his application of the “Long Tail” theory to computer help systems.
• In the STC, Mike is campaigning for a campaign: The STC must more effectively promote the value of what we do.

Next, opinions:

• Mike’s ideas about the forward march of the STC are on target.
• He defines value a little narrowly. (Some writers, including us, focus on a long tail indeed — buyers who know that “well-written, correctly punctuated documentation” is rare and valuable.)
• On at least one occasion, Mike has worn a tuxedo (though not long-tailed) and carried it off successfully.

FULL DISCLOSURE. For several years Mike has served as an academic adviser to Holly Harkness, a technical communicator married to the author of Strong Language.

Again, big SL props to Mike. Challenging times lie ahead, and we’re looking forward to STC leadership.

Best practices for business email. If that’s not a dead horse, we’d like to see one.

But still, the time has come for us to lay out the rules — the SL rules.

Rule 1:
Respond to questions unless someone higher than you on the food chain (boss, client) responds first. Then do nothing.

Rule 2:
Learn to use f Few words.

More to come.

A debate recently broke out at DontCallMeTina, a technical communications blog, over the use of “irregardless.” The blogger says the word’s not acceptable, and cites the Chicago Manual of Style for support.

But then come others who say Everybody knows what it means! Chicago is just a self-appointed gatekeeper. Go ahead and use it!

The same logic applies for words like “ain’t.” Or, more ominously, for words like “inflammable.”

Of course it means not flammable! Except it doesn’t. And pity the poor soul who thinks it does, and uses an “inflammable” liquid to douse a fire. There will be burns. And lawsuits.

Language evolves! they say.

That’s not in question. But as it evolves, writers must decide when and where to introduce less-than-standard words. SL, for our part, prizes the opinions of CMOS, AP and, yes, even Microsoft.

We prize the vernacular too. And we know a perfectly good sales pitch to teenagers might be incomprehensible to an adult. But at present we don’t think it’s a good idea to sprinkle your next Fortune 500 piece — whether it’s a newsletter or a technical manual — with “whatever.” Or “ain’t.” Or “irregardless.”

SL at its post.

A recent letter submitted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

I was surprised to learn in the AJC that the late Georgia State University president Noah Langdale “was pleased with GSU’s long-standing tradition of open debate and academic freedom.”

When I was at Georgia State in the mid-1970s, it was students, not administrators, who maintained the campus as a free-speech zone.

I never saw President Langdale personally shut down a literature table, chase away newspaper vendors, or undermine a student election campaign. But I saw his underlings do those things.

Like other campus administrations, Georgia State’s was reflexively hostile to efforts opposing “off-campus” ills like race and sex discrimination, South African apartheid, and U.S. military adventures abroad. When students and faculty members engaged in such efforts, the Langdale administration often forced them to begin by defending their right to speak.

Those “open-debate” conflicts were reported in the campus newspaper, and even broke into the AJC now and then. For the most part, I’m pleased to recall, the students won.

/s/ Steve Marshall

This one is more articulate that a few full-grown lawyers I know.

Star Wars according to a 3-year old

Netscape Navigator got the axe yesterday.

You can still download it, presumably forever. But AOL, the browser’s latest owner, announced it will no longer provide support or security patches after February.

It was a good run.

SL came up through Mosaic, Netscape’s predecessor. (After Tandy, Commodore, Microsoft DOS and Compuserve, a Web browser running on a Windows PC was a Big Deal.)

Netscape Navigator fought a good fight. The browser innovated so often it was said to run on “Internet time,” and its market share reached 70 percent.

Last week that stood at less than a point. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, meanwhile, had 78.

No one should forget the small but valiant part that Microsoft technical writers played in the victory: Shameless in Seattle.

There’s trouble in DVD Land.

Consumers have recently enjoyed a “competition window,” during which Netflix innovation forced a measure of civility upon Blockbuster.

It was no small thing — the Giant gave up a big piece of its model, which was to build a business on late fees. (Talk about innovation — evil geniuses worked overtime on that one.)

But the window may be closing. Why? Netflix is in trouble with the PO. Turns out the Netflix return packaging jams the postal gears.

Merely a logistical hiccup, you say?

Those paper-thin red wrappers are close to the heart of the model. That’s why postal grumbles give Netflix investors big jitters.

Will the Netflix kingdom be lost for want of a horseshoe nail? Probably not. But however the mess finally monetizes, it helps the Giant.

SL suggests watching Blockbuster closely. A backslide on the late fees is unlikely, but they may have other innovations up their sleeve. Or bankruptcy.

BTW, don’t miss the great short story Why I Live at the PO, by Eudora Welty.

Gifting issues this year? Can’t find the right thing for Strong Language? Here are two suggestions:

Glowkitties

Seoul, South Korea. Dec. 13. The government today announced a successful cat-cloning experiment that many scientists believe holds promise for prevention and treatment of human genetic diseases.

In a side effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark.

True? GoogleNews “korea cats glow” and see.

Any glowkitties received at SL will be forwarded interoffice to Abby, our grammar hound.

Yumberries

Believe it: China has twice as many acres in yang-mei berries as the U.S. does in apples.

Charles Stenftenagel, a garden supplies importer from Indiana, named the little gems for the western market.

Fruit vendors like it. Quoth Terry Xanthos, president of Frützzo: “Yumberry is the best name in the history of fruit.”

Read the Times article.

____________________________________________________________

Which all goes to prove that, when it comes to language, there’s never a slow news day.

We’re not watching TV these days.

If you think it’s because of the writers’ strike . . . you’re wrong. We detest most of their inane product and we shun it year-round.

There are a few exceptions, e.g. The Sopranos. (Of course, in a showdown with The Man, we naturally solidarize with the poor writers (Don’t see a triple entendre every day, do you?).)

Yup, that closing puntuation is correct. Poor Lynn Truss.

Our TV-starved diet, however, has a different driver: We moved recently, and we haven’t gotten around to hooking up the beast. This denial-of-service is of our own making.

We confess to a weakness, probably inherited, for a highball and a half-hour of network news. But when it comes to television, it turns out no news is good news.

You can spend 30 minutes with ABC World News Tonight, but for a far better return, spend it with the NYT or WSJ. To see why, compare a network newscast transcript to a serious newspaper. The half-hour TV “news” takes about 5 or 10 minutes to read.

The downside is missing out on some graphics and video, but you can find anything important online. Either way, it’s a small price to pay for the sudden and complete absence from your life of ABC’s Martha Raddatz, the Most Concerned Person on Earth.

In any case, Holly wired the tube to the DVD player. Had I tried it, there would have been one bumped head and many blasphemies, but she made it look easy.

There’s trouble in DVD Land, by the way.

Anyway, we’ll climb back on the TV grid eventually. We’re not anti-medium. Plus we like a little Entertainment Tonight now and then (the most watched entertainment news show in the world!).

Still, we can’t help recalling a comment by Bob Keeshan, better known as Captain Kangaroo: “One of the big secrets of finding time is to not watch television.”

To give up, press 2 now.

You’re deep into a push-button conversation with an “automated telephone response system.”

You had hoped to reach someone at a phone company, airline, library, bank. Instead, welcome to Crazytown. The Mad Hatter is in charge, and he has plenty of your time.

Surely everyone with a phone has a visceral interest in this topic. Luckily, we’ve scouted the terrain for you — SL at its post — and we’ve learned a thing or two about the language of automated response. We’ll investigate this strange tongue from time to time.

First, a low-tech tip

If you’ve ever just given up and punched O twenty times — fifty times — ONE MILLION TIMES — it turns out you’re onto something.

That’s right. You thought you’d been defeated, but the fact is that many advanced automated systems can recognize anger. More accurately, they recognize a long string of zeroes in quick succession, and they flag this pattern as anger — because someone, somewhere has correctly identified it as a reliable indicator of customer rage.

Many customer service departments know about this finding, but they don’t advertise it. Instead, they say Please pay attention because our menu has changed. And SL makes no guarantees — on any given system, you can press a thousand zeroes to no effect. A million.

But the technology is in place, and some systems move you faster if you convey your disenchantment in zeroes.

Some people might say it’s “the only language they understand,” while others might call that cynical. SL stands above.

Still, we are empiricists, and we must report that on occasion we have spoken this language and been fully understood.

Now what we REALLY need is a new button: Cancel my service, refund my money, and don’t make a peep.

Splenda blindsided the faux sugar industry and left it hopping mad.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Sugar! There’s nothing sweeter than pure white cane.
2. Of the artificials, Splenda tastes closest to cane.
3. In a deft marketing gambit, Splenda has staked two claims at once: It’s sugar, and it’s not sugar.

It’s sugar in almost every way. It’s derived from sugar, behaves much like sugar, has a chemical compound formula almost identical to sugar. (Remember dextrose, fructose, sucrose, glucose, etc.? All that ose.)

It’s not sugar. Period. No calories, no effect on blood sugar.

BOOM! No wonder consumers went wild. They were lapping it up, eating it raw by the bucket. Some were using funnels. Never underestimate the sweet tooth.

The makers of Blue and Pink, naturally, felt otherwise. (Splenda is the yellow one). Not fair! they cried. Splenda can’t have it both ways!

They have made appropriate complaints.

Meanwhile, Splenda marches on, and the people want more, and we may see over-the-counter intravenous delivery systems by early 09.