I’m Possessive . . .

. . . but I know when to let go.

My older (not older than me, I mean, but probably older than you) editor colleagues are appalled when I tell them that the neuter third-person possessive “its” is definitely on the way out, and that while I still loyally use “its,” I have resigned myself to its (it’s) disappearance, and even to the logic of its disappearance.

Look, we make possessives by adding “apostrophe s.”  The only reason we break that rule in the case of “it” is to avoid confusing the possessive with the contraction of “it is” (“it’s going to be a long day”).  But why are we suddenly so phobic about confusion?  We constantly distinguish between homonyms on the basis of context alone.  When we “peer” through a mail slot we don’t think of forcing a member of the House of Lords through the aperture.  Or for a better example (because both are verbs), we know that it’s one thing to “tear up” and another to “tear up your Kleenex.”  People who form the possessive “it’s” may be ignorant of the niceties of grammar, but the niceties—especially, God knows, in English!—are often arbitrary, and in this case the ignorance is logical.

I believe that sooner than later, the dictionaries will accept “it’s” first as an acceptable alternative, and then as the correct way to form the neuter third person plural.  And why not?  (Ironically, I’d be willing to betcha “his” started out as “he’s.”) Language changes because usage is the ultimate authority, or as William Safire used to call her, “Norma Loquendi.” (In this case, actually, her cousin, Norma Scribendi.)

There is one problem, and that’s that when people are uncertain about where apostrophe’s belong, they multiply like fleas.  As in the preceding sentence (I actually typed that unintentionally!), they are attracted to any terminal “s” and thus they start infecting plurals, which is beyond the pale.

And . . . here’s what prompted me to write this . . .

Today I actually saw           you’r

The Ambiguity of Important Words

. . . in English, that is.  It’s recently grabbed my attention that English perhaps uniquely leaves its most important words—such as love, work, belief—ambiguous and multivalent.  For example, Greek distinguishes between eros, agape, and philia, and maybe even more, but we use “love” for all three.  Over at Ron Fisher’s new blog The End of Work, we’ve had disagreements that have led to stimulating discussions, because we are using the word “work” simultaneously in so many different senses: effort, drudgery, energy expenditure, employment, calling (“your life’s work”), and more.  And now, in the comments at Ambiance, starting here and resuming here, I’m getting embroiled in a similar discussion about the word “belief.”

How to explain this quality of English?  It’s clear why we don’t have as many words for snow as Eskimos—we lack life-or-death need for such distinctions (and therefore, perhaps, aesthetic delight in them)—but the same cannot be said of love, work, or belief, which, in their many permutations, permeate our entire lives.  Is this a failing of English or, on some deep level, a deliberate choice?  If there is danger and confusion in this ambiguity, there’s also tremendous generative power (look how it can make us rack our brains! what’s more creative—and harder work!—than thinking about things there aren’t ready-made words for?), and also a recognition of deep, if conflicted, relationships among the many phenomena we call love . . . or work . . . or belief.

I would appreciate input from people with knowledge of other languages.  Is English really so unique in this?  If so, is it part of what has made English so hardy and adaptable?

(In Spanish, “I love you” in the romantic sense is often stated, not “Te amo” but “Te quiero”—literally, “I want you.” That at least seems honest!)

Intelligence Agency To Stockpile . . . Metaphors?

Is this a joke?

Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity [1] want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right.  Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers.

Why metaphors? “Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,” IARPA says. . . .

In the end the program should produce a methodology, tools and techniques together with a prototype system that will identify metaphors that provide insight into cultural beliefs. It should also help build structured framework that organizes the metaphors associated with the various dimensions of an analytic problem and build a metaphor repository where all metaphors and related information are captured for future reference and access, IARPA stated.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.  “TIME IS MONEY” is NOT A METAPHOR!!!  @#&^!! government!  Can’t get anything right!

But wait — the entire Internet thinks “Time is money” is an example of a metaphor.  In fact, it’s the Internet’s favorite example of a metaphor.  I maintain it is something else, for which the term is lost in ancient books of the subtle art of rhetoric.

I didn’t find it there.  Can anybody help?

A Voice in the Wilderness

This is the lament of an endangered species.  A plaintive, nasal piping, like the voice of the duck from the the wolf’s tummy in Peter and the Wolf.

I started to read a book.  It was a book I had received for the fact checking of a review in Natural History.  It looks like a fascinating book:  The Order of Days:  The Maya World and the Truth about 2012, by Mayanist scholar David Stuart.  It is NOT a book about predictions of the world’s end on December 21, 2012; the author takes a couple of pages to dismiss that as “complete nonsense.”  Instead it is, in our reviewer Laurence A. Marschall’s words, an exploration of “the sense of time itself as conceived by one of the great civilizations of the ancient world.”

I was hooked.  I started at the beginning.  Within a couple of pages, I was in pain.

Here’s what was hurting me.  Either you’ll get it or you won’t.  If you get it, you’re a dinosaur like me.  If you wonder, “Dude, what’s the problem?”, you’re in tune with the times.

The glottal stop involves an abrupt interruption or obstruction of airflow during speech, and while not a part of standard English phonology, many English speakers do often make use of it.

Ajaw is the word for “king” in classic Mayan, but the similar day name I prefer to spell it as Ahaw, largely because the Yukatek Mayan language of the sixteenth century, where the day names we use come from, did not have a j.

As someone who has studied the Maya for nearly all of his life . . . I have to lay down the line and assert that any such statements about the Maya predicting the world’s demise or, alternatively, some “transformation of consciousness” in 2012 is, to put it as simply and directly as possible, wrong.

This is within four pages, so I can be pretty sure there’s a lot more ahead.  By the time I get through a few chapters I’ll feel like a bull bristling with bandilleras (bloodless as they may be).

(Pardon me while I mix my metaphors.  This in itself may cause pain, and a good copy editor would not let me get away with it.  But I’m trying to sketch a quick and dirty portrait of a painful sensation, and a composite may get it best.)

People read to get at the content, now.  Writing is supposed to be as transparent as a pane of glass.  But how many HDTV or iPad aficionados would shell out big bucks for their gadgets only to tolerate fingerprints, noseprints, dog slobber, or bird shit on the screen?  Language is a technology of reproduction to which standards of fidelity and precision once applied.  How ironic that while we’re going all hi-def in our visual media, our written transmission of images and ideas has gone lo-fi with a vengeance.  We seem to regard words as a blunt instrument, a beat-up softball bat for lobbing blurry blobs of thought in the world’s approximate direction.

Every time such a blow is merrily struck I flinch as if the writer were driving in a nail with the blade of a fine axe.  It makes it difficult for some few of us to read a book.  All it would take to blunt the pain and sharpen the image is . . . a copy editor.  But it is not worth paying one, because so few customers are lost for want of one.  Most likely, even most of the acquisitions specialists who still bear the vestigial title of “editor” don’t know the difference.

To argue that such fine-tuning would have a salutary effect even on minds that are completely unaware of it is to be a voice in the wilderness.

UPDATE: Turns out I had added a typo of my own.  Fixed.

When Copyediting is A Matter of Life and Death

I’ve been shaking my head over CNN’s tsunami coverage.  I know they are working in haste and under pressure (and nobody’s perfect — I just made a bad blooper myself, letting “guerrilla” get by me with one r), but when you’re reporting a disaster, and accurate information is crucial, a wrong or missing word can disappear a thousand people with a non-stroke of the pen.  For example:

Authorities have evacuated people living 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the reactor, according to the prime minister.

That’s nonsense, of course (imagine evacuating a ring of people at a precise distance from the nuclear plant).  All that’s missing is the word “within” (which would also entail changing “from” to “of”).

Even worse is this headline on the front page:

Pump system caused nuclear blast

The full headline on the linked article:

Japanese official says pumping system caused nuclear plant blast

Yes, a small amount of radioactivity was released, and technicians are still racing to cool the fuel rods in several reactors.  Still, space constraints are no excuse for equating a steam explosion with a mushroom cloud.  A better solution would have been

Pumps caused nuke-plant blast

Okay, okay.  No one was hurt by mere misinformation.  But copy editors can work fast and under pressure, too.  Why don’t they have someone sweeping up behind the headline writers and the wire services?

Two-Spacer’s Lament

Long time no post, but when I heard rumors of Farhad Manjoo’s Slate diatribe against “the two-space error,” I knew I would have to track it down and respond.

Farhad, two spaces after a colon or period is not an error.  It is a custom, a gracious custom that is passing away, like ironed handkerchiefs and hat-doffing and saying “You’re welcome” instead of “No problem” and starting a business letter to a total stranger “Dear Miss Welty” instead of “Hi Eudora.”  I freely grant you that two spaces after a colon or period is an anachronism.  I grant you that it is quaint.  But that is different from an error.  Farhad, you are so presentist. G.K. Chesterton would even say you are undemocratic.

It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it . . . along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

But two-spacing is not that venerable a tradition.  As Manjoo points out, it was an accommodation to the peculiarities of a late-nineteenth-century invention that dominated the first half of the twentieth:  the manual typewriter.  Because typewriters used “monospaced” type, granting the same width of space — defined by a keyhead — to both fat and skinny letters, the spacing in a line looked spotty, and it was harder to tell where sentences ended.  Now that our computers automatically insert proportional spacing, as typesetters do, there is no need for two-spacing. The typewriter remains an object of some nostalgia — some living writers can only write on them (the persnickety pace and companionable clackety-clack suit their muse), some people even play music on them, and the funky font Courier pays tribute to them — but it is, on the face of it, odd that the custom of two-spacing should have a momentum that propels it beyond the technology that launched it.  Isn’t this just mental inertia?

I don’t think so.  Two spaces after a period or colon represents, to me, a pause to take a breath.  In a time when there seems to be less and less time, it is an insistence on a tiny space of time, if not around then within the high-pressure flow of information — a pinprick, a pore, just enough to keep an air-breathing animal from drowning in viscous data.  Two spaces give a stubbornly stately, unhurried rhythm to the succession of sentences and clauses, more like moseying musing than the jabber of a teenager on T-Mobile, more like a promenade or paseo than a bullet train.

Punctuation is part of the musical notation of language — something I learned, not from anyone of G.K. Chesterton’s vintage, but from the Beat poets.  They laid out their words like a musical score on the page, showing the reader where to rush ahead like rapids, where to hesitate tactfully, where to take a breath like a clarinetist so that the next arc of notes might be unbroken.  Of course a period or colon by itself means “take a longer pause,” but to us two-spacers there’s something pleasing about seeing that pause on the page, in a small way making a visual image of the rhythms of thought.

I have a hunch that the real reason two spaces are not just unnecessary, but to be damned, is that they trip up computers.  And computers are our masters now.  Especially your generation, Farhad.  God forbid you inconvenience a computer.  It might (gasp!) slow down.

Evil Twin of the Week

We’ve talked about people who “pour” over manuscripts, “horde” their possessions and “tow” the line.  Well, they also “reign in” their emotions.  AARRRRGGGHHH!!!  I’m not reining mine in!

It’s an understandable case of mistaken identity, I guess.  You could certainly “reign over” your emotions, in the sense of “govern,” “rule,” “control.”  And a “rein” is used to govern, rule, control a horse, so I wondered if they had a common root that would stretch to justify the misuse.  Nope.  I consulted the trusty Online Etymology Dictionary (if you don’t know it yet, you should):

reign (n.) early 13c., “kingdom,” from O.Fr. reigne, from L. regnum “kingship, dominion, rule, realm,” related to regere (see regal). Meaning “period of rule” first recorded mid-14c. The verb, meaning “to hold or exercise sovereign power,” is attested from late 13c., from O.Fr. regner, from L. regnare, from regnum.

rein (n.) c.1300, “strap fastened to a bridle,” from O.Fr. rene, probably from V.L. *retina “a bond, check,” back-formation from L. retinere “hold back” (see retain). The verb is c.1300, from the noun. Figurative extension “put a check on” first recorded 1588.

Wait a minute — retina??  OED (were those initials intentional?) doesn’t comment on it, but:

retain late 14c., from O.Fr. retenir, from L. retinere “hold back,” from re- “back” + tenere “to hold” (see tenet). Meaning “keep (another) attached to one’s person, keep in service” is from mid-15c.; specifically of lawyers from 1540s.

retina late 14c., from M.L. retina, probably from V.L. (tunica) *retina, lit. “net-like tunic,” on resemblance to the network of blood vessels at the back of the eye, and ult. from L. rete “net.” The V.L. phrase may be Gerard of Cremona’s 12c. translation of Arabic (tabaqa) sabakiva “netlike layer,” itself a translation of Gk. amphiblestroeides (khiton).

It’s hard to tell if the Latin rete, net, is related to re-tenere, to hold back, but it seems logical.  Think of a fishing net stretched across a stream to hold back salmon.  Lawyers, though?  Eyes?  How far afield we’re led by language’s tangled web!  Yet every far-flung excursion circles back to the same handful of basic, kinesthetic roots.  To grasp, to hold, hold over, hold back.  Rule, regulate, restrain, retain, rein — maybe this mistake, at least, conceals an insight.

Coining a Word (Well, Trying To)

For those who missed it on Twitter, or who didn’t but can stand to think about it a little more, I asked if there was a word for someone who shares your exact birthday — day and year  (someone, that is, who’s not your actual twin) — and if not, whether we could come up with one.

Disclaimer:  of course, you can invent words till you’re blue in the face, but there is no guarantee that any of them has that effanineffable whatchamacallit that will make it catch on.  Catching on is also about context; there are vehicles — certain TV shows and movies; viral videos; disasters, scandals and gaffes — that have the mojo to drive their contents, both words and images, home into the end zone, the Zeitgeist and the vernacular, whether they merit such pawn-queening apotheosis or not.

Ann Althouse was born on the same exact day as Rush Limbaugh.  I was introduced to Jacques, indirectly, because of a guy who I learned only much later was my . . .

connascent, Chicken Little’s good coinage — probably the best so far; or

day-double – my Anglo-Saxon alternative, in turn inspired by Jason (the commenter’s)

birthdaygänger, as in Doppelgänger.

Other suggestions of varying seriousness:

soul sister what Ruth Anne’s father called his connascent, Audrey Hepburn, which made me think of

simulsoul

Mitgeburtstag, Chicken Little’s stab at what the Germans would call it, and

Zeitzwilling (time-twin), mine, ditto;

homonatal, my lame attempt at a temporal version of “homeboy”

star-crossed, star-linked, or star-siblings, from reader_iam, and in the same vein,

ZodiacXerox from the inimitable KngFish.

Co-incident and contemporary were suggested by reader and by @dustbury, respectively, but were deemed too nonspecific.

More suggestions?  I can imagine a compound using natal (conatal?  connatal?  sounds NSFW, somehow) or arrival, f’rinstance, but I can’t come up with one.  Co-arriviste would mean something quite different.

Have at it.  And tell whether you feel a bond with someone you discover was born your same day, or whether it seems like meaningless coincidence.  Also welcome:  examples of famous connascents (Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln!).  And then of course we need a companion word for people who die on the same day (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson).  Comorbid?  No, no.  Conatal and comortal?  Croakmates?  Crap, why is it easier to think of good words for death than birth?

Love the Tweeter, Hate the Tweet?

Here’s your chance to do something about it.

Right from the start I felt ridiculous “tweeting” (not so much “twittering,” oddly) and felt it was infantilizing for adults to accept this lingo:  tweeps, twibbons, twibes . . . it’s as if we’ve all become a gene-spliced, lisping cartoon chimera of Elmer Fudd and Tweetie Bird.  According to the piece at the link, many people feel the same way about Facebook’s Botoxed “like” — forcing you to react with the verbal equivalent of a smiley face to, say, a powerfully despairing piece on the oil spill.  (It can be no coincidence that both Tweetie and the smiley face are my least favorite color, yellow.  And why do I hate yellow?  I’ll be Jewish and answer a question with a question*:  why was yellow the color the Nazis chose for the star of David they made the Jews wear?  Huh?)

However, these coinages have a despicable tenacity, like cockroaches in cracks.  They multiply and become ineradicable.  As Ann Althouse once admonished me when I bridled at accepting the word “vlog,” which sounded to me like a Soviet torture.

“Blog,” on the other hand, I adore.  Some people hate it.

The only hope is to coin better ones to begin with.  And in that respect, we’ll win some and lose some.

* Disciple:  Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?

Rabbi:  And why should a Jew not answer a question with a question?

How Catastrophe Marks Language

Mark Morford writes a playful but ultimately mordant post about the new words gushing into our language from BP’s broken pipe.

What other examples can you think of?  Often events become metaphors, from Waterloo to Watergate.  There’s the silly suffix “-gate” to signify any corruption scandal (as silly as “-burger” to denote any patty of ground meat; “Hamburger” originally means something or someone from Hamburg!).  There’s “Ground Zero,” passing from Hiroshima to Lower Manhattan by way of the eerie misuse “go back to ground zero,” which apparently precedes even square one.  There’s “Obama’s Katrina.”  There’s “a tsunami of” this or that.  Some events are irreducible to metaphors.  D-day is only and always itself.  V-J Day never became vajayay-day.  So “the Holocaust,” although that word, literally “all burned,”  originally meant “a sacrifice consumed by fire” and then any catastrophic blaze.

Other, better examples of marks left on the language by great catastrophes or crises, from Pompeii to Teapot Dome?  Do these words stay, or do they eventually date and fade away?