Making it up at the Wall St. Journal

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger tries a little grammatico-rhetorical analysis in his critique of Obama's Sunday speech at Ohio State:

The job market, he said, is "steadily healing." An adverb fronting a gerund; talk doesn't get any weaker than that.

Wait, aren't we all supposed to think that the passive voice is the wimpiest wording in the English language?  But leave that aside. Ignore, as well, the fact that in a grammar that distinguishes between gerunds and participles -- the grammar Henninger and I learned in school -- Obama's "healing" is a participle.

No, what's interesting is the Henninger's idea that the grammatical combination itself -- adverb modifying participle -- results in a "weak" expression, regardless of content. Yes, there are writers who make a fetish of disdaining adverbs. But even Elmore Leonard probably wouldn't argue that "[is] steadily healing" is somehow weaker than "[is experiencing a] steady recovery" (adjective, noun). 

And what if the economy happened to be “rapidly improving” or “audibly humming” or “still booming”? Are those adverb-participle combos examples of talk that "doesn't get any weaker than that"? "Steadily healing" may be an optimistic description of a limping economy, but there's nothing inherently "weak" about the grammatical structure of the phrase.

DARE to struggle, DARE to win?

This recent "Big Nate" strip took me back to my Ohio childhood, and to those exciting occasions when a box of assorted chocolates made its appearance at our table. With five kids competing for the "good" candies, there were a fair number of disappointments (maple nut! mystery fruit jelly!) and frequent attempts to return these rejects, poked or slightly bitten, to their little fluted cups. At which point another kid was sure to say, "No spitbacks!"

(In Nate's case, I guess it would be "No sniffbacks!")

And what does spitback have to do with DARE, the wonderful Dictionary of American Regional Usage? Well, when I went to check the status of spitback -- real Midwestern word or just family usage? -- DARE was the first place I looked. It wasn't there, nor in my slang dictionaries, which only gave the later (carburetor-, drug-, and sex-related) senses.

I emailed DARE's editor, Joan Houston Hall, to ask if the word had shown up in the project's files after the S volume was printed. No, she said, "but your comment has just been filed so that we can include this if we're able to update the text." And she has a lead on it: "I do remember that one staff member has told of her grandmother's going through a new box of chocolates, poking a hole in the bottom of each before deciding which one to choose. I'll see if she had a name for it."

But her if, as you've probably heard, is a very big if. DARE has completed its print edition, but to publish online and keep updating its research, it needs money, and funding is falling short. Aside from the Oxford English Dictionary and a couple of fine slang dictionaries, I can't think of another reference work I'd rather see in a searchable online format. So I've made a donation (the DARE website takes you to the relevant University of Wisconsin form), and I hope you will too. (And think about possible angels; wouldn't Garrison Keillor, regionalist and word lover, be a great spokesman, even if he is a Minnesotan?) 

Back to spitback. My search continued on the Web, where I did eventually find a couple of cites that suggest the word was not our family's coinage. "Valentine gift-giving is complicated," one blogger advised:

Rung Two on the Chocolate ladder is inhabited by Godiva, Esther Price, Fanny Farmer and Sees. You can’t go wrong with these, unless you dive in, take a bite and leave a spitback -- before she opens up the box. 

Another online commenter asked, "How many of those candies are spitbacks? You know, you take a little bite off a candy, make a face and put it back?"  And there are clues (though not conclusive ones) that both hail from Chicago, near enough for a connection to Northern Ohio speech.

But as this meager sample shows, spitback is fading away. My sister says even her kids (still Ohioans) don't know it -- perhaps because candy nowadays is regularly available in bars and individually wrapped bites, so an assortment is a rare and not so special treat. If you've heard the word, I hope you'll let me know, and Joan Houston Hall as well. It deserves to be in DARE, and DARE deserves a shining place in the online firmament.

Who'll take charge?

Until this morning, the only reference to the impending Kentucky Derby I had noticed was John McIntyre's annual guide to the concoction of a mint julep. Then I opened today's Wall Street Journal and promptly misread a headline:

17 Reasons Not to Bet on Will Take Charge

"Not to Bet on," I thought. "Wow, Thoroughbred names just keep getting stranger."

But the piece was not about why a horse called Not to Bet on will take charge in this year's race. It was advice to readers not to bet on the horse called Will Take Charge.  (The "17 reasons" are really one reason: He's the "unlucky" horse starting at post position 17, the only position that has never launched a winner. Well, it's not science, it's horse racing.)

Fellow journalists will have noticed that the headline is an argument in favor of "down" style in headlines, using caps sparingly rather than capitalizing most headline words as the Journal and the NYT do. In a down-style paper like the Boston Globe, the headline would have read

17 reasons not to bet on Will Take Charge

And voila -- the story may still be fanciful, but the headline ambiguity has evaporated.

A copywriter's blind spot, or mine?

I'm about to have a bit of eye surgery, and I don't want to scare the grandchildren, so I picked up a fetching eyepatch to conceal any colorful aftereffects. (The kids should be fine with the pirate look, since they're big fans of Jake and the Never Land Pirates, a Disney updating that ignores poor old Peter Pan.)

But check out the description: "Shaped for comfort and protection. Concave shape minimizes pressure." Doesn't "concave" mean depressed, curving inward? And wouldn't a concave eyepatch give the wearer a poke in the eye?

I opened the box and found a satiny black Captain Hook/Hathaway Shirt-guy patch. And is it concave or convex? Trick question. It's aimed outward at the world in a perky point, like a junior Madonna's bra cup; I'd call that convex, reflecting the point of view of everyone who will see it in use. But it's also concave, if you're looking at the inner surface rather than the outer.

I can see how it's fair to call it concave, since concavity is what matters to the eye it's protecting. But it would never have occurred to me to describe this item -- pictured on the box from its convex side, visible in use only from its convex side -- as concave. The word "concave" is only accurate from one point of (non)view -- that of the eye that's hidden in protected darkness. Even when that's my eye, I don't think I'm going to see it that way.

A rhetorical challenge

My favorite public radio station, WBUR, is finishing up a fund-raising drive today (we all hope), and this drive, as usual, featured a number of time-limited pitches spurred by "challenge grants."

"Loyal listeners have pledged $10,000 if we can match their donations [or reach a certain number of donations] by 1 p.m.," and so on, the employees say. (I paraphrase, of course; even I am not a committed enough listener to write down the patter word for word.) "We can only keep the $10,000 if we make that goal," the pitch goes on (though a few cautious announcers say instead that the challenge amount is "not guaranteed").

I remember vaguely thinking, years ago, that there was something odd about the challenge model for public broadcasting fundraising. Are those donors really the sort of people who'd withdraw their support unless it was matched? And why would they? Continuing support doesn't depend on reaching a certain make-or-break level of funding, the way making a movie or starting a business might. Unlike a Kickstarter project, no critical mass of money is necessary for the enterprise to proceed.

But I didn't give it serious thought till one recent season when, after I made my online donation, the station e-mailed me to ask if it could be bundled as part of a challenge grant. I was confused; "I don't want it back," I said. But of course I soon realized that the "challenge" was just a device to get listeners' attention, and the station's risk of forfeit was essentially zero.

Now the collective "challenge" has been institutionalized; if you make a sufficiently generous donation at the station's website, the screen asks you to check a box if you want your largess to be part of a challenge grant (with an assurance that you can have it back if the challenge fails).

This strategy still seems to me like a rhetorical mismatch. First it casts public radio donors as the kind of people who'll take their bucks and go home if other people don't play their game. Then it compromises the public radio brand, which relies so much on integrity, by asking employees to tell fibs. Or maybe I'm just a priggish literalist. But given their downside, I sure hope those "challenges" are getting good results.

Eager peevers

William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well" (the book is 37 years and seven editions old), recently published a collection of blog posts he'd been writing for The American Scholar. I haven't read the essays, but Edwin M. Yoder Jr. has, and he is delighted, he reports in the Wall Street Journal, to find in Zinsser "as hardened a cultural tory as I." That is: a fellow peever.

Readers of "On Writing Well" may not remember it as particularly cranky, and it's not. But this new collection (whatever its actual contents) apparently includes enough language grousing to keep the reviewer happy. For instance, Yoder reports, Zinsser objects to the "weasel word" relationship:

Zinsser's problem with the word "is that it means whatever anyone needs it to mean. . . . But nowhere in bardic lore is there any word of Antony's relationship with Cleopatra, or Tristan's . . . with Isolde." Nor did Cole Porter "write, 'let's do it, let's have a relationship.' "

Zinsser also "doesn't use email and is offended by the term 'snail mail,' patronizing as it is to the dedicated workers of the U.S. Postal Service who get our checks and bills to us on time," says Yoder.

I suppose Zinsser deserves credit for not limiting himself to the same old peeves. But these new ones seem like odd targets. Relationship, after all, has described many sorts of connection in its three centuries of existence. Yes, for Jane Austen it meant a legal kinship, not mere love or friendship. But her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft used it, writing to her baby daddy, in 1793: "Where shall I find a word to express the relationship which subsists between us?" So our modern use is hardly an unnatural development.

It's more understandable that Zinsser (in the sole excerpt of the book I could find) makes fun of his investment adviser for referring to a subordinate as “the lead assistant assigned to your relationship" with the brokerage. But even this commercial jargon usage has OED entries dating back decades: "Relationship management" and "relationship banking" took root in the 1970s.

As for snail mail, I was surprised to hear it might be offensive; I always assumed it was just an irresistible and innocent backronym coined for the age of e-mail. Google did turn up one example of genuine word rage at it, from a direct mail marketer defending his turf:  

I despise the term "snail mail." It is a pejorative that denigrates all hand-carried mail -- Standard, First Class and Parcel Post -- well as the dedicated men and women who deliver it. It is a far more offensive term than "junk mail."

But aside from this highly interested party, there were only a few people claiming snail mail was disparaging, and they were just guessing: inferring that it was intended that way, or was taken that way, but not themselves claiming to intend or take offense.

So has Zinsser become a complete curmudgeon? I suspect not; this article probably highlights the language gripes out of a combination of journalistic strategy (lead with the red meat) and the reviewer's own love of kvetching. So until I see the primary source, I'm reserving judgment on who's the eagerer peever of the pair.

Shirr madness on the runway

This photo ran in Tuesday's New York Times with a caption describing the garment as a Jil Sander "beaver coat, longhaired on the top, shirred below."

Shirred is a perfectly good fashion word -- shirring is gathering fabric on a cord or thread(s) -- but I don't see any shirring on that coat. I think the lower section is actually sheared, i.e., cut shorter than the fur on top.

The author, Cathy Horyn, certainly knows the difference, but she probably never saw the photo. Whoever provided the caption probably heard "shear"; the editor who wrote the caption was similarly clueless; and shirred is fine with spellcheck. It's just not correct.

I don't think this can be an eggcorn, because I doubt that the people who put it into print gave a thought to what shirred might be referring to. Which reminds me of another tidbit of wisdom from the Old Editor: "If there's a word in the text you don't understand, and you let the text go, you haven't edited it."

I'm still curious, though, about the original mishearing. Sheared and shirred aren't homonyms for me -- shirr sounds like "sure," not "sheer." Is there any dialect in which the two sound the same?

 AP photo / Antonio Calanni