Humpty Dumpty and Wall Street: Nursery Rhymes and the News

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article with the headline, “London’s Best is Falling Down” about the decline in sales of homes in fancy London neighborhoods; a full-page ad in the New York Times featured a clay piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills, with the catchy line, “Guess Where This Little Piggy Went …” – an Ameritel ad for wireless phone bill savings. And a New Yorker cartoon last month had two lambs talking in a field, with one saying, “My self-esteem was so low I just followed her around everywhere she would go.”

Most adults, and even most children, in the English-speaking world would recognize in the headline, ad, and cartoon that each was based on a simple nursery rhyme, respectively: London Bridge is Falling Down; This Little Piggy Went to Market; and Mary Had a Little Lamb.

But those single references are nothing compared to the year Humpty Dumpty has been having: the famously clumsy egg has not only become the poster boy for the economic crisis, he has become an adjective as well, as in “Humpty Dumpty Economics,” a reference that pulls up 62,000 sites on Google and which refers to the policies that have brought the world to its current financial crisis.

But aren’t nursery rhymes for babies? Just what are Humpty Dumpty and company doing in our newspapers and magazines, anyway?

On close inspection, it can be safely said that Americans and the English like their cultural references. These include puns, parodies, and other clever takes on famous lines from classic books (Aesop’s fables, the Bible and Shakespeare, on up to more modern classic novels); movies (from cult to current favorites); and sayings from famous people, contemporary or historical -- all of which run rampant in the headlines of the New York Times, the Economist, and other prominent publications in the United States and England.

The Economist used Aesop’s fable, Tortoise and the Hare, to draw readers to an article about Argentina and Brazil; the New Yorker last month used the same pair on the cover as a metaphor for the continued presidential race.

This past spring, when now ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught cheating on his wife with a call girl from an agency called The Emperor’s Club, the reference to Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes inspired headlines for the New York Observer and Institutional Investor, as well as another New Yorker cover.

A recent full-page ad in Newsweek and elsewhere,from the company iShares, featured a simple acorn, with the tag line: “Maybe the Sky Isn’t Falling,” with the added message, “Don’t let all the hype and uncertainty distract you from your long-term investment goals.” The ad assumes readers remember the alarmist Chicken Little, who, when an acorn falls on his head in a forest one day, runs off to tell the king that the sky is falling.

Editors, headline writers, advertisers, and cartoonists of the English-speaking world use these references as a way of luring readers to their articles and illustrations. Americans like these cultural references (I’m generalizing broadly here) because they’re catchy, direct, and make a potentially complex subject seem easy; the English, meanwhile (and more generalizing), like cultural references because they appeal to their more literary, verbally playful side.

So, for example, an article about Australian river management in the Economist is titled, “Not so gently down the stream,” a reference to the preschool favorite, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Such a title might actually get a reader to peruse at least the first paragraph, whereas something like “Climate change and drought change boating habits in Australia” would ring up a “Next!” and a quick flick to the next page.

Nursery rhymes are an interesting pick for cultural references, though, because they go back to poems and ditties we learn as preverbal, or barely verbal, babies. The rhymes and characters found in these verses, most of which are between 150 and 400 years old, are silly and old fashioned at best, and then sometimes downright strange and bizarre choices for soothing or entertaining children: (see “Rockabye Baby”). Some rhymes were made up for children, while others are disguised as darker political statements whose meaning has been long forgotten. (Why else would parents continue to sing about a baby falling out of a tree, cradle and all?!) Even so, somehow these early poems stay with us – and explain in shorthand, and with simple humor, what is going on in our world.

But say you are a foreigner – even one quite fluent in English – but nonetheless unfamiliar with Mother Goose (the mythical figure who made up these rhymes). And say you see a New Yorker cover, such as the one from this past February:
There before you is a giant, vaguely grotesque egg dressed in bow tie and suit, a skinny arm raised in despair, while sitting on a wall marked “Stock Exchange.” You get that it is financially related, but why … an egg?

Meanwhile, the English-speaking audience knows the meaning at a glance from four simple lines learned long, long ago:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Humpty Dumpty is an instant, visual metaphor for the recent failure of banks, government lending institutions, and private Wall Street companies -- and the inability of economists and policy-makers to put him back together again.

These days, financial crisis headlines using Humpty Dumpty shorthand range from established business publications to personal blog sites. There is Forbes magazine’s “The Humpty Dumpty Economy” and the Financial Times’ “Humpty-Dumpty legal interpretation by the UK government” (re frozen British assets in Icelandic banks); then there’s “The Coyote’s Byte: A Place for Me to Howl at the Moon” (from Phoenix, AZ): “Humpty Dumpty and Republicans That Make You Go Hmm…”

In any case, by the time we start kindergarten we have already started to forget them; by the time we’re teens and young adults, Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Peep and the rest of the gang are faded, distant, barely memorable memories. But then – boom: once we become a newspaper-reading adult, the headlines and references to those lost rhymes and characters rise, somewhat hazily, to the surface; and once we become parents ourselves, and crack open the Mother Goose book received as a baby present, the verses are more fully revived, ready to be passed on from one generation to the next.

Just how much longer such rhymes remain a source of cultural and generational unity is something the British currently worry about: “Humpty Dumpty Falls From Favour” (The Times, July 2007), as new parents find these rhymes “irrelevant” and perhaps not as catchy as newer tunes. My own son -- now 17 years old but at one time a big Humpty Dumpty fan – sees little use in repeating these seemingly strange verses. But time has yet to tell if the sky is falling on nursery rhymes as cultural references, or not.

Part and Participled

“Parts of the city might be under-retailed, though I don’t think any part of the city is under-Dunkin’ Donuted.”
--Jonanthan Bowles, Center for an Urban Future,

“Under-Dunkin’ Donuted”?

The quote came from the free daily newspaper, Metro, in a recent article about the number of chain restaurants in New York City. I don’t think that the speaker, Jonathan Bowles, intended to coin any particularly new usage with his unique “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” – it was probably just the most efficient way for him to say that although some areas of the city might not have enough stores in general, nowhere is there a lack of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Now I know we American English speakers have taken certain brand names and turned them in nouns – like Kleenex , Band-aid, Post-it. And some of those brand names nouns are also verbs (scotch tape, Xerox, Wite-Out). Other languages have turned brand names into general nouns: Spanish, with Bic (for “pen”); French with Gillette (as “razors.”)

But I don’t know another language where you can take the name of a store, restaurant, or in this case, an international chain retailer that sells 35 varieties of donuts and other calorie-laden goodies, and turn it into a participle.

A participle is that verb form that ends in either “ing” (informing) or “ed” (informed) or some irregular ending (written, sold, brought, etc); it can act as a verb (I am informing; I have informed) or an adjective (I am informed). Participles are amazingly useful in everyday speech.

Participles that end in “ing” are present participles; they’re present because they show some action in progress (either now or in the past): I am working; I was working; I have been working, etc. Past participles are ones that go with helping verbs like “have” and “had”: I have written; you had worked. And it is this past participle form that is also used as an adjective – and the one that has become the most flexible:

When I moved to New York in the 1980’s a friend commented that people in Manhattan were totally “yupped” out, meaning that everyone looked very yuppy (do you remember the word created from “young urban professionals”?) in their work clothes – especially women in their shoulder-padded blazers and floppy ties.

Did you catch the word “shoulder-padded” just now? That is a participle, which, like under-Dunkin’ Donuted, you will not find in the dictionary, but which requires no explanation to understand that it means, blazers with shoulder pads. If I had said “… women in their blazers with shoulder pads and floppy ties” it would have sounded like the blazers had floppy ties. And if I had written “women in their floppy ties and blazers with shoulder pads,” it would have been clearer, but clumsy. Shoulder-padded is the way to go – and unofficial though the word may be, English does not need any grammatical permission to make those kinds of switcheroos. The structure of our language is set up to handle that kind of thing.

In German, there is a fanciful term for “jack of all trades” that translates as “the egg-laying, wool-and-milk pig” or eierlegende wollmilchsau (Iyer-LAY-guehn-duh-vole-milsh-zow). In a Latin language such a concept would have to be written out as “a pig that lays eggs and produces wool and milk” – which loses much in the translation. English can clearly handle the idea; we just happen not to have that particular expression in our book. But the fact that we can stack our participles-as-adjectives and turn nouns (wool, milk) into adjectives to describe a type of versatile pig shows the essence of our language’s West Germanic foundation—and the basis for its flexibility.

Such verbal elasticity shows up with Google, a trademark term (noun, and one derived from “googol,” a mathematical term) that is scarcely as old as a fifth grader, but which is now noted in the dictionary in lower case as a verb: I google, I googled, I have googled. And though it is not yet listed as an adjective, it certainly is used that way -- as in, “a much-googled site.” (I just googled “googled site” and there were over 2 million usages, though some of them were the past tense of google, and not the participle.)

Starbucks, that popular purveyor of caffeinated beverages, is not in the dictionary yet, nor has it even become an unofficial common noun or verb, despite its ubiquity. Still, as a participle, it clearly works: if you said that your neighborhood was totally over-Starbucked (or in lower case, starbucked), you would know just how easy it is to get a double soy latte where you live. In fact, there are over 30,000 Google usages listed for “Starbucked.”

But so far, "under-Dunkin' Donuted" has only a single reference on Google – the one in the August 1, 2008 New York Metro. It’s such a specific adjective that I can’t imagine much room for its growth, except maybe as another part of speech. As a noun, it might be used like, “The under-Dunkin’ Donutedness of the neighborhood ...” As a verb, it could go: “Homeowners have intentionally under-Dunkin’ Donuted the neighborhood.” Have fun with it!

However, perhaps we’ll start to see more chain retailers turn into participial adjectives – like, over-jamba juiced or thoroughly chipotleed (2 “e’s” for the final “e” sound). But “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” has a certain special sound: maybe it’s the recurring, alliterative “d” in its four out of seven syllables, and the way you have to say each syllable clearly — there’s no way you can rush that phrase, yet. Plus it’s a lot funnier-sounding than say, “Mac Attack” (a noun meaning a sudden craving for a MacDonald’s Big Mac hamburger).

It’s simply hard not to appreciate “under-Dunkin’ Donuted” as a prime example of everyday English adaptability, and a sort of delicious one at that.

Howya Doin? Contracted Speech

The Language Lady’s “No-Business-Like-Shoe-Business” Award for Linguistic License goes this summer to Kenneth Cole’s flagship Rockefeller store: The backdrop for the July window display had two wall-sized panels with July written in bold across the panels. On either side of July were gray-colored words that, on close inspection, were questions that used that word “July” in an unusual way:

July about your weight? July about how much you make? July about walking the dog? July about renting a house in the Hamptons? July about your age? July about what you did last night? July about the report? Why July to me?

Whoever dreamed that up deserves some major props (Didn’t know I knew rap slang popularized in the 1990’s, did you? “Props” is short for “proper respect.”) for using linguistic contraction in such a timely and seasonal manner. English is full of such contraction, or reduction, in our everyday speech: Whadja do daday? Didja hafta say that? I’m gonna letcha have it. Wanna go? Even the most articulate speakers, if they want to sound natural, use this type of reduction in their speech – or risk sounding too formal and stilted. But until the Kenneth Cole window display, I had never seen “did you lie” rendered as “July.” And in July! Nice.

Of course, we have Woody Allen to thank for this: his “Annie Hall” (1977) brought this type of speech into mass awareness. In the movie, Woody, playing the insecure, neurotic character Alvy Singer, who feels painfully aware of his “outsider” status because he is Jewish, complains to his friend about what he perceives as an anti-Semitic remark. Alvy says:
“You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, 'Did you eat yet or what?' And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?' Not 'Did you?'...JEW eat? JEW? You get it? JEW eat?”
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaPBhxXhprg&feature=related)

It just so happens that in English, it’s easier to say words or syllables with “d” followed by “u” as a “j” sound. Try saying these out loud: graduation; “how bad you are;” “could you/would you …”

(Likewise, “t” + “u” creates a “tcha” sound, as in “nature,” or “congratulations,” when we say, “get you” and it sounds like “getchu.” That’s why when some people pronounce “mature” as “ma-toor” instead of “ma-tchoor” it sounds pretentious. But Dictionary.com says both pronunciations are correct.)

This kind of informal speech no doubt exists in other languages but, not being at native level in any, I can only give a few examples. Languages like Spanish and Japanese pronounce every syllable with more or less equal stress, making reduction less likely. However, in some Spanish-speaking countries, the “s” in words gets dropped before a “p” or “t” : i.e., “espantoso” will sound like “eh-pantoso” and “estado” will sound like “eh-tado;” for example, I believe Puerto Ricans do this all the time, whereas such pronunciation in Argentina will have people laughing at your baby-talk. In French, the “ne” often gets dropped in a spoken negative sentence: “Je ne sais pas” is typically heard as “je sais pas;” “je n’ai pas d’argent” is said, “J’ai pas d’argent” -- though never in writing.

The other day I overheard a very proper-French receptionist speaking on the phone, and she was apologizing to the person on the other end; but instead of saying, “Je suis desolee,” (zhe swee desolay) or “I’m sorry,” she was saying (repeatedly, with some insistence) what sounded like, “Shwee desolee.” That sound is just the sort of speech captured in a linguistically groundbreaking French book called "Zazie dans le metro" (1959) by Raymond Queneau:

“Doukipudonktan” is the first word of this antic novel (Louis Malle directed the 1960 movie), which is peppered throughout with many such strange-looking phonetic renderings of colloquial speech. Even French readers do not immediately recognize all these renderings. “Doukipudonktan” is actually “D'où qu'ils puent donc tant,” or “Why do they stink so much?” Other such compressions include: “Skeutadittaleur” = “Qu’est-ce qu’il t’a dit, alors?” or, “So what did he tell you?”; “Izont des bloudjinnzes”= “Ils sont des bluejeans,” or “They’re bluejeans;” “Kouavouar” = “Quoi a voir?” or “What’s there to see?” “Lagosamiebou” or “La gosse a mis la boue” or “The girl has flown the coop.” All this is meant to convey the very working class-ordinary joe sort of people these characters are. Same as when we write that way in English. The difference is, we do it in English all the time – in novels, ads, comic books, and in our own shorthand-style of writing (I’m gonna, do you wanna, see ya,” etc.) In French and Spanish (and no doubt other languages) this type of speech is spoken, but rarely conveyed in writing – even in comics like Asterix or Tin Tin.

So, we’re lucky: instead of my having to write, “I’ve got to go,” all I hafta write is, “Gotta go!” or, text message-style, “G2G.”

Flip Flops

It’s almost too hot to write, much less read, a blog; but if you’ve got time and air conditioning, maybe a short one, sort of seasonal, would be okay. It’s now midsummer – and it’s midsummer in an election year, so have you noticed how “flip flops” are working overtime as both noun (sandal) and verb (to reverse one’s position on an issue)?

Once upon a time -- back when McDonald’s had just one franchise, when Bill Haley and the Comets were singing “Rock Around the Clock” on the radio -- there was no word for a cheap, thin-soled rubber sandal with a sort of curved, upside down Y separating the big toe from the rest of the toes. There wasn’t a word for it, because the “flip flop” had not yet been invented. Until then, people wore thin, canvas sneakers to the beach; and the words “flip” and “flop” were like two siblings – alike in many ways, but intrinsically totally opposite.

“Flip” is generally positive: A guy flips for a girl (and vice-versa); we flip coins and pancakes; and mastering flips from a diving board or trampoline is considered a praiseworthy talent – while belly flopping (ouch!) is not. “Flop” is generally bad: a comedian gets flop sweat when the audience doesn’t laugh; when a movie flops, heads roll in Hollywood. You don’t want hair flopping in your face, nor do you want to sleep in a flophouse. Flopping onto a couch is good but often associated with sheer fatigue, boredom, or depression.

Cut to 1957, when the “flip-flop” summer sandal was invented: The name was probably derived from the sound the backless shoe makes as you walk -- fffflp-flllllop, fffflip-fffflop. (These are also called thongs and beach shoes). Flip-flops have morphed over the years from the still available cheap and plain to the more popular snazzy, sporty, patterned – even diamond-studded. Flip flops have become such a fashion statement that in 2005 the Northwestern champion women’s lacrosse team wore flip-flops to meet President Bush at the White House, apparently not perceiving what a fashion faux pas this was – some dubbed it “The Flip-Flop Flap “ -- until they ended up in the national news. (As I had to explain to my own teenagers – their toes should have been covered; yes, even for George Bush).

But flip-flop, the verb, only recently came into everyday use: in the 2004 presidential election, presidential nominee John Kerry was seen as switching his stance on the war in Iraq, and that became known as “flip-flopping.” According to salon.com, the Republicans used Kerry’s changing positions to make him look weak and waffling, compared to what Republicans called Bush’s “firm” (as opposed to “stubborn” or “intransigent”) stance. Kerry’s flip-flopping was used against him with deadly precision -- we know who was elected.

Flip-flopping, the verb, then lay fairly dormant for the next three years until the 2008 presidential contenders hit the campaign trail last year. Early on in their runs for the nomination, Democratic contender John Edwards flip-flopped on issues, as did Republican contender Mitt Romney – as reported in multiple news articles. And not long after their flip-flops both of those “coulda-been-a-contender” contenders were has-been contenders. Flip-flopping is not good if you want to run for president. That was presumably why Hillary Clinton never voiced the slightest remorse for having voted for invading Iraq – despite the war’s unpopularity with her voter base, she did not want to be brought down by the flip-flop curse. (It was other things that brought her down instead).

These days, as both presumptive presidential nominees Barak Obama and John McCain modify, hone, or outright reverse their positions, the “flip-flop” verb has appeared attached to their names in news articles everywhere. To the press, no matter how slight or subtle a politician’s change of position may be (granted, with politicians, it’s rarely either) when a politician changes his mind for what seems to be political expedience, it’s all flip-flopping.

However, since both Obama and McCain have flip-flopped on certain issues, the curse of the flip-flop curse has been canceled out – one of the flip-floppers has to win. So you could say that whoever wins will have flipped (reversed) the flip-flop flop this time.

Being and Not Being a Gerund

A cartoon in a recent New Yorker magazine shows a Buddhist monk leading a yoga class with several middle-aged men and women. One woman has her hand raised and is asking the instructor, “You say that life is suffering, but isn’t it also complaining?”

Agreeing or disagreeing with the question is not the point here; rather, today’s subject is our friend, “the gerund,” which is a type of noun formed from a verb and which ends in “ing.” Suffering and complaining, in the sentence above, are gerunds, each one serving as a complement to “life.”

The inspiration for this topic is a letter from Language Lady reader Danny White, whose enquiring mind had him recently pondering gerunds and non-gerunds:

Hi Louise,

Here's one for you: What's the proper term for a non-gerund? That is, when you're trying to distinguish between a verb in the gerund form and a verb in the non-gerund form, what do you call the latter?
A person who's not a Jew is a gentile. Food that isn't kosher is traif. A verb that's not a gerund is ... what?
This comes up in the context of my discussion of "as well as." If you view "as well as" as a preposition (examples to follow), then the verb that follows should be a gerund. But if you view "as well as" as a conjunction, then the verb that follows should be a ... what? Non-gerund? "Regular" verb?
Example:
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drinking like a fish and hustling underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a preposition, with the verbs that follow being put in the gerund form.)
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drink like a fish and hustle underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a conjunction, with the verbs that follow being put in the ... what form?)
See the question? Nobody in the world but a nerd like me would ever care about the answer, but I thought maybe someone like you would know the answer (even if you don't care about it).

How could Language Lady NOT care about this?! It’s the air I breathe, my lifeblood, and other clichés, parts of speech, and grammar terms that get me out of bed in the morning.

Before answering however, I thought a little trip down Gerund Lane might be useful for readers whose knowledge of such forms and functions may be a little rusty.

The gerund is one of a little family of grammatical things called “verbals,” or parts of speech formed from verbs. Like verbs, these words can express action, abstract action, or a state of being: Action verbs: run, jump, fall, etc.; Abstract verbs: have, love, feel, think, suffer, complain. Being verb: (you guessed it): be.

There are three members of the Verbal family, and the other two are the “infinitive” and the “participle.” The infinitive is the base part of a verb preceded by “to,” as in, “to suffer” and “to complain,” or, as Macbeth once asked, “to be, or not to be.” The participle is an adjective formed from a verb that ends in either “ing,” as in “crying” babies, or in “ed,” as in, “I'm shocked, shocked (to find that gambling is going on in here!” -- Capt. Renault, “Casablanca”). The participle is also the “ing” or “ed” (or irregular ending) of verbs that take helping verbs, as in
“I am writing” and “I have written;” or “talking/talked,” “jumping/jumped,” “emailing/emailed,” etc.



(For further insight into Verbals, I recommend the Owl writing and grammar site from Purdue University: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/627/02/)

Now then, let’s look again Danny’s question, “..when you're trying to distinguish between a verb in the gerund form and a verb in the non-gerund form, what do you call the latter?”

I’ll pause here to let you answer.

(Pause)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes, it’s a Participle!

(Unpause) (Danny’s letter continued:)

This comes up in the context of my discussion of "as well as." If you view "as well as" as a preposition (examples to follow), then the verb that follows should be a gerund.


(Pause again.)

Danny brings up a really cool point -- one that most native speakers of English probably just take for granted: that when we have phrases like “thank you for” or “looking forward to” or “he broke his arm by,” we always follow them with a gerund when expressing some kind of action. That is, “thank you for inviting me;” “looking forward to seeing you;” and “he broke his arm by falling out of a tree.” In each case, the gerund follows a preposition (words like in, on, at, by, from, to, on, through etc.)

Danny’s confusion is thinking that “as well as” is a prepositional phrase. Prepositions are, as the term implies, little words that show a “position” of something or someone (in the dark, through the forest, etc.) “As” is an adverb; and depending on the context, “as well as” is either an adverbial phrase (“He shoots pool as well as his mother does.”) or a type of conjunction, something that joins other words or phrases (like “and,” “but,” “or,” etc. As in, “We went shopping all day as well as dancing all night.”)

(Unpause – back to Danny):

Example:
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drinking like a fish and hustling underage girls." (Here, "as well as" is treated like a preposition, with the verbs that follow being put in the gerund form.)
Thinking that “as well as” was a prepositional phrase forced Danny to turn “drink” and “hustle” into “drinking” and “hustling,” resulting in a type of grammatical faux pas known as “non-parallel structure.” Let’s break the sentence down into basic parts: the subject of the sentence is “member;” and what does that House member do? He “will campaign.” And what ELSE?
By treating “as well as” as a conjunction, which it is, and which Danny does in his second sentence, he arrives at the correct answer and good parallel structure: in its most basic, sentence-diagrammable form, the House member will campaign (and also) drink and hustle. Just as Danny says below:
But if you view "as well as" as a conjunction …
• "Upon winning office, a member of the House of Representatives will campaign for the next two years, as well as drink like a fish and hustle underage girls …"
•
• … then you get the perfect, parallel-structured and grammatically correct sentence.

Danny’s final question is:
• (Here – referring to the second example sentence -- "as well as" is treated like a conjunction, with the verbs that follow being put in the ... what form?)
Anyone like to try? (I mentioned this form briefly a little earlier.) When you have a helping, or auxiliary, verb – in this case, “will” (as in “will campaign”), the verb that follows is the non-conjugated base or stem form. And since “drink” and “hustle” are as much a main verb as “campaign,” they take the base form too.
Thanks for writing, Danny – and most of all, thanks for (gerund, please): caring!

Subprime Grammar

Tucked into the English Reference section at Barnes & Noble, next to titles like “Painless Grammar,” “Woe is I,” and “Grammar for Dummies,” are several copies of a new little work with the crude but catchy title, “Grammar Sucks.” That a writer and editor – presumably word-and-grammar people themselves – would choose that vulgar verb, and popular attitude, to hook potential buyers into improving their shaky grasp of grammar; and that a major national bookstore chain would bet that such a title would sell, shows you how just low the subject of grammar has sunk.

Meanwhile, speaking of sinking, there’s the economy: the credit market, the housing market, the job market, and – if you’re thinking “interest rates,” that would be “cut,” or “slash,” not “sink.” Gas and airline prices are on the rise, making our spirits sink. And then there’s that clump of words that appears almost daily on the front pages: “the subprime mortgage crisis,” usually followed by “troubled investment bank,” “bailout,” and, for those of us outside the financial industry, this year’s newest vocabulary word, “writedown” (n.) meaning the amount (these days, in billions of dollars – i.e. unimaginable amounts) that at least ten major international investment banks are writing off their books (at a loss to all the shareholders) mostly through subprime mortgage deals, which seem to have triggered the whole economic mess.

The public’s taste, or really, distaste, for learning grammar has been at an ebb for decades, while the economy’s drubbing is fairly new. Still, it’s no coincidence that the two have arrived at the same lousy point – not that the government is bailing banks out due to improper use of past participles or irregular verbs. Rather, where grammar and troubled banks are linked is at the core, with structure.


On the grammar side, the whole notion that “grammar is boring” is something that came out of the 60’s, when traditional ideas were tossed in favor of snazzier, more fun ways of learning. Take “Sesame Street,” for example: learning with Muppets was fun, and by now, generations of preschoolers have learned their ABC’s by watching bouncing, talking, or morphing letters on their TV screens.

Alas, Bert and Ernie did not go into nouns, verbs, objects, comma placement, or the subjunctive case. Maybe they thought it wouldn’t be fun, or age appropriate, or that it would turn away their core audience. (Though adult caregivers might have watched.) Apparently, progressive English teachers could not come up with a fun way to impart grammar either, and the pedagogical philosophy that emerged was, “No more grammar lessons -- let students learn by DOING!” So students wrote, and teachers corrected, mostly fitfully, per essay, and not in any orderly, formal manner.

And in the beginning, that attitude seemed refreshing, and even democratic: who was to say one person’s grammar was better than another’s, as long as we could all understand each other. “Have it your way,” went the famous 1974 Burger King ad, which was revived in 2004 and still, unwittingly, stands for so much in American culture, including speaking and grammar.

True, you can learn by doing. But even young, natural athletes need a coach to help them perfect their pitching, slap shots, or swings. Similarly, we also need teachers to help us sharpen our ability to communicate clearly -- and we need an understanding of grammar to do this.

Grammar is the system of rules that guides how words are put together to make sentences; those rules, developed over centuries of speaking, provide the underlying structure to a language. A three-year-old can grasp a language’s structure and speak fluently and fairly grammatically.

But around 3rd or 4th grade, it’s a good idea to start to teach children grammar rules, because if you understand the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) then you can go on to understand the parts of a sentence (subject, object, etc.); and if you understand those two components, which include punctuation, you’ll have the necessary tools and knowledge to shape your ideas in clear, solid, dangling-modifier-free, and even eloquent English.

Remember “Mad Libs”? They’re still around. The gap-filled pages provide the story structure, while you (without looking) provide the parts of speech; the results, when read aloud, are wacky, or plain nonsense, but it is all grammatically correct. That is the beauty of grammar – its structure holds even when word choice inhibits the meaning.

I recently experimented with a 16-year-old, extremely smart, native-English speaking student of mine, who has never been taught grammar in school. I had her fill in a Mad-Lib-style sentence that used the opening line to “Pride and Prejudice” for its structure. I asked her for certain parts of speech and the results were not exactly Jane Austen: “It is a tragedy not wanted that a mournful clown in possession of a stingy cat must be in wont of a mouse.” Nonsense, yes – but grammatical, absolutely.

Not providing knowledge of grammar prevents children, and many adults, from correctly and concisely constructing more complex thoughts. For example: Last month, in his first statement to the press about his affair with a prostitute, ex-governor of New York Eliot Spitzer said, “I am disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.”

True, Spitzer got the reflexive pronoun (“myself”) part right; but in addition to failing his own standards, the ex-gov failed to tell us what he was disappointed with (or by, or in), as in: “I am disappointed in my behavior,” for instance, or maybe just disappointed that he got caught. But he shouldn’t have just hung his disappointment there without some specific object. It sounds weak and muddled and only compounds his current image.

Commenting on Spitzer’s departure in his foreword to the March issue, the editor of “Institutional Investor” magazine, Michael Carroll, needed a teacher to wrap his knuckles for this unwieldy sentence: “Spitzer’s apology at least puts to rest any thought that he might try to argue that he had gone undercover, as it were, to see whether the ratings assigned by the Emperors Club to its employees were accurate in much the same way that he and his minions once investigated the accuracy of reports written by Wall Street’s research analysts – and found them wanting.”

President Bush, currently the Leader of the Mangled Word, is old enough to have been taught grammar before they took it out of the curriculum. But that doesn’t mean teaching grammar is a waste of time for everyone: just because I failed to dissect my frog properly doesn’t mean other biology students shouldn’t get to try.

At least thirty years have passed since our nation’s public schools required young minds to identify subjects and predicates or an object of a preposition (“A what?!” you shriek.) So now our teachers – those born in the 60’s, 70’s or early 80’s – do not have the foundation for grammar necessary to teach their students, our children. Yet grammar-challenged parents determined to somehow teach grammar to their offspring, or even to themselves, can always head to their nearest bookstore English reference section and find books like “Grammar Sucks” to explain it all to them in dumbed-down, ironic prose.

Which brings us to the whole subprime mortgage crisis/credit market mess – or a total lack of structure. Now, I can only explain this financial stuff in Language Lady terms, so don’t go running off to the head of Goldman Sachs to check on every point. But big picture:

Pick a “structure” metaphor – would you invest in a house without beams; a book without a spine; wine without a bottle? A while ago, as a way to make more money, banks (local and big ones) invented and started selling financial products, called (ironically) “structured investment vehicles;” they sold these products to millions of investors here and around the world, with many banks keeping some of the riskier/potentially more profitable products for themselves.

Imagine a cake box as your structured product. Your financial advisor tells you it’s AAA-rated and a solid investment that will yield a delicious yellow cake with fabulous chocolate frosting; so you hand over your money and wait for the cake to rise. But the ingredients inside are not what you think – in fact, the ingredients (which include loans with enticing initial interest rates – i.e., interest rates lower than the prime interest rate, or “subprime” -- to people with less-than-stellar credit) are completely incapable of producing a cake at all, and what you get instead is a runny, gooey mess. The structure – the box – was a sham.

But who’s to blame? The whole structured product business was put together, pre-fab chip-by-pre-fab chip, by loads of investors, banks, etc. – i.e. people – who had gotten used to following their own guidelines, whether financial or grammatical.

Which is not to say that had investors and bankers, as elementary and middle school students, been forced to learn the principles of solid sentence structure, they would not have created today’s economic mess. But you never know: an unconscious, innate respect for structure might have set off some kind of inner alarm bell in at least a few people.

Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant, fictional detective whose success was grounded in the structure of reason and deduction, would certainly never have bought a structured product without knowing to the molecule what it contained. And Sherlock’s talents might have led some structure-abiding financial authority to force Sherlock’s broker to break down the contents of the, ultimately, bad product.

Say some grammar-knowledgeable investors had read the finer points on their structured vehicle contracts and noticed some dangling modifiers or strangled syntax. Further investigation on their part might have revealed a similarly weak structural product – and ended the deal before any money was traded. The failure of that deal and others like it may have prompted the corollary that bad grammar is a smoke signal for weak structural thinking and therefore, possibly, a bad investment.

The good news is that the notorious college entrance exam, the S.A.T., has recently added a grammar component to the test. This will surely prompt a revival of grammar classes in schools and language institutes across the land – for teachers (to finally learn it) and students alike.

But improvement – on the economic and grammar fronts – will take time, effort, and patience. And with all that maybe, someday, (right -- in my dreams), I’ll come across a book with the title, Grammar’s Sweet!”













Likewise,

The Language of Sound

As I write, I hear the sounds of early morning: sparrows chirping in a tree, the distant and lonesome coo of a dove, a crow cawing as it flies overhead; last night’s wet snow has now melted and is trickling off the roof and down the rain pipes, and Tito, our cat, is meowing to be let in from his night’s prowl. (Just a second while I go open the door for him.) Inside is the reassuring whisper of central heating – a sound so natural that I only notice it when it clicks off – and the rapid bubbling of water boiling in the kettle on the stove for my tea. (I’ve opened the spout cap so I won’t hear the shrill whistle.) Chirp, coo, caw, meow, trickle, whisper, click, bubble, whistle: just as language is made up of different vocal sounds, the sounds we hear are made into language. Every language has these sound words, and some of these are called “onomatopoeia.”

Onomatopoeia (a great word for spelling bees), which is pronounced ahna-mahda-PIA, is the term for words that imitate the sound associated with the thing or action in question. The word, “onomatopoeia,” you’ve maybe guessed, is from Greek and it means, simply, “to make (poiein) a name (onoma).” These imitative words differ from language to language, but the idea is the same: animal sounds like moo, oink, bow-wow, quack, etc., as well as sounds found in nature like “hiss,” “buzz,” “hum,” etc. are examples of onomatopoeia.

Other words do not imitate sounds so much as suggest them; these include words like “clank,” “grunt,” “whip,” “dash,” “sleazy,” and “giggle.” Some linguists lump these “sound-suggestive” words with onomatopoeia; others distinguish them as “phonaesthetic” words. I’ll make it easy on all of us but calling both groups “sound words.”

In any case, no matter what language you speak, life is full of sounds and our respective languages reflect that:

Think how many sounds we hear in a day: the br-r-ring of the alarm clock (if you’re a masochist) or the drone of the morning’s radio alarm; the splash of water from the sink and shower; yawns, burps, the jangle of house keys, the slam of the front door; there’s the honking from cars, the whir of a train’s engine; the screech of the subway pulling into the station; there’s the clang of the school bell; the groan of students being hit with a “pop” quiz; the beep of a cell phone; the click of heels on a tiled floor; the crinkle of a wrapper being pulled off a candy bar; the murmur people talking on a bus; the crack of someone folding a newspaper; the pop of a cork; ice cubes clinking in a glass; the plop of gravy spilled on the floor; the slurp of a dog eating dinner; the hum of the dish washer; a child’s wail for water and comfort in the night; a tired sigh as you crawl into bed.

These words are old – going back hundreds or more years. Early farmers no doubt needed a word to describe the sound of milk coming from a cow or goat (squirt); or how it felt to hammer your thumb (OW!!); or to know the certain sound in the bushes (rustle) that meant either enemy or just a squirrel.

And with all those undeveloped woods back then, villagers would have had to know the sounds of the forest: the rattle of bare branches, the gurgle of a stream, the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf. In the village would be the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestone; the clatter of constructing all those quaint half-timber houses and marketplaces, plus the hustle and bustle of everyday commerce, in addition to the steady chatter, patter and gab among the townspeople, and the peal of church bells on Sunday.

Sound words can slink, slither, slip, and slide almost unconsciously into our lives and vocabulary; or they can appear with a gush, burst, or spurt of creativity: The 60’s TV show “Batman” is known for bringing onomatopoetic words like “POW!” “BAM!” “KRRASH!” and “WHAM!” into our lives. My brother-in-law is informally called Biff, which is the sound, according to his mother, that he uttered as a little boy fighting imaginary foes -- “Bfff! Bfff!”. And in Cole Porter’s song, “Paris,” we’re told: “I love Paris in the autumn when it drizzles; I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles.” “Drizzle” so well conveys a light but steady rain; and “sizzle” suggests summer heat – the hissing sound of raw meat hitting a hot barbecue.

One interesting imitative word is, “gnaw,” as in, “to bite or chew with a scraping noise,” like a dog gnawing on a bone, or a mouse on the wood inside your kitchen wall; it’s interesting because it’s so similar in sound and spelling in such a wide variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have gnave (pron: g’nah-veh), gnage, and gnaga; Latvian-grauzt and Lithuanian-grauzhti; Polish – gryzc (grooch); and Russian – grizt; Latin-based languages gave up the “g” but kept the basic idea: Portuguese - roer (a throaty ghro-ehhr); French – ronger (a nasal rohnZHAY); and Italian – rosicare (a lovely trilled rozee-KA-reh, which is similar to the others except completely loses the dog-chewing sound in favor of the language’s natural music). “Gnaw,” according to the dictionary, goes back to Anglo-Saxon times; however, in view of its use in other languages and cultures, it’s probably safe to say this verb has been around for as long as dogs and bones.

The word “cuckoo” is also a fairly universal sound, even though the cuckoo bird, native to tropical climes, is mostly known from Swiss clocks. Its meaning can vary from country-to-country too. For example, saying, “Cou-cou” is currently in vogue in France as an informal greeting among French women; said quickly as one word, “coucou” means, “peek-a-boo,” as in the baby’s game, both of which could also be seen as sound words. In the U.S., “cuckoo” means simply “crazy.”

Lewis Carroll has been wowing word-lovers for 130-plus years with his onomatopoeistic masterpiece, “The Jabberwocky,” found in his story, “Through the Looking Glass.” In that poem -- about a boy going into the woods to slay an imaginary monster -- Carroll invented words to sound like the imaginary animals or actions he wanted to convey. It begins: “T’was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbel in the wabe ...” Roughly translated it means, “It was evening and the slimy-lithe imaginary forest creatures turned round and round and made holes in the grass plot around a sundial.”

But the point of “The Jabberwocky” is not to translate it into ordinary language, but just to have fun saying the made-up words that rhyme with ones you know: “… the jaws that bite, the claws that catch; beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious bandersnatch.” (The poem has even been translated into French and German: “Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave …” and “Es brillig war, die schlichte Toven wirrten und wimmelten im Waben …”)

Children’s books and poems abound with sound words. There’s A.A. Milne’s, “Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles and they bundled him into his bed;” there are Roald Dahl’s books, with funny names like Veruca Salt and Willy Wonka, and candy bars called “scrumpdidliumptious.”

J.K. Rowling also played with words, as in her characters’ names: the good and wise Albus Dumbledore (“dore” suggestive of French “d’or” or gold), the evil Voldemort (“mort” suggestive of Latin “death”), and even the minor character, the French nurse, Madame Pomfrey (sounds like pomme frites?). I just could never understand why she named Harry Potter’s utterly loyal best friend Ron Weasley, since “weaselly” means resembling a weasel, and thus someone nasty and untrustworthy. For that matter, why was the famous school of wizardry and witchcraft called Hogwarts? (Hog+warts implies the opposite of something magical; was she being ironic? Why?)

I remember learning about sound words in elementary school and having to write a poem using them. Many years later I wrote a sound-word poem for my young niece; called “Mud,” the poem was later published in a children’s poetry treasury and went:

“Mud is gooey, SQuisshh patooey!
Mush it with your fingers, gush it with your toes;
Slimy, glimy, wet and grimy --
Oooohhhh! I love mud!”

(Still later the poem was made into a rap-style kids’ song, recorded by the deep-voiced man who played the evil plant in the movie, “Little Shop of Horrors” and you can hear it on this site (along with my “Gonna Sleep Like a Baby”):
http://www.bmsolutions.ru/cat/search/?section=0&author=Brad%20Ross&pp=100

What’s interesting about English sound words is how their usage can be categorized by the first two letters. For example, what do clink-clank-clunk have in common? Cl-words tend to suggest the sound of something sharp or metallic, like “clash” and “clang.”

The book I’ve found this in, “Vocabulary in Use” by Cambridge University Press, has explained this amazing aspect of word lore in a few short paragraphs. Take these opening sound word combinations:

Gr-words, as in “groan,” “grumble” “grumpy,” “grunt,” and “growl” suggest some unpleasant, or even threatening, sound or action.

Sp-words are related to water or other liquids, or even powder: splash, splutter, spray, sprinkle, and spurt. (That 50’s song: “Splish-splash, I was taking a bath”)

Wh-words suggest movement through air: whiz, whistle, whirr, wheeze, whip. And what do you say when you’re on a swing – “Wheeeee!”

On the other hand, words ending in “—ash” as in “dash,” “lash,” “crash,” and “gash” suggest something fast and violent.

So keep listening, word-lovers, for the sounds of your life: from the snap-crackle-and-pop in your morning cereal to the sound of silence – or maybe snoring – at night. And here’s to a good night’s sleep: Zzzzzzzz.

To the Irregular Past, and Back

Here we are -- men, women, and children of the 21st century -- texting, talking, streaming videos, and listening to podcasts on our slick new cell phones, Blackberrys, iPods, and computers – but still using many basic nouns and verbs that are well over 1000 years old. That seems practically un-American! How could a culture so bent on “now” and “new” and “the future” still use words that can be traced back to the mists of time?

Obviously, people and their language can’t evolve as fast as technology. But what strikes me as cooler than an iPhone is that even a phrase like, “Here we are – men, women, and children” – is made up of words that were spoken by pillaging Vikings, the savage Goths, and the Proto-European tribes spread out over Northern Europe and Russia thousands of years ago.

So, if you’re with me on a little linguistic time travel, you might appreciate a recent Harvard study, published in the October 2007 issue of Nature and written about in a variety of newspapers and periodicals; in the study, researchers came up with a mathematical formula for predicting how long it would take an irregular verb (like write-wrote-written) to become a regular verb (like look-looked-looked). The researchers’ conclusion was that frequency of usage kept an irregular verb from changing: that a verb used 100 times less frequently than another is 10 times more likely to change over a given period. In other words, use it or lose it.

At this rate, for instance, the verb “to be” would take 38,000 years before someone would say, “I beed” instead of “I was.” The same formula said that it would take a scant 14,400 years for “thinked” to replace “thought.”

Of more imminent interest were words like “wed” and “forecast,” which were among 15 verbs that the researchers predicted would change to a regular-verb “ed” ending within the next 500 years. To test that theory, I did quick Google search with “they were wed,” which brought up 11 million sites, as opposed to 1 million sites with “they were wedded.” Change is afoot (“afoot” being first coined in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”) but not yet fully here.

Testing “forecast” vs. “forecasted” was not so accurate, since “forecast” is both a noun and a verb, so the Google results wildly in favor (103 million results) of the traditional “forecast” were skewed. However, the Free (online) Dictionary lists both “forecast” and “forecasted” as past tense options. And there were some 3 million other sites with “forecasted” in the heading.

I have also noticed that the verb “seek” has fans of the past tense “seeked,” though still more fans of the traditional “sought;” and “strive” is in the balance between the traditional “strove” and the newer “strived.”

“Irregular” verbs did not originate as such 1,200 years ago, when English was developing out of a West Germanic/Saxon dialect; rather, those verbs were following certain standard pattern and conjugation systems. The ones that we use now, according to Wikipedia, are remnants (or fossils) of those ancient rules.

The rules and patterns for these now-irregular verbs were gradually displaced between the years 1200-1600 by changes in English pronunciation, a period linguists call The Great Vowel Shift. It was during this time that past tenses started to use an “ed” on the end of most past tenses and participles. According to the study, the old verbs that entered unchanged into the new system were ones that were frequently used: rise-rose, break-broke, bite-bit, catch-caught, think-thought, etc.

The study’s rule of frequency figures that when a word is used often, it tends not to change because of natural correction. That is, children who unconsciously follow the regular past tense pattern and say, “I seed you” will eventually hear “I saw you” so much, that they will adopt the irregular tense without any trouble.

To develop their formula the Harvard researchers, two graduate students in applied mathematics in the Evolutionary Dynamics program, traced the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English (think: “Beowulf,” 800 A.D.) through Middle English (1066-1450) to modern English (Shakespeare to now). According to their study, the 177 irregular verbs of Old English shrank to 145 irregular ones in Middle English, shrinking to today’s 98 irregular verbs.

The modern irregular verb list may be proportionately small (roughly 3% of all verbs), but it has some heavy hitters. The top ten most-used verbs in English are all irregular: to be-was/were, to go-went, to have-had, to do-did, to say-said, to see-saw, to take-took, and to get-got, plus the helping verbs, can-could and will-would.

But what’s curious about the “frequency” theory is this: according to the study, words like bake, climb, fold, reach, starve, and yield were irregular in Old and Middle English but have since become regular. Does this mean people between Middle and Modern English didn’t say those words very much? I don’t think so. In fact, maybe those words were used SO frequently back then that it was easier to make them regular. Who knows? The study does not address this point.

I myself did a small (in fact, microscopic) study on changing past tense verbs, for a Linguistics class at Hunter College back in 2004. In it, I surveyed the pronunciation variation of the past tense for the following: sneak, shrink, creep, dream, leap, kneel, dive, and sink. That is, do you say: sneaked or snuck; shrank or shrunk; crept or creeped; dreamt or dreamed; leaped or leapt; knelt or kneeled; dived or dove; sank or sunk?

I asked 9 people, ages 12-78, mostly family members or friends, with the addition of one hairdresser and the man in the hair salon chair next to me. The results showed that age was not a factor, since word choices varied within age groups; and for most of my survey group, both past tense forms sounded natural. One participant, a 28-year-old male, added that he was not above adjusting his preferences to certain situations. He said, “I might say, ‘I dreamt about you’ to a girl, just because it sounds more literary than ‘dreamed,’ which is the word I’d otherwise use.” (Ladies: Beware of men saying “dreamt!”)

One reason both verb choices sounded correct, I observed in the paper, was that because Americans tend to move a lot, there is a lot of mixing and mingling of pronunciation. Some people unconsciously change their words in a new environment, while others cling to their native-born pronunciation, and both forms are passed on to children.

As for sneak-snuck, I found that Edward Finegan, the author of my Linguistics class textbook, Language: Its Structure and Use was actually wrong: he said that the traditional past tense form of “sneak” was “sneaked,” but that “snuck” was a commonly accepted variation. However, I found that “snuck” was actually closer to the original Norwegian and Danish words that gave us this verb. “Snike” in Norwegian and “snege” in Danish used “snek and “sneg” respectively for the past tense – so “snuck” is actually the older past tense, and “sneaked” would be the upstart. (This was my first linguistic discovery.)

So, as we type, text, and otherwise click our electronic way through the day, you might appreciate how far those words have come to appear on your tiny, shiny screen. I’m not just referring to the technology that has brought us such newbies as “to google,” “to youtube,” and “to email,” (all spoken and spelled with the regular past “ed” endings). I mean, a simple “How r u?” which represents more than a millennium in the making.

Talking Time

This Holiday Season

Take Your TIME

To Make A Difference.


The above message, from the tres chic Swiss French watch companies, Baume & Mercier and Torneau, is written on a fancy, blue silk banner that for the past month has been hanging on every lamppost in the heart of Midtown-New York, along Lexington, Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues – and it has been driving me crazy at every turn.


If you are among the majority who fails to find anything grammatically awry with that phrase, then please take time to consider that phrase; but there’s no need to rush – just take your time.


Okay. Have you spotted how the banner has managed to mangle two “time” expressions and merge them into one – and one, that if you take time to think about it, makes no sense:


“To take your time” is a phrase suggesting that someone use any amount of minutes, hours, or days to accomplish something. (Ex: She took her time writing the cover letter to send along with her resume.) Note that “to take your time” is followed by an “ing” word, or gerund.


“To take time,” on the other hand, means to set aside some moment or other in order to do something. (Ex: How can you write a book if you don’t take time to write?) This phrase is followed by an infinitive, or “to + base verb form” (i.e “to come,” “to do,” etc. are infinitives).


The distinction between these two common expressions may sound subtle, but I’ve never heard or seen them confused before in conversation or print. Why now? Baume & Mercier’s/Tourneau’s banner should say either, “Take Time to Make a Difference,” (set aside some moments from shopping or partying to do something nice for someone else) or “Take Your Time Making a Difference” (meaning, take all the hours or days you need to do something nice for someone else). But the way they wrote it, the sentence means neither.


But that’s not the only thing that gets me.


What really gets me is, Not Even My Own Mother – that universal standard for judging something’s worthiness – thought this subject was worth wondering about, much less writing about. Supporting my normally grammar-conscious mother was a group of blank faces of seemingly well-educated, native English-speaking Americans who I tested the phrase on at a party. “Sounds okay to me,” was the general consensus; meanwhile, Mom suggested I turn my attention to bigger bloopers.


But if Mom had seen the size and quantity of those banners, she’d realize how big a blooper that phrase was. This holiday season I have taken way too much time pondering how Baume & Mercier/Tourneau could have let this linguistically unfortunate phrase slip through the various levels of corporate art direction and bureaucracy to have those banners end up on those lampposts.


Perhaps this phrase is an unwitting example of how language changes in the 21st century: It starts with a big, expensive ad campaign with millions of people uncaring or unaware of some grammatical slip as they walk past the words; in time, they start saying things like, “Take your time to watch TV,” or “Did you take your time to listen to the words on that CD?” In time, I suppose I’ll be able to guess what the person means. For now, it still sounds mangled. Or is it just me?


The generally blasé reaction to this banner seems proof that English is fragmenting and morphing right under our native-speaking noses. Some of us cling longer to our linguistic ways, only to realize that a living language is a verbal sandcastle at high tide. Things change …


Speaking of which … goodbye, 2007 and Happy New Year, everyone!!

Speak You Global?

I’ve always liked the holiday cards that say, “Joy and Peace,” or “Season’s Greetings” in different languages -- Spanish, French, German, Italian, and maybe Greek, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese. And English – of course. The different words and expressions seem at once textbook-familiar but culturally exotic, even when the words are written in green and red ink and fashioned into the shape of a Christmas tree.

But I wonder how exotic the English “Season’s Greetings” seems to foreign speakers – my guess is: not very. According to a recent article in the Financial Times (Nov. 9, “Whose Language?”), roughly 1.5 billion people around the world speak English – that is, one-quarter of the world’s population -- and two-thirds of that number speak it as a foreign language and speak it reasonably well, according to linguist David Crystal.

For decades now, people from Mexico to Mongolia have been learning English as a foreign language – and not as some academic exercise (as is the case here in the U.S. with foreign languages), but as a survival tool; in fact, the Financial Times article calls English “the key to prosperity.” As the language of international business and commerce, English enables Nigerians to speak to Norwegians, Spaniards to Slovenians, and Uruguayans to Uzbekistanis. It lets street sellers in Cairo, Santiago, and New York hawk their wares and haggle with tourists; meanwhile, in sleek, glassy office buildings, English lets investment bankers sell stocks and equity derivatives by conference call to clients in Brazil, France, and Singapore.

Not knowing English limits your ability to thrive outside your village or country; knowing English brings possibility, opportunity – and the ability to fix your computer over the phone with a tech support operator in India. British linguist David Graddol says that the majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers. “Indeed,” the Financial Times quotes Graddol, “many business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when there are no native English speakers present.”

This is not because foreign English speakers automatically understand each others’ accents: if one person has learned American English and the other British, that sometimes presents complications. In fact, a French woman living here in New York arrived speaking and understanding British English – but now, after ten years of concentrating on American English, she has discovered, to her great chagrin, that she no longer understands Hugh Grant movies.

Still, overall, foreigners have an easier time of it speaking English with other foreigners, particularly in business situations. Why?

What we’ve got here – particularly when work involves colleagues from different countries – is not standard English, the Financial Times says, but something called Global English. This form of English is different from everyday, conversational, idiomatic-expression-filled English of native speakers; instead, Global English uses words and terms that are generally recognized by those foreign speakers present; it forgives slight grammatical errors; and it is aimed at making sure everyone understands what is being said – not necessarily how grammatically perfectly they say it.

Linguist David Graddol says that “even the most competent foreign speaker sometimes leaves the ‘s’ off the third-person singular,” but that no real loss in meaning comes from saying, for example, “he come,” instead of “he comes.”
In a meeting filled with non-native English speakers, such a “variation” would be perfectly acceptable in Global English.



At the same time, the Financial Times says, “Native (English) speakers are often poor at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions,” due to their use of idiomatic expressions and slang: “Let’s knock this deal out of the ball park!” for example, could easily leave a few foreign colleagues in the dark.

I shared the Financial Times article with some of my corporate English language students (from Switzerland, China, France, and Latin America), and they agreed that meetings would be easier if the native-English speakers spoke more slowly and used regular terms and vocabulary.

One student, an Internet Technology manager from Argentina, said that in conference calls and at big meetings, “It is not hard to understand the foreign people, because they don’t know so many words and they also speak slowly,” she said. “But the Americans and British speak always too fast and use expressions I don’t know -- And then I get more nervous when it is my turn to speak.”

But English among foreigners also seems to vary according to whether the audience is mixed nationalities – or not. A Spanish-speaking lawyer from Chile said she was recently in a room with French lawyers speaking English with each other: “I could not understand any word,” she said. “They spoke English fast and in a French sort of way that is still English but English that only they understand.”

Meanwhile, a Colombian graphic designer stood up for the native English speakers in meetings: she said that native speakers of English at least have clear accents, good grammar and – most importantly to her -- get to the point faster. “Latin speakers,” she added, whether from South America or Europe, “love to talk, love to hear themselves speak.” This can be fine on their home turf and in their native languages, she said, “but in any meeting here that is in English, to listen to them (with their difficult accents and bad grammar), well, it is really hard.”

Even so, native English speakers should at least be aware of the potential for misunderstandings -- and vice-versa: A Japanese bond trader I once worked with recalled the time she had just joined a new office team to work on their project. “What do you want to get out of this project?” her team leader asked at their first group meeting. Not realizing the team leader was asking what she wanted to learn from the experience, the Japanese woman said, “I thought he was telling me to get out of the project. I almost left the room!”

As foreigners learn English, they might not realize when their skills are sub-par – with potentially disastrous results. Take the hilarious ad for Berlitz Language School found on YouTube: in the ad, a young, new-to-the-job German Coast Guard officer is alone at the radar panel when a British-accented voice calls over the radio: “May-day, may-day! We are sinking! We are sinking!” The officer, unsure how to react, leans into the microphone and responds in heavily accented English, “Siss is zeh German Coast Guard. What are you … sinking about?” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-hW75wF4E)

Sometimes non-native speakers pick up English terms for things by hearing them from Anglo-American friends or colleagues; they then take these terms back to main headquarters -- only a bit altered. This would explain how our term, “touchy-feely,” meaning “ultra-sensitive,” arrived at a Zurich office as “touch-me, feel-me” – currently the large, corporate office’s name for long, in-depth meetings.

In another instance, a Belgian woman, describing her large, New York apartment, added that she loved her “walking closet.”

Other mistakes that non-native speakers make are things like mixing up verb tenses (“I have done not my homework last night.”); confusing “make” and “do” (“Sorry – I did a mistake!”); and translating word-for-word from their own language (“Finally, I must work all the day” – instead of, “In the end, I had to work the whole day.”) Pronunciation, word order, prepositions, and where-the-accent- falls-on-words are all killers too, because they are so irregular. Added trivia: The two words most often mispronounced and hardest to correct, in my book, are “women” (usually said as “two womans” or even “two womens”) and “clothes” (usually pronounced with two syllables as “clo-thes.”)

Such “differences” could some day become standard Global English -- if Global ever becomes a standard language. English itself developed over 500 years, as various foreign newcomers, merchants, and traders came to England and had to communicate with the locals. Over time, this meant pitching genders, the formal “you,” noun-adjective agreements, inflections, adopting easy and regular forms of plurals and past tenses, and all kinds of things that must have shaken each older generation’s foundations. (“Kids these days!” an old, Anglo-Saxon peasant might have said. “I work with my ‘Hande’ but my sons say they work with their ‘hands.’”) Global English could possibly develop in a similar way – except that English developed on one small island, where as Global English is developing all over the globe, making a standard Global English less certain.

In any case, to remedy the native/non-native language barrier in business communication, in 2005, a Frenchman and retired IBM vice president named Jean-Paul Nerriere invented a language tool that he called, “Globish;” this was not a language, he explained, but a simplified and codified version of English to be used at international business meetings. In his book, “Don’t Speak English -- Parlez Globish,” he explains how to learn and use this linguistic tool. Now two years later, Globish does not seem to have caught on, but Nerriere’s point is well taken: native English speakers in multinational business situations should hold back on the slang, long-winded jokes, and sports metaphors -- especially for games not commonly played overseas.

Americans and Anglos with thick regional accents are especially hard for foreign-speakers. On the other hand, good “standard” American accents are appreciated more than I once realized. For example, a young French student and his mother recently enjoyed the 1997 movie, “You’ve Got Mail;” though I had thought they would like the film for the scenes of the Upper West Side, their first comment was, “Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were so easy to understand!”

What’s happening with English, in short, is that Global English is creating a new strand of the language, a new international strand. Global English and standard English are at a certain crossroads: on one hand, the “key to prosperity” still lies in speaking as much like native English speakers as possible. Global English may allow for mistakes, but ultimately, those who speak it strive for standard English perfection.

On the other hand, with non-native speakers of English being a new and growing linguistic majority, native English speakers just might have to make some adjustments if we want to be understood – and hold onto that slippery key to prosperity.

With that, allow me to be the first to wish you “Have a Happy Holiday” in Global English: “Happy Vacations!”

For those who prefer the more traditional multi-language seasonal greetings, you may take your pick: Cheers! (English) Feliz Navidad! (Spanish) Nollaig Shona Duit! (Irish) Meuilleurs Voeux! (French) S Rozhdestvom! (Russian) Glædelig jul (Danish) and Bom Ano Novo (Portuguese), Gelukkig NieuwJaar! (Dutch), Νέο Ετος (Greek), and ལོགསར་ལ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་། (Tibetan).

(P.S. If you want to know how to say the above in Breton, Comanche, Galician, or even Kurdish, then check out this amazing site: http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/christmas.htm )

Verb Tension

In one of the most unusual cases linking language use and government waste, Brazil made using the verb form they call “the gerundio” (gerund) officially illegal last month. What’s unusual is not that government workers spoke in such flabby, ineffective language that it provoked a reaction – but that the governor actually took the law into his own hands and did something about it.

Apparently, Brazilian Federal District Governor Jose Roberto Arruda was sick and tired of hearing government workers, especially phone operators at a government call center, add one or two unnecessary verb tenses to their responses; these extra tenses required unnecessary syllables, words, time, and of course, all that zapped their sentences of nice, crisp direct speech and turned it into what Arruda considered verbal mush – and a bit pretentious at that, sounding just a tad too much like the way we say things in English.

An online article from “Estadao.com.br” cited two examples of such wasteful speech, as in, “I am going to be transferring you, sir” which in Portuguese comes out: “Eu vou estar transferindo o senhor;” and another such phrase:, “”Nos vamos estar providenciando,” or “We’re going to be arranging that.”

Though such language does not sound at all unusual or “inefficient” to native English speakers, Brazilians actually could say it more concisely. In standard Portuguese, those same phone operators could say, “I transfer you;” or, at most, “I’m going to transfer you.” But stretching it out to “I’m going TO BE TRANSFERRING you” was, according to Arruda, an abuse and exaggeration of the gerund.

The gerund, according to an online article in the newspaper, “Folha”, is defined as “the noun form of the verb … that indicates continued action.” Such words end in “ndo” in Portuguese, similar to “ing” in English. In the sentence, “I like shopping,” “shopping is a gerund – a noun formed from a verb.
Another use of the gerund, according to the grammar book, “Portugues Contemporaneo” (Georgetown University Press), is as a verb form tagged onto the main verb to suggest duration of an action. For example: They have finished shopping,” with “shopping” as the gerund.

However, In the sentence, “They are shopping,” “shopping” is a verb participle – not a gerund – though lengthy online research proved only that the Brazilians consider them roughly the same thing – noun form, verb form – whatever …

In any case, on September 27, 2007, “by reason of inefficiency,” Governor Arruda made any further use of the gerund strictly prohibited, by Decree 28.314, as stated in the “Diario Oficial do Governo do Distrito Federal.”

The news broke a few days later. On October 2, Brazilian blogger Tania Carvalho wrote, “Well, I woke up today to discover that the governor … has basically fired the gerund! This (form of) the verb can no longer appear in any branch of the government of (the capital city) of Brasilia.”

Though Tania herself mainly informed her fellow bloggers of the facts and withheld any opinion herself, comments to her blog, “O Mundo e uma Aldeia” (The World is a Village), were varied:

(From Marcelo): “At least the gerund left Brasilia. Many others could go too.”

(Marco): “Don’t you think it’s crazy that (Arruda) forbids the gerund but allows so many other (bad) things to continue?”

(Beth): “Maybe the governor should worry about basic education instead.”

(Buzz, a social website): “It seems like a joke, but it isn’t.”

Arruda himself no doubt expected guffaws from around Brazil and the world -- when the news broke, he managed to be unavailable for comment, being at a World Bank conference in New York. But I give it to Arruda for taking a linguistic stand on government efficiency (or lack thereof) and then following through.

But what, you may still be asking, is so BAD about that verb form?

In English, we use the verb participle “ing” forms in the every configuration of present, past and future tenses: I am doing; I was doing; I will be doing; I would have been doing; I will have been doing. These tenses do not exist in that same form in most Western languages, except to a certain extent in Portuguese and to a lesser extent in Spanish.

Language expert David Crystal, in “Stories of English,” suggested that during the Middle Ages when English was still taking shape, there were so many different people speaking different forms of language – Norwegian, Danish, Saxon-German, Latin, Norman French, and more – that people came up with tenses to say exactly what they meant. In other Western languages, the tense is left mainly to context.

Let’s take a look at the tense that drove the Brazilian governor crazy: the present progressive. In English, we use the present progressive tense when we say, “I’m going to the store,” or “I’m reading the best book.” That tense means that we’re in the process of doing a particular, specific action – even if we’re not doing it at that exact moment. That is, you might be going to the store “this morning” or “a little later;” and you might only be reading that good book at night before bed, not at the precise moment you spoke about the book. But going to the store and reading that book are actions that still have yet to be completed.

In Brazilian Portuguese, you have the option of saying, “I am going to the store,” (present progressive) or “I go to the store” (present simple), though both mean the same thing.

In English, “I go to the store” sounds funny, unless it is given further context; that is, followed up by something like “every Wednesday” or “as little as possible,” or some other phrase that lets someone know you go to the store on a regular basis, and that it’s a fact.

The differences in English between these two tenses are so clear that no native speaker would confuse, for example, “What do you do?” (i.e. for a living) with “What are you doing?” or “What do you play” (implying an instrument, or sports position) with “What are you playing?”

But for foreign speakers learning English, these two verb tenses are not as easily distinguished. Both Latin languages and Germanic languages mainly use one tense, the present simple, as in “I go,” to cover both meanings.

The problem with those government workers in Brasilia was that they were adding, “going-to-be-doing something” when a simple “do” would have done. And that got Arruda’s goat.

The French newspaper of record, “Le Monde,” took note of the Brazilian gerund/participle ban in a small column on October 24: in it, columnist Robert Sole let loose with the smugness of a child teasing the losing team:

“All use of the gerund,” Sole says, “was just banished by the governor, Jose Roberto Arruda, who intends to fight against the inefficiency of public service …
The French administration will certainly be inspired by such grammatical politics, while knowing full well that we must respect tradition, that is, to leave the tenses to themselves … “

Sole compares the “gerund” form of Portuguese to the “en train de” form in what he calls his “language of Moliere.” That is, “Estou estudando” (I am studying) in Portuguese is “Je suis en train d’etudier” in French.

However, a random sampling of two highly educated native French speakers begs to differ with Sole: their feeling was that the simple “j’etudie” serves as “I study” as well as “I am studying.” “En train de” doing something does mean that you are in the middle of doing something, but because of the extra length of the sentence and the effort to say it, the expression is usually spoken in the same way that we say, “Well, I’m TRYING to study” – i.e., with a verbal edge that the Portuguese and English forms do not have in their present progressive tenses.

One possible concern to this whole Gerund Prohibition is that someone, somewhere will challenge Arruda’s loose definition of the gerund itself. If the Brazilian Ministry of Language decides that “gerund” and “participle” are two separate entities, then the whole decree may be swallowed up in one giant, linguistic loophole – and the problem, a Brazilian might say, will keep on continuing.

Peopleisation

He has been described as a skirt-chaser; she as mysterious, capricious, and detached.

These are not the usual adjectives newspapers use to describe a new country’s president and his wife. And yet the new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and his wife, Cecilia, are as much an embodiment of the new generational change in French political power as they are symbols of the new word, “peopleisation.”

“Peopleisation” is not yet in the dictionary, but it already has a lengthy online Wikipedia description, including its various spellings: “pipeulisation, “ “pipolisation,” and the most current, “peoplelisation.”

Those are strange spellings because they’re French. Oui, and pronounced “people-ee-za-seeyon.”

I stumbled upon “peoplisation” in a conversation with a French lawyer I’ll call Veronique. She and I had started talking about President Sarkozy, or “Sarko,” as he is often dubbed, the first Baby Boomer President of France, and his wife, Cecilia. It seems that France’s new First Lady has displayed some rather unusual behavior before, during, and since this past spring’s election. And as Veronique got into the particulars of Sarko and Cecilia’s reported affairs, arguments, and odd conduct, I suddenly realized that she was dishing the dirt on them as if they were Brad and Angelina, or Tom and Kate, or Britney, K-Fed or any other regulars gracing the cover of People magazine (which does not exist in France – at least, not yet) or The National Enquirer.

This is what the French call “peopleisation”: it’s all about “celebrities,” not “people” as ordinary humans. “Peopleisation” is about the people who appear in what the French call the “presse people” – the “anglo-saxon–style” (French Wikipedia’s term) of weekly magazines and tabloid newspapers featuring people in the media, show biz, and in France right now, politics.

Voila “peopleisation” in French power and politics: On Sarkosy’s Inauguration Day this past May, the English newspaper, The Telegraph, gushed:
"Mrs Sarkozy looked more like a star arriving at the Cannes film festival than the matronly presidential consorts France is accustomed to.
Camera shutters whirred as the 49-year old former model, holding the hand of their ten-year-old son Louis, brought Jackie Kennedy glamour to proceedings in an ivory duchess satin Prada dress. Known to prefer T-shirts, combat trousers and cowboy boots, Mrs Sarkozy silenced at a stroke the critics of her dress-down style."

Though celebrity culture in France may have been around for a while, “peopleisation” has only emerged since around 2000 and is still not yet included in dictionnaire.com. As a word, “peopleisation” reflects a definite English/American embrace. Yes, the French long ago adopted “le weekend” and “le Burger King,” but “peopleisation is their own invention. They could have substituted a French word for “people,” but they intentionally stuck with our word – a linguistic nod to the inventors of celebrity culture.

The English newspaper, The Independent on Sunday, had this to say about Cecilia at the G-8 Summit in Germany this past June:

"Like the Devil, she wears Prada, like Marie-Antoinette, she fascinates and antagonises people in equal measure … At the G8, she dazzled photographers with her toned body in an Azzedine Alaia black-laced, strappy dress. Nicolas was very attentive, as always, holding her hand, while she stood, aloof, with a steely smile and fiery eyes."

Monsieur Le President is not without his own attributes: alliterative adjectives punctuate articles in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, who refer to Sarkozy as “passionate,” “pragmatic,” and “pugnacious.”

But others dish a little more deeply – take Judith Warner, author of several non-fiction books ranging from politics to modern-day motherhood, as well as the New York Times blog, “Domestic Disturbances.” In her Sept. 13 posting last month, Warner referred to the “attractive tableau vivant of family disorder exhibited by France’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and first lady, Cécilia.”

Warner went on to explain some of the marital tensions that, in the U.S., might have destroyed a presidential campaign faster than you can say “cuckold” (an old English/Old French word referring to the female cuckoo bird, who is known to lay her eggs in other birds’ nests). Warner’s blog says:
"In case you missed it, Sarkozy last year greatly entertained France by running a campaign in which his wife was almost entirely absent. Cécilia, a former model whom Nicholas first eyed in his previous incarnation as mayor of the city of Neuilly, while administering the vows that consecrated her last marriage; she left him in 2005, eventually showing up – and being photographed – with her lover (a Moroccan advertising executive) in New York City.

The Sarkozys ultimately reunited. But life together remained rocky. Cécilia made major headlines once again last May when she pulled a no-show on the night of her husband’s final run-off race against his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal.
She was rumored not to have voted at all."

Cecilia hit American radar this past summer when she snubbed President Bush’s invitation to a picnic at the Bush family manse in Kennebunkport, Maine; at the last minute, she backed out, explaining that she and her children had “sore throats” and could not attend the picnic: so Sarko went solo.

The Sarkozys had been vacationing 50 miles away in Wolfeboro, NH and, according to the Times Online/UK, fellow vacationers noticed Mrs. Sarkozy strolling in shorts around town with friends, both the day before and the day after the picnic. Le Figaro, the most pro-Sarkozy newspaper, noted drily that the infection seemed to have come and gone as fast as lightning, adding, "The day before she was in good form, and the day after she was cured."

Over here, newspapers and online blogs, magazines, and newsletters, from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle to the Liberal Doomsayer to the Surf Wax News, commented on the “sore throat excuse” and gave Cecilia’s behavior a thumbs down.

A French Presidential term is five years – so just think of the rumors, gossip, and innuendos waiting in those Gallic wings. Not that it takes adultery and unconventional behavior in a Presidential couple to get our attention – but recent American history does prove that it’s pretty effective.

Bill Clinton would easily have been called “un lapid chaud” – or, “hot rabbit” – in France, during his administrations. Whether or not politicians-as-celebrities helps us elect the next one remains to be seen. Hillary is older and wiser and her relationship with Bill leaves little else to discover (I hope). Rudy and Judy? Spare me.

So far, “peopleisation” has only really touched Barak Obama -- as in the recent You Tube video sensation, “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” in which a girl sings and fantasizes about how to get her favorite candidate’s attention.

In contrast, the past two French presidents both had tabloid potential in their lives, yet prior to 2000, the French press did not consider this type of news as peopleisation-worthy. Their transgressions made them human, not celebrities.

The German online magazine, Spiegel International (5/22/07), said of Francois Mitterand (1981-1995) and Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), “Mitterrand had a mistress and paid for her accommodation with taxpayers' money. Shortly before he died, when he admitted to having an illegitimate daughter by her, it only served to give the man many in France referred to as "God" a more worldy image. Mitterrand's successor, Chirac, also had a reputation as a bon vivant.” But these men tended to hide their private lives.

Now, reporters like to comment on Sarkozy’s “in-your-face” style, his hob-nobbing with millionaire friends, his Rolexes and vacations on yachts – and his total lack of embarrassment in enjoying the good life. In short, says New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, Sarkozy “has broadcast that money’s okay.”

That’s “peopleisation.”

Clearly, Sarko is becoming prime meat for the press and paparazzi. He is outspoken, volatile, loves America, listens to an iPod, jogs, and is part Napoleon-part JFK. The “peopleisation” of this President will keep Sarkozy on the front pages of French newspapers, and at least in the first section of American papers and blogs for a while.

It’s taken thousands of years for “peopleisation”, the word, to emerge. From the Latin, “populus,” the French came up with “peuple” for a specific group of people and “gens” for people in general.

“Peopleisation” does not seem like a very French word and it will be interesting to see how long it takes to be made official. The French verbo-crats are so careful not to let English words slip into their formal speech. In France, there is a Ministry of Language that forbids Anglo words to become part of elevated speech: for example, this machine I am typing on cannot be called “le computer;” oh no – only “l’ordinateur” (pron: lor-dee-na-toor) will do.

The same ministry forbids naming your child anything too “extraordinaire” – Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter’s name, Apple; or Bob Geldof’s daughters’ names, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, and Little Pixie, would never fly with in France. (However, the French lawyer I spoke with did know of a pair of twins who were able to keep their names: Starsky and Hutch.)

Still, I’m betting that the English word “people” will eventually be accepted by the official French dictionary, and maybe even by the Ministry of Language: only “people” conveys that gossipy, trendy, paparazzi-craven world we so take for granted, but which is so new to the French.

And when Sarko’s term is up five or maybe ten years from now, perhaps he and his wife will find a new way to stay in the limelight. Maybe a TV show: “In the French Kitchen with Sarko and Cecilia.” Nothing like a little peopleisation while cooking over a hot stove: a dash of marital tension along with a splash of white wine … The celebrity weeklies can start salivating now.

In Any Event

Labor Day is recently behind us – and with it, that glorious state of mind called “summer.” People who haven’t seen each other in a while will be asking for another week or so, “How was your summer? Did you get away at all?” or “Did you have a good summer?”

By “good summer,” perhaps we mean “eventful” -- which Encarta defines as “full of important, interesting, or exciting occurrences; or something that had a major effect on your life.” On the other hand, a “good summer” could mean one of long, lazy days, lots of iced coffee, and reading beach books so l-i-t-e they floated away – i.e., a blissfully uneventful summer.

Eventful, uneventful, event … to ancient Romans, evenire, i.e., to come out of, or occur.

I’m thinking about the word “event” these days not just because my second child just went off to college for the first time (THAT was an event) and my first child just went back to college (very important, but less of an event than the first time), and we now have just one child (well, age 16) at home for the first time since 1989 -- there’s probably a name for this new period, but that’s a separate column.

No, what’s getting to me is the commercialization of the word “event,” which is diminishing the real meaning of the word. So what, exactly, is an event? Encarta defines it as 1. “an occurrence, especially one that is particularly significant, interesting, exciting or unusual; 2. An organized occasion, such as social function or sports competition; 3. Any of the races or other competitions that form part of a larger (sports or other) event; and 4. A happening or occurrence.

Now take a look at my Exhibits A, B, and C: I just drove through town and noticed the women’s clothing store, Ann Taylor, is having what they call, a “Shoe Event.” A few weeks ago, they were having a “Sweater Event,” and before that, a “Summer Sale Event.”

(Could the events of my summer even begin to compare to those?!)

Last week, The Body Shop was having a “20% Off Everything Event.”

Even pet shelter organizations like PetBond.com, and the giant Petco pet store chain, have gotten in on the “event” action with “Pet Adoption Events.”

Have these so-called events become a modern sales code word meant to avoid sounding crass or commercial? What Ann Taylor and The Body Shop are really doing, it seems, is “promotion” for one and “a sale” for the other. Has the word “event” become polite society’s expression for the equivalent of “blow-out sale”?

The release of the seventh and final Harry Potter book was commercial but, still, definitely an event, even a worldwide event – with children and grown-ups alike dressing up in Harry Potter character-related costumes, going to parties at bookstores that had book-related games, trivia contests, face-painting, and food – definitely memorable events, as was my own completion of reading the series.

Meanwhile, Ann Taylor’s “Shoe Event” includes no balloons, confetti, or live auction; no face-painting or speeches or anything to make the “event” in any way memorable or once-in-a-lifetime. All it means is that the new fall shoes have arrived, and that we should come in and try them on. The fall sweaters that were the featured “event” in August are still on the table near the door – but now considered a tad dated for the “event” crown. Mind you, those sweaters and shoes are still full price – any reductions will no doubt be announced with the Fall Sale Event.

As for the pet shelters and their Pet Adoption Events: these regular-as-morning-coffee happenings (though an event is supposedly a unique or rare occurrence) give people who want a pet an opportunity to acquire one. The shelter brings animals from their locations to a local pet store or town center. There, the shelter displays cats and dogs in cages, pens, and carriers and waits for hopeful owners to apply for ownership.

The potential owners are then thoroughly screened – they must fill out a lengthy application with many personal questions as to why they want a pet and how and where they intend to keep it, and keep it safe (from falling off balconies, out of windows, etc.); you must also supply references, which are duly checked: If your reference cannot be reached (not at home, cell phone on the blink), too bad -- either wait, or try again at another “event.”

Once potential pet owners have passed the paperwork stage, some shelters require a home-check: they bundle the pet-owner-wannabes into a van, then with a pet professional, go to each wannabe’s house or apartment to check for possible safety hazards.

They call this an “event”?! For those proud pet owners who make it through the entire process, bringing home the puppy or kitten is definitely an event. But the method of acquiring it -- while completely fair and humane for the animals – is more Trial than Event for the humans simply seeking a little love and four-legged companionship. (Perhaps the shelters could call these ordeals, “Attempt to Adopt a Pet Day.”)

Lifetimes are full of events – some are acknowledged with a hug and a surprise under your pillow, or a “How ‘bout that!” (losing your first tooth, not being picked last at gym). Other events are reasons for extravaganzas – bar mitzvahs, Sweet Sixteens, graduations, weddings, births. (And though death is equally dramatic and occurs just once per lifetime, I’ve never heard anyone refer to someone’s death as an “event.”)

County fairs are also full of events: Bingo; the 4H Poultry, Rabbit and Livestock Competitions; the tractor pull, the dessert cook-offs, the greased pig race, the watermelon-eating contest, and much, much more. Swim and track meets have different events within them; our local fire station had a festive little event today for parents and little children, with balloons, a train, face painting, spin art, sticker tattoos, and free food and drink.

Events are usually happy or fun – but not always. There is a tremendously popular children’s book series called, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” which describes the bitter and painful experiences, disasters, and awful occurrences that challenge three orphans seemingly every second of their miserable lives.

The biggest use “events” as a negative occurrence is the one attached to to September 11, 2001: the terrible happenings of that day are often referred to as “the events of September 11th”. In this case, the word “events” is fitting – since it’s hard to find a date in American history with more drama or significance.

So my advice to Ann Taylor, The Body Shop, pet shelters, and other entities dressing up their promotions, sales, and rigorous adoption procedures in verbal sheep’s clothing is: delete “event” from your sales language. Unless you come up with something that has us consumers standing in line overnight; that can rival the first day of school in significance; or that can compete in emotional tension with a county fair’s husband-calling contest, it’s best to let our natural idea of events remain as special, happy, or even tragic as they are meant to be.

Endangered Semicolons

It’s summertime, the livin’ is easy – right?

Well, it’s easy livin’ to some – but not to the poor semicolon, whose existence is fading as fast as the Polar Ice Cap but without a Live Earth Concert to protect it. (Witness the first line, above.)

The actual lyrics to the Gershwin brothers’ “Summertime” are, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.” The “and” between “summertime” and “the livin’” keeps the flow of the line going; it also links the first part of the sentence to the other.

There – did you see how I snuck in that semicolon?

A semicolon is perfect for when you have two related sentences without an “and,” “but,” or “or” to connect them; a semicolon tells you to give each related sentence equal attention – not just a comma’s worth of a pause – because a pause is sometimes just not enough:

Like in “Clueless” when Paul Rudd accuses Alicia Silverstone of driving through a stop-sign: “I totally paused!” she says in California-style self-defense. But, you see, a “pause” – whether on paper or on wheels -- is not the same as a more definite stop.

A semicolon between two sentences tells the reader that each part is sufficient to stand alone, but that there is a close relationship between the two parts that would get lost with a full-stop period. (A comma should not attempt to join two complete ideas – and I’ll get to that.)

In the excellent, humorous grammar book, “Woe Is I,” author Patricia T. O’Conner calls the semicolon “one of the most useful but least used punctuation marks,” and I have to agree. O’Connell also thinks people might be too intimidated to use semicolons, but I think that’s optimistic: (I put a colon there because a colon means, “now I’m going to elaborate.”) if people are thinking that semicolons intimidate them, then that means they’re at least thinking about semicolons. I don’t think most people even think about semicolons.

To those of us who remember watching “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Brady Bunch,” the semicolon probably dates back to some grammar lesson slept through years ago. Those born during the “Beaver” and “Brady Bunch” years probably did not even have a grammar class, so they now hardly recognize a semicolon’s existence -- except as a curiosity found in other people’s writing.

Willing as I am to accept that punctuation, like language, changes, losing the semicolon would indeed be a loss. Visually, semicolons carry more muscle than a comma. Commas don’t stop the flow – they simply regulate it, with changes of tone and pauses. Semicolons bring the flow to what O’Connell calls the “flashing red light” stage – a brief stop; they serve as connector-rods to strengthen a sentence.

The trouble is, people have found a way to live without them; but their writing suffers as a consequence. A semicolon is red meat, full of iron; a comma is lettuce – valuable, good for you, but light and somewhat flimsy, occasionally left to an author’s discretion or whim.

Transition words like “however,” “nevertheless,” and “anyway,” are always followed by a comma; commas separate asides, things that could also be put in parentheses; and commas, which are often forgotten in these cases, go before clauses beginning with “which.”

Commas also separate items in a list or series; but when that list already has commas and/or dashes in the items, use a semicolon. Like: Don’t forget to bring the popcorn, which I hid on the back shelf so no one would it eat before the picnic; the cream soda – mmmm; and a big blanket for the lawn.

Semicolons hold together two related sentences. A sentence, or “independent clause,” has a subject, a verb and a complete meaning. For example, “John reads” is a complete sentence, with a subject, verb, and complete meaning. Likewise, “Run!” is a full sentence, because it has all the elements of an independent clause: a subject -- in this case, an understood subject, which is “you;” a verb, “run;” and a complete meaning, which is along the lines of “You’d better get out of here fast!” In contrast, a clause like, “When you run” has a subject and verb but no complete meaning, so that is a “dependent” clause.

Newspapers articles tend to use periods, commas, and dashes. (We’ll get to dashes another time.) Semicolons are more often used in magazine articles and books. However, lately, in books or articles where there are plenty of properly placed semicolons, there are random paragraphs where they were left out. Either this is a dubious stylistic choice, or simply editorial neglect, I don’t know. For example:

*The book, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” is a perfect example of the spineless punctuation seen today. I could see if this were a list, like: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and semicolons are nowhere. But as it is, the title lacks the bite a nice semicolon would have provided.

See if you can find the missing semicolons in the following passages:

In Philippa Gregory’s, “The Other Boleyn Girl”: “Whenever I looked up the king’s eyes were on me, whenever I looked away I was conscious of his stare still on my face.”

In Nick Hornby’s “How To Be Good” the husband says to his wife over the phone, “Yeah. Molly’s here watching TV, Tom’s round at Jamie’s.”

And in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” a person quoted in an article in a Hogwarts newspaper says: “We’re not allowed to talk about it, don’t ask me anything.”

Moving away from literature and fixating on the warning on my cup of Barnes & Noble/Starbucks coffee, I see the following:

“Careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot.”

Now, why did the coffee-cup editor put a weak, little comma after a warning? An exclamation point, or at least a period, would have been more appropriate for preventing drinkers from burned fingers and potential lawsuits. Grammatically speaking, a full-stop would have been the correct choice too: “careful” is actually a command and thus an independent clause with an understood subject (you) and understood verb (be), with “careful” a complementary adjective. “You be careful,” is what the word really means.

On a daily basis, I find plenty of semicolonless emails like:

“Here is the report, I hope you can understand it;” or
“Thanks for the update on Shelia, I was wondering what happened to her.”

You might argue that those lines, punctuated with commas instead of semicolons, sound the way people speak. But to me they simply lack muscle, or definition; they’re just not going to last.

Printed interviews often take the same comma-or-bust approach, which robs the speaker of the expression and intonation he probably better conveyed on tape:
In an online interview with Eric Zala who, with his two friends and fellow “Indiana Jones” fans, spent seven years, between ages 12-19, remaking “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” said, “My mom had this big rambling house and a huge basement which was perfect for our makeshift soundstage, where we would later shoot the bar, the cave, the Well of Souls, the map room, and we listened to a bad horror movie sound effect records, two 12-year-old kids getting inspired about the idea of doing our own Indiana Jones movie.

Still, it’s not too late to start a Semicolon Survival Campaign; it just might work. We can start with a little grass roots effort and build awareness from there. And by Summertime 2008 we might even see ”Punctuationfests” carried by satellite right to your living rooms, Palm Pilots, cellphones and iPhones from semicolonless spots all over the world.