This is an ironic cowboy. Image credit: Ric Szopa

Every year about this time, the good people at Lake Superior State University produce a list of words that ought to banished from the English language for at least a year. Longer, in some cases. This year’s list is helpful, certainly, even though it includes at least one word that I didn’t realize was in the English language to begin with. (Do people really say “trickeration”?)

All told, they have modestly limited themselves to a scant dozen words and phrases that deserve banishment. I am in favor of a more thorough purge, and as we all know, a good linguistic purge begins at home. So here is the list of words that we (by which I mean, principally, I) really really need to stop using this year. And probably forever.

1. irony/ironic/ironically: Alanis Morissette killed it once in 1996. It has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of everybody who lives in Brooklyn, and/or Portand, and/or wishes that they did. Alas, the time has come for it to die again for a while. Adios, compadre. Read more »

“This is your brain…” Imagine a freshly hatched egg rolling on the kitchen counter.  To the left is a skillet set on a stovetop and there’s butter already simmering on its stick-resistant and concave surface.   Some legendary actor then cracks the egg shell with one hand, allowing the yoke and stuff to spill into the hot skillet.   The egg fries quickly — sunny-side-up — and the voice-over of the commercial continues, “And this is your brain on drugs…  Any questions?”

I’ve seen variations on this themes on everything from astrological horoscopes to bumper-stickers to political buttons (see end of post) to a manual on Zen Buddhism (This is your brain on Buddha!)

And yes, as prevention programs go, this one beats Nancy Reagan’s “Just So No!” hands-down.

Metaphors, 1.

Moralizing Slogan, 0.

And yet, before we, in the creative arts, run up the score, I’d like to consider a book on the brain that has been acclaimed by neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-imaging researchers and even by such egg-heads as the editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman.   The book is published by Yale University Press and is written by Johns Hopkins mega-star in the above fields, Iain McGilchrist.  It’s entitled, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is odd, considering it has nothing to do with the despicable institution of slavery, nor with any messengers who might have made special deliveries.  Nothing literal like that at all.

On the contrary, the subtitle saves the day (not to mention the marketing department’s ass):   “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World.”  And it is here — in that criss-crossing, apple-saucing of the two hemisphere’s of your primary internal organ, your grey matter, that the rubber meets the road… that the kettle becomes black… that the chicken (coming first) traverses the road, lays the egg (coming second), which gets fried in the skillet, next to the kettle on the adjacent back-burner…   The point is, once the author clears his throat, everyone who has ever set a coffee mug down upon a literary journal of any reputation should stand and salute.  Or bow and genuflect.   McGilchrist is brilliant, as the mere progression of chapters in the table of contents can testify:

Read more »

My students have their first paper due in two days, and there’s more than a bit of panic going around. They have to write a three- to five-page personal essay that explores some aspect of their relationship to new media literacies. As such, it should come as no surprise to learn that many of my students have chosen to write about their phones. And this past week, while discussing their paper topics, an interesting point kept cropping up.

My students, you see, are annoyed that their parents don’t text in complete sentences. “I hate it when my parents just send me a text that says, ‘k,’” says one student. “Yeah,” says another, “they use more texting lingo than I do.”

Let’s pretend here, for just a minute, that I actually believe that there’s a generation of college freshmen out there who text with their words spelled correctly and all sentences grammatically correct. (Wouldn’t that be amazing?) While I’ve never shortened you to u, even I have been known to leave out a comma. Just last week I chose not to go back and fix a word I’d forgotten to capitalize. But even if their claims aren’t true, I was still startled to hear just how annoyed my students were by the language—or lack there of—their parents use. Perhaps it’s that it feels strange to them to have their parents using language that seems stereotypically designated to them—like the mother who shops at Abercrombie right alongside her daughter. Or perhaps my students really are moving back toward real communication, having gotten the Internet-speak out of their systems while their parents are still discovering it exists. In either case, it’s a nice counterpoint to the stories you see about teachers grading papers littered with u and r and lol. Now I just have to get them to learn your and you’re.

I’m spending a lot of my time right now learning French. I haven’t been able to find a local class, so I’m teaching myself. Sometimes I read through French picture books I own, and I also have a few novels in French, (Harry Potter, Candide, etc.), but mostly, I’m using the online service Babbel. I’d had a free account there for well over a year before finally dishing out the $5/month for the paid content. I haven’t used it enough yet to be able to judge if it’s really worth the money, but so far, it does seem to be helping.

Babbel teaches language mainly visually. You get virtual flashcards that feature images, which you then have to provide the correct word (and spelling) for. Everything is voiced by native speakers. In the past few weeks, I’ve taught myself over 600 words. Since the individual lessons come with ten words, this means I’ve spent a lot of nights in the living room at my parents’ house, trying to copy the speakers’ pronunciations (I will never, ever, get that French “r” totally right, I’m convinced), and beating my head against the TV tray while I try to remember the various French translations. Some words, I get right away (the words for pumpkin, turnip, roll), but others (the French words for rocking chair and knife, for instance) I just can’t get through my head).

As evidenced by my list above, I seem to do best with food, which amuses me greatly. Now if only I could navigate French-speaking countries with nothing more than a list of food items, I’d be fine. But sadly, communication takes a lot more than that: like sentences. But my novel reading isn’t exactly helping either. When am I ever going to need to use the word for fireplace poker?

There’s probably a better way to learn a language. In fact, I’m sure of it. It’s not how we learn our native language, obviously, but submersion into total ignorance isn’t sounding too fun to me. Neither is paying hundreds of dollars to sign up for a real class. I guess I’ll just head back to my Babbel course. After all, it’s doing something right. I’ll never, ever forget the word for pumpkin.

TRANSLATIONS

• pumpkin :: citrouille
• turnip :: navet
• roll :: petit pain
• rocking chair :: fauteuil à bascule
• couteau :: knife
• tisonier :: fireplace poker

This article came up in my twitter feed today: Learn the F*cking Rules.

It worries me. Not that there are people concerned about grammar and language (that’s a great thing), but that they hold them to be the most important aspect of a written work. And that these people are professional editors with lots of experience in publishing.

Isn’t there more to writing than noun/verb agreement? Important? Of course. But not the end, just part of the means.

My dog died this past weekend. We’re one of those families that gets really attached to our animals, but this dog seemed to have an extra special something that is making his loss all the more poignant (especially for me since I was on vacation in Florida when it happened, and at 26 I still haven’t lost anyone I was close to). On top of that I have two family members who recently had to go to the hospital for heart problems. And on top of that, I just turned in my review of Édouard Levé’s Suicide for The Collagist.

So I’ve been thinking about death lately, and the ways in which we, those left living, navigate talking about it.

It first hit me a few hours after my parents called to say they’d found our dog dead in his bed on Sunday morning. “He’s dead,” my dad said, and it struck me how odd it is to talk about the departed using future tense. Not “He died” but rather “He is dead,” as if death is another state that we can move into, and again back out of. I’m trying to use the past tense more, but I still notice myself (and others) slipping, transitioning to this change in language, to this permanence, this final, irreversible state. Read more »

Aluminumfoiled Abba

I’m writing from the motherland this week. In preparation for the long flights required to get here, I loaded my netbook with works in progress to work on during my gadget’s long battery life. I then spent the longest plane ride catching up on movies and TV shows through the video on demand system and slept on the shorter legs because I’d watched too much crap instead of calibrating my bio-clock to minimize jetlag. I told myself there would be plenty of downtime at my parents’ house and I would get lots of writing done there. I’m very good at lying to myself.

There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay. Read more »

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

As a self-professed grammar geek, I was a little upset to realize that I had somehow missed the news that the 16th edition of The Best Style Book Ever (aka the Chicago Manual of Style) was given a publishing date of August 1 (although Amazon claims I can have it tomorrow if I select one-day shipping—and yes, that hyphen is necessary). Had I known about this glorious event sooner, I might have thrown a party, at which the main form of entertainment would have been sharing our most despised grammar, style, and usage pet peeves (a recent one of mine is unnecessary quotation marks). I even might have served these cupcakes.

But all that aside, I can’t wait to see what additions and changes are included in this new edition. More guidelines for electronic mediums and sources is a given, and Amazon tells me there will even be something called a hyphenation table, which makes me more excited than I care to admit.

The bad news, though, is that without a job I can’t afford this marvelous piece of editorial genius (okay, that might be overdoing it slightly—maybe). Until such time that I can spend over $40 on a reference manual, I know what to ask for for my birthday.

Also, isn’t that cover just gorgeous?

When I stop and think of what grammar errors drive me the most insane, I think the misuse of words like your/you’re and their/there/they’re and its/it’s are at the top of my list, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I get snarky when I see these mistakes, such as

Your driving me nuts with your ineptitude!

or

Its time you learned how to writer properly!

and say things like, “My what again?”

These are the obvious ones, and I think it’s the apostrophe that usually throws people off, but as a grammarian, there are quite a few other blunders (and some things that I know are nothing more than pet peeves) that are sure to make my blood pressure shoot up, at least a bit. Here are a few:

• in the U.S., we use toward, not towards, just like it’s (see how I did that?) color, not colour
• punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless it’s (again!) an exception, of course
• IM speak or text speak or whatever it’s called these days (but lolspeak is acceptable in certain circumstances, including the Bible)
• not capitalizing the word I (I’m looking at you, McDonalds)
• the absence of the serial comma, because my parents, Angelina Jolie and God means something totally different than my parents, Angelina Jolie, and God

So what drives you insane?

Okay, so I know I just posted, but a couple days ago, Shawn Vestal stole my thunder (no worries, Shawn) by posting a much cooler version of my book list post, so I felt it necessary to post an additional challenge. Besides, this is something I’ve been mulling over for a while. We need a new word for boyfriend…or girlfriend. A word that falls somewhere between those and husband/wife. I’ve been in a serious, committed relationship with the same man for over three years now, and in these modern times when marriage isn’t required or even always desired and gay couples aren’t allowed to get married in many states–forcing them to stay “boyfriends” or “girlfriends” forever unless they choose “partner”–we’ve gotta come up with a better word. According to trusty Wikipedia, this man I’ve been sharing my life with should not be my “boyfriend”: Read more »