Parts of Speech

Celts gave us our odd "helping verb" sentence structure, & other fun insights

This isn't your typical "History of English" article. It's by John McWhorter, who has a great audio course on linguistics.

English is not normal:

No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language

 

"Mondegreens" remind us that sounds aren't exactly the same as words, and may betray them

The problem with misused fancypants words is NOT that they're Pedantically Incorrect, it's that they're pseudo-pedantic

Here's my reply to Chris Brecheen's '10 Words Writers Need to Learn to Use "Correctly"':

The problem with most of these is not that they're Pedantically Incorrect: It's that when used incorrectly, they're twee, faux-highbrow words that most people don't really understand, in situations where normal straightforward words would work much better. That's Bemused & Nonplussed, and to a lesser extent Disinterested, Reticent and Penultimate (the last three when used right are non-twee and just fine, and each of the three is the best single word to convey its exact meaning).

Decimate's figurative meaning is totally legit, and needed, and the original meaning is interesting history, but not essential.

Conversely, Redundant's standard meaning is well-known and important, and it would be a shame to lose the ability to conceive and convey it. But the people whom you think are misusing it to simply mean "useless" may have some connection to its standard meaning in mind when they do so.

Literally is overused but it does have a legit comic/figurative sense. Which may be Ironic, but probably in the wrong sense of the word.

With Plethora, I find it hard to see your distinction between the two senses (a wild overabundance versus a plain old abundance), or at least where to draw the line between them, and it's often used with a sense of comic exaggeration.

In Portland, media's bureaucratic style smokescreens who killed who

Press deploys its worst bureaucratese against Portland's anti-Muslim killer and its Constitution-burning mayor

Our default victimhood jargon on sex & violence disempowers victims, ignores responsibility

"X% of women were raped." "Battered women". "The accuser". The passive voice leads us to ignore  responsibilities, actions, transgressions.  But it is the politically correct way to talk about sex and violence. (Ah, there's another one, this "violence" that just somehow happens, that we talk about as if it were more real than the people who do it and the people they do it to.)  It is politically correct because (1) officialdom wants people passive. If individuals take action on their own solutions, it considers them part of the problem, or worse. And (2) starting in the 1970s,  everyone has wanted to identify as a victim of something, a rare flower with its own peculiar rights, sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Which the rest of us not only must accommodate, but must confess ignorance about, unquestioningly submitting our "awareness" to "raising".

Guess what?  When the rubber hits the road, most people don't actually sympathise with, or at least don't respect, people claiming special victimhood. Or "rights." Even fewer trust or respect the kind of people who claim and fetishize empathy and identification with all kinds of rare and exotic victims, minorities, disabilities, deviancies, animals, etc. Think of Mrs. Jellyby. (If you can't, better read Bleak House.) This has been a problem ever since the days of the abolitionists. I used to lament that people were just mean and callous. But actually it makes more sense than that. People feel that they have real lives and real work to do and don't have the capacity for full-time compassion, and to be honest, they might add, they don't really have enough information or leisure to decide whether a minority group that they don't interact with often, or one they never heard of in some distant land, is really as deserving and equal and wonderful as the Mrs. Jellybys assure us. And when someone is claiming "rights", many take it as a sign of weakness and weirdness. I've seen all this up close, from studying 19th-Century abolitionists, Northern Democrats and Irish immigrants, to volunteering with the ACLU in the 80s, to decades of working with fathers and mothers threatened with losing child custody -- the most doomed and lost of them can't stop talking about their "rights."

So when the question is an examination of whether this small group with odd coloring, beliefs, preferences, etc. is deserving of some special kind of "rights", or whether "we" should choose to be "permissive" or "tolerant" and "give" them rights, then they're probably going to lose, or gain only grudging and unpopular "tolerance" without respect or legitimacy.

But that is completely turned around when the question is instead posed in terms of rules governing people in general: Things people "shalt not" do to other people. Things the government simply isn't allowed to do. Compare these different ways of describing the same US Supreme Court cases:

• "Does some troublesome Jewish guy have a Jew-hat right to wear a funny Jewish hat when Air Force cockpit safety regulations prohibit hats generally?"
• "Does an Indian have a right to take illegal hallucinogenic mushrooms in a so-called religious ritual that you've never heard of?"
• "Can the government make laws interfering with people's real, longstanding religious traditions that don't harm anyone?"
• "Is a corporation a person with  'free speech' rights to intervene in a presidential election?"
• "Is the government allowed to regulate speech about presidential elections?"

The other great problem with victimhood language is that it puts what trial lawyers call "the focus of judgment", i.e. the microscope, on the vic, not the perp. And when we're under that microscope, most of us don't look very good. Officialdom at all levels, including us good-hearted individuals in the "helping professions", talks about the millions of "battered women", not the millions of "battering men" and "battering women".  Jackson Katz, Ph.D., a filmmaker, cultural theorist, and educator who might be called a "Men's Responsibility Activist", brought that message to the sanctum sanctorum of political correctness, Middlebury College, in a lecture incorporating self-styled "cunning linguist" Julia Penelope's insights into sentence structures about violence. More at:

"The Language of Gender Violence" by Robert Keren in Middlebury Magazine. Via international family law attorney Nancy Zalusky Berg.

 

Good writing makes readers feel smart, bad writing makes them feel stupid.

Make motions more powerful by writing openers that focus on 'deep issues'

By Bryan A. Garner in the ABA Journal

Adds great new phrases to English: "Rhetorical botox", "A stultifying sub-dialect of pseudo-professionalism"

"SPARE ME THE FASHIONESE" by LUKE LEITCH on The Economists's 1843magazine.com

... A stultifying sub-dialect of pseudo-professionalism has also sprouted, in which the acquisition and possession of fashion is made to sound like a full-time job. If you get rid of old clothes to make way for some new ones, you are “editing your wardrobe” (much in the same way, I suppose, as binning furred cheese and liquefying tomatoes is “editing your fridge”). Choose what to wear of an evening and you’re “curating” your outfit. These days, anyone who manages to stumble out of his front door without being entirely naked can claim to be a stylist.