I've been spending too much time...

In the northern Corn Belt.  I'm starting to talk like them.

Take the test yourself.

I stand corrected...

Yeah - he's talking to me.

Another thing...

I'm doing wrong: my titles.

Two pieces of advice follow from these observations. First, find the simplest title not yet taken for your papers. One word titles are the best. Second, before you get started on a paper, think about the title. If you can’t come up with a short title for it then its probably not worth writing.


The absolute worst thing you can do with your title is to insert a colon into it. (quiet down beavis!) As in, Torture: A Model of Dynamic Commitment Problems. Or Kludged: Asymptotically Inefficient Evolution. In the first case you have just ruined a seminal-signaling one-word title by adding spurious specificity. In the second, you just took an intriguing one-world title and turned it into a yawner.


The second worst kind of title is the question mark title. ”Is the Folk Theorem Robust?” This says to the reader: ”You picked this up because you want to know if the folk theorem is robust. Well, if I knew the answer to that I would have told you right away in the title. But look, all I could do is repeat the question, so you can safely assume that you won’t find the answer in this paper.” [More]

Oh, and I'm a habitual two-spacer, too.

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.  [More of magnificent rant]

In following this tempest in a typewriter, I also found out I'm dashing in an un-American fashion.

I couldn’t agree more – though I’d be even more impressed if he allowed his long dashes a little breathing space on either side. But then Americans never do. And, come to think of it, Americans are far more likely to double-space than Britons (unless they’re British concert pianists who lived for 20 years in New York, where double-spacing is endemic). [More]

In fact - if you're still with me - it's amazing you can read this post at all.

Words of the Day...

Words we need but didn't have before now (my favorites):

BELL’S LAW OF TELEPHONY No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size. 

DENARRATION The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story.  

INTRAVINCULAR FAMILIAL SILENCE We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid. 

(More)

Why I'm behind in my writing...

I've been studying the Masters.  This years winners in the Worst Sentence Competition (aka. 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Award).

Elaine was a big woman, and in her tiny Smart car, stakeouts were always hard for her, especially in the August sun where the humidity made her massive thighs, under her lightweight cotton dress, stick together like two walruses in heat.  

She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad checks, but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so.

(Note: I actually liked the next one.)

As Jeffrey Hicks, the event safety coordinator for the Renaissance Festival finished posting the revised standards for weaponry, he thought of the day an unleashed dog wandered onto the jousting field, causing the rider from Indianapolis to stop short, impaling himself on the butt of his spear, and the following day’s newspaper headline which read: “Stray Injures Indy Knight, Hicks Changing Lances.” 

[More for English teachers and users everywhere].

Maybe next year, I can break into the winner category like a rasp bar from a much-abused 7700 combine cylinder escaping to freedom through the grain tank floor.

The urge to write is like a...

From high school essays, the best  most unforgettable analogies penned by beginning writers:

(My favorites)

•  John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
•  She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

[More]

[via sullivan]

A little place in  history...

I have received e-mails and comments in ALL CAPS.  After long enough, we who read mostly electronically can hear shouting in our head when reading such documents.

Therefore, I pause today to honor the guy who thought up small letters.

Lower case (also lower-case or lowercase), minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case.
Originally alphabets were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly with a pen, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like uncials. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines ^[1].
These in turn formed the foundations for the Carolingian minuscule script, developed by Alcuin for use in the court of Charlemagne, which quickly spread across Europe. Here for the first time it became common to mix both upper and lower case letters in a single text.
The term "lower case" comes from manual typesetting. Since minuscules were more frequent in text than majuscules, typesetters placed them in the lower and nearer type case, while the case with the majuscules (the "upper case") was above and behind, a longer reach. [More]

I love the explanation of how the term "lower case" originated.  Another dazzling conversational opener.

More pie?

I seem to be on a pie chart theme lately.  This one I found interesting.

Where our words come from.

 

The French, of course derives from the Norman influence in England.  The Germanic from frisky Viking tourists during the Middle Ages, and the Latin from Roman invaders and the Church.

[Unhelpful link]

And while we're in England...

I think we can find a heads-up for a buzz-phrase that will be overused in speeches here as well.  I have noted it a few times, but we in the Pedant Police can't issue enough alarms.

For the last few months I've been on a mission to rid the world of the phrase "going forward". But now I see that the way forward is to admit defeat. This most horrid phrase is with us on a go-forward basis, like it or not.

I reached this sad conclusion early one morning a couple of weeks ago when listening to Farming Today. A man from the National Farmers' Union was talking about matters down on the farm and he uttered three "going forwards" in 28 seconds.

The previous radio record, by my reckoning, was held by Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor. He managed three going forwards in four minutes on the Today programme, but then maybe that wasn't such a huge achievement when you think that he spends his life rubbing shoulders with business people. And they say going forward every time they want to make any comment about the future, which is rather often. But for the farmer, who spends his life rubbing shoulders with cows, to say it so often represented a linguistic landmark. If the farms of England are now going forward, then there is no turning back for any of us.  [More from an upset language warchguard]

Ya notice how the last  straw was a farmer using the despised phrase. Apparently we are still the lowest common denominators for communications skills.