This week's Gabfest was especially good. If you haven't heard of this podcast, and you like insider political bantering, give it a listen.
Here's a copy of the email I sent to them afterwards. (Warning: minor spoilers. If you're planning on listening, you may want to skip this for the moment.)
Hi, all,
David made an argument for the US supporting strongmen-type leaders in other countries, in the interest of favoring order over freedom, and said that not only was this something that "worked" from the perspective of US self-interest, but was also better for the people in those countries.
While I take his point about there being something to be said for an orderly, if repressive, society when looked at in terms of the amount of hassle an ordinary person would have to deal with day-to-day, I was glad that Emily and Hanna pushed back against this. One point that they did not make, which I was shouting (virtually) at my speakers was this: it is empirically true that favoring strongmen over encouraging democracy and other reforms has directly caused any number of the problems we're dealing with today. I don't claim democracy is a panacea, but there's no getting around the reality that decades of suppression have aggravated a number of regions and peoples, and further, that the US has been easy to portray as the enemy by discontented groups because of its historical role in these matters.
My two cents. In other bloviating ...
I liked the spousal bickering. I thought David's lead-in the Cocktail Chatter was hilariously catty -- "a great piece on XX Factor that neither of you wrote." I'd give that a zing.
Hanna's Cocktail Chatter about the schism in the Episcopal/Anglican Church was a good topic. I did happen to know about this from reading the NY Times article last night, so it didn't seem so insider-y to me. However, good comeback by her to the torment that Emily and David were laying on her -- "Twilight was an excellent movie."
Finally, it was a major relief to hear Emily and not to have to suffer through Ann Althouse in the same conversation. I hope to see you on Bloggingheads.tv more often, Emily, but not at that price. I encourage you to agitate for different partners.
Good show, all around. Thanks.
No, I have no idea why I felt compelled to share that with the world, either. But there it is. Maybe it will be of interest to the group that is the intersection of the set of people who read this blog and the set of people who listen to the Gabfest. Legions!
On an unrelated note, the Firefox spell-checker does not like afterwards. It prefers afterward. I am aware that I am in the habit of using the former, since I keep getting this red underline treatment. I haven't overridden the spell-checker's behavior by adding afterwards to the personal dictionary for some reason, being unsure whether I'm wrong about this.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says, "Both variants are Standard in American English." Paul Brians implicitly seconds this, I guess, since he does not flag this as an error. Garbl, however, does not approve of the trailing S.
Your thoughts?
And when we settle this, we can move on to the considerably thornier toward/towards dilemma. And you thought the Episcopal Church schism was news.
9 comments:
As Simon Winchester pointed out in his book about the OED, in Shakespeare's time there were no dictionaries nor agreed upon spellings. Every author just spelt things as he thought they should be spelled or used what pleased his idea of the spoken word.
It's only when they started writing dictionaries that spellings became "correct" and uniform and the authors of each dictionary could establish their own lexicon.
I can cite no authority, but to my West Coast ear (originating in mid-America as a youth) putting the "s" on words makes them sound like southern dialect versions.
Try saying them with an Oklahoma accent and making the "s" very sibilant. See if they don't sound more like "Okie" accents with the sibilant "s". "Afterward" and "toward" sound more literate and "northern" to my ear.
Then again, I had to learn to say THE-ater rather than the-ATE-her, and Wah-shington rather than Wore- shington when I came to the West.
Here's a vote toward leaving the "s" off. Now, "Here's a vote towards leaving the "s" off" doesn't sound as literate or necessary -- does it?
JMHO
Brendan,
Check out midweek politics with David Pakman.
Also a long but a good radio show is beyond the beltway.
Rishi
Hey, Northampton! My old stomping grounds.
Thanks for the tip, Rishi. I'll give it a try sometime soon. Please ping me if you don't hear anything about it from me.
Here's a link for anyone else who wants to check it out: Midweek Politics Radio with David Pakman
That's an interesting theory about the trailing Ss, TC, but it doesn't do much to explain why I picked up the habit. I've lived in the Northeast and in Los Angeles my whole life.
That "Worshington" thing is something I don't remember noticing until well into adulthood.
I never had problems pronouncing theater correctly, but I have always had to fight the nearly automatic instinct to type it as theatre.
I agree that the idea of there being any notion of standardized spelling at all is relatively recent. However, given recent Bush machinations, I am now starting to suspect that this story is revisionist history designed to cover up the fact that Shakespeare was just a lousy speller.
You can't be a lousy speller if there is no officially correct spelling. Maybe Shakespeare was just a creative speller.
As far as theater and theatre, isn't it the case that you pick up the spelling as what you see. If you read a lot of British English books you see "grey" rather than "gray" and then there is "envelope" and "envelop" and "centre" and "center."
Maybe the Brits are closer to the Norman Invasion than we are and some of those words came into English from the French? I don't know it's just a speculation. When you see it in print both ways your mind picks up one or the other as correct. If you've seen both toward and towards in print you can choose one or the other to be correct in your own mind. Where you grew up wouldn't bear on that, and then you tend to pronounce it the way you spell it. I just think to me it sounds regional to have the final "s."
"Theater" with the accent on the second syllable is strictly mid-western. Chicago, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Missouri, Oklahoma and places such as those. Being from Illinois, see if Barack doesn't tend to say theater with the accent on the second syllable or Wore-shington. On the East Coast or in L.A. you wouldn't hear theater with the accent on the second syllable, but you might see theatre in print, and I think you see afterward and afterwards or toward and towards everywhere. It's sort of like ee-conomics and ek-onomics. You hear it both ways everywhere
so it really isn't regional just an alternate pronounciation. The OAD says it's ee-ko-NOM-iks, but i-KON-o-mist. Now how you spozed to remember that? It's also
ee-koh-sis-tem and not i-koh-sis-tem according to the Oxford American Dictionary.
Interesting that "spozed" didn't get a red underline from Word or whatever program checks spelling in your blog. You mean it's an accepted spelling? Or maybe there is such a verb as "spoze?" As in "I got spozed by the IRS."
You can't be a lousy speller if there is no officially correct spelling.
I see you've bought into the revisionist history. ;^)
You're right about picking up spellings from reading. I had the same problem with grey/gray. I once worked on a software package that produced grayscale images from a set of data, and the original author had, throughout the code all the way up to the name of the main program, used the E version. I still type it that way, a lot.
Which reminds me. Just so you know, the spell-checker that works when you're typing in a textbox in Firefox, like one of these comment boxes, is built into Firefox. It has nothing to do with Word or any other program. You might have yours disabled -- spozed gives me a red underline.
If you want spell-checking turned on in Firefox (something I often wish was mandatory for other people!), do Tools→Options, click the Advanced icon, click the General tab, and check the box marked "Check my spelling as I type." When you get a red underline, you can right-click that word. This will cause a context menu to pop up, offering suggested corrections, allowing you to enter the word into a personal dictionary, etc.
So, if you have spell-checking turned on, and "spozed" didn't get underlined, it's possible you (inadvertently) added it to your personal dictionary at some time in the past. If this seems to be the case, and you want it out of there, let me know, and I'll figure out how to do that. (I've done it before, but it's not something done through menus, so I'd have to figure it out again. It's basically finding a file and editing it.)
Now that you mention it, I realize I usually pronounce economics with a long E, especially when saying something like "economics professor," but I pronounce economic, especially as a synonym for thrifty, with a short E.
Thee-A-ter is a pronunciation I've always associated with pretentiousness. I didn't realize it was a common regionalism. Learn something new every day.
We've probably driven everyone but us off this thread by now with this spelling debate, but I'll desist after this final comment. In Shakespeare's time there was no agreed upon spelling, but by George the Second's time we've had agreed upon spellings for the last few centuries so I wouldn't give him any credit for creativity (or anything else for that matter.)
My spell check is turned on and I do get words underlined but spozed didn't get the treatment the first time although it did this time. I don't have a personal dictionary because I kind of like the feeling of power it gives me to ignore the quibbling from the spell checker, and the alternatives it supplies usually just indicate that it hasn't understood the sense of what I'm writing.
In German a single vowel followed by a single consonant is pronounced long rather than short, so I've applied that rule in English thinking that since English is fundamentally a descendant of primitive German, most of the time it would work. Indeed, most of the time, it does. Following the Germanic rule, economics would always have the long e sound and it wouldn't change from economics to economist. A rule is a rule and you vill do ezaktly as you are tolt or you vill zuffer zee konzekvenzes! But then we have Latin words we got from the Roman conquest of England and French words that came into the language from the Norman invasion. What kind of a rule explains the pronunciation of "lieutenant?" If you adopt a word from another language I guess you have to adopt the rule for pronouncing it along with it. The Brits very sensibly Saxonized the pronunciation to"leftenant" which at least has a jolly good Saxon ring to it.
Sorry for the long thread. I'm one of those people who can amuse himself for hours with just a dictionary. I look up one word and then read all the other words on the page to see if I know them all -- as long as I've gone to the trouble to get that far. That usually leads to more words.
BTW if you haven't read "The Madman and the Professor" it's a good read. The story of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. James Murray was an amazing guy. Could recite the alphabet at age 18 months and by age 7 was learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Chinese by comparing bibles in those languages. As an adult he could speak something like 14 languages and until his death personally wrote each of the definitions in the OED after years of research by a worldwide cadre of scholars for each word. Some say the OED was the greatest feat of scholarship of all time. They traced the history of every word in the English language from the first time it was used through every meaning change over the centuries down to the present. The 6 inch thick OED you see at the library is a small part of the whole dictionary which has separate volumes for scientific words and many other sub-categories. Look up any word in the OED and then look up the same word in any other dictionary. You will seldom find a definition that improves on the OED definition.
Remember: i before e except after C or when sounding as A as in neighbor and heinous (which you hear mispronounced fairly often." But then there is "weird" to worry about. In German this would not be permitted. You probably know the old saw about "the exception proves the rule". This, of course, means that the exception requires that the rule be proven rather than the often misunderstood idea that every valid rule has an exception, and that by citing an exception you have proven the rule somehow.
Another old saw you see misunderstood all the time is that "all men are created equal."
I've heard people try to explain that if you lack brains then you have some other skill like athletic ability to make up for it and that's what makes everybody equal. I know I don't have to tell you that it means that all men are created with equal rights, and not that everybody is equal in some other way, but it's amazing how often that is not understood. Sorry, to go on, but it's one of my pet peeves.
First, never apologize for length. I am always delighted to read your thoughts. I'll never say TLDR to you. If it puts others off, well, as Markos says, it's a big Internet.
Second, I hope you know I was kidding, and not really debating you about spelling not being standard until fairly recently.
My spell check is turned on and I do get words underlined but spozed didn't get the treatment the first time although it did this time.
Huh. I do know that a misspelled word won't get underlined until the cursor is away from the word. This is a good thing; otherwise, virtually every word would be underlined, at least momentarily, as you typed. Sometimes the spell-checker does seem to get confused if you've done a quick series of movements or deletions, though.
In German a single vowel followed by a single consonant is pronounced long rather than short …
The more I think about it, the more I think I don't have even the small amount of consistency that I claimed earlier when it comes to words beginning e-c-o-n-o-m. I think I probably have an internal rule set, but it's more complicated than I first said. Just sub-vocalizing what you wrote, I could hear the different pronunciations ping-ponging.
What kind of a rule explains the pronunciation of "lieutenant?"
That one always seemed straightforward enough to me, probably because I took a few years of French in high school. I like the way "leftenant" sounds, although I've long wondered if this was nothing more than petulance; i.e., vestigial hostility by the Brits towards France. I also wonder if instead of saying "in lieu of," they say "in left of." And what about their slang term for bathroom? Is the loo part of this?
BTW if you haven't read "The Madman and the Professor" it's a good read.
I haven't read the book, but I read either an excerpt of it, or a longish article by the same author. Yes, a fascinating story, isn't it? I have an OED -- the two-volume compact edition, which I think means it's condensed only in size of type, but if you say there are separate volumes for scientific terms and the like, I'd believe that. Anyway, it's (they are, actually) one of my treasured books, even if opening it reminds me of my decline into geezerhood -- I can't read the definitions without the magnifying glass anymore. :(
"the exception proves the rule"
I share your pet peeve on this one. Seemed to be in vogue a few years ago, and I was thankful for the eventual backlash. Probably became a buzz phrase out of the Bush Administration. Perhaps the falling out of favor of this phrase tracked the falling out of favor of the Bushies. It's nice to think so, anyway. (And related, see this column for a laugh.)
"all men are created equal"
This one doesn't bother me as much. I take your point about its overuse and misuse, but on the other hand, I do think there is something to be said for the reminder that all people have worth. That is, I agree that the original intent of the phrase was meant to specify rights, not abilities, and I agree that some people get carried away with insisting that everyone has compensating skills to make up for deficiencies, but even so, I like that attitude up to a point. Wisdom from the mouths of babes, and so forth: it's good not to dismiss someone out of hand.
I never had a problem spelling or pronouncing lieutenant either, but I think that it's just that we've seen it often enough that our visual memory has recorded it. What I was getting at was a rule that would explain the French pronunciation for words you might not be familiar with. A rule such as "when there are three vowels in a row the first two are silent and the third is pronounced long." Problem is that the rule doesn't work for other French words such as "bureau" or "bureaucrat". There the rule would be "when there are three vowels in a row, they are all silent and are pronounced like a long vowel that isn't in the series." Not a very helpful rule. I think for French based words that have come into English we just have to memorize them. No problem for those of us with good visual memory, but for poor spellers who are taught to sound them out phonetically to spell them, they run into a problem trying to spell lieutenant by sounding it out.
My black students used to tell me that a dictionary was useless because to find a word you had to know how to spell it and if you knew how to spell it you wouldn't be looking up the spelling. There's a certain grim logic there and the explanation that you had to get close and get in the right area and then find it by scanning was not very convincing. Words like pneumonia they could never find even after scanning all the "N" words. Well, you see students, you have to be familiar with other words that sound like "n" put start with "p" so you can guess that this is a possibility. But then if you had that much feel for the language you wouldn't be in a middle school remedial reading class.
I agree that there is a certain value in thinking that all people have worth. Just what is it that George W has that compensates for the fact that he can't speak English and seems not very bright? Maybe he can hold his liquor? Oops, not a good example.
Britain is a country of left- handers, I think. If you've been there you know that not only do they drive on the left side of the street, but they also walk up the left side of the stairs and down on the right. The hot water tap on the sink is on the right and the cold is on the left. Many other examples that I can't think of right now.
I knew you were kidding and not challenging about spelling. This is all much ado about nothing and just for fun anyway.
Here's one I puzzle over:
"Lay on, MacDuff and damned be he who first cries hold enough."
Shakespeare thought it should be:
"Lay on, MacDuff and damned be him who first cries hold enough."
"he be damned" sounds like it should be a sort of predicate adjective with "damned" modifying "he". "him be damned" doesn't sound right. I guess S thought of it as a sort of direct object of "damned", with "damned" being the verb rather than "be." "Be damned" is kind of a funny English construction anyway. "The government be damned". Isn't "government" the subject and thus in the nominative case? If "government" isn't the subject then what is the understood subject that "government" is the object of? Doesn't that same logic then apply to "damned be he who first cries hold enough?"
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