Whose Faulty Vision

Revising Quotes

Have you ever tried to transcribe the way people talk exactly? I’m writing down quotes from a focus group I’m watching, and I find myself correcting their grammar as I go along. Fixing the subjunctive, subject-verb agreement, things like that. I’m not even consciously doing it, I just find myself writing down grammatically-correct versions.

Which is fine for what I’m doing, since it’s the gist of the statements that really matters, but I think I’d have a hard time being a court reporter or similar, doing something where you really need to get a word-for-word transcription.

Linguistic Peeve of the Moment

Linguistic peeve of the moment: People in today’s focus groups saying “artesian” when they mean “artisanal.”

Pet Peeve of the Moment

Pet Peeve of the Moment: Olympic commentators saying “degree of difficulties” when they mean “degrees of difficulty.”

Renaming Languages

This came up in a conversation I was having the other day: What if we renamed languages so that they were named by the country that has the most speakers of that language, instead of the country that the language originally came from?

Portuguese (which sparked the conversation in the first place) would clearly have to be renamed “Brazilian”.

Spanish would be called “Mexican”.

English is debatable…depending on which set of statistics I trust, it would either be called “Indian” (see for instance this source) or “American” (see here.)

French would still be called “French”…guess they were less successful in the colonization game.

Vocabulary Rant of the Whenever

If someone’s in danger of running amok, and you want to keep control of them, you rein them in. Like the reins of a horse. You don’t reign them in, and heaven forbid, you never rain them in. “Reign” is only for monarchs.

Sorry, but that’s one I’ve been seeing a lot lately, and it’s getting on my nerves.

Corporatese

Okay, I’m a big fan of the way the English language mutates and evolves. I really am. I even like some of the “corporate” mutations of it–I’ve been known to defend such uses as “impact” as a verb (goes back centuries, even though the haters claim it’s a neologism) and “grow” as a transitive verb (if you’re not offended by “growing tomatoes”, why do you hate “growing your business” so much?). But I’ve recently moved onto a very, very corporate account, and I just have a couple of things to say:

You’re not going to “action” a research finding. You’re going to “act on” it, or possibly “use” it. Those both have the advantages of a) being shorter, and b) not making you sound like a total prat.

And for the love of all that’s holy, never say “we’re dialoguing about” something again. The word is “talking.” Perfectly sensible word.

I just had to get that off my chest.

Dental Crossword

I just want to gloat about a recent crossword puzzle triumph, possibly my greatest yet.

A little background for my readers who aren’t regular crossworders: Your typical daily crossword puzzle includes 3 or 4 long answers that share a common theme, which is usually hinted at in the title of the puzzle. Sometimes instead of a theme, the long answers form a single quotation. In that case, you often have no information about the quotation aside from whatever’s hinted at in the title–the clues will simply say “Quotation, part 1″, “Quotation, part 2″ and so on. You have to work it out from cross words.

So this puzzle was one of those. The clues were just “Quip, part 1″ through “Quip, part 3″. I don’t remember the title exactly, but it had something to do with dentistry. I had managed to work out all of “Quip, part 1″, which was “BE TRUE TO YOUR”. I also got the word “WILL” at the tail end of “Quip, part 2″. I had nothing of part 3 except for the number of letters. And from that, I was able to guess, letter-for-letter, the correct answer, which turned out to be…

do you want to guess it?

Don’t look ahead just yet, then.

It turned out to be…

“BE TRUE TO YOUR TEETH OR THEY WILL BE FALSE TO YOU”

I was pretty pleased that I got that from so little information. Maybe I’ve been doing too many crossword puzzles.