The English languge in crisis: swearing is losing its punch

In “What the -?,” Ben McGrath, a writer for The New Yorker, explores American’s proclivity for cuss words. One of the most interesting points in the article is that by swearing so often, vulgarity’s impact is minimized.

But even some blasphemers have found this seeming erosion of taboo an occasion for alarm. “Bit by bit, these terms are being neutered,” Ed Conway, a London newspaper reporter, said the other day. “Swear words perform a useful function in conversation, to shock or engage. Once we lose that, where are we left?”

A few weeks ago, Conway launched a “Campaign to Devise a New Swear Word for the 21st Century” on Facebook.

It’ll be interesting to see the results.

The national holiday Americans celebrated this past Monday: when the possessive, plural, and plural possessive are all wrong

The difference between punctuating the possessive and the plural possessive can confuse a lot of writers. But in “Too Many Chiefs” in the Feb. 19 & 26, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg explains that it does not matter how one punctuates the federal holiday we celebrated in the United States last Monday.

According to some of the calendars and appointment books books floating around this office, Monday, February 19th, is Presidents’ Day. Others say it’s President’s Day. Still others opt for Presidents Day. Which is it? The bouncing apostrophe bespeaks a certain uncertainty. President’s Day suggests that only one holder of the nation’s supreme magistracy is being commemorated, presumably the first. Presidents’ Day hints at more than one, most likely the Sage of Mount Vernon plus Abraham Lincoln, generally agreed to be the greatest of them all. And Presidents Day, apostropheless, implies a promiscuous celebration of all forty-two: Jefferson but also Pierce, F.D.R. but also Buchanan, Truman but also Harding. To say nothing of the incumbent, of whom, perhaps, the less said the better.

So which is it? Trick question. The answer, strictly speaking, is none of the above. Ever since 1968, when, in one of the last gasps of Great Society reformism, holidays were rejiggered to create more three-day weekends, federal law has decreed the third Monday in February to be Washington’s Birthday. And Presidents’/'s/s Day? According to Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, it was a local department-store promotion that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular ones, even the Father of His Country. Now everybody thinks it’s official, but it’s not.

So when is proper punctuation irrelevant? When the information it is punctuating is wrong.

Language quantifiers gone bad

In the 1980s the curriculum at the Joshua Eaton Elementary School in Reading, MA, included a lesson on the differences between language quantifiers, such as several, many, some, a couple, and a few.

Despite the good intentions of my teacher, I often forget where you draw the line between “some” and “many.” In my writing and that of my clients’ when I am editing, I avoid using such words and instead use the number or a more specific quantifier to avoid ambiguities. After all, not everyone got that lesson at Joshua Eaton and, if they did, they might not have remembered it.

From “What’s the trouble: How doctors think” by Jerome Groopman in the January 29, 2007 New Yorker:

When he [Harrison Alter, an emergency-room physician] had asked whether she [a patient] had taken any medication, including over-the-counter drugs, she had replied, “A few aspirin.” As Alter told me, “I didn’t define with her what ‘a few’ meant.” It turned out to be several dozen.

That ambiguity, in part, led to the doctor misdiagnosing the patient with subclinical pneumonia, when she in fact had aspirin toxicity.

Can electronic style manuals replace the paper format?

While reading last week’s New Yorker, in which two of my favorite writers had articles about two of my least favorite people (Jeffrey Toobin on Arlen Specter and Ken Auletta on Lou Dobbs), I noticed a small advertisement toward the back of the magazine:

The Chicago Manual of Style is now available online.

One of the great benefits of freelancing is that I can work from anywhere. Having to lug around style manuals, however, hinders my mobility. So the ad got me thinking about electronic style manuals: might they make it easier to travel?

Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks about this new product:

• It only is available online. So if you are going to rely on it, you need to have Internet access.
• Annual subscriptions cost $25. As the hardcopy costs $35 (with free shipping) on Amazon.com and the manual is not updated every year, the website is more expensive.
• My copy of Chicago—as I’m sure is the case with many other writers and editors—is dog-eared. I’m not sure how to replicate that timesaver online.

Chicago, however, is available as a CD-ROM. I figured that format might better suit my needs as it’s only a one-time purchase and it doesn’t require Internet access.

Then I read the feedback on Amazon.com: “The software implementation permits users to read only a single numbered paragraph of the book at a time: those who know the print edition will readily understand that having to click one’s mouse repeatedly to move from paragraph 17:148 to 17:149 to 17:150, each occupying just a few lines on separate screens, is an unbelievably cumbersome way to use this essential reference tool.”

So much for not having to cart around the big orange book any more.

Other style manuals have been similarly clumsy in their electronic formats. The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, which I reviewed earlier, comes with a CD-ROM, but it does not work on Macs and most reviewers have deemed the disc useless. And while The Economist’s Style Guide is available online, other than The Economist I don’t know of any publications that use it.

Freelancing, Word styles, Bill Clinton, and Russia: Articles worth reading

Here are some good reads on an assortment of topics:

• Freelancing tips from an illustrator. It’s obvious that Megan Jeffrey has 17 years of experience freelancing; there’s not a single suggestion with which I’d disagree (link via Lifehacker).
• Macworld: Save time with Word’s styles. One of the biggest ways to make publishing a document more efficient is to get everyone in an organization using Word’s styles. It makes an editor’s job easier, as he or she won’t have to waste time reformatting a document and instead can focus on improving the text.
• The New Yorker: “The Wanderer”—The ex-presidency of Bill Clinton. This article in the September 18, 2006 issue isn’t available online, but it’s worth picking up at the newsstand. David Remnick’s profile of President Clinton is fascinating and examines his work fighting HIV/AIDS.
• The Economist: Russian health and demography—A sickness of the soul. It’s hard to think of a country that put the first man in space as having problems usually reserved for developing nations in Africa and Asia, but that’s what former superpower Russia is facing.