Word[s]count — Running the Grammar Gantlet

UPDATE: It seems I spoke too soon. There are indeed a few reporters at the Times who know the difference between “gauntlet” and “gantlet,” but not A.G. Sulzberger (who, one might assume, was a shoo-in for the job). Some copy editor will probably fix the error in an hour or two, but here it is, immortalized via screenshot:

I especially love how gauntlet is paired with triple digits . . . a three-fingered glove, perhaps?

ORIGINAL POST:

Even as modern-day laziness has eroded the difference between “staunch” and “stanch” and otherwise intelligent people thinking “honing in” is the same thing as “homing in,” the line between “gantlet” and “gauntlet” remains firm. You run a gantlet and throw down a gauntlet; the AP Stylebook notes that “a gantlet is a flogging ordeal, literally or figuratively,” while “a gauntlet is a glove.” More specifically, according to good ol’ Dictionary.com, a gauntlet is “a medieval glove, as of mail or plate, worn by a knight in armor to protect the hand.” The act of tossing a glove to the ground was a silent challenge, indicating the knight’s willingness to fight. “Gantlet” is also a historical reference: “a former military punishment in which the offender had to run between two rows of men who struck him with clubs, etc. as he passed.” That’s according to YourDictionary.com, which, annoyingly, adds that it is “now spelled equally gauntlet.”

Actually, I don’t think it’s that bad yet. Just because some people are sloppy does not mean the rest of us need to be. The words aren’t interchangeable, and the situation is not nearly as hopeless as the staunch/stanch elision. For every misuse, there are two or three cases of a writer choosing the correct word. Thus, from a Businessweek article on the Nordstrom department store chain, we have this mess:

They jogged through a gauntlet of more than 300 employees, and clapping along with tall the store managers, salespeople, and security guards were four tall men.

But we also have two articles from the Times that prove there are still reporters who know the difference between “gantlet” and “gauntlet,” and who make a point not to give their readers a bizarre image of a tiny, kitten-like person shoving his way through a giant mitten. From a story about the heightened security in New York City for the 9/11 anniversary, there is this:

The increased police presence forced drivers heading toward Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge to squeeze through a single-lane gantlet as police officers walked between the cars, singling out some for a closer look.

A second article demonstrates that the Times hasn’t just chosen an alternative spelling as a catch-all for both words:

A day after throwing down the gauntlet to Congress, President Obama took his new $447 billion jobs plan on the road on Friday, exhorting college students here to contact their lawmakers in the first salvo of what the White House says will be a sustained campaign by the president to sell his legislation this fall.

As a sort of riposte to those who write the dictionary entries that shrug at the gantlet/gauntlet confusion, I would point you to this bit from a New Yorker article about snooty critic Dwight Macdonald, who waged a relentless battle against middlebrow culture:

When Webster’s Third listed “disinterested” as a synonym for “uninterested,” on the ground that the former word frequently gets used in this way, it was renouncing a dictionary’s basic function. It was refusing to exercise judgment. Macdonald saw the abandonment of such distinctions, between correct and incorrect diction or genuine and sham art, as society’s abandonment of its own history and traditions.

So there.

Yeah, so I was saying . . . .

I recently stumbled across a 2010 piece by Anand Giridharadas, who writes the “Currents” column for the Times, on the rise of a new verbal tic: the word “so.” Appended to the front of nearly any spoken sentence, “so” joins the ranks of “um” and “like” as a meaningless place-filler that public speaking gurus will try valiantly to eliminate. Giridharadas believes that “so” is not as meaningless as it may seem, however. He quotes Michael Lewis, the popular author of Moneyball and The Big Short, as writing in 1999 that “When a computer programmer answers a question, he often begins with the word ‘so.'” With the ascendancy of the technology sector, “so” spread to the general population, creating what Giridharadas characterizes as “a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process, proceeding much in the way of software code — if this, then that.”

Attributing broader cultural trends to a specific cause is always risky, and Giridharadas is on firmer ground when he notes that “so” ties what follows it to what has come before. It forges a connection, a cause-and-effect relationship, between one person’s statement and the other person’s response. Conservations are all too often one-sided: I pretend to listen to what you say, but instead of reflecting on your words, my mind is already formulating a rebuttal, just waiting for the chance to express my own opinion. “So” implies that I have heard what you are saying, that your words have influenced mine, when in reality my point was honed and formulated before our exchange even began. “So” eliminates the awkwardness of the non-sequitur. It is a “signal that one’s coming words are chosen for relevance to the listener.” According to one scholar interviewed by Giridharadas, it demonstrates “that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”

It is not difficult to see the popularity of “so” as an attempt to make up for our increasingly perfunctory communication style. E-mail and text messages don’t allow us to couch our words in body language or facial expressions; all that is left is the word on the page, stripped of any information that might clarify intentions or soften a seemingly caustic remark. “So” seems to be a good-faith offering, an acknowledgment that “I know what you’re saying” or “I follow your reasoning.”

In my own speech, I notice fewer instances of “so” than of that similar transition, “yeah.” Both work as a bridge between your last remark and whatever response has since percolated in my brain. Conversations are not linear exchanges; they rarely amount to the focused give and take of movie dialogue, in which Person A picks up the thread left by Person B and runs with it. Instead, during the silence between our words, my mind operates tangentially, leaping from your lousy day at work to my coworker’s irritating YouTube habit to my own distaste for barking cats and dancing grizzly bears. When I finally get the chance to speak, what I have to say seems be bear little relevance to what came directly before it. The “yeah” habit infects even sui generis comments: it is the preface to everything, even sentences that break the silence. “Yeah, I really need to find some new shoes,” implies an agreement that does not exist, an excuse for broaching an otherwise irrelevant or self-centered topic.

So. Yeah. Neither takes responsibility for the opinions or proclamations to come. Both serve as place holders, updated “likes” or “uhs” for the twenty-first century. The good news may be that, one the trend subsides and technology may make such words more extraneous than ever. After all, when every letter counts, there is not room among 140 characters for filler. Or perhaps we’ll just adapt: Yh, so I’ll c u l8r.

High Hopes

Usually I gripe about everyone else’s spelling and grammar errors (while probably making plenty of my own), so perhaps today’s post will be a breath of fresh air. It does say something, however, about the state of the English language that I am pleasantly surprised when I stumble across the correct usage of a word. “Hopefully” is right up there with “nauseous” when it comes to errors made so frequently that you draw more attention to yourself by using the word properly than by making the mistake. Pronounce the “e” on the end of “forte” and nobody bats an eye; drop the vowel and people look at you as if you’re an idiot, no matter what the dictionary says. I tried for awhile, in high school, to answer “How are you?” with “well” instead of “good,” until I met someone who did the same and realized how pretentious it sounded. So, to the dismay of the persnickety chorus of grammarians that I imagine hovers just above my shoulder, I say “good” — and share responsibility for the sorry state of the language.

As usual, I digress. The point is, I was happy to discover that a writer for the NYT Sunday Magazine is doing her best to prevent English grammar from going to hell in a Twitter- and text message-induced handbasket. This is how Susan Dominus begins an article about a Hollywood screenwriter:

If Aline Brosh McKenna were to write a script about her life, it might open with McKenna, wavy-haired and underdressed, hopefully showing her work to a series of unsmiling magazine editors in New York.

Most people (mis)use the word “hopefully” as a stand-in for “It is to be hoped that.” While there are a few online dictionaries that accept this loosened definition of the word, traditionally “hopefully” is an adverb. It describes how you do something and means “in a hopeful manner.” Dominus uses it correctly; the screenwriter shows her work hopefully, in a hopeful manner. We’ve been so conditioned to accept the second sense of the word that I initially read uncertainty into the sentence. Is McKenna showing her work? Well, “hopefully” she’s showing it, but maybe she was hit by a bus on the way to the meeting.

Given the persistence of my aforementioned chorus of grammarians (is there such a thing as a grammar conscience?), I can’t side with the laissez-faire school of thought that would be OK with the statement “Hopefully, we can go to Disneyland this summer.” Yes, that’s how everyone uses “hopefully,” but the fact that everyone does something wrong does not make it right. We’re not going to Disneyland “in a hopeful manner”; we’re hoping that we’ll be able to go.

I probably have as much chance of winning this battle as I did the one over “well” and “good” or “nauseated” and “nauseous.” I can only hope that, by rambling on about it, I can bore my readers into submission. I suppose you could say I’ll be rambling hopefully.

Word[s]count – 7/31/11

I’m sensing a double negative here . . .

“America can no longer afford neither new Marshall Plans nor new wars.”

(From a NYTimes article, 7/31/11)

Either eliminate the “no” (America can afford neither new Marshall Plans nor new wars”) or replace neither/nor with either/or.

Word[s]count – Hear Ye, Hear Ye

This, from a newspaper that just ran an opinion piece on the proliferation of typos:

I’d wager that it will take less than a “hear” for someone at the Times to catch this. Of course, the day that Virginia Heffernan’s op-ed was published, a Room for Debate essay accused Texas of “steeling” jobs from other states. Nice.

The Geico Gecko Thinks You’re Boring

The “After Deadline” feature at the Times often preaches against using “since” to mean “because.” It may be technically correct, but the word’s double meaning is enough to throw the casual reader, if only for a moment. The sentence “Since Mary went on vacation, Sarah fed the cat” generally suggests that Sarah is pet-sitting for a Hawaii-bound friend, but if the word “since” is interpreted as an indication of time, the reader can be left wondering how long Mary has been on the beach. The reader expects a different conclusion, something to the effect of “Since Mary went on vacation, she’d drank six mai tais.” A second glance clears up any confusion, but a writer shouldn’t force her audience to read a sentence twice.

Similar fuzzy meanings trip up readers all the time. This line, from an advertising column by Stuart Elliot, is a prime “After Deadline” target:

The idea behind multiple, simultaneous campaigns is to break through the proverbial clutter by attracting attention as well as avoiding the risk of wear-out — that is, boring or annoying potential customers who may get tired of seeing and hearing the same pitches again and again.

Just how boring or annoying are those potential customers, anyway? Even Geico isn’t betting that insulting customers will increase market share.

Word[s]count – Digging the Hole Deeper

Can you append a correction to a correction?

From a piece in the Times about the location of the 2018 Olympics:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 5, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the 1972 Winter Olumpics.

I’m waiting to see how long it takes before someone notices this. I give it half an hour.

Word[s]count – 5/29/11

Come on, Washington Post. Granted, this is the paper of the Easter “Peep Show” contest (dioramas of Marshmallow Peeps) and an ever-shrinking news hole. But really, even if the Post can’t afford a copy editor, can’t it at least afford an eighth-grader to proofread? I’m no sports genius, but as far as I know, fantasy “footall” is not an $800 million industry.

Word[s]count – 5/28/11

A headline from the Times:

“Serbian War Crimes Suspect, Ratko Mladic, Is Caught.”

I could be wrong here, but I think the commas around Ratko Mladic’s name are misplaced. As written, the headline implies that Mladic is the only Serbian war crimes suspect in existence. Commas denote a non-essential phrase, one that can be removed without changing the meaning of the sentence. But if Mladic’s name were not included, we would not know which war crimes suspect the Times was referring to.

“Sally thought her husband, Bob, was a nice man” is correct because Sally only has one husband. Bob’s name can be left out without any confusion. “Sally thought her husband Bob was a nice man” implies a polygamous marriage: more than one husband. And so I would suggest that the Times ought to change the headline to “Serbian War Crimes Suspect Ratko Mladic Is Caught.”

Word[s]count – 5/26/11

A Headline from the WSJ:

Identity Theft Involving IRS Mushrooms

Is anyone but me left thinking that the IRS is growing something hallucinogenic on the side? The sub-head — “identity theft involving taxpayers and the IRS is on the rise” — clarifies that “mushrooms” is meant as a verb, but it’s nevertheless a classic example of a had-to-read-it-twice headline.