Just a word in passing: this phase in the long history of my blog has now run for two full years. a sibilant intake of breath first emerged on this day, back in 2005. Since then, I have started and finished an M.Phil at Oxford and moved into a relevant and interesting job. I wonder where I will find myself two years hence.
Category: Writing
Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion
Tricky bits of language
Living in Ottawa frequently involves encountering people speaking French. While I have been reasonably fluent at times, most of my felicity has been sapped by lack of use. There are many areas of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that make me feel uncertain and amateur.
In English, there are relatively few such areas. Only two really stand out as perpetually confusing for me:
- I can never remember the proper use the subjunctive. I have never understood it, correctly structured phrases employing it still sound incorrect, and the Wikipedia entry is bewildering. As such, I avoid using the subjunctive altogether. I am in good company, at least. Somerset Maugham is reputed to have said: “The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.”
- The other is the interaction of apostrophes and the letter ‘s’ in situations where words end in ‘s’ naturally. It gets no more confusing than when you have a word that always ends in ‘s,’ is being made plural, and is a possessive. For instance: “The different species’ characteristics can be easily distinguished.” I always feel inclined to say (and write) spee-sea-ze-ze-ze.
Without a doubt, I have looked up the proper usage of each of these dozens of times. The explanation is just very reluctant to stay in my brain. Not even reading Lynn Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves has provided any lasting understanding.
Transitioning from transition
After a month on the job, this no longer feels like a “weblog in transition.” As such, I need to come up with a new secondary title. Given how it is the first piece of information most people absorb about the site – after a general appreciation for the layout and style – it is important to tune correctly. Given the diverse areas of interest explored here, I am not sure what would be most suitable. What I do know is that I don’t want it to mention my area of employment, because I do not to be an important feature of what happens here.
Do people have any suggestions? The cleverer the better. Work is also being done on a new banner.
Cognitive dissonance
One of the odd things about reading The Economist recently is seeing the extent to which their commitment to reason and the impartial consideration of scientific facts is clashing with their long-held views about economic growth. So far, their considerations of how ecological issues – especially climate change – impact their core philosophy has been fleeting and confined to the margins. This article on air travel is a good example.
Imagine, however, that they played some of the ideas through. What would their next Survey on Business look like if they really accepted that mass air travel is climatologically and morally unacceptable?
Ottawa blogs
Within a few months of arriving in Oxford, I had sorted out which blogs were worth reading. So far, I have not stumbled across any good Ottawa blogs. Does anybody know of any? Environment blogs, photo blogs, food blogs, travel blogs – all of these are potentially interesting. Personal blogs are better than pundit blogs. High quality writing is the key factor, along with some local information.
The Pardoner’s Tale, as rap
Baba Brinkman has recast the Pardoner’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a rap song, illustrated by Erik Brinkman. It actually works very well.
You can read the original in modern or Middle English.
Uniqueness is binary
Reading through various climate change reports, I am reminded of a linguistic error that has long annoyed me. Specifically, it is the use of moderating adjectives before the word ‘unique.’ Uniqueness is fundamentally a binary distinction; the Hope Diamond and Mount Everest are unique because they are singular and irreplaceable things. It is logically nonsensical for something to be ‘fairly’ unique, and it is redundant to call something ‘completely’ unique. Likewise, it is impossible to be ‘quite uniquely situated.’
From a slightly broader perspective, it is worth noting how the prevalence of adjectives diminishes both the variety and power of nouns in language. This is particularly true for expressions of degree like ‘very’ and ‘extremely.’ I try to avoid them, though it cannot always be managed.
Proofread
This afternoon, my mother kindly passed along a list of 28 minor spelling and grammatical errors in my thesis. Curiously, there seems to be an direct correlation between the number of people who read a particular chapter and the number of errors. The same goes for the length of time that passed between writing and submission. 25 of the 28 errors are in the three chapters for which Dr. Hurrell gave me comprehensive feedback.
- Chapter 1: 8 errors
- Chapter 2: 9 errors
- Chapter 3: 8 errors
- Chapter 4: 1 error
- Chapter 5: 2 errors
Chapter two was the single most edited of the lot, with 25 major revisions prior to the one submitted. This seems to confirm the Law of Editing: “For each correction or clarification made, an equal and opposite error will be inadvertently introduced.”
Since the thesis is 30,000 words long, the version that will reside in the Bodleian has about one error per thousand words. The PDF that I will put online once the thesis has been graded will be better, and probably more widely consulted. For those with access to the appropriate restricted pages on the wiki, the corrected version has been uploaded.
Neologism
I learned a new word just now: ‘backronym.’ This refers to a situation where you take an existing acronym and create a new description based upon it. The excellent web comic PhD could be considered an example.
Somehow, this all arose from re-watching Oh Brother, Where Art Thou: definitely one of the better films of the last decade.
Document metadata
It remains somewhat amazing to me that governments and major international institutions so frequently forget what it means to distribute documents in Word format. In particular, people are surprisingly ignorant of how Word tracks changes: making documents into a palimpsest of revisions, not all of which you want the outside world to see. You don’t want the comment about how pointless one of the ‘key items’ in your ‘corporate vision’ is making it into the file that gets passed to the New York Times. Even the early copy of the Summary for Policymakers of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC that I have includes a few notes about edits that still need to be done.
Hopefully, closed standards like Word documents will fall by the wayside during the next decade or so. It is insane to be distributing so much information in a proprietary format for no good reason (just one more manifestation of monopolistic dominance). Hopefully, whichever open document format eventually comes to be standard will have better means for assessing and controlling what information you are inadvertantly embedding in your press releases, reports, spreadsheets, etc. Until then, lax security is likely to keep offering some interesting glances into the drafting processes of such publicized documents.
PS. One other thing to remember is that the standard jpg images produced by Adobe Photoshop include thumbnail files that are not edited when you change the image. As such, a face blurred out of the large version may still be recognizable in the embedded thumbnail version. The same goes for areas that may have been cropped from the image entirely. I am sure Cat Schwartz isn’t the only person who has suffered public embarassment because of this. No doubt, many other pieces of software include such counter intuitive and potentially problematic behaviours.