Where’s the the? And punctuation for the dead.

Here’s a question for someone like Stephen Pinker: Why do we drop determiners on some acronyms? For example, when speaking of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, I wrote “the” before the name of the organization. However, if I called it “OSHA”, then I would not say or write “the OSHA.” That just sounds odd. But I would keep the “the” with or organizations: “Like the FBI and the CIA
And the BBC”. Dig it? Is it the vowel? No, I think not. It’s that people don’t say the letters O-S-H-A, they say the “word”, as it were, osha. Thay must be it.

On a related note, I wanted to check the proper use of nested quotation marks, so I checked the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style. This question is amusing:

Q. I am currently editing a lengthy manuscript made up almost entirely of quotations made by a dead person to a living person. The living person is what is known as a �channeler.� Since the living person is quoting what the dead person tells her, how do I handle the quotes? The dead person is of such stature that giving the quotes to the living person does not seem right. Any help you can give me is much appreciated.A. If you want to represent the dead person as truly speaking through the channeler, then by all means quote the dead person as if he or she is physically speaking, even if it is the living person�s voice box that is being used for turning spirit or thought into physical vibrations in the air. If you do this well, it will be clear enough what is going on (though you may want to outline your methods in an introductory paragraph). I think that it would be more awkward to keep having to resort to something like �the channeler, speaking the voice of the dead person, then said. . . .�

You might consider some alternative approaches. The rather convoluted narrative voices in Faulkner�s Absalom, Absalom! were differentiated in a variety of ways, most of them verbal, but some of them typographical. For example, you might decide to use unquoted italic type for everything that the dead person says through the channeler�or for everything that the dead person does not say. Whatever approach you use, try to maximize the transparency with which different voices can be distinguished. (And for more ideas, see CMS 15, paragraphs 11.43�48, which include discussions of unspoken and indirect discourse.)

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Flora

I was at a plant nursery the other day and I was pleasantly surprised to find some very nice looking ones. The employee (or owner, perhaps), Sean, told me about a video series he saw, The Private Life of Plants. One plant, I can’t recall the name, was a type of vine that grew on top of trees, created a ball-like bundle of seeds that eventually fell off the tree and broke upon hitting the ground. Seeds had a very short time, ~14 hours, to take root and find a tree to grow on. Otherwise, they would die. Apparently the video showed this process in a time-elapsed manner. Sean also told me about the corpse plant, which smells like, well, a corpse, attracts insects.

On a completely inane note, I bought a cleaning product that claims to have a “clean scent.” What does that mean? Usually clean denotes a lack of an scent. Surely a clean carpet smells, well, like tiny carpet molecules, unless it was recently “cleaned,” so it smells like, uh, the cleaning agent? So the “clean smell” is the smell of whatever soap was used to clean. Clearly there’s a redundancy here.

Linked from Geekpress.com, penny sculptures. People do some strange things.

One for the Word Court

Once again I Googled something completely innocent, and got back “adult” sites: “latex patent.” See, Latex is a typesetting system that I use to write my papers, and I wanted to site a patent as a reference. There must be a word for this occurance, so perhaps I should write to Barbara Wallraff at the Atlantic Monthly’s Word Court.

In other news, apparently Prozac has been found in tap water in England. And in an unconnected finding, more Brits think about tea when waking up than they do sex. Hmm.

“Please RSVP”

Even though “Please RSVP” literally means “Please Respond Please”, RSVP seems to have taken on a meaning of its own. “Please respond” sounds odd, maybe a bit curt. So “RSVP” must now refer to a response to a party invitation.

I’ve been reading a great book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. With that in mind, I was at Nordstrom the other day. Upon leaving I was aware of the placement of the merchandise and signs, and how deliberate it was. What song came on? “Come and Get It”, written by Paul McCartney and performed by Bad Finger:

If you want it, here it is, come and get it,
but you better hurry ‘cos it’s going fast.
If you want it here it is, come and get it, make your mind up fast.
If you want it anytime I can give it, but you’d better hurry ‘cos it may not last.
Did I hear you say that there must be a catch
will you walk away from a fool and his money.

Needless to say, I chose not to buy anything.

“thumbs up emoticon”

I just Googled the above. Woah. I was not prepared for the first link that came up. Still, it’s not as good as Googling “amature,” or if you can hangle it, “amatur”. Yikes! For the contrast, Google “amateur.” I’m staying away from Google images on this one.

etymology of expunge

Yep, that’s the Mirriam-Webster Word of the Day. Before I, uh, delete the message from my in-box, I should record the derivation, as it’s pretty neat:

In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a series of dots was used to mark mistakes or to label material that should be deleted from a text, and those deletion dots can help you remember the history of “expunge.” They were known as “puncta delentia.” The “puncta” part of the name derives from the Latin verb “pungere,” which can be translated as “to prick or sting” (and you can imagine that a scribe may have felt stung when his mistakes were so punctuated in a manuscript). “Pungere” is also an ancestor of “expunge,” as well as a parent of other dotted, pointed, or stinging terms such as “punctuate,” “compunction,” “poignant,” “puncture,” and “pungent.”

Home runs and the c-word

First of all, I don’t know if this is true. I have not looked at the data. But say it is. It could be that the ballparks are smaller, or that the pitchers are worse, that the hitters are better or stronger. Perhaps the bats are different. Yet, some researchers at the University of Rhode Island looked at the balls. Pretty neat. Surely there’s a more comprehensive article about this. In any case, a home run is among the most boring way to score in all of sports, but TV news loves showing them. Bummer.

A few nights ago I watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David used the “c word.” Yeah, I know, he’s a dumb ass. Still, he had a point that there’s a double standard, there being no equivalent word for male anatomy that is so offensive. I mean, the c-word is the worst, much worse that the f-word. But why? It really packs a punch. And then there’s the whole censorship thing, as if words carry some strange magical power. Anyway, I should look into why the c-word has its status, and for how long it’s been this way … are there equivalents in other languages, or in England, Australia, or other English-speaking countries? Does each language have a word that carries the most taboo? Hmm.

What’s in a name?

This social science research is quite odd.

The Language Instinct, Moneyball, and Janet & Justin

I’ve added two new booknotes files: The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker and Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.

So this Superbowl half-time show hubub is still in the news. The FCC is up in arms, and there are lawsuits. Ideally, how should this work? I am not so sure. Here are my thoughts, that maybe mistaken.

I guess there would be no FCC, and this would be a civil issue. There could be a breech of contract between those responsible for the “exposure” and MTV and/or CBS. So that’s a civil issue, and damages can be assessed. As it is, perhaps CBS has some kind of contract with the (illegitimate) FCC, by which the FCC “allows” them to use “its” airwaves.

Is there also some kind of contract violation between CBS and the viewers? What are analagous cases? If parents take their children to a Chuck-E-Cheese’s, and instead of the mechanical mice on stage, there are mechanical naked people-like figures, then I suppose the parents would have a case against the eating establishment for misrepresentation of a product. Is the Superbowl incident so far off? Perhaps not. I have not read the arguments for the lawsuit, but they might be similar.

What do you say…

to a young man in a grocery store wearing a black t-shirt that says “F**K off and die”? So, what do you wear when you’re in a bad mood? Is this your outfit for picking up women?

In football there’s something called the “prevent defense.” Had I not read The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker, I probably would not have noticed that people place the accent on the first syllable of “prevent”, where as when the word is used as a verb, the second syllable is accented. “Permit” is similar. As a verb, the accent is on the second syllable, but as a noun, the accent is on the first. Hmm. What would Pinker say about this?