Lord of the accent

I’m reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, linguist at MIT, and a damn good writer. He talks about how the English language has changed on both sides of the Atlantic, and how some aspects of American English resemble English spoken in the British Isles at the time of American colonization (Chapter 8). So I wonder what Shakespeare’s accent was like. And why do the characters in the Lord of the Rings movies have British accents? Sure, the human realm resembles current notions of English Feudalism (without the tiny detail of life’s being nasty, brutish, and short), but what kind of accents did jousting knights-in-armor have anyway? Surely I can find this information. To Google, away!! OK, maybe not right away.

New York Times apostrophe policy

According to the New York Times Style Guide, the times chooses to use an apostrophe when making the plural of an acronym (see my Nov 30 entry) because not doing to would make their all-capital letter headlines confusing. So to avoid this, which rarely occurs compared to how often it does in the text of their stories, they choose to use the apostrophe (DVD’s, 1960′s, CEO’s) when no possessive exists. Why not just place a lower-case s in the headline? Instead, the NYT editors are probably responsible for the proliferation of misplaced apostrophes in written American English.

Apostrophes and plurals

It’s (=It is) about time I address a very serious issue: The use of the apostrophe in making a plural. The New York Times does this with acronyms and years, e.g., “DVD’s” and “1980′s,” instead of what I consider correct, “DVDs” and “1980s.” (I suppose the punctuation does go before the closing quotation mark, and parenthesis, for that matter.) Chicago Manual of Style agrees with me on this, as does the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd Ed. (entry on “M.P.”, plural is “M.P.s”.) OK…I agree with them. As discussed in a Mediantics article, the apostrophe is tricky.

zeugma ZOOG-muh noun, to vote is to pray (& to prey?)

Word of the week: zeugma ZOOG-muh noun. Date: 1523: the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one (as in “opened the door and her heart to the homeless boy”).
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Pretty neat. I also like suffrage. From m-w.com’s word of the day, August 26, 2003:

Why would a 17th-century writer warn people that a chapel was only for “private or secret suffrages”? Because since the 14th century, “suffrage” has been used to mean “prayer” (especially a prayer requesting divine help or intercession). So how did “suffrage” come to mean “a vote” or “the right to vote”? To answer that, we must look to the word’s Latin ancestor, “suffragium,” which can be translated as “vote,” “support,” or “prayer.” That term produced descendants in a number of languages, and English picked up its senses of “suffrage” from two different places. We took the “prayer” sense from a Middle French “suffragium” offspring that emphasized the word’s spiritual aspects, and we elected to adopt the “voting” senses directly from the original Latin.