Monthly Archives: April 2010

April 19, 2010 · 7:46 am

Malaprop Monday

You could have knocked me over with a 10-foot pole.

That’s not only a real life example, but also my reaction every time I hear a really good malapropism or mixed metaphor.  For whatever reason, my life’s path has been graced by many a modern day Mrs. Malaprop who, God love her, utters well-intentioned phrases with a twisted tongue.  

We know Mrs. Malaprop as the 18th century character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, The Rivals, who personified the habit of inadvertently swapping a word for one with a similar sound, rendering the phrase nonsensical or, more often, really funny.

Everyone knows a Mrs. (or Mr.) Malaprop.

I will never forget one walking into my office distraught; she said tests showed she had fiber-optic tumors.   I thought to myself, ooh, that must be painful.

The same woman once told of a colleague who gave a speech at a conference.  I think what she intended to say was that, after the speech, attendees flocked around him.  Instead, she said his speech was so successful the audience flogged him.

A top executive at that same company once reported that her business unit was making money hand over foot.

Recently, as I discussed this topic with my husband, he confessed to his own high profile slip.  In a division memo on Safety at Sea he reported that, during a shipboard mission, a well known oceanographer was hospitalized after having lost the majority of his hand in a winch (a device used to adjust the tension of a rope or cable).  What’s the malapropism, you ask?  My husband reported that Dr. Smith lost his hand in a wench.

Malapropisms are also associated with mixed metaphors and nothing titillates a word nymph more than a good mixed metaphor.

I once heard “Don’t burn your bridges before they’re hatched” while trying desperately not to picture a bridge being hatched.  Talk about painful.

If you have a favorite malapropism or mixed metaphor you’d like to share, I’ll be here, holding my bated breath.

Note:  Also akin to malapropisms are mondegreens, phrases that are often misheard or misunderstood.  But let’s save those for the next time we talk about (you guessed it!) song lyrics.

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April 17, 2010 · 8:16 am

Poetic license suspension

It’s tough duty being a fan of good word usage and classic rock. 

I spent my formative years in front of the radio, appreciating the Great Poets of my time—Elton John, Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt, to name a few.  To this day, the lyrics of the 60s and 70s occupy most of my cranial hard drive, leaving room for little else.

While so many of the classic lyrics are nothing short of pure poetry, there are some that still assault my ears like teeth on a fork.  I am betting you have a few examples of your own.

Now I’m not talking about the obvious no-no’s that give rock music its character.  This may come as a surprise, but I’ve got no beef with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”  “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” happens to be one of my favorite songs ever.  And a phrase from The Vogues’ “Five O’Clock World” — “livin’ on money I ain’t made yet” — has become my personal tagline.

Further, I have less of a problem with liberties taken to force a meter or a rhyme than I do lyrics that their writers assumed correct, or likely deemed smart-sounding.  If only for their place just under the radar, there is a small sampling of well-known lines that mustn’t in good conscience go unchallenged.

So, at the risk of offending fellow fans of some of the greatest artists of my generation, I must take issue with:

“Touch Me” by the Doors – “til the stars fall from the sky for you and I”

“Heard It in a Love Song” by the Marshall Tucker Band – “I was born a wrangler and a rounder and I guess I always will”

“Live and Let Die” by Paul McCartney – “But if this ever-changing world in which we live in…”

I plan to someday write in this forum about lyrics I do find poetic and will ask you to share your favorites, irrespective of the genre.

But for now, what’s your lyrical peeve?

Reminder:  Word Nymph rests on Sunday but welcomes (and reads) your comments.

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April 16, 2010 · 7:54 am

Boogie on down the road

We’ve taken a lot of road trips lately, Rosebud and I.  I’ve never been one to name an inanimate object such as a car or anything else, but iTunes makes you give your iPod a name when you register it.  Anyway, mine’s Rosebud; I’ll just trust everyone knows the origin.

In the car I have been listening to Rosebud’s entire song list, more than 1,000 songs in all, in alphabetical order.  No play lists, genre affinities or artist groupings.  I am enjoying the way in which the random play renders no noticeable theme or pattern, except that multiple songs begin with the same word. 

Yesterday, songs beginning with “Boogie” carried me a good long way down the New Jersey Turnpike.  Which got me thinking.  Now that I have overanalyzed my magazine rack, and enjoyed the comments on yesterday’s post, I will turn to search for meaning in my MP3.

Does the fact that 61 songs on my iPod begin with “I” or “my” but only 31 begin with “you” or “your” make me an egoist?  Does the fact that I have as much Mormon Tabernacle Choir as I do heavy metal make me schizophrenic?

What other words dominate my song titles?  Setting aside “how,” “what,” “when,” “where,” subordinating conjunctions and other minor words, I watched for a theme to emerge.   “Love” popped most prominently but that’s no surprise.  Except on the devices of a few evil souls, Love dominates everyone’s iPod.  So let’s take Love out of the equation, just for balance.

What’s left in my top five?  “Boogie” to be sure, along with “dance,” “rock,” “crazy” and “bad.”

In the absence of any logical conclusion, I leave it to Avril Lavigne, who sums it up aptly in “Anything but Ordinary,” as she observes, “Sometimes I get so weird, I even freak myself out.”

Note:  After another brief look at song lyrics tomorrow, Word Nymph will turn to another topic.  At least until she is On the Road Again.

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April 15, 2010 · 8:03 am

Artifact check

A few months ago I threw out a question from my Facebook:  “What is the strangest combination of foods you’ve eaten when unusually low on groceries?”  The replies were hilarious.   

So here’s another one. 

Everyone has a magazine rack or basket of reading material in at least one room of the house.  In a shared space, it might contain material of interest to multiple household members.  I recently contemplated what the one in our house might reveal about our family if it were discovered after our hypothetical demise (or, less morbidly, what a passing stranger might learn).  I challenge you to do the same.

What is in your magazine rack and what, anthropologically speaking, might it say about you or your family?

I will start the bidding off with:  a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, Lake News by Barbara Delinsky (been there for seven years with a bookmark about 75 pages from the end), two back issues of Vanity Fair, a country ham catalog, the current issue of Playboy and A 40-Day Lenten Journey with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  You tell me.

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April 14, 2010 · 6:58 am

Did you want to ask me that again?

Here is another grammatical trend I am betting you haven’t noticed but, once you do, you’ll hear it everywhere.  I hear it in restaurants all the time.

I say, I’d like a cup of coffee, please.”  The server asks, “Did you want cream?”

I reply “yes” but in my head I am sarcastically responding, “Yes, I DID and I still DO.”

When did we move from “Would you like” to “Did you want?”

Yes, I did want fries with that and, once that burger comes off the grill, I am pretty sure I will still want them.

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April 13, 2010 · 7:41 am

Sort of a verbal pause

I’ve written before about generational shifts in language.  If this topic interests you, here’s a parlor game you can play at home alone or out with friends.  Count the number of times someone says “sort of” in conversation or a television or radio interview.

In everyday speech, we are all prone to using a verbal pause now and again, usually the “um” or “uh” that comes between words in a spoken sentence.   As with hemlines, forms of verbal pause change with the times. 

In the 1970s, “you know” was the verbal pause of the decade.  For example, “I was doing my homework, you know, and I couldn’t do this long division problem, you know, so I called Cindy, you know, and she told me how to do it.”  I became aware of this at an early age because sloppy language was not tolerated in our home.  We had what was called the You-Know bell.  Whenever any of us used “you know” as a verbal pause, my father rang the You-Know bell.  Whoever said it the most won the You-Know bell prize.  But I digress.

In the ’80s it was “like,” as in “Nancy and I were like so into Bonnie Raitt that we were like listening to her albums over and over like every night.”

I first noticed “sort of” in the late 1990s in a meeting of senior U.S. government officials and prominent industry executives.  “Sort of” is a bit more refined than its predecessors.  In fact, at the time I first tuned in to it, it seemed more a verbal tiptoe than a pause.  Here’s how it might have been used around the conference table that day.  “We need a policy framework that sort of gives companies sort of an incentive to offer innovative products while allowing them to sort of achieve sort of a reasonable return on their investment.”  This wasn’t exactly it but illustrates how “sort of” was not used to mean “a kind of” or “a little bit” but rather, was a simple substitution for “uh” or “um.”

“Sort of” has spread like wildfire, showing no signs of dying down even in this decade.  I hear it every day.  Recently Jennifer Love Hewitt was on the Today show promoting her new book.  I lost count of how many times she said it.  Disappointingly, I’ve noticed prominent cable news anchors have picked it up.

“Sort of” is a slight improvement over “like,” to be sure.  But once your ear is attuned to it, it becomes annoying to the point of distraction.

On second thought, forget this parlor game.  It’ll drive you sort of nuts.

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April 12, 2010 · 7:04 am

Blink and you’ll miss it

In order to compose today’s blog entry, I had to perform some computer forensics.

Used to learn what a victim or perpetrator was doing in the days or minutes before a crime, computer forensics help create a chronicle of events leading up to the time such crime occurred.  They tell investigators when the person in question was last online, what Web sites were visited, when e-mails were sent and to whom.

Following is what appears to have occurred on the morning of Friday, April 9th.

9:10 – Return rental car at Pittsburgh International Airport.

9:25 – Clear airport security.

9:30 – Arrive at Gate C51 for 10:21 flight to Washington Dulles.

9:31 – Experience passing amusement:  the Griswolds arriving at Wally World, “first ones here, first ones here!”

9:42 – Complete and save expense report for the trip.

9:50 – Older gentleman takes the seat next to me.

10:00 – Observe a few passers-by asking older gentleman for his autograph.  Listen in.

10:08 – Post the following on Facebook:  “Sitting in the Pittsburgh airport next to a hockey icon who, I’ve overheard from those lining up for his autograph, won the Stanley Cup in 1964.  Nice man but I don’t know his name.”

10:10 – Answer an e-mail while waiting for boarding announcement.

10:11 – Blink.

10:31 – Wake up.

10:32 – Ask older gentleman if flight to Dulles has begun boarding.  Older gentleman smiles and says, “You must be Monica Welch.  They paged you several times before your plane left.”

10:45 – Older gentleman boards his flight to Toronto, shaking his head and laughing with his fellow passengers.

10:47 – Call to ask client to deploy contingency plan for the 2 p.m. meeting on the narcolepsy drug—because I fell asleep. 

Postscript:  I still don’t know the name of that famous Stanley Cup winner, but he knows mine.

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April 10, 2010 · 8:50 am

Mattel me it isn’t so

I would have written an impassioned piece about Mattel’s plans to introduce a version of Scrabble that permits the use of proper nouns.  By the time my smelling salts took effect, all the good puns and analogies had already been played.

The story has gone viral, so there isn’t much to add.  All I have to share here are a few questions based narrowly on Mattel’s rationale. 

Reportedly, the company believes relaxing the rules will encourage younger consumers to play Scrabble.  Presumably, being able to turn ore into Oreo will attract kids to the board. 

If this is true:

Will Mattel next introduce a version that accepts the spelling conventions of instant messaging?  (That wouldn’t do much to boost a Triple Word Score.) 

What about the fact that many twenty-somethings, and young corporations for that matter, appear to have abandoned the upper case altogether, even in their own names?  Will those names be deemed legal in conventional Scrabble?

What about all those made-up names and inventive spellings?

For those who fear the invasion of this diluted version of their favorite word game, take comfort in knowing the so-called Scrabble Trickster won’t be sold in the United States any time soon.  Mattel does not own the rights to sell Scrabble in North America and will offer Trickster only in the United Kingdom for the time being; hence, you can play as you do now within U.S. borders.   But players hoping to turn mile into Miley here at home are out of luck.  Hasbro, which owns the Scrabble rights in the U.S. market, has no plans to legalize proper nouns in this country.

Consider this:  Perhaps proper nouns will be extinct before American Scrabble players ever face this scenario.

Note:  Word Nymph takes Sundays off.  Tomorrow she’ll be giving her Scrabble Deluxe Edition a little love.  See you Monday.

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April 9, 2010 · 6:18 am

Little old lady who?

“Deputies Kill a Fla. Grandmother Armed With Gun”

“Grandmother Defeats Home Invader”

“Slamming Granny: Grandmothers for Peace Get Hard Time”

“Australian Grandmother Fights Shark” 

These are just a few headlines from print and broadcast stories of late.  In addition, The Washington Post reported recently that “Donna M. George was a grandmother living in a gated community in Fredericksburg when she sold prescription drugs out of her kitchen — while babysitting for her three grandchildren.” 

I am not sure precisely what image the news media are trying to conjure by naming Grandmother in the headlines but I am pretty sure it’s not me or my peers. While I am not yet a grandmother, plenty of my friends in their 40s and 50s are.  If they did anything newsworthy, why would their grandmother-hood be of note? 

No, I suspect the image the media are after is the stooped over, gingham-clad lady with a gray bun atop her doddering little head.  You know, Tweety Bird’s Granny.  It’s that lady’s role in a crime or act of heroism that makes the story all the more sensational. 

I have news for headline writers.  Today’s Grandmother looks like I do.  No gingham shirt dress, no bun.  Today’s granny wears low rise jeans and a ponytail.  She listens to Christina Aguilera, pops her gum and says “I’m like” when she means “I said.”  While, admittedly, she may eat a few more prunes than she used to, she also runs marathons and goes to wine tastings.  She might even write a blog.

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April 8, 2010 · 5:23 am

Who gives a fig about an Oxford comma?

They say if you love something, set it free.  That’s what I am doing with the Oxford comma.

Just a refresher:  the Oxford comma, also called the series comma or the serial comma, is the comma used immediately before a grammatical conjunction—such as and or or—preceding the final item in a list of three or more items.  For example, a list of three fruits can be punctuated as either “apples, oranges, and bananas” (with the Oxford comma) or “apples, oranges and bananas” (without the Oxford comma).

I don’t know for certain, but I suspect the Oxford comma made its way into accepted practice around the mid-1960s.  At least that’s the time I began writing sentences.  I must have been right on the cusp, so I’ve always used the comma. 

I do know those older than I eschew it.  My father is horrified by an Oxford comma.  My brother, eight years my junior and an accomplished public relations executive, uses it.  The attitude of some much younger may best be expressed in a 2008 song by the group Vampire Weekend, called “Who Gives a F*** About an Oxford Comma?”  In general, older writers don’t like the comma, younger ones do and the youngest ones may not really care.  That’s a subject for another day (but let it be noted that I have some faithful readers who are under 25 and keenly attuned to such matters).

Whether or not an Oxford comma is correct truly depends upon which authority you consult.  Nevertheless, a wise wordmistress reminded me just recently that consistency is what’s more important.

Either way, this year I’ve made a definitive choice.  Perhaps it is a desire to return to a cleaner, simpler way of life.  I am making a conscious shift and ditching the Oxford comma.  No ifs, ands or buts.

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