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TO EFFORT

Dan E. sent this nasty bit of news:

Have you heard the new verb, to effort, sometimes used in the mass communications/media industries?

Example: Q: Have you contacted them? A: We are efforting that.

I have heard it numerous times. It's efficient, but I don't like it!

I've never heard it, and hope not to. More efficient is "to try", also less ugly and more right in every way.

Dan also wrote,

I'm laughing out loud as I send you this: From PO 176, "Yes, these are more good alternatives to 'Edgar and I's relationship'." Shouldn't you have said "Yes, these are gooder alternatives to "Edgar and I's relationship." (I know what you were saying: "... additional alternatives ..." but I heard more good as the comparative for of good.

A careful writer would be aware of possible misreadings. I could have written, "These are additional good alternatives," but then I wouldn't have made Dan laugh.

Now take a minute to think about this headline (ripped from today's newspaper):

"UC should be about done building fancy."

UC is the easy part. It's University of Cincinnati, but we know it's an abbreviation. Then we get to the verb phrase. Where do you break that sentence into phrases? Should be about ... done building fancy?

OK, think about it some more.

I had to read the article to figure out the headline. Architect William J. Brown wrote a short piece criticizing the university's expansion (but I doubt if he wrote the headline). UC unnecessarily continues to hire prestigious (expensive) architects for complex projects, creating a confusing campus, expanding into historic neighborhoods, admidst a deteriorating city neighborhood, in order to gain recognition for UC's physical plant. He's says it's now overkill.

So the headline means UC should be almost finished ~ "about done" ~ erecting fancy buildings. But I couldn't make that out. I wanted to read, "UC should be about fancy buildings" or "UC should be about building done fancy." None of it made sense. The two colloquialisms crammed into a short headline ~ "about done" plus "building fancy" ~ didn't work here. It's hard to figure out that you read: should be ... about done .... building fancy.

I'LL HAVE A GLASS OF DUMB CHEWY HOLLOW RED

Wine-tasters have their own vocabulary for trying to convey something about wine qualities, including smell and taste, which two senses are hard to verbalize. Some of their words are legs, decorum, attack, chewy, closed-in, dumb, hollow, matchstick. Much like the vocabulary of modern physics, where the flavors of quarks include charm, strange, up, down, top, and bottom.

IED

Just after finding out that so-called road rage now has a so-called official name, so-called "intermittent explosive disorder" (IED), I see first of all that USA Today doesn't put "intermittent explosive disorder" in quotation marks, and second of all that these periodic outbursts of rage or violence are "more prevalent" than previously thought. Personally, I think they're more prevalent than previously thought because now that they have a scientific-sounding name, professionals who deal with this sort of thing can charge insurance companies for therapy and medication, which "can be effective treatment," says a Harvard Medical School guy. The right wording is crucial. I doubt if insurance covers treatment for "bad temper".

The most commonly diagnosed malady in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is personality disorder 301.9, Personality Disorder not Otherwise Specified. That pretty much covers everything. (By the way, IED is 312.34.)

LOST IN TRANSLATION

In a random newspaper survey of local opinion on illegal immigration, one fellow said, "I think it is unequivocally racial profiling when such a large emphasis is put on the Hispanic population." Well, to be fair we could try dealing with the problem of millions of illegal immigrants by looking at, say, illegal blue-eyed Scottish immigrants. There probably are a couple. But now I hear that Al Qaeda is trying to recruit light-skinned, blue-eyed suicide bombers, and who knows, some of them might sneak in from the south.

Victor Landa, a writer for the San Antonio Express-News, wrote about the City Council of the border town El Cenizo, Texas, which not only has been holding its official meetings in Spanish for years, but also made Spanish its "official" language. Unlike those who object to day-to-day official government business being conducted in Spanish, Landa thinks El Cenizo is progressing nicely. "Today," he reports, "El Cenizo is reported to be transitioning to English. City signage is beginning to change, and English is taking its place in city business. This was the intent all along." Texas has been a state since 1845, but the mills of government grind slower than God's.

Frank the Spud sent an article from a Tucson paper by Andrew Greeley about the issue of English. Greeley is being facetious about wiping out all pronunciation variants and regionalisms in the interests of national unity, while conflating "all diversity of dialects" with "all diversity of languages". But the point is not dialects, accents, and regionalisms, all of which are part of English, which is a very old and a very big language. Spanish is a completely different language. Fred said Greeley's a Jesuit, what can you expect.

I would make an exception about official government language. It's reasonable for Indians ~ Native Americans ~ original pre-European peoples ~ indigenous tribes ~ whatever you call them ~ to conduct tribal business in their own languages. They were here first.

ER OR RE

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day covered something I always have a problem with ~ words ending in er and or.

Essentially he says "agent-noun suffixes" (that is, er/or words indicating the doer of something) end in or if they come from Latin, but if they've become "naturalized" (really English) they end in er. Also, legal terms that are paired doers and receivers, such as donor/donee, have or endings paired with the ee words.

Words that end in re come from French, but have usually changed to er, except words like acre, massacre, and mediocre that have the letter C before re. However, in some cases both spellings are accepted, with the re spelling being more common in British English (theater/theatre).

As early as PO #3 I wrote about the irritating practice of using the British spelling for no good reason. Garner says:

Some American companies have started using the "-re" spellings to distinguish themselves and perhaps to try to bring some cachet to their projects. Many major cities, for example, have downtown buildings called "Such-and-Such Centre." Next door might be the "Such-and-Such Theatre." People who go to such centers and theaters should be on their best behavior ~ no, make that "behaviour."

But though I will still have to stop and think about how to spell adviser, at least now I know that er is the default spelling. Maybe. Now if only Garner would send me something about ant/ent and ance/ence suffixes.

ICE DAMNS

Dave DaBee sent this from his home inspection report: "If left uncorrected, in winter this could lead to ice damns." So many things do. I guess an ice damn is the opposite of a hot damn?

RAGE THE GRAMMAR

Dave DaBee and Mike Sykes both told me I meant participle instead of gerund referring to "raging" in "raging storm". Quite right. I know what gerunds and participles are, and misspeaking, or rather, miswriting is only one of the reasons I'm taking some time off this summer ~ not from Parvum Opus, but from other things. I'm going to have my brain removed, rinsed, and put back, my ears drained, and my eyes rotated.

EVOLUTION OF DANCE

Judson Laipply is an "inspirational comedian" who has a truly fabulous 6-minute video of maybe 50 dance steps called The Evolution of Dance. Don't miss it.

SOMETHING NEW! Check out the new "I Eat Dead Things" T-shirts for dogs and people, and the Protestant Work Ethic items in the Parvum Opus CafePress shop, plus a new Parvum Opus mouse pad! Now you can buy neat products with the Parvum Opus / KeithOps Catti logo at CafePress.com/parvumopus.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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