PARVUM OPUS

 

Number 185

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WATERING THE CAT

 

This week I've watered the tomatoes and the cat several times. No, that's not a zeugma, where you use the same word with two different meanings in parallel construction ("Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave"). I watered the cat the same way I watered the tomatoes. It's been hotternhell here, and I'm sure there, and the cat looked limp and was panting, which cats don't often do. She didn't resist being watered.

 

NEXT STORE

 

From the AAA travel magazine, Journeys:

 

The Community Hall, built in 1894, now is a residential social place where no business can be discussed. Next store is St. Paul's Episcopal Chapel, built in 1902, which welcomes visitors.

 

"Next store"? Did the writer dictate "next door" and transcribe it with sound recognition software? No stores are involved, and it can't be a typo. It's more like a brain glitch of the kind that made me spell "does" D-U-Z in a fourth-grade spelling bee, when I knew very well how to spell it. A faulty brain synapse must have taken me to the part of the brain that stores TV commercials. There used to be a detergent called Duz that packed free glasses or dishware in the boxes. Don't you wish they still did that?

 

If you're interested, by the way, the AAA story is about Magnolia Springs, Alabama, on the banks of the Magnolia River, 18 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Seems like a nice place to visit.

 

BREEDERS

 

Did you know there's a pejorative slang term for heterosexuals, especially those who have children? It's "breeders." Human beings do breed, of course, but the term is best applied to animals. There's a faint whiff here of contempt for people who are not clever enough to avoid breeding, as any civilized person would. It's used by gay people but not only by them. I first heard it used by a straight couple (in Kansas!) who decided not to have children and who were extremely offended by a harmless Steve Martin movie, the 1989 comedy Parenthood, because it extolled, well, parenthood. I don't remember anything in the movie that insulted non-parents, however. Anyway, non-breeders come from breeders, which seems to make them (the non-breeders) mad.

 

EATS

 

The History Channel is running a series called American Eats. Note that it's not America Eats, but American Eats, therefore "eats" is a noun here, meaning food. Way down south I used to see road signs that said "EATS" advertising little restaurants, so I always thought it was a southern colloquialism, though not one I ever picked up even when I lived down south. It had no charm for me, so I was surprised to see it on TV.

 

WANT THAT WITH RELISH?

 

TV promo for Sherlock Holmes: "Holmes thrives on the puzzling, delights in the bizarre, relishes in the unknown." The writer got carried away with the parallel construction. Surely he or she didn't think he or she had ever heard "relish in". Usually it is synonymous with "enjoy". But ... when I looked it up (dict.org), "relish" does have definition as an intransitive verb, but the examples given are very old: "Had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relished among my other discredits." (Shakespeare) Here it means to have a flavor or to give gratification, but I've never heard it used that way.

 

POLLING POLES?

 

Overheard, I mean over-read: Somebody couldn't make a meeting because he was "working the poles." He was really working the polls. At least I think so. Could he have been working the Poles? How would you do that?

 

DO EVERYONE UNDERSTAND?

 

Mike Sykes wrote about collective nouns, American and British:

 

Not so fast!

I quote from Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage for *collective noun*:

The principal question of usage with collective nouns is whether they should be treated as singular or plural. In BrE, the practice is well established of construing them either with a singular verb to emphasize unity or with a plural verb to emphasize individuality. ... It is particularly important to maintain consistency within a statement, avoiding, for example, a singular verb with a plural pronoun following, as in ... /When the jury retires to consider their verdict/.

Of course, there are cases where it's difficult to be sure whether singular or plural is more appropriate.

The different emphasis of AmE and BrE is well described in "The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style":

Apart from the desire for consistency, there is little "right" and "wrong" on this subject: collective nouns take sometimes singular and sometimes plural verbs. The trend in AmE is to regard the collective noun as expressing a unit; hence, the singular is the usual form. When the individuals in the collection or group receive the emphasis, the plural verb is acceptable <that deconstructionist school were not wholly in error>. But generally in AmE collective nouns take singular verbs, as in the jury finds, the panel is, the committee believes, the board has decided, etc.

 

I hope I've indicated the quotes (Mike's and his sources) correctly.

 

Garner's Daily Word pertinently discussed "everyone" yesterday.

 

Today it is standard British English to use "everyone" and "everybody" with a singular verb but a plural pronoun. Here's the British view: "Jane Austen wrote 'every body' as two words and considered the phrase as singular; we now write one word, 'everybody,' and consider it as plural, equivalent to 'all people.' Hence the entry in the [Oxford English] Dictionary under 'agreement' gives 'Everybody knows this, don't they?' as an example of notional concord, obviously rightly: we would not accept 'Everybody knows this, doesn't he or she?'" Paul Dean, "More Grammatical Than Thou," TLS, 22 Apr. 1994, at 8.

But many Americans continue to think of this usage as slipshod, "everybody" requiring a singular. After all, they reason, nobody ~ not even Paul Dean ~ would say "everybody know" instead of "everybody knows." An early usage critic remarked insightfully: "The use of this word is made difficult by the lack of a singular pronoun of dual sex. Nevertheless, this is no warrant for the conjunction of 'every' and 'them.'" Richard Grant White, Every-Day English 420–21 (1884). A goodly number of Americans now take the same stand, thereby making a happy solution elusive.

 

RED WORDS

 

We have a few colorful linguistic legacies from the Communist Party, at least the English speakers. Here are a few in fairly common though usually ironic use:

 

politically correct: sticking to the politically acceptable (or permissible) opinion regardless of the facts.

apparatchik: even with the obvious Russian ending, you do hear this from time to time for party functionary / bureaucrat (you also hear the ending in the more endearing Yiddish "boychik" meaning a young boy).

useful idiot: useful to the party, that is; possibly coined by Lenin, according to Wikipedia.

running dog: someone who goes along with those in power; in the movie The Big Chill, the ex-hippy named his successful athletic shoe business "Running Dog" after the Maoist expression (in Chinese, of course) for capitalist lackeys.

Potemkin village: a fake village, something like a movie set, erected to impress a visitor and divert attention from reality.

 

 

 

 

 

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