Number
202
There are too many interesting books on language so I have to control my buying, but two of them were irresistible:
In Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey says that sentence diagramming was introduced in an 1877 book by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English, amazingly still available in print. She also says that the word grammar is related to glamour. According to yourdictionary.com, glamour is from "Scots, magic spell, alteration of grammar (from the association of learning with magic)." I knew it.
I haven't read far into the book yet, but it could have used better proofreading. A diagrammed sentence on page 17 is missing a "the" (The dog chased rabbit into the woods down the road). And on page 18 a diagram of "Stop that loud barking!" seems to show that "loud" modifies "that" instead of "barking". Nevertheless, any book that encourages new interest in sentence diagramming is good.
My other new book was a great remaindered bargain: The Oxford Guide to World English by Tom McArthur. It's a very big book that covers English all over the globe, and it's for dipping into. I have only dipped a little so I can't say if one of the Amazon reviewers refers to something in the book itself or if it's his own opinion, but I think he's grinding an axe:
On the one hand, it
presents English as a predatory language that endangers other languages. English
takes over, influences local languages, anglicises thinking patterns, etc. etc.
In short, it has become a world wide imperial language.
On the other hand, this book presents English as a
vulnerable language, crumbling into lots of Englishes. ...
It is interesting to see the two sides of the argument but on occasions it is not clear what this book really means.
Does the book really present English as a "predatory" language? I guess we'll have to wait for the post-modernists to deconstruct it. (See "Uh-Oh" below.)
Also, a couple of months ago Mike Sykes told me about Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas R. Hofstadter, and I finally got it from the library. It's an enormous book about translation and language. In 1537, Clement Marot wrote a poem (in French) to a sick friend. Hofstadter asked a lot of people to translate it, and he also made numerous translations. This is also a book to dip into, so I must find a used copy to buy.
Back in the heyday of graduate school and avid feminism, some literary feminists were hopefully trying to discover a female sentence structure distinct from the male or "patriarchal" sentence structure, or as someone called it, the uterine sentence. I don't believe it's been done. The closest they came was to say the periodic sentence was male, while women tended to write a loose sentence. The periodic sentence doesn't get to the point till the end, that is, it starts out with modifying phrases, sometimes in parallel constructions, and so on, leading to the verb though perhaps not quite German syntactically. The loose sentence can have lots of independent clauses or sentences strung together. (I would have guessed the periodic sentence might be female, as in, "Cramps ~ I've got 'em.") Anyway, you'd have to analyze vast amounts of writing by men and women and count the use of these two types of sentences to check that theory. I don't suppose it's been done and I don't think anything would come of it. If women write both kinds of sentences, it's possible to say they were influenced by reading works by men. If not, we'd have to say that women were different, which as we know caused Larry Summers to lose his job as president of Harvard.
The other day I attempted to type yourdictionary.com in my browser, but a typo brought up yourdicitonary.com, which is still stuck in my browser history. This is an actual web page of nothing but links to dictionaries. There's nothing solid on the web site itself. What's the point? Who took the time and trouble to capture all of us who make this specific typo? I wonder if other typos for (the real) yourdictionary.com are also valid URLs, but I'm not going to test it because I don't want to clutter up my browser memory.
As far back as PO 2, I wrote about the use and misuse of "as far as" because so often people do not complete the phrase, which is "as far as [that] goes". They usually leave off "goes". Hearing this yet again on TV yesterday, it occurred to me that people probably confuse it with "as for" since they sound so much alike and serve similar purposes. Here's an example sentence I used in PO 2:
“As far as shopping at the mall goes, it’s not only impossible during the holidays, it’s boring because there are nothing but chain stores.”
You could also say:
“As for shopping at the mall, it’s not only impossible during the holidays, it’s boring because there are nothing but chain stores.”
Bill R. wrote about the laws against insulting Turkishness:
Back along (~1973) I
was Main Propulsion Assistant in USS PONCE (LPD15). When we visited Izmir,
Turkey, one of the embarked troops drunkenly made the mistake of trying to take
down a Turkish flag in Ataturk Circle. Because the Air Force liaison folks in
Izmir couldn't remember what unit the guy belonged to but could remember
the name of the ship in which his unit was embarked, we were still receiving
message traffic about him eighteen months later. He was still in jail awaiting
trial for "insulting the Turkish nation."
I hope he's back home now.
WANT A PEN PAL?
Perhaps you've read the letter from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the people of the United States. You can write an answer online if you like. Before you do, be sure to check out some of his TV speeches. I think we should all write letters to the Iranians, but I'm guessing they'd get lost in the mail.
One of my Venezuelan students said that when a baseball crowd started chanting the political slogan of Chavez's political opponent Manuel Rosales, Hugo Boss had all the media cut off immediately. (Also, five journalists in Venezuela have been killed since he's been in office.) But people had video cameras or video camera phones and the event got out over the Internet. This is why when Chavez met with Castro and had a little boy sing to him, the kid sang "Internet es el Diablo" (The Internet is the Devil).
But it's so much fun. I ran across The People's Progressive Truth Generator (along the lines of the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator). A "debate framer" example: "You are a reactionary racist because you shop at Wal-Mart!" You know what debate framing is, don't you? It's picking the terms of the argument.
UH-OH
bell hooks is the pseudonym of Gloria Jean Watkins, or her alias, or something. She has said she intends the lower-case spelling to show that what's important is the substance of her books, "not who I am". Of course the lower case spelling does attract more attention. She has also written, "People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities."
And she's an English professor who has written, "It is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest." Depends on what you read, I guess, but she doesn't mean the content, she means, well, standard English, i.e. not dialect or slang. So all you PO readers who take an interest in grammar, usage, and so on, turn yourselves in.
SOMETHING NEW! Check out the new "Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts 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.
It is the glory of God to
conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs
25:2
NEED
SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.
Go to Babelfish
to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!
Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back
issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/.
Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries.
The PO
mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want
to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe,"
"quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject
line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.
Copyright Rhonda
Keith 2006. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with
permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright
remains.