Number 51
A reader sent this bit of aggravation:
"Quietly situated on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio, Firestone Country Club has the finest 54-holes of golf of any private club in the country."
HOW CAN ANYTHING POSSIBLY BE "QUIETLY SITUATED"? she then screamed typographically.
Moi: Hmm. No large neon signs and blaring loudspeakers, like all the other golf courses?
What disturbs me more is the hyphen between "54" and "holes", which sounds as if there is something called a "54-hole".
This is just one more example of the dangerous habit of inserting hyphens between adjectives and nouns for no reason. I believe people have a vague awareness of the hyphenated adjective-noun modifier (e.g., "three-time winner", "full-time job"), and even more vaguely suspect that lots of adjectives, maybe all of them, require hyphens before their allotted nouns, especially if the two have appeared in conjunction more than once in the history of the English language, and therefore constitute "a phrase" that necessitates something other than the words themselves to be understood. (See PO 22.)
A cousin to this hyphenating twitch appears on an advertising sign I found recently: "How Good Are Your Brake's?" Again, some sign painter or his client had learned about the apostrophe, someone who would have been perfectly happy to get along without it, but education induced a sense of insecurity without understanding of the rules.
On TV: "Arnold marauded across the stage." You know, of course, who Arnold is, and no doubt he is capable of marauding across a stage, but I'm still not convinced the speaker knew the meaning of "maraud." The only plunder a marauder might find on a stage would be publicity, unless he looted and ravished the other people in the studio, and I expect even Arnold would do that off-camera.
The venerable English adverbial suffix "ly" comes from the Old English, meaning "like," as you know. I can't think of any word in which the adverbial suffix "ly" as a final syllable is stressed, but a TV journalist today said "momentariLY." He sounded a bit playful, almost singing the word (in fact he was downright facetious throughout most of his newscast).
The only other like instance I remember is hearing people say "probabLY", which seems almost to add more, although not different, meaning to the word. Reminds me of a couple of relatives of mine who sometimes say, "Yeah, it is," with the same intonation you'd give to "No, it's not" (imagine a tone of defiant agreement). I think it's a bit of unique American linguistic humor. And other of my relatives add "ly" to a word already an adverb: "majorly". I used to think this must be a Michigan peculiarity until I heard it elsewhere.
A reader sent this back in September:
The letter scramble story I like best is what a friend of Richard Stallman (father of the "GNU" project and hence most influential person in starting free software, now widely known as open source). The GNU General Public License or GPL gives free use to the software and requires that anyone who modifies it also gives free use to their modifications. It's called "copyleft". What Stallman's friend doodled was to transform "All Rights Reserved" to "All Rights Reversed".
Perhaps we'll have copyleavers now, in addition to copywriters. I wonder why we don't have copywrights, like playwrights?
I always thought "wright" and "wrought" came from the same root as "wreak" but I have no evidence of it. Some writers do wreak literature, though: copywrongs?
Two readers identified Etoain Shrdlu (which I may have misspelled, if that's possible):
I knew these "words" were supposed to be the most frequently used letters in the English alphabet in order of frequency, but I first saw them in the margins of Mad magazine years ago. (Another question: How did Mad get by for so many years with no advertising?) Someone there must have simply liked the sound or look of "etaoin shrdlu", sort of like "notary sojac" and "scram gravy ain't wavy" in the old Smokey Stover comic strip, and "semolina pilchard" in the Beatles' song "I Am the Walrus" (goo goo goo joob).
I found this on Smokey Stover along with a cartoon showing Smokey in a car with "Foo" on the radiator:
"Foo", by the way, was picked up from this strip and used in several animated cartoons, notably some that Bob Clampett directed for Warner Bros. It may have influenced the formation of the World War II slang expression "fubar" (a relative of "snafu"). The expression "foo fighter", a term used by UFO enthusiasts, is traced to Smokey Stover, who often called himself a foo fighter when anyone else would have said "firefighter". Computer hackers also use "foo" as an all-purpose noun ~ also, probably from having seen it in this strip.
Why is this important? Because I often called my kids and my cats by variations on "foo" as part of varying pet names (Fooboo, Foojoo, Foolaroo, etc.), and I now realize that it may have come from a subconscious memory of Smokey Stover.
But the word "foo" had other offspring as well:
Toward the end of World War II pilots began reporting seeing strange glowing balls flying around their aircraft at night. The objects seemed to maneuver with great speed and the Allies began to worry that the Germans had developed a new weapon with startling capabilities. The objects were dubbed "foo fighters" because of a popular comic strip at the time, Smokey Stover. Smokey was fond of saying, "Where there's foo there's fire" and the objects seem to be fiery, rounded shapes.
"Happy" comes from the same root as "happen", to befall or chance (also connected to the meanings "to wrap or clothe"). "Thank" comes from the same root as "think". "Give" always meant "give". So ~ give some thought to what has befallen you as well as what hasn't, and you will find reason to be grateful.
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