ornoth

With the help of the Duolingo app, I’ve been learning Japanese since December. Inspired by my example, Inna began refreshing her Hebrew in March.

So we’ve had a little time to hear one another’s practice as well as compare notes on what we’re being taught. And the results are more than a little bit interesting.

To amuse my captain, I’ve included a few screen shots of the everyday phrases we’re learning. Let’s start with my newly-acquired Japanese language skills:

And now let’s compare my Japanese phrases to the vocabulary that Inna is picking up in Hebrew:

I’m sure no further elaboration is necessary.

… or “nihonjin ni henshin”: inexpertly translated as “turning Japanese”. This is the story behind my attempt to learn the native tongue of the rising sun.

Obviously, the first question is “Why?” and it’s not that easy to answer.

I’ve had some relationship to Japanese culture as far back as high school. I practiced kyūdō – Japanese meditative archery — for several years and hope to resume again. I’ve also dabbled with taiko: Japanese drumming. There’s a slight Buddhist connection, tho Zen is rather distant from my own meditative lineage. Despite approaching 60, I still watch anime (usually subtitled). Even something as mundane as the virtual cycling app I train with, which recently released a Tokyo-themed expansion, provides lots of signage for a Japanese language student to decipher.

Another big reason why I am attempting this now is because physical limitations reduced the amount of indoor cycling I could do over the winter. So with more time on my hands, I could attack one of the most time-consuming things on my long-term to-do list.

As an aside, the other big pastime I undertook over the winter was improving my investing by doing a lot of reading about how to interpret corporate financial reports: balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements.

Other than just killing hours over the winter, learning Japanese provides a great intellectual challenge. I’ve always loved – and been reasonably good at – picking up foreign languages (French, German, Russian) and alphabets (runic, Cyrillic, plus calligraphy). Although to be honest I think I might have opened Pandora’s box in tackling a language made so difficult by formal and non-formal modes, slang, regional dialects, and of course three different alphabets, including kanji. Still, it’s a great way for an older guy to stretch his neurons. And if I really enjoy it, I can always look into formally testing myself by taking the standardized five-level JLPT language exam(s).

The next question is how I’m attacking it.

So far my primary tool has been the (Pittsburgh-based) Duolingo phone app. Theoretically they’ve taught me about 1,200 words, which is terrific, but it does have some shortcomings. My active vocabulary is trailing my passive vocabulary, and I find I rely too much on the hiragana pronunciation hints rather than learning the kanji characters in words. Part of the problem is just how the app is set up, and part of it is because the gamification elements set up incentives that aren’t always in the best interest of the student.

I’ve also made use of YouTube, where it’s easy to find tons of language instruction. Although I don’t feel especially loyal to any one channel, the one I’ve relied on most is Japanese Ammo with Misa.

And no Japanese student can avoid the elephant on the bookshelf: the Genki textbooks. I’ve downloaded electronic copies of their third editions, but haven’t used them much yet. If I find them useful, I’ll spring for the print copies.

There are other resources that I am not using yet, including local language programs, online tutoring like Italki, and local Japanese language learner meetups.

I seem to have a fair number of friends who have learned Japanese, including one guy whose former wife was a Japanese native. But I’m sad that my high school friend Mark died before I took this up. He moved to Japan after college, where he married a Japanese woman and taught English for thirty years. I’m sure he would have been amused and happy to support me and host a visiting traveler.

I’ve already alluded to how it’s gone. I’ve been putting in ten to fifteen hours a week, and I’m enjoying it and making steady progress. Although like any language, the complexity ramps up substantially as you start tapping into more complex (and realistic) grammatical structures. And learning a few thousand pictographic kanji characters is a bear.

But it’s been fun, and hopefully I’ll become competent enough to actually interact with other Japanese speakers in person sometime in the future.

This is a question that has followed me for most of my life. From the college employer who had no idea what I did for him; to Inna’s family and friends who wonder how I spend my copious free time, since I don’t work. It’s a question even Inna herself can’t answer, despite having lived with me for six years!

That question – what do you do? – confuses me, because I make no secret of it; there’s evidence plastered all over my social media.

I suspect that people are confused because I don’t push myself and my interests forward in verbal conversations. I’m more of a listener, allowing others to guide the conversation, and will only talk about myself after people express interest in what I’m up to; although most people will naturally direct conversations toward their own interests.

And then some of my closer friends avoid delving into my interests because they know that once I do get that implicit permission, I’ll talk about them enthusiastically and at length. Kinda like when you open up one of my blogposts… There’s a reason why my writers’ group always cautioned new members with, “That’s Orny… Don’t encourage him.”

On a side note, my interests tend to be very long in duration and deep in nature. It might take a while before I commit myself to something, but when I decide to do it, I insist on doing it well and thoroughly. I will not half-ass anything I do; this is one of my core values as a person.

So let me attempt to answer that eternal question: what does Orny do, anyways?

Number one: cycling. I ride up to 10 or 20 hours a week, either solo, group rides, or major events, both outdoors as well as on the indoor trainer through the winter. And that doesn’t include time spent on bike cleaning, maintenance, repairs, and performance analysis. Cycling is my passion.

Number two: meditation. I spend 2-4 hours a week in meditation, and another couple hours listening to dhamma talks. About twice a month I lead two different meditation groups, and must put time into researching, developing, practicing, and delivering my own dhamma talks. Sometimes I’ll go off on weeklong silent retreats, and I’ve always got plenty of dhamma reading to do. The philosophy and practices behind Buddhism are a central part of who I am.

Number three: investing. My former employment at Sapient gave me enough capital to consider living free of the working world. However, that means my “full-time job” is to invest my finances wisely and safely, and provide financial advice to Inna. So I devote a ton of time to reading financial news and books about investing. I keep tabs on the market daily, both because I want to be aware of my opportunities and, frankly, I enjoy monitoring my success. Financial self-sufficiency and independence are life goals that were drilled into me by my parents.

Number four: the Pan-Mass Challenge. I’ve ridden this annual fundraiser for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute sixteen times and raised $119,000 for cancer research. You have no idea how much time that fundraising effort requires: the countless emails, tracking contacts (and writing my own database to manage it), chasing down corporate matching gifts, et cetera. For many years, it alone was a full time job from May through August. But this has been one of the most fulfilling things I have done.

Number five: learning Japanese. This winter I’ve put 10-15 hours a week into this newest intellectual challenge I’ve committed to. Characteristically, I’ve attacked it with energy and dedication. Academic learning and developing new skills are lifelong pleasures, and this is their current form. There’ll probably be a separate blogpost on this sometime later.

Number six: my relationship with Inna. It should go without saying that a lot of time goes into sharing our lives together and helping one another out. Partnership and family have always been a challenge for an introvert and loner like myself, so this is where a lot of work needs to happen.

So those are the big things.

Now fill in the remaining gaps with some of my more episodic background interests. Between my general and cycling blogs I write two or three dozen posts per year. I devote time to artistic interests in both photography and videography. I find time to enjoy a number of simulcast anime series and follow MLS soccer and the New England Revolution as well as the US national team.

And there’s always plenty of household duties. I’m fairly fastidious about my living conditions, and my responsibilities include vacuuming, laundry, garbage & recycling, car maintenance, computer maintenance, and cat feeding, grooming, litterbox, and exercise (if you only knew!). Plus grocery shopping and cooking for myself every day. And then in the background is researching our future move away from Pittsburgh.

That’s my life every day. If you ask me, I think the question shouldn’t be “What does Orny do?” but more like “How does Orny possibly do all that?”

As a man who tries to be sensitive to gender issues, I want to address one way that I think women and men both unconsciously perpetuate marginalization of women.

You might not think one’s given name could be the source of judgement and marginalization… but you’d be wrong.

It might sound like an incredibly minor nit, but what could be more core to one’s identity than the very name you use to refer to yourself, and the names you use for others?

Consider the difference in how you respond to a man who calls himself “Robert”, versus if he introduced himself as “Robbie”. Even if you’re looking at the same individual, most of us will have a meaningfully different initial impression of someone depending on whether he is introduced to us as “Billy” or “Willie” or “William”.

The underlying cause goes at least as far back as Latin, if not earlier. In Romance languages, words that end in open syllables (ending in a vowel sound like “Billy” and “Robbie”) are almost always grammatically feminine, while words ending in consonant sounds (closed syllables) like “Robert” and “William” are usually grammatically masculine.

Don’t get confused by the labels “masculine” and “feminine”. Those just represent two classes of words. I’m not saying that “Robbie” is really a girl’s name, or that “Janet” should be a boy’s name. At least not directly…

However, in Romance languages—and thus in Western society overall—the grammatical feminine has often been applied to things that are cute, small, young, informal, trivial, and (in gender terms) feminine. As a result, when we hear a name that ends in a vowel sound, we tend to ascribe those attributes to the person.

Calling someone “Scotty” is not just a less formal way to address “Scott”; because names ending in open syllables carry this historical baggage, it also carries with it the idea Scotty is more diminutive or more childish or less serious than Scott. And it isn’t much of a leap to infer that Scotty himself is inferior, subordinate, and less capable than his “older brother” Scott. Just as Robbie is less adult than Robert, and Jimmy is less professional than James.

This becomes an even greater concern when applied to women. We have very different preconceptions when we meet a girl named “Chrissie” than a woman named “Christine”, or “Shelly” versus “Michelle”. When a woman’s name ends in an open syllable, the association with grammatically feminine attributes like smallness, informality, and youth becomes really problematic. They didn’t call her “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” because it’s a strong name; they used it because (in contrast to her occupation as a Slayer) it’s such a weak, fluffy, impotent, “girly” name.

What’s worse is that we as a society still prefer to name women something cute and feminine, automatically hampering our daughters’ chances of being taken seriously right from the maternity unit. And even then, women will often choose to abbreviate their name into a “cute” nickname that ends in an open syllable.

When I first wrote this article, I looked at my employer’s “About Our Team” page. After removing the outliers from our India office, I counted up the names that end in open syllables, and grouped them by gender. What did I find? In a progressive software company, 73 percent of the women listed names that end in vowel sounds, while only 13 percent of men did. Our female employees were more than five times as likely to bear names associated with smallness, informality, and inferiority than their male coworkers.

I also checked out the most popular 100 given names for each gender over the past 100 years, thanks to this Social Security Administration page. While not quite as dramatic, the trend is inescapable. Women were 2.5 times more likely to have open-syllable names as men (56 percent to 23 percent).

Bottom line, we’re saddling our daughters with names that trivialize them from childhood through adulthood.

Of course, this only applies to Western society. The Japanese language doesn’t natively have closed syllables at all, which can cause some confusion among Westerners. It shows the extent of our bias that you might guess that Japanese people named Tomoya, Takeshi, Makoto, Kenichi, Junichi, Yuji, Katsumi, and Koki were female. They’re not; those are among the most frequently-used male names in Japan.

As a final parting shot, I encourage you to take a moment and consider your emotional response and preconceptions based on the following pairs of names. For me, the conclusion is absolutely clear that using a name which ends in a vowel sound is both trivializing and marginalizing, and something I’d suggest be avoided, especially by progressive-minded parents.

With sincere apologies to those of you who might already bear such names!

David	Davy
Michael	Mikey
Mark	Marky
Samuel	Sammy
Steven	Stevie
John	Johnny
James	Jimmy
Harold	Harry
Scott	Scotty
William	Billy
Robert	Bobby

Michelle	Shelly
Ann	Annie
Christine	Chrissy
Kim	Kimmy
Catherine	Cathy
Nicole	Nicki
Susan	Susie

There really needs to be a corollary to Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, stating that website maintenance is a constant (and un-winnable) battle against the Stupid introduced by other people.

Usually this involves a lot of quiet fuming while cleaning up the garbage left behind by the incompetent agents of entropy. But sometimes the Stupid is just so ludicrously headdeskingly perfect that there’s nothing you can do but laugh until you gag on your own puke. All the while, marveling at the “mysteries of the universe”.

For example, consider the following. While working on something, I once came across the following block of code on a production website:

$rss_feeds = ""; echo $rss_feeds;

Now, even if you’re code-illiterate, you can probably figure out what this does. It sets a variable to nothing and then prints… nothing.

Why? No reason. The only thing I can figure is that someone hired a contractor and paid them based on the sheer number of lines of code they produced.

Now, before I lose all the non-coders in the audience, here are a couple examples where people chose to demonstrate their mastery of their native language. For example, take this headline that appeared in a second-level heading on one page:

Private vs. Gevernment

Or this major announcement:

Without further adieu [...]

Or this favorite job listing of mine:

[...] is currently seeking a Senior FrontEnd Web Developer with 710 years of professional experience

Working our way into the code doesn’t have to be painful, though. How about this one: Need to name a file? Why not name it after your own awesome self?

$fileExt = 'markrules';

Another one that is easy for non-coders is this one:

<div id="left_content" class="right">

Yup. In the Stupid Universe, left is right and right is left.

Now how much would you pay? But wait: there’s more!

<?php // include('ad_med_rectangle.inc.php'); ?> <?php include('ad_med_rectangle.inc.php'); ?>

In PHP, two slashes are used to comment something out. So here we have a line of code carefully commented out. And then the exact same line, not commented out. Um… huh?

Speaking of comments, try figuring out what this one does:

$form->addElement('hidden', 'xzdf', 'A3104', array('id' => 'xzdf'));

Using names or key values with self-evident meanings is really overrated. The Law of Stupid instructs us to use completely nonsensical names, and make sure you don’t leave any comments in the code that might explain to the people maintaining your code what those random numbers and strings of characters actually mean!

And then there’s this mystery of the universe, a perennial favorite:

$term = ereg_replace("hero", "elongated sandwich", $term);

I can’t tell you why this site has such a strong aversion to heroes, but it’s clear that any time we find the word “hero”, we replace it with our preferred term “elongated sandwich”. No reason; we just do. No hero worship allowed here!

Here’s a fun one!

.blue_button { background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #ED8D1E; }

Blue_button, huh? You might be forgiven if you thought that might actually show a button that was blue. But that background color of #ED8D1E? That’s dark orange. OF COURSE!

For some reason, “switch” statements seem beyond the grasp of many well-compensated “engineering professionals”. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult to do different things depending on whether a variable has a value of 1 or 2 or 3, etc. Is that so hard? Apparently it is. Here’s a nice example:

case 1: $url = 'http://www.awebsite.com/'; break; case 1: $url = 'http://www.awebsite.com/'; break; case 1: $url = 'http://www.awebsite.com/'; break; case 1: $url = 'http://www.awebsite.com/'; break; case 1: $url = 'http://www.awebsite.com/'; break;

That’s a double dose of Stupid! Here, all the cases do exactly the same thing! But that’s okay, because they all test against the same value, too!

In plain English, it translates thus: if it’s a 1 you do this; but if it’s a 1 you still do this; or if it’s actually a 1 you would also do this; and if 1 you do the same thing too; and so on. That’s seventeen lines of code to do what requires only one. See what I mean about someone being paid per line of code?

Of course, that only works if you want to do something. Truly masterful Stupid code does nothing, like this switch statement:

switch($page[subnav]) { }

Huh. Only outside of the Stupid Universe is it customary to write code to actually *do something*.

Of course, junior developers often aren’t wise enough yet to disguise the fact that they’re doing nothing. Consider this:

Yes, that’s nothing. That’s the whole contents of a file I found called small.css. Small, indeed! Perhaps they thought they weren’t leaving any evidence of their stupidity behind.

Here’s some additional CSS-flavored fun:

<div style="clear: left;"> </div> <div style="clear: right;"> </div>

More from the Planet of the Confused: why not just do “clear:both”? Oh yeah, it’s because YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING!!!

ttable tr td.odd { border-left: 0; border-right: 1px solid #fff; }

Did the W3C create a new HTML tag (ttable) and I missed the news?

p.margin-left {margin-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px;}

So let me get this right: a paragraph called “margin-left” actually has equal margin on both sides? But on the left it’s a margin, and on the right it’s padding? That makes perfect sense, especially if you don’t understand basic HTML page layout!

Here’s an exemplary 12 lines of masterful coding:

if (isset($page_close)) { $page_close .= <<<EOD </body> </html> EOD; } else { $page_close = <<<EOD2 </body> </html> EOD2; } echo $page_close;

That’s just another example of how these guys clearly were getting paid per line of code. No matter what $page_close is set to, what those 12 lines of code really do is this:

</body> </html>

No need for complex logic or any dynamic behavior. Good thing they inserted an extraneous IF/ELSE block, two “here quotes”, and echoing a variable, because how else would one know they were such masters of PHP syntax?

if (test_it_counter == 0) { computeForm(entry.form); } computeForm(entry.form); test_it_counter++;

So the first time through this program, computeForm() get run twice in a row, just for kicks. I’m sure that works just great! I wonder why they didn’t run it twice every time?

<div id="nav" onmouseover="Tip('#nav { <br /> <var>float:</var> left; <br /> <var>width:</var> 788px; <br /> <var>height:</var> 36px; <br /> <var>margin:</var> 0; <br /> <var>padding:</var> 0; <br /> <var>background:</var> #fff url(images/navbg3.gif) no-repeat; <br /> <var>text-align:</var> center; <br /> } <br /><br /><cite>Note the hover action. </cite>')">

I have absolutely no idea what the coder was thinking here. If you hover over a nav, it displays a tooltip with a bunch of CSS code (which actually doesn’t get used and doesn’t appear anywhere in the page) and the message “note the hover action”. Glad that has been running out on the production web site for four or five years…

My final example is a solve-it-yourself problem. Are you ready for a developer challenge? How long does it take you to spot the Stupid in this statement?

<?php if ($isForm = false) {

This one’s an all-time classic and a personal favorite. When comparing a variable to a literal, professional software engineers always put the literal first. Do you know why? Well, the above is a perfect illustration why. The reason why will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Okay, I’m making this official.

Headhunters / recruiters will forthwith always and everywhere be referred to solely as LABRADOODLES.

Please spread the word, and remember: you heard it here first.

Two more nuggets from life as a consultant.

It’s probably not a great idea to draw attention to yourself by BitTorrenting at the client site. Nor is it good form to give your computer a name that includes profanity. Combine them and you might have to own up to it when the client IT staff publicly ask, “Who here has the computer called ‘Little Bitch’?” No, I don’t make this stuff up, people…

At a company update today, a manager spoke about ramping up our new accounting personnel. “It’s gonna take a little time for them to get immersed and catch up.” But I swear to god that what I heard was “It’s gonna take a little time for them to get immersed in ketchup.” Kinda blew my chunks on that one. I guess the old consultant hazing practises are still alive and well!

From the welcome sheet that came with my Wyndham Hotels affinity program card:

At the new Wyndham, thoughtfulness and intelligent design define everything we do, so you can be well fed, well rested and well treated. Be well.

OMG… You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. This is a good example why the management aphorism that “Anyone can write copy” is false.

A geeky list of potential band names. Vintage circa 1994. Favorites in bold.

A Cod from Moscow
Acetylene Bone
Assembler H
Bang Path
Castle Anthrax
Category One
Co-Morbidity
Continental Heavy
Fair Market Value
Fetchez La Vache
Flartch [Mode]
Frabjous Day
Garbage Plate
IAMGIB

Medical Misadventure NEC
Much Rejoicing
MX Record
Odd Parity
Photosensitive Nippleheads
R.O.U.S.
Real Cheese Flavor
Smut Module
Snorklewacker
Stop Bit
Techniques with Foam
TGOTARAR
Vorpal Bunny

Okay, enough of all that heavy life stuff! In order to maintain the balance in your chi, I offer the following list of the 14 funnest (not funniest, but funnest) things in the world to say. I encourage you to say them aloud. Often. Loudly. In crowded rooms!

First up is my childhood favorite: flabbergasted. There’s something inherently funny about “flabber”, and “flabbergasted” is a pretty righteous thing to say in any circumstance.

Closely related is the slangy term: bogus. Much funnier and more useful than the similar “boathouse”. It always reminds me of the 1990s kid’s program Mr. Bogus, with the animated star being a tiny, yellow, gremlin-like character.

My first job out of school was mostly manipulating data from hospitals. I made up the name of a fictional hospital that I always used for my test data, and it was pretty fun to say: Loofey Gronk Memorial Hospital. Though that’s a bit lame, being the only made-up word in my list. The rest are all bona fides, more or less.

Speaking of work, there’s a new word at work, and it’s all the rage. Web Services Description Language, aka: WSDL, pronounced wizzdle. Technical terms and acronyms are always good fodder for entertainment.

Another good source is foreign languages. There’s a couple words from Russian that I think are particularly nice. First up: yablicka, which is the word for “apple”. It’s just plain fun to say.

The other is a Russian phrase that’s always applicable: shto eesho, which translates as “Hey, what’s next?”. Like I say, it’s eminently useful.

The other foreign word that makes our list is the perennial favorite Thai dish: duck choo chee. Pure brilliance! Beats the hell out of “duck in curry sauce”.

Then there’s the fun of: chunder, slang for vomiting. Not a pretty thing, but it sure rolls off the tongue, so to speak…

And then there’s people’s names. For some reason, people love to name their children something painfully stupid, as evinced by the longstanding stupid names thread on B3ta.com. One of my favorites is the “software methodologist” who created the Unified Modeling Language: Grady Booch. His name is so fun that it wound up being the team cheer for one of my project teams back during the Internet bubble.

More tech terminology. The group of users who have “root” or administrative privileges under unix is called the root group. Almost as much fun as duck choo chee, but without the fowl.

Okay, let’s get serious, now. We’re down to the four funnest things you could possibly ever say. Exciting, isn’t it?

Well, number four is an Indonesian island best known as the site of one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in recent history: the infamous Krakatoa! That one’s so much fun that it was a random exclamation of mine for years…

Number three is a bit of tongue twister, and requires some lead-in. If you’re a consultant, you have to bill your time to the client. If you run a consulting company, it’s important that your consultants’ time is always “billable”, because they’re only making money for the company when they’re billable. In other words, you have to maximize their billability. Who’d’ve thunk that consultants would be on the leading edge of language, in addition to technology?

Number two is budget. I shouldn’t need to explain this one. Just say it! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget! Budget!

And now we’re up to the last, final, most fun thing you could ever possibly say. It’s the name of a Serbian player on the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I offer up to you the magical name of Zarko Cabarkapa! Usage note: the ’Z’ is really a ’zh’, and the ’C’ is really a ’ch’, so the proper pronunciation is actually “Zharko Chabarkapa”. But any way you spell it—even in the native Cyrillic—Zarko Cabarkapa means Big Fun!

Have you got additions to this list? What’s your mouth’s favorite thing to say?

So I’m onsite at a company that makes vaccines. And like anywhere that does medical stuff, they’re given promo items from drug companies. So when I needed a sticky note, I grabbed one. It said the following (italics and color theirs):

This fall, think pneu.
That makes sense.

That makes sense? Uhh… no, it doesn’t. Why is autumn a particularly auspicious time to think about tires? In French, no less! And it’s a stupid word to begin with; who puts “pn” together with no vowel and calls that a single phoneme?

Well, actually… If you think about “pn” words—and there’s really only two kinds in English—you’ll eventually figure out what those sticky notes were advertising. But it’s still pretty bizarre that they’d choose the abbreviated “think pneu” and assert “that makes sense”. Freaks.

I suppose there’s some titillation value in the words Merriam-Webster choose to add to their dictionary each year. So this year I took the time to read the Boston Globe article that covered it.

And, of course, I also checked out the accompanying list of new words and the original Merriam-Webster list.

And there, toward the end of the list, was a word that really surprised me: polyamory.

They define it as “the state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time”, which is actually a pretty reasonable definition. It captures the openness idea, which is often overlooked. The only thing I think they missed was “the capacity to…”, which would admit polyfolk who aren’t actively maintaining multiple intimate relationships.

They also list polyamorist and polyamorous, which both make sense and are commonly used. But there’s also “polyamories”, a plural, which doesn’t seem to make a whole heck of a lot of sense to me. Polyamory is an abstract noun, and as such, the plural “polyamories” makes about as much sense as “bisexualities” or “peaces” or “sanities”.

But, hey, it’s a little bit more public awareness and acceptance of the idea, which can only be good. Cujos to Merriam-Webster! Now if only LiveJournal would put it in their spelling checker…

Is it hypocritical for newspapers to tout themselves as defenders of the English language while simultaneously butchering it whenever it is convenient?

Here’s a selection of recent headlines from the Boston Globe. You’ll note the grammatically egregious use of “slay” as a noun and/or adjective, rather than the proper nominal/gerund form, “slaying”.

IN SLAY CASE, NYC POLICE SEEK CLUES AT BAR SITE
SLAY VICTIM, 24, MOURNED IN BOSTON
‘SCHOOL CAME FIRST’ FOR NYC SLAY VICTIM, 24
OFFICIALS POINT TO SLAY CASE SUCCESSES
HUNDREDS PAY TRIBUTE TO SLAY VICTIM
GAS STATIONS ARE A FOCUS IN SLAY PROBE
PROSECUTORS SAY OTHER VICTIMS POSSIBLE IN N.H. SLAY CASE
BAIL SOUGHT IN 33-YEAR-OLD SLAY CASE
REWARD MONEY OFFERED IN PROBE OF NYC SLAY CASE
JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL IN THE HOPKINTON DOUBLE-SLAY CASE, VICTIMS’ KIN SAY
SLAY CASE MYSTIFIES A MAINE RETREAT
WEAPON FIGURES IN SLAY TRIAL
JURY SELECTED FOR TRIAL IN ’03 SLAY CASE
DEATH PENALTY RULED OUT IN GANG SLAY CASE
BAIL STAYED FOR ACCUSED IN TRURO SLAY CASE
SLAY CHARGES DROPPED VS. HOMELESS MAN
CHARITY HONORS SLAY VICTIM’S EFFORTS
SLAY SUSPECT OUT ON BAIL
OFFICER GRANTED BAIL IN GANG SLAY CASE
SLAY VICTIM MOURNED IN NEW BEDFORD
2D SUSPECT ARRESTED IN MBTA SLAY CASE
FORMER CORRECTION OFFICER PLEADS GUILTY IN SLAY PLOT
SLAY VICTIM’S GOAT BRINGS COMFORT IN E. FALMOUTH
MAN FOUND STABBED IN DORCHESTER IS CITY’S 27TH SLAY VICTIM
DEFENSE EYES DNA IN TRURO SLAY CASE
SLAY-PLOT SUSPECT EJECTED FROM COURT
FBI SEEKS MEETINGS WITH R.I. POLICE ON SLAY SUSPECT’S ARREST
SLAY SUSPECT ARRAIGNED

So an individual can be suspected of slay, be charged with slay, and be arraigned for slay. One can plot slay, probe slay, investigate cases of slay, and try slay. And believe me, we’re all victims of slay.

Obviously, this isn’t a case of one headline requiring a tweak, nor is it the doing of one marginally literate writer. It’s a systematic practice in which the Globe’s demonstrates its inability to write headlines in coherent English.

The Globe’s presumed justification for this practice would be that it is impossible to use proper grammar in their headlines, due to space constraints. However, one of those headlines is no less than 72 characters long. If we take that as a theoretical maximum length, then not a single one of the other 27 headlines would exceed that limit if we were to add the three-character “-ing” suffix that would make “slay” grammatically correct. So what, exactly, is their justification for this wanton butchery of standard practice? Answer: there is none. It is pure and utter caprice, reinforced with the weight of bureaucratic hubris.

I pointed this out in an email to the Globe’s so-called ombudsman two years ago. “Thanks for the course correction on the use of ‘slay’ in headlines. I’ve given the headline bosses the benefit of your wisdom.” In other words, “Fuck you very much; we’ll do as we please.” Proper grammar has no place in the Boston Globe, except when it can provide some entertainment value, in which case it is conveniently relegated to their weekly “The Word” column.

One of the most useful sites I’ve found for writers is Common Errors in English, which is maintained by WSU English prof Paul Brians. He provides a handy reference that is amusing and easily navigable. It rocks my world.

I recently purchased and read the book which he has made out of the site. It contains just the same information as you can find online, but I thought purchasing it a worthy way to support the site.

Last night, as I plowed through the ‘Y’ entries before finishing the book, I came across something I didn’t know and found highly amusing. It was in this entry for “Ye/The”.

What it says is this: “ye” as a synonym for “the” is a malapropism. “The” was originally spelled not with the digraph “th”, but with the old Anglo-Saxon thorn character (Þ): þe.

Big deal? Well, although it’s always represented the sound ‘th’, the symbol that represents the thorn has evolved over time. For a while it looked quite like the letter ‘P’. Then it evolved to look more like the letter ‘Y’. Thus, while “the” has always been pronounced “the”, there was a time when it *looked* like it was spelled “ye”. The thorn spelling was replaced by the “th” digraph in the late Middle Ages, but the thorn continued to be used for a long time in certain places, notably store signs.

Thus, while everyone knew “the” was spelled “the”, there were places that still used the thorn. Since the thorn looked like a ‘Y’, places like “Ye Chandler” spurred a popular misconception that “ye” was some old-school word (pronounced “yee”) that was a synonym for “the”. But there never was any such word as “ye”. Surprise!

Now, this does not extend to “ye” as a plural personal pronoun. That usage is fine, such as in the carol “O come all ye faithful”. No problem there, because there “ye” is a valid form of the old school “thee/thou/thine” pronouns. But “ye” as a synonym for “the” is just a myth that began when the use of the thorn character in English was discontinued.

And yes, both the thorn character and the sharp, pointy bit on a rose were both originally spelled: þorn.

It hasn’t yet been a month since I ranted about “lose” versus “loose” in this entry.

Less than a week later, I was reading “Better Available Light Photography” by Joe Farace and Barry Staver, published by Focal Press, an imprint of Butterworth-Heinemann, when I came across the following:

Once the clip test is evaluated, the balance of the film is then processed to achieve the best results. It’s easy to do a clip test and not loose one animated, important image.

Then, last night I was being a sensitive New Age guy, reading “Nothing’s Wrong: A Man’s Guide to Managing His Feelings” by David Kundtz, published by Conari Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, and read:

[…] change is constant and pervasive. Often it also is unannounced: a new job, a new family, a different place to live, changed priorities, getting or loosing money, an illness […]

Sometimes I feel like the only literate person on the planet. Then I wake up from my dream-state and discover to my horror that it’s true.

So after much delay, I finally sat down and read Lynne Truss’ extremely popular “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”.

As both a writer and an editor, I naturally approached the book with certain expectations: her correction of common misconceptions, a tone of authority, and clear, correct, and entertaining explanations of grammatical rules. I think that’s a fair set of expectations for a work subtitled “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”, and which describes itself as “The Runaway #1 British Bestseller”.

Frau Truss—anyone pontificating on grammar should be referred to by a German title—does start out quite strongly, dealing right up front with the marks whose use is most prone to error. She begins by devoting an entire chapter to a justifiably militant tirade against misuse of the apostrophe, which is sadly epidemic. She goes into quite a bit of detail on both the apostrophe and the comma, citing specific usage rules chapter and verse.

Even her section on colons and semicolons is reasonably clear, although not nearly so concisely put as the rules in my 2002 Missive to the DargonZine Writers on the Colon and Semicolon.

However, from that point on, Truss’ book goes all pear-shaped, as she explains that exclamation points and question marks should be used at will to control meter and tone, as if proper punctuation were subject to postmodern revisionism and prose was just another form of interpretive dance.

Most frustratingly, Truss proceeds to expound on italics, quotation marks, dashes, parentheses, ellipses, and hyphens, but gives the reader little more instruction than “These marks all mystify me”. Where are the rules of usage and the research behind them that were all cited in earlier chapters? Why bother including chapters on all these marks when you have no insight into their proper usage?

But the book does, after all, have panda bears on its cover, so that makes everything alright [sic], doesn’t it?

Actually, what does make it all right is that any progress in getting people to properly operate their own language is a Good Thing. However, it’s probably unrealistic to expect a single book to have any great impact upon such a longstanding and pervasive problem, since proscriptive writers and editors have been railing about public misuse for several centuries with no appreciable effect.

iniren is a native Russian, and I studied Russian for most of my college career, so when we started dating, I tried to revive what little I remembered of the tongue.

For the most part, iniren had no patience for it, and gave me little to no support, allowing me to flail around at random in hopes that I’d eventually give up. However, on one occasion, I provided an unexpected moment of amusement.

Earlier, I’d managed to wheedle out of her the adjective ВКУСНЫЙ (FKOOSNEI): “tasty”. I thought I’d compliment her by combining it with the second person singular pronoun.

Unfortunately, my memory or my pronunciation was faulty, and iniren heard a slightly different word: СКУЧНЫЙ (SKOOSHNEI).

Just look at those two words. You might think an intelligent race like the Russians would give nearly identically sounding words nearly identical meanings, wouldn’t you?

Well, you can see where this is going. The difference between FKOOSNEI and SKOOSHNEI is the difference between telling my girlfriend she’s “tasty”, and telling her she’s “boring”. And people say English is difficult?

Although she’s never let me forget that incident, this week I got the last laugh. When she came back from the Passover Seder, her mother asked her how it was. When she called down the stairway that it had been “ВКУСНЫЙ”, her mother (knowing nothing about my confusing the two words) heard “СКУЧНЫЙ”, causing iniren no end of chagrin.

I think I’ve been vindicated.

In recent months I’ve seen at least three college graduates on my friends list type “loose” when they meant “lose”, or vice versa, and it’s just as common an occurrence for the people who write for my magazine.

I find that surprising. The two words are completely distinct: in meaning, in part of speech, and in pronunciation. It shocks me that anyone could mistake one for the other, and it usually lowers my opinion of the author’s intellect when I see it.

So in an effort to ensure that doesn’t happen to you, I’d like to provide a little review. I’ll make it as quick and painless as possible, but it may require a bit of mental effort to internalize the difference.

Here’s the lazy person’s rule: if you say it aloud and get a “Z” sound, that’s “lose”; if you get a soft “S” sound, that’s “loose”. If, as a native English speaker, you have a reliable ear, that might be all you need.

But if not, here’s the gritty that is nitty…

“Loose” is usually an adjective. It describes something not firmly attached. Your belt is loose. A knot is loose. Some *thing* is loose. But it has absolutely nothing to do with something that is (or might become) lost, and you usually can’t “loose” something¹.

“Lose” is a verb; something can’t be “lose”. It is an action: you lose something. You lose your way. You lose your keys. You might even lose weight one of these days. If you lose something, it becomes lost; you can’t find it or don’t have it anymore.

That covers 99% of all cases. Unless you’re a purist, you can commit the above to memory and never look silly again.

¹ Now, for the purists out there, “loose” can, in fact, be a verb. In rare instances, you can actually loose something. However it still has the same basic meaning: to release or unattach. You can loose a boat from a mooring. You can loose an arrow. It’s like a more complete form of “loosening”, as you’d loosen a tie. But in none of these instances does the object you loose or loosen become lost. If you lost it, then you want “lose”, never “loose”.

“I before E except after C, except when said AY as in ’neighbor’ and ’weigh’…”

Uh, hello people? Can you spell “proficiencies” for me?

I know, they're just links, but they're pretty righteous. I thought you could use them. I'd post them to

b0st0n, except I don't want all the replies. And yes, I'm disabling replies here, too. Enjoy them.

http://www.cascadilla.com/arlington/bostonanagram.html
http://smileyhandface.blogspot.com/2006/02/boston-mbta-anagram-remix.html
http://flickr.com/photos/popplers/105342044/

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