The Washington Post compiles a helpful list; it’s up to 200. I am guilty of using the following in speaking (and the first one listed here in writing, too – alas):
Any “not-un” formulation (as in “not unsurprising that you’d use that cliche”)
Less than you think (how do you know what I think?)
More often than not
The new normal
For all intents and purposes
Don’t get me wrong …
Some clichés irritate more than others. I tend to stop listening when I hear “Orwellian” or “double-down.”
h/t JG
Lawyer and language genius Bryan Garner over at LawProse.org spells out, in typically lucid fashion, how to compose documents when you know they will be read on a computer screen rather than on paper.
1.Summarize. It’s important to learn the art of summarizing concretely. Avoid airy generalizations and instead make pithy, practical, vivid summaries. These should always appear at the fore. (By the way, a LawProse survey has demonstrated that 87% of headings that say “Executive Summary” are highly misleading: what follows is a true summary only 13% of the time.)2.Give bearings. The architecture of your writing must be overt: you must use highly informative headings, preferably full sentences that amount to succinct propositions.3.Cut the clutter. Clutter is more anathema than ever. With on-screen reading, it’s even easier to flick over pages with just a scan. Readers can skim page after page with just a swipe of the finger. So anything extraneous must be eliminated altogether or radically subordinated. Anything that sets the reader to skimming or skipping must go.
You must always edit any serious document by hand, after printing it out. Sending an important document without that step is a serious mistake.
A friend in the media emailed me this morning: “Everyone keeps talking about hostages having been taken in Paris. Doesn’t the word ‘hostage’ imply a demand on the part of the terrorists? They made no demands; they intended all along to slaughter them. Wouldn’t captive be a more appropriate word, or am I over-thinking this?”
I replied: “You are definitely right about ‘hostage’ being the wrong word and for the reasons you say. I would say that ‘captive’ is also the wrong word, because captives are prisoners – not intended victims of murder. At the very least, one ‘holds’ a captive for a predetermined period of time; this was not the case yesterday. To see how ‘captive’ is the wrong word: One would not say that a person killed in his/her or another person’s home is a captive – same for a person killed in a restaurant in a drive-by. I think ‘intended victim’ is the closest. There is no single word for ‘terrorist victim,’ and it seems discourteous to refer repeatedly to the slain as ‘terrorist victims’ – two awful words to describe innocent souls.”
My friend’s reply: “Alas, ‘intended victim’ is clumsy.”
True.
About this one can truly say, There is no word.
Many Italian Americans pronounce cucumber – “cetriolo” in the Italian dictionary – this way: ‘jadrool’.
In Fairport, New York, where I grew up, there were lots of Italian American families, and I had many Italian American friends (still do). I married an Italian American from Liverpool, New York, and have a son from this marriage who, though he is only *half* Italian American, regards himself as *almost completely* Italian American. I noticed the way my friends and my (then) in-laws and wife pronounced words for food dishes did not correspond (to my ear) to either the spelling or the pronunciations provided in my fat dictionary. Writer Dan Nosovitz of AtlasObsucra.com explains why, in How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained:
Let’s do a fun experiment and take three separate linguistic trends from southern Italian dialects and combine them all to show how one Standard Italian word can be so thoroughly mangled in the U.S.
First: “The features that you’ll find across a lot of these dialects, and one that you still hear a lot in southern Italy today, is vowels at the ends of words are pronounced very very softly, and usually as more of an ‘uh’ vowel,” says Olivo-Shaw. D’Imperio is a little more extreme, calling it “vowel deletion.” Basically: if the final syllable is a vowel? You can get rid of it. Vowel deletion is common amongst many languages, and is done for the same reason that, sometimes, vowels are added: to make the flow from one word to another more seamless. It’s easiest, in terms of muscle movement, to transition from a vowel to a consonant and vice versa. A vowel to a vowel is difficult; in English, that’s why we have “a” versus “an” in phrases like “a potato” or “an apple.” Some Italian words that would follow food words, like prepositions or articles, would start with a vowel, and it’s easier to just remove it so you don’t have to do the vowel-to-vowel transition.
The stereotypical Italian “It’s a-me, Mario!” addition of a vowel is done for the same reason: Italian is a very fluid, musical language, and Italian speakers will try to eliminate the awkwardness of going consonant-to-consonant. So they’ll just add in a generic vowel sound—”ah” or “uh”—between consonants, to make it flow better.
Second: “A lot of the ‘o’ sounds will be, as we call it in linguistics, raised, so it’ll be pronounced more like ‘ooh’,” says Olivo-Shaw. Got it: O=Ooh.
And third: “A lot of what we call the voiceless consonants, like a ‘k’ sound, will be pronounced as a voiced consonant,” says Olivo-Shaw. This is a tricky one to explain, but basically the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant can be felt if you place your fingers over your Adam’s apple and say as short of a sound with that consonant as you can. A voiced consonant will cause a vibration, and voiceless will not. So like, when you try to just make a “g” sound, it’ll come out as “guh.” But a “k” sound can be made without using your vocal cords at all, preventing a vibration. So “k” would be voiceless, and “g” would be voiced. Try it! It’s fun.
Okay so, we’ve got three linguistic quirks common to most of the southern Italian ancient languages. Now try to pronounce “capicola.”
The “c” sounds, which are really “k” sounds, become voiced, so they turn into “g”. Do the same with the “p”; that’s a voiceless consonant, and we want voiced ones, so change that to a “b”. The second-to-last vowel, an “oh” sound, gets raised, so change that to an “ooh.” And toss out the last syllable. It’s just a vowel, who needs it? Now try again.
Yeah. Gabagool.
My Central New York State friends and family didn’t share the famously distinctive accents of their New Jersey brethren, but they did pronounce “Prosciutto” like this: “pruh-zhoot” (or “bruh-zhoot,” beginning with the voiced consonant).
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P.S. – A “jadrool,” you should know, can mean moron as well as “cucumber.”
h/t BD
“Memory” – or memoria – is one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. Write Brett and Kate McKay in their excellent blog “The Art of Manliness”:
Anciently, almost all rhetorical communication was done orally in the public forum. Ancient orators had to memorize their speeches and be able to give them without notes or crib sheets. Note taking as a way to remember things was often looked down upon in many ancient cultures. …
Because the orations of ancient rhetoricians could last several hours, they had to develop mnemonic devices (techniques that aid memory) to help them remember all the parts of their speeches. The most famous and popular of these mnemonic devices was the “method of loci” technique.
The method of loci memory technique was first described in written form in a Roman treatise on rhetoric called ad Herennium, but it also made appearances in treatises by Cicero and Quintilian. It’s an extremely effective mnemonic device and is still used by memory champions like Joshua Foer, author of the recent book, Moonwalking With Einstein.
To use the method of loci, the speaker concentrates on the layout of a building or home that he’s familiar with. He then takes a mental walk through each room in the building and commits an engaging visual representation of a part of his speech to each room. So, for example, let’s say the first part of your speech is about the history of the Third Punic War. You can imagine Hannibal and Scipio Africanus duking it out in your living room. You could get more specific and put different parts of the battles of the Third Punic War into different rooms. The method of loci memory technique is powerful because it’s so flexible.
In his excellent blog, LawProse, Bryan Garner makes a good case for trying to memorize the prose of good writers.
What did David Foster Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson have in common? They taught themselves to write better using the same technique: reading short passages from superb writers, trying to re-create from memory the passages they’d just read, and then assessing how their own versions compared with the originals. The assumption was always that the original was superlative—and that each departure from exact replication was a slight failure. It’s a superb technique to improve your command of syntax, punctuation, and phrasing. …
Here’s what David Foster Wallace said about the exercise: “If you’re like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate the passage that you’ll actually learn what’s going on.” Robert Louis Stevenson called the exercise “playing the sedulous ape.” He said: “I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the coordination of parts.”
So even though the best exercise is to repeat the drill using the same passage, this technique is not an exercise in rote memorization and reproduction. It’s a technique to improve your attention to the building blocks of superb writing and to develop your feel for them. As you do that, you’ll be able to appreciate the cadences, syntax, punctuation, etc. in your own writing.
Read the whole post and try one of Garner’s nifty practice exercises.
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photo by Bob Basil
Read more at the always alert, amusing, and erudite Language Log.
Regarding Devoney Looser’s ‘Chronicle of Higher Education’ article “Me and My Shadow CV: What would my vita look like if it recorded not just the success of my professional life but also the many, many rejections?” my friend Jonathan Mayhew writes,
Nobody cares about your list of rejections and failures. When I first saw the title of this essay I thought it would be about something much more interesting: the parts of the scholarly formation that seem less scholarly but that somehow affect one’s writing: my study of jazz and percussion, my obsession with prosody: all the things I never wrote about but that are essential to who I am: for my friends, it could be their work as zen masters, or being in a band: the translations someone has worked on but not published.
The point the article is trying to make is that we see a cv loaded with stuff but don’t see the rejections and failures that everyone experiences. The longer the cv, the longer the shadow cv too, because someone more active will also have more opportunity not to get grants they apply for. Everyone knows this, so it’s supposed to be great for younger people to see that these successful people have also failed. I get the point, but it is a stupid article because it is not the one I would have written with this title. (Sorry.)
My shadow CV would certainly include a long section on hitchhiking, an obsession of mine for several years during which I learned how to talk with many different kinds of people. (When I graduated from SUNY/Buffalo no one – friend, family, or foe – believed me when I told them, with the exception of my then-future, now-former wife, because I seemed to have spent more time on the road than on campus – or in New York state, for that matter.)
Also on my shadow CV would be my study of the piano (thank you, Mom and Dad, for the lessons and for the summer music camps). I feel my devotion to that instrument pouring into my palms as I type this. After I broke the pinky of my right hand in a stupid fight when I was in eleventh grade – it was poorly reset – my repertoire and record collection for several years thereafter focused almost exclusively on jazz. (I named my son after Miles Davis.) Now I play all kinds of things – this week it’s Arvo Pärt, some old hymns, always some Bach, and some easy & winsome pieces by a fellow named Charles Koechlin.
A third section would have to describe my study of radical politics and conspiracy theories, to which I was introduced, as most of us are, I would guess, in our young university years. It became an interest, and then a hobby, while I was on the road riding shotgun and listening to drivers talk about UFOs, the Illuminati, the CIA, JFK, Jonestown, and lizard people, and those secret and super-powerful, super-rich cabals controlled by Mormon or Catholic or Jewish magnates (or by the British Royal family!). When the drivers got tired of talking, we’d listen to the radio and learn even more. I went from hobbyist to serious amateur while putting together my book on the New Age movement. My correspondence with people in far out religious movements tended to be very vivid, to say the least, and I treasure it to this day. I never became a believer in the conspiracies, or in the religions, alas – not that I ever wanted to – though I do prefer the grand verbal edifices they produce to fictions like novels, and by a wide margin. (My favourite “researcher” is Dave Emory.)
reposted from basil.CA
In a recent piece in The Guardian, “Unfinished story … how the ellipsis arrived in English literature,” Alison Flood describes the work of Cambridge University professor Anne Toner, who locates the origin of the ellipsis – “the mark of incomplete speech” – in Renaissance English drama,
pinning it down to a 1588 edition of the Roman dramatist Terence’s play, Andria, which had been translated into English by Maurice Kyffin and printed by Thomas East, and in which hyphens, rather than dots, mark incomplete utterances by the play’s characters. … Although there are instances of ellipses occurring in letters around the same time, this is the earliest printed version found by Toner following her chronological research into the earliest dramas in print.
“This was a brilliant innovation,” she writes in Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission, a history of the use of dots, dashes and asterisks to mark a silence of some kind, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press.
[Note: Above I use an ellipsis, the one before “Although,” to indicate missing or removed words rather than “incomplete speech.”]
Toner’s favourite uses from literature:
From Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne:
“Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing.”
From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot:
“ I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
From The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
“… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.”
From “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson:
“’Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all -”
Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West:
“if I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—”
Virginia Woolf imagines death by a bomb in her diary:
“Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so – Then a swoon; a drum; two or three gulps attempting consciousness – and then, dot dot dot.”
Sophos, the esteemed network-security company, is starting a new series on its always erudite blog. It is called “What Is …,” and it promises to turn “technical jargon into plain English.”
The inaugural post, written by Paul Ducklin, is called “What is … a VPN?”
VPN stands for “virtual private network.” Writes Ducklin:
On your own network, you get to set the security rules.
You can make sure your router has a decent password; you can keep everything patched; you can run security software on all your devices; and so on.
But once you’re on the road, whether it’s free Wi-Fi at the coffee shop or the business network in the airport lounge, you don’t have the same control.
For all you know, the network you’re using might not merely have been hacked by crooks, it might have been set up by crooks in the first place.
One solution is to be careful, and stick to secure websites for sensitive work such as uploading documents or online banking.
But you are probably giving away plenty of information anyway:
- Some secure websites include links to insecure sites, which leave a visible trail.
- Some applications use secure connections, but don’t bother to check if they’re talking to an imposter server.
- Some applications use insecure connections, but don’t tell you.
- When a program connects to, say, https://bank.example/, it first asks the network, “I need bank.example. Where do I find it?”
In other words, your computer’s internet connection is a bit like a conversation two rows behind you on the bus: even if most of it is inaudible, you can nevertheless be pretty sure what it’s about.
That’s where a VPN, short for Virtual Private Network, comes in.
The idea is surprisingly simple.
You get your computer to encrypt all your network data (even if it’s already encrypted!) before it leaves your laptop or phone, and send the scrambled stream of data back to your own network.
When the scrambled data is safely back on home turf, it is decrypted.
Only then is it sent onto the internet in its unscrambled form, just as if you were at home.
The encrypted internet link, known in the trade as a tunnel, acts like an long, secure, extension cable plugged into your own network.
Unless the crooks can crack into the encrypted tunnel itself, they’re no better off at hacking you than if you were back at home or in the office.
So, you have neutralised any advantage the crooks were hoping for because you were on the road.
And that, very briefly, is a VPN.
Read the whole thing. It is completely lucid.
This is a wonderful start to the series.
I prefer my classical-piano sheet music to be professionally edited, published, and printed. I like the help with fingering editors provide, and I like big easy-to-read pages in front of me.
When I am experimenting with new (to me) composers, though, I like to experiment without making a monetary investment. (I will certainly make the *time* investment, practicing.)
Free-scores.com is a superb resource for students and instructors (and for the people who help support them). Scores and sheet music not subject to copyright are made available to music-players everywhere.
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