Subjunctively moody

In his After Deadline column last week, New York Times editor Philip Corbett criticizes some overly complex sentences, reminding Times writers that, while Times readers needn’t be coddled, meanings need to be clear. One of his suggested corrections refers to this: [...] and Ms. King, who said she would ensure that the program be smart and entertaining. Mr Corbett has this to say:

At the end, there’s no need for the subjunctive be. The original assertion was something like, I will ensure that the program is [or will be] smart and entertaining. So, with proper sequence of tenses, make it was or would be.

He’s right, but this is a tricky one. We don’t use the subjunctive mood^[1] very often, so we’re not well versed in its use. Except for some common phrases, such as, So be it, and If I were king, the subjunctive has all but died out in speech and informal writing, and it’s uncommon even in formal writing nowadays. Spanish still uses it extensively (the rules for its use there aren’t the same as in English, though some are similar), but English, not so much.

And to top it all off, even when it is used we usually don’t notice: with notable exception of to be, most verbs use the same form for subjunctive and indicative in all but the third person singular. We may be using subjunctives, but we can’t tell.

A simple rule that many people remember is to use subjunctive with something that’s contrary to fact (as in the if I were king situation), but that only goes so far. In fact, it’s generally used not just for such conditionals, but also for demands, wishes, and desires. And that’s what makes it tricky with ensure.

A writer would correctly use subjunctive were he to say, Ms King said she would insist that the program be smart and entertaining. Be (subjunctive), not is (indicative), because of the demand. Ensure seems similar here: she insists that it be entertaining, so she will ensure that it be so. But no: she will ensure that it is so, or that it will be so. Assurance is not one of the situations where we use subjunctive mood. Why? Well, it just isn’t. Someone made these rules up a long time ago, and that’s that.

On the other hand, that should give us a clue as to why the rule is vanishing, n’est-ce pas?

---

^[1] Yes, mood. Subjunctive is a mood, not a tense, nor a case, nor an aspect. The other grammatical moods in English are indicative and imperative.

Premier[e]

At Westchester County Airport (HPN), there are (among others) the following two ads:

Tranquility Spa
Westchester’s premiere day spa.

Dominican Sisters Family Health Service
New York’s premier visiting nurse service.

Never mind, for the moment, the pretentious use of premier — we’re talking about (mostly) affluent Westchester County, NY, after all. But note that the Dominican Sisters got it right, and the day-spa folks blew it:

Premier refers to the best of something, the leading example.

Premiere refers to the first, not the best. And even if premiere were what they meant, its use in this context would be odd. One might refer to a premiere offer for their opening day, but this just doesn’t work.

Someone obviously did not use the premier advertising agency.

We decline!

I’m back from Prague, and recovering from the trip. I talked about the Czech language after my 2007 visit, and mentioned the case endings. This trip’s given me something else to say about that.

After the IETF meeting, during the vacation part of my stay, I moved to a hotel called The Golden Tree. In Czech, golden tree is zlatý strom, and there were a few things around that said that. But that’s the nominative case. Hotel names are frequently (usually, it seems) rendered as U [something], where the word u is like the french chez, meaning at the place of. That throws it into the genitive case, so the proper name of the hotel is U Zlatého Stromu.

Czech has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental), so the combinations of endings as nouns are declined and adjectives are changed to match can be dizzying.

Unlike German (but like other Slavic languages, such as Russian), Czech declines proper nouns, including people’s names. And they decline everyone’s names, not just Czech ones, or ones that look like they might be Czech.

This trip included a visit to the Czech Museum of Music, which had an exhibit called Beatlemánie, about the Beatles. I had to see that, of course.

It was amusing to see the names declined. The most interesting was Sir Paul’s. He was Paul McCartney when it was nominative, of course. But when a display talks about The Solo Career of Paul McCartney, it becomes Sólová dráha Paula McCarneyho.

Paula McCartneyho ?

Oy!

Send me an e-mail?

The New York Times has not just gone astray with its payment scheme; it’s gone completely off the deep end, gotten lost in the forest, fallen off the cliff and into a pit, and is knee-deep in any other mixed and fractured metaphor you can devise... linguistically.

See, they have recently updated their style guide, removing, according to editor Philip Corbett, some aging or outdated technical terms, such as CD-ROM, floppy disk, Dictaphone, Usenet, newsgroups, VHS, CAD-CAM and I.S.D.N. Yes, they used to use periods in ISDN, as they still do in I.B.M., I.P. address, C.P.U., and others. But I’m happy to see that they’re eliminating the dots in USB, URL, and PDF.

They also agree with me on capitalizing Web and Internet.

But here’s where they now err:

We no longer have to write about people sending an e-mail message — we can call it an e-mail. The term is also acceptable as a verb. (For now, at least, we are keeping the hyphen for this and similar coinages like e-commerce and e-reader.)

I’m apathetic, disinterested on the hyphenation issue. I, myself, omit the hyphen and prefer email, but I think it’s fine either way. But I insist that email, avec hyphen ou sans, be used in a parallel way to mail. It only makes sense, yes? And one would never say, I sent him a mail. Of course not.

A letter is parallel to an email message, and they should keep it that way. If one wants to be shorter, it’s easy: I sent him email, works fine, just as I sent him mail, does.

But the New York Times is giving in to sloppy, lazy usage, such as is unbecoming the Gray Lady.

Oh, Noes!

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

There’s a phrase given to us by the venerable computer game called Adventure, which fits many situations. The game, in which one explores caverns, searches for treasures, and solves puzzles to obtain the treasures and bring them back to the surface, contains two mazes.

Most adventurers find the first maze when they go south from a particular room in the cave. You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, says the computer, adding that there are passages leading off in all directions. One’s first thought is to go north to retrace one’s steps, but, well, the passages are twisty (and little), and going north from there only lands one in another room within the maze. Again, You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The directions are not random, and there actually is a well-defined maze here, which one can map. Enter the maze while carrying as many items as you can, and you can drop the items like bread crumbs. You have to keep carrying the lamp in order to see, but as you drop the rest, one by one, the rooms become distinct:

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There is a bottle of water here.

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There is tasty food here.

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are some keys on the ground here.

Interestingly, the maze comprises two lobes, connected by a single passage. Because the only (non-magic) exit from the maze is the way you came in, wandering into the far lobe makes it much more difficult to ever get out, and you’re likely to run out of battery power in your lamp, fall into a pit in the dark, and die.

Such is the maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The second maze is interesting only for its differences. It’s also entered by heading south, from a different starting room. Its map is much more complex than that of the other, with many more passages interconnecting the rooms, though with fewer rooms. When you enter it, you see, You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.

But this time you don’t have to leave bread crumbs; you have only to read the descriptions carefully:

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.

You’re in a maze of little twisty passages, all different.

You’re in a twisty maze of little passages, all different.

You’re in a little twisty maze of passages, all different.

...and so on.

The all-different maze is cute, and, as I said above, mostly there for its contrast with the all-alike maze (most adventurers stumble into the all-alike one first). There’s a treasure in the all-alike maze, so you have to go in there (and kill the pirate) in order to get it. There’s nothing you need in the all-different maze, and experienced adventurers just avoid it.

And anyway, it’s the first description that’s stuck with us as a catch phrase: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re having a discussion that keeps going around in circles with no hope for resolution: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re debugging a problem, but everything you try just makes the problem happen without adding any clue as to why: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

When you’re trying to deal with bureaucracy, and every attempt to get something done just sends you to another office that you know won’t help any more than the last did: You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Very useful sentence, that.

Rain, reign, rein

I was going to give today a miss, but then I read, for the 17,248th time, I think, the phrase given free reign. And now I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.^[1]

There’s rain, the water that falls from the sky. That can be free, but no one thinks that he was given free rain means anything interesting.

There’s reign, the rule of a king, or the metaphorical equivalent. One can be given the freedom to reign, I suppose, but think about it: what does it mean to be given free reign?

Then there’s rein, the strap by which we control a horse. When we pull the reins in, we control the horse more tightly. When we let up on the reins, we exert less control. And when we give [the horse] free rein, we let it do as it pleases.

The phrase is given free rein.

---

^[1] No, it’s just a Network reference.

As a pedant, I...

My town is moving into the 21st century, beginning a program wherein we can sign up to receive our property tax receipts by email. Of course, we have to mail them a piece of paper in order to sign up, but let’s not expect the moon, eh?

The letter announcing this and containing the form to send in begins this way:

As the Receiver of Taxes, it has been important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up to date and cost effective office practices.

Ms Breining, our Receiver of Taxes, has fallen into a very popular pit, one containing enough writers that I think she should be able to climb out on the others’ backs.

Any sentence that begins with as [role] must go on to have a subject that matches the role. I am the author of this entry. If I should say, As the author of this entry, I must be the subject of the rest of the sentence.

Correct: As the author of this entry, I think that getting language right is important.

Incorrect: As the author of this entry, getting language right is important.

The subject of the incorrect sentence is getting language right, but that is not the author of this entry.

It should be easy to get this one right, but it seems to be hard. A common error with the as [role] construction happens when there are two people involved, and the as gets attached to the wrong one:

As the representative on duty, call me if you have any problems.

The implied subject here is you (you call me), but it’s the me who is the representative on duty. Rewrite it one of these ways:

As the representative on duty, I am on call in case you have any problems.

As the representative on duty, I invite you to call me if you have any problems.

I am the representative on duty; call me if you have any problems.

In fact, it’s often best to avoid the as [role] thing. It’s prone to error, and it’s often awkward or stilted anyway. But if you want to use it, please use it correctly.

As the Receiver of Taxes, I consider it important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up-to-date and cost-effective office practices.

Maybe we’ll talk about the demise of the hyphen another time (she did use it in first-rate, but left it out of the other compound modifiers).

How many are that?

It might surprise you — it surprises me — that number agreement is a serious problem in technical papers and specifications. Having just reviewed a specification that’s full of number-agreement errors, I feel an urge to talk about the problem here.

In the easy case, things are... well... easy:

Bill and his brother are tall.

Bill and his brother is tall.

The second sentence is clearly both

1. wrong and
2. unambiguous.

That is, we know it’s wrong, but we also know what the writer meant to say, and, apart from tripping for a moment before reading further, we have no problem understanding this.

But try this pair:

I saw Bill and his brother, who are tall.

I saw Bill and his brother, who is tall.

In this case, both sentences are correct, but only the first one tells you that Bill is tall; his brother is tall in both of them. Now, it matters that we get the number correct.

Of course, you say. Any fool knows that.

Well, yes, mostly. But when sentences get complicated, some of this gets lost. Let’s try this one:

Data objects have a set of well-defined fields that include a single value and optional metadata.

Look at what we have in the sentence:

1. Data objects. [plural]
2. A set of fields. [singular]
3. Fields. [plural]
4. A single value. [singular]
5. Metadata. [collective; singular or plural]
6. A single value and optional metadata. [plural]

As it’s written above, the sentence says that multiple data objects share one set of fields. That’s not right, so let’s fix that first:

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields that include a single value and optional metadata.

Now comes the question that I don’t know the answer to: Which of the following is correct?

1. The set of fields contains one field with a single value and one or more optional fields that each contains metadata.
2. Each field in the set includes a single value and optional metadata.

The way the sentence is worded, number 2 is correct (imagine parentheses that start before well-defined and end after metadata). But the fact that the document is full of number-agreement problems makes it unclear what the authors really mean. The sentence has to be reworded:

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields that includes a field with a single value and optional fields with metadata. [Here, a set of well-defined fields is singular, so the verb is includes.]

...or...

Each data object has a set of well-defined fields; each field includes a single value and optional metadata. [Here, each field is singular, so, again, the verb is includes.]

The trap we too often fall into is forgetting that a set of things or a group of things, while it might look plural (especially when the clause defining the things is complicated), is singular. For example, compare these:

That group of Tea-Party voters who voted for the Republican candidate in the last election and who are looking for big tax cuts is influential.

Those Tea-Party voters who voted for the Republican candidate in the last election and who are looking for big tax cuts are influential.

Be careful of the difference. It can really matter sometimes.

Referring to those illegals

Last Thursday, I listened to a discussion on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about the use of the terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant. Go read the transcript and/or listen to the program.

There are a few issues conflated in this discussion, so let me separate them out:

1. There are the terms alien, immigrant, resident, and others, used to describe someone who’s in the United States and is not a citizen. These are sometimes combined, as in resident alien.
2. There are the modifiers illegal and undocumented (perhaps there are others as well), used to refer to a non-citizen who is here without a required visa, or who has overstayed his visa or violated its terms.
3. There’s the shortening, illegals, used as a collective term.

Issue number 1 is a complicated one, and is one that’ll get at least 40 answers from 50 people. One person might be perfectly happy to be referred to as a resident alien, while another might bristle at the alien part. Yet another might prefer visitor, saying that if he wanted to be an immigrant he’d apply for citizenship. And so on. We’ll never resolve that, and I don’t aim to try.

As for issue number 3, well: many such shortened collective terms are used derogatorily, and this one’s no exception. He’s one of those illegals, is never meant to be benign, and no protestations of, I didn’t mean anything by it, will convince me of that. So let’s just forget about that one.

But issue 2 is the interesting one: is it insulting to refer to illegal aliens (just picking aliens, here, somewhat arbitrarily)? Here’s how Ms Cepeda characterizes the question on the program:

No. You know what? I think it really is a debate about respect, and it is a debate about being careful how you say things. You know, I think one thing that’s really important to put into this context is that immigrants and Hispanics have felt very, very, very violently opposed by some people who would slur them with a term like illegals. Those things really, you know, go to the heart of the matter.

And, you know, some people who are advocates or even activists for the issue of illegal immigration have kind of gone over and focused on this, because it is important. It’s kind of like the day-to-day thing that could hit you in the donut shop when you least expect it. But, you know, as part of the larger immigration reform conversation, it’s perhaps not the most important conversation that we, as Americans and as new citizens, could be having.

Now, apart from my wanting to quote her hit you in the donut shop idiom, I wanted to highlight her point that it’s just about picking a term, on the one hand, but that it’s having respect for people and making them feel welcome (or at least not making them feel unwelcome) on the other. Generally, the people who refer to illegals don’t care a toss about making those people feel welcome at all. They’d rather see them go home.

Ms Cepeda points us to the legal statutes, and takes the terms from there:

But at the same time, you know, when I talk to DHS, when I talk to immigrations and Customs, immigration services, they say the same thing. We go by the letter of the law. Illegal immigrant, illegal alien, those are terminologies that can be found in the law. And, you know, that’s what they go by.

But it’s not quite as simple as that; here’s how I see it:

When we’re talking generally, about the law, about people, in general, who snuck in, who overstayed their visas... we can refer to them as illegal aliens and that’s pretty clear. We are, by the nature of our discussion, presupposing that there are people who have skirted the immigration laws. What we’re saying is that some people have entered or stayed illegally; referring to them as illegal aliens works.

But on the individual level, it doesn’t work. The police have to deal with illegal aliens, is fine; Joe is an illegal alien, is not: it’s making a judgment on Joe, and that judgment might not be correct. We might not have all the information we need. Joe has not had due process. He may be accused of being an illegal alien, just as he might be accused of any other crime. He might be guilty, and he might not.

On the individual level, referring to someone as an illegal alien is making a presumption of guilt. We prefer to take the approach of a presumption of innocence — something that’s notably lacking in how we treat non-citizens, though I continue to maintain that if presumption of innocence is a basic tenet of our justice system, it’s a human right that needs to be extended to everyone, regardless of what they’re accused of.

Of course, that means that there’s no simple term we can use for an individual that both conveys their status as being accused of illegal entry and does not make a presumption of guilt. That’s OK; I can cope with that. If I have to say, Joe is a citizen of Slobovia who’s accused of entering the U.S. illegally, that works. And that makes it easy to add, He denies the accusation, and explains the confusion with his visa status.

One singular sensation

I’ve run across this often, and, particularly, a few times recently: someone talked about singling out four talks at a conference; someone else spoke of a teacher’s singling out three students for criticism, though others had also done poorly on the assignment. Another wrote about the singling out of Muslim travellers, on suspicion that they might be terrorists.

The clue, here, should be the word single: you can’t single out multiple things. You just can’t. Please don’t try.

Four talks may be given as examples, three students may be selected, Muslim travellers may be picked on or set apart or characterized, whether or not they should be. But in none of these cases may they be singled out.

Using it incorrectly dilutes the term and devalues it, as is too often done with terms such as unique (the most unique) and literally (I literally died). We may have lost all of these, but I hope not.

Touring Beijing, appendix 2: Language

Of course, you know that I couldn’t get away from the China stories without saying something about the language.

When I arrived, I knew none of the writing at all, and only two useful things to say: nǐ hǎo (你好, hello... literally, you good), and xiè xiè (谢谢, thank you). Nice things, but not sufficient for much.

By the time I left, I still didn’t know much more to say in conversation. But I learned some interesting things in general.

What surprised me the most, I think, is that I learned to read quite a few of the characters. For those who don’t know, each Chinese character represents one syllable... with multiple different characters representing the same syllable, with different meanings. Each syllable has a meaning in itself, and combinations of syllables can make words with meanings different from the component syllables. For example, 大, dà, means big/large. 学, xué, means science or learning. Together, 大学 means university.

A lot of Chinese is put together as concepts. Similar to big learning becoming university, we have the words for entrance and exit, 入口 and 出口, respectively. The second character, kǒu, means mouth, or, figuratively, opening. And so the words mean in opening and out opening.

Chinese for China is 中国, zhōng guó, meaning middle country, and you can see the character for middle or center in many other contexts, for shopping center, and such. And because Chinese doesn’t separate things into parts of speech in the same way we do, 国, guó, can mean nation or national, so you see it in phrases such as national museum.

It was easy, from looking at the names of the stops in the subway system, to figure out 北 (běi, north), 南 (nán, south), 东 (dōng, east), and 西 (xi, west). You see Beijing (北京, north capital) around all the time, of course, so that one’s easy. The others show up in many location names. And there are gates (门, mén) all over the city (Tiān’ānmén, for example, 天安门). It then becomes easy to read the Chinese name for one subway stop, in full: 北京大学东门, Beijing University east gate.

It came in very handy to have learnt the characters for the four directions: on Thursday of touring, I left the Jishuitan subway station and headed east, looking for the lakes (starting with Xi Hai, West Lake) to walk around. Not finding an entrance soon, I figured I needed to go a block or two south to find it, so I turned right. I soon saw the Xizhimen subway station, which I knew to be in the wrong place entirely: I had to be significantly south and west of where I thought I was — or else someone had moved the station.

Looking at the street signs, though, I could see that I was going west, not south, and that turning left at the intersection I was approaching would send me south. See the photo to the right (taken a few blocks later, after I’d gone south on Zhaodengyu Road and was about to turn east onto Ping’anli West Avenue), and note that, while the street names are written in English, the directional arrows have only the Chinese characters... which it was very nice to know just then.

I also learned more about the tones in spoken Chinese (though I didn’t learn to properly reproduce them). Apart from a neutral tone, there are four tones in spoken Mandarin, which is what makes it sound, to western ears, either sing-song or whiny, depending upon one’s perception. Imagine three pitches, high, medium, and low. The first tone, designated in Pinyin with a straight line over the vowel (ō), is a steady high pitch. Second tone, designated with an acute accent (ó) starts at medium and rises to high. Third tone, designated with a caron (ǒ), starts at medium, dips to low, then rises to high. And the fourth tone, shown by a grave accent (ò), starts at high and drops to low. The Pinyin markings mimic graphically the directions of the pitch changes.

The same syllable may have different meanings in written Chinese, depending upon the character used to represent it. But in spoken Chinese, the tone conveys different meanings. For example, 茶 means tea, and is spoken in the second tone, chá. 喳 is in the first tone, chā, and means twitter or chirp. In the third tone, 衩 (chǎ) means panties, and in the fourth tone, 诧 (chà) means surprised. As in, you would be surprised if you tried to order tea and chirped panties instead.

Sign in a Chinese washroom

Over the sinks:

Swing and dry your hands in the basin, do not bring any drop!

Neighborhood synecdoche watch

A colleague and I recently came across the following sign:

This neighborhood reports suspicious activity.

Ha, ha, my colleague said, I don’t think the neighborhood does any such thing. The people in it may, but not the neighborhood.

Ah, me. Folks who laugh at such things think they’re so clever, don’t they.

Only, they’re not: such things are using a common and acceptable (and rather interesting, if you ask me) figure of speech called synecdoche (pronounced syn-EK-duh-kee) or metonymy (meh-TAH-nim-ee)... you get the challenge of discerning the difference between the two, and deciding which one is operative in this case.

We see these in use all the time. Right lane must turn right. (Yes, it’s the traffic that turns, not the lane itself.) The White House said today that.... (The White House is a building, and says nothing; a spokesperson for the U.S. President is who did the saying.)

If they make you laugh, that’s great: the world needs more joviality. Just don’t be so jovial as to think there’s anything wrong with these locutions.

If you do, I’ll attack you here, because, you know, the pen is mightier than the sword (and bits on the Internet are the mightiest of all).

Holly holy

The image to the right was the logo of Barking Pumpkin Records, a record label created by Frank Zappa in the early 1980s. The logo shows a pumpkin barking at a cat, and the cat exclaiming two Chinese syllables in response.

Let’s look at the Chinese characters here: 聖糞

A friend once asked a Chinese-speaking colleague what those two syllables mean, and the colleague hesitated, then responded, somewhat embarrassed, They mean... sacred... dung.

Or, in more idiomatic colloquial English: Holy shit!

The other day, I read a blog post (or perhaps it was a comment to a post), in which the writer typed Holly shit! With two ls. After shaking my head and saying, Moron, I wondered whether the guy might have more company in Morontown than we’d like to think. And so I asked Google...

...and I saw almost 85,000 hits (along with a suggestion for the better way to spell it). 85,000 web references that think holy has two ls. Sample text: HOLLY SHIT!!!! The Hippie movement was created by CIA.

Checking further, I found almost 31,000 references to wholly shit (sample, Wholly Shit They Found A Nuke In Iraq). But take heart: I see only about 7,000 references to holey shit (sample, Holey shit the achievements are so easy to obtain.), so there are limits, after all.

Least common denominator

For another comment about something a recent speaker said, we look at the guy yesterday who made a reference to least common denominator, and included a graphic that showed the fraction 9 / 12, then displayed it as 3*3 / 4*3, and concluded with 3 / 4. There are two problems with the graphic.

One is that it’s gratuitous. It has nothing to do with the colloquial meaning of least common denominator, which doesn’t relate to fractions or mathematics at all. In English rhetoric, it refers to a common kernel that can serve or satisfy everyone involved. Alternatively, it can be used disparagingly to refer to someone or something from which every distinguishing and distinguished characteristic has been removed, leaving only a common bit that’s dull and useless.

Some presenters seem to like sticking graphics on every Powerpoint slide they show — sometimes several per slide — whether or not the graphics add anything to the understanding of the slides. Presenters who do that think the graphics make their presentations snazzier.

They don’t.

But the other problem with the graphic is from a mathematical point of view: it’s not illustrating the concept of least common denominator at all. It’s an illustration of greatest common factor. When we reduce a fraction, as in the graphic, we find the greatest common factor of the numerator (the top of the fraction) and the denominator (the bottom) — the largest number we can find that goes evenly into both numbers, that divides both numbers with a remainder of zero. When we cancel that greatest common factor out, what’s left is the fully reduced fraction.

We use the least common denominator to compare (or add or subtract) two or more fractions.

Which is greater?: 5 / 12 ... or ... 9 / 20 ?

To answer that using fractions, we need to convert them into fractions with a common denominator, and we customarily use the least common denominator — the smallest number that is a multiple of both denominators. In this case, 12 = 4 * 3, and 20 = 4 * 5, so the least common denominator would be 4 * 3 * 5 = 60. Multiply both the numerator and denominator by the same amount, and we get 5 / 12 = 25 / 60, and 9 / 20 = 27 / 60. And, so, because 25 is less than 27, 5 / 12 is less than 9 / 20. And the difference between the two is (27 - 25) / 60 = 2 / 60 = 1 / 30 (which we reduced by finding the greatest common factor of 2 and 60).

I have no quibble with the colloquial use of least common denominator as a language idiom, with a meaning that doesn’t relate to the mathematical one (though I do think the usage is trite). But when you bring mathematics into it, please get the maths right.

Verbing of the worst kind

Sometimes, verbing weirds language more than at other times. Dogfooding is one of those cases, perhaps the most horrific verbing I’ve yet run across, turning they’re eating their own dog food into they’re dogfooding, and even making it transitive.

It refers to a company’s use of their own products, as a way to test the product, or sometimes to promote it ("See?: We’re eating our own dog food," and then "See?: We’re dogfooding our new product.")

Some reference put it in quotes, as in this one from December 2009:

Google is dogfooding the Google Phone and has given it to employees all over the world to test it.

Sometimes, there are no quotes, as though someone might actually consider it a real word. See this use, from January 2009:

I then asked if Gdrive is something Google is dogfooding internally. He laughed and repeated nothing I can comment on there. But I could tell he wanted to.

Wikipedia has an explanation of the origin, but I don’t buy it; I’ve watched eat our own dog food evolve this way over some 35 years:

1. First it was We’re eating our own cooking. That actually made sense, because our production of the products can be held as analogous to cooking a meal. As a restaurant does, we’ll sell it to you. But, here, look: our employees eat here too!
2. That morphed into We’re eating our own food. It’s still reasonable, but it’s lost the sense of who produced the food, a sense that was strong in the original. I heard this version for some time, until the first seemed to disappear completely.
3. Initially, the variation We’re eating our own dog food, was meant to be silly, perhaps an ironic reference that implied that our products are not the best, but we’re using them anyway. I know it’s only dog food, but it’s our dog food, so we’re eating it.
4. Alas, people thought that version was funny, and it stuck, eventually pushing out its predecessors entirely. The version with dog food has long been the only one anyone ever uses.
5. Finally, we got the inevitable shortening to a single word, along with turning it into a transitive verb. People still say, We’re eating our own dog food, in general, but We’re dogfooding SuperPanda Pro, is the common form when talking about a specific product.

I’d prefer to go back to We’re eating our own cooking. But, then, you all know I’m a pedant.

Possessing inheritance

There’s a car in my neighbourhood with a sign in the rear window that’s got an old joke on it:

I’m spending
my kids inheritance

The joke’s pretty trite, well worn, dinosauric, and not terribly funny. It’s also missing a possessive before inheritance.

And it’s funny: the sign maker has proven that he/she/it can do apostrophes, with I’m. But then we’re left wondering whether the inheritance being squandered spent would otherwise be going to one kid (my kid’s inheritance), or to two or more (my kids’ inheritance).

This stuff matters, you know!

OED3: printed, or not?

’Tis sad news, indeed: the Oxford English Dictionary will probably cease printed versions and will make the upcoming 3rd edition online only.

The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year, Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times. Asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: I don’t think so.

Almost one third of a million entries were contained in the second version of the OED, published in 1989 across 20 volumes.

The next full edition is still estimated to be more than a decade away from completion; only 28 per cent has been finished to date.

It’s sad, in that the world will miss a beautifully bound piece of work. No more will we be able to heft a volume and see several pages of definitions and references for just a single word. The OED is the most researched word reference there is.

But it’s not just a large tome: it’s a large set of large tomes. It takes up a great deal of shelf space, it’s very expensive (Amazon sells it for $1300, but they’re out of stock as I write this), and it takes them more than 30 years to put out a new edition, once they decide to get started. It’s sad that it probably won’t be printed, but it’s not surprising.

With an online version, users can access entries quickly and easily from their computers — and these days, that means iPads, iPhones, BlackBerry devices, and others of that sort — untethered from the couple-of-dozen weighty volumes, however nicely bound they be. Updates can go in incrementally, so every time you access what’s there, you get the latest version, with whatever updates they’ve put in. And cross-references are right there, simple and quick. When puggle sends you to echidna, which sends you to monotreme, you can flip from one to another with a click — you don’t have to run to the shelf to pick up a different volume.

Of course, even the online version is expensive. £240 is about $370, and that’s the annual fee — four years of that, and you’ve paid more than what Amazon wants for the printed second edition. Of course, you’re also paying for the convenience of having it online, as I note above. But ten or twenty years of twenty-pound-a-month subscription fees really add up.

The official word of Oxford University Press is that another printed version is still possible. I’m sure they want to keep their options open as they test the waters with this announcement. And they’ll still print the other, smaller editions, which abound: the Compact OED, the Concise OED, the Shorter OED, the collegiate version, the pocket version, and so on.

It really is a sign of the times.

The pluperfect subjunctive

I just ran a quick errand, and former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin gave me today’s blog topic while I was out. He was on a radio show on WNYC, on the program Tell Me More. And he said this:

Well, you know, I think the Latino community has been pretty invaluable in this recovery. I mean, if they wouldn’t have came here and helped us to rebuild, we wouldn’t be where we are.

One has to wonder what tense that is, if they wouldn’t have came here and helped us to rebuild.

Properly, it should be, if they hadn’t come here and helped us, but the construction he uses is more or less a common error. If they hadn’t [x] we wouldn’t [y], is very easily turned into, if they wouldn’t have [x], we wouldn’t [y], because it sounds more parallel. But it isn’t, in fact. The conditional clause, correctly put in the pluperfect subjunctive, is "if [person] had [or hadn’t], followed by the past participle of the verb — in this case, come here.

Of course, Mr Nagin got the past participle wrong, as well: came is the past indicative, not the past participle. One would think that a mayor of a major U.S. city might know how to speak proper English, but, well, one would be wrong, wouldn’t one?

Alternatively, the sentence could be cast this way (my preference): Had they not come here and helped us to rebuild, we would not be where we are now. But that sounds a bit too hoity-toity, doesn’t it?

A businessman from the midwest is on a trip to Boston, and he’s been told that the first thing he has to do while he’s there is find a good seafood restaurant and eat some scrod. It is, he’s told, what Boston is known for.

So the guy gets into a cab on his first night there, and the cabbie says, Where to, Mac? The businessman replies, Take me to the best place to get scrod!

The cabbie turns to face him and says, Mac, I been drivin’ in this town for thirty-two years, and this is the first time I ever heard that used in the pluperfect subjunctive.

Are you hip?

The New York Times Standards Editor, Philip Corbett, has something to say about the word hipster:

We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang hipster? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

The word is not new, of course. The O.E.D. dates it to the 1940s and helpfully equates it with hepcat. American Heritage offers this quaint definition: One who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes, especially a devotee of modern jazz.

Our latest infatuation with hipster seems to go back several years, perhaps coinciding in part with the flourishing of more colloquial (and hipper) blogs on our Web site. In 1990 we used the word just 19 times. That number rose gradually to about 100 by 2000, then exploded to 250 or so uses a year from 2005 on.

Then there’s the Brooklyn connection: our archive confirms that Kings County is the very center of hipsterdom. Ninety-six Times pieces in the past year that included the word hipster also mentioned Brooklyn, edging out even once-hip Manhattan, which had 87 overlapping mentions. Queens trailed badly with 33, while the Bronx merited only a handful and Staten Island just two.

In any case, hipster’s second life as hip slang seems to have lost its freshness. And with so many appearances, I’m not sure how precise a meaning it conveys. It may still be useful occasionally, but let’s look for alternatives and try to give it some rest.

Those of us in the New York City take no surprise in the ordering of the boroughs, except perhaps that Staten Island rated as many as two hip mentions.

Go, man, go.