grammar – Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Under the Radar

This metaphor gives me the chance to engage in a bit of aviation-geekery. I am also certain I can figure out a Holiday angle, as the season did suddenly come upon me by surprise after a year that dragged on, slowly: a rarity at my age. Such unexpected events can be said to have flown under the radar.

So where did it come from, this term? The OED has many radar-related metaphors we use constantly, and they’d provide good training on the vagaries of phrasal verbs (ones that have a preposition after them) for English-Language Learners. Consider the nuances between these sentences:

Sorry I missed the meeting. It wasn’t even on my radar.
Several unpopular provisions of the law flew under the radar until just before a final vote in the Senate.
Briefly the darling of campus technologists and a few educators, the use of virtual worlds in learning fell off the radar after just a year or two.

“Below the radar” and “under it” pretty much imply the same thing: something slipped in unnoticed. Storms actually do this and so can stealthy aircraft or low-flying ones.

These metaphors started turning up in the 1980s; I find that date unusual, as radar played an enormous role in aerial warfare during the Second World War. The word itself is an acronym for “Radio detection and ranging,” first appearing in 1940, when the United Kingdom used it to great effect to detect Luftwaffe aircraft bound for British cities during the Battle of Britain. At the time, London claimed that their anti-aircraft gunners were doing so well because their eyesight had been improved by eating lots of carrots.

Step back a moment. I recall when that lie, worthy of a Monty-Python skit, still had some currency. The truth of the matter did not fly quite under the radar, as the Germans knew about British radar installations and attacked them. They had radar of their own, as did all the major combatants.

You can find an interesting history of British radar myths at The Spitfire Site, where I borrowed the Creative-Commons image above of a German radar installation. Happy landings!

And it cannot hurt to eat more carrots.

Please send interesting words and metaphors and send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Word of the Week! Acrologia

If this word is not in your personal dictionary–I’m looking at you, students–put it there. No, it does not appear in any form in The OED, yet. A friend shared it with me a week ago, but it’s a common-enough stylistic error in student work:

He is considered imminent in his field of study (instead of “eminent”)
The committee redacted the report (instead of “edited”)

Usually, students and other careless folk employ acrologia alongside a poorly used thesaurus: in the attempt to sound more academic, they sound “off” or even hilarious. It also marks the confidence man’s trade. Consider The “funeral orgies” noted by The King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He means “obsequies,” and his attempt to cover up his mistake would make any first-year student practicing the art of BS proud:

It’s a word that comes from the Greek word ORGO, which means outside or open or abroad, and the Hebrew word JEESUM, which means to plant, cover up, or inter. So, you see, funeral orgies are simply open, public funerals.

Since The King is trying to punch above his intellectual weight (which is slight) it’s acrologia.

Acrologia is a subset of malapropism. We all do that, but we often encounter it afflicting ridiculous characters in drama, since actors first stepped on stage. Malapropism can cause low-brow guffaws when coupled with a non-native speaker’s natural mistakes in vocabulary or pronunciation. Dr. Caius, noted in last week’s post, says in one line of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that he shall be the turd, when in fact he means third.

Acrologia also would not, in my estimation, include instances of mistaken idioms. as in “We use to go to Florida every year” (instead of “used to go”) or “suppose to” instead of “supposed to.” These errors come from how we write out the sounds of speech, not from an attempt to sound academic. The words remain the correct term, but the forms do not.

Some words that may have once provided examples of acrologia slide under the door, over time. In American English, even formal writing, we no longer make much distinction between “reluctant” and “reticent,” the latter (to me) implying a reluctance to speak: that person of few words in our talky-talk times.

At our Web server I’ve a list of commonly confused words that I post for my students. They have a week to correct the instances or lose 10 points on a paper. If you have more such confused and confusing words, send them, along with other good words and metaphors, by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of the King faking his sorry about “Funeral Orgies” stolen blatantly, in honor of The King and The Duke.

Words of the Week! Three Two-Letter Words

At the start of a troubled year and the return to classes, I decided to play it safe with the linguistic equivalent of “comfort food.” We could use a bit, true?

I will soon feature a lineup of timely words, including “sedition,” “impeach,” and “riot,” whose origins and uses may be of interest to both native speakers and English-language learners. Somehow writing about such things as words makes their awful reality more tolerable.

As political events of great import unfold around us, let’s turn for a moment to aiding newcomers to the English language. Consider this: why do we say “he lives in Virginia” or “she lives in Fairfax County” but “I grew up on Parkwood Avenue?”

And we wonder why prepositions are so hard to master. As I discovered while learning Spanish, the best method may be to memorize idiomatic usages and repeat them, frequently, with gentle corrections coming from those who grew up speaking English. Most of these speakers can often tell a learner what “sounds right,” even if we don’t know the rules.

As for rules: the Voice of America’s page about in/on/at shows us that, for position, “in” points to the most general location. Thus, “I lived for a year in Madrid,” while “on” gets more specific, as in “My apartment was on Calle Huesca,” yet “at” gets more specific still, as in “at numero 27 Calle Huesca” or “at the corner of Calle Huesca and Infanta Mercedes.”

Speaking of Mercedes, there’s the exception, where “in” gets quite specific: you can be “in” a car, but you are “on” a larger vehicle or vessel unless you mean you are literally inside a ship, airliner, or the carriage of a train. Then you are indeed “in” the ship, plane, or train.

The pilot is in the biplane, while the wing-walker is on it. Here’s an extended example:

We rode in our car to the airport, left it at the extended parking lot, departed on a plane, where I managed to leave my reading glasses in the airliner! We flew to Miami and got on a cruise ship, where we had a cabin on the starboard side at the stern of the ship. We stayed in our room the first two days, as we were too seasick to be on deck. We were very happy to be on dry land again, when the ship was in Jamaica. We docked at Ocho Rios but stayed at a small hotel on the north side of the island.

These little words are harder than they seem!

Then we have figurative uses of these prepositions. Back to my childhood, for a moment. While I did have a mean-tempered neighbor who told me to “go play in traffic!” I can assure readers that I did not actually grow up in the street or on it, in a literal sense.

The shades of meaning here are key for one (and not the only) distinction between “in” and “on.” If you are “in the street” you could be hit by a car. If you are “on the street” the meaning becomes figurative, for walking about in an urban area, unless you happen to fall down. Then you could both be “lying on the street and in the street.” We also refer to the homeless as being “on the streets” at times. Protestors and rioters (here come those future posts) are said to be “in the streets.”

As for time? Another set of distinctions appear for these words when we move to chronology. Again, the VOA page helps a great deal. Consider this example:

At 3:00 am on July 7th in 2020 we saw the peak of the meteor shower.

We’d usually skip the “in” here, inserting a comma for the preposition, but I added “in” to demonstrate the shades of specificity that distinguish our three words. They help to master idiomatic phrases such as “at the stroke of midnight,” “at noon,” “in the afternoon,” “on the day of reckoning,” and so on.

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Title image courtesy of me and Photoshop; Creative-Commons licensed wing-walker image from Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Vestigial

Dr. Joe Hoyle in our Business School came to the rescue again today, with a word that I associate with “tail,” for some bizarre neuron-event that burned the image into my head, perhaps when reading Philip K. Dick’s science fiction or during a daydreaming session in a high-school Biology class. Yes, we humans have the last remnant of a tail at the tips of our spines. That final bone is our coccyx.

The OED, as usual, gives more nuance here; something vestigial is not merely a remnant but one that survives in “degenerate, atrophied, or imperfect condition or form.” That string of adjectives says it all. If some island were the last vestige of a sunken continent, then it becomes vestigial. Though of Latin origin, the usage proves recent; the OED does not date our word before the mid-19th Century.

Our bodies are full of vestigial organs and other features, no longer needed as humans evolved: the appendix, our wisdom teeth, and more as detailed in this piece about vestigiality.

Writers beware of one issue: some Google searches for synonyms turned up “immature” or “unformed.” The latter might work, for something like the coccyx. But the former word implies that the subject might mature one day. Though not all eggs become chicks and chickens, neither egg nor chick is a vestigial chicken. An eggshell, however, is the last vestige of an egg.

Please nominate a word or metaphor useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

image of appendix courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Word of the Week! Harum-Scarum

I have had a rather rushed and chaotic week renovating a house we rent, just ahead of new tenants arriving. Thus, I’ve acted rather harum-scarum about this blog, and that gives me a good opportunity to share a favorite word often found in English Literature before 1900.

The OED Online shows a likely etymology as a rhyme made up of hare + scare. If you have walked up on a bunny and watched it flee wildly, going one direction, then another, you get a sense of the recklessness and panic of the resulting harum-scarum behavior. The term is not very old, and the oldest example (perhaps misheard by the writer) from the 17th Century is harum-starum!

Wild, rash, reckless, chaotic, running one way, then another! I frequently see it in Dickensian prose about a “harum-scarum fellow” one cannot trust to act calmly. Not long ago I chastised a friend about his undependable “harum-scarum friends,” knowing that a fellow English Major would get the reference.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Image from Nick Park’s excellent 2005 film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, just because I could not resist.

Word of the Week! A Priori

Yes, I know it is two words, but you will hardly ever encounter this phrase or its counterpart a posteriori outside academia. Inside it, the Latin term speaks volumes and appears often enough to merit recognition in the blog. The phrase occurs as adjective and adverb. I often run into it, casually, as a noun. That usage does not appear in my references (but I like it anyway).

I first puzzled over a priori concepts (and had more than a few of them toppled)in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at The University of Virginia. As I came to understand it then, the term meant “principles we assume to be true with out any further questioning,” an idea that I came to see as fundamentally at odds with academic inquiry. A priori ideas were, in my graduate program at Indiana heavy with postmodern literary theory, lampooned.

I suppose this a priori statement would get the founder of UVA, Thomas Jefferson, in trouble were he to write in an essay for some of my grad-school classes:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That Declaration gave us one of the most famous a priori statements in recorded history and began a revolution that one hopes has not ended. But wait. It appears that I need more schooling before I make any claims a priori. I assumed something, and as a student once said in class, ” ‘assume’ makes an ass of ‘u’ and me.”

When I open the pages of The American Heritage Dictionary, my sense of our phrase comes third. Instead, the reference book gives “proceeding from a known or assumed cause” pride of place. The OED Online puts my sense of a priori second, as “in accordance with one’s previous knowledge or prepossessions.” The dictionary also provides a clear 1862 example, “Reason commands us, in matters of experience, to be guided by observational evidence, and not by à priori principles.”

We have lost the accent over the “a,” but I lost more in my reasoning without further investigation. Both reference works imply that a priori ideas do not provide the final word for anything. They are, instead, merely presuppositions for making future claims. That works well with fundamental principles of academic reasoning. H.W Fowler’s classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage links a priori reasoning to deduction. Mr. Holmes would be proud of us.

A priori reasoning works well outside revolutionary manifestos, the Humanities, or detective work; it is, in fact, essential in the natural sciences. In physics, bodies near the Earth fall at 32 feet per second per second. It was not until Galileo’s era that we came to understand how gravity is related to the mass of a planet and would not be the same on other heavenly bodies. Empirical evidence followed. That new scientific principle became, then, a new a priori concept for those working in the field.

With the end of the semester nigh, consider the a priori concepts you have had challenged or overturned in your life’s journey. More will follow, a posteriori when learning new ideas. I leave that up to the reader to learn, along with the meanings of a posteriori.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here. If you want to read more about whether Sherlock Holmes employs deductive or inductive reasoning, have a peek here.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Bacchanalia

With Spring Breaks blooming like daffodils across America, I decided that I would nominate a word myself.

In case my choice gives offense, I admit–and dare hope–that most students will do community service, visit family, or engage in healthy and safe activities during their Spring Breaks. In my experience, I was too poor to go anywhere except right home.

Such a low-key respite from schoolwork is not, however, the reputation of the annual student holiday. In fact, we have an ancient and sacred ancestor for today’s decidedly profane revelries, a term that managed to survive two millennia without much alteration: Bacchanalia. Bacchus, the Roman god of “wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy” (Wikipedia), survives as well; he seems a less dangerous re-branding of the Greek Dionysus. In those earlier rites, people got ripped limb from limb by the followers of the god.

Bacchus’ festivals, purportedly still celebrated at every Spring Break hotspot, can be dangerous indeed. This must account for the negative sense in which the term and its synonym “bacchanal” have been used during my lifetime. As recently as 2016, at my alma mater The University of Virginia, an article in The Cavalier Daily reported on “this year’s Block Party — an unsanctioned bacchanal which took place on Wertland Street last Saturday.”

I leave the nature of the rites that constitute “excess,” up to readers’ discretion. More than one martini constitutes excess to me, these days, if not the drunken disasters so often synonymous with Bacchanalia. The OED Online traces that sense of the word, a secular version of the ancient partying, to the 17th Century. My other dictionaries also raise a glass in the same direction.

If you engage in singing about drinking, you will also be singing a “Bacchanal” or “Bacchanalia.” Those usages seem as lost to us now as the proverbial lost weekend.

So have a safe and sober Spring Break. Remember, as poet, printer, and mystic William Blake wrote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But only if you make it that far.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Possessives’ Apostrophes: Oh, What a Mess

If a reader checks the entry in Writer’s Web, our online handbook, the rules for using apostrophes seem simple enough, whenever a word ends in the letter S:

For words that are plural, such as “Joneses,” just add the mark.

Singular words are different. They take ‘s, as in “I ran into the boss’s car! What do I do?” or “Is that Thomas’s cat?”

Prediction: in 100 years’ time, the possessives of every word that ends in an S will take a simple apostrophe. That is, of course, if anyone still bothers to punctuate.

For now, however, the situation is hopelessly muddled. Our Writing Consultants try to adhere to the simple rules just given, yet in common usage and under “house rules” for various fields of study the matter of correct usage remains far from settled. Consider this set of exceptions from the Grammar United site about the different house styles for AP and University of Chicago formats. Happy reading.

Back? Still sane? Good. Now consider a few classic handbooks and the advice therein.

Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers (6th Ed.)

“If the noun is plural and ends in -s, add only an apostrophe”
“if the noun is singular and ends in -s or an s sound, add -‘s” (299).

Listen for the “S”? Why? I envision people reading their work aloud, no bad thing to do, to hear that “s” sound.

So let’s try the grandfather of all usage guides.

H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage (2nd Ed. Sir Ernest Gowers, Ed.)

“It was formerly customary, when a word ended in -s, to write its possessive with an apostrophe but no additional s. . . . In verse, and in poetic or reverential contexts, this custom is retained. . . .But elsewhere we now usually add the s and the syllable” (466).

Recent handbooks do a better job.

Patricia T. O’Conner, Woe is I

“To indicate ownership, add ‘s to a singular noun or to a plural noun that does not end in s. . .” (151).
“If the word is plural and ends in s, add just the apostrophe” (38).

Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of American Usage

“For most plural possessives, use the ordinary plural form and add an apostrophe to the final s” (509).

While I remain reverential to the late Diana Hacker, whose books have so long had an honored place in writing classrooms, I am going to come down on the side of the living. American English tends to evolve toward simplicity; in this case, the simpler usage does not remove any nuance from our language, and our Writing Consultants have dragons to slay in student work. They do not have time for this particular gnat, let alone deciding how an S sounds or if the context might be poetic or reverential.

Thus, unless a house style dictates otherwise, our Writing Center and I hold with Garner and O’Conner: add an apostrophe only to plural nouns that end in S. Possessives such as children’s hospital or men’s room are different and easy enough. The plurals do not end in an S.

So there we have it, for even the worst possessive obsessive’s grammar notes.

Mr. Fowler, rest in peace, please. And I am so pleased that you began a sentence with a conjunction, as I just did. Hah.

Making Pronouns Inclusive By Making Them Plural

Faculty members’ ideas vary on this, and our Writer’s Web page about pronoun usage provides the canny advice to ask a professor.

The author of this post is far from “politically correct” in many areas, but it has always made good rhetorical sense to avoid gendering language when an audience includes men and women.

In a pinch, I can rewrite any sentence to keep it both grammatically correct and inclusive. Every summer, we edit our handbook for Writing Consultants, and I am surprised that three female editors still kept in sentences like this one:

“Have the writer identify his main point by asking…” when it is easily broadened to “Have writers identify main points by asking.” This revision has the virtue of brevity. Using “his or her” seems awkward.

I invite readers to come up with a sentence that cannot be revised by making it plural, save when an obvious gender-specific reference must be made.

Out, Damned (Gravy) Spot!

Image courtesy of “Make your Own Bar-B-Q Sign“

Imagine an orator making a speech after a formal dinner, and imagine the speaker doing so very well. In the end, however, a large segment of the audience never recalls the content because of the large gravy spot on the speaker’s tie or blouse.

The speaker lost the audience. So what are the sorts of small errors that make otherwise sympathetic readers stop reading? A general list may be nigh impossible, but I will take a stab at what most perturbs academic readers of student prose. In doing so, I won’t focus on the fatal flaws of novice writing: sweeping generalizations, sentence fragments, lack of support for claims.

Confused words. One does not hear the difference, in speech, between the homonyms “here” and “hear,” but in writing, such gaffs make the writer look unprofessional, if not ignorant. See our Center’s list of “Commonly Confused Words.”
Overstatement. One study or source does not conclusive proof make, even if it is a valid source or study. Academics expect an abundance of supporting evidence, including admissions as to where more study may be needed or the limitations of a source. One might write “the 2011 study only considered effects on male college students at private universities” as a way to present such data.
Names. Student writers often use both first and last names for sources. It may be appropriate to cite a full name on first reference or for clarity when, say, two Smiths have been cited. But in most cases, in-text sources need only a last-name reference. A graver (gravier?) spot is to misspell the name of a source. I once had a reader of an article stop on page one when I did this, back in grad school. He said “after that I did not trust your prose any longer.” Ouch.
Format errors. APA, MLA, Chicago, and similar are not systems of fiendish torture. Writers use them to get work into a format needed for a particular journal or conference proceeding. I frequently see errors with a misplaced parenthesis, italics and double quotations both used for titles of sources, and the like. A first cousin of this problem can be adding blank lines between paragraphs, odd indents, and other mechanical gaffs. When in doubt…ask the prof!

These “spots” come to mind right away. Got more? Let me know in the comments section.