My kind of comic

XKCD is a comic for all kinds of geeks, intellectuals, nerds, mathematicians, developers, linguists, polymaths, and other brainy types. If you read The Writing Rag with any regularity, you would probably like XKCD, too if you don’t already subscribe. Here’s the link to this strip http://xkcd.com/1010/

And here’s the strip. You have to go to the actual site to see the alternate text (that pops up when you hover the pointer over the picture).

They say an etymologist is someone who knows the difference between etymology and entomology

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I frequently use the word “solecism,” meaning a mistake in grammar. It’s one of my favorite words (harrumpf). I also read A.Word.A.Day, written by Anu Garg. The word of the day a while back was “solecism.” Here’s the article. He includes a link to an audible pronunciation of the word, and an inspiring quote at the bottom. I left both of those out to help motivate you to click the link to the site.

A.Word.A.Day–solecism

solecism (SOL-i-siz-ehm, SO-li-) noun

1. A grammatical mistake or a nonstandard usage.

2. A breach of etiquette.

3. An error, inconsistency, or impropriety.

[From Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikismos, from soloikos (speaking incorrectly; literally, inhabitant of Soloi) after Soloi, an ancient Athenian colony in Cilicia where a dialect considered as substandard was spoken.]

“`Ah! Madam,’ said Ovid, `how great a solecism would it be both in a lover and a poet if he did not look upon his mistress as the sublimest object of his thoughts!’
Benjamin Boyce and Thomas Brown; The Adventures of Lindamira: A Lady of Quality; The University of Minnesota Press; 1949.

“But the AAUP’s (Association of American University Presses) guidelines go beyond correcting what it regards as solecisms to more drastic exercises in raising consciousness. Consider the traditional personification of ships as feminine. According to the AAUP task force, such usage is `quaint at best’ and should be avoided: `it’ is preferred. Along the same literalist lines, you should think twice before describing an important work by a woman scholar as `seminal’.
Speech Therapy; The Economist (London); Jun 3, 1995.

If you don’t subscribe to the AWAD email already, why are you still reading this post? Go subscribe right now. Then come back and don’t make any more solecisms.

Somebody criticized Robert Burns’ writing, once. I think you could call his reply “strongly worded” even though he uttered not a single profanity. Many of the metaphors are particularly apt, and it requires a classical education (or access to Google) to “get” all the allusions.

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

Of course I can’t resist making a grammar comment. Did you notice that the entire passage contains not a single main verb? Plenty of participles, and a “was” in a subordinate clause, but the whole thing is really a sentence fragment! At first glance it looks like an extended direct address, as if someone called “Hey you!” and then didn’t follow up with anything.

Actually, Burns isn’t quite so guilty of bad grammar. He left out the main verb (this is called ellipsis), which would have been the second word, “art” or nowadays, “are.” The verb “to be” is easy to leave out in many languages, and we use this particular construction not infrequently when we want to insult someone. Ever hear someone call out “You Sunday driver!” or “you nincompoop!” Same thing.

Only Burns did it rather more eloquently.

Everybody shows a picture of the poet; here's a picture of his home

Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our ninth anniversary of wedded bliss. We have a tradition that I write her a poem every year to celebrate. For your amusement, here is a quatrain I wrote, then rejected.

A nine-year party, now who’d’a thunk it?
With me so old, that’s quite a junket
‘Cause she’s a young, good lookin’, chick,
At least she likes my manly oops

(You didn’t think I’d really write that, did you?) The one she got was much nicer and more romantic, and I set it in an old-fashioned font (small x-height) nicely formatted on a page. She has a picture frame in her office where she puts the most recent poem. The bad poem, above, is a quatrain consisting of four accentual feet each, rhyme scheme AABB. The good poem, which I’m not sharing unless my wife asks me to, contains four couplets, each consisting of a double dactyl and a molossus. (Look it up. They’re not supposed to exist in English poetry, but I can do ‘em.)

Update: Not only does my wife want me to post the “good” poem, but she wrote me one! so if you can stand all the sentimental treacle, here are two more poems. Mine first:

Year nine

Valerie George is my
Dear sweet wife.
Hug her and kiss her my
Whole sweet life.
Tease me and please me my
Whole life long,
Mess me or bless me, my
Life a song.

Just so you know: Four couplets, each consisting of a double dactyl and a molossus.

She said the footnote was very me. (I should add that I read her to sleep every night when I’m home.) Here’s her poetic reply:

Read to me
All my days
Of Science and farming
And kids and their ways.
Your voice fills my mind
With beautiful phrases.
Whether couplets or dactyls
To me it amazes
The love of my life
Gives the gift of his voice
Reassuring to me that I made a wise choice!
The sound of my love fulfills all my wishes,
The only thing sweeter…one of his kisses.

You might be wondering what we look like. Here’s a picture of us.

Valerie and her curmudgeon

I might have posted about this mistake before, but here’s a nice comic to remind you about it. People misinterpret “the exception proves the rule”  almost  as often as they get “beg the question” wrong ( I’ve written about that one, too.). Recently I discovered a comic that’s been around at least since 2007 (so I have some catching up to do in my copious spare time), and a recent strip mentions this expression.

Kieran Meehan writes a clever strip about some professional people and crooks called Pros and Cons. Here’s the strip:

I haven't figured out all the characters, but the gal on the right runs a diner and she's the sister of one of the other characters

Most people (in my experience, anyway) think that the exception proving a rule means that when something breaks a rule, it illustrates the existence of the rule because you notice the exception to it. BRAAP! Completely wrong.

“Prove” is an old word for “test.” There’s the famous reference to tithing in the Old Testament book of Malachi that goes “Prove me now herewith and bring all the tithes into the storehouse…” We still use the word prove in a testing sense in certain contexts, such as when someone says something like “Well, let’s see if the plane proves airworthy.”

What this expression means is that to really find out is a rule is for real, you have to break (the exception) it (the rule) and see what happens. If something bad happens because you broke the rule, yup, it’s a rule, all right. If nothing happens, it wasn’t relly a rule in the first place.

Children do this to their parents all the time. Don’t make a rule unless you’re willing to enforce it. Does this comic get the expression right or wrong? I’m not sure—I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s funny.