A style guide

Way back when, about 25 years ago, I read a whole book on how to use non-discriminatory language when referring to women. In grade school they taught me to use “he” when referring to a male or female; saying “he or she” being considered wordy and unnecessary. No longer.

Maybe you remember the joke that ran around back then, that went something like this:

A man and his son were in a serious traffic accident. The man was killed and the boy received a serious head injury. They rushed him to the hospital and called on the hospital’s brain surgeon to operate. The surgeon took one look at the boy and said, “I can’t operate on this boy—he’s my son!” How could this be?

Another group has become more vocal about linguistic discrimination. Not being familiar with the field of transgender and sexual preference issues, I found the reference enlightening and useful. Well, I use the term “useful” advisedly. I’m not likely to need much of the vocabulary to write computer documentation (my day job), and I tend to hold the opinion that private matters are private, but still, it’s nice to know, and it might prevent me from making a faux pas.

It’s the GLAAD Media Reference Guide – 8th Edition. It’s a pdf, and it’s free. If you’d rather, here’s a link to the page that has the link. It lets you browse the topics in the guide without needing to download the whole document.

A somewhat related linguistic note: Although I bemoan the loss of a perfectly good word for happiness, the term “gay” has a legitimate etymology. I’m told it’s derived from the French gai, meaning a male actor who plays a female role.

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I don’t usually blog about typographical errors because I tend to assume that they are more a slip of the finger than of the intellect. Just the same, I can think of a couple places where typos are verboten. Your résumé is one. Aphorisms are another.

As a rule, any time you leave a stupid mistake in something you write, it gives the lie to your competence, wisdom, status; whatever your writing is trying to accomplish. (Since I write about mistakes in writing so much, I even proofread my emails and instant messages. People are delighted when they find that I made a goof.)

Here’s a case in point.

A nice piece of wisdom, perhaps, but you wonder who would allow that apostrophe in there. I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say it was a slip of the finger, but I still say PROOFREAD!

This comic,um, literally addresses an issue I mentioned not so long ago, so I won’t go into that. It also addresses another issue–linguistic change. As a technical writer, I am tempted to wish that language didn’t change. Eliminating the ambiguity of having new meanings for words would certainly make it easier to be understood. I think this is the rationale for the French Academy, which is infamous for its insistence that the French language not change.

But language has to change over time. After all, the world changes over time. New ideas mean neologisms (and if you know what neologism means, I don’t need to explain this to you). A principle in linguistics is that all languages are sufficient. That is, for their environment. A corollary of this is that when something new comes along, we make or borrow a word for it.

Language also changes for less justifiable reasons, and that’s what makes me roll my curmudgeonly eyes.

Let’s look at the comic, from January 17, 2014:

Definition creep is a neologism, by the way, derived perhaps, from “scope creep,” a term you hear too often in software development circles. The comic dances around the point, dear to my heart, that if you mush around the meanings, you can lose the use of perfectly good words. If if “literal” and “figurative” both mean “figurative,” how can you say that something is literal? Here’s another example: nauseous means “making one want to throw up,” and nauseated means feeling like throwing up. Both ideas are useful (in the right context), so don’t make both words mean the same thing.

We’re going to lose a lot of these battles, but I recommend that when you write, you exercise care to use the right word. In fact, here’s some evidence that we’re going to lose the nauseous/nauseated battle. The character speaking in the center panel is one of the intellectuals in the Luann Strip (Nov 9, 1998).

On the other hand, perhaps Greg Evans has already gone over to the dark side. This one is from 1992.

One last comment: Note that the guy on the left in Basic Instructions said “…in a recent dictionary.” It’s been a running battle in the lexicographical world whether dictionaries should prescribe the “correct” meaning, or merely describe what people are saying, without casting judgement. Currently the trend is toward being merely descriptive. Alas.

Scientific American has pretty high editorial standards, but the blogs must use a different editor. This isn’t entirely bad–the goofs provide grist for my mill. I recently ran into a thought-provoking article in the Information Culture blog about removing books from a library’s collection. Thoughtful content notwithstanding, I found a couple things to edit. Here’s the guilty paragraph:

Scientists learn new things everyday that render previous books and articles on a topic out-of-date or simply incorrect.  Yesterday I pulled a book off the shelf about how to conduct radiometric dating published in 1954. There have been major advances in the topic in the past 60 years and we have more up to date information available on the shelves.

I found three solecisms. See if you can spot them before you continue. Here they are, with some additional remarks.

1. First one: “everyday” is an adjective. In this sentence we want an adverb (tells when), which in this case should be “every day.”
2. “previous” is correct. A lot of people would have written “prior,” which is wrong. I mentioned that in at least one past post.
3. “simply incorrect” gets along fine without the “simply.” I wrote several times about fluff—unnecessary words—two of them are “just” and “simply.” However the writer here is being conversational, not giving instructions, and the word is not ungrammatical, so we can call it a stylistic choice. But it’s tighter without the extra word.
4. Second one: The hyphenation in “out-of-date” shouldn’t be there. It’s a plain old adverb phrase that goes with “render.” No need for hyphens.
5. This remark is rather picky. I would have put a comma after “radiometric dating” because “published in 1954” goes with “book.” The comma separates dating from published, making you look elsewhere. Books and publishing go together so commonly that you’re not likely to be confused, but the rule is that a modifier belongs as close as possible to what it modifies. The comma makes sure you don’t suppose that the dating itself was published in 1954.
6. Third one: “up to date” should be hyphenated. It’s a compound adjective, which we hyphenate.

That’s a lot of chopping on one poor paragraph in an interesting article. I should add that nothing else jumped out at me in the whole rest of the article, and I shall give credit where it is due: the last sentence in the article is nice:

Weeding no-longer-useful books is just as important to collection building as acquiring new books.

OED is the Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete and scholarly dictionary of English. It’s famous for its etymologies, and once a word appears in the dictionary, it never leaves. This is useful for scholars who study old documents, but it’s also interesting. Run into a word you don’t know, and it’s in there, especially if it’s old. I once owned a copy of the OED. It was a very large volume, and it came with a magnifying glass (that I still have) that you needed to read the thing. The online version is much handier.

Especially of late, they add new words fairly regularly, once a year, I believe, and the new additions are good for several days of human interest articles. This year they added “cake pop” among others.

Okay, this isn’t exactly a Christmas present, but it’s Christmas eve, so I guess that’s close enough. And it has to do with new words. Go to this site to see which new words were added in any year; the idea is to see what new word was added in the year you were born. The word for me today is “mobile phone.” I don’t know if the word changes or not. I get the impression that if you come back another day, you might get a different word.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/

And with that, a Merry Christmas to you all. I hope you like your present.