I taught journalism on the college level for awhile in the 1990s, then I was sidetracked by other things.
(I liked the way Robert Redford used that word to describe, in "The Natural," why he had been away from pro ball for so long. I think it frequently applies to life in general.)
Nearly a year ago, I returned to the classroom. I've been teaching journalism again, and I've also been teaching developmental writing, which focuses on the fundamentals of written English (subjects, verbs, prepositional phrases, dependent and independent clauses, etc.), at the local community college.
As the start of my second year there approaches, I've been thinking about what I learned last year and how I can improve what I've been doing.
That isn't quite as easy as it may sound because there are many differences between being a professor at a four–year college and being an adjunct professor at a community college. I can't always apply what I learned in the classroom then to what I'm doing now.
Last year, I spent the summer preparing to teach classes that wound up being canceled just before the school year began because enrollment in those classes wasn't sufficient.
It wasn't that way when I was teaching in the 1990s. In those days, I knew what I would be teaching long before the semester began. My classes were never canceled because enrollment didn't reach a certain level.
Anyway, I hope I'll be teaching journalism again this fall. It remains to be seen if I will.
I do know, though, that I will be teaching developmental writing again — because it is required unless incoming students meet or exceed a certain grade on their placement tests — and I've been thinking about what I learned from teaching that class last year.
I think one of the most important things I have learned has to do with expectations.
Some of my students are foreign students for whom English is a second language, and they compare the rules of their native language to the rules of their acquired one. That is their frame of reference. It is how we human beings process information. We compare new knowledge to that which we already have.
For others, I think it's a simple matter of applying logic — if something is true in one usage, it must be true in all usages. Same sort of thing, really. It's all based on past experience — and the knowledge of previous outcomes.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I was reminded of an old episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy, who was expecting the couple's baby, decided that everyone who came in regular contact with her child — Ricky, Fred and Ethel — had to speak nothing but perfect English.
Ricky, whose native tongue was Spanish, resisted, but Lucy made her point by asking him to read out loud a story that worked in several words that had similar spellings but different pronunciations — all in just a few sentences.
The spelling was o–u–g–h. It was pronounced differently, of course, depending upon which letter(s) came before.
Anyway, the story Ricky read was about a woodsman. It spoke of how he cut boughs (pronounced bows) from trees.
All this cutting made his hands quite rough (pronounced ruff). Also, apparently, all this cutting released a lot of junk into the air, which gave the woodsman a hacking cough (koff).
There were other sentences that contained words like enough (enuff) and through (threw). I'm sure you get the idea.
Ricky mispronounced each word and got increasingly frustrated. Spanish isn't so complicated, he protested. A sound is always the same. It sounds the same. It is spelled the same.
Many of my students last year (and, I am sure, many of my students in the coming year) would sympathize with Ricky. Why must written English be so complicated?
Well, the main reason is that the British Isles were occupied by different conquerors over the centuries, and elements of those languages were absorbed into the evolving English language. In English, you will find words with roots from all corners of the globe — primarily from the civilizations that actively occupied Britain at different times but also from cultures that were more like bystanders.
Each contributed words (and whatever linguistic peculiarities came along with them) to the language.
As a result, you have to work a little harder to make sure that you do things correctly in English. One must apply, as fictional detective Hercule Poirot put, the little grey cells. One size does not always fit all.
I tried to make this point with my students last semester by contrasting written English with other subjects — and I unexpectedly learned a couple of things about the shortcomings of the modern educational system.
In math, I told my students, when you learn the multiplication tables, you know that they will never vary. The answers will always be the same. Two times three will always equal six. Three times three will never equal six.
You can count on it.
In chemistry, I told them, H2O is always the chemical formula for water. It is never the chemical formula for anything else.
You can count on it.
Those examples made my point, but I wanted to add one more for emphasis. In hindsight, I should have stopped when I was ahead — and launched into my discussion of the peculiarities of the English language.
In history, I told my students, events always happened whenever they happened. When you commit an important date to memory, it doesn't change. The years in which the American Civil War was fought will always be between 1861 and 1865. The year of President Kennedy's assassination will always be 1963.
To drive home my point, I said to my students, "If someone says '1776' to you, what do you think of?"
I was shocked that no one, in a classroom full of people, raised a hand to indicate that he/she knew the answer. I thought everyone knew the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.
I still think it is a good point — even if the modern education system doesn't seem to be producing high school graduates with adequate appreciation for their history. I mean, even if those students don't know those dates, they are facts that you will find in any history book.
English is much more ambiguous. It isn't as certain as a mathematical equation or a chemical formula or a date in a history book.
But that is what makes English, both spoken and written, a living, vibrant thing.
My students want written language to be a simple, fill–in–the–blank proposition, like the mathematical formulae they learned when they were younger. Logically, they know that only three times two will equal six so if they are asked to complete something like this — 3 X ___ = 6 — they know that 2 is the only possible answer.
But the rules are different for language. My students seem to have trouble understanding that the very same word may be a noun in some uses — and a verb in others.
For example, take the word run. Ordinarily, that is a verb — They run in the park.
But it can also be a noun — for example, when it is used as part of the names of events or when it is used to describe the act of scoring (particularly in baseball). Under such circumstances, it becomes a noun.
The same thing applies to spelling, punctuation, all that stuff. You've gotta use your brain.
If I can get my students to use their brains, I feel we're moving in the right direction — even if there is still much to be done on the basics.
That's the way I feel about the people who are in charge of the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington these days.
Creative solutions are required. Everyone — the president, the speaker of the House, everyone in Congress — needs to put the interests of the nation ahead of everything else.
I'd like to get all of them to look beyond their limited horizons.
They might not be able to resolve the situation once and for all — but, at least, they could deal with this crisis and move beyond the roadblocks.
Our problems, as John F. Kennedy said, are man made. Therefore, they can be solved by men.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Sunday, September 27, 2009
William Safire is Dead
In my life, I have had a variety of jobs and a variety of titles. But, no matter what kind of work I happened to be doing or what my title happened to be, I always considered myself a journalist.
Journalism was my major in college and graduate school. For many years, I worked for newspapers as a reporter and as an editor. I can't say the work ever paid very well, but it was probably the most satisfying work I have ever done.
As I have said many times in this blog, I have been writing as long as I can remember. I can't say how old I was when I started writing. I know my mother always encouraged me so perhaps she deserves most of the credit or blame, but I really don't know if any particular writers inspired me from an early age — other than the ones whose works my parents read to me, like Dr. Seuss. As I got older, various authors and journalists were added to my mental list of people I wanted to emulate.
One of those had to be William Safire. When I was a boy, he wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. In fact, Safire was responsible for the phrase for which Agnew may be most widely remembered — "nattering nabobs of negativism."
In 1973, he became a columnist for the New York Times, which seems like an odd pairing, given the fact that Safire regarded himself as a "libertarian conservative" and the Times is known for its progressive editorial policy. Safire retired from the Times in 2005, having penned essays for its Op–Ed page for more than 30 years, but apparently he continued to contribute to the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine until recently.
And, today, he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79.
Safire and I did not share the same political philosophy. But we did share an appreciation of language. Consequently, I was pleased to see that Robert McFadden's obituary for Safire that was posted at the Times' website earlier today referred to Safire's "rules for writers."
Remember to never split an infinitive.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
Avoid cliches like the plague.
And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
I never lived in New York so I didn't read his columns very often until the internet gave me access to them. But when I was growing up, I read his books. I read "Before the Fall," an insider's look at the Nixon White House, when I was in high school, and I read his political novel, "Full Disclosure," when I was in college.
It's been a few years since I last worked on a copy desk, but I read two of Safire's books on language, "No Uncertain Terms" and "The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time," both of which were published while George W. Bush was president.
I would have recommended either book to Bush, who was linguistically challenged, to say the least. We might have been spared some of the more egregious — although, admittedly, colorful — Bushisms that were imposed upon us (speaking of which, the word strategery was created by Saturday Night Live writers in a memorable satire of real Bushspeak, like misunderestimate).
Maybe not, though. Judging from how quickly Bush was distracted from his pursuit of Osama bin Laden (which lasted only slightly longer than O.J.'s pursuit of the "real killer" of his ex–wife and her friend), I'm inclined to think that Bush suffers from attention deficit disorder — and, as a result, he might not have absorbed much of the useful information contained in those books.
But I digress.
I'm sorry to see Safire go. But it does give me an opportunity to direct my readers' attention to a site Safire undoubtedly would have liked — Funny Typos, Misspellings, Bad Grammar & Engrish. (Yes, that is right — "Engrish.")
In honor of someone who cared about language — a breed that is vanishing far too rapidly — I urge you to look at it and enjoy it.
And raise your glass in Safire's memory.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Some Werds
When I was a boy, George Carlin was building a reputation as — in my opinion — the best comedian alive.
Much of his reputation was established by his routines about words, language, clichés. That wasn't how his career began. If you go back and listen to his earliest albums, you'll hear routines in which he plays characters that were inspired by broadcasting personalities like TV newscasters, weathermen, disc jockeys. Other routines were his musings about issues of the day like the drug culture and birth control.
But when he was in his mid–30s, he made an album called "Class Clown," in which he performed what may have been his most famous and most requested (but probably the least frequently played on radio) routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," a seven–minute monologue that earned his album a parental warning label many, many years before such a thing became standard in the recording industry.
From that moment on, every Carlin performance, every Carlin album included at least one discussion on language, often more. His very next album, in fact, had an 11–minute routine called "Filthy Words," which was an extension of his "Seven Words ..." routine. That album also had routines on childhood clichés, how certain words (in this case, "fart") were used as personal descriptions and thoughts about "raisin rhetoric" (which was inspired by a popular Raisin Bran commercial from the '70s in which the actors wore raisin outfits, complete with dark shirts labeled "RAISIN," and sang a commercial jingle while sitting in a bowl filled with a milk–like liquid and surrounded by bran flakes).
The album that followed that one had a routine called "Some Werds." It was actually a rant about phrases like "calm, cool and collected," "kit and kaboodle," "odds and ends" and other aspects of language that made no sense to him. He wrapped up the routine with a fictionalized statement from an "anti–pornography dude, kind of an anti–smut man ... (the words) you select tell a lot about you." That led into the statement: "Our thrust is to prick holes in the stiff front erected by the smut dealers. We must keep mounting an offensive to penetrate any crack in his defenses ..." Well, I'm sure you get the general idea.
Anyway, that is why I have been inspired to give this post the title "Some Werds." For a long time, I have had some thoughts relating to language and popular usage, and I feel like I will explode if I don't express them.
When I was in school, I always did well in English. I almost never missed a word on a spelling test. I always got an A when I wrote an essay. When I took my college entrance exam, I scored in the top 5% in the nation in English.
I'm not sure how I developed this talent. It probably goes back to my childhood. In addition to the things I was taught in school, many things were reinforced in my home life. I come from a family of teachers. My father was a college professor. Before my brother and I were born — and then again after we reached our teen years — my mother taught in elementary school. My father's father also was a college professor.
And my father's mother was an English teacher.
By the time of my earliest memory of her, she had retired from teaching, but while you might be able to take the girl out of the English class, I don't think you could ever take the English class out of that girl. In fact, I have memories of sending her thank–you notes for birthday and Christmas gifts I received from her when I was only 6 or 7 years old, and she mailed them back to me with my spelling and grammar mistakes circled.
Now, I never doubted that she loved me. But I guess my ego took a bit of a beating when my thank–you notes came back to me with my mistakes corrected. And it became my mission to write a letter to her that would meet her standards.
I don't remember how old I was when I sent her a letter she didn't send back to me. Perhaps she reached a point where she decided she had fought the good fight. Or maybe she concluded that it had become a mountain too high. She had three other grandchildren from my aunt, and they were all older than I was. By the time my brother learned to write, she may have stopped grading thank–you letters entirely.
But, as I say, it became my mission to submit the flawless thank–you note. She never announced that she had stopped grading them so I may never have passed her test.
But that experience, and the lessons I learned from it, have remained with me all my life. My penmanship has never been much to, ahem, write home about, but I didn't have to worry about that much after I learned to type. And nowadays, most written communication is done by computer, anyway. Even note–taking seems to be done more and more on computer laptops.
But I get the feeling that, for some reason, most people take computers as a license to be sloppy ... in all kinds of ways.
One way is just plain old–fashioned laziness.
I was reminded of that this morning when I was looking at a blog that is written by North Carolina journalism professor Andy Bechtel. The blog, "The Editor's Desk," made the point that the phrase "15 minutes of fame," artist Andy Warhol's often cited statement from 1968, is worn out but "lives on even though the artist himself has been dead for more than 20 years."
In my opinion, it lives on because some people are too lazy to come up with an original observation that suggests the same thing — a one–hit wonder, a flash in the pan, that kind of thing.
It's like saying "friendly confines" as a reference to the home crowd at a sporting event. It isn't an indication of how literate you are or how clever you are. It says you are lazy. Too lazy to find an original way to say which team is the home team.
By the way, I think "friendly confines" should be outlawed by most copy desks at most newspapers — but copy desks seem to be expendable at newspapers these days and, consequently, copy editors are fighting bigger battles. To use another cliché that probably should be retired, they've got bigger fish to fry.
I'm sorry to see copy desks in this sort of fix because I parlayed my training from my grandmother (not to mention my college education) into a profession for many years, but now I feel like I'm caught betwixt and between. I'm out of work, and I haven't found much of a need for people who can write and spell. Journalism majors who didn't study public relations or advertising aren't in great demand.
But I still think it's important to be able to write. And I still think it's important to spell words — and spell them out, not use abbreviations like BTW or IMO — or even more obscure abbreviations, like BFF.
I still have to stop and think about that one when I see it. It always reminds me of a scene from the original movie "The Odd Couple." Oscar was complaining to Felix about the fact that he left notes for Oscar on Oscar's pillow. Then he quoted one: "We are all out of corn flakes. FU." He glared at Felix. "It took me three hours to figure out 'FU' was 'Felix Ungar.' "
Actually, I get irritated by just about all the internet acronyms that I see everywhere around me. When someone writes "LOL," that is supposed to imply that the person is "laughing out loud." Some people punctuate every sentence with it. If that is a statement of fact, some folks must be downright mirthful, judging from all that nonstop laughing.
The ones that give me pause are the ones who write "ROFL," which means "rolling on the floor laughing." I always try to picture that in my mind, but I just can't quite manage it. And I also find it difficult to picture the ones who write "LMAO," which means "laughing my ass off." And I refuse to even think about "ROFLMAO."
Boy, talk about mirthful.
Now, some of these acronyms predate e–mail and text messaging and computer chatting — like "ASAP" and "FYI." I think they're pretty commonly accepted, even in spoken conversation.
But be honest: Before you started reading this post, did you know what "CMIIW" means? It means "Correct Me If I'm Wrong." Do you know what "IANAL" means? It means "I Am Not A Lawyer."
Apparently, they have entire books now — called "Wiktionaries" — that give extensive internet acronym listings. People who are well–versed in this kind of language could carry on entire conversations by e–mail or text messaging and never write a single legible word.
But I think it is wrong for people to assume that everyone is familiar with all these acronyms. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if you know for a fact that the person for whom the e–mail or text message is intended knows what the acronym stands for. If he/she doesn't, he/she might spend three hours puzzling over it like Oscar did.
For that matter, if you are sending a message to several recipients at once, I would suggest tailoring it for the lowest common denominator. There may be recipients among them who are fluent in today's acronyms, but if you know that there is a codger or two in there, resist the temptation.
Sending out a message that you know probably would not be understood by everyone would violate what I presume is still the objective of communication — to get a message from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I also have an issue with the so–called "emoticons." I've always felt that every key on the typewriter (and now, every key on the computer keypad) has a purpose. Colons and semicolons and parentheses have purposes, and those purposes do not include indicating to the reader if the writer was smiling as he/she wrote a sentence.
Here's another "let's be honest" for you: Up to this very moment, did you know what :-& stands for? It is supposed to imply that the writer is tongue–tied. I learned that in an e–mail exchange. I'll spare you the details, but, again, I will recommend that you be sure the recipient is acquainted with the emoticon you want to use.
Back to the acronyms, for a minute. They might be preferable to some of the horrendous misspellings I see on the internet. Constantly. Everywhere. Sometimes it is sloppy. Sometimes it is plain ignorance.
But it really annoys me that people don't seem to understand (or don't seem to care) how to make a word a plural or how to make a word possessive. And don't even think of complicating things by introducing the concept of plural possessive into the discussion.
I used to have a manager who would send out e–mails all day. Several of those e–mails were guaranteed to require (at least in her limited written language) "there," "they're" or "their." I don't think she ever used the right spelling of the word in any of those e–mails.
My all–time favorite message from her said something like, "Their going to hold there meeting they're on Friday." She was always preaching the virtue of the spellchecker, but her e–mails were prime examples of how spellcheckers can be fooled. Context matters.
I run into the same thing with "your" and "you're." If the description is of something that belongs to a person, such as a car or a house or a book, "your" is the possessive form that needs to be used. But if the intention is to combine the words "you" and "are," forming a construction that can be used to say something like "you are correct," then "you're" is the appropriate choice.
I think it is important to use the right word to express yourself. When I taught journalism, I used to tell my editing students that they didn't need to use a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
Clearly, words can be overused. A couple of weeks ago, CNN.com wondered if the word "absolutely" is overused.
My answer would be "yes," but I have a whole list of words that I think are overused. For example, I think "awesome" is overused. It means to inspire awe. Does your mechanic inspire awe when he changes your oil? If he does, I want to meet him. He might change my life. Wouldn't that be awesome? Most definitely — which I also believe is overused.
And then there are redundancies, which is an entirely different category, but I just can't finish this rant until I mention the one that really annoys me — exact same. I read it all the time. I hear it all the time. If something is the same as something else, why do you need to add the word exact? You don't.
Well, I could go on and on. But the fact is that, most of the time, I don't say anything to anyone. Maybe I should let off some steam now and then.
There were times when I worked for that girl and I had to stop myself from replying to her e–mails and informing her why she should have used "there" or "their" or "they're." Maybe I would have felt better — at least, I would have felt as if I contributed to her knowledge — if I had pointed out what she did wrong.
And there are times when people throw an acronym at me that I am totally unfamiliar with. So, like Oscar, I have to ponder it for awhile — and, given the context of the conversation or the previous e–mail messages, I can usually come close.
And, please, let's not get started on the fact that most people don't seem to know when they should (or should not) capitalize words (the answer is to be found in the difference between common nouns and proper nouns). And many don't bother to use exclamation points or question marks appropriately.
But I guess the main reason why I feel many people are just sloppy is this: When I was growing up, my family had a set of World Books, and my brother and I had a subscription for several years to the children's monthly magazine from World Book.
There were a couple of cartoon kids who were featured in each issue — one month, it might be about weather; the next month, it might be about animals at the zoo; the next month, it would be about something else — and they asked questions that readers could answer by looking it up in World Book. Their signature phrase was, "We never guess. We look it up."
People today are too lazy to look it up. They're too lazy to confirm facts or spellings. And that, I believe, is part of the problem with journalism today.
There's more to it, of course. But that's another rant for another day.
Much of his reputation was established by his routines about words, language, clichés. That wasn't how his career began. If you go back and listen to his earliest albums, you'll hear routines in which he plays characters that were inspired by broadcasting personalities like TV newscasters, weathermen, disc jockeys. Other routines were his musings about issues of the day like the drug culture and birth control.
But when he was in his mid–30s, he made an album called "Class Clown," in which he performed what may have been his most famous and most requested (but probably the least frequently played on radio) routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," a seven–minute monologue that earned his album a parental warning label many, many years before such a thing became standard in the recording industry.
From that moment on, every Carlin performance, every Carlin album included at least one discussion on language, often more. His very next album, in fact, had an 11–minute routine called "Filthy Words," which was an extension of his "Seven Words ..." routine. That album also had routines on childhood clichés, how certain words (in this case, "fart") were used as personal descriptions and thoughts about "raisin rhetoric" (which was inspired by a popular Raisin Bran commercial from the '70s in which the actors wore raisin outfits, complete with dark shirts labeled "RAISIN," and sang a commercial jingle while sitting in a bowl filled with a milk–like liquid and surrounded by bran flakes).
The album that followed that one had a routine called "Some Werds." It was actually a rant about phrases like "calm, cool and collected," "kit and kaboodle," "odds and ends" and other aspects of language that made no sense to him. He wrapped up the routine with a fictionalized statement from an "anti–pornography dude, kind of an anti–smut man ... (the words) you select tell a lot about you." That led into the statement: "Our thrust is to prick holes in the stiff front erected by the smut dealers. We must keep mounting an offensive to penetrate any crack in his defenses ..." Well, I'm sure you get the general idea.
Anyway, that is why I have been inspired to give this post the title "Some Werds." For a long time, I have had some thoughts relating to language and popular usage, and I feel like I will explode if I don't express them.
When I was in school, I always did well in English. I almost never missed a word on a spelling test. I always got an A when I wrote an essay. When I took my college entrance exam, I scored in the top 5% in the nation in English.
I'm not sure how I developed this talent. It probably goes back to my childhood. In addition to the things I was taught in school, many things were reinforced in my home life. I come from a family of teachers. My father was a college professor. Before my brother and I were born — and then again after we reached our teen years — my mother taught in elementary school. My father's father also was a college professor.
And my father's mother was an English teacher.
By the time of my earliest memory of her, she had retired from teaching, but while you might be able to take the girl out of the English class, I don't think you could ever take the English class out of that girl. In fact, I have memories of sending her thank–you notes for birthday and Christmas gifts I received from her when I was only 6 or 7 years old, and she mailed them back to me with my spelling and grammar mistakes circled.
Now, I never doubted that she loved me. But I guess my ego took a bit of a beating when my thank–you notes came back to me with my mistakes corrected. And it became my mission to write a letter to her that would meet her standards.
I don't remember how old I was when I sent her a letter she didn't send back to me. Perhaps she reached a point where she decided she had fought the good fight. Or maybe she concluded that it had become a mountain too high. She had three other grandchildren from my aunt, and they were all older than I was. By the time my brother learned to write, she may have stopped grading thank–you letters entirely.
But, as I say, it became my mission to submit the flawless thank–you note. She never announced that she had stopped grading them so I may never have passed her test.
But that experience, and the lessons I learned from it, have remained with me all my life. My penmanship has never been much to, ahem, write home about, but I didn't have to worry about that much after I learned to type. And nowadays, most written communication is done by computer, anyway. Even note–taking seems to be done more and more on computer laptops.
But I get the feeling that, for some reason, most people take computers as a license to be sloppy ... in all kinds of ways.
One way is just plain old–fashioned laziness.
I was reminded of that this morning when I was looking at a blog that is written by North Carolina journalism professor Andy Bechtel. The blog, "The Editor's Desk," made the point that the phrase "15 minutes of fame," artist Andy Warhol's often cited statement from 1968, is worn out but "lives on even though the artist himself has been dead for more than 20 years."
In my opinion, it lives on because some people are too lazy to come up with an original observation that suggests the same thing — a one–hit wonder, a flash in the pan, that kind of thing.
It's like saying "friendly confines" as a reference to the home crowd at a sporting event. It isn't an indication of how literate you are or how clever you are. It says you are lazy. Too lazy to find an original way to say which team is the home team.
By the way, I think "friendly confines" should be outlawed by most copy desks at most newspapers — but copy desks seem to be expendable at newspapers these days and, consequently, copy editors are fighting bigger battles. To use another cliché that probably should be retired, they've got bigger fish to fry.
I'm sorry to see copy desks in this sort of fix because I parlayed my training from my grandmother (not to mention my college education) into a profession for many years, but now I feel like I'm caught betwixt and between. I'm out of work, and I haven't found much of a need for people who can write and spell. Journalism majors who didn't study public relations or advertising aren't in great demand.
But I still think it's important to be able to write. And I still think it's important to spell words — and spell them out, not use abbreviations like BTW or IMO — or even more obscure abbreviations, like BFF.
I still have to stop and think about that one when I see it. It always reminds me of a scene from the original movie "The Odd Couple." Oscar was complaining to Felix about the fact that he left notes for Oscar on Oscar's pillow. Then he quoted one: "We are all out of corn flakes. FU." He glared at Felix. "It took me three hours to figure out 'FU' was 'Felix Ungar.' "
Actually, I get irritated by just about all the internet acronyms that I see everywhere around me. When someone writes "LOL," that is supposed to imply that the person is "laughing out loud." Some people punctuate every sentence with it. If that is a statement of fact, some folks must be downright mirthful, judging from all that nonstop laughing.
The ones that give me pause are the ones who write "ROFL," which means "rolling on the floor laughing." I always try to picture that in my mind, but I just can't quite manage it. And I also find it difficult to picture the ones who write "LMAO," which means "laughing my ass off." And I refuse to even think about "ROFLMAO."
Boy, talk about mirthful.
Now, some of these acronyms predate e–mail and text messaging and computer chatting — like "ASAP" and "FYI." I think they're pretty commonly accepted, even in spoken conversation.
But be honest: Before you started reading this post, did you know what "CMIIW" means? It means "Correct Me If I'm Wrong." Do you know what "IANAL" means? It means "I Am Not A Lawyer."
Apparently, they have entire books now — called "Wiktionaries" — that give extensive internet acronym listings. People who are well–versed in this kind of language could carry on entire conversations by e–mail or text messaging and never write a single legible word.
But I think it is wrong for people to assume that everyone is familiar with all these acronyms. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if you know for a fact that the person for whom the e–mail or text message is intended knows what the acronym stands for. If he/she doesn't, he/she might spend three hours puzzling over it like Oscar did.
For that matter, if you are sending a message to several recipients at once, I would suggest tailoring it for the lowest common denominator. There may be recipients among them who are fluent in today's acronyms, but if you know that there is a codger or two in there, resist the temptation.
Sending out a message that you know probably would not be understood by everyone would violate what I presume is still the objective of communication — to get a message from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I also have an issue with the so–called "emoticons." I've always felt that every key on the typewriter (and now, every key on the computer keypad) has a purpose. Colons and semicolons and parentheses have purposes, and those purposes do not include indicating to the reader if the writer was smiling as he/she wrote a sentence.
Here's another "let's be honest" for you: Up to this very moment, did you know what :-& stands for? It is supposed to imply that the writer is tongue–tied. I learned that in an e–mail exchange. I'll spare you the details, but, again, I will recommend that you be sure the recipient is acquainted with the emoticon you want to use.
Back to the acronyms, for a minute. They might be preferable to some of the horrendous misspellings I see on the internet. Constantly. Everywhere. Sometimes it is sloppy. Sometimes it is plain ignorance.
But it really annoys me that people don't seem to understand (or don't seem to care) how to make a word a plural or how to make a word possessive. And don't even think of complicating things by introducing the concept of plural possessive into the discussion.
I used to have a manager who would send out e–mails all day. Several of those e–mails were guaranteed to require (at least in her limited written language) "there," "they're" or "their." I don't think she ever used the right spelling of the word in any of those e–mails.
My all–time favorite message from her said something like, "Their going to hold there meeting they're on Friday." She was always preaching the virtue of the spellchecker, but her e–mails were prime examples of how spellcheckers can be fooled. Context matters.
I run into the same thing with "your" and "you're." If the description is of something that belongs to a person, such as a car or a house or a book, "your" is the possessive form that needs to be used. But if the intention is to combine the words "you" and "are," forming a construction that can be used to say something like "you are correct," then "you're" is the appropriate choice.
I think it is important to use the right word to express yourself. When I taught journalism, I used to tell my editing students that they didn't need to use a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
Clearly, words can be overused. A couple of weeks ago, CNN.com wondered if the word "absolutely" is overused.
My answer would be "yes," but I have a whole list of words that I think are overused. For example, I think "awesome" is overused. It means to inspire awe. Does your mechanic inspire awe when he changes your oil? If he does, I want to meet him. He might change my life. Wouldn't that be awesome? Most definitely — which I also believe is overused.
And then there are redundancies, which is an entirely different category, but I just can't finish this rant until I mention the one that really annoys me — exact same. I read it all the time. I hear it all the time. If something is the same as something else, why do you need to add the word exact? You don't.
Well, I could go on and on. But the fact is that, most of the time, I don't say anything to anyone. Maybe I should let off some steam now and then.
There were times when I worked for that girl and I had to stop myself from replying to her e–mails and informing her why she should have used "there" or "their" or "they're." Maybe I would have felt better — at least, I would have felt as if I contributed to her knowledge — if I had pointed out what she did wrong.
And there are times when people throw an acronym at me that I am totally unfamiliar with. So, like Oscar, I have to ponder it for awhile — and, given the context of the conversation or the previous e–mail messages, I can usually come close.
And, please, let's not get started on the fact that most people don't seem to know when they should (or should not) capitalize words (the answer is to be found in the difference between common nouns and proper nouns). And many don't bother to use exclamation points or question marks appropriately.
But I guess the main reason why I feel many people are just sloppy is this: When I was growing up, my family had a set of World Books, and my brother and I had a subscription for several years to the children's monthly magazine from World Book.
There were a couple of cartoon kids who were featured in each issue — one month, it might be about weather; the next month, it might be about animals at the zoo; the next month, it would be about something else — and they asked questions that readers could answer by looking it up in World Book. Their signature phrase was, "We never guess. We look it up."
People today are too lazy to look it up. They're too lazy to confirm facts or spellings. And that, I believe, is part of the problem with journalism today.
There's more to it, of course. But that's another rant for another day.
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