Author Archives: John McGrath

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CJR: The Limits of Clear Language

Nicholas Lemann had an interesting piece in last month’s Columbia Journalism Review*, in which he uses Orwell’s influential essay “Politics and the English Language” to discuss language, propaganda, and political writing.

Lehmann closes with the argument that corruption of information is now an even more frightening prospect than the corruption of language described by Orwell. He doesn’t fully develop the idea (worth an essay in its own right), and it feels bolted on. That’s a small quibble, though; the piece is well worth reading.

As a bonus the article conveniently comes with a numbing array of examples of both good and bad political argument. Mostly bad, to be honest. Just read the comments.

* Where I worked for a while in the 90s.

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Steve Jobs: "People Don’t Read"

Apple’s Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.–180 million people–are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.

It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn’t appreciate that.

* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that’s called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.

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More Definitions

Wordie has displayed a definition for most words for the past few months, but it had been displaying only the most common one, in order to keep the focus on the fun stuff: citations and comments added by members.

You can now see all the definitions available for a word, in case you want to save a trip to a proper dictionary or just want to see what other strange tricks WeirdNet has up its sleeve. I tried to keep it subtle, so you still see only the top-ranked one, but now with a “more” link just below it. Click and the rest appear.

I decided to leave out example sentences, thinking it might get in the way of people providing their own, but I’m happy to revisit that if people would like. Let me know.

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Scrabble for Cheaters

The heroes at 826NYC, the Brooklyn-based children’s writing workshop and local 826 affiliate, are hosting the Wordie event of the season:

“On Saturday, January 19, 826NYC will host SCRABBLE FOR CHEATERS, a tournament of verbal smarts and fraudulence. Teams of two compete in a tournament to determine the “World’s Best Cheater at Scrabble” and raise money for charity. Cheating is allowed, and encouraged. The more money raised, the more a team can cheat. The more a team cheats, the closer they are to glory. Sign up to play. Pledge money to your favorite team. Cheating is the only way to be champion.”

Scrabble is joyless, and I loathe it; there’s no better way to cheapen words than to put them on a grid and assign them points. So subverting it pleases me to no end, almost as much as pirate supply stores.

If anyone out there wants to field a team, Wordie will sponsor you with the entirety of the site’s advertising revenue for 2007: $71.48. Almost enough to buy a vowel and trade out a letter on the tournament cheats menu.

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New York Times, why do you hate me so?

We used to pick up The New York Times at the corner store every Sunday. We moved last September, though, and no store within walking distance carries it. So we signed up for home delivery. That was almost five months ago, and they haven’t yet figured out how to get us the paper.

We only subscribed to the Sunday edition, which presents a (very) slight challenge in that the Sunday paper is delivered over two days: the magazine and some other sections on Saturday, the remainder on Sunday. But still, it’s been five months, and their track record sucks: Sometimes no paper at all. Sometimes nothing on Saturday, then half the paper on Sunday. For a while we got nothing on Saturday and two identical half-papers on Sunday. For a few happy months we actually got the paper as expected, half on each day. Then last week we got nothing at all, and this weekend we got nothing on Saturday followed by two Sunday halves.

Before we moved our Sunday ritual was to sink into the paper (“like slipping into a warm bath,” as Tom Wolfe said) over a leisurely breakfast. Now our ritual is to call subscription services, wait forever, and then struggle with a sullen and uncooperative Times customer service person.

Though it isn’t perfect, I love the Times, and would really like to have it delivered. But five months of effort was too much, and after yesterday’s snafu we gave up and cancelled our subscription. Or tried anyway–I expect they’ll screw that up too.

Driving your customers crazy isn’t a good policy under any circumstances, but it seems particularly unwise when your industry is in a death spiral. I have no doubt that eventually the Times will figure out how to transition to a healthy online business model. But in the meanwhile you’d think they’d make it as easy as possible for people who want to give them money for the print edition to do so*, instead of shooting holes in the bottom of their sinking ship.

* The other possibility: this is all William Safire’s doing.

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Shelby Lynne, Grammarian

From a New York Times Magazine story on torch singer Shelby Lynne:

“Do you know the difference between the words ‘bringing’ and ‘taking’?” she practically whispered into my sleeve, as if not to embarrass me. “Because you just used one of them incorrectly.” I do know the difference, and though I couldn’t remember what I said, I agreed with her anyway, dizzied by the sudden altitude of the conversation. Lynne then proceeded to conduct a sobering mini-symposium on grammar: subjective and objective cases; “begging” versus “raising” the question; parts of speech. “It’s all about using the proper pronouns,” she asserted with the calm authority of a linguistics maven promoting her latest book on NPR.

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The Salad Dodger

Wordie’s mole at the The Wall Street Journal has forwarded another worthwhile post, this one from the WSJ Health Blog. The WotY is a global phenomenon*, and Heather Won Tesoriero posts about some gems in the ‘health’ category of the Word of the Year contest sponsored by the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia.

My favorite by far is “salad dodger,” defined as an overweight person. I envision an Artful Dodger focused solely on junk food, quietly pocketing moon pies while avoiding the soy police.

* And an exhausting one. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t even blogged about the American Dialect Society’s recently annointed WotY. I very much like their choices and their attitude, both of which are better than most of the commercial WotY offerings. But I’m suffering a bit of WotY fatigue**. I’ll try to get fired up, as Obama (and Hillary) would say, this weekend.

** Doubly embarrassing is that I have given short shrift to Wordie’s own grassroots WotY movement, which has been great fun to watch from the sidelines. Though part of me thinks it might function best as a phantom WotY, forever discussed but never announced.