If my self-defined word bibliophilia means both a love of books and a certain madness about them, what then describes a certain madness about books written by others about that very madness? A madness for madness? Is that a thing? Where and when does it stop? Ever? (Death would be a safe bet.) Of those who love to read, there exists a subset who thrill, not to be reading, but in anticipation of reading. Cue Carly Simon. People in this subset feel a fevered, shaking promise when entering a funky bookstore in the middle of nowhere and the first ten titles they see scream “READ ME! NOW!!” And yet…
Within this subset of bibliphiliacs, a smaller, more exclusive sub-subset exists. These distinct suffers of bibliophilia feel an intimate rush when they espy that one volume probing directly into their literary, book-loving soul, purporting to deliver not just a few hundred finely written pages but promising those pages will satisfy not just their book-lusting souls but will simultaneously glorify the very building blocks which construct the objects of their obsessions. It’s a feedback loop not unlike the pleasure paddles given to rats which OD’ed on opiates. It’s as if one of their objects of desire shed all the clothing of characterization and plot or rhetorical structure and laid themselves bare for the reader’s ultimate satisfaction. No wonder we tingle all over and feel a slight loss of rationale thought when we see these titles.
My, my. Did it suddenly get warm in here? Let’s cover up and move on…
Language books that stood the tests of time and usefulness. July 2025.
Despite having degrees in both Communications and English, I possess a scant half-shelf of books about the language I use. Perhaps this relates to the Communications degree carrying a focus of journalism and the latter one a focus on literature. The English degree also had a few courses pared from it because of the additional classes I had to take to get the “.Ed” added to the end of it. Linguistics interested me until I encountered the arguments for Noam Chomsky’s innate grammar versus the classic thought that grammar remains culturally induced. I suppose this means something important to someone, but who really cares right now? All books I bought for linguistics possessed such rarified, dry prose to make them insufferable the moment I finished the class which required their purchase.
Other books departed for different reasons. Those which all claimed to be about “being a writer” fell victim to The Purge of 2020 when I removed about a third of the library to live in boxes designated for assignment to others…or to the trash. I determined at that time I will never be A Writer although I will write. A freeing decision. Joining those were books which celebrate the language of English and which I found only mildly amusing: volumes by William Safire, Willard Espy, and Richard Lederer all sit waiting to grace someone else’s shelves.
Nine “keepers” don’t appear on the shelf at all because they are points of data in Kindle form. Several lovely books appear in this group: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in L:etter [sic] by Mark Dunn, sadly prescient for our time, where a Council decrees the removal of letters one by one from all written and spoken communication; Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene Pepperberg which I haven’t read yet but which looks great; Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter, a slightly controversial book dealing with how certain aspects of English came into being; and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, a true story about a murderer incarcerated due to insanity who nevertheless overwhelms the compilers of the OED with 10,000 entries. I’m looking forward to two more: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler; and Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco.
Missing from the shelf because I loaned it ten years ago to a friend who I believe is “still getting around to it”: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett. Though some revile him, the book fascinated me. Everett traveled to the Amazonian jungle to proselytize Christianity to the Pirahã mostly by learning their language and then translating the Bible into it. A trained linguist, he discovered the Pirahã have no counting system, no fixed words for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. I seem to recall they didn’t have all the temporal aspects of language (past, present, future and the permutations thereof). The title comes from their belief that evil spirits (and snakes) can only get you when you fall asleep, therefore they attempt to sleep as little as possible. They sleep communally and at all times several will be awake talking to each other.
I decided to take pity on you. Rather than a lengthy bibliologue through the shelf, left to right (because that’s how these things are done), I’m breaking things out for individual treatment. In my subjective view of the shelf, L to R, it breaks into books about books and reading them; books about English, including how to physically present it on the page; a few books I’ve retained which promise advice on writing; and one lovely volume which defies categorization but touches on the meaning of words, poetry, and translation, all while tackling the relationship of cognition to language and adding in the personal pain of losing a spouse to a killer disease.
Or am I delaying and stringing out this series to heighten my pleasure? (It’s getting warm again…)
Take a Sears-Roebuck catalog, cross it with the hippie ethos, and add a large dose of product recommendations. WEC blazed a new trail. Photo, July 2025. Catalogs, Summer 1972 and sometime in 1994.
When I headed off to college in 1972 my curiosity led me to enroll in an experimental education program funded by the Ford Foundation. I hope to write of that someday, but today we consider two peculiar residents of my library: two editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. Being 18 in 1972, I didn’t exactly participate in “The Sixties” which meant I hadn’t heard of The Whole Earth Catalog until it appeared on the textbook list for that experimental program I’d enrolled in. What is it and why am I making a big deal about it? Is this just some oldster nostalgia trip? Maybe, but I think it’s much more than that.
The WEC basically laid the groundwork for what today is Wirecutter and everything like it, except…what if Wirecutter had a hefty dose of social awareness ethos baked in? And what if there were no suspicions that Wirecutter and websites like it make decisions partially based on monetary reward? Before The WEC, I’m unaware how one could have gone to a single source for information, evaluations, and recommendations on a number of topics. Everything one needed know about consuming involved a physical trip to interface with salespeople. In certain cases one could consult a dedicated publication for audio equipment, say, or fashion, but sooner or later one needed to go to a store to buy something. If I wanted information about high quality stereo equipment, I went to Huppin’s Hi-Fi downtown where all the audiophiles (a.k.a., stereo gearheads) gathered and had all the information. When one wanted furniture, one headed to a furniture store or several and bought the best of whatever you saw. The same with clothes, garden tools, hardware, books, cars, pretty much anything. Who knew if it was good? Who knew if the price here was as good as there? If you ordered something, like a car with all the options in your favorite color, you started at a dealership. Everything filtered through the salespeople.
But the WEC gathered its recommendations for just about everything which interested the Peace Generation (or whatever you want to call us), told you why it represented the best you could buy, and gave information about how to get it. Or as the Function statement on the very first page of The Last WEC said , “The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.” This “last” edition didn’t have a table of contents. After page two told you how to get the stuff, and other tips, the third page launched right into “Whole Systems” and starting with the subsection Buckminster Fuller (anything dealing with Buckminster Fuller, a near-god of social planning). Other sections dealt with land use, industry, craft, community, nomadics, communication, and learning. These were loosely defined: subsections in Learning include “Thinking,” “Serendipity,” “Psychology,” and “Free Schools”. Additionally, the lower right corner of all right-hand pages from Page 9 onward contained the story “Divine Right’s Trip” where the main character, Divine Right, experiences many adventures of the time until he lands on the Whole Earth Catalog at the very end, a sort of gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow thing.
I could write pages and pages about the WEC to little effect on anyone who hasn’t seen it. In its way it picked up the tradition of the old Sears-Roebuck catalogs which allowed people living in the backwaters of America to buy through the mail most of the things they could ever want for their farms, their businesses, their personal health, and to clothe their bodies. (“Through the mail” • prep phrase describing movement of written communication and goods prior to delivery services such as UPS and FedEx) The S-R catalog fell onto hard times when everyone started to get electricity and cars made it easier to get to the merchants.
After navigating the remainder of the 1970’s and all of the 1980’s, issuing a few Supplements—the informal publications which came out between editions of The WEC—founder Stewart Brand and crew decided a new edition needed to be published. Those 20 years saw the introduction and rise of the personal computer, for one thing, and the starry-eyed, inchoate idealism of The Sixties had given way to a gritty, in-the-trenches attitude by the early 90’s. Most of the casual members of the Peace Generation had left the ranks, lured by money, security, and mere existence. The title page of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog quoted Brand from 1969: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” before explaining that good things performed by governments and other large bodies were being obscured by “gross defects”; a rising personal power needed a guide to the new tools making this possible.
Two random samples from The WEC shall suffice, one from each.
Opening The Last Whole Earth Catalog to pages 36-37, I find myself in the middle of a five-page description of something called Liferaft Earth. I’ve no personal knowledge of this, and I’m not reading all five pages of very tiny print (looks like 6-8pt type; it varies because consistency was not a strong point for The WEC). It appears to be about making sure everyone on the planet has enough to eat. Here’s a snippet from the top of the second column of page 35…
The following five pages chronicles a week-long event sponsored and organized by the CATALOG in October 1969.
Richard Brautigan saw the end of it. The beginning of it was three days I spent alone on a train with excellent hash and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Ehrlich had been a teacher of mine, back in his butterfly and my tarantula days, so I knew to believe him.
—SB
“SB” was Stewart Brand who created and led the WEC publication team. Incidentally, in looking for a formal description of his title/role, I discovered the entire Last WEC was composed using an IBM Selectric typewriter. I didn’t find his role.
I left a bookmark in the Millennium edition long ago. Opening to this page brought me to the Communications section/Writing subsection. An article preceding the tools for and about writing begins, “We are swimming in a great polluted sea of language, and we wonder why we can’t write.” How much more so now! It continues:
We wonder why we don’t want to read. Even worse, we cease to wonder; we just don’t do it. It’s as though it didn’t matter anymore.
As though hammers didn’t matter; as though air didn’t matter; as though horses and balloons had disappeared.
It’s not a hardware problem; it’s not a brain-wire problem. It’s a writing problem. It’s software, it’s soft words, it’s swampish bureaucratic slide-down of mush-mouthed ass-covering prose that promotes long term despair in humans.
—Jon Carroll
This appears on page 242 of 384 pages in a book measuring 11×14.5 inches in fonts rarely bigger than 8pt. You can see how one would get lost in there, and how part of him would never come back out. Which is why more than fifty years later they remain on my bookshelves despite the hundreds (thousands?) which have not withstood the journey.
For several weeks I’ve written, re-written, and re-re-written a difficult piece about my father. Its point still eludes me. I fear several things: I’ve attempted to describe something, but I’m only describing it superficially; I’ve selected an inferior topic to one which begs to be heard; or perhaps what I’m writing about doesn’t rise to worthiness. This has delayed my promise to myself to post one piece of writing about my father every Sunday. It’s been like attempting to grasp a wriggling fish. I shall continue to rant to the air, to myself, to my wife—heck, to the birds on the grass—about this, and hope it gels in my mind and in my words.
Until then I’ll post a few photos, and maybe I’ll write something less weighty, something which elicits a few chuckles or wry reactions. Yes. That would be it.
The deep blue one recently joined this bookshelf. June 2025.
I recently purchased a collection of short stories by the author of one of the blogs I’ve followed the longest, Bridgette Tales. That’s it up there, the dark blue one. I noted with satisfaction it has excellent company!
Our first night view from our Maui condo (unretouched). September 2024.
[written on January 3rd, but subjected to the Don’t-Post-Anything-After-The-First-Beer rule.]
At the end of September 2024 I mused on boring y’all with 100 Days of Hawaii, my poor-taste humor suggesting I would post every day through the end of the year something about Hawaii, thereby driving away the few visitors who swing by this little neck of the Interweb. Today, 96 days since then, I find 100 days will not be enough owing to my typical lack of focus. (“Oh, look! Something shiny!”) I’ve only posted through our arrival on Maui, barely more than halfway into our trip. And I’ve made myself a mockery for eagerly anticipating the 12 Days of Christmas and all of the writing which would spring to life from my keyboard. (See link for last year’s procession through the Christmastide.) Therefore, on this Tenth Day of Christmas, and just past the turning of the civil calendar from 2024 to 2025, I pause to reflect, to resolve, to anticipate, to evaluate, and to pontificate. I guess I should apologize in advance. I’ll try to return to better stuff soon.
Most obviously, Hawaii remains unfinished. I therefore resolve to complete my reminiscence by the end of January. Given that we lazed out in Maui, did very little, and that I took the same few photographs over and over and over, this likely won’t prove difficult.
I anticipate a medical march through the month. I had a doctor consultation today. Coming up I’ve got a blood draw, a procedure I would name but for the fear I bring to its table, a semi-annual physical, and one or more appointments with those who keep my legs from collapsing. That last item melodramatically addresses ankle and feet issues which would take a lengthy post of little interest to address.
At 70, health becomes ever more preoccupying. I’m trying to change my instinct to live in front of this keyboard when I’m not in the kitchen, the choir loft, or in front of the TV. We’ll see. This intent has been issued many times before, apparently to the void for all the good it did.
I’m ditching Reader’s Horror. It intimidates rather than educates. I think I’ve made my point. Just as with several other things important to me–music reproduction, technology, cars that do what they’re supposed to do–the masses happily settle every day for a lower level of quality, all in the name of convenience. My parents’ and my generation bear some responsibility for thinking TV dinners freed us from cooking; polyester and “wrinkle-free” represented a step forward from cotton; plastic and just-throw-it-away moved us away from the repetitive chores of cleaning our glass and metal containers (can you say disposable diaper?); and gosh darn it, anything digital must be better. This mindset surprisingly (?) led to the demise of institutional journalism and the important publishing houses of my youth. Predictable, maybe, but we’ve tossed too much out with that bathwater: copyeditors, proofreaders, and those who function as guardrails and protect us from the mental cockroaches who crawl out in the absence of intellectual light. Thus sayeth me: When all voices equal each other, rationale thought dies.
I miss my decades-long foray into poetry. In pushing to publish, I’ve lost that time for stewing in my juices which engenders my poetic thoughts. I can’t make this a resolution, but I acknowledge it to myself, if only to start writing down the thoughts when they occur, even if I’m heading for bed! Just this past week I lost two pretty good poems.
I’ve read too few books and too much news. I ditched one digital subscription at the beginning of December, and I’m ditching another in the next week. If it weren’t for the depth of its offerings, I would ditch the New York Times.
There you have it. Nothing earth-shaking. Except, hopefully, for me!
Today’s assault holds a special dose of vinegar because it inverts the usual way this mistake gets committed. In a New York Times article about the Congressional scuttling of a temporary federal funding bill, Hakeem Jeffries is quoted thusly:
House Republican have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt every day Americans all across this country.
I’m ignoring the politics involved here, except those of grammar, usage, and mechanics. Usually when writers mix up every day and everyday they use the latter to refer to every singled blessed day. This is wrong. When referring to all of the days, every single one of them, there must be a space because we’re using the adjective every to describe and restrict the noun day. However, when we want to describe something as being routine, mundane, ordinary, etc., no space is used. Make the compound word everyday to describe the noun of your choice. In the paragraph above it’s Americans.
I’m tempted to say the above error actually hurts everyday Americans right now, not in some undefined future, but the mistaken usage likely slipped right past most of them. The everyday/every day error resembles those involving into/in to and onto/on to. In the case of today’s horror, the most common format for every + day would be with a space. Non-proficient writers usually slam them together making this supposed-to-be uncommon word more common in print these days. I suspect the reverse is true for the other two, but I’ve no data to support this.
Author’s role: I’m going to assume this error found its way into print due to the author, not an editor. This is a writer for the NYT, one of the premier news organizations in the world. The author should know better. We therefore rate this a 4.
Egregiousness of the error: The error will be read by most readers to mean what the author intended. As explained in the first Reader’s Horror, these space-oriented mistakes where a compound word is used when it should not be represent one of the many confusing aspects of English. Since most readers won’t notice it and will get the intended meaning, we therefore rate this a 2.
My personal reaction rating: I sigh, shake my head slightly, and mutter, “but of course.” Immediately thereafter I also say, “but it’s still wrong.” That makes it a 1.
Final rating: This error rates a 4/2/1 for an 7 out of 10 on the Reader’s Horror scale.
[Note: I’m tweaking the scale, and I’ll write a quick update later. The egregiousness rating above became a “2” instead of a “3” as a result.
Tatted (and tarted) snowflake in a window. November 2024.
I discovered 30 minutes in my day! Our holiday newsletter has reached 50% completion. For the first time in several years, I am “on schedule”—I dare not say “ahead” both due to the Law of Jinxing and because I see little time to work on it during the next two days. My Sunday deadline approaches, just as Tuesdays did decades ago when I worked on weeklies. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like starting a Tuesday knowing you don’t have enough copy to fill the empty pages! It really gets the creative juices flowing! I used the same approach as a teacher, walking in some days only clutching a topic in my mind. Lesson plans? Hah!
We kicked Covid out for good this week, but like with any unwanted guest there’s a bit of cleaning up to do. Last night’s choir rehearsal—my first in four weeks, my second in two months—did a number on my throat, partly because I had to violate the “sing from your diaphragm” rule on several pieces. My muscles ache from weeks spent primarily sitting in this office chair. The cough hasn’t completely disappeared either, small but annoying.
And lastly, one of the readers of this site and the one who partly inspired a trip to Michigan in 2023, may be amused by the photo below. I’m not a cider drinker, but I think this is being newly distributed here in NC:
From the exurbs of Detroit! Spotted in a Raleigh, NC, grocery store. November 2024.
From a story in today’s New York Times describing a veteran who was court-martialed for shooting an Iraqi in 2004.
Mr. Richmond shot the herder in the back of the head from six feet away as the man, who has handcuffed, stumbled.
—from “Veteran Who Was Court Martialed Gets 4 Years in Prison for Jan. 6 Attack”, New York Times, November 18, 2024
Error: “…, who has handcuffed,…” instead of “…, who was handcuffed,…”
Type of error rating: 2, because this seems to be a typo which wasn’t caught. (Although we should note the H key isn’t near the W key. Actually this is more a brain-fart than a typo.)
Author/editor rating: 4, because regardless of the minor level of error, a reader of the Times has a right to expect the author (or an editor) actually reads the copy prior to its being published, and even if it slipped by everyone on Nov. 18, it would be noted by somebody and corrected by the time I read it midday on the 19th.
Personal reaction rating: 1…It neither entertained or enraged. It jarred me a little, but my blood pressure stayed constant.
Bottom line: This error rates a 2/4/1 for a 7 out of 10 on the Reader’s Horror scale.
Discussion:
I’m going to need to see if all of these errors wind up being in the 7-9 range. The scale won’t mean much if so.
Writing something like this really puts one on his toes. I know I’ve corrected numerous errors in already-published posts!
[I wish there were a photo here. There isn’t because all the good photos I have about poor usage of written English are owned by someone else who likely would sue me. But, hey, we’ve illustrated the use of the subjunctive verb conjugation! That’s cool, right?]
In my email every day I receive a list of books which can be purchased in electronic format from Amazon for $1-$4. Each book is described in only two or three sentences, just enough to hopefully entice you to read the full description on Amazon and then buy the book. [See Caveats below regarding split infinitives.] Today a description of the book Girl by Alona Frankel contained this opening sentence:
In this “impressionistic memoir,” a world-renowned children’s author and illustrator offers a “truly moving and bravely rendered” account of her time as a Polish Jewish girl hiding as a Gentle in Nazi-occupied Poland (Kirkus Reviews).
A “Gentle”? Surely you meant “Gentile”?
Every day–not everyday as may be written ignorantly–I read something where the author and/or the author’s editor have recorded their ignorance of the written English language. After noting for several years how these blemishes have crept into what I consider to be prestigious sources–New York Times anyone?–I’ve decided to record all of the offenses, rating them similar to a fact-checking site. Not all offenses are equal. We will consider the source and the egregiousness of the error.
Time out for my GUM Guidelines. Grammar is how we know words mean something. “Ball he red the threw,” confuses a speaker of English because it’s out of order: “He threw the red ball.” Don’t go all Noam Chomsky on me. My definition will suffice for our purposes. Grammar is not class-based. Usage refers to the accepted way of saying something. People who say “don’t nobody know nuttin’ but me!” are deemed ignorant by the people who say “nobody knows anything except for me!” Usage is class-based. Mechanics refers to how spoken language is rendered in print. It’s a convention, neither class-based nor non-class-based. As a society we have come to an agreement that words will be written a certain way…until they aren’t. As such, mechanics change over time. Mechanics refer to punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and the like. Okay, back to our tirade of the day.
Me
At the bottom of the heap I will place graffiti, notes from friends and relatives, and other signs posted in haste. Everyone of us and every one of these examples have been written on the fly, often by persons who somehow passed through school while they regarded English classes as the scheduling version of a roulette wheel. Who knows where the ball will land? Maybe they were lucky on a certain day when final exams were given. Maybe the teachers just didn’t want to try teaching them one more time. Regardless, we can hardly damn ignorance when it’s being spray-painted on the side of a building or dashed off in haste on the back of a grocery store sales receipt. Occasionally one of these haste-lays-waste mistakes will crop up in what we read. We will sigh and rate these a 1.
Next up we encounter those who labor with the English language–and I want to emphasize “labor”. [See Caveats below for punctuating quotation marks.] People with only a passing knowledge of how to write English can find themselves employed in jobs demanding continual use of those non-existent/woefully lacking talents. In these days of electronic word processing, I suspect they often don’t write the English, they just copy and paste it from somewhere else. This copy-and-paste existence demands editing skills but ultimately the failure to catch errors, i.e., to edit your own writing or someone else’s is exactly what we’re concerned with here. We’re not dissing people for not measuring up to Shakespeare, Hemingway, or the adroit use of language we read in the work of so many fine authors. We’re taking these writers to task for how they symbolically render their thoughts into print. At this level, one up from the ignorant, they should know better–but they don’t. That’s why we will rate these a 2 and not higher.
Unlike the previous group, many persons do write professionally. They might not consider it the defining talent for their profession, but it commands an integral part in it. I’m thinking of the people who design and render web pages, paralegals who draft documents all day, people who work in advertising or real estate, and those who write blogs or newsletters or for small town newspapers (to name only a few). These people generally should know better. At the very least, they should know when they don’t know better and take the time to figure out whatever is perplexing them. (Actually, I’m probably kidding myself. They likely think they do know how that particular phrase should be written, that particular word spelled. It never crosses their mind to check it.) Perhaps most egregious, these are the people who ought to be able to question the suggestions from autocorrect, check the spelling of the underlined words, and turn on grammar checkers to parse their work. When they don’t, we must hold them more accountable. We will rate the lazy and purposefully ignorant a 3.
Finally, we come to the no-excuses group. These folks have climbed to the top of the writing pyramid. They write for the most prestigious news organizations, for literary reviews, for think tanks, for professional journals. They write books. They edit books. These people not only represent the best writers of English, they are monitored by those who set the standards of the language itself. The more frequently intelligent writers spell the word gel as “jell,” the more dictionaries will list it as an acceptable spelling. Although this is how the mechanics of written language change, it should happen slowly, and it should happen with intent. In the first years of this century I started writing “e-mail” as “email” because I figured it was headed thataway and wanted to hurry it along. I argued with co-worker and fellow purist, citing the words such as to-morrow to bolster my position. He served a useful purpose by objecting. If we unilaterally accept new spellings when one or two people obstinately use them, we start heading toward spelling chaos. Therefore, those who speed up the pace of change through sheer ignorance should not be rewarded with the support of dictionaries. At the top of the heap we should demand better. We will rate these erring standard-bearers with a 4, our highest rating.
We’re only halfway. Not all errors are equal. We can sum these up more rapidly.
We’ll deliver a gentle admonishment for missing apostrophes (some of them), plain typos, and mistakes which indicate the writer/editor willingly caved to the masses even when those masses don’t know what they’re talking about. We’ll rate them 1.
Mix-ups which appear to be a general miss by the autocorrect, those which don’t change the meaning of the writing (much), those which generally seem to be based more on haste than ignorance get a slap on the wrist and the advice to “slow down!” We rate these errors with a 2.
Ignorant errors which change or obfuscate the intended meaning must result in stronger reactions, but in the face of the difficult we need to be flexible. In writing about an online class did the author say the learners “tuned into learn”? I won’t go into details why it should be “tuned in to learn” because this error has become ubiquitous and I’ll have plenty of opportunities to explain it later. And I’m willing to admit I might deserve to be put in this group for the previous paragraph where I didn’t capitalize the S when I wrote “slow down!” My defense is that I didn’t think it appropriate to put a comma after the word “to,” and commas before quotations indicate they’re being used to set off independent clauses…so if this isn’t an independent clause but only a phrase…eh, that’s where my mind takes me. I have a reason, and I hope, nay, believe I’m right. However, I can see the argument that says the two word imperative does represent an independent clause. You see how complex this can be? Let’s not condemn these ignorant mistakes made in the face of English’s complexity with our full force. We’ll rate these errors a 3 only.
Some errors provoke the response, “That’s just wrong! How could THAT get into print?” Setting aside the skill level of the writer, we look at the error and evaluate it from a standpoint of how easy it would be to get it right, presuming the writer knew enough to figure it out. Sadly, these are the ones I see more and more. I would like to say that a 4 isn’t nearly as common as a 2 or a 3, just as most writers will fall into the 2 and 3 level in our first set of standards. No, errors seem to be at best evenly distributed from 1 to 4. Too many are grievous and demand a 4.
While the above rating scales for the actor and the act will be applied somewhat subjectively, the final scale will be totally, purely subjective. I’m going to add 0, 1, or 2 points for how much it pisses me off! A good example would be this screenshot from a local TV station’s newscast a number of years ago:
Photograph of local news story about changes coming to ATM’s in the Raleigh, NC market. Circa 2012.
This one would get a “0” because it amuses me. We live in North Carolina, so of course it’s withDRAWL instead of withDRAWAL! (And by the way, I had to check how to spell withdrawal–it’s what responsible writers do.) Most of the time this type of error in all caps and prominently displayed on the screen of a TV station in the 41st largest city in the USA would rate a “2” because at the time I captured this photo, they routinely were making horrible typographical errors like this. The station broadcasts to the Cary-Durham-Raleigh area which contains more than 1.5 million people. Apparently they fired the person who kept making these errors because they became few and then disappeared altogether.
Which brings us back to the email which set me off this morning. Clicking through to Amazon, I note that the word Gentile is spelled correctly at the top of the book’s description. Therefore I presume some low-level clerk hurriedly typed the description directly from the Amazon page. Much less likely but plausible: it was copied and pasted from Amazon, then Amazon corrected its mistake afterward. The clerk-level role is a 2. The error is grievous, though, one which should have been caught by all but the most ignorant person–apparently no one ever looked at what had been typed. The error is a 4. And because it’s so obviously wrong, it pissed me off a great deal, so I’m throwing a 2 at it. This error rates a total level of 8 out of 10 on the Reader’s Horror scale.
The Caveats:
I have a highly subjective and not terribly consistent approach to how I italicize words versus putting them in quotation marks (single or double). Generalized, when I talk about something symbolically I italicize it; when I am quoting from something I use double quotes. When I want to indicate ‘air quotes’ I use single quote marks.
Also, I stand with William Safire that only a fully quoted independent clause should have ending punctuation inside the quotation marks.
I don’t give a rat’s posterior about split infinitives. If I notice I’m doing it and if I can flip the words around to avoid it and still sound natural, I’ll rearrange the words. The abhorrence of split infinitives comes from Latin teachers. Latin verb infinitives cannot be split (as in the Romance languages), which led them to regard English infinitives as one word. Your eyes can tell you this isn’t true. It wonderfully represents the beautiful fluidity of English, and its ability to totally disregard (hah!) the silly Latin rule. The phrase “totally to disregard” is at once more awkward and slightly different in meaning.
Similar to split infinitives, I don’t overly worry about prepositions at the ends of clauses. If I can easily switch the sentence around, I will. Winston Churchill is famous for being accused of ending a sentence with a preposition and replying, “Madam, that is an accusation up with which I will not put.”
At 70 my opinions tend toward the conservative end of the scale but I started out liberal once. I surmise I’m somewhere in the middle at this point.
I’ve come to believe everyone thinks in pictures, even if they don’t know it. By adulthood some of us go on autopilot, our connection to the pictures, images, emotion-movies cemented so far in the foundation-concrete of our makeup that we know only words anymore.
Creativity demands turning away from the words and toward the pictures. Visual creatives, you live here. Connect your hands to your pictures. We wordsmiths, though, must act as our own interpreters, must turn our backs on the pictures while remembering them, must translate the pictures into words.
At least, that’s how it works for me. When it works for me. (The rest of the time I just wander among the pictures and say to myself, “sure, I’ll remember this for later.”)
all the voices in my head 