PARVUM OPUS

Number 274

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Inelegant Variations

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day renamed the “elegant variation” (named by Fowler) the “inelegant variation”, that is, the suggestion not to repeat the same word in a sentence or passage.

When Fowler named this vice of language in the 1920s, "elegant"* was almost a pejorative word, commonly associated with precious overrefinement. Today, however, the word has positive connotations. So lest the reader think that the subject of this article is a virtue rather than a vice in writing, it has been renamed unambiguously: inelegant variation. ... [However,] variety for variety's sake in word choice can confuse readers. If you call a car "the BMW" in one place and "the sporty import" in another, can your reader be certain that you're referring to the same car? If you write about a person's "candor" in one sentence and "honesty" in the next, is the reader to infer that you are distinguishing between two traits, or using different words to refer to the same one?...

Today: "Elongated Yellow Fruit. "Perhaps the most famous example of inelegant variation is "elongated yellow fruit" as the second reference for "banana." Thus Charles W. Morton named "the elongated-yellow-fruit school of writing," citing examples such as "the numbered spheroids" for billiard balls, "the azure-whiskered wifeslayer " for Bluebeard, "hen-fruit safari" for an Easter-egg hunt, "succulent bivalves" for oysters, and "rubber-tired mastodon of the highway" for a truck. "The Elongated Yellow Fruit," in A Slight Sense of Outrage.... There is even a book full of these things, in which a minister is "an old pulpit pounder," a prizefighter is "a braggart of the squared circle," and a vegetarian is "a confirmed spinach-addict."... See J.I. Rodale, The Sophisticated Synonym Book....

Sometimes the variation leads to real confusion. For example, in the following headline, the reader must wonder at first whether "victim" and "loved one" refer to the same person: "Victim's Family Can Witness Death of Loved One's Killer," Austin Am.-Statesman, 17 Nov. 1995, at A11. The solution there would be to delete "Victim's."

Reminds me of The Romance Writer's Phrase Book, which lists 3,000 metaphors to be used in the garden-variety romance novel. Cliché’s, or in other more or less elegant words, pre-digested language.

Writers have also been told not to repeat “said” in dialogue, but substitutions can become much more intrusive than repeated “saids” which blend into the woodwork. You might as well make it a rule to avoid frequent use of “the”. In grade school I was also taught not to repeat “I” too much, and not to begin a letter to a friend with “I”. I do not follow this rule. Do kids even learn to write letters in school anymore?

*Regarding “elegant”, I think I wrote once about the confusion in the use of “elegant” in Jane Austen, describing the character Anne Elliott in Persuasion. In this case, “elegant” was a compliment, in its meaning of refined, without excess; you can have an elegant solution to a problem in mathematics, for instance. But some reader thought it meant too fancy, fussy, and affected. Not so.

Red-Eye

Heard at the Post Office on tax day: “I’ll give you a red-eye.” A red-eye is a hand-stamp, one of those round cancellation hand stamps used with red ink. So add this to your list of definitions for red-eye: red-eye gravy (made from ham drippings and coffee); a flight that arrives early in the morning, maybe before dawn; the demonic effect of light on the retina in photographs.

Attendee

Just wondering why we have attendees at meetings instead of attenders. Attendants is already taken and means something else. The “ee” ending usually denotes a passive recipient of the action, grammatically, as in employee, donee, payee. By attending one actively provides, not receives, one’s presence.

Anniversary Celebration

Fred and I were married fours years ago yesterday, on April 17, 2004. Here’s an interview with my musician friend Sonny, whose performed with his band at our wedding. (The video link only works in Explorer, not Mozilla Firefox or Netscape.)

Spoiler Alert: Beyond Here Be Drags

Ancient campaign history now ~ going back several weeks ~ but I finally figured out Geraldine Ferraro’s remark about Barack Obama. Remember that? Something to the effect that he’s where he is in the campaign because he’s black. She must have been thinking of John Edwards: good looking, successful, left-wing. Obama is a slicker speaker, and, of course, black, but aside from a few other superficial differences, there’s not a lot to choose between them. But John Edwards couldn’t and didn’t offer to repair your soul, which Obama’s wife said was on offer. Edwards wasn’t mailing out specially blessed prayer cloth / shop rags with the imprint of his face on them.

I usually don’t seek out this sort of insane rant, but while following this riveting campaign, I ran across Harlem Dyse of the Black Anarchists, whose support of Obama (and his minister Jeremiah Wright) goes like this:

Anytime you can sneak a fox to the door of the hen house to play guard, do it. The hope of black America is that this fox’s teeth are sharp and his appetite verocious. America’s chicken houses are full of foul white birds that need to be slaughtered.

Of course it’s the word “verocious” that really caught my eye, an efficient combination of ferocious and voracious. (Shouldn’t he have tried out “foul white fowl”?) And Dyse’s unique take on global warming:

Obama’s got soul and is the Fard Muhammad of our times. He is in touch with the gifts God has given him through his skin color. He knows white people burn in the sun and will hasten global warming and the destruction of the Ozone layer so that the earth may be purged of evil. Obama’s soul is with black people & God. And that’s easy to say because white people don’t have souls or a God.

            Am I taking his words out of context? Is he really a great guy if you get to know him? I doubt it. “Out of context means” distorting the meaning, not taking a sample of someone’s expressed ideas.

            More rhetorical analysis: Obama said small-town people in Pennsylvania (i.e. white), bitter from lack of jobs, go to guns and religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like them and anti-immigrant sentiment. That is, they have no reason for their religion, no tradition for their gun ownership (including the Bill of Rights), no rational opposition to illegal immigration that might be affecting job availability. So instead of voting on the important economic issues (which they can’t understand), they vote on trivial issues like gay marriage. They’re bitter because they have to rely on family, friends, and God rather than the government, as any rational person would. Well, it analyzes itself, doesn’t it. But just let me note that guns usually mean something different in South Chicago than in rural Pennsylvania. Apparently religion does too. And does Obama mean that affluent people ~ say, rich Republicans ~ vote rationally?

            Incidentally, Obama’s web site has a bid for the Amish vote in Pennsylvania, but an Amish observer/journalist says they don’t often vote for candidates, usually only for local issues.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning ~ Parvum Opus discusses  language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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"Flash in the Pants"

"If you're so smart why aren't you me?"

"If you build it they won't come"

Rage Boy/Bat Boy: Can you spot the difference?

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

"I am here" T-shirt

"Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

"I eat dead things" doggy shirt and BBQ apron

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WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video and music clips of great blues man Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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PARVUM OPUS

Number 273

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YEOMAN BILL

Bill R. wrote:

||| On climate change: Thomas Friedman calls it "global weirding" for just that reason.

||| On yeoman: In fact, it comes from their activities ~ yeomen were known for spending most of their time polishing their brightly colored yeos. Later, advanced technology gave us yeo-yeos.

||| On medieval life (nasty, brutish, and short): You bet your booty it was nasty brutish and short! (I have a wallpaper that states, "Solitary, poor, nasty and brutish, but of average stature.")

||| On Harry Reid and voluntary taxes: Maybe Harry Reid doesn't get hassled by the IRS ~ ya think?

YEOMAN DAVE

||| Dave DaBee isn't having "climate change":

No no no no, "climate change" is a spin expression created by a spinner-for-hire, paid by the oil industry, to shift the focus from warming (perceived negatively; worrisome) to "it's just *change*. We don't really know what's happening."  I saw the spinner-for-hire interviewed on some show last year, talking quite openly about his services, and expressing quite openly that he didn't have a single scruple in his soul.  If I recall correctly, he was also the one who, thirty years earlier, served the tobacco industry, recommending that they publicize that there's "controversy" about "this seemingly closed subject."  But perhaps that was just a comparison the program made.  At any rate, this guy has also come up with one or two other meme changes that are now part of the vernacular ~ I don't recall which.

If you will, it's "differently abled" thinking, implemented this time by the oil industry.

I suppose there's a slippery slope between meme-changing, PC-ness, spin, and eventually Orwellian NewSpeak.

Gotta have some sources, Dave.

||| Dave also sent a lengthy professional comment on typesetting; here's part of it:

In hand-set type, using a larger space between sentences was easy. But that's hard for machines. On a Linotype machine, the variable-size spaces used in justified text are achieved by a spaceband, which is a mechanical thing that physically spreads the words apart when a line is cast into metal, as lead is injected into the mold under great pressure.  But it does not work at all well to place two of those spready things together, so that wasn't done. (When a Linotype machine malfunctions, it squirts hot lead into the air, often landing on the typographer; journeyman Lino men had burn scars or holes in their work sweaters.)

||| And he discovered TEAL, two guys on a typo eradication mission. Someone in that e-mail string said here are two people who need to get a job. Maybe they have a job. They did at least one NPR interview (see Hoboken). Seems like a knock-off of the Brit Apostrophe Society, since they spot a lot of bad apostrophes or lack thereof. But can we assume faulty apostrophe usage to be typos? I wonder if NPR would pay for my next vacation if I took photos of typos etc.

||| Dave also was wondering what you might call the phenomenon of seeing a word and thinking it looks wrong, that it must be spelled wrong even if it isn't. He has that problem with banana, for instance. I queried Rich Lederer, who said that as far as he knows there's no technical name for it. Dave would like to name it "typeaux beaugus". When I was a kid certain words used to devolve into a meaningless sound if I repeated them to myself long enough. Probably related to some sort of obsessive-compulsive thing in the brain. Perhaps it could be controlled by drugs, or hours of meditation.

FOOD AND DRINK

||| "Disappearing Concoctions" from The Amish Cook lists a few old-fashioned Amish dishes, which like similar foods from other cultures were created out of poverty and scraps. Some are similar to country (or southern) cooking, with which I'm most familiar, but the names are different. For instance, "Brown Flour Soup" is just flour and milk, but if the flour is fried it's basically gravy. "Coffee Soup" I've never heard of: a mug of crumbled crackers or bread crumbs with hot coffee poured over it. I guess it's the poor relation of dunking your doughnut in coffee. I looked up red-eye gravy in Wikipedia and found that it's a gravy made from ham drippings and coffee. (And I thought I was being adventurous putting coffee in barbecue sauce.) "Rivvel Soup" (if "rivvel" is German, what does it mean?) is dumplings.

||| On the other side of the comestibles universe, in more ways than one, is Absolut vodka. The Swedish company ran an ad in Mexico showing a 19th-century map of North America when Mexico included California, Texas, and other states further north. Part of their "In an Absolut world" campaign. They succumbed to complaints from gringos who objected and pulled the ad. But perhaps Mexicans, who might think that was a more "ideal" vision than current reality, along with the Absolut ad people, might go back even further, before Spaniards or any Europeans arrived. Why not go back to the Aztecs and blood sacrifice? If the border were stuck in the mid-19th century location, wouldn't the border where illegal immigrants cross simply be further north? I assume the United States would still be prosperous enough to lure them, and that the Mexican economy would be just as poor, but it would cover more territory. Anyway, I get the message. No more Absolut for me. Too bad, because I like Fris vodka, by Absolut, and I loved an ad they did years ago with a very verbal work by outsider artist Howard Finster.

LYING ON MY MIND

It must be the interminable presidential campaign that keeps lying on my mind. One of my favorite sayings about lying is, "He lies so much his wife has to call the dog." But here's a good one that's new to me: "He wouldn't tell you the truth if it helped him."

||| Read Theodore Dalrymple on lying.

||| Read about the Chinese Wikipedia block.

||| Read Mark Steyn on free speech (and punishment thereof, for telling the truth, in Canada's "Human Rights" Commission, scare quotes Steyn's); and Steyn on lying.

DARKCOPY

Son Jude sent a reference to the DarkCopy Online Fullscreen Text Editor, a simplified word processor for those who don't like or need the complications of Word, et al.

SEIZE THEM!

Whereas some Christian objections to school library books on gay-parent families have been decried as repressive, oppressive, and suppressive, Muslims were able to get The King and the King, And Tango Makes Three, and other items "temporarily" removed from a Bristol, England elementary school library. Why did they succeed where the Christians did not? Because they'll kill you, and your little gay dog too.

WITHOUT IDEALS OR VIOLENCE

Bob Dylan won a Pulitzer Prize! I thought he was an interesting writer, from way back in the days of teaching freshman comp when I had students analyze "Dear Landlord". Out of all the things I lost by the wayside, I still think he's a good writer.

EXTRA INNING

Ever notice this line in Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die":

... if this ever changing world in which we live in

makes you give in and cry...

Imagine you were a Beatle helping him out with the lyric. How could you get rid of that extra "in" and retain the meter? You could always delete the second "in" and just stretch out the word "live". Or how about, "...if this ever changing world that we all live in". Lots of possibilities.

Discussing language, education, journalism, culture, and more, Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

NEW SHOP: Scot Tartans (custom orders available).

T-SHIRTS AND OTHER STUFF AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

"Flash in the Pants"

"If you're so smart why aren't you me?"

"If you build it they won't come"

Rage Boy/Bat Boy: Can you spot the difference?

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

"I am here" T-shirt

"Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

"I eat dead things" doggy shirt and BBQ apron

Plus kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, coffee mugs, beer stein, and more!

ELSEWHERE

Parvum Opus now appears at http://cafelit.blogspot.com/. It is also carried by the Hur Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10, 2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video and music clips of great blues man Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!