Diacritiques

I imagine Geoffrey Pullum has a file on his computer named “Strunk and White adjectives”, and every time he posts about The Elements of Style he chooses a new one and ticks it off as “used”. He’s called the opus a horrid little notebook of nonsense, a stupid little book, a poisonous little collection of bad grammatical advice, a horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices, a toxic little book of crap, a disgusting little atavistic compendium of falsehoods, a pox-ridden little pocketbook of pointless pontifications — and that’s where I stopped searching. (Do I sense an attempt to create a snowclone here, by the way?)

An illustrated version could only be an improvement, then, right? In particular if the pictures are, as David Gelernter puts it in the Opinion Journal, “bright, jazzy, irrelevant” and show that Maira Kalman, the illustrator, fundamentally strayed from the book’s dictum of “keeping things plain and simple”: Take that, Strunk! Serves you right, White!

Jeremy Eichler’s review in today’s New York Times has more. The illustrations aren’t even attempting to illustrate rules of grammar and usage. They riff on the visual quality of the book’s example sentences — which are apparently#[1] about as natural as those your typical EFL textbook uses — and occasionally on Strunk or White’s own prose. This might be entirely appropriate: I can’t see how “Be obscure clearly” would help me improve my “weak and flabby prose”#[2], but the sentence does take my visual fancy.

Still, the following passage, which I read very late last night, had me check I wasn’t suffering from caffeine-induced hallucinations:

She explained that while she was painting her illustrations, she found herself singing the words and dreaming of a Strunk and White opera, or even a ballet. She turned to Mr. Muhly, whom she had known for more than a decade as a family friend and co-conspirator in various neo-Dadaist adventures. (Ms. Kalman once ran a Rubber Band Society - for people who love rubber bands, naturally - and invited Mr. Muhly to compose a work scored for rubber bands, which he did.) “I knew that Nico and I would have an immediate conversation in shorthand about humor and imagination, and that he’d completely get it,” Ms. Kalman said.

Mr. Muhly, 24, is a talented and audacious graduate of the Juilliard School who has worked with Philip Glass and Bjork. His Strunk and White songs are eloquently scored for soprano, tenor, viola, banjo and percussion. They also include parts for Ms. Kalman’s friends and family, who will make “little gentle noises” through amplified kitchen utensils (vintage eggbeaters and meat grinders) and a set of dice shaken in a bowl.

I’m torn, I admit. On the one hand, that’s a lovely idea. A neo-Dadaist song cycle is probably exactly what the book needs#[3], a way to desecrate this Monument of American Culture. But on the other hand, if Mr Muhly’s song cycle has any success, it could also serve to perpetuate Strunk and White’s style and grammar advice. Which I don’t think would be helpful, really.

UPDATE: On the site of the NY Public Library, more on THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE: A Short Happy Evening of Song with Maira Kalman and Nico Muhly, which is being performed about now. Dixit the library:

With titles such as “Be Obscure Clearly!”, “Overly Over,” and “Hyphens,” the songs are drawn from the humorous examples of poor writing and the pithy rules for proper grammar found in The Elements of Style.

There’s also a pretty picture of the soprano Abby Fischer.

UPDATE2: Embarrassing misspelling corrected.

[1]: I don’t own the book and rely on the language blogosphere on this; if Prof. Pullum’s stance seems particularly radical, I’ve rarely seen much good said about the book, and even the most sympathetic language bloggers call it outdated. But I was sorely tempted to go out and look for a used copy when I learned that Strunk and White forbid the use of people as a plural form for person when the word is preceded by a number. That bit was too crazy for me to stomach. English native speakers, I’ll tell you a secret: it’s taught that way in EFL classes all over the world, though I’ve personally stopped short of calling people the actual plural of person — some do, but that’s just not right — like in mouse, mice or child, children. Update: It hadn’t occurred to me that there’s a copy available on Bartleby.com. [2]: Jeremy Eichler’s words, which appear in the same sentence as “split infinitives” and “dangling participles”, sigh. He’s considerable more pro-Elements than the conventional linguablogospheric wisdom has it. [3]: Let’s not forget that Dadaism was a reaction to utter despair.

[That’s readings, not lectures, mind.]

At Language Log, Bill Poser has posted a wonderful introduction to Hangul (한글). Today is Hangul Day, the celebration of the promulgation of the Korean alphabet by King Sejong the Great in 1446.

Prior to 1446, the Korean language was rarely written at all. The written language used in Korea was Classical Chinese. The combination of the use of a foreign language with the large amount of memorization required to learn thousands of Chinese characters meant that only a small elite were literate, overwhelmingly men from aristocratic families. The great majority of people were illiterate. On the relatively rare occasions when Korean was written, it was written using Chinese characters, in part for their sound, in part for their meaning. This too was a complex system poorly suited for mass literacy. Hangul was the first writing system to make it easy for any Korean to read and write his or her native language. […]

Hangul is considered a great achievement for several reasons. First and foremost, it is a perfect alphabet. It distinguishes all of the distinct sounds in Korean and makes no subphonemic distinctions. From the point of view of the reader, there are no ambiguities. From the point of view of the writer, there are a few ambiguities in that in certain environments syllable-final nasals may be written either as nasals or as the plain stops of the same point of articulation. This is not an error but reflects a decision to write at a higher level of abstraction than a classical phonemic representation. It makes things slightly harder for the writer but makes things easier for the reader, who is given more direct access to lexical representations.

Go and read the whole thing.

Bookforum has an article by Jesse Sheidlower, editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, about Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

And in French news, we learn via ABC de la langue française that Le Petit Robert — arguably the best one-volume brick-sized French dictionary — is advertising via… eggcorns (poteaux roses). Well, they don’t use the label (yet?), but the first instalment of their new campaign plays on the reshaping tirer au flanc»tirer au flan (.gif image). Eggcorns are useful: the proof is in the pudding.

The software upgrade seems to have gone all right (please report any problems you may have with this site). Posting, on the other hand, has been light; mainly because I’m recovering from a particularly tenacious cold/cough/bronchitis, which has me look at the more substantial posts in the pipeline and shake my head in disgust about their lack of clarity and conciseness.

To tide you over, some more levity. The language blogs have been abuzz with posts about swearwords lately — their origins, their usages, and the annoying tendency of some media to censor, edit or otherwise partially camouflage the offending words, blatantly disregarding the speakers or authors who chose them in the first place. (Search engines still have problems retrieving the appropriate posts, but for a small sample, try this and this Technorati search — I just can’t get their Boolean operators to work correctly.)

In the latest instalment of this meta-series, Arnold Zwicky approvingly cites the Guardian, whose editors have no problem printing relevant quotes in full:

Sir Richard [Mottram] put it more succinctly. He is said to have told a colleague: “We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department’s fucked. It’s been the biggest cock-up ever and we’re all completely fucked.”

The Guardian Style Guide — always a pleasant read, and at the very least you’ll enjoy the cartoons (see above) — has the following to say:

fuck
do not describe this as “a good, honest old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word” because, first, here is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon word (they spoke Old English) and, more important, it did not appear until the late 13th century
see swearwords

swearwords
We are more liberal than any other newspaper, using words such as cunt and fuck that most of our competitors would not use.
The editor’s guidelines are straightforward:
First, remember the reader, and respect demands that we should not casually use words that are likely to offend.
Second, use such words only when absolutely necessary to the facts of a piece, or to portray a character in an article; there is almost never a case in which we need to use a swearword outside direct quotes.
Third, the stronger the swearword, the harder we ought to think about using it.
Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a copout.

Asterisks are explicitly forbidden. Very sensible advice.

On the same topic, when I was talking about this sort of thing with my friend Kareen some time ago over a pleasant cup of tea under her plum trees, I was reminded that the asterisks, periods or underscores of avoidance aren’t an English-only phenomenon. In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre published a play called La P… respectueuse. “P…” stands for “Putain”, whore. Here, the avoidance is achieved with a standard ellipsis: three dots, which according to French typographic rules are printed without a preceding blank space. The number of dots does not equal the number of elided letters. Kareen surmised that literary scholars and the like would refer to the play as “La Putain respectueuse”, though.

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