the affective effect of affectation

In the Tuesday, June 22, 2010, print edition of The New York Times, the newspaper announced that Arthur S. Brisbane had been named the paper's next public editor, or ombudsman, for a three-year term.

Bravo, Mr. Brisbane.

The article in The New York Times said:

"Mr. Brisbane, who is the grandson of the legendary Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane, said he expected to tackle a wide variety of subjects during his three-year term, including the affect on The Times's journalistic standards of publishing articles for the Web on tight deadlines." [emphasis impertinently added]

Mr. Brisbane may want to begin by tackling the person who ran off with The Times's style manual, or at least the page that covers affect versus effect.

[Note: Well, maybe Mr. Brisbane did tackle the appropriate editor. Somebody did. Immediately after I posted this, I checked the Permalink, as The Times calls it, to the original story. Someone had corrected the word, to good effect, at least for the permanent online version. Fair is fair. Bravo to The Times for making things right. I might have looked like a persnickety fool who was wrong if I did not check that Permalink. This is restorative. It is refreshing to learn that someone saw this and fixed it. It affects me positively, but it certainly does not impact me! Insert emoticon of your choice.]

Some Sententious Sentences on Sentencing

"Jesus wept." It is said to be the shortest sentence in the Bible. I first heard it as an exclamation from my friend Jeannie, from Enid, Oklahoma. Since the expression has biblical origins, one can get away with it as a mild expletive. You can almost hear the sigh that accompanies it. But what else is there to say about sentences? And to whom do I say it? Well, for starters, you can very legitimately start a sentence with "but" or "and," despite what Mrs. Rivers told us in seventh grade at Burdick Junior High School in Stamford, Connecticut. You can also end a sentence with a preposition. It's something you can live with. You can also decide to boldly split an infinitive within your sentence -- and do so with grammatical impunity. The other point I want to make about sentences -- I know, "sentencing" in the heading lured students of criminal justice to this blog under false presentences -- is that, despite a muddy river of digressions, or appositive phrases, or recursively recurring and redundant recasting of words to the point of annoyance, a perfectly grammatical and "correct" sentence is not limited to the soulful brevity of a lachrymose redeemer, but may also include such meanderings as incarnated in this sentence. So, I have said it before and will proclaim it again, "A run-on sentence is not one that 'runs on and on and on' in the impatient reader's mind; a run-on sentence, also known as a comma splice or fused sentence, is a punctuation error -- an error that has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of words or syllables in the sentence, be they running, walking, trotting, sprinting, galloping, sauntering, crawling, or strolling words. I'm done.

Who-ha Over Whom, ah...

I hardly ever watch TV (I waste my time doing this crap), but it is refreshing to know an Amerkin network television program can feature a humorous argument over grammar.

Admittedly, "The Office" came by way of England (actually, I think I saw all those Ricky Gervais shows on DVD).

Refreshing.

Between you and I, that is (mwhahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAwhowhohee).

Props to the Words to the Wise blog of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Anti-Semantic Banking

As part of a new ad campaign, HSBC Bank barks forth with this online copy:

A headline of:

there's no small change

Followed by:

Choose a more impactful way to bank.

It's all part of the green, eco-friendly bandwagon, which is fine, which I salute. The HSBC site says they were the first major bank, in 2005, to be recognized for being "completely carbon neutral." Fine. Excellent. Even without a hyphen between carbon and neutral. Alleluia. I get it. I'm green with usury.

But let's ponder impactful.

Yes, it is found in dictionaries; yes, our dynamic, living language gives birth to new words every day. I don't subscribe to the pedantic or superior view that yesterday's solecisms can't become today's standard form. You might say it's sort of like clothing fashion and style.

Impactful, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Well, for one, I believe it all stems from "impact" as verb, arising from environmental impact statements in the U.S., starting in the 1970s. With that usage, "affect" flew out the window like some threatened or endangered bird.

Impactful carries with it all the weight of seriousness it doesn't deserve.

It abdicates responsibility; it lets the writer or speaker avoid taking sides as to whether we're talking good impacts or bad.

I loathe it.

You can bank on it.

p.s. At least the spellchecker hates it, too, for once (for nonce).

Manhattan Serial-Comma Mystery Probed

Score one for us, The Serial Commakazies.

Yes, we of The Loyal Order of Serial Comma Orderliness and Logic (TLOSCOL) can take solace and comfort from this sentence in The New York Times, today, March 2, 2007, anno Domini, page A1, from the lead story, no less (the lead story is the one in the upper-right column in the ancient style of reading newspapers made of paper, which is my preference):

[hautboys, as they say in Shakespeare]

"A series of disclosures published prominently in The Washington Post about the living conditions, the red tape that ensnarled treatment, and other serious problems have challenged the notion promoted for years by the Army -- especially since the war in Iraq -- that wounded soldiers receive unparalleled care at Walter Reed."

Take a deep breath after that mouthful, eh? Imagine diagramming that one in Mrs. Rivers's seventh-grade English class! (I've just got to do a post on her one of these days.)

Well, this is delicious on several levels. First, the Gray Lady is forced in its lead story to pay homage to its stalwart competitor, The Washington Post. And, as if that ain't bad enough, the sentence, written by David S. Cloud, is brightened by my beloved serial comma. Can you spot it? Yes, it elegantly and clearly and brazenly shines after the word "treatment." (I will dodge the grammatical debate that might ensue over whether it should be "A series . . . has . . . .")

A tantalizing mystery presents itself: is the serial comma grudgingly allowed by a copy editor because it is simply too confusing without it? If so, a victory for us (just one battle, not the war), who have claimed all along that is why we insist on this punctuation mark. Or is it an error or oversight on the part of writer and copy editor? In other words, will they be slapped for not following The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage?

Or, is this a tidal turning point in the culture wars, symbolized by an awkward embrace of the serial comma?

Will we ever know?

Will Manhattan media watchers and gossipmongers, such as at gawker.com, be able to get to the foggy bottom of this persnickety puzzlement?

"No comma," is not, um, an acceptable answer.

(You just don't get sizzling stuff like this on YouTube.)

Impacted Wisdom

Count me among those who dislike using impact as a verb. I didn't say it couldn't be justified or defended on linguistic and historical grounds, as pointed out by The American Heritage Dictionary and others.

But I don't have to like such usage -- or use it.

And if I do use impact as a verb, I want it reserved for one of its most literal meanings, which I experienced yesterday as a passenger in a car.

"The car I was riding in was impacted by a pickup truck advancing upon us from the rear, which forced our car to collide with the car in front of us."

Yes, collided is a better verb. (But the collision, or, um, adverse impacted event, also known as an accident, hurts just as much or causes as much damage.)

Along with others, I don't like impact as a verb because it smacks of smug jargon. A more specific verb (affected, influenced, harmed, deteriorated, corrupted, failed...) would convey the real intended meaning. But maybe the users of impact as a verb are trying to obfuscate. (I think the current vogue use is owing to the jargon employed in environmental impact statements.)

Anyway.

No one got hurt in the accident. I thought I'd be sore today, but wasn't.

There but for the grace of God go I.

(Hmmm, as noted in the link above, Wikipedia gives an informative history of that phrase, crediting John Bradford.)

It wasn't a semitractor-trailer bearing down on us.

I am reminded of Emily Dickinson's sobering words:

Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. . . .

The Door

I've heard it said "when one door closes, another opens." But what happens when one door closes, then opens, and then remains open? Such was my experience this morning. It was very cold, just a little bit above zero degrees Fahrenheit (a German word, if ever there was one; isn't their word for zero "null"? I'm boning up on meine Deutsch in preparation for my odyssey to Berlin, on Friday). This morning was crisply frigid with the sound of crunchy snow under my feet. Invigorating and lustrous. An incandescent beauty greeted me as I looked down from Tipperary Hill onto gleaming wood-frame houses, many -- like ours -- more than one hundred years old. White smoke rising straight up (as if the whole community were announcing "habemas papam") against a cerulean sky. A scene that could be more poetically and mystically described by The Secretary of Dawns. I brushed a veneer of snow off my car, holding my gloves in my hand (if I can remember back that far). (Why do I do that with my gloves? Is it laziness, impatience, or self-destructiveness?) I placed the key in the car door. It is not a car door that can be unlocked or locked electronically. The 1999 Ford Contour (listed on the registration as green but it strikes me as more olive-tan) is not paid off (technically, yes, but it was paid by borrowing money at a cheaper interest rate than the original loan), and sports very retro manually locking (or unlocking) doors. I turned the key right, left, then right again, then left, encountering frozen resistance, which I expected, since the lock had recently been sticking, largely owing, I felt, to the moist weather followed by sudden temperature plunges. Happily the door opened. (In that preceding use of the adverb happily, does it refer to the door or the act of opening? Well, if it is truly functioning as an adverb, it must refer to the verb opened. Admittedly, it is an adverb that squintingly tries to modify the whole sentence -- as does the word admittedly in this sentence.) But the door did not close. More accurately, it did not stay closed. (This was not a shock; the same thing happened earlier in the week.) I slammed it, figuring that a jarring thrust might do the trick, dislodging ice or frigidity, as if the door were an illuminating and glistening sexual metaphor. No luck. I lustily slammed it several times, and still the door would not latch closed. I sprayed WD-40 onto the keyhole, onto the door's locking mechanism, and onto the latch on the frame of the car. You might say I sprayed both the male and female lock components. I even sprayed the manual lock lever on the inside of the driver's (moi) car door, leaving an oily smell, but not nearly as much as I had expected, perhaps because of the cold. All the while, the car was running, defrosters going. I felt that perhaps the environmentally suspect act of warming up the car might generate a cumulative de-icing effect (I have a small de-icer spray device, but I didn't bother; it didn't work the other day). I even tried closing the door tenderly and gently, as if treating it thusly would coax it to surrender romantically into its rightful niche in the universe. No deal. I tried to lift the door up while closing it, imagining it may have been misaligned (as opposed to maligned, hence the slamming). Time was ticking away. I was already late for work (typical). The morning was still beautiful. Lambent. I pictured neighbors (neighbors are very close by; even a driveway is a treat; the house of our down-the-hill neighbors, renters, is maybe five feet from our house, a proximity that bestows upon one and all the obligation to refrain from loud arguments or boisterous carnality, especially in summer). After a few more futile slams of the door, I decided to drive to work. As is. After all, I had managed to drive my youngster to school like this the other day, and the situation ultimately cleared itself up after I arrived at the school. The drive to work is under three miles. It went well, if comically. Oh. Let me point out that I drive a standard shift. So, picture The Laughorist, true to his appellation, driving the car, shifting gears, and holding fast the door with his left hand (I am left-handed), and perhaps managing a self-effacing smile garnished with my new DKNY Euro-style hip frames and newly acquired (last night) progressive lenses. I refrained from listening to the Bob Dylan Modern Times CD because I did not want any distractions. Right turns were especially problematic. Physics dictated that a right turn hurled the door orbiting outward. I got a little tired out before even entering the hallowed temple of Labor. But I got there. And not too grouchily or miserably. I didn't especially feel as if This Is Happening To Me, Poor Me. (Okay, a little bit.) I call this grace. (For the record, a car repair place near work fixed it for thirty-eight dollars and change; cleaning, greasing, etc. They had to open the door up. We'll see. No guarantee it might not happen again.) The whole episode strikes me as a scene out of Haruki Murakami. What lessons can I draw about my encounter with the door? What have I learned, and what greater metaphor applies? What did my friend the door teach me, just for today?

One door opens, with difficulty, then stubbornly stays open, then (with help) closes. One driver smiles. What is the sound of one hand holding the door?

Laugh. Or....

Else.

Let's Stop Serial-Comma Killing Now!

We know society exhibits moral outrage over serial killings, as well it should.




But why the widespread apathy over the death throes of the serial comma?




Fight the good fight. Become a Serial Comma Commando today!


The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma or the Harvard comma, is the comma found in this construction:

Hurray for the red, white, and blue.

Believers of the use of this construction (like me) insist on that comma after the word white.

My particular reasons are straightforward: consistency and lack of ambiguity.

At least I thought so until I checked out the entry for topic at Wikipedia. I must say, the entry is exhaustive and entertaining.

It gives cogent arguments both for and against.

I used to be a newspaper copy editor. Nearly all newspapers (at least in American and Canada) do not use the serial comma. The New York Times and The Washington Post, excellent newspapers, do not employ that comma after the word white in the example above. Nearly all book publishers used to use it. The New Yorker magazine still uses it.

I reject the argument (made by some, including Lynne Truss of the popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves) that this style decision is variable depending on context and circumstances. (Oh, of course, you can find an exception to any rule. So, yes, all such decisions are potentially variable. I'm not talking about that. Oliver Wendell Holmes said something like you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. I'm talking about the rule here, not the exception[s].)

I say adhere to the rule, or not, but do so consistently.

It is troubling in recent years to find myself reading a novel and to encounter style usage all over the place on this.

Sloppy.

Most of you say this is all silly and does not matter.

I'll close with the wonderful example from The Chicago Manual of Style (which, naturally, supports the view of the serial comma embraced by The Laughorist):

According to the erudite and entertaining folks at the University of Chicago Press (check out their FAQ section), not using the serial comma can put you in this pickle with this hypothetical book dedication:

"With gratitude to my parents, Mother Teresa and the pope."

Laugh. Or....

Else.