Daily Archives: 05 Oct 2010

Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences

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Janis Bell’s Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences is a grammar book for people who don’t like grammar but still must occasionally write. I’ve read it at least two times—and I don’t even own it! I had been planning to write about it; on my first read, I found that I disagreed with her on a few issues. Now I find that there isn’t much to disagree with. (BTW: “Contrary to what a well-meaning teacher may have told you in elementary school, there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence in a preposition.”)

Bell is so wonderful because at the same time that she is grammatically liberal, she doesn’t bog down the reader with endless caveats. In fact, she doesn’t bog down the reader with any caveats at all. To someone like me, this is a problem—undoubtedly the cause of my initial slightly hostile reaction. Instead, she just tells you how you should write.

A good example of this is her discussion of punctuation around quotation marks. I can’t bring up the subject without (like now) bringing up the British and how they deal with this issue far better than we Yankee idiots. Here she is in all her terse beauty, “Note: Periods and commas belong inside closing quotation marks, no matter what. Don’t even think of placing them outside—just tuck them in.”

Towards the end of the book, she seems to lose a bit of her nerve. She notes that we never capitalize a dependent clause following a colon; it is optional for independent clauses. Give me a break! It is a single sentence! You never capitalize after a colon! Never! And when discussing making abbreviations, letters, and numerals plural, she gives up even quicker. She says that we should add an apostrophe-s. But then adds, “The apostrophe may also be omitted.” Again: wrong! Always omit the apostrophe! Always!

But these are minor points. This is an excellent book.

Get on the Bus!

When discussing prepositions, she points out how strange they are. For example, “It’s also not easy to understand why we get on a bus, on a train, on a plane, yet in a car. Or why we are on a team, and on a committee but in a group.” I can’t help out with the second sentence—why is that?—but I think I can with the first.

While it is not as true now, in the past, one always climbed stairs to get on a bus, train, and plane. One simply opened a door and climbed into a car. Now, most new city buses are single-step-on (they’re very cool), airplanes have tunnels or similar, and some cars (more trucks) do have stairs. Trains still have stairs, but these too will likely fade into history. But I don’t think we are going to muddy our language just for these technological changes.

Whew! One less think for Ms. Bell to worry about!

Update

I just realized that people are always on TV but in movies. Off hand, I think this dates back to live TV and our current feeling that TV is happening now. “Hey! Bob Hope is on TV. Right now!“

Politics: 5 October 2010

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The Power of Nightmares

I just got the first episode of this series (just like NetFlix to have it on three different one-hour disks when it is sold with all three episodes on a single disk at Amazon) by Adam Curtis about the use of fear to enslave people. It, along with other fun reads like The Shock Doctrine and C Street make me think that Niccolo Machiavelli had it right in The Prince back in 1513: power is all that matters. Watch a group of pigeons fighting over a slice of bread if you want to know everything important about political and economic power (the same thing, really) in the human world.

Justice Stevens Regrets Capital Punishment Ruling

In an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Justice John Paul Stevens admitted to regretting one of his decisions:

Mr. STEVENS: I think there is one vote that I would change, and that one was upholding the Texas capital punishment statute.

TOTENBERG: In 1976, when Stevens was first on the court, he voted to uphold the death penalty. At the time, he says, the court believed it was upholding statutes that allowed the death penalty for a narrow category of offenders, using procedures that, as Stevens puts it, prevented loading the dice towards the prosecution.

But as the court’s composition grew more conservative, he says, the universe of those eligible for the death penalty grew, and the court permitted more prosecution-friendly procedures in capital cases.

Mr. STEVENS: We did not foresee how it would be interpreted. I think that was an incorrect decision.

It is worth listening to the whole story, which is only about eight minutes long.

The Worst Twenty Years—ever!

From an article by Peter Coy in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University belongs to the committee of distinguished economists who officially declared on Sept. 20 that the U.S. recession ended way back in June 2009. Don’t mistake that pronouncement for optimism. According to Gordon’s research into the long-term determinants of growth, America’s next two decades are going to be disappointing. He predicts that between 2007 and 2027, gross domestic product per capita will grow at the slowest pace of any 20-year period in U.S. history going back to George Washington’s Presidency.”

Welcome to fourth-world America…

Gooo team!

Stupid Jew Boy

I was looking for something to listen to while I cooked dinner and I came upon Sam Seder on The Young Turks Network, because he was going to have Chris Hayes on, and I really like him. It was on YouTube, so I looked at some of the comments. Two, right in a row where: (1) “lol stupid jew boy” and (2) “air america fell because of jews like YOU!!” I still can’t get my head around this. Or Rick Sanchez? I’m all for blasting Israel, but Jews? I know they have retractable horns, but come on!