Safire on language Thread poster: Jacek Krankowski (X)
| Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ...
Moving over here from http://www.proz.com/?sp=bb/viewtopic&post=40167#40167
\".... A tangential cavil: to me, an acronym is a pronounceable word created out of the initials or major parts of a compound term, like NATO, radar, or TriBeCa. But G.O.P is universally pronounced gee-oh-pee -- by its initials -- and never as the word \'\'GOP,\'\' rhyming with \'\'cop.\'\' Though not a... See more Moving over here from http://www.proz.com/?sp=bb/viewtopic&post=40167#40167
\".... A tangential cavil: to me, an acronym is a pronounceable word created out of the initials or major parts of a compound term, like NATO, radar, or TriBeCa. But G.O.P is universally pronounced gee-oh-pee -- by its initials -- and never as the word \'\'GOP,\'\' rhyming with \'\'cop.\'\' Though not all dictionaries agree, I say that makes G.O.P. an initialism or abbreviation. In the same way, the initialism for the Securities and Exchange Commission is S.E.C., pronounced sibilantly ess-ee-see, not, dryly, \'\'seck.\'\' And R.I.P., gravestone initialese for \'\'Rest in Peace,\'\' is pronounced as individual letters, not \'\'rip.\'\' ....
Here\'s the plank in my platform: it\'s true that not everybody knows the derivation of G.O.P., but it\'s just as true that not everybody has to know its root to know what it means. Etymology is an elective, not a course required for newspaper comprehension. If a word or set of initials communicates meaning to most people and it\'s not vulgar, use it.
My kids plan to give me a DVD player for Christmas. That stands for \'\'digital videodisc,\'\' and by the time I finish this sentence I\'ll have forgotten the whole phrase. All I need to know is \'\'who can hook up the DVD?\'\' \"
--William Safire
[ This Message was edited by:on2002-12-19 20:24] ▲ Collapse | | | Andrzej Lejman Poland Local time: 14:03 Member (2004) German to Polish + ...
DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc... Regards Andrzej | | | Elena Sgarbo (X) Italian to English + ...
I am not totally sure about what \"DVD\" stands for, but I believe you. Your comment on the \"DVD\" spell out will certainly interest Mr. Safire. In one of his books (Quoth the Maven), Safire publishes letters from many readers who bring up errors or misconceptions in the words or concepts expressed by Safire.
That\'s why I think Mr. Safire would like to hear about the Aabreviation -not acronym \"DVD\".
Yo... See more I am not totally sure about what \"DVD\" stands for, but I believe you. Your comment on the \"DVD\" spell out will certainly interest Mr. Safire. In one of his books (Quoth the Maven), Safire publishes letters from many readers who bring up errors or misconceptions in the words or concepts expressed by Safire.
That\'s why I think Mr. Safire would like to hear about the Aabreviation -not acronym \"DVD\".
You may want to write to Safire to Random House, in NY.
Elena ▲ Collapse | | | Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ... TOPIC STARTER
Going to Pot By WILLIAM SAFIRE
\"Is America Going to Pot?\'\' asked Time magazine on its cover recently. The article was about the battle over legalizing marijuana, and the headline was wordplay on the familiar expression going to pot (synonymous with \'\'going to hell in a handbasket\'\'), which the headline writer tied into the slang term for the hemp plant.
Scholarly potheads know the derivation of pot, the controlled psychoactive substance... See more Going to Pot By WILLIAM SAFIRE
\"Is America Going to Pot?\'\' asked Time magazine on its cover recently. The article was about the battle over legalizing marijuana, and the headline was wordplay on the familiar expression going to pot (synonymous with \'\'going to hell in a handbasket\'\'), which the headline writer tied into the slang term for the hemp plant.
Scholarly potheads know the derivation of pot, the controlled psychoactive substance: the word is rooted in the Mexican Spanish potiguaya, which are marijuana leaves after their pods have been removed. The word may be derived from potacion de guaya, a potation (from the Latin potere, \'\'to drink\'\') that causes guaya, \'\'lamentation\'\' in Latin American Spanish. Apparently, this was \'\'the wine of grief\'\' in which marijuana buds were steeped. (The word marijuana could come from Mariguana, one of the Bahamian islands, or from a seductive Maria Juana -- Mary Jane. It\'s a mystery.) ....
The phrase collector John Ray in 1670 defined to go to pot as \'\'to perish; to be done for; as by death, bad seasons, pecuniary difficulties and so forth.\'\' A decade later, the poet John Dryden wrote, \'\'Then all you heathen wits shall go to pot/For disbelieving of a Popish plot.\'\'
The cannibalistic origin of the metaphor -- to chop people up into edible portions and stew them in a pot until tender -- disappeared over the centuries. The meaning is now \'\'to deteriorate; to fall apart; to go to seed.\'\' Colleen Barrett, president of the profitable, no-frills Southwest Airlines (bring your own lunch), told reporters recently, \'\'A nongrowing company is the quickest way to have morale go to pot.\'\' ....
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Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ... TOPIC STARTER Andrzej? (see no. 12 below) | Jan 5, 2003 |
Culpa for Mea by William Safire
1. When the self-described language maven wrote, \'\'Such past experience should remind us, . . . \'\' David Prentice of Sheenboro, Quebec, a member of the Squad Squad policing redundant tautologies, noted coolly, \'\'I wonder what other kind of experience there is?\'\' (O.K.; when dealing with experience, lose past.) ...
3. Conjunctionitis: \'\'Burton\'s likely successor i... See more Culpa for Mea by William Safire
1. When the self-described language maven wrote, \'\'Such past experience should remind us, . . . \'\' David Prentice of Sheenboro, Quebec, a member of the Squad Squad policing redundant tautologies, noted coolly, \'\'I wonder what other kind of experience there is?\'\' (O.K.; when dealing with experience, lose past.) ...
3. Conjunctionitis: \'\'Burton\'s likely successor is the fabled G.O.P. fund-raiser Tom Davis, though Representatives Chris Cox or Christopher Shays have much more investigative experience.\'\' The charge of the Boo-Boo Brigade was led by Frank Gado: \'\'Cox OR Shays HAVE? Shame!\'\' The plural verb have would have been correct if the two names had been tied together with and, but by introducing the conjunction or, the careless writer separated the two individuals. If such separation was desired, its purpose would have been served with \'\'Cox and Shays each have.\'\'
4. In that regard, the law of proximity: \'\'Henry [Kissinger] is one of the few who has the trust of the keepers of the secrets.\'\' Ken Paul e-mails: \'\'The antecedent of who is \'the few,\' and thus the verb should be have.\'\' The Yip Harburg rule of agreement: if you\'re not near the antecedent you love, you use the antecedent you\'re near.
5. The right to be left: \'\'Brent Scowcroft and his leave-Saddam-alone acolytes on the president\'s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.\'\' Writes the purist Alvin Hattal: \'\'Leave Saddam alone? Not let?\'\' He\'s correct in his pristine prescriptiveness: to leave alone is \'\'to allow to remain in solitude,\'\' while to let alone is slightly different: \'\'to refrain from disturbing.\'\' It\'s a nice distinction, often ignored by good writers but worth preserving, remembering Justice Louis Brandeis\'s defense of privacy as \'\'the right to be let alone.\'\'
6. Present laughter: \'\'William Bulger . . . is presently the respectable president of the University of Massachusetts.\'\' And again: \'\'Just because the F.B.I. brass hats are presently computer-literate. . . . \'\' John Di Clemente of Tinley Park, Ill., says, \'\'I was taught that presently meant \'in a short while\' and that currently meant \'now.\'\'\' The maven was taught that, too, and presently forgot, but is currently reminded. Nothing beats now and soon for plain comprehension. ...
8. Mistake detector: In a blast at the sweat machines known as lie detectors, the maven wrote, \'\'That was one fewer career lost to the predatory polygraph.\'\' Bob Davidson of New York consulted his trusty high-school grammar book, which said, \'\'Use fewer if the word it modifies is plural; use less if the word it modifies is singular.\'\' Unless the maven studies that old grammar, he\'ll have one less career.
9. What, never? In an article protesting Singapore\'s suppression of a free press, the maven thundered: \'\'The New York Times, which willingly corrects itself when in error, does not settle libel suits for money. Never.\'\' Wes Pedersen of Washington writes: \'\'I served under an early \'word man\' who would have nailed my embarrassed hide to the city-room wall for a gaffe like that. To him caning would have been far too mild a punishment.\'\' The never following the not formed a double negative, even though it was tacked on as a sentence fragment. A repeated negation, however, is not a double negative; the fragment tacked on for emphasis should have read \'\'Not ever.\'\'
10. Hawkish on dove. In the same castigation of Singapore, the gaffe-prone vituperator claimed that a news executive he tried to reach \'\'dove under his desk.\'\' By analogy of the verb pair drive/drove, the past tense of dive was mistakenly thought to be dove. Longfellow used dove in his \'\'Song of Hiawatha\'\' but changed it in a later edition. It is currently (now) widely accepted as an American variant, but not by hard-nosed grammarians who read this column from their posts high on the ramparts. ...
12. Play it, Sam: \'\'DVD stands for \'digital videodisc.\' \'\' Buncha surly nit-pickers insist it means \'\'digital versatile disk.\'\' Now it does, but only because rival manufacturers got together in 1995 to change video to versatile so as to emphasize its ability to store everything from music to data to movies.
▲ Collapse | | | Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ... TOPIC STARTER The whole world listens when a president speaks | Jan 18, 2003 |
By FRANK ABATE (Frank Abate is a lexicographer and president of Dictionaries International, a consulting and editorial services firm. William Safire is on vacation.)
President George W. Bush pronounced malfeasance without its s in July 2002, adding to the growing collection of his verbal gaffes, dubbed Bushisms. Web sites listing Bushisms are legion. Bush has a well-documented habit of tripping over words, especially when, as... See more By FRANK ABATE (Frank Abate is a lexicographer and president of Dictionaries International, a consulting and editorial services firm. William Safire is on vacation.)
President George W. Bush pronounced malfeasance without its s in July 2002, adding to the growing collection of his verbal gaffes, dubbed Bushisms. Web sites listing Bushisms are legion. Bush has a well-documented habit of tripping over words, especially when, as with subliminal and malfeasance, they\'re somewhat bookish. (...)
So, in his pronunciation of nuclear, Bush is in line with a national trend as well as bipartisan presidential tradition. Indeed, from the founding of the country, American presidents have had their way with English, for good or ill. I scoured the Oxford English Dictionary, now out as version 3.0 on CD-ROM, and was struck by the many words for which U.S. presidents provide the earliest-known dated evidence.
George Washington referred to his presidential tenure with the word administration, the earliest example given in the O.E.D., dated 1796. Notable, too, is that he did not use government, the already established British term for the elected leadership in power: \'\'In reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error.\'\'
The O.E.D. also quotes Washington for the earliest examples of such common words as ravine (1781, for \'\'a deep narrow hollow . . . worn by a torrent\'\'), tin can (1770, though George spelled it Tinn can), tow path (1788, for a path next to a canal; the British term is towing-path), corn row (1769, for \'\'a row of planted corn\'\') and even Newtown pippin, a variety of apple named for the town on Long Island where it was introduced.
As in other presidential matters, Washington set the tone for his successors. Familiar terms like normalcy (popularized though not coined by Warren Harding), belittle (from Thomas Jefferson\'s \'\'Notes on the State of Virginia,\'\' 1782) and lunatic fringe (from Theodore Roosevelt\'s \'\'History as Literature,\'\' 1913) are so well established that their presidential roots are a mere etymological footnote. (...)
Other everyday terms got a boost from once or future presidents, whether or not presidentially coined. Here\'s a rundown, all first examples in the O.E.D.: public relations (Jefferson, 1807), squatter (Madison, 178, caption (Madison, 1789, in the sense \'\'a heading in text,\'\' used instead of the British terms title or heading), relocate and relocation (Lincoln, 1834 and 1837), point well taken (Lincoln, 1863) and come to stay (Lincoln, 1864, referring to peace: \'\'I hope it will come soon, and come to stay\'\').
The whole world listens when a president speaks, so we should expect that, in prepared remarks, presidential words are very carefully chosen. In January 1998, President Clinton famously said: \'\'I want you to listen to me. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.\'\' The choice of the term sexual relations is a very formal way of putting it; one might have expected something like \'\'I did not have an affair with that woman\'\' or \'\'I did not have sex with that woman.\'\' I turned to Webster\'s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, a standard authority in American legal practice. There, sexual relations is defined as \'\'coitus.\'\' Given the facts of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as they have generally been reported, Clinton spoke the truth, albeit deceptively. Did the Clinton White House check its Webster\'s Unabridged before the president spoke and script his words in line with its definition, thus sidestepping out-and-out perjury?
This trove of president\'s English could go on: bully pulpit (Theodore Roosevelt, 1909), military-industrial complex (Eisenhower, 1961), a thousand points of light (George H.W. Bush, 198. Listen closely as President George W. Bush, from his bully pulpit, delivers the State of the Union address later this month. But for now, to adopt Truman\'s words (1945), the buck stops here.
***
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
President Bush said recently that the United States has a \'\'fabulous\'\' military. On other occasions, he has proclaimed himself proud of such a fabulous country, and of his fabulous cabinet. Texas and Alaska are both fabulous states. Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, is a fabulous senator.
Laura Bush is doing a fabulous job as first lady, and Mr. Bush\'s father is a fabulous man. Last fall, Mr. Bush attended a fabulous World Series, and last summer proclaimed baseball a fabulous sport.
That was around the same time that Mr. Bush said he hoped to make \'\'some fabulous history\'\' with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Last year, despite all the tragedy, was a fabulous year for Mr. Bush and his wife. He expects 2002 to be fabulous, too.
One of the jobs of the president of the United States is repeating himself, whether it is calling for tax cuts or promising to smoke out the evil ones. Still, students of the presidency have noticed that Mr. Bush says \'\'fabulous\'\' an awful lot.
It is particularly noticeable when Mr. Bush uses the word alongside his trademark Texas frontier talk, or when he shouts it out, as he did last month at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, to a hangar filled with thousands of roaring American troops.
\'\'We\'ve built a fabulous coalition of many nations!\'\' Mr. Bush said.
(...)
Lyndon B. Johnson, another president from Texas, did not say fabulous, at least according to Michael Beschloss, the editor of two volumes of Johnson\'s White House tapes. If Mr. Johnson used a superlative, Mr. Beschloss said, it was often \'\'wonderful\'\' -- but drawled out without the d, as \'\'wunnnnnerful,\'\' almost the way Lawrence Welk said it.
Presidential verbal tics are nothing new. Former President Bill Clinton used the phrase \'\'a big deal\'\' all the time -- on more than 75 occasions between January 1993 and May 1996, in fact, to describe everything from a pending crime bill to a Western buffalo preserve to the joys of homeownership to the deer population of Arkansas. At the time, Mr. Clinton\'s excessive use was cited as an example of a president sounding too many notes and failing to distinguish what was really important from what was not.
Former President Ronald Reagan had some verbal tics, too. \'\'Forgive me, but,\'\' he would say repeatedly -- a genial, gentlemanly disclaimer before letting someone have it. (...)
Jesse Sheidlower, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary\'s North American editorial unit, said that all people, not just presidents, have individual \'\'ideolectal\'\' patterns that distinguish their speech.
\'\'Everyone speaks particular dialects, which are usually regionally and socially distinguished kind of language,\'\' Mr. Sheidlower said. A person\'s ideolect, for example, encompasses pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, tonal qualities and speed. Presidential ideolects, Mr. Sheidlower said, are simply noticed more than others.
Mr. Bush used \'\'fabulous\'\' in public on Friday at Fort Bragg, N.C., though he converted it from his usual adjective to adverb, as in \'\'these are fabulously trained soldiers.\'\' Mr. Bush was referring to troops who had just staged a mock liberation of what was supposed to be a United States embassy from anti-American forces, a military exercise that left him impressed. \'\'That was exciting,\'\' he said to reporters afterward, dropping, for the moment, his favorite word.
Still, it is notable that Mr. Bush uses \'\'fabulous\'\' more often outside of Washington, and in settings where he speaks from note cards, not a prepared text, before thunderously adoring crowds. For Mr. Bush, fabulous is also a good-times word, something he reaches for when he is feeling, well, fabulous.
http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-page.html?res=9F0CE6DE1438F93BA25750 C0A9649C8B63&fta=y
▲ Collapse | | | Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ... TOPIC STARTER When in Rome, romanize as the Romans do? | Jan 18, 2003 |
Roh or No?
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
In print, the name of the new president of South Korea is spelled Roh Moo Hyun. But in transcripts of broadcasts, the family name as spoken by American newscasters is spelled not Roh but Noh, reflecting the way it is pronounced. Which is it -- Roh, as in \'\'row your boat,\'\' or Noh, as in \'\'a thousand times, no\'\'?
Answer: It is spelled Roh but pronounced Noh.... See more Roh or No?
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
In print, the name of the new president of South Korea is spelled Roh Moo Hyun. But in transcripts of broadcasts, the family name as spoken by American newscasters is spelled not Roh but Noh, reflecting the way it is pronounced. Which is it -- Roh, as in \'\'row your boat,\'\' or Noh, as in \'\'a thousand times, no\'\'?
Answer: It is spelled Roh but pronounced Noh. How come?
Reached in Seoul, the new president\'s media adviser, Ben Limb, says: \'\'It is common practice for people in Korea whose family name is Noh to transliterate it Roh. Roh Tae Woo, former president of Korea, also spelled his name this way.\'\' Sorry, \'\'common practice\'\' is no explanation.
At Sogang University in Seoul, a British-born monk who has taken the name An Sonjae offers this: Korean syllables are pronounced in three parts -- initial consonant, middle or peak vowel, final consonant. The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, contains a symbol that is usually romanized (spelled in English) as r. When this symbol comes first, it is pronounced as \'\'a liquid n\'\' if the vowel following is a simple one, but disappears completely if it is followed by a diphthong, a gliding sound like oi. So? \'\'The English spelling Roh,\'\' An says, \'\'reflects the original Chinese pronunciation more accurately than the spelling in Korean does, but the pronunciation Noh reflects the modern Korean pronunciation.\'\'
Wait a minute. If the name in Korea is pronounced with what we romanize as an n, why do we write it in English to make it sound like an r? That defeats the whole idea of transliteration -- imitating the sound of one language in the alphabet of another. Makes no sense.
The Korean Embassy in Washington sticks to the party line: \'\'The r spelling is a function of the Hangul letter,\'\' says an uncomfortable spokesman, \'\'and how it is pronounced when that Korean initial letter is followed by that vowel. It is a weird grammar rule.\'\' Ah, but here is the anecdote that may shed light on the n that is masked by an r. In 1987, Howard Chua Eoan wrote in Time magazine about the previous President Roh: \'\'As a young military officer, he wore a small brown identification tag with his name inscribed in English as NO. It was the most common pronunciation of his surname. Quickly, however, the unpropitious English meaning of \'no\' got to him. Using a less frequent but acceptable pronunciation, No Tae Woo became Roh Tae Woo. Said Roh: \'N-o is negative, and I am a positive person. So I prefer R-o-h.\'\'\' That \'\'less frequent\'\' pronunciation -- with the nonnegative r -- was obviously a media manipulation by a smart politician determined to overcome the problem of the English meaning of the Korean sound of \'\'no.\'\' But roh with an r is not the way most Koreans pronounce the Korean name, nor is it the way Jim Lehrer and his broadcasting brethren properly say it on television.
What to do? When in Rome, romanize as the Romans do: spell the word in English the way it sounds to most Koreans, north and south. Should we call the new president No, and with sublime consistency spell his name No, or to give it a foreign flavor, Noh? I say yes.
▲ Collapse | | | Jacek Krankowski (X) English to Polish + ... TOPIC STARTER Smoking guns and class warfare | Jan 25, 2003 |
Smoking Gun
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
...\'\'U.N. Inspectors Criticize Iraqis Over Arms List\'\' was The New York Times\'s more objective headline, with the hot phrase in the subhead: \'\'But search teams find no \'smoking gun.\'\'\' ...
When did that phrase first become the favorite figure of speech meaning \'\'incontrovertible incrimination\'\'? ...It was made famous during the Golden Age ... See more Smoking Gun
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
...\'\'U.N. Inspectors Criticize Iraqis Over Arms List\'\' was The New York Times\'s more objective headline, with the hot phrase in the subhead: \'\'But search teams find no \'smoking gun.\'\'\' ...
When did that phrase first become the favorite figure of speech meaning \'\'incontrovertible incrimination\'\'? ...It was made famous during the Golden Age of Political Coinage. The Watergate era coined or popularized Saturday night massacre, stonewalling, cover-up, dirty tricks, straight arrow, expletive deleted, third-rate burglary, plumbers, Deep Throat, Big Enchilada, enemies list and my personal favorite, twisting slowly in the wind. That was when Doyle\'s smoking pistol, which had changed in occasional usage over 80 years to smoking gun, blazed its way into dictionaries.
It first appeared in The New York Times on July 14, 1974, in an article by Roger Wilkins: \'\'The big question asked over the last few weeks in and around the House Judiciary Committee\'s hearing room by committee members who were uncertain about how they felt about impeachment was \'Where\'s the smoking gun?\'\'\' The question was rooted in a Nixon defense strategy, to narrow the grounds for impeachment to a provable crime. ...
Today, in applying the phrase to the inspection of Iraq for evidence of making weapons of mass destruction, those opposing an attack on Saddam Hussein\'s regime have adopted the defense strategy of Nixon\'s lawyers: to demand incontrovertible physical evidence, which journalists and United Nations officials agree to call the smoking gun. ...
Class Warfare
The opening salvo came from the Democrats. \'\'The tax break the president is proposing ... is the wrong idea at the wrong time to help the wrong people.\'\' President Bush fired back: \'\'I understand the politics of economic stimulus. Some people want to turn it into class warfare.\'\'
...The phrase\'s origin was in the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: \'\'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle\'\' -- in German, Klassenkämpfen. The German Kampf (as in Hitler\'s Mein Kampf, \'\'my struggle\'\') is sometimes translated as \'\'battle\'\'; it is not quite Krieg, meaning \'\'war\'\' (as in Blitzkrieg, \'\'lightning war\'\').
...That war was condemned by anti-Communists. In 1927, Aldous Huxley decried \'\'those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of class warfare.\'\' As the 20th century progressed, and especially in its latter half as the nature of the Soviet Union was exposed, the phrase was anathematized in the West. Politicians of all stripes knew that class warfare was something most people were against, along with categorizing people in classes. (\'\'Working class\'\' is O.K.; \'\'chattering class\'\' is used with a sneer at pundits; \'\'lower class\'\' is out.)
Today, class warfare is a phrase conservatives use to blast liberals, and that liberals, long on the defensive about it, are at last beginning to use to attack conservatives.
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