Those promiscuous dictionaries

The Menifee Union School District is forming a committee to review whether dictionaries containing the definitions for sexual terms should be permanently banned from the district's classrooms, a district official said Friday.
The 9,000-student K-8 district this week pulled all copies of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary after an Oak Meadows Elementary School parent complained about a child stumbling across definitions for "oral sex."
The decision was made without consultation with the district's school board and has raised concerns among First Amendment experts and some parents.
Other parents and Menifee residents, though, have praised the district's decision, saying a collegiate-level dictionary is inappropriate for younger children. (Reason Magazine 1/27/2010)

Three cheers for Menifee Union School District! Banning the dictionary will hopefully make its use more enticing, and that would really be a happy accident.

Verbal malversations

"If I find a way of expressing adequately now what I am thinking and feeling you will take it to be a piece of verbal dexterity and the latest in a long line of verbal malversations. You see! I can't even say 'deceit'. I have to say 'verbal malversations'." (Stephen Fry, The Liar)


We just like euphemisms (eu good + pheme speaking = cheating). False teeth are dentures, constipation is occasional irregularity, toilet paper is bathroom tissue, panty hose have control tops, not girdles, and somebody didn’t die but passed away. Evidently, everything unpleasant needs to be renamed to make it at least sound less unpleasant. Does this make somebody’s death or the rotting of our teeth less disturbing? Certainly not. Euphemisms are just a way to sugarcoat the truth, to cheat ourselves.
But what about the new euphemisms for plagiarism, which - being the theft of somebody else’s intellectual property - already means cheating? Free-appropriation, adaptation, remix, communal creativity, repurposing, re-contextualizing, open-source approach - whatever one wants to call it - is then cheating to the power of 2.

To "repurpose" a sentence by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in politics, what begins with euphemisms usually ends in folly.

[David Brooks] had published an unusually harsh column criticizing what he saw as Democratic overreach on health care and the stimulus. Already, he had heard from administration officials complaining about the piece. But “they’re always nice,” Brooks said, adding, “It’s never, ‘You’re a complete asshole.’My line is, the Clinton people would tell you you’re a complete and total asshole. The Obama people say, ‘We love you. You’re a great guy. It’s sad you’re a complete and total asshole.’ They’re always very mature about it.” (Gabriel Sherman, "The Courtship")

Dreadfully puzzling

"If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him,” according to the Mad Hatter.



A problem is seeping into writing like the coal ashes from a Tennessee power plant into the Emory River, almost imperceptibly, yet perniciously. The problem is called unclear reference, the ambiguous use of pronouns.
Pronouns are stand-ins for nouns. We use them (the pronoun them, for instance, here stands in for the word pronoun) in order to avoid excessive repetition of the same word or name. However, it gets tricky when a pronoun could theoretically refer to more than one antecedent, the word it replaces.
To curb the environmental hazards of the 2009 Tennessee accident, the ashes are removed from the Emory River. “Sediment can be seen in the Emory River as machines pump it into holding ponds.” Even though we can logically infer that the river’s water is pumped into ponds where it then can be cleaned, the sentence itself is ambiguous. The antecedent of the “it” the machines are pumping could be the noun “sediment” or the name “Emory River.” Neither really makes sense because one cannot pump sediment or an entire river into holding ponds. The only substance that can be pumped is the water of the Emory River; yet the writer does not mention the word “water." It is up to the reader to read it into the sentence, to see it between the lines, and to clean up the muddy mess-age.
One citizen, who directly is affected by this disaster, says that he wants “to plant a garden. I’m concerned about it getting in the soil.” “It” can here only refer to the antecedent “garden,” yet that’s clearly not what the aspiring gardener implies, who is concerned about the spillage polluting the ground ("In Aftermath of A Spill, A New Round of Challenges" NYT 3/7).
Newspapers are full of such disasters. (Pun intended.) The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are just the most recent ones, and since time immemorial, disasters are accompanied by looting. For example, “In 1911, Sicilians dodged lava flowing out of Mount Etna to loot homes abandoned in its path.” Whose paths? Although the closest antecedent would be Mount Etna, the reader correctly assumes that the pronoun refers to “lava” ("The Rough Morality of Up-For-Grabs" NYT 3/7). Again, the reader must do the writer’s job and clarify the connection.
Dodging blow-ups and spills is probably routine for a president’s political advisor. “David Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision” ("The White House Message Maven" NYT 3/7). While “He sits in… meetings” clearly refers to Axelrod, “the last person he talks to before making a decision” must be the president. Again, the reader simply uses his (or her) common sense to get a message whose rendering is incorrect and fuzzy.


A pronoun should refer clearly to one, definite noun.
This noun, coming before the pronoun, is called the pronoun’s antecedent.
Take the car out of the garage and clean it. What needs to be cleaned? The garage? Most likely, if the sentence was spoken in California. The car? Just as seemly a guess.
When the party finally reached an agreement, it was in tatters. Was the party in tatters or the agreement?

A pronoun should not refer to an implied idea.
When the antecedent is implied instead of explicitly stated, the reader has to guess the sentence's meaning:
Pearl S. Buck received much critical praise and earned over $7 million, but she was very modest about it. She was probably modest about her success.

The antecedent should not be remote.
In Euripides’ Medea, he describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband. It is much clearer to say that "In Medea, Euripides describes the plight of a woman rejected by her husband."

Imagine that!

The panel of a new TV show called “The Marriage Ref” was “particularly tickled when Mr. Rios [one of the contestants] stuttered out the words ‘There is no reason why to have more use.’ ‘You have to be pretty angry to get to a place where you can construct that sentence,’ said Jeff Cesario, one of the show’s writers.” ( "A Show About Something" NYT 2/28)

Well, Mr Telegdy, executive vice president of NBC for alternative programming, must have been a little angry then when he uttered that he would respect Mr. Seinfeld’s wishes even if he wanted to make a show “in the North Pole.“ However, it might have been as good an idea as “The Marriage Ref” because everybody who watched the first episode of this “hybrid reality-comedy-variety-celebrity-panel show” may wonder if it doesn’t prove true the old Latin saying “nomen est omen” and Mr. Telegdy agreed to produce a tele-elegy, an elegy (a sad song for something that doesn’t exist anymore) for his television station.

Mr. Rios’s and Mr. Telegdy’s slips of the tongue are probably examples of those “moments you weren’t supposed to hear,” a phrase coined by Yahoo News that is less tickling than puzzling. How can one hear a moment? But maybe it is because journalists are notoriously underpaid that they are so often angry enough to construct such weird sentences. “Carnal, Gum-Crackin’ and Dangerous” (NYT 2/7), for instance, analyzes how in movies produced in the 1950s “the Bad Girl gradually lost her usefulness. It was no longer necessary to characterize women as hopelessly evil for expressing an interest in sex. By the time of ‘A Summer Place,’ even Sandra Dee was doing it. She lived on for a while in soft-core pornography, notably in the Times Square specials of Doris Wishman, but then faded back to where she had come from: the roiling American subconscious.” No, Sandra Dee neither lived on in soft-porn nor did she fade into the American subconscious. The Bad Girl did, but that is not what the writer is saying here.

The same article includes a shot of Evelyn Keyes in “The Killer That Stalked New York” and explains that Keyes played a “jewel smuggler who has brought a case of smallpox with her back from Cuba.” The “jewel smuggler who has brought back from Cuba a case of smallpox” would be much clearer, but “the case” is still a little bit discombobulating in the context of a smuggler’s junkets.
It prompts the reader to imagine Evelyn Keyes carrying a case full of diamonds in one hand and a case of smallpox in the other. How about “on her return from Cuba, she smuggles some diamonds through the port of New York City but is also bringing in a smallpox virus”?