circuitous sentences

The movie Goodfellas offers a great lesson on how to send forth a torrent of words without saying anything. Some politicians obviously have been watching attentively:

"He is one of the very few people who can sit in on anything he wants to sit in on" (Anita Dunn about Robert Gibbs).

"If all you do is get focused on what this does to this, and what this does to this, you will be so paralyzed that you will never make a decision. It's not easy. If you take the long view, you have to take it" (Robert Gibbs).

"To be a competitor, it will have to be able to compete" (Nancy Pelosi on the public option).

"I think if you were to look forward a year, I expect I will be where I am" (David Axelrod).

up and down, back and forth, in and out

“E-Books Explode” (Daily Finance.com) – duck and cover! – and Yahoo News asks if the ipad is “over-hyped,” creating sort of a hyperbolic tautology, not quite inappropriate after all the build-up to the release of this new tablet computer.
Since gadgets sell and "Online Ads Show Signs of Pickup" (The Wall Street Journal) – which one? F 150 or Tacoma? – the economy seems to be on its way up again. Or perhaps not since “Economists broadly agree that the recession probably ended last summer” (Yahoo News). So, the downtime is over – just as likely as not.
While the economy may be up or down, education remains stable with “teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead” (NYT). Teachers may neither drag students down nor pull them up, neither hold them back nor pull them ahead, but education is at least at an equilibrium, unlike some buildings which, during the April 4th earthquake, were “swaying from Los Angeles to Phoenix to Las Vegas” (Yahoo News), obviously swinging back and forth at an amplitude of more than 200 miles.
Similarly lopsided is Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric. After declaring that "We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what's in it," now that the bill is out, she compares health care reform to “the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest. All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans" (KCBS radio, San Francisco). I, for once, open my fridge to take something out and so far did not have to go through whatever terms to access its contents. Although Aristotle called the metaphor “the greatest thing by far,” when the comparison is crooked, it looks more like “bad optics.”

like-minded

NPR’s Robert Smith interviewed “recent graduates,” who share an apartment, about the census. Here is what they had to say:


Mike: Did we get the forms?
Nate: Yeah.
Mike: We did. I didn't see any yet.
Nate: We still get mail from the past 30 people that have lived there [sic]. So it's like who knows if people are getting these.
Smith: Well, actually the census knows. These few blocks around Wythe Avenue and 6th Street have about a 36% return rate.
Nate: I guess it's laziness and like what's the point? When it comes down to it, nobody wants to fill out like another form that's just like getting sent to your house that really relatively has nothing to do with your life. I mean people would do it if they got like five bucks.
Smith: Five bucks?
Nate: Yeah. Or if there was like more than just like a piece of paper that's like you have to do this or you could get in trouble, which no one will get in trouble; that's why they don't do it.

Check for blind spots

The Checklist Manifesto contends that using a checklist for any task helps to avoid overlooking details. Kathryn Schultz sees a problem with those checklists because they need to be kept short to make them useable, and “omissions can have grave consequences.” Leaving out items that “are deemed either too routine or too rare to merit inclusion,” leads to a “phenomenon known as inattentional blindness: when you ask people to look for something specific, they develop a startling inability to see things …that would normally be glaringly obvious” (Huffington Post 4/1/10).
Wouldn’t we know that he did it on purpose just to be expelled from West Point, we could assume that it was this blindness that caused Edgar Allen Poe to attend a parade where gloves and a belt explicitly were required. He showed up wearing those two accessories – but nothing else.
Yet, a checklist can be a good thing, for example when deciding whether to purchase a cartridge coffee maker or a drip coffee maker. The cartridge machine may come out the winner because it has one decisive advantage: it helps to avoid “making a pot, most of which will be thrown out” (Sam Allis/Boston.com 3/8/10). Normally glaringly obvious that no method of brewing coffee requires to discard parts of the pot, a writer’s inattentional blindness may make him indeed throw out the pot with the coffee - or the music with the money. “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity” (Michael Winerip/NYT 3/28).
While money certainly isn’t a musical dilemma, Congress’s modus operandi apparently is a political one. “It is an ugly process. It was ugly when Republicans were in charge, it was ugly when Democrats were in charge” (B. Obama/Fox News 3/17/10). Was it attentional or inattentional blindness which made the speaker not see that Democrats still are in charge? Yet, according to David Brooks, Democrats prefer anyway to be remembered for their glorious past, a time when they “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor” (NYT 3/21/10). And what came (ro comes?) after the poor deal?

Always check the antecedent: an antecedent is an expression (usually a noun or noun phrase) to which another expression (an anaphor) refers. The relationship between noun and anaphor must be absolutely clear. Sentences in which this relationship is strained, avenge themselves on a writer's inattention by twisting his or her intention.

Missing antecedent: “...making a pot, most of which will be thrown out:” the pronoun which grammatically refers to pot instead of the correct but missing antecedent coffee. ..."making a pot of coffee, most of which will be thrown out."
Intervening antecedent: “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity:” The writer probably did not want to say that the $3 were a musical calamity, rather that the lessons were. Yet the three dollars are the closest subject of the verb was to which the subject complement musical calamity can refer, and thus three dollars usurps the role of antecedent. To avoid such unclear references, the proper antecedent must be repeated and the sentence slightly changed. "... and believe me, despite the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years, those piano lessons were a musical calamity.")
Ambiguous antecedent: They “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor:” Even though we can assume (based on the use of lower case versus capitals) that the old and the poor are a continuation of the list that began with the unemployed, the placement of these two items suggests that the adjectives old and poor modify the immediately preceding deal. To avoid ambiguity, the sentence needs rephrasing. "Starting with the New Deal, they protected the unemployed, then the old, then the poor."

Woe is me

"The president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using 'I' instead of 'me' in phrases like 'a very personal decision for Michelle and I'" Patricia O’Conner points out and explains that "The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use 'I' as a subject and 'me' as an object."
David Brooks, a staunch admirer of Obama's eloquence, may have heard this criticism and decided to avoid I "even when it's right. The term for this linguistic phenomenon is 'hypercorrection’" (O'Connor).

I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he [Obama] knew both better than me (“The Courtship” ).

In fact, senators do not know a policy area better than him/Mr. Brooks; rather they know it better than he/Mr. Brooks does. Just as well, Barack Obama may know both, politics and political philosophy, better than David Brooks does, but he does not know them better than he knows him. Thus, every "me" in the quote above should have been an "I:" "while they may know a policy area better than I do, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than I. I got the sense he [Obama] knew both better than I do.”

Since "an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line" (O’Connor), Obama and Brooks should maybe do some woe-is-meing together, a new shtick and the modern adaptation of "woe is me," "meaning to express sorrow and misfortune to others. Glorified moaning, perhaps" (urban dictionary).

WHY?
He (subject) knows (verb) me (object)

He (subject) knows (verb) Bill (first object) better than me (second object) = a comparison of someone’s knowledge of two different objects (Bill and me).

He (subject) knows (verb) Bill (object) better than I (subject) do (verb) = a comparison of different people’s (he and I) knowledge of the same object (Bill). Sentences like this are often incorrectly shortened by omitting the second verb (do): He knows Bill better than I.