Strange causes of death

Even though Great Britain abolished capital punishment after in 1964 the last execution was performed by hanging, the country is seemingly thinking things over, and, as the NYT reports, "British Voters May Hang Parliament" (5/4/10).
On the other side of the Atlantic, some Caribbean countries, claiming that the Caribbean Court of Justice is "a hanging court," welcomed a statement by “Barbados Deputy Prime Minister, Freundel Stuart, who is also the country's Attorney General, [and] has announced that the mandatory death sentence will be abolished in Barbados” (Carribean Net News 5/29/09). This most certainly was a relief for every citizen of Barbados.
Several thousand miles north of Barbados, America's first shore wind farm will be built “in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod. The bitterly contested project was held in check for years by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose family’s seaside compound faces the site; he died last August. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered the project reconfigured to minimize its visibility from land” (“Turnarounds” NYT 5/2/10). While the NYT here sounds as if the wind farm is not only a “costly eyesore” but also a lethal one, its own weekend editions can apparently be really fatal: “A note with the ‘On Language’ column on Page 14 this weekend refers to the absence of the regular columnist, William Safire. Mr. Safire died last Sunday, after some copies had gone to press (NYTmagazine 10/3/09).
Back in Great Britain, academics have something else to worry about. Dr. Sam George from the University of Hertfordshire and author of Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing 1760-1820: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant laments that the undead have been “losing their British passports,” presumably after “in 1974, a man who thought he was being tormented by vampires choked to death on garlic” ("Have the Undead Become Americanized?" WSJ 5/6/10).

data minding

“Google unveiled ... a new tool that reports on ... government monitoring the internet ...Google’s new tool showed, at its launch, the number of requests for information from various countries between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2009. The data is broken down by country, and if you click on a specific country, you get details like what percentage of requests for data removal the company complied with. Google has been candid about the fact that the data is not complete” ("Google and Government Monitoring"/NYT 5/2/10).
Is the data incomplete or are the data incomplete? Many argue that the singular verb is justified by data being a non-count or mass noun. However, non-count nouns refer to entities that “are viewed as an undifferentiated mass, like furniture, bread, cheese, coffee” (Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar). This definition does not quite work for data since data are “facts that were gathered in order to be studied,” clearly indicating a collection (=similar things brought and kept together) of different pieces of information, for example "all your activities online and off," that are to be scrutinized. This scrutiny is called data mining and a rather spooky business .
Data (plural of datum), like many other nouns is borrowed from Latin. Nouns with a Latin or Greek origin often retain their foreign plural forms. Thus former students of a university are alumni (alumnus), many books have indices (index), and bacteria (bacterium) can cause diseases.
Another Latin word, antenna, takes two different plurals, antennas when it refers to the rabbit ears on top of an outmoded TV or antennae when it denotes the two feelers on an insect’s head. For again other nouns, two different plural forms commonly are accepted, e.g. formulae/formulas or memoranda/memorandums.
But back to data and those nouns that end in –a. They are often treated as singular although they are indeed plural, for example media, trivia or memorabilia. Since the word media refers to all types of news organizations, from newspapers to TV, its meaning is plural. Trivia, unimportant facts - or the stuff of Jeopardy, and memorabilia, the stuff we collect, similarly refer to a group of very distinct pieces and should be followed by a plural verb - as does the word data. Only someone who collects all the right data “can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction"(Sherlock Holmes).
By the way, the spaghetti (or rigatoni or gnocchi or ravioli) are cooked, graffiti were painted on the wall, and one cannot eat only one biscotti.

Here are some examples of foreign nouns and their plurals.

alga/algae
amoeba/amoebae
analysis/analyses
antenna/1)antennae/2)antennas
appendix/appendices
axis/axes
bacterium/bacteria
bacillus/bacilli
basis/bases
cactus/cacti
crisis/crises
criterion/criteria
(datum)/data
diagnosis/diagnoses
emphasis/emphases
(erratum)/errata
focus/foci
fungus/fungi
formula/formulae/formulas
hypothesis/hypotheses
index/indices
larva/larvae
matrix/matrices
medium/media
(memorabilium)/memorabilia
(minutia)/minutiae
neurosis/neuroses
oasis/oases
parenthesis/parentheses
phenomenon/phenomena
radius/radii
stimulus/stimuli
syllabus/syllabuses/syllabi
thesis/theses
vertebra/vertebrae

What were they thinking?

Not from The Onion but from Congress:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing entitled
"Running Out of Time:
Telecommunications Transition Delays Wasting Millions of Federal Dollars"
has been postponed. A new hearing date will be announced soon.

This iffy whether

David Sax does not like the idea of restaurants charging a gratuity fee. After all, “Once that tip is locked in, who cares if the fish is cold” ("Hey, Waiter, How Much Extra Do You Really Expect?"/NYT). Actually, if (or in case, under the condition that) the fish is cold, David Sax has every right to send it back to the kitchen. What the gratuity fee generates, however, is that the personnel may stop caring whether the fish is served steaming hot or lukewarm.
If introduces a condition, a chance that something might happen while whether announces an alternative. For Luis Tavarez, the parent of sixth- and eighth-graders at Creighton it, therefore, doesn’t “matter if my children are learning" ("Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency"/WSJ). What matters to him, one might hope, is whether they learn something in school.
It might also matter to him how much his children follow every trend, and he may ask them whether they would also follow “if everyone else jumped off a cliff.” Another, similarly trite question is “if the old rule, ‘Men and women can’t be friends’ still remains true” (“Friendships without benefits”/The Daily Aztec). This question requires whether instead of if since it suggests the alternative of this rule being true or false.
A complete mess was created by Donald Rumsfeld (not only) when he declared that “The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.” Since he addresses the alternative of programs being federal, state, or private responsibilities, he should have encouraged his audience to “ask whether a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or can better be handled by local or state governments, or privately by voluntary organizations.”
Whether the answer would be in favor of government or private organizations, it should be honest because “Lying to a federal investigator is illegal under oath or not” (”Who’s Not Sorry Now?”/NYT), although this sentence should have included the word whether before the alternative “under oath or not.”
The puzzle whether to use if or whether can be solved by asking whether it is possible to replace if with “in case.” Then if is correct. When, however, an alternative is suggested, whether is correct. Hence, the Vicomte’s exclamation “God help us whether or no!” (S. Weyman, The Abbess of Vlaye ) is indeed "senile," while Charles Dickens' wondering “whether she was engaged, whether she was pretty, whether she wore much bustle, and many other whethers of equal importance” ("Sentiment") is deft.

Blame: responsibility for a mistake

To take the blame (= to acknowledge that one is to blame for doing something; to admit that it is one’s own fault) is the hardest thing to do. Maybe that’s why www.ehow.com offers four different techniques how to do it:

Step 1: ALL MY FAULT! - Just say it; you don't have to mean it.
Here is how this sounds: "I made a boneheaded mistake yesterday. Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration -- which bugged and intimidated and harassed journalists -- to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me. I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do. I apologize for a dumb comparison" (Ken Rudin, NPR).

Step 2: SO WHAT? It's easier to take the blame for something that really isn't your fault. This is not about justice, it's about letting go of the blame syndrome.
Of course, one subtly can let people know that the blame is not really one’s own. This is called sharing the blame (= to accord a share of it to others), and it’s done by suddenly switching from the pronoun “I” to “we.” "All the Toyota vehicles bear my name. For me, when the cars are damaged, it is as though I am as well. I, more than anyone, wish for Toyota's cars to be safe, and for our customers to feel safe when they use our vehicles. We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization and we should be sincerely mindful of that" (Akio Toyoda).
Even though the vehicles bear “my” name, they are “our” vehicles and “we” must be mindful. But who are these “we”?
The management team, Chuck Prince of Citigroup says before he goes one step further. “I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.” Prince tries to share the blame not only with “our management team” but with “so many others.” Honestly, how can somebody be at fault who simply did something so many others did as well?
Tiger Woods is even smarter. Although he begins by blaming himself for transgressions, he soon deflects the blame altogether. “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. … For the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives. … Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions.” Suddenly, not his transgressions but those who made them known deserve the blame. Moreover, Mr. Woods uses the passive voice, cleverly avoiding to declare anybody in particular guilty for such misdeeds.

Step 3 : YEAH, SO? Accept responsibility. If it really is your fault, don't wallow in it. Accept responsibility for your actions and move on …
… as does Michael Steele, who, too, first blames some obscure “they” before he decides to just move on: “They love nothing more than for us to keep pointing fingers at me and others, instead of their radical un-American agenda, and we shouldn’t fall for that trap. I’m the first here to admit that I’ve made mistakes, and it’s been incumbent on me to take responsibility, shoulder that burden, make the necessary changes and move on.”
Tiger Woods and Michael Steele attempt to shift the blame (= to transfer it from one person to another), but they haven’t mastered the final strategy, which is

Step 4: Lighten up. What does blame have to do with anything? Who cares who is at fault? Choose an attitude of 'oh well, that's okay' and see how much pleasanter [sic!] life can be.
“At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought “ (Pope Benedict 9/12/06). The Pope is not sorry for his words, just for the reaction they provoked. And a little bit like Adam, who first blamed God for giving him Eve and then blamed her for giving him the forbidden fruit, the Pope first blames the Muslims’ sensibility (= their way to feel about or react to his statement) and then some medieval scripture that doesn’t even reflect his own beliefs. See how much more pleasant life can be!