assorted

Sat Jan 6 21:52:00 UTC 2007

Jim, by characterizing the headline rule as "immutable," I had no intention of implying it was arcane or arbitrary. Your explanation for it is absolutely correct.

  My impression is that the extreme brevity rule emerged only after World War I with the rise of the New York Daily News and other tabloids.  As in Jerry's ex., it may have achieved its ultimate practical brevity in the post-1945 sports pages.

  But the classic ex. remains Variety's "Hix Nix Stix Pix" of the 1930s.

  JL

"James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:
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    The reason my post about "omphaloskeptics" was garbled for some list-members is because Netscape's e-mail software gets erratic when you try to cut-and-paste into a new e-mail.  In this case it copied some formatting codes (that's why my message was double-spaced) and Wilson Gray's e-mail software misinterpreted those codes as signalling something other than straight ASCII.  I'll try to be more careful in the future, but since the copy I got back (I subscribe to the digest) looked OK, I had no way of knowing some readers would receive pi.

  As a native Kentuckian, I will insist that there is as much difference between a "string tie" and a "bolo tie" as there is between a bowtie and a four-in-hand.  I have in front of me some pictures of the Jesse James gang.[James D. Horan and Paul Sann, _Pictorial History of the Wild West_ New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, no ISBN, pp 27ff]  Of some 22 men shown in photographs, at least 16 have some kind of neckwear, including Jesse James's son, apparently about 5 years old in the photo.  Bob Younger, in a picture taken in 1876, is shown wearing what appears to be a piece of twine tied in a bow, and Jesse's brother Frank in one undated photo is wearing what is definitely a string tie (in another he wears a four-in-hand).  Jesse himself is shown in two photos wearing what appears to be a ribbon about 4 cm wide tied like Colonel Sanders's string tie, but in his coffin photo he wears what looks like an Ascot.

  The reason for the prescriptivist notion not "to end a sentence with a preposition" is not that prepositions are insignificant (they are not) but 1) Latin never ended sentences with prepositions (being case-inflected, it didn't use much in the way of prepositions---the "law" against split infinitives probably comes from the fact that in Latin it is physically impossible to split an infinitive so why should English be different?) and 2) (much more reasonable-sounding) it splits up the two parts of a phrasal verb, *allegedly* making the sentence harder to understand because the listener has to reassemble the verb phrase. (A terminal prepsition in an English sentence, as far as I can tell, is always part of a phrasal verb, never part of a prepositional phrase)  However, avoiding a terminal preposition can lead to such clumsy constructions that the listener would find it easier to understand the sentence with the terminal preposition.

  Does anyone know who originated "that is something up with which I will no put"?  It is usually attributed to Winston Churchill (the statesman, not the novelist).

  There was an English teacher in Louisville KY named, if I remember correctly, Anne (or Annie) Polk, who published an English grammar textbook which contained the imperative: "Never use a preposition to end a sentence with".  This is not an urban legend; I have personally seen the book and that statement in it.

  "The Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage"---is there anything wrong with that sentence?  "Maiden x", e.g. "maiden speech", meaning the first such for the person being described, is a common expression, used with reference to both males and females.  Oddly, "virgin" is used to describe inanimate objects, e.g. "virgin forest", "virgin snow".  "Maiden" in this case does not mean "a young woman" but rather is a less stark replacement for the word "virgin".  Similarly "lose his/her cherry" in which "cherry" obviously originally referred the hymen, or perhaps to the bleeding when the hymen is broken, is used metaphorically, and when meant in the first-coitus sense can be applied to either a man or a woman.  The "Jaynestown" episode of "Firefly" used the term to refer specifically to a 26-year-old male losing his virginity.

  Jonathan Lighter said "A nearly immutable rule of headline writing is never to use an unnecessary letter, space, or symbol."  No, it is not some arcane tradition that governs why headline writers use the wordings they do, but a very practical reason: headlines have to give a precis of the story in large type in a limited space.  When fighting to get a long story into as little type as possible, it's not surprising that ambiguities and unintentional double-entendres appear, e.g. "Short Police Officer Loses Sex Appeal" or "Nation's Hungry Attack Meese" . Try figuring out this one: "Concern For Guarding Software Mushrooms".  The Columbia Journalism Review runs a column of such amusing headlines in each issue.

  To announce the death of Soviet Premier Andropov,  the Washington Post ran three headlines across the top of Page 1.  Collectively they read  "Reagan To Attend / Funeral / Andropov Dead".

  Anyone who accepts the story of Travis drawing a line in the sand at the Alamo necessarily accepts that the Alamo had a figurative back door, since that story rests on the testimony of one man who claims he observed the event, declined to cross the line, and escaped from the Alamo via some back-door route.

  To Tom Zurinskas: quit your dysgastrosis.  You were never banned from the ADS List, any more than you are Arthur Fiedler (band in Boston).  Did you notice that I replied, sympathetically even, to your comments on diagramming?

  "Gentlelady" is redundant.  English has "ladies and gentlemen" because there is no non-compound synonym for "gentleman".  Spanish for example says "damas y caballeros" where "dama" is obviously cognate to English "dame", a word (that except in titles, e.g. Dame Margot Fonteyn) that has fallen into the gutter, and "caballere" literally means "horseman" and is related to English "cavalier", also originally a term for a horseman.  However "cavalier" has acquired a derogatory sense---"he was cavalier with his expensive books"--- and also has a political sense, i.e. a supporter of Charles I.  Putting a sign reading "Cavalier" on men's restrooms would leave Roundheads in trouble.

  My personal favorite 2006 quote: "as exciting as an Andy Reid press conference."

      - Jim Landau

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