NYT: "blather" from Pa.?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 4:09 AM, Seán Fitzpatrick
<grendel.jjf at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> << These are people distrustful of rank, and finery, and high-flown words.
> It should come as no surprise that the word 'blather' originated here.>>
>
> Could it be that the reporter's mistake is not iffy etymology but sloppy
> writing?  In context, these two sentences—and hence the final "here"—do SEEM
> most likely to refer to the American Middle-Atlantic region, but perhaps
> they were INTENDED to refer to the English midlands and its people.

A Language Log reader also suggested that possibility, but it seems
unlikely to me. The article is all about Pennsylvania, where the
correspondent is reporting from, so it would be very odd indeed for
the deictic ground of "here" to shift suddenly to the English (North)
Midlands. If the writer had intended that, I would have expected
"there" instead of "here" in this context. (Or who knows, maybe
"there" got changed to "here" by an inattentive copy editor.)

> BTW:  Note the apparent serial comma in "rank, and finery, and high-flown
> words".  Is serial comma NYT style now, or just forced by the anaphoric use
> of "and"?

The latter, to be sure. (Today's review of the Martin Scorsese/Rolling
Stones documentary "Shine a Light" says,"Mick Jagger, Keith Richards
and Ronnie Wood, the quartet's three skinny members, certainly look
their ages.")

--Ben Zimmer


> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu>
> wrote:
> > From a New York Times article about Obama's campaigning style in
> Pennsylvania:
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/us/politics/01obama.html
> > "Pennsylvania's culture, as the historian David Hackett Fischer noted
> > in his book 'Albion's Seed,' is rooted in the English midlands, where
> > Scandinavian and English left a muscular and literal imprint. These
> > are people distrustful of rank, and finery, and high-flown words. It
> > should come as no surprise that the word 'blather' originated here."
>
> Now on Language Log:
>
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005519.html
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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