World Wide Words -- 04 Oct 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 898: Saturday 4 October 2014

This mailing also contains a formatted version of the text. 
This issue is also available online (http://wwwords.org/lctk) .


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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NOT SO GREEN AS YOU'RE CABBAGE-LOOKING. Several readers pointed out 
that I had said nothing about the second part of this strange 
expression. "Cabbage" here is a reference to the head, it being 
roughly the same size and shape. "Cabbage" and "cabbage-head" have 
long been slang terms for a dull-witted, stupid or naive person.

The Yorkshire exclamation I quoted in the piece is "well, I'll go to 
the foot of our stairs", not "bottom". Janet Alton emailed, "I was 
born and brought up in a South Yorkshire pit village between Sheffield 
and Worksop, and if anyone had said 'bottom' where I lived, they would 
have been accused of 'talking posh'!" She added, "A similar expression 
of surprise or disbelief is 'Well, I'll go to't back of our 'ouse'."

THE WORD AT WAR. In my review of the book, I misquoted the famous 
statement by FDR that 7 December 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl 
Harbor, was a "date that will live in infamy". The book's authors had 
it correctly. Nick Willmott disputed one of the book's statements, 
"You are not to be blamed for repeating the assertion that the 
celebrated Keep Calm and Carry On poster was never distributed during 
World War II. However, Reece Winstones' Bristol Blitzed of 1976 
includes a photograph which clearly shows the poster on display in 
1941."

TESTING, TESTING ... I'm developing a version of the World Wide Words 
site that will be responsive to differing screen sizes on mobile 
devices. If you have access to a smartphone, tablet or similar device 
and would like to look at a sample page and comment in detail on how 
easy it is to use and - as far as possible - its design, typography 
or coding, please contact me and let me know what make and model of 
device you have. Use the email address beta at worldwidewords.org.

HOUSEKEEPING. If you recognise any of these defunct email addresses as 
having once been yours, would you contact me? scrapvee at msn.com, 
bigfoot at jacqi.net, vdrandi3 at pop.htnet.hr, u4419216 at anu.edu.au.


Habiliments
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It means clothes.

It was more widely used centuries ago, because it had several senses, 
based on its Old French source, "habillement" or "abillement", which 
come from the verb "habiller", to fit out or render some item fit for 
service. The form without the initial "h" shows its link with English 
"able", which comes from the related French "habile" or "hable". 

Earlier senses were of the outfit and equipment of a warrior, more 
broadly the weapons, munitions and other equipment of war. These 
senses died out in the seventeenth century but one other survived, the 
garments or vestments appropriate to some occupation, occasion or 
season. 

It's too pompously formal to fit our age and most dictionaries mark it 
as archaic. However, "habiliments" also became a jokey way to refer to 
one's everyday clothes and it may still be found as a humorous, 
dismissive or sarcastic way to refer to clothing:

    You know the kind of cyclist I mean: all is vanity. ...
    He wears wicked shades, an insect-head helmet, and has
    athletic signage on his inappropriate habiliments.
    [The Herald (Glasgow), 20 Jun. 2014.]


Wordface
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A NEW TRIBE. You may remember the yuppies of the 1980s, the Young 
Upwardly-mobile Professionals. Their name coined several imitations, 
of which the newest and most awkward appeared in British newspapers a 
couple of weeks ago. The group is the "endies", those who are Employed 
but have No Disposable Income or Savings. It was invented by a think 
tank, the Centre for London, in a report, Hollow Promise: How London 
Fails People on Modest Incomes and What Should be Done About It.  The 
Centre concludes that a combination of static incomes and increasing 
cost of living, especially housing and transport, have put about a 
fifth of Londoners into the endie group.

BOOK DAY. Next Thursday, 9 October, is "Super Thursday" for publishers 
in Britain, the day on which they launch their key books for the 
season. In the past, individual publishers have decided to put their 
best titles out on the same day, but this year publishers have 
combined to make an official joint promotional campaign. Book 
publishing has used the term from at least 2000, but borrowed it from 
politics. British elections are always held on Thursdays and a chance 
combination of national and local by-elections and the European 
elections was given the name in 1994. This was almost certainly taken 
from the older Super Tuesday in the US, when several presidential 
primary elections are held on the same day.


The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
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Professor Pinker claims to love reading style guides. However, in much 
of his book - the last 115 pages especially - he points out their 
deficiencies and dismisses the views of purists, otherwise "sticklers, 
pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nit-pickers, traditionalists, 
language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis and the Gotcha! Gang." 
In this lies one of the themes of his work as well as a hint of his 
style

He explains cogently how to write better, to learn the sense of style 
of his title. His arguments and examples are drawn from cognitive 
science, which tells us how people take in information, and from 
modern grammar, which has replaced traditional assertions about the 
nature of English with a researched understanding of the way English 
actually works.

The book is entertaining while containing much good sense about the 
art of writing well. He takes examples of twenty-first-century prose 
and argues his way through what makes them good or bad. He advocates a 
classic style of writing, a conversation between writer and reader in 
which the writer knows what he wants to say and knows how much he 
needs to tell the reader and how much he can leave to the reader's 
knowledge. The prime failure in much communication, he points out, is 
assuming that your reader knows too much (he calls it the curse of 
knowledge) or that he or she understands technical terms that are 
everyday concepts in the writer's field but not outside it.

He follows this up with detailed advice on such matters as signposting 
your intentions to keep your reader on course, avoiding clichés, 
limiting the number of abstract nouns (to call that "excessive 
nominalisation" is an example of the problem), preferring positives to 
negatives (research has shown it takes more mental effect to 
understand negatives) and preferring active to passive (though he 
argues forcefully that the passive can usefully emphasise the key 
element of a sentence).

Much of the attention that's been paid to The Sense of Style has 
focussed on Pinker's iconoclastic views on grammar. Are dangling 
modifiers (the subject of so many Sic! items in this newsletter) 
always mistakes? No, he says, many are acceptable, so much so that we 
don't notice them. It's only the examples that lead to glaring 
incongruities that become reasons to avoid them. Is it OK to verb 
nouns? He says it often is, since they make it easy to express 
concepts that would otherwise require circumlocution and, anyway, 
using them is a matter of taste, not grammar. He points out the 
subtleties of "less" versus "fewer", noting as one case that "less" is 
fine with units of measurement. In his discussion of punctuation, he 
advocates the serial comma, but decries the way his fellow Americans 
put their closing punctuation inside quotation marks, regardless of 
sense and logic. 

After 115 pages of this and related rejection of convention, he ends 
"For all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are 
the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind 
coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to 
say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness." Amen to 
that.

[Pinker, Steven, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to 
Writing in the 21st Century; published in hardback and ebook in the UK 
by Allen Lane (ISBN 9781846145506) and in the US by Viking (ISBN 
9780670025855). Help support World Wide Words by buying from Amazon: 
UK (http://wwwords.org/ssuk), USA (http://wwwords.org/ssus), Canada 
(http://wwwords.org/ssca), Germany (http://wwwords.org/ssde).]


Sic!
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The miracles of modern technology. Bob Bendesky found this on the US 
Weekly site on 27 September: "Chelsea Clinton introduced her newborn 
daughter Charlotte to the world one day after giving birth via Twitter 
on Saturday." As Cedric Vendyback discovered, Time magazine included a 
tautology in a related announcement: "Chelsea Clinton gave birth to a 
newborn baby girl, she announced Saturday morning."


Useful information
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published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting 
and advice are provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
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