Historic Occasions

On the surface, the three articles in the English language (a, an, and the) are uncomplicated little runts, and for this they should be congratulated. They’re so small that they barely even exist and therefore should require the minimum possible amount of brain cell activity in order to use and understand. But things can’t be that easy, can they? Well, they can. They just aren’t because of our incurable need to establish and follow odd, nonsensical conventions.

Adhering to the basic elementary school rule, we use an before words that begin with vowel sounds. This makes an a little bit special because it has no basis in the written word. It exists solely to aid in graceful pronunciation by providing us with a convenient little consonant so that we don’t have to go stumbling over consecutive vowel sounds as if a ghost just passed through our larynx. A impossible task looks fine on paper, but it is horrible to say and requires some advanced verbal gymnastics to prevent the vowels from getting smashed together into unpossible task instead of a impossible task. We add an n to prevent this kind of awkward, perilous voweling. And if you are currently experiencing any perilous voweling, you should get that examined by a local witch doctor immediately. An elixir of peppered pond water and an exorcism should be prescribed, to be taken three times fortnightly.

The premise behind an is simple enough, but in the grand tradition of everything being the worst, a and an get all tangled and confused for no reason when it comes to the word historic because people insist on using an even though it makes no sense.

A Capital Idea

Most grammatical and mechanical regulations are more like recommendations than airtight rules. They can be mangled, modified, or ignored in certain circumstances when following them would result in more trouble and confusion than they’re worth. Even some of the most ingrained concepts like not ending sentences with prepositions or not beginning sentences with and or but aren’t really rules at all, just popular misconceptions.

With all these amorphous guidelines floating around, the few simple, constant rules that we do have become the most comforting. One such stalwart is our universal understanding that we should always begin sentences with a capital letter. Fiction or nonfiction, prose or dialogue, every sentence starts with a capital. Not only is this a rule based on centuries of convention, it is also useful. “Here comes a sentence!” the capital letter screams. Periods are tiny and difficult to differentiate from commas for those with blindness or attention problems. The capital letter at the beginning makes it easy to read sentences quickly and efficiently and know where each one begins and ends.

But this practice is crumbling. It’s under siege from a new virulent construction that is sweeping through the populace: the insidious lowercase. For some time, we’ve been acquainted with people beginning sentences with lowercase letters, either out of laziness or a failed attempt to seem creative, but that was always on the individual, harmless level. Over the past decade or so, the insidious lowercase has attached itself to a new host, a breeding ground for parasitic, upsetting, nonsensical constructions. I mean, of course, corporations.

How Does It Feel?

People certainly have a lot of feelings. Every conversation lately seems peppered with all manner of “I feel like this” and “she felt that we shouldn’t” and “burglary feels wrong.” Feel is such a common, indistinct verb that we tend to assume it can be used to mean nearly anything in any context, but should that really be the case?

When you say, “I feel like we should leave,” you’re clearly not describing an emotion, so why use the word feel? The decision to leave is the result of a cognitive process in which you weighed the pros and the cons of leaving and not leaving and ultimately decided that, yes, leaving makes the most sense. You don’t feel like we should leave; you think we should leave.

And yet, basic thoughts are frequently expressed with the vocabulary of emotions. Is this because somehow emotions carry more conversational weight than thoughts? It’s easy to argue with a thought. It can be as simple as saying, “I disagree with you” and as complicated as saying, “I disagree with you for the following seven reasons, which I will now present in inverted chronological order using a series of visual aids and a skit involving three apples and a goose. The goose also disagrees with you.”

Whatever the selected method, thoughts can easily be countered with other thoughts. Expressing thoughts as emotions, however, indicates that the feelings rose from your bones, that this sentiment is not a thought but is instead a sense born of instinct and intuition that is somehow impervious to disagreement or logic and therefore must be followed. If you think we should leave, I’m free to think we shouldn’t leave, but if you feel like we should leave, who I am to disagree with your feelings?

You’re Not Helping

Dear Microsoft Word,

First of all, I need you to know that everything you’ve ever done is the worst. Now that that’s out of the way, we have new a problem. Don’t laugh. This time it’s serious. This isn’t just a “Why are tables so inconvenient to make, you imbecile?” kind of problem. We’ve been through that, and we agree to disagree. Well, you agree to disagree. I agree to use Pages instead. No, this is a real problem. This is a full Threat Level 5, bouncing paperclip kind of problem.

Just today, I was attempting to type the simple word may into your woeful abyss of an application. You know the word may, right? As in, “You may have noticed that you’re horrible”? Yes, I thought you’d recognize it.

As I typed the word, you decided to pipe up with a little yellow box of misery saying, “May 18, 2012.”

“What is this?” I cried. Is that supposed to be helpful? When I wrote the word may, which is among the most common of words, did you think I actually meant to write the date, and so you gave me a little reminder? If you still had that paperclip with its eyes like you did in the Dark Ages, I imagine that the eyes would have been blinking at me with that hellishly calculated innocence, and my Dictionary Eyes would be blinking back with increasing rage until they shot spontaneous lasers in all directions.

Hoi Polloi: A Landmine

Hoi polloi is a trick. Don’t trust it.

You may be drawn to the phrase because it rhymes and sounds playful, like something you would yell in the midst of a nonsensical swimming pool game. Everyone swims to one end of the pool, and someone yells, “Hoi polloi!” Then you all have to swim back to the other end while picking up plastic coins, or something. I don’t know. I haven’t worked out all the rules yet. There will be a false start penalty, that’s for sure. I’ll workshop it and get back to you.

Either that, or you may want to use it in high-class conversation to sound vaguely erudite or exotic so you can pretend you’re a wealthy import/export industry heir who just returned from a business trip to Southern Europe feeling confident and fancy.

These are bad ideas. No matter your aim, hoi polloi will betray you.

A Whole Other Nother

Horror movies have never interested me. I don’t find the feelings of fear or shock that these movies are supposed to inspire particularly appealing or cathartic or whatever other adjectives people use to describe why they inexplicably like them. Nor am I very frightened by seeing a person or a severed limb or a blood ghost (A thing? No? See, I don’t know what’s in these movies) popping out of a dark place unexpectedly. Monsters, axes, serial killers, I just don’t have the energy. If you really want to frighten me, hand me a transcript of everything I say over the course of a day.

Aside from being composed mostly of sounds like “brhhhh” and “fehfehfehfehfeh” and “Kreeeeeeeeeeee,” I’m sure the transcript would contain multiple unrecognizable constructions, bizarre word choices, and syntax errors the likes of which might be considered cute only in a lesser ape. Regardless of how well I understand rules and conventions when writing, speech is so rapid and casual that common sense breaks down. Common sense takes energy, and it just can’t keep up with all this chattering. While this is true for everyone that exists, it would still be the equivalent of a horror film times thirty for me to see my daily speech written out.

We all have our own verbal foibles that we’ve been saying for so long that we don’t even notice them anymore until they are pointed out to us, causing embarrassment and lasting emotional scars. For instance, some people say, “also too” when they just mean “also” or “too.” I don’t suffer from this affliction and am therefore free to judge anyone who does. That’s how it works. I do, however, suffer from the affliction of using the sad grotesquerie “a whole nother thing” and am therefore free to judge myself with equivalent harshness.

Nother is not a word. I know it’s not a word, and yet I use it all the time. This is my shame.

Fun with R

R is by far the most satisfying letter to use at the beginnings of words. This is because you can enthusiastically bite into the r to propel the word in a way that you can’t with words beginning with vowels or s or h, which are always breathy and timid and drab no matter how much emphasis or intent you put behind them. Biting into an s word just makes you sound leaky and entirely non-menacing, but biting into an r word, even over-pronouncing the first letter a little bit, makes people say, “Oh, is that a pirate? I’m going to listen to what’s happening over there.”

Capitalizing an R with inflection (not using an actual uncalled-for capital R in writing, which would be horrifying) is the most effective way to show that a word, particularly an adjective or adverb, is genuine and intentional rather than a matter of habit or politeness. There is a significant difference between pronouncing really with a little r and pronouncing Really with a big R.

 “That was Really fun” is a genuine expression of fun, but “That was really fun” is more of an obligatory recognition that an event occurred and might have been interpreted as fun by some people but wasn’t by you and probably shouldn’t be mentioned again and certainly shouldn’t be recreated by anyone ever. It all comes down to how well you hit the r, which is why words that start with r can be among the most satisfying to say if done properly.

A Regular Scent

Let’s make a pact to be done with the word regular. I don’t mean that we should be done with it in a “no human being is regular because we’re all unique flowers on the Earth” kind of way, though. That’s nonsense. A large majority of people are regular, and that’s how it should be. Certainly, there are degrees of regularity ranging from “muh” to “heh,” but those are subtle distinctions, and everything still falls under the general category of regular, a use that I can accept.

I cannot, however, accept the woefully increasing use of regular as a specific adjective as though regular is an adequately informative description of anything. Particularly, I’m talking about all the shampoos and soaps and toothpastes and deodorants that describe their smells as Regular Scent, which meaningless code for the fact that they don’t smell like poisonous lemons or the tropics if the tropics were horrible.

The 12.9″ Dime

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about preposterous, insane car commercials, by which I should just say, “car commercials,” and I have arrived at the conclusion that I’m done with them. I realize I would be much happier if I weren’t forced to think about them, and at the very least, I wouldn’t have to spend time asking whether a car that can read a person’s handwriting is in any way a good idea.

Recently, my Dictionary Eyes had a minor destructive episode over one such baffling ad. The ad’s bizarre and indecipherable setting and theme were all too familiar in the automotive industry, where advertising executives consistently seem to confuse “appealingly cool and futuristic” with “the concept of advanced dementia,” but that alone is unremarkable. It would be far too tiring, even for the spry Dictionary Eyes, to react appropriately to all commercials set within an arthritic time machine’s nightmares.

No, this commercial caught the Dictionary Eyes’ attention for one brief but striking moment of inverted sanity.

Words with M

It’s misty and overcast today, and I’m wearing a sweatshirt, so that  means it’s time to break open MWCD (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary) and flip around for some hearty, interesting words and facts.

• A mortmain is “an inalienable possession of lands or buildings by an ecclesiastical or other corporation,” but it can also refer to “the influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” Creepy-sounding and useful, my favorite type of word. There’s no surprise that it sounds creepy since mortmain literally means “dead hand.” I do take some issue with the construction of the first definition, though. Ecclesiastical and other don’t match particularly smoothly as parallel adjectives because of a difference in scope. I’d prefer “ecclesiastical body or other corporation.”

• An interesting note about martian: It is not capitalized in its main entry (though the note does say “often cap”), and it’s the only adjectival version of a planet that has the option of non-capitalization. The dreadful red Word underline wants me to capitalize it, but according to MWCD, I don’t have to. Is that a result of its pervasiveness when compared to the other planet adjectives? Though the entry doesn’t mention this, we seen martian used figuratively to describe any foreign thing, which may account for its lowercase option, which we wouldn’t see with something like Venusian. Venusian is (and should be) used only to describe things from Venus.

• Moving picture and motion picture are both noted as originating in 1896. I think most people have a sense that moving picture is more antiquated expression, and therefore came about earlier, while motion picture came along later and stuck it out, so it’s interesting that they date to the same year. Movie is a 1912 shortening, and flick as slang for a movie is from 1926, which is unsurprising. It’s a very 20s word.

• In looking up the date of motion picture, I noticed that just below it we see motion sickness dating from 1942, which is surprisingly late. Surely motion sickness as a specific category of nausea was around and recognized much earlier than that. It’s strange that no one called it motion sickness until 1942, given what a logical and obvious expression that seems to be.

• Murderee is an actual word. It’s meaning is obvious, but I didn’t know it existed. I thought always we had to use murder victim, which can get repetitive, so this is useful and should be more common. Not murder, to be clear, just the word.

• Mustached is a perfectly acceptable word, but we tend to use mustachioed to describe someone with a mustache. I fully support this since mustachioed is odd and delightful, but it’s rare that the more cumbersome, less intuitive option wins out over the logical form. The noun form, mustachio, does not survive with the same popularity.