A very small rant.

The Washington Post recently ran a short news item about the health benefits of fidgeting. This subject always interests me because I am, or at least I was, a very fidgety person. The headline ("Fidgeting might be good for your health, new study suggests") didn't exactly match the conclusions of the study; that didn't surprise me -- news, especially online news, frequently has bait-and-switch headlines. What did surprise and irritate me a bit was that the quote from the co-lead author of the study makes absolutely no sense to me. Maybe one of my readers can explain it to me. Here's the quote:

"While further research is needed, the findings raise questions about whether the negative associations with fidgeting, such as rudeness or lack of concentration, should persist if such simple movements are beneficial for our health," study co-lead Janet Cade of the University of Leeds said in a statement. 

What? I get the part about "negative associations," and it's probably true that all these years while I've been fidgeting I've been distracted and, more important, I've been rude to anyone nearby (sorry). But what does "...raise questions about whether the negative associations...should persist if such simple movements are beneficial for our health" mean? Is Dr. Cade saying that if fidgeting leads to better health, and therefore longer life, it should also lead to reduced rudeness and better concentration? That's the best I can do. Opinions?

Oh, one more thing. The Post article links to the study and gets the name of the journal wrong. They call it the American Journal of Preventative Medicine while the real name is the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. I've long hated the word "preventative" and I always edit out that errant "ta."

I guess I'm done. I'm going to stand up now and go fidget since that seems to be the only exercise I get these days. Unless complaining counts as exercise.

A few thoughts about words.

Three times today, in three different contexts, I encountered the word "spangle" (or "spangling" or "spangled"). Isn't it a great word? Spangle.

The first occasion was in a book review by Meghan O'Rourke.
Since those days much has changed; you can’t go out to the Fort Greene Greenmarket on Saturday without running into a spangle of fiction writers.

The second occasion was in the book I'm reading for my book group meeting (Gold by Chris Cleave):  
The day of her birthday was hot. ...The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it.

I like the way the word sounds in both those instances, although the first use -- "spangle" as a collective noun -- seems to deviate a lot from all the definitions I can find for the word.

And of course we all know "spangled" from the National Anthem, as in star-spangled banner. My third encounter with a spangly word today was during the HBO Veterans Day TV thing. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and the Zac Brown Band doing "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty.

Yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord

Interesting song choice for a Veterans Day event. They were great.

The following sentence, also from the novel Gold, made me grind my teeth: 

Me and Zoe have to see Tom ....

I know it's just a novel, but I hear that kind of sentence ...."Me and Bob are going to ...." far, far too often. I'm flexible, I'm willing to change with the times. But I am not, nor will I ever be, ready to accept "me" as the subject of a sentence. Me won't!!

Finally, I've given up caring about the use of "between you and I." I think even grammarians have given up. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on the subject, including this over-the-top sentence:

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English."

I nominate this word for the compost pile.

Nonplussed. What a bad, bad word. So confusing. So often misused. So often the cause of me having to stop reading whatever I'm reading to, once again, look it up. It does not mean  "unimpressed" or "indifferent." It means "confused" or "perplexed." Maybe blogging about it will imprint it on my brain.

 

 

Fun jobs. Being paid by Stephen Colbert to think up silly anagrams like this one.

Reince  Priebus

Crisp Bee Urine

"Forward"??

The last time I thought I'd found a typo I quickly learned that I was wrong, as you can see if you go here.  Recently I came across another apparent typo (in the May 14th New Yorker) but maybe I'm wrong again. But I'm not, right? It should be "Foreword," right?

The article is a good one. About geoengineering. Depressing of course but what's new. The link is here.

One space or two? How did I miss this debate?

This is wrong.  Because there are two spaces before the word "Because."

This is correct. Because there is only one space before the word "Because."


At least according to this January 2011 article from Slate.com.  Very interesting little history of typography, and I feel like I should have known this long before 2012.  I guess I could start using only one space but it would be hard.

About 15 years ago, maybe more like 18?, a smart, talented, polite young writer came to work with me, and after a few months she smilingly and casually told me that, in a previous job, she had learned that one space was the more appropriate style.  I smilingly thanked her for telling me about her former employer's interesting thoughts on spaces but I also told her that we would stick with the two-space rule.  My boss agreed with me so that was that.

Now, all these years later, I want to apologize to Natalie.  She was right, I was wrong.  I wonder if I would care about this at all if I still worked?

Found scribbled on a folder on my desk.

I don't know where I saw this phrase but it obviously impressed me because I wrote it down on a folder. (I'm always finding notes to myself that I've written in the most inconvenient places.) I suspect that it was used in Christopher Hitchens's autobiography "Hitch 22," which I raved about a few months ago. It sounds like a phrase he would have used. "Quisling" is a relatively new word, but I offer it to my readers as a possible name to call someone you loathe. I hope the word takes on a broader meaning over time. For example, "that Newt Gingrich is such a embittered quisling." Even if you don't know what it means it sounds bad, right?

"50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" by Geoffrey K. Pullum

A friend (Stephanie) who knows me well sent this 2-year-old article in order to mess with my mind. It was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication with a very good reputation.

I toiled for decades as an editor, and loved every minute of it (the editing part, not the toiling part). I kept copies of Strunk and White (that's a picture of my 1972 edition, showing lots of wear and tear) and Fowler's Modern English Usage close at hand, and referred to them weekly, if not daily. Now I learn that S & W have fallen on hard times, at least with some academics. I've read the Chronicle article twice and had one slightly contentious "discussion" about it with another smartypants (besides me) who thinks he knows what's up in the grammar world.

Now that I don't edit for a living I don't care quite so much that people are criticizing S & W, but I care a little.

Conclusions? None so far. Research continues though.

OMG. OMG. OMG!

(I hate to start a sentence with the word "so" but I just have to do it here.)

So I'm puttering around the yard, not rushing around, filling up the bees' watering places since so many of them are out on this 50-degree sunny day. I decide to peek under the top of my hive to see what's up, if anything. Well, a lot is up, including the Queen, who is obviously in the top of the 4-box-high hive laying eggs on the underside of the inner screen cover. This might not mean a lot to anyone but a beekeeper but it's NOT what you want to see. The Queen is obviously healthy, and is being fed well and (most important I guess) she's being kept alive. But I DON'T want her laying eggs on the screened cover! And right now I have a vague idea of what needs to be done, but only a vague idea of the best approach.

About a week to 10 days ago, I was musing about adding another new box with frames to the top, because the hive seemed so strong and surprisingly full of honey given the time of year. I asked my beekeeping listserv group if anyone agreed with my idea of adding a box. I got a few answers, all of them helpful but none of them being this answer: yes, add a box NOW. So I didn't add the box. I was waiting for a warmer day to do a hive inspection that would give me more information about the state of the bees.

Now I must go do some reading, and thinking, and probably emailing, to get ideas for how I can add a box without killing the Queen. I'd like to do it now, but it's 4:30 in the afternoon and the temperature is dropping and the day is getting short and the bees will be coming home and oh my poor dear Queen out there laying eggs at the f'ing top of the hive.

OMG.

[PS: The larvae are in the middle of the picture. The white stuff on the right is fondant, a solid sugar candy that I fed them 2 weeks ago and they probably didn't need but they almost finished. A self-respecting beekeeper will look at that and say "why didn't you remove it? or why didn't you this? or why did you that? or what were you thinking??"

Beekeeping: not for the faint of heart.]

I learned two new words at my mishpocha Thanksgiving.

Grandniece Anabelle on the right, nephew Seamus in the rear, Norah on the left.
This picture wasn't taken on Thanksgiving; I took it a month+ ago. But every day I give Thanks for them and my grandnephew George, and Ildiko and Emese, my nieces by marriage. All the little ones. I got to smooch briefly with Ildiko (10 months old) on Thanksgiving; it was heavenly. Wish I'd taken my camera.

I'm posting this picture now just because I want to. I believe their mom, my niece, told me that the stove in the back is the entire source of heat for the whole house. Big house too. Out there on that mountain being buffeted by the winds. Brrrrr.... wish I was (were?) there. I love the cold weather.

These are the words I learned:
Buteo
(noun) A type of soaring hawk that prefers grassland and other open habitats. Buteos have broad wings, wide bodies and short tails, and are able to soar without flapping their wings for long periods of time. These birds are most easily identified by wing patterns and shape, though the large range of color variations within individual species can make identification difficult. Buteos prey on lizards, snakes, mammals and rodents. Buteos include red-tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks, red-shouldered hawks, Swainson’s hawks and rough-legged hawks.

Mishpocha
(noun)
(Yiddish) the entire family network of relatives by blood or marriage (and sometimes close friends); "she invited the whole mishpocha."

The group of people I was with on Thanksgiving are in-laws of in-laws, and Doug knew there was a Yiddish word that described that kind of gathering. At dinner, David -- a Jewish in-law of an in-law -- provided the correct pronunciation of mishpocha, telling me that you aim for a sound somewhere between a "B" and a "P."

And, finally, all of this came together in my head because a blogging friend posted a picture of hamantaschen.