How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013

Spelling
How to not write wrong

a. Homophone-phobia

Spell-check programs are great. Spell-check programs are a disaster.

Let me explain.

Back in the old days, students would frequently make spelling mistakes like embarass (instead of embarrass) or influencial (instead of influential). No more. Modern word processing programs put squiggly red lines under misspelled words or, better yet, silently correct them (as mine just tried to do with embarass).

The programs are not perfect, even on their own terms. My version of Microsoft Word accepts miniscule unsquiggled, even though the correct spelling is minuscule, and alright even though all right is preferred by every authority I’m aware of. And although Word does in fact indicate that momento (as opposed to memento) is an error, many of my students apparently don’t believe it, because they go ahead and write momento anyway. I wonder about that, and sentences I get along the lines of:

“The [pengellem] is swinging fully against finance reform,” Vogel said.

It is actually quite rare for me to get an assignment with a word as badly misspelled as pengellum, but I’ll devote a minute to this example, because I feel for the student. She was reporting on Vogel’s speech, and rightly recognized that this was a good quote. There was this squirrelly word in it, however. She could sense it was an important word—it was what made the quote a good one, in fact—but she had no idea how to spell it. The only alternative offered by spell-check was entellus, which was surely wrong—and the dictionary didn’t seem to be any help, either. So she just left it. This is another example of the Blind Spot Problem (BSP), the dilemma of not knowing enough to know what you don’t know.

Even though I feel for her, and I recognize that the Blind Spot Problem is profound, I still wrote “NO NO NO” in the margin. What could she have done to avoid this fate?

1. Have read more. If she had, she would have come across and learned the word pendulum.

2. Pick up the paper dictionary and read the whole pen- section. There aren’t that damn many words in there.

3. Alternatively, seek out friends and keep asking, “What’s a word for something that swings, and starts with pen?” until you find someone who knows.

Back to the far more common spelling problems. Spell-check, in many ways a wonderful innovation, has caused spelling muscles—never especially robust to begin with—to atrophy to the point that they now have the firmness of mint jelly. Even worse, it’s inspired a false sense of confidence, so that students would never even think of checking the spelling of a word in the dictionary.

One major consequence is a sharp increase in the number of bungled homophones—homophones being a pair of words that sound the same but mean different things. A lot of times the mistakes create unintentional humor, and make me want to concoct snarky, New Yorker—style headings, as in:

He just wanted to lend dudes money

A self described loaner, he wasn’t given to hanging out and the male bonding.

If there is a mote around your house, case it out

These zoning codes might restrict a person from building a mote around her house.

But a little of this comedy goes a long way, and in any case doesn’t win your writing a great deal of respect. Here are some of the most commonly confused words; study them:

b. The Blind Spot, Yet Again

In a particularly sloppy sort of spell-check error, the writer knows very well that he or she has typed the wrong word—or would know if he or she took even a couple of seconds to look over the sentence. The words have completely different meanings and don’t sound exactly or sometimes even vaguely alike: thought instead of though, for example, on instead of one, or weird instead if wired. But the writer has come to rely on the squiggly red line, and the squiggly red line is no help. Some of these mistakes have become so common that I think the writers don’t actually realize they’re wrong. For example:

· Advise (verb) instead of advice (noun).

· Breathe (verb) instead of breath (noun).

· Loose (adjective) instead of lose (verb).

· Mixing up quiet and quite and than and then.

· Where instead of were.

And sometimes these substitutions can have a certain poetic rightness to them. The student who wrote, “The eminent [instead of imminent] arrival of spring marks a time for flip-flops, volleyball, and compost,” and the one who said, “People will say we are America and we can not let our hollowed [instead of hallowed] education system be mocked,” after the Virginia Tech shootings, made felicitous plays on words that may even have been intentional (probably not). Yet another student wrote, “In 1996, former President Bill Clinton singed the Defense of Marriage Act.” No comment.

Most of the time, however, the only redeeming social value these errors have is that they’re funny. You may be laughing to keep from howling with despair, but at least you’re laughing. I once got an assignment with the line “You can get a descent car for $2000,” which seems about right for a vehicle that can only go downhill. This nicely complemented another essay with the sentence “The narrative voice was undeniably a black man in his late thirties or early forties, educated, and possibly of middle-class decent.”

And these guys can get the New Yorker—heading—treatment as well.

I knew the criminals were getting younger, but this is ridiculous

…the 199-unit low-income housing district is a teething hotbed for drug deals and violent crime…

Clint always seemed pretty normal to me

At 74 years odd, a weathered, contemplative Eastwood portrays this inner-struggle perfectly, naturally.

I went to a fight and a city council meeting broke out

The opening of the meeting was similar to past meetings with mediation and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Try it yourself, it’s fun!

[Put your heading here]

Her gentile nature shines through her songs, which focus on love, growing up, and moving on.

Truth to tell, I don’t always know if the people who make these mistakes are aware that they’re mistakes. I do know that relying on spell-check and your instincts creates a huge blind spot as far as spelling is concerned.

c. Eggcorns

In 2003, linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term eggcorn to refer to common homophone or near-homophone mistakes in which the mistake makes a kind of sense. Eggcorn itself has a certain logic, for example, because acorns are roughly the shape of eggs. In writing and usage circles, the term caught on, and you can go to the Eggcorn Database (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/), where, as of this writing, 631 examples are collected and defined.

Spell-check has ushered in a golden age of eggcorns, and people can be quite creative and individualistic with them. In the Introduction, I mentioned the article I once got about a board-of-education meeting that mentioned the Super Attendant of Schools and the one on drug problems that referred to a heroine attic. Others have made reference to the environmental group the National Autobahn Society, to Linda B. Johnson, to an ex—Green Barrette, and to the punk rocker Sid Viscous. I always thought he was an oily guy.

Sometimes you have to think before you realize what was meant, as in references to a newspaper’s ethics policy being determined by its On-Buzz Man (the real word is ombudsman) and to the writer’s fondness for going out on the town wearing a sequence-covered dress. Only after searching for context clues and employing the process of elimination did I realize that that a supped up hers was supposed to be souped-up hearse.

I once got an assignment that talked about a student athlete who had to miss several games because of phenomena. I stared at that one for a few minutes before realizing it was supposed to be, that’s right, pneumonia. The error illustrates another spell-check problem. What probably happened is that the student took a wild stab at the spelling of the disease and then perused spell-check’s suggestions. Maybe the stab was so wild that the correct spelling wasn’t on the list; maybe it was and the student didn’t recognize it. Who knows. The end result, in any case, was phenomena.

One hears a lot of these in conversation, most famously for all intensive intents and purposes and Old Timer’s Alzheimer’s disease. Some of the others I’ve come upon and treasured include It’s a doggy-dog dog-eat-dog world and Any notes, quotes, or antidotes anecdotes?

Some eggcorns come up so often that they now outnumber correct usages, at least in the work handed in to me. I actually expect to read that something peaks or peeks (rather than piques) the interest; that a person poured (rather than pored) over a book; or that a storm wrecked or reeked (as opposed to wreaked) havoc. Other popular ones are hone in on (as opposed to home in on); dribble (drivel); a mute (as opposed to moot) point; and take the reigns (reins).

Listing the eggcorns and all the other spelling mistakes is well and good, but the trouble is, if you’re about to commit one, by definition, you don’t know you’re doing so. That’s the blind spot again. The answer, again, is to cultivate an attitude of deep skepticism about your own word use. Then, if you have any smidgen of doubt about a word, DO NOT RELY ON SPELL-CHECK. Use a dictionary, preferably a paper one, and look up not only the spelling but the definition.

d. Skunked Words

I’m taking a wild guess that when some readers came to the second-to-last paragraph (the one that starts “Some eggcorns…”), their reaction to at least one or two of the examples was “But, that’s right!”

To understand why they’re not, it’s helpful to think about “skunked terms,” a phrase coined by Bryan Garner, in his excellent book Garner’s Modern American Usage. (No comma after book because Garner is the author of several outstanding tomes.) Garner explained: “When a word undergoes a marked change from one use to another—a phase that might take ten years or a hundred—it’s likely to be the subject of dispute.” Even as the new meaning gains popularity, traditionalists—or, as they’re sometimes called, “prescriptivists”—dig in their heels and roundly condemn it as ignorant, illiterate, unacceptable, etc.

Garner observes—and I agree—“To the writer or speaker to whom credibility is important, it’s a good idea to avoid distracting any readers,” and thus he counsels avoiding these words and phrases. I agree with that, too.

The trouble is, like the language itself, the corpus of skunked words is always changing. To take just a few examples, I can remember when prescriptivists and sticklers used to grumble about the use of contact as a verb, as in When are you going to contact the senator? Hard to believe, but it’s true. Obviously, they lost that battle a long time ago. Even longer ago, the expressions champing at the bit, stamping grounds, tit-bit, and pom-pon roamed the earth. Eventually (more specifically, by the end of the nineteenth century), they turned into chomping, stomping, tidbit, and pom-pom. If you used the older forms today, you would get some seriously strange looks.

Again, I’ll note that writing and speaking have different standards. In conversation, getting your meaning across is really the important thing, while writing for publication or in a business, journalistic, or academic setting demands a higher standard of rules and propriety. Thus new words and new meanings gain acceptance in conversation years or even decades before they do in writing.

Going back to the list of common eggcorns, let’s take a look at duct tape, a roll or two of which you can probably find less than fifty feet from where you’re sitting. It’s called duct tape because its original use was to tape up ducts, but duct is hard to say, so people started calling it “duck tape,” and then people started writing “duck tape.” You can even buy a brand of duct tape called Duck Tape. There’s a fun Web site called Google Fight (http://googlefight.com) that allows you to type in a pair of words or phrases and see how many times each of them has been used on the Internet. I just staged a fight between duck tape and duct tape. Duct tape won, but by a relatively slim margin of 1.83 million to 1.07 million. Before too long, duck tape will prevail, and duct tape will seem as antique and dusty as an e-mail message. But that day is not here yet, and using duck tape will still make you seem a bad writer, to at least some of your readers.

A list of current skunkers is below. Once again, some may seem perfectly fine, but all have traditional meanings different and in some cases opposite from the ones in popular use. (If you don’t believe me, look them up.) Going beyond the list, the best general way to avoid these guys is to read good writers in books and respectable publications, and follow their lead. As for an individual word, if you have any doubt as to its meaning, look it up in the dictionary. Either the skunked meaning won’t be there, or it will be the fourth or fifth definition, followed by a note that says something like nonstandard or objected to by some. And Google Fight is useful as well. If a onetime skunked term wins by a standard of at least two-thirds, I hereby declare it sanitized and ready to use.

The word in the left-hand column is the current skunked term; acceptable alternative(s) follow. When the skunked term has a different meaning, it’s given in parentheses.

One short skunked word and its relatives demand a fuller explanation. The word is they when used as an “epicene pronoun” (EP), that is, in place of a singular antecedent. For example:

1. [Any student who wants to attend the game should bring their ID card to the ticket window.]

2. [Arcade Fire and about 20,000 of their fans turned the PNC Center into a raucous party Thursday night.]

3. [The Court Street Pub is changing to their summer menu this week.]

The EP has a lot of arguments in its favor. In example 1, replacing their with his would sound sexist; her sounds like you’re trying too hard not to be sexist; and his or her could come off as stilted. Meanwhile, using it for a rock band just sounds weird. Consequently, the EP—and all three of the above examples—are perfectly fine in conversation. I predict that they’ll be acceptable in formal writing in ten years, fifteen at the maximum. However, they’re not acceptable now, so you have to make adjustments.

1. Any student who wants to attend the game should bring his or her ID card to the ticket window.

A write-around is even better:

If you want to attend the game, you have to bring your ID card to the ticket window.

2. Arcade Fire and about 20,000 fans turned the PNC Center into a raucous party Thursday night.

3. The Court Street Pub is changing to its summer menu this week.

(For Skunked Grammar, see II.C.2.d.)