The miscellany - The stuff in the back

Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022


The miscellany
The stuff in the back

Here’s everything I can think of that I think is important—or at least interesting, or at least simply odd—that I couldn’t find a place for elsewhere.

1.

Strictly differentiating between “each other,” in reference to something occurring between two people,

Johnny and I like each other.

and “one another,” for three or more,

“Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.”

is yet another of those shakily justifiable rules invented by some obscure grammarian of centuries past that, nonetheless, I like to observe, particularly as many writers flip back and forth between the two apparently at random, and randomness in writing, unlike raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, is not one of my favorite things. You cannot properly be criticized if you don’t follow the rule (or, let’s say, “rule”), but neither can you be criticized if you do.

2.

You’ll hear a lot of people say things like this: “If I would have known she was sick, I would have stayed away.” “If she would have just told me, I would have invited her along.” Please, please don’t be one of those people. The verb mood used here should be the subjunctive, in the past tense: “If I had known she was sick” and “If she had just told me.” Getting this wrong is, in my opinion, one of the most telling reflections of your regard—or lack thereof—for language.

3.

If you only see one movie this year…

Normal human beings frontload the word “only” at the beginning of a sentence. Copy editors will tend to pick up that “only” and drop it next to the thing that’s being “only”d:

If you see only one movie this year…

Or, for instance:

NORMAL HUMAN BEING: You can only watch a movie ironically so many times before you’re watching it earnestly.

COPY EDITOR: You can watch a movie ironically only so many times before you’re watching it earnestly.

Does the latter perhaps sound a bit stilted? Maybe, but to be perfectly honest, there’s a certain tautness in slightly stilted prose that I find almost viscerally thrilling.

I also think that readers don’t much notice when prose is wound up a bit too tight but may well, and not favorably, notice overloose prose.

Moreover, a loosely placed “only” can distort the meaning of a sentence entirely.

That said, in fiction, especially fiction with an informal narrative voice and, even more so, dialogue in fiction, I’m most likely to leave the “only” where the author set it.*1

4.

Fifty-eight years and counting after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy theories it gave birth to, I continue to caution writers against describing any other grassy knoll besides the mysterious grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, as a “grassy knoll.” It remains, I think, a distractingly potent term.

5.

Here’s a fun weird thing: The word “namesake” works in both directions. That is, if you were named after your grandfather, you are his namesake. He is also yours. Who knew.

6.

Clichés should be avoided like the plague.

7.

There’s a world of difference between going into the water (an action generally accompanied by flailing and shrieking and other merriment) and going in the water (an action generally accompanied by staring abstractedly into the distance, and, no, you’re not fooling anyone), and it’s a difference to be honored.

Into = movement.

In = presence.

The same applies to, say, “jumping into a lake” (transferring from pier to water) and “jumping in a lake” (in the water already and propelling oneself vertically upward), but the vernacular being what it is, no one will object to the traditional dismissal “Aww, go jump in a lake.”

8.

There’s also a world of difference between turning in to a driveway, which is a natural thing to do with one’s car, and turning into a driveway, which is a Merlyn trick.

9.

Of two brothers, one fifteen and one seventeen, the fifteen-year-old is the younger, not the youngest, and the seventeen-year-old is the older (or elder, if you like), not the oldest (or eldest).

It takes three to make an “-est.”

Except, English being English, in the phrase “best foot forward.”

10.

If you love something passionately and vigorously, you love it no end. To love something “to no end,” as one often sees it rendered, would be to love it pointlessly. If that’s what you mean, then OK.

11.

The habit of inauthentically attributing wisecracks, purported profundities, inspirational doggerel, and other bits of refrigerator-door wisdom to famous people is scarcely new—members of the press, particularly newspaper columnists, have been doing it for decades—but the internet has grossly exacerbated the problem, with numerous quote-aggregation sites irresponsibly devoted to prettily packaging the fakery, thus encouraging the unwary (or uncaring) to snarf it up, then hork it up, ad nauseam.

To cite one majestically apposite instance: In July 2017, the writer Colin Dickey stumbled upon a 2013 tweet from the elder daughter of the person who would, eventually, assume the presidency of the United States:

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

As Dickey then himself tweeted, “That Einstein never said any such thing only makes this tweet that much more perfect.”

And indeed and in fact, and no matter the hundreds of Google hits suggesting otherwise, the quip never emerged from the mouth or pen of Albert Einstein. It’s simply a bit of unattributable pseudo-cleverness assigned, presumably to lend it weightiness and importance, to someone who, particularly in this case, would never have said it.

Einstein is only one of the pin-the-wisdom-on-the-maven targets. Five’ll get you ten that a quote you find attributed, particularly without reference to a published source, to Abraham Lincoln is inauthentic; the same goes for Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde (and with the thousands of witticisms Wilde uttered, why would anyone put words into his mouth?), Winston Churchill, and Dorothy Parker (like Wilde, an industrial-strength generator of cleverness).*2

There are any number of ways to verify or debunk quotes:

· Wikiquote, with individual entries for just about everyone who ever picked up a pen, not only lists a writer’s greatest hits but helpfully links you to the published sources of said hits and, perhaps even more helpfully, includes reliable sections on disputed and misattributed quotes.

· If you want to explore on your own, make use of the highly searchable books.google.com. If you can’t, with a modicum of effort, find a published source for a quote, the odds are at least reasonable that it’s a sham.

· I also commend to you the work of the doggedly thorough Garson O’Toole, who runs the Quote Investigator website (quoteinvestigator.com) and tweets as @QuoteResearch, and who specializes in not only debunking fake or misattributed quotes but time-traveling through the archives to discern, if he can, how and when the fakeries and misattributions first occurred.

Now, what has any of this to do with writing?

Lazy writers often litter their manuscripts with allegedly uplifting epigraphs they’ve plucked from either the internet or the works of their equally lazy predecessors, and thus the manure gets spread.

I beg you not to perpetrate and perpetuate these fortune-cookie hoaxes, which are often empty words and are as demeaning to the spirit as in their inauthenticity they are insulting to the history of the written word.

May I make a suggestion?

Build yourself, on either a virtual or a paper tablet, what’s known as a commonplace book—someplace you can copy down bits of writing you find clever and/or meaningful—and keep it handy for future use, even if that future use is simply your own edification. (Don’t forget to make note of where you found the stuff.) Then, if you ever find yourself in a position to share with the world your own wisdom and want to periodically sprinkle it with others’ smarts, you’ll at least have something fresh and heartfelt to offer.

12.

Q. What do you have to say about the increasing use of “woman” as an adjective, rather than “female,” as in “woman candidate” instead of “female candidate”? It’s not as if anyone ever says “man candidate.”

A. People don’t often say “male candidate,” either; they just say “candidate.” I suppose that brevity goes back to the peculiar notion that a default human being is a male.*3 Or a man. I, like you, do increasingly see “woman” used as an adjective; I wonder if it’s because to some people the word “female” looks particularly biological, as if a “female cashier,” say, totes up your purchases with her uterus. That said, the use of “woman” as an adjective isn’t particularly new. You want to be especially careful, though, not to turn the tables and refer to a woman as “a female.” “Female” as a noun is rarely meant as a compliment, and it’s unlikely to be taken as one.

And, I must emphasize: Whether you choose to characterize people by gender is not my business. How you do it is.

13.

A button-down shirt is a shirt whose collar points fasten to buttons on the upper-chestal zone of the shirt. It is not any old shirt that buttons from neck to waist. Call that a dress shirt, if it happens to be one. Or a button-up shirt, which is both accurate and, in the context, amusing.

14.

You don’t tow the line. You toe it.

15.

The approving exclamation is not “Here, here!” but “Hear, hear!”

16.

Something that is well established down to the marrow is not “deep-seeded,” which may sound as if it makes sense but, I’m assured by people who know how plants work, doesn’t. It is, rather, “deep-seated.”

17.

In an emergency you call 911.

The similarly numbered day of catastrophe was 9/11. (In the rest of the world it’s 11/9, but we Americans are alarmingly stubborn in our date styling.)

18.

A reversal is a total 180.*4 If you do a total 360, you’re facing the same direction as when you began.

19.

I note that, increasingly often, some people refer to other people referring to themselves as “we” as “speaking in the second person.” Nope. Speaking of oneself as “we”—which unless you’re Queen Victoria you oughtn’t—is speaking in the first person plural. The second person is “you,” as in, as a writer once wrote, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of morning.”

20.

The line from Hamlet is not “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”; it’s “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Also, if you haven’t been dead for four hundred years and are planning on using the word “methinks” in the spirit of roguish cleverness, please don’t.

21.

They’re not Brussel sprouts. They’re Brussels sprouts.

OK, I’m done.

SKIP NOTES

*1  This also applies to the temporal use of “just” and the difference between writing, say, “I almost just tripped on the stairs,” which sounds perfectly natural, and “I just almost tripped on the stairs,” which makes a bit more sense. If I’ve inspired you to give it an extra thought every time you’re about to write or say the words “only” and “just,” I feel I’ve done my job.

*2  Also, in no particular order, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Mahatma Gandhi, and (impudently and absurdly, given how easily traceable every word he ever wrote is) William Shakespeare.

*3  At the dawn of my career I frequently encountered in manuscripts the unspoken notion that a default human being was white. That is, only nonwhite characters would ever have their race specifically called out. You’ll still often run into the idea that the unmodified use of “man”—as in articles about what men do or don’t like about women—inarguably means “heterosexual man.” It doesn’t.

*4  Is the term “full 180” redundant? Isn’t it enough to say “I did a 180”? Sure, and sure. And yet.