Category: words

Posts about endangered words.

Pleonasm, or How to Fake It

PLEONASM (/ˈpliːənæzəm/, from Greek πλεονασμός pleonasmos from πλέον pleon “more, too much”) is the use of more words or parts of words than is necessary for clear expression: examples are black darkness, or burning fire, or A malignant cancer is a pleonasm for a neoplasm. Such redundancy is, by traditional rhetorical criteria, a manifestation of tautology. – Wikipedia entry for pleonasm

I learned a new word today. If you know me, that’s no small thing. The word is pleonasm, proffered by Facebook friend Crys. She writes:

Why has it become so trendy for people to use double negatives? Ooh, it grinds my gears when people say/write things like “reply back”!!!!!
— feeling annoyed. 

Then continues: Also on my naughty list are pleonasms…including, but not limited to: reduce down, raise up, safe haven, & burning fire.#WORDNERD

Crys, I know you read this blog regularly (and if you don’t, I’m pretending you do), as I see you name-checking some previous entries. In addition to your examples, we’ve called out frozen tundra, salsa sauce, please R.S.V.P., and La Brea Tar Pits. But I never knew these tautologies had a designation. So a big Lexicide thank you!

Now, let’s return to faking erudition by using redundant phrases – and annoying Crys!

See also: Redundant, Repetitious and Redundant

Of crashes and Oxford Dictionary entries

I returned from vacation (not vacay) to find my hard drive dead. As in bereft of life, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. As a result, I lost August’s Lexicide article, a smashing collection of portmanteau words in the business world, with suggestions from you readers.

Never fear. Today on the Oxford Dictionary blog are two appropriately relevant articles. “Business Jargon in the Mainstream” leads with a word I had not included in my piece: solopreneur. Since most entrepreneurs are one-person shows, I fail to see why this word is necessary. But that’s okay! I fail to see why most portmanteau creations are necessary. A threepeat is still just a repeated action and all marketing should be smart, whether it’s smarketing or not!

Also featured on Oxford’s blog is an update on new words. Hangry is cute and conveys a unique sensibility, but manspreading reminds me too much of meggings, murse, and mandals, words I have lamented before. Of course, manspreading defines an action not defined elsewhere and, unlike the other words, doesn’t try to differentiate something that is genderless as masculine.

So stay tuned. I will reconstruct my article and return in force.

– Otto E. Mezzo

Spotted on Tumblr: Help a Socialist Out

fistred

http://helpasocialistout.tumblr.com/

So how do you help a socialist out? [Insert jokes about nationalizing banks here.] For the record, a quick Google search turns up no other hits of socialist meaning one who uses social media. Except for two notable instances:

Socialist, a jQuery plugin that aggregates social media feeds

Socialist, a social media consulting firm based in… Moscow.

There’s a word for that, and it isn’t lexicide.

See also: Socialism, Socialize

Grammar Girl: Why Do People Say ‘Ain’t’?

GrammarGirlI’m catching up on my Grammar Girl, and she has an insightful history of ain’t. Lexicide.com is all about words that die because they lose their unique definitions for incorrect, redundant ones. Ain’t is a word that fell out of favor due to racism, classism, and general snootiness.  Mr. Whitman and Ms. Fogarty lament:

The stigmatization of ain’t is a pity, because without ain’t, there’s a gap in our system of contractions. When you negate the present tense of be and your subject is a pronoun, you usually have a choice between contracting the pronoun and the verb or the verb and the negative word. For example, you can write we’re not or we aren’t, they’re not or they aren’t, and you’re not or you aren’t. The lone exception is I, where your only choice in standard English is I’m not.

Just like split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition, there ain’t no good reason for shooing ain’t off to the side.

Rhetoric

RHETORIC: “The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.” – Oxford English Dictionary

Certainly Justice Kennedy’s sense of marital “dignity” is over the top. But it’s not just sentimental rhetoric: It’s a kind of legal “term of heart” that can keep you up at night. – New York Times, “The Supreme Court’s Lonely Hearts Club”

“Lawmakers take rhetoric to Twitter as PA House passes budget bill” – headline at abc27.com

“Trump’s Rhetoric Threatens Full GOP Field” – headline at nbcnews.com

I have some problems with the use of rhetoric in the three recent news examples above. In the first one, I question how sentimental true rhetoric should be. Certainly the classic orators derided emotional appeal as a cheap trick, subject to all kinds of logical fallacies. The classical model of Western education teaches the trivium: grammar (the foundation for reasoning), logic (the mechanics of reasoning), and rhetoric (the application of reasoning). The purpose of rhetoric was to enable constructive debate. Alas, today the notion of constructive debate is less popular even than a classical education. So perhaps it’s a sign of the times that most people today use rhetoric to mean worthless verbiage – something to be suspicious of. It also doesn’t surprise me that Michael Cobb, writing for the Times, can type out “sentimental rhetoric” without incurring the wrath of his editor.

Cobb’s example is positively Cicerone when compared to the next example. How much artful persuasion can one cram into 140 characters, anyhow? According to the story, this rhetoric amounts to the hashtags #GimmicksOverGoverning and #PAGOPfail. #Gag.

Of course, we reach our nadir with the final example. The idea that Donald Trump would effectively persuade anyone or threaten his competition is laughable. Offended at my anti-Trump political stand? No worries. I have some high-minded rhetoric for you: #TrumpSucksBooyah!

Seneca would be proud.

– Otto E. Mezzo

References: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/opinion/the-supreme-courts-lonely-hearts-club.html?_r=0
http://abc27.com/2015/06/28/lawmakers-take-rhetoric-to-twitter-as-pa-house-passes-budget-bill/
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/lid-trumps-rhetoric-threatens-full-gop-field-n384011

Hack

HACK: “1. informal An act of computer hacking; 2. a piece of computer code providing a quick or inelegant solution to a particular problem” —Oxford American Dictionary

25 Life Hacks to Make Life More Livable!

88 Useful Hacks to Get Better Gas Mileage!

1500 Best Disneyworld Hacks!

Please stop. And by “please” I mean “unless you want to see what comes out of this rifled barrel.” Seriously, where did this use of hack for tip come from? These aren’t hacks. They are helpful hints (Notice Heloise has not changed her column to Hacks from Heloise). Everyone knows darn tootin’ well that true hacks require a computer, possibly a modem, and maybe also a voice synthesizer. You can hack NORAD. You cannot hack your dryer.

So how did clickbait writers come up with hack as a trendy synonym for suggestion? As with so many other terms, it’s probably because we crave secret knowledge or membership in some exclusive club – something hackers have enjoyed (or at least fancied themselves enjoying) since the term came into being. Breaking into mail servers requires skill and knowledge, while placing a dryer sheet on your air conditioner requires – well, none. But if you think of it as a hack, you can pretend you’re Kevin Mitnick instead of a marketing assistant wasting your B.A. in creative writing on web copy for cloud solutions.

In other words, a hack.

— Otto E. Mezzo

P.S. By the way, a hack requires a computer or computer analog, otherwise it isn’t a hack. So says Adam Penenberg.

P.P.S. Not every corporate copywriter is a hack. See: Thomas Pynchon, Dana Gioia, Otto E. Mezzo. Don’t be one.

References:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-short-history-of-hack
http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/07/26/the-real-meaning-of-hack/

From the WSJ: How ‘Secular’ Became a Word for Clerics and Economists

Companies can be agnostic, and Ben Zimmer has penned a recent article on how economies are secular. No, economists did not borrow the term from the Church or Voltaire. As Zimmer writes:

In economics, “secular” is not opposed to “spiritual” or “sacred,” as it is in theological circles. Rather, it describes trends that are not cyclical but persist indefinitely.

Zimmer goes on to explain that secular derives from the Latin saeculum, a word denoting the outside span of a human life, roughly 100 years. To the Romans, secular events did not occur often, and marked the passing of generations. To Christians, saeculum signified things temporal — as opposed to God, who represents aeternum. (Note Paul’s description of the time between Christ’s Resurrection and Second Coming as “this present evil age” — praesenti saeculo nequam.)

In other words, secular derived two definitions from the same root meaning. Eventually, the Christian church began to use secular to describe activities outside church life, which remained the dominant definition for centuries. In the 1800s, scientists (including the dismal sort), began using secular for lengthy trends  — for example, secular stagnation.

Zimmer’s article led me to ask Lexiciders for other words that sport dual meanings derived from the same root. Debbie G. suggested gross, a versatile word meaning “disgusting,” “unrefined”, “calculated before taxes or costs”, and “twelve dozen”, among others. They all originate from the Latin grossus (“large”), a meaning that lives on in gross anatomy and gross motor skills. David M. proffered current, from Latin currere (“run”), which gives us a flow of water or electrons (noun) and also that which is newest or most contemporary, such as current events (adjective). David also notes that the same Latin word gives us currency, which clues us in to how quickly money (and economies) can change.

And that brings us full circle back to secular stagnation, which complains economies sometimes don’t change quickly enough. You can’t please everyone.

— Otto E. Mezzo

Reference: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-secular-became-a-word-for-clerics-and-economists-1423249134

Socialize

SOCIALIZE
(intransitive verb) “to participate actively in a social group”
(transitive verb) “1:  to make social; especially :  to fit or train for a social environment; 2a :  to constitute on a socialistic basis <socialize industry>; b :  to adapt to social needs or uses; 3:  to organize group participation in <socialize a recitation>”
– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Socialize, as you can see above, bears several definitions. The most widespread is the first one listed: “to participate actively in a social group” — to parlay, mingle, visit, hang with the posse. But there is a very strange use in the corporate world that essentially equates socialize with disseminate [information]: “Beth, would you please socialize the meeting notes?” In some cases, the context of discussion is present: “Let’s socialize the proposal requirements and circle back.”

Some will argue (don’t they always?) that this meaning comports with the third transitive verb definition above. I think this use of socialize is jarring because, first, it is still rare and therefore does not bear the spark of familiarity, and second, there are two other well-known definitions for socialize that crash against the corporate definition: the abovementioned “to participate actively in a social group” and the more sinister “to constitute on a socialistic basis,” meaning to appropriate a private enterprise and place it under government control. You still want to socialize that profitable startup concept?

Socialize as a synonym for “disseminate,” “discuss,” or “make widely known” is not new, but it’s still awkward and causes confusion. Avoid this usage at all costs, even if your pipeline is social media. And read this column on the word by the New York Times‘ Ben Zimmer. Then feel free to socialize among yourselves.

– Otto E. Mezzo

See also: Socialism

References: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04FOB-onlanguage-t.html?ref=on_language&_r=0

IANAL. That’s why I don’t write like one.

IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so I do not write or speak in legalese. Why would I want to? The dense, antiquated language of legal documents makes for great bedtime reading – if you’re an insomniac. I understand its purpose (married to a lawyer, thank you), but like most jargon, it has no place outside a legal brief.

AND YET business writers love borrowing jargon. They steal from scientists and pilfer from engineers, so what’s to stop a marketing director or analyst from using legalese? For example: including but not limited to. As we have covered before, the word including already implies the following list is not all-inclusive.* Lawyers add “but not limited to” to make doubly clear the parties of the first and second parts understand that, but you don’t have to.

Making points doubly clear is actually the point of legal language. English courts set up by the Normans used French terminology (including but not limited to estoppel, mortgage, plaintiff and defendant, force majeure, and attorney, which is why we pluralize “attorneys general” a la française), but also used the English (Germanic) terms alongside, creating doublets we use to this day:

  • Aid and abet
  • Free and clear
  • Null and void
  • Sole and exclusive
  • Will and testament
  • And, of course, law and order

As you can see, usually the Anglo-Saxon term comes first, often because it’s shorter. (One notable exception: to have and to hold, a phrase that does not mean “to possess and cuddle,” but rather “have care of”. Yes, I think this is sweet, too.) The point being twelfth-century English barristers had a reason for redundancy: making themselves clear to both English and French speakers. Today’s lawyers cite tradition as their reason. What’s yours?

You have no excuse. Including but not limited to belongs in contracts and nowhere else. The same goes for whereby (use where) and hereby (cut altogether). Also, joint and several does not simply mean “several.” It means “together and separately” (sever forming the root of several). And no, several does not connote a specific quantity, so it is fine to boast of your company’s several, multiple or plentiful achievements rather than insist on only using the vague numerous.

So please stop using legal terminology in company communications. I understand you like verbiage. But no company ever got sued for glowing, yet truthful, PR. And YANAL. Court adjourned.

– Otto E. Mezzo

*And for the sake of the great Learned Hand, please do not end your not-all-inclusive list with etc. We get it already.

Reference: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/historical-roots-redundant-synonyms/