Recently in language

I've never been an outdoorsy kind of guy, but something about these first few lines from William Wordsworth's poem resonates with me.

The poem was written sometime around 1806, so Wordsworth had plenty to complain about, what with the Industrial Revolution and all. But, he spent most of his life in the Lake District of England, which was still positively bucolic when I visited the place nearly 200 years later.

When I read this poem last night, I had a "back in my day" reaction, but in reverse. Seriously, how much "getting and spending" could the guy have seen back then in lovely Grasmere? I'd like to drop Wordsworth into the middle of New York City now and see what he thinks. And yet, the poem makes me wonder about the fever pitch of today's commerce and marketing and advertising and technology and communication. In another 200 years, will the breakneck pace of our lives look more like a gentle stroll through a quaint village?

Sara got a pair of shoes in the mail from Zappos today. On the shoebox, in big, bold lettering, were the words "100% HYBRID."

Is it just me, or is that an oxymoron? Isn't it like saying that something is completely partial? (And I don't mean partial in the sense of biased.) Anyway, it struck me as kind of funny.

Billy Collins is one of my favorite contemporary poets. His writing is always crystal-clear, yet many-layered. A couple years ago I featured one of his poems, Man Listening to Disc, in my "Take a Stanza" series. A couple days ago I discovered (via 37signals) a little gem of a site that accompanies 11 Billy Collins poems with gorgeous animation.

Today: animation by Little Fluffy Clouds/Curious

The site is billy collins action poetry. Even if you're not a big poetry fan, you ought to check it out.

At some point in my life I had this one memorized; it felt good having it rattle around in my head. It's one of my favorites from Seamus Heaney—more tender than most of his poems, but still infused with his working-class vigor.

Read more about Seamus Heaney at the Poetry Archive.

Last year my mother gave me a desk calendar that had an obsolete English word for each day. It was geeky-cool to be greeted with an example of "Forgotten English" each day at work.

Some of the words are just too fun not to be shared. Others are so useful that I think they should be re-adopted into the English language.

Here are my favorite forgotten words of 2006:

1. purfled: short-winded, especially in consequence of being too lusty (1808)
2. squizzle: to let squizzle, to fire a gun (1956)
3. chaddy: full of chads. The bread is chaddy [if] it has been made of meal not properly sifted to get out the husks, fragments of straw, or gritty particles of the mill-stone. (1830)
4. tooth-saw: a fine frame-saw for sawing off portions of the teeth; used by dentists. (1874-77)
5. lunting: walking and smoking a pipe (1824)
6. curglaff: the shock felt in bathing when one first plugnes into the cold water (1808)
7. scurryfunge: a hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door (1882)
8. flippercanorious: elegant (1934)
9. irrisory: addicted to laughing or sneezing (1897)
10. jirging: the noise too dry shoes make when walked with (1824)

My favorite is scurryfunge. What's yours?

Note: All of the calendar pages © Jeffrey Kacirk. You can buy his book, Forgotten English, at amazon.com.

Here's a fun new game that I just made up this morning. Go to a book store and find the New Releases section. It should be staring you in the face as soon as you walk through the door. Now, start reading the dust-jacket blurbs and inside-flap promotional fluff of as many books as you can as fast as you can and don't stop until you find one that does not contain at least one of the following words:

• luminous
• haunting
• compelling
• spell-binding
• provocative
• astonishing

It's a simple game, but not an easy one to win. It's almost impossible these days to find a book that isn't being touted as a stunning literary achievement or a modern masterpiece or an instant classic. I've read about so much luminous prose it's a wonder I haven't been blinded by the light.

Play the Book Store Game with a friend or race against the clock. Estimated time to complete: three hours. Mileage will vary. Some assembly required.

Every once in a while a word will gain traction in the press, and reporters, pundits, and other authoritative voices will say it over and over again until it becomes embedded in the public's consciousness. Occasionally the word that bursts to the forefront of our attention is one that I've used, or at least heard others use, in casual conversation for years, the only difference being that now the word is pronounced completely differently. As someone who cares about language and tries to use it properly, both in writing and in speech, I've grown increasingly concerned by the realization that I could be blithely mispronouncing hundreds of words and won't be aware of my misdeeds until the media expose me once again by the new big news.

It all started in the early nineties during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the coinciding Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal. For the first 24 years of my life I had thought that the word was pronounced huh-RASS-munt, only to discover that everyone in the media had decided, seemingly on a whim, to start calling it HAIR-us-ment.

The most recent example of the media turning the pronunciation tables on me came with the fighting between Israel and Lebanon. I had the mistaken impression that the Islamic group was pronounced HEZ-bull-uh, but I had to drive that one out of my mind and start referring to the freedom fighters terrorist organization radical Islamic group as hez-BOWL-uh.

Another Middle Eastern pronunciation shift was the country Qatar — previously kuh-TAR, but now KOT-er, as in "Welcome Back..." (note: you probably need to be at least 35 years old to understand that joke). And don't even get me started on Al Qaeda, which changes pronunciation about as often as my daughter Lucy changes her clothes (about four or five times a day).

I'm not sure when it happened, but the African country NI-jur turned into nee-ZHAIR and anyone wishing to pay tribute no longer gives an AH-muj but an oh-MOZH. I just can't keep up.

It's time once again for a little poetry. Wait! Don't run and hide! This is a good poem, and it uses simple language, and it isn't hard to "figure out." Larkin can be so curmudgeonly at times that he makes Oscar the Grouch look like Sweet Mary Sunshine, but this poem seems to hold something tender beneath its contrary exterior.

One of the things I love about Larkin is his blend of colloquial language with formal structure. Check out the rhyme scheme on this baby! If you didn't look carefully, you might have missed it when you first read the poem. It's subtle like that.

It would be terribly irresponsible of me not to post a little poetry before the month ends. After all, April is National Poetry Month. The presumptive poem of the month is T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, because it starts with these timely lines: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain." But I'd like to take us back in the calendar a month or two, back to the "midwinter spring" of Eliot's "Little Gidding," the last of his Four Quartets.

Little Gidding is actually a small town in England that was once the home a religious community. The speaker, visiting the town, senses the spiritual dimension of the place and pauses to reflect on the paradoxical nature of both the physical place and the metaphysical plane.

I admit that this poem can seem opaque at first, but after reading through it a few times, it does start to make some sense. Eliot was no dummy.

Read the full poem.

By now just about everyone reading this blog (yeah, all three or four of you) has heard about the big scandal involving best-selling author James Frey and his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. In a lengthy exposé, The Smoking Gun confirmed what others had suspected: Some events in the book were either creative embellishments or complete fictions—in other words, lies. Since then, Oprah phoned Larry King to defend Frey, after which she invited Frey back on her own show to give him a public spanking. A lot of journalists and bloggers have joined the growing chorus of those condemning Frey for his falsehoods and his publisher for her laziness or incompetence (and Oprah for her support).

To me, the biggest mistake Frey made was carrying on about the hard, cold, hard facts of his life and about how important honesty is and how we all need to cut the crap and face reality. We'll never know if publisher #18 would have accepted A Million Little Pieces as a work of fiction after the first 17 rejected it, but there's no doubt that a lot of the power in the book came from the idea that it was a true story of a real person's struggle through a devastating addiction.

Myth-Making

Still, there's an arrogance on the part of a lot of the Frey bashers regarding how easy it is to reconstruct past events. Forensic psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, even though it is often one of the most important factors in a jury's decision. John Kotre, psychology professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, claims that memory is even more slippery when we try to recall important events of our own lives:

Autobiographical memory is interested in specific events, but only insofar as they contribute to meaning. Ultimately, meaning will arise in a comprehensive story of the self, a story replete with wishes and prophecies, a story that puts the self at center stage. By day, autobiographical memory may be a keeper of archives, but by night it's a maker of myth.

So, how much more accurate would I be if I were to write my own personal narrative? I hope I'd be able to tell the difference between three months in jail and three hours. But then again, my identity isn't based on the archetypal bad boy, as James Frey's is. (If you must know, it's based on the archetypal geek.)

The Road Nobody Wants to See

This whole truth-in-memoir controversy reminds me of the little trick in Robert Frost's most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken." Most people, when they read the poem, fixate on the last two lines: "I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference." After all, isn't that what it's all about? Non-conformity, being self-reliant, accepting the consequences of right over wrong, good over bad, crunchy over smooth? Well, no, probably not.

The speaker is actually projecting into his future ("Somewhere ages and ages hence") and foreseeing how he will recast his life. In other words, the last two lines are about what he will someday want to believe about his life, not what his life was actually about. He doesn't really take the road "less traveled by." For all he could see at the time, the two paths were "really about the same." The great irony here is that Frost's speaker recognizes the painful truth about himself, his memory, and his inevitable attempt to reshape his life into something meaningful; yet Frost's readers typically do not see it at all.

Both Frey and Frost's speaker may be experiencing some sort of cognitive dissonance: Having defined themselves in specific ways—Frey as the unflinching, hard-core bad boy who overcomes adversity by sheer bull-headed willpower; Frost's speaker as the lone traveler who acts on principle, not popularity—they both are faced with the dilemma of either changing their self-perception or adjusting their memories of past actions. Seth Mnookin, in his article for Slate.com, describes Frey's cognitive dissonance this way:

Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey's weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a "victim" led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers.

"The Road Not Taken is clearly metaphorical. Of course, nobody would argue that the poem is really about some guy taking a walk in the woods. But it's also metaphorical in that the speaker's situation, both the decision itself and the recollection of the decision, represents a universal human condition. Maybe it's no surprise then that Ronald Reagan "couldn't recall" anything about the Iran-Contra deals. Or that Bill Clinton said he "did not have sexual relations with that woman." Or that George W. Bush seems to lie about nearly everything he's done. Or that James Frey tried to write a memoir but ended up creating a fictional character "inspired by" a true story instead.

A recent check of the big list of 2005 lists at fimoculous.com revealed a number of new word lists popping up around the web. Here are a few highlights:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

As you may recall, last year's winner was blog. In a telling redirection of attention, the most-looked-up word in 2005 is integrity. Others in the top 10 are contempt, filibuster, insipid, tsunami, pandemic, and levee.

For the complete list, visit Merriam-Webster Online.

Lake Superior State University

This year saw some fun entries into their annual "List of Banished Words." By "banished words," I think they mean words that they themselves or others would like to banish from the English language because of their recent misuse, abuse, or overuse. A few that made it on the list this year were:

• Blue States/Red States
• Flip Flop
• Pockets Of Resistance
• Enemy Combatant
• Wardrobe Malfunction
• Blog [say it ain't so!]
• Journey
• Sale Event

For the complete list, as well as reasons for banishing these words and phrases, visit the Lake Superior State University website.

The Global Language Monitor

This website just posted their Top Politically Correct Words for 2005—a list of words that people or organizations have substituted for harsher, less-sensitive words. My favorites:

• misguided criminals (for terrorists)
• thought shower (for brainstorm)
• deferred success (for failure)

See the whole list with explanatory notes and quotes at The Global Language Monitor.

This little poetry feature of mine is long overdue, so here are two stanzas from a four-stanza poem by Jane Kenyon. That's right—two for the price of one:

For a brief biography of Jane Kenyon, along with about 10 of her poems, visit the Academy of American Poets website. The site also has the full text of Happiness.

It's time once again for the word of the year, this time brought to you by the New Oxford American Dictionary. As you may recall, last year's top word, according to Merriam-Webster, was blog. Now we have Podcast, a technology popularized by blogs. Oh, that rapidly encroaching blogosphere.

The NOA Dictionary's definition of podcast is "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player." But the definition seems a little weak to me, because a podcast has a very particular delivery mechanism which uses RSS to automatically download new audio content at regular intervals as it becomes available. Not that most people care. Anyway, Wikipedia has a much better explanation of the term.

Here are a few of the other top words this year:

• IED: improvised explosive device, such as a car bomb
• rootkit: software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files or system data
• sudoku: a logic-based puzzle consisting of squares that form grids within a grid. Into each smaller grid, the numerals 1 through 9 are entered but not repeated, and they may not be repeated in any row or column of the larger grid
• lifehack: a more efficient or effective way of completing an everyday task

Read the full story in Yahoo! Financial News: 'Podcast' Is the Word of the Year.

A year ago a new section of my website, the English Rules Word of the Day, was born. I started it after chatting with a couple friends at work about words and bemoaning the lack of inspiration in the words generated by the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day. I can't remember if they challenged me to do my own word of the day or if I just said I was going to, but whichever it was, I felt compelled to at least give it a shot. To be honest, I didn't think it would last this long. But as the year progressed, more and more people signed up for the email notification, making it harder and harder to stop the madness. The list is at more than 160 recipients and growing.

I haven't managed to get a word out every single day, but I try not to let more than two days pass between updates. Along with the word and definition, I usually type up something about where I saw the word or what inspired me to choose it for that day. Here are a few of my favorites from the past year. Click the links to read their inspiration:

• obviate: to anticipate and dispose of effectively; render unnecessary
• insouciant: marked by blithe unconcern; nonchalant
• defenestration: an act of throwing someone or something out of a window
• confabulate: 1. (psychology) to fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts 2. to talk casually; chat
• antipodes: 1. any two places or regions that are on diametrically opposite sides of the earth 2. something that is the exact opposite or contrary of another

If you want to sign up for email notification when I post new words, send in your email address at the sign-up page. You'll get email with a link that should take you to a confirmation page to ensure that somebody else isn't signing you up against your will. This confirmation thing is new, though, so I may not have worked out all of the bugs yet. If it breaks on you, just reply to the email and ask me to put your name in manually.

I finished reading Marilynn Robinson's novel Gilead over a month ago, the same day that I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Since then I've been on a hiatus from reading fiction, though I'm not sure why. Either Harry Potter cast a spell on me or the melancholy beauty of Gilead lulled me into a contented stupor. All I know is that I was on a fiction-reading binge for months, and it felt good. Now other responsbilities are squeezing me a bit. I'm not even managing to keep up with all the New Yorker issues that keep streaming in through my mail slot. It's tough to find a balance. Too bad there's no such job as professional dilettante.

Anyway, Gilead is a lovely book—sad and yet deeply satisfying, full of gentle wisdom without being pedantic. I highly recommend it. The story is told through a series of letters written by a 70ish minister to his 7-year-old son. The minister, John Ames, is about to die, so he is trying to leave a series of memories for his son to read when he gets older.

Here are a few of my favorite pieces from the book. I hope they still resonate when stripped of their context. In the first one, Rev. Ames is writing about his father, who was either an optimist or a fool. The second one reflects a kind of humble spirit that is beautiful to witness, even when it's only in print. And the third captures in such a perceptive way the internal struggle that most people have to be better human beings.

"I am confident that I will find great blessing in it." That is what he said about everything that happened to him for the rest of his life, all of which tended to be more or less drastic. I remember at least two sprained wrists and a cracked rib. He told me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true etymologically, in English—but not in Greek or Hebrew.

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to them all, every significant aspect of it, and they were tactful. I've spent a good share of my life comforting the afflicted, but I could never endure the thought that anyone should try to comfort me, except old Boughton, who always knew better than to talk much.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

It's time once again for the monthly stanza. This one appears at the end of a poem by W. H. Auden, one of the great 20th century poets. Some of you may remember the Auden poem that the Scottish chap read for his dead friend in Four Weddings and a Funeral. This is a different poem.

Here's what the Breughel painting looks like:

If you look carefully, you can see the legs of Icarus in the lower-right corner. His dive had a high degree of difficulty, but he over-rotated a bit, and there was too much splash on the landing.

Jose Saramago's writing is so peculiar that three weeks after I finished reading his latest novel, The Double, I'm still baffled by how he pulls it off. It wasn't just the long, sinuous sentences or the simultaneously disturbing and comical events that teeter on the brink of absurdity, but also the odd voice of the narrator, who most of the time seems omniscient, though never omnipotent, and, at times, almost ineffectual, that made me love this maddening book so much. The narrator is like a deist's God who winds up the characters, sets the story in motion, and sits back to watch what happens, either unable or unwilling influence the course of action. Oh, he'll poke his nose in the characters' business from time to time and inject his commentary, but for the most part the characters seem quite out of the narrator's control.

Usually when this narrator makes himself obvious, stepping into the foreground of the book, it's to pontificate about an abstract philosophical concept that arises from some mundane event. These were my favorite parts of the book, the moments when the narrator would go off on a meandering tangent and then casually loop back into the flow of the story.

For example, when the protagonist impulsively looks up "monkfish" in the encyclopedia, the narrator leaps smack into the middle of the land of epistemology:

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.…

Sure, it's an interesting idea about the sloppiness and slipperiness of meaning, but the part that really gets me, the part that makes me scratch my head and laugh, comes next when he blames his digression on the character, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, as if the narrator had no choice but to engage in small talk while Afonso went about his business.

Responsibility for this tedious linguistic digression lies entirely with Tertuliano Maximo Afonso for having taken such a long time to put A Man Like Any Other in the VCR, as if he were hesitating at the foot of a mountain, pondering the effort required to reach the summit.

Right. It's all the character's fault.

May almost slipped away before I got a chance to post the month's stanza. This poem, "Spring and Fall," was written by one of my favorite poets of all time, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A couple of the lines are hard to unpack, and the syntax is a little convoluted in places, but most of the sense of it is pretty straightforward. I like his neologisms—"unleaving" and "wanwood" and "leafmeal." Nice. And since the poem is in the public domain, I can post the whole shebang.

In a blog entry titled What's wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four, the pseudonymous B**ch PhD complains that the student evaluation is typically the only regular feedback [professors] get on any aspect of our jobs. Let me tell you, her entry, as well as many of the 110 comments, gave me the willies—because of how much I could identify with the sentiments. When I was teaching, student evaluations could twist me in knots for days—maybe because my personality tends more toward the Woody Allen than the Clint Eastwood, but maybe because the circumstances surrounding student evaluations make it almost impossible not to be neurotic about them.

Here's more from her entry:

Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I'm talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it's true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are peers and superiors. In academia, the people who observe and evaluate you on a day-to-day basis are distracted 18-year olds who don't understand what your job actually is.

Even worse, for the first few years of my teaching career, I was evaluated by distracted 15-year-olds. The evaluation forms were lousy, too. I have to give the school some credit, though, because they eventually gave us a choice of whether or not to have the students fill them out.

There are some words that I may not use because they are too vulgar. Others I try to avoid because they may offend someone (and I try my best never to offend). And then there are those I won't touch because I don't have the gravitas that such words require. Here is a small sample of the many words I can't get away with saying—or couldn't utter without giggling:

1. ersatz
2. erstwhile
3. demagoguery
4. reify
5. traduce
6. ipso facto
7. hegemony
8. indubitably
9. titillate
10. prophylactic (in the general sense of "acting to defend against or prevent something"

It would have been too easy to choose the first stanza of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" for this month's verse: "April is the cruellest month…" Instead, I give to you a few lines of a poem by Edward Hirsch, an American poet, professor, and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. Here is the last stanza of the last poem in his book The Night Parade:

Tad Friend's article, "Secret Agent Man," in a recent issue of The New Yorker, has this great quote from Michael Ovitz, former head of Disney and Hollywood agent:

I always viewed myself as the quarterback of a smoothly oiled football team, the playmaker.

For some reason that struck me as the funniest thing I had read in a long time. The article, however, paid no attention to the humor, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say about a football team.

A former colleague of mine at Calvin College has been collecting mixed metaphors. Check them out at the English department's Mixed Metaphor page.

In what scientists are calling the first text-to-human transmission of a virus, a Yale University student who goes by the name "Anotmas" has contracted the deadly Extended Metaphor Disease (EMD). Doctors for the afflicted student first discovered his condition after concerned friends alerted New Haven police to his plaintive cry for help in an online poetry forum:

i DON'T GET EXTENDED METOPHORES! THEY MAKE ME SICK! WHEN MY COLLAGE TEACHER AT YALE UNIVERSITY SAID " WHAT ARE EXTENDED METOPHORS?" I FETL SO EMBARRESED WHEN I SAID "I DON'T KNOW!"

Initial symptoms of EMD include dizziness, shortness of breath, and poor spelling. Doctors warn, however, that if left untreated the condition can be fatal.

Among the many questions that researchers are still struggling to answer is how someone could get Extended Metaphor Disease without getting extended metaphors. ("i DON'T GET EXTENDED METOPHORES!") Meanwhile, reporters are investigating why someone who was embarrassed by his ignorance in class would broadcast his ignorance on a public internet forum.

Faculty and staff at Yale are just as confused over what critics are now calling EMD-gate. In the English department, professors are looking into possible subject matter theft, as it appears that at least one member of the art department ("MY COLLAGE TEACHER") has been teaching figurative language. In the admissions office, everyone is trying to figure out how the student was accepted to Yale in the first place.

"Anotmas" is currently in stable condition at a local hospital.

Lately I've been feeling bullish about leveraging innovations and making them top of mind. But I realize that going forward we'll have to step up to the plate and kick it up a notch so we don't get behind the eight ball.

With just-in-time paradigm shifts, we'll empower key target markets to embrace enterprise solutions and create a win-win for stakeholders. You see, if we just raise the bar, we can take it to the next level. We can bring it. And bring it on.

Since we're all on the same page and thinking outside the box, let's touch base on utilizing collaborative tools to increase mindshare and build infrastructure before we run out of bandwidth. Together we can push it live.

Is everyone on board?

(Inspiration: Stepping up to the Plate, from Bill Walsh's Blogslot)

This idea just popped into my head, and I'm going with it. Once a month, I'm going to post a stanza from a favorite poem—just one stanza, though, because I don't want to run afoul of copyright law if the poem is a recent one. Okay, if the stanzas are really short, I might include two. And if they're really long, maybe I'll select just a part of one.

For the inaugural stanza, I've chosen a poem by Billy Collins, a great contemporary poet whose plain-spoken style has won him a lot of fans. And because it's the first time I'm doing this, I'm putting in a bonus stanza for free! I hope Mr. Collins and his publisher don't mind. Somebody needs to take a stanza; it might as well be me-za. (Ouch!)

Announcing the new English Rules Writing Guide!

It's just a wee little project I decided to put together after looking at my site's referral log and realizing that most of the people who visit English Rules are probably going away empty handed. A lot of people are looking for help with English "grammer," so that's what I'm going to give them.

I only have a few entries in there so far, but I'm hoping to build it up without losing too much more sleep. What I really hope is that people who visit will fill out the form to Ask the English Master. (I'm not a real English master; I just have a master's degree in English.) If any of you want to play "stump the chump," feel free to put in a question of your own.

Also, I'm looking for a volunteer to help me out with it a bit, maybe by posting an entry or two every once in a while. If you're a grammar geek and think this might be fun, let me know, and we can chat about setting you up with an author account on this thing.

One of my favorite online references, Visual Thesaurus, has just been upgraded to version 3, which now includes audio pronunciations, spell checking, and enhanced printing. While it used to be free, it's still available for a limited number of searches before they require you to pay. Just type in a word, and the visual thesaurus will show a diagram with related words floating around it. Click on one of the other words, and the new word becomes the center of the constellation. It's quite fun, for word geeks at least, and can be addictive as well.

(hat tip: Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting)

There is a great tradition of visual artists using "found" objects to create new masterpieces, be they sculpture, collage, or mixed media. Musicians, too, have mixed a variety of elements into new compositions—bird songs, environmental noise, samples of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder that comes pre-installed with Windows and the collection of generic sounds that play when users perform certain actions on their Windows computers. You can watch a Flash animation of Clown playing the tune: Windows Noises. (hat tip: Robin Good)

While I'm not crazy about the song itself, I admire Staples's decision to limit himself to a rudimentary tool and a discrete sound source—a great example of how limits can actually foster creative expression. It reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who chose to write many of her poems in sonnet form long after the rise of free verse, or Richard Wilbur, who is still churning out verse with complex rhyme schemes and rigid meter. Maybe, at least when it comes to art, there is such a thing as too much freedom.

One of the utterances from service personnel that I find most irritating—along with the ubiquitous "Can I help who's next?"—is the question, How are we doing? It's as if they're asking how they themselves are doing, too. How should I know how they're doing?

My standard response to such effrontery is, "We're fine. How are we?" Unfortunately, that kind of sass doesn't usually improve the service.

So, what would you recommend I say instead? Should I take the high road and be polite, or reply with something a little more subtle? Maybe give a withering look and walk away? Let's hear your suggestions!

Jim Vanden Bosh, a former professor and colleague of mine, once told me he was tempted to write on a student's recommendation form, "I cannot recommend him too highly," just for the beautiful ambiguity of the statement. Inspired by his masterful wit, I've been trying to come up with a list of other backhanded compliments, or mixed messages, or accidental insults—some of which I recall hearing others use and some that I've just made up on my own. Here they are, in no particular order:

• We're all impressed with the progress you've been making here. (This one works only if the person has been doing just fine all along.)
• Never mind what everyone else says. You're okay in my book.
• It's great to see that you have the self-confidence to wear that outfit.
• You're not even close to being the worst employee here!
• I admire your ability to stick it out. (Works best if person thinks everything is going well.)
• You seem much smarter in person.

Of course I would never seriously say any of them to anyone, but it has been fun testing them on a couple friends at work. Can you think of any to add to the list? Just for fun.

Update: I got an email the other day from Jim Vanden Bosch himself. He said that the "can't recommend too highly" quip didn't originate with him, but with Robert Thornton, a professor at Lehigh University. He has a collection of what he calls a Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations, or LIAR.

Merriam-Webster just named their 2004 word of the year, based on number of online lookups. And the winner is blog. One of my favorite words, defenestration, just squeaked in at number 10, while others on the short list related to the U.S. elections or other news events this year (incumbent, electoral, insurgent).

While the Word Spy site is great in theory, there hasn't been a new word posted to it since I integrated the RSS feed into the englishrules.com Writing Resources page a few months ago. So, I'm stripping it from the page to make way for my new favorite grammar blog, Verbal Energy, which appears as a column written by Ruth Walker in the Christian Science Monitor. Now, whenever a new article from Verbal Energy is posted, its title will automatically appear in the right-hand column of my writing resources page.

According to the Christian Science Monitor's web site, Verbal Energy is a "blog about words and grammar from the Monitor's copy editor extraordinaire." So visit it, bookmark it, and read it with glee. It's fun and witty and perceptive.

Here is an excerpt from one of her recent articles, The Other "L" Word:

An observation during the closing weeks of this current presidential campaign: What a rich vocabulary the English language has for suggesting — without explicitly saying — that someone is lying.

That's "lying" as in "fibbing." Saying things that aren't so. Telling falsehoods with the intent to deceive. Practicing mendacity. Indulging in willful obfuscation. Prevarication. See what I mean?

...A liar is what we are taught early on not to be. It's also a word we're taught to be very careful with in applying to others. And yet so many in the public square are being so selective with so-called "facts" that we're all starting to develop elaborate vocabularies to hold politicians and their spinmeisters to account without using the "L" word.

See what I mean?

Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and winner of a Nobel Prize for literature, has just published a new book, The Double.

A New York Times book review describes it as "clever, alarming and blackly funny, even though its central premise is a literary cliché.

I've read three of his other books—The Cave, All the Names, and Blindness—and look forward to reading this one as well, though I'll probably wait until it comes out in paperback.

I agree with the book review that Blindness is the author's masterpiece; in fact, I'd rank it up there as one of the top 10 novels of the 20th century. Here's more from the review:

"Blindness" is a truly frightening account of what happens to so-called civilized values when a mysterious affliction strikes everyone in the world blind, except for a single person. In even his bleakest works, however, there is a note of dark laughter – the same note that sounds through Kafka, Celine and Beckett, who are Saramago's direct literary ancestors.

Surprisingly for an atheist, Saramago imbues all of his works with a redemptive quality and a hope that outlasts even the darkest, most despairing situations. I highly recommend him.

Ben and I are reading E.B. White's Stuart Little for a second time, and enjoying it very much. I'm never quite sure how much Ben understands, or how long his attention lasts, but he usually wants to keep reading when I've closed the book and tucked him into bed, and he occasionally stops me to ask what "mercy" or "offhanded" or "descended" means, so I suppose he's getting something.

Anyway, last night we read Chapter XIII, "Ames' Crossing," which begins with this loveliest of all sentences, full of sophisticated syntactical devices such as polysyndeton and anaphora and anadiplosis, yet somehow remaining simple and fluid and utterly beautiful:

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

Isn't that delightful? There is no doubt in my mind that I am enjoying the book much more than Ben is.

If you're interested at all in what those rhetorical devices are, or how they can be used, Silva Rhetoricae is well worth a visit.

The Word Spy tries to keep track of neologisms as they start making their way into the vernacular. Here are a couple of my favorites:

• butt call n. An unintended phone call placed by sitting on one's cell phone.
• wife acceptance factor n. In an object, especially an electronic device, that normally appeals only to men, the qualities or features added to or modified in the object to make it acceptable to women. Also: WAF.
• brandalism (BRAN.duh.liz.um) n. The defacement of public buildings and spaces by corporate ads, logos, and other forms of branding
• poo X n. A poodle cross; a dog that results from the cross between a purebred poodle and another canine breed.

And here are a few of my favorite poo X combinations that The Word Spy lists:

• Jack-a-poo (Jack Russell terrier x toy or miniature poodle)
• Labradoodle (Labrador x standard poodle)
• Pug-a-poo (Pug x toy or miniature poodle)
• Schnoodle (Miniature schnauzer x toy or miniature poodle)
• Scoodle (Scottish terrier x toy or miniature poodle)
• Terri-poo (Terrier x toy or miniature poodle)

In the Summer 2004 issue of City Journal, Michael Knox Beran wistfully describes the bygone days of classical education, when students were required to commit lines of both poetry and prose to memory. He makes an eloquent case, and I am sympathetic to his views (at least, some of them):

Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap of verse has been drawn into the civilizing interplay of music and language, rhythm and sound, melody and words—just as educational theory as far back as ancient Greek posits.

Unfortunately, he sometimes tries to pass off assertions as arguments, and he seems to conflate close study and memorization, which, last I heard, are two different things.

Read "In Defense of Memorization"

By the way, after seeing some of the other articles the City Journal publishes, I almost didn't write about this one—but decided to go ahead with it, as a gesture of respect for my more right-leaning friends. Besides, I can appreciate an interesting article, even if it comes from a right-wing nutjob publication.

On a related note, Mark Edmundson, a popular English professor at the University of Virginia, has penned a piece in the New York Times about the value of reading. After dismissing other attempts to spread bibliophilia in the wake of the NEA report on the dramatic decline in literary reading, he makes his own case for why reading is so important.

To me, the best way to think about reading is as life's grand second chance. ...for many people, the process of socialization doesn't quite work. The values they acquire from all the well-meaning authorities don't fit them. And it is these people who often become obsessed readers. They don't read for information, and they don't read for beautiful escape. No, they read to remake themselves. They read to be socialized again, not into the ways of their city or village this time but into another world with different values. Such people want to revise, or even to displace, the influence their parents have had on them. They want to adopt values they perceive to be higher or perhaps just better suited to their natures.

Read "The Risk of Reading"

Saturday morning I took the kids to the YMCA so they could jump around and climb on things in the kids' gym while I tried get a little exercise. While I was lumbering along on the treadmill I glanced up at the closed captioning for a report that was showing on CNN. The first thing I saw was that "Popeye Doll Will Young" was nominated for a British music award. It took me a minute to realize that they were referring to the Pop Idol Will Young. I know it's really quite dumb, but for some reason it made me laugh and almost sent me reeling off the treadmill. Those things are dangerous if half the foot lands on the conveyer belt and the other half lands on the stationary platform.

I just wanted to be on the record as someone who is against landmines. I know that most people think they're great, but I'm willing to stand up for what I think is right. That's why I decided to show this envelope that came in the mail a couple years ago from the Campaign to Ban Landmines:

I have one question, though: How are we going to save all those innocent people who have been killed by landmines? Call me crazy, but I think it might be too late for them.