Grammaricks

Over on my other blog, I've got some limericks about language, grammar and editing.

Because silliness is better than politics.

(It'll help you with the first one if you know that 'stet' is a proofreading term meaning 'leave it the way it was'.)

Well, quite

I’ve just noticed that David Cameron began his speech about the riots and looting with this line:

It is time for our country to take stock.

Jack Bauer, copyeditor

If you share my sense of humour and fondness for grammar, you might like this what I wrote. (If you don’t, you probably won’t.)

Update 2/5: And here’s a topical second episode, revealing Jack’s role in bringing bin Laden to editorial justice.

Stroppy editing

I reckon that what my psyche really needs is a bit more fragmentation. So I’ve started another blog, focusing on things I’ve come across in my work as a copyeditor/proofreader/general editorial dogsbody. All anonymised, to spare the blushes (and the sacking).

I like my work in theory, but in practice it often annoys me. Hence the title: The Stroppy Editor. It’s of niche interest, but it’s my niche, so there.

Political meanderings and intermittent silliness will continue here as usual. But posts like this and this and this will in future appear in the other place.

Sticks and stones and Tory-led coalitions

Labour has executed a small, but smart bit of media handling:

Ed Miliband's office is writing to the BBC, ITV and Sky demanding they stop describing it as a coalition and instead use Labour's preferred description, a Tory-led government.

Everyone knows that the government is a coalition in which the Conservatives are the larger party and the Lib Dems the smaller party. To describe it as “the coalition government”, “the Conservative-led government” or indeed anything other than “the government” is to specifically draw people’s attention towards one aspect of it.

If the modifier is factually accurate, then that’s fine – as long as the context makes it reasonable to highlight that aspect. “Lib Dem backbenchers have been arguing for X, but the Conservative-led government is maintaining its policy of Y” – fine. “Despite tensions, the coalition government shows no sign of breaking up” – fine.

Otherwise, you’re making a political point. And unless you’re a news reporter who needs to present things neutrally, that’s fair game. Labour calculates, probably rightly, that “Tory-led” is likely to make some left-leaning Lib Dems less keen on the government. And the Tory and Lib Dem leaderships calculate, also probably rightly, that the word “coalition” makes them seem to be doing lovely things such as making sensible compromises, forming a consensus, putting aside partisanship for the greater good. But whatever effects this language has are probably marginal.

(I’d love to see an opinion poll testing the effect of the word “coalition”. For instance, ask half the sample “Do you think the government is acting in the whole country’s interests/understands the problems faced by people like you/whatever?” and ask the other half “Do you think the coalition government…”)

Now. Miliband’s people will not get the news media to start using “Tory-led” in standard reporting. But, as James Forsyth says, “I suspect that this whole row will rumble on for a while yet. It is tempting to dismiss the whole thing as absurd, as only of interest to a few journalists and spin doctors. But labels do matter.”

Yes. And while this spat is not going to achieve its nominal aim – as Krishnan Guru-Murthy says, “because of the associated controversy my own view is currently that I should avoid the phrase [‘Conservative-led’]”. But the effect is that “coalition” has now been outed as a politically loaded term. So we may well see less of it. Guru-Murthy again: “However the exclusive use of ‘coalition’ feels equally unfair and controversial”.

Sentencing policy

I enjoyed Adam Haslett’s review of How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish. I’ve heard Fish’s name around but don’t know his work at all. The book looks pretty interesting.

I have few ambitions that I’m aware of, but one of them is to implement a forward-looking raft of proposals to action sustainable enhancements with respect to my capabilities in the area of impactful prose production in order to deliver on the objective of the progressive maximisation thereof.

Doing things with words

I’m writing very little here these days, so to sort-of make up for that, here are two people writing about writing:

Cathy Relf reports on a debate between David Marsh and Simon Heffer, style guide supremos of the Guardian and Telegraph respectively.

Tim Radford has 25 tips for journalists (with a lot of them applicable to other types of writer).

What’s in a name?

I’m glad to see Ed Miliband doing this:

Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word "coalition" to describe the government because it sounds too moderate and reasonable, and fails to convey what he says is its true "ideological, rightwing agenda". …the Labour leader's director of policy, Greg Beales, says that from now on they must use the term "Conservative-led government"

And it’s only taken him three months since I suggested it:

What better way to suggest [the Lib Dems’] inability to tame the Tories than disregarding their existence? Refer to ‘the government’ or even just ‘the Tories’ – not ‘the ConDems’, which is cute but maybe a bit too pleased with itself, nor even ‘the coalition’, which sounds too much like ‘the consensus’, and who wants to be against that?

I am confident that he’s shaping up to be a better leader of the opposition than Iain Duncan Smith or even William Hague.

A palpable hit

I may not be blogging properly right now, but other people are. Go and read this by Cathy Relf, on the media use of “hit by” to jazz up abstract noun phrases, because it’s right and because it’s well-written.

(I’m just very busy at work at the moment, and quite drained the rest of the time. It’s annual financial report season, and I’m struggling to prevent a small band of fanatical yet shambolic illiterates from sabotaging it. Yesterday’s only light relief came when I took a short break to proofread a Christmas menu that included “mice pies”.)

“An important diagnostic tool”

Sometimes the stuff I have to edit for work is borderline incoherent, sometimes it’s full of painfully misjudged jargon and sometimes it barely even exists. This sort of thing can exasperate and entertain me in equal measure.

But the latest gem is none of these; it’s a simple yet massive failure of perspective:

In medicine, identifying changes in handwriting may provide an important diagnostic tool to monitor neurological disorders and motor function.
In the case of Lord Nelson, British Naval Officer, his handwriting changed dramatically after the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797), when he lost his right arm.

Something new every day

Guy Keleny’s superb Errors and Omissions column in the Independent has delighted me today, by giving me a piece of knowledge that makes sense of a little bit of the English language – and that immediately makes me wonder why I hadn’t already realised it.

Living things are categorised by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species (‘keep playing church organs, for god’s sake’). Scientists normally use the last two of these to identify organisms: Homo sapiens, Panthera leo, Tyrannosaurus rex, Staphylococcus aureus and so on. The genus identifies the wider group and then the species narrows it down.

What Keleny reveals (in the process of making an entirely different point) is that the adjective for species is specific and that for genus is generic.

Obvious, really.

Deficit metaphors: the state took a bullet

What with the government trying to flog us the old ‘government budget as household finances’ metaphor, Liam wondered if anyone had any others.

I suggested we could think of the deficit as a metaphor: a powerful use of it can be stimulating and help to move things along, but if you stretch it to breaking point you’ll lose credibility and have to spend even longer getting back to where you started.

More seriously (and more partisan), here’s one that occurred to me this morning:

Unlike the Tories’ laissez-faire attitude, during this recession Labour decided the government should take a bullet to protect the economy. To prevent the worst of the harm to businesses and households, we let government borrowing take the strain.

Letting the deficit rise was the right thing to do. In normal times, this much borrowing would be a terrible idea, but a global financial crisis is not normal times. And it worked: unemployment and repossessions have not been nearly as bad as in previous recessions. The Tories, on the other hand, wanted us to gut the public sector at the same time as the private sector was taking hits, and they opposed the VAT cut that helped people struggling to make ends meet.

So the government took a bullet, and now we have to repair the harm to the public finances. There are two ways we can cope with this bullet-wound: cut off the injured limb and hobble on as best we can, or stop the bleeding and then take time to heal and grow back to strength. The first option is quick but brutal, causing irreparable damage. The second is less dramatic, but it allows us a fuller recovery.

Does this have potential? Maybe not – it’s a bit all-or-nothing – but I’ve been blogging so little lately I figured I owed you something.

I’ve also got a half-formed idea about the dangers of slamming on the brakes when your car’s skidding, even though it seems the instinctive thing to do – instead, you have to slow gradually and turn the wheel back steadily. Anyone’s welcome to develop that one, but I’m too clueless a driver to do it myself.

(The standard political metaphor for deficits is the ‘black hole’, the most destructive thing in the universe, swallowing anything that comes near it and becoming all the more powerful in the process. If it hadn’t been cheapened by overuse to describe any old gap in the public finances, then it would have been perfect for those warning of a catastrophic debt spiral.)

Words fail me

I am ‘editing’ (turning gibberish into language) a graduate recruitment pack. The section that lists the qualities applicants should have is currently divided into subheads with sets of bullet-points underneath, and I’m supposed to turn each of these into a paragraph of flowing, meaningful, engaging prose. One of the sets looks like this:

Curiosity and Critical Thinking:

• Critical thinking
• Curiosity

I especially like that they’ve reversed the order to try to avoid the impression that they’ve just typed the same thing twice.

It’s going to be a long day.

Grammatical nuance and scientific methodology

Two distinctions in one:

• We looked at all the evidence, which supported the hypothesis. (Systematic review; non-defining clause)
• We looked at all the evidence that supported the hypothesis. (Cherry-picking; defining clause)

Exactly how much bigger should society be?

Please imagine that question being asked by Chris Morris on The Day Today.

Because whatever you might think of the general principle, or the motivations behind it, or the policies that may be produced in its pursuit, “big society” is a bloody stupid phrase.

Before Cameron coined it, had you ever heard anybody discussing the size of society? Sure, you’d hear about a strong society, a vibrant society, an active society, a good society, a flourishing society, an open society and so on. But had you ever heard anyone complain that society was too small, or argue that society ought to be made bigger?

Yes, I understand why he went for it: “big society not big state” sounds less nasty-old-Tory than “small state not big state”, so it was an effort to change the terms of the debate. But given that “big society” also makes it sound as though English is his second language, couldn’t he have done better? I gather that many on the Tory right thought that the idea was a very hard sell during the election campaign, and that doesn’t surprise me at all: “big society” is a category mistake.

Oh no. I was going to leave it there but then I made the mistake of looking for the Big Society website. It says: “The Big Society is a society in which we as individuals don’t feel small.”

Think about that for a moment. Surely, the bigger society is, the smaller I as an individual am going to feel by comparison.

Memo to leadership candidates: please stop talking to us

I am fed up with hearing the Labour leadership candidates explaining to the party what we should do over the coming years to win over sceptical voters. Don’t tell us, show us. Stop trying to win a leadership election and start acting as though you’ve already won it.

Make speeches aimed at the wider electorate. Craft your arguments and language for an audience that’s not terribly partisan and only intermittently interested in politics.

To win a general election, you need to be able to do this. So start showing us that you can.

Yes, intellectual depth and strategic analysis are important – David Miliband’s latest effort I liked, but then I’m a political anorak and a philosophy graduate. Or, in other words, a weirdo. Most people will be left utterly cold by phrases like “a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope”, which is of course not a compelling articulation of anything. And that’s a very mild example.

But while I agree with Hopi that someone needs to “stop Mr Miliband stringing abstract nouns together and calling it an argument”, I wouldn’t join him in calling this sort of thing “Cameronian”. Whatever his faults, the PM does know how to use language in a way that ordinary people can nod along to.

The Milibands aren’t as bad as Jon Cruddas, who can hardly open his mouth without the names of half a dozen long-dead political philosophers dropping out, but they’re close.

We know you’re clever. Now show us that you can engage with people.

They’re sounding more and more alike

All politicians have their little verbal quirks. One of David Cameron’s that struck me during the third election debate was this:

It is completely unacceptable what has happened, and we need to grip it very, very hard to sort this out
…
they'd know their government had listened to them, gripped it, and got it under control
…
I say, let's grip this problem
…
What you can see is two parties that won't grip immigration, and one that will.

It’s very common to talking about ‘getting a grip on’ something, or ‘getting to grips with’ something else. But I’d never before heard anyone talking about simply ‘gripping’ a problem.

Now I’ve come across someone else doing this:

He said it would have been an "act of cowardice, socially deeply unjust and an abdication of political and moral responsibility not to have gripped the crisis."

It is, of course, Nick Clegg. I hear that sometime married couples grow to share each other’s tics. I also hear that pets can come to resemble their owners.

Poor sustenance

There’s a talk at the Cheltenham Science Festival today titled ‘London 2012: The Most Sustainable Games Ever?’

No. The 2012 Olympics will last from 27 July to 12 August, and then stop. They will not be “sustainable”.

(The blurb for the event also asks: “Construction of the Olympic site is well underway, but is the sustainability agenda on course for a gold medal?” Ah, it’s that kind of subtle blend of inhuman corporate jargon and leaden sporting metaphor that makes me proud to be a speaker of this fine language of ours.)

Subbing blog

Cathy Relf has a great blog on sub-editing. I particularly recommend her post on spatial awareness training for editorial staff.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of People Being Crap With Language, the other day I was editing something that contained the phrase “female parents”. I’ll never know how I managed it but I was, eventually, able to trim this down to a single word.

And, just as I typed the above, my colleague C came across this gem: “The venue also offers baby-hanging facilities.”

Update 15/7/10: I've closed comments on this post owing to a plague of spambots.

Leaders’ debate: the real winner

If just one person has learnt where to put the apostrophe on a plural possessive, it will all have been worthwhile.