When 'Disaster' Isn't Enough

What to call the Gulf oil disaster continues to confound people who are trying to adequately and accurately describe the situation.

"Spill" doesn't cut it, since it was and is no such thing, and "leak" doesn't do it, either.  I think "gusher" might be a bit better but still not strong enough.

Some links:

New York Times primer
Fake reporting by BP

New Language Honcho at the Times

The New York Times magazine has named Ben Zimmer as its new language columnist, succeeding the late William Safire.

Zimmer wrote about the trendy use of the word "optics" March 5 in the Times.

Turn Down the Heat

When the restrained folks at the National Weather Service call you out, maybe you've gone too far. We've all watched TV weather people go off the edge, repeatedly, with each storm but a lot of the over-the-top language is making it into print. And have you noticed how much more coverage and accompanying hysteria we get from TV for an East Coast storm  than a comparable--or far worse--storm in the Midwest or northern states?

On Tuesday, 48 hours before the storm was to hit, Accuweather called it "hurricane-like," a "monster," and a "powerful storm of historical proportions" that would wreak havoc from Pennsylvania to Maine and by Wednesday was using the term "snowicane."
That prompted a stern response from National Weather Service meteorologist Craig Evanego.
"It's almost inciting the public, inciting panic," he said.
The Weather Channel called the hurricane talk "bad meteorology."
Accuweather senior meteorologist and director of forecasting operations Ken Reeves called the NWS criticism "unfounded" and said there is nothing wrong in using language that gets people's attention when the situation calls for it.

Yes, and there's nothing wrong with, say, just reporting the facts and stop trying to sell the momentousness of the story so that you can boost ratings or get attention for yourself.

Native Terms

A group over on LinkedIn is discussing the term "Indian giver," which still crops up in language. And while there's someone arguing against the time devoted to the discussion, the point is worth discussing.

Here's the posting:


Indian giver is a North American English expression used to describe a person who gives a gift (literal or figurative) and later wants it back, or something equivalent in return.

The term "Indian gift" was first noted in 1765 by Thomas Hutchinson, and "Indian giver" was first cited in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1860) as "Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned."

The consensus is that it is based on Native Americans having a distinctly different sense of property ownership as opposed to those of European ancestry. Early European settlers in North America misinterpreted aid and goods they received from Native Americans as "gifts," when in fact they were intended to be offered in trade, as many tribes operated economically by some form of barter system, or a gift economy where reciprocal giving was practiced. It is also theorized that this stereotype may have been coined or exaggerated by the conquering European groups to denigrate the native people as dishonest and thereby justify their conquest.

The phrase is considered a racial stereotype and is often offensive, as it implies that Native Americans commonly practiced this behavior.

I'd not heard it explained this way, so I find it useful.

The use of the word "squaw" gets a lot of attention, though not everyone agrees on its offensiveness.

We'll save the debate over Indian mascot names for another day. Actually, I don't think there's much of a debate: we white folks don't get to decide that we're "honoring" people by using their words and they find it an insult. It's pretty simple.

A Word Morphs

It's been interesting to watch how William Ayers and his friends are now routinely called "domestic terrorists" when back in the day, they were known as radicals. And how the word "socialism" is being thrown around, often in very angry terms, and usually conflating the Bush economic Wall Street rescue/bailout, Obama, Democrats, the media and pretty much everything else people in the crowd don't like. There's so much fury out there.

Lining Up

I take no public position on U.S. immigration and English-only issues but offer these two items, for whatever they're worth. The video has a surprise.

Nod to Mighty Red Pen for the sign pic.

All That Needs to Be Said

From Sam Zell:
"This business has been eroding before your eyes and you're worried about my language? ... Everything I said was with an intent to get everybody to get off their [behinds] and understand this is a crisis. We've got to save this business. We've got to make this work. And we've got to prioritize what we get all pushed out of shape about. ... If we keep operating the way we've been operating, there is no future."
The [behinds] is courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.

Copy Editing and 'The Wire'

"Apropos of Nothing" at New York Magazine looks at the depiction of a copy editing issue.

When we complained yesterday about a curmudgeonly copy editor's opinions on the proper use of the word "evacuate" in the Wire premiere, we never in our wildest dreams imagined the response we would get — not only from Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, but from David Simon himself! Merriam-Webster's Peter Sokolowski, using the handle "MERRIAM_WEBSTER" (heh), commented on our post, pointing us to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage's article on this very subject. Summarizes Sokolowski: "This was indeed a usage controversy until about WWII, by which time the 'remove (people)' sense had taken firm hold. According the MWDEU: 'The respectability of this sense is no longer subject to question.'"

The argument about "evacuate" reminds me of an editor I knew who wouldn't allow the use of "during" because of the different ways it could be interpreted. You could look it up!

UPDATE Romney and the Dictionary

Update 3: The Washington Post upgrades its Fact Checker rating of Mitt Romney and his Martin Luther King claim to "four Pinocchios," which means a seriously large whopper. Keep reading if you haven't been following this but basically: Romney claimed to have seen his father marching with Dr. King, then later said he meant that figuratively, not literally. Then on the Friday afternoon news dump to Politico.com, 2 witnesses claimed to have seen Gov. George Romney and King marching together in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Then, this weekend, the Washington Post and the Boston Phoenix blew a hole in that story too.
I keep going back to this story because in the beginning, I thought we sometimes get ensnared in too many petty details at the expense of bigger issues in the campaign. And because we need to make sure reporters are keeping up on this story and render the facts correctly as they develop. But this story continues to be very weird.

From the Washington Post:

After news reports challenged Mitt Romney's repeated accounts of his father marching with Martin Luther King, his campaign put a reporter from Politico in touch with eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the former Michigan governor "hand in hand" with the civil rights leader. But their memories are almost certainly flawed as contemporaneous news reports show that King was addressing a meeting in New Jersey at the time the eyewitnesses supposedly saw him in Grosse Pointe, MI.

And, also from Michael Dobbs of the Fact Checker:

I called up one of the eyewitnesses cited by Politico and the Romney campaign, Ashby Robertson, a data collector now living in Massachusetts. Robertson told me that he called the Romney campaign last week because he had vivid memories of the Grosse Pointe march and was upset by media reports challenging the Mitt Romney version.
"I was fifteen feet away from them [Romney and MLK]," said Robertson, 64, who attended Grosse Pointe high school. "You don't forget that kind of thing."
When I told Robertson that news reports placed Martin Luther King in New Jersey at the time, he replied: "Well, it was somebody who certainly looked like him."

UPDATE 2: And yet another turn, Talking Points Memo rounds up some links that seem to prove that Gov. George Romney DID march with Dr. King. Curiouser and curiouser.
UPDATE: It gets better, according to the Boston Globe:

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

Earlier:

Ah, the dictionary enters the political arena.

This is Mitt Romney explaining his statement that he "saw" his father, George Romney, "march with Martin Luther King."
From MSNBC:

A defensive Romney was peppered with questions today on exactly what he meant when he said -- most recently on Meet the Press -- that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. Recent articles have indicated that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, didn't march with the civil-rights leader.

Admitting that he didn't see the march with his own eyes, he said, "I 'saw' him in the figurative sense."

"The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights," he said, "and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership."

"I've tried to be as accurate as I can be," he continued, smiling firmly. "If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described.

Now, personally, I often think there are many more important things* to write about instead of automatically seizing on minor word choices in many candidate comments. When we complain about candidates and their surrogates seeming stiff and formulaic, why do we suppose that is? Here, we're concentrating on whether Romney was speaking literally (he definitely wasn't) or figuratively (that's what he says now) or his mixup of Super Bowl and World Series events. I can't stand this urge to hold every candidate to perfection, 100 percent of the time, in every single comment or word choice when we're not perfect** and am fed up with snarky shit passing as journalism or commentary.
But Romney's comment is a biggie in terms of race and given the not-so-distant LDS policy on black members, he needs to be much more careful when dealing with any and all race-related questions. Heck, any white person needs to think twice before invoking any variation of the "some of my best friend are" kind of claim.

*Domestic spy satellites
Mortgage mess
Military readiness
Iraq
economy
CIA torture
the Federal Election Commission
Election dirty tricks
Auto emissions
**Today's language outrage: I saw a newspaper headline that used "gift" as a verb, as in "Celebrity 'X' Gifts $5,000 to Alma Mater" as if "give" wouldn't have worked just fine.

Change That Wording Forever

Several editors at the ACES discussion board have been listing their pet peeves.

Not on the list is my personal teeth-gnashing usage: "x will change this town/this game/the family/ their lives FOREVER." The usage shows up on TV all the time; less so in print. But it is not only trite, it's ridiculous--rarely can someone say at any given day that an event has changed something forever.

Take Sept.11. Yes, the attacks knocked down the buildings, permanently. The skyline changed. But forever? No, tall buildings will go up in their place someday.

Are the lives of all Americans, all New Yorkers, changed forever, as many were saying or writing back in 2001? No. Not at all.

Yes, a death changes the lives of the victim's family, not to mention the victim.

But after that, whatever led to the death may affect someone else's behavior; there may be a new stop sign put up, let's say, or some sort of traffic pattern may be altered.

But changed the town forever? No, no, very unlikely.

Crock Hunter

M. Lynne Murphy at the University of Sussex examines differences between British and American English.

Her most recent blog entry at Separated by a Common Language looks at how the word "crock" is used and perceived.

Read This Essay

Agree or disagree with this essay from The New Republic but please read it. It's a bit of a slow start but fascinating and not terribly long.

Here's how TNR describes it:

John B. Judis's eye-opening cover story draws on a wealth of psychological research, showing how voters are susceptible to politicians who can manipulate their fear of death. Obviously, we all want leaders who can defend us, but only recently have social scientists begun to understand how a fear of our own mortality guides many of our political choices without our ever realizing it--and how politicians like George W. Bush can, and have, tapped it to further their own policies.

Language Decline

Prof. William Z. Shetter writes a smart assessment on how changes in a language are often perceived as evidence of its decline.

His Language Miniatures site is pure joy.