Grammar

There’s nothing wrong with this caption on Yahoo! Shine that moving the apostrophe to the left wouldn’t fix: The apostrophe should be used to show the omission of digits (in this case, 19), and not to form the plural of a decade: ’60s is correct. Filed under: Apostrophes, Plurals, Punctuation Tagged: apostrophe, editing, incorrect punctuation, plurals, proofreading, punctuation mistakes, Shine, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

Edna O’Brien’s book Girl With Green Eyes has a romantic line involving bicycles: Ah, the bloom of you, I love your North-Circular-Road-Bicycle-Riding-Cheeks. It’s a sweet declaration ending in an impressive hyphenated string, though if I were editing it I would separate cheeks from the compound and reduce the capitalisation: North-Circular-Road-bicycle-riding cheeks. In a modest correspondence between books decades apart, Declan Hughes’s detective novel The Dying Breed has another elaborate compound phrase constructed with the help of bicycle imagery: I made a face at that, my d’you-think-I-cycled-up-the-Liffey-on-a-bicycle face. When I tweeted that sentence I was treated to a few variations on the theme: Belfast’s D’you think I floated down the Lagan in a bubble? (@charlieconnelly), and Glasgow’s D’ye think ah came up the Clyde on a water biscuit/banana boat? (@ozalba; @Yanbustone). There are many versions of this idiom, often beginning Do you think…, You must think…, or I didn’t… More (or less) familiar lines include: Do you think I came down in the last shower?, You must think I was born yesterday, and I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I love the water biscuit one, but for some reason I relate most strongly to cycling on the Liffey – so long as I steer clear of Gogarty’s swans. Filed under: books, Ireland, language, phrases Tagged: bicycles, books, Declan Hughes, editing, Edna O'Brien, fiction, hyphens, idioms, Irish books, language, Liffey, literature, phrases, punctuation

This week MedCity News shared an article about patient engagement that posits, "Patients today aren’t truly engaged with health technology or even with their own health." The article, written by Laura Wagner and originally appearing in VentureBeat, is a commentary based on a session from HealthBeat 2013, a VentureBeat presented conference. VentureBeat "covers disruptive technology and explains why it matters in our lives," which well explains the session's title: “Consumer Health Apps: Human Centered Design." However, if the panel's conclusion was that patients are not engaged with health IT or their own health, then the human centered design part of consumer health apps is clearly failing—because the apps are not designed to meet consumer needs. No one needs an app. In order to even want an app, a patient—engaged or otherwise—must first have a device. Far too many advocates on the health IT bandwagon assert that smartphones are ubiquitous. According to Pew Internet statistics, 85 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone. Of that 85 percent, 53 percent have a smartphone. Of the 53 percent who have a smartphone, 52 percent have used that smartphone to collect health information, Pew Internet reports. The additional questions to ask are—of that half of a half, how many are using an app and how many remain patients of Dr. Google? One report from Adeven, a mobile analytics firm, provides some insight—nearly 400,000 apps sit in the iOS App Store classified as "zombies," generating few downloads and little to no revenue for their producers. The beauty of the internet's search function is the power of suggestion. One doesn't need to know exactly what one is looking for in order to embark on a search. With each return of results comes an addition of knowledge that enables one to further refine one's search and/or run off down an entirely different rabbit hole of information. Apps limit this kind of unfettered exploration. Their specificity of operation—the very thing that makes them a marketable app—is exactly what keeps them from being the go-to tool for inquiring minds. To want to use an app is to want to do a specific thing. To engage patients in this form of health IT we must not ask how we get patients to use an app, but how we get patients to want to do the certain thing in question. Whether we want patients to keep track of their blood pressure, count calories, log blood glucose readings, or learn about cellular reproduction, we must first find their source of motivation. Games and rewards only go so far in triggering prolonged motivation—but show me the game that rewards me not with new flowers for my virtual garden or a special frog to breed and instead with reduced insurance premiums and I'll make it part of my daily routine. What patients want is to define their own goals and outcomes. To be "healthy" is couched in institutional ideology of standards and measurements; yet a patient who couldn't care less about his BMI and blood pressure may care enormously about living long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle or celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. To engage a patient in his own health one must find what matters to that individual patient. To engage a patient in health IT is thus a secondary matter, and engaging patients in mobile health IT a tertiary one. The benefit of utilizing health IT to achieve the patient's self-defined goals and outcomes must be clearly defined with a detailed measure of cause and effect. Should the aforementioned patient who wishes to walk his daughter down the aisle receive a doctor's recommendation to lose 10 percent of his body weight, the benefits of doing so must be illustrated in relation to his goal. According to a recent New York Times article, a recent national study found that "patients who lost a mere 7 percent of their total body weight reduced their risk for diabetes by 58 percent." For the patient to gain his own definition of meaningful use

Instead of focusing on the names the writer for Yahoo! Movies got wrong (like Taissa Farmiga and Sofia Coppola) or the arbitrary word that got capitalized, let’s focus on the words that are correct: That was easy. Filed under: Capitalizing, Misspellings Tagged: bad spelling, capitalization, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, Sofia Coppola, Taissa Farmiga, Yahoo! Movies

I’m pleased to announce that, for the fifth consecutive year, this blog has been honored with a nomination in the Lexiophiles Top Language Blogs competition, “Language Professional” division.   Support a professional! Click the badge to cast your vote for Fritinancy!   Make that two nominations. I’ve also been nominated for Top Language Twitter Account: Click the badge to vote for my Twitter account! What’s in it for you? Just the deep (and cheap) satisfaction of supporting a blog and Twitter account dedicated to the profound, puzzling, quirky, mysterious, enlightening world of names, brands, and the language of commerce. Remember: I receive zero compensation for publishing all this content (or “kohn-tent,” as a Russian friend used to say). So your votes are, to me, the equivalent of winning the Powerball or being fully funded on Kickstarter or getting acqui-hired by Yahoo. Or like discovering a treasure chest full of Bitcoin. Vote once (in each category) and vote at once: the contest ends at midnight June 9, German time. Like Bartles & Jaymes in the famous ads from the 1980s, I thank you for your support.   P.S. Congratulations to fellow nominees and blog/Twitter friends Grammar Girl, Literal-Minded, Lingua Greca, Word Routes, Johnson, Back of the Cereal Box, and Sentence First.

SUBJECT-VERB PROBLEMS Find, identify and correct the error in the following piece. “Officials said as much as 125,000 pounds of plastic was on scene, keeping the inferno fuelled despite the best effort of dozens of firefighters.” Chris Thompson and Trevor Wilhelm, “One firefighter injured as black smoke covers city”, The Windsor Star, Wednesday, May, 22, 2013. SO TRUE! Identify the author of the following observation. “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” TODAY’S WORD The word for today is “aberrant”. What part of speech is “aberrant”? What other parts of speech can be made from “aberrant”? Which syllable should be stressed in “aberrant“? Define “aberrant” and use it in a sentence that demonstrates its meaning.

Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning. Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.Give it a try!

What do you do when you’re unsure of the use of the hyphen? Should you hyphenate two words or leave them open? Just do what the editors at the Yahoo! front page do: You’re sure to be right — once. Filed under: Hyphens, Punctuation Tagged: consistency, editing, hyphen, inconsistency, proofreading, Punctuation, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse, naturally”), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”? A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events. And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.” Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours). The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run. John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words are derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.” In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward. Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series. It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding. This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English. To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” or treatment. It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.” The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED. In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”). By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, the OED says.  And that’s how we generally use it today. Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823): “She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.” This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ” We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries. It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722). In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course. Check out our books about the English language

David Brooks has found a congenial story in Google ngrams — or rather, in three papers about ngrammatical history, which he interprets to show that virtue, discipline, and concern for the common good have been declining, while subjectivity and concern for self-esteem have increased ("What Our Words Tell Us", NYT 5/20/2013)). Brooks doesn't cite or link to the papers, which in my opinion is a form of journalistic malpractice, so here they are: Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile, "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012 Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir, "The Cultural Salience of Moral Character and Virtue Declined in Twentieth Century America", Journal of Positive Psychology, Forthcoming Daniel B. Klein, "Ngrams of the Great Transformations", GMU Working Paper in Economics, 2013 I discussed the Twenge et al. paper last summer, with some (non-)replications: "Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012 "Textual narcissism, replication 2", 7/14/2012 "What does this graph mean?", 7/15/2012 "It's all about who?", 7/31/2012 I haven't read the Kesebir and Klein papers carefully, and don't have time to do so this morning, but a glance at them raises an interesting point about the ideological resonances of certain time spans. Daniel Klein's "very casual paper" surveys the past 250 years or so, because he's interested in the "governmentalization of society and culture" which on his view "began to set in" around 1880, "as a reaction to liberalism, the first great transformation". (By which he means classical liberalism, as represented by Adam Smith.) Since Klein is himself a liberal/libertarian, he notes with disapproval the rise since 1880 of phrases like "social needs", "needs of the community", "needs of society", "national unity", "social unity", "our society". He also notes a "long decline" — since the early 19th century —  in words and phrases like "liberty", "ought", "duty", "goodness", "good conduct". In contrast, the Kesebirs are concerned with what they call the "well-established cultural trend in the United States toward greater individualism and its implications for the moral domain", which predicts that "during the twentieth century, words related to moral excellence and virtue" would "largely [wane] from the public conversation". This perspective resonates with the view that moral decline is a consequence of the rise of secular modernism. The underlying ideology, while not precisely the opposite of Klein's, certainly assigns a very different evaluation to the individualism/communalism dimension. Jean Twenge also takes a negative attitude towards the rise in individualism — she calls it "narcissism", just so that we're clear what she thinks about it — but she sees the crucial cultural change as something that's happened since 1960 or so, presumably as a consequence of the counterculture and the hippies and all.  In the previously-cited blog posts, I noted that the trends of interest to her are actually much more striking in the period from 1900 to 1960, and in fact are hard to discern (or even reversed) in the post-flower-power era. David Brooks doesn't mention this ideological and temporal inconsistency in his sources. In general, as I've noted in discussions of his earlier columns, his "unparalleled ability to shape an intellectually interesting idea into the rhetorical arc of an 800-word op-ed piece" crucially depends on skillful editing — or revision — of his raw materials into a form that fits his theme. In one of the posts about Twenge on narcissism, I observed that there had been "surprisingly little uptake in the mass media", and expressed particular surprise that "so far, neither David Brooks nor the Daily Mail has taken the bait". So I'm glad to see that despite the debilitating influence of social democracy, modernism, and the counterculture, Mr. Brooks continues to demonstrate the virtue of self-consistency.