Grammar

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.” An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process: Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name. Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,”a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on: “This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.” The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist: Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.) For now, let’s call it shmeat. Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content. “Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation. As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”) Words beginning with shm- indicate mockery or derision in Yiddish (see shmo, shmendrick, shmegegge, shmuck, etc.), and the pattern has been adopted in dismissive English reduplications like fancy-shmancy. (See my recent post, “Name, Shmame,” and related links.) __ Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.

At least it should be Tobey Maguire and Quai Laubeuf in this photo caption from Yahoo! Movies: Apparently the ability to spell — or even do a Google search — is not a requirement at Yahoo!.  Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: bad spelling, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, Quai Laubeuf, spelling, spelling error, spelling mistake, Tobey Maguire, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Movies

Alison Dye’s novel The Sense of Things (1994) has a conversation between the narrator, Joanie, and her friend-to-be, Jesus, in which Jesus nervously corrects himself twice in an effort to speak more properly. Joanie has gone to Jesus to order new flooring for the shop she works in, and Jesus is explaining the sheet approach to her: ‘Installation is slightly easier with the sheeting and therefore cuts down on your labour costs. We would unroll it and cut as we go, from the wall out. However, with a sheet you are stuck with the one colour or print except for the borders which you can be a little creative with, if you like. I mean, with which.’ He coughed. After a brief exchange about the relative advantages of tiles, Jesus continues: ‘I like to advise customers that the replacement tiles will always be slightly different in shade than – I mean from, sorry – the original because of wear and tear.’ So we have preposition stranding (which you can be creative with vs. with which you can be creative) and idiomatic variation (different than vs. different from) deployed as usage shibboleths which the speaker rewords to present himself more professionally. He code-switches awkwardly and self-consciously. The author’s use of preposition stranding for this purpose is unremarkable, since it’s one of the best known historical usage disputes, a source of contention ever since John Dryden invented the rule in the 17th century. Different than as a style peeve is far less notorious, and is therefore more interesting here. If you were asked to name a dozen ways someone might correct their own speech in order to sound more proper, I suspect few would include different than – though it was among the 36 questionable examples in my Usage Peeve Bingo card. The phrase elicits strong reactions, though, as can be seen in the comments to my post on different from/than/to, where debate over these phrases’ relative acceptability periodically reignites. Incidentally, I used The Sense of Things in a bookmash last year, and am glad I finally got around to reading it. Filed under: books, grammar, language, usage Tagged: Alison Dye, books, code switching, correction, different than, formal English, grammar, language, phrases, prepositions, speech, usage

Q: Why are so many things going viral? Pictures of cute puppies or kittens or kids may be widely seen on YouTube, but “viral”? An ugly image, and it’s wildly overused. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. And now you can move on to your next complainer. A: The verbal phrase “go viral” may be going viral these days, but we kind of like the imagery: the rapid spread of a YouTube video likened to a virus running amok. The noun “virus” has been around in one sense or another since the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes from a classical Latin term for a poisonous secretion, a malignant quality, and animal semen, among other things. When it entered English sometime before 1398, the OED says, the noun referred to either semen or pus, but it later came to mean any infectious substance in the body. It wasn’t until the early 20th century, though, that the term was used in its modern medical sense, which Oxford defines this way: “An infectious, often pathogenic agent or biological entity which is typically smaller than a bacterium, which is able to function only within the living cells of a host animal, plant, or microorganism, and which consists of a nucleic acid molecule (either DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protein coat, often with an outer lipid membrane.” In the 1970s, according to published references in the OED, the word “virus” took on its familiar figurative sense in computing: “A program or piece of code which when executed causes itself to be copied into other locations, and which is therefore capable of propagating itself within the memory of a computer or across a network, usually with deleterious results.” OED citations indicate that the adjective “viral” first showed up in the late 1940s and the verbal phrase “go viral” in the late 1980s. The adjective was used at first in the medical sense. A 1948 citation from a medical work, for example, refers to “viral agents.” By the late 1980s, the OED says, the adjective was being used in the marketing sense to describe the “rapid spread of information (esp. about a product or service) amongst customers by word of mouth, e-mail, etc.” A Sept. 31,1989, article in PC User, for example, describes the “viral marketing” of Macintosh computers. The OED’s earliest citation for “go viral,” the usage you’ve asked about, is from How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office (2004), a collection of accounts by young people who influenced elections: “Their petition also went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks.” Check out our books about the English language

O Grafton, Mrs. Grafton, I can’t believe my eyes This memo from HR tells us we must “incentivize” ...

As part of your research, you have probably revisited a single problem several times to strengthen your results by applying fresh insights. Such enhancements should, of course, reflect as improvements in your paper, and continued support from your editor can make this possible. The Editage Multiple Round Editing (MRE) service offers the continued support of your editor over a wide range of scenarios, where you may have revised the paper for different reasons and to varying degrees—based on recommendations from the journal reviewer, your supervisor, your colleague, or simply revisions that you have made by yourself. As we make continuous improvements to the Multiple Round Editing (MRE) service, we would also like to share some tips on how you can get the most of out of this service: · Create a schedule: Time often becomes a more crucial factor once you have submitted a paper for review, received feedback, and started preparing for resubmission. At the same time, depending on the feedback received, editing a revised paper may require as much time as revising it. So, begin with your resubmission deadline and work backwards to estimate when you need to finish revising the content of your paper, send it for editing, and receive the final version from the editor. Such collaboration between you and your editor can yield delightful results! · Incorporate all content-related changes: The details on your research, e.g., background, methods, and results, are the necessary raw material that an editor works with to prepare an attractive paper. As journal reviewers or co-authors typically recommend new ways of presenting such details, do incorporate all their suggestions before sending the paper for MRE. · Send us all the comments you receive: Knowing what your journal, colleague, or supervisor said about the paper is essential for the editor to make the changes that improve your paper along the desired direction—where the final paper meets the expectations of those who gave you feedback. · Mention specific requirements: Unlike the first round of editing, where a standard set of language/writing rules can be used for editing, the MRE is influenced by individual preferences—those of your reviewers and, indeed, your own preferences. Think of whether you want the editor to check the entire document or only specific parts; to convey a new idea or present the same idea in different words; or to suggest a better word/phrase even when the phrase from the first round is correct (yes, this is possible!). We have systems in place to record and follow such requirements. Finally, do remember that the MRE is meant for a revised version of the same paper edited previously. If you are writing a new/heavily revised paper connected to a different aspect of the same research topic, send it to us as a new paper, because editing requirements can change drastically even for two papers connected to the same research problem.

So, I was expecting a list of all the categories of weird ballpark food when I read this on Yahoo! Sports‘ “Big League Stew”: Or maybe the writer meant he was going to precede all the categories with something as-yet unnamed. Or maybe the writer doesn’t know that forego means “to precede”; forgo means “to abstain from.” Filed under: Confused Words, forego/forgo Tagged: Big League Stew, Commonly confused words, forego, forgo, homophone, homophones, proofreading, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Sports

In "The Inca Connection: A Quechua Word Game", 5/18/2013, Piotr G?siorowski compares "a 200-word Swadesh list for Southern Quechua and the Tower of Babel 'Eurasiatic' etymologies", and finds 22 clear matches. He notes that "There are only twenty-two matches because I got bored too soon, but it’s an easy game", and concludes I think I have already demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Quechua people are a lost Nostratic tribe. Note that the semantic matches are impeccable and the similarity of the words is quite obvious to any open-minded observer. Indeed, the matches are much better than many of those in the LWED. The quality of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, in particular, is guaranteed by the fact that they represent statistically certified ultraconserved Eurasiatic vocabulary (Pagel et al. 2013). The famous items ‘mother’, ‘bark’, and ‘worm’ are among them. […] But there is more to Quechua than just its Eurasiatic affinities. It seems to be particularly close to Proto-Indo-European. Compare the Quechua numerals pichqa ‘5’ and suqta ‘6’ = PIE *penk?e, *swe?s, clearly a common Indo-Quechuan innovation not shared with any other Eurasiatic group. I can’t reveal too much at present, but mark my words: you’ll read about it in Nature one day – or Science, perhaps, or PNAS. Certainly the current reviewing standards at Nature, Science, and PNAS (at least for speech- and language-related papers) will allow and even encourage this future bombshell, if only Piotr can be persuaded to hold his nose and write the paper. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to integrate the Quechua data into the statistical analysis of Pagel et al. 2013. While you're at it, you could incorporate the Quechua/Sinitic correspondences revealed in Mark Rosenfelder's prescient 1996 work "Deriving Proto-World with tools you probably have at home". A quote from that source worth repeating: When I first posted this stuff to the Net, one gentleman wondered aloud (wondered anet?) if I might have proved that Chinese and Quechua are related. Some days it's not worth getting out of bed. Similar words with similar meanings do not prove that languages are related. They might point to a relationship– but they might also be due to borrowing ('gung ho' really is from Chinese); they might be due to universal processes like babytalk or onomatopoeia; and above all they may just be chance. This seems to be hard for some people to accept. Just look at ren and runa, or gaijin and goyim, they seem to think– how could that possibly be due to chance? These people should be treated with respect. They are the people who made Las Vegas what it is today. What are the chances of finding maliq'a-style pseudo-cognates? Well, empirically, based on my experiences finding the above Quechua/Chinese list, the answer is "One half." That is, with a little ingenuity, and given languages with reasonably compatible phonologies, you can find a 'cognate' between two unrelated languages about once out of every two words you try. [h/t to Ben Zimmer and Languagehat. See "Ultraconserved words? Really??", 5/8/2013, and "Scrabble tips for time travelers", 2/26/2009, for background.]

What was the writer for yahoo.com thinking? Putting a hyphen in Triple Crown (even when it’s used to modify a noun) is like hyphenating a name. You wouldn’t write “Tom-Hanks movie” or “Barack-Obama speech,” would you? Oh, I guess if you’re a Yahoo! staffer you probably would. Filed under: Hyphens, Punctuation Tagged: editing, hyphen, incorrect punctuation, proofreading, Punctuation, punctuation errors, punctuation mistakes, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page

Luke Johnson, "Louie Gohmert Goes Off On Eric Holder At House Hearing", Huffington Post 5/16/2013: A visibly infuriated Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) tore into Attorney General Eric Holder after his time expired in a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.  […] "I cannot have a witness challenge my character," said Gohmert, as the chairman told him again that his time had expired. Gohmert continued talking as other members of the committee asked him to observe hearing rules and suspend. Gohmert asked again for a point of personal privilege and said that Holder was "wrong on the things that I asserted as fact." The other members of the committee disputed that his contention was a point of personal privilege. "The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus," said Gohmert, in a malapropism for the ages. Here's the audio from the crucial passage, beginning about 4:10 into the C-SPAN clip embedded in the HuffPo story: I can't make out anything (of the crucial phrase) except "…((cast)) aspersions on my asparagus". When I first heard this, I wondered whether it was some kind of down-home idiom. But I haven't been able to turn up any evidence for this view, so apparently it's just an unexpected Fay-Cutler malapropism for "cast aspersions on my character".