About six months ago, Dennis Murray, a Fox News producer, told the Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz of his dismay at having to run even a brief shot of a truck caravan carrying ballots from Palm Beach County, Florida, to the state capital to be counted. “It was just funny, looking at it on the screen, like some poor schlub just moving something,” he said. “What’s the point? … Who cares?”
Which spelling is correct—the magazine’s zhlub or the newspaper’s schlub?
In his Yiddish dictionaries, Leo Rosten spelled it zhlub, from the Slavic zhlob, “coarse fellow.” The sound is better transliterated as zh than as sch. That’s this maven’s call; in either case, the word rhymes with rub.
The senses today range from describing a person who is “ill-mannered” (“he acts like a zhlub, that zhlub”) to “clumsy” (“Vassar-Shmassar, the girl’s still a zhlub”) to “oafish” (“what can you expect from such a zhlub?”).
Jerk and drip are long gone; nerd and dork are passé. Is this the time of the zhlub?
Zero Misteaks: The Gotcha! Gang Strikes Again
1/28/2001
“In your pick-apart work on the 2000 census,” writes David Galef of the University of Mississippi’s English Department, “you ruefully noted, ‘Language has its limitations.’Make that limits.”
Yeah, right. (Make that “Yeah; right.”) Although both limit and limitation mean “boundary” and by extension “point beyond which nothing is allowed or possible,” limitation has a special sense of “lack of capacity; restrictive condition; handicap.” A limit is like a line that marks an end, as in city limits; a limitation is a restriction that disables or nullifies, as in statute of limitations.
In an article about an investigation by Independent Counsel David Bar-rett into political influence in the Internal Revenue Service, I wrote that an immunized IRS employee was “singing like a birdie” and added parenthetically, “(hardly an original metaphor).”
“A simile is a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared,” observes Henry A. Jackson III of Pittsburgh, “often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’ or ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life.’ Singing like a birdie is not a metaphor, but is a simile.” Right; and in Shakespeare’s sonnet 75, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” is more of an analogy than a simile.
He has me on the tropes. Both metaphor and simile compare one thing to another, but simile is specific, as in Shakespeare sonnet 97’s “How like a winter,” while metaphor is poetic, as in U. S. Grant’s “I am a verb.” Grant could have said, “I am a man of action, like a verb,” which would have been a simile; instead, he let the reader take the metaphoric leap. A metaphor is like a fragrance that calls up a beautiful memory (which is a simile), while a simile lets a metaphor be its umbrella. (So I strain for effect. A grammarian’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?)
The world’s only best-selling nonagenarian intellectual is Jacques Barzun; he is the kindest member of the Gotcha! Gang, a veritable cavalier of cavil. The author of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years ofWestern Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present noticed that I wrote, “If the Florida Supremes had named a Gore slate of electors, the Florida Legislature would have named its own; some electors in other states may then have been seduced into faithlessness.” From San Antonio, the former Columbia University professor writes: “The needed word is not may, but might, to match the would. Write ‘will name its own,’ then you may have your may.”
Yes; correct. Might is iffy, hypothetical, perhaps contrary to fact; may introduces a real possibility. Because my opening if … would was conditional, it should have been followed by the iffy might. Only if I had used the certain will should I have followed it with the possibly factual may. (It could be that I might get more mail on this, and may well be moved to answer it.)
“While I am at it,” adds Barzun, “I may (or might) as well cavil at an aside in your language column. A bee in the bonnet is not quite the same as ‘slightly crack-brained,’ though it may imply it. The primary idea is ‘obsessively intent on one idea.’ It buzzes on one note. You’re the man for fine distinctions: backtrack!”
Gotchaed again. My irked gratitude to the Nitpickers’ League knows no limits, because its members force me to learn my limitations.
Discussing U. S. Grant’s poetic metaphor “I am a verb” you wrote: “Grant could have said, ‘I am a man of action, like a verb.’ …” But this would not have captured Grant’s meaning. He was dying of throat cancer, in excruciating pain, unable to speak, struggling to complete his memoirs and thereby leave his wife financially secure after his death. He wrote to his doctors: “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I think I signify all three.” No longer a man of action in the conventional sense, Grant was eloquent to the last.
Marc Lange
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University ofWashington
Seattle, Washington
6/24/2001
Now about those two dots above a vowel. In an aside that was a sly attempt to boost mail from speakers of German, I wrote that “an umlaut—pronounced ‘OOM-lout,’ meaning ‘changed sound’—also separates the sound of a vowel from the different-sounding vowel that follows, as in reënter, though in English we tend to replace the umlaut with a hyphen.”
I naïvely confused an umlaut with a dieresis. An umlaut in the German language is a diacritical, or distinguishing, mark placed above a letter to specify the sound. When the umlaut is on a u, the vowel is pronounced by pursing the lips to say “OO” and then trying to pronounce “EE.” An umlaut on an o gives it the same vowel sound as the u in the English turn.
Thus, the German name Müller is pronounced “Mue-ller,” and in English, we insert an e after the u to show that it is not pronounced like an ordinary u.
A dieresis denotes the separated pronunciation in English of two uncomfortably adjacent vowels. As the co-author of the world’s greatest stylebook gently informs me, “It’s ‘reënter,’ not ‘rëenter,’ and accordingly, three words earlier in the sentence, you mean ‘precedes,’ not ‘follows.’”
An umlaut changes the sound of a German vowel; a dieresis splits two vowels that are pronounced separately in English. When two vowels snuggle together confusingly, a clarifying separation is indicated by the dieresis over the second vowel; in naïve, the two dots tell you to pronounce the word “nah-YEEV,” not “knave” or “knive.”
The same separation is needed when the two vowels are the same but are pronounced differently. Examples: with reënter, the e in re is pronounced “EE,” while the first e in enter is pronounced “EH.” The two dots over the second e tell you not to pronounce that as a single syllable, “REEN.” And zoölogy is “zoe-ology” not “zoo-logy.” As army recruiters say, please coöperate and reënlist.
I don’t know about you, but when the vowels are the same, I’m ducking diereses and following Times style by switching to hyphens.
Your essay leaves the citizens of Hawaii in a state that can theoretically neither be spelled nor pronounced.
George Gerson
Westfield, New Jersey
1/13/2002
“Uofallpeople” is the name of the file I must grimly address today. It contains the pointing of fingers by the Gotcha! Gang at the language maven for errors in my columns last year.
On biblical quotation: Let me first get right with the Good Book. In a diatribe attacking senators who were giving John Ashcroft a hard time at his confirmation hearings (who knew?), I directed readers to Proverbs 1:15. My intention was to make the point that “a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Unfortunately, as several pious readers noted, my numbers were switched around and that observation is in 15:1. (However, 1:15 advises us not to associate with thieves: “do not set foot on their paths.” My quoted guidance, while not germane, wouldn’t land you in jail.)
On death and taxes: In examining dysphemisms, I wrote: “When did the inheritance tax (a pro-taxing term) become the estate tax (a neutral term)? And who changed it to the death tax, which has a built-in antitax message?”
The Gotcha! Gangsters Robert Johnson and Harry Allan set me straight: an estate tax (federal or state) is imposed on the net value of the deceased person’s property; an inheritance tax (nonfederal, some states) is levied on the heir who receives that property. Both are death taxes.
On Stalin’s friend: In warning President Bush about trusting Vladimir Putin, I recalled a previous president’s misplaced trust and quoted FDR as saying about Joseph Stalin, “I like old Joe.” Wrong president. It was Harry Truman, recalling the Potsdam Conference, who said on June 11, 1948: “I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin, and I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo.”
On comprise/compose/constitute: I wrote of Yasir Arafat’s Force 17, his personal Tanzim militia, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad: “They comprise a terror coalition, supplying one another with arms, money and suicidal killers.”
Greg Walker of the International Association of Chiefs of Police blew the whistle on this one, suggesting that I should have written constitute, meaning “make up.” He’s right.
The rule is that the parts compose the whole, and the whole comprises the parts. That’s because comprise—from the Latin comprehendere, “to grasp all, to take in mentally”—means “include, contain, embrace” (as if from the outside in). Contrariwise, compose and constitute mean “to make up” (as if from the inside out).
Therefore, I should have written, “They compose (‘form, produce’) a terror coalition” or—equally correctly—“The terrorist coalition comprises (‘includes, contains, embraces, brings together’) not only Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah but also Arafat’s Force 17 and his personal Tanzim militia.”
Loosey-goosey usagists say that the distinction is all but erased, and some great writers have even used the misleading construction is comprised of, but I belong on the ramparts on this one.
On the stickiness of wickets: I wrote about Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, “maneuvering his way through the sticky wicket of the Middle East.”
One neither navigates nor maneuvers through such a soggy metaphor. The wicket, as I am informed gleefully by Lee Child, Jack Kenny and Ben Werschkul, is the ground on which the baseball-like game of cricket is played. When it is sticky, not in the sense of “tacky” but in the sense of “wet, slippery,” the ball bounces on the ground in front of the batsman in unpredictable ways. This metaphor has been extended to a general meaning of “awkward, embarrassing, difficult,” but as Mr. Child notes, “the key point is that the batsman is on a sticky wicket; he is perforce immobile in front of it; the bowler, himself knowing that the wicket is sticky, will be bearing down on the batsman with a wolfish grin.” Therefore, it’s on, not through, the sticky wicket.
Those of us in language’s artful dodge who make a living correcting others must learn to strike a noble pose and take the gaff when we goof. Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected. As FDR said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
Wait—no. That was Harry Truman.
6/09/2002
I have been semantically unchaste. In describing the difference between celibate (“single, unmarried”) and chaste, I held that the latter meant “to deny all sexual intercourse.”
Not so. As a horde of irate and probably married readers thundered, a person who engages in sex within marriage is chaste. Only when the intercourse is premarital, extramarital or postmarital can one be charged with being unchaste.
This chastening (“purifying”) experience of being chastised (“punished”)—all rooted in the Latin castus, “pure, cut off from”—drags me into my annual exercise in self-flagellation. It provides a glorious if somewhat sadistic moment for the Gotcha! Gang.
In an article about intervention in the Middle East, I wrote, “That is why a dovecote flutters.” John Scanlon e-mails, “I can understand a dove fluttering, but wouldn’t a dovecote sway?” True; a cote is akin to a cottage, a place of abode; birds flutter, but their cages and nests do not.
And while dealing with the Middle East, I misidentified Aipac as “the American Israeli Political Action Committee.” Though this mistake can be found almost five hundred times on the Web, including on a United States Navy site, common misusage does not make it so. The name of the pro Israel group is “American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.” (Because political action committees are so often denounced, and so many people make this mistake, maybe Aipac should change its name; send your e-mail to [email protected], not to me.)
In my op-ed incarnation, I’ve been in a running battle with our intelligence agencies about their all-out campaign to discredit evidence of a visit to Saddam Hussein’s spymaster in Prague by the suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta. I called the torrent of self-protective leaks by CIA and FBI sotto voce spokesmen “a misdirection play,” and defined this as a move by an adept offensive lineman: “He blocks his man toward the center; as the defender pushes back hard, the misdirecting lineman gives way, seemingly overcome by the countercharge—as his running back scoots through the hole near the center left by the defender.”
Watch out for those sports metaphors. “What you described as a misdirection play,” e-mails an anonymous Sunday couch potato, “is really an influence block. A misdirection play is when running backs and sometimes linemen flow in one direction and the ball carrier, usually after a delay, runs in the opposite direction.”
I checked back with John Beake, VP of football operations at the NFL, who said, “It’s not exactly a misdirection play; it’s an influence draw.” A call to Bill Brink at the Times sports desk suggested that that could be an influence block or draw taking place within a misdirection play, and my usage required no correction.
When a spook friend then called to say my column was “about a boo-boo,” I said yeah, I know, some say it was an “influence block,” but that’s in dispute. No, my source said, the reason for all the CIA leaks to discredit the Atta-in-Prague story was “that the Company made a boo-boo in not passing on data about Atta to the FBI from Czech intelligence.”
I immediately wondered:What is the origin of boo-boo, “blunder, egregious error”? Why are our spies and counterspies, engaged in the most serious business, using a reduplication that sounds like baby talk?
The etymology of boo-boo is a subject of fierce debate among leading lexicographers. The Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest citation from a 1954 article by Bill Henry, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Defense Secretary “Engine Charley” Wilson’s “recent boo-boo … threatens to become historic,” speculates that it’s a reduplication of boob, meaning “fool” (and not in its sense of “breast,” a vulgarism to be hooted at). The OED holds that boob is a shortening of booby, “a lubber, a nincompoop,” from the Spanish bobo, “fool,” in turn from the Latin balbus, “stammering.” (I suppose that is the basis of booby prize, won for being especially stupid. It is a short linguistic leap from the ignorant booby to the erroneous boo-boo.)
Both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage take a different tack. They argue that boo-boo is an alteration of boo-hoo, “imitative of the sound of weeping.”Webster’s New World ducks any etymology and dismisses the second-order reduplication (changing the second letter to produce a rhyme) as an echoic colloquialism based in “baby talk.”
To an undisputed error: In a recent dissection of compound adjectives, I wrote that “the hyphenation of modifiers rules the linguistic roost. This rule-roosting device….” Neil Greenspan, a professor of pathology, e-mails, “You seem to have your new hyphenated entity backwards.” Betsey Walters of Lakeville, Massachusetts, in-chimes: “A rule-rooster would be a chicken balanced on a yardstick. A roost-ruler is a chicken in charge.”
Just as bad, I defined 24/7/365 hosting as “a host is on duty at our Web
site continuously.” Gerald Dorman of Lindenhurst, New York, notes that “the Web server, or host, is not a person; it is a computer, serving out bits and bytes of data, not paté. What 24/7/365 means is that the server is up and running continuously.” Other members of the Gotcha! Gang argued that logic directs the new continuum to be fashioned 24/7/52, meaning “24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year,” but in language, logic is not roost-ruling (got it).
Many members of the Nitpickers’ League who set me straight by writing to [email protected] (the server is on duty 24/7/nowandthen) precede their corrections with a kindly “Homer nodded.” This is a loose translation of dormitat Homerus, “Homer nods,” a phrase by the Latin poet Horace, suggesting that even great poets have senior moments. (The phrase was popularized by the English poet Alexander Pope in 1709 as “Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, / Nor is it Homer nods, but that we dream.” I sometimes make a mistake on purpose, too, to demonstrate the power of my mail pull.)
As language changed, Homer nods became a mistake. Yesterday, to nod meant “to fall asleep momentarily, as the head falls forward,” based on “to move the head up and down as a signal of affirmation.” Today, to nod means only “yeah, OK, uh-huh.” The original meaning of “to drift into dreamland” requires an additional word: to nod off. And so to bed.
I had always thought that the word boo-boo originated as “bubo”—the infected, swollen lymph nodes that characterized bubonic plague. Childhood hurts and injuries are often referred to as boo-boos by parents who kiss and make them better. It is an easy jump from having a boo-boo to making a boo-boo—an error or mistake in judgment.
Arlene Marin
Orangeburg, New York
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 44