This little tidbit spotted on eonline.com:
Okay, so here’s the deal. If you mean assistant (helper), then the word you want is aide. If you mean assistance (help), then the word you want is aid.
Someone should have been a better aide to this proofreader and offered them some editorial aid.
Brians Common Errors weighs in, also more here. And over at Sentence Sleuth, gimlet eyes spotted this same error in the new “Sherlock Holmes” movie, of all places.
H/t to Emily for this little tidbit, spotted on Overheard in New York:
You should really, really check this out:
I wonder what the penalty is for not turning in your books on time.
H/t to Today in Bullshit.
Pete Wentz wants everyone to know he is taking a permanent vacation from Fall Out Boy, but words seem to have failed him:
Actually, don’t you get it? A hiatus, by definition, is not forever. By definition, according to Merriam-Webster, it’s a break, an “interruption in time or continuity.”
But perhaps you’ve taken a hiatus from your dictionary. I can understand that.
Scene: La Casa de MRP. MRP and S. (age 6 1/2) review a packet of materials that he’s worked on recently in his first grade class. Among them, this:
MRP: What’s this?
S. : That’s editing.
MRP: What’s editing?
S.: It’s when you cross out a mistake and write the answer above it.
Did you hear that, everyone? They are teaching the children editing. In school.
I can’t wait for the next lesson, which I’m certain is going to be “How to Wield Your Red Pen.”
Hat tip to Crackerjack Copyeditor, who gave MRP the heads-up that on this day, February 1, in 1884, the Oxford English Dictionary debuted. According to the History Channel:
On this day in 1884, the first portion, or fascicle, of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, is published. . . . Plans for the dictionary began in 1857 when members of London’s Philological Society, who believed there were no up-to-date, error-free English dictionaries available, decided to produce one that would cover all vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon period (1150 A.D.) to the present. Conceived of as a four-volume, 6,400-page work, it was estimated the project would take 10 years to finish. In fact, it took over 40 years until the 125th and final fascicle was published in April 1928 and the full dictionary was complete—at over 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes—and published under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
And here was my favorite cocktail party tidbit about the whole thing:
Today, the dictionary’s second edition is available online to subscribers and is updated quarterly with over 1,000 new entries and revisions. At a whopping 20 volumes weighing over 137 pounds, it would reportedly take one person 120 years to type all 59 million words in the OED.
No word on how long it would take a monkey, hitting keys on a keyboard at random, to produce the OED, though.
Scott Meets Family Circus
by Scott Gairdner
January 6, 2010
Hat tip: Scott Meets Family Circus and Captain Moondog.
By now you’ve certainly heard of the passing of J.D. Salinger. I gasped when I read it, and then paused to wonder why I was gasping at something that wasn’t really a surprise. After all, as we know, Salinger was quite old and quite reclusive, and except for an occasionally salacious detail that escaped from the cauldron of mythology surrounding him, it’s not like we had enough of Salinger to miss him anymore. And yet, there was that instant feeling that some thing had happened, that some member of American literary royalty had passed on, and that was worth gasping for.
I recall only a feeling of unease when I think of The Catcher in the Rye, which I read at the appointed time (tenth grade) and was then assigned to write a paper in this fancy style called satire, which I had no idea what to do with. So I wrote the paper, attaining something that approximated satire (at least my teacher was satisfied). I accepted without much question that The Catcher in the Rye deserves its appointed place in the pantheon of U.S. literature. I read the rest of his books, because my grandmother kept the old copies that belonged to my mom when she was a teen. None of them really made an impression on me. And I don’t really know why.
In looking about to see how Salinger was being remembered, it seemed appropriate that over at The New Yorker, they are showcasing Louis Menand’s essay, “Holden at Fifty: ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and What It Spawned,” written in 2001:
The world is sad, Oscar Wilde said, because a puppet was once melancholy. He was referring to Hamlet, a character he thought had taught the world a new kind of unhappiness—the unhappiness of eternal disappointment in life as it is, Weltschmerz. Whether Shakespeare invented it or not, it has proved to be one of the most addictive of literary emotions. Readers consume volumes of it, and then ask to meet the author. It has also proved to be one of the most enduring of literary emotions, since life manages to come up short pretty reliably. Each generation feels disappointed in its own way, though, and seems to require its own literature of disaffection. For many Americans who grew up in the nineteen-fifties, “The Catcher in the Rye” is the purest extract of that mood. Holden Caulfield is their sorrow king. Americans who grew up in later decades still read Salinger’s novel, but they have their own versions of his story, with different flavors of Weltschmerz—”Catcher in the Rye” rewrites, a literary genre all its own.
You can also read some of Salinger’s works there (subscription required to read beyond the abstracts).
When I talked a bit with Mister MRP, an English teacher who yes, does subject his students to readings of The Catcher in the Rye, what we talked about was this: is his passing a loss to American letters or just the passing of an old guy who lived in New Hampshire? I don’t mean to disrespect Salinger’s memory with this question, and I’d really be interested to hear how folks are reflecting on Salinger and what he meant to you.
********
Update, January 29: Mister MRP reminds me that a few years back, I picked up The Catcher in the Rye for a re-read. I seem to remember something now about my thesis at the time, which was that the story was really about Holden Caulfield having been sexually abused. So there was that.
I just love stuff like this.
From Erin McKean, I learned about sweet tooth fairies, “a combination of two two-word phrases that, when overlapped, make a certain cockeyed sense. Sweet tooth + tooth fairy = sweet tooth fairy.” Some examples include: drag queen bee, peer pressure party, and victory lap dance. Check out “Sweet Tooth Fairies: The Rise of a Language Mash-up.”
For more like these, you’ll want to check out the Illustrated Sweet Tooth Fairy, website of Graham Hidderly/Burgess (yes, it’s a slash), who coined the term in 2008.
Also, you’ve heard of words such as trim (which can mean both to remove or to add), screen (which can mean to show something or to conceal something), or cleave (which can mean both to split something and to cling to something), these are words that also mean their own opposite. Crazy. Also called contronym, contranym, and auto-antonym, I was delighted to learn the more whimisical term Janus words referring to the Greek god with two faces, one that looks forward and one that looks backward.
(As an aside, once upon a time, a fellow English grad student named a cat who had a face that was half black and half tabby Janus. Uh, yeah, not nerdy at all. It took me awhile to get the joke. I thought they were calling her Janice.)
You can read more about Janus words here, here, and here. And feel free to share your own sweet tooth fairies or Janus words.
When I first read about the California school distract that removed copies of the Merriam-Webster dictionary in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms because it contains an entry for oral sex, it seemed kind of snicker-worthy. But the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. According to The Press Enterprise:
After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across “oral sex” in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster’s 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week.
School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. The dictionaries were initially purchased a few years ago for fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms districtwide, according to a memo to the superintendent.
“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.
“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.
Well, apparently the dictionary is bringing sexy back these days. I immediately went to Merriam-Webster to see what this racy entry was all about.
It turns out the aforementioned graphic description is “oral stimulation of the genitals” and further refers you to (avert your eyes!) cunnilingus and fellatio. Well, gee whiz, sounds downright pornographic, doesn’t it?
I don’t want to downplay the panic in Menifee but okay, well, I do. I find it kind of hilarious that they think that kids (or anyone for that matter) are being corrupted by reading the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The dictionary. Heaven forfend that a parent of a 9 or 10 year old should use it as a teachable moment if their kid comes across a term such as oral sex when they are searching the dictionary for the definitions between oracular and ornamental.
I hardly think we should be standing in the way of kids getting proper information about s-e-x, and any youngster who is intrepid enough to look in the dictionary to find out what it’s all about shouldn’t be dissuaded from educating themselves. It’s not as though Merriam-Webster is some kind of gateway porn. Today the dictionary, tomorrow Penthouse Forum!
H/t @EditorMark and @emckean.
