language

Omit needless words

  • Reading time:1 mins read

After some months and numerous delays, I have finished reading Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style — all 85 pages of it (102, with the glossary and introductions). It seems that doing so required that I spend two weeks in parts unfamiliar and two hours on a bus with broken headphones. Despite the uncertainty which, on cue, descends upon me as I descend back home, I feel both relieved and delighted by the advice in this volume.

An excerpt; see if you can guess at the root of my fondness:

Flammable.     An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning “combustible” is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means “not combustible.” For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.

My having read the book also gives me a more solid introduction to the gerund.

The next time I am insane, I might revise my entire backlog of articles, such that they no longer horrify me.

I have been suggested to post this. I will post this now.

Do not inject opinion.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Ho ho! I am currently deriving great amusement from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Where has this book hidden for the past twenty-five years of my life? In E.B. White’s coffin, perhaps?

Jolly good.

It’s torrentulating outside. Could this be hurricane Residue?

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The Good:

Old English gōd has a Germanic source; it is related to Dutch goed and German gut.

The Ugly:

Ugly is from Old Norse uggligr ‘to be dreaded’, from ugga ‘to dread’, therefore the primary sense reflects the effect on the observer rather than the appearance itself of the person or object observed.

And The Bad:

The source of this derogatory adjective is not altogether clear but is perhaps Old English bǽddel ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘womanish man’, and so it probably owes its semantic core to homophobic feelings. The sense is refelcted in the obsolete word badling (Old English) which was an ‘effeminate or worthless man’.

Source: The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories; Glynnis Chantrell, ed. Oxford University Press (UK), 2002

“Beoo-wuuUUUUUURrf!!”

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I picked up the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf in the bookstore. Wow. This was just recently completed, and has been highly-praised. I think I see why.

In high school we read it in the original Anglo-Saxon, with a bevy of footnotes. This is a bilingual edition, laid out beautifully with the Anglo-Saxon on the left and a flowing, interesting translation on the right. Breaks are inserted. Weird changes in the text, where there are unlabeled poems-within-poems in the original, are now in italics and set off and written in a somewhat different meter to reflect the aside. There are tiny notes in the right margin to give quick passing reference or explanation to what’s going on in each stanza or section. The introduction is extremely deep, helpful, and interesting.

And the cover’s really neat.

Also, now that I can actually read the fool thing, I can see a lot of from whence Tolkien reaped his ideas. I knew he taught himself Anglo-Saxon when he was in grade school or something of the silly sort and became quickly fluent in it, and it was obvious that Beowulf was one of his influences for his work. But yikes. Actually, he was one of the most vital scholars of the work, ever. He singlehandedly changed the way it was viewed, skewing it as an artistic work of an individual rather than some kind of chronicle of accumulated and traditional information.

Reading the translation discourages and inspires me, just from how well it flows and how verbose and eloquent it manages to be. Elegant, in the sense that it is wordy with few words.

Something about which I wonder, however: the semi-line break I have oft seen in Shakespeare and the like. For instance:

    Enraptured by neutrons, he wept;
                                                      and yet forever it fell
    upon the wayside of his daughter’s carpet; she never cared
    for the pumpernickel sample encroached in her slumber that eve.

    (Heaney, 1441)

In some cases it’s obvious and makes sense — such as when a long quote ends partway through a line. This line of verse must be completed, and yet the remainder is set off to make the end of the quote and the beginning of the next thought more obvious. Maybe that’s really what it is. A sort of a stanza/paragraph break where it seems one is needed but where doing so would sever a line. Interesting.