Aside: I immediately assumed that the title was a reference to George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue, also known as "Seven Dirty Words," and sometimes misquoted as "Seven Deadly Words." Turns out I'm not the only one who associates the phrase "seven deadly words" with Carlin; as of this writing, if you Google the phrase (in quotation marks), a Carlin monologue is the first result. At any rate, whether or not Harris meant to refer to the Carlin monologue, his "seven deadly words" are kind of the opposite: they're words that he sees as overused.

And I'm puzzled by almost all of the ones that he and his readers list, because they pretty much all seem perfectly reasonable to me. Perhaps it's just that I don't read very many book reviews?

I may be a little defensive about this, too, 'cause several of the words (such as "compelling" and "intriguing") are words I use all the time.

Anyway, mixed in with the distaste for certain words being used too often, I detect what I think is a certain attitude toward writing in general. Harris starts it off by quoting Wilson Follett (author of Modern American Usage: A Guide and other books) as saying "The best critics [...] are those who use the plainest words[....]" A commenter refers to a word as being "a product of laziness and lack of imagination"; another refers to "great deal of sloppy, lazy writing going on"; another quotes The Elements of Style as referring to critics using words "whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning"; another says reviewers should use more "language every person can relate to."

All of which makes we think that perhaps what's really going on is a complaint about use of words that the objectors see as hifalutin. Reviews, the argument would appear to go, should be written in plain language so that plain-speakin' plain ol' folks can understand 'em.

Which I totally disagree with. I'm not saying book reviews should be hard to understand, but to me, nearly all of the words these folks are complaining about are pretty ordinary words that have pretty ordinary meanings. Is "readable" really meaningless? Are metaphorical descriptions, like "luminous," really so awful? Is the use of the word "smart" to describe a book really so cryptic? They don't seem so to me.

(The one criticism in the list (of those I read) that does seem useful and interesting to me is the idea that male reviewers often refer to a particular feminist poet's work as "engaging"; that sounds to me like potentially the same kind of politically problematic attempted praise as referring to an African-American as "articulate." On the other hand, there are plenty of other contexts where "engaging" is perfectly good praise.)

I suppose part of my reaction is that I have a poor ear for cliches. There are several phrases that I use regularly and see nothing wrong with but that critique groups have told me are cliches to be (yes) eschewed. So maybe overuse just doesn't bother me; maybe I'm deaf to that (um) nuance of language and usage.

And, of course, lists of pet peeves don't have to be rational.

Speaking of rational, I have to object to the other part of the quote from Follett: "[...] and who make their taste rational by describing actions rather than by reporting or imputing feelings." Really? Reviewers are supposed to have rational tastes, having nothing to do with their feelings? I apparently don't live in the same world of reviewers as Follett and Harris; I often rather like learning about a reviewer's feelings about a work.

Which wouldn't have been noteworthy in itself; a weak joke made in passing. But not long after that, Kavi finished her bath (in her little plastic baby bathtub, which the baby bathes in while the mini-tub sits inside the otherwise dry full-size bathtub), and Mary Anne picked her up to put her to bed, and I found myself dumping out the bathwater but not, of course, the baby.

Fulfilling two proverbs in ten minutes! A new record for me, I think.

Btw, an article in De Proverbio, the electronic journal of international proverb studies, notes that the baby/bathwater proverb comes from German, and didn't come into common use in English until the 20th century. (Or at least the 19th.)

I walked down the hospital corridor away from my room. One of the doctors I didn't know well--Dr. Karlson, I think--called out, "Jason, wait!"

I turned around, glaring.

The doctor took out a stethoscope. "Before you leave, I have to check your heart one more time."

I sighed. "Can't I just get out of here?"

"No, Jason. I'm sorry, but there are certain rules we have to follow."

Now: what gender is Dr. Karlson?

It should be obvious that the doctor's gender is unspecified in this little snippet. But something weird often happens when I read the word "doctor":

Not only do I assume that the doctor is male (which a lot of people, at least in the US, do), but I often think that the doctor was explicitly identified as male.

And then a paragraph or a page later, the author drops a pronoun and we discover that the doctor is female. And I say to myself, wait, the author explicitly said the doctor was male, this is not just me being sexist, it was right there in the story. And then I go back and look, and in fact it wasn't right there in the story; it was just me being sexist. Or gender-normative or something.

It's not that I don't believe in female doctors. I probably know more female medical doctors than male medical doctors; I've certainly gone to as many female doctors as male ones; it doesn't bother or upset or surprise me to encounter a woman who's a doctor. And if a story I'm reading clearly identifies a doctor as female upfront, that seems perfectly normal.

It's just that when I see the word "doctor" without any other markers, somehow my brain develops the idea that I've been explicitly told that the doctor is male. It's kind of bewildering, and remarkably (and unfortunately) consistent.

There are other professions that I have a strong gender assumptions for, of course. But I don't generally go so far in fabricating evidence about those.

Delany once referred to the assumptions we make about generic and otherwise undescribed people as the "unmarked state": in the absence of any markers giving us information to the contrary, we tend to assume certain things about people when they're mentioned to us. The unmarked state for a story's narrator (for a lot of us white American readers) tends to be white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, etc. Probably male, too, although sometimes the unmarked gender for the narrator is the same as the gender of the author, or the assumed gender of the author if you can't tell from the author's name.

For me, the unmarked "nurse" is female; the unmarked "guard" is male. Certainly the unmarked "programmer" or "software engineer" or "computer scientist" is male. And there are plenty of others.

But I don't think my assumption is ever quite so strong with other words as with the word "doctor."

(The Perils of a Google-Yahoo Blocking Move, 8 February 2008)

(From Love he won such dule and teen!)

Turns out that "teen" is an archaic or obsolete word meaning things like "grief" or "injury" or "irritation." And a Dule Tree was a tree used in Britain for public hangings; "dule" in Scots and Middle English (according to Wikipedia) had to do with sorrow or grief.

There are a few other web pages that include the phrase dule and teen; most are other copies of the Rossetti translation, but a few are other verses, mostly copies of an Andrew Lang poem. One page defines the phrase as meaning "grief and pain."

The connection to teenagers is left as an exercise to the reader.

BLEVE, pronounced [...] "blevvy"[...], is an acronym for "boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion". This is a type of explosion that can occur when a vessel containing a pressurized liquid is ruptured.

Encountered it in a cover letter for a story submitted to SH.

Pullum's entry is primarily a fairly standard "damn those PC people who are trying to stop our precious freedom of speech!" post, thinly disguised as being of linguistic relevance through a couple of arguments about the use of language. And, y'know, I agree with him that our society has too many lawsuits. And he later retracted some of the political stuff that I found most annoying about his post, after he found out more about the situation; also, he linked to Jane Achson's subsequent guest entry that makes some compelling points about harassment. It's worth noting that there have always been legal limits on Americans' freedom of speech.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about; this is my language blog, not my political blog. So what I want to say here is that in that particular entry, Pullum (whom I normally have a fair bit of respect for) was so focused on making his political point that he fumbled a couple of language-related arguments. And the reason I want to talk about those arguments is that they're arguments that I see pretty often; so my point here is not primarily that Pullum shouldn't have made these arguments, but rather that nobody should be making them.

This got very long, so I'm continuing after the jump.

The invariant-meaning argument

According to this argument, a word's meaning depends solely on its historical meaning; and/or a word's meaning in a given context must be the same as its meanings in other contexts. For example, Pullum suggests that because the word "slut" has been used to refer to things as mild as "bad housekeeping"; and because it has been used affectionately by some people; and because it has been used metaphorically by some people (as in Volokh calling himself and others "media sluts"); therefore, the frat boys who used it in this incident must have intended it affectionately and without any offensive intent. They could not possibly have meant it to be derogatory, because the word has in the past been used non-derogatorily.

This argument is just as ridiculous to me as the argument that because "decimate" once meant killing every tenth man, it cannot now refer to a large amount of death or destruction. Words quite often change meaning over time, and quite often have different connotations in different contexts. Surely Pullum doesn't really think that when someone yells out "you fucking slut!" it's meant as a sign of affection?

I myself use the term affectionately, metaphorically, or for fun in some contexts, and I applaud those who try in various ways to reclaim the word, and I was tickled when I first saw the T-shirt that says "Sometimes you feel like a slut, sometime you don't"; nonetheless, I don't make the mistake of thinking that it's always, or even usually, used in a positive or friendly way. On the contrary, it's usually an insult.

The descriptors-can't-be-universal argument

According to this argument, when someone refers to a class of people (or a category of things) but attaches a descriptor, the descriptor must always refer only to the members of the given class whom the description fits, and can never refer to all members of the class.

For example, if I refer to "those morons at the TSA," then I'm obviously only talking about those TSA employees who happen to be morons, not saying that all TSA employees are morons. Right? And if I say "I hate lying Cretans," I must mean that I dislike the particular subclass of Cretans who happen to be liars--I couldn't possibly be implying that all Cretans are liars, right?

Well, wrong. You may intend the descriptor to apply only to the subclass, but that's not the only reasonable interpretation. In fact, it's quite common to apply a descriptor to a class of people and intend the descriptor to refer to all members of that class.

Pullum did retract this idea in an update to the original entry; he noted that someone else had pointed out that the phrase "Princeton bastards" does indeed suggest that all Princetonians are bastards. But I'm bringing this issue up in this entry anyway because it's an argument I see people make quite often, and it really annoys me.

I regularly see people saying things like "Look, Joe, when I said 'you assholes' in my previous post, obviously I wasn't referring to you; I was only referring to those of my readers who are assholes." It's a technique for making yourself look reasonable while still managing to insult entire groups of people.

My issue with this argument is not an issue with the idea that a descriptor can be non-universal; a great many descriptors are used to refer to specific members of a class. My issue is with the notion that it's obvious that a given descriptor is intended non-universally. In most situations (in English), this kind of phrase is ambiguous, and more context is often needed to make clear which meaning was intended.

For example, if I say "I threw out the moldy vegetables," it's not immediately obvious (to my ear, anyway) whether I mean "All of the vegetables were moldy, so I threw them all out" or whether I mean "Some of the vegetables were moldy, so I threw out the ones that were."

In my experience, most derogatory descriptors (without further context) are intended to refer to the entire class, not only to select members of the class. I have occasionally seen people use a derogatory descriptor to refer to a subclass, but it's definitely not the most common usage, so suggesting that it's the obvious intended meaning is either disingenuous or just wrong.

A lot depends on the details of the phrasing and context and choice of words, of course. "We love promiscuous Yale frat boys" would suggest to me that they were referring to a subclass--i.e., that there are also non-promiscuous Yale frat boys. "We love slutty Yale frat boys" is more ambiguous to my ear; as with the moldy vegetables, I can see the meaning going either way.

But again, my point is that (a) this kind of phrasing is quite often very ambiguous in English, and (b) it's therefore usually a bad argument to claim that one meaning or the other is obvious.

John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply ... that two Americans can become one.

--Blog entry "More on Edwards," retrieved 30 January 2008, 3:28 p.m. Pacific time

This was very widely quoted, and then very widely corrected--within a few hours after the quote appeared in dozens or hundreds of articles and blogs, it had virtually disappeared from the web.

Took me a while to track down the source of the error: the video of Obama's statement shows him saying, to a crowd at a Denver rally, "John and Elizabeth Edwards believe deeply that two Americans can become--that the two Americas can become one." (Starting around 0:50 in that video.)

A Salon blog entry explains that the Obama campaign sent out an email version of the statement that had it as "Americans." Clearly someone made a mistake somewhere. I wonder if Obama was reading from a teleprompter that contained a typo, and if the words on the prompter were from the same text source as the email that went out. Seems like the alternative would be that a staffer transcribed the statement from the speech but left the error intact, which seems unlikely.

The Obama website now gives it as "two Americas"; don't know whether that was originally posted as "Americans" and then corrected or not. Note also that the printed text has an extra phrase in the middle, a phrase Obama didn't say in the spoken version: "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this--that two Americas can become one." This leads me even more strongly to suspect that Obama was reading from a printed source (and modifying it on the fly), even though I had always thought he generally spoke without a prompter.

I don't mean to make a big fuss about this; people make mistakes, and typos, all the time. What made it worth an entry is that (a) it's funny, and (b) it was very widely reported for a brief time--and none of the articles that reported it seemed to notice the mistake. And (c) I'm intrigued by the ephemerality of the web--the fact that an error like this can be expunged so quickly that there remains very little evidence that it happened.

Wikipedia also mentions a third pronunciation that looks like it would sound more or less like "you ran us," which avoids both of the off-color homonyms. Fair enough.

But I would like to propose yet another pronunciation, to both avoid the homonyms and make clear how silly the whole thing is: oo-RAAAAHN-oos. (In ASCII IPA: /u 'rAA nus/.)

It's important to hold that second syllable, making the whole thing sound sort of like a war cry. In fact, ideally the word would be sort of half-sung while charging into battle.

It can sometimes be a symptom of Tourette Syndrome. I already knew that coprolalia (involuntary swearing) was another such symptom, but I hadn't previously heard the name for yet another symptom: "copropraxia," "involuntarily performing obscene or forbidden gestures."

I normally don't list words here whose meaning is obvious from the roots (when I know the roots); I could've guessed what copropraxia is. But I like the word, so I figured I'd include it.