I glanced up from my laptop screen to look at one of the TV screens we keep on all the time in our External Affairs office to monitor news around the country. On the screen, the closed captioning underneath the image indicated that someone had said something “was deep-seeded” and I fought the urge to jump out of my chair and rush the TV set because it’s “deep-seated” not “deep-seeded.”
The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the TV is mounted 8 feet in the air on the wall. Lucky TV!
But it wasn’t really the TV’s fault, of course. It was whoever was transcribing the spoken words for the closed captioning. In fact, today’s occurrence is but the latest of many, many such malapropisms creeping into closed captioning. So many that I am wondering if transcribing for closed captioning is now being done by a computer that “hears” the speaker’s words and spells out the closest approximation it can come up with, instead of a person who would understand the subtleties of spoken language and type the correct words or phrase within its context.
It’s interesting that this happened today because, coincidentally, 3 years ago today I blogged about “20 Phrases You’ve Likely Misused” and in the article I was citing was the misused phrase, “deep-seeded” so it felt like deja vu.
I DO know people who don’t typically read books. One of my best friends; I’ve never seen him with a book in his hands, or tell me about a book he has read. I’ve gifted him a couple of books and he’s never indicated if he has read them or not. I know he reads. He reads newspapers, magazines, online articles and such. But I can’t recall ever seeing or knowing about him reading a book.
My late father quit school after the 8th grade and though he was not illiterate by any means, reading was difficult for him. It may have had more to do with his eyesight than anything else and by the time he was old enough to obtain the kind of glasses he needed to see clearly, he was no longer in school being taught how to read. When I was 2 to 4 years old I would climb up into his lap at the breakfast table (especially on Sunday mornings) and he would read the comic strips to me. Around the time I was 4 to 5 he stopped and my mom told me later in life it was because I was reading the comic strips faster than he was and correcting him when he misread or mispronounced a word. It embarrassed him. I have always regretted that, though of course at the time in my young mind I was just showing my father how good I was doing and looking for his praise. It was never, ever meant to embarrass him. Throughout his life I saw him read newspapers and magazines, but I can’t recall ever seeing him read a book.
The article goes on to state that science seems to support the finding that reading books is good for you on several levels. Such as:
Reading fiction can help you be more open-minded and creative – Getting into the minds of other people through stories about them makes it possible for you to broaden your own mind and thought processes and realize that there are things you never considered that are indeed possible.
People who read books live longer – I like that scientific conclusion! And the reasons seem valid.
Reading 50 books a year is something you can actually accomplish – One of my favorite things about Goodreads is the annual reading challenge. You take part in it by setting a goal of how many books you want to read in the upcoming year and then track them throughout the year. This was something I had never done before; track the number of books I read. Since taking part in this for the past 5 full years (2011 was a partial year because I started late in the year and of course, 2018 is not complete yet) my most prodigious year was 2014 when I read 58 books. My least was in 2012 when I read 22 books. Thus far this year I have read 14 books. All of that to say I agree that you CAN read a book a week if you wish, but even if you read a book a month you’ve made quite an accomplishment.
Successful people are book readers – For this, I would say it depends on your definition of success. I do like to see what people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins, and Barack Obama are reading and recommending, but I also search for the types of books that I feel will touch me where I am in my life right now and where I want to go in the future. Personal success is just as, if not more, important than what the world considers successful.
So, what is the secret to getting adults to read books? I’m not a professional in this field by any means, but most likely it is to ignite that love of reading in them when they are children. Especially if you can find WHAT they like reading about so that they WANT to read. I don’t think you can force a child (or adult) to read, especially if they have some condition (like dyslexia) that makes it incredibly hard, but if you can find something that they want to read about, I think you have a better chance of sparking a love for reading in general.
Are you part of the 26%, or the 74%? Do you read books?
Who knew, but yes, there is a Proofreading Day that is observed on March 8th and has been since 2011.
“In 2011, Judy Beaver created Proofreading Day in remembrance of her mother, Flo. On her website, Judy relates that her mother loved to correct people. She thought by creating the day on her mother’s birthday it would be a fun way to remember her, and help people take more time to proofread their work!”
I’ve covered this subject before on this blog with this post, this post, and this post especially. You can see it’s a subject near and dear to my heart.
I’m usually pretty good at spotting errors in things I’m reading unless I’m speedreading to finish something quickly. I’ve been called a perfectionist, a grammar troll, and a few things that aren’t anywhere near as nice as those two labels. The things is, I don’t really try to do so most of the time; these things just jump out at me.
Proofreading my own writing is “a whole ‘nother story” as one of my friends used to say. And it’s for the same reason that proofreading your own writing is a bad idea for anyone; because your mind fills in words or meanings that failed to come out through your fingers.
I don’t have the luxury of hiring a proofreader for any of my blog writing so I employ some tricks based on spellcheck and grammar software and some such as reading my words backwards to do my best to reduce the errors that might creep in. Still, sometimes it happens because we’re all human.
But if I were publishing something that people were paying for, like a newspaper, magazine, or book, I would be damn sure to have at least one other set of eyeballs read through my words and correct any errors that I may have made.
“Because the soup is getting cold.” – Leonardo da Vinci
Back in November of last year, I had the opportunity to attend the Texas Book Festival here in Austin, Texas for the first time. I was especially excited to get to be there because Walter Isaacson was present and was signing his books. I picked up his biography of Leonardo da Vinci (as well as his Steve Jobs biography) and he graciously autographed both for me. It took me until February to work my way through my TBR stack to his da Vinci bio and it was well worth the wait.
I was especially interested in the da Vinci biography because I have always admired his artistic skill, his scientific mind, and the incredible inventiveness of his life. The man took old ideas and reimagined them into something even better and also created completely new ideas, some of which were too far ahead of their time to be possible in his lifetime.
But another reason I was very excited to read the da Vinci biography was because back in May of 2007, I had the immense pleasure of visiting the town of Amboise in the Loire Valley of France and the Château du Clos Lucé, just down the road from the King’s palace, where Leonardo spent the final three years of his life. I count it as one of the highest experiences of my life that I was able to walk through the same halls of the Château du Clos Lucé that da Vinci walked, tour through his workrooms, his living quarters, and his bedroom where he drew his last breath, surrounded by some of his incredible paintings and writings.
I wish that they had allowed photos inside the Château du Clos Lucé, but sadly they did not. You could only take photos outside and on the grounds, which are beautiful, but you would have been so amazed to see the things inside. Paintings and sketches in various stages of completion, inventions, notebooks using his “mirror handwriting”, the view from his bedroom of the palace (which had an underground tunnel so that the King could come to Clos Lucé unseen, or so Leonardo could do the same going to the palace). The bed where he passed away.
Isaacson’s biography is absolutely incredible on multiple levels. Not only does he tell the story of the life of Leonardo da Vinci, but he deeply explores the thoughts, relationships, skill, and talent of the man. Isaacson is a writer and journalist, as well as a professor of history at Tulane University. To read Leonardo’s biography, you might be inclined to believe that Isaacson is also a university art professor. He delves deeply into the artistic style of da Vinci (and how that changed and improved over the years), and incredibly explains the techniques the master employs to achieve the effects that he does in his sketches and paintings. Isaacson makes you appreciate all the more the wonderful artistic works of da Vinci by explaining the technical mechanics that enhanced the talent.
In addition, Isaacson goes into great detail about da Vinci’s engineering and scientific thought processes, showing how he imagined the way things should work and then proving or disproving those imaginations through observation, experimentation, and building scale models of his inventions to see how they would actually work in practice.
The last writing we have from Leonardo is a page in his notebook where he is working out a puzzle involving rectangles within triangles. Abruptly he stops writing his observations with the words “et cetera” followed by these words, in his distinct mirror script, explaining why he is putting down his pen. “Because,” he writes, “the soup is getting cold.”
The tomb where Leonardo da Vinci was interred at Château du Clos Lucé
On May 2, 1519, three weeks after he turned 67, Leonardo da Vinci passed away in his bed at Clos Lucé. There is a painting done afterward called “The Death of Leonardo” that shows the King cradling the head of this genius of a man, but historians are divided on whether that actually happened or not.
At 525 pages, Isaacson’s book is a hefty read, but not one word, sentence, paragraph, page, or chapter is wasted. And while it contains all the facts of da Vinci’s art, engineering and science accomplishments, he also lays out the kind of life Leonardo lived. How he thought, what his reasonings were, and why he took the actions that he did at different phases of his life.
If you want to examine the life and work of one of the greatest thinkers and artists of our time, the true Renaissance Man, then Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci is the book you should read.
I’m a big fan of constantly expanding my vocabulary, mostly for my own benefit because I learned a long time ago that most people don’t do so and tend to look askance at those who do.
And, as a writing instructor told me many, many times, “Don’t use a big word when a small one will do.” Or words to that effect. But it just so happens that I LIKE an author who uses some words I may not be familiar with. It gives me an opportunity to learn new words.
Science Fiction has always been my favorite genre, both in books and movies. I started early with the Tom Swift books and thereafter quickly fell in love with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and other Science Fiction writers, as well as TV shows like Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Star Trek.
So I am happy to celebrate the unofficial observance of National Science Fiction Day, observed on January 2nd each year because that date is the birthdate of Isaac Asimov.
This is, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story when it comes to our history in dealing with Native Americans in the 1800’s as we moved across this land making promises that we broke and signing treaties we had no intention of honoring.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in front of the Wounded Knee Memorial on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Because I am in the area for a few months and serving the people of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, I wanted to learn more about the history of the people who were here before the rest of us. The sad, plain truth is that our ancestors and our government took the good will that Native Americans offered us and threw it back in their faces by lying to them, cheating them and stealing their land from them. Their culture was broken and almost eradicated. A great people, at peace with themselves, their land, and their fellow man, have almost been destroyed, both figuratively and literally.
As a child I grew up on books, TV shows, and movies that pretended to tell the stories of the old west. Almost without exception, the Indians were always the bad guys. When children in the neighborhood played “Cowboys and Indians” no one ever wanted to be the Indians. They were the bad guys and they always died at the hands of the good guys, the Cowboys.
Read this book and you’ll read that nothing could be farther from the truth. Nothing is ever as black and white as we are led to believe. It is true today and it was true then.
No reflection on the book at all, for I only believe it records the truth of the day, but all I feel after reading it is shame.
A couple of weeks ago I took my three oldest grandchildren to Orlando International Airport to give them a tour of the main terminal and all the shops, eateries and entertainment locations. I would say they were slightly rambunctious, though overall very well-behaved. We had a good time!
Rambunctious
[ram-buhngk-shuh s]
adjective
1.difficult to control or handle; wildly boisterous: a rambunctious child.
2.turbulently active and noisy: a social gathering that became rambunctious and out of hand.
With the release last week of the Ashley Madison hacked database, making clandestine the Word Of The Week seemed like a natural choice.
clandestine
[klan-des-tin]
adjective
1.characterized by, done in, or executed with secrecy or concealment, especially for purposes of subversion or deception; private or surreptitious:
Their clandestine meetings went undiscovered for two years.
Origin of clandestine
Latin
1560-1570 Latin clandestīnus, equivalent to *clande, *clamde, variant of clam secretly (with -de adv. particle) + -stīnus, probably after intestīnusinternal;
Do you ever get confused about proper pronoun usage? Are you unsure about which pronoun form to use when a possessive 1st person plural is needed? Or when it’s a subject pronoun for a 3rd person plural usage? If so, then this Pronoun Chart from Grammarly may be just what you need to ensure that you use the proper pronoun in the proper format.
You may be looking at this word and thinking you have no idea what it is, but if you’re even passingly familiar with Star Wars then you DO know it without realizing it.
Anastrophe
\uh-NASS-truh-fee\
noun
Definition: inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect. The name for this kind of syntactical inversion is anastrophe, from the Greek verb anastrephein, meaning “to turn back.”
Examples:
“Powerful you have become Dooku, the dark side I sense in you.” Fans of Star Wars will recognize Yoda’s line in Attack of the Clones. Others might guess that Yoda is the speaker because of the unconventional syntax that is the hallmark of Yoda’s speech. (In typical Yoda fashion, the subject is second instead of first in both clauses—it follows a predicate adjective and the direct object, respectively.)
President John F. Kennedy employed anastrophe for rhetorical effect when he inverted the typical positive-to-negative parallelism in his famous line “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
In poetry, anastrophe is often used to create rhythm, as in these lines from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: “So rested he by the Tumtum tree, / And stood awhile in thought.”
Dilbert is hoping to coax himself into writing that novel by employing the unspoken pressure that results by telling everyone he’s writing a novel. His goal is that he will be held accountable to his writing by telling all of his family and friends that he is putting words to paper or perhaps words to screen.
But we all know how that turns out.
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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (74)
The Stand by Stephen King (41)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (39)
Bird Box by Joshua Malerman (36)
As you can see, Stephen King books took 6 of the top 10 places. My only real argument with the King placements is that I would move “It” to number 1 and drop “The Shining” to number 2. The other King books I might have a little difference of opinion about where they rank, but not enough to actively dispute their placement.
I haven’t read ANY of the other books, which is fine because they give me some apparently good stories to add to my “To Be Read” list. I also found it curious that Dean Koontz is not included as he’s had some scary books in the past.
My biggest “beef” is the lack of inclusion of one of the BEST horror writers; Robert R. McCammon. I actually found McCammon’s “Swan Song” and “Stinger” to be far more frightening than most of King’s works. He pulls you into his stories and then you find yourself clawing your way out in fear. It’s a shame that none of his works found their way into this top 10 survey.
But the upside of my unhappiness is that it has reminded me that it has been years since I read the titles above, and others of his, so I need to dig them out and re-read them when I get to our cabin next month…all alone in the woods.
I have never seen the Johnny Depp movie “The Libertine”, nor have I eaten at a restaurant named “The Libertine” (real), or had drinks at a bar (real) or pub (real) named “Libertine”, or enjoyed the taste of a “Libertine Ale” (real), or, to the best of my knowledge, inhaled the fragrance of White Musk Libertine (real) perfume.
But I do remember, when first stumbling across the word in my late teens, having an idea for a man who during the day pretended to be a conservative but at night donned a mask and costume to become “The Libertine”, scourge of the straight-laced.
Libertine
lib·er·tine
ˈlibərˌtēn/
noun
a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.
The recent situation with the Confederate Flag and its origin, history and place in modern culture reminded me of a word I first discovered way back in my junior high school (better known as the Stone Age to modern readers) Social Studies class.
Or, to be more precise, I discovered it in the school library.
In Social Studies, on a Friday, we were discussing flags of the world and I asked the teacher if there was such a thing as a person who was an expert in flags.
“Why don’t you research that and report back on it next week?”, he replied, which is teacher-speak for, “I don’t know, so I’ll turn it back on you to provide an answer.”
During lunch, I stopped by the school library and asked the matronly librarian the same question.
(By the way, there was a time in my young life that I wanted to be a librarian, though I’d never seen a male librarian up to that point, because I thought librarians were the smartest people in the world. And they got to be around BOOKS all day!)
She returned with a volume of the encyclopedia and a Webster’s dictionary opened to the word, “Vexillology” and I trotted off to an empty table to copy down the information. When I got home I checked our own encyclopedia, but the information was the same. Monday, my Social Studies teacher asked if I had found the answer to my question and I gave my short report that affirmed there was such a thing as a person who was an expert in flags; a vexillologist.
Vexillology
noun vex·il·lol·o·gy \ˌvek-sə-ˈlä-lə-jē\
Definition of VEXILLOLOGY
: the study of flags
— vex·il·lo·log·ic \(ˌ)vek-ˌsi-lə-ˈlä-jik\ or vex·il·lo·log·i·cal \-ˈlä-ji-kəl\ adjective
Here’s a word, if you’re an American, that you would be more apt to find in news accounts, books or magazines from elsewhere in the world because it is seldom used in the U.S. but is common in international language. The definition explains why;
interpellate \in-ter-PELL-ayt\
Definition
verb
:
to question (someone, such as a foreign minister) formally concerning an official action or policy or personal conduct
Examples
At the international tribunal, U.N. officials interpellated the premier about his country’s acquisition of illegal weapons.
“The group noted that Mr. Lotilla was being interpellated at the time by Rep. Elpidio F. Barzaga, Jr., a member of the majority bloc who supported the fare hike.” — Melissa Luz T. Lopez and Vince Alvic Alexis F. Nonato,Business World, January 23, 2015
Interpellate is a word you might encounter in the international news section of a newspaper or magazine. It refers to a form of political challenging used in the congress or parliament of many nations throughout the world, in some cases provided for in the country’s constitution. Formal interpellation isn’t practiced in the U.S. Congress, but in places where it is practiced, it can be the first step in ousting an appointed official or bringing to task an elected one. The word was borrowed from the Latin terminterpellatus, past participle of interpellare, which means “to interrupt or disturb a person speaking.” The “interrupt” sense, once used in English, is now obsolete, and interpellate should not be confused with interpolate, which means “to insert words into a text or conversation.”
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While reading Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion” last week, I came across the word “sere” and one of the cool things about reading an ebook is that you can highlight a word in question and see the definition IF you have a wireless connection. At the time, I did not and I had to use my iPhone, which always has a data connection, to look up the meaning of this word.
Language is so wonderful! Even as you think you have a pretty wide-reaching vocabulary, someone, usually a writer, but in this case a very intelligent and well-read justice of the Supreme Court, will introduce you to a new word or phrase that you had never heard before.
This past week Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of his co-supremes majority decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act against a court challenge by accusing his assenting colleagues of “interpretive jiggery-pokery”, which sent me scurrying to my dictionary to identify this phrase I had never heard before.
I’m sure more than a few people (OK, maybe it was just me) thought that the Supreme Court Justice was making up a word, since he had stated that, “Words no longer have meaning…” and suspected he was illustrating that point with the seemingly nonsensical phrase, Jiggery-pokery. However, it turns out he was using an English term that dates back to the late 1800’s meaning, “deceitful or dishonest behavior”, but it’s even a little more descriptive than that. In popular usage, it meant what we mean when we say “baloney”, “rubbish” or “hogwash” to indicate what has been stated holds very little or no truth.
Editors over at the Oxford English Dictionary traced the phrase back to a Scottish word, “Jouk”, which meant to skillfully twist one’s body as to avoid a blow. It seems pretty obvious that Scalia was writing that the majority justices had twisted their views or bent themselves in order to make words seem what they did not clearly (in his opinion) mean.
But it’s even a little more descriptive than that.
The word, “Jouk”, led to Scots using the word or its variable of “joukery” to describe trickery, or even worse, dealing in an underhanded way. Another Scottish word, “Pawk”, meant a trick. The words were eventually combined into the phrase “joukery–pawkery”, or what is referred to as rhyming reduplication. It eventually morphed into the English phrase “jiggery-pokery” that Justice Scalia employed. A real word/phrase with a real defamatory meaning.
It seems clear that Scalia was attempting to paint his colleagues as people who were willing to bend and twist themselves to perpetuate a trick or in a tricky fashion to arrive at the basis for their decision. Quite the insult, I would think, to his colleagues. He’s clearly not trying to win friends and influence people.
But he did broaden our vocabulary.
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The word “gossamer” has always been one of my favorite words. I know that I first read it somewhere as a child and even though the context (the passage was about a spider’s web) made it pretty clear what the word meant, I still, as was my habit when confronted with new words, looked it up in the dictionary and so discovered that it could also refer to a light, delicate material, such as a “fairy’s gossamer wings.”
gossamer
noun
gos·sa·mer \ˈgä-sə-mər also ˈgäz-mər, ˈgä-zə-\
: a piece of a spider’s web
: a very light or delicate material
Full Definition of GOSSAMER
1: a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm clear weather
2: something light, delicate, or insubstantial
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I glanced up from my laptop screen to look at one of the TV screens we keep on all the time in our External Affairs office to monitor news around the country. On the screen, the closed captioning underneath the image indicated that someone had said something “was deep-seeded” and I fought the urge to jump out of my chair and rush the TV set because it’s “deep-seated” not “deep-seeded.” 
