Submersed/Immerged In My Studies

I need to post something in here, and I've been wrestling with words a lot, so I think I'll double-back to that tack, if no one minds.

By which I mean, I'm nearing one full year as a hired employee of a local health and medical marketing agency, for which I fulfill the capacity of QA specialist, proofreader and copy editor. I could not be more pleased: on top of friendly and interesting staff, more than a spacious creative office, and beyond the stunning view of St. Anthony Falls and the Stone Arch Bridge—I am a valued member of a dynamic and cohesive team, and my function is to clear up the language we speak. I could not be more pleased.

Essential reading for this work are John McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by which the nascent editor will learn to take some power away from grammarians and lend it to linguists. No longer do you defend the idiosyncrasies of the American English dialect as "that's just how it is" (per those horrible Victorians, who just pulled stuff out of their butts and declared it Scripture); you can step up and say "this is where it came from and why we still use it". Isn't that exciting?

Creating Words and Worlds

Many people may not know this about me, but I love to play with word roots, like Greek and Latin pre/suffices. To borrow the vulgar argot: "It's just the funnest thing." I'd always been curious about this as a game, you know, creating new words (or discovering obscure ones, as with circumversion—thought I made it up, but it totally existed) out of these components. It's a useful exercise, not just for learning and memorizing these roots but as a creative tool: a new word can evoke images, suggest a culture or a new world.

I've been making my own lists of word components, but here are a couple resources for Greek and Latin medical beginnings and endings:

• Wikipedia
• Nat'l Library of Medicine
• About.com
• English words categorized by prefix and suffix

And now, a selection of made-up words that I may do something with later.

tocometer

a tool to analyze and measure one's children (Ex.: Either my tocometrics are way off, or you're eating too much sugar, young man.)

necrophore

one who transports corpses/carcasses (Ex.: Consarn it anyway! Whar's that blasted necrofer at? This here body needs ta git throwed into Potter's Field 'fore it 'splodes in this heat!)

demolatry

adoration of the common people (Ex.: No one with that much money can claim to be a demolatrix, I assure you.)

Friends and Dining Abroad

On my main blog, I built (for the sake of building) a Page of naive but well-intentioned tips for traveling throughout SE Asia. I did the best I could with it, attempting to show how to say three important and handy phrases for wherever they go: hello, thank you, and (very) delicious. Using even this little of the language will put you on people's good side and make your interactions more positive, as folks living overseas are used to tourists blowing through their proud nation and not making any effort to learn their language.

On Postcrossing, I listed in my profile that I'd like to learn these phrases from other nations—when people send me postcards, they come from all nations around the globe—and many senders have been nicely compliant with this request. Here's a summary of what I've got so far:

Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Quiz

Just a little blurb between breaking news stories and startling events in the worlds of Language and Postal Services:

If you're reading this blog, you'll find it worthwhile to haunt Merriam-Webster's games section. Lovely crosswords and other games, usually gadgets retooled to center around words instead of garden creatures or gems. You know what I mean.

But what's really cool, what I really enjoy, is their Vocabulary Quiz! You get ten words that pop up sequentially, and each one has four attendant words: you race against the clock to select the best synonym. It's a real test of vocabulary--many of the words are easy or medium, but once in a while they throw in hard or genuinely obscure words.

On the other hand, if you have a good vocabulary, it's simply a physical test of hand-eye coordination and response times. My first score was 3200 points, pretty good for my age bracket (oh yes, they show you how other people your age did!), the average score being 2730. I improved that to 3800 points, and yesterday I scored 3940, after three tries. A lot of that is luck, of course, when the obscure word happens to be one I know.

That leads me to believe a perfect score would be 4000 points, and the only thing that holds me back is my response time. I'll have to be satisfied with that.

Various Forms of Water

You know how things come in trends? Like, someone mentions an unusual word, and for the next two weeks you overhear it in conversation, catch it in a TV show or movie, or see it in print media?

"Water" has been like that for me. Certain expressions have been coming up and I started to get them confused in my head (if I was ever clear on them). For my own clarification, I just wanted to render these here so I don't get them mixed up again.

jerkwater

Remote or insignificant.

backwater

Reservoir of water welling up behind an obstruction.

(of the) first water

Of highest value or purest quality.

The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the first term comes from American carnival slang, a contemptuous name for small, rural settlements that had no water tank from which to refill their boilers. Instead, they drew water from any regional creek or stream.

The second definition seems clear once you see it spelled out like that, yet I don't know how I would have ever come across this term in casual conversation. No one I know has ever been overly concerned with "the section which is influenced by the conditions at [a river's] mouth."

The third has a pedigree as rich as usage by Shakespeare, and it apparently refers to the clarity of a diamond. The purest diamond should be as clear as a drop of water, then an ordinal value is added to rank the diamond from "highest quality" to "colored stone."

Not included is "greywater," about which I am absolutely not confused. This is a catch-all term for dirty, used water produced by a domestic environment, everything from laundry water to what you flush down the ter-let.

We Want the Right to Abuse Our Rights

This is an old picture, I don't remember which protest it's from.  There was some kind of political event, and some batch of random college kids turned out to make sure their voices were heard.

And their voices demanded free speeck.

More specifically, they demanded "free speeck," instilling a sense of irony with the use of open and closed quotation marks.  They wanted their speeck to be "free," that is, not free at all, and what they wanted free was their right to speeck, that is, not actually speeck at all.  Whatever that might be.

This quotation mark scramble comes up all the time.  ALL THE TIME.  As a copyeditor working with adults on every level, it is surprising and discouraging how rampant this misuse is.  In fact, it has been abused so widely, so frequently, throughout such a protracted period of time, I'm a little surprised that Merriam-Webster hasn't canonized it and declared it yet another valid convention of speech.

I tried to create a little mnemonic device to help people remember what effect quotation marks have: fresh fish.  Would you eat "fresh" fish, or even fresh "fish?"  It helps if I'm there in person to do the hated air-quotes.  This drives the point home, and hopefully it gives them something to remember next time they're writing anything out.  It's just an interesting semiotic breakdown, to me, that someone could look at quotes being used ironically but interpret them as emphatic.  Fresh "fish," to them, means it's fresh and it's doubleplus fish.  The freshness is regular and the fishness is superlative.  But gods preserve anyone to whom that sounds especially delicious.

As for the egregious misspelling of "free speech," I don't know how to address that.  It is far beyond my ken what may have been going through his head when he thought he would defend the nation's right to free speeck, but first he should have made sure he knew what the hell he was saying.

Or!  Maybe that's what he was protesting!  Maybe there was a parade of editors and proofreaders, and he was defending his right to abuse spelling and punctuation!  That thought only occurred to me just now, and it makes total sense.

My Delirious Love-Affair with Language

Currently I'm contracting myself out (yes, that means I'm my own boss, my own company--so weird to think of it like that) as a proofreader/copyeditor.  People hear that and wince inwardly (or outwardly).  They imagine this must be among the most boring, tedious work in the world, and that I must have a huge stick up my ass.

I can't say one way or the other about the latter, but the work is far from boring.  I'm perhaps unique in that I have a real passion for it and, consequently, I enjoy the hell out of my job.  It's not that I get an endorphic rush out of telling people how wrong they are, correcting their spelling errors, stuff like that.  Most of the time spelling doesn't even come into it: the issues have to do with the slight nuance of one word choice over another, the structure of a sentence or a paragraph, the emotional feel of the text as it pertains to the message we're trying to get across.  I'm cleaning things up, making them look nice, not power-tripping over stupid people.

Because language bears such delicious nuance for me on multiple levels, I'm honored to be trained as its custodian.  And again, this does not mean that I browbeat people until they use formal grammatical structure, not at all: the context is the heart of the matter.  If you're speaking to an adolescent audience, a formal tone will be off-putting and repulse people from your message, even if you're trying to carry valuable information to them.  If you're submitting a job application or writing a column for the New York Times, a street-casual tone would be grossly inappropriate, by the same token, and I think no one needs that explained overmuch.  Rather than dressing language up in a suit and making it sit up straight, I want to see it dance, flow, transform.  I want to see it thrive in as many situations as possible.

Included is a picture of my personal little library at work.  The old Webster's New World dictionary doesn't have a lot of functional value, being several decades old--it does not reflect how people currently speak.  My mom gave it to me as a gesture of congratulations, both at landing this job and finally wrapping up my BA in Creative Writing.  When I need a dictionary, my go-to is Merriam-Webster's, as an American, though I do have access to the OED through my old school account and its etymological value is beyond reckoning.  I also have several style guides: Chicago, NYT, and AP.  Those are just basic, essential guides for professional writing and citation.  They're also a useful plea for sanity when you just want things to look nice, and that itself is the first rule of editing: it has to look nice.  My Copyediting guide also reminds me of the core editing lessons I learned in class.

I also have The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, an informative and fun guide to grammatical structure.  I can write a good sentence, but I can't identify the parts of speech very well.  I know adjectives and pronouns, but I'm not so clear on the past participle or subjunctive clause, and so I refer to this often.  Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog also serves this purpose, through the archaic practice of sentence diagrams.  I don't know how I got a passing grade in high school English, never having learned how to construct a sentence diagram.  Less useful is Sin and Syntax, a former textbook written by a woman who lends herself to judgment.  Her picture makes her look a little dumpy and plain, but she writes as though she were a full-blown sybaritic temptress.  The book is as much a guide to the language as it is her self-delusional manifesto of lush indulgence and sensual revelry.  The author's need to represent herself thusly actually distracts from the useful information in here, but there is useful information in here.

The Artful Nuance was a gift from my wife, and it frequently comes in handy.  It specializes in word choice between similar terms, helping to clarify which is closer to what you're trying to express.  The Idiot's book, Weird Word Origins, was a whimsy purchase I deeply regret.  Poorly researched and glazed in unevolved humor, this book so infuriated me that I set upon it with my red editor's pen and marked it all to hell.  Later, I realized I could have simply returned it to the store for a full refund.  I keep it on my shelf to remind myself to restrain my emotions, even in the face of the most egregious text.  At the other end of the spectrum is The Chronology of Words and Phrases, a gift from a friend who knows me quite well, evidently.  Reading this book, which explains the formation of various words throughout history with their colorful background stories, is like eating an entire box of chocolates all by myself.  I use it as a reward or a pick-me-up.  I don't read it straight through: I leaf through it and am inevitably delighted by whatever I find, wherever I land.