F5 the Sixth: #1: English as she is spoke

Here we go again. Four Fridays of February means four further F⁵s: Four February Fridays of Fabulous Frivolity.

And, one major headache. This is the sixth time that I have done this blog tradition, in which I extol the virtues of my loves, likes, favourites, guilty pleasures, and bad habits. Over the years I've covered such eclectic topics as shaving habits, preferred aftershaves, fountain pens, Godzilla, Doctor Who, wine, spicy foods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Shakespeare, Buffalo wings, 80s pop music, James Bond, coffee, and comic books. That's a somewhat fair snapshot of the simple pleasures I enjoy, so it's actually getting harder to come up with new ideas, unless you want to read me extolling the virtues of, say, tasty ice water, or why spiral-bound books are better than Cerlox.

So I thought that this year I'd do something different this year, and talk about my favourite pet hates. I don't mean the things that I genuinely and deeply loathe, like abortion or Scientology^TM. Rather, I mean pet peeves, or severe annoyances: the things that bug me to no end.

Being a writer by profession, I thought I'd start off with bad writing.

Acronymania

Spotted recently in the wild:

LGBTTIQQ2SA

This unpronounceable and unmemorable letter salad stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited and Allies. Yes, really: someone actually thought this dog's breakfast was a necessity to include every variety of non-heterosexuality under the rubric of inclusivity.

Thanks to the wonder of postmodernism, however, the varieties of socially constructed gender identities are now near infinite. I will note, just for the record, that LGBTTIQQ2SA fails to be inclusive of the following groups:

• deaf gays
• lesbians of colour
• people who prefer to hump stuffed animals

Bigots.

A pet peeve

Achtung!

[dons Grammar Nazi jackboots and Schirmmütze]

I must draw to your attention a new threat to the purity of our mother tongue: the unrestrained use of the term deconstruct, as seen, for example, in this review by Kevin DeYoung (which is pretty good, and you should read it anyway):

Evangelicals can make the mistake of thinking the Bible says everything about everything. They can also be guilty of majoring on the minors or forcing the Bible to address matters it never meant to address. Smith is right to deconstruct these tendencies.

Deconstruction is a form of literary theory, founded in the 1960s by Jacques Derrida, who famously wrote, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is nothing outside the text"). He challenged the assumption that words have a stable reference point outside of other words (there is no objective link between a word and the object it symbolize). Words can only be defined with other words, which can only be defined with other words, and so on and so forth. Nor is there any such thing as authorial intent; that, too, lies outside the text. To deconstruct a text, then, is to abandon all assumptions about meaning, and construct new meanings through new coinages, wordplay, and so forth: finding conflicting meanings for the text and unraveling the points it purports to make.

When DeYoung points out a few inconsistencies in Christian Smith's arguments (e.g. that "biblicism" doesn't work because evangelicals can't agree on essentials, yet Christians ought to get together and agree on essentials), he is in fact deconstructing Smith's argument by exposing areas in which it is incoherent. However, when he concedes that "Smith is right to deconstruct" wacky Evangelical Bible-reading tendencies, it appears that he is using the term deconstruct in a different way. I haven't read the book, but from reading DeYoung's post, it doesn't appear to me that Smith is saying it's impossible to find the Evangelicals' meaning. It's implied that he does understand their meaning. He just finds it foolish.

When you are tempted to use deconstruct when you mean something like analyze, rebut, or criticize, please use another word: for example, analyze, rebut, or criticize.

That is all.

The panda says NO!

The title of Lynne Truss' book Eats, Shoots & Leaves comes from an old joke - not referenced in the text but printed on the back cover - about a panda that walks into a bar and orders a meal, then pulls out a gun, fires two shots, and walks out. Asked why he did it, he shows the bartender a nature book, whose badly edited entry on the panda says it is a native of China that "eats, shoots and leaves." Rim shot. As soon as I read the following paragraph, I knew two things about this book: a) I was about to be subjected to a protracted vent about crimes against grammar, and b) I was going to have a lot of fun reading it:

I don't know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasise it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal. Encouraged to conduct easy tests on television, I discovered to my horror that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow. "I'm an Oxbridge intellectual," slurred a chap in Brighton, where we were asking passers-by to "pin the apostrophe on the sentence" for a harmless afternoon chat-show. He immediately placed an apostrophe (oh no!) in a possessive "its". The high-profile editor of a national newspaper made the same mistake on a morning show, scoring two correct points out of a possible seven. On a TV news bulletin, the results of a vox pop item were shown on screen under the heading "Grammer Test" - the spelling of which I assumed was a joke until I realised nobody in the studio was laughing. Meanwhile well-wishers sent hundreds of delightful/horrific examples of idiotic sign-writing, my current favourite being the roadside warning CHILDREN DRIVE SLOWLY - courtesy of the wonderful Shakespearean actor Timothy West. Evidently, this sign - inadvertently descriptive of the disappointing road speeds attainable by infants at the wheel - was eventually altered (but sadly not not improved) by the addition of a comma, becoming CHILDREN, DRIVE SLOWLY - a kindly exhortation, perhaps, which might even save lives among those self-same reckless juvenile road-users; but still not quite what the writer had in mind.¹

Each chapter of Eats, Shoots & Leaves is devoted to one punctuation mark (or a few related ones). The lesson is served with a generous helping of snarky anecdotes. The best of these is about a teenage Truss tearing her new pen pal, the befreckled Kerry-Anne (who dotted her i's with little circles), a new orifice with a semicolon:

I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can't remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word "desultory", and I think I may even have used some French. . . . The main reason I remember this shameful teenage epiphany, however, is that in my mission to blast little Kerry-Anne out of the water, I pulled out (literally) all the stops: I used a semicolon. "I watch television in a desultory kind of way; I find there is not much on," I wrote.²

Book Review

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss

Gotham-Penguin, 2003

ISBN: 1-592-40203-8

209 pp.

But amidst all the biting wit, the book does give helpful, and largely unconfusing, guidance for good punctuation usage. Many of the examples form a running gag involving Starburst candies (Truss is amusingly resentful of their name change from Opal Fruit), and in the chapter on semicolons, several take a jab at Kerry-Anne and her freckles.

The one thing this book doesn't explain clearly is quotation marks. For some reason, Truss prefers North American-style inverted commas (double outside single), but British-style "logical" placement of other punctuation within them. Her explanation of logical punctuation didn't un-confuse me any more. I think I can see why the American edition was published with British spelling and typology instead of following the usual custom of converting it to American usage: one side of the Pond might completely miss the point!

My edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves comes with a "Punctuation Repair Kit," consisting of a variety of punctuation-mark stickers, which pedantic vandals can use to correct local vendors' signage; and a handful of "The Panda Says NO!" stickers, which I assume are to cover up superfluous apostrophes when your grocer tries to sell you "apple's"³ at $1.49/lb. I wouldn't use them myself, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be immensely satisfied to see that other grammar vigilantes have stuck them on signs all over town.

"Bad Comma", Louis Menand's peevish review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in the New Yorker⁴ points out, in painstaking detail, numerous instances of punctuation at odds with Truss' rules. Perhaps the copyeditor should have paid closer attention to detail. However, it's nit-picky to place a serial comma (a stylistic preference that Truss doesn't like) on the same level as an apostrophe in a plural (an error). Truss is a curmudgeon, but she's not a pedant. Maybe the New Yorker prefers its grammar descriptive rather than prescriptive.

After finishing up Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I sought out Truss' followup, Talk to the Hand. In this book, she laments the death of common courtesy, in such ways as the lack of simple pleasantries (please and thank you); the breakdown of public and private spaces (leading to telemarketers intruding upon your dinner with obnoxious sales calls, or loud cellphone conversations on the bus about how many times and with whom and in what positions); the end of true customer service (so that customers must serve themselves by punching endless numbers into automated attendants); and the Universal Eff Off Reflex (because everyone has the right to do what he wants and to be free of criticism for doing it⁵, "Eff Off," or an equivalent hand signal, has become the expected response to any attempt to rebuke or correct loutish behaviour). It's an excellent read - in many ways more entertaining than the previous book - but here, Eats, Shoots & Leaves gets the nod simply for not merely pointing out what's wrong, but being helpful. I'd be happy enough to have both volumes on the bookshelf, but it's Truss' earlier book that I would include in the library I carry from workplace to workplace.

Footnotes

¹ xx-xxi.

² 104-05.

³ Halal footnote: Or, more commonly around here, shawarma's.

⁴ Louis Menand, "Bad Comma: Lynne Truss's Strange Grammar," The New Yorker, 28 June 2004, 102-04.

⁵ Judge not, lest ye be judged footnote: I sometimes wonder if our prevailing non-judgmentalism ought not to be classified as a Christian heresy. After all, Jesus did say "judge not" (amongst other things), and it's probably the one thing in the Bible everyone knows . . .

Word-B-Gone

Lake Superior State University has released its annual list of "Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness." The university takes nominations through its Web site, selects the short list in December, and publishes the final outcome on New Year's Day.

These are the 16 terms marked for banishment this year:

• Gitmo: Meh. It's not half the mouthful that "Guantánamo Bay Naval Base" is (and doesn't have the annoying accent).
• Combined celebrity names: Like "TomKat." The real problem, of course, is that we're inundated regularly with vapid celebrity gossip masquerading as "news."
• Awesome: Not as in "inspiring awe," but "cool" or "nifty." Unfortunately for the folks at LSSU, slang that's been around for 20+ years has pretty decent staying power.
• Gone missing: Yeah, this is a perennial favourite with the language mavens - apparently a close relative of "near miss."
• Pwn or pwned: Banish it? I don't even know how to pronounce it. "Puh-owned"?
• Now playing in theatres: As distinct from "Now available on DVD and Blu-Ray" or "Exclusively on pay-per-view." I don't see the problem.
• We're pregnant: Yeah, if nothing else, it's cutesy.
• Undocumented alien: For people who don't want to admit that illegal aliens have snuck into the country without the permission of the government. Orwell would be proud.
• Armed robbery/drug deal gone bad: Yes, as opposed to one that was carried out successfully, without shots fired, hostages, or collateral damage. What's the problem?
• Truthiness: Incidentally, there's still more written about truthiness on Wikipedia than Lutheranism, which tells you something about the general worth of that resource.
• Ask your doctor: Yeah, I've often been persuaded by television advertising to ask my doctor if I need prescriptions to pharmaceuticals designed for diseases I don't have.
• Chipotle: Uh . . . and what are we supposed to call something chipotle-flavoured? Maple syrup, vanilla ice cream, chocolate milkshake, chipotle sauce. I suspect some people would rather have the flavour banished, not the word. (I love chipotles myself, but then I've been eating them since before they were trendy.)
• i-Anything: iAgree.
• Search: One comment says that it has been "replaced by'google.'" Only half true. I don't "google" my Word files.
• Healthy food: Specifically, as used to describe the nutritional qualities of foods. Come on: who actually says "healthful"?
• Boasts: As in "master bedroom boasts his-and-her fireplaces"; whereas, as the commenter adds, "kitchen laments pathetic placement of electrical outlets." Well of course not, that wouldn't be good advertising.

Just for your own edification, check out the inaugural list from 1976. See too many words on there that have been permanently banished from the English languages? No, me neither. Incidentally, I vaguely recall Charles MacKay's immensely entertaining 1841 history of popular hysteria, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, noting several slang terms he hoped would pass out of popular usage that are still commonly used a century and a half later. So bad language predictions aren't just a recent thing. They're a way of life.

(H/T: Rebecca Writes. Cindy caught it too.)

You, too, can speak Curmudgeonese

(Last updated June 26, 2014)

Christianity, like any field of expertise, has its own distinctive jargon. And Evangelicalism, of which I am a part, certainly has its own flavour of Christianese.

It occurred to me a few days ago, while putting together an upcoming blog entry, that after several years of debating various positions on the Net, I've both adopted and developed a fair bit of jargon of my own. Here, then, is the first few entries in the Glossary of Curmudgeonese.

Aryan bonehead

White supremist. Technically, I suppose, "Aryan bonehead" is redundant. Anyone who thinks one part of humanity is morally or genetically superior to another, merely because Providence dealt them a different set of chromosomes, isn't firing on all cylinders. I picked up this phrase from an English professor of mine when I was in school.

Cage-Stage Calvinist

Many new Calvinists go through a period during which they become hyper-zealous for the cause of Calvinism and attempt to convert their Arminian friends more aggressively than most Jehovah's Witnesses. Theologian and philosopher George Grant calls this period the "cage stage." New Calvinists ought to be locked in a cage for about the first two years, or until they mellow out and realize John Calvin isn't God, the Reformers weren't infallible, and the Westminster Confession is not a Bible.

Church of the Holy Horseshoe

Nickname for KJV-only extremists who think that even differences between KJV editions in spelling or orthography constitute some sort of Satanic corruption. So called because of their belief that dropping the U from "Saviour" (thus reflecting American usage) actually paves the way for worship of a counterfeit Savior, the Antichrist.

Members of the Church of the Holy Horseshoe are like Ruckmandroids (see below) but even more psychotic.

Conspiracy Boy

Nickname for Texe Marrs, author, radio host of Power of Prophecy, home-church advocate, and Ruckmandroid (see below). As Phil Johnson says, Texe never met a conspiracy he didn't like.

De-Marification

Modern-day iconoclasm! Vandalism of "apparitions" of the Virgin Mary appearing in water stains, cheese sandwiches, etc.

Dr. Petey

My nickname for Peter S. Ruckman (see Ruckmandroid, below).

Excuse, The

The Excuse is frequently trotted out by militant KJV-onlyists, and can be summed up thus: "You quoted a Bible translation other than the King James, and so I am going to ignore everything you said, neener neener neener." Responding to The Excuse is difficult; I prefer to say something along the lines of, "OK, die in ignorance."

Free-willy

An evangelical Arminian; a typical Evangelical churchgoer who believes that the final say as to whether a person gets saved or not depends on an autonomous act of human free will: raising his hand during an altar call and "accepting Christ" as his "personal lord and Saviour," rather than on the free choice of a sovereign God. Many people of this persuasion do not like the label "Arminian," feeling it is inaccurate since historically Arminians do not believe in "eternal security."

Fair enough, responded a number of Calvinists on the now-defunct Fundamentalist Forums one day, we'll call you "free-willies" instead.

Gail the Ripper

Nickname for G. A. Riplinger, KJV-onlyist author of New Age Bible Versions. That ripping sound you hear is the rending of words from their context as she attempts to prove that all English Bibles other than the King James Version are part of a vast New Age conspiracy to immanetize the Eschaton and bring Christianity into the One World Religion of the Antichrist.

God And

Another common nickname I've used for Riplinger, based on her infamous claim that when she wrote New Age Bible Versions, she wrote under the name G. A. Riplinger, "which signifies to me, God and Riplinger - God as author and Riplinger as secretary." This way, God gets all the credit for the bad logic.

"Here doggy! *ring ring*"

Psycho-fundies seem to have a whole bunch of stock responses to those horrible, dangerous positions that go against the "standards" that they have been taught. More often than not, these responses contain multiple straw man arguments and extremist rhetoric. For example, if you suggest that God permits the moderate use of beverage alcohol, you might be accused of endorsing drunkenness, recreational drug use, and pornography.

The sameness of these responses leads me to believe that it might be some sort of conditioned response, like Pavlov's dogs drooling at the sound of a bell. Hence, "Here doggy! *ring ring*" is my "conditioned response" and means, roughly, "Your post is nothing but a knee-jerk reaction."

The Law of Indistinct Induction

A hermeneutical principle employed frequently by psycho-fundies trying to defend their holiness standards. If one Christian approves of a behaviour about which the Bible is silent or ambiguous, but which another, Fundamentalist Christian disapproves of, it is not a mere difference of opinion. Rather, the Fundamentalist shall infer that it is a tacit admission that the first Christian knows the behaviour is sinful, and furthermore, he secretly desires to commit even greater sins.

Shorter version: If a Christian has less strict standards than a Fundamentalist, that is the same as having no standards at all.

Leftards

There are many people whose opinions veer to the left of mine, whom I am proud to count as friends. The world might be a lot more convenient if we just all agreed, but it'd be nowhere near as interesting. I welcome an honest exchange of opinion.

But there are a handful of public personae on the Left that seem addicted to saying some of the most inane things that ever were uttered in the public square. They appear to be motivated less by reason than an overwhelming desire to prove their progressive credentials by uttering outrageous opinions or pushing for the most bizarre policies. There are also rightards, of course, but they don't tend to be the ones who get to publish op-eds in the media. See also stupidsia, below.

Monkey-boys

KJV-onlyists. I started calling them this around 1998-99 when I began to notice that many KJV-only "arguments" were simply poorly thought-out imitations of arguments against KJV-onlyism. Monkey see, monkey do, I thought.

Mushy-headed

My personal adjective to refer to people who have an emotional attachment to strongly held beliefs, but when the chips are down, are unable to clearly articulate why they believe them.

Psycho-Fundy

Some Fundamentalists apparently believe that the mark of true holiness is to "separate" from anything and everything that they can. Psycho-fundies are the ones who circle heaven and earth trying to outdo each other in multiplying and inventing unclean things: wire-rimmed glasses, PowerPoint, pants on women, pink shirts on men, you name it.

Ransom (or RansomOttawa or sometimes mosnaR)

My alter-ego. Ransom is the nickname by which I am known on most Web forums, including The Fundamentalist Forums, BaptistBoard, and Free Republic. (Since Ransoms have proliferated in recent years, "RansomOttawa" sometimes distinguishes me from all the others out there.)

Elwin Ransom is the protagonist of C. S. Lewis' fantasy novel Out of the Silent Planet, which I had read shortly before venturing out onto the Net for the first time in 1992.

Ruckmandroid (or droid for short)

A follower of the theology of Peter S. Ruckman. Ruckman is a bombastic, foul-mouthed Baptist pastor in Pensacola, Florida, best known for his radical view of the King James Version of the Bible - that it is completely without error of any kind, any discrepancy between it and its Greek source documents constitutes new revelation superseding the old, and any other English version of the Bible is corrupt and perverted.

Droids are often called "Ruckmanites" by Ruckman's critics; however, they have adopted the name for themselves, calling themselves "Ruckman Knights" and wielding the sword of truth against the invasion of apostasy. (Tilting at windmills is more like it.) So "Ruckmandroid" is a word I invented about two years ago out of "Ruckman" and "android." Fruit falls close to the tree, as a former pastor of mine used to say, and "Dr. Petey's" disciples tend to slavishly mimic his theories and mannerisms. It's almost as if they were programmed that way . . .

You can tell a Ruckmandroid by the battery of loaded questions and claims they often use on Internet chat forums. "Do you have a final authority you can handle?" is one; "You either believe in a single final authority [i.e. the KJV] or you don't believe in any Bible at all" is another. They call themselves "Bible believers" (as though they have a monopoly on it) and their church signs often say "King James 1611" on them to reassure other droids that they can safely worship there without having their ears polluted, God forbid, by someone reading from the NIV.

Secular brownshirts

Drama queens such as those from the American Atheists or Freedom from Religion Foundation, who object to, and desire to eradicate, any public display of religion or religous imagery, on the shaky Constitutional grounds that swearing on a Bible or having a Christmas card on a bulletin board in a public office violates the separation of church and state. (I believe I borrowed this turn of phrase from Mark Shea.) See also vampires, below.

Spooftexting

"Prooftexting" is a favourite means of establishing a point of doctrine or practice, especially used by Fundamentalists. Various Bible verses are trotted out to prove some point or other. More often than not, the verse in question is decontextualized, whereas in its proper context it would have little or nothing to do with the subject at hand.

For example, Exodus 28:42 is often cited as "proof" that women should not wear pants because "breeches" are described as men's garments, and/or that the biblical definition of "nakedness" extends to covering the thighs. This interpretation ignores the fact that the "breeches" in question are specifically part of the priest's costume (and hence would be forbidden to laymen as well if the proof-texter were consistent), and the specific reason for their length was to protect the dignity of the priest's office in case someone caught a peek inside his robes and saw his privates.

"Spooftexting" goes one step further: posting nothing but bare Bible references, without explanation, and the more the better. Their relevance to the question at hand is simply assumed, never given. After all, who would dare question the Bible?

Stupidsia

The opposite of intelligentsia: self-appointed, self-important pundits whose opinions are poorly written, ill-informed and less than enlightening. See also leftards, above.

"Those horrible, dangerous ....."

Any otherwise innocuous object or idea that Someone, Somewhere has deemed unfit for human exposure because they might get the wrong ideas. Examples: Religious symbols on public display, ultrasounds of the unborn, or books not found in the libraries of Fundamentalist Bible colleges.

Vampires

Ever see the way secular brownshirts (see above) recoil in horror at the sight of a cross on public display, or a public Bible reading? I used to think they were just obnoxious. Now, I'm convinced that they are actually undead and in mortal fear of being vanquished from a world where every Christian is a potential Van Helsing.

"You gotta laugh"

Standard response to the more ridiculous assertions made by KJV-onlysts, particularly those that have been repeated over and over and over and over and . . . Apparently, KJV-onlyists never get their heads together and compare notes to find out which lies have already been refuted.