“Next year sees the publication of A Wilderness of Monkeys, Howard Jacbson’s literary re-imagining of Merchant [Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice]. Writing post-Holocaust gives him the chance to exploit the ambivalence in Shakespeare’s text. ‘Who is the hero of this play and who is the villain?’ Jacobson said when the book was announced.”

–Preti Taneja, in an article for The Conversation about censoring Shakespeare

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I’m as big a Downton Abbey fan as the next lover of soap opera gloss, but I’ve been struck increasingly by the show’s verbal anachronisms.  These are forms of speech that nobody would have been caught saying in the 1920s, especially not aristocrats, whose servants speak better than almost anyone living today.  We hear a lot about how the series strives for historical accuracy through consultation with experts.  (The web, however, is crawling with “gotcha” lists of the show’s historical blunders.)  Why isn’t somebody monitoring the dialogue for wording that’s jarringly modern?  The characters don’t have to speak in stilted, outdated ways; they need only avoid expressions that are way ahead of their time. [Read more…]

A recent article about the words comprise and compose for the Chronicle of Higher Education speaks directly to the prescriptivist / descriptivist opposition I wrote about in an earlier post for this blog (“Word for Word,” Sept. 16, 2014).  The two words are like the outside and the inside of a glove.  As the article’s author Geoffrey Pullum explains, compose means to “make up” or “constitute,” as in “a martini is composed of gin and dry vermouth,” whether stirred or, in James Bond fashion, shaken.   The same word can also mean to “create,” as in composing a piece of music. [Read more…]

One reason the young man didn’t immediately see his “me and Jimmy” construction as such a big deal was that it’s currently slang for his age group and younger.  This was one small, but significant, leap into adulthood that the young man hadn’t yet made.  I explained to him that, if he was going to break his habit, he’d have to give it up completely, not just selectively; he couldn’t talk one way at work and then start using “me and Jimmy” on the weekends with his friends.  I analogized: when I quit smoking, I had to do it across the board, absolutely and definitively.  I couldn’t quit at home and at work and then sneak even one smoke at a bar.  Especially tenacious habits like ours, I said, are very difficult to break. [Read more…]