On the April 5 edition of 60 Minutes, long-time correspondent Morley Safer opened his segment on Wikipedia by referring to it as “the greatest argument-settler wrought by man.”  That’s April 5, 2015.  Really?  We’re still saying and hearing phrases like “known to man” or “mankind has always . . .”?  And even on a TV show with some claim to intellectual respectability like 60 Minutes? [Read more…]

“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  The characters don’t have to speak in stilted, outdated ways; they need only avoid expressions that are way ahead of their time.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…]