Throwaway
As I've mentioned before, I never read the Globe and Mail because it's so maddening to find a typo or a grammatical error on pretty much every single page. I read it yesterday over lunch, though, because Jim bought it and it was there and, well, you have to read something while you're eating.
The back page of the first section consists of a commentary on some subject or other and a bunch of what are usually called "factoids". Yesterday's commentary was a delightful piece by one Peggy Lampotang on the differences between French and English, Canada's two official languages; not just on the physical differences between the languages, but on how they make the writer feel when she's speaking them. You can (probably) find the article here, but in case it isn't a permalink, here are few of her observations:
During a French conversation, I can elaborate at leisure my descriptions; the more words, the better. However, in English, I use clear, exact words, with the least repetition possible.
...
The economy of movement in delivering words in English, whether it's from the mouth or the rest of the body, gives a feeling of preciseness but also of control. The French language however, with its constant shifting of the mouth opening, from the jaw breaking "Ah" to the pouting "Oh," while the hands point, close, open, spread, or jiggle in all directions, expresses unbound passion. An Anglophone could see this openness as too dramatic, vulnerable and exposed, but a Francophone could interpret the lack of movements of the Anglophone as rigid and cold.
...
I feel in charge, efficient, and love the flow of English sounds rolling and swishing from my mouth.
When I speak French, I feel sensual, demonstrative, perhaps a bit excitable, but I relish its intensity.
I don't speak enough French to really get that sense of its openness, but her attitude is something I try to keep in mind; that every language has its felicities, its beauties, its own character which means something to its speakers.
English can be sinuous, elaborate, and baroque (just read Henry James), but I agree with Ms. Lampotang that one of the signal qualities of English is its crisp, efficient manner, and I love that about it. It can seem cold to someone whose native tongue is fluid and caressing; a Romanian native I knew called it "an ice-language". But ice has its place, too.
+
Having finished that piece, I tried to read the rest of the paper, and was stopped in my tracks by this line from a review of the new movie The Skeleton Key:
The only person Caroline can turn to with her suspicions that Violet has tricked Ben into believing he is under a hoodoo spell is Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), the handsome young lawyer whom we suspect is in on, well, whatever the heck is going on.
Jesus. Is there not one single copy editor in the entire enterprise? Any decent editor worth his or her salt would immediately have caught that careless, ungrammatical error: it has to be "who", not "whom", because in the second clause, the lawyer is the subject, and "who" is the relative subject pronoun while "whom" is the object pronoun. And if that's too technical for people nowadays, all they have to do is reconstruct the clause using the appropriate masculine singular personal pronoun, which is to say "he" or "him", instead (in this case, "...we suspect he is in on...") and then use "who" if the pronoun is "he" (because both words end in vowels) and "whom" if it's "him" (because both words end with "-m"). It's an old, easy trick and it never fails, unless you don't use it.
+
And then I made the mistake of reading an article about the brave Cindy Sheehan, who is holding a protest vigil against the unnecessary deaths of soldiers in the Iraqi occupation and the cowardly president who's taking a helicopter when he leaves the ranch rather than be driven past her. There in the middle of the story was this sentence:
Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who has studied Mr. Bush's rise, said: "For him, meeting this woman face to face would be blinking. His whole game is to be confident and to appear never to doubt and never to waiver. It's his idea of determination."
And that was when I threw the paper down. (Jim called me a quitter, but how can I read such junk?) "Waiver" and "waver" are not the same thing, as the first is a noun and the second is a verb and they have no point of etymological connection, nothing in common except their pronunciation, and a good writer or a decent editor will catch such a mistake but a spell-checker won't, and it pisses me off that a newspaper with pretensions of greatness--it wants to be Canada's New York Times or Washington Post--would consistently and continually make such stupid, avoidable mistakes.
The back page of the first section consists of a commentary on some subject or other and a bunch of what are usually called "factoids". Yesterday's commentary was a delightful piece by one Peggy Lampotang on the differences between French and English, Canada's two official languages; not just on the physical differences between the languages, but on how they make the writer feel when she's speaking them. You can (probably) find the article here, but in case it isn't a permalink, here are few of her observations:
During a French conversation, I can elaborate at leisure my descriptions; the more words, the better. However, in English, I use clear, exact words, with the least repetition possible.
...
The economy of movement in delivering words in English, whether it's from the mouth or the rest of the body, gives a feeling of preciseness but also of control. The French language however, with its constant shifting of the mouth opening, from the jaw breaking "Ah" to the pouting "Oh," while the hands point, close, open, spread, or jiggle in all directions, expresses unbound passion. An Anglophone could see this openness as too dramatic, vulnerable and exposed, but a Francophone could interpret the lack of movements of the Anglophone as rigid and cold.
...
I feel in charge, efficient, and love the flow of English sounds rolling and swishing from my mouth.
When I speak French, I feel sensual, demonstrative, perhaps a bit excitable, but I relish its intensity.
I don't speak enough French to really get that sense of its openness, but her attitude is something I try to keep in mind; that every language has its felicities, its beauties, its own character which means something to its speakers.
English can be sinuous, elaborate, and baroque (just read Henry James), but I agree with Ms. Lampotang that one of the signal qualities of English is its crisp, efficient manner, and I love that about it. It can seem cold to someone whose native tongue is fluid and caressing; a Romanian native I knew called it "an ice-language". But ice has its place, too.
+
Having finished that piece, I tried to read the rest of the paper, and was stopped in my tracks by this line from a review of the new movie The Skeleton Key:
The only person Caroline can turn to with her suspicions that Violet has tricked Ben into believing he is under a hoodoo spell is Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), the handsome young lawyer whom we suspect is in on, well, whatever the heck is going on.
Jesus. Is there not one single copy editor in the entire enterprise? Any decent editor worth his or her salt would immediately have caught that careless, ungrammatical error: it has to be "who", not "whom", because in the second clause, the lawyer is the subject, and "who" is the relative subject pronoun while "whom" is the object pronoun. And if that's too technical for people nowadays, all they have to do is reconstruct the clause using the appropriate masculine singular personal pronoun, which is to say "he" or "him", instead (in this case, "...we suspect he is in on...") and then use "who" if the pronoun is "he" (because both words end in vowels) and "whom" if it's "him" (because both words end with "-m"). It's an old, easy trick and it never fails, unless you don't use it.
+
And then I made the mistake of reading an article about the brave Cindy Sheehan, who is holding a protest vigil against the unnecessary deaths of soldiers in the Iraqi occupation and the cowardly president who's taking a helicopter when he leaves the ranch rather than be driven past her. There in the middle of the story was this sentence:
Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who has studied Mr. Bush's rise, said: "For him, meeting this woman face to face would be blinking. His whole game is to be confident and to appear never to doubt and never to waiver. It's his idea of determination."
And that was when I threw the paper down. (Jim called me a quitter, but how can I read such junk?) "Waiver" and "waver" are not the same thing, as the first is a noun and the second is a verb and they have no point of etymological connection, nothing in common except their pronunciation, and a good writer or a decent editor will catch such a mistake but a spell-checker won't, and it pisses me off that a newspaper with pretensions of greatness--it wants to be Canada's New York Times or Washington Post--would consistently and continually make such stupid, avoidable mistakes.
posted by pyramus | 6:10 AM
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