Tag Archives: grammar

Take two adverbs and call me in the morning

Grammarians generally split into two camps, prescriptivists and descriptivists. A prescriptivist tells you to follow the rules, much as a physician urges you to exercise, stop smoking, and lose ten pounds. (Okay, twenty. But who’s counting?) A descriptivist explains how people actually speak and write. As a retired English teacher and the author of a number of grammar books, I have strong ties to prescriptive grammar. Without standards of expression, meaning often sails off the cliff of comprehensibility. Take a look at this sign:

Shop for free?

I get that the store wants to associate shop and save, though you could make the case that customers save more by declining to shop altogether. But how do you shop for free bakeware? This sign may be a promotion — buy a certain amount of food and the store will present you with the pan to cook it in — or it may be something else. The language is so mangled that the meaning is lost. Same thing here:

Are there unnatural springs somewhere?

When everything is up for grabs, words lose meaning. Sign- and ad-writers know this very well, as do politicians.

On the other hand, rigid rules kill creativity. Language can’t — and shouldn’t — be preserved in amber. I used to fume when I saw disinterested, which traditionally means “unbiased or neutral,” in a sentence where uninterested was clearly indicated. But I’ve given up. Just as the definition of nice evolved from “neat and exact” to “friendly and kind,” disinterested has come to mean “not interested.” That’s how people use the word, and most readers or listeners understand. Those who insist on uninterested have lost the battle. Time to move on.

But I can’t give up completely on prescriptive grammar, and not just because I sell grammar books. Standard English — language that follows currently accepted rules — opens doors to careers that require formal expression. To tell someone trying to wedge a toe on a higher rung of the socio-economic ladder that prescriptive grammar is a totalitarian invention is not helpful. Citizens of the reality-based community know that “me and him are working on that case” is not something an attorney should say — well, not an attorney hoping to keep the job.

Yet I love this sign, despite the fact that it breaks the rules:

And mingle?

The thought of patrons of this bar enjoying mingle is just too much fun to edit out. Not to mention the image of a couple dancing to the beat of a football pass or a smartly executed bunt down the third-base line.

So I’ll play for both teams, and console myself with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” What grammarian could oppose a principle containing the word hobgoblin? Not this one.

Where beauty lies

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I’m no stranger to the silliness of advertising. I came of age in the Sixties, when beauty product companies sold a “no-makeup look” that required about a pound of cosmetics to achieve. But lately, those same companies or their descendants have been marketing their wares using some strange appeals. I wager that the average consumer has no idea what’s in these products. Take a look at this ad:

Wild-crafted?

I understand the definition of organic, but seriously — wild-crafted? Are these products mixed in a small clearing overhung with oaks or whatever trees grow in the Black Forest? And of course it has to be a “complete system,” not just a jar.

If forests aren’t your thing, how do you feel about the Dead Sea? Read this one and weep, because you missed the deadline (or the Dead Sea-line) for a session with a haircare expert, who came, as the sign says

Which 26 minerals?

I don’t know how many minerals are in my shampoo. Twenty six sounds like a lot. But the more the merrier – or the shinier.

Maybe your hair is in good shape, but what about the skin underneath it? Better be sure, with this service:

The ultimate selfie

I hope your scalp is photogenic! If it isn’t, move south a bit, to your eyes. They may be hungry:

: How do eyes eat?

Focus in on the cream, which appears on the window above the “nourish” tagline:

So glad the treatment doesn’t migrate!

And as long as you’re nourishing, consider this last sign:

: Vegetarian cosmetics?

This sign would make sense if it appeared on the window of a food shop, but it’s advertising cosmetics. So what is a vegetarian cosmetic? One not tested on animals? One not made from animal products? One that doesn’t eat animals? All three categories are fine with me, but the signage is not.

These stores are selling beauty, which certainly lies in the eye of the beholder. The ads, though, simply lie.

Head scratchers

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How’s your throwing arm? If it’s really good, leave this blog immediately and head for the Bronx. The Yankees need all the good pitchers they can get. Still here? Take a look at this sign:

Small salads are cheaper and land farther away.

For a small fee, apparently you get to hurl lettuce and tomatoes at the target of your choice. (Yes, I know the intended meaning is tossed salad, but even that term is problematic. I saw the salads, and the dressing was in a little cup on the side, not distributed by tossing the liquid with the greens.)

Now have a look at this sign, atop a store selling New York themed t-shirts and caps and tiny plastic Empire State Buildings:

Investigative souvenirs?

The first word, from the French, is traditionally used for a news report that uncovers (exposes) guilt. The workers who toiled to sew or shape the novelty items were probably underpaid, so guilt is in this store somewhere. And goodness knows, you don’t have to look far to uncover guilt in NYC. The sign, though, is a bit strange.

One more, from a café near Grand Central Station:

What occupies a busy breakfast’s time?

Part of the sign didn’t make it into the picture. The full phrase is “The Busiest and Best Breakfast in New York.” Okay, I can see how a breakfast can be the “best,” at least in the opinion of the breakfast-maker or seller. But how can breakfast be the “busiest”? The café can be the busiest, but is that a selling point? You’ll wait on line behind a hundred tourists before we get to you! Oh yes, I want to eat there.

But only if they let me toss a salad.

Unintended Meanings, Part 2

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All business owners want to offer something unique. Their fondest wish is to drive out the competition by cornering a slice of the market that consumers can’t find elsewhere. Right?

Wrong, according to this sign, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t say what the proprietor intended:

“Everyday” is not “every day”

The service in this salon is available “all day.” So far, so good. But to move from the 24 to the 7 part of the expression 24/7, the next words should be “every day,” not “everyday.” What’s the difference? The two-word expression means “today, tomorrow, the day after that, and so on.” The single-word expression means “ordinary” or “commonplace.” According to the sign, you can get your hair styled in an ordinary way at an extraordinary time of day. (Even that statement isn’t totally accurate, as the salon isn’t in fact open all day. But that’s exaggeration, not grammar. I’ll let it go.)

A few blocks later, I saw this sign, which still confuses me. My first reaction was to wonder: What are “plumbing keys” and “electrical keys”? The gap in the middle suggests that the “keys made” part belongs to two columns.

What are “plumbing keys”?

Perhaps the owner wanted to emphasize this small but essential service to anyone needing an extra set of door keys? Or maybe the point was to capture my attention. If so, mission accomplished.

Lest you think that all I do is complain, here is a sign that (be still my beating heart), correctly pairs singular pronouns with a singular noun (pet):

“Him/her,” not “them”!

In societies without companion-animal spas, designer cat beds, and dog booties, the pronoun “it” would suffice. But this is New York City in the 21st Century, which is rife with those items (and many more pet-indulgences). Who am I to quibble with unconditional love and its pronoun necessities? I once had a parakeet that more or less lived on my shoulder, when she wasn’t laying eggs in my husband’s lap. (Note that I said she, not it.) So I’m giving this sign my seal of approval, not least because it begins with “please” and ends with “thank you,” two niceties that aren’t always found in the Big Apple.

Unintended Meanings

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Walking around Manhattan, I often feel the urge to enter a store, grab an employee, and ask this question: “What, exactly, do you think your sign says?” I’m rather shy, and I also understand that most storeowners and employees are far more interested in selling goods and services than in grammar and usage. So I don’t ask anyone anything. Nor do I explain the unintended meaning of the signs I see, such as this one:

Just one bagel?

Get there early, people, because after one bagel is sold, you’re out of luck. Here’s another puzzler:

Three adjectives? Two adjectives and a noun?

Does this sign offer the services of a gifted psychic or something else that is gifted, psychic, and spiritual? If so, what is that something else? Maybe the noun, psychic, is bookended by two descriptions – gifted and spiritual. I’d tell you the answer, but I can’t. I’m not psychic.

And then there’s this salon, which offers a facial for the neck or back. If you’re working on those body parts, is it still a facial? Or are you getting a neckal and backal? But that’s not the best part of this sign. It’s the high frequency and excellent custom mask. I don’t know what that is, but I want one.

Custom mask?

By the time I finished reading this sign, I had quite a few dead cells I wanted the shop to “eliminate” — from my brain.

Not Raining but Poring

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Nobody seems to look for anything these days, if my favorite newspaper, The New York Times, is any indication. A small selection from just a couple of days in April 2015:

CIA analysts “poring over drone video feeds, satellite data, electronic intercepts of cellphone conversations and informants’ reports.”
A writer “on her couch, poring over a new story.”
Football coaches “poring over game film and scouting reports” before the draft (for players, not for combat).
American “business and investment lawyers poring over the mash-up of laws in the existing trade embargo” of Cuba.
Angora rabbit fans (who knew they existed?) “who spend time coddling the rabbits and poring over their pedigrees.”
The South Korean government, “poring over private chats” in an invasion of privacy.

I’m not sure what to make of all this poring, which, by the way, is not related to climate change. “To pore over” is “to read or study carefully, in an attempt to remember,” according to one dictionary. That definition doesn’t seem to be the operative one lately. Instead, poring over is the new sifting through — checking a mountain of information for just the right fact. Not that sifting through has gone away entirely. I got more than 4000 hits when I searched for “poring” in the NY Times site, and a slightly higher number for “sifting through.” In the last two weeks, jurors were “sifting through” evidence in a high-profile murder case, a scholar was commended for “sifting through” early Modernist works, and an actor was depicted as “sifting through television and film scripts” in search of a new project. An employer was “sifting through resumes” and someone else was “sifting her memory for clues about her father’s secrets.”

And then there’s data mining. Can’t you just picture data miners, wearing reading glasses instead of helmets with those little headlights, poring over their algorithms, hoping to uncover something of value? The gold nugget, so to speak. Before data mining I often read about people massaging the data to find patterns. I’m not exactly sure what you do when you massage the data, but it sounds like a lot more fun than poring over or sifting through.

All these terms, though, mirror how overwhelmed we are. Documents, film, audio tapes, and rabbit pedigrees — how are we to keep up? The haystack keeps getting taller and the needle smaller. Me, I’ll just keep looking.

Upcycling

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Now trending, as they say in media far less long-winded than I am, is “upcycling” – taking discarded or undervalued material and pushing it up the value ladder. While I can appreciate the conversion of old rubber tires into sturdy sandals, I have some problems with upcycling language. Take a look at this sign, which turns a regular old cup of coffee into something else:

Small batch?

I guess “small-batch” is one of those terms you’re supposed to see as worth at least a dollar more per cup. After all, “small” implies that most people are excluded. The fact that this sign appears on a worldwide chain of coffee shops is irrelevant, though ironic. And speaking of “shops,” note the upcycling of this name:

Add two letters and double the price.

Here’s another, for those of you who slap some polish on their fingertips (if that) and assume they’re ready for the runway:

Design team?

Pause for a moment to pity the team-less. To console themselves, they can go to a bar. Or, as the next sign indicates, they can visit a “taproom” where they have “craft beer” and, if I’m being grammatically picky (and I always am), a “craft kitchen,” whatever that means. Nowadays, “craft beer” frequently carries about as much meaning as “small batch,” given that conglomerates have taken over many of what used to local beer companies that really did make small batches.

Not to belabor the point, which is already on overtime, here’s a sign that eschews (1) patriotism or (2) common sense by advocating “European Wax,” which is either a style of hair removal or a sticky product of bees residing abroad:

What’s wrong with American wax?

I think I’ll stay home, make a small batch of coffee, and drink it in my craft kitchen. You’re welcome to join me.

Didn’t we win that war?

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It’s been a long time since I studied American history, but until recently I was under the impression that we’d won the Revolutionary War. If we did, the Upper East Side apparently hasn’t gotten the message. Check out this sign from one of the local luxury food stores (yes, in this part of town there are several), which shall remain nameless to protect the pretentious:

Bespoke? Really?

I’m not going to touch the “dissappoint,” misspelled words being beneath my notice (usually), but it is a nice touch. This sign first appeared as a simple sheet of paper, printed by someone who hadn’t worried about the wavy red spellcheck line under what should read “disappoint.” About a week ago the store had the sign framed and mounted under a container of melon cubes. The busy employees don’t have time to read the sign aloud, so I can’t make a joke about someone who “misspoke” about “bespoke.” Sigh. What I can do is compare “bespoke fruit baskets” to “custom-made” or “made-to-order” fruit selections. What’s the difference? About thirty bucks, give or take. It’s the British influence. Associate a word with Colin Firth’s accent, and the price goes up.

The same principle is at work with “Stonehenge Realty,” a name I see on any number of NYC buildings. I would keep the name to myself, for the same reason I’m reserving identification of the foolish fruit-seller, but in this case the name itself is the point. Now don’t get me wrong. I have visited Stonehenge (the real thing, not the apartment buildings), and I’ve marveled at its power and history. But in New York? Can’t you just picture a real estate agent, Armani on and portfolio ready, extolling the virtues of living under a rock slab? “You’ll love the workmanship on this monolith,” the agent in my fantasy says, “and rocks are practically maintenance free. Of course, in December and June the Druids have access, but they add character, don’t you agree?”

Don’t think the tendency to turn to Britain for luxury references is purely a matter of money, with whoever names apartment buildings (and who does, do you know?) applying the names of economic powerhouses to their houses. If so, I’d expect to see the “Beijing” or possibly the “Riyadh.” If they’re out there, I can’t locate them. Nor is it a former colony’s desire to show reverence to the mother country. If it were, someone would be living in the “Chiapas,” because we beat Mexico in a war also. Okay, technically it was Spain, but don’t quibble.

No, it’s cultural bias, plain and simple, the same impulse that drives the ratings for Downton Abbey into the stratosphere. The Yanks won the war, but the British won the peace.

That’s it for today. I’m off to high tea.

Can’t we all just calm down?

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In the spirit of “colossal olives,” which is marketing-speak for “large,” I’m seeing language moving up on the intensity meter. Nothing seems to be “good” anymore. Good is the new so-so, and fair is foul these days, as it was in Macbeth. I give my order to a waiter, who replies, “Awesome!” Somehow, the tuna-on-rye, though tasty, does not move me to awe. A simple “good choice” works just fine.

I was thinking about this intensification trend when I saw these signs. Here’s one demonstrating way too much enthusiasm:

Special isn’t enough. They’re going for “special!!!”

If the masseuse feels that much passion, I doubt I want the service offered. The masseuse may be, well, a practitioner in another business entirely. On the other hand, the sign writer, not the masseuse, may be the overly enthusiastic one. After all, Massage Special!!! was on the same street as this awning:

Note the name of this deli.

I wonder who owns this deli? The artist once “formerly” and then again known as Prince? I also wonder how employees answer the phone. “Hello, this is !!!!!”? How exactly do you pronounce five exclamation points?

Or six?

Time to calm, down, people. Or perhaps I should say, in the spirit of the age, “Time to calm down, people!!!!!!!”

Hallucinations for sale

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I’ve been “collecting” signs for a while. This post is a mix of old and new sightings in the category labeled “Huh?” that I add to nearly every day. First up is a store that specializes in hallucinations. Does the DEA know?

Top quality visions only.

Next is something my friend Michael sent me, with the email subject line “Word Crime.” Isn’t it wonderful to hydrate yourself for your entire lifetime for only $1.95? Quite a bargain.

Below is another puzzle. We buy cash in exchange for cash? And then there are the “old boyfriends.” (Young boyfriends, I guess, don’t count.) Also, even if you insert an apostrophe and exchange your “old boyfriend’s jewelry” (singular) or “old boyfriends’ jewelry” (plural), aren’t you stealing the old guy’s jewelry? In the face of larceny, I won’t mention the missing comma after “gold” or the period that should follow “diamonds.” Should I be surprised that the store went out of business?

Turn your cash into cash? Not to mention your old boyfriends.

Grammarian in the City

Snarky remarks on language I see and hear in New York City

Tag Archives: grammar

Take two adverbs and call me in the morning

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Head scratchers

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Unintended Meanings, Part 2

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Unintended Meanings

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Can’t we all just calm down?

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Hallucinations for sale

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