Take two adverbs and call me in the morning

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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.

No workers, but lots of work

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The famous command of the Communist Manifesto — “Workers of the world, unite!’ — is obsolete, and not just because communism proved to be, as the old joke says, the most painful route from capitalism to capitalism. The communist ideology failed, but the slogan bites the dust for a completely different reason. Those who labor are no longer workers. Somehow it has become crass to refer to employees as the underlings they are, as this sign illustrates:

Who is the opponent?

The idea that “we’re all in this together” may appeal to management (where you’ll find many managers but few coaches), but I doubt that the store displaying this sign shares power and profits equally.

Another popular word for employee is partner, which is what you are when you work full time at Starbucks and Whole Foods, among other New Age enterprises. Barnes and Noble invites you to join its community of booksellers, not apply for a job. At Walmart you’re an associate, either management-level or hourly. Traditionally, an associate worked as a colleague, not always as an equal, but close to the power center. New lawyers become associates on their way (they hope) to partner status. Walmart has many employees (sorry, associates) who complain about forced overtime and underpayment. These claims may be without merit, but it’s hard to see the people at the registers of a discount store truly associating with those higher in the company structure, as associates in law firms do.

Conferring titles instead of power and increased pay isn’t confined to the business world. Just ask a distinguished professor or a professor emeritus. True, some with these designations see a small bump in salary, and many an adjunct (a college-level instructor paid a subsistence-level salary with no job security) would love to join their ranks. But the point is the same: Symbolic gestures, whatever the field, have come to replace concrete advantages.

Just ask the partner who bags your groceries.

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.

You are what (you think) you eat

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I didn’t bat an eye when I read two separate references to “artisanal pickles” in yesterday’s New York Times. I live in Manhattan, where signs advertising “artisanal food” or as in this sign, “artisan bread,” abound:

Sign by an adjective-challenged writer.

So I was fine with artisanal pickles, which I presume are soaked in brine lacking any ingredient with more than three syllables in its name. But an article about “artisanal fish” stopped me cold. What would an artisanal fish be? I pictured busy little fins, fluttering around watery workshops as they fashioned – well, what would an artisanal fish create? Seaweed cooked according to an old family recipe?

After some digging, I discovered that artisanal fish is the term for the opposite of large-scale, commercial fishing, with its miles-square nets and other ocean-destroying practices. If I eat an artisanal fish, I’m chewing on something caught on a hook at the end of a line held by a real person, plying the waters in a small boat inherited from a crusty-but-kind, weathered ancestor who patiently explained ancient methods before he sailed off beyond the horizon. Or at least that’s what the label hopes I think.

The term, though, has no real legal definition. At least the definition of “organic” has evolved from “any carbon-based life form” into “free from pesticides and genetic engineering,” with some legislation or certification to back it up. But artisanal, like its linguistic cousin craft, resides in the eye of the beholder. Or in this case, the mouth.

That got me thinking about other phrases I see on signs and menus. They may have meaning, and the products themselves may carry more flavor and nutritional value than others — but how do we really know? The term green in this sign hints at earth-friendly, natural (dare I say artisanal?) cooking, but the term may be either completely appropriate or totally undeserved.

Contrast the above sign with this one, whose products are identified only by color:

Or shape:

To be honest, these food products may not be as tasty as artisanal cheese and meat, but at least you know what aspect of the food they’re promoting. Which brings me to the main point. In our over-mechanized world, advertisers know that consumers often want to hurtle into the past – which they will find with the help of their voice-enabled, speech-recognizing, GPS-loaded, smartphone apps. The product may not be real, good, or natural. That’s fine, as long as it seems that way. You are what you eat, or in this case, what you think you’re eating.

“Euph” and Old Age

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The New York Times recently referred to a “residence for older adults.” My attention snagged on the term older. “Older than whom?” I wondered. The unfinished comparison brought to mind of one of my pet peeves: all the signs reporting that a shop’s coffee, beer, hamburger or whatever was “voted best” without explaining who cast the ballots — chef and spouse, 300 million Americans, everyone at the corner table . . . you get the idea.

Then I realized that older adult is just one of the many euphemisms for, well, the old. Somehow older sounds softer than old. The elderly is somewhere in the middle . . . not as harsh as old, but not as sappy as older. In the past (which we older adults remember well), retired people were known as Golden Agers, living in their Golden Years. Ironic terms, if the stats about the retirement income of most people aged 65+ are correct.

These terms replaced some fairly accurate, descriptive, but unpleasant labels: long in the tooth (just wait – your gums will recede someday too), graybeard (can’t shave with reading glasses on), and declining years (what’s not to sag?). These terms are the reverse of euphemisms (mal-misms?) but in some ways I prefer them to the shinier autumn of life or advanced age.

Think about advanced for a moment. “To advance” is “to move forward.” And where are you going at an advanced age? What is ahead of you? This expression is a close relative of senior, a term that showed up in the 1930s when old people ate free food at senior centers.

Senior. Sigh.

As a former high school teacher who dealt mainly with 12th graders, I shepherded many seniors toward graduation and college. Applying the term to the last stage of life (insert your favorite euphemism here) makes me think about my own graduation — from senior to . . . well, whatever’s next. And I’m not sure I’m ready for that one!

Maybe this sign has the best answer. From now on you can call me major, the opposite of minor.

“Under 40”?

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.

Grammarian in the City

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

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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