‘Scary quotes’

You’ve probably heard of scare quotes, well here’s scary quotes.

This is an image from the BBC news website today. Note the scary phrases in quotation marks, aka inverted commas:

Scary quotes commonly appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase. They are a subset of claim quotes, an unofficial journalistic term for what Martyn Cornell describes as

a shorthand way of saying “someone is making this claim and we neither give it authority nor dismiss it, we’re just reporting it”. Frequently what is inside these sorts of claim quotes is a paraphrase of what was actually said, to make it fit inside the headline space

Bombers, memory holes, vomiting and screaming: the defining feature of scary quotes is that their contents are scary. Visit BBC news any day, at any hour, and you might take fright. [Edit: On a visit an hour later, I saw 'rape', 'recession', and 'rhino gang' in scary quotes – and that's just the Rs, on the front page.]

Yes, I’m plagiarising my Twitter self again. It’s a busy week.

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Previously in novel punctuation: apostrophantoms.

The problem with banning words

I recently wrote about linguistic inflation for Macmillan Dictionary Blog, asking self-referentially if the phenomenon was “insanely awesome”. John Petrie, in a comment, told me about a “Campaign to Stamp Out Awesome”. The person responsible calls it a “nauseatingly ubiquitous (and by now, completely meaningless) superlative”. He sells stickers with this message.

Inflation is a form of semantic change. This is a very common process, yet critics tend to be strangely selective about the particular changes that bother them. It doesn’t seem to matter to awesome-haters that many people find the weakened sense of the word natural and useful, or that to call it “completely meaningless” is absurdly hyperbolic – something to which another pedant might well object. Now that would be a funny campaign.

Sparsed and cahooted

I encountered two unusual derivations in prominent places last week, and want to note them briefly.

First, Laura Slattery’s Irish Times report (5 April 2012) about investigative journalism by RTÉ, the state broadcaster, contains the following line:

New investigative television documentaries from the unit will be “sparsed throughout the year”, according to RTÉ director general Noel Curran.

The adjective sparse, meaning dispersed or (thinly) scattered, is common enough. It comes from Latin sparsus, past participle of spargere “scatter”. But sparsed is much rarer. The OED dates the participial adjective to the late-16th century and calls it “rare or obsolete”, and the verb sparse to around the same time: M16–E17.

COHA has no matches for sparsed or sparse (v.), which surprised me given their semantic transparency. But the form does appear online; there are other instances of “sparsed throughout”, for example.

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Nick McGivney on Twitter drew my attention to cahoot (v.), a creative shortening of the phrase be in cahoots, meaning be in partnership, often secretly. On the RTE Radio 1 show Drivetime (4 April 2012, at 1:42:50 approx.), Michael Fitzmaurice of the Irish Turf Cutters and Contractors Association said:

Out of the blue yesterday, both the EU and the Irish government cahooted together and decided, “Naw, we’re not goin’ to let ye cut yeer turf.”*

Cahooted here seems to have been used as a synonym for conspired or colluded, but perhaps with slightly different connotations in the speaker’s idiolect. Cahoot(s) (n.) first appeared as U.S. slang, possibly from French cahute (cabin, hut) or cohorte.

I found no evidence of the verb cahoot on COHA either, though again it appears informally online; Wiktionary has an example from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “our leaders were lying, tricking and cahooting with Halliburton”. But the usage is sparse.

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* yeer means your (plural) and was formed from ye by analogy with your. Both ye and yeer are common in colloquial Hiberno-English.

“Who to follow” is grammatically fine

As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. (Calvin Trillin)

Who am I writing for? (William Zinsser, On Writing Well)

Twitter has a feature called Who to follow that suggests other users you might be interested in. I haven’t paid it much attention yet, but I’m interested in the fact that the phrase is censured by people who think it should be Whom to follow. There’s even a Chrome extension that “corrects” it.

Did I say even? I should have saved that for the Grand Order of the Whomic Empire, which solicits “moral support for those people who work tirelessly to bring whom back into everyday circulation”. I fear their quest is not entirely tongue-in-cheek.

Anyway: Who to follow. Let’s see what its critics say.

Business Insider thinks it’s “bad English”. GalleyCat calls it “one of the most viewed and easily overlooked grammar mistakes on the Internet”, adding that it’s “reassuring to watch a major social network struggle” with grammatical rules. Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, believes it’s a “grammatical error”:

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

Too, it’s a strange usage

Reading John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, I was struck by the use of too in this passage:

Common wisdom would indicate that she should be a little apprehensive but her instincts tell her differently; this person wishes her no harm. Too, she hasn’t felt inclined toward apprehension lately. She has quickly faded into an observational fatalism — or is it bland apathy? She doesn’t really care.

Too is used this way — as a sentence adverb at the start of a clause — on at least one other occasion in the book. The usage has some currency: the Shorter OED has a line from Robert Ludlum (“Too, the windows were not that close to one another”), but I wondered how acceptable the language authorities consider it.

The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition) says it “cannot be called incorrect, but some critics consider it awkward”. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says it’s “rather stiff when compared with besides, moreover, also, and the like”.

Garner’s Modern American Usage finds there is “a tendency in facile journalism to use the word this way”, and recommends that we use also, and, or words such as moreover, further, and furthermore.

Lest the recency illusion take hold, I should point out that this is by no means a new idiom. Robert Burchfield, who edited the four-volume OED Supplement, says it had

a long and untroubled history from OE until the 17C. [...] at which point it became rare or obsolete, only to be revived in the 20C., chiefly in AmE.

Burchfield quotes several examples, including one from the New Yorker: “But, too, he was a charmer.” But is this usage a charmer? It’s certainly not wrong, but it sounds slightly strange to my ears, probably because I encounter it so rarely.

The last source I checked is the last I’ll quote from: the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. Its inclusion of examples from the NY Times Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated suggests that the idiom is seen principally in journalism, but I haven’t explored this in any depth.

the OED Supplement shows that such usage has been revived in the 20th century, originally in American English but now in British English as well. No grammatical objection can be made to it, and the practice is clearly standard. Whatever problems it causes have to do with idiom — which it to say that, because of its relative rarity, it sounds peculiar to some people.

This chimes with my own feelings about it. Whether or not to use it is a matter of style and personal preference. I don’t plan to adopt it in my own speech or writing, but I have no problems at all with its occasional appearance in my reading material.

How about you — do you ever use it, and how do you find it?

Subjected to unreasonable laughter

From the Sligo Times, date unknown:

In many parts of Co. Sligo hares are now practically unknown because of the unreasonable laughter to which they have been subjected in recent years.

The Sligo Times was published from 1909–1914. I haven’t seen this superb typo in its original context, but I’d like to think it’s genuine. It appears in A Steroid Hit the Earth, an amusing misprint-o-rama by Martin Toseland.

Who’d have guessed hares were so sensitive to mockery?