NET—A flawed translation

 kw: book reviews, partial reviews, Bible translation, Bible interpretation, annotations, grammar

In late February I reviewed the NET's rendition of Genesis.  See that review for background information and my impressions up to that date. NET is The Holy Bible, New English Translation. I considered at that time finishing my reading of the text and all the notes before reviewing again, but now having read the books of Moses and a few of the historical books, I think it worthwhile to write this update.

In the prefatory material, beginning on page XI, the Translation Team members are listed. A team of five worked on the books of Moses (the Pentateuch), and a team of four on the historical books, from Joshua to 2 Chronicles. I note that two persons are members on all the teams for the various sections of the Old Testament, so I presume they are the editors.

I am at present midway through 2 Samuel. Here I will focus on a few helpful notes, then on notes or translations that I consider the most egregious errors, and finally on obscure terms used without explanation in the notes, that were not found in notes on Genesis. I begin with positive or helpful items.

• Note E, Ex 4:19: The SN (Study Note) discusses the possible dates of the return of Moses to Egypt, supporting 1450 BC or soon thereafter, after the death of Thutmose III, who reigned 1504-1450. This places the Exodus early in the reign of Amenhotep II, who is thus denoted the Pharaoh of the Exodus. This is good. It is in marked contrast to speculations I encounter from time to time that the Exodus might have taken place two or three centuries later. Israel's sojourn in Egypt is stated to have lasted 400 years, making 1450 BC the latest possible date. Many exegeses confuse the city of Ramses with one or another Pharaoh of that name.
• Note C, Ex 10:22: The SN correctly points out the fallacy of trying to "explain" the plagues imposed on Egypt by various natural phenomena. God's miracles are God's miracles. A similar note is found as Note O in Dt 8:3, regarding manna. Natural products such as honeydew are no substitute for the real thing. Consider also that manna never arrived on the Sabbath day.
• Note G, Josh 15:63: The TN (Translator's Note) makes a good point that the writer was writing before David captured Jebus.
• Note d, Ju 5:27: discusses the word shadad and the NET translation "violently killed", which is better than most translations.
• Note R, 1Sa 25:37: A very good TN, that God's striking of Nabal needs no medical explanation, though this should be a SN.

Now, on to some questionable items:

• Conversions of units, such as the cubit, beginning in Ex 26:2. The numbers used, primarily 3 and 5 and the half-units 1½ and 2½, are important to interpreting the typology of the tabernacle and its furniture. They got the cubit wrong anyway (see further in the prior review). The numbers and their units belong in the text; it is best to explain such conversions in footnotes or marginal notes.
• Dt 11:13, 18: The translation of "heart and soul" as "mind and being" reveals that the translators are confused about the use of these words, and the rich meaning inherent in understanding human tripartness (spirit, soul, and body, with the "heart" composed of part of both spirit and soul). 
• Note a, Ju 5:15-16: The Text-critical note (TC) states, "The great majority of Hebrew MSS have 'resolves of heart,' but a few MSS read 'searchings of heart,' which is preferred in light of v. 16." This misunderstands Hebrew parallelism, in that a near-synonym was written to avoid repeating an expression. The two terms differ by a single letter and they rhyme. Sloppy translating!
• Note a, Ju 13:25: In the translation the word "control" is used where Hebrew has "stir." The note indicates what the Hebrew word is, but the word "stir" properly belongs in the text, and then no note is needed. "Control" is too harsh and absolutist.
• Note N, 1 Sa 1:12: It is curious that the 6th letter of Hebrew is spelled "vav" in the Notes to the Pentateuch, but "waw" in the Notes to the historical books. Didn't these scholars communicate amongst themselves?
• Note D, 1Sa 14:15: The TN states that "God" may have been used as an intensifier. This just waters down the force of the expression.
• Note E, 1Sa 24:6, 10: The word "anointed" is rendered "chosen one," which weakens the sense. Anointing by a prophet was a really big deal!

Of a total of 47 comments I have gathered from Exodus to the end of 1 Samuel, I see that ten are highlighted dark red, by which I indicate something really awful. Several of my comments refer to weakened expressions, such as "being" for "soul" or "leading" for "judging" and "show respect" for "sanctify". Besides these, I present just four:

• Note D, Ex 26:37: The SN derides typology and the study of symbolic meanings. Terrible advice! To the Jews, the Old Testament is history and is literally true. In the New Testament, Paul writes in a few places about the symbolic meaning of certain passages, even using the words "type" and "antitype", and in one place, "allegory". To a Christian, the Old Testament is a rich source of typology and symbolism regarding divine matters.
• Note R, Lv 7:32: The "heave offering", alternatively "lifted-up offering", is translated "contribution offering", which destroys the sense. This offering was literally tossed a few inches into the air (and then caught), and is a type of the ascension of Christ. Similarly, the wave offering (which NET properly translates) is a type of the resurrection of Christ.
• Note U, Ju 2:10: The Hebrew expression "gathered to their fathers" is translated "passed away", which obscures the beauty of this term; it indicates that there is an afterlife in which a dead person is reunited with ancestors. Many Christians think the Jews didn't (and don't) believe in an afterlife. The term "gathered to their fathers" proves the opposite. There are other indications also.
• Notes A, T, Dt 1:29, 45: More instances of a strong expression being toned down in the translation, and explained away in the note. Disgraceful!

I complained at length in the prior review that thousands of notes speak of adding or changing a word for "stylistic reasons" or "clarity". The volume would be quite a bit shorter if the historical custom of using italics to indicate supplied words had been used, and a single statement in the preface would then suffice.

I think that's enough to illustrate why I consider the translation to be flawed, and the scholarship expressed in the notes to be frequently sloppy. I don't recommend NET. Now, to explain another flurry of obscure grammatical terms. Firstly, a few more Hebrew verb tenses:

• hishtaphel - a very rare verb stem that expresses causative action in active voice.
• hitpoel (=hithpoel) - "to do something to oneself". Rare.
• poel - a verb stem based on the noun meaning "worker", referring to repeated action.
• khetib (properly ketib or ketiv, versus qere) - ketiv and qere are markings to indicate the difference between what was written and how it is to be read.

More grammatical terms almost nobody knows:

• cohortative - expressing desire, or a first-person demand.
• apodosis - the consequent clause of a conditional sentence: "If you asked me I would agree."
• protasis - the conditional clause, as "If you asked me..." above.
• frequentative - indicating repeated action, not necessarily iterative.
• paranomastic (-tia) - a fancy word for "pun" or double meaning.
• volitive - expression desire or volition; "volitional" is a better known synonym.
• asseverative - a statement made with great solemnity, certainty and conviction. Think of court testimony.
• epexegetical - added words to clarify meaning.
• talionic - a synonym for retaliation; talionic law, or lex talonis, is "an eye for an eye", for example.
• optative - a verbal mood expressing a wish, desire, hope or prayer; "if only..."
• aposiopesis - breaking off a sentence in the middle, to hint at the unspeakable or to express shock.
• adversative - in opposition to, like an adversary.
• casus pedens - probably a typo for casus pendens, the placement of a noun or pronoun first in a sentence, but modified later in the sentence. "Pendens" means "hanging".
• haplography - accidental omission of one or more repeated letters in a longer word, as philology→philogy. This is a particular occurrence in manuscript copying. "Haplo-" means "half".
• metathesis - in linguistics, swapping sounds or letters in a word, such as ask→aks or nuclear→nucular.
• homoloteleuton - literally, "similar ending", a near rhyme for rhetorical effect or to sort-of-rhyme a word that is hard to rhyme, such as "orange".
• casuistic - either resolving an ethical dilemma, or being rhetorically subtle and deceptive.
• erotesis - a rhetorical question that expects a negative answer: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
• merism - speaking of parts to refer to the whole, as "day and night" to mean "all the time".
• strophe - a defined section of a poem; often a synonym for "stanza".
• paraenesis - moral exhortation, usually basing one's argument on tradition.
• chiastic - literary structure best described as "going out the way one came in." Many stories detail a protagonist's trials to reach a goal, to be repeated in reverse order to return home.
• homoiarcton - when a series of lines begin the same way, a copying scribe may skip from one line to the next, leaving out an intervening portion of text.
• nunated - the use of the letter "nun" as a suffix; in Hebrew the letter is written differently when it is the last letter of a word.
• stative versus fientive - stative verbs express a condition, fientive verbs express actions.

I knew only four of these words previously. Even Blogger marks nine as unknown. It is a serious fault of the NET volume to omit a glossary.

At the rate I am reading, I expect to finish the Old Testament near the end of 2026. I hope I observe better results in the New Testament.

I am so glad to learn that Copy Editors still exist

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, copy editors, copy editing, punctuation, word usage, grammar, memoirs

Mary Norris is one of those wonderful people who make sure that "everything that's fit to print" is also "fit to read". Her 2015 book is Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. She is a long-time copy editor for The New Yorker. One of her mentors actually had a "comma shaker", a decoration at her desk, to emphasize that the style favored by TNY incorporates plenty of commas, but not too many. A big bone of contention between different schools of copy editing is the serial comma. Some know it as the Oxford comma, apparently because at one time it was universally used in publications at Oxford (not so much, these days, I understand). 

And just what is this mysterious comma? It is the one used after "and" in a series such as "red, white, and blue". Most publications these days don't use it, preferring, "red, white and blue". However, while it is OK to leave the comma out of that particular list, consider the sentence, "The singer was accompanied by his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings." Here, a comma before "and" would make it clear that the two men mentioned are not former wives of the famous singer! The list refers to four persons accompanying him.

So, copy editing. You might think the subject is going to be dull. I assure you, it is not. In this author's hands, it's delightful.

Any memoir begins with an obligatory chapter or two about one's early life. By the end of Chapter 1 the author has been accepted into the august halls of TNY, and she can get down to the business of regaling us with stories of solecisms and how they are exterminated…or not. Here we meet the formidable Lu Burke and her comma shaker, and others who guided Ms Norris's career, sometimes catching her slips, and sometimes grinning in chagrin when she catches one of theirs. Several pairs of eyes scrutinize a manuscript or galley proof before it ever hits print, the work's author (and often several friends and relatives), the intake editor (the one an author might think of as "My editor"), the typesetter (although these days most authors submit electronic text, sidestepping the typesetter), the copy editor, a supervising editor, and someone in the print shop who at least glances over the text while making sure the layout is proper.

Many of the details of a copy editor's job, as described throughout the book, are relevant to a time before word processing and the ubiquitous PDF file: Lots of hand markup, and markup of markup, and an author's "STET" where he or she doesn't want a certain change to be made (I had to do a ton of STET's while negotiating with a copy editor for a British journal, who tried to de-Americanize my text, while I wished to retain my own voice, not sounding like a warmed-over Brit). It isn't clear how does all these revisions and re-revisions electronically. I should ask my brother, who publishes a book every few years!

[For this image I had no success getting Playground/Stable Diffusion to show a comma shaker, but a different query popped out this kettle of question marks]

The author's career at TNY really began when she caught an error all others had missed: the word "flour" spelled as "flower". Homophones are hard to catch, and are so far impossible for "spell checkers" in software to detect. They're one big reason we still need copy editors. Some chapters are devoted to grammatical solecisms ("solecism" is the grammarian's term for "sin"). Others to punctuation marks and their use/misuse. She alternately rhapsodizes and agonizes over the way one must edit poems by Emily Dickinson, who used dashes of several lengths—sometimes half a line—in favor of most other punctuation. Opinions vary as to how many "buckets" to use for her dashes. The usual set, more than plenty for most of us, numbers four:

- Hyphen, also used for a preceding minus sign, sometimes.

– En dash (the width of a capital "N"), usually used for the minus sign; it's the same width as the +.

— Em dash (the width of a capital "M").

—— Long dash, which doesn't have a code in Unicode, but is entered as two Em dashes strung together. It runs the risk of the two Em dashes being separated at the end of a line.

Plus, there are rules at TNY about when to surround a dash with spaces, and when not to do so. Other punctuation marks that get lengthy treatment include the semicolon, colon and apostrophe. A few pages are devoted to dangling participles, such as, "Over tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark." It wasn't her mood that was hovering over the tea, so the sentence was rewritten, "As we drank tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark." That made it clear that one of the tea drinkers possessed the darkening mood (or was possessed by it).

In these reviews I have noted when I've found more than one or two evident errors in a book's text, and I have complained about the evident lack of competent copy editors (often, total lack…). I note that I have used an ellipsis (…) a couple of times. Ms Norris tells us of a writer who uses the ellipsis almost to the exclusion of other punctuation marks. I lends a breathless quality to the writing, and one hardly knows where to pause and recollect one's thoughts. It also leaves a copy editor quite unable to do much.

I cannot close without adding my 2¢ to the chapter on "you and me", which these days is so frequently replaced with "you and I", as in, "My brother called for you and I." Hardly anyone would write, "My brother called for I." Rather, we would write, "My brother called for me," which is the clue that the pronoun is the object of "called", not the subject. A side issue is that, while my generation was taught to always mention oneself last, that practice has also been gradually eliminated. Now we hear, "such-and-such happened to me and him," for which at least the pronouns are back in the correct (objective) case. I was taught that anything other than "…to him and me" is impolite. My 2¢? AMEN! The book ends with the author, at a memorial event for Lu Burke, having mentioned "Alice or me." Correct, right up to the finish.

A quibble or two

kw: grammar, solecisms

The publisher of Octopus!, reviewed here yesterday, is Current, an imprint of Penguin. I noted 3 things that got past the editorial staff:

1. p53, writing of one group of colleagues, "…a mix of born-and-bread Puerto Ricans…". The proper term is "born and bred", where "bred" means "raised". The hyphens are optional but not improper.
2. p66, "A giant Pacific octopus, for example, can squeeze itself through anything smaller than its beak and braincase, …". The word "larger" should be used.
3. p171, writing of someone "pouring over satellite images". One imagines this someone spilling his drink. The term is "poring over" meaning to study closely.

Errors like these were most likely in the author's text, received electronically. An editor is supposed to go over the text thoroughly, and even if most publishers still employ bespoke proofreaders, an educated editor ought to have caught these. In the past, the text would be received on paper, so one could then fault a typesetter for 1 and 3, but not 2. But in those days, a further proofreading would have been performed, which is now typically foregone.

Failure of the Editors

kw: proofreading, solecisms, grammar, usage

Not to overly embarrass the author of the book in the prior post, I decided to put my complaints about a number of textual errors in a separate post. An author may be forgiven for occasional errors in a book's text, but the editor ought to have caught them. I suppose it is too much to ask that book publishers employ proofreaders. Most do not any more, trusting a computer spell checker and even the grammar package to catch most errors. The following baker's dozen items would not have been found by the software. The "misspelled" words are correctly spelled "wrong words", and certain punctuation errors might raise a flag in a grammar software, but the correction might be as bad as the original mistake. So here we go:

• About using apples in bird feeders: "…it helps to peal away a bit of the skin…". The proper word is "peel". To peal is to ring a bell. (p18)
• "Well-manicured lawns are basically green desserts to birds." Here is a homonym with exactly the opposite meaning of "deserts", the proper word to use. (p24)
• About small prey impaled on thorns: "This is also known as a shrike, larder, or cache." The comma highlighted in red is misplaced, misleading and must be removed. A shrike is a bird; the string of impaled bugs or small critters is a shrike larder or shrike cache. The comma after larder is not really needed either, but is permissible. (p38)
• "…the female lays her eggs on the branch and raised her young there." This is a tense error caused by hitting a "d" instead of an "s". It is a frequent error, the letters are adjacent. The word ought to be "raises". (p56)
• "…a hairy woodpecker has set its sites on your home…". The proper word is "sights". This is an idiom from shooting; you aim through the sights on the gun. (p103)
• Concerning cryptic coloration, the bird can "…stay hidden in plain site…". No, it is "in plain sight". (p128)
• "…out of site, out of mind…". Yikes! Everyone should know it is "out of sight, out of mind"! (p188)
• "Not all birds are so cutthroat in the nest, some birds actually raise their young in family groups, …" These are not clauses, but independent sentences. The highlighted comma must be either a semicolon or a period. (p191)
• "If food is plentiful, some of the siblings will survive, if food is scarce, only the cowbird chick will survive." Another run-on sentence. The comma after "survive" must be replaced by either a semicolon (that's what I'd prefer) or a period. (p193)
• Another run-on sentence: "Some field guides may call them northern orioles and others will call them Baltimore orioles, it's confusing and will only get more so in the future." Here, a period would be best, but a semicolon is also acceptable. A comma is not. (p206)
• "…it can be tagged on to a visit to Disney World…". The appropriate synonym for "attached" is "tacked". (p215)
• "Because of it's location, …". One of the most common pronoun errors. The literal reading of this phrase is "Because of it is location, …". "Its" is the possessive neuter pronoun, while "it's" is a contraction for "it is". Just remember "his, hers, ours, its, yours, theirs". (p215)
• "…for people who plan to go out at all hours of the day and want to see as many birds as possible; these scopes are worth every penny." This is a breakage error. The last six words are a dependent clause, thus there is no need for a semicolon. A comma is perfect. (p222)

This may seem like nit picking to many. Yet I have read many a book without encountering even a single error of spelling, word usage or punctuation. The editor at Running Press, if there even is one, is overpaid. Considering that good spelling, good punctuation and good proofreading have become foreign to many American schools, I fear that errors of this magnitude and greater will only increase. Perhaps, one day, a few nit-pickers might persuade Microsoft and others to substantially beef up the grammar checking capabilities of word processing software. Yet no matter how "smart" such software becomes, we will still need a remnant of properly educated people to check it.

12-plus pluralizations

kw: words, grammar

At a time I can no longer recall, I developed a love for words, as words. One fruit of this is a collection of lists of words by parts of speech. Not only so, I have classified those words that change with use. In this post I will get on record the pluralization of nouns, and the various patterns used. The table shows my analysis of 31,619 nouns. An explanation follows.

• Adding an "s": three-fifths of nouns work this way. It is the first spelling rule most children learn. Dog → dogs and cloud → clouds and shoe → shoes and monkey → monkeys work this way.
• Nouns that have no plural, or are their own plural: This plus the "add s" group make up 89% of all nouns. If you think of "water" as two words, one of them adds s, the other has no plural. That is, "waters" as a reference to numerous bodies of water is a +s plural. "Water" as a substance has no plural. "Lore" is another example; it is a kind of virtual substance also. Chemical terms (listed separately below) are also not pluralized: A word like "oxygens" is meaningless except to chemists using shorthand for "oxygen atoms" in a chemical structure.
• Changing final "y" to "ies": This is for -y words that have a consonant before the "y", such as curry → curries and ruby → rubies. I find it interesting that these outnumber the -es plurals.
• Adding "es": In singular form most of these nouns end in a sibilant sound. Examples are wish → wishes and paradox → paradoxes. A smaller number end in "o": potato → potatoes, although an increasing number of writers—currently 0.1%—add only "s".
• Changing final "man" to "men": The 205 words in this category are all compounds with -men, such as "spokesman" or "workman". Many of these are being superseded by words ending in "person".
• Irregular plurals: The 141 I have collected are a pretty comprehensive list. It includes child → children and beau → beaux and foot → feet. The "x" ones are from French, and the others came to English from a variety of languages.
• Changing final "um" to "a": This is one of those famous Latin rules. Certain common words are now almost unknown in singular form, such as agendum → agenda and datum → data. Few people know that "agenda" and "data" are plural. More people know cranium → crania and spectrum → spectra, though you do find "craniums" and "spectrums" in print these days.
• Changing final "us" to "i": Who doesn't know octopus → octopi? This is the best known Latin rule. Other examples are bacillus → bacilli and cactus → cacti and stimulus → stimuli.
• Adding a final "e": Another Latin rule, only for nouns with female gender in Latin, such as larva → larvae and nebula → nebulae.
• Changing final "is" to "es": A more obscure Latin rule. Examples are crisis → crises and analysis → analyses. The knowledge of oasis → oases and neurosis → neuroses persists mainly because other attempts to form a plural are so clumsy.
• Changing final "f" or "fe" to "ves": An example of the first is wolf → wolves; of the second, life → lives.
• Changing final "is" or "ex" to "ices": Examples of the first case are helix → helices and matrix → matrices; of the second, index → indices and codex → codices. However, a lot of "add es after the x" is being done, and these forms are likely to die out.
• The last two cases, with a total of five words among them, ought actually to be included in the irregular verbs. Pluralizing the rare noun "do" to "do's" is probably not done any more, while using "go's" as a noun plural for "go" (think, "Let's have a go at it" – could you logically pluralize that?) is so rare I have seen it only once (and not in my own writing!). Finally, the consonant doubling rule applies only to quiz → quizzes and whiz → whizzes.

If you didn't know I was a nerd before, you know it now! I know only a couple of people who know more than five of these rules. Hardly anybody cares. Lists of such facts are primarily useful for people making software to recognize and process "natural language", particularly if they need to parse older texts.

Seeing the language's architecture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philology, grammar

It is strange that a subject for which I once had the utmost horror became a figlio caro, that I might perpetrate it on my own offspring. Somehow, I did not...but I thought about it, time and again.

What is this fearful system? Sentence diagramming! I learned grammar readily enough, and I have also a mathematical mind, but this combination of parsing and geometry was wholly opaque to me. Having recently gone through—rather briskly, I admit—the sixty examples presented by Gene Moutoux, I think I now understand it better. Somehow, I've developed a fondness for diagramming, a paradoxical mellowing of my old phobia.

Let's be clear: I don't think "the good old days" were very good at all. But they did have their points...just, this wasn't one of them! Not then, anyway.

I could not resist snatching up Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog when I saw it. The full title adds ...:the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences. The author, Kitty Burns Florey, grew up loving grammar, sentence diagramming, and journaling. She's a writer and a professional copy editor. Now there's a picky-picky job for you! I ought to know; I am a pretty good proofreader, and I know how others react when I suddenly chase a grammatical rabbit like a Captain of the Grammar Police.

I can't resist showing a couple of examples. These are not from the book, which uses scanned handwritten examples, but a couple of GIFs cribbed from Gene Moutoux's site (linked above).

This first example shows both the diagram of the sentence "Several of her students speak with the confidence of Demosthenes," and an analysis of the parts of speech in each section of the diagram.

The second example shows how one handles a compound sentence. I believe the word order of this one is obvious.

So far as I know, diagramming is primarily an English language discipline. This must be because English amalgamates three major languages: Anglo-Saxon (a Germanic scion), Norman (pre-French), and Greek (primarily Byzantine); not only their words but their semantics and word order. Further, English borrows from dozens, perhaps hundreds of languages for even more ways to say things. It is the only major language that really needs a thesaurus.

Interestingly, diagramming began only in 1860, with S. W. Clark's system of balloon diagrams. These proved popular, but a bit confusing, and soon gave way to the system created in Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, in 1877. A craze truly began.

Sentence diagramming fell out of style, along with phonics, times tables, and other memory training, just about the time I finished High School. A few school systems are reviving the practice, but it is hard to find teachers who either know how or are willing to learn. Just like I haven't met a reading teacher since 1965 who knows genuine phonics; today "phonics" mainly means "sound out the first letter or two and guess the rest."

So, this discipline, and indeed discipline in general, is found mainly among home schoolers. See the Classical Christian Homeschooling site, for example (and enjoy the misspelling in their own page title).

I must admit, the aspect I enjoyed the most was the larger examples, including a few approaching (exceeding?) 100 words. The author mentions a poster, the diagram of a sentence some 950 words long. It takes a fanatic to puzzle through such a monster. But things could be worse.

I once helped a friend by proofreading some of his essays in linguisics. The diagrams now favored by that profession are more complete, but quite difficult to follow without great amounts of practice. They are very hard to produce.

Ms Florey admits that diagramming probably didn't help her become a better writer, and most friends that she asked agreed (a few thought it a detriment, some a minor benefit). Nothing can substitute for reading, reading, reading books, not always even the best books. I learn as much from struggling through a badly-written volume (or giving up partway through) as from enjoying the prose of master stylists. And I love a quote the author gained from Virginia Woolf:

"Style is a very simple matter: all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words." (p. 151)

Kitty Florey certainly learned that principle quite well!

Omnibus Review No.2

kw: book reviews, grammar, etymology, nonfiction, ecology, science fiction, humor

Another week had to pass, and I've read four books. Seems using a computer all day, when it gets intense, to do so at home also is like a busman's holiday. Well, that's another story.

• Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, also subtitled The seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhumes: a collection of "the real stories," or as real as can be known, by Chris Roberts.
• Word Origins...and how we know them, also subtitled Etymology for Everyone: a modest collection of the conceptual tools used to discern words' histories, by Anatoly Leiberman.
• Tree: a Life Story, a natural history of one conceptual Douglas Fir by David Susuki and Wayne Grady.
• Only You Can Save Mankind, science fiction, firmly tongue-in-cheek, by Terry Pratchett.

The two "words" books are much different from one another. The first presents entertaining histories that are known, conjectured, or speculated to have led to about forty familiar nursery rhymes, and some that led to groups of similar rhymes, such as lullabies. I've long wondered why "Rock-a-bye Baby" ends with the baby falling out of a tree. You won't quite learn exactly why, here, but you'll get food for thought about it.

I've long realized that stories of dragons, elves, sprites, and the knights in shining armor that overcome them, or become subject to their tricks, are about inner battles: one day I realized that the dragon is me, the knight is me, and the captive damsel is also me; I cried a long time. Other stories, about ogres, trolls, and giants, recall the terror of learning to get along with larger kids, older siblings, and parents, who were not always exactly pleased with us.

But nursery rhymes, most often, seem to be kids' ways of coping with unconquerable forces, or of making fun of the grown-up hypocrites around them. Author Roberts has dug up quite a set of interesting history for our enjoyment.

Dr. Liberman's book is a much more difficult read. I find linguists' tools fascinating, but it is easy for me to see that it would take a number of the precious few years I have left to gain any facility with them. In the end, I find etymology a bit like playing 'Tetris'. With a handful of exceptions, we don't know the 'original origin' of a word. Rather, we determine, say, that STAND and quite a number of ST- words (STAY, STEAD, STABLE...) come from a Greek root meaning "fixed" or "held steady". We may even find an older word that the Greek came from, but we know we'll probably never find out if ST- goes back to the origins of speech in the 1000th Century BCE. In the end, a Tetris block will get you. But it's pretty cool to see how linguists dig out the relationships. Cool and strenous.

Suzuki and Grady have produced a lyric proem to a Douglas Fir (they use the term Douglas-fir, because the tree is not a real fir, but a false cypress), tracing its history from the fall of seeds centuries ago, through maturity, ending in its inability to overcome the depredations of predatory beetles, becoming first a snag, then a fallen giant, finally a nurse log for a row of hemlocks. Along the way they open little windows into many facets of Earth history and ecological studies. As close as I've come to a kind of empathy with a forest giant. This is the second time I've read the book.

Terry Pratchett writes well enough to entertain me in six or seven subgenres of Science Fiction. This book plays off the 1992 Gulf War and its obsessive TV coverage against video games, as the latter get more real, until the young gamester Johnny finds the line between game and world getting rather blurry. From one angle, it is a solipsist permabulation. But mainly it is a humorous romp through the half-real world of "virtual reality," which we find is getting more real-seeming daily. My favorite series of Pratchett's is the Discworld saga.

Omnibus Review

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction, dogs, grammar, humor

I note I haven't posted since August 24th. That's when I began physical therapy for tendonitis caused by excessive use of the computer mouse. I wear a brace along the top of my arm, anchored to my thumb. A foot-long contrivance, all to protect a bit of tendon a half-inch long while it heals. I've recovered enough to make one post, which I'll use as a mega-review of the eight books I've read in the past twelve days. These are not in the order I read them.

First, the dog books:

• The Light-years Beneath My Feet, science fiction by Alan Dean Foster.
• The Dogfather, a mystery by Susan Conant.
• Dog World and the Humans who Live There, nonfiction by Alfred Gingold.

To over-generalize, the world (in the West, at least) is composed of dog people, cat people, a smattering of bird-, snake-, and other ex0tic pet-fanciers, and those who wonder how a "dumb animal" can inspire such devotion. Of course, we pet people know animals aren't dumb; they speak languages that humans seldom care to learn. Yet many, perhaps most, house pets learn quite a lot of the human language used around them. So who is the dumb one?

In Foster's tale, which continues the alien abduction story told in Lost and Found, the dog has been equipped to speak, and given sufficient brain boost to do so rather eloquently. The dog and his man, plus two alien creatures allied with them, continue their quest to return home after being captured by "evil alien zookeepers". It puts an interesting spin on the experience of many animals captured in the wild for our zoological parks.

The Conant mystery, about a dog trainer "invited" to train the new puppy of a Mafia figure, is touted as "The dog lovers' answer to Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who series." Ms Braun's protagonists are two Siamese who keep a retired, rich journalist and provide him with clues to solve murder mysteries. Both cats and journalist are urbane, witty, and noble, though the gentleman in question can be a bit of a bumbler. Ms Conant's canines are definitely the kept ones, here, and the trainer is anything but urbane or noble. There is really no solving of a mystery in this book, unless it is the detection done by the Mafioso in figuring out who offed his favorite hit man. Inside job, of course. However, the story is enlivened by a view inside the world of high-stakes dog shows. A fun read, but Braun's cat stories are in no danger.

The Gingold narrative traces a "why" person's conversion to dog lover. Anyone who has seen a Norfolk terrier will understand that Gingold had no choice: "resistance is futile; prepare to be assimilated." Being a writer by trade, however, he goes a bit farther than you might expect, becoming conversant with dog breeders, trainers, and the show circuit. So the title is apt. George the terrier is a foil for a world of dogs that Mr. Gingold observes, records, and finds amusing or admirable by turn.

Now, a couple SF&F collections:

• Wild Galaxy, an anthology of Sci Fi stories by William F. Nolan.
• Bedlam's Edge, an anthology of Urban Fantasy stories, edited by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, written by fifteen writers including the editors. All concern Urban Elves or Mall Elves, the Sidhe set in Ms Lackey's bailiwick.

Here, the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy could not be more pronounced. Nolan's stories are near-hard Sci Fi, shorter on explanation than "really hard" Sci Fi, but set in a universe that, we understand in reading, could be explained if he wished to take the extra space. I found it interesting that nearly all his stories derive their tension from solipsism: as "mechanicals" (androids) replace humans, how do you know which you are? I find his obsessive attention to this boundary reminiscent of Asimov's "I Robot" stories and their successors. For Asimov, robots were sane—or they could by—, humans weren't, nor could they be. His non-robot stories primarily explore various neuroses. Nolan digs deeper. Once you have machines that mimic humans so precisely, how to distinguish? I most of the stories, mayhem is required, to see the gears inside. In only a few does the human protagonist come to terms with the thought that every other "person" may be mechanical.

Finally, a diversity of nonfiction:

• Bob Hope: My Life in Jokes, a brief autobiogiggle, with brief notes by Bob Hope held together by material collected by daugher Linda Hope.
• The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution, by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard.
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, a grammatical guide for the true sticklers among us, by Lynne Truss.

Ms Hope has done us all a service by collecting hundreds of her father's best jokes, and ordered them by decades (nine of them, at the time of writing). I remember seeing a live TV special in which Bob Hope appeared, when he was about 95. I don't know if the cameramen were being cruel or just unfeeling, but they broadcast him from the time he stepped from a limousine, helped by a nurse to reach the stage. It was, inadvertantly, quite touching. We saw a bent-over, tentative, shuffling old man led to the steps and helped up to the stage. At its verge, he was handed a microphone, the nurse backed away, and he seemed to bloom. The ancient vanished, and there was Bob Hope! He could'a been forty. His piece wasn't long, time enough for thirty or forty jokes, and he said goodbye to the host, handed over the microphone, vanished, and the nurse returned to help an old, old man leave. With Bob Hope, at any stage of his life (I was a fan for fifty years, and watched a couple of his movies made when my parents were young), what you saw was what he was.

Messrs. Kusek and Leonhard present a more serious issue. With about half the online American public, and many millions more worldwide, downloading music freely using peer-to-peer and similar networks, are we all criminals, or the vanguard in a sea change in the music industry? Really, the answer is "both". However, downloaders are criminals in the sense that the flow of traffic on I-95 between NYC and DC is composed of criminals, because they are all going 70 mph or faster in 55- or 65-mph zones. They are not "nefarious pirates," as the recording tycoons would have us believe. Pirates attempt to profit financially. Downloaders don't; they just want music at prices below rip-off. There is a principle of jurisprudence, that if more than 15% of a population refuse to abide by a law, it becomes impossible to enforce, and will eventually be replaced or eliminated. The authors expect the music industry to change much as other industries have changed, when disruptive technologies drive some segments of an industry out of business while setting the stage for new ones to arise and thrive (buggy-whips, any one?). Fact is, the recording industry is going away, but the music industry as a whole will grow mightily. The authors' preferred method of music distribution is "music like water," where part of our subscription to online services is divvied up according to the services provided. It is quite doable now to record the number of times a particular entertainer's track is copied, and to pay accordingly. This will eventually work for videos and still images also.

Ms Truss has a visceral reaction to solecism. That means, these days she must feel pretty sick all the time. Unlike the vast majority in the "grammar advice" genre, her book is readable, entertaining, and educational. Having a sense of proportion, she knows where to stop. So, while she briskly explains a half dozen uses of the comma, for example, when she mentions as an aside one writer who lists seventeen (calling them an insufficient collection), she doesn't give us the seventeen. Considering that very few people could enumerate two or more uses of the comma, what's the use?!? While some writers decry punctuation almost in its entirety—in manifestoes that make copious use of punctuation—and the spread of phone texting and "emailese" (e.g. "CU B4 8" and "wrking on pres. - hav it dun by noon - boss wants rt aftr lnch") bid fair to replace almost every symbol with the dash, the author makes a good case that punctuation will survive, as writers find the need to ensure their readers will understand their writing. Had Matthew had the use of a comma in 55 AD, theologians wouldn't be fighting over the passage rendered "I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise" by Protestants, and by Catholics, "I say to you today, you shall be with me in paradise."

OK, that's the lot. Tendon a bit sore, time to ice it then put my brace back on.

Spell Checkers Can't

kw: homophones, homonyms, grammar, solecisms

I have for years collected instances in print, for which it is likely the author and editor both relied on spelling checkers but went no farther to establish a correct text. My favorite, seen at least every year or two in the daily paper, is often seen in a headline:

"New Store Draws a Hoard of Shoppers"

To which an evil voice in my head asks, "Oh, where were they cached? I hope they had enough cash!"

(Did I need to tell you the mot apropos is horde? Yes? Then please keep reading!)

Recent examples that set me off today:

• In a marvelous book on anthropology that I'll soon review, one caption states, "Almost all living apes are restricted to living in tropical rainforest environments — accept the chimpanzee..." "Accept" is a verb meaning to tolerate or to admit into a group (among a dozen similar meanings), while "except," the word meant here, is a conjugation that means just the opposite: to exclude. The sentence as written loses its meaning entirely!
• The recent issue of Scientific American, reporting the death of polymath Philip Morrison, stated that he was "a font of new ideas." No, not really. A font is a typeface, such as Roman or Arial. Dr. Morrison was genuinely a fount (think Fountain) of new ideas, and I am sad to see he is gone.
• The newest Harry Potter book has a couple: "...the site of Mr. Fudge..." Really, now, it was the sight of Fudge that so discomfitted the P.M. And elsewhere "fug" is used rather than "fog," of a deposit on a cold windowpane. The former, incorrect word, refers to a gloomy, even perhaps a foggy, mood, but never to what you get by breathing against a cool window.

Now, we really have two kinds of errors here. "Accept" vs "except" are near-homophones. They sound much alike, though not exactly so. "Horde/hoard" and "cache/cash" are more exact homophones, as are "site/sight". (Many of us were taught that they are homonyms, but that word, meaning "same name," can mean either similar spelling or similar sound; homophone is more exact in this case) However, "font/fount" and "fug/fog" are more nearly look-alikes that sound roughly similar. I suppose they are more nearly what is meant by "homonyms."

I keep waiting for someone to put the smarts in a grammar checker (maybe the one in Microsoft Word?), so it can ask you whether the word you're using is really what you want, and offer a sound-alike that might carry the meaning you want. Meantime, there is still no substitute for a properly educated editor.