[stylist] The Elements of Clunk

[Judith Bron]

Gotta watch those commas!  Working with Lori I saw the dangers in comma 
splices and am now more aware of this taboo.  Commas go before, but but you 
have to be aware of what comes after a comma in most situations.  Two 
sentences in one statement isn't cool.  Judith
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barbara Hammel" <poetlori8 at msn.com>
To: <jsorozco at gmail.com>; "Writer's Division Mailing List" 
<stylist at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: [stylist] The Elements of Clunk


> That was a very fascinating article.  I am generally an excessive comma 
> user also, as most of probably tend to be.  I love to write poetry and 
> some British spellings of words do grab my fancy I like to use c o l o u r 
> now and then, but not always.  I do use g r e y sometimes because that 
> sounds like a prettier color than g r a y.  There again, I don't use it 
> all the time.
> I need to pull out my old "Elements of Style" book and look at it.
> Barbara
>
>
>
>
> Through the sunny fields of yesterday
> Echo voices of children now grown,
> Their golden peals of laughter
> Ring upon the ivied stone.
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Joe Orozco
> Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 4:16 PM
> To: 'Discussion list for NABS,National Alliance of Blind Students.' ; 
> 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list' ; 'Writer's Division 
> Mailing List'
> Subject: [stylist] The Elements of Clunk
>
>
>
>
> The Elements of Clunk
>
> The Elements of Clunk 1
> <http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/photo_9155_landscape_large.jpg> 
> Enlarge
> <http://chronicle.com/article/The-Elements-of-Clunk/125757/#> Image
> close <http://chronicle.com/img/close.gif>  The Elements of Clunk 1
> <http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/photo_9155_carousel.jpg>
>
> By Ben Yagoda
>
> Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging "The
> <http://chronicle.com/article/The-Seven-Deadly-Sins-of-St/17229/> Seven
> Deadly Sins of Student Writers"-the errors and infelicities that cropped 
> up
> most frequently in my students' work. Since then a whole new strain of bad
> writing has come to the fore, not only in student work but also on the
> Internet, that unparalleled source for assessing the state of the 
> language.
>
> Consider:
>
> For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a
> Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather
> Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go
> with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".
>
> Those two hypothetical sentences contain 11 instances of this new type of
> "mistake" (I put the word in quotes to include usages that would almost
> universally be deemed errors, ones that merely diverge from standard
> practice, and outposts in between). They are as follows:
>
> 1. There should be no comma after "But."
>
> 2. The period after "Iron Man 2" should be inside the quotation marks 
> around
> the title (which would be italicized in most publications, including The
> Chronicle).
>
> 3. No comma is needed after "movie."
>
> 4. "Its," not "their," is needed with "Weather Channel."
>
> 5. "Whomever" should be "whoever."
>
> 6. "Myself" should be "I."
>
> 7. "Girl that" should be "girl who"
>
> 8. "Gray" is the correct spelling, not "grey."
>
> 9. "Amongst" should be "among."
>
> 10. "One year anniversary" should be written as "one-year anniversary," 
> but,
> really, "first anniversary."
>
> 11. It's a "Yankee," not "Yankees," game.
>
> Are you surprised by the absence of smiley faces, LOL-type abbreviations,
> and slang terms like "diss" or "phat"? A reading of the typical lament 
> about
> student writing would lead you to think all are rampant. However, I have 
> yet
> to encounter a single example in all my years of grading. Students realize
> that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment
> (even an assignment for my classes, which for the most part cover
> journalism, broadly defined-that is, writing for publication in newspapers
> and magazines, in print or online). Maybe students are being too careful.
> Slang can streamline or lend poetry to language, or both. The new errors 
> and
> changes, on the other hand, make it longer and more prosaic. They give a 
> new
> sound to prose. I call it clunk.
>
> The leadoff hitters are Nos. 1 to 3; punctuation is a train wreck among my
> students. I have no doubt as to the root of the problem: Students haven't
> spent much time reading. Punctuation, including the use of apostrophes and
> hyphens, is governed by a fairly complicated series of rules and
> conventions, learned for the most part not in the classroom but by
> encountering and subliminally absorbing them again and again. Students 
> have
> a lot of conversations and texting sessions, but that's no help. You need 
> to
> read a lot of edited and published prose.
>
> Unfamiliarity with written English has brought about the other mistakes 
> and
> changes as well. They may not appear at first to have much in common, but
> note: All except Nos. 2 and 8 lengthen the sentence they're in. This is 
> the
> opposite of the way language usually changes. "God be with you" becomes
> "goodbye"; "base ball" becomes "base-ball" and then "baseball"; 
> "disrespect"
> becomes "diss." Two hundred years ago, Jane Austen wrote, "It is a truth
> universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good 
> fortune,
> must be in want of a wife." A copy editor today would cut both commas.
>
> Standard written English is a whole other language from its spoken (and
> texted) counterpart, with conventions not just of punctuation but also of
> many shortcuts to meaning-streamlined words and phrases, ellipses (omitted
> word or words), idioms, figures of speech-that have developed over many
> years. You learn them by reading. And if you haven't read much, when you 
> set
> pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a
> literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way through a dark 
> house.
>
> Thus, in No. 1, it seems natural to place a comma after "But" because in
> speaking you would pause there. (So natural that commas after "But," 
> "And,"
> or "Yet" at the start of a sentence now show up frequently in Associated
> Press dispatches and The New York Times, as well as in blogs and other
> writing on the Web.) And in No. 2, it makes sense to put a period after 
> the
> title Iron Man 2-after all, a film title is a unit. But in both cases the
> rules, animated by a general urge to make writing smooth and efficient,
> allow us and in fact compel us to punctuate in an illogical and
> counterintuitive way.
>
> The question in No. 3, of whether to put a comma after the word "movie,"
> relates to the famously difficult issue of defining or nondefining clauses
> and phrases-the whole "that/which" thing. It's a slam dunk that students
> would be clueless here. What I want to point out is that they're much more
> likely to err by putting a comma in than by taking one out. In other 
> words,
> every day I see mistakes like "the movie, Iron Man 2" or "my friend, 
> Steve."
> But rarely do I encounter something along the lines of "We live in the
> richest country in the world the United States."
>
> As for No. 4, every student of mine who is not the child of a high-school
> English teacher uses the third-person plural pronoun ("they," "them,"
> "their") to refer to companies, organizations, and rock bands with 
> nonplural
> names, such as the Clash and Arcade Fire. That is eminently reasonable,
> given that these outfits consist of multiple individuals, and in fact the
> plural pronoun is standard in Britain. However, we live in the United
> States, where it is not.
>
> (Even English teachers' children use "they" for the epicene pronoun-that 
> is,
> to stand for a person of indeterminate sex. Thus, "Everyone who wants to
> come on the trip should bring their passport." In that sentence, "their" 
> is
> so much better a choice than "his or her," "her or his," or "her/his" that
> it will almost certainly become standard in written English in the next 10
> years.)
>
> Nos. 5 and 6 are examples of "hypercorrection": errors that are induced by 
> a
> combination of grammatical confusion and a desire to sound fancy, such as
> the chorine who refers to "a girl like I." Her equivalent today would say 
> "a
> girl like myself." The enormous popularity of that last word stems in part
> from understandable uncertainty over whether "I" or "me" is correct. The
> same goes for "who" and "whom," about which almost nobody is completely
> confident.
>
> But there is more going on here; stay with me. In No. 5, while "whoever" 
> is
> correct (you would say "we'll go with he who can make it," not "with him 
> who
> can make it"), the error is reasonable because most of the time 
> prepositions
> like "with" take an object, like "whom." But people often use "whomever"
> even when the error is not reasonable. A Google search quickly yields a
> Facebook group called "Quazie's Hair Fan-club" (put up by college 
> students,
> significantly), which has a discussion called "Whomever wants an office in
> this group."
>
> Here's what's happening, as I see it. My students aren't unique but
> represent a portion of the millennial generation: at least moderately
> intelligent, reasonably well-educated young people. When they write in a
> formal setting-for a class assignment or for publication in a blog or a
> magazine-they almost always favor length over brevity, ornateness over
> simplicity, literalness over figuration. The reasons, I hypothesize, are a
> combination: the wandering-the-house-in-the-dark factor, hypercorrection
> brought on by chronic uncertainty, and the truth that once people start
> talking or writing, they like to do so as long as they can, even if the
> extra airtime comes from saying "myself" instead of "I."
>
> Examples of the trend may seem trivial in isolation. Take "a person that"
> instead of "a person who." It's not a crime against the language. But the
> language, in its wisdom, has offered us "who" as a relative pronoun when
> referring to a person rather than a thing. It's there to make your prose
> marginally more fluid, to save a letter, and to be used. Why not use it?
>
> Another manifestation is a boom in Britishisms: not only the weirdly 
> popular
> "amongst," but also "amidst," "whilst"-I actually have gotten that more 
> than
> once in assignments-and "oftentimes." (In a parallel move, the 
> stretched-out
> and unpleasant "off-ten" has become a vogue pronunciation among youth, as
> has "eye-ther.") In spelling, "grey" has taken over from the previously
> standard "gray." I haven't seen "labour" yet, but the day is young.
> "Advisor" isn't British-in fact, dictionaries label it an Americanism-but 
> it
> seems so, or at least fancier and more official than good old "adviser." 
> The
> "-or" spelling has become so prevalent-85 million in Google, against 26
> million for "adviser"-that although the Times, The New Yorker, and the
> Associated Press, along with The Chronicle, cling to "-er," it has started
> to look funny in their articles.
>
> Rampant hyphen confusion is part of the general punctuation problem, but 
> the
> particular usage in No. 10 is also an example of a concise locution 
> replaced
> by an awkward literalism. People: We've always had a way to indicate the 
> day
> when something is a year old, and it's "first anniversary." A Google 
> search
> yields 1.2 million hits for "one-year anniversary" (or "one year
> anniversary") to 2.4 million for "first anniversary"-and I predict the
> margin will quickly vanish. (It just occurred to me to Google "one-year," 
> as
> opposed to "first," birthday. I have to admit I am shocked: nearly two
> million hits.)
>
> A lot of venerable expressions have had their seams let out recently. One
> change (picked up and then propelled by Facebook) is from the traditional
> "he's my friend" or "he's a friend of mine" to the longer, clunkier, and
> more literal "I'm friends with him." In similar fashion, "too big a" has
> turned into "too big of a"; "can't help thinking" into "can't help but
> think"; "this kind of thing" into "these kinds of things"; "I would like 
> to
> have gone" and "I would have liked to go" combined into "I would have 
> liked
> to have gone."
>
> And then we come to the Yankees and their contests. I know there will be
> skeptics on this one, so let me start with some numbers. In The New York
> Times, from 1851 to 1980, the phrase "a Yankee game" occurred 39 times. 
> And
> "a Yankees game"? Zero. Contrast the period between January 2005 and June
> 2010. The Times used "a Yankee game" 19 times and "a Yankees game" 65 
> times:
> more than three times as often.
>
> To understand the change, let's first look at the previously dominant
> "Yankee game." I would characterize "Yankee game," "Yankee pitcher," or
> "Yankee fan" as metonymy: a figure of speech in which the part (a Yankee)
> stands for the whole (the Yankees collectively). The convention still 
> holds
> for some expressions: We say "I'm a cookie lover" or "Let's go to the shoe
> store," even though I like cookies (plural) and the store stocks many 
> pairs
> of footwear. The dropping of the "s" is one of those shortcuts that
> streamline the language.
>
> Not for sports teams, however-not anymore. Trying to get a more precise 
> fix
> on when the change occurred, I compared a "Yankees game" with a "Yankee
> game" in the Times database for various chunks of time. It turns out that
> "Yankees" surged ahead between 1996 and 2000, beating out the previously
> preferred "Yankee" 35 to 22 and setting the stage for dominance in the
> 2000s. What was going on in the late 1990s? I confess I do not have a 
> clue,
> only a conviction that this was an early sign of the coming of clunk.
>
> Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and
> author, most recently, of Memoir: A History (Riverhead Books, 2009).
>
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