Category Archives: language

Casanova, aged 11, discovers wit

Giacomo Casanova

Giacomo Casanova

I’m reading The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova and arrive at the following event, which took place when the boy was eleven years old.

(And yes, this is part of the bibliography for my book. If you’re trying to figure out why, I leave, for the time being, the subtlest of hints here.)

Casanova was in his home town of Venice, with a group of people having supper. An Englishman, who was communicating with the Italians in Latin, which the educated were able to do in the Enlightenment era, wrote down a couplet for young Casanova to read:

Discite grammatici cur mascula nomina cunnus/Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet.

In English: “Tell us, grammarians, why cunnus (vulva) is masculine and mentula (penis) is feminine.”

Casanova announced that, rather than just translating the phrase, he would prefer to answer the question. So he wrote, in pentameter:

Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet.

In English: “It’s because the slave always bears the name of his master.”

“It was,” he says, “my first literary exploit, and I can say that it was from this moment that my love of the glory conferred upon literature began to germinate, for the applause brought me to the pinnacle of happiness.”

Later that evening, the priest charged with looking after him told him it was a pity that he could not publish the couplet or Casanova’s response.

“Why?”, Casanova asked.

“Because it’s smut. Still, it’s sublime. Let’s go to bed now and speak no more of it. Your response is extraordinary because you know neither the subject nor how to write verse.”

Casanova would catch up very soon.


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Spaces between words

Marc Davis

Marc Davis

The good conversations are always the impractical ones, I’ve discovered. Either I do a focussed interview of somebody and I end up with the right quotes and facts in my notebook, ready to write a story. Or I … have fun. The notebook winds up chaotic, but I end up thinking about all sorts of interesting things.

My lunch on Friday with Marc Davis, Yahoo’s “social media guru” was a good conversation. Yes, we dutifully got around to talking about how technology might a) make all people permanent producers of “content” (photos, text, video) and b) connect them socially. But first we indulged ourselves with the fun stuff.

Marc, it turns out, is a student of words. He studied at the University of Konstanz with Wolfgang Iser, author of such works as Der Akt des Lesens (The Act of Reading). We talked a lot about what communication is and whether it is even possible.

It is possible, of course, but there is an arbitrary dimension to it. A spews out words (in text, audio or video, or in person) and perhaps other gestures. B receives them and does something with them (or not). (Mis)communication happens somewhere between A and B.

As Marc puts it, it happens in “the spaces between words.” A has to say the words, but B has to put something into those spaces.

This immediately reminded me of my drawing and painting classes in college. “Look at the negative spaces,” my teacher kept saying. He meant: Don’t just draw the leg and hip and waist and so forth. Look at the shape of the empty space surrounding them. And it’s true. If you draw the empty space it’s always a better drawing.

The spaces between words are a little different, of course. They are for somebody else to fill in. So the skilled writer/storyteller/communicator uses words in such a way as to create empty spaces for the other person’s imagination and projection. The writer cannot control what the other persons puts in there, but can shape the space.

That is really difficult. It takes the second secret of good writing, ie empathy, to do it well.


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Word-loving as science

I still remember my high-school English teacher telling me that good writers minimize the use of the, of, a and so forth. Those are fill words–in effect, noise. Turn nouns into verbs and get rid of them, so that the signal-to-noise ratio of your writing goes up. Don’t say: “A restructuring of our financial system and a recapitalization of our banks is an imperative for the avoidance of a depression.” Say: “We have to change our financial system and put capital into our banks to avoid a depression.”

I’ve also warned in a previous post about the treacherous first-person voice, which writers overuse, in my opinion, especially in America.

James Pennebaker

James Pennebaker

Well, James Pennebaker is now forcing me to think much more deeply about all this. He’s a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and he counts words. All sorts of words, especially the fill words that I thought existed only to be eliminated, and all those Is, mines and mes.

Why? Because how people use words, even and especially the ones we think don’t matter, says so much about them.

For instance, in analyzing the difference between Obama and McCain, Professor Pennebaker has this to say in on his blog:

Categorical versus fluid thinking.  Some people naturally approach problems by assigning them to categories.  Categorical thinking involves the use of articles (a, an, the) and concrete nouns.  Men, for example, use articles at much higher rates than women.  Fluid thinking involves describing actions and changes, often in more abstract ways. A crude measure of fluid thinking is the use of verbs.  Women use verbs more than men.

McCain and Obama could not be more different in their use of articles and verbs.  McCain uses verbs at an extremely low rate and articles at a fairly high rate. Obama, on the other hand, is remarkably high in his use of verbs and low in his use of articles.  These patterns suggest that McCain’s natural way of understanding the world is to first label the problem and find a way to put it into a pre-existing category.  Obama is more likely to define the world as ongoing actions or processes.

In this post, Pennebaker actually counts how often the candidates use various categories of words.

It’s all about probabilities, of course. But I love how Pennebaker reminds me–not that I’m somebody who was likely to forget it–just how much words matter!


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Just one more on metaphors, really

Well, after exhausting all of you with my recent trilogy on metaphor-mixing, I thought I was done. But I also felt guilty that I didn’t quite live up to my promise of juicy and sufficiently current examples from The Economist. Let me atone herewith.

It must be this financial “meltdown”. It’s impoverishing all of us, and to add insult to injury (is that a metaphor?) it is making metaphor mixers out of hitherto presentable magazines. I will venture a theory about this below, but let’s have fun with–oh, let’s pick a random piece from our Finance section–the first two paragraphs, including title, rubric and chart caption, of this article: (As always, different metaphors in different colors)

Domino or dynamo?

Oct 9th 2008 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition

China is pretty well placed to cushion a global downturn

CHINA has become the main engine of the world economy, accounting for one-third of global GDP growth in the first half of this year. Will it keep humming? Compared with many other emerging economies, notably Brazil and Russia, which have recently suffered big capital outflows, China has so far largely shrugged off the global credit crunch. But there are signs that China’s economy is sputtering. Export volumes have slowed markedly; the growth of industrial production dropped to a six-year low in the 12 months to August; car sales fell by 6% in the same period; and China’s property boom seems to be turning to bust.

Some of the recent slowdown reflects the temporary closure of factories around Beijing during the Olympic games, which cleared the air but made China’s statistics even hazier than usual. …

Now, you notice that I couldn’t color the caption of the chart, but “Sweet and sour” is another metaphor.

So we have: Dominos, dynamos, cushions, a lot of engine stuff (with humming and sputtering, which is fine because it belongs to the same metaphor), as well as some shrugging and crunching and flowing and the obligatory dropping, falling, sliding and so forth.

Why does this happen?

I haven’t taken the time to test this hypothesis, but I will venture to guess that newspapers were mixing fewer metaphors after 9/11. After all planes flying into skyscrapers setting off blazing infernos over the skyline, human beings jumping off of buildings and avalanches of dust shrouding an entire city don’t need metaphors. Such images are what metaphors are made of. They are not abstract but primal.

This financial crisis is the opposite. Who has seen the enemy? What does a credit-default swap look, smell, sound, taste and feel like? Has anybody ever kicked a money-market fund in the shin? Have you ever seen a mortgage-backed security go up in flames? Have “toxic” assets ever actually made you puke?

No, no, and no. This stuff is so hard to write about because it’s so abstract. I once taught a class in which I started by asking “What is money?” One or two people tried the usual “I don’t care as long as I have enough of it”. But, as in the 1930s, people are discovering that money, banknotes and coins aside, is not actually there. That’s in the Gertrude Stein sense of “There’s no there there.” Go into a bank and ask politely to see and touch your money. That’s what I mean.

Ergo: We are in huge trouble, but we can barely even describe why and how. So we stretch for metaphors from primal experience. And we overdo it.

That doesn’t mean I condone it. For good writers, the advice stands: Just say No.


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Amy Tan and I

And just as I am researching J.K. Rowling for my book, I am also looking into Amy Tan, and discovering interesting things other than those I am actively searching for. From Amy Tan, during this interview, the following:

I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. … Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

Why interesting? Because I have, in my own way, said the exact same thing, many, many times. Perhaps there is something about bilingual types that lets us love words as others can’t.


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The Republicans and language

And from that same issue of The New Yorker, this piece, which might well have telepathically come out of my mind.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I feel rather strongly about words and language–in more than one language, as it happens. So when a political movement arises with the apparent mission to abase and disdain language itself, you might be able to guess where my sympathies lie…


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Metaphor metaphysics

And just to follow up with the final post in this trilogy on mixed metaphors (after this and this), here is the exegesis of what goes on when you commit this crime.

1) The writer

From the writer’s point of view, the reason for mixing metaphors is usually fear and laziness, a toxic cocktail.

The fear is that whatever he is writing is not interesting enough in and of itself. It is not a murder mystery, but a friggin’ merger of two banks, for instance. Or a wobble in the stockmarket. Or something else that Truman Capote never chose to write about. So, out of insecurity, he and his editor dramatize. They do that by aggrandizing the thing in question with words from more primal situations. Mergers become either “takeover battles” or “marriages.” Divestitures become “divorces”. Usually, war, love, sex, floods, fires, mountains and geology (“erosion,” “tectonic shifts,” “rifts”) find their way into the passage. And so on.

The laziness consists of not even noticing. They stuff these templates of primal experience into their paragraphs and don’t bother to think about what the words actually mean.

2) The reader

When the reader sees the outcome, he has one of two reactions. If sophisticated, he will notice the mixed metaphors and lose respect for the writer, usually in excess of what is justified, and probably stop reading the article, or at least taking it seriously.

If less sophisticated or hurried, he may not notice the mixed metaphor per se. But something more insidious now occurs. The different metaphors (floods, fires, quakes, wars) will cancel one another out in his mind. Instead of evoking strong and specific images, which is what metaphors are supposed to do, they produce a verbal goo. Its effect is tedium. The text loses energy and the reader gets tired and bored. The subject that the writer feared was not sufficiently interesting is now even less interesting. It’s excruciating.

3) The solution

In 99% of all cases, the solution is for the writer to address first the laziness (because that’s easier) and then the fear. To stop being lazy, just get in the habit of loving words and seeing their original meanings. To stop being afraid, get in the habit of forgetting about your audience entirely. You must find your subject interesting (otherwise, why not choose something else to write about?), and so it simply is interesting.

At this point, you’re ready to take all metaphors out of your text and see what’s left. Usually, it will be much better. The big secret about metaphors is that you don’t usually need them at all! Other details, from direct observation, take over.

Then, if you really feel something is missing, choose something evocative–but just one single image for the entire article–and stick with that. It doesn’t need to be “literary”. I heard a Congressman complain about the “bailout” package last week by saying that it was “a giant cow patty with a little marshmellow in the middle of it”. He didn’t even need to spell out that he was not going to swallow the marshmellow (by voting Yes), given what it was served in. Now that’s an effective metaphor, don’t you think?


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More metaphor mixing

I promised in the discussion underneath my declaration of war on the pox of wordsmithery–this pox being the mixed metaphor–to follow up with examples from…. The Economist, lest I sound smug.

Now, now. That was a joke. I was just seeing whether you were paying attention. War, pox and wordsmithery do not belong together, because that would be … mixing metaphors!

In any case, those mixed metaphors are everywhere. Well-known writers such Thomas Friedman practically bathe in them. (Does he not have editors?) So it was good to see that the New York Times Book Review finally took him to task for it today, choosing this example from his new book:

“The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”

Oh, right, I was going to make us at The Economist look bad. Sorry.

Alright, here is a story that pains me to this day. It was supposed to be my first act of heroism for The Economist. It happened almost ten years ago, on a Thursday morning (London time). Thursday mornings are when we “close” the issue of the week. We sit in a room in a building we call the “tower” in St James’s Street (London’s drag of private clubs for toffs) and proof-read. No big changes are supposed to be made, because the pages are about to be sent off to the printing presses. Only if huge news happens, do we “open” up the book again and quickly insert something new.

I was still relatively new at The Economist and was not, on that morning, planning to call attention to my existence. But then a news item crossed the wires. A large Dutch insurance company had just announced that it would buy Transamerica, the large American finance firm that gave its name to San Francisco’s landmark skyscraper. As it happened, I had just met and interviewed the boss of that Dutch firm, and had really fun, colorful details about him in my notebook. I thought I might be able to hack out a piece quickly and … bask in glory.

I mentioned it to two editors, and they said ‘alright, write something really fast, and we’ll see if we can keep the paper open to use it.’ My adrenaline spiked, and I set to it. To my relief, the words came out in a torrent. And it was good. And the editor said it was good. And they took the piece into the still-open book.

There were only minutes or seconds to spare now. Two editors had to sit in front of the screen to give the piece a quick edit (because that’s what editors do). I stood behind them, watching the clock tick and biting my nails. They loved it and I was proud. And then…..

To my horror, he (who shall remain unnamed) fiddled here and there, and suddenly the last sentence–the very last and thus most prominent sentence!–read:

Surely Mr Storm hasn’t been seduced by the greatest merger wave in history?

Say what? Seduced? By a wave? You mean, not swept up by it, or deluged by it? I was horrified. But I was new and they were senior and this was my big moment and there were seconds left and I was not about to make this my final stand. I said nothing. They pushed ‘send’, and it went to the presses. I was that week’s hero.

But I walked through the streets of London in a state of shame comprehensible only to the loony fringe among pedants. Everyone–no, really, every Briton in this city, everyone in the Tube, and certainly my landlord–would within hours receive a copy of The Economist, and they would all turn straight away to the most important article, which was mine, and they would immediately spot this atrocity of a sentence! I was ruined!

And in truth, I have never gotten over it.

For those of you who want to read the silly thing in question, which is a decent sample of my style as of a decade ago, here it is.


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Mixed metaphors

I’ve weighed in a number of times on various style crimes in the English language, starting with my rant on this grammar felony. Now Abhishek, India’s up-and-coming podcaster, tells me that he’d like more on style and language on this blog. Well, Abhishek, this one’s for you.

We’re in the middle of a financial meltdown, you may have noticed. Well, meltdown is a metaphor, from the nuclear industry. It’s fine to use metaphors from time to time. But let’s have a look at two articles published in the last hour by esteemed organizations, the New York Times and the Associated Press, about today’s market drop (another metaphor).

First, the two opening paragraphs of the NYT article:

Stocks fell by nearly 9 percent on Monday — the worst single-day drop in two decades — after the government’s bailout plan, touted by its supporters as a balm for the current market stress, failed to pass the House of Representatives, setting off a fresh wave of anxious selling.

In yet another day that has shaken the embattled canyons of Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrials fell 777.68 points after it became clear that the legislation could not muster the support it needed to pass the House.

You notice I had some fun here by giving colors to each kind of metaphor. This was actually quite hard, because I ran out of colors of sufficient contrast. And that’s exactly my point.

In a passage of 85 words, I counted nine different kinds of metaphors, and I was being conservative. That things should be falling and dropping and otherwise succumbing to gravity when prices are going down seems obvious. That bailout nowadays refers more to Wall Street than to ships in distress I can accept. But….

… do we really need–simultaneously!–to imagine ointments (balm) for wounds, in this case stress, as well as waves, even though these do not go on to deluge anything, but rather shake things? In fact, it turns out that the things being shaken are canyons, which makes us wait for some quaking or perhaps erosion. Instead, we discover that the canyons are embattled (although it is not clear by whom). Just as I settle in for more siege and war images, I am asked to go back to falling, and then to take a side trip to mustering, with an image of congressmen standing at attention.

Ouch. My head is spinning. If the writer just wants me to know that this is all really bad, well, I get it. But do I need word torture as well?

Surely, this one slipped through the editors. The Associate Press, in its opening paragraph, probably does it better. Let’s see:

Wall Street’s worst fears came to pass Monday, when the government’s financial bailout plan failed in Congress and stocks plunged precipitously — hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 780 points in their largest one-day point drop ever. Credit markets, whose turmoil helped feed the stock market’s angst, froze up further amid the growing belief that the country is headed into a spreading credit and economic crisis.

Oh well. So we have the bailout, then a whole lot of plunging and dropping with some hurtling (not the same thing) thrown in. Fine. But now we also get turmoil and then, instead of waves and canyons, feeding! Of angst, no less, which I recall means fear in German. This fear is apparently what caused a temperature drop because the markets froze. And this in September. While this was going on various things were either growing or spreading.

Pulitzers to all involved.


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It’s the cliché, stupid

Here at The Economist, we correspondents have just received an order from above:

… a formal ban on “It’s the XXXX, stupid” … I think the phrase has been overdone, especially in election stories.

Can we also try, wherever possible, to avoid using “top”, as in “top officials say” or “America’s top companies”: “leading” is much better.

This is great advice for everybody, not just us. It’s one of those constant updates to Orwell’s first rule of good writing.


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