Reaching Out

At least three times in the past few months, I've heard someone in business say, "I will reach out to X" to get the information needed.  In one case, the reference was to an official at Amazon.  Is this a new idiom promulgated by social media?

I would have said "contact," since I couldn't imagine wanting to reach out and touch someone at the IRS or FBI.  "Reaching out to" sounds too warm and fuzzy in the hard-edged context in which I've heard it used.  I have yet to see it in print.

I am always curious about how our language changes and why we say what we do.  I wonder about the origin of this new expression, if indeed it is new and not regional.  Maybe a reader will enlighten me.

A divided America--linguistically

One of my favorite activities is to sit with a cup of coffee at the café in our local Barnes and Noble and look at three to four new books that look interesting. Usually, by reading the opening page, I can tell whether I want to continue.

Last week, I happened on a glossy book, intended mainly for non-readers since it is filled with colorful charts and maps; it's what used to be called a coffee-table book: Speaking American by Josh Katz, who surveys several dozen words and expressions used in various ways in the U.S.  Of course, it is a fascinating topic for someone like me.

Some of the words pronounced differently in various regions are interesting for writers, especially poets concerned with sound (rhyme): "syrup" is pronounced "sir-up" by 53% of the population, we learn, whereas  36% say "seer-up." This despite many decades of TV and radio ads with their mainstream pronunciation.  Regional differences do not die out very easily.

How do you say "route"?  We seem about evenly divided, according to Katz's research, between saying "rowt" and "root."  Oddly, he doesn't include the word roof, which has a variant pronunciation.

If the Brits have take-away food, most of us say "take out" while "carry out" is used in some parts of the Midwest.

"Skillet" is regional (Northeast mainly), as is the use of "sneakers" instead of tennis shoes.  In Chicago, you might hear "gym shoes."  (Frying pan is much more widespread than "skillet.")

Which is right?  Wrong question!  In matters of usage, there is no right or wrong; the sources from  which Katz draws in his book merely record or describe what we say in this country. Of course, writers creating dialogue might be aware that their own regional usage (should we use garbage, trash, rubbish, refuse, or waste?) will impact readers in different ways.  "You guys" is preferred by 50% of Americans in contrast to "you all" (10%) and "y'all" (28%) or simply "you" (10%)

I enjoyed looking at this book, reminding myself that we are divided not only into bitter political camps, especially following the recent surreal election; but, on a lighter note, by the way we speak, which proves again the adage (applied originally to the linguistic divide between Britain and the U.S.): we are divided by a common language.

Whom you gonna call?

Just after reading an amusing Atlantic piece by Megan Garber on the decline of the pronoun whom, I saw on the sports page of the Orlando Sentinel this morning the headline: "Whom to trust--a coach or an accused robber?"

I wondered if the readers of the sports page were really so demanding and traditional in their grammatical usage as to expect "whom" in this construction since, as Garber and others have pointed out, "whom" has been slowly dying for a long time; it's been on a decline since 1826.

Will we speakers and writers of English be using who instead of whom as the object of a verb or preposition exclusively in the future?  Garber and others say Yes, that it will have disappeared in 50 to 100 years because it costs readers more than it benefits them. It has become a pompous word.

The problem?  Confusion over whether the word is in the subject or object slot in a sentence, as in these examples, which make "who" the correct or standard choice and "whom" the antiquated choice since, yes, grammar does change as language usage changes.

1.  Jack said to his wife, whom he had just learned had been unfaithful to him with the man next door, "Go to hell."  Problem: The writer thinks that "whom" is the object of "learned" when in fact it is the subject of "had been unfaithful," the "he had just learned" being parenthetical.  It is easy to be confused by the grammar of such a sentence.

2. I don't believe in relying on whomever is sitting at the table.  Problem: "whomever" is not the object of "on," as the writer thinks, but the subject of the verb "is sitting."  Few people bother to figure such things out.

WHO has been traditionally been the personal pronoun used in the subject slot, WHOM in the object slot. Now, with "whom" being increasingly loathed and avoided, we can use "who" not just for subjects but in general--unless the effect is totally jarring.

So it's Who do you trust?  and Who you gonna call?--or preferably, Who are you going to call?  And, instead of "To whom am I speaking?" we can say something simpler: "Who is speaking?"

In defense of puns

Puns are often considered the lowest form of humor, but anyone reading John Pollack' engaging book, The Pun Also Rises, as I have just done, would have to argue with this oversimplification.

If you have a hard time imagining an entire book of 200-plus pages about puns, imagine instead an enjoyable tour through linguistic history in which the work of scholars and experts is presented with down-to-earth, often amusing clarity.  This is not a book of puns.

Pollack shows that for thousands of years, the pun enjoyed a privileged place in Western history, art and religion: the Bible uses puns (lost to us in translation; Jesus used them to make a point, not to be funny). Cicero and the ancients valued them, Chaucer and Shakespeare had great fun with them.

So what happened? The so-called Enlightenment, the age of reason in which ambiguity, that playful awareness of multiple meanings, was frowned on and the pun was considered silly, at least in English literary circles. But in the new U.S.,  Ben Franklin and other founding fathers did not have such a bias against the venerable play on words. The very fact that the British at the time considered punning low humor made it all the more delightful for the rebellious colonists over here.

And so it goes in this enlightening overview of language and the importance of ambiguity. Without puns, how would advertisers, crossword puzzle makers, some songwriters and pundits like Maureen Dowd, greeting card creators, and headline editors get along?  They provide smiles at least, if not belly laughs.  We enjoy wordplay more than we let on.

And as to the groans that puns often seem to elicit, Pollack has sensible things to say.  We react to puns and other types of wordplay with a variety of responses since simple puns make complex demands on the brain. Pollack has done his homework in cognitive linguistics.

Every language, he says, seems to have had a place for wordplay, even the ancient Egyptians. This raises the key question: is there something about punning that is basic to language itself?

Pollack believes that intentional punning "laid the foundation for alphabetic writing as we know it." This in turn made possible the accumulation of knowledge and the modern world: wow!  It all began with a pun!

His reasoning: the human capacity to connect widely divergent ideas (two words having similar sounds, for example, but totally different meanings) enabled people over thousands of generations to construct systems of language that enabled man to move from the cave and the drum to the telegraph and the iPhone.  Sound too simple?  See what he says for yourself.

This is a wonderful book, full of humor and insight, making complex issues accessible to the general reader, and raising questions about the mind, about the human need to remain alert and nimble in an ever-changing world. That, in a word, is the function of the not-so-simple pun.

Who(m) do you trust?

To keep my mind off last night's sprightly debate, and the coming election, I am focusing on grammar today. Or rather usage.

"Whom is not a real word," a 4-year-old told her mother when she had used "whom" correctly in a sentence. Kids are sharp; they know that language has to sound idiomatic. (This comes from a piece in The Economist.)

Years ago, when Johnny Carson was getting started on TV, he hosted a show called, "Who Do You Trust?"  There was a mild uproar in the media, with grammarians complaining shrilly that who should be whom (the direct object of the verb), as most of us over 35 were taught.  Just recently, when VP Joe Biden asked, in his debate with Mr. Ryan, "Who do you trust?" nobody, as far as I know, paid any attention to the normal/informal usage.

WHOM has mostly disappeared, except in formal usage.  Most users of English, says Geoffrey Pullum, using Normal English, steer clear of WHOM. Kids are rarely exposed to Formal English (found in books and highbrow journals) and so have never heard the word.  "Whom did you invite?" sounds stuffy; so today WHO is a standard way to start certain sentences, as in "Who are you talking about?" (or to introduce a relative clause: "Marge is the neighbor who rings my doorbell each afternoon").

The former example involving WHO is an interesting example of language change, of the way usage alters grammar. It takes place slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes spontaneity and ordinary, everyday talk, over the polished and old-fashioned. Who can blame them?  The problem is that, when people write, they carry over the highly informal style of speech they are accustomed to into their academic work, making it sound awkward, immature, or trivial. "History is not much of a turn on," one of my students wrote.

Many would say that the use of WHOM over WHO makes people uneasy, and so they avoid the standard form. Some misuse it when striking a formal prose, as in "He's the candidate WHOM I hope will win the election."  Here the "I hope" does not make WHOM an object; the clause (modifying "candidate") is "who will win the election." The "I hope" is merely inserted, an interpolation.

WHOM will probably remain with us in print, not in speech, where it has been slowly dying. No great loss. More problematic, as in the above election example, is the over-correctness of some people, leading them to make the non-standard grammatical choice.

A friend often says, "Mom gave Judy and I a Caribbean cruise," when he means "me" (the indirect object of gave: she gave to Judy and me). Even worse are the college students who develop the habit, uncorrected at home or school, of saying (and even writing), "Me and Judy are going on a cruise."

First, as I tell them, be polite and put yourself second; then think about the subject of the sentence:  I, not Me is used in the subject spot: It's "Judy and I."

Why, as Henry Higgins famously asked, don't the English learn to speak? Why are we so careless about our valuable inheritance, the rich English language? If we are to communicate effectively, we must listen carefully to the way words are used both in educated speech and in writing.

Tomorrow I am giving a talk, "Fractured English," on the many ways people can stumble in our complex language: the results are often unintentionally humorous, even hilarious.

Waking Up Dead

In preparing for two comedy presentations in October, I find that I am laughing out loud, even at material I have read before--a healthy thing to do. I hope our audience is equally amused. . . .Especially by the program called "Fractured English," a collection of amazing, often hilarious blunders and bloopers from students and many others: sign makers, printers of menus, hotel owners, newspaper editors, and more. . . . Even from the medical world, reminding me of Mark Twain's quip: Be careful of a book giving health advice. You might die of a misprint. . . . Thanks to Richard Lederer and his great books (Anguished English), as well as the internet, I have unearthed a few bloopers from the medical profession. My favorites from doctors' files: "The patient refused an autopsy." Another(from coroner's report): "Patient went to bed well but woke up dead. Cause of death unknown, had never been fatally ill before.". . . . I don't think such things can be fabricated. . . . Like everyone else, I have made many typos (not, as one student wrote in a recent email, "Type-O's") but none are funny enough to share. . . .In the days I had many papers to grade, I would be grateful for any glimmer of humor in a student essay or exam....Like the student (not mine) who thought Michelangelo had painted sixteen chapels in the Vatican; as if lying on his back for years to paint the Sistine Chapel was not enough! . . . . A Facebook group, formed by Sharon Nichols, has many followers, I am glad to say, concerned enough about careless editing to take pictures of signs and other public displays of mistaken English: my favorite sign from this group: "Please knock. Buzzard is not working.".....If I start listing the bloopers made by politicians in the past 50 years, I will be writing all night......Suffice it to say that our language easily lends itself to errors and that we can get a much-needed laugh from the innocent errors of others without ridiculing the person. "To err is human..." Of course, I could connect this to the point of a recent post: hurrying is the cause of much carelessness and confusion.