Defiantly reaching out

Yesterday I got an email from a vendor that said, among other things, the following:

we will defiantly reach out if we have any questions

It’s obviously an honest mistake, and all I should have done was chuckle and move on.  But I didn’t.  First I started thinking about how one would defiantly reach out to someone else with questions.  Perhaps, “I have a question, and I don’t care what your opinion is about it, but you WILL answer me!”?  I’m not sure.

And then I sent it to Keri, because I just wasn’t ready to be done with it.  She took it one step further, so I feel like it’s appropriate to copy her exact email here:

Two things:

“Defiantly.” Hilarious.

“Reaching out” as a term for “contact” or “call” or “email.” That really annoys me. “Why don’t you reach out to Chris and get more information?” No. No, I will NOT “reach out” to Chris. I don’t need Chris to save me and Chris doesn’t need counseling from me. I just need to CONTACT him.

Just say CONTACT.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

…Okay. I’m better now.

So clearly Keri has some issues.  But aside from that, it sparked a discussion on the use of fancy business jargon when good old-fashioned regular words would actually work just fine:

Reach out should be Contact
Leverage should be Use
Solve (as a noun) should be Solution
Touch base should Talk to
Absolutely should be Yes

And the list goes on and on.  So I ask of our tens of blog readers – what other phrases are we missing?  What business jargon drives you nuts?

By the way, to top it all off, this morning I received a widely distributed email where the author thanked a bunch of people for “breasting this tsunami project despite the aggressive timeline and other adverse conditions.”

I really have no idea how you would “breast a project,” so if anyone has any ideas about what that might mean, let us know…

Faithfully, Obama

I just knew there would be a slew of linguists lined up to analyze Obama’s performance today, and y’all didn’t disappoint.

Especially of note was the flub in the oath, specifically, the placement of “faithfully.”

Okay, fine. Someone screwed up. I personally couldn’t tell if it was Obama or Chief Justice Roberts who stumbled, so I’ll let the people who know what they’re talking about figure it out for me:

From Literal Minded:
Faithfully Execute Faithfully the Office of President of the United States Faithfully

From the Linguists Graduate Student Association:
Constitution vs. Cooperation. The case of syntax and Oath of Office.

From Language Log:
Adverbial placement in the oath flub

Huh. I would really like to hear some Journey now. Go figure.

I’m with it. I’m hip.

I was thinking about the word “hip” (as you do), and about the irony of such a decidedly unfashionable word for what the dictionary defines as “familiar with or informed about the latest ideas, styles, developments, etc.”

I’m not quite sure when exactly “hip” became a word your parents use to refer to something they don’t understand or recognize, but I’d like to think that the tipping point was Dr. Evil’s outcry in Austin Powers (”I’m with it. I’m hip. Tucka, Tucka, Tucka…Huhhhhh. Well don’t look at me like I’m freakin’ Frankenstein, give your father a hug.”).

The reality is probably a little more mundane. Words go in and out of fashion, and it’s hard to predict what will happen.  I am personally amazed at the longevity of the word “cool.”  How is it still ok to say that?  Paris Hilton brought “That’s hot” back, so there’s one easy explanation, at least.

Other words have shorter seasons.  The New York Times recently published a fantastic article about the buzzwords of 2008 – I bet “Caribou Barbie” is already forgotten, but words like “fail” and “staycation” are probably here to stay, for better or worse.

Back to “hip” though, and why I’m thinking about it (because I feel like I owe you an explanation). I always cringe when I see the programming summary that Comcast uses for The Daily Show: “Jon Stewart’s hip, irreverent skewering of the news and pop culture.” It bothers me because while irreverent is a perfect word to describe the show (”satirical, critical of what is generally accepted or respected”), hip is such a death sentence for coolness.

What other words for “cool” fell out of fashion? Am I missing anything?

Funnily enough…

During the holidays, Rian mentioned he was delaying his viewing of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in favor of “The Terminator.” I told him that wasn’t very Christmassy. He said I was making up words.

Of course I was.

“Christmassy” is not something you’ll find in the dictionary (although my spell check doesn’t seem to have a problem with it). And though he pointed out “Christmassy” was a made-up word, he didn’t ask me what it meant. It was evident by the construction of the word I meant “The Terminator” did not have the qualities one would associate with Christmas (although he tried really, really hard to prove it does. He failed).

I’m okay with made-up words. I love playful language. “Christmassy” is, in fact, a word my sisters and I use often around the holidays when one of us is being particularly mean-spirited or negative (“You’re not being very CHRISTMASSY!”). It’s a funny word. It makes us laugh.

We never claimed it was a real word. But how much more fun is it to say, “You’re not being Christmassy” than it is to say, “You’re not exhibiting the kind of behavior one would associate with Christmas”? How much more descriptive is it to say “ginormous” than it is to say “both gigantic and enormous”? Isn’t the word “galumphing” better than “galloping triumphantly” (thank you, Lewis Carroll)? And if you are doing something in a funny way, I submit you are, in fact, doing it “funnily.”

This creative wordplay is different than using non-words such as “irregardless.” The distinction is in the intent of the speaker. In the first case, someone is constructing a new word using existing and familiar patterns to create a more descriptive visual. In the second case, the person just doesn’t know any better and should be smacked. When one introduces a new word, it’s best to come from a place of knowledge rather than a place of ignorance.

And now that I’ve reached the bottom of this post, I found this subject was discussed quite eloquently and thoroughly in the Boston Globe by Erin McKean. Instead of just deleting this post in disgust, I’ll just leave it up here as a hearty head nod in agreement.

Yeah. What Erin said.

MUKLUKS!

Some words are just fun to say.

I’m personally fond of “mechanism,” “onomatopoeia,” and “mouth.”

What’s an Elegiac?

This morning an interesting headline caught my eye on the New York Times web site:

In Final News Conference, Bush Strikes Elegiac Tone

(No, REALLY, this is a blog about language, not politics!)

I have to confess that I had no idea what “Elegiac” means, so I looked it up. The first definition I found was a little less than satisfactory:

Noting a distich or couplet the first line of which is a dactylic hexameter and the second a pentameter, or a verse differing from the hexameter by suppression of the arsis or metrically unaccented part of the third and the sixth foot.

Since this definition introduced more words that I don’t understand, it seemed like a step backwards in my quest for knowledge, so I ignored it. Instead of giving up though, I persevered and finally figured out what “elegiac” means:

1. used in, suitable for, or resembling an elegy.
2. expressing sorrow or lamentation: elegiac strains.

An elegy, as I’m sure you know, is “a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.”

So coming back to the Times article – this headline strikes me as odd for two reasons:

1. No one died
2. Press conferences aren’t exactly poetic (See how I generalized? I told you this isn’t a political blog.)

Unless, of course, the author was aiming a little higher than the literal meaning of the word, and believes that President Bush was lamenting (in a sorrowful tone) the demise of his presidency in its final weeks. Well, yes actually, that sounds like a pretty plausible explanation. Which would make this blog post a little bit of a waste. But am I going to delete it? Not so much. (Don’t you hate question-talking? I do too.)

But then again, it may just be that the author’s Word thesaurus threw out “elegiac” as a synonymn for “sad”, and he was under a tight deadline which didn’t leave him time to look it up. You never know with these things.

Peeance Freeance

No, really – this is not a political blog.  It’s a language blog.  But you can’t have politics without language, right?  So this recent CNN report on “Bushisms” deserves a mention (if the video doesn’t work in Firefox, try it in Internet Explorer):

So I guess now is as good a time as any to mention Going Nucular, one of our favorite books on the use (and misuse) of the English language:

How to pronounciate words

Do you remember Joe the Plumber?  If you don’t, I recommend you go do a quick Wikipedia search.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ok, now that we’re on the same page.  So anyway, Joe is back.  In a staggeringly tone deaf move, “news” outlet Pajamas TV is sending Joe the Plumber to Israel to be war correspondent for their online division (and that’s all I’ll say about that, since this isn’t a political blog).  In an interview with Fox News yesterday, Joe said this to answer a question on how he is preparing himself for the trip:

Ah you know I’ve just been studying new, everything that comes out on the news lately, um, trying to get uh, how to pronounciate some of the names, things like that.

This sentence is a word geek’s dream.  There’s the “you know” indicating he doesn’t really know.  The “everything that comes out on the news lately” indicating “nothing that came out of the news”, and which is particularly ironic since he said earlier in the interview his reason for going there is this:

We don’t really get the full story. And so I’m gonna’ go there, interview some Israeli soldiers, civilian population and get their take on what’s going on.

But I digress.  There’s also the obligatory uh’s and um’s and “things like that” as he tries to come up with something remotely coherent.  And then of course, there is the pinnacle of content irony, the zinger: learning to pronounciate some of the names.

Classic.

For Jon Stewart’s take on all of this, see below (starting at 3:25).

0 for 2

The correct spellings are right on the packaging, you see. Although “high lighter markers” conjures up some good imagery.

New Year’s Solution – Part II

I feel that Keri, as she is prone to doing, did not accurately represent my viewpoint on the whole “Resolution” thing.  (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please read her post first at http://www.wordsaredelicious.com/2009/01/new-years-solution).

I believe that a project that deals with solving customer problems should be called “Resolution” as opposed to “Solution.”  This is because the word “Resolution” to me has a very musical connotation, as in:
a.     the progression of a voice part or of the harmony as a whole from a dissonance to a consonance.
b.     the tone or chord to which a dissonance is resolved.

It implies the progression from a customer problem (dissonance) to a solution of that issue (consonance).  Yes, I did use the word solution there, but the distinction in meaning and usage is important.  We come up with a solution, but as a company our responsibility is for the process of getting to that solution, and that process is called resolution.  It includes whatever solution is being proposed for the customer issue.

The Bach story, first told in 1775, is about an elderly Bach jumping out of bed to resolve a six-four chord left in the air by young Johann Christian, and Bach subsequently boxing Johann’s ears for this clear violation of proper musical manners.

And that’s why we call it “Resolution.”  Imagery, people, imagery…