Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

metamorphose

In a fashion article I was editing today, the writer had said that a hairpiece metamorphosizes an entire ensemble.

I stared at it for a long time try to figure out why it seemed both right and wrong. In the end, all I figured out is that it's wrong -- at least, according to Webster's New World and Dictionary.com, anyway.

Both dictionaries say the verb form of metamorphosis is metamorphose. No "ize."

Though it sure seems I hear a lot of people "ize" that word. I bet I've done it myself.

Yikes

From the main page at latimes.com today. Their layoffs are showing.

Okay .... NOW I'm going dark.

I'm Dark This Week

I'll be back next week!

- June

Chopper's Delight

Came across this in my copy-editing work today:

Recovery time varies but is approximately about one week.

I bow down in awe of the inefficiency. I enjoyed this so much I was almost reluctant to change it. On the other hand, razing it was pretty enjoyable, too. It now reads:

Recovery time is about one week.

Man, Do I Hate Sentences Structured Like This

This surveying of the invited dinner guests is what led Joe to serve ham.

The trouble starts with the nominalized sentence subject, but it goes downhill from there. Why couldn't the writer have made "led" the verb instead of "is" to set up "is what led"?

Yuck-a-tori.

Ah, I Always Wanted a Term for That

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman uses the term "rent-seeking":

... the rapid growth in finance since 1980 has largely been a matter of rent-seeking, rather than true productivity.

It was a new one on me, so I looked it up.

Wikipedia says that, basically, rent-seeking means making money by exploiting economic factors instead of by producing something that creates real wealth.

Nice to know I'm not the only who's noticed how often this seems to happen.

Writing WTF of the Month

Here, modified just enough to keep me from getting into trouble, is a sentence from an article I copy edited yesterday.

"It was a lot of work," said Joe Mason of the 1968 Chevy Camaro he built using parts purchased at a half dozen local junkyards as well as a chassis and quarterpanels given to him by his dad, James Mason, an accountant at Bank of America, and assembled in his front yard over the course of six months to create what Joe had always said was his dream car.

And if you think that's bad, consider this: There was no previous mention of the Camaro anywhere in the story. That "It was a lot of work" referred to nothing the reader could yet know -- stuff that would only be explained retroactively in the quotation attribution.

The lesson here: "Of" in quotation attributions is a recipe for disaster.

To fix this monstrosity, I explained, in separate sentences, that Joe had built the Camaro, and put those sentences before the quotation.

Flabbergasted ...