Know You Could Spend Half a Day Wondering Whether This Is a Question (. ? . ? )

This morning, Ted found one of those hanging brochure thingies on our doorknob. The first sentence:

Know you could chase down the guy who left this on your door.

It's an ad for Gold's Gym, the message being that if I signed some centuries-long contract with them, I would be able to leap tall leaflet-hander-outers in a single bound. (They don't mention whether I would also look good in one of those Gold's Gym muscle tank-tops, and by "good" I mean "as ridiculous as all the other human knots who wear them.")

Anyway, we spent some time noodling over the intent of the sentence. At first, I thought it was a truncated question:

Did you know that you could chase down the guy who left this on your door?

But on the brochure it ended with a period and not a question mark.

Then we wondered whether "know" meant "now," but that didn't make sense either.

In the end, I found my guiding light some "Simpsons" dialogue. In an old episode, shyster lawyer Lionel Hutz is struggling to stay sober. He calls his sponsor, David Crosby, who says: "Just take it one day at a time. And know that I love you."

In other words, it probably means "know THAT you could." (There's nothing wrong with dropping a "that," unless by doing so you create enough confusion that it ends up on some stranger's blog.)

Know that I could, if I wanted to, find my way through life without "The Simpsons." It would just be a lot harder.

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

dowager

I came across this word today, used in earnest – not in a comedy context like the Wealthy Dowager character on The Simpsons.

Per American Heritage online, "dowager" means: 1. A widow who holds a title or property derived from her deceased husband. 2. An elderly woman of high social station.

Those aren’t bad things to be. “Dowager” may not be an enviable status, as it requires a woman to have lost her husband or lost her youth. But it doesn’t mean “ugly,” “uptight,” “mean,” or anything deserving of contempt or warranting shame.

Yet the thought of being labeled a “dowager” is perfectly icky. And I’d bet lots of other women would feel the same way. We 21st century types are awfully invested in NOT identifying with “old” – especially not with “old woman.”

That, in turn, got me thinking about other words used for woman – none of which I’d want slapped on me:

* matriarch (Hard-faced, old, mean)
* dame (Fraternizes with guys who still listen to Sam Spade radio broadcasts)
* lady (Once an honorable term even for the young and beautiful, but now somehow conjures images of pastel-suited biddies who subsist solely on gossip or quiet judgment)
* broad (See Sam Spade reference above)
* gal (Should be a perfectly good alternative to calling a grown woman “girl,” yet it remains stuck in the past)
* chick (A glimpse into my own sexism in that I hate it primarily when women use it. A man saying “chick” reminds me of Ritchie Cunningham. Coming out of a woman’s mouth, “chick” often seems venomous.)

I won’t get into those famously sexist words – babe, hon, bitches, etc. on down to beaver and worse. That’s not exactly the issue that interests me here. (If only because I don’t feel I can add anything new to that discussion.)

What interests me is how FEW words for women seem devoid of negative connotation. And though we could sniff out negative connotations in guy, fellow, dude, bro, chap, or bloke, it’s not the same. They’re not on the same scale.

Maybe we should take “lady” back. Then again, to do so, we would have to admit we can no longer go by “girl.” And that would be motherfrickin' icky.

Weaponized Hyphens

I'll be honest: I don't have a good justification for bringing this up. I could craft one. I could talk about the creative formation of compound modifiers and how hyphens help the reader understand more quickly which words are modifying which. I could talk about language trends in recent years in which such compounds are used to craft insults.

But the truth is, I just remembered a "Simpsons" line and it's making me smile.

The setup: Some Canadians and some Americans are hurling insults back and forth at each other. The line in question came from one of the Canadians. He called the Americans a bunch of "Shatner-stealing Mexico touchers."

Really, did I need to find a way to justify sharing that line? I didn't think so.

The Great Thing About Being 'Unwashed'

The other day I used to the term "the great unwashed" in a blog post. I didn't really think about it -- didn't consider where I'd learned the term or how it got into my lexicon.

Well, last night the answer found me. And, wouldn't you know, I learned the term not from academic journals or Shakespeare's plays or any other source that would make me look good.

Here it is in the context from which I must have learned it:

Mr. Burns (to Smithers): "Just give the great unwashed a pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending, and they'll 'oink' for more every time."

Still, it proved to be a useful term, even if I didn't learn it in the most prestigious way. In fact, I guess you could say I pulled a Homer.

Weekend Edition (Wherein I stray even further than usual from the topic of grammar): The Queen of "Huh?"

In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart nabs a handful of someone else's business cards then hands them out saying, "Look at me! I'm a business jerk."

I'm not a business jerk. Not that I'm not a jerk, mind you. It's just that I'm a little challenged by the business part. Still, on the increasingly less frequent occasions when I actually read the newspaper, I like to read the business page. There's some good stuff there -- stuff you can't learn anywhere else.

For example, I learned today that Edison International's profit in the second quarter nearly tripled. Interesting during a time of so many energy woes. But it gets more interesting: According to the Los Angeles Times, this is due partly to "lower utility taxes."

Huh? We lowered taxes? In a way that helped add about $157 million to Edison's profits?

Huh?

The Edison story was on the main page of the Los Angeles Times business section. But when I turned to a very small Bloomberg wire story on the bottom of the next page, that's when I really started to wonder about this business-jerk business. It's also when the business stuff began to intersect with my usual blog topics of writing and words.

The 173-word inside story is about a lawsuit against Chevron -- a lawsuit alleging anti-competitive behavior that "caused substantial harm to (California) consumers of gasoline due to increased retail prices."

From what I can piece together, here's what happened. In 2003, after California adopted some new clean-air standards, the Federal Trade Commission sued Unocal for failing to disclose it had some patents pending on refining technology for cleaner-burning gasoline. Two years later, Chevron bought Unocal and inherited the suit. Sometime in the last few weeks, the company coughed up $48 million in a settlement with California consumers who were members of the class action.

So, distilling down further the alleged injustice to consumers:

• Company applies for patents.
• Company stays mum on applying for patents.
• Consumers are thus screwed.

In the grammar game, ignorance has become my sort of stock in trade. I ask stupid questions (a humiliating-but-essential survival habit I picked up as student who entered college with just an eighth-grade education) and share the answers. How DO you spell "ambience"/"ambiance"? Stuff like that.

But today I'm extending my brazen ignorance to another arena: business. So with that I ask, is it just me? Or has the LA Times/Bloomberg failed to connect the dots for all of us who can't insert the word "business" before the title "jerk"?

Am I the dense one? Or did the wire/paper fail to fully explain what happened?

This makes me NOT want to read the business page. I feel dumb. I don't get it. Surely, the problem is my ignorance and not the paper's failure to write for us garden-variety jerks, right?

Sure, I COULD try to do some of my own research. I mean, they've probably been covering this extensively and I've just been too pea-brained and distracted to follow it, right? You'd think so. But when I type into the LA Times archives the kewords "Unocal" and "patents." I get exactly one hit: today's story.

Maybe I should stop trying to understand stuff that's over my head and just join in the headline-fueled chorus of voices going all Jerry Springer on how John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife.

No. On second thought, call me the Queen of "Huh?"