Why Didn't I Think of This Marketing Trick?

Apparently, the new novel "The Rotters' Club" by Jonathan Coe contains just 13,955 words.

Oh, but all 13,955 of them form just one sentence. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/arts/sentence.shtml

I'm withholding judgment until my inner copy editor puts down her Uzi.

What Not to Do in an Earthquake: Conclusions of a spontaneous scientific experiment

Experts have amassed a wealth of information on how to react in an earthquake. But, as is true in most fields of science, there remain hypotheses that cannot be verified due to the ethical problems of performing certain tests on human subjects.

For example, would a person react to temblors in a fundamentally different way if he were raised from infancy in an oversized maraca? Would it or would it not increase your chances of survival if, when the shaking started, you immediately took cover under the belly of Rush Limbaugh? Or would you be pummeled by a barrage of pills and/or curses against the liberals responsible for the quake?

The sad answer to these and many other questions is: We may never know.

But one such scenario -- previously thought untestable -- was indeed subjected to inadvertent empirical analysis during yesterday's 5.4 magnitude temblor. And I was the unwitting subject.

This fluke occurrence, which could never before be simulated for a human subject, answers at long last the age-old question: Should you or should you not attempt to eat a chicken wing during an earthquake?

The spontaneous experiment began at approximately 11:41:59 when, in a fifth-floor office in downtown Los Angeles, I lifted a cafeteria hot wing to my mouth. At approximately 11:42:00, a tremor rocked the building.

The following observations have been recorded for science.

* In a quake, chicken wings becoming highly elusive targets. A subject may try jerking her head back and forth in an attempt to capture her rapidly moving quarry. Yet these efforts will be for naught, as the hand holding the wing is likely moving at a speed unattainable by subject's open mouth.

* Interestingly, colleagues' yells of, "Earthquake! Earthquake!" do not immediately hinder the test subject's efforts. Attempting to eat the moving chicken wing proves sufficiently engrossing as to cause a delayed response, temporarily muting the noise associated with less-important matters such as building evacuation.

* Attempting to eat a chicken wing during a magnitude 5 or higher temblor can result in an effect similar to that seen in the 1980 documentary "Airplane" -- illustrating an experiment in which an airline passenger attempts to apply lipstick amid extreme turbulence -- except with blue cheese dressing instead of lipstick.

* Though a subject who maintains laser-like focus on a chicken wing during a life-threatening emergency may indeed possess certain academic skills, such as adeptness with language and grammar, such subjects are nonetheless not very smart.

Must. Learn. To write. Shorter. Sentences.

I've been doing a lot of copy editing in the last year. It's satisfying work. The bad kind of satisfying. The drunk-on-self-righteousness kind of satisfying. The "this sentence is a pile of crap and I and only I can whip it into a work of art but not without first nursing some very unkind thoughts about the writer" kind of satisfying.

Power-drunk-jerk stuff.

Okay, I'm being a little hard on myself. I'm not that big a jerk. But I do enjoy getting angry at clunky, fatty, inefficient sentences. I enjoy pummeling them into submission. I enjoy the little rush of outrage I get in the process.

Here's what I don't enjoy so much these days: Looking at my own writing.

Don't get me wrong. I can write some good sentences. Elegant and efficient. But I also excrete some colossal steamers. And it's making me mad.

Here's how thoughts come out of me.

When I consider whether it's important to write short
sentences I can't deny that, in more skillful hands, long sentences are, indeed,
often quite effective and, when used as a form of artistic license, can
serve as a form of Cormac McCarthy-esque poetry-as-power sort of device.

Here's how I want that to come out of me:

Yes, some long sentences kick ass.

I suppose the good news is that I'm catching more problems in my own sentences. The bad news is that I don't want to catch them. I want to write sentences perfectly in the first damn place. I can only hope that, slowly, that's what I'm learning to do.

In the meantime, I should probably lighten up on the freelancers I edit who don't know a dangler from a dingleberry.

Nah. That's not gonna happen.

Signs of a Bigger Problem

This is not one of those blogs with lots of pictures of poorly punctuated signs. But this pair of signs I noticed in a parking lot the other day was just too good to pass up. They appeared right next to each other, like this:

Yet upon closer inspection they revealed some interesting differences:

" ... at vehicle owner's expense .."

" ... at vehicles owners' expense ..."

I like this because, to me, it doesn't reveal the stupidity of the signmaker. It reveals the stupidity of the system. What IS the best way to handle issues of agreement in these signs?

In the first one, at vehicle owner's expense is a fine choice. But it ignores a flaw. It attributes to multiple vehicles a single owner.

The sign with the sticker appears to be a noble attempt to fix this. To correspond with multiple vehicles, it references multiple owners. You've got to applaud that effort.

But vehicles owners doesn't work. The plural of vehicle owner doesn't include an S after vehicle. You could use vehicles, but it only makes sense as a possessive: vehicles' owners'. And that's just weird.

The only way to get around this agreement problem without creating weird possessive issues is to write:

All unauthorized vehicles will be towed at the expense of their respective owners.

But that defies another priority for signmakers: economy of words.

So with that, I'll just express my sympathies for the people who have to make these signs and, out of respect, will refrain from mentioning the issue of capitalization.

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

muster

Recently, a New York Times editor named David Shipley rejected an opinion piece written by presidential candidate John McCain not long after running one by rival Barack Obama. A July 22 Los Angeles Times article asked why and then reported:

For a parallel piece to pass his muster, Shipley added, it "would have to
articulate, in concrete terms, how Sen. McCain defines victory in Iraq."

Normal people reading this may find their thoughts turning to issues of media bias and perceptions of media bias. Me, I'm stuck at: "Pass his muster"? What the hell is a muster and how do they know if Shipley really has one?

According to American Heritage and other dictionaries, muster is primarily a verb meaning "to call (troops) together, as for inspection" and variations also about calling things together or summoning (think "I mustered up the courage").

Muster does have a noun form that means, most often, a gathering -- usually of people.

So obviously, the well-known expression "pass muster" isn't literal. If so, it would mean to get something past a gathering of troops or other people. Clearly, "pass muster" is an idiom and a reference to the inspection of the troops that form into one of these muster things. And, yes, the dictionaries acknowledge the idiom.

Idiom. pass muster: To be judged as acceptable. -- American Heritage

But they don't mention any variation that uses a possessive determiner like "his." So "pass his muster" is not an idiom, nor is it completely logical as a straightforward construction.

Could you make a case for "pass his muster"? Probably. If you really wanted to. But if I were a copy editor in the Los Angeles Times editorial department and I had a muster, this usage would not have passed it.

Long Sentences I Like and Long Sentences I Don’t Like (Or “How Not to Read While Poolside in Vegas”)

I always have a hard time finding beach/poolside reads. Narrow indeed is the range of reading fare that mixes well with both the sound of techno music from a deejay somewhere off to your right and the smell of tequila from the fat guy to your left.

Such interferences compound another problem I have: copy editor’s disease – defined just now by me as the irksome tendency to focus not on words’ meaning but on their arrangement.

Usually, any time I’m off to tempt the melanoma gods, I have in tow a copy of the day’s newspaper and something in paperback. Sometimes, that paperback is a good book, sometimes it’s a bad book. Either way, it’s usually a bad choice for beach/poolside read – just as a newspaper is usually a bad choice, too.

For example, Tuesday I was poolside at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with a copy of the Los Angeles Times and a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. They were the worst possible choices for someone struggling amid Vegas smells and sounds to score some textual escapism.

Not three minutes after picking up the Times, I stopped dead at this sentence.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday dismissed Iran’s response to
a proposed solution on Tehran’s nuclear program in Geneva over the weekend as
‘small talk’ meant to buy time.

That’s a lot of tacked-on prepositional phrases ...

on Monday
to a proposed solution
on Tehran’s nuclear program
in Geneva
over the weekend

as small talk

... plus another tacked-on modifier ...

meant to buy time

I understand that, in news writing, it’s often necessary to cram several ideas into a sentence in order to assure they’re weighted properly. But still. Yuck.

I put down my newspaper. I picked up All the Pretty Horses. I came across this sentence.

At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.

This is the kind of sentence that no high school composition teacher would tolerate. Yet, for me at least, it worked. And it was all the more brilliant for the fact that I didn’t completely understand it.

The sentence was a sort of stream-of-consciousness straying away from the cowboy who was the subject of the paragraph and off to a place just over the horizon where Indian lives and histories made an otherwise desolate land nothing short of mystical.

It worked for me. But confronted by someone who hated McCarthy’s sentence, I would be at a complete loss to defend it. Yes, its literary context gives it an unfair advantage over the article -- amounting to near carte blanch. But, to me, the success of this sentence is more about McCarthy’s ear and his ability to extract slavish compliance from every word he wields.

How to truly understand the difference? I don't know. But these are the kinds of questions that torment me every time I find myself armed with SPF 50 but not armed with a guilty-pleasure paperback a la The Da Vinci Code.

So, if anyone else out there is "special" enough to find such sentence comparisons interesting: Do try this at home, kids. Just don’t try it poolside in Vegas.

Before I Go Dark: Banking and the Art of the Nebulous Sentence

I have to stop posting for a few days. I'll be back soon. But first ...

I've been doing more copy editing in the last year. As a result, my attention to words, sentences, and their meaning has improved. Basically, I get paid to stop and wonder: Did that sentence make sense? Was it clear? Did it do the best job possible of enlightening the reader?

I enjoy the work, but I'm just now beginning to realize the full value of keeping this particular mental muscle in shape.

A postcard I got in the mail yesterday served as an eye-opener. The postcard was from a bank with which I have a credit card account. I don't use this credit card anymore. The bank pissed me off two years ago when they sided against me in a charge dispute. (CompUSA had, without notifying me of their plans, erased my hard drive and then charged me $209 for the honor. The bank said that I failed to demonstrate that CompUSA's tech desk was staffed by primates.)

Because I don't use this credit card anymore, the bank's announcement probably would not have affected me. The problem was that, from their wording, I had no way of knowing:

At BankyBank (name changed to protect me from the dangers of announcing who I bank with), we're always looking for ways to enhance your BankyCard experience. That's why we're pleased to introduce a new feature for your credit account this fall. If you receive this offer, it means you can borrow at a lower APR than the standard purchase rate you pay on your credit accounts, with repayment in predictable monthly installments.

If you accept this new feature by using the check offer, your minimum monthly payment will increase by the monthly installment to which you agree. If you do not want to receive the offer for this new feature, please call the customer service number on the back of your card.

That's all it said. There was nothing else written on the postcard.

In other words: We're doing something to your account and we refuse to tell you what it is. Oh, and only people who wade through this nonsense will realize that silence equals consent.

I called the number of the back of my card. After wading through the computerized menu system, I got a woman on the phone. I told her the situation.

She asked, "What is the offer you're referring to?"

That's exactly the point, I said. I have no frickin' idea. When she finally figured it out, she started on a spiel about the benefits of this new feature. Not what the feature is, mind you -- just its pluses.

I cut her off. I'm quite sure, I said, that the feature has benefits. I just resent your company foisting it on me without a word about the potential costs or even a basic explanation of what the hell it is. I ended by issuing the clear instruction: Don't make any changes to my account.

She assured me that they would not alter my account in any way, however, it may take up to 30 days for them to make the change.