perhaps they should have hired a proofreader

This just in from AW1L.

Our friend Alan With One L knows that Allan and I share his teeth-grinding annoyance and mystified incredulity at the misuse of apostrophes for plurals.

Not that I've never confused its and it's. That's a tough one for many people. And non-native speakers of English, especially if they've been through the US's lousy public education system, are to be congratulated if they grasp the possessive apostrophe.

However, the use of apostrophes for plurals is beyond rampant. It's pandemic. The pen has already been pulled, but I hope it enjoys renewed life on the tubes.

Background here.

language thoughts

This language column by Colleen Ross muses on how what language we speak may affect our behaviour, rather than the other way around. The author is trilingual, and notices how her behaviour differs when she is speaking English, French or German.

It's an interesting idea - that a culture's norms would be brought along with its language. On the other hand, the writer is reinforcing cultural stereotypes without questioning them. The French enjoy life more, Germans are aggressive and rude. People repeat these stereotypes, often with little or no first-hand experience of the culture itself - or with only the tiniest sample size, and that experience already prejudiced by expectations, based on stereotypes. These people are rude, these are tricky, not be trusted, these are brusque, these are obsequious. Ross seems to accept the cultural stereotypes as fact.

I'm a thoughtful sort of person. I like to mull things over before coming to a conclusion. I don't rant and rave. I'm not belligerent.

But German changed me.

I had been living in Germany for a year and felt comfortable in the language and culture. But that summer, a Canadian friend came to visit and was shocked at how aggressive I had become, speaking brusquely to slow waiters and queue jumpers.

The existence of my aggressive side fully hit me one night in Prague. I was with my sister, returning from a late night at the clubs. When the taxi driver quoted us the fare, I was incredulous: It sounded far too high. From the back seat, I spouted in German (more widely understood than English at the time) that no way were we paying that price. I halved the fare and paid the driver, insisting that was more than enough. My sister later said that I was very loud, very forceful and well, very scary. The next day, I learned the taxi driver had asked us the going rate.

I've always been fascinated by the intersection of language and personality. With the experience of my own split linguistic personalities, I was especially intrigued by a recent study that shows people who live in two cultures may unconsciously change their personality, or identity, when they switch languages.

According to researcher David Luna at Baruch College at the City University of New York, identity has traditionally been thought of as stable, but research in the past decade shows that identity is fluid, changing with the context. People do shift between different interpretations of same events, but the study shows that bicultural people do it more readily. Language, it seems, is the trigger.

This makes sense to me. When I moved to France, I felt like I'd been split into two different people. Two containers, wine bottles if you will, represented my two personas. The bottle for Canadian Colleen was full; wielding words and subjunctive clauses with aplomb, self-expression was my forte. The container for French Colleen, on the other hand, was empty, save the sediment of a mediocre Merlot.

As I gradually gained vocabulary and an ear for la belle langue, the bottle filled up. It was when I got my sense of humour in French that I felt the bottle was finally full. Yes, French Colleen had arrived and she was drunk on the finer things in life. I felt different when I spoke French: more joie de vivre, an ability to savour the daily pleasures of life.

"Language is one of the most powerful cues to activate a culturally specific way of doing things, thereby activating a different identity," says researcher Luna, who is originally from Spain. His study showed Hispanic women interpreted the same advertisement differently, depending on whether it was in Spanish or in English. They viewed the woman in the Spanish ad as more independent and assertive than the same woman in the English ad.

So why do people tap into different identities when they switch language and culture?

Here, English and Spanish are contrasted as if they represent two cultures: English and Spanish. But people speak Spanish in many countries with very different cultures. Similarly, is the English speaker adopting norms from Canada, the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand...? If they're North American, are they using the cultural norms from Ontario, or Alabama? Maybe this idea of language changing identity is another way to confirm and reinforce cultural stereotypes?

I'm interested in what you have to say, especially the several linguists who read this blog.

In another language-related story, I enjoyed reading this book review of Reading The OED - One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea, an account by a man who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary, straight through, in one year.

If you're not familiar with the OED, it's a massive, multi-volumed book that contains a miniature history of every word in the English language. It's so huge that it's usually displayed on its own reading stand, and often with a magnifying glass. I see entries from the OED when I get my weekly Pepys Diary installment (the diary is daily, but I catch up on it weekly). I also bought the OED on CD-ROM for Allan as part of a birthday present. So I have a lot of OED exposure. The idea of reading it straight through makes me feel better about my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies!

The review itself, by the author Nicholson Baker, is very enjoyable.

one day late

Yesterday was 08/08/08. And I missed the opportunity to share that with you because I was so busy.

Now I'll have to wait a year and a day for the next one.

content alert: jargon ahead

I miss a lot of marketing-speak because I usually mute commercials. But sometimes, for whatever reason, the sound stays on, and some new bit of jargon slips through. Recently I learned that sports drinks - those brightly coloured beverages that are supposed to replenish all the precious bodily fluids you supposedly lost while supposedly working out so hard - are now marketed as hydrators.

Perhaps you can consume a hydrator in your luxury sports utility vehicle while expanding your skill set with other individuals in your demographic.

Now rewrite that sentence in English.

Today the excellent Globe and Mail columnist Russ Smith writes about jargon, and tries to articulate why writing is not content. I also reject that stupid word; as soon as a prospective editor refers to my work as "content", I know we're not on the same wavelength. As Smith says, it's difficult to explain why, but he does an admirable job.

I find it hard to explain to anyone in business why I can't stand the word "content." I've tried before and it annoys people. "Yes, yes," they say, "we're sure you're very clever and artistic and all that, but we need a word to refer to what you guys do as distinct from what the marketing people and the management people and the technical people do. Why does it bother you?"

From a literary point of view, the word "content" bothers me because it falls into the category of the pseudo-technical: It's like saying "individual" for man or woman, or "offline" for talk privately. It signals "business jargon ahead." It's a way of making old-fashioned things such as books and music seem archaic: In the speaker's brave digital world, these things become part of a streamlined, scientific system of exchange - platform, delivery system, partners, synergy, content.

I also just can't imagine Leonardo or Derrida or Jean-Paul Gaultier sitting down at the desk or studio and thinking, "Today I produce Content!" (What are you working on, Mr. Bob Dylan? "Oh, some Content.") The only people I ever hear using this word are non-creators. Every artist says I'm working on a play, a video, a novel, a sound experiment.

I don't think of my own work as content. I think of the whole newspaper - and everyone who works on it - as content. It seems strange to differentiate between the content and the product as a whole, as if anyone who buys a paper or goes to a website or buys a ticket to a concert is interested in anything but content. Yet this is the way producers of entertainment think. "You know what's great about this movie? It's got fantastic brand equity, a narrowly targeted and influential demographic, and it also has some solid content."

I have heard people who work in entertainment industries - record labels, cable-TV chains - plan new entertainment products. I have been privy to conversations about platforms and demographics and advertising opportunities that mention "content" as a necessary afterthought. "Of course," I have heard people say, "we'll have to have some really top-level content as well. We have someone who can handle that."

Most of these discussions are about new websites or Web magazines. They are conceived as platforms for advertising. You think up a target market first, then you think up a look or style you think they will appreciate. There is a lot of describing the ideal consumer for this advertising: He or she lives in this part of town, drives this kind of car and has these products in his bathroom. Printed proposals for new magazines or TV shows often have pictures of these fictitious people - usually, amusingly, cut and pasted from advertising in other magazines.

Then, once you have your ideal consumer described (you call them "Jenny" and "Aqbar"; they are smiling in the pictures, and drive hybrid cars, and drink merlot and sauvignon blanc, and know who Robert Lepage is), you talk to a designer about fonts and colours. Then you find someone with celebrity status to be attached as a host or figurehead. There is talk of A-lists and C-lists.

Once you have this juggernaut rolling, money starts to flow. It is only at this point that you can start to think about "content." You know some people who are fresh out of school to do that: They need the money and are not going to be too demanding about it. Make sure they don't get too weird with it, and you should be okay. (Their own private projects - their blogs, their bands - they tend not to call "content." They call them blogs and bands.)

Not surprisingly, projects launched this way don't all do terribly well. You know what does well? When a bunch of experts in some subject, say economics, get together and say, "Let's publish a magazine about economics that expresses our views. We'll call it, say, The Economist."

I am quite sure that when that happened, the words brand and content were never mentioned. Nobody ever thinks of a good idea as content. They think, "I am really sick of fashion magazines that don't reflect my taste and life, and I would love to publish Dave's photos, and Gail could write her brilliant articles."

The idea of media as a vehicle for "content" is a virus. It's a subtle diminution of the importance of creative people and thinkers. To talk about your cultural artifact as a brand or a vehicle is to think of its creators as paid suppliers, as small cogs in a machine. If you start thinking about entertainment in terms of ideas - stories, strong sensations, provocations - rather than in terms of vehicles for ideas, you'll make entertainment that people might voluntarily absorb. If that works, you can sell advertising in it.

please, i beg you: retire this expression

Can we declare a moratorium on the use of the words "um" or "uh" in mid-sentence to denote irony, sarcasm or the writer's supposed delicate search for the correct word?

It was cute when it started, lo those many years past. I'm sure I've used it myself, and I probably thought it was cute at the time, too. But now it is just another over-used cliche, devoid of meaning, carrying no humour or any element of surprise.

To those of you who enjoy using said "uh" and "um" in this manner: a suggestion. Consider writing those words as you always do, then going back and editing the sentence to more accurately reflect your meaning without that qualifier. Example:

I would offer my opinion, but Laura might, uh, object.

can become

I would offer my opinion, but Laura would bite my head off.

Why not just say what you mean? What would you have written before "um" and "uh" were used this way? Write that!

If this post irritates you, you should see what I've got saved in drafts! Should I unleash the wmtc grammar and spelling class? (I think not. That's why it's in drafts.)

Previous expressions I have begged for retirement are found here.

Now cue all the comments using "uh" and "um" this way, all you readers who are so, um, clever!

free rice!

No, Condi has not been locked up. Oh well.

But while I was visiting Impudent Strumpet, I realized I have neglected to blog about Free Rice.

Word lovers, test your vocabulary skills and donate food through the United Nations Food Program. Careful, it's addictive. Which is a good thing.

Free Rice

bit of an inside joke, but still worth posting

Russell Smith says: I'm not begging the question, I'm just begging.

And in case you can't access it:

I suspect that it is only a matter of time before the major usage guides begin to give two meanings for the phrase "beg the question": one archaic, the other current. The phrase is now in such constant use in the media, particularly in the broadcast media, with the meaning "raise the question," that this usage must soon be considered standard.

This will be a terrible shame, of course, and so permit me, in my recently acquired role of quixotic defender of all things archaic, to lay out the argument for fighting this development for as long as we collectively can, like the last remaining humans defending the crumbling fortress against the hordes of vampire zombies. (Sorry, just watched that movie.)

Up to now, the accepted meaning, among educated people, of the phrase "beg the question" has been a fairly abstruse one. It is a principle from philosophy that means an argument that assumes as a premise the conclusion it arrives at. Basically, it means making a circular argument, like saying "This article is flawed because it is not perfect." A good example (from a useful site called alt-english-usage.org) is, "Telepathy cannot exist because direct transfer of thought between individuals is impossible."

The phrase comes from an archaic and clumsy translation of the Latin phrase petitio principii. And no wonder the translation is difficult: The Latin phrase is itself a translation from the Greek to en archei aiteisthai, which means "in the beginning to assume." The noun petitio (from the verb petere) can mean an attack, thrust, blow, request, application, standing for office or candidature. And principium can meaning either beginning or principle. So why "beg," and why "question"? A better translation for principium is probably "premise," and the idea of begging comes from petere as "asking for" or "requesting," a loose translation of the Greek idea of assuming. In other words, a better translation of petitio principii might be "assuming the premise" - in other words, taking for granted the premise on which your conclusion rests. The proposition is used to prove itself.

Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, a book I find very precise if frustratingly non-judgmental, notes that begging the question has also often been used to mean avoiding or ducking the question. The example it gives is this: Say you must prove that locusts are harmful, so you list proposals for counteracting the damage done by locusts. You may convince your audience, with your colourful anecdotes, of the necessity for taking these measures, but you have in fact not proved anything about locusts. This is, strictly, petitio principii. But this definition leads people to thinking that any kind of evading an issue in an argument is "begging the question," and Webster's gives various learned examples of this usage dating to 1860. The editors comment, with their usual cautiously diplomatic tone, that this is "a new meaning of beg that lexicographers must account for. It is fully established as standard."

Okay, well whatever the fine tuning on the logical process the phrase represents, it certainly has not meant, up to now, anything as simple as "bring up an obvious objection," or "raise the question." And this is how it is most commonly used on our airwaves. It's easy for a radio reporter who wants to challenge an interview subject to interject, "Ah, but your public-health initiative begs the question - how will we pay for it?"

Why do you encounter this on radio and TV but not so much in print? Not because writers are superior thinkers, actually, but because we have copy editors. I could no more get the colloquial use of "beg the question" past my editors here - a stern and ruthless bunch - than I could write something racist. Obviously, when you're talking, and particularly in a live broadcast, you don't have the opportunity to polish your language as do those of us who spend our days in ratty sweaters, making coffee and stroking cats and not talking to anyone. So I don't mean to be condescending to my fast-thinking counterparts in radio and TV. But I do worry about the influence of this repeated phrase. The erosion of the original meaning is now almost complete.

So now we are back to the old question: Who cares? If this is the common meaning of the phrase, then why fight it?

Two reasons: First, because it's not yet the common meaning of the phrase. There are still enough educated people around who believe the phrase has one meaning only, and they tend to be influential people. When those people are no longer in positions of power, you will no longer have to worry about impressing them, but it is still useful to do so if you want high marks or wonderful jobs. Second, because the idea of petitio principii is an interesting one and it is useful to have an English phrase for it. It is generally useful to have as many different words and phrases for as many different phenomena as possible; it makes your language a subtler instrument.

Furthermore, the past isn't inherently ridiculous just for being the past; the past is a delightful and fascinating place, full of wisdom and quirk. I respect it. It's pleasant to preserve some of its picturesque ruins in our speech, just as we do in our landscapes.

I have been reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys online, ever since the amazing Phil Gyford began posting it in January 2003. One of the many things I've learned from reading Pepys is how much the English language has changed, and is always changing. Many of the words Pepys uses in the 1660s now have the exact opposite meaning. Yet he also uses many slang expressions that we continue to use, some 350 years later, to mean the same thing. It's fascinating.

I tend to see language as more fluid and ever-changing, and am more willing to go with popular usage, than many people of similar literary bents. But I have my own language dislikes, patterns of popular usage that I am forever correcting, at least in my own mind. "Begging the question" doesn't happen to be one of them, but I can sympathize.

If you know what and who inspired this post, you've been hanging out with wmtc a long time. And I thank you for that.

peter roget, a man who made lists

If you love words, as I do, you might enjoy this review of a book called The Man Who Made Lists - Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus, by Joshua Kendall. It's a biography of Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), creator of the first thesaurus.

I was very surprised to learn that Roget never intended the thesaurus as a book of synonyms. He didn't believe there was such a thing as synonyms, since every word has a distinct meaning. But he was mentally ill, or at least mentally unstable, and one of his compulsive coping mechanisms was making lists.

I was also surprised - amazed, startled, astonished, shocked? - to learn that the thesaurus was not Roget's life work.

The Thesaurus, a retirement venture carried out when Roget was in his 70s, may have been prompted by a reissuing, in 1849, of "British Synonymy," a handbook of definitional equivalents first published a half-century earlier by Hester Lynch Piozzi, known to devotees of Dr. Johnson as his friend Mrs. Thrale. Freshly exasperated by the volume's haphazardness, Roget soon set to work in earnest on his own production.

Never quite intended as a book of synonyms (Roget thought there "really was no such thing," given the unique meaning of every word), the Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, "certainty" leading to "uncertainty" leading to "reasoning" leading to "sophistry." The truth is that most users of the Thesaurus have never made head nor tail of the system and have just availed themselves of the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to find what they are looking for.

The book was a hit with the English public from the moment it appeared in 1852; a bowdlerized American edition — dropping such objectionable exciters as "aria" and "the ups and downs of life" — appeared two years later. Roget continued revisions and updates until his death at 90, and his heirs kept the book going as a kind of family concern for a full century, before the name, like Webster's, passed into the public domain. Since 1852, Roget's has, Kendall explains, "lost 10 concepts — it's down to 990 — but it has gained a couple hundred thousand new words."

I love thesauri, although I rarely use one anymore. I like to keep my writing simple and straightforward; I'm more likely to use a dictionary to clarify a word's meaning. But I love looking at the vast array of somewhat synonymic words. When I open a thesaurus, I get lost, the way I get hypnotized by reading place-names on a map.

My mother bought me a hardcover thesaurus when I was in junior high school. A hardcover book was a big deal in our house, and her gift was an affirmation of me as a writer. The edition itself is now a bit archaic, and not the thesaurus I reach for, but I'll never part with it.

please retire this expression

"And so it begins..."

Whatever you're writing about has already begun.

Can we please add this to the list of phrases to be retired, along with "But I digress," "That said," "Wait for it," and "'Nuff said"?

Thank you.

happy day, and bye for now

We're off to Vermont - a great way to spend one of the five major Kaminker-Wood stat holidays. Allan and I met on July 20, a million years ago.

Plus, I just wrote a cheque to our dogsitter, and the date on the cheque comes out like this:

20 07 2007

Nice!

Have a great week, everyone. See you soon.

great date

07.07.07! A great date.

It's not that I think sevens are lucky. Last year I liked June 6.

oh, the irony, part 2

Catching up on some book reviews yesterday, I came across something pertinent to one of our recent discussions. Patricia O'Connor, reviewing two language books for the New York Times Book Review, writes:

Get a few language types together, and before long someone will bring up the great divide between the preservers and the observers of English, the "prescriptivists" and the "descriptivists" — those who'd rap your knuckles for using "snuck" versus those who might cite Anglo-Saxon cognates in its defense.

The truth is that the divide isn't nearly as great as it's made out to be. Most grammarians, lexicographers, usage experts and linguists are somewhere in between: English is always changing, but that doesn't mean anything goes.

Ben Yagoda, the author of "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It," is with the right-thinking folks in the middle. His book, an ode to the parts of speech, isn't about the rights or wrongs of English. It's about the wonder of it all: the beauty, the joy, the fun of a language enriched by poets like Lily Tomlin, Fats Waller and Dizzy Dean (to whom we owe "slud," as in "Rizzuto slud into second").

. . .

While some things bug Yagoda (he despises "enthuse," for example), he has a healthy skepticism toward language extremists. The rule-bound sticklers leave no room for change, and the descriptivists are inconsistent: they sneer at Miss Grundy, "yet in their own writing follow all the traditional rules."

One might make the same complaint about Yagoda. He says it's time we embraced "they," "them" and "their" as sexless singular pronouns (as in "Who lost their lunch?"). Sure, Ben. Then why don't you use them yourself?

David Crystal, on the other hand, has the courage of his convictions. You'll find sexless pronouns and more in "The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left," his survey of the 500-year-old crusade for correctness in English. By and large, he's against it — not the correctness so much as the crusade.

His subtitle is an allusion to Lynne Truss's best seller "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," and his subject is "the whole genre of books which that book represents." His beef isn't with standards for punctuation or other rules; he doesn't believe that anything goes. It's with a "zero tolerance" attitude better suited to "crime prevention and political extremism."

Crystal, an eminent British linguist and the author of "The Stories of English," "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language" and about 100 other books, manages to be genial and irascible at the same time. He acknowledges that the emergence of standards is natural. It's the umpires he can't abide. He sees them as "self-appointed language watchdogs" with a "social agenda": to promote the interests of the ruling classes and make the proles feel bad. He then lumps together just about everyone from Johnson and Swift to Fowler and Strunk as enemies of linguistic tolerance and diversity.

He sees spelling, grammar and pronunciation as battles in a kind of class war. In one camp are the descriptivists, academic linguists like himself. In the other are the prescriptivists, politically incorrect language cops.

There are two points to be made here. First, this is not a class issue. Fowler, who was more interested in puncturing pomposity than in oppressing the underclass, would have snorted at the notion that he was elitist. The worst crimes against English are committed not by the underprivileged but by bureaucrats in academia, government and business.

Second, Lynne Truss aside, most writers on usage today agree with Crystal on the big issues: Change is inevitable. People don't talk the way they write. Dialects are the life of the language. The sillier "rules" of grammar were just stupid misunderstandings.

Now can we dispense with the labels? Usage guides have their uses. Since language is forever changing, it's nice to be able to look up a word and see how most people currently use it, spell it and say it.

. . . .

Much as I admire both Crystal and Yagoda, I can’t believe the singular "they" will become accepted in educated writing in our lifetime. Of course, I could be wrong. In the words of Fats Waller, "One never knows, do one?"

This helped me articulate where I come down in this quasi-debate. I respect the rules of language; I like to know them and strive to use them correctly. Incorrect usage and punctuation bother me. But, like David Crystal, the self-righteous umpires bother me more.

oh, the irony

Although I ask people on this blog not to correct each other's spelling, usage and grammar, this is not to say that incorrect usage doesn't bother me. It does. Sometimes it drives me nuts.

Yet people who are very nitpicky about other people's grammar and usage also drive me nuts. I think we should all be more generous with each other, and that what's important is that we communicate, not that we communicate according to a specific set of rules.

Clearly these two modes of thought come into conflict.

And it's with that preface that I write this post, which is not aimed at anyone in particular, certainly not at anyone on this blog.

When it comes to language, the thing that drives me the nutsiest is the spread of fake words or meaningless expressions in the media. If you follow a sport, you see this all the time in the sports media. Words spread through interviews like wildfire cliches. One season everything will be prefaced with "obviously" or "and again...", whether or not it's obvious, whether or not the person is repeating him or herself. Another year it will be "Having said that...". Right now words are being turned into adverbs with abandon. "Relatedly", "admittedly" and "belatedly" are just a few that are making the rounds.

But here's my point, and I do have one.

Would everyone please stop calling everything IRONIC???

Every little coincidence is not ironic. Every time something happens that even vaguely resembles or contradicts something else, it cannot rightly be described as "ironically".

How's this for a sentence? I won't provide a link because I have no wish to embarrass anyone. In a history of First Nations people in Canada, I read, "...which happened ironically on September 11, 1883".

Can something that happened to native peoples in the Canada of 1883 be described as ironic? Because it occurred on a date that, 118 years later, would be famous for something else? That's at most a coincidence, but it's really not even that, as there's no connection between the two events.

Here's a coincidence. Two people meet in Chicago on September 11, 2012. It turns out they both lost partners in the World Trade Center attacks. They fall in love. Their meeting on September 11 is a coincidence. Their falling in love might correctly be described as ironic, although I don't think so. But September 11, 1883? There's nothing ironic there.

On the bus yesterday, I overheard this, "I'm telling you, she's out to get me. And it's so ironic, because I hate her too, but there's nothing I can do about it."

What is ironic about that?

For the next week or so, listen carefully to what you hear at work, on the street or on TV. When you read the newspaper, especially letters to the editor, keep an eye out for the word "ironically". See if what's being described is actually ironic.

That is all. Rant over.

words

I love palindromes, and I love anagrams. I guess it's my love of words and language, combined with my enjoyment of puzzles and games. I can't make palindromes at all, and maybe that's partly why I like them.

For reasons unknown, Allan recently started making anagrams of Red Sox players' names. (Scroll down.) I joined in - and then continued because it was annoying a neocon. (Did I ever claim to be mature?) So there I was, wracking my brain to use up all the letters, only to learn that Allan's astounding anagrams were more easily acquired: he used one of the many online anagram generators.

So folks, anagrams for "we move to canada"?

The only rule is you've got to do it on your own, no using anagram sites. You're on the honour system. Be (or be like) good Canadians: pay your fare, don't cross against the lights, and think up anagrams on your own.

I'll warn you, we do have a Scrabble champion in our midst.

cinq à sept

Walrus again. Just a Canadian story I liked a lot.

Touchez-pas That Dial
An anglophone DJ charms Montreal listeners, one bungled word at a time

by Martin Patriquin

Tim Morgan doesn't remember exactly what French phrase he first botched on-air, but he's pretty sure it was Jeanne Mance. Morgan, a DJ on the Montreal classic-rock radio station chom-fm, pronounced the storied Montreal street as most Vancouver natives would: instead of sounding like "Zhan Mahnse," it rhymed with "green pants." The phone lines lit up, the assistant station manager came in to correct him, and Morgan sheepishly apologized for his faux pas during his next segment.

A few days later, he mentioned on the air that he was taking French lessons and had learned key phrases such as Je m'excuse, mais mon français n'est pas très bon (I'm sorry, but my French isn't very good) and, more importantly, Je vais jouer du Floyd entre cinq et six heures (I will play Pink Floyd between five and six o'clock). Morgan's earnest attempts, combined with chom's steady dose of classic rock—for which French Canadians have an enduring affinity—have made him a minor celebrity in francophone Montreal. For the first time anyone can remember, the 3-to-7-p.m. show, which Morgan has hosted since December 2004, recently beat out French-language ckoi-fm's drive-home show in the ratings, no small feat considering that ckoi is a Montreal institution.

Over the past year, Morgan has received praise, encouragement, party invitations, Christmas cards, a verb-conjugation wheel, and offers of free French lessons—only some of which weren't thinly veiled overtures from smitten French-Canadian women. "I got into an exchange with this girl who said she wanted me to come out with her and her friends to practise French," Morgan says. "I said that might be fun. She wrote back, saying that actually it would just be me and her over dinner. I had to tell her thanks, but my girlfriend speaks pretty good French."

chom's playlist hearkens back to the days of seventies and eighties stadium rock, and the station's DJs, Morgan included, regularly usher in "Thirty-Minute Non-stop Rock Rides" with utmost zeal. The real Morgan, though, is the antithesis of Tim Morgan, rock DJ. Tall and unassuming, the thirty-year-old doesn't look like someone who peppers a significant part of his day with boilerplate chatter about potholes, rickety Metro cars, lazy blue-collar workers, and overpriced beer at the Bell Centre. His face would look good on a chom billboard, no doubt, but his tastes run to Wilco and Ben Harper—acts that would make the average chom listener dial in to demand something Led Zeppelin-related.

In person, Morgan turns off the slick, exaggerated inflection he uses on the air and is prone to introspection about his profession. "What is a Rock Ride, really" he asks out loud to no one in particular. "Tell me what it is. It doesn't make any sense." He also has a habit of aborting thoughts mid-sentence if he thinks he's being immodest. Of his show's success, he says, "I guess it's good, but for me it's— ckoi might kick my ass next time, you know."

By speaking hesitant French to an audience of roughly 312,000 people, Morgan has become French Canada's favourite type of anglophone: one who makes an effort to learn the country's "other" official language. "English people don't force themselves enough, and someone who comes here from Vancouver and really tries to learn is fun en tabarouette [as all hell]," says Johanne Nepton, forty, who has tuned in to chom since 1979. ("I listen because I know I will never wake up to Céline Dion," she says.)

Although statistically, more Quebec anglophones than francophones are bilingual, the idea that les anglos can't be bothered to learn French persists. So when someone like Tim Morgan butchers his verb conjugation in public, the reaction is grateful, not derisive. For her part, Nepton sent Morgan a friendly note. "I think it's really good that you are learning French," she wrote in her native tongue, adding, "I hope you can read what I write."

None of the 925 songs that make up chom's weekly playlist are likely to invoke the ghosts of Quebec nationalism. And DJs rarely, if ever, bring up language politics, for reasons both practical (how do you segue from "Whole Lotta Love" to Bill 101) and institutional ( chom is a rock station, nothing more, nothing less, a swell fit for famously apolitical Montreal).

Morgan has resisted calls from several listeners and at least one member of the chom sales team to speak more French on his show. Classic rock takes up a lot of airtime and he doesn't want his French to become a gimmick shoehorned into the limited space he has between songs and commercials. His biggest on-air preoccupation is nailing down words that are themselves staples of every self-respecting Montrealer, English or French. It's a dépanneur, not a corner store; a terrace, not a patio; cinq à sept, not happy hour; Zhahk Car-tyay, not Jack Cart-yer.

A year and a half on the air hasn't cured the curse of Jeanne Mance though. Every time the street name pops up in a script, Morgan envisions the hordes of callers who will make fun of him, send a card, or ask him out on a date. "It's scary. I see the words in my brain coming up, and I think, "Say it really quickly. Maybe they won't notice.' Thing is, they always do."

We love Montreal - we've been visiting there long before we ever dreamed we'd live in Canada - and I'd love to know the city better. We're also spending our 20th anniversary of domestic partnership (January 3, 2007) in Quebec, but that's another story.

This reminds me we should check in on Uncle David in in Montreal. You have to be reading wmtc a long time to know who that is!

today

You know what today is, right? 06/06/06! 666! Have a devilishly good day.

And take pause at 6:06 to enjoy the full effect. You 24-hour-clock people missed the boat this morning.

Boy, I'm really posting challenging material lately.

seen

Seen on the New York State Thruway:

Open 24 Hours
Til 11 pm
Mon-Sun

I spent eight hours in the United States and all I got was this illiterate signage.

words

I hope you've all seen the excellent movie Spellbound. I'm referring not to the 1945 Hitchcock classic, but to the 2002 film about the Spelling Bee. This terrific little movie follows eight regional spelling champions, all under fifteen years old, as they compete in a crazy American phenomenon called the National Spelling Bee. If you haven't seen Spellbound, you must! You won't believe how a spelling bee can generate edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Having seen and enjoyed Spellbound when it came out, last night we saw a movie in a similar vein: Word Wars, about the National Scrabble Championships. Word Wars is about obsession and obsessive people more than anything else. It follows the "tiles and tribulations" (groan!) of four people who live, breathe and sleep Scrabble. They've memorized tens of thousands of words (not their meanings, just their existence), studied strategy, explored the upwards limit of mental endurance - and have given their lives over to the pursuit of the Championship. It's a window into a bizarre world, and a nice little movie. (It owes much to the book Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis.)

The Word Wars movie also introduces you to another subculture: the Scrabble players of Washington Square Park, in New York City's Greenwich Village. Washington Square Park is home to a community of highly competitive chess, backgammon and Scrabble players, who play the "street" version of their respective games. Here are some good photos of the famous Washington Square Park chess players.

It was a great surprise to see this part of my beloved city. Like the news of the transit strike, it made me a little homesick - not in the sense of wishing I still lived there, just in a sweet, wistful way, a piece of my life I'll always treasure.

* * * *

Here's a great story for me, a lover of words, books, history and Canada.

It's been discovered that a Bible in the University of Manitoba's archives is in fact an extremely rare first edition, first printing of the King James Bible. I have a thing for very old books, and I especially love this collection of Christian mythology as a piece of Renaissance literature. The language is beautiful and evocative, and stands alongside its contemporary Shakespeare as some of the greatest writing in the English language.

How cool that a first edition has surfaced in Canada. Here are some pictures.

synergy

Sometimes several things we love come together. Redsock, in his baseball guise, sent me this link to some baseball poetry. Specifically, limericks. For example:

The Yankees are sitting in last.
Steinbrenner cries, "I'm aghast!
I have a bill
For 200 mill!
Gimme my victories, fast!"

Baseball Toaster has written one for each MLB division. (It's a really nice blog. Scroll down to see his lovely tribute to a former professor.)

This Toaster guy has found an entire dictionary (or dictionary-in-progress) being written in limericks! Really! It's called the OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.

You have to see it believe it. An example from today's "recently approved limerick" listing:

The apostrophe's often abused:
It gets battered, and bruised, and misused.
On a plural, a blight;
For possessives, just right,
Barring "its", which leaves people confused

And following the limerick is a concise definition of the word. I especially love that he's retaining the name of the contributor for each entry, a nice touch that will attract more people. Go. Give it a try.

fives

Before the day is over, let me wish everyone a happy Cinco de Mayo. Today is the best Cinco de Mayo because it's 2005: 05.05.05.

I always note dates like that: January 1, 2001 (01.01.01) or February 2, 2002 (02.02.02). Don't even get me started on palindromes. I love palindromes. Naturally the best time of day is 12:21.

Not so, Boston.