Blogging mystery

Why is my proof-reading proofreading more thorough and accurate after I post than it is before I post?

Update:  You'll think I misspelled proofreading for effect, but I did not.

Bated breath

World Wide Words says:

Q: From Steve Gearhart: Where does the term baited breath come from, as in: ‘I am waiting with baited breath for your answer’?
A: The correct spelling is actually bated breath but it’s so common these days to see it written as baited breath that there’s every chance that it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers.
[Jump]
It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it means “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing as a result of some strong emotion, such as terror or awe.

Using the power of the internet for good. This time: learning languages

Here's yet another way that social networking via the web can be harnessed for good. A person trying to learn a language can, through world-wide social networks, get access to native speakers. And, perhaps more importantly, one can get a motivational boost to learn:

Still, he finds it ultimately worthwhile to work with others on the Web and search for the better partners because that provides a real connection that cannot be found from a book or a simple computer program.

“When I have to do an exercise and submit it to the world, when I know that real people are going to look at it and comment on it, it really jacks up my brain,” he said.

Someone spends too much time with her gerbils

Good news!  We did not win an award for writing any of the worst sentences of the year.

This year's winner is Molly Ringle for this counterproductive simile:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

I'm betting Molly has also won an award for worst kisser on the planet.

Former client mentioned on The Corner

Ok, actually his firm was the client. Nordlinger makes mention here. Ouch. I can't believe that after many meetings and conversations with this guy, I never made the connection with his name.

Pace

Sheesh. I have to look this up every single time. Maybe if I post about it I'll remember.

From Dictionary.com:

Pace

–preposition

with all due respect to; with the permission of: I do not, pace my rival, hold with the ideas of the reactionists.

Re: "puts paid"

It's an idiom. I've never heard it before either.

"puts paid"

I came across this early this morning:

As Tariq Alhomayed, the editor of Asharq al-Awsat, noted in response to the news, the deal puts paid Nasrallah's contention that Hizbullah does not operate outside Lebanon except to wage war against Israel. But it also points to a severe problem with the West.

Any idea what that means? Does paid modify Nasrallah? Is "puts paid" some kind of idiom with which I am unfamiliar?

I beg your pardon

I had the perfect chance today to address the "beg the question" issue. A colleague at the office asked me to analyze a client's response to a question...was the reply "circular?"

I replied that yes, it was circular and thanked her because it gave me a chance to say, "it addressed a pet-peeve of mine and begged the question."

As I left her office I was surrounded by three associates who'd heard me say, "one of my pet-peeves."

"We want to hear about [Scooter's] pet-peeves. This is always fun."

Glad I could provide so much entertainment.

For Michael

Begging the question from Mona Charen:

My children have started to become exacting grammarians. David, 15, is driven nearly crazy every time someone misuses the expression “beg the question.” It’s a good thing he is away on a band trip this week and didn’t catch a CNN report on the morning news. A story on the financial situation was phrased like this: “This begs the question: What happened to the TARP money?”

If David had been watching, he would have scowled at the screen and, voice raised, corrected the reporter. “It doesn’t ‘beg’ the question. It presents or suggests or poses the question. To beg the question is to avoid or circumvent it!” David is mostly right. “Beg the question” is widely misused. Michael Quinion of World Wide Words responded to a reader who asked whether it was ever correct to use the meaning David disdains. His answer is comprehensive. “You can easily find examples of the sense you quote, which is used just as though one might say ‘prompt the question’ or ‘forces one to ask’ . . . This meaning of the phrase seems to have grown up because people have turned for a model to other phrases in beg, especially the well-known I beg to differ, where beg is a fossil verb that actually used to mean ‘humbly submit.’ But the way we use beg to differ these days makes beg the question look the same as ‘wish to ask.’ It doesn’t — or at least, it didn’t. . . . The meaning you give is . . . gaining ground, and one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable — the New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is ‘widely accepted in modern standard English.’ I wouldn’t go so far myself."

...

RE: Crips

Stephanie's post got me wondering about the name of the gang. Per Wiki:

The original name for the alliance was "Cribs", a name narrowed down from a list of many options, and chosen unanimously from three final choices, which included the Black Overlords, and the Assassins. Cribs was chosen to reflect the young age of the majority of the gang members. The name "Cribs" generated into the name "Crips" when gang members began carrying around canes to display their "pimp" status. People in the neighborhood then began calling them cripples, or "Crips" for short.

Subhead: Crips

The subtitle nearly quotes Gen. Richard B. Meyers, from his appearance on The Daily Show on Monday, March 16. He was talking about the partisan political climate since 2004.

Thanks to reader RS for correcting my spelling of Crips.

When I posted it, I thought about rephrasing it as: "Like the Crips and the Bloods, except with better grammar" but I couldn't remember if we ever took liberties with quotes for the subtitle. Now it looks like I might have considered "Like the Crips and the Bloods, except with better spelling." Or would that be worse spelling, since I got it wrong?

Bank Nationalization

Deroy Murdock of the Hoover Institution deploring Greenspan’s, Graham’s and McCain’s (allegedly, I haven’t heard McCain say it) call for the possibility of Bank Nationalization at NRO:

Regarding nationalization, America’s free market has devolved in half a year from unsullied maiden to street-corner whore. This sad truth is one more reason for the American Right to repudiate the Bush-Rove-Paulson borrow-spend-and-bailout model and its architects, as if severing and discarding an infected appendix.

I’m not sure she was completely unsullied last Labor Day but I loved the paragraph.

Sex or gender?

It's not "begs the question" territory, but I've always subscribed to the notion that "sex" is a biological descriptor, and "gender" is a grammatical one. The traditional idea is set out here. Wikipedia takes a different, and in my mind, heretical view.

Of course when you start talking about someone having a different "gender" from their "sex," you're going to need two words.

Begging the question....

Thankfully, Laura Ingraham says the point leads to the question rather than “begs the question” during her interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Begging the fargin question

This week's hall of shame: (1) "Author and conservative comedian Brad Stine;" (2) Mike McDaniel of the Chronic;

and (3), well I don't have one (or do I?). This travesty is so widespread I thought I could get a weekly feature out of it, you know, three (surely not more) violations I saw THIS WEEK. Either I've not been paying attention or ... something. Anyway, I only had two, so I thought I'd cheat and google some news stories for "begs the question."

The result was shocking. Aussies, at least at 9 CDT, 4/24/06, seem to be the worst offenders.