the elements of junk english
In the spring of 1991, my undergraduate neuroscience adviser assigned me a most challenging and unusual task. In addition to sectioning rat spinal cord on the microtome, in addition to writing papers and preparing posters, and in addition to running the local computer network, I was to teach English to the lab’s newest post-docs, whose native language was Chinese.
Both had adopted “American” names in anticipation of their arrival in the United States and, in my opinion, were already proficient enough with English. Indeed, Joan’s and Angie’s TOEFL scores were as high as I had ever seen. But my adviser demanded a thorough knowledge of English usage on their part – not mere fluency – and so one day, he handed me Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and blurted, “I’m certain you’re familiar with this book. I want you to teach Joan and Angie straight out of it – cover to cover.”
It was, of course, the first time I had laid eyes on the slim text. I went directly to the library and devoted the next few hours to it. I had thought, at the time, that I was a fairly decent writer and speaker, but here were so many new rules and guidelines. Waves of fear ran through me as I read; how many grievous offenses had I unknowingly committed? How many infinitives had I split? How many times had I said that when I meant which and which when I meant that or farther when I meant further or vice-versa? And how often had I used between when I should have said among?
In the space of two months, Joan, Angie, and I made it through the whole of Strunk and White, and I’d like to think that our tutorials had a positive and lasting effect. I remember few of the details of our sessions, save those of the last, when we closed the pithy paperback for the final time and worked through some examples. After two or three, Angie suddenly said, “May I ask a question? This word – fuck – I seem to hear it a lot. When and how should I use it?” I tried to craft an answer as calmly, honestly, and thoroughly as I could. I explained the verb form first, and illustrated with some usage examples. I continued with adverbial and adjectival uses and had moved onto fuck-as-noun before our hour was up. I was astonished to find that I had written out 43 examples of the word in short phrases and was somewhat saddened at the prospect of necessarily erasing them from the whiteboard.
Profane as fuck may seem, it is innocuous according to the standards by which I now judge the English language, or at least corporate English as spoken in America.
— Let’s all think outside the box and incent the customer to grab the low-hanging fruit.
— We’re just not on the same page; I’m not tracking on any of your key learnings.
A confused jumble of clichés, jargon, and heretofore nonexistent or incorrect syntax and semantics now permeates and pollutes the language at a seemingly increasing rate. And to me, this is far more profane than any form of fuck. I have known this, at least at a subconscious level, for several years now, but it didn’t cross my threshold of full awareness until I read Ken Smith’s recently-published Junk English. Upon doing so, I had the very same reaction as I did when I read Strunk and White, for I realized that Junk was the very dialect I spoke each day. I floated from euphemism to abstract adjective, from one to another of Smith’s “flaccid” or “fat-ass” phrases. I generated things, employed methodologies, and went on fact-finding missions. Pretty impressive for a data analyst.
Smith’s book is a variant of Strunk and White that pays greater attention to the times than to the eternities, and it is much more an enumeration of mistakes than of rules. And although more focused, one could argue that it is no less important, for it delivers the same message as the nearly 70 year-old work: Speak and write with clarity. Each entry in Smith’s book hits a nerve with me; nearly each muddle makes me wince, because I’ve so often been guilty. Favorite (and most frequently committed, by me at least) offenses from Junk English:
(1) Cheapened Words
“There’s nothing wrong with describing the rise of Joan of Arc as a miracle, the Eiffel Tower unique, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper a masterpiece, the discovery of penicillin a breakthrough, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture a classic...When every executive is a visionary, every product revolutionary, every instance of mismanagement a crisis, every idea innovative, every unsolicited offer exclusive, by what names will we know the true articles when they come along?” (p30)
(2) The Default Dozen
“...the default dozen are twelve words that come to mind automatically when we neglect to think of better ways to say what we mean. They are: factor, focus, function, impact, issue, level, major, positive, process, quality, serious, and significant...” (p36)
(3) Machine Language
“Some people have had their English so debased – possibly it was never based to begin with – that they write and talk as if they were robots. Sometimes machine language is deliberate, an effort to lull the reader into oversight...Sentences such as Specific partnership objectives include promoting sustainable development in designs and project administration... deaden rather than awaken interest, as if they had been assembled from a series of binary equations.” (p80)
Strangely, fuck has almost taken on the status of a charming anachronism, for it is far too genuine, precise (despite its varied uses), and succinct for our times. Your company may have been fucked in the 1990s, but in 2003, the company for which you work is now sustaining a prolonged and necessary phase of right-sizing and streamlining.
But those of us who have read The Elements of Style and Junk English will have
swallowed a bittersweet pill, for we know that if we take the advice of Strunk and White while avoiding Smith’s Junk, we may appear almost boring – not at all colorful, and certainly not nearly as persuasive as the new marketing manager who spews forth junk English as though it were his mother tongue. Yet we will speak and write clearly and honestly, and that may still be worth something to somebody, right? Seems like low-hanging fruit to me, anyway.
18-April 2003
typing out loud
Occasionally I’ll just go hog wild with the magazines.
Heaped before me at the moment are fresh copies of
Eye, Frieze, How, CMYK,
Print, Step, and I.D.
Good Lord! But wait a moment...did I say
“magazines?”
I had a teacher in college who referred to Rolling
Stone – quite often, as a matter of fact
– as a “journal.” He was a professor in
the Department of American Studies who specialized in
popular culture, so to him, the periodical was a legitimate
subject for scholarly investigation. His issues, which
dated to the early 1970s, were arranged neatly and in
perfect chronological order on two bookshelves in his
cramped office.
My 22 year-old sensibility invariably found it to be quite
funny – and not a little pathetic – whenever he
brought a copy to class and read from it at length, and my
cynicism led me to question whether my four credits at
$44.50 a pop were a good investment in the liberal arts.
For this was the same magazine to which I
subscribed: A sensationalist, sense-numbing biweekly that
struck me as the Euclidean mean of People, Esquire, and
Life, but lacking the focus of any of these; a confused
jumble of music news, record reviews, and Q&As, with an
investigative report thrown in here and there. Fodder, then,
for the laundromat, the auto repair, or the trashbin,
but certainly not the classroom.
Thirteen years hence, I’ve mellowed considerably, but I still
wonder whether there is some sort of dichotomy that differentiates
journal from magazine, or if printed periodicals lie on more of
a continuum in this regard. Perhaps, more simply, it’s just relative
to the reader. Certain cases are easy to define, of course; you won’t
find Lancet, for example, at the local beauty salon. Bringing the
question much closer to home, which of the several periodicals related
to typography and graphic design are magazines and which are journals?
But is this even a legitimate question to ask? It seems that, before
we attempt an answer, we must distinguish journal from magazine. The latter
is certainly a broader category and would appear to comprise any periodically
printed material that attempts to inform or entertain a more-or-less broad,
nonspecialist audience. Time, Popular Science, and
Q are all magazines by this
definition, and so may be even Science and Nature,
although they perhaps ride the line.
To me, a journal, then, is a periodical whose readership consists almost exclusively
of specialists and whose intent is to advance scholarly investigation of the discipline
to which it is devoted. And herein we come to the second fork in the road, for what
distinguishes scholarly investigation from non-scholarly investigation? Or more generally,
what is scholarship?
Consultation of my Webster’s proves disappointing; a scholar is merely “a learned
person...one who has done advanced study in a special field” and scholarship is
therefore “the character, qualities, or attainments” thereof.
Frustrated, I then ask my wife, who, in the space of two minutes, crafts a definition as
parsimonious and faultless as I could hope for: “The earnest pursuit of understanding as an
end in itself.” Words like expertise, exhaustiveness, and context work their
way into the subsequent discussion; they are all implied, too, of course.
Having established a definition, I nonetheless attempt to poke holes:
Ego: If I have read all of Jane Austen’s novels – novels as fine
as any ever written – and know them well, am I
a scholar?
Alterego: No, I am merely a fan of Jane Austen.
Ego: Hmmm. Okay, if I have read each issue of Rolling Stone over
the past thirty years, and know them all well,
and have attempted to understand the role and function of the magazine – of this genre of literature vis-à-vis
other, similar periodicals as well as relative to popular culture, am I a scholar?
Alterego: Yes, absolutely. This implies studies of comparative literature and of American history –
both perhaps being loosely defined, of course.
Touché, and only thirteen years to come full circle on this. Oh well, chalk one up for the professor.
At this point, I had better confess that I had originally planned to write a little
opinion piece with the aim of persuading you
that really, only one (and you may feel free to guess which) of the aforementioned
design periodicals deserves to be considered
a journal, and that the rest are merely magazines. But all of this fell apart because
I began to worry about definitions. And now I see that this derailment cuts two ways.
In one respect I am more muddled than ever; I must conclude that one
person’s journal is apparently another’s magazine.
Any persuasive attempt ultimately would have been futile; it is indeed relative to the reader.
But in another respect, my notion
is absolutely clear: It is time to do more than feel the paper, look at the
ads, and envy the design competition winners.
I had better get reading, and I had better try to read as much as I can.
06-April 2003
ernest
We had to put our dog to sleep today. Ernest was a twelve
year-old Lab-Shepherd mix – beautiful and kind, and sadly,
full of cancer.
Rest in peace, good friend.
05-April 2003
first daidala typeface
APRIL 1, 2003: FOR IMMEDIATE WORLDWIDE RELEASE
After one and-a-half months of exceedingly hard work, which has included two trips to the public library to page through some old books, three nearly uninterrupted hours of testing, and the interception of an email conversation between two local masters of the discipline who shall remain nameless (although they do, it should be noted, have names), daidala is proud to release its first typeface.
At once elegiac, lyrical, transitional, modernist, postmodernist, and deconstructivist, it is a face that nonetheless defies classification. And so it is called, as a tangential homage to the typeface whose reputation and utility it shall soon undoubtedly eclipse, Timely New Roman Nose.
Designer Jon Coltz feels that “it’s the only typeface that really seems to matter right now...the only one relevant to our generation.” The Nose is available as an 18-character face in one weight and width, and in Microsoft Windows format only. Says Coltz, “Bill Gates has really done so much for the computing world...why insult him by making a font available for any other, weaker platform?”
The designer has carefully and wisely chosen to omit the upper and lower case f, g, l, o, q, and x–z. “Anyone who knows anything about type knows how incredibly difficult these characters are to draw...one morning, after my third Egg McMuffin, I had an epiphany: Just screw it. Y’know, kind of like the opposite of Just Do It. It was,” Coltz continues, eyes growing moist, “the greatest moment of my working life.”
Subscribing to the same logic, only the numerals 1 and 7 are included. (It is worth mentioning, however, that 0, 2–6, and 8–9 may be drawn and released in the future as an expert set.) Coltz adds, “In addition, all of those characters that sit on the same keys as the numbers, like the little ‘a’ with the circle around it...yeah, well, they got the boot, too, because I really don’t know what they mean. I don't think anyone else does for that matter, either.”
A bold weight, italic variants, and small caps were contemplated momentarily, then omitted, because the designer felt that “they detracted, and not in a nice way, from the spirit of the face. Besides, I’ve got a life.”
Expert opinion has already weighed in en masse on Timely New Roman Nose. Bobby Slimjim claims, “Whenever I use it, I find that it brings out the calmer, gentler me that lies deeply – way deeply – within.” And Suzanne vanderLicketySplit says, “It’s a shocking, disturbing face – ever since I first saw The Nose I’ve been finding it difficult to sleep at night. I may sue.”
Timely New Roman Nose will soon be freely downloadable for a period of one week, after which a simple $100.00 US per-use fee will apply. Coltz explains the licensing structure: “Anytime anyone uses it, they must mail me a check for $100. It’s that easy. A letter to Mom? A hundred bucks. Another to Dad? Another hundred bucks. Violate it and I’m all over your ass. I’ll be as rich as Croesus!”
Timely New Roman Nose: Pick it now!
01-April 2003
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