This error has gotten soooo common!

Another post from the kodiakdailymirror.com Herman's Hawks and Handsaws collection

In the language of Western tonal music, a V chord at the end of a phrase makes your brain expect a I chord. This V-I sequence, called an “authentic cadence,” creates the most satisfyingly final-sounding ending possible. Consider the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a sequence of G and C chords (the V and I in the key of C) alternating eight times, just to make sure everybody really gets the point.
Other types of cadences play with the strong sense of expectation. The “deceptive cadence” creates a sense of surprise by following the V chord with a VI instead of the expected I.
The “half cadence” just cuts off at the V, ending the phrase with the unshakable feeling that something more must follow.
But where Beethoven could use that feeling to carry us into the next musical idea, people speaking and writing English have taken to misusing a little word, leaving listeners and readers hanging.
The culprit is “so,” when used as a substitute for “very,” as in this example:
“The teen vampire was so dreamy.”
This adverbial “so” needs another clause to make a complete sentence:
“The teen vampire was so dreamy that the girls swooned.”
or
“I swooned because the teen vampire was so dreamy.”
One might argue that the incomplete version belongs in the category of exclamations, like “Wow!” and “What a fluffy kitty!” These sentences share with imperatives an exemption from usual subject/predicate requirements. That whole area would make for some interesting syntax papers.
Meanwhile, I associate the incorrect usage with a style more immature than illiterate, but it has spread beyond the junior high schools.
The same internal grammar sense that gives me the “unfinished” feeling about those “so” sentences leaves me unhappy with an AP-sanctioned usage. It goes like this: The omnipotent stylebook tells us to use upper-case “Gov.” or “Sen.” before a name, as in “Gov. Sean Parnell.” But that leads to the less perspicuous usage “former Gov. Sarah Palin” or “ex-state Sen. Ben Stevens,” supported by a dedicated entry on the word “former.”
That bugs me because it applies the AP style by grouping the wrong elements. The rule should apply only to titles like “governor” or “senator” — not, I argue, to quasi-titles like “former governor.”
In formal syntax terms, “former Gov. Sarah Palin” treats “Gov. Sarah Palin” as if it is a constituent, excluding the “former.” However, any reasonable structural analysis would treat “former governor” as a constituent separate from the following name.
How say the readers? Should I defy AP and start using “former governor Sarah Palin”?
And why should my sense of what sounds wrong — as opposed to anybody else’s — have any relevance in deciding the issue? Frankly, the best reason is that I grew up in a middle-class family in Toledo, Ohio, and therefore use the most generic possible American English. It looks like this blog will keep coming back to the question of prescriptive authority for language.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

Did elsewho among the studentry sneeze?

Serious publications naturally adopt a conservative stance toward language choices, or diction. At the same time, language inexorably evolves, so that the Latin of Caesar’s time turns into the French, Italian, Spanish and so on of 1,000 years later.
I am fascinated by the ways change comes to different languages — and how communities consciously try to control the change. People who read Modern Greek can understand a 2,500-year-old text pretty well. The Icelandic of today differs little from the Old Norse of 1000 AD that changed to become Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. For English the break-off point comes a little before Shakespeare.
And I will come back to the Académie Française in a later blog.
It happens bit by bit. The Associated Press recently decreed that the venerable “e-mail” must now appear as “email,” and cell phones are now “cellphones.” Both demonstrate the common progress of compound nouns: first two words, then hyphenated, then one word.
I don’t particularly like “email,” but I won’t fight AP on this one.
Americans have brought several logical improvements to the language, including “plow” for “plough” and “today” for “to-day.” Phonologically, “centre” versus “center” is a toss-up.
Some reforms didn’t make it. I think it was the old Chicago Herald that tried to give us “thru” instead of “through” in a crusade to save three characters worth of ink.
Professor Strunk (pictured above) suggested one of my favorite failures. He wanted “studentry” to replace the awkward “student body,” by analogy to “faculty” and “peasantry.”
Eminently sensible, and stylistically strong, to boot.
Even more sensible would be to drop the biologically silly term “crab fishery” in favor of “crabbery.”
I don’t really think I’ll win this one, either, so here is another of my ideas for reform:
The word “elsewhere” is so tidy and useful, why not also “elsewho,” "elsewhen” and "elsewhat”? Much neater than “somebody else,” etc.
And of course, when I am king, “snaze” will become the official past tense of “sneeze.”
The complementary category consists of words and phrases that clearly do not deserve to survive. Some people call them “buzzwords,” but I say that’s one of them. This week two that have long outlived their time came over my desk. Please immediately and permanently retire “no-brainer” and “man up.” Other candidates?
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

Joe Miller picks pathetic path

Despite his honorable Army service, Joe Miller has decided to embody the least admirable character in the naval tradition.

Miller’s post-election crusade marks him as a true “sea lawyer” — the type of sailor who uses a captious, pedantic insistence on the letter of the law to serve only himself.

The current political tragedy recalls the fall of former state Sen. Ben Stevens, who squandered his chance to inherit the mantle of his father, Alaskan of the Century Ted Stevens.

Thanks to the tea party Zeitgeist and his own energy and charisma, Miller earned a loyal following and a shot at the U.S. Senate. And he lost.

At that point he faced a choice about how to use his hard-won prominence and leadership potential. He could have launched a real political career, going back to the trenches to advance the issues he campaigned on, thus building himself a broader base of support in his own party.

Instead, he looked down from the mountain and decided the most urgent use of his energy, charisma, time and money was in service of personal pique.

Miller says his motivation is preservation of the integrity of Alaska elections. If that is so, why didn’t he denounce the people who tried to disrupt Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign by filing phony candidate papers under names designed to confuse voters choosing the write-in option?

Has Miller become an Alaskan Laurent Gbagbo? The president of Ivory Coast lost a re-election bid in November, but had himself sworn in for another term anyway. The psychology seems similar: Gbagbo claims election fraud, unwilling to acknowledge he could have lost fairly. He has chosen to impugn election monitors without evidence and invite civil war rather than man up to a schellacking.

No politician lists ego and personal ambition as platform planks. Ambitious people naturally use the language of the society and system they work in. On his way up to the Politburo, Vladimir Putin was content to spout the ideals of Communism. As president and prime minister in post-Soviet Russia, he talks as easily about his liberal democratic values while heading a regime as dictatorial as its Soviet and tsarist predecessors.

Yet we cannot fault politicians just for ambition, and it doesn’t necessarily stop them from being good and honest. As Al Gore candidly admitted while running for president, nobody seeks high office without a larger-than-normal share of ambition in their character.

Some exceptional leaders pay a heavy price for putting belief above opportunism. We cannot ask every office seeker to meet the standard of Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi or Vaclav Havel. That level of ideological integrity and heroism is not for most of us, or even most of our leaders. In this era, the willingness to serve in public office at all deserves admiration and a deep reservoir of benefit of the doubt with respect to motive.

Alas, Miller falls short even of Sarah Palin’s standard of service while out of office. Palin at least advocates an agenda based on a form of principles while advancing her own power and wealth.

Of course, sometimes sea lawyers are right, at least as far as the letter of the law goes.

But the law is only one leg of a tripod test. In legal matters we have to answer three questions: What are the facts? What is the law? What is just?

Even if Miller achieves the vindication of exposing flaws in Alaska’s election laws, his challenge fails the test of the other two questions. The evidence says the election results were fair and accurate. And throwing out the results would not serve justice.

Here it is in terms of the old Latin legal saws, “cui bono” (who benefits?) and “cui malo” (who is harmed?): Success of Miller’s election challenge quest could benefit only Miller; it would harm the plurality of voters whose intent nobody seriously questions.

The aspects of American politics most admired around the world are honest elections and the peaceful transition of power.
These are worth defending, but is that what Joe Miller would be doing if he takes his case farther?

Onboard the ship, sea lawyers lose the respect of officers and crew, ending up friendless and ineffectual. Redemption lies in picking up a mop and swabbing the deck.

Reality redivivus, or what kids really want

For the ninth year in a row Merriam-Webster has ignored my nomination letters for word of the year, delivering another slap in the face to me and all the other loyal supporters of “borborygmus,” “sastrugi” and “pangolin.”

The company claims they choose the winner based not on intrinsic merit or accomplishments, but rather on how many times people looked the word up. That makes this year’s winner doubly disturbing. “Austerity” getting the nod means our primary education system must be in even worse shape than the economy.

I will not be so jejeune as to suggest a connection between a nation’s standard of public education and its long-term economic viability, but I bet the U.S. retail sector would collapse if we boycotted vendors who use scare quotes in their ads or spell “barbecue” with a q.

I can, however, suggest a better method for deriving outsized claims about the social and technological Zeitgeist from scanty linguistic data. Do not try this at home. To paraphrase Dan Coffey, I am not a real linguist. I have a master’s degree. In linguistics.

No thanks to which I landed a job as a part-time copy editor for the smallest daily newspaper in the country, and spent much of last week proofing letters to Santa Claus from local children for publication in our annual Holiday Greetings special section.

I don’t know why academia has ignored this source material, which would blow away hemlines and beards for economists and beat Facebook hollow for sociologists. For linguists, the most telling datum in the 2010 Santa letters signals a momentous convulsion in our reality on par with the widespread adoption of “acoustic piano.”

What does a redundantly named musical instrument have to do with sociolinguistics? Allow me to digress (but note I do commit to making an equal number of pushes and pops).

In semantics — the subfield of linguistics concerned with meaning in language — we refer to words as “marked” or “unmarked” for properties not essential to their main definition. To illustrate, I exhibit a riddle from an old joke book always in high demand at the Whiteford Elementary School library in the early 1970s:

A man and his son have a terrible car accident. The man dies, and medics rush his son to the hospital. In the operating room the surgeon sees the patient and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How can this be?

Even in 1971, this riddle sucked. But apparently when the book was written, the appearance of a woman surgeon sufficed to catch most people with their stereotypes down. In linguistic terms, “surgeon” was marked for gender. The word indicated not only a human who performed medical operations, but a male (white, adult, non-disabled, Protestant, etc.) human, unless you specifically mentioned anything about race, gender, age and so on.

Words get marked and unmarked as society and technology changes. “Surgeon” used to be marked for gender and is now unmarked.

“Piano” started out unmarked for power source. From Beethoven to Tatum, the sound from a piano emerged due to direct mechanical generation. Then the unneutered housepet of sociolinguistics as who should say claimed some territory. With the invention of the electric piano, it occasionally became necessary to specify what you meant by "piano."

The important thing to note here is that “piano” went from unmarked with respect to method of sound production to marked as mechanical. If you meant electric piano, you had to say “electric piano.” Otherwise people assumed you meant the same kind Beethoven played.

At some point during the 1960s, musicians got so used to electric pianos, they stopped saying “electric” and just assumed you meant electric when you said “piano.” At that point the marking changed, and if you wanted to talk about a regular, old-fashioned piano, you had to specify, and that created a lexical gap.

Whoever thought of sticking “acoustic” on the front of “piano” to mean regular and non-electric achieved the kind of immortality I covet.

I thought “Skoldetnai” as a portmanteau of Soldatna and Kenai would prove my ticket into the neologistic big time, but it didn’t catch on with the people of the Peninsula. Then I pinned my hopes on “ambient reality,” which I coined when the rise of “virtual reality” meant we had to get more specific about where your head’s at. Then I found out cybergeeks had already adopted “RL” (for “real life”) to fill that role.

I may still have a chance here, since “RL” has gotten little traction in — savor the poetic justice — RL. Even if “ambient reality” does not ultimately triumph, I already feel somewhat vindicated. To the gatekeepers of cyberspace argot, I only pose this query: If it’s all in my head, where is my head?

Back to the Santa letters. The most striking request our freshest descendants had of the jolly sleigh driver: a “real puppy.” (I almost had to write this column about kids wanting paralytic shellfish poisoning, but the video game reviewer in the newsroom set me straight.)

So here we are. In post-"Avatar" 2010, children grow up with the default use of the word “puppy” referring to a plastic and electronic “pet,” and you have to add more words if you mean the old fashioned kind that pees on the leg of your acoustic piano, gnaws your print newspaper and guards your brick-and-mortar storefront.

In effect, living creatures are no longer marked for reality, itself now a relative concept. We stand on the brink of the final triumph of the cosmic, epistemological, ontological scare quotes. As ambient reality fades away we are all marked adult, white, Protestant men. And women, and African-Americans, and Sikhs, and pangolins …

Me and acoustic puppy Calypso

The Ruble Stops Here

After three weeks in Russia, I have to admit I still don’t understand the Russians — but then, why should I start with them?
Still, that brief visit, during which I hardly left one little neighborhood of Kaliningrad, permits me to pass judgment. For you see, Kaliningrad is the westernmost piece of Russia, separated from the rest of the nation by the Baltic States. Since Alaska, where I live, is also a non-contiguous, westernmost territory, and I told people in Russia that I am a completely typical American, I feel obliged to assume that anything I concluded about Kaliningrad is valid for the rest of the world’s largest country and its hundreds of ethnicities and regions.
Not that I reached any profound conclusions. The Russians are as contradictory a compilation of virtues and vices as any other people.
Chief among the former I judge their enthusiasm for gardening and their tolerance for cats. Among the more conspicuous of the latter are rampant alcoholism and the utter lack of a free press. At least Putin doesn’t support the alcoholism.
But now a little history, starring the Dom Sovyetov, a Kaliningrad landmark widely known as “the ugliest building on Russian soil.”
The city of Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic Sea, less than 50 miles east of Gdansk, Poland. Like Gdansk, it was once German territory, part of East Prussia. For seven centuries the busy port, famous for the region’s amber mines, was called Konigsberg. And for many of those centuries, a spectacular cathedral and castle complex dominated the central cityscape, a gem of medieval European architecture.
Near the end of World War II, the Royal Air Force bombed Konigsberg, wiping out the central city and destroying the castle. The strategic value of the attack is debatable, but the people who live there now still hold a grudge, even though Konigsberg was an enemy city at the time.
After the war, the Soviet Union annexed the territory, ejected most of the Germans, and renamed it after one of Stalin’s yes-men who never went near the place. While the Soviets turned the rest of the city into a workers’ paradise over the following decades, the castle remained a pile of rubble, with one dramatic wall fragment teetering over the remains like the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin. That is, until 1967, when some party hack decided to make his bones by tearing down this last trace of bourgeois excess.
But what a great spot to demonstrate Soviet progress! After 20 years of design and development, construction began on the massive Dom Sovyetov, intended as a modern home for the national, regional and city administration of Kaliningrad. After another few years, construction stopped on the massive Dom Sovyetov as the even more massive Soviet Union went broke and dissolved into its pre-war constituents, except for Kaliningrad, which stayed Russian.
So for the next 15 years, a giant, unfinished, gray eyesore blighted what should have been prime commercial real estate in the center of a newly capitalist downtown. Then came 2005, and the visit of President Vladimir Putin to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city. What to do, what to do?
I can’t decide whether the next part harkens more to the Soviet tradition of the Potemkin Village, or further back, to the Gogolian “Inspector-General” tradition of tsarist oxymoron. Or maybe it’s just the latest manifestation of a timeless Russian approach to civic administration.
In any case, officialdom decided to feed more funds into the dingy Dom, but only to the extent of some thousands of gallons of light blue paint and a few acres of glass panes to cover all the window holes.
And so it stands today — massive, empty and unusable, casting its depressing shadow into the trench where a few archaeologists scratch for treasures of the medieval town and castle. Meanwhile, a German consultant concluded the cheapest and safest thing to do now is tear down the whole thing and let future archaeologists enjoy the rubble.
I grew up thinking of Central Europe as a zone full of backwards, impoverished victims of communist oppression, and found my recent visits to Poland and the Czech Republic a little jarring because they are now clearly more modern and prosperous than where I live. So I indulge a perverse schadenfreude from the story of the Dom Sovyetov and can still feel a little superior knowing that at least Russia has held true to dictatorship and public mismanagement. The only remaining question is when Putin will end the charade and declare himself tsar.
In America, nothing remotely like that comedy of goof-ups could ever happen. We would never, for example, disrupt traffic in Boston for eight years and go $20 billion over budget on a project with such shoddy materials that a piece of new tunnel collapses and kills a motorist. In America, a city like Denver would not build a new airport ($3.1 billion over budget) with a state-of-the-art automated luggage system that breaks down the first day and can’t be repaired because the access tunnels were taken out of the design as a cost-cutting move. Equally impossible would be getting most of the way through construction of an 8,000-foot highway bridge over the Saginaw River in Michigan and finding that the two halves miss each other by six feet ($48 million over budget).
So I’m back in the USA, and don’t I know how lucky I am, boy. I intend to enjoy it as long as possible — probably until 2012, when Obama and Romney split the rational human vote and throw the election to Palin on her Real American Party ticket. Then, While Vice President Limbaugh pats down the dirt on the grave of our own free press, I will humbly recall the words of another, somewhat more famous Konigsberg.
“In six months, we’ll be stealing Erno’s nose.”

Second Annual Esperanto Club Report

GDANSK, Poland -- The 94th Universala Kongreso de Esperanto ended Saturday in Bialystok, in eastern Poland, and while I alone attended from Alaska, that still qualifies our state as among the proportionally best represented regions of the world.

Bialystok is the hometown of Ludwig Zamenhof, the eye doctor who invented Esperanto in 1887. The honor of hosting the 2009 conference commemorates the 150th anniversary of his birth. While growing up in the multiethnic city during the 1860s and '70s, the studious Jewish boy heard a veritable tumult -- a Gemisch, a melange, a gobbledy-gook, if you will -- of languages around him, as his fellow citizens spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German, Lithuanian and Byelorussian. Zamenhof's ingenious solution to the problem of six languages competing for attention in the same space? Invent a seventh.

On the other hand, Esperanto is easy to learn, culturally and politically neutral and as capable as any other language of expressing the range of human experience. When it comes to popularization, that counts as three strikes against.

According to the United Nations, 2009 is also the International Year of Reconciliation. Unfortunate timing -- Poland's No. 1 brewery, Tyskie, also declared 2009 the International Year of Beer, thus stealing the U.N.'s thunder. Participants at the Esperanto Congress made every effort to honor both celebrations.

The declared theme of the congress was a modern re-evaluation of Zamenhof's ideas about mutual understanding and toleration, goals he hoped to further with his new language. In case you wondered, the 1,860 people who showed up decided we're still for that stuff.

But as impressive as that attendance number is, it doesn't quite live up to the 'universal' part of the congress title. Indeed, as far as I could tell, this year's event suffered from the same problem as the previous 93, with not a single representatives from off-planet, let alone outside the Solar System. Oh, well.

Still, on the principle that we will welcome any aliens who do make the trip, the 2010 congress in Havana will also be called 'universal'. In this respect we are more up-front than the sponsors of the Miss Universe Pageant, who don't even send invitations to Mars or Venus, in an obvious move to keep the home-planet advantage. I can hardly wait till a sentient green cloud from Alpha Centauri calls their bluff, sings all four solo parts from the "Ode to Joy," then blows away Miss Brazil in the swimsuit competition.

Within our movement, some admit to doubt about what we call the "final victory," the day when everybody in the world uses Esperanto as a second language. These Esperantists just make the most of the movement's own microculture of networking, literature, hobby clubs and wearing little green star pins on our lapels.

I suppose I'm in that group, but I do what I can for diffusion. During the congress, I took the intermediate Esperanto competency certification exam endorsed by the European Commission, and therefore recognized in every country of the world except the United States. But I figure it all works out, because even where they do recognize it, it doesn't entitle you to anything.

Meanwhile, I've read some good books, and I have connections good for free lodging all over the world. The Esperanto movement even issued its own currency, the 'stelo', or star, in 1959. I have examples of coins in the 1, 5, 10 and 25 steloj denominations in uncirculated condition -- as are all stelo coins. At the current rate, one stelo can be exchanged for another stelo.

Esperanto youth culture appears particularly vigorous, in a wholesome, make friends around the world and sing Pete Seegery stuff in translation kind of way. Kids who learn Esperanto also have an easier time learning other languages later (true fact in real world).

Indeed, my informal census in Bialystock reinforces observations I made last year at the Pan-American Esperanto Conference in Montreal. It looks like esperantists are either in their teens or retired. OK, maybe people of working age just had to work all week.

I credit the return to our traditional recruitment method for the resurgence among the younger set. Apparently our ill-conceived, friendly cartoon character, Esperanto Asparagus, reminded people of a gangrenous finger, and has now retired. So we're back to hiding around the corner from playgrounds with textbooks and dictionaries strapped inside our trench coats.

"Pssst. Hey, kid, wanna learn Esperanto?"

What's my point? Learn a new language -- it keeps your brain from shriveling.

And, as always, "Qapla'!"

[The first annual report is 'below' at 17 July 2008.]

No nutshell large enough

As the 2009 recipient of the Suzan Nightingale prize for newspaper columns published in Alaska during the previous year — universally recognized as the world’s highest literary honor — I now face the same danger of career anticlimax that turned triumph into tragic farce for Alexander after conquering Persia, Ronald Reagan after leaving Hollywood, and Richard Daystrom after inventing duotronic circuits.
From this height, a decline looks unavoidable, but I have set my sights on another goal to at least prolong the pain. And while the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is not the Suzan Nightingale prize, it can still claim the distinction of a bar set so high that neither Walter Lippmann nor Walter Winchell reached it during their lives, and whose chances of ever doing so have only declined since their deaths.
EBLFC is like a TV show that doesn’t mind jumping the shark in the pilot episode. As a literary exercise, it blurs the line between the pointless and the superfluous, asking entrants to compose the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. That anyone reading this sentence already shares my high tolerance for unnecessarily complex sentence structures, irrelevant parentheticals and gratuitously recherché vocabulary goes, although obviously not without typing, at least without saying.
Either that or you’re German.
Yet I know restraint, having split only half the infinitives in this article so far. The name of the contest commemorates an author who knew none, an Englishman whose turgid style could stand eye-to-eye with that of Eichendorff, Kleist or Hoffman without flinching. Heck, it could take them all on at once, beat them around the ring, swipe their Menthos, and leave the entire post-Goethe pantheon gasping for a semicolon.
Amazingly, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) enjoyed tremendous success with Victorian readers, whose faultless judgment in wrought iron railings and which backward civilizations to colonize did not extend to their bookshelves.
Of course, modern readers have an answer to that in Jackie Collins. In the spirit of research, I once tried to read one of her books, since I make a modest living at writing but would rather make several thousand such modest livings, as she does. I found I lost nothing of the story by skipping every other sentence, then paragraph, then page, and finally chapter. The more mathematically inclined could see Collins’ style as the perfectly redundant literary manifestation of a Mandelbrot set.
But I digress. Of course.
The point is, Bulwer-Lytton is unreadable —and not in the cool way like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Nobody pretends to have read his 1834 novel “The Last Days of Pompei” to score points with an intellectual chick. Witness the wisdom of the Hollywood rewrite. The classic 1935 film based on it kept nothing but the title. At least that’s what we all assume, since nobody has actually made it through the book since 1904.
During my stint as a newspaper editor, I have devoted most of my waking hours to the transmission of important information through clear, concise prose. But with the goal of winning this year’s EBLFC in mind, I did what anybody with a narrow range of outdated skills in a stressed industry would do during economic hard times.
I quit my job.
Would it make more sense to devote my energy to improving newspapers as a product, thus bolstering their status as an indispensable bulwark of democracy? Perhaps.
Do I marvel at my own ability to waste time composing such sentences? A little.
Are rhetorical questions a hackneyed and irritating literary device? Undoubtedly.
So here are my entries for this year’s contest:

The day began, like so many others, almost immediately after midnight, and continued virtually uninterrupted until the following midnight, despite Jeremy’s foredoomed attempts to construct a time machine without the calliope and live kinkajou usually associated with such devices.

I field-tested that sentence a few months ago, and was told it was too coherent for the spirit of EBLFC. So I tried again.

Theodosia’s gaze strayed to the kitchen window, through which she saw a dreary rain mottling Paul’s latest triumph, an abstract sculpture in concrete — an apt metaphor for life itself, she reflected, if only he had named it something other than “Up Yours, Manitowoc County Arts Commission.”

But I was enjoined to be more turgid. I took the criticism to heart and produced this third possibility:

It would be no wanton hyperbole to call Cecil Basingstoke-Weekes a giant among men, as it would be to call him one among musk oxen, and while to the great good fortune of the Godalming Society for Orthographic Reform’s reputation for scrupulous accuracy the latter expression never found its way past the lips of any of its members — due however much to their profound, if unsurprising, ignorance of a species rarely seen in that part of Surrey — it was the merest spite that prevented them from making use of the former.

This time the reaction tended to blank stares rather more than I intended, and I felt obligated to try one last time.

Palomina — for such was the name by which Fanny Metacarpal referred to herself in the privacy of her own thoughts — leaned against the drab doorway of her hovel, lugubriating in a mental landscape that owed much to the dreary aspect of similar hovels stretching into a Hoovervillian vista before her for its desperate Weltschmerz, strewn as it was with spiritual rubbish and emotional dirty laundry, and decided to go inside.

Was reading this column any more painful than watching Sarah Palin choose Bobby Jindall as her 2012 running mate at the exact moment a volcano erupted near Anchorage? You be the judge.