The Harris/Walz candidacy and the apostrophe

With the Harris/Walz candidacy fully on the rails, I thought it prudent to review some apostrophe basics, as it has stuck a stick in the spokes of many communicators stymied by what seem to be equally bad choices. Should “Harris” have an apostrophe followed by an “s” or simply an apostrophe? An apostrophe after a “z” followed by an “s” feels weird but it seems right, right?  

The Wall Street Journal’s treatment of the bugaboo is “Harris’s and Walz’s,” but the Associated Press at last check has been printing it as “Harris’ and Walz’s.” The New York Times, which generally subscribes to AP, has been using the WSJ model.

 

There is much crankiness in the editorial community for the AP to move fully to the WSJ model. In AP style, the possessive form of “Paris” is “Paris’s” and the possessive form of “King Charles” is “King Charles’s.” The AP must fully adopt the possessive of “Harris” as “Harris’s” or it will have a shambles on its hands. 

 

The important thing is not to fear the Harris/Walz candidacy’s possessive usage. You must, however, do something. You can’t just leave it like it is with an intended possessive sense and slink away thinking everything’s fine. If you write, “Harris and Walz candidacy promises to be…” you are assaulting your readers. 

Here are your options and my opinions on them:

 

Harris’s and Walz’s: My favorite. A little bulky, but worth it.
Harris’ and Walz’s: Perfectly fine, though a little precious.
Harris’ and Walz’: Writer is a chaos agent and must be stopped.
Harris and Walz: Unclear and reflective of sloth. 

 

Devising mnemonic devices

Mnemonic devices are useful for preventing finger-in-the-air proclamations at cocktail parties that are dead wrong. One classic example is differentiating word origins and the insect kingdom with clarity between etymology and entomology. You don’t want to be schmoozing it up at a garden party with Thurston Howell the Fifth—millions at stake—and blather on about the Japanese entomology of “tycoon.” Your sycophancy will have been all for naught. The easy solution for avoiding the etymology/entomology trap is to associate "entomology" with ants. 

The mnemonic I like for remembering that “mnemonic” begins with a silent “M” is by associating the word with that modern master of morphology, Eminem. Do you have any favorite mnemonics?

Bird versus fowl

With Thanksgiving approaching, the time has come to distinguish between birds and fowl. Your fine feathered friends outside the window are birds, whereas the 40-pound behemoth you and yours are planning to devour is fowl. Note that it’s not “a fowl,” as the word “fowl” is a non-count plural noun that refers to a class of bird kept or hunted for its meat or eggs. All fowl are birds, but not all birds are fowl. The wild varieties include landfowl (like pheasants and quail) and waterfowl (like ducks and geese). Roosters and hens are landfowl, but with the distinction of being raised, which also makes them domestic or barnyard fowl. What makes a bird? You need five things: lungs, legs, wings, warm blood and eggs. Bats’ egglessness renders them winged mammals, and egg-laying reptiles miss the classification by being cold-blooded (though most lizards prefer ectothermic as being both more descriptive and less prone to stigma). Your wings don’t have to fly and your legs don’t have to be able to do a Texas two-step either, but if you want to claim to be a bird, you need to hit this list five for five. If in addition to all of this you are a candidate to be eaten, you are fowl. 

Eponyms, Malthus and coyotes

An eponym is a word whose source and meaning refers to a person. The person can be historical or fictional, living or dead. Perhaps the most famous eponym is pasteurize, which refers to Louis Pasteur, who pioneered the process of heating milk to a point where harmful microbes are killed without affecting the milk's taste or nutritional value. Other such words include sadistic, platonic and gerrymander. Braggadocio is a fine eponym that references a fictional character, Edmund Spencer's empty, boasting narcissist finding new life in modern English. America is itself an eponym. 

Recently returned to Southern California after a wonderful summer and early fall in Maine, I was serenaded last night by a pack of coyotes, and the word “malthusian” came to mind, as that is a feature of the Los Angeles coyote population. "Malthusian" references English economist and pessimist, Thomas Robert Malthus, who espoused the notion that populations grow to the limit of the sustenance systems that support them, and that human population reductions only occur in the inevitable event of famine, war and disease. Malthus was a lot of fun at parties. The malthusian attribute is most certainly true of the coyote population in the Los Angeles suburbs, whose supply of jackrabbits and Jack Russells are the sole determinant for its density. 

 

Though both plentiful and reviled, coyotes are protected here–in large part for this reason. As satisfying as slaked bloodlust over the loss of poor little Pookins might be, an open season on coyotes would achieve little. Grief-stricken, below-the-line movie professionals  littering their front lawns with leg-hold traps and staggering through the streets of Woodland Hills with an air rifle has plenty of potential downside and no realistic upside because the practical result would be nil. The coyote population is malthusian, and even subsequent to an all-out rout would rebound to the degree the land could sustain them within a season or two. Malthusian.

Jeffrey Clark's error offers a learning opportunity for using noun/verb homophones

In a broadcast from the Center for Renewing America studios, former Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division Jeffrey Clark expressed his objection to 50 Trump officials having received DOJ subpoenas. “All of this makes me angry,” Clark said. “It seems like they won’t stop. This is really causing a lot of upsetment in the country.”

The use of the non-word, “upsetment,” was intended to express the noun form of the verb, “to upset.” The word he was going for of course is very simply, “upset.” The verb/noun relationship of upset/upset is just one example of dozens that exist in the English language in which the noun/verb forms are homophones. In these cases, however, they are of course not homonyms because that would be maddening.

 

In the noun form, the accent is on the first syllable, whereas in the verb form, the accent is on the final syllable. Two-syllable examples include “survey,” “implant,” and “conscript.” For another example, the code enforcement agency will only permit you to build if you have a permit. 

 

One disclaimer here–you may find "upsetment" in Wiktionary or other highly permissive dictionaries. It has been coined before, but it hasn't caught on in journalistic, fiction or historical writing, nor has it been welcomed into the benchmark dictionaries.

Deadly, not stirred; history and etymology of the Molotov cocktail

Russia’s invasion of a blameless Ukraine has invigorated a citizen response the world hasn’t seen in decades, which in turn has invigorated use of a homemade incendiary device preferred by improvised armies the world over, the Molotov cocktail. But who was Molotov, and why is this guerrilla gasoline grenade deployed in his honor? 

Molotov was an Old Bolshevik who became a great party loyalist to the Soviet Union. A favorite of Stalin and vice versa, Stalin appointed Molotov as his right-hand man, chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, in 1930. He held the post until 1941. 

 

At the outset of World War II, in what is called the First Soviet-Finnish War, the Soviet Union leveraged the chaos of the war as cover to invade Finland, but met unexpected resistance. The surprising weakness of the Soviet machine was noted by an ambitious German leader, who soon afterward launched an ill-fated offensive into Russia. 

 

Here’s where it gets a little convoluted. Soviet propagandists were claiming that visible bomber flights over these little Finnish villages were humanitarian food drops. The local populations began referring to this Soviet fantasy as “Molotov bread baskets.” As tanks and personnel began moving into these villages, they were met with homemade incendiaries they then called “Molotov cocktails,” very real beverages that were intended to complement these non-existent food deliveries from the Politburo. 

 

The idea didn’t originate there, though the name did. A bottle filled with gas and a lit rag is no stroke of genius and has been used as a sabotage for settling scores ever since combustible fuel. Notably though, they were used as a tool of desperation by poorly equipped soldiers in the Spanish Civil War fighting under Franco, and we all know how that ended. The Molotov cocktail. Crude but effective.

 

I guess the most important takeaway is that Molotov cocktails were designed for use on Molotov, not by Molotov. 

 

 

The 100th Grammar Dance article, and it's a doozy

This being my 100^th Grammar Dance article, I thought I’d make it a doozy–that is, I thought I might track down the origins of the word, “doozy.”  

I first heard it watching American cartoons in the 1960s. Just before Bugs Bunny’s antagonist falls off a cliff, into a mine or down an elevator shaft, Bugs would often offer the faux-kindly advice, “The first step’s a doozy!” As a child, I contextualized it to mean an extreme version of whatever category “the doozy” occupied, and accepted it on its face. 

The word’s archaic charm kept it in my unquestioned active vocabulary for decades, and I sometimes employed it when I wished to invoke a mood of waxed-mustache anachronism for an impressive person, place or thing. When I finally took it upon myself to find out about the word's history, I was a little disappointed. I imagined its source being its onomatopoeic resemblance to someone falling, Bugs Bunny-style, down a well or a conflation of "ooh" and "huzzah." Alas, no.

 

“Doozy” is probably the result of the gradual evolution of the word, “daisy,” which in the late 19^th century was a common metaphor for any exemplary thing. “Doozy” begins to emerge in the earliest part of the 20^th century as a comic replacement where “daisy” might have been used before. 

 

There is also a theory that the word derives from popular Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who lived at the turn of the century. Credible or not, this is the etymology I prefer to believe, as she was one of the great stage artists of her time and was known for tackling deeply challenging material.

There is also a theory that it derives from the Duesenberg automobile, whose legendary luxury is tempting to associate with “doozy,” but its usage predates the car company’s widest popularity, so that is unlikely.

 

Most signs point to the mundane transition of “daisy” into “doozy” over the course of the 19^th century’s departure and the arrival of the 20^th, likely at the hands of a series of grinning, bow-tied goobers seeing their first steamship or a nicely carved walking stick. 

That’s where most of the evidence lies, but as is the case with beliefs of such low stakes as these, strongly holding to them even in error bears little consequence. So, in furtherance of the arts and in furtherance of the feminine, I am throwing in all the way with the Eleonora Duse theory, as wrong as I surely am.