You don't "bring in" the New Year." You "ring in" the New Year.

This New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, you will probably hear the expression, "Bringing in the New Year." That is incorrect. It's "ringing." While the history of the phrase is not certain, it may be a reference to the bells of Trinity Church in New York, which began a midnight New Year's bell-ringing ceremony to celebrate its completion in 1698. Tennyson cements the proper usage to a certainty in his poem, "Ring Out, Wild Bells," a prayer for the ills of the year to be replaced with new hope. You'll hear "bringing in the New Year" in the coming days, and it should now clang in your head like cathedral bells.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Daylight saving time is neither plural nor possessive

Now that its departure is upon us, I thought it worth covering one of the most common grammar mistakes in all of chronology: daylight saving time. It is neither plural (daylight savings time) nor possessive (daylight saving’s time). Under the correct punctuation, the word “saving” appears as a gerund, modifying the word “daylight.” Think of it in its inverse and you’ll hardly be tempted into the errors. You’d never say “savings daylight” or “saving’s daylight.” 

The strict rule-follower will include a hyphen as “daylight” and “saving” combine to create a compound adjective that modifies the word “time.” But “daylight saving time” without the hyphen has ingrained itself into common use to the point where it has earned a bye on the hyphen rule for compound modifiers. 

 

However you choose to present or butcher the expression, in the name of perspective, one should always be mindful that daylight saving time has nighttime losing time as its unavoidable adjunct.  

Unpaired word seeks same for LTR

There is a category of words that have affixes but that without them cease to be words. These are called “unpaired” words or sometimes “orphaned” words, though cultural sensitivity is trending heavily toward a preference for the still sad, “unpaired.” They often appear as what seems to be a negative prefix. The classic example is “inert,” meaning “without effect.” There is no word, “ert,” meaning “having an effect,” or meaning anything else at all. Other examples include “nonchalant” and “indelible.” An interesting anomaly is “disgruntled.” Most people think of it as an unpaired word, but "gruntled" indeed means (though its usage is uncommon) pleased or contented.

 

Words can also have suffixes whose absence renders their parent word gibberish. “Reckless” and “feckless” qualify here. Their causes vary, sometimes in their having been borrowed from other languages, while sometimes the word’s root simply resembles a negating affix. Incorrigible readers may feel free to debunk any of this. I will not become discombobulated, nonplussed or overwhelmed; rather your efforts will be considered intrepid and any disambiguation welcome.  

"I'm not an idiot, you imbecile—I'm a moron!"

So goes the punchline of one of the all-time great jokes, describing the conclusion of an argument between two mental patients. Now that the lines of disagreement are wide open across all platforms and the ad hominem is well underway, it’s open season for accusations of cognitive impairment and it's important for you to get yours straight. Alongside all of the well-considered, good-faith debating that happens on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, there are sometimes invectives, many of which allege some degree of mental incapacitation. The most egregious of these is the R-word, for which there is no reason or excuse. It ought to be extinct as a pejorative.

The three words in the punchline, however, do not carry the clinical sting that the R-word does, largely due to their 50-years hence discontinuance as legitimate psychiatric terminology. They do have a grim past as a single-word redux of human persons, at least according to Edmund Burke Huey in his dandy little tome, “Backward and Feeble-Minded Children,” published in 1912. 

Huey’s hierarchy is thus: idiots attain intelligence common to a two-year old, imbeciles reach about seven, and morons put the brakes on development at about 12 years of age. In light of this history, they should probably be used with some circumspection, but again, because they had fallen into some disfavor by the late 60s and into utter disuse in the 70s, their capacity for harm is greatly lessened. Of the three, “imbecile” is the least common in Twitter fights. Moe uses it frequently to describe Larry and Curly. 

 

“Idiot” and “moron” enjoy a brisk new life on the internet, with “idiot” returning 207 million instances of use on Google and “moron” clocking in at a respectable 48 million. One presumes there are more idiots than morons. “Idiot” is derived from the Greek and was coined into English some time in the 14^th century. Of the two words, it is the elder by six-hundred years. “Moron” was coined for clinical purposes, and shares an etymology with “sophomore,” for all you morons in your second year of college. 

 

As a disciple of the Moe Howard school of usage, I am trying to reinvigorate use of “imbecile.” Its Google usage cowers conspicuously below the ten million mark, and deserves your support. The other two have had their day, and it’s time. Or you could go with any number of other negative characterizations like birdbrain, dimwit, dunce, frogspawn, nincompoop, squirrel bait or sponge head.

 

We only drop dimes metaphorically now

As the nation’s cosplay patriots are being informed upon willy-nilly across the country (and let’s hear it for the ex-wives), a lovely and anachronistic expression has emerged. In a gangster movie, when you would turn someone in, you might be said to be “dropping a dime” on them. This refers to putting a ten-cent piece into a payphone. The expression experienced its first dissonance when payphone calls went up to 25 cents in the early 1980s. “I’m dropping a quarter on Muggsy Malone,” doesn’t have quite the same zip to it as “dropping a dime.” Now that payphones are a relic and everyone turns each other in free of charge, the phrase has no modern relevance at all. Its use is becoming less and less common, but given the ten-cent payphone’s decades-old disappearance, that it persists at all is testament to its charm. It is one of those rare expressions that has (somewhat) survived the now forty-year gap since its direct relevance.

 

 

It would be a capital idea to capitalize on the common misuse of "capitol"

Events of this week have revealed a horrible patch of ignorance in the United States, one that is usually undone in grammar school. This classic homonymic error happens a dozen times before breakfast in your social media feed, and you don’t want to be the one with egg on their face. I speak of course of “capital" versus "capitol.” Capital means several things: it can refer to accumulated wealth (business equipment purchases require a capital investment), an uppercase letter (a capital “Q” delineates terminal gullibility), or a city that serves as the seat of a country’s or state’s government (the capital of Vermont is Montpelier). Capitol means only one thing: a building in which an entity’s legislature resides. Capitol is reserved only for the building, not the city where the building resides. The capitol is always located in the capital city. The capitalization of “capitol” is another matter! When you reference a capitol building specifically, like when you say, “I am going to storm the United States Capitol,” you do capitalize “capitol.” When you say, “My fellow whackadoodles are going to storm every capitol building in the country,” you do not capitalize “capitol,” as it doesn’t refer to a particular one.  

North, South, East and West qualifiers

 I’m from New England and I live in California. When I refer to my native home, I say “back east,” and when I’m home and referring to my adopted city of Los Angeles, I say, “out west.” You would never say “back west” or “out east.” How did these conventions begin? 

“Back east” and “out west” emerged at approximately the same time, and as you might guess, it was during the western expansion of the United States. The east was the settled area, the known quantity. If you were going west, you were going out west, into the unknown, and if you were coming back, you were headed back east, returning to the familiar. In most sentences, these expressions will serve as adverbs, as they typically modify the verb. In the sentence, "I am going back east," the word "back" offers more details on the verb, "going." If you answer the question, "Where in the heck is he?" by simply saying, "Back East," the word "back" behaves as a preposition.

 

So what of the other chief compass points? It’s “up north” or “down south,” obviously because of a map’s orientation. The word “up” probably ought to refer to a direction away from the center of the Earth, while the word “down” ought to indicate a direction towards it. Our frame of reference for North and South is a physical positioning of up and down, whereas at least as far as adverbial expressions go, the East and West seem more to be derived from a frame of mind.