"Live Free or Die," a Brief History

“Live Free or Die” is the state motto of my native New Hampshire and it is without even a remote challenger the best of all of the state mottos. But where did it come from? Like so many good things, it came in the mail.

General John Stark, New Hampshire’s most celebrated Revolutionary War figure, composed the phrase in a toast denoting the anniversary of a victorious battle, but he was too ill to deliver it in person so he sent it in a letter to be recited at the event. “Live free or die,” his toast read. “Death is not the worst of all evils.”

That second part would look great on the license plate too.

As a small child growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire, I have distant memories of playing in Stark Park, marveling at the stacked, painted cannonballs and concrete-filled Revolutionary War cannon, imagining a battle with General John leading the charge and me loading cannonball after cannonball into these great guns and annihilating rows of redcoats. Had I known at six years old that it was he who had uttered those words that had at first frightened and then invigorated me, I might have joined ROTC in grammar school.

The identical phrase, “Vivre libre ou mourir,” was popular during the French Revolution, so it is likely that our man Stark lifted it from them. “Live Free or Die” was accepted as the state motto in 1945 and it immediately appeared on the new emblem and soon enough, on the license plates, which as the great Bill Morrisey pointed out, are often made by prison inmates.

New Hampshire. The gnarly motto, the craggy White Mountains, the inhospitable winters, the now-fallen Old Man of the Mountain, all conspire to make New Hampshire’s mind-blowing beauty and deeper-than-wide conception of community a little rough-hewn, something you have to do a little work for, but once you do that work and experience the richness of living in New Hampshire, then you know a depth of human experience I have never felt anywhere else. So a big “Live Free or Die” shout-out to all of my friends back home in New Hampshire from me out here in California, where our state motto is “Eureka.”

Subject and Object Pronouns: More Hard Core Grammar

Using subject pronouns correctly can make you sound like you’re auditioning for the part of Thurston Howell III in a film reprise of Gilligan’s Island: “It could well have been he; I’ve never trusted the professor.”

Though grammatically incorrect, the object pronoun, him, would almost always be used in this case, at least in speech. Picture this: a cop slams you into a wall and shoves a mug shot in your face. “Is this the guy who sold you the heroin?”

You’re not going to say, “It’s he! It’s he!” No, what you’re going to do is deny, deny, deny, deny. You played the game, now you do the beef. You can do a year, and your homies will appreciate it. Do it for the ‘hood! Man up, thug! But if you were going to roll over and squeal like a pig, you’d say, “It’s him! It’s him!”

It’s more conversational, but it is in fact wrong. I am for the most part a prescriptivist in grammar, in that there must be a compelling reason to deviate from existing conventions, and because it’s more comfortable to say, mostly because of repeated error, for me isn’t reason enough, so I try never to use object pronouns where a subject pronoun is called for. Admittedly though, if in an LAPD choke-hold, I suspect I would burp out a feeble, "It's him! It's him!" In writing though, you can call me Thurston the Third with regard to subject pronoun use.

The most common subject pronoun use is easy. I, you, they, he, she, we. I booked a gig. You brought your parents. They were horrified. He stormed out. She followed. We perform in drag. Object pronouns are used when you are substituting a pronoun for something functioning as the object of a sentence. Me, you, them, him, her, us. You’ll notice that the second person subject and object pronouns are identical.

If you ponder that a while, you’ll also eventually notice that if you were to attempt to use both the subject and object forms of the second person pronoun in a single sentence, you would be forced into using the reflexive from of the second person pronoun, yourself, as the object pronoun. “You are only fooling yourself, Donald.”

The most common mixup with subject and object pronouns is with the Mary and I construction when it appears as the object of a sentence. It’s Mary and I won the prize, but The prize was awarded to Mary and me.

So the moral of the story is that using the correct subject form in some sentence structures makes you sound snobby. If you want to get that one wrong in speech, that’s no big deal. Proceed. Avoid it in formal writing. Either write it properly, or if you really hate the way the correct expression looks and feels, rewrite the sentence. Getting the “Mary and I” wrong in direct object use should make you wince a little, and any other subject versus object pronoun errors should make you writhe in pain.

The Verbing of Adjectives: Will the Coining Never Stop?

The nouning of verbs and the verbing of nouns have both been covered in these pages, mostly in terms of their popularity as business jargon. Sad enough, but there have recently been credible reports of the verbing of adjectives.

The one I heard about was robusting. A PR professional who reads this blog called it to my attention and I assumed it had been uttered in a meeting, but she sent me the following graphic:

                           

This is from a systems security industry trade rag called Information Security Buzz, and one must assume that the editor rather liked this particular usage mangle. I rather don't and I am gratified to have found out from another reader that the street has beaten Information Security Buzz on this particular case of adjectival verbing, this from UrbanDictionary.com:

You'll notice this interpretation of the term "robusting" has garnered just five votes with only two of them positive (one of which is mine); nonetheless it is the top answer at Urban Dictionary for that word. My guess is that the author of the definition was attempting to write "act" rather than "art," but it more or less works either way.

Disgusting though it may be, I prefer this definition to the business definition, "to make robust," as it contains some component of comedy and mischief, whereas the business editor's linguistic laceration suffers from both its self-importance and its misplaced sense of cool.

Let me know if you find any other verbed adjectives.

Getting Ben-Hurred in Business

Having for the most part spent my working life as an ink-stained wretch, retail punching bag or cubicle rat, I am new to business meetings and am having a good time with some of the jargon. This recent delight is probably remedial to many readers, but it’s a relative novelty to me.

My favorite thus far has been the term, Ben-Hur. When one gets Ben-Hurred, it means a relatively small issue has distracted a manager, which has in turn caused him or her to turn away from a more important matter. It refers to a moment in the movie "Ben-Hur" when Charlton Heston’s character meets a group of people who are going to see Jesus Christ deliver the Sermon on the Mount. Poor old Ben elects not to join them and misses out on one of the defining pieces of Christian oratory. It’s like missing the “I Have a Dream” speech, the Gettysburg Address and Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance all at once.

In a business context, it might refer to someone getting wrapped up in a merchandising project and as a result, missing out on an opportunity to land a major client. It is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees or of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. It is the misapplication of resources born of a poor assessment.

I have been so entertained lately by business jargon that I am tempted to share another term here, but I wouldn’t want you to feel rag-dolled.

Imply versus Infer Through the Lens of Toby Keith

Some Grammar Dance entries have a low aspiration indeed—no big picture, no analysis of a trend, no solution to an age-old conundrum. Our ankle-high bar today seeks simply to clarify the difference between infer and imply. It’s an easy one to get wrong, but a bad one to get wrong as well, as it can unwittingly tumble  out of your mouth and you might not even recognize you’ve been pejoratively judged in a conversation.

In the case of the Berlin Wall, people tended only to jump over from one direction. The same is true of imply and infer; when people use the word infer, many make the mistake of thinking it means the same thing as imply, though rarely will someone say the word imply and think that it means infer. 

Think of it in terms of an internal versus an external action. Suppose you hear someone say, “I went to the Toby Keith concert. Unfortunately.” He is implying that the concert was bad. It is a rhetorical vehicle that has been used to make you think something without directly stating it. 

What you may infer from hearing someone say, “I went to the Toby Keith concert, unfortunately,” is that the person has dreary taste in music. Even though the intention on the part of the speaker was not to telegraph a preference for the worst that country music has to offer, the listener gleaned that through her own powers of deduction.

In order to imply, one must say something with an intended but not expressly stated alternate or additional meaning. When something is inferred, it is an opinion arrived at within the mind of a single individual based on empirical evidence and that person’s intuition. They differ pretty wildly, and it’s important to use them correctly.

Election Season and the Straw Man Argument

As the elections inch nearer, we should prepare ourselves for a waterfall of doubletalk, newspeak and lack of plain dealing. There are relatively few major bad faith arguing techniques, and if you learn what the chief cheap shots are, it will help you smell a rat before it gets into your kitchen or even worse, before you vote for it. We will be salting in these common rhetorical sucker punches over the course of the coming election season; today’s is the old standby, the straw man argument.

A straw man is an effigy, a dummy, a stuffed pair of pants and a shirt, two old boots and a hat, and when you attack it, it can’t fight back. The same is true of straw man arguments. The straw man arguer will make it seem like he is addressing a point of debate and will refute it vigorously, only he has shifted the argument slightly and is not directly addressing the point that is in play.

Let’s say a performer at an acoustic open mic plays an original song called Festering Wound in which he acts out ten minutes of a Civil War field amputation. The lady at the front table is upset because she brought her twelve year-old daughter to hear her big sister sing Michael Row Your Boat Ashore. She was scheduled next.

She says to him that she has come to this open mic before, and that it has always been quiet and nice, so she felt comfortable bringing her child. She further suggests that in the future if he’s playing an open mic and there are children in the audience, he might pick a different song, one that didn’t involve blood capsules and a hatchet.

He takes offense and says that she is a lousy parent for bringing her child into a bar. He accuses her of exposing the child to alcohol as a result of being a slave to her own irresponsible drinking. He goes on to accuse her of having no artistic vision and a quickness to censor that is worthy of a Nazi.

The author of Festering Wound has characterized a caring parent as an alcoholic who brings her child into the bar with her and lacks any artistic discrimination whatsoever. He creates an inaccurate and caricaturized representation of his opponent and attacks that instead of her argument.

Expect that kind of ugliness in the coming year and a quarter, highly skilled rhetoricians using straw men to beat the stuffing out of one another in an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Pro-forms: a Part of Speech Defined by its Exceptions

Pro-forms are an often-overlooked part of speech, mostly because they really aren’t one. They function as pronouns most of the time, and can rightly be called pronouns most of the time, but just as all dogs are animals while not all animals are dogs, all pronouns are pro-forms, but not all pro-forms are pronouns. Pro-forms are weird in that they are only really defined by their exceptions.

Simply put, a pro-form is a word that represents something or someone else that has been previously mentioned. It is often used as a writing vehicle to avoid repeating the same word or group of words twice in close proximity. “I played that Madden Football video game for the first time yesterday. Now I’m addicted to it and I am afraid to fly.” The word it is the pro-form with a classic pronoun function.

Instances of pro-forms that aren’t pronouns include so, there and do or did. “When Sean bungee-jumped off the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge without incident, Jules did too.” The word did is the pro-form here, and the phrase, bungee-jumped off the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge is the pro-form's antecedent. Notice that the pro-form here is the simple past form of the verb to do, and not a pronoun at all.

“Bill thinks he can climb Mt. Washington on a pogo stick. I don’t think so.” The antecedent here is climb Mt. Washington on a pogo stick and the pro-form is so, an adverb. In this case, it keeps us from writing, “Bill thinks he can climb Mt. Washington on a pogo stick. I don’t think he can climb Mt. Washington on a pogo stick.” Pro-forms are critical, and most people use them without knowing what they’re called. And now you do.

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