Category Archives: Grammar Gripery

It is kind of horrifying how precisely the main character in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip matches my own opinions.

It’s like they were collecting data points at one of my dinner parties.

There’s been a lot of talk about airborne lidar recently, because it has once again been used to find archaeological ruins in a jungle, as opposed to the standard topographic mapping it gets used for day in and day out.  It has even gotten into the pages of the comics, ever the spot for cutting-edge news and science, in the form of Mark Trail:

The professor here makes a common error, and we need to push back on it.  Lidar is not an acronym, it is a portmanteau of “light” and “radar” (or RADAR, if you prefer, RADAR actually being an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging or RAdio Direction And Ranging).  Of course, people writing papers in the academic and business world can’t bring themselves to talk about portmanteaux, so they engaged in some revisionist history to turn the word into an acronym so they could just stick that into parentheses after the first use and move on with their lives.  Like radar, there was disagreement about exactly which words went into this putative acronym (“LIght Detection And Ranging” or “Laser Imaging Detection And Ranging”) but unlike radar they don’t both have that awkward way of using two letters from one word, so convention has it that the former acronym is expressed as “LiDAR” with a lower-case i to differentiate it.

So shame on you, Mark Trail, for perpetuating the myth that lidar is an acronym, and an extra “tsk” for, having made that error, not picking the version that would fit with your all-caps font.

We’ll save the thrilling discussion of why no one bothers using all caps for certain acronyms like radar and scuba for another day. Also, maybe we’ll get to why that kid Rusty looks like Ted Cruz now.

I don’t expect much from television stations, Lord knows.  But Scripps Interactive seems to fancy themselves something of an owner of educational programming (Food Network, Travel Channel, etc.), not that horrible brain-rotting stuff that encourages coarse behavior and lack of socialization that you hear about.  Still, even educational programming can be cut a bit of slack, and I don’t demand detailed knowledge of fiddly arcana.

But come on, DIY network, this new ad is too much.  The ad I refer to is for “Building Alaska” (there was a law passed recently that at least 20% of new reality shows have to be set in Alaska, I believe).  It features someone defining words one might hear on a building site in Alaska for the benefit of residents of the lower 48 (and I presume Hawaii – I don’t know why Alaskans always ignore that state).  Some of the words aren’t really regional Alaskanisms, but we’ll let that pass.  What bothers me is when the guy gets to the word “snoozle”, which, hell, might be only used in Alaska for all I know.  Anyway, he points out that it is both a noun and a verb – to be precise it can mean either “something to poke with” or “a type of movement”.

Now, my readers are no doubt all shouting “Hah!  What a maroon!  Those are both nouns, the way he said it!  Or maybe that second one is an adverb!  I’m not really sure!”.  But the fellow was speaking extemporaneously (or pretending to), and anyway, he actually meant verb for the second, because the example he gave was “snoozle on over there”.  No, the real problem is with the knucklehead who wrote the copy for the words that are printed under him while he talks.  When he says “Any kind of poking device”, the text reads “Snoozle = (n.) To poke” – identifying a verb form that the guy didn’t even mention as a noun.  Then, when he says “type of movement”, the text reads “Snoozle = (v.) Movement or go to fetch” – which, sheesh, I don’t know, just throws in a noun and some random clause and calls it a verb.

This is all part and parcel with people mis-identifying “passive voice” of course – the vague notion that the function of a word has something to do with its grammatical definition, so if something is vaguely related to motion, it must be a verb or whatever.  But you know, the person responsible for that copy is like, a writer.

My word processor does not believe in contracting “it is”.  My phone does not believe that “it” can ever take a possessive.  I assume this is a manifestation of some kind of battle between Microsoft and Google, but it would be nice if they’d loosen up and take less absolutist stances, vis-a-vis autocorrect.  Oh, and MS Word?  “And then” is worse than “and” or “then” 99.99% of the time.  Cut it out.

This here not only perfectly captures my feelings on linguistics, but gymnastics as well!

I was listening to the news the other day, and heard someone say that they were “literally flabbergasted” at something.  I don’t recall what had caused the flabbergastation, or anything in particular about the news story, but it got me thinking.  Is there any other way to be flabbergasted?

I mean, I’m not here to rehash the old “literal versus figurative” thing, though I tend to abandon my normal descriptivist leanings and come across all prescriptivist about that particular topic.  Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to tack “literally” onto “flabbergasted” if one is using literally properly.  Flabbergasting doesn’t really have a concrete sense, so there’s no need to explain to everyone that you aren’t, in this particular case, talking about being figuratively flabbergasted (what would figuratively flabbergasted look like?).

But see here, even if we allow improper use of literally as a generic intensifier, it doesn’t make much sense here.  “Flabbergasted” is a pretty damn intense word already.  Intensifying it is kind of gilding the lily, isn’t it?  It’s sort of the ne plus ultra of surprise already, folks.  Leave it alone.