Category Archives: Language

The Automatic Readability Assessment

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I needed to know the word count of a story of mine today, so I consulted a site called Word Count Tools. No Word on my machine yet, so I’m making do with primitive word pad programs without automatic word-counting. WCT not only counts the words, but it assesses your writing in terms of “readability level.” I wondered what that meant, aside from a subjective impression you might get reading text. Helpfully, it says at the bottom that it calculates something called a Dale-Chall score.

“[The Dale-Chall] formula is used to assess the readability level of a given text, which is described below:

0.1579 (difficult words/words ) + 0.0496 (words/sentences )

Difficult words do not belong to the list of 3,000 familiar words. The formula adds 3.6365 to the raw score if the percentage of difficult words is greater than 5% to get the adjusted score.”

Sure. I see. Anyway, a score of 4.9 or lower (for example) is “easily understood by an average 4th-grade student or lower.” A score of 10 or more is “easily understood by an average college graduate.”

I couldn’t resist putting yesterday’s post through the count, just for fun. It’s 335 words, 1898 characters, with a readability level of “easily understood by a 11th-12th grade student.” The most used words are “time” and “clock,” four times each, then “yard” and “now,” three times each. Clearly, I was writing about time and space. There were 100 “difficult” words and 211 unique words, with 26 sentences of an average length of 12.9 words.

What about the Gettysburg Address? Famously, it’s short: 271 words, 1462 characters, “easily understood by a 9-10th grade student.” Its top word is “nation,” at five times, or fully 8.3 percent of the total. Other top words are “dedicated,” “great,” and “dead.” There are only 47 “difficult” words. Clearly a speech for the common man, or at least the 19th-century common man.

Pet Peeve Opposites

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Time for a winter hiatus. Back to posting on February 22 or so, when there will still be plenty enough winter to go. At least we haven’t had the kind of wall-to-wall snow that Boston’s experienced lately.

Pet peeve for the day: postings, especially those containing business or economic data, that have no date, nor any way to figure out when they were posted. Worse than useless. I ran across two of them yesterday. Want to be cited in an article? Don’t do that.

But I don’t want to rattle on about pet peeves. Is there an opposite term for pet peeve? A small thing that consistently brings pleasure. One of life’s “itty-bitties,” as my Old Testament professor called them, though they could be good or bad. Finding money you didn’t know you had; a doughnut with a bit more cream filling than usual; a new understanding of a lyric or a plot point or a concept that suddenly occurs to you.

There has to be a term for that. Something just as pithy as pet peeve, that is. I haven’t been able to think of one, or spend any time looking. Finding such a phrase would, in fact, be an anti-pet peeve, considering the pleasure a pithy new phrase brings, so I’ll have to work on it. Besides the Internet – not everything is there yet – I’ll take a look in delightful books like They Have a Word for It and Lost Beauties of the English Language. When I have time; that can be the best little pleasure of all.

Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon

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Just showing off. This week I thumbed through my beaten-up copy of The Book of Lists (1977), and came across its list of long words. Such as Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon. These days, that word has its own Wiki page. As is probably should.

BookofListsIt’s been years since I looked at the book, but looking again I can see why it was a mammoth bestseller. It’s one of the best browsing books that I know of, and the godfather of the slide show and the listicle. The back cover promises: the 10 worst films of all time; 7 famous men who died virgins; 10 sensational thefts; 15 famous event that happened in a bathtub; 20 famous high school dropouts; 9 breeds of dogs that bite the most; 10 doctors who tried to get away with murder; the 14 worst human fears; and much, much more! That last one’s no hype. The book comes in at 519 pages with fairly dense text.

The male virgins, incidentally, are on page 321, a list based on conjecture (and weaselly calling them “full-time or part-time” virgins). More accurate would be a list of historical figures suspected of long periods of celibacy, but that kind of phasing wouldn’t get enough eyeballs, to put it in modern terms. On the list: Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, Louis XVI, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Adolf Hitler.

Another interesting list, more-or-less at random: Top 10 Air Aces of World War I. Of course, everyone’s heard of the number-one ace, Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen, one way or another. But what about number 2 and 3 — a Frenchman and Briton, respectively? That would be Capt. René Fonck and Maj. Edward Mannoch. (Though Wiki puts Mannoch at number 5.)

And one more fun one: people who became words. Bloomer, Bowdler, Boycott, Braille, Chauvin, Diesel, Guillotin, Lynch, Nicot, Quisling, Sacher-Masoch, and of course John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich.

-gate

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I read the term “deflategate” for the first time today. Peculiar, but not funny enough to laugh at. Even better when referring to that incredibly, absolutely minor flap about deflated footballs — and it did make me laugh — is “ballghazi.”

Which made me wonder: just how many incredibly, absolutely minor flaps have had that -gate suffix attached to them in the last 40 years? Wiki, as usual, makes a stab at such a list, but there’s probably no way to know them all. I’d never heard of many of those on the list, and for good reason, since it includes the likes of “Flakegate”:

Photographs of the wedding reception of TV presenter Anthea Turner were used to promote Cadbury’s then new Snowflake chocolate bar, bringing scorn from the tabloid press and causing Turner to claim this was not part of the £450,000 by OK! magazine paid her for exclusive access to her wedding.

The article also credits, or blames, columnist William Safire (whom I didn’t realize has been dead for five years until I looked him up) with getting the ball rolling on -gate. Could be. But it might have been more spontaneous than that, as language tends to be.

I also wonder: in another 40 years (say), is anyone going to remember that the construction started with Watergate? The suffix has legs enough to survive that long, but historical amnesia being what it is, I can imagine some as-yet unborn person thinking, “Gate? That’s strange. Where did that come from?” And then either forgetting about it, or finding out by tapping the gizmo that pulls up whatever information ocean is sloshing around in the future.

Etymology for the Day

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December has started off cold, which isn’t unusual, but dry, which is. A little. No predictions of much snow in the week ahead, either. I remember a lot of early Decembers around here with heavy snow to kick things off, a few times on December 1 exactly.

The subject of the mint julep came up today. The drink’s mentioned in The Great Gatsby, which Lilly is reading, and she asked me what it was in it. Besides the mint, I forgot for a moment, but then I remembered: bourbon. At least that’s what I sampled at the Kentucky Derby those many years ago, as one does. I didn’t cotton to it particularly.

Naturally, that led me to various web sites, mainly because I didn’t know the origin of the word julep. Bon Appétit tells me – and I’ll assume they do their food and beverage word homework – that “in the beginning (and likely a very early beginning, at that), the word was gul-ab, and the drink was Persian rosewater (gul = rose, ab = water). Gul-ab then moved through the normal channels (Arabic>Italian>French), until finally ‘julep’ shows up in English, around 1400, in a surgical textbook called Lanfranc’s Chirurgie (the old-timey word for ‘surgery’).

“There, it’s described as a ‘sirup maad oonly of water & of sugre,’ mixed with more medicinal ingredients to make them easier to swallow. So by the 15th century, ‘julep’ had lost its floral notes, and had moved into meaning any kind of soothing, sweet drink.

“By the late 1700s, though, the Atlantic seems to have split the julep into two camps. In Europe, it was still a general term for a sweet drink, including something with medicinal properties, but hard-drinking Americans had codified it into a cold cocktail, served with sugar, ice, and some kind of aromatic herb. Speed up to 1804, when an American writer credited his love of whiskey to ‘mixing and tasting my young master’s juleps.’ So we know that whiskey was a major component, but in the 19th century, juleps were also made with brandy and (surprisingly) gin.”

One more thing about the julep, from Wiki. No footnote, but I believe it: “Since 2006, Churchill Downs has also served extra-premium custom-made mint juleps at a cost of $1000 each at the Kentucky Derby. These mint juleps were served in gold-plated cups with silver straws, and were made from Woodford Reserve bourbon, mint imported from Ireland, spring water ice cubes from the Bavarian Alps, and sugar from Australia. [Why Australia?] The proceeds were used to support charitable causes dedicated to retired race horses.”

Conifer Man, Conifer Man, Does Whatever a Conifer Can

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On Saturday we took a quick hop over to Rockford, Ill., and soon found ourselves face-to-face with Conifer Man.

Klehm Arborteum, May 24, 2014

To me this looks like a guy in a tree suit – that’s how I’d guess it looks, anyway – but it’s really one of the odd-shaped conifers to be seen at the Klehm Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Rockford, which features about 500 species and cultivars of woody plants on 155 acres. Not that I would know even a fraction of those, but still I know an odd conifer when I see one.

This, for instance, is a weeping white spruce. Ann compared it to Charlie Brown’s tree.

Rockford Ill., April 24, 2014

Next, according to the sign, is a procumbent blue spruce or, as I like to think of it, a Christmas tree implosion.

Conifer, Rockford, Ill May 2014

Procumbent. Now there’s a word you don’t see much, a solid Latinate that seems to be used mostly to describe plants with stems that trail along the ground without rooting. Another meaning is simply lying face down, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used that way, with “recumbent” the main choice for lying down in some way. The terms accumbent and decumbent are cousin-words usually used in botany – “resting against another part” and “lying or growing along the ground, but erect near the plant’s apex,” respectively.

As long as I’m on a lingual tangent, the Latin cumbere, to lie down, goes all the way back to the Indo-European base keu-(2), which my American Heritage New College Dictionary appendix tells me is a “base of loosely related derivatives with assumed basic meaning ‘to bend.’ ” Plants certainly bend to be accumbent or decumbent or procumbent, but animals and people do as well, to some degree, so that fits.

Starting in the early 1900s, the site of the Klehm was a commercial nursery, and so it remained until 1985. The original owners planted a good many of the now-large trees, which are sometimes noticeable for being in rows. These days the land belongs to the Winnebago County Forest Preserve District, who have been busy in recent decades making the place less like a nursery and more like a woody museum.

Walk along the main path and you can’t miss the conifers, some of which are very large, unlike the oddities pictured above. Not that you can’t see the likes of pines, firs, junipers, spruces and so on elsewhere, especially as you go north, but even so the Klehm collection is impressive.

Klehm Arboretum, May 2014

Naturally, we had such a casual visit that we missed some of the more remarkable trees – which I read about later – such as the grove of Bur oaks that were there before the nursery, and which might be as old as a pre-settlement 300 years. There are also some fully grown American chestnut trees on the grounds, which I understand are pretty rare, since an invasive blight destroyed most of that species in the 20th century.

Dictionaries!

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Not long ago, I put many of my dictionaries together on one shelf. Then I got a little snap happy with the camera. Most of them date from the 1980s. It’s a modest collection, but I’m fond of all of them.

I’ve always kept the biographical and geographical dictionaries together. Just seems right somehow. They’re really good for thumbing through to  find odd bits of information.

The beaten up American Heritage Dictionary New College Edition is beaten up for a reason: I bought it on August 23, 1979 — I wrote the date inside — to take to college two days later. It also got a lot of use in my early editing jobs.

The Dictionary of Business and Economics was so impressive I wrote the authors, complimenting it. The Macquarie Dictionary is Australian. I bought it in Sydney and it became one of the larger souvenirs I’ve ever lugged home. Chambers is British, but bought it in the U.S. I can’t find my Canadian dictionary, which is really a modified American Heritage volume, including the addition of the maple leaf on the cover. I bought it in Duncan, BC, which is on Vancouver Island.

A Bit of Random Mencken

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Most of the snow is gone, as expected, though pockets remain in shady spots. Temps are supposed to be as high as 60 F over the weekend, though, and that’ll return us completely to November brown.

Books are being re-arranged downstairs in a major way, and today I opened my copy of The American Language (Fourth Edition, 1936) at random, which is a good way to approach that work. Picked at random, page 211:

“The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incommunicado, ley fuga, machete, mañana, and rurale, some of which are already obsolete; and the popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more, e.g., rodeo, hoosegow (from juzgado, the past participle of juzgar, to judge) and wrangler (from caballerango, a horse-groom), and greatly increased the use of others,” Mencken writes. “Chile con carne did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix –ista came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911.”

Barista, in fact, is borrowed from Italian, but fashionista is patterned after Sandinista. Mencken wasn’t referring to that, however, and he doesn’t say what -ista word he’s thinking of from the 1910s, rather than the 1980s, when (I think) fashionista was coined, as Clintonista was in the 1990s.

One more language-related item. I didn’t know that some Germans were so touchy about Anglicisms in German. Golly, you’d think they were French.

Flotsam and Jetsam

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Long, long ago in an English class far away – junior high – our teacher asked us the difference between flotsam and jetsam. I don’t think anyone knew, so he told us. Or it might have been a question posed by our text book that the teacher then re-asked. Anyway, I’ve known it since then. I can’t ever remember ever using that knowledge in my professional writing, but so what? Vocabulary is its own reward.

Later I wondered, does The Thing count as flotsam or jetsam? That’s going to stay an unanswered question.

That same book (I think) also posed the question: Would a gnu gnaw gneiss? The consensus was no, a gnu would not gnaw gneiss. And a gnostic wouldn’t gnaw gneiss gneither.

Goethe Institut, Lüneburg

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It’s the oddest thing: looking at this snapshot, taken 30 years ago this month, I can remember the name of only one person in the picture besides me, but I remember almost everyone’s nationality. Then again, the grundstufe 1 class at the Goethe Institut in Lüneburg, West Germany, in the summer of ’83 was a motley one, representing four continents and at least 10 countries. That must have made an impression on a lad traveling outside of his country for the first time.

I was traveling that summer with college friends Rich and Steve. It was their idea to study German in Germany, the better to read philosophy. My interest in 19th-century continental philosophers wasn’t as keen as theirs, but I thought spending five or so weeks in one place, taking classes in the morning and knocking around the rest of the time, would be a good idea. And so it was.

How they picked Lüneburg, I don’t remember, but it’s a fine Lower Saxony town near Hamburg. I ought to ask them sometime. They might not remember either. Rich and Steve knew some German already, so were in a higher class. I was in the beginner class, grundstufe 1. One day, the class went outside an lined up for a photo.

On the upper row, beginning on the left, are three Americans. The fellow on the farthest left was nicknamed Howdy Doody (by the other Americans) for his red hair, small stature, and childishness. Fourth on the left was Herr Witt, our teacher. A fitting name, since he was a lively, entertaining teacher. Next, and to the back, a Japanese fellow. Then me. Next to me, a Finn, who was something of a celebrity on Finnish children’s TV, if I remember right. I ought to remember his name, since he lived in the same building as I did, and we spoke fairly often, but I don’t. Behind him, a Frenchman, and then a South American whose nation I forgot. At the end is an Italian woman.

On the lower row, beginning on the left, two Italian girls; Howdy Doody in particular was fond of flirting with the girl second to left, and she was fond of brushing him off. The black fellow was from Canada. Next to him, another Japanese guy. I ran into him one day at the Lüneburg McDonald’s, and we had lunch together. Next to him, a Venezuelan, and finally a Hungarian, our only classmate from behind the Iron Curtain.