Rich Mintz » Language

Shall vs. will

richmintz — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:49:09 +0000

After receiving my eleventeenth email from an English person who said “shall” in a sentence in which I and everyone I know would instead say “will,” I have to admit that I have no effing idea what the rules are. Aside from a couple of special situations in which a poetic “shall” is conventional, which I could probably describe if a gun were held to my head, I’m completely stumped about the difference. I feel more or less the way I did about merry, marry, and Mary before I moved East — people insisted there was a difference, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

As a start, I sent this article to Instapaper to read on the train, but I suspect it will be unsatisfying and I’ll still be confused afterwards. I will (shall?) report back on anything useful I learn.

Argh! Pet peeve: “reticent”

richmintz — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:26:13 +0000

Dear everyone — once and for all, “reticent” does not mean “reluctant” or “unwilling,” it means “reserved” or “withdrawn.” I realize I’ve lost this one — people have been confusing “reticent” with “reluctant” for more than a generation, and the incorrect definition of “reticent” is now starting to make its way into dictionaries as a secondary meaning. Which means that, by popular acclamation, it is incrementally less incorrect than it used to be. But it still drives me crazy!

Especially when I see the word used incorrectly, in quotation marks in the New York Times, by someone (clearly a perfectly nice and thoughtful and intelligent person) who is described as working in publishing!

Aguas con tu ligue!

richmintz — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:31:12 +0000

A visibility and safety initiative, from Mexico, on behalf of gay, transgendered, and other vulnerable people: Aguas Con Tu Ligue, which roughly translated means “watch out for your hookup,” i.e., beware of the man you just picked up. Be careful about whom you let into your house. Or, in extremis, “Tu ligue de hoy puede ser tu asesino,” i.e., “the guy you pick up today might turn out to be your murderer.” Blunt stuff, but routine assaults on gay people — sometimes physical crime, sometimes extortion, sometimes just disruption and harassment — are a bigger social issue in Mexico than here in New York. (Not that we don’t have them here too.) The case examples on the site are blunt.

I admire the courage and forthrightness behind the initiative; the philosophy behind it is that visibility helps increase safety in the short term and lead to social change in the long term, which you can hardly argue with.

As a side note, I just learned the word “aguas,” which (in Mexico only) means “look out.” Literally, it apparently originally meant “look out, I am about to throw toilet water [or, probably more literally, urine] out the window onto your head,” but nowadays it is conventional to follow it with a description of what the hearer is supposed to look out for, e.g., “¡Aguas! ¡Viene un carro!” The things you learn…

Quakerspeak

richmintz — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:00:18 +0000

I’m familiar with the way Quakers speak in olde-tymey historical novels — typically, there are a lot of “thee”s — but now I’m reading Edward Rutherfurd’s novel New York, and a Quaker character is using “thee” as the subject of her sentences.

Now, I know enough to know (and this is one of those exceedingly rare moments in life when having studied “The Wanderer” in the original Old English in college has some practical usefulness) that “thee” is not a nominative pronoun; in (affected) modern English it can stand in for the direct or indirect object, but not the subject. Right?

But Rutherfurd is not an idiot, and (from my position about 20% into this book) it seems to me he has been at least moderately thoughtful about accuracy of all kinds. If he had meant “thou,” he surely would have said it. Which leads me to wonder, did 18th-century Philadelphia Quakers also say “thee” when they meant “thou”? And if so, why?

Well, what do you know? I’m the ignorant one: “thee” in the nominative case is perfectly normal among speakers of this dialect, through the same path by which our familiar “you” in the nominative case (for the more technically correct “ye”) has come to sound perfectly normal.

And if you’re curious about Quakers, Quaker Jane is as interesting a place to start as any; I found this page on why women opt for plain dress to be thoughtful and thought-provoking.

“Curate” is a trendy word?

richmintz — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:15:25 +0000

Uh-oh. I just learned via Nancy Friedman that “curate” (v.t.) is a trendy word at the moment. I have to confess having heard myself using it a lot lately, and not just in my work with museums (in which it takes its literal sense), but in that metaphorical sense, to mean “carefully and thoughtfully tend” a reputation, a public image, or the like. I think I just used it yesterday! Am I going to have to stop?!