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Good Punctuation Transcends Politics

Since Mr. K-- is busy grading finals tonight and doesn't have time to watch Dexter on Chinese YouTube with me, I've been keeping myself entertained by toodling around Slate. I came across this (admittedly old) article in which Bruce Reed mentions Supreme Court Judge John Roberts's passion for punctuation.

As proof, Yale professor Akhil Amar points to one line from a recent Roberts opinion: "The state did—nothing." Amar tells Greenhouse, "That little dash is brilliant."

I have to agree with Mr. Amar. Although I might have gone for ellipses instead, that's still a damn good em dash.

Did Someone Misspell the Name of Castro's Boat?

The following paragraph appears in Dreaming in Cuban, a novel by Cristina Garcia:

I think about the Granma, the American yacht El Líder [Fidel Castro] took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 on his second attempt to topple Batista. Some boat owner in Florida misspells “Grandma” and look what happens: a myth is born, a province is renamed, a Community party newspaper is launched.

Is this true, or did Ms. Garcia make it up for the sake of her story?

Well, there is a Granma Province in Cuba. There is a Communist newspaper, published in Havana, called Granma, which the Encyclopedia Britannica claims was named for Mr. Castro’s yacht. As far as I can tell, granma doesn’t mean anything in Spanish. And 101 Top Historical Sites of Cuba, by Alan Twigg, backs up the typo theory.

¡Chingao! Wouldn’t you hate to be that Floridian boat owner?

Ah! So Close!

Cloche has alerted me to a typo in an e-mail that New York State Senator Michael F. Nozzolio sent to his "friends":

The Governor's budget still eliminates of $1.7 billion in property tax rebates and tax relief that are depended on by struggling seniors and middle class families.*

I can't help feeling a little bit bad for the guy. But, as Cloche said, "Ugh. No, thank you, Senator Nozzolio. You must have slashed the budget for your proofreaders in an effort to save us money." The sad thing is, that's entirely possible.

* I really wish I could tinker with this sentence: "The governor's budget still eliminates $1.7 billion in property tax rebates and tax relief that struggling seniors and middle-class families depend on."

Math Error Botches DOE Project

From the Associated Press:

The Energy Department failed to prepare a proper analysis and made a $500 million math error when it decided to shelve an experimental coal-fired power plant slated for central Illinois, according to a report from congressional auditors released on Wednesday . . .

"We always knew the DOE's logic was flawed," [Illinois Senator Dick] Durbin said in a statement. "Now it turns out their math was wrong too."

Read the rest here.

Misplaced Anger

From Gail Collins's New York Times column this week:

Earlier efforts by the White House to come to the aid of the hopelessly indebted homeowners sparked the now world-famous unfairness explosion by the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” howled Santelli, in one really impressive display of righteous wrath and misplaced modifiers.

Ms. Collins has inspired me. I want to comb through Rush Limbaugh's CPAC screed* in search of misplaced modifiers, subject-verb-agreement errors, and the like. Because I really need to do something to blow off some liberal steam after reading this.

* I had to get that link from Fox News's website. Now I feel all icky.

Fox News Makes a Spelling Gafe. I Mean, "Gaffe."

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The Woman Who Stole My Make-Believe Girlfriend

Did you see the hat Aretha Franklin wore to the inauguration? Of course you saw it. People in space saw it.

Well, Ellen DeGeneres (or, as I like to call her, the woman who stole my make-believe girlfriend) made fun of the hat on her show, and Us magazine reported on it:

On Wednesday's Ellen DeGeneres Show, the talk show host sports an over-the-top hat similar to the one that Aretha Franklin wore to Barack Obama's historic inauguration.

"That would of [sic] been so embarrassing. The next thing you know, we would have been in Us Weekly's 'Who Wore it Better?'" DeGeneres jokes. "They said this is the only one they made! I can't believe it!"

I sincerely hope Us was trying to re-create Ms. DeGeneres’s speech when they pulled that “would of been” stunt, but even that’s a lame excuse. No one says “would have” except for, possibly, this guy.

Chief Justice Roberts: Stickler for Grammar

When Chief Justice John Roberts was swearing in Barack Obama, he mangled the oath by instructing President Obama to “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully,” instead of to “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” which is the correct wording. (In other news, your Ford Pinto might kill you.)

According to the New York Times, Chief Justice Roberts might have erred because he's too much of a stickler for grammar. His inner copy editor -- a persnickety, old-school sort of copy editor -- may not have wanted him to split up “will” and “execute”:

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

That still doesn't explain how “president of the United States” got changed to “president to the United States,” but I'll take it.

Hat tip: Helen.

Fox News Covers Karl Rove's Ass Rove's Assessment of Obama

The link circled above, from Fox and Friends, reads, "Karl Rove on Obama's Ho on Obama's Honey."

Stay classy, Fox.

Hat tip: News Hounds

Don't Misunderestimate Me

I just got around to reading Gail Collins's New York Times column. This one was called "He's Leaving. Really." I bet you can guess whom it's about.

Ms. Collins writes:

"Sometimes you misunderestimated me," Bush told the Washington press corps. This is not the first time our president has worried about misunderestimation, so it's fair to regard this not as a slip of the tongue, but as something the president of the United States thinks is a word. The rhetoric is the one part of the administration we're surely going to miss. We are about to enter a world in which our commander in chief speaks in full sentences, and I do not know what we're going to do to divert ourselves on slow days.

I'm intrigued -- and disturbed -- by the notion that President Bush thinks misunderestimate is a word. I'd always assumed that it was a whoopsy-daisy kind of thing, like the time I asked Mr. K-- if he thought I was infanticiding him by packing his suitcase. But Ms. Collins brings up an excellent point. President Bush has butchered the word underestimate more than once. Does he really think misunderestimate is a word? Am I the only one who finds that prospect chilling?

Here's something even more chilling: Do you think misunderestimate will eventually become a word now that (a) President Bush has used it so much and (b) so many people (including me) have been carping on it? If misunderestimate did enter the lexicon, my guess is that it wouldn't just be a synonym for underestimate. I think it would be a saucebox of a word, a word that means something like "to simultaneously loathe and pity someone." Or maybe it will come to mean "to go for a big word to make yourself seem smart and, in so doing, come off looking like an idiot" (e.g., "Joe the Plumber was misunderestimating when he said 'pronounciate' on Fox News").

 

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