Homer Nods Again

Homer Nods Again

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: December 23, 2007

Do you get a kick out of watching a Bigfoot columnist grovel? A few kindly souls don’t give a tuppence for comeuppance, but the stern legion of the Nit-pickers League looks forward to this column all year. (The League was split for decades in a fight between Nit-picker’s and Nit-pickers’, which they finally resolved by eliminating the apostrophe altogether. The elite squad of its Gotcha! Gang is still at odds over the inclusion of their exclamation point.)

LIKE VS. SUCH AS: Prescriptivist language mavens are supposed to use like for resemblance and such as for an example. I have been breaking this “rule” frequently, as the N.L. likes to point out, but the time has come to come to terms with the terms in a systematic way. Here goes: Like you, I say “like me” and will continue that usage. But such as serves a function in setting up a series, such as you, me and the lamppost. Besides, the word like is being used as verb, preposition and interjection ad nauseam: expressing affection (I like you), comparison (like father, like daughter) and as a delaying crutch or nervous hesitation (like, I forgot, like, what I was saying). Because like has been ripping through teenage lingo like a verbal virus — challenging even y’know — I will henceforth replace it with such as in the following kind of construction: such as before a series of examples, a list of names, a farrago of complaints and some such.

GREEK TO ME: In evidence of erratic erudition, I wrote that generals in ancient Greece were known as strategi. As a phalanx of Greek scholars pointed out, the correct plural of the Greek strategos is strategoi; only later, in Latin, did it become strategi. This matters to serious students, and I appreciate the correction, in the course of which I was also instructed that the plural of octopus is not octopi but octopuses or octopodes. I’ll use that one day to evoke scores of miscorrections.

INCORRECTION/MISCORRECTION: When a card-carrying Nit-picker sent in a correction that was in itself mistaken, I stood my grammatical ground, chided him for his own error and called it an incorrection. A gleeful follow-up from a Gotcha gangster wiped the smirk off my face: An incorrection, if another synonym for “error” were needed, would be a noun for “an assertion that is incorrect” — but an “incorrect correction” would be a miscorrection. (In the same way, subtle indirection is not foolish misdirection.) Gotta be careful in that coinage game, and on that subject:

WOMANISM: It seemed to me a good substitute for the word feminism, as many women were resisting female as an adjective, preferring a formulation like “woman president.” Several activists in the field informed me, coolly but not testily, that Alice Walker used the term in the title of her 1983 book, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose,” in which she wrote “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” It was also noted that her term referred to “the embrace of specific feminist goals by both men and women of African descent.” (In the same column, I looked askance at the semi-euphemism gender and defended “the plain old Anglo-Saxon word, sex,” and was set straight by another reader: “Sex comes from the Latin sexus, not from an Anglo-Saxon root.”

E-MAELSTROM: After a tsunami of e-mail flooded in from readers (such as baseball fans, physicists and sound engineers) challenging my etymology of sweet spot, I dubbed the flood an e-maelstrom, thinking the pun to be original. Not so; in use since at least 1997, its definition on the helpful urbandictionary.com is “a long and complicated e-mail trail with dozens of cc’s discussing a situation almost none of the recipients cares about” (“cc” is a vestigiation — coined today as a portmanteau of “vestigial abbreviation” — for “carbon copy,” a zombie-ism. And if anyone knows a pre-1999 usage of carbon footprint, send it in before I err again).

SWEET SPOT: I gave its meaning in baseball as “the place somewhere on the ‘meat end’ of the bat that the batter believes gives him the most power and control of placement. Or it is the place on the ball, just below the center of the sphere, that — when hit squarely to generate the proper amount of backspin — leads to the longest high drive.” Physicist readers say it is “the center of percussion . . . the place on a rigid body that exactly balances the effect of a force against both the linear momentum and the angular momentum.” A ball hit near the handle or end of a bat causes the batter to feel a “sting”; the sweet spot is sting-free and deliciously satisfying.

THE PARTICIPLE-GERUND WAR: I recently reported that the new word being used to describe our new strategy in Iraq was overwatching and described it as a participle. This drew the scholarly ire of the Gerund Jingoes. When the -ing form of a verb is used as an adjective, it is a participle; when used as a noun, it is a gerund. Thus, “I am thinking” (participle form of verb); “a thinking reader” (adjective, participle); “thinking is dangerous” (noun, gerund). Serious syntaxpayers dispute the call on my treatment of overwatching by President Bush as an adjective — therefore, a participle.

I sought heavyweight support. Stephen Anderson, a professor at Yale and president of the Linguistic Society of America, says, in part, “Most linguists interested in the syntax and morphology of English would probably call them participles, though ones who did Latin in high school might be tempted to call them gerunds.” Sort-of contrariwise, Lindsay Whaley, chairman of linguistics at Dartmouth, says, “In the section of your column that you sent to me, the participles are gerunds, but this does not negate the fact that they are also participles.”

This needs settling (pardon the participle or gerund). Send in your own irenic judgments, and I will address them in a subsequent column. (Justice Antonin Scalia, master of the gerund, where stand you?)

ON MISTAKES IN GENERAL: On “Meet the Press” this month, Rudy Giuliani quoted Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as saying, “When I make a mistake, it’s a big one.” Nit-pick: After the uproar over his closing of Townsend Harris High School in the ’40s, Hizzoner said: “I don’t make many mistakes, but when I make one, it’s a beaut.”