My remarks a few days ago regarding a problematic acronym were intended to stand on their own. But shortly thereafter, I noticed that Jan at Secular Blasphemy had contributed some additional commentary that got me thinking about the nature of linguistic criticism. I'd like to share some of those thoughts with you.

We're all language critics to some extent, from the lemony-faced pedant who raps knuckles with a ruler to the mother who gently guides her child to say, "may I" instead of "can I." You don't need a special qualification or extended training to join in the game, but you do need to attend to your inner critic who whispers in your ear that something you said or wrote doesn't sound quite right. What matters is that you care, and most of us do.

Yet that definition of "critic" seems somewhat loose, and we might want to allow that just as there's a difference between a movie critic and a movie reviewer, so too, there are language critics and those who review or comment on language based only on their subjective experience with it. The critic is expected to command a broad measure of expertise with his or her subject, and the reviewer comments in the domain of "this is how it seems to me."

Grammarians, who we might think of as language critics in a sense, tend to fall somewhere along a continuum from prescriptive to descriptive in type. The prescriptivist is more conservative, perferring the language to change as slowly as possible while retaining its maximum potential for communicative precision. The descriptivist avoids making any kind of judgements, preferring to catalog or record native usage as it is spoken in the field.

"Fine," you say, "so what does this have to do with anything?" Well, this tells me that when you hear someone use a phrase like, "English changes constantly, it's a living thing," then you're hearing a more descriptive statement about how language works—and few people would gainsay the sentiment. A prescriptivist, on the other hand, tends to act as a referee on the gamefield, periodically tossing down a flag and blowing a whistle to signal that a review of a given play is called for.

To extend that metaphor a bit, various linguistic battles break out all around us, and the language critics are those who watch them, and try to pitch in to effect a desired outcome if and when the opportunity presents itself. No one in their right mind says that English is a frozen language, but heated debates arise in connection with neologisms—new words—radical punctuation, and shifts in meaning. For example, "begging the question" has been under pressure for a long time, often used in the sense of "raises the question..." whereas the purist is careful to restrict its meaning to "founded on a conclusion which has not been proved," as in "we know God is trustworthy, because it says so in the Bible." The distinction is a useful one, but only when the majority of English speakers understand and agree upon it.

This discussion came about over my protest that "LOTR" was an unacceptable abbreviation for the title of the film The Lord of the Rings. This drew some comment. Anonymous wrote that, "Despite the full name being easy to write, if you use it often the TLA [three-letter acronym] saves quite some time and effort." I agree, but what, I would ask, does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Use "copy" and "paste" to replicate the title as many times as you like. If you're writing in a fixed medium—a Weblog, a magazine article, a book—nobody cares how much time you spend typing. Take all day if necessary, but get it right. Perhaps Anonymous was conflating print with online chat, where speed is called for and typists have come up with all kinds of timesaving shorthand just as telegraph operators did in the 1800s. But this isn't that.

Steve wrote in to point out that acronyms generally do not include the letters of prepositions and articles (e.g., FBI, NASA), to which I'd add that when they do, they tend to do so in order to form a more pronounceable word (e.g., TARDIS). Thus LOTR fails several key tests, and we should ask ourselves whether or not it is pronounceable. True, common abbreviations like "cont." are not spoken, nor are they meant to be, but they are omnipresent, and LOTR seems to lack a certain historical gravitas warranting the exception. "But a lot of people use it, so there!" might be a counter, to which I'd reply that a lot of people are mistaken and confused about a lot of things. It isn't an argument.

Perhaps the best case for LOTR is that it's a nonce coinage, ubiquitous in any text in which the full title would be laborious to read repeatedly. If you were writing a treatise on Gone with the Wind, you might give the title in full and follow it at the first instance with (GWTW), explaining your abbreviation to the reader and then using it thereafter, but I haven't seen that in Weblogs. Rather, someone will make an entry along the lines of "I saw LOTR last night and it was smashing!" This is loose usage at best, and while arguing that it is might seem to be tilting at windmills, the fault in question goes beyond this specific case and appears to be a mounting trend propagated by the entertainment industry, and so the problem deserves serious reflection.

3:24:54 PM       

That's our advice, based on this morning's lineup of stories about control. In most of these cases, people just lost it. In a couple of others, people are trying to get it back. The bottom line is that keeping a firm hold on yourself and your life has never been more important. If you run out of wax, get your crew to lash your body to the mast.

Psycho Analyst

That was the headline at the New York Post, and I couldn't improve on it. Psychiatrist Richard Karpf went ballistic—literally, when the "soft-spoken Long Island shrink" went haywire over the end of a relationship he was having with a female patient.

Karpf failed to heed the hippocratic admonition to "first, do no harm" and decided instead to enlist another patient in a lethal scheme to kill six people.

The patient notified police and an undercover officer posing as an unlicensed gun dealer met with Karpf and offered to sell him a .22-caliber semi-automatic pistol, four ammo clips, a box of 50 rounds and a threaded silencer that could be screwed onto the muzzle of the gun.

"He wanted to shoot the people point-blank in the head and in the heart," says assistant DA Fred Klein.

Good Intentions

We applaud a Maine couple's attempt to make a political statement about the intrusive and heavy-handed policies of the TSA. Only problem is, they may have chosen the wrong way to go about it. Paul Kenneth Donahue, 50, and Teresa Marie Wood, 46, were arrested at the San Jose Airport when security screeners discovered a fake bomb in the couple's luggage. The Feds didn't like what they saw on the scanner, and opened the suitcase to find "a snow boot with batteries, wires and an electrical power strip arranged in a suspicious way."

Screeners also found a note that read, "To the uniformed puppet opening this bag—congratulations. You've just brought this once free nation one step closer to becoming a fascist police state."

You Gotta Love Those Screeners

While we're on the subject of messing around with airport security, consider smut king Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine (and we use both terms loosely), who got "yanked off a commercial flight" after he cozied up to an airport screener. Apparently, he asked one of the wand-friskers if she was "a real blonde." Then he got uber-frisky.

Kelly Nobles, a screener at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, burst into tears when Goldstein allegedly told her that if he were to have sex with her, he'd want her to keep her uniform on, police said.

Repeat After Me

Teachers need to be especially cautious in today's classrooms. Those kids do tend to run home and tell momma all about the weird stuff that happened in class. Then the parents give the principal hell about it. That's what happened in St. Louis Monday after junior-high teacher Shannon Schumacher conducted a class about a particular racial epithet.

Jennings School District Superintendent Terry Stewart said Schumacher had good intentions but bad judgment when she used a chapter from Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and former Rhodes scholar.

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

That seems to be thinking behind "slippery-slope" arguments. A good case in point occurred in Nashville, Tenn., this week regarding the city's plan to add anti-discrimination language to its housing and employment code.

Under Nashville's existing employment and housing ordinance, people can't be discriminated against because of their "race, color, religion, national origin or sex." Under the proposal, the word "sex" would be dropped and "sexual orientation and disabilities" added.

"We're not just talking about homosexuals. We're talking about pedophiles, sex with dead people, sex with animals," said Councilman Tony Derryberry, who opposes the ordinance.

The New Americans

A story over at WIRED this morning looks at the specific techniques used by Hotmail spammers to crack e-mail addresses. It explains the mechanics of a "dictionary" attack on a server, which is amusing, but not as funny as this line about the picture that emerges of the intended spam recipient:

If so many spam offers weren't totally bogus, Hotmail users would be incredibly well-endowed, slim people with plenty of hair who make big money working at home when they aren't having great sex provoked by free porn and herbal Viagra.

10:02:01 AM