All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Today marks 90 days of continuous sobriety for me.
Recovery from my various addictions has not been easy — for one thing, quitting has meant rediscovering all the reasons I was using in the first place — but I am glad to be on this path of recovery. I am learning about myself and learning how to reengage with the world in important ways. I am facing old fears. I am hopeful for the future. I am grateful for the last 90 days of sobriety, and looking forward to another sober day today.
It’s a very long way to the next presidential election, or even the first primaries, so I haven’t been blogging a lot about the various bumps and ruffles in the polls. But TPM Café points to an interesting Gallup poll that shows Obama and Clinton in a dead heat, both when paired directly and when put in the pack with all the other candidates1.
This goes against every poll we’ve seen so far, all of which have put Hillary in the lead, and I see it as a hopeful sign. I am not a Clinton hater — I respect her work in the Senate — but I have a variety of reasons to think she’s the least compelling of the leading Dems. She’s the most conservative, for one thing, with a history of DLC-style triangulation, and I think that was a great strategy back in the early nineties. With the Bush disaster, though, I think we have a real opening for a new progressivism in America, and I would hate to see that frittered away on compromise and caution. I am also uncomfortable with the big-money aspect of her campaign and her ties to all the people who have kept Democrats losing for years. Her refusal to admit she was wrong on her Iraq vote is disheartening, and her political hedging around the issue is depressing to watch. And I am simply bothered by the idea of having two families rule America for 28 years, which is what we’d get if Hillary were to win in ’08 and ’12.
That said, any of the Democratic front-runners, including non-candidate Gore, would be just fine with me as president. I appreciate that Edwards has apologized for his vote on the war and called the War on Terror a nonsensical idea, I like that his talk on healthcare is serious, and I appreciate his emphasis on poverty issues. Obama is impressive in his whole political approach, he made his name as an anti-poverty activist, and he had the good sense to be against the war from the start — plus he has the advantage of beating every GOP candidate in early polls. Hillary is bright, capable, immensely knowledgeable about healthcare, and a sophisticated political fighter. And Al Gore has been right about so many things for so long that I wish we could just install him as president and beg him to fix everything that’s broken.
So if Hillary wins the nomination, I can live with that. But I want this to be a race. This is an extraordinarily rich Democratic field, and I would hate to see it go to the default candidate without a struggle. I certainly don’t want to see the party tear itself apart, but a vigorous debate and real passion on the ground would be great.
—
1.The matchups that include all the declared Dem candidates also include Al Gore, so an interesting question is where Gore’s support goes if he doesn’t run. Recent polls gave Hillary a 7-point bump and Barack getting just 4 points from a Gorectomy. But then, that poll also gives Clinton a 12-point lead.
SENTENCE: This is NAME WITHHELD, calling from Korean Mission.
WHERE: Overheard in the next office.
CORRECTION: This is NAME WITHHELD, calling from the Korean Mission.
GRAMMAR: Ah, articles! Is there any part of speech more vexing for non-native speakers whose native languages don’t use them? Prepositions, maybe — try explaining why we get in an airplane but on a bus — but prepositions at least have the decency to be vexing to native speakers as well. (Are you waiting for a friend who’s on line, or on a friend who’s in line?) With articles, any native speaker knows what goes where, but just try explaining why.
A good rule is that you need the if both parties know which one you mean — the post office, the beach — or if there is only one around — the sun, the United Nations.
In this case, both of these factors are true of the noun Korean Mission, but it’s particularly the latter factor that counts: there’s only one South Korean Mission to the UN, and both parties know the phrase Korean Mission is an abbreviation of that longer term. As such, a definite article is needed.
BONUS: Why is it a definite article is needed rather than the definite article is needed in the preceding sentence? You could probably go either way, but which you choose depends on how many definite articles you think there are. In this case, I’m counting each instance of the as another definite article, so a specifies that definite article is one of many. But you could just as easily count definite article as a singular categorical noun, in which case it would take the because there’s only one around. (We’re not like those profligate Spaniards, with their varieties of singular and plural articles in various genders!)
SENTENCE: ATTENTION BENEFICIARY: YOUR APYMENT IS READY
WHERE: Subject line of a spam email.
CORRECTION: ATTENTION BENEFICIARY: YOUR APY PAYMENT IS READY
GRAMMAR: Look, if you’re gonna spam me with fake banking messages, at least have the decency to spell the subject line right. I mean, APYMENT? That’s not like spelling it CIALI$ to get past the spam filters. APYMENT is just dumb. It’s a waste of bandwidth even from the perspective of the spammer, and that’s saying something.
What happened to all those spams I was getting with extended quotes from conspiracy literature? Or was that the spammer guy they caught? I miss you, creative spam!
This is the pedestal of the statue of Horace Greeley in Greeley Square, that patch of ground just downtown from Macy’s and west of K-town that has the pay toilets. In this case, Greeley is memorialized as the first president of the New York Typographical Society, and herein lies the irony. Can you spot the typo?
Granted, even when you click through to the larger image, it’s blurry. So here’s the text retyped for your editorial perusal:
See it yet?
Mysteriously, the first to two instances of the abbreviation NO lack periods, while the second two instances take them. How weird is that? And you can’t even argue that different unions had different usages, because NEW YORK TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION NO 6/NO. 6 is the same friggin’ union!
Let’s just hope some typographical union thugs worked that engraver over but good.
SENTENCES: You are the prince and princesses. We treat customers with gold.
WHERE: At the car wash used by one of the authors of I Hate Duane Reade: Service from Hell (and nice non-capitalization of your preposition, by the way).
CORRECTION: You are the princes and princessess. We treat our customers with like gold.
GRAMMAR: This one took a little creative correction because the meaning of the original is somewhat vague. After all, the first sentence is not grammatically incorrect, in and of itself. If the author wishes to indicate that the addressee, singular or plural, is both the one and only prince and a group of princesses, then the sentence is in fact perfect. (A more realistic example: The priest and congregants entered the church.)
However, I think it’s safe to say that the car wash management does not really believe that each individual who reads that sign is both the one and only prince and a bevy of princesses. It’s a metaphor, obviously, and meant to indicate to all customers that they will be given the royal treatment. As such, it’s necessary to create an agreement in number, either plural or singular, and I opted for the plural. Once you’ve got that, there’s no longer a need for the definite article, so we can toss the like so much Rainex down the drain. I can see how these mistakes got made — the is a perennial doozy for non-native speakers, and both prince and princess, with their S-sound endings, raise confusing questions about whether they’re singular or plural.
The second sentence is easier to deal with. Treating customers with gold means using gold to do something to the customers, and it has an unfortunate medical connotation that I would not welcome even at a car wash that considers me the heir to a throne. (We treat customers’ cars with wax would be more appropriate.) Instead, I assume they mean that they treat their customers as one would treat gold: with respect for their great value. It is a fine sentiment once rendered correctly. And I threw in our before customers because it improves the flow, and anyway I doubt the car wash guys treat, say, all Duane Reade customers (to choose an establishment at random) like gold. Clearly this is about their customers, who are special — little baby kings and queens, in fact.
While I’m at it with the more focused blogs, please to enjoy [this is not a sentence], my new grammar blog. Seriously.
SENTENCE: Please maintain the COFFEE AREA neat and clean!
WHERE: My office kitchenette.
CORRECTION: Please maintain keep the COFFEE AREA neat and clean!
GRAMMAR: This one is purely based on usage. There is no logical reason why keep can be followed by an object with adjectives and maintain can’t, but there it is.
Ever see a sentence that just doesn’t cut the mustard? Something somewhere that is just grammatically or syntactically funky (old socks funky, not Mothership Connection funky)? Send me an email at josh@palaverist.org and I’ll see if I can parse it.
In the meantime, I’ll be collecting particularly egregious or confounding bits of grammatical weirdness and putting them up here for your amusement. Or for my amusement. Something like that.
Someone who didn’t make it to last night’s Meetup posted about her blog I Hate Duane Reade: Service from Hell — a truly brilliant concept for a blog.
My own story of hate is about the Duane Reade around the corner from my office, where I actually watched a woman assess the line forming by the pharmacy, ostentatiously lock the door to the pharmacy, and then tell all the customers standing there that there was no way she could give anyone their medicine because the pharmacy was locked.
Nice.
Maybe what’s needed next is a competition to see what Russell Stover candies are harder than.