The Elf King

Burnt Orange

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An Error-Riddled Post On Usage

Today I was pleased to receive an early Christmas present, from myself to myself, in Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I have wanted a good usage guide for a long time but always brushed off all of my choices as either too pedantic or too expensive. This is neither. It's the guide recommended on Language Log, a website that is basically (basically, I say, even though that word is "not used in highfalutin prose,") an advocate for the "descriptivist" school of usage.

Descriptivists more or less say usage principles are derived empirically; if people say it enough, it's correct. (Undoubtedly it isn't that simple, but that is the straw man I'm setting up for now.) Opposed to them are the prescriptivists, the pedantic types who tell you what is correct and what is wrong. They are represented by William Safire and the like, or more entertainingly, by David Foster Wallace in "Authority and American Usage." Prescriptivists are best known for telling you not to split infinitiives (ignore them), or telling you not to use words like "irregardless." On the latter point, Merriam-Webster concurs, but its empirical argument is a bit more hedged: "Word or not, irregardless has continued in fairly common spoken use, although its bad reputation has not improved with the years." But to conclude, irregardless "is still a long way from winning general acceptance as a standard English word. Use regardless instead."

For a similar discussion, we can turn to the entry on "ain't," which includes the fascinating history that it started out as "amn't" as a contraction of "am not." The word "is a part of the normal habitual speech of people from rural, working class, and inner city backgrounds -- just the sort of people that teachers and other elders don't want the rest of us to sound like." Very true; and what's also true is that nobody should use "ain't" in professional correspondence. Merriam-Webster agrees. To some degree it seems the rhetorical distinction among different approaches to usage advice lies not in which words you should use, but in why.

The guide also has fun with the common advice that you should avoid the passive voice, pointing out what may be unintentional irony from Orwell when he mocks bureaucratic speech ("the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active"). It makes a good case for ignoring other pointless rules, like the one about not ending sentences with a preposition. But every open-minded person has limits, and my limits are reached in its entry on "espresso." It notes that the variant, expresso, is "in widespread use, both on menus and in edited prose ... Espresso is the more common form." All correct, as far as it goes. They add the origin of expresso may be the mistaken belief among English speakers that espresso means "fast." On the other hand, I've also seen "expresso" on the menus of coffee shops in Mexico.

But all of this is to avoid the essential question here. (What we may also be doing, which will become clear if you turn to their helpful entry on the topic, is "begging" the question.) It's useful for an empirical guide to tell us whether expresso or espresso is more common. But the next pertinent question for someone consulting a usage dictionary is not whether people do say "expresso," but whether they should. And no. Oh no. They shouldn't. If you don't want the next edition of Merriam-Webster to list "expresso" as a common and acceptable alternative, then vote with your voice, with your keyboard, with your pen, with your mind.

Quote of the Day

"It is what it is, which is the saying we always fall back on when it's not what it's not."

-- Al Gore, in a good interview from Darren Samuelsohn at Greenwire. I appreciate his ironic use of "it is what it is," which is, at the end of the day, the oldest and tiredest expression in the city of Washington. 

Today's Lepidoptery

I really should learn how to identify butterflies. This one I found in the Shenandoahs.

A section of moss.

It looks like moss on the trees.

Another hillside.

The Blue Ridge horizon, or at least my photographic approximation of same.

 

Blue Ridge (1)

It's winter already on the top of the Shenandoahs; how very exotic it all felt.

Mountain laurels are still alive.

When you hike a little way down, remnants of fall are there.

 

A mountain:

Looking down at the river.

Cradle

"It's the first thing you see when you wake up, it's the last thing you see at night." 

A not-so-comforting observation about cell phones, from an ad for the apparent iphone competitor HTC. (Whatever that is; I'm still an unsophisticated telephone consumer.) If the futurists of 25 years ago tried to imagine our modern communications technology, they easily could have made it sound like a dystopia; they also could have made it sound a lot of fun.

Today's Classifieds

This job hardly seems worth the cost of posting the ad. And what's wrong with their previous employees?

Atlantic Publishing Company is a leading publisher in the business, finance, real estate, and hospitality areas. We are searching for freelance writers who are able to review both English and Spanish books and are able to write honest reviews of 1-3 paragraphs. We will pay $50 for the entire project of ALL 3 reviews upon completion. We make payments via PayPal ONLY. If you do not want to be paid via PayPal, please do not respond.

**If you have done book reviews with us in the past we will not be able to re-hire you at this time.

Orcas

On our last day in the Northwest, we boarded a whale watching ship north of the city.

We left from Anacortes, a town lit up by a Shell oil refinery at night.

As long as we remained within the San Juan Islands, the Pacific felt more like a system of lakes.

Summer homes.

And camping.

Spieden island, one of the westernmost in the chain, was stripped of its vegetation by exotic animals once conveyed there for a big game hunting preserve. It is still home to Mouflon Sheep (like Bighorns and from Corsica) and Sika Deer (from the Far East, and which look like white-spotted elk).

We reached the open sea close to twilight and saw the mountains on Vancouver Island.

Three orca pods came together in one place for the whale equivalent of a reunion or festival, an occasion for communication and breeding. There were whales all around us, but I gave up trying to take their picture. 

 

Pike Place

What we tried at the Seattle market could have been a hybrid of an apple and a pear, or maybe a cross between plum and a peach ... I can't remember it accurately enough to pin down its distinctive Northwestern taste. But there is plenty of fresh produce, of whatever flavor, that probably makes its way into the city's restaurants.

Hiroe, my maternal grandmother by marriage, gave us a tour of the waterfront area around the market, where one can find good espresso, tea tastings, bohemians, trinkets, specialty maps. The guitar players on the street have been there since the 90s, it seems. From there you can move on to Pioneer Square, an upscale and earth-friendly shopping district that's like a magnified version of a college town. Elliot Bay Books is recommended. The adjacent neighborhood has dim sum restaurants, pho places and big Asian markets. And down at the pier, watching the ferries, we saw a man using chicken wings as fish bait.

Because the sun isn't out that often, and the streets wind around and there's water on both sides, I found Seattle difficult to navigate. It isn't a walking city so much as a hiking city -- such steep hills! The reward for the pedestrian is what seems to be uniformly good food. Vancouver has great food too, but it's more of an insider's place where it's easy to get trapped in mediocre tourist restaurants where the best option is always a salmon burger. Here, I didn't try anything that wasn't fresh and interesting. "I don't like everything," a middle-aged man said at an expensive Vietnamese-style restaurant with market broccoli, Idaho catfish and wine, "but I like my wife and I like this dessert."

Visit the science fiction museum, where you'll find distinguished exhibits on the history of the genre in books, comic books, fanzine and film. Even more importantly, they have the original model of the Death Star. The official science fiction hall of fame is here; of the inductees I'm familiar with, almost all are deserving. (I might quibble with George Lucas, but he is a branding and marketing genius if nothing else. And he created the Death Star!)  In the same building is the Experience Music Project, which we didn't have much time to see; there was an exhibit on the history of music in Seattle with its main theme being "it's not just grunge."

It's warm enough to grow palm trees.

Yellow

Neighborhood photos.

The 15th Avenue Cafe

As we were exploring the well-frequented neighborhoods of Seattle, what surprised me the most was how difficult it could be to find a Starbucks. Far more common were the independent coffee shops, each one of them unique. It wasn't just the minimalist, low-budget cafes we all know from college campuses (fond as I am of that model), but every sort of creatively designed outlet for coffee and tea, or coffee and wine, or coffee with books. 

One of these shops, at first glance no less charming than the rest, is the recently opened 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. It has local bakery goods, beans roasted daily, Chinese teas, everything the tasteful bohemian might want. The only clue to its true nature is a note, in small letters above the doorway, that the store was "inspired by Starbucks." How odd, I thought; what sort of place would describe itself as "inspired" by Starbucks? The truth emerged upon questioning one of the baristas: 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea is a Starbucks. The store is part of an experimental strategy to appeal to those who frequent independent coffee shops. The company even researched nearby establishments and tried to appropriate their business practices. "They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with these obnoxious folders that said, 'Observation,'" an area coffee shop owner told the Seattle Times. 

By this method, Starbucks apparently hopes to conquer one of the only parts of the country that has eluded them: Seattle. And if successful, they want to open other stores tailored to particular neighborhoods in other cities, with these also named after the streets where they are located. In time, customers might recognize the Starbucks ownership but still patronize the stores without any conscious intent of supporting the brand.

My reflex, of course, is to condemn and mock the project. There were protests on the day it opened. At the same time, it seemed to be kind of popular, at least when we were there. The building has air conditioning, which is not always a given in Seattle, and it no doubt helped that it opened around the time of a record-setting heat wave. (And this speaks to what I consider a basic reason that Starbucks exists: To provide shelter. A Starbucks is a reliable way to get out of the rain, an easy way to find a bathroom, neutral ground to meet a date or a business partner, a quiet enough place to get work done. In any lonely downtown or strip mall where you are very far away from a library, Starbucks offers the type of quasi-public space that local governments can't afford to provide in large volumes.)

And what, exactly, is wrong with what they are doing here? To a greater degree than most corporations, they are trying to meet the needs of the community. What if more big companies followed regional architectural traditions or bought their supplies from local vendors? We always complain about how every chain business looks the same everywhere, but now they are offering us a change. And since corporations have money, it may well be that they can afford to be more locally minded than a small business. They can design a shop "reminiscent of a European mercantile" (from the store's website), or build a table "using wood from an old ship, and wood cladding [that] was made from a retired barn in the Pacific Northwest." Many of us go to local restaurants all the time without wondering if they're part of some larger financial conglomerate. And we usually, say, drink Blue Moon pilsner without worrying or acknowledging that it's owned by Coors -- though the more precise equivalent would be a huge beer company starting its own microbrew, and I don't know offhand whether that's been done.

And as multinationals go, Starbucks is not all that evil. Its employees get health benefits, something else that not every small company can afford. While I bristle at its expansion into China ("we did not go to China to replace tea," the CEO recently said, "we came to China to create a complementary beverage"), it is probably true that Starbucks has instilled a coffee habit within the U.S. populace that has been equally beneficial to independent stores. To those willing to pay for it, Starbucks offers fair-trade and shade-grown coffee. It sometimes promotes good music. The drinks are very strong and addictive, which no doubt helps sales, but may also contribute to a fast-paced and productive American economic culture. Their drinks are certainly more beneficial than a lunchtime martini. 

And yet: When we were at 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, we ordered a regular iced coffee. They grind the beans every day and use whatever brewing method you choose, but it is still the recognizable Starbucks brand: burned, intense, difficult to swallow without a liberal amount of milk. It's hard to appreciate the coffee itself without adding bells and whistles like whip cream or pumpkin spice. And while it's a good idea for the company to spruce up its decor, adapt to local conditions, improve customer service and do other things to make the corporate experience less impersonal, the biggest problem with Starbucks is not that it's an impersonal corporation. The problem with Starbucks is that they don't have very good coffee.

The New Gosh Darns

In public Internet forums such as Facebook, a convention has emerged that requires the substitution of actual curse words with "effing" or the strategic use of asterisks. That's okay, but it's linguistically interesting that self-censorship has emerged in a medium with few official rules. It perhaps shows how afraid we are of offending people when we know anyone could be watching. You should know, however, that you are either profane or you are not: When we resort to euphemism, the impact diminishes accordingly. It's all a roundabout way of getting us to talk like our grandparents. 

Days Of Rain

It was raining here for three days without stopping, and it was cold. Now it is only cold. I got a book of Roberto Bolaño's poems and found this one, "Day Bleeding Rain" (sagriento día de lluvia):

Oh, day bleeding rain, / what are you doing in the soul of the abandoned, / day bleeding volition only barely glimpsed; / behind the reed curtain, in the mire, / with your toes seized up in pain / like a small shivering animal: / but you're not small and you're shivering from pleasure ...

I think I dislike many of his poems. He considered himself a poet more than a novelist but he's justly famous as the latter.

Happy Columbus Day

For those lucky enough to have a three-day weekend, it's a pretty time of year for one. It's also a good excuse for me to recommend books about our native peoples.

-- If you have not read the Popol Vuh yet, you should. It will tell you more about the Indians than you ever thought possible. See my note from last year.

-- Or, for a modern archaeological perspective, try Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (2004) by Timothy Pauketat. Cahokia was a metropolis near present-day St. Louis from around A.D. 1050-1150, when it was probably larger than many cities in Europe. And today it isn't even a well-known tourist attraction. They left no writing and no oral tradition, so the only records we have are the ruins, mound pyramids and artifacts, the majority of which have been plowed over to build farms and suburbs. The reasons it was built and the ways it was governed are still unknown, as are the reasons it was abandoned. (The author rejects simplistic ecological determinism.) The book is written for an academic audience, and it requires a lot of deciphering to get at the buried conclusions. But its implicit theme concerns the forces behind historical change.

-- For a post-conquest account, take a look at George Catlin's North American Indians (1841; abridged by Peter Matthiessen). Catlin, who left his wife and kids to travel among the Indian tribes, is best known for his realistic paintings, many of which are now displayed above a staircase at the National Portrait Gallery; he spent his last days working from a studio in the Smithsonian castle. His journals are written very much from a painterly perspective; he doesn't so much narrate events as construct scenes. While he occasionally adopted the prejudices of his century -- he encountered a more "civilized" tribe and assumed they were Welsh -- he was a careful observer and frequently an advocate for the people he studied.

He often records some particular surpising detail that reminds us of the cultural differences involved. On the Mandans in North Dakota:

These people never bury the dead, but place the bodies on slight scaffolds just above the range of human hands, and out of the way of wolves and dogs; and they are there left to moulder and decay ... Some hundreds of these bodies may be seen reposing in this manner in this curious place, which the Indians call, "the village of the dead."

...

Reader, be not astonished that I sat and ate my dinner alone, for such is the custom in this strange land. In all tribes in these western regions it is an invariable rule that a chief never eats with his guests invited to a feast; but while they eat, he sits by, at their service, and ready to wait upon them; deliberately charging and lighting the pipe which is to be passed around after the feast is over.

Here you will also find an astonishing depiction of the principal Mandan religious ceremony, which took place annually at the time of "the full expansion of the willow leaves under the bank of the river." It was both an initiation ritual for young men, and a dramatization of the emergence of humans after a mythological great flood. See also his account of the chunkey stones game, which "is very difficult to describe" but was widespread among Midwestern Indians; the people at Cahokia played it too.

-- Columbus Day is also a time to celebrate Italian Americans. But we must be honest: Christopher Columbus was not a very nice person. We should instead be honoring their positive contributions, beginning with the most obvious: their food. Tomatoes are still in season, barely, and they have the advantage of being native to the Americas. Simply combine them with basil (from India via Greece) to produce an elegant union of several ancient civilizations.

-- We shouldn't forget Leif Ericson either. William T. Vollman's The Ice Shirt (1990), the first volume of his fictionalized account of the North American conquest, is an eccentric book and I don't necessarily recommend it. The beginning, though, is a poetic retelling of Scanadanavian legends:

Banished, banished, banished, Eirik set sail forever. His father was already ailing. Beneath the cloud-sea was the ocean-sea, which seemed blue through the clouds but was actually blue-grey, a coldly lovely color, wrinkled like gooseflesh, with comet-like whitecaps which decayed like shooting stars.

If I Were Built

My brother is on McSweeney's.

Running Log

Time to get excited, or attempt to get excited, about running in the winter.

Distance: 9 miles

Weather: Looked like snow

Flora: Fruits and nuts

People: Not many of them. A lonely day.

Train To Seattle

A friend of ours who does quantitative work for the government, and who places a high value on predictability and schedules, once told us the slowest train in North America is the one from Vancouver to Seattle. Whether that's correct or not, I can now say from experience that it is a little bit faster than your average bicycle. It takes four hours and 20 minutes, according to schedule -- based on the driving distance, that's 33 miles an hour. Moreover, it's reasonable to expect your journey will last much longer than advertised. Our train stopped for half an hour or so in rural Washington so they could align a drawbridge or release a lock, something like that. It halted several times on the way out of the city while they got out to flip the switches by hand. The conductor told us it was not unheard of for them to leave at 6 p.m. and arrive in Seattle at six in the morning.

All of that said, the train can often be the best option, provided that you are not on business travel. The important factor here is the border. On the way into Canada, we took the bus, which should always, always be avoided. The buses have to stop at customs and unload both passengers and luggage, one by one. Then, along with all the other passengers on your bus and the other buses, you line up to show your passport to a bored, French-speaking official, in a building that feels like the airport gateway to some minor island nation. The bus drivers say you should allow seven hours, or better yet, don't take the bus.

You can rent a car, of course, but maybe you don't want to. Public transit is excellent in Vancouver and decent in Seattle. Both cities also have Zipcars if you need one for a daytrip. So the remaining option is the train, and it's a nice ride; it's just slow. Some of the people in line with us at Amtrak said they were looking forward to the scenery, which never would have occurred to me as someone used to riding trains through New Jersey.

I'm going into painstaking detail on transit options only because I never found any adequate information in guidebooks or on the Web. So if you do take the train, keep in mind a few rules they don't tell you about. Arrive at Victoria Station in Vancouver at least half an hour early so you can wait in line for a passport check. They encourage you to check your luggage, but there is no reason to. When the train gets to the border, it stops for about 20 minutes and you have to return to your seat and show your passport again. After that, it's just a matter of passing the time and enjoying the view.

The train pulls out of Vancouver and over a wide river, the Fraser, which is spanned by many suspension bridges, one built exclusively for the Skytrain transit line. Rolling through the woods alongside a suburban bike trail, you emerge next to a broad ocean bay. 

You see waterside parks where kids wave and run after you.

The sea:

Once back in America, you notice brave-looking pines on ridge tops; the scene is forlorn but everything is very green. A lake in the mountains near Bellingham.

When we arrived in the middle of the night, I couldn't avoid that sinking feeling about how American everything looked. The train station was deserted and lacked upkeep; there were the same chain hotels and restaurants, and the downtown was empty except for groups of people walking the five blocks from their car to their destination. Seattle is a great city, but it is not in Canada.

Talk to an Iraqi

In case anyone has forgotten, we are at war in Iraq. From the summer, an uncanny video production that follows Haider Hamza, who traveled around America setting up a booth that said "Talk to an Iraqi." The whole thing is about 15 minutes, but worth the time. It's like Borat, but real.

Today's Lepidoptery

I don't see many blue butterflies around here, but I found one on the Great Falls trail. It reminds me of the Blue Morpho in Costa RIca.

A nice day.

I found someone catching catfish from the side of the cliff. No picture of it, sadly; it's hard to capture those catfish. The river was very calm near the falls.

Beer News Of The Day

New beer bar opening in Logan Circle: 500 beers, 50 draft, 5 casks. You can read about it on my former coworker's new beer blog.