Timeline

CENTURIONS -- For those of us past puberty, "turn of the century" used to mean the years just before and after 1900. However, since we have turned yet another century, good writers will remember to specify that. It won't be too long before we will think of the year 2001 as "turn of the century." (Hal, please take note before you get too spaced out.)

TRUE, BUT -- TV ads have been praising New Jersey Chris Christie for presentng balanced budgets in the two years he has been in office. However, the same "balanced budget" claim can be made by every other New Jersey governor, as well as the governors of every other state, since only the federal government can operate at a deficit. One way or another, states must devise balanced budgets.

GROUNDING -- "His sons carried the casket after the funeral and the burial." After the burial, no one carries the casket.

MODIFICATIONS -- Adjectives often take an -ed ending when modifying a noun; but just as often, that ending is dropped in informal speech, as in "mash potatoes." The standard in writing, however, calls for the use of the "-ed" ending. That said, confusion can arise in a phrase like "distress sales," referring to the sale of distressed property owners. Is it the properties that are in distress, or the owners? Are the sales distressed or those who hold mortgages on said properties? In short, who or what is in distress; the owners, the properties, the sales or the mortgage holders? The fallback position for the Samurai Rim Man is this: When in doubt, rephrase and rewrite. If we as allegedly professional uses of the language have to puzzle over what is the "correct" usage, how much more confusing is it for the poor shlub reading it? The goal is communication. If the writer sends the reader into puzzlement, the result is a failure of communication. In broadcast news writing, you get one chance to communicate the information to the listerner. In print, the reader has the option of going back and reading the phrase several times over before understanding. Good writers should not force readers into that option.

Dunce and Redunce

Airline agents are fond of asking passengers to take their seats quickly because the aircraft is "very full." But are there degrees of fullness? A container of any kind, including an airplane, can be half full, or nearly full, or some other descriptor denoting partial. But once something is full, it's full, and can't be fuller or fullest.

There is something to be said for redundancy for the sake of emphasis, but there is even more to be said for economy of usage and a need to be clear without beating the reader over the head. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Lawyers are fond of facts, even when they're not true. We heard one say in a courtroom, "Every fact that came out of his mouth was a lie." And they often cite "true facts" in submitting briefs and arguments. Which is good, since as the grammar guru Edwin Newman once wrote, false facts are of no use.

Then there was the academic who repeatedly cited a "whole range" of various things. Perhaps he meant to contrast it with a half range. Big or small, wide or narrow, a range is a range. Use these modifiers instead.

And finally, there is the wonderful phrase, "a fight to the finish." All fights end in a finish. The phrase may sound good, but it has no real meaning. But that's true of a lot of political rhetoric; it sounds good, but has no meaning. Good writers stick to phrases that have real, substantial meaning.

Allegations

When a person is found with hands tied behind his back and a bullet wound in the back of the head, using the term "alleged victim" does not apply. There is no doubt that the dead person is a victim. Nonetheless, we often hear news reports, especially on TV, referring to an "alleged victim." In legal-speak, to allege means to "assert without proof," and this is appropriate when used about a suspect. Example: An "alleged killer." But to say "alleged suspect" is going too far. Either the person is a suspect or not. Just as a dead person bound hand and foot with gunshot wounds in the head is either a victim or not. It's highly unlikely that the "alleged victim" was a suicide.

Extensive use of the term "alleged" does not necessarily get a journalist off the hook of responsibility. Defense lawyers are especially fond of the term because it supposedly takes some of the alleged sting off the alleged offense of the alleged murder as allegedly perpetrated by the alleged suspect.

The  term is rooted in the Latin meaning "to send a message," and has come to mean an accusation. We do not refer to an "accused victim"  -- that's inherently contradictory, an oxymoron.

The narrower definition, "to assert without proof" is lawyerspeak for "someone, probably the police or the victim, is lying; my client is innocent."

Science vs Faith

Science wants to know how something works.
Faith is content in the belief that it does work.
There is no conflict.

Science goes beyond Faith in an effort to understand. It takes Faith as a starting base, then uses observation and analysis to reach a greater understanding of what is.

These efforts may take years, and may never succeed. But even True Believers will (or should) acknowledge that we have the mental capacity as well as the moral obligation to try.

We are given these abilities. We should use them.

Lost Privacy

The Orwellian Age is here, and we have willingly and eagerly signed on.

People are giving up their sense of privacy. Posting details of their daily lives on Internet social media sites and shouting into their mobile phones in public places are symptoms of a major change in society. Then there are those who record their actions on video and post the pictures on Web social media sites. For example: Teenagers who recorded their beating of a homeless man, posted the video on the Web, and were soon arrested.  What a surprise.

Lesson for the Day: There is no privacy on the Internet. Ever. Computers never forget. Anything. Ever.

Deleting something only moves it to a different file, which may (or may not) be overwritten with new material. Someday. Eventually. Perhaps. Maybe. Or not.

Rule Number One: If you don't want the world to know, don't put it into the computer.

Thus spake Pogo, the Okefenokee Sage:  "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Moral Economy

A society's cultural values show up in many ways; in fact, its values are expressed in every aspect of any social group, no matter its size.

Concepts of morality, politics, government,  business, economics and religion are all intertwined. And within each concept, there are opposites, always in conflict.

Thus, in morality, there are those who do evil. In politics, there is debate about the "right" policy. In government, there is conflict over how to carry out policy. In business, there is competition for customers. In economics, there is, in Joseph Schumpeter's phrase, the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism, and Karl Marx's belief that capitalism will destroy itself completely. And in religion there is not only its opposite -- atheism -- but debate over which spiritual path is the most "righteous."

In short, what works for one society may not work for another. A hunter-gatherer tribal society does what it does because it works. Giving a mechanical harvester combine to a people with no experience in large-scale agriculture is an extreme example, but the principle remains.

In many ways, then, morality is culturally defined. What is acceptable behavior in one social group may not be in another. Even so, there may be a core set of beliefs that could be termed a "univeral morality" that is shared by all humans. Perhaps science can find out whether such a morality is "hard wired" in the human brain.

Word Breaks

The rules for hyphenating a word at the end of a typewritten line are simple. Any computer can be, and all have been, fed these rules. But there also many times where these rules do not apply, such as in compound words. It takes an understanding of the meaning to know when to ignore the rule. For example, one rule is to hyphenate a word between syllables; another is to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant, which is where most syllable breaks occur. But what is a syllable? Until computers can be taught semantics -- the meanings of words and syllables -- they will continue to blindly follow the rules.

Why is this a problem? Consider compound words, where a two-word verb phrase becomes a one-word noun. Computers at the New York Times missed out with the noun "tradeoff." It starts life as a verb, "to trade off," and becomes a single word when used as a noun. But the hyphenation rule says to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant when it reaches the end of a line in type. Thus, the NYT computer perpetrated "tra-deoff."

The solution has been available for decades. Computers have, in addition to the set of rules, a lexicon of words and their preferred hyphenation. But it takes human intervention to add words to the list.

Let's hope newspapers (and magazines) assign someone to add words to the list whenever a sharp-eyed copy editor catches a misplaced hyphen.

SPELLCHECK CHECKUP -- There is a province in France called Provence. Don't mess with it. The Oxford University Press, of any house, should know better, but somehow in a caption the name of a town came out as Aix-en-Province, while the text had it, properly, as Aix-en-Provence.