Short shot #30: up and Adam

Over on his blog, John McIntye posted a little while back (December 6) on editing slip-ups in various newspapers, including this one from the NYT:

It is the breakfast hour, the day before Thanksgiving and the lobby is busy with clean-looking families who are up and Adam, ready to set off in their varsity-letter jackets and Rockports for some holiday shopping, maybe a show. (link)

Eggcorn Forum contributor Jill caught this one too. And it turned out that there already was a thread there on up and Adam for up and at ‘em, focusing on whether the expression was an eggcorn. Certainly, you can google up lots of hits for it, and some of them look like intentional puns, but many do not. For the latter, the question is whether up and Adam is just a demi-eggorn (in which an opaque expression is interpreted as containing some familiar material, even if that doesn’t make full sense) or a straightforward eggcorn (with Adam contributing meaning to the whole).

It’s probably a demi-eggcorn for many people who use it, but some of the forum contributors reported having rationalized it as involving a reference to be biblical Adam, as in this commen from charsnyder:

There was imagery for me. I didn’t know much about Adam and Eve but I’d seen the Michelangelo painting segment where God’s finger is sort of commanding Adam to “get up”. I wasn’t sure about Adam and didn’t think “up and Adam” meant it was an exhortation to DO anything, but just to sort of “spring forth” into the world. So that made some sense in terms of my Mom wanting me to get out of bed.

The impulse is fairly strong not only to see meaningful elements in partially opaque expressions, but also to make the whole expression meaningful. So one person’s demi-eggcorn can be another person’s full eggcorn. Chris Waigl reported on ADS-L on August 16 about another case:

I was mentioning B-line [for bee-line] as a very questionable eggcorn to an interested friend a while ago, and she surprisingly said she used to think it came from the letter B, thinking of the vertical line in it as the very image of a straight line. So this is just to show (once more, after many times) the subjective nature of making sense of some lexical item.

(There are also hits for up and atom, not all of them plays on words. I am of course reminded of the 1960s television cartoon The Atom Ant Show, the motto for which was “up and at ‘em, Atom Ant”. There was also a later computer game Up and Atom, Atom Ant.)

Short shot #26: the tyranny of the style sheet

In an op-ed piece (“The Next Surge: Counterbureaucracy”) in the NYT on December 8, Jonathan J. Vaccaro describes the baleful effects of bureaucracy on the conduct of the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan; multiple approvals from many different authorities are required before action can be taken. And then:

The red tape isn’t just on the battlefield. Combat commanders are required to submit reports in PowerPoint with proper fonts, line widths and colors so that the filing system is not derailed.

No report, however, of requirements on punctuation, spelling, and the like, not to mention grammar and usage.

Short shot #25: setting a record

Reporters often feel that it’s not enough to just report a story, that they need to set the story in some perspective. So instead of writing that it was very cold locally on December 1, and reporting the temperatures for the day, they’ll add that this was the coldest December 1 since 1997.

That’s a made-up story, but here’s a real one, about a school stampede in China’s Hunan province in which 8 were killed and 26 injured. This sad event was described on this morning’s Morning Edition on NPR as “the deadliest school stampede in China since 2002″.

According to Yahoo! News,

Despite harsh punishments aimed at forcing improvements, deadly stampedes continue to occur repeatedly in China’s schools, usually as students are rushing to exams or charging out of class down tight corridors and narrow stairwells.

This story cautiously described the Monday stampede as “among the deadliest since the crushing deaths of 21 children in a northern China middle school in 2002″.

(Early hits on {“school stampede”} include stories on a September stampede in Delhi, India, and a March 2002 stampede in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Until this morning I hadn’t thought of school stampede as a category of events.)

Short shot #24: douchefag

A recent Language Log posting of mine on the rise of douche as an insult (directed at people) elicited a number of comments on the older, longer insult douchebag. And now (I suppose predictably) we have the portmanteau douchefag, which I came across in a feature in the December 2009 issue of Details magazine but which seems to have been around for a while.

(Details is aimed at cool guys, both straight and gay.)

The piece is entitled “The Rise of the Douchefag” — announced on the cover as “Introducing the G-Bag: A Guide to the Gay Douchebag” and summarized inside this way:

The fist-bumping, Bluetooth-wearing dude’s dude isn’t the only tool in the box. Meet the douchefag–a plucked, preened party boy who’s taken being gay to new depths of tackiness.

After that it’s a side-by-side snarky comparison between Gay and Gay Douchebag, with items like:

Bleaches teeth VS. Bleaches anus

Dead lifts to shape his butt VS. Buys shapewear to dead lift his butt

Buys a Beckham jersey on eBay VS. Buys Beckham’s underwear on eBay

Posts sleeveless pictures on Connexion VS. Posts pantsless pictures on Manhunt

It goes on and on.

Short shot #18: the dialect coach

The November 9 New Yorker has a fascinating piece by Alec Wilkinson: “Talk This Way: The man who makes Hollywood sound right”, about dialect coach to the stars Tim Monich. (An abbreviated version is available on-line here; the full version is only available to subscribers.)

Monich is versatile: he taught Donald Sutherland, a Canadian,

to speak like a South African in “A Dry White Season,” then like an Englishman, a wealthy New Yorker, a New Englander, a Kansan, a Georgian, an Oregonian, a North Carolinian, a Mississippian, a Michigander, a Minnesotan, and a member of the Polish politburo

In fact, what he aims to teach is not some generic accent, but an accent appropriate to a specific character (though of course no coach can teach someone to reproduce an accent perfect in every detail). So in teaching Hilary Swank to speak like Amelia Earhart, Monich took into consideration that she

was from Kansas but had gone to boarding school near Philadelphia, and so had elements of a period upper-class accent

Monich has a huge archive of “recordings of talkers whose speech represents a particular place, period, or social station.”  And he goes around the world collecting additions to this archive.

There’s an interesting account of a coaching session with actor Gerard Butler, in which Wilkinson struggles with the task of representing details of pronunciation for New Yorker readers without using the technical terminology or transcription schemes of phonetics.

Short shot #17: Fanshawe the mononome

Ian Frazier’s “Fanshawe”, a humor piece in the November 2 New Yorker, begins:

Fanshawe had just the one name.

Later:

In college, Fanshawe’s social set had included an unusual number of men–Neuman,Farrel, Fogel, Harrison, Fegley, Carson, Foster, Ferguson, Sapers, Miles, Northon, Winslow–who were mononomes like himself.

Mononome is a wonderful morphological invention, immediately interpretable in context.

Fanshawe the mononome immediately reminded me of Mr. Spiggott in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch “One Leg Too Few”, about a one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan, “a role which traditionally involves the use of a two-legged actor” and so wouldn’t normally be taken by a “unidexter”.

Introducing short shots

Introducing a new feature on this blog: Short Shots, brief items with little comment. This inaugural posting has five items in it.