ZOMBIE NOUNS!

Helen Sword wrote about zombie nouns as an op ed in the New York Times last summer, and I have been thinking about them more and more often as I notice examples cropping up all over the place. The problem with living dead verbiage, or nominalizations, is the pomposity of the presumption to ply readers with an excessiveness of wordiness. Did you get that? Probably not. It's a lot easier and more direct to just say that zombie nouns make sentences unnecessarily wordy and pompous. If you haven't already caught on from my example above, a nominalization is the creation of a noun by fusing a noun ending (like -ism, -ity, or -ness) onto a verb or an adjective. The irony is that the name nominalization is in itself a zombie noun, isn't it?! Here is Ms. Sword's definition: "Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings." Wonderful!

This is your warning to steer clear of the zombies and viva active verbs! Or, if you like the living dead, join the comment conversation below to make a few new blood-sucking zombies...

Ebonics and ESL?

     I just read an article called "Watch Your Language" in the most recent edition of Sarah Lawrence College's magazine entitled The Will to Live. Because the college emphasizes and practices teaching through small group lectures, the magazine often features an article based on a partial transcript of the roundtable discussion that takes place between students and professor. This one particularly interested me because it takes on the issue of the Oakland, CA school board's decision to recognize Ebonics, or in linguistic terms African American Vernacular English, as a language, making speakers of Ebonics ESL students in that district.
     Since many of you out there who read my blog are fellow Sarah Lawrence graduates for whom this type of dialogue is natural and/or linguists, translators, and language instructors who thrive on matters of the tongue, I thought that it would be brain candy to get a discussion going. I have posted the short two-page article here for you to read, as well as links to the Sarah Lawrence magazine website. Read up if you're interested. Then, post your ideas here. Are Ebonics and English distinct languages? Is it appropriate to educate Ebonics speakers as ESL students?

Mosey On Home

You always say walk. Why not use stroll, amble, wander, meander, mosey, march, trudge, saunter, or stride? English is pretty wonderful in its richness and nuance. Do you appreciate the fact that we can differentiate between walking confidently and walking with a purpose without using a single adjective?! I do. Spanish offers us several options as well; for example, you can caminar, patear, recorrer, pasear, or marchar. Today I challenge you refresh and broaden the range of words you employ. Let's ditch our habitual words and phrases and challenge our brains and tongues. Add some synonyms to my list in either English or Spanish...or get a new one going!

Cake-tastrophe!

    As you know, yesterday I wrote about people using poor spelling in their routine on- and off-line correspondence and on their social spaces like Facebook and Twitter. It made me remember a book I saw years ago at a friend's house called Cake Wrecks, which you can check out here. The author is Jen Yates, and I found her blog, Cake Wrecks, which is just as hilarious and pithy as that book I flipped through. 

     Translation often involves working in conjunction with transcribers, and I have often found myself in the position of having to interpret what a transcriber has written due to spelling or other mistakes that happen in the process of transcribing. These cakes are a really funny testament to the cake decorator's role as a part-decorator, part-transcriber (all courtesy of cakewrecks.com). I only wish that these bakeries had had a translator or an editor to catch their terrible transcriptions and spelling and punctuation mishaps!

Dose spilling rilly mater?

Poor grammar and spelling mistakes are two things that I am apt to notice right off the bat. Even my fiancé, who isn't nearly as nit-picky or sensitive to language variation as I am, complains rather frequently about how often he encounters spelling errors in his day-to-day business and personal correspondence. Why is this? Have we gotten so lazy about communication and taken our casual  channels of communication, like email, twitter, Facebook, and IM, to such an extreme that we don't even care if our language is correct as long as it is communicative.
     Most of us have seen this well-circulated example of how our brains can comprehend a passage even if every word is spelled incorrectly: "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
     It is an interesting cognitive ability, yet when we refer to it in terms of the importance of spelling, you must take into account the many years of schooling we have all had to get to where we are now. If we didn't already have a solid knowledge of spelling, would we still be able to comprehend the passage above? If we all forsake spelling rules and begin writing carelessly, will our English still be the same language in a few generations?
      I read an article today on FinancialTimes.com called If You Want a Job, Learn Your It's and Its. It's an extremely interesting article that I'd suggest you read. The author, Michael Skapinker, quotes several employers who claim that they would not hire someone who made spelling errors such as confusing "it's" with "its" or "they're" for "there" or "their." These employers are skeptical about such a person's ability to pay attention to details on other tasks, as well as the cause of their inability to straighten these problems out in the twenty plus years prior to seeking work at the companies in question.
     As a translator, I am a writer and a lover of language, so spelling errors often feel like garlic to my inner writer vampire. Maybe we can raise awareness and help some people correct their "your" and "you're" usage! Okay, probably not, but at least we can laugh! Besides the few examples I mentioned here, what are some of the other most frustratingly common spelling mistakes (in English or Spanish) that you see around? Comment below and let's get a conversation and a good laugh going!