2010, Zero Zero

Ten years ago, it seemed like you couldn't say the words "2000" or "millennium" without somebody rushing to tell you that the millennium didn't really start until 2001, because there was no year 0. Fine. I mean, what people were celebrating was the dawn of the two-thousands, and "the millennium" was just a shorthand for that, so those corrections always had a whiff of fussiness. But a word is a word, there was no year 0, and the correctors were absolutely correct.

Now I'm hearing -- not a lot, just here and there -- that we shouldn't be talking about "the end of the decade" this month. It's the logical extension of that "no year 0" argument: There have been 200 successive decades since the beginning of the Christian era, and No. 201 doesn't end until Dec. 31, 2010.

Well, the 201st decade A.D. does end on Dec. 31, 2010.

But this is still just wrong.

(1) First of all, it's wrong because if you followed this logically, you'd have to claim that 1990 wasn't part of the 1990s, but the 1980s.

(2) It's wrong because while you may say we're in the year of the Lord 2009, nobody says we're in the decade of the Lord 201. We just don't measure time that way. Again -- the "no year 0" argument only makes sense for ordinals, like "third millennium" or "21st century," where you really do have to account for what that first year was called. This leads into my final point.

(3) It's wrong because marking off time this way -- Aughts, Nineties, Eighties -- isn't math, it's cultural shorthand, and therefore subject to pop culture's rules. And pop culture is not on the side of fussy math. For example: When did the Sixties end? Altamont? Nixon's resignation? The fall of Saigon? Dec. 31, 1969? You don't have to look too hard to find someone making each of these points. But Dec. 31, 1970? Good luck.

Hey, who's seen Richie?

Transaction of the day: The St. Louis Rams release guard Richie Incognito.

Words you've never heard Tom say

The shock in this story isn't that an Irish MP dropped the f-bomb in Parliament. (Well, I suppose it would shock me if I didn't throw two F's, an MF and an SF or two before I've even left the house in the morning.) The shock is that they have a list of banned words and fuck is not on it. Among the words that are: "Brat; buffoon; chancer; communist; corner boy; coward; fascist; gurrier; guttersnipe; hypocrite; rat; scumbag; scurrilous; and yahoo." Also "handbagging."

How bad is Congress' handbagging epidemic? Manageable, it would seem.

There are thousands of instances of "communist" in the Congressional Record this decade, but they tend to be dry policy references. Likewise, of the 22 instances of "brat," only six are the unspeakably offensive variety and none are direct verbal assaults.

All but four refs to "Yahoo" are the uppercase Yahoo -- two are outbursts of excitement and only two are about actual yahoos. "Buffoon" appears twice, but one of those is a quote and the other is about Hugo Chavez. "Scumbag" is in there twice, referring to corporate thieves and predatory lenders. "Guttersnipe" has not been heard in either chamber since 1994, when Bob Dornan quoted Churchill on Hitler.

"Canker" is listed more than 100 times. I expected to find a bunch of medical uses, but the overwhelming majority are botanical: "citrus canker." There is an interesting metaphorical one: a reference to a letter written by Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter that touches on the "canker of slavery." (I wondered if she meant "cancer," but no, a longer excerpt shows she committed to the metaphor: "The canker of slavery eats into our hearts, and diseases the whole body by this ulcer at the core.")

"Coward" and "hypocrite" both chart in the triple digits. "Scurrilous" is in the high double digits (I've always felt this word had a special kinship with "knave," so imagine my sadness to find out those two appear together only once, and not in combination).

Want to waste your own time looking up naughty words in the Congressional Record? Click here.

Bubblicious

John Tamny, writing for Forbes.com:

The dictionary definition of the word "bubble" is "a nearly spherical body of gas contained in a liquid." But economists, market commentators and politicians have hijacked the word, using it now to describe any market rising higher than what self-presumed experts deem a correct level....

Since all trades balance, bubbles quite simply don't exist. Indeed, the only real bubble in our midst is the excessive use of "bubble." That dreaded word should be banished so that commentators can get back to actually analyzing market moves instead of writing that which is easy, but which tells us nothing.

I'm not the guy to evaluate Tamny's economic point. But his linguistic point is a little silly. "Bubble" is elegant shorthand for a market based on hopes, dreams and not much else; it's one of the few economic terms that need no explanation to a newcomer. And anyway, its "hijacking" came centuries ago -- its use in economics goes all the way back to the definitive example, the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century, as Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave wrote in his Dictionary of Political Economy in 1894.*

It's interesting to note that in the South Sea Bubble in the 18th century, "bubble" as a noun extended to the daydream-economy companies themselves (which, again, makes perfect sense -- what were the shakiest Internet start-ups of the '90s if not tiny bubbles waiting to pop?). When that episode was over, Palgrave wrote:

The greatest popular indignation was aroused against the directors, and found expression in parliament. An inquiry was instituted and pushed on rapidly. In the sequel upwards of two millions was taken, in the shape of fines, from the estates of the directors, and they were allowed to retain only a small residue.

And everyone learned their lesson and lived happily ever after.

* EDIT (1/1/10): In fact, it goes back a little further.

DeNeen L. Brown, once upon a dream

DeNeen L. Brown:

You watched the Disney movies, sure enough, as other girls watched them.

And you put on your mother's pink nightgown and tied a long silk scarf on your head. And you danced, swirling in circles to the imaginary strings of orchestras.

Dreaming of the day when someone would come on a white horse and make everything all right.

It's like she was there with me.

The bell tolls for whom

Tracee Hamilton: "You're upset about the Tiger Woods scandal, and I'm here to tell you whom to blame for that: Yourself."

Yes, "whom" is the grammatical choice. No object is more an object than the object of blame. But would you go for "who" anyway? Is that the word you expected to find there?

This isn't just a modern quirk. In the New York Times' online article archive, "tell you who to" beats "tell you whom to" by a count of 29-9 going back to 1851. In the Washington Post archive, going back to 1877, "tell you who to" wins 21-10. On Google, an unscientific search of a hopelessly broad spectrum shows roughly a 9-to-1 advantage for "tell you who to." That ratio holds up even after you take the Isley Brothers out of the equation.

I don't know that "tell you who to [verb]" could ever be strictly grammatical, considering "you," the subject, will be doing "[verb]" to "who," the object. But that distinction is losing its relevance. And, frankly, meh. Sometimes it seems like the last mission of "whom" is to remind us what subjects and objects are.

Toby Flenderson can have the last word (there's video; scroll down).

Poetry lives 2

Actual lines of text taken from the front page of today's Washington Post. Three words cut today.


perchance to dream

when he heard what he thought

rising seas and catastrophic
performance

to sleep to the murmur
of black swans in a lagoon
between the two camps

police asked the man to get up

Poetry lives 1

Actual lines of text taken from the front page of today's Washington Post. My changes are minimal.


Five minutes

These people in the shadow

the virus mutates into a more
important part of the chaos

but that's a virtue. No one here

"Five minutes to go!"

Culture shock

A Reuters headline from this weekend: "Baucus recommended girlfriend for job: aide."

The job in question is actually U.S. attorney for Montana. "Aide" is who told the reporter. Another reason why I hate the overseas style of putting attribution at the end of the headline.

The larger problem, of course, is that this appeared on the Washington Post's site, not overseas, and the Post is hemorrhaging editors, like the rest of the industry.

Not enough eds to check the wire heds? Whatever, it passes spell-check, right?

'A date which will live in infamy'

It's a Pearl Harbor Day tradition for me to reflect on FDR's word choice, but I feel dirtier and dirtier about it. Yeah, "that" is preferable with the restrictive clause. But "which" is perfectly comprehensible, the distinction is more of a custom than a rule, and anyway it's silly to complain about a timeless phrase. Of the seven words in that phrase, "which" is the least important.

More interesting to me is the popularity of the tuneless variant "a day that shall live in infamy." Would you believe that returns a third as many Google results as the real thing?