iPad, etc.

Nancy Friedman, who always has interesting things to write about naming and branding, doesn't seem terribly impressed with "iPad." Me neither. Maybe if Apple didn't already have a product with a basically identical name ...

Other midweek links:

• Woody Allen's mind-bending powers of sentence construction.

• How the copy desk got that way, and why we're doomed (YMMV), by David Sullivan. There's a lot being written now on why slashing copy desks is a bad idea, but Sullivan explains why the people who make these decisions don't understand why you can't just replace us with spellcheck.

• Mark Peters on brand names going generic.

• A quick but fun word game (h/t Talk Wordy To Me).

• And last, from this morning's Washington Post: "On New Year's Eve, conservative activist James O'Keefe telegraphed across the Internet that he was up to something big."

Yes, the writer used "telegraphed" correctly. No, sometimes that doesn't matter. This was my note of perspective for the day when I read it on the bus, and it's a good place to leave things this evening.

(UPDATED, 8:34 p.m. on Jan. 29) I'm way more torn about "telegraphed across the Internet" than I thought I'd be. CONS: It's gratuitous; there are shorter, cleaner ways to write that lede; if it is a joke, it's not sold very well. PROS: English is a strange little language, and we ought to celebrate that instead of diminishing it. So this gag didn't work -- the next one might, and I don't want to discourage the attempt.

You make the call.

Precriminations

Atlantic Wire headline from Tuesday morning: "Precriminations: Dems, Expecting Loss, Lay Into Coakley."

Assigning blame for a loss that's yet to happen -- truly a concept for our times.

To begin where a lot of people have: "Precriminations" was popularized by a Dana Milbank piece in the Washington Post in February 2006 predicting whom Democrats were going to blame if they botched the midterm elections. By October, the Republicans had done a good bit of botching themselves and began their own precriminating. And a term that now seems inevitable had begun to circulate.

Milbank is sometimes credited with coining the word, but it predates him. In October 2004, the New Republic appears to have used it in a pair of online pieces speculating on whom each party would cannibalize if it lost the presidential election. I say "appears" because I have to rely on the word of these blogs; the links to TNR's Web site are dead. Fortunately, we have an even earlier mention: James Fallows, writing about the last days of the Bush-Gore race for The Atlantic's Web site in November 2000, calls it "Michael Kinsley's term." But my trail ends there; if Kinsley or anyone else used the word in public before 2000, I can't find it.

"Precriminations" isn't exactly a new concept -- infighting and finger-pointing go back forever in politics. And it shares more than a little with "pre-mortem," whose political use (as opposed to medical use) goes back decades. But holding a carnival of blame before the polls have even opened seems perfect for a 24/7 political culture where someone's always talking, predictions are mistaken for actualities, and you've got to get the stench of failure off you before the next election.

The earliest political use of "pre-mortem" I could find is the headline of an H.L. Mencken column for the Baltimore Evening Sun in October 1932. Herbert Hoover was about to get crushed by FDR, and Mencken summed up the mood among Republican solons: "The Republican grand goblins, having given up hope of reelecting Lord Hoover on November 8, now devote themselves con amore to concocting what, on less exalted levels, would be called his alibi. He will go to the block, they say, as a sacrifice to the public's notorious incapacity for cerebral functioning. He will be butchered at the polls, brutally, melodramatically and against all justice and reason, because it blames him for the Depression, and pants to punish him."

There is always bipartisan support for blaming the voters.

Anyway, if we're going to draw a line between pre-mortems and precriminations when they involve party officials, Mencken's column provides a useful contrast with the other examples quoted above. The Republican leaders of 1932 decided voters weren't buying, but they still took care not to damage the merchandise.

Midweek reading

• Talking on the phone might be messing with your head. "One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown." I guess this is why I feel the need to give people play-by-play when I'm on the phone with them in the car.

• Call Abdulmutallab the Undiebomber. Interesting, especially for those who feel society needs to bury the psychopath mystique.

• Where love-light comes from.

• Stop using being verbs.

• This doesn't have much to do with language, but here's what the guy who dubbed Gilbert Arenas "Agent Zero" thinks about that whole mess.

• Semicolons in civil service.

(Just like) starting over

One of the things I get out of this blog is that when I feel like venting about one of my pet peeves, I have to figure out if it's really a crime against the English language or if I just don't like it.

So it was during the NFL playoffs this weekend, when we heard again how the Saints and Colts started the season 13-0 and 14-0, respectively. That's always bugged me -- talking about a "start" when the teams involved are closer to golf than training camp. In 2007, you could even find references to the Patriots starting the season 15-0 -- when the end was one game away.

The thing is, when I played devil's advocate, I had to admit it had a stronger -- and more interesting -- case than I expected.

• It is literally true that the Saints started the season 13-0. It's unwise to complain about expressions that are literally true.

• The alternatives don't exactly sing. The Saints won their first 13 games. They were undefeated through 13 games. They were 13-0 at one point. Any others?

• The people who say it know the deal. After Week 14, football fans might have said the Saints were off to a 13-0 start, but nobody said the Giants were off to a 7-6 start. That's because those people weren't really talking about a beginning, they were talking about a season-long trend. The Giants started the season 5-0, and then that trend was broken (painfully).

If you're curious, the theory seems to hold up for other sports, too. I did a quick and dirty study of the New York Times from 2000 to 2009 to see how deep into the regular season they would use the phrase "started the season" in combination with a team's record. The results: For the NFL, 12 games (75% of the season). For college basketball, 19 games (68%). For the NBA, 35 games (43%). For baseball, 54 games (33%). The shorter the season, the higher the percentage.

Makes sense to me. In the NFL, 12 games may be most of the season, but 12 is a small number. A first-grader can count that high. It's probably more natural for people to associate that with a beginning than an end if there's a trend there.

What about the NHL, which is missing above? That's the exception that proves the rule, because of OT losses and standings points -- it's harder to see a trend at a glance. The longest "start" in hockey was just 18 games (22%).

I admit this isn't the usage problem I imagined. I'm going to make my peace with it. And I've learned something. I'd like to think I learned to stay open-minded about things that rub me the wrong way. Maybe even that the Internet can be a tool of understanding as well as divisiveness. But really, I learned that it's one of life's little pleasures to be able to hate something with justification, and you should never cheapen that pleasure by being a lazy hater.

Awfuller and awfuller

Andrew Malcolm, Los Angeles Times: "The bad political news is his awful poll numbers are getting awfuller, which isn't a word but should be in this case."

You know this blog's default position: Every word is real, just as every person is special. But "awfuller" is a good test of how real real is.

First things first. It is really "real." Mark Twain thought so; John Keats did; Charles Dickens did; Margaret Atwood did; Elizabeth Barrett Browning did; Gertrude Stein did. The OED thinks so, too, listing it as an occasional comparative for "awful."

The problem is that "occasional." Language Log has been having a good recurring conversation on inflected adjectives and the difference between wrong and unusual, and that gets at the problem here. Comparative forms, like all words, have their vogue, and there are winners and losers. In 2010, awfuller is a loser. If you check Google News' historical archive, its use is pretty damn scarce, and when it does surface, you'll see it in a lot of jokey escalations of awfulness like Andrew Malcolm's. Malcolm made a case for awfuller right there in his copy and even he hung it out to dry.

It's probably not even as common as "awfullest," you know that? By two very rough and unscientific measures of published English, the Google News archive and the New York Times archive, awfuller gets smoked. And people will say awfullest and mean it. They'll use it in hardship. Why is this? We can speculate ... when you go for a comparative form of awful, you're probably trying to express an extreme, not putting this new awfulness on a continuum. Plus, awfuller -- I'm sorry -- just sounds like gagging.

Will there be another day for awfuller? Well, people are going to have to start using it unapologetically. Who's first?

I've seen those English dramas too

From a recent Guardian piece on Vampire Weekend, describing a song from their new album: "In a way, it's their two fingers up to the tired idea of being a two-fingers-up band."

They'd only use one finger, is my guess. They may be cosmopolitan, but they're still American.

But I'm snarking. It strikes me a little weird, but I don't think the writer did wrong, exactly -- he's a Brit writing for Brits, how else would he put it?

As for the larger issue, there's got to be a word for relating someone's thoughts in argot that's foreign to them. I've been keeping an eye out for this kind of thing since reading this passage on Blanche Lincoln in the Economist a few months ago: "She first won a seat in the House ... after ousting a sitting congressman in a Democratic primary. He had 487 overdrafts at the House bank. She campaigned on the promise that 'I can sure enough balance my chequebook.'"

Again, what are they going to do, change their spellings just because she's from Arkansas? All the same -- take a minute and savor.

Conflictual

My new word of the day is "conflictual."

I didn't give it a chance when I first saw it, but that was just bigotry against a familiar word with a new suffix. Just because Washington is full of those Frankenstein creations doesn't mean they're all monsters. If you can reduce a lengthy or involved or bulky concept to a single word that might fit in conversation outside its original context (for conflictual, that seems to be psychology), that's a useful thing.

It's no "incentivize," or, God forbid, "incent." That's a prejudice I don't think anyone can turn me around on.

This is not bigoted: I like -ual at least as much as -mania or -teria.

Brilliant deduction

I was at the post office this afternoon trying to track down the mail I asked to be held while I was on vacation. Two others were in the same boat when I was there, and when I spoke to the manager, it was clear he'd had a lot of practice getting his rap down.

His best guess: With so many people in my building asking for vacation stops, and with the post office always so busy during the Christmas rush, "I deduct that it was probably human error."

How wonderful if he could deduct human error. I'm sick of blaming bureaucracy and bad luck -- I want a villain! But I kid. He meant "deduce," not "deduct."

Didn't he?

Well, yes, but it's not that simple. At the beginning, those words used to be fairly synonymous.

As you might guess, "deduce" and "deduct" both derive from the same Latin ancestor (deducere, to lead down or draw away). They also entered English at about the same time (early 15th century), and it was a while before people felt like they needed to differentiate. It makes sense in light of that Latin definition: You can take away an inference from facts, and you can take away a part from a whole. Not precisely the same idea, but our language has always been as creative as it is accommodating.

It's hard for modern ears to accept "deduce" for "deduct," but you'd think we would see the other mix-up all the time. (Especially since the noun "deduction" inconsiderately matches up with both verbs: "Sherlock Holmes had awesome powers of deduction, and maybe after this blog post I can use my movie ticket as a tax deduction.") Indeed, even though the modern distinction between "deduce" and "deduct" has been in place for ages, the usage of "deduct" for "deduce" is recognized in both the American Heritage Dictionary and Princeton's WordNet.

But in the latest edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, Bryan A. Garner calls "deduct" creep a Stage 1 language change, the lowest on his five-stage scale. If Stage 1 were a car, it would have three wheels.

That's a long way for a word to fall in 600 years.

Banishment

It's always fun to read Lake Superior State University's annual list of "banished words." Right, all the usual caveats apply -- it's an unscientific list of pet peeves; every word has its uses; and if someone really could banish words from English, then English would be no better than French.

Still, I like to imagine the LSSU folks keeping a sense of humor about the whole project. For instance, the first contributor they quote in their criticism of "shovel-ready" uses "implement," a word from the very first "banished" list.

Mostly I like to see where new concepts are challenging our old perspectives on the world. New terms that seem silly at first can reveal tiny nuances that either didn't exist before or just didn't have a name. A good example is this comment on why we shouldn't use "friend" as a verb:

"'Befriend' is much more pleasant to the human ear and a perfectly useful word in the dictionary." – Kevin K., Morris, Okla.

Making this change would obliterate one of the casual social dynamics that define life on the Internet. You can "friend" a random co-worker, a networking contact, the cute girl from the bar, the funny dude from an Internet forum you read, or maybe even a celebrity you've never met. How many of them have you actually "befriended"?

Honestly, this does show the limits of the noun "friend" in the social media context, an issue that, of course, long predates social media. At the same time, torturing "friend" into a verb seems to reflect the ad hoc nature of these new* Internet-enabled relationships. Maybe there's a better word waiting to be invented. Maybe it's good that we're discomforted. Is that a bug or a feature?

Here's one more, on "sexting."

"Any dangerous new trend that also happens to have a clever mash-up of words, involves teens, and gets television talk show hosts interested must be banished." – Ishmael Daro, Saskatoon, Sask., Canada.

Dude, seriously? Never mind what you think of "sexting," that sounds like how a lot of perfectly acceptable new words are born. Replace "teens" and "television talk show hosts" if you must.

* Is this actually new anymore? There are thirtysomethings who have done this half their lives. I'm probably biased since there's no word we all agree on. Name it and I'll let it be.