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Usage Guide
Copyright 2005 by Ralph. All rights reserved.
Na,
na-na, na-na, na!
Affect, Effect
The
similarity between these two words affects even doctors,
lawyers, and accountants, and the effect is effective. There
is, however, a simple, effective rule for dealing with the two
words. If your meaning is influence and you want a
verb, then use the verb influence. If, on the other
hand, your meaning is influence and you need a noun,
use the noun influence. Is that hard? Likewise, if you
are looking for a verb meaning to bring about or to
put into practice, then for the sake of Noah Webster, use
to bring about or to put into practice,
and stop wasting everybody's time.
(As you can see, a little
prudence in word choice can help one avoid many of the
conflicts that editors and writers normally spend months
developing ulcers over.)
Then again, if you are looking for an obscure noun used in
psychology, and you do not know which of these two it is, it
is sincerely hoped that you are not a doctor, in whose care
people trust their lives and sanity.
ULCERS: Effecting the plan will have the
effect of affecting everyone.
EASIER: Putting the plan into practice will have
the influence of influencing everyone.
ULCERS: Effecting the effect, we saw that the
effect of the effect was that the effective effect
effectively affects all the affects, showing their
effectiveness. That's a fact, and an effective fact at
that.
Alright All Right?
In the
spring of 1817, a student at Oxford University began what has
now been two centuries of stormy and sometimes bloody
controversy when he wrote the phrase "Alright now" on a test
paper.* The quarrel, of course, is over the one-word form
(alright) of all right, which the majority of
authorities say is not at all right or at all all right, all
right already?
The
anti-alright camp point out that there is no need for a
one-word form. The pro-alright camp reply that there is
too. The anti's say, "There is not," and the pro's say,
"There is, too!" Inevidibly, they become too loud and
the police are called in. An officer pounds on the door and
says, in a heavy Irish accent, "Alright, open this door!"—to
which they all fall silent and, yes, ask "Would that be all
right spelled as one word or two?" Police officers, who
find it helpful to sound tough and who think it sounds tough
to sound uneducated (which is usually true), answer that it is
all right as one word. This invariably upsets the
general public and gets the police chief fired for bad
spelling on the force (a great plot for a Starsky and Hutch
episode). As a result, in most municipalities, it is now
illegal to say all right in any form. You are supposed
to say OK instead (which unfortunately has already led
to the tragic Gunfight at the OK Corral, between the OK camp,
the O.K. camp, the Okay camp, the okie dokie camp, and the
people of the State of Oklahoma, who claimed exclusive rights
to all forms of the abbreviation).
And
this is only the stormy part of the not-alright
problem. There is also the bloody part. In 1848, riots broke
out across Europe over the issue, and thousands of English
teachers were killed or injured in the chaos. Similar
problems, at times bordering on world war, have erupted
frequently since. (It is rumored that the pro-alright
camp may have mobile chemical-weapons
laboratories.)
In America in the
1960s, a youth culture developed. To spite their parents, the
establishment, society, convention, people over thirty, and
the makers of frozen fish sticks, young people grew their hair
frighteningly long, wore torn-up clothes, and went around
making victory signs and saying in loud, taunting voices,
"Alright!"—with, of course, an intonation that made it
clear they were thinking the one-word form.
The horrible alright
dispute, along with all the trouble it has caused over
time, is made all the more tragic by the fact that the
original Oxford student who tried to spell it as one word was
actually trying to spell not all right now but all
write now, a command in the imperative. (It was spring,
after all, and students tend to blunder a lot in the
spring.)
Had his professors
known of the stupid blunder, they would have simply taken him
out back and shot him. But they discovered it too late. Blood
had already been shed; newspaper copy editors and English
teachers were already doomed to an eternity of "Is too!"
"Is not!" And if the professors had tried to spare the
world and tell the truth, Oxford would have lost its standing
as the center of learning in the English-speaking world, and
so the professors kept quiet (the Nixon White House could have
learned much from these professors). They did, all the same,
take the student out back and shoot him.
OLL KORRECT: "OK, turn right here and
left there." "Left there?" "Right." "Oh, all right. I get
it." "No, left!" "All right and no left. Right." "Left!!!"
ALL RIGHT: After they all write all right
as alright, the teacher makes them all write all
right so that all the alls and all the
rights were all right.
ALL WRONG: After they alright alright as alright .
. .
ALRIGHT!: Kurt Vonnegut has a new volume of
collected short stories out.
ALL WIGHT: Alwight, silly wabbit, hands up!
ALL RIGHT: A bunch of Republicans.
ALL LEFT: Ralph's attempt to make beef stew. Do
not buy his forthcoming cookbook.
* The famous blunder was remembered in the Rolling
Stones' hit song "Jumpin' Jack Flash" ("It's alllllllright
now"), which sounds much better when played by the blues
guitarist Johnny Winter.
Anglo-Saxon vs. Latin
If
you want to make text very clear and easily acceptable to the
average English speaker's ear, use mainly words of Anglo-Saxon
origin. Do this also if you want to continue driving a 1973
Ford Pinto and living in a trailer-park suburb of
Buttonwillow, California.
If, on the other hand, earning big bucks, driving a nice
automobile, and, possibly, buying a home in Beverly Hills are
more important to you than making a piece of text—which may
well be drivel anyhow—readable, then replace as many of the
Anglo-Saxon words as possible with words of Latin or Old
French origin.
Take the
following phrase for example.
ANGLO-SAXON: The basic hope of cows
to eat coconuts . . .
This, of course, sounds
ridiculous. This is the sort of thing you get from a writer or
editor who drives a 1973 Ford Pinto. However, if this is said
using stuffier-sounding words, of Latin or Old French origin,
that Ford Pinto might be traded in for at least a Buick:
STUFFILY PUT: The fundamental desire of
cattle to consume Cocos nucifera fruit . .
.
Of course, it is not always easy to come up
words from extinct languages (not a lot of barroom
conversations take place in Old French), and looking up the
etymologies of each word is too troublesome a task (which is
part of the reason why the examples above are phrases, not
whole sentences; the other part of the reason is, well . . . you
finish those sentences!). Therefore, you will do best
simply to guess, choosing those words with more syllables,
prefixes and suffixes, and snobbish-sounding tones.
In addition, you need not
restrict yourself to words of Latin and Old French origin.
Words from many other languages also sound amply formal and
pretentious. Slavic words, for example, can sound very
official, and words from Japanese can raise the syllable count
considerably. Note how official-sounding are the words
pivos spaciba (beer, please). And look at how many
syllables we get in the Japanese domo arigato
gozaimashita—eleven, if one bothers to pronounce them all,
which the Japanese do not—which means, basically, "thanks."
Remember also, foreign words or
Latin terms can be set in italics. This looks very
sophisticated.
Another
interesting device is to use both the Anglo-Saxon term and the
Latin or Norman French term together. Lawyers do this
all the time. Try first and foremost, full and complete,
basic and fundamental, will and testament, indemnify and hold
harmless, lamb and mutton, Suntory Rare and Old, cow and
cattle. To have even more fun, add a third term from yet
another language, say, Chinese: first, foremost, and diyi;
full, complete, and wanzhengge; basic, fundamental, and
jibende; cow, cattle, and niu . . .
Then again, there are a whole lot
of English speakers, particularly in the United States, who do
not speak a second language (and there are some who, it could
be argued, do not speak a first very well). If you are one of
these, or you are certain that most of your readership
is, then try making up some words. This is guaranteed
to circuminsulate you in cases of mesmerization where you are
phenindentally undisposated to verigitate the migloberitation
of elves.
WRONG: The kids did not get the teacher's
lesson on church history.
RIGHT: The youthful scholars failed to fully
comprehend the professor's lecture on
antidisestablishmentarianism.
WRONG: I wanna buy a new suit.
RIGHT: It is my considered intention to procure
recently produced and unused attire.
RIGHT: Kleptography has proved microlasms to be
less than 1 milihoffer in fannability.
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