The Hourglass

There's a new book out by Michael Erard called Um … Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean … (website, Amazon). I am excited to read it since it has been recommended by Ben Zimmer and Arnold Zwicky is one of the featured (non-fictional) characters in the book. Both of these guys post regularly at Language Log, one of my most frequented blog sites. Furthermore, the author has a Master's in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in English. It's darn near always good when a linguist gets around to writing a book for the broader public. That's not necessarily 'cause the books themselves are always good, but rather because more linguists should try to engage larger audiences than our own narrow in-group. In this case, though, it looks like we have the added bonus that the book is actually good.

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If you use WordPress, then you know that at the bottom of the Dashboard in the administrator's area, there is an array of gray boxes, advertising recent news items regarding WordPress features, development, and related blogging issues in general. The other day, one item in particular caught me eye. It is pictured on the right. The line-break between the words stress and free caused me to read the first line as the main title and the second line as the sub-title, as if it had been written thus.

The Art of Stress: Free Blogging

So my first interpretation of this title was that the article would make the case that free blogging (either blogging pro bono or using blogging tools that cost nothing like WordPress and the like) causes not just stress, but the kind of stress that is somehow aesthetically superior. All right, that last part is a little ridiculous, but since I am relatively new to blogging, almost anything seems plausible.

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I was shopping the other day at a department store and wandered into one shop which carries a lot of American country goods: things like quilts, decorative covers for kitchen appliances, and that kind of stuff. Although this was in Japan, most of the stuff seemed to have been imported directly from the US (or at least diverted enroute from China…) and had labels entirely in English. I noticed a small package of reusable stickers—you know, the kind that you can put on windows—that had roses on them. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the following description:

For me, this sentence is ungrammatical. While there are some (e.g., peevologists and peevebloggers) who would take this as evidence of waning educational standards and thereby bemoan the pitiable state of the education system, that's not my interest. For me, it's much more interesting to try to figure out why the writer wrote the sentence this way. So let's walk through a couple of possibilities here.

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