Steve Kass

When you read the word ugh, what do you hear?

• [ʌg], which rhymes with mug
• [ʊx], [ʌx], [ɯx], or [ɯχ], ending with a brief harbinger-of-spitting sound
• either of the above, depending on context, but sometimes you can’t tell

If you answered [ʌg], as I would have before I began thinking too hard, then how would you spell the spitty word? Similar questions with blech.

Today’s word of the day is emmadden.

em·mad·den /ɛm.’ma.dən/

verb
To constructively make mad or crazy, or to feign to make mad or crazy, always without malice or injury, and usually with the complete opposites.

Origin
2011: intentional coinage by Steve Kass (http://www.stevekass.com), variant of madden with intentionally vague technoetymology. Perhaps a portmanteau of madden and imagine, perhaps an intensive of madden, or perhaps a variation of madden that communicates a quality of uncertainty or inconfidence, as if compounded with the interjection um.

Now and then, I peregrinate past something well worth keeping. Starting today, I’ll keep some of those somethings right here.

Today’s keeper: Is Being Done, an essay by Richard Grant White from the March, 1869, issue of The Galaxy¹. (Publishing² from 1866 to 1878, The Galaxy was subsumed into The Atlantic Monthly; Cornell University Library’s Making of America project contains a complete digital archive of The Galaxy.)

Little did I know that the so-called “progressive passive” tense (as in “Your Amazon order is being fulfilled.”) was a relative grammatical newcomer (i.e., it appeared centuries after Shakespeare) to the English language. White did not welcome it. This is an excerpt from his incisive essay.

In Goldsmith’s ‘Citizen of the World,’ (Letter XXL) is the following passage, descriptive of a play.

‘The fifth act began, and a busy piece it was; scenes shifting, trumpets sounding, drums beating, mobs hallooing, carpets spreading, guards bustling from one door to the other; gods, demons, daggers, rags, and ratsbane.’

Read the second clause of the sentence according to the formula is being done. ‘Scenes being shifted, trumpets being sounded, drums being beaten, mobs hallooing, carpets being spread,’ and so forth. The very life is taken out of it. No longer a busy piece, it drags its wounded and halting body along, and dies before it gets to rags and ratsbane.

Related information: Mr. White’s son, Stanford, the celebrated architect, designed the Washington Square Arch and was murdered in 1906.

[Source: Mark Liberman at Language Log]

Roundup from the December Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine. (Which was thankfully captivating, there being no new SkyMall to which to turn.)

Misspellings

• “Luxury” (as “Luxuy”, in large type on page 58)
• “Remembrance” (as in “Pearl Harbor Rememberance Day,” page 126)

Arguable misspelling

• “DAMMIT” (as “DAMNIT, page ??¹) 

Unexpected nonmisspelling

• “memento” (as “memento”, page ??²)

Clichés (and other embarrassments) up the wazoo

Witness this small (trust me) sample from the literal surfeit in “Crowd Control,” a single article by Scott Steinberg, CEO of the “high-tech consulting firm TechSavvy Global,” who limited research suggests speaks and writes thus prolifically.³ The Spirit article wasn’t intended as humor or parody.

• “bet the farm”
• “field day”
• “trust me”
• “au contraire”
• “dress for success”
• “won’t be a cakewalk”
• “make no mistake”
• “weeding out the winners” [My personal favorite. –SK]
• No matter how unique the idea, we’ll dress it for success.”
• Even crappy concepts generate helpful response and criticism.”

Other funnies

I didn’t note the sources or page numbers of these other Spirit gems.

• “(Though the Baltimore monument [to George Washington] is almost 400-feet shorter than the Washington monument in D.C., it’s actually 56 years older.)”
• “reams of red tape” [A close second. –SK]
• “When I watch Dr. Stern practice medicine, I am struck by how little it is like those medical shows on television. She doesn’t rush around with heart paddles and needles.”

¹ Despite the appearance of the jump line “Continued on page 108” on page 99, a dozen or so unnumbered pages (presumably including page 108) immediately and consecutively followed the page bearing the number 101. The first numbered page thereafter bore page number 114. “Page ??” refers to one of these unnumbered pages, though not always the same one.

² See previous footnote.

³ The quoted description of TechSavvy Global was copied from something on the internet. TechSavvy Global’s actual website rather roundly and soundly belies the description. (Remarkably, even the blue underlined email address on the home page is not a link.)

Last night, as a few of us not backing up Ray Davies in Philadelphia gathered for dinner in Hoboken, I spotted this holiday mispostrophe (ssp. dyspostrophe).

It probably wasn’t intentional on Trader Joe’s’s part, but the mispostrophe distracted me from the numbers on the box — especially 24 and 50. But only briefly; the pressing question quickly loomed.

If 24 Milk Chocolates weigh 50 grams altogether, aren’t they too small?

The appropriate comparison was obvious: M&M’s®. Little did I suspect it would be something of a challenge to find out the true weight of one regular M&M.

Disregarding outliers like “I think it is about 15g; 15 grams is perhaps the answer,” answers on the web (to the question of an M&M’s weight) generally fell into two camps. There was a handful of a-bit-less-than-a-gram answers, like “There are about 500 Plain M&M’s per pound,” and there was also a handful of around-2-grams answers, like “After an experiment, of weighing M&M’s, here were the results. 1) 2.208 g 2) 1.882 g 3) 1.904 g 4) 2.438 g.”

After considerable “research,” but no direct measurement, I’m swayed, not by any attestations of milligram precision, but by the preponderance of evidence [and 1] that one regular M&M weighs a bit less than a gram. Which conclusion is consistent with my personal experiences as a candy sorter (when I can find an uncluttered flat surface, which isn’t very often).

From the web’s many M&M Q&A (or should I say Q&“A”?) a few examples:

• Q: What is the weight of one M-and-M candy? [link]
  A: I think it is about 15g; 15 grams is perhaps the answer
   
• Q: How much does an M and M weigh? [link]
  A: When we counted the number of M&M’s in a 12.6oz bag, we got 404, which means there are 32.06 M&M’s/oz, which means that each M&M weighs 1.13 grams. [SK: If you divide backwardsly, perhaps. Otherwise, each M&M weighs (on average) about 0.88 grams.]
   
• Q: How many m&m’s do you reckon are in 7oz? I’m ordering custom m&ms, and they come in 7oz bags. I need about 1000 m&ms, total. how many bags should I order? [link]
  A1: [Best Answer] 10 bags, maybe around 75 or 100 in each bag. [SK: Better safe than sorry.]
  A2: 2 or 3.
   
• Q: How much does a single plain m&m weigh? [link]
  A: After an experiment, of weighing M&M’s, here were the results. 1) 2.208 g 2) 1.882 g 3) 1.904 g 4) 2.438 g.

As for the pressing question, I’ll cautiously answer it “No” and hope Toby and Theo agree. Two or three M&M’s-worth of chocolate every day for most of a month — for those endless days, those sacred days, believe me — is not so bad. Despite anyone’s opinion that one serving of M&Ms comprises 208 grams (and 1023 calories).

Today’s word of the day is surmisery.

sur·mis·er·y / ˈsɚːˈmɪzăɹi/

noun 
Misery (the surmiser’s) arising from a surmisal.

Origin
2010: intentional coinage by Steve Kass (http://www.stevekass.com), portmanteau of surmise and misery.

† I (†) am a dagger (pl. daggers, Fr., obèle). I am a good friend of the asterisk; in fact, my alternate English name, obelisk, rhymes with asterisk. Respect my friend. My homograph is a weapon used for hitting, stabbing or thrusting.

* I (*) am an asterisk (pl. asterisks, Fr., astérisque). I rhyme with obelisk, not Vercingetorix or candlestick. I am not an asterick. Please, folks. This is who I am. Respect me.

Roundup from the October Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine.

Misspellings

• “Give” (as “Hive”, page 40)
• “learn” (as “lea040n”, page 40)
• “green” (as “gree”, page 95)
• “quinceañera” (as “quinciñera”, page 97, in Neal Pollack’s quite awful short story Down with Ice Cream!

Unexpected nonmisspelling

• “minuscule” (as “minuscule”, page 93)

At which point I went back to reading the Holiday 2010 issue of Sky Mall.

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum relates his discovery of “the neolexeme embiggen in a perfectly serious Economist report about Ascension Island.” Should embiggen, um, embiggen its foothold in the English language, its coiner, The Simpsons writer Dan Greavey, might enter into “the very select club of people who invented words that [like cromulent, grok, and Pullum’s own eggcorn] make it into major dictionaries.” (Here, major apparently means at least somewhat more exclusive than Wiktionary.)

Unfortunately, none of the words I’ve coined or threatened to coin, like headlinic, toddfoolery, pastametric, mispostrophe, maniest, alsowise, sicize, vulpigeration, and interludinous, have made it even so far as Wiktionary, my having modestly forborne the public onanism of adding them myself. Still, I do hope to join the club some day.