I’m now writing a series of grammar articles for The Saturday Evening Post. It makes me feel old when my friends under 60 ask me, “What city is that newspaper published in?” If you younger readers of this column don’t get the point of my lament, ask your chronologically endowed family and friends. They’ll tell you about the beloved Norman Rockwell covers and a luminous and patriotic chronicle of our great nation. And, like yours truly, it still has a pulse.
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February comes in a week and is the perfect month to point out how often we drop an r from the middle of a word. While some dictionaries accept “Feb-yoo-ary” as a standard pronunciation, I urge you, gentle readers, to reflect the spelling of the word and to sound it as “Feb-roo-ary.” Please don’t come foward and mispronounce the likes of the San Bernadino liberry. There is no foe in forward and no berry in library, and you have to wonder why we pronounce both r’s in the second word of Rancho Bernardo, but only the first r in the second word of San Bernardino.
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Two columns ago, I lamented the dearth of verbal skills in America. Leave it to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon to put a humorous spin on the situation. Fallon quips that, on the bright side, the students are too bad at math to realize how sad the situation is.
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In 2012, the Boston Red Sox suffered an embarrassing 69-93 season, and in 2013, the team was rocked by the Boston Marathon bombing. But the outlook gradually brightened, and a grand slam home run by right fielder Shane Victorino in the ALCS propelled the Sox into the World Series, which they won in six games.
When asked what that blast meant to him, Victorino replied, “rejubilation!” — a perfect, albeit inadvertent, blend of jubilation and rejuvenation.
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The bitter cold temperatures that engulfed most of the United States this past week often evoked the word arctic, as in arctic cold and arctic vortex. Did you notice that many broadcasters dropped the first c in arctic?
In Hell, Michigan, the temperature plummeted to -17 degrees — so, literally, Hell froze over.
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In my last column of 2013, I sang of Charles Dickens, whose stories were read by a greater percentage of the literate English-speaking public than those of any other author ever. One signature of Dickens’ quotable style is his memorable opening sentences. Identify the Dickensian works that are launched by each of the following “button-holers”:
1) “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
2) “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”
3) “Marley was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt about that.”
4) “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages will show.”
5) “Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse.”
Answers: 1) A Tale of Two Cities 2) Great Expectations 3) A Christmas Carol 4) David Copperfield 5) Oliver Twist
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com