Posts by Dr. Boli
THE SINGULAR ASPECT.
In celebration of his sixth anniversary on the World-Wide Web, Dr. Boli presents (once again) the first story he ever published in electrical form.
—
A MAN WALKED into Abelard’s office the other day and announced that he had a singular case. Our morning had begun with tea, as usual, but I had hardly poured the first cup when the office door opened and the man with the singular case walked in.
It is well known by now that Magnus Abelard deals only with singular cases, so everyone who walks through the door announces that he has a singular case. Nevertheless, the door is, by Abelard’s explicit command, never locked; and this case really did turn out to be singular. I have taken the trouble, therefore, to record it among Abelard’s most remarkable achievements, in the hope that the record will serve as an imperishable monument to Abelard’s genius.
We began with the usual formalities. I informed our visitor that he would have ten minutes to convince Abelard of the singularity of his case. I also explained the payment schedule in the unlikely event that Abelard did pronounce his case singular. Abelard did not speak during the proceedings; he never does speak until some singular aspect of the case has caught his attention.
“Mine is a singular case,” the visitor began as I took notes. “Indeed, it is so singular that I have not spoken with anyone about it until now. I have lived for ten years in fear for my life—a fear all the worse for being secret. I have not dared reveal it to anyone, and yet it eats at me, day after day, hour after hour, like a kind of parasitic creature that gnaws but cannot consume.”
“You have nine and a half minutes,” I reminded him.
“Ten years ago, my wife, to whom I had been married only a month, announced that she had a few purchases to make, and declared her intention to walk to the drug store on Murray Avenue. She would be gone for about an hour, she said. I bid her farewell; she walked out the door; and that, Mr. Abelard, was the last time I ever saw her.
“I shall not weary you with the details of my inquiries. Over the years, I have found opportunities to interrogate our neighbors and the clerks at the drug store. From their statements, I have discovered that my wife did indeed reach the drug store; that she left and turned right on Murray Avenue; that she was last seen walking on Phillips, the very street on which we lived, in the direction of our house. But she never arrived.”
Here the visitor stopped; and, as Abelard was still silent, I knew the narration had not interested him enough for him to take the case. It was therefore incumbent upon me to disappoint our visitor.
“Disappearances such as the one you describe,” I told him, “while exceedingly regrettable, are not extraordinarily uncommon. Perhaps the city police, or a less specialized private agency, might be able to render you some assistance.”
Our visitor sat back in his chair and sighed. “I have not yet revealed to you,” he said slowly and quietly, “the singular aspect of the case.”
Abelard leaned forward. This statement had at least caught his attention.
The visitor took a deep breath, appeared to think for a moment, and then continued, picking his words with care and deliberation.
“About an hour after my wife left, a woman entered my house by the front door. She entered boldly—as if she owned the place, you might say. Now here is the singular and remarkable thing: in every particular, this woman was the exact image of my missing wife. Even her clothes were the same as the ones my wife had been wearing when she left. She proceeded to make herself quite at home; she treated me as though she were actually my wife.”
Here the visitor leaned forward and lowered his voice about a fifth. “For ten years, Mr. Abelard, that woman has inhabited my house, living in every respect as though she were my wife. For ten long years, I have lived in fear, utterly convinced that this woman in my house is somehow deeply involved in the mystery, and afraid even to sleep at night—afraid I might fall prey to the same sinister forces that took my beloved wife from me. The fear is tearing at my soul, sir, and I have at last resolved that, whatever the cost to myself, I must unravel this mystery.”
A moment of silence followed; then Abelard spoke for the first time.
“And how exactly was it that you knew this woman was not really your wife, returned from her shopping trip?”
The visitor started forward; then he sank slowly back in his chair, staring straight ahead.
“Good lord,” he whispered hoarsely.
Abelard observed him closely.
“Good lord,” the visitor said again, somewhat louder this time. “I never thought of that.”
He sat upright in his chair with a new air of confidence. “Well, sir, you certainly have earned your reputation. I never would have imagined that a mystery of such devilish complexity could be unraveled in such a short time. I shall certainly be recommending your agency. You may expect a check from me in the morning, although you must be aware that no remuneration could ever express my profound gratitude. I bid you good day, and once again I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Abelard watched him walk out of the office with a jaunty confidence that had been completely foreign to him only minutes before.
For some time after, Abelard was silent, as though lost in thought. At last he turned to address me.
“Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to reconsider the idea of locking the door.”
IN THE NEWS.
State Representative Albert Cardoon has announced that he is leaving the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to work in the private sector. According to his publicity agency, Mr. Cardoon has accepted a position at Representix, a firm that provides outsourced legislative services to state governments. Representix has already taken over legislative functions in Delaware and Wyoming, and is currently in talks with Governor Corbett aimed at replacing the General Assembly with a cheaper and more responsive private alternative.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
DESDEMONA’S SONG, RECONSTRUCTED BY EMINENT SCHOLARS.
The poor sap sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
With the sketchiest knowledge of Gray’s Botanee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by him, and said, “’Tis a plane,”
Sing willow, willow, willow,
“Platanus in Latin”—but spoke all in vain;
Sing willow, willow, willow;
Sing all those dang trees look like willows to me.
POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR,
By Dr. Ambrose Hinge, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor of History at Duck Hollow University.
—
Misunderstandings and misconceptions are distressingly prevalent in discussions of the Civil War. I have been given space only to clear up a few of them, but my upcoming book, The “Civil” War Was Really Quite Rude, is recommended to any readers who wish to delve further into this dark period in our history.
Misconception: The Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
Fact: The governments of the seceding states, which fired the first shots in the conflict, explicitly intended to prevent the slaves from being freed. This is a matter of public record.
Misconception: The Southerners fought to protect states’ rights.
Fact: The Southerners’ most frequent accusation against the North was that individual Northern states had passed laws that prevented the effective enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
Misconception: The Civil War was very romantic.
Fact: It has been historically documented that, far from being the stuff of romance, the Civil War was dirty and dangerous, and several people were actually hurt.
Misconception: The Civil War was unavoidable in the conditions of the time.
Fact: It has been conclusively demonstrated that both sides could have avoided the war altogether by not shooting at each other.
Misconception: Brother fought brother on the battlefields of the Civil War.
Fact: In fewer than 0.1% of cases were siblings divided in their allegiance, making it statistically very improbable that one brother would encounter another fighting on the opposite side in any given battle.
Misconception: Southerners fought for a worthy and noble “Lost Cause.”
Fact: The so-called “Lost Cause” was actually found under Jefferson Davis’ desk when Union troops entered Richmond in 1865. He had been using it to prop up one of the legs. It had therefore never really been lost at all.
Misconception: The Civil War succeeded in freeing the slaves.
Fact: Most adult Americans spend eight or more hours a day at the mercy of the arbitrary whims of an employer.
IN THE NEWS.
Controversy erupted yesterday at a local elementary school when a parent complained that his daughter’s answer had unfairly been marked wrong on a third-grade arithmetic test. Ms. Regina Denary, a teacher at Blandville Elementary School in Blandville, gave a grade of 90% to a pupil identified by the school administration as “Student X,” claiming that the pupil’s answer of 37 to the problem of 12 × 8 was “wrong.” The father, identified as “Mr. X,” complained to the school administration that Ms. Denary had established a regime of totalitarian microfascist Orwellian hegemony that stigmatized students with “deviant” ideas by insisting on a univocal “truth” that denies the irreducibly individual experience of the student. The school administration upheld the complaint, and Ms. Denary was reprimanded and ordered to “teach the controversy.”
THE SPELLING BOOK: DR. BOLI’S OWN LIST.
Several amusing answers came in when we asked readers to pick the words on the page above that would not appear in an elementary-school spelling book today. (Do children learn to spell in elementary school today? Dr. Boli has not been in elementary school for some time, so he is perhaps ignorant of current educational theory.)
For what it may be worth, this is Dr. Boli’s own list, along with his explanation of why he thinks each word would be excluded from current spelling books:
Fag, because children use that word all day and teachers are sick of hearing it.
Cag, which turns out to be an obsolete variant of keg.
Hag, because we prefer not to teach our children more colorful insults for their teachers than the ones they already know.
Wen, because the proofreaders would assume it was a misspelling for when.
Cit, an insulting term used of townsmen by country people; no longer heard now that everyone lives in the suburbs.
Wit: an obsolete term.
Wed: obsolete, because our aversion to monosyllabic language has caused it to be replaced in all usages by marry, although we still happily use the form wedding, which has two syllables.
Fop: obsolete, because for the past two hundred years (with a brief interruption in the age of Oscar Wilde) men have not cared enough about clothes to be fops.
Milt, because children might ask what it means and have to be told to shut up.
Gilt, because a proofreader would correct it to guilt.
Smut, because the metaphorical use has entirely replaced the literal.
Slut, because the meaning has shifted subtly over the years.
Chub, because it would be taken for the insult rather than the fish.
Flog and drub, because teachers are no longer allowed to do those things to children and do not wish to be reminded of the fact.
Some of the obsolete terms, such as wed, are kept tenuously alive by journalism-school graduates who, rather than use the same word twice in an article, will ransack the thesaurus for synonyms. But these words would almost certainly be excluded from a children’s spelling book.
There are also many other terms that are unlikely to appear because they are seldom used today: shad, drab (which has been almost entirely replaced by the real-estate agent’s term neutral decor), jilt, and brad, for example. But these words would probably raise no serious objections if they did appear.
The book, by the way is Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, the ninetieth edition (Webster spells that “nintieth”), published in 1816.
ONE MORE SPELLING GAME.
A few articles ago, Dr. Boli used this page from an early-nineteenth-century spelling book merely to illustrate the idea of “spelling.” Now here is one more spelling-related game: How many words can you find on this page that certainly would not be in an elementary-school spelling book today? Dr. Boli will start the game by picking two words: “cit,” because it is almost never used anymore, and “slut,” because it is used entirely too often.
MORE FUN WITH MISSPELLED WORDS.
What fun we have had with spelling! The correspondence is rolling in thick and fast with even more candidates for “most misspelled word.”
“Rabe” suggests “‘affect’ and ‘effect’? But I don’t know how to ask for it.”
The answer, of course, is that you ask politely. Then you think of a way to outwit Google. Dr. Boli tried an experiment:
“does not effect”: About 37,200,000 results
“does not affect”: About 511,000,000 results
This search is not perfect: effect is a perfectly legitimate verb (“I hope to effect some change in their behavior”), but rarely used. In this case, however, the inaccuracy is irrelevant. Even assuming that every use of “does not effect” is wrong, you’re, definitely, and led still beat “affect” in our ranking.
Except for a grammar site explaining the difference between “affect” and “effect,” the top-ranked site for “does not effect” was the Facebook page “Chewing gum does not effect my learning at school,” whose “about” page elaborates: “You don’t need to be a genius to know that chewing gum does not effect your learning at school.” Dr. Boli has a snippet of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. (Unless, of course, the writer meant “effect” in the perfectly correct sense of “bring about,” in which case, brava, anonymous young woman on Facebook! You are indeed correct in saying that chewing gum does not cause learning to happen.)
If you’d like to have some fun in the other direction, try “has no affect.”
Jared writes: “Incredibly, hors d’oeuvre is spelled appetizer nearly three quarters of the time.” To which Horace Jeffrey Hodges adds: “And the Germans usually misspell ‘hors d’oeuvre’ as ‘Vorspeise’!
Dr. Boli might add that the Italians leap into the melee with antipasto, which gives us another category of misspelling to deal with: foreign terms commonly used in English. Antipasto is very commonly spelled antipasta in Pittsburgh Italian restaurants. When pasta meets antipasta, is the result an earth-shattering kaboom? Evidently not.
Also in the category of foreign terms often misspelled: the abbreviation etc., which is often spelled ect. and pronounced “eck cetera.”
Meanwhile, Greybeard asks, “What about differences in regional dialects? While I currently live on this side of the pond, I used to live on that side of the pond. Even though I no longer live on that side of the pond, I frequently colour my speech by adding a ‘u’ to certain words just for the humourous effect.”
We must obviously make a distinction between misspellings and legitimate alternate forms. It might be possible to argue that colour is a misspelling if the writer is not consistent in applying the same rule to humour, honour, rumour, and so on, but it would not be worth the trouble. There are also certain words that are variable even in American usage: gray and grey, for example, or judgment and judgement, where one form is more common but both are correct. (The computer spelling-checker is rapidly propagating the notion that there can be only one legitimate spelling of any word, and it is likely that the less-used alternatives will be considered as un-American as “colour” within a generation.)
On the same subject, “creeper” picks “‘cancelled,’ hands down.” But here is another case of regional difference: “cancelled” is correct in most other English-speaking countries, but the most common American spelling is “canceled,” although the double L is also legitimate, as Merriam-Webster told us a hundred years ago: “Cancel v. i. [imp. & p. p. Canceled or Cancelled; p. pr. & vb. n. Canceling or Cancelling.]”
The question of regional dialects is an interesting one in the scientific study of misspelling. Misspellings often reflect pronunciation; and, as pronunciation varies, so must misspellings. In Pittsburgh, “the Galapagos Islands of American dialect” (as one national newspaper famously called it), there is a strong tendency to shorten long vowels, so that meal is indistinguishable from mill and sale hard to distinguish from sell. Thus we often see “FOR SELL” or “MUST SALE NOW” in classified ads—mistakes that would be simply baffling in an area where the distinction in pronunciation is strong.
“RKae” writes, “I would’ve guessed ‘its.’ (Or should I say, ‘would of’ guessed…?)”
“change it’s spots”: About 236,000 results
“change its spots”: About 2,380,000 results
The ratio here is almost exactly 1 to 10, which is (surprisingly) not nearly as high as your for you’re.
Dr. Boli tried an experiment in the other direction, but ran into a serious difficulty. Google searches URLs as well as text, and most software that automatically generates URLs from titles (such as the WordPress software Dr. Boli himself uses) strips the apostrophes. If you write an article called “It’s Not About the Money,” the WordPress-generated URL will include “its-not-about-the-money.” A majority of the top results for “its not about” were sites where the writer knew perfectly well how to spell it’s, but the URL stripped out the apostrophe. This observation also means that the number of correct spellings of its in “change its spots” may be slightly overestimated.
THE MOST MISSPELLED WORD, CONTINUED.
So far in our quest to find the most misspelled word in the English language, we have discovered that the question is even more difficult than we thought. We have to decide what counts as a misspelling (rather than a mistyping, as reader Martin the Mess reminds us), and what counts as a word. Assuming that contractions count as single words, our top candidate so far is “you’re,” which may be misspelled “your” about 15% of the time. But what about “you’re” for “your”? And “they’re,” their,” and “there”? “And “it’s” and “its”? Let us keep refining our methodology, and Dr. Boli will share some of his results in this space tomorrow.