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Front Page: Big thinks

Editorial Assistance
Help with Word


Colon and semicolon


Word into HTML


Word abuse


House giveaway


False dignity

Some writers may impress themselves by using big words they don’t understand. Utilize may sound more impressive than use (but has a specific meaning of its own). Comprise is not the same as compose; a nation-state isn’t merely a sovereign country; coalesce isn’t transitive (things coalesce, people don’t coalesce things). (See “Technically Incorrect” for a further discussion of misused words.) When you read misused big words, you can almost hear the writers asking, like the animals on Doctor Moreau’s island, “Are we not men?”

Words Into Type (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974) offers an antidote: a list of “Words Likely to Be Misused or Confused.”

In his book Doublespeak (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), William Lutz described related kinds of Big Thinks: “gobbledygook or bureaucratese … a matter of piling on words, of overwhelming the audience” or “inflated language that is designed to make the ordinary seem extraordinary.” This is language that is meant to impress, and specifically to deceive, the reader.

Aside from writers who deceive themselves, readers are usually the victims of Big Thinks. As William Safire wrote in his book In Love With Norma Loquendi (New York: Random House, 1994), “Meanings can be assigned to words to suit the speaker, corrupting communication and derailing intelligent discourse.”

One job description stated, “Demonstrates technical achievement at the highest Government and corporate levels”: in plain English, does that mean “Must be president”? Or would head of the judiciary or legislative branches also be considered the highest Government levels? Such overblown prose corrupts and derails intelligent discourse.

Jargon, said Lutz, can be “pretentious, obscure, and esoteric terminology used to give an air of profundity”; he cited invented words such as concretization and preboarding as well as usually superfluous (and therefore meaningless) words such as process and initiative (nowadays redundantly expressed as new initiative).

Safire, in Coming to Terms (New York: Doubleday, 1994), cited preplanning as another word invented without a need for it to fill.

When writing and editing, let our first concern be the reader. Let’s not try to impress anyone, least of all ourselves. Instead of engaging in Big Thinks, let’s pursue the goal of “plain and comprehensible” communication.

Invented by Accident

cattlelab the secret government laboratory responsible for mutilating cattle, which has been blamed on aliens

deadling an article sent in that we really don’t want to run (see kindling for suggested uses)

footmotes tiny notes at the bottom of a page that seem to multiply as you read them

distinguised secretly distinguished

intension an anxiety-ridden decision

lamblasted attacked by a meek-looking person, usually by surprise

Missle East a land of perpetual conflict

miximum right in the middle

seemless apparently not

simplifiction fiction for dummies—“It’s not real, so who cares if it’s wrong!”

In some ways, Word is very good—its numerous tools, such as the dictionaries, symbol libraries, alphabetical sorting, and generation of tables of contents. In other areas, it doesn’t perform well—the grammar checker, layouts with pictures or columns, and inconsistent text flow from one printer to another. Other aspects of Word can have you pulling your hair out— page numbering, section breaks, automatic numbered lists.

Whether you’re new to Word or you’ve been working with it for years, there will probably be days when you scream for help. Fortunately, help is available, in the form of tutorials, newsletters, and personal assistance.

A Google search turned up 129,000 results for “Microsoft Word tutorials.” For example, the University of Alberta, Penn State, and the University of North Carolina have online tutorials. The University of North Carolina site lets you choose a tutorial based on your level of experience.

For help with specific Word problems, Microsoft has “Word help articles.” Another useful resource is the weekly WordTips e-mail newsletter. Visit the website or request a sample. Also be sure to see the Microsoft Word “Most Valuable Professional” Frequently Asked Questions Site.

When you can’t find the answer to your problem using one of these resources, try allexperts.com. The level of free, personal service is astounding.

—Edwin Newman, A Civil Tongue (Warner Books, 1976)

Colon and semicolon

Colons are often used to introduce lists, but only if the colon follows a complete sentence. “I like dessert: cakes, pies, cookies, ice cream—anything sweet.” But “I like dessert, such as” is not a complete sentence, so there should be no colon in “I like dessert, such as: cakes, pies, cookies, ice cream—anything sweet.”

Nor should a colon separate a verb from its object. “I like: dessert” is wrong. Adding a long list after dessert wouldn’t make it right.

Colons are also used after formal salutations in a letter. “Dear friend of the cows:” Another use for colons is to separate hours from minutes (“Let’s stop work at 3:30 today”), chapter from verse in scripture citations (“Luke 12:18”), numerals in a ratio (“2:1”), or city from publisher in a bibliographical citation (“Boston: Little, Brown”).

Colons may be used to join two clauses or sentences when one follows from the other. “She wouldn’t eat the cake: she’s allergic to chocolate.” That’s where the duties of colons overlap with those of semicolons. That sentence could have a semicolon instead; the colon is a slightly better choice because it indicates that the thoughts are not just parallel but closely related. Separating independent clauses is the main job of semicolons. Their other job is to separate groups that have items separated by commas, such as lists of cities and states. The following series is hard to understand with only commas: “West New York, NJ, New York, NY, and East New York, NY, are within twenty miles of each other.” Semicolons break up the units that are themselves divided by commas: “West New York, NJ; New York, NY; and East New York, NY; are within twenty miles of each other.”

Finally, colons and semicolons next to quotation marks and parentheses go outside those punctuation marks. We heard them perform last night (in a recital): he played “Moonlight Sonata”; she performed “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Word into HTML

Or so I thought. Until I posted my first web pages and some of the pictures didn’t display correctly and some of the links, especially bookmarks, didn’t work. It turned out that Word had put needlessly long paths in some of the links, specifying, for example, the hard drive and folder, which didn’t exist on the web server. I had to open the HTML file and edit some of the links manually to make them work. That satisfied me for a while.

Then I found that the HTML files created by Word were loaded with a lot of superfluous coding. If you want a page that loads quickly and is easy to troubleshoot, this matters.

So I started writing more HTML coding myself, and, in this, Word can still be a help. I can write an article in Word and apply formatting such as italics. This way I can use the spellchecker and all Word’s other features until I’m done writing and editing. Then I put in the i and /i commands around the italics, add heading tags, change the em dashes to the HTML code, and so on. I use Word’s Edit, Replace feature to find em dashes, for example, and replace them with the HTML code. Then I save the whole thing as plain text.

I ended up redoing my personal web pages this way because the files came out about 80 percent smaller. One of my teenage daughters, who has caught up to and passed me in knowledge of HTML, asked me, “Why didn’t you just write them in HTML in the first place?” Because a year ago I didn’t know any HTML. I’m still learning.

—Steve Dunham

Word abuse

actionable means “inviting a lawsuit” but in some circles is acquiring a secondary meeting of “useful”; considering the word’s primary meaning, it is folly to say that you produce actionable recommendations

both not every pair of words needs to be emphasized with this word: “We produced both classified and unclassified versions” could do without both

coalesce means “come together”; you don’t coalesce things

comprise means “be made up of” —a state comprises counties, cities, and towns; but comprise sounds so sophisticated compared to compose that it gets forced in where it doesn’t belong

emulate means “do at least as well as” but imitate, the word that is more likely appropriate, doesn’t sound nearly as impressive

respective “The adjutant generals report to their respective governors”—well, of course they report to their own governors

utilize means “find a use for”; if it refers to something that is not used to full potential, fine—otherwise it could be insulting

“Larry’s Homes. Free haunted house”

—roadside sign in Spotsylvania, VA, October 1996.

For more about this sign, see “My Haunted House” at “Steve Dunham’s Trains of Thought.”