In an op-ed recently published by The New York Times, Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, acknowledges that “[b]y withholding bonuses from their top executives, Goldman Sachs and UBS may soften negative reaction from Congress and the public if their earnings reports in December are poor” but wonders “will they also suffer because their executives, lacking the motivation that big bonuses are thought to provide, will not do their jobs well? To find out, he and three colleagues conduct an experiment in which the participants were divided into three groups and found that those “offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses” and that “the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.”  

 

When Ariely presented his findings to banking executives “they assured me that their own work and that of their employees would not follow this pattern” and “weren’t that interested” in participating in another experiment to find out whether “a multimillion-dollar compensation package could … be counterproductive.”

 

Reader Jeff Nathan from Highland Park, IL, suggests that these Masters of the Universe get incentivized by the “real-life bonus system” under which the rest of us mere mortals work: “If you do your job well, your bonus is that you keep your job. If you muddle through your tasks, your bonus is that you get demoted. If you do your job poorly, your bonus is that you are shown the door.”

 

 

Well-Chosen Words: Part VI

 

Words – grammar and spelling, too - that have popped up news reports and op-eds, that The Stiletto didn’t get around pulling together into a round-up until just now because of the crush of events during the run-up to, and aftermath of, the election (another one of these round-ups and she’ll be all caught up):  

 

† MediaPost’s Robert Passikoff reports that “[a]fter nearly three decades in mothballs, and more than $451 million in brand advertising in 2007, Citigroup is resurrecting the theme 'The Citi Never Sleeps,' the campaign that was used to usher in the original ATM and 24-hour banking.”

 

Given the bank’s $20 billion in losses, which necessitated a government bailout, somebody at Citi was snoozing while the rest of us were losing. Passikoff notes that “[f]inancial experts have suggested that it would not be surprising to see a public backlash emerge over the rescue plan, specifically in requiring neither a change in top management nor the sale of parts of the bank and for privatizing profits made from the bank's high-risk bets, but placing losses on the taxpayers' shoulders.”

 

† After winning a jury verdict of $150,000 in civil rights suit McKenna v. City of Philadelphia attorney Brian M. Puricelli filed a petition for more than $180,000 in attorney fees for himself and co-counsel Theodore M. Kravitz that contained so many typos Senior U.S. District Judge J. William Ditter Jr., was driven to use “the first three pages of his opinion in just describing the errors, adding "[sic]" after each one, and ultimately slashed the fees to about $26,000.,” reports The Legal Intelligencer:

 

Among the many misspellings flagged by Ditter were "plaintf," "Philadehia," "attoreys," "reasonbale" and "Ubited States." Puricelli also wrote the phrase "mocong papers" where he clearly intended to write "moving papers." …

 

And in the proposed order attached to the motion, Puricelli had evidently cut and pasted from a document in a different case without changing the defendants' names or the dollar figures, leading Ditter to say, "It is suggested that I sign an order which recites the wrong amount of McKenna's judgment and orders three strangers to this action to pay attorneys' fees and costs."

 

Ditter also noted that Puricelli had misidentified one of the defendants, Andrew Jericho, as "Richard Jericho," and, in the next paragraph, as "Ritchard Jericho."

 

A subsequent paragraph in Puricelli's motion changed the name again, Ditter noted, so that “instead of calling Andrew Jericho 'Richard' or ‘Ritchard,' names him ‘Anthony.’”

 

Believe it or not, this was not the first time a judge cut Puricelli’s fees because of a slapdash court pleading.

† Gregory Bergman, associate editor of Equities Magazine, pulled together a compendium of business jargon, “BizzWords,” which he describes as the “emerging vocabulary” of “some of the newest, hippest, and most important … terms used in corporate America today” that will make you “sound like a business big shot.” Like what? Brightsizing (“downsizing by laying off the brightest workers”; chainsaw consultant (“an outside consultant brought in to fire employees”); mucus trooper (“an employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work") and prairie-dogging (“the sudden appearance of people's heads over the top of the cubicle”).

 

Speaking of business jargon, MediaPost recently asked: “When Exactly, Did Toxic Debt Become Troubled Assets?,” noting that “toxic debt … has been repackaged by politicians as ‘troubled assets’ … proving, if nothing else, that words matter.”

 

† In what was introduced as the “first in an occasional series of rants about dining out,” Washington Post writer Jane Black confessed that she has an otherworldly ability to spot typos in restaurant menus and she dreams of ridding the culinary world of this scourge as “Correct-a-girl”:

In my fantasy, I enter a restaurant, order and sweetly ask the waiter if I can "hold on to the menu" during dinner. Then, using a distinctive purple pen, I discreetly copy-edit the descriptions of the dishes.

 

Caesar, not "caeser." Shiitake, not "shitake." Riesling, not "reisling" (though I'd quietly applaud restaurants that spell it wrong as long as the misspelling was consistent.)

 

"Who was that anonymous proofreader?" chefs would whisper to one another. Correct-a-girl strikes again! Eliminating menu mistakes, one restaurant at a time.

 

Given the state of the world, I know this fantasy is a bit of an embarrassment. Even in restaurants, there are far greater calamities than the occasional menu mistake. …

 

I don't expect chefs to be writers, just as they don't expect me to make my own puff pastry. But given the existence of spell-checkers (the writing equivalent of frozen puff pastry dough), the number of errors is surprising.

 

Black’s fantasy is being lived out by Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, MA, and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, VA, two self-appointed “grammar vigilantes … who toured the nation removing typos from public signs,” reports The Arizona Republic. But their persnicketiness got them banned from national parks and a year's probation after they “corrected” (the government says “vandalized”) a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park:

 

According to court records, Deck and Herson toured the United States from March to May, wiping out errors on government and private signs. On March 28, while at Desert View Watchtower on the South Rim, they used a white-out product and a permanent marker to deface a sign painted more than 60 years ago by artist Mary Colter. The sign, a National Historic Landmark, was considered unique and irreplaceable, according to Sandy Raynor, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix. …

 

An affidavit by National Park Service agent Christopher A. Smith says investigators learned of the vandalism from an Internet site operated by Deck on behalf of the Typo Eradication Advancement League, or TEAL. Smith identified four members, but only Deck and Herson faced charges.

 

According to the Internet posting, TEAL members agreed to “stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language.”

 

† Responding to a reader’s question, New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott explained the use of the “minced oath” when cussing isn’t allowed, as in substituting “asshat” in place of its sound-alike insult on TV:

 

[A]n expression based on a profanity that has been changed to reduce its potential offensiveness. Examples include gosh, darn and “Godfrey Daniel,” the W. C. Fields coinage, as well as blimey, which was a minced oath for “May God blind me,” and dork, which seems to be a substitute for the same word that “dill” substitutes for in “dill weed.”

 

The mincing of oaths in the mainstream media has even inspired the creation of a word, bleep, which can be a noun or a verb or even an adjective.

 

† Washington Post writer Linton Weeks fretted that “abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging” may signal “the impending death of the English sentence”:

 

Librarian of Congress James Billington, for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness," he says, and the demise of the basic component of human communication: the sentence.

 

This assault on the lowly - and mighty - sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.

 

He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects, there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action. Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.

 

Plus, simple sentences clarify complex situations. ("Jesus wept.") …

 

The Internet revolution, Billington says, creates new possibilities for people to be in touch with others, but it could also lead to a gobbledygook language without sentences and punctuation and paragraphs - and with less understanding of the world and its meaning.

 

"We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers," he says. "Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking."

 

Pondering flat or falling on standardized reading test scores over the past few years, the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association are among those who fear that “the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading - diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books,” reports The New York Times. Not everyone agrees:

 

[O]thers say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write. …

 

[T]he Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write. …

 

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text. …

 

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

 

Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University (Buckinghamshire, England) seems willing to cede the argument, rather than to fight to teach – and preserve for succeeding generations - standardized grammar and spelling, reports Reuters:

 

Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

 

Instead of correcting the same spelling errors year in, year out, professors “should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell,” he tells the wire service:

 

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

 

Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient," a commonly used variant of "variant."

 

And that doesn't even begin to delve into all the problems English people have with words that use the letters "i" and "e" together, like weird, seize, leisure, foreign and neighbor.

 

The rhyme "i before e except after c" may be on the lips of every schoolchild in Britain, but that doesn't mean they remember the rule by the time they get to university.

 

Of course, such proposals have been made in the past. The advent of text messaging turned many students into spelling neanderthals as phrases such as "wot r u doin 2nite?" became socially, if not academically, acceptable.

 

But one of the fastest texters in the U.S., 14-year-old William Glass III refuses to sacrifice precision for speed, and “sends text messages with … Properly spelled words. Correct punctuation. Precise capitalization. Lengthy paragraphs. No shortened words,” reports the WaPo. Glass texted reporter Jenna Johnson: “I guess I just never started using the abbreviations, so I'm used to typing things out. Also, everyone understands words, but everyone might not understand the abbreviations.”

 

Glass, an honors student at Leonardtown High School in Great Mills, MD, was one of eight regional finalists in the 2008 LG National Texting Championship and won $800, “which he plans to spend on a new iPod and back-to-school clothes.”

 

To read other posts in the “Well-Chosen Words” series click here (fourth item), here (second item), here (last item), here (third item) and here (third item).

 

 

Is Disney Doing The Devil’s Work?

Just a couple of months after a prominent Muslim imam issued a fatwa calling for the death of Mickey Mouse, because mice are Satan’s foot soldiers (second item), “Christopher Jamison, the Abbot of Worth in West Sussex, has accused the corporation of 'exploiting spirituality' to sell its products and of turning Disneyland into a modern day pilgrimage site,” reports The Telegraph (London): 

In a guide to helping people find happiness, the abbot, who starred in the hit-BBC series The Monastery, warns that society is in danger of losing its soul because of growing consumerism and the decline of religion. …

 

While he acknowledges that Disney stories carry messages showing good triumphing over evil, he argues this is part of a ploy to persuade people that they should buy Disney products in order to be "a good and happy family".

 

He cites films such as Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians that feature moral battles, but get into children's imaginations and make them greedy for the merchandise that goes with them.

 

"The message behind every movie and book, behind every theme park and T-shirt is that our children's world needs Disney," he says. …

 

"Where once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products."

 

Editorial Note: The Stiletto has given her nieces and nephews DVDs of their favorite Disney films, but drew the line at Disney clothing, sheets or other merchandize tied to the release of a movie.