In which I am baffled by a real estate listing

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Richard Bowker

A friend of mine is selling her house, so I took a look at the online listing. I didn’t get past the first two words before I stopped, baffled. The listing started off by describing the house as “deceivingly spacious.” What the heck did that mean?

I suppose the listing intended us to understand something like this: “You might think this house isn’t spacious, but you would be deceived. It really is spacious.” But is that correct usage (aside from questionable strategy of starting out a real estate description with the word “deceivingly”)?

I thought: presumably the listing broker came up with the phrase by some vague analogy with the idiom “deceptively simple.” OK, that’s reasonable. But then I realized I didn’t know what the heck “deceptively simple” means. Take this sentence:

Horowitz made playing the Chopin Ballade look deceptively simple.

That sounds like a reasonable usage; it suggests that playing the piece is in fact difficult. but Horowitz made it look easy. But this also sounds reasonable to me:

The problem seemed complicated, but its solution turned out to be deceptively simple.

It turns out that I am not alone in my confusion; deceptively is just hard to parse, and people tend to use it any way they want. This British site has a good discussion of the word and zeroes in on the specific usage in real estate:

Other meanings are harder to pin down. The estate agent’s favourite, “deceptively spacious” – does it mean a property which looks small from the street, or from photos, but is actually very large? Or does it – as Dogberry thinks – mean a property which is rather small, but gives the impression of being spacious through use of light and clever decorating? Either way, it means a property whose spaciousness is compromised in some way – not very desirable, but perhaps intriguing enough to persuade a buyer to set up a viewing.

Here’s another site, among many, where people tie themselves into knots trying to figure out what “deceptively simple” means.

I think the lesson here is to avoid deceptively or its evil cousin deceivingly if you want to be sure you’re understood. My friend is going to suggest that her listing be changed to “surprisingly spacious.” Works for me.

Rule 7: Learn all them grammer and spelling rules

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is some prose Ernest Hemingway scribbled on the envelope of a letter he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance? I dint put in about the good parts. You know how good they are. You’re write about the book of stories. I wanted to hold it for more. That last one I had in Cosmopolitan would have made it.

(The letter itself is wonderful, and you can read it here.)

I dint put in? You’re write? Of course, Fitzgerald was a notoriously bad speller himself.

If you are as good a writer as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, you can spell however you please. Why are you paying any attention to me? Go back to your novel! But if you’re not, do yourself a favor and learn how to spell. And learn the rules of grammar, even if you choose to break them. Clearly I’m still learning. But this stuff matters. The site I linked to above says of Hemingway:

Whenever his newspaper editors complained about [his poor spelling], he’d retort, “Well, that’s what you’re hired to correct!”

But editors aren’t doing that anymore! The editors didn’t pick up the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harvard English professor’s misspelling of “Ptolemy.” No one noticed the grammatical errors and the misspelling of “rarefied” in Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door. I was looking at the résumé for a technical editor a few months ago, and I noticed he had misspelled the name of the college from which he had graduated. “Rutgers” just isn’t that hard to get right! Even when their spelling is OK, some of these editors don’t seem to notice when they use the serial comma in one sentence and don’t use it in the next. Make up your minds already! Microsoft Word helps, but notice that its spellchecker wouldn’t have picked up “dint” or “write” in the Hemingway quote. (It did pick up “Rutgars” though — the “editor” didn’t even bother to spellcheck his own résumé!)

Writers are pretty much on their own nowadays, particularly if they are going the self-publishing route with ebooks. And that means it’s up to them to get the basics right. If they don’t bother, they better hope they are as talented as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

In which Microsoft Word proves that I’m a grammatical idiot

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Writers, of course, have styles; they use some words and grammatical constructions more than others. That’s why, for example, we can do acomputerized linguistic analysis of some text and demonstrate whether Shakespeare wrote it. Even I have a style! Replica (coming soon to an ebook store near you!) is littered with sentences like this one:

Hunt retreated a step, then attacked again.

In reviewing the Microsoft Word file for Replica with grammar-checking turned on, I noticed that Word took offense at the word then in sentences like this one. I appealed my case to the cold-eyed editors where I work, and they affirmed Word’s judgment: “Then” is an adverb, not a conjunction. Or at best, it’s a conjunctive adverb, or an adverbial conjunction, or some damn thing. At any rate, you can’t use the way I was using it. At best, you can say: “Hunt retreated a step; then, he attacked again.” Which is not the effect I wanted at all.

Here’s what one site says (referring to idiots like me derisively as “students”):

Too many students think that then works the same way [as a regular ol’ conjunction]: “Caesar invaded Gaul, then he turned his attention to England.” You can tell the difference between then and a coordinating conjunction by trying to move the word around in the sentence. We can write “he then turned his attention to England”; “he turned his attention, then, to England”; he turned his attention to England then.” The word can move around within the clause. Try that with a conjunction, and you will quickly see that the conjunction cannot move around. “Caesar invaded Gaul, and then he turned his attention to England.” The word and is stuck exactly there and cannot move like then, which is more like an adverbial conjunction (or conjunctive adverb — see below) than a coordinating conjunction. Our original sentence in this paragraph — “Caesar invaded Gaul, then he turned his attention to England” — is a comma splice, a faulty sentence construction in which a comma tries to hold together two independent clauses all by itself: the comma needs a coordinating conjunction to help out, and the word then simply doesn’t work that way.

Of course, Replica had a mainstream publisher (Bantam) and was professionally edited. Why didn’t someone stop me? I feel betrayed.

Readers of the ebook edition will not have to put up with these atrocities. Microsoft Word has taught me the error of my ways, and I fixed all of these errant sentences. Thanks, Microsoft!

As great, if not greater than…

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Richard Bowker

In the Boston Globe today, we have this sentence, in an article about the dangers facing America after the Cold War:

Nonetheless, more than two-thirds of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations–as good a cross-section of the foreign-policy brain trust as there is–said in a 2009 Pew Survey that the world today was as dangerous, or even more so, than during the Cold War.

Is it just me, or does that sentence go off the rails at the end? The “or even more so” seems to cause the author to completely forget where he was going. He wants to say something like “as dangerous as, or even more dangerous than, it was during the Cold War.” But maybe that was just too simple.

The second “as” in constructions like this seems to disappear more often than it shows up nowadays, leaving us with sentences that just don’t parse. This sentence was a little complex; I have noticed the problem in constructions as simple as, if not simpler than: “…as great, if not greater than, Larry Bird.”

I’m too young to feel like a curmudgeon.

The article, by the way, is fairly interesting, making the case that the world is safer than we think, while the foreign policy establishment, and all the political candidates, hugely overestimate the threats out there. It doesn’t mention Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it should.

“Calls will be answered in the order they are received”

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Can you spot the grammatical problem with this familiar sentence? Yeah, me neither.

A sentence like that one came up at work, and our very fine editors were deeply disappointed with me when I didn’t understand what was wrong with it.

It seems that the “in” in the sentence is doing double duty. The sentence should really go: “Calls will be answered in the order in which they are received.” Or, if you don’t mind a preposition at the end of a sentence: “Calls will be answered in the order they are received in.”

This is the sort of nuance that separates the grammatical sheep from the grammatical goats. And of course the Internet possesses all kinds of wisdom about it: here is one example. Fowler’s Modern English Usage calls the phenomenon”cannibalism”–the first “in” has swallowed the second one.

I opined to the editors that this kind of “cannibalism” wasn’t that big a deal, and one of the editors opined back that it was “deplorable, repugnant, and vile.” Tough crowd.