Worst punctuation complaint ever

I just found this ridiculous rant concerning punctuation. The guts of that post is that English punctuation is illogical because we don’t use Spanish–style inverted question marks to begin questions (and, mutatis mutandis, inverted exclamation points). By reading his rant you’ll notice that the writer seems not to know the difference between a tag question and a tag itself. The reason for his belief is that it is confusing to rely on context to determine when a question begins. The fact that he makes such a claim shows why he has no clue what he’s talking about.

Heres why.

What happens when you ask a question in the English language? In almost all cases, either you invert the subject and an auxiliary verb (if there’s no auxiliary, add one), or you do the preceding and also begin with one of the wh–words. The main difference between the two question forms is that the former is a yes–no (or polar) question, while the latter is a wh (or non–polar) question. The other form is a tag question. Tag questions are a semantically a subtype of yes–no questions. Let’s look at examples:

• (Declarative): You went to the store.
• (Polar) Did you go to the store?
• (Wh) Where did you go?
• (Tag) You went to the store, didn’t you?

What do wh– and yes–no questions have in common? The first word(s) (or implicitly, the word order) in either of them indicate that the following sentence is a question. In other words, the beginning of these sentences indicates that what follows is a question. Hence, there is no need for a beginning of sentence question–marking punctuation mark because the words and word order already do that. Tag questions are rare enough that they won’t need special punctuation rules. Indeed, in speech, tag questions have no “marker” at the beginning that tells us a question is coming, but this in no way hinders our ability to make ourselves understood. The same applies to writing.

This post has been edited for clarity.

Words of the year and decade

The American Dialect Society has chosen its words of the year and word of the decade.

• The word of the decade was “google”, meaning to search the internet.
• The word of the year was “tweet”, meaning a short message sent through Twitter, or the act of so doing.
• Most Useful was “fail”, as in “FAIL”.
• Most Creative was “Dracula sneeze”, the act of sneezing into your elbow.
• Most Unnecessary was “sea kittens”, PETA’s euphemism for fish.
• Most Outrageous was “death panel”, those non–existent committees of doctors that will euthanize your grandma (thank you Sarah).
• Most Euphemistic was “hike the Appalachian Trail”, to have sex with a secret lover.
• Most Likely to Succeed was “twenty–ten”, the name of the year 2010.
• Least Likely to Succeed was any term used to refer to the last decade.

Smooth move, Texas

This might be old news, but it has begun to circulate through the blogosphere, and so I am going to post it anyway.

In 2005, voters in Texas approved a constitutional amendment that “bans” same-sex marriage and civil unions. The text of the amendment (my emphasis):

Section 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.
(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Banning marriage just shows that opposition to same-sex marriage is not really about the sanctity of marriage.

On the other hand, someone at the Language Log thinks that there is a way to dodge this reading.

You can’t make this up

The National Organization for Marriage has released two new advertisements. You can watch one of them here. Then, notice this still (my underlining):

Same same sex marraige? What's that?

You can watch NOM’s other ad here. Again, notice this still (my underlining):

Same same sex marriage? What's that?

Update: The NOM has removed the first ad (top still) from YouTube; last time I checked, the second one was still working.

Update 2: The NOM has also yanked the second ad (bottom still) from YouTube. Must have been too embarrassing to show the world that bigots don’t know grammar and can’t spell.

Rebranding

Consider the following:

At some socially consie organization, a high-level meeting is going on. An employee stands up and says: “We are losing the people. They associate our beliefs with bad things. We are failing. I don’t know what to do.”

The head of the organization thinks about this for a while. That bigwig then looks across the table and says: “I know! Let’s change the names of things we advocate! That way, we can get them all popular again!”

“But won’t people realize that it’s just the same thing with a new name?” And then, that rational employee is fired, and the name change is done anyway.

That little story is made up. But it may as well be what some social consie organizations are doing. Via Feministe comes this Amplify Your Voice post about Abstinence Day on Capital Hill. And it looks like that abstinence ignorance-only sex education is now “holistic approaches” and “healthy lifestyle approaches”, “advocates of real sex education” is “the promiscuity lobby”. And who could forget “reality-based” is “having no values”!

Let’s see now, where have we seen this before? Where have we seen other examples of changing the name of things so as to advance an agenda and to make the other side look bad?

I dub thee…

The Religious Right Wrong does not want to be referred to by that term anymore (hat tip). The same goes for “Moral Majority”, “Christian Right”, and other terms:

The term “Religious Right” pops up every election cycle, but leaders often identified with the political movement say that while their constituencies remain strong, the catchphrase deserves a proper burial.

…

[S]everal politically conservative evangelicals said in interviews that they do not want to be identified with the “Religious Right”, “Christian Right”, “Moral Majority,” or other phrases still thrown around in journalism and academia.

The problem with this idea is that the term “Religious Right” is accurate. Those people are clearly religious, and in some sense right-wing. If they have a problem with the term’s connotations, it’s because their actions brought it upon themselves. More is after the jump.

It must be those damned donuts

I know its only mid-January, but there is already a front runner for stupidest event of the year. First, some background:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts released the following press release to announce that it is giving out free doughnuts on January 20, the date of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration:

“Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet ‘free’ can be.”

You do see where this is leading, right?

Yes. The American Life League is protesting these “abortion doughnuts” because of the word choice. Here is an excerpt (the entire release is quoted at the article I linked above, and for context, it is proceeded by quoting Krispy Kreme’s press release and followed by background information about the ALL:

Just an unfortunate choice of words? For the sake of our Wednesday morning doughnut runs, we hope so. The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that ‘choice’ is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of ‘freedom of choice’ is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.

President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.

Celebrating his inauguration with “Freedom of Choice” doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it’s disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A misconstrued concept of “choice” has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free doughnuts to celebrate this “freedom.”

As of Thursday morning, communications director Brian Little could not be reached for comment. We challenge Krispy Kreme doughnuts to reaffirm their commitment to true freedom – to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and to separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame.

This ridiculous press release has already received a well deserved mocking (I especially like the comment about going January 21 for morning after doughnuts). I’d also like to ask about whether the people at the ALL have anything better to do, perhaps like shutting up? The context of both uses of the word “choice” in  Krispy Kreme’s press release makes it entirely clear that the release has nothing to do with abortion. To make it clear that the writer of the release had no idea what they were talking about, an analysis shows why below the line.