Blog: Language

This is to inform you that one of my pet peeves is emails that start with "This is to inform you that..." I can tell very well from the fact that there is information in the message, and that you are sending it out, that this email is to inform people about said information.

For example, I just got an email that said, "This is to inform you that weekly residential street cleaning operations resume on Monday, March 24, 2008." How about just "Residential street cleaning operations will resume..."? Or if you really need a lead-in, "Please be aware that..." or "Please note that..."?

The worst is from the In-Towner, a local newspaper, whose monthly emails about its new issue read, "This is to advise that the January 2008 on-line edition has been up-loaded and may be accessed at ..." They're a news organization! Concision is in a journalist's DNA. Yet, in addition to the superfluous hyphens, every email starts with the same totally useless, redundant, and unnecessary quintet of five (5) words.

I know I'm a little heavy on the whining this week, but what's with people who on business phone calls or interviews - where they are trying to convince me to partner with their company, or to hire them - start most of their sentences with "Again, ..."? It always seems condescending to me. Either I didn't understand what they said, in which case they probably didn't explain it clearly, or else I did understand it perfectly well, in which case repeating it probably doesn't accomplish anything.

"As he was attempting to evade them, his actions caused them to fire shots and, in fact, he is deceased."

Thus spake James Bauer, special agent in charge of the Miami office of the Federal Air Marshals Service.

Any causal connection between the firing of shots and death is left to the imagination of the listener.

I always knew that in Russian, "Sasha" is the nickname for "Aleksandr" - but I didn't know that American name "Nancy" started out as a nickname for "Ann", and "Peggy" was originally a nickname for ... "Margaret". "Peggy" originated because "Meg" got turned into "Peg", and knowing that makes it seem so much less random.

I'm guessing "Sasha" is the middle "sa" sound from "Aleksandr" coupled with the standard diminutive ending "-sha" in Russian (Grisha, Ksusha, Misha, Natasha, Tonya) equivalent to our "-ie" or "-y", as in Andy, Cindy, Debbie, Eddie, Harry, Jeannie, Jenny, Jessie, Jimmy, Kathy, Katie, Larry, Mandy, Niki, Ronnie, Sally (Sarah), Susie, Tony, and of course, Alpie.

Ironicallie, names ending in -y in Russian get nicknames ending in -ya (Anatoliy -> Tolya, Vasiliy -> Vasya, Yevgeniy -> Zhenya) while names ending in -ya evolve or are abbreviated in English into a -y ending (Cynthia -> Cindy, Julia -> Julie, Maria -> Marie, Virginia -> Ginny). And in Russian "Natasha" is short for "Nataliya", while in English, there are people named "Natasha" who take the nickname of - what else - "Natalie".

Seen on a whiteboard at Google:

The old man the ships.

The cotton clothes are made from grows in Mississippi.

Update: Mike informs me that these are called "garden path sentences". More are here.

Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran, on the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:

Voters must be given a chance to speak. They have the penultimate constitutional authority, not four judges.

Finneran is known for not following the expressed will of the voters when it suits him - for example, he refused to fund a Clean Elections measure passed by voters in 1998. So was this an ironic misunderstanding of the word penultimate, or a very clever truth?