In praise of Gerry Brownlee (IPoGB)

It seems necessary to write a post praising Gerry Brownlee.

Neither a sentence, nor a sentiment, I ever thought I would express.

It turns out however that Mr Brownlee is as contemptuous of the over-use of acronyms as I am. And as opposed as David Seymour appears approving. Bob Edlin takes up the story:

In Parliament this week, ACT MP Mark Cameron lobbed a patsy question at his leader, David Seymour, the Minister for Regulation:

    What recent announcements has he made about cutting red tape?

Seymour replied:

    [an answer filled with acronym-filled gobbledy-gook]

Andrew Hoggard: What particular recommendations did the review make regarding the approvals process under the ACVM?

Speaker Brownlee intervened before the reply was given:

SPEAKER: What’s the ACVM? I hate acronyms.

Hoggard explained: Agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines.

SPEAKER: It’s easy to say. Carry on.

This is true. Full names are easy to say. And easier for a listener (or reader) to digest.

As evolutionary ecologist Stephen B.Heard explains, acronyms put a cognitive load on readers and listeners that obscure the actual message being said (so you can see why politicians generally love them.)

Writing about his pet peeves six years ago, Heard said that over a two-week period he had written peer reviews for three different manuscripts (MSs).

All three included newly coined acronyms (NCAs) to substitute for repeated short technical phrases (RSTPs). I’ve gotten in the habit, whenever I run across an NCA, to use my word processor’s search function (WPSF) to find and count occurrences of the NCA in the MS. Frequently (including for two of the recent three MSs), my WPSF reveals that the NCA is used only once or twice more in the MS. That makes it an RUA – a rarely used acronym – and RUAs are one of my writing pet peeves (WPPs). 

By now that you probably suspect that I’m deliberately using a lot of acronyms to annoy you. You’re right, and if I’ve succeeded, I’ve made my point.

The problem with acronyms in general, and newly coined ones in particular, Heard said, was that they placed a cognitive load on the reader.

As you read that first paragraph of mine, every time you came to an occurrence of “NCA”, you had to stop to decode the acronym – to remember what it stood for, to replace NCA in the sentence with “newly coined acronym”, and then to reconsider the modified sentence to assess what was being said about those newly coined acronyms.
    When an acronym is brand new, that cognitive load is significant. As an acronym becomes more familiar, the load gets smaller, until an acronym as familiar as DNA or SCUBA doesn’t carry any load at all – it’s simply a word synonymous with the original phrase, and often a simpler one at that. The issue is that few acronyms have the status of DNA – carrying lower cognitive load than the phrase it replaces.
    The extra work imposed by a newly coined acronym is worthwhile only if there’s a payoff for the reader; and if you use the newly coined acronym only once or twice, that’s very unlikely.

In his article, Stephen Heard suggested there are four reasons for people loving acronyms – one good, and three dubious at best.The good reason: because sometimes, acronyms really do save reader effort. I’d rather read “DNA” thirty-seven times in a paper than “deoxyribonucleic acid” thirty-seven times.

• The first dubious reason: because acronyms make it easier to write. I’d rather type “DNA” than “deoxyribonucleic acid”, even if it’s just once. Actually, I use all kinds of newly coined acronyms when I’m writing – but then I use search-and-replace to substitute actual words before I put my manuscript in front of a reader. (A custom macro can do this easily, if you like such things.) No decision about how a manuscript looks should be based on how it’s easiest to write – all decisions are about the reader.
• The second dubious reason: because acronyms make the text shorter. Brevity is indeed important (which is why The Scientist’s Guide to Writing has an entire chapter on it). But: while it’s easy to measure brevity by word count, what really matters is not a manuscript’s word count,*** but how long it takes someone to read and understand it. Here, acronyms (and especially novel ones) can be counterproductive.
• The third and most dubious reason: because acronyms make our writing sound science-y. Like the passive voice, “utilize”, the flattening of authorial voice, and the avoidance of contractions, acronyms are a familiar characteristic of our literature. They’re part of what makes a piece of writing feel like authentic scientific writing to us. As writers, we tend to emulate what we read, and we can be downright uncomfortable with text that doesn’t sound like the rest of the literature. Unfortunately, that means our tedious and turgid literature only gets more tedious and more turgid.

Heard wrapped up his article with a plea to cut it out with newly coined but rarely used acronyms (NCBRUAs).

Acronym advice

I like the Associated Press’s style guide advice on acronyms:

Do not follow an organisation’s full name with an abbreviation or acronym in parentheses or set off by dashes. If an abbreviation or acronym would not be clear on second reference without this arrangement, do not use it.

Names not commonly before the public should not be reduced to acronyms solely to save a few words.

Good writing must be clear. Too much writing is too often crammed with acronyms for too little space saving, leaving writing filled with ‘jargon monoxide’ or worse. If the acronym is well known—NASA, FBI, CIA—then leave it. Otherwise, write it in full. 

"A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool."

"A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. 

    "Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. 

    "To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language's miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality."

~ David Bentley Hart from his post 'On Writing, Part Two' [hat tip @NickFreiling]

 

Definition

"An argument against the use of personal definitions of words can be framed around the concepts of communication efficacy, shared meaning, and societal cohesion. ...

"The primary purpose of language is to facilitate clear communication between individuals. Personal definitions of words undermine this goal by distorting the shared meaning that allows people to understand one another. ...

"Standardised definitions, whether agreed upon in dictionaries or understood within a particular community, provide linguistic stability. This stability is critical for maintaining clarity across generations and cultural contexts. ...

"Shared definitions are vital for productive debate and critical thinking. ... When personal definitions are introduced, arguments become subjective and unfalsifiable, as participants are no longer addressing the same concepts.

"Language serves as a bridge between diverse individuals and communities, but if this bridge is weakened by subjective definitions, mutual understanding becomes more difficult, and divisions deepen. ...

"In fields that rely on precision and objectivity, such as law, science, and medicine, consistent definitions are essential. Personal definitions introduce ambiguity that can be dangerous. ...

"While language does evolve, and there is space for creative expression, the integrity of communication, the stability of society, and the clarity of important discourse depend on shared definitions of words."

~ Tim Harding from his post 'Against personal definitions'

"Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not."

 

"In vain they call upon the lofty TruthWith sombre conjurations; for the darkShe ne'er endures; for her abode is light.In Phoebus' world, in knowledge as in song,All things are bright. Bright beams the radiant sun;Clear runs and pure his bright Castalian fountain.Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not.Twin-born with thought is word on lips of man;That which is darkly said is darkly thought;For wisdom true is like the diamond,A drop that's petrified of heavenly light;The purer that it is, the more its value,The more the daylight shines and glitters through it.The ancients builded unto Truth a temple,A fair rotunda, light as heaven's vault.And freely poured the sunshine from all sidesInto its open round; the winds of heavenAmid its ranks of pillars gayly gambolled.But now instead we build a Tower of Babel,A heavy, barbarous structure. Darkness peepsFrom out its deep and narrow grated casements.Unto the sky the tower was meant to reach,But hitherto we've only had confusion.As in the realm of thought, in that of songIt is; and poesy is e'er transparent ..."

~ Swedish writer Esaias Tegnér from the epilogue to his1820 speech to the graduating class at Lund University. Per Bylund (via Bing) renders the key passage as "What you cannot say clearly, you do not know; with the thought the word is born on the man's lips; what is obscurely said is what is obscurely thought."

Advice to writers

"You do not always have to exhaust a subject so much that you leave nothing to the reader. [At some point] it is not a matter of reading, but of thinking."
          ~ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 11, chap. 20

[Hat tip Per Bylund/ Steven Kates] 

Why use an acronym when decent words will do?

"They are detached from the language
and inflated like little balloons."

- Wolcott Gibbs

Why do so many so-called writers fill their screeds with acronyms and neologisms when decent and real words will do instead? One simple answer: pretentiousness.

The "nonce-word" or -phrase may be, rarely, one constructed simply to serve a need of the moment, but invariably the motive is an attempt to pass off pedestrian thought as profundity. Unfortunately, this is to reverse cause and effect: as the authors of one of the greatest writing guides warn: "The writer should not indulge in these unless he is quite sure he is a good writer." [Emphasis mine.]

Too often today, however, the usage only confirms the opposite.

A repast of neologisms and acronyms aplenty across a writer's prose -- an alphabet soup of EBITDAs, ATMs and MOBIEs poured out across the page -- confirm only that he is neither the writer, nor the thinker, he deems himself to be. He dreams of the heights, and very publicly attains not even the lowlands of mere adequacy.

Acronym over-use is, perhaps, the worst of these crimes.

Even the most knowledgeable audience needs you to define each acronym right away, since some acronyms have double meanings even within a single field. If you must use an acronym or difficult term, it's best to define it the first time you say it. My advice: avoid acronyms altogether.
    When I'm baffled by an unclear acronym, I jokingly tell people, "I'm in the SAA."
    Then I go silent, to make them ask me what it means. "I belong to the Society Against Acronyms."

"Write things out," advise those sound advisers Strunk and White, 

Not everyone knows that MADD means Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials....

    Many shortcuts are self-defeating; they waste the reader's time instead of conserving it. There are all sorts of rhetorical stratagems and devices that attract writers who hope to be pithy, but most of them are simply bothersome. The longest way around is [often] the shortest way home, and the one truly reliable shortcut in writing is to choose words that are strong and surefooted to carry readers on their way. 

Oddly enough, it turns out that these pieces of pestilence, these admissions of writer's sloth, are relatively new accretions upon civilised life. Like many big bad modern things, they grew to prominence with the rise of big bad modern government, the rise of the aptly-christened FDR ushering in the rise of the many alphabet-soup departments to which his "New Deal" gave birth -- and which, in their obese adolescence, gave aid and comfort to much waffle bolstered by this form of over-capitalised pretension.

The condensation of a word or phrase into a pronounceable initialism (acronym) seems to be a fairly recent invention, identified as being American [declares the textbook]. 

An acronym is a nuance of word‐group abbreviation, wherein the word group (usually a single entity or noun, but sometimes a verb) is pronounceable. The neologism is usually operationally more valuable (and ideally, easier on the ear and tongue) than the parent word group. The line between simple initialism and pronounceable acronym can be indistinct (e.g. ELISA) although general usage favours the case for simple initialism. Fowler labelled abbreviations ‘curtailed words’ and noted the special circumstances of acronyms.

‘Another way of forming curtailed words is to combine initial letters, a method now so popular, especially in America, that a word ‘acronym’ has been coined for it. The first world war produced a few; Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), Dora (Defence of the Realm Act), Wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service)...'

... Implicit in Fowler's interpretation of the acronym is the pronounceability as a word, although not all authorities have demanded this test...
The practice of acronymology is far older than its representation by a word. Students have long made mnemonic initialisms to help retain tedious information. Thus the six critical elements of life, referring back to the periodic table, are CHNOPS, which, if pronounced as ‘chin‐ups’, qualifies it as an acronym. To locate the femoral artery generations of medical students have depended on NAVEL, going from lateral to medial under the right inguinal ligament: nerve, artery, vein, empty space, and lymphatic. The corporate world and scientists were doing this sort of thing early in the 20th century, but the first acknowledgement of this practice as a general tool in language with the neologism acronym was 1943. Defining examples in the Oxford English Dictionary include MASH (mobile army surgical hospital), Nabisco (National Biscuit Company) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). 

The Second World War era provided several useful and often colourful acronyms, including SNAFU (situation normal, all fouled up), RADAR (radio detecting and ranging), and SONAR (sound navigation range). With their incorporation into everyday speech, radar, sonar and other terms have become so commonplace that they have lost their capitalisation, as if they have become less overtly acronyms. 

Acronyms are not un-useful, and if the abbreviation is already well-known, (BBC, CIA, DNA, NATO, OECD) may be well used.

However, there is widespread evidence of overuse in technical writing and it may be wise to follow some simple rules for "acronymology":

• An acronym is at least three letters.
• The word must be easily pronounceable.
• It must simplify communication.
• An acronym should have utility beyond a single paper/report.
• Spell out the complete term at first usage.
• More than one new neologism or novel abbreviation per paper burdens the reader.

Do not put the reader in the position of having to refer back to a key of novel abbreviations. It is preferable to spell out most repetitive phrases...
Some acronyms and initialisms fit the needs of the moment, to compress a paper or abstract, whereas others are destined for longevity. Overuse of abbreviations for the writer's convenience or for the constraints of word counts, generally obfuscates information. 

The advice of the writers' writers: "Stick to words when you can. Acronyms make writing easier but reading harder. Your shortcut is the reader’s hindrance."

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The words "are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons, and presently sent spinning, lovely, iridescent, and meaningless into the wild, blue heaven of prose." #QotD

"The result is...a very special vocabulary in which words come to transcend their exact and customary meanings -- in which, in a sense, they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons, and presently sent spinning, lovely, iridescent, and meaningless into the wild, blue heaven of...prose."

 ~ Wolcott Gibbs, quoted in Strunk and White's Elements of Style  on the pretentious vocabularies used in courtrooms, boardrooms, government reports and spin -- nonsense words and phrases like "step change," "deep dive," "trickle-down," "learnings," and now "recalibration."
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Quote of the Day: On overusing acronyms

 

“Acronyms and abbreviations are powerful medicine, and should be used in limited doses--always remembering what you are using. It doesn't kill many more pixels to spell out terms.”
~ Timothy Taylor, ‘When Authors Forget What their Own Abbreviations Stand For’

 

RELATED POST:

• It's death by acronym – SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

“…florid excesses do not constitute good writing.”

 

From the Herald’s sports department of 1964:

.[Hat tip Matt Nippert]

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Unnecessary words

 

May I confess to a secret love. I love reading writing guides. Style guides. Guides to English usage.

It’s true.

My favourite is probably the guide to Modern Engish Usage known to its friends only as Fowler’s, to which Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words is a useful complement ("Class, when do you use 'fewer' instead of 'less'?”) The best of them are pithy and incisive (I remember with affection Peikoff’s Principles of Grammar offering the example of subject and verb in a sentence: Governments coerce.”).

So a friend who knew my love gave me a copy of The Economist Style Guide (1986 edition), from which this guide to excising flatulence fell out (note: the emphases are in the original):

UNNECESSARY WORDS. Some words add nothing but length to your prose. Use adjectives to make your meaning more precise and be cautious of those you find yourself using to make it more emphatic. The word very is a case in point. If it occurs in a sentence you have written, try leaving it out and see whether the meaning is changed. The omens were good may have more force than The omens were very good.
    Avoid strike action (strike will do), cutbacks (cuts), track record (record), wilderness area (usually either a wilderness or a wild area), large-scale (big), the policymaking process (policymaking), sale events (sales), weather conditions (weather), etc. This time around just means This time, just as any time soon just means soon.
    Shoot off, or rather shoot, as many prepositions after verbs as possible. Thus people can meet rather than meet with; companies can be bought and sold rather than bought up and sold off; budgets can be cut rather than cut back; plots can be hatched but not hatched up; organisations should be headed by rather than headed up by chairmen, just as markets should be freed, rather than freed up. And children can be sent to bed rather than sent off to bed—though if they are to sit up they must first sit down. Pre-prepared just means prepared.
    The word community is usually unnecessary.  So the black community means blacks, the business community means business, the homosexual community means homosexuals, the international community, if it means anything, means other countries, aid agencies, or just occasionally, the family of nations. What the global community means is a mystery.
     Use words with care. A heart condition is usually a bad heart. Positive thoughts (held by long-suffering creditors, according to The Economist) presumably means optimism. Industrial action is usually industrial inaction, industrial disruption or strike. A substantially finished bridge is an unfinished bridge, an executive summary a summary and a role model a model, a major speech usually just a speech, a top politician or top priority is usually just a politician or a priority. Something with reliability problems probably does not work. If yours is a live audience, what would a dead one be like.
    This advice you are given free, or for nothing, but not for free.
In general, be concise. Try to be economical in your account or argument (“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out”—Voltaire). Similarly, try to be economical with words. “As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give to your style.” (Sydney Smith). Raymond Mortimer put it even more crisply when commenting about Susan Sontag: “Her journalism, like a diamond, will sparkle more if it is cut.”

No mention is made of either sea change or step change, but then neither are used by the Key Government any more either. So there’s that.

And here’s a useful exercise too: see if you can spot the paragraph that’s been dropped from the more recent edition – and ask yourself why. (Here’s a clue.) Feel free to drop us a line when you have it.

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Quote of the Day: But me no buts!

 

“In every sentence where it appears, ‘but’ is the boundary between what the author doesn’t mean and what he does.”
~ commenter at the Samizdata blog

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Obama grammared

I'm pleased I scored so highly on the silly old Facebook grammar quiz, since educator Lisa VanDamme reckons you need good grammar to make yourself understood -- and it looks like the ObaMessiah himself don't have no grammar.

Turns out the Great Communicator doesn't know grammar any better than Dan Quayle knew how to spell, making the common blunder of inverting "me" and "I."  Doesn't matter?  Says VanDamme, mastery of the rules of grammar add great precision both to your thinking and your communicating.  And it may avoid scandal, for example:

    Rather than the innocuous, "President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I," what if President Obama had said, "Michelle likes President Bush better than I." Is this a mere difference of opinion about the former President, or a scandal? The ambiguity is resolved with a universal understanding of the rules of grammar.
    "Michelle likes him better than I," as my grammar students can tell you, contains an elliptical adverb clause with "I" as the subject, and means, "Michelle likes him better than I like him." On the other hand, "Michelle likes him better than me," contains an elliptical clause with "me" as the direct object, and means, "Michelle likes him better than she likes me."
     So, if you whose children are gaining a thorough mastery of the rules of grammar have ever asked yourselves, "Does my child know grammar better than me?" the answer is no, he should know you better. And by the time he graduates, he will know better than to ask the question like that.

Straightforward, huh.

And these students of whom she speaks, by the way, are Year 4 at her school.  Like I said, she's an educator.

Reason, freedom, and raising fine children

A guest post here by Brian Scurfield, who argued recently that the future of liberty depends on the idea taking root that it is possible to educate children in a coercion free environment.  He lays out his argument in this post.

What I want to argue in this post is that the way we treat our children is intertwined with the future of liberty.

Most parents want to give their children a good education and to inculcate in their children good values and respect for reason. Yet, despite these intentions, our education system has failed our children. Why is this? Is it simply a case that the problem lies with State schools and that all will be well and good if schools were privatized? While privatization would be a step in the right direction, I don't think this in itself would solve the problem. For the problem is much deeper than just a question of who should run the schools. The problem in fact lies with some deeply entrenched ideas about how children should be raised.

In their starkest form, these ideas hark back to the old idea that "to spare the rod is to spoil the child". Of course, most parents today would find this idea abhorrent, and rightly so, yet many parents are willing in one form or another to practice coercion on their children. They would argue that coercion is necessary to get their children to learn, that it is OK to coerce children because children, after all, are not miniature adults and that parents have more knowledge and experience than children.

I would like to ask these parents how you can inculcate reason if you are willing to employ coercion?

A person that employs coercion to inculcate reason demonstrates by their very actions that reason - not to mention liberty - can be overridden in the pursuit of a goal. But these things can't be overridden: Not only will you probably not achieve your goal or getting a child to learn, you will end up with a whole lot of bad and unintended consequences. Many of these you may not even become aware of.

There is a link between the inculcation of reason and freedom from coercion.

The idea that coercion should play no part at all in child-rearing apparently is an idea that many people, including libertarians, have difficulty accepting. Libertarians often pull out the property-rights argument, that it's my house and my rules. Yet this is to confuse one's legal rights with one's moral obligations. Just because you think your child shouldn't be watching that soap opera doesn't mean it is a morally right for you to simply turn off the TV. Just because you think your child should be attending Auckland Grammar doesn't mean you should force your child to go there.

You can't just raise a child any way you please. That is to deny that children are people possessed of ideas, motivations, and a will of their own. It is also to deny how knowledge is created.

Children are not buckets that you pour ideas into. Children learn best when their learning is self-directed and governed by interest. It's how you learn best isn't it? Young children are naturally inquisitive, but it is only too easy to stamp out that inquisitiveness through coercion.

Parental authoritarianism and thinking "I know best" is just as corrosive as State authoritarianism.

Furthermore, if "knowing best" gives you the right to coerce your child, then that argument will be used against you by others who claim more knowledge and more experience than you. Which, of course, it is.

It is because the creation of knowledge and the inculcation of reason are strongly intertwined with freedom from coercion that the future of liberty depends on how we treat our children. A future libertarian society is going to require lots of new knowledge, including knowledge about freedom, but that knowledge will not be won, nor that society last, if children are not allowed the freedom to control the contents of their own minds.

I believe it is possible to educate a child in an environment free from coercion. This doesn't mean that you become a doormat for your child or that what your child says goes. But how is it possible? Well, it requires lots of things. It requires acknowledgement that both you and your child are fallible, that one or both of you may be wrong, that problems can be solved through reason, that by working with your child you can find a common preference where nobody need get hurt. Yes, these things may not always be easy, but that's no excuse for not trying. The whole approach is called Taking Children Seriously.

Saturday morning ramble - #23

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Fixing your errors

Here's a list from the ever useful Economist Style Guide of unfortunately far too common solecisms you should know about, and should definitely avoid (especially if you're submitting an article to The Free Radical). [Hat tip Ceely's Modern Usage] What's a solecism? Looks like you definitely need to read the list...

SOLECISM, n., a deviation from correct idiom or grammar; any incongruity, error or absurdity; a breach of good manners, an impropriety.

Many necessary correctives here, to quote just a few:

• Canute's exercise on the seashore was designed to persuade his courtiers of what he knew to be true but they doubted, ie, that he was not omnipotent. Don't imply he was surprised to get his feet wet.
  
• Confectionary [of whatever colour]: a sweet. Confectionery: sweets in general.
  
• Crisis. This is a decisive event or turning-point. Many of the economic and political troubles wrongly described as crises are really persistent difficulties, sagas or affairs.
• Critique is a noun. If you want a verb, try criticise.
  
• Decimate means to destroy a proportion (originally a tenth) of a group of people or things, not to destroy them all or nearly all. Factoid: something that sounds like a fact, is thought by many to be a fact (perhaps because it is repeated so often), but is not in fact a fact. [e.g., "global warming has already made hundreds of thousands of climate refugees from low-lying Pacific islands."]
• Frankenstein was not a monster, but its creator.
• Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.)
  
• Hobson's choice is not the lesser of two evils; it is no choice at all.
• Homosexual: since this word comes from the Greek word homos (same), not the Latin word homo (man), it applies as much to women as to men. It is therefore as daft to write homosexuals and lesbians as to write people and women.
• Key: keys may be major or minor, but not low. Few of the decisions, people, industries described as key are truly indispensable, and fewer still open locks.
• Like governs nouns and pronouns, not verbs and clauses. So as in America not like in America. But authorities like Fowler and Gowers is a perfectly acceptable alternative to authorities such as Fowler and Gowers.
  
• Media: prefer press and television or, if the context allows it, just press. If you have to use the media, remember it is plural.
  
• Only. Put only as close as you can to the words it qualifies. Thus, These animals mate only in June. To say They only mate in June implies that in June they do nothing else.
  
• Oxymoron: an oxymoron is not an unintentional contradiction in terms but a figure of speech in which contradictory terms are deliberately combined, as in bitter-sweet, cruel kindness, sweet sorrow, etc.
  
• Per caput is the Latin for per head. Per capita is the Latin for by heads; it is a term used by lawyers when distributing an inheritance among individuals, rather than among families (per stirpes). Unless the context demands this technical expression, never use either per capita or per caput but per person.
• Propaganda (which is singular) means a systematic effort to spread doctrine or opinions. It is not a synonym for lies.
• Rebut means repel or meet in argument. Refute, which is stronger, means disprove. Neither should be used as a synonym for deny.
• Use and abuse: two words much used and abused. You take drugs, not use them (Does he use sugar?). And drug abuse is just drug taking, as is substance abuse, unless it is glue sniffing or bun throwing.
• While is best used temporally. Do not use it in place of although or whereas.

Style and Grammar

In a bid to raise the standard of the blogosphere, I wish to point out that too many bloggers are ending their sentences with prepositions. This is the sort of thing I mean: "Just had an amusing case of passing a message along electronically at the Telco conference I am at."

Awful. As Winston Churchill said about such things, "This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put."

LINK: 'Preposititions at the End,' part of Guide to Grammar & Style - 'P'

TAGS: Blog

The Site of Brian

DPF has the link to the website of the newly crowned and extraordinarily humble Bishop Brian Tamaki of the Destiny Church. It's hard to know which site is funnier, the offical Brian site or the unofficial 'happy clapping for Jesus' Brian site hosted by the Density Church. Some of the comments on the DPF thread are hilarious:

"Look on the bright side - no doubt Tamaki's political start-up will corner the stupid bigot market..."

"I liked his use of grammar in this quote, 'The Christian religion must prevail over all other false religions.'"

"The man has all the potential to be the leader of the Maori Taliban."

The site itself is even funnier: "The Media: a modern day witchcraft," declares Brian. He's not really serious, is he? Sadly, he is.

So too is his political party: leader and former policeman Richard Lewis was interviewed yesterday on 'Agenda.' He didn't mention stoning sinners, but he did look like he was about to start taking names ...