Mellifluous words for caught red handed: in flagrante delicto

(from wordsmith.org)

In flagrante delicto (fluh-GRAN-tee di-LIK-to) adverb In the very act of committing the offense; red-handed.[From Medieval Latin meaning, literally, while the crime is blazing.]

"Mr. Big, the dung beetle, for instance, regularly patrols his tunnel to check on Mrs. Big, and if he catches her in flagrante delicto, he throws the interloper out."
-- Richard Conniff; Close Encounters of the Sneaky Kind; Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.); Jul 2003.

15 Practical Rules of E Mail Etiquette

Dave Barry delightfully reviewed Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe (Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95) in today's New York Times.

The story below makes some of the same points. Several GTOTD recipients will recognize a high school football coach of ours, Dick Johnson, in the last line.

15 Practical Rules of E Mail Etiquette

It’s 11 a.m. on am ordinary day at the office. You notice that little yellow envelope in the bottom corner of your screen that means you’ve got e-mail. You click to see what’s come in. It seems someone in your firm has a problem. With you. He is not happy, and he has e-mailed you and “cc”ed your boss, your co-workers, several other managers---just about everybody but the president of the company. There’s one of those threatening “if/then” sentence near the end, something along the lines of, “…if you are not willing or able to fix this situation, then…”
You’ve been flamed. (“Flaming” is e-mail lingo for venting strong emotion online or sending highly inflammatory messages.) So it’s 11:02 a.m. on that same morning, but now you’re fuming with rage. You’re tempted to bang out a response, hit “reply to all,” and share some ungentle sentiments of your own. But you pause. You resolve to wait until after lunch to frame a considered response, a polite response, one that recognizes not only the unique qualities of e-mail but also its pitfalls.
The fact that most of us are still figuring out the rules of practical etiquette that enable us to use this medium to best advantage. E-mail can be as personal and revealing as a letter or as impersonal as junk mail. It has limitations in conveying emotions—but it can also convey emotions too well. Especially fiery ones! It’s instantaneous and easy—often too easy. What we need is e-mail etiquette. So here goes:

1. Use that subject line. Take a moment to summarize what your message is truly about, as a newspaper headline does. This helps get your message read. (Key words in the title line also help if you have to search for a message later on.) To avoid “Re: Re: Re:-itis” in multiple replies, summarize your response, as in “12:15 better than noon,” rather than “RE: lunch plans.”

2. Pause for a salutation. We are always grateful to be greeted with politeness and humanity. “I like the classic ‘Dear so-and-so,’ just as in a letter,” says Karen Ramsay, a computer network engineer. Short of “Dear,” it’s more and more common to start with your recipient’s name and a dash or comma. This also signals that it is a personal communication and not spam or a broadcast to the group.

3. Include pleasantries. In the elevator, we say, “Good morning.” At a co-worker’s office door we ask a greeting question. These are the lubricants of daily interaction. Some e mails are more formal than others, but the vast majority move between two people who might just as easily be saying hello in the hall. In your e-mail, consider the same pleasantry you might employ in a conversation: Before you launch into your three points of action from the previous meeting, consider saying, “It was good to talk with the group today.” Or if it’s an individual, “It was good to hear about your trip to Cancun.” Or, if it’s an acquaintance you haven’t e-mailed in a while, “Hope you are well.” Why? It makes life more pleasant and your reader more apt to enjoy the message.

4. NO SHOUTING! All-caps in e-mails have the same effect as shouting in conversation. It’s considered rude. Even an all-cap word here and there is iffy, since it takes the reader aback.

5. Proof and spell-check. A poorly written message replete with run-on sentences, omitted punctuation, misused or misspelled words is difficult to read, easy to misunderstand---and reflects poorly on the sender. (And no one will ever tell you if you’ve made an embarrassing gaffe.)

6. Use “cc” sparingly. Copy co-workers or bosses only when there’s a reason to do so. Similarly, don’t use “Reply All” as your default. Resort to “Reply All” only when everyone truly needs to see your response.

7. Beware the negative. E-mail is great for conveying information, instructions, and objective facts. But for some reason slams slam harder in an e-mail. It is rarely a good idea to send anything negative online. If the news is that bad, it should be delivered face to face, or at least by phone, so that your facial expression or the sound of your voice can soothe and explain tough news. “Even if it’s mild criticism,” says Ramsay, “take some extra words to make your tone much gentler than in regular conversation.” Another side to this issue is that everyone is very courageous in e mail, precisely because they don’t have to face the person. A good rule is, “Never say anything in an e-mail you wouldn’t say to the person’s face.”

8. Remember, it’s public. E-mails are forwarded from person to person, often multiple times, with forwarders often forgetting a nugget of “touchy” or classified information that appeared several messages below. Says Karen Ramsay, “I tell my staff, before you send an e-mail, ask yourself if you’d be willing to post it on your office door.” And e-mails can legitimately be perused by employers and are often subpoenaed in legal cases, sometimes going back years.

9. Be careful about humor. Always a two-edged sword, humor can be extremely touchy in e mail. Sarcasm is easily misunderstood and may come across as insulting. If you must make a light comment, it’s often a good idea to use a smiley-face J or emoticon ---to make sure a recipient knows you’re kidding.

10. Never respond in anger. First, if someone has insulted you, it may well be a miscommunication, a lame attempt to be funny, or it might be a response to a hasty e-mail of yours. Pick up the phone and ask, “What was that about?” A double caution is, “Never ‘Reply to All’ in anger. This is a good way to make an enemy for life.

11. Multiple questions. If you ask a series of questions, most responders will answer only the last question asked. If you are posing a series of questions, number them. This is also a good idea for multiple pieces of information. It simply helps the reader order the information. If you are responding to a series of questions, number them in your reply and use a different color to set your replies off from the questions.

12. The shorter the better. Something about a long e-mail can make a reader say, “Oh, no.” Shorter ones are better read and more quickly responded to. If you find yourself responding to an emotional situation with a three-page, single-spaced rehashing of events, consider the possibility that e-mail is not the best medium for working out the situation.

13. Kick the forwarding habit. Everyone gets too much mail already. If you can’t resist broadcasting jokes, inspirational stories and political diatribes, consider saving them for friends and family—and realize that we’ve all seen most of them already.

14. Sign-off: Consider the same pleasantry and sign off as you would use in a letter. “Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. Best regards, Brooks.”

15. Say “please” and “thank you.” Your grandmother was right: “They’re the three most valuable words in the English language: they don’t cost you a thing, and they pay dividends your whole life long.” In e-mail, as in life, a little courtesy goes a long way.

Fab Four Facts: Why Everyone Needs Fact Checkers

A while ago I devoured The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, a wonderful book with 860 pages of text and another hundred pages of footnotes sourcing virtually every quote.

Generally, the book did as promised and wiped away the sins of Albert Goldman's mean-spirited John Lennon biography, and I was sorry when I reached page 860. I wanted more.

Among hundreds of bit of trivia, I learned that I was wrong in thinking that George had tried out for John Lennon's skiffle band by playing Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock." That was Paul. George played "Raunchy" for his audition. I learned that Paul, in writing his song to comfort Julian Lennon (originally "Hey, Jules") got "Jude" from the mean Rod Steiger character in Oklahoma! And I'm embarrassed to say I never knew it was Ringo who says, "I got blisters on my fingers!" at the end of "Helter Skelter." (The group had implored the lovable Ringo to play as hard as he could to get the wild feeling of that song, not knowing it would cause the Manson gang to go on a murder spree.)

So maybe I shouldn't care about a few errors. But who would read a book like this if he or she didn't care that Jackie DeShannon didn't write "Needles and Pins" for the Searchers, as Spitz offhandedly says she did. (The late U.S. Congressman Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche wrote that song.)

And then there's the section about George's rising to a new level as a songsmith with "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," in which Spitz implies that George wrote "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby." That was Carl Perkins, whose songs the Beatles recorded or performed more of (7) than anyone other than Chuck Berry (9).

I guess a sin of omission falls in a different category. But, on page 499, Spitz quotes Peter Brown saying that George wrote "Something" about his wife, Pattie Boyd, and Eric Clapton wrote "Darling, You Look Wonderful [sic] Tonight" about her. But Spitz fails to mention that Clapton also wrote "Layla" about her. Since Spitz mentions in a note at the bottom of that page that Donovan wrote "Jennifer Juniper" about Pattie's sister Jenny, I say this information is pertinent in placing these sisters in a special Pantheon of Super Muses.

Subordination and coordination

Harbrace Chapter 24 : Subordination and Coordination

Use subordination to relate ideas concisely and effectively.
Use coordination (that is, giving ideas equal structural rank) to give ideas equal emphasis.

24a Use subordination to combine a series of short sentences into longer, more effective units. The idea is to place emphasis on the most important part of the sentence.

Example: I was bored. I went to the movies. I discovered that Johnny Depp makes a funny pirate.

Because I was bored, I went to the movies, where I discovered that Johnny Depp makes a funny pirate.

[Note that, for those who prefer Hemingway-esque shorter sentences, you could put a period after movies and start the next sentence with "There I discovered...."]

24a (1), (2), (3) and (4) offer handy tips on subordinating, such as using adjectives and adjective phrases, adverbs and adverb phrases, appositives and contrasting elements, and subordinate clauses.

24b(3) offers and important caveat: Subordinate and coordinate clauses logically. Avoid making faulty connections between two ideas.

FAULTY Chen was only a substitute pitcher, winning half of his games.
BETTER Although Chen was only a substitute pitcher, he won half his games. [Although establishes the relationship between the ideas.]

This last idea definitely appears in the new PSAT and SAT grammar sections, but if you're not on the lookout for it, you can easily miss it.

With a wink to the scribe: amanuensis

amanuensis -- from the Latin (servus) a manu, a slave with secretarial duties: meaning one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript.

This word often shows up as a euphemism of sorts for a ghost writer -- My Turn at Bat by Ted Williams, as told to John Underwood; Iacocca by Lee Iacocca with Ralph Novak; or Learning to Sing by Clay Aiken and Allison Glock.
The word appears in texts about the Bible in the Middle Ages. For example, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible refers to the men who in 1605 refined, corrected and improved previous translations of the Bible as "Amanuenses of the words of God." (Note the plural.)
By using this word, a skilled writer is usually implying with a wink that there was a lot more than just dictation and pure secretarial work being done ---as there usually is, even in pure secretarial work!

If you don't like the edit, write "stet"

(from wordsmith.org)

stet (stet) verb tr., intr. Let it stand. [From Latin stet (let it stand), from stare (to stand). Ultimately from Indo-European root sta- (to stand) that is also the source of stay, stage, stable, instant, establish, static, and system.]

Stet is used as a direction on a printer's proof or manuscript to indicate that the alterations be undone and the original word or passage be restored.

"I realize that I have silted myself into the debate as a typographical neoconservative and a novitiate Barzunite, having insulted both pop culture and the West, and implied an allegiance to elegance and the author. I don't really want to mean this. Nevertheless, pls stet."
--Janet Burroway; Language, Culture, And the Cop (sic) Editor; The Chronicle of Higher Education (Washington, DC); Nov 7, 1997.

"The charges later were dismissed in Baltimore City and stetted in Howard County."
-- Peter Geier; 'Patricide' Author Sues Sheppard Pratt; The Daily Record (Baltimore, Maryland); Feb 5, 2003.

Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers

From the Hamilton College Writing Center's Seven Deadly Sins of Bad Writing: http://www.hamilton.edu/writing/sins.html

The Fifth Deadly Sin: Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers
Misplaced and dangling modifiers create illogical, even comical, sentences. We confuse our readers if we fail to connect modifiers (words that describe or limit other words) to the words they modify; be sure to place modifiers next to the words they modify. See the illogic in this example:

Walking back from the village, my wallet was lost. (Does your wallet walk?)
revised: Walking back from the village, I lost my wallet. (Your wallet doesn't walk, but you do.)

A misplaced modifier is a word or phrase that due to its placement mistakenly refers to the wrong word. The modifier truly is misplaced.

To correct a misplaced modifier, move it next to or near the word it modifies.

A fine athlete and student, the coach honored the captain of the tennis team. (The coach was not the fine athlete and student.)
revised: The coach honored the tennis team's captain, a fine athlete and student.

Limiting modifiers (only, almost, nearly, just) are commonly misplaced. To avoid ambiguity, place them in front of the word they modify.

Marsh's evidence reinforces the view that the artist only intended the images for a local audience.
revised: Marsh's evidence reinforces the view that the artist intended the images only for a local audience.
******
A dangling modifier is a (usually introductory) word or phrase that the writer intends to use as a modifier of a following word, but the following word is missing. The result is an illogical statement.

To fix a dangling modifier, add the missing word and place the modifier next to it.
Acting on numerous complaints from students, a fox was found near Root. (The fox did not act on the complaint.)
revised: Acting on numerous complaints from students, security found a fox near Root.

After reading the original study, the flaws in Lee's argument are obvious.
revised: Reading the original study reveals obvious flaws in Lee's argument.

Dangling modifiers go hand-in-hand with wordiness and passive voice.

Correct one and you correct them all!