Banished Words

                                                                    Milton C. Toby photo

By Milton C. Toby

How often have you read or heard snippets of dialogue like this one:

"So, Mrs. Rottingham, what does this new information tell us about the missing horse?" the detective said.

What purpose, exactly, does the introductory "so" serve?

No purpose at all, apparently, which is why it topped Lake Superior State University's 41st annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness." The list first was compiled by the late W. T. Rabe, former public relations director at LSSU, who began collecting words he and his colleagues hated at a New Year's Eve party in the mid-1970s. Publication of the inaugural list generated hundreds of letters to LSSU, and the banished words selection soon was opened to suggestions from the public.

One of the nominations for banishing an introductory "so" from our speech came from Thomas H, Weiss, from Michigan:

"Frequently used to begin a sentence, particularly in response to a question, this tiresome and grammatically incorrect replacement for "Like," or "Um," is even more irksome . . . It hurts my ears every time I hear it!"

Scott Shackleton from Canada noted that "the word serves no purpose in the sentence and to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard."


Other words or phrases to make the 2016 list of banished words (with selected comments) include:

• Conversation--We are invited to "join the conversation if we want to give an opinion. This expression is overused and annoying."
• Problematic--A personal favorite of mine, "problematic" was described as a "corporate-academic weasel word."
• Stakeholder--"A word that has expanded from describing someone who may actually have a stake in a situation or problem, now being overused in business to describe customer and others," according to LSSU. "Dr. Van Helsings should be the only stake holder," according to Jeff Baenen, of Minneapolis, Michigan.
• Price Point--"An example of using two words when one will do."
• Secret Sauce--I've never encountered this one, but it apparently is common in business communications touting the success of something or other.
• Break the Internet--"An annoying bit of hyperbole about the latest saucy picture or controversy that already is becoming trite."
• Walk It Back--Used to describe a politician who makes a statement and then has to either retract it or try and explain that what he said isn't what he really meant.
• Presser--Ridiculous shorthand for a press release or press conference.
• Manspreading--Used to explain the lack of seats on pubic transportation in larger cities as males take up more than their fair share of room.
• Vape--A verb describing the use of e-cigarettes instead if tobacco products. Canadian David Ervin hopes the word "goes up in smoke."
• Giving Me Life--A phrase that "refers to anything that may excite a person, or something that causes one to laugh."
• Physicality--Common in sports broadcasting and writing, although no one knows exactly what it means.  

So, why should the LSSU list and others like it matter for writers?

For me, the list means a New Year's resolution to be more aware of trendy words when I write. Sometimes they work, sometimes not, but there always is a danger of confusing readers with a word that was popular yesterday, but not today. There also is a very real danger associated with trying to sound hip when you are anything but, as I've learned to my chagrin from time to time.

Books We Read, Books We Use

                                                                     Milton C. Toby photograph

By Milton C. Toby

Writers write. It's what we do.

Writers also tend to read, a lot.

One of the secrets to writing well is recognizing good writing by others. I read mostly nonfiction these days because that's what I write. I finished David McCullough's The Wright Brothers a few days ago and was enthralled by his story of Wilbur and Orville and the early years of aviation. McCullough doesn't write about horses but he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award and his work is a good model for any nonfiction author.

I'm now working my way through Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA, trying to sort out the politics of the the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland as part of my book proposal research into the theft of the Thoroughbred stallion Shergar. The "Shergar shelf" in my office keeps growing, occupied with the few books already written about the horse and hundreds of clippings from old newspapers and magazines.

I don't read much current fiction unless Daniel Silva or John Sandford has a new book. More often than not when I need a dose of fiction, though, I'll pick up an Arthur Conan Doyle volume and reread a Sherlock Holmes story or two.

Our house is littered with books--real books, not even counting the ebooks on my Kindle. They are arranged neatly on shelves or in precarious stacks in my office, in the bedroom, in the spare bedroom, in the living room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And then there are the boxes of books gathering dust in the attic and in the garage. Most of them have been read once, and probably won't be picked up again except when dusting the shelves or rearranging the stacks.

A few books, on the other hand, have migrated through frequent use from the shelves and stacks to a place within easy arm's reach in my office. These are the reference books that I use over and over again, often on a daily basis. In no particular order, here are my top-10 go-to books when I have a question about definitions, word origins, or the mechanics of writing:

1. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in two massive volumes
2. The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (three editions)
3. The Chicago Manual of Style
4. The Associated Press Stylebook
5. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
6. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words
7. The Writer's Legal Companion
8. The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus
9. The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook
10. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations


None of these are "writing books" as such. They don't deal with plot, or characters, or dialogue, or the other creative elements we usually associate with good writing. They are essential reading, though, if you need help putting together a query, or a proposal, or a manuscript that is both technically correct and likely to satisfy a publisher's guidelines.

An added--and somewhat unexpected--benefit: A few of the books go beyond dry reference and are fun to read. The Elements of Style, The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, for example, all manage to be both informative and entertaining.

Besides, where besides Phrase and Fable are you going to find the origins of the "trilby hat," the headgear of choice for James "Jazzer" Murphy, the detective in charge of the Shergar investigation?

What reference books do you use on a regular basis?

Correct, But Still Wrong

                                                                           Milton C. Toby photo

by Milton C. Toby

Verschlimmbessrung?

It's one of the few tidbits of useless information I still recall from a miserable semester of college German--a course I passed by swearing to never take German again. The word is long and unpronounceable, but what does it mean?

Roughly translated, verschlimmbessrung refers to an improvement that makes things worse.

"New Coke" comes immediately to mind. The "improved" soft drink represented the first change in Coke's secret formula in almost a century and was introduced with much fanfare on April 23, 1985. New Coke promptly bombed in spectacular fashion. Other examples abound, but the application of verschlimmbessrung that matters for our purposes as writers involves copy editing. Whether editing our own work, or working with a professional copy editor, a devotion to "correctness" can be a disaster.

The apparent contradiction that an editing change can be both correct and wrong at the same time occurred to me when I came across an article about copy editing in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I love The New Yorker, in part because of the quality of the writing and in part because the magazine is one of the few places where you can find a lengthy article about the history of commas. (The ubiquitous comma was invented--as much as a person can invent a punctuation mark--by an Italian printer named Aldo Manuzio. He apparently was looking for a way to separate items in text without ending a sentence, and added a tail to a period around the year 1500.)

I had the good fortune of working with a excellent copy editor on my manuscript for Canonero II: The Rags to Riches Story of the Kentucky Derby's Most Improbable Winner. She knew her job and her changes generally made the book better. Our only disagreement, and it was a significant one, involved how to refer to a horse in a sentence when the animal's name is not used. Was a horse a "he" or an "it?" My editor opted for the latter and made changes throughout the manuscript, leading to many awkward sentences like this one: Hoist the Flag finished the year unbeaten in four starts, although it (not he as I originally wrote) was disqualified in the Champagne Stakes for causing a serious traffic jam during the early going.

Canonero II received dozens of "good luck" cards before his start in the 1971
Belmont Stakes. His fans clearly did not consider him an "it."
Collage by film producer/director Salomon Gill

A flurry of emails ensued, with both of us citing various sections of The Chicago Manual of Style for support. (If you are not familiar with the CMS, it is the bible of style for writers and editors. It has a spot within easy arm's reach of my computer.) Her argument was that "he" referred to a person but not to a horse; mine was that even if using "it" rather than "he" was technically correct, the usage violated well-established tradition and would offend every reader.

We eventually settled on an exception in Section 5.49 of the CMS that allowed gender-specific pronouns such as "he" or "she" to be used "as if the antecedent represented a male or female person." It also helped that "he" and "she" rather than "it" were used to refer to horses in my two previous books for that publisher.

Some improvements actually do make things worse.

Happy Verschlimmbessrung!