Notebook Dump
Lingua Franca 2018-12-19
I recently got an email from my friend Milena Davison in which she commented, “I find myself increasingly annoyed with the use of ‘redact’ and ‘redaction.’ I learned and sometimes even used these technical terms in connection with textual — mostly ancient — studies. When and why were they appropriated and substituted for ‘blacked out’ or ‘censored’?”
I immediately got onto the websites of The New York Times, Google Books, and the Oxford English Dictionary – as I do — in search of an answer. Fifteen or 20 minutes later, I wrote back to Milena:
Interesting on redact. The OED doesn’t have a distinct definition for this meaning, but rather includes it in a broader one: “To put (writing, text, etc.) in an appropriate form for publication; to edit.”The first relevant citation is from a 1957 law journal: “Means should have been adopted to redact De Gennaro’s confession and admissions — before their introduction into evidence.”And then this from 1994: “But most disturbing is a confidential memo Ickes sent to Hillary Clinton on the RTC, which has been redacted from 25 pages to just one paragraph.”It appears to have started as a legal term of art: The New York Times in 1973 quotes a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling: “public disclosure of testimony given by him before a Federal grand jury in that district on Nov. 26, 1971, redacted so as not to reveal the names of other persons or businesses mentioned therein.” And a federal judge in 1980: “counsel for the defendants had grossly overstated the number of documents that had been released in redacted form by the C.I.A.”Maybe the first political use in the Times is from a 1983 article with the word in quotation marks, indicating that it’s a fairly new usage: “The agreement provides that subcommittee members and staff can have copies of ”redacted,” or expurgated, copies of the documents that have been withheld, and can demand to see the full, unredacted copies in executive session.”
- Headline from The Athletic: “Schultz: Kirby Smart knows bowl games have lost their relevancy …” Seems that relevancy has been increasingly used over relevance, leniency over lenience, etc. What’s next — importancy?…
- Choose-your-own pronouns: Do I dare touch it?…
- The expression move the needle has definitely been moving the needle lately. Another one’s set it and forget it. Trace their rise to popularity …
- Rachel Maddow always chooses pled over pleaded. A change in usage?…
- People pronouncing milk and bank as melk and benk: Is this in fact on the rise, or am I just noticing it because it annoys me so much?…
- Spend a day answering emails by choosing one of Gmail’s three sometimes eerily prescient and sometimes way-off suggestions …
- From a Bloomberg News story: “About 7 percent of tweets prominent women receive in government and journalism were found to be abusive or problematic.” In some circles, problematic has long been a popular euphemism for more direct terms like “abusive,” “racist,” “hateful,” or “offensive.” What’s its appeal, and is it going wider? …
- “Black and brown people” seems to be gaining on “people of color” …
- “Never such truer words”: a thing? …
- Sharp-eyed Emily Gordon sends a quote from a Washington Post article: “‘I am a normy guy,’ Davis said.” Emily notes: “It’s a common slang word, but it’s misspelled. It should be ‘normie,’ meaning exceptionally or overly normal, square, vanilla, straight, non-alternative. … So, ‘He listens to all that normie music from the radio’ (snicker). Or ‘She’s one of those normie girls who just cares about good grades and getting into college.’” How different from basic? Worth looking in to? …
- The superiority of “looking in to” over “looking into”…
- Did the seemingly common pronunciation of Beto O’Rourke’s first name as “Bay-toe” rather than “Bay-doh” signal a decline in alveolar flapping in American English? …
For seven and a half years, the prospect of having to write a Lingua Franca post every week has concentrated my mind wonderfully. It’s forced me to turn random observations and notions such as the above into 700-1,000-word pieces, with what were meant to be cogent arguments, backed up with solid research and reasoning, and expressed in a reasonably precise and elegant manner. It’s given me the privilege of being on the same team as the sterling crew you see pictured to the right of this column, gently reminded of deadlines and deftly guided into print by Heidi Landecker and her colleagues Mitch Gerber and Carmen Mendoza, and read by a discerning group of readers, who rapidly pointed out our errors, engaged with our arguments, offered praise when appropriate, and, in my case at least, upped my game.
Hopefully I hope that when it came to discourse on language and writing, we moved the needle a little bit.