Tag Archives: developmental editing

Surfacing from a sea of Tracewskis, Podgajnys and Gedeons

April 3, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

It has been a bit since I posted, and that’s because I have taken on a project which should soon appear elsewhere in the blog. Some years, back, a very capable writer and researcher named Tony Salin authored a book about forgotten baseball personalities. Almost as a throw-in, he included an appendix listing pronunciations (many coming from associates of the persons in question) for oft-mispronounced baseball figures’ names. It was great work, original research, and I’d long wanted to expand on it.

One may not, of course, misappropriate others’ work. One must address intellectual property rights, and this may not be done after the fact. Thus, once I made the decision to proceed, I contacted The Baseball Reliquary to ask if they knew who owned rights to Salin’s work (the man himself being now very sadly deceased). The response was swift and encouraging: TBR owned those rights, and would gladly grant me permission to use Salin’s compilation as my starting point. Thus, in my blog time for the past several days, I have been trying to figure out how players like Chris Cannizzaro and Kiki Cuyler pronounced their names.

It isn’t that easy. Of course, if the player himself is alive, and I can find a Youtube where he says his own name, that’s authoritative. Sometimes I can find a relative or descendant, which is the next best thing. Other information may come from ballplayers who were contemporaries. Last would be media and fans, who often think they know but do not–but I’d rather have that input than nothing.

It should soon be ready to go live (it’ll be linked under ‘About Me, and My Work’), a proud moment for me as the main holdup is twofold. I must conquer some HTML foibles, and I would rather root for the Yankees than mess directly with HTML code. Also, I do not feel right releasing it until I have added enough of my own discoveries and knowledge that the page goes significantly beyond what Tony Salin pioneered.

I harbor the hope that once the baseball nostalgia community learns of it, they’ll help me fill in some gaps. I would have fewer gaps, but until I was about 34, I did not have the ability to watch baseball games on TV, so I actually never heard many names articulated except by those with whom I traded baseball cards. I believe it will be a fun long-term project, and I thank the regular readership for its patience with my non-blogginess of late. No, I’m not losing interest; just got a lot on my plate here and in real life.

Adventures, Editing/writing life

Radcon 2013: Sunday and after-action

February 17, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

Radcon is a science fiction convention held in Tri-Cities, WA.

Wouldn’t you know that the only day I get decent sleep is the day when I need the energy the least. There was one panel that was important to me, and I was on time, but it was about half bust. Some panelists just boggle my mind with their not-getting-it. If the panel is about how to write, the minute you say ‘Have you seen Suchandsuch movie?’ you have lost me, because the point is that you have tools available in film that you do not have in print. What is worse: then talk for five minutes about how the movie did it. That’s simply not helpful to the writer or editor, unless the panel is about screenplays and making movies.

I did pick up something for Deb and some books for Jenn, so that was productive. Sunday at Radcon is usually pretty lax, with a lot of goodbyes and such. Some years I don’t even show up for Sunday.

Overall I think that the all-volunteer organizing bunch at Radcon does a pretty good job. Some of the vendors are fairly lousy at business, and it shows, but the only ones that hurts are themselves. The panel subjects have gotten fairly stale, there was a lot of ‘they have that every year.’ But I’m firm that I’d never go back with a mobility impairment, nor encourage anyone else with one to go. Security simply makes zero effort (that I could see) to keep kids from running people over. I realize that they have a hard job, and I think what they want to say but dare not is this: “Look. The day belongs to the adults, the night belongs to the kids, so just go home at night, if you would please.” Which is convenient for them, but isn’t what I came for.

There are several panel ideas I could suggest to freshen up the lineup, but I don’t think they’d be very receptive, since I’m not part of the old line Tri-Cities Radcon in-crowd and am not a big name, so I just elect not to make a nuisance of myself with ideas and suggestions. It is probably my last one anyway, for other reasons. There are a lot of people involved that I’ll miss, as the people really are the highlight, but a lot of the actual con content is fairly much the same from year to year, and I assume that’s how the majority prefers it, so, fair enough. Overall it was a good if physically painful experience, where all my guests seem to have had a good time and enjoyed the con and each other. That really is the main overriding thing.

Social comment, Sports

Coaches Hot Seat froth on the Pac-12 Networks

Link December 4, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

Yeah, I know that college football discussion is not in the wheelhouse of a good percentage of the readership here at the ‘Lancer, but maybe some of it will work out. Here’s a rather frothy rant from the guy at Coaches Hot Seat, who Uses A Lot Of Caps and Exclamation Points! (It’s also a way for me to test a Firefox WP add-in. But I’m going to let you watch Larry Scott get blistered, and that should be worth it. I hope.)

Coaches Hot Seat froth on the Pac-12 Networks

The CHS fellow and I disagree about the meaninglessness of bowl games. I would, however, agree that the proliferation of stuff like the Kraft Fight Hunger With Manufactured Junk Food Bowl, the Beef O’Brady Bunch Bowl, and the Idaho Potato Bowl (they repeat themselves, ahem) has made college football bowl season ridiculous. Most times, all it takes is a .500 record to be assured of a bowl in a major conference, or a winning record in a non-major. It feels like ‘every kid gets a trophy,’ even though it isn’t, quite. Though at the rate we are going, we might end up with enough bowls that everyone makes it. It would only take about 60, and we’re halfway there. Bowl games I think would be fun:

The Rotten.com Bowl (play it in East St. Louis)
The Experian Credit Wrecker Bowl
The Bank of America Nickel-and-Dime Bowl
The Onion Bowl (in reality, it would turn out to be a hoax)
The Bismarck Bowl (let’s see how well your team really travels: North Dakota in December!)
The Twilight Bowl (during Fairbanks, AK’s few hours of dusk that pass for daylight)
The Lentil Bowl (played at Pullman)
The Begging Bowl (hold it in whichever EU country, that refuses to tax its rich people or rein in spending, is in the worst shape and needs a boost…Greece would be the current frontrunner, though Spain is mounting a credible bid)
The Crock O’ Crap Bowl (where else but our nation’s capital?)
The Smoke-A-Bowl (alternating between Colorado and Washington; I think that’s fair)
The Tidy Bowl (Geneva, Switzerland, since you can basically eat off the streets in Switzerland)
The Sanction Bowl (best two teams on bowl probation; held in the yard at a maximum security prison)
The Facebook Bowl Sponsored by Everyone

What isn’t funny this year, as the CHS article mentions, is the colossal failure of the highly touted brand spankin’ new Pac-12 Networks. Here was the idea: imitate the Big 10 (which used to have twelve members, now the number keeps shifting, but only ten of them are even remotely big anyway) by starting the conference’s own network, getting nearly every Pac-12 football game on TV and also televising a lot of other sports that don’t get as much exposure. It was a good idea.

What we did not expect was that the Pac-12 would get so greedy. It had a year to reach agreements with the major premium TV providers. In the main, the conference failed at the basics of business: you need to get the sale. My understanding is that the Pac-12 had promised the member schools Big Moola, forgetting two things: that one still has to reach agreement with providers, and that if one fails in this, one’s network is a not-work because your viewers can’t watch the games. In our area, the Pac’s failure to reach agreement with DefectiveTV and Cheater (two of our three primary providers) denied a majority of the local viewership any chance to watch the games. In my case, four Husky games plus one non-Husky rivalry game mattered to me. During that one, I sat down to write a letter, since it wasn’t on my TV. I’d like to share it with you.

November 24, 2012

Mr. Larry Scott

Pac-12 Conference

1350 Treat Blvd., Suite 500

Walnut Creek, CA 94597-8853

Dear Mr. Scott:

Normally right now I would be rooting for one disliked Pac-12 rival to beat a more disliked Pac-12 rival on TV. Unfortunately, the UO/OSU game is on your Pac-12 Networks, which DirecTV doesn’t offer, so I have free time to write you a letter I have spent most of the season formulating.

In 2011, I was able to watch all twelve Washington games on TV. In 2012, I was able to watch eight. Sadly, the other four were on your vaunted Pac-12 Networks, thus unavailable to me. I trust you understand what this means: your network has been a detriment to Pac-12 sports coverage. If that weren’t bad enough, you have sicked our almae matres on us. Pliant minions that they can so often be, they’ve tried to convince us to blame the satellite and cable providers, and to switch to a provider that carries the Pac-12 Networks. I am not an unreasonable man, nor am I new to DirecTV. I know that DirecTV, a perennial corporate spoiled child and bully, manages to fight with some content provider most months, causing loss of coverage. I am not taking DirecTV’s side when I fault you for the situation. I’m pointing to results: we were better off without your networks. Your networks made sports worse.

It didn’t have to be this way. There were other options. You had a year to work out some sort of deal with the likes of DirecTV. If you had to settle for less money than you have evidently promised the schools, you could have negotiated a one-year deal and returned to the table later. You could have offered online viewing through the Pac-12 Networks website for a reasonable subscription fee (or even free). I would have paid. Instead, you co-opted the schools into repeating your talking points, pressuring fans to pressure their TV providers. One problem with that, Mr. Scott: bright minds graduate from Pac-12 schools. Most aren’t fools. We learn critical thinking. We aren’t all so easily manipulated, and the attempt insults our intelligence and education. Who’s going to dump an otherwise functional vendor relationship over such a small percentage of their TV service? That would be dumb business.

I can tell what this stance cost the conference, because I happened to see some Pac-12 Networks coverage while visiting a friend. While I found the overall coverage substandard, the commercials stood out most. Nearly all were yours, which tells me you didn’t sell much airtime. While the ADs may parrot the line, the advertisers aren’t buffaloed. They know that your stance has lessened the audience, making your price higher than your viewing base is worth to them. It was more sad than comical, but it was a bit of both.

Sir, you have failed. You have taken yet another step in the transformation of a great sport into purest moneyball, where fans are just annoyances who had best hush, accept what is thrown to them, and keep their noses out of corporate management. You have made it pointedly clear that the fans’ good does not matter.

Proud of that?

Sincerely,

J. K. Kelley (UW ’86)

I don’t expect a reply.

Homeownership

Groucho stance: the world’s worst light fixtures you don’t need a ladder to reach…

November 30, 2012 jkkblog 2 Comments

…are the ones in our bathroom. They’re halogens, four of them, and they don’t last as long as they should.

I have to use a stepstool to get up and stand on the counter.

The lights cannot be on because if one must manipulate the bulb, it becomes extremely hot, thus a lamp has to be placed on the bathroom counter for basic ability to see.

The roof is too low for me to stand up on the counter, so I have to do something like what cavers call the ‘Groucho walk.’ Call it the ‘Groucho stance.’

One must remove a ridiculously long screw that holds in place a little screen piece that keeps dust from landing on the bulb. One must not misplace this. The only easy part is removing the old bulb, which of course flashes light a couple of times while doing so, thus making me suspect that it isn’t really burnt out and that this is a needless pain in the ass.

I have to get the new bulb out of the blister packaging without getting finger oil on it, lest it burn out within minutes. That isn’t as simple as the writing makes it sound.

For the same reason, I must handle the bulb solely with a washcloth fresh from the dryer. It is hard to do all this while doing the Groucho stance.

It’s then time to attempt to screw the bulb into the fixture. Usually it’s too loose. The washcloth is a pain. Don’t fumble it, even though washcloths are not designed to be primitive oven mitts! If it lands in the bowl-like covering, which is full of dead bugs, guess what–bulb is rendered useless. Start again.

Did I get the bulb in correctly? Hope so. Have Deb switch the lights on. If it comes on, we’re almost done.

Now the screen has to go back in place–without touching the bulb. At all. It must be held steady until the screw is driven all the way down. I have excellent manual dexterity for a man; even so, I manage to ruin one bulb in four this way, just by bumping the bulb, which resides about 1/2″ below the screen’s final resting position.

Repeat this whole pain in the ass two times. Because you can now see why I don’t get into this until three of them are dead.

If in the end, I have four functioning light bulbs in the bathroom, I deserve a beer. If they all still work correctly the next day, I should go buy a lottery ticket. If only three still work, I declare marginal victory and am grateful.

Languages

Foreign-related stuff people get wrong

November 26, 2012 jkkblog 3 Comments

English just might be the $2 hooker of languages. Every language you’ve heard of has done English a few times, so many that English’s Latin and Greek words don’t even stand out except to cognoscenti. That may be why its vocabulary is gargantuan. A lot of more obvious adoptions are frequently misused, mispronounced or misspelled, a thing one only learns when one studies the language of origin. I’ll help.

You are not an ~~alumni~~. You are an alumnus (male) or alumna (female). Alumni are the masculine or mixed plural, so don’t say you are a Flat Rock State U. ~~alumni~~ unless you’re really huge. More than one alumna are alumnae. If you went to college, it’s pretty embarrassing if you do not know how to refer to that fact, but I accept that lots of people neither took Latin nor absorbed that much by osmosis. No problem; your fellow alumni are here for you.

A male betrothed is a fiancé. A bethrothed female is a fiancée. They are pronounced the same.

The problem with spelling résumé correctly in your cover letter is that in today’s Murrica, it’s likely to get your application tossed as emblematic of too much education and intelligence, both of which are out of fashion. Correct accents look snooty and suggest that you might actually speak French, which could indicate the kind of education that dares question things. Spell it down to the level you think will help you get the job–but hold the truth in your secret heart. Even if you have to get it wrong as ~~resumé~~.

Scotch is a drink, not a nationality, as any Scottish lad will tell you. Another name for that drink is whisky, which is not ~~whiskey~~. Don’t ask me why the Scots care so much about how English renders the Gaelic word for ‘water of life.’ They just do.

Coup de grace is not pronounced ~~koo day GRAW~~. Never do this again. If you want to use it, say ‘koo duh grawss’ (last word rhymes with ‘floss’). Bonus: when you say it like my D&D groups all have, you’re actually referring to the ‘stroke of flab.’ Player: “Okay, my paladin is going to coup de gras the ogre.” DM: “How can he do that? Your paladin is totally ripped. He has no fat to hit the ogre with.”

If there are twö döts over a vowel in German, it’s an umlaut. Non-Germanic languages do not have umlauts, so please stop referring to Noël as having an ~~umlaut~~. It has a trema. To think otherwise is naïf (or naïve, if the thinker is female). The trema tells you to pronounce two vowels separately, which is why we say no ELL rather than ~~nole~~, and na YEEV instead of ~~nyve~~ or ~~nave~~.

When you see an Å in a Swedish word, pronounce the little ring, not the A. It’s a long O sound. Your True Blood stud, Alexander Skarsgård, pronounces his last name SCARS gourd. The Ångström unit in atomic physics is ohng struhm. I can live with it if you get the ö wrong (kind of rhymes with ‘book’), but if you make the first part sound like ‘angst,’ I suffer pain which you could have so easily avoided.

If you know just enough Spanish to be dangerous, you have wondered why it’s Buenos días, with what looks like a masculine adjective on a feminine noun. On about your second day of Spanish class, you learn that the last letter is not 100% reliable at indicating gender in Spanish. The true marker is the article: el día, masculine, thus ‘buenos’ is correct. However, it is la tarde and la noche, thus buenas tardes and buenas noches.

French accents are pronunciation, not stress. French has no stressed syllables, and you won’t believe how difficult that is until you try adjusting to it. Live there a decade, it’s the last vestige of your native accent you defeat (if ever). Spanish accents are stress. Why bother, then, to have an accent on a one-syllable word like sí? To distinguish it from si, which means ‘if.’

It’s time to stop abusing Cyrillic. Let’s start with Я, which is pronounced ‘ya’ just like German ja. When you write ~~Яussia~~, we who read Cyrillic throw up in our mouths, because the country is not called ~~Yaussia~~. Г is the Russian G. Н is the Russian N. П is the Russian P. Р is the Russian R. С is the Russian S. This is how USSR could be СССР on Soviet Olympic hockey jerseys: Soyuz (Union) Sovietski (Soviet) Sosyalistcheski (Socialist) Respubliki (Republics), SSSR in the Latin characters, СССР in Cyrillic.

Since French accents do not mean stress, everyone is screwing up mêlée. D&D players have been destroying it since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson started the thing (I blame them). It is not ~~mealy~~ nor is it ~~ma-LEE~~. Say meh-lay, trying like hell to have equal stress on both syllables. There is no hope of straightening out the gamers, a highly literate but notoriously careless band, but others of you may yet be saved from barbarism.

César Chávez‘s name probably gets pronounced correctly by a non-Spanish speaker once a decade. Let this be the decade. It’s not ~~SEE-zer sha-VEZ~~. Say it with me: SAY-zar CHA-vez. Yes. People botch both the consonants and the accent on his last name, even as they rename streets after the guy.

Yom Kippur is not ~~yawm KIPP-er~~. That makes it sound like a pickled herring, which can be kosher food but isn’t kosher pronunciation. It rhymes with ‘home for sure.’ Rosh Hashanah is not ~~rawsh ha SHA na~~, but roash ha sha NAH. (Last syllable rhymes with ‘blah.’ In fact, the last three syllables do.)

You are probably saying Qabalah wrong. Nearly everyone in the U.S. is, at least, including a fair number of people with names like Goldberg. In a spiritual practice where letters are important, it seems sloppy to butcher articulation, eh? It is kah-bah-LAH, Madonna. If you say it as ~~CAB-uh-luh~~, you are being positively qlipotic, leaving the listener’s mind a shell. (Qabalah joke.) Do not say ~~kuh BAWL uh~~, either. That was a hokey occult game from the 1960s. Oh, and if you play one of those console games that uses a character called ~~Sephiroth~~, know that this is the gross mutilation of a word for the spheres of the Qabalah: sfirot, uttered sfeer-OAT. If you say ~~SEFF ur ROTH~~ in Hebrew, it means nothing at all. Ah, but you heard it from someone you just know is well learned in ~~CAB uh luh~~? My sources are my collegiate professor of Hebrew and a retired Israeli colonel, native born. Either neither of them actually knows Hebrew, or they are correct. Your move.

Don’t even try to pronounce a Chinese word unless you have heard a fluent speaker and emulated his or her tonal until s/he told you it was correct. Otherwise, you might accidentally confess a sexual longing for brick mortar (or something worse). True for some other Asian languages as well.

If using the word año in Spanish, do yourself a favor and make sure to articulate the Y sound produced by the virgulilla, called a tilde in English. Thus, ON yo. If you say ~~ON oh~~, you just referred to the anus. To say one’s age in Spanish, one says that one ‘has’ however many years. I had great merriment in college Spanish when an attractive young lady answered the professor by declaring that she had nineteen anal openings.

Tijuana, Mexico is not pronounced ~~TEE-a WA-nah~~. The nearest translation of that pronunciation is ‘Aunt Jackie.’ I have an Aunt Jaque and have been calling her this since junior high school. As for the city, it’s tee HWA nah.

Some non-Murrican English bits: Greenwich is really, truly GREN itch. Norwich works likewise, and probably all the other -wiches do too, though I’m not sure what happens if you order a ‘sanitch.’ Anything ending in -cester gets the middle mooshed up. Leicester = LESS ter. Worcester = WOOSS ter. Gloucester = GLOSS ter, etc.

The media are getting most of the Russian names wrong. It is brutal. Example: Gorbachev is actually GAR ba chyov. Ivan is ee VAWN. Just believe me that, half the time, what you hear from newsies is wrong. It’s not your imagination; they really just don’t care, because they have a low opinion of their audience and a casual relationship to accuracy anyway. It’s much worse with Arabic names, complicated by regional dialects which make the correct pronunciation a matter of valid difference. Most everyone outside the Islamic world is saying Allah wrong: it’s all LAH. Pronounce the L both times. During both Gulf Wars, our beloved newscasters made the city names look like a bombed-out area of Fallujah.

Good examples of botched Russian are ~~czar~~ and ~~czarina~~. Tsar only takes three letters in Cyrillic, which has a letter TS. Why the serial botch? It has caesar as its root, like kaiser: the name that became Latin for ’emperor.’ It’s not too late to save the words, provided we stop appointing ~~czars~~ in government, and provided we learn that it is tsaritsa, not ~~tsarina~~. Oh, and there actually is no N in Kreml’, Moscow’s great fortress and sometime seat of government.

And lastly: no matter how you try, you’ll never pronounce Polish correctly by looking at the letters and imagining them to relate to English. These are not the Latin characters you want. Move along.

Adventures, Human relations, Social comment

The only white guy on the bus

November 15, 2012 jkkblog 2 Comments

With nearly zero experience of the east, a few years back I went to D.C. Deb had a training event in Silver Spring, MD, which gave me free housing. Now, I have zero basic interest in the nation’s capital for its own sake. Like many residents of Washington, I am habituated (if not accustomed) to people asking “oh, you mean the state?” It’s difficult. If I say what I’m thinking, it sounds very churlish. Sometimes it comes out anyway: “Of course, the state. Is there another place called Washington that is relevant?” I’m not good at holding back, unfortunately.

Of course, when the Smithsonian card is played, I fold. Is there anyone with a passion for history who would not brave our nation’s capital if it meant a chance to spend almost unlimited time browsing the Smithsonian museums? Besides meeting up with a longtime online acquaintance who lives in the area, the Smithsonian was the reason for tagging along. I didn’t care about anything else. My world resolved into the need to get to the Smithsonian in the morning, then back to the lodgings at night.

Living in Seattle for sixteen years, bus travel is old hat for me. Not so light rail, which Seattle didn’t build until I was safely out of town. My day therefore meant taking a bus from Silver Spring to Fort Totten, where I would board DC Metro for the National Mall. I could then choose my museum, and wander freely and joyfully, lingering until closing if I desired. It was, of course, complete museum overload–and in a good way. I’m not sure the Smithsonian museum complex has an equal in the world. Whatever percentage of my tax dollars keep the Smithsonian going, I will cheerfully pay.

Thus, I didn’t expect that commuting to the National Mall would be an educational experience. Oh, sure, I knew I’d be a minority. I’m not ignorant of demographics. Didn’t bother me, and I even kind of felt I might learn something.

It was about a forty-minute milk run to/from Fort Totten. In nearly every situation, I was the only white/Anglo on the bus. Everyone else was black or Hispanic (perhaps both). Many times in Seattle, there had been only one black person on the entire bus. Now I was getting some exposure to that feeling, however brief, and it was an interesting sensation. No one was friendly or talkative, but that’s big city bus travel, and is the same in Seattle. People are in their bubbles. No one was hostile, though; no glares saying “you’re in the wrong place.” I’d describe it as similar to a Seattle bus, except perhaps a little more polite overall. Seattle bus travelers can be quite indifferent to basic manners.

But as the bus filled up, the last vacant seat was always the one next to me. Sometimes it stayed vacant even when the bus had standing room only.

I don’t think it was conscious. But I saw that in reverse plenty of times in Seattle, and now I had a sense of how it felt. I wasn’t offended, nor terribly surprised. I guess I could have been offended, but it wouldn’t have done me any good. No action available to me was going to change habits overnight, or in a week. Nothing for it but to mind my own business, ride the bus to my stop, and that was that. It’s not as if anyone were singling me out on purpose; I just stood out, with my pale skin, crew cut and heavy beard. They weren’t talking to me, but they weren’t talking to each other either.

The only real epiphany from it, I suppose, would be this: I think I understand why minorities are sometimes bemused and philosophical about implied racism, rather than angry. The anger will kill you without changing the reality. One gains more from just observing, accepting that it’s not going to change today, and getting on with whatever life details face one that day. It’s not like anyone acted in a way to force me to take notice of the situation; they just decided not to sit next to me. I have no basic call or right to influence where someone chooses to sit on a bus. Or stand. The only way one can lose in that situation is to call more attention to oneself, which would probably confirm to everyone else on the bus–and one is heavily outnumbered–that it was smart of them not to sit next to one. That’s going backward.

It does make me wonder how different the world would be if we all made a better effort to bridge the gap. On all sides.

The Editorial Maverick