Worth Its Weight in Gold

Interest in finding an ancient book of Turkish grammar is so high, a writers' association is willing to pony up 1,000 golden coins for it. Fascinating!

Efforts to find first Turkish grammar book accelerated

The Eurasia Writers' Association (AYB) is trying to find early Turkic linguist Mahmud al-Kashgari's long-lost Turkish grammar book, Kitabu Cevahirü'n Nahv Fi Lughat al-Turk, which is believed to be the first grammar book on the Turkish language.

The association announced over the weekend that the person to find the book would be awarded with 1,000 Cumhuriyet golden coins -- a haul worth around YTL 226,000. The chairman of the association, Yakup Deliömeroğlu, told reporters that the association has announced 2008 as "the Year of al-Kashgari," marking the 1,000th anniversary of his birth. Deliömeroğlu added: "We know that the book exists, however, no one has seen it so far. We hope that this book turns up like the Diwan ul-Lughat al-Turk (Collection of Turkic words), thus contributing to our cultural heritage."

Read on...

Sometimes, Grammar is the Least Important Thing

We saw a listing for an unusual piece of jewelry (thanks to Barbara Card Atkinson for the tip).

It's a ring. Made--somehow, mysteriously--from a man's most private bits. Here's his headline, verbatim:

Its my scrotum made into a ring seriously

We could correct this grammar, of course. If we did, it would read, "It's my scrotum, made into a ring. Seriously." But that would be a bit like rearranging doilies in a burning house. It wouldn't fix the deeper problem—namely, that the artist thinks anyone would want to wear a ring made from the scrotum-print of a stranger who might be several noodles short of spaghetti, judging by his grammar.

Here's his big sales pitch:

This ring is both a work of art and a great conversation piece. Please feel free to contact me if you would like more details.

We get the work-of-art thing. We're sure he worked hard on it, and it is an innovative use of materials. We do not, however, want more details, as we can imagine they would involve the words "tiny hairs," "hot wax" and "excruciating tinglies."

Nor would we want our conversations to revolve around such things. In our experience, if you want to end a conversation or a blog post—say scrotum.

See? It works.

There, There...

This news item from MSN Music gave us a pang—and not because it's about the death of Ike Turner (we're on Tina's side). Rather, it's the appearance of the wrong their:

But over the years they're genre-defying sound would make them favorites on the rock 'n' roll scene, as they opened for acts like the Rolling Stones.

It's since been edited. But still. It hurt our eyes for hours afterward.

Thanks to Carrie B. for sending it.

The Apostrophe Protection Society

If members of the Apostrophe Protection Society were to happen across this Web site, they just might die.

Kelly F. sent it our way; here's an excerpt from the site's navigation:

- Auction Designing Service's

- Personal Website Designing Service's

- Website Designing Service's

What's with using an apostrophe to make a plural? It's just a mystery why some people do this. In the site owner's defense, though, she was at least consistent.

The Grammar Defense

The Arkansas Democrat Gazette carries an interesting story today about a woman denying her alleged role in a $1 million mail-order scam. This could well be the first criminal defense based on punctuation and capitalization. One wrote a letter to her defense attorney:

In the letter, which is included with the motion, Henningsen denies being the Sharon Jeanette Henningsen listed in the criminal complaint, noting that she now hyphenates Sharon-Jeanette and separates her first name from her last with a semicolon. She also claims that the complaint, which spells her name in all capital letters, does not refer to her.

“I learned in first-grade grammar that proper names have the first letter capitalized and the remaining letters in lower case,” the letter states. “Your DEFENDANT is not me, according to the rules of grammar.” Henningsen claims that Neal shouldn’t represent her because he has a conflict of interest, and she declines any legal representation.

“Based on my research, and as there is no contract between Sharon-Jeannette; Henningsen and Barry Neal, I decline an attorney of any kind,” the letter states.

The rest of the story is here; our only question at this point is how do completely insane people get it together enough to steal a million dollars in the first place? Our grasp of punctuation, capitalization, and which end is up hasn't netted us nearly so much.

Conjunction Dysfunction

We're doing a little research for Encarta on presidential debates and famous zingers, and we came across this dysfunctional conjunction at the Commission on Presidential Debates:

DebateWatch is a voter education program of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). DebateWatch brings citizens like you together to watch the televised debates, talk about what you learned, and, if you choose to, share your reactions with the CPD.

The beauty of this program is its flexibility; anyone can participate including children, young adults, or retirees. DebateWatches can take place in high-profile televised venues with hundreds of people, or they can occur in people's living rooms with half a dozen neighbors.

What's with the "or"? It makes it sound as though either children OR retirees can participate, but not both. That's hardly the beautiful flexibility they're promising.

Take care with conjunctions. They're not interchangeable.

They Were Wounded in the Wallet?

The grammar-challenged blogger Perez Hilton reports that Dennis Quaid is suing the makers of heparin after his infant twins were given an accidental overdose of the blood-thinning drug.

Hilton writes: "As a result of the accidental overdose, the papers claim, twins 'ZOE GRACE QUAID and THOMAS BOONE QUAID, suffered and will continue to suffer injuries of a pecuniary nature.'"

This word goof probably isn't Hilton's fault. He's just quoting the lawyers. As terrible as it is what happened to the Quaids and their babies, this is such a lawyerish sort of mistake, all dressed up in its fancy Latin toga.

Pecuniary means "relating to money" or "involving a financial penalty."

What the lawyer meant to say is that they were injured and deserve to be compensated for it. But instead, he reached for a Latin term he didn't really understand, and ended up suggesting that the babies had been hurt by money. They're too young for that; that sort of injury comes later, especially if you have to spend too much of the wrong sort of time with lawyers.

A Bad Spell for a Politician

The education minister in New Zealand is taking well-deserved knocks for sloppy e-mail. Yes, everyone does make errors. Still, a dozen, in one e-mail?

What's more, not everyone is the minister of education. If his constituents can't trust him to have paid attention in school—and to pay attention to what he's typing while he's representing their interests—then they have a right to be outraged. We should all expect excellence from our leaders. Their langauge, the doorway to their thoughts, is no exception.

Bad spell for education minister

Education Minister Chris Carter has been pinged for making more than a dozen spelling or grammatical errors in a short email to a persistent opponent of election funding law reform.

Mr Carter's spokeswoman confirmed yesterday he had written the mistake-ridden email.

However, she otherwise issued a blanket "no comment" on whether Mr Carter was a good speller, prone to making errors of grammar, or should set higher standards for students.

In the email to Simeon Brown, 16, Mr Carter spells the recipient's name "Simon", leaves out a question mark and full stops, spells "elsewhere" as two words, puts "your" instead of "you're" and commits the common error of putting an "e" after the "u" in argument.

It was one of three emails Simeon, a level 12 Correspondence School pupil, had received from Mr Carter. Another also contained errors.

"I'm not a perfect speller. One or two is acceptable, but 12 or 13 is getting crazy," Simeon said.

"There is something called a spellcheck and that would have got rid of a few of them."

Whither the Clichéd Adjective?

We came across this sentence this morning in a review of an album by American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis.

But then it's back to the song, which is so slick with cliché dramatics it might have been directed by Michael Bay ("Pearl Harbor" and "Transformers").

It should be clichéd dramatics. The word, which from the sound metal engraving stereotypes make when over and over as they strike the press, is a noun.

The Queen's English...Betrayed!

The Independent carries this anxious report on the future of English spelling outside England. We're guessing the queen won't be pleased:

The British media's rush to make a mark in Indian ink

For years, Indian newspapers and magazines were infatuated with their English counterparts. Now it is the Western press scrambling to get a foothold in the Indian market, says 'The Times of India''s Manu Joseph

In the largest fragment of the Commonwealth, the spelling of "colonise" has changed – to "colonize".

On 12 November, The Times of India took the first step towards breaking from a long tradition, with an official email instructing senior editors that all verbs ending with the British "ise" must now be changed to the American "ize". "That's the way forward," says Jaideep Bose, the executive editor of the paper, which has an average daily circulation of over 3.1 million.

"'Colour' has to be 'color'. 'Honour' has to be 'honor'. The world is moving towards American spelling. We are largely reading American books, American magazines. Indian children are taking American entrance exams. There is no good reason any more why we should stick to the British spelling."

This betrayal of the Queen's English endangers one of the only two enduring British traditions in India: spelling and keeping to the left of the road. Ironically, the change in spelling convention comes just as British media organisations are besieging the Indian market, seeking growth that is hard to find at home.

Read more: http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3216030.ece