The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (5 page)

Thus, if the object of desire is asked, “Will you?” and replies, “I’m
celibate,
“ that is not a proper declination; it may only be an indication of housing condition. “I’m
chaste,
“ however, slams the door.

Unfortunately when you turned to “celibacy” and “chastity” you erred. In Roman Catholic moral theology, which is relevant here, these terms are not used in the way you say that they are. You tell us that one can be celibate without being chaste. Better you had turned this around: One can be chaste without being celibate. That is, to be celibate (which can be described independently of marriage) one must refrain from sexual intercourse. To be chaste one need not unless he is unmarried or widowed. In other words, for married couples their chastity—conjugal chastity—is expressed by affectionately achieving coitus. What makes a married person unchaste is committing an act such as adultery.

Ronald Colvin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I think you’re a bit too liberal in your view of what
chaste
means. It is quite possible to be unchaste in marriage—by excessive sexual indulgence, perpetual search for means to heighten pleasure, and anything like animal violence that disregards the partner in the act. I know that the current view of sex is unbridled recreation, but that fact is the very reason why the word
chaste
is quasi obsolete and often equated with marital infidelity.

Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas

Surely, chastity does not require total abstinence from sexual intercourse. Among many examples, Emilia, bemoaning her mistress’ murder (
Othello,
Act V, Scene II), “Moor, she was chaste; she lov’d thee cruel Moor.” Don Juan, in Shaw’s
Man and Superman,
refers to the “chastity” of the much-married Doña Ana to make precisely this point, indeed. There is clearly a mode of morally sanctioned (positively) sexual intercourse which does not erase chastity. The removal, for obvious purpose, of the chastity belt by the husband did not make his lady unchaste.

M. H. Rodman, MD
Winchester, Massachusetts

Census 2000.
Ten years ago this week, I received in the mail a census form that began, “Please use a black lead pencil only.” Naturally, I objected to the loose placement of the
only,
preferring “use only a black lead pencil” or the even more direct and simple “use a black lead pencil.”

This year, reflecting the leap forward in technology, the United States Census 2000 says, “Please use a black or blue pen.” I have a blue pen that writes with black ink; I suppose that’s OK. But I also have a black pen that writes with red ink; is that impermissible?

The clear intent is “use black or blue ink.” But if the Bureau of the Census, conscious of literal correctness, wrote those words, millions of people unfamiliar with the details of writing instruments would respond: “I don’t use ink; I use a ballpoint pen. Does this mean I have to fill this out with a fountain pen? There’ll be big inkblots all over the form. What do they want from my life?”

Therefore, I give the census-form writers a little leeway. In return, they try not to make the same mistakes twice. The 1990 form concluded with the admonition “Make sure you have … filled this form completely,” and I complained that it was possible to
fill in
or
fill out
a form, but not to simply
fill
a form because a form is not a bucket. In the 2000 form, the error is averted by the adoption of the “Thank you for not smoking” trick: “Thank you for completing your official U.S. Census form.” It seems friendlier and is not subject to attack by nitpickers in this space.

However, our intrepid people counters cannot be counted on for the correct use of commas. Turning to the first question in the long form, and aided by my fellow nitpicker Jeff McQuain, we read “people staying here on April 1, 2000 who have no other permanent place to stay …” If a date in mid sentence uses a comma, then another comma must follow the year: “on April 1, 2000, who …”

Later, the form directs, “Start with the person, or one of the people living here who owns …” This cries out for a balancing comma: “person, or one of the people living here, who owns …” Better still, forget the commas in that sentence entirely: “Start with the person or one of the people living here who owns …” Use two commas to separate the phrase or no commas if it does not need separation.

This comedy of commas continues with “What is this person’s age and what is this person’s date of birth?” The two independent clauses call for separation by a comma after
age
. (An even better fix is to obviate the need for a comma by shortening it to “What are this person’s age and date of birth?”)

And the form writers are tensed up. Right at the start, the past tense is used in “How many people were living or staying in this house … on April 1, 2000?” Then the tense is switched to the present with instruction to include them “even if they have another place to live.” Gotta be this or that:
are
and
have
or
were
and
had
.

The Parallel Construction Workers Union should file a grievance about the way a question about occupation is phrased: “patient care, directing hiring policies, supervising order clerks, repairing automobiles, reconciling financial records” are the examples given. The last four of those listed begin with gerunds; why, then, does “patient care” have no -
ing
? To be in proper parallel, it should be “caring for patients.”

At least that was a series of examples not masquerading as a sentence; correctly, with no verb, no period was placed at the end. However, in what is called the ancestry question (more precisely the lineage question), we read “Italian, Jamaican, African Am., Cambodian, … Taiwanese, Ukrainian, and so on.” The “and so on” tries to make it all-inclusive, but there is no verb to make it a sentence—and yet in this instance a period is put at the end. No style is followed. And why, when no other group is followed by “Am.,” is “African” so designated—and without a hyphen to boot?

Hats off to the writers for sticking to past practice in identifying aboriginal Americans as “American Indians” and not the confusing “Native Americans.” That last could mean anyone born in America, in contrast to “Naturalized Americans,” citizens born elsewhere. Past designations as Eskimo and Aleut are now lumped together as “Alaska Native.”

Thus, the sensitive question of “What is this person’s race?” has three main categories: (1) the above “American Indian or Alaska Native,” which follows (2) “white” and three choices of names for (3) the other—“Black, African Am., or Negro.” The Census Bureau explains that the terminology changes with each generation and that “Negro” was put in so that older members of the group would not feel outdated. What about whites from South Africa? I presume the form presumes that they will choose to describe themselves as white. In a triumph of inclusive self-differentiation, eleven other racial groups are listed, from “Asian Indian” to “Samoan,” with blank space left for anyone to write in “Some other race.”

Language has its limitations. In the question about relationships, the form includes, among others, “Husband/wife, Natural-born son/daughter, Adopted son/daughter.” That “Natural-born” seems awkward; obviously it is there to distinguish between what the Bible colorfully called “the fruit of one’s loins” and an adopted child. But with artificial insemination and test-tube babies in the mix, what is natural and what is not?

The delicious bureaucratic euphemism POSSLQ is gone. “Persons of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters,” which appeared in the 1990 census, has been replaced by two categories: “Housemate/Roommate,” who shares living quarters “primarily to share expenses,” and the new “Unmarried Partner.” Says the bureau: “Mark the ‘Unmarried Partner’ box if the person is not related to Person 1, shares living quarters, and who [
who
should be dropped] has a close personal relationship with Person 1.”

Prediction: In the 2010 census, this last category will be listed as “Lovers.” Also, the form writers will be warier about their use and abuse of commas.

The main objection I found to the Census Form—the grammatico-usage-style matters aside—was that it asked about the people living in the house on April 1, 2000. So I held on to the form for mailing on or after the 1st, since, God knows, anything can happen in a week.

Then publicity started appearing about how everyone had to send in the form BY April 1st. I don’t have at hand the birth and death rates in the U.S., but I assume the former outdoes the latter since things seem to be getting more and more crowded, but there surely must be a difference between the figures for, say, the 25th of March, when I completed the form, and the 1st of April.

I am sure that the people at the Census Bureau are well-intentioned and trying very hard; but it is a pity that they really haven’t a clue as to what in hell they are doing or in the simple rudiments of communication.

Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut

In counting the mistakes contained in the United States Census, you seem to have made one of your own. You use the phrase “obviate the need for …” This appears to me a redundancy, as the common meaning of obviate is “to make unnecessary.” To make a need unneeded is surplussage at its best. You have suggested many ways the Census could eliminate excess verbiage; so too could have you.

Andrew J. Heimert

Washington, D.C.

If one wants to get the structure across, unforgettably, one would say, “use black pencil, only.” That is more demanding and retentive. A pause in the expression, if oral, and a comma before the last word achieves the result in the interim between instruction and performance.

Judge Milton Pollack

U.S. Senior District Judge

U.S. District Court

New York, New York

Chad.
The word of the year is
chad
. Its current sense is defined in the
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE
) as “the small bit of paper released when a ballot is punched or a paper punch is used.”

This meaning of this single-syllable noun was a mystery to most when it first poked its head through the tape of language in the counting of ballots in Florida. But some Californians were familiar with it. In 1981, the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “What the city is trying to avoid is a repeat of April’s Great
Chad
Chore, when more than 40,000 ballots had to be recounted because their
chads
—the punched-out portions—failed to break loose.”

At that time, one of
DARE
’s lexicographers noted that the word “is used only by people in the ballot-counting business, not by other users of computer cards, who seem to call the same bits of cardboard ‘confetti.’ ” But according to Peter Graham, now university librarian at Syracuse, who served early in his career as a keypunch operator, “We had what we called a
chad
box underneath the key punch. We resisted calling it ‘confetti’ because the small bits of paper, when they caught on your clothes, would not dislodge.” Graham notes that the noun was then construed as plural, on the analogy of
chaff,
but today’s ballot counters are referring to
chads,
construing the word
chad
as singular.

The first use in this sense is in the files of Merriam-Webster: “The small discs, called
chads,
“ noted the
RCA Review
in 1947, “… are perforated only sufficiently to permit the
chads
to rise like small hinged lids in response to the sensing pins of a transmitter.”

A presidential election appeared to hinge on those hinges. Their near-infinite variety was listed by Katharine Q. Seelye in the
New York Times
: “Variants include
dimpled chad
(bulging but not pierced),
pregnant chad
(attached by all four corners to a ballot that is either bulging or pierced),
hanging chad
(attached by a single corner),
swinging-door chad
(attached by two corners) and
tri chad
(attached by three corners).” Bruce Rogow, an attorney for Florida election supervisors, explained with a straight face, “Pregnancy does not count in Palm Beach County, only penetration.”

Other meanings exist. The oldest is from the Middle English
ich hadde,
pronounced
shad
or
chad,
meaning “I had” (and legitimizing the
Wall Street Journal
headline, “
Chad
Enough?”). According to the Venerable Bede, an especially humble priest became St.
Chad
(and his feast day is March 2, for those ballot counters who want to celebrate it). And the nation of
Chad,
formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, took its name from Lake
Chad,
from a word in the Nilo-Saharan language of Kanuri meaning “an expanse of water.” According to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, traders stopped in what is now northeastern Nigeria to take on water.