Stupid metaphors, second in a series: From Slate's Dana Stevens:

Noise bites off much more than it can chew—an indigestible wad of broad social satire and sincere political commentary, with one too many Hegel references for even this former grad student to endure. But it masticates that wad with admirable vigor.

To masticate is to chew. If the film can masticate the wad -- with vigor, yet -- then it has not, by definition, bitten off more than it can chew.

Pants on (Sa)fire: Pedantic warmonger William Safire, guest-blogging for Oxford University Press, claims to have made up the verb "consense":

As a language columnist, I feel free to coin a neologism now and then; “consense” is a verb that can replace “form a consensus”. Not the opposite of “nonsense”.

Anyone who has spent even a little time around left-wing politics and activism has heard "consense" used in exactly this way a hundred times. Wiktionary has several citations, including one from 1970 -- a speech by pioneering gay activist Harry Hay. Looks like the queers beat you to that one, Bill!

Call for a new literary category

Jack Shafer's debunking of a Malcolm Gladwell riff demonstrates only that Gladwell is a talented bullshit artist and Shafer is a scold, both of which we already knew. (An obvious point Shafer misses: when a guy tells a funny story about sneaking humorous fabrications into a newspaper, doesn't the story itself hint that the guy is not to be trusted?)

Gladwell has apparently told the "new and troubling questions" story at dinner parties for ten years. My guess is that it has gotten funnier, and less strictly veridical, over that time. Anyone who heard him tell it at a dinner party would identify it immediately as a hybrid of fact and fiction, just like any other successful dinner-party anecdote. And then it gets played on This American Life, and Shafer spends 3,000 words pointing out that it doesn't stand up to fact-checking.

Why don't we just have a category called "anecdote," to accommodate stories rooted in autobiography but containing exaggerations and emendations for comic or dramatic effect? The ones in magazines like the New Yorker would typically be humorous, but Reader's Digest could use the rubric for those moralistic little fables that illustrate how Jesus is always there when you're not expecting him. Let's stipulate that an anecdote must be relatively short (when it reaches book length, it's a novel), and that it's bad form to use anecdotal license for self-glamorization, just as it would be at a dinner party (Margaret Jones, throw your hands in the air). And then let's stick the word "anecdote" at the top of the page where it used to say "personal history," and Rodney Rothman can write for the New Yorker again, and David Sedaris won't get special treatment, and Shafer can stop stating the obvious.

This post's title notwithstanding, the anecdote -- the tale told around a fire, presented as true but not entirely verifiable -- has a much longer history than the clearly labelled fiction or the thoroughly researched news story. (Homer: [stands up, clears throat] "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles....") It's no wonder that it keeps returning even when we don't make room for it.

Copy-editing the primaries: In the wake of John Edwards's departure from the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both released sucking-up statements aimed at securing an endorsement from the cheery populist.

Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, and the Politico all include this sentence in Obama's statement: "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this -- that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose."

Of course, Obama meant to say that two Americas can become one -- an attempt to connect Edwards's "two Americas" theme with Obama's own message of unity. (Indeed, that's how Obama's website has it.) But someone -- a sleep-deprived Obama staffer, perhaps? -- added an extra n, and now it looks as though Obama was paying some kind of weird tribute to the Edwardses' marriage.

Your linguistic update for the day: I have always opposed the colloquial use of deconstruct as a fancy synonym for thoroughly analyze. It makes me think of the Village Voice's arts section, and not in a good way. Deconstruction properly refers to a specific and rather abstruse school of critical reading in which texts are examined not for their meanings or methods but for their internal contradictions and lacunae. As a rule of thumb, if a person hasn't gone to graduate school in the humanities, he or she probably isn't deconstructing anything.

But when a usage is employed by Joan Didion, that usage has, by definition, become acceptable and probably admirable. So as of now we can all go to town, deconstructionwise.

Copy-editing the election: First, the unwelcome return of a familiar error. Joe Klein, writing in Time:

With the terrorist threat diminished, is it worth spending $9 billion a month to referee the eternal Mesopotamian ethnic differences?

Klein is talking about the struggle between the Sunni and the Shi'a, and about the Kurds' fight for control of Kirkuk. Only one of these is an ethnic difference. (The incursions of Persian terrorists from Iran have an ethnic dimension, but Klein has already dismissed these as a contributor to the turmoil in Iraq.)

Second, from the NYT editorial page:

Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.

There is nothing technically wrong with this. The word denigrate simply means to criticize unfairly. But am I alone in thinking that its usage in this context leaves a bad taste? Washington mayoral aide David Howard got in trouble for using the word niggardly, which unlike denigrate is etymologically innocent of any connection to blackness.

Maureen Dowd has been punting a lot lately. Today she turns her column over to Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers to do gags about the TV writers' strike. But there's something off about this bit:

As a comedy writer, I am more than willing to admit that I need a world with producers, but do they need us? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, without writers whom will the studios blame for their failures? Second, seriously, whom?

Does anyone else detect the heavy hand of the Times copy desk here? Or did Meyers really land the joke on whom rather than who?

I have posted before about Jezebel's "Write Like a Man" feature, but there's a newish episode up and it's kind of a doozy: an anonymous men's-magazine writer compares celebrity profiles in women's magazines with those in men's magazines, and argues that the mensmag ones are better because they're more meta about the total fraudulence and inadequacy of the celebrity-profile form. From the nutgraf, which comes almost exactly halfway through:

The modern mensmag celeb profile is actually a surprisingly prayerful, if superficial, blend of braggadocio and dogged practice.... The work of writing about celebrity is not real work. It's a break from the real work. It is The Writer's Time To Jizz -- a way to keep that writerly muscle loose and limber and tuned up for the next Big Plunge ... for that 14,000-word hillock of ASME-judge porn that all of us contract heroes have got sitting on our laptops. (Many of which, if we're being truthful, are nowhere near as playful or, in a weird way, honest as our best celeb pieces.) ... Each celeb profile becomes a little underdog story, an uplifting tale of a ragtag writer saddled with a task that Nobody Thought He Could Ever Pull Off: Can he spin a few hours' worth of smalltalk and smiles into a revolution?

There's 2,300 words of this stuff, with detailed examples from both sides of the fence. The next time someone claims that the Gawker Empire does nothing but cookie-cutter snark, point them here.

Copy-editing the Iraq War, second in a series: Here's what occurred to me reading Gawker today: It's time to stop talking about 3,000 US troops dead and start talking about nearly 4,000.

Politico-linguistic intervention of the day: Listening to Terry Gross's meaty interview with WaPo's Thomas Ricks last week (web, iTunes), it struck me that serious, knowledgeable people have begun using the term ethnic cleansing to refer to what's going on in Iraqi cities and neighborhoods. Besides Ricks, the author of one of the most important books on the war so far, and Gross, who's usually pretty careful with her words, it's been all over the NYT in recent weeks, appearing in news stories and opinion pieces alike. David Brooks writes,

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods.

But the problem, for once, is not Brooks's limited intelligence. Paul Krugman has this:

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city.

An early example is this Time piece headlined "Ethnic Cleansing in a Baghdad Neighborhood?"

The term ethnic cleansing originated, during the Balkan conflict, as a euphemism for genocide, often used by the English-speaking media with deliberate irony. It's a little strange to watch it turn into a legitimate, unironic term for mass displacement, especially since the word cleansing carries an ineradicable whiff of Nazi ideology.

But if we're going to use the term, can we at least use it accurately? Sunni and Shi'a are not ethnicities, they're religious denominations. For the most part, the people involved in homogenizing their neighborhoods, both Sunni and Shiite, are Arabs (although some are Turkmen, on both sides). The process is more properly called sectarian cleansing, or if you want to get really technical denominational cleansing, or if you want to lose the Nazi stuff sectarian homogenization. The best example of ethnic cleansing during the Iraq War is probably the expulsion of Arabs from Kirkuk, which seems to have calmed down a bit.

The misusage reminds me of another Fresh Air interview, this one with George Packer, who told a horrifying story about an Iraqi whose beloved kid brother was kidnapped by militiamen. The kidnappers called the Iraqi on his celphone and asked him, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" The man had to guess whether the kidnappers were Sunni or Shiite, in order to give them the answer they wanted to hear. He said he was a Shiite (a lie), and heard the line go dead: the kidnappers were Sunnis, like him.

Butler, desnarked

Pulitzer-winning oversharer Robert Olen Butler has sent a lengthy response to Gawker about his loony e-mail re: his wife and Ted Turner. Gawker posted Butler's e-mail sliced into little chunks, with funny/snarky commentary in between. For those who want the soap opera without the commentary, I've put the pieces back together below.

Subject: Can you please give voice to this at your site?

I am sure there are a number of your followers who actually might want to understand this intense letter which was written in an extreme emotional circumstance. They encountered the email with no knowledge of two of the three principal players in the drama. They have only a sound-bite-and-media-spun understanding of the third. I can well see how a first reaction to the email by someone for whom it was not intended might be that it is only a bizarre and inappropriate document worthy of scorn.

But to begin to see the email in a fair way, you must understand this premise: I loved Elizabeth deeply for 13 years. I did not stop loving her when she told me what was happening between her and Ted. I love her still in an altered but sincere way. She loved me. She loves me still, but no longer as her husband. I'm sure many, if not all, of your readers have gone through their own dramas of love and loss. Love is not easily relinquished and it can shift its shape.

My drama of love and loss was particularly intense and had some strikingly unique characteristics. And it presented only a small range of choices, none of them good. In terms of the inevitable news of all this, my primary concern, of course, was with the community she and I lived in. If I had said nothing, the naked facts of the events would have meant that Elizabeth would be savaged by the rumor mill.

Even with the facts of her terrible childhood before them, some of the commenters on this and other forums are saying terrible and cruelly untrue things about her character. With no mitigating interpretation at all offered about what happened in our lives and in our marriage, you can well imagine how much worse the reaction would have been. It's just human nature. Nor would very simple, broad-outline public pronouncements have made any difference. If I had simply said something to the effect of "they're marrying for love and she and I will remain friends and I wish them well," it would not have been believed and the very same false assessment of her would have occurred. The explanation vacuum--even a partial one--especially given Ted Turner's involvement--would have been filled in a way that would have been unfairly critical of Elizabeth. Remember, I'm talking about the circle of our friends and acquaintances and colleagues here. Those were the people I had to focus on, not the wide general public. I never dreamed you all would get this intimately involved.

Either of those two choices--silence or vagueness--would have been the easy way out for me. I had nothing to gain from the letter I wrote unless it was a covert act of rage, an act of passive aggression. It was not. Your readers may not believe that. But my wife and I have warmly and lovingly spoken on the phone virtually every day since the breakup. We are going through this crisis of publicity together in a loving way. She is the one person in the world--the only one other than myself--who can judge if I am raging and aggressive over her. When I said in the email that she knew about, endorsed, and even encouraged the email, that was literally true. I showed the entire email to her before I sent it. She could have said not to do it. She could have significantly altered it. She did not. She made a few suggestions, which I implemented.

And the email was never a mass email. I chose five trusted grad students who know us both the best. I chose half a dozen faculty members who know us both the best. And they were asked, when the rumors reached them, to tell the appropriately nuanced story. Or to tell the fuller story on their own initiative--because everyone would soon know anyway. Yes, I sanctioned the use of the email I sent them in order to explain the circumstances to the people in our community who were hearing about this. Why should I avoid vagueness myself and then force them to be vague? Without that sanction to use the email, the explanation vacuum would have continued to form and be filled with lies. And this process worked exactly as I had hoped. That email went out six weeks ago. And faculty members and students alike have told me that all of the talk around campus and around town has been sympathetic and generous about both of us.

Now as to the intimate nature of the email, this is crucial to understand: there is not a single fact of Elizabeth's or Ted's or my personal lives that the intended audience could not easily have already known. Elizabeth has spoken and written openly, publicly, about everything in her childhood. Ted's persona and the details of the pattern of his love life are widely known (just read Jane Fonda's memoir). I do connect some dots to try to explain why Elizabeth has been drawn to him. But it was not meant to be a judgment against either of them. Ted's own difficult childhood is also public knowledge. We all of us often--some psychologists would say pretty much always--form adult relationships as an acting out of the basic love patterns of childhood relationships. There is nothing unseemly or wrong about this. It is the human condition.

And I tell you absolutely that Elizabeth did not do this for money and Ted did not do it lightly as conquest. They love each other deeply. And given what they've both been through in their lives, I expect them to be very good for each other. I love Elizabeth and her remarkable writing talent. I admire the wide-ranging good works Ted does to preserve the earth and prevent nuclear war. These are admirable people doing important work in the culture and in the world. I sincerely hope they have the rich happiness they deserve.

In spite of my previous chiding of you and your readers, I wish that happiness for all of you, as well. It's dangerous to live too deeply in a world of glib judgmentalism. And man, there is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all. But I hope at least some of you come to realize that vituperation, no matter how funny or elegantly expressed, is not an art form. Because some of you may well be capable of turning your talent with language--and your ferocious sense of right and wrong--to a more enduring purpose: to exploring, with courage and frankness and humor and compassion and moral insight, the truths of the human heart.

What do you do if you're a Pulitzer-winning novelist and your wife leaves you to join Ted Turner's stable of girlfriends? If you're Robert Olen Butler, you write a fucking batshit-insane e-mail to your grad students telling them about it. I don't usually hard-sell stuff, but you must read this right now.

Update: Butler tells the Post that his wife, Elizabeth Dewberry, read the e-mail before he sent it, and "she was weepingly grateful to me for it. It's full of love and compassion."

Update 2: NPR has an interview with Butler, which doesn't add much. At the end, there's this about Dewberry, who wouldn't talk on-air:

She said she had read Bob's e-mail but had not approved it. "There are inaccuracies in it," she said, but would not go into detail.

When you're writing a novel, you start to sort other people's novels into the following categories: novels that you're confident your novel will be better than, novels that you hope your novel will be better than, novels that you'd love for your novel to be as good as, and novels that you know your novel has no hope of coming close to. (This came to mind because I'm finally reading Mating, which is squarely in the last category.)

Re: On Chesil Beach: Who knew that Ian McEwan was such a fan of the early-'60s British blues boom? I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the greatest novelist in history to mention both John Mayall and Alexis Korner in two consecutive books.

Jezebel (new gynocentric gossip blog from the Gawker empire) has a feature whose premise is as follows: men's magazines are better written than women's magazines, so let's get a men's magazine writer to critique articles from women's magazines. I am curious as to the identity of the lunatic/genius who thinks of this stuff. Anyway, this recent installment is more than 1,500 words long, and it's about Alyssa Shelasky, who writes a blog for Glamour, and it has nothing to recommend it except its quality. You can totally enjoy it without reading the source material.

I especially like the way the reviewer's insight into Shelasky's failure as a writer bleeds into criticism of her failure as a person -- a slippage that, given the nature of the work under discussion, is both inevitable and appropriate.

There's a grammar thing that's been bothering me for a while now: sometimes people put commas between adjectives, and I know that the commas don't belong there but I can't explain why. A clear example is What a good, little boy! Most people would agree that comma is out of place. But why? We use commas in What a beautiful, complex, challenging book! It's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it things, and those always make me uneasy with grammar because what if my precious instincts are wrong?

The truth is more complicated and elegant than I had guessed: adjectives in English go in a precise order by category, which goes like this:

opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

and as long as the adjectives can be categorized you don't need commas between them. A discussion of the phenomenon is here; an explanatory chart is here.

What's amazing is that every native English speaker has absorbed this system and maybe one in a thousand could explain it.

People 1, robots nil

Dear Abby,

A software program thinks that a random chunk of my novel was written by a girl. Does this mean I'm gay?

Bilious in Brooklyn

What did you do this week? I added a few thousand words to my novel, and removed some of the words that were already there, for a net gain of perhaps a thousand words. Also I walked the dog a lot, because Tali was out of town, and I watched Friday Night Lights, which I haven't posted about because I've been waiting to come up with something to say about it beyond "This show is surprisingly awesome." My friend Ty, on the other hand, got this guy out of jail. So there you go.

'We refuse to be each other'

In October I saw Zadie Smith deliver a lecture at the New Yorker Festival. At the time I thought, 'Yes, she's done it, she's put something central and unspoken about writing into words that are exactly right, and then she's managed to think about it intelligently.' More than any of her novels (which I like just fine), this lecture convinced me that Zadie Smith is really, really smart, and that she might turn out to be Major. I was disappointed when she said, in response to a question, that she wasn't planning to include it in a book of essays on literature she's preparing.

RoBros' much-beloved mutual mother has just alerted me to the fact that the lecture's text was published in the Guardian last month. It turns out that it's as good as I thought it was. Part one can be read here; part two is here. It is long, so you should print it out.

The Nine (ABC, Wednesdays)
There was a girl in my MFA program whose novel-in-progress was constructed around a mystery, which went like this: Two teenage girls are living with their grandma. Their mom's dead. Out back of the house there's a yard, and buried in the yard is a box, and what's in the box is very, very important. But the grandma can't just show the girls what's in the box, or tell them what it is, because, she says, they're not ready to know yet. In order to get them to the point where they're ready to learn the mysterious secret of the box, the grandma has to tell them the story of their mother's tragic life.

I thought of this never-to-be-completed novel when I learned that ABC was cancelling The Nine. The Nine is one of the current crop of TV shows that, in an attempt to duplicate the success of Lost, tell a single story over the course of one or more seasons. Like my classmate's novel, both Lost and The Nine are structured around a mystery. But Lost is huge, and The Nine is axed, and The Novel About the Mysterious Box helps explain why.

The big problem with the what's-in-the-box framing device is this: Why doesn't grandma just tell the kids what's in the fucking box already? I don't just mean that the psychology ("they're not ready to know") is contrived. I mean that, if the reader is waiting to learn the solution to the mystery but the storytelling character already knows, the reader is going to get frustrated and impatient with the character for not just coming out with it already.

Which, multiplied by nine, was the problem with The Nine. The show followed the lives of nine people who had been caught in a bank heist gone horribly wrong. (I watched the show because the bank-heist-gone-horribly-wrong is perhaps my favorite genre of all time.) At the start of the pilot, the robbery got underway. One of the thieves said, "This'll all be over in five minutes." And then the caption "52 hours later" appeared, and people were taken away in ambulances. We don't know What Happened In There, but the nine people's lives are Not The Same. For instance: the young couple who went to the bank together on their lunch break, who are engaged and happy and in love. After the robbery she can't look him in the eye, and he says "It was a moment. Does it have to mean everything?" Apparently he did something very cowardly inside the bank, and we keep watching in order to find out what it was.

The problem is, the characters -- all nine of them -- know what happened. (Well, eight of them do, More on this later.) They make oblique references to it. But they won't just come out and tell us what's in the fucking box already. This forces us into an antagonistic relationship with all nine of the protagonists, wihch is not what ABC is hoping for.

In Lost, by contrast, the characters are for the most part as much in the dark as we are. Like them, we're in a mysterious landscape with all kinds of unexplained features that we have to learn about as we go along. As in a detective story, we find the clues along with the characters, and so we're naturally led into a sympathetic relationship with them.

Oddly, The Nine had a perfect vehicle to inspire some Lost-style identification. The youngest of the nine -- Felicia, the teenage daughter of the bank manager -- had post-traumatic amnesia: she couldn't remember what had happened in the bank either. If Felicia had been the show's protagonist -- if the story had revolved around her quest to find out What Happened In There, with the audience finding out at the same time she did -- The Nine might have worked. But The Nine was conceived as an ensemble drama, and Felicia was one of the less interesting characters. When she started investigating What Happened In There, the other eight all sat around a restaurant table and began to tell her ... at which point the camera pulled back and the closing theme came in to drown out the dialogue. That's not a mystery, that's a cheat.