Here in the Midwest, it’s been 2012 for just over 12 hours, but other parts of the world are further along (or further behind) in the new year. I thought it would be fun to explore ways that other people — and there are lots of other people — greet each other in new year’s celebration (italic font shows a phonetic transcription):

• Afrikaans — gelukkige nuwejaar (also voorspoedige nuwejaar)
• Arabic — aam saiid (also sana saiida)
• Armenian — shnorhavor nor tari
• Basque — urte berri on
• Bosnian — sretna nova godina
• Bulgarian — chestita nova godina
  
• Cantonese — sun lin fi lok (also kung hé fat tsoi)
• Corsican — pace e salute
• Czech — šťastný nový rok
• Danish — godt nytår
• Dutch — gelukkig nieuwjaar
• Estonian — head uut aastat
• Finnish — onnellista uutta vuotta
• French — bonne année
• Georgian — gilocavt akhal tsels
• German — prost Neujahr (also ein gutes neues Jahr)
• Greek — kali chronia (also kali xronia)
• Hawaiian — hauoli makahiki hou
• Hebrew — shana tova
• Hindi — nav varsh ki subhkamna
• Icelandic — gleðilegt nýtt ár
• Indonesian — selamat tahun baru
• Irish Gaelic — ath bhliain faoi mhaise
• Javanese — sugeng warsa enggal
• Kashmiri — nav reh mubarakh
• Korean — seh heh bok mani bat uh seyo
• Latvian — laimīgu Jauno gadu
• Luxembourgeois — e gudd neit Joër
• Maltese — is-sena t-tajba
• Marathi — navin varshaachya hardik shubbheccha
• Norwegian — godt nyttår
• Occitan — bon annada
• Polish — szczęśliwego nowego roku
• Portuguese — feliz ano novo
• Punjabi — nava saal deeyan vadhaiyaan
• Romanian — un an nou fericit (also la mulţi ani)
• Russian — S novim godom
• Samoan — ia manuia le tausaga fou
• Spanish — feliz año nuevo
• Swiss-German — es guets Nöis
• Tahitian — ia orana i te matahiti api
• Thai — sawatdii pimaï
• Tibetan — losar tashi delek
• Ukrainian — Z novym rokom
• Vietnamese — Chúc Mừng Nǎm Mới (also Cung Chúc Tân Niên; also Cung Chúc Tân Xuân)
• Welsh — blwyddyn newydd dda
• West Indian Creole — bon lanné
• Xhosa — nyak’omtsha
• Yiddish — a gut yohr
• Zulu — unyaka omusha omuhle

Happy trails!

SAK

They were talking about a route (obviously) that someone was trying to take (as in road or path) and couldn’t decide if it should sound like “root” or like “rout” (rhymes with “out”). What a fun idea for a Friday afternoon post!

Here’s what I found out:

• Webster’s New World College’s online dictionary only offers the “root” sound.
• Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary offers both versions, but its first (and therefore preferred) pronunciation is “root.”
• Bobby Troup’s “(Get your kicks) on Route 66″ had it right.
• The famous song mentions all the states it passes through except for Kansas. What the …?
• While Route 66 passes through Kansas, it’s only a 13-mile stretch (12.8 miles by some accounts).
• Check out this fun site that has photos of part of the Kansas Route 66. Fun stuff.
• The Mother Road originally began in Chicago and ends in Los Angeles, passing through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
• Route 66 became a symbol for the Beat Generation, in part due to a brief mention of it in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (Sal Paradise traveled Route 66 through part of Illinois.) On the Road, by the way is easily one of my favorite books, and if you haven’t read it or the history of how Kerouac wrote it, you should. What a trip.
• Folk singer Woody Guthrie claimed to have traveled the road enough to bump the number from 66 to 6,666. “Let’s go riding in the car-car!”
• The state with the longest stretch of Route 66 is Oklahoma; the highway is sometimes referred to as the Will Rogers Highway because of his travels up and down that road.
• For a road born in the 1920s, it’s held up remarkably — it’s still in process of being preserved and restored, and around 85 percent of Route 66 is still providing kicks for those who go.

Happy trails!

SAK

It’s one of the great joys of being a human. Doesn’t matter if you sing on or off key. Doesn’t matter if you sing only in cars with rolled-up windows, stopping to wait for the next green light, or in shower stalls with warm water cleansing your body as your favorite lyrics soothe your soul.

Assuming you actually know the lyrics.

For some of us (ahem), that’s a big assumption. Take me, for instance. I’ve been a singer my entire life. I remember singing at the top of my lungs in my room when I was around 8 years old. Imagine my horror when I twirled around in ecstasy of performance, only to find my parents standing in the doorway, watching. The horror! How long had they been standing there? If I had known there’s an audience, well, that would have been something different.

But I digress.

I sang in junior high, then in the high school madrigal group and in every musical that would have me. I sang my way through college (although I started to realize the small-fish-in-big-pond concept around that time). I continued singing on my own as a full-fledged adult and into my married life. Hey, I married a guy who loves to sing, as well, and we can holler out tunes in our automobile, the likes which you have never heard. Seriously!

So one fine day, we’re tooling down the road and the 1981 version of “Bette Davis Eyes” made popular by Kim Carnes (but written in 1974 by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon) came on the radio. We’re singing along, sometimes he louder, sometimes I. Then came the line, “All the boys think she’s a spaz, she’s got Bette Davis eyes.” I belted it out — with feeling. And then I commented about how amazing it is that someone actually got the word “spaz” into a song.

My husband looked at me sideways. He asked me to repeat the line. I obliged. Then the heckling began.

I suppose at some point in my 40+ years I could’ve looked up the words to the song, but why? I knew them. I did, truly. But apparently, not really.

(It all made sense to me — sort of still does, really, because I never thought Bette Davis was much of a looker and thought, well, yes, the boys think she’s a spaz. Her eyes weren’t the eyes of a “regular” gal, so “spaz” sounded right on, if not very nice.)

My loving husband informed me that “spaz” was not cutting it. The line is: “All the boys think she’s a spy.” OK, fine. “Spy” does rhyme with “eyes” slightly better than “spaz” does. And now all my friends and readers now know my dirty little lyrics secret. Ugh.

Let it be known, though, that I am not alone in my affinity for the mondegreen (which, btw, refers to screwing up the lyrics; it got its name from Sylvia Wright mishearing a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” in the 1950s).

Someone (name unmentioned here, but if you can guess, go for it) was tooling along in the car with me one fine day several years ago and was belting out Elton John’s “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road.” I was singing along, too, as usual. Then came the phrase “Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny back toad.” 

Elton John's horny back toad is probably a short horned lizard (photo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Short_Horned_Lizard.jpg)

As with everything in life, I’m no expert at language. I may have been trained in English this and grammar that more than the average bear, and I may write a silly but fun little language blog here and again, but I absolutely claim no expert affiliation where language is concerned.

Why? Because I have a hard time with the word expert. In a black-and-white, absolute world (the kind of world that surely would clear up a few things), an expert is supposed to know everything there is to know about a certain subject, right? Well, I may know a decent amount of tidbits, but I positively don’t know everything. Not even close. And I am wary of those professing to be experts in their chosen field unless they have a ton of experience and positive results, plus a lot of positive feedback from those who have dealt with them. And even then, I have one eyebrow raised. Fair? Perhaps not. But that’s my thinking. Beside the fact that I’m no fan of braggarts, if someone claims to be an expert, well, I have some reservations.

Anyhoo — I got that view on experts from an English professor I had once, one whom I was not even that crazy about. She once told me that I reminded her of her when she was younger (and thus less wise than she had learned to become, bleh). So why do I even bother to keep that slant on expert alive? Good question.

Regardless, the term expert is not the point of this post; indict, indicted — they are the point. I cannot get it straight in my head how to read those words aloud, even though I know how to spell them and I know how to pronounce them. Anytime I see them in print, I want to say in-DIGHT or in-DIGHT-ed. Ugh! Talk about feeling like a dope. I was reading an article to my other half awhile back and just read those words without skipping a beat. My husband stopped me and said, “What did you just say?”

Those being indicted may very well see a lot of eyebrows raised in their general direction (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orijinal/4740227639/)

Caught in the act of mispronunciation! So I looked up the word indict and found out where this crazy spelling came from, the spelling that has a silent ‘c’ in it. Double-ugh! In my defense, this is what I found out:

• Webster’s New World College Dictionary says that indict is a bastardization, if you will, of the Middle English term enditen, which meant “to accuse” or “to write a document.”
• Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary adds that enditen is from the Anglo-French enditer, which meant “to write or compose.” It stemmed from the “Vulgar Latin indictare, frequentative of Latin indicere,” which meant “to make known formally, proclaim.”
• The word indict held onto its French pronunciation after the spelling was re-Latinized in the 1600s.

So I’m not completely crazy, after all. That third bullet made my day. It’s not my fault that I can’t pronounce it correctly; it’s the bloody Latinization of yet another word that is causing all the hullabaloo.

Happy trails!

SAK

The headline is just a short collection of words thrown together that sum up the article, you say? Hmm — well, yes. But as writers of all sorts know, sometimes the hardest thing to write is the thing that mandates the fewest words. Sort of like telling a story versus telling a joke; lots of people can tell a story but can’t tell a joke to save their life. I should know — I’m one of them.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.” —David Ogilvy, advertising executive

The headline draws a reader’s interest in enough to encourage him or her to actually read the article — and who does that nowadays? Exactly.

But this isn’t a lesson on how to write the ideal headline. And I’m definitely not the one to give that speech, anyway. So, what the heck is this entry about? Quotation marks in headlines, but of course! And it’s really quite simple:

In headlines, if you must use quotation marks, use single quotation marks. Cutlines (i.e., captions) follow the same rules as regular body copy.

Someone must've called those egotistical swans "smug" (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/plentyofants/1601760091/)

It began back in the day when typesetters had to manually set type; space was a premium commodity. Today, space is still a premium commodity, but all the new fancy fonts and software programs allow typesetters (or graphic artists or designers, as their title may reflect) are able to fiddle with what little space there is more than their predecessors were able to. Fancy-schmancy double quotation marks are for the article (or story or blog or cutline or what-have-you) — not for the headline.

Here’s an example from The Washington Post:

Iran warns that it will deal ‘fiercely’ with protesters

Makes sense, yes? I do think that the single quotation marks look a bit weird, but I’m getting over it. There are a lot of people out there who don’t like to use quotations in headlines, and there are also people out there who’ve done research that shows that headline quotes boost readership or sales, and quotes in a subhead, rather than a headline, boost readership or sales even more — weird little factoid for you.

Happy trails!

SAK

I had just started in a new position at a new agency and was excited to start things off right with an updated AP Stylebook. Makes sense, I thought, since my own copy of the veritable writer’s bible was the 2007 version. Staying current with the 2010 version (even though it’s already 2011, thank you very much) seemed like a grand idea, especially since the 2011 version wasn’t going to be published for a few months yet.

The 2010 version, for those with inquiring minds, is the first book put out by the AP folks with website spelled as one word and all lowercase. That, my dear readers, was a monumental advancement. Ask any writer or editor you know (hell, you can even ask an opinionated designer or two — they’ll freely offer their belief system on the now-antiquated two-word Web site); he or she will probably be able to explain in four-part harmony the beneficial or detrimental nuances of using one word or two, depending on his or her preference.

So — back to the crapshoot.

As a writer and editor in my new digs at Armstrong|Shank Advertising, I thought it appropriate to get my hands on the latest AP Stylebook. The office manager said, “Hey! No problem. We’ll order one of those suckers right away.”

Cool!

It arrived lickety-split and I set to work, prepared for whatever odd grammar question could arise.

Those progressive heart candy makers must've known that the AP Stylebook editors would cave sooner or later (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trmarch/3240265590/)

Then, just a few short days ago, the AP Stylebook folks threw a grammar wrench in my well-laid plans. They decided to cave under the pressure of the masses and allow email to take the place of e-mail.

And that, my friends, is huge. Even bigger news than Web site to website. It’s so huge because, in the history of the English language, no compound noun that starts with a single letter has lost its hyphen. For example:

• A-frame
• G-string
• S-curve
• T-ball
• T-shirt
• U-turn
• X-ray

It seems odd to me that the hyphen isn’t there, too, because for the two people who don’t yet know what electronic mail is, reading the word sans hyphen could theoretically make it sound like ehMAIL. And that, as the rest of us electronic whiz kids know, isn’t how it’s supposed to sound.

Why should e-mail lose its hyphen? My best guess is because the masses, in all their texting and tweeting and e-mailing (er, emailing) glory, decided that it’s just too darn difficult to add the hyphen to a word that gets typed or written on such a frequent basis, and those masses revolted to the point of forcing the hand of the AP Stylebook editors.

So — lazy wins.

And you know what? I’m sort of OK with that. I don’t really think it’s the wisest decision based on correctness, but I’ll be a much happier — and faster — tweeter with this new rule in place.

For the record: Email is correct to start a sentence; email is correct in all other sentence locations. Fun times.

Happy trails!

SAK

• Excuse me while I kiss this guy!
• Dirty deeds and the thunder chief!
• There is a place in time sweet as honey!
• All I can do is just pull some teeth or two!

So my life goes. Songs haven’t been the only things that I’ve mistakenly spoken or written about. A biggie that stands out in my mind is the beige folder that’s in every office in America. Also the beige envelope with the little button that you wind a string around to keep the envelope’s contents from spilling out onto the floor. You know what I’m talking about.

The vanilla folder.

Well, it is sort of vanilla-like in color. And a gazillion other people also call it the vanilla folder, even though that’s not the thing’s name.

This is my kind of vanilla (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/acfou/3189690364/)

That beige folder (and its kissing cousin, the large beige envelope) is called a manila folder.

The manila folder got its name from the original fiber content of the paper — manila hemp — which was derived from the leaves of the abacá (a species of banana that grows in the Philippines). Manila is also the capital of the Philippines, which is a primary abacá producer.

Coincidence? I think not.

So while a folder may remind you of vanilla and be as exciting as imitation vanilla, by any other name — and any other color — that file folder your carrying around is still a manila folder.

Happy trails!

SAK

I can hardly wait until the kiddos are ready for the “Pippi Longtocking” series. In fact, I already tried reading the original to my oldest, but the story’s details (and lack of pictures) are still a bit above her head. Nonetheless, I bought three of the books and am ready and waiting to explore the pigtails, monkeys, crazy socks and lively adventures with my two little monkeys.

They are, though, ready for “Old Hasdrubal and the Pirates,” one of my old books that explores Louisiana’s bayou Barataria and the (albeit glorified) history of Jean Lafitte. My youngest — a girl — loves the story almost as much as I do, and we read it several times a week.

Note the motor on this modern-day pirogue (photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dakar_-_Pirogue.JPG)

Fluently written by Berthe Amoss, the narrative talks of  “galleons full of silver and gold, precious gems and diadems, diamond tiaras and lace madeiras, festooned dragoons and doubloons from tycoons!” Who writes like that these days for kids? That’s some crazy-good, super-fun writing, if you ask me. And the next line: “Then, in their pirogues, Lafitte and his men slipped back to hideouts in the labyrinth swamp where no man could seek them out.”

Ah lak dat. Except — what the heck is a pirogue? As the lucky momma holding the book and looking at the pictures, it’s easy to see that a pirogue is a long, skinny, flat-bottomed boat, much like a canoe, that the pirates navigated through the swamplands. But how am I, a flat-plains Midwesterner, supposed to pronounce that word without giving my daughter the impression that I don’t know how to read? Aack!

Peh-ROGUE?

Peh-ROG-ee?

PEE-rogue?

PIE-rog?

Pie-ROG-ee?

Coooh. So, to the Internet I went. I looked it up on Merriam-Webster’s trusty website that includes audible pronunciation guides and figured it all out. It should sound thus: PEE-rogue.

Voilà tout! That being said, if you’re from the bayou and know of an alternate or more authentic local pronunciation, by all means — let me know!

Happy trails!

SAK

One of my favorite albums is “Negotiations and Love Songs,” and one of my favorite songs on the album is “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” (which, by the way, debuted on his second album, “Paul Simon”). The very first line of the song goes like this:

The mama pajama rolled out of bed and she ran to the police station.

In this song, my friends, Paul sings it with that second a in pajama rhyming with mama. Not Pam or clam or jam or even jammies. But like llama. Like Obama. Like it should be pronounced, according to Merriam-Webster’s preference.

I suppose that’s enough on this subject. Just thought it would be another good way to get some decent tunes flowing.

Happy trails!

SAK

OK, I say to-MAY-to, too. But that’s the apparent difference between pronouncing the long form of P.J.’s (or jammies, if you ask my husband). The subject came up about the correct pronunciation of pajamas, so I  followed my M.O.: I looked it up online. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary has two (count ‘em, two)  sound buttons that play the preferred and secondary pronunciations of the word. But when I looked it up, the sound wouldn’t work.

That was last night.

So I checked out a few other sites that also have sound buttons. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which the AP Stylebook prefers, has one button. And to my horror and my husband’s delight, it pronounced it pa-JAA-mas (the middle syllable sounds like the a in jam).

Ugh. My loving but woohoo-I’m-right husband thought the case was closed.

Today during a break at work, I polled co-workers about their pronunciation preference. Most agreed with my husband; one agreed with me. So I vowed to check out Merriam-Webster’s one more time, and it worked — on several levels.

P.J.'s, jammies, pajamas — Oh, my! (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erix/4161088394/)

The first, most prominent sound button confirmed my suspicion: pa-JAH-ma (singular construction, mind you — the middle syllable sounds like the a in saw). The second, less-preferred sound button put forth pa-JAA-ma (again, sounds like jam).

One other tidbit I learned while researching the pajama dilemma: It can be a regional thing. My way (and the correct way, according to Merriam-Webster’s) is the Southeastern United States way to pronounce it. On the flip side, my husband’s pajama preference is popular in the Northeast U.S. and Great Lakes area, as well as the West Coast.

And that’s news to me, for sure. I wouldn’t have guessed that my preference is a Southern thing. Heck, lots of folks have mistaken me for an East Coaster, and I lived in sunny Cali for a spell. But after thinking about it, pa-JAA-mas does have a Southern ring to it. Interesting stuff.

Happy trails!

SAK