Month: January 2009

“Childrens Protective Service”

Adjectives, Apostrophes, Devolution toward Simpler, Misspellings, Possessives

I saw this yesterday in an email message.

Problem:
An apostrophe is missing.

Explanations:
The email message was talking about social-work efforts, and “Childrens Protective Service” — with “Childrens” spelled C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N — was the title of one of the sections in the message.

I believe that the absence of a required possessive apostrophe in “Childrens” can be attributable to:

  • A typographical error;
  • Ignorance about possessive apostrophes.

Given how often I see the apostrophe-free “Mens” and “Womens” in department stores, I doubt that “A typographical error” applies to this situation.

That leaves us with “Ignorance about possessive apostrophes”.

I believe that this ignorance is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis.

It is simpler to write possessive words without apostrophes than to write them with apostrophes.

Solution:
“Children’s Protective Service”

“The goal of these interventionalists …”

Nouns

I heard this earlier today on CNN.

Problem:
The word “interventionalists” is non-standard English.

Explanation:
Someone on the CNN television channel this morning was interviewing physician-turned-TV-commentator Sanjay Gupta about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the impact of yesterday’s U.S. Airways plane crash in the Hudson River on the plane’s passengers and crew.

Gupta was talking about the importance of psychological intervention to prevent PTSD among the passengers and crew.

Gupta started his sentence with “The goal of these interventionalists …”.

I had never heard the word “interventionalist”, so I tried to find it in a dictionary but failed.

Apparently Gupta thought that he could add the suffix “ist” to the perfectly appropriate adjective “interventional” to form a noun for someone who practices intervention.

Instead, he should have added the suffix “ist” to the noun “intervention” to form the noun for someone who practices intervention.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “interventionist” — 1,770,000 matches
  • “interventionalist” — 52,600 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “interventionist” versus the incorrect “interventionalist” by a ratio of 33.7-to-1, which is very good.

Solution:
“The goal of these interventionists …”

“baklava” vs. “baklawa” vs. “balaclava” vs. “Balaclava” vs. “Balaklava”

Nouns, Versus

A personal confusion the other day about some of these words prompted this blog post.

Problem:
These nouns sound similar but are not all synonyms.

Explanation:
My wife bought a “balaclava” — with a “c” in the middle — to stay warm for her half-marathon last Sunday.

I have lived in the southwest U.S. my entire life and am not fluent in the names for cold-weather clothing.

So I thought that my wife said “baklava”, which is a word that she and I heard during our visit to Turkey two summers ago.

I researched both words and learned the following:

  • A “baklava” — spelled B-A-K-L-A-V-A — is a sweet pastry that is popular in Turkey and is made from filo dough, nuts, and honey or syrup.
  • A “baklawa” — spelled B-A-K-L-A-W-A — is the same sweet pastry, simply spelled with a “w” instead of a “v”.
  • A “balaclava” — spelled B-A-L-A-C-L-A-V-A — is a knitted cap that fits closely around the head and neck and sometimes shoulders in order to keep the wearer warm.
  • “Balaklava” — spelled CAPITAL-B-A-L-A-K-L-A-V-A — is a seaport on the Black Sea in the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol.
  • “Balaclava” — spelled CAPITAL-B-A-L-A-C-L-A-V-A — is the same seaport, simply spelled with a “c” instead of a “k”.

The lowercase-“b” “balaclava” garment dates back to the 1880s and is named after the capital-“B” “Balaklava” seaport.

If you have eaten both a “bear claw” and a “baklawa” or “baklava”, then you know that these two pastries do not even look alike, let alone have the same ingredients or taste alike.

However, in case you are wondering, the name “bear claw” is not related to “baklawa” (or “baklava”), even though they sound similar.

Instead, the name “bear claw” refers to a yeast-raised, almond-paste-flavored pastry that is prepared such that its shape evokes the image of a bear’s claw.

Wikipedia says that a “bear claw” is chiefly popular in the western states of the USA.

Adding to possible linguistic confusion, the U.S.-based “bear claw” is different than the Dutch “berenklauw”, which means “bear’s claw” — with a possessive apostrophe-“s” — in English.

Wikipedia says that a “berenklauw” — spelled B-E-R-E-N-K-L-A-U-W — is a Dutch snack on a wooden skewer and made with meatballs, fried onion rings, and peanut sauce.

To summarize, one conceivably could wear a balaclava in Balaclava while consuming a baklawa, a bear claw, and a berenklauw.

Solution:
Remember that the capital-“B” word for the Ukrainian seaport can be spelled with a “k” or a “c”, that the seaport is cold, and that the small-“b” “balaclava” is named after the seaport and is for keeping warm. Remember that the shorter “baklava” is the pastry and can be spelled with a “w” instead of a “v”.