It’s funny, but I’ve always considered “Superbowl” to be one word. “Are you going to watch the Superbowl?” “Went to a great Superbowl Party last night.” “The Cardinals haven never been to a Superbowl.” I mean, when you think about it, it’s not a bowl that’s super and, unlike the college bowl games, there’s only one of them. I know, I know, one easily could argue that if Superbowl is one word, then Orangebowl and Sugarbowl and Southerncaliforniastyledcornchipsanddipbowl and all the others should be as well. But somehow, I’ve treated Superbowl differently.

Firefox agrees with me. If you type “superbowl” in a Web form, it puts those familiar red squiggles beneath the word and tells you the S must be capitalized–”Superbowl”–for the word to be legitimate. Microsoft, however, is pretty adamant that “Superbowl” is not a word, even if the S is capitalized. When you type the word “Superbowl,” Microsoft offers two alternatives to correct what it perceives to be your misspelling.

1. Super bowl. As in: “My, what a super bowl.”

2. Superb owl. As in: “My, what a superb owl.”

Personally, I found the latter mildly amuzing. “Are you going to watch the superb owl?” “Went to a great superb owl party last night.” “The cardinals have never been to a superb owl.” Okay, that last one doesn’t work so well, but you get the idea.

Naturally, owls can be superb; I remember seeing a superb owl at Corkscrew Swamp in Florida a few years ago. But that doesn’t make it any less funny. At least, I don’t think so.

One last note: I just ran WordPress’s spellcheck against this post. It allowed “Superbowl,” but not “superbowl.”

I was driving along Interstate 295 today, when I came across one of those portable digital display signs that warns you about things up ahead–you know, one of those signs made of lightbulbs that can change its message every few seconds.  This one started with this:

 DAYLIGHT
SAVINGS TIME
HAS ENDED

Fair enough.  However, it then changed to:

PLEASE
DRIVE
CAREFUL

Okay, leaving aside the use of the adjective where there should be an adverb, I found this message rather … odd.  So odd, in fact, that I slowed down to watch the message flash by again–I was not sure I had seen it correctly the first time.  As it turned out, I had.

This raises all kinds of questions.  Do people really drive around at 4:30 as it’s getting dark and fail to turn on their headlights because they forgot the clocks were set back?  That does appear to be the implication:  our driving is based not on weather or traffic conditions or how dark it is but what time we think it is.  Being reminded that the clocks were set back, therefore, will cause us to change our driving behavior.  Is that it?

And is this really why this sign was towed to this location?  I’ve driven by that spot quite a bit, and there has not been a portable light sign there before.  It seems the state highway commissioner or the department of transportation or the state police or whoever is in charge of these signs decided it was very important to remind people to drive like it was an hour later–whatever that means–so important in fact that it was worth programming one of these signs and towing it to that spot on the Interstate.

Naturally, these people must be right, and I’m simply overlooking some obvious point of safety.  Accordingly, I implore anyone reading this to remember that we moved our clocks last weekend and that you all, therefore, should drive careful.

I had an epiphany the other day. It seems that every time I sit down to write something, I freeze in front of my computer, hands poised on the keys. I stare at the screen, searching for just the right words, just the right tone. Beginnings of sentences play though my head, and all those great language ideas I had while lying in bed or standing in the shower or driving to work seem to vanish. Vanish, actually, is the wrong word. They’re still there, but they hide like playful children. I can hear them giggling, and I know they’re there, but I cannot see them.

So the proverbial light bulb that came on over my head was that the words don’t have to be perfect when I first write them down. One of the beauties of writing is that unlike, say, brain surgery, you can go back over what you’ve done to get it right. In other words, your first swipe at it can be just a draft, a sketch with language. After getting the whole thought down, you then can start at the beginning, reshaping the words, filling the gaps.

Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci (also known in our house as Leonardo da Fishy thanks to The Muppet Show), working from the upper left hand corner, decided each brush stroke should be perfect and that he should not have to go back over any section he’s worked on. After a couple of hours, the Mona Lisa may have looked something like this:

In case you don’t recognize it, that’s the upper left corner of the Mona Lisa. Of course, he wouldn’t have painted the cracks and lines–those come with age. But you get the idea: the rest of the canvas would have been blank.

No, I’m guessing that da Vinci started by sketching a big oval for the face, then sketched in the eyes and lips, drew in the crossed hands, etc. In other words, rather than trying to create perfection from the very first brush stroke, he began with a draft and slowly refined it until it was perfect. As I hear tell, this da Vinci guy was pretty smart. Maybe he was on to something there.

Writing should be the same. Rather than attempting perfection from the first key stroke, writers (writers of any kind) should get the concepts down quickly and then go back over the words to refine the language. (In my case, this means stepping away from it for a while and returning later. Also, I tend to edit by reading out loud to see how the words sound.) When done this way, writing goes much faster.

I’m certain this is not news to some of you. I’m a perfectionist, however, and the concept of throwing words at the page and then going back to rearrange them simply had not dawned on me.

A few days ago, I wrote about the pronunciation of ough. Since then, I’ve heard from a few experts on this issue. Sarah Ough from England said her family “pronounces Ough as just the letter O,” adding that “[o]ther families pronounce it other ways.”

Sarah is correct, as I found out from Tami Ough from Oregon, who said, “We pronounce our name ‘Ow….. like Ow that hurts!’” Tami said she hears “every mispronunciation of my name possible…….:).” (See my September 18 post on the use of sideways facial expressions.) This may be an Oregon thing, however, as Jeremy Ough–who I believe is from Oregon–said they also pronounce it “like an expression of pain.”

I also was reminded that, although we have turned plough into plow, you still can get a ploughman’s lunch in many fine restaurants. Further, it is fairly common during The Holidays to deck one’s halls with boughs of holly.

Finally–and we’ll leave it here–I came across this poem by Bennett Cerf, publisher and co-founder of Random House.

The wind was rough
And cold and blough;
She kept her hands inside her mough.

It chilled her through,
Her nose turned blough,
And still the squall the faster flough.

And yet although
There was no snough,
The weather was a cruel fough.

It made her cough,
(Please do not scough);
She coughed until her hat blew ough.

One of the things I like about the French language is that, if you know the basic rules of pronunciation, you can read aloud anything, even if you don’t have the slightest clue what you’re saying. (I did this in Quebec once, when I was pulled from the audience to participate in an outdoor play by reading a town crier announcement at the top of my lungs. The mostly French-speaking audience knew exactly what I was saying, even though I had no idea.) You see a word like fromage or chapeau or regarder, and you know precisely how it should be pronounced. I took this language from the United Nations Web site:

Pour engager le XXIe siècle sous de bons auspices, les États Membres des Nations Unies sont convenus de huit objectifs essentiels à atteindre d’ici à 2015.

Even if you cannot translate it, anyone who has taken enough French to know how each of these letters is supposed to sound and what the accents mean can read this out loud.

Now let’s look at our own language. Four of my favorite words to compare are:

• tough (ˈtəf)
• though (ˈthō)
• through (’thrü)
• thought (ˈthȯt)

You add or change one letter each time, and the ough dramatically changes the way it is pronounced. Very simply, there’s no logic to it whatsoever–that’s just the way it is.

How are young spellers supposed to learn that although tough and rough rhyme, cough and dough look like they should but are not even close? And if the ough in tough, rough, and cough is pronounced with an -f sound at the end (never mind that the ou sounds entirely different in cough), why is it that we doff our caps instead of doughing them?

Fortunately, in the United States we have turned plough into plow. And we’ve pretty much abandoned hiccough, in which the gh, as one logically would expect, makes a -p sound.

Earlier today, I came across the Family Genealogy Forum for the Ough family, who undoubtedly are experts on this issue. Perhaps someone from the Ough family could shed some light on the true pronunciation of ough.

But enough.

Back in the early days of the Web, organizations constantly were attempting to find ways to make people want to come back to their Web sites.  One original concept was that a site should have a really good Links page–a page people would bookmark and then come back to frequently to get to your links.  (Law firms, for example, liked to have links to all the local courts, libraries, and law resources, with the idea being that people view their site as some kind of portal into the legal world.)  This didn’t really work.  First, everyone was doing it.  Second, it turns out that Links pages simply give site visitors a vast array of juicy-looking exit points.  Finally, the advent of search engines like Google (or “the Google,” as our president says), made these Links pages fairly irrelevant.

More recently, some companies have put games on their site, thinking that games will drive people back to the site and, of course, cause them to buy more of their products or services.  The success of this approach will depend on your audience.  The Keebler Elf games on Kellogs’ Web site appeals to kids, applying the same marketing logic as was done with Joe Camel:  if you can get them to like the character, you can get them to like the product.  Although this may work well when your goal is Brand awareness, I have yet to see games on a corporate Web site–a site targeting an adult audience–that I thought were effective.

What I do find effective, however, are clever and imaginative contests that anyone can enter and the results of which the target audience will want to come back to see.  An excellent example of this is The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest, which is held monthly.  They show you a cartoon, and anyone can submit a caption for it.  Then they let their on-line audience vote for what they think is the best caption (collecting your name and email address as you vote).  I try to go back every month to see what people have submitted, and usually the winning entries are extremely clever.

Another good example of using contests to attract your target audience is the Wine Limerick contest for Wine Enthusiast magazine.  What serious wine drinker does not want to demonstrate how witty he or she is?  They just recently posted the results, and I’m happy to say that my own father was one of four 1st place winners, having entered this little ditty:

I have an untamed predilection

for building a vast wine collection.

But my wife is incensed

o’er the vinous expense.

‘Tis a shame; I shall miss her affection.

Way to go, Dad.  For his efforts, he apparently gets two years of the magazine for free!  The cost to the magazine, therefore, is virtually nothing.  But they received hundreds of entries and probably thousands of additional eyeballs on their Web site.  Clever.

I suppose everything has an anniversary. Today is the 25th anniversary of the sideways smiley face.

On September 19, 1982, at exactly 11:44 a.m., a Carnegie Mellon University professor named Scott Fahlman typed this message in an on-line electronic bulletin board:

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given the current trends. For this, use

:-(

Professor Fahlman asserts that he probably was the first to use this–he has seen no evidence that anyone used it before this date, although he concedes that it is a fairly simple concept.

It’s unclear when people started modifying this concept to connote different sentiments, such as surprise :-o sticking out one’s tongue :-p anger >:-{ or “you know what I mean, hint hint, wink wink” ;-) (Note: my apologies for the lack of punctuation in this last sentence. As it turns out, it’s hard to punctuate a sentence about use of punctuation to make facial expressions. See also Scott Johnston’s blog entry noting the difficulty of using smiley faces at the end of a parenthetical.) My guess, however, is that this trend started around 11:45 that same morning.

With all due respect to Professor Fahlman, I can’t stand these things. I suppose they’re harmless enough, but why not use language to express your meaning? Moreover, this simple language shortcut is the apparent parent to the obnoxious little emoticons that now pop up everywhere, even when you don’t want them to. As a PRIME EXAMPLE, WordPress converted my smileys here into emoticons when I saved this entry; I had to dig around in the WordPress options to find a setting that would turn these off so they would remain as intended. How annoying.

I suppose the only argument in favor of the smiley face is to ensure that the reader understands intended tongue in cheek. In the cold, sterile environment of email or text messaging, it is fairly easy to misinterpret the author’s tone and meaning. Even so, try to use words.

Mondays, I’ve decided, should be all about language. After all, last night’s Red Sox-Yankees game–a game that was dripping with almost stereotypical September drama: bottom of the ninth, two outs, Red Sox down by one, bases loaded, and up to bat comes David Ortiz, Big Papi, Mr. Walk-off–I really don’t want to talk about.

All that not said, considering I’m at the beginning of this little writing adventure (and no one is reading it yet), it feels like the right time to talk about opening sentences.

One is not supposed to judge a book by its cover–or so we’ve been told–but I confess I often do judge a book by its first sentence. The opening sentence is a wonderful opportunity for the author to make a strong first impression, to set a theme, or to introduce a mood. It provides a first peek into the story’s character and the writer’s mind. Consider “It was a dark and stormy night.” As maligned and over-played as that sentence is, think about everything it accomplishes.

I used to take my kids to the bookstore at midnight when the latest Harry Potter novel came out. After purchasing the book around 1:00 AM, we would proceed to the sidewalk, sit on the curb, and read the first sentence. The thrill of it always gave us chills.

As an exercise, I like to write opening sentences occasionally. Here are a few:

It was a creaky old porch swing, most recently loved only by spiders it seemed, but it still had a smooth, comfortable glide, and the early summer afternoon breezes felt good against Graham’s face.

This story’s really for people who have had their fingers gnawed off by alligators while they were trying to retrieve something dropped in a murky river, so if that’s never happened to you, you probably won’t like it.

My Aunt Gurt used to say I didn’t have a lick of sense, which, from my mind, was utterly bogus, and which, I’m not too modest to say, I proved completely false at the potluck dinner that Sunday when no one but me seemed to have any idea how to get yellow-mustard potato salad stains off the white carpet in the church meeting room.

What I could never really understand was why Tony chose me instead of Borky, considering that Borky had been married several times already and clearly had a much better knowledge of what made women tick.

“Get out of my face, you putrid little punk,” my daddy spat, shoving me backwards hard enough to make me fall on my ass.

To say I had a crush on Lilly, even after she killed Sheriff Perkins and his deputy, would be to understate the situation quite badly.

An opening sentence can provide for the reader what that little hole in the door must have provided Howard Carter when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb: a small glimpse of the mysteries and treasures within.

But you know, I will say this about the Red Sox-Yankees series. The two teams played 27 innings of baseball over the last three days. The Yankees won two of those 27 innings and, consequently, two of the three games. Friday it was the top of the 8th when they scored 6 runs and won 8-7. That was awful. Last night, it was again the top of the 8th … and one pitch. With two on and two out and two strikes on Derek Jeter, Schilling could have ended the inning (and a brilliant night of pitching) with a strikeout, keeping the game tied 1-1. Instead, his last pitch of the night did not touch ground until it had sailed deep over the Green Monster, putting the Yankees ahead 4-1.

Two innings out of 27.

But I really don’t want to talk about it.