GUILTY PRESSURES

by Steve Steinbock

Last Friday, during our week-long celebration at Criminal Brief Corporate Headquarters (CBCH), I disclosed a few of my guilty pleasures.

While I continue to enjoy the “Beach Party” movies and The Three Stooges, I haven’t actually eaten an entire can of chocolate frosting for a long time.

Another cinematic guilty pleasure of mine is “Hello Down There” with Tony Randall and Janet Leigh. It really is a pretty bad film, but I’ve watched it countless times, and enjoy it just as much with each new viewing. “Hello Down There” – the story of an inventor who moves with his family and his kids’ rock band into an underwater home – was written and produced by Ivan Tors (“Daktari,” “Flipper,” “Sea Hunt,” and “Birds Do It”). It includes appearances by Jim Backus, Ken Berry, Roddy McDowell, Richard Dreyfuss, Charlotte Rae, Merv Griffin, and even Harvey Lembeck (who played “Eric Von Zipper” in the “Beach Party” films).

(Here’s a snippet from the film with Richard Dreyfuss lip-synching the song “Little Goldfish”)

I like chocolate of all kinds, especially Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But of late, for health reasons, I avoid milk chocolate in favor of the dark stuff.

Speaking of dark stuff, coffee is probably my greatest weakness. My grandmother was Turkish. I think I get it from her. I drink several cups a day, and have been known to have a cup before going to bed just so I can extend my reading time.

These days when I crawl under the covers I’m reading The Annotated Brothers Grimm and a thriller by Spanish author Jose Carlos Somoza called Zig Zag. I’d like to talk with you about the Brothers Grimm sometime.

Blogosphere Update

While you were visiting us here at CBCH, our friends at Murderati moved. They can now be found at www.murderati.com. Check them out. Like Criminal Brief, they have a rotating team of writers. They keep a nice blog.

Also in the blogosphere is novelist (and Criminal Brief friend) Bill Crider. Bill writes the “Blog Bytes” column at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He’s the author of more than forty novels and is probably the busiest blogger in the mystery community. On a typical day at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, he’ll write a dozen or more posts!

This past week, Bill wrote a post (more of an elaborate hyperlink) about Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. He links to an article by University of Edinburgh professor Geoffrey K. Pullum decrying the fifty-year old handbook. The article is called “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” Pullum makes some great points which I agree with in content even if I find his manner crass and cheeky. E.B. White might not have been a paragon of good grammatical advice, he was a beloved American children’s writer (Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little). His reworking of Bill Strunk’s handbook is without a doubt the most commonly read English grammar book in the U.S. (It was required reading when I was in school). But as grammar books go, it doesn’t go very deep. Pullum points out that The Elements of Style is full of idiosyncratic prescriptions that would have caused the manuscripts of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Mark Twain to be riddled with red marks. The “rules” in Elements are often historically incorrect, based on White’s own tastes, and are frequently broken within the very handbook. Read the article yourself. Tongue-wagging aside, it’s worth the read.

Double Copulas

If E.B. White was able to force his grammatical and stylistic biases on countless budding writers, and Professor Pullum was able to voice his protests to thousands of readers, I have the right to issue my own bugaboo.

What I hate is, is when people make double copulas.

What’s a double copula you ask? Despite sounding like a sexual position, it’s actually the very verbal sin I committed in the previous paragraph. It is when a person uses a connecting verb (usually forms of the verb “to be”) TWICE when only ONE is needed.

You’ll rarely see a double copula in print, because it looks so glaringly wrong. But in conversational speech Americans do it far more often than they perform the other type of copulation. You probably heard someone do it on the bus this morning, or at the supermarket. You may have heard a college professor or a politician do it, and you may have done it yourself. We find it in constructions like:

“What I like about it is, is when . . .” or
“What I was talking about was, was that. . .”
and the ubiquitous “The thing of it is, is that. . . ”

According to all the authorities I’ve read, it’s a new phenomenon. It didn’t exist before 1971, and didn’t become virulent until the 1980s.

There may be times when it isn’t technically incorrect to use two copulae in a row, such as when the first “is” is part of a dependant clause, as in:

“What my point is is that . . .” or the example provided by Grammar Girl Mignon Fogerty: “What he is is a complete jerk.”

But I say even sentences like these are signs of sloppy speaking. Drop the “what” and the second “is” and you have a better sentence. (I hope I’m not sounding like E.B. White). The only time it is acceptable is when Doris Day sings “Que Sera Sera.”

This reminds me of a story I came across somewhere. A linguistic professor was discussing the “double-negative,” pointing out that in many languages, it doesn’t make a statement positive, but rather makes it emphatically negative. At this point an inquisitive student asked the professor if in any language a double-positive made a statement negative. The professor said no.

At this point, a voice in the back of the lecture hall was heard saying, “yeah, right!”

And that is is all there is is for this week!