The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on December 10, 2017, 11:11:58 am ---It's just way overused. I think people get carried away with the "bash" part of it. Plus, there are so many prefixes and suffixes attached to the root word that it's almost impossible to tell what the word means. Why use so many syllables when a better, shorter word, like "boldly" could be substituted? Nobody knows what "bash" means, anyway. Look it up and it's a verb; or in British English it's a party. And abash by itself? It means "to destroy the self-confidence, poise, or self-possession of". I think a lot of people who use the word don't realize what it means, they just like the sound of it.
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Maybe it's the people you hang out with. I can't say the last time I heard, or even read, somebody used "unabashedly."
And, by the way, "Nobody knows what 'bash' means"? Oh, yes, they do. Just ask any gay man.
serious crayons:
"Abashed" as an adjective means embarrassed, ashamed, disconcerted. Unabashed, therefore, means not embarrassed or ashamed, and the adverb unabashedly means doing something despite it being potentially embarrassing or shameful. (It's also probably related to "bashful.")
So it's not quite an exact synonym for boldly, because you could do something boldly that wouldn't be embarrassing -- "boldly go where no man has gone before," for example. Yo wouldn't say the U.S.S. Enterprise was "not ashamed" to seek out new lives, new civilizations.
You might say, "He unabashedly requested cash contributions from everyone at the party." That could be a bold move as well, but "unabashedly" adds a bit of extra meaning, implying the speaker would find it embarrassing to impose on people that way.
And while we're on the subject, I hereby declare that the rule against splitting infinitives is silly, especially if you're splitting them with an adverb. "To boldly go" isn't the English-teacher-proper formulation. But "Boldly to go" sounds dumb and "to go boldly" is slightly awkward. In most cases, putting the adverb between the "to" and the verb sounds most natural.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on December 11, 2017, 10:50:32 am ---And while we're on the subject, I hereby declare that the rule against splitting infinitives is silly, especially if you're splitting them with an adverb. "To boldly go" isn't the English-teacher-proper formulation. But "Boldly to go" sounds dumb and "to go boldly" is slightly awkward. In most cases, putting the adverb between the "to" and the verb sounds most natural.
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That's a well-known argument for it being OK to split an infinitive. :)
I suppose Capt. Kirk et al. were also unabashed to boldly go. ... ;D
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on December 11, 2017, 01:18:27 pm ---That's a well-known argument for it being OK to split an infinitive. :)
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True. There are probably other rusty grammatical rules, like ending a sentence on a preposition, that the same thing has happened to. :laugh:
--- Quote ---I suppose Capt. Kirk et al. were also unabashed to boldly go. ... ;D
--- End quote ---
Yes, they seemed pretty unabashed. And of course Spock was theoretically unable to feel abashed, so he did everything unabashedly.
serious crayons:
Apparently there's a short story in a recent New Yorker called 'Cat Person.' I rarely read the NYer's fiction these days, but I might try to find this one; it sounds interesting. What caught my eye was this piece about it:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/12/11/too_bad_twitter_turned_the_new_yorker_s_cat_person_story_into_a_piping_hot.html
--- Quote ---The last time I can remember a short story in the New Yorker being as enthusiastically talked-about as Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” was when Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” was published by the magazine in 1997. That autumn it seemed that every literary gathering had to reserve at least 15 minutes to rhapsodizing over the story. At present, “Cat Person” has been dominating my feeds to a degree that a New Yorker story never has before, and of course because this is the age of social media, countless people have also found countless sententious reasons to dislike it.
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