Janet Haven

My Polish colleague Jerzy is one of those crushing European polyglots who make single-language Americans like me despair over our upbringing, education, and entirely unrigorous way of life. Jerzy effortlessly speaks Polish, Hungarian, and English. If you're at all into language families, you know that's not like being able to speak Italian, French, and Spanish. Polish, Hungarian, and English are, to put it mildly, way, way, different.

To lull me out of my despair, Jerzy occassionally asks my advice on the finer points of composing in English; mostly recently, he asked me when it was appropriate to use a semi-colon in a sentence. Since Americans of my age (33, if you must know) were not requried to study grammar (at least in California, I kid you not), I actually haven't the slightest idea what the official answer to that question is, and so waxed philosophical about semi-colons, linked sentences, the emotional qualities of punctucation, and so forth. Then I recommended Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, and slunk off to my office, embarassed at my loquaciousness on a topic that I don't actually know the answer to.

Today, the question came back to me, and I googled "When do you use a semi-colon?" The magic 8-ball gave me back this answer, which I thought was much more accurate than what I told Jerzy:

Q. When do you use a semicolon?
A. After you’ve attended grad school.

So, there you go. Sorry, Jerzy, I got it wrong.

Posted by Janet at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Actually, it's not really a death match. Mel has Ukraine on the mat accordig to Google news, with 1800-and-counting stories covering all aspects of the alcoholic actor's anti-semitic rant and subsequent apologies versus the not-quite-500 stories on the resolution to the young democracy's mutli-month constitutional crisis. I had actually been quite pleased at the amount of coverage Ukraine's situation was getting until I compared it the ever-blossoming Gibson story.

Anyway, it's not just a matter of brute numbers. The endless Mel coverage means that every aspect of the crisis has been dissected for the public. Not so with the media coverage of the Ukranian resolution, which has been fantastically bad. With the exception of the International Herald Tribune's article I read on the issue, every major newspaper I've read has either misreported or under-reported the story. If I hadn't been in Kiev last week and had the situation explained to me by Ukranian colleagues, I would come away from the mainstream coverage of the situation understanding that Yushchenko, the hero of the Orange Revolution, had inexplicably turned his back on the party and appointed his arch nemesis, the Russian-backed Yanukovych, as prime minister. In fact, the parliamentary coalition of socialists, communists, and Yanukovych's Party of Regions (the Russian-leaning nationalists) nominated Yanukovych, meaning that as president of the country, Yushchenko was faced with a devil's bargain: either accept his rival as PM and try to work around him, or dissolve Parliament altogther and call new elections, which would almost certainly mean that he would not be re-elected as president -- by most accounts, he's done a pretty lousy job of being president and his ratings are in the single digits. Pretty rotten decision, but faced with that choice, it seems obvious why he would choose to do as he did. Now, that's a pretty straight-forward story. Why have I only read one article that explains it?

For useful information on understanding the situation Ukraine, follow Transitions Online's series of articles on the country, or the always thoughtful Neeka's Backlog.

Posted by Janet at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)