Scribing postcards from Starbucks

JUNE CASAGRANDE

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Business of Language,

or as I’m thinking of calling it, Postcards From Starbucks.

I’m not a big fan of Starbucks. In fact, I’m predicting the

company’s eventual demise as more and more people slowly come to

terms with the reality that half the drinks they’re calling “coffee”

are just variations on the milkshake. Still, it’s hard to find places

where I can read my nerdy grammar books and also catch peeks over

strangers’ shoulders of countless blockbuster screenplays in the

making. I suspect that soon half the people in here will have their

own bodyguards and entourages dedicated to shooing away riffraff such

as myself. So I’m wise to bask in their reflected glory, while

they’re still moving among the little people.

Unbeknownst to the people around me who, as I type, are butchering

the language by forcing heroes to exclaim “Alright!” or “Lay down on

the ground and put your hands behind your back,” there exist a number

of super-handy little books specifically designed to keep writers

from making such mistakes. Many writers reference these books to make

sure they’re using the language well. But a small contingent of

serious nerds read these things for fun. (I’m not necessarily a

member of that contingent, by the way. I’m just in it for the money.)

So with that, I open Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” to a

random page and happily stumble upon an answer to a question I’ve

been meaning to look up for a long time.

“Imply” and “infer,” I learn on page 49, are not interchangeable.

“Something implied is something suggested or indicated, though not

expressed. Something inferred is something deduced from evidence at

hand.”

And right here, at this very moment in this very Starbucks, I

believe I may have unlocked the secret as to why so many people could

care less about English grammar and usage: The people who claim to

love the language so much that they toil over all the tiny rules are

the same people who couldn’t write their way out of a brown paper bag

with a blowtorch for a pencil. Of course, that’s true only if you

accept that a litmus test for good writing is that the reader remain

conscious for at least four sentences.

Even the notoriously stuffy “Chicago Manual of Style” makes a

lighter read out of this one: “The writer or speaker ‘implies’

(hints, suggests); the reader or listener ‘infers’ (deduces).”

The notoriously simplistic Associated Press Style Book takes a

distinctly journalistic approach to the subject: It basically

plagiarizes the Chicago Manual while changing just enough of the

words to make the blurb its own. “Writers or speakers ‘imply’ in the

words they use. A listener or reader ‘infers’ something from the

words.” Notice how cleverly they changed Chicago’s “the writer or

speaker” to the plural “writers or speakers”? I’m proud to say that

when I was a staff reporter, I was every bit as clever.

So, to recap, while you may have inferred that I was hard up for

material for this column this week, it’s certainly not because I

implied it.

Returning to the screenwriting examples above, it comes as a

surprise to many people that “alright” isn’t a word. It’s “all

right.” The other example above -- “... told them to lay down ...” --

is one I’ve written about in this column before. Recapping that one

in its simplest form, “to lie” is something I do to myself; “to lay”

is something I do to an object. “I lie on the ground,” “I lay the

$4.50 on the counter to cover the cost of one very thick, very icy,

very sweet and creamy cup of ‘coffee.’”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].