PBS Needs to Watch Its Modifiers

The April 8-14, 2011 "PBS Previews Newsletter" included this teaser for a biography on Alexander Hamilton. It's a terse example of junk English:

Author and journalist Richard Brookhiser explores the legacy of Alexander Hamilton and examines what made him a great man with reinactments.

Perhaps the PBS editors were too concerned about budget cuts to concentrate on optimizing their English.

The first error they should have spotted is the spelling. It's "reenactments" not "reinactments". But, there's another way to optimize the English in that teaser. The way it's written, one could be led to believe that Alexander Hamilton was great at performing in reenactments.

Unless Hamilton had a penchant for emulating Louis XIV of France, the PBS promoters meant that their documentary features reenactments. So, one way to optimize their English is:

Employing reenactments, author and journalist Richard Brookhister explores the legacy of Alexander Hamilton and examines what made him a great man.

Emulating Topic-Prominent Languages in English

Abstract: English lacks the topical precision of topic-prominent languages, but with a touch of creativity, we can construct sentences that are almost as good.

Don’t Be Too Liberal With "Literal"

On the April 16th 2008 broadcast of Morning Joe on MSNBC, columnist Mike Barnacle reported on a primary rally:

They appeared separately, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama back-to-back, Hillary Clinton came out and she sounded like the substitute teacher who comes in and makes sure you finished your homework, and Barack Obama literally, you know, lit the crowd on fire. [Emphasis added.]

Let’s hope Senator Obama didn’t kill anyone.

Even experienced writers have become too liberal in their use of "literal." Barnacle did not mean that Senator Obama doused the crowd’s members in gasoline and took a match to them. Barnacle meant that the senator figuratively set the crowd on fire.

When you want your reader to interpret your words exactly as written, use "literal." For example, if reporting on fisticuffs that turned deadly, you might say, "The thugs literally beat the homeless man to death." When writing figuratively, cut the misused word.

An Upper or Lower Case of Chardonnay?

I was writing a piece about a sommelier when I came across a dilemma: Which, if any, of the names of wine should be capitalized? Should I capitalize appellations in honor of their geographic origins? Should varietals be lowercase? We don’t capitalize the names of trees, why should a product made from grapes be different? Maybe all should be lowercased?