Atop a column of mine about ethical concerns churned up by scientific advances in longevity, an International Herald Tribune editor ran this provocative headline: "Do you wanna live forever?"
The use of an elision to reflect the common pronunciation of a familiar phrase -- wanna for "want to" -- is surely attention-getting, which is what a headline should be. And if the aforesaid devil-may-care, fatalistic question from gangland movies entices my readers to come to grips with the moral fallout from age retardation, I'm not gonna complain.
Now, about gonna: "Hillary basically told me she wasn't gonna run," The New York Post quoted Howard Dean as saying in his interview with Dan Rather on CBS. His broadcast words were reported in The Post's pages along with "Iraq is gonna become a disaster under this presidency."
The Associated Press stylebook is seemingly unequivocal: "Do not routinely use abnormal spellings such as gonna in attempts to convey regional dialects or mispronunciations."
Norm Goldstein, the stylebook's editor, informs me: "I don't like it; we shouldn't ever use it. Ever. [With rare exceptions.]"
His stylebook's exceptions apply to feature writing: "Such spellings are appropriate when relevant or help to convey a desired touch in a feature."
The entry on dialect in The Wall Street Journal's stylebook advises writers to avoid using dialect in quoted matter "unless it is clearly pertinent to a story, because it can imply the speaker's usage is substandard or illiterate."
Its editor, Paul Martin, notes that, except for lighthearted features, the Journal discourages the use of phonetic spellings that are intended to represent the pronunciations of the speakers.
"But the elisions do creep into print, it seems," he tells me, "especially when we quote people like pop idols or laborers. We recently quoted rap star Jay-Z, for example, as saying he likes to sip his favorite cognac `whenever I wanna have a relaxing moment, usually with a cigar.' Using any such dialectical speech patterns in print, however, can be a slippery slope in class-consciousness."
The New York Times advises its writers to hesitate before using gonna, hadda, wanna because they strike some readers as patronizing.
"Usually the decision should be that word order and turns of phrase paint a clearer picture than eccentric spelling," reads The Times' stylebook. "A classic Times article captured the Lower East Side of Manhattan when it quoted an onlooker, spelling intact, about the inevitable hot dog vendor at a political campaign appearance: `Sure. For Rockefeller he gives discounts.'"
Some dictionaries give elisions (from the Latin elidere, "to strike out," which has come to mean "omission of a letter or sound") the status of informal contractions, or as the OED puts it, "representative colloquial pronunciation." Elisions may make it as words on their own: wannabe, the sliding sounds of "want to be," is now the popular substitute for the nominative form of hopeful, as in "presidential wannabe."
Writing in Business Week, William Donaldson, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, noted that he and New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, were "not in the business of playing 'gotcha.'"
I confess to having referred to helpful people who write to correct me as the Gotcha! Gang (the elision based on "Got you!") when they gleefully catch me in error, or think they do.
On the central issue of reporting mispronunciation, however, I'll go along with the consensus to clean up the pronunciation of a quoted person, reporting it as if said in standard English.
Not every editor agrees. When I queried Colin Myler, managing editor of The New York Post, about its repeated quoting of Dean saying gonna, the determinedly populist journalist replied: "Wassup? Let's fuggedaboutit." Myler added, "The only instruction to our reporters is not to use words like elision in print."
Something of the night
Sometimes an unwanted phrase or sobriquet sticks to a politician, the way "used-car salesman" was associated with the late US president Richard Nixon, "malaise" with former president Jimmy Carter and "Slick Willie" with former president Bill Clinton.
Michael Howard, once Britain's home minister and now leader of the Conservative Party, had a phrase hung around his neck six years ago that he cannot shake. A Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, who served as his prisons minister at a time when crime declined markedly under Howard's hard-line policy, said in 1997 that there was "something of the night in his personality."
The sinister connotation of the phrase has reverberated, especially in Britain, ever since. The Sunday Times noted that while most rock stars mellowed with age, "Mick Jagger has still managed to keep something of the night about him." The Guardian, reviewing a radio drama about a late-night talk-show host, wrote that "she had a chilling, thrilling voice, with more than something of the night about it."
What is it about Howard that caused that to stick? Cartoonists label him "Mr. Something-of-the-Night," and anti-Tory columnists use the phrase as his middle name. Asked about this phrasal albatross by Rachel Sylvester of The Daily Telegraph, the British-born Howard said wearily: "That's a phrase. I don't know what it means, do you?" The Guardian did: "True, Howard's father fled persecution in Romania, which might justify the vampiric imagery. But some Jewish observers doubted this was quite the aspect of Howard's roots that Widdecombe had in mind."
Whence the phrase? In 1900, the literary critic Lewis Gates wrote that the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne "had in fact something of the night in his disposition ... a suggestion of the discolored temperateness of night." John Baker, a Washington lawyer, found this citation from Henri Frederic Amiel's Intimate Journal, published about 1886: "The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it."
Andrew Pierce of The Times of London found a Latin dedication in the works of the poet George Chapman, Versus Mei Habebunt Aliquantum Noctis, which Pierce translated as My Verses Will Have Something of the Night.
If Howard should ultimately make it to prime minister, the British Tory can paraphrase Ronald Reagan with "It's morning in Britain."
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