Tag: comprehension

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My wife Heather may be the happiest person to ever receive an MS diagnosis.

“Yes!” she shouted after the doctor’s call came in Wednesday afternoon. “I told them I was sick! I told them I was sick!”

Regular readers know that we’ve been searching to an answer for Heather’s “mystery illness” for some time. The symptoms have been a regular cavalcade, including fatigue, pain, loss of coordination, foggy eyesight, foggy memory, a foggy day in London town …

Ahem. Sorry about that.

Anyway, after being introduced to a spinal tap that’s not nearly as entertaining as the Christopher Guest version, Heather can now definitively tie her troubles down to two words: multiple sclerosis. Yes, that ugly disease of the brain and spinal cord, the one that can’t really be cured, only contained.

Of course, anyone who saw our huge, relieved grins after the diagnosis would probably conclude that there wasn’t much brain left to affect, anyway. But in a weird way, it’s exciting.

At long last, something makes sense.

Any chronic pain sufferer should recognize the feeling. You can spend weeks, months, even years in shadow boxing, going through the medical motions without hitting anything solid. You get told that you’re fine, even when you know better. You get medicines that don’t help, tests that don’t show anything, advice that fails to illuminate. Sometimes people will suggest you’re a hypochondriac. After a while, you may start to wonder if they’re right.

And then, BAM – you hit something solid. Or it hits you. Either way, there’s a reality that can no longer be denied. You’re not crazy, you are in a fight, and even if it’s one against Mike Tyson himself, you can finally see the other fighter in the ring.

That’s huge.

You don’t even need to be a patient to understand. We see the same thing every day in the political world, or the business world, or in military strategy, or in the thousand small-scale issues we deal with every day. To solve a problem, the people involved have to agree 1) That a problem exists and 2) What exactly the problem is. What you cannot define, you cannot defeat.

Put down a name and you can have objectives. Goals. Tactics. Hope.

Heather has a name. A nasty name. But a real one.

That means we have a road forward.

Even better, the road may not have as many potholes as we feared. The tests caught her MS early. That’s one reason it slipped through the early scans undetected, and it means the disease may be at a more manageable stage.

Still better: this is something we know from the outside. We have good friends who have been through this, people who still live full lives despite the need to recharge and recover. One even kept up a position in the Navy Reserve until fairly recently.

I know, there are stories of worse as well as better. But again – what you can name, you can know. And some of that knowledge is encouraging.

We’re not alone.

Not that we ever were. But now our friends and family have something to rally around as well. Unease and uncertainty can drain a caregiver as well as a patient; a lifting of the fog can be almost rejuvenating.

Is it any wonder we smile? And even laugh?

No wonder at all. Not when there’s a purpose that can outweigh the fear.

It will not be unremitting joy. We know that. We’re looking at a hard struggle, probably a painful one.

But we’re looking at it. And that makes all the difference.

I hope someone out there can take encouragement from this. The fog can someday lift. The light can shine. The battle lines can be drawn and defended to the inch.

Victory is never certain. But knowing, really knowing, is a victory all its own.

It’s time to celebrate.

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Getting “Over” It

When the news broke, reporters and editors went up in flames. Within minutes, the stunned outcries and passionate debates were filling the social network.

Russia’s invasion of the Crimea? Nope.

The passing of Topeka’s most infamous preacher? Uh-uh.

The early exit of Duke and Kansas from March Madness? Maybe a little, but … no.

No, this was an issue designed to strike at the very soul of journalists everywhere. Are you ready? Brace yourselves.

The Associated Press declared that “over” could mean the same thing as “more than.”

I’ll stand back while you recover from the faint. Feeling better? Good.

OK, it sounds like a silly thing. Frankly, it is a silly thing. But from the commentary I saw from most friends and colleagues in the industry, you’d think it was December 2012 and the Mayan gods had come to demand sacrifice.

“NOOOOOOO! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!”

“That AP concession is making my brain ache.”

“More than my dead body!”

For those who don’t know — or, most likely, care — about fine points of journalism style, the AP’s stance for decades has been that “over” is a position and “more than” is a quantity. So it’s incorrect to say that I’ve had over a dozen arguments on this subject since the change was made.

Or at least, it was incorrect.

Excuse me while I grin.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a style and grammar geek as any reporter. I’m insistent that “cement” is not the same as “concrete,” that “literal” does not mean figurative and that “enormity” is a horror, not a size. From the AP’s complex use of numerals (“Write out one through nine, except for all the times you don’t”) to the non-existent period in “Dr Pepper,” I fight the good fight and do so pretty well.

But — brace yourself — I don’t see the big deal here.

Part of my “meh” is because the AP has been swimming against the tide for a long time. “Over” as a figure of speech has at least a 700-year history, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a frequent guest on lists of “language rules that aren’t,” right up there with the myth that you are not to in any way split an infinitive, lest you be sentenced to a career on Star Trek.

But the larger reason is that the change does nothing to obscure understanding. No one who reads that “Babe Ruth was the first baseball player to hit over 700 home runs in a career” is likely to think that the Babe stacked up all those home runs like cord wood and then hit a ball over them, any more than someone would expect sunny side up eggs to come with a weather report.

It’s a harmless change. The end of a rule that existed only to have a rule. And really, don’t we have enough of those already.

And to those who fear that English is about to lose all meaning — well, the language has taken that step. Many times.

You could ask William Shakespeare. But he’d probably have to listen carefully to hear past your outlandish grammar and curious word choice.

You could ask Geoffrey Chaucer. But he’d likely understand one word in 20 at best, and that badly accented.

You could ask the anonymous Beowulf poet. Assuming you could even get past “Hello.” Or should it be “Hwaet!”?

Actually, you can’t ask any of them because they’re centuries dead. Minor detail. But you get the point. Language changes. Especially English. Over time, those changes add up. At some point, old and new become strangers to each other.

Our job is to keep clarity for the readers and speakers of now. While recognizing that “now” is a moving target.

By all means, fight to save useful words. Those are the paints that allow fine shades of meaning.

Absolutely, encourage prose that gives more clarity instead of less. Without mutual comprehension, there is no language.

But recognize the moment when a rule has become nothing more than a habit. In language, or anything else.

Those don’t help anything except stylebook sales.

And now, I think I’ve said more than enough on this topic. It’s time to sign off.

Over and out.