Coma comma comet
SOME say Comet Ison (short for International Scientific Optical Network, whose Russian scientists discovered it) might appear brighter than the moon from November 28. Others say it might fall to bits before it gets near enough to be seen, so don’t spend all your summer nights staring up at the sky or you’ll get a crick in the neck.
Speaking of summer nights, there’s a song I heard recently called Long Teenage Goodbye, written by a country band called Lady Antebellum. “Antebellum” is that which predates the US Civil War. What astonishes me is that someone who can spell antebellum also wrote the line “We drug out those summer nights”.
I have checked and that is exactly what the lyric says. Drug. It doesn’t refer to drugs of the sort usually sung about by bands with pretentious names. That would be forgivable. The long-haired members of Lady Antebellum are using “drug” as the past tense of “drag”, and they’re not the only ones.
If Americans persist in this corrosive convention, what fresh atrocities await us? Today I lag behind; yesterday I lug? Today I am being nagged; last week I was nug? I hope there is a drug to cure this madness before it drags us down.
I also hope that Comet Ison stops shedding fragments of itself so we get to see its mane of fire in the sky. The word “comet” comes from the Greek aster kometes, meaning “a long-haired star”. Aster Kometes is a better name for a band than Lady Antebellum, if you ask me.
Kome , Greek for “hair of the head”, is also the root of “coma”. Not the one involving unconsciousness — that is from komatos, meaning deep sleep — the other coma, which, I discovered today, means the head of a comet. This coma was also once used in botany to describe a tuft of hairs. If a member of Bill Haley’s band (or indeed Aster Kometes) was losing his hair in patches, you could say, “Look at the coma on that Comet.”
Neither sort of coma should be confused with comma, a punctuation mark that seems always to be either overworked or sorely neglected. Not only are commas often stuck where they don’t, belong, they are also sometimes mistaken for reptiles. A friend of mine was convinced that the band Culture Club was called Culture Club because they were interested in grammar. I could never bring myself to tell him that the song he warbled as “Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon” was not about punctuation.
The way Boy George pronounced “karma” made it a homophone of comma. I’ve been sent many more of these pairs since I mentioned them last week. One reader pointed out that we don’t seem to mix up the homophones “weight” and “wait” as much as we do the rest. I think this may be due to a fear of putting on weight. To “lose weight”, incidentally, was a term coined only after the registration of the trademark Weight Watcher in 1960. Interestingly, the word “wait” comes from the Old French for “watcher”.
Going back to annoying Americanisms, singer John Mayer has a song called Waiting on the World to Change. He ought to have been drug through a thorn bush backwards for spreading this evil.
I shudder when I hear someone say they are “waiting on” their pizza. If you are actually sitting on the pizza, or if you bring your pizza a glass of wine and its slippers you might be waiting ON it. Usually, however, you are waiting FOR it. We need to lose this “wait on” scourge. Perhaps wait watchers will help us.