{"id":352,"date":"2013-04-18T10:46:21","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T16:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=352"},"modified":"2013-04-18T10:53:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T16:23:34","slug":"did-i-pen-this-blog-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/did-i-pen-this-blog-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Did I pen this blog post?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of course not. I typed it on my computer keyboard. But have you noticed how commonly pen<\/em> is used to mean write?<\/em> In this age of the keypad and touch screen, pen<\/em> is such an anachronism that it jars me every time I see it.\"Original<\/a><\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal <\/em>note<\/a>d last December that Cyndi Lauper had \u201cpenned an essay for Rolling Stone\u201d describing how going off the fiscal cliff would harm LBGT youth. The New York Observer <\/em>report<\/a>ed that former Lehman Brothers vice chairman Thomas Russo \u201chas penned a book about this country\u2019s pressing financial calamities.\u201d A blurb for The Now Revolution,<\/em><\/a> <\/em>a book telling businesses how to use social media successfully, exclaims that the authors \u201chave penned a book that truly isn\u2019t a social media book.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0And the writer of a website touting the benefits of posting articles to content mills in order to create inbound links to one\u2019s own site actually titled his site \u201cPenned Articles.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m guessing that none of these people wrote by hand.<\/p>\n

This breezy usage of penned<\/em> irritates me, maybe partly because I\u2019ve been \u201cpenning\u201d less and less myself. Initially, the physical connection between brain and pen in hand was integral to writing. Then I began typing first drafts directly on a typewriter and editing them by hand. I\u2019ve now reached the point where the last few books I wrote stayed entirely inside the computer\u2014no printouts. The brain-hand connection still exists, but through the fingers on the keyboard.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting how language changes, creating this disconnect between a word\u2019s current usage and its original meaning. Pen<\/em> dates from the 14th century and comes from the Latin word for feather,<\/em> the original writing instrument being a quill. The notion of a pen as an object held in the hand that uses some kind of fluid stuck, even as writing implements became metal pen points, then fountain pens, then ballpoints. It stuck so tight that we continued to \u201cpen\u201d books with typewriters, and now with computers.\"Metal-nib<\/a><\/p>\n

I once had an Israeli client who relished his excellent command of English and loved pointing out to me how Americans\u2019 usage of certain words was incorrect, because, he insisted, their etymological meaning was quite different. Mindful of my English-major course in the history of language, I pointed out in return that languages evolve over time, so the meaning of words naturally changes. Thus presently<\/em> used to mean at once,<\/em> but now means\u00a0in a while<\/em>.\u00a0Fast<\/em> originally meant\u00a0immovable<\/em>; now it most often means rapid.<\/em><\/p>\n

My client was quite unmoved by this argument, perhaps because modern Hebrew is a new language. Hebrew had been used only in a religious context for centuries, so when the settlers in Palestine revived it as a living language in the early 20th century, they had to invent many words for contemporary ideas, objects, and actions, often derived from word roots. So Hebrew hasn\u2019t had time to evolve the way English has; the new words are still close to their etymological origins.<\/p>\n

Normally I enjoy seeing how a word changes. But I want penned<\/em> to go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of course not. I typed it on my computer keyboard. But have you noticed how commonly pen is used to mean write? In this age of the keypad and touch screen, pen is such an anachronism that it jars me every time I see it. The Wall Street Journal noted last December that Cyndi Lauper had \u201cpenned an essay for Rolling Stone\u201d describing how going off the fiscal cliff would harm LBGT youth. The New York Observer reported that former Lehman Brothers vice chairman Thomas Russo \u201chas penned a book about this country\u2019s pressing financial calamities.\u201d A blurb for The[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[50,49,53,51,52,123,48],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-etymology","tag-quill-pens","tag-typewriters","tag-word-meanings","tag-word-usage","tag-writing","tag-writing-pens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}