If there's a public radio program that you'd like to hear, and none of the stations in your own market carry it, you can find a very thorough list of online streams at . That's how I was able to keep following "Schickele Mix" all across the country until they finally quit broadcasting it altogether.

Post edited 7:35AM – May-04-09 by tvieno

Ping: I wonder if the submariners came up with the term PING from the table tennis game, ping-pong. The ping of a sonar does go out and come back just like a ball in ping-pong. I do wonder if the "ping" sound we hear in movies is actually audible.

Go, Humans, go. I was taken humored by Martha's interpretation of Quaker Oats new catch phrase. I thought it meant, "if you eat oatmeal you will have the energy to go do things." Not the BM kind of having to go.

I would be sorely disappointed if the famous sonar "ping" in all of the submarine movies turned out not not really be audible. I think that the sonar "ping" was used to memorably eerie effect in the movie Das Boot (best submarine movie ever), so I would be disappointed if that sound isn't really audible to human ears.

Post edited 7:06PM – May-04-09 by samaphore

Grant and Martha, what a tease! This week’s show has made me feel stabby, on a Monday morning no less! You got me all worked up for a discussion about the excesses of ad copy, and what we got was barely a two minute mention of the topic.

Grant paraphrased one of the more inane points of the New York Times article: “Part of the common strategy for selling things to people in a recession is to use upbeat language.” But in good times or bad, it is always a common strategy to use upbeat language. Grant then pointed out that, “You’re not going to buy a product from someone who says, ‘Life sucks,’ right?” Well, wrong, at least sometimes. It depends on what’s being sold. Just about every ad for pain and illness medication plays up on the “painful” side of life. Take a drug and your life won’t suck quite as much. How about all the ads for products to make us look better, get skinnier, or smell better? In other words, our bodies suck! Ditto for ads related to home security systems. The world – indeed, your own neighborhood – is a dangerous place: it sucks! You need to buy expensive security systems to keep your family safe! It’s wonderful how the ads often show a wife all alone in a nice, big house at night (her husband is away on a business trip), and there’s a burglar trying to break in. And then there are the ads with the same unfortunate wife whose car has stopped working in the middle of a stormy night in the middle of nowhere – thank God that her husband was thoughtful enough to install the OnStar car security system! People who write books about vegetarianism will tell you how much life sucks for people and the world when we subscribe to a meat-centered diet. Computer protection companies will tell you that, without their software, life on the internet sucks. Mercedes and BMW ads tell you that you suck if you don’t drive their cars. Jewelry company ads say that husbands suck if they don’t continuously purchase diamonds, rubies, and sapphires for their wives. Republicans, in their ongoing efforts to “sell” their brand, will tell you how Democrats make life suck. Al Gore et al say that life is going to suck big time, unless . . . and so on.

The NYT article itself points out that ad campaigns include charitable or philanthropic aspects to increase their feel-good appeal to feel-bad consumers. But again, this is a common strategy in good or bad times. Nothing in the article, and nothing on Grant and Martha’s show this week, offer any evidence that ads are more upbeat in down economic times than otherwise. Likewise, no evidence is offered that ads “go too far,” any more than they always do. And the article devotes far too much time on Quaker Oats, as if they are a prime example of this “phenomenon.” The article almost serves as an ad for Quaker Oats.

Perhaps I don’t watch enough commercial television to judge how ads have changed their approach and tone in the current recession. But the “chirpy” ads I have seen in recent months don’t seem any chirpier than “normal.” (It’s hard to think of marketing as normal, in any case). What I have noticed is a predictable increase in the number of ads that emphasize incentives of one kind or another.

Grant and Martha, your show was great, as usual, but you really let me down on the ad discussion! You need to look at the “spin” in your own advertising.

Post edited 7:28AM – May-05-09 by xheralt

Regarding the sentence “There are some patients whom we cannot cure, but there are none we cannot help, cannot comfort, and none we cannot harm.” I would say “whom” — to my (Great Lakes region) sensibilities, for that sentence to be grammatical using “who” in place of “whom”, it would have to read something like “There are some patients who cannot be cured by us…” Funny thing is, the underlying rule has been long since forgotten, so I’m not precisely sure why I feel this way…

Post edited 2:16PM – May-06-09 by samaphore

What an interesting online reference, Glenn (Bartleby). When I saved it to add to my list of online language resources, I had to think about what to name it! In the end I called it Bartleby Language and Lit.

We’ve been picking on, and defending, that poor sentence for quite some time now. The “there are” versus “there is” question could be avoided altogether thus: "There are some patients whom we cannot cure, none we cannot help or comfort, and none we cannot harm." But I suspect that the creator of that sentence crafted it to sound just like it does, the same way Lincoln crafted "Four score and seven years ago . . ."

We could update the darn sentence: "There are some patients whom we cannot cure, but there are none we cannot bill, cannot bankrupt, and none we cannot turn away for lack of insurance."

Yes, congrats on 100 – not just for quantity of posts but quality as well! Grant and Martha will be sending you a pair of autographed boxers with the WWW logo on them – an apropos gift as they always do their show by the seat of their pants.

I will find and read the story Bartleby the Scrivener (perhaps it is available online in the public domain). You didn't say what it is about, which is fine because I like nice surprises.

The plural of hiatus can also be hiatus because it's a Latin noun of the fourth declension (nouns with genitive in us and singular = plural). Another example is apparatus (pl. apparatuses or apparatus), not apparati, since not all Latin words ending in us have i in the plural, only second declension nouns (those with genitive in i).

The 1991 NYT article is noticeably better than the current article on the same subject. Plus ca change, plus c'est change, or, vive la difference!

I am so surprised that no old salts (or young salts for that matter) mentioned the Bosun's Pipe. There are many things that can be piped on a ship as well as "pipe down" as you mentioned, someone of some importance or significance and coming aboard might be "piped aboard" as an example.