The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style : A Readable Reference Book, Illuminating Thousands of Traps That Snare Writers and Speakers by Paul W. Lovinger

Author:Paul W. Lovinger [Lovinger, Paul W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2002-10-22T10:28:40+00:00

subject expresses oneness, and so must

time, or the amount of energy or power

the verb express it.

that a device can produce, or the data

Any related pronoun also is singular:

that come out of a computer.

“Abe or Charles, whichever one goes,

The verb output flowered in the four-

will have to pay his own way”—not

teenth to seventeenth centuries with sev-

“their.”

eral general meanings, and it persisted as

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280

outrageous, outrageously

jargon for produce or put out: “to outOVAL. Oval (adjective and noun)

put coal” or to “output some 1,200 tons

originates in ovum, Latin for egg. En-

of flour per day.” Computer technology

glish adopted ovum in the sense of egg

assigned output another sense: to give

cell, female reproductive cell. From the

out, print, or transfer processed data.

foregoing, one could reasonably assume

No one objects to the technical use that oval has something to do with eggs, of a technical term. Adapting such a

and so it has. Oval means (as an adjec-

term to general use, however, may not be

tive) egg-shaped, whether solidly or

necessary. A common word or phrase

planely; or (as a noun) an egg shape.

may bring out the meaning as well or

What is the shape of an egg? Anyone

better.

who has ever seen a common hen’s egg is

A boy doing poorly in school was de-

probably aware that it is rounded and

scribed, in a newscast, as handicapped in

somewhat elongated, with one end

“his ability to output the information”

broader than the other. The disparity be-

he was taught. To express it? To recall it?

tween egg ends is likely to be impressed

To write it down?

on the minds of those who have read

Let that Germanic-sounding verb re-

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and recall the

main a technical term in computing and

violent ideological conflict in the empire

industry, not replacing common words

of Liliput: It pitted the Big-Endians, the

or phrases like put out. If we are lucky,

heretics, who broke their eggs at the big

nobody will ever “output” a fire, “out-

ends, against the Little-Endians, the or-

put” a batter, “output” to sea, or “out-

thodox egg-breakers.

put” the cat.

Oval may be distinguished from ellip-

See also Backward writing, 3.

tical (adjective) and ellipse (noun). An ellipse is an elongated circle, the shape of

OUTRAGEOUS, OUTRA-

the numeral 0. (More technically, it is a

GEOUSLY. The adjective outrageous

symmetrical closed curve, the path of a

(and its adverbial relative outrageously)

point that moves in a way that the sum

can mean disgraceful(ly), harmful(ly),

of its distances from two fixed points is

immoral(ly), indecent(ly), offensive(ly),

constant.) A planet’s orbit is sometimes

shocking(ly), or violent(ly). Those mean-

called its ellipse, inasmuch as the plane-

ings apply to criminal or other antisocial

tary orbits are approximately elliptical.

deeds. (“We’ve got to curb that drug

An American football is an ellipsoid, a

lord’s outrageous activities.”) Does a sin-

solid object whose plane sections are all

gle one apply to the event described be-

ellipses or circles. The adjective is ellip-

low?

soid or ellipsoidal.

More often than not, the public con-

More than 17 million visitors were

fuses an oval and an ellipse. Usually an attracted to the 1939 Golden Gate

ellipse is called (an) “oval.” Occasionally

Exposition, held on man-made Trea-

it is the other way around. A number of

sure Island, dredged from the Bay bot-

modern dictionaries have legitimated the

tom to house the outrageously

misemployment, thereby contributing

spectacular exhibition.

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