Advertizing
Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.
Thus cries William Blake in his preface to Milton. His fine righteousness aside, what seems notable here is the thing that seems to mark it as slightly outdated English. More than the stray capital letter that we wouldn’t use these days, the “z” in “advertizing” jumped out at me as looking quite odd.
A while ago I decided to standardize (see!) on using “z” instead of “s” in such verbs. As far as I can tell, both are acceptable; the “z = American” / “s = British” idea seems largely to be a myth. So—a few petty lexicographical arguments that I’m probably not aware of notwithstanding—it seems to be a matter of aesthetic choice. For me, at the time I standardized, I felt the “z” had a resonance I preferred: stronger, with more bite in the shape of the letter, not to mention a closer match to the feel of the noise.
Some time later, in my years-of-not-writing-much, I reverted to the “s”. Maybe that reflected my written word sinking a little more into the background, the softer shape belying and dampening the sound, perhaps.
Getting back into writing more has, with a considered but abrupt aesthetic u-turn, found me preferring that jaggedy “z” again.
Apart from “advertising”. The wonders of digitization means I can check, roughly. A search on this site for “advertising” gives 16 hits. “Advertizing” gives none (and a helpful hint directing you to the other spelling). Now, I’m not saying I’ve managed to be completely consistent in using “z” on everything else, but this word seems to be an odd exception. My Concise Oxford Dictionary gives “advertising” as the primary spelling, whereas a random sample of other verbs (”organize”, “categorize”, “theorize”) give the “z” first, and add “(also -ise)”.
Using Google again, we find that global searches for “advertising” and “advertizing” give 529,000,000 and 1,430,000 hits respectively. Something like “organise” and “organize” gives us 42,500,000 and 87,200,000 hits. Hardly scientific, but still, very odd.
And here’s Blake using the “z”. It’s strange; it seems to me this spelling subtly emphasizes the sleazy, glitzy, grimily duplicitous nature of advertizing. It doesn’t do anything similar in any other word I can think of.
Maybe that’s just my mind, or the context of Blake. But from now on, I’m going to follow Blake, consciously bringing advertizing into the “z” fold, and let its sleaze shine through!
Join us!
The advantage of using -ise for words with -ise/-ize endings is that it can never be wrong (the only exception being ‘capsize’). Will you be writing ‘advertizement’? How wrong that looks to me. Will you be consulting the dictionary on words like ‘advise’ to see if you can use ‘advize’? Will you be wasting time looking up ‘compromize’?
Joel - 30th August 2008 @ 17:10
I should have added that -ise can never be wrong in Britain. As for the UK/US divide, I’m not sure why you think it is a myth. Where British dictionaries show both -ise and -ize as alternative endings, only -ize is used in the US.
Joel - 30th August 2008 @ 17:24
You’re so serious sometimes!
Gyrus - 30th August 2008 @ 17:53
Words are a serious business.
The only line of a book I have remembered from childhood is from the Ronald Searle caricature of the classics master in The Compleet Molesworth: “And when I asked him the supine stem of confiteor the fool didn’t know!”
Joel - 31st August 2008 @ 16:51
I just thought it would be insulting to repeat the point I made in the post. My English dictionary has “s” for most words like that, with “also -ize”. So the right/wrong thing (with some exceptions - this is English after all!) is just aesthetic choice (or linguistic pedantry, depending on your mood).
Seeing “advertize” in Blake looked wrong, but it made me think. And I like the fact that it’s wrong. Seems to reflect something worth thinking about. No manifesto here; just serious playfulness.
Kind of loses some of the playfulness when you have to drag it away from being taken too seriously. Ah well…
Gyrus - 31st August 2008 @ 17:40
You were talking about standardising on s or z. I was saying that doing it on the s means you never have to think about it again. To me, this serves flow. Aesthetic choice introduces a pause where I have to think whether I am writing a word that even exists. I don’t want that level of fiddling about on what should be a simple matter. Also, I support the preservation of British English and naturally scoff at ‘Fall’ and ‘color’.
When I set letterpress by hand I would sometimes be forced into using a z when I ran out of s. You will find this from time to time in hand-set letterpress.
I don’t know whether the Blake z you witnessed was a facsimile or a re-setting, you don’t say. But I expect you could get PhD funding for a study of the frequency on -ize endings in Blake. It’s true I can’t conjure up the same level of mystical wonderment that you feel about it. Whether this is being too serious about it I don’t know.
I didn’t realise your post was intended to be taken as trivial. I apologise for not having the requisite level of playfulness. I hope I will be assimilated by the Borg shortly for my lapse.
Joel - 31st August 2008 @ 18:23
Ackroyd maintains that Blake was simply an erratic speller.
Lapse! You’re pretty consistent in your blog comments…
Gyrus - 31st August 2008 @ 18:55
Just a brain in a jar making conversation. I used to enjoy sharpening sticks with my penknife, when I had hands.
Joel - 31st August 2008 @ 19:21
OK, I was feeling pretty “breezy” this weekend, little time for arguing fine points. Anyway, skipping past the ham-fisted Borg-referencing sarcasm…
Basically, I know “advertize” is “wrong” (i.e. it doesn’t get the “also -ize” treatment in the dictionary). I’m a relatively careful speller and I get the same visceral reaction to seeing “compromize” (which doesn’t happen with “organize”, “categorize”, etc.).
It’s exactly that “wrongness” that I was interested in in seeing Blake’s spelling. (The quote was quoted in Ackroyd’s biography, and as he had full access to Blake’s manuscripts, I assume that was the original spelling.) I like the way it neatly casts of resonances (for me at least) of wrongness of the sleazy kind - summing up my general attitude to advertizing. Maybe I’ll keep up this semi-serious spelling stance, maybe I won’t. I guess the post wasn’t pitched right (for you) to express the no-man’s land between idle musing and interesting serious point that I was coming from. There’s no “mystical wonderment”—I can’t see that in the post myself.
I terms of bare efficiency, I’m sure you’re right in general about using “-ise”. But this is actually the first time I’ve given the issue much thought—previous changes have been quite organic, almost sub-thought aesthetic swerves. If I was going to cut down my thinking expenditure, I’d start somewhere else. Reminds me of the guy who seriously tried to improve his fuel efficiency by cutting down the unnecessary weight of “old car park tickets and receipts” in his car!
I’m with you on preserving British English. You need a certain disproportionate stubbornness these days to bother. I try for a small-scale stubbornness with a large-scale perspective that remembers how ephemeral it is in the end. But, without that small scale adherence, I wouldn’t find such idle pleasure in significant deviations like “advertizing”…
Gyrus - 1st September 2008 @ 11:35
I just read your review on “Blake” and found this statement unsettling:
“I realize how ambivalent I’ve become about my one-time unequivocal
enthusiasm for pagan immersion in the ‘vegetated world’”
What’s this, are you about to leave your beloved flesh behind? Or is it
just that Blake, Hillman et al points to greater mysteries than
simple(?) paganism dare or care to reveal?
Best wishes,
Joakim
Joakim - 1st September 2008 @ 14:24
Well, I’d stress the “ambivalent” part. Not necessarily ambivalent to “the flesh” (apart from the usual neurotic inheritance), more ambivalent about theoretical cheerleading for a wholly pagan anti-dualist stance.
Right in the middle of ‘Dionysus Risen’, talking about trying to see things in terms of some unitary matrix of flesh, I talk of suggesting, “with a little caution, that we consciously overshoot the mark as an exercise in balance.” I always remembered writing that, and wondered when I might start considering “dualist” models again, or stop being so stridently anti-dualist.
I also quoted Christmas Humphrey’s description of the Buddhist jijimuge doctrine:
The tussles between Gnostic and Pagan views, or between monotheism and polytheism, seem to be limited from this sort of perspective.
Blake seems contradictory, with his sexual radicalism and “heaven in a wild flower” on the one hand, and his strident Platonic Gnosticism on the other, disparaging this world of matter and exalting the eternal realm of spirit. Ten years ago this conflict might have troubled me, but now it just seems like a guy living life honestly. Life is paradoxical. I just feel like I’ve widened out from a personally necessary over-emphasis on a simple kind of pagan “Yea to this world!” thing. Not moving to “Nay to this world!”, but just accepting that in the traditions of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Sufism, and so on, there’s some perceptions that can’t be contained by simple paganism, and can’t be dismissed as world-denying compromises.
(Damn, I swear I didn’t plan to end on one of the words that the rest of this thread was about!)
Gyrus - 1st September 2008 @ 14:50
I always remembered writing that, and wondered when I might start considering “dualist” models again, or stop being so stridently anti-dualist.
I’ve always been a mind / body dualist (as well you know). But after studying psychoanalysis for the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that such a dualism is self-evident.
I believe that the anti-dualist stance is, as you’ve suggested, fuelled in no small part by a reaction to the anti-flesh position of classic dualism (i.e. that the mind is “superior” to the body, or that the body is “merely a vessel for the mind”). I myself may have been guilty of that last view for a time, though it seems wrong-headed (wrong-minded?) to me now.
I assume everyone would agree that the body is physical (matter and energy). The mind, on the other hand, cannot be physical. Values, beliefs, memories, etc… there are not physical things. A neurobiologist may point to areas of the brain in which it is said these things are stored (memory formation, for instance, is accompanied by the formation and alteration of protein clusters in the parahippocampal gyrus, er, Gyrus). But to suggest that a particular memory, along with its associated emotions, is a protein cluster seems to be clearly making an error of categorisation.
One might suggest that the memory is a property of that cluster. Or that the mental event corresponding to that memory is generated by that cluster. But to suggest that they are identical is like suggesting that a piece of music, along with the associated emotions it generates is identical to the speaker system from which it emerges.
And when you widen the definition of mind, as I’ve been forced to do through my research, to include “interactions”, “difference” and a multitude of systems and mechanisms through which we integrate ourselves into our environment then it simply can’t be considered identical with, or a part of, the body.
Mind is a real phenomenon. But it is not physical.
Jim Bliss - 22nd September 2008 @ 21:47
You say ‘mind is a real phenomenon’. I know what you’re saying in simple terms, but the trouble with this mind/body divide is in deciding what ‘real’ means. It is like according mind and body different levels of ‘reality’, only to find that you have done so in a dream. The material universe can never be divorced from the mind that perceives it, so as far as that goes it is of the same stuff.
Apart from that, I don’t know what the discussion about ‘mind’ and ‘body’ is about any more. I’m frankly surprised people are still interested in dualism. (And ‘anti-dualism’, as far as I can conceive the term having any meaning at all, must just be another form of dualism, but I confess I have lost the knack of using my mind for ‘thinking’, which strikes me as just a way of looking foolish, full of illusions, and actually dulled of mind, all ideas being dead and then dissected. And somehow that’s supposed to look clever.)
Joel - 24th September 2008 @ 17:24
They say that for “optimiZing” techniques (no pun intended), sometimes intentionally misspelling can lead to better search rankings. Even unintentionally misspelling has lead to this. I think mixing intentionally misspelled words with properly spelled words might be OK
Dan - 8th October 2008 @ 13:36