The Word “Semi-Certain” and Dennard Dayle’s New Book
Is there a word “semi-certain” and a first look at Dennard Dayle’s new book.
The Fix
The Passage
Here is the initial passage from a blogpost about looking back and assessing progress.
This year I turned 25. Last year I turned 24 and naturally saw this “quarter-century” milestone coming. So long as I survived the year, I would (and did) turn 25.
It was the only semi-certain thing that I could predict and naturally, it freaked me out. This 25th birthday could mark the quarter point in my life, but depending on where fate takes me, it may mark something more substantial - my half life, my 80% life, etc.
Lots of numbers here … and the writer appears to be concerned that she’s not been as productive as she’d like to be. Let’s see what we can do with it.
Feedback
Let’s start with what the first sentence—This year I turned 25—means. With “year,” she means the calendar year, January to December. Since the verb is past tense, it means she must have turned 25 in one of the months of the current year that have already passed. For instance, if it were July, 2022 and her 25th birthday was in May, 2022, she could write “This year I turned 25.” This sentence tells us a lot. It means she survived to her 25th birthday, and that she turned 24 in 2021. Consequently, much of the remainder of the first paragraph is redundant. However, there is the idea of her realizing in her 24th year that she would soon be turning 25 which, for her, was a significant milestone. So how might we express this idea of her 25th birthday as a significant milestone? Here is one possibility:
Last year I realized that I was within a year of turning 25, my “quarter-century” milestone.
It seems to us that this expresses the idea in the first paragraph.
Let’s look at the first sentence in the second paragraph:
It was the only semi-certain thing that I could predict and naturally, it freaked me out.
We’re not fans of the word “semi-certain.” We checked at dictionary.com and got the response “no results found for semi-certain.” That said, we understand what she means. When she was 24, her 25th birthday was somewhere between “uncertain” and “certain” or semi-certain. That said, it does not appear that she’s aware of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum about death and taxes and hence we’re also concerned about her use of the word “only.” Finally, we’re not sure that it’s natural for the average person to be “freaked out” about realizing they’re 24 and soon to be 25.
The rest of the paragraph is nonsense so we’d nuke it. That said, the writer is clearly feeling some angst. We’d advise that she think about what precisely is bothering her about turning 25 and then write more clearly about what that is. Here’s a possibility:
Last year I realized that I was within a year of turning 25, my “quarter-century” milestone. That concerns me because I don’t feel I’ve been as focussed or productive as I could have been.
Odds and Ends
Dennard Dayle’s New Book
In a previous post we reported that we would be purchasing Dennard Dayle’s new book Everything Abridged (The Overlook Press, New York, 2022). It arrived and we were not disappointed. In his first paragraph, he explains what he is trying to do:
“If you’re alive today, you’re either confused or too deluded to be confused. Everything Abridged is the cure. A comprehensive guide to what the world is, was, and will be. My handmade gift to everyone navigating the Anthropocene. If you can’t define “Anthropocene,” you’re welcome.”
In the book, he explains what various words and phrases mean in a clever way. The list is alphabetic and, for this post, we thought we’d include his assessment of several words in the chapter labelled “E”:
editors: Society’s last line of defense against an interesting idea.
euthanasia: The right to cut the boring part of your biography.
Eve: Pandora’s plagiarist.
extinction: About September 24, 2064.
We’ll look at other letters in future posts.