And while we’re on the subject of metaphors, I wish to God people would stop using the “carrot and stick” metaphor to refer to enticement and punishment.

The stick is NOT a weapon to make the donkey or whatever get moving. The stick is held out over the animal’s head, with a carrot dangling from it, as an unattainable enticement.

So, next time you hear a reporter on NPR analyze some situation as “all carrot and no stick” you must all shout at your radios, “NO NO NO! You’ve got it all wrong!”, as I do.

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 1 July 02009 @ 9am

Janis:

Sick Gust/Hoffman from Charlie Wilson’s War on them.

Seriously, I’ve never heard this ‘all carrot and no stick’ bit. That’s pretty special. I mean, it basically does work. It’s not a weapon, but it is the means to entice. The stick is the tease, and the carrot’s the… um… and ‘all carrot and no stick’ would just be a donkey sitting around munching its carrot instead of doing its job. In either case, the donkey has what it wants and has no motivation to give you what you want from it.

All of a sudden I feel like a bowling pin, facing that stone ball from Raiders. ;)

Posted by Cory Capron on 1 July 02009 @ 10am

Janis,

If you’re right, people have been making this mistake for well over a century. But it’s possible that your insistence on the carrot-hanging-from-a-stick imagery is misplaced.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/08/carrot_unstuck/

At this point, I think it’s rather silly to insist that one usage is more correct than the other. Surely, if we’re judging by usage frequency, the carrot-or-stick form is more widely used, and if we’re judging by which form was used first, the answer is far from clear. I would be interested to see how far the various similar idiomatic phrases from other languages can be traced.

Posted by Ben C. on 1 July 02009 @ 11am

Oh, Ben, you descriptivist, you! You probably think “nu-ku-ler” is hunky dory, too.

(If I ruled the world, people who say “nu-ku-ler” would be swept away to re-education camps and be forced to repeat “nu-klee-er” until it is firmly embedded in their vocal muscle memory. But that’s just me.)

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 1 July 02009 @ 11am

While I have seen Nineteenth Century drawings of donkey carts where the driver had mounted a carrot on a stick from the cart extending in front of the donkey, that driver also wielded a crop or a switch to either whack the donkey’s rump or to steer the donkey.

Back when I lived across the border from Mexico,(in South San Diego) I enjoyed frequent bike rides in Tijuana. While in TJ, I would often see donkey carts being maneuvered on the streets. The drivers of those carts were often children who would use a stick to whack the donkey a little to get it moving, and also as a prod, to steer the animal. I never saw any Mexicans leading their donkey with a carrot or anything else; they just used a stick.

As for VITA, whenever our government has been enticed to outsource core infrastructure, it appears that contractors win big, bureaucracy remains large, and we the citizens, just get less in the form of service and reliability.

Back when this central management issue was implemented, a key concern was that agencies were buying “stovepipe” systems and software that were incompatible with other state and federal systems. The other major issue was cost containment, with the hope being that a centrally managed procurement process could achieve greater economic benefits.

While the industry has worked out many of the software compatibility issues, we still see some developers who insist that special plug-ins be bought or downloaded in order to make their applications available, while others, such as DB giants Oracle and SAP still wrestle with format compatibility issues. VITA and Northrop-Grumman have had no impact on these and other compatibility issues. Any gains have been driven by the industry and their collective profit motive.

The central management and outsourcing done by VITA, has achieved standardization to some extent and it can be argued that cost containment has occurred in some areas. However, as with similar efforts on the federal side, the individual worker sees a net reduction in service and equipment, while the citizens dealing with such impaired agencies just see another example of bureaucrats who spend a lot of money and deliver little in return to the citizens in the form of service.

My experience with Virginia’s agencies over the last ten years has been mostly positive. I believe that the good work that I have observed, was in spite of the VITA experiment with centralized IT management, rather than because of it.

Posted by J. Tyler Ballance on 1 July 02009 @ 11am

Janis,

Hah! No, I’m not big on “nucular.” In that case, it is unambiguous which pronunciation is correct (unlike with the carrot/stick debate), and as a bonus, consistent with spelling. Still, if people had been pronouncing it “nucular” for over a century, I might concede it’s a viable alternative pronunciation.

How do you feel about the name of the town of Byoona Vista? ;-)

Posted by Ben C. on 1 July 02009 @ 1pm

I was once stuck in the town of “Byoona Vista” for half an hour by virtue of not knowing what spelling to look for on a map. I felt like such a carpetbagger before I remembered oh wait a minute my family has lived here for more than 250 years, but try telling that to the guy at the gas station looking at you like you’re the biggest jackass ever.

Posted by Sam on 1 July 02009 @ 2pm

The Brits would love the pronunciation of Buena Vista.

We lived in London for a year (when Waldo was knee-high to a grasshoppah) and the Brits went to war with Argentina over the Falklands.

Maggie Thatcher was all “Byoonos Aires” this and “Byoonos Aires” that. They appeared to revel in mangled pronunciations of foreign names. Arrogance, not ignorance was the name of the game.

That said, I like the fact that people in Buena Vista pronounce it the way they damn well please. Local shibboleths (like Staunton Virginia and Concord, MA — pronounced “KON-kid” — make life interesting.)

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 1 July 02009 @ 9pm

Spanish, run through a Southern accent, seems to create many of these charming local pronunciations.

Posted by Steve Vaughan on 2 July 02009 @ 10am

Janis — The British have a long history of pronouncing everything as if the natives were just doing a bad job of writing English. If you read the rhymes in Byron’s “Don Juan,” it’s clear that he pronounced it “Don Joo-an.”

Posted by Jim E-H on 6 July 02009 @ 3pm