Goddamnit! plus thoughts on Barry Cunliffe

Barry Cunliffe is a wide-ranging scholar, an eminent archaeologist, a stimulating thinker, and a fluent and engaging writer. But he (or his editors) doesn't know what mitigate means. Here's a sentence from Britain Begins, his history of the peopling of Britain and Ireland, boldface mine:

"A genetically conditioned predisposition to be mobile is, however, balanced by a sense of territoriality which mitigates against wandering."

I knew a professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania who similarly misused mitigate for militate. Mitigate means to ease, mollify, or alleviate: A nip of schnapps mitigated the surgery's painful aftereffects. Militate means to have an effect, to weigh (against), or, loosely, to conspire or work (against): His insistence on correct word usage militates against the possibility that he will ever be promoted. Militate takes a preposition (against). Mitigate does not.

I don't know what Cunliffe's copy editor was doing the day that sentence came across his or her desk. Dreaming of citizen journalism, self-publishing, and the benefits of overthrowing gatekeepers, maybe.

Cunliffe, meanwhile, is even more impressive than I thought. I'd known of his work on the big-picture issue of population origins, but he's also a nuts-and-bolts archaeologist. I have just learned that he was involved in excavating Fishbourne Roman Palace in England, one of the most moving, because most human, of all Roman remains. This knowledge mitigates, if only slightly, my annoyance at his book's misuse of a word.

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What misuses of words have driven you nuts in your reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Another prejudice that might be history

I feel like a man unburdening myself of my sins. First I dropped a prejudice against crime stories set in countries other than the authors' own. Now I'll try to do the same for historical crime fiction.

My hesitation about such writing has two causes. First, is the inability of many authors to dispel the reader's nagging awareness that decades, centuries, even millennia have elapsed between the story's time and the author's. Then there is Lindsey Davis, whose historical research is so good and whose tone is so engagingly breezy that for me the two have interfered with one another, at least in her novels.

But I'm giving her another try because I've just visited the spectacular setting of one of her books. Fishbourne Roman Palace in Fishbourne, West Sussex on England's south coast, contains gorgeous Roman mosaics that are all the more moving because most are in situ, right where they were laid in the first and second centuries. Davis' novel A Body in the Bath House, part of her long-running series about Marcus Didius Falco, the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Travis McGee of first-century Rome, sends Falco to far-away Britain in pursuit of some shoddy building contractors who have fled Rome. There, the palace later to be known as Fishbourne is under construction and plagued with problems that include fatal accidents.

At Fishbourne last week, a member of the staff told me that Davis launched her novel at the palace and that she was highly respected by historians and classicists. That and the memory of some funny lines from Davis' other work were good enough for me. I'm reading her again.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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