A stunning silver or a shocking one?

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South Korea’s first medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics was won by snowboarder Kim Sang-kyum. This was headlined by the Korea Times as a ‘stunning silver’, but the article starts “Alpine snowboarder Kim Sang-kyum captured a shocking silver medal …”

I’m trying to decide whether I would ever describe a Good Thing as shocking. A shock silver medal, maybe, but not a shocking one. A silver medal may be shocking for a favourite who fell over doing a premature victory celebration.

Google Ngrams shows (a) stunning view(s), beauty, blow, success, effect(s), victory, example, noise and (a) shocking thing(s), news, spectacle, accident, manner, scene, state, sight, story. Whether these are Good Things or Bad Things may require more information. 

The results for shock include wave, syndrome and therapy, which are obviously very different.

(or, if you prefer/prescribe active voice: “Snowboarder Kim Sang-kyum won South Korea’s first medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics. The Korea Times headlined this as …”)

Elsewhere, the Times reports that enthusiasm for the Games is noticeably low among South Koreans. I’m not actively following, apart from occasionally glancing at headlines, even though Australia apparently has multiple medal chances.

A correctly used apostrophe

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After I mentioned a hymn in my previous post, I remembered another hymn I sang last year where a correctly used apostrophe causes another issue. I have sung the hymn many times before, but not noticed that issue.

Most hymnbooks have the music and words separate, with the music at the top and/or on the left hand page and the words in verses at the bottom and/or right hand page. Some hymnbooks always and others sometimes, especially for hymns with an irregular number or stress of words, have the words between the two staves, with each syllable placed under a note, separated by a hyphen whenever necessary. This hymnbook has the first formatting by default, but this hymn has an irregular number or stress of words, so this hymn has the second formatting.

The hymn Holy Spirit, ever dwelling in the holiest realms of light has the words Holy Spirit, ever living as the Church’s very life and Holy Spirit, ever working through the Church’s ministry in the second and third verses. The ’s turns the one-syllable Church into the two-syllable Church’s (compare justice’s sake in my previous post). In the first formatting, there’s no problem. In the second formatting, the editors must decide to use either Church -’s or Chur – ch’s, both of which look strange and are problematic in different ways. The editors’ solution is to sidestep the choice by setting Church’s without a hyphen, spanning both notes. I can’t immediately decide which I would choose.

The same issue occurs in the hymn The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord. The English hymnbook we use has the first formatting, but the US hymnbook I have a copy of at home has the second formatting, and uses Church’s unhyphenated spanning both notes. Both of these are major hymnbooks within the Anglican/Episcopalian Church. There are also free versions of both hymns on the internet, which use Church’s, Church – ’s and Chur – ch’s. Most people wouldn’t notice.

More catastrophic apostrophes

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Since posting about apostrophes twice recently, I encountered two more usages which are plain wrong.

The first was in a legal document, discussing social conditions in a country which I can’t remember but is irrelevant to the point (warning, brief mention of abortion):

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Dancing with the czars

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A few days ago, an Australian news website stated that Trump’s border tsar was going to Minneapolis. Another stated that Trump’s ‘border czar’ was going to Minneapolis.

I am far more familiar with the spelling tsar, and would only ever use either to refer to eastern European monarchs (tsar for Russian and czar for south Slavic), not people holding positions of power in US politics or public life. 

Czar is the earlier spelling (from Latin caesar (classically pronounced with a /k/, compare German kaiser)) and was more used until about 1900. The two spellings traded usage for most of the 20th century, then tsar has been the most common since about 1990. If anything tsar refers to Russian monarchs (compare Russian Царь) and czar refers those people in US politics or public life. With the resources I have access to, I can’t find when when czar was first used in that way. US industrial magnates and the Russian monarchy overlapped by several decades (compare also ‘barons of industry’).

I have never knowingly encounteredczar in reference to Australia or any other country. (Wikipedia says US and UK.) The second website saw fit to use inverted commas around the phrase. I can’t immediately think what term we would use in Australia to refer to a person of equivalent power. Maybe, fortunately, we don’t have (m)any, as the Australian prime minister has less power to make such appointments. Intriguingly, most similar words come from other languages: boss (Dutch), supremo (Italian or Spanish), honcho (Japanese) and mogul (Persian or Arabic). ‘White House Border Czar’ seems to be Tom Homan’s actual title (Wikipedia, citing the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, 1 July 2025). The first news source has a further article in which the commentator writes “The ‘White House Border Tsar’ (yes, that is his actual title)”. 

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Who are they and why are they avoiding passive voice?

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A cafe on the ground floor of our office building has a screen which cycles through photos and short videos, weather forecasts, book, tv, movie and podcast reviews, and, relevantly, trivia questions. Yesterday, one of these was “When [or maybe What year] did they open the London Underground?”. My guess (1861) was reassuringly close to the actual answer (1863). (I have browsed through Wikipedia’s articles on various rail networks, but have never memorised relevant dates.) But I couldn’t help thinking about why they chose to ask the question like that. 

There’s nothing wrong with the question as it is; active voice is the default within the English verb system. But it throws too much emphasis onto they, when we either don’t know or don’t care who they were. Who opened the London Underground? Some representatives of royalty, government, commerce and industry, probably. Passive voice is useful in situations like this. 

You may have noticed that I wrote “But I couldn’t help thinking about why they chose to ask the question like that”. Same question: who are they? We don’t know individually, but we know there was a person (they!) or people who chose to ask the question like that. Besides, that clause doesn’t have a direct object to become the subject of the passive voice alternative. Compare “They chose that question to demonstrate active voice” > “That question was chosen to demonstrate passive voice” or “Why did they chose that question to demonstrate active voice?” > “Why was that question chosen to demonstrate passive voice?”. 

Apostrophes, catastrophes and other strophes

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Apostrophes and catastrophes have something in common, which is strophes, but it may not be immediately obvious what sections of Greek or later poetry have to do with punctuation marks or disasters. στροφή  strophḗ means “a twist, turning about”from stréphein “to turn”, and was the first part of a choral ode, followed by the antistrophe. Now it can be any section of a poem (possibly distinguished from a stanza (“a standing”) in that it doesn’t (have to) have a fixed or repeating length, meter or rhyme scheme), or an exclamatory figure of speech, often introduced by O! (“O for a muse of fire and/or the wings of a dove …”)

Etymologically, an apostrophe is a turning away and a catastrophe is a turning down. There’s some rule of pronunciation which turns strophe (with a long o) into catastrophe and catastrophic (with a short o). I have never encountered apostrophic (stressed like catastrophic), but it’s in dictionaries. Maybe the pub menu poster in my previous post was apostrophic. 

The Free Dictionary lists 15 words that end in strophe (or 16 if you count strophe itself). These are (I was going to add a definition to each, but it got complicated):

* ecocatastrophe (but eco-catastrophe)
eucatastrophe 
* psilostrophe
catastrophe
antistrophe
* monostrophe
* hypostrophe
* peristrophe
* katastrophe
apostrophe
epistrophe
anastrophe
* enstrophe
* ecstrophe

The words with an asterisk are not recognised by Pages for Mac or WordPress. 

The only one I’ll talk about further is eucatastrophe. With respect to Tolkien, eucatastrophe doesn’t work for me. A good catastrophe? Shouldn’t this rather be an anastrophe (a turning up, which I have just noticed is on the list above, but Dictionary.com defines it as an “inversion of the usual order of words”) or a eustrophe (a good turning)?

Reknown

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An article on a major open-source site included two references to either “a renown actor” or “a reknown actor” (or some other artistic occupation). I didn’t save the quotation or URL, and have forgotten the exact article, but that doesn’t stop me investigating and speculating. If I have encountered this before, I haven’t noticed it. I also haven’t used renowned in any of my posts here.

Both are wrong. Renown is a noun. A noun can modify another noun. We talk about a movie actor or a stage actor, but not about a fame actor (it’s got to be a famous actor). Reknown isn’t a word, but if is was, it would be an adjective; compare “a known actor”. (Pages for Mac and WordPress both red-underline it.)

Renown isn’t about being known, well-known or re-known. It comes from Old French renom (noun) and renomer (verb) to make famous, and Latin re- + nōmināre to name. Renowned people are re-named, not re-known.

Not surprisingly, there are examples around. Dictionary.com has five example sentences for renown, one of which uses it as an adjective: “Even amid Welsh rugby’s renown tribalism, this news will not have been celebrated by regional rivals” (the BBC, no fewer). Google Ngrams shows reknown expert, scientists, artist, experts, although at lower usage than renowned scholar, author, artists, city, warrior, men, general, hero, name, knight. Its results for “renown_ADJ *_NOUN” are garbled; the first result is renown hath, which is clearly noun + verb. A general Google search shows widespread results for “renown actor”, including major sites and enough results for “reknown actor” to say that it’s out there. 

So will either renown actor or reknown actor become standard, alongside or instead of renowned actor? I doubt it. The word just doesn’t have enough usage, alongside renowned,  famous and other synonyms. I can see why people would use either or both, though.

I’m also puzzled by how renown (noun) became renowned (adj) without renown (verb) in between (renowned is, at face value a past-participle verb). There’s also famed, but the verb to fame did exist (and famed is less common than famous). If the verb to renown existed, I can’t find any reference to it. Maybe the fact that there’s a Latin and French verb in the history is enough.

Benjamin and other names

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In a recent post I mentioned the sons of Jacob as Old Testament biblical names which either are or aren’t in widespread use. Various sources track the popularity of names over time. It would take too long to identify the most comprehensive and/or authoritative, so I chose one at random (NameTrends), which almost certainly pertains to the USA. Its results for the most recent year, in most cases 2020 but in some cases earlier, and in descending order, are. 
Benjamin no 7 male baby name, 6.627 per thousand 
Levi no 18, 4.917 per thousand
Joseph no 26, 4.559 per thousand
Asher no 32, 4.153 per thousand
Judah no 186, 1.13 per thousand
Reuben no 919, 0.132 per thousand
Dan no 945, 0.077 per thousand compare Daniel no 14, 5.14 per thousand
Simeon no 965, 0.115 per thousand compare Simon no 251, 0.759 per thousand
Zebulun (not in the top 2000) compare Zebulon no 981, 0.044 per thousand
Naphtali (not in the top 2000)
Gad (not in the top 2000)

A few observations: These results are broadly what I would have expected, except I would have put Joseph above Levi and Asher lower, maybe below Judah and Reuben. Asher and to a lesser extent Levi have been “big movers” over the past 1, 10 and 20 years, which I have obviously missed.

Joseph is more likely to be the New Testament Joseph of Nazareth than the Old Testament patriarch Joseph, Dan is more likely to an abbreviation of the OT prophet Daniel, Simeon is possibly more likely to be the NT character (Luke 2) and Simon is more likely to the NT apostle Simon Peter (Simon being a variant of Simeon). 

Other names also have variants, across Judaism (Beniamin, Yehuda(h)/Yehudi, Shimon), Islam (Yūsuf), English-speaking countries (Jude) and other Christian-tradition countries (Giuseppe, Josef, José, Yossi, Semyon, Semen (all of which may predominantly refer to the NT characters), and abbreviations (Benny, Ben, Joey, Joe, Rube, Danny). Note also the female forms Danielle and Simone. 

The less common names have been less common for some time (NameTrends’ results are from 1880). The more common names show a variety of trends:
Benjamin: peaked in 1889, slow decline to 1940-1960, strong growth to peak in 1981 and popular since
Levi: rare and declined from 1880 to 1960s, moderate growth to 2005 and strong growth since
Joseph: major declines from 1914 to 1974, moderate growth to 1982 and major decline since
Asher: rare until the late 1990s, then very strong growth since then
Judah: (results begin in 1998) strong growth since then, from a low base

I can’t even begin to speculate about the socio-cultural factor behind those. 

I mustn’t forget the less obviously biblical name Dinah (Dina, Deena but not the Roman Diana, Dianne), which is rare. 

My very OT name peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, and has been declining since, but still ranks in the top 30.

By their books you shall know them

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This morning I left home a few minutes earlier and caught a different train than my usual (living in a major suburban hub, there are trains every few minutes in peak hour). I shut my eyes and maybe dozed, and when I opened them/woke up, there was a young man sitting opposite me reading The last picture show by Larry McMurtrie. I haven’t read the book, but watched the movie on video many years ago. 

This afternoon I was slightly delayed at work and caught a different train than my usual and sat in a different carriage. There was the same young man reading the same book. I tend not to look at people on trains, but can spot a book some distance away. I also tend not to strike up conversations with people, about books, movies or otherwise.