What’s a “breakdown box?”

Spotted on a dumpster:

Yes, I know that the sign maker meant that people should break down boxes—that is, flatten them—before putting them into the dumpster.

But let’s have some fun with this. What do you think, dear readers? What would you use a “breakdown box” for?

I didn’t know there was a word for that

If a duel is combat or a contest between two people, what do you call it when there are three people involved?

Nancy Friedman points us to the word we need: truel.

Used mostly in game theory, truel was coined by mathematician Martin Shubik in a 1954 article, ""Does the Fittest Necessarily Survive?" It's a portmanteau of trio (or perhaps "three-way") and duel that assumes that duel has a root meaning "two," as in "duo." However, "duel" in fact is a shortening of an Old Latin word for "war," duellum, and truel ambiguously suggests a root of true.

It seems that, no matter the concept, there’s a word in English that fits.

Learn the rules. Then you can break them.

"In fact, part of the fun of Standard English is to abuse it in ways that create excitement and aesthetic tension. But first one must master enough Standard English to have a basis for abuse."

-Arthur Plotnik, The Elements of Expression

A rant about clichés

A cliché is a “trite or overused expression or idea.” It is a phrase that, when someone first uttered or wrote it, was a fresh, humorous, and lively way of expressing an idea. It was so good that people who heard it or read it said “I like that! I’m going to use that!” And they do, again and again.

And so it spreads like sniffles in a preschool, eventually losing whatever freshness, humor, and life it once had. (I was just about to write “it spreads like wildfire,” but that would have been, well, a cliché.)

Someone just emailed me a marketing brochure that included the phrase “a 24/7, one-stop shop.” Blork! Those two worn-out business clichés slid from my monitor onto my keyboard and sagged there, blinking mournfully, as if to say “Look at us. Once we were young and energetic. Now we can’t even keep ourselves from sliding off the screen. Pathetic, isn’t it? We’d kill ourselves, but we don’t have the will.”

Clichés are the parasites of language. They embed themselves in your writing and speaking, unnoticed, but slowly sucking the blood, the energy, the essence out of your words. They can be hard to purge, because they often become impacted in the culture at large. You hear them from the radio, in conversations, in movies. You read them in newspapers, books, and on the web.

As I’ve said before, the best defense against clichés is to ask yourself, “Are those my words, my thoughts? Or am I just parroting a cool phrase I picked up somewhere?”

Which is right: deep-seeded or deep-seated?

Ran into a bit of usage that caught my attention and made me say “That’s not right.” However, I thought that, rather than pontificating on it, I’d ask you for your thoughts.

Without consulting a usage manual or search engine, which would you say is correct?

a. He has a deep-seeded hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

b. He has a deep-seated hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

Sound off in the comments.

Update on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 02:44PM by Roy Jacobsen

I have the most well-informed readers in blog-dom. Yes, it should be deep-seated. This error is an eggcorn, that is, a usage error that—unlike a malapropism—actually makes sense on some level.

I wrote about eggcorns here. You can browse a growing database of eggcorns captured in the wild (including an explanation of the seated/seeded variety) here.