Words We Love Too Much

Yes, I’ve voiced this complaint before. But our love of “famously” appears undiminished.

The word is often superfluous and sometimes slightly annoying. If the situation in question is truly famous, it’s usually unnecessary to say so; a reader will already know. And if the situation isn’t widely known â€" if I’ve never heard the story before â€" insisting that it’s famous just makes me feel clueless.

Nonetheless, we recently managed to use “famously” six times â€" in a single day (June 9). Help!

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Then as now, it was a cash transaction. Among its many criteria for allowing transfers of ownership, the famously selective co-op board at 778 Park accepts only cash. Turndowns of even all-cash suitors are not unheard-of; Brooke Astor’s much-photographed 16th-floor apartment, originally on the market for $46 million and ultimately bought by a hede fund manager for $21 million in 2011, was at the mercy of the board through three years of price reductions and repeated offers from affluent buyers nonetheless deemed ineligible.

Surely you were aware of how selective that particular co-op board is. No? Why, it’s famous!

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Bruce and Kris Jenner, married since 1991, are the subject of tabloid divorce rumors in part fueled by a story line on the show. On last week’s season premiere, Ms. Jenner appeared briefly to discuss the state of her parents’ marriage.

In the suite, in a rare unrehearsed moment, she said of the divorce rumor, “It’s just stupid; that’s not true.”

(Her mother, who famously manages her children’s careers, was not in the room.)

If you follow the Kardashians, you probably know this; if you don’t, you don’t. Either way, “famously” is superfluous.

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But Ms. Power is no John R. Bolton, George W. Bush’s United Nations envoy, who once ! famously remarked that nobody would notice if someone lopped the top 10 floors off the United Nations Secretariat building.

I have no recollection of this “famous” remark. Should I feel dumb? (Perhaps we meant something like, “who once created a stir by remarking …” If so, let’s say that.)

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Larger publishing houses use the expo to promote titles they want everyone talking about come fall. This year, that includes Elizabeth Gilbert’s first book of fiction in more than 12 years, “The Signature of All Things”; Jonathan Lethem’s novel “Dissident Gardens”; and “Blowback,” the first thriller in a planned series written by Sarah Lovett and Valerie Plame, the former C.I.A. operative whose cover was famously blown by Robert Novak’s column in 2003.

If we want to remind people of the circumstances surrounding this case, we have to say more than this. If we think everyone remembers, there’s no need to say “famously.”

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p>It was a folksy and apt metaphor for an unproductive political convention grinding to an exhausted halt. But then he [Earl L. Butz, President Gerald R. Ford's secretary of agriculture] went on to tell the famously nasty racist joke that got him fired.

Ditto.

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Having moved only weeks before from Philadelphia, where Santa Claus himself was famously booed during an Eagles game, I half expected the guy to slug me. Instead, looking taken aback, he said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’m sorry.” I was stunned into silence.

I doubt many people outside Philadelphia recall this “famous” incident. I don’t.

 
And Another One

A colleague notes a recent rash of “foes.” The Times’s stylebook warns that the word, which means “enemy,” is frequently hyperbolic in political and other contexts. It’s seldom used in ordinary conversation and has a flavor of journalese. Let’s! be judic! ious.

A couple of recent questionable uses:

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He nominated Gina McCarthy to lead the E.P.A. even though he knew she would stir opposition among foes of environmental regulation.

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Against Rufin [at the French Open tennis tournament], he was facing a foe 12 years younger but far less accomplished.

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The Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan, where the service was held, was filled with a tableau of political friends and foes ranging from local New Jersey lawmakers to Washington fixtures.

Besides the hyperbole of calling a political rival a “foe,” this “friend/foe” formulation is a tired cliché.

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Mr. Dingell has earned himself foes and friends and watched his cherished Congress change from the days when committee chairmen held sway to a body overrun with partisan discord and strife.

Ditto.

 
In a Word

This week’s grab bag of grmmar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

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But Hezbollah’s large-scale entry into the fight in recent weeks and the Assad government’s firepower has tilted the battlefield in favor of the Syrian government.

Subject-verb agreement; Hezbollah’s entry into the fight and the Assad government’s firepower have tilted the battlefield, not has tilted.

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Selecting jurors may prove to be the most longest part of the trial of Mr. Zimmerman, 29, the neighborhood watch volunteer who claimed self-defense in shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in a gated community here more than 16 months ago.

Our ragged edges were left to show in our haste to post this online update.

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[Caption] Sarah Murnaghan, left, with her adopted sister, Ella, in her hospital bed.

We should refer to adoptive status only when it’s relevant an! d the rel! evance is clear, which was not the case here.

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ISPARTA, Turkey â€" After retaking Taksim Square in Istanbul after hours of ugly street battles with police officers firing tear gas this month, many of the haggard protesters cracked bottles of Efes beer and raised them in a mock toast to their prime minister, who had recently pushed through a law to curb drinking.

Two “afters” make the phrase awkward and the timeline overly complex.

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At that point, neither knew his name yet.

Redundant; we could have omitted “yet.”

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In many ways, the Sunday morning talk shows are like ID lanyards and BlackBerries. While much of the nation has lost interest in them, they hold a big â€" some would say disproportionate â€" sway in Washington.

For the proper name, the plural is BlackBerrys.

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Despite not having a high school degree, he was later hred by the C.I.A. to work on information technology security, serving in Geneva.

Generally use “diploma” for high school, not “degree.”

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Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a veteran Republican member of one of the Senate’s most testosterone-driven panels, was now flanked by them on both sides, including by two Republican colleagues, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska.

Perhaps we meant “male-dominated”? We might want to leave endocrinology to the experts and be sparing with this increasingly common trope.

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When his blog was picked up by Salon, said Kerry Lauerman, the magazine’s departing editor in chief, Salon agreed that Mr. Greenwald would have direct access to their computer system so that he could publish his blog posts himself without an editor seeing them first if he so chose.

Agreement. Make that “its computer system” or “the sit! e’s com! puter system.”

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Last year’s meeting in the Bronx drew 21 speakers (of which 12 were tenants) compared with 55 in Manhattan, he said.

Make it “of whom.”

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Mr. Zimmerman talked to police repeatedly and willingly, making statements that lay the groundwork for his self-defense case.

We use the article: “the police.”

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Johnny Johnston in “This Time for Keeps” (1947), John Carroll in “Fiesta” (1947) and Peter Lawford in “On an Island With You” (1948) were male ingénues whom the studio was hoping might turn into stars.

Who, not whom; it’s the subject of “might turn.”

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Throughout the recent upheaval, Mr. Erdogan’s behavior has given new fuel to already-simmering questions about his aims and methods â€" whether he has turned more autocrat then democrat, or at the least whether a deft politician has fallen into overconfidence.

“Than,†not “then,” of course. A distressingly common typo.

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More important, Weebly continuously adds themes and removes old and outdated ones.

“Continuously” means uninterrupted in time or space. We meant “continually,” which means periodically, or on a regular basis.

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Under the new system, 20 percent to 25 percent of a teacher’s rating score would be determined by state-approved measures of students growth.

We needed an apostrophe: “students’ growth.”

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The singer Ashlee Simpson has a young son named Bronx, and a hard-core punk band from Los Angeles also chose that name before ever stepping foot in the Bronx proper (the members have visited since).

Make it either “setting foot” or “stepping.”

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ALBANY â€" At 74, Justice Sidney F. Strauss loves his job and has no desire to stop working. But at the end of 2014, he may be forced into his golden years by a ! mandatory! retirement rule.

“Fifty years ago, when the life expectancy was 61, if you said, ‘You want to work to 76?’ They’d say, ‘You should live so long,’ ” said Justice Strauss, a State Supreme Court judge in Queens. “But as long as I am physically and mentally capable of doing this, I want to keep doing this.”

The highlighted phrase is not a quote with a quote, so it should not have single quotation marks or be set off with a comma.

European Aid to Egypt ‘Ineffective’

LONDON â€" A $1.35 billion European Union aid program to promote good governance and human rights in Egypt has been “well-intentioned but ineffective,” according to a critical report by the alliance’s auditors.

Around half the aid, which went directly to the Egyptian treasury in the form of budget support, was largely unaccounted for, according to the report.

Other funds to support human rights and democracy had failed in their objectives in the face of the negative attitude of the Egyptian authorities.

The findings published on Tuesday by the European Court of Auditors are likely to feed into a wider debate on the efficacy of aid to countries with a legacy of corruption and human rights abuses.

The report covered a seven-year period beginning in 2007 that spanned the overthrow of the regime of Hosni Mubarak and its replacement by the government of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s Islamist president.

“Following the uprising no new major initiatives were taken to tackle key human rights issues and the measures taken have had little impact to date,” according to the auditors.

The report comes at a time when Europe’s foreign aid commitments are under pressure from critics who say the money would be better spent on tackling austerity than on funding allegedly corrupt regimes.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, came under renewed fire on Tuesday for pledging to maintain the country’s aid budget despite making huge spending cuts at home.

While Mr. Cameron has defended Britain’s aid as a matter of national interest as well as morality, other E.U. governments have shown greater readiness to cut back on spending.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported in April that aid budgets were down by four percent among the world’s richer developed economies. In countries that have been worst affected by the euro crisis, such as Spain, aid spending was reduced by as much as 50 percent.

Tuesday’s report may be seized on by advocates of further cuts in aid. However, the main target of the auditors’ criticisms was not the level of assistance but rather the lack of control over how the money was spent.

It said E.U. officials had failed to take decisive action to ensure accountability within an Egyptian system characterized by a lack of budgetary transparency, an ineffective audit function and endemic corruption.

On the human rights front, it said, officials had failed to use the financial and political leverage at their disposal to counteract the intransigence of the Egyptian authorities.

Karel Pinxten, the Belgian author of the report, said “The softly, softly approach has not worked, and the time has come for a more focused approach which will produce meaningful results and guarantee better value for the European taxpayers’ money.”

Should the Europeans cut their losses and suspend aid to countries such as Egypt? Are aid budgets too high in an era of austerity, or should rich countries be spending even more to encourage reform? Let us know your views.

In China, a Controversial Law Is Seen to Excuse Sex With Minors

BEIJING â€" When Yan Yinhong, having removed a pair of pants from under her long dress, did a handstand and exposed her leotard-covered crotch onto which she had painted the face of a Chinese policeman, she intended to shock.

Ms. Yan’s act was part of a bigger feminist art show on a recent Saturday afternoon: “Bald Girls: A Door.” Sexual violence was a key theme of the four performances, as this week’s Female Factor Letter explores. Another artist, Li Xinmo, put a razor blade in her mouth as she painfully told the story of a father raping his daughter in the shower. Blood seeped from her mouth.

Recent news reports about the sexual abuse or rape of school students by teachers has drawn attention to a normally hidden issue here.

For feminists, a law in force since 1997 is particularly galling: A person who has sex with a minor â€" the age of consent here is 14 â€" may not be automatically charged with rape if he can prove the sex was consensual and commercial. Known, literally, as “spending the night in a brothel with a girl child” â€" “piaosu younü” â€" article 360 of the Criminal Law is a target of children’s rights activists and feminists, who say men use it as a loophole to have sex with minors.

Feminists say the law damages children’s rights by voiding the notion of statutory rape. Rape of minors still exists as a crime, but men are using this legal loophole to get off lightly, they say, paying off or intimidating a victim’s parents to agree the sex was consensual or commercial. The crime carries a minimum of 5 years jail time, according to multiple Chinese media reports, but in practice, men have gotten off with fines and a couple weeks’ detention, according to legal experts. Rape carries the maximum penalty of death though it can also entail as little as three years jail, the Southern Weekly newspaper reported.

The law’s very name “disgusts” people, Southern Weekly wrote last year. “On Children’s Day in 2012, the author Han Han, raised the question: a girl child is girl child, rape is rape. What is ‘spending the night in a brothel with a girl child’? He said, this evil law must be repealed.”

Southern Weekly cited Zhou Guangquan, a member of the National People’s Congress legal committee, as saying that a reason for creating the separate crime was related to the desire to lessen the use of the death penalty in China, bowing to “international pressure.” Its defenders pointed out that with a minimum of 5 years in jail, it was not a lightly punished crime, the newspaper wrote.

Yet Southern Weekly painted an arbitrary picture of how the law was created in the first place.

Revisions to the criminal law published by the Congress on March 1, 1997, held that commercial sex with minors “was still rape,” the newspaper cited Lin Wei, an expert on youth law, as saying.

“Twelve days later it had changed. On March 13, 1997, the meeting passed the draft law and it was a separate crime,” the newspaper wrote. The very next day it became law. How it all happened is “very hard to tell from publicly available information,” the newspaper wrote.

In China, a Controversial Law Is Seen to Excuse Sex With Minors

BEIJING â€" When Yan Yinhong, having removed a pair of pants from under her long dress, did a handstand and exposed her leotard-covered crotch onto which she had painted the face of a Chinese policeman, she intended to shock.

Ms. Yan’s act was part of a bigger feminist art show on a recent Saturday afternoon: “Bald Girls: A Door.” Sexual violence was a key theme of the four performances, as this week’s Female Factor Letter explores. Another artist, Li Xinmo, put a razor blade in her mouth as she painfully told the story of a father raping his daughter in the shower. Blood seeped from her mouth.

Recent news reports about the sexual abuse or rape of school students by teachers has drawn attention to a normally hidden issue here.

For feminists, a law in force since 1997 is particularly galling: A person who has sex with a minor â€" the age of consent here is 14 â€" may not be automatically charged with rape if he can prove the sex was consensual and commercial. Known, literally, as “spending the night in a brothel with a girl child” â€" “piaosu younü” â€" article 360 of the Criminal Law is a target of children’s rights activists and feminists, who say men use it as a loophole to have sex with minors.

Feminists say the law damages children’s rights by voiding the notion of statutory rape. Rape of minors still exists as a crime, but men are using this legal loophole to get off lightly, they say, paying off or intimidating a victim’s parents to agree the sex was consensual or commercial. The crime carries a minimum of 5 years jail time, according to multiple Chinese media reports, but in practice, men have gotten off with fines and a couple weeks’ detention, according to legal experts. Rape carries the maximum penalty of death though it can also entail as little as three years jail, the Southern Weekly newspaper reported.

The law’s very name “disgusts” people, Southern Weekly wrote last year. “On Children’s Day in 2012, the author Han Han, raised the question: a girl child is girl child, rape is rape. What is ‘spending the night in a brothel with a girl child’? He said, this evil law must be repealed.”

Southern Weekly cited Zhou Guangquan, a member of the National People’s Congress legal committee, as saying that a reason for creating the separate crime was related to the desire to lessen the use of the death penalty in China, bowing to “international pressure.” Its defenders pointed out that with a minimum of 5 years in jail, it was not a lightly punished crime, the newspaper wrote.

Yet Southern Weekly painted an arbitrary picture of how the law was created in the first place.

Revisions to the criminal law published by the Congress on March 1, 1997, held that commercial sex with minors “was still rape,” the newspaper cited Lin Wei, an expert on youth law, as saying.

“Twelve days later it had changed. On March 13, 1997, the meeting passed the draft law and it was a separate crime,” the newspaper wrote. The very next day it became law. How it all happened is “very hard to tell from publicly available information,” the newspaper wrote.

From Nepal, a Push to End Human Trafficking

BEIJING â€" Human trafficking is one of the world’s fastest-growing crimes, the United Nations says, with nearly 21 million people falling victim each year. More than half of the victims of forced labor are from the Asia-Pacific region, the International Labor Organization estimates. It’s a major policy challenge and in Asia, Nepal is leading the way in terms of legislation, according to the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation.

Yet passing laws and implementing them are two different things, lawyers and activists say. In its 2012 report, the U.S. State Department warned that anti-trafficking laws were “not well implemented” in Nepal.

Six years after the country passed landmark legislation to fight trafficking, the challenge is how to enforce it, said Sapana Pradhan Malla, one of the prime architects behind Nepal’s Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act.

We caught up with Ms. Pradhan Malla, a lawyer and advocate at Nepal’s Supreme Court, this month after she received a Lotus Leadership Award from the Asia Foundation in New York for her work against human trafficking.

Here is an edited version of the telephone interview:

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

A: Back in 2000, we found 118 legal provisions in Nepalese law that were discriminatory against women. While we’ve made significant progress, we are still working to tackle the two discriminatory laws left in Nepal: polygamy and citizenship. Compared to other Asian countries, Nepal has strong laws against human trafficking. But now the challenge is how to implement the human trafficking law.

Q: What are key challenges?

A: There are some serious problems with policy in Nepal. For example, in order to protect women from being trafficked, the government has a restrictive policy for foreign employment. Because of this, women who want to seek foreign employment are forced to use fake passports to illegally move to another country.

Another issue is how to measure justice for survivors. I recently worked on one case involving the trafficking of six girls from Nepal. The trafficker was sentenced to 117 years’ imprisonment. When we asked the victims if they were satisfied with the length of the sentence, they said, “Yes, but what about us? The accused doesn’t have any property and the government doesn’t have any mechanism to compensate us.” Justice is collectively demanded and individually experienced. Even if we have laws, how do we ensure that survivors feel like justice is being achieved?

Most importantly, the root cause needs to be addressed â€" the poverty, illiteracy, corruption. In many human trafficking cases, people are lured by economic benefits.

Q: How many cases have been reported using Nepal’s human trafficking act?

A: I have represented hundreds of cases, but the number is still very low. An International Labor Organization study found 12,000 to 15,000 women are trafficked in Nepal every year but no more than 180 cases are reported each year.

Q: What are the reasons for the low levels of reporting?

A: Victims sometimes don’t want to go to court because they worry it will further stigmatize them.

Intimidation is another problem. We’ve had six or seven cases where, during their hearing of their case, the victim either changed their statement or didn’t appear as a witness. We’ve found that in the majority of cases victims are either threatened with their lives or lured by economic benefits.

We don’t have the resources to provide adequate security and protection for victims and witnesses.

Q: Are there men who use Nepal’s human trafficking act to press charges?

A: It used to be that sexual exploitation was the main form of trafficking in Nepal. But now there are lots of cases of trafficking for cheap labor, forced labor, trafficking for marriage, trafficking for organ transplants. The law is gender neutral, but the majority of cases still involve women and girls.

Q: What is the current situation of human trafficking from Nepal into China?

A: There are a lot of reported cases of Nepalese women being trafficked into Tibet. Sometimes they migrate for work, but other times they end up in the sex industry. A lot of Nepalese have been deported, but we haven’t been able to initiate any bilateral arrangement to deal with this.

Q: Do you have bilateral arrangements with other countries?

A: No, unfortunately. But at least with India, we have informal mechanisms between N.G.O.’s. There are also some mechanisms that exist for joint investigation and legal assistance. But those informal mechanisms don’t exist with other countries.

Q: Are you hoping for similar informal mechanisms with N.G.O.’s operating out of Tibet?

A: We don’t know if there are any N.G.O.’s working on this issue there. I think it has to be government to government. India and Nepal have a different type of problem because of the open-border policy.

Even though Nepal shares a long border with China, it isn’t very accessible, particularly compared to the Indian border. The Chinese government hasn’t paid any attention to the issue. We need to implement cross-border mechanisms to monitor and implement strict work permits. It’s the early stages and if we take it seriously, there is a possibility we can work with China to handle the situation.

Q: What is the most important thing Nepal can do to fight human trafficking?

A: Nepal is currently in a very politically fragile state. When a country is in transition, women will also be in transition, justice will also be in transition.

We need to create political stability in the country. It is most important to create opportunities inside the country, especially opportunities for economic empowerment.