A House is a House is a House

As I write this, I’m sitting in my house clacking away on the keyboard.

Hmm. House. I’m thinking of various houses.

There’s “House, M.D.,” the TV show starring Hugh Laurie. It ran from 2004-12 on Fox.

There’s “House of Cards,” a 1989 book by Michael Dobbs that spawned a BBC TV show and a Netflix show. That’s also the same name of four movies, 15 songs, three TV episodes and a painting.

There’s the House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress. The presiding officer is the Speaker of the House. It’s capitalized when referring to the governmental body.

There’s the two houses of the British Parliament: the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The Commons — which is the common way to refer to it on second and subsequent references — is the lower house, an elected body of 650 members of Parliament. It, too, has a Speaker, but Sir Lindsay Hoyle does not wield the same power as Nancy Pelosi because he is required to remain non-partisan.

The House of Lords is the upper house. It currently has 794 members, but the amount is not fixed by law. Its members are comprised of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal. The Lords Spiritual are 26 Church of England bishops and archbishops. The Lords Temporal are laypeople, but all hold at least the title of baron.

Finally, we come to the houses the Census Bureau considers. When it counted people last year, it used the terms household and housing unit.

A household is made up of all occupants of a housing unit. A household may contain more than one family or just one person. The Bureau defines a housing unit as room or group or rooms people occupy, but they don’t live or eat with any other person in that structure. It must have either direct access to the outside or through a common hall, or it must have a kitchen or cooking equipment that only the occupants can use.

And I think after all that, I’m going home.

Until next time! Use the right words!

leebarnathan.com 

Even Netflix Isn’t Immune to Caption Confusion

Despite the high price, I pay for Netflix’s streaming and DVD services. I recently finished watching “House of Cards,” and while Kevin Spacey always gives a good performance (he deserved his Emmy nomination), the caption writer(s) did not.

In the fifth episode, a character says that something “peaks my interest.” I naturally thought that was wrong, that what the caption should have read was “piques my interest.”

So I looked up the words.

My dictionary’s definition of the verb peak read in part, “to reach a maximum (as of capacity, value or activity).” This makes it sound like the caption writer(s) got it right.

But the definition continued: “often used with out.”

Peak out? I’ve never heard the word used that way.

Pique, meanwhile, means “to excite or arouse by a provocation, challenge or rebuff.” That sounded right to me, so I was ready to conclude Netflix got it wrong.

But that was the secondary definition. The primary one read: “to arouse anger or resentment; irritate.” That certainly did not fit in with the scene’s mood.

What I learned here was the usage’s context determines what word would be correct. I still think Netflix got it wrong, but I’m not definitive anymore.

Until next time! Use the right words!

leebarnathan.com