Sentence-ending prepositions create an Insta uproar

Can you end a sentence with a preposition? Yes. Can you say so online and not send angry social media users into attack mode? Apparently not.

That’s the lesson of a recent Instagram post by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary that stated plainly and accurately: “It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with. The idea that it should be avoided came from writers who were trying to align the language with Latin, but there’s no reason to suggest ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong.”

The denizens of Instagram weren’t having it.

“This represents something ugly,” one replied.

“I don’t like it,” said another.

The outcries came in spite of Merriam’s perfectly illustrating their point: “This is what we’re talking about.”

Not familiar with the issue? That’s OK. It gets less relevant with each passing year. Telling students not to end sentences with prepositions was a fad among teachers in decades past, especially in the 1950s and ’60s. The echoes of those lessons grow fainter every year. And because they were never based in fact anyway, you don’t need to worry where you’re putting your prepositions. But if you’re interested, here’s the lowdown in my recent column.

How to write rock 'n' roll

Rock & Roll

rock-n-roll

rock’n roll

rock n’ roll

rock and roll

I've seen all these forms and more in my editing work, and it's my job to figure out which one to keep. Yes, they’re all perfectly clear and understandable. But that’s not enough for editors. We have to worry about the whole consistency issue, too. So I always change them to rock ’n’ roll.

I never bother to look it up. I know it’s rock ’n’ roll. I’ve been doing this a long time. But when I’m passing along what I know to other people — mainly, here — I always double-check my facts.

So when the issue came up again recently, I turned to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is the final word on these matters at the publication I edit. Here’s what I learned: The entry for  rock ’n’ roll gave this for a definition: rock-and-roll.

Whenever a dictionary entry for one word refers you to the entry for another, that’s the dictionary’s way of saying that the other is the main entry — in this case, that rock ’n’ roll is merely a variant of the preferred rock-and-roll.

That surprised me: Where did I get the idea it was rock ’n’ roll? I checked the house style guide for the publication and that’s where I found it: Our house style is rock ’n’ roll, which trumps even our house dictionary, which, though it allows rock ’n’ roll, clearly prefers rock-and-roll. That was a relief. It meant 1. that I haven’t been doing it wrong all these years, and 2. that I don’t have to switch to the weird-looking rock-and-roll.

But that's just for news editing style. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which most book publishers follow, doesn’t like rock  ’n’ roll as a first choice, either. According to that dictionary, rock ’n’ roll is acceptable, but the preferred form is rock and roll.

If you're using a version with apostrophes, make sure your word processing program doesn't turn your first apostrophe into an open single quotation mark, which curves in the opposite direction. If it does, just type a second apostrophe after the first one then delete the first one.

Advanced hyphenation

“Are the hyphens in this sentence correct?” a colleague asked me recently: “The couple moved in to the beautiful 175-luxury apartment-home community just two weeks after it opened.”

Hyphens are often intuitive. People who’ve spent exactly zero minutes of their lives reading about hyphen rules tend to get right terms like “a good-looking car” or “a cloud-filled sky” without even thinking about them.

Other times, hyphens aren’t so clear. That’s especially true for compounds with more than two words, for example when you have “175” and “luxury” and “apartment” and “home” all modifying a single noun: “community.”

Luckily, with some hyphenation basics under your belt, you can make good choices in every situation.

The basic principle: Hyphenate words that work together to modify another word that follows. That is, words that team up to form an adjective, describing a noun. Or words that work together to form an adverb, describing a verb or an adjective.

Compare: “I saw a dog eating lobster” and “I saw a dog-eating lobster.” In the first one, “dog” isn’t part of an adjective. It’s the object of the verb “saw,” working as a plain-old noun. What did you see? A dog, and it was eating lobster.

But in “I saw a dog-eating lobster,” you didn’t see a dog at all. You saw a crustacean. Its tendency to eat canines is merely descriptive.

This is what hyphens do: prevent confusion. They help make it clear which part of a word cluster is the object or subject by sort of sequestering all the other words that could be mistaken for the object or subject.

In the jargon, we say hyphens connect “compound modifiers.” Adjectives and adverbs modify other words, so they’re modifiers, and when you string words together with hyphens, the result is a compound.

Here's my recent column explaining why I used three hyphens to make "175-luxury-apartment-home" a single compound.

The enormous issue with 'enormity'

“While on the glacier, it was impossible not to feel humbled and awe-struck by its enormity.”

“I stood outside the arena amazed by its enormity.”

“When I look up at the night sky I am just overwhelmed by its enormity.”

If you were a student of William Strunk in the early 20th century carefully following the instructions laid out in his classroom guide “The Elements of Style,” you would have had no problem using the word “enormity” to refer to size — as the writers of the passages above did.

But if you read a copy of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” in the late-1950s or later, you would think that it’s a mistake to use “enormity” to mean bigness.

Yet if you open a dictionary today, you’ll see it’s not a mistake at all. What gives?

Well, like a lot of words, “enormity” has gone through significant changes over the years, some stickler-approved, some not.

Team Stickler is best represented by E.B. White, a onetime student of William J. Strunk, who in the late 1950s added about 50 pages to his former professor’s short classroom guide, transforming it into the bestseller that still rakes in the bucks today.

Among the many bits of information White inserted to make Strunk’s classroom instructions sound like universal rules for every English speaker was this: “Enormity. Use only in the sense of ‘monstrous wickedness.’ Misleading, if not wrong, when used to express bigness.”

If you’re looking for the safest, most buttoned-down way to use “enormity,” you can stop reading here. Just stick to the meaning about badness, not bigness, and no one can say you’re wrong. If you want a more thorough understanding of the issue, you can read about it in my recent column.