'For Joe and I' and other reader peeves

 Reader Louise wrote: “My big pet peeve is those who say, ‘It was a great trip for Joe and I.’ … I want to scream, ‘You wouldn't say it was a great trip for I.' It's ‘me’!"

There are several standards of correctness in English. Grammar is one. Idiom, or common usage, is another. A subject pronoun like “I” in an object position is ungrammatical, but you can’t say it’s 100% wrong because it’s idiomatic. Still, to anyone who cares about grammar, it’s bad form. Plus, it’s a minor tragedy because people who say “for Joe and I” usually choose “I” because they’re trying to be grammatically correct — and failing. To get these right, follow Louise’s model: Try the sentence without the other person: “A great trip for I” is clearly wrong, so that’s how you know the most grammatical choice is “It was a great trip for Joe and me.”

Reader Mike is peeved by the phrasing “where is it at?” “It grates like fingernails on a chalkboard,” he writes. Over the years, a lot of people have told me they feel the same way. As an editor whose job is to delete needless words, I understand their reaction. The “at” at the end of “where is it” is unnecessary. But unnecessary isn’t quite the same as being wrong, exactly. Consider “where is it at” to be a casualism that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Meanwhile, Reader Sherry wrote to ask about people who use “so fun” instead of “so much fun.” Reader Katie doesn’t like when people who’ve been asked “How are you?” respond with “I am well.”  And Reader Dick thought he spotted an error in my column. Read how I answered them all in my recent column.

'Chaise lounge' isn't just a corrupted version of 'chaise longue'

One of my favorite summer activities is relaxing on a chaise longue under an umbrella with a good book. It’s a nice escape from the grueling work of changing “chaise lounge” to “chaise longue” in article after article this time of year — and wondering why I bother.

A “chaise longue” is, of course, one of those long lounge chairs you see situated around swimming pools, as well as indoor furniture in a similar shape. The term comes from the French “chaise,” meaning “chair,” and “longue,” which is the French feminine form of “long.” But because these chairs are for lounging and because Americans are less familiar with the French spelling, we English speakers often use “chaise lounge.”

This process of transforming foreign or less familiar words into something familiar is called “folk etymology” — like “duck tape” formed from “duct tape,” both of which are correct today.

But it would be a mistake to assume that “chaise lounge” came from “chaise longue” through this exact process. In fact, “chaise lounge” is almost as well established in English as “chaise longue.” The English spelling started showing up in dictionaries in the 1920s, just a decade or two after dictionaries started including the French term, which we used to hyphenate: chaise-longue.

But even before that, English speakers were using “lounge” to mean a type of chair, for example in this passage from the 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: “He stretched himself at full length on a lounge opposite Marie.”

So we didn’t get this sense of “lounge” simply by rearranging the letters in “longue.”

Even more interesting: “chaise longue” and “chaise lounge” have sort of carved out their own roles over the years.

“The American ‘chaise lounge’ began to appear in print in the 1920s; undoubtedly it had been used in speech for some time earlier,” writes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. “As a printed term, it seems to have become established first in the trade; many of our early citations are from manufacturers’ catalogs and newspaper advertisements. When the spelling began to appear in both the Montgomery Ward and the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, it could no longer be ignored.”

As “chaise lounge” was staking out its place in the business world, “chaise longue” became dominant in literature. Surprisingly, it still is. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, “chaise longue” is about 50% more common in published works than “chaise lounge.” Editors like me could be the reason. I discuss why in my recent column.

Avoid semicolons

Semicolons have two functions. They connect independent clauses, and they work like commas in situations where a comma isn’t strong enough, for example in a list of items that already contain their own commas.

An independent clause is a unit that can stand alone as a sentence because it contains both a subject and a verb: Steve quit. So if independent clauses can stand alone as sentences, why bother connecting them with semicolons? Why not just punctuate them as individual sentences instead? Good question.

Sometimes writers want to show that two independent clauses are closely related; they go together. That’s what semicolons do; they tell you that two units that could stand alone as sentences are so important to each other that they should be in the same sentence. But is that really a good reason to force two short, tidy sentences into one long, unwieldy unit?

In my opinion, no. Longer sentences put greater demands on your reader — the mental equivalent of holding your breath till you get to the end. Shorter sentences are more easily digestible. A writer’s job is to deliver information or ideas to readers in the manner most useful to them. So when you start showing off your comma prowess at the reader’s expense, you’ve lost sight of the writer’s purpose.

The worst abuse of semicolons occurs when writers use them to create single-sentence paragraphs. Think about it: If you have a paragraph with just two sentences, it’s obvious those sentences are closely related. So there’s no reason to connect them with a semicolon, creating a single-sentence paragraph.

The other job of semicolons — stringing together items that commas can’t handle — is more practical, sometimes. For example, imagine you’re listing cities where you’ve lived: Burbank, California; Shreveport, Louisiana; Venice, Florida; and Albany, New York. Each of these places contains its own comma. So without semicolons, these four places would be punctuated in a way that suggests they’re actually eight places.
But writers abuse semicolons in this function, too. I explain how in my recent column.

What to capitalize in a headline

Copy editors notice a lot of little stuff that other people might not. The online news sites that continue to nudge out traditional news outlets often contain tiny hints that they’re being produced by people who aren’t as well versed in language and style as older forms of media.

One of the most common examples has to do with headline capitalization. A lot of online writing uses title case for headlines, with the first letter of most words capitalized.

Fed Chair Will Keep Interest Rates Low

Often, it works out just fine, as in the headline above. But some situations seem to stump less experienced editors and designers

Fed Chair To Keep Interest Rates Low

See that “to”? Well, traditional news style calls for that to be lowercase: Fed Chair to Keep Interest Rates Low

A lot of inexperienced editors don’t realize that, so they just “initial cap” every word. But more of them, it seems, know that some words in headlines are supposed to be lowercase. And they know those tend to be short words. So many guess correctly that the T in “to” is lowercase, yet they still make other mistakes.

How to Know When it is Time to Make a Will

The capitalization in that last headline doesn’t conform with editing style.

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out to

Neither does that one.

These two examples illustrate why it’s often a good idea to know and follow capitalization style for headlines. It just looks more professional, even to readers who aren’t consciously focusing on capitalization.

So here’s a simple system offered by AP that you should consider for any headlines you write:

Capitalize the first word of every letter except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer. There’s one exception: Any word that is the first word in the headline or the last word should be capitalized, regardless of its part of speech. So that last headline, in AP style, would leave the first “to” lowercase and capitalize the last one:

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out To

The biggest problem writers have with this simple system is remember that "is" and "it," unlike "in," are not prepositions. Is is a verb and it is a pronoun. So they’re always uppercased in AP style headlines.

Candidate Asks What It Is

By the way, the Chicago manual uses a similar system, except it doesn’t contain the same three-letter stipulation for prepositions, etc. So though in AP you’d write Many Shoppers Wait Until Last Minute, in Chicago style that could be Many Shoppers Wait until Last Minute.