Adjectives as noise

Adjectives are controversial. Rightly so. About four times out of five, you can improve a sentence by cutting one out:

Joe is dating a beautiful supermodel.

Joe is dating a supermodel.

Clearly, the noun “supermodel” does not need to be propped up by an adjective. It’s powerful enough on its own.

Adjectives exist for a reason. You can’t just take the adjective out of the sentence: “She is beautiful," without its adjective, loses its meaning. But before a noun, an adjective can come off like a weak attempt to convince your reader of something he should be able to see for himself.

So adjectives have enough problems of their own. Yet marketers, it seems, are determined to bludgeon them into complete meaninglessness. They do this by using adjectives as mere noise. In marketers’ hands, adjectives are born to be ignored.

Take, for example, this Kashi brand cereal flavor: Island Vanilla.

Really, Kashi? Is that supposed to mean anything other than “vanilla plus some extra syllables to make it sound like something more than plain-old vanilla”?

Here’s another Kashi flavor I like: Harvest Wheat. Again, what does that adjective tell me about what I can expect when I open the box? Nothing. “Harvest wheat” is just wheat.

Kashi isn’t alone in this practice, not by a long shot.

Ragu has a flavor called Garden Vegetable, as opposed to what? Factory Vegetable?

Luden’s makes Wild Cherry cough drops, which we can only presume are superior to those awful farmed cherries.

And Kettle Chips come in this flavor: Backyard Barbeque. (You can almost taste the chain-link fence and kiddie pool.)

And what might a blind taste test tell us about the difference between chocolate and Dutch chocolate, between vanilla and French vanilla? About ranch and cool ranch?

Examples of this kind of hot-air blowing are too numerous to count. And while it’s standard marketing procedure, I think we should all be wee bit insulted by it. When marketers slap meaningless words onto product names in this fashion, it’s worse than telling people “Don’t think.” It’s telling people: “We know you don’t think and we’re so confident about it that we’re going to rub your noses in it.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little hypersensitive. But it’s still an insult to consumers and an act of violence against simple, clear nouns.

'Wrack' and 'rack'

Do you wrack your brain or rack it?

Are you racked with guilt or wracked?

Are these questions nerve-wracking or nerve-racking?

Faced with these questions, I forget what I once learned. Rather than get it wrong or (heaven forbid) take the time to look it up, I just avoid these phrases altogether.

Turns out, that’s not a bad strategy. Though their origins point to different meanings, “wrack” and “rack” are often interchangeable today. But folks who choose their words carefully might want to keep the original meanings in mind.

“Rack” originates from a noun referring to a Medieval torture device, with the verb evolving to mean torture, strain or wreck. “Wrack” was born as a nautical term meaning, essentially, “wreck.”

“This etymology explains why the word is ‘nerve-racking’ rather than ‘nerve-wracking,’” insists Theodore Bernstein’s 1965 guide “The Careful Writer.” “Something that is nerve-racking does not wreck the nerves, it merely strains or tortures them.”

“Wrack,” by this reasoning, isn’t very useful — limited mainly to talk of ships and things that can be similarly wrecked: like a “storm-wracked vessel” or, from that, “wrack and ruin.”

Beware any usage guide that, like Bernstein, speaks in absolutes. Sometimes, their prohibitions are correct. But more often, the writer is a little drunk with power, demanding that good advice be treated as a hard rule.

In the real world, “rack” and “wrack” aren’t so simple. For more than a century, leading language experts have been doling out contradictory advice. Some, like Bernstein, say to keep these words separate and true to their origins.

Others say “wrack” is dead and to just use “rack” no matter your meaning. Though “wrack” is most certainly not dead (in fact, it has gotten a little more popular in the last 30 to 40 years), it wouldn’t be so bad to follow this advice. After all, how often do you talk about ships destroyed by storms?

Still other authorities, notably the official style guide of the New York Times, say to avoid both words and instead just find a more modern synonym. So what'a a conscientious writer to do? Some thoughts in my recent column.

The 'idiot's apostrophe' makes headlines in Germany

In French, to show that someone possesses something, you use their word for “of,” which is “de”: La plume de ma tante. Spanish works the same way: La venganza de Moctezuma. Italian, too: Buca di Beppo. I don’t know as much about German, but the internet tells me that in many cases you form the possessive by just adding an S at the end of the noun: Angelas Mercedes.

And then there’s English.

A simple “of”? Sure, we can use it in rare constructions: A friend of Bill. But usually we don’t.

A simple S? No can do. That’s our system for forming plurals. Marias means more than one Maria. Not that Maria owns something.

An apostrophe plus S? Sure, sometimes, but only when you’re talking about a singular: the cat’s tail. When your noun is plural, you usually add an apostrophe with no S: the cats’ tails. But that’s only when the plural is made plural with an S. When it’s plural and doesn’t end with S, you add S plus an apostrophe just as you would for a singular: children’s books.

From the outside looking in, this can seem like an odd system. Illogical. Some might even say idiotic.

That’s exactly what they’re saying in Germany, where the “idiot’s apostrophe,” as some call it, just got official approval.

Amid a long-term trend of businesses using these English possessive apostrophes on signs — like Rosi’s Bar instead of the correct Rosis Bar — the Council for German Orthography, which regulates how the German language is taught in schools and used in government, gave its blessing to the Deppenapostroph, or “idiot’s apostrophe.” It’s now in the council’s official style guide, meaning it’s no longer wrong in German.

Some German speakers are pretty unhappy about it, saying that their language is caving in to the influence of English. One German who was quoted in the media said this apostrophe “made his hair stand on end.” But some German language experts are more forgiving, pointing out that German already allowed these apostrophes to prevent confusion, for example to keep straight possessive “Andrea’s” and the common men’s name “Andreas.”

I, too, have some thoughts. You can read about them here in my recent column.

There are no stupid grammar questions

People with grammar questions often feel stupid for not already knowing the answer, but the people who answer them are often the ones who should have stayed mum.

Google searches for “dumb grammar question” and “stupid grammar question” prove the point. Here’s one of the first hits, a 2017 post in a writers’ community message board. “DUMB grammar question!” someone named Sherry began. “After being a writer for almost 40 years, I am aware this is a really silly question. I should know better. BUT … which is correct? ‘My family HAS seen me through’ … or ‘My family HAVE seen me through.’”

Raise your hand if you were taught in school that certain collective nouns can take either a singular or plural verb, depending on your meaning. Yeah, me neither. But that’s the case here. “Family” is usually singular, taking a singular verb like “has.” But sometimes it’s meant as a collective of individuals acting independently of each other: “Half my family are voting for candidate 1 and the other half are voting for candidate 2.” Another example: My family comes to the reunion every year, but my family come from all over the U.S.

In Sherry’s question, though, the singular interpretation, while not mandatory, is better: My family has seen me through. But that’s not the answer she got.

One person said Sherry’s real problem was passive voice and that she should make it active voice by changing “My family has seen me through” to “My family saw me through.”

Um, no. Both those sentences are in active voice. They’re just different verb tenses. “Has seen” is called the present perfect tense. “Saw” is the simple past tense.

Passive would be “I have been seen through by my family,” with the object of the action made into the subject of the sentence. But in both “My family saw” and “My family has seen,” the doer of the action, the family, is the subject.

Other posters who tried to answer Sherry’s question didn’t do much better. Read about their misguided guidance in my recent column.