Towards, backwards, forwards? Why that s may not be a good idea

Posted by June on December 9, 2024
LABELS: BACKWARD VS. BACKWARDS, TOWARD VS. TOWARDS

Every time I see the preposition “towards” in an article I’m editing, I delete the s. I’ve been doing this as long as I can recall, decades, and it’s been going on so long I don’t even remember why. I just know that, for whatever reason, “towards” simply won’t do.

This habit stands out among my other brain-on-autopilot edits because I never recheck this one. I never do a quick search of my AP Stylebook or my dictionary. I just delete the s.

I think about it so little that, in the 20-odd years I’ve been writing about grammar, it’s never crossed my mind to make “toward” and its cousins including “backward,” “forward” and “afterward” subjects of a column.

It’s time. And I’m pleased to report that the Associated Press Stylebook — that is, the rulebook I follow for most of my editing work — backs me up. It says, quite simply, in its entry for “toward”: “Not towards.”

That’s the whole entry. Whew. My laziness hasn’t come back to haunt me the way it did when I kept spelling out “percent” years after AP style switched to using “%.”

Of course, that rule really only applies in edited text. So what about everyday writing? Is “towards” allowed there? In my reading of Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the answer is yes.

Merriam’s dictionary doesn’t have an entry for “towards,” but it lists it under its entry for “toward” as a “variant.” This tells us two things: 1. It’s OK to use “towards,” and 2. Merriam’s dictionary prefers “toward."

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which is a usage guide and not a dictionary, goes deeper: “Many commentators have observed that ‘toward’ is the more common choice in American English, while the preference in British English is ‘towards.’ Our evidence confirms that such is indeed the case. Both words are commonly used in the U.S., but ‘toward’ is undoubtedly prevalent.”

The word dates back in Old English to sometime before the year 899, when it was written “toweardes.” According to Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, “toweardes” came from combining “to” with “weard,” which was a noun meaning direction, plus “es,” which indicated possession. Sometime before the year 1300, Old English seemed to drop the s, using just “toweard.” And within a century or two, “toward” and “towards” had appeared.

Back in the 1800s, “towards” was dominant in all the printed sources reflected in Google’s Ngram Viewer, which includes lots of American publications. But shortly after the turn of the 20th century, “toward” overtook “towards,” and has dominated ever since, despite a slight reversal of that trend that started just about seven years ago. 

As American English speakers became less inclined to add the s, British speakers kept it. Today, both spellings are correct in the U.S., though “toward” is the best choice if you want to emulate professionally edited writing.

As for “afterward” and “afterwards,” it’s the same story: American publishing usually drops the s, while British sources may keep it, according to Merriam’s usage guide. Merriam’s dictionary, meanwhile, doesn’t have an entry for “afterwards” and instead reroutes those searches to its entry for “afterward,” where it says the s-spelling is a variant.

“Backward” seems least controversial. Merriam’s usage guide doesn’t consider the issue worth mentioning at all, while the dictionary lists the s-spelling only as a variant of the more standard “backward.”

Here’s where things get weird: “forwards,” which I don’t recall ever hearing outside the expression “backwards and forwards,” does have its own entry in Merriam’s dictionary, suggesting it has more legitimacy than all those other s-forms we talked about above. But because its definition refers readers to the entry for “forward,” without the s, it’s clear that, just like “toward,” “afterward” and “backward,” “forward” is more proper without the s.

How to avoid embarrassing errors on holiday greetings

Posted by June on December 2, 2024
LABELS: COMMON GRAMMAR MISTAKES, GRAMMAR, HOW TO WRITE PLURAL LAST NAMES, possessives, WHAT IS THE PLURAL OF JONES

It's holiday greeting card season. And you know what that means: Humiliating grammar and punctuation errors. So here's how to avoid common mistakes.

Happy holidays from the Smiths!

Merry Christmas from the Rossis!

Happy New Year from the Thibodeauxes!

Happy Hannukah from the Williamses!

Happy holidays from the Gomezes!

We’re looking forward to visiting the Nashes.

Notice how there's no apostrophe in any of those plurals? One Smith, two Smiths. It doesn't matter if the last name ends with S, Z, X, Ch or Sh. No apostrophe is used to form the plural of a name.

Only if you were showing possession would an apostrophe apply. We're going to the Smiths' house (plural possessive). We're going to Mr. Smith's house (singular possessive). We're going to the Gomezes' house (plural possessive). We're going to Mr. Gomez's house (singular possessive).

If the opening line of your card has both a name and a greeting, separate those elements with a comma and end the sentence with a period, exclamation point, or colon.

Hi, Joe. Happy holidays, Beth! Hey, Mom.

This is preferable to the more common

Hey Joe,

with comma at the end because it conforms with publishing style rules that say to set off a “direct address” like a name with a comma.

However, if you’re opening with just a name and some other word modifying it, like Dear Joe, My beloved Beth, or Dearest Mom, don’t put a comma in those. Also, a greeting like this you can end with a comma or a colon, but note that a period or exclamation point wouldn’t make as much sense because — unlike Hey, Joe —  Dear Joe is not a complete sentence.

Dear Joe,

Dear Joe:

Christmas and New Year’s are proper nouns and are thus both capitalized. Happy and merry are not (though of course you'd capitalize them at the beginning of a sentence). Nor is holiday. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are also proper names that should be capitalized. But dictionaries disagree on the singular new year. Webster’s New World College Dictionary lowercases new year. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says to capitalize New Year. Except in the most generic of contexts, I like the capitalized New Year better.

So you could write:

Wishing you and merry Christmas and a happy New Year! or … and a happy new year!

Both are fine.

The spelling of Hanukkah can be tricky because this word is transliterated from a different alphabet, and people can disagree on which English letter best represents any particular foreign sound. But Hanukkah is the preferred spelling of Webster’s New World and Merriam-Webster’s and, yes, it's capitalized.

Greeting cards have a way of inviting in some of the most incriminating spelling and grammar errors (maybe we’re so worried about coming up with something to say to Grandma that we forget to police ourselves), so watch out for these common typos.

Never use of in place of have or its abbreviated form 've in the terms could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, might've, or their spelled-out forms could have, would have, should have, and might have.

Remember the difference between let’s and lets: Let’s get together in the New Year means let us get together. Whereas the one without the apostrophe is the verb to let conjugated in the third-person singular: Uncle Lou really lets his hair down during the holidays.

Remember to watch their, they’re, and there, as well as who’s and whose.

Their shows possession – We will go to their house for Christmas dinner. They’re means they are. And there is a place.

Whose shows possession – Whose turn is it to cook? Who’s is always a contraction of who is or who has: Who’s going to cook this year?

When in doubt, find out. Ask a friend, check a dictionary, or run a quick Google search.

And happy holidays!

Adjectives as noise

Posted by June on November 25, 2024
LABELS: GRAMMAR, UNNECESSARY ADJECTIVES

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'

Posted by June on November 11, 2024
LABELS: GRAMMAR, WRACK VS 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.