December 26, 2022

The best thing about the subjunctive: It's usually optional

The subjunctive isn’t as scary as it sounds. Technically, it's optional.

Consider a sentence like “It’s crucial that he goes to college.”

One letter, the “s” at the end of “goes,” makes that sentence indicative as instead of subjunctive. Normally, starting off with something like “it’s crucial” sets up the subjunctive mood. And if we instead said, “It’s crucial that he go”  instead of “goes,” it would have been subjunctive. But because we used “goes,” it was not.

The subjunctive is a grammatical mood that occurs in statements contrary to fact: wishes, suppositions, demands, commands, and statements of necessity like “it’s crucial that.”

In those sentences, the subjunctive replaces the regular conjugated verb, like goes, with the base form of the verb, like “go.” Sometimes there’s no difference between the indicative and the subjunctive because the conjugated verb is identical to the base form of the verb. “I go to work” is indicative. “It’s crucial that I go to work” is subjunctive, but there’s no audible difference because both forms of “go” are the same.

In the past tense, the subjunctive applies only to the verb “be,” which becomes “were.” So in the past tense, “be” can become “was,” as in “I was going.” But if you put this as a statement contrary to fact, like a wish, you’d use the subjunctive “were”: I wish I were going.

One of the most interesting things about the subjunctive is that grammar guides don’t say you must or even should use it. So it’s not wrong, exactly, to say “It's crucial he goes” instead of the more proper subjunctive “It's crucial he go.”

It’s up to you.

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December 19, 2022

Em dashes, en dashes and hyphens

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen with just a space on either side connecting two parts of a sentence – like this. But it wasn’t until very recently someone asked me about the term “floating hyphen.” Is that a real thing?

Of course it is, I said. Then I googled it and learned that, apparently, I had made the term up. But my point remains true: A hyphen is not an em dash. Nor is it an en dash. Each of these three punctuation marks has its own special job.

Em dashes, often simply called dashes, are sentence punctuation — a way to connect ideas and phrases and clauses. If you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to. Commas, parentheses and colons can usually get your point across in any spot where you might use a dash.

But if your sentence already has enough commas or if you want to create visual emphasis — like this — you can use em dashes to signal a change in sentence structure or thought. Or you can use em dashes to set off parenthetical thoughts — and who doesn’t love those? — in a sentence. They can also set off lists of items — names, places, things — mid-sentence or at the end. You can even use em dashes for dialogue, datelines or taglines or to show that speech was cut off mid-sentence.

Personally, I consider it a mistake to use an em dash between complete clauses — this sentence is an example. A period or possibly a semicolon would be better. But not everyone agrees with me.

News publications usually put a space on either side of an em dash — making it sort of float. Book and magazine publishing usually omit the spaces—their dashes touch the word on either side. Both are correct. Here's more in my recent column.

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December 12, 2022

Happy holidays from the Miller's? How not to mess up holiday greetings

Sending out holiday greetings this year? Christmas cards, emails, posts on the family Facebook page and party invitations are all wonderful opportunities to embarrass yourself with punctuation and grammar mistakes. So here, continuing my annual tradition, is the 2022 edition of the most common holiday greeting grammar flubs and how to avoid them.

Wrong: Happy holidays from the Miller’s! Right: the Millers. If your last name ends with any letter other than S, Z, X, Ch or Sh, make it plural by just adding S. No apostrophe. Two people named Miller are the Millers. Three people named Smith are the Smiths.

Wrong: Happy holidays from the Ricci’s. Right: the Riccis. A name that ends in a vowel may look weird with an S at the end, but that’s no excuse to add an apostrophe. If your last name is D’Angelo, two of your family members are D’Angelos.

Wrong: Happy holidays from the Jones’, the Ramirez’s or the French’s. Right: Joneses, Ramirezes, Frenches. Seeing a theme here? No matter the name, you should never use an apostrophe to make it plural. These names work just like common nouns ending in S, Z, X, Ch and Sh, which add ES to form the plural — bosses, blintzes, axes, marches, marshes. So two Ramirezes, no apostrophe.

Wrong: We’re visiting the Miller’s house, the Ricci’s house, the Williams’ house, the Jones’s house, the Ramirez’s house or the French’s house. Right: The Millers’, Riccis’, Williamses’, Joneses’, Ramirezes’, Frenches’. Unlike plurals, possessives actually do take apostrophes. But when you’re talking about something that’s owned by more than one person, like a house, first make it plural — one Williams, two Williamses — then add the possessive apostrophe at the end: the Williamses’ house.

Here's more in my recent column.

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December 5, 2022

'Alright' isn't quite 'all right'

Style guides, notably the Associated Press Stylebook, have long considered “alright” an error: the correct spelling should be “all right,” they say.

But if you're not following a style guide, "alright" isn't so bad. Merriam-Webster is okay with it. Webster's New World College Dictionary calls it a "disputed spelling" of "all right." American Heritage dictionary calls it nonstandard.

So if you want a safe choice, go with "all right." Otherwise, "alright" is alright.

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November 28, 2022

Is 'cringe' an adjective?

“I hated that movie. The love scene was so cringe.”

Suddenly, this use of “cringe” seems to be everywhere. And some quasi-scientific evidence shows it’s on the rise.

According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which lets you search for words and terms in a database of published sources then charts the words’ use over time, “cringe” appeared in about 0.000013% of published works in the mid-1970s. By 2017, “cringe” was showing up in about 0.0001% of published writing in the database — a nearly eightfold increase.

These numbers tell us only that “cringe” is being used more often, not how it’s being used. So from these numbers alone, we can’t tell whether this uptick comes from people using “cringe” in the traditional way, as a verb, for example describing characters in horror novels who “cringe” in fear. But if we tweak our search term we can learn more.

In the phrase “so cringe,” it’s likely that “cringe” is being used not as a verb but as an adjective. We know this because “so” is an intensifier of adjectives: so nice, so true, so small, so bright.

I searched Ngram Viewer for “so cringe.” No surprise: The phrase is extremely rare in published writing, appearing in just 0.00000007% of published works in the database in 2017. But compared to 50 years ago, that’s a landslide. In the mid-1970s, “so cringe” showed up in 0% of the publications in the database. It didn’t exist.

That’s Exhibit A that the verb “cringe” is being adopted as an adjective.

Exhibit B: the emergence of the term “cringe comedy” to describe shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that make viewers laugh by making them squirm. Wikipedia even has an entry for “cringe comedy.” I don’t recall people using that language to describe the awkward hilarity in “The Bob Newhart Show” or “All in the Family.”

Exhibit C (and this is the real hallmark of a language shift): the backlash. Whenever a new English usage gains popularity, people push back, as evidenced by this February 2022 post on Reddit.

“Cringe is a VERB,” an anonymous user insisted. “It’s something you DO: ‘I cringe at the thought’; ‘I am cringing just thinking about it’; ‘he cringed so much he imploded.’… Cringe is NOT an adjective, so saying ‘that is so cringe’ or ‘that’s the most cringe thing ever’ is objectively incorrect. … It’s like pointing at something funny and saying, ‘That is so laugh!’ What people mean when they use ‘cringe’ as an adjective is ‘cringe-worthy’ or ‘cringe-inducing.’”

Was anonymous right? Yes and no. "Cringe" is gaining acceptance as an adjective, so you can use it if you don't mind making others cringe. Here, in my recent column, I explain why.

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November 21, 2022

Got language questions? Your dictionary probably has the answers

In the late 1990s, a friend told me she had used the word “exponentially” in a debate with her brother-in-law.

“That’s not a word!” her brother-in-law insisted.

“Of course it is,” my friend replied.

“No, it’s not! And I’ll prove it!”

The brother-in-law then stormed out of the house and into the frontyard of the next-door neighbor, who was working on his lawn, and demanded, “Is ‘exponentially’ a word?”

This would have been perfectly reasonable if it happened in the early 1800s and the neighbor’s mailbox said “N. Webster.” But near the turn of the millennium, when nearly every house in the country contained a dictionary, this ask-a-random-person fact-check strategy was telling. And the unfortunate reality it revealed is still true in the age of Google: Most people don’t know the value of a dictionary.

Dictionaries have a lot more to offer than just word definitions. They also show you different forms of a word, like the adverb form in this entry from Webster’s New World College Dictionary: “exponential … 2. of or increasing by extraordinary proportions — exponentially, adv.”

Dictionaries also tell you how to form tricky plurals, pronounce a word, use an idiom correctly and whether a noun can be used as a verb. Here, in my recent column, are just a few examples of the great stuff you can find in a dictionary.

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November 14, 2022

When comma rules collide

Which of the following sentences is punctuated correctly?

Look for fresh basil at your local grocery store, and, if it isn’t available, tell the staff to stock up.
Look for fresh basil at your local grocery store and, if it isn’t available, tell the staff to stock up.
Look for fresh basil at your local grocery store and if it isn’t available, tell the staff to stock up.

The answer is more complicated than meets the eye because it involves two different punctuation rules.
The first rule at play is summed up well in the Associated Press Stylebook: “When a conjunction such as ‘and,’ ‘but’ or ‘for’ links two clauses that could stand alone as separate sentences, use a comma before the conjunction in most cases.”

Our sentence has two clauses that could stand alone as separate sentences: “Look for fresh basil at your local grocery store” and “if it isn’t available, tell the staff to stock up.” The clauses are connected with “and,” so according to this AP style rule, we should have a comma after “grocery store.”

The second rule at play says that introductory phrases and clauses should be set off with commas. The second part of our example sentence, “if it isn’t available,” qualifies as an introductory clause because it sets up another clause to come. So according to this rule, we should have a comma after “and,” which marks the beginning of the introductory part, and another after “available,” which is the last word in the introductory phrase.

So if you take a strict interpretation of both these rules, you’d choose our first option because it has a comma before “and,” another comma after “and” and a third after “available.”
So option 1 is correct, but it’s also ugly. The three commas are just too much in my view. Luckily, comma rules leave room for personal taste.

Here’s the full story in my recent column.

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November 7, 2022

Lineup, line up, line-up

Here’s a word that separates the careful writers from everyone else: lineup. You know you’re reading something that’s not edited by a pro when you see: “On Saturday night, the club will have a great line-up.”

Just as telling: “On Saturday night, the club will have a great line up.”

And this mistake you don’ see as often, luckily: “The patrons had to lineup in front of the building to get in.”

That last one is a particular danger to anyone who doesn’t know to be skeptical of spell check. Most spell-check programs don’t question the one-word lineup because it is, in fact, a legit word. Yet it’s still wrong in that sentence. Here’s why.

The one-word lineup is a noun: We have a great lineup of performers today. The coach something-something’d the starting lineup. (I don’t speak sports. But you get the idea.)

The verb form is two words: Line up the planters against the wall. The children should line up outside the building at 8 a.m.

There’s no need to ever hyphenate it. Though, technically, according to the rules of punctuation, you could turn the two-word form into an adjective by writing "The line-up procedure is as follows." But that’s rare, and most people would probably just use the noun attributively (as an adjective) there anyway: The lineup procedure is as follows.

To write like a pro, use the one word lineup when you need a noun, use the two word line up when it's a verb, and never hyphenate it.

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November 1, 2022

'Here's' or 'here are'?

Like “there’s,” the contraction “here’s” gets used a lot in front of plurals, especially when some modifier like “a few other” or “some” comes before the noun.

Here’s some things you should know.

Here’s all the ways you can look at this problem.

I don’t remember who taught me so or when, but somewhere I picked up the clear message that, when the stuff that follows is plural, you should use “here are” instead of “here is” or its contracted form “here’s.” As in:

Here are some things you should know.

Here are all the ways you can look at this problem.

These structures put the subject after the verb. “Here are my cousins” is an inverted way of saying “My cousins are here.” But either way, the true subject of the verb is “cousins.” And because “cousins” is plural, logic dictates that it should take a plural verb like “are” instead of a singular verb like “is.”

Actually, there’s no prohibition against using “here’s” before a plural. As with “there’s,” you could make the case that putting “here’s” before a plural is standard in common speech —idiomatic. So I’m not critical of people who make that choice unless they happen to be members of the media writing for publication. News organizations strive to avoid sloppy, informal, ungrammatical forms. So if you want to do the same, avoid “here’s” before a plural.

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October 24, 2022

Yes, 'headquarter' is a verb

When I was a young editor, I was taught that “headquarter” isn’t a verb — that the word exists only in the plural and only as a noun. So a company can have its headquarters in New York, but it can’t be headquartered in New York.

I didn’t bother to look it up. Why would I? Right or wrong, my boss had the authority to tell me how to do my job, so I just changed every instance of “headquartered in” to “with headquarters in” without question.

If I had looked it up, I would have probably gone straight to the Associated Press Stylebook, the manual for my editing job at the time, and I would have seen my boss’s instructions affirmed. “Do not use ‘headquarter’ as a verb,” AP instructed at the time.

But if I would have checked a dictionary, I would have discovered a disconnect between AP and the real world. Reference guides at the time, for example Webster’s New World College Dictionary, had long recognized “headquarter” as a verb.

Style guides and dictionaries have different jobs. Unlike dictionaries that simply report how people are using the language, style guides tell editors what to do, helping ensure consistency and readability. When readers think a word is wrong or just poor usage, it can get in the way of the message. So style guides sometimes prohibit controversial language. And the use of “headquarter” as a verb was indeed controversial.

Unlike the noun “headquarters,” which dates back to the mid-1600s in the meaning of the residence, or quarters, of a military commander, the verb “headquarter” didn’t show up in print till 1903. It took another 50 or so years to become common and another 15 or 20 years to capture the attention of the panel of experts at the American Heritage Dictionary. They didn’t like it, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. The American Heritage panel voted in 1969 to reject the verb in formal English. They continued to reaffirm their distaste for the verb into the 1980s.

By 1985, the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, as cited in Merriam’s, warned that the verb “can still cause careful users of the language to shudder.”

“While we do not doubt the truth of that observation,” Merriam’s editors write, “we suspect that there are also many careful users of the language who wonder, as we do, what the shuddering is about.” Here's more on "headquartered" in my recent column.

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