May 9, 2022

Big words don't make readers think you're smart

TOPICS: BIG WORDS, GRAMMAR, JARGON, READER FRIENDLY LANGUAGE

It’s a question that has hounded us all: What are the consequences of erudite vernacular used irrespective of necessity?

OK, not really. That’s the ironic title of an academic paper published in 2005 by Carnegie Mellon psychologist David Oppenheimer that studied the effects of stuffy, reader-unfriendly language. The subtitle brought it back down to Earth: “The problems of using long words needlessly.”

Oppenheimer’s study turned up some interesting findings about academic writing that apply outside the academic world, offering lessons for business writers, essayists, bloggers, novelists and anyone who wants to write better.

The big takeaway: Highfalutin, fancy language doesn’t make readers think you’re smart. Quite the opposite.

For the study, the author manipulated the language in written works, leaving some pieces in simple terms and putting others in unnecessarily complex language. Then readers were asked how smart the writer seemed to them.

The results: “a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence.” In other words, the fancier the language, the dumber the writer was perceived to be. Read more about it here in my recent column.

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May 2, 2022

Italics or quotation marks for movie and book titles?

TOPICS: COPY EDITING, HOW TO WRITE BOOK TITLES, ITALICS VS. QUOTATION MARKS

When you’re writing titles of movies, books and other compositions, you usually have a choice between using italics and putting them in quotation marks.

Associated Press style says to put movie and book titles in quotation marks. “Star Wars.” “Slaughterhouse Five.” That makes sense when you consider that AP is a news writing style and early printing presses could not make italics.

The Chicago Manual of Style, which is followed by book and magazine publishers, says to use italics for book and movie titles. Star Wars. Slaughterhouse Five.

Neither style says to underline titles, which throws off a lot of writers who remember doing so in school. But that convention of some academic styles isn’t really followed in professional publishing.

As for those ALL-CAPITAL TITLES THAT SEEM TO SCREAM AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, those are common in marketing writing. But you won’t find titles written that way in newspapers or books. In fact, even proper names that are supposed to be in all caps, like the entertainment complex L.A. LIVE, don’t stay all caps in many newspapers. This one, for example, becomes L.A. Live.

Both AP and Chicago have special rules for song titles, magazine titles, composition titles, poem titles, and just about anything else that a writer has given a name to. There are too many to commit to memory. If you absolutely need to get them right, consult a style guide. Otherwise, don’t sweat these too much. It’s probably fine to just choose one style — quotation marks or italics — for all. No one will think less of you for not knowing every little rule. After all, even editors often have to double-check.

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April 25, 2022

'A historic' or 'an historic'? 'A FBI agent' or 'An FBI agent'? 'A AAA-rated hotel' or 'an AAA-rated hotel'?

TOPICS: A AAA VS. AN AAA, A HISTORIC VS AN HISTORIC, COPY EDITING, GRAMMAR, INDEFINITE ARTICLES

English has just two indefinite articles and the choice between them is usually easy. “A” precedes a consonant sound: a cat, a truck, a man. “An” precedes a vowel sound: an idea, an octopus, an intelligent octopus.

Usually, a word starts with a vowel sound because it starts with a vowel — an umpire —or it starts with a consonant sound because it starts with a consonant — a referee. But not always. The word “university,” for example, starts with a consonant sound: Y. That’s why you say “a university” and not “an university.”

Even in these cases, “a” and “an” are easy for native English speakers.

Sometimes an indefinite article that comes naturally when you’re speaking can make you second-guess yourself when you’re writing. For example, some struggle with the question of which article to use before an abbreviation like “FBI.” F is a consonant and it stands for a word that begins with a consonant sound, “federal.” But when you say the letter F, you start with a vowel sound: “eff.” That’s why when you’re speaking, you say “an FBI agent” and not “a FBI agent.”

Whether speaking or writing, the rule is based on pronunciation. So you’d write “an FBI agent.”

People disagree on how to handle “historic.” But there’s no wrong answer. If you treat the H as silent or nearly silent, you can use “an historic.” People who prefer this method point out that, because “historic” puts the stress on its second syllable, “stor,” the first syllable is all but lost without “an” in front of it. People who pronounce the H use “a historic.”

The Associated Press Stylebook, which I follow in my editing work, says it’s “a historic.” So that’s how I do it. The guide for book and magazine publishers, the Chicago Manual of Style, is less rigid: “The word ‘historical’ and its variations cause missteps, but if the H in these words is pronounced, it takes an A (an hour-long walk at a historical society).”

The oddest case of all is the abbreviation for the American Automobile Association. Is it “an AAA” or “a AAA”? The answer in my recent column.

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April 18, 2022

Sometimes 'me' is better than 'I'

TOPICS: COPY EDITING, GRAMMAR, ME VS I, OBJECT VS SUBJECT PRONOUNS

For people who want to speak and write “properly,” the most basic, possibly most important issue to master is illustrated in the following sentence: “Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with Bill and me.”

When you’re aiming to use the language well, the temptation to change that “me” to “I” is strong. For most of us, this urge is rooted in childhood. Every time we said, “Stephanie and me are going to school,” we were corrected. It’s “Stephanie and I,” we were told. After hearing that a thousand times, we were left with the impression that “I” is always the proper choice.

Not true. “Me” is often the best choice and, if you’re aiming for “proper English,” it’s often the only correct choice.

The trick is to figure out whether your pronoun is an object or a subject.

Subject pronouns perform the action of a verb. They are: I, you, he, she, it, we, they and who. I made coffee. You work hard. He walks fast. Who did this? In every case, subject pronouns do the action.

Object pronouns receive the action of a verb or serve as the object of a preposition. They are: me, you, him, her, it, us, them and whom.

In “Maggie shot Mr. Burns,” Maggie is doing the action. So she’s the subject of the verb. Mr. Burns is on the receiving end. That makes him the object. So when we replace his name with a pronoun, we use the object pronoun “him” instead of the subject pronoun “he”: Maggie shot him.

Objects of prepositions aren’t as widely understood. Here's my recent column explaining how they work with object pronouns.

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April 11, 2022

Words I change even though I don't have to

TOPICS: ADVERSE AND AVERSE, MYRIAD VS. MYRIAD OF, PERUSE, SINCE VS. BECAUSE, TOWARD VS. TOWARDS

Language is ever-evolving, and “loose” usage isn’t wrong. But as an editor, I often opt for traditional, stickler-approved uses just because they seem more appropriate to published works. Here are some of the terms I change even when they’re not technically wrong.

Peruse. If you’ve ever talked about casually perusing titles at a bookstore, you’ll be surprised to learn that you were probably offending traditionalists. The primary definition of “peruse” isn’t to read casually or passively. It’s to study closely, with plenty of attention to detail. Its secondary meaning is, in fact, to skim or read passively. But in my work, I like to steer clear of offending tough audiences.

Towards. This word is perfectly fine with an s at the end — unless you’re writing in Associated Press style. In that case, “toward” is the only correct option.

Adverse. If you say, “I’m not adverse to that idea,” you’ll raise eyebrows. In strict usage, if you dislike something or find it repugnant, you’re “averse” to it. “Adverse” means harmful or unfavorable, like adverse effects from a drug. I stick with this distinction when I’m editing.

Myriad. There’s an old myth that “myriad” isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. If that were true, you couldn’t say “a myriad of styles” because there it’s a noun. You’d have to say “myriad styles,” using it as an adjective. Though I’ve since learned better, I once fell for this myth. So I got in the habit of avoiding “myriad” as a noun. Bonus: This cuts down on wordiness.

Since. “Since” can mean “because.” But this can be a little confusing: “Since you met Steve, you know he’s nice.” For the first half of that sentence, it’s unclear whether you’re talking about the period of time since you met him. Swapping out that “since” for “because” eliminates that chance of confusion.

There are more. Read about "enormity," "that vs. who," "that vs. which" and "sex vs. gender" in my recent column.

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April 4, 2022

Hyphenation: Are you attaching a suffix or a whole word?

TOPICS: COPY EDITING, HYPHENATING SUFFIXES, PUNCTUATION

Would you write “a county-wide event” or “a countywide event” and, more important: why?

Anyone who knows the basics of using hyphens knows they connect two words that together modify a third. The word “county” and the word “wide” can be joined with a hyphen and thereby work as an adjective to describe “event.” So “county-wide event” is consistent with hyphenation rules.

I see forms like this all the time in the articles I edit – often in articles so clean and error-free that there’s no doubt the writer ran spell check. Yet, every time I see “county-wide” or “office-wide” or I change it to a one-word form: countywide, officewide. And I do so even when spell-check disapproves.

My reason: Even though hyphens can combine whole words like “county” and “wide” those rules don’t necessarily apply here because, depending on how you look at it, this “wide” isn’t a word. It’s a suffix.

Look up “wide” in Webster’s New World College Dictionary and you’ll see lots of information about the word itself. But toward the end of the definitions you’ll also see “-wide” with a little hyphen on front. The dictionary calls this a “combining form,” meaning you combine it with another word. And though Webster's doesn’t specify  whether you’d combine it with or without the hyphen, many editing styles say that, in general, you not use a hyphen to attach a suffix. (There are lots of exceptions, of course, but the style guides list those individually.)

So while the word “county” with the word “wide” would be “county-wide,” with the suffix “-wide” they combine to become “countywide.”

It’s not always that simple, though. Some terms are common enough to have their own dictionary entries, and when they do, those usually take precedence. For example, “storewide” is listed in Webster’s New World as its own word. So when you're writing "storewide," you're not combining two words or a word and a suffix. You're using a single word.

The guideline that says not to hyphenate most suffixes gets complicated when you start looking at longer words: university, community, corporation, etc. These don’t look so great with “wide” tacked on the end: “universitywide,” “communitywide,” “corporationwide.” So in these cases, there’s nothing to stop you from interpreting this “wide” as a whole word an not a suffix: university-wide, community-wide, corporation-wide. It’s a judgment call.

Just remember that anytime you want to combine a word with another that could be a suffix, first check a dictionary to make sure the compound isn't already listed as a single word, then check to see whether your second word is a suffix. If not, hyphenate away. If so, you can use your judgment and knowledge of combining forms to make the best decision.

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March 28, 2022

Borne Of vs. Born Of

TOPICS: COPY EDITING, GRAMMAR

Here’s an interesting word-choice conundrum I came across in my copy editing a while back: “A completely retooled Buick borne of German design.”

“Borne,” in my mind, usually comes up in terms like “airborne virus.” I think of it as meaning “carried” or “transported.” So it seems to be completely distinct from “born,” which means “given birth to.” Babies are born, viruses are transported, and in my mind it was as easy as that

Of course, language is never as easy as that. So when I needed to get this right for the article, I looked it up.

“Borne” is a past tense of “to bear,” meaning “to carry.” But that got me thinking: This word isn’t quite as different from “born” as I had always considered it. After all, the very babies who get born are carried — borne — by their mothers. When I think about it this way, the distinction seems weaker.

What’s more, I’d never really thought much about the term “born of.”  I had always assumed it used “born” on purpose — the car is the offspring of such-and-such engineering tradition. But I was starting to have doubts. Couldn’t this car be carried — borne — by this engineering tradition? Could it have been, metaphorically speaking, carried on the winds of change to a dealer near you?

Technically, sure. So you can use whichever you mean. But presumably you’d want the reader or listener to be clear on what you wanted to say. Usually, the best way to achieve that is to use the term most familiar to the reader instead of your own spin on one. So to find out which is more common in the term “born/e of,” we turn to some reference works.

“Webster’s New World Dictionary” lists both “born” and “borne” as past participles of the verb “to bear.” And bear has a number of definitions, including “to carry” and even “to give birth to” (think “child bearing”). So Webster’s confirms that “born” and “borne” are both born of the same word.

When bear means to give birth to, Webster’s notes, “the passive past participle in this sense is born when by does not follow.”

A baby is born. A passenger is borne. But when followed by the word “by,” both take borne. “He was borne by her.”

"Fowler’s Modern English Usage" takes an academic approach to these words. It says that the past participle of bear “in all senses except that of birth is ‘borne’ (I have borne with this too long; he was borne along by the wind); borne is also used, when the reference is to birth, (a) in the active (has borne no children), and “b) in the passive when ‘by’ follows (of all the children borne by her only one survived). The [past participle] in the sense of birth, when used passively without ‘by,’ or adjectivally, is born (he was born blind: a born fool; of all the children born to them; melancholy born of solitude; she was born in 1950)

Of course, none of this tells us for certain whether our Buick was born of German engineering or borne of it. To find out which is the standard expression, I turned to the dubiously handy arbiter of all modern usage issues: Google. Searching for a famous line from an old Helen Reddy song, I tried “it’s wisdom born of pain” — 202,000 hits. Then I searched “it’s wisdom borne of pain” — 52 hits.

The widsom I gleaned: “born” is better. And, yes, it was painful.

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March 21, 2022

'Homo sapien forebears'?

TOPICS: ATTRIBUTIVE NOUNS, HOMO SAPIEN VS. HOMO SAPIENS, NOUNS AS ADJECTIVES

“Scientists have unearthed startling revelations about our Homo sapien forebears,” CNN reported in December.

But is that true? I’d argue no because we don’t have Homo sapien forebears. In fact, there’s no such thing as a Homo sapien. It’s Homo sapiens.

So why did CNN use “Homo sapien” instead of “Homo sapiens”? Probably because it sounded right. And though about 99% of the time your ear is your best guide to good grammar, odd words and unusual forms are exceptions. This is one such exception.

“Homo sapien forebears” sounds better than “Homo sapiens forebears” for the same reason it sounds wrong to say you bought your loafers in a “shoes store” or you took your dog to the “pets hospital.” We know instinctively that “shoe store” and “pet hospital” are the preferred forms.

The more you think about this, the less sense it makes. There is no store that sells one shoe. They all sell multiple shoes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a veterinary hospital that serves just one pet. They all have multiple patients. So why do we use singular “shoe” when it comes in front of “store” and singular “pet” when it comes in front of “hospital”? And how is it even possible that “shoe” and “pet” can modify nouns since that’s the job of an adjective and “shoe” and “pet” are clearly not adjectives?

These are the odd properties of attributive nouns.

In grammar, a word that comes before another to describe it is called “attributive.” This usually means adjectives. In “the gray cat,” the word “gray” is an attributive adjective. But nouns can do the same job. For example, in “the cat toy,” “cat” is modifying a noun that comes after it, so it’s functioning attributively, making it an attributive noun. Here’s my recent column exploring how to use them.

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March 14, 2022

Should you capitalize 'wasabi miso mashed potatoes'?

TOPICS: capitalization, CAPITALIZE DISHES, CAPITALIZE MENU ITEMS, GRAMMAR

Here’s a pro tip for how to make your reading more pleasing to the eye: Use fewer capitals.

A lot of writers don’t realize that many capital letters are optional — especially capitals that originate from companies or their products. For example, when writing a restaurant review, they’ll write Macadamia-Crusted Swordfish with Wasabi Miso Mashed Potatoes because that’s how it appeared on the restaurant’s menu or website.

It’s only natural that a restaurant would treat its chef’s creations as proper names — especially if the chef coined the name himself. But just because the restaurant considers it a proper name doesn’t mean you can’t use all those words as generic descriptors. Their Wasabi Miso Mashed Potatoes are really just mashed potatoes flavored with wasabi and miso, right? So while you could use the restaurant’s proper name, you could also use the words as generic descriptors.

In most cases, unless it’s a trademarked name, the choice is yours. So how should you make that choice? Well, many newspapers and other professional publications have a policy of lowercasing such things whenever possible. The reason: They believe it’s easier on the eye. Generic words flow as part of an ongoing narrative while Formal Capitalized Proper Names break up the flow by demanding all the attention for themselves. That’s the argument anyway, and that's how I see it, too.

It’s the same reason many publications have a policy of lowercasing the T in “The” in proper names that appear in running text. Even if the band name is The Beatles, these publications believe that the Beatles is more digestible in the middle of a sentence. Again, I agree.

And it’s also the reason why the president and chief executive officer of a company need not be the President and Chief Executive Officer.

Of course, the restaurants, bands, and corporate officers don’t like this. They hold their own labels and titles in high regard. So if you’re writing marketing copy or the like, you might as well follow the Chief Executive Officer’s advice and capitalize The Company’s Miso Mashed Potatoes. But when your real boss is the reader, you might do better to lowercase every word you can.

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March 7, 2022

'Slava Ukraini!,' how to pronounce Kyiv, and other things to know about the Ukrainian language

TOPICS: HOW TO PRONOUNCE KYIV, SLAVA UKRAINI

Language is culture. It offers a way to form bonds with people from other lands. When a peaceful country is fighting for its survival, when civilians are being bombed in their homes and children are getting killed, learning a little about its language can be a small gesture of solidarity. And when those attacks are part of a worldwide assault on democracy itself, such an act of solidarity is simultaneously an act of American patriotism — a nod to the ideals of freedom and self-determination at home and abroad.

With that in mind, here are a few facts about the language of Ukraine.

Ukrainian is the first language of about 68% of the country’s 44 million residents. About 30% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language, while just under 3% speak Crimean Tatar, Moldovan, Hungarian, Romanian or any of the other three dozen languages spoken in Ukrainian homes. 

Ukrainian is also common in some communities outside Ukraine, notably in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia.

Like English, Ukrainian is an Indo-European language, which means it is structurally similar to our own tongue, as well as to German, Greek, Celtic, Italian, Hindi and about 440 others. Ukrainian falls under the East Slavic sub-branch of Indo-European languages, making it a close cousin of Polish, Serbian, Czech, Russian, Belorussian and Bulgarian. 

Ukrainian uses a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, which is very similar to the alphabet used for Russian. Think of the small differences between the alphabets used in Spanish and Portuguese, or those of Arabic and Farsi, and you get the idea. 

The Ukrainian language has come under repeated attack for centuries. In 1863, a secret order called “The Valuyev Circular” was issued by a minister of the Russian Empire to prohibit publications in the Ukrainian language. After the Russian revolution of 1917, the Ukrainian language was afforded equal status in the region. But forced “Russification” resumed in the 1930s and more attempts to suppress Ukrainian ensued. 

Ukrainian became the official language of Ukraine in 1989 — about two years before the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic claimed its independence — and was reaffirmed as the country’s only official language in 1996 in the country’s constitution. 

The easiest way to learn a language that uses a different alphabet is by using “transliterated” forms. Transliteration converts the sounds from one language into the alphabet of another, like the Q in al-Qaeda, which represents a sound that we don’t make in English. Transliterations aren’t standardized, which you may have noticed when reading about Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kadafi. That’s why you’ll see different spellings of the last name of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky/Zelenskiy/Zelenskyy.

There’s no single correct way to transliterate it, and newsrooms have different processes for deciding which transliterated spelling will become their official style. 

Ukrainians pronounce their capital city, Kyiv, using sounds that don’t quite exist in English. But it’s closer to “Keev” than to “Key-ev,” which is more of a Russian pronunciation. 

If you search Google for “English to Ukrainian,” you’ll arrive at a translator app where you can type in an English word or passage and Google will, with varying degrees of accuracy, translate it, showing both the Ukrainian Cyrillic form and a transliterated form. Click the little speaker button underneath to hear your term spoken aloud in proper Ukrainian. 

You can reverse the process, too: If you come across Ukrainian text online, you can copy and paste it into Google Translate to get an English translation, though it may not be a very good one. 

Here, transliterated by Google, are a few Ukrainian terms worth learning. 

Hello: zdravstvuyte. The Google pronunciation sounds like “stravs-TOO-ee-tay.” 

Welcome: laskavo prosymo. The emphasis is on the second syllable of the first word, las-KA-vo, and the first syllable of the second word, PROSS-im-o.

Cheers: budmo. When Ukrainians toast, they use this term that literally means “let us be.”

Glory to Ukraine: Slava Ukrayini! is the official salute of the Ukrainian armed forces since 2018. 

Peace: myr. It sounds almost like “muid,” and its written form is identical to the Russian word for peace.

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