August 16, 2021

Crisphead, buppie, axion and other words that haven't stood the test of time

Lexicographers spend all day looking for new words and new ways people are using old words. They search different “corpora,” or language databases, to see how often the terms show up. Then they try to gauge whether the word has become entrenched enough to warrant a spot in the dictionary.

Often, they get it right. Other times, words don’t have quite the staying power lexicographers anticipated. Some dictionary additions that flopped in recent decades: Crisphead, buppie, axion, hahnium and digerati. Here's my recent column tracking the rise and fall of these once-promising dictionary entries.

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August 9, 2021

Should you capitalize 'city' in 'city of Boston'?

Does your Bostonian friend hail from the City of Boston or the city of Boston?

Before you answer, here’s a hint: It depends who’s asking.

I flunked this question on an editing quiz recently. I got it wrong even though I’ve spent decades — literal decades — getting paid to change City of Los Angeles to city of Los Angeles and City of Pasadena to city of Pasadena.

So what happened? I was editing according to Associated Press Stylebook rules and the quiz was in Chicago Manual of Style rules.

In AP style, which is followed by many news media and business organizations, the c is lowercase. I like that. After all, “city” isn’t part of the name. If you live in Boston, you don’t write City of Boston on the top left hand corner of envelopes when you send mail. The city name is Boston, period. But the Chicago Manual of Style, which is followed by book and magazine publishers, disagrees. If you’re following their style, City of Boston can be the way to go.

Clearly, capitalization can be confusing — especially if you take your cues from your reading material. Here's my recent column explaining how to navigate these questions.

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August 2, 2021

Predominantly or predominately?

A while back I was editing an article and came across a sentence like “The community is predominately white.” It took me till the second read to notice that “predominately” wasn’t “predominantly.” And I was pretty proud of myself when I caught this “error.” But luckily I wasn’t so cocky as to trust my own judgment. I looked them up.

It turns out that “predominately” and “predominantly” are both legitimate. And if there’s a difference between them, it’s very subtle. This is from "Webster's New World College Dictionary":

predominate: 1. to have ascendancy, authority, or dominating influence (over others); hold sway 2. to be dominant in amount, number, etc.; prevail; preponderate. Related forms: predominately: adverb

predominant: 1. having ascendancy, authority, or dominating influence over others; superior 2. most frequent, noticeable, etc.; prevailing; preponderant. Related forms: predominantly: adverb

“Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage” argues that the words are basically synonyms. So how do you know which one to choose?

Well, if you want to follow someone else’s lead, you could do worse than to take the "Associated Press Stylebook’s" advice:

"predominant, predominantly: Use these primary spellings listed in 'Webster's New World' for the adjectival and adverbial forms. Do not use the alternatives it records, 'predominate' and 'predominately.' The verb form, however, is 'predominate.'"

Plus, Merriam-Webster's usage guide calls “predominately” a “less frequently used alternative” to predominantly. So that could be construed as yet another reason to stick with “predominantly.”

Of course, follow their cue only if you want to march in step with the majority. If you march to the beat of your own drummer, “predominately” is valid, too. It's just not predominant.

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July 26, 2021

Ganging up on the myth that you can't end a sentence with a preposition

As every qualified language commentator under the sun has been saying for years: There’s no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. Yet the myth lives on. When I wrote a recent column about a co-worker of mine who’s still victim to the myth, I got a number of e-mails from readers who were surprised to hear it.

The sticking power of bad information never ceases to amaze. So, in yet another drop-in-the-bucket attempt to counter the bad information, here are a whole bunch of experts on the subject.  

 “The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake.” – Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

 “Superstition. … Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.” – Garner’s Modern American Usage

 “The ‘rule’ prohibiting terminal prepositions was an ill-founded superstition. Today many grammarians use the dismissive term ‘pied-piping’ for this phenomenon.”

 “That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put” – Unknown (Surprised? If you think this was a Winston Churchill quip, you’re not alone. Even the Chicago Manual of Style attributes it to him. But have researchers discovered that it probably wasn’t!)

 “‘Never end a sentence with a preposition.’ … Wrong.” –Washington Post Business Copy Desk Chief Bill Walsh

 “Good writers throughout the history of English – from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Alison Lurie and David Lodge -- have not shrunk from ending clauses or sentences with prepositions.” – Word Court author Barbara Wallraff

 “Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.” – William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

 “For years and years Miss Thistlebottom has been teaching her bright-eyed brats that no writer would end a sentence with a preposition if he knew what he was about. The truth is that no good writer would follow Miss Thistlebottom’s rule. – Theodore M. Bernstein, “The Careful Writer” (copyright 1965)

 “Superstition.” – H.W. Fowler

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July 19, 2021

Crash blossoms

It was the headline that launched a thousand linguistics blog posts: “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms.”

In 2009, a copy editor spotted this headline in Japan Today. Then he logged on to an internet language forum to ponder the question: “What’s a crash blossom?”

The rest is linguistics history. What had been a nonsensical pairing of two words became a term referring to just such nonsense. Today, crash blossom means any headline that invites a misreading — especially a ridiculous one.

For example, the Japan Today headline didn’t mean that a violinist is linked to mysterious things called crash blossoms. It meant that a violinist who is linked to a crash is blossoming in her career.

How do we know that? Certainly not from the grammar.

As written, the headline has two meanings — one logical, the other nonsensical. We need logic to tell us which of the two valid interpretations is more likely.

Headline writing, which crams big ideas into very tight spaces, is uniquely vulnerable to such misunderstandings. Lots of well-known examples go back more than a century.

“British Left Waffles on Falklands.”

“Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel.”

“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.”

“MacArthur Flies Back to Front.”

“Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.”

“Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim.”

Here's a closer look at crash blossoms in my recent column.

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July 12, 2021

'Try to' vs. 'try and'

“I have been arguing with my husband about the word ‘try’ for years and I think you might be the right person to help me figure it out,” a reader wrote recently. “I was taught that it is unacceptable to say ‘try and’ because it should be ‘try to.’ An example would be as follows: ‘I am going to try to remember to turn off the light’ instead of ‘I am going to try and remember to turn off the light.’

“Can you help me? Is one actually correct or is it just one of those things where both are acceptable and it’s just one of my unfounded, not-backed-up-by-reality peeves?”

As I explained, "try and” is both right and wrong, though I’ll confess I have a strong preference here. “Try and,” though acceptable, defies my sense of logic and order. When I come across it in my editing work, I always change it to “try to.” Here's a closer look in my recent column.

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July 6, 2021

How the LAPD took the bang out of its explosion announcement ...

“Our Bomb Squad officers were in the process of seizing over 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in the area of 27th Street and San Pedro. Some of the fireworks were being stored in our Bomb Squad trailer as a precautionary measure. Unknown at this time what caused an explosion.”

That was the only tweet from the Los Angeles Police Department’s @LAPDHQ account reporting a June 30 explosion in a residential neighborhood that happened after officers had taken steps to prevent an explosion.

To someone who values transparency and accountability, the LAPD’s announcement is maddening. But to a language geek, it’s also kind of exciting. The tweet illustrates just how powerful syntax can be to shape your message, for good or for ill. Here's my recent column exploring how the LAPD buried the lede and how understanding the grammar of this tweet can help your writing.

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June 28, 2021

When is an apostrophe not an apostrophe?

Of all the nitpicky tasks I perform while copyediting and proofreading, here’s the nitpickiest: You know how you use apostrophes when you write rock ’n’ roll or ’80s or  ’twas? Well, my job includes making sure that those apostrophes are actually apostrophes and not apostrophe imposters.

Type rock ’n’ roll into Microsoft Word, look at the marks around N, and you’ll make a shocking discovery: Your software is out to get you. If your program is set to its defaults, chances are that the mark before the N is not an apostrophe but instead an open single quotation mark. You know, the ones you use for quotations within quotations, as in, “I heard someone yell, ‘Wait!’”

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June 21, 2021

Commonly misspelled words where E is the culprit

E is the most-used letter in the English alphabet. It’s also the most evil. This seemingly innocent vowel comes up in 11% of words in the dictionary, leaving second-place S in its dust at 8.7%. But in my highly unscientific analysis, E comes up in a hugely disproportionate number of spelling errors — like, maybe half of them. And I’m not just talking about typos like “teh” in place of “the.” I’m talking about actual misspellings of words that confound even smart people.

Here are just some of the words that prove the letter E is out to get you: sleight, adrenaline, hoard, breathe, envelop, gray, theater, affect, lightening. And here's my recent column on how to spell them right.

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June 14, 2021

This headline didn't prove the Oxford comma is superior — it proved it's not

The Cult of the Oxford Comma reared its ugly head recently on Twitter when an obscure California attorney tweeted an example of the Oxford comma’s supposed superiority.

The tweet was an image of a Politico headline: “How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream.” Above the image was the lawyer’s commentary: “And always remember to use the Oxford comma, kids.”

The dog whistle was heard far and wide. About 8,000 Oxford comma fanatics retweeted it and 80,000 liked it. They agreed that, without an Oxford comma after “interrogator,” the headline suggested that Harry Reid was not just a former United States Senator but also a terrorist interrogator and the front man for a rock band.

In the replies, hundreds of cultists took shots at the headline writer.

“I didn’t know Blink’s singer was named Harry Reid,” one replied.

“People who do not use the Oxford comma deserve a hefty fine, a 90 day jail sentence, and a day and night listening to lectures by Alan Greenspan,” another insisted.

Strong words from true believers. There’s just one problem. They’re wrong. An Oxford comma would not improve the Politico headline. Instead, it would make it ambiguous. Here’s my recent column explaining why.

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