October 26, 2020

What's a declarative question?

Simple, declarative questions — that’s the best way to get answers from a Supreme Court nominee, a news commentator insisted recently. Just ask declarative questions.

I scoffed and filed the term in the corner of my mind home to “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence.” An oxymoron. A contradiction in terms. Nonsense.

But now, after doing a little research, I know better. “Declarative question” is neither nonsensical nor a contradiction in terms. Instead, it’s a mashup of two basic concepts: declarative and interrogative sentences.

All sentences come in one of four forms: declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory.

A declarative sentence is a simple statement: You eat gluten.

An interrogative sentence is a question: Do you eat gluten?

An imperative sentence is a command: Eat gluten!

An exclamatory sentence is an exclamation: Gluten!

So if a declarative is a statement and an interrogative is a question, what's a declarative question? The answer is in my recent column.

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October 19, 2020

'Every day' vs. 'everyday'

A while back, I saw written on a truck something like, “Delivering the best to you everyday.” I see that use of “everyday” a lot, which is unfortunate. The two-word version, “every day,” would have been a better choice.

According to a number of dictionaries, including Webster’s New World, the one-word “everyday” is an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns. “We offer everyday values.” Here, the one-word version is correct because it’s doing what an adjective should do -- modifying a noun.

But the message on the delivery truck didn’t call for an adjective. Try plugging in a different adjective, for example, “great,” in the example sentences above. You end up with “Delivering the best to you great.” If that were truly a sentence that called for an adjective, “great” would have worked fine, as it does in “We offer great values.”

So you can see that this usage actually calls for an adverb.

Adverbs answer the question when? where? or in what manner? The passage “Delivering the best to you every day” calls for an adverb because it needs something to answer the question “when?”

“Every day” is a noun phrase. It consists of a noun, “day,” and an adjective modifying it. Together, they work as a single unit in our example to function as an adverb: Delivering the best to you every day.

If that's more than you care to take in right now, just remember that the one-word “everyday” is an adjective and you’ll never have to worry about bloggers pointing out mistakes on your delivery truck.

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October 12, 2020

Lead, sneak peak, reign, eek and other words even smart people get wrong

In our tricky language, certain words are out to trick you. Sometimes, they succeed. It doesn’t matter how grammar-savvy you are or how many degrees you have in English lit. Some misused words can and will pop up in your writing. Vigilance won’t save you, but it can help. So watch out for these seven words that even smart people get wrong.

Lead. You may know all about the verb “to lead.” You may know that in the present tense it has an “a” but in the past tense it doesn’t: “He led them astray.” That knowledge is worthless if you let your guard down. The metal, “lead,” is lurking in your subconscious waiting to ambush your sentence. It’s spelled just like the verb’s present tense, but it’s pronounced just like the verb’s past tense. That’s why so many people who know better use the wrong form, as in “He lead me astray.” That should be “led.”

Sneak peak. In any other context, “peak” isn’t a problem. Most people know not to say, “I peaked out the window.” But, true to its name, “sneak” is trying to pull a fast one here. The human brain has a thing for patterns — and shortcuts. So when we see with our eye the spelling s-n-e-a-k and we hear in our mind the “eek,” our brain goes on autopilot and repeats the spelling at served us so well in our last “eek” sound, causing us to write “peak” instead of the correct “peek.”

Five more are here in my recent column.

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October 5, 2020

Media outlets flub the past tense of 'lie'

When plans were announced for late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to lie in state at the Capitol, no one seemed to struggle with the verb. But after the fact, editors and social media managers stumbled.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s trainer of 21 years, Bryant Johnson, paid tribute to her with a set of push-ups as she laid in state at the Capitol on Friday,” National Public Radio announced in a Facebook post.

NBC News tweeted: “The flag-draped casket of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lied in state at the US Capitol.”

For news folks, those are bad errors. Unlike casual users who have a lot of leeway in how they use “lay” and “lie,” news agencies are supposed to follow the strict guidelines for these words.

Present and future tenses don’t seem to cause too much confusion, but past tense forms trip people up — even pros. So for anyone who wants to master “lay” and “lie,” here’s my recent column offering a refresher.

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September 28, 2020

Apostrophe imposter: How your word processing software is sabotaging your punctuation

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!’”

The difference is that the open single quotation mark curves to the right, like the letter C. The apostrophe curves to the left, making it identical to a closing single quotation mark in most fonts.

Of course, some fonts and printers and computer programs don’t curve their apostrophes at all. In those programs, the apostrophe looks like a straight dagger. So does their opening single quotation mark. With those programs, you can’t go wrong. But most of the time, whenever you type an apostrophe at the beginning of a word or number, your word-processing software will assume you’re starting to quote something and turn your apostrophe into a single quote mark.

If you’re the kind of person whose socks usually match, you’ll probably want to keep an eye out for those and change them to real apostrophes.

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September 21, 2020

When you're smizin', it doesn't mean the whole world should smize with you

Attention denizens of the English-speaking world: Supermodel and television personality Tyra Banks would like a word.

That word: smize. Where she would like it: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Smize, a Tyra Banks original coinage, means to smile with one’s eyes. And it’s gained some traction, securing spots in several online dictionaries.

Merriam’s, however, remains a holdout. But Banks and her people aren’t relenting.

“We call them. We email them. We show them the cover of the Wall Street Journal,” Banks recently told National Public Radio.

“We show everything, all this stuff. And they’re just like ... ‘We’ve had our eye on smize for a couple of years.’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? Now you’re just hating.’”

And with that, Banks makes her second-most important contribution to the language, redefining “hating” to mean “practicing lexicography.”

Lexicography, the act of creating dictionaries, doesn’t work like the maître d’ at a fancy restaurant. Important people can’t strong-arm or cajole or smize their way to the front of the line. The process for adding new words to the language is far more democratic than that. Read how words really get into the dictionary in my recent column.

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September 14, 2020

'As well as' can't do everything 'and' can do

“As well as” can join two nouns that are the subject of a sentence, “John as well as Jane is here.” In these cases, it’s hard to know whether you want a singular verb like “is” or a plural verb like “are.” Inexplicably, everyone handles these situations well.

But “as well as” can also add an item to the end of a list: “Specialties include pasta, steaks, chops and fresh seafood, as well as craft cocktails.” That’s where people mess up, instead structuring sentences like this: “Specialties include pasta, steaks, chops, fresh seafood, as well as craft cocktails.”

Notice how the “and” before fresh seafood has disappeared. The result: a grammatical error based on the belief that, because “as well as” works kind of like “and,” it can replace “and.” Not so.

“And” is classified as a coordinating conjunction and, as a member of that club, it has a special power: It can be used in lists to signal that the next item will be the last item in the list. You don’t say the flag is red, white, blue. You say it’s red, white and blue. You don’t say your piggy bank contains pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. You say it contains pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.

“As well as” can’t do “and’s” job in those situations because it’s not a coordinating conjunction. Some people call it a quasi-coordinator because it has some properties of “and” but not all. Here's my recent column with everything you need to know.

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September 7, 2020

John as well as Jane is, or John as well as Jane are?

You probably use “as well as” from time to time in your speech and writing. And chances are you’ve been using it so well, so effortlessly, that you have no idea how difficult it is to employ.

Behold: “He, as well as the producer, are Broadway newcomers.”

“The theme, as well as the writer’s art, makes the novel a work of art.”

“Available evidence as well as past experience suggests as much.”

“John as well as Jane was late for dinner.”

All these sentences are lifted from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English usage, the first three are real-world examples and the fourth a deliberately simplistic made-up usage. But they all prove the same point: As a coordinator — meaning a term that, like “and,” links nouns and other parts of speech — “as well as” is a minefield.

Look at the verbs to see what I mean. In the first example, the verb “are” suggests that the subject is plural — that “he as well as the producer” is grammatically the same as “he and the producer.” Hence it’s a plural subject with a verb to match: “he as well as the producer are.”

Now look at the verb in the second example, “makes.” That’s conjugated for a singular subject, like “Ed makes.” Yet the presumably singular subject of this sentence, “the theme, as well as the writer’s art,” is grammatically the same as “he as well as the producer.” Yes, this one has commas and, yes, those commas seem to have an effect on whether the subject is plural. But commas alone don’t explain why “the theme, as well as the writer’s art” takes the singular verb “makes.”

So what’s going on here? I explore the intricacies of as well as in my latest column.

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August 31, 2020

How to Write Book and Movie Titles

Do book and movie titles go in quotation marks or italics? Neither way is wrong. It’s just a matter of style. AP style, which is followed by a lot of news media, uses quotation marks. 

The actors in “Star Wars” went on to have varying degrees of success.

Johnny read “War and Peace” in school.

Magazine titles they just capitalize, skipping the quote marks.

Jane writes for the Time and Newsweek.

Book publishers, who mostly follow the Chicago Manual of Style, skip the quotation marks and just italicize those titles instead.

We read The Road.

Book publishers also italicize magazine titles, but put article titles and chapter titles in quotation marks.

If you don't need to conform to either style,  you could just pick one way, saying using quotation marks, and stick with it. Either way, there’s no need to worry you're doing it wrong.

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August 24, 2020

Some comma mistakes are real killers

Comma mistakes happen all the time, but serious comma mistakes — errors that change your meaning or mislead your reader — are rare.

It seems like every day I see a comma placed after a quotation mark, as when someone writes about a specific “word,” but writes it “word”, which is wrong according to American punctuation rules.

Another mistake I see a lot is unneeded commas between adjectives. A gaudy Hawaiian shirt should have no comma because you only put commas between adjectives when the word “and” would make sense there. It’s not a gaudy and Hawaiian shirt. It’s a Hawaiian shirt that is gaudy. People who don’t know that write gaudy, Hawaiian shirt and I even see gaudy, Hawaiian, shirt, with a comma before the noun. (Tip: If you can’t swap the order of the adjectives, don’t put commas between them. It’s not a Hawaiian gaudy shirt, so no commas in gaudy Hawaiian shirt.)

These mistakes are harmless. No one is going to misunderstand what you’re saying about the shirt or the word “word.”

But other comma flubs are bad. None more so than leaving out the comma before someone’s name when speaking to them directly: Let’s eat Grandma. Add a comma and you have a warm invitation to break bread with a loved one. Without a comma, you’re Hannibal Lecter.

Here are some more examples of comma errors that can change your meaning.

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