May 18, 2020

Navigating the gray areas in punctuation rules

Consider the following two sentences.

“Days are usually great, but, when they aren’t great, they still pass in 24 hours.”

“Every word should bring something to the table and, if it doesn’t, it should be chopped out.”

In both examples, a conjunction is connecting independent clauses. In the first, that conjunction is “but.” In the second, it’s “and.” But the “but” has a comma before it and the “and” does not. What, Liz wants to know, is the right way to handle these?

The rules for commas seem, at first glance, to be pretty clear. They state that when any of the coordinating conjunctions “and,” “but” or “so” connects two clauses that could stand alone as sentences, put a comma before the conjunction unless the whole sentence is short, simple and poses no danger of confusion. In other words, use a comma before the conjunction — or don’t.

That’s why both these sentences are punctuated correctly. It’s also why you could change your mind about both — removing the comma after “great” and inserting one after “table” — and still be correct.

Punctuation rules are full of gray areas where you can call the shots. Here are some more thoughts on navigating these gray areas.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

May 11, 2020

Coronavirus Slang

Are you enjoying your coronacation? Or is it making you coronalusional? Are you surrounded by covidiots? Do you go to the opposite extreme by hamsterkaufing every scrap of food you get your hands on?

Either way, your experience is being captured by a slew of new coronavirus slang terms. The U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper recently published a list of Covid-inspired expressions popping up in the language. Like a lot of reporting about language, take this with a grain of salt. It may have more to do with a news outlet eager to publish a fun story about new words than having a meaningful impact on the language. But who knows whether any or all of them could catch on?

Here they are.

Coronacation — forced time off work due to the virus

Coronalusional — having delusional or strange thoughts due to pandemic

Covidiot — someone disobeying lockdown or self-isolation rules

Covid-19(lbs) — weight gained during lockdown

Corona Bae — the partner you are quarantining with

Drivecation — holiday in parked motorhome

Hamsterkaufing — stockpiling food like a hamster (German)

Iso — isolation (Australian)

Isobar — fridge well-stocked with alcohol to get through the pandemic

Isodesk — home workplace

Miley Cyrus — coronavirus

Morona — person behaving moronically during the pandemic

Post-rona - when the pandemic is over

The rona - another word for coronavirus (Australian)

Quarantine and chill - chilling at home during the pandemic

Click player above to listen to the podcast

May 4, 2020

Em and Em: Dashes Two Ways

I've been seeing a lot of double-hyphens used as em dashes lately -- like this. That's okay in a pinch, but a real computer-generated em dash — like this — looks more professional. On a Mac computer, make one by holding down the Shift and Option keys they hitting the minus sign. On a PC, hold down Control and Alt then hit the minus sign. You can also set your computer's autocorrect to change double hyphens to em dashes, too.

If you want to emulate the style used by most news media, Associated Press style, put a space on either side of the dash — like this. If you want your writing to look more like it was published in a book, follow the Chicago Manual of Style and omit the spaces—like this.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

April 27, 2020

Microsoft Word to Flag Double Spaces as Errors

Microsoft Word isn't the boss of the language. No one is. But when your spell checker reaches something like a billion people, you have a lot of power to influence the language.

That's why Microsoft's recent decision on double-spacing is so significant. The company's Word software will now flag double spaces between sentences as errors. This could be the end of the road for traditionalists who still double space decades after most style guides publishing authorities decided single spacing is the way to go. Here's the full story at CNN.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

April 20, 2020

A Word Whose History Is a Mystery

I’ve never been very interested in etymology. I know that makes me a bad little language columnist.

But the truth is, word histories all start to sound the same after a while. Such-and-such word came from this-other word in this-other language, which evolved from this-other word and its meaning changed subtly from this to that to some other thing over time. Same story, different details.

But while word origins don’t interest me much, a word with no known origin — now that’s interesting.

Lexicographers and linguists trace the histories of words by looking at written works going back decades, centuries or all the way back to the days of Chaucer.

Doing so, they can determine when, where and how words have been used, as well as who was using them and how they’ve changed over time. So when you look up a word in a well-researched guide like Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, you’re never surprised to find lots of historical context for whichever word you’re looking up.

But it’s quite surprising to see something like this: “‘Sneak’ is a word of mysterious origin.”

Then the mystery deepens: “It first turns up in Shakespeare.”

Here's what I learned, including some interesting facts about "snuck."

Click player above to listen to the podcast

April 13, 2020

This use of 'so' was so confusing

“Erin Burnett was in tears. So will you.” This headline and subhead appeared on the CNN homepage, for a while. A few hours later, the wording had been changed, replaced by “An interview left Erin Burnett in tears. You will cry, too.”

Someone figured out that something was wrong with “So will you.” But to understand where that wording failed, we need to put under the microscope a word we use every day but probably never think about: so.

Like a lot of words, “so” qualifies as several different parts of speech, including adverb, conjunction and adjective. Some of its common uses are controversial among sticklers. More on those in a minute. But for now, we need to figure out what job it’s doing in this sentence.

My best analysis was that “so” was standing in for a verb. Look at “He will quit and so will she.” In the first clause, you have a subject, “he,” followed by a modal auxiliary verb, “will,” followed by another verb that works with the modal to complete the verb phrase, “quit.” I figured “so” was working kind of like a pronoun, standing in for the verb “quit.” But pronouns only stand in for nouns, not verbs. Therefore, in my analysis, “so” would have to be a verb.

I was wrong, but I found someone to set me straight for this recent column.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

April 6, 2020

Coronavirus, Covid, Pandemic and Related Terms

The language of pandemics is on all our lips these days. Tragically. Here are some of the terms pertaining to the pandemic that are worth getting right.

Coronavirus

Though sometimes used to mean the disease that has afflicted more than a million people across the globe, that’s not quite right. Nor is it the name of the virus infecting people.

Instead, coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect humans and animals. The most common human coronavirus causes 15% to 30% of cases of the common cold, according to a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

SARS-CoV, another coronavirus, was responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak that killed 774 people worldwide.

SARS-CoV-2

The virus causing our current pandemic is called SARS-CoV-2. Despite the 2 in the name, it’s the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans. The “SARS” part of the name is an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome, just as it was in the 2003 outbreak.

COVID-19

The illness caused by SARS-CoV-2, which can bring respiratory and other symptoms ranging from mild to fatal. The CO part of the name is taken from “corona,” the VI part comes from “virus” and the D is for “disease.” The 19 refers to the year in which it was named. There’s no consensus on how to capitalize the name. But if you want to follow someone’s lead, note that the Associated Press style experts have come down on the side of all capital letters.

For VIRUS, VIRION, CAPSID, PANDEMIC, EPIDEMIC and SOCIAL DISTANCING, see this recent column.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

March 30, 2020

Staying neutral in the comma wars

There’s a cartoon about commas going around on the Internet.

The first panel reads: “With the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.” The illustration shows four people: two men, one bearing a resemblance to John F. Kennedy and the other to Stalin, and two women in G-strings and high heels.

The second panel reads: “Without the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin” above an illustration of just two people: men resembling JKF and Stalin, who themselves are wearing G-strings and high heels.

If you’re looking to pick a side in a silly war, you can stop reading now. That’s all the ammo you need to join the legions of people who believe that the Oxford comma is king. But if you want a clear picture of why this just isn’t so, here’s a column I did explaining it.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

March 23, 2020

The syntax of great writing

It is a truth universally acknowledged that great writers make fools out of great editors.

Great editors say, “Avoid passive voice.” Then a writer like Ian McEwan starts Atonement with a whopper of a passive in the very first sentence: “The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”

Editors say you should use correct punctuation. Yet Cormac McCarthy dispenses with apostrophes at will.

An editor who noticed a writer switching from the third-person to the second-person would fix it immediately. Yet in Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut switches from his third-person narration to directly command the reader in the second-person imperative: “Listen.”

Some editors (present company included) would tell you to avoid cleft sentences, which start with “it is,” then relegate the meatiest information to a subordinate clause. Yet Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, got away with “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

The remarkable part: in every instance, the defiance pays off. Each of these sentences is far better than any by-the-book rewrite could have produced.

Why do they work? Magic, mostly. But to see how, exactly, the magic manifests itself, you need a basic understanding of syntax. Here's a piece I did examining what these writers did and why it worked.

Click player above to listen to the podcast

March 16, 2020

'Are' vs. 'is' writ large

“There are a variety of Medicare supplement plans on the market.”

For an editor, this is not a difficult sentence. We see stuff like this all the time and don’t blink an eye. But sometimes things that shouldn’t trip me up trip me up. Things I’ve known for years — things I’ve researched and confirmed and committed to memory — seem to fall right out of my brain.

And so it was when I found myself staring at that sentence, which appeared in an article I was editing recently, and stopped dead in my tracks. “There are a variety”? “There is a variety”? For some reason, I couldn’t remember despite having researched the matter multiple times in the past.

To get to the answer, there are a couple of issues to consider. One is whether “variety” is singular, which would require the singular verb “is,” or whether it’s plural, requiring the verb “are.”

The second issue is whether “variety” governs the verb at all. Could “plans” be the subject of the verb? If so, there’s no question the verb should be “are,” as in “There are plans on the market.”

Finally, there’s a question of whether “existential there” changes the equation. In my recent column, I start with that one.

Click player above to listen to the podcast