August 5, 2019

So you want to sound proper ...?

Proper English isn’t correct English. At least, it’s not the only correct English in town. It’s more like a flavor. Or a style.

It’s the type of English used in academic and literary as well as professional and diplomatic circles. An ambassador hosting a foreign emissary would never say, “Tell me you ain’t leaving so soon.”

Sticklers spend a lot of time telling people that informal English is incorrect English. That’s why people like me spend a lot of time pointing out that terms like “ain’t” aren’t wrong.

You can use them if you want to. But we seldom get around to asking the next logical question: Do you want to? Even people who understand that less-formal English is as correct as the proper kind still might like to master the proper kind. It’s nice to know how, even if you know it’s not necessary.

Here's how proper types say to handle a range of terms, including "whom," "lay" and "lie," "between" and "among," and "anxious" and "eager."

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July 29, 2019

Should you put a period after the exclamation point in Yahoo!?

I was editing a business proposal for a company that has an exclamation point at the end of its name, like Yahoo! but it’s not Yahoo! The company name came up multiple times in the document, sometimes at the end of a sentence.

In those instances, the writer followed the name with a period: Yahoo!.

Should the period be there? I asked some editors on social media. The answers I got were surprising and, at the same time, not at all surprising. Here's what I found out.

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July 22, 2019

Rules for hyphens, commas change with new style guides

You may not have noticed, but your world just got less hyphenated. There are fewer commas, too.

That’s because changes to the country’s two most influential style books lean lighter on those punctuation marks, but only in certain, very specific circumstances.

Take, for example, the following AP style rule change: Hyphen not needed for “pre” or “re” before an e. Hyphenation rules break down into different categories. For nouns, like “passer-by” and verbs like “mass-produce,” you can just go with whatever your dictionary says. For compound adjectives you make up yourself, like a “hyphen-obsessed editor,” the longstanding rule has been to add your own hyphen if it helps.

Here in my recent column are some more of the new punctuation rules influencing what you read and, if you like, what you write too.

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July 15, 2019

'Email' Sans Hyphen Takes Another Leap Forward

The hyphen has been steadily fading from “e-mail” for years. The Associated Press Stylebook, which since the technology’s earliest days explicitly called for “e-mail,” abandoned the hyphen about a decade ago.

Everyday users, in my anecdotal experience, ditched the hyphen even earlier.

AP’s counterpart in the book-publishing world, the Chicago Manual of Style, has been the holdout.

As the rest of the world slid toward “email,” this influential guide stood firm. It’s e-mail, Chicago insisted. Hyphen included.

Those days are over. In its most recent edition, Chicago finally changed its position. “Email” is now its official recommendation.

You don’t have to follow their rule or AP’s. Many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate and Webster’s New World, allow “e-mail” as an alternative to “email.” So you can write “e-mail” if you want to. But you won’t. Together, AP and Chicago govern the vast majority of your reading material, with AP style observed by most news media and Chicago style by most book and magazine publishers.

But anyone who holds firm on “e-mail” will be swimming against the tide. Here’s my recent column explaining why.

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July 8, 2019

Serial commas can cause confusion, too

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July 1, 2019

What's old in the AP Stylebook's 'What's new" section

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June 24, 2019

Time to talk y'all

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June 10, 2019

Dreyer's 'Nonrules' You Can Ignore

They say that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. The source of this pithy saying is a perfect example: It’s usually attributed to Mark Twain, though the New York Times reports it was most likely Jonathan Swift.

But we need an equally pithy saying for what happens next: The lie colonizes the world and decrees that under no circumstances should the truth be granted a visa for entry.

That’s how grammar myths work — especially the grammar myths that were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s.

These misguided “rules” traveled around the world at lightning speed, carried on the tongues of folks who love to say, “You can’t split an infinitive” and “You can’t start a sentence with ‘and.’” And despite the efforts of many language experts determined to set the record straight, the lies linger.

In his best-selling new book, “Dreyer’s English,” Penguin Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer delivers these “nonrules” the bludgeoning they deserve.

Could his be the final death blow to these superstitions? We can only hope. Here are Dreyer’s “nonrules” and why you can, with his blessing, ignore them entirely.

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May 28, 2019

Some words are just hard to keep straight ...

A lot of tricky word issues I’ve committed to memory, like “lay” and “lie.” But others I have to look up every time.

Adverse and averse.
Emigrate and immigrate.
Continual and continuous.
Aesthetic and esthetic.

Those are just a few of the terms that I can never seem keep straight in my mind, as I show in this recent column.

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May 20, 2019

'Cannabusiness,' New Meanings for 'Chipmunk' Enter the Oxford English Dictionary

Dictionaries add words all the time. But really, it’s not the dictionaries adding words to the language. It’s us. Dictionaries just record the words we’ve anointed by using them enough to indicate we really have made them part of the language.

That’s an art, of course, not a science. Most dictionaries drop words, too, banishing from their pages terms we’ve banished from our speech and writing.

But there’s an exception: the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED — a historical record of the language where words check in, but they don’t check out.

“As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings,” the editors explain on the dictionary’s website.

“You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language — traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books,” the editors added.

For this reason, the OED has a singular place in the language — an authority held above all others.

So when this dictionary adds words, it’s worth taking notice. The new words can be a window into our minds and our culture.
Take, for example, a few of the OED’s 2019 additions, which are featured in my recent column.

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