August 22, 2016

Suspensive Hyphenation: United We Stand

In our society, we entrust certain individuals with immense power based, in large part, on our sincere belief and hope that they'll act as unifiers, not dividers.

It's a tall order.

Sure, it's easy to bring together those already close to each other. But the ability to reach out, across a divide, to join diverse players so they can all work together as one — that's true leadership.

That's why, regardless of stripe or creed, we should all seize the opportunity to make full use of the talents of the greatest unifier at our disposal.

I’m speaking, of course, about the hyphen.

Here’s a lesson on suspensive hyphenation that’s also a lesson in how to reach across the aisle.

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August 15, 2016

Apostrophe Imposters Are Out to Get You

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.

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August 8, 2016

A Great Unifier

Our politicians could learn a thing or two from the humble hyphen. A quick lesson in suspensive hyphenation shows just how powerful you can be when you reach across a divide to bring disparate elements together. Here's my column on suspensive hyphenation as a lesson in leadership.

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August 1, 2016

More Fun with Prefixes

It sounded like a straightforward question: should "cybercrimes" should be written as one word, two words or hyphenated? The answer, though, isn't so simple. It comes down to whether "cybercrimes" is already in the dictionary and, if not, whether "cyber" is a hyphen or a word. When it's both, which it is, you have all kinds of choices, which I explain in a recent column.

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July 25, 2016

Hyphen ... Interrupted

My friend Tracy had a question about hyphens in the following passage:

... patients receiving a lenalidomide (Revlimid) or bortezomib (Velcade) based treatment ...

Where, she wanted to know, do the hyphens go? Under normal circumstances, you'd hyphenate a compound modifier with "based." A carbon-based life form. A faith-based initiative.

In a sentence where two compounds "share" a word, you'd hyphenate like this: a carbon- or silicon-based life form. This is called suspensive hyphenation, where the hyphen attached to "carbon" is just sort of hanging there to clue the reader that it attaches to a word that comes later.

But in these sentence, the parentheticals mess everything up.

lenalidomide- (Revlimid) or bortezomib- (Velcade) based?

lenalidomide (Revlimid)- or bortezomib (Velcade)-based?

If both look awful to you, I agree. The rule books never get this specific. They never say what to do in oddball situations. But they do say that most hyphens are optional, to be used only when they actually help. So, as I told Tracy, I'd leave that passage just as she found it.

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July 18, 2016

We're Not Worthy

As a suffix, "worthy" is on the rise. In his recent Wall Street Journal column, Ben Zimmer asks why.

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July 11, 2016

Prolly Worth Your Time

Baltimore Sun copy editor and all-around language guy John McIntyre did a post a while back about one of my favorite casualisms: prolly. Worth a read!

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July 4, 2016

Who Can Use 'Whom'?

It seems anytime "whom" or "whomever" is positioned as the subject of one clause and the object of another, people mess it up. And by people, I mean professional writers and editors.

The latest comes from the Los Angeles Times:

"Edric Dashell Gross, whom police said is a transient known to frequent Santa Monica, was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder."

Here's my column explaining why that "whom" should have been "who."

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June 27, 2016

Rumors of the Death of the Period Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

In case you missed it, a recent New York Times piece has proclaimed that the period "may be dying." But if you read what the experts quoted in the story actually said, that's not quite it. Periods are out of vogue in one- or two-sentence text messages, as well as in 140-characters-or-fewer tweets. Fascinatingly, when a tweet or text does include a period, the punctuation takes on a new connotation: snark.

But that doesn't mean the period's dying. Decide for yourself. Here's the Times piece.

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June 20, 2016

Commas, Subject-Relative Pronoun Agreement and More

Some questions that made it into my recent column touch on serial commas, where to put commas and periods relative to quotation marks, and whether "Betty is one of those people who like(s) cupcakes" takes the plural or singular verb. All those answers and more here.

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