August 31, 2015

Question Marks and Exclamations with Quotation Marks

A longtime reader of my column, a man named Steve in Moreau, New York, has mentioned multiple times in his e-mails that he doesn’t want to follow the American rule for putting periods and commas inside quotation marks. Like many people, he prefers to put the period or comma after a closing quotation mark in situations like:

I use the word “fabulous”.

In American English, that’s wrong. The period or comma comes before the closing quote mark regardless of the content of the quotation. Of course, almost no one knows that. So almost no one writing online does it right. So it’s just a matter of time before we’re doing it this way (which, by the way, is how it’s done in British English).

Steve was firmly committed to this method until, recently, when asking me a question about numbers, he wrote:

Should I have written, "Eight hundred comes to mind?"

Steve continued.

Please note my acquiescence to your rule that I challenged, that quotation marks must always go on the outside of a sentence.

Steve went on to say that he would have rather put the question mark after the closing quotation mark because the quoted part was not a question. Instead, it came within a larger question. So logic would put the question mark after the quote mark.

Would it kill the grammar police to let me clarify that by putting the question mark outside the quotation mark?

I blame myself. Here’s how I replied:

All that stuff I say about periods and commas next to quotation marks? It doesn't apply to question marks and exclamation points. Those follow a different system -- the basic logic that you prefer. If the quoted matter is a question, the question mark goes inside. If the quoted matter is a statement within a question, the question mark goes outside.

Correct: Alfred E. Neuman's catch phrase is "What, me worry?"
Correct: Should I have said, "800 comes to mind"?
Correct: Bart Simpson's catch phrase is "Ay, Caramba!"
Correct: I hate, hate, hate the word "prolly"!

So aesthetics rule with periods and commas. Logic rules with question marks and exclamation points. And because question marks and exclamation points add information to the words, which periods and commas don't, this system makes sense. Welcome to the hell between my ears.

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August 24, 2015

Getting One's Fix

Here’s a weird thing I often have to fix. See if you can spot it in this passage.

The amusement park offers many adrenalin-pumping rides, from the death-defying Zipper to the classic flume, complete with splash landing.

See anything there you’d fix?

If not, don’t feel bad. It’s an odd one. It’s “adrenalin.” I change that to “adrenaline.”  In the dictionary I must follow in most of my editing work, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, “adrenalin” used in this sense isn’t strictly an error. But it is inferior to “adrenaline.”

Why? Because, according to Webster’s, the spelling that ends with an N is a trade name for epinephrine. It starts with a capital letter: Adrenalin.

The term that ends in E is usually the correct generic term for the hormone that gives you a rush on a roller-coaster or a boost of strength when you’re in real danger. The definition leaves a little room for debate, however. It says that the generic term is USUALLY spelled “adrenaline.” So you could interpret that to mean that the alternative is another, albeit less popular, correct spelling. But me, I go follow the dictionary’s cue and stick with “adrenaline.”

Merriam-Webster’s, by the way, isn’t as flexible. In that dictionary, “Adrenalin” is always a trade name and always starts with a capital letter. The one that ends with an e, “adrenaline,” is the generic term.

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August 17, 2015

Where to Put Your 'Only'

Here’s a reminder about the word “only”: You can put it wherever you like. But some people don’t know you can put it wherever you like, so they’ll think you’re wrong any time you don’t put it where they like.

The myth – and it’s one I, myself, once believed – is that “only” must be placed immediately next to the word it modifies.

If this were true, “I only want candy” would mean that wanting is the sole thing you do with candy. You don’t buy it. You don’t make it. You don’t even eat it. You only want it.

According to this belief, you would have to say “I want only candy” when you mean that candy is the only thing you want. You don’t want cookies. You don’t want fish and chips. You want only candy.

The nice thing about this idea is that it helps you remember that, sometimes, putting “only” next to the word it modifies can erase all doubt about your meaning. And I like the idea of laser precision in language. But you don’t have to. There’s no rule that says “only” must be placed right next to the word it modifies. On this matter, the only real rule is clarity. So on this matter, as in many others, your only real obligation is to the reader.

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August 10, 2015

Sneaked vs. Snuck

Until just over a century ago, if you did the thing we called sneak, but you did it yesterday, you would have sneaked.

This follows the pattern all English verbs use to form their past tenses. Today I walk, yesterday I walked. Today I bake, yesterday I baked. Today I peek, yesterday I peeked. So for the longest time it was Today I sneak, yesterday I sneaked.

But sometime in the late 1800s, people started replacing sneaked with snuck. Today I sneaked, yesterday I snuck. And here’s the weird part: No one knows why, according to the blog at Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. People just started using it.

That kind of thing happens in language all the time. A lot of our regular verbs were once irregular, but people started applying the "ed" formula we see in walked, baked, and peeked. It’s a natural process.

But snuck is different for one very important reason: No other English verb follows this pattern. So it’s like people who needed to use the verb “peek” in the past tense began to eschew "peeked" in favor of "puck." No one knows where that “uck” ending came from or why.

All they know is that, in the past 120 years, “snuck” has gained solid legitimacy as an alternative to “sneaked.” Merriam Webster’s even reports that “over the past 120-odd years, ‘snuck’ has become by some estimations the more common past-tense form. Some people object to the sneaky upstart – especially speakers in British English – but it appears regularly and without commentary in respected publications on both sides of the pond.”

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August 3, 2015

Stannis on 'Fewer'

There’s a JPEG out there on the Internet spoofing “Game of Thrones” character Stannis Baratheon as a grammar snob. If you’re very behind in your viewing, here’s your spoiler alert: a spoiler is coming.

Stannis’s young daughter, Shireen, is tied to a post and set on fire. Wailing, the little girl asks, “Why are you sacrificing me after spending less than three weeks stuck here?”

In the next panel, her father, whose affection for proper grammar has been, until this point, eclipsed by love for his little girl, replies: “Fewer.”

I’ll admit I laughed. But in fact, whoever wrote the joke had his facts wrong. Shireen’s grammar was fine – even if you’re taking a very conservative approach to less and fewer.

Why? Because “fewer” modifies countable, plural things – individual units. Fewer items, fewer calories, fewer side effects. But Shireen wasn’t talking about weeks as individual units. She was talking about thing that is singular in concept: a single duration of time. And singulars are modified by “less.”

Fewer than three weeks would mean exactly two weeks or exactly one week or exactly no weeks. It couldn’t mean two weeks and six days. Or two weeks and five days. Or two weeks and four days and nine hours.  So unless Shireen had some reason to think of each week as significant in its distinction from the other weeks, she meant it as a single span of time. And anything less would be “less than three weeks,” not “fewer than three weeks.”

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July 27, 2015

A Reminder About 'And Me'

I have a friend to whom I’ve explained several times (she asked) when to use “and I” and when to use “and me.” She’s a smart friend. Think: high school valedictorian. Yet she still gets it wrong a lot. So for everyone who has trouble remembering the rules, here’s a reminder on “and I.”

If you want to be grammatically correct, “and I” should never be used as the object of a verb or a preposition. (If you want to be less formal, “and I” is defended by some as idiomatic in object uses.)

An easy way to get this right is to try dropping the other person. Consider:

I’m so glad you came to visit Penny and I/me.

Now try dropping Penny.

I'm so glad you came to visit I/me.

A no-brainer, right? It's me.

The grammar shows why: The verb is visit. The people following the verb -- Penny and you -- are the object of that verb. The pronoun "me" is an object. The pronoun "I" is a subject. So as the object of the verb "visit," you want “Penny and me.”

You could also try plugging in the subject pronoun “we” and the object pronoun “us.” Would you say “I’m so glad you came to visit we” or “I’m so glad you came to visit us”?

It’s "us," no question. And because “us” is an object form, that’s your clue that you want an object here: “Penny and me.”

Another one:

We tried ballroom dancing, but we learned really fast that’s not for Stan and I/me.

Here a preposition, “for,” is calling the shots. The noun phrase that follows is the object of the preposition, so it has to be in object form: “It’s not for Stan and me.” The litmus test again proves it: “It’s not for I/m.” It’s clear that “I” just doesn’t work here. “Me,” the object pronoun, does. So you want the object form: Stan and me.

Another:

I know you think that Larry and I/me were lying when we said we couldn’t attend.

Don’t let the verb “think” fool you. What we have here is not an object. It’s a subject. “Larry and I were lying.” Why? Because it’s performing the action in the verb “were lying” and also because the word “that” before it renders the whole noun phrase not an object but a subordinate clause. Clauses need subjects -- subjects like "Larry and I."

So just remember: “Me” and “us” are objects. “I” and “we” are subjects. Whenever “I” sounds wrong on its own, that's your clue that it's wrong with another person, too.

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July 20, 2015

Which Word Governs the Verb?

Here’s a sentence someone posted on a sports message board a while back. “I’m one of those proper-grammar assholes who uses ‘literally’ correctly.”

In classic Internet style, another poster followed up by saying that that this sentence itself is grammatically incorrect because the verb “uses” should be “use.”

The original poster fired back: “The verb ‘use’ is correct the way I used it, because the noun in that sentence is not ‘asshole,’ it is ‘one.’ The phrase ‘of those proper-grammar assholes’ is a prepositional phrase.”

To prove his point, he posted this from a grammar website: “The noun at the end of a prepositional phrase will never be the subject of a verb. For example: ‘A list of factors are at play.’ Here, the subject is not factors. It is list. Therefore, the verb should be singular in number.”

Sigh.

That’s wrong. But, perhaps more important, it’s moot: The real issue in that message board post has nothing to do with the prepositional phrase. It has to do with the word “who.”

But let’s start with the prepositional phrase business. When you have a singular noun like “flock” followed by the preposition “of,” followed by a plural noun like “birds,” a lot of people believe that the verb that follows should be singular because it’s governed by the first of those two nouns. According to this view, it’s correct to say “a flock of birds is overhead” but wrong to say “a flock of birds are overhead.”

That’s incorrect. Either noun can have a verb. Sometimes it makes more sense for the plural noun to be the subject of the verb -- even if it’s the object of a prepositional phrase -- as in “A flock of birds are fighting amongst themselves.” This plural verb is acceptable.

If that weren’t true -- if the website that the original poster cited had been correct --  you couldn’t say, “A bunch of teenagers are partying in the park.” You’d have to say, “A bunch of teenagers is partying in the park.”

But that has nothing to do with the original poster’s error. In his sentence, “I’m one of those proper-grammar assholes who uses ‘literally’ correctly,” the word governing the verb is neither “one” nor “assholes.” It’s “who.”

“Who” always agrees in number with its antecedent. Think about “the men who are coming tomorrow” with “the man who is coming tomorrow.” The subject of the verb in both cases is “who,” yet it changes depending on whether its antecedent is plural or singular.

If our original poster had written or “one of those assholes uses,” then we could talk about whether the verb must agree with “one” or “assholes.”

But instead he wrote “one of those assholes who uses.” That “who” changes everything because it’s the only possible subject of the verb. Again, “who” can be singular or plural, depending entirely on its antecedent. Our original sentence was about “assholes who use.” “Who” is plural because “assholes” is plural.

So the poster should have written “I’m one of those proper-grammar assholes who use ‘literally’ correctly,” not “uses.”

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July 13, 2015

A Pivotal Moment in the History of Lexicography?

I stumbled across an interesting old Los Angeles Times article about the state of dictionary publishing. The 1993 piece describes a new direction taken by the dictionary publishers: massive publicity campaigns, some to the tune of $2.5 million. (Who knew any books ever sold enough to recoup that kind of spending blitz?)

The article seems to mark an important moment in the language: a time when lexicographers were forced to think of things other than lexicography: namely, attention-getting. Nothing’s wrong with that, of course, as long as it’s not tainting the lexicography itself. But more recent developments suggest it could be.

Take, for example, the recent addition in Merriam-Webster’s of the word “youthquake.” That’s a great entry for UrbanDictionary or any other source that compiles new coinages and of-the moment slang. But that’s not a real dictionary’s job. Folks who write dictionaries are supposed to follow a procedure built on unbiased scholarship to determine whether a word has gained enough acceptance in the language to warrant entry in the dictionary. I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear people using "youthquake" enough to suggest it’s a legit addition to the language.

What I do see are CNN headlines announcing wacky new words added to dictionaries -- announcements that, no doubt, started with press releases issued by the dictionary publishers.

I’m about as accepting of language change as a person can be. If the dictionary tells me that one of the most vulgar or upsetting words in the English language can now be used to mean “hat,” I’ll accept it, provided it's based on untainted research.  But if it looks like someone fudged the research a bit just so he could put out an attention-grabbing press release, that’s a problem. It means that something we long took for granted -- pure lexicography, an honest, scholarly snapshot of the language and how it changes -- is in danger.

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July 6, 2015

Hopefully

There are still a lot of people holding on to an old superstition about “hopefully.” Here’s how it goes: “Hopefully,” they say, means “in a hopeful manner.” So it should only be used to describe actions done in this manner.

Emma hopefully mailed out ten resumes.

Hopefully, John dialed Marcia’s number.

Therefore, the idea goes, it can’t be used as a sentence adverb to mean “I hope” or “It is to be hoped that.”

Hopefully, it will rain tomorrow, in this view, is nonsense because rain can’t fall in a hopeful manner.

If this seems ridiculous, that’s because it is. The so-called correct use -- Emma hopefully mailed out ten resumes -- is almost nonexistent. By far the most common way it’s used is as a sentence adverb to mean “I hope” or the like. And yes, common use counts. Remember: that’s where correctness comes from in the first place.

But even if you don’t like that idea, there’s a better reason you can use hopefully to mean “I hope”: The dictionary. Look up "hopefully" in just about any dictionary, modern or old, and you'll see that one of its definitions is "it is to be hoped that."

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June 29, 2015

'Baited' Breath

A recent Google search for the term “baited breath” turned up 431,000 hits, including this headline at CNBC. Fascinating. This means one of two things: Either the people who wrote this term didn’t know how to spell it or a whole bunch of people have been eating night crawlers.

OK, that may be a wee bit unfair. Perhaps we shouldn’t be harsh on people for not knowing a word that, outside of one rare expression, hardly even exists: “bated” (unless you live in the world depicted in the movie “Idiocracy,” in which case we’ve moved on to a whole different subject).

But if you note the similarity to the word “abate,” meaning to put an end to something, you’re off on the right foot.

To say that you waited with bated breath means that the anticipation was so intense that you stopped breathing. Stopped, like in abated. That’s the root of the term.

The fact that this expression is so often paired with the verb “wait” -- he waited with bated -- makes it even easier to get it wrong by just repeating the vowel pattern to get "baited." Do a Google search for “sneak peak” and you’ll see what I mean.

So just remember, bated breath is stopped breath because you’ve abated it. That’s why, with “baited breath,” something always smells fishy.

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