September 30, 2013

More Confusion About Sentence-ending Prepositions

Recently, after I mentioned in a column that there’s no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, a reader e-mailed the following:

<<Regarding ending sentences with prepositions … We should avoid the practice because ending a sentence on a preposition almost always creates a passive sentence.>>

Huh?

I wrote back, trying to get to the bottom of what he was talking about -- and trying to explain passives. He must have seen that his grasp of passives wasn't what he thought it was, because he backed off on that argument. But he stood firm against sentence-ending prepositions.

<<Sentences that end on prepositions are longer, less comprehensible and less exciting than necessary. For example: That is the table the book is on. The book is on the table.>>

Sigh. I shouldn’t be shocked to see such a twisted grasp of the issue. And I shouldn't have been shocked that it came from someone who identified himself as a professional writer who taught English. But I was.

Yes, “That is the table the book is on” is a clunkier sentence than “The book is on the table.” But the clunkiness is not caused by a sentence-ending preposition. It’s caused by a desire to say something quite different from the other sentence. In the longer sentence, the point is that THAT is the table. The whole first clause is dedicated to clarifying which table we’re talking about. “The book is on the table” says something else.

So I e-mailed him the following examples:

Who are you blowing kisses to? / To whom are you blowing kisses?

A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered her with. / A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which he murdered her.

What are you talking about? / About what are you talking?

In none of these does a sentence-ending preposition cause a passive. (A passive, as I tried to explain to him, occurs when the object of a transitive verb, like “dinner” in “Joe cooked dinner,” is made the grammatical subject of the sentence, as in “Dinner was cooked by Joe.")

Nor does a sentence-ending preposition in these examples create sentences “longer, less comprehensible and less exciting than necessary.”

He wrote back that the claw hammer example (which, by the way, I borrowed from Strunk & White) would be better as just “He murdered her with a claw hammer, not an ax.” I agreed. But that wasn't the point. The point was that, some sentences work best with a preposition at the end. And there's no reason to object when they do.

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September 23, 2013

Of Snobs and Quotation Marks

As much as I complain about grammar snobs, I get where they’re coming from. You go to the trouble to learn something, you buy that it’s important, then you spend the rest of your life watching people trampling all over this “important” rule.

That’s why they jump so fast to correct you when you end a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive or use “between” where they think you should use “among” -- or whatever rule they have the hots for.

I’ll confess I’m not immune to those impulses. And working as an editor and proofreader makes it worse. It’s my job to stay on high alert for errors, crouched and ready to pounce.

And though I’m convinced that language peevishness is a very bad idea, I still can’t help but be irked by a few things I consider wrong, like the punctuation in the following sentence:

My wife likes to use the word “fantastic”, though I prefer “wonderful”.

In British English, that would be correct. But in American English, periods and commas go inside the quotation marks. And, no, it doesn’t matter whether they’re conceptually part of the quotation. It’s a style convention decided long ago for aesthetic reasons.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know this rule. Instead, when faced with a sentence like the one above, people try to apply logic instead. But the rule isn’t logical. (Especially when you consider that there’s a different rule for quotation marks and exclamation points. Those can go before or after a closing quotation mark, depending on whether they pertain to the whole sentence or just the quoted part.)

So virtually all the writing you see on the Internet that isn’t professionally edited gets it wrong.

As a result, the rule is probably dying. But it’s not dead yet. And until it is, seeing a period or comma after a closing quotation mark will continue to bring out in me something I wish wasn’t there.

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September 16, 2013

Mysterious Plurals

Sometimes I think that the only difference between me and all the people who feel utterly overwhelmed by grammar is my overdeveloped inclination to open a dictionary. This idea hit home recently after a friend e-mailed me with a question about plurals.

This friend is not just a professional writer but also a longtime copy editor. In fact, she’s the person I ask to cover for me on some of my freelance jobs when I go on vacation. She knows her way around the language. But she felt she needed my help recently. She was proofreading a manuscript of a novel for a friend and needed to know how to form the plural of “ho,” as in the slang term for “whore.”

“Any thoughts on this?” she asked.

I didn’t want to think. I wanted to know. So I went to Merriam-Webster’s website, m-w.com. (I chose Merriam-Webster over Webster’s New World, which at yourdictionary.com, because I knew she was editing a book and books are usually edited according to the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style, which uses MW as its go-to dictionary.)

I’ll confess, I was a little surprised to see what happened when I typed in “ho.” I got this.

ho – plural hos or hoes – slang: whore

There it was.

Now, dictionaries always list their preferred forms first. So from this we know that Merriam-Webster considers hos the standard plural. But personally, if I had the leeway, I’d go with hoes. Its similarity to the garden tool makes it easier to recognize the sound, unlike hos, which looks more like it would rhyme with Ross.

I told my friend so. She agreed. And I got to be the answer lady, just because I knew where to look for an answer.

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September 9, 2013

*Right and Wrong vs. Rightly and Wrongly

Here are two weird words: wrong and right. And when I say they’re weird, I mean their adverb forms.

Do it right. Don’t do it wrong.

In both those sentences, right and wrong are functioning adverbially. They’re modifying the verb do. But neither ends with ly.

That’s not weird in and of itself. There are lots of “flat adverbs” in English. For example, if you look up quick and slow in the dictionary, you’ll see they can be used as adverbs in place of quickly and slowly.

Think quick.

Drive slow.

But right and wrong are different because they’re actually more standard as adverbs than their ly counterparts: rightly and wrongly.

Do it rightly and Don't do it wrongly both sound weird compared to Do it right and Don't do it wrong.

Of course, glaringly obvious reality doesn't stop everyone. Some are too eager to leap to assumptions you're wrong, like the guy who e-scolded me years ago when I wrote the sentence: Be careful not to use it wrong.

Here was his reply:

Dear June,

It seems that you do not agree that only adverbs can modify verbs. ... One cannot use anything "wrong," only "wrongly." "Incorrectly" would be a more appropriate adverb to use. ... In your incorrect use of "wrong" there is no doubt that you are wrong. I therefor challenge you to admit your mistake in a follow-up article for all to read. I am not holding my breath."

More amazing: He was one of two people who wrote to spank me for that "error."

I did, in fact, print their remarks in a subsequent column (without too much snickering at the misspelled "therefor"), with the note:

Please open your dictionaries to the word "wrong." Please see that, following the first cluster of definitions under "adj.," adjective, comes the abbreviation "adv." Adverb. "Wrong" is an adverb. And you are both wrong.

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September 2, 2013

Poor Headline Capitalization: A Major Tell

If there’s one thing that can tell me, in a single glance, that a news article was not edited by an experienced pro, it’s the headline capitalization.

Here’s an example from a Yahoo Finance headline I saw a while back:

Stocks Pull Back: Why it Might Not Last

One look at that headline and I know that someone in the organization doesn’t know what he or she is doing. The reason: the lowercase I in “it.”

A lot of editing styles capitalize the first letter of most words in a headline, but they make exceptions for some prepositions, articles, and conjunctions – especially short ones of three or fewer letters – unless they come at the beginning or end of the headline.

“Simpson Back in Jail” – Here, the word “in” is lowercase because it’s a short preposition that doesn’t happen to be the first or last word. But if "in" were first or last word, the "i" would be capitalized: “In Jails, Healthcare Suffers” or in “Sheen Decries the Mess He’s In.” (Not great headlines, I know. They’re just for illustration.)

Now, these capitalization rules aren’t a matter of right and wrong. This is a style thing. But when you’re making a clear effort to follow this style, you don’t want the world to see that you don’t know how.

In the case of our Yahoo headline, the editor was probably used to seeing “Simpson Back in Jail” and gave “it” the same treatment as “in.” That was a mistake.

"In" is a preposition. "It" is a pronoun.

I see the same mistake with “is.” Just because it’s a two-letter word starting with I doesn’t mean it should be treated like “in.” "Is" is a verb.

Some online publications just skirt the whole issue by capitalizing every single letter, including all the prepositions, articles and conjunctions: “Simpson In Jail And Out Of The Way.” At least in this style you don’t have to test your editors’ knowledge of prepositions, conjunctions and articles. But it sure looks ugly.

The best course is just to learn the basic parts of speech before you publish.

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August 26, 2013

*"There's" Before a Plural

Here’s another thing I can’t help but wince at, even though I know grammar wincing is pointless:

There’s a lot of people outside.

I don’t know how I got so invested in the idea that that should be There are a lot of people outside.  But I, unwisely, let it rub me the wrong way every time I hear “there’s” before a plural.

Here’s the idea:

There’s is a contraction of “there is.” Is is singular. It goes with a singular subject, the dog is, versus are which is for a plural subject, the dogs are.

Sentences like There is a dog outside or There are dogs outside are kind of special. Notice that the grammatical subject of both is there. So theoretically the verb shouldn’t change. But in fact, these sentences are unusual. In There is a dog outside, there is functioning as a pronoun, but the real intended subject of the verb isn’t there. It’s dog. This sentence really means “A dog is outside.”

Grammarians label this “the existential there.” The word there is the grammatical subject and dog is something called a notional subject. It’s sort of the intended subject even though it’s been upstaged from the subject position by the pronoun there.

In these sentences, the verb is supposed to agree with the notional subject. So There are dogs and There is a dog are both correct because the verbs match the notional subject.

But over the years, there’s has become a handy shorthand for either there is or there are, especially when the next word to follow is some modifier like a lot, which has a singular flavor.

That's why There’s a lot of dogs outside sounds much better than There’s dogs outside.

Either way, though, you can get away it: “Like other grammatical subjects, [there] often determines the number concord, taking a singular verb even though the notional subject is plural” says the Oxford English Grammar.  “This usage is common in informal speech.”

In other words, I should loosen up a bit on this one.

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August 19, 2013

Co-worker vs. Coworker

Publishing can’t get its act together on whether to hyphenate co-worker. But there does seem to be a trend toward no hyphen and it couldn’t be uglier to me.

Here’s what AP says:

co- Retain the hyphen when forming nouns, adjectives and verbs that indicate occupation or status: co-author, co-chairman, co-defendant, co-host, co-owner, co-partner, co-pilot, co-respondent (in a divorce suit), co-signer, co-sponsor, co-star, co-worker.

Use no hyphen in other combinations: coed, coeducation, coequal, coexist, coexistence, cooperate, cooperative, coordinate, coordination.

Elsewhere in the guide, AP encourages hyphenation of compounds that create double vowels, like re-enter. So under co-, AP notes that coordinate and cooperate are exceptions. I assume that’s because they’ve become standard words in English and are no longer considered compounds as much as they are freestanding words.

The Chicago Manual of Style, in its 15th edition, left a lot of wiggle room in their rules, basically allowing users to choose between coworker and co-worker. But its 16th edition takes a firmer stance.

Compounds formed with prefixes are normally closed, whether they are nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.

Chicago of course makes some exceptions. Most notable is that you should use a hyphen to separate “combinations of letters or syllables that might cause a misreading.” One of the examples they give is “pro-life.”

Yet under the entry for the prefix co-, Chicago actually includes coworker as an example of a word that does not take a hyphen.

Personally, I don’t see why prolife would be any more troublesome than coworker. In the latter, you’re actually spelling the word “cow” with your first syllable, whereas pro plus L doesn't make a separate word.

I don’t normally argue with style guides’ rules. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just referees making calls – many of them just for consistency’s sake. And I don’t consider style issues particularly important – after all, if serial commas were so important, everyone would have agreed on their utility long ago. Yet serial commas are optional, so I’m fine with letting style guides tell me whether or not to use them.

But coworker is different. It’s ugly, weird and, well, cow-like. Me, I’ll use co-worker every time I have an option, which, if you know how to read between the lines of a style guide, is pretty often.

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August 12, 2013

Color Me Fuchsia

Here’s a word that came up in an article I was editing the other day: fuschia. The article was describing the color of something, and I blasted right through the sentence without a second thought. When I got to the end of the article, I did what I always do: I read it again. (In copy editing classes, we teach students to always read everything at least twice. Do this enough and you’ll see why. It’s pretty much impossible to catch every error and every questionable issue on the first pass.)

Reading through the article a second time, I noticed a few little things that needed questioning. But I didn’t hesitate at “fuschia.”

Finally, just before I was about to send the story back to the editor, I did another thing I always do: I ran spell-check.

Say what you will about spell-check. I know it’s downright stupid at times. Its ignorance of how prefixes and suffixes work is especially annoying: Spell-check doesn’t get that a prefix or suffix can create words that aren’t in the dictionary but are nonetheless perfectly legitimate. So it tells you that perfectly fine words are wrong.

But, weaknesses aside, spell-check has one strength: it can scrutinize every letter of every word much more easily than a human can. And guess what it stopped on: fuschia. So I fixed it and took another quick look at the rest of the document. Then, out of reflex, I hit spell-check again. It stopped on just one word: fuchia, which is how I had “corrected” the spelling of fuschia.

I got it wrong when I wasn't trying, then I got it wrong again when I was.

Turns out, it’s spelled fuchsia, which I will ever after remember as “fuk-see-ya.”

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August 5, 2013

*Adjectives as Noise

Adjectives are controversial words. Rightly so. About four times out of five, you can actually improve a sentence by cutting one out:

Joe is dating a beautiful supermodel.

Joe is dating a supermodel.

Clearly, the noun “supermodel” does not need to be propped up by an adjective. It’s plenty powerful enough on its own.

Naturally, adjectives exist for a reason. You can’t just take the adjective out of the sentence: “For a supermodel, she wasn’t particularly beautiful.” But especially before a noun, an adjective can come off like a weak attempt to convince your reader of something he should be able to decide for himself.

So adjectives have enough problems of their own. Yet marketers, it seems, are determined to bludgeon them into complete meaninglessness. They do this by using adjectives as mere noise. In marketers’ hands, adjectives are often born just to be ignored.

Take, for example, the Kashi brand cereal flavor in my cupboard right now: Island Vanilla.

Really, Kashi? Is that supposed to mean anything other than “vanilla plus some extra syllables to make it sound like something more than plain-old vanilla”?

Here’s another Kashi flavor I like: Harvest Wheat. Again, what is the modifier telling me about what I can expect when I open the box? Nothing. In all the memory banks of my mind, there’s nothing of substance that conveys the difference between “harvest wheat” and plain-old “wheat.”

Kashi isn’t alone in this practice, not by a long shot.

Ragu has a flavor called Garden Vegetable, as opposed to what? Factory Vegetable?

Luden’s makes Wild Cherry cough drops, which we can only presume are superior to those awful farmed cherries.

And Kettle Chips come in this flavor: Backyard Barbeque. (You can almost taste the chain-link fence and kiddie pool.)

And what might a blind taste test tell us about the difference between chocolate and Dutch chocolate, between vanilla and French vanilla?

Examples of this kind of hot-air blowing are too numerous to count. And while it’s standard marketing procedure, I can’t help but think we should all be wee bit insulted by it. When marketers slap meaningless words onto product names in this fashion, it’s worse than telling people “Don’t think.” It’s telling people: “We know you don’t think and we’re so confident about it that we’re going to rub your noses in it.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little hypersensitive. But it’s still an insult to consumers and an act of violence against adjectives.

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July 29, 2013

*The Poor, the Meek, the Red: Nominal Adjectives

Think for a moment about the following adjectives: poor, downtrodden, wealthy, well-to-do, meek.

They’re definitely adjectives, right?

Well, here’s a cool thing about English: Sometimes you can use adjectives as nouns (and, I should add, vice-versa). And when you do, there’s even a name for them. They’re called nominal adjectives.

That is, poor people can be referred to as the poor. And that can work as a noun in a sentence: The poor often live in bad school districts.

Ditto that for wealthy. The wealthy often live in good school districts.

And everyone knows who shall inherit the earth: the meek.

Even the following use can be considered an example of a nominal adjective in use:

I tried on the blue shirt but bought the red. Here, the red is functioning as a noun -- the object of the verb bought -- even though it’s just shorthand for the red shirt.

That’s a little different because the red isn’t as substantive a noun as the poor, which is well-known to be a thing (“things” being members in good standing of the group known as nouns.)

And there you have yet another interesting (to some people) trait about the English language …

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