March 11, 2013

*Sleight of Hand

The term “slight of hand” got about 730,000 hits in a recent Google search. That’s a shame because the expression is “sleight of hand.”

Actually, it’s not as big a shame as it may seem. A lot of those “slight of hand” hits were pointing out the error of spelling it “slight.” But many other were errors: “Best slight of hand you’ll ever see,” boasts one YouTube video.

A particularly notable slighting of "sleight" appeared in a link to a Daily Mail headline, “Magician used slight of hand skills to steal money while working at the cheese counter at Harrods.” What’s interesting about this one is that, when you click the link, you see that the headline was changed to say that the magician “used talent to take money with one hand and hide it with the other.”

Neither “slight” nor “slight” comes up anywhere in the story. So the editors caught the error after the article was posted and, in fixing it, decided to steer clear of the whole mess.

Don’t make this mistake. Trickery involving sneaking movements is “sleight of hand.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, sleight is a noun meaning deceitful craftiness, stratagem, dexterity or skill. Of course, you never hear it used that way. The only time it comes up is in the term “sleight of hand,” which is probably why the dictionary has a listing for the whole term.

sleight of hand

1

a: a cleverly executed trick or deception

b: a conjuring trick requiring manual dexterity

2

a: skill and dexterity in conjuring tricks

b: adroitness in deception

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March 4, 2013

Under Way vs. Underway

Here’s a word I can never seem to get comfortable with: underway.

Back when I first started editing for newspapers, I learned it was always two words. Or possibly one. Then I learned that whatever I had learned the first time was wrong. Then I learned that it was a style thing.

Then I learned that it was a dictionary thing. Then I learned it was a part-of-speech thing.

Then I learned that I had better look it up.

In the publishing industry’s two preferred dictionaries, underway is one word. But if you look closely, you notice a little “adj” next to it. This one-word form is an adjective and only an adjective. Therefore it modifies a noun. An underway process. An underway voyage.

But, really, how often do you hear it used that way? Rarely.

More often, you hear it in sentences like: The voyage is under way. The renovations are under way. But in these sentences, it does seem so much like and adjective that’s modifying a noun. It seems more like a sentence element telling us when something is going on.

The party is here.

The meeting is tomorrow.

The time is now.

The meeting will happen soon.

Now, to understand under way, you have to understand how here, tomorrow, now, and soon are functioning as adverbs.

Remember that adverbs don’t just modify verbs. They answer the questions when? and where? too.

(For more on that, here’s a podcast: http://www.grammarunderground.com/lesser-known-adverbs.html)

And if you look up here, tomorrow, now, and soon in the dictionary, you’ll see that they’re all classified as adverbs when they do this job.

So in The voyage is under way, unless the writer’s emphasis in on the adjective concept (an underway voyage), chances are it’s being used adverbially. And because dictionaries don’t list the one word form as an adverb, you have to use two.

And that, in turn, would explain why both the Associated Press Stylebook and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage’s recommend that you use two words in these senses.

under way -- Two words in virtually all uses. The project is under way. The naval maneuvers are under way. One word only when used as an adjective before a noun in a nautical sense: an underway flotilla.

So basically, it’s almost always two words. What did I think was so hard about that?

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February 25, 2013

*Faulty Predication

An inauguration is where we get to see the president sworn in.

How do you like that sentence? Does anything strike you as a little off? How about this one:

A hurricane is when wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour.

or

The purpose of toothpaste was invented to help people care for their teeth at home.

When I’m editing newspaper articles, from time to time I find myself staring at a sentence like one of these and scratching my head. The sensation is a little like getting rear-ended at a traffic light. You just sit there blinking, trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world, momentarily unable to remember how the world is supposed to be.

There’s a term for this problem. It’s called faulty predication. And it’s explained like this: Faulty predication occurs anytime a subject doesn’t make sense with the verb. More precisely, it happens when the subject can’t logically do or be whatever the verb says it’s doing or being.

Let’s look at our first example. An inauguration is where we get to see the president sworn in.I chose this one because it’s nice and fuzzy. Is it okay? Is it not?

The subject is “an inauguration” and the verb “is” says that it is “where.” Technically, that doesn’t make sense because an inauguration isn’t a place. But can you stretch the meaning to “where” to something like “an event at which,” giving us “An inauguration is an event at which we get to see the president”? Possibly. And you certainly could make the argument that the reader understands what you mean. But it’s pretty sloppy. I wouldn’t let it stand in an article I was editing.

Ditto that for “A hurricane is when.” Technically, a hurricane isn’t a when. More precise would be “a hurricane occurs when” or “a hurricane is what happens when."

Our final example, “The purpose of toothpaste was invented” isn’t as forgivable. It’s illogical. The purpose was not invented. The purpose of toothpaste is … Toothpaste was invented for the purpose of … There are a number of ways to extract a logical statement out of this sentence, as long as you’re focused on the illogic of saying the purpose was invented.

The only way to avoid faulty predication mistakes is to stay vigilant and, especially, to reread what you’ve written.  When in doubt, just ask yourself: Can my subject really do what I’m saying it’s doing? If not, look for a better way to make your point.

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February 18, 2013

It Grows the Brand

In an old “Futurama” epsisode, a character known only as Eighties Guy who had been cryogenically frozen (guess when) is reanimated. He takes impressionable delivery boy Fry under his wing and together they try to take over Planet Express, the intergalactic package-delivery firm Fry works for.

In no time, Fry is wearing ‘80s-style suspenders and talking business nonsense. When the pair create a ridiculously over-the-top TV commercial for Planet Express, Fry smugly defends it on the basis that “It grows the brand.”

The line is meant to make Fry look like an idiot, and it succeeds. But, setting aside the question of whether it’s silly to use these business clichés, we can ask: Is that even correct? Can you use “grow” that way?

Let’s find out.

In case you don’t recall, most verbs can be classified as transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs take objects. Lou watched TV. Betty knits sweaters. The workers built a house. Objects “receive the action” of the verb. In other words, they’re the things the verb is acting upon.

Intransitive verbs are actions without objects. Karen slept. Bert walks. We spoke.

But, of course, many verbs are both. Lou watched. Betty knits. Bert walks the dog. We spoke the truth.

We all know “grow” as an intransitive verb. Flowers grow. Children grow. Love grows. The question is, can it function transitively? Can it act directly upon something? And to get an answer, we need look no further than the dictionary.

Merriam-Webster lists “grow” first as an intransitive verb. But right under that listing, it says this:

transitive verb

1. a: to cause to grow: ‘grow wheat.’ b: to let grow on the body: ‘grew a beard’

2. to promote the development of: ‘start a business and grow it successfully’

So yes, you can say “grow the brand.” But that doesn’t mean you should.

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February 11, 2013

A Spelling Shortcut

A lot of the typos I see occur because a writer guessed wrongly that a term was two words instead of one: line up, pick up (as in truck), home owner, and on and on.

These types of mistakes aren’t egregious or shameful by any stretch. But they still require correction. They’re still, in some cases, mistakes. And the often harmless habit of writing a one-word term as two words can sometimes go really bad (titmouse, anyone?).

So here’s a tip: Whenever you’re not sure whether a noun is one word or two, and you’re not inclined (for whatever reason) to take the time to find out, just make it a habit of typing it as one word.

That will improve the odds that spell-check can help you.  If you type skincare as one word, a good spellchecker might flag it (though mine, for some reason,  does not). But spell checker would never flag the word skin or the word care. A compound made of two words squished together is less likely to pass muster with spell-check than the two halves we already know are valid words.

It could tell you that your word needs to be split up, but it will never tell you that two words like over and priced need to be squished together.

Of course, this is just for rushed writing that doesn’t need to be perfect. If you need to meet a higher quality standard, first check the one-word form in the dictionary, where you’ll see that a pickup is a noun meaning a truck or a retrieval of a package or a person. Then also check the root word, in this case pick, where you could see that it’s often paired with up to create a slightly different meaning.

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February 4, 2013

The Worst Kinds of Typos ...

Most of the errors I see in print are in articles I’m editing. It's my job to find them. So I've never shocked to see that mistakes happen. Writers, even very good writers, make mistakes they know better than to make.

I’m talking about the absent-minded typos like “your” in place of “you’re” made by people who have demonstrated many times over that they know the difference.

 But when I read message boards, blogs, and other stuff online, I see a lot of errors that I know aren’t just careless. A lot of people really just don’t know better, and you can tell because they make the same mistakes over and over.

So, after a morning of skimming Internet message boards, here are the ones that, at the moment, get my "For the Love of Pete Don’t Make This Mistake" Award.

 “A lot” shows up a lot as “alot.” In some ways, that seems pretty understandable. It’s just a very easy mistake to make. On the other hand, it’s downright iconic: People who have taken the trouble to learn anything about grammar and spelling don’t make this mistake. So the ones who write "alot" make a strong statement about how they want to be identified by readers.

 “It’s” as a possessive shows up quite a bit. Again, understandably so. When you think about how to form the possessive of “it,” the points of reference that pop into your mind are usually singular possessives like “dog’s” and not possessive determiners like “ours.” But, in fact, “its” is a possessive determiner. In other words, it's more like an adjective than a possessive noun. And, like “ours,” it takes no apostrophe. The "it's" with the apostrophe is a contraction of “it is” or "it has."

The No. 1 "For the Love of Pete Don’t Make This Mistake" mistake is similar to the “its” vs. “it’s” problem. It happens when people use apostrophes for form plurals.

Do the bus’s run all night?

Where can we get good empanada’s?

How are the noodle’s?

Awful stuff. Never form a plural with an apostrophe unless you’ve tried it without one and ending up with something too weird, like when you say your child got all A’s in school and without an apostrophe your reader really could think you meant the word "as."

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January 28, 2013

*Homonyms, Homophones & Homographs

On an episode of 30 Rock, television executive Jack Donaghy tries to sabotage his network by greenlighting a slate of awful shows. Along with programming like Mandela starring Joe Rogan and a full hour of Gary Sinise’s band, one of the worst is called Homonym! It’s a game show that works like this: The host reads aloud a word to a contestant, just a word, and the contestant has to guess which meaning of the word is intended without any context.

Host: “Okay, your next word is meat.”

Contestant: “Um, when two people run into each other.”

Host: “Sorry. It’s the other one. Your next word is stare.”

Contestant: “Uh, okay, the things you climb –“

Host: “No. It’s the other one.”

Contestant: “It’s always the other one! Let me see the card!”

Host: “No! Never! Next word: sent.”

Contestant: “I don’t care. Cent like a penny.”

Host: “No. Sorry. No.”

Lights begin to flash.

Host: “It’s a Homonym! double-down. That means you get to guess again: sent.”

Contestant (brightening): “Okay, um, scent like a smell or an odor.”

Host: “No, it’s the third one.”

Contestant: “Go **** yourself.”

It was hilarious. But I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I was distracted by the fact that those aren’t homonyms. They’re homophones.

The Oxford English Grammar says that homonyms are "distinct words that happen to have the same form." Examples include the bank where you put money as opposed to the bank of a river. The bird called a duck is a homonym of the act of moving your head out of harm's way really fast: to duck. So homonym means, basically, "same name."

Words that spelled differently are but pronounced the same are "homophones." Ate as in he ate some cake and eight as in the number before nine are homophones. So are peak and pique, hair and hare, and cue and queue. In other words, homophones, as the “phone” part suggests, are all about sound. So meat/meet, stare/stair, and cent/scent/sent are homophones.

So what about words like dove in “A dove flew by” and dove in “He dove into the pool”? Words that are visually (graphically, if you will) the same but pronounced differently? Those are homographs, according to Oxford. Some more examples: the verb lead and the metal lead; does the present singular of do, versus does, the plural of the female deer doe; sow, as in putting seeds in the ground, versus, sow, a female pig.

So homonyms are named the same. Homophones sound the same. Homographs look the same.

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January 21, 2013

*The Mistake I'm Most Prone To: Undeleted Words

For the last 11 years, I’ve been writing a weekly grammar column for some small community newspapers. It started with some Los Angeles Times supplements in Orange County, Calif., then it branched out to papers in Los Angeles County, Florida, Texas, and New York.

For the first 9-1/2 years, the column never appeared in a community where I actually lived. This can be a little confusing to community news readers, who expect their news to come from – you know – the community and who sometimes ask me to give talks at schools and civic organizations several light years away from my home.

But I’ve always been happy with this arrangement. For one thing, I don’t have to feel like some grammar ambassador in my own home town. But, more importantly, I never actually have to see the column in the paper.

I don’t like to look at my own column. The reason: typos. For the last ten years, it seems like about half the times I've seen an installment of my column online it has had some embarrassing error.  I never know who to be angry at: the dodo who made the mistake (me) or the editors who might have caught it. Either way, it's a team effort to make me look bad, and I'm captain of the team.

At least the errors weren't showing up in print in my own home town -- that is, until, recently. That blissful separation was shattered a little over a year ago when the Los Angeles Times added a Pasadena section of the paper.
Here’s how I found out my column I would be in that section: I opened the paper one morning and saw it there. No one asked me. No one told me. And you better believe no one offered to pay me. They just started running it periodically -- I assume whenever they needed some light filler material squeezed between articles about Rose Queens and face-melting heat waves.

Now my typos taunt me where I live – literally. Like the one in this column installment.

The error was in the sentence: Webster's New World College Dictionary is more reluctant to embrace the hyperbolic usage, instead adding to one it its definitions this note: “Now often used as an intensive to modify a word or phrase that itself is being used figuratively: ‘she literally flew into the room.'”

Don’t see the typo? That’s okay, neither did I and neither did the editor who checked it before passing it on to the four publications in which the mistake appeared. The typo is “it its.” I meant to type “of its.”

This is a classic example of my own typographical Achilles’ heel. If there’s one error in something I wrote, chances are it's a wrong or extra preposition, article, or pronoun. These little words make mischief when I delete part of a sentence to rewrite it but fail to delete all the words. So I end up with something like “at on,” “to about,” or “at to.”

I guess I’ll just have to implement a policy of reading every word – especially the little ones –
out loud.

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January 14, 2013

An E-mail I Got About 'Less' and 'Fewer'

I got another e-mail from a column reader recently imploring me to school everyone on “less" and “fewer.” The request, of course, was written from the perspective of someone who’s sick and tired of hearing people say things like “10 items or less” instead of “10 items or fewer.” And I’m the hired goon who’s supposed to whip everyone else into shape (no mind that hired goons actually get, you know, paid).

So, once again, I had to explain that this belief someone has held so dear for so long isn’t exactly true.

Look up “less” in Webster’s New World and you’ll see immediately that it can be a synonym for “fewer.”

So it's not necessarily wrong to say "10 items or less." Still, e-mails like these always give me an excuse to address a more interesting issue with “less” and “fewer” – the idea that the difference is all about count nouns vs. mass nouns.

People who say that “10 items or less” is wrong often believe it’s because “less” is for quantities – stuff like water, courage, money, and food. These are called mass nouns. Conversely, these folks think that “fewer” is for countable things, called count nouns  -- bananas, guns, friends, dollars, etc.

Ninety-nine percent of the time that explanation works. But it’s actually not quite right. The traditional distinction between less and fewer isn't about mass nouns vs. count nouns. It's about singular things vs. plural things.

Mass nouns usually are singular: You say you have less money not because money is a mass noun but because money is singular. You say you have fewer dollars not because dollars is a count noun but because it is plural.

That makes a difference in a situation like this: Say you’re in the express lane and you realize you have 11 items, so you decide to remove one. According to the mass-noun/count-noun explanation, you now have one *fewer* item because “item” is a count noun.

But that’s wrong. You actually have one less item. That’s because “less” modifies singular things like “item” even as “fewer” modifies
plural things like “items.”

Of course, that’s if you want to follow the sticklers.

If you want to follow the dictionary, you don’t have to worry about it at all.

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January 7, 2013

*What to Capitalize in a Headline

Copy editors notice a lot of little stuff that other people might not. The online news sites and articles that continue to nudge out traditional news outlets often contain tiny hints that they’re being produced by people who aren’t as well versed in language and style as older forms of media.

One of the most common examples has to do with headline capitalization. A lot of online writing uses sentence case for headlines, with the first letter of most words capitalized.

Fed Chair Will Keep Interest Rates Low

Often, it works out just fine, as in the headline above. But some situations seem to stump less experienced editors and designers

Fed Chair To Keep Interest Rates Low

See that “to”? Well, traditional news style calls for that to be lowercase.

Fed Chair to Keep Interest Rates Low

A lot of inexperienced editors don’t realize that, so they just “initial cap” every word. But more of them, it seems, know that some words in headlines are supposed to be lowercase. And they know those tend to be short words. So many guess correctly that the t in “to” is lowercase, yet they still make other mistakes.

How to Know When it is Time to Make a Will

The capitalization in that last headline doesn’t conform with editing style.

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out to

Neither does that one.

These two examples illustrate why it’s often a good idea to know and follow capitalization style for headlines: It just looks more professional, even to readers who aren’t consciously focusing on capitalization.

So here’s a simple system offered by AP that you should consider for any headlines you write:

Capitalize the first word of every letter except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer. There’s one exception: Any word that is the first word in the headline or the last word should be capitalized, regardless of its part of speech. So that last headline, in AP style, would leave one “to” lowercase and capitalize the other:

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out To

The biggest problem writers have with this simple system is remember that is and it, unlike in, are not prepositions. Is is a verb and it is a pronoun. So they’re always uppercased in AP style headlines.

Candidate Asks What It Is

By the way, the Chicago manual uses a similar system, except it doesn’t contain the same three-letter stipulation for prepositions, etc. So while in AP you’d write “Many Shoppers Wait Until Last Minute” in Chicago that could be “Many Shoppers Wait until Last Minute.”

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