October 22, 2012

*Spot the Complete Sentence

Can you tell which of the following, if any, are complete sentences?

Outside!

Now!

Stop!

Onward!

Beautiful!

Some of my column readers couldn’t, even after I explained which and why.  Obviously, that one’s on the explainer.  I’ll try harder here after you’ve had a chance to mull over the question.

Here’s your first hint: Yes, one of these is a complete sentence. But only one. The rest aren’t errors, mind you. There’s nothing wrong with punctuating an incomplete sentence as if it were complete. When you do so, it’s called a sentence fragment. And writers -- even many of the very best writers -- use sentence fragments all the time.

I think that’s what tripped up the couple of readers who wrote to object to my saying that “onward” and “outside” are not complete sentences. If you yell either of these words at someone, your point is 100% clear and complete. So why was I being such a pain and refusing to acknowledge they’re complete sentences?

Well, as I wrote in a subsquent column, just because a thought is clear and complete doesn’t make it a complete sentence.

A complete sentence must contain at least one clause. A clause is a subject and a verb, and neither can be left implied, with one exception: Imperatives, that is, commands, always leave their subjects implied. It’s not a problem because the subject is always the same: “you.” So when you tell someone “Eat!” the subject is already built in to the verb, if you will.

But in four of our five sentences above, not only is there no subject, there’s no verb either. Outside! Now! Onward! and Beautiful! aren't verbs. Yes, they make clear the verbs that they’re implying. (Go) outside! (Do it) now! (Move) onward! (That is) beautiful! But remember that the verbs must be explicit in order to make for a complete sentence.

So  on our list only Stop! is a complete sentence because it’s the only one that meets the criteria of having a verb (which must be explicit) and a subject (which, in commands only, can be left implied.)

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October 15, 2012

*Such Is Like ....

To hear me talk about the e-mails I get from readers of my column, you might think I get a lot. I don’t. Unfortunately, of the e-mails I do get, about half of them are to point out mistakes I made. And about 95 percent of those aren’t real errors. They’re based on misconceptions that, ironically, I have addressed over and over again in the column.

Here’s an example:

“In your June 10 column you refer to "editors like me." Unless you're speaking of editors who bear similarities to you, I think the phrase should be "editors such as me.”

The author of this e-mail has been writing to me for at least seven or eight years. I’m sure I’ve mentioned the “like” vs. “such as” issue before in the column, just as I have here. Yet this reader often seems to think he’s educating me about issues I had no idea existed until he e-mailed me.

The issue of whether  “like” can be a synonym for “such as” is an old one, and  it’s well-known among people who pay attention to language. The popular misconception is that it cannot: “like” means "similar to” and “such as” means “for example” and that anything else equals bad grammar.

Not so. “Like” isn’t just a verb meaning “bearing a resemblance to.” It’s also a preposition that can mean “such as,” according to Merriam Webster’s.

Every other source I checked agrees. Yet I doubt I've convinced my e-mail friend and I'm even more doubtful that I've convinced him that I.

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October 8, 2012

Quotation Marks Around Associated Press Stylebook, Chicago manual & dictionaries

Unlike Chicago style, which puts book titles in italics, Associated Press style says to put them in quotation marks. It makes sense. Decades ago, when printing presses were simple, lumbering, limited machines, italics were harder to produce in print. If you have a universal system in which everyone uses symbols you know they can reproduce -- i.e. quotation marks -- then you don’t have to worry about whether they’re able to make italics.

Of course, today, any teenager can produce highly professional looking publications complete with not just italics but pretty much any formatting, symbols, or graphics under the sun. So AP's style may be a little outdated. But, in what may be an example of “If it works, don’t fix it” thinking, quotation marks around book, movie, TV show, and other titles contineus to be AP’s official style.

The Associated Press Stylebook just happens to be one of the book titles I write about most, along with the Chicago Manual of Style. I always put them in quotation marks – have been for years.  I do the same for dictionaries, which I also mention a lot. Then just the other day, I got an e-mail from an editor at one of the papers that runs my column.  He was writing to tell me I was doing it wrong. The style guide titles should not be in quote marks, he said.

He pointed me to listing in AP for “composition titles,” which says to put quotation marks around “book titles, movie titles, opera titles, play titles” and more. That’s as far as I ever remember reading in the guidebook. I never noticed the second half of that sentence: “… except the Bible and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material. … this category includes almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, hadnbooks and similar publications.”*

I’ve been doing it wrong all these years, even though clear instructions were under my nose the whole time.

*Exact wording taken from the 1992 edition.

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October 1, 2012

More Confusion About Phrasal Verbs

The timing was kind of strange. The e-mail about phrasal verbs that inspired this week's podcast was one I had actually received months ago. It sat in my "interesting topic to write about" mental pile for quite a while before I was finally ready to put up a podcast about it.

Though it wasn't the first time someone had asked me about word order in expressions like "lock him up," this is nonetheless a pretty rare topic for my in-box. It had been years since I'd last explained the concept of phrasal verbs to anyone.

But, just as I was ready to run the podcast here, I got an e-mail from a man named John telling me about a correction his daughter had made to a political sign. The sign had the expression "taking our country back." I don't know whose sign it was or why it had such an effect on the daughter, but she contacted the campaign with a correction. “She notified them [it] should be ‘taking back our country’ because ‘taking back’ is a verb phrase and should not be split by ‘our country.’"

Um, nope.

No. 1: It's a phrasal verb, not a verb phrase. A verb phrase usually means stuff like "am walking," "had gone," "would have quit." That is, it's usually a participle like "walking" or "gone" plus an auxiliary or two, like "am" or "had." Plus there can be other stuff in between. Grammarians often use the term "verb phrase" to refer to just a single word verb. That's handy when you're analyzing the syntax of a sentence: chopping it up into noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.

Phrasal verbs, as we discuss in this week's podcast, are things like "bring up," "call off," "take down," "throw up," and "make up." They're combos in which the second word actually gives the verb a different meaning than it has when it stands alone. That is, to call means to communicate. To call off means to put an end to. So that's a phrasal verb.

No. 2: You can put the object of a phrasal verb anywhere it sounds best, as in "call the wedding off." And sometimes it clearly works best in the middle. Compare "bring it up" with "bring up it" and you'll see what I mean.

So don't every let someone tell you you're wrong to go with your gut on the word order in terms like "run him over," "call him out," "make something up," and on and on. Anyone who says you can't is just misinformed.

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September 24, 2012

The Pronunciation of Forte*

I don’t focus on pronunciation matters. In general, they don’t much interest me -- probably because they don’t frighten me. I know that pronunciation is dictated by usage -- we speakers are the ones who vote for our preferred pronunciations every time we speak. So it’s literally true that, if everyone else pronounces a certain word a certain way for long enough, I can, too.

But there are a few pronunciation matters I find interesting, mainly because they came on my radar before I realized how the rules get laid down.

The one that’s one my mind today is “forte,” as in “Working with computers is definitely your forte.” Everyone pronounces that “for-tay.” I thought nothing of doing so myself until I came across an old Mallard Fillmore comic strip shredding to bits anyone who pronounced it that way. It should be pronounced, the author insisted, just like “fort.”

Sound like hogwash? Of course it is. But don’t take it from me. Here’s the word on dictionary.com, which will pronounce it for you if you press the little audio button saying you can pronounce it either “fort” or “for-tay.” In keeping with their phonetics designations, however, they write the pronunciations differently than I did here, using instead a w and an r. So they write that first pronunciation as “fawrt,” which seems pretty apt considering the curmudgeonly cartoonist who insists that’s the only right way to say it.

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September 17, 2012

*How to Write 'Rock 'n' Roll'

Rock & Roll

rock-n-roll

rock’n Roll

rock n’ roll

rock and roll

Due to an unusual number of live musical performances mentioned in my editing work recently, most of these forms have come across my desk of late. Yes, they’re all perfectly clear and understandable. But that’s not enough for editors. We have to worry about the whole consistency issue, too. So I always change them to rock ’n’ roll.

I never bother to look it up. I know it’s rock ’n’ roll. I’ve been doing this a long time. But when I’m passing along what I know to other people -- mainly, here -- I always double-check my facts.

So I turned to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is the final word on these matters at the publication I edit. Here’s what I learned: The entry for  rock ’n’ roll gave this for a definition: rock-and-roll.

Whenever a dictionary entry for one word refers you to the entry for another, that’s the dictionary’s way of saying that the other is the main entry -- in this case, that rock ’n’ roll is merely a variant of the preferred rock-and-roll.

That surprised me: Where did I get the idea it was rock ’n’ roll? I checked the house style guide for the publication and that’s where I found it: Our house style is rock ’n’ roll, which trumps even our house dictionary, which, thought it allows rock ’n’ roll, clearly prefers rock-and-roll. That was a relief. It meant 1. that I haven’t been doing it wrong all these years, and 2. that I don’t have to switch to the weird-looking rock-and-roll.

By the way, in case you’re more interest in book-writing style, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary doesn’t like rock  ’n’ roll as a first choice, either. According to that dictionary, which many in the book publishing world follow, rock ’n’ roll is acceptable, but the preferred form is rock and roll.

So Sammy “There’s Only One Way to Rock” Hagar was wrong. So very, very wrong ...

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September 10, 2012

*When Did America Toss Its British Accent?

Have you ever watched one of those cheesy basic-cable docudramas set in colonial times? Me neither. But I’ve seen a lot of promos for them. And it always makes me smile that George Washington, John Hancock and the gang are so often portrayed as having posh British accents.

It makes sense. People on this side of the Atlantic weren’t oo far removed from people in Britain

In fact, many were themselves Brits fresh off the boat. So you could see how they might do lots of crazy British things, like fancify their Rs and eat kidney pie.

I never questioned those highfalutin historical accents at all – I figured they were somewhere close to the truth – until I got a copy of Patricia T. O’Conner’s Origins of the Specious.  Just a few pages into the introduction, I read this:

“I’m sometimes asked, ‘When did we Americans lose our British accent?’ Answer: We didn’t lose it. The British once spoke pretty much as we do. What we think of as the plummy British accent is a fairly recent happening.”

In the following chapter she explains how this happened. The Englishmen and –women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sounded a lot like the Americans of today. What we think of as a British accent (and the many variations within that could be construed as separate accents) didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Then, shortly after we broke away, a fashion started forming among educated folks in English who thought it sounded jolly good to start doing things like dropping their R sounds in words like “far” and “church” and adding other little fancy-sounding flourishes to their speech.

A lot of the Americans who had the closest ties with England – you know, people in New England – picked up the habit. Which is why parking a car too far in Harvard yard is a punchline-worthy activity.

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September 3, 2012

*Lead Test

Here’s a passage worth thinking about:

There were many  factors that precipitated the American Revolution. Colonists had grown tired of living under oppressive British rule. But without a doubt, the rallying cry of “no taxation without representation” is remembered as the most important sentiment that lead to the rebellion and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence.

There’s an error in there. I didn’t want to say so before you read that because it’s the type of error that’s not too tough to spot if someone tells you one is in there. But it’s very, very easy to overlook if your brain isn’t in typo-hunt mode.

The error is “lead.” It should be “led.”

This is one of the most common mistakes I see. No one’s immune. Even people who know that the past tense of the verb lead (which rhymes with weed) is led (which rhymes with bed). The problem is that there’s another word, lead, which rhymes with led. It’s a metal (not to be confused with medal).

So anyone, it seems, can write, “the most important sentiment that led to the rebellion” instead of “lead to the rebellion.” And editors and proofreaders who aren’t consciously looking for this error can let it slip right past them, too.

The only way to avoid this error is to pay special attention to every instance of “lead.” If it’s being used as a verb and it’s supposed to be in the past tense, it should be spelled “led.”  Another way to look at it: if it’s a verb that rhymes with bed, again: it’s led, not lead.

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August 27, 2012

*Commas Between Coordinate Adjectives

One of the most common things I change in the articles I’m editing is demonstrated in sentences like this: “The menu includes a delicious, macadamia-crusted sea bass and a selection of seasonal, red wines.”

If you don’t see an error in there, don’t feel bad. Depending on how you look at it, there may not be one. But on my watch, those commas are just not okay.

A basic guideline for commas is that they should be used between “noncoordinate adjectives.” The quickest way to get a handle on noncoordinate is to think about coordinating conjunctions, specifically the coordinating conjunction “and.”

With that in mind, it’s easy to remember this rough guideline: if the word “and” works well between the adjectives, you can put a comma between them. If it doesn’t, don’t.

So we can apply that to our sentence above by trying “and” in place of those commas. Does it make sense to call the dish “a delicious and macadamia-crusted sea bass”? Does it seem right to say “a selection of seasonal and red wines”? I don’t think so.

Another test to tell whether your adjectives qualify as “coordinate” or not is to try moving them around. Coordinate adjectives, because they all modify the noun in the same way, can go anywhere. Think about “a fast, easy, fun hike.” That’s a hike that’s fast and easy and fun, right? And it’s just as logical to say it’s an easy and fun and fast hike.

It doesn’t work the same way with our original example. A macadamia-crusted delicious sea bass doesn’t say quite the same thing as a delicious macadamia-crusted sea bass. It’s as though “macadamia-crusted” is integral to “sea bass” in a way that “delicious” is not.

Ditto that for “red seasonal wines.” Red wine is a thing. Seasonal is just a word we’re using to throw some added description on top of this well-known thing. So seasonal red wines seems different from red seasonal wines.

The choice isn't always clear. For example, “a seasonal local wine” could in fact be a “local seasonal wine.” And the good news is that you do have the leeway to go with your own judgment in these situations.

But when in doubt, just apply the “and” rule. Whenever “and” sounds a little off between two adjectives: no comma.

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August 20, 2012

*Comma Question from a Friend

A friend wrote to me recently to ask about the commas in this sentence, which appeared in a textbook she was editing: "Greta had learned about different cultures, and perhaps more importantly about her own.”

My friend, Tracy, thought it would be better if she moved the commas around and wanted to know if I agreed. Here’s how she wanted to write
it:

Greta had learned about different cultures, and, perhaps more importantly, about her own.

“Am I off the wall?” Tracy asked.

Here’s my reply: “I like your commas a lot better. They're more logical. Technically, you don't usually put a comma before an ‘and’ that doesn't precede a whole clause. Though you can if you really want to indicate a strong division or pause.

“Your commas do a more logical job of setting off a parenthetical  -- ‘perhaps more importantly’ -- from a sentence that otherwise wouldn't need a comma: ‘Greta learned about different cultures and about her own.’"

And by the way if you bristled about the use of “importantly” instead of “important,” you’re not alone. Tracy didn’t like it, either, just like the many people who prefer “important” to “importantly” in contexts like these.

The objection is often rooted in the idea that the adverb form is wrong here because adverbs describe the manner in which an action is taking place. From this perspective, “Greta learned about different cultures, most importantly, her own,” suggests that the adverb “importantly” is modifying the verb “learned,” saying that she somehow went about learning in an important way. That would be true if adverbs only modified verbs. But in fact they can modify whole sentences or thoughts, as in “Unfortunately, my flight was canceled.”

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