'Predominantly' or 'predominately'?

Here’s a word that caught my eye while I was editing an article a while back: predominately.

The context was something like “Brazil is a predominately Portuguese-speaking country.” I didn’t notice the spelling of predominately until my second read.  And spell-checker didn’t notice either.

I quietly congratulated myself for catching the error, changed it to predominantly and continued reading the piece. But a few minutes later, I got the urge to check a dictionary. To my surprise, it was in both Webster’s New World College Dictionary (the dictionary required by the style guide I was using that day) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (which is the one I use when I’m editing in Chicago style). Both list predominately as a variant of predominantly.

I understand that the dictionaries’ job is to document usage, but I don’t think I’d ever seen predominately before. Unless this spelling had been slipping unnoticed under my nose for years, I had only ever seen predominantly.

Not that it mattered. In editing, we always use to the dictionary’s preferred forms and never the variants. So predominantly was the right choice for the article.

But the whole thing was pretty surprising — not just that a spelling I’d never noticed before warranted listing in the dictionary, but because it’s a strange one.

Adverbs often derive from adjectives: smart/smartly, nice/nicely, true/truly. So the adverb predominantly makes sense as a form of the adjective predominant. But predominate is a verb, and verbs don’t usually spin off adverb forms: walk/walkly, know/knowly, keep/keeply, dominate/dominately.

Chalk this one up as another example of our ever-surprising language.

Can 'quote' mean 'quotation'?

Years ago, someone told me you can’t use the word “quote” to mean “quotation.” As in, you can’t say, “There aren’t enough quotes in this article.” You have to say, “There aren’t enough quotations in this article.”

I think it came with a little lecture on nouns vs. verbs — that is, that “quote” is a verb, you quote someone, and “quotation” is a noun, you use his quotation. But I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.

When you get a piece of advice like this, the logical thing to do is check it. The answer’s as close as the nearest dictionary. So of course, I didn’t. I just spent the next who-knows-how-many years deleting “quote” and replacing it with “quotation” anytime I was worried who might see it.

There’s an old saying about laziness — something about how it ends up causing you more work. I’m sure I could find it if I tried.

But instead, I’ll spend my one precious bit of energy today looking up “quote.”

Surprise, surprise. In Merriam-Webster’s, Webster’s New World, and American Heritage dictionaries, after its main entry as a verb, it says that “quote” can also be a noun — a synonym of “quotation.”

So all these years I could have been saying, “Let’s add another quote” or “I don’t like this quote” instead of worrying that I’d get rapped on the knuckles for not using “quotation” instead.

What’s that famous quote? “Better late than never”?

Dashes, colons and commas should often be replaced by a period

Are you a dashaholic? It’s a thing, apparently. I’m more of a colon abuser myself: as if everything I write is so important it requires the colon’s drumroll effect. I’ve known more than a few comma junkies, too.

No matter your punctuation poison, there’s an easy antidote. The period. Let’s look at the role of each of these marks and how not to abuse them.

Dashes are widely misunderstood. A lot of people call hyphens dashes. Heck, even I call hyphens dashes when I’m reading my insurance policy number over the phone: “Two, nine, three, dash, one, one, eight.” But in text, dashes are something quite different. Unlike hyphens that connect a word with another word, prefix or suffix, as in “best-dressed,” dashes work at the sentence level — like this.

Dashes have two main jobs. A dash can signify an abrupt change in sentence structure — a shift like this that doesn’t fit with the grammar of the first part of the sentence. Or a dash can work like parentheses — setting off lists, parenthetical information, etc. — when you feel parentheses won’t cut it. Rules for dashes do not say you can use them to join complete clauses — this clause is an example. This is one of the most common abuses of the dash I see — people use them to string together two things that could stand alone as sentences. I suppose a loose interpretation of that “abrupt change in sentence structure” rule makes this OK. But when I’m editing, I make each clause into its own sentence, separating them with a period.

By the way, we’re talking about em dashes, not en dashes, which are shorter, less widely used and have more in common with a hyphen than with a dash. En dashes are often seen in compounds like “post-World War II,” connecting longer names and proper names with prefixes and other words. Dating back to days when newswires couldn’t transmit certain marks, news media have traditionally avoided the en dash and today just use a hyphen instead.

Colons are similar to dashes, just with a little more oomph: They set off an idea from a main sentence, but they suggest a greater emphasis. This can be a single word, as in this Associated Press Stylebook example: “He had only one hobby: eating.” Or one or more complete sentences can follow the colon. If the words that follow the colon don’t make up a complete sentence, don’t capitalize the first letter. But if one or more sentences is introduced by a colon, capitalize the first letter. Never double-space after a colon.

Colons can also introduce examples and lists, as in this sentence from the Chicago Manual of Style. “The watch came with a choice of three bands: stainless steel, plastic or leather.” But never use a colon after the word “including” to set up a list. “The watch came with a choice of four bands including stainless steel, plastic and leather.””

Colons that scream “listen to what I’m about to say” too loudly should probably be replaced by a period. I’ll try to take my own advice on this.

Commas have a lot of jobs, but they can’t connect two independent clauses without an “and,” “or” or “but.” This sentence is an example of a comma splice, you shouldn’t use commas this way.

Technically, a semicolon can link independent clauses. But they shouldn’t because — well, yuck. Semicolons to link clauses make sentences longer and less readable with nothing to gain except a chance for the writer to show off her knowledge of semicolons. Rude.

Dashes, colons and commas have a proper role to play between clauses. But if you’re using them to cram multiple ideas into a single sentence, ask yourself whether a period would make the passage more palatable to your reader.

Don't assume 'each' is the subject of the verb. Sometimes it's an adjective.

OK, fellow wordy types: See if you can spot the grammar mistake I fixed when editing the following sentence.

“Our team wrote, published and promoted a series of 12 human interest stories that each honors a California veteran who has served our country proudly.”

Don’t see a problem? Don’t feel bad. This was a tough one. In this sentence, the verb “honors” should be “honor.”

If you have an advanced understanding of the word “each,” this edit may seem wrong to you. But hear me out, because this isn’t your typical “each.”

Grammar buffs know that “each” is usually singular, which means it gets a singular verb. “Each has its issues.” “Each knows the way.” “Each is better than the last.”

We can also see the singular nature of “each” in sentences like “to each his own.” If “each” were plural, we’d get “to each their own,” which is clearly wrong.

When “each” refers to a unit that contains multiple individuals — for example, a family — it may be more natural to treat “each” as plural: “A number of families will participate and each have their own priorities.” This is called “notional agreement” and it’s a legitimate reason to give “each” a plural verb, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Otherwise, if “each” could only be singular, we’d have to write: “A number of families will participate and each has its own priorities.” That could work, too. But you can see how the rule loosens up in these situations.

But that doesn’t explain why I changed “each honors” to “each honor” in our original sentence. To understand why the plural verb “honor” is correct, we have to dive deeper into the word “each.”

Those of us who were taught that “each” is singular didn’t get the full story. That rule deals with only one form of “each” — the pronoun form. But “each” isn’t exclusively a pronoun. It can also be an adjective or an adverb. In those cases, “each” is not the subject of the verb. Instead there’s some other noun or pronoun in the sentence that governs the number of the verb.

Here's an example from Merriam’s: “They each have too many possible meanings.” There’s no disputing the correctness of that verb conjugation. The alternative, “They each has,” is clearly ridiculous. The subject of the verb is “they,” which is plural, and not  “each.”

Another example from Merriam’s:  “If we and our Atlantic community partners each take our respective share.”  The subject here is the plural “we and our partners.” So “its share” or “my share” wouldn’t work. We need the plural “our share.”

Merriam’s says these are examples of “each” as an adjective. That’s not how I see it. To me, these sentences show “each” in its adverb form, describing not the noun or pronoun but the action. In “We and our partners each take,” I see “each” as modifying the verb “take,” which would make it an adverb.

Back to our original sentence: “We wrote, published and promoted a series of 12 human interest stories that each honors a California veteran who has served our country proudly.”

If “each” had been the subject of the verb — “each honors a veteran” — then the singular verb “honors” would be correct. But that’s not how the sentence is structured. Instead, the true subject of the verb is “stories,” plural. The “each” isn’t a pronoun, so it’s not the subject of the verb. We’re not saying “each honors.” We’re saying “stories honor,” which is why I made the edit.