'My boyfriend and I's'?

With all the working from home, cultural divisiveness, addiction to screens and the rise of AI “companions,” humans are becoming ever more isolated. That’s a bad thing. But there’s an upside. As we go through life desperately alone and starved for human contact, at least we’re less likely to make shared possessive errors like this one from a travel post on Reddit: “I bought my boyfriend and I’s tickets at the same time.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen “I’s,” but it’s still a shocker. Who thinks it would be a good idea to say, “That’s I’s car” or “I should get started filing I’s taxes” or “Do these pants make I’s backside look big”? No one.

We all know “I” isn’t used as a possessive. It’s a subject: I have a car. I filed my taxes. I am wearing unflattering pants.

So how do these errors happen? How can we get so confused about a pronoun we all know so well? Human contact. The other person. In the case of that Reddit poster, her boyfriend was the culprit. Had the poor woman flown to Hawaii alone, sure, she would have missed out on a marriage proposal, but at least she would have had the sense to say, “I bought my ticket.”

This error is related to the much more common “with John and I” mistake that, frankly, almost everyone makes. “With” is a preposition, prepositions take objects and “me,” not “I,” is the object form that belongs here: “with John and me.” But “I’s” takes this to a whole new level.

It’s a safe bet that people who misuse “I” labor under the false belief that “me” is incorrect or at least improper when paired with another person. A kid who says, “Billy and me are going to the park” gets corrected pretty swiftly: “It’s ‘Billy and I,’ not ‘me,’” adults tell them. The kid walks away with the lesson that, if he wants to get to the park with the least hassle possible, he should just always use “I.”

On top of all that, we’re not taught how to handle shared possessives. Is it “My boyfriend’s and my” or “my boyfriend and my”? I’ve studied this stuff for years and even I am not comfortable with this.

I know the rules for shared possessives: “Ed’s and Louise’s cars” is correct if they own the cars individually. If they own the cars jointly, it’s “Ed and Louise’s cars.” That’s because the rule says that if possession is shared, Ed and Louise share an apostrophe and s, too. But when people possess things separately, each gets their own apostrophe and s.

That’s an easy rule when you’re working with nouns like Ed, but when you’re working with pronouns like “my,” things get weird. “Ed’s and my cars” is easy enough if Ed and I own our cars separately, but if we share cars, a strict reading of the rules requires us to say, “Ed and my cars.” The absence of an apostrophe and s after Ed’s name strikes me as unnatural. And I don’t hear other people saying “Ed and my …” No matter who owns what, they say “Ed’s and my.”

Other pronouns pose the same difficulty:  If you want to talk about the jointly owned “Ed and Louise’s cars” but you’re using a pronoun for Louisa, you’d get “Ed and her car,” which is unclear and sounds wrong.

In these cases, I openly defy the rule about sharing possession. I say “Ed’s and her cars” no matter whether they own the cars together or separately. As long as I’m not using “I’s,” it’s unlikely anyone will even know if I’m wrong.

'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.