I noticed the back-page “In Style” article in the [April–May 2009] issue by Paul Martin of the Wall Street Journal. My question is about the period at the end of the WSJ masthead. There has to be a rationale, but I’ve been unable to find it. If the answer is easy, I’m also curious to know where I could have obtained it elsewhere. Nothing turned up using Google or WSJ online.
Paul Matalucci President Wordwright Communications, Inc.
I wrote that I suspected it was a relic from the days of the Dow Jones Newswires, founded in 1882, which delivered news by telegraph. In 1883, the organization produced the “Customers’ Afternoon Letter,” which became the Journal in 1889. Periods are used on newswires at the end of every distinct unit of meaning, which is why the AP still uses a period at the end of every bulleted point, whether it is a complete sentence or not. But I checked with Paul, and found it had nothing to do with newswires. He replied:
The Wall Street Journal has always had a period after the name in the page-one “nameplate” or “flag.” At the beginning, in 1889, the use of such a period was traditional among newspapers. But it became unfashionable, and one paper after another dropped the period in the 20th century. The Journal, however, has kept the period in the page-one flag—and has used a period as well atop individual sections that incorporate The Wall Street Journal name.
I am looking for your thoughts on the spelling of daycare and child care.
On the Canadian federal income tax and benefit return, for many years we have had line 214, “Child care expenses.”
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary has an entry for child care, and one of the meanings is daycare. That dictionary notes that the one word childcare is used in Britain in reference to the care of orphaned, neglected, or homeless children by a local authority.
On the Ontario provincial Web site, there are references to family care, elderly care, and child care. Also, on the British Columbia provincial Web site, there are references to child care.
Aside from the Oxford entry for child care, I am wondering how to explain to authors why we spell daycare as one word, with no hyphen, but child care as two words. Have you noticed any trend in the U.S.A. to writing childcare?
Bernard Sullivan Canada Revenue Agency
Open and closed compounds don’t necessarily follow any identifiable logic. Many open or hyphenated compounds close up over time, while others remain resistant to change.
In the U.S., daycare is the usual spelling, though my daughter attended a school with “Day Care” in its name. Child care is strange: there is no entry for the compound in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the preferred spelling of the adjective as child-care; the alternative is childcare for the adjective, and the only spelling given for the noun is childcare.
I’d be interested in the sources for the AH, because a quick Google search (on Google News, narrowed to Location: US) gives 41 for childcare and 2,194 for child care. The open spelling in a search returns hyphenated spellings too, so I can’t narrow that down.
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry to show the British use of childcare — only the adjective and noun child-care. But the editors haven’t reached the letter C yet for the third edition, so I wouldn’t take that as gospel at this point.
My theory is that child care, elder care, and so on are conceptually separate: you care for a child, you care for an elderly parent, etc. But you don’t care for a day, so daycare doesn’t have that same conceptual separation. This doesn’t account for healthcare, of course, which I see spelled open and closed about equally (McMurry, which publishes many custom healthcare publications, dictates the closed spelling in its house style).
Many of us work for publications that are both in print and on the Web. Even though we have a physical publication and a Web site, we here at Macworld refer to ourselves as Macworld, not Macworld and Macworld.com.
This poses a problem in the sense that titles of journals and other works are italicized, but Web sites are set in roman type.
When we refer to ourselves, should we continue to italicize all instances of Macworld, even when we don’t specifically mean the printed magazine?
The same is true for many publications: the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, and many more.
Is there a trend to stop italicizing titles of works?
Sue Voelkel Managing Editor Macworld
The “conventional” wisdom, if it’s been around long enough to be called conventional, is that you italicize the title of the work if it has a print form that would traditionally be italicized. You give the URL or a shortened form of it in roman—Macworld.com—but your publication is Macworld.
This is what Tony Long has told me, anyway. He’s the copy chief of Wired News. That publication has no print equivalent (Wired has a different editorial staff, though they interact), so its name is given roman. So is the name of Slate.
I think it makes more sense to italicize titles, period—and save the roman only for URLs that are not titles. This streamlining seems to be the direction in which style conventions are heading; the latest MLA Style Manual says to italicize all Web-based titles. It even goes so far as to recommend that LexisNexis Academic be italicized, and that’s a Web site, not a Web publication!
In the pages of Copyediting, we’ve been following the rules of Wired News, but I’m about ready to start putting publications such as it and Slate in italics, too.
I’m hoping you can give us some hyphen guidance.
We have a rule about hyphenating things like well-known as attributive adjectives and not hyphenating them as predicative adjectives.
The problem arises when we add very. It seems to work okay with well-known (a very well-known writer), but today we were faced with very in front of much-needed (a very much-needed improvement), and the hyphen seemed wrong.
Is there a rule for these? We can’t find anything in Gregg or Chicago that specifically covers the very scenario. We produce a verbatim report, so we can’t change the word order, unfortunately.
Can you, will you, put us out of our misery?
Janet Brazier Legislative Assembly of British Columbia
The problem is that very isn’t modifying much-needed. The compound modifier isn’t gradable (the improvement can’t be more or less “much-needed”). In this way your compound is not like, say, well-read, where one can be moderately well-read or very well-read. In your case, very is intensifying much alone. So the only choice you have, when you can’t say “the improvement is very much needed,” is between using no hyphens or two hyphens.
I find that other manuals than the ones you checked aren’t definitive either; they also provide examples in which very is used without a hyphen before a compound that can be considered to be gradable (e.g., “very low-density lipoproteins,” from the AMA Manual). I’d like one of the manuals to provide an example like yours, and then give me a darned good reason for leaving it as “very much-needed.”
Note that even Chicago does not lump very in with the -ly adverbs, which don’t take hyphens. And section 7.88 essentially says that reasonable people can disagree about the need to hyphenate certain strings of modifiers. It’s important to do what best serves clarity, and then be consistent about it.
I’d be tempted to leave “a very much needed improvement” open because each of the modifiers performs a clearly different function that a reader will recognize—intensifier, quantifier, participial adjective—in an order that is fixed by the underlying grammar of English. I therefore don’t think the string will be misread without the hyphens, whereas it makes for kind of a cumbersome compound modifier if you hyphenate it.
I need to refer to one of three vases in a photo.
There are two vases of one size (short) and one of another size (tall).
Because there are three vases but only two sizes, do I write “the taller of the vases” or “the tallest of the vases” when referring to the tall vase?
David L. Coake Editorial Director Florists’ Review
The rule is that if you have more than two things, and you are saying that one of those things possesses a given quality to a greater degree than all the other things, you still use the superlative. It doesn’t matter whether the other members of the group are identical or not. If you say “the taller of the vases,” conventional usage rules dictate that you be referring to only two vases.
I’m not sure what surprised me more in the “In Style” column of the [April–May 2009] issue: that Paul R. Martin wrote, “Of course, Dr. is used instead of Mr. in second references to physicians and others . . .” or that Copyediting let it stand.
My dentist, my present and past primary care providers, and a majority of my other health-care providers over the past few decades, know first-hand that Dr. is also used instead of Ms. and “those fading relics, Miss and Mrs.”
(By the way, wasn’t Ms. originally written without the period?)
Joan Pederson Director of Product Development for Nystrom Social Studies
A very good reminder to us all. Of the four people who copyedit and proofread CE, three are women! Paul Martin responded, “My bad! And I have a Dr. daughter! And a woman dentist!”
As for the spelling of Ms.: a Wikipedia article suggests that Ms was used as an abbreviation for Mistress as early as the 17th century, but I don’t see any corroboration of that in The Oxford English Dictionary. The source for the Wikipedia tidbit is listed as Miss Manners, so I guess we’d have to dig up whatever she wrote about it. But it is certainly the case that when the title gained acceptance in the 20th century, it was spelled Ms in the U.K. and Ms. in the U.S., following our patterns with other titles. In the U.K., punctuation is not used in abbreviations that are actually contractions. Mister, Mistress, and Doctor all retain their final letters in abbreviated form (so technically, I suppose, we ought to be spelling them as M’r, M’s, and D’r); the absence of a period distinguishes these from abbreviations in which the last bit of the word is lopped off.
I have a grammar question for you. Is the following sentence incorrect?
It’s critical that no yolk contaminates the whites because that might prevent them from whipping properly.
One suggested change is:
It’s critical that no yolk contaminate the whites because that might prevent them from whipping properly.
In this case, the argument is: “critical that” is a mandative subjunctive and the verb should be present tense.
Another suggested change is:
It’s critical that no yolks contaminate the whites because that might prevent them from whipping properly.
In this case, the argument is: The sentence contains a complement clause (no yolks contaminate the whites) introduced by a subordinating conjunction (that).
In American English, it’s a subjunctive. British English would allow the “contaminates” indicative. But in neither case should you make yolk plural, because yolk is a mass noun here. It doesn’t make sense to say “that no yolks contaminate” because you’d be talking about entire, whole yolks, instead of the little bit of yolk substance that is meant.
Whether you’re looking at a subjunctive or indicative use, the that-clause is not a complement. It’s an extraposed subject clause:
That no yolk contaminate(s) the whites is critical.
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