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Archive for September, 2009
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Yesterday was National Punctuation Day. We editors don’t get a chance to celebrate ourselves very often, so we might as well make the most of it. The people I follow on Twitter sure did, posting tweets with the hashtag #punctuationsongs.
The idea was to list songs that have the name of a piece of punctuation in the title or lyrics, or to suggest puncutation-related lyrics. The latter category generated more interesting posts, but even they began to recycle themselves: “Comma Chameleon” is just not that big of a creative stretch, and eleventy-seven people seem to have come up with it independently. In case you aren’t on Twitter and missed out on the festivities, my favorite was a play on lyrics from the 1980s band Wang Chung: “Everybody hy-phen tonight.” If you are on Twitter, you can search on the hashtag for the posts. (And you can follow me @WendalynNichols, or the newsletter’s news @Copyediting.)
Jeremy Lang of The Oregonian found a real song called “Oxford Comma” and posted it as the Song of the Day on The Oregonian Music Blog. It’s by the band Vampire Weekend. Turn down the volume on your computer first before you launch it!
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Tags: Punctuation
Posted in Copyediting -- Because Language Matters | No Comments »
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
 Subject: A classic of historic importance
It’s fall in New York, and around our house, that means sports heaven — though it’s strange not to hear John Madden’s colorful commentary on football games, snot bubbles and all. I suspect that the resume of anyone who wants to become a sports announcer must include, in the list of skills, “Demonstrated facility with hyperbolic expression.”
Hyperbole thrives on adjectives, and two that get overused in sports commentary are classic and historic. If that Super Bowl catch was one for the record books, it was a historic catch. If this game between longtime regional rivals is won in the eleventh inning with a walk-off RBI, it’s destined to become a classic.
The trouble with labeling something as historic, of course, is that you’re not going to know for some time whether the event will be historic — that is, historically significant. And the other problem is that, more often than not (it seems to me, anyway), people say historical when they mean historic.
Jackie Robinson is a historical figure: he really did live, and he really did participate in events in the past. Information can be historical, like historical data on the tide levels in a bay over the past century. Lawmakers’ decisions can have historical significance, meaning that they had an impact on things that happened afterward. But for something to be historic, it has to be important to the extent it stands out, like Jackie Robinson’s historic breaking of the color bar in major-league baseball. An Alex Rodriguez grand slam might be laudable, but it’s not historic.
It might be argued that Rodriguez’s home run is classic, though, if you mean that it’s typical of his style as a ball player. You could say it’s “classic Rodriguez.” A classic is a prototypical example, something outstanding. The word is used too readily, and often too soon: It’s hard to say that a given action is classic Rodriguez until the guy has been playing for enough years to establish a pattern. A car doesn’t become a classic until enough undistinguished models have followed it. And calling something an “instant classic” is an oxymoron if ever there was one.
But we can almost forgive the hyperbole if sports announcers and advertisers and whoever else is breathless for a living would just remember that classical means ‘having to do with the ancient world’ and cannot be used to refer to the retro look of a team’s helmets or the style of a bottle of Chardonnay, and that historical just refers to something that happened in the past, not to its importance. If the Yankees and the Red Sox were a classical match-up, they’d be playing naked in ancient Greece. And I’m sorry, guys, but however much money all the vested interests may need to earn back from developing the new Yankee Stadium, it’s still too soon to call it a historic season.
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Tags: classic, classical, English usage, Historic, historical
Posted in Copyediting -- Because Language Matters | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Subject: Save your regards for Broadway
Our written language is growing less formal. We use you instead of one when we’re talking about people in general, the subjunctive is dying out, and few people bother to use whom, except when they shouldn’t use it. As this casual register becomes more common, so too do errors in the use of more formal forms of language. People tend to use words and phrases they recognize as formal when they want to sound more authoritative, but they often make mistakes because they so seldom use these expressions.
The noun regard is a good example. It’s a formal and fairly old-fashioned synonym for gaze, as in “His regard fell upon the waif in the gutter.” This is technically a countable use, meaning you could talk about more than one aristocrat and say “Their regards fell upon the waif in the gutter.” But this form is hardly ever found in the plural.
You can also use regard to mean ‘respect’ or ‘esteem’, as in “I hold her in high regard.” We can say we hold someone in low regard, too, although this is much less common; regard in this sense is nearly always used with high, almost like a fixed expression. In this sense, regard is uncountable: you can’t have five or ten regards.
In another uncountable sense, regard is a synonym for care, as in “He shows little regard for anyone else’s time and effort.” A less formal way of putting this would be “He doesn’t care much about anyone else’s time and effort.” Regard isn’t often used incorrectly in this sense.
But it is used incorrectly all the time in the phrases “in regards to” and “with regards to.” Regard should be singular here; the phrases, which mean ‘respecting’ or ‘concerning’ or ‘with respect to’, make use of the uncountable sense of regard that means ‘attention’. Yet people frequently use the plural form instead of writing “in regard to” and “with regard to.” The problem is that another expression is interfering, namely “as regards.”
“As regards” means ‘concerning’, too, and for the most part it is interchangeable with “in regard to” and “with regard to.” All of them mean “as for such and such,” and really, you’re better off saying as for or regarding most of the time. (Did you know, by the way, that the abbreviation Re in a memo header is for the word regarding?) But the expression “as regards” does not use the uncountable noun. It uses the singular form of the verb to regard, as shorthand for “Now, as for the way in which we must consider (regard) the following…”
The only expression in which the noun regard is used in the plural with any frequency at all is in the sense of ‘good wishes’, which is in fact always plural. So you can give your regards to Broadway, you can send your friend’s mother your best regards, you can sign a letter with Regards. But if you’re tempted to say “with regards to” or “in regards to,” mentally substitute respect for regards, which might help you remember to change regards to the singular regard.
[Before you write to me about the use of singular quotation marks with commas outside them for glosses, consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, section 7.52.]
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Tags: as regards, English usage, with/in regard to
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 14th, 2009
After eight years of working from home, I’m commuting to an office again. Because I live in Manhattan, this means taking the subway, and because I live on the north end of the island and the office is south of Canal Street, it’s a longish commute.
Reading time!
What a luxury to have forty minutes each way to spend reading. I’ve pulled out books I’ve meant to read for years and have only dipped into. The one in my bag at the moment is Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules. I admire the way Pinker makes the complex subject of linguistics accessible to the layperson without dumbing things down. I also like the way he uses language as a writer, so I was particularly interested in the following sentence, which appears on page 47: “A generation of speakers uses their language and lexicon to produce sentences.”
This is not an example of false attraction of their to speakers. If it were, the verb use would be in the third-person plural instead of the singular. He’s clearly treating generation as the subject, which it is, and making the verb uses agree with it. What’s interesting is that he has chosen to use their instead of its as the possessive pronoun substitute for that generation’s.
This sentence shows neatly how complicated the choice of pronoun can be. His or her would not work here; a generation is not a person. Its seems too impersonal, especially because it’s a generation of speakers, who are clearly people — not, say, a generation of fruit flies. Yet “uses their” still sounds wrong, to my ear at least. This pattern — in which the subject and verb are both singular, but the pronoun their is used to refer back to the subject — is common in spoken English, surviving despite the determined efforts of 19-century grammarians to stamp it out. I’m seeing it more and more in the written language as their marches toward acceptance as an epicene pronoun (a gender-neutral singular pronoun).
I’ve also noticed, though, that in most sentences like this, there is some distance between the singular verb and the plural pronoun, as in “Redbook magazine uses focus groups to test their readers’ reactions to advertising.” Seeing the singular verb and the plural pronoun directly juxtaposed made this middle-aged reader stop and re-read the sentence; I wonder, though, whether it would give a younger person pause.
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Tags: "their", Epicene pronoun, Grammar, Pinker, Pronouns
Posted in Copyediting -- Because Language Matters | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
Subject: Aural spellings
It’s that time of year again: the Tip writer is going on vacation. We’ll be back with a new e-mailed Tip on September 15.
My daughter, who is six, is feeling the power of the written word. She’s taken to taping notes all over the house—labels for shelves and rooms and drawers, and messages to us that begin “Dere parints.”
She hasn’t yet made all the connections between words she can read quite easily and their spellings, so that great is “grat” and really is “rile.” What’s interesting to me is that her spellings tell me what she is hearing: to her, “ledr” is exactly the way letter is pronounced, and she’s hearing really as “rilly.”
Over time, most of us manage to become decent spellers. But we do it by a combination of memorization and rule-learning; the pronunciations of many English words have strayed too far from their spellings for us to be able to predict with much reliability how a word we’ve only heard, and never seen, is spelled.
And so we guess, just as my daughter does. And often, we end up producing aural spellings, just as my daughter does.
An aural spelling is one that is based only on what the listener hears. The spelling is incorrect in that it doesn’t represent the word or phrase that the speaker used, but it’s accurate in that it does reflect the sounds the listener heard. I asked my Twitter followers and Tip readers to send me examples of aural spellings for this article, and I was pleased to get a nice range of examples of all three main types of aural spellings. (Thank you to everyone who responded!)
Spellings with missing letters:
In speech, some syllables are stressed and some are not. English speakers often reduce unstressed syllables; for instance, some of us say “lookin’” instead of pronouncing the /-ing/ in looking. I see spellings such as “our renown faculty” with great frequency, and that’s because people don’t hear the -ed in renowned.
If a past participle that ends with an unstressed /d/ or /t/ sound (like iced) is followed by a word that begins with a consonant, we sometimes let one consonant do double duty (iced tea becomes ice tea; iced cream becomes ice cream), or we just drop the sound altogether (popped corn becomes popcorn). In the case of both ice tea and popcorn, the aural spellings became common enough that they are now standard. An aural spelling of this type that is not yet accepted, and still causes much confusion, is use to for used to.
Mondegreens:
When you think you’ve heard one word but have actually heard a different one, you might never find out unless you try to use the word in writing. That’s what happens to people who write “it’s a doggie-dog world” for “dog-eat-dog” or “the whole kitten caboodle” for “kit and caboodle.” You can tell that these spellings, too, reflect the fact that we swallow sounds when we speak, but in the case of a mondegreen, listeners associate the sounds they hear with whatever familiar word or phrase sounds closest to that set of sounds. One of my respondents said that a friend of hers used to think there was a famous novel about a guy named “Warren Peace.”
Usage books are full of comments about easily confused pairs of words. The confusion can reflect a misapprehension that is similar to what happens with an aural spelling, even though, for many of the pairs, the sounds are not quite the same. A good example is the common mistake “a mute point” for “a moot point.” People tend to be more familiar with mute than with moot, and assume they have heard the more common term. Another example, a ubiquitous one, is then for than, as in this headline that a respondent sent me:
Credit clampdown may pack less wallop then feared
Outright guesses that are flat-out wrong:
In this category come “flying debree,” “mini-blines,” “chester drawers,” and “tryna” for “trying to.” One of the funniest examples sent to me was “making endsmeat”; presumably the writer thought “endsmeat” was some type of sausage. What I find curious here is that the writer did not stop to wonder what “endsmeat” was, and perhaps try to look it up. No, the writer assumed that, whatever the stuff was, that was clearly what had been said, and he or she was not going to look stupid by showing ignorance of the word.
Mistakes can go the other way, too—we can only ever see a word in print and make assumptions about how it is pronounced.
I read A Little Princess years before I first went to England. The main character, Sara, liked the name Cholmondeley—I cannot remember why now, but I do remember sounding out this unfamiliar name and coming up with something like /kol-MAHN-duh-lee/. I then met a young man with this name in England—not the Marquess, but quite possibly someone related to him—and had the misfortune to see it on his nametag before I heard him introduce himself.
“Wow,” I said, “You’re the first real Kol-mahn-duh-lee I’ve ever met.”
“It’s CHUM-ley,” he said down his nose.
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Tags: Aural spellings, English usage, mondegreens
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | 3 Comments »
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