April 3, 2017

Serial Commas Again

Following up on last week's post about serial commas, here's a Quartz piece on why people are just so passionate about them. The writer does a better job explaining my take on the court case than I did.

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March 27, 2017

Serial Comma Fans Gone Wild

The serial comma made headlines recently after a Maine court ruled that state employment laws were unclear due to lack of a serial comma.

A group of delivery drivers were suing their employer for overtime pay. The state doesn't require employers to pay overtime for a number of activities, including "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution."

Note that there's no comma after "shipment." Without one, the court asserted, it's unclear whether "distribution" is an object of "packing for." The drivers don't do "packing for distribution." They do distribution, but not packing for distribution.

The court saw this as an opportunity to preach its punctuation partisanship. Without the "clarifying virtues of serial commas," the court wrote, there were two possible interpretations of Maine's statute. The court was forced to choose between the two interpretations and, in the end, sided with the drivers.

The court blew it.

That statute is unambiguous. It doesn't need another comma to be clear. It already states that "distribution" is a separate list item and it's not an object of "packing for." How do we know this? Because of the conjunctions.

In English, a conjunction precedes the final item in a list: Red, white and blue. Red, white, purple, green and blue.

Now look at this sentence: "The sandwiches we serve at our restaurant include turkey, tuna and ham and cheese."

That's three sandwiches. We know that "ham and cheese" refers to a single sandwich because there's an "and" before it.

Now look at: "The sandwiches we serve include turkey, tuna, ham and cheese."

We took out "and" before ham and now we have four sandwiches. The only remaining "and" in the sentence indicates that "cheese" is a separate list item.

The Maine statute was a more confusing example of the same dynamic. "Canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution" lists nine items. The court thought it was just eight, with "packing for shipment or distribution" as the final item. But without a conjunction like "or" or "and" before "packing," that's not possible.

For a longer explanation, here's a column I wrote about it.

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March 20, 2017

Can You Spot the Errors?

My recent column contains a little grammar quiz I hope people will enjoy. For the answers, head to the column here. The questions are in a spot-the-error format below. Note: Not every question has an error! Good luck!

1. The water skier water-skis on water skis.

2. The lengthy debate, which went on for hours, lead the council members to reject the measure.

3. Isabelle and Brie braided each others' hair.

4. Neither Joe nor his wife Christine are going to clean the garage.

5. I feel badly about the argument.

6. There have been reports of robbers in the area, so lets be more careful about locking the doors.

8. Jeremy wants to be a FBI agent.

Answers, with explanations, here. 

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March 13, 2017

An Easy Fix for a Faulty Parallel

Some faulty parallels can be fixed very easily by inserting "and."

For example, if can you spot the faulty parallel in the following sentence you can probably see where an "and" would fix it:

The program addresses the energy needs of a wide range of industries including healthcare, data centers, commercial real estate, warehouses, hotels, heavy and light industry.

Here's more on the subject in a column I wrote.

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March 6, 2017

Some Thoughts on 'Only'

Do you only work with licensed professionals? Or do you work only with licensed professionals? Perhaps you work with only licensed professionals?

There's a popular myth that says two of these are errors. Happily, the language isn't so rigid. But precision use of "only" could help your reader get your meaning. Here's a column I did recently that should help.

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March 1, 2017

McIntyre's featured word: embouchure

If you don't check in on John McIntyre from time to time, you miss a lot. Sometimes he features new vocab words that, I'll confess, I've never heard before.

I'll give you a hint about what embouchure means: It involves the lips. But for the full definition, you'll want to go straight to the horse's mouth. Here's McIntyre's post.

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February 20, 2017

"Spelling's not for everyone, Mr. Precedent"

The Los Angeles Times did a piece on some rather high-profile spelling errors coming out of the White House. Enjoy.

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February 13, 2017

Begging the Question

In his recent New York Times column, Charles Blow uses "begs the question" to mean "raises the question."

This begs the question: “Why do you need someone to push you to do the right thing?” Blow wrote.

Many writers and speakers do the same.  But I was surprised to see this in the New York Times. Traditionalists oppose this use, and newspapers usually take traditional positions on matters like these. And, traditionally, "beg the question" does not mean to raise a question. Instead, it's a term from logic that refers to any of several logical fallacies — stuff like answering a question by posing the same question to the questioner. It's a circular logic, of sorts.

As I've reported many times, when many people use a term "wrong" over a long time, the term becomes "right." That's how the ungrammatical "aren't I" surpassed the grammatical "amn't I." "Beg the question" in the meaning of raising a question has been gaining ground and credibility with experts. Still, I'm surprised the copy editors let this one by.

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February 6, 2017

Why Are Some Adjectives Separated By Commas While Others Aren't?

The handsome, articulate, intelligent man wore a bright green midriff peasant blouse.

Not really. No intelligent person would do that. But I offer up this sentence not as an example of fashion sense or IQ testing. It's an example of a comma situation that confounds many people yet is surprisingly easy to handle.

Did you notice that, in our sentence, there are commas between some adjectives but not others? How is it possible that some adjectives before a noun are separated with commas and some aren't?

Here's the full academic explanation along with an easy trick you can use to get these commas right.

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January 30, 2017

Oxford Comma Spin

There's a cartoon about commas going around on the Internet.

The first panel reads: "With the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin." The illustration shows four people: two men, one bearing a resemblance to John F. Kennedy and the other to Stalin, and two women in G-strings and high heels.

The second panel reads: "Without the Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin" above an illustration of just two people: men resembling JKF and Stalin, who themselves are wearing G-strings and high heels.

If you're looking to pick a side in a silly war, you can stop reading now. That's all the ammo you need to join the legions of people who believe that the Oxford comma is king. But if you want a clear picture of why this just isn't so, here's a column I wrote about it.

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