September 6, 2016

Adjective Order Goes Viral

If you're down with a lot of wordy types on the web, there's a good chance that in the last few days you've seen an excerpt from a book called "The Elements of Eloquence" by Mark Forsyth. It says, "Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”

There's one word in this passage that makes the whole thing dead wrong. That word is "absolutely." The proof is in this assessment of Forsyth's assertion: That's one big, beautiful overstatement.

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August 29, 2016

Email Greetings

Hi June,

That’s a greeting I see almost every day in my in-box. The punctuation catches my eye every time.
According to a careful reading of the Chicago Manual of Style, that’s wrong. Yet pretty much every email ever sent, including ones sent to me by editors, does it this way.

Chicago says that a “direct address” should be set off by commas. A direct address occurs when you call someone by a name or other term used like a name.

Goodbye, Norma Jean
Hey, dude
Listen, punk
Excuse me, ma’am
I swear it, officer
Chief, you gotta believe me
Oh, Steve

Dude, punk, chief, officer, Steve -- those are all direct addresses because they’re all things people are being called directly.

When we say they’re supposed to be “set off” with commas, that means that when one appears in the middle of a sentence it should have a comma on either side. Goodbye, Norma Jean, and good luck. Hey, dude, that’s awesome. If they're at the end or beginning of a sentence, of course, the period at the end of the sentence precludes the need for a second comma. Goodbye, Norma Jean. Dude, that’s awesome.

But almost every time I see a direct address in my e-mail in-box, it has no comma before the name. Hi June,

It does, however, have a comma after the name. But that doesn’t make sense, either, because it’s not in the middle of a sentence.

I think I know why this is so common. A lot of correspondence starts with greetings like: Dear John,

Unlike Hi, June, that is fine. “Dear” isn’t the same as “hi.” Dear is a modifier, and you don’t use a comma to separate modifiers from the things they modify “lazy, cat.” They work as a unit: “lazy cat.”

A comma after Dear John makes more sense than a comma after Hi, June. Dear John, begins a thought, while Hi, June. is a complete thought. (By the way, when addressing a letter, it’s okay to use a colon, too. Dear John: )

I think people have the Dear John, greeting seared into their minds, so Hi John, looks right to them, even though it would be better as Hi, John.

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August 22, 2016

Suspensive Hyphenation: United We Stand

In our society, we entrust certain individuals with immense power based, in large part, on our sincere belief and hope that they'll act as unifiers, not dividers.

It's a tall order.

Sure, it's easy to bring together those already close to each other. But the ability to reach out, across a divide, to join diverse players so they can all work together as one — that's true leadership.

That's why, regardless of stripe or creed, we should all seize the opportunity to make full use of the talents of the greatest unifier at our disposal.

I’m speaking, of course, about the hyphen.

Here’s a lesson on suspensive hyphenation that’s also a lesson in how to reach across the aisle.

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August 15, 2016

Apostrophe Imposters Are Out to Get You

Of all the nitpicky tasks I perform while copyediting and proofreading, here’s the nitpickiest: You know how you use apostrophes when you write rock ’n’ roll or ’80s or  ’twas? Well, my job includes making sure that those apostrophes are actually apostrophes and not apostrophe imposters.

Type rock ’n’ roll into Microsoft Word, look at the marks around N, and you’ll make a shocking discovery: Your software is out to get you. If your program is set to its defaults, chances are that the mark before the N is not an apostrophe but instead an open single quotation mark. You know, the ones you use for quotations within quotations, as in, “I heard someone yell, ‘Wait!’”

The difference is that the open single quotation mark curves to the right, like the letter C. The apostrophe curves to the left, making it identical to a closing single quotation mark in most fonts.

Of course, some fonts and printers and computer programs don’t curve their apostrophes at all. In those programs, the apostrophe looks like a straight dagger. So does their opening single quotation mark. With those programs, you can’t go wrong. But most of the time, whenever you type an apostrophe at the beginning of a word or number, your word-processing software will assume you’re starting to quote something and turn your apostrophe into a single quote mark.

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August 8, 2016

A Great Unifier

Our politicians could learn a thing or two from the humble hyphen. A quick lesson in suspensive hyphenation shows just how powerful you can be when you reach across a divide to bring disparate elements together. Here's my column on suspensive hyphenation as a lesson in leadership.

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August 1, 2016

More Fun with Prefixes

It sounded like a straightforward question: should "cybercrimes" should be written as one word, two words or hyphenated? The answer, though, isn't so simple. It comes down to whether "cybercrimes" is already in the dictionary and, if not, whether "cyber" is a hyphen or a word. When it's both, which it is, you have all kinds of choices, which I explain in a recent column.

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July 25, 2016

Hyphen ... Interrupted

My friend Tracy had a question about hyphens in the following passage:

... patients receiving a lenalidomide (Revlimid) or bortezomib (Velcade) based treatment ...

Where, she wanted to know, do the hyphens go? Under normal circumstances, you'd hyphenate a compound modifier with "based." A carbon-based life form. A faith-based initiative.

In a sentence where two compounds "share" a word, you'd hyphenate like this: a carbon- or silicon-based life form. This is called suspensive hyphenation, where the hyphen attached to "carbon" is just sort of hanging there to clue the reader that it attaches to a word that comes later.

But in these sentence, the parentheticals mess everything up.

lenalidomide- (Revlimid) or bortezomib- (Velcade) based?

lenalidomide (Revlimid)- or bortezomib (Velcade)-based?

If both look awful to you, I agree. The rule books never get this specific. They never say what to do in oddball situations. But they do say that most hyphens are optional, to be used only when they actually help. So, as I told Tracy, I'd leave that passage just as she found it.

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July 18, 2016

We're Not Worthy

As a suffix, "worthy" is on the rise. In his recent Wall Street Journal column, Ben Zimmer asks why.

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July 11, 2016

Prolly Worth Your Time

Baltimore Sun copy editor and all-around language guy John McIntyre did a post a while back about one of my favorite casualisms: prolly. Worth a read!

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July 4, 2016

Who Can Use 'Whom'?

It seems anytime "whom" or "whomever" is positioned as the subject of one clause and the object of another, people mess it up. And by people, I mean professional writers and editors.

The latest comes from the Los Angeles Times:

"Edric Dashell Gross, whom police said is a transient known to frequent Santa Monica, was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder."

Here's my column explaining why that "whom" should have been "who."

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