November 30, 2015

'Beckon Call,' 'All Tolled' and Other Misheard Terms

Here are a few terms people often mishear. Take care next time you want to use one of them!

Beckon call. When people say "beckon call,” what they really wanted to say was probably “beck and call.” A beck is a summoning gesture, and, yes, it’s related to “beckon.” Here’s Garner’s Modern American Usage: “‘Beckon call’ is an understandable guess at the phrase, since one would naturally call out to beckon someone. And ‘beckon’ is a more familiar term than its shorter sibling ‘beck.’”

All tolled. "All told" is sometimes used wrong as “all tolled.” It means roughly the same thing as “all said and done,” suggesting that once you have the whole story, something becomes clear. But there is a myth circulating out there — one I, myself, briefly fell for — that the correct form is “all tolled,” meaning all counted. Not so. “All told” is the original and proper form.

Bold-faced liar. Liars are often bold. But their faces aren’t. So a “bold-faced liar” is the misheard form of the original term “bald-faced liar.” Bald-faced means brazen, obvious and shameless — as many liars are.

Pawn off. “Pawn off” is an interesting mishearing of “palm off.” The original term with “palm” means to pass something off to some unwitting person — a usage Merriam Webster’s says is probably a reference to cheating at cards or sleight-of-hand tricks. Again, it’s easy to see where this one went awry. Pawn shops are at least as prevalent in the modern consciousness as card cheats.

One in the same. If you say that two things are really “one in the same,” you probably mean that they’re “one and the same.”

Baited breath. If you’re waiting for someone with “baited breath,” you might be inadvertently conjuring thoughts of worms and chum: The term is actually “bated breath,” whose first word is related to “abate,” meaning, basically, to stop.

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November 23, 2015

Mondegreens and Eggcorns

Here are two fun language terms to roll out at your next cocktail party.

A mondegreen is any misheard expression, lyric, catchphrase or slogan. The name itself is a mondegreen. For example, there's an old John Prine song called "That's the Way That the World Goes 'Round" with the lyric, "It's a half an inch of water and you think you're going to drown." As the Prine has repeated many times, a woman once asked him to play the happy enchilada song. When he asked her what she was talking about, she recited the lyric: "It's a happy enchilada and you think you're going to drown."

Related to the concept mondegreens are eggcorns, which are also misheard terms, including one derived from “acorn.”

The name mondegreen comes from a misheard lyric from the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Moray.” In the song are the words “laid him on the green,” which some people famously misheard as “laid him mondegreen.” The name eggcorn came into being exactly as you'd guess.

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November 16, 2015

Till vs. 'Til

One of the quickest ways to tell whether an article has been professionally edited is the word 'til. 

This contracted form of until correctly uses an apostrophe to indicate omitted letters. But though it's technically right, it's a dead giveaway that the writer or editor didn't know what he was doing.

Professionals, when they want a shorter form of until don't use 'til. They use till.

Anyone who hasn't studied a style guide might think this is an error. A till, in many cases, is a drawer in a cash register famously featured in the sentence "He had his hand in the till." So anyone with good language fundamentals but no editing training would logically conclude that till is the error.

It's not. The word till used to mean until actually predates until itself. Till is the original. That's why style guides say to use this original word and not a contracted version of a its younger cousin.

And while, technically, the contracted for 'til is legit -- you can, after all, contract anything you want -- it's a sure-fire sign that the editor doesn't know editing.

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November 9, 2015

Passives Fail

Here's a link to the 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article referenced in this week's podcast. In the article, linguist Geoffrey Pullum points out some problems with Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style," the most shocking of them being that Strunk and White didn't understand passive voice.

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November 2, 2015

More on the subjunctive

Fascinatingly, the subjunctive mood is much easier to use (you probably use it well all the time) than it is to understand. So here's a bit more on the subject, my newspaper column on the subjunctive from last year.

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October 26, 2015

Peeve As I Say, Don't Peeve As I Do

I spend a lot of time telling people to try to put their grammar peeves aside. In language, peevishness is always a recipe for frustration and often leads to humiliation. Language evolves. It keeps changing. When people use the language “wrong” often enough, it becomes right. (And no, that’s not a bad thing. It’s how we got all our words in the first place.)

Peevishness is at its worst when it causes us to criticize someone else’s usage. If we do that enough, eventually we end up being wrong. So it’s never a good idea to get peeved.

That said, I'll confess I have some peeves that I just can’t shake -- silly ones in that the "errors" that bother me aren't really outright errors. But I still cringe when I hear them. Here are a few supposed language abuses I just can’t let go of.

There’s before a plural modified by some or many or a lot

I’ve long followed the advice that “there’s” should not precede a plural. “There’s” means “there is,” which naturally should be followed by a singular. There is a man I want you to meet. There is a reason we were chosen. Before a plural, “there are” makes more sense. There are some men I want you to meet. There are reasons we were chosen. But lots of people use “there’s” before plurals, especially when the plural is preceded by “some” or “many” or "a lot" or a similar word. There's a lot of people here. There's some sandwiches in the cooler. There's just so many choices. This use is considered idiomatic, and therefore it’s okay. But it still grates me.

Between you and I

This one is just sad to me because the people who use it are usually striving to be as proper as possible. They’re choosing “between you and I” because they believe “between you and me” is wrong. But they have it backwards. “Between” is a preposition. Prepositions take objects, which come in object form (that is, they take an object like “me” instead of a subject like “I”). Some experts defend “between you and I” as idiomatic. But using it because you think “between you and me” is wrong is a shame.

Acronym for initials or abbreviation

A lot of people say CIA and FBI are acronyms. But according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, an acronym is really “a word formed from the first (or first few) letters of a series of words, as radar, from radio detecting and ranging.” So according to this definition, NASCAR is an acronym because it’s pronounced as a word, but NCAA is not an acronym because it’s pronounced as individual letters. This distinction seems to be fading. And other dictionaries allow some crossover. But I haven't let this one go yet.

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October 19, 2015

A Shining Example of Great Writing

The last 20 years has seen an explosion of bad writing. And I'm not just talking about amateur bloggers. I'm talking about "content" produced on companies' behalf for publication on the web. These pieces are written and edited by people who are getting paid to do so. That makes them professionals. Yet the quality of what's being turned out is anything but.

The sheer volume of text being cranked out by profit-seeking entities (entities that, by the way, are steering revenue away from traditional news gatherers and storytellers) is making quality writing an ever-smaller percentage of the available reading material.

Plus, there's so much of it. We're bombarded by text clamoring for our attention. Anything that can hold our eyeballs for more than a minute or two is a rare thing indeed.

That's why I feel compelled today to give a shout out to this New York Times Sunday cover story, "The Lonely Death of George Bell." Beautifully written and well reported, it held me riveted for over 8,000 words! Kudos to N.R. Kleinfield for an extraordinary read.

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October 12, 2015

'Log In' vs. 'Login' and Other One-word-or-two Dilemmas

Some people struggle with words like login/login. Should it be one word or two, they wonder.

According to the Associated Press Stylebook, “login” is a noun and “log in” is a verb. So, if you're following AP style, you use your login to log in. Piece of cake.

The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t have an entry for "login." And neither Webster’s New World College Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster’s includes a listing for the word. So documents edited in Chicago style should use the two-word "log in" for both the noun and the verb.

The “login” situation is a good guide for other one-word-vs.-two-word conundrums. Often, the noun form is one word and the verb is two words. Take “lineup”/ “line up”: You tell all the players in the lineup to line up on the field. All three of the above sources agree on this one.

Here are some other stumpers that are easily solved simply by applying the noun-is-one-word formula:

makeup / make up – One word as a noun meaning composition or construction: the patient’s psychological makeup. Also one word as a noun meaning cosmetics (though American Heritage also allows “make up.”) Two words when a verb.

backup / back up – One word as a noun or adjective referring to an accumulation (The sink overflowed because of all the backup) or a form of support (Chief, call for backup). Two words as a verb.

workout / work out – One word as a noun, two as a verb.

pickup / pick up – Whether you're talking about a truck, a UPS man fetching a package you want delivered, or succeeding with a romantic prospect, the noun is one word and the verb two.

giveaway / give away – One word as a noun, two words as a verb.

signoff / sign off – Ditto above. One word as a noun, two as a verb.

leftover / left over - Ditto that ditto. One word as a noun, two as a verb.

And, by the way, nouns can function as adjectives. So if you have a makeup case, a pickup time, a backup plan, a workout routine, or lineup changes, those are all one word.

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October 5, 2015

Telling Friends How to Punctuate E-mail Greetings

I made the mistake of telling some friends a while back that it’s better to address an e-mail

Hey, June.

than

Hey June,

Bad idea. But before I get to how this backfired, let me explain the punctuation issue.

Most casual correspondence you see these days begins with something like “hey” or “hi” or “hello” followed by the recipient’s name. Nothing wrong with that. But perhaps 99% of the time, there's a comma after the name but not before it.

Hey June, 

I suspect that’s because people are so conditioned to seeing the traditional greeting:

Dear June,

But just because “Dear June,” is punctuated this way doesn’t mean that’s how you’d punctuate greetings that being with “hey,” “hi” or similar words. Grammatically, they’re different. In “Dear June,” the word “dear” is an adjective. It’s modifying the noun “June.” So “Dear June” is just a noun phrase, not a complete sentence.

But “hey,” “hi” and “hello” aren’t adjectives. They’re basically interjections, which can stand alone as sentences. So they don’t combine with a name to form a single noun phrase.

There's another aspect to this, too. In editing, when you call someone by a name, it’s called a direct address. A direct address is set off with commas.

As I’ve been saying, June, this is the plan.

In "Hey, June" you have a complete thought, "Hey," followed by a direct address. So theoretically a comma should go between them. What about afterward? Well, as I said, interjections can function as complete sentences, which is why I punctuate these greetings with a period.

Hey, June.

If you prefer you can make this part of the sentence that follows by ending it with a colon.

Hey, June:

And, technically, you could also end it with a comma.

Hey, June,

That looks terrible. So I don’t recommend it. Unfortunately, ever since I mentioned this issue to friends, that’s how a couple of them now address their e-mails to me and, I presume, to their business associates.

Hey, June, 

I tried to explain that the first comma's good but a period at the end would be better. But the second lesson isn’t sticking as well as the first. So my help wasn't very helpful. And from now I’ll keep silent on this matter.

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September 28, 2015

'Is When'

It’s been 13 years since I started writing a weekly grammar column. And just when I think I’ve heard every weird grammar myth that ever existed, another one comes at me out of nowhere. Here’s an e-mail I got from a reader in Upstate New York.

“You can’t be talking about grammar and say ‘is when.’”

Apparently, somewhere in my column, I had used this this term. I was so gobsmacked by the “rule” that I didn’t bother to check. Instead, I immediately wrote back saying that was a new one on me and asking my correspondent where she heard it and if she knew of any rule books that mentioned it.

She was cool enough to answer me: She had no source. A teacher had told her that once and it stuck in her mind. She had never heard it anywhere else and didn’t know of any book that discussed it.

In other words: We can add yet another silly superstition to the mountain of nonsense that people have been told and believed.

Like all grammar nonsense, the idea that you can't use “is when” may be rooted in some solid logic. There’s a common problem in writing called faulty predication that deals with sentences like “A death is when bereaved people come together to mourn.” That’s illogical because a death is a thing, not a when. Another example, “Good dental hygiene is when you brush three times a day.” Again, it’s just too weird to call hygiene a when.

But does that mean you can never say “is when”? Of course not.

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