A myth out there alleges that this is an outright error. The idea is that “while” means “during,” so you can’t use it to mean “though” or
“although.” Not true.

while. conjunction:

1. … on the other hand … whereas

2. … in spite of the fact that, although (while respected, he is not liked)

3 … similarly and at the same time that (while the book will be welcomed by scholars, it will make an immediate appeal to the general reader)

That’s Merriam-Webster’s take on “while.” So clearly, it’s correct to use it as in the example sentence above. But is it a good idea? That’s a different question.

Whenever “while” comes before an action, especially an action expressed as an “ing” verb, it sounds like you’re using the other definition of “while”: “during the time that.” So “while pedaling” sounds like you mean “during the time that you’re pedaling.” And in this sentence, it’s going to be a long time until the reader gets your real meaning “while pedaling is …” When we get to the verb, "is," we can see that "while" was meant as “although.”

In my book, any “while” that can lead the reader astray should probably be replaced. “Although pedaling along the beachfront sidewalk is delightful, so too is stopping for a snowcone.”

Recently, a reader of my column wrote to ask about "won" vs. "beat." He wanted to know whether “John won his opponent" can be used to mean "John beat his opponent."

He added:

Also, isn't "won" also referencing ownership? Jon won the trophy.  I hope you have the time to respond as I have a bet with my wife on the correct use.

After a few minutes of staring at my computer screen like a dog stares at a TV test pattern, here's what I replied:

Hi, Robert.

Are you saying you've heard folks say "John won his opponent" to mean he defeated his opponent? That's a new one on me.

As a transitive verb, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary definitions of win include to get, to gain, to attain, and to be successful in. In none of those usages does it seem that a person could logically follow (unless, of course, the person is the prize: Achilles won Briseis). The only times a human seems an appropriate object of that transitive verb is in definitions like to win someone over and to gain someone's support or sympathy -- neither of which equates to defeat.

So, unless I'm missing something, the Ravens didn't win the Patriots.

Does "win" mean "ownership"? Not necessarily. Some definitions include enough elbow room for that, others don't seem to. You don't really own an argument you won, do you?

Anyway, I hope that helps (and I hope your wife doesn't hate me now!).

- June

A team of rivals was/were meeting the statehouse.

A bunch of whiners is/are affecting morale.

A flock of birds fly/flies by every day.

Everyone knows that a team was meeting but rivals were meeting. Everyone knows that a bunch is affecting but whiners are affecting. And everyone knows that a flock flies but birds fly.

But when noun phrase contains a singular noun and a plural noun, things can get pretty confusing. How do you know which noun should govern the verb?

Actually, the answer is easier than most would guess. You just take your pick. It’s up to you.

When your subject is a noun phrase with more than one noun, like “a team of rivals,” either one can "do" something. That is, either noun can get a verb. So choosing the verb depends only on which one of the nouns most seems to you like the one performing the action of the verb.

If you think the focus is more on the individual rivals than the whole team, you can write “A team of rivals were.” If you think it's more about the team, you can write “A  team of rivals was.”

There really is no right or wrong way. And your own ear is by far your best guide.

However, I have a way of looking at these structures that may help.

Every noun phrase -- a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, a flock of birds -- has a head noun. Now, recall that a prepositional phrase is a preposition like “of” plus its object, which is always a noun or pronoun.  The "of rivals" and "of whiners" are prepositional phrases within the larger noun phrase.

The job of a prepositional phrases is to *modify.* They act sort of like adjectives or adverbs, depending on where they’re placed and what they point to. In a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, and a flock of birds, the “of” phrases are all modifying nouns (team, bunch, and flock). So they’re really functioning like adjectives of those nouns. That’s how we know that team, bunch, and flock are the head nouns in their respective noun phrases.

Now, there’s no rule that says that the head noun gets the verb. There’s no reason nouns in the prepositional phrases can’t be doing some action. But I give head nouns a little more authority. As a default, I figure the head noun should get first stab at governing the verb. Only if it sounds funny do I make the verb agree with the object of the preposition.

So how would I write our three example sentences? Let’s see …

a team of rivals were (I feel that the rivals here are more important than the team.)

a bunch of whiners are (Ditto. Whiners seem to rule this noun phrase.)

a flock of birds flies (Here, I think the emphasis is on the whole flock.)

But if you disagree, your opinion is as valid as mine.

That's the peculiar power of "every."

One letter, the “s” at the end of “goes,” makes that sentence not subjunctive, even though saying “it’s crucial” is a classic indicator of a sentence in the subjunctive mood. Had the speaker said, “It’s crucial that he go,” that would have been subjunctive. But because he said “goes,” it was not.

One of the most interesting things about the subjunctive is that, of all the books that discuss and explain it, I don’t know of any that say you must or even should use it. All the discussion out there is about how to use it and when to use it, conspicuously absent of words like “should.” Books and experts just sort of talk about the subjunctive as if it’s required, without ever saying that it is.

So you can’t, technically, say it’s wrong to opt for “It's crucial he goes” over the more proper subjunctive “It's crucial he go.”

Personally, I’d prefer the subjunctive in this case. Here, long form, is how to use the subjunctive. The short version goes as follows:

The subjunctive occurs in statements contrary to fact: wishes, suppositions, demands, commands, and statements of necessity like “it’s crucial that.”

In those sentences, you can just use the base form of the verb, like “go,” instead of an inflected form, like “goes.”

In the past tense, the subjunctive applies only to the verb “be.” Its form is “were.” So in the past tense, be can become was, as in “I was going.” But if you put this as a statement contrary to fact, like a wish, you’d use the subjunctive “were”: I wish I were going.

Or not. It’s up to you.

These two little words cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. Here's how to keep them straight.

It's one of the most popular mom corrections of all time: the idea that you can't say "I'm done" to mean you've finished eating. Unfortunately, Mom had it wrong ...

As I’ve discussed here before, “affect” is usually a verb and “effect” is usually a noun. So you would say “I’m affected by coffee because caffeine has a strong effect on me.” That “affect” is a verb --  it’s an action coffee is performing -- and that “effect” is a noun -- a thing.

If you’re having one of “those moments,” which I sometimes do, you can forget which is which. The confusion is compounded by the fact that “affect” can sometimes be a noun meaning a person’s emotional state. Also, “effect” can be a verb. Ever hear someone talk about wanting to “effect positive change”? That’s the verb form of “effect.” It means “to bring about” and is a distinct word from the verb “affect.”

But those uses are rare compared to the main definitions of “affect” and “effect.” So it’s safe to say that “affect” is almost always a verb and “effect” is almost always a noun.

Here’s how I remember that whenever my brain seizes up: I think of the term “side effect.” That, to me, is clearly a noun -- a thing. And I note that the “e” in “side” prompts me to write “e” in “effect.” So that reminds me that the noun form is the one that begins with “e.”

I suspect that, for some people, that’s not at all helpful. Only if you think of the first "e" as a prompt for the second does this make any sense at all. But it works for me.

Think it's wrong to say "Drive slow"? Not so fast ...

The context was something like “Brazil is a predominately Portuguese-speaking country.” I didn’t notice the spelling of predominately until my second read.  And spell-checker didn’t take notice either.

I quietly congratulated myself for catching the error, changed it to predominantly and continued reading the piece. But a few minutes later, I got the urge to check a dictionary. To my surprise, it was in both Webster’s New World College Dictionary (the dictionary required by the style guide I was using that day) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (which is the one I use when I’m editing in Chicago style). Both list predominately as a variant of predominantly.

I understand that the dictionaries’ job is to document usage, but the weird thing was I don’t think I’d ever seen predominately before. Unless this spelling had been slipping unnoticed under my nose for years, I had only ever seen predominantly.

Not that it mattered. In editing, we always use to the dictionary’s preferred forms and never the variants. So predominantly was the right choice for the article.

But the whole thing was pretty surprising – not just that a spelling I’d never noticed before warranted listing in the dictionary, but because it’s a strange one.

Adverbs often derive from adjectives: smart/smartly, nice/nicely, true/truly. So the adverb predominantly makes sense as a form of the adjective predominant. But predominate is a verb, and verbs don’t usually spin off adverb forms: walk/walkly, know/knowly, keep/keeply, dominate/dominately.

Chalk this one up as another example of our ever-surprising language.

Here’s another item from the “People are annoying me so you need to tell them to stop” mailbag.

 <<Something that drives me crazy is the word “awake.” I hear newscasters saying, “I was woked up.” He "woked me up." "I was waked up," "wokened up." Could you please do an article on proper usage of the word? Articles in newspapers are always using it incorrectly too, so it isn't just young people who have their words autocorrected. It's adults who are intelligent but must have been absent on the days when they had spelling and grammar. Thanks for your help....>>

I understand what this person was asking. She wanted me to write a column about a usage problem she’s noticed. But requests of this nature always rub my journalistic sensibilities the wrong way. As a former news reporter, I’m pretty invested in the idea that the news media’s job is to inform readers, not to exploit their attentions by telling them how they should talk in order to stop bugging one person.

On the other hand, a good topic is a good topic. And though I’ve never heard anyone say they were woked, I agree that past tenses and past participles of wake and awaken are tricky.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, “wake” gives you a number of past-tense forms to choose from.

 For the simple past tense, Merriam-Webster’s prefers “woke.” But it also recognizes “waked.” 

Yesterday I woke.

Yesterday I waked.

And, yes, you can use “up” if you want to with any of these, according to Webster’s.

 Yesterday I woke up.

Yesterday I waked up.

 As for the past participles, Webster’s allows three forms. (Remember that past participles the ones that work with forms of “have.”) For wake, the preferred past participle is “woken.” But they also allow “waked” and “woke.”

 In the past I have woken.

In the past I have waked.

In the past I have woke.

 In the past I have woken up.

In the past I have waked up.

In the past I have woke up.

So two of our correspondent’s examples are, in fact, wrong. There is no woked. But it’s not wrong to say “I was waked up.”

This form is a little different from our other examples because it’s passive. But passive participles are identical in form to past participles. (Pete had eaten the cake. The cake was eaten by Pete.) So that means that, yes, you can say “I was waked up” if you like. 

Oops. What the writer should have written -- or, more  precisely, what the copy editor should have caught -- was that wretched should have been retched.

The disheartening thing about this error is that it appeared almost 300 pages into an otherwise very well copy edited book.

Whoever was copy editing this book knew what she or he was doing. Yet even a team of professional editors with great skills aren’t immune to letting typos slip by. That’s troubling because it means that, no matter how hard you try to make a written work perfect, there are no guarantees.

Plus, some typos are particularly easy to make.  Wretch and retch are among them.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a wretch is a person. Specifically:

1 : a miserable person : one who is profoundly unhappy or in great misfortune

2 : a base, despicable, or vile person

It’s one of those words you hear a lot in old-timey dialogue, especially British. For example, in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, a character refers to juries as “vulgar grovelling wretches.” And of course, the term “poor wretch” comes up in pretty much every piece of fiction with a Dickensian tone.

From wretch, comes the adjective wretched. But it’s not pronounced like the verb retched. Wretched has two syllables, RETCH-id. And it means:

1. deeply afflicted, dejected, or distressed in body or mind

2. extremely or deplorably bad or distressing <was in wretched health> <a wretched accident>

3.  being or appearing mean, miserable, or contemptible <dressed in wretched old clothes>

The verb retch is simpler.  It means only 1. to vomit, 2. to make an effort to vomit.

There’s no trick to keeping them straight, other than just being on your guard. Which, somewhere around page 300 in a 900-page novel, is no small feat.

The term "I couldn't care less" could be losing ground to "I could care less." But should you use it? Ummm ... I'm going to say no.

There’s a good chance you knew that already. I knew it for years, right up until I stumbled across some bad information on the subject, which led to a series of unfortunate events.

For years I knew the term as “all told.” Again, that’s correct. I considered “all told” a close cousin of “when all is said and done.” That’s not exactly right, but it’s a good way to think of it because it equates the telling in “told” with the saying in “said.” Both words refer to talking.

Then, some years ago, I came across a wrong bit of information. I read, I don’t remember where, that “all told” is wrong and that it should be “all tolled.”

I wrote a column about it before I realized it wasn’t true. A writer friend of mine who read the column repeated its incorrect message in a book. Only by sheer luck did we realize the error before the book went to press.

To get this right, remember that it’s about telling – when all has been told. But for a historical understanding of the term, well, that’s not exactly how it works.

“One archaic meaning of ‘tell’ is ‘to count,’” says Garner’s Modern American Usage. “Hence the idiom is ‘all told’ -- ‘All told there were 14 casualties’ -- which dates from the mid-19th century. Some people write ‘all tolled,’ perhaps because ‘toll’ can mean ‘to announce with a bell or other signal.’ But this is an error.

Here are two words that make a lot of mischief: next and last.

We will be there next Tuesday.

The event took place last March.

If you’re speaking on a Wednesday, does “next Tuesday” mean six days in the future? That is, the Tuesday nearest on the horizon? If so,  what if you’re speaking on a Monday? What, then, does “next Tuesday” mean? One day from now or eight days from now?

As for “last March,” people often use it to mean the most recent March. Others use it to mean the March prior to that.

So what’s right? Well, it doesn’t seem there is a right. The situation is a mess.

“In ‘next’ I think I detect the handiwork of the same folks who decided that Sunday should be not only the first day of the week but also half of the week end,” writes Barbara Wallraff in Word Court.

Wallraff has a helpful take on the matter, though I think mine, which I’ll get to later, is even more helpful. Here’s Wallraff on structures like "next Thursday."

“The  ‘next’ in the phrase typically [refers] to next week. Never, not even on Wednesday, is ‘next Thursday’ tomorrow.”

Basically, she argues, “next” usually means in the following week.

This problem doesn't bother me because I just adhere to some common newspaper guidelines. In a newspaper, there is no next Tuesday or last March. The Tuesday following the publication date is just Tuesday. The Tuesday after that is identified by the date -- not the day of the week. “Performances will take place on Tuesday and on May 21.” We would write it that way even if those two performances are exactly a week apart.

Same idea for last. An event that occurred in a March less than 12 months ago occurred not “last March” but just "in March.” If it happened the March prior, it happened “March 2012” or whatever year applies.

“The political showdown that occurred in March was reminiscent of the events of March 2012.”

An event that will occur in the coming March is not “next March.” It’s just March. “The president is scheduled to visit the Middle East in March.” If it’s more than 12 months away, you mention the year. “The president is scheduled to visit the Middle East in March 2015.”

Dropping “next” and “last” altogether seems the only surefire way to make your meaning clear.

Actually, it’s not as big a shame as it may seem. A lot of those “slight of hand” hits were pointing out the error of spelling it “slight.” But many other were errors: “Best slight of hand you’ll ever see,” boasts one YouTube video. 

A particularly notable slighting of "sleight" appeared in a link to a Daily Mail headline, “Magician used slight of hand skills to steal money while working at the cheese counter at Harrods.” What’s interesting about this one is that, when you click the link, you see that the headline was changed to say that the magician “used talent to take money with one hand and hide it with the other.”

 Neither “slight” nor “slight” comes up anywhere in the story. So the editors caught the error after the article was posted and, in fixing it, decided to steer clear of the whole mess.

Don’t make this mistake. Trickery involving sneaking movements is “sleight of hand.”

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, sleight is a noun meaning deceitful craftiness, stratagem, dexterity or skill. Of course, you never hear it used that way. The only time it comes up is in the term “sleight of hand,” which is probably why the dictionary has a listing for the whole term. 

sleight of hand

 1

a: a cleverly executed trick or deception

b: a conjuring trick requiring manual dexterity 

2

a: skill and dexterity in conjuring tricks

b: adroitness in deception

Back when I first started editing for newspapers, I learned it was always two words. Or possibly one. Then I learned that whatever I had learned the first time was wrong. Then I learned that it was a style thing.

Then I learned that it was a dictionary thing. Then I learned it was a part-of-speech thing.

Then I learned that I had better look it up.

In the publishing industry’s two preferred dictionaries, underway is one word. But if you look closely, you notice a little “adj” next to it. This one-word form is an adjective and only an adjective. Therefore it modifies a noun. An underway process. An underway voyage.

But, really, how often do you hear it used that way? Rarely.

More often, you hear it in sentences like: The voyage is under way. The renovations are under way. But in these sentences, it does seem so much like and adjective that’s modifying a noun. It seems more like a sentence element telling us when something is going on.

The party is here.

The meeting is tomorrow.

The time is now.

The meeting will happen soon.

Now, to understand under way, you have to understand how here, tomorrow, now, and soon are functioning as adverbs.

Remember that adverbs don’t just modify verbs. They answer the questions when? and where? too.

(For more on that, here’s a podcast: http://www.grammarunderground.com/lesser-known-adverbs.html)

And if you look up here, tomorrow, now, and soon in the dictionary, you’ll see that they’re all classified as adverbs when they do this job.

So in The voyage is under way, unless the writer’s emphasis in on the adjective concept (an underway voyage), chances are it’s being used adverbially. And because dictionaries don’t list the one word form as an adverb, you have to use two.

And that, in turn, would explain why both the Associated Press Stylebook and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage’s recommend that you use two words in these senses.

under way -- Two words in virtually all uses. The project is under way. The naval maneuvers are under way. One word only when used as an adjective before a noun in a nautical sense: an underway flotilla.

So basically, it’s almost always two words. What did I think was so hard about that?

How do you like that sentence? Does anything strike you as a little off? How about this one:

A hurricane is when wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour.

or

The purpose of toothpaste was invented to help people care for their teeth at home.

When I’m editing newspaper articles, from time to time I find myself staring at a sentence like one of these and scratching my head. The sensation is a little like getting rear-ended at a traffic light. You just sit there blinking, trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world, momentarily unable to remember how the world is supposed to be.

There’s a term for this problem. It’s called faulty predication. And it’s explained like this: Faulty predication occurs anytime a subject doesn’t make sense with the verb. More precisely, it happens when the subject can’t logically do or be whatever the verb says it’s doing or being.

Let’s look at our first example. An inauguration is where we get to see the president sworn in.I chose this one because it’s nice and fuzzy. Is it okay? Is it not?

The subject is “an inauguration” and the verb “is” says that it is “where.” Technically, that doesn’t make sense because an inauguration isn’t a place. But can you stretch the meaning to “where” to something like “an event at which,” giving us “An inauguration is an event at which we get to see the president”? Possibly. And you certainly could make the argument that the reader understands what you mean. But it’s pretty sloppy. I wouldn’t let it stand in an article I was editing.

Ditto that for “A hurricane is when.” Technically, a hurricane isn’t a when. More precise would be “a hurricane occurs when” or “a hurricane is what happens when."

Our final example, “The purpose of toothpaste was invented” isn’t as forgivable. It’s illogical. The purpose was not invented. The purpose of toothpaste is … Toothpaste was invented for the purpose of … There are a number of ways to extract a logical statement out of this sentence, as long as you’re focused on the illogic of saying the purpose was invented.

The only way to avoid faulty predication mistakes is to stay vigilant and, especially, to reread what you’ve written.  When in doubt, just ask yourself: Can my subject really do what I’m saying it’s doing? If not, look for a better way to make your point.

Next week: Indirect Objects

In no time, Fry is wearing ‘80s-style suspenders and talking business nonsense. When the pair create a ridiculously over-the-top TV commercial for Planet Express, Fry smugly defends it on the basis that “It grows the brand.”

The line is meant to make Fry look like an idiot, and it succeeds. But, setting aside the question of whether it’s silly to use these business clichés, we can ask: Is that even correct? Can you use “grow” that way?

Let’s find out.

In case you don’t recall, most verbs can be classified as transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs take objects. Lou watched TV. Betty knits sweaters. The workers built a house. Objects “receive the action” of the verb. In other words, they’re the things the verb is acting upon.

Intransitive verbs are actions without objects. Karen slept. Bert walks. We spoke.

But, of course, many verbs are both. Lou watched. Betty knits. Bert walks the dog. We spoke the truth.

We all know “grow” as an intransitive verb. Flowers grow. Children grow. Love grows. The question is, can it function transitively? Can it act directly upon something? And to get an answer, we need look no further than the dictionary.

Merriam-Webster lists “grow” first as an intransitive verb. But right under that listing, it says this:

transitive verb

1. a: to cause to grow: ‘grow wheat.’ b: to let grow on the body: ‘grew a beard’

2. to promote the development of: ‘start a business and grow it successfully’

So yes, you can say “grow the brand.” But that doesn’t mean you should.

These types of mistakes aren’t egregious or shameful by any stretch. But they still require correction. They’re still, in some cases, mistakes. And the often harmless habit of writing a one-word term as two words can sometimes go really bad (titmouse, anyone?).

So here’s a tip: Whenever you’re not sure whether a noun is one word or two, and you’re not inclined (for whatever reason) to take the time to find out, just make it a habit of typing it as one word.

That will improve the odds that spell-check can help you.  If you type skincare as one word, a good spellchecker might flag it (though mine, for some reason,  does not). But spell checker would never flag the word skin or the word care. A compound made of two words squished together is less likely to pass muster with spell-check than the two halves we already know are valid words.

It could tell you that your word needs to be split up, but it will never tell you that two words like over and priced need to be squished together.

Of course, this is just for rushed writing that doesn’t need to be perfect. If you need to meet a higher quality standard, first check the one-word form in the dictionary, where you’ll see that a pickup is a noun meaning a truck or a retrieval of a package or a person. Then also check the root word, in this case pick, where you could see that it’s often paired with up to create a slightly different meaning.

According to the dictionary, yes, you can.

Download audio file (0113-Graduate-College-vs-Graduate-From-College.mp3)

People often use forego to mean "to do without."  Not a good idea ...

Most of the errors I see in print are in articles I’m editing. It's my job to find them. So I've never shocked to see that mistakes happen. Writers, even very good writers, make mistakes they know better than to make.

I’m talking about the absent-minded typos like “your” in place of “you’re” made by people who have demonstrated many times over that they know the difference.

 But when I read message boards, blogs, and other stuff online, I see a lot of errors that I know aren’t just careless. A lot of people really just don’t know better, and you can tell because they make the same mistakes over and over.

So, after a morning of skimming Internet message boards, here are the ones that, at the moment, get my "For the Love of Pete Don’t Make This Mistake" Award.

 “A lot” shows up a lot as “alot.” In some ways, that seems pretty understandable. It’s just a very easy mistake to make. On the other hand, it’s downright iconic: People who have taken the trouble to learn anything about grammar and spelling don’t make this mistake. So the ones who write "alot" make a strong statement about how they want to be identified by readers.

 “It’s” as a possessive shows up quite a bit. Again, understandably so. When you think about how to form the possessive of “it,” the points of reference that pop into your mind are usually singular possessives like “dog’s” and not possessive determiners like “ours.” But, in fact, “its” is a possessive determiner. In other words, it's more like an adjective than a possessive noun. And, like “ours,” it takes no apostrophe. The "it's" with the apostrophe is a contraction of “it is” or "it has."

The No. 1 "For the Love of Pete Don’t Make This Mistake" mistake is similar to the “its” vs. “it’s” problem. It happens when people use apostrophes for form plurals.

Do the bus’s run all night?

Where can we get good empanada’s?

How are the noodle’s?

Awful stuff. Never form a plural with an apostrophe unless you’ve tried it without one and ending up with something too weird, like when you say your child got all A’s in school and without an apostrophe your reader really could think you meant the word "as."

A lot of writers put commas in the construction "from blank to blank." So I spend a lot of time taking those commas out.

Download audio file (0106-Comma-in-From-To-Constructions.mp3)

On an episode of 30 Rock, television executive Jack Donaghy tries to sabotage his network by greenlighting a slate of awful shows. Along with programming like Mandela starring Joe Rogan and a full hour of Gary Sinise’s band, one of the worst is called Homonym! It’s a game show that works like this: The host reads aloud a word to a contestant, just a word, and the contestant has to guess which meaning of the word is intended without any context.

Host: “Okay, your next word is meat.”

Contestant: “Um, when two people run into each other.”

Host: “Sorry. It’s the other one. Your next word is stare.”

Contestant: “Uh, okay, the things you climb –“

Host: “No. It’s the other one.”

Contestant: “It’s always the other one! Let me see the card!”

Host: “No! Never! Next word: sent.”

Contestant: “I don’t care. Cent like a penny.”

Host: “No. Sorry. No.”

Lights begin to flash.

Host: “It’s a Homonym! double-down. That means you get to guess again: sent.”

Contestant (brightening): “Okay, um, scent like a smell or an odor.”

Host: “No, it’s the third one.”

Contestant: “Go **** yourself.”

It was hilarious. But I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I was distracted by the fact that those aren’t homonyms. They’re homophones.

The Oxford English Grammar says that homonyms are "distinct words that happen to have the same form." Examples include the bank where you put money as opposed to the bank of a river. The bird called a duck is a homonym of the act of moving your head out of harm's way really fast: to duck. So homonym means, basically, "same name."

Words that spelled differently are but pronounced the same are "homophones." Ate as in he ate some cake and eight as in the number before nine are homophones. So are peak and pique, hair and hare, and cue and queue. In other words, homophones, as the “phone” part suggests, are all about sound. So meat/meet, stare/stair, and cent/scent/sent are homophones.

So what about words like dove in “A dove flew by” and dove in “He dove into the pool”? Words that are visually (graphically, if you will) the same but pronounced differently? Those are homographs, according to Oxford. Some more examples: the verb lead and the metal lead; does the present singular of do, versus does, the plural of the female deer doe; sow, as in putting seeds in the ground, versus, sow, a female pig.

So homonyms are named the same. Homophones sound the same. Homographs look the same.

Download audio file (0105-Compare-To-and-Compare-With.mp3)

For the first 9-1/2 years, the column never appeared in a community where I actually lived. This can be a little confusing to community news readers, who expect their news to come from – you know – the community and who sometimes ask me to give talks at schools and civic organizations several light years away from my home.

But I’ve always been happy with this arrangement. For one thing, I don’t have to feel like some grammar ambassador in my own home town. But, more importantly, I never actually have to see the column in the paper.

I don’t like to look at my own column. The reason: typos. For the last ten years, it seems like about half the times I've seen an installment of my column online it has had some embarrassing error.  I never know who to be angry at: the dodo who made the mistake (me) or the editors who might have caught it. Either way, it's a team effort to make me look bad, and I'm captain of the team.

At least the errors weren't showing up in print in my own home town -- that is, until, recently. That blissful separation was shattered a little over a year ago when the Los Angeles Times added a Pasadena section of the paper.
Here’s how I found out my column I would be in that section: I opened the paper one morning and saw it there. No one asked me. No one told me. And you better believe no one offered to pay me. They just started running it periodically -- I assume whenever they needed some light filler material squeezed between articles about Rose Queens and face-melting heat waves.

Now my typos taunt me where I live – literally. Like the one in this column installment.

The error was in the sentence: Webster's New World College Dictionary is more reluctant to embrace the hyperbolic usage, instead adding to one it its definitions this note: “Now often used as an intensive to modify a word or phrase that itself is being used figuratively: ‘she literally flew into the room.'”

Don’t see the typo? That’s okay, neither did I and neither did the editor who checked it before passing it on to the four publications in which the mistake appeared. The typo is “it its.” I meant to type “of its.”

This is a classic example of my own typographical Achilles’ heel. If there’s one error in something I wrote, chances are it's a wrong or extra preposition, article, or pronoun. These little words make mischief when I delete part of a sentence to rewrite it but fail to delete all the words. So I end up with something like “at on,” “to about,” or “at to.”

I guess I’ll just have to implement a policy of reading every word – especially the little ones –
out loud.

Download audio file (0101-Done-vs-Finished.mp3)

So, once again, I had to explain that this belief someone has held so dear for so long isn’t exactly true.

Look up “less” in Webster’s New World and you’ll see immediately that it can be a synonym for “fewer.”

So it's not necessarily wrong to say "10 items or less." Still, e-mails like these always give me an excuse to address a more interesting issue with “less” and “fewer” – the idea that the difference is all about count nouns vs. mass nouns.

People who say that “10 items or less” is wrong often believe it’s because “less” is for quantities – stuff like water, courage, money, and food. These are called mass nouns. Conversely, these folks think that “fewer” is for countable things, called count nouns  -- bananas, guns, friends, dollars, etc.

Ninety-nine percent of the time that explanation works. But it’s actually not quite right. The traditional distinction between less and fewer isn't about mass nouns vs. count nouns. It's about singular things vs. plural things.

Mass nouns usually are singular: You say you have less money not because money is a mass noun but because money is singular. You say you have fewer dollars not because dollars is a count noun but because it is plural.

That makes a difference in a situation like this: Say you’re in the express lane and you realize you have 11 items, so you decide to remove one. According to the mass-noun/count-noun explanation, you now have one *fewer* item because “item” is a count noun.

But that’s wrong. You actually have one less item. That’s because “less” modifies singular things like “item” even as “fewer” modifies
plural things like “items.”

Of course, that’s if you want to follow the sticklers.

If you want to follow the dictionary, you don’t have to worry about it at all.

Copy editors notice a lot of little stuff that other people might not. The online news sites and articles that continue to nudge out traditional news outlets often contain tiny hints that they’re being produced by people who aren’t as well versed in language and style as older forms of media.

One of the most common examples has to do with headline capitalization. A lot of online writing uses sentence case for headlines, with the first letter of most words capitalized.

Fed Chair Will Keep Interest Rates Low

Often, it works out just fine, as in the headline above. But some situations seem to stump less experienced editors and designers

Fed Chair To Keep Interest Rates Low

See that “to”? Well, traditional news style calls for that to be lowercase.

Fed Chair to Keep Interest Rates Low

A lot of inexperienced editors don’t realize that, so they just “initial cap” every word. But more of them, it seems, know that some words in headlines are supposed to be lowercase. And they know those tend to be short words. So many guess correctly that the t in “to” is lowercase, yet they still make other mistakes.

How to Know When it is Time to Make a Will

The capitalization in that last headline doesn’t conform with editing style.

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out to

Neither does that one.

These two examples illustrate why it’s often a good idea to know and follow capitalization style for headlines: It just looks more professional, even to readers who aren’t consciously focusing on capitalization.

So here’s a simple system offered by AP that you should consider for any headlines you write:

Capitalize the first word of every letter except articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer. There’s one exception: Any word that is the first word in the headline or the last word should be capitalized, regardless of its part of speech. So that last headline, in AP style, would leave one “to” lowercase and capitalize the other:

Knowing Which Loved One to Make Your Will Out To

The biggest problem writers have with this simple system is remember that is and it, unlike in, are not prepositions. Is is a verb and it is a pronoun. So they’re always uppercased in AP style headlines.

Candidate Asks What It Is

By the way, the Chicago manual uses a similar system, except it doesn’t contain the same three-letter stipulation for prepositions, etc. So while in AP you’d write “Many Shoppers Wait Until Last Minute” in Chicago that could be “Many Shoppers Wait until Last Minute.”

Here's why it's important to keep straight reign, which means to rule like a king, and rein, which is a strap on a horse's bridle or the act of using reins -- literally or figuratively -- to keep something under control.

Download audio file (0103-Reign-vs-Rein.mp3)

Do you like clichés?

No, of course you don’t. No normal person would answer that question with a yes. I hate them, too. Or so I would have said till I flipped past an entry on clichés in Garner’s Modern American Usage.

Here are the terms that were listed there:

at the end of the day

blissful ignorance

but that’s another story

comparing apples and oranges

conspicuous by its absence **

crystal clear

far be it from me

fast and loose

get with the program *

his own worst enemy

if you catch my drift *

innocent bystander

moment of truth

more in sorrow than in anger **

more sinned against than sinning **

my better half *

nip in the bud

on the same page

pulled no punches

sea change

six of one, half dozen of the other

throw the baby out with the bathwater

viable alternative

The ones with two asterisks next to them I don’t remember ever hearing before I looked at this page in Garner's, at least not in that exact phrasing. The ones with the single asterisks I dislike. Every single other one, I must confess, I like.

I know that some of these cliches shut people’s brains right off.

For example, people who’ve heard “at the end of the day” once too often grow to really hate it. And I get why overused and well-used expressions garner so much contempt. Their actual words lose mean and they become sort of a humming nod to a vague idea created by brains in off-mode and appealing to brains in off-mode.

Yet, somehow, “on the same page” fills a need that “in agreement,”  “collaborating” or any other term doesn’t quite fill.

“Throw the baby out with the bathwater” seems a great way to communicate the idea of discarding too much good along with the bad. And “moment of truth” -- come on. Are there any better words in the world to express the idea of the moment – the one life-changing moment – in which a flash of insight or clarity will change everything forever?

As someone who writes about language, I feel almost obligated to chant the “avoid clichés” team motto. But perhaps saying “avoid clichés” is itself a cliché that supplants a once substantive message with droning noise that has lost all meaning.

And by the way, if, like me, you’ve been told that cliché can only be used as an adjective, as in “a clichéd expression” and not as a noun “it’s such a cliché,” that’s not true. It’s a noun, too.

Download audio file (0104-Beg-the-Question.mp3)

The newspaper column that I write always ends with an e-mail address, JuneTCN@aol.com, where readers can contact me.  And they do , often to cheer on my fight against bad grammar and to ask me to tell people to stop engaging in some linguistic habit that drives them nuts.

That would be lovely if 1. I had ever given the tiniest indication that I was in fact “fighting” against bad grammar and

2. I had any desire to tell people how to use the language.
I don’t do either in my column. Never have. I just talk about questions that come up and the answers I find.

Usually those answers are not what grammar-cop types want to hear -- research almost always proves them wrong in matters like whether you can use “hopefully” to mean “I hope that” or “healthy” to mean “healthful” (answer to both: of course you can).

Lucky for them, the things I actually say needn’t stand in the way of their hearing whatever they want to hear.

I’ve written about this bizarre dynamic before, but it happened again recently after I wrote a column about the word literally.

In the column, I explained that some dictionaries allow the word to be used as an intensive – that is, figuratively. According to those
sources, it’s fine to say, “I literally flew out of the room.” And I said so in the column.

What happened next shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Not one but two readers wrote to congratulate me on my column railing against people's excessive and wrong use of literally.

“Thank you SO much for addressing the overuse of “literally”! That’s been bugging me for some time now. At work, I’m surrounded
by young women who use that word constantly."

She wasn't done.

"Would you consider writing a column about the difference  between transitive and intransitive verbs? I keep reading about people filing bankruptcy and graduating college. UGH!”

Sigh.

Download audio file (0099-Less-vs-Fewer.mp3)

Is an ing word like running a noun, a verb, an adjective?

The answer: All the above. And knowing which form it's taking in a sentence can help you write better.

Download audio file (0111-Identifying-I-N-G-Forms.mp3)

Here’s an interesting email I got a while back:

<<I enjoy your column and am curious about your opinion of the Time Warner ads enticing us to “Enjoy summer better” and “Enjoy back to school better.” My initial reaction was a snicker and comeback: “I already enjoy it good,” but I can’t figure out why it irks me. Is it nasty grammar, stinky syntax, or just me?>>

Usually people who write me have a specific problem with a usage and ask me whether I agree that a usage is wrong. But in this case, she didn’t have a specific problem. It was kind of my job to figure out her problem -- then address it.

I did the best I could. Here was my response:

<<I'm not sure what exactly the issue is with "Enjoy summer better," either. Perhaps it's rooted in an idea that "better" is an adjective and therefore can't modify a verb like "enjoy"? It actually is both an adjective and an adverb: http://www.yourdictionary.com/better. In the latter form, it means "in a more excellent manner" or "in a more suitable way."

So "better" is grammatical as a modifier of "enjoy." But it's a little unidiomatic. It's more common to say you enjoy something "more" than to say you enjoy it "better." So, yeah, it's a kind of odd.

The other issue could be that "better" always suggests a "than."

"I like Joe better" only works in a context in which the listener already knows who I'm comparing Joe to.

Your example sentence leaves the "than" concept implied. "Enjoy summer better than you would have without our service" is, I suppose, the general idea. But without an explicit "than" or any context to suggest one, a lone "better" seems a little out of place.

As for "Enjoy back to school better," it's a bit of a stretch -- though not wrong, per se -- to treat "back to school" as a noun. Still, I'm sure most linguists would argue that it's sufficiently established as a noun to render this sentence grammatical.

Hope that helps!>>

I suppose that’s why so many copywriters and even features writers think that the titles of company bigwigs must be capitalized in every circumstance.

 Joseph Jeeves is the President and Chief Operating Officer.

 Mary Jessup is the Executive Vice President in Charge of International Mergers and E-Commerce Manager.

I long ago lost my ability to be objective about all the things that may be wrong with that approach. Instead, my measured opinion on all this caps is a straightforward “yuck.”

 Professional publishing doesn’t like using this many caps. So, if you want your writing to look like something in a professionally written publication, neither should you. The easiest thing to do is just to never capitalize them at all. But if you want to emulate the news media, consider the Associated Press Stylebook's recommendation:

"In general, confine capitalization to formal titles used directly before an individual’s name. The basic guidelines:

"LOWERCASE:
"Lowercase and spell out titles when they are not used with an individual’s name: The president issued a statement. The pope gave his blessing."

 Plus, AP warns, while you might use caps in Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, commas could change that.

 “Lowercase and spell out titles in constructions that set them off from a name by commas: The vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, declined to run again.”

 In other words, when there are commas separating it from the name, it’s not part of the name. You’re not saying Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. You’re saying: The vice president, who is named Nelson Rockefeller.

The bottom line: To make your writing look professional, avoid capitals whenever possible, and resist the urge to pay homage to anyone with capitalization like: Nelson Rockefeller, Former Vice President of These United States, Distinguished Gentleman, and Exceedingly Wealthy Individual.

Download audio file (0105-Compare-To-and-Compare-With.mp3)

Proofreading is very different from reading. At least, for me it is. When I’m proofreading, I’m looking for commas and skipped words and extra words and sentences without subjects and faulty parallels and a million little things like that.

In that mode, I can read a whole article twice and learn nothing from it. A piece on a restaurant, for example, could contain lots of information on the food it serves, the chef’s background, its history, and on and on. But if you quizzed me on any of it I’d flunk. Reading for information and reading for errors are two very different mental processes.

Interestingly, the other mode doesn’t quite work the same. When I’m reading for content – articles, books, etc. -- certain typos and editing matters jump out at me. I suppose it’s just because I’ve invested so much energy into whatever mental faculty scans for typos that it’s hard to turn off.

And that’s unfortunate because the minute a misplaced comma or other typo catches my eye, it automatically flips a switch in my mind, turning off the brain engine that reads for substance and powering up the part that scrutinizes form.

Then it’s hard to get back into whatever I was reading.

The most common errors that do this to me have to do with commas. They’re illustrated in this sentence:

It was March 14, 2009 when Widgets, Inc. moved its headquarters from Flint, Mich. to Detroit.

I guess if we’re being technical, the comma choices in that sentence aren’t really errors. But from an editing standpoint they are. And when I see them in published material, I think: This piece was not edited my professionals well versed in style.

It’s an instant prejudice that will color my perception of the source forever.

Here’s where the commas in that sample sentence fell short. In professional editing, years, “Inc.,” and states after cities are considered parenthetical information. They’re set-asides, if you will.

Compare:

My wife, Mary, works in entertainment

with

My wife, Mary works in entertainment.

The name Mary is just an aside – a “by the way, the person I just referred to as my wife happens to be named Mary.”

A similar principle applies to years, Inc.s, and states. They’re often included parenthetically. But that’s not as intuitively clear. They’re actually a little different. Mary, in the example above, is something called an appositive, whereas years, Inc.s, etc. are not. So, unlike with the Mary business, the comma rules for Inc. and states you actually have to know. Lately it seems that fewer and fewer of the people producing written content do.

Here are the rules of most professional editing:

* Years after a specific date are set off with commas: “March 14, 2008, was a good day.” But a month and year without the date does not take commas: “March 2008 was a good month.” The same is true of seasons. No comma: Spring 2008 was a good time for me.

* Inc., LLC, and items like that don't need commas. Widgets Inc. had a great quarter. That’s purely a style matter – and one that doesn’t come up much in journalism because Inc. is usually omitted altogether: Widgets had a great quarter. But if a comma comes before Inc., one should always come after.

* States after cities get the same treatment. Any time there’s a comma before “Mich.” one should come after, too. (By the way, news style prefers these abbreviations to two-letter postal codes like MI and book style just spells them out. But all these forms are acceptable.)

What's difference between 'historic' and 'historical'? You probably already have a good idea.

Download audio file (0107-Historic-vs-Historical.mp3)

terrine

This one came up in the context “a terrine of soup.” I hesitated, trying to remember whether I’d seen it spelled “tureen.” Indeed I had. Webster’s New World has entries for both.

“terrine: noun. An earthenware dish or casserole in which a pâté or any of various similar meat or vegetable mixtures is cooked and served.”

“tureen: noun. A broad, deep, usually covered dish used for serving foods such as soups or stews.”

So, if we take this exact wording to heart, you can cook food in your terrine, but you can only serve it in a tureen.

chitter

Just a fun-to-know word meaning “to twitter.” Of course, that was written before the advent of the Twitter. So it’s probably lost some of its currency.

meatloaf

I came across an example of the word meatloaf” but written in the plural, meatloafs. The plural of loaf is loaves. So I wondered whether the same formula applied to meatier masses.

But that raised another question. Can meatloaf be a countable noun, like car? Or is it what we call a “mass noun,” like spaghetti, which in English is considered a mass and not a singular thing that can be multiplied into plural things (explaining why no one says, “I’m so hungry I could eat three spaghettis.”)?

Neither Webster's New World College Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online, American Heritage via Dictionary.com nor Dictionary.com's own entry offers a plural form or any discussion of whether meatloaf can be a count noun.

Usually, any word that has an irregular plural form gets special mention in the dictionary. For example, under child you’ll see children. Similarly, under loaf Webster's tells us the plural is loaves. But it does not offer any similar notation under meatloaf. So we're left to assume one of two things: Either dictionaries aren't down with meatloaf as a count noun or it follows the same rule as every other regular noun in the dictionary, forming the plural by just adding S.

I'm still not sure what to do about this one.

Download audio file (0108-Rob-vs-Burglarize.mp3)

Download audio file (0109-Disinterested-vs-Uninterested.mp3)

Every time I see “waver” in print, I experience one brief moment of thinking it should be “waiver.” And vice-versa: anytime I see “waiver” I think it should be “waver.” It only takes me a split second to realize I’m wrong. But it’s still a little unnerving to have my mental defaults exactly backward.

For the record, here, per Merriam Webster, is the difference.

waver: verb. to vacillate irresolutely between choices; fluctuate in opinion, allegiance, or direction

waiver: noun. the act of intentionally relinquishing or abandoning a known right, claim, or privilege; also : the legal instrument evidencing such an act.

More simply, to waver is to change your mind. A waiver is a legal relinquishment or exemption.

* *

And here’s another word that always give me pause: smartphone. There’s still no consensus on whether it should be one word or two. But indicators I’m seeing definitely indicate that the trend is toward one word.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary -- the one AP users are supposed to follow -- doesn’t have an entry for the one-word “smartphone” yet.
That means, by implication, that you can only use the words that are in the dictionary: smart and phone. However, some publications I edit that follow a basic form of AP style have decided in-house style should be one word, smartphone.

Merriam Webster, by the way -- the Chicago Manual’s default dictionary -- does have a one-word entry. So in book and magazine style, if you will, smartphone is the clear choice.

This is especially true of usage guides.  I stumble across language issues I never even knew existed, like about how the Shakespeare reference “hoist with his own petard” is better written, according to Garner’s Modern American Usage, “hoist with his own petar.”

The problem with flipping through usage guides is that you can end up with just one opinion on a usage matter and confuse it for something more universal. But I find that Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage poses the least danger of that. This usage guide seems the most reluctant to prohibit usages its authors don’t like. So it’s a safe bet you’re not learning a prohibition that's not really a prohibition.

So on a recent gray day I picked it up for a casual flip-through and learned that, apparently, there’s a controversy over the words complexioned and complected. Sticklers say the first one is the only correct choice. MWDEW begs to differ.

“complected: Not an error, nor a dialectal term, nor an illiteracy, nor nonstandard – all of which it has been labeled – complected is simply an Americanism. …. Until the early 20^th century it excited no  notice except from compilers of Americanisms and regional terms. Beginning with [“A Desk-Book of Errors in English” by Frank Vizetelly published in 1906], however, it began to raise hackles. … There seems to be no very substantial objection to the term, other than the considerable diffidence American usage writers feel about Americanisms. It is irregularly formed, to be sure, but so are many other words. It has been used by some of our better-known authors.”

So that fast I find out that some people say you should call someone “light-complexioned” and not “light-complected” and that those people are just talking smack.

Download audio file (0110-Myriad.mp3)

Download audio file (0102-Anxious-vs-Eager.mp3)

Except the thing is, sometimes it isn’t. And, when it’s not, sometimes it’s my job to act like it is anyway, which makes me feel like a bit of a schmuck.

Case in point: Not long ago, one of the section editors I work for mentioned “accoutrements” in an article headline. Spell check didn’t have any problem with it. So it was printed and laid out on the page before it landed under my nose.

I whipped out my red pen and swapped out the R with the first E, changing A-C-C-O-U-T-R-E … to  A-C-C-O-U-T-E-R … accouterments. 

The original spelling wasn’t wrong. It just didn’t happen to be the preferred spelling in the dictionary we use, Webster’s New World College Dictionary.

I’ve been an even bigger schmuck about “ambience.” For years, every time I saw that in an article I changed it to “ambiance” because that’s what a quick check of Webster’s New World’s online edition led me to believe was the preferred form. When another editor finally questioned me about it, I explained that the A spelling was the preferred form, at which point she opened the hard copy of Webster’s New World and showed me that, now “ambiance” is the alternate spelling. The preferred form is “ambience.”  

Then there’s the world-famous “doughnuts” vs. “donuts” issue. Both are right. But at the newspaper I always change “donuts” to the longer form because that’s the official, preferred spelling.

So sometimes spelling doesn’t matter … unless, of course, you’re paid to be pettier than the pettiest person alive …

Actually, it's all of the above. And knowing what job it's doing can help you write better sentences.

Download audio file (0111-Identifying-I-N-G-Forms.mp3)

So here’s a question: If you were not, as I did above, looking for a way around writing the past tense of “underlie,” how would you have put that in the past tense?

In the past, principles underlied older systems of government?

Underlay?

Underlain?

Underlaid?

When the question popped into my head recently, I had to confess I had no idea. I know that the past tense of lie is lay. But underlie is its own word. And the standard way past tenses are formed is by adding ed or, sometimes after changing a y to an i. So if the verb underlie is regular, its past tense would be underlied. As in, “Different principles underlied older systems of government.”

But that just doesn’t sound right. And when we tinker with different forms, most would agree that underlay sounds best of all. “In the past, different principles underlay those systems of government.”

Mark this as exhibit ZZZZ in the case to prove that the ear usually guesses right.

Here’s what Webster’s New World College Dictionary says.

underlie. transitive verb underlay, underlain, underlying

to lie under or beneath: trusses underlie the roof

1. to
   be the basis for; form the foundation of
2. Finance
   to have priority over (another) in order of claim, as a bond

As I’ve mentioned before, dictionaries have a system for telling you the past forms of verbs. After the main entry, they list the past tense and past participle in bold, in that order.

So open the dictionary to blow and you’ll see right next to it blew then blown. That’s how you know how it’s “Today the winds blow. Yesterday they blew. In the past they have blown.”

However, if you look up walk in most dictionaries, you’ll see no such forms after the main entry. And if you didn’t know how to use your dictionary, you might think that the publishers had left you hanging. But actually, the absence of past forms is just as informative as their inclusion. Most dictionaries include past forms only for irregular verbs. Regular verbs get their past forms the same way: by adding ed for both the simple past tense and the past participle. And they explain this stuff right up front in the section on how to use the dictionary. So because no past forms are listed in the entry for walk, you know it’s: Today they walk. Yesterday they walked. In the past they have walked.

So, based on the dictionary entry for underlie, we know it’s “Today these principles underlie government. Not long ago, other principles underlay government. In the past, many different principles have underlain government.”

Outside!

Now!

Stop!

Onward!

Beautiful!

Some of my column readers couldn’t, even after I explained which and why.  Obviously, that one’s on the explainer.  I’ll try harder here after you’ve had a chance to mull over the question.

Here’s your first hint: Yes, one of these is a complete sentence. But only one. The rest aren’t errors, mind you. There’s nothing wrong with punctuating an incomplete sentence as if it were complete. When you do so, it’s called a sentence fragment. And writers -- even many of the very best writers -- use sentence fragments all the time.

I think that’s what tripped up the couple of readers who wrote to object to my saying that “onward” and “outside” are not complete sentences. If you yell either of these words at someone, your point is 100% clear and complete. So why was I being such a pain and refusing to acknowledge they’re complete sentences?

Well, as I wrote in a subsquent column, just because a thought is clear and complete doesn’t make it a complete sentence.

A complete sentence must contain at least one clause. A clause is a subject and a verb, and neither can be left implied, with one exception: Imperatives, that is, commands, always leave their subjects implied. It’s not a problem because the subject is always the same: “you.” So when you tell someone “Eat!” the subject is already built in to the verb, if you will.

But in four of our five sentences above, not only is there no subject, there’s no verb either. Outside! Now! Onward! and Beautiful! aren't verbs. Yes, they make clear the verbs that they’re implying. (Go) outside! (Do it) now! (Move) onward! (That is) beautiful! But remember that the verbs must be explicit in order to make for a complete sentence.

So  on our list only Stop! is a complete sentence because it’s the only one that meets the criteria of having a verb (which must be explicit) and a subject (which, in commands only, can be left implied.)

Download audio file (0097-Acronym.mp3)

To hear me talk about the e-mails I get from readers of my column, you might think I get a lot. I don’t. Unfortunately, of the e-mails I do get, about half of them are to point out mistakes I made. And about 95 percent of those aren’t real errors. They’re based on misconceptions that, ironically, I have addressed over and over again in the column.

Here’s an example:

“In your June 10 column you refer to "editors like me." Unless you're speaking of editors who bear similarities to you, I think the phrase should be "editors such as me.”

The author of this e-mail has been writing to me for at least seven or eight years. I’m sure I’ve mentioned the “like” vs. “such as” issue before in the column, just as I have here. Yet this reader often seems to think he’s educating me about issues I had no idea existed until he e-mailed me.

The issue of whether  “like” can be a synonym for “such as” is an old one, and  it’s well-known among people who pay attention to language. The popular misconception is that it cannot: “like” means "similar to” and “such as” means “for example” and that anything else equals bad grammar.

Not so. “Like” isn’t just a verb meaning “bearing a resemblance to.” It’s also a preposition that can mean “such as,” according to Merriam Webster’s.

Every other source I checked agrees. Yet I doubt I've convinced my e-mail friend and I'm even more doubtful that I've convinced him that I.

Download audio file (0089-Faze-Principal-Site-etc.mp3)

Of course, today, any teenager can produce highly professional looking publications complete with not just italics but pretty much any formatting, symbols, or graphics under the sun. So AP's style may be a little outdated. But, in what may be an example of “If it works, don’t fix it” thinking, quotation marks around book, movie, TV show, and other titles contineus to be AP’s official style.

The Associated Press Stylebook just happens to be one of the book titles I write about most, along with the Chicago Manual of Style. I always put them in quotation marks – have been for years.  I do the same for dictionaries, which I also mention a lot. Then just the other day, I got an e-mail from an editor at one of the papers that runs my column.  He was writing to tell me I was doing it wrong. The style guide titles should not be in quote marks, he said.

He pointed me to listing in AP for “composition titles,” which says to put quotation marks around “book titles, movie titles, opera titles, play titles” and more. That’s as far as I ever remember reading in the guidebook. I never noticed the second half of that sentence: “… except the Bible and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material. … this category includes almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, hadnbooks and similar publications.”*

I’ve been doing it wrong all these years, even though clear instructions were under my nose the whole time.

*Exact wording taken from the 1992 edition.

The timing was kind of strange. The e-mail about phrasal verbs that inspired this week's podcast was one I had actually received months ago. It sat in my "interesting topic to write about" mental pile for quite a while before I was finally ready to put up a podcast about it.

Though it wasn't the first time someone had asked me about word order in expressions like "lock him up," this is nonetheless a pretty rare topic for my in-box. It had been years since I'd last explained the concept of phrasal verbs to anyone.

But, just as I was ready to run the podcast here, I got an e-mail from a man named John telling me about a correction his daughter had made to a political sign. The sign had the expression "taking our country back." I don't know whose sign it was or why it had such an effect on the daughter, but she contacted the campaign with a correction. “She notified them [it] should be ‘taking back our country’ because ‘taking back’ is a verb phrase and should not be split by ‘our country.’"

Um, nope.

No. 1: It's a phrasal verb, not a verb phrase. A verb phrase usually means stuff like "am walking," "had gone," "would have quit." That is, it's usually a participle like "walking" or "gone" plus an auxiliary or two, like "am" or "had." Plus there can be other stuff in between. Grammarians often use the term "verb phrase" to refer to just a single word verb. That's handy when you're analyzing the syntax of a sentence: chopping it up into noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.

Phrasal verbs, as we discuss in this week's podcast, are things like "bring up," "call off," "take down," "throw up," and "make up." They're combos in which the second word actually gives the verb a different meaning than it has when it stands alone. That is, to call means to communicate. To call off means to put an end to. So that's a phrasal verb.

No. 2: You can put the object of a phrasal verb anywhere it sounds best, as in "call the wedding off." And sometimes it clearly works best in the middle. Compare "bring it up" with "bring up it" and you'll see what I mean.

So don't every let someone tell you you're wrong to go with your gut on the word order in terms like "run him over," "call him out," "make something up," and on and on. Anyone who says you can't is just misinformed.

Yup. Though not everyone realizes it.

Here's the full story ...

Download audio file (0093-Placement-of-Objects-of-Phrasal-Verbs.mp3)

I don’t focus on pronunciation matters. In general, they don’t much interest me -- probably because they don’t frighten me. I know that pronunciation is dictated by usage -- we speakers are the ones who vote for our preferred pronunciations every time we speak. So it’s literally true that, if everyone else pronounces a certain word a certain way for long enough, I can, too.

But there are a few pronunciation matters I find interesting, mainly because they came on my radar before I realized how the rules get laid down.

The one that’s one my mind today is “forte,” as in “Working with computers is definitely your forte.” Everyone pronounces that “for-tay.” I thought nothing of doing so myself until I came across an old Mallard Fillmore comic strip shredding to bits anyone who pronounced it that way. It should be pronounced, the author insisted, just like “fort.”

Sound like hogwash? Of course it is. But don’t take it from me. Here’s the word on dictionary.com, which will pronounce it for you if you press the little audio button saying you can pronounce it either “fort” or “for-tay.” In keeping with their phonetics designations, however, they write the pronunciations differently than I did here, using instead a w and an r. So they write that first pronunciation as “fawrt,” which seems pretty apt considering the curmudgeonly cartoonist who inists that’s the only right way to say it.

Download audio file (0088-Pique-vs-Peak-to-precede-89.mp3)

rock-n-roll

rock’n Roll

rock n’ roll

rock and roll

Due to an unusual number of live musical performances mentioned in my editing work recently, most of these forms have come across my desk of late. Yes, they’re all perfectly clear and understandable. But that’s not enough for editors. We have to worry about the whole consistency issue, too. So I always change them to rock ’n’ roll.

I never bother to look it up. I know it’s rock ’n’ roll. I’ve been doing this a long time. But when I’m passing along what I know to other people -- mainly, here -- I always double-check my facts.

So I turned to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is the final word on these matters at the publication I edit. Here’s what I learned: The entry for  rock ’n’ roll gave this for a definition: rock-and-roll.

Whenever a dictionary entry for one word refers you to the entry for another, that’s the dictionary’s way of saying that the other is the main entry -- in this case, that rock ’n’ roll is merely a variant of the preferred rock-and-roll.

That surprised me: Where did I get the idea it was rock ’n’ roll? I checked the house style guide for the publication and that’s where I found it: Our house style is rock ’n’ roll, which trumps even our house dictionary, which, thought it allows rock ’n’ roll, clearly prefers rock-and-roll. That was a relief. It meant 1. that I haven’t been doing it wrong all these years, and 2. that I don’t have to switch to the weird-looking rock-and-roll.

 By the way, in case you’re more interest in book-writing style, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary doesn’t like rock  ’n’ roll as a first choice, either. According to that dictionary, which many in the book publishing world follow, rock ’n’ roll is acceptable, but the preferred form is rock and roll.

So Sammy “There’s Only One Way to Rock” Hagar was wrong. So very, very wrong ...

Download audio file (0092-When-to-Capitalize-After-a-Colon.mp3)

It makes sense. People on this side of the Atlantic weren’t oo far removed from people in Britain

In fact, many were themselves Brits fresh off the boat. So you could see how they might do lots of crazy British things, like fancify their Rs and eat kidney pie.

I never questioned those highfalutin historical accents at all – I figured they were somewhere close to the truth – until I got a copy of Patricia T. O’Conner’s Origins of the Specious.  Just a few pages into the introduction, I read this:

“I’m sometimes asked, ‘When did we Americans lose our British accent?’ Answer: We didn’t lose it. The British once spoke pretty much as we do. What we think of as the plummy British accent is a fairly recent happening.”

In the following chapter she explains how this happened. The Englishmen and –women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sounded a lot like the Americans of today. What we think of as a British accent (and the many variations within that could be construed as separate accents) didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Then, shortly after we broke away, a fashion started forming among educated folks in English who thought it sounded jolly good to start doing things like dropping their R sounds in words like “far” and “church” and adding other little fancy-sounding flourishes to their speech.

A lot of the Americans who had the closest ties with England – you know, people in New England – picked up the habit. Which is why parking a car too far in Harvard yard is a punchline-worthy activity.

Download audio file (0094-Since-and-Because.mp3)

Download audio file (0096-Lighted-vs-Lit.mp3)

There were many  factors that precipitated the American Revolution. Colonists had grown tired of living under oppressive British rule. But without a doubt, the rallying cry of “no taxation without representation” is remembered as the most important sentiment that lead to the rebellion and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence.

There’s an error in there. I didn’t want to say so before you read that because it’s the type of error that’s not too tough to spot if someone tells you one is in there. But it’s very, very easy to overlook if your brain isn’t in typo-hunt mode.

The error is “lead.” It should be “led.”

This is one of the most common mistakes I see. No one’s immune. Even people who know that the past tense of the verb lead (which rhymes with weed) is led (which rhymes with bed). The problem is that there’s another word, lead, which rhymes with led. It’s a metal (not to be confused with medal).

So anyone, it seems, can write, “the most important sentiment that led to the rebellion” instead of “lead to the rebellion.” And editors and proofreaders who aren’t consciously looking for this error can let it slip right past them, too.

The only way to avoid this error is to pay special attention to every instance of “lead.” If it’s being used as a verb and it’s supposed to be in the past tense, it should be spelled “led.”  Another way to look at it: if it’s a verb that rhymes with bed, again: it’s led, not lead.

Download audio file (0087-Can-Apropos-Mean-Apropriate.mp3)

If you don’t see an error in there, don’t feel bad. Depending on how you look at it, there may not be one. But on my watch, those commas are just not okay.

A basic guideline for commas is that they should be used between “noncoordinate adjectives.” The quickest way to get a handle on noncoordinate is to think about coordinating conjunctions, specifically the coordinating conjunction “and.”

With that in mind, it’s easy to remember this rough guideline: if the word “and” works well between the adjectives, you can put a comma between them. If it doesn’t, don’t.

So we can apply that to our sentence above by trying “and” in place of those commas. Does it make sense to call the dish “a delicious and macadamia-crusted sea bass”? Does it seem right to say “a selection of seasonal and red wines”? I don’t think so.

Another test to tell whether your adjectives qualify as “coordinate” or not is to try moving them around. Coordinate adjectives, because they all modify the noun in the same way, can go anywhere. Think about “a fast, easy, fun hike.” That’s a hike that’s fast and easy and fun, right? And it’s just as logical to say it’s an easy and fun and fast hike.

It doesn’t work the same way with our original example. A macadamia-crusted delicious sea bass doesn’t say quite the same thing as a delicious macadamia-crusted sea bass. It’s as though “macadamia-crusted” is integral to “sea bass” in a way that “delicious” is not.

Ditto that for “red seasonal wines.” Red wine is a thing. Seasonal is just a word we’re using to throw some added description on top of this well-known thing. So seasonal red wines seems different from red seasonal wines.

The choice isn't always clear. For example, “a seasonal local wine” could in fact be a “local seasonal wine.” And the good news is that you do have the leeway to go with your own judgment in these situations.

But when in doubt, just apply the “and” rule. Whenever “and” sounds a little off between two adjectives: no comma.

My friend, Tracy, thought it would be better if she moved the commas around and wanted to know if I agreed. Here’s how she wanted to write
it:

Greta had learned about different cultures, and, perhaps more importantly, about her own.

“Am I off the wall?” Tracy asked.

Here’s my reply: “I like your commas a lot better. They're more logical. Technically, you don't usually put a comma before an ‘and’ that doesn't precede a whole clause. Though you can if you really want to indicate a strong division or pause.

“Your commas do a more logical job of setting off a parenthetical  -- ‘perhaps more importantly’ -- from a sentence that otherwise wouldn't need a comma: ‘Greta learned about different cultures and about her own.’"

And by the way if you bristled about the use of “importantly” instead of “important,” you’re not alone. Tracy didn’t like it, either, just like the many people who prefer “important” to “importantly” in contexts like these.

The objection is often rooted in the idea that the adverb form is wrong here because adverbs describe the manner in which an action is taking place. From this perspective, “Greta learned about different cultures, most importantly, her own,” suggests that the adverb “importantly” is modifying the verb “learned,” saying that she somehow went about learning in an important way. That would be true if adverbs only modified verbs. But in fact they can modify whole sentences or thoughts, as in “Unfortunately, my flight was canceled.”

Here’s a word that makes me all chop-happy when I edit: “both.”

I comes up a lot in sentences like this one: “The hospital provides a supportive work environment for both doctors and nurses to provide superior patient care.”

 That “both” is, technically, just fine. It’s used correctly, of course. But it has one drawback. And when you weigh that drawback against the benefits of this “both,” I see no reason to leave it. 

The drawback is that “both,” when immediately followed by a plural noun, might momentarily be construed to be modifying that noun only. In other words, a someone looking at the phrase “both doctors and nurses” might first read it as “both doctors” and wonder which two doctors you’re talking about.

Granted, they wouldn’t be confused for long. It only takes a split second to realize that “both” is modifying the whole noun phrase “doctors and nurses.” But if your goal is optimum clarity, precision, and economy of words – which mine usually is when I’m editing – you have to question that “both.”

 Does it really add anything that offsets its drawbacks? Not in this sentence. “The hospital provides a supportive work environment for doctors and nurses” says it all just as well with fewer words. So I would chop “both” out of the sentence without hesitation.  

Writers use “both” more often than needed because, in spoken English, it can add some emphasis. It can say: Wow. Not just doctors but even nurses have a good gig here. But in print it doesn’t always have the same effect. Readers can’t always “hear” the way the word sounds in the writer’s mind. So “both” can do more harm than good.  

On the other hand, “both” can sometimes achieve the desired effect in print. Used well it can drive how that “wow” point quite well – even before a plural noun it doesn’t modify alone. That’s why I weigh the merits of every “both” on a case-by-case basis.  

But my simple rule of thumb is: If “both” isn’t adding anything to the sentence and it comes before a plural noun that isn’t its sole partner, “both” is an extra word we can do without. 

Download audio file (0095-The-Reason-Is-Because.mp3)

Download audio file (0085-Healthcare-Health-Care-or-Hyphenated.mp3)

Here’s something you probably never have to worry about: whether to capitalize the first letter after a colon. It’s not the kind of thing that, if you get wrong, people will roll their eyes or giggle behind your back or pass you over for a job or even notice. Unless, of course, it’s your job to know these things.

But if, for whatever reason, you’d like to know when to capitalize after a colon and when not to, here’s all you need to know.

1.  If the stuff introduced by the colon is not a complete sentence, don’t capitalize the first letter (that is, of course, unless it’s a proper name). This is true in both AP and Chicago styles. Here’s an example: “I know what you did last summer: nothing.”

2. If the words that follow the colon form at least one sentence, AP style says to capitalize the first letter. “I know what you did last summer: You did nothing.”

3. In Chicago style, you capitalize the first letter after the colon only when the colon introduces two or more sentences. “I know what you did last summer: You did nothing. You were a couch potato.”

And in case you’re not clear on when to use a colon instead of, say, a dash or a semicolon or to start a new sentence. That's not as serious a problem as you may think. There is some overlap in these choices, which we’ll save for another day. But for now, here, in Chicago’s words, is a simple explanation of when to use a colon: “A colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon.” I think of it kind of like a spotlight or a pregnant pause -- something that says, “Here it comes ...”

Some say loan is a noun and lend is a verb and "Loan me some money" is wrong.

Not so ...

Download audio file (0083-Loan-vs-Lend.mp3)

Here, slightly disguised, is a sentence from an article I had to edit some time ago. The article was about a couple, how they met, and how they made their relationship work.

Supporting each other through their education and in their career dreams has been a vein running through their 10-year relationship that continues today as Jones pursues her dreams of becoming a licensed psychiatrist.

You’d be surprised how often I see stuff like this, penned by professional writers no less. Somehow, their words just get away from them and the result is a sort of a swamp of nondescript thoughts that never take shape.

 It can happen to the best of us. And, when you find out that your clear, simple ideas turn to something like this on the page, the best thing to do is to start looking for subjects and verbs. Once you’ve identified the main doer and the main action in each sentence, you’ll be able to decide whether they’re saying what you wanted to say.

In this sentence, the subject is the gerund “supporting.” Bad call. Gerunds, which are “ing” forms of verbs functioning as nouns, turn dynamic actions into static things. Sometimes this is fine, as in “Jogging is great exercise.” But often it’s just a sort of vague abstraction that doesn't crystallize in the reader’s mind.

The main verb of this sentence is “is,” which is a fine verb. But look what it attaches our subject to: “a vein.” So the main point of our sentence is “Supporting is a vein.” True: In context, it’s not quite so nonsensical. But it’s still abstract and borderline meaningless.

 When you start looking for other verbs, you find “continues” and “pursues.” (“Running” in this sentence isn’t functioning as a verb or even as a noun. It’s really working as an adjective  – a participial modifier describing the word “vein.”) The verb “continues” is part of the larger thought “a vein that continues through their relationship.” So that action is subordinated -- stuck in a relative clause. “Pursues” in “Jones pursues her dreams” is a decent verb, I suppose, but it’s subordinated by the conjunction “as,” which allowed the writer to sort of weld this idea on to the rest of the sentence.

And once I scrutinized these clauses individually, I found other ways to write this.

 “Supporting is a vein” had to go. I reworded the passage to convey the idea buried within: Throughout their 10-year relationship, Jones and Wilson have supported each other’s education and career goals.

 Here the subject is actual people. Supporting is now an action instead of a vague concept. And, better yet, now that we haven’t wasted a whole clause on stating the existence of a “vein,” we don’t need to say it "continues." It’s clear with just one clause that they continue to support each other.

 I still had to find a way to work in the information that Jones was pursuing her dream of becoming a therapist. But that one simple thought could now fit anywhere. I found a good spot a few sentences down after a bit about their history: Jones decided that she wanted to enter medical school and began taking pre-med courses at Princeton.

 So whenever you find yourself staring down a world-class Frankensentence, just break it up and take a cold, hard look at the parts. Usually, that’s all it takes to turn it into something real.

I was about four pages deep into a very boring eight-page publication I was proofreading, struggling to keep my mind from drifting off to some balmy beach in the South Pacific, when suddenly a word seemed to leap off the page: wtith. I circled it in red, wrote “with” under it, and silently congratulated myself.

Prepositions are the sneakiest typo smugglers. We (or at least I) tend to skim over them quickly when we read, focusing instead on the nouns and verbs that give the text its substance. It’s easy to overlook an “it” that should have been an “in” or an “if” that should have been an “of,” not to mention the combos: “in if,” “on of,” and even “in in” and “on on.”

What’s more, by the proofreading stage, the articles I edit have already been through spell-check, which catches typos like “wtith” as well as duplicate prepositions. So I wasn’t exactly laser-focused on the spelling of every word in this 4,000- or 5,000-word publication. That’s why, whenever I catch stuff like this, I’m kind of proud of myself. And by “kind of” I mean “very.”

Not two hours later, in another boring 5,000ish-word publication I’d already read several times, I caught an “aboard” that should have been “abroad.” I went home that day, a Friday, feeling like an invincible Typo Terminator.

Then, on Monday, I came in to my freelance job to learn that the publication in which I had caught "wtith" had the word “stil,” misspelled, right on the cover. Fortunately, another editor caught it before it went to print. But unfortunately, that editor wasn’t me.

Typos are the bane of my existence. They’re like little demons lurking behind every paragraph just waiting for the opportunity to humiliate me. And I’m actually quite good at catching them – in other people’s writing.

My own writing is another thing entirely. I’m a messy thinker and a messy typist, which makes for some very messy writing. My skill at catching other people’s typos doesn’t apply to my own writing – ever. I can proofread something I wrote four times and not catch that I spelled my name Juen (this has happened).

In 15 years or so I’ve been writing for community newspapers, I’ve come to accept the fact that my embarrassing typos are going to end up in print. Community newspapers operate on shoestring budgets forcing underpaid and often inexperienced workers to crank out a ridiculous amount of text in a ridiculously short period of time. If I type something wrong, there is perhaps a 50% chance it will get fixed.

Over the  years, I’ve learned to try harder to catch my own typos. The best trick I’ve discovered is to write something the day before deadline then read it again the next day with fresh eyes. Actually, this mostly helps to find problems with the writing itself – clunkiness, unclear explanations, etc. – but I do catch a few more of my own typos.

The best way to catch your typos is to recruit someone else to. Ask a word-savvy friend or family member to carefully proofread your work. Reading aloud also helps – it forces you to pay attention to every word, assuring you won’t gloss over any.

But, to me, the only way to shield myself against typo-induced embarrassment is to accept, in advance, that my next public humiliation is just around the corner.

Because than is primarily a conjuction, some say it can only be followed by a subject like I. But, actually, it's a mistake to label than me a mistake.

Download audio file (0084-Than-I-vs-Than-Me.mp3)

<<I am a professional editor who has a great ear for the language and can turn anyone's writing into gold. My gift is not precise knowledge of grammar but flow, aliveness and clarity and assuring that the reader will not put it down. I have no formal training and don't know a split infinitive from a split log. My authors rave about my work, but I live in terror of people like the one who emailed you... any advice?>>

Oh, yes. I have some advice. It's not just for professional editors but for anyone aspiring to use the language better while fending off uninformed attacks from people like Barbara. Here it is, long form.

1. You know who has formal training in grammar, syntax, usage issues like split infinitives, punctuation, and all other matters language-related? Almost no one. There are a couple of copy editing programs (including a great one I teach for at UC San Diego Extension) that teach this stuff. Linguistics majors learn a lot about these matters, too. But they're a tiny minority of folks in the writing and editing professions. Most professional wordsmiths, including a lot of editors and copy editors, started with an innate flair for language and picked up their knowledge in bits and pieces - much of it on the job. Tragically, pretty much every writer or editor I've ever met felt he or she was at a disadvantage because they didn't "learn" such things in school. So they all feel like the lone dunce in the class, not realizing that everyone else in class feels the same way! The innate ability to make poor writing sing can't be taught. But facts about prepositions and infinitives can be easily looked up. Which brings us to ...

 2. My second piece of advice for Leslie and anyone who shares her desire to get a better handle on language can be summed up in two words: usage guide. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, Garner's Modern American Usage, Fowler's Modern English Usage -- these books look like dictionaries, but they're not. They're goldmines. They list, alphabetically, answers to every language question their authors could anticipate, including whether it's okay to start a sentence with "and," which you'll find listed right under the letter A, and the truth about "split infinitives," listed right under S or I. Thumb through one of these for an afternoon and most of your grammar insecurities will melt away.

 3. Get a copy of either the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook. They are essentially playbooks offering guidelines to help you consistently write numbers, hyphenate prefixes, use words, and on and on. The Chicago Manual focuses on book and magazine writing. The AP guide reflects popular standards in news media. But be warned: neither is an absolute authority. If Chicago says you can't use "nauseous" to mean "nauseated" that just means you can't do so according to their style. It doesn't mean it's wrong to, as any modern dictionary will tell you.

4. You know that little section in the front of your dictionary that explains how to use the dictionary? Read it. Really read it. There's a lot more help in there than most people realize. This section can actually solve mysteries like how to choose between "indexes" and "indices," whether "propertywide" should be one word or hyphenated, why the entry for "smart" mentions the comparative form "smarter" but "intelligent" doesn't mention "intelligenter," why after the entry for "think" you'll see "thought" but after "walk" you won't see "walked," and why the following is correct: "Today I lie on the bed, yesterday I lay on the bed, and in the past I have lain on the bed." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (not to be confused with Merriam-Webster's usage guide) even posts its guide online here.

 5. In the more than 10 years that I've been getting e-mails about grammar, I've never once plugged one of my own books -- not even when people ask me to recommend books for their reference library. But for anyone who wants a basic primer on sentence structure, phrases and clauses, and the parts of speech, I recommend Appendix 1 of my book It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences.

 6. Know this: Those grammar snobs -- the people who leap to tell you some usage or construction is "wrong" -- they're full of it. Most of what they say is pure superstition that they never bothered to fact-check. Most grammar "rules" that begin with "you can't" or "it's wrong to" are myths. There is no enormous tome called the Grammar Penal Code on a shelf of some hallowed archive of the Grammar Legislature. Anyone who tells you something is "wrong" and can't provide at least two credible sources doesn't have a leg to stand on.

 And that, in a nutshell, is most of what you need to know to write clean, edit well, and take down those bullying grammar snobs.

Download audio file (0081-Faulty-Parallels.mp3)

And here’s her complaint.

“You committed that old rule about ending a sentence with a preposition,” the reader, whose name is Barbara, wrote.

Assuming she meant that I had committed an error, let’s consider her charge.

Years ago, it was popular to teach schoolchildren that it’s grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition like “to,” “at,”  “with” or “for.” But that was just bad information that, unfortunately, spread like wildfire. (I’m not sure why messages that “you can’t” do something and “it’s wrong” to do something make such a powerful impression on people. But many misinformed teachers passed this
bad information on to students and, with a lot of them, it really stuck.)

Underlying all this is a valid idea: Prepositions are supposed to be partnered with objects: “to him,” “at noon,” “with cheese.” When
the preposition comes at the end, it’s split from its partner: “The cheese you top your burger with.” But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

As I’ve written here before, the experts are unanimous:

“The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake.” – Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

“Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.” – “The Elements of Style”

“Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.” “Garner’s Modern American Usage” calls it.

“Superstition.” -- H.W. Fowler

But that’s just part of Barbara’s mistake. In my sentence, "up" was part of something called a phrasal verb: “to look up.” A phrasal verb, also sometimes called a multi-word verb, is usually a verb plus preposition combo in which the preposition actually changes the meaning of verb and so is integral to it. "Don't give up!" Even the people who object to sentence-ending prepositions would have no trouble with that because it's a different animal.

The bad news for Barbara is that there's no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. But the worse news is that I didn't.

Is it "Me seeing this letter is important" or "My seeing this letter is important"? To make the best choice, you need to know about the "possessive with gerund" and its despised cousin, the "fused participle."

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There's a lot of bad information in the beloved little book The Elements of Style. Here's how to sift the bad from the good.

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Last week I shared an e-mail I got from a reader about an “error” in my weekly column.  Here’s the sentence that drove her nuts.

“Even professionals have to look these things up.’”

And here’s what the reader, Barbara, had to say about it: “You do that thing that raises the hair on the back of  my neck -- you split an infinitive! Excuse me just a minute while I walk out to the patio just off my office space and scream!”

The split infinitive is the term used to describe constructions like “to boldly go,” in which a word intercedes between a particle “to” introducing a base form of a verb like “go.”

Here’s how “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” explains it: “The base form of an infinitive is shown in ‘to love,’ in which the verbal part is preceded by the particle ‘to.’ When such a combination is severed for ‘split’ by the insertion of an adverb or adverbial phrase (e.g. ‘to madly love,’ ‘to really and truly love,’) or other word or words the construction is called a split infinitive.”

That’s not what I did. There’s nothing between my particle “to” and my verb “look.” So the only thing Barbara could have been talking about was my insertion of “these things” between “look” and “up.”

“To look up,” in this sentence, is something called a phrasal verb. A phrasal verb is a group of two or more words, usually a verb and a preposition, that together combine to make a unique verb with a distinct meaning. Compare “to chalk” with “to chalk up.” The former means to write something in chalk, the latter has a completely different meaning: to attribute. So this is a phrasal verb: to put up, to storm out, to warm over, to throw up, to give up -- these are just some of the many combos we call phrasal verbs.

“To look up” is not a phrasal verb in the sentence “If you hear a noise in the sky, look up.” In this sentence, “to look” means “to look” and the preposition just adds extra information (a direction). But in “I have to look up the spelling of a word,” the phrase “to look up” means something different from “to look.” So it’s a phrasal verb.

And never, in all the years I’ve been reading and talking about grammar, have I heard of a rule against breaking up elements of a phrasal verb. If any such rule existed, you wouldn’t be able to say “to chalk it up” or “to give it up.”

But even if I had split an infinitive, would Barbara be right? Nope. There is no rule against the so-called split infinitive. Here are some experts.

“No absolute taboo should be placed on the use of simple adverbs between the particle ‘to’ and the verbal part of the infinitive.” -- Fowler’s Modern English Usage

The idea that you should never split an infinitive is “superstition.” -- Garner’s Modern American Usage

“Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stovewood does. ‘I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow.’” -- Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style

Some experts go further, saying there’s no such thing as a split infinitive.: “The term is actually a misnomer, as ‘to’ is only an appurtenance of the infinitive, which is the uninflected form of the verb.” --  Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

Next week we’ll talk about reader Barbara's other allegation: that I ended a sentence with a preposition.

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A few years after discontinuing my weekly grammar column, the Daily Pilot newspaper in Newport Beach, California, started running it again. Not long after, I got this e-mail from a reader, which is reprinted here exactly as it was written.

“When I first read that you are back I was briefly excited about your column because I weep for the lack of the proper use of our language. Then, as I read your column my excitement that at last, someone was going to do something about the horrible use and abuse of our language I read your phrase ‘Even professionals have to look these things up.’”

The reader, whose name is Barbara, didn’t like that one bit: “You do that thing that raises the  hair on the back of  my neck -- you split an infinitive! Excuse me just a minute while I walk out to the patio just off my office space and scream!

“It's done all  the time and I really should get used to it, but I can't. Somehow I thought that a column about English usage might help a little to perfect the language we use every day. If professional writers can not be correct then who in the world can be.

“So, be aware that I will continue to read your column and we may become fast friends because I am going to sent a message to you every time I read something awful that you  have written. Someone has to do it and it is apparent that the newspaper doesn't have an editor for such stuff although one might expect that someone edit a column about language usage so that it doesn't begin with two huge errors at first printing. That would be terribly offensive not to say embarasing to the person who hired you.

“In case you can not find the second error ---- look above when I quote your offense of splitting the infinitive and you will see that you committed that old rule about ending a sentence with a preposition. The funny thing about all this is that if you hadn't split the infinitive you might not have gotten yourself in the position of ending the sentence with a preposition.”

There are a number of mistakes in Barbara’s e-mail:

There’s no rule against splitting an infinitive.

Even if there were, I didn’t split one.

There’s no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition.

Even if there were, it wouldn’t apply to the sentence Barbara took issue with.

She says I committed a rule.

And, some mistakes I believe should be overlooked in an e-mail: Her second sentence was ungrammatical, “embarrassed” is misspelled, and she uses “to sent” instead of “to send.” (Those are typos anyone can make, even a sane person.)

I’ll cover, in several installments here, her charges that I split an infinitive and ended a sentence with a preposition. But this week I wanted to point out what, to me, is the biggest problem with her e-mail. Her “excitement that at last, someone  was going to do something about the horrible use and abuse of our language.”

Tell people you’re interested in grammar and a lot of them will jump to the conclusion that you, like them, bemoan the horrible demise of our language and you consider yourself part of the resistance against the tragic erosion of language standards.

I get this all the time from readers of my column. They’ll say straight up stuff like, “I, like you, am appalled at the demise of proper English.” Yet I’ve never said any  such thing. I’ve never implied it, either. My columns often debunk the myths to which these people are victim.

I don’t believe the language is eroding and I don’t believe in telling people how they should speak or write. Yet so many people assume that, if I have any interest whatsoever in grammar, surely I’m part of some prescriptivist crusade.

It boggles the mind.

Next week: my “split infinitive.”

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Recently, I and about six million other schadenfreude-fueled  bloggers snickered at the Mitt Romney camp’s publishing a Facebook promo with  the term “sneak-peak” instead of “sneak peek.” I warn careful writers about this peak-vs.-peek danger a lot, so the campaign’s error was a good reminder  that, unless you’re talking about stolen hallucinogenic drugs, the thing you’re  sneaking is probably a “peek.”

But another interesting fact about the typo got less  attention is that hyphen. Even if they had gotten the peek part right, why did they think it contained a hyphen?

We may never know, but the one thing we can be sure of is that a lot of people – even people who know how to hyphenate compound modifiers like “smooth-running” or “well-paying” – have no idea when to put a hyphen in  terms functioning as nouns or verbs. That’s because no one ever tells us that  the answer is right at our fingertips, no farther than your nearest dictionary or dictionary site.

My favorite example: type “water ski” into Webster’s New World College Dictionary online at yourdictionary.com and you’ll see that the piece of equipment is called a water ski, but the verb is water-ski. The person  doing the water-skiing is a water-skier.

Two out of three are hyphenated, but one isn’t. No formula will help you figure out which. You just have to look it up.

So did the Romney team confirm their hyphen in “sneak-peak”?
Considering they got peek wrong, it won’t surprise you that they were none too meticulous in researching that hyphen, either. Webster’s New World doesn’t have a listing for “sneak peek” or “sneak-peek,” which means there is no such  hyphenated word. Instead, “sneak peek” is a combo you form yourself with two distinct words. And because hyphenation rules don’t apply to noun phrases, this takes no hyphen.

Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage agree. Hopefully next time, one of the professional communicators on the Romney team will sneak a peek at a dictionary before embarrassing the candidate and themselves.

I, for one, could probably save the world and wow the Pulitzer committee with my groundbreaking economic theory (our concept of inflation is obsolete due to our highly responsive luxury goods market) -- if only I had a clue what to do with that dazzling insight.

It takes a few days to realize how silly I'm being in thinking that bigwigs should listen to me.

But this month, something amazing happened: actual confirmation that, yes, world leaders should listen to me. That realization came in the form of a Facebook posting by the Mitt Romney campaign that made it all too clear someone there could have benefited from my recent podcast on the common typo "sneak peak."

In a flub-filled couple of weeks that also served as a national advertisement for quality copyediting, the Romney campaign posted an offer of a "sneak-peak" of a campaign video. That "peak," of course, should have been "peek" -- meaning a glimpse or a look. The embarrassing mistake made headlines, along with two other Romney team typos. A week before, a campaign app misspelled America as Amercia. Not long after, the Romney camp took a bold stance against spell-checker by offering Web surfers a chance to get "official gar."

As I've said, most of the people who make the "sneak peak" typo probably know the difference between "peak" and "peek." But as this astoundingly common typo proves, knowing the difference isn't enough. This is a typo looking for a place to happen. If your mind hears an "eek" sound in "sneak" and as you type it with an "eak," it's only natural that that you'd be tempted to give "peek" the same treatment.

The only way to avoid the "sneak peak" error is to make it a point to pay attention every time you use this term. And, I would add, the only way to run a media campaign for national office is under the watchful eye of a skilled proofreader or copy editor.

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The problem is: I’m no expert. Pronunciation isn’t my thing. When it comes to how certain words should sound, I have no more insight than anyone else. All I have is a dictionary. And that’s where it gets sad: Almost everyone has a dictionary, or at least access to one online, yet they don’t know that it holds the answer.

Take, for example, an e-mail I got recently from a reader of my column named Ellen.

<<I'm from downstate New York, where we pronounce the word "often" without the "t" sound as "ofen." Since moving upstate three years ago, I have noticed that many people pronounce the "t" sound. Is there a right or wrong way to say this word? Is it a regional pronunciation? I do get teased often about my downstate accent and wondered if I am indeed mispronouncing this useful word?>>

I told her that I don’t know anything about regional variations in how this word is pronounced. I was raised in Florida by New Yorkers and was taught that the T is silent. As I recall, most people around me used a silent T and those who didn’t stood out. But as for whether she is mispronouncing this word -- well, that’s as easy for her to answer as it is for me.

In its entry for the word “often,” “Webster's New World College Dictionary” lists two correct pronunciations -- one with a T sound and one without. That tells you that both pronunciations as correct. However, because this dictionary lists the silent T pronunciation first, that means its preferred pronunciation is the one with the silent T.

So Ellen has been right all along. But so have her new neighbors.

This stuff is on my mind because I’m teaching a friend copy editing and I’m finding interesting the things she misses. I should note that not only is she smart and highly literate, she’s more literate than me. By just about any measure -- past school achievement, number of books read, mastery of foreign languages -- she’s ahead of me. So it says something that, while our recent focus has been on commas, hyphens, and badly written sentences, she’s overlooked some doozy errors in the copy she’s been practicing on.

Here are some things she missed. They might seem obvious to you. But in a four-page article loaded with a million little pitfalls couched in passages that sometimes had to be completely rewritten, these aren’t as easy to catch.

1. “After a day of pouring over the shoe, handbag, and cosmetics selections, you’re ready for some serious refreshment at P.J. Fakename’s Bar & Grill at Caesars Palace.”

2. “SkyJump Las Vegas is a heart-pounding, pulse-racing, high-speed thrill ride that will leave you with the kind of adrenalin high only a day at the spa can reverse.”

3. “Prawn dumplings and venison sausage on sweet corn pancakes are two of the tray-passed hors d’oeuvres offered by Joe’s Catering that make for exciting cocktail fare appealing to every palette and dietary choice—spicy, gluten-free, vegetarian, or omnivore.”

4. “While cocktail receptions are generally more informal and relaxed than seated dinners, you don’t need to forego glamour.”

5. “A photo booth complete with props like feather boas or a life-sized Easter bunny is a playful twist on traditional photography, says event photographer Ann Onymous.”

Here are the errors my friend missed: 1. “pouring” should be “poring.” 2. “adrenalin” should be “adrenaline.” 3. “palette” should be “palate.”  4. “forego” should be “forgo.” 5. my favorite: “a life-sized Easter bunny”? Does that mean it’s the size of the real, live Easter Bunny? (If so, I have some sad news for our writer.) Or did the writer mean it’s the size of a live rabbit, which seems not worth mentioning at all? My friend should have either questioned it or changed it to “oversized,” “large,” or something like that.

If you found other problems with these sentences -- especially if you saw ways to rewrite them better -- you were probably right. And that just further bolsters the point: catching errors can be really tough.

The choice comes down to whether you want a noun or an adverb.

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There are some headlines you really want to believe, like the one I saw a while back on Yahoo Finance: “4 Fundamental Reasons Stocks Are Headed Even Higher.” The stock market has been having a rough time -- to say the least -- ever since the crash of 2008. And, because the market can be an indicator of the overall health of the economy, rising stock prices suggest good news for everyone.

Of course, articles that attempt to forecast the stock market or the economy are hardly reliable. If any of their authors actually knew where stocks were going they wouldn’t have to waste a minute of their time pulling down writers’ pay. But sometimes you want to believe. And when I saw the headline offering reasons for more hope, I clicked.

Turns out, the story, which was provided by the financial news service Breakout, was one of those video segment/article combos, where you can watch footage of people sitting at a desk talking and/or read the accompanying article. I started to read the text, expecting an uplifting experience full of convincing, expert insights on why the economy is looking up.

It took less than a sentence for me to lose all faith in the writer. The article began: “When I was on my high school basketball team, in the throws of a disappointing season …”

If we wanted to be really kind to the writer, we could guess that the word “throws” was maybe intended as a pun. But I’ve seen this typo enough to know that lots of writers just aren’t aware of the word “throes.”

A “throe,” according to “Webster’s New World College Dictionary,” is a spasm or pang of pain: usually used in pl.: the throes of childbirth, death throes. Clearly, that’s the word the writer wanted.

When I see an error like this, however, I don’t blame the writer. The writing process is weird enough that even a writer who knows the word “throes” can accidentally type “throws.” And even if the writer didn’t know the difference, well, he’s not expected to catch every typo in his own work. That’s the copy editor’s job.

Copy editors aren’t perfect, obviously. It’s not inconceivable that this error could have slipped by me. It’s also possible that some last-minute change to the article or its layout caused the error to be inserted after it was edited.

Regardless, a typo like this calls into question just how professional this whole news operation is. Was this indeed just “one of those things” that can happen to anyone? Or does it reveal a lack of professionalism that could also offer clues to this news agency’s credibility?

I don’t know. And I may never find out. The moment I saw “throws” my hopes that I was going to get good news from a trustworthy authority got tossed out the window.

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“The step is among many Brown has taken to address the state’s massive budget deficit, which now stands at about $13 billion. Here’s a few other things he’s instituted.”

Like “there’s,” the contraction “here’s” gets used a lot in front of plurals, especially when some modifier like “a few other” or “some” comes before the noun. “Here’s some things you should know.” “Here’s all the ways you can look at this problem.”

I don’t remember who taught me so or when, but somewhere I picked up the clear message that, when the stuff that follows is plural, you should use “here are” instead of “here is” or its contracted form “here’s.”

Here are some examples.

Here are all the ways to approach this.

Here are a few of my many relatives.

It’s easy to confuse these structures because they put the subject after the verb, which isn’t all that common in English.

“Here are my cousins” is an inverted way of saying “My cousins are here.” In either case, the true subject of the verb is “cousins.” And because “cousins” is plural, logic dictates that it should take a plural verb like “are” instead of a singular verb like “is.”

Actually, though, there’s no prohibition against using “here’s” before a plural. As with “there’s,” you could make the case that putting “here’s” before a plural is standard in common speech -- idiomatic. So I’m not critical of people who make that choice unless they happen to be members of the media writing for publication. News organizations strive to avoid sloppy, informal, ungrammatical forms. They hold themselves to a higher standard, which seems like a good idea to me.

So it’s unfortunate that the “here’s a few other things” sentence appeared on a blog of a major newspaper, the Orange County Register. In my view, it wasn't a good call.

Recently, I bought a copy of  the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. I’ve been meaning to do this for years for one reason and one reason only: From time to time while reading the paper I’ve stopped dead in my tracks when I came across a sentence like: “The band was popular in the 1980’s.”

Everyone who knows the first thing about apostrophes knows that they’re not usually used in plurals. One carrot, two carrots. Write it “two carrot’s” and you can end up the butt of jokes that have launched a thousand websites and even a book, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.”

And though the New York Times doesn't use apostrophes in plurals of carrots, it has long used them in decades. The paper also uses apostrophes in plurals of initials like TV’s, DVD’s, IOU’s, etc. That’s not how others do it. In perhaps 99% of American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the plural of TV is TVs. The plural of DVD is DVDs. And so on. No apostrophe needed.

So I long wondered why the New York Times did it the other way – that is, until I got a copy of their style book.

“Use the apostrophe for plurals formed from letters or numerals (p’s and q’s; size 7’s; B-52’s) and terms like PC’s, TV’s and VCR’s. While many authorities prefer to omit the apostrophe in these cases, it is necessary for clarity in all-uppercase headlines. Therefore use it in other kinds of copy also, for consistency.”

There you have it. A headline wouldn’t say “WARNER TO PRODUCE DVDS” because it’s not clear whether the s is there to form a plural of the initialism or whether it’s one of the initials (which would be pronounced dee-vee-dee-ess). So why not, the paper figures, have the text mimic the headline?

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, the New York Times doesn’t use many all-caps headlines these days. Most editions I’ve seen lately have just one cover page headline in all caps and the rest in upper and lowercase.

What’s more, when I went to their website to search for examples, I found a number of examples that contradict the Times’ own rule: “…a pared-down selection of the couturier’s signature looks, some dating from the 1980s …” is just one of the examples I found with no apostrophe in the decade.

So, after spending $12 on their style book, I’m no closer to understanding what’s going on there.

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I, too, have a very strong opinion about serial commas, though it’s not in line with either of the two warring camps. Here it is: I passionately, emphatically, vehemently don’t give a hoot. I care so little about this issue that I find it hard to believe anyone else does. For me, it would have to be a pretty slow news year for serial commas command even an ounce of ire (banking deregulation, anyone?).

The serial comma, in case you don’t remember, is the comma before “and” in “red, white, and blue.” If you pay attention to these things, you may have noticed that this comma shows up a lot in books and magazines, yet doesn’t seem to be favored by newspapers. True that.

 Books and magazines tend to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which is pro serial comma. News media and the public relations industry often follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which says not to use it. So in a newspaper you’d see “red, white and blue.”

In academic circles, I’m told, the serial comma reigns supreme. Its advocates, including the Chicago Manual, insist it can prevent confusion. And, yes, sometimes it can.

Take the sentence: “I’d like to thank my parents, God and Sharon.” Without the comma, the speaker seems to be saying that God and Sharon are his parents. In other words, the coordinate noun phrase “God and Sharon” seems to be functioning as an appositive of “parents.” (An appositive, if you don’t recall, is just a restating of a noun that comes before. “I met with the CEO, Robert, before lunch.”)

Sounds like a pretty good case for the serial comma, huh? 

Not so fast. What if we replaced the plural “parents” with a singular noun phrase, like “my father.” Then our sentence would be, “I’d like to thank my father, God and Sharon.” A serial comma here would backfire: “I’d like to thank my father, God, and Sharon,” because it raises the possibility that “God” is appositive to “father.”

Another argument against the serial comma is that commas separate coordinate adjectives, that is, adjectives that could logically have an “and” between them. “The flag is red, white and blue” could be expressed as “the flag is red and white and blue.” In other words, the commas are standing in for the word “and,” so it doesn’t make sense to have one before “and” in “red, white, and blue.”

 Part of the reason I don’t take sides on this matter is that I edit in both Chicago and AP styles, switching back and forth sometimes several times a day. So maybe I’m too busy trying to keep track of which style I’m using at any given moment to care about which side is more right.

For folks not sure which style to use in their everyday writing, I recommend using the serial comma simply because it’s so much more popular. Most academic writing seems to favor it.

 But deep down in my heart of hearts, I passionately couldn’t care less.

You've already decided your piece is formal enough to warrant using "whom." But do you really have to use it at the beginning of sentences like "Whom is this letter for" and "Whom else did you see"?

Download audio file (0076-Who-vs-Whom-at-the-Beginning-of-a-Sentence.mp3)

A while back I came across a website about real estate foreclosure. The site and its main article were trying really hard to convince readers of the company's professionalism and expertise (it was selling an advanced course for prospective real estate investors). The layout wasn’t too sharp, but I wasn’t going to hold that against them. And the site seemed to have a good idea of how to organize information. So in some regards they were living up to the standards of well-polished professional sites.

Then I saw this sentence: “Bank owned properties commonly called REO or real estate owned is one of the most common foreclosure investment practices today.”

I’ve read a lot business writing in my day. In fact, I used to be a proofreader/editor for Business Wire. I was always surprised at how seriously corporations approach the writing and editing of their annual reports and other documents. Reputable companies, I could see, usually have professional editors ensuring the quality and consistency of their copy.

This sentence was a sign -- one of many, actually -- that the website wasn’t in the same league.

In grammar, there’s a lot of talk about subject-verb agreement. It goes like this: your verb should agree in number and person with your subject. It’s “I am,” not “I are.” It’s “he walks,” not “he walk.” But really, who didn’t know that already? It’s so easy to make verbs agree with their subjects that it can make you wonder whether all the talk about agreement problems is a waste.

Then you come across a sentence like this and see that, yes, subject-verb disagreement isn’t just a remote possibility. It’s a real-world problem -- one that can occur quite easily anytime a sentence gets longer than “I am.”

In “Bank owned properties commonly called REO or real estate owned is one of the most common foreclosure investment practices today,” the main verb is “is.” The subject it’s supposed to agree with is a little hard to pin down because it’s surrounded by so much other stuff. But when you zero in on it, you see that the real subject is “properties,” which when paired with your verb gives you “properties is.” Of course, it should be “properties are” in which a plural verb matches a plural subject. But the writer stumbled and there was no editor on the job to catch him.

Of course, there are other problems with this sentence. I’m especially turned off by how the phrase “or real estate owned” isn’t set off by commas. And I don’t like the logic of calling properties a practice. But the subject-verb disagreement is what really gives away that this company isn’t as polished as they’d like people to believe.

If this book has a regular shtick, it’s debunking popular language prohibitions. For example: have you ever heard it’s wrong to split an infinitive? Well, this book will give you an earful on that one, making it quite clear there’s no such rule.

So I was more than a little surprised recently when I was thumbing through the usage guide and saw this: “dissatisfied, unsatisfied” Though ‘dissatisfied and unsatisfied appear to be synonyms, there are distinctions evident in the usage examples in the Merriam-Webster files.” (By the way, that’s what most language authorities base their opinions on: usage examples. That’s what academics do, too.)

The guide continues: “These examples show that ‘unsatisfied’ is more frequently used to modify nonhuman terms (such as ambition, debts, curiosity, demands, claims) than human ones and that in all instances the meaning is generally of something or someone being ‘unfulfilled’ or ‘unappeased.’”

The examples the book gives include published excerpts saying “… the curiosity was unsatisfied” and “a large unsatisfied demand for education.”

Then the book gives examples of dissatisfied, showing how it usually applies to peple or groups and means “not pleased or gratified.” “Dissatisfied landowners stopped action” is one of the book’s examples.

Merriam-Webster’s usage guide makes clear that there’s some crossover. And a look at dictionary definitions proves there’s some overlap.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines “dissatisfied” as “not satisfied; displeased.” This dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for “unsatisfied.” So we have to think of it as a form of “satisfy” negated by the prefix “un.”

Because “un” can negate something, “unsatisfied” also means “not satisfied,” just as “dissatisfied” does.

According to this dictionary, the two words are overlapping. So it makes it that much more interesting that, in common usage -- at least as far as Merriam-Webster’s usage guide can see -- they’re not.

Well, yes: Impact is both a thing and an action -- though some people still don't like it.

Download audio file (0073-Impact-as-a-Verb.mp3)

Recently, I was editing an article and came across a reference to a consortium, then to another consortium, then (here it comes) to two consortiums.

I didn’t want to futz with it. I liked it fine. And the tendency I’ve seen in some people to go all Julius Caesar when forming the plural of any Latin noun always struck me as a bit much. I’m talking about the people who lunge at the chance to use “memoranda” without even considering whether it should be “memorandums” because, hey, that’s how you’d do it in ancient Rome.

This may be a good way to justify how they spent a couple precious semesters in high school, but it’s not a good policy for forming plurals. In fact, if you did this with memorandum, you’d be making a bad call.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary allows both “memorandums” and “memoranda” as the plural of “memorandum.” But it prefers “memorandums.” And editing styles usually defer to their dictionaries’ preferred forms, in part because it helps ensure consistency. Otherwise, if editors chose whichever correct form they wanted, some would choose “memorandums” and others would choose “memoranda” and a publication that didn’t watch such things could have all kinds of inconsistencies.

So when I saw “consortiums” I really didn’t want to be that editor who gets all Latin happy on a writer’s word choice. But, of course, it’s not my call anyway. So I had to check.

The dictionary I was editing from, Webster’s New World, says the correct plural is “consortia.” So I had to change it. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, however, allows both plural forms, though it prefers “consortia.”

You can use either one you prefer. Just don’t judge an editor too harshly if she changes it on you.

Download audio file (0078-Mama-vs-Momma-and-Other-Kinship-Names.mp3)

Those might be lovely and welcome replies except I don’t crusade against erosion of the language, I’m not a stickler, and, I don’t fight to protect the language.

In fact, the lion’s share of my columns demonstrate why sticklers are wrong and why there’s no reason to resist the natural evolution of the language. Yet for some reason, people see a grammar column and assume it’s either a crusade against teenagers saying “Where are you at?” or a crusade against adults using “hopefully” as a sentence adverb.

Isn’t that weird?

As I tell them, the language doesn’t erode. It just evolves. Some people think that’s terrible because the evolution is often driven by “misuse.” The irony, of course, is that every one of the language tenets the sticklers hold most dear -- the usages they fight to preserve -- were born the same way: from "misuse." Every word we now use was once “wrong.” So the very language the sticklers hold dear is an abomination unto a language someone else held dear.

If it weren’t, we’d all still be saying “thou” and “thine.”

Many of my column readers are them older people who are longtime subscribers to their community newspaper. They worry that the language is eroding, losing its integrity, or going to hell in a handbasket. But the irony is that they simply lack historical perspective. When English changes, it's just doing what languages do. That's what I've been trying to tell them along. But somehow I've failed.

Download audio file (0069-One-of-the-Only.mp3)

I realize that I may be in the minority on this. To many people,
“donut” is to “doughnut” what “thru” is to “through.” I get that. I also get
that “dough” is a foodstuff while “do” is not. So there’s another logical
victory for “doughnut.”

But ever since I was a kid I’ve looked at the word “doughnut” and
marveled at how weird it seems to have the word “nut” in there. Doughnuts don’t
look like nuts, they don’t taste like nuts, most don’t even contain nuts.
Doughballs, doughrounds, doughdrops – any of those I could see. But these
things just don’t strike me as nuts made out of dough.

What’s more, I tend to think of dough as a firm substance you can
hold in your hands and knead on a board, while many doughnuts are made not from
dough but from batter – a liquid that would seep through your fingers if you
tried to hold it. So not only does the second syllable of “doughnuts” seem
illogical to me, the first one does, too.

Of course, my opinion on this is worth the rough equivalent of
nuthin’. Whenever a word has more than one correct spelling, which “doughnut”
does, editors just go with whichever one is preferred by the dictionary.

Dictionaries can indicate their preferred spelling any of a number
of ways. They often use terms like “variant spelling” or “informal spelling” to
indicate their least-favored choice. For example, if you look up “donut” in Webster’sNew World, it says “informal
sp. of doughnut.” If you look it up in Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, you see “var. of doughnut,” meaning it’s a variant
spelling of the proper word “doughnut.”

Other times, dictionaries will use a word like “or” or “also.” For
example, if you look up the word “ambience” in Webster’s, you’ll see “also sp.
ambiance.” And because this dictionary does not have a separate listing for “ambiance”
with an “a,” you know it prefers “ambience” with an “e.”

But because Webster’s New
World, which is the default dictionary of the Associated Press Stylebook, and Merriam-Webster’s,
which is the default dictionary of the Chicago
Manual of Style, both prefer “doughnut,” that’s how I’ll continue to spell
it, despite how weird it seems to me.

Download audio file (0077-Indefinite-Articles-A-vs-An.mp3)

Download audio file (0080-Hyphenation.mp3)

Would you write “a county-wide event” or “a countywide event” and, more important: why?

Anyone who knows the basics of using hyphens knows they connect two words that together modify a third. The word “county” and the word “wide” can be joined with a hyphen and thereby work as an adjective to describe “event.” So “county-wide event” is consistent with hyphenation rules.

I see forms like this all the time in the articles I edit – often in articles so clean and error-free that there’s no doubt the writer ran spell check. Yet, every time I see “county-wide” or “office-wide” or I change it to a one-word form: countywide, officewide. And I do so even when spell-check disapproves.

My reason: Even though hyphens can combine whole words like “county” and “wide” those rules don’t necessarily apply here because, depending on how you look at it, this “wide” isn’t a word. It’s a suffix.

Look up “wide” in Webster’s New World College Dictionary and you’ll see lots of information about the word itself. But toward the end of the definitions you’ll also see “-wide” with a little hyphen on front. The dictionary calls this a “combining form,” meaning you combine it with another word. And though Webster's doesn’t specify  whether you’d combine it with or without the hyphen, many editing styles say that, in general, you not use a hyphen to attach a suffix. (There are lots of exceptions, of course, but the style guides list those individually.)

So while the word “county” with the word “wide” would be “county-wide,” with the suffix “-wide” they combine to become “countywide.”

It’s not always that simple, though. Some terms are common enough to have their own dictionary entries, and when they do, those usually take precedence. For example, “storewide” is listed in Webster’s New World as its own word. So when you're writing "storewide," you're not combining two words or a word and a suffix. You're using a single word.

The guideline that says not to hyphenate most suffixes gets complicated when you start looking at longer words: university, community, corporation, etc. These don’t look so great with “wide” tacked on the end: “universitywide,” “communitywide,” “corporationwide.” So in these cases, there’s nothing to stop you from interpreting this “wide” as a whole word an not a suffix: university-wide, community-wide, corporation-wide. It’s a judgment call.

Just remember that anytime you want to combine a word with another that could be a suffix, first check a dictionary to make sure the compound isn't already listed as a single word, then check to see whether your second word is a suffix. If not, hyphenate away. If so, you can use your judgment and knowledge of combining forms to make the best decision.

The first time I read through the article, I didn’t notice anything odd about that sentence. Only on my second pass did I notice the spelling of the word “borne.” (By the way, this is exactly why copy editors always do at least two passes. I’m always amazed at how much I can overlook the first time I read something yet catch the second time.)

“Borne,” in my mind, usually comes up in terms like “airborne virus.” I think of it as meaning “carried” or “transported.” So it seems to be completely distinct from “born,” which means “given birth to.” Babies are born, viruses are transported, and in my mind it was as easy as that

Of course, language is never as easy as that. So when I needed to get this right for the article, I looked it up.

“Borne” is a past tense of “to bear,” meaning “to carry.” But that got me thinking: This word isn’t quite as different from “born” as I had always considered it. After all, the very babies who get born are carried -- borne -- by their mothers. When I think about it this way, the distinction seems weaker.

What’s more, I’d never really thought much about the term “born of.”  I had always assumed it used “born” on purpose -- the car is the offspring of such-and-such engineering tradition. But I was starting to have doubts. Couldn’t this car be carried -- borne -- by this engineering tradition? Could it have been, metaphorically speaking, carried on the winds of change to a dealer near you?

Technically, sure. So you can use whichever you mean. But presumably you’d want the reader or listener to be clear on what you wanted to say. Usually, the best way to achieve that is to use the term most familiar to the reader instead of your own spin on one. So to find out which is more common in the term “born/e of,” we turn to some reference works.

“Webster’s New World Dictionary” lists both “born” and “borne” as past partciples of the verb “to bear.” And bear has a number of definitions, including “to carry” and even “to give birth to” (think “child bearing”). So Webster’s confirms that “born” and “borne” are both born of the same word.

When bear means to give birth to, Webster’s notes, “the passive past participle in this sense is born when by does not follow.”

A baby is born. A passenger is borne. But when followed by the word “by,” both take borne. “He was borne by her.”

"Fowler’s Modern English Usage" takes an academic approach to these words. It says that the past participle of bear “in all senses except that of birth is ‘borne’ (I have borne with this too long; he was borne along by the wind); borne is also used, when the reference is to birth, (a) in the active (has borne no children), and “b) in the passive when ‘by’ follows (of all the children borne by her only one survived). The [past participle] in the sense of birth, when used passively without ‘by,’ or adjectivally, is born (he was born blind: a born fool; of all the children born to them; melancholoy born of solitidue; she was born in 1950)

Of course, none of this tells us for certain whether our Buick was born of German engineering or borne of it. To find out which is the standard expression, I turned to the dubiously handy arbiter of all modern usage issues: Google. Searching for a famous line from an old Helen Reddy song, I tried “it’s wisdom born of pain” -- 202,000 hits. Then I searched “it’s wisdom borne of pain” -- 52 hits.

The widsom I gleaned: “born” is better. And, yes, it was painful.

Download audio file (0071-Decimate.mp3)

 I answered her questions – straightforward stuff about sentence-ending prepositions and placement of adverbs. Only afterward did I notice the nagging doubt in the pit of my stomach. These were fiction writers and I, indirectly, had them thinking about language “rules.” I could tell by the questions coming from Naomi that, as her students turned their focus to grammar, they were worrying about making mistakes and embarrassing themselves by exposing their imperfect grammar.

For fiction writers, this fear can be counterproductive. How can you focus on story and message and voice and character and description when you’re afraid every preposition or introductory phrase could be your downfall?

When you think about this long enough, you could easily conclude that fiction writers shouldn’t worry about grammar. But anyone who’s ever agreed to read a friend’s “novel in progress” knows the flip side of this argument. Grammar and punctuation errors aren't always nitpicky, minor things. They can make a big difference in the overall quality of a written work.

 So, what exactly is the role of grammar for the creative writer? Should he learn and follow the rules? Or should he cast them aside in the name of creative freedom?

The more I think about this, the more I think the answer is neither. Or perhaps both. I think that fiction writers who want to defy every grammar rule and convention under the sun should do so without hesitation. But the best way to get away with breaking the rules is by demonstrating a mastery of grammar.

Take for example the structure “might could.” That’s probably not one you want to use in a paper in an MBA program. “The leading economic indicators suggest that the GDP might could improve in the coming quarter.” Yet I’ve seen fiction writers like George R.R. Martin and Kerry Madden use “might could” to great effect. Martin uses it to strike a medieval tone in his “Game of Thrones” books. Madden used it in “Gentle’s Holler” to give her characters a Southern/rural voice.

Readers get it. It’s clear that the writers are using “might could” quite deliberately and not out of the belief that it’s more proper than a simple “might” or “could.”

What does that tell us about the grammar “requirements” on fiction writers? Well, it seems to me that if Martin or Madden had littered their manuscripts with “it’s” in place of “its,” the word “alot,” or evidence they don’t know a “their” from a “they’re,” they wouldn’t have earned the license to use structures that people consider “nonstandard” – terms like “might could” and “ain’t” and awkward double negatives and sentence fragments. (Indeed, they never would have been published in the first place.)

And from that perspective, I can see clearly the importance of grammar for fiction writers. For them, grammar is important. They should know as much as possible about syntax and usage rules and punctuation and word choice and spelling. But, whenever they feel it's appropriate, they should ignore those rules completely. Once a fiction writer has demonstrated that he knows his craft, readers will give him the benefit of the doubt in all his language choices. But if it’s clear he has bad grammar, every departure from the “proper” can and will be chalked up to ignorance.

Download audio file (0079-Writing-Numbers.mp3)

The museum is at 281 Maple Ln., Topeka, KN, 50022.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s almost no wrong way to write an address. And, of course, getting it right is much more important than making it pretty. But the way that the AP and Chicago style manuals tell editors to write them can be beneficial to many writers, especially bloggers, who want to go easy on their readers’ eyes and don’t have an editor to help them.

The most important thing, of course, is consistency. An article or blog entry that changes its address style from one sentence to the next isn’t doing the reader any favors. It's jarring and can detract from the information.

“The museum, located at 9120 Third Street, moved from its former location at 9128 43rd Terr. in order to be closer to its corporate offices at Three 82nd St.”

So here are two simple approaches, based on the two major editing styles, that can make your addresses more flowing and integrated into a larger message.

Many newspaper styles say to use numerals for everything in an address -- even numbers less than 10. They abbreviate only “Street,” “Avenue,” and “Boulevard," making them “St.,” “Ave.,” and “Blvd.” But they only abbreviate these terms when they appear with an exact street address. If the street name stands alone, the street name shouldn’t be abbreviated. So, according to this style, you’d write:

The museum is at 281 3rd St., at the corner of 3rd Street and Wilshire Boulevard.

Newspapers don’t use postal codes for states. They use abbreviations. California, when part of an address, is not “CA” but “Calif.” A complete list of these abbreviations is in the AP style guide. But most of them are pretty intuitive. Kansas is Kan., while Iowa is already short enough, so it’s just written Iowa. If you want to mirror newspaper style, avoid those two-letter postal abbreviations. On the other hand, if you like the handy two-letter versions better, you can make that call for your own website or blog.

Also, many newspapers don’t include the state for any address in the state the newspaper covers. So, for example, in the Los Angeles Times, cities mentioned are always considered to be within California unless expressly stated otherwise. "They visited Fresno; Eureka; Eugene, Ore.; and Spokane, Wash."

Book and magazine styles don’t like abbreviating street names. They usually spell out Boulevard regardless of whether it appears in “100 Wilshire Boulevard” or just plain old “Wilshire Boulevard.”

And no styles I know of ever abbreviate Drive, Circle, Terrace, Way, or Place.

So if you want an easy-to-remember and easy-to-read style, just either spell out every street name or spell out all but Ave., St., and Blvd. appearing with street numbers, use numerals for all numbers, and only include states when they're not obvious.

Download audio file (0070-Presidents-Day.mp3)

Download audio file (0068-But-at-the-Beginning-of-a-Sentence.mp3)

“That's not all for which kiwi is good.”

Full disclosure: I don’t know for sure it was a witch instead of, say, a warlock or a demon or William Safire. And we can’t know whether this sentence, which appeared on the SlashFood health and nutrition website, was the mangled offspring of the writer or an editor. All I know is that these are some ridiculous acrobatics to go through to avoid writing the simple: “That’s not all kiwi is good for.”

 For decades, people have been taught that it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition like “for,” “at,” with,” or “from.” This mangled sentence demonstrates all too clearly how bad this advice is. But it illustrates another bad call as well: dogged allegiance to rules, real or fictional. Any writer or editor who valued clarity and readability would have ended the sentence with “for,” even if she thought it was against the rules.

There is no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. Even if there were, violations wouldn’t carry a prison term. And sentences like the one above would offer quintessential examples of the old saying that some rules were meant to be broken.

Download audio file (0065-Biweekly-Bimonthly-Semimonthly.mp3)

Then you start working for a new attorney who promptly tells you you’re punctuating something incorrectly and should stop immediately. What do you do? Well, if you’re one of my column readers, you e-mail me to settle the dispute. And if you’re lucky, I have some good news to offer you.

 That’s the origin of an e-mail I got recently from a legal secretary in Burbank: “There are a lot of statutes that refer to time deadlines and giving proper notice to parties in a lawsuit," she wrote. “Please read the following sentence: 'Plaintiff is required to give 15 days' notice to the Defendant when serving the Motion to Compel Documents.' Throughout all my years working for attorneys, I was always taught to write 15 days' using the possessive apostrophe. I have recently been working for a new attorney and he corrected me by saying that I should get rid of the possessive apostrophe. I did what I was told but it's really bugging me. Who is correct?”

 Correctness, as you may know, can be a little wily in language. Because there’s no grammar penal code documented in a great grammar law book in some hallowed halls of grammar justice, it’s hard to label any popular language choice as “wrong.”

 But in this case, even though I couldn’t dub either choice “incorrect,” I could certainly label one as “more correct.” And I did.

 The secretary’s way of doing it was better: 15 days’ notice is better with the apostrophe. I told her so.

The AP Stylebook uses the term a quasi-possessive to describe such phrases as “a day’s pay,” “two weeks’ vacation,” “three days’ work,” and “your money’s worth.” AP says they take an apostrophe.

The Chicago Manual of Style includes these phrases under its discussion of “Particularities of the Possessive.” Chicago’s advice is basically the same as AP’s: “Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain expressions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies 'of': an hour’s delay; in three days’ time; six months’ leave of absence.”

I sent the legal secretary a link to a column I had written about this last year. But, just in case her boss didn’t want to take it from me, I threw in a link to an excerpt from the most popular punctuation book of all time, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which talks at length about the movie Two Weeks Notice and its egregious omission of the apostrophe in the title.

 I hope that was enough evidence for the Burbank reader to win the argument with her boss. But who knows? It’s hard to picture an attorney just backing down and accepting he lost a case to his secretary.

I hadn't thought about that in years until I happened to notice the entry in the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style for the words “nauseous” and “nauseated.”

 Here’s what Chicago says: “nauseous/nauseated. Whatever is ‘nauseous’ induces a feeling of nausea – it makes us feel sick to our stomachs. To feel sick is to be ‘nauseated.’ The use of ‘nauseous’ to mean ‘nauseated’ may be too common to be called an error anymore, but strictly speaking it is poor usage. Because of the ambiguity in ‘nauseous,’ the wisest course may be to stick to the participial adjectives ‘nauseated’ and ‘nauseating.”

Really, Chicago? That’s the same trumpet William Strunk was blowing a century ago, and even for those times it seemed silly and quaint. I’ve never in my life heard someone in conversation describe something sickening as “a nauseous sight” or “a nauseous smell.” And only rarely do I hear people opt for “I’m nauseated” over "I’m nauseous.”

Ironically, I came across this Chicago entry while looking in the guide to see its ruling on “log in” vs. “login.” I wanted to know whether Chicago editors echoed the AP's advice to use “log in” as a verb and “login” as a noun. But, no, Chicago didn’t cover these matters. Instead, they dedicated space to trying to resuscitate a supposed “rule” so long dead that many people have probably never encountered the “correct” usage.  

 Plus, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Garner’s Modern American Usage, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage all allow "nauseous" to mean sick-feeling, with the latter adding that there is “a persistent belief, dear to the hearts of many American commentators, that ‘nauseous’ has but a single sense: ‘causing nausea.’ There is, however, no basis for this belief.”

That’s why Chicago’s entry seems about as practical to me as that Emily Post business with the calling card and the butler.

Download audio file (0058-Variety-Is-or-Variety-Are.mp3)

The joke is that blanket condemnation and snap judgments are absolutely wrong, except when they’re not. And when you’re talking about a guy as terrifying looking as that one, contempt prior to investigation … well, it seems a little more justified.

That sums up how I feel about certain adverbs. I’ve long argued with the popular “avoid adverbs” advice. It’s usually applied too broadly and sometimes interpreted as “all adverbs are bad.” That, of course, is ridiculous. Adverbs are essential parts of speech, and even the much maligned manner adverbs – the ones that modify verbs and often end in “ly” – can be just what a piece of writing needs to make it sing.

 Even so, there are some adverbs that I kill on sight. Anytime one of these crops up in an article I’m editing (or when I catch it in my own writing), I delete it without hesitation.

Truly. Formerly. Currently. Absolutely. Definitely. Utterly.

These are the pudgy, overpaid middle managers of language. They contribute nothing and are almost always dispensable.

 Consider the sentence: Peterson is currently the CEO of the company.

Editors see stuff like that a lot. And all the editors I know agree that currently adds nothing whatsoever to this sentence. Formerly, which often goes hand-in- hand with the verb was, is no better. The verb is already in the past tense. So the reader doesn’t need to be told the situation is former.

Truly, absolutely, definitely, really and utterly say a mouthful. Unfortunately, their message boils down to, “I really, really, really want you believe the thing I’m about to say.” Ironically, that makes the statement that follows seem less plausible.

For these adverbs -- and any other that adds no new information whatsoever to a sentence -- we can justify applying the old “Shoot first and let God sort ’em out” philosophy.

Download audio file (0063-Immigrate-Emigrate-Migrate.mp3)

Download audio file (0057-Peruse-mp3.mp3)

In American English, single quotation marks denote a quotation within another quotation. John said, "I cried when he said, 'Here's looking at you, kid.'"

What if you want to put a quotation within a quotation within a third quotation? Then alternate regular quotation marks with single quotation marks: “Bob told Mary, ‘Please say “howdy.”’” There’s a reason you don’t see this often. It lends itself to a messy page and reader confusion. So try to avoid nesting too many quotes within one another.

 It’s a common mistake to think of single quotation marks as sort of quotation marks lite – as though they carry half the power of regular quotation marks. But that’s not how they work. Anytime you want to signify a word as a word, you use regular quotation marks. That is, if you’re talking about the word “lariat,” you put it in quotation marks, not single quotation marks (unless, of course, it all falls within a larger quotation).

The only seeming exception occurs in newspaper headlines. Many newspapers use single quotation marks instead of regular quotation marks in their headlines, but that’s just a style convention. It doesn't mean you should use single quotation marks for anything other than their main job: indicating a quotation within a quotation.

These are just a few of the delights I found on a recent visit to UnneccessaryQuotes.com -- the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks -- which posts photos of signs with unnecessary quotation marks.

 I don’t advocate making fun of other people’s punctuation shortcomings. But some of these are just plain fun. And when you toss in the UnnecessaryQuotes.com headlines and comments, which ponders what could be meant by “soups,” “fish,” and “Wednesday” when they're in quotation marks, you just have to laugh.

For example, a sign that reads Because “We Care” on the blog bears the headline: We Care-ish.

The idea here is that, because one of the jobs of quotation marks is to call a word or phrase into question, "We Care" could mean that they don't.

 If you’re not quite sure how to use quotation marks, here’s a quick primer.

 The quotation mark’s main job is to indicate verbatim quotation. The mayor said, “Potholes will not stand.” The quotation can also be part of a sentence: The mayor said that the potholes downtown “will not stand.”

Quotation marks are also used to denote words referred to as words. That is, if you and I were talking about the word “ambience” or how people use the word “me” too often, that’s a valid use of quotation marks. (Even though some styles may recommend italics instead.)

 Finally, quotation marks can be used to show irony or doubt: Gee, what a “great” actor Matthew McConaughey is. And that’s what makes the signs so funny. Fish is just fish until you put it into quotation marks. That’s when you know it may be anything but fish.

Is it wrong to say, "Pete sent letters to John, Bob, and myself"? Well, yes and no. Here's the full story on reflexive pronouns.

Download audio file (0062-Myself-and-Other-Reflexives.mp3)

Of course, this was a disputed matter to begin with. And things change. So I looked up the world “alright” in Merriam-Webster online. Turns out that that dictionary is okay with it. But while looking it up, I stumbled across something I wasn’t expecting. Under the entry, a user commented “My daughter had her first 6th grade spelling test. She spelled "alright" and got it wrong. The teacher said it was 'all right.' So now do I bring this up to the teacher?”

Then, half-buried under a really annoying candy bar ad that expanded seemingly every time I exhaled, I saw the replies to her comment:

“Wow!!! That is as bad as the librarian saying ‘welcome to the libary”

“‘Are you smarter than a sixth grader?” Teacher edition.’

“ … That is crazy …”

I feel bad for the teacher. No doubt, she or he got the information from one of the countless sources that disagree with Merriam-Webster’s but are every bit as authoritative. Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is the official referee for most news media, lists “alright” only as a disputed spelling of “all right.” American Heritage Dictionary calls it nonstandard. The Associated Press Style Guide has long said that “alright” is never an acceptable form. Chicago style also prohibits “alright.”

Sure, you can disagree with the teacher. In fact, I myself no longer believe you can call “alright” an error. But the pot shots seem unfair to me. Really, how many sources could we expect him or her to check? If the first 9 sources she checks all prohibit “alright,” can we really be that hard on her for not checking a tenth?

Download audio file (0054-Latino-Hispanic-Chicano-mp3.mp3)

A Los Angeles Times article in September reported that a popular Chinese gift called mooncakes are a lot more popular with givers than with recipients. The small, dense cakes filled with everything from red bean paste to cheesecake have become China’s equivalent of our fruitcakes, the Times reported, citing the case of one Zou Jin:

 “The 30 cakes that Zou had received from her employer and various clients weeks ago sat unopened and neglected under her desk as the 31-year-old marketing manager tried to pawn them off on anyone who would take them."

It was an interesting article, but I never got past the “pawn off” bit. Did the Times mean “palm off”?

To “pawn” means “to give or deposit (personal property) as security for the payment of money borrowed.” So according to this definition, Zou was only pawing off the cakes if she was using them as collateral for loans.

 The writer might have done better to choose “palm off.” According to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, “palm off” means “to pass off by deception, substitute with intent to deceive. So if you’re trying to sucker your co-workers into believing that your mooncakes are anything more than trashcan ballast, you’re palming them off.

 It would be natural to assume that “pawn off” is therefore a mistake. But that would be going too far. Here’s the same source on “pawn off”: “to dispose of by deception, as in 'They tried to pawn off a rebuilt computer as new.'  This expression may have originated as a corruption of palm off.”

 That doesn’t mean it’s still a corruption, though: “pawn off. This is a peculiar expression,” writes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, noting that almost no slang dictionaries or usage guides bother to mention it. It is, however, “easy enough to interpret: it must mean ‘palm off’ or ‘pass off’ or ‘fob off.’ … The Oxford English Dictionary thinks it erroneous for ‘palm,’ but it may in fact be a dialectical variant.”

 In other words, you could argue that “pawn off” is an acceptable alternative to “palm off.” But why would you want to? It seems to me that “palm off” is the better choice.

Download audio file (0040-Danglers-mp3.mp3)

Download audio file (0052-Bring-and-Take-mp3.mp3)

Xmas, as a shortened way of writing Christmas, irks some people. Language sticklers have looked down on it as slovenly. And, because slovenliness is in the eye of the beholder, there’s no arguing with them. But the other anti-Xmas camp is easier to deal with. Some pious people consider Xmas to be borderline profane – taking the “Christ” out of Christmas, some call it.

But the real outrage here is a blatant disregard for the virtue of doing one’s homework. The X in Xmas isn’t, as some might assume, a crossing off of the holiday’s namesake. Instead, the X is actually a direct reference to Christ.

According to Garner’s Modern American Usage, X represents the Greek letter chi – the first letter in Christ. Garner’s cites poet and language commentator John Ciardi as pointing out that” X has ancient antecedents as the symbol of Christ and the cross.” How pervasive was this symbolism? “So much so that illiterate Jews atEllis Islandrefused to sign with an X.”

In other words, Xmas is as much a reference to Jesus as Christmas itself. So there’s no need for anyone to get in a tizzy about it.

On the other hand, trying to figure out how to write it correctly can be upsetting. Though a lot of people aren’t sure whether to put a hyphen in it, major style guides agree there’s not. It’s just Xmas. But whether you should put “a” or “an” in front of it isn’t as simple.

According to “Garner’s,” it depends on your “mind’s ear.” If, to you, Xmas would be pronounced “eks-mas,” then it would be preceded by “an.” But if you see Xmas and hear in your mind “Christmas,” then Garner’s says it makes sense to use “a.”

Bottom line: You can use it however you like without fear.

 Merry Xmas!

Download audio file (0061-Media-Is-vs-Media-Are-w-accompanying-blog-post.mp3)

For example, in Webster’s New World College Dictionary under fungus, the first thing you see is “fungi or funguses,” meaning the dictionary prefers fungi.

 So you can imagine my shock when I looked up the noun medium and saw that the dictionary’s first choice for a plural was not media but mediums. Had I stopped there, I would have forever believed that this Webster’s -- the dictionary I have to follow in most of my work -- would have me say, “Print is one news medium, digital is another, and together they’re two different types of mediums.”

 That’s completely counter to conventional wisdom. Most people who pay attention to this stuff will tell you without hesitation that one news medium and another news medium together form two news media. (Which is different from a fortune-teller type “spiritual medium,” which in the plural is “mediums.”) Yet, in the very place that this dictionary indicates its preferred forms, it seemed to be saying that I should opt for mediums over media.

 Good thing I kept reading. Under its third definition for the noun medium, Webster’s says: "3. pl. usually media: any means, agency, or instrumentality, specif., a means of communication that reaches the general public and carries advertising.”

 In other words, the preferred plural indicated at the beginning of the listing wasn't the same as the preferred plural for one specific definition of the word. So, yes, if you consult two fortune tellers you talked to two spiritual mediums. But if you read a newspaper and a magazine, you consulted two types of media.

Good thing I kept reading.

 As for whether media is necessarily plural, that's covered in this week's podcast. But here's the spoiler anyway: depending on its use, media is sometimes treated as a plural and sometimes treated as a singular.

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After years of hyphenating “e-mail,” Los Angeles Times recently changed its style to “email.”

For me, that is a hard pill to swallow. I’ve been editing in Los Angeles Times style for years. I used to work for the paper’s community news division, and now I do a lot of freelance work for its special advertising sections. So I’ve been changing “email” in writers’ articles to “e-mail” for what feels like an eternity.

Habit isn’t my only objection. Logic plays into it, too. Despite the public’s clear preference for “email,” it just doesn’t make as much sense.

“No initial-based term in the history of the English language has ever evolved to form a solid word—a few are split and the rest are hyphenated,” writes Washington Post Business Copy Desk chief Bill Walsh in “Lapsing Into a Comma.” Examples? Walsh has ’em: B-movie, C-rations, D-Day, G-string, H-bomb, I-beam, K car, L-shaped, N-word, O-ring, Q rating, T-shirt, U-boat, X-ray, and Z particle.

That’s a really good point. Here’s another: “At first glance, the e in email begs to be pronounced unaccented, as a schwa (“uh-MAIL”). Setting the letter apart makes it clear that the letter is a letter and the one-letter syllable is accented. E!”

I like this thinking. But the masses have spoken. My editors have spoken. “Email” has won.” And I must try to let go. It’s not going to be easy.

 DIVE. Past tense: dived or dove. Yesterday he dived. Yesterday he dove. Past participle: dived. In the past he has dived.

 SPIT (meaning to eject from the mouth). Past tense: spit or spat. Yesterday he spit. Yesterday he spat. Past participle: spit or spat. In the past he has spit. In the past he has spat.

 SPIT (meaning to skewer on a stick). Past tense: spitted. Yesterday he spitted the roast. Past participle: spitted. In the past, he has spitted many roasts.

 SWIM. Past tense: swam. Yesterday he swam. Past participle: swum. In the past he has swum.

 GET. Past tense: got. Yesterday he got a lot of attention. Paste participle: gotten or got: In the past he has gotten a lot of attention. In the past he has got a lot of attention.

 RING. Past tense: rang or (now chiefly dialectical) rung. Yesterday he rang the bell. Yesterday he rung. Past participle: rung. In the past he has rung the bell.

 LIE (meaning to recline). Past tense: lay. Yesterday he lay down on the lawn. Past participle: lain. In the past he has lain down on the lawn.

 LAY. Past tense: laid. Yesterday he laid the book on the table. Past participle: laid. In the past he has laid the book on the table.

 LEND. Past tense: lent. Yesterday he lent me money. Past participle: lent. In the past, he has lent me money.

SHINE. Past tense: shone. Yesterday the sun shone brightly. Past participle: shone. In the past, the sun has shone brightly.

But: In one instance, Webster’s New World recommends shined. When you use “shine” as a transitive verb meaning to make something shiny or bright, the past tense and past participle are both shined.” Yesterday he shined his shoes. In the past, he has shined his shoes.

 TREAD. Past tense: trod or treaded. Yesterday he trod lightly. Yesterday he treaded lightly. Past participle: trodden or trod. In the past he has trodden lightly. In the past he has trod lightly.

 WAKE. Past tense: woke or waked. Yesterday he woke early. Yesterday he waked early. Past participle: waked or woken. In the past he has waked early. In the past he has woken early.

 HANG (meaning to suspend, as a door from its hinges). Past tense: hung. Yesterday he hung the picture on the wall. Past participle: hung. In the past he has hung pictures on the wall.

 HANG (meaning to kill by suspending someone from a rope around the neck). Past tense: hanged. Yesterday he hanged the bandit. Past participle: hanged. In the past he has hanged bandits.

 BRING. Past tense: brought. Yesterday he brought flowers. Past participle: brought. In the past he has brought flowers.

 DREAM. Past tense: dreamed or dreamt. Last night I dreamed. Last night I dreamt. Past participle: dreamed or dreamt. In the past I have dreamed. In the past I have dreamt.

 Download audio file (0064-Confusing-Past-Forms-for-use-with-corresponding-blog-post.mp3)

If your opening line has both a name and a greeting, separate those elements with a comma and end the sentence with a period, exclamation point, or colon.

Hi, Joe. Happy holidays, Beth! Hey, mom.

This is preferable to the more common

Hey Joe,

with comma at the end because it conforms with publishing style rules that say to set off a “direct address” like a name with a comma.

However, if you’re opening with just a name and some other word modifying it, like Dear Joe, My beloved Beth, or Dearest Mom, don’t put a comma between those. Also, a greeting like this you can end with a comma or a colon, but note that a period or exclamation point wouldn’t make as much sense because -- unlike Hey, Joe --  Dear Joe is not a complete sentence.

Dear Joe,

Dear Joe:

Christmas and New Year’s are proper nouns and are thus both capitalized. Happy and merry are not (though of course you'd capitalize them at the beginning of a sentence). Nor is holiday. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are also proper names that should be capitalized. But dictionaries disagree on the singular new year. Webster’s New World College Dictionary lowercases new year. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says to capitalize New Year. Except in the most generic of contexts, I like the capitalized New Year better.

So you could write:

Wishing you and merry Christmas and a happy New Year! or … and a happy new year!

Both are fine.

The spelling of Hanukkah can be tricky because this word is transliterated from a different alphabet, and people disagree on which English letter best represents any particular foreign sound. But if you might want to note that Hanukkah is the preferred spelling of Webster’s New World and Merriam-Webster’s and, yes, it's capitalized.

Greeting cards have a way of inviting in some of the most incriminating spelling and grammar errors (maybe we’re so worried about coming up with something to say to Grandma that we forget to police ourselves), so watch out for these common typos.

Never use of in place of have or its abbreviated form 've in the terms could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, might've, or their spelled-out forms could have, would have, should have, and might have.

Remember the difference between let’s and lets: Let’s get together in the New Year means let us get together. Whereas the one without the apostrophe is the verb to let conjugated in the third-person singular: Uncle Lou really lets his hair down during the holidays.

Remember to watch their, they’re, and there, as well as who’s and whose.

Their shows possession – We will go to their house for Christmas dinner. They’re means they are. And there is a place.

Whose shows possession – Whose turn is it to cook? Who’s is always a contraction of who is or who has: Who’s going to cook this year?

When in doubt, find out. Ask a friend, check a dictionary, or run a quick Google search.

 And happy holidays!

Happy holidays from the Smith's!

Seasons greetings from the Thomas's!

If you don't know what's wrong with those two sentences -- or how to fix them -- step away from that box of holiday cards and listen to this.

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 As every qualified language commentator under the sun has been saying for years: There’s no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. Yet the myth lives on. When I wrote a recent column about a co-worker of mine who’s still victim to the myth, I got a number of e-mails from readers who were surprised to hear it.

The sticking power of bad information never ceases to amaze. So, in yet another drop-in-the-bucket attempt to counter the bad information, here are a whole bunch of experts on the subject.  

 “The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake.” – Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

 “Superstition. … Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.” – Garner’s Modern American Usage

 “The ‘rule’ prohibiting terminal prepositions was an ill-founded superstition. Today many grammarians use the dismissive term ‘pied-piping’ for this phenomenon.”

 “That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put” – Unknown (Surprised? If you think this was a Winston Churchill quip, you’re not alone. Even the Chicago Manual of Style attributes it to him. But have researchers discovered that it probably wasn’t!)

 “‘Never end a sentence with a preposition.’ … Wrong.” –Washington Post Business Copy Desk Chief Bill Walsh

 “Good writers throughout the history of English – from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Alison Lurie and David Lodge -- have not shrunk from ending clauses or sentences with prepositions.” – Word Court author Barbara Wallraff

 “Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.” – William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

 “For years and years Miss Thistlebottom has been teaching her bright-eyed brats that no writer would end a sentence with a preposition if he knew what he was about. The truth is that no good writer would follow Miss Thistlebottom’s rule. – Theodore M. Bernstein, “The Careful Writer” (copyright 1965)

 “Superstition.” – H.W. Fowler

Download audio file (0043-Synonyms-Antonyms-Homonyms-Homophones-Homographs-mp3.mp3)

 He learned a lot, he said, but the experience still left some questions unanswered: “Will it grow into a cohesive movement? Who knows.”

I don’t know, either. But what I do know is that I stopped reading there. The period after “knows” got my attention. Lopez or his editors could have just as logically opted for a question mark. Yet the period won them over.

“Who knows” is a question, not a statement. So why no question mark?

There are two ways to look at this, both acceptable in professional publishing.

One way, as stated above, is summed up thusly: A question is a question is a question, and it takes a question mark. The other way to look at it is: Lopez wasn’t really asking. Thus, you could argue, it was a rhetorical question.  And since he wasn’t asking anything, the question mark isn’t necessary.

 Both interpretations are fine. But, personally, I prefer the former.  A sentence structured as an interrogative – even if it doesn’t seek an answer -- has a different quality than does a declarative. Instead of “who knows,” Lopez could have said “no one knows” or “I doubt anyone knows,” both of which are structured as declaratives. But his choice of “who knows” conveys something different – a mystery, a riddle, a thing to be pondered. In other words, it has a questioning quality. And, after all, structurally it is a question.

 Another question that’s often meant as a statement: “Why not?” I often see this written “Why not.” And why not? The writer isn't really seeking an answer, right? Well, I wasn’t seeking an answer to that “right,” either. Yet that clearly requires the question mark.

 In fiction, many questions meant as statements end in periods.

Bad guy: “Get in the car.”

Hero: “And if I don’t.”

Bartender: “Here’s your drink, sir.”

Customer: “You call this a martini.”

Neither the Chicago Manual of Style nor the AP Stylebook addresses this matter directly.  But Chicago includes an interesting note about “courtesy questions.” “A request courteously disguised as a question does not require a question mark.” An example: “Will the audience please rise.”

But the wording “does not require a question mark” suggests that the question mark may nonetheless apply.

Me, I’d put a question mark after all those – the hero’s, the customer’s, the request to rise, and even “who knows?”

But you don’t have to do it my way. Whenever you’re certain the question seeks no answer, you can choose for yourself. The question mark suggests that, if the sentence were spoken the speaker's voice would lilt up at some point to intone a question. The period suggest a flatter sound, which can help a fiction writer keep their tough guys from sounding like Valley girls.

Whatever you do, watch out for “Guess what.” This is not a question. It’s a command -- an imperative. And a question mark after “guess what” makes no sense at all.

I can only think of one example of a rhetorical question that I would not end with a question mark. It comes from an old Simpsons episode in which Homer is trying to guess how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a man. “Seven!” he guesses.

Lisa: “No, Dad. It’s a rhetorical question.”

Homer, thinks about it a moment, then blurts out, “Eight!”

Lisa: “Dad, do you even know what rhetorical means?”

Homer: “Do I know what rhetorical means!”

"Him" works better in this sentence. Here's why ...

Download audio file (0053-Good-Things-Come-to-He-or-Him-Who-Waits-mp3.mp3)

Every once in a while, I come across a sentence that uses “others” like this: “Smith’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, PoetsQuarterly, and Reflections, among others.”

It’s the kind of thing that you could let slip by you a thousand times and think nothing of it till one day you pause just long enough to ask: other whats? In sentences like these, which actually come up quite a bit in certain kinds of feature articles, the term “among others” is used as a sort of catch-all to suggest there are more than just the things listed. But it doesn’t quite work whether there’s no clear thing that “other” refers to.

 None of my usage guides has anything to say on the subject. So I’m left with no source but my little old self to say that this is wrong.

 “Other” can be a number of different parts of speech, but in our example sentence it’s functioning as a pronoun. The job of a pronoun is to stand in for a noun – preferably one the reader will immediately associate with it.

 When you say a writer was published in “the New Yorker, Story Quarterly, and Reflections, among others,” there’s no noun to which "others" clearly points. We can use the term “unclear antecedent” to describe this, even though an unclear antecedent usually means sentences like “Donald and Peter got in his car,” in which it’s unclear what “his” refers to.

 In our original sentence, “others” seems to refer to other publications. That’s a good clue for how to fix it: “Smith’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, PoetsQuarterly, and Reflections, among other publications.”

 In this case, we’ve swapped our pronoun “others” for its adjective form, modifying the noun “publications.”  Another approach would be to find someplace earlier in the sentence to squeeze in an antecedent: Smith’s poems have appeared in publications like the New Yorker, PoetsQuarterly, and Reflections, among others.

In my view, the original sentence has to be changed using one of these two approaches -- if not recast altogether.

Interestingly, a nearly identical sentence poses no such problem: “He has edited the work of Henry Roth, Oliver Stone, D.M. Thomas, and others.”

 What's the difference? In this case, “others” is not a pronoun. It’s a full-fledged noun. According to American Heritage Dictionary, as a noun “other” means “a different person or thing” or “an additional person or thing.” So in this case, it doesn’t need the word “person” before it to make clear it’s a person. That’s already built into the definition.

 The Student Resource Research Center (SRRC) works with the National Association of Educational Consultants (NAEC) to help freshmen locate tuition resources such as for California State Department of Educational Assistance (CSDEA), the nonprofit League of Catholic College Charities (LCCCP), and United Minority and Financially Disadvantaged College Fund (UMFDCF).

 After that, the initials may reappear later in the article -- on the assumption that the reader should have memorized all these nicknames on command. Or, weirder yet, the organizations are never mentioned again, meaning there was no reason whatsoever to “teach” this abbreviation to the reader (other than to simply point out that the organization has initials).

 I understand why writers do this: We’ve all seen it done a thousand times. It seems standard. Yet it never fails to blow my mind. It makes me want to call the writer and say, “Hey, real quick, if I told you the SRRC and the NEAC work with the CSDEA, LCCCP and UMFDCF, could you off the top of your head give the full name of even one of those organizations? No? Then why do you expect the reader to know them?”

 True, for a lot of publications this is simply how it’s done. But Los Angeles Times style sees it differently, and their way seems to make much more sense than this force-feeding of alphabet soup.

In this editing style, if an initialism is already known to the reader, you can use it freely on second reference without cramming it in after the first reference. “Investigators from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that DIA operatives are already in place.”

Of course, if it's very well known, like FBI or CIA, there may not be any need to spell out the name at all. On the other hand, if it’s a new one on the reader, here are some of the solutions Times style advocates:

1. After a first reference to an organization, refer to it with descriptive words the reader already knows. This can be a generic descriptor like “the association” or “the state assistance program,” or even a shortened version of its full name “the Catholic Charities.”  If there are multiple subsequent references, consider mixing one of these impromptu nicknames with occasional uses of the full name to remind readers of that name.

2. If no generic nouns will do the trick, on subsequent references, go ahead and refer to the organization by its initials -- even though you never did that whole parenthetical cram thing at the first reference. The idea here is that when a reader sees UMFDCF and wants to know what it means, he’s going to have to go back to the first reference regardless of whether you cluttered it up with parentheses and unfamiliar letters. This requires no more work of the reader but cleans up a lot of the visual blight.

 3. When references to the organization are scattered far apart within the document, scattered initials or references may fail to remind the reader of what organization you’re talking about. In those rare cases, when there’s no other way around it, mention the initials -- not in parentheses but in the sentence. "The Centers for Initialism Restraint, called the CIR, approve of this."

4. When none of those methods fits the bill, go ahead and insert the initialism in parentheses after the first reference then refer to the organization by its initials thereafter. In other words, this is a case in which the reader’s best course really is to learn the nickname. And those are the only times you should teach it to him.

 No matter what, there’s never an excuse to cram in the initials of an organization you refer to only once. This does nothing but break up the flow of the writing and drive certain copy editors nuts.

Download audio file (0055-Plurals-of-Irregular-Nouns-Like-Index-mp3.mp3)

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Why do some people say “an historic” but others say “a historic”? For a long time I thought it was because the “an” advocates were conspiring to annoy me. But it turns out there is, in fact, some logic to their choice.

But before we get to that, let’s get the big question out of the way first: Which one is right? Is “an historic” more proper than “a historic”? Is it the other way around?

Good news: The choice is up to you. The bad news: If you want to look professional or even reasonable, your choices narrow greatly.

People who prefer “an” before historic do so despite the rule that requires “a” before a consonant sound. They say that “an historic” is an exception to that rule because the emphasis in “historic” is on the second syllable. This, they say, causes a speaker to bulldoze right over the first syllable, so the N in “an” helps the first syllable of “historic” stand out.

That’s why these folks also put “an” before “heroic.” If you think the “an” sounds better or if you think it makes the following word easier on the ear, by all means go ahead and use “an.” But before you do, you should note who’s not on your side.

Authorities that prefer “a” include the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, Bryan Garner, R.W. Burchfield, Bill Walsh, Theodore Bernstein, Eric Partridge and, perhaps best of all, Mark Twain.

That’s the company I want to keep.

Download audio file (0057-Peruse-mp3.mp3)

 While I’m always flattered when someone thinks my opinion is worth a diddle, the truth is that it’s not. So “where I stand” is always right next to a good style guide or reference book.

 According to the Associated Press Stylebook, I told her, “login” is a noun and “log in” is a verb. So, if you're following AP style, as she does, 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 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.

Greg saw it, too.

I’d like some, also.

Tina didn’t come, either.

The idea is that when one of these adverbs modifies a whole sentence, and especially when it comes at the end of a sentence, it should be set off with commas. That’s what I was told and that’s what I believed.

But lately, more and more professionally written and edited material seems to eschew these commas.

Greg saw it too.

I’d like some also.

Tina didn’t come either.

When they come midsentence, the commas don’t seem quite as expendable. Changing “I, too, saw the accident” to “I too saw the accident” creates a weird and perhaps momentarily confusing relationship between the adverb and the verb that follows. But these commas don’t seem quite as common as they once were, either.

Turns out that, as austere comma use continues to be the fashion, commas setting off “too” and similar adverbs are less important.

How do you know whether to use them? Well, many experts point out that the comma before a “too” or “either” can give it extra emphasis, setting it off from the pack and letting it stand alone. By skipping the comma, you deemphasize the “too” by integrating it into the sentence.

If you’re looking for a guideline, use the comma when you want the extra emphasis. Otherwise, skip it. Me, I find that old habits die hard. I’ll continue to use commas before “too,” “also,” and “either” whenever possible.

Download audio file (0050-Palate-Palette-Pallet-mp3.mp3)

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 The marketing terms that annoy me the most are empty descriptors, and there’s no better example than “artisan.” In the last decade or so, this noun and its adjective form “artisinal” have become the words of choice to describe everything from bread to glass to mutual funds.

 Traditionally, as the L.A. Times noted in a recent article, the term has referred to “a meticulously handcrafted product, made in small batches.” No more. Just when you thought marketers had milked this word to the max, Domino’s has introduced a line of artisan pizzas. Domino’s. As in NYSE-traded multinational with 9,000 stores in 60 countries.

 Like every other company that uses this word, Domino’s would rather you not question what it means and instead swallow whole an image --a feeling it conveys: old-world bakers and cheesemakers with salt-and-pepper handlebar mustaches and adorable accents plying their craft amid the spirited strains of accordion music. Good marketing, indeed. But in Domino’s case, a more accurate image might be a pimply-faced teenager who no longer spits in the sauce because he grew bored with that his first month on the job.

 Domino’s isn’t stretching the truth, though. One definition of “artisan” is “a worker who practices a trade or handicraft.” So, sure, the word can describe a member of Domino’s 145,000 -strong workforce.

 “Applewood-smoked bacon” is another term that bothers me. It emphasizes the flavor and aroma of apples through a ridiculously flimsy association: The smoke came from wood that came from trees that, presumably, produce apples. Could anyone really taste the difference between applewood-smoked bacon and, say, cherry wood-smoked bacon?

 No doubt, some companies that use the term “applewood-smoked bacon” don’t even afford it that much meaning. They’re just operating on the premise that the more descriptors you can tack on the front of a noun, the fancier it sounds.

 To me, any word used to convey image at the expense of meaning -- telling us to shut off our brains and open our wallets -- is just annoying.

You may have heard that "insure" should only refer to insurance products and that it's not a synonym for "ensure." But actually, these words are more flexible than that.

Download audio file (0039-Ensure-vs-Insure-mp3.mp3)

A lot of people get tripped up on suffixes, unsure whether to hyphenate them or whether it’s okay to slap them right on the ends words, thereby forming conglomerations that send spellchecker into panic mode: words like “neighborhoodwide,” “instrumentborne,” and “dismissable.” 

The alternatives don’t look much better:

neighborhood-wide, instrument-borne, dismiss-able

neighborhood wide, instrument borne, dismiss able

What to do?

Actually, this seeming conundrum is pretty easy to deal with. First, check your dictionary to make sure that a one-word form of your desired word doesn’t already exist. For example, “communitywide” is already listed in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. So that’s a no-brainer. Just use the already-existing word.

If your main word isn’t in there, look up the suffix to find out if it’s really, well, a suffix.

Dictionaries designate suffixes with a little hyphen in front of them. For example, if you look up “wide” in Webster’s New World College Dictionary, you see the first entry is for the plain old adjective (“The street is wide”). But after that, there’s an entry for -wide, the suffix. And, like many dictionaries, this one’s very clear on how to deal with them. “The very full coverage of affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms) makes it possible for a dictionary user to understand and pronounce many words that are not entered in the dictionary. The dictionary user can form these words by combining affixes with words already entered."

In other words, as long as it’s listed in the dictionary as a suffix, you can slap it right on the end of any other word in the dictionary, spellchecker be damned. A lot of suffix entries, including -wide, make these easy instructions even clearer by including the term “combining  forms" right in the dictionary entry, meaning you can combine them to other words at will.

On the other hand, if the word you want to use as a suffix isn’t actually a suffix, for example maker, you can’t attach it directly to another word. But you can follow one of two easy styles. In Chicago style (that is, in book- and magazine-style writing), make it two words: sneaker maker. In AP style (preferred by news media and PR agencies), connect the two nouns with a hyphen: sneaker-maker.

Even if you get that wrong, it’s not too big a deal. Most readers, including editors, know the rules aren’t exactly cut-and-dried. So no one will think it so bad if sneaker maker slips into an article you’re writing or sneaker-maker appears in your book manuscript.

Download audio file (0045-Passive-Voice-mp3.mp3)

Here’s a professional tip on how to make your reading more pleasing to the eye: Use fewer capitals.

A lot of writers don’t realize that many capital letters are optional -- especially capitals that originate from companies or their products. For example, when writing a restaurant review, they’ll write Macadamia-Crusted Swordfish with Wasabi Miso Mashed Potatoes because that’s how it appeared on the restaurant’s menu or website.

It’s only natural that a restaurant would treat its chef’s creations as proper names -- especially if the chef coined the name himself. But just because the restaurant considers it a proper name doesn’t mean you can’t use all those words as generic descriptors. Their Wasabi Miso Mashed Potatoes are really just mashed potatoes flavored with wasabi and miso, right? So while you could use the restaurant’s proper name, you could also use the words as generic descriptors.

In most cases, unless it’s a trademarked name, the choice is yours. So how should you make that choice? Well, many newspapers and other professional publications have a policy of lowercasing such things whenever possible. The reason: They believe it’s easier on the eye. Generic words flow as part of an ongoing narrative while Formal Capitalized Proper Names break up the flow by demanding all the attention for themselves. That’s the argument anyway, and that's how I see it, too.

It’s the same reason many publications have a policy of lowercasing the T in “The” in proper names that appear in running text. Even if the band name is The Beatles, these publications believe that the Beatles is more digestible in the middle of a sentence. Again, I agree.

And it’s also the reason why the president and chief executive officer of a company need not be the President and Chief Executive Officer.

Of course, the restaurants, bands, and corporate officers don’t like this. They hold their own labels and titles in high regard. So if you’re writing marketing copy or the like, you might as well follow the Chief Executive Officer’s advice and capitalize The Company’s Miso Mashed Potatoes. But when your real boss is the reader, you might do better to lowercase every word you can.

As a reasonable person, I don’t like to nitpick others’ use of the language. But, as a copy editor, I have a bone to pick with some people.

A good portion of my time every week is spent reading and changing sentences like this:

“The festival runs May 21-28 with the gates open every day from 10 a.m.-8 p.m.”

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, nothing, technically. Except that in professionally edited articles, hyphens aren’t words. Sentences are supposed to flow, almost like live conversations. And for both these reasons, I consider the hyphens in that sentence to be really bad choices.

“The festival runs May 21-28” would be spoken as either “The festival runs May 21 TO May 28” or “The festival runs May 21 THROUGH May 28.” Either way, the thought is represented by a real world and not some little symbol trying to pinch hit.

It’s similar to the reason that we never use ampersands to stand in for the word “and.” Sure, if an ampersand shows up in a proper name, like Harry & David, we leave it. But editors never use it as a word.

Most editing styles, including the ones I follow in my work, aim for a smooth visual flow of words. That’s why capital letters are kept to a minimum and initials in place of real words are discouraged. And to me, that’s another good reason to just use the word “to” or “through.” It’s just more digestible in running text.

Of course, outside of running text, hyphens or dashes can be used to indicate a date or time range. For example, in lists and charts. But in a sentence in the middle of an article, I believe words should be written as words.

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Here’s my list. Any list of writing resources should come with a disclaimer: None of these books is an absolute authority. They often disagree with each other, for example the style guides mentioned below disagree on the commas in “red, white and blue” versus “red, white, and blue.” When leading authorities disagree on the rules, you know that there is no single right answer.  You can either choose the answer that seems best to you or follow the style of whatever publication or institution you’re writing for.

If you’re writing a school paper, your teacher may have told you to follow MLA style. But if you’re writing for your local newspaper, your work will probably end up in AP Style. If you’re not sure which style they want, then you don’t need to worry about which style is right. If it was important, they would have said so.

That said, here’s my “most useful list.”

"Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage." Love the book, hate the title, which makes it too easy to confuse this book with a dictionary. It's actually a usage guide. Unlike dictionaries, that set out to define every word in modern use, usage guides set out to address specific areas of language confusion. For example, if you open a dictionary to the word "and," you'll see definitions and spellings and pronunciations and etymology." But if you open a usage guide to "and" you'll see a discussion on whether it's true you can't start a sentence with it. (It's not true, by the way.) Of all the usage guides, Merriam-Webster's seems to take the broadest view and to take into account the widest range of variables and sources. I highly recommend it.

“Garner’s Modern American Usage" is another excellent usage guide. It's slightly more editorialized than Merriam-Webster's. But if you're looking for someone to make a judgment call for you on some disputed usage issue, there's probably no better source.

“Fowler’s Modern English Usage” is the most famous usage guide. It contains lots of great advice and information. Its biggest drawback is that it focuses primarily on British usage, which can at times fail an American. But it still deserves its reputation as an excellent source of expert advice.

“The Associated Press Stylebook” is, as the name implies, a style guide. One of its objectives is to help editors ensure consistency within a single publication. For example, do you write “One in 11 dentists recommend” or “One in eleven” or even “1 in 11”? That’s just a question of style. And AP is the official source for a lot of newspapers who want to be sure they’re consistent from page to page. AP also contains discussions of grammar and usage points as well as punctuation basics. Their advice can give your writing professional polish. Just be aware that some of their “rules” are really serving suggestions that don’t apply outside an AP-adherent publication. 

“The Chicago Manual of Style.” Book publishers and a lot of magazine publishers use this as their official style guide. Like AP, it contains lots of helpful advice on everything from hyphenation to number writing. But unlike AP, this book serves as a manual for the entire book publishing process. So it’s bigger and more expensive and contains lots of information that doesn’t pertain to most writers.

“Webster’s New World College Dictionary.” Whenever you need the most definitive answer you can get, turn to a dictionary. Dictionaries have the clout to operate as referees. To my mind, they’re the most authoritative arbiters of the language. So if three style guides and two usage guides tell me not to use “over” to mean “more than,” but my dictionary says the terms are synonymous, I know I’m safe using them interchangeably. But be warned: Dictionaries often disagree with each other. So even these refs can’t always make a final call. “Webster’s New World” is the default Webster’s of the “AP Stylebook,” which I use most in my editing work. So it’s the buck-stop-here source for much of my editing work.

“American Heritage Dictionary.” This one is just smart. I don’t like every call its editors make, but most are excellent and this dictionary’s entries often include the opinions of its “usage panel,” a group of experts who vote on disputed uses.

“The Oxford English Grammar.” If you’re looking for some light entertainment on a rainy afternoon, you’d be better off cleaning the septic tank with a Q-Tip than curling up with this excruciatingly academic read. But if you want to understand hardcore grammar, it’s worth it. This book, a true “grammar,” is a goldmine of knowledge about syntax and sentence structure.

Barbara Wallraff’s “Word Court.” This little book, culled from the former Atlantic Monthly editor’s column, touches on a lot of issues relevant to writers and editors. Her answers are snappy and smart.

“The Most Common Mistakes in English Usage” by Thomas Elliott Berry. Though dated and incomplete, this little book contains a few gems of knowledge that make it worth thumbing through.

There are a lot more books I admire and rely on. But, at my house, these are the ones whose spines are cracked and whose pages are crumbling.

 Proponents of “email” argue that their choice follows the natural order of things. Compounds smush together over time, as “healthcare” and “cellphone” seem to be doing. But Washington Post business desk copy chief Bill Walsh makes an interesting point: The smushed versions always result from two whole words, not a word with an initial. So X-ray, T-shirt, A-frame, and D-Day never became Xray, Tshirt, Aframe, or Dday.

 “Setting the letter apart makes it clear that the letter is a letter and that the one-letter syllable is accented. E! E! Eeeee!,” Walsh writes in his book “Lapsing Into a Comma.” The alternative, “email,” suggests the pronunciation “uhmail,” just as a one-word “aframe” would take the oomph out of that first A.

 My reasons for preferring “e-mail” are less scholarly. That’s what I was first taught was correct. And first-learned methods hold powerful sway over us.

But "e-mail" is losing ground in my world. The big nail in its coffin: a change in the official Los Angeles Times style from "e-mail" to "email." This is the style I edit in most. A magazine I do editing for also has "email" as its style.

So "email" is now the official form in most of my work. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

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I have a new least-favorite word. It’s “those.” Not the determiner form that comes before a noun -- “those cookies” -- but the pronoun form that stands in for a noun --“those who visit the new resort.”

 You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I developed this prejudice in the course of my editing work. It took shape somewhere around the millionth time I changed a poorly used “those.”

 For example, I see a lot of stuff like this: “Those who visit the property will enjoy the new restaurant and spa.”

 Yes, it’s grammatical. No, there’s not technically anything wrong with this. But there are three reasons why I change this whenever possible.

 1. It uses three words to do the work of one. “Those who visit” can, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be replaced with just “visitors.” In professional editing and especially in newspaper editing, wordier forms are always discouraged. Wordy prose wastes not just ink but also the reader’s time.

 2. It’s abstract. “Those” as a subject pronoun is usually so woefully vague that it needs at least two more words (usually a relative clause) just to make clear who it’s referring to. “Those will enjoy the new restaurant and spa” is nonsense. A relative clause like “who visit” is needed just to tell us who “those” is.

 3. My third reason is really a byproduct of the other two, yet it’s my biggest reason of all: This form just doesn’t show up much in top publications. The best writers and editors opt for specific and efficient terms. As a result, language like “those who visit” sounds less like a well-written article or story than like a stuffy-sounding press release or a tentative freshman English assignment.

 Those who dissent are welcome to comment. But, then again, so are dissenters.

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Who’s right? They both are. Who’s wrong? They both are. And the whole stupid argument occurs only because the anti-adverbs people overstated their case or the anti-anti-adverbs people took the other guys out of context.

When a writing teacher tells students to avoid adverbs, there’s a good reason. That teacher has seen over and over how adverbs undermine amateur writers' work.

But when someone takes the “avoid adverbs” advice too seriously, when then, obviously, the advice is silly. Adverbs exist for a reason.

Here are some real examples of one amateur writer’s adverbs.

“Relentlessly, people began to pour out of the black mouth of the building.”

“Gus quickly grabbed his flamethrower.”

“Gus looked down at the small creature that had recently tried to end his life.”

“Gus watched the reflections from the city’s streetlights float across the windshield for several blocks before he finally spoke.”

And here’s one that I see a lot editing feature articles for newspapers.

“Jackson is currently president and CEO of Widgets, Inc.”

By deleting “relentlessly,” “quickly,” “recently,” “finally,” and “currently” from the above sentences, you lose nothing. In fact, the streamlined effect you get is actually a gain, making the sentences’ remaining words more impactful.

It’s my firm belief that every manner adverb should be subjected to the “take it out” test. If, by taking the adverb out of the sentence, you lose nothing, keep it out. If, on the other hand, you lose some important bit of information, then by all means put the adverb back in.

That way, you benefit from the wisdom of both warring parties without falling into a stupid debate.

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I was editing an article and came across a sentence like “The community is predominately Latino.” It took me till the second read to notice that “predominately” wasn’t “predominantly.” And I was pretty proud of myself when I caught this “error.” But luckily I wasn’t so cocky as to trust my own judgment. I looked them up.

It turns out that “predominately” and “predominantly” are both legitimate. And if there’s a difference between them, it’s very subtle. This is from "Webster's New World College Dictionary":

predominate: 1. to have ascendancy, authority, or dominating influence (over others); hold sway 2. to be dominant in amount, number, etc.; prevail; preponderate. Related forms: predominately: adverb

predominant: 1. having ascendancy, authority, or dominating influence over others; superior 2. most frequent, noticeable, etc.; prevailing; preponderant. Related forms: predominantly: adverb

“Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage” argues that the words are basically synonyms. So how do you know which one to choose?

Well, if you want to follow someone else’s lead, you could do worse than to take the "Associated Press Stylebook’s" advice:

"predominant, predominantly: Use these primary spellings listed in 'Webster's New World' for the adjectival and adverbial forms. Do not use the alternatives it records, 'predominate' and 'predominately.' The verb form, however, is 'predominate.'"

Plus, Merriam-Webster's usage guide calls “predominately” a “less frequently used alternative” to predominantly. So that could be construed as yet another reason to stick with “predominantly.”

Of course, follow their cue only if you want to march in step with the majority. If you march to the beat of your own drummer, “predominately” is valid, too. It's just not predominant.

To find the answers, it helps to know that "well" isn't just an adverb. It's also an adjective.

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And they always seem dissatisfied with the answer: There’s no right way, from a grammar or punctuation standpoint, to write titles. It’s simply a matter of style.

Associated Press style says to put movie and book titles in quotation marks. “Star Wars.” “Slaughterhouse Five.” That makes sense when you consider that AP is a news writing style and early printing presses could not make italics.

“The Chicago Manual of Style,” which is followed by book publishers and many magazines, too, says to use italics for book and movie titles. Star Wars. Slaughterhouse Five. I’m not sure what the reason is. But it could simply be that it looks better. Those quotation marks in AP style definitely interrupt the visual flow of a sentence.

Neither style says to underline titles, which throws off a lot of writers who distinctly remember doing so in school. But that convention of some academic styles isn’t really followed in professional publishing.

As for those ALL-CAPITAL TITLES THAT SEEM TO SCREAM AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS, those are common in marketing writing – you know, the kind of writing that’s actually trying to push something on readers. But you won’t find titles written that way in newspapers or books. In fact, even proper names that are supposed to be in all caps, like the entertainment complex L.A. LIVE, don’t stay all caps in many newspapers. They become L.A. Live.

Both AP and Chicago have special rules for song titles, magazine titles, composition titles, poem titles, and just about anything else that a writer has given a name to. There are too many to commit to memory. If you absolutely need to get them right, consult a style guide. Otherwise, don’t sweat these too much. It’s probably fine to just choose one style – quotation marks or italics – for all. No one will think less of you for not knowing every little rule. After all, even editors often have to double-check.

By traditional copy editor standards, they should be “chaise longue” and “champing at the bit.” Our name for the long chairs called chaises actually comes from the French, in which “chaise longue” literally means “long chair.” Yet for decades, careless American writers have glossed over that last word and assumed it was the English word “lounge.”

Likewise, “champing” isn’t a verb that comes up much these days. According to “Webster’s New World College Dictionary,” it means “to chew hard and noisily.” And, based on my experience as a kid hanging around horse stables, it’s the standard word for describing how horses chew. In my mind, it’s a horse-folk term.

We car-crazy Americans have gotten pretty detached from our country’s horsey roots. So it makes sense that we’d be more comfortable with the idea of the more general “chomping” than with the horse-centric “champing.”

But recently, I’ve started to feel funny about “fixing” them. When I do, I feel that I’m clinging to some bygone standard that is losing relevance by the minute. The “traditional” forms seem less realistic all the time.

A Google search confirms what my gut’s been telling me:

champing at the bit: 687,000 hits.

chomping at the bit: 3 million hits

chaise longue: 5,220,000 hits

chaise lounge: 6,610,000 hits

It’s easy to see which way the tides are turning. It’ll be interesting to see when the style guides finally change their rules.

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Yet, to me, it’s becoming a bigger issue every day.

When I was first learning to edit, it was at a publication where very specific views on both matters reigned: The first was that newspaper writing should aim to be conversational – real-world language that doesn’t draw attention to itself but that downplays itself in order to better serve the message.

That was the reason we put “said” after the name, unless there was a reason not to. In everyday conversation people don’t say things like, “Said my friend, mall parking is free.”

Regardless of the verb, English shows a strong preference for placing a verb after the subject in declarative sentences. So even though you could sometimes say, “Drove John,” chances are you’ll always opt for “John drove.”

As for “said” versus “says,” the former is usually more precise. “Says” is present tense and describes an ongoing action. So when you’re reporting something someone said in the past and just once, “said” is more logical.

So I edit according to these principles. And, the more I do, the more invested in them I become. It’s especially annoying to me that, when writing feature articles, many writers never, ever, ever put the “said” after the name. Every attribution is “said Wilson.”

Obviously, the when a modifying noun or phrase follows the quotation attribution, "said" works best when it comes first:

… said Wilson, author of three math textbooks.

… said Wilson, the company’s president and CEO.

… said Wilson, who saw the accident from his balcony.

In those cases, you need to place the modifying phrase next to the thing in modifies, "Wilson."

One more point about “said” and “says”: Consistency is important, but it shouldn’t trump logic. If you’re writing something using the “Wilson says” form, make "says" your default choice except when you want to emphasize that it was said in the past and just once. Likewise, if you’re writing in the “Wilson said” style, stick with “saids” everywhere unless you’re really quoting something he says repeatedly.

Whatever you do, don’t get irked if an editor changes it. We can be a little rigid on this matter. Ahem.

Style guides have clear rules about when to use "that" and when to use "which." But the rules only apply within those editing styles. As far as grammar is concerned, there's no need to worry about these relative pronouns.

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But the up side of Twitter is that I have found some very good language resources. Here, in no particular order, are some of the language Twitterers I follow who keep me engaged and informed.

@grantbarrett. Grant is co-host of the public radio show “A Way with Words” and a lexicographer, editor, and journalist. He compiled and edited the "Official Dictionary of Unofficial English" and the "Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang.” He’s also well known for his Double-Tongued Dictionary, which “tracks slang, jargon, and neologisms from the fringes of English.” Oh, and he’s co-founder of Wordnik, an online dictionary. In other words, he’s a serious language expert.

@grammarphobia. This is the handle of Patricia O’Conner, word expert and author of the well-known “Woe Is I” and the excellent “Origins of the Specious.” Along with her co-author and husband Stewart Kellerman, she runs a website with lots of great language info.

@theslot. Want to know what goes on in the mind of a language lover who’s also copy desk chief of the Washington Post’s business desk and the author of “Lapsing Into a Comma” and “The Elephants of Style”? Bill Walsh uses this handle to provide some really helpful insights.

@grammargirl. Subscribing to Mignon Fogarty’s tweets is like having a close friend work as your own personal grammar spy. She’s always on top of what’s going on in language and always has great advice and great links to recommend, too.

@mightyredpen. On her website,  Mighty Red Pen identifies herself like this: “Grammar goddess. Word nerd. Grammartarian. Wordsmith. Call me what you will, I’m an editor and writer with more than a dozen years of professional experience, and this is my blog for exploring issues of grammar and language.” Her tweets are fun and interesting, especially to editors.

@grammarmonkeys. Grammar and language tips from the news editors at The Wichita (Kansas) Eagle, tweeted by Lisa McLendon. Fun and useful, with lots of examples of how spell-checker will fail you.

@fritinancy. Nancy Friedman is a name developer and @VisualThesaurus contributor. She does an amazing job of staying on top of language news (I'm smarter for following her) and she shares lots of fun stuff, too.

@absolutewrite. MacAllister Stone, guru behind the Absolute Write website, tweets here. This is a great resource especially for people seeking to become published authors.

@bryanagarner. Garner is the author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” one of my favorite language guides. And he wrote the grammar chapters in the "Chicago Manual of Style."

@fakeapstylebook. The leading source of “Why didn’t I think of that?” hilarity for editorial types.

@stancarey. Stan’s an editor, blogger, and one of those naturally academic types who often has great stuff to share.

My apologies to the great Twitterers I'm overlooking. I'll mention them here just as soon as I remember who I'm leaving out!

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A while back, one of my copy editing students noted a little discrepancy in one of the course’s editing exercises. Her task was to edit a document that included a passage like this:

 “The crusader for grammar strives for the kind of consistency and stability that one only finds in a dead language like Latin. The authors, who only want to express themselves in their own style, tire quickly of the unyielding crusader.”

 The answer key showed she should have transposed “only finds” to make it “finds only.” But it left “only want” intact. My student wanted to know why.

 Well, I didn’t write the exercise or the answer key. So I wasn’t sure what the creator of the document had been thinking. Instead, I told her I would have done the exact same thing. That is, I would have moved the first only but left the second where it was.

 Here’s what I told her:

"The use of 'only' is kind of controversial. Some people say it must immediately precede the word or phrase it modifies. Compare 'I only have eyes for you' with 'I have eyes for only you.' If it's modifying 'have,' it means I have eyes for you but I don't blink eyes for you or pluck out eyes for you or search eyes for you, etc. The act of 'having' is the 'only' thing I do with them. Others say that's just not true. There's no such rule.

"But we copy editors should keep this debate in mind so we can remember to make sure that onlys are being used as clearly and precisely as possible. To say you find something only in a dead language is more precise than saying you only find it in a dead language. (After all, couldn't you also discover it, interpret it, infer it, reveal it, argue for it, etc., in a dead language?)

 "So why is the second sentence any different? Here's my interpretation: This is a different meaning of 'only.' In the first example, it means 'exclusively.' In the second example, it means 'merely.'

 I would argue that the only in 'one finds it only in a dead language' is an adverb modifying the verb 'find.' But I'd argue that in 'They only want to express themselves,' it's a sentence adverb meaning 'merely.'" 

 I hope she bought it.

Goers drive me nuts. I’m not talking about the kind of goers that so fascinated Eric Idle in an old Monty Python sketch. I’m talking about the goers you add at the end of words like party, beach, festival, mall -- you name it. Any place people go, you can tack a “goers” on the end of.

Because I edit feature articles, goers come up quite a bit. And no two writers “goer” alike.

“Festival goers can also check out the 40-plus carnival rides.”

“Beach-goers flock to Santa Monica ever weekend.”

“Partygoers enjoyed cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.”

What’s worse is that, despite years of dealing with this, I’m still not confident in my handling of “goers.” So when I come across a goer in my editing, I wait for a moment till my heart rate returns to normal, then I take a meticulous approach.

First I check the style guide I’m using. AP doesn’t have a listing for “goer.” Under “suffixes,” AP says, “If a word combination is not listed in ‘Webster’s New World,’ use two words for the verb form; hyphenate any noun or adjective forms.”

But here’s where it gets a little confusing: Webster’s doesn’t actually list “goer” as a suffix. It lists it only as a noun. Still, because AP’s suffix advice specifically mentions “word combinations,” we can reasonably assume it also applies to a noun like “goer.”

Things would be a lot easier if Webster’s said “goer” was also a suffix because style rules for suffixes are much clearer. If the dictionary says something’s a suffix, you can just tack it right on the end of a word with no hyphen required.

For a noun like “goer,” we can glean that AP prefers hyphenated forms, but only if the combo you want isn’t already in the dictionary. That means I have to check the exact word first.

I look under the Fs for “festivalgoer” -- nothing.

I look under the Bs for “beachgoer” -- nothing.

But when I look under the Ps, I see “partygoer” right there in black and white.

Thus, in AP style, I’d write: The festival-goers and the beach-goers and partygoers had a nice time.

“The Chicago Manual of Style’s” designated dictionary also treats “goer” as a noun only, but Chicago has a different opinion on what to do with it. According to Chicago, compounds formed with two nouns in which the first noun modifies the second (as in “student nurse”) do not take hyphens. So compounds not found in Chicago’s preferred “Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” take no hyphen. However, unlike “Webster’s New World,” the Merriam Webster dictionary does have an entry for “beachgoer” and even one for “festivalgoer.”

So, in Chicago style: “A dictionary goer soon sees she should write partygoer, beachgoer, and festivalgoer, creating a clear danger she’ll end up an asylum goer.”

... and, more important: How can you know for sure?

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