November 25, 2024

Adjectives as noise

Adjectives are controversial. Rightly so. About four times out of five, you can improve a sentence by cutting one out:

Joe is dating a beautiful supermodel.

Joe is dating a supermodel.

Clearly, the noun “supermodel” does not need to be propped up by an adjective. It’s powerful enough on its own.

Adjectives exist for a reason. You can’t just take the adjective out of the sentence: “She is beautiful," without its adjective, loses its meaning. But before a noun, an adjective can come off like a weak attempt to convince your reader of something he should be able to see for himself.

So adjectives have enough problems of their own. Yet marketers, it seems, are determined to bludgeon them into complete meaninglessness. They do this by using adjectives as mere noise. In marketers’ hands, adjectives are born to be ignored.

Take, for example, this Kashi brand cereal flavor: Island Vanilla.

Really, Kashi? Is that supposed to mean anything other than “vanilla plus some extra syllables to make it sound like something more than plain-old vanilla”?

Here’s another Kashi flavor I like: Harvest Wheat. Again, what does that adjective tell me about what I can expect when I open the box? Nothing. “Harvest wheat” is just wheat.

Kashi isn’t alone in this practice, not by a long shot.

Ragu has a flavor called Garden Vegetable, as opposed to what? Factory Vegetable?

Luden’s makes Wild Cherry cough drops, which we can only presume are superior to those awful farmed cherries.

And Kettle Chips come in this flavor: Backyard Barbeque. (You can almost taste the chain-link fence and kiddie pool.)

And what might a blind taste test tell us about the difference between chocolate and Dutch chocolate, between vanilla and French vanilla? About ranch and cool ranch?

Examples of this kind of hot-air blowing are too numerous to count. And while it’s standard marketing procedure, I think we should all be wee bit insulted by it. When marketers slap meaningless words onto product names in this fashion, it’s worse than telling people “Don’t think.” It’s telling people: “We know you don’t think and we’re so confident about it that we’re going to rub your noses in it.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little hypersensitive. But it’s still an insult to consumers and an act of violence against simple, clear nouns.

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November 11, 2024

'Wrack' and 'rack'

Do you wrack your brain or rack it?

Are you racked with guilt or wracked?

Are these questions nerve-wracking or nerve-racking?

Faced with these questions, I forget what I once learned. Rather than get it wrong or (heaven forbid) take the time to look it up, I just avoid these phrases altogether.

Turns out, that’s not a bad strategy. Though their origins point to different meanings, “wrack” and “rack” are often interchangeable today. But folks who choose their words carefully might want to keep the original meanings in mind.

“Rack” originates from a noun referring to a Medieval torture device, with the verb evolving to mean torture, strain or wreck. “Wrack” was born as a nautical term meaning, essentially, “wreck.”

“This etymology explains why the word is ‘nerve-racking’ rather than ‘nerve-wracking,’” insists Theodore Bernstein’s 1965 guide “The Careful Writer.” “Something that is nerve-racking does not wreck the nerves, it merely strains or tortures them.”

“Wrack,” by this reasoning, isn’t very useful — limited mainly to talk of ships and things that can be similarly wrecked: like a “storm-wracked vessel” or, from that, “wrack and ruin.”

Beware any usage guide that, like Bernstein, speaks in absolutes. Sometimes, their prohibitions are correct. But more often, the writer is a little drunk with power, demanding that good advice be treated as a hard rule.

In the real world, “rack” and “wrack” aren’t so simple. For more than a century, leading language experts have been doling out contradictory advice. Some, like Bernstein, say to keep these words separate and true to their origins.

Others say “wrack” is dead and to just use “rack” no matter your meaning. Though “wrack” is most certainly not dead (in fact, it has gotten a little more popular in the last 30 to 40 years), it wouldn’t be so bad to follow this advice. After all, how often do you talk about ships destroyed by storms?

Still other authorities, notably the official style guide of the New York Times, say to avoid both words and instead just find a more modern synonym. So what'a a conscientious writer to do? Some thoughts in my recent column.

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November 4, 2024

The 'idiot's apostrophe' makes headlines in Germany

In French, to show that someone possesses something, you use their word for “of,” which is “de”: La plume de ma tante. Spanish works the same way: La venganza de Moctezuma. Italian, too: Buca di Beppo. I don’t know as much about German, but the internet tells me that in many cases you form the possessive by just adding an S at the end of the noun: Angelas Mercedes.

And then there’s English.

A simple “of”? Sure, we can use it in rare constructions: A friend of Bill. But usually we don’t.

A simple S? No can do. That’s our system for forming plurals. Marias means more than one Maria. Not that Maria owns something.

An apostrophe plus S? Sure, sometimes, but only when you’re talking about a singular: the cat’s tail. When your noun is plural, you usually add an apostrophe with no S: the cats’ tails. But that’s only when the plural is made plural with an S. When it’s plural and doesn’t end with S, you add S plus an apostrophe just as you would for a singular: children’s books.

From the outside looking in, this can seem like an odd system. Illogical. Some might even say idiotic.

That’s exactly what they’re saying in Germany, where the “idiot’s apostrophe,” as some call it, just got official approval.

Amid a long-term trend of businesses using these English possessive apostrophes on signs — like Rosi’s Bar instead of the correct Rosis Bar — the Council for German Orthography, which regulates how the German language is taught in schools and used in government, gave its blessing to the Deppenapostroph, or “idiot’s apostrophe.” It’s now in the council’s official style guide, meaning it’s no longer wrong in German.

Some German speakers are pretty unhappy about it, saying that their language is caving in to the influence of English. One German who was quoted in the media said this apostrophe “made his hair stand on end.” But some German language experts are more forgiving, pointing out that German already allowed these apostrophes to prevent confusion, for example to keep straight possessive “Andrea’s” and the common men’s name “Andreas.”

I, too, have some thoughts. You can read about them here in my recent column.

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October 28, 2024

There are no stupid grammar questions

People with grammar questions often feel stupid for not already knowing the answer, but the people who answer them are often the ones who should have stayed mum.

Google searches for “dumb grammar question” and “stupid grammar question” prove the point. Here’s one of the first hits, a 2017 post in a writers’ community message board. “DUMB grammar question!” someone named Sherry began. “After being a writer for almost 40 years, I am aware this is a really silly question. I should know better. BUT … which is correct? ‘My family HAS seen me through’ … or ‘My family HAVE seen me through.’”

Raise your hand if you were taught in school that certain collective nouns can take either a singular or plural verb, depending on your meaning. Yeah, me neither. But that’s the case here. “Family” is usually singular, taking a singular verb like “has.” But sometimes it’s meant as a collective of individuals acting independently of each other: “Half my family are voting for candidate 1 and the other half are voting for candidate 2.” Another example: My family comes to the reunion every year, but my family come from all over the U.S.

In Sherry’s question, though, the singular interpretation, while not mandatory, is better: My family has seen me through. But that’s not the answer she got.

One person said Sherry’s real problem was passive voice and that she should make it active voice by changing “My family has seen me through” to “My family saw me through.”

Um, no. Both those sentences are in active voice. They’re just different verb tenses. “Has seen” is called the present perfect tense. “Saw” is the simple past tense.

Passive would be “I have been seen through by my family,” with the object of the action made into the subject of the sentence. But in both “My family saw” and “My family has seen,” the doer of the action, the family, is the subject.

Other posters who tried to answer Sherry’s question didn’t do much better. Read about their misguided guidance in my recent column.

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October 21, 2024

The teacher who condemned 'got'

I never used to believe in ghosts. The idea of hauntings sounded ridiculous to me. Then I started writing about grammar. Now I know better.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been hearing bone-chilling tales of undead teachers haunting former students from the great beyond with bad information: You can’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can't use healthy to mean healthful. You can't start a sentence with but.

The stubborn persistence of these bad teachings never ceases to amaze me. But from time to time these chilling tales go beyond the pale, wowing me with just how bad bad information can be.

Case in point, an e-mail I got recently:

Dear June. Today, in your column from the Pasadena Sun section of the L.A. Times, you used "the writer got bogged down." I will never forget several teachers, including one particularly memorable Mrs. Hamilton, telling me that using "got" in any sentence anytime was simply being lazy, that it was bad English, uncouth, uneducated, etc. You get the point.

Yup, there was once a teacher who took it upon herself to single-handedly condemn a well established and highly useful word. I particularly like that “uneducated” part -- and the irony of how it came from someone who needed only to open a dictionary to see that she was misinforming her own students. Of course, I didn’t say so to the poor guy in so many words. Instead, here’s what I wrote: 

The most common objection to got is that have and got are redundant in phrases like "I have got quite a few friends." Yes, it's inefficient, but it's accepted as an idiom. Every major language authority I know of agrees it's a valid option. 

We editors usually trim the gots out. Especially in news writing, which prizes efficiency, "He has got $20'" is a poor alternative to "He has $20." But that's an aesthetic. Not a grammar rule.

 From what you're saying, your teacher was condemning the word got in all its uses. And, yes, that's extreme to the point of being illogical. Got is the past tense of get, which can be both a regular verb and an auxiliary verb: "They got married."

It sounds as though Mrs. Hamilton would have everyone say, "They were married." But if so, that's just a personal preference she was trying to pass off as a rule. There isn't a dictionary under the sun that would back her up.

"I hear a lot of stories about teachers who used to lay down laws that weren't laws. (It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It's wrong to split an infinitive. It's wrong to begin a sentence with and.) These kinds of unfounded prohibitions were very fashionable in educational circles for a while. But they never were rules. It's unfortunate kids got so much bad information.

 Hope that helps! - June

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October 14, 2024

Quasi possessives

Do you know about quasi possessives? You probably should. Unlike so many other things in language you can figure out on your own, quasi possessives are one of those things you just have to know. And since you’re visiting a grammar site, chances are you’re one of the people who’d like to know it. So here goes.

You know how people talk about a hard day’s work or two weeks’ pay or getting your dollar’s worth? Well, those are all considered quasi possessives. They get treated as possessives even though they don’t convey the same degree of “ownership,” if you will, as do regular possessives.

AP discusses these in its on using apostrophes and says that phrases as a day’s pay, two weeks’ vacation, three days’ work and your money’s worth all get the possessive treatment.

The Chicago Manual of Style calls this the “possessive with genitive,” which I don’t love because “genitive” roughly translates to “possessive,” making the whole term seem a bit nonsensical. However, this use of the word “genitive” is a nod to the fact that there are two ways to form possessives in English. Either with an apostrophe plus S (or, in the case most plurals, just an apostrophe): Joe’s house, the Smiths’ daughter. The other way, and this is more consistent with English’s Latin roots, is to use of: the house of Joe, the daughter of the Smiths.

As Chicago describes it, forms like a week's pay are a carry-over from the latter: “Possessive with genitive. Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain expressions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies ‘of’: in three days’ time, an hour’s delay, six months’ leave.”

If it helps to think of these as “three days of time” or “an hour of delay,” do. But I find it easier just to remember that these expressions are possessive-like. Or, as both guides recommend, you can also tweak the sentence so you have a hyphenated compound like “a six-month leave” or “a two-week vacation.”

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October 7, 2024

Why is legal writing so convoluted?

Legal writing is famously inscrutable and inaccessible — especially fond of long parenthetical ideas shoved in the middle of sentences. And according to a recent study, their reader-unfriendly prose is contagious.

“Legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike,” write the authors of a study published this summer. In other words, nobody — not even lawyers themselves — can easily slog through their stuff. Yet they keep cranking out sentences like this gem I found online: “I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.”

In my books and columns, I sometimes take badly written passages and show how they could have been better. No can do this time. You can’t streamline a passage if you don’t know what it says. Bravo, returner of the stipulation to dismiss. Bravo.

If non-lawyers can’t decipher stuff like this and even lawyers themselves find it hard to understand, why do they write like this?

To find out, researchers asked 200 study participants to write laws prohibiting crimes like drunk driving and burglary. Then they asked them to write stories about those crimes.

The laws they wrote contained unnecessarily long, labyrinthine sentences with lots of parenthetical explanations crammed in. The stories, however, were written simply, without the parenthetical information stuffing. The kicker: None of the participants were lawyers. They were laypeople who somehow got it in their heads that bloated, fussy sentences make you sound more authoritative.

Researchers explain this with the “magic spell hypothesis” legal writing, which you can read about in my recent column.

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September 30, 2024

Chaise longue and chaise lounge

Chaise longues — those reclining full-length chairs that beckon you to the beach — are making me nostalgic. Not for days when I had more free time and closer proximity to the ocean, but for days when all the editing rules I learned were still relevant. Editing rules like: It’s chaise longue, not chaise lounge.

The nostalgia hit me recently when I read this sentence about digital nomads in the New York Times Magazine: “Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button.”

Outside the New York Times, “longue” sightings are rare these days. More and more, I see “chaise lounge” instead. That’s not necessarily a problem. But when you’re a longtime copy editor who once believed that editing rules were universal and people who knew them were uniquely valuable, it’s hard to let go.

Apparently, some editing bigwig at the New York Times feels the same way. “Chaise longue” appears in their pages about three or four times a month. The only recent instances of “chaise lounge” appear in the proper name of some product that spells it that way.

This can get a little awkward, like in the Times’ 2019 article “Shopping for a Chaise Longue” that lists five chaise longues named “chaise lounge,” sometimes with both spellings appearing in the same sentence. It’s the kind of tug-of-war between old and new that we editors see a lot. “Healthy” and “healthful” are another example. Read about both in my recent column.

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September 23, 2024

'Whomever' is harder for people who good at grammar

 “I’ll hire whomever does best in the interview.” 

“I’ll hire whoever does best in the interview.”

People who aren’t trying to use good grammar, often choose “whoever” in a sentence like this. People who are being careful often choose “whomever.” Ironically, the folks who weren’t trying get this right more often than people who are trying. The correct choice here is “whoever.”

Grammar buffs get this wrong because they have only half the picture. They know that “whom” and “whomever” are object pronouns, but they don’t understand that whole clauses can be objects, too.

Object pronouns are words we use every day and include “me,” “him,” “us” and “them.” They’re often objects of verbs, as in “show me,” “invite him,” “tell us” and “ignore them.” Or they’re objects of prepositions like “at,” “to” and “with”: “yell at me,” “send to him,” “relate to us,” “go with them.”

They’re the mirror image of subject pronouns “I,” “he,” “we,” “they,” etc., which we use as subjects: “I yell,” “he sends” and so on.

“Whom” is an object pronoun, “You sent it to whom?” and “who” is a subject pronoun, “Who sent this?” Similarly, “whomever” is an object pronoun and “whoever” is a subject pronoun. But because these two often sit between clauses, there’s a twist that some people don’t realize.

Compare: “Police will arrest whoever breaks the law” and “Police will arrest whomever they catch breaking the law.”

In both cases, the pronoun comes right after the verb “arrest.” So if you apply a simple understanding of pronouns, you would guess you need “whomever” there because it’s an object. But in that second sentence, the word after “arrest” is not the object. The whole clause that follows “arrest” is the object, and that clause needs its own subject: whoever.

For a super-simple example, look at the sentence: I saw who did it. The object of the verb “saw” is the whole clause “who did it.” If the pronoun were the object, you’d have to say, “I saw whom did it.”

Even professional writers, editors and broadcasters get this wrong. A lot.

Look at this sentence from the Aug. 22 New York Times sports section: “He talks to whomever wants to hear about the story of the hat.”

Either the editor didn’t understand object pronouns or the writer made a mistake and the editor didn’t catch it. He or she clearly thought that the preposition “to” needed to be followed by an object pronoun. But in fact, the object of the preposition “to” is the whole clause “whoever wants to hear about the story of the hat.” That’s because “wants” needs a subject and only “whoever” can fill that role.

Anytime you see a “whomever” sandwiched between two clauses, ask yourself if the second verb has a subject. In “Police will arrest whomever they catch breaking the law,” the subject of the verb “catch” is “they.” Clearly, we don’t need to swap “whomever” to “whoever” to do the catching in the verb. But in “Police will arrest whoever breaks the law,” there’s no other word that could be the subject of “breaks,” so “whoever” must be it. Here's the full story in my recent column.

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September 16, 2024

When a comma and a possessive s collide

A while back, an AP Stylebook online subscriber wrote: “Please, no recasts. I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere on the planet. Keep in mind these represent directly quoted utterances. Do we keep or toss the comma after France’s, New York’s and 2001’s? ‘Alice said, “Paris, France’s, sights are breathtaking!”’ ‘Gov. Cuomo said, “Albany, New York’s, crime rate has risen exponentially.”’ ‘Joe said, “September 11, 2001’s, tragic events will be indelibly etched in the minds of everyone.”’”

These are interesting questions because they create a conflict between comma rules and good taste. Comma rules say that when you refer to a city followed by its state, then continue the sentence, the state is followed by a comma. For instance: Albany, New York, is lovely this time of year.

The same rule applies to countries after cities: Paris, France, is home to the Eiffel Tower.

And the same rule applies to years after dates: September 11, 2001, was a tragic day.

But sometimes, especially in casual speech, people can make New York, France or 2001 possessive. New York’s weather is nice this time of year. France’s president will visit. 2001’s events affected us all.

This is almost never a problem, but when the rules call for a comma in the same spot, things get unsightly and a little weird. Notice how, in “Paris, France’s, sights are breathtaking,” it sounds more like you’re talking about France’s sights than Paris’. A similar effect is true for the other two sentences.

Rulebooks like the Associate Press Stylebook don’t tell you what to do in these situations. So subscribers sometimes just pose the question to AP’s editors on the stylebook’s website. Usually, this works out great. But not this time.

“Really, truly, recasting is the thing to do,” replied an editor.

I don't love this answer. I explain why in my recent column.

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