The other day at work I came across a fantastic formation I’d never seen before: “newest fangled.” It was from a speech given back in 1938 by J. Reuben Clark at Brigham Young University, where the law school is named for him.

The speech was pretty formal and serious, so I’m not sure if I want to assume that it was a jocular or ironic usage. However, a Google search for “newest fangled” returns a mere 363 hits, and citations in the OED for fangle or fangled are pretty rare and don’t appear much after 1700, so it doesn’t appear that this is an example of dialectal usage. Idiolectal, perhaps, but it’s hard to say since I’ve only got one example and I’m not familiar with Clark’s other works.

At any rate, I got a kick out of it, and I thought I’d share.

This is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for quite some time, but the recent movie WALL-E has reminded me of the issue once again, and that is this: some people seem to think that logos are the ultimate guide to the orthography of some names.

Now, Bill Walsh has already covered this topic on his site, the Slot, but it’s worth covering again. I’ve seen a couple different websites that pointed out that WALL-E is either spelled with or “promoted with” an interpunct, and I got involved in a forum discussion where people were wondering whether the dot should be rendered as a hyphen or an asterisk (once again, someone explained that it’s an interpunct).

Something about this strikes me as silly. Did I miss the memo when it was announced that graphic designers are the arbiters of proper orthography? And why is it that some people kowtow to certain logos and not others? After all, as Bill Walsh points out, nobody insists that the proper spelling of Macy’s is actually macy*s, so why do we worry about whether it’s WALL-E or WALL*E or WALL·E? (Then again, I see Wal*Mart plenty often. Perhaps there’s some research grant money to be had in studying the sociolinguistics of brand name orthography.)

A while back, I thought this issue mostly cropped up with tech companies (particularly internet companies, like Yahoo and eBay), but then I started seeing the aforementioned Wal*Mart as well as car names like SATURN (remind me again what that stands for) and Mazda6 (now we have to match the italics too? What next, colors and fonts?) I don’t know if this is just an example of the recency illusion, but it does seem like a lot of people nowadays don’t really know how to properly represent brand names.

And anyway, getting back to WALL-E, how do we even know that that’s an interpunct? The Wikipedia article doesn’t cite a source for this fact, and it’s not easy to tell from the logo whether it’s an interpunct, a bullet point, or just a dot. When a novelty font uses a decorative punctuation mark, it might be impossible to say what character that mark is supposed to correspond to. It might not correspond to anything at all, as with the stars in Macy’s and Wal-Mart. As Walsh notes, the five-sided star used in those logos is not the same thing as an asterisk.

I really see no good reason to forsake good judgement and slavishly copy the styling of logos, especially since it’s not always possible to do so. After all, the purpose of a logo is to be eye-catching and recognizable, not to conform to the principles of good spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. I say let logos be logos and text be text. It’s the job of editors to use common sense and good judgement in helping text to conform to reasonable standards. It’s not our job to mindlessly reproduce what we see.

Recently I got a letter from my phone company informing me that my area code will be switching to 10-digit dialing sometime next year. Several times the letter mentioned that we will have to start dialing “10-digits.” It was very consistent—every time the numeral 10 was followed by the noun “digits,” there was a hyphen between them.

Now, I’ve tried to mellow over the last few years and take a more descriptivist stance on a lot of things, but I’m still pretty prescriptivist when it comes to spelling and style. Hyphens have a few different purposes, one of which is to join compound modifiers, and that purpose was not being served here.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that most people aren’t really taught in school anymore, and even a lot of editors struggle with hyphens. It seems that some people see hyphens between numerals and whatever words follow them and generalize this to mean that there should always be hyphens after numerals.

But this isn’t the case, because as I said before, hyphens serve a purpose. The stress patterns and intonation of “10 digit(s)” are different in “You have to dial 10 digits” and “You have to dial 10-digit numbers,” because one is a compound and the other is not. The hyphen helps indicate this in writing, and if there’s a hyphen when there doesn’t need to be one, the reader may be primed to expect another word, thinking that “10-digits” is a compound that modifies something, only to find that that’s the end of the phrase.

Of course, one may argue that in compounds like this, the noun is always singular (“10-digit dialing,” not “10-digits dialing”), thus preventing any ambiguity or misreading. While technically true, some readers—like me—may still experience a slight mental hiccup when they realize that it’s not a compound but simply a numeral modifying a noun.

The solution is to learn when hyphens are actually needed. Of course, not all style guides agree on all points, but any decent style guide will at least cover the basics. And if all else fails, trust your ear—if you’re saying it like a compound, use a hyphen. If you’re saying it like two separate words, don’t use one. And if you’re writing or editing anything for publication, you really should know this already.

First off, let me apologize for not writing anything in a while. I’ve been busy with preparations for grad school and a new baby and haven’t gotten around to working on any of the ideas I’ve got bouncing around. I promise I’ll work on something soon.

But for now, you’ll have to be satisfied with something else entirely: t-shirts. I’ve moved my store from Cafepress for various reasons and have expanded my product line a little bit. I’ve got some other designs completed or in the works, but apparently Spreadshirt only lets me have three vector graphic designs at a time until I sell at least 10 shirts.

Until then, if you have any requests for different types of shirts or different designs, like maybe this better living through phonetics one, just let me know and I’ll be glad to accommodate.

Recently I was involved in an online discussion about the pronunciation of the word the before vowels. Someone wanted to know if it was pronounced /ði/ (“thee”) before vowels only in singing, or if it was a general rule of speech as well. His dad had said it was a rule, but he had never heard it before and wondered if maybe it was more of a convention than a rule. Throughout the conversation, several more people expressed similar opinions—they’d never heard this rule before and they doubted whether it was really a rule at all.

There are a few problems here. First of all, not everybody means exactly the same thing when they talk about rules. It’s like when laymen dismiss evolution because it’s “just a theory.” They forget that gravity is also just a theory. And when laymen talk about linguistic rules, they usually mean prescriptive rules. Prescriptive rules usually state that a particular thing should be done, which typically implies that it often isn’t done.

But when linguists talk about rules, they mean descriptive ones. Think of it this way: if you were going to teach a computer how to speak English fluently, what would it need to know? Well, one tiny little detail that it would need to know is that the word the is pronounced with a schwa (/ðə/) except when it is stressed or followed by a vowel. Nobody needs to be taught this rule, except for non-native speakers, because we all learn it by hearing it when we’re children. And thus it follows that it’s never taught in English class, so it throws some people for a bit of a loop when they heard it called a rule.

But even on the prescriptivist side of things, not all rules are created equal. There are a lot of rules that are generally covered in English classes, and they’re usually taught as simple black-and-white declarations: x is right and y is wrong. When people ask me questions about language, they usually seem to expect answers along these lines. Many issues of grammar and usage are complicated and have no clear right wrong answer. Same with style—open up two different style guides, and you’ll often find two (or more) ways to punctuate, hyphenate, and capitalize. A lot of times these things boil down to issues of formality, context, and personal taste.

Unfortunately, most of us hear language rules expressed as inviolable laws all the way through public school and probably into college. It’s hard to overcome a dozen years or more of education on a subject and start to learn that maybe things aren’t as simple as you’ve been told, that maybe those trusted authorities and gatekeepers of the language, the English teachers, were not always well-informed. But as writing becomes more and more important in modern life, it likewise becomes more important to teach people meaningful, well-founded rules that aren’t two centuries old. It’s time for English class to get educated.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always the grammar free-love hippie that I am now. I actually used to be known as quite a grammar nazi. This was back in my early days as an editor (during my first year or two of college) when I was learning lots of rules about grammar and usage and style, but before I had gotten into my major classes in English language, which introduced me to a much more descriptivist approach.

It was a gradual progression, starting with my class in modern American usage. Our textbook was Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in editing or the English language in general. The class opened my eyes to the complexities of usage issues and made me realize that few issues are as black-and-white as most prescriptivists would have you believe. And this was in a class in the editing minor of all places.

My classes in the English language major did even more to change my opinions about prescriptivism and descriptivism. Classes in Old English and the history of the English language showed me that although the language has changed dramatically over the centuries, it has never fallen into a state of chaos and decay. There has been clear, beautiful, compelling writing in every stage of the language (well, as long as there have been literate Anglo-Saxons, anyway).

But I think the final straw was annoyance with a lot of my fellow editors. Almost none of them seemed interested in doing anything other than following the strictures laid out in style guides and usage manuals (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage was somehow exempt from reference). And far too often, the changes they made did nothing to improve the clarity, readability, or accuracy of the text. Without any depth of knowledge about the issues, they were left without the ability to make informed judgements about what should be changed.

In fact, I would say that you can’t be a truly great editor unless you learn to approach things from a descriptivist perspective. And in the end, you’re still deciding how the text should be instead of simply talking about how it is, so you haven’t fully left prescriptivism behind. But it will be an informed prescriptivism, based on facts about current and historical usage, with a healthy dose of skepticism towards the rhetoric coming from the more fundamentalist prescriptivists.

And best of all, you’ll find that the sky won’t fall and the language won’t rapidly devolve into caveman grunts just because you stopped correcting all the instances of figurative over to more than. Everybody wins.

In my current job making day planners, I get to read a lot of quotes. I don’t know who decided that day planners needed cheesy motivational and inspirational quotes in the first place, but that’s just the way it’s done.

One of my tasks is to compile databases of quotes and to make sure everything is accurate. The first part is easy. We’ve got a couple dozen books of quotations in the office, and if for some reason we want a little variety, there are countless sites on the internet that compile all kinds of motivational quotes.

Unfortunately, virtually all of our sources are unreliable. All but a few websites are completely untrustworthy; there are no standards, no editing, and no source citations. Most people seem to think that a vague description of who the person is (“actor,” “business executive,” and so forth) should suffice.

But surely edited and published books would be reliable, right? Not usually. Only one or two of the books in our office have real source citations so that we could track down the original if we wanted. Most just name an author, and sometimes they even screw that up—I’ve seen a quote by Will Durant attributed to Aristotle (it was in a book in which he discussed certain of Aristotle’s ideas) and another quote attributed to Marlene vos Savant. (For those of you who don’t know, it should be Marilyn vos Savant.) I can’t even figure out how an editorial error like that happens. Then there’s a quote from Jonathan Westover that pops up from time to time.

You begin to realize pretty quickly just how low the standards are for this genre of publishing. Most people don’t care about the accuracy of their inspiration—it’s the warm fuzzy feeling that matters. So things like research and thorough copy editing go out the window. It’s probably largely a waste of my time too. I doubt any of our customers would’ve spotted the errors above, but I feel like a fraud if I don’t try to catch as many of them as possible.

I’m beginning to realize that there are probably dozens of apocryphal, misattributed, or otherwise problematic quotes that I’m missing, though, simply because I don’t have the resources to track everything down. Googling for quotes seldom turns up anything of real use. And anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of our books are sourced entirely from the internet or from other unsourced collections of quotations. It might be an interesting study in stemmatics if it weren’t such an inane subject. Though sometimes I wonder if there are real origins for these incorrect quotes or if it’s just bad sources all the way down.

In my mind, less and fewer illustrates quite well virtually all of the problems of prescriptivism: the codification of the opinion of some eighteenth-century writer, the disregard for well over a millennium of usage, the insistence on the utility in a superfluous distinction, and the oversimplification of the original rule leading to hypercorrection.

I found a very lovely example of hypercorrection the other day in The New York Times: “The figures are adjusted for one fewer selling day this September than a year ago.” Not even stuffy constructions like “10 items or fewer” make me cringe the way that made me cringe.

No usage or style guide that I know of recommends this usage. In my experience, most guides that enforce the less/fewer distinction grant exceptions when dealing with things like money, distance, or time or when following the word one. And why, exactly, is one an exception? I’m really not sure, but my best guess is that it sounds so strange that even the most strictly logical prescriptivists admit that less must be the correct choice.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has an excellent entry on less/fewer, but surprisingly, regarding the “one fewer” issue it says only, “And of course [less] follows one.” Perhaps the use of “one fewer” is so rare that the editors didn’t think to say more about it. Obviously someone should’ve said something to the copy editor at The New York Times.

I was just reading this article about Adobe’s new online word processor, and something caught my eye. In the screenshot, there’s a sentence that’s highlighted, and a bubble in the margin says, “Passive wording fixed.” First of all, it makes me groan to think that so many people still think that the passive voice is simply something that should be fixed, but that’s a topic that’s been covered in a lot of depth elsewhere, notably Language Log, so I won’t get into that right now.

The real head-scratcher is that the sentence “It has some very nice features” is not one that can easily be made into a passive. Yes, it is transitive, so it meets the basic requirements, but I can’t imagine that any native English speaker would produce the sentence “Some very nice features are had [by it]” unless they were intentionally trying to create an example of when the passive voice is a poor choice.

More likely, I think, is that Buzzword misidentified some other type of construction—perhaps there is/are—as the passive voice and then corrected it. There’s a lot of grammatical advice out there right now that makes the same sort of mistakes. Heck, even Brian Garner and staff members of the Chicago Manual of Style get it wrong.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the trial of Buzzword, so I can’t test out its grammar checker to see if this is the case. If anyone knows more about it, please let me know.

From time to time, websites such as MSN and Yahoo challenge their readers to quizzes on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These quizzes are often written more to stump than to educate, so the questions are worded in confusing ways, and the answers are masked in vagueness to the point where even those who know the answer get the question wrong.

A recent grammar quiz was so chock full of errors that I, being on the nitpicky side of things myself, felt a need to address. Let’s look at the directions first, followed by each question individually.

Directions

Judge the quality of the writing in the questions below. Look for wordiness, misplaced modifiers, passive constructions, incorrect word choice, and problems with parallelism and punctuation. Potential errors are underlined.

Considering this is a grammar quiz, I take issue with the first sentence. Grammar comprises morphology and syntax, neither of which has much to do with the quality of a person’s writing. I’ve known plenty of people who have good syntax whose writing leaves much to be desired.

The second sentence of the directions gives a laundry list of potential errors: “wordiness, misplaced modifiers, passive constructions, incorrect word choice, and problems with parallelism and punctuation.” Some of these issues are related to grammar, namely misplaced modifiers, passive constructions, and problems with parallelism. Wordiness, incorrect word choice, and punctuation have nothing to do with grammar and should have been left out of this quiz. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so picky; after all, grammar has come to be used as an umbrella term for everything an editor or red-pen-happy teacher might change or judge about our use of language.

Question 1

As the gamekeeper at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (a), enjoying the great outdoors (b) was easy for Hagrid (c) and his magical creatures.
a) The error is here.
b) The error is here.
c) The error is here.
d) The sentence is correct.

The answer to this one is easy. Since the subject of the main clause is enjoying, it should be the noun that the first phrase modifies. But enjoying is not the gamekeeper of Hogwarts; Hagrid is. Therefore, we have a misplaced modifier. Easy enough.

But what’s up with the sentence in the first place? “Enjoying the great outdoors was easy for Hagrid and his magical creatures?” Have you heard anyone talk like that before? I mean, really. Enjoying reading is easy for me. Talk about wordiness (which, as I recall, is one of the things we’re supposed to be looking for). It’s obvious the awkward sentence was concocted just so it could have a misplaced modifier.

Question 2

The reason she’s (a) sleeping is because (b) she’s tired (c).

Note: In the future, I won’t include the options with the question since they are identical to the ones in question 1.

The answer to this question is b. The reasoning, according to grammar police, is that it’s redundant to use “the reason is” with “because,” since they define because as “for the reason that.” The correct wording would be, “The reason is . . . that. . . . ” (There are convoluted, ultimately groundless grammatical arguments against the phrase as well, which I’ll spare you for the sake of keeping this post as brief as possible.)

I, on the other hand, firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with the construction. It’s only redundant insomuch as you define because in precisely that way. But if you look at Merriam Webster’s second definition of because, you’ll see that it can also mean “the fact that.” Also note that this exact construction is used as an example.

One good way to tell whether a usage rule is worth anything is to see whether the alternative is more awkward than the “bad” usage. For instance, the admonition against ending sentences with prepositions often results in horrid workarounds that are harder to understand than the original, preposition-ending version would have been. In this case, I’d wager that if you tried to change “because” to “that” in your speech whenever you use “the reason is,” you’d find it surprisingly awkward and difficult to do. This is another example of pedants frowning on a natural, comfortable way of wording a sentence just because it makes them feel smart to have “noticed” the “error.”

Question 3

The three-piece suit (a) was taken to the dry cleaner (b) by the maid, (c) but picked up by the butler.

This question has several problems. The error in section b is “was taken,” which is a passive construction. Never mind that passive voice isn’t necessarily wrong or that it’s nearly impossible to tell whether it’s appropriate or not out of context. Brockenbrough warned us in her directions that we should look for passive voice, so it’s fair game in this question. But the bigger problem is that “[was] picked up by the butler” is also passive, so c is an equally acceptable answer. Too bad the quiz only allows you to pick one.

Finally, the comma before “but picked up” is unnecessary. Commas are needed before conjunctions only when the conjunctions link two complete sentences. “Picked up by the butler” is a verb phrase, not a sentence, so the comma should have been left out.

Question 4

I’m a (a) cowboy (b), on a steel horse I ride (c).

Are you stumped by this one? So was I. The obvious error is the comma, which should be a semicolon. But it’s not underlined. That makes “cowboy” and “on a steel horse I ride” equal contenstants, since they surround the error. I picked the latter, since, I figured, if it had a conjunction of some kind in it, the comma would be all right. I should have picked the former, I guess because it’s closer to the comma. Maybe it was just a typo, and the comma should have been included in the underlining for “cowboy.” It’s a pretty sloppy typo for a quiz that compares itself to the SAT, though.

Question 5

They’re (a) dream house burned (b) to the ground last week (c).

This is a good question. I’ve seen some pretty intelligent people mix up there, they’re, and their. (The answer is a, by the way.)

Question 6

“Rarely is (a) the question asked, (b) “Is our children (c) learning?”

Did anyone actually miss this one? If you’re like most people, “Is our children” sounds positively alien to your ears, as well it should. Many actual grammatical errors sound like this one. Believe it or not, you know English grammar pretty well. You know that children are, not is, for instance, without looking it up or second-guessing yourself. You’d probably know just as well that “Our is children learning?” is bad grammar. My biggest beef with this question is that it seems too easy to belong on this test.

Beyond that, “Rarely is the question asked” is a passive construction. If you’re supposed to correct the passive in question 3, why not in this question as well?

Question 7

The general consensus (a) is that elephants mourn (b) their dead (c).

If you want to be really picky, you’ll notice that a consensus is already general, so the word general is redundant. It’s like talking about a big elephant. At the same time, I don’t personally mind if people say “general consensus” (or “big elephant,” for that matter) for many of the same reasons I don’t have a problem with “the reason is because.” There’s a shade of difference, at least for me, between consensus and general consensus. After all, a consensus among experts isn’t the same as a general consensus. Sometimes it’s important to distinguish that a particular elephant is the big one; sometimes it isn’t. It’s impossible to say out of context whether something that appears redundant actually is.

Question 8

Look besides (a) the television; (b) the phone book is there (c).

I have the same problem with this that I had with question 6. No native English speaker would ever make this mistake. As such, it’s a pointless, unchallenging question.

Question 9

The professor taught John and I (a) the difference between (b) right and wrong (c).

This is the best question in the whole quiz, in my opinion. It’s tricky because everyone’s been taught that you’re supposed to say “John and I,” not “John and me.” Right? But take John out of the sentence. Suddenly it becomes clear that “The professor taught I” is wrong. Sometimes it’s right to say “John and me,” and this is one of those times.

I’m so thrilled that she included this question that I won’t nitpick the fact that I hope most people learn the difference between right and wrong before they get to college.

Question 10

Known by some as “terrible lizards,” carnivorous dinosaurs ate meat, laid eggs, and tore the flesh of their prey with sharp claws and teeth.

Did you catch that pesky passive again? “Known by some” is apparently less appalling to Brockenbrough than “was taken by the maid” because the answer to this question is that there’s nothing wrong with it. Not that I have a problem with the passive, of course, but let’s be consistent at least.

And if you’re going to frown on apparent redundancies like “the reason is because” and “general consensus,” then surely you’ll take issue with “carnivorous dinosaurs ate meat.” Also, the sentence seems to imply that only carnivorous dinosaurs laid eggs and were known as terrible lizards, when both of these facts apply to all dinosaurs. Finally, tearing the flesh of prey is something that all carnivores do, so it is doubly redundant. Here’s a perfect example of a sentence with decent grammar yet much to be desired in the quality of the writing.

The moral of the story, dear readers, is that you shouldn’t trust everything you read on the internet. We’re all pretty self-conscious that our use of English will make us sound dumb to some grammarian who might be listening in, but here’s a secret: sometimes it’s the grammarians who make mistakes. There, doesn’t that make you feel better about the time your third-grade teacher wrote all over your report with red pen?