Category Archives: Punctuation

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Dec 13)

Words and language in the news this week: a sign language interpreter meltdown; Yankee driving lingo; two tweets that could have used an edit; and Cormac McCarthy on punctuation …

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When the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in Johannesburg started to “sign rubbish”, complaints started to flood in from deaf viewers around the world. According to the BBC, “Wilma Newhoudt-Druchen, the country’s first deaf female MP, tweeted: ‘ANC-linked interpreter on the stage with dep president of ANC is signing rubbish. He cannot sign. Please get him off.'” Thamsanqa Jantjie, the rogue interpreter, explained that he had a schizophrenic episode and started to hear voices in his head.

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BBC America’s Mind the Gap blog published a very useful British hitchhiker’s guide to understanding America’s driving lingo. From jaywalking to tailgating, you can get your Yankee drive-speak on.

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Slate.com’s Lexicon Valley blog argued a case for the Oxford comma by publishing a Sky News tweet reporting on the Mandela memorial. “Top stories: World leaders at Mandela tribute, Obama-Castro handshake and same-sex marriage date set…” was the tweet. “A handshake and a proposal” was Slate’s interpretation of it.

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Cormac McCarthy takes a minimalist approach to punctuation. “James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.” Open Culture examines McCarthy’s three punctuation rules and how they all go back to Joyce.

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When the University of Michigan found out that it was ranked number 12 in a world ranking, it sent out this tweet:

Ooops! Not so hot in the spelling rankings, it seems …

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Possessive waffling

So, why is it called Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream – and not Ben’s & Jerry’s? It’s what’s known as a joint possessive: because the ice cream is owned jointly by Ben and Jerry, they need only one possessive — ie. one apostrophe — between them. And this rule is good for limitless numbers of owners. Let’s say Jack Hypothetical joined the company and claimed his stake in their delicious branded FroYo: the three ice-cream men would still have to make do with just one apostrophe: Ben & Jerry & Jack’s FroYo.

Now, assuming that Ben & Jerry don’t live together, when it comes to talking about their homes we refer to Ben’s and Jerry’s houses, and to their respective loved ones as Ben’s and Jerry’s families. That’s not to suggest that they each have multiple properties or that either of them is a bigamist, however, and to be sure to avoid any confusion or ambiguity with regard to that plural matter, it’s sometimes wise to just reword the phrase. But giving them each their own possessive apostrophe clarifies that the items are separately owned — what’s Ben’s is Ben’s and what’s Jerry’s is Jerry’s — whether in single or multiple form.

That’s joint possessives covered. Double possessives are a different thing — and, just to confuse things further, they come in two forms.

First, going back to Jack Hypothetical: let’s say he started out as a friend of Ben’s. Looking at that sentence, I’ve twice indicated Ben’s possession of Jack (as a friend): first by saying “friend of” (with the of suggesting ownership), and then by giving Ben an apostrophe and an “s”. Why do we sometimes repeat the possessive sense like this? There’s no real reason, except that it’s been done for centuries and it’s generally accepted in standard English. In the same way that we say “it’s a habit of mine” (and not “it’s a habit of me” or “it’s a habit of I“), we naturally use the double possessive. In The Careful Writer (1965), Theodore M. Bernstein noted that “grammarians have argued over the origin and nature, but not the validity, of the double genitive with the fervor of hot-stove league fans rehashing a Word Series play.”

Now, what if we want to ask about Ben & Jerry’s ice cream’s calories? That seems a fair question, if a little awkwardly phrased (and a bit of a party pooper, if you ask me). This is the other form of double possessive: when something is owned by something that is in turn owned by something else. By far the best way of avoiding this sort of double possessive is to reword it: let’s ask instead about the calories of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. But note that we don’t use the earlier form of double possessive in this case — ie. we don’t inquire after “the calories of the ice cream’s”, whereas we might inquire after that amazing FroYo idea of Ben’s (or Jerry’s? or both?). Only people and animate objects have the privilege of the extra possessive, it seems: not even ice cream warrants it. But please don’t ask me to explain why …

I know: I’m waffling now — but not in the American sense, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “failing to make up one’s mind”. Ben & Jerry’s “Waffling?” poster uses some tasty word-play here, pointing out our failure to choose which flavor of ice-cream to put in their waffle cones. So yes, a lot of waffling goes on in North America’s Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream stores. But this particular play on words would be lost on most Brits, to whom waffle means something different: “to speak or write, especially at great length, without saying anything important or useful”. Waffle seems to be what I’m doing and spewing here — since it comes in both verb and noun form.

Here ends this waffling of mine. A triple possessive is calling me: my Ben & Jerry’s Ron Burgundy’s Scotchy Scotch Scotch…

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TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Nov 29)

Words and language in the news this week: women vs. girls in India; a grammatical collie, and cute cats in language learning; the strident period; allegations of racist correcting; and some classic American mispronunciations …

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In India, the BBC reports, men are men, but women are often “girls”. “‘In colloquial Indian parlance, you are a girl until you get married – only then do you become a woman’, says Winnie Singh, whose Maitri charity supports female victims of violence. But in itself, that illuminates deep-seated patriarchal views about women and their role, argues Delhi-based lawyer Rebecca John, who has represented many rape victims.”

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In the New Republic, Ben Crair reports on the new aggressive stance of the once benign period. The period is pissed. Period.

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According to many news outlets, including AZonline, a border collie called Chaser is so smart that she knows verbs, adverbs and propositions.

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A professor at the University of California in LA has been accused of racism after correcting a student’s grammar, capitalization and punctuation. Examiner.com reports.

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The BBC‘s technology reporter Carolyn Rice writes that the use of cute cat photos can improve people’s memory function when they’re learning languages.

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Having trouble pronouncing some of the names in the news (especially when they’re from other lands)? Have no fear: the Washington Post‘s WorldViews blog presents a guide to 26 foreign countries and names that Americans often mispronounce.

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Oct 25)

That Gerund Is Funky: Words and language in the news during the week ending Oct 25.

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NPR took us on a linguistic journey through the word glitch … What is a glitch, anyway? Meaning everything from a catastrophe to a mere flaw, the word that began in the groovy 60s to describe uneventful snafus in space might now spell peril for Obama’s affordable healthcare act.

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“School Makes Parents Sign Contracts Promising Students Won’t Twerk or Grind at Homecoming Dance.” Yes, that’s a real headline in Time magazine. “It’s hard enough to explain twerking to parents. Now Maryland high schoolers have to explain twerking contracts.” The straight-faced magazine added this caption to the article’s accompanying photograph: “People who twerk or grind will get judgy looks.” Judgy?

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The Guardian‘s David Marsh called for the appointment of a Language Czar, to outlaw ugly business and political lingo, as reported in Prospect magazine. March also argued, in the New Statesman and the New Republic, that “the golden age of grammar is a myth. … Just think about the gay times we had in the old days, when spam was something that went into fritters and you kept your mouse in a cage. The belief that all change is for the worse is invariably accompanied by the conviction that standards of literacy are falling. Such fears date from at least the 18th century.”

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Huffington Post identified 9 words or phrases in everyday use that have racist or prejudiced origins (or murky historical pasts). Who knew that “uppity” once had more repugnant connotations?

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An appalled Daniel E. Jones wrote a letter to the editor of Baton Rouge’s The Advocate, complaining that the paper’s bad grammar (on the first two pages of its Metro section) seems to reflect a lack of education. Joan E. McDonald of Lethbridge up in Canada directed a similar complaint at her local paper, the Lethbridge Herald. But here’s a juicy one: the Washington Post must have hung its head in shame when it received this letter from one of its readers, complaining about an especially egregious ungrammatical utterance — by a penguin no less — in one of the paper’s recent editions. “’It’s me and my wife’s 20th anniversary.’ Listen, kids may be reading this stuff,” warned Jack Fretwell from Reston.

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It’s OK to retweet, but not to copy and paste on Twitter. CNBC Africa has been accused of Twitter plagiarism by its competitor, Business Day Television (BDTV), after it admittedly lifted messages posted by BDTV during South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s midterm budget speech. “As far as I know, publishing someone’s content as your own is plagiarism. Or does the Twittersphere have a different set of rules?,” BDTV boss Vernon Matzopolous wrote, according to TechCentral.

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When is it OK to use incorrect punctuation? When you’re listing something on eBay, explained Angus Kidman on LifeHacker. “When you’re listing items for sale on eBay and the product name includes punctuation, you should not include it in the headline. The reason? Most people find stuff to buy by searching rather than browsing, and most people are too bloody stupid to use correct punctuation. They will type the punctuation-free version. If you want to top those search results, you have to use the incorrect rendering.” Perhaps this is wise advice for anyone posting a searchable internet listing?

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Oct 18)

That Gerund Is Funky … Language in the news …

As The Guardian pointed out, when British journalists add synonyms to add clarity to reports from across the Atlantic, they should make sure they’re choosing the correct words …

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As reported by Yahoo! Canada’s OMG blog, singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens joined the queue of Miley Cyrus critics, taking issue not with her twerking but with the grammar in one of her songs, “#GETITRIGHT”. As Stevens pointed out: “One particular line causes concern: ‘I been laying in this bed all night long,’ Miley, technically speaking, you’ve been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there’s an object, i.e. ‘I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long.'”

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An exhibition named after a famous shoe named in turn after a punctuation mark has recently opened in Paris: “Virgule etc. … In the Footsteps of Roger Vivier” has the “Comma” shoe (otherwise known as the “Virgule”) as its top billing. Style.com reports.

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The English language, according to linguist Dennis Preston, “makes up a great big gob of who you are.” People tend to use voices and accents to make determinations — often inaccurate — about age, gender, social status and race. The Holland Sentinel reported on his speech about the other “-ism” that we don’t often think about: language …

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It’s National Punctuation Day!

We all take punctuation a little bit for granted. Or maybe not all there are some who never use it at all texting especially can get confusing are you confused well we all are when those dots and commas get forgotten have you taken a virtual breath yet

gasp …

So today’s the day to celebrate National Punctuation Day! (with an exclamation mark). Here’s a look at some of the news stories of the last few weeks in which the art of punctuation and its star characters have been walking the red carpet. It’s never far away from the news, even if it often manages to escape our lazy thumbs and fingers. Long live these often unsung heros of our complicated but beautifully expressive language.

And below the news items are a few previous Glossophilia posts about punctuation, and information about the National Punctuation Day contest: don’t forget to enter, and please punctuate your entries correctly.

Punctuation in the news:

Vanity Fair was among the many who noted incredulously that “Even the Yahoo! Exclamation Mark Can’t Believe It Made the Cut for the New Logo.”

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David Haglund asked on Slate‘s cultural blog whether any bands “Give a @#$% About the Oxford Comma”, going on to explain that “in [their] survey of 15 pop groups—from Blood, Sweat & Tears to Phantom, Rocker & Slick and beyond…—we did not find a single official usage of the Oxford comma in a musical act’s name.”

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In The Week, James Harbeck wrote “You’re using that dash wrong”, enlightening us all with his “comprehensive guide to our language’s horizontal lines — from the humble hyphen to the three-em dash.”

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“Punctuation can tell you a lot about the emotional state of the person who you are speaking with” — at least, that is, in texting, claims Massachusetts’ Daily Collegian. In her piece on “Decoding text-iquette”, Malea Ritz goes on to give several examples. “An exclamation point shows enthusiasm, although multiple exclamation points can demonstrate overeagerness or extreme excitement. One question mark turns a phrase into an inquiry, but several can be impatiently inquisitive.”

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The new ABC superhero series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is ruffling some feathers among TV journalists, who are concerned that they will be made to type out each p.e.r.i.o.d in the last word of the show’s title every time they write about it. Time TV critic James Poniewozik is one of those unfortunates, tweeting: “Lost my battle with copydesk to keep periods out of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD in print. But they can’t make me use them on Twitter! #rebel“. But The Atlantic says it won’t be punctuating the series.

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The Lancaster Evening Post reported that Preston College has spent tens of thousands of pounds to improve its image — by adding an apostrophe to its name …

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Curbed reported on a new condo development with a “curiously punctuated name” that has sprung up on the market in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. “Kane 1.1.3” consisting of 2- and 3-bedroom homes, is situated at 111-113 Kane St. But is it curiously punctuated, or curiously spelled? Discuss …

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The New Yorker recently reviewed a new book about the history of punctuation: Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston. “reveals the stories behind esoteric punctuation marks, from the pilcrow (¶) to the manicule (☞) to the octothorpe, a.k.a. the hashtag.”

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Vanity Fair imagines, in its slightly surreal way, an episode during the filming of the music video for Britney Spears’s upcoming single “Work Bitch”. (Hint: it involves punctuation …)

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Some previous Glossophilia posts on the subject of punctuation

Celebrating the most misbehaved punctuation mark on National Apostrophe Day

Oxford & Cambridge: a new battleground for an old rivalry?

A subway mystery

One space or two with your full stop?

A fortune known as Bunny

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The National Punctuation Day contest:

The annual National Punctuation Day contest — this year marking the holiday’s 10th celebration — has been announced in the fall 2013 issue of The Exclamation Point!, the e-zine for aficionados of National Punctuation Day and Punctuation Playtime.

The newsletter has been posted here (click on the Fall 2013 front page):

http://www.punctuationplaytime.com/exclamationpoint/index.html

In addition to the contest, this issue of The Exclamation Point! features:

* Articles from The Wichita Eagle, Sauk Valley (IL) Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, and The Canton Repository

* Punctuation Man’s book recommendation

* Great punctuation gifts.

Contest rules have also been posted on the National Punctuation Day® Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NationalPunctuationDay?ref=hl

NOTE: Send your essays to Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com by October 31. Please use proper punctuation. Contest winners will be announced in December.

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Celebrating the most misbehaved punctuation mark on International Apostrophe Day

Today is International Apostrophe Day!

As Sam Tanner tweeted earlier this morning: “An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it’s shit.”

Here’s a round-up of apostrophe news and celebrations on its auspicious day. (This particular awareness day was conceived last year by The Guardian‘s production editor, David Marsh.) Continue reading →

BBC English: a flawed quiz – the questionable question

I wrote in yesterday’s post about the BBC’s English quiz, which wasn’t up to scratch in my book. My score was docked because of my answer to question number 3, concerning a certain androgynous sibling called Hilary, which went as follows:

“Read this sentence carefully. “I’d like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn’t, and to my only other sibling, Hilary.” Which of the following is correct?

1) Hilary is male

2) Hilary is female

3) It’s impossible to tell from the context”

Well, it’s not just impossible to tell from the context, but the sentence itself doesn’t make sense. Given the way it’s punctuated, it states pretty clearly that the speaker has more than one sister (“my sister Clara” means that there is another sister; “my sister, Clara” would have identified Clara as the only sister) and more than one brother (“Benedict, my brother who doesn’t” identifies Benedict as the only one of two or more brothers who doesn’t live in Madrid). So the speaker is kidding himself if he thinks he has only one other sibling: it just doesn’t follow logically. Either that, or he doesn’t understand how to punctuate.

And it seems that I’m not the only one who found fault with the quiz, which was doling out 9/10s by the dozen to undeserving souls. And it wasn’t just question 3 that raised eyebrows and tempers. The internet lit up with confusion and outrage; linguist Peter Harvey had a field-day with the quiz on his blog; and there was a lot of healthy discussion among Facebook fist-shakers who felt similarly wronged.

The moral of the story seems to be this: check your own proficiency before testing others’ …

BBC English: a flawed quiz?

The BBC’s News Magazine posted a grammar quiz today – supposedly to test how much we know “about apostrophes, semi-colons and dangling participles”. At least one of the questions seems to contain a fatal flaw, as far as I can tell. (And I don’t think I’m just trying to find an excuse for scoring only 9 out of 10 on the quiz.) See if you can guess which one I’m talking about, and why.

Answer and explanation here at Glossophilia tomorrow.

National awareness days & weeks: from speech to Scrabble

Happy National Scrabble Day! (It was on this day in 1899 that Alfred Mosher Butts, the game’s inventor, was born.) It’s a day for all glossophiles to celebrate, literally with fun and games. And this month is also one for literary lovers: April is National Poetry Month here in the United States (and in Canada). Started by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, the annual April initiative celebrates poetry and its vital place in American culture, with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets banding together to organize readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other poetic events.

But national awareness days, weeks and months devoted to literary and literacy causes haven’t always been as cheery and celebratory in nature.

Nearly a century ago, in 1918, the Chicago Woman’s Club initiated “Better American Speech Week”, taking its revolutionary mission to “speak the language of your flag” and “watch your speech” into schools across the nation. The movement required the schoolchildren to take a “Pledge for Children”, promising “not [to] dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words” and “to make my country’s language beautiful for the many boys and girls of foreign nations who come here to live” (as well as a distinctly racist promise that I don’t think is appropriate to publish here).

Previewing the club’s activities in 1921, the Literary Digest wrote:

“‘Invest in good speech — it pays daily dividends’ is typical of the slogans that will be used during Better Speech Week of November 6 to arouse the nation to the evils of slovenly speech — careless enunciation, ungrammatical constructions, mispronunciations, the use of slang and poor choice of words. … Mr. H. Addington Bruce, the well-known author, observes that ‘there are men to-day in inferior positions who long ago would have commanded good salaries if they had only taken the trouble to overcome remediable speech defects. Strange how careful people are about dress— how sure that dignity and good taste in dress help to make one’s success in getting on in the world—and at the same time how careless these same people are about speech, which is the dress of the mind.’ ”
In an article published in Primary Education in November 1919, a spokesperson for the club stated: “We are looking forward to a time when all of us shall feel the same pride in fine speech that we have in fine clothes. Very few of us object to an improvement in our wearing apparel; we don’t object to having a finer touring car than our neighbor. Why are we so concerned lest our speech should be a little better than his? Why do we like to pretend that we are so poor in speech? Why are we satisfied with the inferior brand?”

Thankfully we’ve come a long way since the Speech Week of the strident Chicago lady grammarians — although many will and do argue that today’s grammar, spelling or punctuation days are anachronistic, prescriptive, and unforgiving, powered by people and movements that are out of touch with the evolving nature of our dynamic language. Fortunately, awareness days and months tend to be more celebratory than dogmatic these days, and provide useful opportunities for schools and communities to devote time and focus to the fun and art and importance of literacy rather than to its policing.

Here’s a list of the national and international days, weeks and months (that I’m aware of) devoted to literacy and language, poetry and punctuation. Please do let me know of any others that you know of.

January 23: National Handwriting Day (US)

Jan 26 – Feb 2: National Storytelling Week (UK)

Jan 27: Family Literacy Day (Canada)

Feb 21: International Mother Language Day (world)

March 4: National Grammar Day (US)

March 5: World Spelling Day (world)

March 7: World Book Day (world)

April: National Poetry Month (US & Canada)

April 13: National Scrabble Day (US)

April 18: Poem in Your Pocket Day (US)

April 23: World Book Night (world)

May: National Share-a-story Month (UK)