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Trials of an English major

November 15, 2025
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I was an English major and I’m married to an English major and it’s hard being an English major and only getting harder. An English major feels genuine pain hearing the language abused, mal-used, corrupted and perverted. 

I’m not talking here about outdated grammar rules and a fussy sort of prisspot pedantry. As a matter for fact, one of the most persistent pains a true English major suffers is such misplaced censure, especially when interrupting a casual speaker to let them know that “them” is plural and “speaker” is singular. In my book, this is merely rude. A caboose preposition is nothing to lose sleep over. 

No, what I’m writing about here is are things that are genuinely ugly or purposely unclear, or overly trendy, to the point of losing all meaning. You know — politics. That and corporate language, or management speech — which I call “Manglish” — is a great corrupter of speech. 

“We have assessed the unprecedented market shifts and have decided to pivot this company’s new normal to a deep-dive into a robust holistic approach to our core competency, circling back to a recalibrated synergy amid human capital in solidarity with unprecedented times.”

Committees try to make language sound profound and wind up writing piffle. I’m sure it was a committee that agreed in Iredell County, N.C., to make the county slogan, “Crossroads for the future.” I do not think that word means what you think it means. 

I wrote for a daily newspaper and language was my bread and butter, but the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the worse your words become. I remember the day they posted a new “mission statement” on every other column in the office, filled with buzz-word verbiage that didn’t actually mean anything. I looked at my colleague and said, “If I wrote like that, I’d be out of a job.”

But it isn’t just Manglish. Ordinary people are becoming quite lax about words and meanings. Too often, if it sounds vaguely right, it must be so. And you get “For all intensive purposes,” “It’s a doggy-dog world,” being on “tender hooks,” or “no need to get your dandruff up.”

“I’ve seen ‘viscous attack’ too many times recently,” my wife says. “It gives me an interior pain like a gall bladder attack.” 

And the online world is full of shortcuts, some of which are quite clever, but most of which are just barbarous. An essay about digital usage is a whole nother thing. Not room here to dive in. 

But, there is a world of alternative usage that is not standard English, that any real English major will welcome as adding richness to the mother tongue. Regionalisms, for instance. Appalachian dialect: “I’m fixin’ to go to the store;”— actually, that is “stoe,” rhymes with “toe” —  “I belong to have a duck;” “I have drank my share of Co-Cola.”

And Southern English has served to solve the historical problem of having lost the distinction between the singular “thee,” and the plural “you,” with the plural “you all,” or “y’all.” Although, more and more “y’all” is now being used also for the singular, and so is becoming replaced with “all y’all.” Keep up, folks. 

Then, there’s African-American English, which has enriched the American tongue immensely, as has Yiddish: “Shtick,” “chutzpah,” “klutz,” “schmooze,” “tchotchke.”

Regionalisms and borrowings are like idioms. Sometimes they don’t really make sense, but they fall comfortably on the tongue. “Who’s there?” “It’s me.” Grammatically, it would be proper to say “It is I,” but no one not a pedant would ever say such a thing. The ear is a better arbiter than a rulebook. 

George Orwell ended his list of rules for writing with the most important: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

English is a happily promiscuous tongue and so much of the richness of the language comes from borrowings. But there are still other problems: bad usage, misuse of homonyms, loss of distinctions. The English major’s ears sting with each onslaught. 

What causes our ears to burn falls into three broad categories. Things that are just wrong; things that are changing; and things that offend taste. Each is likely to set off an alarm ping in our sensitive English major brains. 

Every time I go to the grocery store I am hit with “10 items or less.” Few people even notice, but the English major notices; we don’t like it. “Comprised of” is a barbarism. “Comprises” includes all of a certain class, not some items in a list of choices. I feel slapped on the cheek every time I come across it mal-used. 

And homonyms: a king’s “rein,” or a book “sited” by an article, or a school “principle” being fired. It happens all the time. It is endemic online. “Their,” “they’re,” “there” — do you know the difference? “You’re,” “your?” Most young’uns IM-ing on their iPhones don’t seem to care. 

And fine distinctions of usage: I am always bothered when I see a murderer get “hung” in an old Western, when we know he was “hanged.” 

Again, most Americans hardly even notice such things. They all get by just fine not caring about the distinction between “e.g.” and “i.e.” In fact, they can get all sniffy about it. 

I know a former medical transcriptionist who typed up a doctor’s notes each day, and would correct his grammar and vocabulary. She corrected the man’s “We will keep you appraised of the outcome,” with “apprised,” and each time, he would “correct” that back to “appraised.” Eventually, she gave up on that one. 

English majors know the difference between “imply” and “infer,” and it causes a hiccup when they are mixed up. “Disinterested” mean having no stake in the outcome; “uninterested” means you cannot be arsed. They are not interchangeable. 

We EMs cringe when we hear “enormity” being used to mean “big,” when it actually means a “great evil.” And “unique” should remain unique, unqualifiable. Of course, “literally” is used figuratively literally all the time.  Something is not “ironic” simply because it is coincidental. 

I hear the phrase “begging the question” almost every day, and always misused. It refers to circular reasoning, not to “raising the question.” I hold my ears and yell “Nya-nya-nya” until it is over. 

Some things, which used to be wrong, are slowly being folded into the language quietly, and our EM ears may still jump at hearing them. “Can” and “may” used to mean distinct things, but that difference was lost at least 100 years ago. We can give that one up. And “hopefully” used to be a pariah word, but we have to admit, it serves a grammatical function and we have to let it in, however grudgingly. 

My wife is particularly sensitive to the non-word, “alot.” She absolutely hates it. I understand, although I recognize a need for it. “A lot” is a noun, and sometimes we use it as an adjective: “I like chocolate a lot.” Perhaps “alot” will eventually become an adjective. Not for Anne. 

People are different and have differing talents. We seem to be born with them. Some people grasp mathematics in a way a humanities student will never be able to match. Some have artistic or musical talent. We can all learn to play the piano, but only certain people can squeeze actual music out of the notes. 

And each of us can learn our native tongue, but some of us were born with a part of our brains attuned to linguistic subtlety. We soaked up vocabulary in grade school; we won spelling bees; we wrote better essays; we cringe at the coarseness of political speech. Language for the born English major is a scintillating art, with nuance and emotion, shadings and flavors. We savor it: It is not merely functional. 

(I loved my vocabulary lessons in grade school, and when we were asked to write sentences using that week’s new words, I tried to use them all in a single sentence. People who show off like that often become writers.)

Just as my piano playing, even when I learned whole movements of Beethoven sonatas, was always the equivalent of speaking English as a second language, my best friend, Sandro, could sit at a piano and every key was fluent, natural, and expressive. It was a joy to hear him play; a trial for me just to hit the right notes. 

I am saying that those of us who gravitate to speech, writing, and language in general, have something akin to that sort of talent. It is inherent, and it can be a curse. Bad language has the same effect on our ear as a wrong note on a piano. 

We can feel the clunkiness of poorly expressed thoughts, even if they are grammatical. Graceful language is better. And so, we can rankle at awkward expressions.

I have a particular issue, which I share with most aging journalists, which is that I had AP style drummed into me — that is, the dicta of the Associated Press Stylebook, that coil-bound dictator of spelling, grammar and usage. One understands that AP style was never meant to be an ultimate arbiter of language, but rather a means of maintaining consistency of style in a newspaper, so that, for instance, on Page 1 we didn’t have a “gray” car and on Page 3 one that was “grey.” 

And so, the rules I lived by meant that there was no such thing as 12 p.m. Is that noon or is that midnight? Noon was neither a.m. nor p.m. Same for midnight. They had their own descriptors. “Street” might be abbreviated in an address, but never “road.” Why? I never knew, but in my first week on the copy desk I had it beaten into me when I goofed. 

“Back yard” was two words, but one word as an adjective, “backyard patio.” Always. “Air bag,” two words; “moviegoer, one word. “Last” and “past” mean different things, so, not “last week,” unless Armageddon is nigh, but “this past week.” Picky, picky. 

I had to learn all the entries in the stylebook. The 55th edition of the AP Stylebook is 618 pages. And this current one differs from the one I had back in 1988; some things have changed. Back then, the hot pepper was a “chilli pepper,” and the Southwestern stew was “chili.” I lived and worked in Phoenix, Ariz., and we all understood this would get us laughed off the street, and so exceptions were made: yes, it’s a chile. 

Here I am, nearly 40 years later, and retired for the past 12 years, and I still tend to follow AP style in this blog, with some few exceptions I choose out of rebellion. But I still italicize formal titles of books, music and art, while not italicizing chapter names or symphony numbers, per AP style. I still spell out “r-o-a-d.” It’s a hard habit to break. 

The online world seems to care little for the niceties of English. We are even tending back to hieroglyphs, where emojis or acronyms take the place of words and phrases. LMAO, and as a card-carrying alte kaker, I often have to Google these alphabet agglutinations just to know what my granddaughters are e-mailing me. Their seam to be new 1s each wk. 

And don’t get me started on punctuation.

Rise of the hoojas

August 31, 2024
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When faced with some difficult problem of geometry or algebra, I usually just throw up my hands and say, “Don’t look at me, I was an English major.” I’ve noticed, however, that Anne will always phrase that a little differently. She say would shrug and say, “I’m an English major.” 

The difference in tense speaks to how we each view ourselves and our place in the world. When it comes to things such as grammar or usage, I tend to be more flexible while Anne has more in common with a British sergeant-major. For her, there is right and there is wrong. 

Of course, there are those more lax than I am and some more unbending than Anne. It is a spectrum. I have many peeves about poor usage, and especially misused words. I admit the definitions of such words as “enormity” and “disinterested” are changing and in the future they will mean whatever their speakers intend them to mean. But for now, it gives me hives when I hear a newscaster say, “There are less people having babies now.” Drives me nuts. But for Anne, this is not so much fighting a rear-guard action against change, as building a fortress against incoherence. “Things mean what they mean; illiteracy is no excuse.” 

To gauge where you fall in the spectrum, consider a simple sentence: “Who did you give the book to?” There are two things “wrong” with this sentence, but how you intend to fix it, or fix it at all, may help you decide. 

If you are one of those people who still believe that a sentence should not end with a preposition, then you will change it to, “To who did you give the book?” But that sounds all wrong. No one would actually say that. 

And that’s because of the other problem — “who” should be “whom.” And so it becomes “To whom did you give the book?” But that can sound pedantic. So, you choose one mistake over the other and wind up with, “Whom did you give the book to?” 

So, you pick your poison. Of course, in reality, you wouldn’t say any of these. What you would actually say is “Hooja give the book to?” And language is filled with hoojas. 

We don’t speak word-by-word, but in phrases, and those phrases become units all their own. “Jeet jet?” Did you eat yet? “I’m gonna sell the old Ford.” “I dunno what is correct.” Sometimes these vocal elisions make it back into print. How many times have you seen “I would of gone” instead of “I would have gone?” But, of course, this isn’t so much an illiteracy but a back-transference from spoken language. You say, “I would’ve gone.” If that’s what you hear, you might very well think you’ve heard “would of” and then use it in your Tweet. 

These back-transferences now often make it into print, mostly in dialog in fiction, to make the speech sound more natural. Ultimately, these have a chance to become standard English, and in the same way that “a nuncle” became “an uncle” by printing what the ear heard. At some point in the future, it will be in the Chicago Manual of Style to write, “We’re gonna study alot of stuff we dunno much about.” 

That brings up “a lot,” which is one of the main bugbears for Anne. She yells at the page when she comes across “alot.” The word bothers me, too, but not as much as it rankles her. And I have to admit that at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be common in dictionaries. 

That’s how languages go. What is an ugly and ignorant solecism in one age becomes propriety in the next. Garish new money becomes respectable old money when the billionaire entrepreneur is knighted. 

So, language changes, but almost never by fiat. Suggestions can be made. They may catch on, they may not. 

One of the most successful came with Noah Webster’s desire to create a “more American” spelling. His 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language sought to simplify spelling. Eventually, his changes caught on and we now spell “color” without a superfluous “u,” and “theater” with the “e” in its functional place. 

Among British language reformers were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. A Simplified Spelling Society was created in 1908 (currently, the English Spelling Society). America had its own Simplified Spelling Board, begun two years earlier, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie. President Theodore Roosevelt issued an order for all federal documents to adopt the suggested new spellings. That lasted short while. The old spellings were soon re-instated. The Louisville Courier-Journal published an article ridiculing him, which stated: “Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him to notis.”

But if these things can’t be imposed from above, they can take hold from below. Consider the effect of Twitter and the Internet on language: “R U There?” Texting language now occasionally shows up in print. Expect more of it.

Language changes because there is a need, or because the newer versions seem simpler, or get adopted because technology or culture changes. 

There are those who want to invent new pronouns to accommodate the rising awareness of gender fluidity. Some new words have been floated, such as “xe,” “xyr,” “em,” or “fae.” None has caught on. Given time, one of these may win out and may become normal. I don’t count on it. But the use of a so-called “singular they,” has long infiltrated common usage: “Everyone should take their hat off.” Solves an awkward problem (“his or her” is just cumbersome) and has actually been hiding in the language for centuries, no matter what edicts are handed down from hide-bound grammarians. 

The last time a new gender-bound word has successfully entered the language was “Ms.” It is now used by almost everyone, and by many who don’t even know it was lobbied for in the 1970s when Ms. magazine first began publication. (And first proposed as far back as 1901). It is just a normal part of our vocabulary now, although those of us who remember when it was new can recall the angry backlash that came from the stodgier sections of our society. 

Another group wants to get rid of apostrophes in contractions. Dont need them, they say. Context makes the meaning clear. “What Id like to study is the human id.” “Dont eat the yellow snow.” There are very few places where the meaning isnt clear, and even with the apostrophes, there is plenty of confusion in the language. 

Linguist Geoff Lindsey points out that in spoken language, we don’t really ever hear the “t” in such words as “can’t.” That when we speak them, the difference between “can” and “can’t” isn’t in the “t” but in the vowel. If you say, “I can’t do it,” you actually say, “I can’ do it.” But you pronounce the “a” as the “a” in “bad,” while when you say “I can do it,” the vowel goes like “ken” — “I ken do it.” 

So perhaps we don’t need the “t” — or perhaps we can just take out the apostrophe and say “cant.” And then write “ken” when we mean the opposite. 

I’m not sure eliminating such apostrophes would make up for the number of supererogatory apostrophes added to create plurals. This is an ugliness that leaves me feeling like King Canute before the sea. It makes me hiccup every time I see it, but I am powerless to stop the rising tide. Perhaps in 40 or 50 years, even the Chicago Manual of Style will accept it as standard. 

There are many normal progressions in the history of languages, expected simplifications and sometimes added complexities. Words that used to be two words became hyphenated expressions and then turned into compound words. Cellphone used to be cell phone; webpage was once web page, then, briefly web-page; hotdog was hot dog. English moves in the direction of eliding these words back down to one. 

It has been pointed out that the perfect tense in English is fading. Where we once said “Have you finished yet” we often say instead, “Did you finish yet.” 

Irregular verbs are being replaced by regularized versions. I remember when I was a journalist and required to use Associated Press style, we had to used “burned” instead of “burnt,” or “dived” instead of “dove.” I liked the older words with more taste in the mouth. But the direction of our language is toward regularization, at least in words less seldom used. We now sneaked instead of snuck; pleaded instead of pled; dreamed instead of dreamt. Maybe at some point “I did it,” will become “I dood it.” 

Also, as we head into the soft middle years of the new century, borrowings from Spanish will become more common. They’ve always been there, from rodeo to hoosegow, but newer ones will proliferate. English has always been promiscuous and up to 80 percent of our vocabulary has been acquired from other languages (depending on your starting point — where was English first English and not related at all to what we speak now?).

And speech is the important issue. English has had a relatively quiescent period for the past several hundred years, as the language has been held steady by print. But as electronic media take over, spoken language is becoming more central, whether spoken on television or radio, or mimicked in texting and tweeting. Before print, English spelling varied widely. It looks like that Wild West of orthography could be our future.

And if so, then the hoojas will take over the tongue. And the didjas, the woodjas, the havyas and canyas.

By the book

May 8, 2023
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The Arizona Republic newsroom, ca. 1988 

For 25 years, working at the newspaper, I had a holy scripture. It was  my bible. And it was just as strict and just as puzzling as Leviticus or Deuteronomy. It told me how to spell certain words, how to punctuate, how to think. It told me, for instance, that “baby sitter” is two words, but that “baby-sitting” requires a hyphen. It told me that third-graders were not students, but instead, they were “pupils.” And that in street addresses, it was required to abbreviate “Street” as “St.” but ordered me never to shorten “Road” to “Rd.” Never. 

It was the Associated Press Stylebook, and the version that first guided my work was the 1988 edition. In it were many notable proscriptions and admonitions. I was not to spell “gray” as “grey.” Unless it was in “greyhound.” That the past tense of “dive” should be “dived” and not “dove.” That donuts didn’t exist; they were “doughnuts.” 

There could be no 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. They were “midnight” and “noon,” although which was which was entirely the problem with the “a.m.-p.m.” formulations. (Is 12 a.m. noon or midnight?) Noon is technically neither morning nor afternoon, but the non-existent mini-instant between the two. 

 “Last Tuesday” should be the “past Tuesday,” unless, of course, time ended and it really was the last one. 

These and many other formulations became second-nature to anyone working in journalism. Some of these may have changed since 1988 — usage changes and the AP takes that into account, even if ever so slowly: They are always playing catch-up. (“Ketchup,” by the way should never be “catchup” or “catsup.”)

Even a decade after retiring, I still have lodged in the noggin all these rules and prescriptions and when writing this blog, I tend naturally to notice whether I’ve put my period inside or outside the close-parenthesis, depending on whether the parenthetical remarks are inside a longer sentence, or in a separate sentence of its own. Anyone who has written for a newspaper will likely have the same grammatical Jiminy Cricket whispering in his ear to get it right. 

Yet, I grew up spelling “grey” with an “e.” And some of the rules in the stylebook seemed so arbitrary. With my Norwegian background and its Germanic language, I always favored butting words into each other rather than separating them as two words, or with a hyphen. What could be wrong with “babysitter?” It seemed natural. 

But I was disabused by my copy desk chief, who explained to me — the way a patient adult has to explain to a toddler having a tantrum — that the point of AP style was never to enforce a “correct” English style, but merely to make sure that we didn’t see on the same page one column with a “grey” and another with a “gray.” “It’s so we don’t look like idiots,” he said. It was not to choose the “right” style, but to choose a consistent one. And AP style was what newspapers everywhere agreed would be the version to provide that. 

Still, there were times that the Stylebook asked us to do patently dumb things that would, indeed, make us look like idiots. In Arizona, where I was working, Mexican food was really good — and really Mexican (not just Taco Bell) — remember this was 1988 before Mexican supplanted Italian or Chinese as the foreign cuisine of choice — and we knew the differences among the many types of chile peppers — jalapeño, chipotle, anchos, etc. — but the Associated Press was telling us we should spell the word as “chili.” We would have looked like fools to our readers, who knew better. So, our management slyly gave us permission to overrule the stylebook and spell the word as it should be. “Chile.” The AP Stylebook eventually caught up with us, and now allows “chile” to describe the capsicum peppers. 

Most recently, AP relented on “pupil” and “student,” so first-graders are permitted to be students. It is a slow process. 

Much of the stylebook does concern itself with correct grammar and proper spelling, just to make sure we writers didn’t accidentally write “discrete” when we meant “discreet,” or forget how many double letters you have in “accommodate.” But most of the important issues concern just how our newspaper would deal with the fuzziness of certain locutions. Is a minister “Rev. So-and-So” or “the Rev. So-and-So?” Can we use “CIA” in a story without having to first explain it as the Central Intelligence Agency? 

I thought that non-journalist readers might enjoy a little peek into the old stylebook for a few of my favorite choice entries, starting with the letter “A.” These are all directly from the 1988 edition of the AP Stylebook. 

A

A.D. Acceptable in all references for anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. Because the full phrase would read in the year of the Lord 96, the abbreviation A.D. goes before the figure for the year: A.D. 96. Do not write: The fourth century A.D. The fourth century is sufficient. If A.D. is not specified with a year, the year is presumed to be A.D. 

From addresses Spell out and capitalize First through Ninth when used as street names; use figures with two letters for 10th and above 7 Fifth Ave., 100 21st St., 600 K St. N.W. Do not abbreviate if the number is omitted: East 42nd Street, K Street Northwest.

all right (adv.) Never alright. Hyphenate only if used colloquially as a compound modifier: He is an all-right guy. 

ampersand (&) Use the ampersand when it is part of a company’s formal name: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. The ampersand should not otherwise be used in place of and. 

ax Not axe. The verb forms: ax, axed, axing. 

B

baloney Foolish or exaggerated talk. The sausage or luncheon meat is bologna.

barbecue Not barbeque or Bar-B-Q.

brussels sprouts

C

collide, collision Two objects must be in motion before they can collide. An automobile cannot collide with a utility pole, for example. 

Comprise Comprise means to contain, to include all or embrace. It is best used only in the active voice, followed by a direct object: The United States comprises 50 states. The jury comprises five men and seven women. Never use comprised of. 

controversial An overused word; avoid it. 

crawfish Not crayfish. An exception to the Webster’s New World based on the dominant spelling in Louisiana, where it is a popular delicacy. 

cupful, cupfuls Not cupsful. 

D

decades Use Arabic figures to indicate decades of history. Use an apostrophe to indicate numerals that are left out; show plural by adding the letter s: the 1890s, the ’90s, the Gay ’90s, the 1920s, the mid-1930s. 

demolish, destroy Both mean to do away with something completely. Something cannot be partially demolished or destroyed. It is redundant to say totally demolished or totally destroyed. 

different Takes the preposition from, not than. 

doughnut Not donut.

E

engine, motor An engine develops its own power, usually through internal combustion or the pressure of air, steam or water passing over vanes attached to a wheel: an airplane engine, an automobile engine, a jet engine, a missile engine, a steam engine, a turbine engine. A motor receives power from an outside source: an electric motor, a hydraulic motor. 

en route Always two words. 

ensure, insure Use ensure to mean guarantee: Steps were taken to ensure accuracy. Use insure for references to insurance: The policy insures his life. 

even-steven Not even-stephen.

F

Fannie Mae See Federal National Mortgage Association.

Fannie May A trademark for a brand of candy. 

farther, further Farther refers to physical distance: He walked farther into the woods. Further refers to an extension of time or degree: She will look further into the mystery. 

fulsome It means disgustingly excessive. Do not use to mean lavish, profuse. 

[“F” is also home to a host of confused pairs and the stylebook makes sure we understand the usage difference between “fewer” and “less;” “figuratively” and “literally;” and “flaunt” and “flout;” and “flounder” and “founder;” and “forgo” and “forego.” It is a minefield of potential oopses.]

 

G

gamut, gantlet, gauntlet A gamut is a scale or notes of any complete range or extent. A gantlet is a flogging ordeal, literally or figuratively. A gauntlet is a glove. To throw down the gauntlet means to issue a challenge. To take up the gauntlet means to accept a challenge. 

ghetto, ghettos Do not use indiscriminately as a synonym for the sections of cities inhabited by minorities or the poor. Ghetto has a connotation that government decree has forced people to live in a certain area. In most cases, section, district, slum, area or quarter is the more accurate word. Sometimes a place name alone has connotations that make it best: Harlem, Watts.

girl Applicable until 18th birthday is reached. Use woman or young woman afterward. 

glamour One of the few our endings still used in American writing. But the adjective is glamorous.

go-go [This was the 1988 edition, after all.]

grisly, grizzly Grisly is horrifying, repugnant. Grizzly means grayish or is a short for for grizzly bear. 

gypsy, gypsies Capitalize references to the wandering Caucasoid people found throughout the world. Lowercase when used generically to mean one who is constantly on the move: I plan to become a gypsy. She hailed a gypsy cab.

H

half-mast, half-staff On ships and at naval stations ashore, flags are flown at half-mast. Elsewhere ashore, flags are flown at half-staff. 

hang, hanged, hung One hangs a picture, a criminal or oneself. For the past tense or the passive, use hanged when referring to executions or suicides, hung for other actions.

hangar, hanger A hangar is a building. A hanger is used for clothes. 

hurricane Capitalize hurricane when it is part of the name that weather forecasters assign to a storm: Hurricane Hazel. But use it and its — not she, her or hers — in pronoun references. And do not use the presence of a woman’s name as an excuse to attribute sexist images of women’s behavior to a storm, for example such sentences as: The fickle Hazel teased the Louisiana coast. 

I

imply, infer Writers or speakers imply in the words they use. A listener or reader infers something from the words. 

injuries They are suffered or sustained, not received. 

innocent Use innocent, rather than not guilty, in describing a defendant’s plea or a jury’s verdict, to guard against the word not being dropped inadvertently. 

J

jargon The special vocabulary and idioms of a particular class or occupational group. In general, avoid jargon. When it is appropriate in a special context, include an explanation of any words likely to be unfamiliar to most readers. See dialect. 

junior, senior Abbreviate as Jr. and Sr. only with full names of persons or animals. Do not precede by a comma: Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. The notation II or 2nd may be used if it is the individual’s preference. Note, however, that II and 2nd are not necessarily the equivalent of junior — they often are used by a grandson or nephew. If necessary to distinguish between father and son in second reference, use the elder Smith or the younger Smith. 

K

ketchup Not catchup or catsup. 

K mart No hyphen, lowercase m. Headquarters is in Troy, Mich.

L

lady Do not use as a synonym for woman. Lady may be used when it is a courtesy title or when a specific reference to fine manners is appropriate without patronizing overtones. 

late Do not use it to describe someone’s actions while alive. Wrong: Only the late senator opposed this bill. (He was not dead at that time.)

lectern, podium, pulpit, rostrum A speaker stands behind a lectern, on a podium or rostrum, or in the pulpit. 

M

malarkey Not malarky. 

May Day, mayday May Day is May 1, often observed as a festive or political holiday. Mayday is the international distress signal, from the French m’aidez, meaning “help me.”

milquetoast Not milk toast when referring to a shrinking, apologetic person. Derived from Caspar Milquetoast, a character in a comic strip by H.T. Webster. 

minus sign Use a hyphen not a dash, but use the word minus if there is any danger of confusion. Use a word, not a minus sign to indicate temperatures below zero: minus 10 or 5 below zero. 

mishap A minor misfortune. People are not killed in mishaps.

N

Negro Use black or Negro, as appropriate in the context, for both men and women. Do not use Negress. 

No. Use as the abbreviation for number in conjunction with a figure to indicate position or rank. No. 1 man, No. 3 choice. Do not use in street addresses, with this exception: No. 10 Downing St., the residence of Britain’s prime minister. Do not use in the names of schools: Public School 19.

non-controversial All issues are controversial. A non-controversial issue is impossible. A controversial issue is redundant. 

O

From obscenities, profanities, vulgarities Do not use them in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them. … In reporting profanity that normally would use the words damn or god, lowercase god and use the following forms: damn, damn it, goddamn it. No not, however, change the offending words to euphemisms. Do not, for example change damn it to darn it. … If a full quote that contains profanity, obscenity or vulgarity cannot be dropped but there is no compelling reason for the offensive language, replace letters of an offensive word with a hyphen. The word damn, for example, would become d – – – or – – – –. 

OK, OK’s, OK’ing, OKs Do not use okay. 

opossum The only North American marsupial. No apostrophe is needed to indicate missing letters in a phrase such as playing possum.

P

palate, palette, pallet Palate is the roof of the mouth. A palette is an artist’s paint board. A pallet is a bed. 

pantsuit Not pants suit. 

poetic license It is valid for poetry, not news or feature stories.

pom-pom, pompon Pom-pom is sometimes used to describe a rapid-firing automatic weapon. Define the word if it must be used. A pompon is a large ball of crepe paper or fluffed cloth, often waved by cheerleaders or used atop a hat. It is also a flower that appears on some varieties of chrysanthemums. 

 

From Prison, jail Do not use the two words interchangeably. … Prison is a generic term that may be applied to the maximum security institutions often known as penitentiaries and to the medium security facilities often called correctional institutions or reformatories. All such facilities confine people serving sentences for felonies. A jail is a facility normally used to confine people serving sentences for misdemeanors, people awaiting trial or sentencing on either felony or misdemeanor charges, and people confined for civil matters such as failure to pay alimony and other types of contempt of court. 

punctuation Think of it as a courtesy to your readers, designed to help them understand a story. Inevitably, a mandate of this scope involves gray areas. For this reason, the punctuation entries in this book refer to guidelines rather than rules. Guidelines should not be treated casually, however. 

R

raised, reared Only humans may be reared. Any living thing, including humans may be raised. 

ranges The form: $12 million to $14 million. Not: $12 to $14 million. 

ravage, ravish To ravage is to wreak great destruction or devastation: Union troops ravaged Atlanta. To ravish is to abduct, rape or carry away with emotion: Soldiers ravished the women. Although both words connote an element of violence, they are not interchangeable. Buildings and towns cannot be ravished. 

reluctant, reticent Reluctant means unwilling to act: He is reluctant to enter the primary. Reticent means unwilling to speak: The candidate’s husband is reticent. 

restaurateur No n. Not restauranteur. 

S

Saint John The spelling for the city in New Brunswick. To distinguish it from St. John’s, Newfoundland. 

San‘a It’s NOT an apostrophe in the Yemen capital’s name. It’s a reverse apostrophe, or a single opening quotation mark. 

Satan But lowercase devil and satanic. 

sex changes Follow these guidelines in using proper names or personal pronouns when referring to an individual who has had a sex-change operation: If the reference is to an action before the operation, use the proper name and gender of the individual at that time. If the reference is to an action after the operation, use the new proper name and gender. For example: Dr. Richard Raskind was a first-rate amateur tennis player. He won several tournaments. Ten years later, when Dr. Renee Richards applied to play in tournaments, many women players objected on the ground that she was the former Richard Raskind, who had undergone a sex-change operation. Miss Richards said she was entitled to compete as a woman. 

Solid South Those Southern states traditionally regarded as supporters of the Democratic Party. 

SOS The distress signal. S.O.S (no final period) is a trademark for a brand of soap pad. 

St. John’s The city in the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Not to be confused with Saint John, New Brunswick. 

straight-laced, strait-laced Use straight-laced for someone strict or severe in behavior or moral views. Reserve strait-laced for the notion of confinement, as in a corset. 

straitjacket Not straight-jacket.

T

teen, teen-ager (n.) teen-age (adj.) Do not use teen-aged. 

that, which, who, whom (pronouns) Use who and whom in referring to people and to animals with a  name. John Jones is the man who helped me. See the who, whom entry. Use that and which in referring to inanimate objects and to animals without a name. 

Truman, Harry S. With a period after the initial. Truman once said there was no need for the period because the S did not stand for a name. Asked in the early 1960s about his preference, he replied, “It makes no difference to me.” AP style has called for the period since that time. 

tsar Use czar. 

U

UFO, UFOs Acceptable in all references for unidentified flying object(s). 

Uncle Tom A term of contempt applied to a black person, taken from the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It describes the practice of kowtowing to whites to curry favor. Do not apply it to an individual. It carries potentially libelous connotations of having sold one’s convictions for money, prestige or political influence.

unique It means one of a kind. Do not describe something as rather unique or most unique. 

United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum and Plastic Workers of America The shortened forms of United Rubber Workers and United Rubber Workers union are acceptable in all references. Capitalize Rubber Workers in references to the union or its members. Use rubber workers, lowercase, in generic references to workers in the rubber industry. Headquarters is in Akron, Ohio. 

United States Spell out when used as a noun. Use U.S. (no space) only as an adjective.

V

versus Abbreviate as vs. in all uses. 

Vietnam Not Viet Nam. 

volatile Something which evaporates rapidly. It may or may not be explosive. 

W

war horse, warhorse Two words for a horse used in battle. One word for a veteran of many battles: He is a political warhorse. 

whereabouts Takes a singular verb: His whereabouts is a mystery.

whiskey, whiskeys Use the spelling whisky only in conjunction with Scotch. 

X Y Z

X-ray (n., v. and adj.) Use for both the photographic process and the radiation particles themselves. 

yam Botanically, yams and sweet potatoes are not related, although several varieties of moist-fleshed sweet potatoes are popularly called yams in some parts of the United States. 

youth Applicable to boys and girls from age 13 until 18th birthday. Use man or woman for individuals 18 and older. 

ZIP codes Use all-caps ZIP for Zone Improvement Program, but always lowercase the word code. Run the five digits together without a comma, and do not pt a comma between the state name and the ZIP code: New York, N.Y. 10020.

Confessions of an ex-grammar cop

March 29, 2020
Uncategorized
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I began life as a copy editor, which means, I had to know my commas and em-dashes. My spelling had to be impeccable and I memorized the Associated Press Style Book, which taught me that the color was spelled g-r-a-y, not g-r-e-y. Except in “greyhound,” that is. 

It is a line of work I fell into quite naturally, because from the second grade on, I have had a talent for words. I diagrammed sentences on the blackboard that had the visual complexity of the physics formulae written on his whiteboard by Sheldon Cooper. I managed to use my 10 weekly vocabulary words, tasked with writing sentences for each, by writing one sentence using all ten. I did OK with math, but it was never anything that much interested me, but words were another thing. I ate them up like chocolate cake. 

The upshot is that I am a prime candidate for the position as “Grammar Cop,” bugging those around me for making mistakes in spelling, punctuation and usage. And, admittedly, in the past, I have been guilty. But as age softens me, I have largely given up correcting the mistaken world. And I have a different, more complex relationship with language, less strict and more forgiving. 

The cause for this growing laxness are multiple. Certainly age and exhaustion are part of it. But there is also the awareness that language is a living, growing, changing thing and that any attempt to capture it in amber is a futile endeavor. 

But although I have come to accept many changes in speech that I once cringed at — I can now take “their” in the singular (“Everyone should wash their hands”) and have long given up on “hopefully” — there are still a handful of tics that I cannot get over. I try, but when I hear them uttered by a news anchor or starlet on a talk show, I jump a little, as if a sharp electric shock were applied to my ear. 

The first is “I” used in the objective case. It gives me the shivers. “He gave the award to Joan and I.” It gets caught in my throat like a cat’s fur ball. 

The second is using “few” for “less.” I know that the usage has largely changed, but it still assaults my ear when I hear, “There will be less pumpkins this Halloween, due to the drought.” Ugh. 

A third is the qualified “unique,” as in, “His hairstyle is very unique.” It’s either unique or it isn’t. 

Then there are common mispronunciations. “Ek-setera” is just awful. Although, I did once know someone who always gave it its original Latin sounding: “Et Caetera” or “Et Kye-ter-a.” Yes, that was annoying, too. 

The last I’ll mention here is the locution, “centered around.” Gets my goat every time. Something may be “centered on” a focus point, or “situated around” something, but “centered around” is geometrically obtuse unless you’re discussing Nicholas of Cusa’s definition of the deity, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. 

Others have their own bugaboos. One friend cannot get past the confusion between “lay” and “lie.” She also jumps every time someone uses “begging the question,” which is misused 100 times for every once it is understood. 

Of course, she may be more strict than I am. “There have been errors so egregious that I’ve stopped reading a book,” she says. “I just stomp my foot and throw the book away.” 

Her excuse: “I was an English major.” 

There are many other issues that bother me, but not quite so instantly. I notice when the subjunctive is misused, or rather, not used when it should be. If I were still an editor, I would have fixed that every time. 

I am not sure I will ever get used to “like” used for “said.” And I’m like, whoever started that linguistic monstrosity? I also notice split infinitives as they sail past, but I recognize that the prohibition against them is a relic of Victorian grammarians. It is too easy to lazily give in to those ancient strictures. 

So far, I’ve only been talking about catches in speech, although they show up in print just as often (you can actually come across “ect.” for “etc.”) But reading a book, or a newspaper or a road sign and seeing the common errors there can be even more annoying. There is probably nothing worse, or more common, than the apostrophe plural. You don’t make something plural by adding an apostrophe and an “S.” “Nail’s” is not the plural for “nails.” This is encountered endlessly on shop signs. 

And digital communication is fraught with homophone confusion. “They’re,” “there,” and “their,” for instance, or “you’re,” and “your.” I admit that occasionally this is just a mental hiccup as you are typing. We all make mistakes. I have sometimes put a double “O” after a “T” when I mean a preposition. That’s just a typo. But there are genuinely people who don’t seem to notice the difference with “to,” “too,” and “two.” (I have great tolerance, however, for the ideogrammatic usage of “2” for “to” in electronic messaging. I find it kind of amusing to see the innovation in space-saving for Twitter and e-mail. I may even have been guilty myself of such things. Indeed, there is a long history of this sort in handwritten letters in the 15th to 18th centuries, when “William” was often “Wm,” and “through” was often “thro.” Paper was expensive and abbreviations saved space.)

Some frequent typological absurdities make me twitch each time. I really hate seeing a single open-quote used instead of an apostrophe when a word is abbreviated from the front end. You almost never see “rock ’n’ roll” done correctly. 

There are lesser offenses, too, that I usually let pass. “Impact” as a verb, for instance. It bothers me, but the only people who use it tend to write such boring text that I couldn’t wade through it anyway. (I wrote about the management class mangling of the language in what I call “Manglish.”) “Different than” has become so normalized for “different from” that I’m afraid it has become standard English. Of course, the English themselves tend to say “different to.” So there. 

There are distinctions that have been mostly lost in usage. “Can I” now means the same as “May I” in most circumstances, and almost no one still makes a distinction between “shall” and “will.” 

Many of us have idiosyncratic complaints. I knew someone who complained that “laundermat” was not a word. We saw such a one on Vancouver Island when visiting. “It should be ‘laundromat,’” she said, arguing the parallel with “automat.” 

Another cringes at “would of,” “should of,” and “could of” in place of “would have,” “should have,” and “could have.” But this is merely a mishearing of the contractions “would’ve,” “should’ve,” and “could’ve” and turning them into print. Yes, it should be corrected, but it doesn’t get under my skin when I hear it. 

And there are regionalisms that bother some, although I glory in the variety of language. One person I know complains about such phrases as “had went,” but that is a long-standing Southernism and gets a pass, as far as I’m concerned. 

And much else is merely idiom. If you get too exercised about “I could care less,” please relax. It means the same thing as “I couldn’t care less.” Merely idiomatic. Lots of grammatical nonsense is now just idiomatic English. Like when the doorbell rings and you ask “Who’s there?” and the answer comes back, “It’s me.” If you hear “It is I,” you probably don’t want to open the door. No one talks like that. It could be a spy whose first language is not English. Better ask if they know who plays second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers (old movie reference). 

And the Associated Press hammered into me the habit of writing “past week” instead of “last week,” on the principle that the previous seven days had not, indeed, been terminal. You can take these things too far — but I am so far brainwashed not to have given in. “Past week,” it will always be. 

I may have become lax on certain spelling and grammar guidelines, but one should still try one’s best to be clear, make sense, include antecedents for one’s pronouns and be clear about certain common mistakes. “Discreet” and “discrete” are discrete words. And someone I know who used to transcribe her boss’s dictated letters once corrected him when he said a client should be “appraised” of the situation and typed instead, “apprised.” He brought her the letter back and complained that she had misspelled “appraised.” Being a man and being in management, he could not be persuaded he was wrong. She had to retype the letter with the wrong word. There’s just nothing you can do with some people. 

Language is just usage at the moment. It shifts like the sands at the beach, what was “eke” to Chaucer is “also” to us. What was “conscience” to Shakespeare is “consciousness” to us. Thus does conscience make grammar cops of us all. We don’t learn our mother tongue, we acquire it and what we hear as babes becomes normal usage. Ain’t it the truth?