Category: Editor at Large

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Editor at Large Written English

High School Grammar Hercules

Are you smarter than an 11th-grader? Here’s a cute little test to gauge your English skills.

The questions you’ll find behind the link are taken from the SAT, the standardized exam that high school juniors in the U.S. take before applying to college. A few years ago the SAT was revamped to include more analysis of writing and grammar.

The new grammar content probably comes from the Test of Standard Written English, or TSWE, which used to be administered in tandem with the SAT. Can anyone confirm in the comments whether the questions were taken from there?

I remember cramming for the TSWE at twelve years old to gain admittance to a summer writing program. It was the first time I had to study grammar.

I don’t recall what I scored then, (I did get into the program), but this time I can dutifully report a 7/7.

How will you fare?

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Editor at Large Policy Written English

Bonus Post for National Grammar Day: Censor This!

Grammar is important on certain levels, because proper word choice can help the world avoid misleading headlines like this one:

Mar 4, 2008, 12:24 GMT: Western nations drop plan for IAEA resolution censoring Iran

Whew! The Europeans certainly dodged a bullet with that one. Imagine if those enlightened secular governments had actually censored Ahmadinejad in the Western press? There would be no more rambunctious debates at NYU! No more SNL Digital Shorts with Jake Gyllenhaal cameos! And, most importantly, the IAEA representatives would be stifling open, democratic debate, one of the most ballyhooed elements of the international governance system.

Obviously, Western nations aren’t really that hypocritical. Or that stupid—censoring Iran would play right into the hands of a government which holds state-sponsored symposiums for Holocaust deniers just to highlight the European limits on freedom of speech.

I’m happy to digress into politics on this blog whenever I get the chance, so thank you today to Monsters and Critics for giving me a reason to explain this completely inexcusable typo. In the words of a blogger we linked to yesterday:

Attention, everyone: C E N S O R ≠ C E N S U R E

A censure is a formal rebuke, often carried out by an institution. A censor will redact portions of your text without mercy, often in service of an overt or covert political agenda. A censure is a public action; censorship is often done behind closed doors. Get the point?

Check out this BBC link for a more well-informed and well-written report of what really went down at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

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Editor at Large

Obligatory Post: National Grammar Day

Today is National Grammar Day, thanks to a campaign by Grumpy Grammarian Martha Brockenbrough over at MSN Encarta. I’m no prescriptivist, but I’ll be celebrating anyway with an extra post today: Monsters & Critics made a gimme this morning that must be seen to be believed.

Stay tuned…

Categories
Editor at Large Mad CAPS U.S. vs. U.K. Written English

Capitalizing on Halitosis

Pop quiz: What country is this label from?

Label with border
Camouflaged by Paint.NET and liberal use of the “Clone” stamp

Let’s take a look at the first line of the copy to find the answer:

kills germs

Hmm. The use of a capital letter for the first word and lower-case on the rest probably indicates British English headline style. If this were a title in the United States, we would see almost every word capitalized–just take a quick glance at my blog to see what I mean. Then again, the capital “K” in “kills” could also just be the beginning of any US or UK English descriptive sentence. We’ll have to keep on reading.

But on the second line, the copy starts to get weird:

bad breath

When did bad breath become a Capital Condition? Even scary, life-changing diseases–breast cancer, hepatitis, bird flu–don’t merit capitalization in run-of-the-mill body text. But plaque gets upper-case treatment too, so could this be some sort of American English title, with only the “important” words in caps?

Not with what’s been done in the lower-case third line.

kills germs bad breath gum disease

Definite article “the” never takes a capital letter, unless it’s the first word in a title. But what about gum disease, the terrifying tooth destroyer? If a social hindrance like bad breath qualifies for capitals, surely a condition that could land you in dentures deserves some highlighting here. After all, gingivitis gets the capital treatment in the last line of the label.

So why did this company choose such inconsistent capitalization? It could be an effort to convince the reader in a hurry that this product Kills Bad Breath Plaque & Gingivitis, de-emphasizing connecting words such as “that” and “cause.” If this were true, however, killing [G]erms would probably be just as big of a draw to potential buyers. If this had been my job, I would have recommended the strategic use of bold or a larger font to highlight the advantages of this U.S.-made product (brand is behind the link).

At least the manufacturer is calling it Bad Breath [sic] these days, not the pseudoscientific diagnosis that this company first popularized through a massively successful ad campaign in the early 1920s.

Bonus link: Consumerist noticed another label oddity from the same source in December.

Categories
Editor at Large Policy Written English

Yea and Yay Mean More than you Think

The L.A. Times is pushing a new debate feature called “Dust-Ups,” in which two sides of an issue are presented in a neutral forum. But the choice of spelling in the headline for this week’s dust-up could leave readers prejudiced from the outset.

The dust-up is entitled, Nanotechnology: Yay or Nay?” One hopes that the headline is an in-joke on the traditional voting method still used in the U.S. Congress and the Canadian House of Commons: an up-down survey of “yea” (from 12th century Middle English, meaning yes) or “nay” (similarly dated, meaning no).

The value difference in opting for the enthusiastic interjection “yay” over the vote-specific “yes,” however, might here indicate an editorial slant against nanotechnology. In a column that is supposed to display both sides in a neutral forum, the title could already prejudice the reader: either you’re absolutely over the moon for these tiny innovations, or you’re not. It’s much easier to choose a noncommittal “nay” than an ecstatic yay, the literary equivalent of jumping up and down.

But “yea” is a tricky creature, and has been perplexing American English speakers since at least the mid-twentieth century. Was this just a copy editor’s error, then? Was the use of “yay” a conscious choice at all, in these times when the older variant sees so little use outside of government? A Google search of “yea or nay” versus “yay or nay” brings up far more results for the more recent coinage–a difference of over 280,000. If this was a deliberate choice by L.A. Times editors, perhaps they did so out of fear that readers would not recognize the older term.

Depends which readers they’re targeting. I have a clear memory of dancing behind Morgan Webb in my junior high school production of Once Upon A Mattress, singing along with a loud cast of twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds as they cheered on her tomboy princess Winifred:

With an F and an R and an E and a D and an F-R-E-D Fred, YEAH !

The lyrics, written in 1959, read Y E A.

Categories
Editor at Large RSI

Workrave Plug

Like any slave to the keyboard, I’ve had my share of RSI war wounds. I own “soft splints” that I wear to bed at night when I have a tendinitis (or tendonitis: both spellings are acceptable) flare-up in my wrists:

My splints
Bedtime: see no evil, type no evil

To reduce eyestrain, I wear yellow-tinted reading glasses (prescription: +1) when I use the computer:

Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Self-Portrait with Yellow Glasses (1971) as seen in The Guardian. Note: not me.

But the best preventive product I have found is the free Workrave software application. You can set your own micro-break times to stop staring at the monitor and look out the window. You can decide how many longer rest breaks you take during the day and how often. Workrave takes care of the most important task: making your computer completely inaccessible during the time you should be resting. Whatever editing or translation project (or blog entry) I’m working on disappears from the screen, replaced by a small box that clocks the time I should be away from the computer. But there’s no reason to look at the countdown–Workrave plays a sound when my break is over, to let me know that it’s time to get back to my writing.

I’m a natural workaholic and I tend to get very absorbed in a project. Workrave wakes me up and reminds me to take care of my body, so that my eyes and wrists will last as long as my mind can concentrate. The program also helps me to put what I’ve been learning in the Alexander Technique to use.

I highly recommend this free program to anyone whose livelihood depends on pointing and clicking.

Categories
Editor at Large

Mixing Metaphors on American Idol

Did Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe flub a common English saying in his comment to USA Today?

Speaking on Carly Smithson, Kristy Lee Cook and other seeming show-biz veterans who have made it into this year’s show, the English-born Lythgoe dismisses concern over their experience as “a storm in a teacup.”

Sound odd to you? Then you’re probably American, as I am. In U.S. English, the expression is usually “a tempest in a teapot.” Both sayings describe a lot of fuss over a small and inconsequential thing: the Oxford English Dictionary defines the teacup version as “a great commotion in a circumscribed circle,” an image I particularly enjoy.

Is one preferable to the other? Not really: the OED dates the first incidence of both phrases to 1854, and both of them continue to recur. The British version is widely unknown in the United States, just as few British English speakers have heard of the more alliterative U.S. version. Word connoisseur Michael Quinion claims that “tempest in a teapot” may have come first, since he finds the phrase in a U.S. journal published in 1838.

The British Quinion, asked by a reader about the origins of the phrase, is initially nonplused by the American version. Michael, I can relate.

Categories
Editor at Large Spoken English Written English

Posting On By Accident

Celebrity gossip sites are often gold mines for grammatical errors. Writers may be hired more for their snark than their smarts, although some, happily, have both.

Today’s offender does not.

A certain starlet, writes a certain gossipmonger, did not get pregnant “on accident.”

On accident? ON ACCIDENT?! This is a mistake that teenagers make, not grown-up blogslaves! This is not just bad grammar, it’s inexcusable in a writer who has grown up writing English. How often do accidents happen? How many times a week are we exposed to the correct usage of “by accident” on the 10 o’clock news?

There are so many less painful ways to get across this information. The starlet’s pregnancy was no accident sounds particularly succinct to my ear. Or we can do Strunk & White a favor, dispense with the negatives and simply say that the pregnancy happened on purpose.

In researching this blog entry, I shuddered to find that the use of “on accident” instead of “by accident” is becoming more prevalent. Grammar Girl has a particularly clear-eyed (i.e., unmarred by prescriptivist paranoia) take on the whole thing. But I’m not the only one who finds “on accident” to be the grammatical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer uses “on accident” to humorously great effect in the voice of his non-native English narrator in Everything Is Illuminated (Google Books link).

Maybe in fifty years this expression will have become a normal alternative, but it still causes far too much controversy to be an acceptable usage right now. If “on accident” showed up in your writing, I’d correct it.

Categories
Editor at Large

Welcome to the Belletra Blog

Hi, I’m Casey. I’ve been an editor-in-chief, a game show champion, a Spanish translator and a jazz singer, but I am foremost a writer in love with the English language.

If you’re looking for editing or translation assistance, you’ll find a decidedly more corporate tone on my Belletra business homepage.

This blog is a chronicle of my idiosyncratic language interests: my observations, as a native speaker, of a world in which English has become the de facto lingua franca of business and Internet communication. Occasionally you’ll see a subject-specific post, usually on politics or international relations.

I spent a long time deciding whether that last paragraph should contain “observations of” or “observations on.” And what about those two Latin phrases one after another? Cliché?