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How to Pronounce 'Tumult'

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A few months ago I had a segment about what it means to read someone the riot act, and I told you that the official name of the act starts with “An Act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies.” But recently, an English teacher in Tehran named Marshall pointed out that I had mispronounced tumult ("too-muh lt") as "tum-ult."

A tumult is riot or uprising or just a loud, disorderly crowd. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, we get tumult from a Latin word that meant "commotion, bustle, uproar, disorder, disturbance,” and Merriam-Webster notes that it may be related to a Sanskrit word for “noisy.”

I’m not sure why I pronounced its as "tum-ult" instead of "too-muh lt," except that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else say the word, but I have heard the adjective form—tumultuous, as in It’s been a tumultuous week—so I was probably modeling the pronunciation after the word I had heard. Although, I wasn’t exactly saying it like that either.

I’m sorry for the error, and now you too can remember that it’s pronounced "too-muh lt."

how to pronounce tumult

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.


A Bull in a China Shop

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bull in a china shop video

In last week’s show about animal idioms, I mentioned the phrase a bull in a china shop, which you’d use to describe someone who is clumsy or careless, and both Joseph and John on Twitter pointed out that the MythBusters have busted the myth that bulls are clumsy in china shops. 

The MythBusters set up a china shop in a bull ring, let in a bull, and he didn’t knock over anything. And he wasn’t just walking around carefully, he was trotting and maybe even running. It reminded me of a dog going through an agility  course—it was amazing, and then they let in two and three bulls and they still didn’t knock over anything. So although the phrase a bull in china shop seems like a good way to describe someone careless or clumsy, it turns out that we have been unfairly disparaging bulls.

Always, Never, Usually, Often, Most, and More

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always, usually, never

Today we'll discuss words you should never use and words you should always avoid—or something like that.

As many of you know, before I was Grammar Girl, I was a science and technology writer. Even as an undergraduate, my instructors said I was especially good at that kind of writing. My secret was that I hedged everything I wrote. I wouldn't write anything as definitive as "Scientists found life on Mars." I would write, "Scientists appear to have found life on Mars," or "Scientists report that they have found signs of life on Mars."

In scientific writing, those kinds of distinctions are important because knowledge changes as new data comes in. What looks like life on Mars today, could turn out to be an instrument malfunction tomorrow. Coffee seems good for you in one study, but bad for you in the next study that looked at different populations or different parameters. But keeping absolute statements under control can also keep your everyday writing honest.

Using Always and Never

Some of the most dangerous words you can throw around are always and never. They almost beg people to ask, "Really? Never? Not even if aliens take over the world and change the laws of physics with their super-advanced technology?"

If I were to write, "Always italicize foreign words," I'm certain that within 12 hours someone would write in with an exception. If I were to write, "Never start a sentence with a lowercase letter," someone would remind me that the P in pH must be lowercase when referring to the acidity or alkalinity of a solution whether it's at the beginning of a sentence or not and that the Chicago Manual of Style says to keep the I in iPhone lowercase even if the word is at the beginning of a sentence.

If you go out on a limb and use always or never, be darn certain there aren't any exceptions.


When Should You Use Usually and Often?

Never write "never." Always avoid "always."

So what about fudgy words such as usually and often? They aren't horrible. When you're tempted to write always, usually can be a safer choice: In English, we usually italicize foreign words.

The problem is that sometimes people use these words without any real knowledge of whether something happens often or usually.

I was tempted to write "people often use these words without any real knowledge," but really? Is it often? I know I see it done, but when I think about it carefully, I'm not willing to commit to often. Sometimes is more accurate.

What Is the Difference Between Many and Most?

People have asked about the difference between most and many. OK, it was only one person, so it wasn't really people; it should have been someone.

Both many and most indicate a large, indefinite amount. Technically, most is more than many. Most is a superlative that means "in the greatest degree" or "in the majority of instances," so you could argue that it's only correct to use most when you're talking about more than half of something. For example, most of the time would have to be at least fifty percent of the time, although in practice, I suspect most people [get it?] don't strictly adhere to that definition.

When Should You Use Most and Many?

My advice to careful writers is to avoid using most and many unless you have evidence that what you're talking about is a lot—a lot of people or more than half the time, for example. It shouldn't just be your opinion. The thought "I believe snails are adorable and make great mascots" floating through your head shouldn't lead you to write "Many people believe snails are adorable and make great mascots."

Going back to my opening paragraph, how did I know that many of you know that I used to be a science writer? I didn't. Although I've mentioned it in a bunch of interviews, I have no idea how many of you already knew that I was a science writer. So I shouldn't have started out with as many of you know. It's pure speculation (and unnecessarily wordy).

As an aside, you can learn more about more and most in episode #124 in which we talk about using more to compare two things (this painting is more spectacular than the last) and most when something is the best of more than two things (this painting is the most spectacular painting we've seen all day).


A Quick and Dirty Tip: Name Your Sources

Finally, make your attributions clear. I don't consider some say or critics have asserted to be meaningful. Name your sources. Earlier when I said, "Someone asked me about the difference between most and many," it would have been better to name the person: A reader named John T. asked about the difference between most and many.

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

I'm Mignon Fogarty, author of the New York Times best-seller, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Here's what a recent buyer, Michelle Cimino, had to say in a review: "I've used your book many times to make sure I don't make a fool out of myself--especially since grammar is not my strongest suit! I highly recommend this for anyone who needs a little help here and there...or for people like me who need a LOT of help." Thanks, Michelle!

You can pick up a copy of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing at most major bookstores. More than half of the bookstores I've checked carry it, so I believe that was a legitimate use of "most."

This article was originally published March 25, 2010 and was updated February 16, 2017.

Double Dactyl Poetry

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Next week is National Grammar Day once again! In what has become an NGD tradition, grammar lovers have been using Twitter to submit their entries in the annual National Grammar Day haiku contest. Actually, like this podcast, these haiku cover not only grammar, but also word usage, punctuation, pronunciation, and writing style. That’s OK, though; we cast a wide net here, and everything that’s both interesting and language-related is fair game. 

This year, though, I’d like to invite you to work with another short form of poetry, called the double dactyl

What’s a Dactyl?

To understand what a double dactyl is, you first need to know what a dactyl is. It’s not an extinct flying reptile; that’s a pterodactyl. However, if you translate the Greek roots that make up pterodactyl, you get “wing finger.” So dactyl means “finger,” but what do fingers have to do with poetry? True, you do use your fingers to write poetry, but that’s true of poetry in general. The more relevant answer is that a dactyl is a sequence of three syllables: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. For example, the word holiday is a dactyl as are genesis and poetry. Are you getting the rhythm?

And what do fingers have to do with sequences of one stressed syllable and two unstressed syllables? In metrical notation, stressed syllables are often written as a dash, and unstressed syllables as shorter, bent lines. Represented this way, apparently a dactyl reminded someone of a finger: The dash for the stressed syllable is the first, longer knuckle, and the two shorter knuckles are the bent lines for the unstressed syllables. 

double dactyl syllables

What Are the Double Dactyl Poetry Rules?

The form of poem called the double dactyl has two stanzas of four lines each, in which the first three lines each are made up of just two dactyls, and the fourth line has a single dactyl followed by one more stressed syllable. For example, some acceptable fourth lines could be Hullabaloo, or Give me a break!



Double Dactyl Poetry

Aside from the metrical description, there are three other requirements for a double dactyl. The one that makes National Grammar Day particularly suitable for a double dactyl is that the topic of a double dactyl has to be a two-dactyl proper noun. Not just any proper noun fits this description. Some that do fit include Emily Dickinson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ivan the Terrible. And as you may have noticed by now, so does National Grammar Day! So here it is, a double dactyl composed especially for next week’s august occasion:

Holy infinitives,

National Grammar Day!

Grammatomaniacs, 

Time to geek out!

Syntax, semantics, and

Strange ambiguities—

This is the fun stuff that

Grammar’s about.

In case you’d like to try writing your own double dactyl, whether it’s about National Grammar Day or something or someone else, I’ll explain the rest of the requirements. They can be found in the introduction to the book Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, which was edited by John Hollander and Anthony Hecht, the inventor of the double dactyl. That’s right—unlike haiku, limericks, or sonnets, the double dactyl has a known inventor. In the book, Hecht explains that he invented the form in 1951, when he was looking for a poem in which the word Schistosomiasis could take up an entire line all by itself. Schistosomiasis, by the way, is a parasitic disease spread by snails. (SHIS-to-so-MY-a-sis)

In fact, this word brings us to the second requirement for a double dactyl: At least one line must consist of a single, double-dactylic word. Furthermore, just to make things more difficult, Hecht and Hollander declared that no double-dactylic word should be used in more than one double dactyl poem. I won’t bore you with a list of all the no-longer-eligible words I found in the double dactyls in Jiggery Pokery, but I’ll put a list of them on the transcript for anyone who’s interested.  


As far as I know, the word grammatomaniac has not yet been used in a double dactyl. In fact, I even thought I had invented the word, on the model of grammatological and grammatophobia. Then I searched for it, and found that it was coined by H. L. Mencken in 1922, when he wrote: 

There are fanatics who love and venerate spelling as a tom cat loves and venerates catnip. There are grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather parse than eat; specialists in an objective case that doesn’t exist in English; strange beings otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely who suffer under a split infinitive as you or I would suffer under gastro-enteritis. (H. Kl. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, Volume 3, 1922, pp. 245-246)

To Mencken’s coinage, I would add that grammatomaniacs can also be people who are just plain interested in how languages work. In fact, in an earlier draft of the poem, I called them language enthusiasts instead of grammatomaniacs, but that’s no good. Although language enthusiastsdoes consist of two dactyls, it’s two words, not one. It has to be one word! The rules are very clear about this. Actually, Hecht and Hollander also specify that the double-dactylic single word should be in the second four lines, and ideally in the second-to-last line, but I just couldn’t make that work.

Here are some tips for finding or inventing your double-dactylic word: 

  1. Take advantage of long suffixes. The suffixes –ability and -ological have four syllables all by themselves, so you only need two to turn them into words like irritability and dermatological
  2. Take advantage of kind of long suffixes, The suffixes -arity, -atical, -ational, -arian, -ality, -istical, -ography, -ology, and -torial are all dactyls, so you just need to find another dactyl that can combine with them.
  3. Take advantage of two-syllable suffixes. Don’t forget about suffixes such as -able or -ible, as in terrible, and -ian, as in contrarian. 
  4. Remember the suffix -ly. This suffix can turn an adjective into an adverb, and sometimes it can do so without even adding a syllable. The following pairs all have the same number of syllables: unjustifiable, unjustifiably; dermatological, dermatologically.
  5. Take advantage of your prefixes, especially two-syllable ones. These prefixes are often borrowed from Latin or Greek, such as hetero-, hyper-, hypo-, meta-, mono-, neo-, and poly-. The negative prefixes non- and un- are useful for putting a stressed syllable at the beginning of a word.
  6. Look for Latin or Greek bound roots. What’s a bound root, you ask? Take the double-dactyl word pharmacologically. You may recognize the root pharmaco- and figure, correctly, that this word has something to do with drugs. But on its own, pharmaco- is not a word. Linguists call it a bound root. Similarly, the noun grammar can stand on its own, but the dactylic bound root grammato- has to be part of a longer word.

In addition to being about a person or thing with a double-dactylic name, and having at least one line that consists of a single, double-dactylic word, there’s one more requirement for a double dactyl: The first line has to be nonsense—for example, jiggery-pokery, the title of Hecht and Hollander’s book. They should have titled the book higgledy-piggledy, because that was by far the most-used piece of double-dactylic nonsense in their poems. They only used jiggery-pokery once. Occasionally they used pattycake, pattycake, and one poem in the book uses pocketa pocketa, which is an allusion to James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you’re curious about that allusion, read the story; it’s a classic. I’ve also seen hickory dickory in double dactyls elsewhere. The name Babbitty Rabbitty in J. K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard has the distinction of being both a suitable subject for a double dactyl and a piece of double-dactylic nonsense. I bent the rule about starting with a line of nonsense, because I didn’t like completely throwing away a line by not having it carry any meaning. Plus, I was sick of reading higgledy-piggledy. Instead, I figured an exclamation would be close enough to nonsense, and went with Holy infinitives!

So much for the anatomy of a double dactyl. Since I’ve spotlighted syntax and semantics in the fifth line of my double dactyl, this is a good time to give a quick and dirty distinction between the two. Syntax is about the structure of a string of words, and semantics is about the meaning. Sometimes, the same string of words can have different invisible structures, which correspond to different meanings. These are the “strange ambiguities” of the sixth line of my poem. A good example is the ambiguity of Make me a sandwich, the classic grammar joke that was the subject of episode 442. Do I want someone to assemble a sandwich for me or turn me into a sandwich? There are also stranger ambiguities, in which you get multiple meanings even without different structures. For example, there’s the sentence Every year, somebody’s dog gets killed by a deer, which Gretchen McCulloch wrote about in episode 422. It had eight possible meanings! And though opinions can differ, my opinion is that this is the fun stuff about grammar.

Tell us what you think grammar’s all about in your own double dactyl! Leave it in a comment on this page, or tweet a screenshot of it to us at @GrammarGirl and @LiteralMinded with the hashtag #GrammarDay.

Neal Whitman is an independent researcher and writer on language and grammar. He blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com, and tweets @LiteralMinded

Single-word double dactyls used in Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls. 

antediluvian
anthropomorphically
balletomania
characteristically
cosmetological
decalcomania
erotogenesis
etymologically
gubernatorial
gynecological
heliocentrically
heterosexual
historiography
hypocoristically
incomprehensible
irritability
Machiavellian
metalinguistically
mythopoetically
Neo-Dravidian
non-navigational
organizational
parachromatically
parliamentarian
parthenogenesis
philolinguistically
plenipotentiary
polysyllabically
practability
propagandistically
psycholinguistical
quasiacceptable
sesquipedalian
uncomplimentary
un-Dostoevskian
ungeriatrically
unjustifiable
unmetaphysically
unsuitability
valedictorian

Hand image courtesy of Shutterstock. Quill image courtesy of Shutterstock.

2017 National Grammar Day Haiku Contest

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2017 National Grammar Day Haiku Contest

Fire up your fingers! It's time for the National Grammar Day haiku contest. It's becoming something of an annual event—but we don't like to commit, so we aren't giving it a number.

In collaboration with the American Copy Editors Society, the contest takes place on Twitter, where you submit your haiku-like poem by tweeting it with the hashtag #GrammarDay.

The haiku must be about grammar, usage, or langauge in some way. Entries must be posted by 11:59 PM PST Thursday, March 2. Judges will deliberate on March 3, and the winners will be announced on National Grammar Day, March 4.

To get more of a sense of the contest and to find out why these are only fake haiku, please visit the page with the 2016 haiku contest winners.

 

How to Write Good Survey Questions

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Today we’re going to talk about a kind of writing that you might not think of when you think about writing. At least, I don’t. It’s questionnaires and surveys. Whether you’re doing scientific research, investigating the market for a new product, or just having fun on your blog or Facebook page, you need to think about how to write your survey questions if you want them to give you the best information possible.

I looked for some references for writing survey questions, and the main thing I discovered is that there is so much to think about that if your survey is really important, you should consult an expert. Even so, experts agree on a number of points that should give a more professional feel to the surveys you do yourself.

Here’s an example of a biased question: “How much did you like the movie?”

I consulted three websites for these tips, and I’ll put links to all three of them on the transcript. The website HowTo.gov is intended for government workers who want to assess customer satisfaction to improve how services are delivered. I used the ”Basics of survey and question design” page from their section on collecting feedback. I also went to the nonprofit website Science Buddies, which provides guidance and science project ideas for K-12 students and teachers and has a page on writing survey questions. For the information on this page, they credit the textbook Marketing Research by Parasuraman, Grewal, and Krishnan. Lastly, I visited the website Creative Research Systems. This is a company that wants to sell you a software package for creating and processing surveys. However, they have a very informative section on designing survey questions, which agrees with the advice given in the other sites I’ve mentioned. All of these websites give much more information than I’m going to give here, and I recommend visiting them when you can. Each site has various details that the others don’t have, but they also agree on a lot of points. Those are the points I’m going to present today.

Define Your Survey Goals

First, you need to know what kind of information you want to get from your survey. If you have only a vague idea of what you’re trying to find out, your questions will be vague, too, and so will your answers.

survey

Put Easy Questions First

As for ordering the questions, you should put them in a logical order, and group questions on similar topics together. If possible, easier questions should come earlier in the survey. Again, this makes it easier and more pleasant for respondents to take the survey, which increases the likelihood that they will actually finish it. In oral surveys, this also helps the interviewer build rapport with the respondent.

Put Difficult or Sensitive Questions Last

Conversely, put the more difficult questions near the end of the survey. If respondents see a tough question right at the beginning, for all they know, all the questions could be that difficult, and filling out the survey starts to look like a real hassle. But if they see it at the end, they may put in the effort since they know they’re almost done, or because by this point they like you and trust you.

Even if they quit, at least you will have most or half of a survey to analyze, instead of none. This advice goes not only for questions that are just difficult, but also for questions that are more sensitive, such as questions about income level or ethnicity.

Be Careful When Giving Respondents Choices

The next few tips have to do with structured questions, that is, questions in which you provide a choice of answers. Examples of structured questions include multiple-choice questions, or questions asking respondents to rate something on a numerical scale.

Cover All Possible Answers

The experts agree that in a multiple choice question, the choices should cover all possible answers. Sometimes, this will mean including an option for “Other,” or “Don’t know,” or even “Don’t wish to say” for sensitive questions. Not only will this get you more accurate data, but it builds trust. If respondents feel you’re trying to make them give you an answer they don’t agree with, they may just skip the question, or stop answering questions altogether.

Make Sure Answers Don’t Overlap

In addition to providing for all possible answers, the choices in a multiple-choice question with just one response allowed should be mutually exclusive. They shouldn’t overlap. For example, if a question asks which kind of food is your favorite, the answers shouldn’t include both Thai and vegetarian, because some food is both. If someone’s favorite food is vegetarian Thai food, which response is appropriate?

Ask About One Thing at a Time

You should avoid “double-barreled questions,” that is, questions that ask about more than one thing at a time. For example, if you instruct a respondent, “Please rate your satisfaction with the service and food quality during your visit,” you don’t know what kind of answer you will get. Will the respondent rate the service and overlook food quality? Will he or she do the opposite, or maybe just report whichever rating is lower, or higher? Instead, break this into two questions, one about the service and one about the food quality. 

Avoid Biased Questions

For any kind of question, you should make sure it is not biased to make the respondent more likely to give a particular answer. At least, this is what you should do if you want as accurate a reading as possible. If, on the other hand, you’re a sleazy politician who just wants a survey to make your candidate look as good as possible, or the other candidate to look as bad as possible, then by all means you should use loaded, emotional terms, and phrase the questions in ways to get the answers you want. And you should go away. But if you’re listening to this podcast for tips on better writing, you’re clearly not one of those people.

Here’s just one example of a biased question: “How much did you like the movie?” That question will bias respondents toward a positive response, even if your answers include a “Not at all” choice. “How did you feel about the movie?” is more neutral.

There are so many ways to bias a question that I can’t go into them all. Aside from the words you use, the order in which you present the answers to the questions, and even the order in which you present the questions themselves, can affect respondents’ answers.

In part because it is so easy to bias a question, the sources agree that you should test your survey before you administer it for real. Have colleagues read it, and have a handful of people take it so you can see where they get confused, or where any other problems come up.

Finally, you should thank your respondents for helping you!

Again, there are many more tips to keep in mind when you create a survey, and I recommend checking the sources I used here for more information and more details on specific types of survey questions. However, the few tips we covered today should help you to avoid some of the most common mistakes.

This podcast was written by Neal Whitman, who blogs about linguistics at literalminded.wordpress.com and is a regular columnist for the online resource Visual Thesaurus.

National Grammar Day Haiku Contest Winners 2017

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National Grammar Day Haiku Contest Winners 2017

The winner of the National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest submitted a single entry that uses grammar terms in a humorous senryu, a poetry form closely related to haiku.

Senryu follows the haiku form of three lines and 17 onji, usually simplified as syllables. Unlike traditional haiku, a senryu doesn’t necessarily make a statement about nature.

The winning entry may have come from Sophia Loren. But probably not. We just don’t know.

The poet goes by Lills on Twitter with the handle @LillaryBlinton. The profile photo is a caricature of Sophia Loren. (Ms. Loren, is it really you? Please call.)

The Twitter account was started this week and has a single tweet: the winning haiku.

But the anonymity of the poet didn’t bother the judges, who chose this tweet from approximately 500 contest entries.

Runners Up

Did I mention we had hundreds of entries this year? Being a runner-up is still a huge honor. Congratulations to these fabulous poets:

 

 

 

Honorable Mentions

 

 

 

 

 

You can review all the entries by scrolling back through the hashtag #GrammarDay on Twitter or at the Storify.

A huge thanks to our expert panel of haiku judges:

•       Emily Brewster (@eabrewster)  is an associate editor and lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, Inc. As a general definer, she’s covered all kinds of vocabulary, from grammar to finance to slang. Her videos for Merriam-Webster’s website tackle such vexing issues as lie vs. lay and its vs. it’s. She’s also worked as a poetry editor.

•       Laura M. Browning (@ellembee) is co-editor-in-chief of The A.V. Club and a board member of the American Copy Editors Society. She once won a poetry award in high school.

•       Amorak Huey (@amorak), a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry, is author of the poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and the chapbooks The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly, 2016). He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University, before which he spent 14 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Florida, Kentucky, and Michigan.

•       Tom Freeman (@SnoozeInBrief) is an editor at the Wellcome Trust, a foundation that supports health-related research and publishes longform science stories at mosaicscience.com. He is the winner of the 2016 ACES National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest.

•       Paula Froke (@PaulaFroke) is the AP’s special liaison editor with MSN/Microsoft and lead editor of the AP Stylebook. Her 30-plus years with the AP has included jobs as news editor in Minnesota and Michigan, deputy national editor at headquarters and assistant managing editor/nights on the AP Nerve Center in New York.  She worked on the editing desk at four Olympics.

'Attorneys General' or 'Attorney Generals'

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Believe it or not, I wrote this segment last week, before all the news about the attorney general broke, because I kept hearing people talk about all the state attorneys general. 

For my listeners who aren’t in the US, the nation has one federal attorney general, but each state also has its own state-level attorney general. And I was really pleased because most people were making attorney general plural the right way—by making the word attorney plural.

The US has one attorney general, but we have many state attorneys general.

In the phrase attorney general, attorney is the main part, and the word general is descriptive—it tells us what kind of attorney we have to deal with. It’s the same rule we follow for similar phrases such as sister-in-law and editor in chief. You make the main noun plural:

I have two sisters-in-law.

The Atlantic has had 14 editors in chief.

Congratulations to all those news writers who have been getting the plural right recently.

Note: In British English, attorney-generals is also acceptable according to Garner’s Modern English Usage.

What Is the Plural of 'Deputy Attorney General'?

Update: After the podcast aired, we got an interesting follow-up question: What is the plural of deputy attorney general?

Although I couldn't find an answer in a style book, my gut instinct is that it would be deputy attorneys general because attorney is still the main noun and deputy is a modifier. When I can't find an answer in a style book, sometimes I search major newspaper websites to see what they use, and it looks like my instincts are right: the New York Times highly favors deputy attorneys general.

plural of attorney general


How to Define Abbreviations in a Document

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A listener named Paul asked about abbreviations. He wrote, 

“The guide that I was taught … was to always precede the first use of an acronym (to be placed in parenthesis) by the full term. This makes logical sense. However, if one has done this, is it then a rule that all further mentions of that same term should be replaced by the acronym (which seems logical, else, why have the acronym)?”

What Paul was taught is right.

You’d write something like this:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Then every time you refer to the World Health Organization later in the document, you can simply call it the WHO.

The Chicago Manual of Style has a particularly quantitative entry on the topic to help you know when to go through the effort of defining an abbreviation. Chicago Section 10.3 says if your readers aren’t likely to be familiar with the abbreviation, you should only abbreviate it if you are going to use it roughly five times or more in your document. And the book notes that you should never go through the effort of defining an abbreviation that you’re not going to use again. What would be the point? I’ve seen people do it, but I’ve always hoped that it’s because they meant to use the abbreviation again, but never got around to it.

In general, once you’ve defined an abbreviation, you should continue to use it, but one exception I’ve made in the past when I was writing long technical documents is that if I define an unfamiliar term and use it for a while, but then don’t use it for a few chapters, I’ll define it again at the beginning of a new chapter if I want to start using it again—just in case the reader forgot or took a long break from reading.

I also caution against using too many abbreviations in one document. It can be hard to know which ones to choose, but I pity the readers of some government and technical documents I’ve seen that seem to have more abbreviations than actual words. 

That’s your Quick and Dirty Tip: When you’re defining an abbreviation, write out the words first and then put the abbreviation in parentheses right afterward. Continue to use the abbreviation by itself throughout the document unless you have a good reason to define it again. And don’t get so carried away with abbreviations that your document becomes hard to read.

And Then the Murders Began

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Last week, a fiction writer named Marc Laidlaw started an internet game by tweeting that “The first line of almost any story can be improved by making sure the second line is ‘And then the murders began.” As I write this, the tweet has been retweeted more than 4,000 times.  

According to the website Know Your Meme, Neil Gaiman, who has more than 2.5 million followers, started the hashtag #LaidlawsRule when he tweeted the second line after the first of A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead: to being with. And then the murders began.

After the Gaiman tweet, the meme took off. First lines that I’ve seen appended over and over again include the following:

Peter Rabbit

Once upon a time, there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. And then the murders began.

The Bible

In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth. And then the murders began.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was at the worst of times. And then the murders began. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. And then the murders began.

Mrs. Dalloway 

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And then the murders began.

I could go on and on. I read so many great tweets. I tried it with my own nonfiction books and it didn’t work so well. For example, the first line of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is “We’re all good at something,” which isn’t a great lead-in for “And then the murders began,” but I fixed it with a small edit:

“We’re all good at something,” she said. And then the murders began. 

Bwahahah.

Give it a try with your favorite books.

I bought one of Mark Laidlaw’s e-books to say thanks for all the fun I’ve had playing with #LaidlawsRule. And a huge thank you to Chris Burdick for first pointing me to Know Your Meme so I could catch up and be culturally literate.

Internet Meme: And then the murders began

What Is a Runcible Spoon?

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owl and pussycat

When I have spare time, I love looking though public domain collections of old books and art, and back in June I discovered an online collection from the British Library that has a book called Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets by Edward Lear written in 1870. The book contains Lear’s famous nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” that your parents may have read to you as a bedtime story. In the poem, the owl and the pussycat fall in love, get a wedding ring from a pig, and are married by a turkey.

The thing that makes “The Owl and the Pussycat” a nonsense poem is that it uses made-up words, or nonsense words, such as the adjective runcible. 

Another nonsense poem we’ve talked about before is “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. He used far more nonsense words than Lear, including mimsy, galumphing, slithy, and wabe.

Runcible is the primary nonsense word in “The Owl and the Pussycat.” After the wedding, it says the pair,

dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon. 

In later nonsense poems, Lear wrote about runcible hats, cats, geese, and walls. 

A runcible spoon wasn’t a real thing at the time, but what I love about this story is that, like Lewis Carroll’s galumphing, the phrase runcible spoon actually took on a meaning. Runcible alone is still nonsense, but if you look up runcible spoon in a dictionary today, you’ll find it!

Lear’s nonsense word became a real word in 1926 when according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Notes & Queries published the line “A runcible spoon is a kind of fork with three broad prongs or tines, one having a sharp edge, curved like a spoon, used with pickles.” It still tells us nothing about what a runcible hat or cat might look like, but at least we’ll know a runcible spoon when we see one.

The famous line from “The Owl and the Pussycat” that you may remember best is is the last line, after the wedding, when “They danced by the light of the moon.”

The British Library also has some of Lear’s whimsical drawings such as a plant he imagined called Manypeeplia Upsidownia that looks like a bluebell plant that grows people instead of flowers.

runcible spoon manypeeplia upsidownia

What Is the Meaning of ‘Devil’s Advocate’?

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what is the  meaning of devil's advocate

You’ve probably heard the term devil’s advocate before. It refers to someone who puts forth an unpopular opinion, or disputes an idea just for the sake of argument.  

What you might not know is that for many years, in the Roman Catholic Church, there actually was a devil’s advocate! No, not an evil minion of Satan—a theologian known as the “Promotor Fidei,” or promotor of the faith.

This guy had a tough job. Whenever someone was nominated for canonization—that is, for sainthood—the Promotor Fidei had to argue for all the reasons the person didn’t pass muster. You could think of him as the official church skeptic. His job was to look critically at all the candidate’s alleged miracles and good works and put forth in writing every possible disqualifying shortcoming—no matter how slight. 

Because the Promotor Fidei’s role was to argue against others in the church, he became known as the advocatus diaboli—the devil’s advocate.

The term shifted into popular usage, and soon anyone who was arguing an unpopular point, or just being contrarian, was said to be “playing the devil’s advocate.”

That’s your tidbit for today. If you play the devil’s advocate, you’re staking out a position you don’t necessarily agree with, either just for the sake of debate or to help someone make a really well-thought-out decision. Hardly devilish.

Samantha Enslen runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com or @DragonflyEdit.

Sources

Cross, Frank Leslie, and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds. Canonization, Promotor Fidei. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Dent, Susie. Devil’s advocate. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.

Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition. Devil’s advocate (subscription required, accessed February 9, 2017).

Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Devil’s advocate (subscription required, accessed February 9, 2017).

3 Tips for Creating Sentences with Punch

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Most people wouldn’t think that writing legal briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court and penning thrillers would require similar writing skills. But after representing clients in more than thirty cases before the Supreme Court—and with the release of my third novel, The Outsider, this month—I can attest that it’s true.  

In both mediums, you’re telling a story (one real, one fictional). In both, you need your audience to believe what you’re saying. And in both, you want the reader eagerly to turn the page. 

Whether you’re crafting the critical opening line of a brief or facing the daunting first page of a novel, it all starts, as Hemingway said, with “one true sentence.” Here are three tips for creating sentences with punch. 

1. Start Sentences with And or But

The best legal and thriller writers understand that, regardless of what your elementary school teacher said, it’s OK to start a sentence with a conjunction. Starting with and or but isn’t just grammatically correct, it’s a mainstay of expert writers.  

Proof is easy to find. Read the latest decision of the Supreme Court, a brief from a top high court advocate, or the first page of the latest Grisham novel, and examples of sentences starting with and and but abound. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, considered one of the high court’s great writers, said, “I love But at the beginning of a sentence, and I never put However” at the beginning. He felt the same way about starting with and.  

But why the preference for and and but over their cousins in addition and however? Because and and but are shorter. And they don’t require a comma, giving a sentence more flow, more verve. 

Consider this passage from Robert Frost’s famous poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

It just wouldn’t have the feel if Frost had said, 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

However, I have promises to keep.

In addition, miles to go before I sleep.

2. Shorter Is Better

General Motors once used the slogan “Wider Is Better” to promote its wide-track vehicles. I’m not sure the company sold many Pontiacs, but I remember the silly commercials, so maybe you’ll remember a variation for sentence structure: Shorter is better.  


In both legal and thriller writing, a tight sentence with a single idea is usually better than a longer, more complex sentence. For legal writing, you want the judges or justices to understand where you’re heading on the first read, and complex sentences require the brain to process more information. I prefer, as Chief Justice John Roberts recommends, to “take the judges by the hand and lead them along” step by step. For thrillers, my job is to get readers to suspend their disbelief. If they backtrack to re-read a sentence—or stumble over an unusual word—it might break the spell.

So short and simple is better. Both Supreme Court justices and bestselling thriller writers agree. As Justice Clarence Thomas tells his law clerks: “Look, the genius is having a ten-dollar idea in a five-cent sentence, not having a five-cent idea in a ten-dollar sentence.” The same principle applies to the words that fill the sentence. As Stephen King said, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”

I follow a “two-line rule”: whenever I see a sentence that exceeds two lines on the page, I ask whether I can break it into two sentences. Then I ask whether I’m using plain language. And whether I’m adhering to Strunk & White’s famous edict to “omit needless words.” 

Shorter is better. 

3. Cock Your Ear

Speaking of Strunk & White, I agree with their advice that sometimes “the rules,” like my two tips above, must give way to the ear: They wrote, “The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear.” 

For instance, if Abe Lincoln had followed my first two rules, “Four score and seven years ago” would have become “Eighty-seven years ago.” But Lincoln trusted his ear and chose cadence over plain words and brevity. Similarly, consider the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,* promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

What’s a “more perfect Union”? And four lines? Under my first two rules, the revised version might look like this:  

“We the People establish this United States Constitution. We do so to improve the union, establish justice, insure tranquility, provide defense, and secure liberty.”  

It’s shorter, but not better. 

Justice Elena Kagan, who some regard as the best writer on the Court, is a master at crafting clear opinions with a unique voice. She uses plain language, pithy examples, and colloquialisms (on occasion even citing Spider Man, Star Wars, and Dr. Seuss). She trusts her ear. 

Cocking your ear is even more important when writing thrillers. Thriller writers aren’t turning in an English essay, but trying to create atmosphere, capture the imperfections of speech in dialogue, and ratchet up anticipation and suspense. 

Consider the opening sentence from one of my favorite thrillers of the past few years, I Am Pilgrim

“There are places I’ll remember all my life—Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother’s bedroom on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theatre of Death.”

This sentence is long and contains many ideas, but it pulls you in. 

I think even Grammar Girl would agree, sometimes you’ve just gotta throw out the technical rules, and follow your ear.  

* British spelling and how it actually appears in the document. Note also that common nouns were capitalized in English at the time the Constitution was written.

Anthony Franze is a lawyer in the Appellate and Supreme Court practice of a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm, and author of thrillers set in the nation’s highest court, including THE ADVOCATE’S DAUGHTER (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), and THE OUTSIDER (St. Martin’s Press, March 21, 2017).

The $10 Million Comma

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People have such strong opinions about the Oxford comma that in 2013 the satire site The Onion published an article titled “4 Copy Editors Killed in Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence,” which ended by lamenting an innocent bystander who committed suicide after being “caught up in a long-winded dispute over use of the serial, or Oxford, comma.”

But that little comma before the and in a series like red, white, and blue is no joke for contract lawyers. Last week, news broke that the Oakhurst Dairy in the state of Maine would have to pay its milk-truck drivers approximately $10 million because of a missing serial comma in Maine's overtime law.

In this class action case, the two sides were arguing about the duties employees do for which they don’t get overtime pay. This is the ambiguous sentence that describes the exemptions:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

  1. Agricultural produce;

  2. Meat and fish products; and 

  3. Perishable good.

The drivers do distribute perishable goods—milk—but the important part is that there is no comma after the word shipment in the phrase packing for shipment or distribution, therefore the drivers argued that the word distribution is modifying packing and isn’t a separate thing that makes them exempt.

In other words, the drivers said, “We don’t package milk” so we aren’t exempt from overtime pay, and the dairy said, “Wait a minute, you distribute perishable goods, so you are exempt.” And this all rests on how you interpret the final part without a serial comma: packing for shipment or distribution of…perishable goods.

Complicating matters is that Maine Legislative Drafting Manual tells lawmakers not to use serial commas—an outrage if you ask me because as the court decision pointed out, the addition of a serial comma would have made the meaning absolutely clear: it would have clearly marked distribution as a separate activity. 

Instead, lawmakers left it out.

The Maine Manual actually warns lawmakers about sentences just like the one in question—where a list item is modified, and it says that instead of trying to solve the problem with a comma, they should rewrite the entire sentence so they don’t need one.

But they didn’t, which left the diary and the drivers with an ambiguous sentence. Worth $10 million.

An earlier court ruled in favor of the dairy, but now the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has overturned that ruling in favor of the drivers. Circuit Judge David J. Barron wrote the opinion, which is more pleasant to read than most court documents I’ve seen, opening “For want of a comma, we have this case.” 

There’s a long section in the middle about whether the words shipment and distribution are synonyms, and then we get to a grammatical argument: that each of the words that describes an exempt activity—canning, processing, preserving, and so on—are gerunds, but shipment and distribution are both nouns. 

Ah ha!” said the drivers. This means shipment and distribution both serve the same function, and it’s a function that is different from the gerunds, also known as the exempt activities. They argue that if distribution of perishable goods were an exempt activity, it would have been called distributing perishable goods. And the court agreed. Boom. $10 million.

This isn’t the first time a court case has hinged on a comma either. Back in 2006, a Canadian company lost a million-dollar case that came down to a comma before a modifying phrase. 

As the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual noted, “Commas are probably the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks in legal drafting and, perhaps, the English language. Use them thoughtfully and sparingly,” and I would add “use them with extreme caution when modifying phrases are involved and millions of dollars could be at stake.”

Sources

Norris, Mary. “A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma.” The New Yorker. March 17, 2017.

Victor, Daniel. “Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute.” The New York Times. March 16, 2017. 

O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. 2017.

Maine Legislative Drafting Manual. p. 113. 2009.

Chicago Updates: Stop Capitalizing 'Internet' and Hyphenating 'Email'

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Chicago Manual of Style Updates 2017

Big style news often breaks at the annual American Copy Editors Society (ACES) meeting, and this year is no exception. Carol Fisher Saller, the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style's online Q&A and @SubvCopyEd on Twitter, gave a presentation this morning about updates that will appear in the 17th edition of Chicago that will come out in September, and she didn't waste any time getting to the good stuff:

Internet will be lowercase.

Email will lose the hyphen.

People in the room reported that attendees cheered the news:

 

The 17th edition will also have recommended citation styles for Facebook and Twitter and other types of social media posts. 

This article will be updated if Saller announces Chicago is striking whom from the lexicon or accepting the singular they.

 


"Between," "Compared to," and "Compared With"

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Verbal ambiguity can lead to a range of confusing scenarios. Rob Reinalda explains:

How to Use “Between”

Someone once said, “Between Springfield and St. Louis there’s only one brain surgeon.”

“Oh,” came the puzzled reply. “Do you mean that if you combine all the medical professionals in those two cities, there’s only one brain surgeon?

“Or do you mean that within the territory that one must traverse to pass from one city to the other, there’s only one brain surgeon?”

Turns out, it was the latter—there's only one brain surgeon practicing in the region between Springfield and St. Louis.

As with many words that have multiple interpretations or applications, between can create confusion.

“Between 2003 and 2004… ” one might write.  Guess what? There is nothing between 2003 and 2004. There’s not an infinitesimal fragment of time there; it’s one year or the other. 

If you use between 2003 and 2004 construction, you may be trying to describe a time spanning all or part of those two years or you may be trying to contrast one year against the other, and there are better ways to do both.

For example, let's say you want to talk inclusively about 2003 and 2004. You could write In 2003 and 2004 … or From 2003 through 2004 …

From 2003 through 2004 is still a bit nebulous, as you’re not specifying when in 2003 your starting point is. From the start of 2003 through 2004 … makes it clear that you mean from the beginning of 2003 through the end of 2004.

If you want to contrast two years, make that clear, too: In 2004, more than 3,500 bison flew out of the Buffalo airport, contrasted with 2003, when only 1,900 buffalo took wing.

How to Use "Compared To" and "Compared With"

As an aside, because “compared to" and "compared with” constructions are so widely—almost zealously—botched, spare yourself.  Use “liken to” and “contrast with,” and you’ll save yourself about a hundred bucks a year in headache remedies.  However, if you must, here’s the Quick and Dirty Tip:  “Compare to” refers to similarities, and “compare with” indicates considering both similarities and differences (1, 2).

For example, Squiggly could compare a flying bison's take off to that of a Chinook helicopter. When he uses "compare to," he's noting the similarity. On the other hand, Aardvark could compare a bison with a Chinook helicopter to look for clues about how a bison could fly. When he uses "compare with," he's examining both things that are the same between a helicopter and a bison, and things that are different.

"Between," the Preposition

Two more notes on “between.” It’s often used as a preposition, and when it is, use the objective case of the pronouns—“ just between you and me,” “that’s between him and her,” “there’s a rift between them and us.” 

"Between" Versus "Among"

We also recently covered the difference between the words between and among. As a brief review, you often use between when you're referring to two individuals or entities and among when you're referring to people or items in a larger group, but it's much more nuanced than that, so if you're interested, refresh your memory.

range

How to Use the Word “Ranges”

Make sure your range really spans something.

Very often a writer will use a range in mentioning a collection of distinct yet closely related elements: “Contributors range from internal communicators to external communicators to public relations professionals to journalists to bloggers.”  Gee, that’s not much of a range, is it?

The Quick and Dirty Tip on using the word ranges is this:  Make sure your range really spans something.  Imagine that the range is like the one in the song “Home on the Range”—offering a wide, expansive view, of an entire landscape from end to end. Your range can span many things—time, size, the alphabet, a continuum of dress designs throughout the ages.

  • The totem poles in the display ranged from three feet to four feet tall.

  • Her hair color over the years had ranged from platinum blond to raven black.

If you're describing a collection of things, use the words as diverse as or as varied as instead of range (3, 4):  His collectibles were as diverse as steam calliopes, odd-shaped persimmons, and Esperanto bartender guides.

Include also works. Contributors include internal communicators, journalists, and bloggers. Remember this, though: When you use include, don’t list every contributor (or whatever).  Those who are “included” are a subset of the entirety.

Related Articles

Ragan.com

This podcast was written by Rob Reinalda, executive editor for Ragan Communications(word_czar on Twitter), and I'm Mignon Fogarty, the author of the paperback book Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

References

  1. Garner, B. Garner's Modern American Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003, p. 172.

  2. Brians, P. Common Errors in English Usage. Wilsonville: William, James & Co., 2003, p. 45.

  3. McIntyre, J. Getting the Range. You Don't Say. http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2010/02/getting-range.html

  4. Walsh, B. Everything's Ranging. The Slot. http://www.theslot.com/range.html

AP Stylebook Updates: Singular 'They' Now Acceptable

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AP Stylebook 2017 updates

Every year, editors announce big stylebook changes at the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) annual meeting. It's where we first heard in 2011 that the Associated Press would no longer use a hyphen in email and in 2016 that the Associate Press would lowercase internet. Yesterday, the Chicago Manual of Style announced it would adopt these two styles as well, and now today, the AP is leading the charge again with these changes:

Gender-Related Entries

The presenters, Paula Froke (special liaison editor) and Colleen Newvine (product manager), saved the biggest news for last, but we'll start with it here:

singular they: The AP Stylebook now allows writers to use they as a singular pronoun when rewriting the sentence as plural would be overly awkward or clumsy. Example: The Obama administration told public schools to grant bathroom access even if a student's gender identity isn't what's in their record.

The style also allows writes to pair they with everyone in similar situations.

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.

his, her. AP style used to be to use he when gender is not known. This entry now refers to the entry on they, them, their.

homophobia, homophobic. Acceptable in broad references or in quotations to the concept of fear or hatred of gays, lesbians and bisexuals. In individual cases, be specific about observable actions; avoid descriptions or language that assumes motives. (The previous version of the Stylebook recommended against using these words.)

LGBT. LGBTQ. Acceptable in all references for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning and/or queer. In quotations and the formal names of organizations and events, other forms such as LGBTQIA and other variations are also acceptable with the other letters explained.

gender. The editors began the presentation by unveiling a huge new entry on gender including new entries on cisgender, intersex, transgender, and more.

Other Entries

autonomous vehicles. Do not use the term driverless unless there is no person on board who can take control in an emergency. They may be called self-driving cars. Describes cars or truck that can monitor the road and drive for an entire trip without intervention from a human. For vehicles that can do some but not all of the driving, such as some Tesla models, use the terms semi-autonomous or or partially self-driving.

Columbus Day. Added Indigenous Peoples Day reference, plus a separate Indigenous Peoples Day entry: A holiday celebrating the original inhabitants of North America, observed instead of Columbus Day in some U.S. localities. Usually held on the second Monday of October, coinciding with the federal Columbus Day holiday.

courtesy titles. In general, do not use courtesy titles except in direct quotations. When it is necessary to distinguish between two people who use the same last name, as in married couples or brothers and sisters, use the first and last name. The presenters gave the example that it would still be proper to refer to Mrs. Trump and Mrs. Obama if the courtesy title is needed for clarity.

cyberattack. One word. Often overused. A computer operation carried out over a device or network that causes physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption. The presenters said they consulted with cybersecurity experts who felt strongly about the "physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption" part.

Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program. Use the acronym DACA sparingly and only on second reference. Do not use DREAMers or dreamers to describe DACA recipients.

esports. As with frequent flyer, the AP consulted people in the esports industry before deciding the recommend spelling should be esports without a hyphen.

fact checks, fake news. Holding politicians and public figures accountable for their words often requires reporting or research to verify facts that affirm or disprove a statement, or that show a gray area. Fact-checking also is essential in debunking fabricated stories or parts of stories done as hoaxes, propaganda, jokes or for other reasons, often spread widely on the internet and mistaken as truth by some news consumers.

Fake news may be used in quotation marks or as shorthand for the modern phenomenon for deliberate falsehoods or fiction masked as news circulating on the internet.

However, do not label as fake news specific or individual news items that are disputed. If fake news is used in a quote, push for specifics about what is meant. Alternative wording includes false reportserroneous reportsunverified reports, questionable reportsdisputed reports and false reporting, depending on the context. 

flyer, flier. AP changed the spelling from frequent flier to flyer after reviewing airline industry websites and determining this was the spelling most commonly used in the industry. The audience seemed happy about this change. Flyer is also the spelling for paper handouts, but flier is still proper for the phrase take a flier, meaning to take a big risk.

Oxford Comma (aka serial comma). The new Stylebook emphasizes that clarity is the bottom line. Although the normal style is to avoid the serial comma, use one if it is needed for clarity. This is not a style change, but a clarification because the editors noted that some writers were confused.

More. In some cases, the presenters noted that there will be new entries, but they didn't share the entire entries. Expect to see new information on these topics when the new AP Stylebook is released: immigration (they will bring immigration-related entries that were scattered throughout the book together into one entry), cliches, television sets (based on input from the technology editor), and Uber and Lyft.

Thank you to all the people at #ACES2017 who tweeted from the presentation and to ACES for livestreaming (one word!) the presentation.

The new print AP Stylebook will be available May 31, 2017. Note that the AP Stylebook is updated every year, but the Chicago Manual of Style is updated less often. The last Chicago update was in 2010.

AP Style and Chicago Updates from #ACES2017

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This was a big style-update year at the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) meeting. The Associated Press usually announces style book changes at the meeting every year, but this year the Chicago Manual of Style also announced updates, which only happens every once in a while. The last time Chicago made changes, for example, was when it released the 16th edition back in 2010. 

As we’ve talked about before, there are many style books and many different reasons to use them, but people tend to use the Chicago Manual of Style when they are writing books or doing some kinds of academic writing, and people tend to use the AP Stylebook when they are writing for newspapers and websites—although, of course, there are other reasons to use both.

Chicago Manual of Style Updates

Carol Fisher Saller, the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style's online Q&A and the author of The Subversive Copy Editor (@SubvCopyEd on Twitter), gave a presentation at the ACES conference on the major updates you’ll find in the 17th edition of Chicago which will come out in September, and she didn't waste any time getting to the good stuff, announcing that the word internet will now be lowercase in Chicago style and that the word email will lose the hyphen. 

Both these changes were popular in the room and on the internet, where most people were glad to have Chicago come into line with changes other style books have been making over the last few years.

‘Ibid.’ versus Short Citations

Another significant change is that the 17th edition will recommend using shortened citations instead of using ibid. when you have multiple references in a row from the same source.  

Ibid. is a Latin abbreviation that means “in the same place,” and in the past you used it to keep from having to write out identical or similar citation information over and over again. For example, if reference 20 was for page 56 of a book, and reference 21 was from page 68 of the same book, you could write out all the information for the book in reference 20, and then in reference 21, you could just write Ibid., 68. to let readers know all the information was the same as the previous reference, except for the page number. 

This saves a lot of typing, but the problem is that in electronic documents, citations are often active, which means you can sometimes click on reference 21 and go right to it without ever seeing reference 20. So if you see ibid., then you have to go searching for the reference before it to find the information you need. That’s a pain, and it’s an especially big pain if you have a bunch of ibid. references in a row, so you have to keep going back and back until you find the first reference for all the ibids.  

To solve these problems, Chicago now recommends using shortened citations instead of ibid., and it sounds like the format for shortened citations is the same as it was in the 16th edition.

Twitter and Facebook Citation Formats

In another citation-related update, the 17th edition will include citation styles for Facebook posts, tweets, and other types of social media posts, but Saller didn’t reveal what they are yet. I presume it will all become clear when the new Manual of Style will be released in September. One thing that seems funny now is that she said when the last edition of Chicago came out in 2010, they didn’t include a Twitter citation format because they thought Twitter might be just a flash in the pan.

And yet it was on Twitter, by following the #ACES2017 hashtag, that I was able to follow along and learn about all these updates even though I wasn’t able to attend the conference in person.

‘US’ versus ‘United States’

A small change that was nonetheless cheered by people on Twitter was that Chicago will now allow writers to use the abbreviation US for United States as a noun as well as an adjective. In the 16th edition, the entry on “US” versus United States said, “In running text, spell out United States as a noun.”

For example, you would have written In the United States, people tend to spell the word graywith an A, but now in Chicago style it’s also OK to write In the US, people tend to spell the word graywith an A.

Hyphens in Chicago Style

Moving on to punctuation, Saller says Chicago strengthened its general aversion to hyphens, but is going to make some hyphenation-related updates and keep the huge hyphenation table, which makes me happy because I refer to that table a lot. Despite the stated hyphenation aversion, she did mention two words that will now explicitly be hyphenated: decision-making (which was previously two words, also known as an open compound) and head-hunting (which wasn’t in the 16th edition).

Comma Changes and Clarifications

Finally, Saller reviewed changes and clarifications to a couple of comma entries. 

First, commas are typically used to introduce quotations after phrases such as Squiggly said and Jeffrey asked, but the new edition of Chicago will clarify an instance when a comma isn’t needed: “When a quotation forms a syntactical part of the sentence, no comma is needed to introduce it.”

Second, Chicago no longer calls for a comma after the abbreviation etc. unless the surrounding grammar calls for it. The current Chicago entry says that if you write something like She usually plays puzzle games such as Candy Crush, Triple Town, etc., when her kids are at soccer practice you’d put a comma after etc. But the new edition says to leave out the comma, which makes sense to me because if etc. were the name of another game, you wouldn’t put a comma there, and it doesn’t seem like an abbreviation for and other things should need one either.  

But if the sentence itself would call for a comma using something other than etc., use a comma where you normally would. For example, you’d use one in this sentence: She used to play puzzle games such as Candy Crush, Triple Town, etc., but lately she’s been listening to audiobooks instead. You use a comma after the etc. in that sentence because you’re joining two main clauses with a conjunction, and whether there’s an etc. there or some other word, the grammar of that sentence calls for a comma.

So those are the major Chicago Manual of Style updates, although I’m sure there will be many more small changes to discover once the new edition becomes available in September. And note that once the 17th edition is available on the Chicago website, Saller said they will no longer support the 15th edition. In other words, online subscribers will continue to have access to the two most recent editions like they do now. 

Keep reading for AP Stylebook updates.


AP Style Updates

Next, let’s talk a bit about the updates to the AP Stylebook. There seemed to be a lot more updates than there were to Chicago, or it could be that the AP is just a little farther along in the release process because these updates are on the AP website now and go into effect immediately. 

I already did a long article on the website about the updates, and I’m talking with ragan.com about doing an updated AP Stylebook web course, but I’ll still go over some of the major or more interesting changes today in the podcast.

Technology-Related Updates

The editors presented a few additions related to new or newish technology. There’s  a new entry for autonomous vehicles for example, which can also be called self-driving cars. But don’t call them “driverless” unless there isn’t a human backup driver. And reserve the terms autonomous and self-driving for cars or trucks that can monitor the road and drive for an entire trip without human help. For vehicles that can do some but not all of the driving, such as some Tesla models, use the terms semi-autonomous or partially self-driving.

Another new entry is for the term cyberattack, which is one word and the editors noted is an often overused word. Throughout the presentation, it was interesting to hear the editors talk about how they consulted with experts in different fields for certain entries, and cyberattack was one of those entries. The definition of cyberattack is a computer operation carried out over a device or network that causes physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption, and the presenters said that the cybersecurity experts felt strongly about the "physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption" part—that it isn’t a cyberattack unless it meets at least one of those criteria. For example, someone who just messes with a company’s homepage is an online vandal or cybercriminal, but if someone wipes an entire data center full of computers bringing down half the internet, that person is properly described as a cyberattacker. 

Esports is another new entry, and interestingly, at least to me, I had never heard the term before. But the morning before the AP presentation, my husband was telling me about a fascinating article about how big the esports industry is and how some colleges are giving scholarships to gamers who participate in esports competitions. And then esports also showed up as a new entry in the Stylebook, which defines it as competitive multiplayer video gaming. Again, they consulted with people in the esports industry before deciding to style the word without a hyphen.

The final technology-related entry I’ll talk about today is the virtual reality, augmented reality entry, and the Stylebook treats these two terms differently because the editors believe people are more familiar with the concept of virtual reality than augmented reality. Therefore, it’s OK to use VR to abbreviate virtual reality on the second reference, but not OK to abbreviate augmented reality as AR. People are less likely to know what that means, so for now, you should continue to spell it out. 

General Updates

Next are a few general updates to existing entries.

For courtesy titles such as Mr. and Mrs, the AP now says not to use courtesy titles except in direct quotations. If you need to distinguish between people who use the same last name, such as married couples or brothers and sisters, they recommend using the first and last name in your text.

The spelling of flier/flyer got an update, and I’ve always found this to be a confusing topic because the AP didn’t match a lot of other sources, but now they do. Yay. It’s now more clear that if it’s a handbill, you spell it flyer. Frequent flyer is also spelled with a Y, which the AP says is a change it made after surveying airline industry websites. So now, pretty much the only time you need to use the flier spelling is in the idiom take a flier, which means “to take a big risk.”

Finally, we can hardly talk about Stylebook updates without someone bringing up the serial comma (or Oxford comma), right? The AP Stylebook still does not recommend the comma before the final and in a simple series such as red, white, and blue, but the new entry does clarify that there are many instances where the serial comma is needed for clarity, and when it is, AP writers should use it. This was always the rule, but they felt like a lot of people weren’t getting it, so they rewrote the entry to try to make it more clear. 

Grammar Girl TED talk.

Gender-Neutral Pronouns: Singular ‘They’

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gender neutral pronoun singular they

It was only about a year and a half ago that I did a show about using they as a singular pronoun, but I told you this was an active area of language change, and there’s been enough new change that you need an update.

When we’re talking about the singular they, we’re usually talking about using they in sentences like these:

  • Tell the next caller they won a car.
  • Every student should thank their teacher.
  • Who left their coat on the playground?

In these sentences, we’re talking about one person, but we don’t know whether that person is male or female. In the past, people might have written Tell the next caller he won a car or Tell the next caller he or she won a car, but as we’ll see, more people are starting to accept the pronoun they in sentences like these.

Back at the end of 2015, Bill Walsh admitted the singular they into the Washington Post style guide, and the attendees at the American Dialect Society annual meeting voted to make the singular they the word of the year. 

Now both the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style have updated their style guides to be more accepting of they as a gender neutral singular pronoun. But this is still an active area of language change, and the two style guides still disagree about how much they accept the singular they.

First, I’ll tell you about the specific changes, and then I’ll wax philosophic about what it all means (or something like that).

Chicago Manual of Style Update: Singular ‘They’

The Chicago Manual of Style took the more timid position of the two stylebooks. In the 17th edition, which will come out in September, the editors first distinguish between formal English and informal English.

Singular ‘They’ in Formal English (Chicago)

In formal English, Chicago would still rather have you avoid using they as a singular pronoun. However, you can tell that they’re struggling with the decision because the editors also want you to avoid gender-biased language, so they seem to grudgingly allow that if you can’t find another way to avoid using he as a generic pronoun, you can use they, even in formal writing. 

Carol Fisher Saller, who gave the presentation at the ACES conference about the style guide updates, described meetings in which some editors wanted to go further than this and allow they to be used more broadly in formal writing. Further, in a later update on the Chicago website, they note that Chicago supports flexibility, writing

“Editors should always practice judgment and regard for the reader. For instance, some recent books published by the University of Chicago Press feature the use of the singular they as a substitute for the generic he. Context should be a guide when choosing a style, and the writer’s preferences should always receive consideration.”

So, in formal writing, the way I read Chicago style is that you should try hard to write around the problem, but if you can’t or you feel really strongly about proactively using they as a singular pronoun, it’s fine.

Singular ‘They’ in Informal English (Chicago)

When we move on to informal English, Chicago is more straightforward. They say it’s fine to use they as a singular pronoun in our “Tell the next caller they won a car” sentences.


‘They’ to Refer to a Specific Person (Chicago)

And then we get to a different kind of sentence: the kind of sentence we use for people who don’t want us to call them he or she. Again Chicago is straightforward, advising that “a person’s stated preference for a specific pronoun should be respected” even in formal writing. That means that if someone’s tells you their preferred pronoun is they, use it. 

I’m struggling to come up with an example sentence that couldn’t be rewritten, but here’s an example to start with that I found in a direct quotation in a recent New York Times article about Alessandro Moreschi, the Vatican’s last castrato singer:

It’s been written that they sang with a tear in each note.

You could easily change that to It’s been written that Moreschi sang with a tear in each note, but the speaker used they.

And here’s another one. This time from a review of the TV show Billions. There’s a character named Taylor whose preferred pronoun is they, so a sentence describing someone named Axe pitching an idea to Taylor reads like this:

Axe’s pitch to them shows a surprisingly progressive understanding of the value of workplace diversity.

Again, the writer could have substituted Taylor’s name and written Axe’s pitch to Taylor shows a surprisingly progressive understanding, but the writer had already used Taylor’s name a lot in the paragraph so decided just to go with Taylor’s preferred pronoun and use they.

Anyway, just because I can’t think of a sentence that doesn’t require you to use they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’m sure they exist. If you can think of one, leave it in the comments.

‘They’: A Singular or Plural Verb?

And if you need to pair the pronoun in cases like this with a verb that is different depending on whether it’s singular or plural, use a plural verb. For example, if you were talking about Taylor’s response to Axe’s proposal, you could write They were happy with the proposal. 

This seems to be one of the things that bugs people most about using they as a singular pronoun—I see a lot of snotty comments about how we should write They is—but it’s actually not unprecedented in English. The pronoun you is both singular and plural, but we always pair it with a plural verb. We write You are not going to like this whether we’re talking about one person or a room full of people.

So that’s Chicago. Let’s move on to the new AP style.


Singular ‘They’ (Associated Press)

The biggest difference between Chicago style and AP style is that AP doesn’t break it down as more acceptable in informal English and less acceptable in formal English—perhaps because the AP Stylebook is primarily for news writers its users aren’t quite as varied as Chicago’s. And even though the Associated Press also recommends writing around the problem whenever possible, the Stylebook’s tone also seems just more generally accepting or less grudging than Chicago’s, depending on how you look at it.

The AP also wants you to respect people’s pronoun choices, although they note that they do not use other gender-neutral pronouns such as xe or zir, so they aren’t that accepting. (Chicago didn’t specifically address that topic.)

And then they say, generally, that if you try and rewriting is too awkward or clumsy, it’s fine to use they in our “Tell the next caller they won a car” kind of sentence.

‘He’ as a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

A related change that is more about what isn’t in the Stylebook than about what is in the Stylebook is that it no longer says that it’s OK to use he as a gender-neutral pronoun. The last edition said it was OK, and the AP was one of the last stylebooks that I’m aware of to say so. They were the last holdout in my mind, and now they no longer specifically support it. Instead, the entry reads

“Do not presume maleness in constructing a sentence. Usually it is possible, and always preferable, to reword the sentence to avoid gender.”

And they go on to say again if rewriting isn’t possible, use they and just make sure your readers can tell you’re writing about only one person.

All the Feelings

So, what does it all mean? As I’m sure you’re probably aware, people have a lot of feelings about these changes. At the American Copy Editors Society meeting, a cheer erupted in the room when the Associate Press made their announcement. But I’ve also seen comments from people who feel like it’s the end of the world.

I did a poll on Twitter, asking people how they felt about the changes and giving just the very simple possibilities of yay, boo, and don’t care. And of the 581 people who responded (I presume most of whom follow the Grammar Girl account), 58% voted yay, 31% chose boo, and I raise a glass to the 11% who bothered to check the don’t care box. You can hang out with my husband someday.

singular they poll

So the majority like the changes, but if you don’t like them, you aren’t alone. And if you don’t like the singular they, you don’t have to use it unless you’re writing for an editor or client who wants you to follow AP or Chicago style or another stylebook that favors the singular they.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my TED talk because it was about this kind of language change, and my premise was that we vote on language change with our usage and our lobbying and our complaints. If I remember correctly, both the AP and Chicago presenters said they were reacting to comments they see on their website and social media accounts and to usage questions they see from writers. Gender-neutral pronouns have been a topic at the style guide sessions at the ACES conference for at least the last couple of years, and I know that neither the AP nor the Chicago editors consider themselves activists for language change. They tend to be relatively cautious and react to what they see in the real world and, in the case of the AP, what they see their writers doing. They follow. They don’t lead.

So, people voted. They voted when they left comments for the editors. They voted when they turned in their articles using the singular they, and eventually the editors took notice, tallied the votes, and decided it was time to make these changes.

One cautionary note that I think is worth making is that as far as I can tell, standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT still mark the singular they as wrong. So if you’re a teacher or studying for one of those tests, you still have to think of it as wrong, at least for the test. And as a teacher, I know it’s easier to teach students straightforward rules than to try to explain that it’s wrong on the test, but fine if you’re writing for a newspaper, but that’s the state of the language today. But don’t worry, it will probably change again in a couple of years. In fact I’m sure it will because if there’s one constant you can count on, it’s that language change is constant.

 

Preposition or Adverb?

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preposition or adverb

Today’s episode is about parts of speech, and the interesting gray area between prepositions and adverbs. Let’s start with the help section of the Grammar Girl Grammar Pop game, which has this rule about labeling parts of speech:

“Sometimes, words you might think of as prepositions act like adverbs. When a word such as over or up is modifying a verb, it’s acting like an adverb, but in Grammar Pop we still call it a preposition. Grammar Pop calls the words in the following sentences prepositions:

  1. She needed to speak up.
  2. The statue tipped over.

“It's the difference between what something is and what something does: It’s a preposition doing a job that is typically associated with adverbs. Rational people can disagree about this. It’s a gray area of grammar.” 

As a reminder, you may have learned that prepositions are little words like up, over, or with that express time, direction, and spatial relationships, while adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, and entire sentences. (The prepositions up and over in these examples are also a type of preposition called “particles,” but that’s a topic for a future episode!)

This decision to go with what the word is, instead of by what it does, is interesting because it is unusual. In other words, with most gray-area parts of speech, we grammarians do go by the job that the word does in the sentence to make the call. For example, the “-ing” form of a verb can be a present participle, like “The baby is crawling,” but the same -ing word can be a “gerund” instead of a participle. The gerund is the noun form of the -ing verb, like “Crawling is what babies do before they learn to walk.” In that sentence, crawling is the subject, and so it’s acting like a noun, not a verb, even though it technically describes an “action.” And, the -ing words can be adjectives, too! Like this: “Crawling babies can be a real handful.” In that sentence, crawling modifies the noun babies. Even though it seems tricky, we cannot call this third crawling anything but an adjective, because it describes a property of the babies, and is not a verb, nor a noun. You can read more about these -ing forms here and here

The point is, few grammarians would lump all three -ing word types together as one part of speech, and yet, many grammarians keep the “adverb-like” prepositions that we talked about earlier as prepositions, even though they are doing more of an adverbial job. It seems that “adverb” is a part-of-speech category whose members run on a spectrum from “fully adverbial” to “barely adverbial.” In fact, some linguists refer to adverbs that end in -ly, like fortunately or quickly, as “indisputable adverbs”! (2) So why is that? We’ll talk about four possible explanations.

What Makes Some Adverbs Controversial, and Why Do Grammarians Classify “Adverb-like” Prepositions as Prepositions?

Let’s back up and look more closely at those controversial prepositions described in the Grammar Pop instructions. According to traditional grammar, we all agree that the word inside in this sentence is a preposition:

  1. Get inside the castle!

We call inside a preposition because it has an object—the castle. But, in this next sentence, many people call the word inside an adverb:

  1. Get inside!

They call that inside an adverb because without the castle, there is no object of the preposition, and all that inside can modify is the verb get.


It may seem like a no-brainer to label all prepositions as adverbs when they modify verbs (again, that’s in those cases when they have no object). Indeed, decisions like this are a common problem to solve in related fields like computational linguistics. Computational linguistics is a science that does things like create software to do language-related tasks, such as translate written language, program voice recognition software for when you call an automated 800 number, or tag (which means “label”) the parts of speech of written words. For example, here in an early computational linguistics article, the tagging software that the authors describe had an extra portion of code to teach the computer when to call as a preposition, and when to call as an adverb. For example, in this next sentence, the first time we use the word as, it’s an adverb, and the second time, it's a preposition:

  1. The Catskill mountains are not as (adverb) tall as (preposition) the Himalayan mountains.

The first as is an adverb because it modifies the adjective tall, but the second as is a preposition because it acts as a comparison, and the noun phrase the Himalayan mountains is arguably the object of the preposition.

The Adverb/Preposition Distinction Is Not Straightforward

Now, let’s go over some fascinating theoretical arguments for why “adverb” may not always be the best label for those prepositions with no object. Even syntacticians disagree, but their reasons are interesting.

Adverbs tend to be considered grammatically optional. 

First, adverbs tend to be considered grammatically optional. In other words, they add detail and meaning to the sentence, but don’t cause the sentence to be wrong if they’re removed. “Jennifer runs fast” and “Jennifer runs,” without the adverb fast, are both grammatically correct. Prepositions, on the other hand, play a much more important role in the grammar of their sentences. In that way, we could argue that in “Get inside!”, inside is not grammatically optional (because “Get!” alone means something else, if anything). This makes inside a lot more like a preposition than an adverb, even though some grammarians would call it an adverb.

A second argument in favor of the preposition label is the fact that the sentence “Get inside!” may be a case of what linguists call “ellipsis.” (It’s not the same as the punctuation, but it’s a similar concept: Think of the way the three-dot punctuation mark is used to show a trail-off of missing words.) Speakers frequently “elide” words, which means that they are not spoken, but they are implied. We know they are there, but it may be redundant to say them out loud. In other words, if I point to the castle and shout “Get inside!” some linguists might argue that inside does indeed have an object—the castle—it’s just that this object is provided by context, and is not needed in the grammar of the sentence. The linguistic study of when context interacts with syntax is called “pragmatics.”

A third pro-preposition point is that these controversial adverbs fail certain syntactic adverb tests. For example, take the prepositions inside, up, around, and over. We know that adverbs can modify adjectives, like incredibly in “She is incredibly smart” (incredibly is an adverb modifying the adjective smart) and they can modify other adverbs, like incredibly in “She drove incredibly fast.” (Incredibly is an adverb modifying the other adverb fast.) However, the preposition around is different: We can’t say “She is around smart,” and if we say “She drove around fast,” around is not modifying the adverb fast. The preposition inside has similar problems: “She is inside smart” and “She is inside fast,” show that inside fails the adverb tests, making many of us inclined to call it a preposition no matter what job it does. (2) This shows that while incredibly is an “indisputable” adverb, prepositions like inside and around when they have no object fall further away on the spectrum of adverbs, so saying that inside is an adverb just because it has no object may not be 100% right. Even though not all adverbs pass all syntactic adverb tests, some members are more controversial than others. Remember that those “indisputable” “-ly” adverb members, like incredibly, on the other hand, are not controversial! We’re all in agreement about those.


Transitivity Is Not Just for Verbs

Finally, here’s the most interesting line of reasoning in defense of the preposition label for words like up in the sentence “She needs to speak up” and inside in “Get inside.” You may have heard of “transitivity” as a property of verbs. For example, snore is intransitive, because it never takes a direct object (a direct object is a recipient of the action), while devour is transitive, because it sounds very strange without a direct object. She devoured. It just sounds weird. In other words, in English sentences, something edible must be devoured. Further, there is an interesting middle ground for verbs that alternate, such as fly: They can be both transitive and intransitive, in different sentences. You can fly a plane, which is a transitive use of fly with the direct object a plane, but you can also just fly. (Wouldn’t that be nice!) Snore, on the other hand, is called “obligatorily intransitive,” because it really can’t alternate or be used transitively (again, “used transitively” means “used with a direct object”). You can’t really snore anything. Another example of an obligatorily intransitive verb is sneeze. Let’s re-cap: “Neil flies (transitive verb) planes (direct object).” “Neil flies (intransitive verb).” You can also read more about transitivity here.

Now, by the way: Some of you may be trying to find examples of forcing an obligatorily intransitive verb like snore to take an object. A common example people come up with is “But, I can say, ‘He snored the night away’!” That sentence is metaphorical, and it may seem like the night is the direct object of snored, but it technically isn’t. The night is not actually being snored, or affected by the snoring action in any way. This is one of the fun things about unconscious language and grammar rules: We “break” the rules in certain situations, such as when we want to create humor, metaphors and idioms, or poetry. In other words, remember that just because a verb has words after it, that doesn’t mean it is transitive. Here is another example: “Poppy sneezed all day.” In that sentence, sneeze is intransitive, because “all day” is an adverbial expression that indicates the duration of her sneezing action, but not “what” she sneezed, so it is not a direct object. 

OK so, when elements such as objects are required after a verb, those are called “arguments” by syntacticians. Arguments can be subjects, direct objects, or indirect objects, for example. Unlike optional words like adverbs, arguments are required by the grammar rules. Verbs take inventory, so to speak. For example, to give (like this):

  1. Eleanor gave a house to Kate.

usually requires three arguments: First, a subject: Eleanor to do the giving action. All English verbs require subjects. Second, a direct object: a house. Third, an indirect object: (to) Kate. We know all three are required in this context because “Eleanor gave Kate” sounds very strange. Kate is the indirect object, because she is the recipient of the direct object a house. Indirect objects usually have to or for in front of them, like “I baked a cake for our guest.” You can read more about direct and indirect objects here.

Prepositions have argument structure, too!

This system of arguments that verbs take, reject, and require is called “argument structure,” and here’s where things get interesting for prepositions: Prepositions have argument structure, too! For example, the preposition by is a transitive preposition. “The dress is by the chair” is fine, but “The dress is by” makes no sense at all. (You may be thinking that the chair in that sentence is the object of the preposition by, and that’s right.)

The point is that viewing prepositions as having transitivity is one way grammarians can reject that adverb label for the adverb-like prepositions. Some linguists theorize that those prepositions with no object are intransitive, the way the verb snore is intransitive, or the way the verb eat can be either one. This line of reasoning points out that when verbs like fly don’t have an object, we don’t re-name the part of speech of the verb; we just say that the verb fly is intransitive in that particular sentence. Therefore, logic suggests not re-naming prepositions as adverbs just because they have no object. In that way, in our “Get inside!” example, you could say that inside is just an intransitive preposition. (2) 

What’s neat about this theory is that there are actually a few prepositions that must always take objects, like to and toward. In other words, you can’t say “Andrea ran toward,” with no object. So, those prepositions are obligatorily transitive, like the verb devour. Also parallel to verb transitivity is the fact that most prepositions can alternate, which means both be prepositions (i.e., take an object) and be adverb-like prepositions that do the job of an adverbs. Two examples are prepositions down or around. These are parallel to those verbs that can be both transitive and intransitive, like fly or eat. Finally, there are prepositions that cannot ever take an object, like away and overhead, and so they are obligatorily intransitive prepositions, like our example intransitive verbs snore and sneeze. (2, 4) You’ve probably never heard the term intransitive preposition, but classifying prepositions without objects as intransitive—instead of as adverbs—can even be found in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (3, 5) Welcome to advanced linguistics!

As you can see, the distinction between adverbs and prepositions is an interesting gray area of grammar, and calling the adverb-like prepositions “adverbs” isn’t always the right choice. Just because a preposition does the job of an adverb, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is no longer a preposition. It seems best to choose the category you prefer as needed—but be prepared with a good defense for your choice!

This article was written by Syelle Graves, who has two master's degrees in linguistics. You can read more about her at syellegraves.com

References

(1)Brill, E. (1994). Some Advances in Transformation-Based Part of Speech Tagging. Spoken Language Systems Group Laboratory for Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(2)Burton-Roberts, N. (1991). Prepositions, adverbs, and adverbials. In I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, & J. Frankis (Eds), Language: Usage and description (pp. 159–172). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

(3)Cappelle, B. (2005). The particularity of particles, or why they are not just ‘intransitive prepositions’. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 18, 29–57.

(4)Emonds, J. (1972). Evidence that indirect object movement is a structure-preserving rule. Foundations of Language, 8(4), 546–561.

(5)Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

(6)Myler, N. (2017). Personal communication.

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