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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged grammar

1. October 1, 2012 03:02 PM

   ‘They’ said so

   Pronouns without sex

   By Merrill Perlman

   Whenever anyone who loves language wants to start a robust discussion, they have only to mention “gender-neutral pronouns,” such as “they” in this sentence. The problem is that “anyone,” an indefinite pronoun, is singular, so it needs that singular verb “loves.” When the sentence gets back to “anyone’s” starting a discussion, a third-person singular pronoun is needed. But English has...

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2. March 5, 2012 01:04 PM

   @#?

   How to quote e-mail, tweets, and such

   By Merrill Perlman

   BREAKING: Palm Beach Sheriffs Office tells @SusanCandiotti that the bomb squad is investigating a suspicious pkg near #Rush #Limbaugh home How would you quote that tweet, sent last week? As it was tweeted? Or would you write “The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office tells Susan Candiotti that the bomb squad is investigating a suspicious package near Rush Limbaugh’s home”? Or something...

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3. February 6, 2012 05:52 PM

   Addressee Unknown

   Another comma goes AWOL

   By Merrill Perlman

   The Super Bowl is over, thank heavens, so all those incorrectly punctuated signs rooting for one team or another can come down. You know the ones: They say “Go Giants” or “Go Patriots.” In telling the Giants (or Patriots—no partisanship here) to “go,” the sign is making a direct address to the team. And in direct addresses, the person or...

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4. June 6, 2011 02:38 PM

   Appositive Negatives

   Some things are not unique

   By Merrill Perlman

   Last week, we talked about setting a parenthetical description off with commas in the grammatical phenomenon known as an “appositive.” Now, we’ll discuss how to apply it to everyday descriptions introduced by the articles “a/an” and “the.” “President Obama saw a movie” tells you about the activity, but not what movie he saw. Adding that information may require a comma,...

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5. March 19, 2012 03:03 PM

   Beggars Can Be Choosers

   Questioning the questions

   By Merrill Perlman

   Every so often it’s important to revisit an issue, to clarify or modify it, depending on the circumstances. It “begs the question” whether revisiting something is needed. After all, revisiting is important, because it allows revisiting, which is important. And if it’s not important, it “begs the question,” why ask about revisiting at all? There. All three uses of “beg...

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6. July 30, 2012 03:00 PM

   Bell curves

   Lots of “ring” words

   By Merrill Perlman

   “You must be a ringer,” the journalism instructor told the student, who insisted that, though he had many years of experience in other jobs, he had never been a journalist. “I admit I had to look that term up,” the student said later.” I wasn’t sure if it calling me a ringer was a compliment or an insult.” Compliment, but...

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7. June 13, 2011 02:28 PM

   Call Me ‘Al’

   Another confusing suffix

   By Merrill Perlman

   Is an appliance “electric” or “electrical”? Is Sarah Palin visiting “historic” sites or “historical” sites? Is being “politic” the same thing as being “political”? Our tour of the wacky world of English continues. The suffix “-al,” Webster’s New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition) says, creates an adjective meaning “of, like, or suitable for.” That’s easy when dealing with some words:...

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8. April 23, 2012 12:57 PM

   Climate Change

   Weathering a climax

   By Merrill Perlman

   An extension of a federal highway program passed the House recently, over the objections of some Democrats. “Even as they were approving the measure in an anti-climatic voice vote, Democrats sharply criticized Republicans for not accepting a two-year, $109 billion version of the transportation measure the Senate had approved on a bipartisan vote earlier this month,” one news report said....

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9. January 24, 2012 11:51 AM

   Confidence Trick

   Scams ‘R’ Us

   By Merrill Perlman

   In an episode of Dragnet from the late nineteen-sixties, Joe Friday is assigned to the “bunco squad,” where he and his partner, Bill Gannon, bust a woman running a “Ponzi scheme.” We’re all too familiar with what a “Ponzi scheme” is, thanks to Bernard Madoff and his ilk. (Charles Ponzi ran a pyramid scene in 1919, forever lending them his...

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10. November 7, 2011 03:45 PM

    Conjunction-itis

    What about ifs, ands, or buts?

    By Merrill Perlman

    Many generations of students have had certain grammar “truths” drilled into their little heads. One is the “myth” that infinitives can’t be split. But today we’re going to discuss the myth that sentences can’t start with conjunctions. (Actually, whether teachers do indeed prohibit conjunctive beginnings seems to be almost as much a myth as the prohibition itself. But more on...

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11. June 19, 2012 06:50 AM

    Digging in

    The etymology of a “clawback”

    By Merrill Perlman

    “Jamie Dimon: JPMorgan Will Likely Claw Back Pay From Responsible Executives,” the headline said. Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, was telling the Senate Banking Committee that the firm would probably seek to reclaim some pay and bonuses from those involved in the firm’s $2 billion trading loss. What a wonderful image: bankers digging in their “claws” to wrest bundles of cash...

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12. June 5, 2012 06:50 AM

    Empty pockets

    A phrase with several meanings

    By Merrill Perlman

    Max Crittenden posted on Language Corner’s Facebook page: I’m seeing some peculiar usage (misuse, to my mind) of the phrase “out of pocket”. “My housekeeper has injured her leg and will be out of pocket for a while.” “Sorry, I’ve been out of pocket and haven’t gotten to your request.” Is anyone else noticing this? To me, “out of pocket”...

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13. July 17, 2012 03:00 PM

    En-gendered

    Terms for sexual identity

    By Merrill Perlman

    Dealing with gender identity these days is a tricky business. And while we prefer to use “sex” to describe biological and procreative characteristics, “gender” has become the more common term to describe identity. A photo caption in The New York Times highlights the situation: A woman writing about her college experience said: “I used to say freshwoman until I was...

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14. May 9, 2011 02:55 PM

    Failure to Launch

    Adding “ing” makes a noun, or not

    By Merrill Perlman

    When the “launch” of the space shuttle Endeavor finally occurs, many “posts” will appear on blogs and news sites around the web until well past the “end” of the mission. And the poor “ing” ending for three nouns will be very lonely again. Nouns that end in “ing” are usually gerunds, which, simply put, are verbs acting as nouns for...

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15. October 9, 2012 06:50 AM

    Forward-looking

    Ways of telling the future

    By Merrill Perlman

    We have weather “forecasts,” budget “projections,” attempts at earthquake “predictions.” Most dictionaries say those are all synonyms for one another. So why doesn’t the nightly weather report call them “predictions” or “projections”? Because the weather people know just how fickle Mother Nature is. A “prediction,” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary says, is “an inference regarding a future event based on probability theory.”...

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16. June 27, 2011 01:12 PM

    Fraught Fest

    Can something be ‘fraught’ without ‘with’?

    By Merrill Perlman

    Kirk Arnott, a retired assistant managing editor of the Columbus Dispatch who keeps his hand sharp with part-time copyediting there, wrote Language Corner that a sportswriter turned in the following passage: A few weeks ago, the Ohio State basketball team entered the roiling rapids of the Big Ten schedule. It was undefeated then, but the way ahead was fraught and,...

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17. November 28, 2011 02:12 PM

    Friendly Fire

    Insulting without meaning to

    By Merrill Perlman

    As language and society evolve, words that were once considered merely slang sometimes take on an offensive odor. In the past twenty years, for example, many municipalities have renamed localities with “squaw” in their names after the belated realization that the word, flung about casually for decades by cowboys and Indians in westerns, is actually a vulgarity. Sports teams have...

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18. July 5, 2011 03:40 PM

    Gonna Wanna

    When dialects collide

    By Merrill Perlman

    Writing the way people speak is one way to make sure your copy doesn’t become bloviated or stodgy. But journalists have always taken great liberties with how they transcribe the way people speak. “Gonna” and “wanna” are endemic in spoken speech, for example. Whether they’re a good idea for written speech is open to interpretation. Seeing it, after all, often...

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19. October 22, 2012 03:16 PM

    However you want

    Who’s on first?

    By Merrill Perlman

    A Florida correspondent writes: My boss is obsessed with Strunk & White, and so tells me that I can never start a sentence with “however” when using it to mean “nevertheless.” I disagree with him and say that I can start a sentence with “however” when I mean “nevertheless” if I put a comma after the “however.” However (lol), he,...

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20. May 2, 2011 03:52 PM

    Hyphen-ation

    A little mark can make a big difference

    By Merrill Perlman

    During the recent gathering of the American Copy Editors Society, a lot of “hyphen” jokes made the rounds. One was “Why we need hyphens: Because thirty-odd editors is not the same as thirty odd editors.” In the first example, “thirty” and “odd” create a sort of number, and need to be joined together, the way “thirty-one” would be. In the...

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