Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly, with Blunderful Examples Drawn from Published Prose
Which of the following two sentences contains an accident of style? (1) "This remains one of the few pervasive observations that consistently describes risks of infection, hospitalizations and death from Covid-19 around the world"; (2) "This remains one of the few pervasive observations that consistently describe risks of infection, hospitalizations and death from Covid-19 around the world."
The first sentence (written by Jay S. Kaufman, a professor of epidemiology, and published in The New York Times SundayReview, September 12, 2021, page 2) is the faulty one. The construction "one of the few" will always be followed by a plural noun (in this case "observations") that will always require a plural verb. Thus, one observation describes (singular), while one of a few, or several, observations describe (plural). We would never say or write "These are the observations that describes . . ." It has to be describe.
"These are nerve-wracking concoctions," writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker's retrospective "Food and Drink: An Archival Issue," published September 6, 2021. (Gopnik's article is reprinted from April 9, 2007, and the quote appears on page 76.) Did you spot the wreck in that quotation?
To quote my own Accidents of Style: "The noun wrack means 'ruin, destruction.' It's 'an archaic variant of wreck,' says Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, that nowadays appears legitimately only in the expression wrack and ruin. In all other familiar contexts, the proper spelling is rack."
So you stretch something on a rack. When you stretch your brains, you rack them. And when something rattles your nerves, it's nerve-racking (as if your nerves had been stretched on a rack). Dictionaries often list nerve-wracking as a variant spelling, but dictionaries recognize anything that occurs frequently even if it's generally considered a mistake. Modern authorities on usage, including the style manuals of The New York Times and The Associated Press, staunchly favor nerve-racking and reject nerve-wracking.
"U.S. Magistrate Judge Tony Leung asked each man separately how he would plea, and each clearly responded: 'Not guilty,'" writes Amy Forliti for The Associated Press (September 15, 2021). Did you spot the accident of style in that sentence?
You could take issue with the colon after "responded" — and I would — as being overly strong and intrusive and better replaced by a comma or deleted. Thus, either "each clearly responded, 'Not guilty'" or "each clearly responded 'Not guilty'" is the better way to go.
But that's not the main problem here. "Plea" as a verb is northern English and Scottish dialect and nonstandard for "plead." A plea, as a noun, is your petition to the court. But the proper verb for petitioning a court is "plead." You don't "plea not guilty," you "plead not guilty."
And please pronounce "plead" to rhyme with "feed," and don't say or write "pled," which is also nonstandard and rejected in modern American legal usage.
Can you identify the two accidents of style in the following sentence fragment? "With seats in a NFL stadium filled to full capacity for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic . . ." (Fred Goodall writing for The Associated Press, September 10, 2021).
First, let's look at the choice between "a" and "an" before an initialism. (An initialism differs from an acronym in that you say the letters of the former but pronounce the latter as a word: e.g., we say A-T-M and R-S-V-P, which are initialisms, but we pronounce AIDS, PIN, and NASA as words, which makes them acronyms. A few examples are crossbreeds or go both ways; this small category includes SAT, which can be pronounced like "sat" or, more commonly, S-A-T; ASAP, which you hear either as A-S-A-P or A-sap; and HVAC, which is always H-vac.)
So the first accident in the sentence cited above involves the initialism "NFL" and the indefinite article that precedes it ("a" or "an"). If "NFL" were pronounced "niffle," as an acronym, writing "a NFL stadium" would be permissible because the reader would tacitly pronounce it "a niffle stadium." But that's not how we hear it in our heads; instead, we hear it as an initialism, N-F-L, and that requires "an": "an NFL stadium."
How do you determine whether to use "an" or "a" before an initialism? It's straightforward. If the first letter of the initialism begins with a vowel or vowel sound, use "an": thus it would be "a CIA investigation" but "an FBI investigation" because the /F/ in FBI begins with the vowel sound of short /e/. It's "a BMW dealership" but "an IBM computer" and "an EMT." Likewise, "an" should precede "MRI," because we pronounce "M" as /em/; and the aforementioned "RSVP," where the /R/ has the initial vowel sound /AH/; and "ATM," which begins with a vowel.
The second accident is a pleonasm — a type of redundancy involving the use of words whose omission would not affect the meaning, as one dictionary has put it. (For more on this topic, please see my essay on pleonasm in the sidebar to the right.) The writer says the stadium is "filled to full capacity." The problem is, "capacity" means "the largest audience that a place of entertainment can hold," and "to capacity" means "with all available room occupied" (OED). So, although a place can be filled to "half-capacity," once it's full it's "filled to capacity," not "filled to full capacity."
"'Last night was the worst that I've ever seen things,' said Hopps-Tatum, an SDSU alumni," write Gary Robbins and David Hernandez in The San Diego Union-Tribune ("SDSU Probing Raucous Weekend Parties," August 23, 2021, page A6).
It is an all-too-common blunder — even among those who graduated from college, and even among journalists who should know better — to misconstrue "alumni" as singular (meaning to use it for one person, male or female). Please memorize this distinction: "alumnus" is a male graduate; "alumna" is a female graduate; "alumnae" (uh-LUHM-nee) are female graduates; "alumni" are either male graduates or both male and female graduates. That's not so hard, is it? And one other word of advice: the clipped form "alum" is casual English and not appropriate in journalism or any formal communication.
Writers often have a rough time with homophones, the precise term for words that sound alike but have different spellings, meanings, and origins — as opposed to "homonym," which is often used in its place but which in careful usage refers to words that are spelled and sound alike but that have different meanings and usually different origins. You often see, for example, "pour over" when "pore over" (to examine closely) is meant. Or, sadly, "loose" used for "lose" or "they're" used for "their."
So now comes this egregious homophonic accident from the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune (August 9, 2021) in an article by sportswriter Mark Ziegler on the conclusion of the Tokyo Olympics: "But a few hours after a replica of Mount Fuji opened like flower pedals to reveal a cauldron that tennis star Naomi Osaka touched with the torch . . ." The writer (who gets a paycheck for this) needs to learn the distinction between flowers (which have petals) and bicycles (which have pedals).
And it would seem that The San Diego Union-Tribune has a special gift for publishing homophonic flubs because in an article titled "Students Walk Out to Protest School Dress Code" by Anissa Durham (August 9, 2021, page B3), she writes that some female students have been "called out several times for not wearing a bra, wearing loose tank tops and bearing a midriff . . ." Whoa, that's a grizzly accident of style! Let's get those homophones straight: The verb to "bear" means to carry, often to carry a burden. The verb to "bare" means to uncover, open to view. So those students were baring a midriff, not bearing one.
"Prevent heart attacks and cancers before they happen," says the brochure from a medical provider I have never heard of called Forward. It's always helpful to prevent things before they happen, just as it's nice to initiate things at the beginning, conclude them at the end, and look at things with your own eyes. We are a society deaf to pleonasm! This one could win the award for Worst Pleonasm of 2021. Please see my essay on pleonasm: link under "Articles" in the sidebar to the right.
"The 29-year-old emphasized that he has not rode a winner in the majors," writes Bryce Miller in The San Diego Union-Tribune (July 27, 2021, page D5). Has rode? Oy vey. This from a writer who gets paid a lot more than I do. Is it really that hard to get these irregular verbs straight? There aren't that many of them; try to memorize the proper conjugations. In this case: You ride today, you rode yesterday, and he/she has ridden, or you/we have ridden, in the past.
The headline in The San Diego Union-Tribune (May 12, 2021, page B1), says, "Resident Questions Inventory at Library: Former volunteer says Escondido shelves, once full with titles, now lay bare."
"Lay bare?" Whoever wrote that headline needs an immediate and punitive lesson in "lie/lay" literacy. For this instance, suffice it to say that "lay" is the past tense of "lie," so you could say that the shelves lay bare for a certain amount of time in the past. But you can't say they "now lay bare" because "now" puts things in the present tense, so the intransitive present-tense "lie" is required.
If that's all too much grammatical gobbledygook, think of it this way: You lie down now, you lay down last night, and you have lain down in the past. And something that is just reclining or at rest or inactive is not laying there, it's lying there. Cripes, what is wrong with people on this basic distinction?
And if you think it's just dumb journalists who screw up the "lay/lie" distinction, consider this sentence from Eley Williams's novel The Liar's Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 2020, p. 91): "You need to know you've lain a trap to catch anyone out." (This is a novel that purports to be, and has been widely praised for being, clever and fetching with its use of unusual words, so I'm aghast at how in the hell such an idiotic blunder could have been overlooked.)
"Lain" is not transitive, meaning it cannot apply directly to something, such as the noun a trap. It is the past participle of "lie," which is intransitive: you lie down (present), you lay down (in the past), and you have lain down (further in the past). "Lay" means to put or place, whether literally or figuratively, and it is a transitive verb. So if, in the past, you have put something down or put it in place, you have laid it, not lain it.
Update on the ongoing "lay/lie" illiteracy in The SaSn Diego Union-Tribune: "People lay out among the umbrellas at La Jolla Shores on Monday," begins the caption to the big photo on Page A1 (above the fold!) in the May 25th edition of the paper. Seriously? What are they laying out, a picnic?
Punctuation update: Did you read Lauren Oyler's charming essay on the "downtrodden" semicolon in The New York Times Magazine (February 14, 2021)? It was refreshing to see someone in this randomly punctuated epoch celebrate the underrated and oft-neglected "period on top of a comma," as Oyler puts it.
Sadly, most people don't know how to use a semicolon, so they ignore it. And when they do use it, the results are sometimes hideous. To cite just one example, Oyler notes that "some people will use a semicolon just before a conjunction: 'I ate three desserts yesterday; but my life didn't change.' I think that's terrible." So do I — or perhaps I could say, "She thinks it's terrible; so do I."
The chief function of the semicolon is to separate two independent clauses that are more closely connected logically than a sentence with a period followed by another with a period. Some have called the semicolon a strong comma; it shows the connection of the two independent clauses without committing the grammatical horror of a comma splice, as in "He didn't understand how to use semicolons, he used commas instead."
Which brings us to the pertinent accident of style. Here is a sentence, or sentences, from the news services of The San Diego Union-Tribune (March 3, 2021, p. A2) that is screaming for a semicolon: "NBC anticipated a ratings bloodbath, the only question was how much." A comma there is a disaster. A period would be banal. A semicolon, however, would silently connect the two independent thoughts and provide just the right amount of breathing room between them.
In an obituary (syndicated February 24, 2021) for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, and owner of the legendary City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, Janie Har and Hillel Italie of The Associated Press write that Ferlinghetti earned "a doctorate degree from the Sorbonne in Paris."
No matter how smart you think you are, or how many degrees you have hanging off your name, there is no such (legitimate) thing as a "doctorate degree." A doctorate is a Ph.D, or PhD, and just as you wouldn't write or say "Ph.D. degree," you shouldn't write or say "doctorate degree." The proper word in all contexts is "doctoral" (properly pronounced DAHK-tur-ul — not dahk-TOR-ul, please), as in a doctoral student, a doctoral dissertation, a doctoral degree.
And no matter how smart you actually are, which in the case of the late Christopher Hitchens is breathtakingly smart, you can still fall prey to an accident of style. In his book God Is not Great (2007, pages 144-145), Hitchens writes, "I am one of the very few people who has ever taken part in the examination of a sainthood 'cause,' as the Roman Catholic Church calls it."
No one would write "These are the very few people who has ever taken part . . ." But as soon as the words one of get mixed up in a sentence, many people wrongly persuade themselves that one now governs the verb so the verb must be singular. The grammatical truth is that when one of is followed by a plural noun (in this case "people") and who or that, the verb that follows must agree in number with the plural noun: "This is one of those blunders that are [not is] easy to make."
I just placed an order with lodgecastiron.com and their confirmation email began with this sentence: "We've received your order and our team is hard at work to sure everything sent your way meets our quality standards." Sure you are. But you need to proofread before you publish!
Here's a line from the lead article by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times SundayStyles section, January 17, 2021 (appearing on p. 8): " . . . the industry is one of the few major business sectors that has remained notably silent on the subject of the president . . ."
This is a classic accident of style involving the "one of" construction. What follows "one of" must be a plural noun, which will then require a plural verb. But writers often err by making the verb singular, as in the snippet above. It should be "one of the few business sectors that have . . ." The verb is not modifying "one"; it's modifying "sectors."
California Governor Gavin Newsom was called on the carpet in November 2020 for attending a dinner party at the renowned restaurant The French Laundry in Yountville, thus violating his own Covid restrictions. On Monday the 16th, he apologized publicly, and on Tuesday the 17th the Los Angeles Times reported that Newsom said, "Instead of sitting down, I should have stood up and walked back, got in my car and drove back to my house."
Watch your verb tenses, Governor. "I should have got in my car" is more British than American English, which prefers gotten, and "I should have drove" is semiliterate. Make that driven, please.
Have a look at this sentence, from an article by the chef Gabrielle Hamilton in The New York Times Magazine (November 8, 2020): ". . . I added a few precautionary and possibly overweaning instructions to the protocol just in case." Notice anything awry?
"Overweaning" is not, as far as I can tell, a recorded word. If it were, it would probably mean "cruelly denying nursing babies their breast milk." The proper word here is "overweening," meaning "arrogant, presumptuous, excessively self-confident," with the "ween" part coming from an obsolete word meaning "opinion, belief." I love Gabrielle Hamilton's writing, but unfortunately her copyeditor failed her on that one.
Consider this snippet, which appeared in The New York Times Book Review (November 1, 2020, p. 17): ". . . a commitment to pluralism is not merely a concession borne of ideological moderation . . ." The problem here is the use of "borne" instead of "born." The former refers to birthing (she has borne six children), producing (the tree has borne fruit), carrying (mosquito-borne disease), or enduring (the cost will be borne by employees), while the latter refers to actual or figurative birth (Jesus was born in Bethlehem; a story born of suffering). Thus, a burden is borne but an idea is born. Children are born, after which their care is (usually) borne by their parents.
At the Democratic National Convention (on August 20, 2020), the biographer and historian Jon Meacham delivered a speech in which he said that "a deadly virus is ravishing us." Whoops! He should have said "ravaging us." To "ravish" is "to drag off or carry away (a woman) by force or with violence (occasionally also implying subsequent rape)." To "ravage" is "to devastate, lay waste (land, a country, etc.), as by deliberate destruction or plunder." (Both definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary.)
It's rare to find an accident of style in The New Yorker, but in the August 3 & 10 issue (p. 68), in an article by Brooke Jarvis titled "Your Body Is a Wonderland," I came upon the classic (and viral) misuse of the plural "bacteria" for the singular "bacterium." Jarvis writes, and the putatively eagle-eyed copyeditors at The New Yorker did not blink, "Some scientists find that symptoms of eczema . . . can be treated with the application of a different bacteria." It should be "a different bacterium," the singular. "Bacteria" is plural, as in "these bacteria."
From an email to investors from J. P. Morgan (received March 27, 2020): "With the stimulus bill, this so called 'replacement rate' is likely to rise to 80%–90% through July." How many accidents of style do you detect in that one sentence? I see three.
First so-called should be hyphenated. Second, when you use so-called, what follows should never be in quotation marks. Third, you need only one percent sign to cover a range, so "80%-90%" should properly be "80-90%."
Recently I tried to email a letter to The New Yorker at their advertised address, themail@newyorker.com, and it got kicked back three times. Talk about lousy customer service. Or maybe they saw me coming with admonishments about two accidents of style. Anyway, for what it's worth I'm publishing the letter here with the satisfaction that it will not become the property of The New Yorker.
Dear New Yorker editors:
I admire Ian Frazier's writing and I laughed out loud for the first three paragraphs of his hilarious "Shouts and Murmurs" column "Etymology of Some Common Typos" (February 10, 2020, p. 23). But when I saw an egregious accident of style in the fourth paragraph, and then another in the fifth, I stopped murmuring and shouted, "Where is your Comma Queen, Mary Norris? How did you guys drop the ball here?"
Specifically: (1) ". . . our mistypings show that they often snuck in a seemingly gratuitous 'j' . . ."; (2) "And, remarkably, 'over' is one of those rare words that is exactly the same in every language . . ."
"Snuck" is a popular but still nonstandard past tense that reputable publications eschew — see Garner's Modern English Usage, for which I was a consultant. The proper form is "sneaked." And good copyeditors (sorry, but it's high time to close that) know that "one of" followed by a plural noun requires a plural verb: "The New Yorker is one of various reputable publications that are weird about their house style."
I will politely avert my gaze from your proclivity for "cooperate" and "preeminent" printed with diereses, and I can forgive your unnecessary hyphens in words like "reelection." I'll even give you a pass for your obsessive insertion of commas for readers in respiratory distress. But I couldn't overlook the two accidents of style noted above because they weren't quirks; they were indisputable mistakes, which The New Yorker prides itself on avoiding. Or has the stylebook been revised?
Good words to you,
Charles Harrington Elster
And now for something not so completely different. Do you know the difference between while and awhile? Do you write for awhile or for a while? Many people have difficulty with these distinctions, and even The New York Times erred when it printed an article by Peggy Orenstein ("Will We Ever Learn How to Talk About Sex?") in the SundayReview (January 12, 2020) that began with the words "Awhile back . . ."
While is a noun meaning "a period of time." Awhile is an adverb meaning "for a while, for a brief period of time." You can stay awhile (for a brief period of time) or you can stay for a while (for a brief period of time), but it's nonstandard and redundant to write stay for awhile. It's also nonstandard to write awhile back or awhile ago because awhile means "for a while," not "a period of time," which is the meaning of while. Make it a while back, a while ago.
Even the Authors Guild, the professional association I have been a faithful member of for many years, and from whom I rent this website, is not immune to accidents of style. In an unbylined newsletter article called "Update on AB-5 and Other Gig Worker Bills" (December 30, 2019), this sentence appeared: "[T]he agreement should be written as a copyright grant of a defined work without interim or ongoing obligations, and renumeration should be in the form of royalties and advances against royalties."
Did that use of renumeration leap out at you? It's the wrong word choice, based on a common mispronunciation. The proper word here is remuneration (ri-myoo-nuh-RAY-shin), which means "payment; money paid for work or a service." Renumeration (ri-n[y]oo-muh-RAY-shin) means "numbering again, recalculation." The confusion of these two words is so old and hoary that the Oxford English Dictionary records the misuse (earliest citation 1572).
"Flesh-Eating Bacteria Has Killed 7" reads the headline in The San Diego Union-Tribune (December 6, 2019, p. B1) to a story by Alex Riggins, who leads with the phrase, "A flesh-eating bacteria . . . has killed . . ." Do you see the all-too-common accident of style here?
Bacteria is a plural noun; the singular is bacterium. It's like the plural criteria, which is commonly misused for the singular criterion. If it were in fact more than one strain of bacteria that killed seven people, then the headline should say "flesh-eating bacteria have killed seven." But invariably in stories like these, as in this one, it's a single strain of bacteria that's the culprit, so the phrase should be "flesh-eating bacterium has killed seven."
This just in from the "What We Have Here Is a Failure of the Overeducated" Department: Ronan Farrow — a Yale Law School graduate, a writer for The New Yorker, an actor, and the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen — was interviewed on Amanpour and Company (November 12, 2019) about his new book Catch and Kill and his role in bringing to light various #MeToo abuses committed by the rich and powerful. During the discussion Farrow answered a hypothetical question by saying, "We would have ran with that."
For years now I've been hearing, to my great consternation, educated people misuse past participles of English verbs. They say "I could have ran" and "I should have went," which makes me wonder if they eat puh-sket-ee instead of spaghetti. In other words, this is the mistake of a five-year-old, and anyone older than that who has at least a fourth-grade education cannot be excused. I'm not sure how it came about that educated people have been messing up the past participles of irregular verbs (perhaps by foolish imitation?), but in the case of "run" and "go" I cannot issue a pass. It's you run, you ran, and you have run, and you go, you went, and you have gone. And that goes for should have, would have, and could have too. Honestly, I can't believe how prevalent this awful accident of style is getting. Maybe we need to have a National Irregular-Verb Understanding Day.
"It was not a majority consensus that told the Padres they should return to the brown-and-gold color base they wore in their first 16 seasons," writes Kevin Acee in The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 9, 2019, p. D6). The problem here is the misuse of the word "consensus." Do you know its proper meaning?
A consensus — and make sure to spell it right (not "concensus") — is a collective unanimous opinion. That's why "majority consensus" is wrong and the regrettably common phrase "general consensus" is redundant.
Find the accident of style in this sentence: "In its current form, Amazon harkens back to Big Business as it emerged in the postwar years" (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, November 2019, p. 56). If your eyes focused on "harkens," you found the problem. Harken, which is a variant of hearken, means "to listen, give one's attention to." Thus you cannot properly "harken/hearken back." The word required here, with back, is "hark," and the phrase "hark back" means "to refer to or recall an earlier time, topic, or circumstance." (See my Accidents of Style, page 184, for more info.)
Now consider this from the same Atlantic article (p. 59): ". . . it also has tributaries shooting out in all directions." This is a misuse of the word "tributary," which denotes something, such as a stream or river, that feeds or flows into a larger body of water. So tributaries can't logically shoot out; they have to feed in.
Objecting to Donald Trump's decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria (on Monday, October 7, 2019), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "a precipitous withdrawal" would benefit Russia, Iran, Syrian President Bashar Assad, and ISIS. For once in his life, McConnell was right about the politics, but he got the language all wrong.
"Precipitous" means "steep." Cliffs are precipitous. Declines in the stock market can be precipitous. The similar-sounding word "precipitate" (pri-SIP-i-tit) means "sudden, hasty," or "rash, impetuous." That's the word McConnell should have used.
Which word in the following sentence is an accident of style: "Roslyn Chenier . . . learned that her forbears had been owned by the Religious of the Sacred Heart when she was contacted by Sister Maureen J. Chicoine . . ." (The New York Times SundayReview, 8-4-19, p. 5). If you guessed "forbears," you're right. It should have been "forebears."
"Forbear," without the medial /e/, is a verb meaning "to refrain or abstain from" and is pronounced for-BAIR. The noun "forebear," with the medial /e/ (giving it the prefix "fore-," before), is a noun (usually used in the plural, "forebears") pronounced FOR-bair(z) that means "an ancestor." Another nonstandard variant to avoid is "forbearers."
Can you discern the error in this sentence: "Antarctica hasn't showed as much consistent warming as its northern Arctic cousin" (The Associated Press, July 2, 2019)? The proper and preferred past participle of the verb to show — meaning when it is combined with has, had, have, or having — is shown, not showed. So make that "Antarctica hasn't shown . . ."
Is it an extraordinary day or a tragic one when you find a language gaffe in The New Yorker? Granted, it doesn't happen often; in fact, if you don't count all the ridiculously unnecessary commas and the risibly precious diereses (two dots over the second of adjacent vowels to indicate a difference in pronunciation) in words like "cooperate," "preeminent," and "reelect," you'll go a couple of blue moons before you find a boo-boo in their pages. (I hate hyphenating "booboo," by the way, because it's crying out for closure, but the damned halfwit dictionaries say it should be hyphenated, jut like "half-wit").
So it is with the requisite surprise and sorrow that we find, in the Talk of the Town article "Good Fences" in the June 24, 2019, issue (on page 19), this sentence: "'They said that a vender was supposed to be mowing every week to keep the pollen count down.'" Although "vender" is listed in dictionaries as a variant spelling, it is "inferior," says Garner's Modern English Usage. Why would The New Yorker choose this obsolescent variant over the established "vendor"? It's like writing "acter," "docter," or "jurer." There aren't that many agent nouns ending in -or left. Just leave them alone.
Can you find the grammatical error in this sentence? "The circuit judges also cited the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Rust v. Sullivan, which upheld a similar Reagan administration rule that forbid Title X-funded providers from advocating abortion."
The past tense of the verb to forbid is forbade (properly pronounced for-BAD, not for-BAYD). The past participle (used with has, had, and have) is forbidden.
"Everything's going to be alright."
— Seen on the marble riser of a flight of stairs at the Ace Hotel, 20 W. 29th Street, New York City. No, everything's not going to be "alright" as long as there's a copyeditor alive. The style universe wants everything to be all right.
In response to what he called "a disturbing pattern of behavior" by the Trump administration toward Saudi Arabia, Senator Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, said that "Trump's eagerness to give the Saudis anything they want, over bipartisan congressional objection, harms American national security interest and is one of many steps the administration is taking that is fueling a dangerous escalation of tension in the region" (Washington Post syndicated article by Karoun Demirjian, June 5, 2019).
Did you spot the accident of style? It's the second "is" in the "one of many steps the administration is taking that is fueling . . ." The subject here is not "one" but "steps," so the verb should be "are": one of many steps the administration is taking that are fueling . . ." This error is rampant, so keep your eyes peeled for "one of the [plural noun] that [singular verb]" constructions, in which the verb should always be plural.
What's wrong with the following sentence (linguistically)? "The idea of the state financing diapers would take some getting use to for a lot of people" (Michael Smolens, The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 10, 2019, page B1).
If you guessed it's the nonstandard use of use to instead of used to, you're right. If you've done something habitually in the past, or if you want to say you're accustomed to something, you used to do it or you are used to it. The form without the /d/ is "inferior," says Garner's Modern English Usage.
It pains me deeply to report that Kevin Acee, sportswriter for The San Diego Union-Tribune, scored a hat trick of embarrassing accidents of style in just one brief article ("Padres Report," April 10, 2019, page D5), confusing effect and affect, misusing lay for lie, and losing track of the subject of his sentence. Here are the gaffes:
"It's the kind of grinding plate appearance the Padres have been talking about since spring training began—and have been using to great affect so far this season." As a noun, affect denotes a feeling or mood. The noun effect denotes a result or consequence.
"The concern was evident as Wieck looked on from the mound at Parra laying face down near the batter's box." To lay is to put or place: lay the book down. To lie is to rest, recline: I was lying down.
"Parra . . . suffered a cut lip after the pitch caromed off his shoulder and started in right field Tuesday." So the pitched ball also played right field? Nice trick. This boner reminds me of the most famous gaffe from Jerry Coleman, the longtime and beloved Padres announcer who was so infamous for his goofs from the booth that they invented a word for them: Colemanisms. In baseball lore, Coleman is right up there with Yogi Berra for the Blunderful Baseball Quotes award. Here's what Coleman said: "Winfield goes back to the wall. He hits his head on the wall and it rolls off! It's rolling all the way back to second base. This is a terrible thing for the Padres."
"Sotomayor responded that, with one exception, the defense lawyer could not have stricken any potential black jurors because Evans had already excluded them all," writes Adam Liptak of The New York Times in a syndicated article (March 21, 2019).
As an adjective, "stricken," meaning "afflicted," has its place: "stricken with disease"; "poverty-stricken." But as a past participle meaning "deleted, rejected, or nullified," "stricken" is "ill-advised," says Garner's Modern English Usage, and "grammatical authorities have long considered it inferior to struck." The writer and his editor may have been concerned that using "struck," the preferred form, would have made it seem as if the defense lawyer physically injured those jurors rather than rejected them, but that concern is exaggerated and baseless, as the context makes clear.
Get a load of this photo caption: "An American Economic Association survey shows that female economists have far worse experiences then male economists" (San Diego Union-Tribune, March 19, 2019, C3). As I'm fond of saying, Can you believe somebody got paid to write that sentence? If you can't distinguish between then, which generally refers to time, and than, which is used for comparisons, you need to repeat third grade.
From the Say It Again, Sam department: In The San Diego Union-Tribune (March 12, 2019, B6), James Hebert wrote, ". . . the kind of fear and desperation that AIDS engendered in America, back when the HIV virus had yet to be identified as the cause of the mysterious and terrible illness devastating the gay community."
Did you spot the redundancy? HIV is an initialism standing for "Human Immunodeficiency Virus," so writing "the HIV virus" repeats the virus part of "HIV." It's the same kind of redundancy we see and hear in "PIN number" and "ATM machine," where the N already stands for "number" and the M already stands for "machine." Hebert should instead have written "back when HIV had yet to be identified . . ."
Someday I have to stop reading the sports section of my local fishwrap or I will go apoplectic. Or maybe reading it is what's keeping the old pump pumping away. I don't know what I'll do about that, but what I do know now is that the people who, unfathomably, make money composing copy for the sports-loving masses (let's not flatter them by calling it "writing") commit, with seeming impunity, almost every accident of style I have covered in my books. It's as if, now that all the copyeditors have been laid off, they are like kids in grade school flouting their substitute teacher's bootless admonitions.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a doozy that appeared today (March 4, 2019) in the sports section of The San Diego Union-Tribune. (If you can stomach more sportswriter missteps after this, keep reading.)
"The Strike Force have had a half-hazard look from its inception," writes Tom Krasovic about San Diego's indoor-football team. It's hard to know where to begin with that verbal disaster.
First, it's "haphazard," one word, not "half-." (Jeepers, does anybody know English down in Sportsville?) Second, if "Strike Force" is construed as plural, as we usually construe teams ("The Yankees are . . ."), then the singular "its" should have been the plural "their." But it would have also been okay to write "The Strike Force has had . . . from its inception." Perhaps the problem arose from the notional singularity of the name "Strike Force" as opposed to most other teams, which are demonstrably plural (Chargers, Dodgers, Mets, etc.).
However it happened, it was a verbal catastrophe that needed a copyeditor, which many newspapers no longer deign to employ. But we who read newspapers expect more from our salaried scribes. Could you guys please crack a frickin' style manual once in a while?
And now for another verbal sports disaster. "What Colin Kaepernick is, at least for the moment, is one of the most important athletes of the 21st century, and beyond doubt one of the most polarizing," writes sports columnist Nick Canepa in The San Diego Union-Tribune (February 21, 2019). Did you discern the egregious accident of style in that sentence?
There is no excuse—ever—to allow "what it is, is" (with or without a comma or an intervening phrase) to disgrace your prose. This "ungainly construction," as Garner's Modern English Usage puts it mildly, is a verbal tic that has become a virus. It has migrated from speech into print at an alarmingly rapid rate, apparently because so many writers today suffer from the delusion that it's acceptable, even preferable, to write as you speak.
What it is is a noun clause that needs a verb to follow it—as you can see from how I had to word that. But the noun clause itself is pleonastic and your sentence is best begun straightforwardly. In other words, you can easily fix the what it is, is problem by replacing that phrase with it is or it's. Thus, "What it is is a goofy exercise in showboat tourism" (New York Times) becomes "It's a goofy exercise in showboat tourism."
Canepa should have written "Colin Kaepernick, at least for the moment, is one of the most important athletes of the 21st century . . ." That's so much smoother and more readable, it's hard to imagine how any professional writer wouldn't put it that way. But apparently some columnists don't mind padding their prose with the odious pleonasms of casual speech if it helps meet the stipulated word count.
Can you tell what's wrong with the wording of the following photo caption? "A 'statement ceiling' shows how planks, beams and arches dramatically can enhance a room." (The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 16, 2019, E2). It's not the quotes around "statement ceiling," and it's not the lack of a serial comma after "beams," although it would be nice if there were one. It's the placement of the adverb "dramatically."
When you want to use an adverb with a so-called compound verb—a verb in two parts, like "will do," "are going," "have been," and "can enhance"—the proper and most powerful place to put your adverb is between the two parts of the compound, not before it: e.g., "will never do," "are immediately going," "have always been," and "can dramatically enhance." That's why the curious journalistic penchant for placing "also" before a compound verb (as in "She also has been" instead of "She has also been") flies in the face of the natural stress and style of good English.
Garner's Modern English Usage has this to say about the matter: "Many writers fall into awkward, unidiomatic sentences when they misguidedly avoid splitting up verb phrases. Although most authorities squarely say that the best place for the adverb is in the midst of the verb phrase, many writers nevertheless harbor a misplaced aversion, probably because they confuse a split verb phrase with the split infinitive" (the fear of which is a persistent, baseless crotchet and NOT a mistake).
Alas, it is my sad duty to note here that in reportage on the State of the Union address today (February 6, 2019) I found three blunders in syndicated articles from The Associated Press and the Washington Post.
The AP report, written by Julie Pace and Catherine Lucey, says that Trump painted "a foreboding picture of the risks posed to Americans by illegal immigration"; later, it says that "the 72-year-old Trump harkened back to moments of American greatness . . ."
In the first example, "foreboding," which means "ominous, portending evil," seems to be misused for "forbidding," which means "dangerous or menacing." Perhaps it's a toss-up, but given Trump's vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric, I think the picture he painted was forbidding. You decide.
The second example is clear-cut. "Harken back" and "hearken back" are persistent misrenderings of the proper expression, "hark back." The forms ending in /-en/ mean "to listen, give one's attention to," while "hark back" means "to refer to or recall an earlier topic, time, or circumstance."
Finally, in a separate article about the Democratic response, Vanessa Williams and Sean Sullivan of the Post write that "polls suggest" the government shutdown "was unpopular with the public . . ." "Unpopular" means "not favored by the public or the people," so they should have jettisoned the superfluous and redundant phrase "with the public." Technically, this is called a pleonasm, and if you'd like to know more about this accident of style, please read my essay on pleonasms under Articles in the sidebar on the right.
Why is it that so many writers can't distinguish between the adjectives precipitous and precipitate (pruh-SIP-uh-tit)? In a syndicated article for The New York Times (February 1, 2019), Catie Edmonson reported that Senator Mitch McConnell had "drafted an amendment warning that 'the precipitous withdrawal of United States forces from [Syria or Afghanistan] could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security.'"
That's wrong, and here's why: Precipitous means "steep, like a cliff or precipice." Precipitate means "sudden, abrupt," or "rash, impetuous." In journalism and business writing, precipitous, steep, is continually misused for precipitate, sudden or rash. For example, here's a misuse I culled from the Wall Street Journal: "Striking Iran's nuclear program will not be precipitous [precipitate] or poorly thought out." (For a fuller discussion of this confusion, see my new book How to Tell Fate from Destiny and Other Skillful Word Distinctions.)
And here's more on Sen. McConnell: The second paragraph of the January 27, 2019, cover story about him in The New York Times Magazine contains this sentence: "Republican senators spent the lunch hour shuttling back and forth between Vice President Mike Pence and McConnell, sequestered in different quarters on the Capitol's second floor." What's wrong with it? If you're thinking redundancy, you're right.
"Shuttle back and forth" is a common redundancy that often slips by editors because it's regrettably not widely understood that "shuttle" by itself means "to travel back and forth, move to and fro." It's easily corrected by deleting "back and forth."
And later in that same story, the author, Charles Homans, uses the phrase "exact replica," a hoary redundancy. As I note in my new book How to Tell Fate from Destiny and Other Skillful Word Distinctions, a replica is properly an exact reproduction of a work of art, traditionally one produced by the artist. It is not, and should not be used as, a fancier synonym of "copy" or "duplicate," and it should never be modified by words like exact, authentic, perfect, or genuine. That's pleonastic and smells like advertising copy.
And alas, now even The New York Times can't properly distinguish the verbs lay and lie. In a syndicated news item (January 25, 2019) I found this sentence: "The gunman who burst into a SunTrust Bank in Sebring, Fla., on Wednesday made the five women he found inside lay [make that lie] facedown on the floor before he shot them . . ." A horrible crime, and a horrible assault on the language.
In The San Diego Union-Tribune (January 25, 2019, B1), columnist Michael Smolens wrote, "That shrunk to less than half a percentage point by the June 2018 primary . . ." Do you know what's wrong with that? "Shrunk" is not the past tense of "shrink"; it's the past participle. The verb is conjugated "shrink, shrank, shrunk." You shrink today, you shrank yesterday, and you have shrunk in the past. In short, "shrunk" needs an auxiliary or helping verb, and if your sentence doesn't need one, it's a clear sign that the proper word is "shrank." Thank you, Disney, for compounding the confusion with your dumb movie "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."
A photo caption appearing in The San Diego Union-Tribune (B1, December 31, 2018) read, "The food truck expected to make a couple hundred pizzas during Sunday's celebration . . ." Can you detect the accident of style in that excerpt?
Using couple as an adjective followed by a noun—as in a couple people, a couple dollars, a couple miles—is excusable in informal speech but unbecoming in careful writing. The circumspect stylist knows that couple is properly a noun that requires the preposition of to link it to a following noun: a couple of people, a couple of dollars, a couple of miles. Without that intervening of, the noun couple becomes an ungainly adjective modifying the noun that follows, so that phrases like a couple weeks and a couple hundred, though commonly heard, are, grammatically speaking, as peculiar as a flock pigeons, a bunch grapes, and a number questions. (You may drop of, however, if more follows couple: a couple more drinks.)
The Associated Press syndicated an article (December 19, 2018) about how the grocery chain Kroger "is trying to leap into the driverless market, announcing Tuesday that it is ready to bring milk, eggs and apples to some customers' homes in a vehicle with nobody at the wheel."
What's the scariest part of that sentence for you? The driverless vehicle? I guess, but we may have to bite our lips and get used to it. The lack of a serial comma after "eggs"? Not for journalists, who insist on writing "the American flag is red, white and blue" instead of the preferable "red, white, and blue." For me, the scariest part is the misuse of "bring" for "take."
In proper usage, "take" means you move things from where you or the things are to someplace else, while "bring" means things are moved from someplace else to your location. Thus any delivery service has to take things to your location. But when they've been delivered you can say those things were brought to you.
So now that you've read that, you can surely deduce what's wrong with this sentence from The New York Times Arts&Leisure section (December 30, 2018) about Lin-Manuel Miranda: "Now the 'Hamilton' creator is bringing [taking] the musical to San Juan."
An ad at the bottom of the front page of the Arts&Leisure section of The New York Times (December 2, 2018) boasts that the Broadway musical The Prom is a "Critic's Pick." Let's hope that refers to the one critic at the Times who picked it. If it's the pick of various critics, it should be a "Critics' Pick."
Do you know the distinction between loath and loathe? Consider this sentence: "Although parents are loathe to admit it, they often have specific gender preferences for their yet-to-be-born children. . . ." (The Atlantic's email newsletter, "The Family Weekly," December 1, 2018). That loathe should have been loath. Do you know why?
Loathe, which is pronounced with the /th/ of this and rhymes with clothe, is a verb that means "to despise, abhor." Loath, which is pronounced with the /th/ of thin and rhymes with both, is an adjective that means "reluctant, disinclined." Properly, you are loath to do something, not loathe to do it. And, if I may say, I loathe this accident of style, which has become increasingly common in educated speech and edited writing.
Do you know the subtle rule regarding the use of "both"? Consider this sentence and see if you can tell what's wrong with it: "The lawsuit . . . is the culmination of a . . . quest by marine mammal researchers and advocates to gain access to necropsies they say will help them and others understand how to better care for cetaceans both in captivity and the wild" (The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 29, 2018, C1).
As I note in my book The Accidents of Style, when you follow both with and in a construction that means "this as well as that," you must make sure that whatever follows both and and is grammatically parallel. Thus the end of that sentence should read "both in captivity and [in] the wild." Another acceptable way of wording it, for proper balance, would be to put both after in, making it "in both captivity and the wild."
I subscribe to an online publication called "The Hot Sheet," which tracks trends and opportunities in the publishing industry. (Note that "which.") In their recent newsletter (November 28, 2018), this sentence appeared: "At Digital Book World in October, a panel of experts discussed the challenges faced by today's libraries, who must deal with growing patron demand for ebooks and digital audio amidst changing publisher terms and access."
Notice anything awry with that? If you surmised that the "who" after the comma should have been "which," hearty congratulations to you. But if you weren't sure what the error was, please read my article on "The Curious Corporate Who," which you'll find under Articles in the sidebar on the right.
It's not often that the print edition of The Atlantic commits an accident of style, but I found a doozy in the article "Crowdsourcing the Novel" by Bianca Bosker in the December 2018 issue (p. 18): the phrase "graduating high school." You don't graduate an institution; you graduate from it. (For further discussion of this, see my book The Accidents of Style, accident 176, page 117.)
Here's a photo caption from the sports section of The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 15, 2018): "Lakers forward LeBron James, who past Wilt Chamberlain for fifth on the scoring list, looks for a way to the basket. . . ." Anything about that seem remiss to you? "Past" is an adjective meaning "before, in some previous time"; "passed" is a verb, the past tense of "pass," meaning "to go by, go farther than." So it should have been "James . . . passed Wilt Chamberlain" on the list. (Or it could have been "James passed to Wilt Chamberlain, who dunked for the winning basket." But that would be too cool.)
In the October 8, 2018, edition of The New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar writes, ". . . the unit was conceived as a kind of nostalgic stage set, a harkening back to an America of eighty or ninety years ago . . ." (p. 42). To "hearken," also sometimes spelled "harken," means to "listen, give one's attention to." But when you "hark back," you refer to an earlier time, topic, or circumstance. Thus the proper phrase in that context is "a harking back."
In news coverage of the NFL protests during the national anthem, more and more journalists are using the variant past tense kneeled instead of the standard knelt. (Two examples from a recent syndicated article: "Wilson kneeled behind teammates lined up standing along the sideline." "Stills kneeled during the anthem during the 2016-17 seasons . . .") Why they are doing this is unclear because kneeled is an "invariably inferior" form, says Garner's Modern English Usage, and knelt has long been the preferred past tense and past participle.
Now, here's an interesting accident of punctuation that appeared in my local paper. Because it involves quotation marks, I'm reproducing it exactly as it was printed, with no additional quotation marks:
"'Will we ever find the answer?'" Sipe asked, Doyle said.
Do you see the problem? The sentence is a quote from Doyle that begins with a quote from Sipe. Doyle's quote should be enclosed in double quotation marks, and Sipe's quote should be enclosed in single quotation marks. Sipe's quote is punctuated correctly, but the double quotation marks ending Doyle's quote are misplaced, and should be placed after asked.
How good are you at conjugating irregular English verbs? Consider this sentence, from a New York Times article about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court (syndicated July 10, 2018): "As staff secretary to Bush, he said in 2006, he strived to be 'an honest broker for the president.'"
If that strived sounded funny to you, you have a good ear for irregularity. It should have been strove. You strive now, you strove before, and before that you have striven.
Here's a forehead-slapper for you: Michael D. Shear writes for The New York Times. But in his article today (June 28, 2018), which was syndicated on the front page of my local paper, he was given this bio end-tag: "Shear writes for The New Your Times." Two out of three ain't bad, right?
"Theodore White invented a genre with his groundbreaking book 'The Making of the President, 1960,'" writes syndicated columnist Hugh Hewitt of the Washington Post (May 16, 2018), "and news junkies ever since have eagerly awaited postmortems from inside the operations of the various Republican and Democrat presidential campaigns." Did you catch the politically incorrect accident of style?
Democrat is a noun, not an adjective. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says, “Do not use Democrat as a modifier (the Democrat Party); that construction is used by opponents to disparage the party.” The word democrat, whether capitalized or lowercased, is a noun, never an adjective, so—in nonpartisan prose, at least—it should never modify another noun. The adjective is democratic and the name of the party is the Democratic Party.
"How great of a motivational speaker is Tony Robbins?" asks San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Karla Peterson (April 9, 2018, page B1). Can you discern the problem with that question?
Inserting an unnecessary and pleonastic "of" after adjectives such as "great" and "big" is a frequent mistake in speech that should never make its way into print. The most common form of this error is the locution "no big of a deal," in which both "of" and "a" are unnecessary." Make it "no big deal."
From The Associated Press, in my local fishwrap's sports section (April 11, 2018): "Manolas, a center back known more for his defensive skills then for his attacking abilities . . ." OY! "Then" instead of the proper "than"? Now that's bush league!
Consider this sentence: "UFC star Conor McGregor has turned himself into police in the wake of a backstage melee that he instigated . . ." (San Diego Union-Tribune news services, April 6, 2018, page D5).
In my new book, How to Tell Fate from Destiny, and Other Skillful Word Distinctions (coming in October), I explain that "with phrasal verbs employing in, in and to are always separate, as going in to work today, came in to see her, and turned himself in to the police (not into, which would indicate a ludicrous transformation)."
Kevin Acee, who covers the San Diego Padres for The San Diego Union-Tribune, writes, "The Padres might start the season with just seven relievers, one fewer than they think they'll need . . ." (March 27, 2018, page D5). Can you spot the boo-boo in that sentence?
Careful writers know that less applies to mass nouns like sugar and fewer applies to count nouns like beets. But what many don't know is there’s another, more subtle rule about fewer and less: We use fewer with plural nouns and less with singular nouns. Since a singular noun will always follow or refer to one, you should have one less of whatever it is, not one fewer, e.g.: “Angels closer Francisco Rodriguez had one fewer [one less] save than San Diego has victories” (The San Diego Union-Tribune again).
Syndicated columnist Dan Walters writes, "The noise from the podium and in the hallways of San Diego's cavernous convention center was mostly directed at retelling the world that the state's Democrats loath President Trump" (The San Diego Union-Tribune, March 3, 2018, p. B7). What are the two problems with that sentence?
First we have the common misuse of podium for lectern. “A lectern is the stand on which a speaker places his or her notes,” says Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. “A podium is the raised platform on which the speaker and lectern stand.” Second, we have an uncommon misuse of the adjective loath (meaning "disinclined, reluctant," and pronounced to rhyme with both) for the verb loathe (meaning "to hate, abhor," and rhyming with the verb clothe). The mistake is usually the other way around, with the verb improperly used for the adjective, as in "She was loathe [make that loath] to do it."
"Not only that, but there's a couple of little-known progressive candidates . . . running to his left," writes Michael Smolens in The San Diego Union-Tribune (February 23, 2018, p. B4). Did you discern the error of number (a singular-plural conflict between a verb and noun) in that sentence?
There's should be there are. As I have noted in my book The Accidents of Style, there's no excuse for using there's with a plural noun (in this case "candidates"). We hear this error of number with "there's" in speech all the time, but in writing (especially professional writing!) it's not just ungrammatical. It's lazy, lame, and unprofessional.
"Do you know Jeffrey W—?" LinkedIn asks me, adding that "You and Jeffrey have 4 mutual connections in common." This accident of style belongs to a category I like to call "When in Doubt, Wear a Belt and Suspenders and Still Watch Your Pants Fall Down."
As I note in my forthcoming book, How to Tell Fate from Destiny, and Other Skillful Word Distinctions," mutual refers to reciprocal relations between two entities and common refers to relations shared by two or more. Of course, this traditional distinction has been muddied ever since Charles Dickens published Our Mutual Friend in 1865, but that doesn't give LinkedIn license to drown it in pleonasm.
If they had said Jeffrey and I have four mutual connections, that would have been wrong but venial, and if they had said Jeffrey and I have four connections in common, that would have been unimpeachable. But they chose to "completely surround everything on all sides," sealing their ridiculously redundant fate.
All right, folks, it's time to play havoc with conjugating irregular verbs. First, what word is both the past tense and past participle of kneel? Some news reports on the "political football" dustup between the NFL and an always Twitter-happy Donald Trump said that last Sunday (September 24, 2017) certain players and owners kneeled during the national anthem.
Sound the Blunder Buzzer, please! The past tense and past participle of kneel is properly knelt. Although you will see kneeled listed as a variant form in dictionaries, usage experts frown on it and knelt is six times more common in print.
Now, tell me what's wrong with this sentence from a syndicated New York Times article by Dan Bilefsky (September 27, 2017): "During World War I, the 93 U-boats stationed at Belgian ports sunk more than 2,550 Allied ships." If you've been following the drift here, you will have guessed it's that funky sunk, which should properly be sank. This verb is conjugated just like drink, drank, drunk. You sink a U-boat today, you sank one yesterday, and you have sunk them in the past.
Here's my nomination for Weirdest Typo of the Year (from an article by Dennis Lin in the sports section of The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 26, 2017): "According to Bill James' Pythaogrean expectation, which is based on runs scored and runs allowed, they should have been 58-98." Pythaogrean for Pythagorean can only be described as a monument of metathesis ("the transposition of letters, syllables, or sounds in a word" — Random House Dictionary).
I have a double-whammy to report from the front page (A1) of my regrettably uncopyedited local paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune (September 18, 2017). In an article about the mysterious sinking of a U.S. naval vessel in 1918, Jeanette Steele asks, "What sunk the armored cruiser San Diego, just 10 miles off the New York coastline during World War I?" Possibly your grammar, Ms. Steele (and that unnecessary and intrusive comma before "just"). The past tense of "sink" is "sank"; "sunk" is the past participle (requiring a helping verb such as "had," "have," or "has" before it). So it should have been "What sank the San Diego . . ."
The other front-page SDU-T accident of style has to win top honors for the most unbelievable (and perhaps creative) blunder of the year. In a teaser for the 2017 Emmy Awards, where "The Handmaid's Tale" won top honors, someone wrote that the show "also wind best drama writing and directing . . ." Yes, wind. I'm not kidding. So much for the traditional past tense "won," and they can't even spell the nonstandard "winned" correctly.
I don't get to beat up on The Atlantic in this space very often, which is a good thing because it's one of the best-edited publications around. But, unfortunately, two accidents leapt out at me recently.
One was in an emissive (my coinage for an email message) about "Radio Atlantic," the magazine's new podcast platform. It said, "We're living in historic times. Who better than a 160-year-old magazine to help you make sense of them."
They got "historic" right, as I would expect, avoiding the common confusion with "historical." "Historic" means "making history" or "important in history," while "historical" means "pertaining to or part of history." But, in the second sentence, does that "who" jump out at you as eccentric in any way?
Using the pronoun "who" for anything other than people is a weird new trend that I discuss in my essay "The Curious Corporate Who," which you will find a link to in the sidebar to the right. My argument, in short, is that things such as corporations and institutions may be composed of people, but (despite the Citizens United decision) they are not people and should properly be referred to with the pronouns "that" or "which." And a magazine, no matter how venerable, is definitely not a "who." Using "who" for a magazine is as foreign to my ear as saying "my essay 'The Curious Corporate Who,' who you will find a link to in the sidebar to the right."
The other Atlantic lapsus appeared in the July/August 2017 issue, in James Parker's article "What Inspired the Summer of Love?" (page 34). "But what it is, the label on the glass case tells me," Parker writes, "is the top half of a set of hospital scrubs . . ."
Take out "the label on the glass case tells me" and you have, in bold relief, one of the ugliest accidents of style to rear its head in contemporary prose: "But what it is, is . . ." I discuss this verbal virus, which has migrated from speech to print, in Accident 281 of The Accidents of Style.
The problem stems from beginning a sentence with a noun clause ("What it is") that requires a verb to follow, creating the ungainly repetition. The solution is simply to drop the opening noun clause and begin with a real subject. Parker's clumsy sentence could have been fixed easily by starting with "the label" instead of the bumbling noun clause: "But the label on the glass case tells me that it's the top half of a set of hospital scrubs." One further example should suffice (from The New York Times, no less): "But what it is is trash." Huh? How about the far more emphatic "But it's trash"?
Remember learning about ordinal numbers in grade school? You know, first, second, third, fourth and so on? Brian Hiro of The San Diego Union-Tribune apparently missed that lesson, and in that paper's "Off the Wall" column (July 3, 2017, D2), compiled "from U-T news services" and "online reports" (watch out for that one!), he wrote, or reprinted, this gaffe: "The baseball that Pete Rose swatted to left-center field for his record-setting 4,192th hit [make that 4,192nd hit] has sold at auction for more than $403,000." The report failed to note that after notching that milestone hit, Rose stole both secondth and thirdth base.
Find the two errors in this sentence, which appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 26, 2017, page B1: "Gloria said that electing politicians when turnout is highest mean more people will pick their representative."
Answer: Mean should be means, and representative should be representatives.
Glance to your right and take a look at the cover of my book The Accidents of Style in the center column. Then ask yourself if confusing "their," "there," and "they're" is an accident of style confined only to amateur texts and tweets and not a DEFCON 1 threat to published prose.
In her column "Making a Difference" (The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 6, 2017, page B4), Pam Kragen—bereft of copyediting assistance because the U-T has fired them all, relying instead on a makeshift editorial safety net that results in horrifying oversights—quotes a source as saying, "When they're around her, they feel like their talking to someone like themselves and they relax." To paraphrase Gertrude Stein's famous remark about Oakland, California, "There's no they're there." And then there's that apothegm, "But for the grace of God, their go I."
This just in via email (May 17, 2017) from Consumers Union: "A handful of major internet service providers—including Comcast and Charter, mega-corporations who [sic] control three out of every four broadband consumers in the country—want to take even more control of your internet."
I'm really getting wigged out that corporations and other nonhuman entities are rapidly becoming people. As I explain in depth in my article "The Curious Corporate Who" (link in the sidebar on the right), the relative pronoun "who" properly applies only to human beings, not to companies, schools, governments, or other institutions. The proper relative pronoun for such entities is "that" or "which."
An article on page A1 of The San Diego Union-Tribune (May 5, 2017), by Greg Moran and Lyndsay Winkley, contained this regrettably common accident of style: "[T]he buyer could simply claim to be an employee of one of the many groups that now has permission from the state to buy them. . . ." Did you catch the mistake?
If you guessed that has should have been have because a plural verb has to modify the plural noun groups, pat yourself on the back.
No one would write These are the groups that has permission. But as soon as the words one of get mixed up in a sentence, many people wrongly persuade themselves that one now governs the verb so the verb must be singular. The grammatical truth is that when one of is followed by a plural noun and who or that, the verb that follows must modify the plural noun: This is one of those blunders that are [not "is"] easy to make.
You can see the logic of this immediately if you invert any sentence where one of is followed by a plural noun: “Of the accidents of style that occur on the highway of words, this is one of the most frequent.”
Another way of thinking about the problem is that in this type of sentence you’re talking about many things, not one thing. It’s not the one blunder that is easy to make; it’s one of the many that are easy to make.
Without sportswriters, this column would have far less grist for the mill. So I suppose I should be grimly grateful, in a schadenfreude sort of way, for the blunders that Jeff Sanders of The San Diego Union-Tribune committed in back-to-back sentences in his "Padres Report" of March 13, 2017 (page D3).
Here's the first sentence: "Blash's 13 RBIs leads all major leaguers this spring and are three more than he had last camp."
Did you notice the so-called error of number (a singular-plural disagreement between a noun and a verb)? "RBIs" is a plural noun, so the verb that modifies it must be plural too: "lead," not "leads." Sanders himself confirms this when later in the sentence he uses the plural verb "are," which also refers to "RBIs." What Sanders probably meant to say was that "Blash leads all major leaguers this spring with 13 RBIs, three more than he had last camp." (I'm not entirely comfortable with that odd "last camp" either, but we'll let it slide.)
Here's Sanders's next sentence: "The toe-tap he added clearly jiving with his approach, Blash also has a .364/.483/1.085 through his first 11 games." Let's leave aside the tenuous and awkward connection between the two parts of this sentence and focus on the word "jiving." When you mean "to agree, be in harmony" (which is clearly Sanders's intention), it's "jibe with," not "jive with" or "gibe with." (For more, see Accident 230 in my book The Accidents of Style.)
And here's another whopper from Jeff Sanders in the U-T, March 20, 2017, page D4: "There was a handful of playoff games, all of them losses." The verb "was" doesn't govern "handful"; it governs "games." So it should be "there were a handful of games," not "was."
See if you can find the subtle copyediting error in this sentence from The New Yorker (December 5, 2016, page 83): "Even today, they often run to one extreme or the other: hard-sell (Riverdance) or no-sell (Savion Glover.)" If your answer was, "The period should be outside the close parenthesis after "Savion Glover," you're right. Periods go outside parenthetical elements when they signal an end to the sentence as a whole. They go inside only when what is contained within the parentheses is a complete sentence that is not part of another, larger sentence.
From the "Are You Serious?" department: An article by David Pierson published in The San Diego Union-Tribune (January 31, 2017, page C1) quotes a corporate public relations executive named Michael Gordon as saying, "We're in unchartered territory." Did Gordon actually say "unchartered" instead of the proper "uncharted," and did Pierson, being a journalist faithful to accuracy, then render it as spoken? Somehow I doubt it. I'm betting it was Pierson's booboo and his editor's oversight. But if I'm wrong, then it's high time for journalists to start using sic after such ludicrous gaffes.
From the "C'mon, Really?" department: A photo caption in The San Diego Union-Tribune for a story headlined "Lab Experiments on Dogs Are Cruel and Unnecessary" (Friday, December 16, 2016, page B7) risibly confused "labradors" and "laboratories": "Nevada Sen. Mark Manendo introduced a bill that would require labratories [sic] that conduct research on dogs and cats to put the animals up for adoption after the study work." Just say "abracalabra" and you magically have a new spelling!
