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Pam Nelson: The Grammar Guide

 

Archive for September 2005

Number of comments in parentheses

29: Something phony

I saw part of a good old movie this morning, “Nothing Sacred.” The movie, made in 1937, is a caustic Ben Hecht satire about a woman (Carole Lombard) who pretends to be dying and becomes the toast of New York through stories written by a reporter (Frederic March). The movie is all about fraud, deceit and sham. It prompted me to think about the word “phony,” so I looked it up. “Phony” is a versatile word: It can be an adjective, a noun or a verb. “Phony,” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says, probably comes from “fawney,” a brass ring used[.....]

23: What “decimate” means

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, writers and broadcasters used the word “decimated” to describe the destruction. Careful writers know, however, that the word “decimate” comes from the Roman army’s practice of killing every 10th soldier in a mutinous legion. See this definition from the American Heritage Dictionary. Professor Paul Brians asserts that “decimate” can mean “drastically reduce in numbers,” but he finds the use of the word to refer to widespread destruction a stretch. Evan Jenkins’ Language Corner points out an even looser use of “decimate” to refer to a single person. For another[.....]

22: Lend an ear

A reader sent a note about this headline from the Sept. 16 City & State section : Grahams loan home to Katrina victims. Some usage experts frown on “loan” as a verb, choosing “lend” instead. As Evan Jenkins’ Language Corner puts it: “A loan is what you get when someone lends you something.” Other usage experts point out that “loan” makes a perfectly fine verb. Bill Bryson in “Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words,” says that loan as a verb is “more or less standard in America,” but that British authorities do not accept “loan” as a verb. Bryson says[.....]

21: “Me” is OK

I ran across this in Rita Cosby’s Cosby Connection on MSNBC’s site: My SUV with my two colleagues and myself is one of the few vehicles heading into what maybe the bulls-eye of the next big storm. A journalist should know better than to use “myself” in a spot where “me” belongs. This just reinforces my belief that people think “me” is somehow wrong. And, yes, I noticed that she typed “maybe” when she meant “may be” and “bulls-eye” for “bull’s-eye.” We can cut Cosby some slack. After all, blogs are written on the fly and without editors. I[.....]

17: How to use colons

A reader found fault with this construction in a recent column: An acknowledgement here: I had an intense appetite for Katrina news because I have family in New Orleans. But so do lots of our readers. The reader said that a colon should be used after an independent clause, not a fragment. That’s true, of course. The first part of the first sentence, “An acknowledgment here,” is a fragment. The writer could have written: I must acknowledge something here: I had an intense appetite for Katrina news because I have family in New Orleans. The reader had another suggestion[.....]

10: Adverbs that have two forms

A reader asks, “Can you please explain to me why the increase in terms such as ‘more closely’ instead of ‘closer’ [and] ‘more quickly’ instead of ‘quicker’?” I suspect that some word choices have to do with a sort of “hyper-correction.” That is, we choose words that sound better to us, ones that sound “more correct.” As my grammar and usage books point out, some adverbs have two forms: close/closely, quick/quickly, clean/cleanly, loud/loudly, slow/slowly, near/nearly, tight/tightly, deep/deeply. (Please note that the first forms of some of the adverbs can be used as adjectives, too.) Both the unadorned form and[.....]

10: The South — where modals are doubled

Most of us probably don’t remember precise moments when we learned something. I remember the feeling of my uncle guiding my hands to tie my shoes when I was 5 (he was appalled that I didn’t already know), but I don’t remember precisely when I learned to read. Sometimes my college years are a blur, but I remember clearly the first time I learned the term for a peculiarity of Southern speech that I had heard all my life. I was in an introduction to anthropology class at UNC-Greensboro when my professor, whose name I can’t recall but who[.....]

8: Baffling punctuation

I found this on a business card. The mistake leaves me baffled. Why did the folks get “his” correct and “hers” wrong? This article was originally posted by the Raleigh News & Observer, a subsidiary of The McClatchy Co.; is posted here to provide continuity; and is copyright © 2011 The News & Observer Publishing Company, which reserves the right to remove this post.

7: When words fail

For the past 10 days or so, we have been preoccupied with Hurricane Katrina and the heartbreaking aftermath. The coverage of the storm, the flood and the human suffering has raised several interesting questions about language. I was struck during the first few days by how often the television news reporters and the people they talked to said that they couldn’t find words to describe the destruction. Indeed, when we all took a good look at the flattened houses and the flooded streets, we were stunned. One newspaper headline was “Overwhelmed.” It seemed that we all were overwhelmed. Later,[.....]