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Pam Nelson: The Grammar Guide

 

Archive for April 2006

Number of comments in parentheses

27: FANBOYS and commas

It’s funny what an odd comma will set off. I saw a comma after a coordinating conjunction on the front page today, and this post is what resulted. Bear with me while I lay the groundwork. The coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. That spells FANBOYS. The words can connect words, phrases or clauses. They are called coordinating conjunctions because they join equal things. The problem that coordinating conjunctions give us is in punctuation. If you write a compound sentence with the clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction, usually put a comma after the[.....]

25: Decider, divider, uniter

President Bush’s statement that he is the “decider” has received a great deal of play. I thought of his assertion during the 2000 campaign that he was a “uniter, not a divider.” The rhymes stuck in my head, and so did the hint of a Texas accent on the “i” in those words. I have a flat “i,” too, although I learned to talk in Catawba County, N.C., not Texas. A flat “i” sounds like “ah.” Read this interesting piece about Southern dialect from the PBS series “Do You Speak American?” Today’s New York Times story looks at another[.....]

24: Careening and careering

Writers have used the word careen for years to describe something that is moving fast and recklessly. For years, some editors have tried to catch and stop such use, pointing out that careen means to lurch or weave from side to side. Career, they said, is the word to use when you mean a headlong rush. Bryan Garner calls attention to this distinction in his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,” and Bill Bryson has an entry on careen and career in “Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words.” But careen as a word to describe a wild forward rush is in[.....]

23: Donuts at the drive-thru?

English spelling is weird, I know, but I will keep changing these words to their acceptable spellings. doughnuts and drive-through What do you think? Am I fighting a losing and pointless battle here? 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.

22: Beat that not-quite-dead horse

Maybe baby boomers can identify with this simile: I feel like an old 45 of the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” with a gash right across the middle of the chorus. We had a class on grammar last week at The N&O. I led it, and the class was relatively well-attended. (One incentive was chocolate.) One part of the hourlong session was devoted to lay-lie. I went through the distinction: Lay is a transitive verb and must have an object; lie is intransitive and doesn’t have an object. I showed the tenses of each verb: lay, laid, laid; lie, lay, lain.[.....]

20: Prepositions at the end

Some colleagues asked me how I feel about sentences that end with prepositions. The truth is, as I told them, I just can’t get too worked up about that. In formal or academic writing, you should avoid such constructions, if only because you are liable to irritate someone who believes in the old rule. Otherwise, write in a way that seems natural. Sometimes, that means ending a sentence with a preposition. The American Heritage Book of English Usage blames John Dryden and 18th-century grammarians for the rule. Dr. Language at YourDictionary.com explains why this rule suits Latin but not[.....]

19: Why cool is still cool

A few months ago, we published a wire service story about why the slang word cool is still in wide use. You can read the story by Larry Neumeister of The Associated Press here or here. The story traces the history of cool, including its switch to insider slang in 1940s jazz circles. World Wide Words and Mavens’ Word of the Day also have entries on cool. The Mavens site discusses why cool is still in use while groovy isn’t. This article was originally posted by the Raleigh News & Observer, a subsidiary of The McClatchy Co.; is posted[.....]

19: Proceed, please

I’ve seen precede used for proceed two times lately — on a sign in a restaurant and on a blog posting. I wondered if the mistakes were just typos (although the restaurant sign was handwritten) or if the writers were confused about the words. The idea they meant to convey was to go on. In the restaurant, patrons were to keep going past the sign to a hostess station. Both pre- and pro- as prefixes mean “before,” but pro- also means “forth” or as a root word “forward.” Both precede and proceed are built on the root cedere, meaning[.....]

14: Slinging slang, part 2

My colleague Craig D. Lindsey, The N&O’s movie writer, has a funny post on his Uncle Crizzle blog about a conversation with an editor. The editor questioned slang in one of Craig’s stories. The term in question, “MC,” would not have stopped me had I been reading Craig’s piece, but the editor who did stop on it had a point. Would all our readers know that in hip-hop and rap an MC is the master of a public performance? Would they know the term in its older meaning of “master of ceremonies”? I think many of the people inclined[.....]

13: Hark! What is that idiom?

Today’s headline “Gas prices harken back to Katrina” raises an interesting idiom issue. The phrase is usually hark back, meaning to recall an earlier time or to return to an earlier topic of discussion. Johnny Carson used the idiom in his monologue sometimes when he said (I am paraphrasing from memory), “I hark back to my boyhood days on the plains of Nebraska.” Both hark and harken (and its variant hearken) mean to listen. Hark back began as a hunting term, according to Merriam-Webster Online. Hunters used it to direct the hunting party and the dogs to go back[.....]

11: Good spellers

Spelling, some readers say, has become atrocious (had to look that one up). Some copy editors agree. I am a fair speller in writing, even without a computer spellchecker, but I freeze when it comes time to spell aloud. One of my everlasting regrets is that I never did well in school spelling bees. I admire those who can spell in front of an audience. Apparently, adult spelling bees are quite popular these days. We’ve had a few stories about the craze, and N&O columnist Dennis Rogers wrote recently about participating in one. If you are a good speller[.....]

8: The bedeviling prefix bi-

Biweekly, the reader wrote, means something happens twice a week. Biweekly, the Associated Press Stylebook and other sources say, means something happens every other week. Biweekly, the Webster’s New World Dictionary (Fourth Edition) says, means “1) once every two weeks, 2) [Now rare] twice a week.” Two other dictionaries, Random House’s Webster’s College and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, give the definitions for biweekly as “once every two weeks” first and “twice a week” second. Those who hold that biweekly means every other week prefer semiweekly as the word for twice a week. Bimonthly and semimonthly have a similar distinction. But then[.....]

3: Betaken by verbs

I was reading the New York Times’ obituary of Adolf Hitler when I ran across this: “With his mother’s passing he betook himself to Vienna, where he applied for admission to the Academy of Arts.” Betook? What an interesting verb. Later, when I heard someone say “beholden,” I wondered about verbs that begin with be-. Some, such as “betake,” sound quaint; others, such as “bedazzle,” seem still to be in wide use. These verbs survive from Middle English, it appears. I looked up be- as a prefix in the dictionary and read that adding be- to a verb can[.....]

2: Slinging slang

Do you know what it means to “mack on” somebody? How about what it means to be “dissed”? Perhaps you need some context. Here is our TV writer’s summary of a new show titled “Teachers” (I added the emphasis): NBC dissed the great “Scrubs” once again by moving it to make room for this sitcom that centers on a misfit high school teacher trying to mack on hot women when he’s not teaching a classroom of apathetic kids who’d probably rather be watching “MTV’s Spring Break” on their iPods. If you like shows where cute people say witty little[.....]