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Pam Nelson: The Grammar Guide

 

Archive for May 2006

Number of comments in parentheses

30: Making comparatives

Writers, it seems to me, have forgotten how to make the comparative forms of adjectives. Here is a sentence from a piece I edited this week that illustrates the point: Ehrlichiosis is a more mild infection accompanied by flulike symptoms. I changed the adjective to “milder.” I have also seen “more happy” instead “happier.” A listener who is also a reader noticed “more smart” and “more easy” on radio shows. I don’t get it. Why choose the more option instead of the -er ending for these adjectives? We seem to have forgotten a rule that we probably learned in[.....]

25: Creating new words

“Mutancy” shows up in Craig D. Lindsey’s review today of “X-Men: The Last Stand.” A colleague wondered if we should use a word that isn’t in the dictionary. I argued that it was fine to use a made-up word, as long as it followed a legitimate form: vacant, vacancy; truant, truancy; mutant, mutancy. I even joked that Lindsey would get credit in future dictionaries for coining the word. However, it appears that “mutancy” is in the movie’s script. “Mutancy” is in almost all the reviews of this movie, too. The inciting incident in the plot is a cure that[.....]

21: Are you a native?

In a graphic today comparing Buffalo/Niagara Falls and the Triangle (something about a hockey match, I think), The N&O called Jack Kemp a “native” of Buffalo. I knew that he played professional football in Buffalo and later served in the U.S. House from that district, but I wondered if he had been born in Buffalo. That’s what a native is, someone who was born in a certain place. I looked up Kemp’s bio: He was born and reared in Los Angeles. The Associated Press Stylebook has an entry on “citizen, resident, subject, national and native.” I refer to it[.....]

15: Sexism and language

A reader questions a caption that used “man” as a verb, wondering if the term excludes women. Here is the caption: Technicians man the video control studio at the RBC Center during the NHL Eastern Conference Semifinals game between the Carolina Hurricanes and the New Jersey Devils on Monday. … Various style guides to nonsexist language suggest that we use “operate,” “work” or “use” as alternatives to “man.” The guides also suggest “staff,” which some experts think makes a bad verb. I don’t think the caption excluded women, but I understand the reader’s point. I am predisposed to be[.....]

12: Punctuation lives

Two sentences in my Saturday morning online reading remind me that some writers (or perhaps their editors) know how to use colons and semicolons. The sentences come from Pete Hamill’s review of New Yorker editor David Remnick’s “Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker” in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. (Hamill writing about Remnick! How marvelous!) Here are the sentences: “Along the way, Remnick clearly learned another lesson: the best reporting doesn’t simply look at the world; it tries to see beyond the obvious surface. The reporter goes places the average reader never visits; the reporter must make[.....]

9: Tender is the word

I saw a memo the other day that said an employee had “rendered” her resignation. I thought the memo writer probably meant “tendered.” But then I went to the dictionary because I wondered why “tender” is the word. “Tender” as a verb means to present something for acceptance or to offer, Webster’s New World says. It comes from the Latin tendere meaning to stretch or extend. So you could picture a person extending his hand to his boss with his resignation letter in it. However, “render” has a meaning that might apply, too. The dictionary gives the meaning as[.....]

8: Whose life is it anyway?

A teacher asks about whose as a possessive for an inanimate object, as in this partial sentence: “…the education system should offer enrichment programs whose effectiveness has been proven.” The teacher suggests “…with proven effectiveness” would work as well, and it would. But the heart of the question is whether whose can be used with an object or a concept, not just with a person or an animal. Most usage experts say that whose is acceptable in that construction. Bryan Garner in “Garner’s Modern American Usage” writes that this use of whose was decried by 19th century grammarians but[.....]

4: Taking the medicine

Copy editors are often accused of being borderline neurotic about mistakes. We wake up in the middle of our sleep with the sudden fear that we have neglected to fix an error or, worse, made an error. We check and recheck and have other people check and double-check. This is a good quality in a copy editor. You can never be too careful. Case in point: See the photo caption below. It appeared on the Life, etc., front Thursday. In even more haste than usual during that section’s production, I edited and rewrote that caption, introducing one error and[.....]