As far as I'm aware, there are few songs whose titles are a non-finite clause including a gerund. (Surprised no one else has writen about this very subject.) The only two I can think of are Squeeze's Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Shed Seven's Chasing Rainbows. The only such band is Counting Crows, although not sure whether this is acting as a present participle.
That is all.
Now I love the apostrophe as much as the next man, assuming of course the next man is an apostrophe-crazed fool. But there is one use in particular that aggravates the shit out of me: when people head documents Do's and Don'ts. Or Do's and Don't's. The latter may be worse, with two faux pas, or better as at least it's consistent. If you have to use the phrase, Dos and Don'ts, please. Thank you.
There are two auto-completes that are really pissing me off right now. First of all, my BlackBerry has suddenly started converting "a " into "on on ". So whenever I space off an a, it suddenly gets replaced. If I hit backspace once, it converts it back. On on real fucking annoyance, I have to say.
My second one came today. i'm working on SharePoint implementation, within which there is a concept of My Sites. If I refer to Your My Site in an email (edited by Word), it changes it to You're My Site the moment I space off the y of My; one can only assume to avoid the mistaken punctuation of the Owen Paul track You're My Favourite Waste Of Time. Ho hum.
Lynx's latest campaign tells us men that "Its good to mix things up". Punctuation included, it seems.
The above screenshot from the Lynx website has addressed the error, albeit with the apostrophe quite clearly added as an afterthought; the TV is yet to catch up. It reminds me of Cadbury's Creme Egg slogan, which temporarily read "How do you eat your's?"
I've recently started working on a project in which apostrophes are second-class citizens. In communications, they crop up where they shouldn't, and they are distinctly lacking where they rightfully belong. The apostrophisation (Look it up! Actually, please don't) or otherwise of its is a lottery, seemingly unconnected with context; an agenda is pluralised with an errant apostrophe, yet people in possession of stuff are merely pluralised.
Maybe my concern of 1998 that the apostrophe is a dying punctuation mark is coming true. But maybe not, given that it's cropping up in places it shouldn't. Hopefully my voting it one of the seven wonders of the modern world two years back will keep its profile sufficiently high to fight off its mis-use, and promote its place in our documents, below the @ sign on our UK keyboards, and below the " in the US. Long may it reign.
I have two grammatical questions to which I need answers:
My style of choice (is this a matter of style?) is to double up on the period in the first conundrum, while refraining from adding a fourth dot in the second. My argument for the former is that I wouldn't omit a question mark, so why should I omit a period, an argument that should also apply to the latter, but somehow doesn't.
Thought? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone
King's Cross is slowly becoming Kings Cross. More and more establishments, some of them well-respected, are ignoring what I assume is the ownership of the cross by the King, deciding instead to imply an anger shared by a whole host of kings.
The recent movement of the King's Cross Thameslink connection to St. Pancras has prompted whatever company is responsible to erect associated, apostrophe-free signage diverting its customers accordingly. I genuinely believe the trend is down to ignorance rather than defiance.
It will be another bitter blow to punctuation if and when London Underground adopts the trend, removing the apostrophe from the blue bar across its logo. I'm confident that this move is a long way off.
A John Inverdale quote from tonight's England vs. France post-match analysis put into question the premise behind its more common opposite:
Now Jonny Wilkinson: you can't overestimate his importance in tonight's game.
At first, I thought Inverdale was wrong. Surely he'd meant underestimate, right? But on analysing, it seems he's right: if I estimate his importance, then the fact that this estimate cannot ever be too high suggests that he performed pretty well.
The counter is that we can't underestimate his performance. And surprisingly, this is equally valid. But the can't brings with it a different meaning.
It's a confusing language.
For as long as I can remember, BBC News has adopted the single-word approach for the word underway. But it seems that it made a conscious decision about four months ago to increase its articles' word counts and update its styleguide by introducing a space between the previously inseparable r and w. Every article in BBC News now seems to adopt the two-word style, although the odd anomaly slips through. BBC Sport, in its less formal style (particularly in live Premier League updates), is more likely to adopt the single-word style, most likely at the disgust of the house-style police on the news desk.
Some quick searches across the News site show 362 pages of results for the one-word variety, yet only 86 pages for the newly introduced two-worder. In Sport, the two worder has racked up a mere three pages of search results, the more common one-worder clocking up 100 pages.
I expect the News site's results will close up over time, while Sport will retain its defiant imbalance.
My strong preference, for what it's worth, is for the conflated variety. Thanks for listening. I say! Hello? Is anyone there?
I've recently enrolled on a correspondence course in proofreading and copy-editing, spurred on by Steve's recent enrolment and the private interest (and bemusement) I've always had in the hieroglyphic markings of a proofread, error-strewn document.
I'm midway through the proofreading section, and was busy doing some example exercises, getting frustrated at my own idiocy and, at times, at my sheer lack of detail-focus. (Not spotting, for example that the word caret was missing both an r and an e, instead assuming the author was referring to some feline beast.)
I was annoyed, however, when confronted with the following one-liner to edit.
Moses basket.
That was it. I ummed and arred for quite some time about whether this was a basket belonging to some modern fella called Moses, perhaps one he'd picked up on entering Tesco; or whether it was a reference to the traditional basket in which babies are laid, named after, er, Moses, he of biblical fame and no doubt proportions.
After the arduous consternation, I plumped for the latter, convinced that I'd be right. (After all, if it was intended as a test in whether to add apostrophes to names ending in s, why wouldn't they use a different name Jesus, for example, as opposed to one after which baskets are named.) On checking the model answers, I was wrong, and somewhat livid. Ho hum. Let's hope Moses finds what he wants in Tesco.
I heard a promotion on the radio this morning offering a free coffee mug with every McDonald's big breakfast meal bought with a coffee. The disclaimer ran "excludes all drinks except coffee". Somewhat unnecessary double-negative, I felt.
I'm not sure why, but today I remembered that I found out about Microsoft's decision to underline mis-spelt words in the New Varsity pub just off the Warwick University campus in the Summer of 1995. I was told by Amanda's fiancé. I was shocked.
I still see it as an affront, an insult to my albeit limited intelligence, an unnecessary return to school days, a similarly unnecessary ridicule of me, the author, in a world where most underlinings invoked by my installation of Word are caused by an incorrect setting of the language (usually CY: Welsh or US: American English). I still have no idea how the language is set.
I've always been thrown by the whole quote unquote thing. Not the fact that people are quoting other people—that's fine. But the fact that their closing quotation marks are always said before the quote itself. So how much of the ensuing wisdom was actually quoted? Does it ever end? Surely it would be more sensible to follow the written standard by de-quoting the quote at its conclusion rather than before it's started. Quote, it's just an idea, unquote.
The Clapham branch of Hamptons the estate agents underwent a revamp just before Christmas. Its new sign is shown below.
I'm always amazed that important signage gets through basic proof-reading with mistakes. Maybe the period after Lettings (and the lack of a corresponding one after Sales) sticks out more to me than to other people. But nonetheless, it's something that should have been picked up in the proof-read, particularly as this is the only text on the sign.
Nice font though (Georgia), and well done on the phone-number grouping.
Congratulations little blog of mine. This is your thousandth post. I thought we'd celebrate (or celibrate as Holly Golightly says at the end of the White Stripes' Well It's True That We Love One Another) by combining two of my loves: numbers and words. So here's a potted statistical history of the first 999 posts. (This one's not included because I've not finished it yet.) Here goes!
There have been 999 posts in 1,220 days, attracting a total of 1,301 comments. That's 1.30 comments per post, 0.82 posts per day, 1.07 comments per day.
The 999 posts are made up of 168,016 words, 758,040 characters (excluding spaces), making an average of 168 words per post; 4.51 characters per word. In total, there were 16,299 unique words and numbers, including hyphenated constructs and spelt-out URLs. My most populous word was the, its 10,703 occurrences accounting for 6.37% of the total, followed by to (2.90%), of (2.65%), a (2.56%), and and (1.78%). The most prevalent 123 words accounted for 50% of all words.
There were 625 instances of it's, but only 402 of its, all 1,027 used correctly, I hope. 525 theres, 409 theirs and only 92 they'res. Beer and wine were mentioned seven times each. 58 footballs compared to eleven soccers and 17 baseballs. 167 Yorks (most of them preceded with New, I expect) compared to 151 Londons. And 140 Googles compare to 15 mentions of Yahoo! Four fucks and three wanks.
The most populous non-trivial word was people, with 284 occurrences, followed by great (225), day (217), little (193), good (181) and number (180). Excel, its capitalised and non-capitalised forms combined, warranted 89 mentions. Twelve was graced with 43; Seinfeld with 14.
α, β, γ and δ got a single mention each. The 4,300 occurrences of a were equal first alphabetically, zoomy rounding us off with a single mention. My longest word was plimpplampplettere, the beautiful Dutch word meaning to skim stones. Compartmentalised won the English record together with indistinguishable, both with 17 letters.
During the 105,282,240 seconds between the first and 999th post, I have married my lovely wife, moved country twice and had a beautiful daughter. Roll on another thousand posts.
I've often struggled with the ambiguity of phrases like this week and next week. And any reference to specific, proximous days, like this and next Wednesday.
Let's start with this week. Assuming a Monday–Sunday week, my strict interpretation of the phrase is that it always means the week that you're in. So if you say it on a Monday, it means any time until the following Sunday; if you say it on Saturday, then it means today or tomorrow, assuming a future event.
Next week means any time the following week. So if said on a Monday, it means between seven and 13 days out from today. If said on a Sunday, it means any time from tomorrow until a week today.
It appears that this is not everyone's interpretation. If said sufficiently close to the end of the week, Friday say, this week apparently means any time from the imminent Monday until a week on Sunday. I'm not sure what next week means in such circumstances; one can only assume it means the following week, given the relationship between this and next.
Which brings us on to next Wednesday. Does this mean the next Wednesday with which we are blessed, or Wednesday of next week? If said on a Tuesday, common usage suggests that we're talking eight days from now. But if said on a Thursday, I think I'd assume six days from now. Leading me to believe it means "Wednesday of next week". But on Sunday, someone referencing next Monday would probably also mean eight days from now, which is neither the next Monday nor Monday of next week.
Can someone give me the unequivocal truth, please? Surely it can't be open to interpretation.
I use the ALT short-cuts in Word and emails to make sure that my em and en dashes are correct (ALT+0151 and ALT+0150 respectively). It's slightly annoying that in my font of choice (Georgia 12-point), the em dash seems to be a pixel taller than its sibling characters, shunting down a smidgeon the line of text which it graces. The result is, I'm sure, more noticeable by me than by my limited, highly appreciated readership.
I'm reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, a recommendation from Alan. It's a lovely, pocket-sized book, and the first 47 pages have been educational and thoroughly enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the following point of style.
Flammable. An oddity, chiefly used in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.
I'm looking forward to the remaining 48 pages.
A recent trend, one that was particularly prominent in New York, is to use the word momentarily to mean "in a moment". I've always frowned upon this use, believing it to instead mean "for a moment".
So my view is that the former of the uses is correct, while the latter is wrong:
Answers.com seems to ratify my view.
Bless her. And a lovely, if subtle, article title.
According to the BBC tonight, the weather is going to be, in a word, pretty unsettled.
I'll always remember Sid Waddell's quote from the Lakeside darts championships many years ago:
There's only one word for that. Magic darts!
We received a pre-printed gift card the other day bearing the message Its a girl. And I read a headline in a professional publication today bearing the word childrens'. Grammatical heathens.
And these are just from the titles, never mind the summaries.
It seems that these two 'qualities' are mutually exclusive: a healthy understanding of grammar and an above average appetite for all things technical.
While I've already referred to the sliding standards of people at large, it seems this trend is particularly prevalent among techies.
To prove this point, simply scroll down the titles and short summaries of articles on digg, and cringe away. Inconsistent mixed-casing, heinous apostrophe crimes and overall grammatical disappointment abound. It's not as if they have to write long essays; digg summaries are really short.
I'm not sure whether it's an education issue or one of attention to detail. Either way, it's distressing, and one of the reasons you rarely get well-rounded techies.
2006 has been a year of grammatical disappointment. On both sides of the Atlantic, I've been stunned at the lack of grammatical awareness among colleagues and clients.
There are two types: grammatical clumsiness and unquestionable errors. The former is almost expected; the latter is becoming similarly commonplace. I've seen numerous documents allegedly in a state ready for distribution which have been littered with mistakes.
While Microsoft Office will correct your spelling and make sure your sums are correct, it hasn't yet mastered perfecting the grammar of the ill-educated.
The root of the problem has to be schooling. The trend is generally more prevalent among younger workers (although it's surprising how often the older generation can get it wrong), indeed suggesting that educational standards have dropped over time. I also think the trend is exacerbated through laziness. People sometimes know the rule that they've broken (its/it's being a prime example) once their copy has been corrected.
While I would be the first to give myself the pedant label (well, maybe not the first), I'm confident that my issue here goes beyond pedantry.
For the record, while both countries fall short of the mark, my experience suggests that grammatical standards in the American workplace are higher than those here in the UK.
Here's a little test to keep you on your toes.
The Metro newspaper today tried to make up for its double apostrophe omission last Friday. In its offline article about the despicable Connor family from Brooklands, Manchester, it reported that "Natalie [Connor] faces 11 years' in prison for manslaughter."
Maybe the apostrophe is making a comeback, in a grammatically incorrect way.
Meanwhile, I enjoyed the "MILF not pictured" caption for the picture in this article. Not sure what sort of traffic that will drive to my tangential ramblings.
Marks and Spencer has some grammatically incorrect slippers on sale at the moment. They contain a red card that you can pull out, which reads: Your Off.
Reminds me of the Friends episode where Ross teaches Rachel the meaning of your and you're.
Two headlines in this morning's Metro:
There should be an apostrophe after both Airports and years, although the former is potentially excusable.
Standards are slipping, and the apostrophe seems to be bearing the brunt.
I've always thought that seasons deserve capitalisation, yet you're unlikely to find a style guide that concurs. The Guardian's opts for lc. I vaguely remember discussing this very subject with Steve a few years back, and him agreeing.
The days of the week and the months of the year are all classed as proper nours, being awarded the honour of a capital letter at the beginning—the grammatical equivalent of being knighted, I expect.
Yet spring, summer, autumn and winter are left behind, blending unnoticed with the words around them, and it seems unlikely that they'll be granted a meeting with the Queen (who herself has been grammatically knighted).
Isn't it about time we honoured their work?
When you search for flights on expedia.co.uk and click search, you are presented with a holding screen, informing you that:
Expedia.co.uk is searching for
flights on selected travel dates:
Thu 23/11/2006 — Sat 25/11/2006
(Obviously the dates in question are those pertinent to your requested jaunt rather than mine.)
The em dash (—) between the dates should be an en dash (–), and there shouldn't be any spaces.
It's only a tiny point, but on a screen that all flight-bookers will see, they should really get it right.
Steve questioned how an ellipsis was displayed in braille. Apparently, it's three apostrophes. In six-dot braille, the bottom-left dot is raised for an apostrophe, and you repeat this three times for an ellipsis. So in effect, it looks very similar to the ellipsis in written English.
As an aside, the full stop in braille is made up of three dots, middle-left, middle-right and bottom-right. Seems inefficient, but I may be wrong.
As a further aside, the fact that braille symbols are made up of six binary entities means that there are only 64 combinations to play with. This limit is extended by the use of prefixes to signify that a capital (bottom-right) or number (bottom-left, top-right, middle-right, bottom-right) follows.
The programme: last night's Wales Today news programme.
The story: a couple jailed because their daughter was repeatedly playing truant from school.
“We’ve tried everything,” said the father in desperation, “We’ve been literally running around in circles.”
Thanks, Steve.
Most people don't understand that the ellipsis is in itself a symbol of punctuation. It consists of three dots in succession, and Microsoft kindly converts it into a single character when you type that third full-stop.
I've sat through countless presentations today. Many attempted to use the ellipsis (usually at the end of a pensive slide title), but all failed grammatically in using it correctly, opting for more than three dots, perhaps to elicit additional anticipation from its audience. The most common number was seven, which is particularly irksome as it's not divisible by three, resulting in Microsoft converting it to two ellipses and a full-stop, with inconsistent spacing throughout. Grammar heathens
So now you know.
The letter h is spelt aitch. It has no leading h, so please don't pronounce it with one.
Please don't lengthen the a of latte. Ever. It's Italian for milk, and should be pronounced as such, even if you're a tw*t from Fulham.
Thank you.
Here is some information on the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is held every year in America. It's so popular, it even gets some significant coverage on ESPN.
The fascinating part of the above-linked page is the list of winners and the winning words. Such is the nature of the competition, a winning word for the winner is by definition a losing word for the runner(s)-up.
First of all, it's obvious that the standard has increased significantly over time. I don't know the meaning of the last 13 years' winning words, and would struggle to spell any of them. Meanwhile, there must have been some runner-up kids kicking themselves in the competition's early history, as the following list shows:
Some of the above faux-pas are an indication of how our language has evolved. Others are no doubt howlers that drew gasps from the live studio audience.
I heard someone use the word hairy-fairy in a meeting today. Made me laugh within.
Gavin at work today overheard someone defining the word monotone to her friend: a word with one syllable or less. So very, very wrong.
This is the BBC's headline for its article about Microsoft releasing a patch for the latest IE vulnerability. Not sure which noun bad refers to. Maybe some subtle editorial humour going on in the newsroom today.
