Category: Punctuation

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Punctuation Word origin

Are scare quotes scary?

Q: Is there any legitimate reason for using single quotation marks, other than when a quote appears within another quote? I often see single quotation marks used to warn readers about a questionable term or simply to highlight a term.

A: In American usage, single quotation marks are generally used in prose for one purpose only: to surround a quotation nested within a larger quotation: “Was it Linus who said, ‘Get lost’?” asked Lucy.

There are exceptions in certain kinds of specialized writing, which we’ll get to later. And single quotation marks are generally used in headlines.

But the warning quotes you’re referring to, sometimes called “scare quotes,” should always be double quotes, not singletons, in American writing.

Here’s how The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) explains the legitimate use of scare quotes:

“Quotation marks are often used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard (or slang), ironic, or other special sense. Nicknamed scare quotes, they imply ‘This is not my term’ or ‘This is not how the term is usually applied.’ Like any such device, scare quotes lose their force and irritate readers if overused.”

Here are the examples given (we’ll put them in italics to avoid confusing things with our own punctuation):

On a digital music player, a “track” is really just a separately encoded file in a directory.

“Child protection” sometimes fails to protect.

Another respected authority, the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.), has these examples:

A silver dome concealed the robot’s “brain.”

Their “friend” brought about their downfall. 

All of those are perfectly justifiable uses of quotation marks, because the term in quotes is highlighted for a good reason—to warn the reader to be wary of it.

But sometimes writers (particularly sign painters!) use quotes merely to highlight terms, as in these examples:

“Fast” and “friendly” service! … Our bread is baked “fresh” daily … Employees must “wash hands.” … “Delivery” available.

We think a writer who wants to boast about a word or merely emphasize it should find another way—italics, perhaps, or a different size type. The quote marks imply that the words aren’t meant literally.

However, the lexicographer Grant Barrett defends the use of quotes for emphasis—a usage he refers to as “shout quotes.” In a May 14, 2008, post on his blog, he argues that it’s unlikely readers would misunderstand them.

By the way, the use of the phrase “scare quotes” in this sense is relatively recent, showing up in the mid-20th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest example in the OED is from a 1956 issue of the journal Mind: “The ‘scare-quotes’ are mine; Aristotle is not overtly discussing the expression ‘whichever happens.’ ”

An earlier use of the phrase, from Southern California: An Island on the Land, a 1946 book by Carey McWilliams, refers to quotations that can be used against a political candidate.

McWilliams writes that “the best advertising brains in California were put to work culling scare-quotes” from the candidate’s writings.

But let’s get back to single quotation marks. As we’ve said above and as we’ve written before on our blog, they’re sometimes used in a couple of specialized fields.

Horticultural writing is one of them. Some publications in the field, like the magazine Horticulture, use single quotation marks around the names of cultivars, the Chicago Manual says.

And in another horticultural exception to normal American usage, Chicago adds, “any following punctuation is placed after the closing quotation mark.” Here’s the example given (we’ll use boldface here, since the illustration includes italics):

The hybrid Agastache ‘Apricot Sunrise’, best grown in zone 6, mingles with sheaves of cape fuchsia (Phygelius ‘Salmon Leap’).

There’s another kind of specialized writing in which single quotation marks appear.

“In linguistic and phonetic studies,” the Chicago Manual says, “a definition is often enclosed in single quotation marks,” and here again, “any following punctuation is placed after the closing quotation mark.” This is the example given:

The gap is narrow between mead ‘a beverage’ and mead ‘a meadow’.

But unless you’re writing about horticulture, linguistics, or phonetics, the convention in American usage is to use double quotation marks (except for internal quotes) and to keep commas and periods inside final quote marks. The Chicago Manual gives this example of the normal usage:

“Admit it,” she said. “You haven’t read ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ ”

Keep in mind that so far we’ve been discussing American-style punctuation. In British usage, single quotation marks are  more widely used.

As the Chicago Manual says, “The practice in the United Kingdom and elsewhere is often the reverse” of that found in American usage. Single quotation marks may come first, with double marks used for quotations within quotations.

For example, if Lucy and Linus had been characters in a British novel, that quote we cited above (from Pat’s grammar book Woe Is I, 3rd ed.) might have looked like this:

‘Was it Linus who said, “Get lost”?’ asked Lucy.

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Possessed by saints

Q: My sisters and I were wondering why schools named after saints are possessive (St. Aidan’s Grammar School, St. Mary’s High School, St. John’s University) while other schools, religious or otherwise, are not (Glen Cove Elementary School, Friends Academy, Brigham Young University).

A: We haven’t found any authoritative explanation why schools named after saints generally use the possessive (as in “St. Hilda’s Academy”) while other schools don’t (“Millard Fillmore Junior High School”).

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t shed much light here, though it does have a small notation that applies to churches: “The possessive of names preceded by ‘Saint’ is often used ellipt. in names of churches, as St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s.”

Perhaps this elliptical church convention was passed along to religious schools. In any case, the possessive form seems appropriate in this situation.

When a school (or church or hospital) is named for a saint, it’s consecrated to and placed under the protection of the saint, not merely named in someone’s honor.

By the way, we’re using the term “possessive” here, though “genitive” would be a better term. The possessive is one kind of genitive, but genitives involve relationships much wider than simple possession or ownership.

A genitive can express relations like measurement (“a week’s vacation”), affiliation (“Sylvia’s book club,”) kinship (“Percy’s cousin”), description (“a bachelor’s degree”), and so on.

There’s another point to be made here. Schools whose names include “of” instead of ’s are also genitives. So “Academy of St. Hilda” is the grammatical equivalent of “St. Hilda’s Academy.”

This seems to work with saints but not with mortal beings. We somehow can’t imagine a school named “Millard Fillmore’s High School” or the “High School of Millard Fillmore.”

For whatever reason, there does seem to be some underlying difference (celestial versus earthly?) that would account for this convention. However, we’ve found that while the pattern is widely followed, it isn’t universal.

Not every school named for a saint has ’s. Examples include St. Bonaventure University in western New York and St. Catherine University in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

And not every school named for an ordinary person lacks the ’s. Take Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York, named after a 19th-century hotel owner. As the school’s style guide says, even on second reference the name has ’s, as in “Paul Smith’s alumni” (who, by the way, are called “Smitties”).

Granted, Paul Smith’s is exceptional. “When a college is named after anyone except a saint, the apostrophe is rare,” Robert L. Coard wrote in the journal American Speech in 1958.

It’s colleges named after saints that generally have the ’s, he said, noting the half-dozen American schools called St. Joseph’s College.

“But even here the tendency to use the uninflected form appears,” he said, “as in St. Joseph College, West Hartford, Connecticut.”

He added that the ’s is usually omitted when “the result would be harsh or cumbersome,” as in “St. Francis College” or “St. Mary-of-the-Woods College.”

Where churches are concerned, it seems that the modern tendency is to dispense with the ’s. We gather that this is a style matter that churches or dioceses decide for themselves.

Writing in the National Catholic Reporter in 2005,  E. Leo McManus noted “a trend to eliminate the troublesome apostrophe by jettisoning what is popularly called the possessive case” from the names of churches dedicated to saints.

When he was a boy growing up in Rochester, NY, he said, his family’s church was known as St. Anne’s. But it’s now listed in the Rochester Catholic Directory as “St. Anne.”

Similarly, he said, “St. Monica’s in Rochester is now St. Monica; St. Salome’s in Irondequoit is now St. Salome; and St. Helen’s in Gates is now St. Helen. Only St. Patrick has, so to speak, held his own, for there are eight St. Patrick’s parishes and but one St. Patrick in Cato. Almost all of the 15 churches dedicated to St. Mary are popularly in the possessive case.”

McManus suggested that mistaken notions about possessiveness may be at work:

“The disappearance of the unruly apostrophe may be the result of having confused the role of the possessive case,” he wrote. “It was the Anglican bishop and grammarian Robert Lowth in 1752 who first called what had been the genitive case the ‘possessive.’ That may have contributed to the erroneous belief that the only function of the possessive is to show ownership.”

If you don’t believe that church names are inconsistent, just look at London’s famous Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the short form of which is St. Martin’s.

As James Graham wrote last year in the journal British Heritage, in the United States there are at least 20 churches named after the original, and those names are written all kinds of ways—with and without hyphens, with and without ’s after “Martin,” and with “Field” in the singular as well as the plural.

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Plural prose

Q: I know a letter or number gets an apostrophe when made plural: x’s, 9’s, and so on. But what happens when letters make up an abbreviation: CEO, RN, MD, and so on? Does the abbreviation get an apostrophe when made plural?

A: There’s no single “rule” about this, since conventions vary widely from publisher to publisher, usage guide to usage guide.

On our blog, we generally follow The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). Here’s what it recommends:

“Capital letters used as words, numerals used as nouns, and abbreviations usually form the plural by adding s. To aid comprehension, lowercase letters form the plural with an apostrophe and an s.”

The Chicago Manual gives these examples: “the three Rs … x’s and y’s … the 1990s … IRAs … URLs … BSs, MAs, PhDs.”

Unlike you, the Chicago Manual would not use an apostrophe with 9s. And as you can see from the examples above, it would not use apostrophes in CEOs, RNs, MDs, and so on.

We’ve had several posts on our blog about this subject, including ones in 2010 and 2009 about  pluralizing abbreviations.

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New Year’s daze

Q: I have a customer who gives out T-shirts at a New Years party. The back of the shirts has the year. Should the date for the next party be 2013 or 2014? I think it should be 2013 because the party starts on New Years Eve. Is there a grammar rule that would apply here?

A: No, we can’t think of any grammar, usage, or style rule that would apply.

The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) says only that the terms “New Year’s Eve” and “New Year’s Day” should be capitalized (don’t forget the apostrophes).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “New Year’s Day” as the first day of the year and “New Year’s Eve” as the last day of the year.

Most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked have similar definitions.

What do we think? Well, we’re sorry to disappoint you, but we think the year on the back of those T-shirts should reflect the new year, not the old one.

From our experience, the main point of a New Year’s party is to celebrate the new year, not the old one, though we imagine that some people would disagree with us.

To the extent that New Year partyers do any serious thinking, it’s to make New Year’s resolutions, which the OED describes as resolutions “to do or to refrain from doing a specified thing from that time onwards, or to attempt to achieve a particular goal, usually during the coming year.”

The earliest written example of “New Year” in the OED is from the Ormulum (circa 1200), a book of biblical commentary that refers to “New Year’s Day” (spelled newyeress dayy in Middle English—we’ve replaced the letter yogh with “y”).

Yes, we know what you’re thinking—where’s the apostrophe?

Although “New Year’s Day” now takes an apostrophe, the use of the punctuation mark here is relatively new.

The earliest OED example of an apostrophe in “New Year’s” is from The New Mirror for Travellers, an 1828 travel guide: “It was new year’s eve, and Douw was invited to see out the old year at Judge Vander Spiegle’s.”

The apostrophe showed up in English in the 1500s, but it was originally used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters in a word (as in a contraction like “can’t”).

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says “apostrophe” is ultimately derived from prosoidia apostrophos, the classical Greek term for an omission mark—the Greek phrase literally means “accent of turning away.”

If you’d like to read more, we ran a post a few years ago about how the apostrophe became possessive.

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The comma in question

Q: I am editing a document that contains the following sentence: “The problem is, how do we properly make sense of it all and use it to our benefit?” My issue is the propriety of the comma. My first inclination is to rewrite the sentence, but I am having a hard time determining exactly what is improper about the original usage. What do you think?

A: You’re right in thinking that we don’t normally use a comma to separate a verb like “is” from its object. But when the object is a direct question, it’s usually preceded by a comma and followed by a question mark.

We’ve touched on this subject before on our blog, including postings in 2010 and 2008. This is an issue of style, rather than grammar or usage.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says a direct question like the one in your example “is usually introduced by a comma” unless it comes at the beginning of a sentence.

The Chicago Manual, which is widely used in the publishing industry, adds that such an interior question “may take an initial capital letter if it is relatively long or has internal punctuation.”

The style guide gives several examples, including this one: “The question on everyone’s mind was, how are we going to tell her?” Your sentence (“The problem is, how …”) is a parallel example. 

The Chicago Manual says an alternative is to rephrase and use an indirect question, as in “The question of how to tell her was on everyone’s mind.”

You didn’t ask about this, but a related issue is whether to use quotation marks to describe thoughts or questions that aren’t actually spoken.

“Thought, imagined dialogue, and other interior discourse may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context or the writer’s preference,” Chicago says. The style guide gives these two examples:

“I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern,” thought Vera. “Besides,” she told herself, “they’re all fools.”

Why, we wondered, did we choose this route?

By the way, we noted in a posting last year that the word “comma” referred to a small piece of a sentence when it entered English in the late 16th century, but it soon came to mean the punctuation mark at the end of the piece.

Although English adopted the word from the Latin comma, it’s ultimately derived from the Greek komma (literally, a piece cut off), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto adds that the Greek verb koptein (to cut) gave Russians the word kopeck and probably gave English the word “capon.”

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The story behind the headlines

Q: I have been trying to find the point in time, and the reason why, the period was dropped from the end of newspaper headlines. Around Lincoln’s time, you would see something like “Man Steals Horse.” as a newspaper headline.

A: Periods began disappearing from the ends of major headlines in the late 19th century, according to our informal survey of historical newspaper databases.

That’s about the time when big-city newspapers began using periods only in smaller headlines and in “decks”—the smaller, descending headlines that appeared beneath major ones and in different typefaces.

In the 1930s the periods on such lesser headlines, too, began to disappear, and they had pretty much vanished by the end of World War II.

That’s the short answer. But in asking two former newspaper editors this question, you’ll get more than you’ve asked for. We can’t resist passing along the story behind the headlines.

When newspapers first began appearing regularly in America and in Britain, around 1700, headlines didn’t exist.

During the course of the 18th century, they appeared only rarely, according to David A. Copeland, the author of Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers (2000).

This meant that the news might change abruptly from paragraph to paragraph. Often a new article was marked only by the place and date where the report originated (as in “Paris, April 21—”).

This so-called “dateline” convention came about because “most of the early news reports were based on letters,” according to Kristina Schneider, whose study of headlines appears in the book English Media Texts—Past and Present (2000).

Finally headlines, as we know them, “started appearing quite numerously around 1800,” Schneider writes. (This must have been a great relief to the readers of the time!)

For most of the 19th century, headlines had periods at the end, as we found when we explored newspaper databases. These are some of the examples we collected—and brace yourself for lots of capital letters:

“OVERWHELMING CALAMITY.” (from the New-York Gazette, 1812);  “FUNERAL SERVICE OF NAPOLEON.” (from the Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, 1821); “REJECTION OF THE REFORM BILL.” (from the Detroit Free Press & Michigan Intelligencer, 1831);  “Shortest India Passage.” (from the New York Daily Times, 1853); “The Fall of Atlanta.” (from the New York Times, 1864).

The practice of ending headlines with periods wasn’t limited to newspapers, however. We found that 19th-century magazines and journals, in both the US and Britain, also used final periods in headlines.

A couple of examples: “RECENT DISCOVERIES OF WORKS OF ART IN ROME.” (from the Century Magazine, 1887); and “A COCKNEY ON A FOX-HUNT.” (from Punch, 1860).

Then in the late 19th century, periods began to drop out of major headlines. 

In the 1899 issues of the New York Times, for example, there are no periods at the ends of important headlines. But the headlines on decks, as well as on lesser stories (like “New Honor for Andrew Carnegie.”), still had periods.

Apparently, the policy was to omit periods in headlines (and accompanying decks) that were printed in capital letters. But lesser headlines, as well as decks printed in upper- and lowercase letters, ended in periods. This policy continued for several decades.

Here, for example, is a headline from the Times of Jan. 1, 1935. (In giving examples of headlines, we won’t try to reproduce the various typefaces and indents.)

PRISONER PASSES

A RESTLESS NIGHT

        ____

Hauptmann Tosses on His Cot

in Cell After First Day of

His Trial for Life.

        ____

PACES ABOUT NERVOUSLY

        ____

Wife, Sitting Near Him at the

Defense Counsel Table, Makes

No Effort to See Him in Jail.

Note the periods on those upper- and lowercase decks. But by 1937, even those periods had disappeared from the Times, as in this headline from Dec. 19, 1937:

NAZIS IN AUSTRIA

GAINING STEADILY

         ____

Leader Named by Hitler Works

Openly in Known Offices

Despite Ban on Party

        ____

ITS PRISONERS ARE AIDED

        ____

Get Money From Fund Set Up

by Ex-Governor—Hitlerites

Smash Jews’ Shop Windows

We found somewhat similar results in the Chicago Tribune, though the periods on decks stuck around for several years longer. Here’s a headline from the newspaper’s issue of Oct. 8, 1937:

WALLY OBEYS HER

DUKE AND ENDS

SHOPPING SPREE

         ____

She Buys Less Lavishly to

Please Husband.

The Tribune continued using periods in this manner throughout 1944, but stopped in early 1945. Here’s a headline from Dec. 6, 1945:

HITLER A RAVING

MADMAN IN LAST

HOURS OF BERLIN

        ____

Hanna Reitsch Tells of

Scene in Bunker

We can’t vouch for the evolution of headline style at every major metropolitan daily. But we think it’s safe to say that periods disappeared at mid-century, and that they vanished because there was no need for them.

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A classical education

Q: My question for you has to do with my son, Thales, who’s named after the ancient Greek philosopher. Is the plural possessive of his name Thales’ (like Achilles’) or Thales’s (like James’s)? Also, do you pronounce it with two syllables or three.

A: This is a complicated question, since Thales is a classical name being used by someone living now.

Ordinarily, as we’ve written on our blog, a name ending in “s” is made possessive with the addition of an apostrophe and a final “s,” as in “James’s sailboat.”

In the past, classical and biblical names were an exception. Those ending in “s” were customarily made possessive without the extra “s” (as in “Achilles’ armor” and “Jesus’ disciples”).

In modern usage, however, this custom is no longer universally followed, as we wrote in a posting last year.

Today, classical and biblical names ending in “s” are frequently made possessive just like other names—with the extra “s.” And they’re pronounced, as one would expect, with an extra syllable.

That’s the word from the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). Although some other guides recommend skipping the final “s,” the Chicago Manual says “such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.”

Among the examples in the Chicago Manual are “Jesus’s adherents,” “Jesus’s sake,” “Tacitus’s Histories,” “Euripides’s tragedies,” and “Xerxes’s armies.”

This would seem to indicate that the name Thales, which has two syllables (THAY-leez), would become possessive as Thales’s, pronounced with three syllables (THAY-leez-ez).

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Chicago says possessive forms of classical and biblical names that end in an “eez” sound (like Thales and Hercules) are generally NOT pronounced with an extra syllable, even when spelled with an extra “s.”

So if you followed the Chicago Manual guidelines, you’d end up writing the possessive as Thales’s but not pronouncing the extra syllable, which seems silly to us. If that extra syllable is indicated in the spelling, it ought to be pronounced, in our opinion.

At bottom, of course, this is an issue of style, not correctness. In the end, the choice is really up to you (and to your son!).

Here’s what we advise. First, decide how you want to SAY the possessive form of his name, since you’ll be pronouncing it more often than you write it.

If you prefer to say “THAY-leez sailboat,” then spell it Thales’. But if you prefer to say “THAY-leez-ez sailboat,” with the extra syllable, then write the possessive form as Thales’s.

That’s the best advice we can come up with. If anyone questions your choice, you can argue reasonably for either one.

After all, your son isn’t a classical figure—he’s simply named for one: Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece.

People are entitled to decide how their names are pronounced, as we noted in a blog item a few years ago. So why can’t Thales decide how the possessive of his name should sound?

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The singularity of Mother’s Day

Q: Which is correct, Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day? I have a customer who wants to use the name as an imprint on promotional gifts for the holiday. I think of Mother’s Day as singular possessive, my mother, but in this case is it correct?

A: We also think it’s Mother’s Day, and so do the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult—five American and five British.

More to the point, Anna Jarvis, the woman primarily responsible for the modern holiday honoring mothers, thought so as well, according to a dissertation by the historian Katharine Antolini.

In “Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of Her Mother’s Day,” Antolini says Jarvis wanted the singular possessive to emphasize that the day was to honor one’s own mother, not mothers in general.

As for common usage, “Mother’s Day” is the overwhelming favorite, according to our searches of online databases, though you’ll find many examples of the plural-possessive “Mothers’ Day” and the apostrophe-free “Mothers Day.”

Although the modern holiday originated in the US in the early 20th century, people have been celebrating mothers in one way or another since ancient times.

The specific term “Mother’s Day,” however, didn’t show up in print until the 19th century. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the June 3, 1874, issue of the New York Times:

“ ‘Mother’s Day,’ which was inaugurated in this City on the 2d of June, 1872, by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, was celebrated last night at Plimpton Hall by a mother’s peace meeting.” (We’ve gone to the Times archive to expand on the citation.)

The OED points out that Howe saw Mother’s Day not as a day to honor mothers (the modern sense) but as a “day on which mothers met to advocate peace, as by the dissolution of a standing army, etc.”

Howe, an abolitionist and social activist, is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” (The music is from the song “John Brown’s Body.”)

Like Howe, Anna Jarvis’s mother—Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis—was an activist who organized women for various social causes.

After the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, Anna Jarvis organized several “Mother’s Day” services and began a campaign, with the help of the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker, to make Mother’s Day a national holiday.

The first two services—on May 12, 1907, and May 10, 1908—were held at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Jarvis’s mother had taught Sunday school.

The national campaign got off to a bumpy start. On May 9, 1908, Senator Elmer Burkett, a Nebraska Republican, introduced a resolution to recognize the following day as Mother’s Day.

But as an article in the May 10, 1908, issue of the New York Times reports, the resolution inspired “a number of witty sallies” in the Senate and was referred to the Judiciary Committee where “it will be permitted to sleep peacefully.”

Interestingly, Burkett’s resolution used the plural possessive, according to an OED citation from the Congressional Record for May 9, 1908: “Resolved, That Sunday, May 10, 1908, be recognized as Mothers’ Day.”

Jarvis pressed ahead with her Mother’s Day campaign, writing letters and sending pamphlets to public officials. Two years after the Burkett resolution was put to rest, she had her first victory.

In 1910, William Glasscock, the Governor of West Virginia, proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and soon the holiday spread to other states.

In 1912, Jarvis trademarked the phrases “Mother’s Day” and “second Sunday in May,” and established the Mother’s Day International Association to promote the holiday around the world.

On May 8, 1914, the US Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day.

The American holiday inspired Mother’s Day observances around the world, but the date of the celebration varied from country to country.

In Britain, for example, where the holiday is also called Mothering Sunday (a name with roots in a religious ceremony dating back to the 16th century), it’s celebrated on the fourth Sunday in Lent.

A final note: Anna Jarvis, who was childless, began campaigning in the 1920s against the commercialization of Mother’s Day. She denounced confectioners, florists, and other commercial interests that she accused of gouging the public.

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Hyphen-iacal

Q: I turn to you to resolve a matter of some debate at the office. The question of the day: Which of the following is correct when it comes to proper use of hyphens? (1) “The project will create an estimated 300 full- and part-time jobs.” (2) “The project will create an estimated 300 full and part-time jobs.” Please help before we hyperventilate over hyphens.

A: We vote for option 1: “full- and part-time jobs.” The second part of the compound adjective “full-time” has been dropped, but the hyphen remains.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a matter of style, not grammar, and we’re talking about the commonly observed convention in published writing.

We’ll quote The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.): “When the second part of a hyphenated expression is omitted, the hyphen is retained, followed by a space.”

The Chicago Manual gives these examples: “fifteen- and twenty-year mortgages” … “Chicago- or Milwaukee-bound passengers.”

Hyphenated terms for ages are treated similarly, as the manual notes. It gives the example “a group of eight- to ten-year-olds.”

But when the two hyphenated expressions form “a single entity,” the manual notes, there’s no intervening space, as in “a five-by-eight-foot rug.”

If you think your readers might find it odd or even confusing to see a hyphen hanging out at the end of a word, you could always write “full-time and part-time jobs.” There’s no crime in using “time” twice in one sentence.

Going  back to your example, note that hyphens are always used in the compound adjectives “full-time” and “part-time” (as in “She gets a full-time salary for part-time work”).

However, “full time” and “part time” aren’t generally hyphenated as adverbs (“She works full time, not part time”), though you’ll find differing opinions here.

If you use the unhyphenated forms, don’t insert a hyphen just because a part has been omitted. Example: “She doesn’t know whether she works full or part time.”

We answered a similar question about hyphenation a few years ago on our blog. In that case, a part was omitted from a solid (not a hyphenated) compound.

The Chicago Manual’s example for a case like this is “both under- and overfed cats.” This works, however, only when the second part of the compound (“fed” in this case) is the same in both words.

We’ve had many other posts about hyphenation, including one about why Spider-Man has a hyphen and another about hyphenated Americans. We also had a brief summary a few years ago about the use of hyphens.

In case you’re curious, English adopted “hyphen” from late Latin in the early 1600s,  but the word is ultimately derived from a cup-shaped Greek symbol placed under a compound to show that it should be read as one word, not two. (In Greek, “hyphen” means “under one.”)

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English English language Punctuation Usage

Elliptical reasoning

Q: I’m a court reporter working in Baton Rouge. When someone ends a sentence with “so,” we have differing thoughts here amongst the 20 plus of us. Example: “Question, Why did you buy the drugs? Answer, I had the money, so.” Some here end the answer with “money … so.” What are your thoughts.

A: In the sense you’re talking about, “so” is a conjunction meaning “therefore” or “consequently” or “with the result that.”

A sentence ending with this kind of “so” is incomplete. The speaker is indicating that a fuller reply is possible but isn’t being offered. So the sentence is deliberately incomplete—that is, the speaker wasn’t cut off mid-sentence.

Such a deliberate omission, according to the ordinary rules of English punctuation, should be indicated with ellipsis points at the end.

The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), under section 13.53 (Deliberately incomplete sentence), says, “Three dots are used at the end of a quoted sentence that is deliberately left grammatically incomplete.”

So your sentence would be transcribed this way: “I had the money, so …” Note the space between “so” and the first ellipsis point. No period follows (three dots, not four).

You definitely should not use ellipsis points BEFORE the “so.” If any are used at all, they should FOLLOW the “so.”

But if ellipsis points would lead to any ambiguity, don’t use them.

We wouldn’t use them, for example, if there’s any chance that they could be interpreted as meaning that something unintelligible followed or that the speaker was interrupted.

We weren’t familiar with the punctuation conventions of court reporting, but we took a crash course by visiting the website of Margie Wakeman Wells, author of Court Reporting: Bad Grammar/Good Punctuation.

Wells says the use of ellipses to mark a trailing off has been gaining favor among court reporters. She says the use of a dash should be avoided, even with a space before the dash and a period after it.

A dash would be misleading, in our opinion: “I had the money, so—” It would indicate that the speaker was cut off.

If any misinterpretation is possible, we’d throw the rules to the wind and use a simple period: “I had the money, so.”

Your principal aim is not to follow the conventions of ordinary English punctuation, but to accurately convey the sense of what a witness said. And a simple period would do that.

In short, ellipsis points would be our choice—but ONLY if you’re sure that ellipses couldn’t be interpreted as signaling that the speaker was cut off or unintelligible.

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English English language Grammar Punctuation Usage

Quote école

Q: I just discovered your blog and enjoyed reading several entries, although I noticed a small error in the recent post about British and American punctuation. The closing quotation mark in the British example should be inside the period, or rather the full stop, as the British say.

A: We’re glad to hear that you’re enjoying the blog. But our Oct. 29 post is punctuated correctly.

As you note, and as we’ve written before on our blog, British style often calls for placing periods outside closing quotation marks.

Often, but not always. The example we used in our blog post is an exception.

Here’s what The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) has to say in a paragraph devoted to the British style for punctuating quotations:

“Single quotation marks are used, and only those punctuation points that appeared in the original material should be included within the quotation marks; all others follow the closing quotation marks. (Exceptions to the rule are widespread: periods, for example are routinely placed inside any quotation that begins with a capital letter and forms a grammatically complete sentence.) Double quotation marks are reserved for quotations within quotations.”

The sentence we used as an illustration is a typical example of this exception: As Professor Witherspoon told us, ‘The word “fructify” means to bear fruit.’

The quotation begins with a capital letter and is a grammatically complete sentence, so the period is placed BEFORE the closing quotation mark.

Keep reading. And keep reading so closely. We like our readers to keep us on our toes.

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English English language Etymology Punctuation Usage Word origin

Shady language

Q: I recently heard a recording in which a doctor pronounces “atropine” as if it were spelled “atropin.” Is this legitimate?

A: Yes, there are two standard pronunciations of the organic compound that eye doctors use in solutions to dilate pupils: AT-ruh-peen and AT-ruh-pin.

In fact, “atropin” was the original spelling of this poisonous compound obtained from belladonna and other related plants. Several standard dictionaries still list that as a variant spelling.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, cites both spellings, with “atropine” pronounced AT-ruh-peen and “atropin” pronounced AT-ruh-pin.

However, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has only the “atropine” spelling and At-ruh-peen pronunciation.

In addition to being used in solutions to dilate eyes, the naturally occurring alkaloid atropine is used, among other things, in medicine to inhibit muscle spasms.

The earliest example of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Records of General Science, an 1836 collection of scientific knowledge:

“Atropin may be obtained in a crystalline state by dissolving it in the smallest possible quantity of boiling water.”

The word “atropine” comes from atropa belladonna, the scientific name of the perennial plant that’s also known as deadly nightshade.

English borrowed belladonna from the Italian name for the plant (it comes from the Italian words for “beautiful woman”).

However, the plant’s name is ultimately derived from Atropos, one of the three Greek Fates, according to the OED.

In Greek mythology, Atropos was the Fate responsible for deciding how people died and cutting their threads of life with her shears.

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English English language Etymology Grammar Punctuation Usage

A sense of wonder

Q: I was typing out dialogue for a play, and wrote this sentence: “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle?” I see dialogue like this all the time, written as if the speaker is asking a question. But then it struck me; is this truly a question? Should it be punctuated with a question mark or a period?

A: Obviously, someone who wonders about something has a question on his mind.

But a sentence beginning “I wonder” is a statement, not a question, and a statement should end with a period: “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle.” (In case any readers are wondering, we’ll discuss “who” versus “whom” later.)

This is an example of an indirect question, and as The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says, “An indirect question never takes a question mark.”

The Chicago Manual gives these examples of indirect questions: “He wondered whether it was worth the risk” and “How the two could be reconciled was the question on everyone’s mind.”

This is a subject we touched on in 2010, but it’s worth mentioning again.

Sometimes a mini-question (like the single word “who,” “when,” “how,” or “why”) is embedded within a statement. Here, too, no question mark is used, though the word may be italicized.

The Chicago Manual illustrates this with two examples: “She asked herself why” and “The question was no longer how but when.”

Similarly, as Chicago says, “A request disguised as a question does not require a question mark.”

A typical example: “Would you kindly respond by March 1.”

So much for indirect questions. But as conscientious language mavens, we should mention one other point about your sentence, “I wonder who they’ll move into Mr. Anderson’s cubicle.”

A purist would remind you that technically, the grammatical construction calls for “whom” instead of “who.” But we believe that “who” can be defended here.

As we’ve written before on our blog, in speech or in casual writing it can seem stuffy and unnatural to begin a sentence or clause with “whom.” So in what appears to be an informal office conversation, you can certainly justify your use of “who” instead.

By the way, the verb “wonder” is very old, dating back to
Anglo-Saxon days. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from King Alfred’s translation of Boethius into Old English, circa 888, when “to wonder” meant to be struck with surprise or astonishment.

The noun “wonder” is even older, according to OED citations, first appearing in “Caedmon’s Hymn,” an Old English poem from around 700, when it referred to something that causes astonishment.

The noun (wunder in Old English) is similar to words in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and other Germanic languages.

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English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Pronunciation Punctuation Slang Spelling Usage

Pat in NY Times on Web. 3 furor

Read Pat’s review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review on the furor over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. She’s reviewing The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, by David Skinner.

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English language Etymology Punctuation Spelling Usage

Something for the weekend?

Q: Before 1945, there was, in effect, no “weekend.” My father worked Saturday and half Sunday up to the late ’40s. Also, my memory is of a hyphenated “week-end.” It must have changed over the late ’50s and early ’60s.

A: The two-day weekend break (three or more days on holidays) may be relatively new, but the word “weekend” isn’t. It dates back to the 17th century.

As for that hyphen, “weekend” evolved like most compound words: they usually begin life as two separate words, are later hyphenated, and finally become one solid word, though this process can be a bit messy.

We checked nine standard dictionaries in the US and the UK, and all of them now list “weekend” without the hyphen.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary still hyphenates the word in its main entry (“week-end”), though the term is hyphen-free in all OED citations from the 1970s onward.

What is a “weekend”? Well, some dictionaries consider it Saturday and Sunday, others include Friday night, and still others describe it as the period between the end of one workweek and the start of another. (A “long weekend” is one extended by adjacent days.)

When the word entered English nearly 400 years ago, it simply meant the end of the week—at least, that’s the apparent sense in the OED’s earliest citation, a 1638 quotation reproduced in the Victoria County History of Yorkshire:

“The greatest weight of the said exaction will fall upon very poor people … who making every week a coarse kersey and being compelled to sell the same at the week end … are nevertheless constrained to yield one half penny apiece.” (Kersey is a heavy wool or wool and cotton fabric.)

In the next OED citation, from The Journal of the Rev. William Bagshaw Stevens (1793), the author seems to be using the word “weekend” in the sense of a period of leisure between two workweeks.

In a journal entry, Stevens, headmaster of the Repton School in Derbyshire, notes his plans to visit a friend, the Rev. John D. Dewe, a master at the Appleby School:

“Wrote to Dewe that I would put on my seven league boots next weekend and stretch my course to Appleby.”

(The excerpt comes from a version of the journal edited by Georgina Galbraith and published in 1965. The editing may account for this early appearance of “weekend” as a solid word.)

The next two OED citations, from the 19th century, are more specific about the meaning of the term.

Here’s an example from the Food Journal (1870): “ ‘Week-end,’ that is from Saturday until Monday,—it may be a later day in the week if the money and credit hold out,—is the season of dissipation.”

The journal Notes and Queries printed this passage in 1879: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so.”

But the fun begins on Friday in this example from Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel The Day Will Come (1889):

“Theodore and his friend betook themselves to Cheriton Chase on the following Friday, for that kind of visit which north country people describe as ‘a week end’.”

As we’ve said, none of the OED citations for “weekend” since the 1970s have hyphens. Here are a few examples, with “weekend” used attributively—that is, as an adjective:

“Lieutenant Mark Phillips, on weekend leave from Germany, went hunting on Saturday with Princess Anne.” (From the Guardian, 1973.)

“A weekend bag packed with scent, toothbrush and so forth.” (From Julia O’Faolain’s novel The Obedient Wife, 1982.)

“Humphrey Brooke was only a weekend gardener until … he decided to retire.” (From Harper’s and Queen, 1974.)

“Weekending French families setting out in their saloons for the countryside.” (From Anthony Grey’s novel Some Put Their Trust in Chariots, 1973.)

In Western countries, the week is typically divided into a workweek of Monday through Friday, and a weekend of Saturday and Sunday.

However, the usual workweek is often longer in other parts of the world. And the weekend can fall on other days, depending on the predominant religion in the area.

We won’t get into a detailed history of the two-day weekend, except to note that Henry Ford began giving his auto workers Saturday and Sunday off in 1926, the year the American Federation of Labor set a five-day, 40-hour week as one of its goals.

By the summer of 1929, according to a report by CQ Researcher, from one-half to three-quarters of a million American wage earners had a five-day week.

We should note, though, that many Americans don’t have a traditional workweek. When we were journalists, for example, we often worked on Saturday and Sunday, and had our days off on weekdays.

We’ll close this with a usage that was new to us. The phrase “something for the weekend” is a British euphemism for a condom (and sometimes for another sexual aid, like an aphrodisiac).

The OED explains the origins of this colloquialism: “Traditionally, as part of a question that barbers were said to have put to their customers.”

According to a 1987 citation in the Sunday Times of London, “Barbers would ask our fathers: ‘Anything for the weekend, sir?’ ”

This would seem to give a whole new meaning to the question, “How was your weekend?”

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English language Punctuation Usage

Quote du jour

Q: I grew up learning and practicing that single quotes belong within double quotes, or sometimes in headlines. But everybody seems to be using single quotes now. Have double quotes gone the way of the buggy whip?

A: We haven’t noticed an increase in the use of single quotation marks—at least not in American usage. Could it be that you’ve been reading a lot of British authors lately?

In the American system of punctuation, double quotation marks are used to enclose quoted material. Any interior quotations—that is, words quoted within a larger quotation—are enclosed in single quotation marks.

The British convention is just the reverse. The British generally use single quotation marks, while the interior quotations are enclosed within double quote marks. That’s why novels and other materials published in the UK can look startling to an American reader.

So if you’re seeing more single quote marks in writing by Americans, you’re seeing something unusual. However, as you say, single quote marks are used in most newspaper headlines.

Here’s how the same sentence would be punctuated in the US and UK systems.

American: As Professor Witherspoon told us, “The word ‘fructify’ means to bear fruit.”

British: As Professor Witherspoon told us, ‘The word “fructify” means to bear fruit.’

However, The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) points out that there are exceptions in some specialized kinds of American writing.

In linguistic and phonetic studies, a definition is often enclosed in single quotation marks.

And in horticultural writing, the names of cultivars are sometimes enclosed in single quotation marks.

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Plural jam

Q: After being so careful to say “daughters-in-law” and “passersby,” it seems wrong to say “cupfuls” or “handfuls.” Can you explain?

A: The convention here, according to usage guides, is that you use a normal plural ending for a solid compound and that you pluralize the most important part of a compound that’s split into parts.

But what about “passersby”? It’s the exception that proves the rule (an expression we’ve discussed on the blog).

“Passerby” was two words when it first showed up in the 16th century as the plural “passers by,” according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A hyphenated version appeared in the mid-18th century and a one-word version in the late 20th century. When the hyphen was lost, though, the plural “s” remained in the middle of “passersby.”

Here’s how Pat, in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, explains the pluralization of compound words:

“• If a compound word is solid and has no hyphen (-), put the normal plural ending at the end of the word:

Churchmen love soapboxes. Kipling appeals to schoolchildren and fishwives. Doormen are good at getting taxicabs. You don’t find Biedermeier bookcases in alleyways. Babies dump spoonfuls of jam on footstools.

“• If the word is split into parts, with or without hyphens, put the plural ending on the root or most important part (underlined in the examples):

Mothers-in-law like to attend courts-martial. Are they ladies-in-waiting or just hangers-on? Those counselors-at-law ate all the crêpes suzette. Do rear admirals serve on men-of-war?

“• Watch out for general when it’s part of a compound word. In a military title, general is usually the important part, so it gets the s. In a civilian title, general isn’t the root, so it doesn’t get the s:

Two attorneys general went dancing with two major generals. Those consuls general are retired brigadier generals.”

We’ve discussed hyphens and compound words many times on the blog, including a posting a couple of years ago.

As we said then, “Often nouns begin life as two separate words (like ‘home school’ and ‘try out’), then become hyphenated words (‘home-school,’ ‘try-out’), and finally lose their hyphens as they become more common (‘homeschool,’ ‘tryout’).”

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Five foot two, hyphens too?

Q: Woe Is I saved me from an “I”-versus-“me” embarrassment in a murder mystery I wrote. But I can’t find anything in Pat’s grammar book about “six foot ladder” and “five feet two” questions. I’m on the side of not using hyphens in these cases. Hope to gain a bit of insight from you.

A: This is an issue of style, not grammar. Although style guides agree on “six-foot ladder” (they recommend a hyphen), they’re at odds about “five feet two.”

We’ll get to our opinion in a moment, but we should mention that Pat does include a section on hyphens, “Betwixt and Between,” in Woe Is I (pages 175-79 in the third edition).

And she discusses whether to hyphenate a two-word description that modifies a noun (as in “six-foot ladder”). Here’s an excerpt:

“One of the hardest things to figure out with hyphens is how to use them in two-word descriptions. When two words are combined to describe a noun, sometimes you use a hyphen between them and sometimes you don’t.

“The first question to ask yourself is whether the description comes before or after the noun.

“• If it’s after the noun, don’t use a hyphen. Father is strong willed. My cousin is red haired. This chicken is well done. Ducks are water resistant.

“• If it’s before the noun, use a hyphen between the two words in the description. He’s a strong-willed father. I have a red-haired cousin. This is well-done chicken. Those are water-resistant ducks.”

Pat goes on to point out several exceptions, but we don’t need to get into them here. In answer to the ladder question, style manuals would recommend that you climb “a six-foot ladder,” but “the ladder is six feet” (or “six feet tall”).

Why “foot” in the first example and “feet” in the second?

We use singular nouns in nearly all adjectival phrases that precede nouns: “two-car garage,” “three-week vacation,” “four-bedroom house,” “five-month-old puppy,” “six-foot pipe,” and so on.

The only exception is with fractions, where the plural is often used in adjectival phrases that precede nouns: “a two-thirds turnout,” “a three-fifths margin,” etc.

Woe Is I doesn’t get into the hyphenation of adjectival phrases that describe dimensions (as in your “five feet two” question), but we’ve discussed this subject on our blog.

Again, if the phrase precedes a noun, it’s hyphenated, and a noun that’s part of it is singular: “a five-foot-two girl.”

Style guides differ, however, on how to deal with an adjectival phrase that follows the noun it modifies: Use hyphens, or not? Spell out numbers, or not? And so on.

The New York Times, for example, would say the girl is “5 feet 2 inches tall” or “5-foot-2.” The Chicago Manual of Style, on the other hand, would recommend she’s “five feet two,” though it would accept what it considers the more colloquial “five foot two.”

The Times’s style on this seems reasonable and natural to us. There’s nothing wrong with saying “She’s five feet two inches,” but if you drop the word “inches,” it seems to us that “She’s five-foot-two” is more idiomatically correct (with or without the hyphens). 

Now, the Chicago Manual does appear to be on your side about whether to use hyphens here. And with style guides at odds, the choice is yours. Feel free to say, “She’s five feet two.”

We can’t resist concluding with a few lines from one of the many hyphenless versions of “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”

Five foot two, eyes of blue,
But oh! what those five foot could do,
Has anybody seen my gal?
Turned up nose, turned down hose,
Never had no other beaus,
Has anybody seen my gal?

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Why the hyphen in Spider-Man?

Q: The latest Spider-Man movie made me realize that I’d been misspelling the superhero’s name as “Spiderman” (as I type this the red, wriggly, spell-check line tells me the non-hyphenated word is wrong). So why does “Spider-Man” have a hyphen?

A: Spider-Man’s name has a hyphen because Stan Lee, who created the comic character with Steve Ditko, apparently wanted to distinguish him from Superman.

In a Feb. 24, 2010, comment on Twitter, Lee wrote: “Spidey’s official name has a hyphen—‘Spider-Man.’ Know why? When I first dreamed him up I didn’t want anyone confusing him with Superman!”

However, Lee’s memory may have been playing tricks. His superhero’s name appeared as two words, “SPIDER MAN,” when it first showed up in 1962 on the cover of the final issue of Amazing Fantasy (a magazine previously known as Amazing Adult Fantasy).

And clarity may not have been the only reason for distinguishing Spider-Man from Superman. We’ve read that Lee, a former president of Marvel Comics, may have wanted to avoid infringing on the DC Comics trademarks for the unhyphenated Superman.

(“Stan Lee,” by the way, is the pen name of Stanley Martin Lieber.)

Interestingly, the word “spider-man” had been around (with and without a hyphen) before the Stan Lee character showed up.

The first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Britannica Book of the Year (1955): “Spiderman, an erector of building structures.”

The OED’s entry for “spider-man” (Oxford uses a hyphen) defines the term as “one employed to work on high structures; a steeple-jack.”

We’ll end with a 1958 citation from the Radio Times, a British magazine that features broadcast program listings:

“These spider-men and steel-erectors work at great heights, often where there are no means of protection. They walk along girders at dizzy heights as though they were strolling along Piccadilly.”

And by the way, be skeptical of those red, wriggly lines. There are lots of words that spell-checkers don’t know!

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Dating service

Q: I am a proofreader at a law firm where the house style calls for a comma after a full date in a sentence. Recently I was reprimanded (mildly) for removing commas after the years in a list like this: “July 24, 2011, letter; February 16, 2012, memorandum; April 19, 2012, document , etc.” I contend that the dates here are being used as adjectives, and should not be separated by punctuation from the nouns they modify. Can you help me with this? Otherwise I will be forced to insert commas while my mind screams “NO.”

A: Our answer will disappoint you. As we’ve written before on our blog, “In the month-day-year style, we use commas both before and after the year (except at the end of a sentence): ‘The party on March 3, 2009, was a blowout.’ ”

And this is true whether or not the date is being used as an adjective, as in “The March 3, 2009, party was a blowout.”

Most American style and usage authorities follow this system, though not all. One dissenter, Bryan A. Garner, is an authority on legal writing, and his views may be of particular interest to you. We’ll get to them later.

But first let’s see what The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), one of the most widely used American style guides, has to say on the subject of “dates as adjectives”:

“Dates are often used as descriptive adjectives, more often today than in years past. … If a full month-day-year date is used, then a comma is considered necessary both before and after the year (the May 18, 2002, commencement ceremonies).”

Here the Chicago Manual adds that such a construction is awkward and “is therefore best avoided (commencement ceremonies on May 18, 2002).”

Later, the editors give examples of non-adjectival usage, like this one: “June 5, 1928, lives on in the memories of only a handful of us.”

We’re not sure the dates in your list can be called adjectives or not, but that’s irrelevant. Either way, we recommend that you retain the commas after the years.

Again, this convention applies only to dates that use the full shebang—month, day, and year. As we noted in that previous blog entry, you don’t need a comma if only the day and month, or the month and year, are given: “The March 5 party was a blowout” or “The party in March 2009 was a blowout.”

By the way, we’re describing the use of commas in the American dating system (month-day-year). In the British system (day-month-year), no commas are used.

Here’s an example of the British style from the Chicago Manual: “See his journal entries of 6 October 1999 and 4 January 2000.”

Now for that dissenting opinion from Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage and editor of Black’s Law Journal.

In the third edition of his usage guide, Garner agrees with the Chicago Manual that using the full date as an adjective “is particularly clumsy.” But then he goes on to say:

“Stylists who use this phrasing typically omit the comma after the year, and justifiably so: in the midst of an adjective phrase (i.e., the date), it impedes the flow of the writing too much.”

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Lyrical punctuation

Q: Anthropologie, a price-inflated clothing company with a creatively spelled name, emailed me a sales pitch with a line of lyrics that I found hilariously alienating. Who goofed—the writer of the song or of the ad?

A: In Anthropologie’s email, the first line of Ingrid Michaelson’s song “You and I” reads this way: “Oh let’s get rich and buy our parents’ homes in the south of France.”

That possessive apostrophe doesn’t belong there.

Obviously, the indie singer-songwriter means “buy our parents homes”—that is, buy homes for the parents, not from them.

The possessive apostrophe in the email version skews the meaning into “let’s buy from our parents the homes they own in the south of France.”

But the mistake is Anthropologie’s, not Ingrid Michaelson’s. The lyrics as given on her website don’t use the apostrophe.

On the other hand, Michaelson isn’t entirely without blame. In the lyrics on her website, the contraction “let’s” is missing its apostrophe. And everything is lowercase, even “France.”

However, we aren’t usually bothered by lyric writers who take liberties with English. We’ve said before on the blog that lyricists are exempt from the rules of grammar, syntax, usage, spelling, pronunciation, and even logic!

As for the company’s “creatively spelled name,” it’s the French word for “anthropology.” In fact, the English word has occasionally been spelled that way too.

For example, that spelling is used in a 1673 English translation of De Motu Cordis, William Harvey’s 1628 book in Latin about the circulation of blood:

“I call the generall doctrine of man Anthropologie, the parts of which, I do ordain to be, according to this division, Psychologie, Somatologie, and Hœmatologie, into the doctrine of the soul, bodie, and blood.”

In case you’re curious, “anthropology” (spelled with a “y”) entered English in the late 16th century.

In fact, the first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1593 work by another Harvey, the astrologer and polemicist Richard Harvey:

“Genealogy or issue which they had, Artes which they studied, Actes which they did. This part of History is named Anthropology.”

The word is ultimately derived from the Greek anthropos (man) and –logia (a science or area of study).

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Was the Founders’ English less than perfect?

Q: A coworker points out that the Founding Fathers used “insure” incorrectly. Of course no one wants to say Thomas Jefferson was wrong! And as you note, “ensure” and “insure” have much in common.

A: The Constitution and its Preamble were written in 1787, and the language, capitalizations, and spellings reflect the usage of the day. The Preamble reads:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

We’ve reproduced the original 1787 spellings, quoting from the document held in the National Archives. The spellings “defence” (still used in British English) and “insure” were common usage in the 18th century.

As we’ve written before on our blog, in current usage to “insure” is to issue or buy insurance against financial loss, while to “ensure” is to make certain of something.

That’s the usual practice, and the one recommended by usage guides, though dictionaries say the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

Meanwhile, in current usage to “assure” means to reassure or remove doubt, though the British sometimes use the term in the technical sense of to underwrite financial loss.

As you can see, English usage changes over time!

Thomas Jefferson used “insure” in the general sense in a memoir he wrote in 1825, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A recurrence to these letters now insures me against errors of memory.”

Jefferson, by the way, didn’t write the Preamble or any other part of the Constitution. He was ambassador to France at the time, and was out of the country during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

But he did write the Declaration of Independence in 1776, though a few touches were added by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

The authorship of the Preamble and much of the rest of the Constitution is credited to another of the Founders, Gouverneur Morris, who was a Pennsylvania delegate to the 1787 convention.

In the past, we’ve answered several other questions about the Preamble, in case you’re interested.

In 2011, we had postings in May and November about the phrase “We the People.” And in 2008, we had postings in January and November about the phrase “more perfect.”

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Punctuation Usage

Just because

Q: I’m in the editing phase of a book and notice that the copyeditor has added a comma before many (perhaps most) occurrences of the word “because.” This seems to halt the flow of the sentences, but I wonder if a rule exists that I’m not aware of.

A: Generally, according to the few usage guides that comment on this issue, a comma is not used before “because.”

The comma is appropriate only when needed to guide the reader through an unusually long or complex sentence.

The conjunction “because” generally introduces a dependent clause, one that adds information to the main clause. The “because” clause provides a reason, cause, or motive—the “why” of the sentence.

Normally, the “because” part flows smoothly from the main clause and no break is needed between them: “He ran because he was a coward” … “They moved because they’re expecting a third child” … “She’s upset because you left.”

However, according to some usage guides, you do need a preceding comma if the clause starts with “perhaps because” or “possibly because” or “but not because” (“He ran, perhaps because he was a coward”).

And you need a following comma, according to these usage authorities, if the “because clause” comes first (“Because he was a coward, he ran”).

You’ll find advice along these lines in Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) and The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage.

Note that a sentence with a negative verb followed by “because” can easily be misread: “He wasn’t fired because he was late.” Was he fired or wasn’t he?

Do the reader a favor and clarify the situation: “He wasn’t fired because he was late. He was fired because he embezzled money.”

That kind of negative sentence, by the way, can be changed completely if a comma is thoughtlessly added.

For example, these two sentences have opposite meanings: “She didn’t marry him because he was dying” … “She didn’t marry him, because he was dying.”

In the first sentence, she married him—but not because he was dying. In the second sentence, she didn’t marry him—because he was dying.

If the first sentence is what you mean to say, it’s better to rewrite it and avoid the ambiguity: “She married him, but not because he was dying.”

It’s always worth taking one more look at those commas!

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Etymology Grammar Punctuation Usage

Is “who’s” short for “who is” or “who has”?

Q: I avoid “who’s” when referencing “who has” as opposed to “who is,” which seems the most obvious and possibly only correct usage. Can you clarify whether “who’s” can be used for “who has,” and if other contractions like it are acceptable as well?

A: In pronoun + verb contractions like “she’s,” “he’s,” “who’s,” “that’s,” and so on, the ’s ending represents a shortening of either “is” or “has.” Both are grammatically correct, according to standard usage guides, including Pat’s book Woe Is I.

So “who’s” is a legitimate contraction of both “who is” and “who has.” Examples: “Who’s he?” … “Who’s done the dishes?”

Similarly, “what’s” is a legitimate contraction of “what is” and “what has.” Examples: “What’s your name?” … “What’s happened to you?”

However, the use of ’s as a shortening of “does” is considered a casual or informal usage. So using “what’s” for “what does” (as in “What’s he think he’s doing?”) would not be recommended for formal writing. We recently had posting about this.

One last point: A lot of people think contractions aren’t quite right, especially when they want their writing to be at its very best. If you’re one of them, think again.

As we write in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths, writers have been using contractions since Anglo-Saxon days.

Old English contractions include nis from ne is (“is not”), naes from ne waes (“was not”), nolde from ne wolde (“would not”), naefde from ne haefde (“did not have”), and nat from ne wat (“does not know”).

“And such shortenings were an accepted part of the language for hundreds of years,” we say. “In Elizabethan times, for instance, Shakespeare didn’t spare contractions. He used them in dialogue (‘But he’s an arrant knave’—Hamlet), in titles (All’s Well That Ends Well ), and in sonnets (‘That’s for thyself to breed another thee’).”

It wasn’t until the early 1700s that anybody thought to question the use of contractions. Addison, Swift, Pope, and others began raising questions about their suitability in print, though educated people routinely used them in conversation.

By the late 18th century, contractions were tolerated in speech but considered a no-no in writing. But by the early 20th century, contractions were back in favor again.

In the 1920s, Henry Fowler used them without comment in his famous usage guide, and most writing handbooks now recommend contractions.

Lots of traditionalists, however, still haven’t gotten the word.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Punctuation Usage Word origin Writing

An etymological valentine

Q: I wished a colleague happy Valentine’s Day earlier in the month and was told there is no apostrophe plus “s” in the name of the holiday. There is, isn’t there?

A: Yes, there is an apostrophe + “s” in “Valentine’s Day.” The longer form of the name for the holiday is “St. Valentine’s Day.”

And in case you’re wondering, the word “Valentine’s” in the name of the holiday is a possessive proper noun, while the word “valentines” (for the cards we get on Feb. 14) is a plural common noun.

“Valentine’s Day” has the possessive apostrophe because it’s a saint’s day. In Latin, Valentinus was the name of two early Italian saints commemorated on Feb. 14.

Published references in the Oxford English Dictionary indicate that the phrase “Valentine’s Day” was first recorded in about 1381 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English poem The Parlement of Foules:

“For this was on seynt Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.” (In Middle English, possessive apostrophes were not used.)

Chaucer’s lines would be translated this way in modern English: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day / When every bird comes here to choose his mate.” (The title means a parliament or assembly of fowls—that is, birds.)

As a common noun, “valentine” was first used to mean a lover, sweetheart, or special friend. This sense of the word was first recorded in writing in 1477, according to OED citations.

In February of that year, a young woman named Margery Brews wrote two love letters to her husband-to-be, John Paston, calling him “Voluntyn” (Valentine).

As rendered into modern English, one of the letters begins “Right reverend and well-beloved Valentine” and ends “By your Valentine.” (We’re quoting from The Paston Letters, edited by Norman Davis, 1963.)

In the mid-1500s, the OED says, the noun “valentine” was first used to mean “a folded paper inscribed with the name of a person to be drawn as a valentine.”

It wasn’t until the 19th century, adds Oxford, that “valentine” came to have its modern meaning: “a written or printed letter or missive, a card of dainty design with verses or other words, esp. of an amorous or sentimental nature, sent on St. Valentine’s day.”

Here’s the OED’s first citation, from Mary Russell Mitford’s book Our Village (1824), a collection of sketches: “A fine sheet of flourishing writing, something between a valentine and a sampler.”

This later example is from Albert R. Smith’s The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his Friend Jack Johnson (1844): “He had that morning received … a valentine, in a lady’s hand-writing, and perfectly anonymous.”

What could be more intriguing than that?

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Grammar Punctuation Usage

Need a PhD to pluralize “master’s degree”?

Q: I’ve been asked to edit some policy papers for the graduate dean at the university where I teach. My inclination is to change “Masters degree” to “Master’s degree.” Do you have an opinion? Also, after reading through some rather convoluted arguments on the Web, I’m at sea over how to punctuate “I have two Master’s degrees.” Do you have a clear explanation of the issue?

A: On our blog, we follow The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), and use the apostrophe: “master’s degree.”

We also lowercase “master’s” when used generically (as in “My son is working on a master’s degree”).

Note that when you pluralize the phrase as a whole, only “degree” gets the plural “s.” The adjective “master’s” doesn’t itself become plural.

So that sentence you’re editing should be written this way: “I have two master’s degrees.”

This practice is also followed in publications of the Modern Language Association.

For example, here’s a sentence from a paper published by the MLA last June (“Rethinking the Master’s Degree in English for a New Century”): “Across all fields of study, the number of master’s degrees granted between 1980–81 and 2007–08 increased 111%, from 295,731 to 625,023.”

We wouldn’t be surprised if the master’s and bachelor’s degrees lost their apostrophes someday, just as the abbreviations—MA and BA—have lost their periods.

Punctuation does tend to fall away over time, as with USA, MD (for medical doctor), USA, NFL, and so on.

But for now, the apostrophe is still used with those degrees in the Chicago Manual as well as in standard dictionaries, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

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Grammar Punctuation Usage

What’s your weekend look like?

Q: The other day I got a brochure in the mail with a cover that read, “What’s your weekend look like?” Yikes! So embarrassing!

A: The writer of that brochure used “what’s” as a casual or informal contraction of “what does.” But in standard written English, “what’s” is normally a contraction of either “what is” or “what has” (as in “What’s you name?” or “What’s he done now?”).

In written English, the verb “do” is normally contracted only with “not”—in “don’t,” “didn’t,” and “doesn’t.” It’s not usually contracted with a pronoun (like “what”).

When people use “what’s” to mean “what does”—shrinking “does” to an apostrophe and “s”—they’re more likely to be talking than writing.

In discussing contracted forms of the verb “do,” Sidney Greenbaum writes in the Oxford English Grammar: “The contracted form ’s is only occasionally found in writing: Who’s she take after?, What’s he say? It is more common in informal speech.”

In another oral contraction we sometimes hear, “did” is reduced to an apostrophe and “d,” as in “What’d they say?” This too is often heard in speech but very seldom used in writing (except written dialogue).

So we don’t think this use of “what’s” belongs in good writing, unless you’re deliberately trying to to sound colloquial, and it probably shouldn’t have appeared in a brochure seeking business. But we don’t consider it an egregious error, and it’s fairly common in casual conversation.

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Punctuation Usage

Compound fractures

Q: You recently quoted a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary that uses the word “overtasking.” I initially read this as “overt-asking.” You’ve written before about how a compound often evolves from two separate words, to hyphenated words, to one word. But what about confusing compounds? Do they keep their hyphens to avoid misunderstanding?

A: Yes, some potentially confusing compounds do retain their hyphens to avoid misunderstanding, though “overtasking” isn’t generally considered one of them. Most of these puzzlers begin, or appear to begin, with prefixes.

The prefix “re-” is probably the biggest culprit here. For example, a hyphen can help a reader differentiate “re-creation” (making anew) from “recreation” (an enjoyable activity), and “re-sign” (sign again) from “resign” (quit).

Here are some other examples: “re-cover” (cover again) from “recover” (regain); “re-collect” (collect again) from “recollect” (remember); “re-form” (form again) from “reform” (change); “re-treat” (treat again) from “retreat” (go back).

Other prefixes can be confusing too. A hyphen in the adjective “multi-ply” (having several layers) distinguishes it from the verb “multiply.“ And before cooperative apartments became more common, hyphens were always used in “co-op” so it wasn’t mistaken for the “coop” that chickens live in.

We once wrote a blog entry that touches on confusion over the pronunciation of a word that could perhaps use a hyphen: “biopic” (a film biography).

No, the prefix “bi-“ isn’t there, but the eye might think it is. Maybe “biopic” should have a hyphen after “bio” so it’s not interpreted as “bi-opic,” which sounds like a word for double vision.

Familiar phrases can mislead us too. At a glance, the eye might read the phrase “a fine toothbrush” as “a fine-tooth brush.”

And a writer might want to distinguish between a “small businessman” and a “small-business man,” though we’d probably avoid the confusion by referring to the little guy as a short businessman.

We could give you more examples, but you get the idea. The presence or absence of a hyphen can make a difference, so both writer and reader need to pay attention.

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Etymology Punctuation Usage

When did “Venus’s beauty” get a second “s”?

Q: I am 50 and I was taught that words ending in “s” (“Chris,” for example) were made possessive by adding an apostrophe (“Chris’ coat”). But in recent years I have noticed another “s” being added after the apostrophe. When did “Chris’s” get an extra “s”?

A: As far as we can tell, an apostrophe plus the letter “s” has generally been used to mark the possessive case of singular nouns since at least the 1700s. This has been true whether the nouns ended in “s” or not.

A 1772 edition of Joseph Priestley’s The Rudiments of English Grammar, for example, says the possessive “is formed by adding (s) with an apostrophe before it” to a singular noun. Examples include one with a singular noun ending in “s” (“Venus’s beauty”).

So a name or other singular noun that ends in “s” (like “Chris”) is usually made possessive with the addition of an apostrophe plus a final “s” (as in “Chris’s coat”).

Here’s the rule, from The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.): “The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s. … The general rule stated at [that paragraph] extends to the possessives of proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z.”

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 24, 2019, to cite the wording in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual.]

The examples given in the Chicago Manual include “Kansas’s legislature,” “Marx’s theories,” “Dickens’s novels,” “Berlioz’s works,” “Borges’s library,” “Camus’s novels,” and “Jesus’s adherents.”

The manual goes on to say: “Some writers and publishers prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s—hence ‘Dylan Thomas’ poetry,’ ‘Etta James’ singing,’ and ‘that business’ main concern.’ Though easy to apply and economical, such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.”

The point about pronunciation is a good one. When a name ends in  “s” or another sibilant sound, we add a syllable when pronouncing the possessive form. So the possessive form of the name “Chris” is pronounced KRIS-ez—a good enough reason to retain the final “s.”

If you’d like to read more, we’ve written before on the blog about forming the possessive of plural names. And if you’re game for a little history, we had an item on how the apostrophe became the mark of possession.

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Grammar Punctuation Usage

A cereal comma?

Q: I’ve noticed that the NY Times has changed its comma rule for punctuating words in a series. The paper now drops the comma before the last item. Example: “Cheerios, Fruit Loops and Rice Krispies.” This can be confusing. Any idea how the Times arrived at this decision?

A: As far as we know, this has always been the Times’s policy on commas. Like many newspapers, it doesn’t use a final comma before the last item in a series.

The paper’s most recent style guide (1999) says: “In general, do not use a comma before and or or in a series.” The Times’s policy was the same in the previous style guide (1976).

When the two of us worked for the Times, we naturally followed the rule. But we think, as you do, that the final serial comma (sometimes called the Oxford comma) is a good idea and aids in readability. We use it in our blog.

We’ve written postings in 2011 and 2010 on the subject. The latest one includes some speculation (not by us!) about why newspapers omit the serial comma.

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Punctuation Usage

A sign of the Times’s?

Q: On the Authors page of your website, you say Pat once “wrote the Times’s weekly columns on new video releases and paperback books.” Why do you add an “s” after the apostrophe in “Times’s”? I would think one “s” is enough.

A: The New York Times, like the Times of London, treats the “Times” in its name as a singular word. Thus when used as a possessive, the name “Times” is followed by an apostrophe plus another “s.”

Though this practice is a longstanding newspaper tradition, it’s not endorsed by standard guides on usage. So you’re right to question our use of the extra “s.” But in our opinion, this is a style issue that’s neither right nor wrong.

Within an entry about the use of apostrophes, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says: “Almost all singular words ending in s require a second s as well as the apostrophe to form the possessive: James’s; Chris’s; The Times’s.”

Elsewhere, in an entry about the use of the newspaper’s name, the manual says: “Note the possessive: The Times’s coverage.”

And in an entry about possessives in general, it says: “Ordinarily form a possessive by adding ’s to a singular noun (the boy’s boots; the girl’s coat), even if the noun already ends in an s (The Times’s article).”

But the paper doesn’t extend this rule to other proper names that consist of technically plural words: “Sometimes a singular idea is expressed in words that are technically plural; in such a case, use the plural form of the possessive: United States’; General Motors’. Never United States’s, etc.”

Is this a double standard? Is the paper making an exception for itself?

For an answer we turned to The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.). In its rules on possessives, the style guide has a section about nouns that are plural in form but singular in meaning.

The Chicago Manual recommends adding only an apostrophe “when the name of a place or an organization or a publication (or the last element in the name) is a plural form ending in s, such as the United States, even though the entity is singular.”

The examples given are “the United States’ role in international law … Highland Hills’ late mayor … Callaway Gardens’ former curator … the National Academy of Sciences’ new policy.”

In a separate entry, the Chicago Manual discusses the use of apostrophes with italics (it recommends italicizing the names of publications). It gives these examples: “the Atlantic Monthly’s editor … the New York Times’ new fashion editor.”

So it appears that the newspaper does indeed have a double standard, allowing “Times” to be singular in its own name, but not “Motors” (in “General Motors”) or “States” (in “United States”).

But there’s some justification for this.

The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for many senses of the plural “times,”  including “the general state of affairs at a particular period.” This is the sense of the word that has appeared in the names of newspapers since 1788.

The Times of London, the first to use “Times” in its name, treats the word as a singular when referring to itself.

For example, a section called “Bricks and Mortar” is advertised as “The Times’s weekly property supplement.”

And recent news articles include such references as “before The Times’s revelations” … “not even The Times’s esteemed chief theatre critic” … “since the beginning of The Times’s campaign” … “The Times’s respected rugby correspondent” … “The Times’s profile of him.”

And the Financial Times has the same policy (“the Financial Times’s London office” … “the Financial Times’s analysis of health department figures”), though it modestly refrains from capitalizing “the.”

There’s one other point to be made here. If the possessive form changes in pronunciation (for example, from TIMES to TIMES-ez), then it’s usually spelled with an extra “s.”

The two of us worked at the New York Times for many years, and we know that the possessive form of the name is commonly pronounced with the extra syllable. But we don’t usually hear the extra “ez” in the possessive forms of “General Motors” and “United States.”

So we’ll stick with the extra “s” when we write the possessive form: “Times’s.” But those who choose to omit it may do so with a clean conscience.

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Grammar Punctuation Spelling Usage

Its/it’s: Grammar, punctuation, spelling?

Q: Over dinner, a friend said she had corrected a co-worker’s mistaken use of “its” where “it’s” was appropriate. She described this as a grammatical error, but our dinner party was evenly split over whether it was grammar or spelling. Any chance you can shed some light on this?

A: On a superficial level, this qualifies as both a punctuation error and a spelling error.

But on a deeper level, it’s a grammatical error, because it represents a failure to distinguish between (1) the possessive pronoun and (2) the contraction.

It also represents a failure to recognize that possessive pronouns don’t sport apostrophes.

So the problem is more than just a spelling goof in our opinion. That probably puts us into the grammar-error camp.

You might be interested in a blog entry we wrote last year about how the apostrophe came to be the mark of possession.

If any reader of the blog is confused by “its” and “it’s,” check out our 2007 posting about the “it” squad.

In the meantime, here’s an easy way to keep “its” and “it’s” straight: If you can substitute “it is” or “it has,” then “it’s” is right. Otherwise, choose “its.”

(The language blogger Jan Freeman argues that these “its”/“it’s” errors are merely typos, but comments from readers of our books, articles, and postings over the last 15 years suggest otherwise. Although a lot of the mistakes are undoubtedly typos, many, many people believe the presence of an apostrophe in “it’s” makes it a possessive. In fact, Pat’s first book, Woe Is I, was inspired by a publisher whose highly educated, adult children didn’t know the difference between these two words.)

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Etymology Punctuation Usage

Do you pronounce the H in Hubert?

Q: My brother’s name is “Hubert.” My son’s name is “Hugh.” Am I making a mistake when I say their names without pronouncing the initial “H”? What about “hue,” “humid,” “Hume”?

A: The short answer is that the “h” is usually pronounced in these words, so “Hubert” sounds like HYOO-bert, “Hugh” and “hue” like HYOO, “humid” like HYOO-mid, and “Hume” like HYOOM.

But quite a few people don’t pronounce the initial letter, so “Hubert” then sounds like YOO-bert, “Hugh” and “hue” like YOO, “humid” like YOO-mid, and “Hume” like YOOM.

And the people who do pronounce the “h” do it in all sorts of ways, from a very aitchy “h” to a whisper of aitchiness that can barely be heard.

Phonetically, the letter “h” in these words is a voiceless palatal fricative (a consonant produced by narrowing the air passages, arching the tongue toward the hard palate, and not vibrating the vocal cords).

All of the standard dictionaries we checked say the proper names you asked about (“Hubert,” Hugh,” “Hume”) should be pronounced with the “h” sounded.

But the dictionaries differ about pronouncing “hue” and “humid,” as well as “huge,” “human,” and similar words.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), for example, lists only one pronunciation for each of these words: with the “h” sounded.

But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) also includes “h”-less pronunciations of “humid,” “huge,” and “human.” And the other standard dictionaries we checked generally agree with M-W.

In its entries for “humid,” “huge,” and “human,” the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary says the words are “often” heard with “h”-less pronunciations.

Interestingly, English adopted all three of these words from early versions of French where the “h” wasn’t sounded.

In the case of “human,” which comes from Latin via Middle French and Anglo-Norman, “the origin of the vocalism is unclear,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED notes that the word begins with an “h” in some Romance languages (for example, humano in Spanish, where it’s not pronounced) and without it in others (umano in Italian).

So are you making a mistake by not pronouncing the “h” in the names of your brother and your son?

Yes, according to standard dictionaries. But a lot of people do it. And as Alexander Pope observed, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

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Punctuation Usage

Are you dotty enough?

Q: Would you please address the disappearing period in print, from AD to MD to CC Sabathia. What is being saved by dropping the dot?

A. Many abbreviations have lost their dots lately in dictionaries and publications: RSVP, MD, USA, and scores of others.

This is an issue of style or convention, and such things change over the years—usually in the direction of simplicity. When in doubt, check your dictionary (and make sure it’s up to date).

If you’re writing for publication, follow the house style guide on whether to use points or not in specific abbreviations.

The New York Times, for example, generally uses points in abbreviations when the letters stand for separate words: F.C.C, I.B.M., N.R.A., J. C. Penney.

But the Times drops the periods in acronyms (abbreviations pronounced as words): NATO, AIDS, NASA.

The Guardian, on the other hand, doesn’t use points in abbreviations (or spaces between initials): BBC, US, mph, eg, etc, 4am, No 10, PJ O’Rourke, WH Smith.

As you can see, the conventions for using periods in abbreviations differ from publication to publication, dictionary to dictionary, style manual to style manual.

When you’re not writing for publication, be consistent. If you use dots with M.D. in one spot, don’t use a dotless MD in another.

We haven’t actually answered your question: What is being saved by dropping the dot?

Well, if you’re in a hurry, as so many of us are these days, every little dot counts.

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Punctuation Usage

An inner-office memo?

Q: I recently came across a person who uses “inner-office mail” as opposed to “inter-office mail.” When I questioned her usage, she informed me that many colleges use “inner” instead of “inter,” and that both are acceptable. Can you please shed some light?

A: A bit of googling reveals that it’s not uncommon to see such things online as “inner-office mail,” “inner office dating,” and “inner office relationships.” But Google helpfully (and correctly in these cases) suggests: “Did you mean: ‘interoffice.’ ”

Our cursory searching did indeed find quite a few examples of the misuse on academic websites. We won’t embarrass the colleges and universities by mentioning them, but they might consider sending around an interoffice memo on the subject.

“Inter” and “inner” mean different things. “Inter” means between or among. But “inner” (or “intra,” which is the more common prefix) means something quite the contrary: within.

That’s why “interstate” commerce is business conducted between states or across state lines, while “intrastate” (not “inner-state”) commerce is confined to a single state.

In a corporate or academic setting, an “interoffice” memo would be one between or among offices. An “intra-office” memo would be one sent around within the same office.

An “inner-office” memo could refer to one sent around within the same office, but “intra” is generally used in such compounds to mean within.

Besides, the noun phrase “inner office” has a special meaning—the chief or primary office, or one located inside another.

So an “inner-office” memo (if such a phrase were used) might mean one sent from, or within, the boss’s inner office.

One more word, about hyphenation. Most adjectives formed with “inter” and “intra” don’t have hyphens (“intercollegiate,” “intravenous”).

Adjectives formed with “inner” are sometimes hyphenated (“inner-city,” “inner-directed”) and sometimes not (“innerspring,” “innermost”).

When in doubt, check your dictionary.

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