Dr. Whom's Peeves: a selection

Contents

Some sites worth seeing

A Good Site: The Curmudgeon's Stylebook, by Bill Walsh, a copy editor at The Washington Post. This is a section of his Web site, whose title as a whole is The Slot. I like this man's style!

Another Good Site: Common Errors in English, by Prof. Paul Brians. I don't agree with everything he says, but I wouldn't expect to. And I admire the way he says it: less colorfully than I do on this site, but that's not a problem -- and with clear explanations for his stands. 

Word Information: Robertson's Words for a Modern Age: A Dictionary of Latin and Greek Words used in Modern English Vocabulary. Roots and prefixes and suffixes, very useful for teachers, word freaks, et cætera. (Thanks to the Doctor's Chinese sister for bringing this to his attention.) 

A Fun Site: Luciferous Logolepsy: Dragging obscure words into the light of day. (Also thanks to my sister.) 

Musical Note: The Doctor's co-persona The Filker With No Nickname has written a song called Editors' Waltz Even if you don't know the tune, Leslie Fish's "Witnesses' Waltz", you may find it amusing.

The serial comma

(Quoted from a technical writers' list. I couldn't have said it better:)

Serial comma? Use it. Why not? Isn't it about time for the popular Ayn Rand example?

• "I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God."
• "I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."

podium for lectern

A lectern is a stand to hold text for a person to read. The root lect- is Latin for 'read' (compare "lecture" and "legible"): it supports the reading material.

A podium is a raised platform at the front of a hall. The root pod- is Greek for 'foot' (compare "podiatrist"): it supports the speaker's feet.

If you stand behind the podium, the audience will have a hard time seeing you!

fortuitous for fortunate

Fortunate means 'due to good fortune' or 'lucky' (as in "a lucky break", "a fortunate occurrence").

Fortuitous means 'due to chance, due to fortune', 'not planned'. It says nothing about whether the occurrence was good, bad, or neutral. It's most often used for something that had a good outcome, which may be what confuses people into thinking that it means "fortunate" but sounds better because it's longer. Balderdash! Longer isn't better, and "sounds-like" isn't "means-the-same-as".

His fortuitous encounter with a policeman just as he was opening the wallet he had found led to an unhappy traversal of the court system.

Misused apostrophes

Many people find the apostrophe a pain to use. It doesn't affect pronunciation, so you can't tell from the sound whether to use it or not. Nevertheless, its misuse, while ugly, is easy to avoid.

The apostrophe has two common uses:

1. with a noun and an s to show possession, often equivalent to the word of:
   • the President's staff ('s for a singular noun)
   • Maria's patent (ditto)
   • the soldiers' weapons (With a plural noun that ends in s, the apostrophe goes after the s.)
   • children's rights (With a plural noun that doesn't end in s, add 's.)
2. in a contraction to show where one or more letters are dropped:
   • Daddy's home! (= Daddy is home!)
   • We've never met (= We have never met)
   • Don't worry (= Do not worry)
   • It's a pleasure to meet you (= It is a ...)
   • It's got something to do with possessives (= It has got ...)

But personal* pronouns don't all use s to show possession, and they never use apostrophes:

subject:	I	you	he	she	it	we	they
possessive (adjectival):	my	your	his	her	its	our	their
possessive (nominal):	mine	yours	his	hers	its	ours	theirs

Most of these don't cause any confusion. But it is the source of a heap of trouble. Taken by itself, its fits right in with the other possessive pronouns. Unfortunately, the possessive its sounds identical to the contraction for "it is", which is it's. So people (as I reason)

1. remember seeing it's in some context,
2. remember learning something about using apostrophes with possessives (only with nouns, but they don't remember that part; see examples above), and
3. decide that they're supposed to use it's for the possessive of it.

* Indefinite pronouns are another story:

• "Somebody's job" is nobody's job. So nobody does it, and it becomes everybody's headache.
• I didn't take anyone's beer! Everyone's attention was on me the whole time, so how could I have?
• Minding one's own business is often, though not always, a good rule of behavior.

(Thanks to "Arthur T." for reminding me of this. [2004-11-14])

A colleague of mine contributes the following anecdote:

I just came back from a dinner honoring volunteers to a local organization. There was a cake with the inscription:

Thank You Say's . . .

I took a fork and removed the apostrophe. I believe I am the only cake editor on the list.

There is an excellent (and irate!) summary here; in color here.

Language Abuse 

There are plenty of stories, books, and sites about the misuse of English by non-native speakers. Engrish.com, for example, is devoted to "the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design".

But it goes the other way, too: we English-speakers abuse other languages terribly in commercial use. Hanzi Smatter is "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture". You don't have to be able to read the characters to understand what's wrong, because "Tian", the site owner, explains them, or the people sending in the photos do. (My thanks to Ben-san Arizona for bringing this site to my attention.)

Many of them are "missing a dot" or "left part of the character is way too small". But then we get gems like this:

This photo was in the October 2005 issue of Skin and Ink magazine. Since there was no translation for the tattoo, I don't know if it was the owner's intention to have "hand warmer" and "air conditioner" tattooed on his body.

Stuff vs. Things

• "Less"? Okay, this is conversation.
• "Fewer"? Sure.
  

• "Less"? Okay.
• "Fewer"? No way.