A Flare for the Language

Found this in my tote bag; I ripped it out of my daily newspaper back on September 12, and intended to post it. Here it is--later, and more rumpled.

On the celebrity-news paper, an item about Kanye West's arrest in L.A. Airport after an altercation w/ paparazzi; West was accused of smashing a camera on the floor.

The line in question:

The singer has a history of flaring his temper.

A temper is not like a ruff--you can't flare it. It flares itself.

Comma, No Comma

a single, working mom

I vote for the comma, since "single" *could* mean "only one of them."

But, if it is:

a working single mom

(for that matter, if you left out "working," I'd still assume she was employed--I don't imagine many single moms get to stay home w/ their kids)

Grammar Cake

Speaking of square fondant-covered cakes:

National Grammar Day is coming up, and I'm planning a party.

I want to make a cake. A grammar cake.

But I have only two ideas, so I'm trolling for more.

My two ideas are:

--a basic rectangle, w/ fondant cut into letters that say: Grammar Are Great.

And then I'll use a piping tip and buttercream to draw editing marks that fix the grammar

--a series of cupcakes, each labeled w/ the name of a part of speech: (transitive verb, preposition, pronoun, appositive, etc.). 

I'll make the labels either out of something edible (writing w/ frosting, maybe), or print them onto pieces of paper, cut out, and tape to a toothpick.

My husband suggested creating a sentence in which the grammar is wrong because of the word order, and making a mini loaf of cake for each word.

Any other ideas?

(I have a cake idea for National Punctuation Day, but I'm saving it.)

Comma, No Comma

a square, fondant-covered cake

or

a square fondant-covered cake

Comma, No Comma?

This is an ongoing issue for me. I constantly read copy (either published by someone else, or passed to me in the office) in which someone else's judgment about the comma in the coordinate adjectives is different from mine. 

I find it hard to explain why I put them in and take them out. Especially when I am challenged.

Ian brought me a puzzle this morning.

The phrase:

tall, red boots

He and another copyeditor argued with the editor that the comma should be out:

tall red boots

But they couldn't explain why.

So, I'm going to be posting similar examples now and then, and ask for your vote.

Here's why I agree w/ Ian. But I can't find backup for this anywhere.

"Tall" is form; "red" is color. They are not coordinate, and therefore no comma.

What's your vote, and why?

And here, many other phrases I'm running across, and am wondering if I'm right.

a small stiff, flat base

Improving, How?

In today's copyediting puzzle, we have this sentence:

 

[product name here] treats your skin day and night, improving the look of dark circles, puffiness, and crow's feet.

Hmmm. Improving.

Improving a negative. Does that mean, making it a better version of the negative? (darker circles, puffier eyes, crow-ier crow's feet?)

Today's Word Misuse

In beauty copy today, a semi-homonym switch:

Environmental stressors can wreck havoc on your skin.

"Wreak" is the word she needed.

It actually might be a good thing, to be able to wreck havoc. Once the havoc is damaged, wouldn't things get better?

He Didn't Look Distraught!

In my newspaper today:

A brief bit about hedge-fund manager Arthur G. Nadel, who disappeared six days ago, around the time he owed investors a $50 million payout.

The last line:

. . . he left his family a note in which he appeared to be distraught.

It was a note. He didn't look like anything in the note.

I really wish they'd used "seemed."

I konw that "appear" can be used metaphorically, but when there is such a strong literal situation (a single piece of paper, not a series of actions and writings), the "appeared' just hit wrong.

Whattya think?

A Copyeditor Plays Scrabble

The Girl and The Boy gave me Scrabble for the computer; I play it when I'm killing time.

Tonight I grabbed a double-letter score w/ M (3 points, x 2), and the triple word score, including the C (3). The word: MICS.

Which I HATE!

 

I hate it, I hate it. We *have* a word: mike. The "mic" is what the sound techs write on the equipment bcs there literally isn't room for the 4th letter.

An "open mic"--open mick?

The other word (all 1's, but I wiped out another triple word score): noun.

"How copyeditor of you," The Husband said.

Someday I'll write about playing Password. (shudder)

What word-geek words have *you* played?

Couple--Plural and Singular

These phrases came up in a story today.

Which would/should you choose?

the couple wear(s) matching smiles

the couple steal(s) a moment together

the couple steal(s) a moment alone

the couple take(s) their first spin on the dance floor

And why?

I'll come put my answers in the Comments

Avoid the Passive

Hiking on Bear Mountain a few weeks ago, I was reading (of course I read while I walk--doesn't everyone?).

The map. I was reading the map.

And the promotional/explanatory text. Bcs I'm not sure you can really *read* a map. I thnk you *look at* a map.

But anyway, there's a stretch of land that's part of the system that was acquired in 1987 via tax delinquency.

It is dedicated to "passive recreation."

The Girl and I got a huge chuckle out of that. How do you passively recreate? (not that you recreate as a verb; we established that earlier)

It does have a meaning--this is another case of "Don't Let Them Get Their Hands on Their Own Jargon."

Passive recreation refers to non-consumptive uses such as wildlife observation, walking, biking, and canoeing.

http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/passive-recreation-area/

Passive recreation may be defined as a non-motorized activity that:

-Offers constructive, restorative, and pleasurable human benefits and fosters appreciation and understanding of open space and its purpose
-Is compatible with other passive recreation uses
-Does not significantly impact natural, cultural, scientific, or agricultural values
-Requires only minimal visitor facilities and services directly related to safety and minimizes passive recreation impacts

Definitions vary by locality. The following is an example of what falls under the definition of one community's passive recreation area:
libraries
6 conservation reservations
10 municipal parking lots
18 parks
75 traffic islands at 58 locations throughout the Town
3 walking paths or parkways
Police Station grounds
Town Forest

So there you go--a term that doesn't make any sense.

(don't start me on "carbon footprint"--that's another post completely)

Noun-ing Words

I love the verbing of words; I think it's fun.

(OK, OK, I won't do it "in print," but I still think it's fun.)

I haven't decided how I feel about the nouning of words. I don't love it when there already exists a decent and useful noun, but sometimes it's fun.

I hadn't spotted this, but Slate has: using the verb "fail" as a noun: "an epic fail" instead of "an epic failure."

GOODBYE, SCHADENFREUDE; HELLO, FAIL. By Christopher Beam


What do you think?

It's National Punctuation Day! Let's Celebrate

My good friend Kathy* reminded me that yesterday was National Punctuation Day.

So, a belated good wishes to you all.
It was an auspicious day; I hope you were able to make the most of it.

You may be thinking, “How on earth would I celebrate a day intended to honor punctuation?”
We could send one another flowers, though I don’t think there is a rose varietal named ‘Blushing Apostrophe.’

I was thinking—yes, I do think on occasion—that we could all vow to use as many punctuation marks as possible.

There is a surprisingly long list of punctuation marks; I (well . . . I got a member of my staff to help me think [OK, OK, sometime I need help thinking] of some of them) came up with the following:
period
comma
exclamation mark
question mark
double quotation marks
single quotation marks
colon
semicolon
apostrophe
hyphen
en dash
em dash
ellipsis/ellipses
slash/solidus
parentheses
brackets
asterisk

You can do it!

My staffer and I decided that the “@” symbol isn’t really punctuation, though in our e-mail–centric world, maybe it is becoming punctuation when used in e-mail addresses.


*a college-era buddy of mine, she is also of the copyeditor persuasion

Compound Punctuation

A colleague to whom I also sent the above message just replied, and added a smilie:

:-) is that a punctuation mark?

she asked.

I told her I think those are compound punctuation.

Let's Get Cracking!


In today's funnies, a comic about revising the dictionary

http://www.comics.com/wash/pickles/archive/pickles-20080908.html


Get busy out there, using up all those old words.

The Girl has made a good stab at it--she had to write and turn in "a piece of polished prose," and I think she misread "polished" for "purple." She got the thesaurus out. 

Now it's your turn to do your part. What old word have you used recently?

If I Were Only Brave Enough . . . 

We need to tighten the credit style on my magazine; more stuff is appearing on page.

We're toying w/ using the Blueprint style: If the company name and the URL are the same, drop the company name and keep the URL.

But the all-lower-case style makes URLs hard to read.

I'm SO tempted to change a listing like:

Flower girl's dresses, Morgane Le Fay, morganelefay.com

to:

Flower girl's dresses, MorganeLeFay.com.

How stupid would that be?

I know that most pubs put URLs in all lower-case, because the browser doesn't need them. But it also doesn't CARE, right? 

And if the capital letters make comprehension easier, and keep readers from trying to read a broken URL as an actual word, then wouldn't the initial caps be a sensible idea?

Tell me what you think.

(edited to fix a typo--thanks, Tony)

Let This Be a Lesson to Them

Those Typo Eradication guys needed this advice from Miss Manners--which oddly enough came 

on Wednesday, August 20, two days before the news hit about the sentencing of the Eradicators.

(Miss Manners writes for the Washington Post; s'pose she knew they were on trial?)

. . . neither of us can run around insulting people, which is what an amazing number of people do when they detect errors, little thinking that they are committing worse errors in so doing.

This applies to correcting individuals, however, not institutions. So you may inform those in authority to act (which the salesperson you approached probably was not) on mistakes of which you sympathetically know they would want to be aware.

Tell Your Typo Eradication Adventure Here

Over at Mighty Red Pen, where MRP linked to her newspaper's version of this story about the Typo Eradication Advancement League vigilantes who've been zinged for defacing a permanent sign in a national park (not just a sign--a national historic monument of a sign), a couple of us were defending the practice of writing on vending-machine signs or even bad graffitti.

Why defending it? Well, bcs we'd done it, now and then.

Tell YOUR typo eradication story--what signs have you corrected?

Here's mine!

Years ago I worked on lower Fifth Avenue, and spent a lot of time waiting for the R train at 23rd Street to go uptown (and home). Subways ran slower then.

There was a spelling error (something like a missing "m" in "accommodate") in one of the posters on the platform that I stared at for weeks on end.

Several months later, at a party w/ friends, someone said, "Hey, I was in your subway stop yesterday!" What stop, and how'd you know if was *my* stop? I asked. "Because you fixed a typo on an ad."

He'd seen the fix on the poster, carefully indicated with proofreader's marks, and thought of me immediately ("Toots should see this correction. She'd laugh."). Then he'd walked over to the NEXT poster, which had a drawing of the map of the U.S., w/ state borders sketched in. And had seen a little star in southern Iowa, w/ the name of my hometown written next to it.

He figured, there weren't 2 people from my 1,300-population "city" in NYC. It had to be me.

BUSTED!

(Oh, and I did actually fix an apostrophe on graffitti in the tunnel under the 42nd St. A-train station, once. And I checked carefully for cops, or even witnesses, before I did it.)

So, tell your story about what you've fixed--and where would you draw the line?

Today's Controversial Decision

I decided not to pay for it; the story's in matchprint already, and it'd be $400.

The error: " your grandmother's bridal bouquet can be easily recreated at your own wedding."

A hyphen is tradition: re-created.

But I think readers will go right to the proper meaning; we seldom use any form of "recreate" as a verb.

What would you have done?

Freudian Typo?

The Amazing Jayme just alerted me to this amazing typo.

Quick, quick, go look, before the AP fixes it:

An Associated Press article filed YESTERDAY, titled "Obama veep announcement expected in coming days," by NEDRA PICKLER

His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.

Just Use the Trademark, Already!

When I worked on our company's "fun with and for kids" magazine, we had big debates about certain terminology.

Popsicle being one.

Popsicle is a trademark, and so we avoided it. Even though often we wished we could use it. First for the dessert treat, and second for the flat sticks w/ rounded ends that make great log cabins, etc.

For the food, we called them ice pops.

For the sticks? although I certainly called them "Popsicle sticks" as a kid, and that's an instantly recognizable term--we avoided it for crafts done w/ those flat sticks. Technically, they are named "craft sticks."

When you go to buy a bunch of them at the craft store, that's what the package will be labeled.

If you want to buy a bunch online, that's what you should search for. (And of course, you don't want to use TRUE Popsicle sticks, bcs they'll be stained red or purple, and sticky to boot*.)

We sometimes used the term "ice-pop sticks" for food references ("use ice-pop sticks for the corn dogs," e.g.). Our ice-pop recipes called for ice-pop molds, or paper cups and "pop sticks."

Why am I writing about this? Here is what I saw in this morning's funnies. Note the term "ice-cream sticks."



The comic strip One Big Happy for 8/15

It took me a while to get this joke, first bcs I blanked at "ice-cream sticks" (they're technically "ice-cream bar sticks" anyway) and second because "those sticks are sold separately" made me assume you had to buy one stick at a time.

If the writer wren't trying so hard to avoid the trademark, it would have been a much easier joke.

What trademark do you wish was a generic?



*And where did "to boot" come from? I'll look that up later.