grammar – The Tousled Apostle

If You Can Ask Google About Loki…

March 6, 2014April 29, 2014 jamieahughes5 Comments

I’ve run across some fairly awful grammatical, spelling, and stylistic errors in my time, but most of them were made by teenagers—people (hopefully) still learning how to write well. However, thanks to meme generators, e-card makers, and other innumerable sites that allow people to create their own images, we’re now caught up in a tsunami of awful writing. And the worst part is, no one seems to notice. How do I know? Because they create and share the stuff without a second thought. Take this one for instance.

Screen Shot 2014-03-05 at 7.54.12 AM — **Images can be enlarged by clicking on them.**

Someone tagged me in this one on Facebook because I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and while I appreciate the sentiment, I can’t get over the fact there are two errors in this card. First off, “that” is the incorrect relative pronoun; it’s typically used for objects, animals, things, and groups. For instance, you could say, “The bees that stung me are in a hive up that tree.” Girls who love baseball (in addition to being awesome) are most definitely not objects. Hence, “who” is the correct relative pronoun in this case.

There is also a glaring run-on sentence that could be fixed by placing comma right in front of the “and.” Brother, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve added one of those to a sentence for someone, I could pay to house Mark Harmon in a manor on the English moors and make him pretend to be Mr. Rochester for my literary amusement.

And then there’s this one that makes me despair because it’s a witty observation ruined by a single incorrect letter.

A “suicide pack”? Seriously? It would have taken two seconds to check the many meanings of “pack,” none of which is “an agreement, covenant, or compact.”

I’ve taught English for more than a decade. I know the English language can be an aggressive, hairy she-beast sometimes. It is unwieldy and hard to train, but the Internet has made it so much easier to prevent errors like this one. Back in the 80s when I was wee, I used to think the phrase was “for all intensive purposes,” and I was roundly chastised by a teacher (in front of the entire class) for writing it that way.

Today, I would simply look it up on the good ole’ world wide web, correct my mistake in the privacy of my own home, and save myself the public shaming. It also would’ve saved Mrs. Wilcox from an afternoon spent wiping up a bottle of liquid soap off the bathroom floor. (Hey, she brought it on herself. I just worked out my feelings with the tools that were available to me. Don’t judge.)

There are teeny tiny errors that make exactness impossible….

Which owl trusts the cat? We’ll never know. (My money’s on the one to its right. He looks pretty content with the state of the world.)

And there are enormous errors that make a sentence’s true meaning completely indiscernible.

The way this sign reads, the only person who can hope to take a leak in this facility must be disabled, elderly, pregnant, and a child. I could see someone being elderly and disabled. That’s easy peezie, lemon squeezie. Disabled and pregnant? Sure, that’s plausible. Elderly and pregnant? Hey, it happened to Sarah. But the only person I know who could combine “elderly” and “child” is Benjamin Button, and even he couldn’t be both at once. So while the owners of this store are very excited about you shopping with them (hence the “THANK YOU” written in all caps), the bathroom is verboten to all patrons, even those who meet some of the qualifications. We all know what they meant, but that’s not what they said.

And then there are errors that just make me wonder what the heck is going on with the public schools these days.

People with a limp-wristed grasp of grammar always claim, “I know it’s correct because it sounds right to my ear.” I hate to break it to you, but your ear is only as good as the stuff it hears. So if you’re surrounded by yutzes “that don’t talk good,” chances are you aren’t going to either. Your ear is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

I know verb tenses can be treacherous, like staircases in Europe, but the correct one is easy to discover. And, let’s face it, “I would have came” is as awkward on the ears as a rousing chorus of “Let It Go” performed by precocious children. “I would have come,” on the other hand, is pure bliss, the auditory equivalent to a glass of ’47 Cheval Blanc. Besides, why would you trust a person who spells wisdom with a Z?

If people can ask pressing questions like “Why does everyone I know like ‘The Walking Dead,'” surely, they can ask “What does suicide pack mean” and discover their word choice is flawed. So simple. And it would make the world (at least my corner of it) a little better.

But I’m totally with the people who asked Google about Loki. I can’t figure out why the sight of Tom Hiddleston drives some women to self-immolation. Seriously, he looks like he should be playing D&D in his parents’ basement and working at Sbarro.

I don’t even know if Google’s algorithms can solve this mystery.

fans-went-wild-when-tom-hiddleston-showed-up-as-avengers-villain-loki-at-comic-con — Shhhhhh….it’s a secret.

What do you think? Is good grammar dead and gone, or can it make a comeback? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the sad state of American English. However, if there’s an error in this blog, don’t point it out. Keep that little gem to yourself. 🙂

For an Unnecessary E, You Get an F

February 18, 2012September 23, 2016 jamieahughes8 Comments

There’s a scene in The Birdcage where the son is trying, for lack of a better term, to “de-gayify” the house. Why? Because his fiance’s conservative parents are coming for a visit and (though he doesn’t know it) to discuss wedding plans. He is being assisted in this endeavor by drag queens from his father’s club, and while he’s busy hiding things in closets and cupboards, they keep putting out objects they think straight people would have in their homes. The chaos finally reaches its zenith when two helpers hang a moose head on the wall and ask, “Too butch?”

Val’s reply is terse utterance I’ve come to use when making editing decisions…

“Don’t add. Just subtract.”

More often than not, this little maxim has served me well. I’m often tempted to alter a document to a way I think sounds better, and while I can say I’m not batting .1000 in the “less is more” department, I do hit more than I strike out.

I wish the same could be said of then Sharpie-wielding clodpate who decided he had an ironclad grasp of English grammar and spelling rules and should “correct” one of the signs on the very nice walking trail in my neighborhood. Granted, this sign is the closest one to a bridge where several resident artists have chosen to make the world a brighter place one shaken can of Krylon at a time. For the record, many them espouse the merits of cannabis…the ones I could read at least. There was, however, one in thin black letters that simply said “Genuine Vandalism” I actually chuckled at.

Okay, the editor in me sees two problems right away.

1. The obvious kerning issue in “HABITAT.” Why in the world did they print a sign with that much space between two letters? Honestly, it’s so far apart, it looks like “HABIT AT.”

2. There are two periods missing. Both the sentences at the bottom are obviously complete and need end punctuation. I would have gone with periods for both, but a case could have been made for an exclamation point in the first one.

There’s also a clarity problem with the phrase “native creatures.” There was a veritable passel of dogs in the park today–all of them walking, playing ball and frisbee, and smelling and being smelled. Seriously, it looked like the party at the end of Go, Dog, Go!

But I digress. My point is that, according to that bossy sign, I could harm the dogs if I wished (and their owners weren’t looking). They aren’t covered by the decree because they are, in fact, not “native creatures.” Something like “Don’t harm the animals” would have been much more inclusive to any critter, creature, or varmint in the general area.

I know. I know….We all assume the prohibition on animal cruelty applies to all of them whether they be “native” or “foreign.” But some uncouth ne’er-do-well could take advantage of a loophole in the signage. I’m just saying.

And then there’s that “E.” Crooked. Awkward. Banal. And somehow comically obscene. It leans on the “M” like a truant child might against a convenience store wall, a pilfered Virginia Slim from his mother’s unguarded pack between his lips.

I have no clue why it’s there or who in the name of Strunk and White thought it would be wise to add an utterly superfluous vowel at the end of a word—one that your average second grader can spell correctly, even under pressure. (Okay, in a completely irrelevant aside, I was looking at the word “Harm” just now and started saying it like Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride. You know, Inigo Montoya, helping Fezzik with his rhymes? “Probably he means no..haaaarrrmmmm….” Now you’re doing it, too, aren’t you?)

I looked up “harme” in the dictionary, hoping for some reason that it would be a word that could serve as an acceptable synonym, but alas and alack! It isn’t a word at all. Nope, this is just another example of needless human error—like the haphazard use of apostrophes when forming plurals or the casual flinging about of commas—the grammatical equivalent of negligent homicide. Epic fail, good sir or madam. Epic fail indeed. 🙂

Tell It To My Face(book)

January 16, 2012September 21, 2016 jamieahughes4 Comments

“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.” —Lemony Snicket

This morning, one of my co-workers came into my office where I was happily whittling away on a study guide my company is getting ready to publish. He revealed something to me that was majorly mortifying, altogether atrocious, downright disconcerting, mighty malodorous, and completely calamitous.

I, yes I, had an error on my Facebook page, a horrible (and wickedly ironic) one.

I misspelled my job title.

Not a bad thing if you’re a ornithologist, a sommelier, or a hermeneuticist. All those are incredibly difficult jobs requiring very specific (and I’m guessing non-interchangeable) skill sets. After all, you wouldn’t want a wine steward teaching you about birds, would you? How about a Bible scholar choosing the perfect Merlot to go with your Kobe beef?

I, however, do not hold one of these lofty positions. Oh no.

I’m an editor. Someone who has no excuse when it comes to being able to spell something…particularly the word “editor.” Seeing as I just added another “I” (making it “Editior”), I suppose I can blame it on the incredibly small font or the rapidity with which I double checked everything as I tried to beat the rush and swap over to the timeline format. Whatever the reason, I missed it.

But I digress. What I did isn’t as important as what my co-worker did…more specifically the manner in which he did it.

This guy, let’s call him Norbert to protect what little sliver of privacy he still possesses in this cyber crazy world of ours, who knows what I do for a living, chose not to call me out in the public sphere for my error. Never mind the fact that it was the orthographic equivalent of the Great Wall of China–one of the few man-made structures visible from outer space.

He did not gleefully point it out on my wall. Why? He said he didn’t want to embarrass me, particularly because it was late when he saw it, and he didn’t want it to sit out there all night gathering replies like random dust bunnies. Thanks to him, I didn’t wake up this morning to a self-esteem demolishing bunker buster of a post festooned with a string of LOLz. Everyone I know—all the way from my former students to the adorable granny I used to take Zumba classes with—would have dog piled on me. Why? Think about it. If there’s something more fun for people than catching a word nerd in a verbal faux pas, I don’t know of it. Except perhaps geocaching; that looks like a fabulous way to spend your spare time.

Instead, dearest Norbert came by my office, messenger bag on shoulder and coffee in hand, looking rather bashful and remonstrating himself (albeit only slightly) for the doleful news he was about to deliver. He did it tactfully in a performance worthy of a Golden Globe for “Best Actor in a Truly Awkward Situation.”

I want to win one for curling…seriously.

He told me, and I performed an Olympic-worthy headdesk (one that merited a 7.5 difficulty level and earned me a 9.0 from the German judge). I then fixed the error and began to ponder not only my own fallibility but also what else there was to be taken from it…spiritually speaking. Because there was a time my pride might never have recovered from such as this.

To my ultimate surprise and delight, there was a lesson for me. I began thinking about his methodology and realized that it was a perfect example of how Christians should correct one another in love.

Matthew 18:15-16 reads:

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that BY THE MOUTH OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES EVERY FACT MAY BE CONFIRMED.

Rather than tell two or three people (who might then tell two or three more), he came straight to me. Yes, it was in reference to an extraneous “I” in a word I should have spelled correctly, but the same principal holds true for everything from skipping church to cheating on a spouse or robbing the till. Matters only need to be escalated to those two or three witnesses–not the entire church–if (and only if) the mano-a-mano method fails to produce results.

The same thing holds for Matthew 7:1-5:

Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Believe it or not, I never castigate people for poor grammar or spelling because I have plenty of “planks” in my own eye in this regard. Likewise, none of us are without sin, and we shouldn’t be overly eager to point out the shortcomings of others because we have more than enough of our own to work through with the Lord’s help.

Remember brothers and sisters, we’re here to aid one another rather than tear each other down. Life is hard enough, and we shouldn’t be putting rocks in each other’s spiritual knapsacks as it were. Instead, as the apostle Paul said, we should “encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing” (1 Thess. 5:11).

Gold medal for you, Norbert. Gold medal all the way. 🙂

Like, We Don’t Talk Good No More and Junk

October 28, 2011September 21, 2016 jamieahughes23 Comments

My friends on Facebook have been passing this image around for the past few days, and I believe no fewer than ten of them have posted it on my wall or tagged me in it on theirs. At first, it made me laugh just by virtue of the topic itself, and I then began to snicker at the sheer number of people whose first thought was, “I bet Jamie will like this” when they read it for the first time.

I’ve been called a stickler, a word nerd, and a nitpicky know-it-all. The labels Grammar Narc, Grammar Ninja, and a Grammar Nazi have all been written in haste and stuck to my chest like nametags. Oftentimes, people I know and love do it in jest, but sometimes the terms come across as slightly more pejorative than facetious. When people I meet find out I once was an English teacher or that I copy edit for a living, they throw up their hands and almost always reply, “I’ll have to watch what I say around you!” I guess they think I have a stash of red pens in my hair and am just waiting for an opportunity to wield them like a samurai on a battlefield in feudal Japan.

When anyone on television states, “This works faster,” my husband knows I will reply, “…more quickly” and roll my eyes. I patronize Publix because it is the only grocery store I know of that has “10 Items or Fewer” on their express lane signs instead of “10 Items or Less.” (If you don’t know why the former is correct, I suggest you educate yourself about count and noncount nouns.)

Yes, I know all the proper ways to punctuate sentences and firmly believe the use of the Oxford is necessary, delightful, and apropos. I choose to use words like myopic, sententious, pulchritudinous, akimbo, and badinage because each of them has etymological value; they are a part of the history of the English language and deserve, like the Blue whale or the wild Mustang, to be preserved for future generations.

I’ve fought the battle for decades—as a writing tutor, an editor, and an educator—and I’m tired of apologizing for knowing the right answers and being derided when I ask others learn them. That’s why Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Finnes just moved from “Greatly Admired” to “Personal Hero” status in my book.

This week, he made his directorial debut with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. When asked about the bard’s continuing relevance in modern culture, he stated , “Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.”

Mr. Twisleton-Wykeham-Finnes primarily blames social media sites like Twitter and sound bites for the atrocious decay of the English language, and I have to say that while I concur with him in part, I can’t lay the blame solely at technology’s feet. (Pun intended!) No one put a gun to our heads and demanded that we communicate in 140 characters or fewer. We chose to do so, and we did it with a reckless abandon that would make Syme clap his hands in glee because Newspeak has finally reached its zenith.

E-mail loosened the rules, but it is archaic for most people today, phased out in favor of texting, posting, and other forms of communication that take place via agile thumbs rather than dexterous minds.

The latest craze, which often leaves me gibbering like a low level inmate in Arkham Asylum, is the seemingly arbitrary addition or removal of letters from what would otherwise be a coherent sentence. For example, one of my former students recently shared this literary gem with the rest of us:

myyyy MOM saiddddd iiiiii cannnnnn goooooooooooo 2 the GAAAMMMEEEEEEEE 2niteeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!! :- D <3<3<3

In case you don’t care to translate, the young lady was expressing her elation over the fact her mother had decided to allow her to attend a sporting event at school that evening. She drove the full measure of her bliss home by using a plethora of exclamation points, a wide grin smiley, and three hearts to show that she does indeed love her benevolent parent.

Like Dian Fossey, I spent many years living in the wild with another species (A.K.A “teenagers”) trying to interpret their body language and various methods of communication. From my research, I gleaned several interesting truths. One, if you add extra letters to the end of a word, it means that you are emphasizing it. Adults have been known to do this as well, typically in the interest of sarcasm—“I am sooooooooo tired of meetings!” for example. However, most people limit the effect to one emphatic word rather than appearing as if we took a header into the keyboard.

ALL CAPS, once a total faux pas on “teh intertubes,” is now acceptable for the same purpose. No longer are you “yelling” if you choose to lean on the caps lock button. Also, while most people can’t tell me what a homonym, homophone, or homograph is, they’re all for using it when it shortens the time between texts. Hence, the use of “2” for “to” or “too” in written language these days.

The removal of letters, mostly vowels, is also cause for great concern. It was all well and good when they lifted them on game shows like Bumper Stumpers, but to simply let them fall out of a word like loose teeth is deplorable.

If you’ve not seen it, this is what passes for thoughtful communication in some circles:

yeh dya remembr , i lst contrl! Nearly sure brad fell off!

I don’t have any clue as to the context of this statement, so I can’t help you with that. However, I think this roughly translates to, “Yes. Do you remember how I lost control? I was fairly sure Brad fell off of ____________.” (I couldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, so I added space where the unmentioned object he plummeted from belongs.)

None of the words in the “full length” sentence are terribly difficult to spell, but, for some reason, it is acceptable to cut them at will. Spacing between commas and excessive exclamation points in addition to all this makes me want to do an impression of Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

Like Cassandra, I’ve been warning others about the flippant usage of words and settling for “good enough” when it comes to communication. Words have the power to inspire people, for good or ill, and, like a weapon, they must be respected. God entrusted us with them for glorious and matchless purposes, and we’re squandering them, tossing them aside like disposable paper cups by a water cooler.

How different would the American Revolution have been had Patrick Henry not uttered sentences like these in his speech to the Virginia Convention in 1775?

If we wish to be free if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight!

What might our nation look like today without Martin Luther King’s rallying cry for brotherhood before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963?

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

I’m not asking for a total return to the rules of yesteryear. I understand that the English language is a kind of living, breathing creature with a mutability that has allowed it to flourish around the globe for centuries. This truth alone is enough to convince me it is worth defending, but even more precious than our language’s history is the desolate future we’ll surely face without it.