Bloody Well Write

Ah, grammar! Were it not for grammar — and good grammar, at that — the world would surely be a heaping, chaotic mess. For without grammar, how would we humans ever be able to order a cup o’ joe properly (especially the double-double light dolce iced latte variety) or be able to sue each other with such flourish? How would we know if we were being asked about which meal we would like to order, and if we would like fries with it? And how, for Pete’s sake, would we be able to communicate our every want, need and desire to those who may be able to provide it, were it not for good grammar etiquette?

Good grammar is the very foundation of our society, is it not? It helped our forefathers put down in black and white just how they wanted the United States of America to operate. And lawmakers and politicians ever since — with a few potatoe-flinging exceptions — have been trying to uphold the same kind of respect for the language.

Go ahead — you know you want to (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/3368018014)

Granted, the very nature of language is a morphing art form. The intelligentsia of yesteryear have given way to the whiz kids of the now. What was once imperturbable and phlegmatic is now cool; what used to be favored (or favoured) and marvelous is now hot, rad or boss.

And that change is, indeed, rad — even though the process of change sometimes raises several eyebrows.

So go ahead and celebrate grammar:

• Bake an ampersand cake or (for the baking-challenged) ellipsis cookies.
• Introduce the kiddos to “Schoolhouse Rock” and don’t feel self-conscious as you belt out the songs.
• Send grammar tidbits around the office via interoffice e-mail.
• Take a pad of sticky notes to dinner tonight, as it’s highly probable that your menu will have at least one grammar issue, and leave behind a sticky note that calls out the offending mistake — much more respectable than writing all over the menu with a red Sharpie®.
• Send a National Grammar Day E-card.
• Profess your undying love of the AP Stylebook guidelines.

Visit any of the myriad of sites online that celebrate language today and every day. Here are the sites of three grammar gurus (my faves) to whet your whistle:

Quick and Dirty Tips™ — Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl™ and the host of this year’s NGD)

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) — Martha Brockenbrough (founder of NGD).

The Slot — Bill Walsh (chief of the night desk — Washington Post)

And on that note (isn’t it fantastic that good grammar includes beginning sentences with conjunctions?), I bid you a happy NGD to you and yours.

Happy trails!

SAK

New Orleans has had its share of excitement lately. What with Hurricane Katrina making a complete mess of things, Brad Pitt (with Angelina Jolie et al. in tow) bringing the Make It Right project to the Lower 9th Ward, the Saints winning the Super Bowl XLIV and the annual Mardi Gras celebration topping off the football frenzy, the Big Easy is proving to be the home of a bunch of hearty souls.

New Orleans is famous for so many reasons: fantastic Cajun and Creole dishes, festive jazz, smooth hurricanes (the drinkable kind) and flowing, fanciful — and now green — architecture. The Crescent City has a language all its own. There are no medians in the streets; that strip of land that separates the paved street is called neutral ground. They have not a single canoe; a pirogue (sounds like PEE-row) is the flat-bottomed version that navigates the bayou. And don’t even think about walking on a sidewalk; it’s called a banquette.

Pat O'Brien's famous Hurricane (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigberto/2826375336)

So how should the name of NOLA be pronounced? It makes the most sense (to me, anyway) to say it as the residents do. And the residents call it N’Awlins. They can spot a tourist out of sight but within earshot when they hear their fair city’s name pronounced New Or-le-uns or New Or-LEENS. That last one sort of sounds like a line from a bad ’80s movie, doesn’t it?

So it’s N’Awlins — pronounced with two syllables but as close as you can get to one.

Now go put a pot o’ water on the stove; them’s a mound o’ crawfish ta boil and we’re all fixin’ ta suck da heads and squeeze da tips.

Happy trails!

A friend asked me to write about the difference between farther and further, and I had a hard time believing that I hadn’t already covered the subject. I combed the Bloody Well Write site and, lo and behold, nary a mention of the two existed. Voilà! A new entry is born.

It’s really quite simple.

I'd be willing to bet that this guy could run farther than I could (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bossco/411695592)

• Farther is literal. It refers to a physical distance: She ran farther than I did. New York City is farther from my home than is Chicago.
• Further is figurative. It refers to an extension of time or degree: It will take further research. He looked further into the situation. Without further ado, yada yada yada.

Farther deals with what’s real, what’s quantifiable.
Further deals with what’s real, as well, but with what’s more abstract.

Farther is measured in inches or miles or whatever measuring system you prefer, whereas further is measured in concepts.

Let’s try using both in a single sentence: After further consideration, he decided that running two miles farther than his usual route was out of the question.

See? Easy-schmeezy.

Happy trails!

SAK

I recently went up to Kansas City to see some friends, have some amazing food, catch a few comfy Z’s and see a football game. I did all that, but I also came home with a nice little surprise: a new topic for a Bloody Well Write entry.

First, a quick mention about the food. If you’re ever in Kansas City and are looking for a fantastic Italian meal in a quaint, romantic little ristorante, look no further than Carmen’s in Brookside. Ask to sit downstairs — I prefer the intimate atmosphere — and request some Italian Butter to start; it’s their version of olive oil and herbs, but I tell you that it is absolutely like none you have ever had.

I order off the menu, à la “When Harry Met Sally,” combining the cheese ravioli from one dish with the vodka tomato cream sauce from another, with a little fra diavolo thrown in to spice things up a bit. And ba-da-BING! It’s the tastiest, smoothest Italian around. No lie.

OK, so back to the grammar bit of this entry. So I’m in the hotel room — the one with the lush, fresh-white bedding and soaps the shape of leaves, with the cool city view — and I am piddling around, waiting until it’s time to go meet our friends. And I pick up this water bottle hang tag, with one word on it, for emphasis: revitalize.

That’s pretty cool. Decent marketing, colors fading from blue to snow white (very spalike), with some smallish print across the bottom: Westin® Hotels and Resorts. Nice little water logo. Then more words:

Nestle Pure Life Eco Shaped Bottles
Less Plastic. Better Enviornment.

So — reread that. See how many mistakes you can find in those two little lines.

By my count, I’d say that there are, at the minimum, five mistakes. There are more if you want to keep the lowercase consistency set by the headline (revitalize). And the periods? Don’t get me started. (OK, get me started. the headline doesn’t use a period, and neither does the first line, but the second line has two. Go figure.)

So what are the five mistakes?

1. There is no ® after Nestle.
2. There is no hyphen between Eco and Shaped.
3. The S in Shaped, since it should follow a hyphen, should be lowercase.
4. If there are two periods in the second line, there is no excuse why there shouldn’t be one at the end of the first line. (None of those groups of words are complete sentences.)
5. Enviornment. Seriously? This is for a national chain, for Pete’s sake. I know that it’s a four-syllable word, but my silly spell-checker caught it, so come ON.

I just checked out Nestle’s site to make sure that it uses a registered trademark (®) and, unbelievably, the site does not have one on the main page, even though products (such as Nestle® Cheerios®) have one next to the name. That sort of thing happens all the time. It blows my mind, especially on these enormous accounts.

I’ll end this little study in proofreading by saying that, despite this crazy hang tag, I had a really, really good time in Kansas City. And I’d even recommend the Westin Crown Center hotel to any friend or acquaintance. Just don’t plan on any solid ultra-light reading in the room.

Happy trails!

SAK

So I’m a word gal; this much is true. I find it quite difficult to read books (adult books, anyway) for relaxation or enjoyment because the majority of my day is spent either writing my own words or editing someone else’s words, so I don’t think reading a few chapters at night sound like a whole lot of fun. I guess I’m not the typical word hound, then, since most do tend to like, um, books and, er, reading.

Fine. I’m OK with that.

I do, however, enjoy reading to my two kids at night. Their books are fun, rhyming, colorful short (short!) stories with cool illustrations. And since it’s the holidays, we’re reading a few books that I grew up with — “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer” and Christmas in Many Lands” — as well as a few new ones, such as “Elf on the Shelf” (we named ours Leo and today he’s perched on top of our refrigerator) and “Olive, the Other Reindeer.”

Ah, Olive. If only your creators knew the difference between every day and everyday, reading would be ever-so-slightly more enjoyable for me, the word dork.

You see, “Olive, the Other Reindeer” starts out by botching the very first word, which means that I have to put on my tattered editor hat throughout the rest of the reading. It’s just innate for me. I can’t get through the book now without cringing on the very first page.

(Technically, it starts off even earlier than the first page: The title has punctuation in it. Ugh. A period is tacked on. Not sure why, it just is. Weird.)

Anyway, the story begins, “Everyday, Olive took her daily dog walk ….” In this instance, everyday should take the adverb form (two words) because it is expressing a manner of time. Were it meant to be an adjective, it would be modifying a noun of some sort. Alas, that is not the case at the beginning of this story.

To keep the adverb-adjective relationship straight, I like to (still) think of the Schoolhouse Rock snippets:

• Adverb — “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here. … How, where or when, condition or reason — these questions are answered when you use an adverb.” If it ends in ly and the ly isn’t a regular part of the word (as in family), then it’s probably an adverb. The phrase every day answers the question of when, so it’s an adverb.

• Adjective — These handy, little words “describe the people, places and every last thing” and “are often used to help us compare things. … We hiked along without care. Then we ran into a bear. He was a hairy bear. He was a scary bear. We beat a hasty retreat from his lair.”

Cool, huh?

Back to “Olive, the Other Reindeer” for just a second. The book, written by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Seibold, is a fun children’s book. The story is cute; it’s about an industrious little dog who thinks that she’s a reindeer, so she goes to the North Pole to help Santa out. The pages are filled with quirky, fun illustrations by Seibold; I especially love the two pages that show the reindeer navigating around the Eiffel Tower. Despite the everyday blunder, this book’s worth the read.

Happy trails!

SAK

This is just a quick entry to welcome you to the new and still-in-the-works Bloody Well Write. All the same information can still be found on this improved version, and it will remain a grammar and all-things-language-related site; only the look of it has changed. I hope you like the upgrade. It should be easier to read — shorter columns are easier on the eye. I like it a lot.

In fact, it’s very similar to my other site, All You Create, which has all the same info (grammar, language, word stuff) plus entries on other topics, such as health, food and exercise. All You Create is the place that I unload all sorts of ideas about all sorts of topics. So if you’re researching language-related stuff, visit Bloody Well Write, and if you’re in the mood to be surprised, check out All You Create. That’s my plug and I’m sticking to it.

Look for a new Bloody Well Write entry shortly. Until then, hope you all had a wonderful Green Bean Casserole Day and are ready for the holidays.

Happy trails!

SAK

OK, so this isn’t the most fun entry to write; it still needs to be addressed, so here goes.

Everyone alive is going to die. That’s just how it is. Not fun, but accurate. However, not everyone alive is going to be killed.

That’s very good news.

The bad news is that those who are killed are the very unfortunate ones who die violently and at the hand of at least one very uncool person. And that is, indubitably, putting it mildly.

Let’s take a look at Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” The storyteller says that he shot the sheriff — but it was self-defense. Self-defense or no, if the sheriff dies due to complications from being shot, that would be considered dying a violent death, in which case anyone writing about it could write, “The sheriff was killed.”

So what about the deputy? Did he (assuming that the deputy’s a male) also die? Did he see the sheriff go down and freaked out so much that he went into cardiac arrest right then and there? If so, he died; he wasn’t killed.

Or is there more to the story? Did he get shot, as well? Did the storyteller shoot the deputy but is now lying about it? Or was there a second shooter? Did anyone check the bullet’s exit wound? Where’s the grassy knoll? If this scenario is valid, then he died, but he was also killed.

As the worst of two evils, killed trumps died.

Here’s another example. Let’s say that John Doe has an incurable disease and passes away from complications of that disease. This means that John has died.

Now let’s say that John has an incurable disease and is walking down the sidewalk to his umpteenth visit with his physician when he gets hit by a car driven by his ex-girlfriend, who just can’t get over him and thinks that he has been stepping out on her (she’s a lunatic, mind you). She thinks that all of John’s visits to the female doctor have been dates, and this ex has had it. So she’s decided to sideswipe John. After all, if she can’t have him, nobody can. So John is hit by the car and dies from his injuries. This means that, yes, John has died, but John has been killed.

I suppose you could argue that certain diseases are violent. I’d probably agree with you and say that just about any way to die is violent; I’m avoiding the whole death thing as best as I can. But it’s up to writers to use distinguishing language that gets across exactly what is meant. Hazy definitions are for weathermen, not writers.

It’s all in the details, folks.

So, to overkill a topic:

• Died = nonviolent death
• Was Killed = violent death

Happy trails!

SAK

Believe you me, I hear — or see in print — those seemingly innocuous little words and phrases, such as honestly, sincerely, frankly, to tell you the truth and believe me, a lot. And when I say a lot, I really mean a lot.

I’m probably guilty of using a few of them in writings. Why? Not sure, really. Perhaps I was trying to emphasize something. To prove that I absolutely knew what I was writing about. To seem über-sincere. To up my word count for ENGL 726.

No matter. I didn’t fool anyone worth fooling. I absolutely didn’t fool my ENGL 726 professor.

The point is, truly (!), that whenever I come across one of those words or phrases these days, I automatically doubt the rest of the story. If it must begin with To tell the truth, what else am I supposed to believe but that everything that has come before is of questionable validity? You’ve been spoon-feeding me a big, fat lie up until this point but, to tell you the truth, the rest of what’s to come is honest-to-goodness true stuff. Yeah, that sounds trustworthy and believable. Hmph.

Honestly, how else am I supposed to react? Those phrases have flim-flam man written all over them.

The idea here is this: Say what you mean to say. Don’t add silly phrases that make you seem insincere; just be sincere. Say what you mean and mean what you say — don’t say that you mean it. Say it, don’t spray it. (Oh, wait a minute. That’s for another entry.)

Happy trails!

SAK

Jenny, I got your number.

Here’s how the AP Stylebook folks would like to see telephone numbers in print: 123-456-7890.

Ah, hyphens. Hey — at least they dropped the parentheses around the area code. Be happy.

Now, I know this doesn’t jibe with all the designers out there. And you know what? It doesn’t necessarily jibe with me, either. I’m a fan of dots (er, periods). I would rather see this: 123.456.7890.

So I guess what I’m promoting is this:

• If you or your company says that AP rules the proverbial roost and there should be absolutely no deviation, use the hyphens in your phone numbers. (And I’m so completely OK with that, as I do believe that AP has your back nearly every time, grammatically speaking.)

• If, on the other hand, you have a designer itching at the keypad to produce funky (or just non-hyphenated) art with numbers, use periods, stars, squares or whatever else floats that designer’s boat.

Just make it readable. After all, if you’re putting a phone number in print, you probably want people to be able to decipher that number and then call it, correct? Correct.

Happy trails!

SAK

Today is Thursday, September 24, 2009 — the sixth annual celebration of National Punctuation Day (NPD). Punctuation ensures that groups of words make more sense and take on more meaning than you can shake a stick at.

Hooray for punctuation!

In 2004, NPD was founded by Jeff Rubin, a former newspaper guy. In 1981, Rubin started The Newsletter Guy, a newsletter publishing firm. Rubin is also a public speaker, addressing effective writing and marketing techniques. I bet that he also addresses the importance of proper punctuation — but that’s just a guess.

Check out the official Web site. It offers some of the standard stuff (e.g., definitions of each punctuation mark, examples of punctuation gone awry, a resources section); most notable, perhaps, is the information concerning the baking contest. Send in two photos of your masterpiece — one of it going into the oven raw and one of it coming out, all warm and yummy — and you may win a bunch of non-edible NPD stuff. How cool is that?! Very, I say.

Doesn't a bake-off seem like a better idea?! (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/3367193003)

OK, stop messing around here and go bake something with meaning, such as a semicolon or em dash. You know you want to.

Happy trails!

SAK