Language Quiz
Wow, it's been a while since I did one of these!
Here's a new quiz - though, as always, maybe there's nothing wrong.
From the Writers Almanac, this description of 'Woody Guthrie:The previous quiz was:He was one of the only American artists whose reputation never really suffered, though he was openly affiliated with the Communist Party.
From the Cassini-Huygens site, this description of a photo:This one's pretty simple - not enough hyphens! Pan is not "flying and shaped like a saucer", it is "shaped like a flying saucer". It's "the flying-saucer-shaped moon".Curving wakes perturb the edges of the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring. The culprit in their creation is the flying saucer-shaped moon Pan, shining brightly within the gap.
And look here for Previous Quizzes, 41 so far.
2 Comments:
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At 9:01 AM, July 14, 2008
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 6:04 PM, July 14, 2008
Anonymous had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->Euw, it's such an awkward sentence; I'd re-write it. Leaving it substantially as it is, "He was one of the few American artists whose reputations never really suffered, though they were openly affiliated with the Communist Party."
But that's still awkward, so here's what I'd prefer: "His reputation never really suffered during the McCarthy era, though he was openly affiliated with the Communist Party. Most of his colleagues did not fare as well." Or something like that.
For the moon, I would actually go one step further in the name of clarity, and change the hyphen between saucer and shaped into an en dash: a flying-saucer–shaped moon. The typographic difference is subtle, but it does help elucidate the structure of the compound. (The Chicago Manual of Style recommends this sort of thing in at least some analogous cases, although I'm not entirely sure whether they'd use it here.)
As for the Woody Guthrie sentence, there are a couple of points of concern; Barry Leiba's suggestions fix them, but I thought I'd state them explicitly:
1. Although I happily accept "one of the only X" in casual speech as an idiom meaning something like "one of the few X" or "nearly the only X," I'd be inclined to avoid it in writing. I wouldn't call it an error, but if I'm trying for a somewhat more formal register, or if I just want to avoid pissing off people who do consider it an error, I'd change only to few.
2. Whose reputations suffered, exactly? Most other American (recording) artists, or just ones with (real or putative) ties to communism? If the former, then the sentence is fine. If the latter, then whether we need to revise it depends on how clear it is from the context. I suspect that Barry Leiba's suggestion of "...though they were openly affiliated with the Communist Party" isn't quite what the sentence is trying to mean—my impression is that most artists with any kind of connection to communism were affected, and that the fact that Guthrie was among the few exceptions was all the more remarkable because he was openly affiliated with the Party (while the others who were so fortunate were so perhaps in part because there was no solid basis for accusing them of being communists).
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