At least the ghosts aren't foreigners

Prepositional phrase placement is important. Sometimes you can get away with separating constituent elements, but sometimes you can't. Like here:

The desired reading is "believed by locals" but unfortunately the embedded clause has a verb that also takes "by" as a complement - "haunted by". And since English tends to run left-to-right and government by the nearest is a thing, the reading this is going to get is not "believed to be haunted" and "believed by whom" but "believed to be haunted" and "haunted by whom".

Such a simple rewrite to remove the structural ambiguity! "Believed by locals to be haunted".

Seriously, WaPo?

The headline reads:

This WWII homeless veteran had no family. So 200 strangers showed up for her funeral.

Seriously? Did a native speaker of English edit this? Did anybody edit it?

"Homeless WWII veteran".

Hyphens, people, please

The headline reads U.S. Supported Shia Militias in Iraq Lead Ethnic Cleansing.

What?

When I hit "lead" I thought it was a typo for "led", with a missing hyphen, then I realized that what was wrong was the missing hyphen in "U.S.-Supported".

Punctuation isn't grammar, but it IS cohesion. There's a big difference between "U.S. supported Shia militia" and "U.S.-supported Shia militia."

Error

In his latest newsletter, Michael Quinion tells us that a couple of his readers "spotted a headline error that turns up on US newspaper sites so often that it has become a perennial joke. Let’s give it one last moment in the sun because this time it appeared (on 26 January) on the website of the prestigious New York Times: “Police Officer Shoots Man With Knife in Lower Manhattan”. The NYT rapidly changed it."

The problem is that this isn't an "error", it's merely structural ambiguity that is fully grammatical and permitted. And not one that anyone really misunderstands it. Sure, "police shoot man with sniper rifle" is somewhat rude to your readers, though I expect the readership would be able to understand from context who had the rifle.

But "police shoot man with knife"? Really? Do people think it's a knife that fires bullets, or a gun that fires knives? "Police shoot man with black hair" - still an "error"?

Look, I'm not saying that the sentence is flawless. Writing things that make your readers drop out of the text to laugh (unless it's a comedy piece) isn't good writing; it might even be slightly rude. But it's not a grammatical or syntactic error.

Is one a sequel?

Commas are fine, but semicolons have their place, too. Here, that place is after Anabel, High, and Everywhere. Because there aren't novels called "Women" in this list. (Or one called "Women" and one called "Women, Everywhere", either.)

"It was during the 1920s that Gene Markey first became a writer, specializing in novels about the Jazz Age. Among his titles were Anabel, Stepping High, Women, Women, Everywhere, and His Majesty's Pyjamas."

(This is from Wikipedia, but I edited it to add the semicolons, so (hopefully) it's not the same now.)

Subtle and weird cohesion

My father's semi-local newspaper (it's from Knoxville), which has just been bought by Gannet and so will be much less local very soon now, ran a story today on that e-cig study from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that includes this:

“In theory it sounds wonderful for a lifelong smoker having a hard time quitting and not successful with nicotine patches or gum to use e-cigarettes that mimic cigarettes and are a good replacement,” Dr. Primack said. But he adds that “it’s not hard to find testimonials from people who [used e-cigarettes to] quit smoking. The potential is there for some people to derive benefit.”,” Dr. Primack said.

"But"? But?

What does Templeton (the writer) think he's contradicting here? That 'but' is outside the quotes, so it's not Primack's.

"In theory it sounds wonderful" for people to have this new tool, BUT ... what should follow is something that show it's not wonderful, something like "But it's hard to find anybody who has used it to quit." Instead, what Primack "adds" is something that is entirely congruent with the first statement: in theory it sounds wonderful AND it's not hard to find people who say it works.

I'm guessing Templeton bought the study's results.

How I say to fix it

"How the owner says the two men got away with his vehicle."

This leading W- word is so common in journalese, but it just annoys me. You're not describing how the owner/police/lawyer/witness/whoever says anything. They are saying how something happened. At the very least you need commas - how, the owner says, the two men got away. But really, dangit, move that w-word!

The owner says how the two men got away.

How Police Say Two Women Almost Got Away With Stealing at Least 6 Houses - Police say how two women...

A-Rod: How lawyers say team could avoid paying him. - Lawyers say how team could ...

I didn't because

Spotted on Facebook:
AA:Sometimes I'm glad that my stuff is not generally read widely, even if that makes me a bit of a coward.
BB: I did not "like" because I think you're a coward, AA, but because I totally understand that.

Even with the "but because", it took me a few reads to resolve the ambiguity: "The reason I "liked" that is not that I think you're a coward" rather than "I did not "like" that and the reason is that I think you're a coward".

I think in speech the distinction would be clearer.

Also, of course, normally when someone says "I didn't do X because Y", you have the knowledge that they did, or didn't do, X. On Facebook, you can't tell - on someone else's post - whether the writer of a comment is also a Liker of another comment.

By their writing?

So, I saw this quiz on Facebook - Can you identify these 11 languages by their writing? Could be interesting, I thought. But then the questions were like this: "This is a West Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. What written language is this? Hebrew, Slovenian, Thai"

Wut? I don't even need to see the writing to answer that.

Or else this: What language is this? Comment allez-vous aujourd'hui French, Italian, Spanish

Guess what? No way to tell from the writing system!

Bild mee?

More purposeless eye dialect in today's Rose is Rose. Given how utterly commonplace and normal the kid's pronunciation is, I find some amusement in picturing the father's weird and probably horrible accent.

Mandatory class

Over at Headsup Fred notes, in passing,

(And no. You could say "denied their request to build" or "blocked them from building," but not "denied them from building.")

I have complained before about people using the thesaurus to get a new word without paying attention to syntax or register. This is an example of the former.

Sure, decide to change 'block' into 'deny'. Go for it - you might well be making the perfect choice. But words aren't plug-and-play.

I often think every Roget's sold should require a class in argument structure.

Incoherent?

From the Sic! section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter, this submission:

The British comedian, actor, author and campaigner Russell Brand won the 2014 Foot in Mouth Award yesterday evening from the Plain English Campaign for examples of incoherent prose like this from his book Revolution:

This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites.

Okay, there are a lot of things you could say about that sentence - it's florid, it's wordy, it's self-parodyingly overly adorned, somebody needs to take his Thesaurus away from him - but it's perfectly coherent. I didn't even have to read it twice.

Mark Twain

Over at Slacktivist Fred celebrates "the Feast Day of Mark Twain" by

revisiting the greatest religious conversion narrative in American literature, a scene from Huckleberry Finn

If you don't know the scene, it's the one where Huck wrestles with turning Jim in. It's one of the greatest scenes in American - possibly English-language - literature.

Chicking?

Today's Bound and Gagged is odd. I suppose they didn't want to infringe the copyright, but they did spell "more" as "mor"... and "chikin" as "chickin'". What do you suppose they think that apostrophe is for?

 

Yes. In fact ...

From the Q&A at Chicago Manual of Style last month. All I can say is "Hell, yes."

Q. Dear CMOS Staff, in a recent issue of one of our periodicals, I altered the original lineup of the names of five coauthors appearing under the title of an article and reordered them alphabetically. One of the coauthors is unhappy with this and requests, too late, to keep the original lineup, which, I assume, implicitly establishes some hierarchy in authorship. What should be my response to the unhappy coauthor?

 

A. Your response should be groveling apologies and a promise to issue a correction in the next issue of the journal and in the online version. Name order is important to authors in certain disciplines, as it indicates who is the lead author. It is meaningful to anyone who reads the paper or sees the citation on a résumé. Sometimes employment and promotion depend on having published a certain number of articles as the lead author. This is a truly regrettable error—the kind of error that can put the reputation of your periodical into question. Please make every effort to make amends.

Interesting: one little word

So I'm reading "The Problem of the Boston Common" in More Things Impossible by Edward D Hoch and come across this bit of dialog:

"We've got three quarters of a million people in Boston, Sam, and we need more good young doctors like yourself."
"Why?" I asked with a smile. "Is Boston the hub of the universe?"
"It could be. How many cities do you know that have daily steamship service to New York?"

Hmmm. It seems to me that proves New York the more important city. It's a daily steamship service from New York that would elevate Boston.

Watch those pronoun referents!

First: dawwwwwwwww. Baby Stegosaurus no bigger than a cat! Dawwwwwwwwwwww!

But this? Please:

And it was late one afternoon in 2007 when Mossbrucker himself found something extraordinary in the sandstone — the footprint of a baby Stegosaurus dinosaur.

“The light hit it just right, and I went, ‘Oh, it’s a track!’” he said. The tiny dino wouldn’t have been much larger than a house cat. Based on its size, no bigger than a quarter, it had recently hatched.

No, no, no. I mean, which was it? Larger, if not much, than a house cat? Or no bigger than a quarter? Because while cats are much tinier than adult Stegosauruses, they are indeed bigger than quarters.

I'm going to bet that paragraph originally read something like:

“The light hit it just right, and I went, ‘Oh, it’s a track!’” he said. Based on its size, no bigger than a quarter, the tiny dino wouldn’t have been much larger than a house cat. It had recently hatched.

There might have been a conjunction or two in there, but I'm betting this was it. (Even here, I'd prefer "based on the track's size", but that's just me.) Because in the paragraph as rearranged, there's a severe pronoun antecedent problem.

Once you stick that "tiny dino" and that "house cat" in there in front of "its", it can't mean the track any more.

This is just funny

On the rubric for assessing the project plan in a course I'm taking, the section "Spelling/Grammar" contains this under Progressing (almost the worst category):

They are few grammar/spelling errors to cause distraction.

Quoters beware

Here's a nice little article about quote websites and their bogus attributions. This is lovely:

W.B. Yeats has come into posthumous possession of this similarly catchy assertion: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” (Being Irish myself, I know a Yeats line when I see one, and this feels deeply un-Yeatsian to me. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t turn up in any of his actual published work, it would probably be more comfortably housed within the quotational estate of an Oscar Wilde, or an H.L. Mencken. Yeats was a lot of things, but he wasn’t much of a wisecracker.)

Outside of the elephants

This is one of the more intriguing opening sentences of spam I've gotten in a long time. Although it quickly turned into a Ralph Lauren polo shirts ad, it began:

At least outside of the elephants he travels with and takes through the streets of London.