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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3185
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 - 12:00 pm: | 
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IN A RECENT column inviting readers to copy-edit along with him, language maven James Kilpatrick objected to a possessive that appeared in the Washington Post: "Stephens's story."
I would argue in favor of an unencumbered apostrophe, i.e., Stephens' story," wrote Kilpatrick.
Argument, however, is beside the point; either version is correct.
Kilpatrick, an old newspaperman, likes AP style, which forms possessives of words ending in -s by adding just the apostrophe. The Post, and many other publications, think the apostrophe-s version is more natural and elegant. Last year, the legislators of Arkansas joined this faction, voting to make their state's official possessive Arkansas's.
But Kilpatrick's return to the apostrophe hobbyhorse made me realize how nearly dead that horse is now. Apostrophe mistakes are surely as common as ever, but readers no longer complain about them much. Could this be an unintended effect of Lynne Truss's 2004 bestseller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"?
Truss's subtitle, after all, promised "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." And though she conceded that was an impossible dream - no golden age of consistent punctuation had ever existed - she did manage to say just about all one could say about apostrophe abuse, whether on the greengrocer's sign (carrot's, eggplant's) or in possessives (it's, her's).
It's not that apostrophes have absolutely dropped off our mental maps. We still had Jeff Deck and his Dartmouth buddies setting out, earlier this year, on a road trip to correct public typos - mostly apostrophe errors, the team reported - across the nation. (I wonder if they hung around Portland long enough to see the Oregonian's story on their mission, which reported that it began in "Summerville, Mass.")
And most of the horror photos submitted to the National Punctuation Day website show incorrect apostrophes or quotation marks; there are no samples of mis-spaced ellipses, misused en dashes, or other such arcana of the punctuation arts.
But in the years since Truss tried to set us straight, the punctuation conversation has shifted its focus from the apostrophe to a more subtle and debatable punctuation mark: the semicolon.
The credit probably belongs to Trevor Butterworth, who in 2005 - citing Truss as partial inspiration - wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity....
Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/10/sex_and_the_semicolo n/
P.S. I know we just had a conversation about the semicolon a while back. But is there really such a thing as too much discussion about punctuation? No, wait--don't answer that  |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12849
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 - 12:37 pm: |
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Certain Blacks seemed to have become enamoured with the apostrophe, what with how babies mamas are now including it in the contracted names they choose for their children. e.g. J'Nay, R'Shay, D'Lisa. (note: I used "babies" as a descriptive adjective not a possessive in the phrase "babies mamas", so I didn't us an apostrophe.)
And grammarian purists are currrently chiding Obama who, when it comes to prepositional phrases, makes constant reference to "Michelle and I" when it should be Michelle and me.
I, myself, continue to be a disciple of the almighty semi-colon. To me, it adds impact to an afterthought. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7421
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 12, 2008 - 01:10 pm: |
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Why would an email and texting generation worry about punctuation? They can't even spell or write complete sentences. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 3422
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 01:51 am: |
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"Certain Blacks seemed to have become enamoured with the apostrophe, what with how babies mamas are now including it in the contracted names they choose for their children. e.g. J'Nay, R'Shay, D'Lisa. (note: I used "babies" as a descriptive adjective not a possessive in the phrase "babies mamas", so I didn't us an apostrophe.)"
Yep! This is true. Your comment illustrates the truth about the entrenchment of the contemporary coon culture. I have yet to understand the fanatical and tortuous Negro obsession with the "a" vowel when ghettoizing their children -e.g., Shalonda, Tonisha, Laqueda, Monica, D’Nika , Shemika, LaShonda, LaTonya, Shanikwa, Tinika, etc, etc…..Yes! These are actual names Negroes have stigmatized their children with. Too bad....Too sad..... |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 10195
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 01:22 pm: |
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Ntfs: "I have yet to understand the fanatical and tortuous Negro obsession with the "a" vowel when ghettoizing their children -e.g., Shalonda, Tonisha, Laqueda, Monica, D’Nika , Shemika, LaShonda, LaTonya, Shanikwa, Tinika,"
What about mostly WHITE-used names such as Alexandria, Andrea, Cassandra, Gia, Hela, Minerva, Mira, Nina and Stella?
Do THOSE also represent some sort "fanatical and tortuous obsession with the "a" vowel"? Or do your race-based denegrations only apply when BLACK foks end their childrens names with a. |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 10196
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 01:24 pm: |
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Btw: I know have two friends named LaShonda and LaTonya. LaShonda's a partner of a CPA firm. And LaTonya's a pediatrician. |
Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 469
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 03:30 pm: |
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Ahem, Deesha here...
What's the problem with "a"???? |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 10200
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 03:44 pm: |
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Ms. Ferocious,
Ntfs thinks if you're Black and your name ends with an a you're inherently ignant and ghetto or something. |
Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 471
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 - 06:54 pm: |
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Iown no what he be talkin' about!!!
*neck roll* |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3199
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - 03:29 pm: |
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And this, for all the "Strunkaholics" out there:
...I have been a Strunkaholic for almost as long as I have been a journalist, though no doubt there have been times when one would never have known it from my prose. "The Elements of Style, With Revisions, an Introduction, and a New Chapter on Writing by E.B. White," was published in 1959, two years after White had written an article in the New Yorker about this privately published (in 1918) textbook "I had used when I was a student at Cornell." Editors at Macmillan immediately decided they wanted to publish it, and contracted with White "to make revisions in the text and write a chapter on style," not newspaper style, needless to say, but real style, of which White was a master.
When what Strunk "sardonically and with secret pride" called "the little book" made its public appearance, I was at Chapel Hill, pretending to be a college student but actually working full time on the university newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel. I must have rushed out to get a copy, because my heavily worn little hardcover is a first edition with a price of (!) one dollar. The book has accompanied me to Washington, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, Baltimore and finally back to Washington, and has been what White probably would not have called my vade mecum, since in his "Approach to Style" he counsels, "Avoid foreign languages. . . . It is a bad habit. Write in English." So: For half a century "The Elements of Style" has been my constant companion, vade mecum being Latin (O lost!) for "go with me."
It is that to this day, and if someone wants to toss it in the box with me when I go six feet under, that would be fine; it might actually assure my passage through the Pearly Gates, since Saint Peter no doubt is a gentleman of impeccable grammatical taste, not to mention style. In the half-century of its public life "the little book" has been a constant companion for millions of people, most of whom know it simply as "Strunk and White." It is scarcely so encyclopedic as H.W. Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (1926, revised 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers) but it is distinctly and distinctively American, and its brevity renders it both portable and accessible.
...Of Strunk's many emphatic grammatical dicta, the most famous and surely the most frequently violated is, "Omit needless words." Strunk eschewed an exclamation point therein, but it cries out for one, for the exclamation point "is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands," which "Omit needless words!" most certainly is. The command is followed by what White calls "the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme," to wit:
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
Thus in Strunk's hands "the question as to whether" mercifully becomes simply "whether" and "he is a man who" becomes "he." Then follows the stricture to which almost no one pays attention: "An expression that is especially debilitating is the fact that. It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs." Expunge "owing to the fact that" and use "since," ditto for "I was unaware of the fact that," because "I was unaware that" is so much better. I am pleased (and relieved) that a search of The Post's electronic library for "Yardley" and "the fact that" yields, on its first page, no appearance in my own prose of "the fact that" but several in quotations from books under review, including ones by William Styron, Toni Morrison and Joan Didion.
The point isn't that I'm a grammatical paragon but that even the best writers can fall into sloppy habits. The price of being a Strunkaholic is eternal vigilance, for it is easy to let participial phrases dangle (my favorite, from Strunk, is, "Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap"), to use "disinterested" when you mean "uninterested," to ignore the difference between "farther" ("distance") and "further" ("time or quantity"), to use "less" when you mean "fewer," to use a plural verb with "none," which "takes the singular verb," to confuse "that" and "which." A particular bugaboo of my own is the use of "like" for "as," which is now near-universal and is almost always wrong:
"The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn't. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has always been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the grounds of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use, before phrases and clauses, as simple error."
It was, of course, an advertisement that nailed the coffin on proper usage -- "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" -- and, as White says in his essay, "the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation," hardly to the betterment of us all. This isn't to argue that the language shouldn't change. To the contrary, many new words that enter common usage from unlikely sources are useful and uniquely describe specific meanings; think, for example, of "geek" and "dis" and "spam," all of which I use with pleasure because they are, quite simply, good words. I shudder to think, though, of what Strunk and White would say about "author" and "reference" used as verbs, of "presently" used as a synonym for "currently" or "now," of "interface," a word with a specific technological meaning, used as a synonym for "meet," as in: "Let's interface in the conference room at noon." Perhaps the day is not far off when it will become a synonym for "kiss," as in: "Interface me, baby!"...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090503728. html?hpid=topnews |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12879
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - 06:11 pm: |
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You know I related to this article. Although I do like parenthetical expressions because they lend a certain rhythm to a sentence, I am a big fan of conciseness. |
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