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Archive for December, 2009
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
FIDDLY RULES 9: “Disabuse,” “disavow,” and confusables in general
The ninth in a series of podcasts about fiddly rules that Copyediting editor Wendalyn Nichols says are nevertheless ones that careful writers follow. In this episode, fiddly rule number 9: “Disabuse,” “disavow,” and more on Confusables in general. (4 min.)
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Tags: Fiddly Rules
Posted in Podcasts | No Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
 Subject: A likely story
Note: The Tip writer will take her customary holiday break at the end of the year. The Tip will return on January 11, 2010.
Last Thursday, I’d finished my commuting book on the way in to work, so I picked up an afternoon tabloid to read on the way home. After reading a few pages, I was struck by something, then quickly flipped through to see whether the phenomenon I’d noticed was repeated throughout the paper. It was.
I’m talking about the use of the word likely in headlines. Seems it’s a frequent go-to word for headline writers, and not just the ones who work for the paper I was reading. I looked up likely in Google News when I got home, and a significant majority of the hits that were returned were from headlines.
Likely is one of a relatively small group of adjectives that end in -ly (unseemly, goodly, and portly are some others). Perhaps for this reason, a myth has been perpetuated that it can never be used adverbially. Before we get further in this discussion, let’s make sure you can spot the difference. In which of the following headlines is likely being used adverbially? (Some of the headlines are down-style, which is common for Web sources.)
1. Hazardous Mayon volcano eruption likely
2. Nick Johnson’s one-year deal with New York Yankees likely spells end for Johnny Damon with Bombers
3. Will Yankees Consider Matt Holliday with Johnny Damon’s Likely Departure?
4. Hanson says he’ll likely sign NDSU smoking ban
5. Guinea massacre likely a ‘crime against humanity’: HRW
6. No Change Likely In How NJ Fills Senate Vacancies
7. Full report of shooting likely still weeks away
8. US Attorney: Bruno likely to do prison time
9. Gibbs isn’t likely to be in the mix
10. Winter storm likely tonight
Seven of these headlines use an acceptable shortened form of “is likely to” or “is likely.” If you can expand a use of likely to the full phrase and it will still work in the sentence, then likely is acting as an adjective: “A winter storm is likely tonight.” “Guinea massacre is likely to be a ‘crime against humanity.’”
Headline number 9 uses the full form in the negative, “isn’t likely to be.” (I wonder why the writer didn’t choose unlikely there.) Likely can be used with linking verbs besides to be, as in seems likely, appears likely, and so on.
One of the headlines, number 3, shows how the adjective can be used in premodifying position—that is, before a noun (departure) instead of after a linking verb. This structure is less common, but it is exemplified in the idiomatic phrase that is the title of this Tip.
So that leaves headlines 2 and 4. In neither case is likely short for “is likely (to).” Both times, it is modifying a verb: in “likely spells,” it modifies the main verb in the present tense; in “will likely sign,” it modifies the main verb as part of the simple future structure.
In both cases, the use of likely as an adverb is helpful. Headline 2 is already quite long and does not need the wordy “is likely to spell” when “likely spells” is perfectly clear. “Hanson likely to sign NDSU smoking ban” would lose the attribution; in the existing headline, it is clear that the assertion of likelihood came from Hanson himself, so it carries more weight. Here again, “Hanson says he’s likely to sign NDSU smoking ban” is unnecessarily wordy.
In running text rather than headlines, I think the adjectival forms read better. But I encourage you not to correct every adverbial use of likely on principle. The principle isn’t actually as strict as that.
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Tags: English usage, likely
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Subject: Two great gifts for the copyeditor in your life
Just a quick message: if you’re searching for the right holiday gift for your favorite copyeditor — or for anyone who’s passionate about good writing — I heartily recommend the following:
The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself), by Carol Fisher Saller. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
The Chicago Manual of Style and other style manuals and usage books tell us more than we’ll ever remember about the dos and don’ts of writing and editing, but they don’t teach us how to be good editors and writers. Carol Fisher Saller, who answers the three-thousand-plus questions that people submit each year to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online and is a senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press, has written a book that is all about the how.
When I received an early review copy of The Subversive Copy Editor, I stayed up far too late to finish it. I told Saller I felt as though I’d been to a revival meeting after reading it, that everything I’d ever hoped to accomplish as an editor and trainer was affirmed in it. She helps us step back and evaluate the way we do our jobs so that we can avoid letting our egos and our compulsions sabotage relationships with writers and colleagues, not allow our fondness for rules to limit our flexibility, and prevent disorganization from wreaking havoc with schedules and deadlines.
Publishers Weekly gave her book a starred review, calling it “relentlessly supportive” and saying it “may be the best copy editor’s companion since the CMS” and that “Saller writes with wisdom and a great generosity of spirit.”
Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition, by Bryan A. Garner. Oxford University Press, 2009.
I reviewed GMAU3 in an extensive article in the December – January issue of Copyediting. Here, I’ll be brief: Even if you own the first two editions of what has become the usage bible for American writers and editors, get this third edition. The “Language-Change Index” alone is worth the price. In the main entries, Garner gives his weighty advice and passes judgment on good and bad usage, but then proceeds to give what are admirably unbiased assessments of how accepted, or not, a given usage has become, on a scale of 1 (still rejected) to 5 (fully accepted). You’ll also find more usage questions discussed in one place than in any other usage book.
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Tags: Copyediting resources
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
On December 10, Romenesko (the Poynter Online blog of Jim Romenesko) reported that Nielsen Business Media was closing Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews.
Reporting on the story on December 12, Dirk Smillie of Forbes.com said, “If your industry’s leading trade journal disappears, what does it say about your trade? Nothing good, obviously. As if it needed another reminder of how bad things have become, the newspaper industry got word that Editor & Publisher, the longtime bible of the business, will be shuttered.”
The imminent shuttering of the 125-year-old brand (with 108 years in publication) has prompted a lot of reminiscing, plenty of it on blogs, by people who remember it especially for the classified ads that listed journalism jobs. For the time being, E&P’s award-winning bloggers, editor-at-large Mark Fitzgerald and associate editor Jennifer Saba, will continue to blog as Fitz & Jen, but it appears that the blog’s last days will be this month–at least in its current home.
Listen to Fitz & Jen’s “Exit Interview” podcast about the closing of E&P.
Other commenters who give a sense of the loss include the following:
Steve Yelvington, who says, “For those of us struggling, underpaid, at the beginnings of our careers, it was a welcome glimpse into a bigger and more promising world.”
Will Bunch of Philly.com, who offers a long, ruminative post and declares that “it died like a supernova, with a great burst of energy.”
Senior editor Joe Stupp, who says in an interview with Dirk Smillie, “I think newspapers will endure, but in what form, I don’t know.”
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Tags: Editor & Publisher
Posted in Copyediting -- Because Language Matters | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
FIDDLY RULES 8: Keep “ensure,” “assure,” and “insure” straight
The eighth in a series of podcasts about fiddly rules that Copyediting editor Wendalyn Nichols says are nevertheless ones that careful writers follow. In this episode, fiddly rule number 8: Keep “ensure,” “assure,” and “insure” straight. (4 min.)
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Tags: Fiddly Rules
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Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
FIDDLY RULES 7: Use “a” and “an” correctly with “h”-words
The seventh in a series of podcasts about fiddly rules that Copyediting editor Wendalyn Nichols says are nevertheless ones that careful writers follow. In this episode, fiddly rule number 7: Use “a” and “an” correctly with “h”-words. (4 min.)
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Tags: Fiddly Rules
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Monday, December 7th, 2009
Subject: It’s not unusual
When we are taught how to use the indefinite articles (a and an) in writing, many of us are told that a goes before a word that begins with a consonant and an goes before a word that begins with a vowel.
A single, crucial word is missing from that rule of thumb: sound. Some words that begin with a letter that usually symbolizes a vowel nevertheless do not begin with a vowel sound, and only those that do begin with a vowel sound are preceded by an. If teachers remembered to add (or emphasize) the component of sound, perhaps fewer people would be confused by the seemingly inconsistent treatment of words that begin with the same letter but not the same phoneme.
As it is, however, I seem to get three or four queries about this point every year, and last week came the fourth of 2009, in reference to usual and unusual. Why, the writer asked me, did we use a with usual and an with unusual? After all, the words both start with the letter u.
The answer is in the tail end of the list of vowels you memorized as a child: “A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W.” Not “always Y and W.” If you say the word usual aloud, you’ll hear that it begins with a “yuh” sound that leads into the vowel (”oo”). That’s the sound of the letter y in its consonant form (as opposed to, say, the “ee” sound of y at the end of the word party). So even though the word usual begins with a letter that usually represents a vowel sound, the sound we make when we say it is a consonant sound.
Here are some examples of how the use of a or an is dictated by the character of the initial sound of the word that follows the article:
Which of the following is not a usual ingredient of mayonnaise?
That’s an unusual choice of gift.
That’s a rather unusual gift.
Notice that a is used when the word rather, which starts with a consonant, separates the article from unusual, but an is used when the article directly precedes unusual.
The classic reason given for the difference in the use of a and an is that it’s not easy to say two vowel sounds with a gap between them (e.g., “a unusual gift”). To distinguish between a and the word that follows it, you would need to use a glottal stop, or a near-stop—a break in the voicing of the kind that you hear if you say “Uh oh!” Far easier to insert an n, a consonant that is voiced at the front of the mouth, as a connecting sound between the two vowels.
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, I’m not sure the n insertion is as instinctive as all that. Witness the way children have to be taught not to say “a apple.” And look at “Uh oh!” too: we seem to have no problem with using a glottal stop in this expression.
Just to complicate the picture further: some English speakers insert a connecting r between words (the idear of it) or syllables (That’s a nice drawring) when the first word or syllable ends with a vowel sound and the second begins with one. Apart from occasions when dialect is represented in print, we don’t write this interposed r the way we write an versus a.
But in the case of a and an, we do make a distinction in both the spoken and the written language—one that is governed by sound, not by spelling.
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Tags: "a" and "an", English usage, Vowels
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | No Comments »
Friday, December 4th, 2009
Subject: The principal problem
I’ve learned that I cannot expect my child’s teachers to spell well. (That one of them cheerfully refuses to engage in self-flagellation over this moral failing still irks me, though.) But I did think that editors were people who could be relied upon to fear the discerning reader’s scorn. I know that English spelling is a mess and that remembering the rules is easier for some than for others, but you’d think someone who was a weak speller but who worked with text every day would be aware of his or her particular weaknesses and be on the lookout for them.
This assumes, of course, that the person is even aware of the problem.
The object of my derision in this case is the person who left a script for an educational video (a component of an English-teaching course) on one of our copy machines at work. At the beginning of the document is a paragraph with instructions for casting the video, followed by the dialogue between the “principle character” and the “secondary character.”
I leafed through the pages to check whether the first use of principle was a typo, but nope. The -le spelling was used throughout the document.
Principle and principal are homophones, so it’s not hard to see how they can be confused. But just as we must distinguish orthographically between they’re, their, and there, we must use the correct form, principle or principal, according to context.
Both words come from the Latin prīnceps (’leader’ in the sense of ‘initiator’), but from two different Latin derivatives: principalis ‘chief, leading’ and principium ‘beginning’. It would have helped if an l hadn’t wiggled into the spelling of the latter somewhere between Middle French principe and Middle English principle, but we’re stuck with it. Today, we need to resort to mnemonic tricks to help us with the difference.
The first thing to remember is that principle cannot be an adjective. It is only a noun, so if you find yourself wanting to describe something, use principal instead. It can help to think of the -le ending of principle as matching the -le of rule.
In contrast, principal is most often an adjective (A for adjective, A in -pal), as in “the principal character.” The noun uses are mainly restricted to two narrow contexts: for certain leadership roles, such as the principal of a law firm or a school (for which you can dredge up the grade school memory trick “The principal is my pal“); and for a sum of money that earns interest (for which you can try to remember that it is from the adjectival use “principal sum”).
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Tags: Add new tag, English usage
Posted in Copyediting Tip of the Week | 1 Comment »
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