I worked for the Bureau of the Census for three years as a writer-editor. In those days, we didn’t have word processors or spell/grammar check, so before submitting a text for publication, we proofread it in detail, including capitalization, bold/italic fonts, font size, punctuation, and spelling. Our goal was to publish a letter- and word-perfect document. Today, that goal is apparently unimportant, but even after all these years, I still read like an editor and I can’t help catching textual errors.

For example, the historic district of St. Charles offers ghost tours, and one of their posters says: “Haunted House. Twilight tours after dark.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines twilight as “the light of the sky between sunset and full night.” It defines dark as “devoid of light.” In other words, it’s impossible to have a “twilight” tour after “dark.” Merriam-Webster defines evening as “the final part of the day and the early part of the night.” That’s probably a better description of the tour time. Just knowing it’s a ghost tour pretty much tells visitors when it will occur, so I doubt if anyone except me notices (or cares about) that error.

I was astronomically mystified when I was reading a book in which the author told readers that “It was already late June, so the days were getting longer.” The summer solstice, when the sun is at its highest in the northern hemisphere, is usually on June 21. After that, the days get shorter, not longer. Luckily, that error didn’t affect the plot of the story.

During my employment years, I worked with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). I once received a letter from the head of the department thanking me for my “patients.” That letter was generated on a computer in the early 2000s, but spell/grammar check doesn’t always catch homonyms if a word is spelled correctly. In my opinion, that error looked really bad, coming from the department that oversees the public K-12 school system, which includes the teaching of vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. I practiced my patience, because there were no patients working in my local program.

Most confusing to me recently was the care tag in a shirt I bought. The tag said “Reversible garment. Turn inside out to wash.” If it’s reversible, which side is the inside? I just threw it in the washer and it came out clean.

Do you ever think about how many things are arranged in alphabetic order? In many instances, this arrangement keeps things orderly and makes them easy to find, but does alphabetic order ever seem unfair to you when your turn in line is determined by the first letter of your last name? I’ll guess that if your last name begins with a letter in the first part of the alphabet, your answer is “no.” My last name began closer to the end of the alphabet, so my answer is “yes.”

I attended a small, rural, two-room elementary school. Depending on the year, there were 50-60 students in eight grades, with grades 1-4 in one room and grades 5-8 in the other. Our school had two small libraries consisting of three shelves that stretched across the back of each classroom. The libraries included a full set of encyclopedias and several dictionaries, so that diminished the space available for recreational reading materials during one’s four years in that classroom. Because this was true of so many schools in our largely rural county, the county provided a “traveling library.” The county school superintendent and his/her assistant made the rounds of all the rural schools every two weeks to exchange packing boxes filled with about 30 books. In a round-robin pattern, each classroom in each school exchanged its current box of books for a box with a different selection of books that came from a different school.

I have always loved to read and I finish books quickly, so I was always impatient and eager for the traveling library to bring a new box of books to our school. Unfortunately for me, my teacher believed that the fairest way to distribute the new books while keeping order in the classroom was to allow a few students at a time to make their one-book selection. This was done in alphabetic order, always beginning with the “A’s.” I lived in an area of Dutchmen, many of whose names began with De-capital letter-remainder of last name, such as DeBlaey, DeMaster, etc., and my last name began with “S.” Those early-alpha kids always had the first pick of the traveling library books and I was always in the last group to make a selection. The traveling library rules said that when you finished reading the book you selected, you put it back into the box and then had the option to choose a different book from the box. The early-alpha kids frequently failed to finish their selected books in the two-week exchange period, so their selections didn’t make it back to the box until the exchange day, and I rarely had a chance to read everything I wanted to read.

Alphabetically, things changed for me when I enrolled in a large university (35,000 students). Class enrollment was open for several days each semester, and was available in alphabetic order. Naturally, those who were in the first alphabetic group were nearly always able to enroll in whichever course/day/time they chose while those in the last group usually had to make some course/day/time adjustments. BUT, the alphabetic groups changed order each semester. I don’t remember the exact groupings, but if, for example, A-G had first choice this semester, they moved to the #3 spot the following semester; group H-P moved to #1; and Q-Z moved to #2. In this way, once every three semesters, everyone had a chance to be first, second, or third in course selection. What could be more fair while still maintaining order and a manageable number of students enrolling at a given time? There may be other entities that do this, but I’ve never encountered or heard of them, so this was a happy revelation to me as a college freshman, and it’s certainly more fair than always giving the “A’s” first choice and the “Z’s” last choice.

Back in January, Jeff was struggling with structuring a particular sentence to describe the rules of a new game he was developing, so he contacted me–the family English guru. It was a tricky question, but the issue was quickly solved by diagramming the sentence.

I don’t think English teachers teach sentence diagramming any more, and I doubt if many of them even know how to do it. It’s a useful lost skill that my elementary school teacher (another English guru) taught us. Diagramming provides a place for every grammatical category–parts of speech as well as sentence components–for any sentence. The most complicated sentence I ever diagrammed was the thesis for my master’s degree in Educational Administration. I was allowed one sentence to describe the entire thesis, but diagramming helped me make that long sentence clear.

Here’s the sentence I diagrammed for Jeff. See if you can read it as it should be written.

It says, “Each of your cities produces, in addition to its normal production, one metal.” The interrupting phrase could also be placed at the beginning or at the end of the sentence to read, “In addition to its normal production, each of your cities produces one metal,” or “Each of your cities produces one metal, in addition to its normal production.” In any of these variations, the diagram would be identical because of the modifiers to the subject, the verb, and the direct object.

Can you spell better than the Office Depot staff? If so, you’ll find the error.

BLFC stands for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The contest began in 1982 as the “misbegotten brainchild” of a professor at San Jose State University who was “sentenced” to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist. Contest entrants are challenged to compose “an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.” The sentence must be original and previously unpublished. There is no limit to the length of the sentence, but the panel of “undistinguised judges” suggests 50-60 words. Entries (usually on postcards) are accepted every day of the year and the winners (grand prize, winner, dishonorable mention) are announced in mid-August. The results are made public on national and international media. Here are some of the winners I enjoyed.

The Grand Prize winner receives an “absolute pittance–and bragging rights.”

This is a Children’s Literature winner.

This was a winner in the Romance category.

Here’s a Dishonorable Mention in the Adventure category, probably written by an English major.

This is another Adventure Dishonorable Mention.

And, finally, a Children’s Literature Dishonorable Mention.

You can find winning entries as far back as 1996 at www.bulwerlytton.com–where “www” means “wretched writers welcome.”

George Carlin had a routine he called “Syllable Inflation.” George’s example began with the first World War. At that time, “shell shock” (two syllables) was the designation for soldiers whose combat conditions stressed their nervous systems to the maximum extent, even reaching a point at which the soldiers “snapped.” As George Carlin said, it was a simple, honest, and direct term. During World War II, “shell shock” evolved to “battle fatigue”–now four syllables. “Battle fatigue,” said George, “didn’t seem to hurt as much.” Soldiers’ stress levels after the Korean conflict were referred to as “operational exhaustion”–eight syllables and now, according to George, “It sounds sterile”–not even like a human affliction. Soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War suffered from “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” That’s a decrease to seven syllables, but George pointed out that “there’s a hyphen to bury the pain under the jargon.” George closed this bit with a comment that, if the condition had remained as clear and direct as “shell shock,” many veterans might have received treatment in a far more timely manner. It’s been a long time since I heard that George Carlin routine (he died in 2008), but because of it, I’ve always been attuned to useless syllable inflation.

Like George Carlin’s syllable inflation, in Errors & Expectations (a book I read for my doctoral research), Mina Shaughnessy wrote that someone who has not learned the word “dregs” (one syllable) must say “what is left in the cup after you finish drinking” (twelve syllables, but Mina didn’t include the syllable count). When I hear an inflated word phrase like “wine bottle opener” (six syllables), like Mina, I want to teach vocabulary lessons and tell the speaker/author that we already have a word for that and it’s “corkscrew” (two syllables).

A long time ago, I started making a list of syllable-inflated words that I’ve heard and read, usually in newscasts and newspapers. (The list part won’t surprise people who know me well.) Here are some of the words from my list.

Hands-on learning (4) . . . kinesthetic learning (6)

Humidity (4) . . . environmental moisture (7)

Diarrhea (4) . . . gastrointestinal upset (8)

Coroner (3) . . . medical examiner (7)

Fire chief (2) . . . incident commander (6)

Warehouse (2) . . . fulfillment center (5); also distribution center (6)

Crop duster (3) . . . aerial applicator (7)

Heart attack (3) . . . cardiovascular event (8)

Fire (1) . . . rapid oxidation (6)

Study hall (3) . . . academic instructional period (11)

Stroke (1) . . . cerebral vascular accident (9)

Firings (2) . . . involuntary eliminations (10)

Layoff (2) . . . involuntary staffing reduction (10)

Affair (2) . . . inappropriate personal relationship (12)

Dishonorable discharge (7) . . . involuntary administrative separation proceedings (17)

The moral of the story: Keep it simple!

USA Today must hire writers who graduate at the bottom of their English classes because, whenever I read it, I find a plethora of errors. I was skimming that newspaper today and found three glaring errors that should never have made it through the first proofreading. Here’s the first of two errors in an article about yesterday’s bridge collapse near Pittsburgh. The error is highlighted.

Since “latter” is an adjective indicating something is nearer to the end than to the beginning, the word makes no sense at all in this context. A noun, such as “ladder” (a thing, an object) is needed to pull victims out of the debris. “Latter” and “ladder” were words my ESL teachers practiced with their students so the students could learn to distinguish between them. Maybe this USA Today reporter should come to one of our local ESL classes. Next, . . .

“Obtain” means to acquire; “sustain” means to undergo. Did the hospitalized people actually go to the hospital in search of injuries? You’ve got to wonder. And now last, but not least, and on a lighter note, . . .

If Minnie Mouse changed her clothes, you might expect her to “don” (put on clothing) her new outfit, but USA Today sees her change of clothing as a “dawn” (the beginning of an event or occurrence, such as sunrise).

I’m sure my childhood friends and I would have used the correct words in all three of these examples when we were in elementary school. If we hadn’t, our teachers would certainly have corrected us. We definitely wouldn’t make these mistakes as adults reporting for a national newspaper!

Sometimes I’m disappointed in the last fifty pages of a good book. After lots of twists and turns in the plot of the story, the author neatly and quickly ties everything together with a happy sappy ending. That leaves me feeling like the author was tired of writing the story and decided to wrap it up fast and be finished with it. It’s very disappointing after 300 pages of a good read.

Yesterday was a different story (pun intended). I read a paragraph that made me think the author possibly started the paragraph and then just decided to keep going and have some fun with it. This excerpt is from Judith MIchael’s book Private Affairs. For maximum enjoyment, read the last highlighted sentence first.

EPSON MFP image

In Olympic news today, I read an article regarding the absence of Bob Costas as a commentator. I have a feeling the reporter couldn’t think of the word nuances.

Or did Bob really report on nuisances? “It’s too bad the runner’s shoelace came untied just as the starting gun went off.” “She was favored to win, but forgot her swim cap.” “He’d do better if he could stop hiccupping.” The reporter also mentions that Bob only “occasionally [chimed] in with clear-headed commentary.” And yet, Bob’s career as a sportscaster for NBC lasted from 1980-2019, Not bad for a muddle-headed reporter whose strength was guiding viewers through nuisances.

The photo below is a screenshot of an ad that appears when I play my free Solitaire game online. Read the text carefully. It was probably written by a right-brained (creative/artistic) person who cannot “match three.” Or spell.

English is a living language and freely adopts and adapts words from other languages. Kathy and I (fellow English majors) were talking today about some of the colorful, folksy terms we use to describe people, specifically words that are difficult to define, but that “we just know” what they mean. Examples include klutz, ditz, putz, doppich, frumpy, and schmuck.

Today, while I was reading The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict, I came across a new descriptive term: “twee.” In the book, Mrs. Christie speaks of her husband, Archie, and says, “I toned down my natural exuberance and chatter, because Archie found it cloying and more than a little twee.” I had no idea what “twee” meant, so I looked it up.

I like the word. The problem? It’s British slang, so if I use it, it’s unlikely my listener will know what I mean and I’ll have to figure out a way to describe a word that “I just know.”

I was reading an article in my news feed about Trump supporters who gathered in Washington, D.C. to show their support for President Trump after the election. The speaker might have known what she meant, but the reporter, proofreader, and editor are all apparently unfamiliar with the difference between a ringer and a wringer. Or maybe all of the aforementioned people actually meant that the President has been treated like a bell.

I hear a lot of weird English language errors and mutations when I watch and read news stories. The errors and mutations are so frequent, that I can’t keep track of them all, but a few recent bloopers were especially notable.

(1) There was a special news report on flying safely now that the COVID-19 lockdowns are loosening. To reassure passengers that airplane cabin air is recirculated, the reporter mentioned that “most airplanes that fly in the air now have HEPA* air filters.” Question: What would be the purpose of an airplane that doesn’t fly in the air?

*HEPA: High efficiency particulate air. These filters force air through a fine mesh to trap harmful particles such as pollen and pet dander. The workmen who refurbished our bathrooms in 2017 used a HEPA machine to filter out drywall dust while they were working.

(2) I don’t remember what the news report referred to, but Miss Ditz told us that it moves in an “anticlockwise” direction. Really? Is she too young to know we already have the word “counterclockwise” to describe this?

(3) Finally, with the riots following George Floyd’s death, the leader of our nation expressed his sympathies for “the people of Mindianapolis.” It’s somewhere in the Midwest–Indiana? Minnesota? Geography lessons needed?

The number of editing errors that occur in published books and elsewhere continues to amaze me. Here are some of my recent finds.

Spelling

How to change the meaning of a sentence with a misspelling.

Know your cars

Ford didn’t build the Cutlass; Oldsmobile did.

Acrobatic dog

Read carefully, then put this picture in your head. Amazing dog, or editing error? You be the judge.

April 14 was the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I saw a series of photos of the event and, although the pictures were interesting, I was amazed at the number of errors I saw in the captions. This was one of the most obvious ones.

The second sentence has one subject and two verb clauses. The subject of the sentence is “RMS Carpathia” and the verbs are “transported” and “were met.” The RMS Carpathia “were met”???? No, it “was met.” Aaarrrggghh! I’m hoping the error was the fault of Wikimedia and not the Library of Congress.

Below are two words and their definitions.

Which of the two words do you think the reporter should have used in the following paragraph about the current flooding in the upper Midwest?

This paragraph was in a story I was reading about a man with OCD. I guess he wanted to run away from all the stuff he’d collected.

I thought my chances of eventually dying were 100 percent, but USA Today recently reported that, if I eat more fiber and grains, I can reduce that risk by nearly 30 percent.

I assume the World Health Organization used better grammar than this reporter, but maybe not. Unless fiber has become a true miracle drug, it would be more accurate to report that a high-fiber diet can contribute to longevity by reducing the risk of premature death.

Just in case, let’s all eat more oatmeal and go for immortality.

Do I need an appointment or may I just walk in?

 Author’s note:  As an adjective describing the kind of person who seeks a professional service without an appointment, walk-in should be a single hyphenated word and it definitely does not need that apostrophe!  Doesn’t anyone proofread signage before posting it????

When you really need auto-correct.

 

This reminded me of a tractor-trailer truck I once saw.  The company name (which I forgot) filled the entire side of the trailer and included the word “Ohoi.”  Close, but not quite one of the 50 states.

Whew!  I found out today that I’m not the Lone Ranger of the Grammar Police Squad.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo differs from his boss, President Trump, when it comes to writing.   According to CNN, while President Trump tends to forego standard guidelines for punctuation and capitalization in his tweets, Pompeo has apparently “had it up to here” with improper comma usage among State Department staff.  As a result, two emails have been circulated among State Department staff in recent months with detailed instructions pertaining to the proper use commas.

According to the emails, Pompeo prefers the Chicago Manual of Style writing guidelines.  Personally, I prefer the American Psychological Association (APA) style because I think it’s far more straightforward than Chicago style, but I guess Mike likes a challenge.  Here are two excerpts from one of the staff memos–one for including commas and one for removing them.

 

Attention to writing detail might come with the Secretary of State job.  CNN alliteratively noted that Colin Powell “famously focused on font and font size,” and Condoleezza Rice was picky about margins and “cramming too much into the regulated length for memos.”  Maybe I should consider becoming Secretary of State.  I already have the grammar skills.

You need a broad vocabulary and a good editor (not spell check) when you’re writing for print media.  I saw this in the newspaper after the Waffle House shooting.

Everyone knows you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with.  Where did that grammar rule come from?  (Grammar humor taking place.)

This preposition rule is based on Latin grammar and makes no sense in modern English.  Grammarly (and other high-ranking language professionals) tell us it’s now OK to use a preposition at the end of a sentence.  We no longer need that Latin rule to hide behind.  (Get it?)

 

For non-grammar nerds, the Oxford (serial) comma is the final comma in a list of things.  People either love or hate the Oxford comma, and style manuals are beginning to compromise by advocating use of the Oxford comma as an option when clarity is needed.  I always use it because it always provides clarity.

Without the Oxford comma:  I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.

With the Oxford comma:  I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty.

My brother Tom sent a cartoon to my siblings and me and it reminded me of some related cartoons I’ve saved over the years.

English majors always try to be grammatically correct, . . .

 

. . . they can be challenged when looking for employment, . . .

 

. . . and they sometimes find the perfect niche.  Thanks, Tom.

It’s been awhile since I found a reporting error that irritated me enough to share it, but it happened again today.  The article was published in the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, FL.  In the following excerpt from the news article, the author erroneously identifies two of the three generations mentioned.

 

Just as their grandparents feared polio . . .

Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was developed in 1953 and was available for public use in 1955.  Dr. Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine was available for use in 1961.  I was vaccinated with both.  A local drugstore provided the injections, and I remember going there after church on Sundays for the series of three injections.  I also remember taking the pink oral vaccine dropped onto sugar cubes.  It was from 1916 until the 1950s that polio was an annual summertime threat in one part or another of the United States.  The worst U.S. polio epidemic occurred in 1949, claiming 2,700+ lives.  I was two years old that year, and my oldest brother was an infant.  It was my parents–“Generation Columbine’s” great-grandparents, born just before and during the 1920s–who feared polio throughout their lives, especially for their children, including Ted and me.  I don’t remember being afraid of polio, but I know that large public gatherings were avoided during the summer months and public swimming pools were often closed during the 1940s and 1950s to prevent the spread of polio.  I do remember my 4-H club collecting money from the good citizens of Hingham for the March of Dimes to support the fight to eradicate polio.

 

. . . and their parents feared nuclear war, . . .

Six of my eight grandchildren were born after the 1999 Columbine school shooting.  (Alex and Kyra were born in 1997 and 1998, respectively.)  Their parents are my children, born between 1972 and 1978.  The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 when Jeff was 17, and the Cold War was lukewarm long before that.  The parents of “Generation Columbine” did not live in fear of nuclear war; it was their grandparents–Ted and me–who were afraid Khrushchev would hit the nuclear button at any moment.  In the 1950s–my elementary school years–some public buildings had fallout shelter signs on them, indicating that those buildings could protect us from nuclear fallout in the event of an atomic war.  (Hah!)  I doubt if “Generation Columbine’s” parents ever saw one of these signs.

 

In summary, there is a “Generation Columbine” and there were generations who feared polio and the Cold War.  The author of the article named one of the three groups correctly, but he is off by a full generation for two-thirds of his main idea.  Aarrgghh!  Don’t journalists have to check their facts before publishing?  Don’t they use proofreaders?  Apparently not.

Go, Elon Musk!  Of the 500,000+ objects of space junk orbiting the earth, the Tesla driven by Spaceman is way cooler than the old satellites and spent rocket boosters up there.  The best part of the launch might have been the return of the reusable booster rockets to the launch pad.  Wow!

 

An English major’s work is never finished.  Notice that, even in cartoons, there’s a need for a good editor.