Comments on: Update on Wayansgate 2009

By: Peter Skouson

Peter Skouson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:00:42 +0000

I’VE SUSSED IT!!!!

It’s all because the Wayans are a tribe. “The Navajo are one of the few tribes who’s reservation’s are on they’re traditional lands’.” “The Aztec no longer practise there humen sacrifice’s.”

By: Hayley

Hayley — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:56:04 +0000

C: To be fair, I am a member of “this generation”, and some of us take our grammatical correctness very seriously. I do sympathize with your wife, though – those of us who care about comma placement are definitely in the minority. (Before anyone points it out, I am Australian, so I get a pass for putting my comma outside the quotation marks in my first sentence. It’s the correct thing to do over here.)

By: JMJ

JMJ — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:17:10 +0000

regarding the punctuation and quotations discussion–from digg:

http://everything2.com/title/The%2520slow%2520reversal%2520of%2520periods%2520and%2520quotation%2520marks

By: C

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:37:37 +0000

Ahhh, what would we do without such dilemmas to discuss during our time online? (I’m glad you’re on the Internets because I don’t live in Portland and couldn’t get hard copies.)

And yes, underlining is for old people with typewriters or young people writing in-class essays in my wife’s high school English classes. Her head almost exploded when she saw this thread, BTW — to paraphrase another teacher’s frustration, teaching grammar to this generation is like trying to split firewood with a pumpkin for a hammer and a pancake for a wedge.

By: Eric D. Snider

Eric D. Snider — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:01:26 +0000

Svengali: For many English-speakers, the “h” in “historic” is not pronounced, or not pronounced very clearly, in which case it feels more natural to say “an historic.” It’s because the stress in “historic” comes on the second syllable, rather than the first, and the “his-” part gets lost. That’s why nobody says, for example, “an housekeeper” or “an history” — the “h” is pronounced clearly enough to make “a” the natural-sounding article. But yes, it’s properly “a historic,” and it should always be that way in writing.

C: There’s no reason to underline anything. Underlining is what you do if you don’t have access to italics. But you’re right that it’s a newspaper style to simply use quotation marks on things that would in other cases be italicized (or, if you were on a typewriter, underlined). I don’t know if I’ll ever retrain myself on that, even though I write exclusively for the Internets now. It’s so much easier — and no less acceptable — to type a quotation mark than it is to type less-than-sign, em, greater-than-sign. And yet I agree that movie titles look better in italics. Such a dilemma.

By: C

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:56:12 +0000

Eric and Randy: I know that you know that you would put the movie title “Gladiator” in quotation marks only in a newspaper or in an online format where you can’t use italics or underlining. (Although you, Eric, could have un-italicized and un-quotation-marked it in your comment, as evidenced by the fact that you italicized other text.) I often elect to use all caps for titles in italics-deficient circumstances.

matt: “There was” and “There were” are not passive.

FYE: I’ve always understood that the practice of placing periods and commas inside quotation marks started among typesetters who thought it looked neater than leaving them outside, and that in addition to saving space, the omission of serial commas in newspapers also saves tons of ink! Think about not having to print millions upon millions of extra dots every day! Who wants to calculate the savings for us?

Also — PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, people of the English-speaking world, STOP USING an apostrophe+s to PLURALIZE words!!! (can I add a few more?) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (thank you)

“(nor did it recognize descriptivist)” = priceless

I [heart] grammar.

By: Svengali

Svengali — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:17:04 +0000

This is a great post and gets me to thinking, and maybe this was brought up already in the comments, but can someone (Eric, anyone) explain to me when and how it became acceptable to say “AN historic event,place,moment…” I hear newscasters say this all the time and it irks me to no end. The H isn’t silent, it’s not like “an homage, an honest truth”, etc., so why does “AN Historic” get a pass? It seems like this is a fairly recently added “rule”, and I’ve always said “a historic…”. Thanks for this post Eric.

By: Genevieve

Genevieve — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:04:39 +0000

This makes my head ache. It is an unbelievably awesome debate, and rather hilarious, but the sheer grammatical correctness of it all is rather confounding.

On the other hand, that was a pretty cool sentence, based on word choice.

And also, to Seth of the soggy popcorn: you are cool. I would give you a prize if I was allowed to issue that sort of thing.

By: Riley

Riley — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:02:01 +0000

This is the best debate ever.

By: Miss Kuecks

Miss Kuecks — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:52:35 +0000

And, going after the not-so-coveted comment trifecta, I wanted to comment that this snuck v. sneaked issue is interesting, since the past tenses of verbs usually become more regular over time, not the other way around. Anyone have online access to the OED?