Tag Archives: language

Everyone Gets a ‘Trophe

No other punctuation mark gets this much abuse—and I have a radical proposition to end it all

I expect it in Chinese restaurants, cheerfully and nonjudgmentally.

Special: Wing’s 10 for $5

Almost anywhere else, it makes me wince.

The Smith’s would like to invite you to their house party Saturday. Please bring appetizer’s or drink’s to share.

At my children’s schools, it makes me want scream, “Who’s in charge here?—or else slam a hardbound copy of The Chicago Manual of Style down on the principal’s desk.

School trip to Six Flag’s on Friday. Don’t forget permission slip’s and snack’s. Lunch is provided, $60 per student, cash only, no check’s.

Yes, checks. I’m checking to see who let you get through school without learning the proper—and improper—uses of the apostrophe.

Every grammar blog known to Google has covered this topic (and headlined the post with some variation of “Apostrophe Catastrophe”).

They all cover the basics, so I’ll keep it short and sweet. Apostrophes have two common uses: (1) to show possession, and (2) to stand in for missing letters, as in contractions. A third, less-common use is to make plurals out of odd (and therefore possibly confusing) constructions, especially lower-case letters appearing as just the letters themselves: Mind your p’s and q’s.

Next, the grammar bloggers address the most commonly confused words, starting with “its” and “it’s.” Hey, what happened here anyway? One is a contraction and one is a possessive, and they both wanted the apostrophe, so they got drunk and slugged it out. The contraction won. So “it’s” means “it is” (“It’s raining men”), while “its” shows possession (“The heart has a mind of its own”).

Back to the epidemic. In a nutshell, these days I am seeing more rogue apostrophes then I can ever remember. Most of them are apostrophes stuck senselessly into a plural noun (Steak’s! Chop’s! The best burger’s in town!). Sometimes they are the disastrous results of someone not being sure if a word is plural, possessive, or both (Ladie’s Night–$5 drink specials!) They typically appear in store signs and event posters, but also almost anywhere else where a punctuation illiterate is left alone to mangle the English language: company memos, school fliers, e-mails from the soccer club president. And yes, even in newspapers and magazines. Yike’s! (Haha … just trying to be cute.)

At this point, I’m thinking that Chinese restaurants should start suing the other perpetrators for plagiarism.

The apostrophe misuse has gotten so bad—and the prospects for reeducation so dismal—that I have come up with a radical solution to end the madness once and for all.

For background, consider what has happened to the period (and the question mark, for that matter). Unless you’re old enough to remember FDR and have never received an e-mail or text message, you’re probably aware that use of punctuation to show that a sentence actually has ended is becoming more and more optional—so much so that even The New York Times noticed and wrote a story about it. And even without periods and question marks to guide them, the kids understand just fine. And not just the kids—old guys like me, too. Consider this series of three texts I received a couple of years ago from an on-again, off-again girlfriend who had decided, early one evening, that she wanted to see me again:

Hello Stephen

How are you

Where are you

I needed no punctuation to grasp the nuances of each text—in fact, they might have been clearer without the periods and question marks. The first text was an olive branch, the second a half-statement, half-question to acknowledge that she wondered how I was doing, the third a more direct question asking if I might be free that evening. Fill in your own unpunctuated texts—I’m sure you have an iPhone full of them

So … is it possible that we can take a page from the Great Period Throwaway, and just do without apostrophes altogether?

I know, language preservationists are supposed to run screaming from radical rule changes. But just think how much cleaner the world of print will look without all those wince-inducing rogue apostrophes mucking it up! And once we eliminate the apostrophe from our keypads, will we really miss the ones that we used to think were essential? I think not.

Some words will retreat comfortably from possessive nouns to adjectives, like Mothers Day and Mets game and Beatles drummer. And consider the many living examples of dropped apostrophes, like Proctors Theatre and the R.E.M. album Lifes Rich Pageant: In the first example, when the arts organization removed the punctuation years ago, it merely established that the question of possession was not important; in the second example, possession is still understood perfectly. As for contractions, I cant and probably wont think of any that we couldnt get used to. And if you do not like them unpunctuated, you are still free to spell them out.

I pulled a few random phrases from the news just to see how they would read without apostrophes: Trumps tax returns, Trumps Russia connections, Trumps early-morning tweetstorms, Trumps alternate reality … Hmmm … from where I sit, all of these are much easier to comprehend than anything the man actually says.

But seriously, it will make life (and writing and reading) so much easier. We can stop fussing about the many unnecessary uses we have for apostrophes (Back in the 90s, I once gave my two weeks notice after my boss told me to mind my Ps and Qs.) Did you notice all three examples of the dropped apostrophe? And if not, could it be that they didn’t matter?

Years ago, when my sister lived in North East, Pennsylvania, she took me to a place called Larry Youngs Fruit Farm. Of course the missing apostrophe on the sign bothered me—until my sister informed me that the farmer’s name was Larry Youngs. But it still bothered me—Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe after the s, then?

To see if other people actually cared about such things, I stood outside the door and asked customers, as they were leaving, if they were bothered by the lack of punctuation in the sign. Their reaction was unanimous, paraphrased here: I don’t care about punctuation, I just wanted the damn cherries!

OK, I didn’t really do that, but you get the point.

One more thing about the case we fret about the most: its vs. it’s. From now on, it’s just its—And everyone will understand which one you mean from the context (just like they do when you’re speaking). And you will never have to worry about which one gets the apostrophe again. Ever.

Best of all, the horror of rogue apostrophes will become a thing of the past.

Then again, Chinese restaurants probably will not get the memo. So we can still look forward to the specials on wing’s.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

Concerning “Concerning”

When the doctor told me that something in my x-ray was “concerning,” I was alarmed.

My distress was not over my dislocated shoulder, which I somehow knew would heal just fine.

It was my reaction to his use of the word concerning as an adjective, which I had seldom if ever heard before, and which had something akin to a nails-on-chalkboard effect on my ears.

“You don’t use concerning that way,” I fumed silently as the doctor explained the shoulder’s ball-and-socket mechanics. To me, concerning was a perfectly useful preposition meaning “regarding” or “with respect to” or “on the subject of.” It was not a proper substitution for more familiar adjectives such as “alarming” or “disturbing” or “troubling.”

Not only did I soon learn that my position on concerning was mostly indefensible; I also began to hear it used as an adjective on a regular basis.

Searches have found the word used as an adjective in literature going back at least to the 1700s. It was not used commonly in American English until it began to take off in the late 1980s, but it is used commonly now, and it stands as yet another example of the fluidity of language over time. It also occupies a slightly different niche than some of its synonyms because it has a milder connotation (compare to alarming). Besides, several of those synonyms—distressing, disturbing, upsetting—are formed in the same way, so there is no justification for rejecting the similar usage of concerning.

Well, maybe one. It is a very specific case, but an important one if, like me, you strive above all for clarity, especially in writing. I always advocate recasting a sentence that is likely to confuse the reader momentarily, and that can happen with concerning precisely because of its common use as a preposition. For example, if we read “The police report was concerning,” we may initially think there is more coming, specifically, the subject of the report.

In that case, I would suggest changing concerning to troubling. I hate tripping up readers, which also is why I separate most multiple subject clauses with commas to keep the reader from momentarily mistaking the second subject for an object. (“The doctor fixed my shoulder and my brain learned to accept concerning as an adjective.”) But that’s a topic for another day.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

A Night Off From Language Abuse–Not Quite

 

As expected, there have been plenty of news organizations and social-media watchdogs to point out the substantive problems in President Trump’s speech last night to the joint session of Congress: the factual inaccuracies, the hypocricies, the credit taken for things that already had happened or were under way before Trump took office. But for once, Trump’s remarks—written by smarter people and read from a teleprompter—did not give editor geeks like me too much to work with. On any other night, his off-the-cuff ramblings would contain so many unfinished sentences and other grammatical errors, so much hyperbole and vague language, that I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Still, as an editor, I do have a couple of complaints. This minor one is from the Department of Redundancy Department: “I will not allow the mistakes of recent decades past to define the course of our future.”

Now the Stephens who wrote the speech might argue that both “recent” and “past” were necessary for full clarity, but this Stephen strongly disagrees. “Decades past” alone would not have focused sufficient attention on the “mistakes” of the Obama administration, but “recent decades” removes any need to add the word “past.” Recent is defined as “belonging to a past period of time comparatively close to the present,” so “recent decades past” is redundant, period. There is no “recent future.”

Another editor’s complaint involves a passage that is a combination of hyperbole and illogic, and may have been overlooked by the fact-checkers precisely because it doesn’t make enough sense to be singled out as factually inaccurate.

“The rebellion started as a quiet protest … But then the quiet voices became a loud chorus … Finally, the chorus became an earthquake, and the people turned out, by the tens of millions, and they were all united by one very simple but crucial demand: that America must put its own citizens first.”

Huh?

OK, before I pick this statement apart, I will acknowledge that its intent seems clear. And even though Trump probably didn’t write it, it’s a page right out of his playbook: keep repeating that I inspired a huge turnout, that I won in a landslide, and that I’m one of the most popular presidents ever, and people surely will believe me and love me.

There was no earthquake, no huge turnout. People have turned out by the tens of millions for presidential elections since before I was born. In terms of sheer numbers, both Barack Obama election years saw higher turnout. In terms of the percentage of eligible voters, 2016 had the smallest turnout in twenty years.

And of course, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. And the voters were not united in their values or “demands”—they were very sharply divided, and still are. Again, the only thing resembling an “earthquake” here is the fault line between red and blue America.

My parting shot comes not directly from Trump’s speech, but from a campaign incident that last night’s event brought immediately to mind. In the emotional high point of the speech, Trump paid tribute to Carryn Owens, the widow of William Ryan Owens, a Navy SEAL who died in a January raid in Yemen. No further comment on that tribute, except to say it stood out in sharp contrast to Trump’s exchange during the primaries with the parents of US Army Capt. Humayun Khan, an American Muslim who died while serving in Iraq. The soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, gave a memorable speech at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia in which he questioned Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and respectfully offered him his pocket-sized copy of the US Constitution to read.

In the aftermath, Trump belittled the Gold Star parents and then defended himself by saying he had been “viciously attacked” by Khan.

In its definitions of “vicious,” Merriam-Webster offers words including “savage,” “malicious,” “spiteful,” and “dangerously aggressive.”

You saw it. Khan delivered his criticism of Trump in gentlemanly, reserved tones, offering his copy of the Constitution as a pointed but polite challenge. There was nothing remotely vicious about it.

Trump’s response was hyperbole. It was loaded, exaggerated wording that can’t be defended. It was abuse of the English language. I wouldn’t accept it from students, and I don’t accept it from Donald Trump. But he does it all the time.

Last night, crutches at hand, Trump sounded, for once, almost articulate. If I sound disappointed, I’m also sure it won’t last. Before you know it, he’ll be in front of a microphone again, without a script.

And his next Twitter rampage can’t be more than a day or two away.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon