Salon.com > Grammar

New track from the Lonely Island features Solange Knowles, semicolons

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:54:00 +0000

As part of "Wack Wednesdays" and YouTube Comedy Week, sketch comedy group the Lonely Island has released a new track featuring Solange Knowles and Maya Rudolph. It's about semicolons:

The "Wack Album” comes out June 11.

It’s OK to use incomplete sentences. Really

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:45:00 +0000

There are a few rules that are drummed so incessantly into our heads in school that we cannot help but internalize them. One is "No sentence fragments!"

Actually, that should be "Don't use sentence fragments!" so as not to break its own rule. What is a sentence fragment? Anything that looks like a sentence — starts with a capital letter and ends with a period — but is not a syntactically complete standard sentence.

This "rule" has some validity as a general guideline, especially to help adolescents get over some of their more atrocious writing habits. But respected authors and well-educated writers have always used exceptions to the "rule" for good effect. Here are some examples:

Sentences without verbs

It's obvious that a sentence needs a verb. Right? If not, why not?

Did you see what I just did there? I didn't need to say "Is that right? If it is not, why is it not?" You can sometimes get by without restating things. This is called ellipsis, and is found in many a well-polished work of prose. No need for extra information. The shorter the better. Out with the longwinded and in with the concise.

Not without our apostrophes!

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:50:00 +0000

After a lengthy era of superfluous punctuation running wild through our shop signs and tattoos, who'd have thought we'd ever come to the day when the apostrophe might become an endangered species? But over the past month, a ferocious battle has been going on over in the U.K., with nothing short of the fate of the possessive mark at stake.

It began with local officials in southwestern England's Mid Devon District moving to streamline street signs to avoid "potential confusion." Chillingly, the council went so far as to propose, "All punctuation, including apostrophes, shall be avoided." So incendiary was the plan that it made outraged headlines around the globe, culminating Thursday in the issue being put to a vote. Picture it: A King's Road rechristened "Kings Road." And as you hold that image in your mind, you will begin to understand that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don't see what the big deal is, and those who are currently making strangled, gasping cries from the backs of their throats. How many of these "Kings" are we talking about here? The people demand answers!

Too many exclamation points!!!

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:00:00 +0000

“HEY STEVE!” someone recently emailed me. Both my name and “Hey” were in caps, and all five sentences in the message ended with exclamation points. At first glance I assumed the message was a loved one writing from a plane that was going down. It turned out to be someone I barely knew, discussing minor logistics and thanking me for something that had taken no effort on my part.

I'm not the first to point out that we're in a punctuation arms race in emails and texts. “Thank you!!” people reply, like you just sent them a kidney instead of an invoice.

"See you at 1:00 for the meeting," I type, and then hesitate: If I don't add an exclamation point it sounds like I plan to kill the person when I get there. And yet when someone emails me about a meeting with an exclamation point, I think, “Listen, it's a meeting. The best it could go is that there are bagels. If you are really that excited about it, you're a psycho.”

But I admit: I do it too. I’ll drop an exclamation point or nine in an email or text to smooth the transaction. I do it not because I’m nice but because I’m lazy: Instead of finding the right words I find the "Shift” and the “1" keys. Synthetic excitement explodes out of my cursor, unearned. And I can sound friendly without all the effort of actually being friendly.

Don’t kill the Oxford comma!

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:14:00 +0000

[UPDATED BELOW]

Grammar lovers today were saddened, shocked, and mightily displeased at the news that the P.R. department of the University of Oxford has decided to drop the comma for which it is so justly famed. As GalleyCat reported, the university's new style guide advises writers, "As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write 'a, b and c' not 'a, b, and c'." Cue the collective gasps of horror. The last time the nerd community was this cruelly betrayed, George Lucas was sitting at his desk, thinking, "I shall call him Jar Jar."

Tragic moments in spelling

Thu, 06 May 2010 01:01:00 +0000

View the slide show

All I want for Christmas is quotation marks

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Everyone knows that the world's material resources -- food, water, oil -- are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, such as handwritten signs in the windows of delis, revel in an abundance of these, so much so that an entire blog exists only to scold them for their conspicuous consumption. Yet in other parts of the world, terrible shortages of quotation marks prevail, leaving some readers confused, disoriented and even downright insurrectionary.

I'm talking, of course, about literary fiction, where at times quotation marks can be as hard to come by as a pre-publication blurb from Don DeLillo. Although every style manual you might care to name will tell you that lines of dialogue must be enclosed in these little paired curlicues (or single ones, if you're British), many writers insist on leaving them out. Authors who have eschewed quotation marks include E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.

And the (antisocial) word of the year is …

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:18:00 +0000

I've done it lots of times. You've probably done it as well. Maybe you've even done it to me. People rarely own up to it, but it happens all time. That's why it's the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year: "unfriend."

The entry of "unfriend" into the lexicon comes right on time, just a few years behind the great friending gold rush of the late-mid-decade. Perhaps you too were seduced early on by the popularity race that is the amassing of names on MySpace and Facebook. Look at me, world! I know people! And not just that Tom guy, either!

So you'd meet somebody at a party, and the next thing you know, you were faced with the prospect of reading what they ate for dinner, how great the band they just saw was, and the adorable things their kids said from now until the end of time. You came to the quiet realization that you give even less of a rat's ass about the person you shared a locker with in fifth grade than you did back in fifth grade. And unlike the real world, where your epiphany about such a doomed relationship would lead to weeks of dodgy avoidance techniques, on the Web, you can make somebody go away with one lethal click.

Memo to grammar cops: Back off!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:24:00 +0000

"Passions run hot when the discussion turns to language," writes Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch in his sprightly new history of the notion of "proper" English, "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." "Friends who can discuss politics, religion and sex with perfect civility are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique." Ain't it the truth? My favorite call-in radio program regularly invites "word maven" Patricia T. O'Conner to come on and talk about new and old figures of speech. O'Conner clearly prefers to marvel over the language's diversity, but the half-hour is inevitably eaten up by people kvetching about their pet peeves, more often than not some barely detectable error or non-infraction that makes the caller apoplectic -- such as the phrase "gone missing," which is "perfectly standard," according to Lynch. But who am I to mock? I, who have gnashed my teeth countless times over the dangling participles that abound on NPR!

Is the semicolon girlie?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:40:00 +0000

Recently someone asked me what my favorite punctuation mark was. I did not even hesitate. The semicolon. Duh. To me, the semicolon has a certain elegance, like a vodka martini; I don't whip it out every day, but on occasion, and with great relish. So it was with shock that I read a recent Boston Globe article suggesting that my favorite punctuation mark is ... girlie? An excerpt:

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.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

“You Send Me” by Patricia T. O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 21:43:00 +0000

If ever there was an exam tailored to measure future professional success, it's the Graduate Management Admission Test. Graded by a software program called E-rater, GMAT essays are given high marks, regardless of content, not only for lengthiness and sentence complexity, but also for unintelligible wording and extensive application of such terms as "since" and "therefore," commonly associated with solid reasoning. To bluff that computer, in other words, you need not be a scholar, but simply must master the tools used to defraud investors.

It's a formula. As former New York Times editors Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman note, there's no need with E-rater "to sweat over creativity, individuality and style -- the things a real reader looks for in writing." Alas, the advice they dispense in "You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online" can only result in prose equally dull and mechanical.