Editor's Corner

Today’s topic comes from one of our readers who was, I think, watching Schindler’s List, and heard the term “skirt” being used to refer to a woman. He then mentioned “skirting the law.” Although references to women and avoiding the law seem unrelated, the various meanings of the word skirt, whether used as a noun or a verb, are actually closely connected.

According to Merriam-Webster, skirt used as a noun is all of these things:

· the part of an outer garment or undergarment extending from the waist down that has a free hanging lower edge and is cut in one with the upper part of the garment or attached at the waistline

· either of two usually leather flaps on a saddle covering the bars on which the stirrups are hung

· a cloth facing hanging loosely and usually in folds or pleats from the bottom edge or across the front of a piece of furniture

· the outer part of a parachute canopy

· the lower branches of a tree when near the ground

· the rim, periphery, or environs of an area, territorial division, or natural feature

· part or attachment serving as a rim, border, edging, or endpiece of an object: such as:

o the lip of a bell

o an apron piece or border in a building (such as a baseboard or the molded piece under a window stool)

o a decorative piece on furniture connecting the legs along the lower edge of the table top, chair seat, or base

o a protective guard or plating on machinery and appliances

o a sheet metal covering for the wheels and other working parts of a locomotive

o the bottom portion of the vertical wall of a screw-on jar cap

· the final portions of a period of time

· the diaphragm or midriff of an animal used as edible meat

· British: a flank of beef

· slang: girl, woman [KC – Derogatory term that may lead to fisticuffs!]

· the bearing surface of a piston consisting of the plain cylindrical portion below the ring

· Fabric, fleece

Most of these things have a similar shape or the function of surrounding something, sort of like the items below.

Skirt

Bed skirt

Tree skirt

The outskirts of an area

As far as the verb skirt goes, here are a few more definitions from M-W:

· to form the border or edge of : run along the edge of : border

· to go or proceed closely around or about : follow the outskirts of

· to remove the skirtings from a fleece of wool [KC-Trimming the edge.]

· to be, lie, or move along an edge, border, or margin : follow a roundabout path

· of a hound : to cut corners rather than follow the actual path of a fox

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Good morning, and welcome to a brand new week!

An interested reader asked me about single quotation marks (‘/’). He noticed that people seem to use them for the same purpose as double quotation marks (“/”) and asked me if they were interchangeable.

Maybe some of you have the same question, and I am ready to give you a definitive answer: No!

Single quotation marks and double quotation marks serve unique purposes.

Double quotation marks are more common; we use them for the following reasons:

· For direct quotations

· For the titles of short stories, short poems, titles of articles, essays, chapters of books, songs, and episodes of TV shows or radio programs

· To highlight technical terms, slang, or other expressions that are not considered normal usage (note: in cases like these, quotation marks are often overused and can be distracting—so be careful)

· To draw attention to a word or phrase to point out that it is inaccurate or absurd (scare quotes)

Single quotation marks, on the other hand, have one main purpose: they are used when you have a quotation within a quotation. Here’s an example:

“The man yelled, ‘Get out of my way!’ and then he pushed past me, and I fell down the stairs,” Janet explained to the hotel manager.

The previous example is a statement that Janet gives to the hotel manager, and she is also quoting something someone else said (Get out of my way!). That gives you a quotation inside a quotation.

Now, earlier, I said that single quotations have one main purpose. There are several other occupation-specific reasons for using single quotation marks, but they don’t really pertain to most of us:

· The Associated Press (AP) uses them In headlines

· Certain disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, theology) use them to highlight words with special meaning

Since most of us don’t follow the AP Style Guide and we rarely write about philosophy, linguistics, or theology in our documentation, your take-away today is this: unless you’re providing a quote within a quote, you will typically use double quotation marks.

Enjoy your day!

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Extension: 765432

Symitar Technical Publications Writing and Editing Requests

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Good day to you!

Today’s offerings are from a Daily Writing Tips article that I received a couple of weeks ago. Some of you may find it odd, but I found it fascinating in this high-tech world we live in, that we have so many compound words (65!) that end in “stone.” Rather than throw them at you all at once, I’m going to skip these rocks gently to you over two days.

Dozens of compound words, all but a few closed, end with the word stone, though some of the terms have figurative senses stemming from the original meaning and a few do not refer to actual types of rock at all. Here’s a list of most if not all compound words in which stone is the second element, with accompanying definitions.

1. birthstone: a gem symbolically associated with the month of one’s birth

2. bloodstone: a type of quartz with red spots that resemble drops of blood

3. bluestone: a bluish stone used in building

4. bondstone: a stone whose length is equal to the thickness of a wall that is placed in the wall to help strengthen it

5. brimstone: a traditional word for sulfur, chiefly used in the phrase “fire and brimstone,” referring to sermons in which churchgoers are dramatically warned about hell

6. brownstone: a building stone, and a type of house commonly clad with a layer of the stone

7. capstone: a slanted stone used on the top layer of a wall to allow water to drain off the top; also, figuratively refers to a high point in one’s experience or life

8. cherrystone: a type of clam

9. clingstone: a type of fruit with flesh connected to the stone, or pit

10. cobblestone: a round stone used to pave streets

11. copestone: see capstone

12. cornerstone: a stone placed on the corner of a building, including one traditionally inscribed with the date the building was constructed; also, figuratively refers to something of fundamental importance

13. coverstone: an aggregate of minerals used to cover treated pavement

14. curbstone: a stone, or concrete, used to form a curb

15. dripstone: a stone that projects over a door or window as an awning, or a stalactite or stalagmite made of calcium carbonate

16. drystone: in British English, an adjective describing a wall constructed of stone without mortar

17. fieldstone: a stone found in a field and used for some purpose without alteration

18. firestone: another word for flint (a type of quartz once used to start fires by sparking), or any stone impervious to high heat

19. flagstone: a flat, hard stone used to make paths

20. flintstone: pieces of flint used in construction

21. flowstone: a deposit of calcite formed by water running along or over a cave’s walls or floor

22. footstone: a stone placed at the foot of a grave

23. freestone: a stone able to be cut without splitting, or a stone, or pit, of a fruit not attached to the flesh or fruit with such a pit

24. gallstone: a hard object that forms in the gallbladder

25. gemstone: a stone of such quality that it can be used in jewelry

26. gladstone: a type of suitcase

27. goldstone: a type of glass to which particles of gold-colored material are applied

28. gravestone: a stone that marks the location of a grave and is often engraved with information about that person

29. greenstone: any of various greenish stones, such as a type of jade

30. grindstone: a turning stone wheel against which hard objects such as tools are smoothed or sharpened

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Happy Thursday!

Today’s fare is from Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs, by Murray Suid. Our etymological adventure du jour covers the words menu and minute. Enjoy!

During the next minute or two, you’re going to learn that you know more than you think you do and that it takes brains to eat at a fast-food establishment. Readers, start your chronometers.

The word minute, referring to the unit of time, came into English from the Latin minutus, “small.” This happened in the late fourteenth century, the beginning of the era of accurate time measurement. But the concept of the minute, as a fraction of an hour, traces back to Babylonian texts written about three thousand years earlier. The Babylonians lacked devices that could measure such small units, but they understood their theoretical importance, especially in the study of the heavenly bodies.

Menu, a French word that like minute traces back to the Latin minutus, is a nineteenth-century creation that came about to solve a practical problem: how to let restaurant customers know what items were being served—without consuming too much of the waiters’ time.

The solution was to print a list of foods, known as menu de repas. This phrase might be translated as “a small (description) of foods.” Eventually, continuing the spirit of saving space, menu de repas was shortened to menu.

We’ve become so used to ordering from menus that we don’t realize how much knowledge and prior experience are required in the process. If you’re not convinced, think about offerings such as “Big Mac” (not listed in any ordinary cookbook or dictionary).

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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As promised, today is the second installment of 14 of the Longest Words in English, by Shundalyn Allen. Today’s list is certain to complete your lesson in sesquipedalianism (see number 14).

7. Strengths has only nine letters, but all except one of them are consonants! This earns the word a Guinness World Record. It is also one of the longest monosyllabic words of the English language.

8. Euouae is six letters long, but all of the letters are vowels. It holds two Guinness World Records. It’s the longest English word composed exclusively of vowels, and it has the most consecutive vowels of any word. If you are wondering about its meaning, it’s a musical term from medieval times.

9. & 10. Unimaginatively has lots of vowels—eight in total, if you count the final y. What’s neat about this word is that its vowels and consonants alternate. It’s not the longest word with alternating consonants and vowels, though. That position is held by honorificabilitudinitatibus, a twenty-seven-letter way of saying “with honorableness.”

11. If you tsktsk someone, you indicate your disapproval by the tsktsk sound or by some other means. Tsktsks is the longest word that doesn’t contain a vowel.

12. & 13. Isograms are words that do not repeat letters. The longest examples are uncopyrightable and subdermatoglyphic. An uncopyrightable song, for example, would not be eligible for copyright. This word has fifteen letters, but one other word without repeated letters is longer—subdermatoglyphic. It’s seventeen letters, but you’ll not have much opportunity to use it outside the realm of dermatology.

14. The fourteenth word on our list describes the tendency to use long words—sesquipedalianism. If you possess this trait, you will enjoy trying to use the words in this article in your next conversation. If you are a true sesquipedalian, it shouldn’t be too hard. Except, of course, for that 189,819-letter protein name . . . it’s doubtful that your friends will wait three hours for you to finish saying it!

And from Robert T., an amusing typo or an amazing new cloud-based application:

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Good morning, everyone! One of you language lovers asked me to do a column on long words, and as you know, your wishes are my commands! I found an interesting article about this very topic, titled 14 of the Longest Words in English, by Shundalyn Allen. Rather than overwhelm you with all 14 at once, we’re going to cover this subject over the next two days. Enjoy!

Yes, this article is about some of the longest English words on record. No, you will not find the very longest word in English in this article. That one word would span about fifty-seven pages. It’s the chemical name for the titin protein found in humans. Its full name has 189,819 letters. Would you like to hear it pronounced? One man helpfully sounds it out in a YouTube video, but pop some popcorn before you get started! It will take you over three hours to watch—it’s just slightly shorter than the film Gone with the Wind. Dictionaries omit the name of this protein and many other long words. Obviously, dictionaries have space constraints, and the average person would have no need to know the technical names of chemicals. Still, there are plenty of lengthy words in dictionaries. Let’s take a moment to appreciate a few of them.

1. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (forty-five letters) is lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica or quartz dust.

2. Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (thirty letters) is a mild form of inherited pseudohypoparathyroidism that simulates the symptoms of the disorder but isn’t associated with abnormal levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood.

3. Floccinaucinihilipilification (twenty-nine letters) is the estimation of something as valueless. Ironically, floccinaucinihilipilification is a pretty valueless word itself; it’s almost never used except as an example of a long word.

4. Antidisestablishmentarianism (twenty-eight letters) originally described opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England, but now it may refer to any opposition to withdrawing government support of a particular church or religion.

5. What’s the longest word you know? If you watched Mary Poppins as a child, you might quickly think of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (thirty-four letters). Mary Poppins described it as the word to use “when you have nothing to say.” It appears in some (but not all) dictionaries.

6. Incomprehensibilities set the record in the 1990s as the longest word “in common usage.” How many times have you used this twenty-one-letter term?

“There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.”–Josh Billings

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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Good morning to you! Last week we talked about words created by back-formation (adding or removing a part of the word to create a verb from a noun, for example). Today, I want to discuss a related topic: clipping. I’ve written about this subject before, but today, I’m going to discuss two specific clipped words that turn perfectly happy verbs into unhappy nouns.

First, to remind you, word clipping occurs when you abbreviate a word: for example writing demo instead of demonstration. Yes, most people know what demo means, but in business writing, which is slightly formal, we avoid clipping words (we also avoid contractions). The kind of clipping I’ll discuss today clips a noun to make it shorter; the problem is that the clipped word already exists as a verb.

You want some examples? I’ve got your examples right here!

· I will send you an invite to my fabulous pool party.
(Invite has been clipped from the noun invitation.)

· We will compete the install by Tuesday afternoon.
(Install has been clipped from the noun installation.)

This kind of clipping is a bigger faux pas than regular clipping because clipping these words doesn’t only make them shorter—it changes the word’s “part of speech” (the categories we assign to words: like nouns, verbs, and adjectives). The words invite and install are verbs. They are things you do, which makes the usage in the bullets above grammatically incorrect. You cannot send an invite, you would send an invitation; and you cannot complete an install, you would complete an installation.

I know, I know, a lot of people use invite and install as nouns. I hear it all the time. A lot of people text when they drive and chew with their mouths open, too. (Wow, that sounded just like my mom!)

Oh, and one more thing while I’m on the naggin’ wagon, the word ask is a verb. So, although you might hear others say, “That’s a big ask,” if you want to be grammatically correct, you should say, “That’s a big question” or “That’s a lot to ask.”

Enjoy your week!

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Extension: 765432

Symitar Technical Publications Writing and Editing Requests

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Monday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. If you missed the boat on this year’s celebration, here’s a joke to lift your spirits.

Q: What is a pirate’s favorite drink?

A: Grog (assuming he’s looking for something stronger than an ARRRnold Palmer).

Grog makes many appearances in pirate fiction. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island, Captain Billy Bones calls the inn where Jim Hawkins works "a pleasant sittyated grog-shop." Later, when Jim joins the Hispaniola’s crew, he remarks, "[T]here was never a ship’s company so spoiled since Noah put to sea. Double grog was going on the least excuse."

In the folk song "All for Me Grog" (first written down in 1929, but popular with sailors before then), the narrator laments his lost boots and shirt, which he sold "all for [his] jolly, jolly grog."

Few people drink grog these days, which raises the question: What is grog, anyway?

Like the Arnold Palmer (named for golfer Arnold Palmer), grog is an eponym: a thing named for a person. In this case, the person is 18th century British naval officer Admiral Edward "Old Grog" Vernon.

Vernon got the nickname "Old Grog" for the grogram coat he wore. In 1740, when Vernon ordered that his sailors’ daily allowance of rum be diluted with water, the resulting mixture was named for him. In 1795, the Royal Navy added lemon juice and sugar to the sailors’ rations. This improved the taste, and the vitamin C prevented scurvy.

Pirates went ashore more often than sailors, and scurvy was less of a risk. They tended to leave out the lemon juice and add nutmeg. They called their version bumbo. Merriam-Webster suggests that bumbo might come from Italian bombo, a child’s word for drink.

Grog has mostly been replaced by the daiquiri (basically the same drink), but Vernon’s memory lives on elsewhere. George Washington’s half-brother, Lawrence, served under Vernon in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and named his estate "Mount Vernon" in Old Grog’s honor.

Edward Vernon by Thomas Gainsborough

National Portrait Gallery, London

Ben Ritter | Technical Editor | Symitar®
8985 Balboa Avenue | San Diego, CA 92123
619-682-3391 | or ext. 763391 | www.Symitar.com

Symitar Documentation Services

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The words compliment and complement are homophones, which are words that sound alike but have different meanings. No wonder some people confuse them!

Here are the definitions of each word:

Compliment: a remark that says something good about someone or something

Complement: something that completes something else or makes it better

Here’s a tip from Grammar Girl to help you remember the difference:

Compliment (spelled with an i): Be a nice person and tell yourself, I like to give compliments.

Another trick that may help you to remember the difference is to visualize the spelling of the word complement, which looks like the word complete.

Jackie Solano | Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.542.6711 | Extension: 766711

Symitar Documentation Services

While at Symitar’s annual educational conference, I was chatting with some of my fellow door monitors and one of them used the term “belay.” The only time I’d ever heard that spoken aloud was when my parents were members of the Mountaineers, and I believe they were referring to a book called Off Belay. In honor of my coworkers, The Mountaineers, and my parents, here are a few vocabulary words from the mountain climbing world. (Actually, I selected these from REI’s Climbing Glossary, which is quite extensive.)

· Barn door—To swing sideways out from the rock due to being off balance. Often occurs with a lie-back maneuver.

· Bashies—Malleable anchors that are literally bashed into small cracks for use in aid climbing. Tough to remove.

· Belay—To keep a climber from falling too far by using friction on the rope. The system that stops a climber’s fall. It includes the rope, anchors, belay device and the belayer.

· Belayer—The person who manages the rope so as to catch the climber on the other end in case of a fall or a slip.

· Carabiner—Metal loop (usually aluminum) with a spring-loaded gate on one side used for connecting various parts of a climbing system. May be oval, pear- or D-shaped. Also karabiner, ‘biner, or krab.

· Chimney—Wide, vertical crack large enough for a climber to fit inside and climb. A move done inside the chimney by using opposing force with the feet and the body.

· Hang dog—To rest on the rope as you lead climb, putting weight on the protection rather than the rock.

· Pumped—To be weakened or in pain (usually in the forearms) from a strenuous move or climb.

· Screamer—A long fall on a rope, frequently with screaming. Also the model name of an energy-absorbing runner made by Yates.

· Sewing-machine leg—Uncontrollable shaking of the lower leg(s) caused by fatigue and/or fear while climbing. Resembles the up-and-down movement of sewing-machine parts.

· Whipper—A long fall.

And from About.com: “Off belay” is a climbing command that means “I am safe and you can take me off belay.” The command is said by the climber to his belayer after he is in a safe place, anchored to belay anchors, and no longer needs to be belayed from below.

Carabiner (Known by non-climbers as a “keychain” or “handy clip thing.”)

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services