It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas and a bunch of other holidays around here! I think we’re looking at the Winter Solstice on the 22nd, Festivus on the 23rd, Christmas Eve and Day on the 24th and 25th, and Kwanza on the 26th. That’s a lot of celebration and cheer (and the airing of grievances, depending on which day you celebrate). Let’s keep it a little light and fluffy by looking at Grammar Girl’s article on colorful idioms over the next few days.

1. Red-Handed

First is that fiery color red, as in the idiom caught red-handed, which has a hyphen between red and handed. This means caught in the act of a crime, as in “She was caught red-handed stealing $100.” As you might suspect, the use of the color red in the phrase originates from the color of blood. The phrase originally referred to blood on a murderer’s hands but now extends to other crimes. The noun red-hand has appeared in print in Scottish legal proceedings since 1432, but red-handed was first printed in 1819, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, which helped to popularize the phrase. [KC – And then there was the episode of
The Simpsons when Bart wrote a book report on Ivanhoe and claimed it was about “A Russian peasant and his tool.”]

2. White-Livered

Now we’ll move from red to white, and the association of white with cowardice. If you say a man is white-livered or lily-livered, you are saying that he lacks courage, or that he is pale and without vitality. It is easy to see why white is associated with being pale and unhealthy, but we need to dig a little deeper to discover what a pale liver has to do with being afraid.

It all goes back to the Ancient Greeks and Hippocrates, who proposed a theory called humorism. This theory, which was believed until the 1800s, held that the body had four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—and that those humors needed to be kept in balance. [KC – So much for the “light and fluffy” feel to this article.]

The humor that is relevant to the meaning of white-livered is yellow bile, supposedly made in the liver. Yellow bile, known as the choleric humor, is hot and dry, and it “provokes, excites and emboldens the passions.” The idiom white-livered, therefore, stems from the thought that individuals without much yellow bile lacked a bold temperament and were therefore cowardly.

3. Tickled Pink

Next on our list of colors is pink, and we’re sticking with the medical theme. We hope you’ll be tickled pink! The idiom tickled pink means delighted and first came into being in 1922. The phrase uses the color pink because your complexion becomes flushed—and pinkish—when you feel the tickling sensation. That’s great if you enjoy tickling, but parents may want to think twice when tickling their children (or other people’s kids). Laughing when being tickled is an automatic response and the child may not actually enjoy the tickling. It can be difficult to say, “Stop!” [KC – This whole phrase seems to leave out the majority of the world’s non-Caucasian complexions, but that is a discussion for another time, I guess.]

Kara Church

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Good morning!

A subordinate (dependent) clause is a group of words, with a subject and a verb, that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence.

Here is an example:

· Because I woke up late this morning.

To make this fragment a complete sentence, attach it to the beginning or end of an independent clause. An independent clause is a complete sentence that can stand alone.

Examples:

· I missed the meeting because I woke up late this morning.

· Because I woke up late this morning, I missed the meeting.

Jackie Solano | Technical Editor | Symitar®

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

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I hope that you’ve enjoyed Robert Alden Rubin’s collection of malapropisms from Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms. Today is the last day I’ll be sharing from this book, but I’d like to do another give-away if anyone is interested in reading through this book or giving it as a gift! If you are interested, just email me the first few words of the title. On second thought, just send me an email that says “malapropisms” and I’ll draw a random winner by Thursday, December 24.

Just like last time, I have a couple of other books to give away as a bonus, so you really have three chances to win:

· Signspotting: The Art of Miscommunication

· More Badder Grammar!

Good luck!

· tarter sauce
Some sauces are tarter, some are sweeter, but few are made with cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate). Tartar sauce gets its name from the French sauce tartare (named after the fierce Asian Tartars for its tangy taste). Its main ingredients are mayonnaise and mustard.

· ten-yeared professor, ten-year track position, tenure tract
It usually takes four to six years for a published junior professor to get academic tenure. Tenure, from the Old French to hold, helps guarantee academic freedom and job security. A scholarly publication might be termed a tenure tract.

· rent is in the rears
Confuses behind in the rent with the rent is in arrears (owed). Or perhaps a person who pays his bill with hams.

· toe-headed child
Few people spin flax from tow (bundles of flax fibers) anymore, so the expression tow-headed child (to describe a child’s pale blond hair) may not make much sense. The confusion comes from a bald baby, or a child with short blond hair, which might resemble a pale toe to some. [KC – A child that looks like a hairy toe? Now that’s a real looker!]

· wheelbarrel
A wheelbarrow gets its name from a wheeled version of a stretcher on which cargo or human bodies were carried, known as a barrow, or a bier. A barrel can be used to carry things too, and barrels, like wheels, will roll, adding to the confusion.

Kara Church

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Hello there and happy Thursday!

I have a few more selected malapropisms for you from Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms, by Robert Alden Rubin. And tomorrow? I will have the final few and the opportunity for you to enter yet another drawing for a free book!

· on the lamb
Lambs gambol [KC – run or jump playfully], so you might imagine that running joyfully to escape capture could refer to them. But on the lam literally means to beat it—to run away. It derives from Germanic words meaning to beat or to lame a person or animal.

· lazy-fare
The English lazy (to dislike work) and the French laissez-faire (leave it alone) both suggest inaction. Yet laissez-faire economic policies would work hard at keeping business un-impeded, whereas lazy policies just wouldn’t bother. The words have different origins, too: Lazy apparently derives from lay and lie, while laissez comes from let or allow.

· new leaf on life, new leash on life
Combines turn over a new leaf and get a new lease on life. Both figures of speech have to do with paper—the first the pages of a book, the second a contract. The variant may confuse the lease idiom with on a tight (or short) leash, which, like a lease, is binding.

· mind-bottling
The adjective mind-boggling and the verb boggle probably come from old words for ghosts and spirits (such as a bogey). This linkage isn’t intuitive when you want to describe amazement. The idea of capturing a mind in a bottle actually seems far more amazing.

· welcome rest bite
A rest bite might be a brief taste of rest. [KC – Or something a vampire gets while stopping along the highway in the United States.] Respite derives from the Latin for refuge, or consideration, and a welcome respite is a period of relief.

· rye expression
A rye expression might be something such as “I adore pumpernickel”—which might prompt wry expressions on the face of those who do not. Rye is an ancient word for grain that hasn’t changed much for thousands of years. Wry (meaning twisted, as with an expression that might be twisted with disgust), is almost as old.

· fairy tail, old wives’ tail, tell-tail, tattle-tail, etc.
May confuse fairies with mermaids who have tails, but this is usually just a homophone mistake. Some variants, however, are more plausible. For instance, a telltale on a sailboat is often a string of yarn that shows wind direction, and it can resemble a tail.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

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We’ve covered some of these over the last few months, but it’s holiday card time so here are a few more reminders for you about addressing your cards. These are from Grammar Girl and a link to a follow-up article is included at the end.

Making Words That End in S or Z Plural

To make names that end in z plural, you add -es to the end of the name. So you would say you are going to visit the Alvarezes—a-l-v-a-r-e-z-E-S. The same rule applies when names end in s, so the Joneses invite you to dinner—j-o-n-e-s-E-S. You don’t use an apostrophe to make the names plural.

You use an apostrophe to make the names possessive. For example, let’s say you went to visit the Alvarezes and then you wanted to write a letter telling your mom about their wonderful house. To make Alvarezes possessive, you add an apostrophe to the end, so you would write “Mom, you should have seen the Alvarezes’ house!”

So now you’ve got that: If a name ends in s or z, add -es to make it plural and an apostrophe to make it possessive.

Punctuating Salutations

Next, if you’re writing a holiday letter, you might be interested in a bet that Laura and her husband John recently asked me to settle. Their question is how to write a salutation: How do you write something like “Hi, Squiggly”?

It seems straightforward, but it’s not. Although most people seem to think that hi is just a friendly substitute for dear, it isn’t. Dear is an adjective, but hi is an interjection just like the words indeed, yes, and oh.

So technically, Hi, Squiggly is a complete sentence that begins with an interjection, and an interjection at the beginning of a sentence is followed by a comma. So the correct way to write this is “Hi, Squiggly.” with a comma after hi and a period after Squiggly: Hi [comma] Squiggly [period]. You could also put an exclamation point at the end, depending on how excited you feel about the greeting.

The problem is that almost nobody knows that greetings should be punctuated this way, so it looks weird when you do it right. In fact, it’s extremely rare to see an e-mail salutation that uses a comma after the hi. I’m always torn about whether to use the comma. It is correct, but it seems a bit pedantic given the widespread use of the incorrect alternative—especially when you are replying to someone who has already done it the wrong way. Use your own judgment. I usually put it in, but you’ll be in good company if you leave it out. [KC – But don’t be surprised if you send a letter into our Editing department and we add that comma back in and ask you not to call yourself “Squiggly” in front of clients.]

· Dear Squiggly, (correct)

· Hi, Squiggly. (correct)

· Hi Squiggly, (widespread to the point of becoming acceptable)

Compound Possession and Apostrophes

Finally, we’ve talked about this before, but compound possession can come up in invitations, so I’ll go over it again. Imagine that Aardvark and Squiggly live in the same house and they are inviting people over for dinner. The location you are inviting people to is Aardvark and Squiggly’s house—with only one apostrophe s. Because they share the house, they share one apostrophe s.

If Aardvark and Squiggly live in different houses, and they are having a progressive dinner where they go from one house to the next, then the location on the invitation would read Aardvark’s and Squiggly’s houses. They don’t share the house, so they can’t share an apostrophe s. Both names need an apostrophe s: Aardvark’s and Squiggly’s houses.

For additional information on names and addressing mail, see Grammar Girl’s article on the Churches, Foxes, and Marshes.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

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Symitar Documentation Services

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Look! I found the perfect gift for everyone on my list: a spelling test!

Here’s a fun little quiz for you from the GrammarBook.com team. The answers follow at the bottom of the email. Good luck!

The Spell of the Holidays

The year-end holidays are an alternate reality. People dress differently, act differently…and even talk differently. This time of year has its own vocabulary, and some of these old-fashioned words have eccentric spellings. So here is our holiday spelling quiz.

1. ___ the night before Christmas.

A) T’was
B) ’Twas
C) ’T’was
D) Twas

2. They have a live ___ down at the shopping mall.

A) raindeer
B) reindeer
C) raindear
D) reindere

3. It was a festive ___ gathering.

A) yueltide
B) yuletyde
C) yueltied
D) yuletide

4. Please! Go easy on the ___.

A) egg nog
B) eggnawg
C) eggnog
D) egg nogg

5. Our ___ holds nine candles.

A) menorah
B) mennorah
C) mennora
D) menorrah

6. “Santa Claus” refers to ___.

A) Saint Nicholas
B) Saint Nichlaus
C) Saint Nicalos
D) Saint Nichollas

7. In European folklore, ___ is considered magical.

A) misletoe
B) mistletoe
C) missletoe
D) misiltoe

8. The winter ___ falls on December 22 this year.

A) soulstice
B) sollstise
C) solstise
D) solstice

9. “O little town of ___.”

A) Bethlahem
B) Bethleham
C) Bethlehem
D) Bethelhem

10. Stop spinning that ___ and join us for dinner.

A) dradle
B) dreidle
C) draydel
D) dreidel

Answers come after the puppy photo!

ANSWERS

1: B) ’Twas

2: B) reindeer

3: D) yuletide

4: C) eggnog

5: A) menorah

6: A) Saint Nicholas

7: B) mistletoe

8: D) solstice

9: C) Bethlehem

10: D) dreidel

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Good Monday, to you!

I have a few more malapropisms for you fromGoing to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms,by Robert Alden Rubin.

· dough-eyed
It’s tempting to speculate that the fairly recent term doe-eyed (meaning a look that is soft, feminine, and perhaps somewhat blankly naïve) may have been an eggcorn itself, deriving from dew or dewy.

· French benefits
Many employed in France enjoy generous fringe benefits, such as a month of paid vacation, but the French model of compensation has not become a byword in the USA. It has, however, become and eggcorn, if a rare one.

· futile lords
Seen from today, the petty warring of medieval nobles certainly seems futile—a time when might made right and literacy was rare. But scholars who’ve studied the so-called feudal system say the reasons for medieval conflicts were more logical than most people believe.

· run the gambit, run the gamete
Running the gamut means playing the entire range of notes on a musical scale. A gambit, originally a chess term, is a strategic move. A complex gambit could run the gamut of all possible strategic options. A gamete is a haploid (half) cell that joins another to create a fertilized egg.

· holiday’s sauce, Holland Days Sauce
The deliciously creamy French butter, egg, and lemon sauce known as hollandaise is suitable for holidays, especially when served with fish. Its name means sauce of Holland, so Holland Day isn’t as wrongheaded as it seems.

· the invincible hand
Sometimes a deliberate pun about card games. Adam Smith’s classic metaphor for the laws of supply and demand in a free-market economy, an invisible hand, holdsthat such forces are more or less invincible, and will self-correct if governments don’t interfere.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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Here’s a little more from a book I shared with you in the past. It is Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms, by Robert Alden Rubin. Don’t forget what Merriam-Webster tells us a malapropism is:

“a usually humorous misapplication of a word or phrase; specifically: a blundering use of a word that sounds somewhat like the one intended but is ludicrously wrong in the context”

· brunt-force trauma, brunt-force drama, blunt-force drama
Confuses a medical term, blunt-force trauma (the damage to a body from an impact that does not penetrate the skin), with a description of what accompanies the brunt (main impact) of a blow.

· cat before the horse
Cart is pronounced like cat in such places as Boston. However, cat before the horse appears instead of cart before the horse often enough to suggest that many writers get the idiom wrong, as if one normally prioritized horses over cats.

· clusterphobia
The condition takes its name from the Latin claustrum—a lock or bolt—and describes someone nervous about being locked in a small space. But a cluster of people can indeed produce both claustrophobia and agoraphobia (fear of crowds).

· constellation prize
A common malapropism that qualifies as an eggcorn only if the runners-up get gold stars. Confused with consolation prize.

Forgot about eggcorns? Check a couple of our past articles here:

· https://episystechpubs.com/2015/03/26/editors-corner-eggcorns-3/

· https://episystechpubs.com/2015/03/27/editors-corner-more-eggcorns-for-foghorn-leghorn/

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Dear Editrix,

Here’s a sentence that made me consider the word hash: Let’s have a meeting to quickly hash this out. I right-clicked to check Microsoft® Word’s thesaurus for a synonym for the verb hash, and got these answers: confuse, muddle, mess, botch, hodgepodge, and jumble. This seems to indicate that hashing means to make something worse. Isn’t this odd?

Sincerely,

Curious

Dear Curious,

What an interesting finding! I am also curious, so I looked into the different definitions and the etymology. There is a lot of information, so I’m going to concentrate on hash as a verb and noun, but not the word hash as the shortened form of the drug hashish.

Hash (noun)

From Dictionary.com:

1. a dish of diced or chopped meat and often vegetables, as of leftover corned beef or veal and potatoes, sautéed in a frying pan or of meat, potatoes, and carrots cooked together in gravy.

2. a mess, jumble, or muddle:
a hash of unorganized facts and figures.

3. a reworking of old and familiar material:
This essay is a hash of several earlier and better works.

4. Computers. Garbage. [KC – This is pretty vague for a dictionary definition.]

5. Radio and Television Slang. Electrical noise on a radio or snow in a television picture caused by interfering outside sources that generate sparking.

From Merriam-Webster:

1a: chopped food; specifically: a dish usually consisting of leftover meat chopped into small pieces, mixed with potatoes, and browned by baking or frying

1b slang: a meal especially in a cafeteria or at a lunch counter: Food

2: a restatement of something that is already known

3: mixture, jumble, hodgepodge: such as

a: a confused muddle

b: an undesired signal or combination of signals in a radio, radar, or television receiver due to set noise, radio noise, interference, or other cause

c: a medley of miscellaneous steps and figures in square dancing

4 chiefly Scottish: a careless or stupid person of slovenly speech or habits: worthless fellow

5: pound sign (#)

Hash (verb, verb phrases, and idioms)

From Dictionary.com:

1. to chop into small pieces; make into hash; mince.

2. to muddle or mess up:
We thought we knew our parts, but when the play began we hashed the whole thing.

3. to discuss or review (something) thoroughly (often followed by out):
They hashed out every aspect of the issue.

4. hash over, to bring up again for consideration; discuss, especially in review:
At the class reunion they hashed over their college days.

5. make a hash of, to spoil or botch:
The new writer made a hash of his first assignment.

Hash (etymology of verb)

From Online Etymology Dictionary:

1650s, “to hack, chop into small pieces,” from French hacher “chop up” (14c.), from Old French hache “ax” (see hatchet). Hash browns (1926) is short for hashed browned potatoes (1886), with the –ed omitted, as in mash potatoes. The hash marks on a football field were so called by 1954, from their similarity to hash marks, armed forces slang for “service stripes on the sleeve of a military uniform” (1909), which supposedly were called that because they mark the number of years one has had free food (that is, hash) from the Army; but perhaps there is a connection with the noun form of hatch.

I hope this helps!

Sincerely,

Editrix

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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I was so inspired by the season, that rather than just give away one book, Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza, I found two more books to give away to those of you who entered Friday’s contest. Here are my random winners and the books you’ll receive:

· Elizabeth Law is our grand prize winner of Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza

· Ron Fauset wins I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar [KC – And Ron, you know that’s the truth!
J]

· Amy Wallace wins Signspotting: Absurd & Amusing Signs from Around the World

I hope you find the books enjoyable!

Today I have a couplet of words for you from Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs, by Murray Suid. Our words for this Wednesday are dandelion and dentist.

Dandelion and Dentist

When they were growing up, future dentists—like most kids—probably puffed the seeds of the dandelion plant and made a wish or did some other folk incantation. That playful activity gives us a tiny hint about the etymological link between these two words.

The origin of dentist is fairly straightforward. The word comes to English via the French dent, “tooth,” which came from the Latin dens, “tooth.” You can glimpse variations of the Latin root in words such as denture and orthodontist.

Indentation is a metaphorical extension; originally it referred to notches cut into paired copies of a contract; matching up the tooth-like cuts showed that each copy was authentic. Later, the word was applied to the typographic notches indicating the start of paragraphs—for example, the indentation of the word indentation beginning the paragraph you are reading right now.

The same sort of metaphorical thinking led to naming the familiar dandelion weed. But there is a twist. The English word is a borrowing of the French dent-de-lion, literally “tooth of the lion” or “lion’s tooth.” To some folk botanist, the leaves of this ubiquitous plant resembled the sharp teeth of the king of beasts.

As often happens when one language borrows a word from another language, the borrowers can’t say the word as it’s pronounced in the original language. Instead, they assimilate the foreign sounds to familiar sounds. So the elements dent-de, which in French sound something like “dawn –day” (pardon my French) came out sounding more like “dandy.”

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

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Symitar Documentation Services

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