Editor's Corner

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: 7 swans a-swimming. (♪ And with luck an avi-a-ry. ♪)

In honor of all of the animals I seem to be gathering, today I am presenting you with a selection of animals and the corresponding names of the male, female, and baby of each species. For a more complete list, check out the Enchanted Learning web page.

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: six geese a-laying. Well, that was a short respite from the birds, and geese can be particularly nasty. I was at a wildlife refuge during vacation and a small flock of Canada geese chased off the sandpipers and sea gulls and even the pelicans. In any case, today we’re concentrating on a different aspect of these troublesome geese—the laying.

Lay versus lie. This is one I admit I’m easily fouled (and fowled) up by. Some of the options are easy:

· Marvin lied to his mom and told her he finished his homework. (lied: did not tell the truth)

· When she said she’d never been to Georgia, she was lying. (lying: telling a falsehood)

· Mrs. Crazy-legs the hen lays an egg almost every day. (lays: pushes an egg out of a tight spot and into the hay so we can have a delicious breakfast)

· Henry is horrible at laying eggs, probably because he’s a rooster. (laying: producing an egg)

Okay. But those are the easy cases. Here are some handy tidbits for the tougher distinctions. First, an excerpt from Grammar Girl:

Lay Versus Lie

If you exclude the meaning "to tell an untruth" and just focus on the setting/reclining meaning of lay and lie, then the important distinction is that lay requires a direct object and lie does not. So you lie down on the sofa (no direct object), but you lay the book down on the table (the book is the direct object).

Now, that might be a little helpful, but my co-worker and our newest editor, Laura, gave me this one. “It’s LIE as in DIE. People lie and people die.” (Then she tipped over.) “You LAY something down.” (She laid her scarf on the table.) Here is a grammatical breakdown of some of those tricky areas, like the past tense, where you may be tempted to say you laid on the bed. Yes, you actually “lay” in the past, or you “have lain.” These examples are from the Purdue OWL, one of my favorite grammar sites.

Still not sure whether you get it? Try the lay vs. lie quiz until it makes sense: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/lay-versus-lie-quiz.

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: five golden rings! Woo hoo! It’s about time we stepped away from the birds. Even my real life true love sent me this tweet the other day:

@nachosarah: The "true love" from The Twelve Days of Christmas sounds like a rich guy with a brain injury

So now my question for you is this: Is it five gold rings or five golden rings? Some would say that since gold is a noun and golden is an adjective, the only correct answer is that those rings are golden. I would tell you that both are correct, since in this case, gold is being used as an attributive noun (or “noun adjunct”). An attributive noun is a noun that can be used to modify another noun. Grammatically, you can remove the attributive noun while maintaining the integrity of the sentence. For example:

· She owns four cotton socks.

· She owns four socks.

Both sentences are grammatically correct.

We have a few words in English where the adjectival form of the word is giving way to the noun adjunct; in fact, I can’t say I’ve ever heard anybody referring to their hot new pair of leathern pants. In any case, either word of the pair you choose to use as an adjective is considered correct:

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: four colly birds. What? What the heck is a colly bird?

So glad you asked! The word colly is a transitive verb (chiefly British) meaning “to blacken with or as if with soot or smut.” A colly bird, therefore, is a common blackbird. Over the years, the phrase “four colly birds” has turned into “four calling birds,” at least here in the United States.

Have a fantastic weekend. Next week, at least we get some variety and our true love gives us something besides more birds!

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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Bonjour! On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: three French hens. And at this point I started wondering, “What is it with this guy and birds?” In honor of French hens, today we are going to look at some French words we have adopted into English. Here are 10 of a list of 20 from DailyWritingTips.com:

1. cachet (“seal”): originally, a seal or mark of approval; now, also (and primarily) used in a figurative sense meaning “prestige”

2. détente (“relaxation”): an easing of political tensions; specifically, the thawing of the Cold War during the 1970s

3. élan (“rush, impetus”): high spirit or enthusiasm

4. fête (“feast, festival”): a celebration, or to celebrate

5. haute couture (“high fashion”): High-quality custom tailoring, referring either to specific garments or to the industry; sometimes called simply couture

6. malaise (“discomfort”): a feeling of poor mental or physical health, or a sense of cultural unease

7. panache (“small wing,” from Latin through Italian): flair or flamboyance

8. patois (“native or local speech”): a nonstandard dialect, especially the speech of uneducated or provincial speakers, or a jargon

9. raconteur (“one who recounts”): a storyteller, or anyone skilled at relating anecdotes

10. savant (“one who knows,” from savoir, “to know”): a learned person, especially a specialist; also a shortening of “idiot savant,” a clinical term for a mentally disabled person with anomalous skill or ability in one area of learning, or a casual term for someone whose knowledge is almost exclusively in one subject

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: two turtle doves. If we were using the specific collective noun for a group of doves, I would say that my true love gave me a dole, flight, or piteousness of doves. Then I would probably run and cry because he gave me 1) a “piteousness” of something, and 2) that something was birds, which I’m not really fond of as pets.

As far as collective nouns go, a collective noun is the word used for a group of people or things that are being referred to as a whole, such as “an armada of ships.” I’ve selected some examples for you below, but this is just a taste. The first list is alphabetical by the collective noun; the second list is alphabetical by animal name and followed by the collective noun. Enjoy!

For the full lists of collective nouns from both lists below, visit the Enchanted Learning website.

A selection of collective noun phrases (A to Z):

· army of caterpillars, frogs, soldiers

· belt of asteroids

· caravan of camels

· clowder of cats

· den of snakes, thieves

· fleet of airplanes, ships

· flight of swallows

· gaggle of geese

· host of sparrows

· knot of toads

· leap of leopards

· mob of kangaroos

· nest of mice, snakes

· orchard of trees

· parliament of owls

· quiver of arrows

· range of mountains

· shrewdness of apes

· thicket of trees

· unit of soldiers

· yoke of oxen

A selection of collective nouns for animals (A to Z):

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: a partridge in a pear tree.

Here in the United States, you might have to substitute a pheasant or a quail, since the medium-sized partridge is native to almost everywhere except here. According to Greek legend, the first partridge was created when Daedalus, a master crafter and inventor, jealously threw his nephew Perdix (in Greek Пέρδιξ, meaning “partridge”) off the top of a tower.

The story goes that Perdix went to live with uncle Daedalus to learn the mechanical arts. As often happens in the Greek myths, the student outshines the teacher and the teacher goes a bit bonkers. While Daedalus is busy making wax and feather wings for his son Icarus (which will eventually lead to Icarus’s death because he flies to close to the sun, thus melting the wax and wings), Perdix is walking on the beach and collecting fish spines and serpent’s jaws and inventing the saw. Perdix is also claimed to be the creator of the compass (the two-point type used to draw circles, measure distance, and poke other students with).

When Daedalus can no longer handle being outshone by his nephew, he tries to bump him off, by pushing him from a high tower. Of course, this is a Greek myth, so there must be a god or goddess nearby. Indeed there is, and this time it is Athena. Athena values ingenuity and saves Perdix by turning him into a partridge and punishes Daedalus by branding him with the image of a partridge. (I think Daedalus still got the better deal.)

The result of this undesired flight as far as Perdix (the partridge) goes, is that partridges are destined to keep a low profile. They build their nests in bushes (not trees), they eat seeds off of the ground, and they don’t take long flights. If you are going to give someone a partridge, be kind. Put it in a pear bush rather than a pear tree.

Kara

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Good morning! My apologies for the length of this email: it is really a Monday “2 for 1” special.

I’m going to give you a few more fun facts about the “12 Days of Christmas” song before we start the “Grammar and Language version,” but I’m also sending along this article from DailyWritingTips.

This article is for all of us—old school and new school. There are many of you out there that lament what texting and tweets are doing to our language; I am often right there with you. There are others out there that are excited about some of the new developments, additions, and changes to our language; I get it. And then there are some of you that are ready to change the world by getting rid of punctuation, leaving out phrases you find superfluous to discussion, and turning verbs into nouns and vice versa; I don’t understand anything you say. This article covers some of these changes and concerns and provides an important message as the bottom line: professionalism.

Ignorance or Sincerity? by Maeve Maddox

Posted: 08 Dec 2013 08:16 PM PST

Grammar consultants are in great demand these days by employers who fear that the inability of their employees to speak and write grammatically gives their businesses a black eye.

In addition to including English lessons in their employee training programs, some administrators go so far as to correct subordinates as they go about their work.

The senior vice president of a marketing and crisis-communications company in Florida interrupted an employee at a staff meeting to correct her failure to make subject and verb agree. She’d said, “There’s new people you should meet.” The v-p said he “cringes” every time he hears people use “is” when the subject calls for “are.”

The usage the Florida vice-president objected to was lack of subject/verb agreement in an expletive sentence. Although still an accepted target of revision in written English, this error is so common in spoken English that I thought everyone had given up on it in conversation.

What the staff member said: “There’s new people you should meet.”
What she should have said: “There are new people you should meet.”

Or, she could have avoided an expletive sentence altogether and said something like, “I’d like to introduce some new people.”

Not all employers are bothered by nonstandard usage. The v-p of a software company in Seattle values “sincerity and clarity” more than “the king’s grammar.” According to this businessman, “Those who can be sincere, and still text and Twitter and communicate on Facebook are the ones who are going to succeed.”

According to Tammy Erickson, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, younger speakers aren’t necessarily ignorant of correct usage; they just don’t think it matters as much as “sincerity in communication.”

So, when a young employee says, “Me and my colleagues want to meet with she and Mr. Singh about the the [sic] new design,” is he merely being sincere? Or is he kissing his chances for promotion good-bye?

Erickson says that younger speakers don’t see correct speech as an emblem of intelligence or education. I suppose that’s not a problem if they go to work for someone like the man in Seattle, but I suspect that the attitude of the v-p in Florida is going to prevail in the work place for a long time yet.

Youthful job seekers may not regard correct speech as an emblem of education or intelligence, but they’d be wise to look upon it as a mark of professionalism.

Every occupation has professional standards. One of the skills required of any white collar worker is–or should be–the ability to speak and write a standard form of English.

As long as English remains a medium of global communication, native speakers who can’t be bothered to master a standard form of it for professional purposes are inflicting an unnecessary economic disadvantage on themselves.

Now, for your “12 Days of Christmas” fun facts:

· Most versions from 1780 to today say the gift giver is “my true love”; in 1842 there was a version where the gifts were sent by dear old mom.

· Someone decided in 1892 that instead of a partridge in a pear tree, they wanted “a very pretty peacock upon a pear tree.”

· In 1900, a version of the song opted for swimming “squabs” rather than swimming “swans.” I think that song-writer had just discovered opium.

· Throughout the ages, some of the other less popular actors and activities:

o 6 ducks-a-laying

o 8 hares-a-running

o 9 bears-a-beating

o 11 lads-a-louping (Scottish term for “leaping”)

o 11 badgers baiting

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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Happy Friday!

Next week, I’d like to take a break from requests and peeves and get into the holiday spirit. I was sitting in a meeting trying to think of a framework to use, and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” popped into my head. No matter what your religion, you’ve probably heard or seen that song referenced. It’s the one where somebody’s true love is giving them some crazy gifts such as 12 drummers, 11 pipers, 10 leaping lords, and as the countdown goes on, a heck of a lot of birds, including a partridge in a pear tree.

Normally I try to stay away from politics, religion, and those other non-PC topics, which is why I am giving you a whole weekend to prepare yourself for references to a Christmas song. Essentially, as I said, I’m just using the song as a framework to talk about other things that are related to grammar and language. A stretch? Possibly. Fun? I hope so.

Here are some interesting tidbits about that song, which was first published in Britain (1780):

· The twelve days begin Christmas Day, or in some traditions, the day after Christmas

· The day after Christmas is also referred to in some cultures as Boxing Day or St. Stephen’s Day

· The twelve days of Christmas end on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany

· The Epiphany is also referred to as the Twelfth Day

· Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”

· Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night was written to be performed as a Twelfth Night entertainment

There’s more, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I promise you we will cover interesting, language-related topics in the next few weeks.

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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Good morning!

One of the top issues people mentioned in their peeves list was the misuse of me, myself and I. If you search Google for those three words together, you can pick from many articles on the topic; I’ve even done two or three Editor’s Corners on this same subject. For those of you who aren’t sure of which word to use and when to use it, maybe this will help. For those of you who are tired of the issue, this article is from a book and website (http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/myself.html) where the snarky grammarian’s irritation comes through loud and clear and can be entertaining in itself.

From Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage:

I/ME/MYSELF

In the old days when people studied traditional grammar, we could simply say, “The first person singular pronoun is ‘I’ when it’s a subject and ‘me’ when it’s an object,” but now few people know what that means. Let’s see if we can apply some common sense here. The misuse of “I” and “myself” for “me” is caused by nervousness about “me.” Educated people know that “Jim and me are goin’ down to slop the hogs,” is not elegant speech, not “correct.” It should be “Jim and I” because if I were slopping the hogs alone I would never say “Me is going. . . .” If you refer to yourself first, the same rule applies: It’s not “Me and Jim are going” but “I and Jim are going.”

So far so good. But the notion that there is something wrong with “me” leads people to overcorrect and avoid it where it is perfectly appropriate. People will say “The document had to be signed by both Susan and I” when the correct statement would be, “The document had to be signed by both Susan and me.”

All this confusion can easily be avoided if you just remove the second party from the sentences where you feel tempted to use “myself” as an object or feel nervous about “me.” You wouldn’t say, “The IRS sent the refund check to I,” so you shouldn’t say “The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and I” either.

Trying even harder to avoid the lowly “me,” many people will substitute “myself,” as in “the suspect uttered epithets at Officer O’Leary and myself.” Conservatives often object to this sort of use of “myself” when “me” or “I” would do. It’s usually appropriate to use “myself” when you have used “I” earlier in the same sentence: “I am not particularly fond of goat cheese myself.” “I kept half the loot for myself.” “Myself” is also fine in expressions like “young people like myself” or “a picture of my boyfriend and myself.” In informal English, beginning a sentence with “myself” to express an opinion is widely accepted: “Myself, I can’t stand dried parmesan cheese.” In all of these instances you are emphasizing your own role in the sentence, and “myself” helps do that.

On a related point, those who continue to announce “It is I” have traditional grammatical correctness on their side, but they are vastly outnumbered by those who proudly boast “it’s me!” There’s not much that can be done about this now. Similarly, if a caller asks for Susan and Susan answers “This is she,” her somewhat antiquated correctness may startle the questioner into confusion.

For more traditional assistance with me, myself, and I, here are a couple of links:

http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/memyself.html

http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/ime.html

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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