Editor's Corner

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: 11 pipers piping.

For some reason, this made me think of people whose last names originated from their professions. I found this list on a crazy site called Name Nerds. It’s long, but you may find it interesting. For a more detailed explanation and etymologies of many surnames, try The Internet Surname Database. (Their tag line is “Our database contains 49,352 last names from Smith to Smiley and Aaron to Zywicki.” My apologies if they don’t have yours yet.)

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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Christmas is over, but as I explained at the beginning of these 12 days (see https://episystechpubs.com/2013/12/06/editors-corner-five-gold-rings/) we are really talking about the 12 days between Christmas and January 6.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: 10 lords a-leaping…and I said, “It’s about time! Finally, something for those of us who don’t really appreciate the birds, milkmaids, or dancing ladies!”

Today, I thought I’d take a look at royal titles. It is tough to narrow down the topic because the empires and kingdoms of the past are either extinct or have evolved into something new. My guess is that we are most familiar with the mix of titles that come from Europe. Here are the titles and ranks of various European nobles (with male and female equivalents) from various Wikipedia articles on nobility. I have edited the daylights out of the details to prevent this from becoming 50 pages long.

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: 9 ladies dancing.

I’ve dreaded today. Not because of the dancing ladies but because of the topic I came up with. That topic, my friends, is the “verbing” of nouns.

For those of you that want some examples of what “verbing a noun” is (outside of the word “verbing” itself) here you go:

Some of you may have read my rant on using the word “architect” as a verb (https://episystechpubs.com/2013/09/12/editors-corner-word-rant/). Well, I have another noun that has been “verbed” and it perplexes me to no end, particularly because this time it is in my field. That word, folks, is “authoring.”

I like this quote on the topic from DailyWritingTips: “The capacity of English for turning nouns into verbs is both its glory and its bane.” That’s as much of the glory as you are going to get. I am here to tell you all about the bane. Why? Because I find the “verbing” of nouns is generally due to laziness! English is full of lovely words that mean what you are trying to say: use your words! This, and often the “new” word is not as precise as the existing word. An author is a person who writes something. I have heard people use the word “authoring” to refer to writing a book, to creating programs, to using programs to create documentation, to document, etc. Which one is it?

The other reason I have a problem with turning nouns into verbs is that it perpetuates jargon. There are many extremely intelligent people in my field (with gigantic vocabularies) and yet they get sucked into the jargon vacuum. Again, I come back to “authoring” and “architecting.”

It is part of my job to promote clear writing that does not contain a lot of jargon, so I will continue fighting this trend according to the following rule: before perpetuating these “verbed” words, I will consider them and try to find an existing word that works better. If I can’t find something that works, then maybe I will jump on the bandwagon. (Oh, who am I kidding? I’m a fighter. I’ll use the word “impacted” for a tooth or colon, but I refused to use it where “affected” functions just as well.)

The most I can ask of you is that you make the same considerations in your writing.

Kara

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: 8 maids a-milking. Oh dear. A house full of birds, five gold rings, and now we’re looking at eight cows and eight maids. Welcome to the insanity!

Today I have a tidbit for you on all of this “a-milking and a-swimming and a-laying” that has been going on. Thanks again to my co-worker, Laura for sending me to the Yale Grammar Diversity Project, where they even have a name for this phenomenon: “A-prefixing.” Here are some interesting facts about A-prefixing from Yale’s website (please see the website for appropriate attribution to these quotes):

· A-prefixing" refers to the phenomenon whereby a prefix a- attaches to a verbal form inflected with the suffix –ing

· The progressive suffix is often spelled as -in’

Examples from Appalachian English:

o “I know he was a-tellin’ the truth, but I was a-comin’ home.”

o “Well, she’s a-gettin’ the black lung now, ain’t she?”

· A-prefixing has been studied by linguists who have focused on speech communities that were predominantly white and as such, it is unclear whether a-prefixing is present in varieties of speakers of other ethnicities. Within white speech communities, a-prefixing is found in Southern American White English, most specifically in Alabama, West Virginia and east Tennessee.

· Noted use throughout the United States starting as early as 1846

· Noticed in varieties [of English] spoken in Scotland, Ireland and parts of England (1898)

· In some varieties, the form is less common in the speech of younger individuals. In a study conducted by Christian et al. (1988), they found that a-prefixing in Ozark English is not present in the speech of individuals under 15 years old whereas in Appalachian English, a-prefixing is used by speakers of all ages.

And if you are interested in a little Friday fun, one of our readers (Thank you, Marvin!) sent this link about mondegreens (misheard song lyrics):

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/12/15/4690592/6-geezers-laying-holidays-bring.html

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

www.symitar.com

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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

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