Editor's Corner

Here is my favorite question (and answer) from the February Chicago Manual of Style newsletter. (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/latest.html) Somehow, they even manage to make the topic below sound a little stodgy. 🙂

Question: When referring to a zombie, should I use the relative pronoun who (which would refer to a person) or that (since, technically, the zombie is no longer living)? Essentially, does a zombie cease to become a “person” in the grammatical sense?

Answer: Let’s assume this is a serious question, in which case you, as the writer, get to decide just how much humanity (if any) and grammatical sense you wish to invest in said zombie. That will guide your choice of who or that.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Another “demotivator” from www.despair.com

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

It’s only Tuesday, but how about a quick break? Way back when, in the bitter cold of January of ‘13, I sent out a few samples of mixed metaphors. Today, I’d like to share a few more with you.

First, a quick refresher from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary:

· metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them: an implied comparison (For example: His heart was broken. She was drowning in a sea of grief.)

· mixed metaphor: a figure of speech combining two or more inconsistent or incongruous metaphors

The following mixed metaphors are from http://therussler.tripod.com:

· Put that in your hat and smoke it.

· She has bigger dogs to fry.

· Sometimes I feel like I’m swimming uphill against the grain.

· Sometimes you have to bite the hand that you’re dealt.

· Spare the rod; spoil the broth.

· That really hacks me to a crisp.

· They’re diabolically opposed.

· We’re cooking on all four cylinders.

· It’s like a wizard in sheep’s clothing.

· Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.

· What goes around, stays in Vegas.

· When life throws you curve balls, make lemonade.

· That’s using your head for something besides a footstool.

· They need to wake up and smell the music.

· I have a lot of black sheep in my closet.

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It’s Monday, so I’m going to let grammarbook.com do most of the work for the letter E. The definitions and most of the examples are from the web site. Not too many words today, but these couplets get a lot of people confused. I have to say, that definition for “illusive” is a little elusive to me. I hope you enjoyed the weekend.

Yesterday, a man (who shall remain nameless to protect him from being whipped with a cable) told me he’d heard people refer to Episys Console Control as Council Control. Unless we switched from data processing software to political and legislative software, Council Control is incorrect. Then I heard more rumors of people getting council and console confused. David Petersen was kind enough to do my work for me, and sent these definitions and examples to add to yesterday’s council and counsel:

· consul (noun)—an advisor, diplomat, representative

· console (noun)—a control terminal for an electronic device (e.g., a “computer or TV console”)

· console (verb)—to comfort, soothe, calm (e.g. “She consoled her friend after her bad break-up.”)

· council (noun)—a group of people meeting for a purpose

· counsel (verb, noun)—advise; advice, an attorney

Thank you David, and thanks to everyone for helping me keep these articles relevant!

And for today’s special feature…

I received this article the other day, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested—but many of you sent it on to me from other places it was published. I’ll take that as a show of interest, so I’ve included it in its entirety. From DailyWritingTips.com:

Is That Even a Word?

Posted: 30 Jan 2013 08:10 PM PST

No authoritarian authority exists that determines whether a given word is valid or bogus. In any language, there’s a complex and imperfect vetting procedure; at least in English, most serious writers agree on the correct or preferred form of a word that is one of two or more variants or on whether a word is acceptable at all. Here’s a list of words that have been under scrutiny in this approval process:

1. Administrate: A back-formation of administration and an unnecessary extension of administer

2. Commentate: A back-formation of commentator and an unnecessary extension of comment

3. Dimunition: Erroneous; the correct form is diminution (think of diminutive)

4. Exploitive: A younger, acceptable variant of exploitative

5. Firstly: As with secondly and thirdly, erroneous when enumerating points; use first and so on

6. Heighth: Rarely appears in print, but a frequent error in spoken discourse (Why isn’t height modeled on the form of depth, length, and width? Because it doesn’t shift in spelling and pronunciation from its associated term, tall, like the others, which are derived from deep, long, and wide, do. Neither do we say or write weighth.)

7. Irregardless: An unnecessary extension of regardless on the analogy of irrespective but ignoring that regardless, though it is not an antonym of regard, already has an antonymic affix

8. Miniscule: A common variant of minuscule, but widely considered erroneous

9. Orientate: A back-formation of orientation and an unnecessary extension of orient

10. Participator: Erroneous; the correct form is participant

11. Preventative: A common and acceptable variant of preventive

12. Societal: A variant of social with a distinct connotation (for example, “social occasion,” but “societal trends”)

13. Supposably: An erroneous variant of supposedly

14. ’Til: Also rendered til and till, a clipped form of until that is correct but informal English; use the full word except in colloquial usage

15. Undoubtably: An erroneous variant of undoubtedly

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

www.despair.com

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

Good morning! I have a lot of words today and tomorrow from the “C list.” As usual, the definitions and examples are from Grammarbook.com; those in blue are from me.

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I’m feeling a bit like Grog the caveman today, which means talking is at the bottom of the list after killing bison, washing the gathered grains and weeds, making a blanket out of bison fur, and sweeping out my corner of the cave. Instead of more words today, Grog take break. Grog give symbol of snail, unless Grog eat snail.

From Grammar Girl:

Where Did the @ Symbol Come From?

How Old Is the @ Symbol?

Every source I found seemed to have a different date for the origin of the “at” symbol, so I’m not going to commit to a certain date. Let’s just say it was a long time ago—at least in the Middle Ages.

Many sources including the Ask Oxford website and a book called Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany reported that the "at" symbol comes from shorthand for the Latin word "ad"—A.D.—which means “to, toward, or at." Scribes used to use it to list prices on invoices and accounting sheets, as in 12 eggs AT one penny per egg.

Names for the @ Symbol

The “at” symbol, by the way, is more formally known in English as the “commercial at,” presumably because of its original use in commerce. It has various names in other languages, and one of my favorites is Italian, in which it is playfully called the “snail.” Longtime listeners or people who have my books will know that in my example sentences, I like to use a character called Squiggly who is a snail. [Grog – Grog no like Squiggly. Grog hit Squiggly with club.] I’ve also seen it called a strudel and a cinnamon roll, which are both cute because it is shaped kind of like a rolled up pastry. [Grog – Mmmm…Grog like cute pastry.]

@ on Keyboards

A book called Managing Web Usage in the Workplace tells of examining pictures of old typewriters and finding that it was relatively common for the @ symbol to be included on the keyboard starting around 1880.

@ for E-mail Addresses

Ray Tomlinson first used the “at” symbol to format an e-mail address using ARPAnet in 1971 for a message he sent to himself from one computer to another to test the system, and amusingly, he’s repeatedly been quoted as saying he doesn’t remember what the message said—it was just some forgettable test message—because he didn’t think it was a big deal at the time.

@ on Twitter

More recently, if you use Twitter, you know that you indicate a reply to someone by prefacing his or her name with the @ symbol, but it wasn’t that way in the early days of Twitter. Users started putting @ before someone’s name to indicate that it was a reply, and the people at Twitter noticed and wrote it into the system so that when you hit the reply link, it automatically inserts the @ symbol. Lately, it’s been showing up more as a general symbol to indicate a response. For example, people use it in the comments section to indicate that they’re responding to someone who posted earlier.

For the full article see: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/where-did-the-at-symbol-come-from.aspx

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Today we have a bunch of “B” words for you. This is by no means the full list of “B” homonyms, nor the complete list of confounding English terms beginning with the second letter in our alphabet. As with the other A through Z terms, these are from grammarbook.com, with examples here and there from the Editrix.

Photo from http://weddingengagementnoise.com/tag/brides-on-horses/

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor

I have a few more frequently confused word clusters from the A’s today. By special request, I’ve also included the fraternal triplets: assure/ensure/insure. The definitions are from grammarbook.com; the examples are from my frazzled brain.

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor