Ask the English Teacher

Friday is National Punctuation Day

Via the St. Petersburg Times in Florida: National Punctuation Day: a great day to celebrate commas and apostrophes. Excerpt:

Feeling uneasy about mystery quotation marks? 

We have "fresh" sandwiches. 

Badgered by errant apostrophes? 

Our employee's are at you're service. 

Confused by AWOL commas? 

Smoking pets and bicycles prohibited. 

Stop worrying about whether your dog smokes and start worrying about punctuation. Friday would be a good day to start: It's National Punctuation Day. 

Many of us are worried already. As a former English teacher and copy editor, I despair for humanity when I open an e-mail that bristles with so many exclamation points I can hardly make out the words in between them. And those are just the press releases about library events. 

Just last week, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten declared the English language dead, the coup de grace delivered by an unnecessary apostrophe. 

But don't bury English yet. People are fighting to revive its proper use. National Punctuation Day was the brainchild of Jeff Rubin, a California newsletter writer who founded it in 2004 as "a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis." 

Rubin and his wife, Norma, maintain a website, national punctuationday.com. Last year they sponsored a punctuation baking contest. (Question mark meat loaf, anyone?) This year they're posting punctuation-themed haikus: 

Exclamation points 

And question marks together? 

Only in comics.

National Punctuation Day is now in the Useful Links list.

Problems with diction

"Diction" means choice of words. In the post on the "obituary" for the English language just below, you've seen some examples of very poor choice of words. Some people get confused about to, two, and too; there, they're, and their; flaunt and flout.

So here's a PDF of what I call "diction demons": words that often sound alike but have very different meanings. You're welcome to download it and pass it along.

Download Diction Demons

An obituary for the English language (updated)

Via last Sunday's Washington Post, a column by Gene Weingarten: Goodbye, cruel words: English. It's dead to me. Excerpt:

The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. 

Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely. 

In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation. 

On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month. 

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. 

The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."

It's not just newspapers. I rarely finish a new hardcover book without finding some embarrassing errors in copy editing. 

But errors like "alot" are old; I first ran across it as a brand-new English teacher in 1967. Forty years of my ruthless corrections failed to stamp it out, and if it persists it will become as "correct" as "alright." Alas.

Others, like "doggy dog" and "eek out" show that people often hear "dog eat dog" and "eke out" but haven't seen them in print (maybe because they don't read enough). When people endorse an idea, they may write "Here, here," when the real term used in parliamentary debates is "Hear, hear."

I've seen "lead" as the past tense of "lead," doubtless based on the spelling of the metal lead and by analogy with "read" as correct past tense of "read."

We seem stuck with the wild inconsistencies of English usage. We spell it "one" because we used to pronounce it like "own." Sloppy pronunciation changed the pronunciation but not the spelling. Yet we've kept the original pronunciation in related words like "atone" (to do something that makes you at one with others) and "alone" (to be just one).

So while I certainly don't like "doggy dog" and "prostrate cancer," I don't consider them fatal blows to the language. They'll either die away or become part of the language...further confounding long-suffering students of the language in future centuries.

Update: Inspired by this obituary, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch compiled a list of errors that have turned up in his own paper. I concur with all of them, except for his "most hated" usage, "went missing." The term has provoked a lot of controversy on this blog over the years. As I've often said, in the non-American English-speaking world it's a perfectly routine expression. But it drives most Americans crazy.

Farewell, Edwin Newman, and thank you

Sad news today from The New York Times: Edwin Newman, 91, NBC Newsman, Dies. Excerpt:

Edwin Newman, the genteelly rumpled, genially grumpy NBC newsman who was equally famous as a stalwart defender of the honor of English, has died in Oxford, England. He was 91. 

He died of pneumonia on Aug. 13, but the announcement was delayed until Wednesday so that the family could spend time grieving privately, his lawyer, Rupert Mead, said. 

He said Mr. Newman and his wife had moved to England in 2007 to live closer to their daughter. 

Mr. Newman, recognizable for his balding head and fierce dark eyebrows, was known to three decades of postwar television viewers for his erudition, droll wit and seemingly limitless penchant for puns. (There was, for example, the one about the man who blotted his wet shoes with newspapers, explaining, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”) 

He began his association with NBC in the early 1950s and was variously a correspondent, anchor and critic there before retiring in 1984. An anchor on the “Today” show in the early 1960s and a familiar presence on the program for many years afterward, Mr. Newman also appeared regularly on “Meet the Press.” 

He won seven New York Emmy Awards for his work in the 1960s and ’70s with NBC’s local affiliate, WNBC-TV, on which he was a drama critic and the host of the interview program “Speaking Freely.” 

He also moderated two presidential debates — the first Ford-Carter debate in 1976 and the second Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984 — and covered some of the signal events of the 20th century, from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Mr. Newman’s best-known books, both published by Bobbs-Merrill, are “Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?” (1974) and “A Civil Tongue” (1976). In them he declared what he called “a protective interest in the English language,” which, he warned, was falling prey to windiness, witlessness, ungrammaticality, obfuscation and other depredations.

I loved Newman's books. As a young English teacher, I found his views on usage perceptive, sensible, and extremely funny. It became hard to read a newspaper without spotting the kinds of errors and jargon he skewered so well. 

That's because he sensitized his readers to the absurdity of "fatal slaying" and "young juvenile," the kinds of terms lazy journalists still thrive on. (And why isn't Newman required reading in every journalism school?) He didn't blast misuse of the language because it was wrong; he blasted it because it was silly, unintentionally funny, and a waste of the reader's time.

So I used Newman's principles in teaching English, and I run Ask the English Teacher on the same principles. Now that we've lost him, I hereby declare Edwin Newman the patron saint of this blog.