My Blog

By Joe Diorio

Time for my annual celebration of Festivus, when we air out grammatical gripes – my own and my readers.

Run-on sentence of the year does not go to CNN

Some readers asked if there can be a “Run-on Sentence Award” and that Maeve Reston of CNN be given the inaugural honor.

Ms. Reston, writing about the January 5 U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia, penned this lengthy one-sentence tome: “With the eyes of the political universe, focused on turning out voters in Georgia — where the two runoff elections will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate — the President’s relentless attacks on the state’s voting apparatus, its tabulating process, and its Republican secretary of state are prompting handwringing among GOP strategists and state leaders who fear those attacks are eroding confidence in elections at a time when they need to turn out as many of their voters as possible to reelect Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue on January 5 and hold onto their firewall against a Democrat-controlled House and White House.”

Funny thing: Reston did NOT write a run-on sentence. The strict definition of a run-on sentence is when two sentences are smashed together without a coordinating conjunction or proper punctuation. Reston’s sentence, while long and having the potential of leaving the reader exhausted from reading it, would not draw a “tisk-tisk” from Miss Thistlebottom since it is properly punctuated and holds together from a grammatical standpoint.

That missive COULD have broken into separate sentences. Like this:

“The eyes of the political universe are focused on a turn out the vote effort in Georgia. That’s where a January 5 runoff election will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the U.S. Senate. President Trump’s relentless attacks on the Georgia secretary of state and the overall voting apparatus might erode confidence in elections precisely when incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue need that confidence. If voters believe Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, then they may stay home on January 5, thereby hurting Loeffler and Perdue’s chances of victory. Their loss would hand the Senate to Democrats.”

Interchangeably? I think not

“Can we get reporters to stop using ‘uncharted’ and ‘unchartered’ interchangeably?” one reader asked.

Both are adjectives, but the similarity ends there. The word “uncharted” means an area not mapped or previously surveyed and is normally but not exclusively a nautical term. Conversely, “unchartered” means having no charter or constitution. Once again, in nautical terms “unchartered” would refer to the part of that famous three-hour tour where the Minnow wound up on a heretofore “uncharted” island.

An unnecessary rush to the finish line

Kudos to copywriter Jessica Shepard for her advice on not being lazy when trying to finish a writing project. Her wisdom was shared on her LinkedIn page.

“When you’re writing … long form sales page or a home page, by the time you get to the CTA (Call To Action), you’re spent, right? So ya get lazy. You write ‘Learn more’ or ‘Sign up,’ then push your chair back and take a much-needed walk.

“But, um, here’s the thing: CTAs are sooooo important. They can make or break your conversions! They deserve more.

“So make the next step clear, risk-free, and irresistible for your customers. Pro tip: Write your CTAs in the first-person and finish this sentence your button copy: “I want to ______.”

Miscellaneous miscellany

From Mark Ankucic, a content marketing specialist at 3P Learning: “Read what you have written out loud. If you find a snag, edit it. If you run out of breath, shorten it. If it sounds insincere, delete it.”

A nurse at a COVID-19 vaccine site said to the patient, “Can you roll up your sleeve?” He probably can, but the proper grammar would have been, “Would you roll up your sleeve?”

Believe it or not, there are a few recipients of A Few Words About Words® who decide they don’t like the newsletter and opt out of the distribution list. Yes, I’m shocked too. One person, back in August, opted out by writing, “Too many emails. I grt over 100 a day.” Apparently, none of those emails are about proofreading.

Pandemic quotes I can live without

According to the Yale Book of Quotations, “Wear a mask,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci was the number one quote of 2020. I do wear a mask, but there is no shortage of pandemic quotes I will be glad to see disappear from everyday conversations in 2021: covidiot, maskne, you’re on mute, abundance of caution, false negative, and – one that may wind up in the dictionary – doomscrolling.

The typo of the year

This one goes to The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee. In April the Lego company, doing its part to help during the pandemic, announced it would stop making plastic toy bricks and would instead start making plastic face shields. The headline in the Tennessean read, “Lego s___s gears to produce 13,000 face visors.” Yes, I “bleeped” myself; think “number two.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Happy New Year and let’s write carefully out there, people.

By Joseph Diorio

It looks like Douglas Emhoff, the spouse of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, will become the first Second Gentleman of the United States.

Juxtaposing the words “first” and “Second” in that usage is confusing enough, but just where did the term Second Gentleman come from? According to a historian of U.S. Presidents, the title is not formal, and it has come into fashion more recently than one might think. It apparently grew out of the custom of calling the spouse of the president First Lady which, by the way, also is not a formal title.

“The title First Lady was first used when describing Dolly Madison, the wife of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. President Zachary Taylor used it when he delivered Mrs. Madison’s eulogy (in 1849),” says Alvin S. Felzenberg, a historian and author of The Leaders We Deserved (And A Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Ratings Game (Basic Books, 2008). And, like Second Lady, the title simply came into common use, although not immediately after Taylor’s coinage of the term.

“I’m not sure when using First Lady became commonplace. No one referred to Mary Todd Lincoln as the First Lady,” says Felzenberg, who thinks it was around the time of Jacqueline Kennedy that First Lady was used on a regular basis.

Felzenberg says the term “Second Lady” became popular much later in history; he says it was applied to Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney. “No one called Lady Bird (Johnson), Barbara (Bush), or Marilyn Quayle by the term, so it is fairly recent.”

Of course, Emhoff would be the first “Second Gentleman,” a term no one has heretofore used. “When Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016, Bill Clinton joked that, because of his Scottish heritage, he would have preferred the title ‘First Laddie’,” Felzenberg says.

Advertisement

Me, myself, and I

DeAndre Hopkins, a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League, on November 15 made an amazing catch of a nearly 50-yard pass from teammate Kyler Murray for a game-winning touchdown. There were three defensive players surrounding Hopkins when he made the improbable end zone catch. At a post-game press conference, Hopkins described his feat this way: “It was just a better catch by I.”

Admit it, you grammar aficionados, just reading that quote made you cringe, didn’t it?

Sports analysts noted the grammatical error and gave Hopkins a pass (pun intended) for his fractured syntax. But in case you’re wondering, “I” is a subject pronoun, whereas “me” is an object pronoun. Use “I” when referring to the subject of a sentence or clause (“Kyler Murray and I make a good combination,” said DeAndre Hopkins.) and use “me” when you refer to the object of a sentence or clause (“Hey DeAndre, will you catch a game-winning pass from me?” said Kyler Murray.)

A holiday card primer Since we are knee-deep in the 2020 holiday season, I figure now is a good time to remind everyone how to make your last name plural. You know, so you don’t write “Happy Holidays from the Smith’s” on a greeting card.

Let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee.

By Joe Diorio

I like Jamie Lee Curtis. She was great in movies like Halloween and True Lies. But Ms. Curtis posted something on social media that has grammar grouches and aficionados in a huff and called my affection for her into question.

An internet meme started floating through the cyber thoroughfare in late October quoting Ms. Curtis from a July 6, 2020 tweet, “In case you thought 2020 couldn’t get any worse, Merriam-Webster just officially recognized ‘irregardless’ as a word.” The post was accompanied by a screaming face emoji, a truly fitting condiment for one of Hollywood’s renowned “scream queens.”

First, I find it curious that a three-month-old tweet is only now generating widespread attention. (Widespread is a relative term. Her July 6 tweet generated over 2,000 comments and more than 5,000 retweets. Meme generators are just a tad slow, I guess. I blame the pandemic.)

Second, Ms. Curtis is wrong. “Irregardless” is a word. It is a horrible word. But irregardless of my feelings, it is a word.

And, third, channeling my inner fourth grade English teacher, we have gone over this before, people.

For those readers who are hissing prove it at their computer or smart phone screens right now, crack open the dictionary. Merriam-Webster notes it is an adverb and is the nonstandard version of “regardless.” AND it has been in use since 1795. Dictionaries simply chronicle word usage; it’s why “doomscrolling” is under serious consideration for entry into the next edition of Merriam-Webster.

“The dictionary can kiss my wild Irish aspirations,” writes John Timpane, writer, author, and all-around grammatical expert.

“I don’t care what Merriam-Webster says, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think that irregardless is a word and the rest of us who know better,” wrote Leslie Geary, another grammatical expert colleague of mine, on her Facebook feed.

I get it. Irregardless sounds like a double negative. It sounds like an overly engineered version of regardless. It’s clunky.

Merriam-Webster sympathizes. The dictionary staff spends a good deal of time apologizing for the word’s inclusion in the dictionary. Kory Stamper, a former Merriam-Webster editor and author of “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” dedicates an entire chapter apologizing/explaining/dodging barbs for its presence in the dictionary. But for the time being (or at least since 1795), we are stuck with irregardless. 

Good resource in these changing times

CISON PR Newswire recently posted a useful news story about AP Stylebook changes and updates related to Black Lives Matter (no hyphen is needed when referring to dual heritages: African American, Asian American, etc.), COVID-19 (saying “global pandemic” is redundant), climate change (Although climate change and global warming are used interchangeably, climate change is the more accurate term that describes the effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases. It includes extreme weather events.), and more. Here is the link.

Still debating crowd sizes

A TV reporter tweeted about the size of the crowd waiting to say goodbye to President Trump as he left Nashville shortly after the October 22 presidential debate and wrote, “A member of the 118^th Wing tells me there are at least 200 hundred people gathered here to bid [the President] farewell …” How many people? It’s either “200” (and it’s ok to use the Arabic numeral in this case), or “two-hundred.” Unless the reporter meant 200 times a hundred, meaning there were 20,000 people at the airport. Surely that would be the largest bidding adieu crowd ever … period.

TV does it right

I pick on the occasional fractured syntax and grammar on TV news. But please know that I know TV journalism is a tough job. You are working against impossibly short deadlines with precious few pieces of information at hand. So here is a positive shout out for a “lower third” (the text that appears at the bottom of the TV screen during a news story) that accompanied an October 27 story on ABC affiliate WKRN in Nashville about a charity clay pigeon shoot hosted by Mike Fisher.

Fisher is a former National Hockey League player who is married to Country Music superstar Carrie Underwood. The lower third that appeared during the portion of the story where Fisher is on camera talking about his charity read, “Mike Fisher. Still married to a famous person.” Well said, WKRN.

Let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee.

By Joe Diorio

Asterisks rather than quote marks

Anybody notice the trend to use a double asterisk in place of quote marks? A recent tweet by a TV news anchor in Cincinnati read, “[…] explains has more on how the Grand Jury came to this decision …” A few minutes later the anchor tweeted a correction, writing “has more on** no need for the word ‘explains’ there. I’m typing too fast and needed to proofread!”

Because I’m old (there, I said it for you) I would have written, “has more ‘on’ …” which seems to be the accepted construction. Or so I thought before I asked my social media hive mind. 

(“Hive mind,” by the way, is a derivative description of group thinking. Its genesis goes back to bees working a hive or perhaps the deadly efficiency of the Borg on “Star Trek.” Or is it Star Trek**? In any event, I’m digressing again.)

The hive mind from my social media feeds provide some interesting theories.

One suggestion is that the double asterisk doesn’t turn into a bullet point as Word applications tend to do (after hitting the space bar), so a double asterisk stays a double asterisk (take that, Microsoft). Another member of the hive mind opined, “I think it’s to say, ‘look look look oops!’ Rather than ‘look oops’.”

“You know, I think it dates to the AOL Instant Messenger days,” someone else wrote. “To correct something, you used to put a “*” before or after the correction.” This individual might be on to something. In the “old internet” days that Linguist Gretchen McCulloch describes in her book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, symbols like the asterisk were a part of HTML coding, so it could be a holdover. McCulloch also describes the use of asterisks as a kind of decorative typography.

Here’s something else to consider. The Chicago Manual of Style, my bible for most things grammatical, says an asterisk is used for footnotes, delineating different points in footnotes, AND, interestingly, offers the following advice:

Other ways to break text. Where a break stronger than a paragraph but not as strong as a subhead is required, a set of asterisks […] may be inserted between paragraphs. In other words, an asterisk can be used as a form of emphasis. So look**, this is important OK?

If you are going to insult someone on social media …

… you better proofread. On September 20 Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress from Georgia, decided to take a jab at Socialist Democratic Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene, who is blonde, tried a play on the dumb blonde trope by tweeting, “I would like to thank Congresswoman @AOC. She has single handily put an end to all ‘dumb blonde’ jokes.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who is no slouch when it comes to heaving a social media haymaker, replied, “Next time try ‘single-handedly,’ it’ll work better. Good luck writing legislation!”

New-ish words of the moment

Merriam-Webster reports “doomscrolling” and “doomsurfing” are new terms referring to the tendency of individuals to continuously surf or scroll on their smart phone through bad news on social media, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. These terms might even make it into the dictionary as Merriam-Webster says they are words they’re watching. At least now, when it’s 3 a.m., you cannot sleep, and you are instead staring mindlessly into your Twitter feed you know there’s a word for that.

Signing off with “Best”

Whilst surfing around on social media I noticed there appears to be some pushback to ending an email by saying, “Best” because it is considered hostile. My reaction to this was a grammatical, “huh?” Can there be a hostile way to end an email message using an ordinary word like best?

“I enjoy a good ‘regards’ when I feel annoyed,” says Rose Carmel Gaspard, a writer in Georgia. Gaspard writes a lot for medical professionals, although she is not a doctor. “If someone really gets on my nerves, and I don’t really hold them in high regards, I just shorten it to ‘regards’,” she explains.

Gaspard makes sense. But the blowback against “Best” was far coarser in online comments.

“You don’t use it because it’s an adjective! An adjective by itself makes no sense. Best what? Wishes? Best regards? Best pins in your eye?”

(Editor’s note: Best can be a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, depending on its usage.)

“’DON’T TOUCH YOUR FACE!’ seems like an appropriate sign-off lately, but usually I just use ‘sincerely’ and call it a day.”

“Who has the time and desire to read this level of intention into an email sign off is what I want to know,” said another individual in a nice summation to this topic.

Let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee.Sign up for his newsletter – text AFEWWORDS to 22828.

By Joe Diorio

New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas found himself in a linguistic pickle 50 years ago while covering the trial of protesters accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants continuously shouted “bullshit” in court, causing more than a little consternation amongst the prosecutors, judge, and everyone else present.

“When the time came to file my story, I realized the trial that day was spent debating the use of a word The Times wouldn’t print,” Lukas recalled. The New York Times may consider itself the newspaper of record, but not all the news was fit to print in the late 1960s.

Lukas, who died in 1997, solved his dilemma by changing the word “bullshit” to “a barnyard epithet.” That phrase became the title of his 1970 book about the trial of the Chicago 8.

A half century later The Daily Tar Heel, the independent newspaper of the University of North Carolina, had no hesitation over printing an obscenity when, on August 18, it described UNC’s efforts to reopen the school amid the COVID-19 pandemic this way: UNC has a clusterfuck on its hands.

The message was abundantly clear. Trying to open the campus amid the worst viral pandemic in over 100 years was not working. The same day that headline appeared, UNC decided to switch to online classes only.

There is no question that the intended message was delivered. But was the delivery vehicle – use of a vulgar term in print – the best grammatical avenue to take? To be clear, I am not criticizing The Daily Tar Heel. Anyone who knows me knows I am no altar boy when it comes to how I talk. Also, clusterfuck is indeed a word. Its first usage, according to Merriam-Webster, was in 1969 … probably describing The New York Times’ internal debates over printing the word “bullshit,” but there I go digressing again.

Advertisement

Most readers applauded The Daily Tar Heel’s choice of words. “I preach you shouldn’t swear in news copy,” one reader posted on Facebook. “However, if you choose to do it, it must serve a narrative purpose, punctuating and lending urgency to your point. I’d say these kids got it absolutely right.”

“Cursing, if you choose to employ it, should be oral,” says Neill Borowski, owner and editor of the online news site 70and73.com and a former college newspaper editor. “When you utter the f-word, it comes and goes in an instant. Any shock tends to be short-lived. In a news headline, it’s in front of you and doesn’t go away. It’s like uttering the curse over and over.”

Another Facebook member posted about the headline and included a photo of abandoned newspaper vending boxes in her neighborhood. She wrote, “It’s sad that this era of local news is behind us, though given the amazing reporting by The Daily Tar Heel, I’m hopeful that journalism isn’t dead.”

Editor’s note: In the spirit of good reporting, I did try to get a comment from The Daily Tar Heel, reaching out to the editors via twitter, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, and this age-old communications tool called the telephone. No one responded.

Formerly known as

After scores of accusations that the team’s name is racially insensitive, the National Football League franchise in Washington, D.C. on July 13 announced it was dropping the name “Redskins.” No new name has emerged; the team will simply be known as “Washington” for the 2020 NFL season.

But that did not deter local television news anchors, one of whom in Nashville delivered the news on August 17 about the Washington team hiring its first Black head of football operations by leading in to the story saying, “the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins today …” It is interesting that the news anchor used the team’s old name to identify it. I mean, a sports story wouldn’t identify the Tennessee Titans of the NFL by calling them “the team formerly known as the Tennessee Oilers” would they?

(For the football-impaired among us, Nashville’s NFL franchise originated in Houston, Texas in 1960 under the name Houston Oilers. The team moved to Tennessee in 1997 and for two seasons they were known as the Tennessee Oilers until changing the name to Tennessee Titans in 1999.)

Before anyone emails me saying “well, WHAT should the local news guy say?” consider what David Muir on ABC News did that very same day when he reported the same story by saying, “Washington, D.C.’s NFL franchise today …” Options, folks. There are always options.

“An” historic, or “a” historic?

The pandemic has basically destroyed my ability to get a good night’s sleep, so I find myself staying up to watch lots of late night television. This made me take note of the fact that Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, prefers to use the term “an historic” rather than “a historic” in his monologue. This is particularly curious to me because Colbert, who is doing his show in an office sans live audience, now comically refers to his program as “A Late Show” rather than “The Late Show.”

Merriam-Webster says both “an” and “a” preceding the word “historic” is acceptable, although “a” is almost four times more common than “an.” Maybe Colbert prefers the role of outlier.

Let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee.