Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Well, that's what you may think reading the following photo caption from a story about the legendary country singer Haggard:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

You see the problem there? The way the second sentence is punctuated, it appears that Merle's ex-wives are named Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. Anything's possible, of course, and I'm certainly an open-minded guy about such things, but I tend to think it's more likely the caption writer meant that the documentarians interviewed two ex-wives, as well as Kristofferson and Duvall, for a total of four people interviewed. But that writer is apparently one of the type of people I bicker with almost daily, the ones who think the serial comma is an outmoded and overly fussy affectation favored only by grammar snobs and professional pedants. I wish I could just let such arguments go and say that it's their business if they want to live dangerously. But I'm afraid such things are actually my business. I'm a proofreader, you see, and I'm all about preventing misunderstandings that conflate two innocent women with two grizzled celebrities. Behold, and see the difference a simple little comma can make:

The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Duvall.

Now, was that so difficult? There really is no excuse for putting up with a major case of ambiguity simply because you don't like the look of an extra punctuation mark in your sentence, or because you're too lazy to punch that key one more time, or whatever the reason is. I've heard them all, and none of them fly when it comes to plain old-fashioned clarity.

Serial commas, people. They were invented for a good reason.

Via Jeff Weintraub, who agrees with me that serial commas rock.

Posted by at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Just a note from your curmudgeonly neighborhood proofreader: the words "breathe" and "breath" are not interchangeable, and the one is not an archaic or European spelling of the other. They both have their purpose.

"Breathe" is a verb. You breathe deeply. You breathe more clearly after taking a decongestant.

"Breath" is a noun. You take a breath when you breathe. We say something is a breath of fresh air. You curse pedantic, pain-in-the-butt proofreaders under your breath.

Got it? Good.

I'm glad we had this little chat. Carry on, now.

Posted by at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You know you've been doing too much proofreading when you're on your own time, outside the office, enjoying a fun little escapist novel about vampires, werewolves, fairies, and beautiful Southern girls who can read minds, and you come across the following sentence:

Since I was very nervous with Sam's Blackberry, he entered the totals while I counted...

And you find yourself thinking that "Blackberry" should have an intercap B and a registered trademark, like so: BlackBerry®.

I couldn't have had adamantium claws or the ability to fly or something cool; no, my superpower has to be "attention to detail." Sigh...

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The following sentence, gleaned from the endless flood of material that's been flowing through my inbox the last couple of days, is perhaps the most fabulously inane bit of copy I've ever encountered:

[The device] will make a successful sound when successfully entering data into a field, and will make an unsuccessful sound when the scan does not successfully enter data into a field.

What the hell is a "successful sound," anyhow? Is it one that owns a big house on the east side and a summer cabin up in the Uintas? One that skis in Vail every other weekend, and drives a black Escalade that never seems to have mud-splashes on the rear quarters?

What does a successful sound actually, you know, sound like? Is it like a bell? A chime? A bird tweet? The contented sigh of a bikini-clad teenage girl sunning herself on a hot summer day? For that matter, what does an "unsuccessful sound" sound like? The first thing that comes to my mind is the truncated raspberry sound at the end of the opening credits for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Which tells you an uncomfortable lot about my mind, probably.

Lest you think I've pulled this sentence out of context for comic effect, let me assure you that this is the only line in the entire document that addresses these rival sounds. There is no further description -- or even mention! -- of them.

I think I'm done at the office for today. I'm blowing this pop stand and heading for home... ibuprofen and whiskey await.

Posted by at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Another busy cycle at the office, with frustratingly little time or energy left over for blogging. Or much of anything else, for that matter. Grrrrrr. No matter how old I get, I don't think I'll ever manage to resign myself to the wildly uneven ratio of hours consumed by my day job versus how much time I'm able to spend on my "real life."

Be that as it may, I have to quickly share something I ran across this afternoon. For some bizarre reason, my most heated professional disputes tend to revolve around the lowly comma. Who knew such a tiny little squiggle of ink could provoke such great passion in people? The serial comma, in particular, seems to make creative directors, account managers, clients, and legal teams absolutely crazy. For the record, I'm a fan of the serial. It banishes ambiguity to the dark, frigid hell where it belongs, and anyway the AP Style is obsolete, as far as I'm concerned. It consists largely of shortcuts that were conceived back in the days when metal type was set by hand, and character counts and column width actually mattered. Now that creating more space on a page is as easy as shrinking the font size or shifting a graphic around on a screen, why continue using an imperfect technique that invites misreading?

I can't tell you how many times I've made this argument, usually to no avail. But now I've got one that's even better, one that simply cannot be countered... commas save lives. Observe:

Yep, nuthin' more to be said after that...

(Source, via.)

Posted by at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's been a while since I got on my high horse about the routine maiming of the English language by non-English majors whose job descriptions don't require an in-depth knowledge of the Chicago Manual of Style. (People who aren't me, in other words.) That's because these proofreading pet-peeve entries are largely dependent on what I've been encountering out there in the wild, and it just hasn't seemed worth my time or yours to call out yet another example of incorrect apostrophe usage. (Good God, I see that everywhere; what's the matter with our schools these days, anyhow?)

In the last few days, however, I've noticed several examples of something a little more substantive: the frequent misuse of the word "breath" when the writer obviously means "breathe," as in, "I can't breath because the air pollution is so bad." Specifically, I've seen this popping up on Facebook and also in the comments on the Salt Lake Tribune website, which leads me to wonder if this is perhaps a Utah-ism, like our preternatural affection for Jell-O. (That's not a myth, incidentally; we eat a hell of a lot of Jell-O in these parts.) Even if it isn't unique to this state, though, it certainly is prevalent here. Interestingly, this tic doesn't seem to cross over to verbal speech; people don't say "I can't breath" when they're talking, only when they're writing. But writing, of course, is my professional purview, and it's what drives me crazy when it's done incorrectly.

So, let's run through it, shall we?

Breath is a noun. It is the parcel of air that you inhale or exhale, as in, "I took a deep breath."

Breathe is a verb. It is the act of inhaling and exhaling, as in "I breathe deeply."

See? Easy, isn't it?

You know, this actually reminds me of another Utah thing I may have written about before, the confusion between "loose" and "lose." I repeatedly see people writing that they are "loosing their minds" or that they "feel like a looser." Nope, sorry, kids. You lose your keys; that guy over there is a loser. However, your pants are loose because your diet is working. Get it?

And we have time for just one more thing, a funny typo that I caught at work this morning: someone wrote "protocol" as "proto-call." As in the evolutionary precursor of a call, I guess, like smoke signals.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Today's episode of The Bloody Red Pen has been brought to you by the number 1138...

Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Man, am I conflicted about this one:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

It's an interesting photo and a clever caption, but that egregious apostrophe misuse kind of sours the experience for me. I know it's folly to expect grammatical correctness from the medium that brought us "I can has cheezburger," but there are some things I can overlook in the name of humorous representations of hypothetical feline speech and some I cannot...

Sigh. I'm going to go take an ibuprofen now.

Posted by at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

First, a brief public service announcement: This edition of "The Bloody Red Pen" concerns itself with clinical terminology as applied to the female nether regions. If you're the sort who gets indignant or starts feeling all squicky inside when you hear or read about such things, you might want to go check out some pictures of cats with funny captions for a while. Go ahead, I won't hold it against you. We'll just plan on catching up later.

Continue reading "A Lesson in Basic Human Anatomy and the Terminology Thereof" »

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every region of the country has its own dialect, a collection of pronunciations, vocabulary, and so forth that are unique to that place, and Utah is no exception. But usually that dialect is confined to spoken language; with the exception of Mark Twain, no one writes words the way people actually pronounce them. So I can only assume that whoever wrote this brief paragraph about Tool Logic Survival Cards in the Salt Lake Tribune was not intentionally trying to capture the weird way Utahns flatten words that sound like "eel" into "ill":

The 1.3-ounce Survival Card I includes a fixed serrated stainless still blade, a magnesium allow fire starter, a loud signal whistle, an 8x power lens, a compass, tweezer and toothpick.

I could be wrong, of course, since this description appears to have been lifted more or less directly from the product's Web page, and over there the blade is said to be made of steel. Perhaps this really was an exercise in what we marketing and tech-writer types call localization, i.e., when a document's spelling and usage is adjusted to suit the area where the document is to be published. (True story: A co-worker of mine who hails from Mississippi and Georgia and has worked very hard to rid herself of her Southern accent -- she feels that it's too often misinterpreted as a sign of low intelligence -- recently thanked me for pronouncing "deal" properly, instead of like "dill"; it's apparently one of her pet peeves about living here. I'm far more bothered by the a/o inversion myself; many Utahns, especially older and/or rural ones, would say "born" like "barn" and vice versa. I cringe when my mom talks about "hornessing the harse.")

However, I don't think even localization can excuse the "magnesium allow" thing. That's just plain wrong.

For the record, this entry marks the beginning of a whole new category of entries here on Simple Tricks and Nonsense: The Bloody Red Pen, a compendium of all these dippy grammar and usage errors I seem to keep running across. If I can find a few free moments, I'll go back and re-categorize the older such entries, so you can find all these little rants in one convenient bin. Assuming you'd have any reason to, that is...

Posted by at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)