Note from a cranky editor

[Silvercrest]

I rarely notice that one. I mean, if I encounter, "Her floatation devices popped right out of her bra." I usually miss it all together. I guess I'm too busy looking at the pictures.

Wow, under those conditions I'm not sure if I'd notice the spelling either. You'll have to post some pics and I'll let you know.

And it's "altogether", not "all together"!

Actually, that one depends on usage, as do words like "everyday" and "every day."

Sure! But that particular usage should be "altogether." The distinction is easy in this case. Mistral said he misses one word when looking at the pictures , so there's no "all".

^ And here's another weird thing. All of my real dictionaries list it as flotation and don't list floatation even as a variant.

But the dictionary in Word recognizes both flotation and floatation. So what do you say we blame it on Microsoft?

I'll blame anything on Microsoft.

Anyway, if there's some historical verification for "floatation", I'll accept it, but I've never seen any outside the Internet.

In a similar vein, I often see the word "wracked" spelled as "racked." That one tends to make my hair go up, but I'm not 100% sure it's wrong. Maybe "racked" is a valid alternate spelling. Anyone know for sure?

 

[TrekkieMonster]

I'm a little bit in love with this thread.

I had a wonderful and very "traditional" English teacher in Junior High School, and she moved to the High School the same time as my class. I took many, many of her classes over the years, partially because she taught interesting subjects, and partially because I was a latent masochist, apparently.

She was a stickler for ALL the rules of the English language, grammar, spelling, punctuation, the whole kit and caboodle. She made us parse sentences until we thought our eyes would bleed.

And I can't thank her enough. She left me with some of the most valuable skills of my life.

Unfortunately, she also left me with a lot (not alot) of the pet peeves mentioned in this thread.

Since I see that the great majority of my own issues have already been covered, I wanted to add some repeat offenders from another BBS.

The Hubby and I are cruise-a-holics, and participate on a cruising BBS where we frequently see people discussing, for instance, how their cabin stewart mistakenly directed them to the buffett instead of the main dinningroom after the emergency mustard drill.

Ya just gotta laugh.

It's how I disguise my teeth gnashing.

Well, typos happen. That's no big deak.

Intentional irony, or accidental...?

Purely accidental! But let's just pretend I did it on purpose!

I seriously thought that was intentional. Well played.

 

[Greg Cox]

I'm a little bit in love with this thread.

Clearly, I wasn't the one poster who needed to vent on the subject!

 

[S. Gomez]

I'm curious, somewhat related to the "all together"/"altogether" conversation above, why do people insist on "all right" instead of "alright"? There really doesn't seem to be any logical reason for it, especially with all the other versions of that particular merging. But it still remains nonstandard. It seems like an example of the more rotten kind of grammar regulation, the arbitrary kind.

 

[Greg Cox]

I admit that "alright" doesn't really bother me. It's kind of slangy, but I've probably used it in dialogue . . . .

 

[JustKate]

^ Ain't has a far longer lineage than alright, and it's still not standard. I dislike alright a lot, but I admit that my dislike isn't necessarily rational. Even so I might use it in dialogue. I use ain't sometimes, after all.

What I will never ever ever ever use (because I loathe it so deeply) is could of or should of. But I think there my dislike is completely rational: It makes no damn sense! Stop it, stop it, stop it, I say!

 

[S. Gomez]

^That second one does make sense. I never do it myself.

I suppose my biggest pet peeve isn't with grammar mistakes at all. It's with those few rules that are based less on rationality and sense and based more on arbitrariness and "just because". That's the kind of mentality that doesn't allow language to evolve and grow to encompass new ideas and discoveries.

True, there need to be some boundaries otherwise there could be no comprehension, but those boundaries should be somewhat flexible to accommodate the communication needs of a culture. That's how we get language in the first place.

 

[Christopher]

^ Ain't has a far longer lineage than alright, and it's still not standard. I dislike alright a lot, but I admit that my dislike isn't necessarily rational. Even so I might use it in dialogue. I use ain't sometimes, after all.

"Ain't" is a sad case. There's really nothing wrong with it as a first-person singular form, a contraction of "am not" ("amn't" with the awkward M sound elided). It's certainly more correct than the dreadful "aren't I" that's sometimes endorsed as an alternative. But this is another case of hypercorrection run amok; when it was discouraged for forms other than the first person singular ("we ain't," "you ain't," "they ain't"), that stigma of wrongness rubbed off on its correct form as well, in the same way that the stigma for the incorrect usage of "him and me" as a subject rubbed off on its correct usage as an object.

And so, because of this silly stigma, our language is deprived of a perfectly useful contraction for "am not."

What I will never ever ever ever use (because I loathe it so deeply) is could of or should of. But I think there my dislike is completely rational: It makes no damn sense! Stop it, stop it, stop it, I say!

No argument there. I can understand how it arises, from a mishearing of "could've" and "should've," but it's just so wrong.

 

[Silvercrest]

^ Ain't has a far longer lineage than alright, and it's still not standard. I dislike alright a lot, but I admit that my dislike isn't necessarily rational. Even so I might use it in dialogue. I use ain't sometimes, after all.

What I will never ever ever ever use (because I loathe it so deeply) is could of or should of. But I think there my dislike is completely rational: It makes no damn sense! Stop it, stop it, stop it, I say!

Agree, agree, agree!

S. Gomez has a pretty good point about "alright." I don't like it myself and never use it, but I'm afraid my dislike is equally rooted in "just because".

 

[Greg Cox]

Granted, there is a flip side to this. I've occasionally tangled with an overeager copyeditor who insists on "fixing" anything too slangy or colloquial--even when that's the author's intent.

As when you discover that your hard-boiled Brooklyn cop is now speaking like a college English professor . . . .

 

[Middle Earther]

Just be glad it's (mostly) confined to this thread. We who find irritation in these errors do our best not to go around correcting every instance we encounter.

QFT - I once made the mistake of correcting the spelling of Colombia (the country) in a forum-that-shall-not-named. Yikes! As I looked back, I did come off kind of smug in the initial post. Oh well, live and learn.

 

[TrekkieMonster]

I'm a little bit in love with this thread.

Clearly, I wasn't the one poster who needed to vent on the subject!

Does it show?

Yeah, I guess you're right.

It's even sadder that, on the other BBS, there is a rule that posters are not to comment on spelling or grammar errors, as it has become such a controversial topic and is bound to incite discord.

 

[Christopher]

Granted, there is a flip side to this. I've occasionally tangled with an overeager copyeditor who insists on "fixing" anything too slangy or colloquial--even when that's the author's intent.

Oh, yeah. Copyeditors like that are the bane of a writer's existence. What I hate is when they rigidly enforce "rules" that don't even exist, like this myth that you have to use "that" in a dependent clause instead of "which." It's just as acceptable to use "The style manual which I threw in the fire" as "The style manual that I threw in the fire." But copyeditors insist on either changing every "which" to a "that" or making it "The style manual, which I threw..." even when that makes it grammatically worse. It's a neverending battle which I must endure...

 

[Greg Cox]

Exactly. I had a copyeditor once (who shall go nameless) who stubbornly enforced her pet grammatical rules and hobby horses with no regard to context, style, pacing, characterization, etc. It was like being rewritten by a cranky computer. She also seemed to hate capitalization and even uncapitalized things like "Social Security" that were supposed to be capitalized!

It took me an entire day to undo all her "corrections."

 

[Smiley]

Christopher, I was taught in school to use "that" and "which" in the manner described in your post. Could there be some style guide that contains that rule?

 

[JustKate]

^ There is a nice - and clear, or so it seems to me - article on this in Garner's Modern American Usage, which is a great reference (for Americans, of course) to have around anyway.

And there's another nice one - and it's much shorter, too, if that's important to you - in Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, another reference that is great to have on hand.

And actually The Associated Press Stylebook does a pretty good job on this, too, in its section on essential phrases and nonessential phrases.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher, I was taught in school to use "that" and "which" in the manner described in your post. Could there be some style guide that contains that rule?

What you were taught is just a suggestion that some people started making in the mid-19th century, and that was popularized by Henry Watson Fowler in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926. These individuals thought it was redundant that the words were used interchangeably and suggested a way of delineating them more formally. But it was just that, a suggestion. Fowler wasn't some authority figure with the power to dictate how the English language was used; he was just an eccentric scholar expressing his ideas about how he'd like to see it used. Just because some guy wrote it in a book doesn't mean that subsequent generations of teachers and copyeditors have been right to treat that book's suggestions as absolute, restrictive rules. In practice, professional writers have never limited themselves to using "which" and "that" in the restrictive way Fowler recommended.

The Language Log linguistic blog deals with this topic so often that it's got a whole archive category to itself: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=36


The same sort of problem crops up with singular "they," another frequent Language Log topic. What the grammar prescriptivists teach us is that it's wrong to use a plural pronoun as a singular, forcing us to settle for either the awkward "he or she" or the sexist "he." But they're wrong, because singular "they" is found in the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and countless other great works of literature. It's always been part of standard English usage, or it was until some elitist grammar tyrants in the 19th century decided to invent a "rule" saying it was wrong.

 

[Marie1]

I'm glad someone started this thread because I'm tired of all the spelling errors in Trek novels...

 

[Greg Cox]

I'm glad someone started this thread because I'm tired of all the spelling errors in Trek novels...

Can I help it if my spellchecker keeps trying to change "Cardassian" to "courtesan"?

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I'm glad someone started this thread because I'm tired of all the spelling errors in Trek novels...

Can I help it if my spellchecker keeps trying to change "Cardassian" to "courtesan"?

Yes you can... Add Cardassian to the dictionary.