ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

good article about esing em and en dashes in the web here - http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/

probably an easy one, but...from CNN:

Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure Monday, causing him to fall at his summer home off the coast of Maine, the Supreme Court said.

could a comma after "fall" or "home" save Roberts from a watery grave? or is this correct, and the fall/off coincidence just seems to make it more ambiguous than it is?

I think it's OK as is, since the phrases are arranged in a logical sequence.

E.g., "causing him to fall" --> Where did he fall? --> "at his summer home" --> Where is his summer home? -- "off the coast of Maine"

If he really fell off the coast of Maine, it'd make more sense to say "causing him to fall off the coast of Maine at his summer home" or "causing him to fall, at his summer home, off the coast of Maine."

I have a question. Why do we use the apostrophe-S in a phrase like "A friend of Nabisco's lent me a dollar to buy a popsicle"? It makes sense in "Nabisco's friend lent me..." since it's functioning as a possessive, but when the word "of" is already there designating possession, there doesn't seem to be the need to use the apostrophe, too.

This was in last week's New Yorker, in that article about the woman with the bionic arm. Supposedly, a "friend of Mitchell's had heard about" the new scientific advances in prosthetics.

We just do. I think it's got something to do with the 'a' at the start. If you said "Nabiso's friend lent me..." then that implies we know which friend you're talking about (perhaps because Nabisco only has one friend), so that's not very useful when it's not a specified friend. You couldn't say "a Nabisco's friend lent me..."

If you use pronouns/possessives it's quite odd, too. You could say "your friend", but not "a your friend", or "a friend of you", or even "a friend of your", it would have to be "a friend of yours".

I've not heard of anyone falling off a coast before. Off a cliff, sure, but off a coast, nope. So I think the sentence is fine.

But why couldn't you just say "A friend of Nabisco lent me..."?

It's odd and inexplicable, but for some reason "A friend of Nabisco" sounds stilted and archaic (or just yodarrific) whereas "A friend of Nabisco's" does not. To my tin ear, anyway.

Yeah, I agree it sounds odd, I just wondered if there was some reason for doing it that way that I wasn't aware of.

I'm going to reach really far up my ass for this one:

The phrase "A friend of Nabisco" has an oratorical ring to it, along the lines of "A statesman, a patriot, and a friend of the common man." As if "Nabisco" is a (possibly grandiose) abstract entity. Adding the 's demotes "Nabisco" to the status of human individual.

This doesn't answer the question of "Is there grammatical justification for the practice of adding an apostrophe-s to a noun that's already been designated as possessive by the word 'of'?" Also it's a complete fabrication. But it has the ring of truth.

"A friend of Dorothy"

If you're starting a sentence with a letter that's lowercase by nomenclature, eg, "n-3 fatty acids," do you cap the N?

my standard fudge would be to try and reorder the sentence if at all possible, so you don't start with it

if not possible, then no, don't cap the n: if nomenclature is important enough that you have to ask, it's important enough to take precedence, despite weird-lookingness

... would be my personal answer and attitude

In other words, the bell hooks/k.d. lang problem. I've noticed that the New York Times ignores these idiosyncratic spellings and just goes with Bell Hooks and K.D. Lang (presumably to avoid this predicament), but in this Austin Chronicle article about the former, the writer starts sentences with "hooks" several times.

Knowing nothing about the subject, I'm curious: does capping the N in "n-3 fatty acids" mean something different?

I just proof the damn stuff, but I don't think so.

The AMA manual, since stuff this specific, isn't indexed, is frequently no help at all.

haha i have subbed bell hooks -- she is just the WORST stylist, and throws tantrums when you try and suggest improvements

prob w.having caps and non-caps in formulae would be exactly that someone would read it and think "is this meant to mean something different?" -- ie it introduces confusion and doubt, hence avoid if possible

(i can think of plenty of mathematical contexts where it WOULD change the meaning)

It might confuse an uninformed reader to see a sentence like, "The next lecture in the series will feature bell hooks."

Luckily, E.E. Cummings poses no such problems.

i once had to stomp on a gallery who insisted for the catalogue we were producing that we put TWO spaces between the "The" and whatever their poncey name was -- i told em that the computers wouldn't let us, it automatically corrected and they would have to lump it (= a lie, obv)

they went out of business so the problem disappeared

"a pair of legal analysts say(s)"

"says." The object is the pair-- ONE pair, therefore singular :)

Or were you asking?

My answer depends on what they're saying.

Well, in the strictest sense, it'd be "says." However, if these two legal analysts were saying it seperately, that wouldn't be conveyed with "says," so the sentence would need a rewrite to something like "Two legal analysts say..."

I was asking, thx. (They're writing together, those analysts, which by AMA standards clinches "says.")

xpost, exactly

Yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at. Are they saying the exact same thing at the same time? (Of course, changing "a pair of" to "two" avoids this dilemma altogether.)

Is it bad that I'm more than a tiny bit proud that I answered that?

Nope. I just sat through an hourlong "grammar review" at work this morning.

love reading this thread

xpost

and you agreed to abolish hyphens in prenominal adjectives?

(ducks)

prenominal compound adjectives, natch.

Why would we do that?

"black cab driver" vs. "black-cab driver"

1/N, damnit

pear says
pears say

Black-cab? Is that a thing?

It is in the UK.

http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Travel/Transport/Taxi/TaxiCab.jpg

Is it something you have to specify at any point? Like, are there yellow cabs and black cabs and one's worth more or less than the other, and you have to say to someone "Hey, I think he's a black-cab driver, let's ask him for a ride"?

"Hey, you --- you black cab-driving jerk!" = comes off racist
"Hey, you --- you black cab--driving jerk!" = doesn't

Further confusion is added when you realise there are no* black black-cab drivers in London.

*or if there is I've yet to see one

or if there are

they'd be black-^2-cab drivers

Is it something you have to specify at any point?

Apparently.

er, yes: ie to differentiate between a dude who drives a minicab and a dude who drives a black cab.

minicabs = unlicensed
black cabs = licensed, have to pass an exam where everything within a certain radius is

not all black cabs are black these days

pedant.

;)

IT'S MY JOB

AND YOURS

AND MORBSES

LUCKY US