ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

When people abbreviate long words because they can't fit in a tweet . . . seriously.

srsly

Sorry, meant http://search.twitter.com/search?q=srsly

"this is seriously not good; I've been throwing up shit since last night. &srsly, what happened to my 'walls' ?! s'all gone now."

If I ever vomit and my walls disappear as a result, I promise you I will NOT tweet about it.

When people abbreviate long words because they can't fit in a tweet . . . seriously.

― kshighway1, Friday, November 6, 2009 10:57 AM (8 minutes ago)

seriously what?

you know abbreviated words have the same meanings as their corresponding full words, right?

Who needs full words!

I wouldn't want to read an edition of Crime and Punishment where every other fucking sentence had three abbreviated words in it.

Abbreviated words have the same meanings as their corresponding full words while having the added benefit of making the person typing them look like a fucking dunce.

grow down

stfu u 2

<3 Q

Talking of abbreviated words...

What is the correct abbreviation for 'committee'?

I think it's 'cttee' but it looks wrong and at 5/9 letters is a piss poor abbreviation.

(piss-poor?)

W/r/t committee (and other words) - I tend to make my abbreviations so that, given content and context, they cant't be mistaken for any other words.

So, committee - cmtee, which could be shortened if your context allows - "steering committee" would be "strng com."

"steering committee" would be "strng com."

That's a good example of strong communication.

When I was on a poxy little club committee we used "ctte", which gets a bit of a showing on google but not as much as "cttee".

"cmte." is the common abbrev for committee

B-but you can't derive hours of amusement every meeting from pronouncing that as "kitty"
(can you tell that this was a student club yet?)

kitty cmte.

Does anyone know the origin of the "do not start a sentence with a figure" rule? It's been in place at every publication I've ever worked on but I've just realised I have no idea why!

It's fine if you spell it, right? "Sixty-three people were denied entry to Score's strip club Thursday night."

yeah that's what he means i think, you're supposed to write it out. i never really thought about it, just accepted it. it's like most style things though, there's no real reason except it just looks better.

Probably because it can end up being overlooked by the reader, or mistaken for a numbering point or something.

Yeah, it's fine if you spell it out, except sometimes this can look sort of cumbersome -- for instance, I'd probably change "1977 was the dawn of the punk era" to "The year 1977 was the dawn of the punk era" so I wouldn't have the deal with the ungainly "Nineteen seventy-seven."

Oh lord, we don't do it for years! A year, to my mind, isn't a figure as such - it's, um, a year. Not on my watch will "Nineteen thirty-nine saw World War II begin" appear on our pages, although admittedly I may rephrase to shift the figure to later.

But yeah, I'm forever adding "Some" to the start of sentences so as not to have to write "Two hundred and seventy people complained" etc.

What made me think about its origins was encountering a sentence starting with a percentage: "43% of people don't know where Paris is" or similar.

I can't say "Some" in this case because 43% is a precise figure so there's nothing vague about it; and no way am I writing "Forty-three per cent of people" because that breaks another rule (that % is always written as the symbol)!

Ugh.

i was just digging to confirm that it's every number except years. that sounds right. but i thought the % symbol is used *only* when the numerals are used. if you write it out you say "percent"

er, per cent?

chicago says percent, might be just the american way

You're right: % is used exclusively when numerals are used. Why would I ever need to write it out as "per cent"? I can't think of an example.

I suppose "How many per cent did you get in your exam?" (if I was like 12 years old) but I'd just say "What percentage did you get?" I think.

For consistency's sake, "per cent" is banned from our pages.

well--if you write out all numerals under ten--than youd have to write "nine percent"

right, "Ninety percent of people..." versus "... up to 86 % larger..."

well--if you write out all numerals under ten--than youd have to write "nine percent"

Ah, I getcha but not so: we have separate rules for percentages that say they're always numerals, no matter if they're less than 10.

At my old place the % sign was banned in all body copy because, said our editor, "we're not writing maths and it's a maths symbol". Fuck that shit. [It snuck into the odd headline/standfirst for reasons of space.]

yeah different style guides set different rules for when to write it out. some of them are less than 20 or less than 99, i don't get it.

less than 20 writing it out=maybe so someone won't confuse the letter "L" with the number "1"

i mean less than or equal to 100? i might just be making that up anyway! xpost

oh i thought it was just because there's no hyphen to deal with, like "nineteen" is there

oh that could be it too

I think I started a whole thread once about how the word "their" has fuzzed up numerical agreements to this point of helplessness. It's funny, though. I'm constantly noticing sentences like ... well, this is a simplified equivalent of what I'm looking at:

If you buy this insurance policy, any children you have, and their spouse or domestic partner, will be eligible ...

Except the real example is more complicated, to the point where if I say hey, that should be "spouses" and "partners," multiple children with their multiple "spouses/partners," they always say no, that makes it sound like one of your children is a polygamist and has multiple spouses.

And at this point it's not even like they're terribly wrong, because people will indeed read it that way, and really no agreement satisfies completely.

:(

(Well, except for putting "each child" or some singular re-write, but that's not really within our purview)

If you buy this policy and have children, they (and their spouses/domestic partners) will also be eligible...

But that both makes the change ("spouses/partners") and reframes the sentence

Bitch, you got kids? Lemme sell you this insurance policy and they get covered (wieves too).

I think the problem here is the insurance industry is disdainful of the English language.

But what's wrong with (and their partners)? The word spouse is unnecessary and encompassed by 'partner' and the plural agrees with children.

ha, the original isn't really insurance, exactly. or not from the insurance industry, anyway.

it's funny, though -- this thread is always full of great rewriting suggestions, but of course with technical/legal stuff you don't get a ton of re-writing leeway (especially if it's already gone past lawyers/technicians) ... in a lot of situations you're more limited to pointing out a firm "error" and the most basic remedy. (plus, the more complex your correction, the more it can make people just go "I don't get this, it's fine, just leave it like it is.") and it's not like I even do super-technical stuff!

xpost - I think there's a pretty clear and important legal distinction between "spouse" (i.e., you are married to them) and "domestic partner" (i.e., gay? no problem!)

Yeah, I get stuff rewritten by lawyers and it drives me insane because they have no care for the language whatsoever. The words are just little arguments in an equation that can be shuffled however as long as the answer comes out the way they want. Then I rewrite to make their writing more clear and they change other things.

I see what you're saying about making both spouses and partners plural but it still sounds more right to my ear than the original. The use of 'their' to mean 'his or her' feels so lazy to me. Rethink the phrasing!

Yeah, that was the other thread I was talking about -- how using "their" for "his or her" creates all these weird vortexes in terms of numerical agreements. (Also it may or may not necessitate the word "themself.")

There's one really funny one I used to deal with, but I can only describe it in generic terms. It had to do with a product relating to sexual health. There was a sentence that would always crop up that said, basically, "people who use this sexual-health product should talk to their partner about XYZ." And I would say, you know, that should be "partners," plural users with plural partners.

But they felt -- and this is valid -- that saying "their partners" put the reader in mind of a single product-user getting with multiple people. And on a branding level, they wanted you to think about the product in an, umm, monogamous context. So they'd say, "no, this makes it sound like our consumer is promiscuous."

Following which I would definitely NOT say "yeah, but what you currently have written ACTUALLY SAYS that all your customers are sleeping with the same person."

oops -- actually in that example it was "sexual partner(s)"

That is funny, especially since "their partner" actually makes me think of a single partner being shared by multiple people.