ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

what the eff is "exibility"?!

it is in a document abt a piece of technology + service of it and the document was originally in german - sentence is like "you can expect more from our company - more exibility, more quality, and more service."

maybe they mean "flexibility"? but that doesn't seem right
the whole doc is making my morning tho, i have to say

If you were talking about a band that broke up years ago, would you say "their hit songs include X, Y, and Z" or "their hit songs included X, Y, and Z."

Without the word "hit," I'm comfortable putting it in the present tense, since the songs still exist, so I guess what I'm asking is, is a hit song always a hit song or is it only a hit song when it hits?

I thought if you were American, you'd say "Its hit songs"...

(anyway, I'd say "included")

"Its hit songs" is probably correct for bands that are singular, like Fleetwood Mac or Van Halen, but it sounds so weird, I usually try to avoid the pronoun altogether and say "The band's hit songs." "Their hit songs" is always correct for the Beatles or the Strokes.

Yeah, 'its' for a collective noun is not exclusively American.

I don't want to live in a world in which Gorillaz is a collective noun.

Ah, yes, it gets dodgy when the band name is a plural. I get headaches from this.

(this? that?)

Correct usage would be "Gorillaz' hit songz"

ARGH THE S POS I HATE THE S POS

unless it's 'the Gorillaz' hit songs'

i luv gorilla'z their my favorite

i brought there cd and bought it home

I saw an X-apostrophe the other day in a newspaper and it kind of threw me.

I have a question.
Do you blog "on" something or "about" something? Also why do some people say "a blog" when they mean "a post on a blog" and which is correct?

Personally, I don't like the sound of any of these

Also why do some people say "a blog" when they mean "a post on a blog"

God, I hate this so much.

I know! But I have to grapple with this head on and resolve it

when you write a BLOG ENTRY or BLOG POST, you blog ABOUT something

ok

also have you noticed that people say "gchat" now?

i always think the ON construction is awful, like "a class on shakespeare," instead of "a class about shakespeare"

I think both "on" and "about" are acceptable. I mean, I don't consider "blog" any different from "write." In both cases, though, "about" sounds a little better to my ears.

I agree

but i mean also fuck shakespeare dude is so olddd

Also why do some people say "a blog" when they mean "a post on a blog"

Partly because certain organisations, such as MY OWN and the BBC encourage them to do so.

bummer

From my company's blog, which is written by a number of guest contributors:

"In my last blog, I concluded that Fred Thompson was the logical candidate for Republicans to turn to this year."

^^ wording is the least of the problems there

Ha.

(To be fair, that post is from Jan. 2, but still.)

But umm seriously is it possible that the bad style here is based on trying to make "blog" function more along the lines of the "log" that's part of it? I would still use "(web) log entry," but I can get slightly closer to imagining someone using "log" in that singular way.

You know what else I hate? When there is one store/restarant called "store/restaurant X" and then they open ANOTHER store called "store/restaurant X TOO. Why do they do that???

Also this sort of thing can lead to some funny constructions. Maybe not the best example but the suburb where I am from had a ladies clothing store called "Not Quite New" (used clothing, get it?) which then opened a sister (brother?) store called "Not Quite New For Men"!

It clearly should have been called "Not Quite New TOO (For Men)"

xxp I'd actually think the opposite -- that if people were to think about the term's origins, they'd realize that it doesn't make sense to call a blog post a blog any more than it would make sense to call an entry in a log a log. A log is always a log of component parts.

Adam, there's a clothing store in Chicago called Shirts on Sheffield, located, unsurprisingly enough, on Sheffield Avenue. When they opened up another location, this time on Broadway, they called it Shirts Off Sheffield.

haha

Aww, Shirts on Sheffield spawned?

an elegy for copy editors

Do you blog "on" something or "about" something?

Once you turn that noun into a verb, everything that follows is a disaster.

yesterday i couldn't even blog on, it was so frustrating

This week's New Yorker has a shockingly obvious misspelling/typo in the Seabrook article! I was QUITE taken aback. Is this the first sign of the copyediting apocalypse?

yeah, i've seen a few typos in the new yorker lately.

Is this the first sign of the copyediting apocalypse?

the first sign was all those misplaced apostrophes on storefront marquees. this is probably more like the seventh sign.

When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."

^^ REAL men

Would you say

"A and B correspond to X and Y respectively"

or

"A and B correspond respectively to X and Y"?

I am in the middle of a fight about this with my supervisor. One of them sounds just plain weird to me. My supervisor is French Canadian, so I don't trust him (about anything, not just English usage).

I would use the first one.

I'd go with the first one. I don't think I've even come across the seond usage.

one of my math professors was pretty intense in his belief that saying "respectively" is redundant. aside from that, both of those are correct, but you may need a comma before "respectively" in the first example.

I have also come across anti-"respectively" editors; I can go either way on that one. But yeah, I prefer the first example with a comma before "respectively" (at least in U.S. usage).