ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

God, nate, you must have thought you were going mad. Like the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I work with a load of idiots, obviously.

you don't understand! my dog, who i have named "it was a pleasure to walk", had just eaten a building!

Most amusing.

I don't understand 'pho-hawk' - what is that supposed to be?

faux hawk?

as in, the dude haircut also known as the hoxton fin

Faux, yes. I don't even....

Grammar folks,

What are your feelings on the tendency to refer to "a politics" or even "a politic"? Is one more correct than another? Or is it just inflated? The phrase in question is "an acerbic sexual politics".

It has become accepted useage to say, for example, "I like his sense of humor, but not his politics." Given this useage, the phrase passes muster, but I'd suggest that if it sounds awkward in its context, change the phrase or the context to something you don't find jarring.

i don't understand why 'an' would go into the context given, admrl.

think such useage occurs frequently as part of cultural studies jargon

Thanks guys. I'm correcting someone else's text, which is always a little difficult. I agree about "an", though

"Over the past 20 years, ABC Company has helped many businesses in __________ (improve) their brand."

this is for a verb conjugation exercise. obviously that "in" means it will be "improving", but...why? is it just some phrasal convention? without "in" it would be just "improve" which to me seems a bit clearer, and could also be easily understood in grammar terms.

wd just go with 'to improve' myself

Verb forms tend to be verb+ing after a preposition, but as Darragh says, there's no real need to go down that route here.

The rough linguist's answer is that a preposition always takes a noun phrase as argument; "improve their brand" is a (non-finite) verb phrase but "improving their brand" acts more or less like a noun phrase (e.g. "improving their brand is fun"). There some caveats and subtleties to this: nominalisations behave more idiosyncratically than other nouns, you have to accept that "to" in "to improve" is not a preposition...

you're right, darragh, of course. missed that. prob wouldn't say the "to" in conversation tbh. totally agree it's clumsier than necessary, but that's how it appears in the gap exercise. but great explanation, thanks very much.

you're right, darragh, of course.

^ most under-used grammatical term on ilx

"Over the past 20 years, ABC Company has helped many businesses in __________ (improve) their brand."

argh, note that this contains my biggest ongoing peeve -- businessES have brandS, plural

Maybe ABC has helped companies improve ABC's brand.

by being an awesome client!

I don't think it's that bad - it's one way to signal that there's a single brand per business. Would you also hate on the following example? "Five of the songs contain a disco breakdown".

"helped many businesses improve their brands" gets my vote.

I also vote to pretty much never use "help" in this sense. Weak-ass word.

would go with with brand singular tbh

that's only playing it by ear mind

ugh I'm with nabisco on the plural

Language Log weighs in, suggests that nabisco is on the side of predominant usage.

Though I think that their example ("ostriches...bury their head") patterns slightly differently to our one.

its "brands" with an "s" because "their" is referring to "businesses"--"a business" is a single thing

i.e. the sentence "the business has improved their brand" is wrong

though yes iirc british people do this the wrong way with sports teams

oh man, we had a whole thread on this, but to me those numerical agreements are a matter of basic sense and information, not context and taste. I think the example I used last time was this:

"the children are cleaning their room" = the children share one room
"the children are cleaning their rooms" = there are multiple rooms

the "S" refers to the normal thing it always does -- is there more than one of a thing or not. so it's useful and gives us critical information. but now, especially since we use "their" a lot to refer to both individuals and groups, I feel like that agreement is slipping away.

God i'm dumb...

Mr and Mrs Roberts’s Golden Wedding Anniversary
Mr and Mrs Roberts’ Golden Wedding Anniversary

It's the first one, right? The family name is "Roberts"

depends what style book you're using. i think the balance of opinion is against needing the extra s, but there are style guides that call for it.

thx!

I would always use it.

have heard the guide is whether or not you would pronounce the extra 's out loud - if you do, then include it. but yes it looks awkward

Wait, I don't think I really thought about this. If it were "Mr. Roberts's anniversary," then yes I would use it. I'm not sure about "Mr. and Mrs. Roberts's," though.

You wouldn't pronounce it in this case, would you? (xp)

i dunno! what are the rules for pronouncing the plural s?

I wouldn't have the extra S.

If it were the birthday of Mr Roberts, I'd say " Mr Roberts' Birthday "

So in this case, I'd say "Mr and Mrs Roberts' Anniversary"

No problem!

I'm not sure about "Mr. and Mrs. Roberts's," though.

Actually, I think my first instinct was right. This is like "Abbott and Costello's."

I hope they quarrel less than Abbott & Costello

Is "radio appearance" an oxymoron?

Technically perhaps but it does not leap out at me as wrong or horrendous and it seems fairly well accepted (618,000 on google v. 2 million for 'tv appearance'. What else could you say?

I don't think anyone would question "He appeared as a guest on 'The Howard Stern Show' on Tuesday."

But that doesn't really answer your question.

Yeah, I agree, just checking.

no other noun works

"Listeners all over the country were enthralled by Mr Throckmorton's recent radiogramme manifestation."