ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

widely ignored convention in the UK is that you don't cap the 'the' for newspapers EXCEPT The Times

in Ken's counter-example it shd be "butcher's shop" (or just "butcher's" or indeed "butcher"), unless it is a single shop in which a number of butchers trade independently, in which case "butchers' shop" (as per grimly) or "butchers shop" (as per martin) are equally good. I prefer the second bcz i wish to strip the lil bleeder aht of everyfing i hate it so

It's true that -- when stand-alone -- "A man jerks off their own penis" emphasises the sense of a generalised rule more than ""A man jerks off his own penis" or even "The man jerks off his own penis" but frankly it's never going to BE stand-alone, and context will (well, should) do the work of revealing which is meant. ALSO: It is a rule easily falsified.

Also it's worse than that, Mark, the school is actually asking that you refer to them -- mid-sentence -- as The Ohio State University. With the cap. (The one thing you can say to their credit is that they're a business, and businesses have been known to do much nit-pickier things in the creation of brand image and the protection of trademarks. There are still all kinds of weird things where a business, say, capitalizing one letter in a product name would actually violate someone else's service-marked product name, or whatever.)

I am trying to think of an exception/example where a non-quote non-ital title really does manage to successfully claim its article. There's surely something.

I recently ran something where I wanted to describe a band as being in tune with the demographic of (ahem) the publication titled The Wire, but the editor changed my usage -- "Wire-friendly" -- to the more proper "The Wire-friendly." (I'm not sure if, per CMOS, you'd use an n-dash in that latter forumation.)

I kinda miss Se7en: other mag started doing it for a while, even when we'd stopped. S&S still omits the colon implied by the line break, which I hate eg Robin Hood Prince of Thieves

I thought this said, "the Beatles or The Beetles?" and laughed. 'Hoo boy, nobody's made that joke since 1963...oh wait.'

Although this is weird: I was convinced that "old-school" was hip-hop slang that somehow wormed its way into mainstream usage within the last ten years or so! Webster's marks its first usage as 1803!

Important statement: I've never worked anywhere that didn't route something or other in cross-it-off fashion.

More important question: where would one acquire classics of copyeditor porn, such as Sorority House Style, Cap that Ass, Stet Me Hard, Big Black Bullet Lists, and Little Non-Hyphenated Adverb/Adjective Modifiers with Big Hard Hyphens?

To my credit, I did not go berserk.

>Elaine: People go to South America.
>Jerry: Yeah, and they come back with things taped to their large intestine.

I suppose Jerry gets a free pass, since Elaine used the plural subject "people," not him, but note that damned numerical disagreement that keeps bugging me lately!

-- nabisco (--...), March 9th, 2006 4:40 PM. (nabisco) (later) (link)

Srsly. I keep fixing that now that you've alerted me to it.

I also keep running into a similar agreement issue that's less egregious but still bothers me:

"Lemurs have a tail that allows them to swing through branches."

I don't like the implication that many lemurs have only one tail among them, but the alternative ("lemurs have tails") makes it less clear as to how many tails each lemur has. I change this sometimes and leave it as is when the pluralization sounds clunky, as it often does. And about a third of the time that I change it, it comes back to me stetted, anyway.

That structure is actually really weird, politically speaking -- it's very rationalist and essentialist! To the point where it sounds really musty and Victorian plus smacks of the kinds of essentialism that now creeps us out ("The female of the species is XXX" / "The Negro is XXX" / etc.) But then we start talking about something where essentialism is exactly what we want -- lemurs have tails! -- and the right construction has been somewhat diminished.

http://www.moresaltplease.com/images/salt%20shaker.gif

An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. "How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all Scottish sheep are black!"

To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!"

The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

i'd suggest: "a/the lemur's [adjective] tail allows it to swing through branches". the adjective is important here: what's so great about this tail? i mean, badgers have tails but they can't swing through branches.

at least, i don't think they can.

i've never read the first post in this thread before. it makes me want to rip out people's eyes and eat them. there really is no fucking hope for (english-speaking) humankind.