ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

Sorry - was slotting in other words to replace the real ones and cocked up.

(ie forget about racial and racism. It's just the was/were thing.)

1930s = plural
decade = singular

this happens a lot. it's ok.

While I do consider myself a Grammar Fiend, I am a little bit confused over the usage of "its" and "it's".

o_O

haha yeah i know, that's like the #1 question in the Are You a Grammar Fiend pass/fail test

That's because its a stupid test.

HAH I typed 'it's' correctly by habit and had to go back and change it.

Another disagreement with my French Canadian supervisor. Please pick one:

"The odds are against us demonstrating..."

or

"The odds are against us to demonstrate..."

numba one

I don't think the odds are actually against 'us'. They're against our having success in demonstrating something.

the odds against OUR demonstrating

The odds are against us in demonstrating?

Zelda OTM.

From the NYTimes Estelle Getty obit:

In the show, Sophia was the mother of Dorothy Zbornak, played by Bea Arthur who, in real life, was older than Ms. Getty.

Not exactly a copyeditor and grammar fiend question, but: am I wrong to think that the phrase 'in real life' is one of those casual, almost childish, expressions that shouldn't see their way into print?

Iit's certainly redundant there. Was that writer paid by the word?

i don't know, i think it helps keep things clear. but i guess you could shorten it and lose a clause by just writing "who was actually older than ms. getty."

bea > estela

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-typo-guys-0521may21,0,6902266.story

Insufferable douches or fearless crusaders or, y'know, just a bit of harmless fun?

hello.

can it be said of someone that they are effronterous, or temeritous even. if not why not - an man of audacity is audacious, plainly.

thanks in advance.

temericious? no.

Imagine some marketing spiel for a company going on about "our firm, our designers, as we go forward..." for three paras, and then ending "I hope you enjoy our new brochure! (signed) Mr Head Honcho". Is the switch from "we" to "I" ok, or a bit off?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-typo-guys-0521may21,0,6902266.story

Insufferable douches or fearless crusaders or, y'know, just a bit of harmless fun?

I always thought 'typo' as in 'typographical error' referred to genuine finger-slippage or similar when typing e.g. 'teh' instead of 'the' - where you didn't mean to type what you did. Most of the examples given in this story I'd be hard pushed to call typos. Maybe the Millwaukee one seeing as they got it right one time. The rest of them would appear to be actual mistakes, e.g. not understanding how to use apostrophes. But obviously you can't actually tell for sure. Can you make such a distinction between typos and stupid mistakes?

But a grocery store that can't spell grocery [as he encountered in California] makes you question the food they sell.

No, no it doesn't.

(a) That guy in the picture looked to me like Jaymc for a second

(b) I have often dreamed of going around correcting things, actually, although to be honest it's my conviction that I'm not alone in that impulse that's prevented me from thinking it'd be that cool to be a grammar-pedant graffitist

(b.2) And the correcting impulse was usually just a matter of taking the train home from proofreading work and still being in proofreading mindspace and wanting to mark up every ad in the car

i know this is v impt, but could people stop using "schwag" for "swag"? kthxbye.

Is there a thread expressly for whinging about English language transgressions? I'm hissing like a pressure cooker.

When you require an overhead activity to be undertaken, ...

^ Subjunctive mood? Or should I start the sentence again?

WAHT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

Wanky business talk. I think I rewrote it in the end.

Where do we stand on blog vs weblog, (noun) bloggers (noun), to blog, blogging (verb) blog post vs blog posting (noun) etc.

In a linguistically conservative economics publication.

What do the newspapers do?

I don't like blog as a verb, myself, but I'm not sure what else to use,

blogging
blog (noun) collection of articles, (verb) action of publishing an article to the blog: "I just blogged about that"

^^^ Guardian style guide.

Yeah. Thanks. The Times don't even have it in theirs.

post wins vs. posting i'd think

I don't like blog as a verb, myself, but I'm not sure what else to use

You'd have to add words, basically, so that "he blogs about the election" becomes "he maintains a blog about the election" or "he covers the election on his blog" or similar ...

I think the issue with this isn't linguistic so much as, like, philosophical -- i.e., do you really think of blogging as a form of writing that just happens to be done on a blog, or do you think of blogging as a distinct activity that is functionally different from, e.g., "she writes about the issue on her blog." I like blogging as a verb because I think it really is a distinct activity in a distinct context, and it's nice to have a word that captures that.

Considering 'blog' is a recently made-up word, it probably doesn't matter.

Cf. "journal" as a verb.

do you really think of blogging as a form of writing

no.

which is right?

The ___ project was conceived in the late 1980s as a “multimedia-based ___ experience,”

or

The ___ project was conceived of in the late 1980s as a “multimedia-based ___ experience,”

the latter seems correct but also awkward, i guess because it's in passive voice? i can't just say it was conceived, right, because it means baby-makin'?

____s are specific details i took out for no particular reason

Whether you can conceive an idea is perhaps debatable, although I would argue that #1 is totally legit.

#2, however, is a big NO NO NONO BOXCAR to me.

why not rephrase it?

there isn't really a group or person listed as having created the project, so can't really shift it into active tense

transpose to: 'proposed', or perhaps 'initiated'

yeah that'll work fine. i typed "intitiated" at first

I don't see that second one as quite the calamity Laurel does -- it was conceived of in the late 80s, no big. (There's nothing particularly wrong or unusual about winding UP WITH two prepositions in a row, and I'm not sure who'd balk at, say, "the project was dreamed UP IN the late 80s" or whatever) -- in any case the easier rewriting route for avoiding it would be just changing the verb

xpost AND THAT WAS DONE, HOORAY

xp Is what you're objecting to the two prepositions next to each other ("of in")? I wouldn't say that's wrong per se, just not totally elegant.

yeah, it just read awkwardly, then i got confused about whether "conceived" was ok instead of "conceived of" or if i was saying something dirty by accident

Weren't we just talking a while ago about how the double prepositions thing is so American, that it sounds really weird to British-Englishers?

What about Churchill's famous retort "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put"? Or are you going to claim it's because his mom was American?