ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

Maybe it's not strictly necessary, KK, but when confronted with a four-word noun phrase like that (or like "four-word noun phrase," for that matter), I figure it can't hurt to be given a bit of word-grouping help. It just reads more smoothly, is all.

we used 2 hyphs for "health-care-reform bill"

Things I really ought to know by now, No.1 in a probably long series:

enquiry vs inquiry...

eh

in british i think there's a subtle difference, where enquiry is a query, and an inquiry is like a formal inquest.

don't know about US- favours just use of 'inquiry' i think?

yeah we don't fuck with "enquiry" much here

LinkedIn profiles have a bit at the bottom where you can say "interested in"... and they have 'job inquiries' as an option. Drives me insane.

From Wiktionary: According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926), inquiry should be used in relation to a formal inquest, and enquiry to the act of questioning. Many (though not all) British writers maintain this distinction; the Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, lists inquiry and enquiry as equal alternatives, in that order. Some British dictionaries, such as Chambers 21st Century Dictionary [1], present the two spellings as interchangeable variants in the general sense, but prefer inquiry for the "formal inquest" sense. In Australian English, inquiry represents a formal inquest (such as a government investigation) while enquiry is used in the act of questioning; (eg: the customer enquired about the status of his loan application); both spellings are current in Canadian English, where enquiry is often associated with scholarly or intellectual research. (See Pam Peters, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, p. 282.)

American English usually uses inquiry.

The following documents are to be submitted as soon as possible, if not done so already

i mean usually i could do this, but for ref i just searched for 'grammer fiends' so obv not operating at 100% right now.

if they have not been already?

oh i dunno if that's any better?

"Please submit the following documents as soon as possible, if you have not done so already." Switching from passive to active usually solves that stuff for me.

yes, i like that.

back to you ledge, can you beat that?

CAN YOU HUH?

^ switch from passive to aggressive

fuck you all

yeah i've zung better

oooh while we're on the right thread can i get a second opinion on 'zung'

stung sung zung

^ zinged beast

Is this grammatically correct?

"He posted a new question to ILX, typing as fast as he could."

Do you always have to have a "while" in there? Would a long dash work instead, or is this construction simply grammatically incorrect?

You don't need a 'while' in there, I think, the end of your sentence is an adverbial describing the way in which he posted rather than a separate activity.

Ah, an adverbial. Thanks! Are adverbial phrases considered a fiction writing faux pas on the level of adverbs?

depending on which linguist you ask almost all clauses can be described as having adverbial components

This is causing huge arguments in work:

1. "It was a pleasure to walk past the building"

OR

2. "It was a pleasure to walk passed the building"

I say 1. Everybody else says 2. Which is correct, and why?

are you serious?

I sense a trap.

Hmmm.

It's like that time in primary school I had to draw the water in a bottle turned on its side and go it wrong. I know it is.

Wait.

Is 'It was a pleasure to walk' the name of someone where you work, nate?

go it wrong got it wrong

I am serious. I thought it was obviously PAST, I can't see any way on earth it could be PASSED, but a bunch of people have got me doubting myself. People who I previously thought were reasonably intelligent.

#1. Anything else is total lunacy.

Also recently found in a book at work: "pho-hawk." Apparently the author has a particular attachment to that horror. Should such people be killed and eaten?

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!