ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

in the my adventures developing similar shortcuts i moved to "6-10am", based on the assumption that (contextually) as nothing routinely being promoted was going to be "6pm-10am" no muddle was likely. (if/when "6pm-10am" was need then put that in full, till then no need).

so i can't complain that someone has invented a new compacting on a similar principle! what else is it going to be before or after except midday?

but i highly favour the compact in these circs so

to answer the question tho, i've not seen it but i don't read to proof off the clock so may have skimmed it w/o noticing

6-10am is good I think. 'a' by itself seems like an unhelpful letter to increase the frequency of its use in isolation. More, I was just surprised, as I hadn't come across it at all.

I was thinking "that looks familiar" but I've realised it's just similar enough to the way fount size is expressed when you buy a small amount of type: the size of a small fount (not point size but number of actual separate letters) is expressed in a number of a or A, and then the other letters are in set ratios to that. So you might buy a fount that's 5A-13a or whatever.

Since your colleague admits to knowing no reason why this construction would be more useful or helpful, it seems safe to err on the side of adding back one fucking letter to make one's communication more universally clear. btw, I've never seen "a" used to denote "a.m." by anyone. if it's a thing, it's a very limited thing.

well my colleague is great, so i perhaps wouldn’t do it with the same level of vituperation, but would be v happy to say “no one(*) in the USA has heard of this, in your face, colleague” to her, as she would take it in the right spirit.

(*by which i mean the totally authoritative aimless of ilx.com, no i will not be taking questions at this time)

obviously management/executive types in US corporations hatch all kinds of weird internal jargon for nonsensical reasons, and I am not intimately involved with their multiform communication foibles, but I'd say the chances are very high that this particular idiomatic use is confined to a tiny local tribe and has not spread to anything resembling ordinary use.

broadcast media r&d in atlanta is the micro-climate here.

Hello. I'm trying to write something in the present tense and I'm stuck on a conditional clause:

What is correct?

"That's amazing!", he says...

- If he could, he would have clapped John around the shoulder.
- If he could, he would clap John around the shoulder.

they're both correct but for different situations:

the second belongs in a context like the following:
he told the others that when he found him, if he could, he would clap John around the shoulder

the first is more like:
if he could, he would have clapped John around the shoulder -- but the crowd was too big and he never reached him

so i think you want the second, the first suggests something that might well still happen if conditions turn out right

I think the second would be correct, but very awkward. You may be able to recast it into something more present: He feels a desire to clap John around the shoulder, but understands this is not possible.

feels like there's a suppressed 'have' in the first one i.e. 'If he could (have), he would have..' but that's repetitive, so you leave it out and allow the 'have' in 'would have' to do all the work

so i think actually the opposite of what mark s has said?? i do not say this lightly

i.e. the first is narrating something that happened in the past; the second feels of the present

I agree with Tracer; the second one is in the present so I'd go with that.

Very much with TH and Lily on this, with the obvious caveat that I'm a non-native speaker.

I'd change the clause entirely to "wishing he could clap John around the shoulder", which gets across the fact that he wants to but can't.

i agree about the suppressed "have" and can't work out how tracer's is "opposite" to mine?

As a thought experiment, 'He would clap John around the shoulder if he could' sounds more idiomatic to me than 'He would have clapped John around the shoulder if he could'.

it's not an issue of more or less idiomatic really, you'd use them in different contexts

mark you say 'the first suggests something that might well still happen if conditions turn out right'

but would've-could've feels like the book is closed on that

it's not an issue of more or less idiomatic really, you'd use them in different contexts

I defer to your judgement, of course, it's just that the second sentence sounds off to my ears without the extra 'have'.

ok lol i think i muddled myself (and everyone else) by writing my expanded examples in the opposite order to dog latin's

when i write "so i think you want the second, the first suggests something that might well still happen if conditions turn out right" and when i say "second" i'm referring to dog latin's order but when i say "first" i'm referring to my order! simples!

ffs

sorry abt that everyone, what i shd have said is ""i think you want the second (your second), which suggests something that might well still happen if conditions turn out right"

Tracer is right. In contrast, however, I would actually say (and write) both "have"s.

If he could have [done whatever], he would have [done whatever].

There may be a way to rephrase to get out of the clunkiness even if it takes more words. My philosophy is WARP (Words Are Readers' Pals). Maybe try inverting it, as pomenitul suggested?

He would have clapped John around the shoulder if he could have.

He would have clapped John around the shoulder, if he only could.

He would've clapped John around the shoulder if he could've.

He would have clapped John around the shoulder, but he couldn't.

He would have clapped John around the shoulder, if it were possible.

He would've clapped John around the shoulder, but didn't want people to think he was gay.

He would have clapped John around the shoulder, if he only could. Unfortunately, John was born without shoulders.

tracer is saying use the one without any haves

(i was trying to say this also but fucked it up)

this should be the only thread permits such pedantry, but there shouldn't be a comma preceding the attribution here

(unless that is an American-specific rule?)

Possibly not the right thread, but you guys will know - where do you go to google the historical usage of a phrase over time? Not just in books but in general (on the internet, I guess).
Or does anyone know if "control the narrative" is a relatively modern phrase?

https://books.google.com/ngrams

That's what I tried; is that not just books?

Oh OK it works anyway! thanks

You might also be interested in the Time Magazine Corpus of American English, which lets you search for the other words and terms that show up in conjunction with a given phrase and thus get a sense of how its connotation changes over time.

https://www.english-corpora.org/time/

Whoa

'It’s a wonderful example of historic architecture with a beautiful garden and an amazing history, particularly of the xxx family who led their creative lives here in the 19th and 20th century.’

OR

‘It’s a wonderful example of historic architecture with a beautiful garden and an amazing history, particularly of the xxx family who led their creative lives here in the 19th and 20th centuries.’

plur(al)

I'd even replace "in" with "during", but it's not a dealbreaker.

Thank you, I also went with the plural, although I suspect the first one might also be 'correct' in English.

Agree too about 'during' over 'in', but this is one of those "don't tamper with the client's copy more than is absolutely necessary" deals, so left as is.

O how I do know exactly what you're talking about.

If anyone ever wants to make a hypocrite meme about editors, feel free to use the "Please provide copy with files" b/w "This copy is all wrong."

Yikes! Thanks for the help upthread everyone. More complicated than I thought it would be.

I know there are common nouns for inhabitans of large English-speaking cities, such as "New Yorker" or "Londoner", but what noun would you use for someone who lives, say, in Oslo or Prague or Helsinki? Osloer/Praguer/Helsinkier? Or Osloan/Helsinkian/Praguean? Or something else?

Helsinkite? :)

These are in (e.g.) the Wikipedia articles for the cities, under “demonyms”

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adjectivals_and_demonyms_for_cities

Ah, okay, thanks! Apparently it's "Helsinkian" and "Praguer", but the Olso article has no demonym.

I wonder if there's some logic to these, or whether people just use whatever is easiest to pronounce out of the available suffixes: -er / -ian / -ite?

(xpost)

Ok, the article you linked says "Oslovian".

The list has “Oslovian” which is superb

sorry!

I wonder where the extra "v" comes from in demonyms like Peruvian or Oslovian?

I think it's to do with an implied W at the end.

Some discussion at
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/310461/why-is-there-a-v-in-peruvian

Wikipedia gives the etymology as Piruw [pɪɾʊw], from Quechua, the Inka language.
That [w] at the end would become a /v/ in Spanish when adding a suffix to produce Peruviano.

Time for a campaign for 'Glagovian' to upset the natives.

spanish word for peruvian is peruano though. could never understand the logic of spanish doing this, in the same vein, americano vs. estadounidense, nicaragüense, etc. why puertorriqueño and not puertorriquense.