ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

actually, i need to add a caveat to that second example ("a disillusioned ...") -- that's obviously meant to be a lede, ie introducing me and my job for the first time. if i'd been introduced as "Grimly Fiendish" before that but without any mention of my job, it'd be -- say -- "A disillusioned sub-editor, Mr Fiendish yesterday blah blah " ...

Oh man I get this all the time:

Chief executive of Megacorps, Keith Mandement, said: "Blah fucking blah"

So many commas! Ugh.

Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said:

ta-dah.

You see, we have to put the commas in, but the sentence would have to read without whatever is inside them. As in A disillusioned sub-editor, Grimly Fiendish, yesterday announced his plans for a campaign to save the hyphen

This leads to lots of stupid annoying sentences with "a" rather than "the", but it is consistent.

I'm not too sure of the grammar of Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said: in anything other than journalese. What are they doing there, all those nouns? They are a compound prenominal modifier, are they? Why aren't they hyphenated?

We would do it The chief executive of megacorps, Keith Mandement, said:

What are they doing there, all those nouns? They are a compound prenominal modifier, are they? Why aren't they hyphenated?

I sort of answered this above with respect to the "then law clerk William Rehnquist" example:

I think the confusion here is that "then law clerk" looks like an adjectival phrase that modifies the noun William Rehnquist (in which case hyphenating the whole thing seems useful), but it's not: "law clerk" is the noun and "William Rehnquist" is an appositive.

Likewise, "chief executive" is the noun here.

i think the lotsa commas thing is more american - the sentence that boiled your blood looks perfectly normal to me

No, it makes my blood boil as well.

the sentence that boiled your blood looks perfectly normal to me

?!

thank you, jaymc :)

Journalist, Grimly Fiendish, said: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea."

I can't tell whether Tracer's gone Euro-native or what side he's taking, but this construction is surely blood-boilingly awful. I think of this as a flat-out mistake, and not a stylistic inclination, partly because I rarely see it in anything that's at all professional or edited or decently written -- but part of me does feel like I see it more often in British writing than American, possibly just because Brit comma use seems a bit more fast-and-loose than American, in many cases.

I mean it reads like saying "President, Bush has scheduled a press conference"

^^ I mean that's not an analogy, since it's not a TITLE, but it reads exactly that bizarrely to me

possibly just because Brit comma use seems a bit more fast-and-loose than American

nabisco, OTM.

Mothers of six don't need hyphens any more than photographers of nudes or makers of books. As with most grammar, I know this without knowing why.

external debt repayment obligations
external debt repayments
natural gas-fired capacity

To draw a conclusion, groups of words don't necessarily need hyphens to be read as a group.

Pete, I agree with you about "mothers of six" but not with those other three examples. With "external debt repayments," for instance, there's no way to know without a hyphen if "external" modifies "debt" or "repayments." It might be reasonably puzzled out, but why make the reader work harder?

exactly.

natural gas-fired capacity

is that the natural capacity when the thing in question is gas-fired, then?

you can "draw a conclusion" all you want, but i think i'll be sticking with the prescribed rules of grammar as opposed to the arbitrary rules of pete ;)

natural gas-fired capacity

is that the natural capacity when the thing in question is gas-fired, then?

You're right, I feel like I'm looking at a Magic Eye painting and seeing it for the first time. Something needs to by hyphened here without any outside context:

external-debt repayment obligations
external debt-repayment obligations
external-debt-repayment obligations
external debt-repayment-obligations

That said, no hyphens is often just fine so long as you know from the context which words modify which, e.g.:

"If you want to steal natural gas, you better find a natural gas-fired furnace."

or

"I've got so many external debt repayments to make, we'd better talk about my external debt repayment obligations."

And the fact that those are shitty sentences is not helped by adding hyphens.

"If you want to steal natural gas, you better find a natural gas-fired furnace."

Hahaha this still has room for wonkiness: it could be advising you that your gas-fired furnace should not be synthetic.

(Hence the en-dash rule in that situation.)

Also, I know I always say this, but I am very much against leaning overmuch on "context" in grammar discussions, since it evades the basic question being asked (i.e., "what is a coherent rule that helps solve this problem regardless of context"). And, like I always say, this is because I spend some time at work reading complex legal disclaimers about credit rates and insurance policies and the likelihood of your medication having side effects -- situations in which there's no such thing about reliable context* and even if there were, it'd be a bit risky to hang the risk of class-action lawsuits on its being fully understood.

* e.g., you can't say "oh, my credit card issuer couldn't possibly mean it the other way, that'd be completely unfair and exploitative toward the consumer"

Yeah, you're right again about "natural-gas-fired furnace," I give on that one. But it's no evasion to insist on context as an essential element of any question about grammar outside of the narrow legalese you're talking about. Notice my second examples stands just fine. Why make an arbitrary rule pretending that it doesn't?

This thread is the first time I've ever heard of n-dashes.

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" looks more right to me than "Aviatrix Amelia Earhart"

(I would never drop the "The" in the first place)

But perhaps this should go to the comma roundtable

I think the real answer is never, ever use the word "aviatrix."

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" makes it sound like she's the only person who's ever been an aviatrix, though.

The Aviatrix Reloaded, Amelia Earhart

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" makes it sound like she's the only person who's ever been an aviatrix, though.

This is why I said in our house style you get a lot of "a" instead of "the". Which can be annoying. You could say The troubled bank HBOS , but we have to say A troubled bank, HBOS
I agree that Grimly's blood-boiling sentence is just wrong, so I don't think that's a Brit-US difference. It's just the basic point that if you set something aside in commas, the rest of the sentence has to work on its own, and no-one would consider Journalist said: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea." to be correct.

That's why my attempt to avoid the hyphens in mum of six was wrong. (Although if you add "a", it works fine, as I said.)

However, while I accept that Megacorps chief executive Keith Mandement said ... and Actress, activist and mum-of-six Angelina Jolie are common usage, I just don't understand what's going on grammatically there, which is why I can't say whether mum of six should have hyphens or not. But why there and not with Megacorps chief executive? Is it because mum of six is a NP made up of a N plus a prepositional phrase? Whereas Megacorps chief executive is just a compound noun? What if you did it Chief executive of Megacorps Keith Mandement? No-one would hyphenate that, but the only difference is that the main noun is a compound again.

Genuinely seeking Grimly wisdom here.

Back to hyphenation in adjectival phrases:

oh, my credit card issuer couldn't possibly mean it the other way, that'd be completely unfair and exploitative toward the consumer

You see, we'd do this credit-card issuer.

I think the rules are perhaps more ambiguous than Grimly is allowing. Where a compound noun is clearly recognised as a unit do you have to hyphenate it when you use it adjectivally?

In my examples, I think external debt definitely needs to be hyphenated, as it is the debt that is external (ie owed to other countries, not your own banks), but you could argue that repayment obligations is a compound noun, that you are then modifying, although I went with the all-hyphens approach in the end. I just think there is a lot of room between the rules for interpretation here. Or is there?

Also, where you have something in attributive position you hyphenate it, but if it's used predicatively you don't ie a high-quality piece of sub-editing but Grimly's work is very high quality .

So in my text, it actually read Two-thirds of capacity is natural gas-fired . What would you do there?

But why there and not with Megacorps chief executive?

i think jaymc's explanation above is the one i'm going to cling to here ... i will try to ponder this more, but i really should be doing something else right now. bugger, this is going to bug me all day.

Where a compound noun is clearly recognised as a unit

but "clear recognition" is in the eye of the reader, not the writer. one of my tasks as a sub is to ensure that no reader needs to stop and say: hang on, i need to re-read that; it doesn't mean what i think it meant. from a psycholinguistic PoV, all sorts of things could affect the way someone's reading something -- those little bits of punctuation simply serve to make things a little more obvious.

sorry, this is a really surface-level engagement with a really interesting thread, but GAAAAH i need to crack on and be reading about the central nervous system right now :)

as for this:

Two-thirds of capacity is natural gas-fired

two-thirds of capacity is natural-gas-fired

OR

two-thirds of capacity is fired by natural gas

no-one would consider "Journalist said: 'Fuck this for a lark, I'm going to make a cup of tea.'" to be correct.

That's because the definite article has been spuriously omitted from the original example. Add back in the "The" that should have been there in the first place and it's fine.

"The aviatrix, Amelia Earhart" makes it sound like she's the only person who's ever been an aviatrix, though.

OTM. We've prohibited the use of that preceding "The" for precisely this reason - it's journalese and horrible.

Whaaa? Omitting the article is journalese - in no other context would it even be countenanced.

"I urged secretary Margaret Peener to fax the documents immediately."

An odd thing about this thread (in which I have not really participated, I don't think) is that it deals in such utter precision with sentence structures, punctuation, etc, to an extent that is often beyond me and makes me feel like a grammatical amateur or incompetent ... but it is so radically untypical of the rest of the world (not least the online world), in which I often feel like one of the few people I know who writes properly.

(Journalist) Grimly Fiendish's examples upthread, using him / herself as self-deprecating case study, are smashing!

It is in the eye of the beholder, and the rules change accordingly. I would write "credit card issuer" because the percentage that would misunderstand that is so small, and most eyes read "credit card" as one word, and a hyphen adds noise. That's the only real argument against hyphens: noise. You can add all the (white) noise you want to legal writing. The faster you put somebody to sleep in that case the better.

Re: "a high-quality piece of sub-editing" vs. "Grimly's work is very high quality"--maybe the latter reads as short for "Grimly's work is of a high quality," and so works without a hyphen, where "The concert had a low turnout" becomes "the concert was low-turnout."

Not quite as vituperative as those Coren emails, but:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/10/sundayexpress.pressandpublishing

that. is. fucking. BRILLIANT.

that's made my day; the fact that one executive, somewhere, still cares enough to send that e-mail out. perhaps all is not yet lost.

it's totally, totally different to coren; coren was one writer whining (albeit with some justification) about his precious copy; this is an exec doling out the beats because of what's happening to quality overall. fuck me, i would LOVE that to happen round our way.

absolutely superb.

I sent that link (sweet music to my ears) to my husband who responded with surprise that anyone at the Express cares that they're writing complete drivel.

That was my response too.

Can't help but feel that the guy who sent that email would have strengthened his position by knowing what century Alexander Pope was writing in.

good point. still. heat of the moment, and all that. (there was something else i spotted and thought "hmm, maybe not" about, but it's small beer in the general scheme of things.)

I know, it's just fun correcting the corrector.

Some islands actually do float.

tht guy is silly

I'd have my papers in txt spk tho, if I cd

^^any chance the hrld cd trail blaze this?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v136/primrosehill/noname.jpg

En-dashes are awesome.

itht guy is silly

why?

while he is correct in what he says (he is a grammar/quality nazi, they are often correct in what they say and often have that male obsession with being right), a lot of the errors he points out are still perfectly communicative. ie readers wd get the gist, which is all I want from newspaper copy; I'm not close reading it

the capitalisation and headline setting stuff is pretty poor and shd have been picked up by eye

I can see and empathise with the larger point that the small stuff is symptomatic of a larger decline in quality and that newspapers need to sweat these details, even tho the ship is sinking

pt of me tho thinks the ship is sinking, let's sink the ship; but then I'm a wapper

^^also I think everything is silly and don't care about anything bcs I am internet dumb, innit