A based-on-real-events overheard conversation in D.C.:

Girl 1: Did you like the movie? I thought it was fun, but I didn’t like the ending?
Girl 2: Yeah, the ending was, like, too depressing for me. But the characters were really likable so…
Girl 1: It’s still early? Let’s get a drink? There’s this great bar a block away?
Girl 2: OK. I wonder if they have mojitos. I love mojitos so…
Girl 1: Yeah, I, like, totally love mojitos?
Girl 2: I wonder why I can’t just end a sentence. Why do I always trail off with so? So…
Girl 1: I don’t know? Why can’t I speak without turning everything into a question? It’s weird?
Girl 2: And annoying so…

What the hell, people! This is, like, totally going to ruin your day, but start listening for people who end their sentences with the word “so.” Or with an unnecessary inflection. It will drive you crazy.

The very excellent local blog The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks was a little baffled earlier this week by the front of the “I AM” temple in Adams Morgan. In a post titled Necessary?, Bethany Keeley scratches her head at the strange doings at the temple, at least when it comes to styling words on its facade.

As somebody who once spent six months of his life researching New Age religion (and who still gets a little obsessed with it), I can answer Keeley’s in the affirmative: The “I AM” movement was a spinoff of Theosophy–named, as Keeley rightly surmises, from God’s announcement of Himself in Exodus 3:14. Like lots of Blavatsky-esque blithering, “I AM” teachings are stuffed with gobbledygook. But all the literature I’ve read on the subject, as well as the group’s official Web site, includes the quotation marks. There may be a glint of tinfoil in its teachings, but its grammar is tight.

(For anybody who cares to investigate this stuff further, America’s Alternative Religions, a collection edited by Timothy Miller, is a great place to start.)

Perhaps too often I’ve been an advocate of lax grammatical standards in the format-busting medium of the Web, but my kids still need to learn how to spell. That’s why we want to send them to a better school by means of the Out-of-Boundary application process. Well, if you’re going to be grading my kids, allow me to return the favor…


—Brian Nelson

Fishbowl NY reports out Maggie Shnayerson’s firing from Gawker, which I’m sure is a huge injustice, but the piece brings up something that drives me crazy. Here’s what Fishbowl quotes Shnayerson saying:

He’s pushing Gawker to its broadest conclusion — and this reduces its caché.

I think the word they’re looking for is cachet. Thing is, I see this misspelling everywhere (could it be because of the movie? this retailer?). But it’s not just as weird as the past participle of an already anglicized French word gaining currency—quite often, I see references to a caché or even a cachet of weapons. The word you want there is cache.

At the moment, new fare-rate boards in Metro stations are covered in butcher paper with an attached note reading:

“Please keep cover until Sunday, Jan. 6.”

Thanks, Metro. I’ll be huddled in the basement till Monday.

The Washington Post yesterday printed an editorial on linguistic controversies in Northern Virginia. The following are a few lines from the top of the editorial:

English, Sí?
A common language takes more than a resolution.
Latinos forman una mayor parte de la populacion en Manassas Park.

IF YOU COULD not read that sentence, you probably aren’t one of the many Latinos who helped make that Virginia suburb a place where minorities now outnumber non-Hispanic whites.

Actually: If you could not read that sentence, it says nothing about whether you’re gringo, Latino, or africano-americano. That’s because the error-filled sentence doesn’t mean anything.

Assuming that the Post was trying to approximate Spanish, here’s a breakdown of the sentence’s breakdowns:

Latinos: Sure, that’s a word we all know, and it exists in both English and Spanish. But in the latter, you can’t just go throwing nouns around without articles. Like French ones, Spanish nouns require articles, especially when they’re the topic of the sentence. So here, Los latinos would be the way to go.

forman: This is the only part of the sentence that’s correct, and the translation is pretty cognative: “form,” or “make up.”

una mayor parte: Another fuck-up, for reasons explained below.

de la populacion: One of the steadfast rules of Spanish is that the accent mark falls on the “o” of nouns ending in “cion.” But an accent mark in this case wouldn’t even save this gaffe. “Populacion” is not a Spanish word. If the intent is to give the Spanish equivalent of “population,” the right word is población.

The only possible explanation available to the Post on this front is that it’s hip to street español. According to the 2003 book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, some people are indeed saying populación instead of the proper word—in the same sense, for example, that they’re using lanlaidi in referring to their female landlords. So until the Post embraces slang on its editorial page—can you envision this lede: “President Bush is a bulchiteador”?—it’s safe to assume that the editorial board just put plain, bad gringo Spanish on the page without blinking.

en Manassas Park: Wrong preposition. Should be “de.”

The translation for the Post’s “sentence” reads something like this:

“Latinos make up a greater part of the Manassas Park population.”

But what does that mean? Greater (mayor) than what? Are they trying to say that the population is growing? Or that Manassas Park is a majority-minority jurisdiction?

If so, there are ways to say those things in Spanish, but not before the editorialists take a few clases de español.

From Page 7 of the last issue of the InTowner:

CORRECTION

In last month’s Letters column, under the sub-heading “Coverage of Former Mayor Williams’ Plan to Dump MLK Library Praised,” we printed a short letter submitted by Robin Diener in which an unintended typo emerged which somewhat muddied her message. In her sentence complimenting our Associate Editor’s extensive reporting on this controversial matter, the reference to his final report published in 2006 as having “caped a year of outstanding work” [ital supplied] was meant to have read as capped. And, so there be no misunderstanding, it was we and not our correspondent, who failed to catch the disappearance of that most important second letter “d.”

Like other City Paper staffers, I’m bugged by the NYT’s new clicking dictionary feature. It does come in handy, though, when the article is about the National Vocabulary Championship.

This is a group that knows what is pulchritudinous and what is pulverulent. This is a group that knows who is nidicoulous and who is nidifugous.

Now granted the article is about a vocab test, not a spelling bee, but clicking “nidicoulous” doesn’t give back any results. That’s because according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the NYT’s reference, it should be spelled “nidicolous.” If you’re going to plague readers with pop-ups, please get things right.

Test yourself.

“The war went well—at first.”

“Tenet, who rarely talked to reporters directly, even called a New York Times reporter on deadline to ensure this point would make it into the paper—and it did.”

“In May 2000, Les, the Defense Department physician detailed to the CPD and one of the intelligence community’s leading experts on biological weapons, was able to meet Curveball—briefly.”

The excerpts above come from Hubris, the Michael Isikoff–David Corn collaboration on the runup to the Iraq war—and required reading for anyone wanting to know just how many lies paved the way to our modern quagmire. The authors break a host of new revelations and couch the entire affair in a readable narrative—packed with telling details about the U.S. government’s highest-ranking officials. It’s the sweetest of reads—except for its extensive reliance on drama dashes.

You know the drama dash—it’s everywhere. It’s the magician’s approach to narrative: Now, folks, direct your attention to what I have in this box—ta-da! It’s a cheap, shortcutty route to infusing your writing with suspense and surprise—and it’s on the rise in publications across the land.* It’s also yet another of journalism’s lame attempts to kowtow to the short attention spans of nonreaders—whoever they may be. The idea here is that the more rabbits you pull out of the hat via the drama dash, the more readily you’ll rope in readers—and keep them.

Drop the drama dash—and fast.

* wild guess

While we’re on the grammar-nerd kick over here at City Paper, let me chip in with a grievance of my own: Hey, Wall Street Journal, those aren’t acronyms.

Today’s A-hed profiles a Web site called AcronymFinder, whose purpose is to catalog all sorts of alphabet-soup terms. Thing is, in this case, not all of those terms are acronyms.

OK, some of them are acronyms: the Texas Anesthesia Conference for Obstetricians, aka TACO, indeed makes for a nice, pronounceable acronym. That’s the thing: If it ain’t a pronounceable word, it ain’t an acronym. It’s a plain old abbreviation.

The WSJ, to its credit, acknowledges the controversy halfway through its story (compelled, in all likelihood, by an offended copy editor). But, judging from the editing of the story, it seems “acronym” mania has won the day at the nation’s second-largest circulation newspaper.

The New York Times, on the other hand, maintains the acronym-vs.-abbreviation distinction. According to a 1999 edition of the NYT’s Manual of Style and Usage, “Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.” Furthermore, if an acronym is more than four letters, it’s rendered in mixed case, not all caps. (For instance, this week’s magazine feature on Abe Foxman refers to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “Aipac.” You’ll also see “Unicef” and “Unesco” a lot.)

And what about us? Well, we render abbreviations and acronyms alike in all caps. The big, controversial exception around here is Pepco. Up until about a year ago, we always did “PEPCO” (Potomac Electric Power Co.), but the company had actually preferred the mixed-case rendering for years before that. Finally last year, we decided that “PEPCO” looked kinda stupid since not even the company itself used all caps—you can’t even find a reference to Potomac Electric Power on their Web site—so we switched. (That wasn’t before we sloppily used both versions in one item in March.)

Is it a huge loss if the distinction between “abbreviation” and “acronym” is lost? Nah, not really—but it does suck a little bit when words lose their precision. Why have a distinction without a difference?

I hate the serial comma: the final comma in a series, e.g., “this, that, and the other thing.”

The one after “that” is the serial comma. Associated Press style, and the style at most newspapers, is to not use the serial comma, i.e., “this, that and the other thing.”

Most magazines use the serial comma. The Washington City Paper uses it, too (even though we otherwise adhere to AP style), and since it’s my job to enforce our house style, I dutifully add that last comma anytime it’s missing from someone’s copy.

That doesn’t mean I have to like it. My argument against the comma is simple: It’s ungrammatical. Here at the copy desk, we hunt down and fix phrases such as “I ate tuna, and crackers for lunch” or “I came for lunch, but stayed for dinner.” In both instances the final clause refers to the same subject as the first; they are properly cast, respectively, “I ate tuna and crackers for lunch” and “I came for lunch but stayed for dinner.”

But the serial comma ignores this inconvenient fact. If you have three things for lunch, you magically don’t have to obey the rules of grammar! Now you can say, “I ate a can of tuna, some sweet corn, and crackers for lunch,” or “I came for lunch, got drunk, and stayed for dinner.”

I understand the arguments in favor of the serial comma. Sometimes series-laden sentences can get confusing. In such instances, even the AP Stylebook says it’s OK to use a serial comma to help the reader out; the example it gives is “The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper mental attitude.” I’m not convinced that even that sentence is ambiguous enough to require the final comma. But hey, if it makes it easier for a reader to scramble through a thicket of a sentence, then Godspeed, foul squiggle.

Even better is to recast sentences that require a serial comma to make sense. The Laughorist, a blog that often touches on the mechanics of writing, got my attention with an argument for the serial comma (Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott approved; so did Emdashes.) It comes from the Chicago Manual of Style and gives the following example: “With gratitude to my parents, Mother Teresa and the pope.” Sorry, but that’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little painless surgery: “With gratitude to the pope, Mother Teresa and my parents.” (And before you ask, “pope” isn’t capitalized without the pontiff’s name in either AP or Chicago.)

All that said, I have no intention of attempting a serial-comma coup here at the City Paper. I think history counts at institutions, and anyway I’m pretty sure I’m alone in my hatred of this unnecessary, ungrammatical, and decorative piece of punctuation. Using it there didn’t even hurt. Much.