What a Girl Wants

What a girl wants (and what a girl needs) is a grammar lesson, apparently. Pop singer Christina Aguilera delivered a baby boy Saturday, and her official Web site carried this message (via MSNBC):

Aguilera said that Saturday was "a very joyful and special day for Jordan and
I."

For Jordan and ME. Would she say Saturday was a very special day for I? Probably not (though one never knows, with pop singers). When in doubt whether you should use "me" or "I," drop the other person from the sentence. You'll know right away.

Look! SPOGG on About.com

The gracious Richard Nordquist has written a lovely bit about our upcoming celebration, National Grammar Day, on his About.com blog.

Do you have ideas for how we can honor the mother tongue this March 4th (which happens to be the only day of the year that doubles as an imperative)?

If so, please send them in!

Does Verbing Weird You?

Then perhaps you might like this piece we wrote for Encarta:

Verbs Gone Wild: Are We Taking Too Many Liberties with Language?

Here's the Beef

Newspaper reporters are taught to shun the serial comma. So, in a sequence of three things--apples, oranges and pears--the newspaper reporter would NOT put a comma in front of the and (even though someone writing a book would).

This is the only explanation we can give for this sentence, which is positively screaming for a comma (and maybe the sort of surgery that separates conjoined twins):

The matter is not simply that his writers were on the picket line on a primary eve that saw both a formerly fat former governor of Arkansas introduce a sandwich called the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel, the presently zany former governor of Alaska, advise an audience at Phillips Exeter Academy to smoke marijuana, as if boarding-school students needed such encouragement.

The sandwich is called "the Huckaburger." It's not "the Huckaburger and Mike Gravel," even though that's how anyone not from a town called Hope would read it. When a sentence sprouts a complete second half, you need to insert a comma before the conjunction.

Sometimes, when you have two complete sentences joined by a conjunction, you can drop the conjunction and insert a semicolon, but not in this particular example, or on Slate in general because its former editor, Michael Kinsley, hates semicolons. That's awfully rich for a guy who was still wearing handsome little gold-rimmed spectacles in the 1990s.

A Bit of Vulgar Latin

A headline on Slate misspells the Latin expression ad nauseam.

Change vs. Experience, ad Nauseum

While MSNBC shoved campaign narratives down my throat last night, I heard very little about the fabled change vs. experience debate. The story line that was all the rage in Iowa and the days after had suddenly evaporated from the collective consciousness of the punditry. For some reason, nobody thought to mention what Hillary Clinton's strong early returns might mean: that New Hampshire voters might have chosen experience over change....(more)

If one must misspell a pompous Latinism, we rather like this version. It calls to mind museum, and what would be more...interesting than a museum of nauseam? We're stepping now into the projectile wing; please put on your protective eyewear.

The Little Things

When you're holding a sign with your name on it and making a national television appearance, here are some things you'll want to check:

Capital letters?
Yup.

Apostrophe after the I?
Check.

Spelling his own name correctly?
Whoopsy-daisy.

Unless this is some sort of subtle Iraq war reference that we just don't get, it's Joaquin. With a u in it. And this, my friends, is probably the saddest thing we've seen all week, even if we wouldn't mind being the sassy June Carter to his strung-out Johnny Cash. We proofread Joaquin! Call us!

When Spice Girls Blog

No wonder there's no Grammar Spice. This comes from Sporty's blog:

Woo hoo!! 2008, Happy New Year everybody, it's going to be a good one.

Myself and all the Spiceys had a great Christmas. We caught up with our families, ate lots of mince pies and got some well-needed sleep!

Sigh. It should be:

Wahoo! [Or, if you went to the school of Homer Simpson, "wuhoo."] It's 2008. Happy New Year, everybody. It's going to be a good one. [Excitement is no excuse for a run-on sentence.]

The Spiceys and I had a great Christmas. ["Myself" can never be the subject of a sentence, unless it's a sentence explaining why "myself" can never be the subject of a sentence.]

We caught up with our families, ate lots of mince pies, [unless you're following AP style, which omits the comma] and got some well-needed sleep. [well-needed...really? How about much-needed? Or just sleep?]

The Poor, Innocent Juggler

We belong to several discussion groups for writers. While we don't ordinarily point out errors in e-mail settings, the following comes from a discussion about typos:

If you happen to notice a co-workers zipper is down (highly un-professional, but it can happen to any of us) do you discretely let them know so they can save face; or do you go for the juggler & tell everybody in the board room how un-reputable they are as a manager or layer based on a rather simple error.

Sigh. Where to begin? Some errors are easy.

• Co-worker's (or colleague's) needs an apostrophe and no hyphen.
• Unprofessional doesn't need a hyphen, either. Also, is it unprofessional to have a fallen zipper, or is it unprofessional to be looking at a colleague's bathing-suit zone?
• Discreetly has two e's in this context. It means tactfully or subtly. Discrete with one e means completely separate or unconnected--chances are if you went that route, your colleage wouldn't hear you.
• Unless many coworkers are running around with open barn doors, you have to say "him or her" to keep your subject and object parallel.
• Go ahead and write out the whole "and." Ampersands should be used with company names, some academic references, when space is limited, or in artsy-fartsy logos.
• Un-reputable is not a word. Disreputable is.
• And for the sake of clowns, leave the juggler alone. Go for the jugular--if you must.

Yahoo! That's Harsh

Xavier D. sent the text of the message Yahoo! sends its discussion group administrators when people ask to join.

Apparently, Yahoo! has software that automatically kills applicants if the group administrator doesn't intervene in two weeks. Either that, or they have the pronoun problem properly known as an ambiguous antecedent.

Here's their language:

Pending members require your approval. If you take no action, they will automatically expire after 14 days.

The "they" appears to apply to pending members, which makes us wonder what sort of automatic death might occur... sudden cardiac arrest? Futuristic disintegration? Total petrification?

Of course, they probably meant the requests would expire after 14 days. That would have been a good thing to write.

We Like Dessert, But...

This comes from the New York Times:

This year celebrities seemed incapable of limiting their misdeeds to isolated bad choices: a flop movie, a regrettable interview quote, an on-air feud with Rosie O’Donnell. At times, their behavior was flat-out abnormal. If you were hoping to see your least favorite Hollywood princess fall on her crown, 2007 provided a parade of tempestuous starlets shaving heads (Ms. Spears), crashing sports cars (Lindsay Lohan) and checking into rehab (Ms. Spears and Ms. Lohan) or prison (Paris Hilton).
If your taste in just desserts ran more esoteric, the displays of personal collapse available on the Internet were downright Dada-esque: you could watch the former television action hero David Hasselhoff splayed across the floor of his hotel room while eating a hamburger; see Vanessa Hudgens, the squeaky-clean star of “High School Musical 2,” posing in the nude; or hear Alec Baldwin haranguing his 11-year-old daughter in a profane voice mail message that could have come straight out of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

It's not just desserts. It's just deserts--as in, what you deserve. Which is probably not dessert, if you're a misbehaving celebrity.