Which Punctuation Mark Are You?

We took this quiz, and here are our results. Our inner potty-mouth wonders what to make of the fact that we are, apparently, a colon:

You Are a Colon

You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren't concerned much with theories or dreams... only what's true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren't subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

Punctuation Mark Are You?

If a Goat Had My Bagels

... I'd hunt him down, too:

Woman seeks lost pet goat with bagels
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BENSALEM, Pa. -- A Bensalem woman has been walking around in the snow with a bucket of bagels and goat feed trying to locate her lost pet Buckwheat. Iris Star said Buckwheat apparently worked her way through a metal cattle fence on Saturday and wandered off from the three-acre property where she has lived for 10 years.

Police have been getting reports of the goat ramming front doors with its 6-inch horns and leaving messes in driveways in the area.

During Tuesday's snow, Star took her bucket to Lower Southampton Township, the area of the latest sightings.

Star said Buckwheat is like a pet and is just seeking companionship and warmth.

Alas, this headline should have said "Woman with bagels seeks lost pet goat." Those darned modifiers. So tricky.

That's Some Old News

This headline greeted us today on the Seattle Times' Web site:

Spokane photographer held in California killing in 1983

They waited an awfully long time to report that story. Either that, or the copyeditor should have written this:

Spokane photographer held in 1983 California killing

This is Not Becoming

A sad story in yesterday's news told the tale of a bride who died in her groom's arms during their first dance.

The Associated Press describes how the "Big Fat Greek Wedding" had captivated the students at the elementary school where the bride taught. Unfortunately, the reporter included a big fat grammar error:

The wedding had became a project at Davie Elementary School, where Sjostrom taught first grade. Fellow teachers provided the wedding gown, the flowers and decorations. One of them, an ordained minister, performed the ceremony. (See the story.)

The wedding had become a project. And now, we must go weep in a corner.

Freakonomics, Grammarrgh!

There's a type of word we love: the portmanteau.

It's a word made of two blended together. Frathletic, for athetic frat boy. Funsanity, for fun and insanity (great on Friday nights!). And freakonomics, for freak and economics.

The Freakonomics blog in today's NYT has us freaking out, just a bit.

To an economist, then, it is no shocker that the average American now consumes almost 60 pounds of frozen potato products per year, more than triple the amount consumed per person in 1965.

And at the same time, we’re burning less calories. No surprise...

Doesn't that just sound barbaric? It should be FEWER calories, because you can (and probably should) count them individually. Burning less fat, and fewer calories. That's the American way.

Here Comes the Sun

John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun strikes again:

Are you ready for the Day of Judgment?

Are you in a good place? Have you examined your conscience? Have you gotten yourself right with grammar? Because National Grammar Day is coming, and those of you who are shaky, those of you who are backsliding, those of you who are lapsed, what do you think is going to happen to you on that terrible day, when gerunds blanket the earth, double genitives blot out the sun, and participles fall from the sky?

Get ready, get ready, while there’s still time.

By way of rescuing the wayward, You Don’t Say offers a small primer today on some of the more common lapses. Look carefully to see whether you have been a miserable sinner, and repent while you still have time.

Read his tips...

Blogging the Super Bowl

The game hasn't even started, and already an announcer just asked a player, "How do you handle the enormity of it all?"

Enormity. This is not a synonym for enormousness. It's a whole separate word and it means "extreme evil." Some soft-hearted types have given up, and they accept "enormity" where "enormous" belongs. We think this is addle-pated. We once received a catalog from Williams-Sonoma promising we would not believe the "enormity" of the cookies they had for sale. We didn't buy them. We don't need to taste an evil cookie, not when there are so many pure and delicious ones running about.

Courtney Love: At Least It Was a Complete Sentence

Courtney Love had this to say to Access Hollywood about the incredible downward spiral that is Britney Spears:

"I know the exactitudes of what's going on, having been there," she told Access Hollywood. "Here is what's gonna happen if she doesn't get help — something very, very bad is gonna happen."

Courtney does a masterful job of demonstrating her psychic abilities (yes, something bad is bound to happen to Britney Spears; some might define losing custody of one's children as "bad"). But exactitude is not a fancy way of saying "exactly." The word means precision, or the quality of being exact. Which sort of makes her misuse of the word ironic, no?

There's an Elephant in the Room

We found this in today's New York Times:

“There’s been more people hurt by roller coasters in the last 10 years than there has been by elephants. Nobody wants to ban roller coasters,” says Minneapolis police Sgt. Timothy Davison. He may not be an expert on roller coasters, but does know a thing or two about elephants. Before he became a cop, Davison was an elephant trainer and caregiver. Davison worked regularly with the Shrine Circus and disputes the contention by activists who charge that circus animals are routinely mistreated.

It's a classic subject-verb disagreement problem. "There's" is a contraction of "there is." "Is" is a singular verb. People...yes, that would be plural. "There've" looks weird. We're not sure it's really a word. But "there's" isn't correct, here.

Far be it from us to cast judgment on elephant trainers turned lawmen, but we'd like to think someone who's sworn a vow to serve and protect includes Mother Grammar among his constituents.

Grammar in Advertising

Truth in advertising: We're old enough to know that we're not going to get that. We do, however, think we can expect better grammar than this:

It's fewer wrinkles, people. FEWER. We'd settle for less wrinkly, though. Here, and in real life.