I just read an article that clears up some confusing points about apostrophes: “Lame Duck Punctuation.” I wish I could say I’m pleased, but I’m not. I have a feeling I’m going to be cranky all day.

Two things bothered me about the article. First, the title – “Lame Duck Punctuation” – isn’t helpful. The writer’s point is that punctuation errors make you as ineffectual as a lame duck. But many people (I’m one) instantly associate “lame duck” with politics, not punctuation. Why confuse your readers right off the bat?

The second irritation is the way she explains pronouns like his, hers, yours, ours, theirs, and its. She wants you to remember that they belong to a group called pronomial pronouns that don’t get apostrophes. Ever.

She’s right, of course. But sheesh – why make it sound so complicated? I have a Ph.D. in English, and I can’t remember ever seeing the word pronomial before.

There’s a much simpler way to learn how to use these pronouns. (And there’s a bonus – you’ll have a handy memory device in case to use if you need it later.)

Here it is: Think about the word his. No apostrophe, right?

All those pronouns work the same way: his, hers, yours, theirs, ours, its. No apostrophe. I love rules that don’t have exceptions!

All of these examples are correct:

That book is his, not hers. 

The dog buried his bone.

The dog buried its bone.

His is the blue Subaru.

Hers is the blue Subaru.

Easy, isn’t it? And you don’t need that duck!

In my previous post, I wrote about the word slunk, which showed up in a recent New Yorker article even though it’s nonstandard.

Today I’m inviting you to read a paragraph from the article about Joan Rivers. It is stunningly well written!

Many professionals do what author Emily Nussbaum did: end some of their paragraphs with a climax or a restatement sentence. (Don’t get nervous about the fancy term “restatement”! All it means is that you say pretty much the same thing you just said – in a different way.)

Putting this extra little polish at the end of a paragraph is a practice we should imitate. (But don’t overdo it! Notice that I said “some of their paragraphs.”)

Here’s the paragraph about Joan Rivers, with the restatement sentence in blue.

For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn’t cross over.

You can read the entire article here.

Portrait of Joan Rivers courtesy of Underbelly Limited

Today I’m going to talk about a blind spot in my brain – one of many, I’m sure!

Lately I’ve been going through some New Yorker magazines that piled up while I was working on my book about Shaw.  I came across a wonderfully written article about comedian Joan Rivers that you can read here. (I’m going to add something admirable about Rivers that wasn’t mentioned in the article. She used to donate all her nightclub fees to a charity that provides nutritious food to patients in New York.)

There’s something odd in that article, however. Take a look at this sentence:

Eventually, exhausted, she slunk back to her teen-age bedroom.

Slunk? Obviously that was wrong. But then what was the right verb? Slank? I – Jean Reynolds, your self-appointed language expert – couldn’t come up with an answer to that question.

I did the obvious thing and went to the American Heritage Dictionary website to look up the past tense of slink. Guess what: it’s slinked. Slunk isn’t listed.

But doesn’t it sound right? Turns out I’m not the only person who feels that way.  Novelist Ursula Le Guin used slunk in an article also published in the New Yorker:

On a banquet night in Berkeley once, when somebody jogged my arm and my beer went straight down the back of Mrs. Robert Heinlein’s dress, I slunk away into the crowd.

I did some sleuthing (don’t you love these -sl words?) and discovered that Oxford University has already admitted slunk into its dictionary. (Did you know that lexicographers from one dictionary might disagree with lexicographers at another dictionary?)

Isn’t language interesting?

Portrait of Joan Rivers courtesy of Underbelly Limited

I just published “The Grammar Wars…And Why You Should Avoid Them.” Click here to read my article. 

Contrary to what we’ve been told, English grammar is doing just fine!

Today I’m going to give you a glimpse into what lexicographers do. (They’re the professionals who add, delete, and edit dictionary definitions.)

One recent Saturday morning before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I heard a startling remark during an MSNBC conversation between host Ali Velshi and journalist Erin Laughlin. Laughlin was saying that “So far, not a single Russian troop has been seen.”

I heard English change, right there on my TV. For some years now the word troop has been acquiring a new meaning and usage. I’m sure that lexicographers were very interested in that MSNBC broadcast!

Here’s what I mean. When I was growing up, troop always referred to a group of soldiers or Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. I belonged to Girl Scout Troop 4 in Bethpage, New York. Sometimes several troops would get together for an activity. Five troops might include 50 or 60 Girl Scouts.

Nowadays, though, troops means “soldiers.” For example, here’s an excerpt from the December 15 New York Times. The subject is the American military withdrawal from Iraq:

Although Thursday’s ceremony represented the official end of the war, the military still has two bases in Iraq and roughly 4,000 troops, including several hundred who attended the ceremony. At the height of the war in 2007, there were 505 bases and more than 170,000 troops.

That 170,000 troops means 170,000 soldiers.

What’s so exciting (or disturbing, depending on your point of view) is that Erin Laughlin used troop as a singular word to mean “one soldier”: “not a single Russian troop has been seen.” That’s new! I haven’t heard anyone else use “one troop” that way. (Back in 1955, we would have thought she meant “not a single Russian military unit has been seen.”)

I can guarantee that Erin Laughlin’s remark was recorded and noted in a vocabulary log. If many more people start using troop that way, eventually we’ll get a new dictionary entry.

And that, folks, is how dictionaries are updated.

Grammar Day was March 4 this year. I always abstain from the annual Grammar Day celebrations, and all of my friends know why: I think grammar is bogus.

Grammar rules and terminology rarely help with a writing problem – quite the opposite, in fact: grammar often leads to confusion.

Monday’s New York Times is a good example. The news summary on the front page featured this sentence:

Angry over blackouts and rising electricity bills, a small but growing number of Californians is going off the grid.

Obviously “a number” requires a singular verb – is. Except that in this case it doesn’t. The actual article got it right:

Angry over blackouts, wildfires caused by utilities and rising electricity bills, a small but growing number of Californians in rural areas and in the suburbs of San Francisco are going off the grid.

In English a number is plural, but the number is singular.

A number of Californians are going off the grid.  (are is plural)

The number of members keeps dropping.  (keeps is singular)

Grammar – as I said earlier – is bogus. It’s not a set of guardrails to keep you from making a mistake. Instead it’s an attempt to explain – in fancy language – what the English language is doing. The language always comes first, and then grammarians rush in to try to explain what’s happening.

Often that process doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Grammarians may have to do some fudging to come up with a plausible rule to explain the crazy usages that have found their way into English.

But if you can’t rely on grammar rules, how can you be sure you’re writing correctly? Luckily there are some common-sense answers.

For starters, you can do what I’ve done (and continue to do): read some good books about English usage. I highly recommend Theodore Bernstein’s books, for example.

(Did you notice that I said usage rather than grammar? Usage does not claim to be a divinely inspired answer to our questions about language. It deals with language problems in a practical way: how do today’s educated speakers handle a particular issue?)

Another strategy is to make sure you have as much experience with English (preferably good English) as possible, especially if you’re an international learner. Read! Watch TV! Talk with a native speaker!

And you can make a resolution that you’ll always, always have someone look over your writing before you submit or post it.

My friend Jenna just sent me a list of mistakes that don’t matter, created by Bill Murphy at Inc.com.

I always have fun with these lists! There’s usually a mixture of good and bad advice, and that’s certainly true of this list. (For starters, most of them have nothing to do with grammar, and a number of them aren’t wrong and never were. I’ll explain those points in a future post.)

Let’s talk about items 1 – 5 today:

1.  Bill Murphy wants us to forget about “his or her” and use their instead. Bravo, Bill! I’ve taken a vow that I will never use the unspeakably clumsy “his or her” again.

Scared to do it? Listen: nobody will even notice. I just published an academic book, and there’s not a single “his or her” anywhere. I used they every time The copyeditor didn’t change any of them.

2.  Who vs. That: Murphy says that you shouldn’t worry about this one. I’m usually careful with it, but I do use who when I write about someone’s pets (or my own). Again, nobody’s going to notice.

3.  Less vs. Fewer. Murphy says you shouldn’t worry about it. I agree, and I’m going to push this  further than he did. It’s a bogus rule. In 1770 a writer named Robert Baker said that he thought “less” should be reserved for uncountable nouns (like coffee, snow, and smoke). Suddenly a rule was born!

English had been using less for countable nouns (“less potatoes”) for almost a thousand years before Robert Baker made his suggestion. What do you think are the chances of breaking a language habit that’s been around that long? Nil.

Many people overuse fewer – another argument for using less. (People, stop saying “fewer than one!” Gack!)

4.  Skipping the -ly in adverbs. Yes – sometimes.

In May, when the Kentucky Derby comes along, I’ll be writing a post about this line from “My Old Kentucky Home”: “The sun shines bright/On my old Kentucky Home.” Stephen Foster didn’t think he had to use brightly, and you don’t have to either.

5.  That vs. Which. I think Murphy missed the boat with this one. He quotes a rule that I find weird: “Use that if cutting the clause would change the meaning of a sentence.” I’m a pretty smart person, but that rule sounds like gobbledygook to me.

Here’s a rule that I (ahem!) invented that works great for me: Never let a comma touch the word that. It’s a rule of thumb and doesn’t work 100% of the time. But my goodness – it’s untangled so many punctuation problems for me!

It solves the that vs. which problem in the wink of an eye: I recommend taking the downtown shuttle, that runs every 30 minutes between 7 AM and 7 PM.

Nope! There’s a comma next to that. I’d change it to this: I recommend taking the downtown shuttle, which runs every 30 minutes between 7 AM and 7 PM.

We’ll do 6 – 10 in a future post.