Elongated unsolicited diet advice

So, two questions that we seem to ask every year around this (Western calendar) time:

1) How long will it take the Freep to copy-paste its annual list of  "things you should know about paczki"?
2) And how long until the Freep breaks its own prescriptive rule on the singular?

OK, you peeked. The answers are "six paragraphs" and "not long at all." (Hint: If you say "a paczki," it's singular, no matter how many annoying, tired, over-hyphenated modifiers show up between the article and the noun.) Nonetheless, a few changes from previous years:

No elongated yellow fruit this year! Specifically, no "beloved jelly-filled and calorie-laden Polish pastries"; no "nummy waistline-busters." No insistence that "'paczkis' is not a word" (if you can spell it, that's a pretty sure sign that it's a word, whether you like it or not). In that light, an interesting tweak to #3: This year's "paczki are thought of" vs. last year's "the paczki is thought of."

McCartney-preposition-wise, I see the no-singular-paczki rule as a strange hill on which to plant one's flag on. If you're cool with "bedouins" (to stay among languages you can see on signage in Hamtown), you shouldn't have a complaint with "paczkis."

While we're at it: Don't do a comma splice in the hed if you don't have to (and you don't). Please proof the copy before you print it; if that's meant to be a force-hyphen at right there, it didn't take. If we've managed to get through the rest of the edition without Frenchifying "Fat Tuesday," I'm not sure there's a need to start now. And is there a reason for shifting from justified to ragged type in the same story?

The editor's work is never done. I'll take a custard.

Elongated grammatical pastries

Two things are always true about Paczki Day in Detroit:

1) The local fishwrap will be at pains to remind you that "paczki" is plural and that you should NEVER EVER use it as a singular
2) It's going to be a footrace of a slugfest of a grand slam dunk of a Hail Mary to see what gets to the finish line first, singular "paczki" or the Elongated Yellow Fruit. And it's close again this year:

 There's another one in the cutline, if you're scoring along at home: "adds butter to a paczki." (Previous paczki whinges here, here and here.)

It's nice, in a way, to observe distinctions like paczek/paczki. I'm almost tempted to call it quaint, except that questions about when foreign words get to retain their own plurals and when we assign them whatever we like can turn into larger social issues before we quite realize it. If you're going to maintain that "paczki" is only and always a plural, though, you might want to assign the same person to read all components of the display with that idea in mind. You could call that person -- I don't know, a copyczker or something.

Elongated yellow fail

No, no, no. An essential characteristic of a properly constructed Elongated Yellow Fruit is that it's definite. "A popular orange vegetable" might as well be a sweet potato, and "a furry rodent" could just as easily be Alvin the Chipmunk or Squirry the Squirrel or Boris the Undead Rat from the Path Lab. The weather gods do not listen to them. The reference must be at least to "the furry rodent," and for best results, insert an adjective: "the avuncular furry rodent."

Nor is it "a shadow." The groundhog cannot use its little groundhog fingers to make a cute bunny or a horsie or a Dalek. The groundhog needs to see its own shadow. 

Too much space to spend complaining about a post-Groundhog Day brief? Imagine the trouble we'd save if you simply stopped running the damn things.

Fox weirds verbing: Double downed

Looks like we have enough data points for a trend here: Fox moving the inflection from the verb to the preposition, as in the earlier "water-downed." (Alas, it's been fixed in the text online, but the screen grab doesn't lie.)

I haven't seen a slightly different version, in which the inflection in a VP moves from verb to object ("Trump lower booms"), for a bit. Hope it's still out there.

Fox weirds verbing: Watership downed

Another entry in Fox's where-does-that-pesky-inflection-go ledger! Unlike the last installment, which offered a couple of verb phrases ("lower booms" for "lowers boom" and "open fires" for "opens fire"), this one features a phrasal verb -- and, cleverly, poses as a quote without trying to represent one. The lede is standard Fox:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy scorched James Comey in a blistering opening statement at a high-profile congressional hearing on Tuesday, declaring “we can’t survive with a justice system we don’t trust.”

... but the only suggestion of watering down is in the sixth graf:

Gowdy accused Comey of watering down his initial statement on the investigation's findings and making other decisions on his own. While Comey has suggested he acted unilaterally out of concern for the Justice Department's handling of the case, Gowdy questioned why he didn't seek a special counsel -- as he indirectly did regarding concerns about the Trump administration. 

Fox is obviously a busy place these days. Do you suppose there are things Fox doesn't want you to read a lot about?

Fox weirds verbing

Was the morning's lead story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network -- "Trump lower booms on GOP Senate" -- just a glitch? After all, it was fixed ("Trump lowers boom") within half an hour or so. But before jumping to conclusions, consider this:

"Man open fires" was from the early stages of the Texas church massacre, and it too was replaced before long. But with two of them in three weeks, you have to wonder if something's gotten into the water cooler at Fox. Are we going to regularize all these idiomatic verb phrases by moving the inflection to the noun? Can we bring back Tribune spelling, too?

We can't let this one go without a look at the level of booms-lowering in the tax story (which might help explain why it's fallen completely off the homepage as of this writing; hate it when that happens to a lead story). The inside hed (and the link) are fall-off-the-bone milquetoast: "Trump to visit GOP Senate in push to deliver tax 'Christmas present' to Americans." But it appropriately reflects the high drama of the lede:

President Trump is meeting next week with Republican senators in a push to get a congressional tax reform bill on his desk by Christmas, with a final vote purportedly coming as early as Thursday.

Surely there's some Trumpian elbow-throwing, though?

Trump is eager to pass major tax reform -- the first in nearly three decades -- to get his first major legislative victory.

"We're going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas,” Trump said last week. “Hopefully, that will be a great, big, beautiful Christmas present."

Hardly what you'd expect from ... how's that, Oxford English Dictionary?

Amer. slang. to lower the boom on: to inflict severe damage or harsh punishment on; to treat severely; (also) to put a stop to (an activity). Also to lower the boom: to deal a decisive or destructive blow.

No doubt Massster appreciated the effort.

Grammar and the party press

Shouldn't be a surprise that the lead story this afternoon at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network was another tweet from Massster. But we should be a little more careful with the syntax, don't you think?

Seems to me that in the Fox hed, both "failing" and "New York Times" are trying to modify "reporter." But that hardly seems to be where the tweet is going, nor yet the lede:

President Trump on Sunday criticized a New York Times story stating that he has failed to fulfill campaign promises on undoing key Obama administration policies, calling the newspaper “failing” and pointing to early successes like exiting the international Paris climate accord and getting conservative Judge Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

Fox, of course, has a bigger mission at hand:

... Baker is The Times’ chief White House correspondent and is billed as a straight-news reporter.

Last month, the newspaper published a Baker story titled, “A Divider, Not a Uniter, Trump Widens the Breach,” that reads like what could be considered an opinion piece.

Baker referred to  Trump as an “apostle of anger” and “deacon of divisiveness,” before noting that the president’s recent comments about athletes protesting the national anthem “distract from other matters, particularly Congress’ efforts on health care reform."

When reached by Fox News, Baker defended his comments as “analysis rather than opinion,” referring to it as “an observation” based on covering Trump for the past eight months.

The Times did not respond when Fox News asked if Baker is still considered a straight-news reporter.

... Trump has previously referred to the Times as “failing,” and many media watchdogs feel liberal bias is showing.

There's a shirttail for Brian Flood, who appears to be the new hand on the Bias Alert beat. He certainly seems to be developing a distinctive style.

Pesky grammar

Hey, kids! Who wants to be first to diagram this headless relative clause from the Washington Times?

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Islamic terrorists and a National Review columnist, asked in a recent column how a probe created to explore any Trump-Russia collusion became what amounts to a large federal task force throwing all of its considerable power against one man who worked only briefly for the candidate.

As is so often the case, the grammar that gets you in trouble isn't "bad" grammar; it's perfectly "correct" grammar that's correct about more than one thing.

Elongated yellow grammar

Q: So how many sentences does it take for the annual paczki story to break its own prescriptive rule about singularizing the nummy waistline-busters? 
A: One or two sentences, tops. Why should this year be any different? 

Seriously, though. Since you don't follow your own rule, and no one else in town seems to either, shouldn't you consider rewriting the rule?

Grave league

So did the Fair 'n' Balanced network think "bigly" was an actual directive from the Dark Tower, rather than just a popular misreading of Master's voice? Has the party press decided to dispense with grammar altogether and instead communicate by means of farts and tap dancing? Or is something else afoot?

A U.S. Navy warship on Friday passed through waters claimed by China near disputed islands in the South China Sea, the Defense Department said, drawing Chinese condemnation.

A department spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross, said the destroyer ship USS Decatur conducted the transit operation near the Paracel Islands. He said it was done "in a routine, lawful manner without ship escorts and without incident."

Let's not entirely let the AP off the hook. If "drawing Chinese condemnation" is supposed to go with "warship passed through waters claimed by China," the attribution is badly placed. (Since the US and China seem to agree on the basic sequence of events, we could simply leave it until the second graf.) And jargonizing isn't a sign of a healthy, independent press. File "conducted the transit operation" with "executed a search warrant"; if the cops searched a house, say so. But the hed is solely Fox:

A Chinese defense ministry statement called it "a gravely illegal act" and "intentionally provocative." The Chinese navy sent a guided missile destroyer and an escort vessel that "spotted and verified the American ships and warned them to leave," the statement said.

How we got a "'gravely' act" out of that is a question for the ages (though with Halloween at hand, maybe we could ask Sir Graves Ghastly). How we got the morning's top story is a different matter. Fox doesn't seem to know that this is the sort of thing that big powers do sometimes. If China puts up a "no smoking" sign at the Paracels, it should probably expect the occasional destroyer to stand next to the door and blow a little smoke inside. Which seems, literally, to be what got Drudge so excited last week:

Funny, whoever's taunting whom, it's still a sign of the Kenyan usurper's fecklessness. What do you say, Fox commenters?
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Today in verb voice: Flak is unfairly gotten

A lot of flak is gotten by the passive voice over its alleged role in manipulating or obscuring agency. Most of that concern is misplaced; for every "mistakes were made,"  you can find dozens of cases in which the passive voice appropriately fronts the object as the center of attention. Unless you need to specify the office that did the arresting, "Suspect arrested after holdup" will always be a better headline than "Police arrest suspect after holdup." 

The passive isn't inherently suspicious. Nothing was being covered up when Macduff explained the circumstances of his birth to Macbeth. News outlets understand this, even if they (like the pundits they employ) generally can't identify verb voice* at better than coin-toss levels. News tells stories, and the passive voice has been an excellent storytelling tool for decades:

WASHINGTON, Friday, April 14 -- 12:30 A.M.

The President was shot in a theatre tonight, and is, perhaps, mortally wounded. 

Read more »

Find the noun!

"Doc shows" as in "Ben Casey"? Or would you rather just read the story, rather than trying to figure out what the Drudge version means?

"Murder" being a law thing rather than a grammar thing, I'll leave the current top story to others:

 

Micetrap

So if the thing that traps mice is a mousetrap ...

In a potential food poisoning scare,  the FBI says it has arrested a man suspected of contaminating produce at open food bars at several Ann Arbor-area grocery stores with a liquid spray containing mice poison, hand cleaner and water.

... right. Birdwatching, not birdswatching; flyswatter, not fliesswatter*; and mouse poison, not mice poison. You're supposed to fix things like that in the text, not amplify them in the hed. While you're at it, when you've said "mouse poison" and "sprayed on food," it's spray-painting the lily to tack on "In a potential food poisoning scare." Save the space.

And the online display? It doesn't help to say "allegedly" in the deck when the main hed says he did it.





* Though I'm starting to like this one.

Attribution and agency

The passive voice gets a lot of stick (often from people or agencies who have trouble telling passive from active at better than coin-toss consistency), but verb voice is only part of the fun when it comes to assigning responsibility and blame in headlines. The active voice is a clear choice here, because Greta's point is that the divider-in-chief just can't stop dividing:

The Obama administration did it again, went stupid, and went stupid for no reason.

It's not that Greta has a problem with women: "You all know some of my best friends are Negresses I'm a feminist -- love to see women acknowledged for the great things they contribute to our nation." The problem is that the usurper and his minions picked a fight, "a 100% completely unnecessary fight, by booting President Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill and replacing him with a woman." And it would have been so easy to fix:

Rather than dividing the country between those who happen to like the tradition of our currency and want President Andrew Jackson to stay put and those who want to put a woman on a bill, it's so easy to keep everyone happy. We could put a woman on a bill ... but give Tubman her own bill. Like a $25 bill. We could use a $25 bill! Put her picture on that and we could all celebrate. That's the smart and easy thing to do. ... But some people don't think and would rather gratuitously stir up conflict in the nation.

That's pretty much all active, because you need to remember who's to blame for all this. Much as with this headline from last week's Washington Times:

Read more »

Relative clause of the week

Because we have so many other largest bridges by surface area, most of them barely rating a mention on the pothole notoriety chart!

Restrictive "which" tends to take up a lot of the air in the room when relative clauses are discussed.* That may be because it's easier to yell about pronouns than to figure out what a clause is actually trying to do. If editors spend more time pondering and less time ticking the pronoun box, the world would be a happier place this Christmas.

* Restrictive Which would also make a great band name, you have to admit. 

 

Peever and peeveress He created them

How are things on the Get Off My Lawn front over at The Journalist's Bible?

Q. Is it permissible (by today's rules) to start a sentence with "And"? – from Vancouver, Wash. on Thu, Nov 05, 2015

A. Yes, but avoid overusing that phrasing.

Apparently we're not going to set this one to rest without appealing to a Higher Power, so -- how about it, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

OK, so it takes the almighty all of two verses to drop a coordinating conjunction on an independent clause. Surely He wouldn't overuse that phrasing, would He?

• And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.*
• And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
• And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
• And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
• And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
• And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Calm down, ye peevers, and notice a few things God didn't do. "It's official: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," for example. The gloves goeth not on, the gloves cometh not off, and Christmas cometh not early (though -- spoilers! -- that's a plot point in the sequel). But if your question is whether "today's rules" allow you to begin a sentence with "and," the answer is: Yes, and they have ever since "today's rules" meant Shakespeare. And you could look it up, but you (and the AP editors) probably have better stuff to do.

* I know it's traditional to number the verses, but bullets would have looked better on the PowerPoint

You make the call!

OK, "that" fans: What does the photo in question show?

The shortest distance, for me, between two points is that the photo must show him blocked in a car. That doesn't seem to be what the (ahem) viral photo had in mind:

The Ohio State coach, who apparently doesn't drive a golf cart, appears to have found every parking spot open except his own. He could have just accepted the mistake and left his car one spot over, but you don't become a reserved parking spot owner by making concessions.

I could have gotten to that with "photo shows THAT Ohio State football coach blocked in car ...", or even by taking out the random "in,"  to wit: "... blocked car that parked in his spot." Except that, looking in the photo, that's hardly what happened. We seem to have a photo posted by one football player (that may or may not be about another football player) showing what an awesome guy the coach is, as long as the second player doesn't mind bumping over a curb that really shouldn't give him pause, as long as the SUV isn't borrowed from a well-heeled supporter or something.

Yes, it's a bit dismaying that the Brave New Social Media manage to make the same sort of syntactic hash out of a few simple clauses that the boring old media did. On the other hand, it's actually a little refreshing to note that, as of this writing, the local newspaper seems to have ignored the matter altogether.

Hey, it's only the front page

When you're in a hurry and you're trying to cram more stuff than will fit into a relative clause that's supposed to make sense of your story, stuff happens. But two subject-verb blunders in the first two paragraphs -- that ought to be a sign unto you. Not necessarily that writers don't know any rules, but that someone learned the rules wrong and nobody's stepping in to help:

The deaths of two Detroit children who were taken out of public school to be homeschooled and later found in a freezer in March has sparked debate over whether more state oversight of homeschooled students is needed to prevent tragedies.

You answer the "who did what to whom?" question by isolating the smallest moving parts of a clause -- in this case, "deaths spark debate." The story might have started its life by talking about the case (singular) rather than the deaths (plural) and just never caught up with itself. That's a good argument for asking someone to take a deep breath, relax, and at least read the ledes before committing them to print.

Michigan is one of only 11 states that does not require homeschooling parents to register with the state or have any contact with officials. But legislation introduced recently could impact the way homeschooling operates in Michigan.

The next one's going to be on the final again. What is Michigan? One of only 11 states. Which 11 states is it only one of? The 11 states that do not require any contact. As soon as professionals stop getting it wrong, we'll stop testing students for it. Fair enough?

While we're here: I wouldn't make "homeschool" one word, but it's your stylebook; my advice is worth every cent you pay for it. If you must, though, please pay some attention to hyphenation. Don't let the computer make it "ho-meschooling" (p. 1) or "homes-chool" (p. 5).

On the Stuff Editors Used To Remember front, one that someone has apparently fixed in the online edition:

U.S. Army soldier William Woodrow Anderson was in his early 20s when he walked into a church amid the rubble of war-torn eastern Germany during World War II and grabbed a piece of fine satin.

Somebody should have raised that point before the print edition closed: Jena's in the east, but East Germany was a few years away yet. And while we're there, could we ask if the church is called "Kollegienkirchen" or just "Kollegienkirche"?

That's a lot of attention for the two feature stories in the middle of the page, but at least it's a way of not talking about the lead story:
 
Visit Detroit's Eastern Market district any Saturday morning and you'll likely see a line of people waiting to eat breakfast at the popular Russell Street Deli, which not long ago celebrated its 25th year in business.

Yes, the day's most important story boils down to this nut graf:

At a time when Detroit celebrates the entrepreneurial culture with splashy contests like Comerica Hatch Detroit, which awards $50,000 to a winning start-up idea, stories of long-term business survival paint a real-life picture of pain and perseverance.

Good thing the common cold is cured and the Fractious Near East at peace, huh?

Volcano gods angry!

My favorite potential band name from the recent ACES conference came when one of the dictionary editors was defending the standards of the trade: "We're not free-love descriptivists." Few word people are. Some innovations work, and some don't, and it's probably a good idea to hold off on the champagne until you have an idea of where stuff is going and how likely it is to get there. Apparently, that isn't happening downtown (online hed shown above, bullet item from the print edition at right).

Sorry. "Offer" doesn't do that -- or, worse, that's exactly what "offer" does in the OED's first definition:

To present (something) to God, a god, a saint, etc., as an act of devotion; to sacrifice; to give in worship

Yes, there follows a definition ("now chiefly archaic or regional") meaning "to make an offer," mostly of marriage, but it takes the preposition, as in "Lord Lansdowne offered to Miss Molesworth." A similar one, to offer on a house, crops in British, Canadian and US usage. But "offer" meaning "to make an offer to" is a new one on me. Still,  rimrats as well as writers seem to recognize it, it gets passive the way verbs do, and story subjects themselves use it elsewhere in the Saturday paper. It's clearly a verb for some people who write about college football recruiting.

I'd be less annoyed -- well, not much less annoyed -- if I hadn't seen this at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network around the same time:
 

Sure, you can upgrade to first class, but tropical cyclones don't invent weather scales and probably don't even use them. Somebody has to upgrade the poor things; they can't upgrade themselves. You can't make "Ana upgraded" better by making it active; you only make it sillier.

Descriptivism is sort of the grammar equivalent of realism. You don't have to like a regime or what it does or the people who run it, but if it's been in power for six decades, you should probably go ahead and treat it like it's in power. As a corollary: If you don't like seeing jargon slip into news coverage, the time to stop it is now. Tell people to write for their audience, not for their sources. Tell cops writers to stop sounding like cop reports; tell sports writers to stop sounding like the sort of dirtbags who recruit junior-high kids to play Division I revenue sports. Don't be a Free Love Descriptivist -- though if you do, rehearsals are in my basement.

Today in misplaced modifiers

Seems a little judgmental for a headline, doesn't it?

Even for the strange, ammonia-based grammar of Planet Drudge®, that's an unusually bold case of taking a bad hed ("Bumble Bee charged in gruesome worker oven death" is the version as linked at CNN Money) and making it vastly, gruesomely worse.