Adventures in punctuation

There's still quite a bit to get through in Fox's coverage of the Amazon contretemps (let alone the week's Fox coverage of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez), but the punctuation hijinx in this short-lived frontpage story are amusing:

Outspoken singer Cher took to Twitter on Friday to slam New York City's role in Amazon's decision to walk away from its planned headquarters there.

The Jeff-Bezos lead company announced Thursday it was turning back on its plans to build its second headquarters in New York City after backlash from lawmakers, notably Ocasio-Cortez, who bemoaned the project.

What on earth could cause Fox to make common cause with Cher, Jeff Bezos and Andrew Cuomo? Tune in tomorrow for more!

The mysterious Oriented-business

Tell us more about that law Stormy Daniels was accused of violating down there in Columbus, Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper!

Police said they began enforcing the laws for sexually oriented-business employees touching patrons this past fall. Franklin County Municipal Court records show 25 people have been charged under the illegal touching law so far in 2018, up from 16 in 2017 and seven in 2016.

Even with its editing offshored to a Gatehouse hub, the Dispatch hasn't lost its high-school-student-like obsession with hyphenating compounds. This one's particularly charming because it sticks to the AP rule about not hyphenating compounds with -ly adverbs, yielding the memorable "sexually oriented-business." I suppose we're lucky it stopped there.

H/t to operative "Natasha" of the Central Ohio bureau. 

Zombie report: Stop and smell the algae

Remember all those hyphens you saved in "high school student" and "ice cream cone"? You could spare one for your zombie friends here. Or -- here's a thought -- simply unstack the modifiers.

Clue-free rules

If you think your rules for hyphens require you to create compounds where compounds fear to tread, please think again. This case is not about flag-free speech at schools. It's a free-speech case* about wearing the American flag as clothing at school. Even if you shrink at saying "top court" or "high court" for the Supreme Court, surely you'd make an exception here, just to unstack "school flag free speech case."

* I can't find the story on the Eagle site; this appears to be the hometown version of the original. The court has declined to grant certiorari. I think it's kind of cool that an amicus brief was filed on behalf of the Tinker plaintiffs.

Hyphens: Ur still doin it wrong

Q. Should "square foot" be hyphenated when used in front of a noun. For example "a 100 square-foot covered porch..." – from thornton, Pa. on Sat, Feb 21, 2015

A. Correct.

Partially correct at best -- yes, "square foot" should be hyphenated, but AP style also says pretty clearly that compounds of numbers and dimensions are hyphenated before nouns they modify. If you should hyphenate "the 5-foot-6-inch man" and "the 5-foot man" (pp. 76), you'd certainly want to hyphenate the whole of "100-square-foot covered porch." Why would the rule go away just because "square foot" is two words? After all, the "hyphens" entry itself says "use hyphens to link all the words in the compound except the adverb very and all adverbs that end in -ly" (p. 292).

"The fewer hyphens, the better" is the wrong way to go about setting up a rule. What you want is the right number of good hyphens and no bad hyphens. If that means you write "ice cream cone" on one page and "ice-cream-cone-shaped UFO" on another, fine. That's not inconsistent; it's consistent about avoiding foolish consistency.

Three decade-old zombie rules

Q. Which is correct: The 20-million-year-old scroll or the 20 million-year-old scroll? – from Tucson, Ariz. on Fri, Feb 20, 2015

A. The second, though prehistoric dates are better phrased without a compound modifier: an object estimated to be 20 million years old. That long predates humans so it couldn't be a scroll.

With respect to our friends at Ask the Editor (who, to their great credit, introduce the annual revisions to the gospel in front of a room full of rabid style nerds, which takes no small amount of sand) -- no. That's just wrong, and it's wrong on a lot of levels, so stop it before you do any more damage to the cause of style.

AP style, like many, exempts number compounds of the million, billion and percent flavor from the general rule on hyphenating preposed modifiers -- reasoning, quite sensibly, that "$7.82 billion budget" and "4 percent increase" simply don't create the sort of ambiguity you get from "man eating blancmange" vs. "man-eating blancmange." The problem comes when the little compound turns into a bigger compound: in the example I still use in class, when a dozen photos taken 20 or so years ago become "two decade-old photos." It's charitable to call that one ambiguous; the word you want is "wrong."

You could always write a rule that says "use hyphens to be clear" and count on the grownups in the room to figure it out on the fly. They generally do, but human beings -- especially copy editors -- are rule-loving creatures. If you're going to write a hyphen rule, write one that isn't likely to paint you into a corner: "Hyphenate the whole damn compound."

While you're at it? "Prehistoric" doesn't seem like a very intuitive cutoff point for when a bunch of numbers ought to be clumped into a compound. And if you think something couldn't be a scroll because it predates humans and their silly artifacts, you haven't been paying attention.

Man eating tiger

We're more into the discourtesy zone than the realm of out-and-out confusion here, but Fowler's point remains: We have hyphens in part so that it's easy to tell "man eating tiger" from "man-eating tiger." Wichita got it right (at least once) in the text; why not spare a hyphen for the hed?

Man editing tiger

Q. I'm confused. In one case, you say you are inclined not to use a hyphen for "copy editing symbols." Then a few entries later, you say to include a hyphen for the compound modifier "copy-editing experience." In both cases, "copy-editing" is a compound modifier. So what is the rule? – from Tallahassee, Fla. on Mon, Aug 05, 2013

A. The first is a noun phrase, no hyphen. The second is a compound modifier with a hyphen.

How many correct answers our friends at the AP could have provided:

• Got us! Five hundred points to Rymratdor, or whatever. We owe you a beer, dude
• This is a news agency, not a centuries-old seat of religious learning. You want a different rule, write your own rule
• Yeah, good point. Whatever you do to the first one, do that to the second one too
• Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then
• OK, why not try it as one word?

Instead, we end up with a "rule" that's meaningless, mostly because it tries to make a technical distinction under which the two terms it distinguishes are, um, indistinguishable.

True, "copy editing" is a noun phrase: Copy editing is fun! So is "copy editing symbols"; it can be an object (a list of copy editing symbols) or a subject (Copy editing symbols drive journalism students nuts), but it's still a noun phrase. So is "copy-editing experience." So, for that matter, is "the copy-editing experience entailed by this year's take on your annual Thanksgiving column," and when you combine it with the VP "cost me half a millimeter of right molar, thanks," you have a sentence.

When it comes before a noun, like "symbols" or "experience," "copy editing" is also a compound modifier. Several such compounds are usually hyphenated: noun-adjective (wine-dark sea) and noun-participle (man-eating tiger), for two. Style guides from Fowler through the AP remind us that hyphens aren't there for decoration but for meaning; they're how we tell deep blue water from deep-blue water.

If you want to read "copy editing" as a noun phrase rather than a noun-participle combination, it's as much a noun phrase in one example as the next. It's equally a compound modifier in both cases. There's no consistency in hyphens, true,* but if you can't have a little consistency in how you describe your grammar, the reader might conclude that all that copy-editing stuff is just smoke and mirrors anyway. And thus is another hill lost in the War on Editing.

* Why the OED hyphenates "ice-cream cornet" but not "ice cream cone" is one for the nearest sphinx. (To this day, though, there are shops that insist on hyphenating "ice-cream cone.")

Man eatin' tiger

Dear New York Post: If you must make junior-high-level puns on people's names, and if you must commit your g-droppin', and if you must refer to your candidates by given name on second reference -- would you at least be so kind as to provide the hyphen that lets us distinguish a Scotsman eating blancmange from a Scotsman-eating blancmange?

Thank you.
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Man-eating catfish

Clear things up for me here, Old Hometown Newspaper. Should I go slow because none of the wake signs have been reinstalled, or should I go slow because a couple of "no wake" signs have been reinstalled?

Sure, you could mark the compound with a hyphen; indeed, that's probably the better choice here, since there doesn't appear to be room for quotes.* But you have to mark it somehow. Otherwise -- it being the Mighty Tar and all -- you risk having readers who can't tell a man eating catfish from a man-eating catfish.

The rules aren't here to insist that you hyphenate "ice-cream cone" and "high-school student." They're here to remind you that there really are differences in meaning that you can affect through the Miracle of Punctuation. Good writers are supposed to be able to tell the difference, but given that good writers are in short supply on the best of days, good editors are supposed to set an example for them.

* On the bright side, it appears that nobody at the OHTN tried to make it "go slowly."

I'll have the chicken tartare

Even at the Nation's Newspaper of Record, idle hands are Satan's maracas:

Because of an editing error, a review in some editions last Sunday about Polpettina, a restaurant in Eastchester, N.Y., described a chicken entree incorrectly. It is half of a roasted chicken, not a “half-roasted” chicken.

Here's the offending sentence from the original lede:

It's a pizzeria at heart, but what turns heads are the sparkling salads, the way-above-average pasta dishes, a profoundly good half-roasted chicken, and trimly tailored desserts.

... and the perfectly good substitute you see today:

It’s a pizzeria at heart, but what turns heads are the sparkling salads, the way-above-average pasta dishes, a profoundly good roasted chicken half, and trimly tailored desserts.

Allow us a guess here: The writer turned in a lede that used the fairly common (and hardly ungrammatical) menu and cooking term "half roasted chicken." Working on autopilot, some editor saw two modifiers together and assumed they were a compound, rather than a sequence, and our review is suddenly much more interesting to the Health Department than once it was.
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Why he no?

Ah, the woes of upstyle.

Well, and the woes of sticking to the "no articles" rule even when the article would give the old parser a well-deserved break.* And of not hyphenating compounds that have been hyphenated since the early 19th century (exemplified in current usage, not to rub it in or anything, by whoever wrote the hed on the homepage).

And -- at Fox, of all places! -- of quoting Marx in heds.

* That's why Your Editor collects heds of the form "Smith gets shot at tourney."

Six million-dollar men

Today's quiz: How many bones, and how old?

If you get to look at the picture accom- panying the story, it's a little easier, and there's also a clue if you see the cutline: the number appears midsentence, so you get a bit of a style bump from "2 million-year-old" rather than "two million-year-old." But it's hard to avoid reminding people that most hyphenation rules, however good they are for however vast a majority of cases, need a footnote on the order of "Break this rule if you're at risk of looking dumb."

We're into the second week of the semester, so today was the first chance to talk about ambiguity. Much of the grammar that editors deal with isn't "bad" or "wrong" as much as it is right about several things at once. Here are a couple examples of what happens when modifiers go feral:
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Man eating tiger

Well, that had to hurt. Let's see what the AP had to say:

The mayor of Vilnius acknowledged Tuesday distributing a deliberately altered picture to The Associated Press and other news organizations intended to dramatize his anti-parking campaign, an image that then was published in newspapers around world.

The AP withdrew the photo, transmitted on Aug. 3, and notified its customers of the breech* Monday, as soon as it discovered the deception.

And the photo dramatized his anti-parking campaign how? Was he lying in the street, eyeball to eyeball with the offending car, when it went after him? Or was he ...

Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas' office sent a photo showing him riding an armored personnel carrier, from which two other people were erased.

Oh. What Vilnius has is a car-crushing mayor, not a car crushing mayor. As old Fowler put it, there's a difference between a man eating tiger and a man-eating tiger.

Important notice: Fun with hyphens aside, Regret The Error is an invaluable part of the daily news diet. Craig is doing good work over there.

*Shurely "breach"?

Skip the parade

It's National Grammar Day, and what are you doing about it?

Allow us to suggest that you skip the parade, take a pass on the ritual which-burning, and Just Say No to any party invitations for which you start by denouncing Those Kids and Their Damn iVocabulary. Instead, take a long walk with your sweetie in the woods and admire the gentle wh- movement of the hardwoods. Introduce some undergraduates to the austere beauty of the coathanger diagram. Don't cringe when you're offered "a free small curly fries" in return for documentation of a hat trick*; show me why it's the same sort of noun phrase as "the next speaker of the House."

But don't -- do we have to rub it in? -- be the goofbag who gives "grammar" a bad name by conflating it with the sort of obsessive hyphenation that leads to "High-school graduation rates jump." Grammar wants you to be clear. It doesn't want you to be silly.

We'll be celebrating up here, of course. Czarina will be plowing through some grading toward an incoming freelance project. I'll be sitting around the lab looking at things "grammar" seems to do in real life. Bernie's playing stalk-and-release with a gingham mouse** even as we speak. But we're not going to be sticking random boneheaded hyphens into perfectly good headlines. That's a hell of a way to spend a holiday.

* Not likely tonight, if you're scoring along at home.
** They're like 79 cents at the pet supply store on Woodward. Amazing. You need more gingham mice in your life.

Hyphens: Your little friends!

Who did what to whom?

In Tunisia, a hairdresser-turned-despot’s wife, Leila Ben Ali, now pronounced on all public matters.

It really does matter where and how often you use the hyphen. Here, Ms. Ben Ali is the wife of a hairdresser turned despot. If that's actually the case, I think the Times has been holding out on us.

Keep opinion to self

This just in from a fount o'knowledge that serves a US Airways hub:

The US Airways jet that landed in the Hudson River on Thursday had engine trouble on the same route two days earlier and the pilot considered an emergency landing, several passengers and CNN.com reported.

Any reason for sourcing this to passengers and a TV network, rather than to the NTSB's examination of the plane's maintenance records (which the AP used in its Monday story)?

The description of a stalled engine on fire raises questions about whether the aircraft should have been back in the air two days later. On Thursday, the pilot of Flight 1549 was forced to ditch his Airbus A320 into the Hudson River after the two engines failed from a “double-bird strike” moments after takeoff from LaGuardia.

Just a few quick questions:
1) What's the normal turnaround time to inspect (and fix if necessary) an A320 engine after a compressor stall?
2) What indications do you have that the procedure wasn't followed?
3) If you're still having trouble with (1) and (2), what makes your opinion about whether the plane "should have been back in the air" worth sharing?

That's not to say the "raises questions" idea is permanently ruled out, but it ought to be restricted to cases in which the questions can't be answered. In this one, the reporter's job is to find out the answers, and the desk's job is to flag suspect phrases until they're fixed.

By the way? It wasn't a "double-bird strike," which would be a strike by a double bird. It was a "double bird strike." We need "double" to modify "bird strike," not "double bird" to modify "strike."

That Monica-Lewinsky scandal

Speak of the devil and he will surely park his SUV in front of your driveway. Here's an alarming bit of hed punctuation by the folks who insist on hyphenating "million" and "billion" compounds:

Court may reduce Exxon-Valdez damages

Ack! The story's been touched by human hands, obviously, because Freep style has invaded the lede:
The U.S. Supreme Court seemed inclined Wednesday to reduce the $2.5-billion award of punitive damages to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

But did it occur to nobody that proper names are a very special case of compound modifier and don't need to be hyphenated to make their unity clear? That anybody who would write "Exxon-Valdez damages" is the sort of person who would get the Monica-Lewinsky scandal mixed up with the Sacco-Vanzetti affair?

Please. Read text before following "rules." Edit for meaning. Have clue.

The when-in-doubt-hyphenate cousins down the road in Columbus commit a different sort of fumble here, but it still reflects blind fear of the stylebook, rather than reasoned use of the tools at hand:


You can read "heart transplant" as a compound if you want, I suppose. Or you can read it as a set of cumulative modifier. Either way, what exactly is the worst-case risk of confusion we've wasted our editing time on preventing?

Man eating blancmange

The hyphen was placed on earth so that fallen personkind, lost in the Forest of Sin, could tell the difference between a man eating blancmange and a man-eating blancmange. In other words, it's there to make meaning clear -- not just to show the slot you've wreaked some sort of damage on the copy that passes through your basket.

The cousins downtown have a few strange hyphen habits -- for instance, hyphenating preposed million or billion compounds, like the now-legendary "$8.4-million settlement." Most stylebooks consider that one unnecessary, because there's utterly no chance of confusion (unlike, say, "the 15 million-year-old fossils," which follows an AP style mandate into the Slough of Ambiguity). Too bad the Freep doesn't spend more time hyphenating for meaning:

Prosecutors and lawyers for Fieger and codefendant Vernon (Ven) Johnson spent the rest of Monday's hearings debating Fieger's vindictive prosecution claims.

Ideally, that sort of noun pileup wouldn't happen in the first place. But if it does, could the first responders give a little more weight to clarifying it?