It's always sunny in Philadelphia

Every comma is precious. Especially the ones that tell you what a prepositional phrase is trying to do.

Don't fear the seekers

If it ain't one comma thing, it's another. Here, the missing Donner Party creates yet another Halloween dilemma. Perhaps you had settled on going as Beautiful Clean Coal, rather than an open stylebook; now you have to add Job Seeker to your list of possible costumes. Alas, it appears the editors have already done so.

Thanks, as always, to Powderhorn for the share.

Shoot, the piano player!

Yes, that's been quite enough breathless promotion of the Stupidity Tax for the year, but even the dozenth lottery story of the week can contain a punctuation gem. Imagine, if you will, these sentences:

You can't win the lottery honestly.
You can't win the lottery, honestly!

... and then see if you still want to lay off all your copy editors.

Because these things never happen in a vacuum, there's also this rendition of the president's excuse-making for his desert friends:

Like, the thing about discourse markers, you know, is that sometimes, well, you get a really different meaning if you don't set them off with commas. (I know, right?) As in, he probably didn't mean "you know you're guilty"? Here's the AP's version:

“I think we have to find out what happened first,” Trump said. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.”

Treat commas right so they'll treat you. Right? Think of the Donner Party.

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. 

Dinner party or Donner Party?

Where's that pesky Donner Party comma when you need it?

(Captured in the wild by Language Czarina; credit for the name goes to the paleontologist Michael Fuhlhage.)

Emergency hyphen drop requested

Sometimes upstyle headlines are their own reward.

As your students ponder where they would put the hyphen, a friendly reminder that even if your goal is a major-market TV station, those boring old editing skills might come in handy.

Wandering comma of the month

No doubt it's busy days at The Washington Times, but -- do you suppose that first comma in the second graf might want to go before "with Washington"? Just so we know who's fighting with whom and what's being dragged into which?

Alas, it's fixed -- after a fashion -- online:

Five months later that Libyan offensive has stalled amid heavy urban fighting with Washington finding itself being dragged further into the conflict, a development that analysts claim will loom large over the Iraqi-led offensive to take Mosulfrom the Islamist terror group, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

Just a reminder that you can't save the world if the world can't tell what you're doing to save it.

Today in punctuation

The occasional comma that makes all the difference:

A North Carolina fourth-grader has earned a lifetime of free haircuts after accepting a challenge from his barber.

“He said if I bring my report card back and it’s straight A’s I will get free haircuts for the rest of my life,” Kamarian Fox, 9, told Fox & Friends’ “Hometown Hero” segment Saturday.

Kamarian got his first free hair cut at the Next Level Barbershop in Gastonia, N.C., last week after proudly showing barber Mike Shelton his latest report card.

And the result?

“I was just blown away, honestly,” Shelton told Fox & Friends.  “Honestly, I forgot to be honest. He came up to me and handed me the report card. I was like, man what is this and I opened it up and I just seen A, A, A, A.”

The video clip is less ambiguous, because it includes some stuff Fox left out here. Rather than "I forgot to be honest," it comes out "Honestly, like, at first ... honestly, I forgot, to be honest with you, Clayton." (And the part after "A, A, A, A" makes it even clearer: "and I was like, oh, man, i remembered.")

We could have an interesting talk about whether this qualifies as doctoring a quote or just neatening it up around the edges a little (and whether Fox could have been politer to its sources with better use of partial quotes and paraphrasing). And we could have a wonderful time figuring out how this became the evening's No. 4 story (below). But one would hope we can all agree that there's a difference between "I forgot to be honest" and "I forgot, to be honest."

Here comes one now

That pesky apostrophe! Never around when you need it -- at least, if your intent was to capture the meaning of the original hed:

 Pesky spelling, too.

Let us eat, Jane

Sorry* to be so adolescent about major news items, but for the foreseeable future, this is going to come to mind when the prescience of Our Founding Fathers is mentioned:

Jamestown's colonists resorted to cannibalism during the "starving time" winter of 1609-10, archaeologists confirmed** Wednesday.

In a presentation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, archaeologist Doug Owsley presented the reconstructed skull of a 14-year-old English girl, named "Jane" by the researchers, discovered at the site of the fort and bearing the marks of butchery.

Perhaps we can now think of the Jamestown comma as a regional variant of the Donner Party comma.


*OK, not very
** Kudos to the AP for not saying "confirmed"

No, they didn't

Let's chalk this up to overstyling -- grabbing for the first style rule that looks handy, rather than one that fits the content at hand.

They said, 'What?!' follows the form given -- twice -- on page 304 of the 2012 AP Stylebook for a direct-quote clause that follows the attribution. (Franklin said, "A penny saved is a penny earned.") But that's not what "said" is doing in this hed. The Twitter users here are saying a lot of things, but "what?!" isn't any of them.
 
The hed is trying to represent an "echo" question, often used to clarify something you either didn't hear or didn't believe.* The form is clear when you substitute another verb for "say":

I saw the candidate eating the rat before the witches' sabbath.
You saw what?

If you need to show emphasis (you probably don't), you might want to tweak the typeface:

She said, "Just had my bag peed on by a bomb-sniffing dog."
She said what?

So unless anyone said "what?" you say "said what?" rather than "said, 'What?'" And don't say the stylebook says otherwise.

* More than you may ever want to know about echo questions can be found in Huddleston & Pullum's awesome Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Everything from soup to hay

For a newspaper that ((back in the days of plush staffing) used to have a "Southern editor" -- shouldn't y'all find the punctuation in the hed a little embarrassing?

Stop eating children

That pesky comma of direct address! You can't fool it by putting the thing you're addressing at the beginning of the hed. It will have its revenge.

The command after the semicolon helps a bit, but I don't think it's conclusive. This is a letter to the editor, so the Donner Party meaning could be a plausible reflection of the get-off-my-lawn randomness of day's letters.

Whether the intended meaning is accurate is another question altogether. Its intent appears to be drawn from the last sentence:

It's time people start being responsible for their own futures, and not rely on the government for handouts.

But the letter as printed makes no mention of Occupiers or Occupying. The Observer is known to whack the letters pretty hard, so it's certainly possible that the cutting-room floor is littered with 700-some carefully crafted words damning the Occupiers for the stalinist lizard creatures they are. Or the hed writer might have simply made it up. And fundamental cluelessness about the Donner Party comma hardly fills one with confidence.

Bring your own gloves

That pesky comma of direct address! Why does it give Our Nation's Tabloids such fits?

No, you can't say the comma is hidden by the subject's hair. Then I really wouldn't know whether you meant "Come, Clean Mr. Cain" or "Come Clean, Mr. Cain."

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:
Read more »

So -- what kind of doctor are you?*

Shurely some kind of comma is still customary between the parts of the compound predicate? (First flagged by JKaufman at TCEs.)

On a related note: The little plot summaries at Netflix frequently make him "Who" on second reference. That seems to be carrying AP style a little too far.


* Worth the wait here.

Time experts like an arrow

Today's quick hed quiz: What kind of experts, and what are they saying?

The Edna Buchanan lede isn't much help:

It may have been the water that worked against him.

Or he might have split up or he might have capsized -- what's "it," and who's who? (Thursday's lede, for comparison: "It was the family’s autopsy that found what the investiga­tors’ could not — a bullet and evidence that banker David Widlak was shot in the back of the head.")

As Macomb County Medical Examiner Dr. Daniel Spitz examined David Widlak's badly decomposed body, the damage caused by its submersion for nearly a month could have contributed to his missing the contact bullet wound on the back of the banker's neck, Wayne County Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt said.

Whatever the case, Oakland County Medical Examiner Dr. L.J. Dragovic, who performed a second autopsy on Widlak at the family's request, said suicide was highly unlikely.

If you've been keeping up with the story, you might have been able to track all the players so far (though you might also wonder why Schmidt isn't also a "Medical Examiner Dr.," given that both the Freep and the News have indicated in the past that he qualifies).

Owing to the Freep's bizarre no-jump policy, this graf becomes the lede of a separate story in 13A:

Forensic experts said what evidence a crime lab finds on the bullet, bullet fragments and .38-caliber revolver registered to Mt. Clemens bank president and CEO David Widlak is critical.

That's one thing if the bullet has already been introduced. It's quite a different thing if it hasn't.

At the very least -- could we please be a little more careful with the heds at the top of the front page? (At the Web site's front page, someone kindly added the missing comma: "Water, time, experts say.")

Punctuation fail

Here's another of those occa- sional cases in which it seems well to listen to the rigid prescriptivists. Quick, what's your first reading of this hed?

I got more or less what I'd get from "Victories give Red Sox hope," where the order of the two objects is pretty much interchangeable:

Give me the ball
Give the ball to me

Make sense? A version of something is being given to some parents? Well, if you've been keeping up with this tale (and when Fox starts showing an interest in your local news, that's a sign), you know better. What's being given is the parents' version, and it would have taken the square root of no time at all for someone to put an apostrophe in the hed and made the point clear. Sheez.

I am somewhat annoyed at this juncture, because editors are still losing jobs. The people whose job it is to make small and quick and obvious fixes like this, along with the vast array of other, subtler, more complicated stuff they do, are being "involuntarily separated" from news organizations even as we speak.* The people who sign, or used to sign, their paychecks are making those decisions because they're convinced the audience doesn't care -- it hasn't yet reached the threshold where it's going to stop providing eyeballs to advertisers out of disdain for sheer technical ineptitude. That's not very promising in the long term, and in the short term, it simply sucks.



* This is not an exaggeration.

Get your hand off that key!

Scanning the Freep from afar, an alert reader wonders about the punctuation in the second and third grafs here, from the latest installment in the Kwame Kilpatrick saga:

The indictment did not include public corruption charges, a point Kilpatrick spokesman Mike Paul seized upon.

He called speculation that the former mayor was involved in bribery schemes "lies from the pit of hell!"

"The FBI found nothing remotely close to that in their investigation because it never happened!"

Specifically, why does the ex-mayor's spokesman get to award himself a couple of bangers, whereas the feds (one can only hope that the Freep's relentless drive toward tabloidism will turn them into G-men before long) are stuck with some measly periods and commas?

Granted, some quotes are just not amenable to the magic of the exclamation point, so you can see why the Freep resisted the temptation. We'll just Photoshop one in to an actual quote for you here, by way of illustration:

"Investigation into corruption in municipal government continues!" U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said late Wednesday.

And yes, in case you were wondering, that's how the quotes and attribution appear in print as well. Is there a good reason for this sort of punctuational deck-stacking?

Best guess (as always, better or more informed ones are welcome), the response is pasted from an e-mail. That's not illegitimate, though it's fairly common to distinguish written responses ("said in an e-mail") from spoken ones -- particularly when there's a graphic feature that the writer is trying to reproduce. In an unorthodox case like this one, that practice looks particularly important.

I think there's a case for losing the damn thing altogether, particularly in the second example; paraphrase and trim the quote down to "because it never happened," stick in some attribution (which wouldn't hurt anyway), and pick up with the following sentence. The first is trickier. When it comes to correcting the comma splices and greengrocer's apostrophes that writers stick into other people's quotes, I'm in the "people don't speak punctuation; just fix it" camp. The question mark is the obvious exception. I wouldn't make the same case for every stray exclamation point, but "lies from the pit of hell!" is the sort of case that tests the rule.*

We don't know, of course, how much tweaking might have already been done. Evidently, the original has already been truncated. What if it said "LIES from the pit of hell!!!!!" -- are we justified in taking it down to one exclamation point, or should we go further?

Thursday-morning-quarterback-wise, I'd push for adding "in an e-mail" to the attribution. Then I'd see if anybody wanted to talk a bit about whether the pervasive reliance on electronic text for attribution calls for some new style guidelines.

* Probably because it sounds like one of those Evan Meacham panels from the golden days of "Doonesbury."

Silly rabbit

OK, friends and neighbors, we can probably agree that the Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas has gotten a little slack with its edpage commas:

Hey Mayor Foxx, keep your nose out of county operations

Hey Obama White House, your double standard is showing

Hey candidates, come back and pick up after yourselves

It's a mild (and hard to confuse, though as cliches go it's getting annoying in a hurry) form of the Donner Party comma: your friend, the comma of direct address. It'd be good to stop things before they spread beyond the letters, though, because that pesky comma can make a difference. A "sorry congressman" isn't unheard of, but he's not necessarily the same one you address as "sorry, congressman."