Offensive terms: Retarded

Style on the Go archive

March 11, 2010: Issue 331

Last week’s discussion of diseases and disorders prompted questions about how we refer to people with intellectual disabilities.
This issue has been in the news lately because Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, called some fellow Democrats “retarded.” (He called them “f***ing retarded,” but the r-word has stirred more outrage than the f-word in this case.)
Many of us grew up calling people with intellectual disabilities “retarded.” But that word, like many words that were acceptable a few decades ago to describe race, has evolved and taken on a negative connotation. Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary says the word is “sometimes offensive,” so we won’t use it.
Borrowing the language that Special Olympics uses, we’ll refer to “intellectual disabilities” and “people with intellectual disabilities” (never “intellectually disabled people” or “the intellectually disabled”).

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Commonly Confused Word Pairs: Every day, everyday III

Style on the Go archive

April 1, 2010: Issue 333

Ha-ha! Gotcha!

Our language plays pranks on us all the time. Take the difference between the adverbs every day and someday:

Every day as an adverb is two words.
“Every day it’s a-gettin’ closer.”

But the similar adverb someday is one word.
“Maybe someday we’ll figure all this out.”

Complicating the issue is the one-word adjective everyday.
“I can’t get enough of this everyday love.”

Name that tune: Can you identify the three songs quoted above and the artists who made hits of them?

E-mail us, and we’ll draw a winner from the correct entries. We promise the prize is not pepper gum or a can of snakes.

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Quotes: With other punctuation

Style on the Go archive

February 18, 2010: Issue 328

Are you in or out?

If the rules about placing punctuation inside or outside quotation marks seem inconsistent, that’s because they are. Here’s a breakdown.

Periods and commas go inside quotation marks:
He said he was confounded by “these arbitrary and capricious rules.”
These rules, which he calls “arbitrary and capricious,” confound him.

The exception is single quotes around cultivar names, which go inside other punctuation:
My favorite new rose this year is Rosa ‘William Strunk’.

For all other punctuation, placement of quotation marks depends on whether the punctuation applies to the quoted material only or to a larger part of the sentence:
We watched the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Have You Seen This Snail?”
Have you seen the Castle episode “The Double Down”?

TV pick: Seriously, watch that episode of Castle. A novelist-turned-detective takes exception to a murderer’s note in which you’re is misspelled. “Whoever killed her also murdered the English language,” he says.

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Foreign Words: Translating

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February 25, 2010: Issue 329

Lost in translation

Years ago, a friend of ours returned to her Illinois home after a stint as an exchange student in France. Her family had strung a beautifully hand-lettered banner across the living room. “Accueil maison,” it read. Translation: “Reception house.”

Her family was trying, of course, to say “Welcome home.” And that banner illustrates the danger of using a dictionary to translate word-for-word into an unfamiliar language.

When we drop French phrases into Country French copy or use Spanish heds for Mexican recipes, we should talk to someone who speaks the language. There’s too much a single entry in a Cassell’s dictionary can’t tell you.
One example: In Romance languages, adjectives must agree with nouns in gender and number. Look up crazy in Spanish and you find loco. Look up friend and you find amigo. So amigo loco means crazy friend. But the dictionary doesn’t explain that if your crazy friend is a woman, the term shifts to amiga loca.

A little help, por favor? Are you fluent or conversant in a language other than English? Let us know, and we’ll add it to our list of foreign language speakers in the BHG Stylebook.

Just for fun: To see how badly garbled a message can get, play with the Babel Fish tool. Translate a phrase out of English and back again. “All you need is love,” after a trip to German and back, comes out “Everything, which needs you, is love.”

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Commonly Confused Word Pairs: Pore/pour

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January 21, 2010: Issue 324

Discrete means separate or distinct:
Changes in elevation divide the great-room into discrete areas for dining, playing, and watching TV.

Discreet means unobtrusive:
When company comes, deep built-in cabinets provide discreet storage for the kids’ toys.

Here are more sound-alike words that frequently cause confusion:

auger: n, a tool for boring
augur: v, to foretell

palate: n, a sense of taste or the roof of the mouth
palette: n, a board for mixing paints or a range of colors
pallet: n, a portable platform

pore: v, to read carefully
pour: v, to rain or to flow

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Computer Tips: Returns, hard and soft

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January 28, 2010: Issue 325

Many happy returns

When you copy text from an e-mail into a Word document, you often get soft returns instead of hard returns at the ends of paragraphs. Soft returns don’t produce paragraph indents or before-paragraph spacing, and they won’t let you select a paragraph with a triple click.

To see the difference in Word, type apple-8. Hard returns show up as paragraph marks. Soft returns show up as left-pointing arrows.

You can change soft returns to hard returns with a Find and Replace. Find ^l (lowercase L) and replace it with ^p.

Give us a “no break”

While we’re on the subject of returns, please don’t use hard or soft returns to force line breaks in layouts. If you do, later edits might create awkward spacing or partial lines of type. To keep two words together on a line, use a nonbreaking space: apple-option-x. To keep a single word from breaking, use the “no break” command: Highlight the word, go to the pulldown menu at the far right side of your toolbar, and select “No Break.”

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Capitalization: Dog breeds

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February 4, 2010: Issue 326

Dear Style on the Go,

What do you have against beagles? You capitalize Labrador, Saint Bernard, and Jack Russell, but beagle gets a measly lowercase b. Is there some kind of breedism going on here?

Signed,
Spotty Dogs Rule

Dear Spotty,
We have nothing against beagles. An impossibly sweet beagle-pointer mix (a boingle, maybe?) rules our house. We’re following Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary, and Web 11 is following a simple rule: Capitalize breed names or parts of breed names drawn from proper nouns.

The Labrador retriever is named for a region of Newfoundland. The Saint Bernard is named for a Swiss hospice. The Jack Russell terrier is named for an English clergyman and dog breeder. The beagle—now please don’t take this personally—seems to have gotten its name from an Old French term meaning loudmouth.

Of course, this rule has exceptions. Shiba Inu is capped, even though it comes from the Japanese words for brushwood and dog. By the way, if you haven’t seen the Shiba Inu puppy cam, check it out. You’ll forgive these little fur balls for their unearned capitalization.

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Common Mistakes: Plurals of proper names

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January 7, 2009: Issue 322

As we sort through our stacks of Christmas cards and presents from 2009, we’d like to remind you of a simple rule: Never use an apostrophe to form the plural of a proper name. It’s an error often committed in holiday letters and on personalized gifts.

Form the plural of a proper name with -s or -es. Sign your letter “Love from the Smiths.” Put “The Joneses” on that doormat or garden plaque.

To make a plural name possessive, form the plural first, then add the apostrophe: “Love from the Smiths’ home to yours.”

In a few cases where apostrophes clear up confusion, we use them to form the plurals of numbers, acronyms, or single or multiple letters used as words. Find examples.

Heh-heh, get it? We appreciate the readers who gently pointed out our errors in the CE Christmas letter. That was our attempt at some “holliday” humor. (And we’ll confess we’re often guilty of skimming those Christmas letters, too.) You’re in better hands, grammarwise, than that letter might have led you to believe. We promise.

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Common Mistakes: Weak ledes

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January 14, 2010: Issue 323

Writing a strong lede can be a daunting task.

That’s why we so often resort to the tired construction above. Even without the cliché “daunting task,” this lede is weak.

Any sentence that fits the pattern “<verb>ing an <adjective> <noun> can be a <noun phrase: synonym for challenge>” tells the reader something she already knows. Instead, tell her how you’re going to help.

Here’s an example (one of the 9 million—no joke—that turned up when we did a Google search on “can be a daunting task”):
Removing lingering odors from the home can be a daunting task, but many easy steps can be taken to insure that embarrassing odors are eliminated.

And here’s our suggested rewrite:
Does your house stink? Here are six easy tricks to eliminate lingering odors.

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