Dreyer's English
Page 5
People who are perfectly content to keep up with the Joneses—and I’ll wager the Joneses are good and tired of receiving Christmas cards addressed to “the Jones’s”—sometimes balk at the sight of the Adamses, the Hayeses, the Reynoldses, the Dickenses, and the rest, but balk all you like, that’s how the game is played.*26 If it’s bothersome to you, you may address your Christmas card to, say, “the Adams family.”
As to the possessives, then, a relative piece of cake:
the Trumans’ singing daughter
the Adamses’ celebrated correspondence
the Dickenses’ trainwreck of a marriage
29.
If Jeanette has some pencils and Nelson has some pencils and Jeanette and Nelson are not sharing their pencils, those pencils are:
Jeanette’s and Nelson’s pencils
But if Jeanette and Nelson reject individual ownership and pursue a socialist policy of collectivization for the betterment of humankind, those pencils are now:
Jeanette and Nelson’s pencils
Well, truly I suppose they’re then the people’s pencils, but you get the point.
30.
Q. Is it “farmer’s market” or “farmers’ market” or “farmers market”?
A. I’m presuming there’s more than one farmer, so out goes “farmer’s market.”
As to the other two, is it a market belonging to farmers or a market made up of farmers?
I say the latter, so:
farmers market*27
(I’m reasonably, hopefully certain that no one will mistake a farmers market as a market in which one might purchase a farmer.)
31.
Though it has its champions, the style decision to elide a title’s The in a possessive construction, as in:
Carson McCullers’s Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
will always make me wrinkle my nose, and it can lead to such eyebrow raisers as
James Joyce’s Dead
which looks to me like either a shocked headline or a bit of Dublin toilet graffiti.
SEMICOLONS
32.
I love semicolons like I love pizza; fried pork dumplings; Venice, Italy; and the operas of Puccini.
Why does the sentence above include semicolons?
Because the most basic use of semicolons is to divide the items in a list any of whose individual elements mandate a comma—in this case, Venice, Italy.
Now, I might certainly have avoided semicolons by reordering the elements in the list, thus:
I love semicolons like I love pizza, fried pork dumplings, the operas of Puccini, and Venice, Italy.
But semicolons are unavoidable when you must write the likes of:
Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Farewell, My Lovely; and One Time, One Place.
Because:
Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Farewell, My Lovely, and One Time, One Place.
Well, how many novels is that, anyway? Three? Five?
Lucy has fascinating taste in novels, I have to say.
But if that were the sum total use of semicolons, they would not invite, from certain writers who should certainly know better, stuffy derision.
For instance:
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.*28
I counter this with a lovely remark by author Lewis Thomas from The Medusa and the Snail:
The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
I’ve been known to insist that the only thing one needs to say in defense of semicolons is that Shirley Jackson liked them.*29 In support of that, I’ve also been known to whip out this, the opening paragraph of Jackson’s masterwork The Haunting of Hill House:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.*30
One paragraph, three semicolons. One might, I suppose, have replaced those semicolons with periods and started each following clause anew, as an independent sentence. The result, though, would have been the unmooring, the disconnection, of these tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas, and a paragraph that grabs you by the hand and marches you from beginning to end would have devolved into a collection of plain old sentences.
While we’re here, I’d also like to celebrate that paragraph’s final comma, perhaps my favorite piece of punctuation in all of literature. One might argue that it’s unnecessary—even grammatically uncalled-for—but there it is, the last breath of the paragraph, the author’s way of saying, “This is your last chance to set this book down and go do something else, like work in your garden or stroll down the street for an ice cream cone. Because from this point on it’s just you, and me, and whatever it is that walks, and walks alone, in Hill House.”
I dare you to walk away.
PARENTHESES
33.
A midsentence parenthetical aside (like this one) begins with a lowercase letter and concludes (unless it’s a question or even an exclamation!) without terminal punctuation.
When a fragmentary parenthetical aside comes at the very end of a sentence, make sure that the period stays outside the aside (as here).
(Only a freestanding parenthetical aside, like this one, begins with a capital letter and concludes with an appropriate bit of terminal punctuation inside the final parenthesis.)
34.
This is correct:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (and her eerie husband) think about anything.
This is not correct:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (and her eerie husband) thinks about anything.
An “and” is an “and,” and the use of parentheses (or commas or dashes) to break up a plural subject for whatever reason does not negate the pluralness of the subject. Now, if instead of writing “and,” I’d written “to say nothing of,” “as well as,” or “not to mention,” then I’d have made me a singular subject:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (to say nothing of her eerie husband) thinks about anything.*31
35.
TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE; OR, DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping down to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.
36.
A magazine journalist of my acquaintance once confided that he avoided parentheticals because his editor, when looking to cut words in the interests of minimizing the writer’s use of precious print real estate, would home in on them and delete, delete, delete.
BRACKETS
37.
&nbs
p; Brackets—or square brackets, as they’re called by people who call parentheses “round brackets”—serve a limited but crucial purpose.
First: If you find yourself making a parenthetical comment within a parenthetical comment, the enclosed parenthetical comment is set within brackets. But it’s extraordinarily unattractive on the page (I try to find a way around it [I mean, truly, do you like the way this looks?], at least whenever I can), so avoid it.
Second: Any time you find yourself interpolating a bit of your own text into quoted material (a helpfully added clarifying first name, for instance, when the original text contained only a surname) or in any other way altering a quotation, you must—and I mean must—enclose your interpolation in brackets.*32
Ah yes, there’s an exception, as there always is: If in the context of what you’re writing you have need to change, in quoted material, a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence to a lowercase one, or vice versa, you may do that without brackets.
That is, if you’re quoting George Bernard Shaw’s “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it,” you’re well within your rights to refer to Shaw’s observation that “patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction,” etc., etc.
And in the other direction, quoting Shaw’s “All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity,” you’re allowed to do this:
“Nothing is so cruel as impunity,” Shaw once commented.
The exception to the exception arises in cases of legal documents and extreme and especially contentious scholarship in which you need to keep your nose utterly clean; then you’ll find yourself doing this sort of thing:
Shaw once wrote that “[a]ll government is cruel.”
I can’t say it’s pretty, but it gets the job done.
39.
[SIC] BURNS
Let’s take a moment to talk about [sic]. Sic is Latin for “thus,” and one uses it—traditionally in italics, always in brackets—in quoted material to make it clear to your reader that a misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact you’re retaining for the sake of authenticity in said quoted material is indeed not your misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact but that of the person you’re quoting. As, for instance and strictly speaking, you might do here, in quoting this piece of text I 100 percent made up out of thin air and didn’t find on, say, Twitter:
Their [sic] was no Collusion [sic] and there was no Obstruction [sic].
But seriously now:
If you’re quoting a lot of, say, seventeenth-century writing in which there are numerous old-fashioned-isms you wish to retain, you’d do well, somewhere around the beginning of what you’re writing, perhaps in an author’s note or a footnote, to make it clear that you’re quoting your venerable material verbatim. That’ll save you a lot of [sic]ing, though you might occasionally drop in a [sic] for an error or peculiarity whose misreading or misinterpretation might truly be confounding to your reader.
Writers of nonfiction occasionally choose, when they’re quoting a good deal of archaic or otherwise peculiar material, to silently correct outmoded spellings or misspellings, irregular capitalization, eccentric or absent punctuation, etc. I’m not a huge fan of this practice—mostly because I think it’s not as much fun as retaining all that flavorful weirdness—though I can understand why you might do it in a work of nonfiction that’s meant to be popular rather than scholarly. If you’re going to do it, again, let the reader know up front. It’s only fair.
Do not—not as in never—use [sic] as a snide bludgeon to suggest that something you’re quoting is dopey. By which I mean the very meaning of the words, not merely their spelling. You may think you’re getting in a good shot at a writer whose judgment you find shaky; the only person whose judgment is going to seem shaky, I’d suggest, is you.
It’s the prose equivalent of an I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt and just about as charming.
And for pete’s sake, if you’re an American quoting British writing, or vice versa, please do not do the following, as I once, hand to God, saw in a U.K. newspaper:
…which it said had been “a labor [sic] of love.”
QUOTATION MARKS
When I was a youth growing up in Albertson, Long Island, a virtually undetectable suburb of New York City, my mother would regularly send me off on my Schwinn to the nearby bakery for a rye bread (sliced) or a challah (unsliced) or six rolls for eight cents each (or was it eight rolls for six cents each?) and, on the best days, a box of black-and-whites. (Black-and-white cookies, as gentiles of my acquaintance tend to call them.)
In the bakery, above the rye bread, was a sign that read:
TRY OUR RUGELACH! IT’S THE “BEST!”
I was fascinated. This, as they say in the comic books, is my origin story.
So, then, to break it down for you:
40.
Use roman (straight up and down, that is, like the font this phrase is printed in) type encased in quotation marks for the titles of songs, poems, short stories, and episodes of TV series.*33 Whereas the titles of music albums,*34 volumes of poetry, full-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and TV series themselves are styled in aslant italics.
“Court and Spark”
Court and Spark
“Song of Myself”
Leaves of Grass
“The Lottery”
The Lottery and Other Stories
“Chuckles Bites the Dust”
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (also known as, simply, Mary Tyler Moore)
It’s a fairly simple system, then: little things in roman and quotes, bigger things in italics.*35
41.
Individual works of art—named paintings and sculptures—are generally set in italics (The Luncheon on the Grass), though works whose titles are unofficial (the Victory of Samothrace, for instance) are often styled in roman, without quotation marks.*36
42.
One also sets off dialogue with quotation marks, though some writers (E. L. Doctorow, William Gaddis, and Cormac McCarthy come immediately to mind) like to do without, to which I simply say: To pull that off, you have to be awfully good at differentiating between narration and dialogue.
43.
Once upon a time, what I’d call articulated rumination was often found encased in quotation marks:
“What is to become of me?” Estelle thought.
Though that, over time, gave way to this:
What is to become of me? Estelle thought.
And now, more often than not, you’ll simply see:
What is to become of me? Estelle thought.*37
That last is best.*38
44.
One does not, as in the rugelach example cited above, use quotation marks for emphasis. That is why God invented italics.
Such quotation marks do not, strictly speaking, come under the heading of scare quotes, which are quotation marks used to convey that the writer finds a term too slangish to sit on its own (I have old books in which young people listen not to jazz but to “jazz”; it makes me chortle every time) and/or is sneering at it. Avoid scare quotes. They’ll make you look snotty today and, twenty years on, snotty and comically obsolete.*39
45.
Do not use quotation marks after the term “so-called.” For instance, I’m not
a so-called “expert” in matters copyeditorial
I’m simply a
so-called expert in matters copyeditorial
The quotation-marking of something following “so-called” is not only redundant but makes a likely already judgmental sentence even more so.
Though I won’t object if you feel compelled, as I often do, to use quotation marks after a “known as,” pa
rticularly if you’re introducing a strange or newfangled term. For example, I might refer to
the long-haired, free-loving, peace-marching young folk known as “hippies”
if, that is, I were writing in 1967.*40
46.
In referring to a word or words as, indeed, a word or words, some people go with quotation marks and some people prefer italics, as in:
The phrase “the fact that” is to be avoided.
or
The phrase the fact that is to be avoided.
The former is a bit chattier, I think, more evocative of speech, the latter a bit more technical- and textbooky-looking. It’s a matter of taste.
47.
An exclamation point or question mark at the end of a sentence ending with a bit of quoted matter goes outside rather than inside the quotation marks if the exclamation point or question mark belongs to the larger sentence rather than to the quoted bit, as in:
As you are not dear to me and we are not friends, please don’t ever refer to me as “my dear friend”!