*3 An acronym is an abbreviation pronounced as a word—NASA or UNESCO, for instance. The Brits tend to style these sorts of things as Nasa and Unesco and, worst of the worst, Aids, which makes my teeth itch. Once an acronym turns into a common word—likely you’ve forgotten that “radar” is short for “RAdio Detecting And Ranging” (how could you not forget that?) and that “laser” stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” (ditto)—one drops the capital letters altogether, as I’ve just done.
An initialism is an abbreviation pronounced letter by letter—as, say, FBI or CIA.
*4 If you please, please: You are not Dr. Jonas Salk, M.D. You are Dr. Jonas Salk or Jonas Salk, M.D. Have you forgotten what the D stands for?
*5 By the way, you don’t have a bachelors or masters degree; you have a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Maybe you have both.
*6 The Times is a U.K. newspaper whose name is not, never has been, and likely never will be The London Times. The New York Times is an American newspaper that you may refer to, familiarly, as “the Times,” no matter that it persists in referring to itself, grandly and pushily, as The Times.
*7 “Highlights of his global tour include encounters with a dildo collector, an 800-year-old demigod, and Nelson Mandela.” Was that so hard? And seriously: What sort of global tour was that?
*8 When Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III was filmed, we’re told, the title was tweaked to The Madness of King George so as not to alienate potential attendees—especially ignorant Yanks—who hadn’t seen The Madness of George and The Madness of George II. Though many such too-good-to-be-true stories turn out to be utter malarkey, this one’s partly for real.
*9 Let it be known that on February 2, 2018, when I was supposed to be typing up this section on comma splices, I was instead reading The G-String Murders, a novel by Gypsy Rose Lee, from which these words are taken.
*10 Not to be confused with an utterly correct “But Mom said we could go to the movies.”
*11 The NSA may be reading your emails and texts, but I’m not. If you prefer “Hi John” to “Hi, John,” you go right ahead.
*12 This does not apply to generic references to someone being addressed as “mister,” “miss,” “sir,” or “ma’am,” neither does it apply to terms of endearment like “sweetheart,” “darling,” “cupcake,” or “honey” (unless the honey’s name is Honey).
*13 Noting, to be sure, that a biographer would refer to, say, “Henry VIII’s aunt Mary Tudor,” presuming that Henry was not in the habit of cozily addressing her as “Aunt Mary Tudor.”
*14 She was called “Nana,” if you must know.
*15 The other was Lillian.
*16 I was recently informed that Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) is an established term in German, so the fact that I learned “idiot apostrophe” from a native German speaker now makes a bit more sense. The Dutch, I have also been informed, so long as we’re mucking about in western Europe, do properly use apostrophes in the formation of some of their plurals, more power to them.
*17 If there’s a less classy word in the English language to describe classiness than “classy,” I’d like to know what it is.
*18 Emphasis, I should add, on the word “word.” See entry 24, below.
*19 Some people, finding “nos” as the plural of “no” to be unsightly, opt for “noes.” Which is no beauty contest winner either.
*20 Some favor omitting the apostrophe when pluralizing capital letters, but I can’t say I care for the sight of As for more than one A or Us for more than one letter U. For, I’d say, obvious reasons.
*21 Sometimes I’ll read old books as much for the pleasure of their old-fashioned stylistic oddities as for their actual content. We all have to make our own fun.
*22 I find specious the notion that you should or even could determine whether to ’s or not to ’s based on pronunciation, given that there’s no universal rule for the pronunciation of proper noun possessives, much less for their construction. And if pronunciation guided orthography, we wouldn’t have words like “knight,” would we.
*23 And, for that matter, a “Sr.,” though in truth there’s no reason for the original owner of a name, whether he’s replicated or not (and it’s almost always a he; there are precious few female Sr./Jr. combos), to set himself off as “Sr.” He got there first; it’s his name.
*24 Psst. Take the middle option.
*25 People do occasionally trip over the pluralization of y-ending proper nouns, overextending the usual jelly/jellies, kitty/kitties formula. Nonetheless, JFK and Jackie were resolutely not “the Kennedies.”
*26 This foolproof system doesn’t, alas, easily or attractively carry over to non-English s-ending names. Even I wouldn’t address René and his wife, had he had one and had they been on my Christmas-card list, as “the Descarteses.”
*27 Let’s hold to “ladies’ room,” though, if only for parity with “men’s room.”
*28 I’ve run across the assertion that this statement—it’s Kurt Vonnegut’s, to name the name—was meant as a joke; I don’t buy it, and even as a joke it’s bad.
*29 More than likely, you read Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” in high school or thereabouts. She’s one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century and, except by the coterie of those of us who idolize her, woefully underappreciated.
*30 Rather than cut and paste this paragraph from some handy online source, I typed it out, because doing so gave me a little thrill. Once upon a time, I typed out in full Jackson’s short story “The Renegade” to see whether doing so might make me better appreciate how beautifully constructed the story was. It did. It’s an exercise you might want to try out on one of your own favorite pieces of writing, if you have the time.
*31 “You may take fire on this one,” my copy editor helpfully points out, noting that Chicago Manual of Style (and even Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage) disagree with me. Fire away.
*32 Random House books and book covers, I’m proud to point out, are positively festooned with brackets—and, as well, ellipses for deletions—for the tiniest alterations to published reviews, even unto the likes of “[A] great novel…about the human condition” when the original review referred to “this great novel that tells us many things about the human condition.” Though this sort of thing drives some of my colleagues batty, I like to think that it quietly conveys integrity.
*33 The fact that the plural of “series” is “series” is almost as bothersome as the fact that “read” is the past tense of “read,” but “serieses” is, aside from incorrect, ridiculous-looking.
*34 I find it charmingly odd that the term “album” has persisted to refer to a collection of music, long past the era in which individual records were packaged in sleeved books—which is to say, albums.
*35 Titles of plays of any length are set in italics, whether they’re wee caprices like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo or nine-act extravaganzas (with dinner break) like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.
*36 For more on this, as well as for the complexities of the styling of titles of works of classical music and other more arcane items, I send you off to your big fat stylebooks, which go into this in exhaustive detail.
*37 To ensure that “What is to become of me?” and “Estelle thought” are not read as two separate thoughts, I’m not opposed to “What is to become of me?, Estelle thought,” but I may be the only one so unopposed.
*38 Six consecutive words set in italics certainly aren’t going to bother anyone, but I caution you against setting anything longer than a single sentence that way. For one thing, italics weary the eye; for another, multiple paragraphs of text set in italics suggest a dream sequence, and readers are always keen to skip dream s
equences.
*39 Some people—Sylvia Barrett’s student Chas. H. Robbins in Bel Kaufman’s splendid novel Up the Down Staircase, the forty-fifth president of the United States, others—use quotation marks (or, as Chas. called them, “quotion marks”) more or less at random. In the writing of an indifferently educated fictional high school student, that makes for amusing characterization; in the tweets of the so-called leader of the free world, it’s not so amusing.
*40 According to the lovely folks at Merriam-Webster, the term “hippie,” in the sense of hirsute member of the counterculture, dates back to 1965, which is a skosh later than I might have guessed. One fun thing about dictionaries is that they’ll provide a date of introduction into written English for just about any word you can think of. This comes in awfully handy when you’re writing period fiction and wish to be era-appropriate, especially in dialogue. Copyediting a novel set during New York’s 1863 Draft Riots, I learned that what we now call a hangover—a term that didn’t pop up till 1894—was known in those earlier days as, among other things, a “katzenjammer.” Note, please, my use of quotation marks just now. I needed them.
*41 No, they were not.
*42 At Random House, I was happy to help push “website” along—if you’re apt to encounter a word dozens of times a day, you’ll tend to want to make that word as simple as possible—though I still feel a pang of remorse over my acquiescence to “email”—doesn’t “e-mail” look better and, more important, look like what it sounds like? But “email” was happening whether I liked it or not, and, as in so many things, one can be either on the bus or under the bus.
*43 Footnote pop quiz: Why, then, would I hyphenate the likes of “scholarly-looking teenagers” or “lovely-smelling flowers”? Because not all “-ly” words are adverbs. Sometimes they’re adjectives. Really, I’m sorry.
*44 A certain magazine famously—notoriously, you might say, and I do—would have you set a diaeresis—the double-dot thing you might tend to refer to as an umlaut—in words with repeat vowels, thus: “preëxisting,” “reëlect.” That certain magazine also refers to adolescents as “teen-agers.” If you’re going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space.
*45 I’m getting there. Hold on.
*46 Now it can be told: Though the hyphenless compound “coworker” is widely derided as looking bovine, and thus you’ll often see “co-worker,” I have as well an allergy—possibly unique—to “coauthor,” and thus you’ll see co-authors cited on Random House jackets and covers. You may now “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” to your collective hearts’ content.
*47 I know I’m supposed to prefer and use “person-hours” or “work-hours.” I can’t, so I don’t. Please forgive me.
*48 On a Mac, you can create an en dash by typing option-hyphen. On an iPhone, if you lean gently on the hyphen key, an en dash will present itself, as well as an em dash and a bullet. On a PC, I believe one types command–3–do the hokey pokey, or some such.
*49 I’d originally written “the Mets clobbered the Yankees,” but a friend, reading the text, insisted I switch the teams “FOR REALISM.” Shows you how much I know about (no, I’m not going to write “football,” because some jokes are too easy, even for me) baseball.
*50 Or you might, and if I were your copy editor I’d try to stop you, and possibly you’d heed me (in which case hoorah) and possibly you’d stick to your guns (and I might wrinkle my nose, but it’s your book).
GENERALLY, in nontechnical, nonscientific text, write out numbers from one through one hundred and all numbers beyond that are easily expressed in words—that is, two hundred but 250, eighteen hundred but 1,823. Print periodicals with a desire to conserve space often set the writing-out limit at “nine” or “ten,” but if you’ve got all the room in the world, words are, I’d say, friendlier-looking on the page.
That said—and automatically excepting writing on subjects like finance that are naturally number-heavy and in which just about all numbers will be expressed as numerals—you’ll often have to dance around that guideline, taking into account what will or won’t be visually pleasing and easily comprehensible to the reader, especially when writing multiple numbers in a single paragraph. I suppose it’s an obvious point, but if a style choice follows the rules but results in something that looks awful or makes no sense on the page, rethink it.
A few fine points:
1.
If in any given paragraph (or, to some eyes, on any given page) one particular number mandates the use of numerals, then all related uses of numbers should also be styled in numerals. That is, not:
The farmer lived on seventy-five fertile acres and owned twelve cows, thirty-seven mules, and 126 chickens.
but rather:
The farmer lived on seventy-five fertile acres and owned 12 cows, 37 mules, and 126 chickens.
The livestock tallies are set in numerals; the acreage, its own thing, can hold on to words. It’s a tiny distinction, but it makes for a prettier page, and it makes it easier for the reader to easily compare things meant to be compared, especially when the comparisons run into further paragraphs.
2.
Numerals are generally avoided in dialogue. That is:
“I bought sixteen apples, eight bottles of sparkling water, and thirty-two cans of soup,” said James, improbably.
rather than
“I bought 16 apples, 8 bottles of sparkling water, and 32 cans of soup,” said James, improbably.
Which rather looks as if the next sentence is going to begin, “If James gives Louella half his apples,” and we wouldn’t want that.
But don’t take your avoidance of numerals to extremes. You certainly don’t want anything that looks even vaguely like this:
“And then, in nineteen seventy-five,” Dave recounted, “I drove down Route Sixty-six, pulled in to a Motel Six, and stayed overnight in room four-oh-two, all for the low, low price of forty-five dollars and seventy-five cents, including tax.”
2a.
Should a character say “I arrived at four thirty-two” or “I arrived at 4:32”?
Unless you are forensically reconstructing the timeline of a series of unsolved murders in a quaint village in the Cotswolds, a character should, please, simply say “I arrived just after four-thirty.”
And a character might well say “I left at 4:45,” and I think that looks just dandy (“I left at four forty-five,” if you absolutely must), but a character might also as well say “I left at a quarter to five.”
3.
It’s considered bad form to begin a sentence with a numeral or numerals.
NO: 1967 dawned clear and bright.
BETTER, THOUGH NOT GREAT: Nineteen sixty-seven dawned clear and bright.
BETTER STILL, ALBEIT TAUTOLOGICAL: The year 1967 dawned clear and bright.
EVEN BETTER: Recast your sentence so it needn’t begin with a year. It shouldn’t take you but a moment.
4.
When writing of time, I favor, for example:
five A.M.
4:32 P.M.
using those pony-size capital letters (affectionately known as small caps*1) rather than the horsier A.M./P.M. or the desultory-looking a.m./p.m. (AM/PM and am/pm are out of the question.)
By the bye, the likes of “6 A.M. in the morning” is a redundancy that turns up with great frequency, so I warn you against it.
5.
For years, then:
53 B.C.
A.D. 1654
You will note, please, that B.C. (“before Christ,” as I likely don’t have to remind you) is always set after the year and A.D. (the Latin “anno Domini,” meaning “in the year of the Lord,” as I perhaps don’t have to remind you but will anyway) before it.
&n
bsp; Perhaps you were taught somewhere along the way to use the non-Jesus-oriented B.C.E. (before the Common Era) and C.E. (of the Common Era). If so, note that both B.C.E. and C.E. are set after the year:
53 B.C.E.
1654 C.E.
I’ll note that, at least in my experience, writers still overwhelmingly favor B.C. and A.D., and that B.C.E. and C.E. remain about as popular, at least in the United States, as the metric system.
Just, please, make sure you get everything in the right place. Should I ever be touring the Moon,*2 you can be certain that my first order of business will be to take a Sharpie to the plaque that refers to humanity’s arrival there in “JULY 1969, A. D.”*3
6.
I refer to the years from 1960 to 1969*4 as the sixties (or, in a pinch, as the ’60s) and the streets of Manhattan from Sixtieth through Sixty-ninth as the Sixties. Some people do it the other way around, but let’s not fight about it.
Or let’s. I win.
7.
If you’re writing dates U.S.-style, note the invariable commas on either side of the year, as in:
Viola Davis was born on August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina.
If you’re writing dates the way people just about anywhere else in the world write them, you can save up your commas for some other use:
Dreyer's English Page 7