OKLAHOMA!
The exclamation mark in the title of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical should not be neglected, nor should the exclamation marks in Hello, Dolly!; Oh! Calcutta!; Oh Lady! Lady!!; Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!; and similarly excitable Broadway shows.
“OVER THE RAINBOW”
The song MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer wanted cut from The Wizard of Oz because he thought it was slowing the picture down.
The “somewhere” is in the lyric; it’s not in the title.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Eminently quotable*19 novel by the eminently quotable Oscar Wilde.
Not “Portrait.”
Not “Grey.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Misrendered with alarming frequency by people in the publishing industry as Publisher’s Weekly.
REVELATION
The New Testament’s Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse.
Not “Revelations.”
SEX AND THE CITY
It’s and, not in.
The TV series and the films having run their course, I’d gone quite some time not encountering this, either correctly or incorrectly rendered, but actress Cynthia Nixon’s announcement, in early 2018, that she was running for governor of New York State brought this one back into the fore.
Unless you’re such a devotee that you’d never get this wrong, you’d do well to check and recheck this one. I always do.
SHOW BOAT
The Edna Ferber novel, and the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein II musical adapted from it.
Two words.
SUPER BOWL
Two words.
“THE WASTE LAND”
T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem.
Your standard-issue barren swath of territory is, per modern spelling style, simply a wasteland.
While we’re here: Though April may indeed be, per standard modern American spelling, the cruelest month, Eliot wrote “cruellest,” and in quoting him you must honor his spelling.
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
The full title of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 cyclonic fantasy novel.
Gale, the surname of the story’s heroine, Dorothy, is not given in Baum’s first Oz novel or in The Marvelous Land of Oz, its superb first sequel, though it turns up in later volumes. It debuted in a 1902 Broadway musical in which, perhaps because little dogs are intractable and hard to see in a large theater, a cow named Imogene was subbed in for the beloved Toto.
No, not a real cow. Don’t be silly.
WOOKIEE
Everyone gets it wrong. It’s not “Wookie.”
Also on the subject of the world of Star Wars, “lightsaber” is one word, “dark side” is lowercased (oddly enough), and “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” ends with a period and three ellipsis points, even though it is a fragment and not a complete sentence, because that is how the Star Wars people like it. And if you challenge them on any of these points, they’ll cut your hand off. True story.
ASSORTED BRAND NAMES AND TRADEMARKS YOU’LL WANT TO SPELL CORRECTLY
Trademarks tend over the long haul to lose their capital letters, thus transforming from proper nouns to—no, not improper, though that would be fun—common nouns, sometimes because the company that established them vanishes, often because the trademark becomes so utterly synonymous with the thing itself that the transformation is irresistible. Thus we have the genericized aspirin, cellophane, heroin, kerosene, teleprompter (formerly and jauntily TelePrompTer), thermos, zipper, and—the copy editor’s delight—dumpster (which, once upon a long time ago, was the Dempster-Dumpster manufactured by Dempster Brothers).
One should do one’s best to honor extant trademarks (and the companies that own them), but I know firsthand that attempting to persuade a writer that a wee plastic bag is a Baggie rather than a baggie is an exercise in futility.*20
More even then dropping capital letters from trademarked things, it’s considered bad form to allow the verbification of trademarks. Thus, copy editors have long attempted (and long failed) to stop writers from using the common verb extracted from the photocopying machines devised by the Xerox Corporation. But it’s scarcely possible anymore to argue that that which one does at the Google site is not googling. If you absolutely must make a verb out of a trademark—not that I am endorsing this, because it’s the wrong thing to do—I do suggest that you lowercase it.*21
Mostly I just want you to spell/style these correctly:
BREYERS
There’s no apostrophe in the name of this ice cream brand. Not to be confused with Dreyer’s,*22 which does have an apostrophe.
BUBBLE WRAP
A brand of what one might otherwise choose to call bubble pack.
CAP’N CRUNCH
Not “Captain.”
Nostalgia alert: This one always particularly reminds me of how in the pre-Internet era I used to jot down all the householdy brand names mentioned in whatever manuscript I was working on, then take a trip to the supermarket, notepad in hand, to walk the aisles, peer at packaging, and verify spellings. So as not to seem completely mad, I would also, in between peering and verifying, do my shopping.
CRACKER JACK
Many (most?) people call this classic combination of candied popcorn and peanuts “Cracker Jacks,” but to do so wrecks the rhyme “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack / I don’t care if I never get back.” It’s also not the name of the product.
CROCK-POT
You probably don’t even know that it’s a brand, and you probably spell it “crockpot.” You might avail yourself of the generic “slow cooker.” Or you might not.
DR PEPPER
The absence of a period in the name of this soda pop is much discussed at copyediting bacchanals.
FRIGIDAIRE
That many people call any old refrigerator a “frigidaire” is a testament to the onetime supremacy of the Frigidaire brand, but if you’re indeed talking about any old refrigerator, call it a refrigerator. Or an icebox, if you’re a hundred years old. Or a fridge, which term is up for grabs.
FROOT LOOPS
An intentionally comic misspelling (as “Froot”) is called a cacography.
HÄAGEN-DAZS
The name of the ice cream manufacturer is not Danish but gibberish intended to sound Danish.
JCPENNEY
They’re still officially J. C. Penney Company, Inc., so if you can’t bear the sight of that smushed JCPenney, feel free to use the more formal version.
JEEP
The vehicle whose name was eventually trademarked by Willys-Overland and is now manufactured by Chrysler may be a Jeep, but lowercase jeeps have been around since the early part of the twentieth century. There’s no reason to retroapply the trademark to vehicles that predate it.
JOCKEY SHORTS
They own the “Jockey” but not the “shorts.” You can always call them tighty-whiteys.
KLEENEX
You can always just say “tissue.”
KOOL-AID
The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” meaning to willfully if heedlessly follow some dogma, must surely rankle Kraft Foods, particularly in that the cyanide beverage Jim Jones’s devotees drank in the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown seems to have been concocted largely if not entirely from the also-ran brand Flavor Aid.
MEN’S WEARHOUSE
Not “Warehouse.” It’s a joke. Get it?
ONESIES
Onesies is a Gerber Childrenswear brand of what can be, but never is, generically referred to as diaper shirts or infant bodysuits. The Gerber people are adamant that the term is theirs alone and should not be genericized into “onesie”; in this case I fear not only that the barn door is open but that the horse is halfway across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.
PING-PONG
Once I learned that the te
rm “ping-pong,” for table tennis, predates the trademark, I gave up trying to enforce the caps on authors whom it invariably irritated.
PLEXIGLAS
Plexiglas is a brand name; “plexiglass” is a wannabe generic name derived from it.
POPSICLE
The Popsicle people also make the Creamsicle, the Fudgsicle (note the absence of an e after the g), and something called a Yosicle.
PORTA-POTTY
There seem to be as many trademarked names for portable toilets as there are portable-toilet puns. Perhaps you should just make up one of your own and then check that it doesn’t already exist—as I once, for reasons I can no longer recall, concocted an Indian brand called “Vend-A-Loo.”
POST-IT
Note the lowercase i.
Q-TIPS
The generic term is “cotton swabs,” and Unilever personnel are mighty proprietary about their trademark.
Did you know that the Q stands for “Quality”?
REALTOR
A registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors. Not every real estate agent is a Realtor, and I see no reason to write “realtor” when you can just as easily write “real estate agent.”
REDDI-WIP
I’m trying to imagine the meeting in which someone inquired, “How much can we misspell two perfectly simple words?”
ROLLS-ROYCE
Hyphenated. Also expensive.
7-ELEVEN
A numeral, a hyphen, and a word. Home of the Slurpee.
SHEETROCK
Or opt for the generic “plasterboard,” “drywall,” or “wallboard.”
STARBUCKS
No apostrophe.
STYROFOAM
Styrofoam is the trademarked name for a type of polystyrene foam used as a thermal insulation material. Those items we layfolk often refer to as styrofoam cups and styrofoam coolers are in fact not made of Styrofoam at all.
TARMAC
A trademark, but good luck trying to get anyone to keep the cap.
TASER
Though University of Florida student Andrew Meyer, in the process of resisting arrest, might have generically and respectfully pleaded, “Don’t stun me with that electroshock weapon, Officer,” what he did in fact cry was “Don’t tase me, bro.” (The unofficial verb is more logically spelled “tase” than “taze,” I’d say.)
VOLKSWAGEN
Keep an eye on that e; it’s not a second o.
XBOX
Not X-Box or XBox.
MISCELLANEOUS FACTY THINGS
The people*23 convicted of and executed for witchcraft in late-seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts were not burned at the stake, as one persistently sees asserted, but hanged. The accused Giles Corey, who refused to plead to charges one way or the other, was, grotesquely, tortured to death as stones were piled on him. His defiant last words were, we’re told, “More weight.”
DEFCON 5 is “I have a hangnail, but otherwise everything is fine.” DEFCON 1 is “We’re all about to die.” There is no such thing as DEFCON 8, DEFCON 12, etc.
Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1969 film about the eruption of the eponymous volcano. Krakatoa, unfortunately, is west of Java.
The rain in Spain doesn’t fall mainly on the plain; it stays mainly in the plain.
*1 The list, you’ll note, leans heavily toward the performing arts. As Popeye once said: I yam what I yam. Also, I’ve found over time that many writers about the performing arts are irksomely cavalier about spelling. And dates.
*2 Also a fairy, a bear, and a few other beings that can’t quite be called people.
*3 The accent mark that slants the other way is a grave accent.
*4 Though unnecessarily female-gendered nouns—“comedienne,” “murderess,” “poetess,” “sculptress,” the delectable “aviatrix”—are increasingly a thing of the past, “actress” persists and likely will so long as award-giving guilds persist in categorically segregating male actors and female actors. That said, many female actors refer to themselves, and are referred to, as just plain actors.
*5 Though in styling his name publishers and text designers occasionally mimicked Cummings’s penchant for writing all in lowercase by styling his name “e. e. cummings,” the writer himself far more often than not favored standard capitalization insofar as his name was concerned.
*6 Whenever you’re about to write something like “Not a Theodore with an e,” as I was just about to, make your way back to the beginning of the word, count up your letters, and adjust your math accordingly.
*7 I might simply have written “the philosopher Adorno and the Zionist Herzl,” but the crash of discrete proper nouns is always to be avoided. See also “June Truman’s secretary of state,” this page.
*8 I’ve generally noticed the odd tendency to slap an s onto the surname of people whose surnames don’t end with one. Thus actor Alan Cumming becomes Alan Cummings, etc.
*9 The habit of identifying people by dropping a specifying parenthetical into their name—e.g., Lorenz (Pal Joey) Hart—is unsightly, so don’t do it, whatever you’re writing. You’re not a 1930s columnist.
*10 The 1941 Universal horror film starring Lon Chaney, Jr., is The Wolf Man. The 2010 remake starring who can even remember? is The Wolfman.
*11 I’d originally written here “idiom trumps accuracy,” but I’ve developed an aversion to that verb.
*12 I’d suggest avoiding the “deceptively [adjective] [thing]” construction entirely, because it’s often impossible to tell whether a deceptively [adjective] [thing] is extremely that [adjective] or entirely not that [adjective]. What’s a deceptively large room, for instance?
*13 Monkeys are not apes; neither are apes monkeys. Monkeys have tails.
*14 Perhaps my single favorite nugget of obscure trivia, thus the surely-uncalled-for two hefty paragraphs I’m devoting to it, plus this footnote and the three that follow.
*15 Latin for “rare bird,” and a remarkably pretentious way of saying that something is unusual.
*16 Not to be confused with Edith Nesbit, who as E. Nesbit wrote many books for young people, including The Railway Children.
*17 When did the twentieth century end? Not on December 31, 1999, but on December 31, 2000. And don’t you forget it.
*18 “Immaculate Conception” is always initial-capped. For some reason, “virgin birth” tends not to be.
*19 “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Even for the epigrammatically adept Wilde, that’s spectacular.
*20 In full they’re Hefty Baggies Sandwich & Storage Bags, so strictly speaking there’s no such thing as a Baggie, much less a baggie.
*21 Department of There’s an Exception to Everything: I’d still say that I FedExed rather than fedexed a package, even if I sent it via UPS.
*22 I always find parenthetical “(no relation)”s bothersomely adorable, but: (no relation).
*23 Mostly but not exclusively women, though one tends to forget that.
THERE’S A LOT OF DELETING IN COPYEDITING, not just of the “very”s and “rather”s and “quite”s and excrescent “that”s with which we all encase our prose like so much Bubble Wrap and packing peanuts, but of restatements of information—“AS ESTAB’D,” one politely jots in the margin.
Much repetition, though, comes under the more elementary heading of Two Words Where One Will Do, and here’s a collection of easily disposed of redundancies. Some of these may strike you as obvious—though their obviousness doesn’t stop them from showing up constantly. Others are a little more arcane—the sorts of things you could likely get away with without anyone’s noticing—but they’re snippable nonetheless.
In either case, for those moments when y
ou’re contemplating that either you or your prose could stand to go on a diet and your prose seems the easier target, here’s a good place to start.
(The bits in italics are the bits you can dispose of.)
ABM missile
ABM = anti-ballistic missile.
absolutely certain, absolute certainty, absolutely essential
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