I've got a quick question for the prescriptivists. How would you punctuate the following:
"Yesterday afternoon, a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall, Jr.’s, Leave Your Language Alone! in its first, hard-cover, vanity press (Linguistica–Ithaca, NY) edition."
I'm sure I got it wrong; so, correct away. Commas delimiting Jr? Apostrophe on Hall or Jr.? Commas wrapped around the parenthetical? I tried, but my potsherd cracked.
If nothing else, I'm glad to see you've spelt Ithaca correctly.
I would remove the comma after afternoon. Not sure why, but if you recast the first phrase "A book arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon: . . . ." you would not have a comma; that makes me believe it would not have a comma in its original form.
I would certainly have typed it automatically without the comma.
Peggy pointed out to me when we were talking about it that she would not put a comma after Jr.'s. I admit I missed that, but after considering the matter I agree with her. The comma does nothing for the sentence.
I would leave the 's where it is. That is exactly how you would say the phrase if you were reading the sentence aloud. And you should not sow too many commas into a sentence lest you become known as a comma suturer. Sentence erections are funny things.
Yes, I misspelled it on my blog, even though I had the book in front of me when I typed it. I have corrected that now, too.
I would remove the comma after afternoon.
When I first typed it online, there was no comma after afternoon, but when retyping it here (or cutting and pasting it), I corrected the misspelled Ithaca and put in an extra comma to ward off the evil punctuating spirits.
I'd leave that first comma in. It's a (phrase or a clause, can't remember which is which right now) that qualifies what follows. No comma means it runs on and could be misread.
Been running network cabling and I'm hot and bothered, so my prescriptivist hat got left downstairs ...
FWIW, I learned, many moons ago, that you use a comma to separate coordinate adjectives, ie, if you would put an "and" or "but" between them, use a comma. Example: a tall, slender lady, but a little old lady. You might say "a tall and slender lady," but probably not "a little and old lady." Using that reasoning, I think you could eliminate the commas in first, hard-cover, vanity press edition. At least the one after "first." Guess I could make a case for saying "hard-cover but vanity press."
Or is the coordinate adjectives rule no longer relevant (if it ever was)?
I think the sentence is over-punctuated and that there are some optional maneuvers that make it easier to read, which is the point!
Here's the original:
"Yesterday afternoon, a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall, Jr.’s, Leave Your Language Alone! in its first, hard-cover, vanity press (Linguistica–Ithaca, NY) edition."
Here's how I would change it to make it easier to read:
Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall Jr.'s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first hardcover, vanity press edition (Linguistica-Ithaca, NY).
I am taking the vanity press to be the generic term since it wasn't capitalized in the original rather than an actual company that goes by the name Vanity Press, although there could be. I also got rid of the hyphenation in hardcover, which is fine according to Webster's, again to help the poor reader with the heavily punctuated original. I changed word order, too, to make the reading easier.
I can even imagine taking the ultimate leap and leaving out one more comma that I don't think detracts from the sense of the sentence. Call me a renegade, but I think Nancy will agree:
Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail: Robert A. Hall Jr.'s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first hardcover vanity press edition (Linguistica-Ithaca, NY). Edit: I put my final choice in bold because I think it's the best form.
In other words, the commas clutter up this sentence unnecessarily, and I can easily read it aloud without feeling any necessity for comma placement. The "Jr." offset with commas is something that is optional, and here the sentence reads better and easier on the eyes without those commas.
Please do disagree!
Excellent, WW! I absolutely do agree.
You might say "a tall and slender lady," but probably not "a little and old lady."
You would say that she is tall and slender because she is tall irrespective of her being slender and slender irrespective of her being tall. Why would you say that being little and being old do not have the same degree of irrespctivity?
I'm a bit fuzzy on the logic but I think it has more to do with little modifying old lady, while both tall and slender modify lady. In other words, old and lady are so closely associated that they *are the noun. Likewise, I would not use a comma with large brown dog. I'm not explaining this very well; need to find a punctuation guide that (1) agrees with me
and (2) clarifies why.
EDIT: This -
http://snipurl.com/a0nm - helps some; scroll down to #6 and continue with #1 under Misusing Commas.
little, old lady
You can rephrase it as a lady who is both little and old, but little old lady is something of a frozen idiom. It's almost an irreversible binomial, as it sounds strange to say an old, little lady, but slightly better to say an old and little lady ~ a lady who is both old and little.
Yesterday afternoon a book arrived in the mail - Robert A. Hall Jr.'s Leave Your Language Alone! in its first hardcover vanity press edition (Linguistica-Ithaca, NY). Congratulations
Wordwind, your final form of Tillie's sentence had only one major error, namely...
USE A DASH INSTEAD OF A COLON WHEN THE SIGN IS SIMPLY A SUBSTITUTE FOR "NAMELY".
A COLON SUGGESTS AN INCONGRUITY WHILE A DASH IS MORE CONGRUENT.
I'll happily disagree, Milo. I never heard anything on earth, other than in what I read above, about a colon suggesting an incongruity.
And for everybody here, here's what Holden Caulfield observes about commas and beyond:
That's something else that gives me a royal pain. I mean if you're good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas. Stradlater was always doing that. He wanted you to think that the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. He was a little bit like Ackley that way. I once sat next to Ackley at this basketball game. We had a terrific guy on the team, Howie Coyle, that could sink them from the middle of the floor, without even touching the backboard or anything. Ackley kept saying, the whole goddam game, that Coyle had a perfect build for basketball. God, how I hate that stuff.
I think I'd put a dash as a substitute for "namely" there too.
I was taught that you put a colon when you make a list and a semi-colon when the next part of the sentence is distinct from the first part but still an integral part of it.
Does anybody have an AP writing guide?
>put a colon when you make a list
and a list of one doesn't qualify??
- ron (suggested by joe friday's The Slippery Slope of Punctuation) obvious
Is it a list if it's only one item?
I guess I'm sure I really don't know -- if you sit down to make a to-do list for the day and you only write one thing, what do you have?
...if you sit down to make a to-do list for the day and you only write one thing, what do you have?The same thing that you have if you have nothing on your to-do list to do. Is a list with nothing on it still a list?
It is - only - if you persist in calling it a list.
But we digress.
I've got a quick question for the prescriptivistsDear jheem, I wonder why anyone who is not a "prescriptivist" would want to consult a "prescriptivist" on the use of commas?
Anyone who wishes to make oneself clear to a reader will use commas judiciously, and they don't have to become slaves of "custom" to do so. In fact, they don't even have to be aware of such "customs" to do so.
Writers who are attentive to their audience display such attentiveness in everything they write, not just in the use of commas.
"Prescriptivists" generally are unaware of that. That's why they are generally pretty good at inserting commas in other people's sentences, but not much good at constructing their own sentences.
True, colons are used for lists. However, they have other functions and, of those, a most important one: to draw attention to a point being made.
In the sentence we're been examining, the colon isolates the specific point of reference, draws our attention to information the reader can focus on. A dash, instead, would indicate that a clause is about to trot down that final lane. But there's no clause that follows that dash in what Milo suggested. I'll continue to happily disagree with the proposed dash for this particular sentence.
Edit: Here's a url for a good overview of colon use:http://www.mccc.edu/students/tutoring/colon.html
Is a list with nothing on it still a list?No, it's listless.
I wonder why anyone who is not a "prescriptivist" would want to consult a "prescriptivist" on the use of commas?
It was an experiment. I wanted to see how many prescriptivists there were onboard, and how many conflictging rules they could enumerate. You've sussed me out. Dang!
Dear jheem,
I enjoyed your response above, and it answered one of my points of curiosity about the thread. However, your test has holes in it, if I may boldly observe upon it in a friendly way.
Here are my observations:
1. When a thread starter invites a restricted group of people to reply, it is guaranteed that people outside that closed set will reply, most often first. Start a thread with: "European speakers of English, explain the phrase that follows." Guaranteed the first four or so posters wouldn't have ever laid a foot on the continent. [Yes, I exaggerate, but that is a deeply ingrained trait that cannot be erased...uh, deleted.]
2. To be aware of punctuation rules (and the distortion, misinterpretation, and varied application of them as in style manuals for corporations) does not automatically make one a prescriptivist.
3. Even the most enthusiastic of punctuation rule observers could have the soul of a descriptivist with flint sharp barb ready to cast at the first person who tries to tie up the language, gag it, and keep it from moving out of capitivity.
Hey! Where did you get that sentence, by the way? It's a sentence without much attitude, although I suppose you could read a little humor in the hardcover vanity press phrase and reference to Ithaca.
Milum, I think I understand what WW is going for. I found this explanation for the dash in a punctuation guide.
Dash (--)
Use a dash to indicate an abrupt break in thought.
Example: The truth is--and you probably know it--we can't do without you.
Use a dash to mean namely, in other words, or that is before an explanation.
Example: It was a close call--if he had been in a worse mood, I don't think I'd still be herSo the name of the book is not really an explanation so the dash doesn't apply.
Well now, see, I love learning something new everyday.
Here are my observations
WW, yeah, it was a flawed experiment, like many. I seriously was curious how many different opinions I'd get. And, was happy with those tendered. I feel that there's a little bit of prescriptivist in all of us: you, me, and others. Likewise there's a touch of the descriptivist in most of us, too.
Where did you get that sentence, by the way?
I wrote it the other day in a blog entry. I added the first comma and corrected the misspelled Ithaca at the time of starting the thread. The book is a rather fun rant by an old-fashioned (i.e., per-Chomskyan) linguist about the foolishness of prescriptivism in general. I'd already read it in its second and non-vanity-press-published edition, and had obtained this first edition to see how much—if anything—had been changed.
I was mainly interested in the commas delimiting the Jr. in Professor Hall's name, but the colon/em dash controversy started up and I've had fun looking through various normative books in my library as a result.
Thanks, everybody.
A) The only failed experiment is one we don't learn anything from
and
2) As Dub Dub' pointed out, there's a difference between prescriptivism and style manuals.
Reverting to an earlier twist of the thread:
No one talks about big old ladies or minor motion pictures.
Is Linguistica the publisher? If so, I think you need a comma after Lingistica: Linguistica, Ithaca, NY. I'm pretty sure that's MLA and APA format. I'll check the MLA manual tomorrow at school. I absolutely detest doing bibliographies, footnotes, and all that's related to proper reference style. It takes all the joy out of research, though I understand the purpose of continuity. I know of a writer-professor who was kicked out of a prestigious university for failing to correctly cite a source. Well, he didn't give any credit at all. It wasn't over a comma or anything like that!
I think it fair to describe "Bugsy Malone" (1976) as a minor motion picture because all of the gangsters and gun molls hit men and barkeeps are played by children.
Is Linguistica the publisher?
Ww, I transcribed the data on the dust jacket as is. Looks like an endash to me (and that's how I typed it in the entry), but it might be an emdash (and worse yet, it has spaces on both sides of it). But you're probably right. There was no publisher, or in other words, Dr Robert A. Hall, Jr., was the publisher in that he paid for the book to be published. j.
No one talks about big old ladies
Maybe about big old gals.
Although nobody would say that there is something wrong grammatically with big old ladies.
minor motion pictures.
But of course there are minor motion pictures - they call em B movies.
Todays quote after the Word A Day.
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell. -William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the
American Civil War (1820-1891)
An example of how a comma would have made the sentence clearer...there needs to be a comma after the word WOUNDED or the "who cry aloud for blood" is associated with the wounded instead of those who've never fired a shot, na.
those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded
anybody have Bush's address? or Cheney's, or Rove...
Yes, I think Anu is being very pertinent in his quote.
Yo, jheem, what does your subject line refer to?
Yo, jheem, what does your subject line refer to?
A period?
Yo, jheem, what does your subject line refer to?I was thinking of the WC Field's movie
Tillie's Punctured Romance (1928). It was a remake of a Chaplin flick of the same name from 1914. It's not supposed to be very good, but I haven't seen it. It, in turn, was based on a play.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0019478/http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0004707/
Jah, gal, dou itashimashite.