Category: Blog

But it’s from The Washington Post, a place where I expect better writing. The quote is lengthy, so I made the solecisms bold.

Carrie Dennett writes about why the Traffic Light Diet, a system of assigning the colors red, yellow and green to foods, is too simplistic, doesn’t have much impact, and can lead to nutritional deficiencies (some “red” foods have essential vitamins and minerals) and obsessive eating behaviors. Cara Rosenbloom writes about why telling people how long they will have to walk or run to work off the calories from, say, a chocolate bar, is too simplistic, can lead to nutritional deficiencies and can encourage obsessive behavior.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/traffic-light-diets-label-foods-red-yellow-and-green-thats-too-black-and-white/2020/01/19/7d0c4030-3878-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html

Simplistic already means “oversimplified.” Good writing has no such thing as “properly oversimplified” to be able to have too much of it. Use the word by itself!

Harrumpf.

We should be able to get it right too! Bottom row:

• There—refers to something, including the rest of a sentence
• Their—belongs to something or someone
• They’re—contraction of “they are.”

Though personally, I don’t think the King of England would get it wrong…

Some kinds of homonyms are spelled the (about) same but pronounced differently. When the pronunciation is the difference, it’s important.

We match the Italian pronunciation fairly closely, but not the French. The French pronunciation is something like “wah-la,” accent on the second syllable. It’s more fun if you go find someone who’s French and ask them to pronounce it for you. The spellings “voila” and “viola” are part of the humor, by the way.

When you quote someone, make sure you get the quote right. Adding to or subtracting from the original is a no-no. Look at the last panel:

The Scout motto is just “Be prepared.” (Someone once asked Baden-Powell “Be prepared for what?” and he answered, “Any old thing.”)

Perhaps we have the excuse that he called it “my scout motto,” but I still say he should have gotten it right. Harrumpf.

Since I ran into someone doing it correctly, I thought I’d remind you about the dieresis, those two dots that look like an umlaut above a letter in English.

Only a few words retain the dieresis now, but naïve is one of them. It means you pronounce the two vowels separately, not together. “Naïve” is really a two-syllable word!

To get those dots over a letter i, hold down the Alt key while you type 139 on the numeric keypad.

Here Dagwood offers his boss two antecedents to reply to. He spells them out in the second panel:

(Short versions: “promise,” or “get mad.”)

I see this pop up occasionally in conversations. And it’s not infrequently a source of conversational humor.

But when you write expositorily, try to avoid this ambiguity!

This error is close to me because of my proximity to chickens. If you have chickens, you know not to do this, right? Bottom right.

It’s like saying a baby infant.