Category: Blog

I mention this every now and then, so I would have skipped this example, but I thought the article was interesting enough to bear mentioning.

Here’s the rule: When two words modify the same noun together, you hyphenate them, unless the first word is an adverb. It’s called a compound adjective.

The title of the article is “Why You Always Have Room for Pie.” Here’s a missing hyphen:

Imagine if your ancestors binged on buffalo meat and then stumbled across a patch of ripe berries — but everyone was too full to eat them. Skipping dessert in that scenario would mean missing out on a stash of important nutrients.
The mechanism that allows us to make room for dessert is called sensory specific satiety, which means that the body has different limits for different foods as a way to help ensure a balanced intake of nutrients. Barbara Rolls, a professor and the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, has been studying sensory specific satiety since the early 1980s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/well/eat/eating-variety-effect-thanksgiving.html (might have a paywall)

Technically, without the hyphen, the first word by itself modifies the second two. And here, “specific satiety” doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Here’s the picture that went with the article:

On occasion we say (write) something like “go part way up the street” and it feels perfectly natural. We might also say something like “that’s only a part-way solution,” and that’s still okay. Now look at this sentence:

“There” in this case is Mars, specifically partway up the flank of Aeolis Mons, aka Mt. Sharp, the massive central peak in Gale Crater, where NASA’s Curiosity rover is still poking around.

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/ban-378-giving-thanks-a-most-curious

This is a rather common change in English. We go from separate words, to hyphenated, to one word. (One of my favorite examples of this is the change from to-day to today.)

Anyway, this tendency to move toward single words is fairly common.

Here’s the picture that the sentence is about:

PS—Here’s a word that has finished the transition to one word, and the writer gets it wrong.

Maybe he split “shortcoming” to make a nicer line break; but then, he should have hyphenated it.

I made some of the words bold to make them easier to find.

A man comes running to the doctor shouting and screaming in pain. “Please doctor you’ve got to help me. I’ve been stung by a bee.” “Don’t worry;” says the doctor. “I’ll put some cream on it.” “You will never find that bee. It must be miles away by now.” “No, you don’t understand,” says the doctor. “I’ll put some cream on the place you were stung.” “Oh! It happened in the garden in back of my house.” “No, no, no!” says the doctor getting frustrated. “I mean on which part of your body did that bee sting you?” “On my finger!” screamed the man in pain. “The bee stung me on my finger and it really hurts.” “Which one?” the doctor says. “How am I supposed to know? All bees look the same to me!”

From a FB post. sorry I don’t have a better reference.

All the humor in this joke depends on the misunderstanding caused by antecedents being misunderstood. Well, it helps to not picture the body language…

Recruiters talk about a minimum of 2 to 5 years experience. So what’s the minimum? 2 years, 5 years, or not? This is incorrect use of a range.

Here’s another example; the kid quotes a badly written advertisement. Is the limit 50% or is the limit more?

So if you’re going to write a range of something , be careful not to contradict it with a mismatching, contradictory limit.

“Seek out” is a separable verb. no hyphen!

“Half-dollar store” is okay. “Half” is an adjective and “dollar” is a noun.

Here’s the comic:

His use of “appositive” is correct. “Rex” = “dog.” If he had more than one dog, he should get rid of the comma after “dog.”

But an incorrect double negative would normally have “don’t” instead of “doesn’t.” So is the double negative correct or not?

Here’s the sentence. Think about the highlighted verbs before you read what’s below.

The blizzard of reports, studies, and press releases that always accompanies a COP means that important developments can get buried. 

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-never-ending-cop

Okay, “accompanies” and “means” are singular verbs. What might be their subject or subjects?

“Accompanies” is close to “reports, studies, and press releases,” but that’s a plural! So “blizzard,” a singular, has to be the subject. The blizzard accompanies a COP.

What about “means”? Looks like “blizzard has to be its subject, too. So the blizzard accompanies and means something. Awkward, but technically it could be grammatical.

But what about that nice list? You could say that they accompany a COP, especially since they’re objects of a preposition with a relative clause right after it.

I think if the list did the accompanying and the blizzard should mean something gets buried; after all, it’s a blizzard!

What’s your opinion?

Lots of people get this wrong, including this guy.

• Infer means to figure out something by looking at examples.
• Imply means to suggest that something is true without being explicit.

“Imply” might work if the conversation had included one or more examples.

Some people call these “malapropisms,” but “malaprop” is a better word. Less pretentious. A malaprop is a word that sounds almost like the word you want. They’re named after a Dickens character, Mrs. Malaprop.

I think he could have said that he plays the violent.

Some words can go either way. “Fish,” for example can mean more than one of the critters but you can also say “fishes,” particularly if you’re referring to more than one kind.

Here’s another critter that can go either way. The lady behind the counter gets the distinction.

• Use “shrimp” when you refer to the ocean-going crustacean. “I had a dozen shrimp for dinner.”
• Use “shrimps” when you’re referring to more than one small human. “We fourth-graders are shrimps compared to those seniors.”

Do any other double-form plurals come to mind?