Getting “Only” Right

Bruce Schneier is a cybersecurity and cryptography guru. (They say he’s so good he can decode alphabet soup.) I happen to be a regular reader of his Crypto-gram newsletter, and here’s a quote from the April 2018 edition:

It’s routine for US police to unlock iPhones with the fingerprints of dead people. It seems only to work with recently dead people.

Many (maybe most) people put the word “only” at the very beginning of the phrase or clause that it belongs with. The trouble is that adjectives (of which “only” is one) should go right next to the word they refer to. If he had written this incorrectly and said

It only seems to work with recently dead people.

Then “only” would be modifying “seems,” an entirely different meaning.

So watch where you put your onlys.

Musk Hires Pretty Good Writers

At least when I tracked down an example of bad writing in a technical article, I found that the writer at SpaceX got it right, and the writer of the technical article got it wrong!

Here’s what SpaceX says:

The competition will focus on a single criterion—maximum speed.

And here’s (blush) Interesting Engineering:

The call says the competition will focus on a single criteria “maximum speed.”

C’mon, guys. They even gave you the correct form…

 

“S” not for Plural?

Not much of a lesson today, but slightly autobiographical.

I think, and have thought so for years, that “-s” being the ending on a singular verb is a little incongruous (weird), since it’s also the usual ending on plural nouns. I frequently see people whose first language isn’t English get this wrong. Can’t say as I blame them.

Anyway, here’s the Andertoons comic that reminded me about this.

Proofreader’s Marks

I’ve been wanting to say a word or two about proofreading lately, and here Warped has given me an example of a proofreader’s mark!

That line with the loop on the end means delete. A just plain line through a letter means to make it lowercase. And three lines under something means to capitalize it.

End of proofreading lesson one.

Homonyms

I think Moose and Molly dates back to before I was born, but occasionally they come up with something for me to mention.

Moose and Molly - 04/03/2018

There you have a homonym. Homo=”same,” nym= “name.” To make matters worse, you can have them spelled the same and pronounced differently.

A Word About Quotation Marks

My topic today, class, is “what do you do when you have a quote inside of a quote?” Here’s an example of it being done correctly:

“On Chrome OS, we were like, ‘We control all the pieces. We can do better,’” Will Drewry, a principal software engineer for Google’s devices, and one of the founding fathers of the Chromebook, said in an interview in January.

The big item is that the inside quotation gets single quotes (apostrophes).

The minor item is that when both quotations end at the same time, put a space between the single and double marks. You get to play fast and loose with this second rule. Some fonts manipulate their apostrophes a bit so there’s a natural space after it, but a lot of fonts don’t bother. The goal is to be easy to read, so if your font doesn’t put the space there for you, do it yourself. The space looks a little big, but your meaning is immediately apparent.

What if you have a quotation inside the inside quotation? I haven’t found any examples lately, but the rule is that you alternate. That innermost quotation gets the double quote marks.

PS—Wouldn’t you know, I found a comic that shows how important to get your quote marks correct:

(I feel obliged to point out that the inside quote isn’t exactly a quotation. Those inside marks are used to call attention to what’s inside them. They’re called scare quotes.)

A Comic Directed at Curmudgeons

Okay, I get the message. Good thing it doesn’t apply to me—I never correct anyone’s grammar unasked, except in this blog.

Of course, you’re welcome to ask…

 

An Email I Sent to a Web Marketing Site

My wife and I are interested in learning to weld, and as part of our research, we checked out a site that advertised welding lessons. The site has a good example of how not to use separable verbs, so I wrote him about it. I spent enough time on the email that it’s worth including here. The subject line was “We might order your materials… .” Here’s what I wrote:

…and thank you for the free sample. My wife and I plan to read it carefully.

I’m a tech writer, so I’ll reciprocate with a free sample of my own. The person or company you hired to do your marketing website doesn’t know about separable verbs, and it makes you look uneducated. I understand you’re a welder, not a grammarian, but still, they ought to know better.

Here’s a sample from page 6 of your MIG freebie pdf:
When you first setup your MIG machine you’ll have to feed this wire through the rollers.
As far as setup goes, that’s about all there is to setting up a MIG welder, and that’s why they’re so great for beginners.
The second sentence is correct (both times), the first one is not.
Here are the rules:
  •  If it’s a verb, it’s two words, so you’d write “to set up a MIG welder…” (in your sentence: When you first set up your…”) (If you can imagine going up to the front of the room and doing it, it’s a verb.)
  • If it’s a noun, it’s one word, so you’d write “when you’re done, your setup should look tidy.” (If you can put “the” in front of it, it’s a noun.)
  • If it’s an adjective, you hyphenate it, so you might have a tidy set-up situation. (Adjectives generally go right in front of nouns.)
TEST: on this page, https://makemoneywelding.com/launch1/, the link that says “How to setup your welding shop
Should it be “set up” or “setup”?
Best wishes,
Rogers George
http://writing-rag.com
ANS: It should be “set up.”

Loan Words

I suppose you could say that English became a lot more cosmopolitan in 1066 when the Normans invaded and infused French into the language. From them we got “pork” and “beef” on the dinner table and “pig” and “cow” in the barnyard. But English, over time, has become almost a pidgin language from all the loan words it has acquired. Hence the humor of this Making It:

He’s making fun of people who have a provincial attitude and don’t give newcomers enough time to learn the language.

It’s a good point, though:

If you go to visit a place where the people speak something other than English, make an effort to learn that language!

Not sure that manager should be smoking in the workplace, either…

Yesterday’s Difficult Article Has Some Things Right, Too

The article I criticized in the previous post has its share of good examples, too. The article is by Dan Geer from the Hoover Institute; it’s 20 pages of difficult reading about computer security, but it’s good if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s the sentence that a lot of people get wrong, but they don’t:

Per the present author’s definition, a state of security is the absence of unmitigatable surprisethere will always be surprises, but the heavy tails that accompany complexity mean that while most days will be better and better, some days will be worse than ever before seen.
It’s the first word. Lots of folks write “as per,” which is wrong. “Per” by itself is correct.
Here’s another one:
 Of late, we have come to center our strategy on employing algorithms to do what we cannot ourselves do, which is to protect us from other algorithms.
He said “center on” instead of “center around.” Good.
‘Nuff said.