Category: Blog

But they’re about language, so I guess it’s okay. First the pun. It’s the last word in the comic.

And that leads to the less jokey joke, use of a figure of speech that we call alliteration. Alliteration is when you start two or more words with the same letter. The Peter Piper tongue twister is a good example of alliteration. The fewer non-matching words you have, the better the alliteration is considered to be, and the non-matching words should never be emphasized. So this comic is a decent example of alliteration.

It’s still bad, though. But I like it. Thank you, Stephen Beals.

I usually ignore things like grammar checkers, but Microsoft Word’s grammar checker happens to be pretty good at this distinction. I should add that we have lots of uses for both words, but today we’ll look at only one use. Here’s the rule:

Use “that” in restrictive clauses.
Use “which” in non-restrictive clauses.

Whatever that means, right?

Restrictive means the information is necessary. Non-restrictive means the information is added info; an aside or parenthetical remark.

Restrictive: The list includes an account that has been set up in the general ledger.

Non-restrictive: The list includes uncollected funds, which is what distinguishes this list from the collected balance.

I should add that you need to use a comma before this usage of “which” to show that the remark is parenthetical.

Here’s an example:

We set up an account that includes uncollected funds, which is what distinguishes it from a collected balance account.

A good exercise is to watch for this construction in your daily reading. You will see a lot of people using “which” when they should use “that.” They’re being pretentious. Don’t you be pretentious.

Here’s the rule:

Use the present tense to indicate customary behavior, no matter when it happens.

That’s right, when you do something, something happens. Doesn’t matter whether you’ve actually done it yet. Here are a few examples:

When true, the boolean indicates acceptance; when false, it indicates rejection.
When you press Enter, the window appears.
When I get hungry, I eat!
Tomorrow I go to the dentist.
Every day I get up before 6:00.

Maybe you’re writing instructions for operating a machine that hasn’t even been built yet. Use the present: When you turn the key, the engine starts.

When may you use the future? I can think of four times:

• When you want to be vague:  Someday we will get married.
• When the time is important:  Tomorrow I will go to the dentist, but the next day I won’t
• For a command:  You will clean your room! (In military tech writing they use “shall.”)
• When something isn’t customary: We will go on the trip if we can ever get the car started.

By the way, this is a good rule even if your writing isn’t strictly technical.

If you’re looking for something to get me for Christmas, this book would be perfect.

It’s The Lexicon of Comicana, by Mort Walker, the writer of Beetle Bailey. Here’s the cover:

Amazon’s blurb can’t be beat, so I’ll just quote it:

Written as a satire on the comic devices cartoonists use, the book quickly became a textbook for art students. Walker researched cartoons around the world to collect this international set of cartoon symbols. The names he invented for them now appear in dictionaries.

If you’re a programmer, you know about “if.” We even call then “If statements.”

If some sort of code thing,
then some sort of code thing
else some other code thing.

We also have conditional sentences in English that have an analogous structure.

If you have short hair, it’s pretty hard to tie a ribbon in it.

But there’s another construction where the “if” is more or less in the middle of the sentence, and here it can get tricky, because you can put “whether” in the same spot where the “if” goes, but the meaning is significantly different. In this case, the “if” refers to what came before in the sentence, and “whether” refers to what follows.

The light tells you if the door is open. (Otherwise it doesn’t shine.)
The light tells you whether the door is open. (Maybe different colors of light for open and closed)

The message tells you if the car is ready. (Otherwise, it doesn’t tell you.)
The message tells you whether the car is ready. (The message says “car is ready,” or “car is not ready.”)

In other words, the “if” applies to what comes before, and it tells of the existence of what comes after.
But “whether” applies to what follows, and shows an alternative.  I should add that “Whether” always implies or says “or not.” If you can fit “or not” into the sentence, you should use “whether.”

Using “if” when you should use “whether” is easy, but don’t do it. Your meaning will be crisper, and nobody will get a mental hiccup from getting your meaning wrong at first.

This kind of mistake is mainly a result of carelessness, I think. Some words refer to points in space, not general areas. These include “center,” and “base.” Here are two examples of doing it wrong. They both treat these points as vague areas that you hang around the edges of.

Usenet’s creation was based around the idea that computers were becoming sophisticated enough that they could be used to hold conversations, and there was plenty of conversation going on.

I suppose this Beetle Bailey comic is a repeat of the second-oldest joke in the book, descending as it does from sixth grade English (Hi, Mrs. Clemens!). Lots of folks get confused when they have two objects of a single preposition, and the mistake is so common that it’s worth repeating the joke as a reminder. The trick, by the way, is to think the phrase without mentioning the other guy; then it’s easy to get the correct word.

The other second-oldest joke, I suppose, is the one about the restaurant manager who goes someplace else to eat.

What? You want to know the world’s oldest joke? Well, just between you and (ahem) me, it’s somewhat scatological, so I won’t repeat it here, but they found it on a cuneiform tablet that dates to about 4000 years ago. Google “oldest joke.” Reuters has a short article about it.

The time has come to write about fluff again—I ran into a comic on the subject. We curmudgeons also call fluff redundancy, wordiness, and unnecessary verbiage. Probably some saltier terms, too. Fluff is the antithesis of conciseness, the first of my gold rules for good writing.

I’ve featured this gal in Jump Start before. Several times, actually; that one was just a sample.

So when you write, look over what you wrote. (You always proofread, don’t you?) Do you see any words that you could delete without changing the meaning? Delete ’em! Your readers will thank you.