Brooklyn Comedy Company

First the comic, Reality Check. Doesn’t work this way in real life, of course.

I still have trouble remembering whether or not to put that “e” into that word. It’s because I don’t follow my own rule about learning to spell those last couple works that you don’t remember how to spell.

When I was younger, I had trouble remembering how to spell “until.” Was it one “l” or two? I also had trouble remembering the conjugation of “lie,” as in lie down. Then someone told me a trick, and here it is:

Write down the thing you have trouble remembering on a card, and tape it up where you can see it when you write. Look at the word whenever you feel the slightest doubt. Eventually you’ll remember and stop doubting.

It worked. I now remember “until,” and know the past tense of lie is “lay,” not “laid.” The wall in my desk nook was not quite plastered, but adorned maybe, with 3×5 cards containing the correct spellings of an assortment of words. Currently I have a card in front of me with a half dozen or so ASCII codes for several symbols that I use occasionally I have about half memorized, the others I use maybe once a year or less, so they’re there when I need them.

So there you have it: post your doubtful spellings up where you can see them.

This one’s too easy.

Um, you do know what “literally” means, and the difference between “healthy” and “healthful,” right?

Not much need for a lesson in this Break of Day, except to say that the one on the left is right. (yuk yuk.)

Lots of Indo-European languages use inflectional endings on words to indicate how the words are used in the sentence. About all we have left of inflected nouns in English is the possessive case.

Now, when we have a direct object and an indirect object, you can usually tell which is which without an inflectional ending. So If I say,

Give the woman the ball.

We rely on word order to know that woman (indirect object, dative) is getting the ball (direct object, accusative). That’s easy when you have nice short sentences. Suppose the ball isn’t in the sentence:

Give the woman.

Sounds like something from a wedding ceremony. Now let’s add a man into the picture:

Give the woman the man.

A little harder. Who’s getting whom? Put a “to” in there:

Give the woman to the man—or—give to the woman the man.

We use a “to” to indicate the indirect object. An inflection would be something like -em for dative (indirect object) and -en for accusative (direct object). Then we could put the words in either order and our meaning would still be clear.

Give the womanen the manem.

Now we can see that he’s getting her! No need for “to.”

All this is a bit trivial with these nice short sentences. But what about a long sentence? Here’s one, from the book Listening In by Susan Landau, page 107:

When a user instructs her iPhone to update, the iPhone sends an Apple authorization server—directly or via iTunes—the device’s unique ID, hashes of the software the phone is requesting, and a random number.

Where did the iPhone get the server to be able to send it? Oh wait—the server is the indirect object; the ID and so on are being sent to the server. Not obvious until you wade through the sentence.

A dative inflectional ending on “server” would have been handy.

Sioux City is one of my favorite places; it’s where I lived when I worked for Gateway 2000. But a recent article written there betrayed a solecism that a writer from (ahem) the big city would have known not to make. Here’s the passage:

An anxious group of football players and their parents took up a full room at The Wheelhouse Bar & Grill – one of Sioux City’s newest sports bars – Wednesday night.

The athletes were there to celebrate their future as members of the Morningside College program, which became official as soon as the players signed letters of intent.

No, it’s not that high school athletes becoming college athletes sign up a bar is inappropriate. Places like that tend more to be community centers than in big cities. (Besides, I’m here to comment on what the writer wrote, not what the kids did.)

It’s the use of “anxious” when the writer meant “eager.” I even wrote about this at least once before. I guess the Sioux City writers don’t read The Writing Rag, eh?

Well, that’s okay. I still greatly enjoyed the time I lived there.

 

English has a tendency to change hyphenated compounds into single compound words over time. For example, “today” used to be “to-day,” and “pickup truck” used to be “pick-up truck.” This process takes a generation or so to happen. As people become more and more familiar with a phrase, they tend to leave out the hyphen. (We call this sort of thing linguistic change. Linguistic change is a common source of grumbling among grammar curmudgeons.)

Today I read an article by a reporter who covers politics. He used a compound word that I would have hyphenated. IMO the spelling is on the early side:

The decadesold informal understanding between the government and the press — that the government would only go through the motions on leak investigations — was dead.

I’m not saying he’s wrong, just early. We don’t use “decades-old” very often.

You saw it here first second!

PS—I ran into another premature compound (for the moment, we’ll ignore the false subject and “upon” where they should use “on.”):

There is a critical need to establish organizationwide data security policies and controls based upon DSG.

Gotta show you the comic first—I didn’t notice the joke in this Argyle Sweater until I read the caption at the bottom.

Now you know why I wrote “letterplay” instead of “wordplay.” A palindrome is a situation where something has the same order of letters both backwards and forward. Punctuation and spaces don’t count.

And here’s the academics: “palin” (πάλιν) is Greek for “back” (in the sense of “again”) and “drome” (well, dromos (δρόμος), is Greek for “race,” which implies running.

So there you have it—a lesson in Classical Greek based on a comic.

Do you know when to use “in” and when to use “within”?

The difference can be subtle. I’ll give you the answer right away:

Use “in” if you are writing about a container.
Use “within” if you’re writing about a limit.

I should point out that “within” is more formal than “in,” too, and I generally advocate plain writing.

The limit can be any boundary, not necessarily physical. For example you might say “Get your room clean within the hour!”

The container doesn’t have to be physical, either. Here’s a quote from page 72 in an interesting book I’m reading, Listening In, by Susan Landau. (I’ll set aside mentioning that “located in” is redundant. “Located” isn’t necessary.):

Zero-day vulnerabilities are most prized when they work against widely deployed systems─and Stuxnet’s were all located in the Windows operating system, which made these particularly valuable.

As they deconstructed it, they began publishing their findings in blog posts.

Okay, here’s a comic with “in.” Try reading this and the sentences above with “within” and you’ll see why “within” doesn’t quite work.

Here’s an example of using “within” when “in” is better. Say it both ways:

These include the Schrödinger Basin, a relatively youthful crater within the larger South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is thought to be the moon’s oldest impact crater.

So here’s the rule: if you can use “in,” do so. Use “within” only when “in” sounds wrong. Most of the time “in” sounds right.

First the comic illustration:

I like Adam @ Home partly because hes a writer who works from a home office, like me, some of the time. This strip is part of an arc that got me wondering about some of our non-phonetic words in English, in this case, “of.” Why do we voice that f as if it were a v?

It turns out we sometimes don’t! The unvoiced pronunciation, when it happens, is usually right before an unvoiced consonant. Say “of course.” We don’t think about it, but that “f” can come out unvoiced. When we say the word “of” to name it (called the citation form) we always voice the f. We say / əv /. So all we ever think about is the voiced pronunciation. (See the previous post for an explanation of that upside-down e.)

What’s going on than? We say the v because it’s less work to say the voiced v in front of a voiced letter! For example, say “of every.” Now say “of course.” Not quite the same, are they? Hmm.