Maybe we need more thread.
I hope to have some time today to write about something good–my reaction (and what it may catalyze in y’all) to starting two new (to me) books: Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices, a collection of occasional essays, and Ursula K. Leguin’s novel, Lavinia.
But, taking my cue from the first piece in the Pullman, I have to put in some real, focused time on my own manuscript.
So, for now, enjoy this:
FSM knows that I’ve no standing to poke fun at anyone else’s grammar, syntax or usage mistakes, much less any errors in copy editing.
But I can laugh, and do.
Open thread–with further examples of comma folly and other errors, whether inadvertent or not, being especially treasured.
Image: Gerhard ter Borch, Woman writing a letter, 1665.
Roger Moore
Yes, I am a fan of the Oxford comma, but I accept that any of those sentences could be reworded to remove the ambiguity.
pluky
Try as I may, the idea of a love child of Ayn Rand and God is something I just can’t wrap my head around.
No One of Consequence
Love this. Personal mantra:
“Precision in language matters.”
And my favorite Twain quote:
“The Right Word is, to the Nearly Right Word, as lightning is, to lightning bug.”
Peace,
NOoC
RandomMonster
Funny how Oxford commas go, because adding one to this sentence makes it ambiguous: “This book is dedicated to my mom, Ayn Rand, and God.”
@Roger Moore: Agree that there are easy fixes to remove ambiguity.
MattF
@Roger Moore: Also a fan, but a hard-core fan in the sense that I don’t agree that there’s any ambiguities about it— if your parents were Ayn Rand and God, then it makes perfect sense to acknowledge that fact. If not, you must insert that comma.
Montanareddog
@RandomMonster: I am no grammarian but I don’t feel that an Oxford comma helps here. I would just repeat the preposition: “This book is dedicated to my mom, to Ayn Rand, and to God.”
Nicole
So all those years Ayn Rand was touting her atheism, she was just doing it to avoid anyone asking her about her ex?
Tom Levenson
I’m starting to feel that I should have titled this post “Release The Hounds!”
arrieve
I didn’t even get that far, because I was struck by Kris Kristofferson being one of Merle Haggard’s ex-wives. I don’t know how I missed that
ETA: On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I knew that Nelson Mandela was an 800 year old demigod.
NickM
Lavinia is a fantastic book, one of my favorites. It’s a retelling of the Aeniad by a female character who is relegated almost to a footnote in the text. It captures what life was like for pre-classical Latins so well; not surprising for an author who was able to bring so many different worlds to life, but still inspiring given that she wrote it in her 70’s. I’ve also listened to it as an audiobook read by Alyssa Bresnahan, who is a fantastic reader. Enjoy!
RandomMonster
@Montanareddog: I’m making the point that it doesn’t help in my example, since you might conclude that Ayn Rand is my mother (yikes). While I’m all for the Oxford comma in most cases, there are constructions where it increases ambiguity.
Avalune
Not exactly comma related but in the same genre: When I worked at the Arts & Crafts Center at RAF Croughton we would receive orders with lots of spelling and grammatical errors. And we would request the order be in writing – by the person submitting, to absolve us of all errors when people realized things like:
Operessed
God’s Speed
Legend against mortals
To be fair – sometimes it was on purpose (none of the above were on purpose) to troll.
JanieM
My folder of irritating or amusing bloopers is endless. Here’s the first one I grabbed:
“Some lauded Neeson for opening up about something he’s shameful about and presenting an opportunity for a greater conversation.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/liam-neeson-says-he-s-not-racist-after-looking-black-n966976
You’d think that people who want to be writers would be interested in the actual meaning of words.
Avalune
@arrieve: I feel like you are missing the most interesting thing – the dildos.
Avalune
This reminds me a bit about a book that came out some time ago about a guy going around fixing people’s signs. And also memes like No Trespassing. Violators will be prostituted.
Edit: The Great Typo Hunt I think it was…
germy
Montanareddog
@RandomMonster: I get you and it’s a good point. My badly-expressed insight is that I think the Oxford comma thing is in general overdone. In Tom’s other examples, repeating “with” for Peter Ustinov’s meetings and putting “and” before Kris Kristofferson are simpler, clearer ways to remove the ambiguity
fake irishman
I have never read the Aeneid, but was so intrigued by the narrative idea behind Lavinia (retelling an epic through the eyes of a secondary character who has some things they need to say) that I read it a few years back after my daughter was born. Probably missed about 75 percent of the context, but still loved it. Familiarity with Dante’s Divine Comedy was helpful. I wonder what retelling the entire Odyssey through the eyes of Penelope would be like. Also, I love how authors over the centuries have just simply hijacked Vergil. I don’t mean his work, but the poet himself as a character.
MattF
@Avalune: I visited Kalamazoo many years ago— there was a sign in the parking lot of the municipal courthouse that read ‘No Parking. Prosecutors will be Violated.’
JanieM
Sign on a gas pump: “Please prepay ahead of time.”
arrieve
@Avalune: I thought we had all agreed not to mention the dildos.
fake irishman
@NickM:
Agreed on all counts on Lavinia. What’s doubly great about the book is not merely that LeGuin wrote it in her 70s, but that it’s both a natural extension of and a radical departure from all of her previous work.
Avalune
@MattF: Oh that’s a good one too. Lol
ETtheLibrarian
@Roger Moore: I am definitely an Oxford comma persona and really don’t understand why there was a “push” to get rid of it.
Avalune
@arrieve: I agreed to no such thing.
RandomMonster
@Montanareddog: Okay, got it. Yeah, agree that there are simple workarounds.
fake irishman
@Avalune:
Another great related genre is “lost in translation” which I imagine you’ve probably seen at some of your international postings (e.g. sign in a Barcelona travel agency that says “Go away!”)
My personal favorite version is the unintentionally very accurate lost-in-translation like GM trying to sell the Chevy Nova in Spanish-speaking Latin America (Ditto for the Ford Pinto in Brazil…)
craigie
@arrieve:
Likewise, I was busy being amused by all of Merle Haggard’s ex wives, and never made it to the second sentence.
Montanareddog
@fake irishman: or the Toyota MR2 which was renamed the MR in France, because emm-err-deux sounds too close to emmerdeur (an irritating man, a pain in the ass)
LongHairedWeirdo
Sometimes misreadings *can* be funny, though it’s sometimes a slightly guilty pleasure. I was reading an article on breakfast sandwiches, and I felt horrible for realizing that there was a joke my inner 12 year old couldn’t ignore. Paraphrased, it read how the sandwiches “are made with egg, ham, cheese, and come in a soft roll”.
When I shared it with some friends, I felt obligated to include an apology to the article’s author.
narya
@NickM: Yeah, I really liked it too!
Elizabelle
@craigie: That Merle Haggard was quite a guy. No dildos for him.
JanieM
Here’s one that comes with a question for you-all:
My bold. Shouldn’t the “may” in bold be “might”? I have dozens if not hundreds of examples of this usage, all from within the past few years. I don’t think I ever saw or heard it before about ten years ago, at this outside.
This is to ignore the fact that some editing might have made “investigating” less ambiguous.
dlw32
When I was in college, the local newspaper was famous for badly worded headlines. These are the two I remember best; they aren’t Oxford comma issues but funny none-the-less.
When the President was proposing installing tactical nukes in US bases in Europe the headline was “Regan to send Bush to Europe on Nuclear Arms.”
When NASA sent an astronaut to give a lecture on campus it was writen as: “First Black Astronaut to Speak”.
Elizabelle
@Avalune: Eh, Nelson Mandela and his dildos. Tell me something new. *yawn
CaseyL
A famous historical one (well, famous among students of 14th Century English history) is the written note Queen Isabeau allegedly received from or passed to her lover, Roger de Mortimer, regarding her husband, Edward II:
“Edward kill not to fear the deed is good.”
Which, depending on where the commas were supposed to go, reads either:
“Edward kill, not to fear the deed is good.”
or:
“Edward kill not, to fear the deed is good.”
They did kill Edward, so I guess the first interpretation is the one they went with. (But they ruled together for only 7 years, until Mortimer was ousted by Edward III, Isabeau’s son.)
Skepticat
@Montanareddog:
Agreement and respect from a proofreader/editor.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
The problem is that there’s an ambiguity either way. If you have a three item list and don’t use the Oxford comma, people can see it as a single item with the second and third as a parenthetical comment. But if you use the Oxford comma, people can assume it’s a two item list with the second item a parenthetical comment on the first. For example, if you wrote the final list as:
it’s ambiguous if “an 800-year-old demigod” is a separate individual or a description of Nelson Mandela.
The real problem isn’t with the use or non-use of the Oxford comma. The problem is that the comma is overloaded; it’s used both to separate items in a list and to offset parenthetical elements. As long as it’s used for both, it’s possible someone will confuse one usage for the other. The solution is to stop using commas for parenthetical elements and use parentheses instead. Then the distinction between “Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector” and “Nelson Mandela (an 800-year-old demigod) and a dildo collector” will be utterly unambiguous.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JanieM: Yes it should be. “May” is present tense and that passage is in past.
James E Powell
I read Lavinia about ten years ago and really liked it. I had read the Aeneid, but read it again right after. I also shared it with a few of my female students and recall some of them really liked it. They were all into the Hunger Games trilogy at the time.
sab
@Tom Levenson: Thank you so much for this. I have strong oinions about Oxford comma (sometimes but not always it is a good rule) but I can never come up with good example. Yours are quite memorable.
NotMax
Warning: Sink of Time Ahead.
Not quite the same thing but amusing all the same.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I insist on using Oxford commas when I translate documents, because often there can be a lot of money riding on the clarity of the documents I’m working on. I also have been known to scream at my colleagues writing stuff in Greek that they need to use more commas because the clarity of their work suffers without them. I’ve even gone so far as to email friends back Stateside asking them to send me care packages containing all the commas they can spare, as there appear to be frequent comma shortages here
(Also, several times I’ve noted that a sentence that crosses two or more page breaks needs to be rewritten. It’s generally too late for me to get the author to do any rewriting by the time I discover that fact, unfortunately.)
WhatsMyNym
The Oxford comma won’t rescue a poorly constructed sentence.
JanieM
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thank you! I agree, but I’ve had pushback from a couple of people.
It reminds me of the use of “whom” when it should be “who” — of which I also have dozens of examples, many from right here on this very blog. Who/whom is confusing, I realize that, but I would have thought that if one of them were going to drop out of sight it would have been “whom.”
Felanius Kootea
Oxford Commas rule!
Yutsano
@Avalune: I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the habit of kinkshaming a demigod.
Tom Levenson
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Have I got a post for you, coming up in the next few days.
Tom Levenson
@Yutsano: Probably a prudent policy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Folks who liked Lavinia might also like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Song of Achilles.
sab
Guys! I am laughing so hard from this thread that I have tears on my glasses.
oatler
Something else I don’t need: colons and semicolons; it’s as if: writing has gotten lazy; that we just plug in phrases like: too long; didn’t read.
germy
West of the Rockies
@Tom Levenson:
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of grammar!
lowtechcyclist
Maybe Merle Haggard should have smoked some marijuana in Muskogee. Kristofferson could have probably provided some.
I remember seeing a headline deep in the A-section of the WaPo back in the late 1970s. It said:
All Utah Sentenced To Be Shot
Seemed like a bit of, ah, overkill to me, but what do I know?
Anyhow, the meaning was that all people in Utah who got sentenced to death would be executed by firing squad, rather than any other means. And the headline is technically consistent with that. Still not what you’d expect it to mean.
piratedan
@Montanareddog: and in response, I’d say that your “book” is an obvious player because it’s claims of “dedication” are so divided…..
CaseyL
@James E Powell: I haven’t read Lavinia, didn’t even know it existed, and now am interested in reading it.
If you enjoy re-imagining the classics from a different perspective, Madeline Miller has written two very good books along those lines: the Song of Achilles (from Patroclus’ POV), and Circe, which is Circe’s story, of which Aeneas’ crew is only a small part.
ETA: Or what @Dorothy A. Winsor: said.
Southern Goth
— Nelson Mandela
Ken
One of my favorite ambiguities is in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting where the investigators find, scrawled across a wall, the message
HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR
Of course since it’s Jackson the ambiguity is deliberate, and just which of the three (four? more?) different possible readings is “correct” is never revealed.
Montanareddog
@Roger Moore: in my writing for work, I sometimes think I overuse the parentheses. Thank you for clarifying what I think I was hitherto subconsciously doing, which was to remove ambiguity caused by the dual function of the comma, and which I had never seen explained before.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Roger Moore:
I’ve seen one usage guide that said it’s perfectly acceptable to substitute a semicolon for a comma, when a harder break was needed. That would turn the example into “Nelson Mandela; an 800-year-old-demigod; and a dildo collector.”
I’ve found that learning to touch type can make a huge difference in language usage. If you’re hunting and pecking, it’s a lot harder to rewrite a long sentence, which means trying to fix it will seem like a better solution for a longer time.
West of the Rockies
Love the thread, Tom. Hopefully, E doesn’t show up.
randy khan
Two thoughts, one on commas and one on LeGuin:
Ken
Who’s E? No, strike that. My real question is, are you deliberately starting a sentence with “Hopefully” to provoke (summon?) this “E” person because it’s one of their grammar peeves?
oatler
Eats shoots and leaves
West of the Rockies
@Ken:
No, I was referring to someone from a thread a day ago who was wildly lacking in empathy and social intelligence.
J R in WV
I have emailed the image of the comma based errors to several friends, one is a professional copy editor, one a bishop who will be fascinated by the 800-year-old demi-god, etc, etc. Funniest thing I’ve seen on the innertubes in quite some time. Wife LOLed, was a professional writer for many years.
Amazeballs!!
Baud
@oatler: Eat shit and die
Montanareddog
@piratedan:
Are you Montytheclipartmongoose’s sockpuppet (or vice versa)? Because I have no feckin’ idea what you mean. Or am I just too dim to get it.
Montanareddog
@Baud: Tina Nurner ate half a bowl of shit and didn’t die. Your curse may be less powerful than you think
namekarB
Eats, shoots and leaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves
Without the comma it refers to a panda. With the comma it refers to a panda with a gun. Commas make all the difference between nouns and verbs
sab
@Montanareddog: Politically she maybe did die.
lurker
More thread is often good, at least as long as you are not on Pern. Hard to question reading anything by LeGuin.
piratedan
@Montanareddog: okay, so we’ll lose the joke
this book is dedicated to.. beholden to, smitten with, a devout admirer of…
Mom, Ms. Rand and The Almighty
apparently the book is apparently “loose” with it’s affections if it can be Dedicated to all three….
so much for Monogamy… //////////////
lurker
@Roger Moore:
While your point makes sense at some level (in legal documents, parentheses are used in place of commas for something that would be an appositive in lay writing), you still have a problem:
still leaves the situation ambiguous. Does your sentence mean Nelson Mandela collects sex toys, or is the collector a separate person? Not clear either way, and a lot of attempts to clear that up will not work. This is part of what makes AI/automated translation challenging.
I am mildly curious to see the collection, along the lines of seeing Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection or the pez museum (there are multiple ones). Less interesting than the kimchi museum.
lurker
@randy khan: not as aware of what LeGuin has read.
Have re-read her written work many times. Even introduced the kids to it, with some limited success so far.
Fake Irishman
@lowtechcyclist:
The American Journalism Review used to run a monthly collection of these ambiguous headlines sent in by readers with editorial commentary attached. My personal favorite was “legislators leave state with $30 million surplus” (with the comment “somebody stop them!”)
Wakeshift
De-lurking to share a memory of my dad’s amusement at a toast to the royal couple making the rounds in the early 80’s:
”Drink up, Chuck and Di”
modifies smoothly to
”Drink, upchuck and die”
probably in poor taste, and if so I apologize.
fitting though.
And I love Eats Shoots and Leaves.
Miss Bianca
@germy: Damn, I could only dream of having that much sang-froid reading my death sentence.
superdestroyer
I never understand people who resist the Oxford Comma given that it makes reading the sentance aloud so much easier.
RSA
I enjoyed the Pullman book. He has nice insights to offer. Of course, he’s extremely opinionated, but he’s not overbearing. I learned a good deal and had fun doing it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Tom Levenson:
Richard
@pluky: Best sentence i read all day. My parents, Ayn Rand and God – descibes Republican philosophy in a nutshell.
E.
@West of the Rockies:
I get that my opinions are unwelcome here but the privilege on this blog fucking reeks. My town is the evacuation zone for victims of the River Fire. People come through here with nothing left at all and express gratitude for saving a horse, or grandma, or their passports. There is no rebuilding for them — they are displaced people. And I gladly bake for them because there is nothing else I can do. My home will likely burn one of these summers too and it is a tragedy too great for words that we have to spend so much money protecting structures when we could use that money to return the forests to a natural fire cycle. But a natural fire cycle is too harsh for the public because it leaves burned landscapes and smoke.
Tenar Arha
Loved that book Lavinia.
Enjoy!
sab
@lurker: That correction was so apt that it was quite unkind.
Randi, I have made mis-statements like that myself, a lot. We know what you meant.
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
@Fake Irishman:
About a third of the way down is the story of what may be the greatest headline of all time :
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/05/footnotes-life-michael-foot
Julia Wood
Sign in a bodega window: “Ice Cube for Sale”
Remembered from years ago: “Congress approves missiles with strings attached.”
Salt Water Cleanse
Malaprops were so frequent amongst my engineering colleagues that we started making a book of them. A few of my favorites were:
A flash in the pants
Let’s circle the wagons and move on
A juicier carrot to buy into
Kitten caboodle
Richard
@E.:
I am sorry for your loss. Yes your neighbors are now displaced people and have lost almost everything. Where will they go?
Who will understand? How can they be helped?
I am sure there are privileged people participating in this forum. There are people who will make it through their entire lives without losing people or places that they love.
That is not to say that your feelings and thoughts are unwelcome in this public forum.
Viva BrisVegas
@Wakeshift: The Australian version is similar but more direct, “eats, roots and leaves”.
It describes either a wombat or your average male’s idea of the prefect date.
Another Scott
@E.: Tom’s family building one-room cabins in the middle of nowhere nearly 60 years ago didn’t cause the Forest Service policies. You crapping on his post isn’t going to change Forest Service policies, or do anything productive, either.
Maybe adjust your outlook.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@E.: Deleted stuff below.
Fuck it. Not worth the effort.
Enjoy your superior insight, clarity of vision, and deep understanding of loss. Yours is a lonely eminence.
Beyond that, I have nothing to say to you.
West of the Rockies
@E.:
I grew up in Paradise. Old family home is gone along with my sister’s and her daughter’s homes.
I’d love to see a consequential thinning of forests here in CA. You’re clearly not without sympathy, but IMO were very insensitive to Tom rather specifically.
I’ve been called insensitive here, too, for a flippant comment about people with cognitive impairments (for which I apologized but was not, as near as I can tell, forgiven–ces’t la vie).
Anyway, it would be awesome if the world’s idiots stopped denying climate change and put the health of future generations above corporate profit and forested McMansions.
Forests need stewardship. Such an approach costs money. Too F*#@ing bad to those who don’t want to hear that. (Tom is NOT among them.)
Roger Moore
@Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog:
It’s awfully hard to do better than “Headless Body in Topless Bar”.
Tom Levenson
@Another Scott:
@West of the Rockies:
Thanks to both of you.
Yes; I’ve followed research and practice on fire management for a long time; may even have written something about it (can’t recall if my reporting made into the magazine…) long ago. There has been a lot more noise, at least, about allowing “natural” fires to burn, and to do more prescribed burning (some of which was done quite recently in the Dixie Fire area).
But, of course, the forest we burn now is not the old-growth forest that thrived on this cycle up to roughly the middle of the 19th c., and the water cycle and temperature regime are, of course, radically different than they were even twenty or thirty years ago.
There’s no sound policy that can correct single digit moisture levels and high temps and winds. You can clear all the fuel you want around a house in the foothills or mountains, but when embers travel a mile or more to set spot fires, you’re the Spartans at Thermopylae: you may be able to hold the Persians off for a while, but the numbers get you in the end.
So, yeah, everyone who spends time in and/or loves CA and the West’s high country and remote places grasps that their love is so vulnerable to heart break. It’s no fun when some random jerk tells you what you already know.
trollhattan
Either elegant trolling or a cry for re-hiring of the thousands of out of work editors and copyreaders.
My kid just boarded her flight outta Vegas. The safety card says “737 Max8.” Not a typo.
trollhattan
@Tom Levenson:
Tom, even best forest practices cannot adequately protect a forest essentially deprived of two consecutive winters. The mountains have been dry since spring. There was no runoff for the State Water Project (i.e., 2021 the initial allocation of 10% was based on projected Feather River watershed snowpack runoff and that runoff never occurred–evaporation and absorption only–forcing an allocation reduction to 5%.)
Not to say our practices don’t need overhaul and funding. But I expect attention will pivot to drought-killed trees, of which there will be tens of millions. Underbrush clearing will perhaps take a back seat.
We had been lucky but today’s sky over Sacramento is smoke-dark. Streetlights were on midday.
debbie
@randy khan:
AP just can’t let go of the glorious days of typesetters who turned saving every possible pica space into a high art.
mary s
Not a comma snafu but . . . in San Francisco, all of the emergency call boxes that are still standing have been covered with red hoods that are labeled as follows:
Out of Order
Call 911
Every time I see one of these, I feel a slight urge to dial 911 and shout “out of order”!
dnfree
@Salt Water Cleanse: those are called “eggcorns”, and there are huge collections of them. They’re a misinterpretation of a phrase, but they usually also have some internal logic. Enjoy checking them out!
Tom Levenson
@trollhattan: We are in vehement agreement
mvr
@arrieve:
Me too, but then it seemed plausible, so I kept looking for the real mistake.
glc
There’s nothing “wrong” with the punctuation in those examples. I find the New Yorker comma policy rather harder to live with, but it is coherent and systematically adhered to. (“His father died, of cancer, in New York City, in 1992” and the like.)
The issue of avoiding ambiguity is a much broader one.
But in another vein, this little item from NPR has long stuck with me:
“Conceived in a garage, its 80 employees now … ”
Dangling, I avoid participles, as they say.
FlyingToaster
@arrieve: We’re Jackals, remember. Of course we’re going to mention the dildos. First.
Glitter won’t be mentioned until 3 or 4 ‘graphs down.
Paul in St. Augustine
“Let’s eat, Grandma” vs. “Let’s eat Grandma”.
namekarB
@glc: I’ve never ended a sentence with a preposition, that I know of
PaulB
Briefly, a long time ago, I was a clerk examining bank loan files in various Midwest banks. I wrote down some of the … unusual … collateral descriptions that I encountered during that job.
Wide Angel Lens
Pickup with Car Wench
Electric Chair
Bassbook Savings Account
15 Sows, 1 Bore
1978 Pickup Trick
1978 Damp Truck
Used 1976
1978 Dodge Couple
1979 Olds Cuss
1978 Mercy
1978 Used Toy
1976 Cinnamon Pickup
1977 Rabbi Sedan
1978 Chevy Camera
1980 Old Cutlass
2-door Camel (I’m still trying to figure this one out)
1/2 Dodge P.U.
One Used
WaterGirl
@PaulB: Ha!
Warren Senders
In the Times of India around 1994 there appeared the headline: “Hijacker of Russian Plane Blows Himself.”
To this day I regret not saving a copy.
My other favorite typo is here:
https://twitter.com/WarrenSenders/status/1423858716022038530
Pappenheimer
I remember reading a very short news clipping from the 70’s stating that some small nation was about to switch from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. It also stated that this change would occur gradually.
glc
@JanieM: On “might” v. “may” of course you’re right, and in theory that’s why we have copy editors – though one sees, increasingly, signs that the task has been left to software, which is fairly good at checking that actual words occur, but not very good at checking whether suitable ones do.
And I’ve been seeing a great deal of fiction in which the narrative uses “yesterday” and “tomorrow” for events in the distant past. “She decided to go to the store tomorrow.”