grammar

no more battling, please

~ Anthony Lee Collins

I don't usually post in the middle of the week, but this is sort of a special occasion.

A few weeks ago, I read an article about Teddy Kennedy, and the title somehow referred to his "battle with cancer" or that he had been "battling cancer." The article itself was about how he had been aware that he was dying, and he was saying goodbye to people, writing his memoir, reflecting on his life.

I wasn't seeing any "battling" in there. And that made me aware of what a cliche it is, that people who have cancer are always battling.

And then it became clear that the Onion felt the same way (Man Dies After Secret 4-Year Battle With Gorilla)

But this morning the "After Deadline" blog at the New York Times (which I follow religiously) made the same point here.

I liked the point about "women athletes," too. I will admit that I just edited part of "The Case of the Four Women" to take out a reference to a "goatee beard."

mr. language person

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

(With apologies to Dave Barry.)

I'm sick, so I have no idea if I will post this, or if there will be more of "The Family Murder Case," or both, or who knows. But, lying feverishly in my bed for the last few days, surviving mostly on tea, I've had a few thoughts.

gerunds

I'm obviously a bit of a fanatic about some aspects of grammar and punctuation, but other areas I'm not strong in. One is parts of speech. This may go back to diagramming sentences in high school, which I (and pretty much everybody else) thought was a big waste of time. I wonder if current education theory would say that we were missing out on something really vital, or is diagramming sentences actually a silly idea?

Anyway.

Nouns, I understand what they are. Verbs, they're pretty easy. And adjectives, too. But then you get into the complicated ones, like past particles and marsupial phrases, and those have always baffled me. But the one which baffled me the most was gerunds.

I always thought the gerund was something like the infield fly rule. You could understand it as it was being explained, but after a few minutes, the information would drift away. But a week ago (admittedly before the fever started), I looked it up in The Chicago Manual of Style, and I got it. And I still remember it. A verb used as a noun.

Walking is the best exercise.

Walking is clearly a verb (anything that describes moving yourself around is a verb), but here it's being used as a noun. So, it's a gerund.

As McCarthy says in The Time of Your Life: "It's so simple, it's amazing!"

Now I guess I'll have to learn about the propositions and the injunctions and so on.

I already know what a conjunction is. That's pinkeye.

Oh, and, if further proof was needed that The Time of Your Life has altered my brain, I just figured out why the bum in "The Church Murder Case" was named Toledo. It's because so many of the stories Kit Carson tells in the play are about Toledo ("Did you ever try to herd cattle on a bicycle?").

Oh, and, emboldened by my mastery of the gerund, I decided to investigate another question. The next mystery story will be called "The Golden Mystery" (I explained before why it wasn't "The Golden Murder Case," but I'm sick so that means I don't have to find where I said it and put in a link). Now, obviously, if the events of the mystery were suffused with a golden light, "golden" would be an adjective. But "Golden" is actually a name, so it's more like The Greene Murder Case (which is an actual Philo Vance, not one of mine). So, is that not an adjective?

Well, I looked that up, and it is a "proper adjective" (which of course makes me think that the other adjectives must be improper in some way, or maybe that just comes from watching Gosford Park). So, that's settled, too.

interesting development

According to Time Magazine (or possibly it was Newsweek – who remembers?), more books were self-published last year than were published by conventional publishers. This is the first year of which that has been true. Ever.

Wow.

So, let me put in a plug for my book, A Sane Woman. Available from Amazon.com or directly from lulu.com.

It's good. You'll like it. Good characters, interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good ending. And it has a really nice cover. Order some for your friends.

more on the gerund (or "why I like the CMOS")

The Chicago Manual of Style section on the gerund is one short paragraph. The Wikipedia entry goes on for a very long time, and includes "passivization," "pronominal substitution," "clefting," and "left dislocation."

And, no, I didn't make those up.

This is the sort of thing that discourages me from pursuing these sorts of questions. It makes me want to say, "That's all very interesting, if that's your idea of a good time, but I'm having too much fun writing my detective stories to take ten years off to learn all that."

Or maybe I'll just give them all the good old bilabial fricative.

categorical, not imperative

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

It has bothered me for a while (in a fairly trivial way) that the recent posts here, which are mostly just plugs for new writing over there, have been being categorized as writing, thereby making it necessary, if somebody wanted to look at the posts which are actually about writing, for that person to sift through a bunch of little plugs to get to the real posts about writing, of which there are some, though mostly not real recent.

(Grammar buffs can appreciate how I deployed the passive voice in the previous paragraph to make it seem as if some abstract force has been classifying these posts this way, as opposed to them being categorized that way by me, which is more accurate. Of course, those same grammar buffs would probably be dismayed at the sentence itself, which is rather long and awkward.

For those grammar buffs, I'll have a little entertainment at the end of this post.)

So, I created a new category, called plugs. This post is classified as a plug, as well as blog news and grammar, for obvious reasons. Over the next few days, I'll go back and reclassify all the plugs as plugs, so the ones which are really about writing can have a little elbow room.

Since this is categorized as a plug, you can be sure that it's plugging something, which is the beginning of The College Murder Case, which starts here.

On the grammar front, here are two items from the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A for this month:

Q. My colleagues are divided in their opinions about "storing data in a computer" versus "storing data on a computer." Which is correct? Thanks.

A. You can do either, but I would store the data in the computer. It used to be easy to store stuff on a computer, but now with flat screens and laptops it tends to slide off.

Q. I have a sports-related question resulting from a recent conversation with a friend during a baseball game. I maintain that the proper term for that administrative unit overseeing sports at a college or university should be "Athletics Department," but my friend contended that it is "Athletic Department." Who’s right?

A. You can spell it either way, but unless your department is particularly buff, "Athletics Department" makes more sense to me.

a journey ends, identity theft, and grammar

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

the journey ends

The rest of the current chapter is posted. You can read it from the beginning, or you can pick it up here, at the first subway station.

it still sucks

Identity theft #2 (#1 was mentioned here) just happened. It consisted of somebody getting my debit card information and making a series of small ($12-$13) purchases with it. In Paris. That made it both easy to contest (since it is not difficult to prove that I’m not in Paris), and annoying (since my money is off having fun in Paris without me).

It was also amusing that it started by someone calling me and asking for my debit card information (and then being pissy because I wouldn’t give it to her). Even before I was the victim of identity theft #1 I wouldn’t have been that stupid. It turned out they were from the bank, but I wasn’t going to tell them anything until that was confirmed.

And you can get rid of a debit card and get a good, old-fashioned ATM card if you want, but you have to ask for it. Which I did.

grammar drones

I saw this post on stormville’s blog. It took a few minutes to track down the origin of the question, but finally this clarified why “pilotless drone” was suddenly such a big deal (and also, amusingly, how it might be partially or entirely a fake).

In the absence of context, I can’t give an opinion on the use of the apparently redundant modifier. Of course, I immediately checked the Chicago Manual of Style, and couldn’t find anything relevant, but I’m fairly sure their answer (if anybody would send in the question, and how much do you want to be that at least one person does?) would involve an assessment of the point the author was trying to make, and a caution against any grammatical rules which say either “always” or “never.”

I would also be very suspicious of any issues raised by somebody who would say, “Aren’t you there to ensure that the English language isn’t pissed on by your subeditors?” Though I originally read that as “pissed off,” which would be funnier (in an “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” way).

show me (and don’t tell me)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

more on chicago style

I forgot to mention another way in which I deviate from Chicago style, which is the fact that starling's name is always lower case. Actually, the CMOS does make provision for writers or artists who prefer for their names to be lower case (like bell hooks), but says that such names should never begin a sentence. So, if we accept that this rule should apply to starling, I obviously don't follow the rule, since her name, lower case and all, begins many sentences.

Do I have any idea why her name is always lower case? Hell, I don't even know why her name is starling to begin with.

(By the way, the "bell hooks" rule cited above does not apply to e. e. cummings, as per the CMOS, since it was his publisher's idea not to capitalize his name.)

stories to think about

I love things which make more sense the more you think about them, rather than the opposite (which is much more common in movies these days).

I was thinking about this when I was watching "The Mother Hunt," one of the episodes of the Nero Wolfe TV series from a few years back (which I just bought on DVD). In the middle of the episode, Archie is chiding Wolfe's client, Lucy, for calling him "Archie" while she's being a "huffy client" (she is informal because their relations have become, as Archie puts it, "cordial").

Much later in the episode, Wolfe tells Archie the solution of the mystery, and Archie chides himself that he should have thought of it himself. "You were fuming," Wolfe tells him. "You can't think when you're fuming." Archie repeatedly denies he was fuming (as Lucy denied she was being huffy), but there is never a mention of the parallel between these two scenes.

In the movie Dogma, Bethany is dissatisfied with both men and women, and her friend says she needs to ask God for a third option. Later, she wonders why she was not able to bear children (resulting in the breakup of her marriage). Her mother told her that, "God has a plan," but Bethany didn't see what plan God had that was more important than her having a family. "Wasn't that good enough for God?" she demands.

These questions are answered by the end of the movie, but no attention is ever called to this fact. There is no big scene (or any scene) where Bethany (or anybody else) comments on how her questions are now answered. But they are.

I like that. The more you think about the story, the more sense it makes. I try to do that (to show things without shining a spotlight on them), though here I gave in and explained what was going on here. But it's in another novel, so maybe that makes a difference. And it seemed (in the context of the current novel) an important part of clarifying (as I do throughout this book) who Katherine really is, compared to U-town, where she was to some extent playing a part.

Now, if someone could just explain to me why my dialup gets all slow and funky on Sunday evenings when I'm trying to post these entries. Well, I shouldn't blame the dialup, since it works fine on this computer (the Mac), just not on the Windows machine.

As Nero Wolfe would say, "Pfui!"

chicago style

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

First of all, this is a day late because the internet connection (and my computer) were acting a little cranky last night. So, I’m thinking about broadband again (and we all remember what an exciting time that was a few months ago, but if you’ve suppressed those memories, you can remind yourself here). The fellow I spoke to today (at a company which is highly recommended) said that a) if Verizon’s DSL was lousy, theirs would probably be the same, since, “they’re the same wires” (which seemed reasonable); and b) cable internet would be $44.95.

$44.95 every month. Really more than I want to spend, I can tell you. So, we’ll see where this goes.

Anyway.

absolute beginners

More of the current chapter is posted. If you want to read it from the beginning, you can go here. If you want to pick it up after SarahBeth’s return, you can go here.

the chicago way

I seldom ask for anything to be bought for me at work (I asked for a chair, because mine is being held together by C-clamps, but no dice), but I have asked for an online subscription to the Chicago Manual of Style, and it looks like I may get it. It would be $30 a year, which isn’t much for a website where I could easily spend many happy hours.

(Plus doing work-related things, too, of course.)

I may buy the hardcopy version of the manual (you know, a “book”), but that I would pay for myself, since I would want to own it. I imagine it’s quite huge, or I would carry it around with me.

Not to imply that I follow Chicago style in everything. My rules on capitalization (detailed here and here) are not Chicago style, and the CMOS advises against capitalizing people’s titles when they’re in text, but I usually do capitalize them (when I’m at work), because (as my father taught me), people work hard to get promoted (or they like to think they did), and they like to see the title printed prominently (and not broken across two lines, of course).

The CMOS has convinced me (at work, at least), to put only one space after periods, colons and semi-colons, rather than two, though probably nothing is going to ever break me of the habit of typing two. But, thankfully, HTML will always compress that down to one. Which is a lot of the reason that one space is now the standard in a lot of places, of course, since people are much more used to seeing one space than two these days.

See how much fun this is?