I don’t know if I’ll celebrate next year, though—it’s getting too commercial. They’ve forgotten it’s supposed to be about the grammar.

This idea pretty much came from The Elephants of Style, and I’m going to quote it for another funny example:

I once saw somebody write of [Nancy Reagan]’s visit to an anti-child abuse center. (It’s one thing to be anti-child, but to open abuse centers?)

If two or more words are acting as an adjective before a noun, use hyphens. If they come after the noun, leave them out. So you might say:

That article was well written.
-or-
That was a well-written article.

There are many other uses for hyphens if you’d like to read more.

Update: My mom sent me this clipping from the Chicago Tribune (from 3/4/12, just over a week after I posted this comic. Ironically, it was National Grammar Day):

First abuse centers, now cruelty charities?!

Most of those books behind the professor just explain the difference between etymology and entomology.

If you google “etymology not entomology” (with quotes) you’ll get over 3,000 results (try it, it’s fun!). Without quotes you’ll get over 170,000. Apparently these words will be forever linked, like pancakes and syrup, fries and ketchup, or bananas and peanut butter…I really need to eat before I post.

Oh, and to answer the question from the comic, “vegetarian” comes from the Latin word vegetus, meaning lively or vigorous. It does not come from vegetable as many people (understandably) assume.

Here’s the quiz question for this week: What’s the origin of etymology (not entomology)? Post your answer in the comments!

If you’re gonna use a stereotype, why not go all the way, right? But to be fair, I often walk around town with an American flag draped over me.

An appositive is a noun or noun phrase that (often) follows a noun, and explains it. They are often set apart by commas. We can even reverse the order, so the above sentence would read: “The pilot, Brad, sneezed.” Now “Brad” is the appositive. Watch out for titles: “Former President George Bush tripped” does not need commas unless you add The: “The former president, George Bush, tripped” or “George Bush, the former president, tripped.” Now the sentence must still make sense without the appositive (appositives contain non-essential information), so The is required in the first sentence. There’s more to it, though, so feel free to read more about it.

This apposition joke was the impetus for this whole comic strip, believe it or not. I thought of this sometime in 2011, and it’s so bad I knew I had to do it. The whole premise of the blocks with words on them was invented just to support this joke. Originally this was going to be the only comic, but after thinking about it more, I realized I had other topics to write about. The plan was to post all of these on my other blog and not register a new domain (I have around ten), but of course I gave in after making the first two (before posting them). No regrets so far!

1. One person has to be the moderator. My cousin was the moderator the whole time (because he enjoyed it), but normally players would rotate each round.
2. The moderator finds a book. Bad genre novels (bad romance, bad sci-fi, etc.) are a lot of fun, but you can mix it up with some good ones too. If you’re using Amazon, browse the Book section for a ridiculous-looking book, and make sure it has the option to “Search inside this book.” You need to be able to view the first sentence.
3. The moderator reads the title, the blurb, and can even show the book cover. Players should take some quick notes. The moderator will probably have to read the blurb a couple times.
4. Players write down their names and write a plausible first sentence to the book—they’re not trying to predict the real sentence; they’re trying to match the tone and style. At the same time, the moderator should write down the real first sentence on a sheet of paper (click on the cover, then click on “First Pages.” We skipped the Prologue if it had one).
5. After everyone is done they hand them to the moderator, who mixes them up, and then numbers them.
6. The moderator reads all the sentences aloud. The players write down the number of the sentence they think is real, and hand their sheets to the moderator.
7. The moderator reads down the list of sentences, saying who wrote each one, and which is real. Players get two points if they guessed the correct one, and they get one point for each person they fooled (i.e., if three people thought my fake sentence was the real one, I get three points).

We didn’t have a time limit, but you may want one. Coming up with sentences isn’t the hard part—it’s settling on only one. The guessing stage is also frustrating, because you don’t know if a sentence is so bad because it’s the real one, or because a player is trying to trick you.

To give you a taste of the actual gameplay, here are the books we used and some of our sentences (plus the real one), in the same order we heard them. I’m not including all of them, so you have better odds than we did on some of these. Can you guess the real sentence? I’ll put all the answers at the end of this post. Remember, these are intentionally bad.

Kindling the Moon

Meet Arcadia Bell: bartender, renegade magician, fugitive from the law. . . .

Being the spawn of two infamous occultists (and alleged murderers) isn’t easy, but freewheeling magician Arcadia “Cady” Bell knows how to make the best of a crummy situation. After hiding out for seven years, she’s carved an incognito niche for herself slinging drinks at the demon-friendly Tambuku Tiki Lounge.

But she receives an ultimatum when unexpected surveillance footage of her notorious parents surfaces: either prove their innocence or surrender herself. Unfortunately, the only witness to the crimes was an elusive Æthyric demon, and Cady has no idea how to find it. She teams up with Lon Butler, an enigmatic demonologist with a special talent for sexual spells and an arcane library of priceless stolen grimoires. Their research soon escalates into a storm of conflict involving missing police evidence, the decadent Hellfire Club, a ruthless bounty hunter, and a powerful occult society that operates way outside the law. If Cady can’t clear her family name soon, she’ll be forced to sacrifice her own life . . . and no amount of running will save her this time.

Amazing. I am so reading that book (seriously, I just ordered it). She teams up with Lon Butler! LON BUTLER! Anyway, here are some of the sentences:

1. “These are on the house,” I said, spilling a round of drinks into his lap.
2. I was dropping the final pineapple into a punch-bowl sized Tahitian Tango when the semi-daemonic firestarter walked in.
3. Cady poured another Triple Brain Blast over ice.
4. I knew better than to be preoccupied when Tambuku Tiki Lounge was overcapacity.

This was the first round, and we all guessed it correctly! There was just something about the real one we all honed in on. As we later found out, this is really rare. Most rounds were all over the place.

Summer’s End

Deanna was eighteen when she married a handsome Frenchman, attorney Marc-Edouard Duras. Now, at thirty-seven, she should be happy with Marc, her elegant home in San Francisco, and their teenage daughter, Pilar. But one summer changes it all when she realizes her failing marriage is a trap she must escape.

Sentences:

1. Deanna Duras opened one eye to look at the clock as the first light stole in beneath the shades.
2. It’s funny how nineteen years can feel like a lifetime.
3. One morning I knew that even our view of the Golden Gate, the aroma of eucalyptus, the fine brass fixtures, and the Aztec jade couldn’t save me from the truth.
4. Startled by her dream, she awoke and instinctively reached out, but his side of the bed was empty…and cold.

River’s End

Olivia’s parents were one of Hollywood’s golden couples—until the night her father destroyed their home and took her mother away forever. Now, years later, Olivia is forced to recall those horrifying events and discover the truth about her childhood.

Sentences:

1. A sound—something between a telephone’s ring and a death rattle—gave her a chill of horror.
2. All she could remember were the golden shards of glass, so pretty, she thought, if they weren’t covered in blood.
3. Olivia was four when the monster came.
4. The sound of a camera flash, once warm and familiar, now echoed the memories of a broken home, a broken life.
5. Her response was automatic—something Olivia had adopted in the aftermath of all the tragedy.

Love Her to Death

In the midst of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, on a peaceful summer night in 2008, the body of 45-year-old Jan Roseboro was found at the bottom of her backyard pool. Her husband Michael, a successful businessman and a member of a prominent family, showed no emotion as he learned of her death. But the next day an autopsy revealed Jan had been savagely beaten and strangled before being tossed in the water to drown. Soon Michael’s secret lover, pregnant with his child, stepped into the media spotlight. And a horrifying true story of illicit passion, deadly deceit, and cold-blooded murder unfolded…

Sentences:

1. Linda looked up to see the reflection of flashing red and blue lights.
2. By the time the news spread, an eerie stillness had settled on our street and my only thought was, “no, not Jan, not like that.”
3. It’s a good living—relaying to the media someone’s heartfelt apology, or their resolve to fight these charges…or even their grief.
4. When confronted with brutality and death, the public expects a reaction.
5. She was fighting for her life.

A Wicked Snow

Hannah Griffin was a girl when tragedy struck on her family’s farm. She still remembers the flames reflected against the newly fallen snow and the bodies the police dug up—one of them her mother’s. It was the nation’s worst murder scene in decades and the killer was never found. Two decades later Hannah is a CSI investigating a case of child abuse when the past comes hurtling back. Years of buried questions are brought to life. A killer with unfinished business is on the hunt. And an anonymous message turns Hannah’s blood cold: Your Mom called…

Sentences:

1. Strolling back from the crime lab cafeteria, Hannah decided her ham sandwich could wait as she eyed the new stack of paperwork dropped on her desk.
2. The girl remembered the snow and the evil that had come with it.
3. It was winter again and the snow had frozen into a hard crust that shattered loudly with every step.
4. At some point in this job, the unspeakable became routine.
5. “Nothing,” Detective Cullen said, shutting the closet door.

Lucky

A hot-blooded beauty in love with power and hungry for pleasure, Lucky’s dazzling odyssey — and her trail of enemies — sweeps from the casinos of Las Vegas to a private Greek island, from cutthroat Hollywood to chic New York and Paris.

She’s a gambler and a lover. She’s wild, savvy, and proud. She’s

Lucky

…and you’ll never forget her.

Sentences:

1. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said, smiling, as I picked up $45,000 in chips.
2. “Yuri, a change of plan—forget Paris and head for Greece.”
3. The jury filed silently into the courtroom.

Play Dead

Mason used to be an enforcer, ensuring that those magic practitioners without a moral compass walked the straight and narrow. But now he just wants to keep his head down, play guitar, and maintain a low profile with Lou, his magical canine companion. But Mason is down on his luck, and when a job with a large payout comes along, he finds the offer hard to resist-not knowing it might mean sacrificing what both man and his best friend hold most dear.

Sentences:

1. The rain was vicious, drenching the streets, bouncing off the pavement, and running down the gutters.
2. Like clockwork, Lou materialized at the worst moment, just when things with Sally started heating up.
3. I awoke to the sound of my best friend scratching at my door.

(You really need to see the large version of that cover; click on it to go to the Amazon page.)

Variations:

• Also have players guess who wrote each sentence, and award a point for each they guess correctly (and award, say, four points for the real sentence). There were a few times where I guessed the correct sentence by eliminating the fake ones, because I thought I knew who wrote them. This may take too long if you have a lot of players.
• See who can come up with the funniest or cheesiest sentence that sounds like it could be real. Then the players vote on their favorite. This can be played at the same time. You might want to do this as a second round so people don’t get distracted or take forever writing two sentences at once.
• Have the moderator give a hint about the sentence before everyone writes, like, “it doesn’t mention a name,” or “‘Cindy’ is mentioned.” That would remove the weird situation where the real sentence is a non sequitur, and easy to spot (see “Lucky”, below)—although maybe some people like that.

Answers:

Kindling the Moon: 4

Summer’s End: 1

River’s End: 3. Weird, eh? No one guessed it; we all thought it was too stupid to be real. This became a running joke with us, where we’d replace “Olivia” with the current character’s name: “[Name] was [age] when the monster came.” If you find a different version of the book on Amazon the blurb actually does mention “a monster,” so it makes a bit more sense.

Love Her to Death: 5

A Wicked Snow: 2. This one is so bad and sounded so much like the Olivia sentence that no one guessed it.

Lucky: 3. What?! This has nothing to do with anything! This sentence is actually from the prologue, though, which my cousin normally skipped. This is a good example of why you should skip it. The first sentence of the first chapter is, “Lennie Golden had not set foot in Vegas for thirteen years, even though it was the city of his conception, birth and first seventeen years of life.”

Play Dead: 1

Well, how did you do? Let me know in the comments!

It’s no coincidence that yesterday’s post talked about The Elements of Style‘s section on active voice. If you’re not familiar with the subject you should read more about it elsewhere, but I’ll give a quick overview. Active voice has the subject doing the action: “Girls kissed Alex.” To make that sentence passive we switch the subject, and make the target receive the action: “Alex was kissed by girls.”

Passive voice enables you to leave out the person doing the action: “Alex was kissed.” Sometimes this is beneficial (if you don’t know who it was, or they’re unimportant), but often it makes the sentence weaker. Which you use can depend on who is more important in the sentence:

“Bob is hated.” (passive; Bob is the focus)
“Everyone hates Bob.” (active; “Everyone” is the focus)

Be careful not to confuse past tense with passive voice (“Bob was happy.”), and don’t assume it’s passive when there’s no person (“The glass broke.”).

Geoffrey K. Pullum, the head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, isn’t a fan. In his article, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, he tears the book apart, along with its authors:

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The article seems overly harsh, and a bit unfair. He describes some of the advice as “mostly harmless”:

Many are useless, like “Omit needless words.” (The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.)

Point taken, but that’s only the heading. That section goes on to give specific advice, and tells readers to eliminate phrases such as “the question as to whether,” “he is a man who,” “the reason why is that,” and so on. But Pullum has valid complaints. When he gets to passive vs. active, he says:

Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

This is true, and may be a problem with many of the examples in The Elements. You can make nearly any point you want by rearranging a well-written sentence. But the problems with passive vs. active get much worse. As Pullum points out, the book gets them wrong. Here are the four examples of passive voice from The Elements. Which ones are indeed passive, if any?

1. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.
2. At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard.
3. The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired.
4. It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had.

Only one is in passive voice—the second one. Their rewrites of these sentences may be better, but the section is about passive voice, so this is totally unacceptable. Update: commenters on other blogs have pointed out that the section in The Elements is actually titled “Use the active voice”, and that the examples show “how a transitive verb in the active voice can improve a sentence.” The commenters are right. The section is not technically about passive voice (though the beginning discusses it), and Strunk and White do not claim the examples are passive—but you can see how easy it is to miss that detail, as so many people have (Pullum pointed out how those examples are all over the web, listed as passive). Strunk and White may not be wrong, but they’ve at least broken their style rule 16: “Be clear.”

What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.

This is something I noticed while recently rereading The Elements. The old adage, “you need to learn the rules to know when to break them” applies, but many of the sentences are weaker and less clear because of it.

“Keep related words together” is further explained in these terms: “The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.” That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase (“as a rule”) that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

They literally break the rule while discussing it. Pullum loses me near the end with this, however:

Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

It’s true that established usage is important and relevant, but simply searching old fiction books is not compelling research. Are the examples from dialogue? Are those writers perfect? Have the rules changed since then? Surely there are common usages that Pullum would love to rid the world of, and that’s kind of how I think of The Elements. (What do you think? Is it still valuable as a reference? Let me know in the comments.)

The article is definitely worth reading, especially if you have read or will read The Elements of Style. It’s a good reminder not to put too much trust in any one source. Whoops, I just broke the “put statements in positive form” rule. Um…it’s a good reminder to distrust every single…wait, it’s a good reminder to always trust multiple…oh, !@#$ it.

Does their room look like it’s made out of chocolate? Mmmmm….

You may recognize this mistake in a lot of DVD special features where they have multiple “alternate endings” instead of “alternative endings.” Using alternate to mean alternative has become extremely common, however.

Traditionally you could only have one alternative, but no one really follows that anymore. Alternate can also mean an understudy.

Edit to clarify:

Because the third definition of alternate is very close to the first of alternative, it’s easy to mistakenly use one of these adjectives in place of the other. Think of it this way: Something that is alternate substitutes for the original, while something that is alternative provides a choice without replacing the original. [source]

So you can have an alternate route if the first gets blocked, but if both are available the other is an alternative.

I definitely did not watch Highlander before making this strip.

You know how some words look really weird after you stare at them for a while? Unique is one of them, ironically*. YOO-NI-KWA…UN-EYE-KAY…I need some sleep. I should mention that although there are no degrees of uniqueness, you can have more unique characteristics than something else. For instance, the blue X has one unique quality, but the pink X has three (pink, bold, and underlined): XXXXXXXXX. Somewhat relevant and interesting: are snowflakes actually unique?

When I told my girlfriend I made a panel with eleven characters that were the same, she said, “I’m sure they’d beg to differ.” :) Anyway, this really isn’t a word I correct people on. We all know what they mean, and it’s a pretty minor error.

* Ironic that it’s just like the rest. Someone call me out on the definition of ironic, I dare you.

This title is so bad I had to use it.

Note: dictionary.com’s usage note says “feel badly” is standard, but “feel bad” is better. Grammar Girl agrees.