I have a feeling we’re losing “whom.”

At least, we’re losing it in the places where it should be used. There’s a generous sprinkling of it in other places, of course: it seems that misuse of language outlasts correct usage by a long shot.

First, a quick review … who and whom are both pronouns. So how are they different?

Well, one is the subject of the clause. That would be who. Whom is used when it is the object of the clause. The George Thorogood song asking “who do you love?” might be toe-tapping, but it’s grammatically incorrect: the person being loved is the object of the clause, and so the question should be, properly speaking, “whom do you love?”

The lovely and venerated Grammar Girl offers the following trick for figuring out the who/whom conundrum: if you can say, “I love him,” then you’ll be using whom. Him, she notes, equals whom, and they both conveniently end with an “m,” so there you go. Which is all right when you’re referring to a male, but it works with females, too, just not as obviously: if it’s her, it’s whom.

The problem isn’t just that people don’t know when to use whom; it’s that a whole lot of folks don’t care. They appear to think that using whom sounds better, is more erudite or upper-class or clever. News flash: when used incorrectly, it’s not only none of those things, it paints one as quite the opposite.

Let’s not lose words: we need them all. But learn to use the ones we have correctly, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

At the grocer’s, when there’s a sign announcing that broccoli is on “special.” On an internet message board, when a contributor notes that “such is my ‘opinion,’ whether others agree or not.”

They’re quotation marks, and they’re almost as widely misused as are apostrophes. When placed around a word or phrase as in these examples, they’re called “scare quotes” … and, man, are they scary! The use of the term seems to date from the first half of the 20th century. Occurrence of the term in academic literature appears as early as the 1950s.

Wikipedia to the rescue: “Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. When the enclosed text is a quotation from another source, scare quotes may indicate that the writer does not accept the usage of the phrase (or the phrase itself), that the writer feels its use is potentially ironic, or that the writer feels it is a misnomer. This meaning may serve to distance the writer from the quoted content.

“If scare quotes are enclosing a word or phrase that does not represent a quotation from another source they may simply serve to alert the reader that the word or phrase is used in an unusual, special, or non-standard way or should be understood to include caveats to the conventional meaning.

“Alternatively, material in scare quotes may represent the writer’s concise (but possibly misleading) paraphrasing, characterization, or intentional misrepresentation of statements, concepts, or terms used by a third party. This may be an expression of sarcasm or incredulity, or it may also represent a rhetorical attempt to frame a discussion in the writer’s desired (non-standard) terms (e.g. a circumlocution, an apophasis, or an innuendo).”

I’m not going to say that they are not sometimes appropriate, because there are many excellent uses for scare quotes, many of them noted in this article:

1. a term used only by a limited number of persons: Linguists sometimes employ a technique they call “inverted reconstruction.”
2. a way to express disapproval: The Institute for Personal Knowledge is now offering a course in “self-awareness exercises.”
3. a way to show that what is being stated is not, in fact, necessarily true: The Serbs are closing in on the “safe haven” of Gorade.
4. a means to indicate a euphemism: Sharon Stone made dozens of “adult films” before getting her Hollywood break.

I have no quarrel with these usages of scare quotes. After all, one can hardly misuse something unless there is, on the other side, a correct way to use it!

But as the wonderful “blog” of “unnecessary quotation marks” is constantly noting, there is a plethora of examples of misuse. Check them out: I guarantee you’ll enjoy them!

A few choice examples:

• Grab a “drink” and get a “snack” on the house!
• Turn off your “cell phone”!
• Great “hot” food!
• We are “open”!

The list goes on and on (to my not-so-secret delight). Do you have examples you’ve seen recently of the misuse of scare quotes? Share them here! Please! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

When Prof. Strunk wrote it in 1919, the book was controversial. Remember that the style du jour was Bulwer Lytton, a high Victorian style that did in fact obsfucate meaning more often than it revealed it. What detractors don’t realize is that a good feal of the clear writing to which our generations have become accustomed is thanks to Strunk and White. If you are reasonably proficient in English, you probably can get by without it; but if it hadn’t been for the Elements, as my friend and colleage Dick Margulis has said, “we might still be thrashing our way through dense, convoluted, triple-canopy rainforest prose with machetes.”

In its historic context, it was an important book. Perhaps it is less important now, but it still is a reasonable guide for those who do not have a strong background in English.

****
What about that historical context? A bit of history from Wikipedia:

Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, privately published it in 1919, and first revised it in 1935 with editor Edward A. Tenney. In 1957 at The New Yorker magazine, the style guide reached the attention of writer E. B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919, but had since forgotten the “little book” that he described as a “forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.”
Weeks later, he wrote a feature story lauding the professor’s devotion to lucid written English prose. Meantime, Macmillan and Company publishers had commissioned White to revise The Elements of Style, then 41 years old, for a 1959 edition, because Strunk had died 13 years earlier, in 1946. His expansion and modernization of the 1935 revised edition yielded the new writing style manual, since known as Strunk & White, whose first revised edition sold some two million copies. Since 1959 the total sales of three editions of the book, in four decades, exceeded ten million copies.

In the 1918 original edition Strunk concentrates upon specific questions of usage and the cultivation of good writing by recommending: “Make every word tell.” One composition principle, the 17th, is the simple instruction: “Omit needless words.” The 1959 edition features White’s updated expansions of those sections, the “Introduction” essay (derived from his Strunk feature story), and the concluding chapter, “An Approach to Style,” a broader, prescriptive guide to writing in English.

Later, E.B. White updated the second (1972) and third (1979) editions of The Elements of Style, by which time it had grown to 85 pages. By publication of the fourth edition in 1999 the second author of Strunk and White had been dead 14 years, since 1985.

The fourth edition omits Strunk’s advice to use masculine pronouns “unless the antecedent is or must be feminine”, noting that “many writers find the use of the generic he … limiting or offensive.” It provides additional advice for avoiding an “unintentional emphasis on the masculine” in the renamed entry “They. He or She.” in Chapter IV: Misused Words and Expressions.

****

Many of my own students and clients (and you know who you are) start out with their writing really needing to find the clarity of thought and expression that is advocated in Strunk and White … there is a sense in many beginners that florid writing and literary writing are one and the same, and it takes a bit of unlearning to understand what we were first told in 1919: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Let every word you use tell. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Unless, of course, the claims are true.

In three cases, I’ve found them to be. The World’s Best Cat Litter is, in my experience, the world’s best cat litter. I am owned by two cats and know whereof I speak. Likewise The World’s Best Glass Cleaner really is amazing—streak-free cleaning, a glorious shine.

And, finally, to something that’s relevant to this blog: The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need, by Susan Thurman. It’s a slim, small volume, which puts a certain pinched look on the faces of most language enthusiasts who think that bigger is better. In this case, not so much.

If you hold any linguistics degree, if you edit medical journals for a living, if you spend your free time wagering on the existence of esoteric words, then you’re right: this isn’t the book for you. But for most people who simply want to get by without misplacing their apostrophes or without confusing their and there, it’s a great tool.

For solving tricky grammar questions, avoiding embarrassing errors, and getting your thoughts organized enough to put pen to paper, this compact work will provide you with all the tools you’ll ever need.

The book’s subtitle is A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment, and it’s possible that it was in fact developed with students in mind. But think of all written communication as a writing assignment, and you’ll enter into the spirit of the thing.

Here you’ll find help understanding the parts of speech and elements of a sentence, avoiding common grammar and punctuation mistakes, using correct punctuation in every sentence, and writing clearly and directly. I suspect we all have colleagues to whom we’d like to gift this book based on those claims alone!

The most damaging mistakes a writer can make are probably misspelling or misusing words. Just a few of these errors will make a reader lose confidence in what you’re trying to say. Here are basic rules of English spelling and the most commonly misused words …

Oh, yeah … (insert blissful sigh here)

The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need is published by Adams Media, is affordable, easy to slip into a jacket pocket or purse (or keep in the top drawer of your desk!), so head out to your local independent bookseller and order a copy today. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

The reality is that copyediting comprises a very specific set of tasks done to a manuscript. When in doubt, start with Wikipedia:

The “five Cs” summarize the copy editor’s job: Make the copy clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent. Copy editors should Make it say what it means, and mean what it says.

Typically, copy editing involves correcting spelling, punctuation, grammar, terminology and jargon, timelines, and semantics; ensuring that the typescript adheres to the publisher’s style.

Copy editors also add any “display copy”, such as headlines and standardized headers, footers.

Copy editors are expected to ensure that the text flows, that it is sensible, fair, and accurate, and that any legal problems have been addressed. Some newspaper copy editors select stories from wire service copy.

Copy editors may shorten the text, to improve it or to fit length limits. This is particularly so in periodical publishing, where copy must be cut to fit the layout, and the text changed to ensure there are no “short lines.”

So a copyeditor begins with a stylesheet, either one used by the publisher or one that he or she creates. The stylesheet ensures consistency: one makes a decision about how to spell something, for example (as in copy editor or copyeditor!), or what one chooses to capitalize, etc.

Using this stylesheet, the copyeditor goes through the manuscript and makes sure that spelling, grammar, usage are all correct and that usage is consistent throughout. Copyediting may also include format editing—in other words, making sure that headers and subheaders are used correctly and consistently throughout the manuscript.

Copyeditors use terms that may sound like jargon to the uninitiated (as indeed does the language used in most specialized fields) but are helpful in deciding what changes to make and explaining why one is making them.

Want to learn more? Sign up for the copyediting elist published out of Indiana University and you’ll learn everything you ever wanted to know about dangling participles, poorly constucted sentences (and how to fix them!) and compound sentences. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!