grammar & punctuation Archives

Apparel chain Old Navy is reprinting thousands of college T-shirts to correct an embarrassing error.

The shirts debuted this month, featuring the names and mascots of dozens of schools including USC and UCLA. Printed at the top of each shirt are the words “Lets Go!!”

The problem is that “lets” is missing its apostrophe, which is necessary to create the intended contraction of “Let us go.” Without the apostrophe, “lets go” means to release something.

via Old Navy reprinting erroneous school T-shirts – latimes.com

The editor wants nothing more than to read something so fresh and powerful and polished there is no question it must be in the journal.

Instead the editor, having read 17 things this morning, keeps going, thinking: A run-on sentence in the first line! Oh no, another story with the character waking up hung-over and getting a phone call. Why must they flash back before anything interesting happens? That isn’t really funny. We don’t publish travel articles. Does no one read the guidelines? This one gets good in the middle, but then the character just sits down and thinks about stuff. Wonderful minor character but the main one is self-pitying. Almost. Good scene. Pretty good. Not quite. Please can’t somebody just dazzle me so I can pick something and stop this?

via What Editors Want; A Must-Read for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines | The Review Review.

Here’s a piece by Russell Working on cleaning up the brain rot. See also his wonderful story “Slava” on Numéro Cinq.

Russians have a phrase for those clichés that burrow into the mind like brain worms: slova-parazity, or “word parasites.”

Though seldom fatal, the disorder can be devastating, and it has reached endemic proportions worldwide. Doctors report that victims suffer the loss of original thought and endure hypnotic spells in which they type strings of words we’ve all heard many times before.

Brain imaging reveals these word parasites are hackneyed phrases and variations on pop lyrics, movie lines, and old ad campaigns. Afflicted writers are unable to write the word father without foggily recalling the “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign, causing them to spout phrases like Not Your Father’s GOP or Not Your Father’s Censorship.

In the giddy brains of an afflicted writer, Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas, anymore morphs the Guardian headline about high-tech Japanese potties: “Toto–we’re not on normal toilets any more.”

We? You mean, you and your little dog, too?

But even as writers flee major cities in panic, medical authorities are calling for calm. The condition isn’t hopeless. Here are some tips for de-worming our minds:

via Are you addicted to cliches? Help is on the way! | Articles.

Russell Working alerted me to this article.

“A storm in a teacup” is the British version of the idiom, and it’s hard to imagine a more apt example than the squall that blew up recently over the claim by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland that Jane Austen was actually a sloppy writer. Sutherland was publicizing a new website that has put 1000 pages of Austen’s manuscripts online. According to her, the manuscripts are full of faulty spelling, break every rule of English grammar, and give no sign of the polished punctuation we see in the novels. She concluded that Austen’s prose must have been heavily edited for publication, quite possibly by the querulous critic William Gifford.

It’s a measure of Austen’s rock-star status that those claims got international coverage as a major celebrity scandal. The BBC headed its report “Jane Austen’s Elegant Style may not be Hers.” The French media website Actualité led with “Jane Austen massacred the English language,” and the Italian daily Il Giornale used the headline “Austen Revised and Corrected by a Man!”

via Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? : NPR.