#40 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday May 27)
Good morning!
GRAMMAR, REDUX!
From Brad McGirr (a classmate from high school and long-time councilmember, and sometimes Mayor, of Rancho Santa Margarita):
Grammar! My biggest beef is the inappropriate usage of apostrophes! “Here’s to the Sonnenberg’s!”
Brad, you are so right. This drives me nuts too. The apostrophe turns the plural into the possessive, which it is not. To pluralize any name, add an “s.” When pluralizing a name ending in “s” or “z,” ad “es.” That simple.
And from Peter Bain, a man of precision and opinion, this:
“Here stands Mark Twain, as on point as ever: ‘Dear Friend: I am sorry to write such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.’”
So true. Editing and precision are skills in short supply. Of course, the “granddaddy of all grammar books,” Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, says it best:
“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 he make every word tell.”
These words, written in 1918, remain true today. That said, I think Tweets often err in the opposite direction!
Finally, for all you grammarians out there, there is now a card game based upon grammar and copy-editing. It’s called “Stet!” And, yes, I ordered it.
Have a great day,
Glenn