Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Trivial as it gets
Man, you know what bothers me sometimes in poems? Comma splices. I write a sentence, I write another sentence but put a comma instead of a period. Maybe some people think it's poetic, I think it's sloppy. I've mockingly used the gimmick enough, I'm stopping now. Is there anything the comma does there that a period or a dash or a semicolon, all acceptable punctuation marks in such a case, couldn't do? A comma splice won't ruin a good poem for me, but it's going to be a point against a merely competent poem. Why use it?
Edited to add: arbitrarily removing commas at the end of lines bothers me too. Do it all the time or not at all in a poem...
While we're at it, some other writing/language things that bother me:
Edited to add: arbitrarily removing commas at the end of lines bothers me too. Do it all the time or not at all in a poem...
While we're at it, some other writing/language things that bother me:
- It's not "shoe-in," it's "shoo-in."
- You don't "pour over" a document, you "pore over" it. Unless you're spilling water, I suppose.
- When the hell did "busses" become an acceptable plural for "bus"? Busses are kisses. Goddamnit, maybe I just didn't learn the variant.
- It's not a "shuffle pass," it's a "shovel pass." Sports announcers are some of the most spectacular manglers of language and terminology in the entire world.
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Oh Steve, I just committed the busses sin in a blog comment today...oh, the shame! I knew something about that word didn't look right. Buses. Busses. Slap me with a ruler!
Well, it may bug me, but it's not technically a mistake anymore, if it ever was. It's in the dictionary at M-W.com. :-(
"shuffle pass"?! Yikes.
And "not technically a mistake anymore"? Double yikes: Collective misuse as an argument for the evolution of language. I've softened on technowords, and I've too much NYC in me to care much about the word "whom", but how about "biweekly", which dictionary.com (on the American Heritage line) gives two definitions for: (1) happening every two weeks and (2) happening twice a week; semiweekly.
More yikes. Keep stickling, Steve. If that is, in fact, a word.
And "not technically a mistake anymore"? Double yikes: Collective misuse as an argument for the evolution of language. I've softened on technowords, and I've too much NYC in me to care much about the word "whom", but how about "biweekly", which dictionary.com (on the American Heritage line) gives two definitions for: (1) happening every two weeks and (2) happening twice a week; semiweekly.
More yikes. Keep stickling, Steve. If that is, in fact, a word.
There are just so many aspects of grammar that folks take for granite these days...
Your fellow stickler,
Mary B.
Your fellow stickler,
Mary B.
This post is a few days old now, but it grabbed my attention. A few that have especially annoyed me for a while are:
confusing "it's" and "its"
confusing "you're" and "your"
saying "going forward" instead of "from now on" (I work in the billing department of a large corporation, and I hear this kind of overblown corporate talk constantly).
Also -- and this is rampant in the poetry world -- writing "mic" (short for microphone) instead of "mike." Open mic? It's one thing to coin a new word for something that there hasn't been a word for previously. But microphones have been called (and spelled) mikes for decades, ever since the invention of something called radio.
confusing "it's" and "its"
confusing "you're" and "your"
saying "going forward" instead of "from now on" (I work in the billing department of a large corporation, and I hear this kind of overblown corporate talk constantly).
Also -- and this is rampant in the poetry world -- writing "mic" (short for microphone) instead of "mike." Open mic? It's one thing to coin a new word for something that there hasn't been a word for previously. But microphones have been called (and spelled) mikes for decades, ever since the invention of something called radio.
My advisor in college hated the mike/mic mixup. Unfortunately, I think that one's become accepted usage too.
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