Charles Harrington Elster

Here's a sentence from the obituary for actor Ben Gazzara that was syndicated by the New York Times News Service and ran in my local paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 4, 2012: "Both his parents had immigrated from Italy."

Did you catch the accident of style? Immigrated should have been emigrated. Why? Here's how I explained the distinction in my book Verbal Advantage:

The im- in immigrate means “into,” and the word means literally "to go into a new country, migrate in." The initial e- in emigrate is short for ex-, which means “out”; to emigrate means "to leave or go out of one’s country, migrate out." Immigrate is followed by the preposition to. You immigrate to a country, go into it to resettle. Emigrate is followed by the preposition from. You emigrate from a country, go out of it, leave it to settle in another. When you emigrate from your native country you immigrate to another.

"Wouldn't you like a job that fulfills you both professionally and personally?" asks an ad in The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 29, 2011) that plugs the paper's online want ads. "With our new filtering tools, you can quickly hone in on the job that's right for you."

The choice of hone in here disturbs me both professionally and personally. As Bill Walsh notes succinctly in Lapsing Into a Comma, "You can hone a skill, but you can't hone in on something. The term is home in" (as in to home in on a target).

This just in via email from the Yale Club of San Diego (I'm an alumnus):

Robin Sheretz-Morgan, Founding Director of the San Diego Ballet will be on hand to guide us through the process of producing "The Nutcracker".

There are three flagrant accidents of style in that sentence, and one questionable point of diction.

First, "Founding Director" should be "founding director." No need for capitals. Second, the phrase "founding director of the San Diego Ballet" is appositional (it adds information to the sentence), so it should be set off by commas on both ends; thus, another comma after "Ballet" is needed. Third, in American English periods always go inside quotation marks, so the sentence should end like this: "The Nutcracker."

Finally, we have the diction (word choice) problem. The phrase "guide us through the process of producing 'The Nutcracker'" implies that the audience is producing the ballet and the speaker will offer guidance in how to do it. But the intended idea is that the audience will learn how the speaker produced the ballet, so a revision is in order, something along the lines of "show us how she produced 'The Nutcracker'" or "take us step by step through a production of 'The Nutcracker.'"

Now for three accidents that I found in my reading over the Thanksgiving weekend. The first is from the Sunday Review section of The New York Times (November 27, 2011, p. 7): "But apparently, he felt badly about Arthur."

We don't say I feel gladly or I feel sadly, so why do so many people say and write I feel badly? Linking verbs such as feel, look, smell, taste, seem, and be should be followed by an adjective, not an adverb. That's why things look different, taste good, seem strange, smell nice, and why you should, properly, always feel bad.

By the way, that comma after apparently also doesn't sit right with me. It creates an odd bump in the sentence. Either apparently should be set off by commas ("But, apparently, he felt bad about Arthur"), which seems overpunctuated, or there should be no commas at all ("But apparently he felt bad about Arthur"), which seems more natural and readable.

The second smashup is from The New York Times Magazine (November 27, 2011, p. 35): ". . . Wang suggests that we may now be at another historical moment." All moments in time are historical because historical means "part of or pertaining to history." But the writer wanted to say that Wang thought this moment in time was going to figure significantly in history, and the proper word for that is historic. Thus, a historical event is part of history, while a historic event makes history.

I found the third smashup on the back of the Times Magazine, in a full-page ad for Mount Sinai Hospital. Here's approximately how the copy was laid out:

A Father
Son Bond So Close,
They're Joined At
The Liver.

Do you see the problem? Something important is missing. There should be a hyphen between father and son because the two words constitute a phrasal adjective modifying bond. They should have laid out the copy like this instead:

A Father-Son Bond
So Close,
They're Joined At
The Liver.

(In case you're wondering about the elliptical subject here — the words they have should begin the sentence, but are instead implied — I'm giving the copywriter a pass on that because that's the kind of annoying stuff that copywriters love to do.)

Now for some commakaze commentary. In reckless writing, which these days includes an astonishing amount of journalism, the most common abuse of the comma is the comma splice, which occurs when complete sentences (independent clauses) are linked by a comma. Take a gander at this glaring comma splice that I found in a pullout quotation that appeared smack dab on the front page of the The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 15, 2011: "'We've had hybrid-electric cars for a while, now you are starting to see the all-electric cars come in.'"

Any half-drunk copyeditor could tell you that the comma in that spliced sentence should be a period, or the word but or and should be inserted after it. But guess what? The U-T doesn't have any copyeditors anymore because, good English be damned, management fired them all to save money.

See if you can find the error in this lengthy sentence by Katie Roiphe, a journalism professor at New York University, which appeared in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, November 13, 2011: "If this language was curiously retrograde in the early '90s, if it harkened back to the protection of delicate feminine sensibilities in an era when that protection was patently absurd, it is even more outdated now when women are yet more powerful and ascendant in the workplace."

As I explain in The Accidents of Style, it should be hark back, not hearken back or harken back. When you hark back, you refer to or recall an earlier topic, time, or circumstance. The archaic word hearken (harken is a variant spelling) means "to listen, give one's attention to." Perhaps because hark by itself is an old-fashioned synonym of hearken ("Hark, the herald angels sing!"), people became confused and began writing hearken back and harken back instead of hark back. Whatever the reason, take care to hearken to my advice and use the preferred form, hark back.

"And its more than just this one fee," says an emailed letter to me from Consumers Union (November 1, 2011) regarding Bank of America's decision to rescind its usurious fees on debit cards. Writing its for it's (or the other way around), especially in professional correspondence, is no itsy-bitsy error. It's a fatal accident of style. That's why Constance Hale, in Sin and Syntax, writes, "Learn this [distinction] or die."

Now one from the ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret department (that's Latin for "Cobbler, stick to your last"). In her emailed language tip of October 25, 2011, Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) counseled her readers not to confuse the exclamation voila with the noun viola (does anyone really do that?) and noted that voila is "pronounced roughly 'wallah.'" Oops! "Wallah" is a beastly mispronunciation not recognized by dictionaries; the proper pronunciation is vwah-LAH, with an audible V in front.

To her credit, Grammar Girl appended a correction to her next emailed tip, to wit: "Last week, in an attempt to stop people from spelling voila w-a-l-l-a-h, I wrote that the word is 'pronounced roughly wallah.' As some of you pointed out, it may be roughly pronounced wallah, but it is properly pronounced vwah-lah."

Want to find an accident of style fast? All you need to do is consult your local newspaper's sports section, where stylistic whiffs and bogies and own-goals abound.

Here's one example of a sportswriter-related injury to the language, from an article on the San Diego Padres by Chris Jenkins that appeared in the September 15, 2011, issue of The San Diego Union-Tribune: "Neither the rotation nor the bullpen are as strong as they were in 2010."

In a neither . . . nor construction the verb should be singular when the second of the two nouns referred to is singular. If Jenkins had written "Neither the rotation nor the bullpen pitchers" he could have followed with the plural verb are. But as is, the sentence requires a singular verb: "Neither the rotation nor the bullpen is . . ." And the rest of the sentence should be emended to conform with the singular: ". . . is as strong as it was in 2010."

Some people think that The New Yorker is the be-all and end-all of well-edited prose, and that the magazine is virtually incapable of error. If you believe that, think again. In the September 12, 2011, issue I found two common accidents of style.

Here's the first, by theater (not, as The New Yorker perversely prefers, theatre) critic Hilton Als: "As the subject of Julie Salamon's excellent 'Wendy and the Lost Boys,' Wasserstein is heart-wrenching" (p. 11). It may come as a surprise to you that the word heart-wrenching does not appear in any current dictionaries. It is a confusion of heartrending, the proper word, and the fairly recent word gut-wrenching. And it appears with astonishing frequency—more often now than the proper heartrending—in edited prose. Here's another example from The New York Times Book Review (September 18, 2011, p. 10): "In these three pages lies the loveliest and most heart-wrenching description of a child I've read." For more on this misrendering, see accident 263 in The Accidents of Style.

Now here's the second New Yorker fender-bender, from a "Talk of the Town" piece by Ian Frazier in the same September 12 issue. Writing of a certain John Miller, Frazier notes that he "became a well-known journalist and one of the only Americans to interview Osama Bin Laden" (p. 24). Notice anything amiss with the phrase one of the only? When you're referring to several or a few, you can't properly use only because it means "being the single one; without others of its kind or class." The New Yorker copyeditor should have stopped worrying for a minute about where to insert unnecessary commas and changed Frazier's one of the only to one of the few.

And now, horribile dictu, for yet another piece of accidental prose from The New Yorker . . .

What is it with the distinction between the words bring and take that so confounds even the best writers and editors among us?

In the August 15 & 22, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert (and her copyeditor) slid off the road into the ditch of incorrect diction with this faulty sentence: "We visited the church where Bach is buried, and ended up at Auerbachs Keller, the bar to which Mephistopheles brings Faust in the fifth scene of Goethe's play" (p. 71).

Bring denotes motion toward the speaker or actor in the sentence while take denotes motion away. So Mephistopheles cannot bring Faust to the bar; he has to take him there.

The Atlantic — which used to call itself The Atlantic Monthly before the recession hit and words were no longer cheap — is one of the best-edited magazines I read regularly. Several issues can survive my withering scrutiny without yielding an accident of style.

So it was quite an eye-opener to find, in an otherwise unblemished and excellent piece by Matthew McGough called "The Lazarus File" that appeared in the June 2011 issue, two fender-benders in a single sentence: "Within hours of receiving the DNA results, Bub and Nuttall brought the four binders that comprised the Rasmussen case file to Stearns and Jaramillo at Parker Center" (p. 88). Did you catch them both?

Once again, brought should have been took because bring denotes motion toward the speaker or actor in the sentence while take denotes motion away. Because Bub and Nuttall went from wherever they were to the Parker Center, they took the files to Stearns and Jaramillo.

The second error concerns the oft-misused comprise. The whole comprises the parts, not the other way around; comprise means to include, contain, be made up of — not to make up or constitute. So the four binders do not comprise the case file. Properly, the case file comprises four binders.

Another prestigious publication that I read regularly and that you'd think would have squeaky clean copy is The New York Times Book Review. But once in a while I'll come across a slipup. Here's one from a pullout quotation on page 10 of the July 3, 2011, issue: "English sympathy for the South lingered up until Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox." Until means "up to the time of," so it's redundant to write up until. The correction for this sentence is simple: delete up.

And once in a while I'll come across a real doozy in The New York Times Book Review. The front page of the May 22, 2011, issue featured a review by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, of The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom, the prolific professor of literature at Yale.

Imagine my surprise when, in the second paragraph, I came upon this sentence: "This may surprise some who think of Bloom primarily as a stalwart of the Western canon . . . or as a self-confessed Bardolator, swooning over 'Hamlet' and 'Lear.'"

There are two errors here, one glaring and one obscure. The glaring error is adding self- to confessed. It's redundant. As Theodore M. Bernstein points out in Dos, Don'ts, and Maybes of English Usage, "Only the person who is confessing can confess, so why the self-?"

Did you find the obscure error? Bardolator is misspelled. George Bernard Shaw coined this word for a worshiper of Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, in 1903. But he spelled it Bardolater (because it's a blend of Bard and idolater), and for the past half a century dictionaries have preferred a lowercase b: bardolater.

Later in the same review, the venerable Prof. Bloom is quoted driving his stately sedan into a tree. Christopher Marlowe, he writes, "is one of those teachers who is always convinced his auditors are not quite attentive." Ouch! This is one of those grammatical errors that trip up [not trips up] even the pros. When one of is followed by a plural noun and who or that, the verb that follows must agree in number with the plural noun (meaning it must also be plural): "[Marlowe] is one of those teachers who are always convinced their auditors are not quite listening." Invert the notion of the sentence and the logic is clear: Of those teachers who are always convinced . . . Marlowe is one.

Here's another example of this common accident of style from the sports section of the Union-Tribune, committed by one of the paper's best writers, Tim Sullivan, in his column of September 7, 2011: "[I]t is one of those awards that defines [define] a career and earns [earn] prominent mention in obituaries."

While we're on the subject of Mr. Sullivan, here's another of his rare accidents, this one from his column of February 26, 2011: "Loathe to take the bat out of Gonzalez's hands, particularly in the late innings, the Padres tended to play more conservatively as games progressed."

Did you catch the mistake? It's in the very first word: loathe, which is a verb meaning to despise, abhor, should be loath, which is an adjective meaning reluctant, disinclined. This is a regrettably common accident that I have found in the pages of some of the most reputable and best-edited publications. It is probably the result of a mispronunciation — many educated speakers mistakenly say loathe, which has the th sound of clothe and bathe, when they mean loath, which has the th sound of cloth and bath.

In quoting pitcher Roy Halladay of the Philadephia Phillies baseball team, The Associated Press made a bush-league error. As the AP report appeared in my local fishwrap, Halladay said, "'It can be a little tougher to swallow sometimes in the ninth then if you get blown out in the third'" (The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 17, 2011, D6).

Whoever wrote that apparently wasn't paying attention in fourth grade when the teacher explained, as Mark Davidson puts it in Right, Wrong, and Risky, that "than is a conjunction in clauses of comparison: 'Jane performed better than Paul.' Then is an adverb of time: 'Then they adjourned.'"

"I would never have had the opportunity to read as many books if my parents would have had to pay for each one," writes Olga Diaz in The San Diego Union-Tribune (June 19, 2011, p. F1). This is a somewhat tricky example of the common and erroneous would have . . . would have construction, which is based on false parallelism.

The sequence of tenses in such sentences usually proceeds from what had happened to what would have happened. Thus, the correct "If I had thought of it, I would have told you" is usually misrendered as "If I would have thought of it, I would have told you." In the sentence under scrutiny the order is inverted; its logic is, "This would never have happened if something had to be done. So the sentence should properly read like this: "I would never have had the opportunity to read as many books if my parents had had to pay for each one."

Now consider this sentence by Karim Sadjadpour, which appeared in The New York Times Week in Review, March 6, 2011, p. 11: “Yet Tehran’s official reaction to the 2011 Arab awakening shows that, at the heart of the Iran’s Middle East strategy, there lays a veiled contempt for Arab intelligence, autonomy and prosperity."

Beyond the superfluous the in the Iran's Middle East strategy, a typo the copyeditor overlooked, there lies a glaring grammatical error in the phrase there lays a veiled contempt. Reading it, one wonders where you can possibly lay veiled contempt. To lay is to put or place. The copyeditor should have changed the transitive lays to the intransitive lies because to lie, in this context, means "to be in a state of inactivity or concealment."

Here's a beauty from an article on the San Diego Padres by Bill Center that appeared in the February 18, 2011, issue of The San Diego Union-Tribune: "[T]here is added cache to being an everyday, homegrown position player."

That cache-as-cache-can sentence misuses cache for cachet. These two oft-confused words differ in spelling, meaning, and pronunciation. A cache (pronounced in one syllable, like cash) is a hiding place, especially one underground, or something hidden as if underground. Cachet (pronounced ka-SHAY to rhyme with sashay) originally denoted an official seal or a distinguishing mark or feature, but today is probably most often used to mean superior status, prestige. That is the sense the writer intended, but his misstep with cache cost him his cachet.

Now find the accident in this sentence from an article syndicated by The Associated Press and printed in the Union-Tribune: "[N]ew research raises concern about diet soda, finding higher risks for stroke and heart attack among people who drink it everyday versus those who drink no soda at all."

It's the very first accident I discuss in The Accidents of Style — the confusion of everyday with every day. In the sentence quoted, it should be two words, not one because every day is a stand-alone phrase that can fit almost anywhere in a sentence, while everyday is an adjective meaning "daily" or "ordinary" that always modifies a noun, as in everyday life and everyday problems.

Here's one from a reader review on amazon.com (please don't get me started on the lamebrain reviews people post there): “What a delight this little tome is!” As Mark Twain said, "Use the right word, not its second cousin." This "reviewer" was trying to be clever by using a loftier word than book, apparently unaware that a tome is "a very heavy, large, or learned book" (Random House Dictionary), and a word that is usually used of books that elicit the opposite of delight in the reader.

“Girls Think Tank, a grass-roots advocacy group, successfully worked last year to convince city officials to set aside $700,000 for four public toilets for the homeless.” (Elizabeth Aguilera, writing for my local fishwrap, The San Diego Union-Tribune, January 3, 2011, B-1.) Did you spot the error in that sentence?

You can convince someone of or convince someone that, but properly you can't convince someone to. You persuade someone to do something. Those city officials should have been persuaded, not convinced.

"Author not neurotic dork."
— headline in The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 10, 2005, p. E12

"A writer has to have his books. He's not a writer otherwise."
— Chuck Valverde, legendary San Diego bookseller and antiquarian

"Writing is both tiresome and hard."
— Robertson Davies

"So much detail goes unnoticed in the world." — Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

When Dorothy Parker was asked to give her two favorite words in the English language, she replied, "Check enclosed."

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
— Samuel Johnson

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
— Winston Churchill