By Bob Yearick
Where Are the Editors?
• Reader, writer, and editor Larry Nagengast discovered this from Grant Brisbee in The Athletic: “The Diamondbacks may be the most underrated team in baseball. They’re averaging 5.42 runs per game, which is almost a full half-run better than the second-place team, the Yankees.” Adds Larry: “I understand what he’s saying, but the phrasing is, well, almost oxymoronic.”
• Jeff Neiburg, in The Philadelphia Inquirer: “. . . Sao Paulo only being an hour ahead made getting acclimated a lesser concern then, say, London — and they are flying to Brazil on a Boeing 777, a larger plane than the one they flew to the United Kingdom in 2018.” Jeff thus joins the growing number of writers who use a word — in this case, than — incorrectly and correctly in the same sentence.
• Jeff McLane, in The Inky: “John Ross and rookie Johnny Wilson started on the outside, with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith watching on.” I have never seen this construction before. Looking on is the usual term.
• Reader David Hull notes that USA TODAY’s Sarah D. Wire quoted a Trump supporter as referring to “callus indifference to the sacrifices that his supporters made on his behalf.” A callus is a hard, thickened area of skin that usually develops from friction or irritation over time. The correct word — callous — means hard-hearted.
Department of Redundancies Dept.
• Hira Qureshi, in The Inky, committed the popular reply back redundancy: “Cline suggests messaging something unique . . . in order to get a reply back.”
• Nancy Armour, in USA TODAY: “Biles is, too often, held to an impossible standard. She’s expected to be both perfect and infallible.” Among the synonyms for perfect is infallible, and vice versa.
Readers’ Pet Peeves
• Debbie Layton’s peeve involves gerunds — verb forms that function as nouns. She sends two examples (corrections in parentheses): 1. Xerxes Wilson, in The News Journal — “Biden, 54, was charged with crimes associated with him (his) lying about his drug addiction on a federal form . . .” 2. In an article titled “Captains of Industry Set Sail” in TIME magazine — “The show, which follows a group of Gen Z bankers working in the City . . . focuses as much on its characters taking designer drugs in Berlin clubs or having sex in the office as it does on them (their) making high-stakes trades.”
Cleanup on aisle 13! A reader submits this sign from the Acme Market in Hockessin. He says he has mentioned the misspelled stationary (should be stationery) several times to customer service, but they remain unmoved. (See what I did there?)
Gerunds require the possessive pronoun because it is the act (“lying about his drug addiction,” “making high-stakes trades”) that is being referred to, not the person or persons.
• Joan Burke sends two examples of her special peeve — the misuse of the contraction there’s with plural nouns (italicized in the examples): 1. Andre Lamar, in Delawareonline — “While the summer concert season in Delaware is starting to fade away like the victims of a Thanos snap, there’s still a lot of cool shows to marvel at this season.” 2. New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, quoted in USA TODAY about Hard Knocks, the HBO documentary series — “There’s a lot of misnomers about it.” As Joan notes, an earlier column called out Rodgers for misusing misnomers — incorrect names — but it did not mention there’s. She blames the problem on the contraction: “People who would never say, ‘There is three things that bother me’ don’t think twice about saying, ‘There’s three things that bother me.’”
Irony
In the new (and entertaining) sitcom English Teacher on FX, star Brian Jordan Alvarez — playing the English teacher of the title — says, “It wouldn’t be good if something happens between you and I,” thus violating the rule requiring an objective pronoun (me) after a preposition. A common mistake, but in a show with this title it’s especially egregious, and qualifies as irony, IMHO.
Word Term of the Month
Kebuki theater
A traditional Japanese popular drama performed with highly stylized singing and dancing. In political discourse, Kabuki theater is sometimes used to describe an event characterized more by showmanship than by content. Donald Trump’s August visit to Arlington Cemetery is an example.
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