From the archive: Grammatical musings
Some years ago, the grammar debate seemed to be raging everywhere. Now that we all have important things to yell at each other about, grammar seems to have fallen out of favour. This was my contribution to that harmlessly overwrought moment.
After a career of proofing and editing other people’s work, and submitting my own to the same process it has become clear that people who care about grammar tend to care about it a great deal. Hence the Great Grammar Fetish Wars of 2006, from which nobody emerged victorious except possibly Lynne Truss’s publishers.
Things may have calmed down since then, but every so often minor skirmishes break out (Pinker here; Rosen here; Fry here.) And it seems there has been long-running feud between the readers of The New Yorker and its Keeper of the Comma Shaker about punctuation. Specifically about its use of the umlaut, or as we find out in this post, the diaeresis, over the second of two repeated vowels.
I have to put my hand up and say that I’m with the New Yorker’s readers: the diaeresis drives me nuts.
It’s a distraction. It pulls me up when I’m reading, in the same way that overly capitalized text or liberally applied commas and exclamation marks do. Personally, I’m perfectly happy with re-elect, rather than reëlect; pre-empt works for me, as does re-emerge, or re-entry. On occasion I’ll even abandon the hyphen: unless I discover that I am misapplying the description for some obscure barrel-making technique, cooperate and cooperation seem perfectly acceptable (although hyphens are, I think, better.)
As usual, the only unbreakable grammar rule applies: if it aids understanding, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t.
Still, I have a professional interest in why we write the way we do, so I wanted to know the rationale behind the continued use of this particularly pesky diacritic at The New Yorker. It seems the that it’s not some contrarian fondness for the antiquated (even Fowler’s Usage says that it is obsolete). Rather it’s simple procrastination and the inevitable ravages of time.
In the words of Mary Norris, current style maven:
“My predecessor … used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
“This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.”
A warning to us all: just because it used to be right, doesn’t mean it still is.
Elsewhere, Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire has a brilliant post about hyphens.
“Grammatical pet peeves are the secret joys, the sour candies, of every former and current copy editor, though probably even those of us who’ve never proofed a page in an official capacity have them too. Those of us reading (and the one of us writing) this post likely have especially strong opinions about the essential yet mundane (not to us!) topic of punctuation. One pet peeve of mine happens to be when the hyphen is not needed and appears there anyway.”
In my experience, nothing causes the copy-editor and writer so much grief as the misplaced, the unnecessary or the missing-in-action hyphen.
My sour candy of choice is real time. Yes, for software developers, business analysts and sales teams the important fact is that a trading platform or data management system or ETRM solution can achieve amazing things in real time.
For me, the important fact is that the accompanying literature doesn’t hyphenate real time unnecessarily (It is at times like this that I stare down into the abyss that is the essential pedantry of editing copy and I suffer the first of the week’s many, many existential crises. The abyss very rarely stares back.)
Of course, when real time becomes a compound adjective then there’s a hyphen to be used: I write about real-time data feeds and real-time risk management, and so by God, will my clients, whether they want to or not.
To be honest, finance and technology offers a whole world of pain for the hyphen fixated.
There’s front-office technology or middle-office infrastructure, but functionality for the middle office.
Buy-side compliance systems but trading platforms for the sell side (although I tend to give into force majeure on this one and just hyphenate sell-side and buy-side all the time). ETRM written in full should be energy-trading and risk-management software – but almost never is.
The difficulty, as always, is maintaining the balance between being right (my preferred position) and writing in a way that everyone recognises. But, as Jen Doll points out, for anyone who feels equally aerated by absent or omnipresent hyphens there’s always Purdue’s Online Writing Lab – a haven for grammatical hair-splitters everywhere.
