Writing under the nom de clavier of “Sharontastrophe” (a name no doubt inspired by our last post about the quotastrophe), a faithful reader asks the question, “Should ‘top of mind’ have hyphens?” A wonderful question, and a wonderful opportunity to wax poetic on the subject of the predicative. While our friends across the pond may have come across this somewhat obscure grammatical term before, it’s rather unlikely that the U.S. educated among us have been exposed to this particular element.

What, then, is the predicative? In the simplest terms, the predicative is an element of the predicate of a sentence (you remember, the part containing the verb) that supplements the subject or object by means of (i.e., by linking through) the verb. That word—linking—might set of an alarm bell of recognition for anyone who took English classes back in the days before the U.S. educational system fell all to hell. At one time, it was common to actually teach the concept of “linking verbs,” or as they are properly called, “copulative verbs,” or simply copulas (more correctly, copulae).

(I know, by now you’re almost certainly thinking, What the hell is wrong with this guy that he can’t just answer a simple grammar question and be done with it? But honestly, what fun would that be? If I merely answer the question, I may have given you a fish, but I haven’t taught you to fish, now have I? So, let’s cast our net and see what we can haul up from the depths, shall we?)

To best understand the copulative verb (gosh, that is fun to type, although it makes me a bit jealous of that lucky verb!), we should first examine the categories of verbs in English: transitive, or action verbs, and intransitive verbs (often called “linking verbs” by those well-meaning 1960s grammar teachers—but as we shall see, not quite correctly so). This part of the discussion is not extremely obtuse. Transitive verbs have a subject and an object; intransitive verbs have only a subject and do not take an object. A couple of examples should grease the intellectual skids nicely:

Xavier threw the ball. [transitive or “action” verb with “ball” as the object]

Harry complains all the time. [“complains” cannot have an object, so it is intransitive]

Pretty simple stuff. Now, the intellectually curious among you might already be thinking, I remember that object stuff, but I remember something about direct and indirect objects—what’s up with that? Here’s where it gets a little dicey, but stay with me. It turns out that there is a class of transitive verbs called ditransitive verbs. As you might guess from the nomenclature, ditransitive verbs take two objects, viz:

Klaus gave the poison to Sunny. [“poison” = direct object, “Sunny” = indirect object]

If you’re already positively giddy with excitement about transitive and ditransitive verbs, you’ll really love what comes next. There are actually ambitransitive verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive depending on usage and context. Try this on for size:

The twins played in the snow. [intransitive, no object]

Django Reinhardt played the guitar. [transitive, “guitar” being the object]

Other ambitransitive verbs include understand, read, and break. “Break” in fact falls into an even more special category of ambitransitive verbs called ergative verbs. Ergative verbs are extra delicious because not only can they be transitive or intransitive, but the change occurs when you make the direct object of the transitive verb into the subject of the intransitive verb. For example: 

Susan broke the cup. [transitive]

The cup broke. [the former object, “cup,” is now the subject, and the verb becomes intransitive]

This is all good and well, but didn’t we start off talking about copulation of some sort? Indeed—and now it’s time for the climax! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) You’re probably wondering whether those copulative verbs are transitive or intransitive, right? Well, the disappointing answer (and believe me, no one knows more about copulation and disappointment than me) is that copulative verbs are usually thought of as neither transitive nor intransitive. Simply put, a copula (or copulative verb) links or equates the subject of a sentence with the predicate. The main English copula is the verb to be. Some others are become, get, seem, and feel. For example:

Bob is an accountant.

The tiger seemed hungry and ready to pounce.

Now consider the words following the copulae in the above examples: accountant, angry, hungry. Are these direct or indirect objects?  Nope, because as you remember only transitive (”action”) verbs can have an object. What are they then? Ah . . . didn’t we start off talking about something called the “predicative”? Indeed we did, and like the chorus in Journey’s epic “Don’t Stop Believin’,” it finally makes its long-awaited appearance only moments before the conclusion! Those words are predicatives, because they supplement or amplify the subject by means of the verb. If the predicative is a noun, it’s called a predicate nominative of the subject, and if it’s an adjective, it’s the predicate adjective of the subject. So in the above examples, “accountant” is a predicate nominative, and “angry” and “hungry” are both predicate adjectives.

(”Daddy, are we there yet? I have to go potty.” “Yes, children, we are almost there.”)

So how does this all relate to our original question, namely, whether “top of mind” needs to be hyphenated or not? Well, when used as an ordinary, garden-variety adjective, i.e., to modify a noun, “top of mind” should be hyphenated for the sake of clarity, as should all compound adjectives, just like “garden-variety” in this very sentence. This is simply to make matters easier for the reader, who may have to reread the sentence if the first word of the compound adjective is mistakenly parsed as a standalone noun. But when used as a predicate adjective, i.e., after a copulative or linking verb, the words should not be hyphenated as there is no possibility of misinterpreting the phrase. Hence:

The analysis included a number of top-of-mind initiatives that were important to the CEO. [adjective, hyphenated]

The marketing team discussed the five product attributes that the research showed to be top of mind for customers. [predicate adjective, no hyphens]

So now, when a friend, coworker, or angst-ridden teenaged English student asks you, “Should ‘top of mind’ be hyphenated?”, you can reply authoritatively, “If it’s a compound adjective, then yes. But if it’s a predicate adjective following a copulative verb, then no.” Or even more simply: hyphenate before a noun, don’t hyphenate after a verb. And of course, this rule by no means applies only to “top of mind.” It’s the general rule of thumb for all compound adjectives:

The black-and-blue mark was visible even under the tattoo.
                             -but-
The bruise was completely black and blue.

A fifteen-minute break will occur between the acts of the play.
                             -but-
The duration of the intermission was fifteen minutes.

Sometimes, compound adjectives become so commonplace and easily understood that the hyphen disappears completely, as in wallpaper, lawsuit, and housewife. In this case there is no difference between the adjective and predicate adjective forms. For example:

Homemade pie is especially delicious with punch.
                             -and-
The pie Dolores served at Bob’s wake was clearly homemade.

One last thing: The hyphenation rule only applies to compound adjective, not to a combination of an adverb ending in -ly and a participle: fully formed, aptly named, scantily clad, etc. Since the -ly removes any possibility of confusion, these forms are never hyphenated, regardless of whether they come before a noun and function as an adjective, or after a verb and function as a predicate adjective. So:

The scantily clad woman at the post office appeared to be an ecdysiast.
                             -and-
The stripper was scantily clad.

And there you have it—the copulative verb and the hyphenated compound adjective demystified. Happy copulating!

The Word Nazi deeply apologizes for going on an unscheduled sabbatical without warning, but as we’ve mentioned before, the Word Nazi is not independently wealthy, and thus sadly isn’t able to devote himself full time to the improvement and preservation of the English language. (Or what little is left of it, at any rate.) The important thing is, we’re back.

Today’s screed, like so many others, comes after being driven nearly to the point of seizures by a tiny mark of punctuation: the apostrophotation mark, also known as the quotastrophe (rhymes with “catastrophe”). What, you say? You’ve never heard of such a thing? Well, you might never have heard of it but you’ve certainly seen it—almost everywhere, in fact, and with geometrically increasing frequency.

Before we proceed, it might be instructional to answer the burning question that’s surely top of mind for our readers at present: What the hell are you talking about? Allow me to elucidate. The quotastrophe appears when an apostrophe—the punctuation mark used in English to indicate the elision of one or more letters at the beginning, middle, or end of a word—is erroneously replaced by an open single quotation mark. A visual example is helpful:

   Livin’ in the ‘80s

The omitted (or elided) letter g at the end of “living” is replaced by the trusty apostrophe; so far, so good. But what’s that in front of the number 8? Yes! It’s the quotastrophe! Clearly this should be the same mark of punctuation as replaces the missing letter at the end of “living,” curling down and to the left, but because it’s at the beginning of a word (or number, in this case) our trusty word processor has incorrectly replaced the apostrophe with the open (or left) single quotation mark—i.e., the quotastrophe. The correct rendition should, of course, appear like this:

   Livin’ in the ’80s

Paradoxically, just twenty years ago the quotastrophe was as hard to find as a virgin at Bryn Mawr, except perhaps as an artifact of fat-fingered Linotype operators with hangovers—but now it’s rearing its ugly head on television, in print advertisements and emails, and on Web sites galore. Who’s to blame for this breeding explosion of almost leporine proportion?

Bill Gates.

Yes, you heard me—Bill Gates. Now, I know it’s fashionable to blame Microsoft for every woe facing the planet today, from computers that don’t work to shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels, and it’s true that many of these are unfairly ascribed to our friends in Redmond. But at the risk of being accused of piling on with the rest of the Microsoft bashin’istas, in this case at least, the blame does fall squarely at the well-shod feet of Mr. Gates. You see, a few years ago, Microsoft thoughtfully added an innocent checkbox to the Microsoft Word options panel: Replace "straight quotes" with “smart quotes.” As you can see, this has the effect of replacing those boring "typewriter style" straight quotation marks with the fancy “curly quotes” that one sees in books and other typeset documents. There is some intelligence behind this process, too. If you type a quotation mark just after a space, the computer assumes you are beginning a quote and uses the “open” or “left” quotation mark. And if you type it just after a letter (or comma or period), it assumes you’re ending the quote, and inserts a “close” or “right” quotation mark.

With the double quotation marks typically used in English, this doesn’t generally present a problem. Where things get a bit dicey is that the computer also does this replacement act for single quotation marks as well—you know, the ones that we use in English to show a “quote within a quote,” like so: “Whoever said you should ‘make hay while the sun shines’ never worked on a Texas farm,” Tom said balefully. This is because the computer keyboard uses the same key for the apostrophe ( ’ ) and for single quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ), with your word processor in the role of psychic referee, trying to guess which one you intended. But unlike single quotation marks, which should “curl” toward the word, the apostrophe should always “curl” down and to the left, regardless of whether it’s at the beginning, middle, or end of the word, viz:

   ’Tis a great time to be livin’ in Idaho, isn’t it?

Yet when you type an apostrophe at the beginning of a word, the computer erroneously assumes that you don’t want an apostrophe, you want an open single quotation mark, and instead of:

   I’d like to give her a bit of the old ’ows your father, I would.

you get:

   I’d like to give her a bit of the old ‘ows your father, I would.

Yikes. Now, in the ancient days of typewriters, the quotastrophe simply didn’t exist, as typewriters didn’t have a key to produce the open single quotation mark. No chance of confusion. But now, thanks to Microsoft, virtually every computer dutifully replaces the apostrophe with the left single quotation mark. There is a workaround, though, if you’re willing to be vigilant and hit a couple of extra keys. You can “override” the replacement in one of two ways in Microsoft Word:

(1) Immediately after typing the apostrophe (and getting an open single quotation mark), press the CTRL-Z keystroke combination. Presto! The offending open single quotation mark is replaced by the “straight apostrophe” ( ' ).

(2) But what if you really do want a “fancy” or “curly” apostrophe—you just want it curling the correct way? Simple. Immediately before typing the apostrophe, press the CTRL key and the apostrophe key simultaneously. Then type the apostrophe key again. Voilà! Your apostrophe curls down and to the left, just as a submissive mark of punctuation should!

So don’t let that computer keep pushing you around. Take control of your apostrophes, and make the quotastrophe—and Bill Gates—your bitch from now on.

I happened to follow a link to Microsoft’s nearly useless MSN Groups site the other day and was horrified to see that the specter of a slogan that I believed had long since died an obscure death was still with us, at least in the “page title” information that’s displayed at the top of your browser. Yes, one of the most egregious taglines in recent corporate marketing history still survives, the MSN slogan: “More Useful Everyday.”

Aside from the tepid, vacuous, banal (and likely erroneous) claim itself, is that an adjective masquerading as an adverbial phrase I see? Quel horreur, it is!—and when I first ran into this piece of stupidity a few years ago, I wasted no time in dashing off a seething, skewering Word Nazi missive to the powers that be at Microsoft, including Mr. Gates himself, as well as to Microsoft’s advertising agency of record, whom I assumed were guilty of perpetrating this travesty. It might not surprise you to know that I received no response, not even a “thank you for your interest in Microsoft products” note. And it won’t surprise you at all (since the evidence is before you) to see that they did nothing at all about correcting it.

I’m sure that there are some of you reading this even now who don’t fully grasp the concept of this error, much less its magnitude—and why should you, when you are attacked “every day” by the Microsofts of the world and their billion-dollar advertising budgets. To clarify, “everyday” is an adjective, and as we recall from some boring elementary-school English class, adjectives modify nouns. They don’t ever answer questions like “when?” or “how often?”—which are the exclusive purview of adverbs and their more verbose cousins, adverbial phrases. (Speaking of elementary school, does anyone remember when this was called “grammar school”? Somewhere deep in his black soul, The Word Nazi believes that this change in nomenclature, from “grammar school” to “elementary school,” was the very start of the slippery slope that landed us where we are today—adrift in a sea of grammatical ignorance. After all, you’re basically saying, “Enough prattle about this grammar stuff; that’s too hard anyway. From now on we’re just focusing on things that are elementary.” And once you make that intellectual shift, dear reader, it’s all downhill from there.)

But I digress. The point is, the slogan breaks down like this: First, “[MSN is] more useful.” Then, “When (or how often) is it more useful?” (Well, we’ll need an adverb to answer a question like that, won’t we?) And so the answer is, “Why, every day, of course!” Note that. “Every day,” not “everyday.” Everyday is an adjective that modifies nouns like “clothes” or “demeanor,” as in, “His everyday clothes and everyday demeanor belie the fact that Warren Buffet is the richest man in the United States.” (Hey, if I can get in a clean shot at Bill Gates while teaching a grammar lesson, I’m taking it.) Everyday means “common, ordinary, encountered routinely or typically.” Every day means “happening or occurring every day, daily.” The first is always an adjective, and the second is always (always!) an adverb.

Of course, there is a word that can serve as both adverb and adjective and carry both meanings, and that word is daily. In the phrase, “My daily ablutions,” daily is an adjective that modifies that fancy word for washing oneself. But in the phrase, “I carry out my ablutions daily,” now it’s an adverb specifying when or how often you carry them out. So why couldn’t Microsoft just say, “More useful daily,” and be done with it? Well, disregarding the fact that this version sounds even more boring than the original, here we encounter a finer point of sense and connotation. “I get better every day” implies a sort of continuous improvement from one day to the next, while, “I get better daily” subtly connotes the possibility that you might get better, and then worse, and then better, from day to day.

Now, I’m sure I wasn’t the only grammarian to send Microsoft a strongly worded note about this egregious corruption of such a humble and inoffensive adjective. The fact that they took no action to rectify the error or to mollify me tells me that either (a) they still didn’t understand, despite lengthy attempts at explanation, or (b) they just didn’t care. I guess you will have to decide that one for yourself. But in the meantime, there’s no reason that you should commit the same mistake as Microsoft, right? So just remember the sentence, “He wore his everyday clothes every day,” and you’ll be sure to get it right—every day.

Once upon a time, there was an underappreciated yet vital person slaving away at your local newspaper. (We’ll save the “once upon a time, you had a local newspaper” lament for another time.) This person was the heart and soul of the newsroom, the bringer of sanity and restraint, the one who knew the difference between Qaddafi and Gadhafi and Gaddafi, the one person who actually knew every aspect of AP style without referring to the stylebook. The person who took the time to check facts and make sure names were spelled properly. The person who got things right.

We called this person “the copy editor.”

Today, it seems, this is a vanishing profession. For proof of this, one need look no further than to any of the Web sites (Yahoo! is a good example) that aggregate and repackage content from the various news organizations such as Reuters and the Associated Press. While in the old days, the faithful copy editor would bathe a reporter’s story in the clarifying astringent of grammatical and stylistic correctness before sending it off to be published, nowadays no such filter exists. More and more reporters are filing their stories “direct to the Web,” and while this might bring advantages in terms of immediacy and responsiveness, I would argue those advantages are nullified by the absence of the cool-headed copy editor and his or her pen, metonymically speaking.

It’s important to point out that this is about more than just correcting spelling and assuring subject-verb agreement. The copy editor is also the person who can adeptly take a two-paragraph breaking story and the next seven leads and write-throughs (okay, “writethrus” in journalistic parlance—and even The Nazi wouldn’t be such a stickler as to argue for “writes-through,” although that’s the correct plural) and in a matter of minutes craft a readable, clear story that’s free of self-contradiction. Without this skill, the hapless browser of Internet news is subjected in many cases to the raw stream of consciousness of a reporter filing a breaking story as it happens, replete with all the errors of style and content that we resign ourselves to countenance in exchange for the all-important virtue of immediacy.

Perhaps the most egregious and troubling development comes not from the Yahoos of the world, where we might expect and even tolerate this sort of laxity, but from the online editions of the print newspapers themselves. Most will freely admit that they simply aren’t staffed to have their online content copy-edited in addition to the print content—and thus opt for the lesser of two evils, copy-editing the print content while leaving the online content to founder in a sea of binary grammatical detritus. My personal favorites are those stories that contain things like, “The river is expected to crest by Tuesday night, Johnson said”—and then you realize that nowhere else in the story is Mr. Johnson referenced, nor are his full name and title ever used. Really bolsters credibility, doesn’t it?

Sadly, I’m not sure how to encourage more young people to go into a profession that doesn’t pay well in the first place and that now isn’t even particularly valued in those places where it still does exist. For my part, I shall miss those erstwhile guardians of the language—but I shall continue the fight in their memory.

Welcome, children—is everyone comfortable? Very well, then let’s begin.

I woke up this morning and thought, what the Web really needs is a pissy, recalcitrant bastard who has too much time on his hands, coupled with a strong misanthropic bent, to set the world straight on matters of grammar. I’m tired of picking up the paper and seeing mistakes. I’m tired of sitting through PowerPoint presentations riddled with bullet points that only begin to approximate the barest components of human language. I’m tired of newscasters saying an historic occasion and so-called “Internet journalists” who seem never to have discovered the shift key. I’m tired of coworkers who can’t spell and sportswriters who can’t write. And more than all those put together, I’m tired of the pansy-ass descriptive grammarians who seem to think this is all just okay.

I’m not saying language shouldn’t evolve and change. The very beauty of language is that it is mutable, malleable, and adaptable. People grow and die. Society changes. New things are invented and discovered for which there are no words. And language still manages to keep up. That’s all good stuff, and I don’t want to frustrate that process.

But it seems we sometimes fail to consider that, every now and then, a little resistance to change can be a good thing. It’s important to know who we are, but just as important to remember who we were and where we came from. Other than the ability to accessorize, language is the only thing that truly separates us from the animals. Let’s not lose sight of that, lest we become more like them than is already our wont.

Now, I won’t be pretentious enough to claim to be the world’s single greatest living authority on the grammar and style of the English language. To aspire to tread in the footsteps of Fowler, Strunk, White, Safire—and a host of others—is the sort of hubris which even I would not dare to adopt. However, if you, dear readers, wish to ascribe to me those lofty honors, I shall not say you nay.   —TWN