Did I mention that I LOVE grammar threads?!
Well, if you love these threads so much, you won’t mind me asking a simple question that I could be easily answer by going up into the attic, sneaking past the guardian polar bears, swimming across the forbidden moat, climbing over the electric fence of death and struggling past the present hiding spot of eternal temptation and digging out an old grammar book and checking its index.
How do you punctuate parentheses, and when do you use them? I am a great lover of parenthetical comments (one must be good at some things, no?) but I don’t know when (or where) to punctuate them. Do you put the punctuation inside the parentheses? Does it make a difference if the parentheses are at the end of a sentence (as in this one?) What if you want to use different punctuation than the main sentence (like now, damnit!)? (Sometimes I wonder if it would make a difference if it were an entire sentence in between parentheses rather than a clause within.) I also wonder (though I don’t make too big of a deal out of it) when I should use parentheses and when I should use, when appropriate, commas.
I am (anxiously) awaiting any answer that may (or may not) come.
Thanks,
Rhythmdvl
According to The Little Brown Handbook, Fifth Edition, p. 442, “Dashes, commas, and parentheses may all set off nonessential information such as nonrestrictive modifiers and parenthetical expressions. Parentheses, the least emphatic, signal that the information is just worth a mention.” (Dashes give the information the greatest emphasis; commas are less emphatic.)
You already seem to know how to use them pretty well, except for when you wrote Does it make a difference if the parentheses are at the end of a sentence (as in this one?) - in this case, the question mark would go on the outside of the parenthesis because the question mark punctuates the entire sentence, not just the part within the parentheses. However, if the entire sentence was within parentheses, the question mark would go on the inside (just like you wrote in the "Sometimes I wonder … " sentence).
Example:
He asked me if I loved him (like hell I do!!!). Then he gave me the ring.
He asked me if I loved him (and I do). Then he gave me the ring.
Parentheses and commas are sometimes interchangeable; in some cases, parentheses will provide more clarity to the reader if the sentence already has a lot of (correct and appropriate) commas in it. I think that using parentheses can sometimes slightly alter or emphasize nuance of the sentence, but in many cases it is simply a stylistic choice.
Mr. Cynical, the way I remember it is by reminding myself that you don’t put an apostrophe in “his” or “her,” (obviously) and “its” is the same part of speech. I use a lot of little tricks like this. Whenever I spell “weird,” I have to say in my head, “It’s ‘weird,’ not ‘wi-erd.’”
Regarding tricks, Brian Regan has a great bit that goes something like this:
“‘i’ before ‘e,’ except after ‘c,’ or prounounced as an ‘a,’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh,’ or on Wednesdays and Sundays, and all throughout May, and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say!”
Achenar:
This questions seems odd to me, since I don’t consider the phrase “A whole nother” to be grammatically correct, if even feasible. Take note:
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I would first change this phrase to be “A whole other” or “another” bearing in mind that “A whole other” is dreadfully redundant as any other is going to be a whole other. You wouldn’t say that a basketball player shot a half other basketball after the first one got lost, would you? You should specify when things get weird, but I think using “another” is what you want there.
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Rhythmdvl: you never finished the sentence “Does it make a difference if the parentheses are at the end of a sentence (as in this one?)” . . . this rule is going to be hard to explain, particularly since I don’t know every little rule about it myself. My general rule is that punctuation in parens is not indicative of a finish to a statement. In your case I would have made things a lot easier by simply taking out the parens, and inserting a comma between sentence and as, then ending the sentence with a question mark. Someone please tell me if this doesn’t work.
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missbunny: this sentence “Its is a possessive pronoun. It is NEVER short for ‘it is.’” would work so much better if you said, “Its is a possessive pronoun. Its is never short for ‘it is.’”
As a general rule for “its” vs. “it’s” . . . well, I think that’s been taken care of, really. I’ll just echo the already-existing statement that if you can say “it is” instead of “it’s” and have the statement mean the same thing, you’ve got the right one.
from dropzone:
When I asked a Latin group for the Latin plural of “virus,” I was told that it is in fact “vira.” Neuter, not masculine. The -us ending is misleading.
But I’ll always use “viruses” in English.
I have seen several versions of the plural of, among other things, virus. Also formula and media, which I have (ack) seen medias and mediae.
However, this is nit-picking. Some of these words are from other languages, and whether or not you want to follow the rules of said languages is, if anything, up to you.
Just so long as you don’t go saying “the media is” or “the medias are,” in which case I will be ready with a sniper rifle to end your pathetic existence.
What’s the word for using “they” instead of “he/she” as in:
“Give the customer what he/she wants.” as opposed to:
“Give the customer what they want.”
I’d rather say “they” instead of “he/she”.
How about “Give the customers what they want”?
Give the customer what he wants.
Unless you know the customer is female, in which case you give the customer what she wants. “He” is the neuter third-person singular pronoun in English. It also happens to be the masculine third-person singular pronoun.
However, if it makes you happier to use “she” or even to alternate randomly between the two, I would have no objection.
“He/she” is an abomination. Use “he or she” if you simply must demonstrate your finely honed sense of political correctness to all listeners.
Okay, here’s one I’ve wondered about for a long time:
Why is it “an historic occasion” ? Are there any other nouns starting with h that an is used with? You don’t see “an helicopter” .
–tygre
Let’s say there is an abbreviation at the end of a sentence.
i.e. I would like to ship the package to Cal.
Now, notice at the end, there is only one period. What I’m wondering is, would a second period be needed?
i.e. I would like to ship the package to Cal…
Whenever I’ve encountered this situation, I’ve always been adding that second period. Am I correct in doing so?
<Give the customer what he wants.>
Um, no. This isn’t going to work. It’s also grounds for a lawsuit and/or nullification of one.
<“He” is the neuter third-person singular pronoun in English.>
In what dictionary is it stated that “he” is the neuter 3rd-person sing. pronoun?
<It also happens to be the masculine third-person singular pronoun.>
Point being?
When I write stuff like this, I normally use plurals.
<Why is it “an historic occasion” ? Are there any other nouns starting with h that an is used with? You don’t see “an helicopter**.”**>
I corrected your punctuational mistake. It’s in bold.
With using a versus an, I usually think to myself “Would this sound odd if I did 'an ‘istoric X’?” If the answer is yes, I use “a” instead. The rules are odd and can depend on pronunciation, but this is about pronunciation.
an: honest, harmonic (arguable), heroic, . . .
I just realized. When you don’t accent the first syllable, out of all the words beginning with H, you use “an.” This may not positively hold true, but so far as I can see it does.
Question two:
<i.e. I would like to ship the package to Cal.
Now, notice at the end, there is only one period. What I’m wondering is, would a second period be needed?
i.e. I would like to ship the package to Cal…
Whenever I’ve encountered this situation, I’ve always been adding that second period. Am I correct in doing so?>
Why complicate things? Don’t bother with the abbreviation. In proper circles, from what I’ve seen, abbreviations such as “Cal” aren’t used.
When you do, though, remember the rule I previously stated: punctuational marks don’t normally go together, with the exceptions of ?", ,", and .". I can’t think of any others off the top of my head but they probably follow the same idea.
Comments/arguments?
Hm, I had hoped to post a more definitive smack-down here, but I can’t find my copy of “A History of the English Language” at the moment. In any case, though, I’m 99% sure that the presence of the apostrophe in possessives was in fact from a mistaken notion that something like the farmer’s goat must be a contraction of the farmer his goat. This wasn’t entirely unreasonable, as other Germanic language use such a mechanism (Dutch, I think?), but for English it was incorrect. (One place you do see a vestigial genitive in English is in the phrase “three foot tall” instead of “three feet tall”, but that’s a whole nother thing ;))
Other notes about this thread… first of all let me state that in general I’m a descriptivist—I try to think less about the Right Way to write English than to just observe how people are in fact doing it. That said, I can still give my impressions of various constructions, and where applicable, insert some historical fact.
plurals of virus, media, formula Three interesting cases, to be sure. In Latin, the plural of ‘virus’ was in fact just ‘virus’ (it was a 4th declension defective noun), when it was even used at all (as it more often took a mass-noun meaning). For English it appears that the preferred plural is just ‘viruses’, although the back-formations ‘viri’, ‘virii’, ‘vira’, and various other such things have achieved some currency. The Latin plural of ‘formula’ was ‘formulae’, which is correct if a bit stilted in modern English; ‘formulas’ will serve as well. ‘Media’ is a funny case, since it’s already plural! It’s the plural of ‘medium’. If you want to figure out how to pluralise it further, you’re on your own.
quotes and periods The rule I was taught in grade school was to put all sentence punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation points) inside of quotation marks. For parentheses, on the other hand, one should put the punctuation inside only if it was part of the parenthetical comment, and outside otherwise (which makes some sense). I rather like using that rule for quotation marks as well; the modern British editorial standard seems to run that way, and it just plain makes more sense. This just looks silly: The first word she could spell was “fragile.” In fact, I tend to take this even further, writing things like the following: As for the boy, all he could say was “I don’t know.”. One period to end the sentence in the quotation (and which falls inside the quotation marks), and one to end the sentence containing the quotation (and which falls outside the quotation marks).
abbreviations ending sentences The usual usage is just to put one period. This isn’t totally strange, either—it comes up when you end a sentence with a list and “etc.”. However, I kind of like the notion of having two separate periods, one for each purpose (cf. my thoughts on quotation punctuation above), so go ahead! You could start a trend.
he/she vs. they A subject of much debate. The prescriptivists have generally said to use “he” whenever the antecedent is of indeterminate gender, and more recently “he/she” has gained currency. But the use of “they” for 3rd person singular is a very old one, dating back to at least the 16th century. (And I feel obliged to point out yet another alternative, because it’s so darned cute: various new pronouns have been coined to serve as gender-indeterminate singular pronouns, of which my favourites are the Spivak pronouns “e”, “em”, “eir”, “eirs”, and “emself”.)
a whole nother From a linguistic perspective, this is a great phrase: folks, this is how language evolves. The cognitive take on this one seems to be that people re-analysed the word “another” as “a nother”, because any phrase “another X” has roughly the same structure and ‘feel’ as e.g. “a different X” or “a new X”. From there, it is a minor matter to insert further modifiers like “whole”. Very cool.
its vs. it’s I agree completely, it annoys me too, but cognitive dissonance is driving out the “correct” forms in favour of more rule-based ones (apostrophe marks possessive, right? Well, not in possessive pronouns, but that’s the way cognitive analogy runs…)
<he/she vs. they A subject of much debate. The prescriptivists have generally said to use “he” whenever the antecedent is of indeterminate gender, and more recently “he/she” has gained currency. But the use of “they” for 3rd person singular is a very old one, dating back to at least the 16th century. (And I feel obliged to point out yet another alternative, because it’s so darned cute: various new pronouns have been coined to serve as gender-indeterminate singular pronouns, of which my favourites are the Spivak pronouns “e”, “em”, “eir”, “eirs”, and “emself”.)>
I don’t like using “he” for the universal pronoun. I use plurals. I’ve heard also of zie, zier, etc and of s’h’it . . .
In Latin, when there is more than one subject being described by an adjective, they make it the gender of the last noun. So we can have a soldier, father and whore all be laeta b/c the whore is last.
Okay, polyglots, is it this much fun to debate grammar in other languages?
The grafitti scene in The Life of Brian** is a favorite of mine.
And you never, ever tack an additional punctuation mark outside the quotes if you have one inside. Even if that leaves it confusing. Did you say, “I am going to the store?” No, I said, “I am going to the store.” Period.
I’ve been accused of being the grammar police more than once so this thread caught my eye. My personal favorite is double negatives. Those grate on me like fingernails on a chalkboard.
True Story:
I was in the drive-thru at Taco Bell. The voice in the speaker asked if I wanted extra sauce with my tacos. I said I did not.
When I got to the window, she leaned out and said, “You didn’t want no sauce with them, right?”
I thought for a second that I should have said, “Yes, I DID want ‘no sauce’ with the tacos”, but I figured she wouldn’t get it, so I just said, “Right.”
First one who makes a smart-ass comment about asking for extra cockroach eggs with them gets smacked…
Kinsey: Congratulations. You have now learned the correct way to deal with double negatives.
Dropzone said:
“Okay, polyglots, is it this much fun to debate grammar in other languages?”
You have no idea. The French have a phrase “C’est moi” which is grammatically incorrect. However, there are a lot of screwy thingy about them, and nit-picking about grammar isn’t bound to solve many of their other problems.
Annoying thing about this language number 1:
"There’s a lot of X . . . "
I won’t even touch the “a lot” bit. “There’s” there should be “there are” but “there’s” is a quickphrase in English, meaning a lot of people are trained from birth to use it with singular and plural. Sort of like how 95 percent of America says “cam” instead of “may.”