Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Flight 1360 is full of eels

Nice little discussion going on over at the ACES board about The Rules: Which ones we do or don't think can be thrown overboard from assorted "rulebooks," particularly the AP's, in the interest of spending less time on trivia and more on stuff that matters.

Submitted for your consideration, then, is an actual grammar issue, which is exactly the kind that does matter (and if you're letting these into your paper or onto your Web site because you think copy editors are expendable, shame on you). This is a fault of parallelism, or coordination. "Ice" is a noun, and "buttocks" is a noun, but they aren't the same kind of noun:

No ice with that, please
No buttocks with that, please

Now. There are certain bodily parts that can be grammatically separated from their human owners and turned into nouns. But doing so in formal writing has the potential of getting you labeled -- well, for want of a better term, a [GEORGE CARLIN, WHY DID YOU LEAVE SO EARLY?] with ears.

Please. Treat grammar right and it'll treat you right. Don't imagine that people won't notice when you cut corners. It shows.

1 Comments:

Blogger The Ridger, FCD said...

Yeah. I was envisioning a rather aggressive mooning. For which images, thanks, by the way.

8:41 AM, June 26, 2008  

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