Tag Archives: Fake AP Stylebook

April 29, 2011 · 5:05 am

Bucklebury bride

A few days ago, one of my favorite sources of online commentary, Fake AP Stylebook, posted this: “About 176,938 reporters are covering the Royal Wedding, or three for every person actually interested in the story.”

I certainly don’t propose to precipitate on the procession of the Prince and Princess. They deserve a jolly nuptial.

But for Pete’s sake, these past weeks, I couldn’t escape the coverage. I switched from one news channel to the next, seeking something else. One would hardly know there was anything else going on in the world. Perhaps this is the reason – our fellow planet dwellers have been looking for a fanciful distraction and the news outlets were only too happy to deliver.

The fact that American network anchors are in London to cover the festivities has me a bit puzzled. It’s as if the whole world were in an imperial trance.

I tried to come up with a unique angle from which to write about it, but it’s all been done. The weird and tacky commemorative souvenirs. The event as perceived by the male species. How British police have deployed a special team of security forces for the “mentally unhinged and the royal-obsessed.” The repeated use of the word “commoner” to describe the bride. Even how much fun the name of her home town is to say: Bucklebury.

I don’t recall that the 1981 affair received this much ink and air time. Then again, I didn’t have a television. I was attending university in Spain. We had no TV in our dorm rooms, but we had a whopper of a movie theatre in the basement, where we watched weekly episodes of Dallas dubbed into Spanish (¿Quién tiró J.R.?). And the Royal Wedding.

It was truly a thrill, being a young woman of 21 (even then I was older than the Princess), watching the procession on the big screen, without having to have gotten up at 4:00 a.m., with fellow students from countries around the world, including Texas.

It must have made quite an impression because just four years later, I walked down the aisle of an Anglican church, carrying calla lilies and English roses, wearing the second poofiest dress you’ve ever seen, pulling a really long train behind me. And I married a prince.

Now that proceedings are underway, I’m a bit more excited, but I must be off to work. I’ll be watching the reruns tonight at a small gathering of my college chums. Don’t expect a review to appear here tomorrow because everything that can be said will have by then.

Cheerio!

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April 14, 2011 · 8:25 am

Keep it short

Yesterday’s blog post was my shortest yet, a mere 72 words. Being that it was a tribute to my husband, I tried to keep it brief. He always says my best posts are the short ones.

Out of courtesy to readers, I try to keep my daily posts under 400 words in length. Sometimes a story takes more words to tell, while commentary can—and should—take fewer.

Packing more narrative into a smaller package is a challenge. It’s also what makes it fun. Often I begin by laying the raw content out on a slab. Later I go back and tidy things up. Think of a trash compactor – raw materials are deposited and fill up the bin quickly, but later become compacted into a dense package taking up less space. That’s how I look at writing.

Someone once said, “If I’d had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Try looking that one up. Variations have been attributed to Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Blaise Pascal, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and George Bernard Shaw, among others.  If even 10 of these good fellows are posers, it just shows how valid a notion it is.

I’d like to become better at keeping it brief. These writers are correct – it does take more time. Anyone can ramble on. Just tiptoe through the blogosphere and you’ll see for yourself. Writers are ever challenged to scour our text for extraneous words and phrases, and eliminate or replace them with more potent substitutes.

Educators in Virginia recently took heat for having students use Twitter for some of their assignments. I thought it was a novel idea. Having kids keep their writing to fewer than 140 characters is an exercise in brevity. Yes, one day they’ll be writing 10-page term papers, and didn’t we all perfect the art of filling blue books and typing paper with loquacious ramblings and flowery phrases?

The test is the ability to serve up meaty content in as manageable a container as even the most attention-challenged reader will digest and, perhaps more important, to know when to stop.

Yesterday, one of my favorite groups, “Fake AP Stylebook,” suggested: “Running out of space? Just end abruptly with, “Only time will tell if this development resolves the issue.”

(388 words)

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September 11, 2010 · 8:42 am

Weird news day

I don’t tweet much. Once a day or so, just to blast out blog updates.

On Twitter, I follow more than am followed. I follow 26 people and only 15 follow me. I really must do something about this.

The reason I follow most of the tweeters I do is to get information. While it might be mildly relevant to know where someone is lunching, I am more interested in newsier Tweets. These often include items that don’t make the major newspapers, are written with esoteric angles or are relevant to narrow industry sectors. Or they’re just plain funny. Those I follow are publications mostly—The New Yorker, Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Advertising Age, Politico. Freaknomics puts out good stuff. I’ll make another pitch here for Fake AP Stylebook.

One night recently, as I was scrolling the latest Tweets before bed,  the most bizarre collection of headlines jumped off the screen.

I wondered how these would look to someone having just awakened from a decade or two of hyperbaric sleep and wanted to catch up on the latest developments in fashion, politics, the environment, cable news or travel. Then again, Twitter in and of itself might buckle the brain of anyone who’s been out of touch for, say, 10 years.

Here is just a sample of the headlines I read within in just five minutes’ time:

New York Fashion Week to Include Designer Sex Toys

Barbara Boxer aide charged with possession of pot

China Beats U.S. to First Offshore Wind Farm

Scandal Glossary: The Complicated Past of Piers Morgan, Larry King’s Replacement

Airport “Naked” Body Scanners Get Privacy Upgrade to Anonymize Your Naughty Bits

Pinch me; I must still be dreaming.

Please remember, there are no blog updates on Sundays. I’ll be opening the Sunday paper with caution.

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August 6, 2010 · 8:13 am

Sounds easy enough

You’ve seen me refer to the Fake AP Stylebook before. The group puts out funny little comments about language every day on Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t use these, you can go elsewhere to see some great examples. Some really get me thinking.

Case in point:  A recent post observed, “there/their/they’re – What, seriously? This confuses you?”

I have never had trouble distinguishing among the three. I don’t find it confusing at all. But it’s not because I’m good at remembering rules necessarily; otherwise, I’d have gotten this bring-versus-take thing down long ago.

What I realized is that it says something about the way my brain works.

When I hear and when I speak, I see the words written out. I suppose this means I am a visual learner or perhaps a visual thinker. I envision words as they are spelled. Maybe that’s why I have such a sensitive ear when it comes to pronunciation. If people saw “sherbet,” maybe they wouldn’t say “sherbert.”

Like the Fake AP Stylebook, when I see there/their/they’re confused, I am tempted to wonder how anyone can get it wrong. I also wonder how anyone graduated from second grade without mastering it, but perhaps I’m too quick to judge.

“There,” “their” and “they’re” are homonyms. They sound exactly the same. It’s no wonder people who are not visual learners might be homonymphobic.

If we had to spell according to how words sound (“sound it out,” we were always told), especially in this confusing language we call English, how can we be expected to commit the difference to paper?

Maybe I can offer some tips.

Let’s start with “there.” “There” is often the answer to “where?” “Where are my glasses? There they are.” On top of my head, usually. So that one’s easy:  Where?  There! Spelled the same (after their respective consonant digraphs).

“They’re” is a contraction of “they” and “are.” Until I had a baby, I thought contractions were easy. You begin with what you are (you’re) trying to say and shorten it; for example, “They are” doing something. With a contraction, typically a letter and a space come out, an apostrophe goes in and, voilà, two words become one. In a sense, they’re getting married. To use song lyrics as a prompt, “They’re Playing Our Song” or, for readers of my generation, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa.” By now they probably are.

I haven’t come up with a tip for “their.” Maybe you have one. For now, let’s just say it’s the other one, and remember, “i” before “e” except after “c.”  Oops, and except in “their.”

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May 21, 2010 · 7:50 am

They is wrong

According to the Fake AP Stylebook’s April 21 Facebook post:  “Avoid using masculine pronouns in sentences where the subject’s gender is not specified.  Broads find it offensive.”

What this broad finds offensive is the subject/pronoun disagreement that often occurs as a result of a writer’s attempt at political correctness.

I am a firm believer that political correctness and grammatical correctness are not mutually exclusive.  (Though if I did have to choose?  Hmmm.)

It is incorrect to suggest that “everyone have their say” or “the winner deserves their prize.”  In these instances, because the subject is singular,“their” should be “his.”   “He” and “his” are considered gender neutral, even though they are masculine pronouns.  For those sensitive to gender equity in grammar, “his or her” is perfectly acceptable.  Or,  if we know that the subject, say “winner” in the earlier example, is female, we may say “the winner deserves her prize.  “Their” is just plain wrong.

Also, remember that “everyone” is singular, even though it sounds like a lot of people.  Every one.   So please do not say “everyone is entitled to their opinion.”  

I recently stumbled on a blog that claims to specialize in writing.  I won’t call out the blogger by name because I know how hard it is to churn out copy day after day, and I am the first to admit that, in so doing, I make mistakes regularly. There is a difference between making a mistake and deliberately breaking a well-known rule.

The blogger wrote this week, “It helps a writer’s ego as well as their ability to write if they have peers to read and give feedback on their work.” 

The writer is a “he” or a “she,” not a “they;” otherwise, it would be “writers’ egos” and “writers’ work,” plural.  And if the choice is to go plural possessive, please note where the apostrophe goes.

Six days earlier, the same blogger wrote:  “Everyone has read a bit of bad prose or poetry in their life and access to the Internet seems to make it easier to point out other’s grammatical and spelling errors as well as their downright awful writing in general.”

Oh, really?

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