Dots must be stopped!

A row has broken out on Twitter (hard to believe, I know. Twitter folk are normally so placid). The blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of the Guardian Style Guide, which, with all the sensitivity of Liam Stacey, has provocatively declared that bullet points should always end with full stops:

@caimin: Full stop at the end of a bullet point?
@guardianstyle: Yes. Every time. Like this.
@AngrySubEditor: I disagree. If it's not a sentence, it has no right to claim a full stop. Treat them like headlines and captions.
@johnemcintyre: There go abbreviations.
@AngrySubEditor: Points in abbreviations are falling out of favour. Who writes N.A.T.O.?
@SnoozeInBrief: Rare to see them in pronounceable acronyms; less rare in say U.S.A. Still OTT though.
@caffyrelf: Woo! Fight! *pom poms*. I think US English uses full stops more than UK.

Luckily for me, I can usually impose whatever style I want. On the rare occasions when it's someone else's call, house style strangely seems to start looking like my style even when it's officially something different. And my house style is not to punctuate bullet points.

To me, they're part of the furniture, like picture captions and headlines, or, in another context, roadsigns and advertising slogans. Those don't take full stops, even if they're complete sentences, although they can take question marks. There's also my own subconscious snobbery, which seems to be telling me that all writing should resemble either a newspaper story or a novel, in which the correct form for text is the paragraph. Bullet points, on the other hand, are the calling cards of the junior marketing executive's PowerPoint presentation, Slide 3 of which usually reads like this:

• SWOT analysis.
• Leveraging innovative marketing solutions.
• Optimised EBITDA. 
• Globalized outreach.

Slide 4, of course, features a picture of a cricketer or baseball player with the caption: “Working here should always be a SLOG!!!”, preferably in a hideous font, italicised, in at least three colours. At this point, holding down your lunch is usually a higher priority than wondering whether the full stops are necessary.

I'll admit I have left them in when the author has written bullet points that are mini-essays in themselves, but such pieces are usually beyond rescue already.

The admirable John McIntyre concluded it was a “pointless discussion” (yes I got the joke too), and in a sense, he's right. Unlike the arguments about 'imply' vs 'infer', there isn't a wrong belief that needs to be countered. It's a question of style, which ultimately becomes a question of personal preference.

But that doesn't make the discussion irrelevant. One of the beauties of Twitter is that it brings together people with similar interests who can share ideas. None of us are megalomaniacs trying to impose our irrational linguistic prejudices on the rest of the world; we just want to promote a culture of clarity and graceful expression through the written word*. I've read hundreds of books and papers that were beyond reproach in terms of their correct English, but were still ugly, unreadable or unbearably dull. Correct vocabulary, grammar and punctuation are not ends in themselves. 

So, here's my rule for the smallest glyph on your keyboard. It has two functions only:

As a full stop or period, ending a sentence in body text

As a decimal point

I'll also use it as a marker between lower-case initials (i.e. and e.g. are the only common ones), but it's unnecessary and confusing for abbreviations, where it can be confused with a full stop (see SnoozeInBrief's use of U.S.A. above).

Moral: Using full stops in bullet points is just dotty.

*This goal will be achieved as soon as EVERYONE AGREES WITH ME.

Five common spelling mistakes – and five tricks to get them right

I have an unhealthy interest in etymology, although it does have its uses. One of them is checking the right form of a word that's often mis-spelt (or misspelled. Either is acceptable). There are other ways, and some of these mnemonics might help. 

Wrong: definately

Right: definitely

The ultimate root is the Latin finis, meaning end. The obvious English word is finish, but the more useful ones are define and finite. When we define something, we show its limits, i.e. where it finishes (and where everything else starts). Something with no end or boundary is infinite. When you draw something: you give it an outline, which is where it finishes. Put another way, you define it. So it's de-finite. With an i. 

Wrong: seperate

Right: separate

I've got a set of knives. The small one, for cutting things, is called a paring knife. When you pare things, you cut them. You sePARate them.

Wrong: Moses lead the Israelites

Right: Moses led the Israelites

I can't offer an etymological way out of this one. The past tense and passive participle of to lead is led. The best I can offer, other than an image of me standing behind your desk holding a big stick with a nail in it, is to think of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and ask yourself, "Who led Led Zeppelin?"

Wrong: neccesary

Right: necessary

The letter 'c' is soft when followed by 'e', 'i' or 'y'. That's why the first 'c' in accident is hard (because it isn't followed by 'e', 'i' or 'y') and the second one is soft, so it's pronounced aksident. That's also why you've been mis-pronouncing flaccid all this time. If there were two 'c's in necessary, you'd have to pronounce it neksessary.

Wrong: ecstacy, extasy

Right: ecstasy

Just take out the 'cst'. Then it's easy.

Moral: We all need a few tricks.

Silence or…? The editor’s playlist

Do you work to music?

My office is sepulchral in its silence, and sometimes that’s good for editing. If I want company, I can wander upstairs and talk about EU emissions regulations, the number of ships at anchor outside Australia’s major coal ports or the differential between Saudi contract prices for butane and propane. Life is never dull. But when I work from home, I need something to puncture the solitude. 

Choosing music is a delicate task for an editor. Some insist on silence, while others seem capable of working with the most raucous of rackets buffeting their eardrums (yes, Anthony and Cathy, I'm talking about you). 

One of the few advantages of having one's family dropping dead is that you get to steal their stuff, and a rummage through some of John's old CDs while I was working at home recently prompted the following tweet:

I’m trying new background music for editing: Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. Going well so far. What works for you?

Anthony Rowlinson (@F1_Prof) suggested Queens Of The Stone Age, while Cathy Relf (@CaffyRelf), who must have nerves of steel, suggested this barnstorming performance by The Pogues & The Dubliners. Sue Proud (@ewesub) said, “Hans Zimmer’s Batman music is dark and angry enough for me, but I don’t use it at work.” Eleanor Crawford (@el_crawford) is inspired in eschewing music altogether in favour of Test Match Special, which is almost a zen experience.

Editing requires concentration, and that restricts my choice of background noise. Anything too raucous or uptempo is distracting, while prominent use of English is confusing, like having someone talking to me while I work. There’s also the fact that singing has a certain rhythm, which is different to the rhythm of the written word. A sensitive editor will make sure that the final edit has a rhythm that helps the reader, which is why I don't like to have competing rhythms in my head. 

Fulfilling all the above criteria eliminates most of my music collection. After years of experimenting, I find I need music where the vocals are down in the mix or in another language altogether because I don’t want to be totally dependent on instrumentals. Here are some of the best pieces I’ve found:

The Placid Sub-Editor's playlist

Hallogallo – Neu!     This is absolutely perfect. Klaus Dinger’s motorik beat is gentle yet unstoppable like a river, while Michael Rother’s guitar swirls and eddies around it.

Pharaoh’s Dance – Miles Davis     Abstract psychedelic jazz isn’t going to disrupt anyone’s concentration.

Slip Inside This House – Primal Scream     It’s hard to choose between this and the 13th Floor Elevators’ magnificent original, but Primal Scream give this classic a trance-like quality that makes it the better choice if you want to get some work done.

7th Symphony 2nd Movement – Ludwig van Beethoven     Beethoven is a bit too energetic for quiet concentration, but how can you resist that second movement? I first heard it ripped off by Deep Purple on one of their early albums. Take enlightenment where you find it, I say.

Echoes – Pink Floyd     The Floyd’s longest single piece of music, floaty and peaceful and without the alarm clocks that might just distract you if you’re foolish enough to choose Dark Side Of The Moon.

Valium 10 – Hawkwind     A bit of psychedelic trance boogie from the space-rock hippies (try to ignore the dentist’s drill at the start). Peps you up a bit in case the Floyd leaves you too laid-back.

Hyper-Gamma Spaces – Alan Parsons Project     A casual, almost throw-away electronic instrumental from the much-derided post-prog AOR criminals.

Bel Air – Can     Like Echoes, Can’s ethereal masterpiece sustained a whole side of vinyl, but with the rhythmic discipline that keeps you engaged without becoming overwhelming – an effect that is helped by Damo Suzuki’s vocals, which are almost subliminal.

Flow Motion – Can     In their world music phase, Can came up with these abstract guitar and vocal variations around a simple, reggae-inspired rhythm.

Isi – Neu!     This sounds like a foretaste of 80s electronica, which is hardly surprising since Neu! were early members of Kraftwerk.

Tenhert – Tinariwen     A sort of Berber blues shuffle, and the lyrics won’t be a distraction unless your Tamashek is more fluent than mine.

Beartown – Polar Bear     Jazz is one of the few genres that works as background music, and Polar Bear have given it a thoroughly 21st Century twist.

So Far – Faust     A simple, insistent rhythm that’s remarkably restrained by Faust’s usual standards. They're not even using a cement mixer.

Naturträne – Nina Hagen Band     Teutonic punk-opera anyone?

Awaken – Yes     I know this breaks my rule about English lyrics, but let’s not forget that these words were written by the notoriously nebulous Jon Anderson and so scarcely count as English. I have an album of Serbian turbo-folk with more comprehensible lyrics than almost anything by 1970s Yes. 

Samba Do Gringo Paulista (Reconstruction) – Bigga Bush / Suba     Speaking of Serbian music, what’s wrong with a bit of laid-back Serbo-Brazilian electro-samba? There’s an interesting story behind the Serbian influences in my music collection, but I can’t tell you in case MI6 is reading this. 

Rollin’ on Chrome – Aphrodelics (Kruder & Dorfmeister remix)     Maybe this is a bit too chilled for a sunny afternoon (or daylight in general), but let’s give it a go. 

Merge – Lamb     A bit of jazzy drum’n’bass, or is an English samba? Lamb seem to inhabit the badlands between Portishead and the Alan Parsons Project, which is the sort of obsveration that ensures I often drink alone.

The Creep Out – Dandy Warhols       So when does the song start, Courtney? It doesn't. There's just a remorseless, compulsive intensification of rhythmic sound, though not as brash and intrusive as you’d expect from a group dedicated to hedonistic alt-pop.

Played in full, that should give you about three hours of listening. Sharp-eyed readers will notice the preponderance of German music (seven out of 20, plus one Austrian). I listen to other genres at other times, but I find the rejection of blues-based Anglo-American rock gives Krautrock an ideal quality for writing and editing. It complements my thoughts instead of overwhelming them. With careful choosing, I could probably put together a playlist to last all day based purely on Neu!, with a bit of Can for variety (when I've finished, I’ll slap on a bit of Beefheart). But don’t take my word for it. Ask Iggy Pop.

That’s what does it for me, but I can’t keep playing the same old stuff. What works for you? C’mon, give me some fresh ideas.

Let’s talk about crapmanteaux

“Mumpreneur is in the dictionary!” proclaims the interesting if repetitive Lilach Bullock, citing Collins Dictionary Online. That’s what bothers me about some of these online dictionaries. Their attitude seems to be, if people use a word, then it’s a word. In which case, what’s the dictionary for? I know the language has to keep evolving, but there’s little point having a gatekeeper if he simply waves everyone through while mumbling, “Yeah, whatevs.”

“I’m a proud entrepreneur and love the term mumpreneur,” trills Bullock, who has fifty followers for every one I’ve got. My instinct is simply to say, “Yuck, yuck, yuckety-yuck, hate it hate it hate it.” Whatever more articulate argument I might propound later, that visceral, grown-man-acting-like-a-three-year-old emotion underpins whatever I am about to say. Mumpreneur is self-evidently horrid and anyone using it should be shunned for that reason alone. But what makes it so, and what makes a good portmanteau?

Like so much else, the term was coined by Lewis Carroll to describe his invention of words in the poem Jabberwocky, whereby gallop and triumph became galumph and chuckle and snort became chortle. Other early examples include smog (a mixture of smoke and fog) and brunch (breakfast and lunch).

Did you put 'mumpreneur' in the dictionary?

Yet now it seems to have got out of hand. After the tongue-in-cheek slacktivism and imagineering came and went, we’ve suddenly found ourselves in a world where every miserably irrelevant ‘new’ concept has to have its own special word, if only to make hashtags on Twitter. Justin Bieber is beleaguered by ‘beleibers’, which seems fair enough, implying as it does wide-eyed, unquestioning, moronic devotion while carrying more than a hint of babbling. But why are Ed Sheeran’s fans called Sheeranators? They can’t be trying to link him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, surely? He’s a ginger, not a ninja.

Since 2009, my feminist friends have been using their own put-down of patronising men, as in:

“Oh but wait, feminists can’t be angry at anything Captain Mansplain hasn’t personally approved of.” @TheNatFantastic

Mansplain is not exactly graceful, but it isn’t hard to work it out. If you’re not sure, ask Nancy Friedman, who will gynsplain (or maybe clarifem) on her blog. The reason there isn’t a female alternative isn’t because women are never disparaging or matronising towards men; it’s because the alternatives are too ugly to survive outside the business environment, where nebulous ugliness is highly prized.

This reaches its nadir with Grexit, where the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph are seriously trying to pretend that there is a word for the Greeks abandoning the euro, just because some oaf at Citigroup decided to try and be clever. 

At least, I thought it was a nadir till I saw this on a design agency’s home page: 

“Creativity in designing makes your clients happy. Designing is our role in playing [no, I can’t work out what that means either]. So e-Ramo calls it Cresigning.”

Part of the appeal of the portmanteau is doing something clever and amusing. ‘Slacktivist’ (someone who campaigns without straying from their computer keyboard) works because the syllables overlap and so retain the essence of both words. ‘Act’ and ‘slack’ almost rhyme while having opposite meanings, attracting and repelling in equal measure and creating a humorous balance. Ideally, a good portmanteau should retain the integrity of the original words and perhaps a hint of something else. Above all, it shouldn’t take itself too seriously.

It’s clear that mumpreneur and the equally loathsome webinar fail on both counts. There has to be some logical link between the component parts. Try explaining it to someone: 

“Yeah, look, it’s really clever: y’see what I did there? I took entrepreneur and replaced the ‘entre-’ with ‘mum’. Then I took ‘seminar’ and replaced ‘sem’ with ‘web’. How genius is that?” 

That’s the same sort of genius that makes a cheese sandwich but replaces the cheese with a Ford Mondeo.

Look, you don’t have to make a single word for a new concept. Fill a milk bottle with fuel and stuff a rag in the neck and you’ve got a petrol bomb or a Molotov cocktail (don’t be alarmed: I always recycle my milk bottles responsibly and anyway I don’t know where e-Ramo or Collins Dictionary have their offices). It’s not a petromb or a mocktail, although the latter would work for alcohol-free drinks in funny glasses with fruit. I can’t think of a word that combines the concept of mother and entrepreneur, but we don’t need to devise a single word to cover everything we do. My urge to find an outlet for my armchair magalomania means I juggle the roles of editor, actor, writer and father. I tried to come up with a portmanteau for that, but it was so ugly that I felt compelled to delete it.

Since there aren’t enough decent portmanteaux around, I’ll suggest a few more (or there’s a list here). Feel free to come up with your own:

Shortmanteau: a single-syllable portmanteau, such as smog or brunch

Crapmanteau: mompreneur, webinar, etc

Momnivore: a mother who copes with stress by comfort eating

Ad choc: the eating of confectionery on impulse

Jazzturbation: aimless, self-indulgent music

Footmauler: any English footballer

Gluicide: an overdose for someone who can’t afford proper drugs

Quartomaton: someone with at least 25% of their body replaced by robotic parts

Piesexual: someone attracted to fuller-figured men or women

Pisexual: someone with slightly more than three partners

Hobknob: an obscene cooking injury
Pornucopia: the internet
Prepostrophe: a preposterously misplaced apostrophe
Fauxhito: at 2am, someone decides to make cocktails. But they don't have all the ingredients.

Update: to save myself editing this post, I've created an evolving list called New portmanteaux for smug writers. Feel free to offer fresh suggestions.

Moral: There aren’t any rules for creating portmanteaux, other than the aesthetic. But that should be compelling enough.

My black, putrescent soul

In the spirit of an earlier post (Words that won't make you look foolish), I'm looking at words that don't mean what they should. This is partly the result of a moral crisis, whereby I don't always know if I'm right, and partly out of a feeling of irritation with online dictionaries, which seem far too tolerant. Every sub-editor, word-nerd and logophile should be a seething ball of fury, scowling at the world and dreaming hideous punishments for those that abuse their beloved language. If our list were less specific and our intended victims less distant, we would all be Dennis Nilsen. 

This is why sub-editors never meet in large groups. Partly it's because the suppressed rage of more than half a dozen of them would acquire its own critical mass, creating a fireball of self-righteousness that would evaporate all life within a 200-metre radius. But it's also because of fear: the fear that others of your ilk might a) disagree with you and b) be right. This is like turning up at a Christian fundamentalist convention and discovering that you've each got a slightly different version of the Bible.

"Hey, Patrick's still clinging to Genesis! Aww, how quaint!"

"It's a great story, but a bit out-dated. I replaced it in my Bible with part 2 of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' Idiots Abroad."

"Leviticus is far too liberal. I replaced it with the Chicago Manual of Style."

The above discourse is unlikely to happen, if only because the God of the Old Testament doesn't have nearly as much fire and brimstone as your average sub-editor. Look into his eyes next time the marketing manager tries to utilise some analytics or leverage some solutions. What's he thinking? Pillar of salt or smiting the firstborn unto the seventh generation? Near to every sub-editor's desk is a suspiciously clear area. But it only looks that way. In the sub's mind it is the display area where he keeps his collection of shrunken heads. 

I'm still looking at words that don't mean what they should. Maybe next week I'll write about them. 

Moral: Self-loathing is pointless. A good sub-editor can loathe you more than you can ever hope to loathe yourself.

The nouning of adjectives

The unfortunate adjective is having a tough time of it. Two unofficial rules covering the use of adjectives seem to have developed in recent years:

1) If an adjective is used, it will be unnecessary
2) If an adjective is necessary, the writer will use a noun instead

An example of the former is the pre-recorded announcement that gets played on British trains as they come into a station (or, as it is now mystifyingly called, "a station stop"): "On leaving the train, please ensure that you take all your personal belongings with you."

Why personal belongings? On one level, you could argue that "your belongings" are personal already, so the adjective is redundant. But what if I'm carrying presents for my daughter? They're my belongings because I bought them with my money, but they're not my personal belongings because they're not for me. The rail company is clearly requesting that I leave them on the train. And yesterday I was carrying a new laptop supplied by my company. That is personal, because it's been set up just for me, but it's not a personal belonging because it doesn't belong personally to me. Again, Southeastern Trains wants me to abandon it. Who do they think I am, a senior civil servant or police officer? 

By adding words, they turn a clear piece of advice into an ambiguous one. Their only excuse is that they don't expect you to take any notice, whatever they say.

Adjectives nowadays are usually unnecessary, as in "her photographer remains locked in ongoing litigation" (Guardian, although let's not forget that "ongoing" is almost always redundant anyway). But sometimes they are deliberately misleading, as in the common phrase "Important Information", which denotes a piece of paper or a web page that can safely be ignored. I'm not aware of any dictionary that has included this new definition of the word "important", meaning "unintelligible and included purely to cover our backside in the event of you doing something stupid". But the day can't be far off.

You'd think that this irrational need to qualify everything would lead to a surge in the use of adjectives, but that's where Point 2 comes into play. When the qualification is truly needed, somehow an adjective isn't enough. In the same way you set a thief to catch a thief, it seems that an unruly noun can only be brought into line by another noun.

This probably started with newspaper headline writers, who would write things like "Noun joy after adjective purge" (the verbs had been exiled years before). Since white space is verboten on newspaper front pages, we can perhaps forgive them for using whatever words fit. That might also explain why headlines are a bit freer on the internet, where space is more malleable and SEO is also a concern. (It doesn't explain why a headline on the BBC front page earlier this month – which, criminally, I failed to save – consisted entirely of six nouns.)

But the habit seems to have spread to places it should never reach. Take this example:

"Per Mertesacker of Werder Bremen is a seasoned Germany international" Guardian, 31 August 2011

Now, there are sometimes excuses for this, such as in this BBC announcement, also on 31 August, of Sanjeev Srivastava as its new "India Editor". One could describe him as "Indian Editor", since he is Indian, but that's not what the BBC meant to say. It would have been odd to describe Mark Tully, who was "India Correspondent" for three decades, as the "Indian Correspondent" since he is English (albeit born in Calcutta). But why not describe Mertesacker as a "German international"? After all, only Germans can play for the the German team, so no ambiguity is possible.*

One objection to using nouns as adjectives is that it creates ambiguity – which of the nouns is the real noun and which are moonlighting as adjectives? – but sometimes that ambiguity has its uses. When Paul Chambers was convicted on terrorism charges for tweeting his desire to blow up an airport, the Twitter hashtag #TwitterJokeTrial implied that it was a trial about a Twitter joke. But it could just as easily read as a joke trial about Twitter, which is how people who oppose security paranoia prefer to read it. Sometimes, a bit of ambiguity is all that's needed to make a joke. Does anyone remember MontyPythonscrapbook?

This is symptomatic of a trend in English of blurring the distinction between word types, summed up by the maxim "There is no noun that cannot be verbed", but we are also seeing verbs being nouned. Most notably, the past couple of years have seen the word "failure" almost entirely replaced by "fail". 

We love the almost unique flexibility of English, but a bit of structure is needed or else the strong meat of language will turn into verbal soup.

*A better example of this has since come to light. When the Guardian reported the death of the legendary Bert Trautmann, he was described as "The former West Germany and Manchester City goalkeeper". Trautmann never played for West Germany.   

Moral: Don't un-noun nouns by adjectiving. 

Lessons without pupils or teachers

BBC Radio 4's Any Questions last Friday was rich with the sort of blah that infects political debate in most countries. The radio doesn't attract the big hitters who get the gig on the BBC's television equivalent, Question Time, which is why the panellists are more timid than usual. There's a bit of slugging, as with all such panel shows, but the main aim of the politicians is to get away without having said anything. It's significant that the follow-up show on Saturday, where listeners write in with their comments, is called Any Answers, because the last thing you'll get on Thursday is answers. 

Every politician has a number of phrases in his arsenal that are designed to deflect the question rather than answer it. In a discussion on the NHS, one panellist (I think it was the Tory representative Andrew Mitchell) came up with one of the most popular such phrases:

Lessons will be learned

Let's think about that for a moment. Lessons will be learned. Doesn't it just resonate with contrition and desire to make amends? Yes it does, and that's why politicians love it. But what does it actually say? Does it say any of the following?

I failed
My organisation failed
I (or my underlings) will make the following improvements
I am sorry
We will discipline or sack those responsible
I will resign

See? This comforting slab of insincerity doesn't acknowledge fault or promise action. At least that other, slightly more contrite platitude "mistakes were made" acknowledges that something went wrong, but both use the evasive passive voice, whose USP (for politicians) is that it is a sentence without a subject.

So, if ever you hear someone say "lessons will be learned", interrupt them with at least one of the following questions, but certainly the last one:

What lesson will be learned?

Why do lessons need to be learned?

Who will teach the lesson?

Who will learn? C'mon, give me a name

Learning is an active process. If something is to be learned, then someone – one or more specific individuals – needs to do the learning. Don't let them get away with stock platitudes instead of answers.

Moral: When politicians use the passive voice, they're hiding something. Insist on an answer.