Too right to write
When I want to inflate my CV I’ll often claim I’m experienced as a ‘professional writer.’ Truth is, I worked for a couple of years at a tiny marketing agency in remote northern England, where I ended up handling many of the copywriting tasks and all the proofreading, because I go pretty alright at it.
This launched me (a pedantic over-thinker) on a collision course with our clients (reasonably intelligent people with average writing abilities) over questions of grammar and style.
The resulting fights yielded some observations about spelling and grammar as signalling dilemmas that I think generalise quite nicely to domains beyond writing. I thought I’d write a few LW posts to get these thoughts out of my head.
you sure were staying in faze with our readers?
Our agency’s own brand-new shiny redesigned website was finally complete, and it was my job to proofread the copy. On our Managing Director’s very own bio page:
“It takes a lot to phase me.”
Wince. Correct it instantly. Look again at the word. F A Z E. That is right, isn’t it? Google and check. Yep. Look at it again. Feels weird man.
It’s just… even though it’s right, you have to admit it’s a mistake that’s become so widespread the correct spelling feels like a mistake. Hell, the correct spelling just feels inherently idiotic. F. Z. Idiot letters.
I start to consider, for the first time in my short career, leaving a mistake in place.
It felt dirty. But 95% of our customers would appreciate it – even at the cost of the 5% of customers I wanted the most.
bigbears
You Americans often pronounce ‘phenomena’ and ‘phenomenon’ almost exactly the same way! The last two letters are just a flat mute sound.
But it’s not just that. If you haven’t already noticed, you will from now on: these two are often used the wrong way around. Phenomena for singular and phenomenon for plural! And this isn’t just random people. I’ve seen this in legal text, I’ve seen it in tweets from public intellectuals.
It’s really just a pointless bugbear – it merely reveals the person doesn’t actively notice Greek/Latin grammar patterns for plurals, or else they’d instantly see the problem. To be fair, though, that certainly would imply things about their education and about how observant they are.
Because we really do constantly judge each other based on these little bugbears. And those judgements inform our choices of friends, romantic partners, business partners, etc. Even if we try not to let them. Terrifying.
cent u ryd?
Century doesn’t need a capital letter. Ok yes obviously that one there does but that’s because it’s the first word of a sentence. It seriously doesn’t need a capital letter.
Shut up about the BBC style guide. I’ll see it and raise you The Guardian, Chicago, MLA, APA, AP.
(The British are actually obsessed with capital letters and often use them for any noun they consider to function bigly in the sentence – and not without reason – but that’s for the next post. Back to century.)
Don’t do it! Not even if you’re talking about e.g. the 20th century. Maybe if you’re saying ’21st Century Fox’, but that’s because it’s a proper noun.
Sorry if you already knew this and I sound more insufferable than normal. But I guarantee plenty of you didn’t know that. Certainly one of our clients, who funnily enough holds a PhD in history, didn’t know this. I couldn’t convince him until I showed him all the style guides. Even then, he slunk away all wounded and suspicious.
I call that ‘building rapport with my clients.’
Just try to find your people
As a copywriter, you start to realise that spelling is just like a haircut. You just can’t please all the people all the time.
It’d be nice to find a haircut/outfit that enabled you to walk effortlessly through boardrooms and into bedrooms, to have a yarn with tradies then charm old ladies, to blend in at a dive bar then play violin in a live orchestr...ar – but it doesn’t exist.
Some subset of people will always think you’re an idiot if you spell things the right way. You can’t win.
As a copywriting agency, we wanted to attract clients who knew how to spell faze. Because they’ll be smart people and smart people are fun and desirable to work with. But if we put the correct spelling on the site, we’d instantly alienate most of our potential customers.
The obvious answer is to just use a different word, but the question lingers. How right is too right? Just be as right as possible all the time? Or try to blend in among the midwits?
Of course no matter what, you’re going to spend the whole time wondering whether there’s a whole class of hooded-cape guys out there smarter than you, babying you so you won’t erroneously decide they’re wrong about things.
Maybe this is just typical-minding, but I would guess that the median person might struggle to say which of faze/phase to put in their own writing but would happily go along with whichever one they encounter on an official-looking website without a second thought.
Yeah, I’d be pretty surprised if there’s any demographic slice who actually demand “phase” when “faze” is correct. The correlation between “bothers to have an opinion on correctness of others’ writing” and “knows what the correct answer actually is” seems too high.
It’s a little unfortunate, because I do think there might be an important point here, but the OP’s choice of example makes it harder for me to see. (Of course, it’s possible I’m just wrong, which would be interesting in its own right.)
This is very interesting. I certainly agree this is our point of difference – I think there’s a big cohort out there with strong, judgey opinions about ‘correctness’ and an active interest in spelling and grammar as a way of displaying status. These people also happen to very frequently be wrong.
But this might well me me typical minding and I’ll try to think about this group more rigorously in my next post about this.
I am not a native speaker. Funnily, I don’t do the kind of mistakes you mention, there are other much more counterintuitive aspects of the language for me:
Capitalisation. That the century should be lowercase is obvious, but why is “English language” with the capital E? And why March with the capital M? Those are not proper nouns either.
Commas. I would expect more people to have a problem with commas than with a phenomenon vs phenomena.
Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.
Do you have some examples of sentences where this is particularly tricky? (I’m just asking out of curiosity—I’m a monolingual English speaker who never really studied the language explicitly, so the non-native perspective can be an interesting prompt to think about the rules that seem intuitive but are often pretty weird and complicated when you think about them.)
Few quick examples:
Why is it “out of curiosity” and not “out of the curiosity”?
Why “see in context” and not “see in the context”? (See the button below this form)
Why “hide previous comment” and not “hide the previous comment”? (See the button above this form)
These are just one native speaker’s impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it’s a quality of “definiteness” that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you’re likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn’t rely on pointing at two specific “curiosity” and “context” objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases “out of curiosity” and “in context” that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.
I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The “definiteness” argument doesn’t apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.
There are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, “Curiosity killed the cat” vs. “La curiosité a tué le chat.” French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn’t have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of “the” is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.
English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.
Articles are hard! I was lucky enough to be raised bilingual, so I’m somewhat adept at navigating between different article schemes). I won’t claim these are hard and fast rules in English, but:
1 - ‘Curiosity’ is an abstract noun (e.g. liberty, anger, parsimony). These generally don’t have articles, unless you need some reason to distinguish between subcategories (e.g. ‘the liberty of the yard’ vs. ‘the liberty of the French’)
2 - ‘Context’ can refer to either a specific context (e.g. ‘see in the proper context’), in which case the articles are included, or the broad category (e.g. ‘context is everything’). ‘see in the context’ is not ungrammatical, but its usually awkward, because without an adjective its unclear which context you are talking about. (And if you were referring to one that was previously established, you would use ‘that context’ or ‘this context’). However, in the particular case of the button, ‘see in the context’ would be acceptable, because the identity of ‘the context’ is clear! I doubt a native English speaker would say that, though, because its not idiomatic.
3 - ‘hide the previous comment’ is actually correct here! However, in human-machine interfaces, articles, prepositions, and pronouns are often omitted to save space/mental effort.
Just pitching in on the last two: there’s an abbreviated register of speech in English called ‘note-taking register’ that has crept its way into a lot of parts of speech and writing, including website navigation. Dropping the definite article (or most articles in general) is a core part of that register.
I suspect dropping the definite article in ‘refresh page’ is not related to definiteness, it’s a linguistic tendency towards abbreviation. Funnily enough, it’s a trait shared by the stereotypical ‘robot voice’, as well as ‘baby voice’ and some others.
Is this definitely true? I think the last vowel sound is the same for both forms (in American, British, and my own Australian English), but I thought people usually hit the ‘n’ of phenomenon enough to distinguish it from the plural.
I certainly do notice the phenomenon/phenomena mistake a lot, though almost always it’s people using ‘phenomena’ as the singular, rather than vice versa. It seems to happen in both print and speech, though if you’re right about the American pronunciations, maybe I’m sometimes just mishearing. Anyway, until now my best guess was that maybe ‘phenomena’ intuitively seems singular to some people because the ending sounds like the singular article ‘a’.
I think it’s mostly that people don’t hear the “n” at the end, so they end up under the impression that “phenomena” is both the singular and the plural form.