As one of the Mercury‘s resident word nerds (read: I enjoy figuring out whether words like “shit-ton” should or should not be hyphenated), it’s come to my attention that we need a new language for talking about grammar and syntax. Like, what do you call it when someone inappropriately and randomly uses commas? Urban Dictionary nailed it:
Shatner commas: Oddly placed commas that don’t seem to serve any actual purpose in punctuation, but make it look like you should take odd pauses, as William Shatner does when delivering lines. This is what Shatner commas look like: When, we get to, the restaurant, we should, order some, tasty, beverages.
Here’s another one from Team Courtney and Alison, inspired by Commenty Colin:
narcolipses: The overuse of ellipses throughout a sentence, which seem to indicate the writer is falling asleep mid-thought. Example: I need to pay my garbage bill… then I should get this mole taken care of… what do you think about John Cassavetes as a filmmaker?
parenthetical rabbit hole: When a parenthetical phrase or sentence is left open with no closing parenthesis to end the lengthening aside, which is becoming a behemoth, spiraling ever closer to becoming a James Joyce novel.
limey crimes: It’s gray, not grey. Traveled, not travelled. What, you think you’re better than me because you spell it theatre?! It’s theater, you pompous ass. YOU ARE NOT BRITISH! (Unless you are, then I’m sorry I yelled at you.)
Your turn, Blogtown! What are terms for your particular brand of grammatical apoplexy?
The most annoying grammar and syntax errors that I encounter while on the Internet include: overused semicolons, improperly used colons, and confusing i.e for e.g.
Most of my mistakes, though, are inadvertent spelling errors. If blogtown featured an option that allowed you to edit your comments, it would solve many of these annoying issues. In general, all commenters should read (or reread) Strunk and White; it the bestest!
Metaphwhores–Chill out, descripty pants.
Narcolipses is great!
I overuse em dashes – forgetting that the pauses in my brain’s cadences are – very – imperfectly transmitted by them.
(Clearly passive voice is not something that I am bothered by)
Sorry I don’t have a snappy name for that – “Dashes to Dashes?” “Complete Dash-hole?”
There should be a word for when you notice someone has not used the correct order of bracket symbols.
I volunteer “being an asshole”.
How about “colipses”,,, you know,,,
(BTW,,, I studied “Theatre Arts” in the “Theatre Building” at a major Midwestern university. It’s not just a British spelling.)
I am totally guilty of overusing exclamation points. I guess that makes me an exclaim jumper.
Courtney: Either that or a bang masher.
How about “punctulexic,” i.e. the habitual mis-ordering of punctuation adjacent to quotation marks and parentheses because it just looks weird to put the comma inside the quotation mark and makes it look like the speaker made a shatner comma even when they actually did not? Even though Strunk and White says to?
arbitrary Capitalization.
@ Alison cRapItaliZation
Dash-inine?
Yes! I was just gonna say Exclaimitis C or Mono Exclaimosis!!
Also, “something” that “bothers” me is mis or over “use” of quotations. “Ahem!”
These people have Quotiovascular Disease.
CrApiTaliZation
now the big letters spell CATZ.
my work here is done.
How about homophone problems, esp. they’re their there?
My term “homo-boners” weirdly hasn’t caught on the way I’d hoped.
Let’s try “Therrors,” instead.
Don’t be silly Courtney, I’m better than you for completely different reasons.
I think Slate or Salon had a story about how putting punctuation after the end quotes is well on its way to becoming the new norm. This just makes more sense to me personally.
I also tend to overdo it with the em dashes – which are not supposed to have a space before or after the dash unless you are British – though I don’t give a fuck because spaces look better and I am too lazy to use the actual em dash character anyway.
And remember, it’s gay, not gey.
Picky, but “theater” isn’t as common in America as one might think…”Theatre” is used almost exclusively in Europe (English speaking) but it’s almost interchangeable here, with most “established” companies using the “re” ending. The OED (consider the source) dismisses the “er” spelling as a variant..so nyah nyah.
OK GUISE I GET IT!!! Gah! You know you can just tell me when I make all these errors as we go along…double gah…
(Punctuation, to me, is the evil-est of the necessary evils…).
evil-est? Created by Evil-Werner-Erhard?
Courtney!! I notice that you often use “read:” instead of “i.e.” such as in this post. Why do you do that? Why do other people do that? Is it really a thing? Did I miss something in my otherwise glowing career in the west Texas public education system?