Pet Peeve of the Day: The “Double Is”

So, as a proofreader, I see lots of errors. Most of them don’t bother me. I mean, people make errors. No big deal. If it weren’t for them, I’d be out of a job.

But occasionally, one particular mistake really snags my shorts. Today, it is the “double is.” This is when, for no apparent reason, people insert an extra “is” (or another form of the verb “to be”) into their speech, with a pause between the two. Examples:

• “The truth is, is that I could not care less.”
• “The fact of the matter is, is that most people will vote on Tuesday.”
• “The reason being, is that I have a headache today.”

Today I heard it again. On NPR. From the mouth of an educated, articulate person who should be above such lazy speech.

But then I thought: Is it really incorrect? Is it some obscure type of clause that I didn’t know about before? Is it one of those slangy turns of phrase that has crept so far into the English language that it’s here to stay, correct or not?

“Double Copula”: Grammatical Error, or Oddball Architectural Feature?

I Googled it and discovered that somebody has given this speech pattern a name: the double copula. (A copula is what we all learned in school as a “linking verb,” as in the phrases “He is tall,” or “Something smells funny.”)

Wikipedia has a short summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_copula

I consulted Webster’s and the Chicago Manual of Style, but I couldn’t find a final word on whether the double is is actually incorrect, or just slangy, or what.

But wait! Didn’t I just use the word is twice in a row in that last sentence?!?! Yes, I did. And Microsoft Word dinged me for it, placing the squiggly red line beneath the second instance of is.

In some cases, using the word is twice in a row is 100% grammatically correct (despite what MS Word thinks). Examples of correct usage:

1. What the problem is is still unclear.
2. My inability to figure out what the solution is is really bugging me.

If sentences like those feel awkward, you can always reword them. For instance:

1. The nature of the problem is still unclear.
2. It’s really bugging me that I haven’t been able to figure out the solution.

So What’s the Final Answer?

Beats me! Grammar geek that I am, I will submit this as a question to the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual’s website. If they answer it, I’ll post it here.

Even Jane Austen Needed an Editor

It's so seldom that editing makes the news. Thank you, NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130838304

Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland studied original, handwritten Jane Austen manuscripts. She found lots of mistakes, and even some crazy punctuation (or lack thereof).

It just goes to show ya. No matter how brilliant and lasting your ideas are, nobody's prose is perfect. Conversely, perfect editing does not make for brilliant prose. Editors and writers need one another and always will.

“Could Care Less” vs. “Couldn’t Care Less”: The Eternal Debate

If you have time to kill, read the comments after this article:

"Could Care Less" vs. Couldn't Care Less" by Maeve Maddox

The comments show just how impassioned people can become regarding which version of this phrase is correct.

The article was posted in August 2007 and was still getting new comments as of this week. Apparently the debate over "could care less," which has been raging for decades, rages on today.

But Which One IS Correct?!

The phrase is supposed to mean that you don't care about something at all. Logically, saying "I could care less" implies that you do care a little bit, making it an inaccurate way to express that you don't care at all. Whereas saying "I couldn't care less" leaves no doubt that you couldn't possibly care any less than you do.

I'd wager that about 80% of people say "I could care less," and the other 20% say "I couldn't care less." The 20% flinch when they hear someone say "I could care less," thinking how idiotic the person sounds. The other 80% say it that way because that's the way they always heard it.

Maybe They're Both Correct

This comment from the above-linked article makes a very interesting point:

john Ireland on August 10, 2007 3:53 pm
In the late 1950's, a verbose variation on the term "I couldn't care less" was spoken: "I suppose I could care less, but I don't see how." Words were dropped over the next few years until "I could care less" was all that was left. Those too young to know the history of the saying likely cringe and think it is nonsense. Those who know its derivation mentally hear the unspoken words and accept its meaning without concern.

If that's true, then maybe this matter is settled. Maybe the people who say "I could care less" aren't throwing logic to the wind after all. Nor should they be subject to the scorn of grammatical purists who insist on the more accurate "I couldn't care less."

I'd love to hear from someone who knows whether this John Ireland guy is correct. If someone backs him up, I'd feel confident that we can declare this issue a dead horse once and for all. Comments please!

Favorite Author Shout Out: Emily Giffin

Do you have an author who, while reading a book of theirs for the first time, you immediately said to yourself, “I MUST read every book that this person ever wrote!”?

Emily Giffin is that sort of author for me, along with Sharyn McCrumb, Clyde Edgerton, Douglas Adams, Greg Bear, and Tracy Chevalier.

My favorite thing about Giffin's books is her appealingly imperfect characters. Each protagonist has some peculiarly human flaw, maybe one that we have ourselves but don’t want to admit (hubris, lust/infidelity, stubbornness, an inability to let go of the past). The flaw leads the character into sticky situations that make you ask yourself, “What would I do if it were me?”

Giffin delves so deeply into each main character’s emotions and motivations that, by the end, you feel like you’ve lived a part of someone else’s life from inside their head. She does character so well that the plots are sort of beside the point. (I’d say the same about Clyde Edgerton.) That may seem like a strange compliment for an author, but I think it’s a remarkable talent.

Loving City Life

In Giffin’s book Love the One You’re With, a married couple decides to move from New York City to Atlanta. The husband is thrilled, because Atlanta is his hometown. The wife is ambivalent, because she loves New York.

This passage rings true for a lot of big cities, including Chicago. It sums up perfectly why I'll be sad if/when I ever move out of the city.

…It’s the little things that get to me the most as we wind down our affairs in the city and hurtle toward our June closing date. It’s the rich fabric of my daily life—things that barely registered before but that now feel sentimental. It’s my walk to work and the silent camaraderie of other commuters swelling in the crosswalks around me. … It’s our dry cleaner’s deep frown lines as he determinedly knots the plastic around Andy’s shirts and then tells us to have a nice day in his Turkish accent, and my Korean manicurist’s chipper command to “pick polish,” even though she must know by now that I always bring my own. It’s the sway of the subway careening efficiently along the tracks, and the satisfaction of flagging down a cab on a bustling weekend night in the Village. It’s the burgers at P.J. Clarke’s, the dim sum at Chinatown Brasserie, and the bagels at my corner bodega. It’s knowing that when I walk out of our brownstone, I will see something new every single day. It’s the diversity of choices and people, the raw urban beauty, the endless hum of possibility everywhere.

Not Again! "Rich Whitey" Runs for Governor of Illinois

Just a few weeks before the November elections, the poor editing of politicians' names continues.

This time, Green Party candidate Rich Whitney's name was misspelled "Rich Whitey" on 500 electronic voting machines. To add insult to irony, many of the machines were in predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

Learn more in this video from ABC News.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

I mean, seriously. "Rich whitey?" I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I feel like I'm back in 1992, watching a Homey D. Clown skit on "In Living Color." Rich Whitey would be the owner of the restaurant Chez Whitey, of course. And Homey don't play dat!

The typo is so egregious that it almost has to be deliberate. If it was, shame on you, error maker. Really... painting the Green Party as a bunch of spoiled, rich, liberal white people? YAWN. It's been done. If you're going to malign a candidate, at least be original.

If the error was not introduced on purpose, then it's just a good laugh for all of us. And some free publicity (and is there such a thing as bad publicity?) for Whitney.

Why You Should Never Proofread Your Own Writing

It’s a fact. You should never proofread something that you wrote yourself. Not even if you are a professional proofreader. Not even if your name is Merriam, or Webster, or if you are on the staff of the Chicago Manual of Style itself, or if you’ve taught English for 99 years.

I don’t know why this is true. But it is. You will never catch all the mistakes in your own writing. You will miss obvious flaws that you might have seen easily if reading somebody else’s work.

I’d love a psychologist’s opinion on this. What makes people who can spot typos from outer space—in other people’s work—partially blind to their own typos?

Here are my theories as to why this happens:

1. If you wrote it yourself, you are “too close” to the text. What does that mean? Your brain has gone through the creative process of transforming your ideas into written words. As a result, your own writing, from your brain’s perspective, becomes something other than just any old piece of text like you might read in a book. Instead, it’s an extension of your mind. It’s your ideas, converted into ink or pixels. This may seem like the same thing as any other text, but to your brain, it’s not.
   
   When you’ve written down your own ideas, you don’t have the luxury of distance—the ideas are part of you. You can’t be objective. This is why spotting problems with text structure, idea flow, wordiness, and length is challenging when trying to edit your own writing. But it can also blind you to typos, because you’re not looking at your own words as a proofreader would, or even as a reader would. When you read your own words, you’re recalling the mental processes that produced those words (your choice of specific phrases, etc.), and the ideas themselves are being re-triggered in your mind. Those higher mental processes are somewhat incompatible with the technical concentration required to produce perfect grammar and syntax.
   
   
2. You tend to skim instead of read. A writer generally goes through several steps: writing, rewriting, and more rewriting. By the time you have a final draft, you’ve looked at your text several times, sometimes dozens of times. When you've read something that many times, your brain tends to skim over it, already knowing the gist of what is being said. By contrast, good proofreading requires reading text thoroughly and carefully, sometimes pronouncing each word in your head as if it were being spoken aloud to you.

Bottom line: If you want your writing to be error free, have someone else proofread it. Preferably a born proofreader. A fresh set of eyes is key.

If you don’t have someone else to proofread your work, at least try to set it aside for a few days and then go back to it. Time diminishes the two effects that I described above. Your eyes will be (if not totally objective) more fresh, the more time you place between the writing and the proofreading.

Nostalgia for Newspaper Lingo

Remember newspapers? Those soft, folded chunks of paper that you could open with a snap and hide behind at the breakfast table, getting ink all over your hands while you devoured stories from all over the world?

Yeah. Me neither. I get 99% of my news online and on the radio. I can’t even remember the last time I bought an actual newspaper. The day after 9/11, I think.

It seems as if newspapers are quickly becoming an artifact of the past. One day soon, asking a young person about a newspaper will be like asking them about a 45 RPM record or a cassette tape. They’ll be like, “Huh? A what now?”

If newspapers do go the way of the dinosaur, I will miss the newspaper phrases that have crept into popular culture (and who knows, maybe some of them will stick around). Some of my favorites:

• Below the fold—i.e., when a piece of content is placed low enough to where it is less likely to be read. The online equivalent of this, I suppose, would be anything after the first paragraph or two of text. In other words, I’m already there and I should probably stop writing now.
  
  
• After the jump—when a story is continued to another page. Long articles on some web pages use jumps too, though I’m not sure if they are called jumps (but they should be).
  
  
• “Stop the presses!” How can you not love this expression? Nothing in the online universe could possibly compare to it. What would you say? “Stop the mouse”? Hardly as dramatic or action-packed.
  
  
• “It was in the papers.” This is something people used to say when talking about a bit of news that everybody should be aware of. Why should they be aware of it? Because it was in the papers, and back then, everybody read the papers. The splintering of news content onto hundreds of different web sites makes me a bit sad. We have lost a common reference point that used to bring people together, at least in some small way.