My name’s Tom. I’m an assistant editor for a London charity that I’ll call the Blenkinsop Foundation (not its real name), which among other things publishes quite a lot of stuff. Like almost all jobs, mine is sometimes dull and sometimes frustrating – but I get to play around with words, which I enjoy. I said in my job interview six years ago that I wanted “to get my hands dirty with copy”. And so I do.
The point of this blog is to be somewhere I can wash my hands of particularly odious abuses of language.
Comments
Dear Tom,
I am a keen reader of your blog, which I enjoy for three reasons. First, it is reassuring to know that there is someone who is equally obsessed with the use and misuse of the English language as I am. Second, it’s an entertaining read. And third, as a journalist it helps to keep me on my toes. Since reading your post on the unholy see, I have been doing my best to ensure it does not appear in my copy. I’d have replied to your blogs before now, but the fear of exposing my own imperfect English has been too great. I’m already wondering whether my list should have employed ‘firstly, secondly…’
Valiantly, though, I have put this fear to one side – and delayed the completion of an article on the political situation in the two Sudans – in order to prevent myself falling into another grammatical trap. I was about to write “Six months later and the atmosphere could barely be more different.” I think this is quite a common construction. But I found myself wondering what on earth the ‘and’ was for.
A Google search of “barely a year later and” returns examples such as:
“Barely a year later, and Hayward is the £150000-a-year senior independent director of Glencore, a director of TNK-BP…”
“Barely a year later and St Marks of West Gorton Football Club was born.”
Am I right in thinking that the ‘and’ is redundant in both cases?
Yours,
The self-improving journalist
Hi Rich – sorry, I so rarely do anything on this blog that I’ve only just noticed the comment! Glad you like my occasional efforts here, and from what I’ve seen of your writing you’ve not much to worry about.
So, clearly far too late for your deadline: I’ve never actually thought about this before, but I’m sure that the ‘and’ here is at best redundant and at worst wrong. It’s being used here to conjoin a sentence modifier (‘barely a year later’) and a statement.that is thus modified. But that’s not what ‘and’ is for – it generally joins equivalent grammatical constructions.
I’d guess that the common use of it in this way comes from something that would make sense, along the lines of: ‘It is barely a year later, and lots has changed.’ And somewhere along the way, people decided to shorten it a bit, But of course you can shorten it even more by cutting the ‘and’ too.
(Oh, and for listing points, use first, secondly, thirdly etc. ‘Firstly’ is a redundancy, as ‘first’ can be both an adjective (my first car) and an adverb (I first drove a car). But second and third etc don’t work as adverbs, so you add the -ly for them.)
I would like to add an American perspective on enumerations. In the US, the preferred practice is to write first, second, third, etc. This is the practice recommended by our two leading style guides, The Associated Press Stylebook (used by most newspapers) and The Chicago Manual of Style (used by most of the rest of the publishing industry).
Please, please, can you give a definitive ruling on the hyphenation of anti money laundering, as in anti money laundering regulations. I know the phrase is horrible in itself, but it continually crops up in the stuff I sub. The people who write this junk seem to favour anti-money laundering, but this can’t be right. Anti-money-laundering is better, but too weighted down with hyphens. Anti money-laundering at least makes the sense clear, but leaves the ‘anti’ stuck on its own. Which of these alternatives is best? (and don’t suggest a re-write – the battle is lost…)
Hi kininvie. I’d use two hyphens. You just can’t strand the anti. But if you don’t then have a second hyphen, it’ll look like some really odd, tedious sci-fi thing in which the physics police are trying to stop “anti-money” from being laundered.
(Or rewrite – I know, I know – but just “money-laundering regulations” is crystal clear because everyone knows they’re obviously going to be anti. Or “regulations against money laundering”. Sorry, couldn’t resist it.)