One problem I have with “next level” is the fact that it implies that progress in whatever field is being discussed is quantized and split into discrete steps. This may very well be the case in certain circumstances, but in many, it’s nonsense.

So please, don’t ever use this phrase again.

Often a writer has things to say that don’t belong in the main text, but still need to be said. Sometimes they’re parenthetical asides; sometimes they’re citations or clarifications. There are two main ways to deal with these: make them either footnotes (placed at the bottom of the page) or endnotes (buried in the back of the book). Now, I don’t mind an endnote if it’s just going to be something along the lines of “ibid p. 347.” But if you’re going to tell me something even remotely interesting, why the hell should I have to flip a couple hundred pages to read it?

One book that takes footnoting to the extreme is Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball. Admittedly, it’s not the world’s most scholarly work, but it is incredibly well-researched and stunningly comprehensive. And the footnotes are full of entertaining asides, jokes, and pop culture references that fly over my head. But the nice thing is that the footnotes are there for you to look at, not buried between the acknowledgments and the index.

Contrast that with another book I read recently: Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, which hasn’t a single footnote. The vast majority of the endnotes are of the dry, scholarly variety, but there are a few gems in there. Unfortunately, the endnotes themselves don’t make sense unless you know their context, so to enjoy the few that contain interesting stuff, you have to hunt down where they occur in the text to see what’s going on.

I realize that authors and publishers don’t want to clutter up books sold to the general public with half a page of footnotes for every page of text, but it’s certainly possible to find a happy medium. I recently read Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and though it has its fair share of endnotes, pertinent material is placed as footnotes. It’s a very nice balance.

So please, publishers, put notes where they belong: at the bottom of a page of text if they’re interesting, at the end of the book if they’re citations and crap like that. Simple as that.

P.S. Totally random aside, but I feel like I can’t mention footnotes without mentioning David Foster Wallace’s heavily-footnoted essay on Roger Federer.

In your defense, however, quite a few people make the same mistake. You would think New Orleans gets enough publicity that people throughout the US would have learned how to pronounce the city’s name by now. But, alas, this is not the case. I think that throughout the English-speaking world citizens of a particular place have a right to determine the proper pronunciations.* I’ve only driven through Louisville, Kentucky once, but I’ve managed to figure out that I’m not supposed to call it “Loo-eee-ville.” So I don’t. I lived in Worcester, Massachusetts long enough to learn that the “rce” is silent. I’m not saying we have to pronounce every place name exactly as the locals do, but we should at least use one of the pronunciations they find acceptable. I hear “New Ore-lee-uns” quite a lot from non-locals, and that doesn’t bother me at all. It seems to be the standard among national broadcasters and the like.

Just for the record, this should be simple: “New ORE-lins.” Or “New ORE-lee-uns.” But never “New Ore-LEENZ.”** There you go, Paul Vallas.

* Notice that I said “English-speaking world.” I can’t stand people who try to bring over-exaggerated foreign-language pronunciations into English. For example, some people insist on calling “Qatar” “gutter” or “cutter,” which is apparently the closest we can get to the Arabic pronunciation. But it’s “kuh-TAHR” in English, even if it’s something else in Arabic. Try this: say “Paris, France.” Did you pronounce the “s” in “Paris”? I thought so. It may not have an s sound in French, but it does in English. And if you didn’t pronounce the “s,” you’re a pretentious douchebag. And if you’ve gotten so bad that even I call you a pretentious douchebag, you really need to reconsider the way you’re living your life.

** Okay, it’s not that simple. Because we have “Ore-LEENZ” Parish and “Ore-LEENZ” Avenue. Why is this the case? I have no idea whatsoever.

So if you’re American, you have no excuse to use this word. Ever. I will hunt you down if you do. And if you’re British, I won’t hunt you down—trans-Atlantic airfare is on the pricey side—but you still shouldn’t use it.

I can understand the difficulties in dealing with “disinterested.” The prefixes “dis-” and “un-” aren’t all that different in meaning. What “disinterested” and “uninterested” do is use two very different meanings of the word “interested”; one means “having or showing curiosity, fascination, or concern”; the other means “possessing a right, claim, or stake.” (Link here.) The second usage is much less common and seems to come up more in a technical legal or financial sense than in common English usage; its rarity leads to the running together of “uninterested” and “disinterested” as “bored.”

I realize that we all walk a fine line between prescriptivism and descriptivism; sometimes I’ll stick out my neck for new or unusual usages of the English language, but I usually tend toward good old-fashioned prescriptivism, and that’s what I have to do here. In “disinterested” and “uninterested” we have two perfectly good words that mean two very different things. Changing the meaning of “disinterested” just muddies things up. If they’re going to mean the same thing, we may as well throw them both out and stick with “impartial” and “bored.”

* An interesting bunch; the New York Times has an article about them here. I think American Heritage Dictionary needs to sign me up for the Usage Panel ASAP. I would love having that kind of power.

I was first introduced to this abominable sin in 11th-grade English class, as we read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. He used a dash, presumably taking after James Joyce, who also used a dash for his quotations. Ultimately I don’t suppose it makes a ton of difference, but a quotation dash only shows where a quote begins, not where it ends. Sometimes a quote will end with “he said” or something similar, which clearly isn’t a part of the quoted speech, but isn’t set off by quotation marks. That’s just illogical. And it’s a whole bunch of “look at me” arrogance perpetrated by show-off writers who think the rules of English don’t apply to them. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my absolute favorite books of all time—probably #1, if I had to choose—but everywhere else he goes off the deep end of unintelligible showmanship. I made it through about 150 pages of Ulysses before giving up. And Finneganns Wake (note the lack of an apostrophe) is the most famously impenetrable work ever written in the English language.

But at least a quotation dash is something. I picked up a copy of Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s account of his thirty years teaching English in New York City’s public schools. An entertaining read, to be sure, especially for anyone in the teaching profession, but he thinks he’s so fucking awesome he doesn’t have to use quotation marks or quotation dashes or anything. So you’re often left wondering whether he’s paraphrasing or directly quoting. I don’t know what the Pulitzer people are thinking giving prizes to people who pull shit like this. It’s one thing to break the rules when breaking them achieves an artistic purpose, but when it doesn’t do that, it just pisses me off.

Think about it: the normal rule in English is to use the letter s. But tons of words break that rule. You wouldn’t say, “Come over here, childs, and have some ice cream.” Everyone would think you’re an idiot, although I’m sure they’d forgive you if you gave them ice cream. (I know I would. Ice cream makes me forgive all wrongs. Especially if the ice cream is Breyer’s chocolate with some Smuckers marshmallow topping. You could kick me in the shin twenty times but if you apologized and gave me ice cream I’d be okay.)* And when you screw up Latin plurals, it’s basically the same think, except that instead of everyone thinking you’re an idiot, the 1% of people who actually know their Latin declensions** will think you’re an idiot. Which I guess isn’t as much of a problem as having everyone think you’re an idiot, but that 1% is way cooler and smarter than everyone else. So really, you want to impress us.

So, what are some of the rules? Well, it’s true that one of the most common is that a word that ends in -us changes to an i. (Take alumnus/alumni as an example.) But many -us words don’t form plurals that way, and no other ending is ever going to be pluralized with an i. One time someone posted on a message board making “Elvis” into “Elvi.” No. For starters, the name Elvis is of northern European origin—not even remotely Latin—so there’s no reason to stick a Latin plural on it. And even if it were Latin, it would most likely be a third declension i-stem, with plural form “Elves.” (That would be pronounced with two syllables, not like the plural of “elf.”)

There’s lots of other rules, some simple, some more complicated. And if you want to learn Latin, then by all means do so. But there’s a much simpler way than spending years of your life learning a dead language. It’s called opening a dictionary. (Of course, these days, you can just use google, but same difference.) That magical device tells you the plural form of every word. For example. if you wanted to talk about your facebook statuses, you wouldn’t say “stati.” (Alas, I have seen people write this.) That’s because the Latin word “status” doesn’t have “stati” as its plural, it has “status” as its plural. (The vowel actually changes from short to long, and it’d be too complicated to explain how it’s in a different declension and thus has a different (nominative) plural form, but you should definitely not write “stati.”) Theoretically, you could just use status as the plural, but why would you want to do that when “statuses” removes the singular/plural ambiguity? The dictionary on google doesn’t yet mention the plural form of “status,” as it doesn’t yet record the use of “status” in the sense of “status message.” But there are other similar examples.

So, in summary, the next time you want to use a Latin plural on an English word, look it up in a dictionary before you make an ass of yourself.

* Please don’t actually do this, though.

** You may have come to this footnote thinking you were going to get a definition of the word “declension.” Here it is.

1) Question marks and exclamation points. These go either inside or outside the closing quotation mark depending on whether they are part of the quoted material or merely part of the sentence as a whole. (If they belong to both the quote and the sentence as a whole, they go inside.)

2) Colons and semicolons. These always go outside the closing quote, since you’re not likely end a piece of quoted matter with one of these.

3) Commas and periods. In American usage, these always go inside the closing quote. Let me make that clear: commas and periods ALWAYS go inside closing quotes.* This may seem somewhat illogical. I’ll even admit that it is somewhat illogical to put something that isn’t part of the quoted material inside the quotes. But it’s ugly. If you put the closing quote and then the period or comma, you get an ugly mass of white surrounding that period or comma. It floats there so lonely and adrift in a sea of white, with the quotation mark loitering loftily in the distance to its upper left. The aesthetic disgust and horror far outweighs any “logic” involved. I refuse to deface this blog with any examples, but try it for yourself somewhere. Putting that comma or period outside is simply grotesque.

Now, can I respect the alternate view? Yes (or at least much more so than I can respect those who don’t use the serial comma. I’ve had this argument with intelligent people who supported the British usage. The origin of the American usage seems to come from old printing presses, where the small comma and periods could easily be broken if they were off somewhere by themselves. (I really have no idea how this happened.) And yes, one can certainly argue that it’s silly to base modern usage on a custom whose purpose has long since been supplanted. But it’s just ugly to do otherwise. The subject recently came up at The Volokh Conspiracy, with the author there calling the American usage “more aesthetically pleasing,” while also noting that it is, quite simply, “correct in American usage, because it is usage and not logic that defines linguistic correctness.” Now, I suppose we could get into all sorts of prescriptivist vs. descriptivist debates, and if you want to, go right ahead. But if you’re American, you should be putting your commas and periods inside your quotation marks. And if you want to launch a massive campaign to change this rule, you should consider the damage it would do upon people’s eyeballs.

And for those who would put logic above beauty, don’t expect me to be swayed by such an argument. I’m a heterosexual male, so I clearly prefer the beautiful to the logical.

* British usage is different. But considering I’m American, and roughly 99% of my audience is American, I’ll stick with the American usage. And besides, the Brits are wrong, though I suppose, if you happened to be in Britain, I could see the point for following their rule. When in Rome do as the Romans do and all that.

The verb “humble” means “to make humble in spirit or manner” or “to destroy the power, independence, or prestige of.” Now, if you just won an Oscar or a Super Bowl, how on earth were your power and prestige destroyed? An athlete might say that he’s humbled to be inducted into a hall of fame—again, I ask, what’s humbling about that? He should think, “Hey, look how awesome I am.” Maybe he has an inferiority complex and doesn’t think he’s good enough to be associated with the legends who have gone before him, but he should see a shrink for that instead of taking out his issues with vicious assaults upon the English language. And people should realize that if they’ve managed some great accomplishment through their talent and hard work in their profession, they probably deserve it, and shouldn’t at all feel unworthy to achieve something. Besides, if you’re humble and not concerned about fame and rewards, why on earth are you up onstage accepting that Emmy Award? Fucking hypocrites.

It’s one thing to be humble in the sense of “not haughty” or “not arrogant.” That’s a good thing. But again, if you’re humble, why are you giving an interview talking about it? Either take the credit when you accomplish something, or shut the fuck up.

Truth be told, I’m not even that strict about apostrophes and plurals. I don’t mind seeing “1990′s” even though some would advise against it. To be honest, I don’t think it looks any worse than “1990s.” And I don’t mind an apostrophe in most abbreviations (VIP’s or TD’s or whatever). So I’m pretty damn lenient about this issue. But when I see people taking run of the mill words and sticking completely unnecessary apostrophes into their plural forms, I feel like vomiting. On the plus side, I also get to feel superior to all the idiots in the world who don’t know the rules of English grammar, but the nausea is a problem. Sometimes people stick apostrophes into words that aren’t even plural. For examples, see Apostrophe Abuse.

P.S. As always, my resource for the English language is the second edition of the Writing Handbook by Bernard Streicher, S.J., a revision of an earlier work by his fellow Jesuits, Kammer and Mulligan. It is undoubtedly the finest contribution the Jesuits have made to modern American society.