things kevin hates

I know what you’re saying: “Kevin, not another article about quotation marks!” (Okay, probably four people are saying, “Ooh, another article about quotation marks!” But they’re in the minority.) My topic today concerns those authors who have decided they’re too good to use quotation marks. They have to come up with some novel concept for quoted material, but that non-standard invention never works quite as well as the tried-and-true. Continue reading ‘authors who don’t use quotation marks’

I’ve been studying Latin for a really long time. So I’ve seen lots of people screw it up in various ways when they try to get cutesy and clever and insert Latin into their English sentences. One of the things people screw up all the time is forming the plurals of Latin nouns which have passed into English usage. There’s probably a dozen different rules for forming Latin plurals, but people will think everything just ends in i. Those people would be wrong. Continue reading ‘incorrect latin plurals’

Here’s another one for you punctuation maniacs out there. When you get to a closing quotation mark, a number of different rules govern whether certain punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points) go inside or outside of that closing quote. In proper American usage, there are three different categories: Continue reading ‘people who don’t put commas and period inside closing quote marks’

It seems like half of the apostrophes I see are used incorrectly. People get confused, I think, because they aren’t able to understand the difference between a plural and a possessive, and they get caught up in a tangle of s‘s and apostrophes. A plural means there’s more than one of something. In that case, you almost never use an apostrophe. The only exceptions, basically, are when you’re dealing with something that’s italicized (such as a book title, magazine title, non-English word, etc.), when you’re dealing with abbreviations that have periods in them, or in a few words or phrases where it’s become standard (“do’s and don’ts,” for example). Continue reading ‘misused apostrophes’

One of the downfalls of being a classicist is knowing the Greek alphabet, and seeing how often it is horribly misused makes me cringe. Most people having a passing familiarity with most Greek letters, either from high school math classes or college fraternities and sororities, and many people can even match each letter to its name. But knowing the actual sounds? Heaven forbid! So society is deluged with ad campaigns that throw in a few Greek letters with no regard for what they are except for having a passing resemblance to a completely different English letter. Click here for examples of stupidity

Ah, the comma. Such a versatile punctuation mark. One could talk about it for days on end, though I have to imagine there are better things to do with one’s time. For now, though one particularly intriguing usage is worth discussing. I’d like to talk about the serial comma. It is also called the Oxford comma, and, according to Wikipedia, the Harvard comma, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to it by the latter name.* For the sake of this discussion, I’ll just call it the serial comma, since using either of the other two names would serve to embolden the arrogant douchebags who attend either of the pretentious snotty universities in the alternative names. (Perhaps at a later date I will discuss my hatred for the idea that going to a big-name school makes you better than everyone else, even though if you’re smart enough to go to a school like that, you’ll probably do well in life no matter where you go to college.) Continue reading ‘omitting the serial comma’