We’re Leaving Latin Behind

Here’s a sentence from a science article by a writer for The New York Times. If anybody ought to know that the plural of millennium is millennia, he (and his editors) ought to. So this has to be deliberate.

And there is no doubt that thawing of the full depth of permafrost would take millenniums.

And I have seen plenty of places where the “singular” of criterion appears as criteria, its plural. Especially in computer-geek circles, certainly not an unintelligent crowd.

Pretty soon I won’t be able to harrumpf about it.

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A few years back I wrote an article about how important it is to write responsible documentation. It’s here: https://ezinearticles.com/?Writing-Good-Instructions—Sometimes-a-Matter-of-Life-Or-Death&id=2640549

The article is about some tech writing in the apollo program that was careful work and made a material contribution to the rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

Here’s an example of someone who didn’t do quite as well:

Three years ago, according to a former D.O.E. official, a federal contractor in Los Alamos, having been told to pack the barrels with “inorganic kitty litter,” had scribbled down “an organic kitty litter.” The barrel with organic kitty litter in it had burst and spread waste inside the cavern. The site was closed for three years, significantly backing up nuclear-waste disposal in the United States and costing $500 million to clean, while the contractor claimed the company was merely following procedures given to it by Los Alamos.

Shall I repeat my mantra?

PROOFREAD!

(Another shameless plug for someone else)

Mike Peterson is a journalist who writes a blog named Comic Strip of the Day. Usually he uses comics as starters for political and social commentary. (Mike, if you see this, I hope you think that’s a fair description.) I frequently use comics too, but to make points about grammar and writing, mostly expository writing.

This time he started with a Non Sequitur comic that fits well here (see below) and he writes about grammar! Go read the whole post; it’s good, though I don’t know the rule he refers to regarding “may” and “might.”

Here’s the comic:

Here’s the headline to a pretty good article about writing.

Clutter

How to remove extra words that make you sound boring

I quoted it because they jimmied up the graphics to make it hard to copy and paste, so you’ll have to follow the link in my first line to see what the formatting looks like.

The article is a pretty good read, even with an incorrect adverb in the first line of the first paragraph. I agree with what the writer says we should do when we write, but the motivation I offer is not about being boring (that’s egotistical), but about whether the reader can absorb the content of the writing without thinking about the writing itself. That’s getting the job done. Here are a few places where I mentioned this concept before: here, here, here, and here.

This probably seems a minor quibble, but the first panel in this comic has the wrong preposition. It should be “on” or “about.”

You pretty much need to be a native speaker of the language to get prepositions right all the time (and even then, you can find geographical differences, say, between the US and UK).

I don’t have a good solution, either. Maybe try googling phrases like “preposition for thesis topic.” Or ask a curmudgeon.