Hooray for One of My Favorite Magazines

I’m referring to Scientific American. My wife calls it my porn because I read it cover to cover, and have since high school. Even though they don’t use the oxford comma, harrumpf.

One subtlety of punctuation is how to use the three horizontal punctuation marks, the hyphen, the N-dash, and the M-dash. These folks get them right.

• Hyphen—use it to connect compounds
• N-dash—indicates a range
• M-dash—indicates a break

From an article in the July 2020 issue (pages 56f).

In 1990 only three-day forecasts were 80 percent accurate or better. Today the three-, five- and seven-day outlooks are at that level.

Many more factors must be considered in a 3–4 week forecast.

And they consider winds in the stratosphere, which extends from roughly 10 to 48 kilometers above the earth’s surface—higher than where airplanes fly.

Can’t beat a good example, even if they left out the oxford comma (you noticed it, didn’t you?)

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Look for “comprise” in the search box to find more examples.

Gascoigne, an amateur astronomer of Middleton, near Leeds, was the youngest member of an enthusiastic little band of Midland astronomers which comprised Horrocks, Crabtree, and Oughtred.

https://www.academia.edu/41400791/THE_HISTORY_OF_THE_TELESCOPE

Page 94. You have to be pretty interested in astronomy, but if you are, the book is pretty interesting. It’s about 500 pages long, with plenty of footnotes at the end of each chapter.

Remember, “comprise” goes from the whole to its parts.

(It should be “that” instead of “which,” but I’m nit-picking.)

PS—I ran into another correct usage, from The New England Journal of Medicine:

This on-line advisory panel comprises approximately 5,000 VUMC patients, representing a broad cross-section of our community.

https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.20.0299

Most people say something like “as funny as me,” but they’d be wrong! Add the verb to the end—”As funny as I am.” Now you can tell that “I” is correct.

The trick is to see what you get when you supply that terminal verb, though technically you don’t have to supply it in the actual sentence. It just helps you get it right.

Credit to Buzz Sawyer (well, Roy Crane) for getting it right. Third Panel.

I confess, she doesn’t strike me as the type who’d get this right…

I post these examples because so many people get “comprise” wrong. (NEVER say “is comprised of”!) This comic gets it wrong another way. The second panel in the second row:

“Comprise” goes from the single big thing to the many parts. An example: The early US comprised 13 states. You could say that “comprise” is the less wordy equivalent to “is composed of.” But here “composed” would have been okay. He’s going from the many (millions of polygons) to the big whole (the material world). In other words, those polygons compose the world.

Oh well.

The rule for agreement is that a singular subject gets a singular verb, and plural subject gets a plural verb—even when a differently numbered phrase intervenes. But exceptions exist!

Sometimes a plural can be treated as a singular. In the past I mentioned that some company names, that end in “& Co.” are treated as singulars.

Here’s a sentence (from a Facebook post, so I can’t link to it) in which the writer, Dr. Bill Stillwell, an MD, defines a plural as a singular:

Renal damage, up to 50% of ICU patients was also seen, possibly from the high concentrations of ACE2 receptors found in the kidneys (used by the virus to effect cell entry) and 5-10% of patients required dialysis.

What was seen? Not the patients (plural), but the damage (singular). (Myself, I’d have inserted “in” before “up.”)

Here’s another one, on page 75 of the March 2020 Scientific American. It’s a bit trickier:

Our concepts of how the two and a half pounds of flabby flesh between our ears accomplish learning date to Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments, where he found that dogs could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell.

The writer is obviously referring to the brain, a single thing, even though he called it a number of pounds of flesh, a plural.

Was he right? “Pounds” is plural, but they don’t act separately (do they?). Feel free to comment in the comments.