Premise, Premises

The last post was about pairs of words that people get mixed up. Here’s another pair. They aren’t even synonyms.

A premise is a starting point in logic, a foundational statement. For example, “All men are mortal” is a premise.
Premises refers to property, buildings, land, and so on, occupied or owned by someone or something. It always ends in “s” and we usually treat the word as a plural.

The two words are not synonyms!

Here’s an example of correct usage:

Kubernetes is currently supported as a hosted service on all three major public cloud providers—Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure—and has a broad system of vendors that also provide Kubernetes distributions that can run on-premises or in the cloud.

http://www.eweek.com/cloud/top-five-reasons-why-kubernetes-is-changing-the-cloud-landscape

If the article had said “on-premise” it would have been incorrect. I’m not goint to quote anyone using the word incorrectly because I don’t want to embarrass them. But I could.

PS—Alert readers might notice that I used a singular verb, “refers,” in my definition of “premises.” Was I treating “premises” as a singular? Well, no. I elided (left off) the actual subject of the sentence, which is “The word.” I could have written “The word ‘premises’ refers to…” but I wanted to be concise. And it gave me an excuse to put in this postscript.

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Semicolons are rather like strong commas and weak periods. The rhino geek below makes a point that’s usually true. Semicolons are supposed to connect two independent clauses that are on the same topic. In other words, closely related sentences. Independent clauses don’t usually start with a conjunction. 

The rule about conjunctions is a bit mechanistic, though usually it’s correct. Too bad for him.

The rule about hyphenating compound words is that the hyphen tends to go away if the word is common enough. We used to write “to-day” instead of “today,” for example. A more recent change is “web site” to “website,” now unhyphenated even when used as a compound adjective. 

Here’s one that should definitely still get the hyphen:

On April 30, the Pu‘u ‘O‘o crater on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, suddenly collapsed. It was the starting point for the volcano’s monthslong eruption, which went on to produce 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of lava that transformed the landscape and ultimately destroyed 700 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/science/kilauea-hawaii-volcano-eruption.html

That’s a months-long eruption. That “nthsl” is just too long, and besides, where does the “s” go? I’m not aware of anything called a “slong.” It’s a good thing that the sentence didn’t have “swimmingpoolsworth.”

Remember, the goal of expository writing is to be clear. Try not to have bumps in your readers’ road.

PS—Those apostrophes in P’u ‘O’o aren’t contractions. They represent glottal stops, which English uses, but doesn’t have a letter for.

Usually folks use the word enormity to mean very large. This is incorrect. Enormity means “very bad.” Frighteningly bad. The stuff of nightmares. Say what you want about climate change, the penguin gets his grammar right. First panel:

I have mentioned “enormity” a couple times in the past. Here’s one.

You all know what mondegreens are, because I wrote about them before. Here, for example. Well, I ran into a new one, so here you are: 

New to me, anyway.