They Got Lego Right

The company that manufactures this plastic toy insists that the word “Lego” has no plural form. “Lego” is an adjective, they say. Lots of folks, especially kids, say “Legos” but they’re wrong. Good old Scientific American gets it right! Here’s a quote from the March 2024 issue, page 4, in an article that mentions antibody-drug conjugate (ADC):

The pieces are mix and match, like Lego bricks: a cancer-killing drug, an antibody that clings to tumor cells, and a connector that releases the drug at the right time.

Scientific American March 2024, page 4

Not that you need a picture, but here’s one:

So what do you call those things?

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Well, I find it easiest to quote Wikipedia:

A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. Wikipedia

I should add that the meter is rather informal.

I subscribe to Scientific American. Recently the renewed a practice of including a page of poetry in their magazine. Seems weird to me, but so far the poems have been pretty much science oriented, so they fit, even if the practice feels funny to me. Their Clerihew page has been littering my desk for a couple months now, and I’m finally getting around to posting about it.

So I challenge you to write a Clerihew and post it. Here’s one off the top of my head:

Rogers George writes Writing Rag
At first he thought it’d be a gag
But comics and grammar go together,
So he wrote a post and then another.

Your turn!

Maybe it’s a subordinate clause lesson, because that’s the key here.

From the June 2021 Scientific American, page 62:

Last line. Shouldn’t that be “to whomever…”? After all, “to” is a preposition, so we should use the objective case, right? Nope.

Here’s the rule:

• Go from the inside to the outside.

What’s inside the prepositional phrase? A noun clause! And “who” (well, “whoever”) is the subject of “needed,” so it gets the nominative case!

So there you have it. Sometimes you can say “to who.”

Well, three.

The Partnership to End Addiction has an ad inside the back cover of the January 2021 Scientific American.

(I added bold for emphasis.)

Here’s the headline:

SOCIAL DISTANCE CAN ALSO BE A SIGN OF ANOTHER EPIDEMIC

And here are the first couple sentences of the text:

Physical distance can keep you safe and healthy. But if an emotional distance forms between you and those closest to you, it may be due to drug or alcohol use.

So three distances, all correct. Go thou and do likewise.

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?)