Usage

A. Sometimes new technologies force us into analogies. Perhaps people ride bicycles because they rode horses—particularly at the time bicycles first became popular. Likewise, one is said to ride a motorcycle—sometimes called a steel horse—more often than one is said to drive it. Cars, once called horseless carriages, are said to marshal the power of many horses, and, just as one is said to drive a team of horses, one is said to drive a car. The distinction between drive and ride doesn’t seem consistently to depend on whether the driver or the rider provides any locomotion. There are better (worse?) examples of words that persist on the basis of analogy: how often do we dial a phone or ring up a sale anymore?

A. Dictionaries and style manuals still tend to indicate that alright is less legitimate than all right. The quasi- or nonstandard status of alright might be compared to that of the one-word forms of the compounds under way and a lot, both of which, to varying degrees, have had to resist the urge to merge. Context is everything. Alright is all right for rock ’n’ roll, but if you’re concerned about appearing to stand on the favored side of the “sociological divide,” as Fowler’s would have it, you will want to write all right (see the third edition, s.v. “all right,” which notes, among other things, that alright seems to be popular in the personal correspondence of “the moderately educated young”). In the case of all right versus alright, however, all this is plainly rather arbitrary—as may already be altogether obvious.

A. For editors, like physicians, the primary goal should be “First, do no harm.” If you are not sure of the correct usage, it’s safer not to meddle with the copy. In this case, your writer is correct. In fact, “Since” would be considered incorrect by traditionalists who restrict its meaning to a temporal one.

A. If you type “data” into the search box on the CMOS web page, it will give you several places where the word is discussed in our Q&A, and you’ll see that it can be either singular or plural. For questions like this, however, I find that a dictionary is a very helpful tool. Judging from the number of queries we receive asking about the meaning or usage of particular words, it seems that people rarely think of using a dictionary, which is surprising, considering that it is much quicker to look up a word than to search through style manuals—or type a question to an online advice column. There are even online dictionaries, if turning paper pages seems too old-fashioned or too big a nuisance. In honor of your question, I’m tempted to create a new category of Q&A column called “You Could Look It Up” (in the hopes that readers will take the hint).

A. Your client is right. According to Webster’s, “kinds of” takes a plural if the relevant noun is countable. (Dictionaries are good for this kind of question.)

A. Tell your friend that CMOS says he is full of baloney, and if he doesn’t believe you, give him the URL for this page.

A. Bless your heart—everyone agrees that the language of the law needs all the help it can get. In this case, I believe you have found the solution to the problem yourself. In your effort to explain the meaning of the passage to me, you write clearly, “the principal of the bonds, the redemption premium, if any, on the bonds, and the interest on the bonds.” I don’t think I could improve on that. (Maybe from now on you and your colleagues should try to write everything as though you were trying to explain it to me.)

I’m sure your office is familiar with the Plain Language initiative promoted by Vice President Gore in the 1990s. You can find tips and examples for rewriting gobbledygook into understandable English at http://www.plainlanguage.gov/. Check out the section specifically for law. There’s also a section called “Fun Stuff about Plain Language,” which includes activities like “Drafting Legal Documents” and a hot link to the Code of Federal Regulations. (Well, as far as I know, Al Gore never claimed to have invented fun.)

A. Your coworker makes a valid point in that “this” has no antecedent and is left dangling. Most readers will mentally supply “definition” or “idea,” but the reader does have to supply something. If you changed “this” to “these,” the referent could be taken to be “points,” and you would be on firmer ground, but even then, there might be initial confusion over whether “these ” referred to “holes” or “points.” Although most readers would probably follow your reasoning, for the sake of precision and clarity and grammar, I’m with your colleague.

A. Supply as much information as you think the reader you are addressing will need or appreciate, which sometimes might include only the city (Toronto), sometimes the city and province (Hamilton, Ontario), and sometimes all that plus “Canada” (Swan River, Manitoba, Canada). For instance, young children might need more information than adults. Or for locations in British Columbia, readers in faraway Texas might need more help than those in nearby Seattle. As for the county, you can add it if you think it will be meaningful to your discussion, but that seems unlikely in most contexts.

A. An old rule that has pretty much faded into oblivion is that at the beginning of a sentence one should use “however” not as a conjunction, but only as an adverb: “However old I get, I’ll never give up bobsledding.” Your usage is correct, so it would be perverse of your editor to move it to the beginning of the sentence, which would offend the ears of some readers.