Q. Back to lay/lie, which is my most unfavorite error! There is an exception to the answer you gave in a recent Q&A—“lay takes an object” EXCEPT when you’re talking about chickens! The hens are laying. (Of course, eggs are implied, but not mentioned.)
A. In grammar as in life, there will always be exceptions. Merriam-Webster does list a few intransitive senses for “lay,” the first of which is “to produce and deposit eggs.” But as you suggest, one person’s intransitive verb is another’s elliptical construction. You can call your cousins or just call [them]. And if you’re not laying eggs, what exactly is your object? (Please don’t lay into us on that one—yet another intransitive use for “lay,” in which the object requires the intervention of a preposition.)
Q. In a past Q&A there is a question about “a fund-raising event.” Does CMOS still treat “fund-raising” as a hyphenated word as in your answer? Is there a reason that you depart from M-W on this one?
A. Good question! Let’s investigate, starting with Merriam-Webster.
The first printing of the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003, p. 507) included entries for “fund-raiser” and “fund-raising”:
The free dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com (the larger, more frequently updated online counterpart to the 11th Collegiate, on which it was originally based) now lists “fundraiser or less commonly fund-raiser” and “fundraising or less commonly fund-raising.”
According to our database, the Q&A that you refer to was posted in May 2014. So either M-W hadn’t yet updated those entries, or if it had, we failed to check M-W.com for the latest lexicographical wisdom when editing that Q&A for publication. Our goal is to keep our free Q&A archive up to date, so (thanks to you and your question) we’ve changed “fund-raising” to “fundraising” in that particular Q&A.
Q. Hi, CMOS staff. My question itself concerns two Q&A entries. In the first one, it looks as though a department name, even when part of a long corporate title, gets capped: “Mary Smith, director of Human Resources.” In the second one, though, it appears that if an otherwise would-be-capped department is a part of the title, it too gets lowercased: “Jordan Smith is assistant secretary of bureaucracy and obfuscation.” I’m editing a book that is constantly shifting its capitalization patterns for these departments (such as “chair of the Department of Physiology and Neuroscience” and “the head of the emergency department”), and I’m having a hard time determining which way to jump, because the advice in these Q&A entries seems to be contradictory. Could anyone shed some light on this for me?
A. The two answers might seem contradictory because neither mentions that departments may be referred to generically by lowercasing them. “Chair of the department of physiology and neuroscience” could be written by someone who either doesn’t know the official name of the department or knows that the official name is the Bedecker Department of Physiology and the Neurosciences.
Q. In your April Q&A, you answered a question about “woman pilot” vs. “female pilot.” I’m surprised that you didn’t address the unspoken aspect of the question: why mention gender at all? I’m guessing no one says “man pilot” or “male pilot,” just as people don’t say “white doctor,” but they do say “black doctor” as if gender and color are only worth noting if the people don’t belong to the dominant demographics. Does Chicago have any thoughts about that?
A. This is absolutely the right question to ask, but there are actually plenty of occasions when it makes sense to specify the gender of a pilot. {How many women pilots asked to join the association this year?} {Are male pilots paid more than women pilots?} {When did the first female pilot make that trip?}. CMOS 5.260 addresses this issue explicitly:
When it is important to mention a characteristic because it will help the reader develop a picture of the person you are writing about, use care. For instance, in the sentence Shirley Chisholm was probably the finest African American woman member of the House of Representatives that New York has ever had, the phrase African American woman may imply to some readers that Chisholm was a great representative “for a woman” but may be surpassed by many or all men, that she stands out only among African American members of Congress, or that it is unusual for a woman or an African American to hold high office. But in Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman to be elected to Congress and one of New York’s all-time best representatives, the purpose of the phrase African American woman is not likely to be misunderstood.
Q. With regard to this Q&A, I believe you have misanalyzed the meaning and etymology of the singular word corps.
Q. When referring to “the corps” as in the Army Corps of Engineers or the Peace Corps, what is the proper possessive form? For example, is it “the corps’ decision” or “the corps’s decision?”
A. Use corps’. Please see CMOS 7.19 [16th ed.] for the possessive of nouns that are plural in form, singular in meaning.
You give a solution based on CMOS 7.19, but actually CMOS 7.16 applies to singular words ending in silent s (e.g., corps, Illinois, Jacques, rendezvous, chamois). CMOS 7.19 refers to words that are plural in form but singular in meaning. However, words like corps or chamois are not plural in form. The word corps, for example, is singular in both form and meaning. It comes from the French le corps. The s on the end is from the original Latin spelling corpus, which is also singular. The s does not signify plural and never has. (The Latin plural is corpora.) We use the invariable plural form that French does in spelling, but in English the singular is pronounced /kor/ and the plural, which happens to be spelled the same, is pronounced /korz/. Thus, by CMOS 7.16, the possessive forms should arguably be “the corps’s plan” (singular) and “the many corps’ plans” (plural).
A. Sigh—you are right. We slipped up with this one. Thank you so much for letting us know! We depend on our readers to keep us on our toes.