Q. Can you advise what part of speech is “cowering” in the following sentence: “They
discovered that she was no cowering little simpleton”? Is it possibly an adjective?
A. Bingo! A participial adjective is indeed cowering in that sentence. Or at least loitering.
Q. In a school application would it be correct to say “At UPenn, I will participate in XYZ club” or “At UPenn, I would participate in XYZ club”? For an applicant who doesn’t yet know whether he will
be admitted, the latter seems correct. Please advise. Thanks.
A. Yes, you’ve put your finger on this subtle difference. UPenn might be impressed by your self-confidence
if you use the “will” construction—or they might just think
you’re arrogant. Good luck!
Q. Hello! When indexing a book that names the same person literally hundreds of times (it’s about this
person’s philosophy), is passim correct in the index? Same Q about his works; some of the famous works are named or referenced dozens, if not hundreds of
times.
A. Imagine yourself using this index to find something. What good is passim? A reader already knows that X is mentioned throughout the book. Professional indexers disagree whether it even makes sense
to have an entry for the main subject of a book, but if you do, it must be broken up into many subentries and possibly sub-subentries,
so readers can find what they’re after. (In fact, any index entry that consists of more than five or
six page numbers should be further broken down into subentries.) Some indexers of biographies create an entry for the person’s
name, but within it they list only passages that relate to the person’s life events (birth, marriage,
death), which could not easily be listed elsewhere in the index. Some indexers also put under the person’s
name “Works. See titles of individual works.” Your questions show that you would profit from learning more about indexing before you go further.
I suggest you read the indexing chapter of CMOS.
Q. I see inconsistent usage in “she is a friend of Bill” versus “she
is a friend of Bill's.” We say “a friend of his,” not “a
friend of him,” so should the possessive control here?
A. Either is fine. The “double possessive” is standard usage, and sometimes it’s
needed to distinguish between, say, a lover of Mozart and a lover of Mozart’s.
Q. A coworker insists “protests against” is never correct because “protests” normally implies someone is against something. I think it depends on context, because one can protest for, say, human rights. Is “protests against” ever correct? I wrote: “A farmer sleeps at a protest against the World Trade Organization in New Delhi.”
A. An inflexible approach to language rarely results in good prose. As it happens, the Latin roots of protest do not imply opposition (pro means “for” or “in favor of”), although English usage has evolved to favor that meaning. Your own counterexample features the noun protest, but you can point your colleague to Webster’s Third International Dictionary, whose definition of the verb protest includes the example “protesting against the morals of the time.”
Q. Is the word “how” necessary in sentences such as “Learn
how to bake breads and cakes”? In some cases, it sounds better with the word “how,”
but it seems unnecessary in this case.
A. Learning to do something isn’t necessarily the same as learning how to do it. If I say “I
learned to turn off my cell phone at the opera during act 4 of Otello while Desdemona was singing that soft, wrenching aria and hoping Otello wouldn’t strangle her,”
it doesn’t mean I was learning how to turn it off. So use the word “how” whenever it’s needed
to make your meaning clear.
Q. Is it “happy medium” or “happy median”?
The author writes: “We would all be much better served as stewards of finite public funds if we could
find that happy median where trust reigns supreme . . .” Thanks!
A. The idiom is “happy medium,” but I like the image of commuters taking refuge
from road rage on the happy median.
Q. Do you have a problem (as I do) with the phrase “the fact that,” and if so, what
alternatives do you offer?
A. In spite of its banishment from style guides (probably thanks to Messrs. Strunk and White), the phrase sometimes has useful
meaning. Where it’s redundant or overused, it should be edited out, but if it’s
doing honest work, there’s no reason to be offended by it. Arthur Plotnik quotes the following from
Don DeLillo’s Underworld: “Sister Grace believed the proof of God’s creativity eddied from the fact that
you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in.” I wouldn’t
mess with that, would you?
Q. Curriculum vitae or vita? According to Merriam-Webster vitae is the plural of vita, but another source indicates that vitae means the “course of one’s life” and vita means “a short biographical sketch.” If these definitions are accurate, it would
make sense to use vitae, as the course of one’s life is made up of many singular events or sketches.
A. The two phrases are synonymous. Vita is Latin for “life,” and while it’s true that its plural
is vitae, in the phrase curriculum vitae the word vitae is not a plural; it’s the genitive singular, translated “of life.”
So curriculum vitae means “course of life” and vita (“life”) is a shorter way to say it.
Q. I often see initialisms such as EPA and FDA appear without “the.” For example,
“One of FDA’s regulations prohibits this.” This comes up
particularly often in technical and legal writing and strikes me as pompous. And, yes, these people also speak this way. Please
tell me I’m right.
A. But you aren’t right. Local usage and idiom vary; I might say, “I believe the
FBI is responsible” but “I believe AIG is responsible,”
and you might say the reverse. The writer gets to choose, keeping in mind the document’s readers and
any precedent that seems obvious from the research.