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.
Q. Hello there, I am usually pretty confident about sorting out punctuation, but recently I encountered some information set
out as follows.
Title: xxx
Date: xxx
Ref. no.: xxx
I know the colon and the period look silly next to each other, but I guess I just need to know which one to remove and why.
A. I realize we’ve been hammering lately on not having two periods or two punctuation marks in a row,
so I don’t blame you for being confused, but the dot in “no.”
is not part of the sentence or phrase punctuation; it’s part of the abbreviation. You have to have it.
And the colon has its own job to do, so you have to have it as well. A period can do double duty: if an abbreviation ends
a sentence, you don’t need two dots. But the period is not flexible enough to convey the meaning of
a colon.
Q. I read a lot and have been working on a novel of my own for a while now. In most of the materials I read the authors use
“had had” and “that that” quite often.
For example: “He had had the dog for twelve years and everyone knew that that was the real reason he
didn’t want Animal Control to take it.” I doubt there is any actual rule against
this, but I find it to be unattractive on a purely aesthetic basis and try to avoid it like the plague when writing. Is there
anything to this or am I just weird?
A. As you can see here, correct isn’t always pretty. So you aren’t weird; you’re
a writer, and one of the things that makes you a writer is that you’re sensitive to ugliness. Once you’re
sensitive to clichés, you’ll be all set.
Q. Do footnotes have to start with number 1? Can I start my first footnote with number 2? Is that considered wrong?
A. Let me guess: you want to delete note 1 but you didn’t use an automated feature for creating your notes,
and you don’t want to renumber notes 2 through 798 by hand. You’ve got a bit of
a chore ahead of you unless you can think up a new note 1, because yes, it’s considered wrong to begin
with note 2.