Which is correct?
On December 24th, a lot of children can be found gazing out windows for a glimpse of _________ sleigh.
a. Santa Claus’
b. Santa Claus’s

Answer: It depends.

Explanation:
The AP Stylebook says to add just an apostrophe for the possessive form of a name ending in s; the Chicago Manual of Style says to add a second s as well.

If you have to follow one guide or the other, there’s your answer. Otherwise, decide which one you prefer and just be consistent. It’ll keep you on the “nice” list, grammar-wise at least.

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Which is correct?
1. Vendors—including Apple, Google and Microsoft—all have their own versions of auto-correct programs and, as a result, their own particular auto-correct fails.

2. Vendors — including Apple, Google and Microsoft — usually have their own versions of auto-correct programs and, as a result, their own particular auto-correct fails.

Answer: It depends on your style.

Explanation:
AP style is to add spaces around the em dash; Chicago style is without spaces. What happened yesterday? I found a source that seemed authoritative and went with it. But that source was following the Chicago Manual of Style. We’re (mostly) Team AP.

See AP vs. Chicago on em dashes and ellipses. Now there’s a blog for a fake grammarian to bookmark.

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Explanation:

According to Merriam-Webster, snuck arose in the late 1800s in America and has, at least in the US, become as acceptable as sneaked. Opinions differ, however. AP style calls for sneaked, which is the original and standard past and past participle form for the verb sneak.

I’m Canadian, which may explain why I was surprised to find that some other people were surprised to see sneaked used instead of snuck. Danny Sullivan wrote about his investigation:

Driving back from the airport this weekend after our vacation, I put on an audio CD for the kids, one of the Horrid Henry stories. In part of the story, he was said to have “sneaked” into a room. Sneaked? Surely he “snuck” into the room, I thought. But then I lost confidence. Have I been saying “snuck” all these years by mistake?

To reassure myself, I quickly tried to think of other irregular verbs ending in -eak where I would do this. I couldn’t think of any. Instead, I thought of examples where I don’t do this. For example, I wouldn’t say:

• cruck rather than creaked
• fruck rather than freaked
• wruck rather than wreaked

It’s a really interesting post. Sullivan researches various authorities and also provides a handy refresher on past verb tenses.

That said, snuck sounds jocular and/or rural to me. The verb form it brings to my mind is drug, as the past form of drag, as in I drug myself out of bed and logged into Facebook. As far as I know, drug remains non-standard. But stay tuned…

In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t get fruck going as a past form for freaked. Here’s my contribution: I nearly fruck out when I saw Merriam-Webster said snuck was as acceptable as sneaked.

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In ________________, David Segal wrote that his previous column had made readers scrutinize their cell phone bills — and that many found fraudulent charges: They’d been crammed.

a. The New York Times
b. the New York Times

Answer: It depends on your guide.

Explanation:
The Chicago Manual of Style prefers lower case for articles (a, an, the) beginning newspaper names but AP style is to capitalize them if they’re part of the publication’s name. If you follow a particular guide, follow its guidelines. If you’re not constrained to a guide, you just have to follow the universal rule: Decide what your own rule is and be consistent.

More on that cell phone billing scam:

The Haggler, AKA David Segal, reports: Cellphone Cramming Gets a Second Look.

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Answer: c, for AP style.

However, if you aren’t constrained by a style guide, you can probably get away with any variation you choose.

@EditorMark argues for saying goodbye to the hyphen and reports on various guides:

“The American Heritage and Webster’s New World dictionaries list goodbye as the first spelling. Bryan Garner in “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” compares the hyphenated form to the archaic “to-day.”

Merriam-Webster, though, includes only “good-bye” and “good-by.” Many style guides, including the Chicago Manual of Style, prefer a Merriam-Webster dictionary, so “good-bye” is with us for now.

The word in any form is only a few hundred years old, stemming from the earlier “good morning” and “good day,” etc., and a shortening of the phrase ‘God be with you.’”

**********

Ed Hurley reported that both hello and goodbye might be on the way out back in 2003:

Pretty soon “hello” and “goodbye” may become as passe as “ye” and “thou.”

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If a new employee has only worked in a WYSIWYG interface before, _____ may be very confused by the content management application’s HTML window.

a. he

b. she

c. s/he

d. he or she (alternatively, she or he)

e. they

Answer: a. — if you follow AP or Chicago style. If you aren’t constrained by a particular style, e. (they) is the best option.

Explanation:

It’s called the generic he, used to represent a single person whose gender is not specified. But of course, he is not generic — it refers to a single male person. Both the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style say you should use he if you get yourself into a situation where you need a generic pronoun. They both also recommend that you try to avoid that situation or rewrite your sentence to get out of it.

Which seems a little cowardly to me — really, if they recommend he as the appropriate generic pronoun, they should at least stand by their choice and recommend that you use it freely as required by your sentence.

Singular they is nothing new. Here’s what Paul Brians has to say about it: Using the plural pronoun to refer to a single person of unspecified gender is an old and honorable pattern in English, not a newfangled bit of degeneracy or a politically correct plot to avoid sexism (though it often serves the latter purpose).

Motivated Grammar also has a nice post on singular they and its use by well-respected writers for hundreds of years.

I expect that singular they will become acceptable, especially considering that rules tend to follow use and use online overwhelmingly favors it. In the meantime, however, you have options: You can take the coward’s way out and rewrite your sentence or boldly buck the rules and use it anyway. I like the second alternative — if enough of us take it and we stand our ground, style guides will have to bow to the inevitability of singular they.

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Explanation:
The general rule here is to use that, with no comma preceding it, if the adjective clause following is essential to the sentence. Here, the fact that the projects were undertaken to improve government services is the point of the sentence. If we wanted to introduce a little tidbit of inessential information, we could use which with a comma preceding it:

Einstein is the product of government projects, which were conducted over a period of three years.

If you follow AP style, that’s the rule. However, rules change and this one seems to be a case in point.

Here’s an example from World Wide Words:

Another cause of stress is a traumatic event that is out of the ordinary and has a major impact on the person’s life.

The argument here is that the clause “that is out of the ordinary and has a major impact on the person’s life” modifies and constrains “event”. It’s not just any event but one specific type of event, to the extent that the whole block from “event” onwards forms one idea. The clause is restrictive.

Older grammar books make two firm points about the difference between the two types of clause:

* Restrictive clauses are introduced by that and are not separated from the rest of the sentence by commas.
* Non-restrictive clauses are introduced by which and must be separated by commas from the rest of the sentence to indicate parenthesis.

Author Michael Quinion goes on to discuss the way those rules are changing and when you can — and can’t — bend the rules. His conclusion:

If you wish to write naturally, don’t fuss too much about the usage of that versus which. Obsessive correction (sarcastically called a which hunt) is best avoided. If your sense of the language is not strong enough to be sure of the right pronoun, use that for the restrictive cases and which for the others and you won’t go wrong.

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Explanation:
Although you’ll see all three spellings online, if you want to be AP compliant, choose “dot-com.” The story is that they preferred that style over “dot.com” to prevent people from reading as “dot dot com.”

Hmmm… I just discovered another good reason not to use “dot.com.” Apparently some applications will consider it a URL all by itself and make it a link to nowhere. So, yeah, don’t bother clicking on that.

Alex J. Newman provides an AP style cheatsheet and glossary for Internet-related terms.

The SEO blog celebrates with a collection of dot-com trivia.

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Explanation:
AP style is to omit the hyphen, but other sources like to hyphenate co, especially when it’s followed by a second o.

I prefer a hyphen in this one, myself, because coopt looks like an odd word and makes me think it should be pronounced like cooped. But since I’ve solemnly sworn to follow AP in my work writing, I guess I’ve got to do without.

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Explanation:
Although both are used, forecast is the preferred form. Forecast is an irregular verb, meaning that its past forms don’t follow the general rule of adding ed to the base.

There are lots of other verbs that are unchanged in past tense forms. You’d never say, for example, “I putted all my money into the healthcare IT tech stocks.” To a stickler, forecasted sounds just as wrong.

That said, you can probably get away with forecasted in informal writing — but why would you want to? And if you follow AP style, stick to forecast.

UsingEnglish.com explains irregular verbs and provides a handy list.

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