Analyticity
Two errors today. Casual, unsurprising ones.
The first is in this sentence from the dependably amusing SupersizedMeals.com:
This deep-fried monstrocity is literally heart stopping!
"Heart-stopping" ought to have been hyphenated, but that's not my problem here.
You can easily see how "monstro-city" came about if you want to write about a city, and a number of writers have deliberately used it; there's even a game by that name. It's still wrong in the above context, though.
The rule is pretty simple: if the adjective ends in "-se", "-ous" or "-ose", the noun ends in "-sity": adverse/adversity, meticulous/meticulosity, grandiose/grandiosity. If it ends in "-ic" or "-ious", the noun ends in "-city": periodic/periodicity, mendacious/mendacity. Since "monstrous" ends in "-ous" (but not "-ious"), its adjectival form is "monstrosity". (There are other words ending with "-sity" or "-city" that are formed in other ways--"extensity" is one--but the rule still holds.)
The second error of the day is in a letter to the editor for a Salon.com column, and I usually give comment-posters lots of leeway because there's usually no spellchecker in the software and once you've posted you can't un-post, but this was obviously not a mere passing typo but a full-fledged mistake:
Brad and Jen for eg were together forever in human years, which in movie star years was, like, 5.
"For eg"? I don't think so. "E.g." must be punctuated because it's an abbreviation. It's not a word, and you don't precede it with "for"--it stands on its own, because the word "for" is subsumed into it.
"E.g." represents Latin "exempli gratia", "the favour of an example", and in English means "for example". That's all.
The first is in this sentence from the dependably amusing SupersizedMeals.com:
This deep-fried monstrocity is literally heart stopping!
"Heart-stopping" ought to have been hyphenated, but that's not my problem here.
You can easily see how "monstro-city" came about if you want to write about a city, and a number of writers have deliberately used it; there's even a game by that name. It's still wrong in the above context, though.
The rule is pretty simple: if the adjective ends in "-se", "-ous" or "-ose", the noun ends in "-sity": adverse/adversity, meticulous/meticulosity, grandiose/grandiosity. If it ends in "-ic" or "-ious", the noun ends in "-city": periodic/periodicity, mendacious/mendacity. Since "monstrous" ends in "-ous" (but not "-ious"), its adjectival form is "monstrosity". (There are other words ending with "-sity" or "-city" that are formed in other ways--"extensity" is one--but the rule still holds.)
The second error of the day is in a letter to the editor for a Salon.com column, and I usually give comment-posters lots of leeway because there's usually no spellchecker in the software and once you've posted you can't un-post, but this was obviously not a mere passing typo but a full-fledged mistake:
Brad and Jen for eg were together forever in human years, which in movie star years was, like, 5.
"For eg"? I don't think so. "E.g." must be punctuated because it's an abbreviation. It's not a word, and you don't precede it with "for"--it stands on its own, because the word "for" is subsumed into it.
"E.g." represents Latin "exempli gratia", "the favour of an example", and in English means "for example". That's all.
posted by pyramus | 6:58 AM
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