Author Archives: Laurel Shane

OK, Let’s Talk About How to Spell “Okay,” O.K.?

O.K., you know what’s weird? OK is one of the most commonly used words in English (—which is pretty darn high when you realize that ). But there’s no definitive way to spell okay! Why is it that we don’t know how to spell a word that we use every day? Because it started as an abbreviation and has become a full word over time.

The word dates back to 1839, when there was a fad in New York and Boston slang to misspell a saying and then abbreviate it. , an excellent guide to etymology, lists a few others that didn’t stand the test of time:

K.G. for no go, as if spelled know go
N.C. for ’nuff ced
K.Y. for know yuse

O.K. is an abbreviation for oll korrect. It probably would have disappeared along with the other abbreviations if not for the 1840 presidential election. Martin Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook (after the village in upstate New York where he was born), and his supporters formed the O.K. Club.

You can buy this 1840 wood-block engraving showing the origin of O.K. for just $2,295 on eBay.

The first instance of spelling out okay was in 1895, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but this spelling wasn’t popularized until the 1930s; President Woodrow Wilson (who served from 1913 to 1921) apparently approved government papers by writing okeh.

But over the second half of the twentieth century, the new spelling really took off. shows the skyrocketing popularity of okay over O.K. and OK in published books.

Does this mean you should use okay? Not necessarily. The major style guides actually lean toward OK.

The AP Stylebook—favored by newspapers—puts it succinctly: “OK, OK’d, OK’ing, OKs. Do not use okay.”

The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing—the guide for academic writing—doesn’t directly address the question, but it recommends turning to a reliable dictionary such as Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary for spelling questions and notes, “Where entries show variant spellings, use the form given first.” Webster’s lists OK first, so that is the preferred spelling for academic work.

The Chicago Manual of Style—used by book publishers—is silent on the issue, too, but in a Q&A on the website, the editors responded:

“CMOS doesn’t specify, but as it happens, the manual uses ‘OK’ twice … and does not use ‘okay’ at all. … We follow Webster’s 11th Collegiate, which puts ‘OK’ as the first spelling—but that does not mean it is preferred. Rather, ‘okay’ is an equal variant (also standard).”

If you like periods with your abbreviations, it’s not incorrect to use them in this case, but it is a bit outdated. At this point, the only major publications that favor O.K. with periods are and .

So how should you spell it? If you’re not bound to a particular style guide, choose whichever spelling you like best. As always with questions of style, though, pick one and be consistent.

Wish It Were Still in Style: The English Subjunctive Mood

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Zach Braff recently released a teaser for his upcoming Kickstarter-funded movie, Wish I Was Here.

My initial thoughts were, That’s a great wig! and This looks pretty slick, production-wise. How much did he raise? [ $2.6 million, but then a traditional financier brought it up to $10 million.]

And my third thought was, It’s called Wish I Was Here? What an unfortunate title. It’s yet another sign that the subjunctive mood in English is dying.

What’s the subjunctive mood? It’s a category of verb tenses that are used to communicate hypothetical situations, desires, suggestions, emotions, and other non-concrete expressions. If you’ve heard of it, you most likely learned it in a foreign-language class—the subjunctive is going strong in Spanish, French, and Italian, among others. But not in English.

The English subjunctive can be hard to identify because the verbs are often conjugated the same way they would be in indicative mood (the group of verb tenses we use to make statements of fact). But let’s take a look at one example where the subjunctive and the indicative are clearly different: the past tense of the verb to be.

Here’s a comparison of how you conjugate to be in the past indicative and the past subjunctive:

Past Indicative
Past Subjunctive

I was
I were

You were
You were

He/she/it was
He/she/it were

We were
We were

They were
They were

Zach Braff’s movie title is in the indicative—Wish I Was Here. But it’s not a factual statement about something that actually happened; it’s a wish that the situation were different. The movie should be called Wish I Were Here.

Does that sound a bit stuffy? Old-fashioned? That’s probably because the subjunctive mood is quickly fading from common usage. Here’s another example—a famous song lyric that got changed from subjunctive to indicative forty years later.

In Fiddler on the Roof (opened on Broadway in 1964; set in 1905), Tevye sings If I Were a Rich Man.

When Gwen Stefani borrowed the tune in 2004, she changed the title to If I Was a Rich Girl.

You could argue that it doesn’t really matter if we use the subjunctive mood less than we used to. The subjunctive isn’t required for comprehension; we can all understand what Zach Braff and Gwen Stefani are saying.

But something is lost when you change subjunctive to indicative. The subjunctive has a certain poetic ring to it—a depth of feeling that the indicative doesn’t convey.

When says, “I would that I were dead!” we feel the despair behind her confession. If she’d said, “I want to be dead!” no one would be quoting the poem today.

If I were Zach Braff, and I wanted my movie to have an emotional impact on people reading the posters, I would start a new Kickstarter campaign to cover the costs of reprinting all the marketing materials for my newly retitled movie, Wish I Were Here.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them

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You have probably noticed that there are a few different kinds of dashes, but you may not know what they’re called and when they’re called for. Well, don’t despair—just follow this guide, and soon you’ll be deftly dashing off dashes.

I consulted The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing and combined their advice to create this list of the most common usages of each dash. Using the AP Stylebook? Follow this asterisk.*

I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like: –

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like: –

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type a space, then a hyphen, then another space. The program will automatically convert the hyphen to an en dash. If you like keyboard shortcuts, use Ctrl + Alt + Hyphen on Windows or Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or just copy and paste it from this post.

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Don’t worry too much about this last one. As The Chicago Manual of Style puts it, “This editorial nicety may go unnoticed by the majority of readers; nonetheless, it is intended to signal a more comprehensive link than a hyphen would. It should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable.”

Em Dash

What it looks like: —

How to type it: In Microsoft Word, type two hyphens immediately following a word and then start the next word (no spaces). The program will automatically convert the hyphens to an em dash. Or hold down Ctrl + Alt + Minus (on the numeric keyboard) on Windows or Shift + Option + Hyphen on a Mac. Or copy and paste it from above.

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

Let’s Make a Dash for It: The Different Dashes and When to Use Them

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I may have omitted or glossed over a few of the less common usages, so if you think of an example that isn’t covered here, please leave it in the comments.

Hyphen

What it looks like: –

How to type it: Type the button between the 0 and the +/= on your keyboard.

When to use it: The smallest dash, the hyphen, is commonly used to join words.

To connect compound words, compound phrases, and some prefixes

Reno doesn’t have world-class casinos like Las Vegas does.
He’s part of the do-anything-as-long-as-it-feels-good generation.
Sophia lived in a co-op during college.

To join coequal nouns

Actor-director Rob Reiner had his first onscreen role in ten years in The Wolf of Wall Street.

To separate groups of numbers

Call 1-800-555-1212.

To spell out a word

Sophia spells her name s-o-p-h-i-a.

To break up a long word at the end of a line (n.b., while this is common practice in books, it is rarely used online).

En Dash

What it looks like: –

When to use it: The en dash, so named because it’s the width of an n, is usually used to separate numbers.

To mean up to and including

We’re almost at the end of the 2013–14 school year.
See pages 45–49 for more details.

To mean to

We took the New York–London redeye flight.
The Red Sox won the 2013 World Series by pummeling the Cardinals 6–1 in the sixth game.

With an unfinished range of numbers

Dianne Feinstein (1933–) is the oldest member of the Senate.

To replace a hyphen in a compound-adjective phrase when the compound is open or consists of two hyphenated phrases.

Is the post–Cold War stability unraveling?
The first-quarter–second-quarter comparison shows steady growth.

Em Dash

What it looks like: —

When to use it: The em dash, which is the width of an m, is used to create an aside or to separate and draw attention to part of a sentence.

Instead of parentheses

And the craziest part of it (and I swear this is true) was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

And the craziest part of it—and I swear this is true—was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

Instead of a comma

People at the party were already dancing on the table, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

People at the party were already dancing on the table—and it wasn’t even ten o’clock.

Instead of a colon

You only ever think about one thing: money.

You only ever think about one thing—money.

To introduce a pronoun that summarizes a preceding noun or series of nouns

God, country, family—these were the things he valued most.

To show a break in thought or dialogue

“Are you—wait a minute—you’re saying that you know who the murderer was?”

In front of explanatory expressions such as “that is” or “namely” or “for example.”

I keep my apartment clean—that is, when I have the time.

If you’re using an email service or a program that doesn’t easily allow special characters, use two hyphens instead of an em dash:

Latest update about the merger–it was just approved by the board.

*Writing for a newspaper? Good news! You only need one kind of dash. The hyphen—which the AP Stylebook simply calls a dash—is used for everything.

Instead of an en dash, just use one dash, no spaces:

We’re almost at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Instead of an em dash, insert a space, a dash, and another space:

And the craziest part of it – and I swear this is true – was that the duck just snuggled up next to the dog and went to sleep.

If you use AP style regularly, you might want to turn of autocorrect for dashes, or Word will automatically turn the Space-Dash-Space combo into an en dash.

I hope this post helps you understand the rules about dashes. Have a question about using a dash in a particular sentence? Leave it in the comments or —I’ll be happy to offer advice.

3 Surprising Places You Don’t Need a Comma

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Get excited: This is the long-awaited follow-up to my post explaining the five surprising places you need a comma. Just as people tend to leave out commas when they should put them in, people tend to insert commas when they should leave them out. Here are three surprising places commas don’t belong:

1. Between a person’s title and name (when the title comes first). When you write someone’s title before the person’s name, you don’t need to use a comma in between:

UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks took office in 2013.
Facebook COO Cheryl Sandburg is a bestselling author.

When the title precedes the name, it functions as an adjective describing the person, and there’s no reason to separate adjectives from the nouns they describe.

Do note, though, that when the title follows the name, it is set off by commas. (See #2 on the list of places you need a comma).

Nicholas B. Dirks, the UC Berkeley Chancellor, took office in 2013.
Cheryl Sandburg, the COO of Facebook, is a bestselling author.

2. From something to something to something. A common way to group a list of items is to start the sentence with from and separate the items with to. Many people use serial commas to separate these items, but there’s no need; each to does its own separating.

I love all berries from strawberries to blackberries to huckleberries.
From boots to bicycles to broccoli, that store sells everything.

3. Between an independent clause and a dependent clause. This one is a bit tricky for people who are not naturally inclined to identify parts of a sentence, but I’ll try to make it make sense.

An independent clause has a subject and a predicate, and it can stand on its own as a sentence:

You should wear a jacket.

A dependent clause modifies an independent clause, and it can’t stand on its own:

Because it’s cold outside.

If you put the dependent clause first, you use a comma to separate the clauses:

Because it’s cold outside, you should wear a jacket.

However, if you put the independent clause first, you don’t need a comma between the clauses:

You should wear a jacket because it’s cold outside.

I hope this post helped you identify some places you may be inserting commas unnecessarily. And don’t miss part three of this series: places you can use a comma, or not.

How to Write an Effective Press Release

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I just contributed a guest post about to Searching for the Happiness, a blog about writing. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Press releases (also called news releases) can be a great way to get news about your business to the media, your current customers, and potential new customers. Unlike direct advertisements, press releases are written in the objective third-person voice, just like newspaper articles.

Press releases used to land in the newsroom, where the story would live or die on an editorial whim. But nowadays, numerous online services will post your release and send it to hundreds of news organizations, building strong links to your website in the process. The good news is that you can easily get your message out there. The bad news is that everyone else can, too, including your competitors.

So how do you make your press release stand out from the crowd? Just follow these six steps. …

And if you’d like to have a professional review your press release to make sure it’s as effective as possible, .

Presidents Day? President’s Day? Presidents’ Day? How Do You Spell the Upcoming Holiday?

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We’re all counting down to the upcoming three-day weekend, but many of us don’t know how to write the name of the holiday on Monday correctly. Is it Presidents Day? How about President’s Day? Presidents’ Day? Well, it all depends on whom you ask.

Most dictionaries and The Chicago Manual of Style favor Presidents’ Day. The apostrophe at the end of the word indicates a plural possessive: It’s a day that belongs to multiple presidents. But the AP Stylebook—perhaps taking its cue from Veterans Day—favors Presidents Day, as in a day of more than one president. You could maybe make an argument for President’s Day, but no official reference book will back you up on that. Why are there two “correct” ways to spell the holiday? Believe it or not, Presidents’ Day (which, as a Chicago Manual enthusiast, I will choose to spell with an apostrophe at the end) is not an official holiday.

The federal holiday is called Washington’s Birthday; the term Presidents’ Day was popularized by marketers seizing on an occasion for a sale. The presidents it refers to are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who both had birthdays in February.

Washington was born on either February 11, 1731, or February 22, 1732, depending on whether you use the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar (both were in use at the time; we use the Gregorian calendar now). Many states started celebrating his birthday on February 22, 1832, in honor of the centennial of his birth. It was made a federal holiday in 1879.

Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Since 1922, it’s been a tradition to lay a ceremonial wreath at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on his birthday, and many states celebrate it as an official holiday. But it has never been a federal holiday.

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, enacted in 1971, moved several holidays to designated Mondays to give citizens fixed three-day weekends. Washington’s Birthday was moved to the third Monday in February, ironically ensuring that it would never fall on his actual birthday. Since it was now within a week or so of Lincoln’s birthday, many businesses squashed the holidays together. And that’s why we’ll be enjoying Presidents’ Day, plural possessive, or Presidents Day, with no apostrophe, on Monday.

This Punctuation Mark Is Not a Backslash: /

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Grammar quiz time! Say the following URL out loud, as if you were giving it out over the phone: www.google.com/analytics.

Did you just say “double-u double-u double-u dot google dot com backslash analytics”? The good news is that you’re not alone; lots of people would say the same thing. The bad news is that you made an error: The punctuation mark / is not a backslash.

When it tilts to the right, / is just called a slash. In British English, it’s called a stroke. In English that nobody except the dictionary uses, it’s called a solidus or a virgule. If you want to clearly distinguish the mark from a backslash, you can call it a forward slash, but you don’t generally need to say the forward part.

The slash has a lot of uses: showing alternatives (he/she), writing fractions (1/3), expressing a two-year span (the 1997/98 fiscal year), writing dates (1/20/2013), abbreviating per (80 miles/hour), expressing a line break in quoted poetry (“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”), and—of course—to separate the domain from the path in a URL (www.npr.org/blogs/money/).

The backslash was invented for and is only used in programming language, so unless you’re a programmer, you probably won’t run into it very often. It is used for different purposes in different coding languages, but it usually indicates that whatever follows the backslash should be treated differently than what came before it.

The really good news is that this is one of the easiest punctuation rules to memorize: A backslash points backward (\) and a [forward] slash points forward (/). Remember this next time you’re giving out a URL, and you’ll be sure to say it right.

Uncommon Words, Commonly Confused

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There are commonly confused words—let’s and lets, for example, or it’s and its. Everyone uses these words in everyday writing, and learning to distinguish them is a worthwhile pursuit. But today, let’s talk about a different kind of commonly confused words: words we use rarely that sound like words we use often.

Maybe you’ve only ever heard these words in conversation or in a movie. Maybe you’ve seen them in print but haven’t noticed the spelling. So when you pull one of these words out of the back of your memory, you automatically go with the spelling of the word’s homonym (the word it sounds and looks like). Totally natural; happens all the time.

Let’s look at a few of these commonly confused, uncommonly used words. The definitions are from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Uncommon Word
Common Homonym

Censer: A covered incense burner swung on chains in a religious ritual.
Censor: A person who supervises conduct and morals.

Gambol: To skip about in play.
Gamble: To play a game for money or property.

Humus: A brown or black complex variable material resulting from partial decomposition of plant or animal matter and forming the organic portion of soil.
Hummus: A paste of pureed chickpeas usu. mixed with sesame oil or sesame paste and eaten as a dip or sandwich spread.

Raze: To scrape, cut, or shave off. To destroy to the ground.
Raise: To cause or help to rise to a standing position.

Whither: To what place. [“Whither goest thou?”]
Wither: To shrivel from or as if from loss of bodily moisture.

Stay tuned for more of these rarely used but easily misused words; I have a long list of them. And if you have ideas for words that fit into this category, please share them in the comments.

Is It Correct to Call Christmas “Xmas”?

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The word Xmas, like fruitcake, is one of those holiday traditions that everyone knows of but no one quite understands. Is it proper English to shorten Christmas to Xmas? Is it offensive? No one seems quite sure. So my Xmas gift to you is a quick clarification.

Contrary to popular belief, Xmas is neither an error nor an attempt to take the Christ out of Christmas. The X comes from the Greek letter chi, which is the beginning of Khristos, the Greek word for Christ. In Greek, the word looks like this:

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of X to mean Christ back to 1021 AD and the use of Xmas back to 1551 AD, so if you choose to write the word, you have a long history of legitimate usage backing you up.

However, you should be warned that style guides frown on the use of Xmas. The AP Stylebook admonishes, “Never abbreviate Christmas to Xmas or any other form.” The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage agrees about Xmas, commanding, “Do not use; spell out Christmas.”

And keep in mind that if you use it, you also risk offending Christians who aren’t aware of the word’s origin.

So when can you use Xmas? I thought of four scenarios:

If you’re making your own holiday cards, and you want the letters to fit on the page easily
If you’re writing a tweet, and the extra five characters in Christmas would put you over the 140-character limit
If you’re sending a text message on a flip phone, and typing Christmas will take significantly longer than typing Xmas
If you’re a natural contrarian, and you enjoy explaining to people that using Xmas is not actually wrong

Don’t do that last one if you work for a newspaper. Can you think of any other occasions to use Xmas? Leave them in the comments.

And have a very merry Xmas.

Past Indicative	Past Subjunctive
I was	I were
You were	You were
He/she/it was	He/she/it were
We were	We were
They were	They were

Uncommon Word	Common Homonym
Censer: A covered incense burner swung on chains in a religious ritual.	Censor: A person who supervises conduct and morals.
Gambol: To skip about in play.	Gamble: To play a game for money or property.
Humus: A brown or black complex variable material resulting from partial decomposition of plant or animal matter and forming the organic portion of soil.	Hummus: A paste of pureed chickpeas usu. mixed with sesame oil or sesame paste and eaten as a dip or sandwich spread.
Raze: To scrape, cut, or shave off. To destroy to the ground.	Raise: To cause or help to rise to a standing position.
Whither: To what place. [“Whither goest thou?”]	Wither: To shrivel from or as if from loss of bodily moisture.