From a recent open letter by Bill Jemas:
“At the same time, the friends that I work for and with are giving me reign
to do what I do best; exploring new challenges.”
Here’s a suggested challenge, Bill:
USE THE RIGHT FLIPPIN’ WORD.
It’s “rein,” dámņ it, not “reign.” To “reign” is to rule, as a king. You’re not a king. To “give rein,” just as in “give free rein,” is a horsemanship term. It means to ease up on the restraints and let the horse go at whatever clip it wants in whatever direction it wants.
I don’t know why so many people screw this up, but I see it all the time and it just makes me nuts.
PAD
• 
Hey, take it easy, Peter. After all, it’s not like the guy was ever in publishing, or responsible for making reading material, or anything…..
I’ve got a bete noir with the general inability of folks to tell the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ I don’t know why it irritates me so much to hear the improper usage, but it does.
Maybe it was a Freudian thing. “Reign…yes…I WILL REIGN OVER YOU ALL! THERE WILL BE NO FLASHBACKS! YOU ARE ALL MY PETS! Grrr snarl”
It could be worse, it’s not like a company director using Pre-madonna instead of Prima Donna, or the same person using Cosign instead of cogent.
Trust me, just because someone makes it to the top doesn’t mean they have the education or intellect one would hope was necessary. 😉
Trust me, just because someone makes it to the top doesn’t mean they have the education or intellect one would hope was necessary.
Would this be a good time to mention the President, or would that just open a can of worms?
Hmmmmmm, I think Jemas probably did use it right…. at least in the way he thinks.
Amd just because he supposedly has the education, that doesn’t mean he finished at the top of his class. Don’t forget, half the doctors who graduated finished in the lower half of the class.
Varjak – Would this be a good time to mention the President, or would that just open a can of worms?
Well with the well known phenomenon of Bushism’s, he certainly fits the topic theme well. 🙂
Mind you, we over here in the UK can’t laugh too much at Shrub; “Who’s the more Foolish, the fool, or the fool that follows him” – thanks to Tony we’re following Shrub into everything. 🙁
On the plus side we now know the Education level needed to get a C grade at Yale (if your family name is Bush anyway). 😀
Howdy,
While we’re at it, can we also line up and dope-slap all the people who replace “hoard” for “horde” and vice-versa?
— Ed
As long as we’re on English language pet peeves, what genius decided that “flammable” and “inflammable” should mean the same thing?
Inflammable means flammable, what a country.
Seriously, I remember hearing on Word to the Wise that inflammable was the standard until early in the 20th century when some fire safety group promoted the use of flammable.
What? You expect someone at such an executive level as Bill Jemas to know how to use the English language properly? Pshaw….I’d be surprised if he actually typed his own memo.
It might have been a typo. Marvel seems to be reigning over the world of typos these days, at least judging by my favorite formerly-written-by-PAD mag, The Incredible Hulk.
Doc Samson has become Dr. Leonard SamPson, and the wife of The Abomination is now Nadia BlonDsky.
Now that I think about it, maybe they’re not typos. Maybe they’re pulling a print-version of the code the Howard Campbell used in Mother Night (can’t remember his name right now) when he broadcast propaganda radio shows for the Nazis in order to simultaneously spread secret coded messages to the Allies.
I’m not sure exactly who the code would be intended for, or what they would be saying, but it may be some kind of subliminal mind-control technique.
That would sound paranoid, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that Marvel has somehow “convinced” some poor Australians to spend money on this:
http://superherohype.com/gallery/Man_Thing/The_Movie/Posters/manthing.jpg
Maybe they’re pulling a print-version of the code the Howard Campbell used in Mother Night (can’t remember his name right now
Whoops! Sorry about that. At first I genuinely couldn’t remember his name, then I remembered it, went back and added it, and forgot to erase “can’t remember his name.
Me I hate the whole “accept” for “except” thing. Like in ST:New Frontier Dark Allies. Bugs me to pain!Like on page 159. Man, that just boils my peanuts!
🙂
This is somewhat off-topic, but you can hear Peter David wax eloquent on a number of topics when he makes his record-tying 17th appearance on “Destinies-The Voice of Science Fiction.” If you live on Long Island or southern Connecticut, you can tune in to 90.1 FM, WUSB, Stony Brook, NY at 11:30 PM for this (at least) hour-long show, which will feature a reading from “Star Trek: New Frontier-Stone and Anvil,” and discussions of all of Peter’s recent projects. To those out of the broadcast area, you can listen online through links at http://www.wusb.fm. If you miss the show, you will be able to hear it in rotation at http://www.cosmiclandscapes.com beginning next week. For a copy of the show, or any of Peter’s previous appearances, send e-mail to Destinies1@aol.com
If something can become impeached, it is “impeachable”, not “peachable”.
If something can become illuminated, it is “illuminable”, not “luminable”.
If something can become inflamed, it is “inflammable”, not “flammable”.
davidh
Very simple:
Reigning – ruling
Reining – controling, moderating
Rayneing – Using a variety of spells to screw with a fellow British ex-buddy’s head
Rahneing – Turning into a Scottish werewolf
Any questions?
Yep. Ranks right up there on the annoyance scale with people who say that something that has been previously established is “cannon”. I often tell them that would cause a lot of damage, but they never get it.
Wohw – Pweter – eye hoope you niver make foon of me speeeling!!!
Jemas probably thought he was using the proper word, but ended up with his little Freudian slip. Is PAD nitpicking? Possibly, given his history with Jemas, but the sentiment is entirely correct. Grammar, and its purpose to language, seem to have gone by the wayside in the last few decades, and Peter is right to be upset about it; somebody should be. This is why most people who read have their own pet peeves as to which grammatical snafus annoy them most. Me personally, it’s the your/you’re thing. Too many people think that “your” is the same as you are, and when I see it in print, it just bugs me. When writing myself, it’s its. Do I use an apostrophe or not? Is it “it is” or is it “property of it”? Bugs me. Tangent, sorry. Anyway, I agree – people need to learn how to speak, how to spell, and how to write in whatever language they are learning (this brings me to another tangent – do Russians have the equivalent of an “Ebonics problem”?) if they want to be taken seriously by anyone in any print medium.
Oh, and Ben – I like the “Rayneing” thing, had to think about that one 🙂
Adam – easy way to remember “it’s” vs. its. The contraction “it’s” always means “it is”. It is never used as a possessive. And my favorite pet peeves include mispelling the word “separate” and referring to something as “very unique.” It’s either unique or it’s not. There are no degrees of uniqueness.
I always remember something my high school English teacher told me: if you want to be a writer, you have to know all the rules of using the English language before breaking them. As a journalist, that advice has probably helped more than just about anything else I’ve ever been told.
I agree with some of the above posters, that Jemas’ slip was probably of the Freudian variety. It was almost too deliberate in a way.
And I also agree with the its versus it’s problem. For me, it’s one of those teeth-grinding mistakes, and yet I’m astonished at how so many people don’t seem to know about so obvious a difference. When I was a kid, that one would knock half a letter grade off a term paper, and yet I’ve seen college grads with two or three graduate degrees who don’t know the difference.
For my money, one of the best books on the subject is Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words, published in 1984. I bought a copy in London, so I don’t know if it’s available here in the States, but it’s worth every penny. It explains the difference between right and wrong words, but often in an amusing way: “‘untimely death’ is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?” Here’s what Bryson says about flammable, inflammable: “It is an apparent inconsistency of English that ‘inconbustible’ describes an object that won’t burn, while ‘inflammable’ describes an object that will. Because the meaning of inflammable is so often misapprehended, there is an increasing tendency to use the less ambiguous flammable. In other cases, this might be considered a regrettable concession to ignorance. But it would be even more regrettable to insist on linguistic purity at the expense of human safety.” And you thought you wouldn’t learn anything in this discussion.
You want to know the really scary thing about this post? While I’ve been happily typing away, I’ve been listening to VH1’s I Love the 80s Strikes Back in the background. And they just had a clip from a 1988 PSA with Sylvester Stallone extolling the virtues of literacy. Sort of puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?
Whenever someone starts ranting about mis-using words, I start to ratchet up the mis-usage of words…
Trying make that throbbing “vane” in “they’re” “four-heads” explode!
To me the reign/reign thing isn’t half as annoying as the countless times I’ve seen “lose” spelled as “loose” or “loser” spelled as “looser”.
“I don’t like to gamble, I might loose money”
“He uses drugs, what a looser”
Arrrhhhh!
My pet peeve is the confusion between i.e. and e.g. I once even saw someone use “i.g.”!
People also sometimes misuse c.f., but since it’s not commonly used it doesn’t bother me as much.
Anybody else bored with comic pro’s fighting for publicity? It’s the WWE. Tired.
Here’s another one I see people screw up all the time:
Affect vs. Effect
Affect is the verb. Effect is the noun.
In other words, If you are able to affect something, you will cause an effect to happen.
It’s been mentioned before in CBG, but it still continues to irk me: The use of the word “literally” to simply denote degree or emphasis, rather than its actual meaning.
“I was literally blown away by that movie!”
No, you weren’t. You were figuratively blown away by it. “Literally” doesn’t mean “really.” It means LITERALLY, not in any metaphorical way.
William Watson: Me I hate the whole “accept” for “except” thing. Like in ST:New Frontier Dark Allies. Bugs me to pain!Like on page 159. Man, that just boils my peanuts!
Luigi Novi: Where on that page does that word appear? I don’t see it.
Ditto PAD. How people can sit for 12 years in grammar and spelling classes and still mix this stuff up is unfathomable.
It’s and its – an easy way to remember and differentiate them follows.
Mentally substitute his for its – if the sentence then scans correctly and makes sense, you use the possessive (no apostrophe). If not, then you need the contraction (with the apostrophe).
English pet peeves that drive me right up the wall:
round circle
new innovation
free gift
“A regrettable concession to ignorance”? What a beautiful way to put it. As far as I’m concerned, the entire online ‘writespeak’ subculture is precisely that: “A regrettable concession to ignorance”.
It’s like Zappa said:
The seepage, the sewage, the rubbers, the napkins
Your ethos, your Porthos,
Your flag pole, your port hole
Your language
You’re frightened
The future, your lang . . .
You can’t even speak your own fûçkìņg language
You can’t read it anymore
You can’t write it anymore
Your language
The future of your language
Your meat loaf
Don’t let your meat loaf…
Heh, heh, heh.
I don’t know. Used to be you’d put some effort behind a written (as opposed to spoken) expression of thought; be it a document, letter or even a note to your partner. Most of that is out the window, and as writing becomes, more and more, a primary means of communication again, what happens to an entire generation brought up on THIS and ‘educational’ videos?
I mean, as – from the top down – everyone’s spoken and written skills deteriorate, what happens when majority rule becomes law? Okay – nobody’s immune to the occasional spelling or grammar mistake, but people just don’t CARE anymore.
“Dear employee,
Wer’e sorry to regrettily inform u that because the companys going broke we have to sack some people, and ur redundant to are operations”?
And what happens to written art?
Ðámņ, Orwell would have a blast with some of the stuff going on the net… and also with 1984, probably soon to be translated into modern English with all the complicated words and concepts crossed out.
Anyway, pet peeves: Weird/wired (“I felt really wired”… Oh yeah? As in pumped full of drugs or the more traditional sense of having a metal cable up your scrotum?), and the blatant misuse of apostrophes. How DIFFICULT is it to remember?!?
*Rant over*
Heh, that was the first thing I noticed as well, Peter, and I mentioned it in the Newsarama message thread, so I got your back. 🙂 Well okay, it was the second thing I noticed; I also had to comment on the “mission accomplished” line (I wondered if Bill was wearing a flight suit).
“The contraction ‘it’s’ always means ‘it is’. It is never used as a possessive.”
Your second sentence is true; your first one isn’t. But it’s been a hard day’s night for us all, I suppose. The trick is, when “it’s” is used for “it has” as with my previous sentence, the word “has” doesn’t indicate possession. I think maybe that’s what’s (that is what has) confused a lot of people over the years. I just keep reminding them, “the purpose of an apostrophe is to substitute for letters that aren’t there, like an abbreviation. Are there any additional letters you could fit into there? No? Then don’t bloody use the apostrophe!”
Den: Affect is the verb. Effect is the noun.
Both effect and affect have usages as both a noun and a verb.
According to Dictionary.com, M-W.com, and my dictionary here at home, anyway. Still, there are specific uses for each word, and while I don’t get them right all the time, I hate the fact that most people don’t even try.
Elayne Riggs: I just keep reminding them, “the purpose of an apostrophe is to substitute for letters that aren’t there, like an abbreviation. Are there any additional letters you could fit into there? No? Then don’t bloody use the apostrophe!”
You have to remember, the average person has an intelligence to rival the tiny stuffed bear sitting next to my computer monitor. If you tell them that, and they listen, you’ll get results that look something like this:
“So, what does Marks new truck look like?”
“Oh, you know, it’s not as nice as Jims, but it’s okay.”
That, in my opinion, is just as annoying.
(Unrelated: I’m very upset about the fact that, in this thread about atrocious grammar and spelling, I just used a sentence fragment as a full sentence in my last post. You are all free to stone me to death now.)
Robin: I’m very upset about the fact that, in this thread about atrocious grammar and spelling, I just used a sentence fragment as a full sentence…
Nah. The problem with online grammar is not that everyone should ‘talk’ like a grammar book reads. The point is that people don’t even try to communicate their thoughts clearly anymore. I mean, look at this (fully quoted) post, by someone from Colorado (He seems like a nice guy and everything. This specific post just caught my attention because of the thread we’re all posting in now, and is by NO MEANS the worst I’ve seen online):
I never did like DC much, well the Main DCU….There Vertigo Imprint i like and I like some of the stuff they have done…
Put it simply I like DC mini series or a run on a title
Hush was awesome but I dropped batman after that…
I always liked marvel cause Marvel characters to me are all either Troubled, or deeply Disturbed…the dc characters kinda donot have that humanity to me…
Although my favorite Comic Story of all time is a DC though I love marvel more
and that is none then Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns
I think you and your fragmented sentence are safe from stoning.
Just a couple of brief comments:
1–Regarding Rob’s pet peeve on “separate”, I observed that he misspelled “mispelling”. The word uses two Ss, not one. (After all you’re mis-spelling, not mi-spelling–unless, of course your first name is Tori, in which case you’re Miss Spelling.)
2–Michael Rawdon’s point about “c.f.” is incorrect as he has typed it. The term is “cf.” as it refers to the Latin word “confer” which translates in English as “compare”. Since the abbreviation is only for one word, there should only be one period (“e.g.” means “exampli gratia” and “i.e.” means “id est“).
3–Regarding the use of “literally”: If the word is used in a sense of hyperbole, then there’s no harm (an example in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary attibuted to Norman Cousins is given as “will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice”; of course, that action won’t actually happen any more than a police force actually “will leave no stone unturned” to solve a crime).
4–Regarding the apostrophe’s use in the possessive “its”, that usage is easily understood (this doesn’t make it the usage any less correct, but it is an explanation). Consider how one changes a common (or proper) noun into a possessive adjective: “The whiskers of a cat are very sensitive” can be rephrased as “The cat’s whiskers are very sensitive”. The possessive form typically replaces the phrase “of something” (“of John” becomes “John’s”; “of the dog” becomes “the dog’s”). “Its” is not really different (“its” simply means “of it”). We learn the possessive forms of the various pronouns, and most pronouns’ possessive forms differ from the objective form (me/my, you/your, him/his, us/our, them/their; neither “her” nor “it” change in this instance) and to complicate matters, when discussing possession using the preposition “of”, most pronouns have another change (my–mine, your–yours, her–hers, it–its, our–ours, their–theirs; “his” makes no change in this situation). When writing out the possessive of “it”, some people may simply make an error by adding ‘s, as they would with the common noun being replaced (“the mango’s flavor” would seem to suggest “it’s flavor”, not the correct “its flavor”).
5–I have to echo the correction about “it’s” always meaning “it is”. The only contraction that always means “it is” is the poetic ’tis.
Rein/Reign doesn’t get to me the way some other slips (its/it’s, their/there, affect/effect) do. I suspect that’s because I see the latter three a lot more in my students’ writing than I do the first one.
You’d think that with the rise of the net, a medium that at least initially was purely written, it might convince people to do a better job. It seems to have done the reverse, though.
And for some levity — I remember Harry Turtledove talking several years ago at a Loscon about some of his time spent as an editor. He saw one author, setting up a romantic moment, using the phrase…
“He put his arm around her waste.”
Sounds … messy.
TWL
Bill Jemas – The Reign of Error.
Hurricane Heeran
My big pet peeve is when people say “at all” and they say it “atall.” That bothers me so much for some strange reason…. Have to look into that.
Joseph: (After all you’re mis-spelling, not mi-spelling–unless, of course your first name is Tori, in which case you’re Miss Spelling.)
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
As long as we’re sharing our grammar pet peeves, one of my particular pet peeves is the use of “I could care less” when the speaker means to say, “I couldn’t care less.”
“I couldn’t care less.” states that there is nothing more trivial to the speaker.
“I could care less.” states that there is, in fact, at least one subject that is more trivial than the one at hand.
Then there’s “ATM machine,” “PIN number,” and the like. What…you’re going to the automated teller machine machine and need to enter your personal identification number number?
I really, really wish that people would learn the difference between ‘To’, ‘Too’, and ‘Two’.
I can’t begin to tell you on how many message boards I’ve seen…
“Fred talks to much”
“Fred talks two much”
“Fred is going too buy his car today”
It drives me up the freaking wall!
Huk’t awn fonix wurk’t 4 mee.
**It’s “rein,” dámņ it, not “reign.” To “reign” is to rule, as a king. You’re not a king. To “give rein,” just as in “give free rein,” is a horsemanship term. It means to ease up on the restraints and let the horse go at whatever clip it wants in whatever direction it wants.
I don’t know why so many people screw this up, but I see it all the time and it just makes me nuts.**
What I hate is the misuse of “compliments” in place of “complements.” Too often I’ve seen something like, “The performance of Sean Connery compliments Harrison Ford’s acting.” It’s “complements,” dámņ it! Sean Connery’s performance is not paying Harrison Ford’s acting a compliment. He’s complementing him!
Joseph – Ya got me! I misspelled “misspelling” in my own rant about misspelled words. I have to plead carelessness, though, rather than simply poor spelling. (I was always one of the last standing in Miss Harding’s fourth grade spelling bees!) And as for Jemas, speaking as a comics retailer, he won’t be missed. The jerk cost me plenty in lost sales, far more than any of his so-called innovations helped.
“ATM Machine” and “PIN number” remind me … isn’t DC Comics “Detective Comics Comics”?
Yeah, well, I’ve heard MTV officially referred to as ‘MTV Television’ on more than one occasion…
Man, I like this thread.
Both effect and affect have usages as both a noun and a verb.
Yes, but not in the context in which people usually confuse the two.
Strunk and White people. Strunk and White. It helps curb those really bad errors.
Travis