A Word, Please: An expert has her not-so-secret source
Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own grammar concierge? Anytime you needed help writing something, anytime you needed a bet settled, anytime you were just curious about a language issue, you could call an expert for answers.
Your information valet would have so much experience studying grammar that many answers were right in her head. When they weren’t, she would always know just where to turn for the best, most authoritative information. Then you’d never have to wonder whether something you wrote was right, right?
Not really.
My husband’s company pretty much has this exact setup. Everyone who works there knows that if they have a question about, say which verb tense to use on marketing materials, they can ask Ted, who’ll ask his grammar columnist wife. Writing confidence on call.
For example, not long ago, a colleague working on some marketing copy needed to know the past tense of “shine.” Is it, “Yesterday, you shined a light” or “Yesterday, you shone a light”? Most workplaces can host long debates over matters like that. Not his. They just have him call me, and I perform my mysterious brand of voodoo, which in most cases means I just look in a dictionary.
Search for “shine” at Merriam-Webster’s website, m-w.com, and under the full definition you see “shone … or shined.” This is how most dictionaries tell you the past tenses of irregular verbs. They put them in bold right after the main entry word. When there’s an “or” situation, it means that both forms are acceptable but the first one is better.
But be careful. Words can have different forms, like transitive vs. intransitive verbs, and different definitions. Any of these forms can have unique rules.
Case in point: We know that “shone” is correct, so would you say that yesterday you shone your shoes? No. And that’s noted in the dictionary under its second definition for the transitive verb form of shine: “past & past part: shined: to make bright by polishing: shined his shoes.” That “past & past part” means the simple past tense and past participle of this particular sense of the word are both “shined.”
But having your own grammar gopher isn’t everything you’d dream. Take, for example, a question Ted’s colleagues had recently about “cybercrimes.” Should that be one word, they wanted to know, two words or hyphenated?
I did some research on the matter, again at Merriam-Webster’s, and came back with an answer: Take your pick. Technically, you could write it as one word, two words or with a hyphen and still be correct, though I’d recommend against hyphenating it.
That didn’t go over so well. They wanted an answer, not permission to do as they pleased. So I tried to explain.
In Merriam-Webster’s, “cyber” is both a word and a prefix. As a word, it’s usually an adjective. So you can use it like any other adjective: Just put it in front of a noun: cyber crimes. Prefixes, which are indicated in dictionaries with a hyphen, “cyber-,” have a special power. You can attach them to a word without a hyphen: cybercrimes. The rules for hyphenating nouns are very murky. And murky rules mean you can do what you want: cyber-crimes. But because the other two options are so clearly sanctioned, there’s no need to wade into hyphenation questions. Just choose one word, “cybercrimes,” which I recommended, or two, “cyber crimes.”
I could tell from the grumbling that my answer didn’t go over great. Next time, maybe I’ll do what lots of grammar experts do: Act as though my own preference is the only way to go.
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JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.