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Grammar
I've been thinking about adjectives today.
(Yes, I know.)
Specifically, I've been thinking about lists of adjectives - and about special cases, when the listing rules don't really apply. In a comment to a dear friend's journal, I mentioned a "crumbling antebellum plantation manor", and I've been wondering since I wrote that whether it wants commas or not.
In my junior year of high school, I was a copy editor on the Harbinger, which was the school newspaper. (You'd be surprised how many people thought it was the Harbringer. That's not a word, folks.) Due to a mishap involving my having misplaced a floppy disk with ResEdit (like the registry editor, but for Mac OS - it was System 7.5 then - and vastly more user-friendly) on it near one of the school computers, I was banned from the computer labs*, and so I was relegated to editing hard copy and sitting in on the lower-level journalism class taught next door.
This class was taught by Ms. Tornabene, who was a decent enough human being but who was really out of her league teaching high school English (and, by extension, journalism). Mostly I just sat in the back of the classroom and did my work, but - as I was nominally in the class - I occasionally clashed with Ms. Tornabene on a matter of grammar or style. The one instance of this that I specifically remember was when she wrote the sentence
Six small brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
on the blackboard and challenged us to correct the punctuation. After I pointed out that Dumpster™ is a trademarked name and at least needs to be capitalized - which she ignored - another student placed the following punctuation in:
Six small, brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
(Actually, that wasn't the first effort - another student had tried "Six small, brown, puppies...".)
Ms. Tornabene smiled - I can still see that smug smile - and said "No, that's not all - anyone else?" When nobody answered, she added another comma:
Six, small, brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
I objected. "Numbers don't count."
"What?"
"Numbers don't get treated like regular adjectives. You don't take them into account when you're punctuating lists."
"Numbers are adjectives just like the rest of them, and you have to include a comma if they're in a list."
So we went and got the grammar reference - damned if I can remember what it was, but it wasn't one of the big style guides like AP or Chicago - which didn't have any reference to this phenomenon. Then we went to the head of the English department, Mrs. Ikeler, who was next door. She listened to both sides, said "Chris is right," and went back to overseeing the computer lab.
I wasn't allowed to talk for the rest of the class period.
* I'd brought the diskette from home accidentally - put it into my backpack instead of a disk containing several Harbinger articles that I'd taken home to edit - and then, when I discovered that it was the wrong disk, set it aside and forgotten about it. Someone else had put the disk into a computer to see what it was, the computer had been taken away for a system upgrade before they had a chance to take the disk out, and the guy doing the upgrades found the disk - with my name on it - in the computer, assumed that I'd been trying to "hack the system", and told that to Mrs. Ikeler, who banned me.
I was reinstated when it turned out that I was the only person in the lab who knew how to do half the stuff that needed to be done to run the newspaper.
---
Anyway. "Crumbling antebellum plantation manor".
I'm of the position that there are no commas needed, because these aren't listed adjectives, they're nested adjectives. "Plantation" describes "manor"; "antebellum" describes "plantation manor"; "crumbling" describes "antebellum plantation manor". In other words, "crumbling (antebellum (plantation (manor)))".
But I can see how people would think that it's a list. But even then - does "plantation" count in the list? (It describes what kind of manor it is.) Should it be "crumbling, antebellum plantation manor" or "crumbling, antebellum, plantation manor"?
Inquiring gnomes want to mine.
(Yes, I know.)
Specifically, I've been thinking about lists of adjectives - and about special cases, when the listing rules don't really apply. In a comment to a dear friend's journal, I mentioned a "crumbling antebellum plantation manor", and I've been wondering since I wrote that whether it wants commas or not.
In my junior year of high school, I was a copy editor on the Harbinger, which was the school newspaper. (You'd be surprised how many people thought it was the Harbringer. That's not a word, folks.) Due to a mishap involving my having misplaced a floppy disk with ResEdit (like the registry editor, but for Mac OS - it was System 7.5 then - and vastly more user-friendly) on it near one of the school computers, I was banned from the computer labs*, and so I was relegated to editing hard copy and sitting in on the lower-level journalism class taught next door.
This class was taught by Ms. Tornabene, who was a decent enough human being but who was really out of her league teaching high school English (and, by extension, journalism). Mostly I just sat in the back of the classroom and did my work, but - as I was nominally in the class - I occasionally clashed with Ms. Tornabene on a matter of grammar or style. The one instance of this that I specifically remember was when she wrote the sentence
Six small brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
on the blackboard and challenged us to correct the punctuation. After I pointed out that Dumpster™ is a trademarked name and at least needs to be capitalized - which she ignored - another student placed the following punctuation in:
Six small, brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
(Actually, that wasn't the first effort - another student had tried "Six small, brown, puppies...".)
Ms. Tornabene smiled - I can still see that smug smile - and said "No, that's not all - anyone else?" When nobody answered, she added another comma:
Six, small, brown puppies were found in the dumpster behind the library.
I objected. "Numbers don't count."
"What?"
"Numbers don't get treated like regular adjectives. You don't take them into account when you're punctuating lists."
"Numbers are adjectives just like the rest of them, and you have to include a comma if they're in a list."
So we went and got the grammar reference - damned if I can remember what it was, but it wasn't one of the big style guides like AP or Chicago - which didn't have any reference to this phenomenon. Then we went to the head of the English department, Mrs. Ikeler, who was next door. She listened to both sides, said "Chris is right," and went back to overseeing the computer lab.
I wasn't allowed to talk for the rest of the class period.
* I'd brought the diskette from home accidentally - put it into my backpack instead of a disk containing several Harbinger articles that I'd taken home to edit - and then, when I discovered that it was the wrong disk, set it aside and forgotten about it. Someone else had put the disk into a computer to see what it was, the computer had been taken away for a system upgrade before they had a chance to take the disk out, and the guy doing the upgrades found the disk - with my name on it - in the computer, assumed that I'd been trying to "hack the system", and told that to Mrs. Ikeler, who banned me.
I was reinstated when it turned out that I was the only person in the lab who knew how to do half the stuff that needed to be done to run the newspaper.
---
Anyway. "Crumbling antebellum plantation manor".
I'm of the position that there are no commas needed, because these aren't listed adjectives, they're nested adjectives. "Plantation" describes "manor"; "antebellum" describes "plantation manor"; "crumbling" describes "antebellum plantation manor". In other words, "crumbling (antebellum (plantation (manor)))".
But I can see how people would think that it's a list. But even then - does "plantation" count in the list? (It describes what kind of manor it is.) Should it be "crumbling, antebellum plantation manor" or "crumbling, antebellum, plantation manor"?
Inquiring gnomes want to mine.