Coyote Blog

Or when used with an acronym: an SMTP server, a USB port, a POP server, an IMAP server

(Says the guy who wanted to name an enum on my work project "participle" because what it represented, when said in a sentence was in the present perfect)

Brad, I'm right there with you. I'll split infinitives and use the British style for punctuation and quotation marks (i.e., in/out depending on context), but will never (intentionally) use the wrong pronoun case; that grammar rule allows you to include information in it:
She likes golf more than I [do].
She likes golf more than [she likes] me.

And, I tend to use nested parentheses if I'm writing informally. All of which seem to be quite common among engineers.

It's not whether it's in front of a vowel. It's whether it precedes a vowel sound. So that's why it's "an" in front of the 'uhn' sound, but "a" in front of the "yoo" sound.

I'm all for "engineer grammar" but it's worth noting that there seem to be two kinds. The first kind, as described above, is the result of an analytical mind understanding the concepts and information conveyed in the rules and applying them as consistently as possible. Example: I heard her say, "What in the world are you doing?" right before he pushed that button. (Although I shy away from adding a comma after the second quotation mark.)

Then there is the most common kind of "grammatical writing" (or speech) which applies rote rules without understanding of the underlying information being conveyed. This is the most common non-engineer grammar.

Then there is the kind of engineer grammar that comes of being analytical and numerate but illiterate... that's something else again. It seems to imply contempt for learning rote rules, without an understanding of the framework behind it. When I see this I worry about the engineering skills too...

My pet peeve is the rule that every level in the hierarchy of an outline has to have two members. I've taken to adding "b. The first element is sui generis." as the second item. If taken to it's logical conclusion, the topic level should also have a partner element and therefore outlines should only be allowed to occur in pairs.

Given the number of comments already, I'll add another question here: how do you pluralize acronyms/abbreviations?

For example, I work in the storage industry, so I am often writing about hard disk drives and solid state drives. Pluralizing here is easy, but if I use the shorthand, do I call them "HDDs and SSDs", or "HDD's and SSD's", or somthing else? If I just use SSD that could imply singular or plural, but generally IMHO the standard meaning would be singular.

Y is a vowel sometimes. So is W.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/499/is-it-true-w-can-be-used-as-a-vowel

Agreeing with AughtSix, plurals of acronyms usually just get the 's' tacked on with no apostrophe. Especially since the possessive case can still apply to things like HDD and SSD ("The HDD's motor is broken"). I also agree with the cases where the last word in an acronym isn't the subject of pluralization, so they're mostly left intact with no s. But if they are considered a word in their own right, then frequently a trailing s is used for pluralization. For instance RBIs and WMDs.

I agree with Highway. The use of "a" or "an" depends on whether the next word begins with a vowel sound. This is why I've always argued that "an historic" is incorrect. I've heard theories that this comes from the British dropping the h--which would make it "an 'istoric." However, in America, where we pronounce our h's, it should be "a historic." After all, you've never taken "an history" class have you?

An historic may have become acceptable over the years but I still fight for what I consider is the correct article. Sadly though, with all of the texting abbreviations and horrible grammar and spelling of facebook I fear that the English language as we know it is not long for this world.

My big gramatical uncertainty comes when I'm nesting quotation marks. Does anybody have any tips for that situation?

Nesting quotation marks? As in:
In reply I said "people say 'using single quotes on any inner quotes and double quotes on the outside is a historically correct method' in reply," and then added "people also get confused about punctuation inside quotes or not, which has loosened up in recent times, partly because it is done the other way when writing software."

Heh, speaking of grammar rules, the one I violate is to use the third person plural "they" in gender-neutral third person singular examples... "When playing on a football team, the primary goal of the wide receiver is that they catch the football", even when the subject is clearly singular.

It tends to be so much less clumsy than "s/he" which you can't really say, even, just write, and a lot less impersonal than "it".

As one quite comfortable in six languages (and functional in six others [at least enough to be polite]) I tend to regard my mother tongue with rather more interest than might otherwise be the case. Perhaps the most remarkable advantage enjoyed by English is its profound adaptability, a trait leading far too often towards absolutely inexcusable usage: "him and me went ..." for example.

I've watched two particularly fascinating and significant patterns of change unfold during the past fifty years or so in English usage and not only here in the States.

First, there is a rapidly growing tendency to use nouns as new verbs, as in "to office" or "to pancake". This is useful adaptation at its best.

Second, many of the relatively few "strong verbs" are continuing their centuries-long simplification towards "weak verb" structure. Weak verbs all have the same set of bland endings: walk-walked-walked. Compare to sing-sang-sung. If you listen you'll begin to notice usages like "I buyed it last week".

These changes may grate somewhat, but consider the weak-verb structure of "he has helped". Two centuries ago it was a strong verb: "he hath holpen". Even more interesting is the way is the rapid transition of "to bring" from one strong-verb structure to one not quite so strong, because it rhymes with "sing": bring-brought-brought --> bring-brang-brung, which is probably just a way-station to fully weak structure because you occasionally hear the bring-bringed-bringed usage.

Parenthetically (parentheses enclose extra *information* not essential to the key thought) it's also worth noting that if your sentence structure is such that you're inclined to use nested parentheses, use brackets to differentiate the inner information. You now see why I structured my first sentence in the manner I did.

Finally--and the difference matters--dashes enclose extra *emphasis* rather than information. Different function, different punctuation, but in essence both have the same purpose: enabling our written communication to resemble effective conversational English.

Putting punctuation inside quotations, always, is a stupid rule which dates back to the printing press. Apparently, having a period after a close quote made them more susceptible to break or misprint (sorry, I can't reference Wikipedia to fact check today). Despite what any grammarians might declare to be the "correct" way to use quotation marks with other punctuation, I just do what makes sense—what "AughtSix" calls the "British style"—unless of course the "American style" makes more sense.

Hmm... not sure why the off-topic link got featured better than the on-topic link.