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Grammar Moses: This Dude can't abide

I asked for it.

In my first column last week, I requested your grammar pet peeves. I asked for your criticisms, should I run afoul of any rule.

And I heard you loud and clear (I know that is the idiom, but "loudly and clearly" technically is better because they are adverbs modifying how I heard you).

At any rate, this is cause for celebration. I have heard from and chatted with more than 60 of you. I thank you for your interest. Clearly there is a lot in your collective craw. I hope you'll continue to vent to me about grammatical injustices so that we all may learn a thing or two.

Rick Barlow of Schaumburg suggested that I level a "syn tax" against anyone who makes an egregious error. He was kind enough to grant me permission to use the term.

So I dish out the first syn tax to ... myself.

Pretzel logic

Reader Dave Gauger wrote to tweak me for the awkward phrasing in this sentence from the inaugural column: I've been compelled to write grammar quizzes ... and, through them, make miserable the people with whom I work and at the same time make better their copy."

In my zeal to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition while maintaining parallel construction, I managed to twist myself into a pretzel.

You'd need a sextant to navigate that sentence.

One way to make the passage clearer would have been to break it into two sentences: "I've been compelled to write grammar quizzes ... and, through them, make my co-workers miserable. At the same time, though, I helped them to improve their writing."

Much more understandable.

Touché, Dave.

The Dude can't abide

Reader Nancy Sigel told me that she and her husband feel I erred in this sentence:

"Still, there are some hard-and-fast rules to which all of us should abide."

She felt I should have written "abide by."

But her husband gets the gold star. He knew the word I should have used instead of "abide" is "adhere."

To abide is to put up with; to adhere is to stick to something.

A winner!

Emilie, who asked that I not use her last name, is the winner of my first treasure hunt.

From time to time I will leave an error in a column intentionally.

I didn't think anyone would find this breadcrumb, but four of you did. Eagle-eye Emilie was the first.

Emilie spent almost 30 years at a legal publishing firm in the proofreading department.

I have no doubt she'd be a whiz as a grammar columnist.

She noted that in ending a sentence with a parenthetical, I should have put the period outside the close parenthesis rather than inside.

I admit that is a master's level punctuation issue.

Let's end this session with something more basic.

Final thought

Jeannette Clark of Naperville wonders whether it is correct to say "all of a sudden" as she learned it or "all of the sudden," which is common today.

If you go by pure numbers of grammar experts, "all of a sudden" wins hands down. "All the sudden" is an even worse bastardization.

But since it means "suddenly," why not just use that?

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is assistant vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can follow or friend Jim on social media at facebook.com/baumannjim.

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