Grammar Moses: Calling out the Calvary
Pronouncing the words "jewelry" as jewlery and "nuclear" as nukeyuler are annoyances, but this time of year it's even more important to make sure you keep your letters in their proper order.
"With Easter just around the corner, I was reminded the other day of one of my pet peeves: Calvary vs cavalry," wrote Gary Andersen of Rolling Meadows.
"A reporter for a large news network was talking about the violence in Chicago and said that the president 'needs to send in the Calvary.'"
Ouch.
The (lowercase) "cavalry," of course, is a group of soldiers. In oaters, they rode horseback. Today, they ride in Humvees and tanks.
But "Calvary" was the spot just outside the walls of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.
To further complicate matters - and you had to know this was coming - "calvary" (sometimes uppercase) is a representation of the Christ's crucifixion, usually a sculpture.
Knot quite right
"I enjoyed the thorough explanation of the knot as a term of ship's speed," Bob Anderson of Wheaton in response to a story we published in our Neighbor section. "After explaining that a knot is 1.15 miles per hour, the author repeats the error made by the majority of people and refers to knots per hour in the next to last paragraph.
"That is equivalent to saying my speed is 10 miles per hour per hour, which in an engineering sense is actually acceleration."
Bob is right, of course.
General-purpose journalists today are much more sophisticated when it comes to math than when I was starting out, thanks in large part to working with data sets in spreadsheets, but I'm in the micro-minority of journalists whose first loves in high school were science and math.
I often remind people an acre is a measure of land area, so it is somewhere on the spectrum of unnecessary to silly to refer to a home built on 2 acres of land.
Woke
Have you ever heard your kids or your grandkids tell you they're "woke"? My guess is if you had, you probably tried to correct their English.
"Woke," often seen as part of #StayWoke in internet circles, is loosely described as a state of awareness of what's going on in one's community, namely in terms of social injustices.
Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote an interesting history of the usage a little more than a year ago on "Fusion.net. Check it out at <URL destination="http://fusion.net/story/252567/stay-woke/">http://fusion.net/story/252567/stay-woke/
</URL>While that might help you be a little cooler in the eyes of your progeny, I'll bet what you really wanted to know is when to use and how to conjugate in a more traditional sense "wake," "awake," "wake up" and "awaken."
Where does "woke" fit in? And is "awokened" even a word?
I could fill three columns on this subject alone, because we'd have to get into transitive and intransitive uses. But I don't want to run the risk of boring you or getting over my skis on a topic that I still find rather confusing.
In an effort to simplify this as much as possible, I refer to language authority Bryan A. Garner's rundown. Let's conjugate:
• Wake/woke/waked (sometimes woken)
• Awake/awoke/awaked (sometimes awoken)
• Awaken/awakened/awakened
• Wake up/woke up/waked up.
Still awake?
Write carefully!
• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.