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Grammar Moses: My opposition to verse versus versus

It's not every day that I get a grammar complaint from a sports writer.

The gripes I usually get from them relate to my prudish stance on swearing in print — whether it be the words of the sports writers themselves or the salty-tongued athletes they cover.

Bruce Miles, the Daily Herald's veteran Chicago Cubs writer, issued this complaint, which is something that bothers me, too:

“One of the things I've noticed is how the use of the word ‘versus' has morphed into ‘verse.' For example, I listen to the radio and I hear that the Cubs ‘will be playing tonight verse the Phillies.' In press boxes around the country, I hear things such as ‘Pitcher so-and-so's 10 strikeouts tonight match his career high, set in 2010 verse the Pirates.' Seems to me that people think that ‘versus' is construed as some sort of plural and that ‘verse' is the singular.

I couldn't have said it better myself, Bruce. Now let me cover a game for you. I guarantee there would be much swearing.

p's and q's revisited

I wrote recently about when to use apostrophes with single letters or runs of letters and detoured into one theory on the etymology of the phrase “mind your p's and q's.”

I stress one because there are many. The one I favored, primarily for the sake of familiarity and comedy, is that p's and q's were bartender shorthand for pints and quarts.

Reader Scott Zapel wrote back with the more logical and more generally accepted origin of the phrase:

“Much more likely, to my mind, is the printer's explanation,” he wrote. “Typesetters of yore had to hand pack their letters into a composing stick upside down and backward so that, when placed in the ‘negative' galley, they would print a ‘positive' page onto the paper. A typesetter had to mind his p's and q's (and b's and d's) to avoid placing the wrong letter into the composing stick.”

I walk past a Linotype machine every morning in the lobby of our building. It sits there as a reminder of how we made the newspaper a scant half-century ago.

Last week I spoke with a retired man who used to operate that monstrous machine, which churned out hot type. I remember as a wee lad visiting the composing room and seeing that machine in action. It was hot and loud. And in my addled memory of that time, I remember guys pounding away on it just like Lon Chaney Sr. did on the pipe organ in “Phantom of the Opera.”

I did think it was fun to try read that type backward, but until now I'd not considered whether those o's with descenders were p's or q's. Or that o's with ascenders were b's and d's, for that matter.

Kiss and tell

Cathy Dillon wrote to tell me of her earliest encounter with the use of the wrong word:

“On a sweltering summer evening, before most everyone had air conditioning, I was a little girl standing with my father at a small-town ice cream social. He was talking about the hot weather with a friend. When she said the heat was bearable because she had an osculating fan, I heard my dad's rather strangulated response as he struggled mightily not to laugh. I knew he had found this exchange terribly funny, and, once we were away, he explained to me the difference between ‘osculate' and ‘oscillate.' I've carried the vision of kissing fans with me ever since!”

For those of you born after 1820, this might need a little more explanation. (And, no, that wasn't a commentary on Cathy's age.)

Some fans oscillate, meaning they sweep back and forth at regular intervals.

The word “osculate” hit its zenith about the same time Maine broke away from Massachusetts to become its own state. But these days it barely registers a blip on the Top 20 Billion Words in the English Language list, which I just made up.

But, yes, to osculate is to kiss.

My advice to you is that when you're whooping it up with your friends after watching the latest “Star Wars” movie and considering whether to whisper “Luke, I am your faaaaather” into an oscillating fan, pause and consider what might happen to your lips were you to osculate that oscillating fan.

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.

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