Grammar Moses: This column won't make you bust a gut

Tom Hanrahan of downstate Harrisburg is a new reader of this column.

"Perhaps you could address the increasing use of the word 'busted.' And not in the noun form as in a drug bust, but as it is used as a verb," he wrote. "For example: 'Police report windows on parked cars busted out.' I see it used everywhere - in newspapers, magazines and in books. What gives? Is this one of those slang words that is now acceptable in formal writing?"

Well, Tom, now that we publish newspapers at the tippy top of Illinois, the Springfield area and Carbondale and its environs, I need to worry about regional dialects.

I do have a simple answer to your question, but you should know that in this space I never follow my maxim that brevity is next to godliness.

I did a search for the word "bust" in Daily Herald stories over the last month and found it has been used in sports stories to describe ballplayers who did not live up to their potential as well in news stories on drug-related arrests, including a casual description of the origin of 4/20 in which "joint" and "weed" and "Grateful Dead" were mentioned.

But not a single reference to anything being "busted" as in broken.

I consulted Renee Trappe, a suburban Chicago girl who now oversees our Southern Illinois papers, among them the Harrisburg Daily Register.

She tells me that while people might regularly use "busted" in speech to describe the condition of taillights, windows and the like, it does not conform with our newspapers' style down south any more than it does in the Chicago area.

"We use words in their traditional sense," she said.

I do remember the first time a reporter tried to get a "busted window" by me in a news story. I delivered a mild smackdown, and I don't believe she tried that again.

Newspapers are different from books and often different from magazines, though.

A book author might employ a more casual style in a first-person story, and certainly dialogue runs the gamut.

Depending on a magazine's niche, it might allow for more casual words, just as some are exceedingly technical.

But newspapers, by and large, will eschew "busted" when it means broken.

Endangerment

Gail Olley of Naperville read a news story about a man who was missing and was considered "endangered."

"I believe 'in danger' would have been the correct term, unless the man was faced with the danger of extinction - as "endangered species," she wrote.

In the dictionaries I've consulted, to "endanger" is to expose to danger or harm.

But the phrase "endangered species" firmly suggests something at risk of extinction.

Back to plain old "endanger." My interpretation is that it is used to suggest someone or something is putting you in harm's way.

In the case of the missing man, the suggestion was merely that he was missing - not that he was taken away.

So I would agree with Gail that the better word choice is that he was "in danger."

In agreeance

Adults say the darnedest things.

A friend just asked me whether we were in agreeance on an issue.

Whaaaaat?

This is neither a malapropism nor an eggcorn.

"Agreeance" first reared its ugly head in the 1600s - derived from the French "agreance" - and apparently is used in New Zealand. But it is considered a misuse in the U.S. of A.

It flatlines on the Google Ngram Viewer.

So, don't use it.

Are we in agreement on that?

Write carefully!

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