I, rebel: When the urge to break the rules can’t be resisted

To many of you, I apologize in advance for the following column. Some of you, I bet, will feel my pain.

As a rule, I follow rules, especially when it comes to issues related to writing. But I’ve long felt the need to confess a sin against the Associated Press Stylebook and against a growing, if not fully grown, acceptance of a violation of lexical logic.

It may seem petty to you, and I’m sorry if so. But for many of us who deal in the realm of words, even small annoyances repeated often enough can become a form of dripping water torture and demand that we rebel and speak out.

I have a few of these, but will do you the favor of keeping most of them to myself. One, however, I feel compelled at last to bring out of the grammatical closet.

It is “under way.” Not only was I taught as a child that the phrase was adverbial, intended to modify a verb to show a sense of motion — The project is under way. Our vacation got under way right on time. — but it also made logical sense. You testify under oath. Detectives might put you under investigation. The road is under construction.

You would never think to combine those phrases into a single word and expect it to make sense — underoath, underinvestigation, underconstruction. Nor in speech, would you pronounce such words emphasizing the first syllable as you would pronounce a typical noun beginning with “under.”

Consider each of these: undertow, underwear, underbelly, underarm, undercurrent, underdog, underground, underneath, underpass, understated, underrated, underway.

Which of these words, to borrow from a most reliable educational model, is not like the others?

UNderway, of course. No one says, “The project got UNderway,.” No more than one would say, “He testified UNderoath,” or “The road is UNderconstruction.” Everyone would say UNder WAY, with equal stress on the “un” and the “way” which is a separate word. We get the job UNder WAY, not UNderway, as if we were going to UNderscore it as we went through the UNderpass. It’s two words. Two.

And, yet Associated Press style and an increasing body of grammarians insist that the public’s growing tendency to illogically blend the two words together make the single word “underway” the preferred form.

So, I try. Honestly, I do. But every time I see the one-word “underway” in copy I’m editing or writing myself, my fingers quiver over the keyboard, and I begin to sweat guiltily, like a dedicated carpenter being ordered to miter inside corners when he knows that coping the joint is stronger and more elegant.

And sometimes, yes, I cope the joint. I ignore AP’s insistence in spell check that “under way” be squished into a single term. I break apart an inelegant (or rule-bound) writer’s “underway” into a satisfying two-word phrase.

Under way.

Ahhhh. I can’t help myself.

I did it today in a syndicated column I edited. I don’t think anyone but our spellcheck system noticed. If you’re a hidebound grammarian, I apologize. But if you’re a rebel like me, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World” has been named a Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association and is available at eckhartzpress.com.