Grammar Moses: Prep yourself. This will take just a few minutes.

If I were to tell you I'd be writing today about prep time, would you assume I'd launch into a recipe for shoofly pie or that I was excited about something going on in the world of high school sports?

It likely depends on whether you have kids in high school or you enjoy baking for your diabetic enemies in the senior club.

"Your front page headline 'Our Salute to Prep Sports' had me buffaloed for awhile," wrote Dave Hammer. "I said to myself, 'What is the "prep" in prep sports?' I found a definition of 'preparatory school' in Merriam-Webster: 'a usually private school preparing students for college.'

"A little research in newspaperarchive.com revealed the first use of 'prep sports' in the Herald: 'The Palatine varsity five ... passed out of prep sports last spring' appeared Jan. 2, 1942."

Google's Ngram Viewer shows the emergence of "prep sports" in books in 1941, and after a bit of an up-and-down the phrase grew pretty consistently between 1980 and 2000.

"High school sports" was far more popular during that time, however.

Dave was bothered that neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster provides a definition for "prep" as shorthand for "high school" in the phrase "high school sports."

I told Dave that our sports editor from 1942 has long since passed, but I'm friends with the guy who replaced him.

Bob Frisk joined the paper in 1958, and he was our sports editor for decades.

"Wow! You do, indeed, have some sharp readers," Bob wrote. "This guy's research was astounding. I must admit I have never given any serious thought to 'prep' and why it is used other than it was there when I started at the Herald in 1958. And it is still used throughout the country. If it was good enough for Bob Paddock Sr. to use back then in the early '40s and then '50s as our high school reporter, it was good enough for me who followed him."

Frisk, who always went the extra mile for the paper, let me know about some words that didn't quite survive the change in millennia.

"I also inherited some words from Bob like thinclads (track and field), harriers (cross country), cagers (basketball) and matmen (wrestling,) but those have faded with time," he wrote. "'Cager,' the informal basketball player, actually was prominent in the very early days because the sport used to be played in cages."

Art of headline writing

"2 teens charged in August killings of Fenger High School students found shot to death in Far South Side field."

David Harding emailed me this headline from another newspaper.

"Do you find it as confusing as I do?" he wrote.

"For some reason I had difficulty recognizing at first glance that 'found shot to death in Far South field' was meant to modify 'students,' not 'teens.' Regardless of what formal grammar rules may say, it seems to me that there is ambiguity. I think that what disorients me is having modifying phrases for 'students' appearing on both sides of the noun.

Let's walk through this headline by stripping it down: 2 teens charged in killings of students found shot to death in field.

Yes, it is ambiguous. As written, it sounds like the teen killers were found shot to death in some sort of revenge killing.

I don't know what the headline configuration was, but headline writers always have to contend with the constraints of space. One can't simply reduce the type size a bunch to fit more words in.

I can improve on the headline by adding words that headline writers generally leave out to make things fit.

With this headline, it's clear what modifies whom:

"2 teens charged in killings of Fenger High School students who were found shot to death in Far South Side field."

I removed "August," figuring it was the least important detail, in favor of adding "who were" to provide clarity and keeping the count about the same. To save space, one also could drop "High School" and just write "Fenger students."

If there had been other killings of students at that school, "August" would help to differentiate.

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.