Grammar Moses: I have had it!

Last month I wrote about when you might string together "had" more than once in a sentence.

That inspired reader Keith Evans to nine-up me.

"Someone gave me a book years ago called 'Games for the Super-Intelligent,'" he told me. "The challenge was to punctuate the following to make sense:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

This book is not in my personal library, and I doubt whether any self-respecting librarian would allow me to check it out.

That's my explanation for not checking Keith's work. He says he memorized the solution, which his hippocampus has tucked away for 40 years.

Wrap your brain around this, based on the scenario that James and John were being tested on the use of "had" or "had had" and James correctly used "had had":

James, while John had had "had" had had "had had." "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

That's 11 hads in a row.

In the spirit of one-upsmanship, once I was able to make sense of Keith's answer, I said, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!"

If this is what Keith does for fun, I imagine he willingly watched last Sunday's ENTIRE Bears/Saints football game and that his choice of gridiron snacks was a bowl of unsalted plantain chips washed down with cucumber water.

Timeout!

Imagine a world in which football fans also are interested in grammar and usage issues. Is this heaven?

"I am interested in clarifying the plural of 'time out' in regards to football terminology," wrote Steve McDowell. "If a team has more than one time out left, grammatically correct would be 'times out.' Is that proper English language?

"The example I have seen on Google compares this to the plural of 'passerby,' as 'passersby.' This has been an ongoing conversation between me and football friends for many years!"

Steve, I'm penalizing you 15 yards for roughing the parser. (Insert groan here.)

I hope you didn't wager too much with your buddy on the outcome of my response.

"Timeouts" as one word has become the proper term. Even the AP Stylebook says so.

That is the simple answer.

But even if it were two words, it would be "time outs" rather than "times out." The former is the standard way to pluralize something.

When you get into attorneys general, mothers-in-law and editors-in-chief, you're talking about nonstandard forms of pluralization.

This occurs a lot in words derived from French and Latin. It should come as no surprise, then, that it's big in legal and military arenas.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy of "The Maltese Falcon" is a femme fatale, but coupled with Oscar Wilde's Salome, you have two femmes fatales.

If you were an out-of-work poet who also had an advanced degree in metallurgy, you might prepare two curricula vitae for your job search rather than one curriculum vitae that most of us less well-rounded folks might.

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.