Grammar Moses: Homicide or hospitality? Depends on the order

Cut me up and throw me out the window a piece of cake.

No, seriously, please do. Right now, I'm jonesing for a nice piece of cake, but I'm not about to cross your threshold to retrieve it.

Social distancing, you know.

"My mother had a language arts teacher who loved to make a point by using outrageous examples," wrote Carol Huntley. The cake example was hers.

Here's another: "Throw dad downstairs his hat."

And everyone's favorite, courtesy of chanteuse Patti Page:

Throw mama from the train a kiss, a kiss

Wave mama from the train a goodbye

Throw mama from the train a kiss a kiss

And don't cry, my baby, don't cry ...

If you remember the song, that subtle pause between the first and second lines leaves a whisper of doubt over whether Patti was advocating a murderous act or a loving one.

A few years ago I responded to a reader's question about the following passage in a story about actor Val Kilmer and his plans to visit Tombstone, Arizona: "Kilmer announced he would be coming to Arizona in August on Facebook, the Sierra Vista Herald reported Thursday."

Kilmer, who played the wan, tuberculosis-afflicted dentist and gunslinger Doc Holliday in the film "Tombstone," did ride a horse in the movie, but I reckon the horse's name was something other than "Facebook."

There is an order of things in building a sentence, you see.

In "Throw Momma From the Train," a Danny DeVito movie whose title is based on the Page song but whose plot is an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers On a Train," director DeVito gives life (or is it death?) to that pregnant pause in Page's singing.

Misplaced parenthetical phrases and modifiers will really gum up the works.

That syntax might make no sense to your ear, but it would to German immigrants. Germans put objects and verbs in different places in a sentence than we do in English.

If you're still waiting for how to salvage that Val Kilmer sentence, try: "Kilmer announced via Facebook he would be coming to Arizona in August."

The pope of all

Sometimes a reader's point requires little clarification or elaboration. This is one of those times.

"In a column written a couple of weeks ago you wrote, 'The pope of all people lives in an apartment,'" Bill Saylor wrote, hinting at my lack of commas. "Isn't 'the pope, of all people, lives in an apartment' better usage? I am assuming you wanted to stress that the pope, in spite of his stature, lives in an apartment rather than a private residence. The gentleman with the large hat might be the pope of all Catholics, but not the pope of all people everywhere."

Your permeant record

Ken Juranek sent me a photo in which the word "permanent" was misspelled.

I wonder: Does something that is "permeant" permeate everything it touches ... forever?

While "permeant" was a misspelling in that case, it actually is a word. As a noun, it's a substance that can pass through or into a membrane or polymer.

Axe me no questions

Sports columnist Barry Rozner reads this column, or at least he leads me to believe he does, and asked whether I objected to this name drop in his column: "That has to go to ESPN's 'World Axe Throwing Championship,' which the four-letter network does spell with an 'e' at the end of 'ax.'

If our own 'Grammar Moses' has a problem with that, and there's little doubt Jim Baumann will be disturbed, he can take it up with the network."

Putting me in a sports column is akin to giving the Harlem Globetrotters a guest spot on "Gilligan's Island."

I am disturbed, Barry, but only slightly. Were ESPN based in England, where "axe" is the standard spelling, that would be fine. Because it's based in New England, however, it is not.

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.