Does your group use shibboleths? Plus, I'll help you avoid common embarrassing greeting card mistakes. | Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe | Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. https://j.mp/3oooKmK | Peeve Wars card game. http://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/grammar-girl-s-peeve-wars | Grammar Girl books. bit.ly/GrammarPopBooks | HOST: Mignon Fogarty | VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) | Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. | Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. | Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Does your group use shibboleths? Plus, I'll help you avoid common embarrassing greeting card mistakes.
|
Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
|
Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. https://j.mp/3oooKmK
|
Peeve Wars card game. http://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/grammar-girl-s-peeve-wars
|
Grammar Girl books. bit.ly/GrammarPopBooks
|
HOST: Mignon Fogarty
|
VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
|
Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
|
Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.
|
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl
http://twitter.com/grammargirl
http://facebook.com/grammargirl
http://pinterest.com/realgrammargirl
http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl
https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.
Today, I'm answering a couple of listener questions, and then I'll help you avoid embarrassing mistakes in all your holiday correspondence.
I'll start with a quick answer to a question from Melissa about a pronunciation in last week's show.
Bag/Beg Merger
"Hi Mignon. It's Melissa. I called you before with the familect story, but that's not why I'm calling today. I am listening to your latest episode on the podcast, and you're talking about tag questions, and I'm actually an English teacher, and I've always called them tag questions spelled TAG. but you call them 'tag question' almost pronounced like T-E-G, teg question, and I called them tag question. What's the difference? Are they the same. Are we just both talking about the same thing? Do you just pronounce it differently? Or do I pronounce it differently? I'm just wanted to clarify. Thanks, Mignon. Happy holidays. I love your podcast."
Thanks, Melissa! People comment on my pronunciation of words like this a lot. Craig from Wake Forest, North Carolina, called about it a couple of years ago, and I actually did a whole segment about it back in 2018.
I have a regional pronunciation that's most common in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and in western Canada that linguists call the "bag-beg merger." It means that when I talk about bagging my groceries and begging for mercy, the words sound the same. It's actually hard for me to say it the way you say it. "Bag?" "Bag?"
I don't know why people who live where I grew up pronounce "bag"-type words this way, but an interesting thing about it is that it only seems to happen before the letter G, so you hear it when I say "aggravate," "dragonfly," and now "tag question," which is the same thing you are talking about when you tell your students about them, but pronounced differently. Thanks for asking! And if anyone wants to know a little more about the bag-beg merger, you can check out episode 628 from July of 2018, and a related episode about the pin-pen merger, #612, from March of 2018 is also interesting.
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Shibboleth
A few of you asked what I meant a couple of weeks ago when I said that the pronunciation of Berlin, Connecticut, is a shibboleth.
A shibboleth is a word or phrase you can use to identify someone who is or isn't part of your group.
The word "shibboleth" itself was an old Hebrew word meaning both "ear of corn" and "flood or stream," and the way we use it today in the in-group-out-group way comes from the Biblical story of the Gileadites, who used the word to identify and kill Ephraimites. The Ephraimites could not pronounce the "sh" sound, so "shibboleth" came out sounding wrong, like "sibboleth," making them instantly identifiable as they were trying to cross military lines.
And militaries and mobs have used pronunciation differences many times over the years to identify enemies or outsiders. For example, in 1937, as many as 35,000 Haitian immigrants were killed in the Dominican Republic on order of the dictator, Rafael Trujillo, in what is called the Parsley Massacre. The story is ultimately unconfirmed, but it's called the Parsley Massacre because Dominicans and Haitians pronounce the word for "parsley" differently, and supposedly the Dominican troops held up a piece of parsley and killed anyone who pronounced it the Haitian way.
In a less violent example, just like people in Berlin, Connecticut, can identify an outsider when we call the city "Berlin," when I lived in Nevada, when we heard people pronounce the state name "Nev-ah-dah," we knew they weren't locals. Houston Street in New York is another one I've messed up in the past, pronouncing it like the Texas city, Houston.
Groups can also use shibboleths to help identify people who are in the same group in an under-the-radar sort of way. For example, members of Alcoholics Anonymous can refer to each other as "friends of Bill W." referring to the group's founder Bill Wilson.
Years ago, when I was on a cruise, I saw multiple evening meetings on the activity schedule for friends of Bill W., and I didn't know what it was, so I thought, "Wow, that Bill guy must really be something to have his friends getting together so often." I actually wondered if it was part of a funeral or something. Ah, those poor people, they really miss their friend Bill.
So that's a shibboleth—any pronunciation, word, or phrase you can use to identify someone as part of some kind of group or class.
———
Greeting Card Grammar
If you're getting ready to write your holiday newsletter, cards, or invitations, I'm here to help you avoid some of the most common problems!
Making names plural is one of the most common questions to come up around the holidays.
Some names are easy, like "Brown." You just add an -s like you would to any common noun. "The Browns invite you to dinner." B-R-O-W-N-S.
But when you get to names that end in -s, -z, -ch, -sh, and -ss, it gets trickier.
Fortunately, the same rule applies for all these names: you add -es to make them plural.
The Joneses are coming for dinner. J-O-N-E-S-E-S.
The Alvarezes always decorate their house beautifully. A-L-V-A-R-E-Z-E-S.
The Birches make the best cinnamon apple cake. B-I-R-C-H-E-S.
And so on with the Marshes and the Besses—they both also end in -es.
People also sometimes wonder how to make names that end in -y or -i plural, like my last name, Fogarty.
They're both the same as those easy names, like Brown: you just add an -s.
The Fogartys meant to decorate their tree on Thanksgiving, but didn't get around to it. F-O-G-A-R-T-Y-S (not -ies as people are sometimes tempted to write).
The Aldis are making pasta with fish on Christmas Eve. A-L-D-I-S. (And—side note—both words of "Christmas Eve" are capitalized because it's a holiday.)
Next, remember you don't use an apostrophe to make names plural.
You use an apostrophe to make names possessive, and when the name is already plural, you just put an apostrophe on the end, no extra -s.
For example, let's say you went to visit the Alvarezes, and then you wanted to write a letter telling your mom about their wonderful house. To make "Alvarezes" possessive, you add an apostrophe to the end, so you would write “Mom, you should have seen the Alvarezes' house!” A-L-V-A-R-E-Z-E-S-apostrophe.
The Birches' cake is the best.
The Besses' always get their decorations up early.
The Marshes' party got canceled at the last minute.
The Joneses' children are coming home for break this year.
Next, we've talked about this before, but compound possession can come up in invitations, so I'll go over it again. Imagine that Aardvark and Squiggly live in the same house, and they are inviting people over for dinner. The location you are inviting people to is Aardvark and Squiggly's house—with only one apostrophe-s. Because they share the house, they share one apostrophe-s.
If Aardvark and Squiggly live in different houses, and they are having a progressive dinner where they go from one house to the next, then the location on the invitation would read "Aardvark's and Squiggly's houses." They don't share the house, so they can't share an apostrophe-s. Both names need an apostrophe-s: Aardvark's and Squiggly's houses.
Next, if you're writing an end-of-the-year letter, you might be interested in a bet that Laura and her husband John asked me to settle. Their question is how to write a salutation: How do you write something like “Hi, Squiggly”?
It seems straightforward, but unfortunately, it's not. Although most people seem to think "hi" is just a friendly substitute for "dear," it's not. "Dear" is an adjective, but "hi" is an interjection just like the words "yes," and "oh."
So technically "Hi, Squiggly" is a complete sentence that begins with an interjection, and an interjection at the beginning of a sentence is followed by a comma. So the correct way to write this is “Hi, Squiggly.” You could also put an exclamation point at the end, depending on how excited you feel about the greeting.
The problem is that almost nobody knows that greetings should be punctuated this way, so it looks weird when you do it right. In fact, it's extremely rare to see an e-mail salutation that uses a comma after the "hi."
I'm always torn about whether to use the comma. It is correct, but it feels pedantic given the widespread use of the incorrect alternative —especially when you are replying to someone who has already done it the "wrong" way. Use your own judgment. I usually put it in, but I do it grudgingly and mostly out of habit these days, and you'll be in good company if you leave it out.
Finally, I mentioned already that "Christmas Eve" is capitalized, and I'll end with some other holiday-related words.
"Hanukkah" is also capitalized, but it has multiple spellings. The AP Stylebook and The Chicago Manual of Style recommend H-A-N-U-K-K-A-H, so that's what I use.
"Yuletide" and "Christmastime" are both one word and are both capitalized.
"New Year's Eve" and "New Year's Day" are both capitalized and both have apostrophes in the word "Year's." "New Year's resolution" also has an apostrophe, but the word "resolution" is lowercase.
And "season's greetings" also takes an apostrophe.
Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they are happy.
And finally, keeping with the holiday theme, I have a familect story from Jules.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Jules from Michigan City, Indiana. My familect story involves my youngest daughter who is now 22 years old. When she is very little, she called candy cane 'candy cans.' It was so cute that our entire family to start calling candy canes candy cans every Christmas until she was about seven years old. I was carpooling her and her friends to swim practice, and she pulled candy canes out of her backpack and offered her friends some candy cans, and you can imagine the rest of the story. My daughter has yet to forgive me fully, but in my defense, candy cans is way cuter than candy canes. Love your show and your books. Keep it up."
Thanks, Jules. I love those stories about kids realizing they're the only one who uses the family's name for something.
If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL, and I might play it on the show.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find articles that go with each podcast segment at my website, QuickAndDirtyTips.com.
Thanks to my audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and my editor, Adam Cecil. Our operations and editorial manager is Michelle Margulis, and our assistant manager is Emily Miller. Our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.