Scott's Pet Peeve #1013

Scott Hardie | October 14, 2017
I'm a stickler about punctuation. Rock Block players may have noticed. I can tolerate people calling me a child of the '80s because that's technically correct if unnecessarily abbreviated, but don't you dare call me a child of the 80's, because no.

That's why it bugs me every time I see written references to some old sci-fi series called The X-Files. What is that show? I've never heard of it. I have heard of a similarly-titled series called The X Files spelled without a hyphen, and that show is great.

The seasons 1-8 title didn't have a hyphen:



The season 9 title didn't have a hyphen:



The revival series uses the classic opening credits, but the promotional materials don't have a hyphen:



Nor does the first movie, which had its own one-off logo:



You could say that the logos were stylized to hide the hyphen. But the problem is, the people who made the show did not spell it with a hyphen. I've seen references to this time and again over the years, and it just came up again a few minutes ago, inspiring this little pet-peeve rant. I was looking at prop auctions online and came upon this set of call sheets (click to zoom):



"The X Files" is written pretty clearly right there. This is the something like the tenth time I've seen or heard that production and creative staff spelled the show without a hyphen. The hyphen is entirely an invention/misunderstanding of the general public, but it's deeply entrenched at this point. Only a few of us sticklers for punctuation seem to realize that the truth is out there.

Are there any other pop-culture punctuation errors like this (or perhaps errors of spelling or grammar instead) that bug you?

Samir Mehta | October 14, 2017
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Scott Hardie | October 14, 2017
Ha! It's true, a decade can own things. But it almost never does in the way that most people use that spelling, and even if it did, they're using the singular (80's) and not plural (80s') punctuation. Calling me a child of the 80's would mean that an 80 owned me, whatever that means.

I have my own unofficial style manual in my head for Funeratic. You folks can spell things however you want in your comments, but in my comments and all official text that's part of the site, I try to have consistent spelling and punctuation. (For instance, RB always has "artists" now, not "cards." RB was called a "card game" last time but I've tried to drop the card terminology completely.) Anyone paying attention to punctuation, which is probably nobody but me, may have noticed that when I need to make a possessive out of a name ending in s, I add an apostrophe-s instead of just an apostrophe, like "Chris's goo" instead of "Chris' goo." This habit came from a number of English professors who insisted that "Chris' goo" would be the British way to spell it, and "Chris's goo" would be the American way to spell it, though many Americans incorrectly use the British method, just as many Americans also mistakenly write the color as "grey" (British) instead of "gray" (American). Sticking to the American possessive is easier for me to code anyway, as I can write $firstname."'s goo" instead of $firstname."'".(substr($firstname, strlen($firstname) - 1) == 's' ? '' : 's')." goo" which would be annoying to write out every time.

Scott Hardie | October 15, 2017
Another pop-culture pet peeve of mine: Smashing Pumpkins becoming "The" Smashing Pumpkins. The band themselves had it right at first, but eventually caved to public insistence on the wrong phrase and adopted it as their name.

The term "smashing pumpkins," taken of course from the classic teenager prank, has the word smashing as the subject. The band is named after the act of smashing some pumpkins, which makes sense.

But when you say "the smashing pumpkins," the word pumpkins is the subject. Said this way, the band is named after pumpkins that smash. This makes no sense: Pumpkins are inanimate objects and cannot smash on their own, nor are they used as tools with which to smash things, nor can they "look smashing" or fit any other sense of the word. What in the hell is a smashing pumpkin?

Just because so many bands are called "The [plural noun]" does not mean that a band name ending in a plural noun must start with a definite article. Go ask Eagles, who have fought all of their career to stop being called The Eagles.

If you want to keep the band named after the act of smashing pumpkins but put the word "the" in front, they would have to be "The Smashing of Pumpkins." That just sounds pretentious, but I wouldn't put it past Billy Corgan to try it out in one of his dumbass fits of Victoriana.

Samir Mehta | October 15, 2017
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Erik Bates | October 15, 2017
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Scott Hardie | October 20, 2017
Yeah, maybe I was wrong to assume that the expectation for possessives ending in s is a mere apostrophe ("Chris' goo") when I wrote the above. I'm so used to seeing it spelled that way everywhere that it doesn't occur to me that plenty of people know that it's wrong. I'm sorry about that.

Yeah, that "Steeler's" thing would irritate me too. Kelly and I frequently drive by this business and notice every time.

I definitely agree about -itis and -holic. Some people are just addicted to inflaming us with poor word choices.

I adopted a habit years ago that defies proper capitalization rules and I have come to regret it: Spelling the word TV in lower-case. Harlan Ellison started spelling it "tv" because he disdained the medium and refused to glorify it with capital letters, and I thought that was a nice little idea and copied it. I started doing this back in the very early 2000s, as the golden age of TV was just starting and so much of its programming was pure garbage. It's strange how now in 2017, television is full of more great drama than we can possibly keep up with, while movies are slowly digging their own grave with their all-blockbusters-all-the-time business model. I hereby choose to spell the term correctly.

Samir Mehta | October 20, 2017
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Denise Sawicki | October 22, 2017
I don't like when people say "is is", as in "The thing is, is that I tried this before..." I did not know there was a name for this.

Double copula

Scott Hardie | October 23, 2017
I like how that article drops Wikipedia's typical objectivity to indicate just how unpopular the practice is. :-)

To say that the second "is" is unnecessary is to miss the forest for the trees: The entire preceding clause is unnecessary. Whether it takes the form of "the thing is" or "the point is" or "here's the thing," prefacing a sentence like that is useless. Just say the next part of the sentence by itself and the point will stand. Using that phrase is a sign of disorganized thoughts, especially in writing where one should take one's time.

But of course, I say that having written the phrase many times myself. :-)

Scott Hardie | November 4, 2017
Do you think hyphens don't matter? They do.

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2017
Another local business (really a Floridian chain restaurant) that I drive past all the time has too many apostrophes in their name. I have no idea what that first apostrophe is supposed to represent, since it's not an omitted letter nor is it an anglicization of an Irish naming scheme, but Wikipedia editors refuse to acknowledge it.

Samir Mehta | December 2, 2017
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Scott Hardie | December 3, 2017
As in, there's a business out there with the same name except for the superfluous apostrophe? Perhaps, but I would have no idea how to search for such a thing online. :-)

Chris Lemler | December 3, 2017
One of my pet peeves is your workers throwing you under the bus. You think they are your co workers but, more like backstabbers.

Scott Hardie | December 8, 2017
I'm really sorry to hear that. :-(

Scott Hardie | March 23, 2023
When it comes to the written word, another pedantic little pet peeve of mine is a failure to capitalize the first letter in Buffalo wings. They are named for the city, folks! Few people would spell them "dallas wings" or "st. louis wings" or "tucson wings" if they came from elsewhere, but somehow, coming from a city that shares its name with an animal, albeit an animal well-known to be devoid of wings, leads to them being misspelled "buffalo wings" – which, as the error spreads, leads people to wonder if they're named for the animal, despite its prominent lack of wings. Oy.

Scott Hardie | April 3, 2023
I guess it's a good thing that Buffalo wings were not invented in Phoenix.

Evie Totty | April 3, 2023
LOL I read the whole thing just now.

Excessive use of "that" is a pet peeve of mine. Affects/effects.

Of course "loose" instead of "lose" - especially now that it's been addressed so much I feel everyone should know by now.

I will say it pains me to not italicize sometimes on here, but I use this via mobile 99% of the time and the markup is painful.

Fun read!