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Last night, while his seersucker cooled on the ironing board, Copy-Editing the Culture poured himself a glass of cold seltzer and settled into the movie pages. To do so, as this column has noted in the past, is often to submit to a depressing truth of modern life: that although this nation's cinematic minds have reinvented film technique, imagined distant corners of the universe, and gotten Julia Roberts to sing, a shocking number can't wield 26 letters and fewer punctuation marks to make grammatical sense. Copy-Editing the Culture was feeling resilient, though, and doughty. Steeling himself with a fresh measure of seltzer, he butterflied the paper and tried to set about making weekend plans. A dog, somewhere, barked with alacrity and purpose.
Disaster followed.
There's a new movie starring Salma Hayek, Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider. The movie is about what happens when a group of friends grows up to be a group of older friends, and it is called—this is when the highball slipped from Copy-Editing the Culture's hand and water spread across his modest breakfast table in a range of Gulf-spill-like geometries—Grown Ups. Just to be clear: That's Grown, space, Ups. What this might mean is a problem of Noam Chomsky-esque proportions. What's fairly certain is that at no stage of the movie's well-funded production did anybody think to check the spelling of the title.
The dictionary that Copy-Editing the Culture happens to be wedded to (not always happily) is Webster's New World College Dictionary: Fourth Edition. It's called "college" because it is intended for, as it were, grown-ups—or, as Webster's also allows, grownups. Never has Copy-Editing the Culture met a prescriptive dictionary that supports Sony's version of the word.
That's because the noun grown ups makes no sense. To grow up—or to push down, to walk toward, to jump up—is a straightforward verb intensified with a preposition. Grown-up is a single noun compounded from those pieces. But what's a grown up? Grammatically, this uncompounded object makes sense only if one is describing an "up" that has grown. And what's an "up"? Does it eat? Need it be socialized?
By the time Copy-Editing the Culture had managed to shake these febrile questions from his mind and throw a roll of Bounty at the fizzing mess, he wanted nothing more to do with grown-ups and their tortured grammar. He's fleeing town to spend the weekend sipping still water and diagramming clauses in the mountains.
Spot a grammar clunker in the cultural limelight? Send it to copyeditingtheculture@gmail.com.
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Just as we're surrounded by a world of micro-organisms—some good, some bad, many imperceptible—our culture is continually under siege by small perversions of the written language. Today, some of the world's nastiest errata appear on marquees and in book titles, burrowing into the innards of an unsuspecting nation. Copy-Editing the Culture collects the most prominent among these to offer both a diagnosis and a cure.
A few months back, Copy-Editing the Culture took on the tortured grammar of the latest Jamie Foxx movie, Law Abiding Citizen, whose title makes sense only in the context of a particularly trippy thought experiment. Our plea for grammatical integrity, though, went unheard: When the film came out on DVD yesterday, it had not one hyphen more of clarity. We are starting to wonder whether Hollywood has priorities besides its parts of speech.
But so it goes. In the meantime, Copy-Editing the Culture has been beset by other horrors. Be Good Johnny Weir, a Sundance TV show, purports to chronicle the high style of an Olympian skater, but in matters of the written language, this unfortunate program has the style of a garment-district trash heap. The crisis here is a missing comma, one that would separate the command be good from the name to which it is addressed, Johnny Weir. Without that crucial punctuation mark, the title describes a show about a man called Be Good Johnny—a zoot suit of a nickname much more likely to land him in a trunk somewhere in Bergen County, N.J., than on the path toward Olympic glory.
And what is one to make of 44 Inch Chest, the gritty U.K. black comedy that seems to have left its hyphen on the toast rack? Does baroque British profanity preclude proper hyphen use? Abso-bloody-lutely not, muppet! Although there is little chance of the title being misunderstood as it is written, 44 Inch functions as a single modifier and thus deserves its own hyphen. Where did Windsor come from, after all, besides the great house of hyphens, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha?
Spot a grammar clunker in the cultural limelight? Send it to copyeditingtheculture@gmail.com.
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Just as we're surrounded by a world of microorganisms—some good, some bad, many imperceptible—our culture is continually under siege by small perversions of the written language. There are errors that help us digest meaning (Boyz n the Hood, Inglourious Basterds), errors that we educate ourselves against (the deli's offering of "sandwichs" could never lead astray a stalwart English major), and errors that, for the most part, go unnoticed (when did you last catch a flubbed subjunctive?). Occasionally, though, disaster strikes. Some of the nastiest errata of our times show up on marquees and in bookstores, burrowing into the innards of an unsuspecting nation. Which crack team of aphasiacs let loose movies with the titles Two Weeks Notice and The Kids Are Alright? What are we to make of Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint's 2007 opus, Come on People?
Recently, while lamenting these and other matters over a pot of coffee and a dish of Weetabix, your culture copy editor flipped open his morning paper and felt the blood drain from his face. Law Abiding Citizen is a new movie starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. It is also—reader, need I really say it?—a grammatical atrocity. Its crime is simple but insidious: no hyphen. Law-Abiding Citizen would have been a movie about good behavior (or, perhaps more likely, an ironic sendup of that conduct). Law Abiding Citizen is a movie about—what? Can law abide a human being? What, exactly, would that look like? Given the movie's vigilante-justice theme, could this be some kind of oblique pun attempt? (Ancillary question: Do oblique pun attempts belong in Jamie Foxx movies?) The ambiguities grow like pathogens across a petri dish. One thing we can be certain of: If any laws are being abided in this action flick, they're not grammatical.
Spot a grammar clunker in the cultural limelight? Send it to copyeditingtheculture@gmail.com.
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