Why some may use woman as an adjective

Hélène from France wrote in a comment on the "Woman is not an adjective!" post her thoughts about how so many people began to use the word in the wrong way. "We often use "femme" (woman)for words that do not have any feminine form," she wrote. "For instance : une femme médecin, as you wrote, a "woman doctor." Check out her entire comment here.

For the final time: Woman is not an adjective!

The online version has been corrected, but out on the streets today, there it was in large bold type on the front page of the Toronto Star: Ontario NDP elects first woman leader.

Why would the NDP elect someone to lead women?

Written as such, the headline in question means they elected a leader of women. hile the headline is grammatically incorrect, most people would understand the writer means first female leader. But that doesn't forgive those who insist on using the word woman as an adjective.

For some reason, people who would never dream of using man as an adjective, forget that woman is a noun and write things like "woman doctor" or "woman lawyer."

A woman doctor, for the record, is a gynecologist.

You can make your "point" without "quotation marks"

You can see them everywhere: Somebody "somewhere" who thinks "quotation marks" are "required" for people to "understand" what is "important" in a "sentence."

In the news business, we get all sorts of submissions with totally wrong use of quotation marks. Most of the time, it seems people use them for emphasis of what they think are the key words, when what they really should be using is italics.

Of course, they usually want to emphasize nearly every word, not understanding that people will understand it better without the confusing and wrong punctuation.

Bethany Keeley has been pointing out the misuse of quote marks for a few years now. For a few laughs, spend some time checking out The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Who's to blame ?

There's no doubt the proper use of the language has declined over the past 40 years. Standards have been lowered, parents don't take the time (or have the time) to help their children along, and for too long there has been a reluctance to fail students who don't make the grade (I graduated from college with people who still couldn't string a sentence together -- and this was a journalism program).

Barry Turner has the following opinion:

The culprits are many and varied. The rot set in early in the 1960s when schools adopted a libertarian approach to education which involved giving up on difficult subjects including grammar. Led on by politicians dedicated to mediocrity, (or ‘equality’ to use the accepted term) teachers were encouraged to set standards by the lowest common denominator. The impact on English was catastrophic as the best educationalists soon came to recognise. But it is easier to destroy than to build and the return to formal and effective learning still has a long way to go. One has only to listen to the delegates to an NUT conference to know that for many teachers clarity of thought let alone clarity of language is way beyond their capacity. Dimly aware of their failings, the incompetents look to technology to compensate for poor linguistic skills. We are now committed to making our children computer literate; no matter that most are illiterate in every other sense.

The decline of English language teaching in schools had its knock-on effect on academia. A recent survey found that nine out of ten graduates submit applications that are full of spelling and grammatical errors. Are we surprised? Pupils who are unable to express themselves clearly become students who are unable to express themselves clearly. Worse still, some then become university and college lecturers. To judge their standard of communication refer to any book list for higher learning.

You can read the whole article here.

Let's get it right

It's incredibly frustrating to see someone write "1970's." Or "lets play ball." Or "Cleveland rock's." Or "Its a Wonderful Life."

The above should, of course, be written as: "1970s," "let's play ball," "Cleveland rocks" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

The improper use of commas is prevalent -- and it's getting worse, particularly as so many people think apostrophe-S makes a plural word. They can be tricky, but it's really not that difficult to use them properly. The easiest way to remember the proper use of apostrophes is that they are used to denote possession or exclusion.

To explain a couple of the examples found above:

• Its is possessive, while It's is the contraction of It and Is (It is a wonderful life).
• Lets (allows) and Let's (the contraction of "let us," as in "let us play ball).

Just think of it this way:

• If you are removing letters, use an apostrophe in their place (let 'er rip, rock 'n' roll).
• If you are writing the possessive form of a singular word, add apostrophe-S (Cleveland's airport, Ohio's embarrassment).
• To make a plural word possessive, add the apostrophe after the S (Residents' anger, parents' pride).

And if you are simply making a word plural, just add an S.