fricfoy, October 15, 1976
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publicans reruse m sp
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Dy Theodore M. Bernstein
That certain party. Since the mkl-1950's some Repub
licans have refused to speak of the Democratic party
and insisted on calling it the Democrat party The idea
apparently was to avoid giving the impression that the
Republicans conceded that their rival party was truly
democratic. However, the trouble is, as Russell Dakcr
has pointed out in one of his columns in The New York
barnstein on words
Times, .that the phrase accomplishes nothing except
to make the Republicans using it sound both illiterate and
coy. Isn't it about time for the phrase to be dropped by
the Republic party? -
A comma that can go to. Yhether to put a comma ahead
of the word too when it ends a sentence is a problem
that bothers George Economaki of Des Rloines, Iowa, and
he asks whether there is a rule that applies to that situa
tion. We are aware of no rule that tells writers what to
do in such a sentence. Most often, however, the comma is
not used ahead of a final too. No comma would usually
appear in a sentence such as, "Johnny went to the store
"Big Eed" cans of
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and Mary went too," and certainly one would not appear
in a construction such as, "Me too. When too In the
sense of also appears in the middle of a sentence, however,
it is customarily set off by commas; for example: "More
taxes will have to be pakl and probably more forms will
have to be filled out, too, under the new law," '
Ready? A columnist in Variety criticized some ad writers
quite properly for having turned out the line "Nestea is
also in ready-to-drink cans." As he pointed out, the cans
are not ready to drink. Ready-to-wear clothes are clothes
that are ready to wear, but ready-to-drink cans are not
cans that are ready to drink. Maybe the ad writers should
have made it Mready-to-drink-outa" cans.
Problem of the times. A question in a physics test that
was reprinted in a newspaper recently raised a question of
usage that caused at least two readers to write critical
letters. In essence the question began, "If that distance is
made 3 times larger than it now is . . . The readers
argued that "three times larger than means "four times
as large as," which is not what the test meant to say. They
contended that "three times larger than" one is four since
three times one is three, and that amount added to one
ie., producing a "larger than" total-would make four.
They maintain that the wording should have been "three
times as large as." Something that is three times as large
as one is three. Certainly as far as common usage is con
cerned and perhaps also as far as technical mathemati-
MOW tAJIS-A
cal usage is concerned the readers' contention is correct.
It's a tricky question, but obviously there is a difference
between the two wordings that should be kept in mind.
Selfless A reader in Salt Lake City deplores what he calls
the change in usage that has turned a pronoun that he
Vket-hisself into himself. No such change ever took
place. In old English him selfum was the dative singular
of he self. There never was any possessive element in the
term or any such pronoun as hisself.
Word oddities. A comma indicates a separation or a
pause in writing. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that
the word derives frcm the Greek root koptein, to cut
off. With that we wiH koptein this column.
Id 1373 Theodora HI. Dcmflcsn
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