Grammar Blunders and Journalistic Discourtesy

Nearly every week some journalist calls me, always on a tight schedule, to get a quote for some story about language or grammar. I help whenever I can, despite knowing that most likely they will slightly misrepresent me, and will not alert me when or if the story appears. Last week I helped Katie Morley of The Telegraph with a story about a supposed grammar error on a banknote. In the story that appeared, which ignored my advice, two linguistic errors of hers appeared in a quote allegedly from me, making me look illiterate.

The story claimed that “a major grammar blunder” appeared on the new plastic £5 sterling banknote. The published draft version of the design had a picture of Sir Winston Churchill, and below it a famous wartime saying of his enclosed in double quotation marks but without sentence-final punctuation:

The design was later revised slightly, and the note went into production without the quotation marks, thus:

I find one fault with this: I’d prefer an Oxford comma after “tears” (the line as Fred Shapiro quotes it in The Yale Book of Quotations has that comma). But this is a minor point, because the Oxford comma is famously optional. There are no actual errors.

Morley, though, had linguistically uninformed sources telling her otherwise. She asked me two questions: (1): Isn’t it a grammar mistake to omit the sentence-final period? And (2): Isn’t it a grammar mistake to omit the quotation marks?

I had clear and decisive negative answers for her on both points. First, I pointed out that although a period (or other sentence-ending mark) is normally required at the end of a declarative sentence in running text, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere, as in headlines, photo captions, T-shirt mottos, tombstone inscriptions, advertisement slogans, or items in bulleted lists.

A very clear example, I observed, is provided by article-subtitle policy in The Economist. Subtitles never end with periods. Even in a subtitle composed of two sentences, only the first has a period (because it’s part of a text); the last one does not (because it ends the whole text, which is a subtitle, and subtitles don’t have final periods). Thus the first editorial in the April 22 issue, headed “Game Change,” has this subtitle:

And the fourth, headed “Whack-a-Passenger,” has this one:

Advertising slogans with no sentence-final punctuation can be illustrated from the same source. Page 2 of the April 22 Economist has a full-page advertisement containing the sentence “Discover the potential” (no period); and Page 41 has an ad making the punctuationless assertion “2 billion potential customers are waiting for you online” (again, no period). These are not errors; the slogans are not embedded in connected prose. An isolated quotation on a banknote could be typeset under a similar style policy.

Morley’s second point was similarly easy to answer. Quotation marks serve a purpose when they separate quoted speech from surrounding text. But around an isolated famous remark inscribed below a portrait of the utterer, they serve no purpose; they’re mere typographical clutter. It isn’t a grammar error to eschew them.

I took a few minutes of my time to explain all this very clearly over the phone. But the next morning I wished we had worked by email, because on the paper’s website I was quoted thus:

Morley had omitted the apostrophe of “it’s obvious” and incorrectly capitalized the adjective “great.” The mostly conservative (indeed, mostly Conservative) readers of The Telegraph would doubtless think I had sent her an illiterate email. They would be itching to find fault anyway, because they love finding “grammar errors,” and I was denying them that pleasure. Morley was supplying them with live ammunition by injecting errors into my words.

I sent her an angry email saying she had damaged my reputation and I was preparing to lawyer up. She never answered (standard journalist rudeness), but at some time between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. the story on the website (see it here) was silently corrected. I’m glad it was. But I won’t be so ready to take Katie Morley’s phone call next time a “grammar blunder” story comes up.