In a Word

September 4, 2012, 8:00 am

By PHILIP B. CORBETT

For the end of summer, here's an extra-large grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.

---

Convention planners were downplaying suggestions early Tuesday that their event might yet be reduced to a single night, saying that while they were keeping a close eye on the storm, they were continuing with their revised schedule full steam ahead.

From The Times's stylebook:

downplay. An ungainly leftover from the age of penny-a-word telegram economies. Make it play down.

---

Through the narrow corridors and battered shelves of the cozy store in the storied Brill Building in Times Square, a knowing worke r will then peruse and (more often than not) find the sheet music, vinyl record or CD the person is looking for.

“Peruse” is not a synonym for search; it means to read or study, and takes a direct object. Not the phrasing we wanted here.

---

Mrs. Ryan's mother struggled with cancer for the last 35 years of her life, first battling advanced melanoma, then breast cancer, then ovarian cancer and a recurrence of the melanoma she thought she had beat.

Make it “had beaten.”

---

Nebraskans approved it by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

Campaign alert: The margin, as the stylebook notes, is “the difference between two values.” “More than 2 to 1″ is a ratio or proportion (and also doesn't need hyphens here).

---

The idea that during rape, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” to prevent pregnancy, as Mr. Akin said, has surfaced periodically among anti-abortion advocates over the past two decades, usually involving the term “forcible rape” to refer to what Mr. Akin called “legitimate.”

Avoid this head-spinning combination of pro and con. “Abortion opponents” is simple and clear.

---

That Mr. Holmes, who is being held in the Arapahoe County jail awaiting arraignment on 142 criminal counts, deteriorated to the point of deadly violence cannot help but raise questions about the adequacy of the treatment he received and about the steps the university took or failed to take in dealing with a deeply troubled student.

The stylebook prefers “cannot help raising.”

---

I first landed at Bank of America not by choice, but by acquisition. Some 20 years ago, I became a customer of Bank South when I moved to Atlanta as a youngish journalist. (My discerning criteria at the time was that it had a branch near my apartment and an A.T.M. near my office.)

“Criteria” is plural. Use “criterion” or choose a different word.

---

Mr. Romney, a Mormon, and Mr. Ryan, a Catholic, also represent a new era in presidential politics: neither are Protestants.

Make it “neither is a Protestant.”

---

Looking back at London 2012 (the closing ceremony is today), watching how the Duchess dressed may very well have been one of the Games' most heavily spectated sports.

The verb “spectate” is probably best avoided, but in any case it's intransitive and shouldn't be used as a passive participle like this. (Also, the introductory phrase here seems to be a dangler.)

---

BOSTON - Mitt Romney read Scripture from his iPad as he juggled his 2-year-old grandson on his lap. He made sure to accept a small piece of white bread and cup of water, representing the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, from a member of the priesthood who looked like he was about to accidentally pass him by.

Avoid this use of “like” as a conjunction. Make it “as if.”

- --

Many criminals in the city are becoming more sophisticated, like using high-tech tools for identity theft and other forms of computer crimes.

A different “like” problem - there's no noun here for the “like” phrase to refer to. Rephrase.

---

Prosecutors loosened howls of indignation. Prominent prosecutorial sorts have written letters in the past month and intimated they will no longer serve on committees if such calumnies stand.

The word we wanted here was “loosed,” meaning “released.”

---

Ms. Brown said her columns and Twitter posts were her own writing - she also has penned two recent Op-Ed articles for The New York Times, one calling Planned Parenthood too ideologically driven, and another saying President Obama can be condescending to women - and dismissed accusations that she was doing anyone else's bidding.

“Penned” is journalese. “Wrote” is perfectly good.

---

One bypasser said as he exited, “Those two really know how to bring the house down.”

Make it “passer-by.”

---

Confident his teammates were on board, he hopped a flight Saturday afternoon.

The idiom used in this sentence about the football player Nick Mangold's trip to London to watch his sister in the Olympics creates unintended ambiguity. Mangold's Jets teammates were figuratively “on board” with his flight, but were not on the plane.

---

“If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, video is worth 5,000 pictures and so to have any sort of raw footage is incredibly helpful to investigators,” said Larry Cunningham, a former Bronx prosecutor who is an associate professor and associate dean at St. John's University School of Law in Queens.

The numeral doesn't work in this phrase. Make it “a thousand words.”

---

Advocates for Mr. Ryan argue that he would be a boon to Mr. Romney on the ballot by cementing in voters' minds an economic v ision for the country that is very different than Mr. Obama's.

Make it “different from.”

---

In that regard, the tax could have enormous symbolic value as a blow for egalité, coming from a new president who has proclaimed, “I don't like the rich.”

If we're going to use French - appropriately enough, in this story about France - we have to get it right, accents and all. Make it “égalité.”

---

You can imagine the Goldstein family's dinner table was a blast, too: debates on the merits of Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln's first vice president, verses John Nance Garner, one of F.D.R.'s three, who famously compared the vice presidency to ”a bucket of warm spit.”

Ouch. Make it “versus.”

---

That feeling may fuel one of the Democrats' great hopes â€" that threats to abortion rights, attacks on Planned Parenthood and objections to the health care law's requirement that insurance plans cover birth control p ills â€" will prove to be more meaningful for single women than jobs plans.

There should not be a second dash here. Better still, streamline the sentence.

---

But Mrs. Fournier, the smoking foe, thinks the soft approach is doomed.

“Foe” means enemy, as the stylebook points out. It's hyperbole in many contexts, where “opponent” would be perfectly adequate.

---

The government fought back hard, with no indication that its far superior military machine had lost its edge against an opposition still working predominately with small-caliber weapons.

As the stylebook says, use “predominantly” as the adverb.

---

[Caption] Mahmoud Shedid, left, Omar Hamed, center, and his brother Abdelrahman Hamed filled up on a pre-dawn meal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Wednesday before their daily Ramadan fast.

The stylebook advises, “Ordinarily close up compounds formed with pre unless the prefix is directly followed by an e or an uppercase letter.” But there is a reason “predawn” does not even appear in our dictionary: it is an unfortunate journalistic cliché of recent vintage.

---

Ms. Gu and the family aide, Zhang Xiaojun, are accused of killing Mr. Heywood in a hotel on the outskirts of Chongqing after what the state media has described as “a conflict of economic interests.”

Monolithic but still plural: make it “media have” (or “news media have”).

---

Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe's résumé includes many impressive accomplishments but not an art history degree. Nonetheless he has been asked to answer a question on which even pre-eminent art experts cannot agree: Are three reputed masterworks of Modernism genuine or fake.

This is a direct question and should end with a question mark.