Reinventing the newspaper

When 'Might' Makes Wrong

Some self-styled sticklers I know, perhaps still smarting at the " 'May' is for permission" lecture they got when they asked "Can I go to the bathroom?" in first grade, insist on changing "may" to "might" whenever they see it used in a non-permission sense. That can be fine -- "I might go to the party" may/might indeed be better than "I may go to the party" -- but it can also screw things up.

Be especially careful when the word "have" is involved. Observe:

"She may have been killed."
"Oh, dear. I hope she just got lost and we hear from her soon."

"She might have been killed."
"So true. Thank goodness she was wearing her seat belt."

(If you read the former example as a quote from a mob boss giving instructions to a hit man, proper English usage is the least of your problems.)

When 'Domestic' Doesn't Mean Domestic

I pointed out in "The Elephants of Style" that Samuel Adams often shows up on bars' lists of "imported" beer, and that phenomenon bubbled up at the tavern where the American Copy Editors Society toasted the conclusion of its recent conference in Philadelphia.

We were given wristbands that entitled us to $3 pints of domestic draft beer, and so I took a look at the taps and pointed to a Pennsylvania microbrew. That would cost more than $3, the bartender told me, adding that " 'Domestic' means Bud, Miller, Coors . . ."

It might be time for the more descriptivist dictionaries to add that:

6. ordinary or inexpensive [domestic beer]

I settled for a Yuengling, brewed in the town of my birth, which might qualify as premium elsewhere but is "domestic" in both senses of the word in Pennsylvania. (Is there a term that means "non-premium" but wouldn't turn off the marketing types? "Regular beer," to follow the gasoline analogy, falls a little short.)

Happy New Decade!

Yes, it's a new decade. Of course it's a new decade. The 2010s by definition include 2010. If this isn't a new decade, 1960 wasn't part of the 1960s (but 1970 was). You're not really going to assert that, are you?

Those who are mounting Walshian objections to this reality are getting it confused with the fact that 2000 wasn't the start of the 21st century or the new millennium. Again, it's a matter of definition: The first century is 1 through 100, the second century is 101 through 200, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on . . .

As I observed 10 years ago, there is a weird disconnect between the way we define centuries and the way we define decades -- and between the two most common ways of referring to centuries. The year 2000 was the start of the decade we call the 2000s, and of the century we call the 2000s, even if the 21st century didn't begin until 2001.

One loyal correspondent raises the question of whether it's the start of the second decade of the 21st century. In-ter-est-ing. On the one hand, it's obviously not (see definition of century above). On the other hand, if the decade we call the 2000s was the first decade of the century, isn't the decade we call the 2010s the second?

Not-Coms

You may well do some of your holiday shopping at Amazon.com or Zappos.com. But I guarantee you that you'll do none at BlueNile.com or eBay.com. Because they don't exist.

Here's the deal: There are names, and there are addresses. It's easy enough not to confuse "Macy's" with "151 W. 34th St.," but things get tricky when you see the same online store referred to as Amazon and Amazon.com and amazon and amazon.com and www.amazon.com and http://www.amazon.com.

Go to www.bluenile.com and you'll see "blue nile" and "Blue Nile" and "Blue Nile Inc.," but you will not see "BlueNile.com" or "Bluenile.com" or "bluenile.com" or "BlueNile" or "bluenile." You'll see "http://www.bluenile.com" only in your browser's address field. Therefore, if you're writing about that store, you must call it "Blue Nile." Call it "Blue Nile (www.bluenile.com)" if you want to help your readers get there.

Go to www.amazon.com, on the other hand, and you'll see "amazon.com" and "Amazon.com" and "Amazon.com Inc." Amazon.com is both the name and the address. Even if the site consistently said "amazon.com," by the way, I would call it Amazon.com. Proper nouns are capitalized. Grant eBay (not eBay.com) a one-letter grace period if you like, as long as it's not at the beginning of a sentence.

If you want to point to a URL within Amazon.com, then you're talking address, and so you'll want to revert to lowercase. Perhaps there's a big Amazon.com sale at www.amazon.com/sale. I like to keep the "www.," if applicable, in such cases, for two reasons: It helps sharpen the distinction between name and address, and it presents more opportunities for a line break if the sentence ends up in a narrow column. Some people like to keep the "http://," especially when there's no "www.," but that strikes me as silly. There will, however, occasionally be times when you'll want "https://" for a secure site.

On a tour of deal-hunting sites, note the difference between not-coms such as Stop It to Me, RetailMeNot and Coupon Sherpa and dot-coms (or -orgs) such as MyBargainBuddy.com and FreeShipping.org.

Some online stores don't know what their names are, leaving you with a judgment call. Go to www.zingsale.com and you'll see "zingsale" and "ZingSale" and "ZingSale.com."  It's usually ZingSale, and so I would call it "ZingSale" or "ZingSale (www.zingsale.com)." Because the name's-the-same dynamic is much tidier, however, it would be an acceptable style decision to take that lone "ZingSale.com" as permission to call the site ZingSale.com. That's the decision I'd make at DealsOfAmerica.com, where the indecision is about 50-50.