Even better, though, was Barrett's online talkback to some of the commenters on the piece, who'd been invited to contribute buzzwords (but often chose peeves instead). One of them offered a complaint I'd also heard from readers, about "the word 'so' to begin a sentence."  He got a swift (but polite) reality check:

Sentence-initial “so” has had a long run as a discourse marker in English. I’ve had a number of people swear to me that it’s more common than it used to be, but the data show it isn’t. I think some folks are just paying more attention as they grow older and wiser, so it only seems like they’re hearing it more.

If you took this as an opportunity to peeve about language rather than find something joyful and exciting in it, then, I fear, you have fallen out of love with the best tool you ever had.

Amen to that. But hostility is the default option in so many comment threads that people may now think a peeve (like a shower gift) is the expected contribution. And since any comment represents a reader (or at least a drive-by scanner), newspapers have no incentive to turn off the spigot; bilious readers, in these desperate days, are better than none.

A couple of readers were puzzled by that "may have been." "I hadn't realized that the Silver Line was missing," e-mailed David Devore of Newton. "The meaning is unclear unless you realize that what is meant is 'might have been placed,'" said William F. Bell of Lenox.

I'm with them. For me, the verb there can only be might, the past of may. ("May have been" means there's a chance the line was once placed there; we know that isn't true.)

But the distinction seems to be evaporating. Just two days earlier, I had spotted the construction on the New York Times op-ed page: "If dentists would just decide to withdraw the flossing directive, we may have enough additional spare time to learn Spanish." I could go with either "If dentists decide, we may," or "If dentists decided/would decide, we might," but as written it sounds wrong. This may/might choice is not about levels of likelihood, just about sequence of tenses; normal English uses "She said she was happy," not "she said she is happy" (unless, some say, you intend to emphasize the latter verb).

And today the Globe's op-ed page has, "I fought off the temptation to shoo the animal with a firm 'no!' or 'go to your bed!'’ -- commands that may have gotten results. " [But it never happened. So: "might have gotten results."]

Officially, the Times is on my side, as Philip Corbett explained in a recent After Deadline post:

A verb that is present tense in a direct quotation shifts to past tense in an indirect quotation after a past-tense verb: I am going to the store becomes He said he was going to the store, not He said he is going to the store. In such constructions, the future-tense “will” becomes “would” after a past-tense verb. In these cases, “would” is not acting as a conditional (He would go to the store if he needed something) but simply as the past-tense form of “will.”

Corbett calls this the "formal rule," but I don't think I learned it it as a formal usage; it's just the way everyone said it. So why the shift? It's another of those language mysteries. As I mentioned in a September Word column, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage can't explain it, and doesn’t approve: 'We advise you to use might in all contexts where the past tense is appropriate or where a hypothetical or highly unlikely situation is being referred to.'"

But a more recent discussion at Language Log quotes the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language on the futility of resistance: "Conservative usage manuals tend to disapprove of [this] usage, but it is becoming increasingly common, and should probably be recognised as a variant within Standard English."

*It turned out the caption was wrong; the rapid bus service it referred to was not officially part of the Silver Line. But that doesn't affect the grammar question.

[Caption] Mike L. has remained a father to a daughter that wasn’t really “his.”

Use "who" for people, not "that."

No, no, no. You can debate the advisability of that in any given sentence, but there is not, and never has been, a rule against using that to refer to people, as I reiterated in the Globe Sept. 27. (No, I don't imagine that the Times's usage guru is looking to me for advice. But surely he would value Bryan Garner's opinion, quoted below?)

Here's my rant, one more time:

NOT THAT AGAIN! Yes, the zombie rule that it’s wrong to use that as a pronoun for a person is still undead. I’ve had several recent complaints from readers who think "the person that cuts the lawn" and "the woman that arrived before you," where that refers to a person, are improper English.

But no. This isn’t even a bona fide zombie rule, because it never was fully alive. That has been applied to people for at least 1,000 years, and usage books have never said it shouldn’t. But somehow, the notion that it’s bad English stays in circulation.

There was a time, in the later 17th century, when the relative pronoun that fell out of favor among the literati, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. The dislike wasn’t aimed at that for people, but at all uses of the relative pronoun; as late as 1752, an anonymous grammarian was still urging writers to avoid that entirely. But they didn’t, and the fad was forgotten.

Of course, not every relative who or whom can be replaced with that. We no longer use that in nonrestrictive clauses, so we don’t say "my father, that I resemble" or "Jane Smith, that is in my biology class." But in the usual formulations -- "women that succeed," "friends that gather each week," "the boy that I was" -- that has always been standard English.

There is no real debate about this; in the new Garner’s Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner says, "It’s a silly fetish to insist that who is the only relative pronoun that can refer to humans." And that’s that -- or at least it ought to be.

* Update: Not so unbelievable; turns out it's actually in the NYT stylebook. If I'd noticed it, I would have set them straight years ago.

It can be depressing to read these repetitive and familiar peeves, but often you're rewarded with a surprise -- a language bugaboo that you've never heard of. This month's prize, among the comments on the Nov. 10 After Deadline, was a demonstration of what Arnold Zwicky has labeled the Recency Illusion:

I may be a bit late with this complaint … but since when has it been acceptable to use the word "inform" as a substitute for what used to be "influenced"? As in, "Kandinsky’s early work is INFORMED by Fauvism …" It’s annoying as hell.

Yes, the complaint is a bit late. The usage is recorded since about 1400, says the OED (while the earliest citation for influence is dated 1658). This inform, it says, means "To give ‘form’, formative principle, or determinative character to; hence, to stamp, impress, imbue, or impregnate with some specific quality or attribute; esp. to impart some pervading, active, or vital quality to; … to inspire, animate. But since the earliest quotes are not absolutely clear examples, let's ignore them and start circa 1600:

1605 CHAPMAN Al Fooles I. i, Without loue...All vertues borne in men lye buried, For loue informes them as the Sunne dothe colours.
1607 SHAKES. Cor. V. iii. 71 The God of Souldiers... informe Thy thoughts with Noblenesse.
1758 BLACKSTONE Study of Law in Comm. (1765) I. 37 [To] inform them with a desire to be still better acquainted with the laws and constitution of their country.
1842 TENNYSON Day-Dream, Sleeping Beauty ii, Her constant beauty doth inform Stillness with love, and day with light.
1968 Listener 1 Aug. 153/2 Britten's exuberant cantata … is informed by a Stravinskian economy of gesture and dramatic style.

Is this informed by more common than it used to be? Perhaps, but so is influenced by, a Google News search suggests; inform is not replacing influence, which after all is not quite the same thing. So this is another non-peeve; do not add it to your hate list. We can hope (though we probably shouldn't expect) that the complainant, should someone inform him, will think that's good news.

*Fish refers to his 377 comments as "many hundreds of comments." In my idiolect, 377 would be "several hundred" or "nearly 400"; I'm not sure I would ever use "many hundreds," given that the groups of hundreds only go up to nine (at which point I'd say "nearly 1,000"). Anyone else have a figure in mind that would qualify as "many hundreds"?

I replied that though this concerning did seem to be enjoying a vogue, it wasn't a new use: The earliest quote from the OED -- "I cannot bear anything that is the least concerning to you" -- is from Samuel Richardson's "Pamela," 1741. And I vaguely promised to look into the rise of concerning.

But now I don't have to: Mark Liberman at Language Log, having received a similar query from a reader, has done it for me. He finds that the usage is gradually increasing, but thinks we should remain calm:

Why not just give up, get over it, and look on the bright side? Concerning has plenty of standard precedents ("This is troubling/annoying/terrifying/grating") where a prepositional-phrase version would be odd (?"This is of trouble/annoyance/terror/gratingness"). In fact, of concern is a bit of an outlier, so you could see the change to concerning as a move in the direction of linguistic consistency.

Or maybe you'd rather look on the gloomy side? After all, "some people enjoy watching the decay (as they see it) of everyone else's language," says Liberman. "If you're one of them, then never mind, and many happy returns of the peeve."

My theory is that this nit persists because writers love to make up the horrible examples with which they buttress the rule. Language writer James Kilpatrick, for instance, has offered as evidence these unlikely utterances:

(1) Only John hit Peter in the nose, (2) John hit Peter only in the nose, (3) John only hit Peter in the nose, and (4) John hit only Peter in the nose.

Several times, over the years, I've challenged readers to show me an example of a truly misleading only in print, not in a made-up example, and nobody has yet responded. But over this morning's coffee, I stumbled onto one myself, in a Wall Street Journal story by Jennifer Corbett Dooren. The story, which discussed improvements in predicting which non-symptomatic people are about to get sick, noted:

Current tests can detect only what type of virus or bacteria people are infected with after they get sick.

OK, what this sentence wants to mean is that tests can detect the pathogens in people "only after they get sick." It's genuinely misleading, thanks to the long stretch between only and the clause it modifies; you have to revise your understanding of the sentence when you're well on the way down its garden path.

But there may be a twist. My Spidey editing sense, honed by years of service on the copy desk, is tingling with suspicion that this is an editor's error, not the writer's.*

Consider the way many of us would naturally have written the sentence:

Current tests can only detect what type of virus or bacteria people are infected with after they get sick.

No problem, right? But say you're an only-sensitive editor: You want that only to "snuggle up" (in Kilpatrick's phrase) to the word or phrase it modifies. Usually, that involves moving it rightward: "I only want seltzer" becomes "I want only seltzer." And so the editor duly moves only to the right of the verb.

But in this case, that's not far enough. If the only isn't in its natural position ("can only detect"), where it alerts us to wait for the conclusion ("after they get sick"), then it has to come much later, like this:

Current tests can detect what type of virus or bacteria people are infected with only after they get sick.

This doesn't really work either, though. It sounds as if it's making a positive statement about what tests can do, then it pulls a 180 on the reader four-fifths of the way through the sentence.

So let me implore, once more: Let's stop worrying about only. Usually, it's fine just where it is. As a linguist would say -- in this case, Geoff Pullum, on Language Log -- "The word only is frequently positioned so that it attaches to the beginning of a larger constituent than its focus (and thus comes earlier), and that is often not just permissible but better."

Not just permissible but better. Or, as we sometimes remember to say on the copy desk: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

*I've e-mailed the author to ask whether this is the case.
[Update: Jennifer Corbett Dooren confirms that her original read "Current tests can only detect," and that the change came somewhere during the editing process.]

Just in time for Halloween, a New Yorker story alerted me to the existence of an apple variety I'd never heard of. "Half-eaten apples lay on the ground, left by the Columbus Day pick-your-own crowds," wrote Lizzie Widdicombe. "Wickham pointed out new apple varieties -- Empire, Razor, Jonagold."

Paging Nancy Friedman! I like a tart, crisp apple myself, but who would name one the Razor, given the decades-old worries (justified and not) about treat-tampering evildoers?

A bit of Googling suggests that the apple is actually the Razor Russet, "discovered by the late W. Armstrong of the University of Kentucky as a limb mutation of Golden Delicious. Fruit is large, round, conical, and uniformly fawn-brown. Flavor is more intense than Golden, yet still sweet."

And oddly enough, it was introduced in 1970, around the dawn of the great Halloween poison-and-sabotage scares. Surely there's no connection, but in the absence of any other explanation, the name sounds a bit like a bad joke.

Photo from Vintagevirginiaapples.com

Like Michael Quinion in today's World Wide Words, I'm surprised to learn that some people think the idiom grasp the nettle is a corruption of grasp the mettle. I suppose mettle isn't utterly fantastic here; if being on one's mettle means "ready for any challenge," I can see how grasp the mettle might be understood as something like "gird your loins" or "cowboy up." Still, it sounds odd if you've always been familiar with grasp the nettle.

The phrase is based on the folk wisdom that firmly seizing hold of a stinging nettle (or a nettlesome problem) is like yanking off a Band-Aid; doing it decisively lessens the pain. Quinion quotes an 18th-century verse that states the maxim (and even rhymes it with mettle):

Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you, for your pains:
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.

Nice rhyme, and total hogwash, as I can painfully testify. Once upon a time, weeding along a backyard fence, I innocently grasped a nettle and pulled hard. It stung like crazy. According to the US Forest Service, the plant's poison is formic acid, and "contact with needle-like, stinging hairs on the twigs and lower surface of leaves of this plant can cause SEVERE SKIN IRRITATION AND MILD SKIN RASH." The all-caps emphasis is entirely appropriate.

Quinion wonders if the plant lore was a prankster's invention. I always figured the metaphor was coined by someone who had never been near a nettle -- possibly the same guy who thought "like taking candy from a baby" was a good way of saying "easy."

There was some collateral damage.

His last regularly scheduled assignment with CBS News was a 90-second radio segment called "Walter Mr. Cronkite's 20th Century."

Johnson reportedly turned to an aide and said, "If I've lost Mr. Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

The son and grandson of dentists, he was born Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite Jr. on Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo.

At home, he was "gregarious," relishing "spinning a one-line joke out into an elaborate shaggy dog story," daughter Kathy Mr. Cronkite once recalled.

Mr. Cronkite's survivors include his son, Walter Mr. Cronkite III, who is known as Chip; and daughters Kathy and Nancy.

I could get used to this form of address; after all, it's no weirder than "Richard, Cardinal Cushing" or "George Gordon, Lord Byron." But I think a daughter might prefer the feminine form: "Kathy, Ms. Cronkite."

*The blog spellchecker, which I have never heard from before, naturally chimed in here to ask whether "Cupertino" should perhaps be Pertinacious, Pertinence, or Pertinacity. That would have been fun ... but no thanks.

** Ben Zimmer corrects me: A Cupertino is an error that starts with the spellchecker, not a mere search-and-replace error like the one that made Tyson Gay into Tyson Homosexual. For more on those, see his Language Log post.

That conjured up unsettling images of parents strip-searching their own 13-year-olds, but it also reminded me to dig out a "loco parentis" variation I'd buried in a pile of notes.

It appeared last month in a Globe op-ed by the president of Wesleyan University, who was explaining how the killing of a student had changed his feelings about "in loco parentis," the notion that the institution stands in the place of a parent.

But he called it "in locus parentis." Twice. And unfortunately, an editor used one of those examples in the callout quote, in nice big type nobody could miss.

Now, I'm not going to profess any shock that a university president doesn't know his Latin declensions. The job has changed a lot in the past half-century, and as Peter Cook might have said,* You don't need the Latin for the fund-raisin'.

But "in loco parentis" isn't some obscure legal term; it's in English dictionaries, along with "ad nauseam" and "in toto" and other familiar tags. The American Heritage Dictionary has everything you might need to know: "Latin in locō parentis: in, in + locō, ablative of locus, place + parentis, genitive of parēns, parent." ("In locus" is just grammatically wrong, like "I believe in she.")

Just two days later, though, I heard a similar usage in a radio interview -- this time it was the even wronger "in locus parenti." That sent me searching, but it was slim pickings: Nexis news has only 11 cites over 30-plus years for "in locus parentis" (three of them in the Globe, one in the Times). Google has a measly 184 overall, along with hits for "in locum," "in local," "in loci," and the aforementioned "in locus parenti." So there's no need for Latin lovers to sound the alarm.

Still, I'm curious; are these random mistakes, or do some people feel an aversion to using "loco" -- given its colloquial sense of "crazy" -- in a dignified Latin phrase? Does "locus" sound better with "parentis," because they both end in s? Or is the word "locus" -- good English, after all, in its place -- just more familiar? Speculation is welcome, though no doubt fruitless.

*"Sitting on the Bench," from "Beyond the Fringe." If you're too young to remember it, you're young enough to find an MP3 of it.

Previously, writes Zimmer, the earliest known Ms. dated from 1949, when Mario Pei mentioned it in "The Story of Language": "Feminists, who object to the distinction between Mrs. and Miss and its concomitant revelatory features, have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into a single one, 'Miss' (to be written 'Ms.')."

But the 1901 proposal makes clear that the issue was convenience, not feminist concerns. "Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman," the writer notes. "To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss."

Clearly, what is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, and what could be simpler or more logical than the retention of what the two terms have in common. The abbreviation "Ms" is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances.

This commonsense wisdom has more or less prevailed, but only after decades of resistance. Ms. magazine debuted in 1972; a decade later, the New York Times still banned Ms., and when William Safire endorsed it in a 1982 language column, he heard from a disapproving Mrs. Havens Grant: ''A woman who wants to be addressed as 'Ms.' is either ashamed of not being married or ashamed of being married.''

But Safire also quoted the Globe's Ellen Goodman, explaining why using Ms. would improve the Times's accuracy: "[The paper has] referred to me each time as Miss Goodman. Actually, my Miss name was Holtz. My Mrs. name was Goodman. But I am in fact no longer married to Goodman, or Dr. Goodman as The Times would put it. Now Miss Holtz isn't exactly right. Nor is Miss Goodman. Nor is Mrs. Goodman."

Four years later, in 1986, the Times officially admitted Ms. to its pages.

And yes, it does (now) have a period.

Barry Hoberman wondered why I ignored the parallel phrase that ends "get off the pot"; the answer is that Globe style doesn't permit suggestively asterisked words, and rather than come up with a labored paraphrase, I figured I would let readers think of it for themselves.

"In the last line of Act I, scene 2 of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream,' Bottom enjoins his comrades, 'Hold or cut bowstrings!' which I assume is an archery-based equivalent of 'Fish or cut bait,'" e-mailed Charlie Rathbone. "Cut bowstrings," if you accept the reading by William Godshalk (also discussed at Wikipedia), would mean "stop fighting," since retreating crossbow archers cut the strings of the weapons they left behind.

Larry Stabile said his understanding of "fish or cut bait" has always been "that if we seize our opportunity we'll get to do the exciting, glamorous job, otherwise we'll be consigned to the menial." But "glamorous" didn't come into it in early uses of the phrase. "The fisherman's life is arduous … Those who do not clean and prepare the fish cut bait for the lines, replace the lost tackle, and repair the nets. ("Land of the Midnight Sun: Summer and Winter Journeys through Sweden," by Paul Du Chaillu, 1881)

Both "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" (2003) and the UK site The Phrase Finder say that "cut bait" means "to stop fishing." I couldn't find any textual support for that as a literal sense, however, even though the "cut bait" part of the idiom now usually means "abandon the endeavor."

The Phrase Finder credits a US circuit judge, Levi Hubbell, with the first use of the phrase: "Judge Cushing has commenced a suit in the United States Court. Judge Cushing must either fish or cut bait."

But there's a earlier citation -- though a murky one -- in The Opal: A Monthly Periodical of the State Lunatic Asylum (in Utica, N.Y.), edited by the patients, in 1852. "The moral turpitude of such customs, among those who profess so loud, and long, their fortunate position among folks, and hence, their infallibility bids him who indulges his time to pass in their narration, to fish or cut bait."

Most subsequent uses, however, are fairly clear. Here's a sampling of the fossil evidence, from Google Books and Nexis, offering more than you probably want to know about the evolution of "cut bait":

Way back in 2001, a reader e-mailed The Word (the weekly column, not this extremely sporadic blog) to ask about her pet peeve, sentences that go like this:

"I'm going to the store, if you need anything."
"If you're just joining us, my guest is actress Laura Linney."

She thought this ubiquitous construction deserved an official name, and for lack of a better, she had temporarily dubbed it the "inappropriate conditional." Here's what I said:

[Her] complaint is clear enough: In these sentences, the "if" clause -- or protasis, if you want technical terms -- doesn't logically relate to the conclusion, or apodosis. Aren't you going to the store even if I don't need anything? Isn't the interview guest the same whether or not I've just tuned in to "Fresh Air"? In fact, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, of NPR's "Car Talk," have made a running joke of this disjunction: "If you'd like to call us, the number is 1-800-323-9287." "And what if they don't want to call us? Is it still the same number?"

I couldn't improve on her name for it, though, back then; it was in the dark ages BLL, or Before Language Log. Then, the other day, Mark Liberman noticed an example of a very similar construction in the "Stone Soup" comic strip, and he posted about it at the Log, calling it a "relevance conditional. "

He quotes Rajesh Bhatt and Roumyana Pancheva's "Conditionals" from the "Blackwell Companion to Syntax": "They explain that 'The if-clause in relevance conditionals specifies the circumstances in which the consequent is discourse-relevant, not the circumstances in which it is true.'" Or as Dr. Seuss put it, that's why I'm bothering telling you so.

That may not be the last word on the subject -- check out the comments on Liberman's post -- but I'm easy; just having a name for the thing makes me feel better.

P.S. As I was fetching the strip from GoComics, I noticed that commenters at the "Stone Soup" pages were criticizing Holly as if she were a real teenager: "Holly, Had you not slacked off during the school year, you would be Free as a Bird." "Just stop whining." "Why are young girls so lazy, flippant, self-involved?" What's that about? Do these people not know that Holly is fictional and that her creator is already making fun of her bad attitude? People, they're called the comics for a reason!

"The testimony which [Fritzl] saw for the first time had a profoundly devastating effect on him and led to the change of direction in this trial. ... I was indeed surprised, not least because someone with such a personality disorder as he has -- which involves keeping up appearances and giving the impression that he's the one with the power -- finds it difficult to drop his trousers in front of the world."