So Dickie-bird is supposed to be an IDIOT?

And while the “is” in the final word balloon IS a bit jarring, it’s still a great (recurring) joke from Tomasi. Thanks for posting this, Brian—I knew I liked that issue for some reason, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. (And what’d everybody think of the ending of Tomasi’s Green Lantern Corps this week? Twisted stuff, I must say.)

The subject/verb agreement issue that I see/hear a lot of late is “There’s lots of books” instead of “There’re lots of books.” It doesn’t sound quite as bad in contracted form, but it still bugs me. Anyone else?

(Oh, and for my fellow editors, feel free to respond to my comments about what I feel to be a horrible movie poster that was shown in a recent CBLR entry from Brian. It’s the [so far] last comment here: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2009/09/03/comic-book-legends-revealed-223/ And yes, I tend to overuse dashes. And parentheses. And fun little sentence fragments like this one—though the tons of sentence fragments and comma splices found in comics nowadays tend to drive me crazy.)

Feel free to email me — dpbailey@att.net. Sounds like you’ve had a really fascinating career track. I’ve only ever been a line editor, but I’m very much a copy editor at heart, I think, which may well be why at my last two newspapers I got along much better with the copy desk than any of my other city desk colleagues did.

I like “everwho” and “everhow”! I’ve been trying for years to promote “elsewhat,” “elsewho,” “elsehow,” and “elsewhen,” by analogy with “elsewhere.” No one listens….

I actually mulled over the hypenation of “socially”! But when I read “socially looked-down-upon,” sans hyphen, I thought it looked like it meant “looked down upon when one is being social” rather than “looked down upon by society.” I chould have written “societally,” I suppose. In formal writing I would definitely change it into “variants that are looked down upon socially” instead of using such a long chain of hyphens.

Everyone who’s interested in language issues should look at Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/), which frequently delves into the problems of prescriptive and descriptive grammar.

Now where was I? Oh yeah – Dad Didio sucks!

What is it I see the young people saying on the ‘net every now & then? Oh, yeah:

“I find your ideas intriguing & I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.”

Although the fact that you used a hyphen after “socially” has me reconsidering …

(Just kidding, of course. The proscription on hyphens after “-ly” [& all other? I'm not awake enough yet to remember ...] adverbs is one of those rules that I see as rather quaint at best, though of course when editing copy here at work my attitude is the same as my stance as regards the AP Stylebook — ‘The rules say it, I enforce it, that settles it.’ I see it broken all the time in submissions & stories that cross my terminal, & at some point I’ll reach my breaking point & slaughter the neighborhood, I suppose. Still, it’s not as bad as the infernal en vogue phrase “going forward,” which drives me mad — the most useless, empty linguistic crutch I can think of, utterly needless unless the speaker needs to specify that “going backward” isn’t a possibility.)

And yeah, I was aware of the internal coherence, as it were, of dialect, though god knows you delved into it more intelligently than I could probably hope to do. Now, if I could only figure out why half the time I invert words like “however” & “whoever” in speech & say “everhow” & “everwho” … I sure as hell don’t recall ever running across that practice back home in rural Arkansas. Hmmm. My first mother-in-law hailed from the Appalachians …

(And yes, in informal writing I definitely use elllipses & dashes much more than most people. As the young people also have been known to say, that’s just how I roll.)

@Capt USA(Jim): Your claim that “nobody uses proper grammar all the time” is true, but such errors arise largely when people reformulate their thoughts mid-stream, and are often accompanied by halting speech or filler syllables like “um.” As someone noted above, subject-verb number agreement errors like the one that Dick commits here are rare.* If Dick had said, “Is Barbara – and Gordon – OK?” it would have been more natural. (It also would have suggested that Dick thought of Barbara first, and only considered Gordon as an afterthought.)

As for your mocking people for how much this bothers them, it’s all relative. Some people don’t notice if a character is drawn missing an arm. If the dialogue balloon had read, “Is Barbara and the Gordon Commissioner OK?” I bet even you would been thrown out of the story – though that error could occur the same way a number of people (myself included) think Dick’s error occurred: by a script revision that wasn’t fully completed and wasn’t caught by the editor.

* One major exception is cases along the lines of the following, “The report on the details were rejected.” That’s actually not a great example, but the point is that sometimes a noun that is closer to the verb than the subject is “attracts” the verb. A lot of research on this kind of error has been done by people who study the psychology of language; they’ve observed, among other things, that it happens much more often when the subject is singular and the “attracting” verb is plural.

Has anybody noticed there´s a grammar error in the last speech ballon?

Oh, Wow!

I thought everyone was talking about the lack of question mark after the ‘yeah’!

Has anybody noticed there´s a grammar error in the last speech ballon?

as if it matters for the song…some people just don’t get it

Not to justify you’re feelings about the net, but if a song asks ‘Isn’t it ironic?’, it probably should have given you an example of actual irony if it wants you to respond with a ‘yes’.

So, this is extra embarrassing for him.

Batman isn’t *real*. Peter Tomasi & his editor(s) *are*.

Anyway, as noted above, I don’t read the comic … but assuming that stressful moments are pretty de rigeur for the character, is Batman constantly using poor grammar? As long as it’s a consistent characteristic, cool. (Like stealthwise above, I certainly know proper grammar, but during informal speech I often toss around the double negatives, ain’ts, backwoods constructions, etc. that I grew up hearing.)

nobody uses proper grammar all the time, especially during a fire fight with zombies.

Yeah, I know, but or purposes of my advanced age (40 1/2 years later, I’m still traumatized over the price increase to 15 cents), the mainstream DC universe pretty much stops in 1970. (For Marvel it’s about 5 years later.)

Brian or Greg or Greg wrote a darned good column about this sort of thing just a couple of weeks ago …

Hell, I’m already buying waaaay too many new titles (50-odd mostly independents at last count, depending on which mini-series ended last week or is starting next week, what one-shot is coming out when, etc.) to even entertain the notion of trying to pay any attention to the superhero mainstream. Closest I come is … lessee … POWER GIRL, JSA, INCREDIBLE HERCULES & DEADPOOL, none of which are particularly close, I’d say, though probably I’m forgetting a couple.

On the other hand, you did get to miss the Batman & Robin film, “Az-bats”, “Face the Face”, Batman Family (including it’s short-lived 2002 revival), and Polar Blast Batman, so… eh… you know.

Have a good day.
John Cage