Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022
Other bits and pieces of social, cultural, and historical arcana that turn up, with reasonable frequency, often misrendered
Notes on proper nouns
The stuff in the back
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
The full title of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 deceptively lighthearted fantasy,*8 though it cannot be denied that people have been calling it Alice in Wonderland pretty much since it was published. The 1871 sequel is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. You may drop the second half of that title; don’t drop the hyphen in “Looking-Glass.”
BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY
Classic book of Greek mythology written by single-l Thomas Bulfinch, not by a double-l bird.
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
The title under which Anne Frank’s journal was first published in English.
The Diary of Anne Frank is the title of a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, as well as of its film adaptations.
FRANKENSTEIN
The title of the novel by Mary Shelley (in full: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus). Also the title of (among other adaptations) the 1931 Universal film directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff.
Though confusion between the two commenced almost immediately upon the novel’s publication, Frankenstein is not the name of the man-made man concocted and brought to life by scientist Victor Frankenstein (Henry Frankenstein in the Karloff film and its immediate sequels) from dead tissue secured in “charnel-houses…the dissecting room and the slaughter-house.” Shelley calls him, among other things, “creature,” “monster,” “vile insect” (that’s a good one), and “daemon.” The 1931 film bills him, simply, as “The Monster.”
It’s not OK to call Frankenstein’s monster “Frankenstein,” and people who willfully advocate for this make me cross.
JEOPARDY!
The game show. With an exclamation point!
THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL
Prestigious performing arts conservatory in New York City. You learn to spell it correctly the same way you get to nearby Carnegie Hall: Practice.
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
Shakespeare comedy. Americanizing out the u in Labour’s is disrespectful; omitting either apostrophe is just plain wrong.
MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE
Much confusion swirls around that hyphen, which in the original 1851 publication of Herman Melville’s novel appeared on the title page but nowhere else. If you hyphenate the novel’s title and otherwise leave the whale’s name open as Moby Dick, you’ll be safe. That said, just about every film adaptation I can track drops the hyphen entirely.
OKLAHOMA!
The exclamation mark in the title of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical should not be neglected, nor should the exclamation marks in Hello, Dolly!; Mamma Mia!; Oliver!; Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!; and similarly excitable Broadway shows.
“OVER THE RAINBOW”
The song MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer wanted cut from The Wizard of Oz because he thought it was slowing the picture down.
The “somewhere” is in the lyric; it’s not in the title.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
The eminently quotable*9 novel by the eminently quotable Oscar Wilde.
Not “Portrait.”
Not “Grey.”
REVELATION
The New Testament’s Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse.
Not “Revelations.”
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
The full title of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 cyclonic fantasy novel.
Gale, the surname of the story’s heroine, Dorothy, is not given in Baum’s first Oz novel or in The Marvelous Land of Oz, its superb sequel, though it turns up in later volumes. It debuted in a 1902 Broadway musical in which, perhaps because little dogs are intractable and hard to see in a large theater, a cow named Imogene was subbed in for the beloved Toto.
No, not a real cow. Don’t be silly.
WOOKIEE
Everyone gets it wrong. It’s not “Wookie.”
Also on the subject of the world of Star Wars, “lightsaber” is one word, “dark side” is lowercased (oddly enough), and “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” ends with a period and three ellipsis points, even though it is not a complete sentence, because that’s how the Star Wars people like it. And if you challenge them on any of these points, they’ll cut your hand off. True story.
SKIP NOTES
*1 The list, you’ll note, leans heavily toward the performing arts. As Popeye once said: I yam what I yam. Also, I’ve found over time that many writers about the performing arts are irksomely cavalier about spelling. And dates.
*2 Also a fairy, a bear, and a few other beings that can’t quite be called people.
*3 Though in styling his name publishers and text designers occasionally mimicked Cummings’s penchant for writing all in lowercase by styling his name “e. e. cummings,” the writer himself far more often than not favored standard capitalization insofar as his name was concerned.
*4 Every publishing house has its own style, called, aptly enough, house style, which is usually determined by the head of the copyediting and/or editorial department. It comprises a conglomeration of select stylebooks, dictionaries, exceptions to rules, pet peeves, and prohibitions, and woe betide you should you fail to conform.
*5 Whenever you’re about to write something like “Not a Theodore with an e,” as I was just about to, make your way back to the beginning of the word, count up your letters, and adjust your math accordingly.
*6 Legend has it that Khrushchev became so angry at a United Nations meeting in New York in 1960 that he removed one of his shoes and banged it on the table in protest.
*7 I’d originally written here “idiom trumps accuracy,” but I’ve developed an aversion to that verb.
*8 I’d suggest avoiding the “deceptively [adjective] [thing]” construction entirely, because it’s often impossible to tell whether a deceptively [adjective] [thing] is extremely that [adjective] or entirely not that [adjective]. What’s a deceptively large room, for instance?
*9 “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Even for the epigrammatically adept Wilde, that’s spectacular.