Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [83]
2. Plural units of measure. Many writers who would never think of omitting the apostrophes in “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” often do exactly that when the unit of measure is increased. Consider: “Laker gets further thirty days credit” (Times headline); “Mr. Taranto, who had nineteen years service with the company . . .” (New York Times). Both days and years should carry an apostrophe. Alternatively we could insert an of after the time elements (“thirty days of credit,” “nineteen years of service”). One or the other is necessary.
The problem is often aggravated by the inclusion of unnecessary words, as in each of these examples: “The scheme could well be appropriate in twenty-five years time, he said” (Times); “Many diplomats are anxious to settle the job by the end of the session in two weeks time” (Observer); “The government is prepared to part with several hundred acres worth of property” (Time magazine). Each requires an apostrophe. But that need could be obviated by excluding the superfluous wordage. What is “in twenty-five years’ time” if not “in twenty-five years”? What does “several hundred acres’ worth of property” say that “several hundred acres” does not?
colon. The colon marks a formal introduction or indicates the start of a series. A colon should not separate a verb from its object in simple enumerations. Thus it would be wrong to say, “The four states bordering Texas are: New Mexico, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.” The colon should be removed. But it would be correct to say, “Texas is bordered by four states: New Mexico, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.”
comma. The trend these days is to use the comma as sparingly as form and clarity allow. But there are certain instances in which it should appear but all too often does not. Equally, it has a tendency to crop up with alarming regularity in places where it has no business. It is, in short, the most abused of punctuation marks and one of the worst offenders of any kind in the English language. Essentially the comma’s use is compulsory in three situations and recommended in a fourth.
1. When the information provided is clearly parenthetical. Consider these two sentences, both of which are correctly punctuated: “Mr. Lawson, the energy secretary, was unavailable for comment”; “The ambassador, who arrived in Britain two days ago, yesterday met with the Prime Minister.” In both sentences, the information between the commas is incidental to the main thought. You could remove it and the sentence would still make sense. In the following examples, the writer has failed to set off the parenthetical information. I have provided slashes (the proper name, incidentally, is virgules) to show where the commas should have gone: “British cars/says a survey/are more reliable than their foreign counterparts” (editorial in the Evening Standard); “Operating mainly from the presidential palace at Baabda/southeast of Beirut, Habib negotiated over a sixty-five-day period” (Time magazine); “Mary Chatillon, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Reading Language Disorder Unit/maintains: ‘It would simply appear to be . . .’ ” (Time magazine). It should perhaps be noted that failure to put in a comma is particularly common after a parenthesis, as here: “Mr. James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)/says . . .” (Times).
Occasionally the writer recognizes that the sentence contains a parenthetical thought but fails to discern just how much of the information is incidental, as here: “At nine she won a scholarship to Millfield, the private school, for bright children of the rich” (Evening Standard). If we removed what has been presented as parenthetical, the sentence would say: “At nine she won a scholarship to Millfield for bright children.” There should be no comma