Monday, July 28, 2014

Baseball geeks are becoming grammar geeks.



This weekend, the National Baseball Hall of Fame held its latest induction ceremony. All inductees receive a plaque with their likeness offering a synopsis of their career, highlights, the usual.

It's in that synopsis that now has baseball geeks turning into grammar and punctuation geeks.

Case in point, pitcher Greg Maddux, one of the greatest pitchers of his generation and a dominant force throughout the 1990s, with a plaque that would cause an English major a coronary:


"Less" instead of "fewer"? And why such disdain for the Oxford comma? Are the hyphens warranted?

The readers of the sports site Deadspin have taken to the comments section debating the merits of everything English, including idiomatic language, sentence fragments, AP versus MLA style, and whether commas and hyphens are actually necessary throughout this plaque.

I question whether playing for San Diego is ever necessary.



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