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03 March 2008

Quick grammar poll: Are "bright young scholars" and "bright, young scholars" different in meaning? If not, is the second grammatically correct anyway?
(Some part of me feels like "bright young things" has become such a cliche that leaving out the comma changes the meaning.)
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 19:07
I think the first one is more acceptable, but not necessarily more correct. The second one is the equivalent of saying "She is bright and she is young," which has a slightly different ring than, say, "she is a bright young thing" or "she is a hot young thing."
posted by mudpuppie 03 March | 19:25
I'm trying to emphasize the and. We're talking about fairly respected people getting paid to go do fairly impressive work; I don't want the connotation of up-and-coming debutantes, which is what "bright young" (without the comma) always reminds me of.

But I could be on crack, is the thing.
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 19:35
The other thing is that being a scholar necessarily implies intelligence, so the 'bright' may be unnecessary, or possibly even redundant?
posted by mudpuppie 03 March | 19:52
The word's actually "economist"; I was working from memory and my memory's apparently shot.

And I've known too many economists to make any assumptions about their intelligence. :-)

And yeah, basically, I should just rewrite the sentence, but we're at the "about to go to printer" stage and I don't want to make unnecessary changes right now. Also, it's the end of the day and I'm tired of this project and I'm feeling contrary.
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 20:01
Well then.
posted by mudpuppie 03 March | 20:03
Hee. I know. It's just a booklet that I've been writing since, like, November, and it kept getting held up, and at this point I've read the damned thing fifty hundred times and seen fifty hundred and one revised copies and I just don't want to bother with it anymore.
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 20:07
Meaning-wise, they're the same thing (and if you don't believe me, please refer to this sentence diagram).

Which one reads/flows/sounds better?
posted by box 03 March | 20:17
I think it needs the comma. I am taking all comments in the thread as back-up that that decision is grammatically sound (and box, the comma makes the sentence slow up a bit, which is good, because the second half of it is a jumble of multisyllabic nouns).

So... yay! I was right! Mudpuppie and box said so! :-)
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 20:28
Ooh, good. I like commas--spoken language is full of pauses and starts and stops and whatnot. Rhythm. And it's nice, I think, having that whole quiver of commas and semicolons and emdashes and ellipses available.
posted by box 03 March | 20:34
I think we need some context. If the phrase is at the end of a sentence, it seems weird to break it up with a comma. But if it's in the beginning or middle, it seems fine. IANAEM (English Major).

"A group of bright, young scholars meets every Tuesday to discuss economic theory."

"Lisa belongs to a group of bright young scholars."
posted by desjardins 03 March | 21:27
Multiple adjectives require commas!
posted by Eideteker 03 March | 21:30
I'm not sure, but...
"And proud we are of all of them"
posted by Triode 03 March | 21:45
I no longer have it in front of me, but the general rhythm of the sentence was something like, "They are a group of bright, young economists who work with governmental agencies to expand economic opportunities for yadda yadda yadda yah."
posted by occhiblu 03 March | 23:16
In your usage, occhiblu, I would go with "bright young economists." I think there's no serious grammatical difference, but there is a difference of emphasis. You are using both "bright" and "young" here to modify "economists." If you were using "bright" to modify "young economists," I might think the comma would help separate the first modifier for emphasis. I tend to think that using the comma puts the focus on the economists' qualities, while leaving the comma out lets you have done with the economists and focus on what they're doing.

"These bright, young economists were inexperienced, but possessed of great talent."

"A team of bright young economists tackled this statistical puzzle."

You might want to run this one by scody or languagehat or one of the MeSites' other many editors, though. I feel a bit out of my depth, though I agree context and emphasis are the important concerns.
posted by Miko 04 March | 01:18
Oh, and the place you're writing for, no house style? It might be an easily-settled thing if you can just refer to a style guide on comma use.
posted by Miko 04 March | 01:19
I tend to think that using the comma puts the focus on the economists' qualities...

Well, it's a description about a fellowship program we fund, so that's actually where the focus should be, really. The idea is, "Here are a bunch of young people who are smart, and we give them money to go do smart things that we agree with."

Our in-house style guide is AP, which I detest, but thanks for the tip -- it seems they require the comma between the adjectives, so I can justify ignoring the proofreader!
posted by occhiblu 04 March | 01:30
Very, very late to the party, but I wouldn't comma, and here's why:


Take a sentence like this: "In the park today, we saw six gorgeous immaculately restored antique flame-red Italian racing cars." That's quite a string of adjectives, but they're placed in order according to a hierarchy that leaves "time, manner, place" in the dust.

This whole question was the focus of the Tip of the Week from the newsletter Copy Editor a couple of weeks ago. A reader had written in: "I deal with a lot of non-native English speakers, and a question frequently arises as to what order to use for a string of adjectives or adverbs. We (editors) know to say '21 large green tables' but why not 'green large 21 tables'? or '21 green large tables'? Is there a rule for this?" Wendalyn Nichols, editor of Copy Editor, responded, "There is indeed a standard order for adjectives, and you’ll find it described in dictionaries and textbooks for learners of English as a second language."

Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.

Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.

Seeing terms for age and national origin as essential seems at odds with the ethos of equal opportunity, but I'm stuck with this system for now at least, just was I was stuck with time, manner, place in German. And if these modifiers are in the right order (unlike, say, "young, angry man"), they need no commas.

I don't mean to sound cranky about commas. But too many of them together are sometimes an indication of prose not well thought through and not flowing gracefully enough.

Punctuation is form of signage. I'm not against signs. But an excess of signage in a public space such as an airport or a courthouse is often a sign of poor design, or an attempt to superimpose some kind of new order on the natural traffic flows of a building. ("This door is not an entrance.")

Similarly I find that if I calm down and reorder words, I can often avoid some punctuation. "His battered old canvas fishing hat" is the phrase usage expert Wilson Follett uses to demonstrate what he calls "superposed" adjectives. I think of them as layered adjectives. We start with "hat." "Fishing" tells you fundamentally what kind of hat this is. ("Purpose" in the taxonomy above.) "Canvas" is from the "material" column. "Old" represents the "age" column. "Battered" is a "quality" adjective on Nichols's hierarchy, or an "opinion" one on some others. ("Battered?" Whose hat are you calling "battered" anyway?) "His" is a determiner.

I had no idea I knew all these rules, but here they are.


From here.
posted by taz 04 March | 06:47
That's kind of where I'm getting hung up, though. I feel like "bright young X" is a "set phrase," as that piece says, and I think treating it as a set phrase in the thing I'm doing makes each of those adjectives lose their original meaning. It's like "little old lady" -- I don't think, at least when I use that phrase, that I really stop to consider whether the woman I'm talking about it particularly little, particularly old, or even particularly a lady. There's just a group of people we superficially classify as "little old ladies." And I want "bright" and "young" to actually sound like separate adjectives describing these particular economists, rather than just like a random class of young academics.

Really, I know, the problem is that it was stupid to use two adjectives that tend to go together as a cliche phrase and then try to make them uncliche, and I should probably have just changed one of the adjectives, but I had just spent a full hour typing up the proofer's changes to send to our designer and I was tired of getting bossed around by proofers' marks. This proofer is severely old school (I might even classify her as a "little old lady"!) and always wants me to change things that really aren't necessary to change anymore, because the less traditional form has become acceptable, and so I tend to get cranky when she has a lot of changes.
posted by occhiblu 04 March | 10:24
That was a fascinating link about the order of adjectives, though, taz. Even though I love language and usage questions, I had honestly never given that a moment's thought.
posted by Miko 04 March | 13:49
There is a bird, or a nest of birds || Diebold accidentally leaks results

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