Spelling and punctuation of academic degree terms

I'm publishing an article shortly (if all goes well) about the history of the "J.D.," the law degree.  I've had to work out a system to refer to and punctuate the words for these degrees.  The bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees are difficult for a writer to pluralize and to make into possessives. This is primarily because those words end in  -'s.  I've worked out an itty-bitty style guide for them.  A style guide helps my style be, at least, consistent.  (Below, I follow the convention of using an asterisk to refer to a non-existent or incorrect form.

General remarks:

There are six ways to refer to degrees in a sentence in modern writing.  With:

• their letter abbreviations (B.A.), 
• the spelled out, English or Latin degree name along with the word "degree": bachelor of arts degree, the degree of master of arts, juris doctor degree
• the spelled out, English or Latin degree name without the word "degree"
• one of three possessive (or genitive) -case single words, with or without the word "degree": bachelor's or bachelor's degree, master's or master's degree, doctor's or doctor's degree
• using an -ate noun: baccalaureate (never *"bachelorate," apparently a non-word), doctorate or, rarely, masterate.  (The word "masterate" is listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as "chiefly N[ew] Z[ealand]," the only time I remember ever seeing it is in an American reference from the 1937 Proceedings of the American Association of Law Schools.) 
• using baccalaureate or doctorate as an adjective, immediately followed by the word "degree."

The Latin sources of the degrees have to be shown so I can emphasize that each degree is a singular noun.  The B.A. is the "Bachelor of Arts," a translation of the Latin A.B., "Artium Baccalaureus".  M.A., Master of Arts, is from A.M., "Artium Magister," and Ph.D., "doctor of philosophy," is "Philosophiae Doctor."  "Baccalaureus," "Magister" and "Doctor" are all singular, so the degrees should be single in English, too.  *"Bachelors," *"masters" and *"doctors" are incorrect.    The style guide:


1) Capitalization:

Abbreviations:
 
The abbreviations of the degrees are generally capitalized according to Latin-abbreviations rules: for instance, B.A., M.A., M.D., J.D.  There seem to be three types of three-letter abbreviations, which you need to be alert for.  The first has three capital letters and two periods, as LL.D. (legum doctor or doctor of laws) and LL.M. (legum magister or master of laws).  The second has two capitals and two periods, as in Ph.D. philosophiae doctor)) and M.Ed. (master's in education, abbreviated according to the Latin rule).  The third and final abbreviations have three capitals and three periods, and typically abbreviate English titles, as in M.P.H. (master's in public health).  Degrees with even more letters exist, and you can extrapolate from these rules.

Don't put a space after any intermediate period in these abbreviations.

Spelled-out degrees:

When used in general terms, as in I want to get a master's degree, or the bachelor of science, there is no capitalization. If you refer to specifically to the degree offered at a university, as one would in promotional materials, capitalization is permissible: Georgetown offers a Master of Laws (or Master of Laws degree) in Taxation.


2) Pluralization:

The easiest and best way to pluralize is to include the word "degree," as in B.A. degrees or bachelor's degrees.  If you are using the abbreviations, you may pluralize as follows: B.A.s, J.D.s, etc., with no apostrophe before the s. 

Do not try to pluralize the one-word forms bachelor's or master's.  There's just no way to do this comfortably.

3) Possessives:

It's easy to add -'s to the word "degree" (or -' to an existing plural) to make a possessive, as in the bachelor's degree's value is undoubted.  You can add -'s to abbreviations as well, i.e., the M.A.'s value or two M.A.s' value.

You almost certainly can't put the one-word degrees "bachelor's," "master's" or "doctor's" into the possessive, any more than you can pluralize them, because the spelling problem of doubling the apostrophe, or apostrophe-s, is too ungainly.


4) You can refer to individuals by the degrees they possess.

Individuals can be referred metonymically as a Ph.D. or a J.D., but it seems much less natural to say, for lower-level degrees, "my son is a B.A." You can also say for holders of doctorates Bob is a doctor of law or Bob is a doctor of philosophy.

You may say Bob has . . . or Bob earned . . . any of the degrees.

5) Punctuation at the end of a sentence.

At the end of a sentence, do not put an extra period after the final period of an abbreviation.

I hope this style guide helps you in your writing!

Pronouncing "-ough"

In standard English the word-ending "-ough" is pronounced in eight different ways in common English words:

1. /oh/ as in "though"
2. /aw/ as in "bought" or "ought"
3. /oo/ as in "through"
4. /ow/ as in "bough" or "slough" (this means a muddy ditch or miry hole)
5. /uff/ as in "enough" "slough" (a verb meaning to shed one's skin, or the related noun)
6. /off/ as in "cough"
7. /up/ as in "hiccough", although I would spell it "hiccup"
8. /uh/ as in some British pronunciations of "borough" and "thorough" (/buruh/ and /thuruh/, where Americas would end with /oh/)

There's a few others:

9. /ahhk/ or perhaps
10. /ahhg/: George G. Vasey's 1862 Classical English Spelling-Book suggests these two unusual ones for the dog called a "shough" (or "shock")--"These Curs are much set by with Ladys, who . . . trim of all the hair of their hinder parts."* There's no pronunciation for this word in my big dictionaries, but alternative spellings suggest two, reading as /shock/ or /showg/.

As well as "shough," a few more are suggested in Jeff Aronson's sidebar, "When I Use a Word, Ough Ough," British Medical Journal (July 20, 2002), p. 160:

11. /ug/ in "oughly," an archaic spelling of "ugly"

12. /ok/, in certain Scottish words like "hough" and "lough," and

13. /ookh/ (with the glottal ending of "loch" or "ach"), as in "sough" (in one of its homonyms, a rushing or murmuring sound) or "through-stane" (the stone or a slab over a tomb).

The Oxford English Dictionary often traces words with these spellings to Middle English or Old English words that ending in the letter ȝ or "yogh," that sounded like /y/ or something like the ending in Scottish "loch."

* Randle Holme, The academy of armory; or, A storehouse of armory and blazon · 1st edition, 1688

"Mirror," "reflect" and "reverse"

I stumbled across an interesting usage phenomenon with the verbs "to mirror" and "to reflect." Mirrors and reflections return the opposite of the original image or object--think of "mirror-writing" (writing from right to left, and forming letters backwards) or the evil Mirror Universe (Star Trek's counterpart of our own, which apparently is the "good" universe).  However, "to mirror" or "reflect" something mean being its identical copy or image. There's no change in polarity, as when you actually look in the mirror.  Maybe your left hand seems to be your right hand when you stand before a mirror in the real world; but when things are figuratively mirrored they go in the same direction. One of the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary is

1992    Economist 4 Jan. 54/3   McKinsey reckons a shortage of hard currency‥means that the east German car boom is unlikely to be mirrored anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

If a country in Eastern Europe were to mirror the German boom, its car production would also increase; but if you looked at a graph of the German boom in a mirror, production would of course seem to go in the direction of decrease.  This limited conception of what a mirror really does, copying but not reversing, seems very natural to me. The same phenomenon occurs when we use the word "reflect"--if trend or concept x reflects trend or concept y, it will move in the same direction as y.  To show movement in an opposite direction, we would say that x "reverses" y.  I might also use "inverts," "flips" or "spins"--but a "mirror" or "reflection" analogy would not be appropriate.  An ontological curiosity, for your delectation.

"Strikingly dark": A euphemism for "Jewish?"

I discovered an interesting euphemism for "Jew" (Jew-phemism?), "strikingly dark," in Six Crises, Richard Nixon's 1962 book (Nixon Lib. ed. 1991) about episodes from his political career.

Some background as to why anyone needed a euphemism for "Jew": In the twentieth century (in its first half, certainly) some people shied away from referring to Jews as "Jews." Instead they would use one of the words more properly denoting the people of the Bible, "Hebrews" or "Israelites."  Think of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, a parallel to the YMC--(Christian)--A.   H.L. Mencken discusses euphemisms for "Jew" in the second edition (1921) of The American Language.  He thinks the  sensitivity stems from the opprobrious use of the "Jew" as a noun generically to mean "money-lender"; and as a verb meaning "to drive a hard bargain."  Supplement One (1945, p. 613) to Mencken's fourth edition makes the same observation, although noting that by 1945 "Jew" and "Jewish" were used much less warily by those whom the words properly denoted. When used as an adjective, as in "Jew boy" or in "Jew-usurer" (from Jane Eyre), the word is definitely opprobrious.¹  Use of the word "Jew" as an attack is not necessarily gone today--read Google's statement about the use of the word "Jew," primarily by anti-Semitic websites, available here.    Finally, I suppose someone predisposed against Jewish people would as soon sneer "Jew" as speak it.   

For "strikingly dark":Chapter One of Six Crises discusses Richard Nixon's career-making investigation of Alger Hiss, an accused Communist and accused spy for the Soviets.  Hiss tells Nixon about Esther, the wife of his main accuser Whittaker Chambers, during a Congressional hearing.

[Hiss:] "She was a rather strikingly dark person.  Very strikingly dark."
. . . I [Nixon] had seen Esther Chambers and she was indeed strikingly dark.  (p. 28)

It seems Esther must be Jewish--her given name is an indicator, and because of the obviously Jewish name of her Brooklynite nephew, Nathan Levine (p. 50).  Wikipedia says her maiden name was "Shemitz."  And it seems Hiss and Nixon intend to identify her by a salient characteristic, looking Jewish.  But they describe her not as a Jew, but by the poetic euphemism of being "strikingly dark."

I've never heard "strikingly dark" used in this way, and can't find anything on the interwebs other than the Hiss testimony that uses it to mean "Jewish." (The locution seems common enough in other contexts.)  Any thoughts?

1. See also R.W. Burchfield, Fowler's Modern English Usage (3d ed. 1996), s.v. "Jew." 

What if Wikipedia stayed off?

What if Wikipedia stayed "off"?  Where will so many of us go to do our research when we have to do real legwork to find sources and answers?

Wikipedia and other websites are going to be "blacked out" on Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While many of the other sites that are threatening to make themselves unavailable on Wednesday aren't educationally valuable as far as I can tell (the Washington Post mentions Reddit and Failblog), Wikipedia does contain lots of valuable information.  I've always been bothered by what people think is the main virtue of Wikipedia (after its comprehensiveness and the price, $0), the broad-based and essentially anonymous base of writers for the online encyclopedia.  Wikipedia believes that inaccuracy in an article, whether stemming from a writer's ignorance or a writer's bad faith, will be corrected by other contributors.  I've always been skeptical that an uncredentialed and anonymous person from who-knows-where could present entirely accurate and complete articles; but it does seem like Wikipedia is more free of vandalism than one might expect from a web page "that anyone can edit."  And I don't recall recently finding huge, honking errors in articles that I've read on subjects where I am knowledgeable enough to notice such errors.

But what really bugs me is that people, especially children and older students, may be using Wikipedia to do their basic research or even all their research.  The growing neglect of printed sources could lead to forgetting why printed sources are so valuable: rather than relying on yet another anonymous Wikipedia contributor to check a contributor's work, publishers have their own experts, people with public reputation, who edit the materials that a writer submits.  The writers are not anonymous, but credentialed.  The vetting process is not anonymous, but is instead done by people a reader must necessarily trust over the anonymous Wikipedian, who has no reputation at all.  The gatekeepers to the city of knowledge that Wikipedia is trying to get around are essential to the process of transmitting information.

This is because the presence of such gatekeepers is the triumph of the past few hundred years of scholarship and professional publishing--we can all rely on printed resources to give us an impartial view of the state of a science, history, or some other subject.  I know that it's only as impartial a view as the current state of research makes possible.  The printed sources are not perfect--but they are perfect in the sense of being the product of the best method we have, that is, knowledgeable and vetted gatekeepers each providing an edited sum of his knowledge.  And the fact that the sources cost money is just fine--knowledge about any given subject isn't free--it takes man-hours and travel time and the costs of pencil and paper.  People should acknowledge that what they're learning is important enough to pay for.

And maybe it's not for the best that every bit of knowledge can be at a young person's fingers at the speed of light!  For one thing, the ease of figuring out how old Harrison Ford is or what the average snowfall in Moscow is leads people to be rude--let's interrupt our humans-only conversation about Moscow to find out some fact on the computer or the Iphone!  More importantly, the ease of getting to an answer makes it even easier for a reader, especially one not an experienced researcher, to assume that he's gotten the whole answer.  To assume that there's not a different point of view out there, or some facet of a subject that Wikipedia has missed.  I don't think that a print source necessarily protects against this naivete or this laziness--but when you go to the library shelf to get a book, it's much harder to ignore all the alternative sources that are right there next to the first source you've chosen.

So . . . if Wikipedia stayed "off" for a little while, perhaps people would be forced to reconsider their faith in a single, essentially anonymous source.  They might branch out and look for other sources, websites or even books, that they like as well or even better.  They might better appreciate how fortunate we are to live in a society where there is so much reliable, expensive information right at our fingertips; and they might better appreciate the effort, discipline and tact that go into providing good information.

And maybe when I wake up tomorrow I'll marshal some evidence for any of the things I've written here.

Professorial authority

My last post dealt with poor taste, and I ran into even poorer taste yesterday in the New York Times (William Yardley, "Bulk's Not Just In Bulkhead, So Coast Guard Steps In," Jan. 1, 2012). The article deals with the impressive increase in weight of the average American--the Coast Guard's Assumed Average Weight Per Person used to calculate passenger vessel capacity is now 185 pounds, up from 160 pounds in the 1960s (page 1, col. 3 of this link).

For color, the reporter included this paragraph, in parentheses:

“Some fine examples of what we’re talking about just went down the stairs,” said William H. Matchett, a retired English professor at the University of Washington, lifting an eye from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl” to nod toward some formidable passengers on the Wenatchee recently. “But this is a big boat.”

A gratuitous quote from an English professor making fun of fat people!  Here's Matchett's biography and his oeuvre.  Matchett is not mentioned again, and I can't find any evidence that he's an expert on anything about ferries or fatties.  William Yardley, you are snooty!

A pun from history

I came across this pun in very poor taste in a book about the Louisiana State University law school.

During the time when Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower was campaigning for president and Adolph Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem, a sign appeared [on a law school dorm] saying "We Like Eich." 

W. Lee Hargrave, LSU Law: The Louisiana State University Law School from 1906-1977 (2004), p. 203.

I never would have thought of that one! For the sake of exactness: Eisenhower's last campaign would have been in 1956, and the trial of Eichmann took place in 1961.