punctuation - Punctuating a Sentence Containing a Question

If a sentence contains a complete question, but ends with a statement, should it be punctuated with a question mark?

Example:

Could she go to the store, he wondered

single word requests - Another term for "FYI"?

I am writing a description for one of our internal repositories of knowledge we have at my company, and I want to describe one of them as being "a hub of FYIs to keep all teams up to date on the latest news, alerts, etc."

I was wondering if there's a better noun other than "FYI" to describe nuggets of information that isn't necessarily urgent, but is there for reference? I tried to replace "FYI" with "information", "knowledge", but it doesn't quite have that implication that these are short, and are just there for other people's reference.

Thank you!

A word for an acronym that doesn't stand for anything

Some brands or product names take the form of an acronym, but the letters don't actually stand for anything. An example would be Windows XP--the "XP" was chosen for its sound and connotations rather than any particular words starting with X or P. Is there a term for this sort of formation? My first thought was "initialism", but it seems too broad since it includes terms that are meant to stand for things.

Answer

I agree with aaa that this could just be recognized as a trademark, but this could also be a pseudo-acronym.

A pseudo-acronym is a type of initialism that once had a deeper meaning (or was once an acronym) but lost this meaning and is now just a string of letters. In this case, XP was an abbreviation for experience, but over time, this has faded away and the letters are just letters.

grammaticality - A friend of John's / John's friend

The question:

Suppose John is my friend, and I am introducing myself to his brother, should I say

"I am a friend of John's"

or

"I am John's friend"

??

I would use the former, but some think the latter is also correct. If both are acceptable, what are the differences? If we can already say John's friend, why do we need constructions like a friend of John's in English?

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^Note:

<sup>There are lots of question on this site asking about a friend of John versus *a friend of John's
* and so forth. This however, is not one of those questions!</sup>

verb agreement - Shouldn’t “art” be “is” in “Our Father who art in heaven”?

The Lord’s Prayer begins in English:

Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be Thy name,
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.

Shouldn’t it be who is there, not who art? You would have said thou art and he is at the time this was written. See the Wikipedia article on Thou for example.

Answer

"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy (your) Name," is the rest of that sentence.

By saying "Our Father... Thy..." you are addressing God personally, making that the second person singular (you are). (First person singular: I am. Third person singular: he/she/it is.) "Our Father" is not speaking about God; it is speaking to God. (It is like saying, Hey, Dad, you, up there. Blessed be your name.)

If it were about Him, it would certainly be He is. From the same book which states Our Father, who art in heaven:

For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us. - Isaiah 33:22

Quoting your source:

When thou is the grammatical subject of a finite verb in the indicative mood, the verb form ends on t... (e.g., "thou goest"; "thou dost"), but in some cases just -t (e.g., "thou art"; "thou shalt")

and

Originally, thou was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun ye... thou was later used to express intimacy...

and

The familiar form is used when speaking to God... (an "informal" singular form of the second person in modern speech.)

usage - Would you say 'yes, neither do I' / 'yes, me neither'?

My question does not have to do with the correctness/incorrectness of 'neither do I'/'me neither', but with the presence of the 'yes' (or 'yeah', which is how it most often 'comes out' for me) at the beginning.

If someone were to say:

I love chocolate.

I'd naturally answer (orally) one of the two:

Yeah, so do I. / Yeah, me too.

But if someone were to say:

I don't like driving.

Would it be normal to answer:

Yeah, neither do I. / Yeah, me neither.

Or with it be best to say:

No, neither do I. / No, me neither.

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I do not understand why my question was marked as a duplicate. My question is not about the personal pronoun (I or me) but about the adverbs (Yes/Yeah or No). I do state in the first paragraph that my question concerns "the presence of the 'yes' (...) at the beginning.", whereas the question I'm supposedly 'duplicating' is clearly focused on the personal pronoun.

I shall edit to make the words I'm concerned with in bold to see if that clarifies that I'm not interested in the pronouns.

Answer

The short answer is yes, it would be normal to respond with either statement.

As was mentioned already in the comments, the "yes/yeah" parts of your example sentences are simply agreeing with the original speaker. It would become awkward if they'd followed their statement with a question ("I don't like driving, do you?" "Yeah, me neither.") and sounds more like you'd formulated your response before they'd finished speaking, but as it stands it's not awkward and definitely not incorrect.

I know you didn't ask about the difference between responding with "me" or "I" but in formal speech they should both be "I" since you are the subject of your own statement. "Me too" and "me neither" are both fully accepted in conversational speech, though.

Having grown up in England and then moved to the States I will say that I have (on incredibly rare occasions) encountered people who are amused by my "formality" when I say "neither do I" but have never encountered the opposite with "me neither."

So, while both are fully acceptable statements in both the English speaking countries I have any experience with, the States appears to have a (very, very) slight leaning towards "me neither" in an informal setting.

Is it grammatical to use the relative pronoun “that” after a comma?

I’ve always thought it grammatically wrong to use “that” to introduce non-defining relative clauses, after a comma, or after a preposition.
The following two sentences, however, use “that” after a comma and they still sound idiomatic to me.

• “It’s no use repeating the obvious things, that have been said by others, and that can be found in any encyclopedia.”


• “That’s the person, if I’m not mistaken, that we were talking about."

Can it be that, contrary to what I think, “that” can be used after a comma? Or is it just the wrong use of a comma where there should be none? It’s true that in the second example “that” introduces a defining relative clause. But it doesn't appear to be so in the first example.

Edit - I'm not asking for a more natural way of saying things. What I'm asking is:

1. Are these sentences grammatical? Should we use "which" in the second sentence?

2. Is it wrong to place the comma before "that"?

3. Is it wrong to use "that" to introduce a non-restrictive clause as in the first sentence?

The questions Difference between 'which' and 'that' in restrictive (defining) relative clauses and Are there rules about using "that" to join two clauses? and The usage of "that" as a relative pronoun have some good answers on when to use or to omit “that” but they do not address these specific points.

Answer

tldr: What’s written is ok, and I’ll show you what it means.

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Grammar is something that falls out of the spoken language, not the written one. Punctuation is unrelated to grammar except in that rare circumstance when it signals an audible intonation change meant to alert the listener to some change in the actual underlying grammar. Those cases are hard to come up with, but do exist. All punctuation is just cues for hearing the real language in your head better.

Therefore by that metric, not only is there nothing wrong with the punctuation as written, there cannot be, and no matter how it is written.

So try saying your first example aloud in your head, which I will here write without commas because voices have no commas, just intonation:

• It’s no use repeating the obvious things that have been said by others and that can be found in any encyclopedia.

This is a restrictive that here, which you can tell because it can be substituted by which with no change in meaning or permissibility:

• It’s no use repeating the obvious things which have been said by others and which can be found in any encyclopedia.

We can’t use that in descriptive clauses but we can use both that and which in restrictive ones, so if you can swap them, you know what you have. And the other way around, too. This is grammatical whether with or without its comma:

• They always wake me at three in the morning(,) which really annoys me.

But this is ungrammatical again no matter whether you write the comma or not:

• They always wake me at three in the morning(,) *that really annoys me. [ᴡʀᴏɴɢ]

That one is wrong because it tried to use that for a descriptive clause, and you can only use which for those. The native ear goes HUH? when it hears it, which is what makes it ungrammatical.

As you see, it’s never its punctuation which makes something grammatical or ungrammatical. It’s whether you the right worms oops I mean words have managed to put together right — which this sentence almost did not. Twice. :) It had almost managed not to put the right words together, twice.

As you observe, we do not usually use commas before restrictive clauses in English because there is no intonation change to signal there. Presuming that the writer was a competent one, this means the writer was trying to signal something else by including intonation dips. I believe that what he was signalling was an apocopated version of two appositives, which I’ll use em dashes to set off with a repeated things:

• It’s no use repeating the obvious things — (things) that have been said by others — and (things) that can be found in any encyclopedia.

If you read his punctuation there, the commas, as an indicator of appositives the same way as they’re used for that in this sentence, his pauses will make much more sense. It’s not especially common, so it’s no wonder it caught your eye, but I believe that there is a legitimate reading where it makes perfect sense.

As for this one:

• “That’s the person, if I’m not mistaken, that we were talking about.”

Here you have to read this for syntactic constituents. The phrase if I’m not mistaken is a parenthetical aside. It could have been written:

• “That’s the person — if I’m not mistaken — that we were talking about.”


• “That’s the person (if I’m not mistaken) that we were talking about.”


• “That’s the person (if I’m not mistaken) who/whom we were talking about.”

So the commas are the same as parens or dashes: they’re there to surround the parenthetical statement. Since in the spoken language you cannot hear any punctuation, this cannot change the grammar. They’re just there to help the reader.

These too are all ok:

• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person that we were talking about.”


• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person we were talking about.”


• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person who(m) we were talking about.”


• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person about whom we were talking.”


• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person about which we were talking.”

All those are fine. About the only thing you can’t do is say:

• “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the person about *that we were talking.” [ᴡʀᴏɴɢ]

Because which cannot function there to start the clause to serve as the object of a preposition.

Don’t allow some simple, perhaps simplistic, mnemonic tip for good writing style such as “don’t use a comma before that” confuse you about the larger surrounding issues or about a sentence’s actual grammar. Such tips exist to break a common pattern in beginning writers unfamiliar with the conventions normally observed in these things. But rest assured that the actual grammar remains intact no matter the punctuation, for any grammatical error will jump out to your ear without seeing the punctuation — just like in my very last bulleted example sentence above, the one with the extra asterisk.