I THINK I CAN SAFELY SAY that no rational person is hubristic enough to type “Zbigniew Brzezinski” or “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” or “Shohreh Aghdashloo” without first checking the spelling of the name, but the number of less formidable-looking proper nouns that wind up misspelled in manuscripts and, if copy editors and proofreaders are not vigilant, in finished books is vast. In response to a few near misses and at least one published oops, which I cop to below, I began keeping this list years ago; in fact, it’s the germ of the book you’re now reading, and I have a great sentimental attachment to it. And I never seem to be able to stop adding things to it.*1
I suppose I might just say “If it starts with a capital letter, look it up” and end this chapter right here, but where would be the fun in that?
PEOPLE*2
BUD ABBOTT
Of the comedy team Abbott and (Lou) Costello, whose “Who’s on first?” routine is an acknowledged delight but whose perhaps lesser-known Bagel Street sketch (also known as the Susquehanna Hat Company sketch) is one of the funniest things in the history of Western civilization.
Two t’s in Abbott.
A single-t abbot, for the record, is the fellow in charge of a monastery.
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR
Film director.
The acute accent*3 sits over the second, not the first, o in his surname.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Fairytalist.
Not “Anderson.”
ATTILA
Hun.
Not “Atilla.”
DAN AYKROYD
Comedian. Half of the Blues Brothers.
Not “Ackroyd” (though that’s the correct spelling for Agatha Christie’s Roger-who-was-killed).
“Ghostbuster” is one word, by the way.
ELIZABETH BENNET
Headstrong heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Just the one t in Bennet.
It’s not “Jane Austin.” Does that bear mentioning? I fear that it does.
PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER
Sixteenth-century Flemish painter, the Matthew McConaughey of his era, as no one can ever quite remember how to spell his name, likely because it is also spelled Brueghel or Breughel. His eldest son, also named Pieter, generally referred to as Pieter Brueghel the Younger, also vacillated on the spelling of the family name. Which happily suggests that no matter how you spell it, you can defend your choice.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
A.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, a.k.a. the Buddha.
Sage.
Not “the Bhudda.”
Also, then, not “Bhuddist” but “Buddhist.”
WARREN BUFFETT
Billionaire.
Not “Buffet,” which would make him a serve-yourself meal.
Here’s a head-scratcher, though: Why does no one seem ever to misspell singer Jimmy Buffett’s name?
JULIUS CAESAR
Roman emperor after whom caesarean delivery was likely not named.
Not “Ceasar.”
The salad—born, untraumatically, not in Rome but in Mexico—is also Caesar.
The Messrs. Chavez (activist) and Romero (Joker), among many others, were Cesars.
NICOLAS CAGE
Film actor.
Not “Nicholas.”
Nephew of film director Francis Ford Coppola and cousin of FFC’s daughter, film director Sofia Coppola, whose surname is occasionally misspelled “Copolla.” (Italian words with double consonants seem to confound people; be on your guard.)
ROSANNE CASH
Singer/songwriter/writing writer.
Most definitely not “Roseanne.”
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
Tragically lost opportunity.
A two-l Hillary.
Novelist Mantel and actress Swank are one-l Hilarys.
PATRICIA CORNWELL
Novelist and Jack the Ripper obsessive.
Not “Cornwall.”
NOËL COWARD
Actor, playwright, composer, lyricist, director, generally busy fellow.
The diaeresis—the New Yorker–beloved mark often affectionately but, in this and all other non-German-language cases, inaccurately referred to as an umlaut—is not optional.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Pansexual occultist.
You’ll more often run into Alistairs and Alastairs (Alastair Sim, for instance, the preeminent cinematic Scrooge).
CECIL B. DEMILLE
Spectacular director.
The family name was de Mille, and that’s how Cecil B. signed his name. But for business purposes and onscreen credits, he used the more imposing DeMille, so thus we refer to him.
Cecil’s brother, also a director (and a screenwriter), was William de Mille.
William’s daughter was the choreographer Agnes de Mille.
CRUELLA DE VIL
Puppy-coat-craving archvillainess.
Not “de Ville,” as I often encounter it.
While we’re here: Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel is The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The 1961 Disney animated film thereof was first released as One Hundred and One Dalmatians; it’s now generally marketed as 101 Dalmatians, which is the official title of the 1996 live-action remake.
The spotted dogs are not “Dalmations,” though that error attempts to happen every so often.
W.E.B. DU BOIS
Writer and civil rights activist.
His surname is correctly rendered “Du Bois” and not (as for Tennessee Williams’s Blanche) “DuBois.”
And it’s pronounced not “doo-BWAH” (which would be correct for Blanche) but “doo-BOYZ.”
T. S. ELIOT
Person ultimately responsible for Cats.
This is your reminder always to look up Eliots, Elyots, Elliots, and Elliotts.
PHILEAS FOGG
Hero of Jules Verne’s La tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, a.k.a. Around the World in Eighty Days.
Not “Phineas.”
MAHATMA GANDHI
Nonviolent revolutionary.
Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
“Mahatma,” by the way, isn’t a name per se. It’s a Sanskrit honorific, meaning “great soul.”
All that taken into account, the surname is not “Ghandi,” as it’s misspelled with dismaying frequency.
THEODOR GEISEL
A.k.a. Dr. Seuss.
Cat in the Hat creator.
Not a Theodore with a second e.*6
There are more Theodors out there than one might at first imagine, including the philosopher surnamed Adorno and the Zionist surnamed Herzl.*7
ALLEN GINSBERG
Beat poet.
Always verify the name of anyone who is named Allen, Allan, Alan, Ginsberg, Ginsburg (Ruth Bader, for instance), or even Ginzburg.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL
Actor.
Also, for that matter, Maggie Gyllenhaal, his sister. Actress.
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Composer.
This, above, is his own anglicized version of his name; in the original German he’s Georg Friedrich Händel.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
Playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, of whom writer Mary McCarthy once commented, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’ ” which is one of the most jaw-droppingly deft insults ever hurled (and for which Hellman sued; wouldn’t you?).
Only one n in Hellman.
Hellmann’s, with two n’s, is a brand of mayonnaise.
O. HENRY
Pen name of twisty-ending-short-story writer William Sydney Porter.
Not “O’Henry.”
The candy bar is Oh Henry!; it was not, as many people think, named after baseball player Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Radiant personality and occasionally brilliant actress.
Not “Katherine.”
PEE-WEE HERMAN
Alter ego of comedian Paul Reubens. Note the hyphen, note the lowercase w.
The nickname of the major-league shortstop Harold Peter Henry Reese is Pee Wee.
ADOLF HITLER
Genocidal maniac democratically elected to run an ostensibly enlightened nation.
It’s not “Adolph.”
I can’t, apparently, say that enough.
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Goddess.
One l in Holiday.
JUDY HOLLIDAY
Actress.
Two l’s in Holliday.
ANJELICA HUSTON
Actress.
Not “Angelica.”
Lot of actresses in this list, are there not.
ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU
Mexican filmmaker.
The back-to-back diacriticals are distinctive.
The full title of his Academy Award–winning film Birdman is, please note, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which manages to be both distinctive and bothersome.
COUSIN ITT
Short, hirsute Addams relation.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
Actress.
Two t’s in Scarlett, like in Scarlett O’Hara.
MADELINE KAHN
Actress, often outrageously funny.
Not “Madeleine.”
While we’re here:
Ludwig Bemelmans’s storybook schoolgirl (“In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines,” etc.) is also Madeline.
The Proustian pastry is a madeleine.
The first female secretary of state in U.S. history was Madeleine Albright.
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
Soviet shoe banger.
You’d think that people would always look up a tricky name like Khrushchev. You’d be wrong.
FREDDY KRUEGER
Frequenter of Elm Street.
Not “Kreuger.” And not “Kruger.” And not “Kroger.”
SHIA LABEOUF
I appreciate people who take the time to spell this odd actor’s odd name correctly. In a more sensible French-cognizant world, it would be spelled LeBoeuf.
K. D. LANG
Musician.
All-lowercase names are a matter of copyeditorial delicacy. I lean toward honoring the preference of the name’s owner. One might, on first mention, to avoid any possible confusion, drop in a parenthetical along the lines of “(who styles her name thus),” but you probably won’t be happy with how fussbudgety it looks. This sort of thing is, I suppose, a matter of taste, of context, of fame, of reader familiarity.
(Same indeed goes for people who make their way through life mononymically, e.g., Cher and Beyoncé, neither of whom, to be sure, requires a “who styles her name thus.”)
VIVIEN LEIGH
Actress.
Not “Vivian.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Quite literally, Renaissance man.
He’s set here between Leigh and Lévi-Strauss rather than up among the D’s because his name is, indeed, Leonardo and he oughtn’t to be referred to as “Da Vinci.” Vinci is where he was from; it’s not his name. That novel by Dan Brown has done much to blunt this particular point, but getting this right remains a laudable thing to do.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
Anthropologist.
(The unrelated company that makes the jeans is Levi Strauss.)
ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Pop artist.
I occasionally see the spelling of his name confused with that of the little landlocked European country hemmed in by Switzerland and Austria, which are themselves landlocked, and which is the Principality of Liechtenstein.
PATTI LUPONE
Singing actress.
Not “Lupone.”
This is not a woman you want to mess with, so get it right.
MACBETH
Thane.
Not “MacBeth.”
It’s the wise writer who looks up any name starting with Mac- or Mc-, whether it belongs to an apple (McIntosh) or to a computer (Macintosh), or to James Abbott McNeill Whistler (painter), Fred MacMurray (actor), or John D. MacDonald (author).
While we’re here: The theatrical superstition against uttering the name Macbeth is often misrepresented. One may safely utter it, say, walking down Forty-fourth Street or at a table at Sardi’s. Or while reading this book aloud. One may not utter it, except during rehearsals or performances, in a theater. Thus the euphemisms “the Scottish play,” “the Scottish lord,” etc.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
Actor.
His surname is impossible to spell correctly.
IAN MCKELLEN
Actor.
His name is—inexplicably, I’d say; one might just as easily get it right as get it wrong—often misrendered “McKellan.”
STEPHENIE MEYER
Writer.
Not “Stephanie.”
LIZA MINNELLI
Star.
Two n’s, two l’s.
Same, happily enough, goes for her father, Hollywood director Vincente.
ALANIS MORISSETTE
Singer-songwriter.
In her surname: one r, two s’s, two t’s. Very easy to get wrong.
See also “irony,” this page.
ELISABETH MOSS
Actress.
Not “Elizabeth.”
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
Trouble-causing philosopher.
There are, I’ve learned over the years, so many, many ways to misspell Nietzsche.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
Artist.
Two f’s.
LAURENCE OLIVIER
Actor.
Laurence with a u. Knighthood made him Sir Laurence Olivier, or Sir Laurence for short. Not Sir Olivier, an error Americans are prone to. (He was also eventually Lord Olivier, but that’s a different honour [sic].)
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Writer.
I’d venture to say that Poe’s is the most consistently misspelled author’s name in the Western canon. His central name is not “Allen.”
CHRISTOPHER REEVE
Actor.
Played Superman.
GEORGE REEVES
Actor.
Also played Superman.
Thus, I imagine, the frequent misrendering of Christopher Reeve’s surname.*8
While we’re here, let’s also take note of:
KEANU REEVES
Star of Bill & Ted comedies, Matrix uncomedies, and John Wick unintentional comedies.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Politician.
Mind the double z.
RICHARD RODGERS
Composer of numerous landmark musicals, most famously partnered with lyricists Lorenz Hart (The Boys from Syracuse, Pal Joey, etc.) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I, etc.).*9
Not to be confused with Richard Rogers, the architect of London’s Millennium Dome.
ROXANE
The love object of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. One n.
The writer Roxane Gay is also a one-n Roxane.
The eponymous heroine of both the 1978 Police song and Steve Martin’s 1987 film (inspired by Rostand’s play) is Roxanne. Two n’s.
PETER SARSGAARD
Actor.
Wasn’t the vampire in True Blood.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Austrian composer.
The American theatrical impresario brothers Sam, Leo, and J.J. were the Shuberts. Same goes, then, for the Shubert Theatre (and Shubert Alley) in New York, and the Shubert Organization.
MARTIN SCORSESE
Director.
Not “Scorcese.”
ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD
Actor.
Was the vampire in True Blood.
The ring diacritic in his surname is often omitted, perhaps because no one can bother to figure out where it’s hiding in their keyboard.
SPIDER-MAN
Superhero.
Note the hyphen, note the capital M.
DANIELLE STEEL
Prolific novelist.
Before I came to work for the company that publishes her, I managed, in a book referring to her, to let her name go to print not once but a half dozen times as “Danielle Steele.” Yeesh.
BARBRA STREISAND
It’s a bit late in the history of Western civilization for people to misspell her first name as “Barbara,” but it still happens.
MOTHER TERESA
Nun, missionary, now a Catholic saint.
No h.
TERESA OF ÁVILA
Nun, mystic, now a Catholic saint.
Nope. Still no h.
If you’re utterly jonesing for a saintly h, I commend to you Thérèse of Lisieux.
TINKER BELL
Fairy.
Two words, the latter conveying the sound of her communication, the former conveying that her job was to mend pots and pans. Really.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
President on whose desk the buck stopped.
The middle initial doesn’t stand for anything, so for decades copy editors have amused themselves, if no one else, by styling his name as Harry S Truman. Truman seems to have (mostly) signed his name with a perioded S, so let’s do it that way.
TRACEY ULLMAN
Funny actress. Note the e in Tracey.
LIV ULLMANN
Less funny, but no less remarkable, actress.
FELIX UNGAR
In Neil Simon’s 1965 Broadway comedy The Odd Couple and the 1968 film thereof, the quintessential fussbudget is Felix Ungar, with an a.
In the later TV series, he is Felix Unger, with an e.
NATHANAEL WEST
Author of The Day of the Locust.
Not “Nathaniel.”
WINNIE-THE-POOH
Bear.
A. A. Milne styled the bear’s full name with hyphens (though the character is also called, hyphenlessly, Pooh Bear). The Disney folk do not.
ALFRE WOODARD
Actress.
Not “Woodward.”
Joanne Woodward, though.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Writer, though it hardly does her justice to refer to her so plainly.
Neither “Wolfe” nor “Wolf.” Perhaps you’re thinking of, respectively, Thomas and the Man.*10
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
New Yorker contributor, Algonquin Round Table denizen, and compulsive quipster, the inspiration for the character Sheridan Whiteside in the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, a role originated by the actor Monty Woolley (and eventually played by Woollcott himself). Called, for short, Alec.
Neither Woollcott nor Woolley is to be confused with the writer Wolcott Gibbs, a longtime editor at The New Yorker, who described Woollcott as “one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed”—and who, you may recall, is the author of every copy editor’s favorite maxim, “Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”
FLORENZ ZIEGFELD
Impresario.
Frequently misspelled (and mispronounced) “Ziegfield.”
PLACES
ANTARCTICA
Two c’s.
ARCTIC
Also two c’s.
BEL AIR
The name of the Westside Los Angeles neighborhood is generally given unhyphenated. The Hotel Bel-Air is, though, hyphenated.
While we’re here: Los Angeles has, unofficially, an Eastside and a Westside. New York City has, more or less officially, an East Side (including an Upper East Side and a Lower East Side) and a West Side (including an Upper West Side, but only people who refer to Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue as Avenue of the Americas would ever refer to a “Lower West Side”). Discerning fans of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will note, in the show’s opening credits, the eternally incorrect newspaper headline “EASTSIDE RAPIST CAPTURED.”
BLEECKER STREET
In New York’s Greenwich Village.
Not “Bleeker,” though one occasionally, even on local signage, encounters it misspelled.
BRITTANY
The French province Bretagne, that is.
Or the late actress Brittany Murphy.
Not Britney Spears, though.
An increasing number of women whose parents were clearly not paying attention are named Britanny.
CAESARS PALACE
Hotel and casino.
There’s no apostrophe in Caesars because, we are told, Caesars founder Jay Sarno decreed, “We’re all Caesars.”
CINCINNATI
Not “Cincinatti.”
COLOMBIA
South American country. Two o’s.
Columbia, with a u, is, among other things, a New York university, a recording company, a Hollywood movie studio, the District also known as Washington, the Gem of the Ocean, and the female representation of the United States.
FONTAINEBLEAU
Both a French château and a Miami Beach resort hotel.
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
Magnificent Beaux Arts structure located at the junction of Forty-second Street and Park Avenue in New York City—a junction and not an intersection because the streets meet but do not cross.
That the building is often referred to as Grand Central Station does not make that its name. That said, if you’re going to characterize a busy and/or crowded place by saying “It’s like Grand Central Station in here!,” you should go ahead and do that because that’s what everyone does, and there are occasions when idiom outweighs*11 accuracy.
LAGUARDIA AIRPORT
Hellhole.
The person after whom the thing was named is fabled New York City mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, but there is no space in the airport’s official name.
While we’re here: The official name for that G in LaGuardia (or for any midword capital letter, whether it’s the D in MacDonald or the P in iPhone or the S in PlayStation) is “medial capital,” though it may also be called a camel case (or, more self-reflexively, CamelCase) capital.
MIDDLE-EARTH
Nerd heaven.
Hyphenated, and the “earth” is lowercased.
MISSISSIPPI
Some people, present company included, cannot ever spell it correctly without singing the song.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS
All told, four c’s.
ROMANIA
The spellings Roumania and Rumania are obsolete.
That said, if you’re quoting the last line of Dorothy Parker’s poem “Comment,” it remains, inarguably, “And I am Marie of Roumania.”
SAVILE ROW
Not “Saville.”
SHANGRI-LA
The hidden Tibetan paradise in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Note the hyphen, note the capital L. That some dictionaries offer it as “Shangri-la,” with a lowercase l, strikes me as effrontery. Surely Hilton, who made up the name, knew best how to spell it.
TUCSON, ARIZONA
Not “Tuscon.”
OTHER BITS AND PIECES OF SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND HISTORICAL ARCANA THAT TURN UP, WITH REASONABLE FREQUENCY, IN MANUSCRIPTS, OFTEN MISRENDERED
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
The full title of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 deceptively lighthearted fantasy,*12 though it cannot be denied that people have been calling it Alice in Wonderland pretty much since it was published. The 1871 sequel is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. You may drop the second half of that title; don’t drop the hyphen in “Looking-Glass.”
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
There’s only one “the” in the title of this F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI
The English-language title of Pierre Boulle’s novel Le pont de la rivière Kwai. (Boulle was also the author of La planète des singes, first published in English as Monkey Planet. You may know it best as Planet of the Apes.)*13
David Lean’s film thereof is The Bridge on the River Kwai.
BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY
Written by single-l Thomas Bulfinch, not by a double-l passerine bird.
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
The title under which Anne Frank’s journal was first published in English.
The Diary of Anne Frank is the title of a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, as well as of its film adaptations.
FINNEGANS WAKE
A novel by James Joyce that you’ve either not read, not comprehended, or both, despite what you tell people.
No apostrophe.
I repeat: No apostrophe.
FLORODORA
A onetime cultural touchstone, now a nugget of obscure and frequently misspelled trivia,*14 Florodora was a musical that played in London’s West End in 1899, ran even more successfully in New York beginning in 1900, then enjoyed numerous tours and revivals for decades. (Little Rascals aficionados may recall its shout-out in Our Gang Follies of 1936.) Its hit number, “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (Are There Any More at Home Like You?),” was performed by a sextet of identically gowned, parasol-wielding young ladies accompanied by six identically suited, top-hatted gentlemen.
According to theatrical legend (this one, rara avis,*15 seems to check out as accurate), all the original Florodora Girls married millionaires. One of the replacement Florodoras, Evelyn Nesbit,*16 not only bagged a millionaire, the unstable, to say the least, Harry Kendall Thaw, but achieved lasting notoriety when Thaw shot to death Nesbit’s lover, the architect Stanford White, in a rooftop theater at Madison Square Garden in 1906. Thus ensued the Trial of the Century, not to be confused with the 1921 Trial of the Century of Sacco and Vanzetti, the 1924 Trial of the Century of Leopold and Loeb, the 1935 Trial of the Century of Bruno Hauptmann, or the 1995 Trial of the Century of O. J. Simpson, shortly after which, thankfully, the century decided to call it quits.*17
FRANKENSTEIN
The title of the novel by Mary Shelley (in full: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus). Also the title of (among other adaptations) the 1931 Universal film directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff.
Though confusion between the two commenced almost immediately upon the novel’s publication, Frankenstein is not the name of the manmade man concocted and brought to life by scientist Victor Frankenstein (Henry Frankenstein in the Karloff film and its immediate sequels) from dead tissue secured in “charnel-houses…the dissecting room and the slaughter-house.” Shelley calls him, among other things, “creature,” “monster,” “vile insect” (that’s a good one), and “daemon.” The 1931 film bills him, simply, as “The Monster.”
It’s not OK to call Frankenstein’s monster “Frankenstein,” and people who willfully advocate for this make me cross.
GUNS N’ ROSES
That the name of this band is not Guns ’n’ Roses is vexing, but so, I suppose, is being named Axl, much less Slash.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
The issue here is not of spelling but of definition. The Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that Mary, the future mother of Jesus, was conceived in her mother’s womb (by the standard biological means) without the taint of original sin.
The belief in the virgin birth*18 of Jesus is the belief that Jesus was conceived through the Holy Spirit, without a human father, and while his mother was, indeed, still a virgin.
The former is not the latter. In the words of Christopher Durang’s homicidal nun Sister Mary Ignatius: “Everyone makes this error; it makes me lose my patience.”
JEOPARDY!
With an exclamation point!
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR
No exclamation point. Or comma, for that matter.
THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL
You learn to spell it correctly the same way you get to nearby Carnegie Hall: Practice.
LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
Smutty D. H. Lawrence novel.
Note the second e in “Chatterley.”
LICENCE TO KILL
The 1989 James Bond film. Universally spelled, Brit-style, with two c’s.
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
Americanizing out the u in Labour’s is impudent; omitting either apostrophe is just plain wrong.
MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE
Much confusion swirls around that hyphen, which in the original 1851 publication of Herman Melville’s novel appeared on the title page but nowhere else. If you hyphenate the novel’s title and otherwise leave the whale’s name open as Moby Dick, you’ll be safe. That said, just about every film adaptation I can track drops the hyphen entirely.
OKLAHOMA!
The exclamation mark in the title of this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical should not be neglected, nor should the exclamation marks in Hello, Dolly!; Oh! Calcutta!; Oh Lady! Lady!!; Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!; and similarly excitable Broadway shows.
“OVER THE RAINBOW”
The song MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer wanted cut from The Wizard of Oz because he thought it was slowing the picture down.
The “somewhere” is in the lyric; it’s not in the title.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Eminently quotable*19 novel by the eminently quotable Oscar Wilde.
Not “Portrait.”
Not “Grey.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Misrendered with alarming frequency by people in the publishing industry as Publisher’s Weekly.
REVELATION
The New Testament’s Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse.
Not “Revelations.”
SEX AND THE CITY
It’s and, not in.
The TV series and the films having run their course, I’d gone quite some time not encountering this, either correctly or incorrectly rendered, but actress Cynthia Nixon’s announcement, in early 2018, that she was running for governor of New York State brought this one back into the fore.
Unless you’re such a devotee that you’d never get this wrong, you’d do well to check and recheck this one. I always do.
SHOW BOAT
The Edna Ferber novel, and the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein II musical adapted from it.
Two words.
SUPER BOWL
Two words.
“THE WASTE LAND”
T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem.
Your standard-issue barren swath of territory is, per modern spelling style, simply a wasteland.
While we’re here: Though April may indeed be, per standard modern American spelling, the cruelest month, Eliot wrote “cruellest,” and in quoting him you must honor his spelling.
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
The full title of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 cyclonic fantasy novel.
Gale, the surname of the story’s heroine, Dorothy, is not given in Baum’s first Oz novel or in The Marvelous Land of Oz, its superb first sequel, though it turns up in later volumes. It debuted in a 1902 Broadway musical in which, perhaps because little dogs are intractable and hard to see in a large theater, a cow named Imogene was subbed in for the beloved Toto.
No, not a real cow. Don’t be silly.
WOOKIEE
Everyone gets it wrong. It’s not “Wookie.”
Also on the subject of the world of Star Wars, “lightsaber” is one word, “dark side” is lowercased (oddly enough), and “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” ends with a period and three ellipsis points, even though it is a fragment and not a complete sentence, because that is how the Star Wars people like it. And if you challenge them on any of these points, they’ll cut your hand off. True story.
ASSORTED BRAND NAMES AND TRADEMARKS YOU’LL WANT TO SPELL CORRECTLY
Trademarks tend over the long haul to lose their capital letters, thus transforming from proper nouns to—no, not improper, though that would be fun—common nouns, sometimes because the company that established them vanishes, often because the trademark becomes so utterly synonymous with the thing itself that the transformation is irresistible. Thus we have the genericized aspirin, cellophane, heroin, kerosene, teleprompter (formerly and jauntily TelePrompTer), thermos, zipper, and—the copy editor’s delight—dumpster (which, once upon a long time ago, was the Dempster-Dumpster manufactured by Dempster Brothers).
One should do one’s best to honor extant trademarks (and the companies that own them), but I know firsthand that attempting to persuade a writer that a wee plastic bag is a Baggie rather than a baggie is an exercise in futility.*20
More even then dropping capital letters from trademarked things, it’s considered bad form to allow the verbification of trademarks. Thus, copy editors have long attempted (and long failed) to stop writers from using the common verb extracted from the photocopying machines devised by the Xerox Corporation. But it’s scarcely possible anymore to argue that that which one does at the Google site is not googling. If you absolutely must make a verb out of a trademark—not that I am endorsing this, because it’s the wrong thing to do—I do suggest that you lowercase it.*21
Mostly I just want you to spell/style these correctly:
BREYERS
There’s no apostrophe in the name of this ice cream brand. Not to be confused with Dreyer’s,*22 which does have an apostrophe.
BUBBLE WRAP
A brand of what one might otherwise choose to call bubble pack.
CAP’N CRUNCH
Not “Captain.”
Nostalgia alert: This one always particularly reminds me of how in the pre-Internet era I used to jot down all the householdy brand names mentioned in whatever manuscript I was working on, then take a trip to the supermarket, notepad in hand, to walk the aisles, peer at packaging, and verify spellings. So as not to seem completely mad, I would also, in between peering and verifying, do my shopping.
CRACKER JACK
Many (most?) people call this classic combination of candied popcorn and peanuts “Cracker Jacks,” but to do so wrecks the rhyme “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack / I don’t care if I never get back.” It’s also not the name of the product.
CROCK-POT
You probably don’t even know that it’s a brand, and you probably spell it “crockpot.” You might avail yourself of the generic “slow cooker.” Or you might not.
DR PEPPER
The absence of a period in the name of this soda pop is much discussed at copyediting bacchanals.
FRIGIDAIRE
That many people call any old refrigerator a “frigidaire” is a testament to the onetime supremacy of the Frigidaire brand, but if you’re indeed talking about any old refrigerator, call it a refrigerator. Or an icebox, if you’re a hundred years old. Or a fridge, which term is up for grabs.
FROOT LOOPS
An intentionally comic misspelling (as “Froot”) is called a cacography.
HÄAGEN-DAZS
The name of the ice cream manufacturer is not Danish but gibberish intended to sound Danish.
JCPENNEY
They’re still officially J. C. Penney Company, Inc., so if you can’t bear the sight of that smushed JCPenney, feel free to use the more formal version.
JEEP
The vehicle whose name was eventually trademarked by Willys-Overland and is now manufactured by Chrysler may be a Jeep, but lowercase jeeps have been around since the early part of the twentieth century. There’s no reason to retroapply the trademark to vehicles that predate it.
JOCKEY SHORTS
They own the “Jockey” but not the “shorts.” You can always call them tighty-whiteys.
KLEENEX
You can always just say “tissue.”
KOOL-AID
The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” meaning to willfully if heedlessly follow some dogma, must surely rankle Kraft Foods, particularly in that the cyanide beverage Jim Jones’s devotees drank in the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown seems to have been concocted largely if not entirely from the also-ran brand Flavor Aid.
MEN’S WEARHOUSE
Not “Warehouse.” It’s a joke. Get it?
ONESIES
Onesies is a Gerber Childrenswear brand of what can be, but never is, generically referred to as diaper shirts or infant bodysuits. The Gerber people are adamant that the term is theirs alone and should not be genericized into “onesie”; in this case I fear not only that the barn door is open but that the horse is halfway across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.
PING-PONG
Once I learned that the term “ping-pong,” for table tennis, predates the trademark, I gave up trying to enforce the caps on authors whom it invariably irritated.
PLEXIGLAS
Plexiglas is a brand name; “plexiglass” is a wannabe generic name derived from it.
POPSICLE
The Popsicle people also make the Creamsicle, the Fudgsicle (note the absence of an e after the g), and something called a Yosicle.
PORTA-POTTY
There seem to be as many trademarked names for portable toilets as there are portable-toilet puns. Perhaps you should just make up one of your own and then check that it doesn’t already exist—as I once, for reasons I can no longer recall, concocted an Indian brand called “Vend-A-Loo.”
POST-IT
Note the lowercase i.
Q-TIPS
The generic term is “cotton swabs,” and Unilever personnel are mighty proprietary about their trademark.
Did you know that the Q stands for “Quality”?
REALTOR
A registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors. Not every real estate agent is a Realtor, and I see no reason to write “realtor” when you can just as easily write “real estate agent.”
REDDI-WIP
I’m trying to imagine the meeting in which someone inquired, “How much can we misspell two perfectly simple words?”
ROLLS-ROYCE
Hyphenated. Also expensive.
7-ELEVEN
A numeral, a hyphen, and a word. Home of the Slurpee.
SHEETROCK
Or opt for the generic “plasterboard,” “drywall,” or “wallboard.”
STARBUCKS
No apostrophe.
STYROFOAM
Styrofoam is the trademarked name for a type of polystyrene foam used as a thermal insulation material. Those items we layfolk often refer to as styrofoam cups and styrofoam coolers are in fact not made of Styrofoam at all.
TARMAC
A trademark, but good luck trying to get anyone to keep the cap.
TASER
Though University of Florida student Andrew Meyer, in the process of resisting arrest, might have generically and respectfully pleaded, “Don’t stun me with that electroshock weapon, Officer,” what he did in fact cry was “Don’t tase me, bro.” (The unofficial verb is more logically spelled “tase” than “taze,” I’d say.)
VOLKSWAGEN
Keep an eye on that e; it’s not a second o.
XBOX
Not X-Box or XBox.
MISCELLANEOUS FACTY THINGS
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The people*23 convicted of and executed for witchcraft in late-seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts were not burned at the stake, as one persistently sees asserted, but hanged. The accused Giles Corey, who refused to plead to charges one way or the other, was, grotesquely, tortured to death as stones were piled on him. His defiant last words were, we’re told, “More weight.”
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DEFCON 5 is “I have a hangnail, but otherwise everything is fine.” DEFCON 1 is “We’re all about to die.” There is no such thing as DEFCON 8, DEFCON 12, etc.
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Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1969 film about the eruption of the eponymous volcano. Krakatoa, unfortunately, is west of Java.
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The rain in Spain doesn’t fall mainly on the plain; it stays mainly in the plain.