Nouns

“STOCKS TO BAILOUT YOUR PORTFOLIO”

Nouns, Verbs

I saw this on television.

Problem:
A noun appears where a verb should appear.

Explanation:
I saw “STOCKS TO BAILOUT YOUR PORTFOLIO” yesterday in a banner over a broadcast of the television program “Cashin’ In” on Fox News Channel.

The word “bailout” — optionally spelled with a hyphen between “bail” and “out” — is a noun and in the context of the TV banner means an instance of coming to the financial rescue.

The writer of the TV banner should have used the verb phrase “bail out” instead of the noun “bailout”.

The verb phrase “bail out” in the context of the TV banner means to relieve in a financial crisis.

In other words, “bailout” and “bail out” are not synonyms!

Solution:
“STOCKS TO BAIL OUT YOUR PORTFOLIO”

“… separate business at arm’s-length from …”

Hyphens, Nouns, Possessives

I saw this yesterday in a company’s announcement about buying another company.

Problem:
The hyphen does not belong in this phrase.

Explanation:
One company was announcing the pending purchase of another company.

The purchase required approvals by various U.S. federal agencies.

The buyer wanted investors and employees to know that it was legally bound to continue to operate distinctly from the other company until all of those approvals had been secured.

The complete sentence announcing this legal constraint was along the lines of “We will continue to operate as a separate business at arm’s-length from [the company that we are buying].”

The problem with this sentence is that the hyphen does not belong.

The possessive “arm’s” is modifying the noun “length”, but together they are not modifying anything else, so no hyphen should appear between “arm’s” and “length”.

In contrast, a hyphen does belong in a phrase such as “arm’s-length transaction”.

Solution:
“… separate business at arm’s length from …”

“Accredidation”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I heard this during a radio broadcast this morning.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation.

Explanation:
The radio broadcast was about The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB).

The news reporter said that UTMB would not lose its “accredidation” in spite of yesterday’s announcement that 3,800 employees there would be laid off.

The noun is correctly spelled A-C-C-R-E-D-I-T-A-T-I-O-N because it comes from the verb “accredit”, which ends with a “t”.

Therefore, the final two syllables of the noun “accreditation” should be pronounced as “tation” (starting with a “t” as in “tango”) instead of as “dation” (starting with a “d” as in “delta”).

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “accreditation” — 38,100,000 matches
  • “accredidation” — 85,500 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 446-to-1, which is superb.

However, this ratio does not tell the complete story because it covers spellings, not pronunciations.

I believe that the mispronunciation of “accreditation” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say “dation” than it is to say “tation”.

Solution:
“Accreditation”