Years ago I attended a grammar workshop that discussed the use of “they” as a neutral substitute for the more gender-specific singular pronouns “she” and “he.” There were few editors at that meeting comfortable with using “they” in a singular sense in order to avoid saying “she or he.” I wonder what that same group would say today.

Trademarks are ubiquitous—we use trademarked products every day, all day long. We use Google for Internet searches, Kleenex to blow our noses, and we wear Levis. I look up words in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—itself a trademarked name—which defines trademark as “a device (as a word) pointing distinctly to the origin or ownership of merchandise to which it is applied and legally reserved to the exclusive use of the owner as maker or seller.”

The presidential election isn’t the only thing being contested in Iran these days. A debate over the naming of the Persian Gulf has been simmering for some time.

Known as Persia until the name was changed in 1935, Iran has always held that the body of water extending from the Arabian Sea and separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula is called the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia, however, identifies that body of water as the Arabian Gulf.

Like most publications, large and small, National Geographic follows an in-house guide for style and word usage. Unlike most publications, however, National Geographic’s guide is free, online, and available to the public. It’s a great resource for writers, editors, and anyone else looking for guidance on matters of language style.

Did you read the previous post titled “Polar Opposites” on this blog? If so, did you notice the phrase “the Earth” was used twice? I bet you didn’t, but one reader who did notice that in the June issue of National Geographic wrote in asking us why we use the article “the” with Earth.

Recent correspondence from persnickety readers who care about the finer points of usage have yielded these comments on the misuse of the English language:

Baited breath

“The word data is a queer fish,” Webster’s Dictionary of Usage points out. Data can be singular or plural; usage depends on context. Strictly speaking, data is the plural of datum. Datum is rarely used these days, though, and data is often used as a collective noun referring to information, statistics, and the like: “The data show.” In scientific contexts, the plural prevails: “These data are.”

“Do Typos Count?” was the title of a recent post on one of my favorite blogs, You Don’t Say. The article asked whether “the occasional slip of the fingers on the keyboard” in a blog amounts to all that much.

I winced when I read the title. Not long before I had learned of an embarrassing typo in the May issue of National Geographic.

Hammurabi or Hammurapi? Neanderthal or Neandertal? Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khan? Inca or Inka? Chac or Chaak?

Spelling questions such as these come up frequently at National Geographic magazine. Because of our in-depth research and tradition of consulting experts for articles, we tend to adopt more scholarly terminology than do other general-interest publications.

Oceans cover more than 70 percent of our planet, so it’s not surprising that naming conventions differ around the world. In the United States, we’re taught that there are four great oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Some in the Southern Hemisphere, however, claim a fifth: the Southern Ocean (or Great Southern Ocean), also called the Antarctic Ocean.

Our article “Australia’s Dry Run” in the April issue included a map showing the Murray River draining into the Indian Ocean. That prompted several queries from Australian readers who wondered why we didn’t label it Southern Ocean.

One of the joys of my job, which involves reading many, many proofs of National Geographic, is that I’m always learning. Today the new topic is half-high dots, also known as middle dots or raised dots, a mark akin to a period but placed in the vertical midpoint of a line of type. For some reason its name seems happy and makes me want to sing.

Just why am I now consumed with this symbol? In the March issue of National Geographic, we used the abbreviation kWh for kilowatt-hour, and received a challenge from a reader who told us that to be scientifically correct we should have written the term kW·h. (See that half-high dot?) However, that rendition does not agree with Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, our primary guide for spelling, which lists kWh.

A reader recently queried our use of the country name Burma in the March issue. Edward Hoagland wrote in his article on China’s Jiuzhaigou National Park that, “Once the panda’s range extended clear into Burma.”

We receive a lot of feedback—both positive and negative—from readers all over the world each month. Last December’s article “King Herod Revealed,” in particular, provoked a flurry of emails, mostly from readers objecting to the claim: “Herod is best known for slaughtering every male infant in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill Jesus. He is almost certainly innocent of this crime.” (See the Letters section in the April issue for a sampling of letters and a clarification.) 

Some very cool lifelike sculptures of insects by artist Gary Staab were recently installed in the courtyard of the National Geographic Society headquarters here in Washington, D.C. They’ll be on display for about a year, so if you’re in the area, stop by to take a gander.

Do you know where Czechia is? It’s not a fictional place—devised perhaps by Franz Kafka, although its capital is Kafka’s birthplace, Prague. That’s right, it’s the Czech Republic. If you read National Geographic very closely, you’ll find that the masthead lists Czechia as one of our 27 foreign-language editions. How did we get from Czech Republic to Czechia?

In short, it’s for convenience’ sake. As a one-word name for Czech Republic, Czechia is used by some people, just as America or the States are used as shortened names for United States of America. After Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce” in 1993, the newly formed Czech Republic sought a one-word name that could be used. That same year, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved Czechia, or Česko, literally Czechland in the Czech language. Public acceptance of that ruling remained elusive, however.

As a young American graduate student in London, I often elicited howls of laughter or mere bafflement from my British colleagues with my apparent mangling of the English language. One evening in particular, my friends were quite amused when I announced that I needed to change my pants before heading down to the pub. How was I to know that “pants” was short for “underpants”? (What we call pants in the U.S. are called trousers in the U.K.)

What follows is a column from David Brindley, Director of the Copy Desk for National Geographic magazine and a member of the Style Committee for the entire National Geographic Society.

Once a month the National Geographic Style Committee meets to discuss matters of style and usage large and small—and often arcane. At our latest meeting, a colleague was puzzled by the absence of “pixelated” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, our first choice for spelling and definitions not listed in our own Style Manual. “Pixel” (the small units that constitute images) and “pixilated” (meaning “somewhat unbalanced mentally” or “bemused”) are listed. But my colleague wanted to know how to spell “pixelated,” as in an image where the pixels are pronounced. To everyone’s surprise, especially given the dramatic shift from film to digital photography, there is no such entry.

Inauguration Day was a glorious day, which I spent with my daughter and two of her friends from 7:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night
•    getting into downtown Washington on the subway,

•    shuffling along like a penguin in the crowds pouring out of the station,

•    breaching a “secure” area to get onto the Mall,

•    staking out our few square feet of space in front of a Jumbotron, where we stood for hours getting       to know the people around us,

•    finding a warm place after the swearing-in to hang out until crowds thinned at the closest sustation (which they never did), and

•    finally giving up on public transportation and walking 20 blocks to a friend’s house where we waited     for my husband to drive in from the burbs get us.

It was a marvelous, moving, historic day, and I thought of grammar only twice.

First during the oath of office when Chief Justice Roberts moved the adverb “faithfully” from the midst of a compound verb to the end of the sentence, where the word was left barely hanging on to the sentence, ready to be blown away by the chill gusts of the day. How awkward, and how much better as our forefathers wrote the words, with the adverb right there in the middle of the sentence’s predicate: “I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.”

Afterall, didn’t Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise not say, “to boldly go where no man has gone before”? There is absolutely nothing wrong in my grammar book with inserting an adverb in the midst of a compound verb.

The second time I had a niggling grammar thought was when President Obama, in his address, referred to the “selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job.” Oh dear, I thought, there’s that ubiquitous “they.” Why couldn’t he have said “see friends lose their jobs”?

Or maybe I’m the one who needs to change and accept this use of “they” with singular entities, either as a substitute for “his or her” or when referring to an entity comprised of many people. (I believe I heard Daniel Zwerdling on NPR this morning say something along the lines of “Before they took over, the administration planned. .  . .”)

I’ll reserve judgment a while longer on “they” but may just have to give in if someone as well spoken as President Obama has accepted this useage.

—Lesley Rogers