Modifier Dogpiles: There's a Frog on the Bump on the Log in the Hole in the Bottom of the Sea

From a Yahoo finance story today:

U.S. stocks fell on Monday as investors worried that the holiday shopping season might have gotten off to a tepid start as consumers trimmed purchases over the Thanksgiving holiday amid concerns about an uncertain economy.

There's nothing technically wrong with this sentence. It's just a great example of how, every day, I get worse at reading for content because I'm so focused on form. Whenever modifiers -- especially prepositional phrases but also subordinate clauses -- are dogpiled this way, I lose all focus on meaning and instead go to, "How might they have rearranged this information better?"

"on Monday," "as investors," "that the holiday," "as consumers," "over the Thanksgiving holiday," "amid concerns," "about an uncertain economy." How can I possibly be expected to pay attention under these circumstances?

There's a hole in my brain in my skull on the lobe where the thoughts on the meaning oughtta be ...

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving, unless you're one of the people who messes up everyone else's Thanksgiving (I'm looking at you, Drunk Uncle Joe, the cousin who polishes up his holiday conversation skills by watching Fox news, and any family member who begins any sentence with "Why can't you be more like ....")

Everyone else in the U.S. have a happy holiday. (And for those outside the U.S.: Don't worry. You're not missing much, unless you enjoy seeing overweight Americans sitting on a couch with the top button of their pants undone.)

Best-named Honeymoon Destination Ever

Nooki Nooki Island
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/contests/livethecover2/nooki-nooki-island-fiji.html

In other news, NYT blogger Anahad O'Connor dedicated today's post to some typos in the menu at a White House dinner. "Willamette Valley" was spelled wrong in a wine description, "chickpeas" was written as two words and elsewhere there was one missing hyphen and one missing accent mark.

The point: "One person the White House apparently neglected to hire was a spell checker."

Too bad the wine wasn't from Molehill Winery. Then O'Connor could have bemoaned how no one changed it to Mountain Winery.

From Today's 'Fake AP Stylebook'

On Twitter, I follow Fake AP Stylebook, which is hilarious to anyone who's worked with the real AP Stylebook. One of today's entries:

Avoid using "decimate" as someone will pipe up about it meaning "remove 1/10th of," and those people are dicks.

: )

Why I Love Google Maps Streetview

Nothing to do with language. Just thought others might enjoy this.

Here, caught on car-top camera by one of the people who were paid by Google to drive down every street this side of nowhere, we see: a man examining his fingernails while chatting on his cell-phone (presumably about his fab no-polish manicure), a carpetbag-carrying-dude with his carpetbag-carrying ghost, and a gentleman who spends his days wishing he lived on a planet where crosswalks were named crosstangos.

What's the Tile Layer's Preferred Medium for Communication?

Tile, actually.

When I left the house yesterday morning, the guys laying the tile for our new bathroom warned me that they might need me to get them more "trims" -- the little edge tile pieces -- of the type known as "quarter rounds."

When I got home last night, I saw that they left me this note.

I'm just glad that I'm not working with a septic tank guy.

Not Commas But Not Not Commas, Either

I'm pondering the commas in this sentence, which was is based on a passage from a CNNmoney.com article:

"Then someone sees, not words on a page, but a vibrant person sitting across the table from them."

From time to time I encounter these structures while copy editing -- the "not blank but blank" structures. I'm never confident in how to handle them commawise.

Should "not words on the page" be set off with commas, as it is here? Clearly, the phrase is an insertion -- an interruption. But, combined with the "but" before "a vibrant," the commas sever the transitive verb (sees) from its likely intended object: (a vibrant person).

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with inserting parenthetical information between a verb and its object. But when the result is to resume the non-parenthetical with a "but" that comes before the object of the verb, it seems to create a logic problem for the whole structure.

My inclination is to leave the commas out: "Then someone sees not words on a page but a vibrant person sitting across the table from them."

I should note: The original sentence was actually a little more complicated: "If someone sees, not words on a page, but a vibrant, energetic person sitting across the table from them, age becomes much less of an issue."

Those other, obviously correct commas seem to somehow make commas around the "not blank but blank" phrase more beneficial.

If only this issue were as easy as whether to eat turducken.