The Whole Kit and Caboodle

Every morning on Facebook, we post a quote from a Mississippian, usually an author. This morning, we quoted Beth Henley, the Pulitzer-winning playwright from Jackson:

There weren't all that many poem books you could get off a the traveling book mobil. Most books I got was about animals. Farm animals, jungle animals, arctic animals and such. Course they was informative, I learned some things; they's called: a gaggle of geese; a pride of lions; a warren a rabbits; a host a whales. That's my personal favorite one: a host a whales!

-Beth Henley, MS playwright of "The Miss Firecracker Contest"

After this, of course, we had to find more. (Aren't collective nouns fun?) For this, we turned to the Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms. Here are some of our favorites for you to enjoy:

• Array of Hedgehogs
• Bloat of Hippopotami
• Bouquet of Pheasants (They don't smell pleasant...)
• Cloud of Grasshoppers



A Splother of Rabble,
or a Rabble of Splother

• Crash of Rhinoceros
• Dreadful of Dragons 
• Gang of Elk (At our next neighborhood watch meeting, we're discussing the influx of elk gangs in the area.)
• Kindle of Elephants (Elephants--the reading animals!)
• Parcel of Penguins
• Pomp of Pekingese
• Scourge of Mosquitoes
• Troop of Bees
• Turn of Turtles
• Walk of Snails (Hmmm.... Still pondering this one.)
   
• Consternation of Mothers
• Horde of Young Readers
• Macaroni of Poetry Selections (I'm trying to figure out how to work this into conversation.)
• Posy of Literary Pieces
• Rabble of Readers
• Sect of Old Maids



A Parcel of Penguins

• Shush of Librarians
• Splother of Children
• Wedge of Standing People

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Group_of_Emperor_Penguins.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schoolchildren_reading_1938.jpg

You Are Entering A Dimension of Sight, Sound, And Math

The other day, Tracy and I became completely sidetracked from our discussion about how to tackle our next reference request. Neither one of us could determine the proper subject/verb agreement for a sentence using a phrase containing a percentage. I turned to the Credo Reference database for answers. (By the way, did you know that if you're a Mississippi resident, you have access to this awesome database for free through MAGNOLIA? Be sure to go check out what's available here!) Credo definitely came through:

Percent can take a singular or a plural verb, depending on the intended focus. Thus both Eighty percent of the legislators are going to vote against the bill or Eighty percent of the legislature is set to vote the bill down are possible, but in the second sentence, the group of legislators is considered as a singular body, not as a number of individuals. The word percent without a following prepositional phrase may take either a singular or plural verb; both are acceptable.

I love vague grammar that allows me to be footloose and fancy-free in determining verb endings. It makes me feel downright decadent!

In a completely unrelated math question, my neighbor, who, funnily enough, is also a reference librarian, and I were watching an old Twilight Zone episode called A Game of Pool last night. (It stars Jack Klugman before he was in The Odd Couple or Quincy M.E.--definitely worth checking out!) About five minutes into the episode, one of the men mentioned that he bought his pool cue for $600 sometime before he "died" in 1959. You just can't throw that kind of thing out into a room of reference librarians and not expect some feedback! We all know about how things used to cost less back in the dark ages and that the value of "x" amount of money in the 1950s would be a vastly different number today. Neighbor Reference Librarian and I both immediately determined that The Value of a Dollar needed to be consulted.

According to this old reference standby, this formula needed to be used:

$1 in 1955 equaled $7.75 in 2007.

2007 was "the most recent year with reliable comparisons" according to The Value of a Dollar. Plug in your numbers and presto!

$600 in 1955 equaled $4,650 in 2007.

Now that is one snazzy pool stick! Now, I wonder what percent of Rod Serling fans own pool cues and what ratio of them own pool sticks worth over, say, $1,000.... Too much?

"percent." The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 14 October 2010.
Derks, Scott. The Value of a Dollar. Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing. 2009. Print.

Humpty Dumpty Had an Argument About Nouns.

This afternoon we had a Meebo patron who was trying to settle an argument with her boyfriend over a question they saw on the quiz show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" The question asked how many common nouns are in the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty.

Let's see:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses and
All the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Wall, fall, king, horses, men. That's five. While the patron didn't say what side of the argument she was on, our guess is that the use of "fall" as a noun here (and not a verb) was what started the argument. (If the rhyme was "Humpty Dumpty was having a ball / But Humpty Dumpty was going to fall," fall would be a verb.)

Meebo patron, I hope this settles it! If you have any other game show disputes, please let us know!

Another Meebo Answer!

Today I received a question from a patron through meebo, but I never got the chance to fully answer the question.

Question: How do you punctuate a sentence that uses the abbreviation "etc." in a parenthetical phrase?

Here's the answer!

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the abbreviation "etc." is always followed by a period (559). If, however, the abbreviation comes at the end of a sentence, then only one period is used (244).

For example:
He writes stories about ghosts, goblins, vampires, etc.

Regarding parentheses:
If an entire independent sentence is enclosed in parentheses, the period goes inside the closing parentheses. When information in parentheses is included within another sentence, the period belongs outside (244).

Examples:
She eats eggs for breakfast every morning. (She owns several chickens.)
She eats eggs for breakfast every morning (except on Sunday when she sleeps late).

So, combining those two rules, the correct way to use "etc." within parentheses is like this:

On Sunday, she eats brunch at the diner (where they make waffles, pancakes, omelets, etc.).
OR
On Sunday, she eats brunch at the diner. (She loves their waffles, pancakes, omelets, etc.)

I hope this answered your question, meebo patron! Let us know if we can help you again.

The Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.