Grammar Girl (and Boy)

The thing I love most about this job is the witty banter between members of my team. I have said it once and I will say it again: I have never been more honored to work with a bunch of people who are so intellectually gifted that it sometimes scares the hell out of me.

There's B who is a repository of useless information/trivia. There's M who is a son of a prominent journalist but for some reason (maybe because he is from that school in Taft) is sometimes exceedingly slow when it comes to understanding stuff. There's C who is called The One in our team because of her exceptional writing and editing skills. And of course, there's our Boss R who is just as crazy as the rest of us.

But I digress. Just this morning, B was asking C and me for words he can use to replace "take into account." Our suggestions were "consider" or "factor in". He didn't like both and instead opted to flip his sentence or some other strategy just so he can use "take into account". And then he asked C whether the word "roll out" needed a hyphen. Here is how their conversation went:

B: How do you spell roll out?

C: Depends. Do you want to use it as noun or as a verb? If you use it as a verb, you don't need to use a hypen. If it is a noun, it has to hypenated.

B: But I am using it as an adjective.

C: What do you mean?

B: As in "roll out time"

C: (without batting an eyelash) with a hyphen.

B: But word does not want to accept it.

C: Then Word is wrong. You're better than MS Word.

B: The spelling is not being accepted.

C: Eh sino ba masusunod? Ikaw o machine?

Author's thought: May point nga naman itong si C. Mas mautak nga naman si B kesa kay MS word =)

Anyways, this is just but one example of many grammar discussions we have each day. I must say that it does not only make for an interesting blog story. I actually learn something out of it. Another important discussion we had was about them things we call "em dash" and "en dash." C actually blogged about it here.

So C and B, keep 'em discussions coming. They're downright funny and enlightening at the same time. Love you both for it.