I've tried and tried and tried with John McCrarey and his poor grammar and mechanics (spelling, punctuation, capitalization), but the man refuses to learn, so as I just wrote on his blog, I'm giving up. This makes me a terrible teacher, but my first faux pas was in mistaking his blog for a classroom. It's not, and John is not my student, which means I'm not his teacher. I have no authority over him, no power over his future, and he knows this, so he has no motivation to learn. He tolerates my attempts at correction; he doesn't internalize them.
It's my fault, too, that any "teaching" from me has been unsolicited. I don't normally take kindly to unsolicited advice left on my blog, so why should John on his blog? Anyway, while I'd harped on John for his many, many mistakes with commas, I've lately been after him about hyphenating phrasal adjectives—a tax-paying citizen, a six-foot-tall man, etc. John just wasn't getting it (his problems were with the phrase rainy day). If I had him in front of me, I could probably get him to learn, but he's in the Philippines, and I'm here in South Korea. Of course, John's also old and stubborn, and he likes the way he writes.
Then, just last night, as I was reading JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, a somewhat autobiographical account of Vance's early life and the sociology and history of hillbilly culture, I stumbled upon a perfect example of the sort of grammar and punctuation I'd have liked to see from John McCrarey (emphasis added):
Mom had a lot of Mamaw’s fire, which meant that she never allowed herself to become a victim during domestic disputes. It also meant that she often escalated normal disagreements beyond where they should go. During one of my second-grade football games, a tall, overweight mother muttered about why I had been given the ball on the previous play. Mom, a bleacher row behind the woman, overheard the comment and told her that I’d been given the ball because, unlike her child, I wasn’t a fat piece of shit who’d been raised by a fat piece-of-shit mother.
That boldface sentence would be an English teacher's wet dream. It's got parenthetical expressions, a compound predicate, subordinate clauses, and a great, great example of when a phrase is hyphenated and when it's not.
Look at the phrase piece of shit. In the clause I wasn't a fat piece of shit, the entire phrase acts as a predicate nominative referring to the subject I. Meanwhile, in the locution a fat piece-of-shit mother, the phrase piece of shit is functioning as a phrasal adjective modifying mother, so it's hyphenated. Either JD Vance is a very good writer, or he's got a good editor.
We could quibble about whether the word fat should be included in the hyphenation: a fat-piece-of-shit mother. It's possible, but a charitable interpretation would be that fat and the phrase piece-of-shit were two cumulative adjectives, with fat modifying the entire noun phrase piece-of-shit mother.
a fast police car (cumulative adjectives: fast modifies police car, not just car)
My kingdom for good prose!
Guilty as charged. But thanks for trying.
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