Tag: style

Clubs

The Boys Club of America teaches young men leadership skills, camping and social skills.

From Twitter:

Which is correct?
① Boys Club
② Boy’s Club
③ Boy Club
④ Boys’ Club

Answer And Explanation
Well, they are all correct except number 2, but they all mean different things:
First, number 2 is incorrect without an article, as in A Boy’s Club;
① Boys Club means a place you can go to find boys
② Boy’s Club means one boy’s club, owned by him.
③ Boy Club either means a club for boys or a club of boys or both.
④ Boys’ Club means a place of , for and owned by boys

I have no purpose except to teach you style (which includes punctuation). There is no inappropriate reference here. I thought of this, because all around Tokyo one sees ‘Girl’s Bar,’ which is incorrect. It means one girl owns a bar, and it is incorrectly written. I didn’t use the example of a “girly bar” (the correct usage), because I think these places are sad, exploit women, fleece lonely and incapable men and ruin relationships; tragically, they offer jobs to young women who deserve to be offered government education and training programs. I did not want to call attention to girly bars. Also, in America, the Boy Scouts is sometimes referred to as a “boys club.”

Photo: Kyle Glenn

Friends at A Smokey Izakaya

From Twitter

Clerk: I __ go. I __ get up early; I’m __ to meet my boss early–and, I __ stop drinking, eating so much pork.

Clerk’s Foreign Friend (a vegetarian wearing a gas mask who sipped one beer all night): Cool.

① must
② have to
③ supposed to
④ should

Answers And Explanation:
I have to go. (Answer 2) Have to shows obligation.
I should get up early; (Answer 4) Should shows obligations we want to resist
I’m supposed to meet my boss early (Answer 3) Supposed to precedes obligations others are expecting.
–and, I must stop drinking, eating so much pork. (Answer 1) Must introduces intentions or obligations with moral- or beneficial- imperatives.

Always–yet… still!

Fill in:
NASA __ does many tests before flying a new spaceship, __ the Boeing Starliner didn’t reach the space station. It went to the wrong orbit. Now the ship is __ in space.

a. yet
b. still
c. always

The answers are: c, a, b; look:
NASA _always_ does many tests before flying a new spaceship, _yet_ the Boeing Starliner didn’t reach the space station. It went to the wrong orbit. Now the ship is _still_ in space.

Explanation
The first answer. Always refers to repeated, cyclic and unchanging conditions, habits, protocols or procedures. ‘Still’ would be grammatically okay here, but it is needed elsewhere in the passage, and in that place where it belongs, the other choices would also work grammatically but not be the best and/or not make sense.

The next answer, ‘yet’, provides a contrast with the information and adverb ‘always’ in the first answer; ‘always’ indicates something continuous or repeating without fail under certain conditions–and thereafter, ‘yet’ tells us a break in that consistency is coming. ‘Yet‘ also acts like the conjunction ‘but’.

Finally, the last answer, ‘still’ tells of a thing that has not ended. Again, all the options work in the space, but then in the other combinations would not make sense.