A Word, Please:

My readers are getting smarter. This would be good news were it not for the fact that I’m getting lazier. And smart questions make me work harder, forcing me to engage in an activity my brain seems more loath to do every day: learn.

Still, if I’m going to keep raking in two figures a week for this column, I must try to keep up. So I’ll start with a tough one from Aine of city unknown who writes, “One thing I have started seeing the past year that is driving me nuts is when people use a slash but put a space before and after it. So rather than saying ‘male/female,’ they write ‘male / female.’ Can you comment on this?”

No, Aine. I can’t. But let me put down my needlepoint and I’ll do some (grumble, grumble) homework.

The “Chicago Manual of Style” contains some interesting stuff on the slash, including other names for it — virgule, solidus, slant (I’d have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life assuming that was some obscure Roman emperor, but Aine just couldn’t resist making me learn something). But amid all its mentally exhausting information, “Chicago” never says whether you ever put spaces on either side of the slash. A pretty good clue, though, is that every one of “Chicago’s” examples uses no spaces.

Occasionally, if I’m making a list that contains slashes and quotation marks, I find it can look a little crunched:

“he”/“him”

“she”/“her”

So occasionally, I’ll put in spaces. This seems even more sensible when the slash separates complete sentences in quotation marks.

We’re used to seeing that with poetry, which sometimes uses slashes to separate lines. But, as Aine sensed, it’s hard to justify the spaces in other situations.

Ray, also of city unknown, had another laboriously insightful question. In a recent e-mail, he asked:

“I have seen references such as ‘the verb “to let”’ or ‘the verb “to go.”’ Please tell me how ‘to’ can be part of a verb. I was taught that ‘to’ is a preposition.”

This is the kind of question that I, for one, am usually reluctant to ask. It has the feel of something we’re “supposed” to know and should therefore hide the fact that we don’t. But, as Ray’s e-mail proves, in grammar here truly are no stupid questions. (If I’m wrong about that, I sure wish people would write to me with them.) Because Ray has touched on a topic that not even language experts can agree on.