The Roman Catholic Church updated its missal last fall, and early reviewers worried the new translation wouldn’t be easily readable by most churchgoers.

Those worries have largely proven unfound, but a few items have caught my attention as needing more explanation or as just plain odd. Last week, we took apart the term consubstantial. Today, I’ll look at oblation.

Oblation

Oblation occurs in the first and third of the four Eucharistic prayers the priest can choose to say during the Mass. From the regular first Eucharistic prayer (there are variations for different holy times):

Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.

Oblation, says The American Heritage Dictionary, means “the act of offering the bread and wine of the Eucharist; something offered, especially the bread and wine of the Eucharist.” Unless you’ve studied Latin or etymology, this term isn’t easy to break down. It traces its history from the Middle English oblacioun and the Old French oblacion and ultimately to the past participle of Latin’s offerre, “to offer.”

Oblation isn’t any more common than consubstantial. It’s found just 26 times in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which contains 450 million words from 1990 to 2012. Results are distributed among academic publications, books, magazines, newspapers, fiction, and speech, yet in the newspaper and magazine results, oblation is part of a name, such as Oblation Papers & Press (a print shop) and Meringue Oblation (an art show)

Worse, though, the text it’s buried in averages a grade level of 17.7 (graduate school). On the plus side, oblation is part of the priest’s lines; the congregation prays along with him. All the same, if these prayers are written at such a high level, few people will be able to follow along with full understanding. It’s more likely that they’ll zone out during this part of the Mass. I’d rather see the Eucharistic prayers written for an easier understanding than flowery language.

Next in the series: the problem of passive voice.

A copyeditor’s job is to apply rules and style to a manuscript, to correct what’s wrong and ensure that the writing is suitable for the writer’s, publisher’s, and reader’s needs.

How can a copyeditor make a decision about a usage that’s in flux? When do we hold the line, and when do we concede a change?

Read how on the Copyediting blog.

Recently on the Copyediting blog, I wrote about how editors could measure their productivity: what measurements are useful, how to measure your productivity, and what tools you can use to measure them.

Although writing is less linear than editing, productivity can be just as important to writers, particularly when you’re a writer-for-hire. You want to ensure that you’re getting paid for the time you put into thinking, dreaming, researching, writing, rewriting, and self-editing your piece. When someone offers you $250 for an 800-word article, is that a good rate? Is $75 for 200 words worth your time?

It’s tough to put a price on the art in writing—the creativity and originality you bring to a topic—but you can track the time it takes you to create that art and determine if you’ve gotten a fair price for your craft.

Read more about productivity on Copyediting:

• “Copyediting Productivity: What to Measure”
• “Copyediting Productivity: How to Measure It”
• “Copyediting Productivity: Measurement Tools”

US Catholics have been using the new edition of the Roman Catholic Missal for eight months now, and the worry over the new translation has proven mostly groundless. Congregations are reciting prayers and responses almost seamlessly.

One change, for example, was the response to “Peace be with you.” Formerly it was “And also with you.” Now it’s “And with your spirit.” When I attend mass these days, I hear the congregation say the latter in unity.

But a few items have caught my attention as needing more explanation or as just plain odd. Over the next few blog posts, I’ll pick my nits in detail.

Consubstantial

The first item that caught my attention was the use of consubstantial in the Nicene Creed, the prayer that outlines the basics of what Catholics believe:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
consubstantial with the Father
through him all things were made.

The term means “of the same substance, nature, or essence,” according to The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD). We can see this easily in its parts. The prefix con- is a variant of com-, meaning “together.” One of substantial’s meanings is “having mass or constitution.” Together + having constitution. In other words, Catholics believe Jesus is the same being as God.

I admit consubstantial doesn’t come tripping off my tongue. It’s just not a common word. It appeared just eight times in a recent Google News search, and three of those results were references to the word’s use in the new missal. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has only 30 instances out of the 450 million words it contains. Google Books returns just 10,200 results from 2000 through 2009, many of those theological.

But given the surrounding text as well as the commonality of the term’s parts, it’s not hard to figure out the intended meaning. It’s not a great choice, given the former phrase was “one in Being,” but not the end of the world either.

Stay tuned for part two: the story and usage of oblation.

I was recently taken to task for writing the following in a blog post:

That’s one thing with pet peeves: they’re our pets. We’re enamored with them.

Do you see the problem?

Read the rest of my article on Visual Thesaurus (subscription required).

Ready to celebrate? Today is Bloomsday! Since 1954, James Joyce fans have celebrated the author and his works on June 16, commemorating Ulysses, which takes place on June 16, 1904.

I’ve long wanted to be in Dublin on June 16. Since I won’t be traveling to Ireland anytime soon, I thought I’d share with you some ways to celebrate Bloomsday.

• Ulysses. Download a free electronic copy of Ulysses from the Gutenberg Project.
• Vocab Builder. Study up on some Joycian vocabulary to enhance your reading.
• RE: Joyce. Deconstruct Ulysses with Irish author and Joyce scholar Frank Delaney. Delaney creates a five-minute each week, opening up a few lines of the famed work. Join him for the whole ride—over the next 22 years!
• JoyceWays. Walk the path Ulysses‘ characters do, even if you can’t be in Ireland. Download this inexpensive iPhone app developed by some smart BC students.
• Walking Ulysses. Don’t have an iPhone? Those BC students will let you talk a walk through your browser, too.
• Bloomsday events. Check out live events in your area.

Whatever you do today, take a moment to raise your glass and give thanks to an author who gave us so much.

Last week, one of Copyediting’s Twitter followers asked, “Is it afterwards or afterward, towards or toward?” Let’s find out.

The suffix –ward goes back to the Old English –weard, meaning “toward,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and comes to us from the Proto-Germanic –warth. It’s also a variant of the Proto-Indo-European –wert, “to turn, wind.” Clearly, –ward is not a newcomer. …

Read the rest of my article at Copyediting.

FANBOYS is a mnemonic device to help students remember that the coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. It teaches that you should join two independent clauses with a comma and one of the FANBOYS. Neither of these things is true. …

Read the rest of my article on Visual Thesaurus.

Last month, The AP Stylebook, the style guide for many American newspapers, finally gave up on restricting hopefully to its original meaning, “in a hopeful manner.” The stylebook now also allows hopefully to be as a sentence adverb meaning “it is hoped” or “it is to be hoped that.”

(Read my article on Visual Thesaurus.)

Whenever I research a debatable usage point, I inevitably run across these words or something similar: careful usage. As in:

Stage 3: The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people, but it’s still avoided in careful usage.—Bryan Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage

The problem is that the phrase “careful usage” and its ilk don’t usually mean careful usage. They’re code that traditionalists (a.k.a. peevers, SNOOTs, errorists, pedants, etc.) use to pound us with rules that have no foundation in real-world usage. “Careful usage” usually means “usage that hasn’t accepted any changes in English since the 18th century when grammarians thought English would be much improved by becoming more like Latin.”

“Careful usage” does not have to mean you follow every one of Miss Thistlebottom’s made-up rules. Or E.B. White’s pronouncements. Or … Well, you get the idea.

It doesn’t mean that you take someone’s random, personal style choices and call them “good grammar.”

“Careful usage” means you look things up. You consider what the text is trying to say and how people currently use words—particularly those people you’re trying to reach. If they’re particular to the point of peevishness and think English should look like Latin, lacking the common sense to see that they are not at all alike, then by all means, follow nonsensical, random rules that don’t reflect how the majority of English speakers think and write. After all, it’s the message that’s important. Don’t rock the boat.

But if you’re not trying to placate the one percent, then don’t let the traditionlists’ “careful usage” throw you for a loop. Do your homework: Find out how the word or phrase in question is really being used and how your audience understands it. Then let the results guide your decisions.