Weekly roundup for August 30, 2014

Here are the posts from this week to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog.

Posts to the blog

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

• New tools to check usage. I just learned about The New York Times' new word tool called the Chronicle. It's like Google's NGram, but it only covers the Old Gray Lady. Type in a word to search its frequency in America's paper of record. Then type in another word to add it to the graph. The link shows one of my favorites to share with lawyers. Click "Clear graph" to start your own search
  http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=pled.pleaded Here's where I learned about it, which also describes a tool by Yelp that you can filter by location. Find Yelp Trends here.

• Direct addresses and commas. Just looked this up to see if it was "Thank you, Judy!" or "Thank you Judy!" It's the first one. (The Chicago Manual of Style 6.38) Story here.

• Tagging on Facebook. I was having trouble tagging The Chicago Manual of Style in my last post, so I looked up how to force Facebook to find a tag rather than just letting it automatically suggest a tag. Use the @ symbol. (I did that in this post too. Since the book's name starts with two very common words, Facebook won't recognize it without it.) http://www.ehow.com/how_8386293_tag-facebook.html

• Schedule Facebook posts. I often look technical things up in the middle of posting to this page. (I found my last two posts and this one, all within five minutes.) To avoid cluttering things, I wanted to schedule them. I had to look that up too. Turns out, it's really easy. Here's how. https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635

• National Bow Tie Day. August 28 was National Bow Tie Day. Here's a video I think does a good job presenting the trickiest step. And here's a pro (though a bit traditional) tip: "A gentleman never wears a button-down collar with a bow tie." John Bridges, *How to Be a Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy* 37 (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press 1998) Get the second edition here: http://www.amazon.com/How-Gentleman-Revised.../dp/B00CVDMEP8# I'm not sure where this rule comes from. If you do, let me know!

• Ensure/Insure/Assure. On request. The short answer is "insure" is limited to the financial product we buy to limit our liability. "Assure" is to make a promise. "Ensure" is to make certain that something will happen.
  We insure cars, houses, and boats and against hail, earthquakes, and malpractice suits; we ensure that we'll post on a topic; we assure someone who was anxious about the difference between two words that there will soon be a post on the subject.
  From *Garner's Modern American Usage* (3rd ed.): "if the verb is in the active voice, a predicate beginning with 'that' should be introduced by the verb 'ensure'." p. 71 Here's Grammar Girl on the subject.

Weekly roundup for August 23, 2014

Here are the posts from this week to the Tatum's Tips Facebook feed, and blog.

Posts to the blog

• Governor's administering oath to Rush was ceremonial, not official

• Create a drop-down menu in Word with a "blank" choice

Stories from around the Internet posted to the Facebook page

• Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After a Period. Story here.

• English might not have become quite so popular, if a 17th-century poet had his way. Story here.

• What Happens When You Hide Everything on Facebook? Story here.

• How to Copy a File's Path to the Clipboard. Story here.

• Schedule posts - Blogger help. Story here.

Create a drop-down menu in Word with a "blank" choice

I wanted to create a drop-down menu for my letter template in Word below my signature with Enclosure as an option because I had caught myself forgetting to delete that word on a letter or two without one. (Oops!) I wanted the menu to include Enclosure, Enclosures, and a blank entry for those letters that don't have one. I used the drop-down selection in the Developer tab of Word 2010.

You can't create an actually blank entry in the Properties menu, though. So I found here that I could create one with just a single space. But when I tried that, when I selected the blank option, Word puts Choose an item in as a placeholder, and that gets printed.

So if you want to be able to select a blank entry on a drop-down menu, create two blank entries.

Governor's administering oath to Rush was ceremonial, not official

Loretta H. Rush has become Chief Justice of Indiana. She's the fifth justice to serve in that capacity since a 1970 amendment made it a permanent office. Before that, justices had rotated into the role.

In one of the stories covering her swearing-in ceremony, I learned that the Indiana Code doesn't give a governor the power to swear in a chief justice. Apparently, every chief justice has been ceremonially sworn in by the sitting governor. (See the video here at 1:43) Of course, the news coverage didn't provide a section, so I just had to look it up. Very soon into my journey, I realized why the young journalists didn't say any more. It's no simple task.

The long and short of it is that there are many, many places authorizing people to "administer oaths" and a handful of places saying something like a specific person "shall administer the oath of office." Nowhere in any of those is the governor mentioned. But where did then-Chief Justice Dickson's power to administer now-Chief Justice Rush's oath of office come from? Even that answer isn't straightforward.

Don't vote on minutes—It's a waste of time!

Every organization I've ever been a part of has meetings. And inevitably there are minutes for those meetings. And for some reason we feel like we should vote on them, which means we ask for a motion, and a second, and then the vote. It turns out that this not only feels like a waste of time, it is a waste of time.

Format text in a reply with the click of the mouse

In an earlier post, I explained how to make new messages look the way you want in Outlook. This post shows how to accomplish similar goals in replies and forwards.

Word: Update all fields

I found a simple macro to update all fields with a single click.