Grammar Question

I hope this thread belongs here in Miscellaneous Discussion...

Okay, so I have this super easy grammar question that my friends. teachers, and I have been arguing over for years.

Does this sentence make sense?

The tables are crowded with plates of cookies with ten kinds of chocolate chip, including wheat-, dairy-, and egg-free.

My friends think that this sentence wouldn't make sense, because of the hyphens.

I think you can do that and two out of the four English teachers I have asked agree, but the other English teachers and my other friends don't think it is grammatically correct We bet $45 on this... What do you think?

I don't see anything wrong with these?

Yeah, I' pretty sure your sentence is correct.

That sentence is grammatically incorrect, but it has nothing to do with the hyphens. The hyphens are correct if you mean there are wheat-free, dairy-free, and also egg-free cookies available (that's not what the sentence says, for reasons unrelated to hyphenation, but I'm guessing that's what it's supposed to mean). It's a horrible mangled wreck of English, which I can explain if you want I guess but it looks like you only care about the hyphens (which are punctuation, not grammar, anyway), and yeah, they're fine.

Your original example about the players who deserved a higher score was also A-OK as written but I can't for the life of me figure out where you would want to stick hyphens into it, if that's what you mean you want to do, so if that's what you're thinking, what you're thinking is probably wrong.

Negrek said:

That sentence is grammatically incorrect, but it has nothing to do with the hyphens. The hyphens are correct if you mean there are wheat-free, dairy-free, and also egg-free cookies available (that's not what the sentence says, for reasons unrelated to hyphenation, but I'm guessing that's what it's supposed to mean). It's a horrible mangled wreck of English, which I can explain if you want I guess but it looks like you only care about the hyphens (which are punctuation, not grammar, anyway), and yeah, they're fine.

Your original example about the players who deserved a higher score was also A-OK as written but I can't for the life of me figure out where you would want to stick hyphens into it, if that's what you mean you want to do, so if that's what you're thinking, what you're thinking is probably wrong.

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Okay, the hyphens were the part I was worried apart, so thanks! I just won $45! But what was wrong with that sentence? I mean it was an exact line from some book that I cannot recall. Can you please explain?

And the thing with the players was completely unrelated and made no sense whatsoever. So that stupid thing can be ignored because sometimes Hippy doesn't make sense.

"The tables are crowded with plates full of ten kinds of chocolate chip cookies, including wheat-, dairy-, and egg-free cookies."

Now there are too many 'of's, but they're more invisible than 'with' and it flows a little better. There was just Too Much. There is quite a lot to think about in that sentence anyway; I would probably put the table reference in a previous sentence and just talk about what's on the plates in this sentence.

Honestly though, sentences that list hyphenated things make me want to barf. I don't really care if it's technically correct. It looks bloody awful. :c

Tailsy said:

"The tables are crowded with plates full of ten kinds of chocolate chip cookies, including wheat-, dairy-, and egg-free cookies."

Now there are too many 'of's, but they're more invisible than 'with' and it flows a little better. There was just Too Much. There is quite a lot to think about in that sentence anyway; I would probably put the table reference in a previous sentence and just talk about what's on the plates in this sentence.

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Okay, thank you so much!

ultraviolet said:

Honestly though, sentences that list hyphenated things make me want to barf. I don't really care if it's technically correct. It looks bloody awful. :c

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That is what my friends were saying, so they thought it was incorrect, just because it looked weird. XP Thank you!! :D

There are many superior alternatives to choose from!

The tables are made with the euphonious symphonies of descant...

No, that's not quite it... Ah, I've got it!

The tables are alive with the plates of cookies!

Oh, maybe you're going for a more noir feeling?

Sometimes I wonder what strange fate brought me out of the storm to that bakery that stood alone in the shadows. As I probed into its mysteries, every cookie - wheat-free, dairy-free, egg-free or otherwise - told me a different story... but each had the same ending: murder. Every instinct warned me to beware that something more dangerous, more deadly than I'd ever known before was in that room. And suddenly...

... I'll be honest, I'm not really very good with noir. I do poetry mostly:

the tables are- crowded with plates
of cookies of ten different- kinds of
chocolate- chip
(wheat-
dairy-
and
egg- free)
and i feel
allergies-
nevermore

Though come to think of it, this was supposed to be prose, right? Hrrm... Let's try the epistolary format: it never fails!

Jonathan Harker's Journal

3 May. Biscuitz. -- Left Munich at 8:35 PM, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.

The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. They served for dinner, or rather supper, a wide assortment of chocolate chip cookies; some wheat-free, some dairy-free, some egg-free.

... You know, I'm in kind of a hurry here. I'll just leave this and maybe flesh it out with more examples later if you need them. Good luck!

Yeah, Negrek is right, this sentence is very poorly constructed.

MD is right, I think poetry is the way to go here.

Hippy said:

Okay, the hyphens were the part I was worried apart, so thanks! I just won $45! But what was wrong with that sentence? I mean it was an exact line from some book that I cannot recall. Can you please explain?

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There's a couple of problems with it. The one that makes it grammatically incorrect is a dangling participle. At the end of the sentence you have the participial phrase "including wheat-, dairy-, and egg-free." The intent is presumably that you have several different kinds of cookies, including those three. But the placement of the phrase right now means that it's modifying "chocolate chip," not cookies (or "chocolate chip cookies," for that matter), i.e. dairy-free, wheat-free, and egg-free are all kinds of chocolate chip rather than kinds of cookie. And "wheat-free chocolate chip" is just nonsense.

What the sentence is actually closest to saying as written is that were a variety of different kinds of cookies (dairy-free etc.), each of which had ten different kinds of chocolate chip on it. That's "cookies with ten kinds of chocolate chip" for you. I'm guessing the actual meaning is supposed to be the one Tailsy's redone sentence has, in which case the sentence is just not even close to correctly conveying its intended meaning. I really can say nothing good about it.

Tailsy's rephrasing is correct, and I agree with her that the sentence is in general just waaaay too crowded.

But overall, MD is probably the one you should be listening to, here. (Good rule of thumb.)