Gramer Girl here. I'm a neon-fogirty in this week. I have a quick and dirty tip about whether you need a hyphen in the word eBook.

A meaty middle by Neil Whitman about really weird sentences that are still grammatical.

And finally, a tidbit by Neil about the word minion and how its meaning is changing.

eBook stands for Electronic Book, the same way that eReader stands for Electronic Reader and e-mail stands for Electronic Mail.

The AP Style Book, the Buzzfeed Style Guide, the Economist Style Guide, and the Chicago Manual of Style all recommend hyphenating eBook, as well as most other e-words such as eReader and e-commerce.

It's conceivable that over time eBook may lose its hyphen, both the AP Style Book and the Buzzfeed Style Guide already recommend spelling e-mail without the hyphen.

But for now, the hyphen in eBook is safe. Continue to include it. And that was your quick and dirty tip.

Next, I have a meaty middle by Neil Whitman about sentences that are correct, but are almost impossible to process.

A few episodes back in one of the tidbit segments, we explained the so-called Buffalo sentence.

A grammatical English sentence composed entirely of the word Buffalo.

Today, we're going to cover some other kinds of sentences that are imperfect compliance with English syntactic rules, and don't use meaningless jargon or buzzwords, but are still all but incomprehensible.

Let's start with an example of a very complex sentence that's nonetheless easy to understand.

Listen to this verse from the nursery rhyme, the house that Jack built. I got this version from Wikipedia.

This is the farmer sowing his corn that kept the rooster that crowed in the morn, that woke the judge all shaven and shorn, that married the man, all tattered and torn, that kissed the maiden, all for lorn, that milked the cow with a crumpled horn, that tossed the dog that worried the cat, that chased the rat that ate the cheese, that lay in the house that Jack built.

This single sentence contains 14 clauses, but it's so easily understood that it's a poem that people memorize and recite to children.

It's easy to understand because every chunk of meaning that comes along can be easily added to the existing meaning.

To illustrate, let's start with the first clause. This is the farmer sowing his corn.

Then we come to an adjective clause describing this farmer. It starts with that kept the rooster.

We don't need to hear any more to know how kept the rooster fits into the overall meaning, the farmer kept the rooster.

But the adjective clause doesn't stop there, it goes on, that crowed in the morn.

Again, we don't need to hear any more before we can fit that crowed in the morn into the bigger picture.

The farmer kept the rooster and the rooster crowed.

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