NPR has been reporting all morning that the alleged shooter in the Fort Hood massacre is in "stable condition."

The Associated Press reported this about the suspect:

He was among 30 people wounded in the spree and remained hospitalized on a ventilator Friday. All but two of the injured were still hospitalized, and all were in stable condition.

Let's get one thing straight:

STABLE IS NOT A CONDITION!

Stable is the lack of change in a condition: Not getting worse; not getting better. Unchanging. Stable.

Good is a condition, which says, “She'll be fine.”

Critical is a condition, which says, “He has life-threatening injuries.”

A victim in good condition can be stable.

A person is critical condition can be stable.

The people in the morgue are always stable.

BUT STABLE IS NOT A CONDITION!

So, are those injuries – to the alleged shooter and the other wounded people – not so bad, very serious, or somewhere in between?

Stable tells me their condition is not changing rapidly.

But it doesn't tell me their condition.

GOT THAT?

Poor apostrophe.

So misunderstood. So misused and abused.

Mose has seen several abuses lately.

A criminal was said to have offenses dating back to the 70's and 80's.

The Jones cousins were referred to in the plural as the Jones'.

The cartoon strip Overboard had pirates discussing "putting fear in peoples' hearts."

One at a time:

1) In contractions, put the apostrophe where stuff is missing, e.g., can't has an apostrophe where we removed no.

So those decades are the '70s and '80s, with the apostrophe filling in for the missing 19.

2) The apostrophe does not often form plurals, even if that sign above your neighbor's mailbox says The Smith's. You have one Jones and two Joneses. 

Apostrophes do form of plurals with letters of the alphabet: She learned her ABC's, and The report card was all D's and F's (probably studying punctuation).

3) People, like men and women, is a plural noun. Form the plural possessive by adding ’s.

Most people don't understand apostrophes, but journalists should.

Any grammar book can help. And the AP Stylebook has a good tutorial in its punctuation section toward the back of the book.

Mose recommends it highly.

Just the other night, a colleague mentioned that his sports team had won a game over the weekend even though it had been "losing at halftime."

That is a misconception that Mose never allows to pass.

You see, that guy's team was really winning throughout the game; it was never losing. The other team just happened to be leading at certain points – including halftime – during the contest.

It all goes back to those present participles, those -ing verbs. They are what an editor once described to Mose as "in the process" verbs.

That's why it's redundant to use "in the process" with a present participle. But it is not uncommon to read something like, "The government is in the process of hiring workers for the 2010 census."

The "in the process" is unnecessary; "hiring" alone implies the act is "in the process."

And so it is with winning and losing.

To say a team is losing is to say it is "in the process" of being defeated. But if it turns out the team wins, it was never losing. It was always "in the process of" winning, even though it trailed in the score during the game.

So when people enter the room while you're watching a game on TV, and they ask, "Who's winning?", you have every right – even if you know the score – to say: "I have no idea. We'll have to wait until the game is over to find out."

Try that one on your sports buddies!

Of course, it will require some explanation.

But then, if the score is 100-6, and only 6 seconds remain in the game, you can go out on a limb and project the winner.

Assuming the other team cannot pull off a 95-point play in the closing seconds.

Conditions. Always, conditions.

While reading a financial advice column in his local newspaper, Mose read that homeowners could pay down their mortgage quicker by make an extra payment once in a while.

But, he wrote, you don't want the mortgagor to apply that money to an escrow account for taxes or insurance, so put the extra payment in a separate envelope that is clearly marked.

"Make sure you write 'principle only' in big, bold letters on the envelope and on the check," the columnist wrote.

Some mortgage companies have payment booklets with a form for mortgagees to designate "any amount you want applied directly to the principle."

And, he suggested, keep a record of what you have designated "to be applied only to the principle."

You wouldn't expect a self-syndicated financial adviser to know the difference between principle and principal. But you should expect the journalists who edit his column to know.

An automated spell-checker won't help. You just have to read it and notice. Oh, and you have to know the difference.

Mose once developed an editing test that included this multiple-choice sentence: The candidate said abortion was the principal/principle issue of the campaign.

Of course, many people have opinions about abortion that are a matter of principle. But if it's the main (primary, No. 1, etc.) issue, it's the principal one.

Was that a trick question? No, but it was one that required many (maybe most) students to stop momentarily to consider the proper word.

That's a good practice for all journalists (who, after all, have to be students, too) when it comes to certain words. Mose calls such things "buzzwords": easily confused or commonly misused words.

Homonyms such as principal/principle certainly qualify.

As do flack/flak. Mose recently spotted that confusion on a page proof after a writer reported that public officials had caught "flack" from some constituents.

The AP Stylebook can be helpful in deciding those matters, such as the difference between 1) a slang term for a press agent and 2) a barrage of criticism (or certain anti-aircraft fire).

But first, you have to recognize the "buzzwords."

For too many journalists, those words fit into the "unknown unknowns" category. That is, they don't know that they don't know those commonly confused terms.

The solution: Read more.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was testifying before a congressional committee recently about the impact of the economic stimulus package.

“How well a job did it do?” he asked before answering his own question.

That not only sounds awkward, it's grammatically wrong. (Those things often go together.)

But it's not unusual to hear such things in conversation ... and see them creep into the written word.

Sometimes you can figure it out by scrambling the sentence – in this case, answering the question – which gives us the adjective good: The stimulus did a good job.

Unless you insist on using the adverb well to modify the verb did: The stimulus did the job well.

Good-well.

I-me.

Who-whom.

They are often confused when people don't consider (or don't know) some technical aspects of the language: adjective vs. adverb, subject vs. object, etc.

Because it sometimes takes a few seconds to choose the proper form (case, mood, part of speech, etc.), the spontaneous spoken word isn't always perfect. Writers, who have time to reflect on the words they choose, don't have that excuse. Nor do their editors.

People are so fearful of the misuse of the object me that they often (incorrectly) use the subject I, as in, That's important to my wife and I.

That's important to I? Nope, the subject I doesn't work. Me is the object of the preposition to.

That, of course, requires some understanding of subjects, objects and prepositions.

Or check this lead sentence from a recent newspaper article:

Cary police are searching for three men whom they said entered an apartment late Tuesday, robbing the occupants at gunpoint.

Problems happen when writers randomly drop attribution (they said) into the middle of a sentence.

Let's scramble that sentence: Whom entered an apartment late Tuesday?

Nope, the object whom doesn't work. The subject who is required with the verb entered.

Why? Because the verb said in the original sentence is not looking for an object. It's part of misplaced attribution.

That would be different if the original sentence had been, Cary police said they are searching for a man whom they saw entering an apartment late Tuesday.

Because they saw him (an object, like whom) entering an apartment.

Reported speech (Cary police said) handles attribution at the beginning of the sentence.

Maybe the language ought to be easier to use. Or maybe we shouldn't make it so complicated.

Take the time to scramble complicated syntax to make writing simple.