A WORD PLEASE
JUNE CASAGRANDE

People love spas. I know this because the people who operate spas are always telling us how much people love spas - they tell us on hotel websites, in hotel elevators featuring posters of women with rocks on their backs, and in badly written advertorials in newspaper travel sections.

I've never been to a spa, but from what I can gather they all follow a simple formula: Smear any substance whatsoever on someone's face, back or feet, charge $180, and they'll feel "luxurious."

From what I've gleaned, foods make the best smearing substances. I've heard about treatments using pineapple, chocolate, mango, mint, coffee and pretty much anything else you might find in the Baskin Robbins display case. By my reckoning, it's only a matter of time before they start mining ideas from sushi bars, church potlucks and Outback Steakhouse. Think fatty tuna facial followed by a rib eye body scrub and Jell-O mold pedicure. Think $200 ($250 for Jell-O with grapes in it).

So, for less than you should be depositing into an IRA every month, you could be wrapped in fish, beef, and then soak in some lime green goo. What a deal.

And as if that lesson in value weren't enough, I've also slathered on a lesson in grammar.

Take a look at the wording of " … you could be wrapped in fish, beef, and then soak in some lime green goo." Sure, some readers responded to this by grabbing their wallets and heading off to Palm Springs. But those of you still reading, I daresay the slightly more logical types, noticed something wrong. It's called an unparallel construction and, like so much kiwi and coffee grounds, it flies in the face of reason.

Parallel construction, sometimes called parallelism, is less a grammar rule than a test of how well you're paying attention to your own writing. The real rule at play is human expectations. When people see something that could be an introduction to a list, followed by elements clearly meant as a list, they expect all the elements of that list to fit in with the introduction.

Take this real example offered by Barbara Wallraff in her book, "Word Court": "Zoologists specializing in lizards and snakes are notorious for being rather slowmoving, fond of the hot sun, and rising late, like the reptiles that they study."

The comma after "slowmoving" is our first clue that items are being listed. From there we can reflect back at what, exactly, it's a list of. When we do, we see that it's a list of things that zoologists "are notorious for being."

The sentence moves along logically at first: They're notorious for being slow-moving, they're notorious for being fond of the hot sun. But then it gets messy, because, the next moment, it technically says that zoologists are also "notorious for being rising late."

There are several ways to fix these problems. One, as Bill Walsh points out in the book "Lapsing Into a Comma," is resisted by people afraid to use more than one "and" in a sentence: "The zoologists are notorious for being slow-moving and for being fond of the hot sun and for rising late." The sentence might be a little wordy and unwieldy, but that's better than being illogical.

As Wallraff explains, "The solution, of course, is to add words until elements that look parallel really are parallel, one way or another."

If you don't like those results, you can just break it into two or more sentences.

Fortunately, all it takes to avoid unparallel constructions is just a little care and thought. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which people don't exercise the same care and thought before coughing up big bucks for a skin treatment with coffee grounds no more valuable than doing a Dumpster dive behind Starbucks.

-- June Casagrande is author of "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies." She can be reached at word@grammarsnobs. com.