It’s National Grammar Day! To celebrate the occasion, take Glosso’s short quiz to find out if you know your grammar. Have fun and good luck!
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How many of the eleven images below depict a grammatical mistake? Post your number (no spoilers please) in the comments section; the answer, with explanations, will be published tomorrow. Continue reading
Are we now safe to boldly go where we weren’t allowed to before? Glossophilia tackles the dastardly split infinitive: here’s most of what you hoped possibly to know — or hoped to possibly know — about grammar’s favorite villain.
Lord Byron’s poem Solitude, written in the early 19th century, opens with these lines:
“To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene” Continue reading
That Gerund Is Funky: words, grammar, usage and language in the news this month.
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As cartoonists and demonstrators around the world raise and wield their pens in protest against the recent atrocities in France, the BBC asks the question: who first wrote or uttered the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”? Continue reading
“Lennon, Mailer’s friend and authorized biographer, told me that McAlice, whom he described as having “Joycean gifts,” once took the bus to Provincetown to visit Mailer.” — Boston Globe
The flu normally lasts a week, sometimes two. But if that time comes and goes and you’re still miserable and showing symptoms, head to the doctor.” — Kansas First News
“If counting down the last minutes before the new year lying on the couch in a blissful food coma seems like your style, consider one of these celebratory meals.” — Sacramento Bee
The is our definite article: we use it to refer to a specific thing (i.e. a noun) whose identity is clear to everyone reading or listening because of logic, common assumption, or a clause that explains it. “Please take the chocolate biscuit.” “I don’t like the hat she’s wearing.” But curiously there are times when we use the and we’re not being specific, as in the press examples above. Why didn’t McAlice take a bus (since we have no idea which bus he actually took)? Shouldn’t the Kansas First News be directing us towards a doctor (surely we can’t all go to the same one)? How does the Sacramento Bee know which couch is our favorite?
We would say that we’re popping out to get a sandwich (because how would anyone know what bread or fillers we’re going to choose when we get to the counter to order? So an indefinite article is definitely in order here). But when I tell my friend I’m taking my cat to the vet, do I really expect them to know which vet I’ll be consulting? The answer is almost certainly no, so why do we use the in these instances?
As Fowler’s Modern English Usage explains, “[The] is frequently used in a non-specific way to mean ‘whichever one of its kind is or was convenient, open, etc.’: I go to the cinema once a year, he heard it on the radio, she took the train to London.”
OK, I’m off to make the sandwich. (And by that, I mean the one that will be most convenient to make using the contents of my fridge.) Have the good day.
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TGIF. In language usage and abusage news this fortnight: Hugh Grant’s new character offers an English lesson; David Remnick talks about the New Yorker‘s copy-editors; a French MP is fined for using sexist grammar; a new documentary about grammar; and the superiority of paper over digital in book-reading … Continue reading
Celebrating its 70,000th visitor earlier today, Glossophilia brings you its 21 most popular posts so far. Subjects include Cockney Rhyming Slang and other quirky Englishisms; contranyms and homophones; when to use which and when to use that; British tea – when is it low and when is it high? and British school – when is it public and when is it private?; some modern words like yolo and like, and a not-so-modern one: dildo. And, of course, some American-British differences that we can never get enough of — this time in the kitchen pantry …
Enjoy (them)! Continue reading
It’s a strange verb, to grow. Usually we talk about things or people growing intransitively — ie. without an object. “The size of the crowd grew.” “She has grown so tall.” “The government’s power is growing.” There’s really no limit to what can grow, on its own, in an intransitive sense. However, when it comes to using the verb transitively — ie. when we’re talking about “growing something“, rather than seeing it grow under its own steam, then most bets are suddenly off: we only grow transitively when we’re referring to natural, living things. We grow plants, flowers and our own food; we grow beards, and our hair; we even grow pot-bellies — whether we like it or not. But it’s only recently that the transitive use of the verb itself has begun to grow: now embracing inanimate objects and abstract items, grow is beginning to mean “expand” — and you can grow anything from your circle of friends to an economy or an international corporation’s revenue (whereas before they grew only intransitively). The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage advises against this growing trend of growing anything unnatural transitively: “The newer usage of grow to mean expand (grow the business; grow revenue) is business jargon, best resisted.”
Disappear is another dodgy suspect when it comes to its transitive use. Continue reading
There was a profoundly important moment at last night’s Emmy Awards: when Chris Hardwick got up and gave the world’s internet trolls a dressing down for not getting their grammar right.
“There’s one very important message and I wanted to use the Emmy stage as a global stage to get this message out … It’s very important … I want them to listen … This is very important, trolls, please. Understand what I’m about to tell you, and write it down. ‘Your’ — Y-O-U-R — is a possessive pronoun. ‘You’re’ — Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E — is the contraction of ‘you are’. As in ‘you’re bad at your grammar.’ Thank you.”
Thank you, Chris. And internet trolls: learn your lesson well. We’re watching you …
TGIF. In language, grammar and usage news this week: does how we write tell others how smart we are? Do punctuation and grammar matter when we’re flirting digitally? Does the language of a restaurant’s menu tell us how expensive the restaurant is? Plus some spelling challenges presented to U.S. foreign policy reporters; movie titles that make us cringe; and the Kim Kardashian of punctuation marks …
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How you write can affect how smart others perceive you to be. According to a piece in the Atlantic, “Typing … in the Comic Sans font … could ruin the whole thing: a Princeton researcher found that a hard-to-read font made an author seem dumber, while a clean, simple typeface (Times New Roman, in the study) made him or her seem more intelligent. The same researcher also looked at how using big words (a classic strategy for impressing others) affects perceived intelligence. Counterintuitively, grandiose vocabulary diminished participants’ impressions of authors’ cerebral capacity. Put another way: simpler writing seems smarter.”
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“The dash is the Kim Kardashian of punctuation marks: misplaced, over-exposed, shamelessly self-promoting, always eager to elbow out her jealous sisters the comma, colon, and semicolon.” So Roy Peter Clark maintains on Poynter.
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The Huffington Post has identified 18 movies whose titles make every grammar geek cringe. It’s mostly a case of missing hyphens (“40 Year-Old Virgin” has a slightly pedophiliac quality to it) and apostrophes (“Two Weeks Notice” cries out for one); but when it comes to Zach Braff’s new movie, he’s
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“Funky or very informal spelling” is the biggest turnoff for both men and women when it comes to digital flirting, according to the results of a digital flirting rules survey done by Omlet, a chat app. …For women, the second biggest turnoff was the lack of punctuation and grammar.” Delaware’s News Journal has the story.
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The Hill has published an article on the spelling challenges of U.S. foreign policy. Is it ISIS or ISIL?
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Does the language of a restaurant’s menu indicate how expensive it is? Dan Jurafsky has found that it does, as reported in the Atlantic. “Fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier—and longer—words than cheaper restaurants do (think accompaniments and decaffeinated coffee, not sides and decaf)…. Lower-priced restaurants, meanwhile, rely on “linguistic fillers”: subjective words like delicious, flaky, and fluffy. These are the empty calories of menus, less indicative of flavor than of low prices. Cheaper establishments also use terms like ripe and fresh, which Jurafsky calls “status anxiety” words.” Does that mean I get a bargain when “steak frites” is on the menu?
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We often beat ourselves up about living too much in the past or the future and not “living in the moment”. But it’s interesting to see that we speak and write in the present tense more than we probably realize …
In my work as a publicist, I’m often talking and writing about things that will happen in the future: a work that is going to be performed or premiered, a CD scheduled to be released, an award to be bestowed. But nowadays — in this age of low attention spans and instant gratification — everything has to sound imminent or immediate in order for it to receive attention or make any impact. So we talk in the present tense — even about the future: “She sings next month”; “he releases the CD in October”; “he opens the Met’s season in 2015”. A press release written strictly and entirely in the future tense, using a lot of wills, would be tiresome indeed: as well as being more removed in time, it is necessarily more wordy and repetitive. Snappy it certainly isn’t.
As well as its sense of immediacy, the present tense has the advantage of linguistic expediency. English speakers don’t have the choice of simple future conjugations the way the French and others do (“j’irai demain”); officially we’re meant to employ extra words (in this case modal verbs) in addition to the main verb to indicate the future: “he will sing”, “the label is going to release a CD”. Our conjugated present tense is much shorter: “he sings”; “the label releases”. But thankfully for us marketeers, and confusingly for anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language, we actually do use the present tense — in common standard and not just colloquial English — to talk about the future, especially if we’re discussing something that is happening [there it is again — ed.] fairly reliably or imminently: “I’m having dinner with him tomorrow”, “he’s giving a speech next week”, or “the bus leaves at 3 in the morning”. Try explaining that rule to a non-English speaker …. Continue reading