Category Archives: Grammar

Whomever Horton hears in Whoville

 

We’ve become used to hearing the over-correction of  “you and me” to “you and I”:  She’s hosting the party for you and I …  He’s just like you and I.  I think of it as a case of grammatical positive discrimination – or linguistic political correctness: if you’ve been rapped over the knuckles once too often for uttering an apparently  illegal phrase (you and me”), without understanding when and why those three words sometimes do work legitimately in that order, you might err on what you think is the side of grammatical correctness, defaulting to a Pavlovian avoidance of an oft-forbidden phrase.

There’s a new over-correction going on in Whoville, and that’s the increasingly frequent incorrect use of whomever in the place of whoever. What is it about that little ‘m’ in the middle of the word that makes people feel so grammatically lofty? Whomever is the new you and I; it’s bandied about with the same lack of understanding of the subject-object issue at the heart of the matter, and in the mistaken belief that inserting an ‘m’ is invariably but unaccountably more grammatically correct.

“Whomever wants this apple can have it” is clearly wrong. Whomever is used only to refer to the object of the verbal sentence or phrase – ie. the person ‘on the receiving end’ of the verb.  The only word in this sentence that can be identified – by any stretch of the imagination – as an object is the apple, not the person wanting or having it.

We can be more forgiving when we start moving into more murky and dangerous waters: when whoever (or, wrongly, whomever) becomes the subject of a clause that is in itself the object of a sentence. Take these examples below.

1) Incorrect: “We will support whomever wins the Presidential election.”  Correct: “We will support whoever wins the Presidential election.”

At first glance, whomever seems to be the object of the sentence – the person whom we will support. However, “whoever wins the Presidential election” is a single person or grammatical ‘package’ – an ‘object clause’; and within that clause – which is itself the object of our support – there is an unequivocal  subject (whoever/any person) who is doing the winning. Therefore whoever takes the subjective rather than objective (whomever) form.

2) Incorrect:  “We will support whoever the country elects as President.”  Correct: “We will support whomever the country elects as President.”

In this case, the person elected is still the object of our support, contained in the object clause. However, this time, within the object clause (“whomever the country elects as President”), the subject is the country; it is not the whoever/any person who is doing the electing. And therefore whomever takes its objective form within the clause.

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“And so, all ended well for both Horton and Whos, and for all in the jungle, even kangaroos. So let that be a lesson to one and to all; a person is a person, no matter how small.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TV’s grammar graveyard, discussed on Patheos

I’m not sure which is more amusing: this blog post about TV’s worst pronoun-abuse offenders, or the fact that it’s posted on Patheos, “the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality and to explore and experience the world’s beliefs.”

Sadly, it does little to strengthen my belief (or faith) in the sturdiness of English grammar – at least not in the context of TV romance-seekers.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frenchrevolution/2012/07/13/the-bachelorette-where-proper-grammar-goes-to-die/

The Bachelorette: Where Proper Grammar Goes to Die

July 13, 2012 By

When Emily Maynard sent Sean Lowe home last week, hearts melted and Nora Ephron turned over in her grave.  According to US Magazine, Emily apparently borrowed a line from her movie “You’ve Got Mail,” to send him home in the limo of shame.

Emily said to Sean:

“I want you to know that I wanted it to be you so bad.”

The Meg Ryan character said to the Tom Hanks character in “You’ve Got Mail:”

“I wanted it to be you… I wanted it to be you so badly,”

Did you detect a very small difference?  Emily shouldn’t have “wanted it to be you so bad,” because “bad” is an adjective and the adverb “badly” would’ve more appropriately explained the degree to which she wanted it to work.  Of course, a missing syllable in a moment of heartbreak is no big deal, except that the producers of the Bachelor apparently look for five criteria in their contestants:

  1. Singleness
  2. Hot body
  3. A desire to “be there for the right reasons”
  4. The willingness to call other people out for “not being there for the right reasons”
  5. Inability to know when to use a nominative case pronoun or an objective case pronoun in a sentence

Numbers 2 through 5 are non-negotiable, but sometimes skipping  Number 1 adds a little drama to the season (examples: Wes Hayden; Justin “Rated-R” Rego, Casey Shteamer).

In fact, Bachelor pronoun abuse is so frequent it almost seems purposeful.  Here are real examples from the seasons I’ve watched:

“Everything feels good with Jillian and I right now. Everything feels good.”

“Today is all about Michelle and I.”

“Brad and I’s relationship is really moving forward.”

Note: using the nominative case “I” when an objective case “me” is correct is the “Smart Person’s Grammatical Error.”  I know countless, very intelligent people who make this mistake because it sounds more sophisticated.  What, however, can explain these?

“While you guys go find tequila, me and Jake are going to go for a little trip.”

“Me and Jillian, we had a great conversation.”

“I feel like after talking to Mike tonight, him and I have a lot more in common.”

“Me and Ashley were horrified to find out we had the two-on-one date.”

It’s gotten so noticeably bad that people have Tweeted in protest:

I share Joshua’s sentiments. To watch The Bachelorette on a weekly basis, one must suspend disbelief about the appropriate dating time frame before engagement, about how many people a person may simultaneously date, and about how wide one can open one’s mouth while kissing while the act is still considered a kiss and not something that Miami Police might attribute to bath salts.

Because we’ve temporarily suspended our beliefs about how people romantically go together, it was just too easy to suspend our beliefs in how words grammatically go together.  Week after week, we’re assaulted by incorrect usage, and we’ve been desensitized to what’s correct.

What’s next?  Will we suddenly think it’s permissible to talk on our cell phones in public restrooms?  Is it really that terrible to chew with one’s mouth open?  Plus, I looked good in shoulder pads back during the Reagan administration.

Another season of this, and I’ll be wearing a Snuggie, talking during movies, asking non-pregnant women when they’re due.

Does anyone know any English teachers who’d like to be the next Bachelor or Bachelorette?  Please, for the love of all that is grammatically holy,  give Chris Harrison a call.

The (grammatical) sins of our (Founding) Fathers

Grammatical errors, or just old-fashioned turns of phrase? Over-capitalization as an act of grandiosity, or simply the way they denoted common nouns in 1776?  Heidi Stevens takes a lighthearted look (in today’s Chicago Tribune) at the prose of our forefathers in the most famous of American documents to date.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/life/ct-tribu-words-work-founding-20120704,0,2083503.story

 

Grammar tics of the Founding Fathers

Words Work celebrates the language of independence in honor of July 4th

James Madison

By Heidi Stevens, Tribune Newspapers

July 4, 2012

The third most popular Independence Day activity—after watching fireworks (No. 1) and sweating (No. 2)—is feigning smug alarm at the stupidity of our fellow Americans, according to a recent poll.

OK, not an actual poll. But that’s beside the point. Researchers love to release data this time of year showing how few people know what we’re actually celebrating with all the hot dogs and bottle rockets. Forty-two percent of us don’t know what year the United States declared independence, according to a Marist Poll, and 26 percent of us don’t know from whom we declared it.

This information serves as a great ice-breaker at family picnics and must be followed by a declaration that the Founding Fathers are totally rolling in their graves.

Eh, maybe. But we’re getting a little tired of the rancor and name-calling and general ill will directed at our fellow man. We think it’s time to direct it at the Founding Fathers instead.

Not that they didn’t do big, important things like, you know, framing our Constitution and winning independence from England. But can we talk for a moment about their grammar?

“I’m pretty sure James Madison was drunk when he wrote the second amendment,” says Martha Brockenbrough, founder of National Grammar Day and the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. “Just look at it. It’s a mess: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

“Just as you don’t want to play with guns,” Brockenbrough says, “you also don’t want to be buzzed enough to get jiggy with your commas and sentence structure—especially when death is on the line.”

And what’s up with the random capitals?

“The founders capitalized nouns such as ‘prosperity’ and ‘tranquillity’ in the Constitution,” says Mignon “Grammar Girl” Fogarty, author of “101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time” (St. Martin’s Griffin). “Capitalizing unnecessary nouns is a rampant error in today’s business writing—’Let’s get Tacos for our Salespeople!’—but when you look at the Constitution, it’s like the worst of the worst. It wasn’t wrong in its time, but copy editors would be whipping out their red pens today.”

Arthur Plotnik, author of “The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts Into Words” (Viva), takes issue with the Constitution’s wordiness.

“You can find a few little extras in the document’s phrasal verbs,” Plotnik says. “‘The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies.’ Fill up, like a gas balloon?

“Another one: ‘No government officer shall accept of any present … from any king, prince or foreign state.’ What’s up with the of? An officer could accept the whole present, but not ‘of’ it? Sounds Super-PAC-ish,” he says. “And Article IV goes all ‘Gunsmoke,’ decreeing that fugitives could be ‘delivered up’ to the states they fled.”

And don’t even get us started on the preamble. A “more perfect Union”? Isn’t perfection, like uniqueness, absolute? Come on, guys.

Of course, there’s a good chance you will start a fist fight (or worse) by dissing the Founding Fathers at your Fourth of July gathering. Particularly if your fellow attendees forget to bring their sense of humor. So we leave you with these parting thoughts, from one of our favorite fellow countrymen.

“Do our sacred national texts violate modern rules of spelling, grammar and logic?” asks Jay Heinrichs, author of “Word Hero: A Fiendishly Clever Guide to Crafting the Lines that Get Laughs, Go Viral, and Live Forever” (Three Rivers Press). “Well, sure. I wish they did so even more.

“As a kid I proudly pledged my lee-gents to the flag; sang to the beautiful, forsaken skies; and had no clue what game Abraham Lincoln scored seven years ago. It didn’t matter. This was no ordinary language, it was like the voice of God—who, grownups assured me, spoke in mysterious waves.”

This was, Heinrichs says, by design.

“The ancient rhetoricians understood it well,” he says.”To make language sound impressively magical, they advised, darken it. Make it a little obscure. That’s because a clear meaning takes the mysticism out of sacred language.

“Proper grammar works well in a memo, but not so well in Amber’s ways of graying, or above the fruity plains, or in all those greats God shed for thee,” he says. “None of that stuff made sense to me as a kid, and I’m a better American for it.”

 

Grammar Gaffes Invade the Office (WSJ)

Published today in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html

This Embarrasses You and I*

“When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, “There’s new people you should meet,” her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company. “I cringe every time I hear” people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.

“Employers say the grammar skills of people they hire are getting worse, a recent survey shows. But language is evolving so fast that old rules of usage are eroding. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break.”

 

How’s Your Grammar?

Take a quiz to test your skills.

 

 

We like to like like Tina Charles loves to love

And I’m not, like, talking about kids who, like, can’t get through a sentence without, like, saying like. That scourge is so, like, 20th-century.

No, I’m talking about when the word like is used before a clause (as a conjunction).

The universally accepted and undisputed usage of like is as a preposition (ie. governing nouns and pronouns): “She looks like her daughter.” “He sounds like a bird.”

It’s when like is used as a conjunction (ie. connecting two clauses) that swords are drawn, tempers start to flare, and trans-Atlantic disagreement comes into play.  In the US, the colloquial use of like as a conjunction is now reasonably commonplace and accepted, especially when like simply replaces as (which more appropriately governs phrases and clauses). “We now have brunch every Sunday like we did in Sweden.” Such a sentence generally grates on English ears, which prefer, “We now have brunch every Sunday as we did in Sweden.”

Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, tackled this “most flagrant and easily recognizable misuse of like,” referring to the OED which similarly and roundly condemned the misuse as “vulgar or slovenly”.  The OED colorfully used a sentence written by Darwin (“Unfortunately few have observed like you have done”) to illustrate the abuse.

More egregious – and even more grating to British English speakers – is when like replaces as if or as though, masquerading even more  boldly as a conjunction. Fowler cites this lovely OED example: “The old fellow drank of the brandy like he was used to it.” Nowadays, the Oxford American Dictionary recognizes the “informal” usage of like as a conjunction to replace as; however, it clearly forbids using the word to mean as if or as though.

If you want to delve into the even more complicated arguments about the use and misuse of this overused word that we love to like (especially once we get into ‘disguised conjuntional use’, when there is no subordinate verb), Fowler’s your man.

Meanwhile, Strunk and White summarize the tussle over ‘like’ in their characteristically eloquent fashion, using it as a case study to argue more generally about the evolution of language:

“The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn’t. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has long been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.”

 

Their’s – no such thing as – correct: grammar ain’t it?

Published in today’s Guardian. Discuss.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/02/no-correct-grammar-martin-gwynne

Sorry, there’s no such thing as ‘correct grammar’

By Michael Rosen

Friday, 2 March, 2012

Martin Gwynne may have fun telling people the rules of grammar, but language is owned and controlled by everybody

Trainee nursery worker with small children in nursery UK 

Preschool children learning about letters and words through play. Photograph: Photofusion Picture Library/Alamy

It may have stirred a few loins down at the Telegraph but the arrival at Selfridges of Martin Gwynne, author of Gwynne’s Grammar, to give grammar lessons, doesn’t seem to have made waves elsewhere.

One of the interesting things about the word “grammar” is that many of its users think that it is self-evident that it refers to one thing: “the grammar” of the language. If only the matter were that simple. Whereas linguists are agreed that language has grammar, what they can’t agree on is how to describe it. So, while there is a minimum agreement that language is a system with parts that function in relation to each other, there is no universal agreement on how the parts and the functions should be analysed and described, nor indeed if they should be described as some kind of self-sealed system or whether they should always be described in terms of the users, ie those who “utter” the language, and those who “receive” it (speakers and listeners, writers and readers etc).

For some, this is just academic nit-picking. There is just “the grammar” and one of the great failings of education today is that neither teachers or pupils know it. In fact, we would neither be able to speak nor understand if we didn’t know it. A three-year-old who says “I bringed it” is expressing the grammar through the structure she has learned which indicates past happenings. It just so happens that the “ed” ending isn’t the customary way of doing it with that verb. So she knows “grammar” but not the grammar of that particular word in that particular context.

This immediately raises the question of whether we get to know grammar in order to be “correct”, or in order to describe what people say and write. So, one of the customary ways of talking in London is to say “I ain’t done it” or “I ain’t going anywhere” or some such. Some would have this as “wrong” or even as “ungrammatical”. Others would say that if “grammar” is about analysing and describing then “ain’t” is as valid a subject of study as anything else. I doubt if that’s what is being taught – or indeed what many people want to hear – at the Selfridges class.

Many people yearn for correctness and this is expressed in the phrase “standard English”. The honourable side to this is that it offers a common means of exchange. However, this leads many people to imagine that because it is called standard, it is run by rules and that these rules are fixed. I’ve always understood rules to be regulations that are drawn up in some agreed list. They are fixed (until such time as they are amended) and they are enforceable. In fact, there is no agreed list, a good deal of what we say and write keeps changing and nothing is enforceable. Instead, language is owned and controlled by everybody and what we do with it seems to be governed by various kinds of consent, operating through the social groups of our lives. Social groups in society don’t swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

So Gwynne, I suspect will have immense amounts of fun and satisfaction telling people what is “right”. People attending his classes will feel immensely pleased that they have been told what’s right and will probably spend a good deal of time telling other people they meet or read where and how they are wrong. This is not a neutral activity. It is part of how a certain caste of people have staked a claim over literacy. In effect, they state over and over again that literacy belongs to them. Other people (the wrong ones) have less of it or none of it. If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people’s speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire. There will always be social reasons for this and knowing these helps people take on the dialects they don’t fully speak or write.

This isn’t easy. We shouldn’t pretend it’s easy. And there is no evidence to date that proves that learning “grammar lessons” enables you to do this faster than if you do it by discussion, analysis and practice in talk and writing. For more than 20 years, O-level exams in English had a grammar question. We were taught “grammar”. There was also an essay question (called composition) which was supposed to show off how good we were at writing. In all that time, there was no obvious correspondence (which could be taken as cause and effect) between scores on the grammar question and scores on the composition question.

In the meantime, if you fancy an outing in the world of grammar, try MAK Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar. If nothing else, it will stop you telling your children lies, as in “a verb is a doing word”.

 

Hopefully taking a crack at hopefully

Hopefully, Oliver Twist asks for more.

That, in a nutshell, is “hopefully” being used correctly: when it refers to the hopeful mind-frame of the subject of the sentence – and not of the writer (or of a wider assumed consensus). The last thing any of us  – including, presumably, Dickens – would have hoped was that Oliver should step forward and make that legendary request. And yet it’s correct to say that “hopefully, he asks for more”.

As Mark Davidson explains in his book Right, Wrong, and Risky, “the adverb hopefully is risk-free if you use it to modify a verb or an adjective, and thus to mean “in a hopeful manner”.” He goes on to quote an example from the New York Times: “In anticipation of China’s 2008 Olympic bid, the city [of Beijing] is fervently and hopefully preparing for the event.”

However, the word is often used colloquially as a sentence modifier, rather than as an adverb, with the implied meaning “it is to be hoped that”. Compare it with the sentence modifier “fortunately”, implying that anyone writing or reading the sentence recognizes that “it is fortunate that” whatever follows does indeed follow. But the word is “hope-FUL-ly” – not “hope-ly”, or “hope-ably”. It makes no sense to say “it is hopeful that” – since someone has to be doing the hoping in order for it to be hopeful and full of hope.

Strunk and White go far in their damnation of the word ‘hopefully’ used as a sentence modifier. “Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, ‘Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane’ is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind?  … Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.”

Hopefully I’ll never find myself making a word choice that would have offended Messrs Strunk and White.

 

5 most common nouns: the answer is in time (and not in Black Friday)

According to Wikipedia, these are the five most commonly used nouns in the English language:

  1. time
  2. person
  3. year
  4. way
  5. day

And according to the The Reading Teachers Book of Lists, the five most common nouns are:  1) word 2) time 3) number 4) way 5)  people.

Isn’t it interesting that in both cases the nouns are all abstract (with the exception of person/people, which is almost on the abstract spectrum)? And perhaps more significantly: “time” makes both lists – and is represented by three separate words in Wikipedia’s rankings (“time”, “year”, “day”).

So, for us mortals – at least for those of us who speak English – time is never far from our minds and lips. Or could it be simply that there are fewer words in the English language to describe units of time and time itself, whereas perhaps in other areas of our waking lives we have a greater vocabulary to express particular concepts?

It’s reassuring to discover that even in this world of money and materialism – when human souls are bold enough to risk their lives for a flat-screen TV – it is still time that appears to be our most  significant commodity.