Tag Archives: English grammar

What’s the referent?

Posted on April 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked about a sentence similar to the following:

Implementing personnel policies is the only real delegation left to make, which requires involvement at all executive levels.

Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that the “which” clause is a nonrestrictive clause – i.e., that the comma belongs there (otherwise, take out the comma, replace which with that, and you have a coherent sentence – but one that implies that there may also be tasks left to undertake that don’t require involvement at all executive levels). The problem, then, is that it’s not clear what the which refers to. Continue reading →

“Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide”

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 1 comment

In today’s New York Times, my eye was caught by the following headline:

Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide

It caught my eye because I couldn’t figure out what they meant by it. There were multiple options, none of them certain. It wasn’t until I read the third and fourth paragraphs that I got the gist:

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

The short of it is that the banks helped to hide the debts, and now they’re betting Greece will default on them.

There are a few problems with the headline the way they have it:

First, “bet” is temporally ambiguous – I wasn’t sure if they were talking past or present.
Second, “defaults” could be a plural noun or a present-tense verb.
Third, the present tense is confusing for “defaults” here because it’s referring to the future – something we do in English, use present for the future (since we have no inflecting future tense, just an auxiliary-based one with “will”), but it might be better to be clearer by saying “will default”.
Add to this the increasingly common practice of using attributive nouns rather than adjectives, which allows “Greece defaults” to be read as “Greek defaults” or “defaults of/by/from Greece”, and the standard dropping of the relative “that”, and you have something really a bit unclear.

Now, of course, “Banks Bet that Greece Will Default on Debt They Helped Hide” is noticeably longer, which is a problem in newspaper headlines, especially since the NYT still has a print edition with actual column inches to fit within. Likewise “Banks Helped Greece Hide Debt, Now Bet It Will Default”. “Banks Set Greece Up to Fail” might seem harder to defend as a statement, but is probably a better headline all around. (The ambiguity of “set” is OK here because it happened in the past and is still happening in the present.)

But, then, is it really a bad headline? It did get me to read the article, just as the most egregious website I’ve ever seen – yvettesbridalformal.com — has gotten me (and my friends) showing it to everyone, making for excellent advertising.

Incidentally, the title on the web page of the news article (not the headline but the title you see at the top of your browser) is “Trades in Greek Debt Add to Country’s Financing Burden” – clearer but, yes, less catching.

1 Comment

Posted in editing

Tagged ambiguity, English grammar, headlines, news headlines

For a thousand years it’s good English, then it’s a comma splice?

Posted on January 6, 2010 | 10 comments

I was a bit surprised by a query from a freelance editor I’m working with. She was asking about how to treat sentences of the “First do this, then do that” type. “Adverbial conjunction? Run-on?” she asked. “Truth is, I’m fine with it in informal writing, especially when the two parts are very closely connected. But because so many people consider it a run-on, I usually change it.”

So many people what?

Well, it turns out she’s right. Many people do think that it’s wrong to write, for instance, “I picked up the groceries, then I stopped at the liquor store.” “Comma splice!” they admonish. “Should be ‘…and then.'”

Well, geez. They should have told that to all those educated, fluent people who have been doing it that way for the past millennium or so, so they wouldn’t have been wrong all this time! Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in editing, language and linguistics

Tagged adverbs, and then, but then, comma splice, conjunctions, English grammar, run-on sentences, then

Rule-bound tut-tutters?

Posted on December 3, 2009 | 1 comment

I mentioned, in a discussion on editing, that editors don’t want to be seen as a bunch of arbitrarily rule-bound tut-tutters. One of my colleagues replied (tongue in cheek, she assures me), “at least when we’re NOT at work – after all, the essence of most editing is being a rule-bound tut-tutter!”

To which I replied:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Sorry for the emphasis, but I must respectfully disagree at the top of my lungs. We are, or we certainly should be, pragmatists, and friendly, helpful ones at that. That means that we understand that rules are made for the sake of communication, not the other way around, and everything we do is to help the author communicate well with the audience. We don’t enforce a rule if there’s no good reason for it – and we have to be able to explain the reason – and we should be helpful, encouraging, and empathetic, not prissy tut-tutters.

English is too good, fun, and useful to be some kind of gotcha game. One of our primary jobs as editors is to pry it loose from the morbid grips of those who would make it simply an arbitrary and devious status game (you know, those who say “Aaargh! I hate idiots who start a sentence with ‘hopefully’!” or who insist coolly “Split infinitives are a sign of poor breeding”). We are not bound by rules; we understand them and understand why each rule exists and we apply them intelligently, not dogmatically. And we ought not to tut-tut! Such is for those who are still in the middle school of the mind, pretending to be adults but maintaining their status by trying to bring others down.

1 Comment

Posted in editing

Tagged editing, English grammar, rules

Fulford fulminates – pfui.

Posted on September 24, 2009 | 4 comments

The National Post‘s Robert Fulford has gone on a grammar gripe to mark the unofficial but much-bruited National Punctuation Day.

Ick.

More “language as gotcha game” thinking. While standards are important in language, they exist to serve communication, not vice-versa. We certainly want children to learn consistency and discipline in their usage, but we should also want them to think about why they do what they do and to focus on language as something enjoyable and to put their main emphasis on effectiveness of communication. Punctuation ranting leads to truly a**hole-ish behaviour like this: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=522. Come on, perspective, please! Language exists for connecting people; if in our focus on language we disrespect people, we have lost the thread entirely.

And to address the apostrophe issue that Fulford fulminates on, I need to point out again that apostrophes on possessives are neither necessary (we get by fine without hearing them in speech) nor historically appropriate. They were forced into the language during the Renaissance by people who mistakenly believed that our possessive was contracted from “has” and who thought the written forms of words should manifest their origins (but only to some extent… for instance, a b was reinserted in debt to make it look more like debitum; why not add the i and the um while you’re sticking in silent letters?). “Ancient tradition” my ass. Fulford should take a short course in the history of the English language and study some Old English inflections. (See faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/courses/handouts/magic.html to see what our possessives used to be – they’re in the G. row, for “genitive.”)

The comments on Fulford’s article give further evidence to my contention that most people who go on about other people’s grammar don’t know grammar as well as they think they do. One fellow attempts to maintain a strict distinction between literal “farther” and figurative “further” when there is only a general trend, not a lexicalized difference. In response, another fellow, trying to sound authoritative, writes “written by whomever feels the urge,” which is altogether nonstandard; the relative pronoun here is the subject of a subordinate clause, and as such should be in the nominative, if we’re going to be insisting on the rules. Another one corrects someone on a supposed misplaced comma that’s not actually misplaced. And so on.

English is fun because it’s crazy. But it’s also frustrating for the same reason if you’re trying to be a stickler about it. Three points of advice:

a) remember why you’re using it;

b) know your stuff, and know what you don’t know;

c) enjoy it, please, and let others do the same.

4 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics

Tagged apostrophe, apostrophes, English grammar, English punctuation, National Punctuation Day, punctuation, Robert Fulford