Tag Archives: grammar

If you were to use the subjunctive…

Posted on March 4, 2025 | 2 comments

It’s March fourth. Happy Grammar Day! Today is a day when certain people who like to loudly declare their love for grammar put extra energy and volume into promulgating their favourite rules. Which is kind of a giveaway about their motivations: It’s not grammar itself that they love (since “bad grammar” is also grammar, adhering to a coherent underlying set of rules, just not the rules that they prefer), it’s security in an imposed order. It’s authority, as long as they get to be the authority. It’s like if someone were to say “I love flowers!” but simply could not stand the disorder of a meadow of wild flowers and had to have the tidy order of a strictly planted garden, with no flower out of place.

But there is an important difference here: Many neat grammar rules do have an organic basis in the language, and the imposed rule is intended to keep usage from drifting away from that. (This is not true of all grammar rules, mind you; for example, we know exactly when the strict distinction between less and fewer was invented, and we do not in fact owe allegiance to its inventor.)

But usage does drift. For most English speakers, for example, whom is effectively a foreign word; they have no natural feel for its usage, and so they use it in places where it’s inappropriate according to the rules they’re attempting to preserve. So a bit of freshening up on the established rules, for those who want to follow them, is not unreasonable. And – to get to my subject for this Grammar Day – for many English speakers, the subjunctive is also a strange thing that, even if they use it sometimes, they don’t altogether “get.”

Which isn’t that big a problem in most contexts. But if you were to use the subjunctive, you would need to know not just how to use it but when to use it. And the available guidelines for it are sometimes so detailed as to be confusing. Wikipedia, for example, says, “Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality, such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action, that has not yet occurred.”

Part of the problem is that these do not all require the subjunctive, but they are things it can be used for. Another part is that people get confused about what’s real versus unreal and what you can and can’t use the subjunctive for. So – as it is Grammar Day (or, if you are reading this on another day, imagine it were Grammar Day) – let me give you the quick and easy way of thinking about the subjunctive mood: It can be thought of simply as a hypothetical mood. Note that I say “mood” – it’s not a tense; it’s a perspective that can be applied to any tense, just like the indicative mood (which is the usual mood, talking about things that definitely do or don’t exist). 

And this is where some people get confused, because hypotheses operate differently in the past and present than they do in the future. When we’re talking about things in the past or the present, something that’s hypothetical hasn’t happened and isn’t happening, whereas something that’s indicative has happened or is happening. To use Wikipedia’s term, in the present and the past, the unreal is known to be unreal. But when we talk about the future, it’s all hypothetical; none of it has happened yet, even when we’re using the indicative. None of it is real yet. Which means that the effect of the subjunctive in the future is not the same as in the present and the past. 

Let’s look at some examples:

Past:

Subjunctive: “If you had helped me, I would have been grateful.” (You didn’t, and I wasn’t.)
Indicative: “If you helped me, I was grateful.” (You might have helped me; I just can’t remember. If you did, I was grateful.)

Present:

Subjunctive: “If you were helping me, I would be grateful.” (You aren’t, and I’m not.)
Indicative: “If you are helping me, I am grateful.” (I’m not sure if you’re helping me; if you are, I’m grateful.)

Future:

Subjunctive: “If you were to help me, I would be grateful.” (I’m proposing that you help me, but I’m doing so indirectly, so as to make it clear that it is not expected but merely possible at your discretion.)
Indicative: “If you help me, I will be grateful.” (Just a straightforward conditional, laying out a possible course of action and a consequence of it.)

You can see that both ways of speaking of the future are possible, and both refer to the same case, but one is using the hypothetical framing to put in more distance so as to disavow any air of expectation or transaction – in other words, it’s being more passive and polite – whereas the other is simple and direct.

And this is where we see that choices of grammar are not just about what is technically correct; they are also about negotiations between people. Everything we say, we say to produce an effect, and part of that effect is a negotiation of status and expectations between us and the person(s) we’re speaking to. (Unsolicited corrections of other people’s grammar are an exemplary case and their intended effect is left as an exercise to the reader.) In the case of my example, “If you were to help me, I would be grateful,” the subjunctive is used to make a suggestion or implied request, or wish – none of which, by the way, asserts or implies that the thing is outside the realm of possibility; it simply uses the hypothetical framing to emphasize that it is not a certainty, and it does that so as not to impose or make a claim on the other person.

One more thing, though: All of this is just if you use the subjunctive. You don’t, in fact, have to; there is a version of English that simply doesn’t use distinct forms for the subjunctive. In it, you never say “if I were you”; it’s “if I was you,” even though I have never been you. This version is more common and more accepted in England than in North America, but it’s available everywhere… though it does have a less literary air to it, and it allows the occasional ambiguity, though that’s usually resolved in the next clause with the choice of tense. For example:

Subjunctive user speaking hypothetically: “If I were finished, I would stop writing.”

Subjunctive non-user speaking hypothetically: “If I was finished, I would stop writing.”

Subjunctive user or non-user using indicative: “If I was finished, then obviously I stopped writing.”

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Harris, possessive, declined

Posted on August 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

So which is it: Harris’ or Harris’s? Neither: it’s τῆς Χάρεως. Or maybe Harro. Or, hmm…

There has been some confusion and consternation lately about the possessive form of the surname of the vice president of the USA, who is also the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Many people, remembering what they were taught in school,* insist it must be Harris’. For the record, if you are adhering to the Associated Press style, that is correct in the singular; if you are adhering to any other major guide (as most people do), the singular possessive is Harris’s. The plural possessive, according to every authority, is Harrises’. But I want to talk about what this paradigm manifests in particular about modern English. And I want to have some fun.

The thing about modern English is that we view proper nouns (names that get capital letters) as internally unassailable. The only alterations they can have are additions of apostrophes and s or es for possessives and plurals and plural possessives. We make jokes, sure, for instance calling the Winklevoss twins “the Winklevii,”† but that just manifests the other thing we do: treat plurals as the one signifier for non-English-origin common nouns. We know that the “proper” plural of radius, for instance, is radii. If a word has been borrowed into English, a certain kind of person will make a point of using a plural from the original language: “Oh, no, you don’t mean inukshuks. You mean inukshuit.” (This also leads to silly mistakes like octopi.) And that’s it. We have no concept of any other possible alteration to a noun.

But speakers of many other languages do. It’s common enough among languages to have changes to nouns, not just common nouns but proper nouns, to indicate not just plural and possessive (called “genitive” by linguists and philologists) but also nominative versus accusative (we do this with pronouns: he versus him, for instance) and even dative (indirect object) and ablative (the reverse of dative: taking away rather than giving) – and, in some languages, a lot more. Linguists generally call these various noun forms “inflections” (the noun equivalent of conjugations, which are what verbs do).

For fun, I worked out what the full inflectional paradigm would be for Harris if it were a Latin noun. When speaking of Latin, one typically calls this “declension”; you say this is how Harris is declined, because of the image of going down a list of forms on paper (not because of students saying “I prefer not to,” though that surely has happened). And as it happens, Harris in form looks like a noun of the third declension in Latin. So here’s how that goes (note that I’m listing the cases in the order linguists list them in, which is different from the order students of Latin learned to recite them in school):

nominative singular Harris
accusative singular Harrem
genitive singular Harris
dative singular Harrī
ablative singular Harre

nominative plural Harrēs
accusative plural Harrēs
genitive plural Harrium
dative plural Harribus
ablative plural Harribus

Meaning that instead of Harris’s you would write Harris; instead of Harrises’ you would write Harrium; and, for that matter, instead of to the Harrises you would write Harribus (Latin doesn’t use definite articles as English does). And if Harris is not the subject but the direct object, it’s Harrem. (The vocative form, which you use when addressing the person, is in this case the same as the nominative. Note also that the macrons on ī and ē indicating long vowels are a modern scholarly device; they wrote long and short identically in ancient Rome.)

I posted this on Bluesky (which is a site you can go to now instead of Twitter) and it got some responses, including how it would be in Finnish – due to length limitations on posts, @uimonen.bsky.social provided just most of the singulars:

nominative Harris
genitive Harriksen
accusative (i.e., partitive) Harrista
inessive Harriksessa
illative Harrikseen
elative Harriksesta
adessive Harriksella
allative Harrikselle
ablative Harrikselta
essive Harriksena
translative Harrikseksi
abessive Harriksetta
comitative Harriksineni

A thing to think about here is that whereas the Latin declension is really for humour, the Finnish inflectional paradigm could actually be used by actual speakers today in Finland (though when I look at the Finnish Wikipedia article on her, for instance, the paradigm is different: the genitive is Harrisista, for instance. Why? Well, it’s not a Finnish name, for one thing, and, as we will see, that tends to matter). There are no modern daily speakers of Latin, and most descendants of Latin – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese – have declined to keep the declensions. 

But another classical language is spoken today: Greek. Here’s the Classical Greek inflectional paradigm for Χάρις, which is how Harris is rendered in modern Greek and might as well be in the ancient kind as well – I’ve assumed the same third declension as for πόλῐς (polis, ‘city’), and feminine gender (the inflection would be different for a man named Χάρις); note also that it’s normal with Greek to include the definite article, which is used far more even than in English:

nominative singular ἡ Χάρῐς (hē Haris)
accusative singular τὴν Χάρῐν (tḕn Harin)
genitive singular τῆς Χάρεως (tês Hareōs)
dative singular τῇ Χάρει (têi Harei)
vocative singular Χάρῐ (Hari)

nominative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
accusative dual τὼ Χάρει (tṑ Harei)
genitive dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
dative dual τοῖν Χάρέοιν (toîn Hareoin)
vocative dual Χάρει (Harei)

nominative plural αἱ Χάρεις (hai Hareis)
accusative plural τᾱ̀ς Χάρεις (tā̀s Hareis)
genitive plural τῶν Χάρεων (tôn Hareōn)
dative plural ταῖς Χάρεσῐ/ταῖς Χάρεσῐν (taîs Haresi/taîs Haresin)
vocative plural Χάρεις (Hareis)

Yes, that’s right: there’s also the dual – which is nice if you’re referring to the Harrises as a couple (except, of course, Kamala Harris’s husband is Doug Emhoff, so never mind). So the family of Harrises, set in English, would, going by this, be not Harrii or Harroi or whatever but Hareis. And so on.

So does this work in modern Greek? Ah, well, I’m sorry to tell you that, while Modern Greek has declensions (just a little simpler than the classical ones), names from other languages are treated as indeclinable. So when you look at articles about Kamala Harris, it’s always Χάρις. Sorry.

But there are other languages that also decline names. Most, however, decline to do so for foreign names – after all, even if the name looks like a word from their language, they know it’s not. Lithuanian names, for instance, tend to end in -is in the nominative masculine, and replace that for different noun cases; Vytautas Landsbergis, for instance, when he is the indirect object (dative case) rather than the subject of a verb, is Vytautui Landsbergiui. And for “Landsbergis’s” it’s Landsbergo. But Harris isn’t a Lithuanian name, and what’s more, Kamala Harris is not a man and so wouldn’t be inflected according to the masculine paradigm.

On the other hand, Lithuania’s neighbours in Latvia have an answer to that. Latvian makes the nominative of her name Harisa, because Latvian feminine names and in -a as a rule, and because rr isn’t a thing in Latvian (you will also see Herisa, but there’s a stronger case for Harisa). And so if she’s the direct object, she’s Harisu; the indirect object, Harisai; and the possessive for her name is Harisas.

This is all lots of fun, of course, but Harris is, in truth, an English name. But we don’t have to leave England to find a full inflecting paradigm for it. We can just go back in time – Old English had a full system of inflections. The Old English inflections for her name would be:

nom sg Harris
acc sg Harris
gen sg Harrises
dat sg Harrise

nom pl Harrisas
acc pl Harrisas
gen pl Harrisa
dat pl Harrisum

So if you give a book to the Harrises, “þu giefst þa boc þam Harrisum” (for those who don’t know, þ is how we used to write the sound we now write as th). 

That’s not nearly as entertaining as treating the -is as a suffix, alas. But it also has two problems: first, the name Harris only appeared in Middle English, so inflecting it Old English style is as contrived as declining it Latin style; second, in Middle English, the name actually does contain a suffix: Harris is the genitive form of Harry. Names formed from genitives are quite common in English, since the genitive used to be used more broadly: if you lived near the field, you were called Fields; by the brook, Brooks; if you were of the family of Stephen, you were Stephens; and if of the family of Harry, you were Harris. And yes, Harry is a nickname for Henry, but so it goes. Toms and Jacks are also family names.

But you can see the problem here: How can you have the genitive of a name that is already in the genitive? Along with which is the fact that it’s Middle English, not Old English. In Middle English, the inflections of Harry would be (with spelling variations):

nom sg Harry
acc sg Harry
gen sg Harris
dat sg Harre

nom pl Harres
acc pl Harres
gen pl Harre/Harrene
dat pl Harre/Harres

But that just means that if there’s a Harry and another Harry and they jointly have something, then it’s Harre thing or Harrene thing. If it’s the thing of the family of Harry, you can’t really do a double genitive unless you treat the first one as just part of the name: Harrisis in the singular and Harrise or Harrisene in the plural. 

It does remind us of one key fact, though: the genitive (possessive) in English didn’t have an apostrophe until just a few centuries ago, when the apostrophe was added on the basis of the mistaken supposition that the possessive was a contraction (imagining “Harry’s book” as short for “Harry his book”). That’s right: this detail that confuses so many people, and that provokes the ire of a certain set, is founded on nothing other than a historically baseless reinterpretation.

Mind you, a Latin inflectional paradigm that gives us Harrium librī for “the Harrises’ books” is also a historically baseless reinterpretation. But at least we know that. And it’s fun, and no one is getting upset.

…

* First: High-school teachers are not subject matter experts. Not even high-school English teachers. Not even the ones who “beat it into you.” Second, many people do not accurately remember what their teachers tried to teach them.

† Which is truly over the top, because even if it were Winklevus it would just be Winklevi – the -ii ending is only for plurals of -ius nouns – and it’s not, it’s not even Winklevos, which would pluralize to Winklevoi. But, yes, the point is it’s a joke, so it goes to the lengths of caricature.

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Sounding Like the “Right Sort”

Posted on March 26, 2023 | 1 comment

I was in Columbus for the annual ACES conference for the last few days. I gave a presentation on how we use vocabulary and grammar to filter audiences in and out – often in subtle ways. Here it is!

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Rules and laws

Posted on March 4, 2022 | 1 comment

For Grammar Day, I want to talk briefly about laws and rules, and the fact that some people who should know better get them confused.

Let’s start with laws of nature. Say someone holds a rock in front of them and lets go of it. It flies upward instead of falling. Do you say, “No, you’re doing it wrong – the rock is supposed to fall down”?

Then there’s criminal law. Let’s say that instead of dropping the rock, they throw it through a store window. You might say “Hey!”; a cop who is nearby might arrest them – or they might get away with it.

That’s sort of like the rules of sport. Say the person is playing football, and they throw a rock instead of a football – or maybe they just throw a football the wrong way. The player will get a penalty – if the referee sees it.

But how about the rules of grammar? Let’s say someone writes a sentence: “Person the throw rock football and window at.” Your reaction on reading it is probably something like “Huh? That doesn’t even make sense.”

So let’s say instead that the sentence is “Smashing a window, the person throwed rock and football.” If you’re like a lot of people, you’ll readily utter a correction of one or more errors, even if no one asked you to. You may also say something about the intellect of the writer.

The law of gravity, like any law of nature, doesn’t need anyone to enforce it. If you see a law of nature being broken, you’re wrong: either the law isn’t really being broken (it’s an illusion, or some other law is relevant) or the law as you know it is inaccurate or incomplete and your understanding needs to be revised.

Civil and criminal laws do need enforcement, because they’re human creations. Some of us may believe that laws are there to enforce laws of nature (or of God), but really at most we’ve just appointed ourselves to try and keep people behaving in accordance with our ideas of those laws, which is an us thing. Civil and criminal laws are like the rules of sports, but with broader application and stronger enforcement mechanisms.

And rules of grammar? Ones like in the last example, such as that it’s “threw,” not “throwed,” that you shouldn’t use dangling participles, and that you should be careful with definite and indefinite articles, are also like the rules of sports: in published texts, editors typically serve as referees, following specified style rules; in a broader social context, enforcement is mostly not formalized. The rules may have a certain tidiness, but that tidiness is not a natural law, nor is it inevitable – any editor who works with multiple house styles knows that.

But what about more basic rules of grammatical conmprehensibility, such as the ones broken by “Person the throw rock football and window at”? Those, too, are human creations – just at the level of social norms that we rarely stop even to inspect. Using the rules of some other languages, that weird sentence would be entirely coherent. English puts the definite article (“the”) before the noun, but Scandinavian languages tack it onto the end of the noun as a suffix. English can be very fussy with verb conjugations (“throw,” “throws,” “threw”), especially irregular ones, but other languages are less so, and some – such as Mandarin Chinese – don’t conjugate at all. English requires indefinite articles (“a rock,” “a football”), but Gaelic doesn’t, and Slavic languages don’t use definite or indefinite articles. And English expects “and” to go between the things it combines, but in Latin its equivalent can be tacked onto the second item, as in “Senatus Populusque Romanus” – literally “Senate People-and Roman” (in English, “the Senate and People of Rome”).

So, in short, the rules of grammar, even the most apparently essential rules, are not inevitable. Grammar, even the most fundamental grammar, is not a natural law; it is like the rules of a sport. The way you say a thing is not the one logical, inevitable, natural way to say it, even if – within the variety of the language you’re speaking – it’s the only “proper” way to say it. Even the idea that a double negative equals a positive, which seems plainly logical to modern English speakers, seems otherwise to speakers of languages such as Spanish or Italian, where a negative requires agreement (e.g., “No vale nada” and “Non vale niente”: “It’s not worth nothing”). After all, it can’t be a negative statement if it’s positive in some places. Logic!

But some people, even some otherwise well educated people, seem unaware of this. Editors and linguists are wearily used to people priggishly “correcting” them with simplistic grammar rules and ideas that they recall from school, as though those rules were basic truths like natural law. I’ve seen it even from people who have graduate-level educations and clearly ought to know better.

And why does it matter? I’ve written before about how this kind of dogmatic position is used to license social aggression (see What do we care about, really and Why all English speakers worry about slipping up), but the boorishness of grammar snobs is not the biggest thing. The idea that there is one correct, natural, logical grammar gives cover for not just class discrimination but also racism (because different social groups use different varieties of the language) and even sexism (in particular ideas about such things as pronouns and grammatical gender – I’ve given talks on this several times; a video of one time is at A Hidden Gender?). 

A person who understands the socially decided nature of grammar rules can understand that someone who’s using a kind of English that’s not “proper” is not inferior, and that different varieties of English are grammatically coherent even if they’re different from the schoolbook standard. Knowing this also broadens a person’s expressive repertoire.

Does all this mean that grammar is a free-for-all, or that there’s no point in teaching it? Of course it doesn’t mean that. We teach people about the rules of sports and the rule of law. We also teach people about dress codes – there are certain things you just don’t wear in certain places and occasions, not for any matter of intrinsic suitability (sweatshirts are no less functionally suited to formal occasions than tuxedos), but just because of the social implications they have come to have. Likewise, if you use a library, you learn how the books are arranged on the shelves, and it’s a tidy, systematic, enforceable order, but it’s not an inevitable one: the choice of Dewey versus Library of Congress, just for instance, will give quite different orderings. 

Tidiness can be good, and consistent, well-defined rules can be useful. I make a nice bit of money every year tidying up text. But rigidity and narrow-mindedness are bad. And believing that the simple rules you learned in your simple youth are the only true rules is a mistake that will limit your effectiveness – and, on the larger level, can limit others, and our effectiveness and potential as a society. Learn rules – as many different sets as possible – and use them judiciously.

Oh, and have fun.

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Prescriptivist or descriptivist?

Posted on October 26, 2021 | 5 comments

I’m once again serving as a guest expert for a friend’s copyediting course. The students in these courses often ask me interesting questions about points of grammar. But this time, one of them asked me a broader question – or, rather, two of them:

Would you describe yourself as more of a prescriptivist or descriptivist?

What value do you see in each of these approaches to language? 

Since you’re here reading this, you probably know what the difference is between prescriptivist and descriptivist: a prescriptivist is someone who believes in imposition of authoritative prescriptions on language usage – fans of Lynne Truss, for instance, and avid users of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style – while a descriptivist is someone who believes in observing and describing how people actually use language and not holding stern judgmental positions on it. Most modern dictionaries are descriptivist: they include a word if it’s in common use – including, for instance, impactful and misunderestimate – and they try to include all senses that are in common use. Some people believe they should be prescriptivist and forbid certain words and senses of words.

Since I have a graduate degree in linguistics, it’s no surprise that by disposition I’m a descriptivist. I love language in all its forms, and I observe how it’s used in each context. But that doesn’t mean I have an “anything goes” approach in my work as an editor. After all, I’m editing a text that is part of a specific genre and is meant to have a particular effect on a certain audience. I use my observations about how people use language (and how they think about it, which is another important issue) to decide what choices of words and phrasing will work best. 

Generally, of course, there’s plenty of latitude – more than some people think. But we can recognize that, for instance, “Go ask your mommy” will have one effect in a children’s book and quite another in a political speech. Your elementary school teachers may have said “‘Ain’t’ ain’t a word,” but aside from being obviously false (the sentence would be incoherent if it weren’t a word; it would be like saying “‘Zzblgt’ zzblgt a word”), all that does is position ain’t as a very powerful mark of “bad” English (informal, nonstandard, folksy – which is also taken as frank and honest). So in an annual report, if you’re giving forecasts on projects, you would have “It isn’t coming by January” (or even “It is not coming by January”), but you may make use of “It ain’t coming by January” as a momentary excursion in style if you want to convey a particular (refreshing, informal) frankness, which might position the ostensible writer (e.g., the CEO) as a “regular guy.”

So, on the one hand, the idea that you must not ever use ain’t just ain’t true. But on the other hand, we can thank such teachers and others like them for maintaining that opprobrium, which gives the word such power. Likewise, you can have a huge effect by slipping in a vulgarity in the right context, and vulgarities maintain their power by having some people constantly treat them as the most awful things.

In that way, we need prescriptions to give us rules to push against, and to know where we stand; anyway, we will always have them, because some people just love rules (regarding rule-seeking behaviour, see “That old bad rule-seeking behaviour”). Beyond that, it’s useful to have prescriptions just to help us decide what to do where – I regularly look things up in the Chicago Manual of Style, thereby saving me from having to justify my choices on my own account and ensuring that my choices will be consistent with choices in other similar books, which also helps make the reading go smoother.

But many of the things that prescriptivists focus on the most have little to do with consistency or clarity. In fact, that’s probably why they focus on them so much. Someone once said “School board politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” and the same goes with grammatical and lexical prescriptions: the ones that people get the most exercised about are precisely ones that make the least difference in clarity or effectiveness – which frees them up to function almost entirely as social shibboleths, signifiers of who is “the right sort.” Grammar peevery is just using the rule-seeking instinct to license social aggression while giving a plausible excuse. One of my favourite articles that I’ve written goes into this: “Why all English speakers worry about slipping up.”

So, in short, while many linguists are simply hard-set against prescriptivists, I have a more complex position. In some ways, I am by profession a prescriptivist: I enforce prescriptions within specific contexts – though those prescriptions are often made on the basis of descriptive observation. On the other hand, I don’t correct people’s grammar unless they’re paying me to do it, and I don’t think grammar is a useful indicator of character or intelligence; some very magnanimous and insightful people are not too tidy with grammar, and some people who have perfect grammar are obtuse and obnoxious. I don’t enjoy the presence of outspoken prescriptivists, but I’m sure we will always have them; and they fill a role, modelling a specific idea of propriety that we can choose to flaunt or flout as we fancy.

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But what about plural “they”?

Posted on September 22, 2021 | 1 comment

This article originally appeared on The Editors’ Weekly, the official blog of Canada’s national editorial association.

Singular “they” is here to stay, and that’s a good thing. There is no decent reason to require that third-person singular pronouns—and only third-person singular pronouns—always specify gender. “He” has never truly covered men and women equally, though starting in the 1800s some people tried to insist that it did, and constructions such as “he or she” or “s/he” are clunky at best. So it’s natural to accept officially what has been an informal workaround for centuries: extending the plural pronoun to cover the singular.

It’s not the first time that English has done this. As early as the 1200s, we started using the plural “you” for individuals of higher status, and by the 1800s, rather than continuing to specify respect—or lack of it—in pronouns, we had almost entirely stopped using the lower-status singular “thou.” If we can use a plural form in place of a singular to erase a status-based distinction, we can certainly do it to erase a gender-based distinction.

But there is one problem that we run into with singular “they,” a problem we have already encountered with singular “you”: how do you make clear when it’s plural?

That’s still a useful distinction, and it’s not always obvious from context. Consider a sentence such as “The CEO met the VPs at a bar, but they drank too much and started singing karaoke, so they left.” If specifying the gender of the CEO is out of the question, to clarify who “they” refers to you’ll need to rewrite it to avoid the pronouns—and if it’s a longer narration, that gets clunkier and clunkier. So what do we do?

Well, what did we do with “you”? For a time—quite a while, in fact, from the late 1600s through the late 1700s—singular “you” got singular verbs: “you was,” “you is,” “you does.” It was so common, Robert Lowth inveighed against it in his 1762 Short Introduction to English Grammar. Even Doctor Johnson used “you was.” Will we try the same kind of thing with “they”—saying “they is” and “they was”? A few people have tried it, but such usages are already strongly associated with “uneducated” English, and so they’re unlikely to become commonplace. And “you was” didn’t last, after all—Doctor Johnson and everyone else ultimately switched to “you were” even for the singular.

So how do we specify plural “you”? You know how: we add further plural specification to it. In the US South, “y’all” or “you-all” is very common, and it’s spreading; in other places, “yous,” “youse,” “you ’uns,” “yiz,” and “yinz” are local favourites. In many other places, we say “you guys” or something similar when we need to make the distinction. And I’ll wager we’ll end up doing the same kind of thing with plural “they.” “They-all” seems readily available; “those ones” and “those guys” are likely to show up; differential usages of “themselves” and “themself” are already in use and may be extended; and others may appear—I’ll be watching eagerly. And in some contexts, for added clarity, something like “the one” might be used for the singular.

What do we do as editors, here and now? We keep an eye on how popular use is changing. When we can, we use our positions to influence it a little. And, as always, we use our judgement to find what’s clearest and most effective for the audience of the text we’re working on. 

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Global English?

Posted on June 2, 2021 | 3 comments

This article originally appeared on the blog of ACES: The Society for Editing.

English is not one language and never has been. Even Old English had different dialects. Global English is a family of varieties, mostly mutually comprehensible but loaded with traps and surprises. And even when you can easily understand English from another part of the world, you will most likely recognize that it’s from somewhere you aren’t… and you’ll eventually get confused by something.

All of that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but some people seem to think it’s possible to produce a neutral, non-regional, truly global English. I will grant that it’s possible to produce an English that seems at least slightly foreign to anyone anywhere – the famous “mid-Atlantic” English you hear in some movies is a spoken version – but it is not possible to produce a variety of English that is taken as unremarkably local by every English speaker everywhere. There are several reasons for this.

Pronunciation

The most obvious difference is in pronunciation. Get someone from Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, someone from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and someone from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, to have a pleasant chat and see if they can understand each other at all. 

Pronunciation is less of an issue when dealing with the written word – you probably won’t have a person from Buffalo writing “hot” and a person from Toronto thinking it’s “hat,” as you may when it’s spoken. But text is, in fundamental ways, a representation of the spoken word, and it often relies on reference to the spoken word. 

Not just jokes but advertisements and catchphrases rely on rhymes and wordplays that are particular to just some varieties of English – “caught” and “court” sounding the same, or “quarter” and “border” rhyming for instance. These differences also help ensure the impossibility of English spelling reform: you can’t make a phonetic spelling of one variety of English that won’t be incomprehensible to users of many other varieties.

Spelling

Not that English spelling is the same everywhere of course. Canadians are used to American-style spellings but can be very patriotic about colour and centre in some contexts; if a Canadian book expects a largely American audience, however, you can count on those Canadian spellings to alienate them. And on the other hand, if you just go with British-style spellings in Canada, you’ll soon realise it doesn’t always suit. And there are more striking differences, such as gaol versus jail, oestrogen versus estrogen, and arse versus ass – though that last case is arguably a difference of which word is used, not just which spelling.

Same thing, different word

There are many, many things that have different names in different countries. It’s well known that British cars have boots and bonnets instead of trunks and hoods and that a British lorry is an American truck (of a specific kind); it’s generally famous that what Americans call a barbecue Australians call a barbie. Fewer people will know that South Africans call the same thing a braai, or that instead of saying bro or buddy they say boet (which sounds like “boot”) – while in India, they say yaar.

For that matter, there are regional differences even in America, some of them quite celebrated. Is a Pepsi a pop, a soda, or a Coke (used in defiance of trademarks)? Do children on playgrounds ride see-saws or teeter-totters? Such regional differences – which don’t always divide on the same lines – are what linguists call isoglosses, and maps showing the isoglosses are some of linguists’ favorite things.

Same word, different thing

Americans occasionally run up against the fact that pants and fanny mean less publicly acceptable things in British English, and Americans are likely to know that in England and Australia mate refers to a friend rather than a romantic partner.

They’re less likely to know that hotel can mean a restaurant in India; that South Africans call a traffic light a robot; that in India you don’t graduate, you pass out; that tea can be a full meal in England; that a torchlight in Nigeria is a torch in England and a flashlight in the US; that I understand you in the US is I hear you in Nigeria; or that South Africans say shame when they are shown a cute baby or told of happy news such as an engagement.

Americans may not even know what someone from a different part of the US means by boulevard (a grassy strip between sidewalk and street or a wide avenue with a green strip in the middle?).

Turns of phrase

The lexical differences also extend to idiomatic turns of phrase. Where an American might write Main Street on Friday is different from a suburb on the weekend, a Brit would have The High Street on Friday is different to a suburb at the weekend.

A person from England might say I’ll knock you up to mean I’ll drop by and might tell you to keep your chin up by saying Keep your pecker up, but if the hearer is from North America, the results could be… awkward.

Some differences are points of pride: New Yorkers make waiting on line rather than waiting in line a kind of local shibboleth, and for New Zealanders, a phrase like Kiwi as (as in This food is Kiwi as) is, well, as Kiwi as… as what? They expect you to fill in the blank.

Grammatical niceties

There is also the matter of things that are correct usage in one variety but terrible errors in another. I dreamed I dove into a lake may be fine in the US, but I dreamt I dived into a lake is necessary in England. I casted my vote yesterday is terrible in some countries but absolutely correct in Nigeria. I’ll call you when I reach is normal in India rather than I’ll call you when I arrive.

Cultural references

Words and grammar aren’t the only things that vary from place to place though. English-speaking culture is obviously far from uniform, and some baseline assumptions just don’t work the moment you cross a border. Food is different, and passing references can quickly be opaque: not everywhere has food trucks or pretzel carts or chaiwallahs; not everyone can order poutine or grinders or bangers.

And while any Canadian will know what another Canadian means by toque and parka, most other people in the world won’t.

Americanizing and Canadianizing texts is a large and expensive business, and the spellings are the least of the issue. I remember one time a Canadian colleague working on a converted document discovered a number of instances of underprovinciald in a document; it turned out that someone had done a replace-all from state to provincial without checking. But when a guide to a health care topic starts talking about insurance, no amount of word replacement will fix the disparity between the US and Canada – or, really, between the US and anywhere else.

Houses and other buildings can be different, including what’s called the first floor (ground floor in the US and Canada, the floor above ground in most of the rest of the world).

There are also regional differences. In Canada, for instance, if you talk about a condo in Ontario, you probably mean a high-rise apartment; in Alberta, a condo is more likely to mean a townhouse, possibly a vacation property. What you mean by the word bungalow can vary quite a bit depending on where you are in the US. And in some cities, a duplex is typically side-by-side residences with one common wall, while in others, it’s a house with one residence on the upper level and the other on the lower – meaning that a reference to the people in the other half banging on the wall may be confusing.

Global varieties

How many kinds of English are there? Hmm, get a book of paint colors from a hardware store and tell me how many kinds of white, or blue, or black there are. Get another book and count again. English has national standard varieties, regional varieties within countries, local variants, socially divided varieties (often people from the same social group in different cities will sound more like each other than like people from other social groups in their respective cities). 

And don’t forget that the status of English is not the same in every country where it’s spoken – it’s the historical main language in some, the language of a colonizing class in others, and a lingua franca in still others. 

But in every country where texts are published in English, someone needs to make sure that that English doesn’t seem strange. And that someone may be you. The one thing you can be sure of is that while one variety of English may be comprehensible to speakers of another, it may alienate them – and may give rise to significant misunderstandings.

No exceptions?

Do I see a hand in the back? …Yes? …Labels on boxes? And short warnings and things like that? Yes, it’s true that you can produce some short passages that look local to anyone anywhere. But that’s not a global variety of English; it’s a snippet, and many other similar snippets will not seem so universal. 

It’s like going up to a rail ticket office in a European country and knowing enough of the local language to buy a ticket without their noticing that you’re not a native speaker: it doesn’t mean you’re fluent. You couldn’t carry on a conversation without being smoked out. You sure couldn’t write an article – let alone a book – that would be smoothly idiomatic. 

The same is true with using English from one part of the world in another part of the world. Oh, they’ll understand you, probably. But they’ll know you’re not from there, and there will be extra friction and effort in the communication and comprehension. You may not realise it, but the little differences to what you’re expecting colour your reception. And editing means understanding, appreciating, and working with these subtleties.

In effect, localizing English is like translating from one language into another, just subtler. You should only localize into a variety you have native fluency in – if you try to adapt a text into the English of a country you’re not from, you will eventually make an embarrassing mistake. But you also need to know the variety you’re converting from well enough to understand the local points of usage and cultural assumptions, so you don’t think a Canadian’s toque is a chef’s hat, don’t believe that a South African at a robot is watching an android, or don’t get what the big deal is about jumping out a first-floor window.

Which, in my view, seems like an excellent excuse to do some international traveling… when you can.

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One of those questions that are often asked

Posted on June 3, 2020 | 4 comments

A friend passed on to me one of those grammar questions that are often asked and often opined on:

In a sentence like “She is one of those people who are always late,” I learned to cross out prepositional phrases when linking subject to verb, so I would cross-out “of those people” and link “she” with “is” instead of “are.” Isn’t “of those people” modifying “one” (which acts as a complement to “she”) and not acting as the actual subject?

The problem with just crossing out preposition phrases is that you sometimes miss where the phrase ends – or doesn’t end! There are a few ways to look at it. The bracket way is short but benefits from further explanation:

She is one [of those people {who are always late}].

What that means is that there are people who are always late, and she is one of them. Yes, “of those people” is modifying “one,” but “who are always late” is modifying “of those people.”

A person could object (as many do) that it could equally be

She is one [of those people] [who is always late].

In other words, of those people, she is one who is always late. The problem with that is only in part that “She is one who is always late” is a bit odd; after all, “She is one” is a bit odd by itself too, but we’re not saying it by itself. The issue is really with “of those people.” For one thing, if the “always late” isn’t there to describe the set of “those people” of which she’s a member, it’s not specified who “those people” are. Who are they? And why are we mentioning them at all? Let’s look at a similar structure:

She is an eater of those hot dogs that have fallen on the floor.

She is an eater of those hot dogs that has fallen on the floor.

The difference is plain enough: in the first, the hot dogs have fallen; in the second, she has. And we have to assume that which hot dogs “those hot dogs” are has been established or can be inferred contextually; if not, it may be perplexing.

She eats those hot dogs. She has fallen on the floor.

Umm… tell me which hot dogs.

Returning to the example in question, the “is” version means this:

She is one of those people. Specifically, she is one who is always late.

If you’re in a context where you know who “those people” are, OK; but otherwise you have to specify them, or why are you mentioning them? And if your answer to “Who are they?” is “People who are always late,” you have shown why you really want to say “those people who are always late.” If she is one of them, then yes, she is one who is always late (as are they all), but if you go with the “is” version then you haven’t actually specified who they are; in fact, you’ve implied they’re not all like her in this respect. It’s like saying

It’s one of those hot dogs that is delicious.

You can see that the implication is that not all of those hot dogs are delicious; otherwise, why would you be singling that one out? Or if you say

He’s an editor who is popular at parties.

you know that it implies that not all editors are! And likewise, if she is one of those people who is always late, by implication others of those people are not. On the other hand, if you say “one of those people who are” and she is one of them, then she is covered.

That’s the logical analysis, and it’s the one I go with as an editor. In casual speech, I admit that I sometimes say “who is” in similar instances before I can catch myself, just because the structure of the sentence is so analogous to others where “is” would be appropriate; “one of those people” is a noun phrase like “a member of the club,” and we would most likely say “She is a member of the club who is always late.” (Unless it’s a club of people who are always late. Which is, in fact, what we mean in this case!) But when I’m editing, it’s more important to make it stand up to analysis. And it sounds good to me.

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To be, or not to be, that is the question

Posted on May 21, 2020 | 4 comments

Why stop at word tastings? That’s like filling your cupboards with food but never cooking it. Here’s a sentence tasting, which is really using a sentence as an excuse to explorations. It’s a long read.

The year is anno domini 1600, or perhaps 1601. We are across the river from London, in the middle of watching a play. Richard Burbage, a short, stout, utterly entrancing thirty-two-year-old actor, walks onto the stage of the Globe Theatre. The ground and galleries of the open wooden O are full of people, but Burbage takes the front of a broad, nearly empty rectangle jutting into it and claims the heart of a zero, a full nothing – or, depending on how you look at it, a Q.

There are three other people on stage, though Burbage seems not to see them: in the alcove in the back are two actors, playing a king and his adviser, present as an absence, and over to one side, kneeling as if praying, is a boy dressed as a young woman to play the paramour of the prince Burbage portrays. The two hidden men, according to the plot of the play, are using the young woman in hopes of drawing out the protagonist’s secrets. They expect professions of love, confessions of plans, the revelation of what is rolling around in the locked box of his head. They are about to be disappointed. Nobody – characters or audience – will get what they see or see what they get.

Burbage, who is holding perhaps a book, perhaps a weapon, perhaps nothing, but definitely not a skull (not in this scene), starts speaking towards the audience, who in the world of the play are not there but are in fact the entire reason this is even happening. He says words written by his friend and business partner, the successful 36-year-old actor and playwright William Shakespeare. His first line will become one of the most famous lines in the English language: Continue reading →

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About the serial comma

Posted on September 29, 2019 | 2 comments

People have opinions about the serial comma (also called the Oxford comma). Sometimes very strong opinions. So I sat down with my lunch, some Cheerios, and a Martini to tell you the truth.

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