One word that gets some people in a lather is anyways with an s. It’s illogical! Senseless! Illiterate! Etc. But none of them ever seem to bother looking up its origins and history. So, for those who want to know, I’ve given the details in my latest article for TheWeek.com:
Originally published on The Editors’ Weekly
The English language is a very complex and powerful thing, capable of many nuances and quite resistant to simplistic attempts at tidying it up. Sadly, not everyone realizes that. Worse still, many people take very narrow and inconsistent views, focusing on pet peeves while letting parallel instances of usage pass unnoticed. It’s as though a self-trained self-appointed “master chef” opened a cooking school and taught, among other things, that salt and anything containing sodium can only be used in savoury dishes, never in desserts. The cakes may all be horrible and heavy and the puddings insipid, but goshdarn it, they’re culinarily correct!
Adverbs give us a good example of this. “An adverb modifies a verb,” some people say, “so it must always directly modify the main verb of the sentence. If someone says ‘Hopefully, they will be here tomorrow,’ it can only mean that their presence here will be hopeful.” And yet the same people will not be seen declaring that “Seriously, it will be very amusing” must mean that it will be amusing in a serious manner, or that “Frankly, you’re being evasive” must mean that your evasiveness is frank, or that “Clearly, someone has muddied the water” must mean that the water has been muddied in a clear manner.
If the “hopefully” peevers were to take note of how these other sentence adverbs function – using the adverb to give an attitude or setting for the entire sentence – they would be forced to allow the same role for hopefully… or perhaps they would decide that all those uses must be wrong, well established though they are (some date from the 1600s). But let’s say they allowed them. The next thing the forced-tidying mind might do – like the robot maid tossing out both the cat and the master of the house – is decide that only single-word adverbs can fill this role. Never mind that one may modify the action of a verb with prepositional phrases and participles; they’re not adverbs, so (the reasoning might go) they can’t be used as sentence adverbs. Sure, you can say “Hypothetically, he could resolve it with a clear statement of fact,” but you must not say “Speaking hypothetically, he could resolve it with a clear statement of fact”…!
Now, of course, there’s a perfectly good reason not to use the latter sentence – it has an ambiguity that could make the reader snicker (I like to say such sentences have a high SQ, or snicker quotient) – but ambiguity (and high SQ) is not the same thing as grammatical error. There are many instances of prepositional phrases, participles, and infinitives being used to set the scene for a sentence: “To give an example, he is disinclined to use illustrations”; “Going forward, all cars on the ferry must have their parking brakes on”; “Among other things, it is located on an empty treeless plain”; and so on. These do not generally raise the ire of the particular – although some can be awkward – and they are not ungrammatical.
Hopefully, as editors, we have eyes more finely tuned to such structures and can discern the many places and cases of their use. Going forward, I would like to suggest that we all keep our eyes open for every instance where an adverbial construction of any sort is used to give a setting for the entire action of a sentence rather than to modify the main verb directly – and, if we dislike it, ask ourselves whether it is truly ungrammatical or simply ambiguous. You may find yourself having to come to some surprising and possibly discomfiting conclusions.
Posted in language and linguistics
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, grammar, hopefully, sentence adverbs, syntax
Many people who like to give writing advice – or just pick at other people’s writing – like to hate on the passive voice. But quite a lot of those who do don’t actually know what they’re talking about. How about you? Try my latest salvo in The Week:
Posted in The Week
Tagged English grammar, grammar, passive voice, quiz, the passive, The Week
This article was first published on The Editors’ Weekly
You can’t split an infinitive.
I don’t mean I don’t want you to. I don’t mean it’s not proper to. I mean it’s not possible to. This is for the same reason that I haven’t just broken one off three times, at the ends of the three preceding sentences.
The English infinitive is one word. Not two. The to is not part of it. It’s just the infinitive’s trusty butler, and sometimes the infinitive doesn’t need the butler. When it does need the butler, it doesn’t need it right next to it all the time. And sometimes the butler stands in its place.
It seems rather posh, doesn’t it, for an infinitive to even have a butler? It wasn’t always thus. In Old English — that Germanic language that was taking root as of the AD 600s, brought over by the Angles and Saxons — the standard infinitive was one word, for instance etan (eat).
But there were cases where the infinitive functioned more like a noun and would be inflected like a noun in the dative case, and it would have the appropriate preposition before it, to. Here’s a clip from the Bible:
Ða geseah ðæt wif ðæt ðæt treow wæs god to etenne
“Then the woman saw that the tree was good to eat.” That is, good for eating. Generally the inflected infinitive was used in places where a noun (e.g., gerund) construction was equally usable: begin to work could also be begin working; the power to kill could also be the power of killing; to speak is a sin could also be speaking is a sin.
Obviously those instances have persisted, since my examples are in modern English. Something happened in-between the Old English period and now, though: English lost almost all of its inflectional affixes. The spelling and pronunciation changed some, too. So instead of ic ete, þu etst, he eteð, we etað, ge etað, hie etað, infinitive etan, subjunctive ete and eten, imperative ete and inflected infinitive (to) etenne, we now have I eat, (thou eatest), he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat, infinitive eat, subjunctive eat, imperative eat and (no longer inflected) to-infinitive (to) eat. All the affixes got eaten and just a little s is left.
One result is that the to-infinitive is now used a bit more widely than it was in Old English, since there are places where it wouldn’t be clear if it were just plain old eat. But the pattern is largely similar: we use to when the infinitive is the focus of purpose or necessity (want to eat, need to eat), completes the sense of a verb or noun (begin to eat, the power to eat), or is the subject or object of a sentence (to eat would be nice). We use the bare infinitive when it follows certain auxiliaries of mood and tense (you must eat), verbs of causing (I’ll make you eat), verbs of perception (I want to see you eat) and a few others in that general vein.
And we can snap off the infinitive and leave it implied; we don’t have to say it if we don’t want to. (Want to what? Say it, of course.) In fact, the to generally tends to stay more readily with what’s before it than with the infinitive it’s serving.
Well, that is how a butler treats guests. He has to watch them to make sure they don’t get lost or steal the silver.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged grammar, infinitives, language, linguistics, split infinitive, usage, word choice, writing
This week is a bit of a double header for me: two articles published in different places at the same time. Yesterday I posted a link to my latest article on TheWeek.com; today I’m posting (in its entirely) my latest article on the Editors’ Association of Canada’s national blog, The Editors’ Weekly.
Adverbs are a problematic and much-maligned class of words. Linguists often have trouble explaining exactly why they go where they go. Some sorts of adverbs are baselessly despised (hopefully, people will eventually get over those hangups, but I’m not hopeful). Some people think adverbs should be excised from writing altogether.
I’d like to cover all the misconceptions relating to adverbs, but that would make for very long reading. So today, I’m only going to talk about the placement of one specific adverb.
Those of you who read that and thought, “That’s bad grammar — it should be ‘I’m going to talk only about’ or ‘I’m going to talk about only,’ ” raise your hands.
Hands raised? Keep them there. As long as they’re raised they won’t be causing any trouble.
Oh, there’s no mistake in thinking that careful placement of only has much to recommend it. The mistake is in thinking that putting it in the default position, right before the main verb, is an error unless it’s limiting the main verb specifically.
Let’s look at an example sentence:
I only wanted to bake three cakes.
Without context, all you know is that baking three cakes is the full scope of what I wanted. You don’t know if the thrust of it is “I was not happy about baking the fourth one” or “I didn’t want to have to decorate them” or “I had no desire to bake three pies too.”
But do you know what the supposed only correct interpretation of that is? It’s that I only wanted to bake the cakes — I didn’t actually do it.
Does that seem odd? It should. It’s a made-up rule with no correspondence to reality. As Matt Gordon recently said on Twitter, quoting a student paper he was marking, “If ‘this grammatical distinction has confused writers for centuries,’ maybe it’s those trying to impose the distinction who are confused.”
In truth, the only way you can make that only about wanted is to emphasize wanted, or to phrase it differently. That position is the default position for only regardless of what aspect of the action it is limiting. But the rule-thumpers insist that you must move the only right next to what it limits:
I wanted only to bake three cakes.
I wanted to bake only three cakes.
I wanted to bake three only cakes.
Ah, wait, the last one isn’t even usable. You have to do this:
I wanted to bake only three cakes.
But that blows the “rule” right away. If you can do that, you can do this:
I only wanted to bake three cakes.
You can do likewise for the other restrictions:
I only wanted to bake three cakes.
I only wanted to bake three cakes.
The fact that we can — and do — shift the emphasis like that without moving the only is proof that this is a standard feature of English grammar, and that the word feels natural in the default position and can work there quite well. Anyone who tells you that “I only wanted to bake three cakes” is wrong and must be “I wanted only to bake three cakes” has not correctly analyzed the syntax of the sentence. He or she also has a tin ear, and yet thinks himself or herself a better writer than the many respected authors throughout the history of English who have used only in the “wrong” way.
This is not to say that you can only put only before the main verb — or, if you prefer, it’s not to say that you can put only only before the main verb. Its mobility gives you a very good tool for clarifying the meaning. But the availability of the default position gives you a tool for adjusting the rhythm and the naturalness of the sentence when the meaning is clear anyway. Why limit your toolkit unnecessarily?
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged editing, English grammar, English syntax, grammar, only, syntax
My latest article for TheWeek.com is about something some people get quite bent out of shape about: use of myself for purposes other than the reflexive. See what I have to say, and why:
Posted in The Week
Tagged emphasis, English grammar, grammar, myself, reflexives, The Week
In Lynn Coady’s Giller-Prize-winning book Hellgoing, one of my editorial colleagues has spotted the following sentence:
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
Does that look quite right? Are you not quite sure? It’s the sort of sentence that you might not think much about unless you stop and look at it, but if you do stop and look at it it might start to drive you a little crazy.
So let’s go into this little Hell and take apart this sentence and see how it works.
Core subjects and verbs:
She tried . . . but she wasn’t succeeding.
Tried what?
…tried not to stare…
Not to stare at whom?
…not to stare at Marco…
I’ll abbreviate “She tried not to stare at Marco” as STNSM. It’s syntactically fine, I think we can agree.
Now: when?
STNSM while he spoke…
OK, spoke to whom?
…he spoke to X
where whoever X was, he was speaking to him.
So X was the person he was speaking to. Whoever that was.
Now here is how that plays out in that bit of the sentence. We need a relativizer:
…he spoke to {the person} {[relativizer] he was speaking to him}
What happens is that {the person} is replaced by the whole {[relativizer] he was speaking to him}.
The relativizer is “whoever” or, as the case may be, “whomever”:
…he spoke to {whoever {he was speaking to [him]}}
The “him” at the end moves up and merges with the relativizer, giving it accusative case (i.e., making it the object) (see the bottom of this post for more on this):
…he spoke to {whoever [+him] he was speaking to}
…he spoke to {whomever he was speaking to}
That’s where the confusion happens. The raising and merging into “whomever” is something that can confuse just about anyone until they learn about the underlying movements.
It could have been
…he spoke to the person to whom he was speaking
Then “the person” stays put and it happens this way:
…he spoke to {the person} [relativizer] he was speaking to {him}
The relativizer would become just “whom”, moved up from the end:
…he spoke to {the person} [whom] he was speaking to
But the “to” typically follows it up in this case:
…he spoke to {the person} [to whom] he was speaking
Notice there are two “to”s in both versions.
So let’s look at the whole sentence again and match the parts:
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
What are the verbs?
tried … (not) to stare … spoke (to) … was … speaking (to) … wasn’t … succeeding
The conjugated verbs have subjects:
She tried … he spoke … he was … she wasn’t
Let’s add the complements:
She tried not to stare
to stare at Marco
he spoke to whomever
whomever he was speaking to [him]
she wasn’t succeeding
There are also the conjunctions “while” and “but”, and that makes the whole thing.
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
So there are actually no surplus words. Each verb “speaking” requires a “to”: “spoke to” and “was speaking to”. Formal English often frowns on stranding the preposition at the end, but it’s always been an available feature of English; indeed, it requires less syntactic movement. Raising the preposition with its complement is a funny thing to do from a syntactic perspective, and linguists call it “pied piping” because it’s as though the object is a pied piper getting the preposition to come dancing along with it.
Most of that is of course rather complex and more than the average person is inclined to want to know. But editors aren’t average persons, so I have put it here for your enjoyment.
Now, here’s the bit more about the “whoever” becoming “whomever”: The reason “whoever” is “whomever” is because it’s merged with the “him”. The entire relative clause is the object, and the case doesn’t penetrate inside it. Here’s proof:
He looked at whoever was speaking to him.
It would not be correct to say “whomever was speaking to him” because the “was” requires a subject, and that is “whoever.”
As it happens, I talk about how case assignment doesn’t automatically percolate into phrases in my latest article on TheWeek.com, “‘You and I’ vs. ‘You and me’.”
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged convoluted sentences, English grammar, English syntax, grammar, Hellgoing, Lynn Coady, relative clauses, speaking to, syntax, whoever, whomever
A company called ePly Online Event Registration has, on its website, a page on common errors of grammar and word choice that people make when creating web forms: “Are You Making These Common Wording Errors on Event Websites and Registration Forms?”
It’s such a pity they didn’t get someone who had any expertise on the subject to write it. You see, some of their recommendations are good, but it’s all couched in a muck of ignorance and rubbish. It does no favours to the company – nor, for that matter, to the reputations of those who give grammar advice.
Let’s have a look at what I’m talking about, point by point.
First they tell people not to use insure where they should use ensure. I actually have no factual disagreement with this point; it’s a correction I make all the time. They give an example of correct use: “Ensure you register on time.” This is indeed grammatically correct. However, it’s also a bit stilted. Depending on the tone you want, “Make sure you register on time” would be better; giving the exact time might be even better (e.g., “Make sure to register by 11:59 pm on December 23”).
Next they hop onto the which/that distinction:
“That” refers to the noun in the sentence and gives essential information about the noun. “Which” introduces a qualifier that is non-essential.
Hm. First of all, the restriction of which to nonrestrictive clauses is not a grammatical law; it is a stylistic recommendation and does not have to be followed, even in North America (let alone in Britain). Secondly, their grammatical explanation is no good: “refers to the noun in the sentence” – most sentences have more than one noun; the subordinate clause beginning with that refers to the noun right before it… when it refers to a noun. It can also be the complement of a verb: “I think that you’re wrong.”
Then there’s their use of “essential” and “non-essential.” This is not really a clear way to put it. If I say “My car, which is older than I am, is not yet 50,” it is an essential trait of my car that it is not yet 50, though the “which is” clause is not essential to the sentence structure. The real difference is that the which-clause is nonrestrictive: that is to say, it’s not further specifying which car I’m talking about; I have only one car. Were I to say “My car that is older than I am is not yet 50,” it would imply that I have more than one car, and I am restricting the scope to the one older than I. But it is actually the commas, not the which or that, that make the difference. I could say “My car which is older than I am is not yet 50” and that would in fact be grammatically correct – though against a common North American practice.
They next pick on whether versus if:
“Whether” is not interchangeable with “if.” “Whether” expresses a condition where there are two or more alternatives.
Hmm. I don’t know if that’s true. Which is to say I don’t know whether that’s true. Which is to demonstrate that I actually know it’s not altogether true: although use of if in place of whether is considered less formal, it is possible in many (though not all) places.
One example of where it’s possible is their example. This is their example of correct use: “Indicate if you are attending the dinner.” Yes, that’s right, they seem to be saying that “Indicate whether you are attending the dinner” is incorrect. This is actually gobsmackingly off-base. The formal standard would actually be “Indicate whether you will attend the dinner.” The problem with the if version is not simply its reduced formality – which can be a good thing – but the fact that in some cases it may be misread: “Do X if you will do Y” can be taken as “If you will do Y, do X” and by implication “No need to do X if you are not doing Y” – an unlikely misconstrual in their specific example, but a possible one in some cases.
Next they dive into the less/fewer matter. Now, I’ve covered this in “When an ‘error’ isn’t”; the use of less for countable items dates back a millennium and a half and has been seen even in journals of science and philology. It’s true that if you use less to refer to countables you will provoke the ire of the peevers, and thus you do well to stick with fewer in contexts with any formality. But it’s not the iron-clad rule they make it to be. And what’s really bad is their explanation for it:
“Less” is for hypothetical amounts, whereas “fewer” or “few” refers to a number that is quantifiable.
OK, now I know for sure that this was written by some underpaid drudge with no real knowledge of the subject who looked up some stuff on grammar advice on the web and didn’t really process it well. For the record, less refers to mass objects: things that can’t be counted – be they real or hypothetical. Fewer refers only to countables. (Few is not a comparative and should not even be in that sentence unless we also bring in the non-comparative words for mass objects: little, not much, and a few others.) “A number that is quantifiable” is a head-desk phrase. All numbers are quantifiable. Oh, ePly, would you hire a non-expert to write about any other thing? Perhaps they would. I don’t know. Well, what they have here is rubbish. Browbeating, grammar-peeving rubbish that has some facepalming mistakes in it.
Just to prove further that their author is desperately ignorant in matters of English words and grammar, they move on next to this:
Impactful simply isn’t a word – “The keynote speaker will give an impactful presentation…” is grammatically incorrect. Sorry to take that one away from you.
First: impactful is a word, and has been for a long time. You don’t have to like it, but if you think it’s not a word, you have no understanding of what is and isn’t a word. Take a linguistics course, for heaven’s sake. One intro course in linguistics and you would stop making all of these dreadful errors.
That includes the error of saying that using a non-word is grammatically incorrect. No, a sentence such as “The vulks spanged the gromple” is not grammatically incorrect, it just uses lexical items for nouns and verb that are not attested in the lexicon and have no agreed sense. On the other hand, “The clowns spanks the dog” is grammatically incorrect because we can see it has an improper conjugation, and “Spanks the dog clown the” is grammatically incorrect because the word order is all wrong.
Next they talk about affect versus effect. This is in fact an important distinction to make. The advice they give is also generally true:
Remember, “affect” is a verb while “effect” is a noun.
However, they should effect one little change there: add a word such as normally or usually after each is. There is a noun affect referring to emotion, but it is uncommon; there is a verb effect, which is a silk-shirt way to say “cause to happen.” Still, this is not as bad as most of their slip-ups.
Next is the it’s/its distinction, also one worth maintaining. The only mistake they make is to say this:
“It’s” refer to a verb, whereas “its” is a possessive.
First, refer is conjugated improperly; it should be refers. Second, refer is not the right word either. It’s doesn’t refer to a verb; it contains a verb – one of two possibles: is and has. They should just say “It’s stands for it is or it has, whereas its is a possessive like his.”
Next they talk about the difference between then and than. They actually pretty much don’t say anything wrong about this. For once.
They follow this, however, with another example of a stylistic recommendation presented as an absolute law:
“Farther” refers to measurable distance, “further” should be used for an abstract length.
This is a distinction you can make but don’t have to. You can talk of going farther in a relationship and further down a road if you want; it’s just more common to do the converse. On the other hand, you can go far but not fur, and you can further an aim but you can’t farther it.
Oh, yes, by the way, their sentence has a comma splice in it. These people who tell you to proofread your forms (in their tips below their grammar advice) haven’t managed to catch a comma splice. Now, many nice people make comma splices – but I would recommend against making one in a screed of grammatical prescriptivism. Or, if you do, hire a proofreader to catch it.
They inveigh next against “misconnecting verbs”:
Wrong: You should try and register before the price goes up. Right: You should try to register before the price goes up.
The “wrong” version is informal – I wouldn’t recommend it in formal businesslike prose. They don’t really explain what’s up (the first is two imperatives presented in a colloquial idiom; the second is an imperative with an infinitive complement – but that’s more technical than most people would understand), but I’ll give them a pass on this one.
They cap off with this injunction:
“Cannot” should always be written as one word. Not “can not.”
In many cases, it’s actually better to write can’t, but that does depend on the formality of the document: many web forms suffer from excessive formality: “Upon completion of the registration process” rather than “When you have finished registering,” for instance. With cannot, though, they’re making too hard a rule again. Consider the distinction between can not do it (“am able not to do it”) and cannot do it (“am not able to do it”).
It’s not that there’s no value in reminding people of some common usage errors and some things that may seem excessively informal. It’s just that it can be done without overstating cases, saying inaccurate things, and making errors of one’s own.
How does one do that? Get an actual expert to write about it. There are many available, often at shamefully low rates.
My latest article for TheWeek.com takes a look at prepositions – their many and often somewhat arbitrary uses.
Prepositions: The super-handy and horribly confusing widgets of language
To, from, of, by: The little linguistic bits that we use to fit in gaps and hold things together or keep them apart. But it’s all rather arbitrary.
I have just seen an infographic (heaven help us, yes, an infographic – generally now not actual charts but just text tarted up) with the following statements:
46% of all U.S. workers claims that they are less productive without coffee.
61% of the workers who need coffee to get through their day drinks 2 cups or more each day.
49% admits to needing coffee while on the job in the Northeast where the workday coffee ritual is the strongest.
Let’s ignore all the other issues in those sentences and just focus on the most egregious, unnatural usages: 49% of workers claims; 61% of the workers drinks; 49% admits. Ick. Just ick.
This is a classic overthink error. I see it mainly in newspapers and similar places where the writers are trying to enforce their understanding of “proper” grammar and are going against their normal speech instincts in doing so.
Percentages can apply to unitary or mass entities and they can apply to populations of entities. When you’re talking about mass or unitary entities, it’s right to use the singular: “50% of this cake is chocolate”; “50% of this collection is action figures.” Moreover, when you’re talking about average (or consistent) percentage of each individual in a set, you may use the singular, though it can sometimes be awkward to phrase it thus: “40% of her cupcakes is sugar.”
But when you’re talking about the portion of the individuals in a set of individual entities, percents are plural quantifiers. You don’t say “46% of the people here drinks coffee” unless somehow each employee has a body 46% of which (perhaps on average) drinks coffee and the other 54% of which abstains. Would you say “Half of the employees here drinks coffee”? How about “A lot of the people here drinks coffee”? Hey, a lot is singular, you know!
Which is just the point. A lot may be singular, and 46% may be a discrete quantity, but their effect on the nouns they describe is a plural quantification. Remember that a dozen is also a singular construction and a discrete quantity, and a hundred likewise, and yet you don’t invariably conjugate verbs in the singular after them: “A dozen people is coming over”? No. (But you can say “A dozen eggs sits in the basket” because you know that’s a carton.) You can say “A bunch of flowers sits by the window” because in that case a bunch is a unitary object; if you say “A bunch of people sit by the window” it means that the people may or may not be together as a unit, but there are a fair few of them in any event. (And “A bunch of people sits by the window” is an almost amusing image of a set of people so together in their grouping that they even sit as a single unit.)
It’s easy enough to see how people can get confused. Many of these things can take singular or plural depending on what are sometimes very fine nuances of meaning. I can say “100% of these usages is wrong” and mean that each usage is 100% wrong, and I can say “100% of these usages are wrong” and mean that every last one of them is wrong. But there are cases where your ear just screams: “46% of workers claims”?! No. Just no. A percentage of a population of individuals is a plural.
And really, if your analysis of grammar leads you to write something that sounds staggeringly wrong, stop and reconsider your analysis.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged conjugation, English grammar, grammar, numbers, percent, percentages, quantifiers, quantities, verbs
Buy my books on Lulu.com:
You can also get them on Amazon.com. Please note that I make less than half as much per book if you buy them there, however.
Sesquiotica 