CHAPTER THREE

A Grammarian’s Dozen

You know more than you think you do.

—DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK

 

Here we will consider the happy idea that our command of grammar is already impressive, mingled with the deflating idea that it’s no wonder we have such command, since grammar is just meant to map what’s in our heads. And we’ll delve into thirteen specific grammatical issues that aren’t well mapped in many people’s heads and are therefore widely misunderstood.

 

A Speech of Parts

 

Most of us learned something about grammar at some point, just as many of us learned a bit of a foreign language and maybe the highlights of calculus. But good luck making use of that knowledge today! People often ask me questions that they could easily answer for themselves if they only remembered what they’d been taught about parts of speech and how the parts fit together, or don’t. And yet the differences among adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, nouns, prepositions, and all the rest, and the purposes each part of speech serves, are hardly a subject for the kind of habitual conversation that would keep everything fresh in a person’s mind. Who can blame anyone for being hazy about grammar? Here are two cases in point:

 

Is it just me, or are we rapidly losing the adverb—or should I say, are we losing the adverb fast? I’m not sure if it’s the inclination of people to speak in shorter “sound bites” or just lazier speech habits, but there seems to be a definite inclination to use an adjective in place of an adverb. Television and newspaper ads shout “Hurry, they’re going fast.’” when there’s a sale, or the weatherman discusses the latest cold front forming in “northeast Montana.”

 

Ah, but fast has long been an adverb as well as an adjective. (In fact, it can be any of five parts of speech: adverb [“She runs fast”], adjective [“She’s a fast woman”], noun [“She broke her fast today”], verb [“She doesn’t fast every year”], and, according to Webster’s, though not the Oxford English Dictionary, interjection [“Fast!”—used in the sport of archery as a warning].) In this, it’s like a number of other words that have been part of English ever since the language was Anglo-Saxon: free, quick, short, slow, well, and wild are a few examples that come to mind. As for “northeast Montana”: northeast here is modifying a noun, so it’s not supposed to be an adverb; adjectives do that job. Nonetheless, northeast (think of “The storm is heading northeast”) is another of those old words that can be either part of speech.

 

I have a thesis to turn in soon, and there is a word I’m using that the word processor says is incorrect. After researching this word in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Intermediate Dictionary, and the Columbia Concise Dictionary, I noticed the word is used in the past tense plus as an adjective but not in the present. This word is authoritate. The research showed it to be au-thor-i-ta-tive, au-thor-i-ta-tively, au-thor-i-ta-tive-ness only. What’s with this?

 

The past tense? I don’t think so. Authoritative is an adjective derived from the noun authority, and the adverb authoritatively and the noun authoritativeness take it from there. The word you’re hoping for would be a “back-formation”—a shorter word derived from a longer one but looking as if the longer word were derived from it. Back-formations that meet a need are coined as a matter of course: diagnose from diagnosis, reminisce from reminiscence, donate from donation. But authoritate has not been coined, probably because other words exist to serve the purpose you have in mind. Be authoritative is an obvious possibility. Or decide, perhaps? Or command, or determine, or direct, or dominate, or ensure, or judge, or lecture, or order, or rule?

 

To make matters worse, grammar is generally taught (when it’s taught at all) as if it inhered in the words being studied, rather than in the minds of those of us who are using them—as if it were like physics, rather than like a branch of psychology. It isn’t. If you throw a pebble, the distance it travels will be equal to the product of its velocity and the time it spends aloft—a fact about that pebble in the natural universe which will remain true whether or not anyone cares to calculate the pebble’s velocity, or even hears the pebble fall. But the “fact” that pebble is a noun is a mental construct from start to finish. Furthermore, this fact is not true except among those of us who speak English, nor is it the whole truth even in English: pebble is also a verb that means “pave or pelt with pebbles” or “impart a pebbly texture to.”

Such grammatical slipperiness is a quality of a large proportion of English words, including many of the ones we use most often. (When people use a word a lot, they tend to play with it.) Fast is a good example. Not only can it be any of five parts of speech, but as most of those it has multiple meanings and usages. As an adjective, fast can mean “rapid” or “immovable” or “staunch” or “wild and promiscuous.” Then, too, the noun form of it that means “abstention from food” (one of two separately derived noun forms) can be used as an adjective, as in the phrase fast day.

To add to the confusion about parts of speech, some adjectives that do not appear in the dictionary as nouns may be used as nouns:

 

I have a severe grammatical affliction. You see, nowhere in my dictionaries is afflicted defined as a noun, but I constantly see it used in print—and, of course, also hear it in that lazy form of communication called speech. Example: “The pope has dedicated his life to helping the afflicted.” So, please tell me, are people who use this word as a noun among those afflicted with poor grammar?

 

In your example sentence, afflicted is perfectly correct; it is being used as an “absolute adjective.” “Absolute,” denoting a word or phrase that is standing in an unusual relation to the rest of the sentence, has a lot of different applications, because a lot of unusual relations exist in English. Here the peculiarity is that an adjective is serving as a noun.

Although this is a somewhat unusual position for afflicted to find itself in, it’s not an especially unusual role for adjectives in general. Think of “For ye have the poor always with you. . . .” In fact, poor has been used this way so often that dictionaries consider it a noun as well as an adjective. Such conversion is the route by which many other established nouns, among them classic, intellectual, and unemployed, have found their way into our language.

 

There are even words that are hybrids of nouns and adjectives, as I tried to explain in the Word Court column to the fifth-grade class that wrote me this letter.

 

Our local newspaper used the words “fun ideas” recently. We have learned that fun is not a descriptive, but we see it used that way all the time. And “everyone” says fun vacation, fun movie, and lots of other things. Is this correct usage now?

 

Not that he’s made a scientific study of it, but the psycholinguist Steven Pinker says he can tell whether people are under or over thirty years old by whether they’re willing to accept fun as a full-fledged adjective, or what you call a descriptive. Let me guess: you are all under thirty. Regardless, you are quite right to question whether standard English allows fun to be used as an adjective. It doesn’t, really. Fun may exhibit some adjective-like qualities at times, but it is a noun. And I’m not telling you how old I am.

If you’ll promise not to say “I had the funnest time” or “That was so fun,” though, I’ll tell you why fun ideas, fun vacation, and fun movie really aren’t so bad. Lots of nouns are used “attributively,” or as adjectives in front of other nouns. Think of science-project ideas and Christmas vacation and action movie. You won’t find science or project or Christmas or action in the dictionary as an adjective; each is a noun, like fun. But all these words—and, indeed, most nouns—can be used attributively.

Being clear about this point of grammar has its pluses and its minuses. Sticklers are likely to assume that you’re misusing fun where it’s not obviously a noun, so maybe you should steer clear of attributive uses when you want to make a good impression on people over thirty.

 

As Pinker had warned me, in truth it’s a little more complicated than that, though I didn’t have space to say so in the column. He wrote me:

 

“We were at a fun party,” which is acceptable even to us geezers, doesn’t seem to fit the patterns of a genuine attributive-noun construction, as in “ We were at a dance party.” First, the stress pattern is different: “fun PARty” vs. “DANCE party.”

Second, so are the modifiers: “That was a really fun party,” with an adverb modifying fun, is fine, whereas no one would say “That was a really dance party” (that is, a good example of one). Conversely, “a great dance party” is good, whereas “a great fun party” is weird.

Finally, the meanings are different—a dance party is a genre of party (cf. costume party, Christmas party, etc.), whereas a fun party can be any kind of party as long as it turned out to be fun. Fun really does look like an adjective here.

The basic problem is that not all adjectives exercise the full set of adjective options. For example, former is an adjective, as in “former wife,” but you can’t say “That wife is former”; conversely, you can say “The man is afraid” but not “the afraid man.”

The distinction, then, is not that boomers use fun as an attributive noun and slackers use it as an adjective but that boomers allow fun to have a few adjective privileges, and slackers allow it to have most or all of them, including modification by so and comparative -er and -est forms.

 

Not only are individual words and their parts of speech slippery, but syntax, or how the words go together, is, too. Think of the sentence “Live fast and have fun.” Is that two commands—two exhortations to do things—or a prediction that if you live fast, you will have fun (comparable to “Drive fast and you’ll get there on time”)? Then again, what about “Go fast and say your prayers”? Is that a warning, on the same pattern as the “Drive fast” sentence, or is it a two-pronged exhortation to a monk?

When slippery words appear together, the number of ways the parts of the sentence could theoretically fit together expands out of all proportion. I learned this lesson in the mid-1980s when I looked into computers’ ability to process and correct English. At the time, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence were struggling to program computers so that they could respond to commands in “natural language”—that is, a human language like English, as opposed to then-current computer languages like COBOL and C. In one particularly advanced project the researchers programmed their computer with certain words, the parts of speech that each of those words could be, and the legitimate ways that the parts of speech could go together, and then asked the computer to “parse” test sentences—to determine the parts of speech of which they were made. Some perfectly ordinary sentences, they found, could be parsed in many potentially legitimate ways. It might be hard to know what certain renditions of a given sentence were supposed to mean, but, of course, this was supposed to be a step toward enabling the computer to compute meaning; a computer doesn’t “know” what anything means.

A team of experts had devoted years to the project, but accurately parsing the sentence “Test results show that sand filters produce more even results” remained well beyond the computer’s abilities. This sentence really is a doozy, because not a single word in it is invariably one part of speech. As far as the computer could tell, the main verb might be test, and the sentence might be a command, like “Test batteries.” (That, in fact, was its first guess.) Or the verb might be results or sand or filters or produce—or the final results. This sentence, as it happens, has literally hundreds of legitimate parses. The record-holder, though, among the sentences that the researchers had tried was “In as much as allocating costs is a tough job I would like to have the total costs related to each product,” which, believe it or not, has 958 possible parses. We should consider it a minor miracle that virtually all of us human beings who can read that sentence, or the “Test results” sentence, will make sense of it in the same way.

English grammar is rife with little curiosities, anomalies, and seemingly arbitrary rules. If doze in the sunshine is a verb followed by a prepositional phrase, then why is breathe in the fragrance a compound verb and its object? The difference in meaning supplies the answer to this puzzle. Similarly, why is the final word in “They are married” an adjectival complement if in “They were married last Saturday” the same word is part of a passive verb? Again, the forms are similar, the meanings different. If you believe you are ignorant of grammar, do note that you recognize such differences, whether or not the terminology for them is ready on the tip of your tongue. Whether or not you have the vocabulary to express everything you know, you have quite a sophisticated understanding of grammar.

As for seemingly arbitrary rules: The grammar of “I want to ask her” is correct, is it not? And isn’t the word whom in the same, objective case as her? So which is correct: “I want to ask whom she is” or “I want to ask who she is”? And then, would it be “She is whom I want to ask” or “She is who I want to ask”?

Perhaps your seventh-grade English teacher told you, as if the whole thing were obvious, that what comes after ask is an objective complement, in the objective case; and what comes after is is a subjective complement (also known as a predicate nominative), in the same case as the subject of the verb. A whole clause (that is, a grammatical unit with its own subject and verb, and probably some other parts besides) may serve as either an objective or a subjective complement, and its internal grammar remains unaffected by its subordinate position in the larger sentence. This rule trumps, as it were, the rules according to which objective and subjective complements are to be treated differently. Thus the right answers are “I want to ask who she is” (the subordinate clause is “she is who [subjective]”) and “She is whom I want to ask” (“I want to ask whom [objective]”). Obviously!

All this is hallowed by time, having been derived from classical languages and the way they were parsed. Nonetheless, to someone who doesn’t know ancient Latin or Greek, it may well be counterintuitive. Here’s another, minor point on which the correct grammar is mysterious to many people, because the rule that’s intuitive to them is the wrong rule:

 

In a recent Word Court you wrote the sentence “I suspect this is one of the many things that aren’t being taught in high school anymore.” The proper grammar is “One (of the many things [prepositional phrase]) that isn’t . . . ,” no? Is that not being taught in eighth grade anymore?

 

“One of the many things I admire about Word Court’s readers is that they say what they think.” This sentence and the high-school sentence, you’ll notice, are constructed along different lines. This one fits together conceptually so: “Of the many things I admire . . . one is that . . .” But “Of the many things that aren’t being taught . . . this is one” is how the other one works. The version you propose, therefore, would not be correct.

 

Having explained that—tersely, I admit—I got many letters from people who simply refused to believe it. I was grateful to this man for writing a letter that I could photocopy and send to his skeptical peers.

 

I fully agree that the matter is a problem for a great many people. But it hasn’t been a problem for me since I was a sophomore or junior in college (I am seventy-three now), when a Spanish professor gave us all a quick and easy solution. Your answer did include an example of the professor’s suggestion, but without your giving a rule or a clear bit of instruction, which I’ll do now: Start with the of. Once you do that, regardless of the sentence, the answer becomes obvious.

“One of the many things that isn’t/aren’t . . .” (which?) is vexing because one is clearly singular and the many things clearly plural, and people lose track of what it is they are talking about—what the subject is or should be. So they gamble and just hope nobody challenges their English. Start with the of: “Of the many things that . . . ,” well, obviously, it has to be the plural form, “aren’t.”

“This is one of the men who truly owns and operates our system”—actual quote, and dead wrong. Start with the of: “Of the men who truly own and operate our system, this is one.” I don’t think anyone could seriously consider plunking down owns and operates if he or she had started with the of.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to stick with a construction that starts with of. I am simply asking you to try it out, to determine quickly whether you need to use a singular or a plural. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to be well educated, don’t have to know (or claim to know) the rules of grammar. Prepositional phrase? You don’t even have to know what that means.

 

Of the various possible ways to be sure a person has it right, yours is one I very much like. Thanks!

 

Reading the Map

 

Our grammar has no objective reality; the lanes and byways of it are often tortuous and counterintuitive—it’s enough to make us swear off the whole idea of grammar and just suit ourselves. Yet traditional English grammar is meant, for the most part, to map forms and structures already in our minds. For example, long, long ago, well before there was an English language, someone noticed that sentences tend to have subjects and verbs. (Not until fairly recently has it become clear that this is true of sentences in every known language.) The rule that sentences should have subjects and verbs simply recognizes this fact. It is in this sense that all of us know quite a lot of English grammar, having learned it as children, in the course of learning to speak.

To someone trained in the science of linguistics, that is almost a tautology. Linguists are fond of explaining that “grammar” is the rules in people’s heads, not the rules printed in so-called grammar books. As Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Language Instinct:

 

The way language works . . . is that each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar).

 

Of course, unless each person’s brain contains pretty much the same lexicon and the same set of rules as each other person’s, we won’t have a language in common; all the important rules for English are in many people’s brains. Furthermore, the rules printed in grammar books—the good grammar books, anyway—reflect particular people’s brains, in order to show how the more able and widely admired speakers and writers use language. Here we leave behind pure description and science, and enter the realms of subjectivity and taste and art.

People do sometimes argue that it is possible to write and speak well without knowing anything about traditional grammar—and certainly someone can be articulate without knowing traditional grammatical terminology. But we wouldn’t say that a person lacked a mental grammar, in Pinker’s sense, just because he was unfamiliar with linguistics, nor would we say that a fine singer knew nothing of music just because she had never learned to read musical notation. By the same token, some of the strengths of a good writer’s work are bound to be explicable in terms of traditional grammar, whether the writer can explain them that way or not. Truly, the most remarkable thing about grammar is how many niceties of it virtually no one ever gets wrong. For instance, no one who means “The spirit is willing” says “The willing is spirit” or “Spirit is the willing” or any of various other combinations.

Indeed, there are a tremendous number of niceties that we could get wrong but don’t. We all know a huge number of rules without having to think about them. You may say or write a simple sentence (“The spirit is willing”); you may say or write a compound sentence (“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”); you may write a complex sentence (“Though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak”); you may write a compound complex sentence (“The flesh may be weak whether or not the spirit is willing, and the spirit may be willing whether or not the flesh is weak”); you may put your dependent clauses before the main clause (“Whether or not the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak”), at certain points in the midst of it (“The flesh, whether or not the spirit . . .”), or after it; you may add adjectival or adverbial elements in various places, modifying various words (“The spirit, that indefinable something . . .”); you may add absolute elements, such as adverbs, that modify entire clauses (“Fortunately, the spirit is willing”); you may elide some clauses, leaving out the verb (“The spirit is willing, the flesh weak”); you may command, leaving out the subject of the sentence (“Be willing in spirit”); you may inquire (“Is the spirit willing?”); you may exclaim (“How willing is the spirit!”); you may wax metaphorical (as in the punch line of an old joke about computer translation, in which the sentence we’ve been manhandling becomes “The wine is fine, but the meat is spoiled”).

You may not, though, write run-on sentences (“The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak”); you may not mismatch the parts of series (“The spirit is ready, willing, and feels able”); you may not mismatch the number of your subject or subjects with the number of your verb or verbs (“The spirit are willing”); you may not place dependent elements where they will attach themselves to the wrong things (“Rapidly tiring of this example, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, we still suppose”); you may not use a single possessive to indicate separate possession by more than one thing (“Here we observe the spirit and flesh’s willingness and weakness”). If you’re hazy on any of these rules, this book can serve as a refresher. But, terminology aside, you probably know them all.

In my experience, people are likeliest to garble their grammar through inattention. The odds are that when they do and their mistakes are pointed out, they will immediately see what’s wrong and be grateful for the help. Or people may come upon a situation in which two different rules seem applicable and will pick the one that tradition does not sanction—as in our “She is whom I want to ask” puzzle, a few pages back.

Linguists may be tempted to argue that such situations only highlight how artificial traditional grammar is. Indeed, many little distinctions—such as between who and whom—aren’t universally observed for exactly the reason that they aren’t now intuitive and probably are, even I will admit, on a path to extinction. But this is one reason why such little distinctions count for something in higher English. If everyone observed them more or less on instinct, there would be less virtue in knowing about them.

 

Thirteen to a Dozen

 

Now let’s look at a few niceties of grammar that, evidently, not everyone does know about. I have the no doubt fanciful idea that if everyone just had a good grasp of the following issues, it would eliminate the majority of embarrassing grammar-related mistakes that are now made—or, at any rate, the majority of mistakes that could conceivably be made by anyone reading this book. And if that goal for this list is too ambitious, then at least the questions and answers on it will serve to illustrate how very useful a familiarity with grammatical terminology is in resolving language questions. All the questions here can scarcely be asked, let alone answered, except in terms of grammar.

By the way, the list covers six out of ten usages that were most disliked by British listeners to a 1986 BBC program about language, according to the letters that listeners wrote in response to a request by the program to share their peeves and preferences. (The top ten appear in David Crystal’s lively and wide-ranging The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.) Note, though, that the peevish British listeners and I disagree about three of the six points: split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of clauses, and the number of none.

Grammar is not fully separate from other aspects of language, and questions pertaining to grammar do appear elsewhere in this book. The grammarian’s dozen here are basics or classics or matters at any rate worth taking trouble over; some are specific points and some are general issues, according to the breadth of what it seems to me many people don’t know. My list begins with relatively subtle matters that I admire others for knowing, and builds inexorably toward points that a person may be thought of as a dingbat for not knowing.

 

13) Split infinitives

 

Is it just my reluctance to get with it or have the rules on splitting infinitives been repealed? I recently received a missive from the headmaster of my daughter’s primary school in which he managed to split two different infinitives in one sentence! And I note that The Wall Street Journal, which I took to be more careful than most, now splits ‘em with alarming frequency. What gives?

 

“To go boldly where no man has gone before” sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. But I say that only to establish my bona fides, for I don’t have anything against split infinitives—in their proper place. We shouldn’t go out of our way to split infinitives, certainly. And it’s always good to know what we’re doing, so I wouldn’t say we should be splitting them unawares. However, authorities at least since H. W. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, have been gently pointing out that splitting an infinitive is preferable both to jamming an adverb between two verbs, where everyone must puzzle out which verb it modifies (“They refused boldly to go so far away”), and to “correcting” a split in a way that gives an ostentatiously artificial result (“They wanted to shorten greatly the length of the trip”). Sometimes those are the only choices we have, except for rewriting the sentence, and my point is that we needn’t rewrite.

In fact, it’s a natural tendency to follow the pattern established by the likes of “If you’re going to put up with the inconveniences of living in outer space, you must definitely want to be there” with “To definitely want to be there is important.” And what are the alternatives? “Definitely to want” changes the meaning. “To want definitely to be there”? I think we definitely don’t want that version, either.

Furthermore, note how “I want to travel far from our solar system and meet extraterrestrials” is constructed: one to, two infinitives. When the actions described by two or more verbs are being thought of as one process or sequence, it is contrary to normal practice to use a separate to for each of them—that is, “I want to travel far from our solar system and to meet extraterrestrials” is a bit peculiar. Grammarians will tell you that the missing to is in ellipsis, but a person could be forgiven for imagining that the to that is present is serving both infinitives and the second of them is split wide. And what about “I want to but he doesn’t”? Here’s a to with the verb in ellipsis. These aren’t split infinitives as such, but they do demonstrate that we are quite used to seeing infinitives and their tos at arm’s length.

No more than we should go out of our way to split infinitives should we go out of our way not to if splitting the infinitive will yield a clearer or more natural result. To go boldly where the hidebound fear to timidly set foot does everyone a favor.

 

12) Gerunds or participles?

 

Everywhere I look, I see the following and wonder if it can be correct: “I was so excited about him having that job,” “I wonder what he thought of us going,” “I appreciate you doing that.”

 

Are we excited about him or about his having the job? Words ending in -ing are either gerunds, which function as nouns, or present participles, which can modify nouns. The trick with sentences like your examples is to decide which of these a given -ing word ought to be. Surely in your first example we’re excited about the having of the job, and therefore that word should be a gerund and the pronoun should be a modifier for it—that is, not him but the possessive his.

Similar-looking instances can be conceptually different. In “I was so excited to see him working again,” the point is less that we’re excited to see the working than that we’re excited to see him in that situation. Your second and third examples could follow this pattern—or the other one. They are awkward as is, though, aren’t they? Which brings us to the general rule: Treat the -itig word as a gerund and make the other substantive possessive unless there’s a reason to think and do otherwise.

 

11) Copulative verbs

 

People tend to be aware that the verb is has some special quality, such that “It is I” and so on are correct (distinct from “It taught me,” “It frightens me” and so on). But they are less likely to know that a number of other verbs may work the same way, or may work either way, according to context.

 

When I am sick, I often say “I do not feel well.” My husband always corrects me, saying that I must be talking about my tactile senses, and tells me to say “I do not feel good.” I tell him that I have yet to see a “Get Good Soon” sympathy card at the card shop. Am I wrong?

 

No, you’re not. Feel confuses people because it can serve either as a garden-variety transitive or intransitive verb or as a slightly more rarefied “copula,” or linking verb. Consider the difference between “When I check the dog for ticks, I feel carefully behind his ears” and “When I check the dog for ticks, I feel like a responsible person: I feel careful.” In the first case, feel is being modified by an adverb (carefully). In the second case, it is linking the subject to an adjective (careful), which is modifying not the verb but the subject itself. (To confirm our grasp of this point, let’s ponder what “I feel badly” means. Despite what most people seem to think, badly is an adverb only, and therefore it must be modifying feel. This sentence, then, does have to do with a deficient tactile sense. “I feel bad” is the way to signify discomfiture.)

Well, too, confuses people, and for a similar reason: it can serve either as an adverb, modifying a verb (“He swims well, now that he has taken lessons”), or as an adjective, modifying a noun or pronoun (“He is well, now that he has taken his medicine”). As you can see, the two constructions can look quite a lot alike; the difference is in what they mean.

Indeed, “I feel well” could be referring to your tactile abilities—just as “Time flies when you’re having fun” could be a command. The only thing is, it’s not. “I feel well” is a perfectly good way to describe your state of health. “I feel good” would also work well—although it is perhaps more descriptive of a mental state.

 

In response to the foregoing exchange in the column, by the way, this letter arrived:

 

Is there any reason to use the more exotic-sounding discomfiture—primary meaning: “overthrow; defeat; disarray; rout”—instead of the familiar and more accurate discomfort? If not, perhaps you should reconsider your comment that saying “I feel bad” signifies discomfiture.

 

It is true that Fowler warned against confusing discomfit with discomfort, on the grounds you cite. But reputable dictionaries have been giving discomfit the additional meaning of “disconcert; embarrass; discomfort” since at least the 1960s, and by now this meaning is the more common one. In fact, the word in the older sense tends to sound archaic; The American Heritage Dictionary even designates it as such. Would you really say “In 1999, NATO forces discomfited Serbia in Kosovo”?

 

10) Diverging parallels

 

Something I have wondered about for a long time is what I call nonparallel series. I seem to recall learning long ago that if one writes a phrase of the type “A, B, and C,” then each of A, B, and C should be of the same grammatical form—“I came, I saw, I conquered,” for example. A recent issue of The New York Review of Books (no doubt an unimpeachable source of good style) contains the sentence “Zoologists specializing in lizards and snakes are notorious for being rather slow-moving, fond of the hot sun, and rising late, like the reptiles that they study.” When I read that sentence, my mind looks for adjective phrases that will modify “notorious for being.” I think, notorious for being rather slow-moving, notorious for being fond of the hot sun, notorious for being rising late. This last phrase jars me. My question is: (1) Have I misunderstood the rules all along, or (2) have the rules changed, or (3) are there no rules governing this situation, or (4) have things just gotten lax, or (5) none of the above?

 

The sad truth is (4). It has never been easy to keep series running smoothly on track, but we’re all supposed to try. The author of your example wasn’t trying hard enough. Nor were the authors of these sentences that I’ve come upon lately: “Do not take this product if you are allergic to aspirin or if you have asthma, bleeding problems or on a sodium restricted diet,” “There are more persons being baptized, received, confirmed, and restored from inactive status than there are losses by death, transfer out or removed for other reasons,” and “The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it.”

The solution, of course, is to add words until elements that look parallel really are parallel, one way or another. For example, “Zoologists . . . are notorious for being rather slow-moving, being fond of the hot sun, and rising late” or else “Zoologists . . . are notorious for being rather slow-moving and fond of the hot sun, and for rising late.”

 

“More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source.” The pronouncement at the end of the ABC network newscast bothers me, but I’m not sure exactly why. Can you help me to understand why it might sound awkward?

 

The problem is that a bit too much is in ellipsis—has been left out, for the listener to infer. “More Americans watch TV than read newspapers” sounds fine, no? That’s because watch TV and read newspapers are parallel constructions. But get their news from ABC News isn’t parallel to from any other source. Ellipsis isn’t inherently wrong, but it is always worth wondering about.

Continuing to wonder, however, we’ll soon come to the question of whether “More Americans get their news from ABC News than get it from any other source” sounds better. This version might be what the Germans would call a Schlimmbesserung, as the term is defined in They Have a Word for It, an entertaining book by Howard Rheingold: “a so-called improvement that makes things worse.”

I do sympathize with the people who wrote the sentence we’re scrutinizing, for I’m sure they were trying to make a factual claim that didn’t sound puffy or vacuous. The vaguer nature of the most succinct version of the claim which I can concoct—“ABC News is America’s most popular news source”—means that this is probably a Schlitnmbesserung, too. The sentence you heard is not out-and-out wrong. All the same, ellipsis is supposed to speed listeners or readers on their way, not distract and delay them.

 

9) Prepositions at the end of clauses

 

Shame on you. When I turned to Word Court in this month’s Atlantic, I was shocked to read the sentence “This isn’t something that we can blame President Clinton for” in your response to one of the questions. Unless you like to leave participles dangling, the sentence would have been more properly worded “This isn’t something for which we can blame President Clinton.”

Please be more careful of your own writing and the editing of your column. You do set an example for proper English usage in this grammatically challenged society of which we are all a part.

 

Now, hold on. “Shame on you” is considered polite discourse where you come from?

Oops. I mean, Now, on hold. “Shame on you” is considered polite discourse from where you come?

What’s more (sorry, but you started this), that’s no dangling participle; aren’t you, rather, objecting to my having ended the sentence with a preposition? If so, kindly have a look at H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (any of the three editions), or Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer, or The American Heritage Dictionary, or pretty much any reputable usage guide, under “preposition at end” or just “preposition,” and see if this doesn’t change your point of view. Good writers throughout the history of English—from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Alison Lurie and David Lodge—have not shrunk from ending clauses or sentences with prepositions. It isn’t something that we should go out of our way to do, but if the alternatives that come readily to mind seem stilted, there’s no reason for us to go out of our way to avoid doing it, either.

 

Your reply about the suspect nature of the “preposition at end” rule had me cheering, but then you lost me with your appeal to the example of “good” writers. Pointing to the habits of exceptional writers seems less likely to sway etiquette-obsessed types like the writer of that letter than does an acknowledgment of the utterly artificial nature of the rule in question. That John Dryden appropriated this rule from Latin, a language in which it did indeed apply, and that he then inflicted it upon English, is surely the clearest invalidation of this not-so-old chestnut. Out of his overweening admiration for Latin, Dryden clumsily grafted a Latinate trait onto English, which is a Germanic language. But what is necessary for Latin is unnecessary, and often silly, for English. It is a sham rule that flies in the face of centuries of natural language development, and its uncritical perpetuation by the socially anxious should be laughed down once and for all.

 

Thank you. That’s another good reason not to worry about a preposition at the end of a sentence.

 

Now, hold on yourself. By doing hold on—> on hold are you saying that that on is a preposition? Are you sure about that?

 

You caught me. I didn’t have space to get into it in the column, so I was being sneaky. A grammarian would tell us that on is an adverb here or a “particle” that’s part of a compound verb. A linguist might go into it a bit more deeply, explaining that the relationship between this sort of particle and a preposition is much like that between an intransitive verb and a transitive one. In other words, though the on is not a preposition as such, it is, in effect, a preposition that lacks an object.

The same, in fact, goes for the up in Winston Churchill’s famous rebuke to his secretary (or an editor or a proofreader, depending on the version of the anecdote) upon finding that a preposition at the end of one of his sentences had been tinkered with: “This is the sort of English [or “arrant nonsense” or “impertinence”) up with which I will not put.” If we restore that particle to its rightful place and banish from the end of the sentence only what everyone would call a preposition, we get: “This is the sort of English with which I will not put up.” Does that sound better to you?

 

8) Antecedents

 

Supplying pronouns that need antecedents with the proper ones is an entire minor art form—like matching beverages to food or setting an inviting table. The general rules do admit of exceptions, but they’re worth bearing in mind all the same: Most pronouns ought to have antecedents that are real, honest-to-goodness nouns, not noun-adjectives or possessives. (Sample problems: “A marble wine cooler only works if it is already chilled” doesn’t work if by it the speaker means the wine, and “A wine’s bouquet is sometimes more appealing than it is” doesn’t manage to say that it is the wine.) A possessive pronoun, however, may have a possessive antecedent. (There’s nothing wrong with “A wine’s bouquet is sometimes more appealing than its flavor.”) The antecedent should be where no one will have trouble finding it or telling it apart from other nouns in the vicinity, and in the best of all possible worlds it should be the subject or the object of a verb. Objects of prepositions, in particular, tend to make weak antecedents. (Sample problem: “Would you like a glass of wine? It is twenty years old.”) And, of course, a singular antecedent should antecede a singular pronoun, and a plural antecedent a plural one. (Sample problem: “Anyone who doesn’t want their wine . . .”)

 

Help is needed on the word which. You sometimes hear or read a sentence like this: “I’d buy that new car if I were rich, which I’m not.” This seems clearly wrong; which has no antecedent, and but would work better, assuming you need the final phrase at all, which you don’t. What is bothering me about this? Somehow I think this construction is not rigorous standard English.

 

What ought to be bothering you is exactly what you mention: which, a relative pronoun, ought to be referring back to an antecedent noun, which in this case doesn’t exist. The word is trying to refer back to the adjective rich (and in your “which you don’t” it is trying to refer back to a verb along with its object), but grammatically that’s not allowed, except colloquially. As you suggest, though, but—or though or as—would be fine.

A common variant on this problem is the likes of “I really need a new car, which annoys me,” wherein an entire clause is meant to be the antecedent for which. As a general rule, that’s not allowed, either. This, that, and it, however, being demonstrative pronouns, do not need specific antecedents, and may refer back to clauses; one may say “I really need a new car, and this [or that or it] annoys me.”

Not even these formulas will work, however, if there’s any ambiguity about what this, that, or it is supposed to be. For example, suppose the previous sentence had begun, “Nor even this will work if there’s any ambiguity . . .” Readers could be expected to wonder, What’s this? Where there isn’t obviously one and only one answer to the question, a noun referring back (like formulas) is probably needed.

 

I’m not pleased by your blanket approval of using demonstrative pronouns to refer to clauses. We all do this at times for simplicity, but in formal writing I believe the following is better: “I really need a new car, and this problem annoys me.” In other words, say what it is that annoys you.

 

When I was teaching English to Peruvian students who wished to obtain the University of Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English, I was guided by a book that under the heading “Coordinate Relative Clauses” gives the example: “It started raining while Sarah was waiting for me outside the Town Hall, which put her in a bad mood.” The paragraph continues, “the . . . sentence contains a coordinate relative clause; which here refers to the whole of the previous clause. . . . Which is the only relative pronoun found with coordinate relative clauses.”

 

Maybe you’ll enjoy it if I lengthen a chain of quotation by quoting from The Complete Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gowers:

 

The New Yorker of the 4th December 1948 quoted a question asked of the Philadelphia Bulletin by a correspondent:

 

My class would appreciate a discussion of the wrong use of which in sentences like ‘He wrecked the car which was due to his carelessness’.

 

and the answer given by that newspaper:

 

The fault lies in using which to refer to the statement ‘He wrecked the car’. When which follows a noun it refers to that noun as its antecedent. Therefore in the foregoing sentence it is stated that the car was due to his carelessness, which is nonsense.

 

What is? Carelessness? is the New Yorker’s query.

Which shows how dangerous it is to dogmatise about the use of which with an antecedent consisting not of a single word but of a phrase.

 

So was I too hasty? Ah, now, there’s another good analogy. When we’re driving, we’re not supposed to speed, and yet at times we all do. Before we floor it, though, we ought to look around, to see if we’re likely to get caught, run anyone over, or bring others screeching to a halt in confusion.

 

7) Negatives

 

I was musing and snoozing on a train trip from Boston to New York when the Amtrak conductor jarred me with the following misplaced negative: “The station stop is Providence. All doors will not open. Station stop Providence.” Of course, he meant to warn passengers that only some doors would open at Providence; taken literally, there would be no point in stopping, as no one would have a fighting chance of detraining. Since that time, I’ve been on the alert, and have noticed this usage is prevalent in excepting generalities: All men are not tall, Everyone’s not a redhead, etc. Should I take this up as a crusade or go back to snoozing?

 

I’ll even join you in the crusade. Recently I’ve come across “All sex is not sexual harassment” and “The airport is open but all its runways are not.”

While we’re at it, let’s also watch out for sentences like “Not all doors will open and will remain open only briefly.” The subject of that second predicate, of course, ought to be not not all doors but doors. To shake free of the negative’s grip, the word needs to be repeated here: “Not all doors will open. Doors will remain open only briefly.” This mistake of negligently negating the wrong thing along with the right thing has many variations. “None of us wants to be trapped on the train but to get off calmly without panicking and needing to beat on the door and shout.” None of us wants to get off calmly? “It was not so annoying that I failed to complain to Amtrak”—really? “Neither on the train nor at the airport is there any good reason for the confusion but only inattention and foolishness to blame.” In neither place is inattention to blame? On the contrary!

 

6) Restrictive and descriptive elements

 

It’s that damn issue of that versus which. I understand that the choice has something to do with specific versus general reference. But I can’t figure out when one should use which. Just to be safe, I use that exclusively nowadays and never even attempt to use which, because I simply don’t know what—or which—usage would be appropriate. Fowler is no help, for whenever I consult him, I get sidetracked for hours reading and chuckling, and forget why I picked him up in the first place.

 

You’re going to think that I’ve gotten things mixed up and answered someone else’s question instead—but just give me a moment, please. An error I often see is the inclusion of commas in a sentence like “The philosopher, Karl Jaspers, conceived of an existentialism quite different from that of the author, Albert Camus.” I can imagine a few—a very few—contexts in which commas around the names would be wanted; whether or not they’re wanted has to do with niceties of meaning. But let’s presume that this sentence is the opening sentence of something for a general readership, in which case it’s inconceivable that the commas belong there.

That’s because what we’re trying to say is “this philosopher, the philosopher whose name is Karl Jaspers” and “this author, the one whose name is Albert Camus.” But contrast that with what we’re trying to say in “The first President of the United States, George Washington, conceived of a democratic leadership quite different from the despotism of the King who then ruled England, George III.” In this sentence, before we get to the names, we have already identified both of the people who are being talked about, and the names are just serving as a reminder; they have appropriately been removed from the main line of the sentence by being tucked between commas. As a matter of fact, we could delete the names entirely from the leadership sentence, and its main clause would still carry the same meaning. But if we deleted the names from the philosophy sentence (“The philosopher conceived of an existentialism quite different from that of the author”), we’d be lost; thus the names need to be part of the main line of the sentence. In grammatical terminology, such names and words are “restrictive,” because they restrict the meaning of what they modify; and the words that can be tucked away are “nonrestrictive,” or “descriptive.”

Now let’s think about a sentence like “The existentialism conceived of by Karl Jaspers was quite different from the existentialism propounded by Albert Camus” and consider the situation of conceived of by Karl Jaspers and propounded by Albert Camus. Those phrases are restrictive—they’re part of the main thought—because the sentence wouldn’t say the same thing without them. Actually, it wouldn’t make any sense at all: “The existentialism was quite different from the existentialism”? Excuse me?

As it happens, those little phrases, about Jaspers and Camus, could be expanded into subordinate clauses. And in that case—listen carefully—that, not to be preceded by a comma, is the signal that a restrictive subordinate clause is under way. Which, preceded by a comma and with another comma to follow at the end of the clause, would signal nonrestrictiveness. Thus “The existentialism that was conceived of by Karl Jaspers was quite different from the existentialism that was propounded by Albert Camus.” Likewise, “The democratic leadership that was conceived of by George Washington was quite different from the despotism that George III demonstrated.”

What is which for, then? Well, we could sensibly assert the general proposition “Democratic leadership is quite different from despotism.” And if that is the point we want to make but we would like to flesh it out a bit with illustrations, we can say “Democratic leadership, which George Washington sought to supply, is quite different from despotism, which was demonstrated by George III.” Similarly, we could say “German existentialism, which Karl Jaspers conceived of, is quite different from French existentialism, which Albert Camus propounded.”

This sometimes subtle distinction between restrictive and descriptive elements pervades English. Often it is reflected in nothing more than the presence or absence of a pair of commas around a clause or phrase, or a single comma behind or in front of an element that begins or ends the sentence. For example, consider the quotation “Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?”—from Diogenes. No comma separates philosopher from who, because Diogenes is not asking whether a philosopher, generally speaking, is of use; he’s asking whether a philosopher of this kind—the kind who doesn’t hurt feelings—is; the who clause is restrictive.

Contrast “Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things”—from Oscar Wilde. Here everybody means everybody, and who is included is an additional, descriptive thought—hence the first comma. And then, Wilde does mean to be saying that any old despot is ill-served by despotism. That the despot was made for better things is an amusing additional idea, but it doesn’t change the central point here—hence the second comma.

Some caveats: Besides indicating that a given phrase or clause is descriptive, commas may, of course, bracket it for other legitimate reasons. There are also other kinds of thats. Here we’re discussing the use of the word as a pronoun, but it can be an adverb, a conjunction (aspects of these two uses are covered in Chapter Four), an adjective, and (on rare occasions) a noun. Note, too, that I don’t mean to be holding up Diogenes, of all people, or even Oscar Wilde, as a paragon of comma placement as it is practiced in contemporary English. Older texts often use commas in ways that would be considered wrong today. It was Fowler, writing early in the twentieth century, whom we have to thank for codifying the difference between that and which in particular, and restrictive and descriptive elements more generally. I can’t think of a nicer place to be sidetracked, reading and chuckling, than his discussion (under the heading “that, rel. pron.”) of that and which.

 

Millions of Americans know how to ride bicycles, and millions can reliably tell restrictive and descriptive clauses apart. As someone who can do both, I find these to be comparable accomplishments—both in terms of difficulty and because once you’ve got it, you’ll never forget it.

But unless you have the basic distinction down cold, please don’t even read the next exchange.

 

Able writers, considerate editors, and respectable publishers have long distinguished between the restrictive and the nonrestrictive, by properly using that for the former and which for the latter. But Word Court asks its readers whether they have “had a dispute about language which [they] would like this column to resolve.” That sounds terrible. Why have you worded it that way?

 

Thanks for noticing! The Atlantic does use that and which to distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. But the magazine also subscribes to something called “the exceptional which”: when another noun (language, in the example) intervenes between the noun (dispute) being modified by the restrictive clause and the clause itself, and that second noun might be misread as the antecedent, we use which without a comma to signal the connection to the first noun. In the example, it’s not language that a person might like the column to resolve but a dispute. Thus the exceptional which, a device promulgated by Eleanor Gould, who has been upholding linguistic standards at The New Yorker for more than half a century now.

The distinction seems fairly natural once one is used to it. And it solves a real problem, by enabling one to disambiguate, as they say, the likes of “a book about misbehavior which I very much enjoy”—or, at least, it would if the distinction were widely known and used. So I am enlisted in your cause; can I enlist you in mine?

 

Perhaps you’d like to read the story of the genesis of the exceptional which as Miss Gould described it to me:

 

No, I didn’t invent it, but I’m pretty sure that Mr. Shawn did. He came into my office one day (when? In the fifties? sixties? seventies? I lose all track of time) with a proof bearing a complicated sentence that we’d both struggled with, and suggested the use of which for the more distant possible antecedent. We agreed on the spot that it should be used only when a real likelihood of misreading the sentence called for it. As for your “dispute about language” sentence, I don’t think it would readily occur to people to read it as being about language in need of resolving, so I’d probably use that.

 

I confess that I was trolling for letters with my phrasing. Shortly after the exchange about the exceptional which was published, I revised the sentence to read “a language dispute that you would like this column to resolve.”

 

5) Sentence adverbs

 

That seventh-grade English teacher about whom I’ve already been supercilious surely told you that adverbs may modify verbs (“He writes beautifully”), adjectives (“He made a beautifully intelligent argument”), or other adverbs (“He writes exceptionally beautifully”). But he or she probably refrained from mentioning that certain adverbs can be used as “sentence adverbs,” or “absolute adverbs,” to modify entire clauses. In fact, this is all that some adverbs ever seem to do.

 

One evening this week Mr. Peter Jennings, the news-reader, gave forth with a sentence of the form “. . . . allegedly killed. . . .” Wouldn’t “It is alleged that. . . . killed. . . .” be allegedly better?

How should one differentiate between politically correct usage and the misuse of legalistic jargon?

 

That allegedly isn’t out-and-out wrong, though I do know why you’re looking askance at it. When an adverb comes next to a verb, we tend to perceive it as modifying the verb—the way adverbs so often do. But is being allegedly killed really comparable to being brutally killed? Was someone killed in an alleged manner? Not at all: allegedly modifies the entire assertion. (So does reportedly in similar constructions.) To make this clear, it’s good form to put the adverb at the outset of the clause: “Allegedly, . . . . killed. . . .” Sometimes that won’t work, but then commas, or pauses in speech, can generally do the job: “. . . . caught up with and, allegedly, killed. . . .”

Having said that, I must admit that certain sentence adverbs can turn up in midsentence, without commas or pauses, and no one gives them a second thought. Think of “The victim was obviously killed before the evening news came on” and “The crime clearly has yet to be solved.” For the most part, this indulgence is granted to a narrow range of words having to do with point of view, which tradition has accustomed us to understanding in this manner. Not everyone is ready to include allegedly (or reportedly) in the group.

Paying attention to what is certain and what is only alleged—that is, to what the adverb should modify—is the way to avoid the silly blunder committed by the author of this sentence, from the police-blotter column in my local paper: “The director also said he had installed security cameras in the office, and had observed cleaners allegedly stealing supplies.”

 

The proper use of hopefully is an issue even more contentious.

 

I hate to admit, in this company of logophiles, that I’ve never exactly understood why hopefully shouldn’t begin a sentence, but I don’t have the temerity to ask that question. Presumably, there are other words, such as the first one in this sentence, that may be used just as incorrectly in the same construction. Is this so?

 

The problem with hopefully in a sentence like “Hopefully’, this explanation will be clear” is that it is an adverb modifying no word that appears in the sentence. In the example I just gave, there isn’t even anything present that is capable of hoping.

But the problem with considering that a problem is the one you point out. There certainly are other words that may be used in the very same way: “Presumably, my best efforts have gone into making this explanation clear”; “Mercifully, this explanation will be finished soon”; “Frankly, this explanation may not be clear.” These are known as sentence adverbs, and no one calls them incorrect.

But the problem with considering hopefully a sentence adverb like any other is that many people who care about language happen to loathe this usage. And yet using it in the old-fashioned, modifying-the-verb way (“Hopefully; I began writing about this topic, eager to share what I know”) tends to seem either bizarre or snooty. It’s too bad, but the word just isn’t very serviceable anymore.

Although various adverbs may be used to modify entire clauses, hopefully isn’t among them—yet. I only hope I won’t have to concede that it is until I’m an old, old woman.

 

Here are a few words from one of those people who care about language and loathe the sentence adverb hopefully:

 

The real problem with overuse or misuse of the word hopefully is not whether the grammatical niceties are observed. A deeper problem is that when we say hopefully in the sense of “it is to be hoped” we are shirking our responsibility for the subject at hand. Just as we hide behind the passive voice (“Mistakes were made,” said Reagan about Irangate, thus clouding the identity of those who made the mistakes), we also use hopefully to dodge our responsibility. If I say “Hopefully, we can resolve this problem,” I’m off the hook. But if I say “I hope we can solve this problem,” the person with whom I’m speaking may rightly ask me, “Well, if that’s what you hope, what are you going to do about it?” Hopefully in this sense is a weasel word, a way to hide behind language.

 

Whether one is a good and forthright person is a separate issue from whether one has a good command of English. Not only that, but a person with a good command of English has always been able either to own up to hoping or to leave vague exactly who is hoping. As you know, an old-fashioned, and still entirely correct, phrase that leaves it vague is it is to be hoped—though these days that seems awfully pompous. Let’s hope does the same job in a more relaxed way. Hopefully may be too relaxed, but it’s no more weaselly than its better-respected elders.

 

And here are related concerns about other words:

 

Your referral of one of your correspondents to the divine Fowler leads me to ask why you didn’t take your own advice and look up the Master on kindly. We no doubt have lost the battle on hopefully, but do we have to accept the sometimes condescending, sometimes minatory kindly when the simple word please is available?

 

In the sentence you are protesting, I wrote, “. . . kindly have a look at H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage.” But it is the “you are kindly requested . . .” formula that Fowler objects to, because this seems to be pointing out how kind we are to be making the request—not what the writer or speaker usually has in mind. Fowler has no quarrel with asking people to kindly do things. This adverb is unlike the disreputable hopefully in that it actually does modify the verb. It needn’t always mean quite “in a kind manner”; it can mean “in an obliging manner” as well, and is appropriate wherever “be so kind as to” could be substituted.

 

The phrase most importantly appears frequently in newspaper columns and editorials, and I hear it said on TV and radio. It seems wrong to me. But in discussions with friends they claim it is correct.

Important is an adjective, and it probably modifies the subject that was in the preceding sentence. I try to substitute other adjectives with most introducing them, and that seems correct. What is your opinion?

 

You are, I take it, complaining about the likes of “Most importantly, let’s make a special effort to be clear.” This is where sentence adverbs (or adverbial phrases) begin to be very hard to explain. Most importantly does work pretty much the way that other sentence adverbs do, and there are well-regarded dictionaries that sanction it in this sense. But this phrase remains on the defensive relative to most important. At least, those who sanction most importantly almost always argue that it is acceptable as a substitute for most important, and not the other way around—a fact that speaks for itself.

When you argue your point, you’ll want to know that the idea you’ve advanced about the grammar of most important can’t be right: adjectives (or, for that matter, adverbs) aren’t allowed to modify words in any sentence but their own. Most important is usually said to be an elliptical form of what is most important.

 

4) Agreement in number

 

The principle of agreement in grammar is a lot like that of color coordination in interior decorating: various parts that will be seen as a whole should match or go together. A room full of clashing colors will never mislead anyone, though, whereas the results of botched agreement can be baffling as well as unsettling.

The issue of agreement that most often comes up has to do with whether phrases like the committee of one hundred and a crowd of well-wishers are singular or plural. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to finesse, because such constructions may go either way, depending on meaning. Start by assuming that the main, singular noun (committee, crowd) is what should be agreed with. If that results in something illogical or terribly peculiar, switch to agreeing with the plural object of the preposition (one hundred, well-wishers). Having made a choice, stick with it: “The committee of one hundred were all lobbying in their home towns, and when they returned to Washington, they were met by a crowd of well-wishers, which was [or ‘who were’] glad to have them back.”

 

Here are several related problems:

 

For decades those of us in the Cleveland area have referred to our Cleveland Indians as the “Tribe”: “TRIBE WINS DOUBLEHEADER.” “TRIBE TRADES COLAVITO.” “TRIBE LOSES 100TH GAME.” It has been a long, painful history.

Now some modern teams are adopting singular names that are being treated as if they were plural. We see headlines like “MAGIC LOSE TO CELTICS” and “HEAT FALL TO HORNETS.” Complicating this issue are teams like the Utah Jazz (leaving aside the commonly held belief that there is no jazz in Utah, if there were jazz in Utah, would there be more than one?) and the Barberton Magics, a high school’s coinage that preceded all these newfangled names and always has been plural. I hate to think of reading “TRIBE ARE AT HOME TONIGHT.”

 

No doubt sportswriters new to your area can be shamed, if need be, into following local custom and treating Tribe as a singular noun. But local custom could just as well have dictated that Tribe be plural, and grammar would not have objected, for the word is a “noun of multitude,” which may properly be treated as either singular or plural.

In fact, any team name may be regarded as a noun of multitude, and the local custom in the team’s home town is as good a guide as any to how to treat a name that is superficially singular. “Magic lose” and “Heat fall” are indeed the constructions that the sports desks of The Orlando Sentinel and The Miami Herald say they would use. They do, of course, prefer it when they are able to say “Magic win” and “Heat beat ———.”

 

When I served as secretary of the organization in question, I had occasion to write the sentence “The Friends of the USS Massachusetts (BB-2) is proud to . . .” I thought that was perfectly correct, as I was speaking for the organization as a whole and not for individual members. However, others saw it differently and said that are should have been used instead of is. Which is the correct usage? The old battleship is peaceful and harmless, but sometimes the members aren’t. Help!

 

Two issues are involved in a question like this. First, is the sense of the noun staunchly plural, staunchly singular, or open to either interpretation? Obviously, one wouldn’t say “Friends are my favorite TV show”—here the word is the name of the show much more than it is a reference to plural persons. But you were a Friend of the USS Massachusetts, weren’t you? And weren’t at least some of the other Friends friends of yours? So your Friends at least sometimes acted plural.

Second, which construction sounds more natural? This criterion is why the Rolling Stones and the Spice Girls tend to be referred to in the plural, whereas Abba, Pearl Jam, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra tend to be referred to in the singular.

Having made a general decision about how to treat a given name—and in the case of your Friends, I would vote for using the plural—one may yet admit of exceptions. The only thing that is definitely not allowed is for a given instance of Friends to be singular and plural at the same time: “I would think the Friends was a friendly organization even if they weren’t in agreement with me.”

 

Could you please resolve a dispute regarding the use of the word none? A friend of ours has the following message on his telephone answering machine: “Hello, this is. . . . and none of us is home right now.” It is my contention that the proper phrase would be “none of us are home,” since us is a plural form. We wouldn’t say we is home, would we?

 

You’re right that us is plural no matter what, just as most words are either plural or singular no matter what. But none, which does not depend on us for its number, is a special case. The Old English word from which it is derived had both singular and plural forms: nán and náne. Long ago these melded into the one form none. Today’s word can be either singular or plural, depending on which form makes more sense in context. The singular none of us is declares “not a single one of us is,” and the plural none of us are says “we aren’t.” The grammar of your friend’s message is fine.

 

I’ve lost patience with the increasing carelessness that follows what with a singular verb, and then a plural verb and some plural noun, as in the following: “What bothers me are people who can’t get their verbs to agree with their subjects.” Shouldn’t both verbs be plural (bother . . . are) or both be singular (bothers . . . is)?

As an English teacher in both primary and secondary schools, I used to tell students that what is a pronoun like a big basket that can contain one thing or many things. Whether you put one or many things into it, the basket itself is singular, calling for this: “What bothers me is people who can’t get their verbs to agree with their subjects.” What do you say on this one?

 

You’re quite right that what is presumptively singular, but you’re not going so far as to say that it must always be singular, are you? You made what are valid points in your first paragraph: verbs must agree in number with their subjects, regardless of the number of any complement present; and once one verb declares a given instance of a word to be singular, any other verbs governed by that word must fall in line and also treat it as such.

But we part company on your second paragraph. There is certainly a tendency for what to be singular, and your analogy to a basket is a good one for explaining the grammar of sentences like your example and like “In ancient times the tribes roamed what is now the Carolinas.” All the same, what may be plural anywhere the singular seems wrongheaded, as it would in “what are valid points,” in my first paragraph. The rule of thumb is: If a given what means “that which” or “the thing that,” it’s singular; if it means “those which” or “the things that,” it’s plural.

 

What rule on noun number applies when the possibilities become messy or even ludicrous, as in the following examples? “They turned their heads to see us better.” (How many heads does each have?) “Both men relied heavily on their wives.” (Bigamists both?)

 

Some may find it obvious that if there’s a plural subject and something to be paired with the individual entities making up that subject—usually, though not always, after the plural possessive pronoun their—this other noun must also be plural: They all have heads, and so it must be “They turned their heads,” and so on. But let’s say a man has his pride, and a woman has her pride, too. “They have their prides”? Surely not.

The general rules are these: When the noun in question describes an abstract or uncountable entity, like pride or vitality, it ought to be singular. Sometimes nouns that one may think of as concrete and countable will turn out to be abstract in context (“They taught school”; “They were held hostage”). When one is at pains to make clear that the individuals in the subject are to be paired one apiece with the persons, places, or things in question, the number of the noun can’t be relied on to make the point, and other clues must be given (“Each of the bigamists relied heavily on his wives”). But it is usually either obvious or beside the point how many of the things are to be paired with the individuals in the subject, and then one needn’t scruple to use the plural (“Like lightning, the models changed their dresses and stockings and shoes, and, zipping their zippers and buttoning their buttons, bolted back to the runway”). This is the rule, it seems to me, that really applies to your wives—and your heads.

People who are focusing on this issue for the first time tend to decide that they will be purists henceforward, and whenever they remember their decision, they will busily “correct” their own writing and the writing of others. But pretty soon they’ll forget, and so they’ll fail to notice just how common—and in most cases innocuous—number mismatches are. Here are a few examples that would be more confusing if number did match: “Anthologies of poetry are usually edited for one of three reasons: to produce a convenient compendium, to summarize a movement or a period, or to prove a point”; “It is time finally to welcome immigrant children into our society by adding to the language they already know a full degree of competency in the common language of their new country”; “They sealed their bargains with a spoken word.”

Whenever carefully matching number results in ridiculous wording, don’t do it. The higher purpose of all our rules is to foster grace and clarity, and these rules on number conflict with grace and clarity more often than most do.

 

A member of the Friday Night Couples League at the Wenham Country Club, on Boston’s North Shore, had a hole in one on the third hole and another on the fifth. Did he have two holes in one or two hole in ones? One of us believes that the pattern should be the same as in attorneys general and passersby. The other disagrees, believing that holes in one would indicate that the golfer gained multiple holes in one shot. A Diet Coke has been wagered on this, and we have agreed that Ms. Grammar shall be the final authority.

 

I admit I explained to an earlier correspondent that we needn’t consider men who rely on their wives to be bigamists, and, in fact, if they relied on their wife, then she would be one. But sometimes it’s just impossible to match all parts of a sentence or a phrase in terms of grammatical or conceptual number. At least, in trying to match them one may run afoul of some other rule, and then, usually, that rule should hold sway. Here the rule is that the main noun itself, and not incidentals attached to it, is pluralized. Even RBIs, when it’s spelled out, becomes runs batted in. Holes in one is correct, at least technically.

All the same, to say “two holes in one” is to ask to be misunderstood. There simply must be some other way to say it. How about “a hole in one twice”—and two glasses of Coke?

 

A golfer would most likely say he shot two aces in the same round. Reminds me of the zoo keeper who wanted to order two animals. He stated he wanted “two mongooses,” then changed it to “two mongeese,” and finally said, “Send me a mongoose . . . and while you’re at it, send me another.”

 

And here’s one last letter on the topic of grammatical number, which arrived in my mailbox after The Atlantic ran a cover story titled “How Many Is Too Many?”:

 

How much are too much? When too many people is on the earth.

That seems the point of the article on population growth in this month’s issue of your magazine. It also reflects the article’s somewhat unusual views on noun-verb agreement. It seems that the word many, which is usually plural and refers to number rather than amount, requires a plural verb form—in this case, are. Even if many is considered an adjective, the implied noun in the question “How many is too many?” is people, a plural noun requiring a plural verb form. One would not usually say “How many population is too many?” Unless, perhaps, one are using the author’s rather “singular” definition of number.

I would welcome a justification of what seems to be an unwarranted suspension of grammatical rules.

 

Think of the question “How rich is too rich?” I’m sure you’ll agree that “How rich are too rich?” would not be better grammar. Likewise with “How many is too many?” You’re quite right that many is an adjective here, but there is no “implied noun” following it, any more than there is one following the adjective in a sentence like “How rich is he?” or “How rich are they?”

The adjective many, or many together with its modifier, is itself the subject of our sentence. As George O. Curme points out in A Grammar of the English Language, a subject may be “any . . . part of speech” or simply “a group of words,” and he gives a range of examples including “Two times two is four”—another seeming plural that isn’t one.

Note that because “How many is too many?” is a question, it ends, rather than begins, with its subject—the way “How rich is he?” does. This doesn’t particularly matter, of course: grammatically speaking, how many and too many, each an adverb and an adjective, don’t offer much to choose between.

 

3) Incomparable adjectives

 

Am I correct in deploring the use of a modifier or qualifier preceding the word unique, which is heard every day on radio? The common expression is very unique.

 

Unique has traditionally belonged to the group of adjectives called absolute or incomparable—meaning that the quality the word refers to must, logically, be either fully present or altogether absent, with no gradations possible in between. One can’t, for example, be just a little bit bankrupt, or a little bit anonymous or pregnant or dead. Quite a few people, though, seem not to have gotten the news that unique is numbered among this rarefied company. And so someone reading or hearing unique can no longer assume that it was intended to mean “one of a kind”; maybe the writer or speaker meant just “unusual.” This is too bad, because extraordinary and exceptional and rare and curious and unwonted and strange and peculiar and abnormal and other words as well, in their various ways, all mean “unusual,” but unique, in its true meaning and in the contexts natural to it, is very nearly unique.

Another incomparable that people often fail to recognize as such is crucial—the adjective form of crux, which has to do with crosses and crossroads and decisive points. And, despite the U.S. Constitution’s “more perfect Union,” perfect is generally considered incomparable as well. So are most words that start with un- or in- meaning “not”—unthinkable, intractable, and, of course, incomparable itself. Such a word doesn’t quite demand that you take it or leave it; you’re allowed to say more nearly crucial or all but unthinkable, for example. The idea is to treat the quality that the word describes as a standard, not a sliding scale.

 

See also the entry for “Destroy” in the “Double or Nothing” section of Chapter Five.

 

2) Case of personal pronouns

 

I, you, he, she, we, they, and who are in the subjective, or the nominative, case, and me, you, him, her, us, them, and whom are in the objective, or the accusative (as direct objects) and the dative (as indirect ones). Mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs, and whose are possessive, or genitive—but let’s not worry about the possessive case just now. It doesn’t tend to get mixed up with the others.

 

Many of my friends and co-workers use me and I incorrectly. For example, “Will you go to lunch with Mary and I?” or “Why did you not contact Jerry or I? I know that in both cases it should be me and not I, but I have a problem explaining this. My friends all think that I do not know the correct usage, because English is not my first language.

 

English-speakers get into trouble surprisingly often with I in constructions that include other people (“Mary and I,” “Jerry or I”). But, really, there’s no mystery about I and me: one uses me exactly where one would use it if no one else were involved. “Will you go to lunch with . . .” Who would ever say I at that point?

This test, though, won’t help with one phrase that people commonly get wrong: between you and me. The rule here is that between you and me is always right, and between you and I is always wrong. This despite one correspondent of mine, who writes, “I have come to believe that between you and I is good English. Among well-educated people I have heard between you and I much more often than between you and me.”

Surely, well-educated people ought to want to demonstrate a familiarity with the rules of grammar. Between is a preposition, and the objects of prepositions must be in the form of objects, not subjects. As Theodore Bernstein observes in The Careful Writer, most people “would not dream of saying or writing between him and they or between her and we.” He argues, too, that “an isolated instance or so of bad grammar culled from even the most gifted writers does not constitute a valid authentication for that particular misusage.”

 

After that exchange appeared in the column, I received the following from a professional linguist:

 

Concerning between Mary and I:

Your insistence that the problem is simple lack of “familiarity with the rules of grammar” blames speakers of English unfairly. The whole mess would never have arisen in the first place were it not for pedagogical attempts to impose “rules of grammar” that run contrary to the straightforward, eminently law-abiding principle of pronoun choice that every speaker of English acquired in childhood. That principle is something like the following:

(1) The nominative form of a pronoun is chosen if the verb agrees with the pronoun. Otherwise, the “default form” (accusative) is used.

Since a conjunction of a third-person with a first-person form triggers third-person-plural agreement (not first-person-singular agreement), the nominative form I is not chosen. That is the reason people produce “Bill and me are happy.” That’s the form dictated by rule (1).

In contrast, when the subject is the first-person pronoun alone, the verb does agree with the first-person pronoun. Consequently, the nominative form is chosen: “I am happy” (not “I is happy”). Again, the rule is followed.

Likewise, “I am here” and “Here am I” but “It’s me.” All quite simple and orderly: pronoun choice depends on verb agreement.

Your time-honored alternative is:

(2) “One uses me exactly where one would use it if no other person were involved.”

This rule, however, deposits us in an entirely different grammatical system, a system in which pronoun choice in coordination is inherited from the bigger phrase that contains the pronoun. What purpose can this difficult correction possibly serve?

The actual response of English speakers to the legacy of correction makes the point quite clear. Speakers have responded to corrections like “Bill and me” → “Bill and I” by learning not the un-English rule (2) but an entirely different rule that does not require a complete restructuring of their internal grammar:

(3) I is a fancy way of saying me after and.

Rule (3) is the rule speakers follow (I suspect) when they produce “between you and I.” It too is a rule of grammar—just not the rule teachers thought they were teaching when they corrected “Bill and me.”

The lesson here is not that people should learn to follow rules of grammar but just the opposite: that you meddle with people’s grammar at your peril. The results are often not what you think.

 

When you and I talk about “grammar,” we are talking about somewhat different things. And yet each of us is saying, These are the rules of grammar that exist; I’m not making anything up.

For my own part, I’m perfectly happy to admit that if I were to make up a grammar for English, I’d come up with something different from what we have. I might even turn the job over to you, in the confidence that you’d create something both rational and intuitive. But as it is, I have hundreds of years of tradition and literature behind me to substantiate my point of view. And behind you are . . . children? who haven’t fully learned the lessons about their language which their parents and teachers are trying to impart? I’m not just being rhetorical. This really is the way it strikes me.

Also please note that as soon as you start allowing objects of prepositions to be in the subjective case, and all sorts of other constructions that seem “natural,” you’re making it impossible for readers to trust that they’re understanding you properly. That is, you’re zipping down a slippery slope whereon nobody is quite sure how the various parts of a sentence are meant to be connected.

The traditional rules exist so that we will all know what they are, and can be free to proceed under the assumption that they are being followed. And the rule that between you and me reflects is really very simple. Once it has been determined that between them and between us are correct, it’s inevitable that between you and me must be, too—unless you want, as you seem to do, to introduce a not-so-simple exception, ahem, to the basic rule.

 

In a recent editorial, the commentator Molly Ivins wrote, “But that set off a firestorm of protest from Utahans, one of who announced it was like living in Russia, where the government can just come in and grab your land.”

Wondering if the who was a typo or correct usage, I consulted three grammarians, one of whom said who was incorrect, and one of who said who was correct; the other didn’t know.

Please help.

 

And in my mail the other day came a Gary Larson greeting card with a drawing of some men wearing powdered wigs, captioned “So, then . . . would that be ‘us the people’ or ‘we the people’?” How amusing. Ha-ha! Now, then, will everyone please stop acting as if the difference between the subjective case and the objective case were quantum mechanics, and get it right? It’s not complicated at all.

Consider your sentence—or, rather, the relevant part of your sentence: “one of who announced it was like living in Russia.” If, instead of a choice between who and whom, you had a choice between they and them—as in “one of they announced it was like living in Russia” or “one of them announced . . .”—you wouldn’t hesitate for a second before choosing the latter, would you? As you’ll recall, them is in the same case as whom (and they is in the same case as who). Therefore, if them would be right, whom is the word you want.

That’s the technique. To vet pronouns in general: As we just did, mentally pluck out of context the phrase or clause immediately related to the pronoun in question and begin substituting other pronouns until you find one that you know is right. Then make sure that the pronoun you are confident of (here, them) is in the same case as the one you actually mean to use (whom).

Sometimes while doing the mentally plucking out, you’ll find you also want to change the word order. I’m thinking of situations like “There was a protest from Utahans who she met in Russia.” Let’s see: “They she met in Russia”? “Them she met in Russia”? What’s to choose from those? But put the words for that little thought-within-a-thought in what would be their natural order if the thought stood alone—“She met they in Russia” or “She met them in Russia”—and it becomes clear that them, not they, would be the right choice. So it’s whom that’s wanted here, too.

Another tip: unless between you and I sets off loud alarm bells in your head, you’ll be well served to look for one pronoun that works, by itself, in your temporary version, even if the phrase you’re vetting started out with two pronouns or more. That is, if the puzzle before you is “She met the Utahans and I” versus “She met the Utahans and me,” cut straight to “She met we” versus “She met us.” Of course, us is right, so me, being in the same case as us, is what you want: “She met the Utahans and me.”

For bonus points, try these two, which are about as tricky as this subject ever gets: “Let’s listen to the Utahans, whom Molly Ivins expects would prefer not to live in Russia” and “Let’s listen to the Utahans, whom Molly Ivins expects to prefer to remain in Utah.” Which is or are right?^*

 

 

And one more: Did “us the people” or “we the people” ordain and establish this Constitution? Please tell me you knew the answer to this one already.

 

1) Possessives

 

Now let’s worry about possessives—and if you’re appalled to see that I’ve ranked this No. 1 on my grammatical-mistakes list, congratulations on your rare degree of sophistication. Somehow apostrophes keep turning up—or going missing—in the strangest places, and never mind that possessives are another subject that really isn’t complicated. I don’t know what makes a writer look sillier than misplaced or missing apostrophes. Those problems don’t arise in speech, thank goodness, though some possessive problems do.

 

I can no longer keep a lid on my confusion over the oft-used word your in place of what would seem to be the more apropos you’re—for example, “Your invited.” I have seen your used in this way more than once, and I would really like to know if it is correct.

 

Oh, dear—has it really come to that? Wherever you are would also be appropriate, you’re (which is a contraction of you are) is the right form. Your is a possessive adjective, like my, his, and their: “Your question is a good one”—that sort of thing.

The only reason this is confusing to anyone is that the possessives of nouns (unlike those of pronouns) do use apostrophes: “teacher’s pet,” “mother’s little helper.” These look just the same as contractions of nouns and is: “The teacher’s coming!” “Her mother’s going to be so pleased!”

 

My friend Henrich believes that truth comes from God and The New York Times. I suggested he put all his faith in the divine after I saw a Times photo caption recently: “The Kennedy’s posed for a portrait. . . .” I told Henrich that the Times erred, and that using an apostrophe to make a plural is a conspiracy against language which originated with house-sign carvers at flea markets (“THE BAKER’S, WELCOME”). Henrich responded that if the Times prints “Kennedy’s” as a plural, then it is obviously accepted common usage. Your decision, please!

 

If Henrich wants infallibility, God is his only option. Too bad God doesn’t do copy-editing.

 

That glib response met with a few demurrals when it appeared in the column. People supposed that I hadn’t really taken in the letter writer’s comment about “house-sign carvers,” and that I’d failed to realize that a possessive might be appropriate to mark a house. One man wrote:

 

Both The Joneses and The Jones’s (or, maybe, The Jones’) are commonly seen on mailboxes. Depending on the writer’s intent, he or she could defend either choice on grammatical grounds. My bet is that an increasing number of people think that they are saying “This is the Jones’s house.” After all, they can write Tom’s when they mean Tom’s Bar & Grill.

 

But the thing to note about The Jones’s is: Tom Jones = Jones or Jones’s (as in “Tom Jones has invited me over for dinner. I am going to Tom Jones’s house”). Tom and Tina Jones = Joneses, or The Joneses, or The Joneses’ (“The Joneses have invited me. I am going to the Joneses’ house”). With the, in other words, the name has to be a plural, possessive or not. The Jones’s is the one indefensible form.

 

Months after the letter about “the Kennedy’s” appeared in the column, I received the following note from the man who had written it. His surname is Alper.

 

It’s over. We lost.

An Op-Ed piece in The New York Times today was all about “WASP’S,” clear through from headline to the last paragraph. And to add insult to injury, although “WASP’S” appeared throughout the article, in the final paragraph, for no apparent reason other than the Times just doesn’t give a damn, the word appeared as “Wasp’s.”

I surrender. It’s over. We’ve lost. If I can’t fight them, I guess I’ll join them. That goes for me as well as the rest of the Alper’s.

 

There, there. Don’t take it that way. There is a convention according to which the plurals of acronyms are given apostrophes, along with the plurals of symbols and numerals (x’s and the 1990’s, for example). It’s never made sense to me, and The Atlantic doesn’t follow it, but the Times does.

“When the Times’s science section or gardening column covers “wasp’s,” write me back. Then it is over.

 

I have been waging a one-man battle for months at work. I contend that the possessive form of a singular noun is created by adding ’s, even if the noun already ends in s. For example, the possessive of Charles is Charles’s.

My co-workers all believe that you add only the apostrophe to any word ending in s, so they insist the proper form is Charles’. Who is right?

 

Your rule is certainly the usual one, though language authorities recommend some exceptions to it. For the most part these arise because an ’s is supposed to be audible if the possessive is read aloud (Carl’s is said “Carlz”; the possessive of Charles is said “Charles-ez”—thus, Charles’s), and an s’ is not supposed to be (carl’s is said “carz,” the same as cars). After certain kinds of singular nouns, however, it is difficult to pronounce an additional’s, and so most authorities would add only an apostrophe to a proper name that ends in two sibilants, such as Jesus or Texas. By a similar rationale, for conscience’ sake and for goodness’ sake are also preferred.

But the exceptions are fine points. Be grateful that your co-workers don’t think the possessive of Charles is Charle’s.

 

An issue has arisen on our campus as to whether an inanimate object can have a possessive. For example, although we routinely talk of “the college’s mission statement” some individuals contend proper usage dictates saying “the mission statement of the college.” In many instances, following such a rule results in stilted and awkward-sounding prose. Does such a rule truly exist or is it simply the stipulation of an overzealous teacher of English?

 

By ancient tradition, the nouns for many kinds of inanimate objects form their possessives with of, not with ’s, but this is less a matter of grammar than it is of what sounds natural because of the tradition.

I have sometimes heard an argument against the ’s as bad grammar—namely, that the college doesn’t own the mission statement, so how can the possessive be appropriate? This is definitely wrongheaded, for what grammarians mean by “possessive” allows for many relations other than ownership: think of the bee’s knees, a year’s supply, doctor’s orders, and a stone’s throw, for example. Besides, of is also considered to be a possessive form, so if this problem were a real one, the switch to of wouldn’t solve it.

Jaunty constructions in which the possessive is inanimate and the relationship between it and the possessed is quite loose (say, Boston’s Ms. Grammar) are not considered good form even today. But where avoiding the ’s results in something more artificial than using it, there is no valid basis on which to object to it.

 

What would be correct in the sentence that follows? “The leader of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ideas were extremely liberal.” Should Emerson be Emerson’s, to show possession of the ideas? But then the appositive would not agree with its nominative antecedent, leader. Or would one need to make leader possessive? Somehow that sounds too convoluted to be right. Or perhaps one should recast the sentence completely to avoid the problem. What do you say?

 

You’ve got almost, though not quite, a “picnic’s grandmother” construction—so called by the editor and writer Harold Taylor (according to the style manual Words Into Type), to remind us not to say or write things like “the girl who gave the picnic’s grandmother.”

There’s a subordinate clause instead of an appositive in the “picnic’s grandmother” construction, however. An “appositive,” as you know, is a noun or noun phrase that restates, defines, or clarifies what immediately precedes it. With a restrictive appositive (see “Restrictive and descriptive elements,” at No. 6, above), such as “the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson,” it’s standard practice in a case like your example to make the appositive possessive: “The transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas.” I find myself wondering whether Emerson’s name ought to be restrictive in your sentence, for the transcendentalists had leaders besides Emerson. Context may not allow it—you may have built a conceptual framework in which there are, say, two opposing camps full of followers, and each has a leader, and Emerson is the transcendentalists’. If context does allow, however, you could say, “The transcendentalist leader Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas were extremely liberal.” I wouldn’t call that a beautiful sentence, but it is a grammatical one.

That won’t work either with descriptive appositives, which involve commas (your phrase is a good example), or with elements of most other kinds (such as “who gave the picnic”). Recast, recast! There’s always a way. How about “The ideas of the transcendentalist leader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, were extremely liberal” or “The leader of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had extremely liberal ideas”?

A digression: All this goes a long way toward explaining why I believe in rendering names that include Jr. without commas. If Jr. is going to take a comma, then unless the name appears at the end of a sentence it will need two: “Harry Connick, Jr., has come out with a new CD” would be the right way to write it if you’re in favor of commas. But plainly the meaning of the Jr. is restrictive—this Harry Connick, not one of another generation, is the point of the designation—and a lack of commas is the signal to readers that they’re looking at a restrictive element. Besides, with commas possessives seem illogical—even absurd. “Harry Connick, Jr.’s, new CD”?

A further digression: You’ll notice that I said Jr. but not Sr. That’s because, properly speaking, the only name in which Sr. should appear is that of a widow and mother. I can’t keep on with the Connick family without falsifying the details of their lives, so let’s say there’s a Harry Harrison whose son is Harry Harrison Jr. If Harry Jr. fathers a son whom he and his wife want to name Harry, the baby will be Harry Harrison III (and no doubt be called Trey)—temporarily. When Jr.’s father dies, Jr. becomes Harry Harrison, Trey becomes Jr., and the former Jr.’s mother, except that she probably decided years ago to call herself Ms. Harriet Harrison, becomes Mrs. Harry Harrison Sr.

 

It’s often possible to figure out points of grammar by listening to educated people speak. Not so in the case of multiple possessives. Faced with the prospect of speaking about a boat that belongs both to their father and to themselves, people will invariably lower their voices while mumbling “my dad’s and my boat” or “my dad and my boat,” thus betraying that if they happened to get it right, it was blind luck.

Even The Chicago Manual of Style punts the question, giving the example of “the Rosses’ and the Williamses’ lands” but avoiding the adjacency of the third and first persons.

The logic of parallel constructions would lead one to think that my dad’s and my boat is correct, but then why does it sound so wrong? And why is there no construction that sounds right?

I suppose there’s always the boat of me and my dad.

 

Style manuals and usage books that do rule on this question tend to state flatly that joint possession calls for one possessive (my dad and my boat), whereas separate possession calls for more than one (my dad’s and my boats, meaning a boat for me and a boat for him). Nonetheless, I agree with you that my dad and my boat doesn’t sound very good. The construction could just as well be referring to two distinct entities: your boat and your dad. Worse still would be him and my boat. The problem isn’t just the mixing of the third and the first person: him and her boat is also hopeless. There’s nothing wrong with grammatically equivalent Marshall and Mileta’s boat, though.

Pronouns are what throws the construction off. In my dad and my boat, the two mys give the impression of being parallel, though in fact it’s dad that’s more nearly parallel to the second my. As for him and my boat, no listener, and no reader except a mind reader, is going to be able to figure out what him is doing there instead of his.

As you drolly note, we may evade the problem if we like, and that’s what I’d recommend. After you’ve said once the boat that my dad and I own, you’ll have clear sailing with our boat.

 

Are you glad or sorry that we’ve gotten all the way to the end of this chapter without so much as a mention of subjunctives? In fact, there are a lot of grammatical matters I haven’t found room to mention: absolute possessives and double passives and perfect infinitives, and on and on. Systematic coverage of the subtleties of grammar is given in several of the books on my bookshelf, whose titles you’ll see catalogued in the aside at the end of the next chapter. I’ll be satisfied if I’ve persuaded you in a general way that the structure of higher English makes a good deal of sense, at the same time that it involves many little peculiarities. Do remember their existence, for it’s easy to overlook, and even doubt the legitimacy of, whole charming districts of language if you’ve never happened upon them on the map.

 

 

AN ASIDE
Diagramming Sentences

 

Many people have a sort of dark fascination with the idea of diagramming sentences. Either they were taught diagramming long ago in school and they dimly recall that there was meant to be some improving purpose in learning diagramming but now they can’t remember how to do it, or they grew up too late to have been taught it and have always imagined that they missed out on one of the fundamentals of an exacting education—like hazing or being caned by the schoolmaster.

According to the linguists who participate in the Ask a Linguist panel on the Linguist List Web site (www.linguistlist.org), the diagramming system prevalent today is Noam Chomsky-style “tree diagrams,” in which words and phrases are connected as if by a weeping willow or a marionette’s strings, and the lines are annotated with parts of speech. This, however, is taught not in elementary school but, more typically, in college linguistics courses. Also used, though less commonly, are things called immediate-constituent diagrams and tagmemic diagrams, both of which have simply a linear appearance, and also stratificational diagrams, which are said to “resemble plates of spaghetti.”

The system that nonspecialists tend to remember, for it is the one that was long taught to American schoolchildren, is called Reed-Kellogg diagramming, after its creators, who published the first description of it in 1879. This is the system in which the words are written above horizontal lines, for the most part, with vertical and slanted lines running between them. The Reed-Kellogg system has never been much used by professional linguists, who warn that it lacks the wherewithal to depict various complicated, though perfectly correct, constructions.

The Ask a Linguist linguists also warn:

 

Diagramming was not intended to improve anybody’s speaking or writing ability—except insofar as knowing the syntactic structure of one’s sentences might cause one to attend a bit more to one’s sentences (Carl Mills, University of Cincinnati).

 

Diagramming sentences, or any other formal parsing system (many of them work much better than the traditional diagramming system), will have almost no effect on speech ability. It may, however, affect writing ability. The point of diagramming (as I will call any visual parsing system) is to get people to think about syntax, by giving them ways to represent it, and maybe making them practice a bit on using them. If you get in the habit of thinking about what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it, you’re ahead of the writing game. At the very least, you’re able to compose sentences and revise them consciously, and this is what every writing instructor is after, in part (John Lawler, University of Michigan).

 

It probably is not the case that parsing sentences has ever helped anyone write or speak better, but some people believe that idea nonetheless. Traditional parsing focuses too much on individual words, and that is why I don’t recommend it to teachers or parents. The parsing devices that linguists use focus on coherent chunks—phrases—and would be much better suited to helping students see the relationships among sentence parts. However, the “trees” that linguists use may be too complex for youngsters to deal with (Marilyn Silva, California State University, Hayward).

 

Listening and reading are far more useful for the general educated language-user than knowing how to parse a sentence. I think a little bit of knowledge about formal grammar, sentence structure, etc., can be helpful to such a person, if only because it helps to know consciously what one is doing when one shifts between, say, active and passive voice. But I have a strong suspicion that this can easily be overdone by schoolteachers who are wedded to the insane idea that “proper” grammar lives in a textbook (Steven Schaufele, Soochow University, Taipei).

 

Darkly fascinating though diagramming sentences may be, if you thought it was just what you needed to improve your grammar, think again.