A few nights ago I dreamed I was in Nigerian with my grandchildren. The eldest, Chidi, was lounging with us outdoors when he reached under a rock and a snake struck his fingers. As his face clouded with pain and fear I grabbed his fingers to cut the bite and suck out the venom, while yelling at my wife to use my belt for a tourniquet above Chidi’s elbow and then dial 911. (911 in Nigeria? Well, this was a dream!) Just then I woke up crying.

All that was standard procedure taught in my youth. But when I called Chidi later to tell him, he quickly corrected me. Everything I did in that dream, Chidi told me (except “911”), would hasten the spread of the venom in a body rather than prevent it! Reaching deeper into my science and consulting Google for confirmation, I found that he was absolutely right. (Anyone remember Mark Twain’s quip, about when he was 17 and thought his father was embarrassingly “dumb”?)

HERE’S THE SCIENCE:

The heart circulates blood as a two-stroke pump. At DIASTOLE the heart muscles relax and blood is sucked up the veins into the heart; then at SYSTOLE the heart muscles contract to push the blood out/down the arteries. So the venom-laden blood would first travel through the heart and into the rest of the body before I can suck it out (on the down-stroke, so to say). Thus, my sucking (yuck!) would assist rather than retard the spread of the venom.

In fact, the Mayo Clinic First-Aid instruction explicitly cautions us not to apply tourniquet or try to suck out the venom.

A few nights ago I dreamed I was in Nigerian with my grandchildren. The eldest, Chidi, was lounging with us outdoors when he reached under a rock and a snake struck his fingers. As his face clouded with pain and fear I grabbed his fingers to cut the bite and suck out the venom, while yelling at my wife to use my belt for a tourniquet above Chidi’s elbow and then dial 911. (911 in Nigeria? Well, this was a dream!) Just then I woke up crying.

All that was standard procedure taught in my youth. But when I called Chidi later to tell him, he quickly corrected me. Everything I did in that dream, Chidi told me (except “911”), would hasten the spread of the venom in a body rather than prevent it! Reaching deeper into my science and consulting Google for confirmation, I found that he was absolutely right. (Anyone remember Mark Twain’s quip, about when he was 17 and thought his father was embarrassingly “dumb”?)

HERE’S THE SCIENCE:

The heart circulates blood as a two-stroke pump. At DIASTOLE the heart muscles relax and blood is sucked up the veins into the heart; then at SYSTOLE the heart muscles contract to push the blood out/down the arteries. So the venom-laden blood would first travel through the heart and into the rest of the body before I can suck it out (on the down-stroke, so to say). Thus, my sucking (yuck!) would assist rather than retard the spread of the venom.

In fact, the Mayo Clinic First-Aid instruction explicitly cautions us not to apply tourniquet or try to suck out the venom.

All that was standard procedure taught in my youth. But when I called Chidi later to tell him, he quickly corrected me. Everything I did in that dream, Chidi told me (except “911”), would hasten the spread of the venom in a body rather than prevent it! Reaching deeper into my science and consulting Google for confirmation, I found that he was absolutely right. (Anyone remember Mark Twain’s quip, about when he was 17 and thought his father was embarrassingly “dumb”?)

HERE’S THE SCIENCE:

The heart circulates blood as a two-stroke pump. At DIASTOLE the heart muscles relax and blood is sucked up the veins into the heart; then at SYSTOLE the heart muscles contract to push the blood out/down the arteries. So the venom-laden blood would first travel through the heart and into the rest of the body before I can suck it out (on the down-stroke, so to say). Thus, my sucking (yuck!) would assist rather than retard the spread of the venom.

In fact, the Mayo Clinic First-Aid instruction explicitly cautions us not to apply tourniquet or try to suck out the venom.

The interrogative pronoun “who” seems to give users quite a bit of trouble; it is one more error in spoken English that tends to creep into the written form. Like a noun, it has to be declined in a sentence. “Declined” means its inflection (ending) has to vary according to its case or function in a sentence.  Its cases are:

Nominative case — who

Accusative (object of a verb) — whom

Genitive (possessive case) — whose

Dative and Ablative cases — whom.  “SEND NOT TO ASK FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, IT TOLLS FOR THEE.”

Note: the genitive form is whose, not who’s (which may seem contra-intuitive!)

Example:

It is wrong to ask, “Who are you talking about?” The key here is the preposition “about,” which, like the other prepositions (on, for, with, upon, about), introduces the ablative case.

So we say: about whom (not about who); for whom (and not for who).

Question:

Which of the following two sentences is correct?

• He is the one whom I told you about.
• He is the one who I told you came home.

Answer:

They are both correct. In (1) “about” again clues us to the ablative case. In (2) “who” is in the nominative (not ablative) because it is the subject of the phrase “who came home.”

Perhaps a clarification with two commas would help make this clear:  He is the one who, I told you, came home.

From historic times, one hallmark of erudition for a user of English language is command of the lexicon: that is the range of one’s vocabulary. Essentially, no two words of English are identical (except, perhaps, “begin” and “commence,” to cite my high school English master, a doughty, old Irish priest whose Magister of Classics was earned in Oxford U of the UK). That being the case, the wider your English vocabulary the wider the range and nuances of meaning you can convey. And that range can be phenomenal!

April 24, 2017

THE FACTS

Charles Berlitz (a US linguist)* said English had “over one million words,” mostly derived from Latin.  And he added:

• A highly erudite scholar  of English language could command some 100,000 of those one million million words.                Hence we shall use 100,000 as the benchmark of high erudition in English Language.
• However, most well-read scholars of English could use or recognize 25,000 to 50,000 of those words.
• Shakespeare used just 20,000 different English words in all his works (but that was 450 years ago).
• For comparison, The New York Times (of 1980s) utilized about 25,000 English words.
• But a UK university graduate mastered only about 10,000 words (10% of our erudition benchmark).
• For US college graduates the mastery was much worse: just below 3,000 words (<3% of our benchmark).

A native speaker of any language who commands less than 3% of its vocabulary is of course failing badly!

We must bear in mind that Berlitz’s statistics are over three decades old, hence outdated. An explosion of new English words has taken place since his time, occasioned by technical and scientific advancements, socio-cultural progress, and the newspeak of the electronic/cyber age. But this only amplifies the lexical inadequacy of US English.

[* Numbers quoted here are from Native Tongues (Perigee Books, 1984) by Charles Berlitz, a famous US linguist.]

ONE EXPLANATION

Non-native users of English tend to acquire their vocabulary in the classroom or from literature sources. In contrasts, native speakers (perhaps Americans especially) seem to do so mainly via conversation (and increasingly TV). Hence the tendency in written US English to confuse phonetically similar words, or to misspell some others (as we saw elsewhere in these blogs) — for instance:

“do to” for “due to”

“principle amount” for “principal amount”

“peddle your bike” for “pedal your bike”

“mute point” for “moot point”

“duffle bag” for “duffel bag”

“loose your way in the dark” instead of “lose your way…”

“bigger then” for “bigger than”

“recumbant bike” for “recumbent bike”

“in dire straights” instead of “in dire straits”

“what is meat for the goose…” instead of “what is meet for the goose…”

… and so forth.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

There is a great deal of confusion in US literature between “farther” and “further.” They are two different comparative forms of the adjective “far.” But there is a subtle distinction between them in terms of connotation:

FARTHER is the correct comparative form for FAR when it refers to distance;

FURTHER is the correct comparative form when FAR connotes EXTENT, not distance. Here are examples:

Distance: farther (comparative)-farthest (superlative).  “I walked one mile but she walked farther, two miles.”

Extent:  further-furthest.  “I invited only adults, but my wife went further and invited everyone we knew.”

In one sentence: “I walked and thought; and the farther I walked down the road the further I considered his idea.”

So, one might say that vocabulary is the Achilles heel of US English. But Americans are not unique in this regard. All people tend toward laxity over their mother tongue and let the looser forms of conversational vernacular creep into their writings. (My spoken Igbo is poor and my written Igbo is abysmal!) In contrast, foreigners are likely to become acquainted with the strictures of grammatically correct English before dabbling into spoken English—where their unusual accent is a major cause of self-conscious hesitation.

An Englishman I worked with in the USA made a  facetious joke about a US exchange student in a literature class at a London university. A coed tried to start a conversation with the American after class and the following ensued:

English coed: “Do you like Rudyard Kipling?”

American:  “Dunno. I never kipled in any kind of yard before.”

The telecopying of document (i.e. creation, transmission, and recovery of facsimiles) was with us for almost a century, from the dawn of telephony — but not very popular until the name of the process was shortened to the catchy word, “fax.” That is a sharp illustration of the power of a succinct word or phrase. For the same reason, the word for photographs (“pictures”) is now routinely replaced with “pix”; and nobody talks about taking a self-portrait (with a cell phone) anymore, but just a “selfie.”

Where does it end? And is it really creative? Does it not lead to obfuscation, making an otherwise clear message quite murky? Not long ago the media used to refer to police dogs as a “Canine Unit” (from canis, the Latin word for dog). Then someone realized that “canine” sounded like “K-9” and now even our print media have abandoned the accurate forms and begun to write routinely about “K-9s” in police units.

One wonders why “K-9” is now preferred in US English. K-9 is not easier or shorter to write or say than “dog” or “canine.” It is not even a clarification: indeed it is the opposite of clarification. Soon students will no longer know or remember the provenance of the term “K-9.” The degradation of our language is going beyond words to embrace the emerging fusion of words and pictures. In cell phone text messaging “U” stands for you, “ur” for your, “2” for “to,” and “4” for “for.” Thus, “I heart u” means I love you (the heart becoming a proxy for love). Now, try and translate “A K-9 is gud 4 u”; that’s the standard English of cell-phone texting, no doubt the English language of tomorrow.

And then there’s the fastest-growing sector of obfuscation: the perceived need to “supersize” every existing word, especially adjectives. It used to be a thing was small, medium, or large (big); then, with time, along came “enormous” from Latin e-normis (literally out of the normal); later we discovered “gigantic” (for “big as a giant”) and “tremendous” (causing a quake by its sheer size!). Then the  “baby-boomer” generation created “humongous” (perhaps a cut-and-nail amalgam of “huge” and “monstrous”). Nowadays, teenagers combine “gigantic” and “enormous” to fashion “ginormous.” Inundated as we are with frenetic commercial advertising, we have all become self-boosters now, leap-frogging one-another with escalating comparisons.

Where will it all end?

English is among the simpler languages in the way it forms plurals of simple nouns: in most cases it just sticks an “s” to the end of the noun. But some kinds of noun are not simple, and forming their plurals is not always straight-forward. Commonest among these are the compound nouns, which are comprised of two or more words: e.g., two nouns, or a noun and a qualifying word (an adjective, for instance), or a noun and a phrase. In such cases the compound noun is easily seen as a substantive noun, plus the qualifying word or words. To form the plural in such cases, an “s” is added to the substantive noun, not to the qualifiers. Thus, we have:

  COMPOUND NOUNS

SINGULAR — PLURAL

1. Chief of staff — Chiefs of staff
2. Commander-in-chief — Commanders-in-chief
3. Man-of-war (a ship) — Men-of-war
4. Head of State — Heads of State
5. Mother-in-law — Mothers-in-law
6. Passer-by — Passers-by
7. Field Marshall — Field Marshalls
8. etc.

Collective Nouns

In this context of pluralization, note that “staff” is one of those words that refer to a group (not a single person or item): like “team,” “cast” (of a play/movie), “faculty,” etc.

Such nouns may be viewed as singular or plural, depending on the context.

1. In “His staff is assembled,” the group is viewed as acting together, as one; but
2. In “His staff are engaged in different aspects of the project,” the staff are treated as different individuals.

I met James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe together in 1980. Much like Chinua’s greedy fly that follows a corpse into the grave, I skipped my class and followed the two men into the seminar they were attending on our campus. They were at the University of Florida (where I taught) attending a week-long workshop of Black Writers during the BHM observances. I literally bumped into them in a faculty elevator at lunchtime, and recognized Chinua by his photo.

Achebe kindly introduced Baldwin. But, barbarian engineer that I was, I’d never heard of Baldwin: I ignored him; I only had eyes for Chinua. (When I queried Achebe about his first name, “Chinua,” as I was wont to do with everybody, he explained: “Chinua’lim ogu” — May God fight for me. And, no, he apologized, he was unable to come to my house for dinner due to prior commitments.) I smiled at the two men and went away, missing a rare chance to get acquainted with James Baldwin.

Only last fall did I discover James Baldwin, the writer. I have read “Another Country” and “The Fire Next Time.” Boy! what a writer!! Reading Baldwin in full stride is like peering over the rim of a volcano in full wrath. His eloquent prose reminds one of the militant imagery in Julia Howe’s lyrics for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I never knew what I missed all those years. Concerning Baldwin I was as clueless as the proverbial nerd parodied in the following allegory:

(Jane, a coed majoring in literature): “John’s your name? Do you like Rudyard Kipling?”

(John, an engineering major): “I dunno. I never kipled in any kind of yard before.”

Today’s topic is prompted by a confusion regarding when a statement (i.e. a string of words) must end with a full stop (aka a “period”). Simply put, only a full sentence must end with a period, or its equivalent, such as the exclamation mark (!) or the question mark (?) as appropriate.

This blog site is dedicated to observations on the vagaries of written English in the USA. The reason for limiting it to written English is that the written form is the one used for formal communications, where ambiguities or inconsistencies degrade the meaning you wish to convey, and you get only one chance to convey that meaning and sense. One rule of formal English that has not changed over time is that you should write your prose in full sentences. So it becomes important to know when a sentence is complete, or “full.”

In what follows, explanation/elaboration from Latin is in italics. Also, we limit ourselves here to a simple sentence; in real life things get more complicated because you have, additionally, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences; let’s call the last three “non-simple” sentences.

Except for minor exceptions (which we shall consider later) a full or proper sentence is one that has basically three parts: 1. a verb (denoting action); 2. a subject (the nominative case in Latin) which performs the action indicated by the verb and which is basically a noun or a pronoun or other parts of speech playing the role of the subject of the main verb in your sentence; and 3. an object. In “She has guts,” she is the subject, has is the verb, and guts is the object; that sentence is complete. The verb and object may be lumped together and called the “predicate”: in “She has guts,” “she” is the subject and “has guts” is the predicate.

A caveat here is that in going from conversation (live or TV) to broadcast speech (on radio) to print (newspaper/magazine) the line between informal and formal English may blur or even disappear!

Besides the sentence, other important kinds of expression are, a clause and a phrase. A clause also has a verb or verbs whereas a phrase does not. The clause and the phrase can be parts of a sentence and so play subordinate roles in a sentence. It is the inclusion of a clause and/or a phrase and/or clusters of clauses and phrases that characterize the other (“non-simple”) kinds of sentences. The reason for mentioning the clause and the phrase here is that in US English there’s a tendency to confuse them with a full sentence.

As stated, only a full/complete sentence MUST end with a period. A clause or a phrase does not need to end with a period. This is important when you write a list and wonder how to end each line. That, in my opinion, is where some writers, editors and reviewers I have encountered tend to get things wrong: You write a bulleted list consisting of phrases, and an editor says you should end each line with a period. (I encountered a reviewer who inserted periods at the ends of subject headings!)

The foregoing is, of course, grossly simplified. As stated, in real life the sentence structure can get quite complicated. However, a sentence cannot be made more simple than “subject + predicate.”) Or can it? Well, there are simple exceptions. Most common exceptions are the single words used in the interrogative sense or the exhortatory sense (vocative case): i.e., used to ask a question, to urge someone to an action, or to answer a question. Examples are, respectively, “Why?”, “Go!”, “Yes.”  Each of those is considered a full sentence though it comprises only one word. Other similar but minor examples are exclamatory words (“Oh!” and “Silly!” for instance).

Finally, here is a word about phrases and especially clauses standing alone. (Note that this foregoing sentence becomes improperly constructed if we remove “here is” — because then it lacks a main verb, “is.” But that incorrect form, without “here is,” has become common or popular.)

It is incorrect English to write:

1. Because we are human.
2. Since he promises to pay.
3. While we sleep.
4. And that is bad.
5. Etc.

The reason they constitute bad English is that the first word in each case is a transitional word and so what follows it is a clause and not a sentence. A transitional word is used to connect two clause, phrases, or sentences: E.g. “She smokes, and that is bad” is correct English.

This blog site was conceived as a forum to explore some idiosyncrasies of written English in the USA, and the unstated reference point is, of course, the British usage of English. Here we mention those differences which really amount to nothing more than what style is preferred.

Those of us who got our formal education on the English Language outside the USA, especially in a former British colony, will encounter quite a few instances when we must reorient our English to the way Americans prefer it. Sometimes the difference is a mere matter of spelling (e.g., color versus colour, labor versus labour, defense versus defence). But other times it goes beyond the choice of vowels or consonants and takes a form more subtle and, yet, perhaps more serious.

It took me a while to realize that Americans say/write “backward,” “toward,” “homeward,” etc., where the British add an “s” to those adverbs and adjectives. Employing the (familiar) British forms does less harm than one might imagine, but I have run into an editor or reviewer who took issue with the British form of the adverb!

The Chicago Manual of Style is thorough and authoritative on such differences, and it regards much of it as a matter of style. However, as noted, not all referees agree. Also, that manual is pricey for an individual writer (although most libraries will have the series). The Manual is updated from time to time, making your current issue obsolete. So it’s helpful, when one is in doubt, that there are more affordable guides like Grammar Girl, etc. And then, of course, the most accessible source is the internet. Finally, if you must rely only on the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, it will do: it may not tell you the difference between the British and American forms (because it is not really an etymological tome), but if you should type in the wrong (i.e., “British”) form, its search will default to the American version.

It is better to refer to those sources than to rely on mnemonics and conventional wisdom. From time to time I have come across mnemonics which stress that “America prefers simplicity” or that America “likes short cuts” (and so the version with a simpler spelling or fewer letters must be the American form). Unfortunately, that is, well, simplistic—and misleading! The better caveat to remember is that English is an idiomatic language (and hence sometimes counter-intuitive!). To disprove the claim that Americans prefer shorter versions of words or expressions, I will cite a tongue-in-cheek counter-claim that I learned in the UK long ago:

“The Briton gets out of his flat, down a lift, into a car, to go watch a film; but the American will get out of his apartment, down an elevator, into an automobile, to go see a motion picture.”

So, beware!