A malapropism is a saying (an “ism”) that uses a word or phrase where it does not belong: where it is inappropriate. “Malapropism” comes from French: “mal” (poorly or badly) “apropos” (relevant). Most often the incorrect word is misused because it sounds like a different word that was intended, hence the confusion.

1. Meat For Geese?
I like the English proverb, “What is meet for the goose is meet for the gander,” but each time I quoted it in a publication, a reviewer or an editor changed it to “What is meat for the goose is meat for the gander.” The third time an editor changed it for me I wrote to him, pointing out that his version was a serious malapropism, for the goose and  its male counterpart are granivores (seed eaters) and so do not eat meat!

The cause of the US confusion of “meat” for “meet” became obvious when that editor replied, quoting the US version of that proverb: “What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” This wrong version occurs in US dictionaries and encyclopediae, including Wikipedia! (Americans like to appear original when they modify an English saying. For instance, where the British say, “I was between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Americans alter it to “I was between a rock and a hard place.”)

So, in the US version of the proverb in question, “meat” came to replace “meet” because meat is used in sauce! But sauce, too, is a malapropism in that proverb, for goose and gander do not eat sauce! Bottom line: The correct English word to use in that proverb is “meet” (which means fair, just, or right).

2. Singular or Plural?
Some English words exist only in the plural form: we study physics and mathematics (but not physic or mathematic!); similarly, we engage in athletics and not athletic. The person who directs athletics is an Athletics Director, and not an Athletic Director. “Athletic” is an adjective indicating: fit, trim, and muscular! (We have commented on this kind of error elsewhere in these blog posts, pointing out that a man is six feet tall and not six foot tall, just as a ten-dollar book costs ten dollars.)

3. Out Of This World!
One US expression that we usually don’t recognize as a malapropism is “astronaut.” It is derived from the ancient Greek word, Argonaut (literally Sailor of the Argo Sea, in reference to the fable of “Jason and the Argonauts.”) Thus, “astronaut” implies someone who sails the “sea” between the stars. But the world has seen no such person yet! The farthest anyone has gone is to the moon; no one has ever gone past the gravitational zone of the earth, let alone beyond the neighborhood of our local star, the sun. So, nobody has ever gone between stars! The Russian equivalent, “cosmonaut,” is in the same category since it implies someone who navigates the cosmos—the universe!

The pompous American and Russian words for travelers to near-earth orbits were coined during the Cold War, when each side was trying to pump itself up as a “superpower!” (It is reminiscent of that comical scene in the Charlie Chaplin movie, The Great Dictator, where “Il Duce” and his guest, “Der Fuhrer,” each furiously ratcheted up his stool in order to look down at the other!)

4. Why Not Consult a Dictionary?
What do we make of statements like:
• “Your point is mute”? (A person may be mute, but a point can only be moot.)
• “I didn’t go, do to bad weather”? (due, not do)
• “I can’t phantom what devil made him do that”? (The word needed there is fathom.)
• “I employ you to send me your comments”? (The correct word is implore.)
• “He does not mix words”? (mince, not mix)
• “We may loose this game”? (lose, not loose)
• An introduction of a TV panel as an “Ombudswoman for Medicaid”? (Since ombudsman is not an English word but Swedish, this is like calling a female German a “Gerwoman”!)

Clearly, some of the more common malapropisms can be avoided if we cultivate a habit of consulting a dictionary (or encyclopedia or thesaurus, or the like) whenever in doubt—especially these days when those reference sources are freely available on the internet.

CONFUSION OVER PARTS OF SPEECH

Everybody knows the difference between nouns and adjectives, right? Wrong….

Electric Bill or Electricity Bill?
An electric bill is one that shocks you, and it may not be for electricity consumed. A $1000.00 water bill would be considered “electric,” even if you are Bill Gates. The bill that comes from your power utility is your electricity bill; it is not electric if it is for $1.50.

Athletic or Athletics?
The man that controls and regulates sports in your high school: Is he your “Athletic Director” or your “Athletics Director”? It depends. If he is muscle-bound and presses 100 lbs., he may qualify to be called “athletic” (which means the same as “sportive”); but if he is a 250-lb couch potato that oversees sporting activities from the cushy comfort of an air-conditioned office, the best he can be is an Athletics Director. A school may have a physics or mathematics or athletics teacher (in each case a noun). Those nouns are always used in the plural, never in the singular, so that a “physic” or “mathematic” or “athletic” teacher makes no sense.

Are you “six foot tall” or “six feet tall”?
The foot in “six-foot man” is really an adjective. It is called an adjectival noun because, while it is a noun, it functions as an adjective in that construction (qualifying man). It is like saying someone is a house painter: “house” is an adjectival noun here, qualifying painter.

So, “I am six foot tall” makes no sense really: it uses an adjective (foot) where it should use a plural noun (feet). A six-foot man is six feet (plural noun) tall; a woman who measures five feet and six inches in height is a “five-foot-and-six-inch woman”; and a child that weighs fifty pounds is a fifty-pound child. Similarly, a twenty-dollar lunch costs twenty dollars (plural noun). We seem to get confused only when it comes to height! Nobody can be “6 (or 5, etc.) foot tall,” Such a unit of height does not exist. If your height is six feet, then: You are a six footer, a six foot person, or a person six feet tall. Just keep in mind “noun versus adjective” and you shouldn’t get it wrong.

Transitive & Intransitive Verbs
Do you Lie down or Lay down? It depends on what is lying or being laid. Americans seem to tip-toe around the verb to lay because of its sexually loaded nuance. But as children we learned the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John prayer: “…Before I lay me down to sleep / I give my soul to Christ to keep”.

Yes, LIE is an intransitive verb: Present Tense, “I lie down,” and Past Tense, “I lay down” ― but LAY is a transitive verb because it takes an object. Thus, a child who is ready to sleep will first lay her book down and then lie down (or lay herself down).

So, “I will lay down on the couch” is confusing, unless you are a hen laying eggs.
Prepositions
Some prepositions are used exclusively or preferentially with some verbs in certain contexts. Thus you “wait for” somebody (if you are biding time for that somebody to be ready to do something); but you “wait on” somebody if you are a waiter in a restaurant or an attendant in a shop, for instance.

We have seen the case of “off” and “on” in a previous post at this blog site. Each is a complete preposition: “I put the book on the table,” or “I won $5 off him in a bet.” In this context “off-of” is meaningless (as in “Take your hands off-of me”).

(aka “Greying and growing”)

USE OF THE APOSTROPHE

There’s spreading confusion about the proper use of the apostrophe (’) in written English. I have encountered a few questionable uses of the apostrophe two of which are quite wrong, and others that are not generally accepted as correct:

to pluralize a noun, for contraction, and to indicate the genitive (possessive) case:

(1) To Pluralize:
“The 1970’s were years of unrest” is not generally accepted. The better entry here is 1970s, not 1970’s.
(2) For Genitive (Possessive) Case:
“The cat lifted it’s tail” is incorrect. Pronouns in the possessive case do not use an apostrophe. The correct possessive pronoun is “its,” not “it’s.”

Related to this example is the confusion of ‘your’ (possessive case) with “you’re” (contraction of “you are”).

“You’re hair is nice” is incorrect: the correct possessive pronoun is “Your,” not “You’re.”

(3) To Indicate Omissions:
This is the commonest use of the apostrophe: to indicate that letters or words were dropped to make things shorter:

• “Don’t talk” is correct. (Few people makes mistakes in this use of the apostrophe.)
• “You’re smart” is correct; it is a contraction of “you are smart.”
• “Your smart” is incorrect. This is the kind of misuse that is becoming rampant.

Since all of the foregoing errors reflect the influence of spoken English on its written form, one can only conclude that composition/essay (the art of setting your ideas down in writing) is no longer well taught in the USA.

Anything to Contribute?

The list above isn’t exhaustive by any means. Perhaps you can send us examples you have encountered.

August 30, 2015

You may have noticed that your bank loan statements and reports now talk about the balance on your “principle.” That is bad English: they mean balance on your principal. It is dismaying because bank staff at the level where statements are composed are supposed to be all college graduates, indeed people with advanced degrees. Similarly, the head of your child’s school is the Principal, not the “Principle.” Their error arises because we tend to let our speech control our writing, and an American tends to pronounce “principle” and “Principal” exactly the same. In other words, our failure to enunciate in our speech causes spelling errors.

Both principle and principal derive from the Latin word “princeps,” which means “head” or “main” (in the sense of a “head,” or a “main” idea). So the “principal” in banking is the “main money” you borrowed, as opposed to the interest that you did not borrow (but which accrues anyway!); on the other hand, “principle” means “core idea,” or “main idea” For instance, the principle behind democracy is individual freedom. A principle is always an IDEA, not a person or material object. Thus, there is no such thing as your “principle balance,” or the “principle” of your high school.

The same enunciation problem makes us say we “peddle” our bicycle. We do not “peddle” a bike; we pedal it. “Peddle” and “pedal” come from the same Latin root, in this case pes, which means “foot.” (The genitive case is pedis, which means “of the foot.”) Again, failure to enunciate clearly in speech makes us pronounce both verbs as “peddle.” To “peddle” a thing really means to try quite persistently to sell it to people! That usage probably started because door-to-door sales people went about their business on foot.

To enunciate is to lay proper emphasis in speech to those parts of a word that distinguish it from other similar words. It requires efficient (sometimes forceful) use of the muscles of the mouth. The opposite of enunciation is mumbling or slurring. Inadequate enunciation is what makes many native speakers of English mis-pronounce certain words in such a manner as to induce improper spelling. For instance, there is no country called “Senegaul” or “Nepaul” (it is “Nepal” and “Senegal,” with the mouth opened wide at the “–al” ending. Similarly, just as your friend is your pal (and not your “paul”), the name of the most famous Spanish tennis player today is “Rafael Nadal” (not “Nadaul”); and the easternmost region of India (the place with the fierce, man-eating tigers) is called “Ben-gal” and not “Ben-gaul.” Similarly, slack enunciation makes us say “Ah” (for “I”), “Mah” (for “My”), “Or” (for “Our”), and “war” (for “were”).

A related error concerns the use of “then” when one means “than.” A surprising number of people now write sentences like “A is better then B,” when they mean “A is better than B.” Again, if you do not enunciate well you will come to mix up “then” and “than.”

Fortunately, these slack versions are still mostly limited to spoken English; they have not yet carried over into written English. But one must expect them to creep into written communication as our educational levels get more and more degraded. I have just finished reading a self-published novel written by a physician (with a dozen or more years of education in English!), which was written in such a terrible style of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, that I began to think that self-published books should not be sold by mainline bookstores. (Unfortunately, I bought that book from Amazon.com.) Books published by mainstream publishers first go through literary agents who ensure the manuscript is up to snuff, that it was adequately proof-read, and that it receives proper review and editing before it goes to the publisher. A self-published book, on the other hand, may not have been scrutinized by anyone beyond the writer himself/herself. That’s how freewheeling errors spread.

Nevertheless, I must declare that I thoroughly enjoyed reading that book, with its poor vocabulary and mangled grammar and syntax in virtually every sentence. The reason I found it entertaining and informative is that the story line was good: about the ethnic background of the author, who lived his professional adult life in the USA, though he was born elsewhere. I must say the book would have been immensely enhanced if care had been taken with the manuscript through the ministrations of reviewers and editors.

US speakers of English have a tendency not to sound the letter “t” in some situations, such as when it is preceded or followed by an “r.” We tend to say “burrer” for “butter,” and “warrer” for “water.” The first time I heard an evangelist on TV say his God was “immorral,” I was flabbergasted until I realized he meant “immortal.” The British have no such tendency: they sound the letter ‘t’ as a hard consonant.

And now, back to business….

Today’s topic is  about punctuating sentence:

The strongest punctuation mark is the period or “full stop” (which is perhaps on par with the exclamation mark and the question mark). The next is the semi-colon; and finally comes the comma. By ‘strong’ here we mean influence on the cadence of your reading, especially your pauses and intonation in oration. When do you use which one?

I’ve read classic books in which an author wrote very long paragraphs (sometimes running to a dozen lines or longer), broken into segments with just commas. Many equally masterful writers would throw several semi-colons into such passages, so as to group the segments into batches that seem to flow better. I have also read good writers who cut such passages into very short sentences with periods and periods and periods. It is to some extent a matter of your preferred style. What one should avoid is pouring on a glut of words without adequate punctuation except perhaps the occasional use of conjunctions (‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘however,’ etc.). A reader tires of such writing, or begins to stumble, easily.

The Comma for Clarification
One magazine ad for a diabetes medicine was worded as follows: Diabetes destroys nerves which may cause pain.” A casual reading of that sentence could lead to a conclusion that is the direct opposite of what the ad intended. To understand the sentence we must determine the antecedent of “which.” (The antecedent of a word in a sentence is a preceding word or phrase to which it refers. If I say “I read a book and I enjoyed it,” the antecedent of “it” is “book.”)

So, in that ad, what is the antecedent of “which”? In other words, what is causing the pain? If nerves cause pain, then diabetes is doing a good deed by destroying them to stop pain! But we know that is not true: destruction of nerves is what causes pain. So, diabetes is doing a bad deed by destroying nerves and thus causing pain. What the advertisers meant to say is best rendered with a comma after “nerves.” (“Diabetes destroys nerves, which may cause pain” is the correct sentence.) Thus, a comma after “nerves” inverts the meaning of the sentence.

The stakes in the use of the comma can be much higher than mere nerve pain. Consider the serial comma. It is a comma in a special role: it comes before the final member in a list of denoted items. For instance, in the sentence, (1) “Divide a chocolate bar equally between Mary, Paul, and John” that last comma is the serial comma. Its use is seriously declining in the USA, and most writers now omit it altogether.

Suppose a zillionaire bequeaths his estate “to be divided equally between my three sons Tom, Dick and Harry.” It used to be argued that such a man was instigating a probate battle in his family because, if Tom retained a clever lawyer, he could obtain half of the state, leaving the other half to Dick and Harry. (That is equal division between two the parties delineated by the comma.) These days, however, each son might get a third of the estate, with or without a serial comma after Dick. But, yes, a fortune could depend on that second comma! Lawyers excel in tweaking out (and exploiting) minutiae like that. If you have a clever daughter and give her a chocolate bar to share equally with her brother and sister, be sure to use a serial comma!

The Hyphen
Take the hyphen, too, which is all but extinct now. It is hard to make any sense of the following sentence: “We buy demand and supply statistics to predict sales.” Now insert two hyphens (one on either side of the word “and”) and the meaning comes into focus.

The Parentheses
In an earlier essay on this site (The Period and he Parenthesis, May 2015) we saw that a pair of parentheses functions in such a manner that, if you threw away the pair and everything inside it, the sentence that remains would retain its integrity without needing any adjustment. That clarification resolved the question of whether a period should be placed before or after the closing parenthesis: A sentence that begins after the opening parentheses should end inside, with the period placed before the closing parenthesis; conversely, one that begins before the opening parenthesis should end outside, i.e. after the closing parenthesis.

Marks for “Heads-Up”
It is a pity that English does not employ an inverted question mark to start off a sentence that is in the interrogative mood as Spanish does (or an inverted exclamation mark for the imperative mood) to give the reader a ‘heads-up’ that what follows calls for an adjustment of intonation. I find I sometimes must get to the end of a long sentence before I realize I have read it with the wrong inflexion.

The colon ( : )
This punctuation mark serves so many different purposes in written English that it is hard to explain all of them exhaustively. As a good approximation, Wikipedia says the colon “is used to explain or start an enumeration” (of a category); it also has other uses, but let us concentrate on its main use (as stated by Wikipedia).

The colon is included here because of my experience with “experts” (editors & reviewers) who have stated rather incorrect or incomplete views on what must follow a colon. In its role of enumerating/elaborating examples, a colon may be followed by: a word, a phrase, a clause, a sentence, or a full paragraph. (Note the use of the colon in the preceding sentence.)

If what follows your colon is a list, it is less confusing if the items on that list are consistently in the same format — all of them being single words or phrases, or clauses, or sentences — (rather than mixtures of the different categories).

Bullets
The practice of delineating a list with “bullets” is relatively new (corresponding roughly with the emergence and supremacy of the PC as a tool for composition of writings); but it can be more tidy and helpful. As with a colon, it is useful to ensure that the items of individual bullets are in the same format. For instance, if the first bullet is a single word, subsequent bullets may be single words or short phases, but not complete sentences.

Beyond that, how to end the item on each bullet (with a comma, semi colon, or period) follows the normal rules of punctuation. If it is a sentence, it has to end with a period; if a word, with a comma; and if a phrase or a clause, with a semi colon — especially if that phrase/clause is long or complex enough to require other punctuation marks within it.

In the first article at this blog site we made the point that “The American gusto for improvisation fosters innovation….” So far we have discussed a few “undesirable” innovations which we think may be attributed to US influence. However, there are also American changes (by which we can only mean changes during this age of American supremacy) that, one thinks, have rather facilitated ease of expression in English. A useful language is a living creation and so it must evolve with time. In contrast, the Latin sentence structure, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that I studied in high school were unchanged from Cicero and Virgil thousands of years before my time; being fossilized in that manner may be one reason Latin is dead!

As we celebrate our independence this July it is fitting at this point to “celebrate” some of those beneficial changes in English that may be due to US influence. I expect some readers can point out more such changes (and if we disagree with them we can at least debate the point!). So, please weigh in with your comments. Just remember that our focus is on written (not colloquial) English.

We saw an example of this kind of positive change under a blog in this series entitled A FEMALE MAN. The example in question is the use of a plural pronoun (‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their’) to refer to a singular subject/object, as a neater alternative to employing the clumsier phrase: “he or she” (or, as the case may be, “him or her”). Thus, we now say “If anyone disagrees let them speak their mind,” instead of the more correct but rather repetitive construction: “If anyone disagrees, let him or her speak his or her mind.”

PLACING A PREPOSITION
In my high school days you were not permitted to end a sentence with a preposition. In those days, you could not say “This is the house I was born in”; you had to say “This is the house in which I was born.” It took the singular authority of Sir Winston Churchill to make the tidier version (“…house I was born in…”) acceptable; now we all use it. Another useful simplification made acceptable by Churchill is “This is me…” instead of “This is I….” Those two examples are mentioned by the renowned linguist Charles Berlitz in his book, NATIVE TONGUES. (BTW, Berlitz holds the interesting view that as a language matures and spreads its reach, it also acquires simpler structure and becomes less likely to differ in form as you go from one place to another. The emergence of local variations is of course what produces dialects, which may in turn become distinct languages eventually.)

SPLIT INFINITIVES
A similar “No-no” that existed in my day but not anymore is splitting the infinitive. The last sentence in the mission statement of Star Trek is: “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” However, in the generation before Star Trek, that sentence would have been considered ungrammatical. Why? Because “boldly” appears between the two parts of one verb that is in the infinitive tense: “to go.” In other words, that Star Trek mission statement split the infinitive. The accepted formulation then would have been: (1) “Boldly to go…” or (2) “To go boldly.” Note that in this particular example all three versions of that sentence are equally concise. In some cases, however, the proper sentence structure becomes less tidy if we cannot split the infinitive. Let’s see one such case.

Consider the sentence: “It is important to review all available evidence before you judge.” The infinitive here is “to review,” and because it is a transitive verb it has an object (which happens to be not just one word but an entire phrase: ‘all available evidence”). If we must emphasize the need for carefulness in considering the evidence, we can now say: “It is wise to carefully consider all available evidence….” But in my youth that infinitive (to consider) could not be split, and the proper construction was (1) “It is wise carefully to consider all available evidence…” (with the adverb before the infinitive), or (2) “It is wise to consider all available evidence carefully …”(with the adverb coming long after the infinitive).

The lesson here is: Splitting the infinitive can make a sentence more concise and compact.

THE ADVERB
I keep referring to my high school days because my formal education in non-scientific topics ended there. All the English language communication skills I ever learned was learned there. I did take a few college courses in English language and literature, but they really only repeated and reinforced my high school curriculum, which was sound.

My high school literature teacher was not a strong believer in adverbs. He considered them perhaps the most redundant of the eight parts of speech. And, though I like adverbs, my adult experience tends to vindicate that teacher of mine. In connection with my scientific writing I found that technical editors did not like adverbs: They thought adverbs ‘colored’ and skewed things and thus rendered scientific narratives somewhat less objective; and the general editors who have handled my non-scientific books do not like “qualifiers” in general (a category that includes adverbs) and always want to minimize the use of them.

Still, we know that adverbs serve a useful function: an adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. A good many adverbs (one might say the majority of them) are derived by affixing “ly” after an adjective (kindly from kind, etc.). Therefore, we tend to consider a word an adverb if it ends in “ly.” But one cannot rely on such inference because there are some words adjectives that end in “ly”. I used to think that likely, timely, leisurely, cowardly, (dis)orderly, etc. were always adjectives. So, while nearly all Americans say “It is likely true…” I used to say “It is probably true….” I now accept sentences like: “You will timely submit reports to us”; “Walk orderly behind the teacher”; “Walk leisurely to school” (with timely,” “orderly,” and “leisurely,” etc. used as adverbs. Thus I can now say “The cowardly lion spoke cowardly to the Wizard of Oz,” (using “cowardly as both adjective and adverb in the same sentence). I am learning, and I’m also beginning to see why the use of adverbs is waning.

Of course one mustn’t think that those stiff old rules were always obeyed rigidly by every writer. Some classic authors of past centuries sometimes ignored some of the straight-jacket rules of grammar and syntax: They had acquired enough authority to assert their independence of mind. What has changed in recent times is that the rules are now being disobeyed by many serious and knowledgeable writers, rather than by just a few masters.

(For Older posts, please see THE ARCHIVES page)

Current Post:  The Period & the Parenthesis

To Judge from confused constructions to be found in most writings today, the question of where to place the period (aka “full stop”) seems to baffle many writers. You see the period inside the parentheses sometimes and outside it in other cases. Which of the two positions is correct? Well, it depends. Take for example these two sentences:

(1) “The period should be outside the parentheses (unless the passage within the parentheses is itself a full sentence).”
(2) “The period may be inside or outside the parentheses. (It depends on whether the passage in parentheses is itself a full sentence or not.)”

Which is correct?
ANSWER: Both are correct. It is not a matter of a mechanical formula to memorize. The correct punctuation follows a simple rule: If a sentence begins inside a pair of parentheses, then it has to end inside that pair as well, like the italicized sentence in (2) above; but if it begins outside the parentheses as in (1) above it should also end outside the parentheses, that is to say, just before the closing parenthesis. Every sentence, of course, begins with a capital letter and must end with a period. And, by the way, in most cases a statement is not a proper sentence unless it contains or implies a verb. (Common exceptions are greetings like ‘Hello,’ a brief assertion like ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ etc.)

A useful way to view the role of parentheses is that, if you lift the pair along with everything between them and throw the lot away, the passage retains its integrity with no need of further tweaking.

PERSONAL NOTE: I fought this battle (and a few others) with editors in the course of publishing my professional (scientific) writings and a couple of books. Editors are especially patronizing when your name suggests to them you are a non-native speaker of English! But even the most buttery American accent or the most sharply clipped British accent does not endow someone automatically with good knowledge of the rules of sentence structure, grammar, syntax, etc.

Consider this fact: Like Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first Prime Minister) was accounted one of the best handlers of English. His anguished broadcast on the sad occasion of ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi’s assassination is stupendous, quite on par with Mark Anthony’s eulogy at Julius Caesar’s funeral —as fictionalized by Shakespeare. If you are curious, check it out on You Tube: “Jawaharlal on Gandhi’s Death.” Note that Nehru was not a “native” speaker of English! In fact, most non-native speakers learn English not casually from their parents and playmates but formally from non-native teachers, who make up for “wrong” accent with good emphasis on the technicalities of written English. So, don’t let anyone corrupt your English. They may mean well, but not all of them are knowledgeable!

Another kind of a growing but insidious “authority” is the Text Editor that is now proliferating in all kinds of composition software used in computer programs. I found that the one used in MS Word is often wrong, and some of its suggestions are atrocious! (One of the more meaningless suggestions it makes is “Fragmentary: consider revising.” That often tells me the machine has no clue what I ‘m trying to say!) Just bear in mind that a text editor is no better-informed than the person who wrote it. If in doubt, consult a good dictionary.

Do Not Accept “Authority” Blindly. Like the spunky 6th-grade Spelling Bee contestant who questioned US Vice-President Dan Quayle’s spelling of “potatoe,” you should question everything, because nobody is perfect! Don’t be intimidated!

In my high school days each of us had a favorite motto. (And how we loved to craft mottoes in those days of brash youth!) My own favorite was “Quantum Potes, Tantum Aude!” It is the first line in the 2nd stanza of the Corpus Christi song composed by St. Thomas of Aquinas. (Corpus Christi  means “Body of Christ.”) That line means, roughly, “Whatever you can (do), dare (to do it)!” It is a ringing exhortation to each of us to aim high and not be intimidated or daunted. My personal interpretation of it was “Whenever you can, dare!”

The stanza: “Quantum potes tantum aude!/Quia maior omni laude/Nec laudare sufficis.”

The song:  Lauda Sion, Salvatorem (“Zion, Praise your Savior!”)

My opinion: Catholic songs were most majestic in their Latin originals!!!

The dynamics of English language can be very baffling to the non-native speaker trained in the tradition of formal/written (as opposed to colloquial/vernacular) usage. US English is especially quirky. In the book Mother Tongue & How it Got That Way an oriental businessman is quoted as telling his countrymen not to be daunted because they might make mistakes when expressing themselves to Americans in English: “They cannot speak their own language, anyway!” he said. And right he is too. There is a lot of babbling in the USA! While Americanism may be charming and catchy in colloquial usage, some of it is downright incongruous in written communication. The distinction between colloquial and written English is often ignored in the USA these days. The rot is spreading furiously now that everyone feels emancipated from restraint and entitled to write as they please without oversight.

English language is, so to speak, the final frontier of an all-too-familiar steam-rolling American dominance in world affairs. British imperialism planted English language in all corners of the globe and US military, economic, and social dominance consolidates that trend, making English a second language for nearly everyone on the globe. But whereas the British required all users of the language to conform to a rigid structure in grammar and syntax, American English is free-wheeling, in keeping with the irrepressible individuality of Americans. As the bold initiators of change in our world, with boundless drive and a pronounced disregard for they way things are done anywhere else, Americans are changing English rapidly ― for better and for worse. US English is, ultimately, an expression of the hegemony of a peerless and pushy people.

At first the US immigrant from a former British colony is intimidated by the honey-smooth flow of the American accent. He starts to copy the style, warts and all, just to be “with it” and to get along. He begins to pronounce the second month of the year as “Ferb-you-wary” (which seems to be OK because even British commentators now use that pronunciation). Then he gets a note from his college-educated boss saying “We may loose money do to your error,” and he begins to wonder: Does anyone care anymore? Do Americans use the dictionary? Do they really learn English in high school? Does the use of correct English matter at all?

Declension of pronouns is muddled ― so that presidential candidate Bill Clinton once kicked off his cross-country bus tour with the folksy message to rally attendees: “If you have any questions send them to Al Gore and I.…” (Did anyone understand that Mr. Clinton was saying: “Send your questions to Al Gore and/or send them to I”?) Verb conjugation is going too. “If I was you” is much more common than the correct formulation, “If I were you.” We may overlook oddities of colloquial expression; otherwise we alienate too many people, for instance by observing that the “dee-poh” in Home Depot (or the “deb-you” for debut) is really neither French nor English but a higgledy-piggledy amalgam of both languages. But what of errors in written communication? Should we ignore them too? Must I guess the meaning behind your sentence? If so, at what point shall we become mutually unintelligible?

Ask Johnny how he’s doing and he will reply: “I’m doing good.” Not long ago that would have meant that he is performing charitable deeds! Perhaps because of its ending in “ly,” the word “likely” has morphed entirely from adjective to adverb. Casting a sentence in the subjunctive mood was always challenging at best with its troublesome requirement of a verb in the infinitive tense; now it is altogether a lost art. Actually, it has been said that whereas the British have only recently began to fudge the subjunctive mood, Americans never bought into it in the first place.
Among the most noticeable changes in written English (one hesitates to call modern American popular writing “literature”) is, that the hyphen is following the semi-colon and the serial comma into oblivion. Those changes in punctuation style are accelerated by the proliferation of text editing features embedded in nearly all software and textual apps we use. If you are reading this text on an electronic screen you will notice several words or phrases underlined in blue or red. Many instances of such machine editing turn out to be wrong, and if you click on the underlined passage you are apt to receive a wild and horrible suggestion for an alternative! All it shows is that those hidden text editors are no better-informed than the persons who wrote them in the first place. I almost always ignore all the editing prompts in MS Word. (Most useless and ubiquitous is the prompt that says, “Fragmentary; consider revising.”)

FUNDRAISING, SHOPLIFTING and THANKSGIVING are similar constructions: in each case a noun is formed by plugging a gerund onto another noun, in the lego style that is quite common in the German language. One can imagine that not long ago the preferred style was to connect the noun and gerund with a hyphen; however, the hyphen is becoming extinct. If you change the gerund to its verb of origin the similarity between the three words vanishes. “They shoplifted” is OK but not “They fundraised” or “They thanksgave.” If you wonder why that is so then you are getting to the heart of the matter, the very spirit of this blog. What is right or wrong in English language is often not a matter of logic, of rhyme or reason. Good English is to a large extent idiomatic, and idioms are a matter of conformity, acquired by learning (aka imitation) rather than by I-too-can-improvise derring-do.

But while tinkering with English grammar and syntax is not for the dilettante, expanding the vocabulary with home-minted words is a different matter. Now and then we find new words injected into the language by some intrepid souls. Recently a blogger dismissed the contrary views of an opponent as “mere hopium” (thus fusing the two words ‘hope’ and ‘opium’ to create a neat, derogatory tag that means essentially addiction to unreasonable hope). Note that blog, and tweet and their derivatives blogger and tweeter, etc. are themselves brave recent coinages spawned by new technology (just like ‘broadcast’ and ‘broadcaster,’ which passed into Queen’s English with the onset of radio communication right after World War II).

Everybody knows the difference between nouns and adjectives, right? Wrong….

Electric Bill or Electricity Bill?
An electric bill is one that shocks you, and it may not be for electricity consumed. A $10,000.00 water bill would be considered “electric,” even if you are Bill Gates. The bill that comes from your power utility is your electricity bill; it is not electric if it is for $1.50.

Athletic or Athletics?
The man that controls and regulates sports in your high school: Is he your “Athletic Director” or your “Athletics Director”? It depends. If he is muscle-bound and presses 200 lbs., he may qualify to be called “athletic” (which means the same as “sportive”); but if he is a 250-lb couch potato that oversees sporting activities from the cushy comfort of an air-conditioned office, the best he can be is an Athletics Director. A school may have a physics or mathematics or athletics teacher (in each case a noun). Those nouns are always used in the plural, never in the singular, so that a “physic” or “mathematic” or “athletic” teacher makes no sense.

Are you “six foot tall” or “six feet tall”?
The foot in “six-foot man” is really an adjective. It is called an adjectival noun because, while it is a noun, it functions as an adjective in that construction (qualifying man). It is like saying someone is a house painter: “house” is an adjectival noun here, qualifying painter.

So, “I am six foot tall” makes no sense really: it uses an adjective (foot) where it should use a plural noun (feet). A six-foot man is six feet (plural noun) tall; a woman who measures five feet and six inches in height is a “five-foot-and-six-inch woman”; and a child that weighs fifty pounds is a fifty-pound child. Similarly, a twenty-dollar lunch costs twenty dollars (plural noun). We seem to get confused only when it comes to height! Nobody can be “6 (or 5, etc.) foot tall,” Such a unit of height does not exist. If your height is six feet, then: You are a six footer, a six foot person, or a person six feet tall. Just keep in mind “noun versus adjective” and you shouldn’t get it wrong.

Transitive & Intransitive Verbs
Do you lie down or lay down? It depends on what is lying or being laid. Americans seem to tip-toe around the verb “to lay” because of its sexually loaded nuance. But as children we learned the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John prayer: “…Before I lay me down to sleep / I give my soul to Christ to keep.”

LIE is an intransitive verb. In present tense , “I lie down” (in past tense, “I lay down”). But LAY is a transitive verb because it takes an object. Thus, a child who is ready to sleep will first lay her book down and then lie down (or lay herself down). So, “I will lay down on the couch” is confusing, unless you are a hen laying eggs.

Similarly, one version of The Red River Valley song lyrics says: “For I know you are taking the sunshine / That has lied in our path for a while.” That is bad English; the last line should read “… that has lain in our path for a while.” Again, the tenses of the 2 verbs are: LIE: Now it lies in our path; yesterday it lay; for years it has lain; tomorrow it will lie; etc. LAY: Now I lay it down; yesterday I laid it down, for years I’ve laid it down; tomorrow… lay. But don’t confuse them with the verb to tell a lie: I lie, I lied, I’ve lied, I will lie; etc.

Prepositions
Some prepositions are used exclusively or preferentially with some verbs in certain contexts. Thus you “wait for” somebody (if you are biding time for that somebody to be ready to do something); but you “wait on” somebody if you are a waiter in a restaurant, an attendant in a shop, or a teller in a bank, for instance.

We have seen the case of “off” and “on” in a previous post at this blog site. Each is a complete preposition: “I put the book on the table,” or “I won $5 off him in a bet.” In this context “off-of” is meaningless (as in “Take your hands off-of me”).

Another surprising error is the saying “It’s not that big of a deal.” What is of doing there? The correct expression is, “It’s not that big a deal.” Shuffling “a deal that big” to read as “that big a deal” is good enough; you don’t have to insert “of” anywhere in it.

I scratch my head whenever I see “including but not limited to….” The word “including” is completely adequate here; it needs no bells and whistles. The clothes in my closet include shirts, but they are not limited to shirts: I have pants and jackets too. It is IMPOSSIBLE to find a case where “including” implies that what is included constitutes the whole category under reference. To see this clearly, draw a rectangle and inside it draw a circle. Your rectangle includes the circle but is not limited to the circle: there are things (areas) that lie within the rectangle but outside the circle.

So whenever I see that “…but not limited to” I delete it. My lawyer does not seem to notice the deletion; or he does not mind because he knows it is totally tautological: it adds no meaning or clarification.

What of “in any way, shape, or form”? What distinction do “shape” and “form” add to the phrase? How about “in and of and by itself”? “In itself “is adequate and everything else there is tautology. While we may blame such chain-link deployment of prepositions on lawyers eager to impress us, there is a new kind of preposition that is more baffling, and the origin of which is more nebulous. English usage in America seems to have evolved a new preposition, “offof”: as in “Get your hand offof me!” Or is it off-of? Ofof? Of-of? I guess I’ve never seen it in writing, so anything goes here. What is wrong with saying just “off” (“Get your hands off me”)?

Such creations start when someone makes a mistake and others latch onto it as a new style. An apparently even more recent creation is “The problem is is…” What is the second “is” doing here? Someone probably heard a speaker say “What this is, is a mistake,” (which is correct English) and the listener (who cannot “hear” the comma after the first “is”) then thought that “is is” is cute. A similar nonsense is “the reason being is….” One can say, “I came late. The reason is that I missed my bus.” Or you can join the two sentences into one by changing is to being: “I came late, the reason being that I missed my bus.” But you can’t keep both is and being together right there (and say: I came late, the reason being is….”

One suspects that such mangled sentence formulation comes from the American habit of taking our cues from “celebrities.” Celebrities are persons who have achieved fame through their hard work (one hopes) in specific, narrow spheres of human endeavor. Such achievement does not make them all-round gurus. In fact, in most cases a celebrity status was attained through the habit of practicing just one role in life and, unfortunately, devoting less time or none at all to education. The child who watches lots of movies but pays scant attention to her English teacher at school is likely to become an adult who speaks gobbledygook!

American children (and increasingly children the world over) learn much more from television than from school, for two reasons. One is that much more time is devoted to TV watching than to school work or home work. Another is that the presenters on TV (including actors especially) are spellbinding because they are cute, while the harried teachers in class are drab. So perhaps our society can ameliorate he problem by requiring that script writers for TV programs be quite literate and competent!