Avoiding anguished English (The importance of grammar when writing and speaking English)

Still a different side-stepping turned up in a small-town newspaper. An article about a forthcoming performance by two violin-playing sisters refers to them as "natives to Poland." This description has a botanical or zoological sound, though not as much so as it would if "natives" were singular: "the Bengal tiger is native to Nepal"; "the sisters are native to Poland." The sisters, whose accomplishments show that they are extremely talented and whose photograph shows that they are extremely attractive, are, in fact, natives of Poland.

An NPR news programme produced its own distinctive example of of-avoidance. Discussing the career of the Czech-born symphony conductor Rafael Kubelik, the reporter noted that "in 1948 Kubelik fell afoul with the newly installed [Communist] regime in Czechoslovakia." This actually looks as though the reporter had merely reached into a barrel and pulled out the first preposition available, which, regrettably, did not prove to be of.

One of the nicest distinctions in English involves the prepositions to and with; it's efficient and economical, and it's also a distinction that seems in danger of disappearing. Look at this sentence from an AP report on electric-power rationing in Brazil: "Households consuming an average of more than 200 kilowatts per hour each month ... would have to reduce their consumption by 20 percent compared to last year." Then consider the following sentence from the New York Times obituary of the sculptor Benjamin Karp: "The art critic Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude Stein, praised Mr. Karp's work and compared his drawings with Picasso's." What these sentences need to do is swap prepositions, with to replacing with before "Picasso's," and with moving over to precede "last year."

Why are these changes needed? Reflect on one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare's sonnets: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Compare to here means liken: Shall I tell you how much you resemble a summer's day? In the sentence from the Times, Leo Stein is likening Karp's drawings to Picasso's. On the other hand, compare with means to make a relative assessment, and thus often to find differences, which is the point in the sentence about electricity in Brazil: Power consumption will be 20 percent less compared with [what it was] last year.

Finally, I mention a delightful, if unintended, contribution from an anonymous reporter who described an acrimonious discussion as breaking up when one of the participants departed “with a huff." With a puff, too, no doubt! And maybe he even blew somebody's house down.

REMINDERS

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to another word or element of a sentence.

Avoid using the preposition for when you mean of: chance of rain, secretary of a chess club. You can be a managing trustee of an educational charity, as well as a trustee for finance of the same charity.

Compare to means to liken to. Compare with means to make a relative assessment.

12. Between Who and What? Prepositions with More Than One Object

For some years now, linguistics professors have been telling us that English will ultimately drop one of the two cases in which certain pronouns come. Perhaps so. Meanwhile, however, these scholars continue to pay careful attention to the difference between the nominative and the objective - they wouldn't be caught dead saying "to she and I” - and so should anybody who claims the title of communicator or reporter or, indeed, anybody else.

Nevertheless, the Associated Press copy chiefs failed at this task in this basketball report from State College, Pennsylvania: "Penn State's Greg Bartram knew there was contact between he and Indiana's Chris Reynolds with the game on the line near the end of regulation."

Here we have, in grammatical terms, a compound object of the preposition between, and compound objects seem to possess some quality that makes normally reasonable people forget linguistic common sense. A person who would never say anything so unnatural as "she gave the present to I” will often - and quite readily -say "she gave the present to he and I," as if by being a double object an object ceased to be an object at all.

A newspaper column informs us that former President Jimmy Carter felt that he had faced much unfair criticism, "with he and his family often depicted as `hillbillies' ”.

You know now - don't you? - that after with or for you must have an objective pronoun. The columnist writing about Carter should have said "with him and his family…" After a preposition, a personal pronoun - or a hundred personal pronouns - must appear in the objective case.

13. Well, Better, Best, Most

In an article about the son of Bill Curry, the former Alabama and Kentucky football coach, a reporter calls the young man "the youngest of two Curry children." Is it possible that a newspaper writer had never learned that one person is young, one person is younger than another person, and one person is the youngest of three or more? These adjectival levels are called positive, comparative, and superlative. In speaking of Curry's two children, we of course need to use the comparative. If the coach and his wife should have another child, then this welcome newcomer will be the youngest of the three Curry children.

A different kind of problem can arise with the comparative more and the superlative most, as in this sentence from the New York Times: "Her research found that married couples were generally more financially well off than couples who simply lived together." The word for more well, of course, is better.

The following sentence from the New Yorker needs a touch of the analogous remedy: "Gershon Salomon ... has become one of the most well-known advocates of removing the mosques in order to rebuild the Temple right away"; Salomon, that is, is one of the best-known.

The same problem arose in this discussion by an AP baseball writer of a Washington pitcher's 1962 feat of striking out twenty-one batters in a sixteen-inning game: "While [Tom] Cheney's total remains the highest in a major league game, it's certainly not one of baseball's most well-known marks."

REMINDER

Use the superlative form of an adjective (best, most, fastest, youngest) only when three or more items or individuals are being compared. When you're talking about two items, use the comparative (better, more, faster, younger).

14. Other or Else

A good sentence and a well-furnished room have much in common. Each has its large, prominent items - piano and couch, subject and verb - and also a number of smaller items that increase its usefulness and appeal - end tables and paintings, adjectives and subordinate conjunctions. Sometimes words that seem modest and quiet make important contributions to the clarity of a sentence.

Such a word is missing in this verdict on the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein delivered by a Cox Newspapers columnist: "Hussein has authored more human misery than any practitioner in the horrid arts today." As written, this sentence does not include Hussein among the practitioners of "horrid arts," but the writer clearly didn't intend to exclude him. What the writer meant was "any other practitioner." Until his defeat, Hussein went right on practising!

"[Representative Sidney Yates] has served longer than anyone in the House." This sentence, from an AP story, seems to tell us that Yates has not only served longer than all his colleagues but has even managed to outlast himself. The writer needed else to do the work performed above by the addition of other to the sentence about Hussein.

As is often the case, however, this area of discussion can see surprising switches take place. Discussing the family background of Orlando "Tubby" Smith, a leading college basketball coach whose career has seen him serve at Tulsa, Georgia, and Kentucky, a sportscaster, properly impressed with the fact he was about to give us, described the coach as "one of sixteen other siblings." Now there's an other we don't need! In fact, it's almost surreal.

15. Silly Tautologies

"If you have to pay for it, it isn't a gift." My tutor proffered this comment after receiving a letter in which a magazine publisher offered a free gift in exchange for a subscription.

My tutor also responded badly to a fund-raising letter from a charitable body, not because he disagreed with the purposes for which the chairman sought support but because of this sentence: "There's one area of the U.K. budget where both political parties agree." "Look at this, Andrey," he said with disgust. "It really does take two to tango or to agree - one can't do it. Therefore, both here is a foolish piece of redundancy. Both political parties can say, or they can maintain, but if you have to make sure that people know you're talking about two and you want to say agree, say the two parties agree or even go so far as to name them."

You say both in a situation in which each of the involved parties can act independently; that is, each one can believe or each one can maintain, but by definition it takes two (or more, of course) to agree. That's why saying both agree is redundant - unless both are agreeing with a third party.

The situation is similar in this sentence about a couple that established a bed-and-breakfast establishment in Drymen, Scotland: "It was the combination of both house and town that persuaded the Lewises". Neither a house nor a town can be a combination, which requires the two of them. Hence both is superfluous. The same point about combination occurs in this discussion of interior decoration: "I like combinations of both fresh and faux" flowers (Knight Ridder).

A different example of the use of the needless both comes from a writer commenting on a long lockout in the National Basketball Association: "Both sides are widely separated on how many players would contribute to the escrow fund." This sentence is actually misleading, at least temporarily, because one first looks to see what third party both sides are separated from. But nobody's there, of course - the two sides are separated from each other. Parallel to the case with agree, if one side is separated, the other is automatically separated, too. Both is not only needless here, it is inappropriate.

A slightly more challenging instance turns up in a column by William F Buckley. Speaking of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Buckley noted the ever striking fact that "both men died on the same day, the Fourth of July, 1826." The redundancy here is perhaps a shade subtler than we see in both ... agree, but a simple question will make it clear: Would anyone say that both died on different days? Same is implied in both; hence deletion of "the same day," which dilutes the sentence, would give it a keener edge.

One of the in-flight magazines produced what's probably the all-time topper in the both department when, in talking about two young brothers, it observed that "both were twins" (and, of course, it isn't remarkably unusual to hear someone speak of two twins).

In the same vein, my tutor snorts at "connected by a common bond" and "sharing the same point of view."

Many of these sillies, as my tutor likes to call them, seem to be the result of the speaker's or the writer's failure to think about what he's saying. That was probably the case in the creation of this paragraph from TV Guide, which summarises an episode of the comedy Frasier thus: "Frasier and Niles try reviving the career of a has-been theater thespian." Aside from the ironic or comic connotation of thespian, this tag is pretty much the equivalent of gridiron football player or body-of-water lifeguard, because thespian means actor and nothing else. (Possibly the writer hoped to convey the idea of stage actor as against performer in movies or TV, if so, it would have been better simply to say that.)

Limited thought or attention probably lay behind this bit of tautology from a Discovery Channel programme on various anticipated consequences of the Allied capture, during World War II, of a German submarine: "The captured maps would enable the Allies to exactly pinpoint the locations of German U-boats." Do we find inexact pinpointing anywhere? No, by definition, we do not.

Streaks of one kind or another form favourite subjects of baseball broadcasters and their comrades in other sports, but in talking about these kinds of individual or team performances, the commentators often forget just what the defining word means. Note, for instance, this observation from the telecast of a Cincinnati Reds game: "Casey's hit stretched his hitting streak to ten straight games." If it's a streak, by definition it's straight. The problem this usage highlights is not that the sentence is hard to understand but that inserting straight weakens the idea of streak, and hence, over a long span of time, one could begin to wonder just what streak really means.

A similar lack of faith in the meaning of a word is evident in this sentence from the New Yorker profile of Jeffrey Archer: "At the time he was accused [of involvement with a prostitute], Archer was the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and a close confidant of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher." Since a confidant is a person to whom you entrust your secrets, the two of you are by definition intimates. Adding close, like buttressing streak with straight, actually weakens the statement.

Another word that writers often seem to mistrust is prerequisite, which has been established in the language for several hundred years and means something necessary to accomplish a purpose, something you have to have. Like many other writers, however, the author of a book on the famous airship Graf Zeppelin displayed limited faith in prerequisite by giving it a supposedly strengthening modifier: "Experience, thoroughness, concentration, caution - these are the essential prerequisites of the airship commander." And what does essential mean? Literally, it describes a quality that is of the essence of a subject, and hence is necessary, something you have to have - just like prerequisite. (The words are not full synonyms, but the large area of shared meaning is what concerns us here.) One reason for the popularity of this bit of tautology may be the pre before requisite, which may mislead some writers into thinking of a prerequisite merely as something that comes first, a preliminary, which may or may not be essential or required.

But, at any rate, the Associated Press sets us straight on the international oil situation. Reporting from Vienna, a correspondent tells us that "OPEC typically acts only with the unanimous agreement of all its members." Please, sir, we may wonder, just what does unanimous mean if it doesn't mean all?

A General Electric advertisement issue of a once influential magazine, the Literary Digest offers a common if not particularly silly example of tautology: "More than forty years ago, [GE scientists] initiated the first use of electricity in the textile industry." Once you have said initiated, of course, you have said first. A widely popular variant on this bit of usage is found in statements like this: "When we first began dating, we really didn't know each other at all." We commit these little redundancies when we forget that began, initiated, and such words have specific meanings related to time and are not simply words of general action: when we first went out on dates, or, simply, when we began dating; the scientists initiated the use ...

Describing an Eric Rohmer movie, the New Yorker commented that "it's all low-key conversation, and there's a thin veneer of chic over everybody." Well, if you find a thick veneer anywhere, cut off a piece of it, wrap it in heavy paper, and send it to him.

REMINDER

Know the meaning of your words, so that you won't weaken your writing and speaking with unneeded or repetitive phrases.

16. None Is, None Are?

Is, indeed, none singular or is it plural?

The strip, called "Rose Is a Rose," presents us with a woman wearing a whistle, which, she explains to her husband, she intends to blow whenever she witnesses a grammatical error.

"Thank goodness," the husband replies, "none have occurred so far today."

The next sound is FTWEE, a blast so loud that it blows the husband off his feet and through a fortunately open window.

Apparently the creator of the strip shares the widespread view that none must be a singular verb. It looks like "no one," of course, and it comes from Old English and Old Norse words meaning "not one." But in contemporary English does it mean only not one or does it mean, as well, no persons or things? The Oxford English Dictionary answers the question quite clearly: none is most widely used as a plural, and has been so used for many years. The Evanses' Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage takes note of an analysis showing that from the time of Sir Thomas Malory to that of John Milton (1450-1650) none was treated as a plural once for every three times it was treated as a singular, but then the trend changed; from Milton's era to 1917, none was treated as a plural seven times for every four times it was treated as a singular. So it has formidable credentials as a plural, and the trend has increased through the years since that analysis was made.

Some situations, however, obviously call for a singular verb: None of us is entitled to be paid before anybody else.

Others just as plainly need the plural: None of the president's advisers agree on the significance of the ultimatum.

And one case unmistakably belongs in the singular camp - when none means no part: None of the mess has been cleaned up.

17. And/Or

When you say and, you're adding items together, as in "chocolate and pistachio are my favorite flavours." When you say or, however, the addition disappears; or is what grammarians call a disjunctive - a divider - and when you use it, you're taking the named items one at a time, pointing to one or the other but not to both.

A reporter failed to show awareness of this principle when he wrote: "Several national reports show that people have been injured when bleach or ammonia have been used as ammunition [for water guns]." If a singular noun follows or, then the verb must be singular. But if that following noun is plural, the verb is, of course, plural, too: "Either the Egyptians or the Pakistanis are going to supply aid."

When you say either, you're also picking one out of two. In looking into high-end Manhattan dining in what he called "depressed times," a New York Times reporter asked a lawyer and a consultant flirting at a bar: Were either of them cutting back in any way? Was is what's needed here.

The same principle applies to neither and nor. Thus a TV reporter made an error when, referring to two suspects in a bombing, he said, "Neither are being identified as of yet."

Discussing a much debated air strike in Iraq, a White House official said, "Neither the president nor Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice were upset about how the strike was handled."

After talking with Fred Claire, then executive vice president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, about a possible trade, an Associated Press sportswriter told us that "neither Nomo nor Hollandsworth were mentioned in his latest talk with Seattle."

In each of these cases, the verb should be singular - is and was - because neither and nor, like either and or, tell us that subjects are being taken one at a time.

18. Quantities, Numbers

“Much of the added costs [of the space station] are due to 18 months of delays." What's wrong here? Much refers to an amount of something, and it means a large quantity of it. Because an amount is a mass, a singular entity, much as a noun needs a singular verb. What the writer most likely had in mind was many, which means not a large mass but a large number of individual items or entities: "Many of the added costs ... are due to 18 months of delay." Or he could equally well have said: "Much of the added cost ... is due," keeping all the references singular.

A similar problem occurs in the following sentence: "Each year, nearly 75 women apply to the programme, but less than half are accepted." If these women constituted a mass of woman, then the writer could talk about less than half of it, if he wished. But women are, beyond question, individuals; the writer must therefore speak of number instead of quantity and turn to few or fewer, in speaking of a small number of them. (For a large number, of course, one would say many women and not much women.)

Discussion of the weather introduces a special point about expressing quantities. The experts measure rain and snow in inches, but discussion can become a bit tricky because this precipitation falls to the ground in amounts, not in individual inch-sized packets. In describing the effect of a winter storm in the American Northeast, the New York Times noted that "just over two feet of snow were measured in the highlands of northern New Jersey and in the Catskill Mountains." In this context, two feet is a quantity, not an enumeration, and was is hence the verb to use here (just as we would say, for example, three months was a long time to wait for an answer to a proposal of marriage).

19. Between vs. Among

Many myths persist about the use of between and among: "One of [the computer artist's] big assignments in The Phantom Menace was working on the light-saber battle among Jedi knights Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi and the evil Darth Maul" (Lexington Herald-Leader). We often encounter an old superstition here - that you can't say between if more than two persons or parties are involved in a situation. Certainly among would be fine in the quoted sentence if each of the three were battling the other two, but if it's the two knights on one side versus the evil Darth on the other, then it's a battle between two contending forces.

Besides, between has never in its history been restricted to just two entities. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, between is "the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually." We speak of a treaty between five countries, for instance, because each country has an individual obligation to every other country. Among, however, has the basic meaning of in the midst of or surrounded by and always refers in one way or another to a group.

III. Conclusion

My tutor once found this sentence gleaming out of a student's essay “The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom.” In the margin of the paper my tutor commented: “My dear student, you must learn to distinguish between a fallen woman and one who has merely slipped.” Clearly, the student was unable to distinguish the respective meanings of the words prostrate and prostitute.

So, as we can see, there are many examples of the incorrect usage of a word, not using the appropriate word, missing the required punctuation marks and other typical common mistakes. Some of them are really silly; they are made due to the carelessness of people. Other errors, on the other hand, are very difficult to identify and we must therefore spend quite a lot of time to understand fully the rules of correct grammar usage.

For example, the confusion between plural and singular subjects. Although the rules of subject-verb agreement aren't very difficult to understand, it is remarkable how often people make mistakes. It's quite simple: if the subject has two or more nouns but describes one action, we need to use a singular verb and use a plural verb with a plural idea, even if the subject looks singular. This rule also relates to the word each. Each is always singular and we must use both when we mean both.

We can see the confusion with the word there. We must remember that there is an introductory adverb, never the subject of a sentence. The verb still agrees with the subject, even if it comes afterwards.

The word former describes only people still living. Former conveys the idea, for example, that someone was once president (or vice-president, trustee etc.) and then turned to other pursuits. After the person's death, however, the need for such a distinction disappears.

For some reason, people generally have progressively assigned to the word may much of the work that might has long and faithfully performed. This change has tended to blur a highly useful distinction and to produce confusion and doubt where we need clarity. In other words, many contemporary sentences with may in them don't make sense. So, these two words should not be confused! May refers to a probability or a possibility that still exists, whereas might refers to a probability or a possibility that existed in the past but did not materialise. May goes with can, and might goes with could. In the present tense, we should use may to express a probability and use might to express doubt about a possibility.

There are three general types of problems with using the apostrophe: (1) it is used when it is not needed; (2) it is left out when it is needed; (3) it is needed but is inserted in the wrong place. We should never split a word apart to insert an apostrophe. For most nouns, we need to add 's to make a singular possessive and add s' to make a plural possessive. To form the possessive of a plural noun that doesn't end in s, we must add 's as we would with a singular noun. Also we need to learn by heart: it's is a contraction of it is. Its (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of it. Its' is not a word at all (and if it were one, it wouldn't have any meaning), so we should never use it in our writing.

A person is a who or a whom, never a which. Both a person and a non-person can be described as that. In general, we should try to use that when the clause it introduces is restrictive; that is, when the sentence won't make much sense without this clause.

We mustn't fall into the habit of using ironically to mean simply coincidentally. There is irony when we express a meaning opposite to the normal sense of the words.

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to another word or element of a sentence. Therefore, we must avoid using the preposition for when we mean of: chance of rain, secretary of a chess club. You can be a managing trustee of an educational charity, as well as a trustee for finance of the same charity. Compare to means to liken to. Compare with means to make a relative assessment. We should know that after with or for we must have an objective pronoun.

We need to use the superlative form of an adjective (best, most, fastest, youngest) only when three or more items or individuals are being compared. When we're talking about two items, we should use the comparative (better, more, faster, younger).

When we say and, we're adding items together. When we say or, however, the addition disappears; or is what grammarians call a disjunctive - a divider - and when we use it, we're taking the named items one at a time, pointing to one or the other but not to both.

Much refers to an amount of something, and it means a large quantity of it. Because an amount is a mass, a singular entity, much as a noun needs a singular verb. Many means not a large mass but a large number of individual items or entities.

Between is the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually. Among, however, has the basic meaning of in the midst of or surrounded by and always refers in one way or another to a group. So we mustn't confuse these two words.

Grammar is vitally important in our lives. Just imagine how chaotic any language would be if we ignored the correct grammar. So it's necessary to learn the rules of grammar and to know the meanings of words, so that we won't weaken our writing and speaking with incomprehensible statements of unneeded or repetitive phrases.

My science work gives examples of most common mistakes in English, which are frequently made by foreign learners and even by many native English speakers. The information given in the sections of Part II can be helpful both for beginners and for advanced level learners.

Because this science work is more like a `how-not-to' piece of reference work, the examples it offers are almost all negative. I took this approach for good reason: as the Fowler brothers wrote a century ago, “Something may really be done for the negative virtues by mere exhibition of what should be avoided.” Besides, this approach offers the most fun, which is quite an important thing, because it helps us avoid getting bored while reading, whereas this often happens when we read some dictionaries or works of grammarians.

I have put much effort into my science work. I've proved to myself that I'm capable of writing science work on such a difficult topic, even though my English is still far behind the standard I want to achieve. It has been a great journey of discovery for me. I've learned a lot and I've found some useful information which will help me in future. And by doing this work I want to share the knowledge I've gained with other people who are also keen on learning English, but find it difficult to cope with some aspects of the language. I've tried to explain the difficult “scientific” rules and definitions in simple and understandable language with more interesting and modern `real' examples.

But this science work is intended to be read for information and even for entertainment. Hence it is a narrative as well as a reference work - one of practical correctness with the aim of helping those who read it to improve their communication with other persons. Beyond that I also hope it'll do its small part to preserve existing literature by helping it remain readable for future generations. There is another purpose: to help readers gain insight into themselves by improving the clarity of their thinking. I hope that my work will be not only useful, but also interesting.

IV. Bibliography

1. The Use and Abuse of the English Language, Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, Marlowe & Company edition, 1995

2. Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler, 1926, second corrected 1937, and revised by Sir Ernest Gower 1965 editions - all Oxford University Press

3. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, R. W. Burchfield, Oxford University Press, 1996

4. A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans, Random House, 1957, reprinted by Galahad Books, 1981

5. The King' English, Kingsley Amis, St. Martin's, 1997

6. Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson, Morrow, 1990

7. The English Language, Robert Burchfield, Oxford University Press, 1985

8. Unlocking the English Language, Hill and Wang, 1991

9. The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinary Literate, Eugene Ehlrich, HarperCollins, 1997

10. The HarperCollins Concise Dictionary of English Usage, Eugene Ehlrich and Daniel Murphy, 1991

11. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Bryan A. Garner, Oxford University Press, 1998

12. A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, Bryan A. Garner, Oxford University Press, 1987, second edition, 1995

13. The State of Language, Philip Howard, Oxford University Press, 1985

14. Usage and Abusage, Eric Partrige, Hamish Hamilton, 1957 edition, Penguin, 1963

15. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Allan M. Siegal and William G. Conolly, Times Books, 1999

16. The Grouchy Grammarian, Thomas Parrish, John Wiley & Sons, 2003

17. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford University Press, 1998