She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: soccer and hooliganism. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
Category: Grammar
Q: Here’s what an NYC teacher had to say about the recent state English tests for grades 3-8: “I felt like the students really were just being tested on how well of a test-taker they were, not necessarily how great of a reader they were or how great a writer they were.” Am I the classic grump who refuses to surrender what’s left of my tenuous hold on good grammar? Please explain just why “how well of a test taker” and “how great of a reader” don’t make sense. At my advanced age (83), I’m too darned tired to look it up!
A: Grumpy or not, you’re right. That teacher’s sentence is a mess. But let’s not rush to put a dunce cap on his head and stand him in the corner. There are extenuating circumstances here.
We tracked down the sentence in question and found that it was made on WNYC during an interview with several teachers about the tests.
People who usually talk or write in standard English sometimes trip over a few words when speaking off the cuff, especially when they’re nervous about being on the radio.
If that third-grade teacher had been given a few seconds to think before opening his mouth, his English might not have sounded to you like fingernails on a blackboard.
Here are a couple of possible revisions of the sentence, keeping singulars with singulars and plurals with plurals:
“I felt as if a student really was just being tested on how good a test-taker he was, not necessarily how great a reader or how great a writer he was.”
“I felt as if the students really were just being tested on how good they were at test-taking, not necessarily how great they were at reading or writing.”
Now, back to the problem sentence. What bothered you about it was the speaker’s use of “well of a test taker” and “great of a reader,” so we’ll discuss those first.
Let’s say right up front that the speaker’s use of the adverb “well” is a major misdemeanor. We’re fairly broadminded here at Grammarphobia, but in this world a student is a good test taker, not a well test taker (unless you’re talking about his health).
Now on to those “of a” constructions. We ran a blog post last January about what some linguists call the “big of” syndrome—using “of” in phrases like “not that big of a deal” and “too long of a drive.” These generally consist of adjective + “of a” + noun (or noun phrase).
As we pointed out, constructions with a noun described in terms of another noun (like “a devil of a time,” “a prince of a man”) are standard English. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to the 1600s.
However, when an adjective is part of the pattern some usages are considered standard and some aren’t.
In standard English, we commonly use certain adjectives of quantity—“much,” “more,” “less,” “enough”—in this way, as in “enough of a problem” and “too much of a drive.”
But with adjectives of degree—“good/bad,” “big/small,” “long/short,” “old/young,” “hard/easy,” “near/far,” and so on—the “of a” pattern is not considered standard.
With that class of adjectives, the “of”-less versions (“not that big a problem”) are standard, while the “of” versions (“not that big of a problem”) are regarded as dialectal.
While this dialectal usage is nonstandard, it shouldn’t be called incorrect—just inappropriate in formal English.
The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says the adjectival idiom is “almost entirely oral” and is “rare in print except in reported speech.”
“The only stricture on it suggested by our evidence is that it is a spoken idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the personal kind,” M-W adds.
But again, we’re talking about adjectival usages here. As for the adverbial “how well of a test-taker,” fuggedaboutit!
Yes, “how well of a” is out there in the ether (we got 2.9 million hits when we googled it), but we haven’t found a single language commentator who speaks well of it.
A final note. You didn’t mention it, but some usage authorities would object to that teacher’s use of “like” as a conjunction. They would have recommended that he start his sentence with “I felt as if” instead of “I felt like.”
We don’t use “like” as a conjunction ourselves, but the ground is shifting here and some language authorities see no problem with it. We ran a post on the blog a few years ago about the usage.
As we wrote then, writers have been using “like” as a conjunction since the 14th century. Chaucer did it. Shakespeare, too. So did Keats, Emily Brontë, Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, Kipling, Shaw, and so on.
The Merriam-Webster’s usage guide says that objections to “like” as a conjunction were apparently “a 19th-century reaction to increased conjunctive use at that time.”
Although conservative usage guides and grammar sticklers still object to the use of “like” as a conjunction, that opinion is far from unanimous.
Merriam-Webster’s says “the usage has never been less than standard,” and the “belief that like is a preposition but not a conjunction has entered the folklore of usage.”
Fowler’s Modern English Usage (revised 3rd ed.) doesn’t go quite so far, but it says “like as a conjunction is struggling towards acceptable standard or neutral ground” and “the long-standing resistance to this omnipresent little word is beginning to crumble.”
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Categories
Just suppose
Q: I told a student of mine that this was incorrect: “Suppose you were starting your own business, what would you do?” I said the two sentences should be divided by a period, not a comma. But now I am having second thoughts. Please straighten me out.
A: The word “suppose” here is being used as a conjunction to introduce a hypothetical “what would happen if” statement, according to the online Cambridge Dictionaries.
The website gives this example of the usage: “Suppose we miss the train—what would we do then?”
In effect, “suppose” here (and in your example) functions like the conjunction “if” to mean “in the event that” or “on the assumption that.”
Cambridge says “supposing” can be used the same way: “Supposing that you had that opportunity, Mrs. Gallagher, what would you say?”
We would describe “suppose” in your example as an imperative verb acting as a conjunction. In that sentence, it introduces a hypothetical statement made up of two clauses separated by a comma.
No matter what terminology is used, “suppose” and “supposing” have been introducing hypothetical sentences and clauses for hundreds of years.
Examples of the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that “suppose” is more likely to introduce a construction made up of two sentences, while “supposing” or “supposing that” is more likely to introduce one made up of two clauses.
However, both words are used both ways in standard dictionaries. We’ve found several examples of “suppose” used when two clauses are divided by a comma.
The online Macmillan Dictionary, for example, offers this example: “Suppose you won the lottery, what would you do with the money?”
And the Longman Dictionary online offers this one: “Look, suppose you lost your job tomorrow, what would you do?”
In describing the usage, the Oxford Dictionaries online says “suppose” is being “used to introduce a hypothesis and trace or ask about what follows from it.” Oxford has this example with a dash: “suppose he had been murdered—what then?”
The word “suppose” has been used to introduce hypothetical statements since the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In this sense, the OED explains, “suppose” is an imperative verb meaning “assume,” “imagine,” or “what if?” However, the dictionary gives examples from the 15th to the 20th centuries of the word “passing into conj.” in Scottish English.
We’ll end with an Oxford citation from the July 25, 1907, issue of the Nation about William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination:
“Suppose him the Democratic nominee, and the issue would be thrust in his face from every stump in the land. His party would have to bear the odium.”
Bryan won the Democratic nomination, but he was trounced by the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, in the 1908 presidential election.
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Q: A recent photo caption in the NY Times reads: “Lizeth Chacon of Aurora, Colo., who signs up Latinos to vote, reports growing disinterest in registration.” I was taught that “disinterest” means impartiality, not lack of interest. Is this meaning now accepted, or are people just forgetting their junior high grammar?
A: The use of the noun “disinterest” in that March 31, 2014, caption in the Times is entirely legitimate. We’ll get to the adjective “disinterested” (the word you were probably taught about) later.
For most of its history, which began in the 1600s, the noun “disinterest” has meant impartiality. But in the late 19th century people began using it to mean indifference or lack of interest, and today standard dictionaries accept that newer sense of the word.
The two dictionaries we use most—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.)—give two definitions of “disinterest”: lack of interest as well as lack of bias.
Other sources also accept both meanings, including Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins English Dictionary.
In fact, a couple of dictionaries have dropped the word’s original meaning altogether. The online Macmillan and Cambridge dictionaries, in their British and American editions, define “disinterest” solely as a lack of interest.
In short, “absence of interest” isn’t merely an acceptable definition of “disinterest.” For some authorities it’s the only definition. And remarkably, this shift has taken place in only a little over a hundred years.
Why? Because there’s no other everyday negative noun with “interest” as its root. The nouns “uninterest” and “noninterest” are rare or nonexistent. It was inevitable that a noun we do have—“disinterest”—would fill the gap.
However, the adjectival form “uninterested” does exist, and thereby hangs a tale.
Today, sticklers—who are neither impartial nor indifferent on the subject—insist that “disinterested” means one thing (impartial) and “uninterested” means another (not interested).
But the history of these adjectives is long and tangled, and they’ve swapped meanings over time. The original meaning of “disinterested” was “not interested,” and the original meaning of “uninterested” was “impartial.”
Long story short: nowadays, standard dictionaries accept two meanings for “disinterested.”
American Heritage says in a usage note that “despite critical disapproval, disinterested has come to be widely used by many educated writers to mean ‘uninterested’ or ‘having lost interest,’ as in Since she discovered skiing, she is disinterested in her schoolwork.”
We discussed the dueling meanings of “disinterested” and “uninterested” in a blog post we wrote way back in 2006, and we wrote about it again in our book Origins of the Specious. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“When it first showed up in print around 1612, ‘disinterested’ meant not interested, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1659, however, another meaning surfaced: impartial. Over the next couple of hundred years, respected writers including Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster merrily used both meanings and nobody seemed to mind.
“It wasn’t till the late nineteenth century that American usage writers decided ‘disinterested’ should mean only one thing: impartial. Why? Because we already had a perfectly good word, ‘uninterested,’ that meant not interested. Our messy language, they figured, would be tidier if the two words had two different meanings. Never mind that ‘uninterested’ had a messy upbringing too. It started out in the seventeenth century meaning impartial, but ended up meaning not interested a century later.
“Forget the inconvenient history. To this day, most usage manuals and style guides will tell you that a juror who falls asleep is ‘uninterested,’ while an impartial judge is ‘disinterested.’ Of course, most of the people who actually speak and write English use ‘disinterested’ both ways. And dictionaries include both meanings, while noting that usage authorities disagree. But, as we all know, in English the majority rules. All those usage experts will eventually come around. In the meantime, what is the conscientious writer to do? You can take a stand, use ‘disinterested’ to mean not interested, and risk being thought an illiterate nincompoop by those who don’t know any better. Or you can take the cowardly way out and use ‘disinterested’ only to mean impartial.”
In conclusion, we say that “it’s better to be understood than to be correct, especially when intelligent people can’t agree on what is correct. If you mean not interested, say ‘not interested.’ If you mean impartial, say ‘impartial’ (or ‘objective,’ ‘unbiased,’ ‘unprejudiced,’ ‘fair,’ ‘nonpartisan,’ ‘judicious,’ ‘incorruptible,’ and so on).”
However, it’s your decision and you may come to a different conclusion—you can go along with the lexicographers, who write dictionaries, or with the authors of usage guides, who are generally more conservative.
But the fact that the noun “disinterest” has become so readily accepted in its newer role is bound to affect the fortunes of “disinterested.”
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Q: I heard this usage at least a half-dozen times in an episode of the sitcom New Girl: “She is embarrassed of me.” Rarely have I heard such an awkward phrase repeated in a scripted context. Is “of” wrong here? If not, why does it sound so awful?
A: We can’t say that “embarrassed of” is wrong, but scriptwriters who were older or more tradition-bound would probably have used “embarrassed by” instead.
Like “bored of,” which we wrote about in 2013, “embarrassed of” has recently become more common.
For now, “embarrassed by” is still the favorite combination, with 1.6 million Google hits. The runner-up is “embarrassed for,” with 1.2 million. And trailing distantly are “embarrassed about,” with 656,000 hits, and “embarrassed of,” with 523,000.
So “embarrassed by” is three times as popular as “embarrassed of.” (We ruled out the 1.8 million hits for “embarrassed to,” since with infinitives there’s no choice—“embarrassed to ask,” “embarrassed to be,” and so on.)
While “embarrassed of” is trailing at the moment, it’s gaining fast. Searches with Google’s Ngram viewer show a sharp spike in the use of the phrase between 1980 and 2008.
We’re not talking here about uneducated speakers. A university professor, writing on the American Dialect Society’s discussion group in 2007, said that “of” was becoming the “default preposition” among students in his linguistics courses.
He reported seeing usages like “poking fun of” and “self-conscious of” in student writing since the 1980s.
In fact, many prepositions used after adjectives are starting to defy their traditional roles.
“It begins to look as if preposition replacement is becoming an occasional but significant feature of the language,” Robert Burchfield writes in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.). “It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, though at present still regrettable, that some people (esp. children) are now usually bored of instead of bored with.”
In fact, it isn’t always “of” that muscles its way in. Sometimes “of” is muscled out by another preposition.
Burchfield cites the linguist Dwight Bolinger, who found that as words like “of” are used in growing numbers of idiomatic phrases, their meanings fade and other prepositions start to replace them.
For example, Bolinger observed that “about” was replacing “of” in certain phrases: “conscious of” was becoming “conscious about”; “wary of” was becoming “wary about,” and so on.
He also found that “enamored of” was becoming “enamored with,” and that “free of” was becoming “free from.”
Unfortunately, it’s easier to observe this kind of trend than it is to explain why it happens. Who knows? Perhaps “embarrassed of” emerged by analogy with “ashamed of” and “afraid of.”
Clearly, prepositions are a handful—in more than one sense. They comprise a relatively small set of words, but it’s often difficult to choose among them or to explain why one is better than another.
We answer lots of mail about prepositional usage, from new learners of English as well as from native speakers.
In 2012, for instance, we wrote about why people say “in the newspaper” but “on the Internet.” In 2008, we discussed why “to luck out” means “to luck in.”
In 2011, we ran a post on why English speakers say “in 2001” but “on Monday.” And in 2008, we had an item on why prepositions are used so differently in British and American English.
The answers aren’t cut-and-dried, because the choice of one preposition over another is mostly idiomatic and becomes habitual. That being the case, preferences emerge (or subside) based on common usage.
This is why prepositions often defy labels like “correct” and “incorrect.” They express relationships, so their meanings are often abstract. It’s better to speak of the “customary” or “dominant” preposition than the “right” one.
In his book The Careful Writer (1965), Theodore M. Bernstein writes, “The proper preposition is a matter of idiom; and idioms, if they do not come ‘naturally,’ must be either learned or looked up.”
And what if a particular idiom can’t be found in a usage manual or dictionary? “The only thing to do,” Bernstein says, “is to consult three knowing friends and get a consensus.”
However, unless the “three knowing friends” are all roughly the same age, you probably won’t get a unanimous verdict.
You could seek an answer in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which devotes several pages to prepositions that complement adjectives.
The book discusses “about,” “at,” “by,” “for,” “from,” “in,” “of,” “on/upon,” “to,” “towards,” and “with.” And while the lists of corresponding adjectives aren’t exhaustive, some are implied in the explanations.
For example, the book notes that “by” is used only with “adjectives deriving from past participles in their passive use.”
This would include “embarrassed” as well as “bored,” because (1) they’re identical to the past participles of the verbs they’re derived from, “embarrass” and “bore”; and (2) they’re used passively, as in “I was embarrassed” or “they were bored.”
Some adjectives aren’t limited to one preposition. For example, Cambridge separately lists “bored” among those that can take “with.”
And some adjectives can take either “at” or “about.” These often denote “a psychological reaction” to what’s expressed in the complement, Cambridge says: “annoyed,” “pleased,” “aghast,” “indignant,” and so on.
What all this boils down to is that prepositions are unpredictable.
“Language is nothing but a set of human habits,” Otto Jespersen wrote in his Essentials of English Grammar (1933). “As with other habits it is not to be expected that they should be perfectly consistent.”
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Q: In the recent New Yorker piece about the father of the Sandy Hook killer, Andrew Solomon writes that Adam Lanza’s older brother “moved to New Jersey after graduating college.” GRADUATING COLLEGE? Shouldn’t that be FROM college?
A: We read the same article in the March 17 issue and had the same thought: How did “graduating college” make it through the New Yorker’s copydesk?
Pat’s feeling was that copy-editing standards at the New Yorker might have slipped a notch. But Stewart wondered if the construction had passed into standard English usage since we discussed the issue on the blog eight years ago.
We decided that we ought to reexamine this subject. So in the interest of open-mindedness, here goes.
Back in 2006, we said the verb “graduate” had evolved over the last two centuries, but not enough for this sentence to be considered standard English: “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”
Traditionally, according to our original post, there would be three proper ways to express that sentence:
● “Stanford graduated him in 1986.”
● “He was graduated from Stanford in 1986.”
● “He graduated from Stanford in 1986.”
Most of the usage guides we’ve consulted still object to a sentence like “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”
Why? Because the verb “graduate” originally meant to award a degree, not to receive one. The school graduated the student, not the other way around.
Over the years, the verb “graduate” has evolved, but usage authorities generally believe that the use of “graduate” in that disputed sentence strays too far from the original meaning of the verb. Here’s the scoop.
When the word first showed up in the late 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “graduate” was a transitive verb meaning to confer a university degree.
(A transitive verb is one that needs an object to make sense: “Stanford graduated him.” An intransitive verb is one that can make sense without an object: “He graduated.”)
The OED’s earliest example is from Robert Parke’s translation of The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (1588), by Juan González de Mendoza: “To commence or graduate such students as haue finished their course.”
And here’s a passive construction of the same transitive verb, from an 1884 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “The class of ’76 was graduated with six men.”
So in the earliest, transitive uses of “graduate,” it was standard to say either (1) that the school “graduated” the student, or (2) that the student “was graduated” by the school.
But in the early 1800s, the OED says, “graduate” underwent a significant change. It acquired an intransitive sense, meaning to take a degree or diploma.
In the intransitive sense (in which the verb has no direct object), the student is the one doing the graduating—that is, taking a degree or diploma.
Oxford has a several examples, starting with one from the poet Robert Southey’s Letters From England (1807): “Four years are then to be passed at college before the student can graduate.”
Late in the 19th century, we see intransitive examples with the institution added in a prepositional phrase (“from Stanford,” “from college,” etc.). The OED, which finds nothing objectionable in this construction, gives a couple of examples:
“In 1837 he graduated from Yale College” (the Times of London, 1892), and “Dwight was … able to graduate from High School at the premature age of fourteen” (Harold Nicolson’s biography Dwight Morrow, 1935).
About the time when people started adding “from” plus the institution, some usage commentators started to object that “graduate” was moving too far from its transitive roots.
In fact, the critics wanted to take a step back and abandon the intransitive usage altogether. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains:
“The critics argued that since the college conferred the degree on the student, graduate should only be used transitively with the student as its object or in the passive construction ‘He was graduated from college.’ ”
But as we know, “graduate” was already firmly established as an intransitive verb (as in Southey’s “before the student can graduate”). In hindsight, it was only natural that people would start adding prepositional phrases: “from college,” “from high school,” etc.
Despite the critics, this use of “graduate” was soon accepted and the criticism has long since disappeared. Today nobody thinks twice about a sentence like “Spot graduated from obedience school.”
But in the 20th century, the use of “graduate” shifted once again and a fourth usage emerged. This is the one we’re reexamining here, in which “from” is dropped (“he graduated college”).
What do the experts say about this newest wrinkle? So far, the disputed usage isn’t yet recorded in the OED, so we find no opinion there one way or the other. But most of the other sources we checked are holding the line against it.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), says the use of “graduate” in the sense “to receive an academic degree from” is a “usage problem.” It gives this example “How many chemists graduated the Institute last year?”
The dictionary notes that this newest use of the verb, “in which the student is the subject and the institution is the object, as in She graduated Yale in 2010,” was rejected by 77 percent of the American Heritage usage panel.
Another source, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), includes this use of the verb (with the example “to graduate college”), but labels it “informal.”
Looking further, we find that Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), says the “newish” transitive use in American English, as in “he graduated Yale in 1984,” is “much more controversial and is best avoided.”
Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) seems to agree with Fowler’s. “In the mid-20th century,” Garner’s says, “usage began to shift further toward an even shorter transitive form: students were said to graduate college (omitting the from after graduate). This poor wording is increasingly common.”
On Garner’s “Language-Change Index,” this new use of “graduate” is rated Stage 3, for “widespread but ….” (A rating of Stage 1 means “rejected”; Stage 5 is “fully accepted.”)
We found only a couple of clear votes in favor of “graduated college.”
The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary lists this among its definitions: “to receive a degree or diploma from: to graduate college.”
A usage note in Random House adds that “although condemned by some as nonstandard,” this sense of the verb “is increasing in both speech and writing: to graduate high school.”
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) finds no problem with the disputed usage either and labels it standard English.
Merriam-Webster’s accepts, without qualification, the use of “graduate” in the sense “to earn a degree or diploma from (a school, college, or university).” It gives the example “she graduated high school.”
The editors at M-W provide their own usage note on the subject. They note the historical shifts in the uses of the verb, then go on to say that it’s the “newer transitive sense,” as in “she graduated high school,” that’s now condemned by some critics.
The dictionary says the newer usage remains “the least common,” while the one with “from” is the most common. But all of them “are standard,” M-W concludes.
Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “This use of graduate without from has been cited as an error” by usage commentators since 1957.
Nevertheless, it’s “probably established by now,” the guide continues, though “it appears to be more frequent in speech than in writing and is not nearly as frequent as the longer established intransitive”—the one with “from.”
A rough Google search—“graduated college” versus “graduated from college”—confirms this. The version without “from” got 1.5 million hits, compared with 24.3 million for the version with “from.”
A search of Google Books is perhaps more significant in terms of written usage: 35,500 hits for the “from”-less version versus 3.6 million for the one with “from.”
Our feeling is that “graduated college” still hasn’t made it into the Ivy League, though it may get there one of these days.
We’d call it informal. It’s OK in conversation, but until the usage is more established, we’d recommend tossing in a “from” when writing.
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Q: A friend says “that” is incorrect in this sentence: “Leonardo DiCaprio’s never winning an Oscar isn’t that surprising when you realize Stanley Kubrick never won one either.” I say it’s an informal usage. We thought why not ask you guys.
A: Some language authorities would agree with you that this use of “that” (especially the negative “not that”) is informal, but we see nothing wrong with using it in formal as well as informal contexts.
Film buffs, however, would object to the sentence you’re asking about: Kubrick did win an Oscar—for visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In your example, the adjective “unfair” is qualified by “that.” In this construction, “that” is a demonstrative adverb meaning “so much,” “so,” or “to that extent or degree,” a usage the Oxford English Dictionary dates from the 1400s.
Oxford adds that the negative version “not that”—the version in your sentence, with “not” contracted—is a colloquial usage that means “not very.” (A colloquial usage is one that’s more common in spoken than in written English.)
Among the OED’s citations are both positive and negative examples, including these:
“Charles Paris found it difficult to get that excited.” (From Simon Brett’s 1980 novel The Dead Side of the Mike.)
“The forgiveness of sin isn’t just an easygoing matter, as if to say: ‘Well, you sinned, but it doesn’t matter all that much—I forgive you.’ ” (From a 1981 issue of the Listener.)
As we’ve said above, we think this usage, negative as well as positive, is acceptable in all kinds of English. To be fair, we’ll give you two additional views on the subject.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) would say we’re jumping the gun. It describes the usage as still informal, though close to becoming formal.
Fowler’s says constructions with “that” as a demonstrative adverb of “the type ‘I was that angry,’ i.e. ‘so angry, very angry,’ and its negative counterpart, ‘things aren’t really that bad,’ have been slipping into and out of standard use since similar uses were first recorded in the 15c.”
“It would seem that both the positive and the negative types are common now,” Fowler’s says, “but in the written language are normally used in plainly informal contexts.”
The usage guide gives these published examples of informal use, both positive and negative: “I’ve been that worried. I thought I’d lost you,” and “Shut up. … It’s not that funny.”
But the manual acknowledges that all this “is only a short step away from reasonably formal territory, to judge from the following example: ‘The questioning attitude that comes naturally at student age is not that easily abolished.’ ”
Another authoritative source, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, says both uses of “that”—positive as well as negative—are “common and widespread.”
But the “most common current use,” the book adds, “is in negative statements in which that is reduced more or less to an intensifier.”
The book’s published examples include sentences like these: “It is not that easy” … “The movie is different, but not that different” … “He did not think that they were that close to a treaty.”
M-W concludes that this use of “that,” in both positive and negative constructions, is “standard in general prose.”
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Q: I have been annoyed at sports commentators who seem to ALWAYS put the subject at the end of the sentence. Example: “Since he returned from injury he is a different player, Smith.” Please advise.
A: The construction you mention is very common in live sports commentary. The speaker puts the subject at the end of the sentence almost as an afterthought.
Sometimes there’s a pronoun mentioned first, but sometimes not: “He came up from the minors like a rocket, Jones,” or “Up at bat now, Brown.”
It’s as if the speaker assumes at first that the audience will know who “he” is, or will mentally supply the subject. But just to be sure, a name is added.
It could even be that the speaker consciously delays mentioning the name to give himself time to think. (Lots of names to remember!)
In the case of your example, the subject (Smith) is reinserted by name at the end to identify who’s meant by “he.”
This kind of thing is sometimes heard in casual conversation outside the broadcast booth as well.
A mother might say, “He’s a good boy, Johnny,” just as a sports reporter would say “It was brilliant, that catch.”
The examples are parallel. When an informal sentence has a pronoun (“he,” “it”) as its subject, the speaker sometimes names the subject at the end for clarification.
In elliptical constructions, the verb might be omitted completely: “A good boy, Johnny” … “Brilliant, that catch.”
Or the verb might be repeated: “He’s a good boy, Johnny is” … “It was brilliant, that catch was.”
Here’s another kind of casual sentence, one you might hear at the playground: “Interesting, watching children play.”
The subject is “watching children play,” and the verb (“is”) is missing. Full sentence, transposed and with verb added: “Watching children play is interesting.”
More often, the pronoun “it” is used up front as a dummy subject: “It’s interesting, watching children play.” The true subject—“watching children play”—identifies the mystery pronoun.
As we said, such sentences are common in informal speech. But the habitual use of such constructions—especially when there’s no original pronoun or when the verb is missing—is a hallmark of live sports commentary.
In the broadcast booth, speakers use a telegraphic style in which loose sentence fragments are strung together, often without explicit grammatical connections.
Some linguists call this “parataxis,” a term from Greek in which it means “placing side by side.” In the parataxis of sports commentary, “Outbursts of short, snappy, loosely connected clauses are typical,” Kersti Borjars and Kate Burridge write in their book Introducing English Grammar (2nd ed., 2013).
Sometimes pronouns, conjunctions, even verbs may be missing, as in “Strong bullpen, the Twins.” Or “Needs a walk, Anderson.” It’s almost stream-of-consciousness.
And the faster the live action, the more telegraphed the commentary. And yet the listener understands perfectly—even though the things we ordinarily consider crucial to the English sentence aren’t there.
One bit of commentary given by Borjars and Burridge is certainly elliptical. It consists of a single word, “Unbelievable.” But there’s isn’t a listener alive who wouldn’t understand.
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Q: I thought you might find it interesting that city officials in Cambridge (England) have banned the use of the apostrophe in new street names. What are your thoughts?
A: We saw the same news stories you did. But a few days after you emailed us, there was a new development. The officials in Cambridge bowed to public pressure and reversed that ban on possessive apostrophes in signs marking new streets.
Here in the United States, we don’t see many possessive apostrophes (or periods, for that matter) in street signs. The authorities that regulate these things tend to discourage the use of punctuation.
(And by the way, you might be interested in a post we wrote some time ago on the use of compass directions—like the confusing “No” for north—on street signs.)
Who gets to decide whether street signs can have apostrophes? In the US, as in Britain, this is up to local cities and towns.
In this country, the individual municipalities use guidelines established by state boards or commissions that regulate geographic names. All 50 states have such agencies.
The states in turn look to the federal government for guidance. And on the federal level, the use of apostrophes in the names of geographic features has been discouraged since 1890, when the US Board on Geographic Names was established.
This is why you almost never see apostrophes on federal signs and maps. The US board says in the FAQ on its website that when place names are in the possessive form, “the apostrophe is almost always removed,” though the “s” by itself is allowed.
What does the federal government have against apostrophes in geographic features? The agency itself can’t explain. “The Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy,” it says in the FAQ.
But it does dispose of a few old theories: “Myths attempting to explain the policy include the idea that the apostrophe looks too much like a rock in water when printed on a map, and is therefore a hazard, or that in the days of ‘stick–up type’ for maps, the apostrophe would become lost and create confusion.”
“The probable explanation,” the agency suggests, “is that the Board does not want to show possession for natural features.”
Elsewhere, in its editorial guidelines, the board says: “Apostrophes suggesting possession or association are not to be used within the body of a proper name (Henrys Fork, not Henry’s Fork).”
However, the guidelines add, “Apostrophes may be used within the body of a geographic name to denote a missing letter (Lake O’ the Woods) or when they normally exist in a surname used as part of a geographic name (O’Malley Hollow).”
As for street signs, the national board says that, unless asked for an opinion, it doesn’t get involved in the names of roads, streets, highways, canals, shopping centers, churches, schools, hospitals, airports, and other entities that are administered by local governments.
So local agencies or municipalities are free to choose whether the names include a genitive or possessive apostrophe. But as we said above, the local agencies generally follow guidelines from their states, which tend to follow the federal government’s lead.
For example, the Hawaii State Board on Geographic Names lists apostrophes among “things to avoid.”
Many American place names that once had apostrophes officially lost them to government regulation back in the 19th century—notably Pikes Peak, named for the explorer Zebulon Pike, and Harpers Ferry, for a ferry operator named Robert Harper.
And for the most past, Americans haven’t been as bothered by all this as their counterparts in Britain. But even here, defenders of the apostrophe have occasionally (very occasionally) made themselves heard on the subject.
As a result, a handful of what the board calls “natural features” have been allowed to include an apostrophe denoting possession or association.
Here are the names, along with the years in which the board relented and gave them back their punctuation:
● Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts, 1933). The locals simply wouldn’t stand for “Marthas Vineyard” and mounted an intense campaign. It worked.
● Ike’s Point (New Jersey, 1944). The argument, according to the agency: “it would be unrecognizable otherwise.”
● John E’s Pond (Rhode Island, 1963). This would be unreadable without the apostrophe. And spoken, the name would sound like “John S.”
● Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View (Arizona, 1995). The Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names argued that three apparent names in a row would be confusing. (The third name is a reference to a stand of Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) once captured on film by the photographer Carlos Elmer.)
● Clark’s Mountain (Oregon, 2002). Meriwether Lewis named the peak for William Clark, who climbed it in 1806. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Geographic Names Board, along with the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, asked that the apostrophe be restored.
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When fewer is less
Q: You’ve written more than once about your preference for “less” over “fewer” in referring to percentages. In a recent comment on the New York Times’s After Deadline blog, Philip B. Corbett takes the opposing view. Your guidance feels better to me, but are you in the minority or the majority?
A: We disagree with Corbett, the Times’s associate managing editor for standards. We think the reporter, Lizette Alvarez, was right to use “less” instead of “fewer” in this sentence on Jan. 20:
“In all, less than 1.5 percent of the country’s 1.9 million inmates are Jewish, according to the Aleph Institute, a social services organization, and many do not even request kosher meals.”
Although “fewer” is generally used for a smaller number of individual things, and “less” for a smaller quantity of one thing, there are many exceptions.
As we’ve said before on the blog, including posts in 2008 and 2009, “less” is more appropriate than “fewer” when percentages are involved.
We’re in the majority on this. Many usage authorities believe that percentages, like fractions, suggest quantity rather than counted individuals.
Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says it’s better to think of a percentage as a collective mass noun than as something that’s been counted.
As Bryan A. Garner writes: “Most percentages aren’t whole numbers anyway. And even if it were a toss-up between the two theories [collective mass noun versus countable noun], it’s sound to choose less, which is less formal in tone than fewer.”
Here’s what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has to say:
“In present-day written usage, less is as likely as or more likely than fewer to appear in a few common constructions. One of the most frequent is the less than construction where less is a pronoun. The countables in this construction are often distances, sums of money, units of time, and statistical enumerations, which are often thought of as amounts rather than numbers.”
Finally, in Woe Is I, Pat’s grammar and usage guide, she recommends using “less than (not fewer than) with percentages and fractions: Less than a third of the graduates showed up for the reunion.”
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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: sports talk—the language of the broadcasting booth and the bullpen. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Is “caring” a noun?
Q: The company I work at lists “caring” as one of its supposed “shared values.” The other values (“productivity,” “integrity,” etc.) are obviously nouns. The word “caring” looks like the odd one out. Sounds awfully, distastefully wrong to me. Am I right?
A: The word “caring” can be a present participle (“He’s caring for his sick child”), a participial adjective (“He is a caring person”), or a gerund (“Caring is a full-time job”).
Although all three are derived from the verb “care,” the present participle is a verb form, the participial adjective is of course an adjective, and the gerund is a noun—technically a verbal noun.
So the gerund “caring” does indeed belong with the other nouns in your company’s list of shared values.
The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for “caring” as a noun, with examples dating back to the 16th century.
The earliest OED citation is from the English poet Nicholas Grimald’s 1556 translation of Cicero’s De Officiis: “No painfulness, no diligence, no caring.”
A gerund can be a subject, an object, or the principal part of a noun phrase. Although gerunds don’t ordinarily have plural forms, plurals are sometimes used (“comings” and “goings,” for example).
Gerunds are sometimes referred to as deverbals or deverbatives, as well as verbal nouns or simply nouns. Some are listed in standard dictionaries as nouns and some aren’t.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, has separate entries for “running,” “skiing,” and “working” as nouns, but not for “driving,” “eating,” and “smoking.” Why not?
We asked Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at the Merriam-Webster company, how lexicographers decide when a gerund gets listed separately as a noun.
He explained that space is the major consideration, so the big Merriam-Webster Unabridged has more noun entries for gerunds than the M-W Collegiate.
“The bar for gerund entry in the Unabridged is much lower than for the Collegiate, because there’s more space,” Sokolowski said.
Less common gerunds “are considered to be covered by the verb entry,” he added, and a “similar policy is in place for nouns that function adjectivally.”
“Our Learner’s Dictionary has a more liberal policy regarding gerunds because we can’t assume that the user will understand the relationship between the verb and the gerund, so ‘driving’ and ‘smoking’ are there, for example,” he said.
We’ve written about gerunds frequently on the blog, including a recent post about why some verbs are followed by gerunds and others by infinitives, and an item in 2012 about the difference between gerunds and participles.
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Q: I’m a language arts teacher in Florida who loves your blog—what fun! Now, my question. In these sentences, does the verb agree with “you” or “who”? (1) “You who have/has been so kind, I thank you.” (2) “You who cut/cuts through the veil of this mortal coil, guide us.”
A: The pronoun “who” can be singular or plural in number, so the choice of verb depends on whether “who” refers to one person or more. Examples: “Who are they?” … “Who is she?”
When it’s preceded by a noun or another pronoun, as in the “you who” construction you’re asking about, “who” takes its number (singular or plural) from the antecedent.
(An antecedent, as you know, is a word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.)
In this case, the verb agrees with the antecedent “you,” as in “you who see me standing before you,” or “you who remember her will recall,” or “this is for you, who were so kind.”
We ran a post a couple of years ago that touches on this subject. But in case you or your class would like to know more, here’s a technical explanation, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED describes “who” in such constructions as a relative pronoun (similar to “that”) being used to introduce “a clause defining or restricting the antecedent and thus completing the sense.”
As we mentioned, the verb in these constructions agrees with the antecedent.
The OED cites this example, from an essay written in 1717 by Alexander Pope: “those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.” (By way of illustration, the singular version would be “he moves easiest who has learn’d to dance.”)
We’ll invent a couple more singular and plural examples:
In subject position: “He who betrays you is not to be trusted” … “They who betray you are not to be trusted.”
In object position: “Don’t trust him who betrays you” … “Don’t trust them who betray you.”
We hope this helps, and all the best to your students!
They’re too young to remember this, but your question reminds us of the old TV show The Goldbergs. Molly Goldberg and her neighbors used to holler “Yoo-hoo!” to get one another’s attention.
The expression became the catchphrase of The Goldbergs, which ran on radio from 1929 to 1946, and on TV from 1949 to 1956.
Although the show undoubtedly helped popularize “yoo-hoo,” the usage had been around before The Goldbergs went on the air.
The earliest example in the OED is from a 1924 issue of the journal Dialect Notes: “Yoo-hoo (call).” Oxford describes the usage as “a call made to attract attention,” and notes that a similar nautical expression, “yoho,” showed up in the 1700s.
We’ll end with an example from the Jan. 2, 1926, issue of the New Yorker: “Yoo-hoo! When did your school let out?”
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Q: Is there a reason why some verbs are followed by gerunds and some by infinitives? I’ve seen lists created to help non-native speakers, but I haven’t seen a rule that explains what’s going on.
A: In the kind of construction you’re referring to, when a verb has an action as its object, that action can be expressed either as a gerund (an “-ing” word like “skating”) or as “to” plus an infinitive (“to skate”).
Some verbs, like “adore,” use only gerunds in such a situation: “She adores skating.” Others, like “wish,” use only “to”-infinitives: “She wishes to skate.”
And still other verbs, like “prefer,” can use either one: “She prefers skating” … “She prefers to skate.”
So for many verbs there’s a division of labor between the gerunds and the infinitives. But for other verbs, either one is possible.
This state of affairs has evolved over time, and native speakers of English don’t have to stop and think about which to choose—gerund or infinitive. It’s largely a problem for foreign learners.
Anyone who’s puzzled can consult one of the many verb lists on the Internet, but those merely tell which complement goes with which verb—they don’t say why.
There’s a good reason for this. In fact, there’s no easy way to explain why some verbs are followed by gerunds, some by “to”-infinitives, and some by either one (but often with different meanings).
A great many academic linguists have written about this subject, but no one, to our knowledge, has come up with a simple formula—perhaps because no simple formula is possible.
For purposes of experiment, let’s make up a test. We’ll look at two different sets of verbs and the typical object (gerund or infinitive) that goes with them.
● verbs followed by a gerund: “She enjoys/practices/finishes/resumes skating.”
● verbs followed by a “to”-infinitive: “She decides/prepares/plans/intends to skate.”
Is there a pattern here that would explain why some verbs go one way and some another? We’ve come across three general views.
(1) Some linguists suggest that the gerund constructions refer to actions that are habitual or have happened in the past, while “to”-infinitives are about potential or future actions.
(2) Others suggest that gerunds represent actions that are “real” or fulfilled, while infinitives represent actions that are hypothetical or yet to come.
(3) Still others see gerund constructions as conveying sensation or actual experience, while infinitive constructions convey volition—that is, a general inclination toward something.
All three make good points, but taken together what do they add up to? Perhaps that gerunds often look back (to an action that’s completed or in progress), while “to”-infinitives tend to look ahead—literally “to” or toward something.
Yet even that statement has holes in it. For example, verbs like “contemplate,” “recommend,” and “advise” all take gerunds and yet refer to unfulfilled actions. You can see what a slippery eel we’re trying to grasp here.
And how to explain verbs that go either way?
With some of these verbs, the choice of gerund versus infinitive can make little or no difference in meaning: “She likes skating” versus “She likes to skate.”
But with some other two-way verbs, the choice can make a marked difference.
The verb “try” is a good example of the latter. It can take both complements: “He tried skating” … “He tried to skate.” But the meanings are different. The first refers to skating in general, while the second refers to a particular act.
Or consider the verb “stop”—”I stopped thinking” means just the opposite of “I stopped to think.”
The verb “remember” is another interesting example. “He remembers washing” is very different from “He remembers to wash.” In the first, he recalls an occasion when he washed (in the past); in the second, he’s reminded to perform the act (in the present or near future).
This answer is a bit rambling, but you can perhaps get the drift. This is a very broad and complicated subject, one that many linguists of our time (and earlier) have wrestled with.
As Randolph Quirk wrote in The Linguist and the English Language (1974): “There ought to be a big award for anyone who can describe exactly what makes him say ‘I started to work’ on one occasion and ‘I started working’ on another.”
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Who’s vs. who’s
Q: I discovered this book description on Amazon: “So if you’re a .NET developer who’s mired in the trenches and yearning for a better way, this book is most definitely for you.” Is this use of “who’s” to mean “who has mired” and “who is yearning” acceptable?
A: The contraction “who’s” is a shortened form of either “who is” or “who has.” But in your example, it doesn’t mean both. It means only “who is.”
Here’s a stretched-out version of the sentence: “So if you’re a .NET developer who is mired in the trenches and who is yearning for a better way, this book is most definitely for you.”
One “who’s” can apply to two or more parts of a sentence, but the contracted verb cannot be both “has” and “is” at the same time. It must mean one or the other.
Generally, the writer depends on the context to make the meaning clear. In cases where there’s ambiguity, the writer should avoid the contraction.
We don’t find the Amazon.com sentence ambiguous, and we’re surprised that you do. It seems obvious to us that “who’s” stands for “who is” in both key parts: “who is mired in the trenches” and “who is yearning for a better way.”
On the other hand, if “mired” were used as a verb—as in “who has mired himself in the trenches”—then “who’s” here would be a contraction for “who has.”
In that case, the verb “has” could not extend automatically to what follows the conjunction. So “is” would have to be inserted after the conjunction (“and is yearning …”).
The passage would then read: “So if you’re a .NET developer who’s [or “who has”] mired himself in the trenches and is yearning for a better way, this book is most definitely for you.”
It might be more graceful, though, to drop the “who” business entirely: “So if you’re a .NET developer mired in the trenches and yearning for a better way, this book is most definitely for you.”
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Q: I have a question about this statement: “He’s a bigot of the highest order.” The meaning here is that he’s the worst type of bigot. Shouldn’t the superlative be “lowest”?
A: The phrase “of the highest order” doesn’t always mean “the best of its kind.” It can also mean “the worst of its kind.” The expression can be used to characterize something that’s excessively or surpassingly bad.
For instance, the phrase is emphatically negative in these recent examples from news websites:
“political malpractice of the highest order” (Washington Post);
“a prickly misfit of the highest order” (New York Times Book Review);
“schemers of the highest order” (Huffington Post);
“a brain explosion of the highest order” (Sidney Morning Herald);
“stupidity of the highest order” (Britain’s Daily Mail);
“a mummy’s boy of the highest order” (the Guardian);
“hypocrisy of the highest order” (the Australian);
“stalemate of the highest order” (NBCSports.com).
Journalists aren’t alone in using the expression this way. Other writers on the Web have described instances of “treason,” “betrayal,” “disgrace,” “arrogance,” “self-abuse,” “tomfoolery,” “insecurity,” “problems,” and “deceit” as being “of the highest order.”
The word “highest” here is an adjective of degree rather than of quality, so it can apply to traits that are highly positive or negative. Think of the phrases “of the highest magnitude” and “to the nth degree,” which can be used with descriptions either good or bad.
The Macmillan Dictionary defines “of a high/the highest order” as meaning “of the best or worst type,” and gives examples of both: “The job calls for problem-solving skills of a high order. … It was economic lunacy of the highest order.”
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t specifically discuss “of the highest order,” though a search of its files turns up several uses of the phrase.
Here’s a negative example, from Warren St. John’s book Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer (2004): “Finebaum has been a relentless badgerer of Mike Dubose, a man he has adjudged an incompetent of the highest order.”
This expression resembles another that’s used for comparisons—“of the first water,” a phrase that originated in the jewelry trade.
In the early 17th century, when the phrase was first recorded, gems of the finest transparency and luster were described as being “of the first water,” the OED says.
“The three highest grades of quality in diamonds were formerly known as the first water, second water, and third water,” the OED explains. This use of “water” in the sense of luster or splendor may have come from Arabic, Oxford notes.
In the late 18th century, people began using “of the first (or finest, purest, rarest) water” in a figurative sense.
Originally, these figurative usages were positive, since the implied comparison was to a fine jewel, but by the early 19th century, negative uses also crept in.
Today, as Oxford says, the expression is used “following a personal designation (often of reproach) with the sense ‘out-and-out,’ ‘thorough-paced.’”
The dictionary quotes this out-and-out condemnation from an 1826 entry in Sir Walter Scott’s journal: “He was a … swindler of the first water.”
It also cites this one from William B. Boulton’s Thomas Gainsborough (1905), a biography of the painter: “He … assumed the airs of a beau and lady-killer of the first water.”
No, the reference isn’t to Gainsborough, but to his landlord, John Astley, who by all accounts was a womanizer, a fortune-hunter, and a rogue of the highest order.
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Q: It sounds wrong to me, but just about everybody inserts an unnecessary “of” in an expression like “It’s not that big of a deal.” How big a deal is this? Is it incorrect?
A: This “of a” usage is a subject that readers of our blog have often raised, and it’s one that we wrote about in 2007.
Back then, we were pretty dismissive of the usage, which some linguists have called the “big of” syndrome.
But this is such a common American colloquialism that it deserves a closer look, so we’ll expand on what we wrote before.
We’ve often said (as we did in a post last summer) that not all redundancies are bad. An extra word can be justified if it serves an emphatic or supportive purpose, as in “first time ever” or “three different times.”
But as we noted in 2007, the unnecessary “of” in “not that big of a deal” doesn’t seem to add any particular emphasis or color (though it might add informality).
We speculated that this usage could have been influenced by phrases like “a whale of a good time,” “a monster of a party,” and so on.
In those constructions, with a noun described in terms of another noun, the “of” is standard English: “a prince of a man” … “a devil of a time” …“that rascal of a boy” … “a little jewel of a cottage” …“a hell of a mess.”
This is a time-honored English usage. Among literary examples, the Oxford English Dictionary cites “his little concubine of a wife,” from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).
And evidence in the OED shows that noun phrases with “hell of a …” and “devil of a …” have long been part of the language, dating back to the 1680s and 1740s, respectively.
So that construction—noun + “of a” + noun—is standard English, acceptable even in the best writing.
However, when an adjective is part of the pattern—adjective + “of a” + noun—some usages are standard and some aren’t.
In standard English, we commonly use certain adjectives of quantity—“much,” “more,” “less,” “enough”—in this way, as in “enough of a problem” and “too much of a drive.”
But with adjectives of degree—“good/bad,” “big/small,” “long/short,” “old/young,” “hard/easy,” “near/far,” and so on—the “of a” pattern is not considered standard English.
With that class of adjectives, the “of”-less versions are regarded as standard: “not that big a problem,” “too long a drive,” etc. But the “of” versions are regarded as dialectal: “not that big of a problem,” “too long of a drive.”
While this dialectal usage is nonstandard, it shouldn’t be called incorrect—just inappropriate in formal English.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage summarizes this dialectal construction as “a fairly recent American idiom that has nearly a fixed form: that or how or too, or sometimes as, followed by an adjective, then of a and a noun.”
The usage guides traces its appearance to the early 1940s, but says it’s probably “somewhat older.”
M-W cites examples from television interviews involving sports figures, newscasters, mayors, and others: “that difficult of a shot” … “that long of a speech” … “that big of a mess” … “too good of a loser” … “how good of a shape,” and so on.
“This current idiom,” M-W says, “is just one of a group of idioms that are characterized by the presence of of a as the link between a noun and some sort of preceding qualifier.”
What’s different about this more recent usage is that the preceding qualifier is one of degree, as we said above, rather than quantity.
The linguist Arnold M. Zwicky commented on this difference in a 1995 paper entitled “Exceptional Degree Markers.”
“This use of of,” Zwicky noted, “is presumably an extension of the rule for NPs [noun phrases] with quantity (rather than degree) modifiers like more, less, enough, and a bit, in combination with singular count nouns: more of a liar, enough of a linguist, a bit of a charmer.”
Kenneth G. Wilson, writing in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English in 1993, made much the same point. He wrote that although “how hard of a job” is nonstandard English, it’s analogous to “how much of a job,” which is “clearly idiomatic and Standard.”
Wilson also suggested—two decades ago—that nonstandard “of a” usages “could achieve idiomatic status before too long, despite the objections of many commentators.”
Until then, he said, they should be left out of “your Planned and Oratorical speech and your edited English.”
Has that time arrived? Well, these dialectal “of a” usages are becoming acceptable idioms in casual speech and informal writing. However, we still wouldn’t recommend them in formal English, written or spoken.
In fact, this dialectal construction—like “how long of a drive”—isn’t found much in print anyway, except in the most casual writing.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) calls it an informal oral usage that’s confined, so far, to American English.
Merriam-Webster’s says the same: “Our evidence shows the idiom to be almost entirely oral; it is rare in print except in reported speech.”
As M-W concludes: “The only stricture on it suggested by our evidence is that it is a spoken idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the personal kind.”
It would be an understatement to call this idiom common in American speech. One linguist has written that for lots of speakers, it’s more than common—it’s preferred.
“Many speakers of American English would never say too big a tree but rather too big of a tree,” Edward L. Blansitt Jr. wrote in his paper “Non-Constituent Connectives” (1983).
For such speakers, Blansitt wrote more than 30 years ago, “of is simply a boundary marker between the preceding descriptive adjective and following indefinite article.”
Since spoken English is the English that’s quoted in print and heard on the news, you can expect to encounter “that big of a deal” for many years to come.
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She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Today’s topic: “lost” words—words that once had a literal meaning but are now used only in their metaphorical senses. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Get me rewrite!
Q: I am wondering if this sentence is grammatically correct and clear: “After touching his cloak, that her hands were still trembling, her nights no shorter hurt a little.”
A: That sentence isn’t grammatically incorrect, but it’s certainly unclear. Let’s call it overly literary. A reader shouldn’t have to read a sentence twice (or three times) to get the meaning.
The word “that” is a conjunction here. It introduces the subordinate clause that’s the subject of the sentence.
The verb is “hurt,” and the subject of the verb is the clause “that her hands were still trembling, her nights no shorter.”
The sentence is hard to read because in this kind of construction, the verb isn’t generally left until the end.
Here’s a rephrasing that makes things a bit clearer: “After touching his cloak, it hurt a little that her hands were still trembling, her nights no shorter.”
That rewording inserts “it” as an anticipatory “dummy” subject. The logical subject is still “that her hands were still trembling, her nights no shorter.”
Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says about subordinate clauses introduced by “that”:
“The subord. clause as subject is most commonly placed after the verb and introduced by a preceding it, e.g. ‘it is certain that he was there’ = ‘that he was there, is certain.’ ”
We recently wrote a post that referred to a similar construction: the use of “it” as a dummy subject when the logical subject is an infinitive.
Example: “It was futile to resist his manly charms.” (Without the dummy subject: “To resist his manly charms was futile.”)
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Q: Here’s a quickie query. What’s the past tense of “forego”?
A: The past tense of “forego” is “forewent.” But do you mean “forego” or “forgo”?
These are two different verbs. Traditionally, “forego” means to precede, while “forgo” means to do without.
However, some dictionaries now list “forego” as an alternate or variant spelling of “forgo,” and “forgo” as an alternate or variant spelling of “forego.” Yikes!
Life is complicated enough, so we’ll stick to the traditional spellings.
The two verbs have separate histories dating back to Anglo-Saxon days. And as Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) puts it, “their meanings are so different that it’s worth preserving the distinction.”
We’ll return to the history of these verbs later, but first let’s get back to your question. Here’s the quickie answer, with the traditional spellings:
● “forego” (to go before): past tense, “forewent”; past participle, “foregone.”
● “forgo” (to do without): past tense, “forwent”; past participle, “forgone.”
Obviously, the past tenses aren’t exactly household words. We’d forgo using either one, and go with something like “preceded” or “went before” for the first verb and “did without” or “abstained” for the second.
The past participles aren’t seen much either, except for the first one, “foregone.” It’s used adjectivally in the familiar expression “foregone conclusion,” meaning an inevitable result or a conclusion formed in advance.
(The OED’s earliest example of “foregone conclusion” is from Shakespeare’s Othello, circa 1603: “But this denoted a fore-gone conclusion.”)
Now, on to the history of “forego” and “forgo.”
Both appeared in Old English religious writing: “forego” in The Vespasian Psalter (circa 825) and “forgo” in The Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 950), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In Old English, the OED says, “forego” was written as foregán, a combination of the prefix “fore-” and the verb gán (go), while “forgo” was forgán, the prefix “for-” plus gán.
The two prefixes are entirely different: “fore-” means “before” or “in front,” while “for-” (a prefix that’s now obsolete) implies a sense of “off” or “away.” (This is the same prefix that survives in “forlorn,” “forget,” “forbid,” and “forbear.”)
The word “forego” has meant to precede since its early days, but “forgo” has had a few twists and turns before arriving at its modern meaning of to do without.
When “forgo” appeared in The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript from an English monastery, it meant “to go away, go past, pass away,” according to the OED.
Over the next few centuries, it came to mean to go by, pass over, leave alone, neglect, overlook, avoid, overreach, forsake, and deceive, but all those senses are now considered obsolete, archaic, or rare.
In the 1100s, according to Oxford, “forgo” (sometimes spelled “forgoo” or “forgoe”) took on its modern meaning of “to abstain from, go without, deny to oneself,” and so on.
The dictionary’s earliest citation for the new usage is from The Cotton Homilies (a manuscript from sometime before 1175), but we’ll skip ahead to this exchange between Achilles and Hector in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1609):
Achilles: Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set; / How ugly night comes breathing at his heels: / Even with the vail and darking of the sun, / To close the day up, Hector’s life is done.
Hector: I am unarm’d; forgoe this vantage, Greek.
Achilles: Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.
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Q: I wonder if Lara Logan’s grammar was correct when she apologized on 60 Minutes for using a questionable source: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.” Should she have said “to have included”? I’ve been studying modern Greek for several years, and deciphering another language makes me question my understanding of my own. Do you answer emails or should I check your blog for an answer?
A: Yes, we do directly answer the emails sent to us by readers like you. Later, we edit these questions plus our responses, and publish them on our blog. (The questioners remain anonymous.)
Now, on to your question about Lara Logan’s apology for her Oct. 27, 2013, report on 60 minutes about the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, the year before.
What she said in her Nov. 10, 2013, apology—“it was a mistake to include him in our report”—was grammatically correct. There was no need say “to have included” instead of “to include.”
The phrase “to have included” is a perfect infinitive, a construction that’s used in tandem with the main verb of a sentence. The perfect infinitive generally refers to an action that has happened earlier than the action of the main verb.
But in this case, the two actions were simultaneous: making the mistake and including him in the report. They amounted to the same thing.
Since there was no difference in the timing of the actions, the simple infinitive “to include” is appropriate.
The infinitive is an interesting creature. It’s a form of verb, but it functions like a noun because it refers to an action as a thing in itself.
A simple infinitive (like “to include”) is sometimes called a present infinitive, and a perfect infinitive (like “to have included”) is sometimes called a present-perfect infinitive.
But those labels are misleading because they sound like tenses. And strictly speaking, infinitives have no tense.
Infinitives do, however, take on a sense of time in relation to the main verb in the sentence.
A simple infinitive refers to an action that coincides in time with the action of the main verb. Here are some examples, with the timing indicated in brackets:
● She likes [now] to study [now].
● She liked [then] to study [then].
● She had always liked [then] to study [then].
● She would have liked [then] to study [then].
Note that the simple infinitive (“to study”) is appropriate in each sentence because the timing of the actions referred to—the studying and the liking—are simultaneous.
A perfect infinitive, on the other hand, is appropriate when the timing of the actions is different, as in these examples:
● She appeared [then] to have studied [earlier].
● She would like [now] to have studied [then].
● She is believed [now] to have studied [then].
● She will want [later] to have studied [earlier].
● She intended [then] to have studied [at some point before now].
So in nearly all cases, the timing of the perfect infinitive and the main verb are dissimilar.
The timing matches, however, when a perfect infinitive is the subject of the sentence and the verb is what linguists call a “past counterfactual conditional”—a “would have” verb referring to an action that never happened. Here’s an example:
● “To have studied would have been wiser for her.”
Patrick J. Duffley describes the peculiar relationship between perfect infinitives and “would have” verbs in his paper “The Gerund and the to-Infinitive as Subject,” published in the Journal of English Linguistics (2003).
Here, he suggests, the perfect infinitive is used to describe “nonreal” actions “in order to situate hypothetical events before the present moment.”
We use the conjunction “if” in a similar way, he says. In effect, a perfect infinitive like “to have studied” signals a meaning similar to “if she had studied.”
Now let’s return to Logan’s sentence on 60 Minutes: “It was a mistake to include him in our report.”
The two actions—making the mistake and including him in the report—are clearly one and the same.
They not only happened at the same time, but they’re placed in apposition (that is, they’re the equivalent of one another).
We’ve written about apposition before on our blog, including posts in 2011 and 2013.
Since for all practical purposes the two actions coincided, there was no need to use a perfect infinitive (“to have included”).
However, Logan would have been justified in using a perfect infinitive in a sentence like this: “It was wrong [in the past] to include his comments and not to have confirmed [earlier] them beforehand.”
A perfect infinitive would also have been justified if the mistake never happened: “To have included him in our report would have been wrong.”
There are a couple of other points to be made about a sentence like “It was a mistake to include him in our report.”
Although the nominal subject is the pronoun “it,” the logical subject is the infinitive phrase “to include him in our report.”
Sometimes “it,” as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, is “placed before the verb as anticipatory ‘dummy’ subject, with the logical subject of the sentence as complement.”
Logan’s sentence is a perfect example. The word order places the logical subject—the infinitive phrase—in the position of complement. As a result, the slot of the subject must be filled, and “it” serves the purpose.
One might also write the sentence this way, putting the subject before the verb: “To include him in our report was a mistake.”
Many people don’t realize that an infinitive or infinitive phrase can function as a noun. As such, it can be the subject of a sentence—or, as we’ve written before on the blog, the object of a verb.
The OED notes that a sentence with the dummy subject “it” can have an infinitive phrase as its logical subject. Here are a few of the examples that Oxford cites:
“It was necessary to make a choice.” (From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England From the Accession of James II, 1849.)
“It has been found possible to render voting perfectly secret and to provide for a scrutiny.” (From the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., 1875.)
“It is important to get Wheatsworth Crackers with your bowl of milk or ‘half and half.’ ” (From an ad in the New York Times, 1923.)
“It’s hard to reconcile the control-freak in his nature with the hyper-adrenalinated kid in front of the camera.” (From a London newspaper, the Independent, 1997.)
Here are a few more examples of our own (without the “dummy” subject).
Infinitival subjects: “To do the right thing is my ambition” … “To leave was not polite.”
Infinitival objects: “My hope was to do the right thing” … “I never intended to leave.”
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Q: At a drugstore here in Hawaii we often hear over a loudspeaker the word “one” used in place of “a” or “an.” For example, “We need ONE manager in the photo department.” Is this pidgin English or does it have a basis in historical English?
A: It’s not surprising that a person living in Hawaii would hear “one” used in place of the indefinite article “a” or “an.”
This regionalism is characteristic of what linguists call Hawaii Creole English, and at least one scholar has attributed it to the influence of Cantonese.
We should mention that the dialect you’re hearing isn’t properly a pidgin—a dialect that has no native speakers, like a trading jargon used for business purposes.
Instead, linguists call it a creole because it has expanded, stabilized over time, and become a native tongue learned by children. So what was once a pidgin developed into a creole about a century ago.
The roots of Hawaii Creole English extend back into the late 18th century, as Hawaii began to emerge as a trading and plantation center.
We won’t attempt to explain the development of this dialect, a subject much debated by linguists over the past 40 years.
It’s enough to know that many tongues besides native Hawaiian have been spoken on the islands in the last two centuries—the South Seas jargon of early sailors plus many varieties of pidgin English brought by traders and plantation workers from China, Japan, Europe, and other Pacific islands.
The feature you’ve noticed—the use of “one” as the indefinite article—was first recorded in Hawaii in 1838, according to the Australian linguist Jeff Siegel.
In his paper “Substrate Influence in Hawaii Creole English,” published in the journal Language in Society in 2000, Siegel notes that “the use of one as an ‘indefinite article’ was one of the features of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) brought to Hawaii.”
“Pidgin Hawaiian, spoken by most Chinese in Hawaii in the 19th century, also used the numeral one (akahi) as an indefinite article (in contrast to Standard Hawaiian),” Siegel writes.
He traces this usage to Cantonese, which “optionally uses the word yat ‘one’ ” in indefinite noun phrases.
“It is likely that this feature of Cantonese accounts for the origin of the corresponding use of one in CPE [Chinese Pidgin English],” he writes, “and it could have been responsible for reinforcing its continued use in Hawaii as well.”
Two earlier scholars, John E. Reinecke and Aiko Tokimasa, have also written about “one” in place of “a” or “an” in Hawaii.
“In careless speech, one is used as the indefinite article,” they wrote in “The English Dialect of Hawaii,” published in the journal American Speech in 1934.
You also asked whether the Hawaiian usage has any basis in historical English.
As a matter of fact, there was a time when “one” served a double purpose in our language, too—it was both the number and the indefinite article.
That changed in the Middle Ages when the uses of the word were separated and the article (“a,” “an”) was split off.
You might even say that English is unusual in this respect.
In many languages the word for “one,” as John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins points out, “is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an.”
“An,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, originated as an unstressed form of “one,” and “a” developed in the 1100s as the form used before a consonant.
But the differentiation between “an” and “a” didn’t become universal for quite some time.
“An” was still used before “y” and “w” (as in “an woman”) until the 1400s, Chambers says. In addition, “an” was “used before h in a stressed syllable (an hundred) down to the 1600s and is still affected occasionally before h today,” Chambers adds.
“One,” meanwhile, has three general senses in modern English:
(1) It’s an adjective meaning either the number or undivided (“one apple” … “with one voice” … “we are one”).
(2) It’s a pronoun meaning a single person or thing (“one never knows” … “I’ll take that one” … “one of us”).
3) It’s a noun for the number (“odds of four to one” … “one o’clock” … “chapter one”).
However, the adjective “one” is also sometimes used colloquially, the OED says, “as a more emphatic substitute for the indefinite article.”
Examples of this emphatic usage include “He’s one tough customer” and “It’s one hell of a blizzard.”
But nowadays “one” isn’t used in the ordinary sense of “a” or “an,” except in regional pockets.
The OED says it’s chiefly found in the English spoken in India, the Caribbean, and parts of the United States—namely South Carolina, Georgia, and, as you already know, Hawaii.
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Q: My daughter Maggie’s seventh-grade class has been studying the parts of a sentence. In identifying a noun, the teacher says, it should be only one word, without any adjective. So “bear” would be a noun, not “black bear.” But Maggie thinks “black bear” and other two-word animal species are nouns too. I believe she’s right, but I can’t find any rules about this. Can you help?
A: Both your daughter and her teacher are right. But they’re looking at “black bear” through different lenses.
If the intent here is to teach the kids the difference between a noun and an adjective, then the teacher is right.
The phrase “black bear” (which might be called a noun phrase) consists of the noun “bear” and the adjective “black.” It could refer to any bear that happens to be black.
But as the name of a species, “black bear” is a noun. Dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, categorize it as a noun when it means a species.
(It can mean either the North American black bear, Ursus americanus, or the Asian black bear, Ursus thibetanus—neither of which, by the way, is always black.)
The same is true of many other terms for particular species of animal, like “yellow warbler,” “indigo bunting,” “painted turtle,” “leopard frog,” “American toad,” and so on. They’re classified as nouns.
These terms may consist of two-word phrases, but taken as a whole they amount to a noun and are so categorized by lexicographers.
In short, there are two legitimate ways of looking at the phrase “black bear.”
The teacher is viewing it syntactically, identifying it according to its grammatical elements: adjective + noun.
Your daughter is viewing it semantically, identifying it by a specific meaning: a species of bear, not merely a bear that’s black in color.
Maybe your daughter has a future as a linguist!
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Q: I’m puzzled by the phrase “in general.” I assume “general” is the object of the preposition “in,” but can an adjective be an object? I looked up “general” but found no noun form that references generality.
A: The adverbial phrase “in general” is an idiom, a peculiarity of language that doesn’t necessarily have to make sense grammatically. In this case, though, it does.
As it turns out, there is a noun form of “general” that refers to generality, as in this example: “Politicians prefer to speak about the general, not the particular.”
Hence, we have the adverbial phrases “in general” and “in particular.”
When the word “general” showed up in English around 1200, it was an adjective describing a whole class of things or people. But by the 1300s, it was also a noun meaning a whole class of things or people.
We won’t comment here on the use of “general” in military and civilian titles. We’ve already had several posts on the subject, including one in 2012 that links to a couple of others.
John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says the word “general” is derived from the Latin generalis, which means all of a whole class, but the ultimate source is a prehistoric Indo-European root that refers to producing—that is, making or creating things.
This Indo European root (gen-, gon-, gn-) was very productive itself, as Ayto points out in his dictionary.
It gave Latin genus, the source of generalis, and English (via Latin or Greek) such words as “gender,” “generate,” “generic,” “genesis,” “genital,” “genocide, and “gonorrhea” (literally, flow of semen).
In its “general” entry, the OED has a section on the use of the noun in various adverbial phrases, including “as to the general” (generally), “for the general” (for the most part), and “in the general” (generally). All those are now considered obsolete.
The adverbial phrase “in general” showed up in the 1300s, when it meant universally as well as generally, but Oxford says the universal sense is now obsolete. (In post-classical Latin, in generale or in generali meant without specific reference.)
Here’s an example of the general sense of “in general” from Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529): “Somwhat wold I speke of Luther, & his secte ingenerall.”
In the early 1500s, the phrase “in general” took on the meaning of “for the most part; as a general rule; commonly, usually,” according to the OED.
Here’s an example from Pylgrimage of Perfection, a 1526 religious treatise by the monk and author William Bonde:
“I shall in general, gather certayne scrappes & cromes that holy doctors hath left behynde them in writyng.”
In contemporary English, “in general” generally means generally—that is, usually, mainly, or overall.
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Categories
A past that isn’t perfect
Q: I teach English as a foreign language. My students have a good grasp of the past perfect, but they’re freaking out at this sentence: “They arrived before the game had ended.” Shouldn’t a past-perfect action (the game) happen BEFORE the other action, not after? How do I explain this grammatically? Or is it, in fact, incorrect?
A: This construction is legitimate, even though the chronology seems mysterious on close examination. The key to the mystery, as we’ll explain later, is the word “before.”
As your students know, when we refer to two events that happened at different times in the past, we use different tenses—like the simple past tense (“arrived”) along with the past perfect (“had ended”).
Normally, the more recent event is described in the simple past tense and the more distant event in the past perfect. This clarifies the sequence of events.
Here’s an example of a normal chronology: “Steve had finished [past perfect] the book, so he returned [past] it yesterday.”
Even if we reverse the sentence—“Steve returned [past] the book yesterday because he had finished [past perfect] it”—we know the finishing happened before the returning.
The past perfect tips us off that an action happened further back in time than one described in the simple past. A linguist would say the past perfect is “anterior” to the simple past.
But here’s the catch. When the past-perfect event is introduced by the word “before,” as in the sentence that puzzled your students, the chronology seems to go awry.
Consider this sentence: “The library asked [past] for the book before he had finished [past perfect] it.”
Note that the event described in the simple past (the asking) comes before the one described in the past perfect (the finishing).
Logic tells us that the past-perfect event should chronologically precede the one in the simple past. But in fact the asking here happened first—the word “before” is staring us in the face.
The relationship between the two events may look screwy but in fact it’s not. That’s because the finishing of the book should have happened by that time but it didn’t. What was expected didn’t actually get done.
When we invent similar examples (“They left before we had eaten” … “He knew her before she had married Edgar” … “We drank the wine before it had been properly aerated”), the same notion is at work. The use of the past perfect here has little to do with the real chronology of events.
In grammatical terms, it appears that the use of the past perfect in cases like these isn’t so much temporal (having to do with time) as modal (having to do with what’s contrary to, or other than, simple fact).
As it turns out, we’ve found some academic writing on this subject, much of it by Renaat Declerck, professor emeritus of English linguistics at the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Declerck delivered a paper on the subject before an international linguistics conference in France in 2004. The article was later collected in a book of essays, Modality in English (2009), edited by Raphael Salkie and others.
In his paper, “ ‘Not-Yet-Factual at Time t’: A Neglected Modal Concept,” Declerck says the degrees of factuality generally recognized in linguistic literature range from factual to probable to possible to improbable to false.
He says linguists have rarely discussed another state of factuality—“the special use of the past perfect in (what I call) not-yet-factual before-clauses.”
In the sentence “She read the letter before I had read it,” Declerck says, “the function of using the anteriorized form had read … is therefore to bring not-yet-factuality into focus.”
In other words, the use of the past perfect emphasizes the idea that the event hadn’t yet come to pass—that it wasn’t yet a fact.
As Declerck explains, the “had”-less version is “weakly not-yet-factual” while the one with “had” is “strongly not-yet-factual.”
Two other linguists, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, have a somewhat different take on the difference between the “had” and “had”-less versions of these “before” clauses.
In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Huddleston and Pullum consider this example: “She left the country before she [wrote/had written] her thesis.”
The “had”-less version, they write, “indicates that the leaving preceded the whole of the thesis writing” while the “had” version “allows (and indeed suggests) that she had started writing when she left.”
As you can see, we’re dealing here with a subtle difference—one that’s viewed somewhat differently by the few linguists who’ve written about it.
Our feeling—and we’re not linguists—is that the use of the past perfect in these “before” clauses simply emphasizes the incompleteness of the event.
It’s true that your sentence—“They arrived before the game had ended”—could have been written entirely in the simple past instead: “They arrived before the game ended.”
But the use of two different tenses emphasizes the fact that the game was incomplete when they arrived.
We hope this sheds some light on a shadowy area of English. Best to you and to your students.
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Q: My husband was riding his bike slower than normal when a friend asked, “Did you have too much mashed potatoes last night?” That got him wondering: too much, too many, too much of? What is the correct methodology of inquiring if someone has overindulged in mashed potatoes?
A: A noun phrase like “mashed potatoes” can be confusing. Does it refer to the individual potatoes that have been mashed? Or to the dish produced by mashing them?
In technical terms, is “mashed potatoes” a countable or an uncountable noun phrase? Are we thinking of individual potatoes that can be counted, or a dish made from an indeterminate number of potatoes?
Well, there’s one thing we’ve learning after writing this blog for seven years. No job is too big or too small for academic linguists. They’ll take on anything.
Stephanie Solt, a researcher at DAS, a linguistics institute in Berlin, discusses the ambiguity of “mashed potatoes” and similar dishes in a paper entitled “Q-Adjectives and the Semantics of Quantity.”
In a footnote, she points out the difficulty in choosing between the adjectives “many” and “much” when modifying “anomalous plurals such as refried beans, mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs.”
She writes that these phrases “syntactically show at least some of the characteristics of plural count nouns, but semantically denote noncountable substances or portions of matter.”
“These items are at least marginally acceptable with both many and much, but with a difference in meaning,” she adds.
She gives two Q-and-A examples concerning “scrambled eggs” to make her point:
“Q: How many scrambled eggs do you want?
“A: Three
“Q: How much scrambled eggs do you want?
“A: A lot/a little/a scoopful/about half the amount you gave him.”
She also offers this hodgepodge of an example: “These/this mashed potatoes/refried beans/scrambled eggs are/is cold.”
Interestingly, the dishes that Americans call “mashed potatoes” and “scrambled eggs” are often referred to as “mashed potato” and “scrambled egg” by British speakers.
Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in England, discusses this in a post published a few years ago on her blog Separated by a Common Language.
“These kinds of prepared food are substances more than individuable things,” she writes. “You can’t see the boundaries of the individual eggs or potatoes once they are scrambled or mashed.”
She points out that the British “forms reflect this—they’re singular just as other ‘substance’ food names,” but the American forms “reflect the state of the food before mashing/scrambling.”
“Does this mean that Americans think more about the origins of their food?” she adds. “I can’t think of much other evidence for that.”
We agree. In fact, the American usage seems to be gaining ground in Britain. We’ve checked four standard British dictionaries and half of them list “mashed potatoes” as the primary entry with “mashed potato” as an also-ran.
Another way of looking at “mashed potatoes” is through the lens of notional agreement—that is, agreement based on meaning to the writer or speaker rather than on formal textbook grammar.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage gives this example of notional agreement from Ecclesiastes: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Here a compound subject (“time and chance”) takes a singular verb (“happeneth”).
And here’s one from a Jan. 20, 1938, letter by James Thurber: “I don’t think the barricades is an answer.”
Merriam-Webster’s has many more, but we’ll stop with this example from the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”
In the 18th century, the usage guide says, grammarians “undertook to prune the exuberant growth of English” and began insisting on formal agreement.
“Modern grammarians are not so insistent,” M-W says, noting that George O. Curme and Randolph Quirk have recognized that when compound nouns form a “collective idea” the “singular verb is appropriate—notional agreement prevails.”
Getting back to your question, we think of “mashed potatoes” as a dish, not the components of the dish. So we’d use “too much,” not “too many,” to modify “mashed potatoes.”
However, Google searches indicate that “too much mashed potatoes” is only slightly more popular than “too many mashed potatoes,” and “too much mashed potato” is a distant third. The expression “too much of the mashed potatoes” barely registers.
By the way, the earliest example of the dish in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, a 1747 cookbook by Hannah Glasse:
“Mashed Potatoes. Boil your Potatoes, peel them, and put them into a saucepan, mash them well; To two Pounds of Potatoes put a Pint of Milk, a little salt; stir them well together, take care they do not stick to the bottom; then take a quarter of a pound of butter, stir it in, and serve it up.”
The OED’s entry, which is listed under the singular “mashed potato,” includes both singular and plural citations for the side dish.
Here’s a singular citation from the Guardian’s Oct. 15, 1994, weekend supplement: “My ribeye of beef with mashed potato.”
The entry also includes references to the dance (called the “mashed potato,” “mash potato,” or “mashed potatoes”) that was popular during the early 1960s.
The OED’s earliest citation for the dance is a 1959 reference to the James Brown song “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes,” which became a Top 10 rhythm-and-blues hit in 1960.
This one, from the March 6, 1963, issue of Punch, includes two other dance crazes from the ’60s: “The Mashed Potato … remains as much of a mystery as the Hully-Gully and the Loco-Motion.”
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Q: I am editing a document that contains the following sentence: “The problem is, how do we properly make sense of it all and use it to our benefit?” My issue is the propriety of the comma. My first inclination is to rewrite the sentence, but I am having a hard time determining exactly what is improper about the original usage. What do you think?
A: You’re right in thinking that we don’t normally use a comma to separate a verb like “is” from its object. But when the object is a direct question, it’s usually preceded by a comma and followed by a question mark.
We’ve touched on this subject before on our blog, including postings in 2010 and 2008. This is an issue of style, rather than grammar or usage.
The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) says a direct question like the one in your example “is usually introduced by a comma” unless it comes at the beginning of a sentence.
The Chicago Manual, which is widely used in the publishing industry, adds that such an interior question “may take an initial capital letter if it is relatively long or has internal punctuation.”
The style guide gives several examples, including this one: “The question on everyone’s mind was, how are we going to tell her?” Your sentence (“The problem is, how …”) is a parallel example.
The Chicago Manual says an alternative is to rephrase and use an indirect question, as in “The question of how to tell her was on everyone’s mind.”
You didn’t ask about this, but a related issue is whether to use quotation marks to describe thoughts or questions that aren’t actually spoken.
“Thought, imagined dialogue, and other interior discourse may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context or the writer’s preference,” Chicago says. The style guide gives these two examples:
“I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern,” thought Vera. “Besides,” she told herself, “they’re all fools.”
Why, we wondered, did we choose this route?
By the way, we noted in a posting last year that the word “comma” referred to a small piece of a sentence when it entered English in the late 16th century, but it soon came to mean the punctuation mark at the end of the piece.
Although English adopted the word from the Latin comma, it’s ultimately derived from the Greek komma (literally, a piece cut off), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.
Ayto adds that the Greek verb koptein (to cut) gave Russians the word kopeck and probably gave English the word “capon.”
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Q: This one riles me to no end. Even the most intelligent people use “everyday” for “every day.” I began to notice it a couple of years ago, as if it started with one person and caught on like wildfire. Please tell me I’m not mistaken: If you want an adjective, it’s one word. If you mean something occurs every day, it’s two words.
A: You’re not mistaken. Generally the single word is an adjective (“He’s wearing everyday clothes”) and the two-word phrase functions as either a noun (“Every day is an adventure”) or an adverb (“She gardens every day”).
However, the use of “everyday” for “every day” isn’t all that new. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has examples going back more than three decades.
Here’s one from the November 1980 issue of Vogue: “Everyday I see or read about women in similar roles.”
“This form may well get into dictionaries someday,” Merriam-Webster’s editors say, “but for now the two-word styling for the adverbial phrase is still more common.”
In her grammar and usage book Woe Is I, Pat gives these examples of “everyday” and “every day” at play: “I just love my everyday diamonds,” said Magda. “That’s why you wear them every day,” said Eva.
We should add here that the single word can also be used as a noun meaning a typical or ordinary day. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, gives these two examples of this less common usage:
“I wore this dress—I wear it for everyday” (Eudora Welty).
“The trite and feeble language of everyday” (Clyde S. Kilby, an American author and educator).
Interestingly, the adjective was actually two words connected with a hyphen when it showed up in English in the 1600s.
The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from The City Madam, a comedy that the English dramatist Philip Massinger wrote sometime before 1640: “Few great Ladies going to a Masque … out-shine ours in their every-day habits.”
Charles Dickens was still hyphenating the adjective two centuries later. Here’s an example from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841): “Mr. Quilp invested himself in his every-day garments.”
The OED’s first example of the adjective written as a single word is from Edward Augustus Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest (1868): “Treason is spoken of as an everyday matter.”
Etymology aside, standard dictionaries now list the adjective as one word. And usage guides say the two-word phrase acts as a noun or an adverb.
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She’s on Talk of Iowa today from 10 to 11 AM Central time (11 to 12 Eastern) to discuss the English language and take questions from callers.
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Three little Wendys
Q: Please tell me the correct way to “pluralize” (is this a word?) a person’s name. For example, “The Marxes (a couple named Marx) will be presenting their ideas to the board.” Is there a rule about when to add an “es” or only an “s”?
A: We wrote a post a few years ago about how names are pluralized (yes, it’s a word), but the subject comes up so often that the commonly accepted rules bear repeating.
Any name or other word ending in a sibilant (a hissing, shushing, or buzzing sound, as in “s” “ch,” “sh,” “x,” or “z”) is pluralized with the addition of “es.”
Examples: “Joneses” … “Foxes” … “Birches” … “Lopezes” … “Schultzes” … “Gishes” … “Fitches.”
In general, names are pluralized the same way as ordinary nouns—except for irregular nouns like “sheep,” “fish,” “children,” and others.
A family named “Child,” for example, would be pluralized as “the Childs.” And a family named “Childs” would be pluralized as “the Childses.”
However, names ending in “y” are treated differently from ordinary nouns ending in “y.”
When a name ends in “y,” it’s pluralized with “s” instead of “ies.” So a family named “Brady” would be pluralized as “the Bradys.” And three little girls named “Wendy” would be “three little Wendys.”
You’ll find these rules in all major usage guides, including Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.), Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I (3rd ed.).
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“Very” similitude
Q: My mother, an old-school English teacher/grammarian, insisted that it was incorrect to say “very amused.” She said that it should be “very much amused.”
A: Both of these sentences—“He was very amused” and “He was very much amused”—are perfectly good English. (“He was much amused” is fine, too, for that matter.)
Your mother was thinking of an old prohibition against “very” that first reared its head in the late 19th century and was criticized even then.
Although you can still find a few sticklers who haven’t heard the word, that old taboo has long been discredited by language authorities.
Why did it rear its head in the first place? The reasoning goes something like this:
Since “very” doesn’t modify verbs (only adjectives and adverbs), it shouldn’t be used right before a verb’s past participle, like “amused.”
When “very” appears with a past participle, the critics said, an adverb like “much” should be inserted so that “very” modifies “much,” not the participle.
That’s the argument, and because of it some language commentators of the past have objected even to usages like “We were very annoyed” and “I am very concerned.”
But fortunately modern usage authorities have brought common sense to the rescue.
Words like “amused,” “annoyed,” and “concerned” are indeed the past participles of verbs (“amuse,” “annoy,” “concern”).
But in sentences like the ones above they’re also adjectives—the kind of adjectives that are formed from past participles. So there’s nothing wrong with “very amused” and the rest.
We’re more likely to use “very” with a participial adjective having to do with a condition, feeling, mental state, and the like—“bored,” “amused,” “relaxed,” “surprised,” “mistaken,” etc.
And the participle is often used passively—that is, with a form of “be,” as in “was very mistaken,” “am very surprised,” “were very bored,” and so on.
Past participles like those have firmly established themselves in the wide family of English adjectives. It’s become natural to see, hear, and use them with “very.”
Some other past participles, though, haven’t yet reached this point, as R. W. Burchfield points out in Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.).
“There are many passive participles which by their very nature are incapable of being qualified by either much or very,” Burchfield writes, citing “defeated,” “finished.” “forced,” “located,” “undetected,” and “unsolved.”
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage suggests, however, that English speakers could even be “very”-ing words like those one day.
“The movement of past participles into adjective function—based on premodification by very—began in the 17th century,” Merriam-Webster’s says.
This is “a continuing process,” M-W’s editors write, and “participles that sound awkward with very today may sound fine in another generation.”
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Q: When a quote comes right after a verb like “said” or “asked,” we use a comma (e.g., God said, “Thou shalt not kill”). But do we still need a comma if we don’t use a verb (e.g., God’s statement “Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments)?
A: No, you wouldn’t use a comma to introduce the quotation in your second example.
The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) notes (as you point out) that a quotation “in the form of dialogue or from text is traditionally introduced with a comma.”
Elsewhere, the manual says, “a comma is used after said, replied, asked, and similar verbs.”
But not every quotation requires an introductory comma.
For instance, the Chicago Manual says no comma is needed before a quote introduced by “that,” “if,” “whether,” or a similar conjunction.
We’ll invent some examples: “He wondered if ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was the fifth or sixth commandment” … “She asked whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or ‘You shall not murder’ was the proper wording” … “How can a murderer believe that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is God’s law?”
And your sentence—“God’s statement ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is one of the Ten Commandments”—illustrates another kind of quotation that doesn’t need a comma.
In this case the quotation (“Thou shalt not kill”) is the explanatory equivalent of the subject (“God’s statement”).
An English teacher would call the quotation an appositive—something placed in apposition to a noun or noun phrase. Grammatically, “apposite” means equivalent (not to be confused with “opposite”).
Sometimes these explanatory equivalents are surrounded by commas and sometimes they’re not.
The Chicago Manual explains the situation in a nutshell here (brace yourself for more grammatical terminology):
“A word, abbreviation, phrase, or clause that is in apposition to a noun (i.e., provides an explanatory equivalent) is normally set off by commas if it is nonrestrictive—that is, if it can be omitted without obscuring the identity of the noun to which it refers. …
“If, however, the word or phrase is restrictive—that is, provides essential information about the noun (or nouns) to which it refers—no commas should appear.”
In plain English, put commas around an explanatory equivalent that’s dispensable—one that could be dropped without losing the point of the sentence. But don’t put commas around one that’s essential to the point.
In your sentence (“God’s statement ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is one of the Ten Commandments”), the appositive (“Thou shalt not kill”) is essential, so you don’t need commas. If you dropped the appositive, the point of the sentence would be lost.
In a section on “maxims, proverbs, mottoes and other familiar expressions,” the Chicago Manual gives examples of two appositive sayings, one with commas and one without:
Commas used: “Tom’s favorite proverb, ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ proved wrong.”
Commas omitted: “The motto ‘All for one and one for all’ appears over the door.”
We’ve written before, including posts in 2011 and 2009, about why some explanatory equivalents are surrounded by commas and some aren’t. Here are examples of both:
“My husband, John, will be joining us for dinner.” (Commas used; you have only one husband, so the name isn’t essential information.)
“My friend Susan will be joining us for dinner.” (Commas omitted; she’s not your only friend, so her name is essential to identify which friend.)
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Q: You’ve written an article about the clipped infinitive and past tenses for the verb “text.” What about the converse—the elongated past tense and past participle “drownded.”
A: We’ll get to “drownded” in a moment, but here’s an aside that illustrates another example of unnecessary elongation.
Pat recently opened a new package of socks that the manufacturer claimed were “pre-shrunked.” Ouch! Now, on to your question.
The familiar “drownded,” which many of us perpetrated in childhood, is another example of the tendency to add an extra “-ed” ending to a verb that doesn’t require one.
The past tense and past participle of the verb “drown” (which has been part of English since around 1300) is simply “drowned.”
So we say, “The victim drowned” and “The victim has drowned.”
But little children, as well as adults who don’t know any better, sometimes use “drownded” as the past tense, past participle, and participial adjective. (A Google search produced 129,000 hits.)
This is a nonstandard usage, though the word “drownded” has shown up at times in the past, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED lists it as a past form of “drownd,” a variant of “drown” that came along in the 1500s and was “widely prevalent in dialectal and vulgar use.”
This variant verb “drownd” is described by the OED as “parallel in development to astound, bound, compound, sound, etc.”
The OED has several citations for this nonstandard verb. Here are two that use it in the present:
“Thy curate (that otherwise wold mumble in the mouth & drounde his wordes).” From Robert Crowley’s The Way to Wealth (1550).
“He had a beautiful voice. He could drownd out the whole choir.” From Harper’s Magazine (1884).
And here are several examples using the past tense “drownded”:
“God … drownded Pharaoh and his host in the read sea.” From William Prynne’s Vindic. Psalme (1644).
“In my own Thames may I be drownded.” From a dialogue of Jonathan Swift (1727).
“They dy’d … in Seas of sorrow Drownded.” From The Roxburghe Ballads (circa 1679).
“ ‘Just fill that mug up with lukewarm water, William, will you?’… ‘Why, the milk will be drownded.’ ” From Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839).
Still, as we’ve said, these examples of “drownded” are past tenses of a nonstandard verb “drownd.” In other words, they’ve been grounded.
In modern usage, the standard verb is “drown” and the past tense or past participle is “drowned”—no extra “-ed” is needed.
Similarly, the participial adjective is now “drowned” and it’s been spelled that way since around 1500.
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Q: Wish you would address “good-paying job” versus “well-paying job.”
A: We’re taught that “good” is an adjective, not an adverb, so it shouldn’t be used to modify a verb or another adjective.
That, in a nutshell, is why many people regard “good-paying job” as inferior to “well-paying job.”
They think a verb form like the participle “paying” should be modified by “well,” an adverb, not “good,” an adjective.
However, language authorities say “good” has been used as an adverb or a quasi-adverb since the Middle Ages, and this adverbial usage wasn’t criticized until the latter half of the 19th century.
In fact, the phrase “good-paying job” doesn’t strike us as bad English—informal, perhaps, but not incorrect.
It seems more natural and idiomatic than the stiffer, consciously correct “well-paying job,” especially in speech and casual writing.
Although many people consider “good-paying job” an acceptable idiom, “well-paying job” is more popular in edited writing, according to a search with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks words and phrases in digitized books. [Note: Updated Nov. 16, 2020.]
We believe that in “good-paying job,” the word “good” is being used idiomatically as an adverb to modify the present participle “paying.”
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees, noting that “good” has been used as an adverb since the 13th century, and that this adverbial use wasn’t criticized until the 19th.
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t go that far, but it describes a category of usages in which the adjective “good” is used “in quasi-adverbial combination” with present participles.
Such a combination, the OED says, is “used adjectivally”—that is, the combined phrase modifies a noun (like “job”).
While the OED says that “in none of these instances is good adverbial in origin,” it nevertheless sometimes functions as an adverb.
There are other common usages in which “good” plays an adverbial role, though in most of them the OED stops short of classifying the word as an adverb:
● The adverbial phrase “as good as.” This modifies a verb or an adjective and means the same as an adverb like “practically.” Examples: “He as good as confessed” … “The victim was as good as dead.”
● Phrases like “a good long time,” “a good sharp knife,” “a good many people,” and so on. Here, “good” acts as an adverb like “very” or “properly.” It modifies the adjective and serves as an intensifier.
● The phrase “good and.” This colloquial expression is an adverbial phrase that intensifies, as in “his hair was good and red” … “until we’re good and ready.”
● The phrases “for good” (as in “he left for good”) and “but good” (“you socked him but good”). These adverbial idioms can be compared to “finally” and “well.”
Merriam-Webster’s, which calls “good” an adverb when it functions as one, says English speakers of all educational levels use “good” adverbially.
“Our evidence shows that adverbial good is common in the speech of the less educated, but is also known and used by the better educated,” M-W’s editors write.
Ironically, they add, “The schoolmasterly insistence on well for the adverb may have contributed to the thriving condition of adverbial good.”
We can imagine a couple of reasons why “good-paying job,” in particular, seems natural to many.
(1) “Good” has other forms—“better” and “best.” There’s nothing at all wrong with “better-paying job” or “best-paying job.” So why not “good-paying job”?
A critic might argue that “better” and “best” are adverbs—forms of “well”—when used with participles like “paying.” (In fact, the OED does categorize them as adverbs when so used.)
But isn’t this a circular argument?
If one calls “good” a misused adjective in “good-paying job,” then why aren’t “better” and “best” adjectives when used in the same expression?
We could just as easily call all three—“good,” “better,” “best”—adjectives being used informally in an adverbial way to modify the participle “paying.”
(2) We use the adjective “good” in phrases like “good-looking boy” and “good-tasting pie,” so why not in “good-paying job”?
A critic might answer that “look” and “taste” are grammatically different from most verbs. They’re known as linking verbs, which are modified by adjectives like “good” instead of adverbs like “well.” (We’ve written about linking verbs before, including posts in 2012 and 2010.)
Here we would respond that when “good” modifies the participle of a linking verb (as in “good-looking,” “good-tasting”), it’s clearly an adjective—not an adverb.
But when it modifies the participle of a non-linking verb (“good-paying”), then it’s being used informally as an adverb.
We admit that “good-paying” is informal English. So do the editors at Merriam-Webster’s, who suggest that “adverbial good is still primarily a speech form.”
“Our evidence,” they write, “is mostly from reported or fictional speech, letters, and similar breezy and familiar contexts. It is not likely to be needed in a book review or a doctoral dissertation.”
We’ll end with an example of the usage from a 1936 letter by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress: “It pays good and keeps the boys in school.”
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“I” strain
Q: I hear more and more people substitute “I’s” for “my” or “mine.” For example, “My friends had a wonderful time at Jason and I’s party.” Ouch! That hurts my ears! Is this something that will fade away, or will it eventually become accepted?
A: You’re right. A lot of people are using “I’s” as a possessive of “I,” though mostly in place of “my,” not “mine.”
We got millions of hits when we googled “John and I’s,” “Bob and I’s,” and so on. Here are a few examples:
● “You really captured the spirit of John and I’s relationship and I absolutely cannot wait to see more of the shots!”
● “Thank you for supporting Jason and I’s celebration.”
● “Bob and I’s story is short, pathetic and kind of sweet!”
● “Tomorrow is Sam and I’s 2nd wedding anniversary.”
This usage seems to be relatively new. The earliest examples we could find were from 2004. Here’s an early one from the film producer Harvey Weinstein about the Weinstein brothers’ rocky relationship with Disney.
“They get to see my books all the time, so there’s no hiding what we do. On the flip side, Bob and I’s pay is determined by accounting from Disney. I don’t get to see everything unless I ask for an audit.”
Getting back to your question, what should be used in place of “Jason and I’s party”?
Well, “Jason’s and my party” would be correct, but that’s not the most felicitous phrasing. We’d prefer something like “our party” or, if you need to mention Jason, “our party, Jason’s and mine.”
Is this “I’s” business something that will fade away? Probably, but only time will tell.
In looking into your question, we came across a paper by Karen Milligan, a linguist at Wayne State University, about the grammar of joint possession.
In “Expressing Joint Possession: Or, Why me and Mary’s paper wasn’t accepted (but Bob and I’s was),” she suggests that the natural way of expressing joint possession (she calls it “the default construction”), is “me and Sean’s.”
She says this is “syntactically the most economical choice and the one utilized by children first. It is also the one adults revert to subconsciously—when under stress or in unguarded speech.”
Ms. Milligan writes that the early usage “declines with age, leading to eventual abandonment” as the “over-extension or misappropriation of prescriptive rules results in constructions that are semantically altered and/or unpredicted by the grammar of English.”
In other words, she seems to be arguing, we got it right as toddlers and we can blame English teachers for our difficulties in expressing joint possession as adults.
Well, that’s enlightening. But since you’re a grownup who expresses joint possession in an adult (albeit syntactically uneconomical) way, you might be interested in a brief post we wrote a few years ago on the subject.
[Update, Oct. 5, 2013. A reader had this interesting comment: “I think that you may find a commonality among most uses of ‘X and I’s’—it is predominantly used when the speaker thinks of the pair of people as a single entity. So couples (or a pair of siblings) will use it when they are talking about themselves as a unit. The possessive gets applied to the noun phrase ‘John and I.’
“This structure would be much less likely to occur with temporary or less significant pairs. If I were to team up with a colleague at work to solve a problem, I would never refer to ‘Trevor and I’s plan.’ However, it would not be uncomfortable to make reference to ‘Heather and I’s wedding anniversary.’ ”]
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