grammar nazi

Less than perfect

2011-04-29T08:55:00.006+09:30

I like to come back to this blog every year or so. In fact, I got to work at 8.30 this morning so don't feel so bad wasting half an hour writing about one of my favourite things: grammar.

Today, our source material comes from twitter.

@PreciseEdit tweets:

Wrong: We have LESS than 3 gallons remaining. Right: We have FEWER than 3 gallons remaining.

Um.

It's hard to know where to start with this one. How about here: THAT IS SO UNBELIEVABLY WRONG!!

Actually, that may not be the best place to start. This blog has never been about right and wrong and I don't take a black and white approach to English.

Mostly.

Cos, y'know, this is wrong.

Isn't it?

There may be a grey area. Let's explore.

I've been an advocate of the word "fewer" for as long as I can remember. It's not a hard word to say, it has only five letters, yet people insist on mis-using the word "less" where "fewer" would be perfectly fine.

To go over the rule quickly, we use "less" when we're talking about a single mass of the same thing but "fewer" when we're talking about a number of individual things.

For example:

We bought a dozen cupcakes for the party. I just ate one, so now there are fewer cupcakes.

and

We bought a big cake for the party. I just ate a slice, so now there is less cake.

Now, what @PreciseEdit did is interesting. He used a liquid as his example. And here's where things get a bit vague.

Let's say you have three gallons of something. How is it contained? Is it in one big container, such as a petrol (or, for our trans-pacific cousins, gas) tank? Or, is it milk, in three individual, one-gallon bottles?

This is important, and to be fair to @PreciseEdit, it's hard to give complete context when you only have 140 characters to make your point.

But back to the containers.

Let's assume we're talking about milk in bottles (because I don't think they make cartons that big). And let's assume that you're referring to each bottle as a gallon.

So, if you came home from the supermarket with two bottles of white, cow-derived dairy liquid, you could conceivably say:

I have bought some milk. I only had enough money to buy two bottles, so we have fewer than three gallons.

Why anyone would feel the need to point that out, I don't know. But if you were referring to the presence or absence of a number of gallon-sized units of a particular liquid, there is a case where you could conceivably use the word "fewer" in referring to them.

"How many gallon-sized bottles of milk am I holding up?"
"Four?"
"No, fewer."

You get the idea.

Now, the problem with liquid is that you can't count it the way you do, say, cupcakes, pipe bombs, testicles, whatever.

When liquid is in a container, it doesn't care how much of itself there is. It's not obvious to us all that it's a particular number of somethings.

If you see a person with one arm, you immediately know the quantity of arms you're looking at and that there are fewer than the normal amount. But you can't do that with liquid. You can't tell just by looking at a liquid how many of it there are.

A mass of liquid, when you take a bit of it away, is still just a mass of liquid.

What we do as humans, because we need to know these things, is assign an arbitrary measure to this liquid. In this case, volume.

So let's say that we have an empty tank, we go to the petrol station (please suspend your disbelief; I don't know how we got the car here on an empty tank) and we put exactly 11.35623534 litres in the tank. We do this because we don't live in a backwards country that hasn't even caught on to the metric system yet. If we did though, we would have bought exactly three gallons of fuel.

Now, let's say we drive around the block and measure how much is in the tank. Will it be two gallons exactly?

Shit, no. It's going to be 2-point-nine-something gallons of fuel, or 11-point-one-something litres.

Now, we have less fuel than we did when we started.

Ask yourself. Do we have fewer than three gallons? Or less than three gallons.

It's less.

It's the same with money. While it might be tempting to say "I just bought a $3 coffee and paid for it with a hundred, so I now have fewer than $100", it's not really the best way to explain the concept because as soon as you break up a dollar into smaller units, you can't really quantify the number of dollars. They cease to become discrete units that can be counted. So if your coffee was $2.80 you didn't spend fewer than three dollars on it, you spent less than three.

And on that note, it's time for my coffee. I like it hot but please let's not get started on whether it should be over 60° or more than 60°. You work it out.

Being objective

2010-09-28T20:31:00.001+09:30

Did you see what I did there? Yep, fell asleep for a few years.

Anything change while I was gone? Are people still getting simple stuff wrong? Not much, then.

I've been having a very long and drawn out discussion over the past few days with a fellow twitter user over that old chestnut debate over whether to use "my friends and me" or "my friends and I".

English teachers (who all have the best intentions, I'm sure, bless) drill it into us at a young age that, when we're talking about ourselves in the company of others, we should always use "My friends/wife/mum/bridge team/uncle Bob/therapist and I".

It seems only right, of course. When we're going through a door, it's polite to let other people through first.

But there are two issues at play here: etiquette and grammar; and I think some users of English are prioritising the former over the latter.

Yes folks, time for a basic lesson in pronouns.

For this lesson, let's use the following sentence as a model.

Barry gives flowers to his girlfriend.

In this sentence, Barry is the subject; flowers is the direct object; and his girlfriend is the indirect object.

Barry is the subject of the sentence because he's what the sentence is about. We conjugate the verb to agree in number and gender (which isn't a big deal in English so forget I mentioned it) to agree with the subject. So in this instance we say gives instead of give. (I orginally had this sentence in the past tense but had to change it to illustrate this point as the past participle agrees with all subjects, regardless of number. (Ignore this parenthetical remark if you don't know what a past participle is; I'm trying to eliminate confusion, not cause more.))

Flowers is the direct object because this is what the verb gets done to. The verb is 'to give'. What gets given? Flowers. Clear? Good.

His [Barry's] girlfriend is the indirect object because the verb doesn't happen directly to her but she is indirectly involved. The indirect object will always have a preposition before it. In this case, to, and a preposition (as we all know) is a word which is placed before a noun to denote a syntactic or grammatical relationship between that noun and its antecedent (the thing that comes before it).

I'm thinking around now that I should have given Barry a nicer name, like Heath or something. Sorry Barry. And sorry Barry's girlfriend too.

Pronouns come in two varieties: subjective and objective. Subjective pronouns are used to replace the subject of a sentence.

He gives flowers to his girlfriend.

Now, because our objects come in two forms, so do our object pronouns. Sure, they're the same set of words, but depending what role they play in a sentence, they can be either direct-object pronouns or indirect-object pronouns. They replace the direct object and indirect object respectively.

Barry gives them to her.

Them is the direct-object pronoun, replacing flowers; her is the indirect-object pronoun, replacing his girlfriend, who I have decided to name Scarlett.

Scarlett is lucky to get flowers. But I guess this is compensation for having a boyfriend named Barry.

Now, onto the case in point, where we have multiple people playing the part of either subject or object. Or, indeed, both.

If I'm set to go out with Barry and Scarlett for a few drinks, I might say:

My friends and I are going to the pub.

In this example my friends and I is the subject of the sentence. It could be replaced by the pronoun we and still agree with the verb. If I said 'Barry and I are going to the pub', I'd still have to use the verb are because if it were just Barry going to the pub, it would be Barry is and if it were just me, it would be I am.

That's the grammar of it. Etiquette and English teachers dictate that we put our friends first, which most of us do. The construction I and my friends are going to the pub is obviously not as common and sounds a little strange, however it is really no less gramatically correct. The pronoun I is a subjective pronoun. Other subjective pronouns are you, he, she, we, they.

But what happens when my friends and I are not the subject..

Heath bought a round of drinks for my friends and me.

Heath is now the subject of the sentence. He's also a great guy and I think Scarlett is a little jealous that he's the gregarious, drink-buying type. Barry's not impressed.

Now, Heath bought drinks for all of us, and now that we're all indirect objects, any of the following could be true (and gramatically correct):

Heath bought a drink for me
Heath bought drinks for them
Heath bought drinks for my friends
Heath bought a round of drinks for all of us

Heath must be loaded.

The point being is that we're now looking at object pronouns, namely me, you, him, her, us, them, it.

The litmus test as to which pronoun to use when multiple subjects exist, is to take out one or the other and see if the sentence still makes sense. If the sentence reads:

Heath and me are cool

If we take out Heath, it just reads Me are cool. Of course you would conjugate the verb properly and it would read me is cool, which, while true, is bad grammar.

Another bad example (the one most people get wrong):

The waitress just said hi to Heath and I

Again, if we take Heath out of the equation, it becomes The waitress just said hi to I, which is also a bit ugly. And wrong.

Etiquette may come into play with multiple indirect objects. Compare:

She just bought drinks for my friends and me

with

She just bought drinks for me and my friends

One of these constructions may be impolite. I wouldn't know; I'm not an expert in the finer points of etiquette but neither phrasing is gramatically incorrect.

Scarlett just left with Heath.

The waitress and I are getting along well.

Barry is forlorn and is considering changing his name by deed poll.

Happy holidays

2007-05-30T21:56:00.000+09:30

It was my wife's turn to choose a DVD at the local Brickbuster the other night. She hired The Holiday. It was a chick flick: some funny moments but otherwise rubbish. As expected.

When it ended, my wife brought up the fact that while we in Australia and Britain use the expression "going on holiday," those on the other side of the Pacific/Atlantic in the USA use the expression "going on vacation". We wondered if, in the US, the movie might have been called The Vacation. It isn't.

But etymologically, the nuances of difference between the words holiday and vacation are interesting.

Holiday is a good old English word from the 14th century. It's so old it used to be spelled with that letter where an o and an e were joined together. It originally and fairly obviously meant "holy day" but came to mean "a day of festivity or recreation on which no work is done," a meaning that has been with us (or probably our ancestors) since the 16th century.

In the US, the term still refers to the day or days when people don't go to work. "What are you doing for the holiday?" The equivalent of this meaning in Australia is public holiday and the English refer to their bank holidays as an approximate translation.

Today, when we take a holiday or go on a holiday or, in the plural, go on holidays, we're usually talking about going somewhere. "I'm going on holidays in Europe," one might say. And one would have a lovely time; it's beautiful this time of year.

But whereas we use the term holiday to refer to where we're going, the term vacation, from vacate and the same latin root that gave us vacancy and vacant, refers not to the day itself or where you're going but where you're leaving.

When you take a vacation, you vacate your premises. (When your brain takes a vacation you might vacate your premisses. Ha ha ha, aren't I witty!) Your home becomes vacant and you might choose a place to stay that has a vacancy.

A holiday house, perhaps.

No, yes!

2007-05-25T10:16:00.000+09:30

Whoops. Forgot I had a hobby picking apart the minutiae of other people's writing/speech for a minute there. I had to go to hospital last year to have a sense of humour operation, hence the no-posting-for-over-a-year-while-I-recovered thing.

But perhaps my brain isn't ready to take up the reins of pedantry yet; as I was writing that first sentence I completely forgot what this post was going to be about.

It's completely gone.

I'd just better go and retrace my steps.

... sat at desk... got coffee (not at desk, in kitchen)... sat at desk again... checked RSS feeds... checked emails... sent SMS to wife... read previous posts and laughed smugly to self...

Ah, that was it! Something I wrote in an email gave me the idea. Seriously, I was struggling there. Now I can fill in the 'title' part of this post.

That done, let's get on with it.

Hang on, I'm going to need more coffee.

Ah, that's better. Now, on with the post.

Have you ever been asked a question you weren't quite sure how to answer? And I don't mean in a "Daddy, what's that man doing to that lady?" kind of way. I'm talking about that wavering uncertainty you get when someone asks you a negative question and you're not sure whether to answer in the positive or the negative.

An example might be in order. Consider the question:
You're not going to eat that, are you?

How do you respond? There are a number of options. That number is four. Options are:
a) No (I'm not)
b) Yes (I am)
c) No (I am)
d) Yes (I'm not)

Of course, unless you specify the parenthetical intent of your reply, things can get rather ambiguous. It's a case of simple mathematics, or grammar; I'm not entirely sure.

We're all taught that two negatives make a positive. So, -2 x -3 =6. The functional grammar approach to this comes up with the same positive answer, to wit: Don't give me none of that cake expresses, when taken literally, an instruction to indeed give some cake to the speaker. If you give someone none of something, they get none. If you don't give them none, you're giving them some (or possibly all) of whatever it is you're serving up with a cuppa for elevenses.

So when someone says, "You don't want any, do you?" they're already putting out one negative. If you answer with "yes," a positive, you agree with the proposition and are effectively saying "yes, I don't want any".

If, however, you answer with a negative, you are in effect negating what has been proposed. In this case "No. I do want some". And this sounds a bit like you're saying "No, yes!".

English has long been referred to as a sort of melting pot of other languages. If English needs a word, we just take it from whatever language has the word we need and we use it. Off the top of my head, words like delicatessen, robot and café all fall into this category.

Why then, oh why, haven't we adopted a positive negative response from another language?

Let's take French, for instance (it being the only other language I've had any official training in). If someone were to ask you "N'aimez-vous pas de gateau?" (don't you like cake?) and you answered "oui", you would indeed be agreeing with them, that you don't like cake.

If you said "non" they'd probably think the same thing because you'd be saying "no, I don't like it".

(Actually, I don't know what they'd really think and I don't have one handy to ask. They would probably look at you funny though because you don't speak French. If you did, you'd know how to answer properly. For that matter, you'd know how to ask "don't you like cake?" a whole lot more idiomatically and eloquently than I do.)

The correct response if you did like cake would be to say "Si". Because, really... who doesn't like cake? What on earth's wrong with you?

Si is the French word for No, yes! It is a contradictory yes, one that corrects a negative assumption.

But we don't have a similar word in English, which leads to all sorts of confusion, especially for French people.

Reasons why not

2006-04-17T13:51:00.000+09:30

I hear it in a lot of songs but am noticing it more and more in everyday speech, the phrase "the reason why".

Obviously, why rhymes with a lot more things than reason does (season, teasin', pleasin' is about all you get in song lyrics these days) so I can accept the poetic licence angle but in everyday speech, the sentence "He did it without knowing the reason why." is, I'm afraid, completely unnecessary.

Can I give you a reason? Can I tell you why?

Well, I've just illustrated it: they're kind of the same thing. If you're asking someone "why?", you could just as well be asking "for what reason?". The meaning is identical. In my earlier example, it would be sufficient to leave out either option: "He did it without knowing the reason," or "He did it without knowing why,".

To use both is tautologically superfluous, yeah?

So stop using it in everyday speech. And if you're a songwriter that employs the phrase, you could really do with taking a longer look in the rhyming dictionary when you're sitting at the piano.

Dangerous

2006-01-04T17:04:00.000+10:30

I've noticed a growing trend among media types to use a certain turn of phrase which has the hallmarks of mediaspeak and which is hopelessly redundant.

This certain turn of phrase occurs with words like 'danger' and 'risk'. Both these words imply that there's a possibility of something unfortunate or unwanted occuring. They are not absolute words, therefore they can be qualified, or even quantified: you can have a 'low fire danger' or a '40 per cent risk of getting out if you pad up to an off-spinner. However, they are completely intangible things. They don't actually exist; danger and risk aren't things you can see, touch, feel or mark in a diary. They're not things you can pick up from the shop on the way home. They are used more to estimate the likelihood of something more tangible happening: if you go skydiving there's a danger of injury or death; if you have sex, there's a risk of pregnancy (assuming that pregnancy at the time of the act is unwanted. 'Risk' carries somewhat negative connotations in this respect. If you do want a child, then there's a chance, or a possibility of pregnancy).

What then, of the writer who speaks (or writes, obviously) of 'potential dangers' or 'potential risks'? What is 'potential danger' but the possibility of the possibility of harm or injury? What is 'potential risk' but the chance of the chance of something going wrong? It doesn't matter how remote the chance is; if there's a chance that something might happen, then there's a chance. So you can say there's a low risk, or a slight, minimal or 1 per cent risk; you can say there's little danger, or that something is a bit dangerous. But potentially dangerous? If something is said to have the potential to be dangerous, then we're saying that under certain circumstances, there are risks involved; and when my Concise Oxford defines 'risk' as a chance or possibility of danger, loss, injury, or other adverse consequences then you can see that we're beginning to talk in circles. Danger of an accident or risk of an accident is the same as potential for an accident.

'Risk' and 'danger' are not faits accomplis so by using the terms 'potential risk' and 'potential danger' a writer implies that the removal of the potential will surely result in whatever the risk or danger was. By using the superfluous word, there's a risk that the words themselves may lose their meaning, until 'risk' and 'danger' are regarded as certainties, unless the 'potential' is expressly mentioned.

And just out of interest, here are the Google results for the number of usages of these, and associated phrases (just so you know I'm not making it up).

2,160,000 for "potential risk"
939,000 for "potential danger"
120,000 for "potentially risky"
2,980,000 for "potentially dangerous"

A most indefinite article

2005-12-08T11:28:00.000+10:30

Again, BT3 has tapped on GN's skull, hoping to tap the brain that lies therein. Of course, the skull in question is a metaphor for this website; I don't know what the tap is a metaphor for but I'm sure there's some form of head adornment we can decide on for that purpose at a later date. Anyway, this indeterminate time period's question is:

'An' historic.

Why through Jehovah's own eyeballs would it be an historic?

While you think of a response, I'll just straddle an horse and ride through an house on the way to an harbour, where I'll seat myself and the horse in an hearse anticipating our arrival. We'll chat and sing Gaelic (an) hymns as the driver drives us to an hospital for the really good drugs.

Hail me a taxi, dear Nazi, for I want to get off this crazy ride called journalism.

--
Posted by BT3 to grammar nazi at 12/07/2005 08:19:45 PM

Well, BT3 (if that is your real name), the rule covering the use of the indefinite article when it comes up against an aspirate is rather a simple one, complicated only by the fact that it's a rule that crosses over from the grammatical to the linguistic.

And now I'm just wondering whether I'm going to have to work out a way to put little diacritical marks above certain letters or syllables in order to explain this by example... no... hang on, I think I can cover it just using italics and/or capitals. On with the fun...

You may have been told (or you may not, how would I know?) that you use a before a consonant and an before a noun. This is almost right. The important thing to remember is that the use a or an, is determined not by spelling but by pronunciation. If you were saying 'a egg,' for example, you'd have to put a glottal stop after the a or slur the words together, much like people do when they're pretending to be drunk. We English speakers seem to be rather uncomfortable with glottal stops as they interrupt the flow of whatever rubbish it is we're talking and make it sound as though we're stuttering.

Interestingly, a few words were actually formed (or at least, altered) this way (by which I mean the insertion of an n between an a and another word). The word apron used to be the word napron (it comes from the same group of words that gives us napery, napkin and nappy) but you can see how similar it sounds to say 'an apron' and 'a napron'. People didn't used to write much in the 1500s, so when they did learn, they had a go at spelling it and stuffed it up. (Middle-age people... sheesh!)

Another English peculiarity is the tendency to drop aspirates from the beginnings of certain words, especially from those beginning with h*. The example they always used to give in primary school was heir. We were told to say 'an heir', just as if we were talking about the stuff we breathe. We also usually say 'an hour', completely dropping the pronunciation of the initial consonant.

These days though, we would never say 'an horse', 'an harbour' or 'an hymn'. I'm not sure if we ever would have (I'd have to do more reading to find out). Why then would we say 'an historic' or 'an horrific'? Well, these two words are pronounced hisTOric and hoRIffic. The emphasis is on the middle syllable; and our preference as English speakers is never to have consecutive stressed syllables ('c'mon you syllables... just calm down... don't stress'). The trouble is that when you produce an aspirate consonant (the sound h), it's actually a bit of an effort to get all that air to come out of your throat, so you're kind of producing a stressed noise (try saying history and then historic; you'll find it more comfortable pronounce the h in the word where the first syllable is stressed). So how do we avoid having two stresses together? Simple, drop the h. And what happens when we drop the h? There are now two vowel sounds together, so we need to use an instead of a.

*This whole question has raised the issue of how, now that we're a literate society, spelling often dictates pronunciation, whereas back before printing really caught on, there were any number of ways to spell a word, depending on the way you said it (we've all read Shakespeare's poems and said 'that's stupid. It doesn't even rhyme!'). These days, people are much more likely to look at the way a word is spelt (a word such as historic and say to themselves 'Well, that starts with an h, so I'd better pronounce it'. But it's not always the way it should be said, or has been said for centuries up till now. Street names are often a good way to illustrate this. There's a street in my home town called San Mateo Ave. If you know anything about Romance languages, you can see that San Mateo is probably Spanish and means Saint Matthew. It would be pronounced /SAN mə-TAY-oh/. I grew up in an isolated country town in Australia, where the Spanish-speaking population hovered at around 0.001%, so people would see the letters, sound them out in their head, and to this day, that street is pronounced /SAN MATTYoh/.

It's similar in my new hometown of Adelaide, where there are street names such as Dequetteville and Waymouth and a suburb called Greenwith. Now, because I have prior knowledge of French names and English place names, and because I didn't grow up here listening to the way the locals said them, I would pronounce the above three names /də-KET-ə-vil/, /WAY-məth/, and /GREN-əth/. But people here prefer to spell out their foreign place names, calling them /də-kWETT-ə-vil/, /WAY-MOUTH/ (giving both syllables equal stress) and /GREENwIth/ (actually enunciating the /i/ sound in the final syllable, rather than producing an unstressed 'schwa', /ə/, or neutral vowel sound).

No one's really right or wrong, I suppose. It all comes down to local variations which are all perfectly valid. It's interesting though.

Colonisation (and semicolonisation)

2005-11-18T13:30:00.000+10:30

This unspecific time period's question is about punctuation.

I get excited whenever I use a (grammatical) colon. I get partially the same feeling whenever I use a semi-colon. I profess to being ignorant when it comes to the use of both as I generally use them because they look cute. How can I avoid the cuteness factor and incorporate more of a grammatically correct factor into my carefree use of colons and semi-colons? -- BT3

Well BT3, what can I say but 'I share your excitement'? Of course, the first rule for using colons and semi-colons is that they have to look cute. In fact, you should throw them in to your prose every now and then just to convey to your readers that you're really quite smart, or at least smarter than them. It gives your writing a certain air of superiority, which you may be able to turn to your advantage. So in things like job applications, theses, binding contracts, statutory declarations and anything written or printed on paper weighing 130 gsm or above, go nuts on the two-storey punctuation! That is, I should say, for instances in which you want to appear smug. If you want to feel, or better yet, be smug, here are a couple of "rules" (I know, that term makes it sound so disciplinary) you might like to skim over before getting RSI in your right little finger.

Colons are actually a bit easier to explain, so I'll start with them. I often think of colons as little 'equals' signs. If you look at a sentence as a sort of mathematical equation, there should be some kind of equi-something-ness on either side of the colon. Fowler once described the colon as having the function "of delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words," so I think he and I are thinking along the same lines. So what does this mean in practice? I think some examples may come in handy here. Examples today are taken from the closest magazine I have to hand: Desktop, Issue 211. (See, I used one just there!)

...perhaps the ultimate example of all this is speed dating: sit opposite someone for five minutes to ascertain if you're soul mates, then move on.

Thus we are intrigued by what we see as a critical question for publications: how to best design and layout a page for both print and online publications?

The report raises a similar issue: when going online, the newspaper's character is lost because its typefaces can't be carried over without resorting to pdfs or font embedding.

We can sort of see a pattern emerging here, we have an introductory phrase that would work as a stand-alone sentence but instead of a full-stop, a colon is in place, after which the preceding idea is expanded upon or defined. Of course, in the second example, the question alluded to and defined isn't actually a question at all but you kind of get the drift.

One of the most frequent places you won't see colons today is where people insist on putting dashes...

Get on any bus in Buenos Aires, board a train or merely walk along the street and soon you will see a sight all too common – the street hawker.

This dash should have been a colon as it does that job of explaining what was just being talked about.
I think this is the main usage you were asking about. I won't go into ratios, bible verses, lists, digital clocks or web addresses.

Semicolons are quite different from colons and are more like a halfway point between a comma and a full stop. They're a good way of pulling together two clauses that could stand alone as sentences but that are best linked as they more fully explain a single theme or idea

CtP has contributed to that expectation of speed; indeed it's a selling point of the technology.

The level of interaction and audiovisual style feels much more like a CD ROM than a web page; it has several hidden areas to discover and wonderfully close attention to detail.

They also come in handy for separating lists of things, especially when some of those things have commas in them. I can't be arsed finding an example right now.

I think that about covers it. Clear? Good then.

Line on the left, one cross each...

2005-11-10T10:41:00.000+10:30

I've been in a lot of pain recently. You might say that sometimes the pain has been excruciating. Now while this isn't an etymology site as such, I do like the word 'excruciating'.

A basic dictionary definition for excruciating is 'extremely painful'; the definition for excruciate has a slightly different shade: 'subject to torture'. It's a transitive verb, so that doesn't mean that something is subject to torture the way bus timetables are subject to change. It's something done by somone/something to someone/something else. And it hurts (the having it done, not necessarily the doing it to).

But what kind of torture is worthy of this definition? Well, how about crucifixion? ('No thanks, a cup of tea will be fine.' Haha.) Yes, both words have a common ancestor in the Latin crux. This word came from Latin, worked its way through a couple of other languages and landed in Old English as cros. We've since added an s.

Excruciate came pretty much straight from Latin but has been Anglicised. The Latin cruciare meant 'to cause pain or anguish to,' or literally 'to crucify', the ex- part of it works as an intensifier ('...And cwucify him well' as that Pontius guy said in Life of Brian).

It kind of helps get across the 'really really painful' aspect of the word excruciating, which I guess is really the crux of it.

_{Reference: Online Etymology Dictionary}

An alternate view

2005-10-24T12:40:00.000+09:30

I was flitting around the blogosphere the other day,digging around a few people's personal profiles, trying to find out what kind of self-indulgent, megalomanic ego would want to publish the minutae of their everyday, humdrum, uneventful lives. (The answer being 'all kinds') I did happen upon one person's list of favorite books and a few titles that made it onto a most-recently-read list. There was a pretty even mix of old and new titles: some classic titles by the likes of Wilde and Dickens and some modern stuff by Winton and some authors I'd not heard of. As an explanation, the author (or the reader in this case) said "I like to read classic and modern titles alternatively".

I had a vision of this person sitting in a grungy café filled with second-hand furniture, wearing worn black Doc Martens with colored laces, some fashionably torn jeans, a T-shirt with a picture of The Clash on it underneath an op-shop cardigan, excess eye makeup, all topped off by a mop of self-consciously uncut, unwashed hair, and pulling a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge from a haversack covered in black-texta peace symbols and lyrics from Cure songs.

This is, of course, the alternative way to read fiction.

A similar instance of this popped up in a piece I was editing by a company offering short courses for busy people. The classes were held fortnightly, "on alternative Saturday mornings" it read. Yeah, you know the kind. Those Saturday mornings that only listen to guitar-based popular music and try to distance themselves from Friday nights because they're "sooo, like 9-to-5".

The word they're looking for is 'alternate'. A reader may alternate between styles of literature; alternate Saturdays happen every other weekend. On the other hand, something 'alternative' is different in some way; or a departure from the norm; not mainstream.

The flip side to this is when you're out driving and you see one of those portable electronic billboards that flash up road safety information saying "Roadworks on Main Rd. Delays expected. Use alternate route". It makes no sense of course but you can only fit so many characters on one of those screens, so I'm prepared to offer the benefit of the doubt in that it may be merely a space-saving measure.

To recap.
Two people living together have differing tastes. Every Monday at 7.30, she likes to watch Desperate Housewives on 7, while he prefers Mythbusters on SBS. They reach a compromise and alternate between the two. They watch them alternately. If they were going to watch them alternatively, they might sit upside-down on the couch, or turn down the sound and listen to Stereolab, or even just regard the shows with an air of ironic detachment as they "watch TV", not because it's necessarily what they want to do but realising that it's just another paradigm that they, as members of 21st century Western society, take part in, and therefore do so with a postmodern sense of resignation and apathy.

Dollars and sense

2005-10-14T10:05:00.001+09:30

Today's question comes from Lyle

Why, when we write £500 or $500 do we say "five hundred pounds" or "five hundred dollars"? Why isn't it written as 500£, or pronounced "pounds, 500"?

Well, Lyle, I'll answer the last part of your question first. We don't say "pounds five hundred" because it sounds stupid. OK?

That said, the rest of your question has me rather stumped, I'm afraid to say. The best answer I can come up with is "because we just do".

I searched everywhere I could think to search for an answer to this question and while I could find out the rules for how to write currency, finding out why we write it the way we do proved elusive.

I do however have my own (completely unfounded) theories on the matter. My first theory is that it has to do with the transcription of metric numbers, which places a certain amount of importance on where the decimal place is put. I.e. to add up a series of numbers in a column, it makes adding amounts a whole lot easier if the decimal points are aligned. Putting a dollar or pound symbol in the middle of this kind of breaks the continuity of the numbers, so it's better to put the dollar symbol before and the cents symbol after.

My second (half-baked) theory is that it has to do with the writing out of bank cheques. Back in the olden days, before banks provided pre-printed cheques and before the symbol-before-amount trend really caught on, if someone gave me a cheque that said

Pay the bearer of this cheque
500£

it would have been too easy for me to just whack a few more digits in front of the 500, clear out someone's bank account and be on the first stage coach for Dover before said cheque-issuer knew he was about to sell his house to keep up his mistress and expensive snuff habit. By putting the symbol before the amount, and a decimal point after it (or the word 'only'), the amount is kind of boxed in, providing little or no opportunity to meddle with the amount.

Where I come unstuck though is that in pre-Euro days, the French would write out their Francs & Centimes as 24^F50, a method of transcription that goes agains both my theories. And they invented the metric system

In or out?

2005-09-16T13:05:00.000+09:30

K (who is an architect and therefore not expected to know these things) asks:

When I finish a sentence with a full stop then start another sentence in brackets, does the full stop for this sentence go inside the brackets or outside?

Well, thanks for your query, K. This is one of those things that a lot of people have trouble with. The short answer is that it goes inside.

It's never that simple though, and there is a strong case for the outside option. See, when you accept full stops as being the dividers between sentences, and parentheses as self-contained ideas that relate (in subject but not necessarily in syntax or punctuation) to the rest of a sentence, you're left with the conclusion that if you end a sentence with a full stop, anything placed in brackets after this full stop becomes a part of the next sentence. Such sentences in brackets seem to sit in limbo: separated by a full stop from the preceding sentence (to which they most commonly relates); and kind of interrupting the next, cutting in line and diminishing the seeming importance of the capital letter. Even though the idea may have nothing to do with this sentence, it nevertheless lies within its full-stopped boundaries.

This is the collateral damage suffered by following the overriding rule that anything within brackets should be gramatically self-contained, even though it may have no grammatical relationship to the sentence in which it appears. But this rule is a good rule, as parenthetical statements (interruptions, interjections, asides) often don't make grammatical sense in the normal flow of words. But then that's exactly why we have punctuation: to separate not only ideas, but also the neatly arranged equations of correctly agreed and conjugated words we call clauses (main, subordinate, adverbial and relative), sentences and paragraphs. And that's kind of what grammar is all about: putting all these bits together so that someone reading can understand exactly what the writer is trying to say.

Isn't punctuation brilliant?

Oh, worth mentioning also, another use for brackets, most commonly employed by journalists.

When quoting someone, journos will often substitute a stated pronoun for a bracketed noun so a quoted sentence makes sense.

A conversation may go something like this:

JOURNO: How's your father?
PERSON: Oh, he's just fine.

but when the journo writes it up, he/she may write:

When asked about Mr. X's health, Mr X Jnr said "Oh, (my father)'s just fine".

I wholly approve of this use of brackets as they indicate that the matter was quoted but that although the actual words in brackets weren't the ones used, this is what the speaker was referring to. Sure, we have to accept that the journalist and the interviewee each knew what the other was talking about but (hopefully) this isn't too far a stretch of the imagination.

Knobs and hyphens

2005-09-06T16:53:00.000+09:30

Part of the service I'd like to offer you, the reader, is my own style of advice on how to do languagey things good*.

Here's an actual query I received a while back.

S from Melbourne writes:

Dear G.N.
I'm currently proof-reading the Business Plan that M is writing with someone else (knob). The other guy - I'll just call him Knobby - has hyphenated 'young people' throughout the document. Maybe I'm out of line? Maybe Knobby is right? It's just that this use of the hyphen doesn't fit with my understanding of the rule. Knobby is too hyphen happy for my liking. ('as-well-as' is another example) Can you please advise me on who is right? Is it me or is it Knobby?
Thanks
xxs

Dear S,

I think Knobby is a very good description.

Here's the lesson on hyphens!

Fowler lists six main uses of the hyphen:

To join two or more words so as to form a single expression, eg get-at-able, weight-carrying, punch-drunk

To join a prefix to a proper name, eg anti-Darwinian

To prevent misconceptions, eg thirty-odd people;extra-territorial rights; more-important people

To avoid ambiguity when adding a prefix: recover (get better)/re-cover (cover again), resign (leave a job)/re-sign (extend a contract)

To separate two similar consonant or vowel sounds in a word to aid pronunciation, eg Ross-shire, sword-dance

To represent a common second element in a list: two-, three- and four-bedroom units

Add to this all numbers above twenty (apart from the multiples of ten). So, twenty-eight and forty-four but seventeen, thirty and one
hundred and eighty.

Point 1 is where most of the confusion will occur. Sometimes the same two words together may or may not be hyphenated depending on how they're being used. Take the expression: 'turn of the century'. If you're saying that people wore hats a lot 100 years ago, you'd say

Hats were commonly worn at the turn of the century

but if you're talking about hats of the era you might talk about

turn-of-the-century fashion.

In the first example, you're using all the words to mean what they mean. In the second, you're using all the words as a single adjective
and this is when you have to hyphenate. If two words form an expression describing a noun, then use hyphens.

Some more examples:

A two-bedroom house
A house with two bedrooms

The building had a vine-covered courtyard
A vine covered the courtyard of the building

Young people are aged below 30
He wore his hat backwards in that young-people kind of way
or
He wore his hat backwards in that I'm-a-young-person-and-I'm-too-cool-and-
hard-for-the-likes-of-you kind of way

In the Knob's example of young people, item 1 above doesn't apply. This is simply an adjective (young) in front of a noun (people). You're right. He's a knob.

OK?

_{* Many people use bad language for comedic or humorous effect (like when Billy Connolly says "fuck" a lot. I like to use actual bad langauge, such as what I'm doing now. It's a style thing and therefore not "wrong" as long as I'm doing it ironically, which I am. So don't get all curmudgeonly and write in to complain, or I'll just proofread your complaint and send it back to you with red pen marks all over it.}

A productive career

2005-09-01T12:10:00.000+09:30

The sports reporter on the ABC last night was talking about one of this country's opening batsmen, and said "Matthew Haydn has had a prolific career".

Prolific?

A prolific career?

I remember diving for Fowler a couple of years back when my brother-in-law, an avid fisherman, asked whether it was correct to say that the fish were prolific (meaning there were a lot of them about, one particular day). 'Well, not really,' was my reply. 'You might get away with saying the ocean was prolific that day,' but even that's a stretch, as it isn't really the ocean that "produces" the fish (other fish do that). 'Better to say the fish were abundant.'

We were both happy with that.

Could he (he went on to ask) then be said to be a prolific fisherman? Hmmm... Inasmuch as he produces a catch, maybe but probably not. It's still not him that produces, or brings into being, the actual fish. Again, it's fish's mums and dads that do that (without going into the biology of the whole thing). Why not just say 'you're a good/great/skilled/lucky fisherman'. Prolific just didn't fit in either case so I was glad to be able to steer him away from it in both.

But back to Mr. Haydn. A prolific career? Sorry, no.

His career hasn't actually produced anything and that's really the key to what the prolific means. It pertains to an abundant production of something. A career doesn't really exist, insofar as it's just a subjective view of a person's employment (or cricketing) record. It's intangible, and intangible things aren't that good at producing other things (though there may be exceptions; I haven't had time to think that one through and I don't want to get all philosophical just before lunchtime, lest I come to the conclusion that the term 'food', when applied to the lemon chicken from the nearby Chinese takeaway is merely an arbitrary, and therefore subjective, and therefore fallacious term, causing me to go hungry this afternoon). Much like with my fishing friend, it's better to say that he's had a good career, a successful career or, using a superlative, as sports journos compulsively do, an unparalleled or unsurpassed career.

You might get away with saying he has been a prolific batsman but even then it's not perfect. The only fitting way to use the word might be to say "Matthew Haydn has been a prolific run-scorer". His successful career is a reflection of this.

Now... lemon chicken.

One word, or two?

2005-08-23T16:29:00.000+09:30

There's a tendency in this liquid language of ours to stick words together. I remember being in grade 2 and hearing Mrs Alderton tell us about compound words: two words which, when placed together, form a single, new word with a new meaning. I can still remember knowing what a fish was and what a wife was, but having no idea what the result of putting these two words meant. Come to think of it, I still have no idea what a fishwife is, though I'm pretty sure it's a real word and not just my grade 2 memory playing tricks on me. I must remind myself to look that up next time I'm thumbing through my New Shorter Oxford. Whatever one is, I can't imagine they'd be any good in bed.

However, people often get confused about whether they should be stringing as many words together as their handwriting will allow, or whether the space bar should be employed to full effect.

One (or two, or in fact, three) such word(s) that is (are) all-too-often misused and confused for one or the other combination of one- or two-wordedness is the addition of the words every and day, forming the new word everyday.

Used separately, the words every day refer to exactly what they say they refer to, namely, every 24-hour period of your (or everyone's) life. For example, a student might say "I go to school every day," even if, as is usually the case, they don't actually go every single day (unless they're particularly diligent, or dumb, in which case you might find them swotting in the library on weekends).

When we put the two words together, however, we get an entirely different meaning (not to mention an entirely different type of word: separately, they are an adjective and noun respectively but together they form a single adjective). Everyday means ordinary, or commonplace (and while it can mean 'occuring every day', I'm going to conveniently ignore that usage for now because it'll only confuse things). Everyday is an adjective you would use to describe something normal, or uneventful.

So, my bank offers everyday banking accounts. These are good for day-to-day banking; deposit here, withdrawal there. Basic stuff. However, my phone company's flier, containing an offer for me to have "a different photograph on your handset everyday" belongs in the same rubbish bin as those home-made leaflets that come through the letterbox that employ clip art and Comic Sans in their design and expect to be taken seriously. I'm not taking the telephone people up on that badly worded offer. No thanks, you illiterate multi-national greedbag. Go back to school, or hire a proper writer.

comprisition

2005-08-04T21:26:00.000+09:30

This happens just too often:

The S****r Foundation is comprised of, over 25 regional branches and a National Body

It's so simple really, so take note here people. The verb to comprise is transitive. It does not take a preposition.

No, it doesn't.

Not.

Ever.

It most certainly doesn't have a comma after it either.

If you're stuck with this one, it works like contain only with a different meaning. To illustrate:

My lunchbox contains a ham sandwich, a banana and a yummy cookie

which is almost the same as

My lunch comprises a ham sandwich, a banana and a yummy cookie

The meaning is quite different, of course. I've made the context similar to give a more familiar example of how a verb can successfully be used without the need to whack a redundant preposition after it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my ham sandwich awaits.

Yummy.

Bang

2005-07-29T15:31:00.000+09:30

One of the universities in my city has the slogan "Life Impact".

It sounds like a fatal car accident.

Impact has been almost completely stripped of meaning by marketing types and challenged journos who no longer feel that the words influence or effect are strong enough. It's insufficient these days for something to happen over time; everything now has to happen with a bang.

Impact used to refer to what happened when one thing hit another thing, usually with a fair degree of force behind it (so you wouldn't use it when describing clapping, better to use it when someone is being punched in the face). Used metaphorically, it could be used when describing a single event. So, you could refer to 'the political impact of the 1975 dismissal of the Prime Minister by the Governor General,' because this was a big event in politics at the time (Americans, think Watergate). It just happened and that was it.

Now, comments like this (using the word as a verb, making it sound like a dental emergency) appear too frequently:

Mr Macfarlane admitted: "It will impact on our economies but it'll impact on all our economies, so our trade disadvantage in Australia vis-a-vis China or India or Korea won't be there."
- Sydney Morning Herald, 29 Jul 05

The speaker was referring to an agreement that was about to be ratified. What's wrong with affect?

Back to the local uni, intent on slamming its students into whatever hard surfaces may happen to be at hand. Once they had an ad campaign in which their slogan was slightly altered. It read

Our students make an impact on the world.

What I assume they left off the top of the ad was the headline: Uni cancels skydiving degree.

By way of explanation

2005-07-29T15:27:00.000+09:30

The folly of the pedant is that he/she is always cast as the snob, the know-it-all, the condescending twat.

I realise that there is a great risk in embarking on a project such as this, which equates to the joy other pedants feel in finding fault with those looking for it. Hypocrisy is an ugly thing but it's a wonderful thing to expose.

I'm hoping that this project won't take itself, or be taken, too seriously. I don't claim to have any greater knowledge of language and grammar than most people but in my occupation, words are my tools. So in the same way a carpenter might cringe to see a novice hammering in screws, it irks me somewhat to see words being used inappropriately. However, I'm not a pedant in the sense that I subscribe to one version of English that is right. English is a very flexible language, although sometimes this isn't such a great thing. Words can be used inventively to create new nuances of expression but at other times they can be used to obfuscate, misdirect and confuse.

I like creativity and I like slang. I like language that is descriptive and flowing as well as language that is short, sharp and to-the-point. I'm not going to pick on every bit of grammar I see that doesn't adhere to the rules of the Queen's English; I don't want to be an embittered curmudgeon, pointing out every split infinitive I come across. What I do want to do is document examples of language that I think could be improved, trends in language that I think are unfortunate, or unhelpful in conveying meaning. I also receive requests from friends and colleagues on correct usage for more formal pieces of writing so I might throw a few Q&A posts in her as well. And I'm happy to answer questions (time permitting: I do have a life, you know).