Certain things that come across one\u2019s desktop, on the internet, are hard to turn away from. Train wrecks, for example. For me, this list includes commentary about grammatical errors and proper language use.<\/p>\n
I find this sort of discussion interesting because I\u2019m an anthropologist, and probably also because I\u2019ve spend a lot of time 100% immersed in a language or two other than my native English. This training and this experience each make me think about how we make meaning linguistically. Also, as a parent, I have observed how a child goes through the process of first, and quickly, learning how to use language properly, then spends the next several years learning how to use it wrong by following our arcane rules. And, as a writer – well, you can imagine.<\/p>\n
Today I was inspired to write my own version of one of those posts on grammatical errors and quirks. I came across Bill Murphey Jr\u2019s post \u201c17 Grammar Mistakes You Really Need to Stop Correcting, Like Now<\/a>\u201d via Stumble Upon. Bill\u2019s main point is to cool off the conversation a bit and tell people to lighten up on the grammar correcting.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not too concerned about that. Excessive grammar correcting certainly is annoying, but my main interest in this topic is not the nature of language policing so much as it is the nature of language, as well as simply knowing what is considered righter vs. wronger. As it were.<\/p>\n So, I took Bill\u2019s list of grammar issues, deleted a few, and created my own commentary on them. And resorted them. And here goes:<\/p>\n Futher is a word\u2019s word. It works with concepts, or as a marker for where the thing you are saying is going. Farther is about physical distance. This is easy to remember. \u201cFarther\u201d has \u201cfar\u201d in it. \u201cThose who go farther have indeed gone far.\u201d Not, \u201cThose who have gone further have indeed gone fur.\u201d Meanwhile, we use the word \u201cfurthermore,\u201d derived from \u201cfurther\u201d but there is no such thing as \u201cfarthermore.\u201d Not yet, anyway.<\/p>\n (Actually, \u201cfarthermore\u201d was a word at one time, but our language has moved further along and it no longer is.)<\/p>\n Don\u2019t use \u201c…\u201d to break up sentences. Use a long dash (an em-dash). An ellipsis is a part of quoted text that is left out. The same word, ellipsis, is also used to refer to the three dots that we put in the ellipsis. So, if you type dot-dot-dot make sure that something is truly missing there.<\/p>\n It is not uncommon for people to use double negatives when they are trying to look like they are not uneducated. Outside of certain contexts, this is always bad. If a logic algorithm has to be applied to your sentence to understand what it means, you messed up. Don\u2019t do that.<\/p>\n That is the \u201cproper\u201d double negative I\u2019m recommending against. The hauty tauty classist double negative. The other kind is the kind that just makes things wrong, but in a way, it is more linguistically acceptable even if grammatically the equivalent of crushing baby kittens.<\/p>\n I ain\u2019t never going to do that. Or, even, a term like \u201cirregardless,\u201d where afixes or words conflict with each other in a way that seems to cancel out. In language, we often add bits to a word or phrase to add emphasis or, perhaps absurdly, underscore something by negating it. Irregard, if it was a word, would be without regard. Regardless is without regard. So, if we really want to make the point that there is very little regard, we say it both ways at the same time: irregardless of grammatical proscription! This would be a sort of double negative you should avoid in proper and clear writing, and keep in your toolkit for dialog or ironic phrasing.<\/p>\n i.e. stands for the latin id est.<\/p>\n e.g. stands for the latin exempl? gr?ti?<\/p>\n Id est means \u201cthat is.\u201d Use i.e. to prefix an example of something that elaborates a term or phrase. The Doctor\u2019s time travel machine, i.e., the Tardis.<\/p>\n Exempl? gr?ti? means \u201cfor example.\u201d Just like it sounds.<\/p>\n Time machines, e.g., The Doctor\u2019s Tardis, or Dr. Emmett Brown\u2019s DeLorean.<\/p>\n See the difference? Not much of a difference. But there is a difference.<\/p>\n E.g. is usually followed by a comma, just as you might say, \u201cI would like dessert, for example, ice cream\u201d = \u201cI would like dessert, e.g., ice cream.\u201d<\/p>\n I like to think of e.g. as plural, in a sense. Examples<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I.e. can be thought of as \u201cin other words.\u201d So, I might say, \u201cI don\u2019t like desserts like flan, i.e. slimy icky stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n In writing, if you find yourself saying \u201cin other words\u201d a lot, you should revise and perhaps use the \u201cother words\u201d that were your afterthought as your actual words. So, perhaps, if you find yourself using \u201ci.e.\u201d you should revise as well. Either way, if someone complains to you about your use of i.e. vs e.g. you could probably make a case that your word choice was correct no matter what you did.<\/p>\n Incomplete comparisons are less annoying.<\/p>\n Than what??? Less annoying than what????<\/p>\n A sentence that is an incomplete comparison may not be incomplete at all if the larger context keys the reader in to what is being compared. The Prius and the Smart Car get great gas mileage. The Chevy Volt gets better gas mileage. This is less of a grammatical problem than a marketing problem. Out of context incomplete comparisons reflect incomplete thinking.<\/p>\n (By the way, we\u2019re not talking about semicolons here, but that would have been a great place to use one: \u201cThe Prius and the Smart Car get great gas mileage; the Chevy Volt gets better gas mileage.\u201d)<\/p>\n This one can be tricky. \u201cInto\u201d is a preposition. Note that the word \u201cposition\u201d is in \u201cpreposition.\u201d \u201cInto\u201d pretty much only means that something is moving from and to particular positions. The words \u201cto\u201d and \u201cin\u201d do a lot more work than the prepositional. Generally, if \u201cin to\u201d and \u201cinto\u201d both seem right, you want \u201cinto.\u201d<\/p>\n There are some odd exceptions. \u201cHe walked into the room\u201d is correct. But if he is a burglar and he gets there by force, he broke in. So, you would not say \u201cHe broke into the room,\u201d but rather, \u201che broke in to the room.\u201d He did, however, burgle his way into the room.<\/p>\n Also, the \u201cto\u201d can be possessed by a verb following the term, demanding \u201cin to\u201d instead of \u201cinto.\u201d He went into the room where he left his wallet. He opened the door of the room and went in to get his wallet.<\/p>\n Prepositions are not always about space, in the usual sense, so of course, \u201cinto\u201d is also used for other kinds of transitions. If life gives you lemons, make them into lemonade.<\/p>\n Regardless of what people tell you, irregardless is a word. But, it is a word that even the dictionary says should be avoided. Instead of sneaking quietly into speech and becoming a normal word that means the same thing as \u201cregardless\u201d it annoyed grammar experts early on (as far back as the 1920s) and was stigmatized. So, now, \u201cirregardless\u201d is a signal that you don\u2019t care about the quality of your spoken or written word. In good writing, \u201cirregardless\u201d should be confined to dialog spoken by characters that you want to look a little careless or poorly educated.<\/p>\n If you want to use an adverb, a word that modifies a verb, you generally need the \u201cly\u201d. But if you are using a lot of adverbs in your writing, you probably want to delete some of them. A well chosen verb hardly needs such help in eloquently written verbiage. After you\u2019ve written something, go on a ly-hunt. Search for the string \u201cly_\u201d (note the space) and revise as appropriately. I mean, appropriate.<\/p>\n In the old days you could leave off the -ly to make more impactful text. Bill gives the example of an Apple marketing campaign that used “Think different” instead of \u201cThink differently.\u201d<\/p>\n This method of catching our attention was overused and that ship has sailed.<\/p>\n This is one of those important distinctions that is very easy in certain circumstances and very hard in other circumstances. So, the way to get it right is to restate a sentence in such a way as to make the distinction unambiguous, then revise as if necessary.<\/p>\n For example, you can see that \u201cI wrote a blog post\u201d is correct and \u201cMe wrote a blog post\u201d is Tarzan-talk.<\/p>\n The confusion comes when the simple \u201cI\/me\u201d part of the sentence is joined with others.<\/p>\n Jose and I\/me went to the movies.<\/p>\n Jose took Jasper and I\/me to the movies.<\/p>\n Simply picking the \u201cI\u201d over the \u201cme\u201d in these sentences might sound to some to be \u201cbetter\u201d because culturally we have come to expect to be corrected more often when misusing \u201cme.\u201d In other words, always opting for \u201cI\u201d is a way to sound like you are not uneducated.<\/p>\n In most cases, the way to figure this out is to remove the second person, the one that is a name and not a pronoun, and see how it sounds.<\/p>\n \u201cJose and me went to the movies\u201d does not sound a lot different than \u201cJose and I went to the movies\u201d but the difference becomes clear when we ask Jose to leave the sentence. Compare \u201cMe went to the movies\u201d with \u201cI went to the movies.\u201d I am the subject of the sentence, so I get to be I, not me.<\/p>\n \u201cJose took Jasper and I to the movies\u201d and \u201cJose took Jasper and me to the movies\u201d also don\u2019t sound all that different, but compare \u201cJose took I to the movies\u201d with \u201cJose took me to the movies.\u201d I am the object of the sentence, and so \u201cme\u201d is correct, and when we parse it out this way, \u201cme\u201d sounds correct.<\/p>\n Me can forgive Tarzan for getting this wrong.<\/p>\n In the old days, you put two pieces of lead after the period in order to make sentences look normal. This practice continued with non-proportional typefaces on typewriters and other machines.<\/p>\n People will tell you that modern fonts don\u2019t require this, so you should not do it. However, there is a missing part of the story often conveniently ignored.<\/p>\n In the less old days, people who used computing technology to manipulate text could use a .__ (a period and two spaces) as distinct from ._ (period and one space) to tell the difference between the end of a sentence (with a full stop period) and an abbreviation.<\/p>\n Had we continued, as a society, to use period-space-space, this convenience could have been preserved. But we din\u2019t. So that was ruined.<\/p>\n Now, of course, when you are fingering your smart device and hit the space twice, the app automatically puts in a period.<\/p>\n Checkmate!<\/p>\n You can tell me again and again to use only one space after a period. But my thumb will ignore you.<\/p>\n An infinitive is a form of a verb that has the \u201cto\u201d attached. In some languages the \u201cto\u201d is so attached to the word that you can\u2019t fit any other words in there. E.g., in upcountry Swahili, \u201cku\u201d is \u201cto\u201d and \u201cdo\u201d is \u201cfanya\u201d so \u201cto do\u201d is kufanya. One word. I imagine that the fact that many languages have infinitives that are pre-stuck together had led to the convention that one does not split them by adding extra words between the \u201cto\u201d and the \u201cverb.\u201d<\/p>\n (There is actually quite a bit of ink spilt over the history of this rule.)<\/p>\n In my view, the ability to split infinitives is really cool feature of English and there should be no rule against it. However, since we often split our infinitives with adverbs, and adverbs are overly used, hunt for split infinitives not so much to unsplit them but to identify adverb overuse.<\/p>\n After you\u2019ve written your text, go on a which hunt and change the whiches to thats. But, you can leave the whiches that start independant clauses. In other words, if the part of the sentence that stats with which could more or less be a separate sentence, and\/or if you can remove it from the sentence and still have a sentence, it is probably OK.<\/p>\n I think that for a time the word \u201cthat\u201d sounded more pedestrian than the word \u201cwhich,\u201d which is a guess on my part, I\u2019m not sure, so people who wanted to write good seeded their sentences with random whiches. Never trust a random which.<\/p>\n Also known as the Harvard comma or, perhaps most correctly, the serial comma. In fact, I\u2019m rather shocked that which of these terms to use is not itself a major battle among language mavens.<\/p>\n The Oxford comma is the last comma in a list, before the last item and before the \u201cand\u201d that separates out the last item. Always use this comma. Often, it is not necessary, but when it is necessary, it is sometimes really necessary. So just use it all the time and avoid certain embarrassing, though often hilarious, mistakes.<\/p>\n From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty.<\/p>\n vs<\/p>\n I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.<\/p>\n English lacks a gender-neutral singular possessive term. Also, English lacks (in common use) a term that is not so strictly gender binary.<\/p>\n Using the plural as a gender neutral is natural, since there is a kind of plurality (his\u2019s, hers\u2019s, or neithers\u2019s).<\/p>\n New terms and new uses tend to grate, but a new term is less likely to be accepted and more likely to bother people than a re-use of an existing term. What needs to happen here, probably, is that the purveyors of proper language (elementary school teachers and the like) need to not correct students who use the plural form as a gender non-specific one.<\/p>\n This is simple. \u201cWho\u201d is about people, \u201cThat\u201d is about things. More obviously incorrect and underscoring the point that who is people is the substitution of \u201cThe people who do that\u201d with \u201cThe people what do that.\u201d<\/p>\n So when it comes to referring to people as that or what, who would do that?<\/p>\n Less and more refer to changing amounts of something you don\u2019t count in whole numbers. More or less rain, love, or apple cider. Fewer and more refer to things counted in whole numbers.<\/p>\n The fact that \u201cmore\u201d is in both of these sets may be the cause of confusion between \u201cFewer\u201d and \u201cLess.\u201d<\/p>\n Fewer trains pass by my house these days, so we have less noise around here. Not, less trains pass by my house these days, so we have fewer noise around here. But, we do have less train traffic these days, so we have fewer instances of annoying noise events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Certain things that come across one\u2019s desktop, on the internet, are hard to turn away from. Train wrecks, for example. For me, this list includes commentary about grammatical errors and proper language use. I find this sort of discussion interesting because I\u2019m an anthropologist, and probably also because I\u2019ve spend a lot of time 100% … Continue reading 16 common grammatical mistakes or problems<\/span> Further versus farther<\/h4>\n
dot dot dot vs em-dash<\/h4>\n
Double negatives<\/h4>\n
i.e. versus e.g.<\/h4>\n
Incomplete comparisons<\/h4>\n
Into versus “in to”<\/h4>\n
Irregardless<\/h4>\n
Leaving off the “ly” ending for adverbs<\/h4>\n
Me versus I<\/h4>\n
One or two spaces after a period<\/h4>\n
Split infinitives<\/h4>\n
That versus which<\/h4>\n
The Oxford comma<\/h4>\n
They or Their as a gender neutral term, instead of the singular Him, her, his, hers.<\/h4>\n
Who versus that<\/h4>\n
Less versus fewer<\/h4>\n