Author: Patricia Nelson

This is a grammar and writing blog, after all, and I frequently write about mistakes, or at least about how not to make mistakes. I not infrequently use “goof” for mistake, though my serious word for a mistake is “solecism.” Here’s a definition:

solecism
PRONUNCIATION:(SOL-uh-sizz-ehm) 

MEANING
noun:
1. A grammatical mistake or a nonstandard usage.
2. A breach of etiquette.
3. An error, inconsistency, or impropriety.

ETYMOLOGY
From Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikismos, from soloikos (speaking incorrectly; literally, inhabitant of Soloi) after Soloi, an ancient Athenian colony in Cilicia where a dialect considered as substandard was spoken. Earliest documented use: 1577.

I’m quoting A Word a Day, a daily vocabulary lesson that I’ve plugged several times in the past. Check it out. For the home page, it’s https://wordsmith.org.

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

Check to be sure you actually mention what you’re actually comparing.

He means “…than the food at the places…”

I see this mistake surprisingly often. Don’t do it.

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

Writing concisely saves your reader time and effort (and irritation), because when you don’t repeat yourself, your reader doesn’t have to read the same thing twice. I’ve written about redundancy before. Use the search box in the upper right corner to find more on this subject.

He could have said:

• Get the sign painter back!
• Get the sign painter here!
• Get the sign painter again!

That sentence would be correct if the sign painter had already been there more than once, though.

When you write, don’t repeat yourself!

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

Ordinarily, good English avoids using two negatives in a sentence. I’m thinking of sentences such as these:

I ain’t got none.
It don’t make no never-mind.

But we do have a way to use two negatives, when it’s what we mean. I’d say it’s a kind of understatement. I ran into a nice example the other day:

Meanwhile, there’s little reason to think that stealthy, sophisticated hackers aren’t already exploiting BlueKeep in secret, says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of the firm Rendition Infosec.

https://www.wired.com/story/bluekeep-worm-windows

You can get away with a sentence like that if you want to sound “literary,” but when you’re into being clear and concise, something like this is better:

We think that sophisticated hackers are already exploiting BlueKeep in secret.

Not as colorful, perhaps, but more to the point. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?

The mistake is in the first panel. I bet you won’t see it. I’m not referring to the false subject (there’s) either:

Here’s the goof: technically, “slower” is an adjective, and she’s using it as an adverb, to modify “drive.” You can have a slow driver, but you drive slowly, or in this case, more slowly.

Ah, idiomatic spoken English is so full of solecisms…

A quickie today. I’ll let the comic speak for itself.

I wonder whether anyone ever texts “SPEBSQSA.”

(Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America)

This post first appeared in The Writing Rag.

“Not” is an adverb. It negates the verb, adjective, or adverb that it refers to. So far so good. “Not” does not modify nouns or noun clauses.

Cover the bottom sentence in the picture, then read the top sentence, then think about it.

That can’t be right! Discernment has something to do with knowing the difference, right? Now read the bottom sentence. Aha!

Let’s go back to the top sentence. “Not” doesn’t modify “knowing,” it modifies “is”! Having “not” modify the wrong word is an easy mistake to make without the context of having that bottom sentence. To make the top sentence unambiguous, you need to separate the “not” from the noun clause, which happens to start with a present participle. (Present participles are verb forms, so “not knowing” feels okay.)

You could do the separation four ways.

• Put a colon after the “not”:
  Discernment is not: knowing the difference between etc.
• Put the noun clause in quotes. Do this to both sentences to make them parallel:
  Discernment is not “knowing the difference between etc.” It is “knowing the difference etc.”
• Reorder the sentence:
  Knowing the difference between right and wrong is not discernment.
• Speak the sentences, and pause after the “not” in the first sentence.

Myself, I’d repeat the word “discernment” rather than use “it” as the subject of the bottom sentence. But who am I to tell Charles Spurgeon how to write? Of course, Spurgeon was a preacher, and he probably first said these sentences in a sermon, and someone wrote them down to make the poster. So maybe I’m not criticizing Spurgeon after all.

Every now and then I mention this habit of our English language taking nouns and making them into verbs. Some are so common we don’t even think about them. “Race,” for example, and “cup,” and “jump” to mention only three. In fact, “mention” is another example!

Some of these, however, we curmudgeons disapprove of, and this comic is about one of them.

We already have a perfectly good verb to use in this situation. it’s “give.”

Harrumpf.