Author: Patricia Nelson

Some words imply two of something. “Pair,” and “second,” for example. And we say “lesser of two evils.” You can be between two things, but if you you have more than two, you are among them.

A few other words imply two-ness and sometimes we get them wrong. Here’s an example:

Some puzzles require a mind for math, others a keen eye. Then there are brainteasers that are so nonsensical the biggest challenge is saying them with a straight face. The “cows and chickens” riddle falls into the latter group.

That next-to-last word should be “last.” “Latter” means “second of two,” and he’s got three types of riddle here.

The rule: count both your blessings only if you have two of them, and use the right word when you do have exactly two of something.

PS—”nonsensical” should have a comma after it.

We use the subjunctive when we want to express something contrary to reality. (Greek has a mood called the optative, which is a step farther back than the subjunctive; it expresses a wish. In English we would say something like “would that I were dead”—but I digress.) Okay, this being contrary to reality poses a problem for this guy, in a way, and therein lies the humor.

(This is Scary Gary (the vampire on the left) for May 2, 2017.)

Owen the ghost feels alive, so for him, being dead is contrary to reality, hence the subjunctive. The humor, of course, is in his misinterpretation of Gary’s question. But his grammar is perfect.

What I’d like to know is how Gary can balance a full coffee cup on the arm of an overstuffed sofa.

Well, sort of. Really it’s about Latin plurals.

I’m learning that people prefer these posts to be short and (heh) sweet. Grammar does tend to get complicated at times, so I’ll try not to put so much, um, content into my posts.

Here’s a really short one about quantum mechanics, that should be doable, right?

Here’s the quote, from an article in This Day in History:

Planck’s theory held that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as “quantum.”

Alas, the writer got his Latin plural wrong. The sentence should end with “quanta.” “Quanta” is like “data” and “criteria.” Those are plurals, and their singulars are “quantum,” “datum,” and “criterion.”

How’s that for short—only quantum mechanics and Latin plurals.

You know what an x looks like, right? Among other things, it often signifies closing something; that’s why you see one in the upper right corners of a lot of computer windows.  But x’s have another common use that’s incorrect! Incorrect of you know the trick, anyway.

Many houses are built at least partly out of 2×4 lumber, right? You said “two by four” when you read that, right?

I hate to tell you this, (Actually, I’m delighted to tell you this. It’s the whole point of this post.) but that’s not supposed to be an x between the 2 and the 4. It’s supposed to be a times sign! (Multiplication symbol if you want to be fancy.) This is a pretty common mistake. Even the guru of computer security, Bruce Schneier has made it at least once. I quote:

Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email­ — usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts.

We have a pretty good excuse: They typical keyboard doesn’t have a key for the times sign. Herein lies your trick:

Hold down the Alt key and type 0215 on the numeric keypad. Release the Alt key. There’s your times sign!

Now you can have typographically correct lumber, dimensions, and equations. Go for it.

Dan Dougherty said it all; I don’t need to say anything. Um, you do know the difference between “may” and “can,” right?

The lesson: Be careful about correcting others’ English.

This post doesn’t have much to do with good writing, but I happen to like jokes that relate to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The gist of the theorem is that he proved mathematically that you can’t have a complete logical system, one that doesn’t have unanswerable questions and has no contradictions. This was much to his colleague Bertrand Russell’s displeasure, who was in the midst of writing a book (Principia Mathematica) to prove the completeness of mathematics. Here’s a link to a joke about that:

Epitaphs in the Graveyard of Mathematics

It’s the second one, but they’re all funny if you know a little math.

Okay, that’s a lot of preliminaries to get to the joke in the comic Dog Eat Doug that I had in mind in the first place. Part of Gödel’s proof hinged on the fact that when something refers to itself, you can get into trouble.

Interesting bit of onomatopoeia there, too. I dare you to try this question on Siri.

PS–since it happened to come up, here’s a link to an article that actually mentions the incompleteness theorem:

The mathematics of Christmas: A review of the Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus

Okay, the intransitive verb “lie-lay-lain” is one we often get wrong in the present tense. We say “I’m gonna go lay down,” when we mean “I’m gonna go lie down.” (note there’s no direct object.)  “Lie,” the correct word, sounds okay even when we often say “lay.”

Ah, but the past tense of lie, which is “lay,” sounds wrong even when it’s correct! I think we’re just too used to something like a “-d” at the end of past tense verbs. Here’s a guy (Mike Peterson of Comic Strip of the Day for December 7, 2017) using it correctly. It’s the past tense:

He may not have been the worst of the lot, but he lay down with the dogs and now he’s getting up with the fleas.

Sorry, he’s right. It’s “lay.” “Laid” is wrong. I suppose Mike could have written, “…he laid his body down with the dogs…” That would be a little strange, but also grammatical.

The rule: “lay” is past tense of “lie.” Deal with it.