Normally I tend to avoid political stuff, concentrating on grammar and writing instead. My interest here is no exception. I like to point out any time someone uses “whom” correctly, politics or not. It’s in the third panel:
https://www.gocomics.com/meaningoflila/2018/11/04
“Whom” is the object of the separable verb “vote for” even though “whom” comes first. And objects take the objective case!
This sentence has an interesting ambiguity, by the way. The verb in question is an infinitive (to vote for) and the subject of an infinitive takes the objective case in English; hence, that “whom” here could be considered the subject of the verb!
They call it “ablaut” in German. It’s when you show the present, past, and perfect forms of a verb by changing the vowel. Sing, sang, sung, for example. I have run into people getting this wrong in writing so often lately that I finally decided to mention it. (Again) This time with a comic. Second panel:
Should be “sprang,” of course. Brooke McEldowney, the cartoonist, Is a high-class sort of guy, so I suspect he’s accommodating the character of the speaker, for whom English is their second language.
But you, dear reader, probably don’t have that excuse. Don’t use the perfect when the simple past will do.
“Be clear” is one of my five gold rules of technical (and any expository) writing. Here’s a good example of what I mean. Is eWeek saying that the updates have critical flaws?
Apple Patches Critical Flaws in iOS 12.1, macOS 10.14.1 Updates
You have to read the article to find out. Inside the article they got it better:
Among the updated releases are macOS Mojave 10.14.1, iOS 12.1 and watchOS 5.1, fixing high-impact flaws…
We hear of flaws being in operating systems, and we also hear of fixing things with an update. They could have put “with” right before “Updates” in their headline. Presto! Ambiguity removed!
They could also have changed the word order:
Apple Updates iOS12, macOS, and watchOS with Patches.
For that matter, whatever comes after “with” is unnecessary:
Apple Updates iOS12, macOS, and watchOS
That last suggestion isn’t as dynamic, perhaps, but shorter is good. Being concise is another of my rules. And it gives room to mention all three updates in the headline by getting rid of all those numbers. Want longer anyway? How about:
Apple Updates iOS12, macOS, and watchOS, Fixing Critical Flaws
Sorry—I couldn’t find a comic to illustrate this. Maybe my next post will have a comic.
I wrote about this little-used punctuation back in October, so click the link to see the lesson. Today you just get an example of correct usage. It’s from 1955, so it fits the pattern of the dieresis being an old usage. Middle panel.
English, being light on inflections, uses word order a lot. Classical Greek, for example, is heavily inflected, so word order can be played with more than it can be played with in English. They even have a figure of speech called chiasmus, in which they arrange the words symmetrically in the sentence (for example, noun, adjective, adverb, verb, adverb, adjective, noun) and you use the inflections to figure out what refers to what.
Sometimes getting the word order correct in English can be tricky. I have mentioned where “only” should go several times. (Search for “only” in the search box in the upper right corner to see some examples.)
So this Buckles comic, first panel, gets it wrong, at least in expository writing. Perhaps we’re more relaxed in conversational speech.
https://comicskingdom.com/buckles/2018-10-27#
The rule is that adjectives go right before the word they modify, so technically, the dog is saying that it’s Paul’s good pair, not good shoes.
Not a lot of difference there; it could go either way, and you might even make the excuse that “pair of shoes” counts as one word. Well, maybe.
But when you’re explaining something, be on the lookout for ambiguity, and avoid it.
Is “bacteria” singular or plural? Well, it’s plural. The singular is “bacterium.” But here’s an example of using the singular to refer to a whole bunch of the little critters. Twice:
A bacterium named Moorella thermoacetica won’t work for free. But UC Berkeley researchers have figured out it has an appetite for gold. And in exchange for this special treat, the bacterium has revealed a more efficient path to producing solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.
The writer isn’t referring to a single bacterial cell, but the whole species.
We do this a lot in American English, refer to a collective noun in the singular. We say “the team is,” for example.
Irony: a figure of speech in which you say (or write) the opposite of what you mean in such a manner that your listener (or reader) can tell what you actually mean.
This statement (last panel) is an example of irony.
We normally expect adjectives to have a noun that they refer to; however, some adjectives get their noun from the context, and we are expected to supply it ourselves. I recommend that you supply the noun anyway, particularly when you write expositorily (when you’re explaining something). In English, using “many” without its noun assumes you’re referring to people. Sentences such as these are taken to refer to people:
How many died in the hurricane? How many came to your party?
But we use the noun when we’re not referring to people:
So, pardner, how many head of cattle yeh got out back? How many pages in your term paper?
Sorry for the pretentiousism—I thought using “virgule” might make the headline more interesting. A virgule is a slash, (also unnecessarily called a forward slash.)
Most of the time when people use a slash, it’s because they don’t want to have to think and actually choose a word, so they use both, separated by a slash. Something like
Ask the manager/owner of the document about its history.
Here’s another example, perhaps a bit more legitimate:
Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.
In the footnotes of an interesting article about US land use. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?srnd=premium
The first example could replace the slash with “or,” and the second example could use “and” instead of the slash. (By the way, pastures are fenced, and range is not.)
I admit, a slash is shorter than a whole word, and I generally recommend making the shorter choice, other things being equal. But a slash is a lazy person’s way out. Rather like “etc.,” but that’s another story.
People sometimes use “as” when they mean “because.” Well, don’t. Use “because.”
“As” means something like “at the same time as,” and here’s an example of how “as” should be used:
Now the company has removed a link from its download site, and updated a support page to say “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating.”
This is The trade rag Engadget quoting Microsoft. Guess Microsoft got something right, eh?
