Category: Blog

“Who,” among other things, is an interrogatory pronoun. We use it when we ask a simple question about someone.

Who ate the last cookie?

To use “who” correctly this way, you need two things:

1. The “who” must be first.
2. “Who” must be the subject of the sentence.

The problem is that being the first word in the sentence is a stronger signal than being the subject of the sentence, and that leads to people using “who” when they should use “whom.” For example:

Who do you think ate the last cookie?

The subject is “you,” making that “who” be the direct object, which means you need “whom.” Here’s the sentence in declarative form to make it easier to see:

You think whom ate the cookie.

Let’s change the pronoun to make it more intuitive, because I have a surprise for you:

You think him ate the cookie.

“Huh??? Shouldn’t it be ‘You think he ate the cookie.’?” you ask.

And yes, you’d be right. “He” is the subject of the subordinate clause “-he ate the cookie,” even though the whole subordinate clause functions as the direct object. So in a declarative sentence, with the subordinate subject right there in the clause,  “he” is correct. Sorry to have to throw a grammatical weasel at you, but when you drag the word to the front of the sentence, as you must do when you ask a question, you have to use “whom” to warn your reader that you have a direct object coming up.

All that to praise the porcupine in this Grizzwells comic for getting it right:

Simple version of the rule: If the question has two verbs, use “whom.”

Scott Meyer is a pretty funny comic strip artist and writer. This recent comic made me twitch. See how many mistakes you can count. You should be able to find at least one in every panel. I counted more than a dozen. I don’t think he’s writing about me; I corrected him only once and that was years ago.

First, a vocabulary lesson. The humor in this comic is called a “mondegreen,” which I wrote about in the past. Good old Frazz.

The other one is a reminder about the rules in Scrabble: Acronyms are not allowed. HOH is the structural formula for water. We laypeople usually use H₂O. Thank you, FoxTrot.

Annnd a bonus, because it’s an inside joke. Note also that the company sign also points inward, not out, to potential customers. Well, maybe it’s an inside wall, not a window.

The list is titled English language did you knows, and it’s here. It’s someplace on did-you-knows .com, too. The rest of the list seems reasonable enough, but this goof makes me suspicious of the veracity of the rest of the list, even though no doubt at least some of them are true.

Anyway, here’s the mistake:

The first English dictionary was written in 1755

That’s a reference to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the most famous early dictionary, but at least a dozen dictionaries preceded it. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia, and easy enough place to do research in.

Johnson’s dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English “wordbook” by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

So there.

While I’m at it, the reference to “durst” being the past tense of “dare” isn’t quite right. “Durst” is obsolete. We use “dared” now. This list appears to be a collection of statements for several sources of varying quality.

By the way, the statement about “e” being the most common letter is true. The 12 most common letters, in order of frequency are etaoinshrdlu, a list I happen to have memorized.

 

First, I see now that we’re using adjectives as verbs! “Harsh,” an adjective is now in style as a verb: “Don’t harsh my, um whatever.” I suppose “criticize” has become too long a word for some folks to use. Harrumpf.

But now that I mentioned verbs and adjectives, that leads to adverbs, another word that adjectives frequently replace. Here’s a Pickles to illustrate:

I don’t often see the guy correctly correcting the gal’s grammar in the comics, but in this case, he’s right. This mistake is easy to make; adjectives are typically shorter than their adverbial counterpart. See the reference to “harsh” above.

Now, having defended the adverb, I have to add that you can usually skip adverbial constructions correct or incorrect altogether. That comic isn’t a good example of leaving out adverbs (they’re used substantively here, but I digress), but most of the time, you make your writing tighter and punchier when you leave out the adverbs and use a good verb, one better than “make” and “do.” And please, try never to use “very”!

This Speed Bump comic reminds me of the joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don’t. You know, of course, that 10 is binary for “two,” right?

When I was a kid, the conventional wisdom was that people tended to be good at (or like) math or language, but not both. I think it’s kind of true, but I’ve met a lot of exceptions, including myself.

But this comic also reminds me of a problem we have in English. (ahem) We ain’t got a good contraction for “am not.” I remember my sixth-grade teacher telling us that if we wanted to ask “ain’t I?” we should say “am I not?” It sounded strange to me, but I’ve gotten used to it.

“Ain’t” is a perfectly good word, but I’m afraid it’ll never escape its low class roots. Of course you can still use the word—just say you’re being just a wee bit folksy.

Sarcasm can be hard to detect in writing. But first, the humor:

We’ve all heard of Ivan Pavlov and his dogs, how they learned that food was on the way after a bell rang, and they started salivating before the food showed up. Even if the food didn’t show up! (We call this a conditioned response. It has several other names, too.) Hence the first pun in the comic.

The other one is a little trickier. You have probably heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s the rule that you can’t measure both the location and speed of a subatomic particle at the same time. A key here is that we’re talking about subatomic particles, where any way we try to measure the particle affects it. Makes it twitch, you could say. When you try this with large objects, though, measuring it doesn’t have a material effect, so you can measure both. Shining radar at an airplane, for example, doesn’t make the plane twitch enough to count.

Quantum physics came up with a corollary of the uncertainty principle, that until you measure a particle, it could actually be in more than one state. Edwin Schrodinger thought this was paradoxical, and he made an analogy of the situation by describing a cat in a box with poison and a triggering mechanism and we didn’t know whether it had triggered or not. Thus, he said, quantum physics claims that the cat would be both dead and alive until we look. That’s a lot to say to arrive at this: he was being sarcastic. The cat is a large object, not a subatomic particle, so it is either dead or alive, but not both.

So the comic is funny because it cleverly alludes to two heavy-duty scientific discoveries, but you should still be alert for sarcasm.

The Freedom of Information Act is a law that allows people to request (and get) information from the government by filling out a form. It doesn’t apply to classified info, but it does apply to a lot of information that, perhaps, the people who own the information would prefer stayed out of the news.

This law is commonly abbreviated “FOIA,” and people who deal with the law, either as dispensers or requesters of the information, pronounce the acronym “foy-uh.” Two syllables for eight, not a bad trade.

The linguistic rule in English is that if you can pronounce an acronym, it’s a word. Another rule, less popular with grammarians, is that if a word is a noun, you can make it into a verb by putting it into a verbal situation, such as putting it after “to,” making it an infinitive, or putting “-ed” on the end, making it past tense.

All that to say I recently ran into my first example of the acronym for the Freedom of Information Act being, um, verbed:

This blog post will address, first, the widespread nature of this misunderstanding; second, how I came to FOIA certain documents trying to figure out whether the numbers really added up; third, what those documents show; and fourth, what I further learned in talking to an intelligence official.

In fact, he did it twice:

That prompted me to FOIA the NSA for the other documents from the docket that led to the Bates rulings.

See? You can do it, and no one will stop you. Worse, everyone will understand you perfectly. This is from an information security blog called War Powers, by the way.

PS—If you read my recent post about future and present tense usage, you’d immediately recognize that the quote above should have started “This blog post addresses…”