*6 Now it can be told: That island to the east of Ireland is called Great Britain, or just plain Britain. Great Britain comprises Scotland (up at the top), Wales (down and to the left), and England (the chunk in the middle). Scottish and Welsh people will tolerate being referred to as British, but do not ever mistake them for Englishpeople.
Never, if you know what’s good for you, refer to an Irishperson as British. Irishpeople are Irish.
England, Scotland, Wales, and, as of this writing, the portion of Ireland politically designated Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
*7 Much transatlantic hilarity ensues over confusion between U.K. and U.S. uses of, among other words, “pissed,” “fanny,” and “fag,” to say nothing of “pants,” but I think we’ve had enough transatlantic hilarity for the moment.
*8 An engraved—or faux-engraved—invitation requesting the favour of a reply is also apt to inform you that luncheon will be served at twelve-thirty o’clock. Make of that what you will.
*9 Yes, except for the olfactory observation that concludes “dealt it.”
*10 The s-concluding versions of these words aren’t exactly unseen in published American writing, but most American copy editors will shear off those s’s, and Bob’s your uncle.
*11 Buy me a cocktail or two and I’ll regale you at length with my admittedly crackpot notion that gray and grey are, push comes to shove, two different colors, the former having a glossy, almost silvery sheen to it, the latter being heavier, duller, and sodden.
I’M GOING TO LET YOU IN ON A LITTLE SECRET:
I hate grammar.
Well, OK, not quite true. I don’t hate grammar. I hate grammar jargon.
I suspect that I’m not the only person currently reading this page who was not especially well trained, back in school days, in the ins and outs of grammar. When I started out as a copy editor, I realized that most of what I knew about grammar I knew instinctively. That is, I knew how most—certainly not all—of the grammar things worked; I simply didn’t know what they were called.
Even now I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what a nominative absolute is, I think that the word “genitive” sounds vaguely smutty, and I certainly don’t know, or care to know, how to diagram a sentence.
I hope I’m not shocking you.
But at a certain point I figured that if I was going to be fixing grammar for a living, I might do well to learn a little something about it, and that’s precisely what I did: I learned a little something about it. As little as I needed to. I still, at the slightest puzzlement, run back to my big fat stylebooks, and likely always will.
I do believe, though, that if as a writer you know how to do a thing, it’s not terribly important that you know what it’s called. So in this chapter—covering the grammar stumbles I tend to run into most frequently—I’ll do my best to keep the information as simple and applicable as possible and skip the terminology.
1.
Here’s one of those grammar rules that infuriate people:
That’s it. That’s the rule, or at least an example of it: The correct verb in that sentence is not “infuriates” but “infuriate.”
I know that you want to match “one” with a singular verb, but in this case…
Well, I keep an adhesive tab on p. 355 of my always handy copy of Words into Type because, I’ve found over time, people will simply not believe me as I stand firm on this point, and citing something written in someone else’s book tends to shore up one’s argument.
So: “The verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun, which is the nearest noun or pronoun and is often the object of a preposition, as in the phrase one of those who [or] one of the things that.”
If you’re allergic to phrases like “relative clause,”*1 as I am, you’ll simply have to remember this one by some other method. (My method is to, whenever I see the words “one of those” or “one of the,” grab my copy of Words into Type and reach for that tab attached to p. 355.)
It’s worth noting that when the typically impeccable Cole Porter wrote “one of those bells that now and then rings / just one of those things,” he made a swell rhyme but committed bad grammar.
It’s worth noting as well that on at least one recording of “Just One of Those Things,” the ferociously impeccable Lena Horne does sing “one of those bells that now and then ring” rather than “rings,” correcting the grammar but wrecking the rhyme.
I don’t think there’s a bit of grammatical copyediting I’ve ever been more enthusiastically challenged on than this one—the responses range from a simple “Really?” to, from points east, “Well, maybe that’s the way it’s done in the United States”—so perhaps I’ll concede that this is simply one of those rules that exist so that copy editors can confound laypeople.
Yes, I saw what I just did there. And I’d do it again.
2.
Even as I type these words, I’m listening to a wonderful singer whom I saw onstage repeatedly and who I didn’t realize had died twenty years ago.
The reports of the imminent death of the word “whom,” to paraphrase that which Mark Twain never quite said,*2 are greatly exaggerated, so you’d do well to learn to wield it correctly or, at least and perhaps more important, learn not to wield it incorrectly.*3
Basic “whom” use shouldn’t pose too many challenges. If you can remember to think of “who” as the cousin of “I,” “he,” “she,” and “they” (the thing doing the thing, a.k.a. a subject) and to think of “whom” as the cousin of “me,” “him,” “her,” and “them” (the thing being done to, a.k.a. an object), you’re most of the way there.
The man whom Shirley met for lunch was wearing a green carnation in his lapel.
(You’ll note that this sentence would work just as well if you deleted the “whom” altogether. Same goes for the sentence about the singer a handful of paragraphs north of here.)
To whom did you give the shirt off your back?
To say nothing of “to whom it may concern” and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The thing to avoid is, in a moment of genteel panic, using “whom” when what you really want is “who.” This sort of error is generally referred to as a hypercorrection, a term I’m not enamored of and that, I’ve found, confuses people, because the point of a hypercorrection is not that it’s super-duper correct but that it’s trying so hard to be correct that it collapses into error. But until someone can come up with a better word, we’re stuck with it.
“Whom” hypercorrections—and “whomever” hypercorrections, so long as we’re here—tend to fall into two camps: the “No, that’s a parenthetical phrase” camp and the “Watch out for that verb!” camp.
For the former, let’s think of Viola, the heroine of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and her brother, Sebastian, whom she believes has drowned in a shipwreck.
No. The “she believes” is parenthetical, settable-off-with-commas, or even utterly extractable, leaving you with, then:
her brother, Sebastian, whom has drowned in a shipwreck
Well, that won’t do, now, will it. So then:
her brother, Sebastian, who she believes has drowned in a shipwreck
In this case, your hypercorrection alarm should ring over the likes of “she believes,” “he says,” “it is thought,” etc.
Is there a correct “whom” version of that phrase? Sure, let’s try this (though it’s a bit of a mouthful):
her brother, Sebastian, whom, supposedly drowned in a shipwreck, she mourns
The “Watch out for that verb!” hypercorrection occurs when you’ve got everything cued up perfectly:
I gave the candy to
and you’re so damn sure that the next word is, well,
of course, an object-type thing—a “him,” a “her,” a “they”—that you continue
I gave the candy to whomever wanted it the most.
And no again. It’s that following verb, that “wanted,” that itself demands a subject, leading to a correct:
I gave the candy to whoever wanted it the most.
You can, to be sure, give the candy to whomever you like, and that will be correct too.
Your hypercorrection alarm, in this case, should sound at the sight of a new verb on the horizon, and a lot of the time that verb is going to be an “is,” as in:
I will give the candy to whoever is most deserving.
In grammarese, that’s (and we’re back to Words into Type here) “The relative pronoun is the subject of the following verb, not the object of the preceding preposition or verb.”
3.
I wrote a note to myself not only to write about “not only x but y” constructions but to write about “either x or y” constructions.
I wrote a note to myself to write not only about “not only x but y” constructions but about “either x or y” constructions.
I wrote not only a note to myself to write about “not only x but y” constructions but a note to myself to write about “either x or y” constructions.
No, I’m not reaching the “All work and no play makes*4 Jack a dull boy” stage. The point is simply this:
In “not x but y,” “not only x but y,” “either x or y,” “neither x nor y,” and “both x and y” constructions, you must ensure that the x and the y match in their makeup—that is to say, are parallel.
(Many people, I’ve found, have lodged in their heads the absolute necessity of including an “also” in this construction, not merely “not only x but y” but “not only x but also y.” Seems like a waste of a good “also” to me. I would include an “also” if I chose to express myself thus: “Not only did I write a note to myself to write about ‘not only x but y’ constructions; I also wrote a note to myself to write about ‘either x or y’ constructions.” But I don’t think I’d choose to express myself thus.)
It’s an easy thing to get wrong—I can assure you of that firsthand. It’s quite easy to write:
She achieved success not only through native intelligence but perseverance.
and not give it a second thought. But you do want to get this correct, so:
She achieved success not only through native intelligence but through perseverance.
She achieved success through not only native intelligence but perseverance.
Similarly:
NO: I can either attempt to work all afternoon or I can go buy a new shower curtain.
YES: I can either attempt to work all afternoon or go buy a new shower curtain.
ALSO YES: Either I can attempt to work all afternoon or I can go buy a new shower curtain.
Or as I once said to T. S. Eliot, “Tom, it’s not ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It’s ‘With not a bang but a whimper’ or ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper.’ Let’s get it right.”
Oh, and this:
In “neither x nor y” constructions, if the x is singular and the y is plural, the verb to follow is plural. If the x is plural and the y is singular, the verb to follow is singular. That is, simply: Take your cue from the y.
Neither the president nor the representatives have the slightest idea what’s going on.
Neither the representatives nor the president has the slightest idea what’s going on.
4.
Q. Is it “It is I who is late” or “It is I who am late”?
A. It’s “I’m late.” Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
5.
If someone were trying to kill you, how do you think they’d go about it?
Did reading that sentence—the issue of my morbidity and your potential corpseness aside—hurt your ears and/or offend your sensibilities? If it didn’t, you might well choose to skip the rest of this section and move on to the next. If it did, stick around, because we need to talk.
The use in prose of the singular “they”—that is, the application of the pronoun “they” to an individual human being whose gender is neither specified nor, at the moment, relevant—tends to raise the eyebrows of many of us of a certain age, because at some point in the journey of our lives we were either taught or simply inferred—because we never saw it used in the books and magazines and newspapers we read—that it was incorrect.
What we saw, over and over, was something like this:
[A] beginning writer…worries to think of his immaturity, and wonders how he ever dared to think he had a word worth saying.
—DOROTHEA BRANDE, Becoming a Writer (1934)
The 1934 copy editor might well say that the pronoun “he” is perfectly appropriate in such cases, because of course by “he” we simply mean any sort of person at all.
Well, this twenty-first-century copy editor would like to point out that plenty of twenty-first-century people will take umbrage and/or feel excluded, and they’ll do it quite rightfully and righteously, and they won’t all be women, either.
Low rumblings of dissatisfaction re the ostensibly genderless “he” were vehemently making themselves known in manuscripts I was assigned to work on in the early 1990s, and some writers, I noted, were attempting any number of workarounds.
The most popular, as I recall them:
The use of “he or she,” as in “A student should be able to study whatever he or she likes.” Perhaps clumsy, and undoubtedly quickly tiresome, but inoffensive.
The alternation of “he” and “she,” sometimes paragraph by paragraph, sometimes sentence by sentence. As in: “If your child is reluctant to eat vegetables, don’t force him. But neither can you give in to a child’s whims, because this may lead her not only to malnutrition but to a belief that she’s the master of her own destiny.” Well-meaning, yes. Maybe a bit vertigo-inducing.
Flat-out use of the pronoun “she,” from page 1 till page the last.
The use of the construction “s/he,” which, truth and happily to tell, I didn’t run across all that often. Because it’s hideous.
Yet so apparently deeply felt was the proscription against the singular “they” that only rarely, once-in-a-blue-moon rarely, did I meet up with a writer who reached for it. And I did what any self-respecting copy editor in those days would do: I got rid of it.
But how? How can you dispose of a he-that’s-not-a-he without resorting to a they-that’s-not-a-they without tying into knots either oneself or someone else’s prose?
One easy out was always to grab the opportunity to turn a singular noun into a plural one, thus obviating the need for a singular pronoun: “A student should be able to study whatever he likes” transforms easily into “Students should be able to study whatever they like.”
When that wasn’t possible, I’d find myself trying to figure out how to get a sentence to work without any pronoun at all. It’s not as difficult as you might think—a nip here, a tuck there—and the result, I found, or at least persuaded myself, was often a tighter, leaner, stronger sentence.
But OK, let’s get back to the second decade of the twenty-first century, in which lexicographers and other word folk enthusiastically remind us that the pronoun “they” has been used singularly in prose*5 for centuries, happily provide examples of that use in Great Works of Literature,*6 dutifully point out that the proscription against the singular “they” is yet another of those Victorian-era pulled-out-of-relatively-thin-air grammar rules we’ve been saddled with, and, for the big finale, encouragingly encourage us to embrace the singular “they” as the ultimate in pronoun efficiency. Not a workaround, not a solution to a problem, but simply A
Thing That’s Been Right There All Along.
The singular “they” is not the wave of the future; it’s the wave of the present. I fear I’m too old a dog to embrace it, and faced with a wannabe genderless “he” or singular “they,” I’m still apt to pull out my tried-and-true tricks to dispose of it.
A few notes, though, before we move on:
We mightn’t be having this discussion at all if we all spoke, say, French, in which every noun, from professeur to livre to bibliothèque to pomme is gendered (respectively le, le, la, la), take it or leave it, so what’s a stray il among amis (or amies), right?
Sentences like “Every girl in the sorority should do what they like” or “A boy’s best friend is their mother” are daft.*7
I can’t help but note that quite a number of prose stylists who loudly advocate using the singular “they” wouldn’t be caught dead using it themselves, according to the evidence of their surrounding prose. Make of that what you will.
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