People who don't care about grammar often get it right anyway

“I’ll dress warm,” I wrote to friends recently in a group email about a get-together on the patio of a local café.

What happened next will sound familiar to every careful user of the English language: I second-guessed my own grammar. “Is ‘warm’ OK instead of ‘warmly?’” I wondered. “How do those rules work again? And, even if I got it right, do I have to worry my friends will think I was wrong? Can I defend my choice? Will I have to?”

If you know people who don’t care a whit about their grammar, don’t look down on them. Envy them. These folks not only sidestep a lot of this anguish, but, ironically, their nonchalance often ensures good grammar. After all, natural language is where grammar rules come from.

Winging it prevents hypercorrection, which is what happens when you work too hard to speak grammatically and, as a result, make a mistake. “Between you and I” is a good example. The more grammatically correct form is “between you and me,” since “between” is a preposition and prepositions take object pronouns. But people trying to be proper use “I,” ironically making their choice less proper than the people who didn’t try so hard.

That goes double for adverbs. Consider the sentence: Slice the onions thinly. To someone who’s fretting over grammar, the adverb “thinly” might seem necessary, since you’re talking about an action: slicing. But you’re not describing an action. You’re describing a noun: the onions.

“One must analyze the sentence,” advises Bryan Garner in Garner’s Modern American Usage. Here's the full story in my recent column.

Another sentence structure to hate

Here’s an example of a sentence structure I just learned to hate: “There are lye-based products that clear debris out of pipes.”

You may not see anything odious about that perfectly common sentence structure. But when you compare it to a version that’s been revised by a professional editor, the problem becomes clear. Here’s the edited version: “Lye-based products clear debris out of pipes.”

Looking at the two versions, you immediately see that “there are” is unnecessary. Just extra words. Worse, these words force you to add one more word: “that.” Instead of saying the products clear out debris, you must say these are products “that” clear out debris. So the structure creates a wordier-than-necessary sentence.

True, shorter sentences aren’t always better. But they usually are. They make the best use of readers’ time and attention, wasting none of it on unnecessary words.

But needless words aren’t the only problem with the longer sentence. A closer look at the syntax reveals deeper problems.

In our revised version, the main clause has a tangible subject: lye-based products. Tangible subjects have a sensory effect on readers, evoking images, sounds or smells. Lye evokes burning and stinging and danger and a certain power. Even pairing it up with a bland, vague noun like “products” doesn’t diminish its effect on readers.

In the original sentence, the subject was the pronoun “there.” Technically, this is called the “existential there,” which is just a structure we use to say something exists. As a subject, “there” is a real yawner — as devoid of specificity as a word can be.

Existential “there” always uses a form of the verb “be,” in this case “are.” Forms of “be” are among the least-dynamic verbs you’ll find. Being is always less action-packed than doing. I explain how to handle this in my recent column.

How to pronounce 'forte'

I don’t usually focus on pronunciation matters. They don’t much interest me — probably because they don’t frighten me. I know that pronunciation is dictated by usage — we speakers are the ones who vote for our preferred pronunciations every time we speak. So if everyone else pronounces a certain word a certain way for long enough, I can, too.

But there are a few pronunciation matters I find interesting, mainly because they came on my radar before I realized how the rules get laid down.

The one that’s one my mind today is “forte,” as in “Working with computers is definitely your forte.” Everyone pronounces that “for-tay.” I thought nothing of doing so myself until I came across an old Mallard Fillmore comic strip shredding to bits anyone who pronounced it that way. It should be pronounced, the author insisted, just like “fort.”

Sound like hogwash? Of course it is. But don’t take it from me. Here’s the word on dictionary.com, which will pronounce it for you if you press the little audio button saying you can pronounce it either “fort” or “for-tay.”

Nonplussed about "nonplussed"

When it comes to grammar and usage, I’m generally non-nonplussable. I’ve been studying this stuff a long time. So when a friend or acquaintance asks me about a word, I usually have something intelligent to say.

But all that went out the window recently when, at a small gathering of friends, I was asked about “nonplussed.” Everyone else at the table had an opinion on the subject. The consensus was that people tend to use “nonplussed” to mean the opposite of what it really means. “Right, June? What say you, June?”

To which I said me — nothing. I had a fuzzy recollection of once being aware of how this word worked. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what the controversy was — or even the definition.
Clearly, it was time for a refresher on “nonplussed.”

The verb “nonplus,” means to perplex or baffle. But you don’t hear it much as a verb. People don’t often say, “Yo, don’t nonplus me, dude.” They could, but they don’t.

Mostly, you hear it in sentences like “He was nonplussed,” in which it’s a verb participle being used as an adjective. Using past-tense verbs as adjectives is standard, by the way. Think: “broken heart,” “painted fence,” “canceled flight,” “known quantity” and “waxed floor.”

“Nonplussed” can be spelled with one S or two, but the double-S form seems to be preferred by dictionaries.

As a noun, “nonplus” means a state of perplexity or a quandary. But this, too, is rare. You don’t often hear “The math questions on the test really threw me into a nonplus.”

In fact, this is how “nonplus” first entered the English language in the 16th century: as a noun meaning “quandary,” which was picked up from the Latin “non plus,” which means “no more.” Here’s an example from 1593 cited by Merriam-Webster. “I am brought to a nonplus, O Lorde what shall I saie?”

It took another century or so before “nonplus” evolved into a verb meaning “to cause to be at a loss as to what to say, think, or do,” which is basically what it means today.

But recently, "nonplussed" has become controversial, which I explore in my recent column.