Here's why a ship can 'flounder' even though ships usually 'founder'

“The ship floundered in rough seas and eventually sank.”

“The ship floundered in the swells off of the Outer Banks for a while before breaking apart.”

“When a cargo ship floundered on the shore, it was often considered providence.”

When I searched Google recently for wrong uses of the verb “flounder,” I found a lot of flubs. Or did I? On second glance, I’m not sure any of the errors I caught by searching the term “ship floundered” were actually errors. On the contrary, the error may have been mine for believing the grammar scolds who complain that almost no one uses “founder” and “flounder” correctly.

“People commonly confuse ‘flounder’ and ‘founder’ because they sound similar and have similar spellings,” one blogger warns. “The words ‘flounder’ and ‘founder’ are easily confused,” says another. And there are lots more where these two came from. For the most part, these online language commenters are right: The verbs “flounder” and “founder” are easy to confuse. But what’s remarkable is that, at least in a nautical context, you’re likely to get them right even if you’re confused.

I explain why in my recent column.

Faulty predication

An inauguration is where we get to see the president sworn in.

How do you like that sentence? Does anything strike you as a little off? How about this one:

A hurricane is when wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour.

or

The purpose of toothpaste was invented to help people care for their teeth at home.

When I’m editing newspaper articles, from time to time I find myself staring at a sentence like one of these and scratching my head. The sensation is a little like getting rear-ended at a traffic light. You just sit there blinking, trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world, momentarily unable to remember how the world is supposed to be.

There’s a term for this problem. It’s called faulty predication. And it’s explained like this: Faulty predication occurs anytime a subject doesn’t make sense with the verb. More precisely, it happens when the subject can’t logically do or be whatever the verb says it’s doing or being.

Let’s look at our first example. An inauguration is where we get to see the president sworn in. I chose this one because it’s nice and fuzzy. Is it okay? Is it not?

The subject is “an inauguration” and the verb “is” says that it is “where.” Technically, that doesn’t make sense because an inauguration isn’t a place. But can you stretch the meaning to “where” to something like “an event at which,” giving us “An inauguration is an event at which we get to see the president”? Possibly. And you certainly could make the argument that the reader understands what you mean. But it’s sloppy. I wouldn’t let it stand in an article I was editing.

Ditto that for “A hurricane is when.” Technically, a hurricane isn’t a when. More precise would be “a hurricane occurs when” or “a hurricane is what happens when."

Our final example, “The purpose of toothpaste was invented” isn’t as forgivable. It’s illogical. The purpose was not invented. The purpose of toothpaste is … Toothpaste was invented for the purpose of … There are a number of ways to extract a logical statement out of this sentence, as long as you’re focused on the illogic of saying the purpose was invented.

The only way to avoid faulty predication mistakes is to stay vigilant and, especially, to reread what you’ve written. When in doubt, ask yourself: Can my subject really do what I’m saying it’s doing? If not, look for a better way to make your point.

What's a fused participle — and is it really an error?

I saw you working hard.

I appreciate you working hard.

At a glance, these sentences seem grammatically identical. But in fact, the grammar of the second one is wildly controversial, with some experts insisting it’s an error called a “fused participle.”

The fused participle concept comes up most often in the sentence: “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me.” Critics of this form say it should be: “I appreciate your taking the time to meet with me.” And that one-letter variation, “your” replacing “you,” makes all the difference in the world. But to understand how that changes the grammar, you need to zoom in on how all the parts work together in the sentence.

In “I saw you working hard,” the object of the verb “saw” is “you.” I saw you. The next word, “working,” is a verb participle functioning as a modifier — essentially an adjective. It may seem odd to classify a verb form as an adjective, but we use verb participles this way all the time: a cooking class, a walking stick, your thinking cap, growing pains, a hiking excursion. In all these examples, a verb participle is modifying a noun, meaning it’s working like an adjective. The participle in “you working” has the same role, even though it comes after the noun.

So when you say, “I saw you working,” you get a grammatical sentence with a verb (saw), followed by its object (you), followed by a modifier of that object (working).

But in “I appreciate you driving him home,” the object of the verb “appreciate” isn’t really “you.” You’re not saying, “I appreciate you as a person” or “I appreciate that you exist.” It’s the driving that you really appreciate. So “driving” is the true object of the verb “appreciate.” Yet the first word after “appreciate” isn’t “driving.” It’s “you.” Between the verb and its true object, there’s another word — “you” — just sitting there with no grammatical job to do. The participle “driving” is just kind of fused to “you” with no clear role. From a standpoint of pure grammar, it’s nonsensical. Here's the full story in my recent column.

'All told' or 'all tolled'?

Should you write "all told" or "all tolled"? The first one: all told.

There’s a good chance you knew that already. I knew it for years, right up until I stumbled across some bad information on the subject, which led to a series of unfortunate events.

For years I knew the term as “all told.” Again, that’s correct. I considered “all told” a close cousin of “when all is said and done.” That’s not exactly right, but it’s a good way to think of it because it equates the telling in “told” with the saying in “said.” Both words refer to talking.

Then, some years ago, I came across a wrong bit of information. I read, I don’t remember where, that “all told” is wrong and that it should be “all tolled.”

I wrote a column about it before I realized it wasn’t true. A writer friend of mine who read the column repeated its incorrect message in a book. Only by sheer luck did we realize the error before the book went to press.

To get this right, remember that it’s about telling – when all has been told. But for a historical understanding of the term, well, that’s not exactly how it works.

“One archaic meaning of ‘tell’ is ‘to count,’” says Garner’s Modern American Usage. “Hence the idiom is ‘all told’ -- ‘All told there were 14 casualties’ -- which dates from the mid-19th century. Some people write ‘all tolled,’ perhaps because ‘toll’ can mean ‘to announce with a bell or other signal.’ But this is an error.