Guys can bring their girlfriends or girlfriend?

“‘Guys are allowed to bring their girlfriend/girlfriends to the event.’ Are both OK?”

That’s what a user on an English language message board wanted to know a while back. And if you’ve never thought about this issue before, prepare for some brain pain.
As you know, subjects and verbs should agree. You walk. He walks. The verb changes form to match the number of the subject. That’s agreement. But objects don’t agree with subjects. You may walk the dogs if there’s more than one. Or you may walk the dog if there’s just one. The subject and verb have no bearing on how many objects you have.

In some sentences, however, that doesn’t work out so well.

For example, try the plural object in our sentence above and you get: “Guys are allowed to bring their girlfriends.” That has a nice mathematical balance to it. There are a number of guys, along with a number of girls. So it’s true, yet the meaning isn’t clear. With “girlfriends” in the plural, you could be saying that every guy has more than one girlfriend — that each guy should bring all his girlfriends. Surely that’s not what the writer meant.

The singular object must fit the bill then, right? “Guys are allowed to bring their girlfriend.” But that seems to suggest that all the guys — no matter how many — share just one girlfriend. Doubtful that’s what the writer meant, either.

Regular readers of this column know that, often, when grammar gives you an either-or, which-is-right scenario, the answer is: both. It’s rare to come across a which-is-right question in grammar where the answer is: neither. But, technically, that’s the case here: Neither the plural object nor the singular object captures your exact meaning. That means neither is wrong, either. So just go with whatever you prefer and take comfort in these words from Barbara Wallraff’s “Word Court”: “When one is at pains to make clear that the individuals in the subject are to be paired one apiece with the persons, places or things in question, the number of the noun can’t be relied on to make the point.” More detail here in my recent column.

'Peruse' is more flexible than some people think

Recently I learned that pretty much everyone who’s ever opined about the word “peruse” was wrong, kind of. And the people who corrected the people who opined wrongly were also wrong, kind of. And that I, myself, never quite understood the real deal with “peruse,” even though I thought I had it all figured out.

Here’s the most common way I see “peruse” used these days: “Peruse the charming boutiques.” “Peruse the delicious menu options.” “Peruse the aisles.” In other words, I see “peruse” used to mean “browse.”

Ten or 20 years ago, the only “peruses” I ever noticed referred to reading, not looking at merchandise. From here, the controversy heats up because there are different ways to read something. You can read something closely and carefully, you can skim it casually, or you can read it while paying just the normal amount of attention. And in the early 1900s, people started saying that only one of those is correct.

“Peruse should not be used when the simple ‘read’ is meant,” argued author Frank Vizetelly in the 1906 “A Desk-Book of Errors in English,” which is cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. “Peruse,” Vizetelly argued, means “to read with care and attention … to examine with critical care and in detail.”

The idea caught on, and within a few decades this rule was standard in prescriptivist handbooks of English like Eric Partridge’s influential 1942 guide “Usage and Abusage.” “Peruse is not synonymous with ‘to read,’ for it means to read thoroughly, read carefully from beginning to end,” Partridge wrote. “One peruses a contract, one reads an (ordinary) advertisement.”

The idea stuck, and to this day anyone who uses “peruse” to mean “skim” or “read” can draw sneers from adherents of this long-held belief.

Strangely, though, it seems Vizetelly based this rule on nothing but his own beliefs. “While we cannot be sure, it appears that this notion of the correct use of ‘peruse’ was Vizetelly’s own invention,” Merriam’s explains. “It was certainly born in disregard of dictionary definitions of the word and in apparent ignorance of the literary traditions on which those dictionary definitions were based.”

Read more in my recent column.

Two-letter words are the biggest typo risks

For years, I’ve been writing a weekly grammar column for some small community newspapers. I try never to look at it in published form. The reason: typos. It seems like about half the times I've seen an installment of my column online it has had some embarrassing error. I never know who to be angry at: the dodo who made the mistake (me) or the editors who might have caught it. Either way, it's a team effort to make me look bad, and I'm captain of the team.

Take, for example, the time I made an error in the following sentence: Webster's New World College Dictionary is more reluctant to embrace the hyperbolic usage, instead adding to one it its definitions this note: “Now often used as an intensive to modify a word or phrase that itself is being used figuratively: ‘she literally flew into the room.'”

Don’t see the typo? That’s okay, neither did I and neither did the editor who checked it before passing it on to the four publications in which the mistake appeared. The typo is “it its.” I meant to type “of its.”

This is a classic example of my own typographical Achilles’ heel. If there’s one error in something I wrote, chances are it's a wrong or extra preposition, article, or pronoun. These little words make mischief when I delete part of a sentence to rewrite it but fail to delete all the words. So I end up with something like “at on,” “to about,” or “at to.”

I guess I’ll just have to implement a policy of reading every word – especially the little ones –
out loud.

Ask not when America lost its British accent — ask when Brits acquired it

Have you ever watched one of those cheesy basic-cable docudramas set in colonial times? Me neither. But I’ve seen a lot of promos for them. And it always makes me smile that George Washington, John Hancock and the gang are so often portrayed as having posh British accents.

It makes sense. People on this side of the Atlantic weren’t oo far removed from people in Britain

In fact, many were themselves Brits fresh off the boat. So you could see how they might do lots of crazy British things, like fancify their Rs and eat kidney pie.

I never questioned those highfalutin historical accents at all – I figured they were somewhere close to the truth – until I got a copy of Patricia T. O’Conner’s Origins of the Specious.  Just a few pages into the introduction, I read this:

“I’m sometimes asked, ‘When did we Americans lose our British accent?’ Answer: We didn’t lose it. The British once spoke pretty much as we do. What we think of as the plummy British accent is a fairly recent happening.”

In the following chapter she explains how this happened. The Englishmen and –women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sounded a lot like the Americans of today. What we think of as a British accent (and the many variations within that could be construed as separate accents) didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Then, shortly after we broke away, a fashion started forming among educated folks in English who thought it sounded jolly good to start doing things like dropping their R sounds in words like “far” and “church” and adding other little fancy-sounding flourishes to their speech.

A lot of the Americans who had the closest ties with England – you know, people in New England – picked up the habit. Which is why parking a car too far in Harvard yard is a punchline-worthy activity.