There are no stupid grammar questions

People with grammar questions often feel stupid for not already knowing the answer, but the people who answer them are often the ones who should have stayed mum.

Google searches for “dumb grammar question” and “stupid grammar question” prove the point. Here’s one of the first hits, a 2017 post in a writers’ community message board. “DUMB grammar question!” someone named Sherry began. “After being a writer for almost 40 years, I am aware this is a really silly question. I should know better. BUT … which is correct? ‘My family HAS seen me through’ … or ‘My family HAVE seen me through.’”

Raise your hand if you were taught in school that certain collective nouns can take either a singular or plural verb, depending on your meaning. Yeah, me neither. But that’s the case here. “Family” is usually singular, taking a singular verb like “has.” But sometimes it’s meant as a collective of individuals acting independently of each other: “Half my family are voting for candidate 1 and the other half are voting for candidate 2.” Another example: My family comes to the reunion every year, but my family come from all over the U.S.

In Sherry’s question, though, the singular interpretation, while not mandatory, is better: My family has seen me through. But that’s not the answer she got.

One person said Sherry’s real problem was passive voice and that she should make it active voice by changing “My family has seen me through” to “My family saw me through.”

Um, no. Both those sentences are in active voice. They’re just different verb tenses. “Has seen” is called the present perfect tense. “Saw” is the simple past tense.

Passive would be “I have been seen through by my family,” with the object of the action made into the subject of the sentence. But in both “My family saw” and “My family has seen,” the doer of the action, the family, is the subject.

Other posters who tried to answer Sherry’s question didn’t do much better. Read about their misguided guidance in my recent column.

The teacher who condemned 'got'

I never used to believe in ghosts. The idea of hauntings sounded ridiculous to me. Then I started writing about grammar. Now I know better.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been hearing bone-chilling tales of undead teachers haunting former students from the great beyond with bad information: You can’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can't use healthy to mean healthful. You can't start a sentence with but.

The stubborn persistence of these bad teachings never ceases to amaze me. But from time to time these chilling tales go beyond the pale, wowing me with just how bad bad information can be.

Case in point, an e-mail I got recently:

Dear June. Today, in your column from the Pasadena Sun section of the L.A. Times, you used "the writer got bogged down." I will never forget several teachers, including one particularly memorable Mrs. Hamilton, telling me that using "got" in any sentence anytime was simply being lazy, that it was bad English, uncouth, uneducated, etc. You get the point.

Yup, there was once a teacher who took it upon herself to single-handedly condemn a well established and highly useful word. I particularly like that “uneducated” part -- and the irony of how it came from someone who needed only to open a dictionary to see that she was misinforming her own students. Of course, I didn’t say so to the poor guy in so many words. Instead, here’s what I wrote: 

The most common objection to got is that have and got are redundant in phrases like "I have got quite a few friends." Yes, it's inefficient, but it's accepted as an idiom. Every major language authority I know of agrees it's a valid option. 

We editors usually trim the gots out. Especially in news writing, which prizes efficiency, "He has got $20'" is a poor alternative to "He has $20." But that's an aesthetic. Not a grammar rule.

 From what you're saying, your teacher was condemning the word got in all its uses. And, yes, that's extreme to the point of being illogical. Got is the past tense of get, which can be both a regular verb and an auxiliary verb: "They got married."

It sounds as though Mrs. Hamilton would have everyone say, "They were married." But if so, that's just a personal preference she was trying to pass off as a rule. There isn't a dictionary under the sun that would back her up.

"I hear a lot of stories about teachers who used to lay down laws that weren't laws. (It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It's wrong to split an infinitive. It's wrong to begin a sentence with and.) These kinds of unfounded prohibitions were very fashionable in educational circles for a while. But they never were rules. It's unfortunate kids got so much bad information.

 Hope that helps! - June

Quasi possessives

Do you know about quasi possessives? You probably should. Unlike so many other things in language you can figure out on your own, quasi possessives are one of those things you just have to know. And since you’re visiting a grammar site, chances are you’re one of the people who’d like to know it. So here goes.

You know how people talk about a hard day’s work or two weeks’ pay or getting your dollar’s worth? Well, those are all considered quasi possessives. They get treated as possessives even though they don’t convey the same degree of “ownership,” if you will, as do regular possessives.

AP discusses these in its on using apostrophes and says that phrases as a day’s pay, two weeks’ vacation, three days’ work and your money’s worth all get the possessive treatment.

The Chicago Manual of Style calls this the “possessive with genitive,” which I don’t love because “genitive” roughly translates to “possessive,” making the whole term seem a bit nonsensical. However, this use of the word “genitive” is a nod to the fact that there are two ways to form possessives in English. Either with an apostrophe plus S (or, in the case most plurals, just an apostrophe): Joe’s house, the Smiths’ daughter. The other way, and this is more consistent with English’s Latin roots, is to use of: the house of Joe, the daughter of the Smiths.

As Chicago describes it, forms like a week's pay are a carry-over from the latter: “Possessive with genitive. Analogous to possessives, and formed like them, are certain expressions based on the old genitive case. The genitive here implies ‘of’: in three days’ time, an hour’s delay, six months’ leave.”

If it helps to think of these as “three days of time” or “an hour of delay,” do. But I find it easier just to remember that these expressions are possessive-like. Or, as both guides recommend, you can also tweak the sentence so you have a hyphenated compound like “a six-month leave” or “a two-week vacation.”

Why is legal writing so convoluted?

Legal writing is famously inscrutable and inaccessible — especially fond of long parenthetical ideas shoved in the middle of sentences. And according to a recent study, their reader-unfriendly prose is contagious.

“Legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike,” write the authors of a study published this summer. In other words, nobody — not even lawyers themselves — can easily slog through their stuff. Yet they keep cranking out sentences like this gem I found online: “I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.”

In my books and columns, I sometimes take badly written passages and show how they could have been better. No can do this time. You can’t streamline a passage if you don’t know what it says. Bravo, returner of the stipulation to dismiss. Bravo.

If non-lawyers can’t decipher stuff like this and even lawyers themselves find it hard to understand, why do they write like this?

To find out, researchers asked 200 study participants to write laws prohibiting crimes like drunk driving and burglary. Then they asked them to write stories about those crimes.

The laws they wrote contained unnecessarily long, labyrinthine sentences with lots of parenthetical explanations crammed in. The stories, however, were written simply, without the parenthetical information stuffing. The kicker: None of the participants were lawyers. They were laypeople who somehow got it in their heads that bloated, fussy sentences make you sound more authoritative.

Researchers explain this with the “magic spell hypothesis” legal writing, which you can read about in my recent column.