June 8, 2020

'Do': The dummy operator

Have you ever thought about the word “do”? My advice is don’t.

The word “do” is one of the bugbears of English that make our language incredibly difficult to master — for nonnative speakers and even for people born into the English-speaking world. Almost no one fully understands “do.” The people who use it correctly do so through osmosis, not understanding.

To see what I mean, consider the formula for making questions in Latin-based languages like French. In other languages, to make a question, you often just take a statement and swap the places of the subject and verb. “Vous voulez fromage” (You want cheese) becomes a question when you switch the positions of the pronoun and the verb: “Voulez-vous fromage?” Simple.

There are exceptions, of course — situations trickier than this. But this is the basic formula. It’s called inversion, because you invert the position of the subject and verb.

Try that in English. “You want cheese.” “Want you cheese?” “He saw a great movie last weekend.” “Saw he a great movie last weekend?” As we’ll see in a minute, sometimes this process actually works in English.

But not in these examples. Examine all these questions and you can see that something is missing — a little-understood word known as a dummy operator. It’s the word “do,” and it’s how we form questions like “Do you want cheese?” and “Did he see a great movie last weekend?”

“Do” has two main jobs. First, it’s a regular old verb. “Do the dishes.” “I don’t do windows.” “I do.” In that job, it works the same as any other garden variety verb. But on top of that, it has a special job — that of dummy operator. Here's a column on what dummy operators are and how you use them every day without thinking about it.

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June 1, 2020

'John and I' or 'John and Me'?

In casual conversation, most people I know don’t worry too much about sounding proper. They don’t bother with “whom.” They say, “There’s a lot of people here” instead of “There are a lot of people here.” They opt for forms like “Joe is taller than me” instead of “Joe is taller than I.”

But there’s one situation in which it seems everyone is bent on sounding as proper as possible. Consider the sentence “I’m so happy you were able to spend time with John and I.” Choosing “I” over “me” in sentences like this seems to be the preferred form of practically every English speaker with even the slightest interest in sounding educated.

Unfortunately, in this case, trying to sound like you have good grammar makes things worse because the grammatically correct form is “with John and me,” not “with John and I.”

I have a theory about why this hypercorrection is so common. When kids say stuff like “Katie and me are going outside” or “Kevin and me are playing video games,” many parents are swift to correct them. Kids assume that “I” is more proper than “me.”

But that’s not always the case. If you really want to sound like you know your stuff, you need to understand the difference between subject pronouns and object pronouns.

I, you, he, she, it, we and they are subject pronouns. They perform the “action” of the verb. I walk fast. You work hard. He is nice.

But when they function as objects, most of these personal pronouns take different forms. Me, you, him, her, it, us and them are object pronouns. “You” and “it” are the oddballs, functioning as subjects and objects. Here's how to use them.

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May 25, 2020

Can you start a sentence with 'he,' 'she' or 'they'?

“Good sentences don’t start with He/She/They.”

That’s a lesson that, according to a Twitter post, a teacher recently passed on to a child.

In context, the lesson seems a little less atrocious: The teacher was talking about the first sentence in a child’s answer to an essay question, meaning the child’s own writing hadn’t yet named an antecedent for the pronoun. In that case, maybe it’s a good idea to teach kids to use a full noun, like Joe, before you start referring to that noun with a pronoun, like “he.”

But that’s not what the teacher said, so the lesson a child would walk away with, carrying it with him for his lifetime, is that it’s bad to start a sentence with one of those pronouns.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that’s ridiculous. But to illustrate, I thought I’d take a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel off my bookshelf and see how well it lives up to this teacher’s high standards. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which won the prize for fiction, has on its first page a sentence starting with “he.” On page two, four sentences start with “he.” On page three, seven sentences start with “he.” Another Pulitzer winner, Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys,” has its first sentence-commencing “he” on page one of chapter one, with lots more on subsequent pages.

So, no. It’s not true that good sentences can’t start with “he,” “she” or “they," as I explain fully in this recent column.

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May 18, 2020

Navigating the gray areas in punctuation rules

Consider the following two sentences.

“Days are usually great, but, when they aren’t great, they still pass in 24 hours.”

“Every word should bring something to the table and, if it doesn’t, it should be chopped out.”

In both examples, a conjunction is connecting independent clauses. In the first, that conjunction is “but.” In the second, it’s “and.” But the “but” has a comma before it and the “and” does not. What, Liz wants to know, is the right way to handle these?

The rules for commas seem, at first glance, to be pretty clear. They state that when any of the coordinating conjunctions “and,” “but” or “so” connects two clauses that could stand alone as sentences, put a comma before the conjunction unless the whole sentence is short, simple and poses no danger of confusion. In other words, use a comma before the conjunction — or don’t.

That’s why both these sentences are punctuated correctly. It’s also why you could change your mind about both — removing the comma after “great” and inserting one after “table” — and still be correct.

Punctuation rules are full of gray areas where you can call the shots. Here are some more thoughts on navigating these gray areas.

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May 11, 2020

Coronavirus Slang

Are you enjoying your coronacation? Or is it making you coronalusional? Are you surrounded by covidiots? Do you go to the opposite extreme by hamsterkaufing every scrap of food you get your hands on?

Either way, your experience is being captured by a slew of new coronavirus slang terms. The U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper recently published a list of Covid-inspired expressions popping up in the language. Like a lot of reporting about language, take this with a grain of salt. It may have more to do with a news outlet eager to publish a fun story about new words than having a meaningful impact on the language. But who knows whether any or all of them could catch on?

Here they are.

Coronacation — forced time off work due to the virus

Coronalusional — having delusional or strange thoughts due to pandemic

Covidiot — someone disobeying lockdown or self-isolation rules

Covid-19(lbs) — weight gained during lockdown

Corona Bae — the partner you are quarantining with

Drivecation — holiday in parked motorhome

Hamsterkaufing — stockpiling food like a hamster (German)

Iso — isolation (Australian)

Isobar — fridge well-stocked with alcohol to get through the pandemic

Isodesk — home workplace

Miley Cyrus — coronavirus

Morona — person behaving moronically during the pandemic

Post-rona - when the pandemic is over

The rona - another word for coronavirus (Australian)

Quarantine and chill - chilling at home during the pandemic

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May 4, 2020

Em and Em: Dashes Two Ways

I've been seeing a lot of double-hyphens used as em dashes lately -- like this. That's okay in a pinch, but a real computer-generated em dash — like this — looks more professional. On a Mac computer, make one by holding down the Shift and Option keys they hitting the minus sign. On a PC, hold down Control and Alt then hit the minus sign. You can also set your computer's autocorrect to change double hyphens to em dashes, too.

If you want to emulate the style used by most news media, Associated Press style, put a space on either side of the dash — like this. If you want your writing to look more like it was published in a book, follow the Chicago Manual of Style and omit the spaces—like this.

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April 27, 2020

Microsoft Word to Flag Double Spaces as Errors

Microsoft Word isn't the boss of the language. No one is. But when your spell checker reaches something like a billion people, you have a lot of power to influence the language.

That's why Microsoft's recent decision on double-spacing is so significant. The company's Word software will now flag double spaces between sentences as errors. This could be the end of the road for traditionalists who still double space decades after most style guides publishing authorities decided single spacing is the way to go. Here's the full story at CNN.

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April 20, 2020

A Word Whose History Is a Mystery

I’ve never been very interested in etymology. I know that makes me a bad little language columnist.

But the truth is, word histories all start to sound the same after a while. Such-and-such word came from this-other word in this-other language, which evolved from this-other word and its meaning changed subtly from this to that to some other thing over time. Same story, different details.

But while word origins don’t interest me much, a word with no known origin — now that’s interesting.

Lexicographers and linguists trace the histories of words by looking at written works going back decades, centuries or all the way back to the days of Chaucer.

Doing so, they can determine when, where and how words have been used, as well as who was using them and how they’ve changed over time. So when you look up a word in a well-researched guide like Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, you’re never surprised to find lots of historical context for whichever word you’re looking up.

But it’s quite surprising to see something like this: “‘Sneak’ is a word of mysterious origin.”

Then the mystery deepens: “It first turns up in Shakespeare.”

Here's what I learned, including some interesting facts about "snuck."

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April 13, 2020

This use of 'so' was so confusing

“Erin Burnett was in tears. So will you.” This headline and subhead appeared on the CNN homepage, for a while. A few hours later, the wording had been changed, replaced by “An interview left Erin Burnett in tears. You will cry, too.”

Someone figured out that something was wrong with “So will you.” But to understand where that wording failed, we need to put under the microscope a word we use every day but probably never think about: so.

Like a lot of words, “so” qualifies as several different parts of speech, including adverb, conjunction and adjective. Some of its common uses are controversial among sticklers. More on those in a minute. But for now, we need to figure out what job it’s doing in this sentence.

My best analysis was that “so” was standing in for a verb. Look at “He will quit and so will she.” In the first clause, you have a subject, “he,” followed by a modal auxiliary verb, “will,” followed by another verb that works with the modal to complete the verb phrase, “quit.” I figured “so” was working kind of like a pronoun, standing in for the verb “quit.” But pronouns only stand in for nouns, not verbs. Therefore, in my analysis, “so” would have to be a verb.

I was wrong, but I found someone to set me straight for this recent column.

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April 6, 2020

Coronavirus, Covid, Pandemic and Related Terms

The language of pandemics is on all our lips these days. Tragically. Here are some of the terms pertaining to the pandemic that are worth getting right.

Coronavirus

Though sometimes used to mean the disease that has afflicted more than a million people across the globe, that’s not quite right. Nor is it the name of the virus infecting people.

Instead, coronaviruses are a family of viruses that infect humans and animals. The most common human coronavirus causes 15% to 30% of cases of the common cold, according to a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

SARS-CoV, another coronavirus, was responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak that killed 774 people worldwide.

SARS-CoV-2

The virus causing our current pandemic is called SARS-CoV-2. Despite the 2 in the name, it’s the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans. The “SARS” part of the name is an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome, just as it was in the 2003 outbreak.

COVID-19

The illness caused by SARS-CoV-2, which can bring respiratory and other symptoms ranging from mild to fatal. The CO part of the name is taken from “corona,” the VI part comes from “virus” and the D is for “disease.” The 19 refers to the year in which it was named. There’s no consensus on how to capitalize the name. But if you want to follow someone’s lead, note that the Associated Press style experts have come down on the side of all capital letters.

For VIRUS, VIRION, CAPSID, PANDEMIC, EPIDEMIC and SOCIAL DISTANCING, see this recent column.

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