5 language resolutions for the new year

Even if you know a lot about grammar, there’s always more to learn. And what better time than the start of a new year? Here are some language resolutions to consider for 2025.

1. Challenge a long-standing language belief by checking a dictionary.

Unless you have a Ph.D. in linguistics, chances are you’ve fallen victim to some misperceptions. Think “since” can’t mean “because”? Think “between” is never for groups of three or more? Think a university can’t “graduate” a student? A quick check of a dictionary will dispel all these beliefs.

2. Learn one new grammar term.

Up your grammar game with a bit of advanced jargon. I suggest “modal auxiliary verb.” You use them every day, anyway, so why not? The most common modal auxiliary verbs are “must,” “can,” “should,” “would,” “may” and “might.” They’re similar to the two regular auxiliary verbs — “be” and “have” — in that they team up with other verbs (think: “I have walked” and “I am walking”). But modal auxiliaries express possibility (may, might), necessity (must), permission (may), ability (can), etc. Congratulations. You just learned a new grammar term. Did you already know about modals? Try looking up predicate nominatives, copular verbs or subordinating conjunctions.

3. Learn to conjugate one verb in a new language.

I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years who’ve tried and failed to pick up a foreign language. When I ask how they studied, the answer is often some app or language software marketed to adults with the promise of “easy, practical” learning. That is, handy phrases that go in one ear and out the other. In my humble opinion, there’s a better way: grammar. At least in the Latin-based languages I’ve studied, if you can’t say “I am,” “you are,” “he/she/it is,” “we are” and “they are,” you don’t have a foundation to build on. Start with just one verb and you’ll be well on your way to forming your first sentences.

4. Learn an irregular past form.

Not sure if it’s right to say, “I have swam” or “I have swum”? Do “drank” and “drunk” or “hanged” and “hung” or “woke,” “awoke” and “awakened” trip you up? Resolve to learn just one. Check the main form of the word — “swim,” “drink,” “hang,” “wake” — in a dictionary, then look at the bolded forms that immediately follow. Under “drink,” for example, you’ll see “drank,” which you know is the simple past tense because those are always listed first, after which you’ll see the past participles indicated with “drunk or drank,” meaning both are acceptable with the auxiliary “have”: I have drank and I have drunk. If that’s not advanced enough for you, memorize the past forms of both “lie” and “lay.”  For  the most proper use of “lie,” the simple past is “lay” (yesterday I lay), and the past participle is “lain” (in the past I have lain). For “lay,” both past forms are the same (yesterday I laid, in the past I have laid).

5. Use “me” in a compound object.

You’d never say, “Thanks for visiting I” or “Send the memo to I,” so why do you say, “Thanks for visiting Beth and I” and “Send the memo to Tom and I”? Somewhere along the line, too many of us got it into our heads that “me” is wrong anytime another person is involved. But that’s not true. The object of a verb (like “visit”) or a preposition (like “to”) doesn’t change form just because it’s more than one person: Try dropping the other person from your sentence to see whether “I” or “me” works alone. Then add the other person back in. Between you and me (not I), it’s not exactly wrong to use “I” in an object position. But it’s a shame if you do so because you were trying (and failing) to use proper English.

'There's' before a plural

Here’s another thing I can’t help but wince at, even though I know grammar wincing is pointless:

There’s a lot of people outside.

I don’t know how I got so invested in the idea that that should be There are a lot of people outside.  But I, unwisely, let it rub me the wrong way every time I hear “there’s” before a plural.

Here’s the idea:

There’s is a contraction of “there is.” Is is singular. It goes with a singular subject, the dog is, versus are which is for a plural subject, the dogs are.

Sentences like There is a dog outside or There are dogs outside are special. Notice that the grammatical subject of both is there. So theoretically the verb shouldn’t change. But in fact, though in There is a dog outside, there is functioning as a pronoun, the real intended subject of the verb isn’t there. It’s dog. This sentence really means “A dog is outside.”

Grammarians label this “the existential there.” The word there is the grammatical subject and dog is something called a notional subject. It’s sort of the intended subject even though it’s been upstaged from the subject position by the pronoun there.

In these sentences, the verb is supposed to agree with the notional subject. So There are dogs and There is a dog are both correct because the verbs match the notional subject.

But over the years, there’s has become a handy shorthand for not just there is but also there are, especially when the next word to follow is some modifier like a lot, which has a singular flavor.

That's why There’s a lot of dogs outside sounds much better than There’s dogs outside.

Either way, though, you can get away it: “Like other grammatical subjects, [there] often determines the number concord, taking a singular verb even though the notional subject is plural” says the Oxford English Grammar.  “This usage is common in informal speech.”

In other words, I should loosen up a bit on this one.

The never-ending myth about sentence-ending prepositions

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary posted on Instagram, “It is permissible in English for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with” (see what they did there?). The result: uproar, like this reply from a user going by the name of AJWarren74: “Absolutely do NOT end a sentence with a preposition!! It’s like fingernails on a blackboard!! UGH.”

Aah, that takes me back. Seems like just yesterday people were telling me I was wrong about sentence-ending prepositions. Of course, correcting the publishers of one of the country’s leading dictionaries — professional lexicographers with decades of study and hard-earned expertise under their belts — is another matter entirely. It’s like telling your doctor that your liver is in your ear.

I learned two things from Merriam’s post and the ensuing uproar: 1. The myth about sentence-ending prepositions is alive and festering, and 2. Merriam’s could use some backup.

So what’s this grammar myth all about? The idea is that prepositions like “with,” “about,” “to,”  “at,” “in” and “on” take objects — nouns or pronouns that complete the thought. You spoke with Linda. You think about pizza. You walked to the store. You yelled at him. You’re grounded in reality. Your keys are on the table.

If you move any of those objects to an earlier position in the sentence and just leave the preposition parked at the end, the result could be a bad sentence. Linda is the person you spoke with. Pizza is what you think about. The store is where you walked to. He is who you yelled at. Reality is what you’re grounded in. The table is the thing your keys are on.

If you tell someone that a preposition at the end makes for a bad sentence, you’ll be right in a lot of cases, as the examples above prove. But not always. And if you tell people that this is a grammar rule they must follow, you’re not just giving them bad information — you’re telling them not to trust the instincts that lead English speakers to use prepositions well every day.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You don’t even have to take the word of Merriam’s lexicographers. Every major grammar authority agrees, including the conservative ones.

“Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else,” advises Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Strunk and White argue persuasively that “A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered her with” is superior to “A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which he murdered her.” It sounds more natural and, as the authors argue, it’s more effective “because it sounds more violent.”

Or consider the words of one of the most conservative language authorities I know, Fowler’s Modern English Usage: “In most circumstances, especially in formal writing, it is desirable to avoid placing a preposition at the end of a clause or sentence,” the guide writes. “But there are many circumstances in which a preposition may or even must be placed late … and others where the degree of formality required governs the placing.”

Finally, consider this snarky example long misattributed to Winston Churchill (which researchers have since learned probably wasn’t Churchill at all but some unknown writer) about a sentence clumsily rewritten to move a preposition from the end:  “This is the type of English up with which I will not put!”   

Towards, backwards, forwards? Why that s may not be a good idea

Every time I see the preposition “towards” in an article I’m editing, I delete the s. I’ve been doing this as long as I can recall, decades, and it’s been going on so long I don’t even remember why. I just know that, for whatever reason, “towards” simply won’t do.

This habit stands out among my other brain-on-autopilot edits because I never recheck this one. I never do a quick search of my AP Stylebook or my dictionary. I just delete the s.

I think about it so little that, in the 20-odd years I’ve been writing about grammar, it’s never crossed my mind to make “toward” and its cousins including “backward,” “forward” and “afterward” subjects of a column.

It’s time. And I’m pleased to report that the Associated Press Stylebook — that is, the rulebook I follow for most of my editing work — backs me up. It says, quite simply, in its entry for “toward”: “Not towards.”

That’s the whole entry. Whew. My laziness hasn’t come back to haunt me the way it did when I kept spelling out “percent” years after AP style switched to using “%.”

Of course, that rule really only applies in edited text. So what about everyday writing? Is “towards” allowed there? In my reading of Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the answer is yes.

Merriam’s dictionary doesn’t have an entry for “towards,” but it lists it under its entry for “toward” as a “variant.” This tells us two things: 1. It’s OK to use “towards,” and 2. Merriam’s dictionary prefers “toward."

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which is a usage guide and not a dictionary, goes deeper: “Many commentators have observed that ‘toward’ is the more common choice in American English, while the preference in British English is ‘towards.’ Our evidence confirms that such is indeed the case. Both words are commonly used in the U.S., but ‘toward’ is undoubtedly prevalent.”

The word dates back in Old English to sometime before the year 899, when it was written “toweardes.” According to Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, “toweardes” came from combining “to” with “weard,” which was a noun meaning direction, plus “es,” which indicated possession. Sometime before the year 1300, Old English seemed to drop the s, using just “toweard.” And within a century or two, “toward” and “towards” had appeared.

Back in the 1800s, “towards” was dominant in all the printed sources reflected in Google’s Ngram Viewer, which includes lots of American publications. But shortly after the turn of the 20th century, “toward” overtook “towards,” and has dominated ever since, despite a slight reversal of that trend that started just about seven years ago. 

As American English speakers became less inclined to add the s, British speakers kept it. Today, both spellings are correct in the U.S., though “toward” is the best choice if you want to emulate professionally edited writing.

As for “afterward” and “afterwards,” it’s the same story: American publishing usually drops the s, while British sources may keep it, according to Merriam’s usage guide. Merriam’s dictionary, meanwhile, doesn’t have an entry for “afterwards” and instead reroutes those searches to its entry for “afterward,” where it says the s-spelling is a variant.

“Backward” seems least controversial. Merriam’s usage guide doesn’t consider the issue worth mentioning at all, while the dictionary lists the s-spelling only as a variant of the more standard “backward.”

Here’s where things get weird: “forwards,” which I don’t recall ever hearing outside the expression “backwards and forwards,” does have its own entry in Merriam’s dictionary, suggesting it has more legitimacy than all those other s-forms we talked about above. But because its definition refers readers to the entry for “forward,” without the s, it’s clear that, just like “toward,” “afterward” and “backward,” “forward” is more proper without the s.