Random thoughts on task as a verb

A reader wrote to the Grammarphobia blog about a line spoken by George Clooney in the film The Monuments Men:

We have been tasked to find and protect art that the Nazis have stolen.

The reader suggested that this was anachronistic, as the use of task as a verb is fairly recent. Other people complain about task being used as a verb at all. But Grammarphobia pointed out that the use of task as a verb is in fact very old.

Silly unstranded preposition at the BBC

Spotted on the BBC News website

• The three [South Korean mobile networks] are selling the phone now to get round government restrictions on to whom they can sell new handsets.

Presumably the writer was trying to avoid ending the sentence with a preposition. But this is a case where by trying to follow a non-existent rule the writer has ended up with a totally unnatural sentence.

Random thoughts on all in all

All in all

In an article from the Economist about an important new discovery in cosmology there appeared the following sentence:

All in all, then, a big day for cosmology—assuming the results hold up.

I got to wondering about the origins of the expression 'all in all', and decided to have a poke round Google Books.

Random thoughts on tidbits and titbits

tidbit   &   titbit

An aquaintance of mine was wondering why Americans say tidbit while in Britain we usually say titbit, with the implied question 'Why do the Americans have to change everything?'

Indeed there are some people, and not only in Britain, who think that tidbit is a bowdlerisation of titbit, the story being that Americans thought that tit was rude, and so replaced it with tid. This idea was recently repeated by David Mitchell at the Guardian, but it is, of course, nonsense.

Random thoughts on referendums and referenda

People who lay down the law on English should really check their facts first, especially perhaps, journalists. On this week's The News Quiz, first broadcast on 14 March 2014 and available on the BBC iPlayer until the 21st, journalist Hugo Rifkind proclaimed, quite gratuitously and with total certitude:

"The plural of referendum is referendums, not referenda"

On what authority, I wonder. The style guide of one of the publications he writes for (the Times and the Spectator) perhaps?

Random thoughts on had rather, profusely illustrated with extracts from literature

Somebody wrote to WordReference forums with a 'question taken from an exam', where you have to fill the gap with one of the options given:

"She ____they travelled by bus."

1. would sooner
2. had rather
3. had sooner

I don't know whether it said 'Choose the best option' or 'Choose the correct option', but either way, the answer they gave was 1. - would sooner. But what I'm interested in is whether both the other answers are 'wrong'.