Language peeves are sometimes a bit hard to understand - the strange case of hard and difficult

I recently came across this, from a commenter at the linguistics blog Arrant Pedantry:

Schoolwork (homework) is not “hard”; it is “difficult”.

Comment at Arrant Pedantry

Googling around, I found a questioner at Stack Exchange saying that this had been a pet peeve of his grandfather, which led me to a discussion at Language Log, where a correspondent KF had written:

Spelling is difficult; walls are hard.
Many people fail to use the word hard correctly….

But why should anyone think using hard to mean difficult to be incorrect?

Whom confusion

Doing a Google site search of TripAdvisor the other day, I noticed that on the first search page for 'the person whom', this expression was used more often to refer to the subject than to the object, in other words incorrectly, in structures like this:

• She is the woman whom runs the hotel.

Which should of course be:

• She is the woman who/that runs the hotel.

I know whom causes problems, but I hadn't realised quite to what an extent.

So I decided to try with a couple of other similar expressions, and compare with Facebook and Twitter.

I realise that many of the contributors to these sites are non-native speakers, and in no way do I want to mock anyone by quoting them, whether English is their first or second language, and I have nothing but respect for people who make the effort to write in a language other than their own. I just want to point out the dangers of using whom unless you really know what you're doing.

Random thoughts on that and wh-words in it-clefts

A couple of years ago I posted a lesson on cleft sentences where I said:

The structure is:

It is / was + emphasised noun phrase + who / that / when + rest of the sentence

Notice that the use of pronouns is the same as in defining relative clauses:

• who or that for people
• that (NOT which) for things and after prepositional phrases
• As in defining relative clauses, who and that can be left out when they refer to the object or the object of a preposition.

I'll quickly gloss over the fact that I compared using that and not which to the use of pronouns in defining relative clauses (where, of course, we can use which, despite the naysayers).

The problem was that a commenter, a certain elhamcz, had noticed that while I had ruled out which for things, one of the resources I had linked to included it in their list of allowable pronouns, and not surprisingly elhamcz was rather confused. Furthermore elhamcz wanted to know what other relative pronouns or wh-words, for example whom and where, could be used in it-clefts, and whether there were any sources that could provide an answer to this problem.

Now I am neither a linguist nor a grammar expert, and had based my lesson on EFL grammars that I use regularly, but I wondered if perhaps I was being too categorical in dismissing which for things, and should I have included when? Anyway, I decided to have a root around.

Watching on as an expression takes root

Here are a few quotes from the British media:

• But detectives watched on as he landed and hid on the plane for two hours, before flying off to escape justice.
  The Guardian, Feb 2008
• Fulham captain Brede Hangeland cannot wait to return to action on Monday after the unusual experience of watching on from the sidelines.
  The Independent, Dec 2012
• But watching on from the performance boat it's immediately apparent that our boys are struggling into the breeze
  The Daily Telegraph, Sep 2013
• Chris Hughton, the Norwich manager, watched on as Gary Hooper scored and Fraser Forster saved a penalty in win
  The Times, Jan 2013
• The 45-year-old had been watching on from the coastline.
  The Daily Mail, Sep 2014
• Boris Becker watched on as defending champ Novak Djokovic made light work of Slovakian Lukas Lacko
  The Sun, Jan 2014
• With Olympic champion and world record holder Usain Bolt watching on from the stands
  BBC, Aug 2014

What's this with watching on? Don't we usually say looking on? A contributor at the language forum Pain in the English wondered about the apparently increasing popularity of this expression amongst sports people (hat tip to 'Hairy Scot'). Not having noticed it before, I decided to investigate.