First(ly) and more important(ly)

According to some people, each of the following three quotations, the first from a leading ninteenth-century intellectual, the second from a twentieth century scientist and the third from a noted 'author, playwright, journalist, composer, and public speaker' (Wikipedia), all three British, break not one but two 'rules', or at least conventions.

John Henry Newman (Cardinal Newman) - Certitudes in Religious Assent, published in The Dublin Review, Vol XVI, London and Dublin, 1871

The net results are, firstly that it would be best to drop the term race from our vocabulary, both scientific and popular, as applied to man ; and secondly, and more importantly for our present purpose, that until we ...

Julian Huxley - Eugenics and Society, Galton Lectures 1936

For two reasons. Firstly because it showed an abysmal ignorance of economics. ... Secondly, and much more importantly . . . . . . the 'What- does-it-matter-who-has-them?' school ignored the one thing that it is fatal to ignore in any virile nation.

Beverley Nichols - Men do not Weep 1941

In this post I take a look, from a largely British point of view, at the use of firstly, secondly (etc) and more importantly, to introduce clauses, and at the objections to them.

Random thoughts - he was sat, she was stood

Some time ago there was a rather lively discussion on the language blog, Pain in the English, about these two idiomatic expressions. Let's take a look at a couple of examples from Google Books:

He was sat there with his arms over the back of the sofa looking really upset so I thought there was something ...

Under the Rotunda - Danny Bernardi

In an instant Dave knew that he was stood on a road and that there was a vehicle coming ...

The Company - James McCann

And here's one with both

We saw him later on chatting to another bunch of bemused holidaymakers, only they were sat down and he was stood in front of them, in his Speedos ...

Thai Tales - Justin Dunn

Read a bit more about these expressions. What do they mean and are they grammatically acceptable?

Random thoughts - on the cusp

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian ran what they called 'a fiendish language quiz', set by their 'style guru', David Marsh, author of the recently published 'For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection'. In one of the questions, entrants had to say what was wrong with this sentence:

'Outstanding performances include Caryl Morgan's Beatie, in bobby socks and denim, on the cusp of womanhood but still impressionable and dreamy, and Sara Harris-Davies as the mother she still looks up to.'

The answers have now been published, and the official answer to this one was:

You can't be on the cusp of one thing. Although it is often misused to mean "on the brink" or "on the verge", strictly "on the cusp" involves two things, for example "on the cusp of Taurus and Gemini" or, as it should have been here, "on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood".

While taking the point that a cusp is between two things (often two periods), I wondered whether it was really necessary to explicitly mention both; on the cusp of womanhood looked fine to me. So I decided to investigate.

Some random thoughts on tell about

When reading ESL teachers' blogs I sometimes come upon as instruction like - 'tell about something that happened to you this week'. Now that doesn't sound quite right to me; I expect to read 'tell me' or 'tell us' about something. Without a personal object, I'd expect 'talk about something that happened to you this week'.

At first, I thought this was because the teachers weren't native speakers, but then I noticed a couple of examples from American writers, so I thought I'd have a bit of a closer look

Prepositional verbs revisited

This post is a fairly detailed, and for me at least quite technical, discussion / exploration aimed mainly at teachers and possibly grammar freaks, and is a continuation of an earlier discussion / rant I had at When is a phrasal verb not a phrasal verb?.

If you were looking for some exercises with prepositional verbs, you could try my earlier posts, Lesson on prepositional verbs and Random stories - Prepositional verbs

In a lesson post on prepositional verbs, I stressed that their definition seemed to be somewhat elastic. Having learnt from Language Leader Advanced, Market Leader Advanced and other sources, however, that prepositional verbs appeared to be more or less the same as good old fashioned Type 3 phrasal verbs, I accordingly based my lesson on that idea in good faith.

I have now discovered a rather different story in The Teacher's Grammar of English, written by Ron Cowan and published in 2008 by Cambridge, who call it – 'a comprehensive resource text designed to help ESL/EFL teachers understand and teach American English grammar'.

What's more, his idea seems to have some support from other writers. I confess to now being thoroughly confused and I might well have to eat humble pie.

Random thoughts on the Subjunctive

I once came across an article at UsingEnglish.com, wondering why we bother to teach inversion. You can speak perfectly good English without ever using it, and it seems to give students a lot of headaches. But the certificate examination boards insist on it, so we have to teach it. You can read the article here. I have some sympathy for this point of view, and have a similar feeling about the Subjunctive.

Some random thoughts about UK and US grammar

There’s a scene in the film Bhaji on the Beach, where three British-Indian women go to the airport to meet their Indian cousin who has just arrived from Mumbai (Bombay). As they come to greet her, she says: ‘My God, you’re all wearing saris. No one in Bombay wears saris nowadays.’ And it is true that, very often, immigrant communities hang on to customs and traditions long after they have fallen out of fashion in their old home country. This is not really surprising as it is a way of clinging on to their identity. You can see a clip of this excellent film, by the way, at Veoh.

I sometimes think the same is true of language. The first American settlers were immigrants too, and in some ways they too hung on to the old (linguistic) ways.