A strange example of negative inversion

I've just spotted a rather strange example of negative inversion in today's Guardian. Commenting on the fact that Google Maps Russia now shows Crimea as part of Russia, the writer says:

the Guardian

The bit we're interested in is this:

• In no uncertain terms is the area marked as a separate country from wider Ukraine.

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 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?

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.

Whom watch #4 - On Messrs Gwynne, Lowth, Priestley and Shakespeare, with a few asides on the way

This is the fourth post in a series on the inappropriate teaching of the use of whom. In this post I look at:

• a silly grammar quiz question
• some early examples of who being used where the purists would demand whom
• conflicting views from the writers of two early grammar books
• how the whom camp triumphed for two centuries
• examples of object who in Shakespeare

and also take a few somewhat meandering detours on the way. Clicking on the framed extracts will usually take you to Google Books.

Random thoughts on Mr Gwynne, sex and gender

Neville Gwynne is the author of a best-selling grammar book 'Gwynne’s Grammar', modestly entitled 'The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English'. I confess to not having read Mr Gwynne's book, but I think we can get a fairly good idea as to the affable Mr Gwynne's attitude to English in various other ways: from an interview he gave on BBC Radio 5, from a grammar quiz he wrote for the Telegraph newspaper, from the Preface, first two chapters and recommended reading from the book itself, available to read at Amazon; and from various reviews, especially rather a long one in the Telegraph.

While I was reading the preface to his book at Amazon, I came across an apparent distinction between the words gender and sex I had only vaguely heard about before.

Whom watch #3 - Silly infographic

Continuing an occasional series where I look at silly or downright bad articles etc about whom on the Internet.

The other day I was looking through a teacher’s blog which had kindly linked to mine, when I came across an ‘infographic’ with the title “Who vs whom”. I rather feared the worst.

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 about hurt people and dictionaries

We can often use participles (usually ending in -ed or -ing) as adjectives. A present participle (-ing form) usually has an active meaning and a past participle (3rd form) usually has a passive meaning:

• The winning team was cheered loudly by its supporters.
  = the team which won - active meaning
• The players of the defeated team looked exhausted.
  = the team that was defeated - passive meaning

In this post, I'm interested in one particular pair of adjectives made from past participles (PPs): injured and hurt.

More random thoughts on examples of the passive

Last year I wrote a post listing some unnatural examples of the passive I've found in books and on websites from people who should know better (linked to below).

It's fashionable in some circles to denigrate the passive (which we'll talk more of in a moment)- although many of the people who do so can't always recognise the passive themselves - which I've also written about - and I can understand why the people who do this might (and do) use silly examples to show how 'bad' they think the passive is.

But there are some more neutral or even supportive observers who also seem to come up with some rather strange examples, which is a bit puzzling, to say the least.

Try and ... get over it

In informal English, we often use idiomatic expressions with and instead of the infinitive marker to, when linking certain verbs with a following infinitive:

• Come over here and look at these lovely flowers.
• I'll just go and get something to write with.
• Run and get me a tissue, will you darling?
• Are you going to stay and have lunch with us?
• Make sure and let us know how you get on.
• He wants to try and find a new job.

It could be said that there is a certain logic about the first four verbs: first someone 'comes over here' and then they 'look at these lovely flowers'. Or first someone stays and then they have lunch. But we can't really say that for make sure and try.

I've already written about go and do something (link below) in answer to a post at Literal Minded, so I'd thought I'd try and have a look at try and.

Begging the question - why all the fuss?

There are some words and expressions that over time, take on new meanings, either in addition to their old meanings, or more or less replacing their old meanings altogether. An example of the first is awesome, which now has a rather different meaning to the one I was brought up with, but still coexists with the old meaning. While gay is an example of the latter, where the current meaning has pretty well replaced its old meaning of "happy, jolly".

Google search results: treat with a large pinch of salt

When deciding whether a certain construction or phrase is natural English or not, it makes sense to check how it is actually used. One way of doing this is to use corpora, but they can be quite complicated for laymen like me to use.

And as we have this wondeful 'corpus' that is the Internet, it is tempting to use search result counts, as well as web-based tools like Ngram Viewer, to make comparative assessments as to how language is used.

What's more, it's not only non-specialists like me who do this; Google search counts are not infrequently used by professional linguists at the linguistics blog Language Log, for example. But it turns out we need to be very careful.

On the other hand ...

You are all no doubt aware of the double linking device - On the one hand ... on the other (hand) ... used to contrast two ideas, for example:

On the one hand we could try that new restaurant on Park Street. On the other, we could just stay at home and order a pizza.

But can we use just on the other hand without the introductory On the one hand? Can we say:

We could try that new restaurant on Park Street. On the other hand we could just stay at home and order a pizza.

I asked some of my students this question the other day. How do you think they answered? How would you answer?

Some random thoughts on different to

If you're a foreign learner looking for advice as to what preposition to use after different, I'd recommend using from; that way you won't tread on anybody's toes. You can read more about the use of different and easily confusable words such as other and next here. That advice, however, turns out to be more of a case of 'do what the teacher says' rather than what the teacher does.

This post brings together information from dictionaries and usage guides, a few statistics, as well as examples from the press and a few books. There are also some links to linguistics books that discuss the question.

Some random thoughts about -ise and -ize verbs in British English.

As a change from writing grammar exercises for foreign students, I've decided with this post to make a small contribution to the debate on the position of -ise/-ize verbs in Britain. It is rather long and quite detailed, and illustrated with lots of examples.

Silly passives that have been seen (by me)

Every now and then I like to put the exercises aside and have a little rant. These are pretty harmless as most people come to this blog for specific posts and completely miss them, but at least it gets it off my chest.

I came across this stuff while looking for material for a post I want to do fairly soon on why the Passive can sometimes be useful.

Subjunctive were revisited (again)

First Joan Osborne and now Ed Miliband.

What, you might ask, have the singer Joan Osborne and the leader of the British Labour Party, Ed Miliband, in common? The answer is that they've both been criticised for using was instead of were in unreal (aka counterfactual, non-factual) if statements:

• If God was one of us - Joan Osborne
• If I was prime minister - Ed Miliband

I've already written about Joan Osborne here. This discussion is mainly aimed at native speaker grammar fans, but as usual I've annotated more difficult words so that advanced learners can also follow along, if they feel so inclined