Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022
Other Dangerous Things: Foreign Affairs
A little grammar is a dangerous thing
The stuff in the front
I’m going to let you in on a little secret:
I hate grammar.
Well, OK, not quite true. I don’t hate grammar. I hate grammar jargon.
When I started out as a copy editor, I realized that most of what I knew about grammar I knew instinctively. That is, I knew how most—certainly not all—of the grammar things worked; I simply didn’t know what they were called.
Even now I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what a nominative absolute is, I think that the word “genitive” sounds vaguely smutty, and I don’t know, or care to know, how to diagram a sentence.
I hope I’m not shocking you.
But at a certain point I figured that if I was going to be fixing grammar for a living, I might do well to learn a little something about it, and that’s precisely what I did: I learned a little something about it. As little as I needed to. I still, at the slightest puzzlement, run back to my big fat stylebooks, and likely always will.
I do believe, though, that if as a writer you know how to do a thing, it’s not terribly important that you know what it’s called. So in this chapter—covering the grammar stumbles I tend to run into most frequently—I’ll do my best to keep the information as simple and applicable as possible and skip the terminology.
1.
Here’s one of those grammar rules that infuriate people:
That’s it. That’s the rule, or at least an example of it: The correct verb in that sentence is not “infuriates” but “infuriate.”
I know that you want to match “one” with a singular verb, but (and I’m now quoting my beloved Words into Type) “the verb in a relative clause [in my example, the verb “infuriate” in the relative clause “that infuriate people”] agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun [in my example, the antecedent is “rules”], which is the nearest noun or pronoun and is often the object of a preposition, as in the phrase one of those who [or] one of the things that.”
2.
Even as I type these words, I’m listening to a wonderful singer whom I saw onstage repeatedly and who I didn’t realize had died twenty years ago.
The reports of the imminent death of the word “whom,” to paraphrase that which Mark Twain never quite said,*1 are greatly exaggerated, so you’d do well to learn to use it correctly or, at least and perhaps more important, learn not to use it incorrectly.*2
Basic “whom” use shouldn’t pose too many challenges. If you can remember to think of “who” as the cousin of “I,” “he,” “she,” and “they” (the thing doing the thing, aka a subject) and to think of “whom” as the cousin of “me,” “him,” “her,” and “them” (the thing being done to, aka an object), you’re most of the way there.
The man whom Shirley met for lunch was wearing a green carnation in his lapel.
(You’ll note that this sentence would work just as well if you deleted the “whom” altogether. Same goes for the sentence about the singer a handful of paragraphs north of here.)
To whom did you give the shirt off your back?
To say nothing of “to whom it may concern” and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The thing to avoid is, in a moment of panic or in an attempt to prove how smart you are, using “whom” when what you really want is “who.” This sort of error is generally referred to as a hypercorrection, a term I’m not enamored of and that, I’ve found, confuses people, because the point of a hypercorrection is not that it’s superduper correct but that it’s trying so hard to be correct that it collapses into error. But until someone can come up with a better word, we’re stuck with it.
“Whom” hypercorrections—and “whomever” hypercorrections, so long as we’re here—tend to fall into two camps: the “No, that’s a parenthetical phrase” camp and the “Watch out for that verb!” camp.
For the former, let’s think of Viola, the heroine of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and her brother, Sebastian, whom she believes has drowned in a shipwreck.
No. The “she believes” is parenthetical, settable-off-with-commas, or even utterly extractable. Let’s dig in:
her brother, Sebastian, whom has drowned in a shipwreck
Well, that won’t do, now, will it. So then:
her brother, Sebastian, who she believes has drowned in a shipwreck
In this case, your hypercorrection alarm should ring over the likes of “she believes,” “he says,” “it is thought,” etc.
Is there a correct “whom” version of that phrase? Sure, let’s try this (though it’s a bit of a mouthful):
her brother, Sebastian, whom, supposedly drowned in a shipwreck, she mourns
The “Watch out for that verb!” hypercorrection occurs when you’ve got everything cued up perfectly:
I gave the candy to
and you’re so dang sure that the next word is, well, of course, an object-type thing—a “him,” a “her,” a “them”—that you continue
I gave the candy to whomever wanted it the most.
And no again. It’s that following verb, that “wanted,” that itself demands a subject, leading to a correct:
I gave the candy to whoever wanted it the most.
You can, to be sure, give the candy to whomever you like, and that will be correct too.
Your hypercorrection alarm, in this case, should sound at the sight of a new verb on the horizon, and a lot of the time that verb is going to be an “is,” as in:
I will give the candy to whoever is most deserving.
3.
In “not x but y,” “not only x but y,” “either x or y,” “neither x nor y,” and “both x and y” constructions, you must ensure that the x and the y match in their makeup—that is to say, are parallel.
(Many people, I’ve found, have lodged in their heads the absolute necessity of including an “also” in this construction, not merely “not only x but y” but “not only x but also y.” Seems like a waste of a good “also” to me. I would include an “also” if I chose to express myself thus: “Not only did I write a note to myself to write about ’not only x but y’ constructions; I also wrote a note to myself to write about ’either x or y’ constructions.” But I don’t think I’d choose to express myself thus.)
It’s an easy thing to get wrong—I can assure you of that firsthand. It’s quite easy to write:
She achieved success not only through native intelligence but perseverance.
and not give it a second thought. But you do want to get this correct, so:
She achieved success not only through native intelligence but through perseverance.
She achieved success through not only native intelligence but perseverance.
Similarly:
NO: I can either attempt to work all afternoon or I can go buy new shoes.
YES: I can either attempt to work all afternoon or go buy new shoes.
ALSO YES: Either I can attempt to work all afternoon or I can go buy new shoes.
Oh, and this:
In “neither x nor y” constructions, if the x is singular and the y is plural, the verb to follow is plural. If the x is plural and the y is singular, the verb to follow is singular. That is, simply: Take your cue from the y.
Neither the president nor the representatives have the slightest idea what’s going on.
Neither the representatives nor the president has the slightest idea what’s going on.
4.
Q. Is it “It is I who is late” or “It is I who am late”?
A. It’s “I’m late.” Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
5.
A student should be able to study what they like, right? That “they”—that distinctly singular “they”—is a grammatical flashpoint. Some people take the singular “they” in stride and think that sentence is fine as it is. Others would balk and rewrite it to, for instance, “Students should be able to study what they like,” which is certainly an easy and grammatical solution. (In the old days you might have seen something like “A student should be able to study what he likes,” but in the old days people wrote a lot of things that don’t work anymore.)
The proscription against the singular “they,” I can report, is yet another of those Victorian-era pulled-out-of-relatively-thin-air grammar rules we’ve been saddled with, and I’m going to assert here, perhaps to the chagrin of some older writers and/or grammarians, that it’s a rule we should let go of. The singular “they” is not the wave of the future; it’s the wave of the present.
That said, please don’t embrace the singular “they” so vigorously that you find yourself writing things like “Every girl in the sorority should do what they like” or “A boy’s best friend is their mother,” because that would be quite, quite daft.
A further—and, I think, crucial—point:
When I first drafted this section, I relegated the discussion of the use of pronouns for nonbinary people—people who do not identify as male or female—to a terse footnote acknowledging the relatively recent invention of alternate pronouns (I guess I’ve encountered the “ze”/“zir” system most frequently, but there are a number of others) and the increasing use of what one might call a particularly singular “they” and excused myself from discussing it.
In other words, I chickened out.
And yet: I now have a colleague whose pronoun of choice is “they,” and thus the issue is no longer culturally abstract but face-to-face personal, no longer an issue I’d persuaded myself was none of my business but one of basic human respect I chose—choose—to embrace. (I’m happy to call myself out for stubbornly avoiding the topic till it became personal. We’re all supposed to be better than that, but we often aren’t.)
6.
Here’s a sentence I was recently on the verge of making public:
I think of the internet as a real place, as real or realer than Des Moines.
If you recognize immediately what’s the matter with that sentence, you’ve already grasped the concept of parallelism. If you haven’t—and don’t be hard on yourself if you haven’t, because you’re in the occasional company of just about every writer I’ve ever encountered—here is the correct version:
I think of the internet as a real place, as real as or realer than Des Moines.
It’s all about that third “as.” How come? “As real” and “realer than” do not match in construction, as you’ll note if, in my original sentence, you flip them around:
I think of the internet as a real place, realer than or as real Des Moines.
Sentences lacking parallelism are direly easy to construct. Here’s another:
A mother’s responsibilities are to cook, clean, and the raising of the children.
Which should correctly be:
A father’s responsibilities are to cook, to clean, and to raise the children.
Everything’s nice and matchy-matchy now.
There’s something bracingly attractive about a sentence that brims with parallelism:
He was not beholden to, responsible for, or in any other way interested in the rule of law.
7.
At some point in your life, perhaps now, it may occur to you that the phrase “aren’t I” is a grammatical train wreck. You can, at that point, either spend the rest of your life saying “am I not?” or “amn’t I?,” or you can simply embrace, as you surely already have, yet another of those oddball constructions that sneak into the English language and achieve widespread acceptance, all the while giggling to themselves at having gotten away with something.
8.
Flipping restlessly through the channels, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was playing on TCM.
Huston, we have a problem.
Improperly attaching itself to the sentence’s subject—that is, “John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”—we in the copyediting business call that introductory bit (that is, “Flipping restlessly through the channels”) a dangler.
This particular flavor of dangler is called in full a dangling participle, but not all danglers are participles, and anyway, using the term “dangling participle” mandates that you know what a participle is. “Dangling modifier”—sometimes one runs into the term “misattached modifier” or “misplaced modifier”—makes for a better overall designation, but “dangler” is easier and quicker, so let’s just stick with that. Whatever we’re calling them, danglers are, I’d say, the most common error committed in otherwise competent prose and by far the error that most often makes it to print. Authors write them, copy editors overlook them, proofreaders speed past them. It’s not a good look.
Essentially, a sentence’s introductory bit and its main bit need to fuse correctly. Or, as I like to think of it, they need to talk to each other. If a sentence begins “Flipping restlessly through the channels,” then the sentence’s subject—more than likely, its very next word—has to tell us who’s holding the remote. It might be “I,” it might be “he,” it might be “Cecilia,” but it’s certainly not “John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
Strolling through the park, the weather was beautiful. Nope.
The weather was beautiful as we strolled through the park. Yup.
Arriving at the garage, my bike was nowhere to be found. Nah.
When I arrived at the garage, my bike was nowhere to be found. Yeah.
Perhaps these sorts of errors seem obvious to you—particularly since we’re talking about them here and staring at them—but, as I said, they can slip right past you if you’re not paying attention.
For instance, please hop back up a few paragraphs and take another look at the sentence that begins “Improperly attaching itself.”
Yeah. Dangler.
I encounter danglers all the time. They frequently turn up in donated bits of praise generously provided by writers to support other writers—blurbs, that is. “An intoxicating mix of terror and romance, Olga Bracely has penned her best novel yet!”
No.
9.
A sentence whose parts are misarranged to inadvertent comic effect can be a kind of dangler, but mostly I think of it simply as a sentence whose parts are misarranged to inadvertent comic effect.
Or to advertent comic effect, if you’re Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
Or perhaps you’ve met that famous man with a wooden leg named Smith.
10.
You’d be amazed at how far you can get in life having no idea what the subjunctive mood is—as if it’s not bad enough that English has rules, it also has moods—but as long as I’ve brought the subject up, let’s address it.
The subjunctive mood is used to convey various flavors of nonreality. For instance, it dictates the use of “were” rather than “was” in Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy.”
“I wish I were” rather than “I wish I was” seems to come naturally to most people, so let’s simply say amen to that and leave it be. The tricky part comes with the juxtaposition of:
“if”
“I,” “he,” or “she”*3
“was” or “were”
Now, if you’re lucky enough to be writing a sentence that includes not merely “if” but “as if,” you can simply grab on to “were” and run with it:
I felt as if I were a peony in a garden of dandelions.
He comports himself as if he were the king of England.*4
But when you’ve got only an “if” in your hands, when do you use “was” and when do you use “were”?
Try this on for size: If you’re writing of a situation that is not merely not the case but is unlikely, improbable, or just plain impossible, you can certainly reach for a “were.”
If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I’d quit my job so fast it would make your head spin.
If you’re writing of a situation that is simply not the case but could be, you might opt for a was.
If he was to walk into the room right now, I’d give him a good piece of my mind.
I tend to think of it thus: If I could insert the words “in fact” after “if I,” I might well go with a “was” rather than a “were.”
Also, if you’re acknowledging some action or state of being that most certainly did occur—that is, if by “if” what you really mean is “in that”—you want a “was”:
If I was hesitant to embrace your suggestion yesterday, it was simply that I was too distracted to properly absorb it.
Other Dangerous Things: Foreign Affairs
Standard practice is to set foreign-language words and phrases in italics. If a word or phrase, however foreign-language-derived, is included in the main part of your handy Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, it’s to be taken as English. If it’s tucked into the appendix of foreign-language words and phrases at the back of the book (or is not to be found at all), it’s to be taken as not-English.
The following, then, can be taken as English:
bête noire
carpe diem
château
chutzpah
façade
hausfrau
karaoke
mea culpa
non sequitur
schadenfreude*5
The following can be taken as not-English:
dasvidaniya
e pluribus unum
n’est-ce pas?
und so weiter
Diacritical marks—accent marks, if you prefer—are the little doodads with which many foreign-derived words are festooned, generally above letters (mostly vowels), in some cases below them (that ç in “façade,” for instance), and in other cases, especially in certain Eastern European languages, through them. In written English they’re occasionally omitted, and the dictionary will often give you permission to skip them, but sojourning in a chateau can’t be nearly as much fun as sojourning in a château, and if you send me your resume rather than your résumé, I’m probably not going to hire you.
But here’s an idea: Let’s say you’re writing a novel in which the characters shimmy easily between English and, say, Spanish. Consider not setting the Spanish (or what have you) in italics. Use of italics emphasizes foreignness. If you mean to suggest easy fluency, use of roman normalizes your text.
On the other hand, if you’re writing a novel about, say, an isolated young Englishwoman living in Paris who is confounded by the customs, the people, and the language, it would certainly make good sense to set all the bits of French she encounters, in narration or dialogue, in italics. You want that French to feel, every time, strange.
No matter how you’re styling your foreign-language bits and pieces, foreign-language proper nouns are always set in roman, as, say:
Comédie-Française
Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen
Galleria degli Uffizi
Schutzstaffel
If you find you must use a foreign tongue you’re not familiar with, be aware that free online translation tools are about as dangerous as language gets. It may be true that it’s a small world in cyberspace, but don’t entrust your words to the ghost in the machine. What you have to say is too important.
SKIP NOTES
*1 What Mark Twain did say—write, in a note, to be accurate—was “James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
*2 I’m concerned with how you write, not how you speak, so if you’re prone to saying “It’s me” rather than “It is I” or inquiring “Who do you love?” rather than “Whom do you love?,” you’re A-OK tops in my book, and in the book of just about anyone else who aspires to speak English like a normal human being.
*3 To be sure, “you” and “we” and “they” are always matched with “were,” so that’s one less problem—or three less/fewer problems—to contend with.
*4 It’s indeed “the king of England,” not “the King of England.” We capitalize a job title when it’s used as an honorific, as in “President Barack Obama,” but otherwise it’s “the president of the United States,” “the pope,” and the various other et ceteras.
*5 Nouns in German are capitalized, but I figure that if a common German noun has made its way into standard English, it should be lowercased like any other standard English common noun.