Whoever tells you to always avoid splitting infinitives is wrong

Yet another colleague has called for backup to respond to someone who insists that splitting infinitives is always and without exception wrong.

Siiigggghhhhh. Really, do these people never, ever look anything up?

If I were using the subjunctive…

The subject of the subjunctive came up in a recent email discussion. English does have a subjunctive – or, I should say, some versions of English do have a distinct subjunctive. Some people will say “If I was you,” meaning right now, and they’re not using a special subjunctive form. But others (me included) will say “If I were you,” because I couldn’t possibly actually be you, and they are using a special subjunctive form. And I will be addressing the kind of English that does use these forms.

There are actually a variety of places where the subjunctive gets used in English, although rather fewer than there used to be, and I’m not going to go into detail about all of them, but they all involve a posited alternate reality – one that is desired (as in “I ask that he come to see me”) or merely posited as possible (“If music be the food of love, play on”), or one that is  definitely expressed as other than the current state (“If I were a rich man…”).

The discussion began with the sentence “He felt as if he were at a crossroads.” And the question: The character is indeed at a crossroads, so should it be “was”?

What flavour of English do you want?

This is taken from a presentation I gave at the Editors’ Association of Canada conference in Edmonton, June 2008. For the bibliography and a concise summary of some key points, see the handout (PDF, 72 KB)

I thought I wouldn’t call this “Register, collocation, and reflected meaning” because, well, that sounded a little dry. And I’m going to be starting into this subject with the use of a metaphor of sort. The metaphor I’m going to be using—and I think it’s a pretty viable one—is, as you may have guessed, that a piece of a text is like a piece of food. A document is like a dish. Words are like ingredients.

Tonnes of options

Today’s discussion on the Editors’ Association of Canada listserv has brought forth an ad looking for performers with “tonnes of energy.” Hm! That would be “tons,” right? Boy, give these people 2.5 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km…

Except that there actually is a case to be made for it.

The majority of these second-guesses are wrong

There are some bits of usage that people are more likely to get wrong if they stop and try to get them right. I encountered one of the most noteworthy and commonly confounding cases in a recent edit, when I had to change “the majority was” to “the majority were” and “the remainder was” to “the remainder were.”

In ordinary speech, we generally have a natural feel for these things.

Let her who is without error…

I’m told Carol Fisher Saller of the Chicago Manual of Style, in her new book The Subversive Copy Editor, recounts how she convinced an author that that of him who seeks should be that of he who seeks.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ms. Saller! You’ve clearly been staring at this stuff too long! You’ve simultaneously overthought and underthought this one. Overthought because you’re letting your ideas override your ear; underthought because you haven’t properly analyzed what’s going on here.

Among other things, it’s a sentence adverb

A colleague asked whether “among other things” in a sentence such as the following is a dangler:

Among other things, this book explores the concept of silliness.

An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)

This is a paper that I will be posting in several parts. The first part, the introduction, is the most concise introduction to the issue; the second part will cover the history; after that I will go into more technical depth with a survey of current attitudes that I conducted. The full text of the paper, with the references, is available as a PDF.

One of the most regular and inflexible rules of English is the one governing which version of the indefinite article to use in a given context. It is a useful thing to have an understanding of the rule, and it would take less than an hour to learn a habit of choosing according to the sound of the following word: a before a consonant, as in habit, but also before a consonant sound written as a vowel, as in useful; an before a vowel, as in understanding, but also before a silent consonant (inevitably h) followed by a vowel, as in hour. Although in some dialects a is used before vowels as well, this usage is considered nonstandard and is generally looked down upon (notwithstanding which it has occasionally been predicted that this will be the ultimate use everywhere – see, for example, the editor’s note following Bolinger 1975). An before a consonant would be considered a mark of a nonnative speaker.

There is, however, a salient exception.

confident in or about?

A fellow editor was wondering about the distinction, if any, between confident in and confident about.  This is what I make of it:

When an “error” isn’t

This is the text of a presentation I made to the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada, Sept. 24, 2007. Certain parts were sung; you can guess which.

It ain’t necessarily so, no,
it ain’t necessarily so,
the things Strunk and White
want to tell you are right,
it just ain’t necessarily so.

Getting pissed off about grammatical errors is a favourite activity of a surprisingly large portion of English speakers.