PET PEEVES
Every instructor has his or her pet peeves. My biggest is people who
refuse
to use the online subscription databases, or (heavens), the library,
and
write essays using only Web sources, and who fail to recognize the
difference
between verifiable scholarly information and hearsay or biased reports.
My essay writing peeves include misuse of words like "then" and "than",
needless
or incorrect use of apostrophes, and things of that ilk. Mixing
singular
subjects with plural verbs drives me stark raving mad. Here are some
examples.
"Oh but I was so much older then.
I'm younger than that now." -- Bob Dylan.
A string of book
thefts
has plagued
the
library (NOT have plagued).
As a librarian, I
found
this assignment exciting, (NOT
As
a librarian this assignment was exciting - you are the librarian; the
assignment
isn't).
Remember that you can't dance in Independence Hall.
We'll
be using two-way radios during our school visit to the Capitol building
in
the nation's capital
city. The Principal wants all students
to
understand the principles
of their two way
radios
while we're there.
I have asked him to advise
us, and here is his advice:
Holding the antenna while the radio is in use can have a bad effect. It can affect its effective range.
That
can cause anger, frustration, and other affective states.
We hope you have fun on the site of the
Capitol,
and that you see all the sights. When you
write
your report, be sure to cite any
relevant articles you find in the literature. You can also cite Web sites. We hope
you
have more fun in Washington than you did on
our
trip to Ottawa, Canada's capital, in the Province of
Ontario.
It was raining then,
but we hope Divine Providence will be kinder this time.
Always try to
use
gender inclusive language, but as one style manual put it, "without
doing
violence to the English language". It no longer socially acceptable to
write
a sentence like, "Every reader should enjoy his book". Instead, try
putting
all the nouns in the plural: "All
readers
should
enjoy their books". A sentence
like,
"When children have a cold, their nose runs", drives this instructor up
the
wall. All those children can't possibly share a single nose.
When children
have
colds, their
noses
run. When one child has a cold, his or her nose
runs.
Another thing
which
bothers me is the misuse of the personal pronouns "I" and "me", and the
over-use
of "myself" when "me" would suffice. The personal pronoun "I" can only
be
a subject, never an object.
Do you have an apple for
me?. Do
you
have enough enough apples for
my daughter and me? (NOT "for my daughter and
I").
That's good enough for me. I will eat
one
myself.
An apostrophe should be used to indicate possession, or to stand in the
place
of missing letters, NOT to
form
a plural.
Ms. Smith's house is nearby, and
I'm
sure we'll all have fun dining with the
Smiths.
We'll
finish our trip at the Smiths' place.
Chris' home is nearby too. He works at one of IBM's offices,
and
usually banks at ATMs.
His son and daughter work in libraries,
because
they enjoy the library's
atmosphere. Down at Roy's Auto Bodies, the technicians all like
strawberries. (NOT body's or
bodys, or strawberrys or strawberry's).
For more on this "devastating shibboleth", see: "Apostrophe (2)", in The Columbia Guide to Standard American
English. The best-selling book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves,
goes into the misuse of apostrophes in great detail.
In the New York Times Magazine, Sunday,
October
19th, 2003, language columnist William Safire writes about gerunds, "My
does
beat me before that gerund wandering." Quoting Robert Burchfield,
editor
of Fowler's Modern English Usage,
he says, "The possessive with gerund... persists in good writing." If
you
take umbrage at my rambling here, don't. The use of the
possessive,
"my wandering"
serves to isolate the wandering as the object of your ire. It's
hopefully
not "me" at whom you've become upset, but my wandering. If I said, "to
me
wandering", some ambiguity might arise. Safire cleverly uses the
phrase,
"the bear's dancing", as a mnemonic. A gerund is a verbal noun, taking
its
name from the Latin, gero, gerere,
"to
bear". But there are other usages for this verb, such as bellum gerere, to wage war.
Alas,
ultimately, my
waging
war on bad grammar may not bear fruit. "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace
from
me on your essays, prepare for this war yourself. (For the origin of
that
quote, see
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable. Available: Bartleby.com). Arm yourself for the
fray
at Dictionary.com.
| COMMON
MISTAKES WITH LATIN WORDS AND PHRASES |
A résumé is a 'curriculum vitae'
(vitae is in the genitive
case, because
it describes the "course of your life"). It could be
called
a 'vita' (life), for short, but never a 'curriculum vita'.
|
Phenomenon,
medium, bacterium, and datum,
are singulars - phenomena, media, bacteria, and data, are plurals.
|