Where’s the grammar in these “common grammar mistakes”?

Grammar is not an easy word to pin down: it has several meanings covering many referents and phenomena. You could think of it mainly as the system or structure of a language, particularly its syntax and morphology, and sometimes also its phonology and semantics; and it is the areas of linguistics that study these. The definitions at Collins and Merriam-Webster are reasonably detailed and admirably clear.

We learn grammar through early exposure to (usually) our families’ use of language, then by using language with them. The “grammar rules” we associate with school, and which we encounter in articles such as those mentioned below, are more often traditional conventions of spelling, style and usage, along with pet peeves and pedantic fancies.

The internet is sadly sodden with pages that purport to list common grammar mistakes but are in large part a dispiriting and repetitive mishmash of misinformation, superstitions, anachronisms, and trivial, one-dimensional advice about spelling and style.

John E. McIntyre recently demolished one such list, calling it a “deeply depressing document”. Mr McIntyre, well aware that what people consider a language’s rules are a complex bag of constraints from “different categories, with varying weights”, has composed a helpful and practical taxonomy which I trust he won’t mind my abridging here, with his examples in brackets:

Keeping ‘discreet’ and ‘discrete’ discreetly discrete

Wordnik’s recent collection of commonly confused words reminded me that it’s been a while since I wrote a post of this sort.* Time for another.

Discreet and discrete are often mixed up. It’s easily done: not only are they homophones with near-identical spelling, they’re also doublets, meaning they diverged from the same original word. In modern English, their spellings and meanings are distinct. Below are mnemonics to help you remember which adjective is which.

Discreet is probably the more familiar word, and is usually used to refer to people, especially their speech, appearance, or behaviour. It means unobtrusive, circumspect and prudent, careful not to attract attention or cause embarrassment, able to keep a secret. Discretion is the noun form. You could think of the adjacent e’s in discreet discreetly sharing a secret: they couldn’t do this with a t in the way.

She promised to be discreet with any sensitive information.
As the meeting began, he yawned discreetly.

Discrete generally means separate, non-continuous, individually distinct; it also has technical usages relating to possible parts or values. Discreteness is the related noun. To remember this spelling, think of the t separating the e’s and keeping them distinct from one another.

A sentence is composed of discrete words.
We divided the work into discrete sections.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has more about the words’ overlapping histories, and shows that they are quite often misspelled even in reputable publications – unless these instances indicate that the words’ spellings are gradually becoming interchangeable again.

But even if that were the case – I’m sceptical – it doesn’t get you off the hook. Careful readers will notice what is, in current usage, a mistake, and may judge your writing accordingly. If you have trouble distinguishing discreet from discrete, use the mnemonics above; or if you have a different trick, do let me know in a comment.
 
 
* If you browse my spelling tag, you’ll find (among other things) posts about its and it’s, minuscule, ad nauseam, climatic and climactic, stationary and stationery, peddle and pedal, principal and principle, affect and effect, forego and forgo.

Ijit, idjit, eejit, idiot

After about 15 years of not reading Stephen King, I came across Dolores Claiborne in a second-hand bookshop and immediately bumped it to the upper reaches of my book mountain. I’ve long admired the film adaptation, so I was more than a little curious to visit the source.

Set on an island off the coast of Maine, New England, it’s a memorable story told very well as a continuous narrative in Dolores’s dialectal speech. It has one lexical feature that I want to mention here. No spoilers follow:

…the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened

I don’t remember seeing the word ijit in print before. Obviously it’s a regional form of idiot – like idjit, another variant – and means more or less the same thing (see eejit, below), but it’s interesting how its pronunciation /’ɪdʒət/ “idget” differs from the standard /’ɪdiət/ “iddy-uht”. I suppose this is related to the tendency for /dj/ to shift to /dʒ/ in words like due and during.

Ijit has only one hit in COCA; idjit has three, including the amusing line “an optimist [...] is just a crossword puzzle way of saying idjit”. Browsing Google Books, though, I see that they’re not so rare, ijit occurring for instance in a story by Jacques Futrelle, who lived not far from Maine in Scituate, Massachusetts.

I expect they occur here and there around the English-speaking world. Wordnik aggregates several colloquial examples of both forms. Rooting around some more, I see that ijit is also an old African American word, mentioned in Hubert Anthony Shands’s Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi (1893):

Eejit is the Irish English equivalent, and is common in fictional and vernacular dialogue. It doesn’t connote mental retardation – idiot can – instead signalling foolish behaviour, be it chronic or occasional. Eejit is softer than idiot, and is not generally used hurtfully but to gently criticise someone the speaker knows and may well hold in affection. I imagine this is also true of ijit and idjit, but I’m open to correction.

T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers a few literary examples of eejit and a note on pronunciation: that it approximates the Irish rendering of d and i. Take for example the Irish words Dia (God) /’dʲi:æ/ and idir (between) /’ɪdʲər/. [Edit: See the comments for more on this.]

“You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,” his old father used to say snappishly. (William Trevor, Fools of Fortune)

Common modifiers of eejit include big, awful, feckin’, fuckin’, and oul’ (also ould, aul’, auld). Its jocular flavour made it a frequent favourite in the TV comedy Father Ted, and might help explain why the word was found to be not unparliamentary when it was used in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Irish English as Represented in Film by Shane Walshe presents some uses of the word in films, but you’ll have to turn your head sideways to read them. Like an eejit.

Link love: language (31)

A grab-bag of language-related links that caught my eye lately:

Conjugating the Werewolf.

The problem with cutesy voices.

Anglo-EU translation guide.

On -ise and -ize.

Capitalisation in E. E. Cummings’ name.

Etymology of newfangled and pagan.

Estuary English in the 21st century.

Why do French babies cry differently to German babies?

University of Chicago completes its Assyrian/Akkadian Dictionary.

Slang, the poetry of everyday life (PDF).

The dramatic history of the letter H.

England’s regional accents continue to move and mutate.

Word usage predicts romantic attraction: report, paper (PDF).

The Internet Archive’s physical archive of books.

A world without standardised/-ized spelling.

Using commas with appositives.

Catalog or catalogue? A library dilemma. (PDF)

“Scobberlotchers.”

Late entry: Index of garbledness as a cyptographic tool.

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[links archive]

United by uncommon lexicography

A few centuries ago, English spelling was a far looser and more inconsistent affair than it is today. Dictionaries were few, their contents patchy. Shakespeare’s name, even by his own hand, serves to illustrate the degree of variation. Gradually, a good deal of standardisation came about, particularly in the written language, but different standards apply in different places, and usage remains much colo(u)red by variety.

A lot of the discussion over this variety concerns the differences between AmE and BrE spellings (many of which owe to the influence of Noah Webster). Ireland uses BrE spelling, for the most part, as do Australia and New Zealand (Burchfield’s home country), while Canada mixes American and British conventions. Wikipedia has a long, heavily footnoted page on transatlantic spelling differences; for analysis of these and more general differences, I recommend Lynne Murphy’s separated by a common language blog, named after G. B. Shaw’s famous quip.

Are AmE and BrE spelling differences reversible? More qualified minds than mine have entertained the idea of bringing the spelling systems closer together. It’s a very human urge to want to tidy the messy edges of a language. We want to fix, if only in part, an imperfect system. Efficiency is one of the forces behind linguistic change, whether it is consciously directed at a text before us or emerges spontaneously and gradually over time.

Lexicographer Robert Burchfield was no stranger to linguistic change: his revised third edition of Fowler’s iconic usage dictionary was criticised for its largely descriptive approach; and as editor of the Supplement to the OED, he received death threats over some of his decisions. So he was more aware than most people of the passions, for better and worse, that words can inspire.

Tucked away at the back of his book The English Language (1985) is a curious endnote about spelling reform that’s worth reproducing in full:

It would not be a difficult exercise for British people to become accustomed to final -or in all the relevant words (honour/honor, labour/labor, etc.), or for Americans to become used to -our. Similarly it should be possible to come to an agreement about the spelling of such words as marvellous/marvelous, travelling/traveling, and kidnapped/kidnaped (the British forms given first in each case). More difficult (it seems to me) would be the resolution of oe/e in oesophagus/esophagus, etc., ae/e in aesthetic/esthetic, etc., and ph/f in sulphur/sulfur, etc. But a ‘trade-off’, if it could be achieved, in such relatively minor areas of spelling would help to bring the written forms of British and American English much closer together. In 1968 Dr Philip Gove (editor of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)* and I lightheartedly discussed the possibility of making an approach along these lines to our respective governments but it came to nothing in the end.

Much as I admire Burchfield’s optimism, I think it’s very unlikely that even the more modest shifts could ever be engineered. If changes along the lines Burchfield describes were to be introduced systematically, there might be uproar – or, at any rate, furious brow-furrowing, ferocious levels of grumbling, and further inconsistencies.

Not only do people become accustomed and attached to words and particular spellings and usages, but they positively fetishize (and fetishise) them – often to the extent of finding legitimate variants objectionable.

But it’s tantalising to imagine the discussions Burchfield and Gove had about this. How light-hearted were they? What sort of approach to their governments was envisaged? Were any records kept of possible “trade-offs” – lists made on café napkins, degrees of difficulty calculated, that sort of thing? My curiosity about this is unlikely to be satisfied.

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* A fiercely contentious reference book which I wrote about here.

[image source]

Its, it’s: It’s a problem

Some pet linguistic peeves are indulged, I find, not for reasons of clarity or grammatical soundness, but out of petty pedantry, habitual curmudgeonliness, or some kind of character disorder. On the other hand, I’ve been accused – affectionately, I hope – of excessive tolerance in such matters. But I have peeves of my own, one of which is the confusion over its and it’s.

Lynne Truss considers this “the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation”. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves she writes that it “sets off a simple Pavlovian ‘kill’ response in the average stickler”, and goes on to fantasise – satirically, one hopes – about lightning strikes, hacking, and unmarked graves.

My instincts are less violently judgemental. I don’t get wound up over its/it’s confusion – but I often wince at it, particularly when it appears in edited prose. So, I imagine, does Roger Ebert:

To summarise the difference: it’s is always a contraction of it is or it has. Usually the former. Keep this front and centre, and you’ll greatly reduce your chances of ever getting it wrong. Its is the possessive form of it – more fully, the third person neuter possessive pronoun. So you might write of a solitary ant: “It’s lost its way.”

It’s not just students, bloggers and learners who mix up its and it’s, but also people for whom words are central to their trade – journalists, broadcasters, reviewers, professors of law, and so on. I even saw a lexicographer slip up. Evidently it’s a major source of confusion – a mistake so common as to be virtually normalised. But I’m an editor with a hero-of-Haarlem complex, so I feel duty bound to do what I can. Lawrence Lessig almost put it well:

A look at the causes might shed some light. There are, I suspect, three main reasons for the confusion. One is that its is an exception to a well-known rule: Add apostrophe-s for possession. Hence the ill-advised leap from, say, the dog’s tail to *it’s tail. Another reason is contagion: the mistaken forms are very prevalent, and their every appearance reinforces the wrongness. The third main reason is that many people don’t care.

Apparently, iPhones auto-correct its to it’s, which might explain Mr Lessig’s lapse. A friend on Twitter thinks this faulty auto-correct feature is responsible for a fair proportion of the confusion on Twitter. She’s probably right. It’s also worth noting that its and it’s have quite a tangled history.

Maybe you’d consider its/it’s confusion a negligible matter – the pet rock of pet peeves. It rarely leads to misinterpretation, and it sure doesn’t amount to much on a cosmic scale. But careful readers will notice the mistake and consider it a sign of inattention, sloppiness, ignorance, or even illiteracy – especially if it’s repeated. So if you value good communication, it’s a distinction you ought to make, and make consistently.

That its/it’s mistakes occur in the prose of reputable publications and careful writers shows how easily confusion creeps in. But with vigilance and application we can defend ourselves from it. If you’re prone to this mix-up, even occasionally, you might want to condition yourself to observe the distinction. Here’s a way. For as long as I can remember, I’ve habitually read erroneous it’s as it is. So, for example, in The Guardian last week I saw the following:

I automatically read this as “in all it is bewildering glory”, with a slight slow emphasis on “it is”. The same goes for these errors on the HSE and Galway City Council websites:

Semantically, I inferred what was meant, but in parallel I processed the absurdities (“it is companion book”; “it is environs”). Doing this for years has given me a kind of immunity, I think, by steadily and deeply embedding the rule in my nervous system. I’m very strongly sensitised to it. Accepting it’s as its would undermine this conditioning, so I don’t.

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Update: I’ll use this space to add occasional examples I consider remarkable or interesting. For example, I didn’t expect to see the error slip past the editors at The Economist – but it did:

The mistake has since been fixed. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Plain English Campaign has fallen prey to this basic error:

Here’s The Boston Globe, not only getting it wrong, but misquoting the New York Times Magazine in the process:

The NYT itself has its moments of weakness:

In a post titled “Not OK”, here’s Language Log (third line from the bottom; subsequently fixed):

Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr:

John Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air:

Anthony de Mello’s One Minute Nonsense gets it right and wrong in the same sentence:

The BBC:

A pack of Siúcra granulated sugar:

Poetry Foundation (spotted by Paraic O’Donnell); now fixed:

The BBC Entertainment News Twitter account, which acknowledged the mistake amusingly a few tweets later:

[more on apostrophes]

Note: this post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus (subscription required).

HSE — Who proofreads the proofreaders?

The Health Service Executive (HSE) is Ireland’s largest employer, and a few months ago it published Plain language style guide for documents, an illustrated style guide stressing the importance of plain English. What follows are some general comments and specific criticisms.

The style guide is a moderately attractive booklet, with moments of mild fun amidst the painstaking political correctness. At 34 pages with a lot of blank space, it’s a quick read, but it could have been reduced to half or two-thirds the size without cluttering its appearance. Some of its advice is arbitrary or oversimplified, but I wouldn’t expect nuanced commentary in so brief a guide. Much more unfortunate are the poor levels of grammar, punctuation, formatting, and spelling.

On page 8, “[If] you plan to use particular term” is missing the indefinite article a. So is this line on p. 21: “If you do not have copy of the first information pack”. The advice on passive vs. active voice (p. 9) is passable, if predictably crude and simplistic. The guidance on concision (p. 10) makes no allowance for context — sometimes longer phrases are better than loosely synonymous single words. Abdomen wall (p. 12) seems an unusual way to say abdominal wall, though I’ve not investigated their relative popularity in any depth.

Now, what do you think of this passage?

I’m cheered by the HSE’s sensible approval of them and their as gender-neutral singular pronouns, but imagine how much clearer the text would be if it used italics or inverted commas to refer to certain words as words. This failing occurs throughout the document and makes it much more troublesome and irritating to read than it ought to be.

Here’s a line in dire need of a comma: “end the introduction to the list with a full stop if it is also a full sentence or with no punctuation if it is a heading” (p. 16). Further down the same page there’s a typo no spell checker would catch, but which would not be missed by a competent proofreader:

We’re advised to “treat named organisations or groups as singular” (p. 19), and we’re given this example: “The HSE is divided into four areas.” Ten pages later we read: “The Health Service Executive under the National Intercultural Healthcare Strategy are developing a set of national guidelines…” This is not a significant sticking point, but if an organisation is proclaiming on style, it ought to at least be consistent in its style guide.

In the “Designers and printers” section, this phrase stood out: “make sure your final product is an easy-to-read document…” (p. 24). Maybe I’m allergic to the word product used as a catch-all term for just about anything (including people), but what’s wrong with: “make sure your final document is easy to read…”? Or change document to text if you want to allow for more possibilities.

We’re cautioned not to “underline words, write them in all capital letters or italicise them” (p. 26). I see the argument against underlining or using all capitals, but why shouldn’t we use italics? I’ve already shown where they would have been handy, and here’s another example: “The Citizens Information Board document Access to Information for All gives guidance…” (p. 29). This would read far more smoothly with appropriate italics (or inverted commas).

An aeroplane is flown in* to emphasise this strange prohibition:

I like the playful presentation, but I don’t think italicising aeroplane distorts the word’s resemblance to its referent.

Worse, the document contains elementary spelling errors — and I don’t just mean typos like the for they. Page 29 offers us compliment instead of complement:

On the next page, English is spelled with a small e. Perhaps worst of all, grammar is spelled grammer and unnecessary is spelled unnecesary:

These are shocking errors to find in a style guide. Just below them there’s a conspicuously absent apostrophe in “according to the readers needs”. Soon after that, the heading “Non Government Organisations” should be hyphenated. Non is a prefix, sometimes forming a solid compound but usually a hyphenated one. It doesn’t stand alone, like this:

I could go on, but that should suffice. In spite of these criticisms, the HSE’s Plain language style guide for documents is not all bad. It contains some sound and useful advice which, if heeded, should foster clearer communication and greater understanding of what can often be challenging material.

Sadly, the HSE style guide is also riddled with errors. I’ve been picky, but a style guide demands and deserves to be picked at. What a pity it wasn’t proofread better, not least because it urges writers to “Seek quotes for translation and two proof reads” (p. 30). Was this style guide proofread twice? More, even? Maybe I should offer them my proofreading services.

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*Note non-horrific use of the passive voice.