Grammar in vogue - in schools and with adults

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22403731

You Won't Get Much Fat from that Heart; And it Won't Pay the Bills, Either!

Okay, so I saw a comment on Facebook today that I must address: "So heart rendering what you have had to go through."

I know the writer meant heart-rending, and perhaps it was a simple typo; sometimes when we're typing fast our fingers type a word the way they want it typed when our mind is thinking something else. But perhaps this person actually thinks "rendering" was the correct word to use.

I offer a quick lesson on rending and rendering.

Render can mean several things. The root render means to give or hand over. As a transitive verb it can mean to submit or present (I rendered the bill to the customer.), to give (I rendered assistance to the stalled driver.), to give something owed (Let us render thanks to God.), to give in retribution (I rendered an apology for my rudeness.), to yield (I rendered the field to my opponent.), to represent, either in verbal form or in a drawing (I have tried to render my own feelings on the opera; My drawing did not render the subject well.), in computer science, to convert from a file into a visual form (I rendered the graphics file into a video display.), to perform or arrange in music (My own rendering of the musical piece was different from the composer's; I rendered the composition for a string ensemble.), to translate (I was able to render a translation that was accurate.), to pronounce (The jury rendered its verdict), to cause to become (Your news rendered me speechless!), and to reduce or melt down fat by heating (My grandfather used to render hog fat into lard.), and as a nautical term, to slacken (I rendered the rope for the captain of the ship.).

Rendering can be a noun, meaning the payment given for a good or service. There is also renderable, an adjective, and renderer, a noun.

None of those definitions would have been correct in the Facebook example I cite at the beginning of this post.

To rend something is to tear it or break it apart; it is to wrest, to divide, to pierce with sound, and to cause pain or distress.

Now heart-rending, on the other hand, is an adjective that means "causing or marked by grief or anguish". It is a synonym for heartbreaking and sorrowful. (And apparently it can be written as one word or as a hyphenated word.) I'm sure that is the expression the writer on Facebook was rendering to her friend.

But it was heartrending to me to see rendering used incorrectly.

Bad spelling costs money!

I just refer to the article on this link.

Spell checkers

I don't use a spellchecker. I've been drilled in spelling and grammar, and it's not a bad thing. I was taught three foreign languages (one of them I'm typing in right now), and you can't properly learn a language if you don't know the basics. Spelling is so fundamental, in my mind, that (typing errosr aside) you shouldn't need a spellchecker. Pedantic? Me?? OK, use a spellchecker if you're not certain. And to weed out those typos. But for crying out loud, please use a passive one. I'm allergic to active spellcheckers, that change words for you, without you having to allow it or not. I came across this horrendous example in an article on the STV website - STV is the Scottish commercial television channel - about Scots cyclists who were in the Joplin tornado. Describing the scene, the article quotes:

The storm sirens whaled out. We had to sprint and get ourselves to the van and head to the storm shelter. It was terrifying; the sirens filled me with fear.

Well, I should not joke about such a devastating event as the Joplin tornado, where over 100 people died. But I am pouring scorn over the text editor on STV.tv, who did not spot that particular banana-skin. He will end up wailing about whales until the end of his days...

Diffuse or defuse

That is a headline from a regional paper in the north of Scotland last Monday. So we diffuse bombs - but do we defuse light? Looks like someone didn't check his spellchecker!

Can you read any more?

Or can't you read anymore?

This is a word that was formerly acceptable only as its split form, any more; however, it is now generally acceptable to use the combined form. It joins other such combinations as anyone, anything, anytime, anyway, and anywhere. However, there is an important distinction in which the separate form should be used. If referring to matters of quantity, the phrase should be two words. If one is full after a meal, the proper term would be, "I can't eat any more." If one is physically unable to eat, the phrase would be, "I can't eat anymore." The former refers to quantity, with the word "food" implied after "more," and "more" used as an adjective. In the latter, "anymore" is an adverb modifying the verb "eat."

Just to add a little confusion, anymore can have a regional meaning, specifically in the Midwest. I used it in speaking the other day and thoroughly confused the person I was speaking with. I can't remember the exact topic of the conversation, but a good example would be, "In Indiana, if you want to buy alcohol, it doesn't matter how old you look. You have to show your license anymore." In this case, it means "at the present time" or "nowadays." When I used it with my friend, they were very perplexed by what seemed to be a contradictory statement. They thought it would have made sense to have a negative in there: "You can't buy alcohol anymore unless you show your license." In that case, it would be using anymore as an adverb modifying buy. My usage was intended to show a time frame.

One of my sources says that such a usage "puzzles readers from other regions." I can testify to the truth of that! Other references state that it is not proper form in writing. As I thought about it, I don't believe it's anything that I use in writing. If I utilize that form, it is generally when speaking, which is when most colloquialisms and regional idioms are prone to "popping out."

Does anyone else here use anymore in that way? I know I'm not the only one. Here is a bevy of bathing beauties to prove it.

I rest my case.

Plurals

Today is Glorious Twelfth, which sees the opening of the grouse shooting season here in the United Kingdom. So, if someone has a good aim, what do you say? How many grouse did you bag? Well, there are a few different plurals for nouns ending in -ouse.

House - houses
Blouse - blouses
Mouse - mice
Louse - lice
Grouse - grouse

It is one of my fave jokes to ask "how many hice in this street are afflicted with mice... "

Ad"DRESS"ing a Question

I've been trying to come up with an idea for this blog, and Donna at JUST ME gave me one. She was writing of memories of watching her mother "dress" a chicken and, as a passing thought, wondered why taking the guts out of a chicken was known as "dressing". Well, let's just see, shall we?

First of all, I was rather surprised to see how many definitions there are for the word "dress." As a verb, there are around fifteen, as a noun there are four, and as an adjective there are two. There are also at least three ways to use the word as a phrasal verb, and one use of it as an idiom, according to one dictionary.

In our query here, we are dealing with the word "dress" as a verb, meaning "to clean for cooking or sale", as one would do a chicken, a deer, a turkey. (A closely related usage would be the verb definition meaning "to garnish".)

The word "dress" is so common to our everyday language that it is interesting to realize that it hasn't always referred to an article of attire. My OED gives the earliest recorded use of the word "dress" as 14th century. There are three definitions from that century. One, the obsolete one, is "make or put straight or right". The second -- now get this -- is "prepare, treat (later, in a specific way)". So when we say we are dressing a joint of beef, or field dressing a deer, or dressing a chicken, we are using the oldest recorded definition of the word "dress".

Interesting, eh?

And in case you're wondering, the third meaning from the 14th century is "array, equip, attire". From the 18th century we have "line up (troops)", and from the 17th century we get the meaning "personal attire" from William Shakespeare.

The earliest noun sense of the word was "speech, talk", and comes from the 15th century. That sense comes from a verb sense (Latin dirigere), meaning "to direct" (addressing or directing words to other people).

Numbers and amounts

This morning, I was listening to the news on Radio Scotland, and in particular an item about potholes. Reporting from the side of a pothole in Perthshire, the journalist was talking about the amount of potholes. This is a very relevant topic, following the hardest winter since 1962/63, with snow on the ground for nearly 3 months in some parts of the Highlands. I remarked to a friend that talking about amounts of potholes is grammatically incorrect. You talk about numbers of potholes. Because you can count them. Of course, I would not expect anyone to go on a drive of all the roads in Highland Scotland and tot up the number of time their suspension gets wrecked. However, what could be a relevant statistic is the amount of tar required to fill in all those potholes. Or the number of men needed to put in all that tar.

You can talk about one tonne of tar needed to repair a stretch of road. That's an amount, you can weigh it or measure it; you describe it with a unit (e.g. of length, weight etc). You can't talk about one tar, unless you are watching a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

You can talk about one lorry, needed to carry all that tar, because you can count the number of vehicles. Talking about an amount of lorries does not make sense.

Check Out Deb's New Blog!

I'd like to invite you to visit a new blog by a former AOL Journaler. Thankfully she and I have stayed in touch since AOL Journals went under. She had a word usage journal for some time, but has only now decided to jump back into blog waters -- on Wordpress, not Blogger, but we won't hold that against her. ; )

Her name is Deb, and her blog is Everyday Language, Every Day. Please drop by to visit and let her know what you think. I am so jealous of the subject she chose for her first post. I wish I'd thought of it first!

A Few Shout-Outs

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

James D. Nicoll

This quote opens one of my favorite web sites, Word Connections, run by John Dierdorf. I first made Dierdorf's acquaintance by using one of his other sites, You Can't Say That! Both are chock full of interesting etymological treasures, and Dierdorf himself is humorous in his presentations. If you write historical fiction (or even if you don't) "You Can't Say That!" is a must-have as far as reference sources go, in my opinion. I like to read both sites just for fun, but I'm funny like that.

Another favored site, and one you may be familiar with, is The Word Detective, "Words and Language in a Humorous Vein Since 1996". I believe I may have run across this guy from a recommendation of another AOL Journaler. I do know that it has been in my bookmarked sites for several years. The Word Detective is newspaper columnist and author Evan Morris, and, again, I like reading his web site just for the fun of it.

One other site that I enjoy reading is EnglishClub.com. It has a little bit of everything for "learners and teachers of English", including a very interesting History of the English Language.

I hope you get the chance to check these out and make use of them.

Punctuation

Last Wednesday, I came across a public notice in an outlying district of the Isle of Lewis, where I reside. There was one comma missing in the first paragraph of the message from the Grazings Clerk, which threatened to render it unintelligible.

I read the first paragraph as:

ANY SHAREHOLDER WHO WISHES TO CAN PUT THERE SHEEP INTO THE AIRD PARK FROM NOW UNTIL END FEBRUARY/BEGINNING MARCH 2010. 

which should of course contain a comma after TO.

A better phrase would have run: 
"Any shareholder who wishes to put their sheep into the Aird Park can do so from now ... "

And yes, "there" should of course have been spelled "their", but that did not prompt me to take the photograph.

A Soupy Entry

I had planned to write about pronouns today, but I read something a few minutes ago that changed my plans. I was reading a blog entry about The Sir John Soane's Museum in London (on my list of "places to visit" when I go to London) and the phrase hotch-potch was used to describe the sculpture in the basement of the home. It struck me that I had never wondered before what the difference is, if any, between hotch-potch and hodge-podge, so assuming you would be just as interested as I am, I decided to write about that instead.

I had a feeling that hodge-podge is what we Americans are more familiar with and that I would find that hotch-potch is older and probably used more by the English.

I first checked my trusty OED to see what it says about hotch-potch. The word is not there. The word hotch-pot is there, and I found that the earliest use of this word in print was by Chaucer in the 14th century with a meaning of "mixture" or "medley", specifically in cookery by the 15th century. In the 16th century it became a legal term meaning "collation of properties to secure equality of division." It is of Anglo-Norman origin, from Old French hochepot, from the French words hocher (shake) and pot (pot). Shaking the pot -- I like that. I'm imagining a stew of whatever I have in the refrigerator all shaken and cooked together. By steady progression the word evolved into hotchpotch, altered by "rhyming assimilation" in the 15th century, and finally hodge-podge sometime in the 17th century. When I looked up hodge-podge the OED told me to "see hotch-pot". So that is that.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gives as the first definition of hotch-potch "a thick soup or stew of vegetables, potatoes, and usually meat", and as "hodgepodge {one word}, a noun meaning 'a heterogeneous mixture', synoymous with jumble". The second definition given is "hotchpot", a word in English law, with the legal meaning given in the above paragraph. Merriam-Webster lists the word's origin as dating from 1538 (16th century), which is in disagreement with the OED of Etymology.

I just thought this was rather interesting and that I would share. Hope you enjoyed it!

A Brief Review of LIE and LAY

It seems like the distinction between the two verbs "lie" and "lay" is disappearing in common usage. I have seen and heard so many examples lately where the writer or speaker uses the wrong one, and these are people who should know better. It has even been suggested {gasp} that someday soon the distinction may be done away with entirely in common usage. However, the distinction is still observed by enough potential employers (or clients) that it would be well to try to get the usage right before using one or the other incorrectly in a professional setting (or in a job interview!).

I believe we've covered these words before, but I thought it might be time for a quick review.

Very simply "to lay" means "to put" or "to place", and "to lie" means "to repose".

"Lay" is a transitive verb, meaning that it is an action word, expressing a doable action, and requiring at least one object; it will always be followed by a noun or pronoun. Its principal forms are lay, laid, have laid, and laying. For example: I lay my keys on the counter as soon as I get home. I know I laid my keys on the counter when I got home today. I have laid my keys on the counter since I learned to drive. Laying my keys in the same place every time helps me keep up with them. If you are saying that something has been put or placed somewhere, then use a form of "lay". In these examples, "keys" is the direct object. What did we lay? We laid "keys".

"Lie" is an intransitive verb, a word that has no object. The action stays with the subject, as it were. (The confusion between "lie" and "lay" usually comes about because the past tense of "lie" is spelled the same way as the present tense of "lay".) The principal forms of "lie" are lie, lay, have lain, and lying. For example: Today I lie in bed until noon. Yesterday I lay in bed until noon. In fact, I have lain in bed until noon all this week. Actually I am still lying in bed right now! There is no object for which the action was performed, so there is no direct object. The subject "I" performs the action, and the action goes nowhere; it stays with the subject.

So really, knowing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is probably the key to knowing whether to use "lie" or "lay" in a sentence. If you are going to be describing an action that is doable, with a noun or pronoun that receives the action of the verb, then use one of the forms of the transitive verb "lay". If the action you are describing is being done by the subject and "stays" with the subject, then you would use one of the forms of the intransitive verb "lie".

The etymology of the two words is also different. The word "lay" comes from an Old English word that means "to place on the ground" or "to put down". (This is also the origin of the verb "lay", meaning "to produce an egg.") The word "lie" comes from a different Old English word that means "to rest horizontally." (Yet another Old English word is the origin of the verb "lie", meaning to tell a falsehood.)

If anyone has a specific question about the usage of "lie" and "lay", please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It . . .

How would you like to go on a sort of etymological treasure hunt with me? Hmm???

My sister Barbara, who is very much a logophile, uses a bookmarker with nothing on the back whenever she is reading. When she comes upon a word that is unfamiliar to her or one that she wants to learn the origin of, she will write it on the back of the bookmark. When she has learned it, she will cross it off.

A few days ago she asked if I could help her find the origins and meanings of two words, cypocraphy and palitant. It had been a while since she'd written them down and couldn't remember in what context they were used, but I know for sure that "palitant" had nothing to do with an avatar on an online game (which is what I found when I googled it.). I've barely scratched the surface of research, so I thought I'd throw them out there to see if anyone else had any ideas or would like to join in the hunt.

My OED has been no help. The most I could find there was the word "Pali", with a capital "P" (long "A" sound), meaning a language used in Buddhist canonical books and short for "line or canon".

I'm hoping someone out there has perhaps come across one of these words or has a reference source that I don't have that may prove useful.

So please join in if you can. It'll give you something to do in 2010.

And yes, these are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night!

We have a request!

Mary has requested that we do a post about the semicolon. I know that Lori is a little under the weather, and I'm sure I have more time on my hands than does Guido, so I'll do a quickie about this handy little punctuation mark.

I like the semicolon; I use it fairly often.

That's the first example of usage. Two independent clauses that are similar and are not joined by a conjunction such as and. The key is that the clauses must be able to stand on their own as a sentence. If and were in there, no further punctuation would be necessary. I like the semicolon and I use it fairly often.

I like the semicolon; however, I feel that I don't use it often enough.

I like the semicolon; I feel, however, that I don't use it often enough.

In this case, two independent clauses are joined by a linking adverb. The linking adverb is followed by a comma, or if within the second clause, offset by commas.

I like the semicolon, the exclamation point, and the ampersand; the semicolon is my favorite.

In this case, there are again two independent clauses, with internal punctuation in the first clause. This sentence could also include a linking adverb such as however in the second clause.

Some of my favorite punctuation marks are the semicolon, an underused mark; the colon, which introduces a list; and the exclamation point, which indicates emphasis or surprise.

This scenario shows the separation of a series in which each item uses internal punctuation. This is probably the usage I employ most often, for when some or all items in a series require a little further explanation, which is offset by commas.

In the first three scenarios, I think the important thing to remember is that the two clauses need to be able to stand on their own in order for the semicolon to be used correctly. A common error is for a writer to substitute a comma for the semicolon. This results in a comma splice, which is two independent clauses joined by a comma. I think many of us remember from school that a comma splice was a most egregious error!

I hope you'll give the semicolon another look; it separates elements of a sentence nicely, and can keep a writer from falling prey to run-on sentences.

Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms

In the 1990s, I worked for the Ministry of Defense in Holland, and I probably don't need to tell you that the military are art masters of the abbreviation. To a grating extent, sometimes. I used to be employed at the medical supplies division. Even if you know the Dutch, it does take a little gnashing of the cogs upstairs to work out what GNKDGDN stands for.

However, you don't need the army to make a meal of an abbreviation. Quite often, the abbreviation is there to cut down on the number of seconds, spent writing out a big long word, e.g. exemplia gratia. We all write e.g., and we all know what it means. When we speak, the phrase turns into for example. 

A different form of contracting words or phrases consists of picking out the initial letters of the constituent words and putting them down as one word. The World Health Organisation is turned into WHO. Nobody will pronounce that as the interrogative who? Everybody spells out the individual letters in pronounciation. That is what you call an initialism. When the initial letters, put together, turn into a word that you can pronounce without causing confusion or difficulty, it is termed an acronym. Sometimes, additional letters are drawn in, added to initial letters, to make a pronounceable word. The word NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is a case in point, as is SONAR (Sound Navigation And Ranging).

Wikipedia has an excellent article on this issue - the post was prompted by a letter in the Glasgow Herald of 12 October 2009.

So sorry, I'm too busy towing my cow!

Photo © Tristan Savatier - http://loupiote.com/ - Used by Permission

Beth and I have noticed a lot of "cow towing" going on in the blogosphere recently, and it really must stop.

First I read a blog that began by complaining that a highly-placed politician was cow towing to foreign interests. Most recently Beth had an anonymous commenter accuse this same highly-placed politician of "cowtowing (one word this time) to just about every socialist dictator in existence". And there were a few other instances in between those two where I saw the words cow tow. So we have decided that it is time to do a brief study of the correct spelling and use of the term kow tow.

Kowtow (also koutau or kautau) is from the Mandarin Chinese kòu tóu, and it means, literally, "to knock head." From my own research I found that the noun came into general use sometime between 1795 and 1805 and was the custom of touching one's forehead to the ground to show respect or submission -- to quite literally "knock" one's "head" on the ground.

The figurative use of the term as a verb came into use in 1826, and it is as that figurative use of "acting in an obsequious manner" (genuflect, scrape, bootlick, brownnose) that the recent blogger and anonymous commenter were trying to use the term. This is not a political blog, so I am not going to get into a discussion of their opinions or arguments, but I will say that because they (and the other examples I read) used the spelling cow tow, I have no idea what point they were really trying to make and remember nothing else that they wrote. When I first read the blog entry mentioned in my second paragraph I couldn't get past the words cow tow. I couldn't have taken the blogger seriously on anything else written in that entry. I even had to go to Beth's blog to re-read the Anonymous comment to get the quote used above because all I could remember about it was that Anonymous had spelled kowtow wrong.

(Side note to bloggers who want to be taken seriously on serious subjects: If you are trying to make a valid point to readers who may not share your opinions, please try to use correct usage and spelling if at all possible.)

I found the history of the cultural and religious use of kowtow very interesting. Britannica.com says that it was

"the act of supplication made by an inferior to his superior by kneeling and knocking his head to the floor. This prostration ceremony was most commonly used in religious worship, by commoners who came to make a request of the local district magistrate, and by officials and representatives of foreign powers who came into the presence of the emperor. By the Ming period (1368-1644), the ritual, especially as made to the shrine of Confucius by the emperor and to the emperor by his officials and foreign envoys, involved "three kneelings and nine prostrations."

And the difference between kneelings and prostrations? The three kneelings were done from a standing position, and the prostrations were kowtows performed while kneeling.

There were different grades of kowtow used depending on the situation. The emperor's subjects were required to kowtow to him as described above. Commoners were also required to kowtow to government officials since they represented the emperor, and if they were brought before an official in a formal situation they were required to remain kneeling. By contrast, a person with a degree in the "Imperial examinations" would be allowed to sit down after performing a kowtow. Children were required to kowtow to their elderly ancestors, especially on special occasions. It was even traditionally required that newly married couples kowtow to both sets of parents at their wedding ceremony, to acknowledge the debt owed to the parents for their nurturing.

The word kowtow came into English in the early 19th century and described the bow itself. Very soon, however, it came to mean any groveling or abject submission, and that is how it is usually used today. A recent BBC News article reported that the former president of Pakistan had accused the Afghan president of kow-towing to India.

In modern times the kowtow is still performed in Buddhist religious ceremonies. It is not known as kowtowing, however, but as "worship with the crown" (head) or "casting the five limbs to the earth". It has all but been replaced by the standing bow in social and formal situations today.

As far as I can find out, the term is most often spelled as one word, kowtow, but it is also acceptable to spell it as two words, kow tow, or with a hyphen, kow-tow. And the "tow" part is never pronounced like "toe", but like "cow".

In researching this word I found several interesting web sites, and also learned a lot about the May Fourth Movement. You may find this site of interest, and The Word Detective is always worth reading.

Many thanks to Tristan Savatier for use of the oh-so-appropriate photo above. I shouted with glee when I saw that photograph!

Coming soon another misunderstood and misused term we've noticed recently: toeing the line! Be sure to tune in for that one!

Whose blog is this, anyway?

If you enjoy words and word usage, it is your blog! Lori, Guido, and I may be the ones posting, but we share a love of language and have a mutual interest in a continued effort to improve and learn, and have some fun along the way.

My topic today is reflected in the title of this entry: who's vs. whose.

The apostrophe has been the topic here twice before: here and here. It's always worth repeating, because a misplaced apostrophe can change a well-intentioned phrase to nonsense.

Who's is a contraction of who is or who has. An appropriate use would be "Who's got the football?" or "Who's going with me to the football game?"

Whose is the possessive of who, and is used to show...well, possession. "Whose football is this?" or "Whose house are we watching the football game at?" (You could also say "At whose house are we watching the football game?" but that sounds a little stilted.)

As with other contractions, a good way to remember which is correct is to expand the contraction. In the first case, "Who has got the football?" makes sense. In the second case, "Who is football is this?" makes no sense whatsoever.

As for the score...who's counting?

I hate to say "I told you so"

Please note #5.