10 Grammar Mistakes People Love To Correct (That Aren't Actually Wrong)
Are you the sort of person who just
loves correcting other people's grammar? Are you sure that you're doing it
right? Some things that people have been taught are rules of English grammar
are not rules at all—and some of them are flat-out wrong. There's a word for this phenomenon: hypercorrection. It's what happens when people
learn that something that isn't a rule is rule.
Now there are plenty of reasons for
people to learn about proper English grammar; it can make you a more confident communicator and
help you understand the way the language has evolved. But sometimes, when
people correct other folks' grammar in a non-education, non-copyediting
situation, they're not being helpful; they're asserting their perceived linguistic superiority.
And while some who proudly wear the badge of "grammar Nazi" or
"grammar police" see themselves as defenders of the language, they're
not really enforcing grammatical rules; they're reinforcing personal peeves.
In 2011, the publisher of my book Enchantment could not fill an order
for 500 e-book copies.…
Not everyone in the United States speaks the same English, as a recent
American Dialect quiz made…
I
am by no means a grammar expert; I just enjoy reading about grammar. These
non-rules are backed up by various grammarians and linguists. You can also feel
free to correct my grammar. I figure that if I write a post about grammar,
karma dictates that it will contain no fewer than a dozen typographical and
grammatical errors.
1.
Saying "I am good" when someone asks "How are you?": This is a funny thing I've noticed in my
daily life: when I ask someone how they are, that person frequently responds
with, "I am [pause] well." It's as if they are fighting their natural
urge to say "I am good."
People,
it's okay. We are all good.
English
speakers tend to mistakenly correct themselves by saying "I am well"
instead of "I am good" because they recognize that "am" is
a verb, a form of "to be." And since it's a verb, people often
figure, you pair it with an adverb (like well), not an adjective (like good).
But what these folks are forgetting is that the verb "to be" is a linking verb. Yes, if
your main verb is an action verb (such as "to run" or "to
see"), then you need to use an adverb, rather than an adjective, to modify
it ("I run well." "He sees poorly."). But with a linking
verb, you are describing your state—good, bad, purple, in a hurry, whatever.
The same applies to verbs like "to seem" and "to appear,"
and in certain cases to sensing verbs, like "to smell" ("You
smell good." vs. "You smell well.") and "to feel." (If
you "feel badly," then you are bad at feeling, but if you "feel
bad" then you are describing your state as bad.)
As
Mignon Fogarty notes in her entry on "Good Versus Well," saying
"I am good" is actually preferable to saying "I am well"
unless you're speaking specifically about your health. But hopefully, if you
are telling people that you are "well," good health is at least part
of what you're trying to convey.
2.
Splitting infinitives: This is a
"rule" that you'll hear about from people from time to time, but that
you won't find in modern style guides. Self-declared grammar sticklers have
been tut-tutting split infinitives for decades; in at least one case, it was allegedly discussed in
treaty negotiations. But while some English grammarians, notably
Henry Alford in his 1864 book The Queen's English, have argued against
splitting infinitives, it is not a rule. In fact, sometimes avoiding a split
infinitive is downright awkward. So grammar aficionados need not
tear out their hair over the Enterprise's mission "to boldly go where no
man/one has gone before."
3. Using "over" instead of
"more than" to indicate greater numerical value:Here's the rule that you may have been taught at
some point: if you are talking about a quantity of something, then you should
use "more than" to describe a greater amount, e.g. "The stables
housed more than a thousand horses." But if you are discussing spatial
dimensions, then you should use "over" to discuss greater dimensions,
e.g. "The mountain was over 20,000 feet tall." But perhaps the final
the death knell of this distinction sounded just this year when the Associated Press announced a change to the AP
Stylebook: "more than" and "over" are now both
acceptable ways to indicate greater numerical value. The AP wasn't exactly on
the forefront of the "more than" versus "over" question;
many style books had long ago ditched the rule, including the Chicago Manual of
Style.
4. Using "preventative" to
mean "preventive": I
recall that once, while working for a dog culture magazine, we printed a
strongly worded letter to the editor taking us to task for using the word
"preventative" in lieu of "preventive." After that, we
eschewed the word "preventative," and sure, we stopped getting
letters about the word, but the change didn't make us more correct. Now, there
are plenty of people who will offer perfectly logical explanations for why they
feel "preventive" is more correct than "preventative."
After all, you prevent something; you don't "preventate" something.
And preventive is the more common form
in formal writing, at least in North America.
But "preventative" is
considered a perfectly acceptable variant of
preventive, one that has been in use for centuries. Grammarist notes that
preventive/preventative is just one of many -tive/-tative word pairs that
remain inconsistently used, no matter how often the head linguistic honchos try
to saddle them with rules.
Even though "preventative"
is just as correct as "preventive," many grammarians will counsel
readers to avoid "preventative" as a preventive against pinging
someone's pet peeve.
5. Using "that" instead of
"who" as a pronoun to refer to a person: I admit, I always thought this was a hard and fast
rule. You would say, "That crazy lady who is writing about grammar,"
not "That crazy lady that is writing about grammar," right? The SAT
and ACT actually test students on this very point. (That's not to say that the
SAT and ACT are the authority on proper grammar, but hey, this is what folks
are told is college-ready grammar.) So I was surprised to read in Patricia T.
O'Conner's grammar primer Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in
Plain English that either form is correct. Apparently, this is one of this is more a
question of style than of rules.
Personally,
I'll continue to favor "who" when referring to people. (Sorry, people
whose work I copyedit!) But at least I'll recognize that it's a stylistic
choice rather than a firm grammatical rule.
6.
Using words like "slow" and "quick" as adverbs: Weird Al Yankovic has a series of videos in
which he "corrects" street signs that read "Drive Slow" so
that they instead read "Drive Slowly." But, as Mignon Fogarty points
out in her swell takedown of the
mean-spirited tone of Weird Al's "Word Crimes" video, Weird Al is
wrong. "Slow" is what's known as a flat adverb, meaning that it
functions as an adverb despite lacking an -ly ending. Daily Writing Tips has
a handy list of flat adverbs and their relationships to corresponding -ly
adverbs. In the cases of "slow" and "quick," the meanings
of the flat adverbs are identical to their -ly counterparts, "slowly"
and "quickly."
Here,
in Merriam-Webster's "Ask the Editor" feature, associate editor Emily
Brewster explains that flat adverbs were much more common before 18th-century
grammarians insisted that words not ending in -ly were adjectives. She lists a
few instances in which flat adverbs have the same meanings as their -ly
counterparts and a few instances in which they have different meanings. Flat
adverbs are an endangered species, in part because people keep erroneously
"correcting" them.
7.
Ending a sentence with a preposition: Writing at the Oxford Dictionaries
blog, Catherine Soanes refers to the notion that one may not end a
sentence with a preposition as "fetish" rather than a rule. And if
you've ever tried to contort a sentence to avoid ending on a preposition, you
might suspect that fetish is linguistic masochism. Like so many
rules-that-aren't-rules, this one gets blamed on Latin-loving English
grammarians who thought they could squeeze an English-language peg into a
Latin-language hole. Latin infinitives are contained in a single verb;
therefore, we must not split infinitives. Latin prepositions must always
precede prepositional phrases; therefore, English prepositions must always
precede prepositional phrases. Even if you never learned it in school, Latin is
still messing with your life.
There's
a cheeky sentence on the matter that is frequently (and apocryphally)
attributed to Winston Churchill: "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up
with which I will not put."
Soanes
offers four examples of when it is perfectly alright (and perhaps even
preferable) to end one's sentence with a preposition:
passive
structures (she enjoys being fussed over)
relative
clauses (they must be convinced of the commitment that they are taking on)
infinitive
structures (Tom had no-one to play with)
questions beginning with who, where,
what, etc. (what music are you interested in?)
Fogarty adds that
the one case in which you want to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition,
at least in formal writing, is when the meaning of the sentence doesn't change
when you drop the preposition, e.g. "Where are you going?" instead of
"Where are you going to?" But in informal spoken English, you will
see such phrases, especially in certain dialects.
8.
Treating "data" as singular instead of plural: Remember what I said about Latin screwing
with your life? "Data" is a word that makes lots of people unhappy.
It comes from the Latin word "datum," a second declension neuter noun
that becomes "data" in the nominative and accusative plural. (Latin
has different plurals for different parts of speech.) We've inherited a lot of
Latin plurals, and many of them we no longer treat as plural: for example, we
say "the agenda is" rather than "the agendas are" and
"opera" is not the plural of "opus" in English.
In
some cases, using "data" as plural is legitimately useful. You're
more likely to encounter "data" as plural in scientific and
mathematical writing where you might talk about collecting each individual
datum. My 2007 copy of the AP Stylebook uses "The data have been
collected," as an example of a sentence where "data" is being
treated as a group of individual items. In that case, "data" is being
treated as what we call a "count noun."
While
some style guides will recommend always using data as plural, in daily speech
we frequently use data as what's called a "mass noun," meaning it has
no natural boundary, no individual units that we can count. Charles Carson,
managing editor of the journal American Speech, uses "butter" as an
example of a mass noun. Sure, you can talk about pats of butter or
cups of butter, but when you talk about just butter, you say, "How much butter is in
the pie crust?" When using data as a mass noun, it is perfectly standard
English to treat it as grammatically singular.
Carson
employs this handy rule of thumb:
If
you wish to use data as a singular mass noun, you should be able to replace it
in the sentence with the word information, which is also a mass noun. For
example,
Much
of this information is useless because of its lack of specifics.
If,
however, you want to or need to use data as a plural count noun, you should be
able to replace it with the word facts, which is also a plural count noun. For
example,
Many of these facts are useless
because of their lack of specifics.
O'Conner
deems treating data as a grammatical plural a dead rule, writing, "No
plural form is necessary, and the old singular, datum, can be left
to the Romans." She also argues that media should be treated as singular
when referring to mass communication and as plural only when referring to
individual types of communication.
9.
Using "they" as a singular pronoun: I've
seen more than a few kids' eyes go wide when you tell them about this
particular SAT/ACT rule: when referring to an individual of indeterminate
gender, you must use "he or she," "him or her," and
"his or hers" as your pronouns. But really, this is a style choice.
English is imperfect in this regard; we don't have a singular, generic,
gender-netural pronoun that can be applied to a human being. (We don't, in
general, use "it" to describe a person unless we are deliberately
dehumanizing that person.) In spoken English, many of us use "they"
to fill the void as an all-purpose neuter pronoun.
Admittedly,
many grammarians don't love "they" as a singular pronoun. Fogarty admits that
she tends to rewrite her sentences to avoid the need for a singular generic
pronoun, but that she will use "he or she" in formal writing.
O'Conner goes so far as to call it a mistake (for now), though she notes that
in earlier centuries, "they" was used as a singular pronoun. (William
Shakespeare used "they" as a singular pronoun, but we're not all Shakespeare.)
But some modern English usage guides do list "they" as an acceptable
singular pronoun and, in the name of evolving language, Fogarty actually
recommends that people writing style guides make "they" an acceptable
singular (but only if they are the sorts of people who can get away with such a
thing). And with some people who sit outside the gender binary taking
"they" are their own preferred personal pronoun, we may be seeing an
increasing acceptance (or rather re-acceptance) of "they" as a singular
pronoun.
10.
Starting a sentence with "hopefully": This is a pet peeve for a lot of folks who
feel that vernacular speech is somehow destroying language. There are people
who insist that "hopefully" has one meaning and one meaning only:
"in a hopeful manner." They argue that, in the sentence,
"Hopefully, Lauren will stop this inane grammar lesson soon," that
"Lauren" would be stopping "in a hopeful manner." These
folks want to replace our sentence-starting "hopefully" with phrases
like "let us hope" or "it is hoped."
O'Conner
writes, "It's time to admit that hopefully has joined the class of
introductory words (life fortunately, frankly, happily, honestly, sadly,
seriously, and others) that we use not to describe a verb, which is what
adverbs usually do, but to describe our attitude toward the statement that
follows." These words are known as sentence adverbs,
modifying the whole sentence rather than just a verb, adjective, or fellow
adverb. In 2012, the Associate Press changed its style
guidelines to allow writers to start a sentence with
"hopefully" to mean "I am hopeful that something will
happen." Hopefully, the sticklers will come around.
Bonus
gray area: saying "I could care less." There are many people who cheered when,
on Orange is the New Black, Flaca chewed out Lorna for saying
"I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less."
The
discussion between Flaca and Piper highlights the differences between
prescriptivism (Flaca) and descriptivism (Piper). Now, a lot of folks will roll
their eyes at the notion of grammatical descriptivism, saying that's how we end
up with words like "irregardless." But there's actually a lot of room
for discussion when it comes to "I could care less."
I
confess, I've always been a bit perplexed by the ire that "I could care
less" attracts. I was raised in "I couldn't care less" country,
but whenever I hear "I could care less," my brain automatically fills
in the words "but not much." But really, logic is beside the point.
There
is no question that "I couldn't care less" came before "I could
care less"; the former was likely invented in Britain in
the late 1930s and shows up in print in 1944. "I could
care less" isn't exactly a newcomer to the scene, however. It's an
American phrase, one that pops up in print (in the Washington Post, no less) as
early as 1955. No one is quite sure how "couldn't" became
"could," but while some theorize that the "-n't" was
dropped due to sloppy pronunciation, others wonder if the American version of
the phrase was meant to be sarcastic. Either way, "I could care less"
has hung around for decades and it's now classed in the Oxford English Dictionary
as an "American colloquialism." For some folks, it's just another
example of Americans mangling the mother tongue.
Bill Walsh's essay on the phrase from
his book Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without
Being a Jerk is the best discussion of the phrase I've
seen, and shows just why "I could care less" sits in such a gray
area. Walsh notes that while the haters of "I could care less" tend
to argue that theirs is the more logical phrase, when in fact, "I couldn't
care less" is hyperbolic to begin with. He also notes that "I could
care less" isn't in danger of going anywhere. While prescriptivists will
tell you to stick with "I couldn't care
less," especially in formal writing, many will note that
the idiom "I could care less" is perfectly fine in informal usage (as
when commenting on message boards on the Internet). Logical or not, "I
could care less" is on its way toward gaining acceptance as an idiom.
As
a side note, here's the funny thing about "I couldn't care less":
we're actually not using the phrase as it was originally intended. According to Christine Ammer,
author of The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, "I
couldn't care less" originally expressed "bored indifference" or
bravado. So while some sticklers for "I couldn't care less" believe
they are working against changing the phrase, it's a phrase that has gone
through some changes already.
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