Forbidding Sky

What’s wrong with this sentence:

 “They struggled on beneath a foreboding sky.”

Answer:

Well, nothing. It’s a perfectly valid sentence … in theory. But it’s not what the writer meant. It should have read:

“They struggled on beneath a FORBIDDING sky.”

Hang on! How do I know what the author meant?

OK, I don’t; but I can make a pretty good guess. I’m willing to bet that on nine occasions out of ten, the author meant “forbid” in one form or another. He or she substituted “foreboding” for “forbidding” because it sounded somehow more dramatic, more poetic.

So is “to forebode” a valid verb at all?

Actually yes. It means to “portend” or “augur”, or to sense impending problems. You’ll find it in all the dictionaries, along with examples of its use. But let’s get real; its occurrence as a verb in modern times is extremely rare. Admittedly, you might sometimes encounter it in a sentence like this:

“The ripple of unease in the crowd seemed to forebode evil.”

This is theoretically valid, but in my book it’s archaic and awkward. Safer alternatives would be “portend” or “foretell” or “presage”. Ironically, to some extent “forebode” feels awkward here precisely because it sounds too much like “forbid”, which can make any sentence containing it potentially confusing.

What about “foreboding” as an adjective?

Yes, OK, “foreboding” is a valid participial adjective derived from “forebode”. But if you apply it to an inanimate object, you have to think carefully about what you actually mean. Can a sky really be foreboding? The simple answer is not in itself. The sky doesn’t have any knowledge or feelings, and its appearance can’t be taken as a portent of much more than upcoming weather conditions.

This is pathetic (not)

It’s the observer commenting on the sky who actually feels a sense of foreboding (noun); but that sense is attributed to the sky (adjective). You could argue that this is a case of what linguists call pathetic fallacy. (That’s pathetic as in “pathos”, not as in “contemptible”.) The foreboding is being transferred from the observer to an external object, atmosphere or feeling. And as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to the word “foreboding”, this kind of attribution is so subtle, and its use is so often likely to be questionable, that it’s best avoided altogether.

“Foreboding” as a noun: the only safe bet

For all practical purposes, you’re safest if you limit the use of “foreboding” to the noun. (Technically it’s a verbal noun, or a gerund.) Quite honestly, you’re playing with fire if you use it in any other way.

Foreboding, n. A feeling of uneasy anticipation; a sense of impending doom.

“Glancing up at the forbidding sky, he was suffused with a sense of foreboding.”

If you talk about “a foreboding sky”, you’re likely to upset pedants like me, and confuse people who don’t know the difference into thinking that “foreboding” and “forbidding” mean more or less the same thing. They don’t, and misleading people simply devalues the language.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

Before or After? (image courtesy Wikimedia Foundation)

Spot the mistake in this sentence:

“It is vitally important that the community hall has a new roof.”

Answer:

We don’t know whether the community hall desperately needs a new roof, or already has a new roof. If it still needs the new roof, the form should be:

“It is vitally important that the community hall HAVE a new roof.”

OR

“It is vitally important that the community hall SHOULD HAVE a new roof.”

What’s going on here?

Historically, expressions that conveyed suggesting, demanding or necessity were followed by a subjunctive verb: “I demand that he HAND it over,” not “I demand that he hands it over.” Yeah, it probably sounds fussy and pedantic, and maybe reminds you of something you learned in Latin. But the fact is that it can still help to make the meaning clearer.

So what’s a subjunctive anyway?

Verbs tend to come in three main flavours or “moods”:

Indicative – This is the usual mood: a statement about how things are
Imperative – An instruction or command (e.g. “Hand it over!”)
Subjunctive – A statement about how things should be, or how we would like them to be

Simplistically speaking, you create a subjunctive verb by lopping the S off the end of singular verbs, or changing singular irregular verbs to what looks like the plural. So we have “It is essential that he GIVE (not gives) me some money,” and “It is vital that he HAVE (not has) his membership withdrawn.”

And I’m seriously suggesting you should use this?

OK, no. If you’re worried about sounding like an eighteenth century linguistic pedant, you can use an auxiliary verb instead: “It is vital that he SHOULD HAVE his membership withdrawn.” This skirts the issue and still makes the point. All I’m suggesting is that anyone using expressions involving necessity, intent and so on make (not makes!) the meaning crystal clear.

The Americans have this nailed

It seems that American speakers are more comfortable with subjunctives than the British, and can actually feel it awkward if someone uses the indicative mood when a subjunctive is required. I salute them!

A final word

You might think this post is about splitting the finest of hairs, but I’ve often heard snatches of news reporting where I genuinely didn’t know whether the speaker was expressing desire for something to happen or gratitude that it had happened already. And that’s not clever.

Oh, and …

“Be it so”, the title of this piece, is apparently a rather archaic direct subjunctive form, which in modern usage would be translated into “Let it be”. And that, as I’m sure you didn’t want to know, is a third-person imperative.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

Watch on Wrist (image courtesy Wikimedia Foundation)

Spot this mistake in this sentence:

“The tennis star lost the set love-six as thousands watched on.”

Answer:

The verb “watch” doesn’t have or need a follow-on particle (the “on” bit). It’s complete in itself.

“The tennis star lost the set love-six as thousands watched.”

So what’s going on?

People like the cadence of an expanded verb (technically a “phrasal verb”). These usually mean more than the naked verb itself. Hence “poured out” and “sat down”. Until recently the verb “watch” didn’t have a follow-on particle, but apparently it didn’t feel weighty enough without one, so people added “on”. TV commentators are especially fond of this form. And of course a parallel example was already in wide use: to “look on”. People simply forced “watch” to take the same route.

But that’s not what it means!

There’s a special problem here, because strictly speaking, adding “on” to “watch” changes its meaning. The phrasal verb “to look on” has come to mean “to watch impassively”. By way of example, you could say that Nero looked on (actually he fiddled) as Rome burned. The verb “watch”, by contrast, doesn’t have this kind of dispassionate overtone. The feelings of the watcher depend on the context.

It sounds like “looked on”

The trouble is that when you say “watch on”, it sounds like “look on”, and acquires a similar nuance. It suggests that the observers are doing it impassively. In almost every case, that’s absolutely not what the writer or speaker means. It’s a linguistic contradiction. If thousands watched on as a tennis star crumbled, it sounds as if they were doing it with supreme indifference – the exact opposite of what almost certainly happened.

Do we care?

Dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster accept “watch on” as a legitimate form because it’s so widely heard; but this doesn’t mean that using it is helpful or desirable. It’s an example of what’s known as “linguistic creep”. It muddies the precision of the language we had before.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

Man with Megaphone (bus by Corgi)

Spot the mistake in this sentence:

“Just because everyone else makes this mistake doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

Answer:

That sentence doesn’t have a subject! What exactly “doesn’t mean you have to do the same”? Grammatically speaking, you can’t make a qualifying clause (“Just because…”) the subject. You need a noun or a pronoun.

“Although everyone else makes this mistake, THAT doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

OR

“THE FACT THAT everyone else makes this mistake doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”

OR

“Just because everyone else makes this mistake, YOU don’t have to do the same.”

The problem:

People are allowing phrases beginning with “Because” to float away into a kind of grammatical nebula, and are continuing their sentences with what they would like to have said, not what they actually did say. It happens more in the spoken word than in writing. Simplify it, and you get something like:

“Because this is black means it isn’t white.”

It sounds a bit weird, don’t you think?

Seriously? Do we care?

Among grammatical mistakes, this is probably one of the least problematic. Everyone knows what incorrect sentences like this mean, and people have been using this type of construction (or misconstruction?) forever. So why should we care?

It’s because “just because” will immediately trigger an alarm bell in the minds of people like me who prize clarity. We’ll be waiting to see if the sentence finishes correctly instead of listening to hear the point that is being made.

What’s that you say? “Get a life” or similar?

I hear you.

The megaphone effect

But there’s a bigger point at issue here. Slips in the clarity of speech and writing tend to be amplified by people with a metaphorical megaphone – broadcasters, politicians, pundits, influencers. The pragmatists will argue that this is how grammar evolves, and we should accept it with a shrug. Maybe, up to a point; but let’s keep constantly in mind that we don’t have to drift into careless speech and writing “just because everyone else does.”

That’s definitely a slippery slope.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

From Peter in the Wood, by Peter Rowlands (my 5-year-old self)

Spot the fault in this sentence:

“While packing his suitcase, he threw in a jacket, a shirt, a tie, and added his electric shaver.”

Answer:

There should be another AND!

“While packing his suitcase, he threw in a jacket, a shirt, AND a tie, AND added his electric shaver.”

The problem

A lot of people seem terrified of repeating “and” in their speech and writing. My guess is that they’re reverting unconsciously to their childhood. Little children are apt to pile sentences together with “and”.

“I saw Davy and we played with my toy car and it was a lovely day and Davy was horrid to me … and … and … and …”

As we get older, we’re told not to do this. But surely as grown-ups we’re wise enough to resist following childhood rules by rote, regardless of whether or not they actually apply?

The rule that does apply

In this case we’re looking at a list: jacket, shirt and tie. The grammatical rule for this is clear. Each item in a list must be the same part of speech. Here it’s a noun or noun phrase. But the incorrect sentence bangs a VERB on the end: “added”. If you break it down, it’s saying “He threw in … an added.” But what’s an added? It makes no sense! In effect, “added his electric shaver” is a separate sentence or sub-sentence, which means the original sentence (the list) should be completed first, with its own concluding “and”.

Faulty parallelism

Technically, it’s an instance of faulty parallelism. It’s matching a list of nouns (jacket etc) with a verb (added). Apples and oranges. Horrible!

Why does it matter?

OK, you might say, but we all know what the sentence means, so why does this matter? The reason is that every time you make this mistake, you’re causing a little mental swerve in the minds of your readers or listeners. They may barely notice, but the fact is that they’re expecting the last item in the list to be another noun, yet they’re actually being given a separate sub-sentence. You’re making their life that little bit harder.

Be brave! Defy the masses who get this wrong. Give that extra “and” its day in the sun! Your audience will thank you subconsciously, even if they don’t know it. Make your writing that bit clearer, sharper AND less burdensome, AND don’t give in to the fear that you’re breaking a childhood rule.

You’re not.

But hang on – what about this?

“He battled with rain, wind, fire, earthquakes, marauding locals, injury, starvation, and still came out on top.”

This is a perfectly legitimate sentence, even though there’s no concluding “and” in the list. However, it’s a different kind of sentence from my original example.

It’s considered
The writer is aiming for dramatic effect. The omission of “and” is intentional, flinging extra emphasis on the second part of the sentence.

The list is open-ended
The implication is that there are other adversities that haven’t been mentioned. Putting “and” before “starvation” would create a notional “boundary”, suggesting that the list is complete. Omitting the “and” gives all the items equal weight, and leaves open the possibility that there could have been more of them. There’s an invisible ellipsis (dot dot dot) after “starvation”.

This special rhetorical omission of “and” at the end of a list doesn’t justify leaving it out by mistake! In the real world, that’s what normally happens.

Author’s note As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you. And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.

From Peter in the Wood, by Peter Rowlands (my 5-year-old self)

“I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations.”
— Samuel Johnson, 1752

“Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning,
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning”
— Oliver Goldsmith, 1773

The two comments above, both written more than 250 years ago, reflect two diametrically opposed views of English grammar. Lexicographer Samuel Johnson was determined to preserve linguistic purity at all costs, whereas the attitude of the character in that Oliver Goldsmith play is “Who needs it?” It’s a debate that still rages today.

Cards on the table: while I can’t embrace Johnson’s rigidly prescriptive attitude, I strongly believe that communication demands grammatical rules. Without them, we’d never understand each other. And if that’s the case, why insist on applying some rules but not others? That’s the crux of the matter isn’t it?

Appropriate and effective

Bill Bryson, the noted travel writer and advocate of clear communication, takes a nicely pragmatic view. In his book Mother Tongue he says, “Good English is what is appropriate and effective, not what conforms to a set of rules fabricated by 18th-century pedants.” But he qualifies this in his Troublesome Words by saying, “Consideration for the reader should be the writer’s guiding principle. If you take the trouble to write clearly, accurately, and concisely, you are paying your reader a compliment.”

All well and good; but my worry is that the laissez faire approach is becoming entrenched. Language, so the argument goes, constantly evolves, so however much you want to apply rules to it, they should be left to define themselves according to how the language is actually used. In other words, forget about precepts; just go with the flow.

How relaxed should we be?

Really? So how far should we take this? Should formal writing embrace slang words, abbreviations, ambiguities, unfinished thoughts, specious arguments, internal contradictions, collapsed grammatical constructions?

Thankfully it usually doesn’t. Writers and speakers tend to be self-policing. They want to get their points across to their audience, so they follow their own system of grammatical rules as best they can – and generally speaking it’s a system recognised by everyone else.

But sometimes the clamour of populism blurs the boundaries between best practice and easy options, and tempts (or bludgeons) writers into lowering the bar when it comes to the rules they respect. They do it simply because that’s what everyone else does, or because they’re too young to remember a better, clearer way to express themselves.

Rules that help with clarity

However, changes in usage are not always driven by populism. Sometimes people break rules that are still as relevant today as they always were, but that those people have simply forgotten, or never knew in the first place because they were never taught them in school. Or it’s simpler than that. It’s just that people are getting careless about the clarity of what they write or say.

Lack of self-monitoring and a tendency to deliver long, convoluted sentences that are often hard to keep on track is often the fault here. No! The subject of that sentence was plural, not singular! Did you notice? I always do. The sentence should finish, “… ARE often the fault here.” It’s a mistake that’s heard a lot, especially in radio and TV interviews.

That rule (matching subject with verb) is the kind that no one has consciously thrown away, but people are simply missing because they’re not thinking carefully enough about how they express themselves. Getting these rules wrong will cause some of the more fussy and nitpicking people among the audience (oops – that sounds like me) to blink twice instead of taking on board the point that’s being argued.

Getting them right will help to get the message across.

A lost cause?

My campaign is a lost cause; I know that. Trying to turn the tide of decline in grammatical rigour is like trying to push water uphill. But in a way, that’s not my purpose. If people want to use “like” as a conjunction, I can’t stop them. It’s not like I even want to. (Not much!)

What I’d love to do in this grammar blog series, though I don’t have much of a platform to achieve it, is to offer a few snippets of wisdom about rules that help with comprehension; rules that won’t hurt in the observance; rules that infuriate me in the breach; and rules that simply smooth the flow of prose.

Spot the fault in this sentence:

“She bought both the yellow dress but also the red pullover.”

Answer:

“Both” should always be followed by “and”, never “but”.

“She bought both the yellow dress AND the red pullover.”

The problem:

People are confusing two different expressions:
“Both … AND …”
“Not only … BUT also …”

What’s going on?

It’s a familiar problem. People are losing faith in the power of language. They think “both … and …” sounds weak. They want to emphasise the “and” part of their statement, so they preface it with “but” instead. Politicians are particularly prone to doing this during interviews. They’re mangling language in their desperation to sound strong and impactful.

Collapse of logic

“Both … but …” is a collapse of logic. It’s a bit like what happens with the the push-puppet I’ve illustrated above. You press your thumb on the button underneath and everything falls apart. In speech and writing, what falls apart is comprehensibility.

Why this is wrong

“Both” is a coupling word, connecting two statements or propositions. The only link word that can follow it is “and”. The “and” part of the statement has no logical impact on the initial “both” part. Each exists on its own.

“But” is negating word. It contradicts whatever has come before it, or qualifies it by introducing a new thought that may change the overall thrust of the sentence. It looks both forward and back.

Connecting “both” with “but” reduces the sentence to a logical impossibility. It’s like trying to imagine a car that is driving both ways at the same time.

The solution

Easy! Either say, “She bought BOTH the yellow dress AND the red pullover,” or say, “She bought NOT ONLY the yellow dress, BUT ALSO the red pullover.”

Just ask yourself …

Would you say, “I’ll have EITHER this dress AND that pullover.” Of course you wouldn’t. So don’t say, “Both … but …”

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.