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.