More Q&A With a Grammar Lover

Dear Grammar Lover,

A friend put it to me that “fuck” is the most elastic word in the English language, since it can be a noun, adjective, verb, etc. I’m guessing it’s not truly unique in this, but I can’t really prove it. What’s your take?

Tom G, Brooklyn, NY

Dear Tom:

By my count, of the eight parts of speech, “fuck” can be used as five:

• Noun: I don’t give a fuck
• Verb: He really fucked it up
• Interjection: Fuck!
• Adjective: He doesn’t have a fucking clue
• Adverb: Are you fucking shitting me?

These last two are of course gerunds, which to me isn’t as wholly satisfying as if “fuck” itself could be used as an adjective or adverb. Thus, I’m tempted to say “well” is more elastic, because (as detailed here), it can also be used as five parts of speech … and it doesn’t need an –ing suffix. However, as one commenter pointed out, “well” isn’t actually one word. It’s a pair of homonyms. “Well” as in “good or satisfactory” is an entirely different word, with a different etymology, from “well” as in “shaft sunk into the ground.” So to my mind, “fuck” wins, at least between these two.

One more thing: bonus points go to “fuck” for being useful not just as an interjection, but as the most powerful interjection of all time.

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you asserted that it’s not always appropriate to correct somebody’s grammar. What’s the most tasteless, tactless context for a grammar correction you’ve ever encountered?

Wanda L, Las Cruces, NM

Dear Wanda,

When my father was dying of cancer, I suggested he write up his own obituary, just so I wouldn’t miss a life detail he felt was important. He inadvertently wrote his draft from the perspective of someone who was still alive, which is understandable … he may not have fully accepted yet that he would actually die. Accordingly, among my revisions were a number of necessary verb tense changes. I also included an email address so people could send tidings without wasting paper on cards (feeling that this was what my dad would have wanted). One of his friends sent a very terse email pointing out that I’d made a verb tense error in the obituary. The obituary had noted, “He has also done work for NBS/NIST on computer peripherals, power supplies, and the atomic clock” which, as this guy pointed out, should have read “He also did work for NBS/NIST….” The guy was right, of course; my sentence did not properly convey that my father was dead, dead, dead and would never do any more work for NBS/NIST, or anyone else, ever again. (The email itself didn’t say “dead, dead, dead,” but it might as well have.)

Since the email didn’t say anything else beyond pointing out the error, my (admittedly ungrammatical) response was quite brief: “Asperger’s much?” (Just kidding. I did not respond.)

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you said the silliest example of bad grammar you have come across in music is “exactly whom I’m supposed to be” in the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. How is this any worse than Eminem repeatedly using the non-word “insaneness” in the song “Brainless”?

Sean C, Boston, MA

Dear Sean,

For one thing, using a non-word isn’t the same class of error as using “whom” incorrectly; “insaneness” is more like a playful stylistic stretch in the Ogden Nash vein. And this non-word opened the door for Eminem to rhyme with “brainless” and “pain in the anus,” whereas the Clash’s goof didn’t accomplish anything. Besides, Eminem freely acknowledges the poetic liberty; in a muted aside at the end of the song, some nameless adversary says, “‘Insaneness’ ain’t even a word you stupid fuck,” to which the singer replies, “Neither is ‘ain’t.’” Meanwhile, at least two dictionaries (such as this one, for example) do include “insaneness” as a legit word. And above all, the whole point of the song is that the singer is brainless, so why wouldn’t he use a non-word?

Dear Grammar Lover,

What do you make of “their” as a singular possessive pronoun? I know this has long been used when the speaker doesn’t wish to specify one sex or another, but it’s technically wrong and can cause confusion, such as with singular vs. plural. Doesn’t clarity trump convenience here? Can’t we all agree that “their” as a singular pronoun is just plain wrong?

John S, San Leandro, CA

Dear John,

I try to avoid using “their” to refer to an unnamed or hypothetical person, preferring “his or her” or some other way around the construction. But I haven’t traditionally worried too much about other people doing this, as it doesn’t tend to cause that much confusion, really. For example, “Everyone must bring their workbook” could imply that a bunch of students share a single workbook … but common sense should easily put that vagueness to rest.

Things get a bit more complicated around the more recent trend of using a plural pronoun for an individual who doesn’t wish to identify as one sex or another. For example, a non-binary person may request that people use “they” or “their” to refer to “them.” This plural pronoun begets a plural verb, to achieve subject-verb agreement, which can also add confusion.

I will cautiously assert that spoken grammar evolves more quickly than formal, written grammar, so if we’re looking for what’s officially “correct,” it’s useful to take after the dictionary publishers and see what’s in print in a mainstream magazine written for an educated audience. (I wouldn’t look to “Us” magazine, which is all about celebrities, because they don’t even get their own name right; the magazine should be called “Them.”) So, as I’d done when trying to determine the definitive spelling of “kindergartner,” I looked for non-gendered pronouns in “The New Yorker.” Consider this passage from a recent article:

    Caro Murphy … said that a Disney rep had told them not to talk about their work at the park, so we spoke about LARPs in general terms. “There is this tension between the commercial part of LARP and the community part,” they said.

The word “them” confused me a bit initially because I thought perhaps it referred to Murphy plus one or more colleagues previously mentioned or implied. But the confusion was dispelled when the quote was followed by “they said.” Obviously this was not two or more persons speaking in unison.

Still, this new usage can get a bit confusing when obvious clues like that quotation aren’t provided. This was the case in the previous paragraph of the same article, which coincidentally involved another non-binary interviewee. And more confusion arose later, with Kes, a LARPer whom the writer and her colleague Tim met onboard a Disney theme park spaceship:

     [Tim] told me he thought that Kes might be a cast member. He’d seen her being chummy with Croy in the engineering room.

     I [Googled] the name of the LARPer Disney had just hired. I edged around the crowd. “Caro?” I whispered to Kes.

     “Yes!” Murphy said, grinning.

Some of the confusion here comes from a single person being referred to by three different names in the span of seven words, which has nothing to do with pronouns. But the earlier bit about “her being chummy with Croy” did complicate things. Kes, when in character, may have identified as female, unless the writer just made an assumption. But when out of character, Murphy prefers they/them. The writer, when composing the article, knew that Kes was Murphy and thus could have said “them” instead of “her,” but this would have spoiled the surprise of the secret identity.

I got some good advice once in a writing class, which is that a writer should never make the reader do extra work unless there’s a good reason. So is honoring the preference of a source a good reason? Of course! Interviewees are at the crux of journalism (and in this case in particular, Murphy was taking some risk, having been told by Disney not to talk about their work). Meanwhile, professional courtesy aside, I think acknowledgement of any human’s self-identity is more important than ease of reading comprehension. Yes, this can mean extra work for the reader, especially for those of us with a lifelong habit of thinking about gender as a very cut-and-dried, binary matter, but isn’t this kind of work good for us, as we grapple with the more complicated reality?

Dear Grammar Lover,

How good are the grammar checkers in Microsoft Word and Google Docs?

Linda S, Broomfield, CO

Dear Linda,

Artificial Intelligence is really bad at grammar. If you asked A.I. to diagram a sentence it simply couldn’t. It is powerless to understand context, so its suggestions can seem practically random. Thus, software grammar checkers are pretty much worthless.

To validate this assertion, I ran a Microsoft Word grammar check against a recent blog post, and then ran the same post through the grammar checker in Google Docs. In theory, both programs should flag the same “errors,” right? After all, if you handed an essay to two different human newspaper or magazine editors, the feedback on grammar and spelling would be similar, one to the next. What I found with the software was that a) there was zero overlap in feedback between the two grammar checkers, and b) most of their suggestions were flat-out wrong.

Here are some of the “errors” flagged by Word (click to enlarge):

As you can see, Word was wrong in every single case. I sincerely hope nobody is trying to learn grammar by reviewing this software’s suggestions and rationale.

Google did a bit better, finding one bona fide error (I had “other the internal” instead of “other internal”), and only making four incorrect suggestions. One suggestion was particularly inane: in the sentence “I considered his feat from the perspective of coach,” Google suggested I change “feat” to “feet.” Why does this software think I’d be looking at a rider’s feet? Does it assume coaches, and/or writers, are likely to have a foot fetish? The less facetious question is this: as an educated human, why would I ever outsource my editing to software that makes so many mistakes?

Dear Grammar Lover,

In a previous column you said the silliest instance of bad grammar you’ve found in rock music is “exactly whom I’m supposed to be” in the song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. How is this any worse than “If looks could kill they probably will” in “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel?

Simon Taylor, London, UK

Dear Simon,

Indeed, this is a clear example of inconsistent verb tense, but why would you suppose it is unintentional? Not only does “will” create a nice internal rhyme with “kill,” but the sudden shift from the hypothetical subjunctive to the future indicative active creates the most jarring—and best—lyric in the whole song. It’s a similar effect to what the masterful novelist Muriel Spark achieves in her story “The Portobello Road” with the immortal line, “He looked as if he would murder me and he did.” In both cases, death goes from hypothetical to real in a split second. So Peter Gabriel’s verb shift isn’t just intentional; it’s brilliant. I wouldn’t say rules were made to be broken, but in the right hands they can be, and to good effect.

Got a question for the Grammar Lover? Click here.

A Grammar Lover is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Grammar Lover,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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From the Archives - A Rather Hostile Letter

Introduction

I am very careful in these pages to respect people’s privacy. I don’t quote people, even anonymously, without permission. The only exception so far has been in the case of my late father because I can’t ask him, obviously.

The person quoted anonymously in this post is also now dead. Thus I feel I can now post this curiosity from my archives.

A rather hostile letter – October 22, 1990

Dear Miss W—,

I had a verbally abusive boss whose favorite phrase seemed to be “pure, unadulterated bullshit.” And your recent letter, Miss W—, reeks of it. Let’s have a look at that first sentence:

“Your father read part of your recent letter aloud to me.”

The first couple of times I read this I unconsciously transposed a couple words, which created a different, probably more accurate version of the sentence:

“I read part of your letter to your father aloud to him.”

I rather doubt my father read the letter, or all of it anyway, because he’s never been able to make sense of my correspondence. This is not an intellectual lacking on his part; as we both know, he seems to be some kind of genius. That’s kind of the problem: he has always felt there are better things to do with his great brain than to try figuring out what I’m trying to convey in my letters. Am I just sucking up, or trying to imply some kind of affection? It’s too much hassle to try to decipher so I’m not surprised he located a secretary figure and in some very carefully worded and tactful manner said the rough equivalent of, “I don’t wanna deal with this shit; here, you do something with it.” (This is the same message I used to get from that old boss, but I respected him for it. After all, he was usually blowing off a creditor or something, not his son.)

But that’s just conjecture; perhaps my dad did read my letter; perhaps you didn’t. But what’s not in question is that you, the lady friend, did respond instead of him. I suppose you might expect me to be grateful, since you did take some trouble. But really, how warmly did you think I’d receive your letter, as a substitute? And did you think you’d endear yourself to me with your insulting tone? Consider Exhibit A, this quote from your first paragraph:

I decided I would respond to your mailbox woes, which I have known, too, that kind of hurt anger you’re not sure whether to direct at your so called loved ones, or at the mailman, or at the stupid box, itself.

Wow, “mailbox woes.” I guess you and/or my dad construed my letter as a self pitying plea for attention. Well it wasn’t. It was a plea for money. My dad is supposed to deposit money in my bank account every month (not because he’s generous but because he’s required to, according to a clause my mom wisely wrote in to their divorce contract). So the “hurt anger” you might think you know seems very different from mine. I have never been confused about where to direct my anger. My mailman is reliable and my mailbox is an inanimate object. I guess an elementary school student with a good imagination who reads about The Little Train Who Could might buy your cutesy personification but I don’t.

Most of your opening paragraph merely insults my intelligence, but its final sentence, “So consider this a pen pal note,” actually insults my feelings. It does not hurt them, it insults them. It insinuates that I’m just some poor lonely dork who sulks a lot about not getting any mail, a guy who would be just thrilled to carry on a correspondence with anybody, even his dad’s lady friend he’s never even met. My letter, if you’ll look closely (I’m sure you’ve got it right there), belabors the fact that since I never get letters from Dad, our relationship has become a purely financial one in which I simply write whenever I need money. It is this very specific relationship that I’m disappointed in. Building a new one, with a stranger, cannot replace or amend it.

It’s possible you just didn’t understand my letter, and thought the money part was just an aside. It’s also possible that you know exactly what the letter meant but you don’t want the old man to give away any more of his money because you’d like to get your hands on it instead. If this is actually the case, then I underestimated you. Perhaps you said to my dad, “Oh, don’t worry Harry, the lil’ bugger just needs a lil’ ol’ pen pal to write a lettery wettery to him. He’s just a lil’ lonely, that’s all.” My dad, pleasantly surprised that no action (such as a bank transfer) is required, settles back into his blissful ignorance and reminds you how wonderful you are, at which point you take a victory lap by writing me a transparently disingenuous letter, just to rub my nose in it. If this is the case, congratulations. You’re a real operator.

But it could be that both these theories are wrong. Maybe it’s you who feels lonely, which is totally believable if you’re counting on my dad for companionship. Even in these early courting days you must get the feeling his mind is somewhere else, such as some technical problem at work or some mathematical flight of fancy that is simply more interesting to him than anything you, an elementary school librarian, might have to say. Perhaps, seeing as to how we’re both liberal arts types, you think we could carry out a literary correspondence of high intellectual value. Based on your letter, you seem to be an expert on Romeo and Juliet. You’re absolutely right, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” is not a question of spatial location, but rather a question of Romeo’s name. What tipped me off to that is that “wherefore” means “why,” not “where.” I don’t know that I’d have described this as a “dense obscurity,” but perhaps I’m not quite reading it on as deep a level as you. But what I can’t understand is why, later in the letter, you wrote, “I’d better get back to work here or people will begin to ask, ‘Wherefore art thou, librarian?’” It’s as if you yourself were now using “wherefore” to mean “where.” Was this just a goof? Or was it a subtle dig at the baser intellects of the school kids, who are still on Curious George?

Speaking of Romeo … how are you and my dad doing? Has it crossed your mind that you might be Rosaline instead of Juliet? Perhaps not—perhaps Dad’s still on his best behavior. Well, every dog has his day and I guess you’re having yours. Live it up while you can, it won’t last. Once he starts to think of you as family, he’ll take you for granted just like the rest of us. Just ask either of his past wives. S— probably has infamous status in your estimation by now. Has he told you the sordid tale of how she made him fat by feeding him too much pasta? I’ve heard that about half a dozen times by now. Actually, I lived at their house one summer, and as far as I could tell, the mayonnaise burritos he made on the sly had more to do with his weight gain. The real reason he’s lost weight since she left him is that he’s too cheap to buy groceries, other than buckwheat flour, millet, and soy lecithin (cheaper than eggs, you know). And of course he always trims down when he’s on the make.

Now, if you have designs on marrying my dad, and taking over as my stepmother, bear in mind you have a tough act to follow. I liked S— for a number of reasons, one of them being that, as custodian of Dad’s finances, she put money in my account with the same regularity that my landlord expects from me. Now I have to deal directly with my dad, who thinks my financial affairs are all conducted in play-world, like I leave my money-woneys under the gub-gub tree for the billy-willy bird and if I’m late, it’s nothing but goop-whoop soup for a week!

I wish you could see my dad’s dismissiveness of me in its proper context, that being the truly magnificent repentance speech that he gave after S— bailed on him. This time it was gonna be different, this time he was gonna pay attention to those close to him, he would stop forgetting birthdays, he would start writing letters. I did get one letter since then, but it was a mass-mailed form letter boasting about his business trip to Hawaii. As for my birthday, he didn’t send a card because, he later explained, he didn’t know if I would be home to receive it.

It is because people like my dad will never change that it would be useless for me to mail this letter, and in fact I never intended to. I’m just blowing off steam. Your intentions in writing me were probably good, and I guess I can’t blame you for thinking I’m a sad sack who just needs a pen pal, since you don’t know me at all. How could you fathom the tortured relationship I’ve had with my dad, when he surely never talks about me (or my brothers)? How were you to grasp that my dad’s suggestion of you writing me was simply a way to get around depositing the money I asked for? You’re just a pawn in our stupid chess game. I thought I had my dad in check, but he marched you all the way across the board and made you a queen. I always hated that rule.

So yeah, you’ll never see this letter. I could send it to Dad, but that would be worse. First of all he would just get all twisted up and confused again, which oddly enough would make me feel kind of cruel since the guy just doesn’t get it, he can’t. When he decides to engage he can be a hell of a guy, so at times we get along well. I had a great time touring the Berkeley campus with him last spring break, for example, so it’s a shame I had to bring in all this unpleasantness around wanting the money he’s supposed to give me. Too bad this letter has no audience … I guess I’ll just put it in the archives, and maybe someday when I’m dissin’ my kids they can shove it in my face to show me what a fool I am.

Oh yeah, you wanted to know about my pets and their names. Sorry, I have none. No cats, no dogs, no goldfish, nothing to name. I know, it’s terrible, I’m so lonely. And yet even still, I will never be your pen pal.

Your pen pal (not),

Dana 

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