Bits and specious

An entire issue of trivia. (So what else is new?)

Photo by Austin Mabe on Unsplash

Is it is, or isn’t it?

Have you ever been told off for saying “one in five people are x”? Were you told that it should be “one in five people is”?

Your teller-offer was talking through a hole in their head.

The rule they had in mind was the one that says verbs should always agree with their subject. In other words, if the subject’s singular, you should always use a singular verb (like is rather than are). And words don’t come more singular than one. Do they?

But in this case the subject isn’t the noun one – it’s the noun phrase one in five, which signifies not one person, but a group of people. It’s a correlate of 20 per cent or one-fifth – which can also take a plural verb.

’Tis I, the twit

When you knock and the person behind the door asks “who’s there?”, should you say “it is me” or “it is I”? Certain types insist on “it is I”.

Laurie Bauer, professor emeritus of theoretical and descriptive linguistics at Wellington’s Victoria University, says this is an example of the rules of Latin grammar being inappropriately forced on English. Other examples include “never split an infinitive” and “never end a sentence with a preposition”.

The trend began in the 18th century, when Latin was seen as the language of refinement. It was hardly surprising, then, that language prescriptivists tried to impose Latin rules on English – like a posh accent, your adherence to these rules marked you out as a superior human being. But as Bauer says, imposing the patterns of one language onto another “is like trying to make people play tennis with a golf club.” I would add it also makes you sound like a twit.

Frankly, my dear, “hopefully” is just fine

Do you shudder when someone utters a sentence like “Hopefully, we’ll win the game this weekend”? Hopefully means “in a hopeful manner”. Doesn’t it?

Rarely. Hopefully in the “I hope” sense belongs to a class of adverbs called disjuncts that allow you to comment on what happened, as in phrases like “fortunately, I was wearing my seat belt”.

You use them all the time and they’re perfectly good English. If you don’t want to upset anyone, by all means avoid using hopefully as a disjunct. While you’re at it, never begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition. But then I have a question for you: When did you get so timid?

Ye Olde Nauseating Bookshop

The ye in Ye Olde Bookshop and other mildly nauseating names isn’t – and never was – pronounced “ye”. Our ancestors pronounced it “the”. So why write ye, ye ask (that second one was the nominative ye, as in “O, ye of little faith”). I’ll tell you. The letter y was a printer’s adaptation of an Old English character called the thorn, used to represent the “th” sound. It looked like this: þ. Y was allegedly the nearest character available in the Roman alphabet, which makes you wonder if our forebears had ever seen the letters b or p.

Does punctuation matter?

Someone much smarter than me once quipped that if you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad. That doesn’t mean there’s no value in paying attention to minor points of punctuation, however. Consider the question below, and the beautifully considered reply from Mark Nichol, author of the blog Daily Writing Tips. This is a man with a soul.

Q: In “Strange and surely intentional was the omission of her name in the credits”, should “and surely intentional” be set off with commas? And would you please expand on such when the second is not clearly subordinate — e.g., an aside.

A: Grammatically speaking, no punctuation is necessary in the sentence you provided, but the force of delivery of the additional information is heightened by setting it off from the main clause: “Strange, and surely intentional, was the omission of her name in the credits” ensures that the reader momentarily ponders the import of the deliberate omission. “Strange (and surely intentional) was the omission of her name in the credits” does the same while suggesting a conspiratorial whisper between the writer and the reader on the topic. “Strange — and surely intentional — was the omission of her name in the credits” intensifies the impact by pushing the surmise onto center stage.

Ask not what your country can do for you

Samuel Johnson once told a would-be writer: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

What Johnson was engaging in – besides deliciously cruel wit – was chiasmus, a device in which the second half of the expression inverts the meaning of the first half for rhetorical effect.

It’s a common and useful device. Hillary Clinton used it in 2008 when she said: “In the end, the true test is not the speeches a president delivers; it’s whether the president delivers on the speeches.” And we all know the saying “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog”.

Chiasmus has been around as long as people have been writing, and probably earlier. It appears in ancient Sanskrit, Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts. You’ll find it in the Old and New Testaments (“the first shall be last, and the last shall be first”) and scattered throughout ancient Greek writings.

Those egregious Americans

A reader once suggested I write an article on the irritating American habit of pronouncing vowels like the name of the letter. “Some egregious examples I’ve noticed – Iraq pronounced Eye-rack; Adolf (Hitler) pronounced Aid-olf; (Ariel) Sharon pronounced Shah-roan,” he wrote.

“The habit seems almost universal amongst Americans,” he added. “Who have, of course, many wonderful qualities.”

Much as I appreciated the invitation, I chose not to venture into that particular snake pit. What I will say, though, is it highlights one of the difficulties facing reformists who suggest we spell words the way they’re pronounced; that is, phonetically. One question that would need resolving for this proposal to fly would be “whose accent gets chosen as the gold standard?” And don’t be too quick to say “who cares as long as it’s not American”. Geordie-based spelling, anyone?

Eschatology

Remember the hoo-ha about the world ending on December 21, 2012 because of the Mayan calendar? As I trust you’re aware, it didn’t. Whether that’s a good thing is another question.

All the fuss was in the eschatological realm – the study of the final events of history, aka the apocalypse, doomsday, death, judgement, Ragnarok, heaven and hell, and the Great Conflagration. What fun!

Eschatology derives from the Greek eskhatos (last, furthest, uttermost, extreme, most remote) + ology (the study of). It is not to be confused with scatology, the study of another end-related matter entirely.

---

Quote of the week

I think the key indicator for wealth is not good grades, work ethic, or IQ. I believe it’s relationships. Ask yourself two questions: How many people do I know, and how much ransom money could I get for each one?
Jarod Kin