Lifestyle News

A Word, Please

“A man is walking down the street.” “There is a man walking down the street.”

What’s the difference between these two sentences? And, if it’s negligible, why do we have two ways to say the same thing?

These sentences are identical in meaning. Some walking is going on. A man is doing it. Period. But look at the grammar and there’s a very important difference. In the first, the grammatical subject of the sentence, the man, happens to be the doer of the action, the walking. In the second, we have the same person doing the same thing, yet he’s no longer the subject of the sentence. Grammatically, the subject is “there.” What’s up with that?

Meet “existential there” – an oddity of language that people use every day without thinking about it. To understand existential there, we need a big-picture understanding of the word “there.”

Most often, “there” is used to refer to location: Ray parks his car there. Don’t go there. Did you try the pizza there?

In this job, “there” is an adverb. Remember that adverbs aren’t only those “ly” words that modify verbs and adjectives. Adverbs are a much broader class of words that answer the questions where? when? and in what manner? So because “there” deals with location in a sentence like “He parked his car there” and “Don’t go there,” it’s an adverb.

But “there” has a different job in “There is a man walking down the street.” It’s not about location. It deals instead with the fact that the man exists: “There is a man.” This “there” is functioning as a pronoun to become what’s known as “existential there.” Existential there lets you rearrange information to emphasize that something exists. That is, if the man’s existence is notable enough to point out, you can use the pronoun “there” to make that the central point of your sentence.

Grammatically, however, existential there creates a puzzle of sorts. In a sentence like “There is a man walking, “there,” isn’t performing the action. So grammarians have a way of explaining it. The pronoun “there” is the grammatical subject. The noun doing the action, in this case the man, is called the “notional subject.” It means that, for all practical purposes, he’s the intended subject of the sentence. We’ve simply rearranged things so that the pronoun “there” is standing in for “man” in the grammatical role of subject.

Can all this hair-splitting help your writing? Yes. While it’s true that both of these forms are grammatically correct, one of them – with surprising frequency – turns out to be a poor choice, frequently plaguing amateur writing while often eschewed by pros.

If you think that “A man is walking down the street” sounds more like something you’d see in professionally edited writing than “There is a man,” that’s because it is.

Quality writing puts as much emphasis as possible on tangible subjects and action-oriented verbs. “There” is not a tangible subject. “Is” is not an action-oriented verb. So “There is a man walking” takes all the action out of the main clause and makes it a mere modifying phrase “walking down the street.” The result is less vivid writing.

Also, existential there flogs the obvious. If there’s a man walking down the street, then of course the man exists. Why waste ink saying so?

Besides, existential there creates longer sentences. In professional writing, efficiency is highly prized, meaning that if you can say the same thing with fewer words, you probably should.

Obviously, there is a time and a place for existential there. It’s just not as useful as some writers seem to think.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN @aol.com.

Lifestyle News

A Word, Please

Some interesting stuff landed in the mailbag for this week. Let’s dive in.

First comes a question about a column in which I wrote: “Never use an apostrophe to form a plural unless it’s necessary for clarity.”

Rosemary in Pennsylvania has a 1970 Webster’s New World College Dictionary that begs to differ: “In my dictionary, the rule for using an apostrophe to form plurals states: ‘Use an apostrophe to indicate the plurals of figures, letters, and words referred to as such.’ Have the rules changed regarding the use of apostrophes to form plurals?”

Rules change over time. My 2004 Webster’s New World College Dictionary differs some from Rosemary’s 1970 edition. But more important: Who put the dictionary people in charge of punctuation?

Language books disagree on punctuation rules, and none of them has ultimate authority. Publishers rely on a few well respected sources, especially the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook, which sometimes disagree with each other. But their widespread use gives these two rule books a lot of legitimacy. They set the standard for professional writing. So you can follow the punctuation rules in your dictionary if you want. But in language might makes right, so the style guides have more sway.

In another recent column, I wrote: “Let’s face it, grammar is more important for some people than for others.”

Al in Glendale had some thoughts. “That comma after the opening clause, though it may be okay, just didn’t sound like the best thing to use. It seemed to me that something a bit heavier was needed. My mind settled on a colon or a dash as the most desirable punctuation mark, with a slight preference for the colon. In a slightly distant third place was the semicolon.”

Any of these punctuation marks could work. But could one really improve my sentence?

A dash? Nah. Dashes set off parenthetical information or they indicate an abrupt change in thought or structure. So putting one between two complete clauses can stretch the rules a bit too far.

A semicolon? No way. Semicolons between whole clauses are usually silly. They raise the question: Why didn’t you just write two sentences?

A colon? Actually, yes. In retrospect, I think that would have been a better choice. A colon adds emphasis to whatever follows it. It says, “Listen: Here’s my point.” Al wins this round.

Dick in New York State wanted to know whether “fresh picked corn” is an ungrammatical version of “freshly picked corn” or whether, perhaps, the two forms carry different connotations. “Is it picked corn that is fresh or corn that has recently (freshly) been picked?” Dick also wondered: Is the dynamic similar to terms like “rest easy”?

Not exactly. In “rest easy,” “sitting pretty,” “slice the meat thin,” “dig deep” and similar sentences, the modifier refers to the noun. So an adjective like “easy,” “pretty” or “thin” is correct. But in “drive slow,” “come quick” and “breathe deep,” the modifier is describing the action. So it is an adverb. When you drop the “ly” ending from an adverb, it’s called a flat adverb. In some cases, flat adverbs are completely above board. Look up “slow” in most dictionaries and you’ll see it’s a synonym of the adverb “slowly.” In other cases, dropping the “ly” is considered informal or even unseemly.

So does fresh picked corn mean picked corn that is fresh? Or does it mean corn that is freshly picked? Well, why would anyone talk about “picked corn”? It goes without saying that the corn was picked. The only reason you’d bring up the picking at all is to emphasize it was done so recently. So that “fresh” isn’t modifying the noun “corn.” It’s describing the picking. It emphasizes that the corn was freshly picked.

This is the job for an adverb. So in “fresh picked corn,” we don’t have an adjective modifying a noun. We have a flat adverb modifying “picked.” And though these flat adverbs are sometimes fine in informal contexts, Dick’s sentence would be more proper with “freshly picked.”

June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

Lifestyle News

A Word, Please

Now showing at a news site near you: the spelling “drive-thru.”

That’s right, any time your favorite newspaper or news website has occasion to write about someone receiving a cheeseburger through a car window, it could be written “thru” instead of “through.” That’s because the Associated Press Stylebook now allows that spelling, a change the editors made a few years ago to supplant the guide’s longtime preference for “drive-through.”

AP is the most influential style in news media. Even publications that don’t follow it tend to use some variation of it. A place in the AP guide is the next best thing to guaranteed legitimacy. Thus, “drive-thru” is pretty much legit.

An atrocity of biblical proportions, right? Not so fast.

It’s easy to assume that the “thru” spelling is a simple erosion of the language. It’s one of the most popular examples of how commerce and technology can take a proper term, use it wrong and mess everybody up in the process – confusing children and infecting the public psyche until eventually a wrong spelling like “thru” supplants the correct one like “through.”

Had our language achieved a state of freeze-it-in-time-now perfection in the 1950s, that would be a valid point. On the other hand, had we been born a couple centuries earlier, we’d have a very different view.

“Thru” was correct and proper a full 100 years before some clowns got the idea to stick an O in the middle and a G and H at the end. But even that’s not the beginning of the story.

“Through” started out as an Old English word often spelled “thurh.” That was back when the language was completely phonetic. But then Old Norse and French influences began seeping in, with new spellings reflecting those groups’ influence on the pronunciation. In fact, “through” has been spelled at least 50 different ways over the years, including “thru,” “thorgh,” “thorth” and eventually “through.”

Our modern spelling of “through” isn’t some timeless pillar of correctness. It’s just one weird, illogical moment in the evolution of the word. You could even argue that “thru” is better than “through,” as I’m sure any non-native English speaker grappling with “through,” “though,” “tough” and “trough” would agree.

Should you start using “through” in place of “thru?” Nope. Not in this century. Whatever acceptability “thru” has earned applies only in the term “drive-thru.” If you want to write “Walk thru that door,” “It flew thru the air” or “I’m thru with you,” there isn’t a stylebook or dictionary that will back you up.

Even if you’re talking about the window through which cheeseburgers magically emerge, you might not want to use the “thru” spelling. Yes, the Associated Press Stylebook tells publishers to use it. But AP is all alone on that one.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dictionary doesn’t have an entry for “drive-thru.” Search for that term on the dictionary’s website and you’ll be rerouted to the entry for “drive-through.” There, you’ll see that “thru” represents a “variant spelling” of the form Merriam considers standard: drive-through. Merriam is the default dictionary for publications edited in Chicago style, the leading style for most books and magazines.

Editors in AP style bow to a different authority. For any issue not explicitly discussed in the style guide, AP says to follow Webster’s New World College Dictionary. What does that dictionary say? “Drive-thru” isn’t official enough to warrant its own entry. Instead, it’s a variant spelling of “drive-through.”

If AP’s own preferred dictionary doesn’t have much love for “drive-thru,” the rest of us can avoid it as well. Just don’t be surprised if you see it in your local newspaper.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

Lifestyle News

A Word, Please

Have you ever thought about the word “do?” My advice is don’t. The word “do” is one of the bugbears of English that make our language incredibly difficult to master – for nonnative speakers and even for people born into the English-speaking world. Almost no one fully understands “do.” The people who use it correctly do so through osmosis, not understanding.

To see what I mean, consider the formula for making questions in Latin-based languages like French. In other languages, to make a question, you often just take a statement and swap the places of the subject and verb. So “Vous voulez fromage” (You want cheese) becomes a question when you switch positions of the pronoun and the verb: “Voulez-vous fromage?” Simple.

There are exceptions, of course – situations trickier than this. But this is the basic formula. It’s called inversion, because you invert the position of the subject and verb.

Try that in English. “You want cheese.” “Want you cheese?” “He saw a great movie last weekend.” “Saw he a great movie last weekend?” As we’ll see in a minute, sometimes this process actually works in English. But not in these examples. Examine all these questions and you can see something is missing – a little-understood word known as a dummy operator. It’s the word “do” and it’s how we form questions like “Do you want cheese?” and “Did he see a great movie last weekend?”

“Do” has two main jobs. First, it’s a regular-old verb. “Do the dishes.” “I don’t do windows.” “I do.” In that job, it works the same as any other garden variety verb. But on top of that, it has a special job – the job of dummy operator.

In grammar, an operator is an auxiliary verb that gets moved around to form questions and do a few other special jobs. It’s part of a broader group called auxiliary verbs that work as helpers with other verbs. English has a number of auxiliaries, “have” and “be” are the regular ones. We see them in sentences like “I have walked” and “I am walking.” There also are modal auxiliaries like “can” and “must,” as in “I can have dessert” and “He must leave.”

These auxiliaries are operators, which means they can move around to do things like form questions: Have I walked? Am I walking? Can I have dessert? Must he leave?

Notice that, when your sentence has an auxiliary verb, an inversion process like the one used in so many other languages works in English, too. “I can leave.” “Can I leave?” The problem is that not all English sentences have auxiliary verbs. “I walk.” “Alex quit.” “Ruby knows.” So to make these into questions, we call in a specialist – the dummy operator “do.” “Do I walk?” “Did Alex quit?” “Does Ruby know?”

Here’s how the Oxford English Grammar explains it: “Auxiliary ‘do’ is a dummy operator, since it functions as an operator in the absence of any other auxiliary when an operator is required to form questions, to make the sentence negative, or to form an abbreviated clause, as in ‘My sister likes them, and I do, too.”

To me, the word “dummy” emphasizes how “do” doesn’t have any meaning – not in these sentences, anyway. Modal auxiliaries like “can” tell us something about possibility. Basic auxiliaries like “have” change a verb’s tense, telling us when something happened. Auxiliary “do” doesn’t. Like a dummy in a store window, it has no substance of its own. It’s just there to help you arrange the things that actually matter.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.