What's a Participle?

     One student out of fifteen -- mostly valedictorians, I'm told -- in my Honors seminar knew.  Our schools do not teach the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax, what used to be called "grammar".  They do teach what now is called grammar, meaning a grab bag of rules, usually mistaken and never organized into a coherent system, which students learn to follow as docilely as they learn to write five-paragraph essays, with a vague opening, three ho-hum body shots, and a recapitulatory conclusion.  Respectively.

     Anyway, Steve's post below has made me think of the six stupidest "grammatical" things our schools teach.  Some of these slide from grammar into style, but since my students are but slenderly acquainted with either one, it hardly matters here how we characterize them:

1. Never begin a sentence with "but".   When they tell me they've been so advised, I open up the King James Bible at random, glance at the page, and read.  "If it's good enough for Almighty God," I say, "it had damned well better be good enough for a high school English teacher."  It is the preferred method in English prose of making the quick adversative shift.

2. Never begin a sentence with "because."  When our retiring linguist heard about this rule, she gaped in incomprehension.  That's what my daughter tells me, who was in the class.  What can you say about it?  It betrays an utter incapacity to understand how sentences are put together in English.  Because teachers do not know what a subordinate clause is, they do not teach their students what a subordinate clause is.  And because they have no clear way to explain what a sentence fragment is, and because immature writers will sometimes begin a fragment with "because," they say -- you get it.

3. Avoid the passive voice.  This rule would be fine, except for two things: neither the teachers nor the students know what the passive voice is; and the passive voice is often quite useful.  My students are under the impression that any verb with an "is" or an "are" in it is passive.  If ever they had to learn about the middle voice, they'd take ill.

4. Never use the pronoun "I" in an essay. 

5. Never use the informal "you," meaning "one".

6. Never use the same word more than twice in a row.  Imagine Lincoln revising the Gettysburg Address, that government of the people, for society, and by the general population, should not perish from the face of the earth.

But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them.  I'm still talking about the valedictorians here.  I suppose "improper predication" would do as well as any.  They use words in ways that are impossible not only in English, but sometimes in any conceivable language.  They get away with it, too, because their teachers, including college professors, do likewise. 

Comments

[Keljeck]

4. Never use the pronoun "I" in an essay.

5. Never use the informal "you," meaning "one".

Well that's liberating. It's strange, I read peer reviewed essays that do both of those things, but as a college student I am not allowed to refer to myself in my papers.

I'm told this came about because some students took it too far. All I know is that my knowledge of my own language is tragically inadequate.

I was taught, and believed, everything you just said except the part about the passive voice (I learned that in Greek!).

[Robin]

Professor Esolen, I was an English major in the '70's but never learned grammar. They didn't teach it in my public school, and I didn't have to take it in college and so, being a lazy student, didn't. BECAUSE I had a good "ear" for writing and grammar, my lack of knowledge has not hurt me much. I've worked as a copy editor at a newspaper, won a writing award in law school, and write fairly extensively in my profession's trade publications.

BUT sometimes I would like to teach myself what I missed. Can YOU recommend an older grammar textbook that would teach "the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax"? In my middle age, I think I might even enjoy learning how to diagram a sentence! ANY HELP YOU CAN GIVE ME WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED.

PS - thanks for mentioning the idiotic rule about not repeating the same word in a sentence. I see sentences like your "Gettysburg address" revision all the time, and they drive me crazy.

[Bobby Winters]

I had an old-fashioned HS English teacher and learned a lot of grammar. I recall an incident in faculty senate wherein a particular faculty member spent 20 minutes slamming a proposal because it had a split infinitive. There were two problems with this. One, split infinitives are OK. Two, the construction in question was NOT an infinite.

(This same faculty member has been known to talk twenty minutes only to say, "I don't have an opinion on this.")

[Irenaeus]

I echo Robin's request: what books do you find helpful? Also, what do you think of Strunk and White? I've sworn by it, but I've also seen some criticisms here and there from people I respect.

[Beth]

Very near total agreement from here, Tony! I must confess, however, that I do ban the use of "you" in freshman essays. This is not because it can't be used well informally, but because my students don't use it as an informal "one" -- shoot, they don't use "one" as a formal "one." Rather, almost universally they use "you" as a lazy means of not bothering to figure out whom they mean -- students? carpenters? Christians? lions? . . . Or they are using it, as they use "one," to avoid the great he/she debate, in which most of them have obviously been flayed alive at some point in their school career.

I can hear the sighs of relief when I tell them that the inclusive "he" is not only grammatically, stylistically, and theologically sound, but they can use it in their papers for my class! I do teach them how to avoid it if they run into an ultra-feminist professor or boss someday, but I also tell them what you have mentioned before about editors often not noticing that it's there anyway, since it doesn't confuse meaning. This helps with the universal confused usage of pronouns in all their work.

But "you" -- sure, I agree that it's not an innate problem to use it in certain contexts, but when you have youngsters who are by nature imprecise in their thinking and lazy in their writing, it seems to help them a great deal not to have that particular out. (I ban "one" also on similar grounds.) Also, their use of "you" tends to come across very much "holier than you" in their persuasive writing, and it helps them with the tone of those essays to avoid it.

All your other points -- oh, yes, we find ourselves addressing them every semester! Their eyes get huge and they begin to hyperventilate when we tell them the 5-paragraph essay is forbidden -- but most of them quickly discover the helpfulness of letting the ideas form the structure instead of vice versa, and they love being told that sentences *of course* may begin with conjunctions, and paragraphs may be whatever number of sentences are needed, and "I" is perfectly legitimate, and repetition can be an extremely effective literary device . . . .

And, yes, I am grateful to you and Steve for offering me some purposeful procrastination tools this weekend . . .

[maria horvath]

Robin,

You'll find that English language guides published before the sixties are generally most useful. The internet should help you there.

These are among my favorites:

- Language guides for advanced foreign students, like those by Robert J. Dixson. I used them when I taught English as a Second Language years ago in Toronto. Just last month, in my work as an editor, I consulted Dixson's rules on the uses of the definite and indefinite articles to help out a Serbian writer who has problems adjusting from a language that avoids any articles at all. Books like these often take a detailed and no-nonsense approach to the study of our language.

- Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English by the great grammarian and etymologist Eric Partridge; and

- High school grammar texts from the time before our anything-goes era. I still consult my grade eleven text, Learning to Write by Reed Smith, which was published in 1939 and remained in use at my Catholic girls' high school in Winnipeg until the mid-sixties. This wonderful book even includes lists of words whose mispelling would be "inexcusable." You get the idea.

You mentioned sentence diagramming. I haven't checked this out yet, but its title sounds promising: Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Foley, inspired by the author's demanding sixth-grade English teacher.

I too had a teacher like Sister Bernadette, a real stickler for following the rules but who nevertheless warned us against the folly of being persnickety. Good writing, Sister Clare Miriam taught us, sometimes sometimes requires us to be creative, to make up our own rules, -- but only when we have mastered the basics, only then. Or if you're e.e. cummings, when anything goes.

[Laura]

Schools do focus on teaching a lot of (usually unsound) petty grammatical rules like the ones you cited, while failing to teach people to write whole sentences and paragraphs that have a logical flow and actually make sense. Lots of college-level essays I read are ruined by the students' inability to construct logical sentences -- sentences where you can be sure who is the subject and who the object, for example. Most of the students don't make sense when speaking at a higher level than small talk, either.

[Fabio P.Barbieri]

Stupid rules have always abounded in English, because of a natural tendency to Puritanism - or nay-saying for its own sake - and a strangely subservient attitude to Latin and French. One I was taught by my English teacher, who was a good teacher, too, was never to start a sentence with a preposition; which is rubbish in any language I know. And what about C.S.Lewis' favourite, the ban on the so-called "split infinitive" - enacted for no better reason than it was felt that what English called the Infinitive should act in the same way as the French and Latin "Infinitive", which was one word and could not be split? Apart from the obvious idiocy of the proposition, there is the fact that the English infinitive is grammatically nothing like the Latin/French infinitive, many of whose functions are filled by the English participle present. English has always been taught badly in English-language schools; indeed, according to Lewis, until the twentieth century, it was not taught in English schools at all, and students were supposed to learn grammar from their Latin and Greek lessons.

[Tony Esolen]

Mr. Barbieri,

A good point -- but I have to draw a distinction. In old days, the stupid rules were hypercorrect, because learned but pedantic grammarians attempted (sometimes; actually much less often than I had supposed, before I started examining old grammars) to impose the laws of Latin upon English. Now, the stupid rules are born of complete ignorance. In old days, you had grammarians insisting in English that certain conjunctive adverbs, like "however," were "postpositives," similar to "autem" and "enim" in Latin, and so should only be used after an initial word in the sentence. It wasn't really a bad rule; sentences beginning with "However" and a comma are rather stilted and sluggish. Nowadays, you have high school teachers who don't know what an adverb is, or a conjunction. They might know that "and" is a conjunction, but they don't exactly know what makes other words conjunctive, and as for adverbs, forget it. In general, the old grammarians were infinitely superior to the new, in the same way that doors that shut too tightly are superior to doors that are smashed in, or lawns too prettily mowed are superior to mud.

Everybody: I have somewhere the most excellent English grammar I've ever seen; I'll dig it up and let you know the name soon. From it I learned about the rare "past future" and "past future perfect" tenses, in English.... Another interesting thing about the old grammars is that they DON'T attempt to equate "tense" in English with tense in other languages. English has only two pure tenses, sort of -- present and preterite. Our other tenses have modal and aspectual shadings.

[Beth]

"Nowadays, you have high school teachers who don't know what an adverb is, or a conjunction. "

Wow, is that true. Nor how to write a decently coherent essay or follow the rules of documentation, or any number of things one would think would be obviously necessary. I very nearly said to a graduating (maybe, if she passes my class) senior in my office the other day "You are the reason I tell my children to homeschool their children" -- but she was already in tears, and I need my job for 4 more years (my son begins college this fall), so I forebore from making it worse.

[Clifford Simon]

I'd like to tip my hat here to the inanest invention ever: the grammar-checker. It's usually right next to the spell-checker button. The spell-checker will underline in red squiggly lines, the grammar-checker will underline in blue squiggly lines. Because computers do not understand semantics (by definition), but only syntax, and a very limited range of syntax at that, and further because the tasks of grammatical analysis are essentially semantic (such as determining the part-of-speech of a word like "run" which could be either a noun or a verb depending on what the sentence MEANS), the grammar-checker is, by definition, whacked-up.

I don't know what rules they program into it but in my experience it mainly flags sentences which it thinks to be in the passive voice. That might explain something, Tony. Of course, whenever it flags a sentence, the student need only rearrange words aimlessly until the blue squiggly line mysteriously goes away.

This is how we produce human beings who fail the Turing test.

[Beth]

Oh, Clifford, the grammar checker is indeed the most inane thing on the computer! You must already know grammar quite well to know whether it is telling you anything accurate, and, if it *does* happen to be right, you have to know grammar quite well to fix the error. In other words, it is only "helpful" to those who don't need it in the first place . . . It is the first thing I look for to turn off when I get a new program, and I tell my students to do the same. (Well, actually, worse might be the new documentation programs, in which you put the information and it formats your citation. But you have to know what information it actually needs, and if you know that, you don't need it to do your formatting for you . . . These are banned from our classes.)

[Bobby Neal Winters]

>>From it I learned about the rare "past future" and "past future perfect" tenses, in English<<

What tense is the verb "ustacould," as in: "I cain't run as fast as an armadillo any more, but I ustacould."

[o.h.]

Bobby,

My spellchecker, set for Standard Texan, changed your "an armadillo" to the more correct "a armadillo."

[Bill Daugherty]

"But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them."

No name for whom or what? the students? the mistakes? Perhaps But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name would suffice. :)

[Kamilla]

I give up - what is a participle?

No, honestly, I am hopeless at grammar and probably couldn't use a comma correctly to save me soul.

One thing I've long been curious about - my essay for freshman english didn't qualify me to skip the normal sequence, but my essay for the honors scholarship not only got me the scholarship but a place in the freshman honors sequence (so I didn't have to take freshman English after all).

Kamilla

[Kamilla]

Oops - I also can't proof my own typing!

K

[William Rush]

Where English grammar is not taught ( nearly everywhere these days) learning Latin is certainly a useful substitute for understanding the construction of one's own language. A child exposed to Latin for a short time will quickly understand the various parts of speech - adverbs, tenses,moods,etc - as well as the delightful discovery of the majority of words he/she uses every day.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>I'd like to tip my hat here to the inanest invention ever: the grammar-checker. <<<

I turned mine off as soon as it appeared in MS Word. To demonstrate its inadequacy, I typed a number of paragraphs by famous authors into a word document with the grammar check on. Amazing how illiterate people like Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Shaw and Hemingway were.

The worst thing about the grammar checker is its abysmal leveling of style. Once people begin relying on it, they begin to sound just like Bill Gates, or USA Today. I suspect that the authors of the revised Ruthenian Divine Liturgy had their going full blast while they were writing it, because that's precisely the style in which it is composed.

[Chuck]

While I don't dispute the value of studying Latin (I took it for four years in high school and loved it), why should it be the language of choice for giving English speakers a familiarity with grammar? Why not German? In spite of centuries of Latin and French accretions, English is still classed as a Germanic language. Some students might be pleasantly surprised to find out, as I often have, why.

I never have understood why the passive voice is verboten. What on earth do we have it for then?

[labrialumn]

O.H., that only works if you put the yogh (3) in front of the 'a' in armadillo.

I was one of the people who had parents and grandparents who spoke proper English, with the result that I got through elementary and high school English by going by what sounded 'right'. And I read a lot, many things not from the 20th century, so that helped. But as a result, my grammar is less than perfect, and that made Hebrew and Greek more incomprehensible than they should have been. Though I would add that languages are not learned as computer code, but as actual spoken language. I fear that Biblical exegesis is affected by the language-as-computer-code model. I suspect we'd miss things in Shakespeare if we tried to understand it in that way. I digress.

If it is good enough for Tolkien, it is good enough for me, though. He knew the language better than most of us.

Mr. Rush, perhaps that might work for Old English, but modern English is a pidgin tongue, and Latin doesn't really apply very well.

[labrialumn]

O.H., that only works if you put the yogh (3) in front of the 'a' in armadillo.

I was one of the people who had parents and grandparents who spoke proper English, with the result that I got through elementary and high school English by going by what sounded 'right'. And I read a lot, many things not from the 20th century, so that helped. But as a result, my grammar is less than perfect, and that made Hebrew and Greek more incomprehensible than they should have been. Though I would add that languages are not learned as computer code, but as actual spoken language. I fear that Biblical exegesis is affected by the language-as-computer-code model. I suspect we'd miss things in Shakespeare if we tried to understand it in that way. I digress.

If it is good enough for Tolkien, it is good enough for me, though. He knew the language better than most of us.

Mr. Rush, perhaps that might work for Old English, but modern English is a pidgin tongue, and Latin doesn't really apply very well.

[James Kabala]

I always thought "Don't start a sentence with and or but" was one of the old Latinate rules like "Don't split an infintive" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition," not a new-fangled one. I have certainly heard it treated as such. But of course (not to be rude) since Dr. Esolen's youth, we have had a few decades for the new-fangled to become old-fashioned.

I wonder what Dr. Esolen would think of the website Language Log. They seemed a be a little too relaxed about standards for his tastes, but he would approve of their extended crusade against those who stigmatize the passive voice (and often don't even understand what the term means). Here are some (of their many) humorous and insightful takes on the subject:

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/004456.html

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000991.html

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003722.html (with cartoon!)

In this post, they attempt to trace a history of the entire misbegotten notion:

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003380.html

[James Kabala]

Here's another good one: http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000869.html

Dr. Esolen would likely approve of the closing polemic.

I've forgotten (although I once knew) how to make links that work, so just use copy-and-paste to read the posts in question.

[Beth]

Passive voice is essential in some cases and appropriate in others. However, it has a wondrous history of being effectively used to obfuscate agency, and so must be used carefully -- one of my children showed this at the ripe old age of two when, having been thoroughly instructed and fully understanding that he was not to dump all the contents of his toybox onto the floor, he wandered into the kitchen and said plaintively, "My toybox got dumped onto the floor, Mommy . . ." No one, least of all he, did the dumping -- it just happened! Kind of like tuition gets raised, bills get passed, companies get downsized . . .

Also, stylistically passive voice is more cumbersome and indirect and so as a *general* rule it is easier for readers to process active voice; also, the verb is stronger in active voice -- agents do things, instead of things just being done. But of course, when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, and the emphasis should be placed on the thing or person done *to*, then passive is the best choice.

(Just in case anyone wonders, "get" is used to form passive voice in some informal contexts; yes, "be" is the usual passive marker. This is the sort of thing that drives my poor neophyte grammar students crazy. But Tony's linguistic knowledge is so light years beyond mine that he would drive me crazy in a grammar class!)

[Tony Esolen]

Grammar is a ton of fun, isn't it, Beth?

I really enjoy learning odd things about the language we use all the time. For example:

The infinitive without "to": I heard him sing.

Or the future tense to express probability: That'll be the mailman.

Or the dialectal double modal: I might could fix that for you.

Or English's attempt to import a future active participle: I'm going to see the movie. I'm fixing to move to Hoboken.

Or English verbs or verbals with active form but passive or middle meaning:

Trout is good eating.
Football is a lot of fun to play.
She sure looks good.
That bread is not to eat.

Or English verbs that denote the removal of the noun from which they come:

peel
shell
core
skin
bark
husk
shuck
stone
pit
juice
bone
gut
scalp

Or English iterative / frequentative verbs in -le or -er:

flutter
shiver
quiver
shuttle
chuckle
stutter
stammer
stipple
dapple
wiggle
shimmer
glimmer
clatter
piddle
waddle

Or English words in wr- denoting twisting:

wren
wrestle
wring
wire
worry
wrath
write
wrench
warp
wrap
wry
wrought

If only teachers who love language and grammar could get hold of our kids when they're young -- to show them how it all works in the quirkiest ways -- gerunds with objects and adverbs, a clause for a subject with three clauses embedded within it, "the" as an adverb, "this" as an adverb, "that" as a conjunction, "yo" as an adverb in Philadelphia, why we say "adder" instead of "nadder," and "apron" instead of "napron," why there's a "w" in "whole" when it's the same word as "hale," why we say "groom" instead of "goom," and "bird" instead of "brid," and what's the difference between a shirt and a skirt or a dike and a ditch, or why birds shriek and screech instead of shreeching and skrieking ....

[Beth]

Oh, Tony, thanks for that list! Some of those I'd never thought of (the "wr" list -- how cool is that?!). Sadly, most students just think it's too hard to learn, or pointless, or nerdy . . . as you say, they need to be caught young, as I'm sure I was, though I don't remember when. I do recall a high school teacher who made us memorize poetry and read Winnie-the-Pooh to us, just because she loved the sounds of Milne's words . . .

[Therese]

There is no better way to learn grammar than to study Latin. Once you understand Latin grammar you can recognize relationships in English or other languages more readily -- that is once you adapt for the fact that most European languages are lazy derivatives in one way or another :-)

If you don't have time to learn Latin, find old books on rhetoric. Some of the best resources on rhetoric that I know are the books written by one of my professors at Penn State, S. Leonard Rubinstein. He is retired but still helping students as a professor emeritus. His books are out of print but still can be found on Amazon. Among his books:
Writing: A Habit of Mind
The Plain Rhetoric
Frameworks of Exposition

But if you think that writing well depends on learning specific techniques and rules, be forewarned: you may may be in for a surprise. Professor Rubinstein insists that thinking well is the necessary antecedent to writing well. This extraordinary professor touched the lives of his students with his zeal for writing and rhetoric. If you google him, you'll find a good number of uplifting testimonies by former students along with articles chronicling his dedication even after having retired some 10 plus years ago. Here's a website with high lights of his career and a photo. Below is a brief bio.

Bio (from Penn State site): Rubinstein, S. Leonard. Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. A.S.T.P, Stanford University; B.L., Rutgers University; M.F.A., State University of Iowa. Fields of specialization: fiction writing, humanities, short story, curiosity. Novels: The Battle Done; The Grave-maker's House (with Robert G. Weaver); Madeleine (with Pamela West Katkin). Textbooks: Writing: A Habit of Mind and five co-authored textbooks. Articles published in: College English, The Writer, AAHE Bulletin, Journal of Teaching Writing, Technology Illustrated, The Underground Grammarian, The American Voice. 260 radio programs: “Odyssey Through Literature.” E-mail: slr4@cac.psu.edu

[T. Chan]

Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English by the great grammarian and etymologist Eric Partridge

Does anyone have familiarity with the later editions of this book? Are they as good as the earlier editions, or should they be avoided for one reason or another (PC changes, etc.)?

[Therese]

Oops missed the website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/l/slr4/cac-index.html

PS.. Prof. Rubinstein gave us all this advice:

If you want to be a fiction writer, go live life. Do not enroll in a masters program immediately after graduation. You will only be able to write convincingly about what you know. What you know will be academia and the vicarious experiences you have gleamed from whatever you have read. Go live. Be a cook. Be a professional something. Be a day laborer. Just be and have real experiences.

PPS -- I've always considered my degree in English as a license to break the rules. And I do this frequently to the chagrin of many. Even though I work in a technical field, I have excelled largely because of what I learned in Professor Rubinstein's class. Even though I am more a technology geek, I excel because of a professor who taught me not only who to write well but how to think.

[T. Chan]

Everybody: I have somewhere the most excellent English grammar I've ever seen; I'll dig it up and let you know the name soon.

Dr. Esolen, I wait eagerly for your update!

[Matthew N. Petersen]

When do you use "the" as an adverb?

Also, Eats, shoots and leaves is a good grammar book.

Another fun point: the English subjunctive.

"I wish I were in the land of cotton."

"Soul clap its hands and sing."

"But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

[Michael]

>>Sadly, most students just think it's too hard to learn, or pointless, or nerdy...<<

Maybe it's only true for my local selection, but the majority of "gifted" students were strong in math and science. During a prepared lecture on a poem in Spanish, I started to explain the construction of an English sentence relative to a Spanish sentence, English being in spoken from generally a subject-verb-object language, whereas Spanish has more obvious cases related to Latin, allowing you to place objects prior to their predicates or agents. For example, "le hizo daño" means "to him one made damage", which in English would be "someone hurt him", a very clear subject (someone), verb (hurt) and object (him). My Spanish teacher and I started the rally cry "Grammar geeks unite", as the rest of the class rolled their eyes, complained that it was ridiculous, etc. Please, someone, explain to me how it is not fun to reorganize a sentence without breaking rules and keeping it "functional".

>>The infinitive without "to": I heard him sing.<<

Dr. Esolen, isn't this technically a participle without the "ing"? It is, after all, functioning as an adverb--you heard "him", and how?, sing"ing". How would it function as a true Latinate infinitive? "I heard him to sing"? What?

Kamilla--

A participle is a verb form (e.g. a word made from a verb) that functions as a modifier or the completion of a compound tense. In the sentence: I woke to the sound of singing birds, "singing" is a participle. More precisely, it is an adjectival particple modifying "birds" (in an adjectival prepositional phrase modifying "sound"). E.g., the birds were singing. Ah, and here is a completely accidental, convenient segue into the compound tense. As you can see the birds were is an incomplete sentence, if "were" were functioning as a copula ("to be"), so it requires what it is the birds were--singing.

However, "to be" is also our "helping" verb in English, and it gives us an imperfect tense of sorts. As Dr. Esolen noted, English only has two real tenses, but for the sake of grammar, it helps to recognize ongoing acts in the past--e.g., the birds did not just sing a note and stop, but it was a continual activity--as "imperfect". (It's technically a progressive aspect, as Dr. Esolen also noted--our "other tenses have modal and aspectual shadings.") "Were singing", therefore, uses "singing" as the completion of a verb form, by telling us the ongoing action of the birds.

This can also be done with what you might commonly think of as the "past tense". For example, the word attached is a participle when it is used to passively modify something, like "the attached cape". Likewise, you have "eaten". I had drunk* my fill uses the helping verb "to have" to complete a tense of "to drink": it is done once and in the past. This is a "perfect" tense.

*My self-professed and heartily held grammar-geekery aside, I confess to being hopelessly confused on "drink/drank/drunk" and "swim/swam/swum" type problems. I believe "drunk" is the right participle, but Lord knows it could be "drank". Darn English and its loads upon loads upon loads of irregular verbs. It has me convinced that English doesn't have any "regular" verbs, just a few that have some things in common. They're in communion with each other, but they're not the same denomination.

[Tony Esolen]

This is a blast.

Matthew: "the" is an adverb in its meaning "to such an extent," as in "the more, the merrier," meaning "to the extent that there are more people, to that same extent will they be merrier."

Kamilla: "sing" is an infinitive without "to," in the sentence "I heard him sing". "Him" is the subject of the infinitive; it's the same construction as in Latin "Audivi illum canere." The participle would be an adjective modifying the meaning of the noun or pronoun.

Michael: the oldest verbs in English form their preterite by vowel change. These vowel changes used to appear in seven fairly predictable forms; many of these have been obscured by time. The easiest to recognize are the i-a-u verbs, followed by nasal consonants:

drink drank drunk
swim swam swum
sling (slang) slung
wring (wrang) wrung
ring rang rung
sing sang sung
stink stank stunk

But then some verbs switched from the vowel-change preterite to the dental preterite (our past in d or t):

strive strived strived (older: strove, striven)
thrive thrived thrived (older: throve, thriven)

Alas, some dental preterite verbs acquired vowel-change forms by analogy:

show showed shown (older: showed, showed)
dive dove dived (older: dived, dived)

Some verbs have dental preterite with vowel change; actually, it was the present that endured the vowel change, with the preterite preserving the original vowel:

bring brought brought
sell sold sold
teach taught taught

Other verbs ending in a dental have a dental preterite that has been absorbed into the word:

set set set
let let let
cut cut cut
cast cast cast

Some verbs have adjectival forms that are different from the third principal part, possibly by analogy with adjectives in -en:

drunken (cf. oaken, brazen, wooden)

[Margaret]

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" can't even get its own title shipshape.

[GL]

Tony,

You may have done this before. If so, I apologize for repeating it. Could you recommend a good grammar text for the working man who (1) had a poor education and (2) forgot much of what he was taught? I have my good old Strunk and White, but I assume that there may be better sources available.

Thanks,

GL

P.S. My pet peeve is the rule that one should not end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes, it seems to me, that is the least awkward way to write the sentence. I recall that Churchill did it all the time in his epic History of the English Speaking People.

[Judy K. Warner]

And there's Churchill's famous sentence about that rule: "This is something up with which I will not put."

[Stuart Koehl]

>>> My pet peeve is the rule that one should not end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes, it seems to me, that is the least awkward way to write the sentence.<<<

To me, it all depends on the way in which the sentence sounds, whether the meter is better if the sentence ends with a preposition or without. I am not dogmatic about it, but there is always something vaguely unfinished-sounding when the sentence ends with a preposition.

[Nick]

No comments on the numbers of sentences in a paragraph? Between forth and sixth grade we were required to add a sentence to every paragraph we wrote. By sixth grade we were generally writing some real clunkers. Being a rebellious twerp I always wrote single sentence paragraphs and pointed out that long paragraphs were not always optimal.

My posting stops here for fear that the grammar police will attack me with wild abandon. But, before I go, I will note that most grammar checkers either do not flag passive voice anymore (for the reasons stated above) or the "feature" can be turned off (MS Word 97 and above).

[Michael]

Nick,

On the number of sentences in a paragraph, it really depends on how many sentences you actually need to complete the presentation of your idea. I've written paragraphs with fifteen sentences; I've written paragraphs of one sentence. Heck, I've written paragraphs of one sentence fragment.* There is no law about the length of a paragraph. Rather, there are ill-imagined ideas regarding what is "right".

Much like the five-paragraph essay, the five-sentence paragraph (point, three supporting details, transition) is an organizational tool meant to teach students the structure of thought going into an expository or persuasive essay. I don't know when teachers started to think it was a part of the building itself rather than the foundation, as all of my teachers taught it as an end rather than a means. I think it is practical to teach the Five-Five Form (five paragraphs, five sentences per paragraph) so long as it is understood as a building block, not a rule.

*Grammatically, a sentence fragment is not a complete sentence (obviously), but I've used it stylistically, flaunting the rule, as a segue or to condense an idea. For example, when submitting an essay for a college application, the prompt read: If you are interested in a particular academic area, tell us why. Do you have a dream job in mind? My first three paragraphs followed:

When I was five years old, I wanted to be a police officer.

Or a Jedi.

Mostly a Jedi, but I was told the likelihood of that happening was about equal to the likelihood of the Seattle Mariners doing something meaningful. I was five, and not very good with similes, so naturally, no one actually put it to me in those terms. Since the 1995 baseball season, however, I’ve often concluded that the unexpected can happen. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi contains a passage wherein the main character (Piscine Moliter Patel, or Pi for short) relates that the problem with modern rationalism is that it concludes that an event cannot occur simply because it has not yet occurred. “If it is not in your realm of experience, you don’t believe it to be possible.” I am, therefore, still holding out for my initiation to the Force and a lightsaber.

The bolded line is obviously a sentence fragment, but it functions as a transition and condenses the idea of fantasy in a concise, precise manner. All this to say: if teachers haven't graduated from the Five-Five Form by ninth grade, they probably shouldn't be teaching ninth grade or anything higher.

[Ethan C.]

I'm sorry to say that I had to look up what a participle is when I first read the post. But at least I looked it up. And it turned out that my vague intuition as to its definition was correct.

Try writing those three thoughts in a single sentence. They would definitely lose their punch.

[Matthias]

Michael wrote,

>>> flaunting the rule <<<

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Can we add this one to the "notes on diction" thread?

[Tony Esolen]

Matthias,

Yes, we should. Not to gang up on Mike, but very few people know about the word "flout".

Flaunt = to show off, as of a mink stole
Flout = to scorn, as in disobeying a law

How about these?

few (for number)
less (for degree or amount)

i.e. (that is; explanatory)
e.g. (ex grege; for example, for illustration)

one biceps, two (in English) biceps (the word "biceps" is singular, meaning "two-headed," because there are two ligaments that attach the muscle to the elbow, I'm guessing)

one homo sapiens (already singular; "homo sapien" is not possible, and even "homo sapiens" is rare enough!)

flammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire"

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>few (for number)
less (for degree or amount)<<<

When my younger one was little, she used to get many and much confused, as in, "How many monies do you have?" and "How much dollars do you have?"

>>>lammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire"<<<

I like "pyrophoric", myself.

>>>one homo sapiens (already singular; "homo sapien" is not possible, and even "homo sapiens" is rare enough!)<<<

Of course, most people believe they are hetero sapiens.

[Bill R]

"flammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire""

But then there is no protection for the grammar geeks, who will assume that "flammable" means essentially NOT "prone to catch fire"!

[Michael]

Dr. Esolen, Matthias-

I confess to recognizing immediately what Matthias meant, recognizing the use of "flaunt" as contrary to its classic definition. I bow my head not in shame, for it is common, accepted usage that I grew up with, but in properly chastised humility and recognition that I should choose my words more carefully. Good thing it isn't contrary to my commentary on paragraphs.

[cnb]

I wish that rule #3 had been stated this way: "The passive voice is to be avoided."

Dr. Esolen points out the confusion over flammable/inflammable. Where I come from, "thaw" and "unthaw" are used synonymously, but that may just be a regional peculiarity.

[Matthias]

I believe you are wrong about "flammable," Dr. Esolen. According to some online dictionaries I consulted it is about two hundred years old in English. It comes from Latin "flammare" just as "inflammable" comes from Latin "inflammare". I don't think the ancient Romans had issues with fuel tanks.

[GL]

The debate over the word "flammable." My six-year-old son was just asking me this morning the origins of the word "poop." I used this as opportunity to tell him about etymology and the good old Oxford English Dictionary. (I looked up "poop" today and found no meaning linked to that word which relates to the one he had in mind. I'm taking home the relevant volume for him to see -- of course, he'll not be able to read it, but perhaps he'll get the idea. I see it as an opportunity to take advantage of a normal six-year-old's obsession with bodily functions to teach him about something that may benefit him more later in life. ;-))

In any event, in light of Matthias' post, I looked up "flammable." It has, according to the OED, the same meaning as "inflammable" and has been in use since at least the 19th century.

[Matthias]

So "flammable"/"inflammable" has a much better pedigree than a similar-looking pair, "regardless"/"irregardless", which also look like opposites but are in fact synonyms. In the latter case "irregardless" really is a late vulgarism (1930s according to one online dictionary).

[GL]

I wrote too soon. I looked for "poop" in the original OED, a copy of which is on a bookcase just outside my office. On the way out this evening, I picked up the relevant volume from the 2nd Ed. My two oldest children were delighted when we went through the various meanings of "poop" until we came to the one to which my son referred. They were even more delighted when I read the examples of the use of the word, especially the news story from Brisbane (if I recall correctly) about a woman who was using bird poop on her hair to cure dandruff after having had a minah bird relieve itself on her head and finding that her dandruff improved.

They then wanted to look up other words. Now you all may believe this was a silly exercise, but I believe I just succeeded in getting them started on what I hope will be a life long love of dictionaries and, hopefully, etymology. Not a bad days work.

[labrialumn]

Tony, isn't the gerund a South African antelope? ;-)

What if we studied Old English instead of Latin (first) in order to understand English grammar and roots?

buy bought boughten?

sow sown
hew hewn

The first edition NIV had those two, the second addition replaced them with the dentals (Latinate imitations?) as well as seemingly paraphrasing more.

Did anyone else enjoy the PBS show _The Story of English_ back in the day?

The mixing of 'few' and 'less' is one of my pet peeves, along with the loss of the -ly ending for adverbs (which itself is a contraction of -like, which was still used occasionally by my grandmother from Kansas)

Matthias, the -eastern- Romans did have fuel tanks - usually mounted on the prow of their small warships.

[Tony Esolen]

Labrialumn,

I'm guessing, from German saeen (to sow), that "sown" has developed by analogy with "grown" and "flown"... I ought to look up "hew," but I think it may be the same thing.

On the loss of -ly for adverbs: I believe, in fact, that for adverbs like "slow" and "quick", the "ly" is a later addition, by analogy ... "Slow" is perfectly legitimate as an adverb: Drive slow.

How about adjectives in -ly? Sickly, manly, motherly, etc.

[barlow]

I think #5 is a good rule because it is clearer and can sound like an accusation against the reader in some contexts to use "you" too much. As for passive voice, reading a paper full of nothing but passive voice can be a very draining experience. Often it is helpful to get students thinking about active vs. passive whether one imposes an absolute rule or not.

[bosphorus]

Has Dr. Esolen told us the name of that grammar, yet?

[Ethan C.]

Wait a minute, Dr. Esolen. "E.g" isn't "ex grege," it's "exempli gratia." It still means "for example," though, so your distinction between it and "i.e." (id est) is correct.

I can add another peeve: people who use periods after Latin phrases that aren't abbreviations: "in re" or just "re" is the most common pitfall, given how common it is in email.

[Ethan C.]

GL, my favorite OED entry: "ginormous." Apparently it dates back to the late '40's.

[Nick Milne]

Ethan:

I'm sorry to say that I had to look up what a participle is when I first read the post. But at least I looked it up. And it turned out that my vague intuition as to its definition was correct.

Try writing those three thoughts in a single sentence. They would definitely lose their punch.

Though I'm sorry to say I had to look up what a participle was when I first read the post, I can at least say that I did look it up, and it turned out that my vague intuition as to its definition was correct.

Glad I could help.

[Nick Milne]

Which is to say, "what a participle is," as you had formulated it. The participle, presumably, persists in being itself.

[Tony Esolen]

Nick,

Maybe -- "I had to look up what a participle was" is OK, because of the rule of sequence of tenses. There, the "was" only denotes that the participle's being was cotemporaneous with my looking it up. Of course, English will also allow "I saw what participles are," denoting persistence regardless of time. The funny thing about "was" in the first example is that it "feels" right in English (and other of the Indo-European languages), since the past tense is often used to denote a shade of uncertainty, even apart from the subjunctive mood.

I still have to unearth that grammar --

[Ethan C.]

Nick, it seems to me that you've proved my point, which was that arranging all three into a single sentence alters the meaning. You've turned the first clause into a subordinate, which lessens its effect and causes the reader to automatically carry onto the second clause. This disrupts the contrast that I was trying for. Also, by joining the last clause on with a comma instead of a period, it robs the second clause of significance and surreptitiously equates the two in importance, whereas my original construction maintained a more distinct separation between the two.

In addition, you had to resort to italics to emphasize "did," which, while not exactly cheating, has a different effect than my rendering.

All that isn't to say that your version is necessarily inferior, but that each style has its own subtle character which may render it more proper to a particular intention.

[Susan Peterson]

I grew up in a house where my declaration "I don't like you coming into my room like that!" was corrected "YOUR coming, always use a possessive with a gerund."

As a result, I cannot bring myself to sing the line of Amazing Grace which says,
"When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days (wince, sick feeling in pit of stomach) to sing God's praise.
Then when we'd just begun."

I sing "fewer days". It doesn't fit the meter. And sounds sort of more English English and elevated than the language in which the song is written. But I heard too many times,

"Less bread. Fewer loaves. Less sand. Fewer grains of sand" and whatever other examples my mother could think of.

So, while I have a real grammarian's attention, please explain for me again the distinction between "will" and "shall".

My mother had a way to remember it, but I get it mixed up. The drowning man says," I shall drown, and no one will save me." but the suicide says, "I will drown, and no one shall save me."

Is this the rule-in the first person, shall is simple future but will indicates intention, whereas in the third person, will is simple future but shall indicates intention?

The old Book of Common Prayer translation of the Nicene Creed has "And he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end."

How does this fit this rule?

Susan Peterson

[Susan Peterson]

Stuart-With respect to your comment about the RDL, what do you think about

"Remember me, Oh Lord, when you come in your kingdom." ?

The natives (probably including you, but not including me) have memorized it the old way anyway, and still say,

"Remember me, Oh Lord, when you shall come into your kingdom."

(what is the will/shall rule for the second person, by the way, Tony?)

But back to the original question. This new translation just doesn't sound like English to me. It seems to try to make the word kingdom serve a grammatical purpose it cannot serve. Maybe Tony can help with this. Why is it that ,"when you come in your glory" is English, But "when you come in your kingdom" is not?

To my ears "come in your kingdom" sounds like something which is done in a place, like play in your backyard, but come can't be used that way. (Please, lets not go there. But the syntax of this forces the mind there.)

I was told that this is theologically correct, that Jesus is not going to come into his kingdom as if He were either entering it or inheriting it; He is going to come bearing it with Him, analogous to "come in Your glory." But I don't think one should need to fracture English to express proper theology. I think the shall could be left out, but that in English one just has to say "when You come inTO your kingdom."

Stuart and Tony, comments?

Susan Peterson

RDL is "revised divine liturgy" the Ruthenian attempt to bring the horrors of gender neutral language to the eastern rite just in time to see the western rite abandon it. Just how sentient English speakers could replace "For He is gracious and loves mankind" with "For he is gracious and loves us all" and not know that they had committed an atrocity, I cannot understand.

Susan Peterson-now I am really finished.

[Matthias]

I believe the Greek experts will tell you that "in your kingdom" is more accurate. But "into your kingdom" is the KJV translation, and sounds more traditional for that reason.

And "kingdom" shouldn't be taken too concretely - something like "kingship" or "kinghood" might better capture the intent, at the cost of sounding less like normal English.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>"Remember me, Oh Lord, when you come in your kingdom." ?<<<

My wife, the professional translator of thirty years experience, says that there are many errors which bad translators can commit, and the Inter-Eparchial Liturgical Commission managed to commit all of them, even when they are mutually exclusive. In this case, they choose excessive literalism over the other pole of loose paraphrase. "Come in your Kingdom" is simply bad English, and worse, sounds vaguely obscene. There are two further objections to be made:

1. The Revised Divine Liturgy was supposed to be working from the 1944 Slavonic Recension, not from any Greek text.

2. The translation "Come into your Kingdom" employs a common English idiom, as when someone "comes into an inheritance".

On the use of "kingship" or "kinghood", the Slavonic recension employs a word (carstviji) that unambiguously means "kingdom" or [hoity-toity alternative] "dominion". As Kingdom is the accepted form, it should have been left alone.

By the way, the 1965 English translation (which, in my opinion (and that of my wife) is quite good and in need of only minor revision to correct some obvious linguistic errors and changes of liturgical usage, translated the phrase as "Remember me, O Lord, when you come into your Kingdom".

One of the hallmarks of a bad translator/editor is making minor, pedantic changes to an accepted text that do not alter in any way the meaning of the text. It shows a certain lack of humility towards both the text and to earlier translators. In this case, it also proves my contention that the reading comprehension skills of the Commission's members, in both English and Slavonic, were not up to the task they were given (and which they chose to ignore in any case).

>>>This new translation just doesn't sound like English to me.<<<

Don't worry, it isn't.

>>>I was told that this is theologically correct, that Jesus is not going to come into his kingdom as if He were either entering it or inheriting it; He is going to come bearing it with Him, analogous to "come in Your glory." But I don't think one should need to fracture English to express proper theology. I think the shall could be left out, but that in English one just has to say "when You come inTO your kingdom."<<<

On the other hand, "come in your kingdom' doesn't express it any better. Which brings up another flaw of the Revised Divine Liturgy--it's relentless didacticism, a fault it shares with the products of the ICEL in the Latin Church. Not content to let the text speak for itself, in all its ambiguities, the translators have to tell us what the text means--which is to say, they are imposing their understanding and interpretation upon it, which goes far beyond the legitimate bounds of translation, and violates the mandate that the Commission was given--to provide a full, accurate and liturgically worthy translation of the Slavonic Recension. Instead, they created what amounts to a new "Ruthenian rite" that is not consistent with the usage of either the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church or the Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Church, both of which employ the "Ruthenian Recension".

As an example of this relentless didacticism, on can look at the acclamation at the elevation, where the Slavonic closely follows the Greek: "Vonmim! Svataja Svjatym!", which literally means, "Attention! Holies for the Holy". This was originally translated in the 1965 book as "Holy things for the Holy", but was changed in the 1996 Passaic revision to "Holy Gifts to the Holy". Not trusting the people to get it, the RDL rephrases this as "Holy Gifts are for Holy People".

As an example of departing completely from the text to impose a new and utterly unsustainable rendition, we can look at the Anaphora, after the Words of Institution. There, the Slavonic again follows closely the Greek: "Tvoja ot Tvojich Teb'i prinosim, o vs'ich i za vsja". In every Orthodox Church that uses English, this is usually translated as "Thine own of Thine own we offer to Thee, on behalf of all and for all". This gets to the heart of the issue, "Who offers what to whom?", and the Fathers and Orthodox theologians down to the present day have written a host of commentaries on this passage.

In the 1965 book, this was translated as "We offer You Yours of Your own, in behalf of all and for all", which, while not perfect (it lacks the elegance of the Greek, Slavonic and common English translation) was acceptable. But for some reason, the RDL renders this as "We offer You Yours of Your own, everywhere and at all times", which is not sustained by any Greek or Slavonic text in use today. My wife believes that this is an example of a simple linguistic error brought on by lack of familiarity with Slavonic ("kitchen Slavonic") in which one particular word sounds like a Ukrainian word that means "everywhere". When pressed on this matter, one of the key members of the Commission flustered that they had found this in a "variant manuscript" and had decided to run with it. Requests to produce the variant manuscript for examination have been met with silence. Make of that what you will.

But let us assume that there is such a variant manuscript. A cardinal rule of translation is when presented with different variations of the text, one should go with the majority text unless evidence can be presented that it is corrupted (an example of such a corruption can be found elsewhere in the Anaphora, in which the original Greek text, "Mercy, Peace, a Sacrifice of praise" became in Slavonic "A mercy of peace, a sacrifice of praise"). In this case, all the other manuscripts, going back to the 13th century, are consistent. The final nail in the coffin is the 1629 Liturgicon of St. Peter Moghila, which was the liturgical text used in the Carpathians at the time of the Union of Uzherod (1646), in which the Slavonic is identical with that of the 1944 Slavonic recension. So here, we depart entirely from paraphrase, and run into the land of pure invention.

On the substitution of "all" for the dreaded "mankind", this appears in several places. In Orthodox liturgy and theology, Christ is frequently called "the Lover of Mankind" (Chelov'ikol'ubec). "Lover of us all" and "loves us all" are not accurate translations. One could, I suppose, substitute "humankind" or "humanity" for "mankind" (asked why he made this substitution, Fr. David Petras resorted to the "argumentum ad Red Lobster"--apparently he was in a Red Lobster restaurant, went to the restroom, and looking at the little icons of a man and a woman on the respective doors, had an epiphany--people are too stupid to know that mankind refers to both men and women), but these lack euphony and would have problems conforming to the meter of the chants. But using "all" begs a lot of questions: just who are "all"? The people at this particular liturgy? The members of the Ruthenian Church? All Christians? Everybody in the whole world? So in trying to avoid offending women (and the only women I know who would both be offended and still bother to go to a Ruthenian liturgy are the radicalized Basilian nuns at Mount St. Macrina in Uniontown, PA), the Commission created more problems than it solved.

I do know this: my elder daughter walked out the door of the Ruthenian Church upon hearing it for the first time, never to return (she wanders between Orthodox and Melkite parishes), my younger daughter responded, "This burns with lameness", and (until we left), my wife and I would literally cover our ears so we could not hear it. "Good", by the way, is an accurate translation used by most of the Orthodox, but to my ear "gracious" was a better choice. Another abiding sin of the RDL is its flattening of the language and avoidance of synonyms, even when, presented with a choice of alternatives, one would work better in a given place, a different word in another. Mindless consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

To paraphrase St. John the Theologian, there are many more abominations that could be mentioned here, that would fill many books. But I hope these will do for a start. I would have been quite happy had the Commission stuck to its knitting and merely presented us with an artful and accurate translation of the full text of the Divine Liturgy, being as literal as possible and as loose as necessary, without imposing its own corrupted concept of modern liturgy upon it.

Supposedly, they made these changes to make the Liturgy more palatable to modern Americans not familiar with the Church, as an aid to evangelization. But, of course, if that was the objective, then I am the target audience, being one of a handful of people who have been baptized directly into the Ruthenian Church without any intermediate stops. So are my wife and my daughters. But, as I recently told one of the authors of this piece of trash, to his face, "If I had walked into a Ruthenian parish back in 1996 and heard this, I would be Orthodox today--and the world would be a different place".

One last note: the old liturgical books had the Slavonic side-by-side with the English text. The new books have omitted all Slavonic. This, I suppose, prevents those in the congregation who know Slavonic from raising embarrassing questions about the fluency of the translators.

[Tony Esolen]

Ladies and gentlemen,

The grammar book I have in mind -- it's pretty sophisticated, but it's delightful -- is R. W. Zandvoort, A Handbook of English Grammar (Longmans, 1966). It's not a style book, but you sure can learn a lot of stylistic nuances from it and its discussion of the different shadings of sentences that seem to say the same thing. For example:

Mr. Gibbons was a timid man.
A timid man was Mr. Gibbons.
He was a timid man, was Mr. Gibbons.

Susan,

The will-shall distinction is really fascinating. Rules -- more descriptive than prescriptive, though it would be a rotten thing to lose these subtle distinctions:

"Shall is used in the second and third persons to express the will (command, promise, threat) of the speaker or writer; also, in the first and third persons, to ask after the will of the person addressed." So:

Any one attempting to desert shall be shot.
Do you think I cannot breach these walls? You shall see otherwise tomorrow.
Shall I get you some aspirin?
Thou shalt not steal.
So he refuses to go? I tell you he SHALL.
He wants to know if (it is your will that) he should (preterite of "shall") pick you up tomorrow morning.

"In slightly archaic style 'shall' is used modally (i.e., to express purpose, desirability or contingency) in dependent clauses":

It has been decided that the second reading shall not be opposed.
Do whatever shall seem good to you.
... That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the face of the earth.

"An action or state belonging to a future time-sphere may be expressed by 'shall' + plain infinitive in the first person, 'will' + plain infinitive in the second and third." (For British English; in American English, the author says, citing Mencken, 'will' is normally used all the way through.)

When shall we see you again?
You will meet a man in a straw hat.
They won't find it as easy as they think.

Yet -- "the idea of futurity is often combined with that of the will or the intention of the speaker or writer." When that happens, the rule above is reversed: "will" is used in the first person, "shall" in the second and third:

I'll follow and bring you back by force -- I WILL!
He won't go? I say he shall.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Probability or an assumption on the part of the speaker may be expressed by 'will' (as in German, with 'werden', and in Italian with the future of 'to be'):

That will be the mailman.
You'll have heard, no doubt, of the recent unpleasantness.

As I said, it's a great book....

[GL]

Tony,

Thanks for the recommendation on a grammar text. Or in the words of that more famous Memphian, "Thank you, thank you very much." ;-)

[Robin]

Yes, thank you, Professor! I look forward to learning something.

[Josh S.]

I recently encountered a number of people who use the word "indifferently" in place of "differently." They were alleging that they were discriminated against (treated more harshly in comparison with co-workers) by their supervisor - not that they were ignored. Has anyone else experienced this use of the word "indifferently"?

[Stuart Koehl]

My present pet peeve are those people who use "disinterested" when they really mean "uninterested".

[Tony Esolen]

It seems that the meanings of "interest" and "concern" are a muddle. Some of it, I suppose, is all right in colloquial speech or writing: "I'm interested" means "It piques my curiosity," and "I'm concerned" means "I'm pretending that the situation moves me emotionally." I like the older meanings: "I'm concerned" means "I have a stake in it" or "I am involved in the problem, unfortunately." As in popular Italian, "Che c'entri tu?", meaning "How do you come into it?", that is, "What's it to you?"

The old meanings had the virtue of precision. If I'm an interested party to a lawsuit, that means I stand to lose or gain by it, possibly... If I want to say that I'm paying close attention to the suit, because it piques my (intellectual) interest, hmm, I guess I should say that... Even if "interest" means what it now means, though, we should still preserve the useful distinction between "disinterested" and "uninterested".

By the way, let's chuck "disrespect" as a verb. Why not "scorn," "contemn," "vilify," "slight," etc.?

[T. Chan]

Thank you Dr. Esolen! It appears to be a difficult book to find.

[labrialumn]

My grammar is by ear, so I do not know how off this might be; but "drive safe" sounds like an imperative to drive a thing called a "safe" whereas "drive safely" means to drive in a safe-like manner, that is not recklessly.

[labrialumn]

MIght some of this be regional? For instance; I am from the upper midwest, above the US 20 dividing line. We don't use the southern 2nd person plural, plural redundancy.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>means to drive in a safe-like manner, that is not recklessly.<<<

I am reminded of a Second City Television skit spoofing Westerns, in which people said things like, "Let's get down to the mine, real quick like" and "Time him up, real thorough like". One of the henchmen asks the chief black hat (with a black hat, of course), "Boss, why don't we use adverbs?" The Boss then shoots him in the arm. "It's OK, Boss", says the dumb cow poke. "It's just a flesh wound, real superficial like".

[Joe Long]

My wife, during her public school teaching days, had a particularly entertaining (though not particularly helpful) student teacher one semester. This young lady (long since graduated, of course, with an elementary education degree) was leading a vocabularly lesson, and the fifth-graders were using the various words in sentences. They faltered at "dejectedly".

She helpfully supplied an example: "He walked along in a dejectedly sort of way".

We still use the phrase "in a dejectedly sort of way" at my house (generally to describe the state of "being embarassed at the deflation of your pretensions").

[Carbonel]

C.S. Lewis recommended reading the reading of old books in order to offset temporal parochialism. There is another advantage to taking his advice: When a child reads old children's books, he offsets slatternly modern grammar.

The most effective guide to good grammar that a teacher can give his children (or his students) is this: read, read, read. (caveat, as to titles chosen, as above)

Then study a foreign language.

Grammatically-sound writing will follow, as the night the day.

[Kamilla]

Sorry I've been a way for a few days - thanks for the responses.

But, Tony, a blast? Really? It makes my teeth ache!

Kamilla

[Vicki Small]

I feel as if I had sat down to eat a yummy snack and, instead, pigged out on a feast meant for three!

a. I learned sentence diagramming--and loved it--in the 50's. In the 90's, I was subjected to the "tree" method, as part of my Master's coursework in English. I learned the truth, that "Only God can make a tree"!

b. In my higher education, I was told that "spelling isn't important, as long as the reader understands what is meant"; and that no justification exists for diagramming sentences. I rejected the first idea and temporarily bought into the second. I came back to "faith" when a professor made the statement, "Diagramming sentences gives us a good visual image of how our language works." Okay.

c. Some of my fellow graduate students--studying for Ph.D.'s, of course--couldn't spell their way out of a hat, so, of course, they told their students that essays would not be marked down for spelling errors.

d. When I began teaching freshman composition courses at our community college, I discovered how little my students knew about this language that was native, to most of them. "What's an adverb?" I asked. "Doesn't it describe things?" No.

e. I took a course in Advanced Composition in my first semester at the university, when I returned to school almost 20 years ago. One of our textbooks was Edward P.J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 2nd Ed. (Oxford, 1971). It is certainly a different animal than, say, the Holt Handbook, which I did like for teaching freshmen who were largely ignorant about the English language. On the other hand, Holt was more on my own level of knowledge, whereas Corbett delved far deeper than I had ever been led, before.

[em]

I always knew some of these were silliness even when I was being taught them but I followed them meekly for the purpose of obtaining good grades. The passive voice is particularly useful at points.

[B. Durbin]

"Never use the same word twice in a row."

I endeavor to not perform this feat in my writing, striving instead for some variance of vocabulary.

*cough*

On the other hand, I very rarely get into parallel structures, where repetition of a key word or phrase is particularly helpful. The Gettysburg Address is indeed a good example of this as "government of the people, for the people, and by the people" is so clearly a parallel structure as to be made into bullet points in the joke PowerPoint version of same.

The problem with many of those "rules" is that they are not rules, they are exercises. When I took advanced composition in high school, the teacher was fond of giving us these exercises. "Go through your paper and rephrase any sentence that starts with 'The.'" "Take out all of your adverbs." "Rephrase every passive voice sentence into an active voice sentence."

The goal was not to teach us that such things were rules but to force us to think about our writing. I still use adverbs. I still write passive sentences (see above.) But (!) now I think about these choices.

And one last thing— my written grammar is, perhaps, both more and less correct than it was when I was in high school. More correct because I understand it better; less correct because it has, in many cases, become quite colloquial and closer to spoken English. (Naturally, on this sort of thread, I use a far more formal mode because it is both appropriate and rather fun.)

[Philip]

Susan Peterson,

Why not change it to "no less day?"

[Philip]

Susan Peterson,

Why not change it to "no less day?"