Sometimes even the experts simply have it wrong. I’m staring at a dozen grammar and style books trying to locate some of the most common errors people commit in writing and speech.
We concede that because people speak about 10 times faster than they write, the ear tunes out some — but not all — of the errors we hear. Because we have more time to read things, we can be more critical of errors in print.
Let me explain:
Now that I’ve turned 70, my short-term memory is not what it used to be. In fact, my short-term memory is not what it used to be. We often hear locutions like, “They gave the award to she and I.”
She and I? Hardly. They gave the award to her and me. Because such a sentence is fairly common, I checked some sources, trying to find an explanation. The first source, a yellowed, ‘60s-era newspaper stylebook, explained that people often use the wrong pronoun in feigning snobbishness. According to the editors of the stylebook, “she and I” sounds more high-falutin’ than “her and me,” and that’s why it’s used that way.
Here, the experts simply got it wrong. There is nothing inherently more high-brow about using she for her and I for me. The problem lies simply in short memory. By the time we get to the object, the receiver of the action, we forget how the sentence started and we simply don’t remember to use the objective case and revert back to the nominative.
For simplicity, the nominative case of the pronoun, she or I, usually goes at the beginning of the sentence, and the objective case, her or me, generally goes at the end.
We would never say, “They gave the award to she.” It’s when we have more than one element, and an “and” that we get into trouble. So, between you and I — er, me— high-blown prose or not, them did not give the award to I.
Forgetting how we started our sentences reminds me of a quotation by Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680): “Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?”
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Can a fact exist in the future or a promise exist in the past? Notice how frequently the mis-placement of “promise” occurs. A music video features a host of fast-food workers asking the customers for napkins. One of the lines is: “May I have a napkin, please? I promise I’m not hurting any trees.”
A promise is an assurance one will do something in the future, as in, “I promise to behave from now on.”
Clearly, the music crew means to say it won’t hurt trees (in the future), but what if they’ve been cavalier in the past? What if one of them wasted many napkins, grievously offending Mother Nature? How else can a person get the meaning across?
We hear people say, regarding something in the recent past, “I promise I didn’t go over the speed limit.” That may well be, and despite the obvious grammatical error, we wonder how else one can assure another of such rectitude. One could say, “Honestly, I didn’t speed” or “I swear I didn’t really put the pedal to the metal.” We don’t hear those usages too often. Is it because people don’t like to swear?
Even the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, gives a past tense slant to “promise” when its instructions for submissions include the following admonition: “You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself.”
Yes, we promise.
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A notice that appears often in the Optic, before we edit it, concerns the fact that for a particular event, seating is limited and therefore it’s on a first-come, first-serve basis.
I asked my colleagues why people write “serve” instead of “served” (as in dinner is served, not serve). Our consensus is that it’s difficult to complete the thought without using “basis.” So, if the basis is that the first to arrive are the first ones tended to, people simply won’t hear the d in served, as its sound gets assimilated by the b in basis.
We see particular letters elided, particularly in home-painted restaurant signs and menus, as in “ice tea,” when the drink should be iced. The first letter in “tea” often drowns out the d in “iced.”
As a language cop, I hoped to find millions of Internet “hits” defending my stance that it should be iced tea and not ice tea, Well, it seems that just as many sources are willing to let “ice” just slide by. The drink tastes the same regardless of how it’s spelled.
So what’s next? Are we to accept cell phone texting as standard? R U ready 4 such a travesty?
The culprit is the first problem is as much politeness as snobbishness, it seems to me.. If we didn’t insist on the nicety of referring to the other person first, we’d never run into a “she and I” problem. We’d say “they gave the award to me and her.”
Of course there are English speakers who start sentences with “me and her” as in “Me and her are going to the show.”
Never thought about “iced tea” until you mentioned it. I’ve been saying “ice tea” all my life, or as long as I’ve been drinking it. I don’t think I tasted tea until I was a teenager.