\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit a man in the eye. Not really. I just used the sentence as a way of demonstrating how adverbs such as “only” get to move around in sentences and thus provide us with a host of interpretations.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In my class at the United World College a few years back, I wrote down that sentence and asked students to place the word “only” in different positions.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Like this:<\/p>\n
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Only I hit him in the eye. (Darn, I wish my Railroad Avenue buddies had been able to join in.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I only hit him in the eye. (The injury could have been much worse. Honest.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit only him in the eye. (His brother was asking for it too, but I decided one lawsuit is enough).
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit him only in the eye. (No other place.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit him in only the eye. (See above.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit him in the only eye. (This guy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a Cyclops.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit him in the eye only. (Nowhere else.)
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Lucille Van Horn, a reader of this column, showed me a newspaper clipping whose headline clearly had a misplaced “only.” The head read something like, “The spectator only wanted to help.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner, describes “only” as “perhaps the most frequently misplaced of all English words.” Garner says its best placement is precisely before the words intended to be limited: “The more words separating \u00e2\u20ac\u02dconly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 from its correct position, the more awkward the sentence.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A recent newspaper article mentioned that the “suspect only provided his driver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s license after police demanded it.” This, I am sure, is the way most people talk. We all realize that the suspect wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t being overly cooperative. Ideally, the “only” should go immediately after “license.” Otherwise, we imply the suspect produced the license and not much else.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Notice how often we place “only” early in the sentence, giving it not quite the intended meaning, as in, “She only dates fraternity members” or “The New Mexico Space Port will only benefit wealthy people like Victoria Principal.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A recent column, in which I broached “only,” mentioned “used to” as well. Deliberately, in several places, I used “used to” in place of “use to” and vice-versa. Meanwhile, before it went to press, the managing editor caught these deliberate errors, fixed them and later needed to break them again.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The use of “He use to be my friend,” I believe, is strictly a question of phonics, what one hears. Because in speech “to” tends to drown out the “d” in “used,” people don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear it and leave it out. The omission is common and usually undetected in speech, but in writing, the error is glaring.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I got so wrapped up in last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s column, attempting to make the “use to” errors that I lost track. Early in the column, I referred to lions that “don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t share, or at least they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t used to.” Should it have been “didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use to?” I believed “didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use to” was correct and accordingly used the other form \u00e2\u20ac\u201d to have something to write about this week. Still, “didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use to” doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sound right.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“I used to” is used by people who drink “ice tea” instead of “iced tea.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Sometimes the wretched way of spelling words haunts people. A colleague, the late Bill Knell, taught composition courses at Highlands for years. The way he told the story, a woman in his class asked Knell if she could show him her shimmy. Now a shimmy is usually what a car does when not aligned properly or a tire isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t balanced.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Or it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a funny, shaky move performed by I.C. cheerleaders of old. Presumably a human\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shimmy would be a kind of stutter step, a jiggle here, a wiggle there.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Surely, Knell was confused over the student\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s offer to show her shimmy, and asked her exactly what she had in mind. Did the coed intend to show the shimmy in full view of her classmates?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0When Knell asked her intentions, she apparently answered something like this: “I have my shimmy ready. Remember last week you asked us to come up with a shimmy for organizing our term papers?”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“Please spell the word you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re using,” he must\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve asked.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0She did: “S-c-h-e-m-e, and that spells \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcshimmy.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Many of us have synonymania, the compulsion never to call a spade a spade. Therefore, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever say, “The ball went through the goalposts,” but “The pigskin split the uprights.” Nor do we call it a football field but a gridiron.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And in election coverage, it gets repetitious to keep saying someone received x-number of votes. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why some people use “garner,” as in gleaning, receiving or collecting.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Yet in a recent college publication, the magazine cover mentions that a football coach “garnished” plenty of support. And the table of contents refers to someone else who “garnished placement” in an institute.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Now only recently has it became acceptable to refer to the process of withholding a portion of a deadbeat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paycheck \u00e2\u20ac\u201d garnisheeing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d as “garnishing.” But garnishing also means the act of placing a tomato wedge and cucumber on a salad or other dish.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0But garnering and garnishing are different bags altogether. Unless, perhaps the recipients of these awards devised some kind of shimmy and only wanted to spruce them up by adorning them with a sprig of parsley, the way we use to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I hit a man in the eye. Not really. I just used the sentence as a way of demonstrating how adverbs such as “only” get to move around in sentences and thus provide us with a host of interpretations. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In my class at the United World College a few years back, I wrote down that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}