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International Grammar Police Branch Office
First established in 1979 in Taipei Taiwan by B. Shuai, Dr. Ati, Ivan Skavinsky Skvar, and ..... , The Grammar Police were forced underground in the United States for years due to the politically unfriendly climate for all things traditionally correct. Nonetheless, the branch manager here, Ali Baba, managed to revive the unit at San Bernardino Valley College where the Deputies' Hall of Fame of has climbed to four:
Grammar Police Kudos to:
The Branch office here compiles crimes against the English language to be found in the print media. The Los Angeles Times is a goldmine, and the classified ads, under education and teaching, are especially rich resources, not to mention the written and printed materials that come out of the Public Schools, even the State Department of Education.
While usage does, indeed, determine what is and is not correct, the simple fact that "a lot of people say it like that" does not make it correct. Remember,
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lie vs. lay
its vs. it's
past participles
their vs. there
bloopers
he and I vs. him and me
- The Times regularly prints articles in which the transitive verb "lay" is confused with the intransitive/reflexive verb "lie."
- Especially memorable was their headline about "Bohemian Ojai which lays...."
- All of these examples have incorrectly substituted the verb "lay" for "lie;" they should be using the verb lie. The confusion lies in the fact that the past tense of lie is lay:
- lie, lay, have lain
- lay, laid, have laid
- A person lies down, gets sleepy, and then lays down his book. The verb lay takes an object ("his book").
- Another source of confusion lies in the words of a bedtime prayer we learn as children: "Now I lay me down to sleep...." Notice, however, that lay does have an object: me.
- lay, laid, have laid
- The recently published Bonfire of the Humanities, is an otherwise elegantly-written book by David Marc, who, while continuously harping on Neil Postman's writing ability, also consistently confuses the use of lie and lay:
- "...we seem to have gotten a lot of people laying around in their underwear watching 'Family Feud.'" (p. 40)
- "...the Whitmanian principle that the measure of democracy's success as a political system would lay in the quality of the popular culture produced under its rule." (p. 95)
- Quoted in the 17 July Hong Kong Standard comes this quote out of Miami:
- "Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Barreto said on Wednesday that Cunanan, who had been spotted in the Miami area as long as two weeks before, ``was laying in wait for him ... it appears to me that this was a planned event ... an execution-type incident.''
- We don't need to hold Police Chiefs to the same English standard to which we hold teachers. Teachers should know better; police have other concerns and, although their spoken English is very colloquial, they must be and are able to write with admirable precision when filling out reports.
- Another common error is the confusing of its and it's:
- It's = contraction of it + is (as in he's [he+is], she's [she+is])
- its = possessive form of it (as in his, not he's, and hers, not her's)
- San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools has a group of Inland Empire Educators doing a packaged tour of China and sending back dispatches and researched information about the sites they visit. On one of these, we find it's substituting for its. As noted elsewhere, School Districts are a surprisingly rich source of grammatical confusion.
- its = possessive form of it (as in his, not he's, and hers, not her's)
- Past Participles
- A lot of people drop the correct past participle in speech. We heard a lot of it surrounding the recent Holyfield fight. Past participles are used in the passive and these two are most frequently misused:
- bite-bit-bitten:
- Part of Evander Holyfield's ear was bitten off by Tyson.
- Holyfield was bitten by Tyson
- Both of these were misstated as: "Holyfield got bit by Tyson," mistakenly substituting the simple past for the participle.
- beat-beat-beaten
- Tyson was beaten by Holyfield before he bit Holyfield's ear.
- Tyson got beaten by Holyfield
- Both of these were misstated as "Tyson got beat by Holyfield."
- Part of Evander Holyfield's ear was bitten off by Tyson.
Another wonderful source of poor grammar is in the public school systems' printed materials, even at the state level:
- Several years ago the State Department of Education held an educational summit. They put together a report on the topics discussed. In not just one but two places they wrote "Bilingual education is a scared cow...." in California. It should have said sacred cow, which is an idiom for something that cannot be interfered with in any way. It's a typographical error; both scared and sacred are words. However, one expects that at the State Department of Education, someone would actually proofread the publication before it was printed, rather than send it through the computerized spell checker. Our Grammar Police agent opened the report at random and this error jumped off the page, written in large bold print and featured in a text box. It's not like it was buried in a fine-print footnote! Grammar at this point is a Scarred Cow.
- If you look on the net you'll see a web page for a group of 20 "educators," under the wing of the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, seeing all the tourist spots of China. Today it tells us they "...have made there way to Hangzhou, China." They have confused the word "there," indicating place, with the possessive adjective "their." Again, the computer will always tell you that you've spelled it right. It doesn't tell you if you've used it right!
- Teachers should know these elementary things: its and their are possessive adjectives; it's and there are a contraction of it is and an adverb of place, respectively. It's no wonder that English skills in High School graduates are dropping below what is expected of entering college freshmen.
- Torrance Unified School District, in a three-sentence letter of rejection managed to state, "You were not selected to be considered further for a elementary teaching position." Is it any wonder I had to write an open letter asking them how on earth they managed to misinterpret everything presented to them? With people like this doing the hiring for public schools, I am assured of a job in Remedial Education for well into the twenty-first century! Oddly enough, the following year, they were advertising for weeks for a Reading Recovery teacher.
- We often hear teachers avoiding the obviously erroneous "Him and me went to the store," without having the slightest idea of why it is wrong, substituting "He and I" for every "him and me" construction, whether correct or not, putting them into the wonderful category we call the "graduates of the Nathan Detroit school of grammar," (aka. the jailhouse learned; use of pretentiously incorrect grammar is as telling as that of the use of speech peppered with incorrect or incorrectly used words of more than two syllables)
- The correct use of these is as follows:
- If the pronouns are the subject of the verb, use the subject form (he, she, it, we, I, they):
- I went to the store. He went to the store.
- He and I went to the store.
- She went to the store. I went to the store.
- She and I went to the store.
- I went to the store. He went to the store.
- If the pronouns are the object of the verb, use the object form (him, her, it, us, me, them):
- He gave some candy to us.
- He gave some candy to her. He gave some candy to me.
- He gave some candy to her and me.
- He gave some candy to him. He gave some candy to me.
- He gave some candy to him and me.
- The rule of thumb here is to test out the sentence in your head with only one pronoun. You wouldn't say, "They gave something to he," would you? You wouldn't say, "They gave something to I," would you? No, of course not. Then why would you say, "They gave something to he and I?" It only demonstrates a wish to speak correctly without the knowledge to do so (if you hear a teacher speaking like this, consider it a warning of a lack of knowledge but a wish for it).
- The primary teachers at teachers.net are all up in arms in their defense of such constructions as
- "It's broke"
- "...something I would have wrote."
- They have clearly stated that they feel that participles are unnecessary parts of speech below the university level; here there is not even a wish for knowledge. Frightening. There is, however, a transparent Emperor's New Clothes syndrome operative in the vicious attacks this office has been under in their stolid defense of such constructions. Stolid defense? It got worse--we actually had a death threat (1/30/99) from a 3rd grade teacher in Texas for our having dared to suggest that teachers should at the very least, in the absence of content competence, be able to spell the subjects they are expected to teach, like "grammer" (sic sic sic). Yes, folks, these are the people who are teaching your children in the absence of qualified teachers (who earn a minimum of $5000 a year more and so are somewhat unemployable). Well, you get what you pay for: talking heads. These teachers are products of the self esteem movement, a self-esteem so fragile that any suggestion for improvement is met with threats and saber-rattling. Support vouchers.
- An especially memorable error came from a June article in The Los Angeles Times from the "Readers' Representative," Michael Parks declaring that a "team of editors and reporters" have been appointed "to identify mistakes, determine how they occur, and propose a course of corrective action." In the article, a wonderful Nathan Detroit School of Grammar construction was made, not once, but twice:
- "A number of readers believes ...."
- repeated several paragraphs later as
- "A number of complaints arrives ...."
- The rule is:
- "Number takes a singular verb when it is preceded by the article the; a plural verb when preceded by a.
- The number of members was increased to fifty.
- A number of new members were elected." (p. 203, Smart, Review English Grammar)
- repeated several paragraphs later as
- Related to this also is the confusion over There is/There are, a simple introductory ESL construction designed to give students practice in using predicate adjectives, which has nothing to do with this. This is a simple subject-verb agreement issue. However, people are confused about There is/There are when followed by the expression a lot of.
- a lot of is a simple substitute for the quantifiers much and many used with mass (or non-count) nouns and count nouns, respectively, as in:
- There isn't much milk in the carton.
- Is there much milk in the carton?
- There is a lot of milk in the carton. (much isn't generally used in positive statements, only in questions or negatives)
- "There are many people in the theatre" becomes "There are a lot of people in the theatre."
- Is there much milk in the carton?
- a lot of simplifies the choices for much and many, as many isn't often used in positive statements, only questions and negatives; it is not, however, a substitute for subject-verb agreement. If the subject is plural, the verb is plural; if the subject is singular, the verb is singular.
- a lot of is not the subject in the sentence below; people is the subject:
- "There are a lot of people in the theatre." is the correct construction for what we commonly see (and more commonly hear) as
- "There is a lot of people in the theatre.
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Copyright © 2007 Alison McMahon Johnson. All Rights Reserved - "There is a lot of people in the theatre.
- There isn't much milk in the carton.