Onesies and Twosies—getting plurals right

Not just any old plurals, either. You know all about ordinary plurals. Several words tend to trip up the educated (read pretentious), especially those in the upper echelons of business.

Incident—an event, especially if it’s remarkable in some way. This word takes a perfectly ordinary plural: “incidents.” Do not burden your listener (or reader) with the Latinized and incorrect “incidences.”

Process—another one the boss lies to Latinize. The plural is perfectly ordinary: processes (‘pra-sess-uz), not procesese, or procesees (pra-sess-’eeze), or however you spell it.

Phenomena— This is the plural! The singular is “phenomenon.”

Data—neither a robot nor a singular. The singular is datum. This distinction is disappearing, and you see it mainly in scientific literature, but figure on maintaining the distinction in any context where you need to refer to a single datum.

Some words tell you whether to use the singular or plural. “Every,” for example, always refers to a singular. I found this one in the wild: “…has crossed every t’s and dotted every i’s…” I leave the fixing of that one as an exercise for the reader.

Got any pet peeve plurals of your own? Do the curmudgeonly thing and comment.

P.S. The title of this post is an expression used in purchasing departments, referring to the purchase of small numbers of items rather than large lots.

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A lot of times we write about two things at once. That’s why we have “and.” Here’s a little trick that will make your writing more logical when you write about two things.

When you have two of something, they should be of the same grammatical type. We call this parallelism.

Here’s an example of how not to do it. The sentence below has three pairs, and one of them is wrong. Can you spot all three and identify the wrong one?

“Injuries and illness bring pain and suffering, as well as causing economic loss to the company.”

…

Got it? The two pairs of nouns are easy to spot. Injuries and illness, pain and suffering. We also have a pair of verbs, but one is an indicative (bring), and the other is a present participle (causing)! The horror! Writers miss this because they want to sound sophisticated by not using plain old “and,” but but the big, long, cumbersome, usually unnecessary “as well as.” Put “and” in there and suddenly “causing” is obviously wrong. It should be “cause.” Now the two verbs are parallel.  Here’s the improved sentence, nice and clean:

“Injuries and illness bring pain and suffering, and cause economic loss to the company.”

Don’t injure your writing by messing up your parallelism. Got any examples of your own? Share in the comments.

Redundancy is when you say (write) something twice that needs to be said only once.

The test for redundancy is to remove one of the candidates. Does the meaning change? If no, then you have a redundancy. Redundancies are easy to miss because you have to be paying attention to what you are saying to catch them. Many redundancies are idiomatic, and since we’re used to them, we tend to slide over them without close attention.

Here’s an easy one: “Let’s do it over again.” —You don’t need both “over” and “again.” Remove either word and you have not only the same meaning, but a cleaner, tighter (technical terms for “more concise”) sentence.

Here’s a hard one. I found it in a construction specification, a very technical document that needs to be a concise as possible so the reader can get to the content with the least effort.

“…uses a ship-lap joint system that allows for expansion and contraction to occur.” I’ll spell out the redundancy below, so look at this sentence yourself first, to see if you can discern the redundancy.

…

Okay, class, time’s up.

Congratulations if you figured out that you can leave out either the “for” or the “to occur.” Go back and read the sentence with each choice left out. See?

Here’s why you have a redundancy. Read slowly—the explanation is a bit technical, but within the realm of basic grammar.

• “Expansion and contraction” stand comfortably as the object of the preposition “for.”
• The phrase “to occur”  is an infinitive, which can take a subject, as it does in this sentence. Its subject is  “expansion and contraction.”

So this sentence uses “expansion and contraction” as two things at once. Big no-no. (oops.)

(Delete the infinitive. “To occur” a way of saying “to be.” As a general rule, any time you leave out any form of “to be” from your writing, you produce better writing.)

Word processors have advanced a lot since I started out in computing (a 64K Color Computer, on which I taught myself BASIC). When you type a quotation mark, the big word processors figure out which direction to make the curly quotes.  Text editors and other simple word processors generally use the simpler straight quotes.

Aside: I am the proud owner of a pocket knife I inherited from my grandfather that has the word “Rajah” inscribed on it, and the closing quote is not an upside-down version of the opening quotes. It’s a mirror image, which is how they ought to be. That convention died out a long time ago when typographers eliminated a bin of punctuation marks by turning the opening marks over. Since they were doing it all by hand, I suppose I can’t blame them, but I still like mirror-image marks.

By convention nowadays, we use the curly quotes for quotation marks, and the straight quotes as an abbreviation for feet and inches. This is a useful distinction, but how do you get your word processor to make the straight ones when you need them?

Here’s something I just discovered:

In the latest version of MS Word, version 2007, you can get straight quotes by typing the quote key, then pressing the backspace key. The curly changes to straight. Slick; only one extra keystroke.

Have you discovered a handy shortcut for something you do when you write? Share!

Lots of people like to quote the Bible. Unfortunately, lots of people like to quote some old saw and say it’s from the Bible. Now you certainly have permission to repeat old saws, but don’t betray your illiteracy by making the wrong attribution.

Here are a few aphorisms (fancy word for old saw) that lots of people get wrong:

• Money is the root of all evil—Sorry, it’s LOVE of money etc. Go look at I Timothy 6:10
• God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform—part of a hymn by William Cowper. Closest similar thought in the Bible would be Hebrews 1:1, maybe Isaiah 55:8f  (f is an abbreviation in verse references and elsewhere for “single (verse) following.” ff means “more than one (verse) following.”
• God helps those who help themselves—Poor Richard’s Almanack.
• Cleanliness is next to godliness—Ben Franklin again. Cleanliness is part of godliness. See Leviticus 10:10 and lots of other places.
• Do unto others what you would have others do unto you—Right idea, but stated backwards. Matthew 17:12 says. “… all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them…”
• To thine own self be true—Hamlet. His dad is giving him advice as Hamlet heads off to college. It’s a good list of advice.
• All things come to him that waits—Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn, first story (the student’s tale)

I could go on. What are your favorite Bible misquotes? Tell us in the comments, and be sure to give the correct citation. Today’s topic was stimulated by today’s Dilbert.