We have seen The Linguistics Major before.

Ahem. Not that a linguistics major is completely useless. My wedding ring is inscribed with a quote (in Greek, of course) from the Septuagint. Oh—in case you don’t know, Uralic and Altaic are two very old Indo-European languages. And I’ve been meaning to point out what “decimate” really means; well, what it used to mean. I think the meaning of that word is a battle we purists have lost.

Artifacts created from one of the five buttes, Obsidian Butte, first appear in Native American villages around 510 B.C. to 640 B.C. … However, for decades, researchers thought Obsidian Butte erupted thousands of years earlier.

To be really correct, the sentence should say “…Obsidian Butte had erupted thousands of years earlier.” The sentence is in an article on volcanism in the Salton Sea in Scientific American online, and I encourage you to read it. The  sentence refers to something that happened in the past, the eruptions. So far, so good. But the eruptions that happened in the past ended before something else that happened in the past, namely the creation of the artifacts. When you have something that starts in the past, and ends in the past, you should use the past perfect, not the simple past.

The only photo of the butte I could find was copyrighted, so here’s a picture of some obsidian in situ

Read the article and you will see a couple more places where the past perfect is more correct. It will be good practice for you.

Hopefully, my party will win the election.

Hopefully means “in a hopeful manner.” What people mean when they say a sentence like this is, “I hope my party wins the election.” I think getting people to get this construction right is a losing battle. Everybody knows what you mean, and it’s even correct to say it this way in German. But to those of you who pay attention to your use of language, and who want what you say or write to be smooth and clear, and not the object of curmudgeonly snickers, I recommend you say what you actually mean. “I hope…”

“Hopefully” isn’t the only culprit. People make this mistake a lot, and it often goes unnoticed. Here’s a sentence from an interesting article in Wired:

What do HIV, Ebola and SARS have in common? For one, they have terrifying fatality rates. But more importantly, they are all zoonotic diseases, meaning they jumped from animals to humans.

No! It’s more important, not more importantly.

Are you a thankful person? How about this article title:

Thankfully, I don’t keep Kosher anymore.

I hope (not hopefully) you don’t mind that I used something sectarian, but I think you can tell that what the writer means is “I am thankful that I don’t etc.”

An interesting fact about Kosher food

Enough examples of doing it wrong. Here’s an example of doing it right: Voice of America, this time (last paragraph in the article):

It is reported that Turkey has extradited to Tunisia a suspect in the Benghazi attack, but State Department officials would not comment on whether U.S. authorities are trying to question that individual.

Notice how easy it would be to start the sentence with “Reportedly, Turkey has …” I’m not all that gung-ho about the reporter using the passive, but at least it’s grammatical.

I end with a test. Is “potentially” used correctly in this sentence, or not? (The article is here.)

In contrast, a single hacker who figures out how to impersonate other voters could potentially cast thousands or even millions of fraudulent votes.

I hope you will be more careful about your adverbs now.

Remember: Compose refers to multiple things combining into a single thing. Twenty-six letters compose our alphabet. Or if you reverse it, the alphabet is composed of 26 letters.

Comprise goes the other way. The English alphabet, comprising 26 letters,… and we don’t say “is comprised of.” Ever. Harrumpf. Saying “comprised of” is a pretentiousism.

Here’s an article in the eWeek online newsletter that has it right:

Shipping and postage-related terms made up over 26 percent of words featured in malicious file names, and comprised 7 of the 10 most common words identified in the first half of 2012.

See? That wasn’t so hard. The terms (admittedly a plural) comprise seven items.  They do it again, and almost get it right a sentence or two later. I think their proofreader wasn’t paying attention:

By far, .zip files were the most common malicious attachments seen by FireEye, compromising 76.91 percent of the file extensions used by attackers. Next on the list were PDF files, which accounted for 11.79 percent.

Oops! The meant to say comprising, but compromising got through the spell checker. Bad proofreader!

By the way, a nice touch in the article (if you ignore the mistaken word) is that they avoided repetition by using synonyms: “made up,” “comprised,” “identified,” “were seen,” and “accounted for.” In editorial writing in English, this is considered good form. It makes the article a more interesting read.

In case you don’t know, here’s what malware looks like:

My thanks to The Bank of Malware for letting me show their logo

The speaker might be in character to make the goof, and the artist actually knows better, right? After all, with a Spanish/German/Japanese name, he ought to be really good at English, right?

You know what the mistake is, right? We have a nominative being used as a direct object. Nominative is the general term for what my English teacher called the subjective case, because it was used for the subject of sentences. In every other Indo-European language (far as I know) they call it the nominative.

Remember your English teacher saying that with the imperative, you have an implied subject, “you”?  So “Sit down” is really “(you) sit down.” Or in this case, (you) let Sandra and ME deal with your son’s abduction.”

I brought your attention to this example because this mistake most often happens with compound objects of prepositions (it was between him and I) and less often with a direct object. It often happens in the writing and speech of people who fancy themselves as edumacated. They picked it up from being corrected as children, when they started to say something like “Me and Tom went fishing” and the authority figure at hand said, ” ahem. Tom and I went fishing, and is that why you are so muddy?”

So how do you prevent this solecism? The culprit the compound construction. Say the sentence without the compound. Then the wrong way sounds wrong. So: “Let me deal with your son’s abduction.”

Now I think I’ll go see what happened to that son.

Harrumpf. I can hardly stand to read this.

He even put his mistake in bold. The rule is that when you are counting something, especially if you have a plural involved, you use Fewer! FEWER! Use “less” when you measure an amount, I have less egg on my face than he does.

But hey, it’s a comic, and it’s funny.

First, then, a bit of linguistics. (We gotta be scholarly, y’know.) The traditional accent we all associate with the romance of 18th century pirates is roughly the brogue from Cornwall, or the southwest of England. I think this was most strongly promulgated by Disney’s version of Treasure Island several decades ago, but it might have appeared in some earlier movies, too. Be that as it may, to my mind the epitome of pirate talk is the strong “arr” sound and “be” and “me” instead of “is” and “my” as spoken by Long John Silver in the Disney movie. I read the book , by the way, and there’s quite a bit more adventure in the book than in the movie. But I digress.

Robert Newton as Long John Silver

Here’s a quote from a review (which gets the name of the day wrong):

He was deeply alcoholic and delivered a performance of such swivel-eyed, bizarrely-accented, scenery-chewing lunacy that he not only stole the entire film but also created a character that almost immediately defined the physical, sartorial and verbal attributes of a pirate.

Second, real pirates, especially modern ones, are bad people as far as we law-abiding folks go. Yes, the older version in the sailing ships had a decent civil structure on their ships, more egalitarian than most people realize, but they nonetheless did not conform to most of our cultural norms (read They were pretty bloodthirsty.). And there was a class of semi-legal pirate types called privateers, who had loyalty to a particular country and tended to concentrate on raiding their country’s enemies’ ships. Talk Like a Pirate day is all in fun, and has no more actual connection to real pirates than having  kids go trick-or-treating on Halloween has to do with Satanism and real demons.

Third, if you’re going to speak like a pirate, you should get it right. Women are “me beauty.” It’s “arr,” not “arg” and not “yarr.” And a friend is “matey,” pronounced “maitey.” If you want to look into it a bit more, here’s a link to the official TLAP site.

Fourth, pirate jokes. Of course my favorites are wordplay, that capitalize on the strong pirate “arr.” A pirate’s favorite vegetable is arrrrtichokes, and they fight best in the arrrmy. You get the idea. A fellow by the name of Doug Savage produced a couple comics about pirates that feature chickens. And you all know the joke about the pirate with a peg leg, a hook, and an eye patch. When asked for how he got them all, he described horrific battles for losing his leg and his hand, but lost his eye because of some seagull poop. It seems he wasn’t yet used to having the hook.

And that, me matey, be all I have to say about pirates.

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention as well as increasing the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

Can you see the mistake? The conjunction “as well as” does this to a lot of people. We have a sentence with a compound predicate. The first part is “improves water retention” and the other part is (ak! horrors!) “increasing the population …” The verbs in a parallel construction like this are supposed to be the same form. Here’s how the sentence should go:

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention as well as increases the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

See? It improves and increases. That’s correct parallelism. If you watch your parallel constructions, your writing will hold together better, and people in the know will see that you pay attention to what you’re writing, and will grant you more credibility than if you had made the goof.  (See? “will see” and “will grant”).

What happens if you change the second predicate into an adverb phrase?

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention,  increasing the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

It’s not parallel now—the participle is subordinate. Hence, “increasing” is now okay.

Bonus item: Do you see the redundancy in the sentence? What word could you leave out without changing the meaning of the sentence?

This sentence, by the way, is about biochar, or homemade charcoal, which I wrote about in my personal blog, Mushrooms to Motorcycles, when I made some a while back. I’m planning to make another batch soon—I have loads of scrap wood from the addition we’re building on our house. Hmm. I need to write a post about that, too.

This guy’s biochar retort is a lot nicer looking than mine. I suspect he hasn’t used it yet.

The rule is that a singular subject gets a singular verb, and a plural subject gets a plural verb.

The problem is that sometimes you can lose track of the subject. Forgetting that you have a singular subject is fairly easy when the subject is part of a group. For example, if you say, “One of the students…” you might be tempted to use a plural verb because “students” is plural. Now maybe not, because the subject, “one,” is still pretty close, especially if you’re thinking carefully about your writing. But when the stuff between the subject and verb gets more voluminous, you can lose track fairly easily. The name for this is “attraction,” and I understand it’s okay in Latin, but it’s not in English.

So here’s the comic:

Jerry Van Amerongen’s Ballard Street is an excellent off-the-wall single panel cartoon

Now the caption to this comic is tricky. The main subject and verb are “Gary is.” Then we have five words between the subject and verb of the subordinate clause. If you said, “One of those guys has a problem,” you might get it right, but throw in the “who never” and you have a pretty good distraction from the actual subject, “one,” not “guys.”

You can find Ballard Street on gocomics.com, and I recommend it for a nice break from the conventional. And thanks for the good goof, Jerry.

Here’s what might be an exception to this rule. You would say that “many” is a plural, right? So it should get a plural verb, right? Even with a singular-feeling prepositional phrase between “many” and the verb, right? Then what about this:

Many a man likes to get his grammar correct.

Yes, the singular verb, “likes,” is correct! Sigh. That there English language, it just ain’t always gonna make sense.

Now for a little change of subject. Look back at the first sentence in this post. It contains an error. Can you tell what it is? I’ll put the answer after the comic to help you resist the temptation to look.

You can find the comic on dailyink.com and bucklescomic.com.

Here’s the mistake: The sentence contains a redundancy. Since I used the present perfect tense (have mentioned), the event had to occur in the past, so the phrase “in the past” should be left out. “On this site” is okay to leave in because I could have mentioned “lie” and “lay” in lots of other places (and I have).  If you caught the mistake, congratulations! You can write!

Never mind that there’s also a slight variation in how you pronounce the “a” at the beginning of the word. On second thought, what about that slight difference? In address, the noun, the a is pronounced like the a in AAK! (The phonetic character is æ, and we call it a short a.) But in the verb, the a is pronounced with a sound called the schwa, rather like uh, and it happens to be the most common vowel sound in English, and we don’t even have a letter for it. In fact, ASCII doesn’t have it in its character set. The phonetic symbol looks like an upside down lowercase e.

Okay, that was a long digression. Sorry. Back to “use” and “have.”

Use: Mostly we think of “use” as a verb, and we pronounce it “yuze.” When we (ahem) use the word as a noun, such as when we say that we put something to good use, we pronounce it “use.” The “s” is unvoiced. But what about when you refer to a past customary activity? That’s a verb, and it’s always in the past tense. For example, we say

We used to do it that way.

When you refer to a past customary behavior, do not betray illiteracy by spelling it “We use to do it that way.”

Have: We use “have” all the time as a helping verb, and when we want to indicate possession. We pronounce it “hav,” or to be phonetic, “hæv.”

But when we refer to an obligation, we pronounce it “haf;” the second consonant (the “v”) is unvoiced. (I have to explain the correct spelling or illiterate people will get it wrong.)

I have to help you with your English.

I did, however, find something that is called a HAF: a high air flow computer case.

I notice the title of the strip is plural, and she seems to be as bothered by the comma as Arnold is.

Okay, I can’t resist. Here are some more words that don’t have rhymes in English: purple, month, scarce, scarf, coif,fugue, gulf, and false.

I recently ran into a comic by the very astute Darrin Bell that gives a nice description of the difference between “listen” and “hear.”

The name of the comic is Candorville, and I recommend it highly. Serious, thoughtful, intelligent, and funny.

I have collected several language-related comics lately, so expect more in the near future.