A Not Uncommon Mistake

She gets it right.

“Bate” is derived from “abate,” and it means to restrain, hold back. Not much more to say, I guess. Forget about the worms.

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Remember “court martial” and “attorney general”? —Phrases where the adjective comes after its noun?

The term for that is postpositive. Post means “after,” and positive means “positioned.” Here’s another source saying the same thing:

These adjectives are called postpositive, but that’s not because they’re positive words. Rather, the designation “positive” alludes to their position — they’re placed (or deposited) after the word they modify, for example, the adjective extraordinaire in “teacher extraordinaire”.

https://wordsmith.org/words/agonistes.html

I ran into a whole group of words that use this construction: heraldry! When you describe the details of a coat of arms, you use postpositive names (such as border engrailed). Here’s a chart:

I remember Mrs. Baird, my high school English teacher, mentioning this topic, but she didn’t go into detail, and I can’t at the moment conjure up a set of rules about this beyond the extremely generic statement that verb tenses should not conflict when you have more than one verb in a sentence.

This sentence from a hearing-aid newsletter reminded me of this.

Prepare in advance and have spares on you in case something is lost or runs out of power before you expected.

That should be “expect,” present tense like the rest of the sentence.

I ran into a question on Quora that raises this issue:

“The irony is that it would have been faster to “have taken”/“take” the back roads after all.” Is there a difference between “to take” and “to have taken” in this example?

The answer is that the sentence should use “have taken” because the tense matches “have been faster.”

Do any of you have a more formal explanation of why this is so?

He calls it “fat,” I call it “fluff.”

Please don’t do this!

BTW, if you’re a teacher, I recommend this comic. The cartoonist is a teacher, and he’s pretty good.

The young lady is not usually an example of good things in the Luann comic, but she illustrates a good point here.

You have permission to end a sentence with a “preposition”!

Actually it’s an adverb, or part of a separable verb, if you prefer. Use the search box on the upper right corner to see more posts on this subject.

Okay, so here’s the comic.

Maybe that last panel is a good illustration of why you can do this.