Make Your Parallels Parallel!

I see this mistake a lot.

First panel:

He should say “What would you say if I were playing golf instead of cleaning the garage?”

or

What would you say if I played golf instead of cleaned the garage?”

The two parts of his sentence are parallel, so they should have the same verb form.

Of course, in this case he’s wrong no matter what he says…

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Back in May I wrote about when to use “if” and when to use “whether” instead. Here’s a comic on that subject. They get it wrong.

Not exactly a lesson, just fun. The last one, by the way is, pronounced “hock.”

The rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode coughing and hiccoughing through the streets of Scarborough leading a horse whose leg had been houghed.

Campbell’s Higher English

Maybe someone can draw me a cartoon of that…

What??? You ask. Hear me out.

First, numbers in most contexts are adjectives. Adjectives don’t show number in English. We say “five apples” but not “fives apples.” But that’s not my point.

Let’s move on to arithmetic. We (correctly) say “Three and six are nine.” Plural verb, so plural numbers, right? Not quite. That sentence has a plural subject, three and six. You could as easily say “Tom and Pete are sick.” The two persons are one each, and they make a plural subject.

A number is singular when you talk about the number itself!

For example, you say, “six is half of twelve, thirteen is a prime number.” Singular verbs! You’re referring to the number itself (not themselves), not six of something, such as six people.

Finally we get to the comic. Third panel. The guy confuses referring to the number itself with the number of things. Sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

Anyway, there’s a little incongruity for you that I bet you never noticed.

Except for onomatopoetic words such as Hmmm and Hissss; and acronyms, such as IEEE (pronounced “I triple E”), English doesn’t allow three of the same letter in a row.

This isn’t usually a problem, except when you want to make a possessive form from a word that ends in “ss.” So the last panel has it wrong:

The rule: take the word you want to make possessive (be it singular or plural) and if it ends in “s,” put on an apostrophe and you’re done.