Why You Need to be Careful with “Only”

English puts adjectives directly before the words they modify. Say you have a red car. You don’t say, “Red Tom can wash my car.” You don’t put the word “red” anywhere except in front of “car.”

The label on the bottle is a good illustration of the effect of adjective location:

We tend to play fast and loose with this rule when the adjective is “only.”

Beware! Don’t write “It’s only going to rain half the day” when what you mean is that it’s going to rain only half the day. Putting “only” first is okay in casual conversation, but be more precise when you write.

Here’s another example, with a better solution than putting “only” where it belongs:

But without a way to accurately gauge how many people are actually on the grounds — attendance is only counted at the end of the night — and with nowhere to send people if they had to be turned away, Hammer says the 322-acre fairgrounds will just have to make room for more.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/09/05/minnesota-state-fair-getting-bigger-after-record-breaking-year

You might correctly put “only” after “counted,” but the best solution in this case it to leave “only” out altogether. 

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We don’t use “whence” and “whither” much any more. But when you do, be sure to get the words right!

Whence means from which, from where, or from when, depending on the context.

Whither is similar, but the implied preposition is “to.”

I enjoy Michael Shermer’s column in Scientific American (in this case, the July 2018 issue, page 73). His material is interesting and thought-provoking. But hah! I caught him in a solecism! Here’s the quote:

That is the compatibilist position from whence volition and culpability emerge. 

“Whence” already means “from where,” So he doesn’t need the “from.” I’d say that considering the rest of the vocabulary in that sentence, maybe he’s being careless; “whence” without the “from” would certainly fit.

I can let this comic stand on its own. Expository writing needs to have the facts right, needs to be correct. (Do a search on “correctness” in the search box in the upper right corner of this page. I mentioned this several times in the past.)

Here’s a way not to do it! Don’t twist facts to make them not tell the truth!

One of my favorite hobby horses—getting “whom” correct.

Subordinate clauses are stumbling blocks for a lot of people because these clauses often put the direct object first, where the subject usually goes. So the nominative form, “who” gets used, even though the actual subject is “you.”

Whenever you have a who/whom decision to make, first decide what is the verb, then look for the subject. Then decide whether the “who” word is the subject or the object. “Who” is a subject, “whom” is an object.

Ambiguity is the bane of expository writing. You want your readers to understand what you write the first time they read it, and without strain doing so. The rule is 

Bad documentation must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

Here’s an example, from Wired:

Most radio astronomical surveys have a single job: Map gas. Find pulsars. Discover galaxies. 

Huh??? The writer says “a single job,” then the sentence lists three jobs! What gives? That’s a pretty obvious mistake; must be something going on. (Hmm Hmm Hmm) Aha! The writer mentions surveys, plural. So the surveys have one job each, mostly! I’m so smart; I figured it out. The writer wasn’t wrong after all.

Except the writing was ambiguous. How would you write the sentence to remove the ambiguity?

Here’s a picture of the telescope, almost a third of a mile across: