Spoken English

In a past life I taught high school speech. I’ve also spent many hours speaking in public. I’ve attended a bunch of classes about spoken English. Somewhere in all this I picked up the habit of dropping the pitch of my voice at the ends of my sentences, even questions, and on occasion I encouraged others to do so to. I was taught that dropping the pitch of your voice  makes you sound more thoughtful, powerful, confident, and poised. I think this is true. Recently I ran into a fellow who gave a talk on this subject. Give it a listen—it’s only three minutes long. I hope the site doesn’t have too many pop-up ads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SCNIBV87wV4

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I know I mention case a lot, but I like to post comics about grammar, and I happened to run into one that uses case both correctly and incorrectly in a construction that can be tricky to get right—comparison. First the comic.

I like Scott Meyer’s work because of his clever humor. Apparently that’s Scott on the right. I don’t know if the fellow on the left represents an actual person, but usually he’s the one who makes the mistakes. This time he gets it right and Scott makes the mistake. Look at the first speech.

I heard the boss yelling. Did you tell him that you’re smarter than him again?

Remember the last post, about copulatives and predicate nominatives? Yup, he should have said “…you’re smarter than he.” The uncompressed sentence is “…that you are smarter than he is.” “He” sounds correct now, doesn’t it?

Go to the last cell, first speech.

Why shouldn’t I be able to tell people that I’m smarter than they?

“They” is correct! The expanded sentence is “…I am smarter than they are.” Sounds right, doesn’t it?

As a footnote, I should point out that the captions on to two last cells use “its” and “it’s” correctly. But you noticed that, didn’t you?

Most of the time when you run into a lesson about who and whom, it’s about using whom when you want to use who. I’ve even posted about it. (Search the site for “whom” for a few other examples.) Usually these articles compare the subject (who) with the direct object or object of a preposition (whom).

There’s another time to use “who,” but first a little background. In Indo-European and Semitic languages at least, the verb “to be” and its various forms and equivalents (seem, appear)  are somewhat special. “To be” etc. is equivalent to an equals sign , and the name for this kind of verb is a copulative. Your grade school teacher probably called them linking verbs. Copulatives couple things together. That means that a noun at the end of a sentence that uses a copulative isn’t a direct object. It’s a predicate nominative.

For example:

Tom is a dentist. Tom and Dave are dentists. They are good dentists, and they are also my cousins.

If we use and equals sign in place of the verb, the meaning is the same:

Tom = dentist; Tom and Dave = dentists.

Predicate nominatives have the same case as the subject, even though they might be where you expect a direct object. It’s the verb’s fault. Copulatives take the nominative, we say. (“We” being linguists, grammarians, and now you, I hope.) So this guy approaches the pearly gates, and St. Peter asks who it is. “It is I,” says the man. Peter mutters to himself, “Ah, an English teacher.”

So be alert! Use “who” with linking verbs. Here’s an example of a professional writer (and his editor, apparently) in a Live Science article who wasn’t paying attention:

There’s no telling whom the original owner of the teeth and finger was, but the cave where they were discovered was both a hermitage, or dwelling place, and the site of a grisly medieval massacre. [8 Disturbing Archaeological Discoveries]

That “whom” really grates. It’s not only at the beginning, where you expect nominatives, but it’s with a linking verb, which takes the nominative.

So there you have it. Two times to use who, not whom. As subjects and with linking verbs.

Any math teacher (and, I presume, most high school graduates) can tell you that the center of a circle is a point. In fact, unless you’re talking about an organization (The Center for the Study of Oxymorons, for example), the center of pretty much everything is a point.

“Center” can also be a verb. It means something like “To pay attention to the center of something.” Even used metaphorically, “center” does not lose its pointiness. Hence, when you use a prepositional phrase as an adverb with this verb, use “on,” not “around.” You can revolve around, rotate around, dance around, beat around (the bush), even gallivant around, but can’t center around. You have to center on something. Here’s an example of correct usage, from a recent Christian Science Monitor article:

A popular dictionary, “Merriam-Webster,” reports that because of having the largest increase in online lookups, “science” was the “Word of the Year” for 2013. On its website, the publishing company’s editor at large, Peter Sokolowski, explains something of why this increase came about: “A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about ‘phony’ science, or whether science held all the answers. It’s a topic that has great significance for us.”

I’d give an example of “centered around,” but it occurs only in writing that’s too lowbrow for me. Don’t you be lowbrow.

Correction. It’s Jan 15, and I ran into an example of “centered around” in an otherwise well-written article by someone who should know better.

Whereas early cop shows like Dragnet and Adam-12 were centered around a couple of officers who always got their man by the end of the hour, the full squad house of regulars on Hill Street Blues rarely resolved cases in one episode.

This from This Day in History on history.com. Shame on you, guys! You’re professionals. Harrumpf.

This comic reminds me of some early lessons in my early language training (as in learning to speak, not classes in German or Greek). It’s a new year, so I recommend you resolve to follow these rules when you interact with new users of language.

The first rule: Don’t refer to yourself in the third person. Use the normal pronouns when you speak. So don’t say, “Mommy doesn’t like that.” Instead, say something like “AAK! Don’t do that!!!”  Much more realistic—the child won’t have to relearn how to speak. In the comic, (Leigh Rubin’s December 22, 2013 effort), Polly breaks the rule while she complains about it, you’ll notice.

While I’m on the subject of teaching new speakers how to talk, here’s rule two: Don’t talk baby-talk. This includes both vocabulary and pronunciation. Children can learn the real words for things just fine, thank you, and by using the normal term and correct pronunciation, you make language learning easier for them. They don’t have to unlearn anything. Children constantly experiment with pronunciation. So don’t say “twain,” say “train.” The English “R” sound is hard to say, but if children hear it only correctly, they’ll work on it until they get it right.

Rule three: Speak at your normal pitch. Ever hear people speak an octave higher when they’re talking to small children? Don’t.

I can remember the first time I heard “choo-choo train.” I thought it sounded stupid. I knew it was a locomotive. I was three.

Postscript: The day after I posted this, I ran into this related comic from Strange Brew. It’s another parrot talking about using the third person.