Watch where you put things!

The rule of thumb in English is that modifiers go next to what they modify. Try not to put anything in between. Here’s an example of doing it wrong:

President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry, lauding his “extraordinary heroism” during a solemn White House ceremony Tuesday that marked just the second time since Vietnam that the honor was bestowed to a living recipient.

This is from a recent news article in the Los Angeles Times. Let’s follow our rule. When did this soldier’s extraordinary heroism take place? The sentence says it took place during a White House ceremony! (Insert presidential political joke here.) Let’s rewrite the sentence so it doesn’t cause unintended humor:

President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry during a solemn White House ceremony Tuesday, lauding his “extraordinary heroism”  that marked just the second time since Vietnam that the honor was bestowed to a living recipient.

It’s still not quite right. What does that final clause, about being the second time, go with? It goes with the awarding, way up at the front of the sentence. There’s no graceful way to put this clause up there, So we make a new sentence. Rule of thumb number two: It’s okay to use two simple sentences instead of one long, complicated, ungraceful one.

President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry, lauding his “extraordinary heroism” during a solemn White House ceremony Tuesday. The award marked just the second time since Vietnam that the honor was bestowed to a living recipient.

photo copyright (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT)

There. Sentences that befit a sitting president and a war hero, regardless of your politics.

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Only maybe it isn’t funny. This was gleaned from a site called lamebook.com from a writer I highly respect, Fred Langa, on his blog What Comes Next.

As Fred Langa does, I hope this is true.

A couple posts back I wrote about the two most basic verbs in English, pointing out that some form of “do” can replace any action verb. I also said that you should avoid using the verb do itself, but here’s an example of using it that’s okay.

Our quote today, class, is from the July 2011 issue of Scientific American. This issue is particularly interesting to me—it’s the first issue I recall having a centerfold, and it’s hanging on the wall in my room. (Don’t get your hopes up, guys. It’s a poster of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (look it up), which turns 100 this year.)

Back to grammar. We find our quote on page 55 near the bottom:

It will be an uphill battle in a country that reveres an individual’s right to choose much more than it does science.

The verbs in the parallel construction are “reveres” and “does.” You can get up in front of the room and revere (something). This is approximately what cheerleaders do at a high school pep rally. And you can replace “does” with “reveres,” which makes the sentence end with “…than it reveres science.”  Go back and read the sentence with “reveres” in there both times. That’s exactly what the sentence is saying.

Why did the writer (Sharon Begley, a top-notch science writer) not use the more specific verb in the second part of the parallelism? In English we usually consider it poor form to repeat a word. Repeating something exactly without enough distance between the repeated words feels patronizing. The writer didn’t want to patronize her readers (after all, this is a Scientific American article), so she let the reader figure out what she was saying.

I really am trying to include a picture in every post; I admit this is a stretch, though I suppose if Ms. Begley made it into The Simpsons, she has to be good, right? Can you find the goofs in Bart's writing?

Finally, I must issue a warning. In technical writing, use the more specific verb both times. Yes, it’s not as smooth, but it removes ambiguity, the bane of technical writing. In tech writing, you want to leave absolutely no question about your meaning, and you may sacrifice smoothness to do so. Take our example sentence. The words “…does science” is a construction you sometimes see, “do science, doing science, to do science.” That is definitely not the meaning in our example sentence.

Next post: I might have some more grammar humor.

PLEASE tell me that you get this. OTOH, tell me if you don't, and I'll explain it.

And no, the joke is not that those are really shamrocks on her grave. I saw this in the comic Rubes, by Leigh Rubin. The link to his comics is here: http://www.creators.com/comics/rubes.html, and I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed. Here’s a link to his bio: http://www.creators.com/comics/rubes-about.html.

I won’t keep you in suspense: The two most basic verbs are “be” and “do” and all their forms. In principle, you can substitute any verb with the appropriate form of “be” or “do.”

I remember in high school English that our teacher suggested that you could always tell if a word was a verb by asking yourself if you you could go to the front of the room and “do” it. Naturally, some things would be preposterous, but if it worked as a sentence, the word was a verb. So, fish, for example. I could go up to the front of the room and fish. That was not actually possible, but the sentence worked, so “fish” was a verb. (“Fish” can also be a noun, but that’s another topic.)

This also works with “be” in a way. Take “smell.” You can go to the front of the room and smell. Picture yourself sniffing the air. It’s something you can do, so it’s a verb. But what if you go to the front of the room and everyone recoils at your aroma, because you smell? (I just remembered that Samuel Johnson pointed out to the lady sitting next to him that the correct verb was “stink,” so let’s switch to that.) So can you go to the front of the room and stink? Yes, but it’s something you are. This is easier to see if we add an adjective, and to be colloquial, let’s go back to smell. You can go to the front of the room and smell funny. Now substitute “do” for “smell. It doesn’t work. But substitute “be” and it works: You can go to the front of the room and be funny. Or not so funny. Hamlet was substituting “be” for another verb in his famous soliloquy.

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, contemplating whether to continue life.

Verbs that “be” can replace are called linking verbs. (We call all other verbs action verbs.) In linguistics, the term is copulative, because they couple things together. Linking verbs are equivalent to an equals sign. In many languages you can even leave linking verbs out, including in English. (Hnngh. Hairface hungry.)

A word of advice: In your writing, if you can, don’t use “do” or “be.” Every other verb in the language has more color, more specificity, more oompf, than those two tired out, vague, non-committal, unspecific verbs.

Next time I’ll tell you another thing about do and be, but it’s a little complicated, and this post is long enough.