Grammar Nazi gets it Wrong!

Okay, sometimes those dogmatic folks who correct your English unasked get it wrong! Jump Start is a Case in point:

She makes three points, and two are wrong.

Split infinitive. Not putting an adverb between the “to” and the rest of the verb is a hold-over from Latin, promulgated by stuffy English teachers. English has been splitting infinitives for centuries. Just remember that Star Trek Movie, “to boldly go…”

Passive voice. She’s correct here. Not that the passive is ungrammatical, but writing that doesn’t use the passive is more energetic. Don’t go passive unless you want to hide the blame.

Ending a sentence with a preposition. Sorry, those are actually adverbs, part of separable verbs. Think of Churchill’s famous (and possibly apocryphal) remark, “Impertinence, young man, is something up with which I will not put.”

However, most of the time in this comic, she’s right.

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A second person singular subjunctive passive present progressive linking verb! First cell of a recent Arctic Circle: you could be being monitored. Savor it! I’m not even sure what order I should put the descriptors in.

It reminds me of the juvenile joke of snickering when you hear someone using the present emphatic of “do.”

The present progressive tells your reader that something is continuing to happen, right now, as you’re telling it. The past progressive says it was continuing to happen in the past, but not any more, but then you miss out on the subjunctive (the “could be”) if you want the idea of the past with subjunctive and passive, you need the present perfect: “could have been being monitored.”

Aren’t you glad you’re a native speaker of English and don’t have to think about all that stuff? But I think it’s fun for me to be being read on such esoteric subjects.

Perhaps the most famous statement in the passive was “Mistakes were made.” (Which has become a common saying, but the first use appears to be in Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union address, in reference to the Iran-contra scandal.)

People use the passive to depersonalize something or to avoid mentioning who did whatever the sentence is talking about. In other words, avoid responsibility. Instruction manuals are notorious for using the passive. Stuff like this:

The flange is fastened with three screws.

When they mean

Fasten the flange with three screws.

Or maybe they meant (how do you tell? You can’t.)

To ensure that the flange won’t come off, we used three screws to fasten it.

Here’s another one I see with some regularity:

Donations are appreciated.

Besides being a way to avoid responsibility, the passive is not as clear as a sentence in the active voice. Recently I read an interesting article in Priceonomics about why some people claim such high fees for giving a speech. The article started with a list of speakers and their fees. At the end, they had this:

Fees are gathered mainly from the websites of speaking agencies. Some fee ranges may be outdated or inflated.

Who does the gathering? He used the present tense, which applies to actions that are customary. Is this how the general public does it? It turned out that in this case the writer was referring to himself, and how he built the table. He should have said something like this:

I gathered the fees for this table mainly from the websites of speaking agencies. Some fee ranges might be outdated or inflated.

Now you have a nice reference that tells you the source of the information, and you know he didn’t talk to a lot of these speakers directly.