The Second Most Common Mistake

—in English! In English! I’m sure this is nowhere near the top of the list of mistakes humans make. This might not even be second on the English grammar list, but I think it comes right after the one where someone, trying deliberately to be high-class, says “between him and I.”

This error is using “whom” when “who” is actually correct (or in this case, “whomever” and “whoever.”). First, the rule: when you have a subordinate clause, work from the inside out. Here’s an example of the mistake, from Edge of Adventure. Look at the first panel in the bottom row. Can you tell why he should have said “whoever”?

Yes, “to” is a preposition, and the clause that comes after it is its object. But that clause has its own subject and verb! And since we work from the inside out, being the subject of that clause takes precedence over the whole clause being an object, so it’s “whoever did this.” If you really want a “whom” in that sentence you could say something like “…to whomever I find on the trail.” Now “I” is the subject, and “whomever” is the direct object of “I find.” Make sense?

So sometimes you have permission to use “who.” Be careful.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

First, I see now that we’re using adjectives as verbs! “Harsh,” an adjective, is now in style as a verb: “Don’t harsh my, um whatever.” I suppose “criticize” has become too long a word for some folks to use. Harrumpf.

But now that I mentioned verbs and adjectives, that leads to adverbs, another word that adjectives frequently replace. Here’s a Pickles to illustrate:

I don’t often see the guy correctly correcting the gal’s grammar in the comics, but in this case, he’s right. This mistake is easy to make; adjectives are typically shorter than their adverbial counterpart. See the reference to “harsh” above.

Now, having defended the adverb, I have to add that you can usually skip adverbial constructions correct or incorrect altogether. That comic isn’t a good example of leaving out adverbs (they’re used substantively here, but I digress), but most of the time, you make your writing tighter and punchier when you leave out the adverbs and use a good verb, one better than “make” and “do.” And please, try never to use “very”!

I mentioned separable verbs before, but I ran into two nice examples of correct and incorrect usage of the same verb, so here you go.

The verb is “to center on.” It’s transitive, so you have to have a direct object. You center on something. So:

The filter uses dual etalons in a double stack configuration (40mm external and 20mm internal) to provide a very narrow <0.5 Ångstrom passband, centered on the 6562.8 Ångstrom H-Alpha line.

It’s a telescope that you can look at the sun through. I have a similar one (with only the internal etalon). Stop by sometime during the day and I’ll get it out and let you look through it. You can see solar prominences around the edge of the sun. Pretty interesting. If you want to buy one like mine for yourself, go here. It’s a little less expensive than the one in the picture.

Now here’s now not to use that verb:

Virgin Galactic’s resurrected dreams of private spaceflight following the crash in 2014 centers around SpaceShipTwo.

That sentence was written about Virgin Galactic, not by them, so no discredit to VG. But the center is a point. You center on that point. If you want to go around, use rotate or revolve.

Using this verb correctly is one of those little things that not a lot of people notice, but doing so improves your writing.

Then there’s the verb “center” all by itself. Used that way, it’s some sort of new age thing meaning to concentrate on one idea, or something like that.

I mentioned this topic before, so this post is more a rant than an actual lesson. Look at the first cell in today’s Lola:

She said “loan” instead of “lend.”

Using a noun as a verb has a long and popular (notice I didn’t say “noble”) history in English. It’s so common that sometimes folks for whom English is a second (or third or more) language can get confused. This is a virtue of highly inflected languages—the inflectional endings make it easy to tell nouns from verbs. The trouble is, you have to memorize all those inflections.

My rant is this: don’t use a noun for a verb unless you can’t think of a good word that’s already a verb.

Last time we looked at compound subjects. This time we look at hard-to-find subjects. Read the first cell of this comic:

What’s the subject? It’s “last,” not “tulips”! Liv got it right.

We often add information about the subject of a sentence before we get to the verb, and that information doesn’t have to agree in number with the subject it’s referring to. Sometimes that information can be lengthy, and the subject, especially if it’s nondescript (such as Liv’s “last”), is easy to get lost. The temptation is to make the verb agree with the closest noun, so be careful.

Sometimes you don’t even have a nice neat noun for a subject, either. Look at this, from a recent Gizmag article:

But what exactly is going on beneath the atmosphere’s chaotic exterior is a question that has mystified astronomers for some time.

I made the main verb bold so you could find it. What’s its subject? It’s “what exactly is going on beneath the atmosphere’s chaotic exterior,” a noun clause with its own verb.

Finally (for now, anyway) the subject doesn’t always come before the verb. You already know this is common in questions (Do you not?) But sometimes the subject comes after the verb for effect. Here’s another sentence from the same article:

“Jupiter’s rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe,” says study co-author Robert Sault, from the University of Melbourne.

Putting the stuff about Jupiter’s rotation first has more punch than starting out with “Robert … says.”