July 14, 2006
Anyone know Vietnamese?
My mom just bought a table, made it Vietnam, with these inscriptions on the underside:
I'd love to know what it says. Hopefully not "Please help me—I'm being subjected to forced labor."
July 06, 2006
Making the World a Better Place Through Grammar, Installment 2
Whenever people meeting me for the first time find out that I am a speech-language pathology student, they are immediately concerned that I am inwardly evaluating their deficient grammar. That is so not the case. I'm not keeping a running tally of everyone's dangling participles and subject-verb disagreements. Occasionally, however, certain agrammaticalities do stand out to me by the sheer frequency of their misuse. And so, every now and then, I feel it is my civic duty to raise public awareness about the mistreatment of countless words. Pay close attention.
The thing is, is that...
Did anyone else notice an extraneous is? This is the El Camino of sentence starters. It took two perfectly good constructions and fused them together into some warped, mutant clause-thing. It's not pretty. The key issue is that... What you need to understand is that... Each of those is fine. Or simply, The thing is... (pause) [start your sentence]. I'm convinced that the latter is really what everyone wants to say, but it makes people uncomfortable because of its sparsity. We feel it needs some cushioning, so we throw that extra is that in there. Don't do it.
He/she is the kind of person that...
I'm going to start this paragraph with a shockingly liberal idea: people are not things. I know, it's radical. But the guys who wrote the English language were progressive like that, and built in a way to tell the difference between people and things. It's called the relative pronoun. For things, we use the word that; for people, wait for it... who. It was the kind of thing that made me question my choice of career. He was the kind of person who never accepted defeat. If you have trouble keeping it straight, just remember: four legs, that; two legs, who.
And that concludes our tutorial for today. Until next time, read over last time. Only YOU can prevent bad grammar.