Posted on 02/24/2007 10:03:44 AM PST by rhema
"If I was President, this wouldn't have happened," John Kerry said during Hezbollah's war on Israel last summer. As 2004's Democratic presidential nominee should know, he should have said, "If I were President…"
It's sad, but hardly surprising, that the subjunctive evades someone of Kerry's stature. The English language is under fire, as if it strolled into an ambush. It would be bad enough if this assault involved the slovenly grammar, syntax, and spelling of drooling boors. But America's elites -- politicians, journalists, and marketers who should know better -- constantly batter our tongue.
The subjunctive, for instance, lies gravely wounded. Fewer and fewer Americans bother to discuss hypothetical or counterfactual circumstances using this verb mood. "This would not be a close election if George Bush was popular," Rep. Chris Shays (R.-Conn.) told reporters last summer, using "was," not "were." He erred further: "This would not be a close election if there wasn't a war in Iraq."
Similarly, a HepCFight.com newspaper ad declared: "If Hep C was attacking your face instead of your liver, you'd do something about it."
In an Ameritrade ad last year, a teenage girl begs her father for $80. "80 bucks?" he asks.
"Well, there's these jeans,” she replies, adding later: "There's these really cool shoes."
Forget the shopping spree. Dad should have sent his daughter upstairs without dinner until she mastered noun-verb agreement. Since they are plural, "there are" jeans and shoes, not "there's," the contraction for "there is."
This is a burgeoning linguistic blunder.
United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told a Manhattan labor rally: "The muscle and the zeal that built our union is still with us." As a teachers' unionist, for crying out loud, Weingarten should know that muscle and zeal are still with us.
Likewise, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.- Nev.) said, "There was no terrorists in Iraq." Actually, there were, and Reid should have used that plural verb with those plural Islamofascists, even if he considered Baathist Iraq a terrorist-free zone.
In a taped, on-air promo, one cable news network's announcer said, "Inside the UN, there’s more than a thousand doors." No, there ARE more than 1,000 doors.
In another odd grammatical glitch, plural subjects of sentences interact with singular objects. Confusion follows. As one cable TV correspondent reported: "Every day, 1.5 million Americans ride a 747." Visualize the line for the bathroom on that jet. Make that "747s," and the turbulence vanishes.
Just before January's Golden Globe awards, a major newspaper's headline read: "Stars put their best face forward for the Globes." Wow! Eddie Murphy and Helen Mirren share a face?
A cable channel's news crawl correspondingly revealed: "Iraqi authorities find at least 21 bodies, many with nooses around their neck." Who knew so many Iraqis shared one neck?
Consider run-on sentences. A sign in a San Francisco M.U.N.I. streetcar recommends: "Please hold on sudden stops necessary." At the local airport, a men's room sign asks: "Please conserve natural resources only take what you really need."
Would it kill people to spell properly? A New York outdoor display company solicited new business by announcing in huge, black letters: "YUOR AD HERE."
A cable-TV news ticker referred to the "World Tade Center." Another explained that President Bush said he needs wiretaps "to defend Amercia."
Such sloth generates nonsense. Ponder these three items, all from cable-TV news crawls written by practicing journalists: Arab diplomats last August tried to change “a U.S.-French peace plan aimed at ending nearly a month of welfare.” Imagine if Hezbollah lobbed food stamps, rather than rockets, into Israel.
Another channel described a deadly, anti-Semitic attack at a Seattle “Jewfish” center.
And then there’s this beauty: “Disraeli troops kill two Hamas fighters” including one implicated “in the June capture of an Disraeli soldier.”
Today's explosion of rotten English should motivate Americans to speak, write, and broadcast with greater care, clarity, and respect for grammar and spelling. Also, when even college graduates in Congress, newsrooms, and advertising agencies express themselves so sloppily, America's education crisis becomes undeniable.
Is it pedantic to expect linguistic excellence? No. Unless Americans want English to devolve into an impenetrable amalgam of goofs and gaffes, protecting our language, like liberty itself, demands eternal vigilance.
Personally, I'm with you, Xenalyte. Had this arguement with my Blog co-author. He pointed out, Oxford English and Webster's Unabridged accept "impact" as a verb. I am, sometimes reluctantly, willing to accept English as an evolving language, our willingness to borrow from the best has made English THE international language. I do sometimes wish we might evolve a bit more slowly.
Impact. Gifting. Verbing is one of the special sins inflicted on the world by business schools, which turn the rules of clear, concise writing on their ear, rewarding sentences that are thick with jargon and never use two words when ten will do. That's how you get sentences like "Our primary goal going forward is to utilize our core competencies to re-engineer processes throughout the enterprise consistent with our mission and values statement while modeling win-win behaviors and maintaining customer focus."
I found a great t-shirt at an Anime convention once. I got one for myself, and one for my #1 son, who was an English major at the time. The graphic on the shirt shows one man in an attack pose standing over a man lying prone on the ground and reads, "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them down, then goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
Turns out it was published 50 years ago, but I remember hearing about it 30 years ago.
I have never thought of an infinitive as a noun phrase, but if that is the case in this example, then the verb would be used in the transitive sense.
I'd be inclined to treat that as a colorful turn of phrase. One that I quite like, in fact. Everyone should know the rules of grammar, but also know when it's more effective and interesting to break them; "My, that young man is rude" doesn't have quite the same punch as one of my favorites, "That ol' boy ain't got no couth."
Love this! Where can one find this?
This thread has been jolly in between my weekend legislative trolling, but I must back to work. The same training that taught me passable grammar crosses over well in attention to detail. My normally competent state senator has introduced a bill that will require us to move either; a) the city of Midland, or; b) 150 miles of existing highway. My thought is it might be a tad cheaper to amend the bill designating a port to plains system.
Parting thought on getting too picky about grammar, surprised someone else hadn't mentioned it. An anectdote I heard attributed to Queen Elizabeth II, on being queried by a fuss-budget reporter about ending a sentence with a preposition, QE responded, "That is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put." This is a rule which evolution should have buried. General rule of thumb; if it sounds uselessly awkward, it probably is.
Good day, fellow Grammarians, it has been fun.
The infinitve and the gerund don't HAVE an object; they ARE objects. Both are verb forms of "wash" that serve as nouns. To answer your question simply, there IS no distinction, at least in grammatical function.
Which I translate to be "Business as usual."
Well, to err is human.
Great article. It is time to bring back the English language before it is too late.
The general consensus is.......
Which has been replaced by the much more intelligent sounding "my colleagues and myself..."
Another Hillary-ism, in addition to the flast, nasal vowels and the uhs and ya knows is her irritating use of "a" pronounced aye instead of "a" pronounced uh. As in a car, a country. A-nnoying if you ask me.
Your posts are always gramatically correct Rhema.
What is missing on an awful lot of posts here at FR is the use of SpellCheck. SpellCheck is your friend.
I think this is why folks use "myself" when "I" or "me" would be correct.
That's a new one to me.
"Say again" is something only heard from rude British houseguests on Seinfeld.
It's a regional thing.
Years aog, no one used the I numbers...is was the San Diego Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway...so, you replace the name with the number...the I-5.
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