Wednesday, August 15, 2001
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Wednesday, August 15, 2001 |
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Minding P's and Q's and similar catastrophes By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
It's not an easy language, English, even American English, which reportedly has been allowed to deteriorate a trifle from the finely honed instrument it was in the hands of Shakespeare and Shaw. We were reminded of this again when our German friend Rainer was here recently. Like most Europeans, he learned British English in school, and is very proficient. But he strives for perfection and asks Mary to correct him when he errs. "Say, 'Don't have to,'" she will suddenly interrupt. "You said, 'haven't to' again." English-speakers use "have to" where Germans would stick with "must," so in Rainerspeak it comes out "We haven't to go so early," and "Hasn't she to rehearse tomorrow?" There is also the matter of our pronouncing certain consonants and vowels inconsistently. The bugaboo this visit was the "s" in closer. "Which is closer, Chattanooga or Columbus?" It sounded as though he meant, "Which is our closer, Remlinger or Smoltz?" Why not? The "s" sounds like a "z," after all, in wiser, busy, was, is, does, closed and closing. We found Rainer's mistakes endearing, if we noticed them at all. His use or misuse of English is just part of who he is. Written English mangled by native speakers, however, by those who should know better, offends me most. I hasten to disclaim any pretense that I never make mistakes. But I try hard not to, and pride myself on turning in clean copy, i.e., stories free of spelling, punctuation or syntactical errors. I tremble to find a misusage of mine featured in my beloved editor's Nag Report, a brief e-mailed seminar he sends semi-regularly to his stable of writers. You might not always believe that newspaper people care a lot about language, as evidenced by the doubtful syntax and punctuation you sometimes find at the end of your driveway. We do care. We really do. Most professional writers consider themselves "custodians of the language," as Richard Dowis and Richard Lederer put it in their useful guide, The Write Way. Most often the errors that get by do so because of relentless time pressure on people with deadlines to meet, either writers or editors. Sometimes they're simply the bad habits of which most of us are guilty, usually habits of speech, where language is less carefully guarded. I think the one that sets the teeth of writers and teachers on edge more than any other is the misuse of the apostrophe. That blight showed up in both this past week's Nag Report and the current SPELL/Binder, newsletter of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, which reports that a retired copy editor in London, of all places, is so incensed about it that he has formed the Apostrophe Protection Society. His first victory was a sign in his local library proclaiming the availability of CD's. A quick review. The apostrophe is used almost exclusively in only two applications: to signify the omission of letters (can't, y'all, rock 'n' roll) and to show possession. Same thing, one could argue, since possessive was once formed by adding the possessive pronoun to the noun. William his book became William's book. The commonest apostrophe catastrophe, the one that gives careful writers the vapors, is that of poor, misunderstood it's and its. Rather than accept identical construction in such different applications, the contraction it's won out and got the apostrophe signifying the letter missing from it is. Its, the possessive of it, then, gets no apostrophe making it nicely consistent with yours and ours, which are also possessive pronouns lacking apostrophes. Apostrophes are not used to make proper nouns plural, another vapor-inducing horror. The Smiths shouldn't have had The Smith's painted on their mailbox, and the Joneses have to put up with the addition of -es to their name to make it plural. But no apostrophe unless to add that the Smiths' dog and the Joneses' iguana also live there. Similarly, numerals like "the 1980s" and "a man in his 40s," both meaning blocks of years, have to stand on their own, although the Associated Press Stylebook, the bible of all exemplary rags, differs from Webster's Dictionary in this case. AP says no apostrophe in pluralizing numerals; Webster's makes it optional. A rare exception permits an apostrophe to form the plural of a letter: Mind your p's and q's, and try to earn all A's. But multiple letters lose it: They are not VIPs, after all. This month's edition of SPELL/Binder includes what Dowis and Lederer call the "World's Toughest Grammar Test." It touched on a couple of fine points I often pause to ponder. Wisdom comes to whomever/whoever seeks it. A wave of technological innovations are/is crashing on the shore of our culture. She is one of those drab homebodies who reads/read McCall's. All she ever wears are/is dresses. Defenders of the language negotiate carefully the hazards of matching verbs to subjects. Rainer's British English prefers plural verbs with collective nouns, as in "The committee are meeting now," whereas we American practitioners of the same language would consider this the action of a single group. Dowis and Lederer relate how New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley insisted reporters treat news as a plural noun (which is about as awkward as we find doing the same for data and bacteria.) "Are there any news?" he cabled a field reporter. The reporter fired back: "No, not a single new."
Answers to quiz: In each pair of words, the second is correct.
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